Welcome to dialogue 12 of the Ah Almas Wisdom Series, in which we plunge into the depths of the ocean of being, which is boundless and has no shores. Welcome to Deep Transformation, Self, Society, Spirit, Life enhancing, Paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.

Foreign.

I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuis. And our guest today is Hamid Ali, whose pen name is Ah Almas. And we're continuing with our Ah Elmis Wisdom Series. This is dialogue number 12 in which we are working away systematically through an overview of Hamid's work, the Diamond Approach, and specifically working our way systematically through one of his magnum opuses, because there are several, the Inner Journey Home. And today we're on to chapter 18, being and knowledge. And this goes really deep, really deep indeed. As we were preparing for our dialogue today, Amid said, well, it could have been a book, but he didn't have the time. And so there is a lot in this, and it follows on from the previous chapter on divine love and is part of the discussion of the. What mede you call the boundless dimensions. So maybe perhaps we could start by reminding our listeners of what the boundless dimensions are. And then perhaps you could speak to pure presence, which is the core of this boundless dimension. And that will give us a lead into the many subtleties of this chapter.

Yeah. So I differentiate in terms of spiritual experience, experiencing the spirit or presence between the localized experience of presence and what I call bond dimension. Localized meaning experiencing presence as within you or holding you or containing you. But it is not infinite, it is localized or it has a limitation in terms of extent and size and expansion.

And you would call that the soul, right, Hamid?

That localized soul is what localizes the power dimension, is the same presence we experience when we experience localized presence, except it has no end. It goes on forever, just like the sky. So boundless means has no boundaries. It goes on and on and on endlessly. So endlessly, you know, in terms geometrically, in three dimension, you could say, but as we will see in this dimension, it also includes time. So the infinite space time. But we'll deal with space first.

Okay.

Too complex to deal with the time part.

Yeah. And maybe you could talk about the transition from divine love to pure presence, because you say that your presence usually emerges subsequent to the experience of boundless love, and that often for people it's experienced. This development or maturation or transcendence to pure presence is actually experienced initially as a kind of loss.

Yeah. So Most people, they're easier to experience divine love before they experience part of the present. Because part of the present in some sense simpler and seem more abstract in relationship. While divine love is boundless, mean infinite. Like an ocean of love that fills the universe, perverts the universe, fills the heart, own the heart. And show that the love is inherent to reality, all of reality. Not just human being, not just a soul. But that's why I call it the heart of God. God has no limitation but that the divine love had the quality, specific richness and quality and color of love. It could be golden, golden wine, you know, it could be other color. And it's like a flowing ocean of. And the suf is called shoreless ocean, ocean with no shores. And now the transition. But the divine love means it is presence but presence that have this weakness and the softness and the characteristic and the effect of love. With all its generosity and goodness and all of that. But that shows the transition is recognizing that love is. There's two things here. There's presence and there's love. And they are inseparable. They're the same thing. And transition happen is by the presence letting go of love, letting go of the quality of love. It becomes just a presence by itself. Without the characteristic there of love. With the softness and sweetness. So becomes more clear, transparent, colorless, but still infinite and boundless and endless and still presence. And I call it pure presence, pure meaning. All qualities of true nature are pure. But pure in the sense it doesn't have other qualities in it.

It's the precursor. Right, of all the other qualities.

Yeah. So it's the precursor of love. And of course, love. Divine love can also manifest other qualities. I mean, you know, love can become compassion or strength. And can manifest that way. So the next dimension that emerges, which in some sense seen as more fundamental. More fundamental in the sense that divine love is just the same thing with the addition of equality. Here's. Before the addition, before the quality manifest in it. For the quality of love and goodness, richness manifest. There is just the simplicity of just presence. I call pure being or pure presence.

And what is the experience of that? What does that phenomenologically feel like when you experience that dimension of just pure being, presence.

So we discussed before the experience of presence. I discussed what the presence is like. It is like that, except has no other qualities. All the other qualities present before, like presence of compassion or love or intelligence or he is just presence with no other quality, just pure presence, which is unpresence here is the sense of beingness. Presence shows clearly what presence mean, which is the ontology, the ontological ground of reality, meaning the existential ground, the ground of existence. It's basically pure isness, a presence that feels like isness. And the experience of it is that I am this unbounded, endless, many dimensional expanse of pure isness. It has a fullness to it. And the presence, the fact that it is presence, gives it a sense of fullness, substantiality. But there's a fullness that has no color, no quality, just completely, just the fullness is the fullness of being.

You make clear, Hamid, that part of this fullness of the experience of boundless presence is a profound sense of completion, a serenity and fullness. And you say there is no deficiency, no need, no want, no desire, no fear. And that this sense of profound completeness is not the result of anything. It's inherent in presence.

It is inherent in our spiritual nature, that it is pure and complete. And here it shows that it is complete before even manifest qualities. Not that in that sense it's complete in the sense it has manifest in it love and compassion and strength and clarity. And no, it's complete because all these are implicit and they haven't come up yet, but they're all in it, all potential to it. So nothing is missing. Everything that is possible, everything that is good in our spiritual nature, everything that is true in spiritual nature is implicit in it. So in that sense it's complete. So the sense feeling in it, there's nothing missing, it's complete. And the richness is a sense of fullness, fullness the way like strong muscle, for instance, and the fullness of the strong. In that sense, the fullness is a substantial fullness, but it's not physical. The fullness is just pure presence of beingness. And so many teachings talk about the I am. Yes, and different people define the I am differently. Some as localized presence, some Nasar Gaidatta. If I want to talk about the point of existence, I am is a point of light. Here it is, all is true. All those are. I am here. The I am is an infinite expanse, infinite in all directions, and it is our true nature.

And the ground of being.

It is that. It's our true nature. Yes, as the being ground of all other possibilities of the true nature. Yeah.

And all manifestation comes from this place of nothingness that contains, as a potentiality, everything, the whole universe, our thoughts, I mean the whole thing.

Everything will come out of it. Everything is. I mean, when I say it is complete, I mean all the perfection of being. Like goodness, awareness, clarity, intelligence, strength, power, fulfillment, peace, all of those are implicit in it, but none of them are explicitly that way. When they become explicit, they become what I call the sagittary qualities before either. Sexual qualities are implicit, but they're not differentiated yet. So he said, that's why I call it non differentiated presence.

And Amit, I want to just draw out one of the implications of what you're saying because you're giving an eloquent description of the holy complete fullness of presence and that there's nothing lacking, nothing wanted within that or within true nature of being. And the implication is what again is one of the central teachings of every spiritual tradition, that the inherent sense of lack or deficiency that goes with identifying as being an ego or separate self sense, and for which we spend our lives seeking and consuming sensations and stimuli and things of one kind or another is basically a compensatory mechanism or the loss of the experience of our innate completeness.

Exactly. And as you said, it is really, this dimension is the core all mystical teaching at the core of the teaching of the Arabi, for instance, of Maestre Eckhart, of Dzogchen, but Veda Vedanta, that's the core of their teaching, all of them. And they might speak about a little differently, but all about Malta Ekharm, I call divine being. So does they just call it the presence of awareness? Advaita vedanta, called Satya 10 Ananda. It's infinite, unbounded, has no limitation in any way, and complete in every way.

And once we recognize that, and also with that recognition, see that the egoic activity is this frantic, unfulfillable quantity quest to compensate for that innate sense of deficiency that comes from our alienation from being, then the insanity of the world and all its craziness and unnecessary suffering and conflict, et cetera, begin to make sense in a whole different way.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if anybody experiences themselves that way, all that insanity will disappear. There's complete sanity here. Sanity, openness, purity, simplicity.

And when I was studying Buddhism, the whole idea of emptiness felt really kind of scary, like negation of everything. And the way you describe it here, it's not that at all. It's the potential of everything. And it's also can be known because it is knowing at the same time, the known and the knower are not separate, not like we're experiencing this. We are that.

We will get to the dimension that more correspond to the Buddha's sense of emptiness. That's not where we're at, okay? Experiencing Something different than. I mean connected to it. But here it is. I mean you bring in the emptiness, which is when side of this presence. It's both fullness and nothingness at the same time, you see. And that's getting deeper into when we first experience it. We just experience fullness that fills the universe, that fill the universe. The feeling I am everything, I am everywhere and I am the fullness of being. I am the existence of all. That is so it is the existential existence, the ground of everything. So most people think things exist because they perceive them. They could measure them, they could touch them. Here you actually feeling that existence itself. You know, existence by feeling, existence by feeling the effect of existing. That thing exists because they have an existential ground. They don't exist because they just appear in perception.

And you're bringing in here the or pointing towards one of the next points you made, Kameed, which is the very nature of manifestation. That out of presence comes all manifestation. And that I was going to say we have at least I had what I now recognize as an incomplete or erroneous understanding of manifestation of somehow something which manifests from. But you emphasize, yes, manifestation is more an out of being or presence. And the being or presence never leaves or is in any way separate from its medical.

That's a good point. Well, I think one of the first thing about the meanings of our nature this way is that there are two major ways of experiencing it. I'm experiencing it here. I mean being it and I mean is somebody experiencing it, meaning it is experiencing itself, it is self experiencing. So the experience here is the realization where the soul is subsumed in it. The soul has become absorbed into it. So there is still a being like me experiencing it. I'm not saying everybody's experiencing it. So there is that important thing that many non dual teachings don't address, which is regardless how universal it is, it is always experienced by a being. The mountains are not experiencing it. We don't know. It doesn't experience itself by itself. It has to have an individual being. An individual being means a soul. But the soul is not appearing as an individual consciousness. It is implicit, is absorbed into it. But it is so of the lens through which being knows itself. It is the instrument of perception, of knowing. But the experience here I wanted to point to two major experiences. They're both non dual, non duality in two different aspects. One is to know myself as that beingness. To recognize I am here, I am what I am and I am pure being. I am pure existence. Pure isness that is a fullness of being. And I am infinite, boundless. And in this experience we are not relating to forms and manifestation and individualism, just experiencing to the nature itself, to the ground itself. I'm experiencing the ground itself. So the ground itself here feels infinite in all directions. And it is an interesting thing. It's like being the sky, except the sky is a fullness, like a gelled sky feels a fullness. But the fullness, both awareness and is aware of itself. Fullness that is at the same time fullness of presence, that aware and knows itself as fullness, as being, as existence. So it has the simplicity of no, but all it knows is I am. And there might not even be I. It could be I am, or it could be just amnes isness, you know. So that is one fundamental way of realizing this dimension is to be this dimension, recognize I am this dimension. Always been that way, but now I know it consciously and clearly. It's an amazing, beautiful. It's a satisfying contenting without there being a feeling of satisfaction, like dissatisfaction is gone, discontent is gone. There's only clarity, fullness, richness of isness, fundamentality, perfection, completeness, blissfulness to it too. There's a fresh blissfulness to it because it's clean as it's been scrubbed clean. It's the cleanness from off the beginning, before any dust alight. And this is one mode of experiencing it from within it. This is what I say experiencing. I call this dimension the Supreme. To give it a name. In our teaching I call the Supreme Being. Came from Supreme Being. I think I took the term from Isa Gaddatta. He talks about the Supremes of time. But anyway, many teachings talk about the Supreme. I just call it Supreme. But it is pure being, non differentiated beingness. And it has no limits, no boundaries, no size, no nothing. Limits it in all direction, all possibilities. And it is simplicity itself. It's simple isness. I mean, we recognize what simplicity is. And it has nothing to do with simplicity of thought, simplicity of situation, a simplicity business. It's just one thing, single. And it is just I am. I am the existence with nothing extra. So there's clarity, there is simplicity, there is an openness, lightness. And the blissfulness can be so intense, can become exuberant joy. So that is one. It is non dual. Because only one thing. It's not like the inseparability of two things. No, there's only one thing. There's no two that are connected. There's just oneness. I call it unity. This is a state of unity, unit. There's one unit. And that unit is, has no end, no limits of any kind. That is experiencing the pure being from within itself. Then the other way, major way of experiencing pure being. Experiencing it from the perspective of all. Manifestation of all particulars, bodies and galaxies and mountains, and including emotions and feeling and thought. That's what people call manifestation. Some teaching called appearance. Some people call it the world or reality. One thing as we transition from pure beingness to its relationship to all those forms, that's when we understand form is formlessness. Formlessness is form because all the forms are forms of this formless. They're all made of the same purity of being. So it turns out the existence of things, their ontological ground, their beingness constitutes not just their existence, but what they are. They are made out of it completely. There is no place on them that is not pure being. So pure being is the mountain. Pure being is the rocks. Pure being is the metals in the mountain. Pure being is the molecules in the mountain. Pure being is the atoms in the molecule. Pure being, the elementary particles, the atom, pure beings. Anyway, wherever you go physically or mentally, you find pure being that it is pure being. So basically pure being is manifesting all these things. It basically form itself into all these things. It's like an ocean that at its surface it has bubbles and edges. And these are the world. These are the content of what most people experience. But here we are experiencing things from the perspective of what I call manifestation or phenomena or appearance. And here it's a different kind of non duality. That's when you see that everything is not separate from anything else. I am not separate from you because we're both pure being. Pure being, extent all the way through. You are like a wave out of the ocean. I am a wave as an individual wave of the same ocean. So we're not separate. So that's non dual. It's a different kind of non duality, which is the inseparability of all forms, of all particulars. And the particulars extend through all possible particular from physical manifestation, mental manifestation, from living being to inanimate matter. All of it is just pure being. When we are in that condition, it's beauty. It's a beautiful thing. It's like an amazing kind of. There's a sense of richness, sense of simplicity. Everything is transparent. Like you look at everything, you see through it and you see through it is like I look at you, I see through you. I don't mean I see the box behind you, I see you. To pure Being. Every surface reveals what is inside. It's inside is the pure clarity of being. And that is non dual. Again, non duality. One of the major ways non dual teaching talk about non duality. Of course, here the non duality can also. There's one way non dual teaching talk about non duality. That is implicit in both kinds. The first one I call unity. The second I call oneness. Oneness of everything. Everything is one and not many. Although there are many. They make up one. One fabric connected by the substance of being. Here the other, non duality, imprisoned all of them. Is that the subject and the object and the perception are the same thing. So the knower and the known are all one thing, completely inseparable. And both of those kinds of unity and oneness. Both kind of states of non duality. So that's non duality implicit in different way. Sometimes people talk about non duality as subject and object are not separate. Because here the subject is pure being, the object, the pure being. What is known is pure being. And the knowing is pure being. All of it is pure being. So pure being includes all of those, has one thing. One thing, meaning there's no other. So we see here unity of oneness in two dimensions. From the middle of the ocean, or the surface of the ocean. Middle of the ocean expands itself. The beingness itself. You know, what is pure being? What is existence in itself. The second one is knowing that everything is made out of that existence. Everything is a formation from within this formless ground. So that's when we see that the form is formlessness. And formlessness is form. When from the perspective of the second kind of unity, which I call oneness. Because each form, if you get into it, if you just look a little deeper into it, you find the infinite formlessness. So the book behind you. Each one of them is an expression. Being is being. Taking that particular form. Each hair in your beard is being taken that particular form.

This realization is very positive. I mean, it feels like an antidote to so much human suffering. Our existential and psychological and spiritual. Our lostness. It seems like.

Well, you need to remember, you know, John, that all manifestation of true nature are antidote to suffering. True nature, whatever way it appears. As pure being, pure love or anything else. Or pure awareness. I will talk about some other time. They all have no suffering. They're all the purity of the spirit. Suffering comes from delusion, from limitation. Here we have no delusion, no limitation.

It's a beautiful vision that you point to Hamid. With the recognition that all manifestation is or Eyes that can see a portal to the transcendent or is transparent to the transcendent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's Internet sometimes experiencing from within. Like I'm sitting in my room and I look and I see every wall, every object is transparent. And I look into it and I see the vast infinity of clear, pure beingness. But everything is that. I mean, as I said, all the way to the elementary particle, because it is the beingness of anything that is so. The isness of anything. Anything that everything that manifests, we say it exists, it is there. Scientists say, well, the mountain exists, it is there, I can measure it. But both the mountain and the measuring device and the measuring person, they're all pure being itself, manifesting in different forms.

And our conventional worldview, including the scientific, overlooks the fundamental nature that you're pointing to. Our conventional worldview operates from the assumption. And we'll get into this, and you get into this in more detail later in the chapter. Operates from the assumption of the separation of all phenomena, all things of us.

Well, the ordinary mind, which is the ego mind, appear in a scientific perspective as everything is separate. And you can measure it, you can know it, you can not know it, but everything, like a rock is just a rock. An iron piece is an iron piece. It's just iron. There's nothing to it but iron made out, maybe created in the middle of a star made out of iron. From this perspective, it is iron, but it's iron. But its nature is pure existence. What is the existence of the iron? And the ordinary point of view say, well, it exists because I can observe it, measure it, and it is there. Here we see it is true what we say. It doesn't contradict those things. But saying it's possible for me to experience its existence and the observer is the observed observer. He always is the observed. It's always pure being itself. Pure being looking at itself, looking at its own appearance.

Perhaps important to acknowledge the point to the complementarity of the profound vision you offer me. Which doesn't negate the fact that the iron, the metal iron had its origin in the starburst or in a supernova. Yes. And the fundamental being of the supernova and the iron, that's.

Yeah, it does not negate any. All those are just the way we know them. You could measure them and look at them from a scientific perspective. A dollar perspective. And that's useful. However, we're going to. We're here delving into them in a different way. We're delving into them by Knowing their ontological ground. You know, one thing to know is that science in general does not deal with ontology. In fact, scientists have been told by many scientists this is not our field. We don't deal with ontology. We deal with how things behave, how they appear, how they behave. That's what science does. And does it well.

Ultimately, science is chasing its own tail because they, they're pretty good with forms. But the formless and the knowingness and the consciousness is left out of the equation. So I think the last 30 years, you know, quantum physics has just been lost because it, it doesn't admit dimensions that you're talking about the ground of being.

Well, I mean, quantum physics, as you mention it, is one of the form of physics that comes closest to acknowledging there is something else beside the physical, which is the fact of the observer. That there has to be an observer experienced, there have to be. And that is not part of the theory. The theory dependent on it. But theory doesn't explain the observer. It is a big question now on quantum theory, what is that? Because you call it, you know, the collapse of the wave function. The collapse happened through the observer observing, making experiment. But the theory itself doesn't explain what is this observer. How does the observer decide to make an observation?

And they don't like that. It really bugs them.

But they're trying to explain it in all kinds of ways. And there are many theories of consciousness actually that are made out by scientists, you know, trying to explain consciousness. Because here they cannot deny consciousness. Consciousness is needed for quantum theory, classical theory, like Newtonian, he didn't talk about those kind of things. He said that's how things are. You know, when you drop something, it just fall. He didn't say that experimenter is needed for that. He said the moon goes around the Earth. It just goes around there, whether we know it or not. Quantum theory says no, only when you see that. That's one thing Einstein didn't like. He said, I mean, the moon doesn't go around the Earth unless I see it. That doesn't make sense. But, you know, it is not the field of science. Maybe science at some point might find out they will have to come to a realm like this to be able to explain some of the phenomena they encounter. It is possible, but we're not close to that. We're not close to that. You know, remember listening to Roger Penrose, you know, you hear Roger Penrose, the guy who got the Nobel Prize for black holes. He's a British mathematician, physicist, 90 something years old. But he's very clear. And he's very clear, very clear. Basically what he said. I remember, I thought, that's very good. He has a theory of consciousness, you know, himself about microtubules, whatever.

Exactly.

Brain. He has it with Hameroff, more biologist. But he says one thing, I admired him because I thought he's a humble. He's really a realistic physicist. He said, you know, to talk about understanding consciousness, we have theories of consciousness, but we're way far from understanding what consciousness is. He said, we don't even know what matter is. Yeah, he said we don't know what matter. He said, nobody knows what an electron is. You know, how to measure its movement. You don't know what it is.

And Hamid, my question I've always wanted to ask you, because of your background in physics and obviously your intellectual brilliance, is how close can mathematics take us to this realization of the ground of being, presence? Can it get there? You mentioned one time you, you tried to do a mathematical state and explaining consciousness, but you said there are too many variables. I mean, how far can mathematics, the scientific way of looking at things, get us to this realization of what we're talking about, the unity of all things, the presence, that which comes before everything?

Well, I don't know at the present time, they're not trying to do that. Nobody trying to go to that direction. Whether it's possible, I don't know. I mean, the ancient mathematicians like Euclid and others before him, they were more in touch with that kind of realm and they saw the physical world and the outer world. But, you know, our modern scientists are more mind oriented. Some of them are mystics and they want to know about those things. But David Bohm tried to connect quantum theory with something like this, and he talk about the explicate order and the implicate order. That's very close to the implicate order. What is the underlying thing? Implicate order, explicate order in the universe as we know it, as scientists measure it, the implicate order is implicit. It's there. We cannot measure it, we cannot see it. He did that and he respected quantum theory. He wanted to go there. And actually he's the one who had dialogue with Krishnamurti, if you know, discussing things like he was interested. But I, I don't know if he had the experience of pure beingness or not. Maybe he did and that's why he did that. So I think scientists, depending on the scientists themselves, how much they have experience of it. By the way, the originator of quantum theory, like Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, they all were interested in Indian philosophy. And because they thought there's more to reality than that, so they were aware of it, they knew there is such thing. And even I think Heisenberg, who said when they asked him about the physical world, that's reality, he said, no, no, this is just a small part of reality. He said, consciousness is much bigger than thing, than that. So those people had an appreciation of that, but they didn't have a way to study it.

That's the problem.

They didn't have a way to study it. Would the science at some point have a way to study it be interesting? I think it is possible. If they use the kind of inquiry we've been talking about, meaning to use the inquiry that looks not into matter but into our. Into the observer, not into what is observed, but into the observer itself, experience itself, then it's possible. I think maybe that's a way of entry into that. What I'm talking about is not just I know it, many people know it. In my school, I taught many people that teaching all of that. So we talk about the community that we have. Many people in this community, many teachers know what I'm talking about. They can teach it. I mean the books are attempt to communicate it to the general public. But in the school people can actually learn it through the practices and learn this to be the full experience of it. It's important to know that I'm saying this for the listeners, that, that it is possible to learn this, not just to hear about it, to learn it and realize it and be it and experience it, you know, and I think with the two of you, obviously you getting some learning here, you're getting some experience by reading the book, by delving into the book deeply.

Stay tuned for part two of our conversation with Hamid Ali as we continue to peek through, through the curtain of the paradigm shattering true nature of reality. 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've done that 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, Sam.