Welcome to part two of the first dialogue in our Path of Love series with A. H. Almaas where we continue our journey to the absolute and our true nature. The nondual personal and intimate journey to the heart of reality. 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.

And the way you speak about love as this force or this dynamic and the stages you lay out remind me of a couple of other descriptions. One is Plato in his description of eros as moving from beautiful bodies to beautiful minds to ethics to the good as one. And then there's a Sufi path of metaphorical and into spiritual and the various stages which you know much, much, much better than I do. So would you like to. I would love to hear you say something about the some comparisons and what your approach adds here. I mean I can see some things you definitely add, but much better to hear them from you.

You see the path of the Indian tradition they took called the Bhakti approach. They have different in the Karma approach, the Yana approach and the Bhakti, the way of the heart. And there are many schools of it, you know, Indian religion and Hinduism and the Bhakti path, Hinduism is frequently toward this particular deity, you know, Rama or Vishnu or Krishna. I mean, I mean different sects orient to different expression of the divine, the deity. Where there's love, there is beauty and all of that. And the Sufi path, I mean there are many lineages, some of them are more love oriented than others. But in general Sufism, the love is the dominant force because frequently they even equate love with the divine with the truth. But some of them do clearly show that the ultimate truth, the absolute truth is not just love and the love and outer expression. The difference between my approach or approach of this teaching than others is that the methodology is a very important part. The Bhakti approach is chanting and praying and supplication. And I mean we do chant in our group some, but it's not the main method, it's a supported method. We do chanting, we do prayer. The main method is continues to be inquiry, to be understanding experience, staying true to experience and understanding, experiencing, seeing what is in the way that limits it from moving the way it wants to move. So the Sufi path doesn't use inquiry as much. The Sufi path uses, you know, Zakir and Lavi. They do the whirling thing. They have all these methods and all these methods for me, I mean, obviously they have been effective for them, you know, I've learned many of them, but I didn't find that the natural thing for me, natural thing for me was more the inquiry. Because remember, the diamond approach is a teaching that has many things, many approaches. The way of the heart is only one major way. There are other realizations that happen in other ways, you see. And inquiry is an approach that works for all of them. Whether it's another opening to awareness and clarity or opening to heart and a beloved, or more grounding the mensity of reality through the belly center. All these like I don't do, like martial arts to do the belly center, for instance. Be difficult for me to do that.

Me too.

But you see, but the inquiry for me is engagement of the heart that uses the mind, internalizes the mind. The mind asks the question, the heart by the answers.

Yeah, you said, I said in this book too that without the mind, the mind is essential because it is part of the function of our soul.

Yeah. And all these, even the bhakti, you know, fully, like the prayer or the chanting, they still use the mind. Some not as much maybe as inquiry does. But everybody uses mind. You got mind, you have to use it.

You use plenty of it.

I use the mind because understanding is very important. But understanding is experiential. Understanding like feeling the love. Understanding love means feeling it and knowing what it feel like. What is this texture? What is this function? That's what I mean by understanding, recognizing what it feel like and how it function and how it impacts experience.

It seems like there's almost two things. There's the love of truth. That's almost a mind centric thing. And then there seems. There's a yearning and hunger that seems to be more of the heart. And you kind of put those things both together. Could you sort that out for me or does that make any sense?

It's very easy to sort that out because truth is not the quality of the mind, it's the quality of the heart.

Thank you.

The heart knows truth, the mind doesn't. You see, when we remember we talked about at some point about different qualities of presence or true nature. One of the main qualities is solid gold of truth. And it appears in the heart. It's really the main quality of the heart is truth. Because truth is sweet, truth is true, genuine. And so the mind is the discerning quality. The standing capacity that discerns to the sense of truth comes from the heart, not from the mind. The mind can discern and explore until something comes from the heart to say this is the truth. See, so inquiry combined Mind and heart, the discernment and exploration and the providing of the actual feel thing, the actual feel of truth, the actual substance to which comes from the heart.

Did you at some point begin to see the truth or the inner beloved everywhere? Not just inside, but it just spread out. And now it was basically everything.

Well, you're jumping to the end of the book. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Which is fine. It's true. That's what happens. Yes.

You just keep reeling me in, Hameed.

Well, you read the whole book, so for you it's all one thing.

Don't give the secret away, John.

I mean, it's not a secret. People who read the book, they'll read the whole thing, you know?

Yeah, you should read the book.

Trust me.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, stepping back to the trilogy again, in 1977, Ken Wilbur really kind of exploded onto the cultural scene with his book the Spectrum of Consciousness, in which he laid out what he called the first full spectrum model or theory of human consciousness. Going all the way from the early fragmented ego through to the various degrees of self actualization, all the way to various degrees of realization and kinds of realization. It feels like you have, in your diamond approach work, offered something maybe conceptually analogous, a full spectrum view of human possibility and maturation, but with a much greater experiential base and a kind of soteriological liberation motive. And now it feels like you're offering a radical and in some ways quite novel whole spectrum view of love and its potentials.

Yeah, that is very true. You see experience in this path. Experience is almost everything. I mean, without experience there is no path. It has to be direct, immediate experience. And the heart is very central in this direct experience. Experience is felt, is sensed, known in the heart, not just in the mind. The mind has insight, has discrimination, illumination, but the heart is what provides the material that is known. And Kant did a great job. And I don't know if he's still doing it, of doing a whole system. His orientation was he has experience, but it was more of a philosophical approach. Actually. My teaching is not really philosophy. It is a teaching as a spiritual teaching. It is based on experience is what's creating the teaching. My mind didn't create it. I did not systematize it. And experience systematized itself. It parceled itself in the way, appeared in this way and that way. And my mind was just trying to figure out what's it doing. Let me put it down.

You're trying to catch up with my mind.

Couldn't do it, I tell you. Yeah, but it Tried, I take it. I'm not that smart and my mind's not smart enough to know that kind of thing. And it doesn't. I mean, nobody is smart enough to know the essential truth.

Yeah, well said. Could you perhaps, speaking of this full spectrum vision of love, could you say a little about what you see as some of the unique features? I mean, I see several unique features, but I'd be much better to have you speak to them.

The path of love and this teaching, you mean?

Yeah, because, you know, as you pointed out, there have been other paths of love that have been pointed to. I mean, you know, Plato provide the basic one, but the Sufis may be laid out on the most sophisticated one. But even here it feels like you're adding some new. Some new aspects or experiences or possibilities.

Well, let's see, the first thing is that there is a union between inquiry and the force of love. Love is the force that dissolves thing, brings out things, manifest things. And the inquiry is basically discerning as it brings out things. What is it from the past? What is it coming directly from experience? What is an obstacle? What is an opening? You know, so the path helps that way, that way. Otherwise the heart can go in the wrong direction. You know, the heart can think, oh, I'm loving this person. I fell in love. Well, that's why my heart is so open, because I met this person and many people do that. And so it need great discrimination because the heart will tend to. Well, I tell you that they'll say, well, if you stay long enough, when you realize at some point, you know, my heart wants something more complete, more perfect. And regardless how beautiful and perfect the outer beloved is, there's something else. And it's sort of the heart. It appears like almost like an intuitive sense. Like the heart knows intuitively what the beloved is, although it is not appearing palpably in experience and perception. So the heart knows it without beholding it yet. And that's why it knows whether it's separate or not separate. And also the experience that many teachings talk about, getting near and far from the beloved, the experience of nearness. In the Sufi approach, nearness is a very important stage. The nearness to the inner glow, the nearness to the truth. Nearness brings in more gladness, more feeling of openness, and more sense of pleasure that you're getting close, you're getting near. You see, just feeling near to what you love is by itself pleasurable, you know, but then there is distance. So you get near. Sometimes things take you out. And here I Feel the need is getting less, I'm farther away. That's what inquiries you, what's making me far away. Not like I go and chant and pray. Some people do that. It hasn't been my way. I look into it. What is it? And then I found that I said the thing. Thing from history thing and belief system thing, you know, from the experiences that I think are what I'm going after. And there are many perils and pitfalls in the path, any path. And the path of love is not different from that. So the path of love is not straightforward. You know, love zigzag up and down, in and out, and it goes on. And for me it lasts for a few years, you know, before the final. But. So it's called tajalli, the emergence and the distancing.

We can experience that as pain. I would imagine existential pain in the soul. Like something's missing. This is not right. What's in the way? What do I have to do?

Yeah, distancing. The response to distancing is a sense of loss. Pain.

Yes.

And tears. Crying. Deep hot tears. Crying like you've been abandoned. The one you love most. So it feels like that, you know.

Yes.

As if you are dealing with a human love, but there's not a human love. But like, where did it go? You know, what made me? Why did it throw me out? Why did it push me away? What did I do? What happened? You know? Because the mind has many things that comes in the way that beliefs and ideas and reaction, relationship from the past. And all of these things come in the way of the path of love. Because the heart is patterned by our history, especially our history of love. We have long history, a story of love with all that imprinted in the heart. And the heart need to be emptied of all of that. You get emptied, all of that. Not in my path. Not by just through the inquiry. I recognize it. And it dissolves and reveals another layer and dissolves until the heart gets emptier and emptier, purer and purer. And when I say heart, I mean the heart of the soul, which is like the whole. It's not like a little thing in the chest, open, expansive, big.

And once you've had a taste of this inner beloved, I think that just gets more painful when you're not there. Because you know there's something beyond, beyond that you have experienced that you are. And you're not experiencing it. You're getting farther away from that. Has to be a lot of suffering involved in that. And perhaps that's Part of the path.

Yeah.

In fact, many of my students come and say they had some taste, some experience or something, surprised them, loved it and so wonderful. And they don't have accurate. They don't know what happened. They want to work to regain that. So many people are moved in that direction because of some encounter. Can be. Most of the time it's a partial encounter, of course, can't be called complete encounter. Complete encounter will be the realization the full beyond holding. But the path of the heart, as I use a Sufi metaphor, I don't know which Sufi which is the. When you make shish kebab, you turn the meat one side to another. He says the way of the heart is like that, like tending the meat one side on it burns one side and burns the other side. The burn one hot one side. It keep cooking until it's completely cooked.

Okay. And would you. I have a couple questions are coming to mind, Hameed. One is, would you describe this experience of being bereft and having lost contact with the beloved as a variant of the dark night of the soul. And second, I'm wondering, you talk about, you know, you work with a lot of students, you know, on this path. What are some of the most common misunderstandings that you find people have?

Well, I mean, there are two kind misunderstandings that happens that can put somebody astray. One is attributing the love to an external thing, person or activity and object. The other misunderstanding is taking one manifestation of spirit and believing that's it. Many manifestations. Spirit. And this is the source of all of them. They are beloved. Yeah. So one thing I wanted to mention here. We were talking about the path of love. One part of the path of love is not only the longing, the yearning, the heartache and the pain, the emptiness and all that. But all along the path, there are also the love, the sweetness, the passion, the ecstasy and the drunkenness. And I mean, you get, you know, closer. The closer you get to the nearness. Make you feel all full of joy, full of love. And there is a surrender and the melting of the heart. And there are many stages of melting. Surrender, sweetness, effulgence, fullness, and, you know, radiance. All these things that the heart has many flavors, have many. I mean, you could talk about different kind of love or different expression of the heart, but it's all mixed together. They're all threads of the same thing. The yearning and the pain and the separation also intertwined with nearness and closeness and moving intimacy and, you know, and pleasure and delight. But the melting and melting and passion are two kind, two opposite kind of way. In the way the heart, a passionate desire, passionate longing, you know, which has love in it. An intense, powerful love. Or the melting, the heart melts and dissolves and sort of becomes open.

Letting.

Go of everything and all holding and all restrictions and limitation and beliefs and ideas. And so in the mind, we say, the mind gets clear, the heart melts.

Well, that's a beautiful comparison. Now, I mean, I'm wanting to ask about the larger picture here. And that is it feels like our current society, our culture, even our civilization is so far from this vision of love. And I wonder how you see contemporary society and its many discontents in the light of this vision of love.

Worsening of the usual condition? Well, it's usually. I mean, the Sufi said it for a long time, humanity is asleep, usual condition. All throughout, all times, not just now. And Gurdjieff said, man is a machine, meaning it's automatic. Other automatic, nothing real organic, so nothing new about that. However, in the last few decades, I will say since the last century, things seamless throughout human society and all around the world, not just in this country, it seems there is more. The other side of the heart. The division instead of unity, the enmity instead of friendliness, hatred instead of love, you know, aggression instead of kindness. It seems like the more survival and animalistic nature is becoming dominant now. And, you know, not everybody, not everywhere, but it seems more there, more out there than it has been. And part of it is that many people feel in the past, I think those things were there, they were somehow hidden or submerged or now they are giving permission, even courage, as a cross and as violent as possible. People feel the permission to do that, which is sort of really, you know, I mean, it happened in some societies before, but this is unusual for the Western society.

Hameed, do you think that eventually we'll all get there?

What do you mean, get there?

Get this realization of who and what we truly are. Is that something that just has to happen because of the nature of things? Because it's a very, very positive vision of reality.

It is the nature of the soul. And the soul will get to know itself, to know its true nature. To me, it's inner beloved. It is inherent in it. It's sort of like an evolutionary process. It's true for all human, however, not many. I mean, there are many who are engaged in that path, but not the majority of humanity. Not the greatest percentage. And throughout history, not the greatest percentage. People are basically, from hand to mouth, trying to survive that's part of it, you know, survival. People need to survive. But I think recently is not only survival, but survival at all. Means and being better, more powerful and richer. The materialism is expanded. The Western culture, protein materialism made it important, which helped our situation a great deal by developing our science and medicine, all of that. But also had a materialistic approach, which the outer, the material, the concrete became more important, like somebody's cell phone, more important than their heart, for instance. And that development, recent development, started, I think the industrial revolution got worse and worse. And now we are at a crossroad where things can get even worse. You say, are we ultimately going to get there? I think yes. But when you say ultimately, how many years you thinking how many millions?

A whole bunch? Yeah, a lot.

It's that soon.

Some people say, I know. Some people ask me some interview, they say, well, do you think we, you know, this is sort of, we're gonna rebound and get to the other side? Several times throughout my life think crisis happen and then people saying, oh, maybe they'll wake up a humanity. None of it woke up humanity. Some people woke up, the majority did it. So I don't think this thing is going to wake up a humanity. No humanity. I don't know. But I don't know if anything can wake up humanity as a whole. Jesus couldn't do it.

No. Jesus said, many are called, but few are chosen.

Yeah, Buddha couldn't do it. Nobody could have done it. I don't know if there's any external force that can do it. I mean, humanity is an evolution of process. The soul is evolving and each human being in a different place in their evolution. We're not all equally the same place. Different people are evolving in different way, different pace, different level of evolution. But it is our potential. You know, the interesting thing, you know, that the materialistic culture doesn't understand, which is we have a spiritual potential. Materialistic culture, the outer thing, the physical thing, is really most fundamental. Spiritual people know that's not true, that there is something in the inner ness deep within our heart and soul that is more fundamental. That is where the beauty is, where the true beauty is, where the true riches of the human being are. And so some of us wake up to it to one degree or another, and few of us wake up a long way. You know, hopefully all the three of us will be awake enough by the end of our life. So when the end comes, we feel no regret done.

And that's quite a practice unto itself to live so as to not have regrets.

Well, Yes, I mean that not only regrets and the path that is in this teaching. I usually give the teaching I gave it. I said the best preparation for death is the fulfilled life. Fulfilled life is both inwardly and outwardly. You have modicum of comfortable life, you know, somewhat easy, not too taxing and painful and health wise and all that. And you have an inner richness. Both are fulfilled. There's a fulfillment like you feel you don't want anything more. Everything that the soul wants is already here and then you're ready to die any moment. Death is not seen as a problem. It's like just one of the things that happens and there will be no regret. Some people I know, even some of my students, very advanced, when I want to live longer and I still have something not finished. You see, most people, that's the situation for me. I don't have those feelings. I've been finished a long time ago, you see, I could have gone a long time ago. I think of my time now as a bonus. I don't know why. Maybe it's not for me, you know. But whatever it is that my soul wants, it has been realized. And it's possible. I'm saying this, I'm saying this not just about me, because it's possible for any human being. That is what is the true fulfillment. So the true fulfillment, which is. I differ from the Eastern approaches where they think, you know, the enlightenment is getting out of this life, to be away from this life and leave it and not come back. For me, no, the true fulfillment is to do that, what they say, the inner enlightenment. But life itself has to fulfill its purpose. Life is. We're not here in life just to get enlightened. We're here to live, to live fully and learn from it. And one important thing we learn is the inner world.

And you're bringing to mind for me, Hameed Abraham Maslow's distinction between deficiency needs based on a sense of lack and longing versus sufficiency. A kind of sense of overflowing, of fullness. And clearly you're coming from beautiful sufficiency. And yet you're also, you know, it hasn't stopped the flow of creative contribution, which is wonderful.

Well, you still have compassion, right? I mean, you still care about the rest of us who are maybe not as far along the road.

Oh yes. Well, I mean our condition of realization that are very paradoxical in some sense. I feel it doesn't matter what happened. At the same time, I care for people. You see, whatever happens, happens. You know, it's not in my Personal hands to change it.

But existential fear is no longer there.

No, I'm not. No, I don't have fear of death, for instance.

Yeah.

As far as I know, I don't know. And also, you know, part of what happened in the past when you get to the like the inner beloved and other realization we talked about, the individual self is gone. There's no more self. No, no. The ego self does not only become secondary or become so not the main thing. It's actually gone. It does not exist. Some people think realization is I am aware and then there is when I need to function and then I become an individual function. Oh, that's only half the realization. The full realization that all traces of inner self and all parts of history and all the impression of it are all dissolved. The heart is one of the things that dissolves many of these things. Because the heart is a big part of what gets conditioned, what get impressed, what get patterned by experience.

You mentioned in this book the death wish. And we're not talking about the, you know, wanting to suicide or die in a glorious battle, but wanting to completely dissolve into the beloved.

Yeah. At that time I was playing when the movie is death wish 1 2, remember?

Yes, I do. Shows our age, right?

That time. Yeah. When I was teaching that, you know, so I was using expression. I used many expressions there that are known and popular to give them a different meaning. Meaning that has to do more with the inner path of the heart. We will talk in the next meeting about the dark night of the soul, the poverty of the heart, the inner poverty, all these things, the stages and the beloved itself.

Yeah. And amid, as we come towards the end here, as the writing and teaching of the path of love, which sounds as though it happened after your own very profound realization of the path. Has that changed things you or how has that affected you?

What do you mean how has that affected me?

Well, I don't know. I'm thinking that, you know, that just to engage in this dialogue is having effects on me. For example, I'm such a cerebral type, I'm operating out of the head center. This is the first time I've ever engaged and felt it's coming. It's an engagement from my heart center. So it's hard for me to imagine that your immersion in years of teaching this hasn't impacted and perhaps led to even further understandings in you.

Yeah, of course. I mean, I mean, I mentioned part of it dissolving of the self and what takes place of that. And we talk about many dimensions of that what takes a place, the inner nature, what it is, how it manifests. And haven't written about all of them, written about some of them. And this path, for some reason has so many things, it keeps revealing itself. I'm not looking for them. It's not like I want anything more. They keep happening. That's why at some point I'm gonna do, I think, a series of what happens after enlightenment. Yeah, nobody talks about that. You get enlightened, you sit there. That's what people think. You just sit in awareness. That's not what happens. There's life with interesting topography.

That would be very important. Hameed. It seems like there are three families or paths, path descriptions. The most common are from beginning the path to some sort of realization or awakening, but as a temporary experience. Then there are fewer descriptions of the process of stabilizing that into continuous either love or awareness or realization, but very little on the kind of post enlightenment stage you're describing. So that'd be a real contribution.

Yeah, because it's not like somebody realize enlightened, they just sit in their state of realization.

Not like the land of the lotus eaters.

It doesn't happen that way for anybody.

That's good. Okay. All right, good.

Coming attractions, situations dynamic and creative. And true nature is inherently creative, dynamic and revealing further and further mysteries. It never stops.

That's what we've noticed about you, Hameed. True nature hasn't finished with you yet. Hameed, is there anything you'd like to add before we come to a close?

I think it's good we're focusing more on the heart and the way of the heart. And there are many ways of the heart and not just one. And I'm presenting the way of the heart in this teaching, which is a particular way, which is more of a Western, actually, a combined Western and some Eastern survey thing. But it has in it the sensibilities of modern mind, modern life, and how to live it from the perspective of the heart. Because it's not like a way of the heart. You go off by yourself and isolate and become a hermit or get lost in a jungle or something like that. You live your life. How do you live your life and engage the way of the heart? That is, you know, an interesting and possible approach. And so there are many people that their orientation is a bhakti is heart orientation. And I want those people to know, yes, there is a way to address your longing, your love. There is a way it can complete itself.

These books certainly do it. Love Unveiled, first, Nondual Love, second and the third, which is coming out as we speak, The Inner Beloved. And they're just a beautiful, beautiful overview of incredibly rich description of the path of love. So thank you so much, Hameed.

Yeah. So hopefully next time we meet, we will have the...

Thank you so much, Hameed. This means a lot to us. 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 very satisfying. So thank you for your help, thank you for your presence and thank you for all you are and all you do.