Welcome to dialogue 13 of our wisdom series Conversations with A. H. Almaas, aka Hameed Ali. During this conversation we discuss being, presence and knowing with one of our human family's greatest sages of all time. 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 Dupuis.

Welcome to Deep Transformation, Self, Society Spirit. Our co host is John Dupuy and I'm Roger Walsh and our guest today is Hameed Ali aka A. H. Almaas. This is our dialogue number 13 in our A. H. Almaas Wisdom series in which we are doing a in depth survey or overview of the work of this remarkable man and the foundations of the diamond approach that he has created. And today we dive into some really deep territory and discussion before we begin. And John was commenting that he really had never seen in any tradition such depth of analysis of variety of profound experiences such as covered in many sections of this text, the Inner Journey Home, which is one of Hameed's many books, but perhaps one of the central texts around which his work is organized. As we're working our way through this text now, we come to the topic which you give a significant attention to, reification. Hameed. And maybe we can begin by maybe just laying out a brief, a brief understanding and then having you and Rich comment or correct that. And that is you talk about the distinction between what you call basic knowledge, that is our direct experience, and then point out that in development we develop the capacity for concepts and we layer these concepts over our experience until we're really having a mediated experience with the world and ourselves, mediated by layer upon layer of concepts, more and more abstraction until we create what you call reification, that is the concepts apparently separate out of this undivided whole, these apparently separate entities, including ourselves. So maybe that's a kind of a statement by way of an invitation for you to expand or correct or take that wherever you'd like. Yeah.

And when we hear about different teaching, discussing reification as an issue, as an obstacle, and we're seeing here, the reification is so basic, so to the mind. So that's why in my practice I don't tell my student, don't rehif, which many teachings do, say, no, avoid reification, can't avoid it. Naturally the mind reifies. So the work with it is to recognize the reification is happening and to understand it. And that way penetrate the reification and it dissolves as we understand it. But we need to understand what revification is. Reification is a mental operation that ends up ultimately alienating us from our true nature. And it is a process in the mind that's natural, normal, necessary, necessary for the development of ordinary knowledge. And here when I say ordinary knowledge, what do I mean? I mean the knowledge that most people know as knowledge. Like remember knowledge, studied knowledge, you know, learned knowledge. So knowledge that we learn from books or from memory is not immediately in the moment. Like if you're having an orange and you're eating it right now and sucking the juice, that is not rarefied experience, that is immediate. You're tasting the orange taste and the juice and all that. Now it's more immediate, you see, every occasion is remembering. You're eating, you know.

So is it making thoughts an object of consciousness, so to speak? And it can get in the way of the objects, can get in the way of our direct experience of being.

That's a good way of saying it, John. Yeah, but you see, to understand, we need to understand two kinds of knowing. And this chapter goes detail about the two kinds of knowing. You see, there is what I call ordinary knowledge, ordinary knowing and basic knowing. Ordinary knowing is what most people know. But we know that in spiritual experience realization there's knowing. And it's been called noises or noises and Tibetan, yeshay or yana in Sanskrit, which is knowledge through being one with what we know. It is immediate knowledge of immediacy, like knowing love by feeling and being the love for, you know, not knowing love. Well, I know what love is and remember it. And you know, I was heartbroken and all of that. I wasn't loved. You know, love is really immersed in love. Like the way we talked about divine love, for instance, you know in the previous chapter how it is like a substantial expanse, you know, not as an immediate knowledge. That knowledge I call basic knowledge. So we need the difference between basic knowledge and knowledge. So basic knowledge is knowledge that is immediacy. Immediate it knowing knowing. Actually I call it knowing by being. Like knowing love by being love. Knowing peace by knowing by being peace, knowing compassion by being compassion, you see, and we.

We get this basic knowledge by experience and it's already there. It's not something we have to learn. It's more like remembering these.

This essence like divine love, it's inherent, it's already there. Basic knowledge is a feature of real reality, an important feature of reality. So basic knowledge is the beginning of knowing, really most elemental knowing. But basic knowledge is not a reified knowledge. It's knowing. The most discussed and spiritual teaching is knowing being by being, being, unknown consciousness by being consciousness. You know, so the being of presence and the known presence are the same thing. They're not two things, they're not separate, they're not differentiated. They're like two sides of the same thing. And then we can know everything like that. We can know our qualities of our true nature, or we can know the soul, our soul or consciousness. We could know many things in our experience. And of course there are degrees of how immediate things are. Like table in front of me, a desk and touching it immediately at the same time, however, it's not completely immediate because in my mindset, it's the table. It exists on its own. That is a reified table. Then basic table, it recognizes it is made out of presence. Presence appearing as a table, that is basic knowledge of the desk. But to see it as a chest but made out of wood and separate and it came out from a tree and all that that is ordinary knowledge. And of course, ordinary knowledge has its uses as we know it culminates in what we call scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is all ordinary knowledge.

And UC Berkeley, near where you are, that's an ordinary knowledge school. They wouldn't like that. But yeah, that's what they're learning.

Well, it is. I mean, but remember Berkeley, it's called. Do you know why it's called Berkeley?

Philosopher, I think.

Philosopher. Berkeley was a philosopher and he was a bishop.

No kidding.

Yeah, Bishop Berkeley. I mean, well known. British, I think, or Irish, I don't remember. So Berkeley has in the name. There is some kind of a spiritual component in it by the fact that the philosopher was a bishop. But spiritual. I was hearing that from a professor friend, Alsen. I was telling the history of Berkeley that this town was named after the campus, actually. And the campus was called Berkeley because of the loss. Anyway, so we're talking about knowledge. So really we're talking about mind. We understanding mind. What is mind, where it comes from? Because many people talk about, you know, everybody knows they have a mind, right? And where does that knowing capacity come from? You see, just like people have heart, where does the feeling capacity come from? You know, so here we see that the knowing capacity come from very deep in our true nature. When we get to the dimension of pure presence, pure beingness, the ontological ground of all reality, the ontological expanse, the sense of isness. And the sense of isness is direct experience, beingness of the fullness of isness. Everything is beingness. Beingness is not just the being of someone. Beingness is just the presence of the supreme being. I call it the supreme dimension, but the Presence of being or dimension of being has in it the knowing of being. Nobody experience if you experience presence and know, don't know, don't recognize. That presence, please. Is not complete. So to experience the presence, you need to know where you are, otherwise there's no awakening. You know, I'm sure many people experience presence of being here and there, but there's no recognition, the recognition of being which goes along with being. We recognize that being and knowing of being are the same thing. So that is the basic non dual understanding, which is that the knower and the known are the same thing.

Yeah, the dichotomy goes away and the knower and the known. The known becomes a knower and the knower becomes a known. Yeah, but there's still the distinction of the individual. And that's what you say in your work, which is completely different from anything I've ever read.

Yeah, we'll get to that. So the knower and the knower are the same thing. And the knowledge, also the known, the knower and the knowledge, they're all one thing. And they get differentiated in our mind later on to know our. But in the realization of pure, what we call pure presence, which we discussed in detail last session, there is inherent in it the knowingness of being. Knowing. To say I am. Well, you can't say I am without knowing, without knowledge. There is knowledge involved, but it is not the knowledge of ordinary mind. The ordinary mind, knowledge is more mental, more representational, more remembered. While here the knowing is more immediate, has nothing to do with memory. It's not a representation. It's immediate, direct. It comes like presence, knows itself by recognizing, recognizes itself. By recognizing itself, it comes, recognizes itself as being. So it's like it becomes so subtle, like being and knowing are so inseparable. So the same thing.

And this is an experience, not a concept.

Correct that.

I mean, people can follow this conceptually, but the experience is the realization.

It's what I call realization of being, to be being. I mean, people talk about I am, right? But the I am is an experience, it's not a thought, you know, And I am is knowing that the, the amnes, the isness of being. But here isn't even I, there's just being. Being knows being. And you might add to it I at some point, but that's an additional concept. So the first concept, and the important thing here in the discussion is that that shows us the original concept, the original knowing, the original concept in the first possibility, the first glimmer of knowing in true nature, the first manifestation Knowing, which is knowing of being known, the beingness of true nature. This ontology is the fact that is. And we see that to say is, is knowing of is. I am being. But in the act of being, it is also the knowing of being. And they're so inseparable and distinguishable that they are really the same thing. And it is. And that is known in many teachings. That's not new, you see. But what I'm saying here is that is the beginning of mind, all mind, including the individual mind. That's where mind begins. Because the mind needs knowing is a foundation of any mind is knowing to be able to know. And I'm saying that's where the capacity of knowing comes from. Being has that capacity of knowing.

So that's a very fundamentally different understanding of the capacity for knowing than for example, our scientific one, which sees it as a result of neuronal mechanisms, et cetera, et cetera. Does a neuronal reductionism. You're bringing it down to the. This is a fundamental aspect or capacity of being.

Yeah, yeah, yes. And of course science doesn't study that. You know, doesn't study ology, as I've been told by many scientists, neos, scientists, we don't study ontology. We study. And I ask him, what is consciousness? Then they were talking about what consciousness does. I said, no, no, that's not what consciousness is. That's what consciousness, that function of consciousness which it perceives.

HamHameedid, a question Is, is mind distinct.

From being in this level? On this realization, mind and being are the same thing. Okay, mind and being. But mind here is in original sense as knowing. The ground of mind is knowing. Without knowing, there's no mind. So this is sort of the proto mind, the beginning of mind. We're seeing the origin of mind, where mind come from, which is the immediate knowing, which I call basics knowledge. But the important thing also in basic knowledge, you know, we'll get to your question, John, is that basic knowledge means there is a concept. To know is to have a concept. Know implies a concept. But concept here is not what most people call concept Here. Most people, when they talk about concept, they mean a thought in the mind, a word in the mind or a representation. But the concept here is the knowing. The fact that it is a knowing, a particular is the knowing of being, not the knowing of something else. So it's the concept of being. So the knowing of being and the concept of being are the same thing. So I call it the basic concepts to differentiate it from what most people call kamsa, most spiritual Teachings, when they talk about reality is non conceptual, they mean it's not mental. They are not eliminating this basic knowledge. Because if you. John Roger, you know about that like in torture. I mean, rigpa is knowing is knowing of awareness or being. So there is knowing there, you see. So it's not so what they call it not conceptual, but they say it knows itself. Well, for me, non conceptual is another state. It is conceptual, but it's different from ordinary conceptualization. We call it basic concept. So it's knowing that is fundamental. That is what I call the knowledge of divinity, God's mind. You see, this basic knowing, you could say it's the original concept. So original concept is only one concept. When I am being, purely being, there's only one concept and that is being, which is the same thing as being. Being, which is the experience of being.

And is that existence. Being?

Yes, being is existence is isness is pure ontology. But I'm saying that the being and the knowing are the same thing here. And I'm saying that being is the origin of mind. That is a new statement. Maybe, I don't know if anybody else said it, that being the origin of mind. Some people did see that being and knowing are connected. I'm saying him going a little further by saying that the experience of being. No, mind being knows itself as being. And that is the beginning of knowing. Original concept. And that concept that can then differentiate. And the chapter goes to say the original differentiation and differentiation into differentiation of presence into different kind of presence, which we discussed in the past, are the essential aspect of essential presence with equality. So if you take love for instance, love has two concepts instead of one concept. Being has one concept, which is being. Love has two concepts. It has the concept of being and the concept of love. You see. But the love here is a basic concept too. Just like being is a basic concept. Yeah.

And we can experience it, but it's hard to conceptualize it. Like what is love? I could say it, but it would lose its power.

It is a concept. When you say conceptualize, you mean ordinarily conceptualizing?

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

Yeah, represent. Then when you remember it, it becomes a representation in your mind. You have an image or memory or thought or feeling, whatever, and becomes a representation. Now that representation, which is a concept, a remembered concept that can be reified, meaning separating it from the ground. Separating it from the ground of being and becoming just an object in the mind. Like love is something there or the orange is. Instead of just tasting it and you can't separate it from your mouth, your mouth and your orange and the same thing. But then you have an orange there. The orange is to separate the orange and to believe the orange exists in time. That is a reification of the concept of origin. So reification requires concept. But when basic concept first becomes ordinary, concept means remembered and then reified, which means separated from other concept as something existing on its own, we call that reification. And that is the beginning, the ground of separation.

And that gets in the way of us experiencing being for what it is, is our conceptualization and our. That our mind creates.

Exactly.

And try to link it to a couple of other things. Hameed, first is the closest I'm aware of. But your account of reification comes would be to Advaita Vedanta with its concept, with its idea of the. That the world is a superimposition on Brahman, on the undivided being. And the other association which you bring up, which is very interesting, is the point about developmental. In developmental psychology, you say that psychology assumes that the world of separate object, of reified objects is a developmental achievement. That we actually, we've matured enough to recognize the way the world is, that it's actually this. It's not just one whole, it is all these separate entities. But you point out that, your point is that conventional psychology and science don't recognize that this apparent world of separated, reified objects in a separated self is actually a mental construction overlaying and obscuring fundamental being.

Yeah, that is accurate. At the same time, it is a developmental achievement in the sense developing an ordinary individual mind is something that develops and it is necessary for living and preserving our physical organism, you know, for survival. So it is an achievement in the sense it's necessary in the development of consciousness. Because, you know, majority, I mean, far majority of people, they grow up with an individual mind, with a sense of being in separate individual, not normal, ordinary, universal truth. And it is like it begins in pure being, but pure being, the origin of it, the source of it. But it's a further development that goes through several steps, many steps actually. First, basic concept become ordinary concept. Then ordinary concept is reified. And then that reification is related to another reification. And you have a string of reifications and that developed then the personality and the ego. You need all these string verification to what psychology called mental structure, which is ego.

Yeah, Hameed, can we have our cake and eat it too? Can we have our intellectual concepts and all of that stuff that we've developed into? And at the same time, Be in touch with our ground of being. Can both of us coexist or be part of the same field, or does it always get in the way?

You're looking at it, yes. How else can it be? I mean, you can be a pure being, but you need to have some conceptual order in mind to learn to eat, drive a car, all of that. You know, to write a book, try the book. Especially to do your taxes. You can't do taxes without a reified mind.

You tell the IRS that you're resting in being and can't do them.

Yeah, I remember when they asked Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the Senate committee and they were questioning his finances. Do you have account? Do you have money? He said, yeah, they have a lot of money. He said, how much do you have? He said, well, I have access to all banks, all accounts. And they all said what? They said, yeah, I have access. It's true as being. You have all of it. All the banks, all the accounts are part of being. And if he is being, being, he's got them all, you see. But he was speaking to people who couldn't understand them. I would guess so, yeah.

That probably did not fly.

Didn't fly. They were wondering what this guy talking about.

So amid you've given us an account of how we reify the world and ourselves create this apparent separation. And then you go, then you point out, point to the possibility of undoing this reification or at least seeing, maybe perhaps seeing through it would be a better way of. Way of describing which you. And for you, that that mode is inquiry. So perhaps you could speak about this process of moving beyond reification or training.

Yeah, you see, all spiritual teachings, all practices, is to go beyond the reification. That's the point. To go beyond reified experience to immediate experience, basically. So the methodology that I developed, which usually deploys this understanding of concepts and verification, all that is to look at the reified concept and understand them and see where they come from. And that way they are penetrated. And then they dissolve. They reveal themselves as just cancer. And there becomes nothing there for a while before a quality being arises.

And when they come back together, Hameed, do they come back together in a different, different way? Are they more translucent than they were before when you dissolve it? And then the concept returns.

It's more like the concept returns, but it does not function as a layer over our perception. It is a concept the mind uses to function in the world. But the mind doesn't use to know itself, to know reality. Reality is known more Immediately. So there is a sense of being. I am being and pure presence at the same time. You know, I could think of my car thinking my car is ordinary knowledge. If I was sitting in my car and driving it. That's closer to basic knowledge. And one thing to say is that experience in general for most people is a mix of basic knowing and ordinary knowing. We all have some immediate knowing, some more than others. You see, for the realized individual, the basic knowing is primary. It's fundamental. It's not lost. But ordinary knowledge sometimes is gone when the mind is clear and empty, but sometimes present as mental functioning, like writing a book or composing a poem.

And you makes a point, Hameed, that the key to moving through these reifications via inquiry is you say continuous inquiry powered by a love of truth.

Yeah, we've been talking about that all along. Truth to find what is the truth of what we're experiencing. Not because I want to get rid of it, I want to get something out of it. You already know what it is. And that means I want to know the truth. Because truth is important for me. And that we see, if we engage, that we see that comes from the heart. It's called. In the traditions, the suf is called hamma. Buddhists call it bodhicitta. You know, it is basically the drive for enlightenment which appears at loving to know the truth for itself.

The Jesuits would call it discernment. We had a priest on last week. Discernment to be able to look deeply and know the reality of the truth.

Yes. Yeah. To discern directly, immediately. Yeah.

And you give a beautiful statement about the result of this, in which you say that apparently separate objects. That's reified objects. Apparently separate objects become increasingly transparent to the light of being until presence stands revealed.

Yeah. As we understand the reification and see that there's a revocation making it into a separate object in our mind, we believe it is something separate object. And to understand that reification, we see the conceptualization underlying the reification. Because conceptualization comes before reification. Reification is a reification of a concept. It doesn't. It's not reification, reality. Reification of concept, which means reification of a knowing, a particular knowing, like I know love, then I can reify, I know power, then I can reify it. But you have to know it to reify it. It has to. So knowing always means concept. That's the thing that many people many times don't talk about. Knowing means concept. They always think concept is against realization. No, there is two levels of concept. There's an ordinary concept. These are barriers to realization. But basic concepts, which is the pure knowingness is concept knowing. No, love as love, that concept, you know, concept of love. But the concept of love is love itself here. But I think it was constant. And that is revealed in this dimension by why I mentioned in it as the qualities arising in a diamond form, in a specific diamond form, transparent, sharp. Each quality arises at a transparent sharp diamond, which is diamond. Any quality like the black diamond, peace and stillness, fullness of it, beingness with the sense of stillness together. So stillness or peace is a concept in addition to beingness. But when we allow the diamond to expand, we see it's nothing, the nothingness of it. That shows that the diamond is a concept, you see, but it's not a concept in the mind as a concept in God's mind.

Right. Is it more of a Platonic type of.

You could say. I think Platonic ideas are sort of in that direction. Maybe. Plato was probably one of the first to talk about things like that, you know? Yeah, I think, you know, this dimension, pure being is. Was Plotinus called the noose. Remember the three hypostasis of Plotinus? The one, the nous, the soul, the middle one, the nous which is the origin of all things, you see? And that is the realm of the Platonic ideas.

Would that also be the logos in the Greek? In the New Testament, in the beginning was the Logos and created all things. Is that the idea?

We'll talk about the logos related to it, but not exactly. Okay, not exactly. Logos mean change and transformation, all of that. Yeah. Now we're talking just about being. Okay, yeah.

Maybe this is a place to transition into the next major section you discussed, and that is when reification is seen through via the process of inquiry and when the concepts become transparent to the transcendent, then you say that awareness and non conceptual awareness become available. And this is a very radical and deep discussion you have here in this whole chapter on awareness and non conceptual. So maybe just throw this out for you to begin a discussion about this.

So we transition it to the next chapter.

Yeah, unless there's more you want to say.

No, whatever. I mean, we could go back and forth, you know, so that shows. I mean, the way in this path thing can happen is first we experience divine love, which is sort of making experience simpler. Instead of many, the revocation, there's just love that is presence. So there's two concepts, love and being. Being is a concept. You have to understand that being, even being pure being pure existence is a Knowing of being, the knowing of being indicate it. There is a, what I call basic concept, which is immediacy. Knowingness and its immediacy implies what I call a basic concept. So I'm pointing to a whole category of concepts that most people don't think about, which is an immediate knowing. It's conceptual, but it's not conceptual in the way most people think of it.

And awareness is not quite the same as knowing. But it is a space that knowing and concepts, either intellectual or these basic concepts such as love arises in.

Well, I mean that's what Roger was trying to get to, which is that recognizing. First we have to recognize that being, pure being has a consider being which mean Trinity can shed that concept. Because, you know, in this dimension pure presence is also a complete awareness. We could call it awareness. It's similar to ordinary. Ordinary awareness has knowing in it. If you notice, you perceive and you sort of know or don't know and. But you know, you don't know. So there is knowledge implicit in the awareness, rather how ordinary mind works. It's a similar. It's a facsimile of the basic mind which is knowing and being at the same time. But there's a concept. However, that concept can. Some can have an experience with that concept itself evaporate. So there is no sense of being. But there is still awareness. So you see, pure presence is awareness, which is the origin of ordinary awareness, which is awareness has knowing. But we can get to an awareness that is free of knowing and that I call non conceptual. You see, most people call the first one non conceptual. They call pure being non conceptual. The knowing of being as non conceptual meaning it's free from the ordinary concept, right? I call non conception is empty of any concept, ordinary or basic. So true nature can also reveal itself that way and as a pure translucence and make us be aware. But in that pure translucency of pure awareness. I call it pure awareness instead of pure presence. There is no knowing of what we are aware of. There's awareness of everything without knowing what we are aware of.

There's no knowing of existence even.

It's just that space, no knowing of existence. There's just awareness, awareness. Aware of itself as awareness. But it doesn't know it is awareness. When you are purely in the experience. There isn't really, you know, knowing. It is awareness. It's just awareness. In fact, I mean, that's the reason why some meditators talk about how they go to meditation and they go to. It's non conceptual. They come out of it. They don't remember what happened. They don't know how long it's been. Because you need concept to know. You need knowing. If you get to the space, there's no knowing. There's no knowing of time, no knowing space, no knowing how long or short. I mean come out of it. It just feel fresh and clean.

So how do you remember it?

Well, I mean, first of all, it's a good question. When we are in pure awareness, how do we know it's pure awareness?

Stay tuned for part two of our conversation with A. H. Almaas. Get your scuba gear ready. We are swimming in deep waters. 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 people 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.

Sa.