Welcome to part one of our 16th dialogue in the A. H. Almaas Wisdom series, aka Hameed Ali. In this conversation we explore the Absolute, the source of all, what it is, how the experience of the Absolute changes us and what to do with the knowledge and recognition of the Absolute. Welcome to deep transformation, Self, society, spirit, life enhancing, paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplative and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.

I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuy. And today we are just delighted to continue our A. H. Almaas Wisdom series in which we're dialoguing with Hameed Ali, the founder and creator of the Diamond Approach and the RidhwanSchool, and working our way systematically through, I was about to say his magnum opus, but he has so many magnum opuses, but certainly one of his central texts, the Inner Journey Home, is a very comprehensive map of the spiritual path of our fundamental human psychology and spirituality and our fundamental nature. And we have been progressing through this. We're now in our 16th dialogue. We're also in chapter 21 of this book titled the Absolute and Emptiness. And I have a mark at the top of the chapter. This is my favorite chapter, which is not to say an easy chapter. It is truly profound. And John and I have had our minds blown open and our heads cracked as we have worked very intensively studying this and dialoguing back and forth and now have the privilege of dialoguing specifically with Hameed about this. And Hameed, so maybe the way I'll begin is by quoting you as you talk about the Absolute, which is as you describe as the fundamental words fail of course, but the fundamental substrate of reality or deepest depths. And you say that by simply you talk about the unmanifest. You begin by talking about the unmanifest in you talk about, say by simply witnessing the process of manifestation. The way the world, the universe appears without getting caught up in it. The soul experiences itself as the background, as a vast silent witness, and becomes this vast silent expanse underlying the process of continual creation. And we discover a dimension deeper than any other, which you call the Absolute, the source of all manifestation, which is also its ultimate and absolute nature. Okay, that's a lot. I'm going to turn it over to you.

Doing a good job.

I'm quoting you, Hameed.

That's why. Yeah, for sure.

I mean a good sentence isn't. I mean, yeah, you know, this chapter is in some sense is the apex of the book. And it's going up, you know, deeper and deeper and, or higher and higher and gets to this place after that another trajectory takes over. We moving toward this all this time, you see, because it is a source dimension. I call it the source dimension partly because in our discussion in the last few meetings, we've been discussing what I call the boundless dimension. And I numerated five of them. Start with love and pleasant, your being and awareness. And the last one was the dynamism, the creative dynamism that creates everything logos. And then you wonder, where does it all come from, created dynamism? What does it create? It's creating. Is it creating from itself? Usually that can take us to that question, to the source of where this creation come from. Because many people think that, you know, things are potential, meaning as if things are sitting someplace and somebody manifests them. Actually nothing is sitting. Any plane. Source has nothing in it. And the potential doesn't mean things that sitting there waiting to be manifesting. It's more nothing and nothing. Things are actually created out of an air in some sense out of nothing. Of nothing. Yeah. Out of complete. I mean, so nothing that is more than nothing. But the name absolute is not. I'm not original on it. Many teaching call it the Absolute, you know, Absolute. I call it Absolute. I talk about dimension absolute. But, you know, many teachings talk about the Absolute. Many teachings talk about this dimension, although most other teachings don't talk about five dimensions. The way I do differentiate these into five dimension because that's how they appeared in this path, one after the other revealing. And each one revealed its own perspective, its own knowledge, its own contribution to experience and to reality. And then this happens. And for me, that was the sort of, for a long time was the dominant condition. The materialization lasted years and years and.

Years of just being in the Absolute.

Yeah, okay. Yeah. Being the Absolute. And for many teachings, it is what continues forever. Like Ramana Maharshi is always the Absolute. And he's talk about silence. That was his station. You know, he remained all of his life till he died in that place. But, you know, I think Zhan has it. Roger, you know, found out from the chat repeating. And they call it Dharmakaya. It's the closest thing to the dharmakaya. Zoukin and Muhammad talk about Nirmanakana, Sabogakaya and Dharmakaya. Dharmakaya is the closest thing to the Absolute. Means it's the energrama that doesn't have anything in it from which everything manifests. Of course, my language is different than I would be different. And of course, Zouchin and many others, they emphasize more the dimension that emerges, the awareness, you know, but from the perspective the absolute awareness is emergent from the absolute and in some sense is the inner nature of awareness and the back of awareness. Awareness has a front and back, the front of the clarity, the back of the emptiness that attract. That's how Dzog Jain and Mahamuda in a minute talk about clarity and emptiness. Well, what's the emptiness? They call it the lack of inherent existence. Right? How do you know about that lack of inherent existence? Well, lack of inherent existence when it is experienced, when it's experiential. Exactly. That absence is lack of heated existence and hid existence is being. It's lack of being. However, it's not contrary to being. You know, that's why many of the thangka, they have yabyam, you know, the embrace the two and embrace and luck. And one of them Shaka sambara and Vajrayudini embracing Vajra Sambhara is black or dark blue, as Darcy saying. And that is really call it emptiness and I call it emptiness. But the emptiness here is not like empty space. They say it the lack of inherent existence means no existence. Nothing has inherent existence.

But it's not the dark nihilistic emptiness of maybe western existential philosophy or psychology.

Of course not. I mean, I don't know, they even call it dark. But this is not dark, it is black. The way we experience it when we are in that place, we see that it is not that it doesn't have light, it is before light, light emerges out of it. It is like light before it manifests. The Sufis talk about that. Actually they talk about the black light, you know, and that black light is the source of all light. And here I don't call it black light, I don't call it light. It's empty, it's nothing there. You know, light is almost as substance. This is basically the, not the negation of substance, but going beyond it. So it is a place where we experience ourselves, everything else as immaterial as so light that has no substance. So empty, there's nothing there. Most people, when they think of emptiness, they think of spacious space or nothingness. This is space and nothingness, half sensation of space and nothingness. This has no sensation. It is so empty, there's nothing to sense. And that is why I usually use the word cessation, which is word that Buddha used. And he talks about the different stages he go through. We are studying Hinduism. He went through universal consciousness, universal nothingness and all of that. And then what he discovered new was the cessation. And he called the cessation of perception and sensation and which is my experience correspond to that exactly. And of course, in Theravada Buddhism, they call it, you know, entering the scene and return and Christ. Return as Christ, I mean, until you fight there. And of course, that tradition equated with Nirvana, coeurization of all movement. So it is really unlikely the word negation, it is beyond substance. So it's absence is beyond sound. So it's silence, it is beyond movement. So it's stillness. No. So beyond anything we can think of beyond that. So sound like the opposite of it. And it is really the counterpart that make all those things possible. And it is the source of all of them.

And you mentioned that in one part, when you're experiencing from the hara for that part of your body that the martial artists talk about so much, that it is immensely more real than what we consider reality. It's more there than there, if that's the right way of saying it.

Yeah, that's one way of experiencing the absolute. And there's something that Maharaj referred to several times in his talks and nobody seemed to get it. Nobody asked him, why are you saying that? And he says, I am rock like. He said it rock like. And I bring it in one of my lectures. Why did he say I'm rock like? Nobody seemed to pay attention to that. They always pay attention to the fact about consciousness. He said, I'm rock like. Because when we experienced it from the belly center, it feels, although it's insubstantial. But one thing to explain that more clearly, that emptiness or the absolute is never. There's no emptiness by itself. Always an emptiness of something else. The emptiness of a penis, the emptiness of substance, the emptiness of sound, emptiness of moon. So it is the other side of everything. So it's the other side. In one side it's empty. Nothing but can be experienced from the belly center. As dense, as immense as solid, more solid than rocks, than physical reality. So sense here when you one is that if you have solid, immense, I mean infinitely extended, infinitely vast at the same time. And that's what I call the crystalline or the diamond level of the absolute. Absolute is always a relation to awareness, the emptiness of awareness. And the awareness can be just clear light or can be diamond light. When it is diamond light, the absolute feels like immensity, density, solidity. But as Nisargadatta Maharaj also mentioned, he said, I am awareness that is not aware of itself. And people don't pay attention to that. Nobody mentioned it when they come onto the he's saying something very important. You know, when he said awareness, not aware of itself, that means he said, when I look at myself, see nothing, because there's nothing there to see. You see, when I look out, I see the universe. He goes down, details. And that's why I did the whole lecture on Nasir Gadda Bhava like that. Because to. I said the neglected teachings because he's a Vedanta person. And Vedanta, you know, many of them don't recognize cessation. No. Or at that time, he was being it. So, yes, it can be. It is absolutely nothing. But it can be experienced as more solid than anything else because it is. The emptiness is always an emptiness of something. Can't experience emptiness just by itself. There's no experience. Then that's the cessation.

And I think for me, the sense of immensity, empty immensity, was best conveyed by your description saying that when the universe reappears. And again, I'll quote, it looks like a tiny luminous sphere floating on the vast silence of the Absolute. Okay. The universe is a tiny sphere. That puts things in perspective.

Doesn't it, though?

That is witnessing in the whole universe from the perspective of the Absolute. That was actually my first distinct experience. Matt had mentioned it before, of the Absolute, which is I was teaching about awareness, about pure awareness to a group. And as I'm teaching, then everything become transparent, clear and limpid. Awareness. Not just our awareness. Everything was awareness.

Were your students aware that something was happening while you were going through this?

No, I don't think so. I didn't say anything about it. Well, you know, I mean, there are. Whenever they knew about the awareness. We're discussing it. That's the topic. And I saw myself receding from the room, you know, receding back in this whole room. And then I was the whole house receding, always. The whole Earth receipt kept receding and receding while I'm still talking with them. I have both sides. I'm in the room, but I'm outside. The outside kept receding, receding until I was outside the universe. And so the whole universe has this shimmering light in the surface of this blackness. And then at some point, I kept receding. The whole universe became a bubble. Bubble, small bubble. So from that, Absolute shows itself to be a vastness beyond any vastness.

And you kept. You kept lecturing through all this?

Yeah, I was talking about doing that. Yeah.

No, that's.

That's focus, Hameed. I wanted to bring up something I think is very important. We were studying a document. We're comparing your teachings to all these great traditions and I won't enumerate them, but just about everybody to include the Christian apophatic nature and. And they're all everybody. And this, you know, centuries apart, thousand years apart, they're all describing the same thing. And one of the things that you said in I believe you said this, that the experience of this is beyond experience. But the apprehension of this beyond that too for a human being is not the final destination. It's a gateway.

The cessation is a gateway. And the absolute is seen by many tradition as the destination. You see. I mean it is what St. John the Cross talk about the black light. He talks about the black light and by the end of his book talk about mystical poverty and his famous book he discusses. He talks about black light actually and as everything is purified. And so yeah, the Christian tradition and many of them discuss it all the Sufi they don't always talk about blackness like St. John the Cross talk of blackness. And Sufis like Lahiji talks about black light. The Buddhas don't refer to it as black. They talk about emptiness. But they all see it as a spacious antennas, as a prison that annihilates everything else. Annihilate raises any sense. I mean it's important for the annihilation of ego and self and attachment and all of that. Everything is gone. But it is really so Sufis connected with annihilation. Now one thing here digression is that cessation and the thing that Ajit did with Chatgpt cessation with the absolute. Cessation is not always in the Absolute. The self can cease without one. Experience can just by initial experience of cessation, identity, absolute, the cessation. The consciousness is sensational gone. There's no content or experience, nothing. And then when awareness comes out, there's awareness of the whole world. It wasn't aware of the absolute. It was later on that the cessation took me to recognize the Absolute. The absolute might have been there all this time. I just didn't know about it, wasn't aware of. So sensation usually or Fana and Sukh is like receding love, the ego or the self dissolving love all gone except love remains. The divine presence remains. But the deeper stages of sensation takes you when you really feel sensation in some intimate way takes it absolutely. For me, that experience was specifically in meditation when I was experiencing consciousness. And as consciousness was thinning and thinning and thinning and then staying all side monitor thinning and thinning until After a while, it became like islands of consciousness. There was nothing in between them. And the little island became all the small atoms of conscious. Conscious atoms with nothing. Absolutely. And those conscious atom, quantum iron. They are touching the emptiness, the blackness. But as they touch it, they dissolve awareness. Until. Completely dissolve. And there was no consciousness. And as you know, as that article rather says. It is not the end for any teaching. It is part of the process of freedom from everything. But the Absolute is not just cessation. Cessation, the entry into it. The Absolute is much faster. It's the inner nature of all manifestation.

So, Hameed, what happens when a human being has this experience? They go through this cessation, annihilation. Into this luminous darkness that many ways you've described it. When they come back into the individual pearl of great price, or the individual body, what changes? What are the effects? Jesus said, wherefore, by their fruits you shall know them. In Matthew 7:20. That you can tell something is real by what it turns into or what it manifests.

What.

What is. What's it like for a person to have that and to come back into manifestation?

Well, as one wakes up from it, consciousness returns with a soul or something else. It is clenched. It's like it got dipped into the annihilating nature of the Divine. And cleanse of everything. So it comes out clean, clear, cleanse. And all. Everything, of course, impurities. So if one abides in there, that's not just as an experience. It becomes more of a realization, continuous, of course. It cleanses the soul in a complete way. And then we. Our action embodies the virtues.

Become wiser, more compassionate, more loving, more peace.

Remember, the virtues are equanimity, humility, fearlessness, or courage.

There is an interesting question here, Hameed. Which I think maybe you're getting at, John. And that is that you talk of. And as I understand, a number of traditions speak of the. That being immersed in the Absolute is exactly as you said. A profound cleansing experience. Purification. But you seem to be saying something more. You're suggesting that it's not only a purification of problematic elements of conditioning and the psyche and the soul. But rather it also leads to a flowering of the positive qualities or virtues. Is that right?

Yes. And then usually coming out of that. The whole universe is glittering, beautiful. You know, radiant. I mean, the Absolute is. It brings in expression, majesty and beauty. Absolute itself is majesty. And the universe that emerges is beauty. That's the Sufi expression, Majesty, beauty. So the universe is the adornment of the Absolute. The universe is. I remember experiencing it with one of the Zogchen masters, one of the leaders of the Nagma School, who was here in California one time. And I went to at his weekend. He was doing the empowerments with the Nanyanas. He went through all the Nanyana. I was going with him until he got to the last one. He called them the Mahaati. And everything became black and everything in the whole. All the walls became jewels, glittering jewels.

You're reminding me of the. Since you bring in the Tibetan Buddhist as evoking this, you're reminding me of the definition of enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism. Sangky with song meaning purification and gye being the flowering of the virtues which. Exactly as you're describing.

Yeah. I mean, if there's no flowering, there's no true realization. I mean, the spiritual path is to be true human being expressing a spiritual quality, that potential human being of heart, mind and everything and functioning. So we're both generous and selfless and, you know, and kind and, you know, and we could do it in our teaching or in just living our life. We live like that. And a life of authenticity and spontaneity, naturalness.

That's incredibly inspiring, hopeful wisdom. When you realize that that our deepest essence, when we experience this absolute, the virtues that come out of it, when we come back, it's all good. You know, we don't come back as a dictator. We don't come back as a sociopath. We don't come back as a selfish person. We are a reborn person with absolute virtues.

You might say, yeah, of course. But that and all the spiritual teachings saying that you don't even have to go to the Absolute to have some purpose.

We try.

Well, that's good news.

The whole endeavor of spiritual, you know, path has two sides of it. Knowing what you are and living it, you know, living it mean living like a true human being with spirit and heart. And you can't be, you know, tyrant or anything from that place. How can you? Everybody is like you. Everybody is precious like you. Everybody embodies the absolute. You see it. Everybody is a glittering light. They might not know it, you know, and most of the time they don't know. They're not aware of it. But it is really the deeper nature of everybody. But, you know, whether you're a tyrant or aggressive or angry or scared, whatever, all this is because we don't know what we are. So that's why when we see somebody being mad or tyrant or we know they're suffering, they're suffering because they're disconnected from their nature. Disconnect from nature, the tremendous suffering, when you really get to experience it, tremendous pain, tremendous poverty. And also that's why moving towards the cessation, we go through a lot of fear. People go through a lot of terror and fear because they sense that, oh, I'm going to die. That's usually movements of cessation. Most people think of it, it's going to be physical death, I'm going to die, and that's it for me. And of course, we take the jump. We have enough trust to trust the spiritual journey that let it happen. And then we don't know you're going to come back or not. You really surrender.

It feels like that's one of the characteristics of major transitions or leaps on the spiritual path, that before you take it, it looks like it's going to be a loss. And only afterwards do you realize that the only loss was of limiting beliefs and impurities. One kind or another.

Yeah, on the stages are like that at peace is going to be a loss. To go to the next stage feels like a loss. Feels like a loss. And some of us resist it or scared of it or whatever, but then turns out to be just a new dimension, different level of richness.

I would imagine it helps to have studied the great traditions, the great mystics, and because when you start experiencing these things, you know, you're not just going into annihilation or ceasing from being. It's. It's a reality and it's really ultimately okay. And when that happened to you while you're teaching the class that, I mean, you're very versed on all the great traditions. I mean, you like an encyclopedia. So did that help you to surrender to the experience because you knew a lot about it already?

I think that helped, but that's not the basic thing that helped me. The basic thing that helped me, something we discussed before, which we call basic trust, trusting the inherent innate trust that reality is going to be okay, things are going to be okay. You know, it is inherent to the human soul that there is basic trust. It gets sort of diminished because of our original experience in life and all that trauma, whatever. Many people lose much of their basic trust, but somebody has to have some basic trust to be alive. But the basic trust can be so strong and powerful that you're willing to let go and let yourself sort of die before you die.

And Amit, I want to point to something very valuable in so much of what you do. You're speaking now of basic trust as this orientation of trust towards everything, towards being non being the universe manifestation, the unmanifest. And of course, within psychology. Erik Erickson, a famous developmental psychiatrist, said that first life stage is one of either building as of a trust versus mistrust, a fundamental mistrusting life and people, or trusting. But it's a very important idea in psychology. But it's psychological. It's based in the psyche. And time and time again, what I find you doing and what I find myself benefiting from is deepening fundamental psychological ideas to ground them in the absolute or the depths of reality.

Yeah, any surrender, any letting go requires trust. It's not like trusting somebody, it's trusting reality. And it is inherent in our soul really, because it comes from true nature. You know, we sort of know we have true nature without knowing it consciously. So that's why the little infant is completely thirsting. I mean, if you don't hit it, it's fine, it's happy.

And they haven't read the news yet, right?

Jonah gets smaller and all of that only when late knows about all the trouble in the world or we get clobbered. But trust is connected to love too. Then here in nature is good that goodness expresses itself as what people call love or heart. And so that's why the more we are loved initially, the more basic. The more we grow up with basic trust. Basic trust remain somewhat intact in numbers, completely intact, but more intact than others.

And amid. It would be valuable to. Now that you've introduced the Absolute, the fundamental. Of course words fail, but also the fundamental substrate of existence might be valuable to talk about the ways in which this is induced. And you emphasize too you call mystical poverty that is a releasing of all craving, attachment, ill, false or substitute loves or, and. Or the soul's love of our own true nature. I say those are both doorways into the realization of the absolute. Which also emphasizes. It's not a common realization.

No, it's not common. But you know, different teachings have different methodologies and the deeper teachings all go there and they always culminate in that place. It is not necessarily finally, but it is a central thing from which of course the natural is adorned with all the qualities, all the possibilities and capacities and. But we need to understand more about the Absolute beside it's emptiness. It's what Buddhism called emptiness. It's not any emptiness. Buddhism calls emptiness, which is the absence of inherent existence. That was why I call it non being. Non being is my language for absence of inherent existence. Existence is being. And here it exists as a pure being. It is absence is the negation of that. The Opposite of that, but also we need to recognize it is also the place of pure silence and stillness, contentment, unspeakable kind of fulfillment and contentment. And also it has an erasing kind of quality to it. Raises mind and manifestations. And of course, in the process, raises all impurities, all contractions, all stiffness, all views. It raises mind, heart and body, all of it together. So cessation, which is the entry into the Absolute is. Everything is dissolved, everything is let go of. Then when we arise, we find ourselves as this vastness where the whole universe emerges from the perspective of this inner vastness that is completely non being. The universe appears as a glittering light. Glittering, of course, because absolutely the world has colors. The stars and trees and everything, it comes back, but as if looking at it from inside it, from beneath it. So it's like the outer surface of the universe, the outer expression. And from perspective, the absolute. All is transparent, all is pure light. And that light is pure awareness or pure consciousness.

Back to the theme of spiritual poverty. And I imagine that people might think that you have to be completely obtained spiritual poverty before you can experience the absolute or God, or however you want to say that. But it seems that the experience of the absolute actually leads to spiritual poverty, where you can let go of things because external things are no longer the source of your peace and your happiness. It's because of this realization that gives you that liberation and that poverty.

Well, you know, St. John the Cross considers mystical poverty as the way to it. You have to first go through mystical poverty, which means recognize that basically mystical poverty is recognizing that the soul has nothing of its own. Doesn't have riches, doesn't have capacity. All comes from the source. It's all borrowed, given to it. That's what mystical poverty mean. None of it is my own. And recognizing that, you begin to recognize, well, where does it come from? That would bring then the inner silence. That is the source.

Yeah. Jesus said, unless a person forsakes all that he has, or she has, they cannot be my disciple. So I think you can take that as. As literal. You know, you gotta take off your clothes and just be naked. Or it's that inner realizing that you don't possess anything you've let go. And there it is.

Exactly. It's not an attachment, but part of recognition. None of it is mine. Whatever I have is given. I mean, all my experience, my awareness, my capacity to think and know, all of this is given to me.

That's extremely beautiful, by the way.

Yeah. For the soul, from the perspective of the soul, that's given to me because we start as a soul, as an individual consciousness. From the absolute, of course, the source of all of these qualities because from it emerges all the awareness, all love, all the radiance, all the light, all colors, beauty, all of that. I mean, and mystical poverty is one of the ways of getting into the Absolute. It's not the only way. And the other way, of course, just on. My latest book that's gonna come next week, is about the inner beloved going through mystical puberty to find out what is the true beloved. Like that is the devotional or the hard way of getting to the Absolute. Find out what do I really love and finding out that whatever I love doesn't completely do it. There's always something, some imperfection, something missing, something. And so that is the whole spiritual teaching which is you don't find the truth or the ultimate fulfillment in the world, you find it inside.

Yeah.

And that's why, you know, what's his name? One of the saying Muhammad, I think, tribute to God. It's called Hadith Qudsi, which means sacred saying. Where God says, don't look for me in mosques or churches or synagogue. Look for me in the hearts of my lovers.

Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, yeah.

And true as one way of finding it, the way of the heart, it is the very depth of the heart. Of my experiences. I followed that path too. Not intentionally, it just happened. Yeah, it happened through the heart. It happened through many ways. One of them was through the heart and you know, went through all, seeing all my loves are incomplete and this all not sufficient. And seeing that different thing I love as polytheism. I love many things instead of one thing. Until the heart is free from all those outer beloved and then become empty. That when I go to the inner poverty, the mystical poverty and beyond that, that's when the true beloved shines in the heart. And when it shines through the heart, it's an amazing uplift, it's an amazing ecstasy. That's when the beauty really shows. Because that peace in the heart, it's like mind blowing kind of beauty.

You make very clear that the experience of the absolute aura of any of the boundless dimensions is radically fulfilling in a way that no manifest, single manifest object could ever be. And this also points to another very important thing you emphasize, Hameed. And that is that there's this mysterious paradox that the absolute is the unmanifest, radically radical non being. And yet it has an unbounded potential for manifestation.

Stay tuned for the second part of our conversation with A. H. Almaas where we continue to explore the absolute and our ultimate true nature. Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation. We hope that you were moved as we are moved being part of it ourselves. We'd also like to say that this is being funded by Roger and myself. It comes out of our pockets. So if you would like to help us to mainly to get this podcast out to more people because the bigger audience have which is steadily growing but the more people we can reach and the more marketing we can do, the more positive effect we can have on the world. So we done a couple of ways but we'd like you to buy us a cup of coffee. Very simple and I do that with podcasts that I support and I find it's very satisfying. So thank you for your help, thank you for your presence and thank you for all you are and all you do. We love you.