Welcome to our continuing dialogue with AH Almas Hamid Ali. Today we explore the depths of our being, the fundamental nature of reality. This is a really deep dive and I think you'll love it.

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, join us in the evolutionary fast lane as we take a deep dive into transformational practice. Peak experience, profound understanding, powerful contribution.

Our co host is John Dupuis and I'm Roger Walsh. And today we continue with our series, the AH Almas Wisdom Series in which we're dialoguing with Hamid Ali, whose pen name is AH Almas. And Hamid is offering us the gift, the priceless gift of an overview of his work and creations manifested in the diamond approach and constituted in a series of very remarkable books. And today we'll be diving into what may be the most profound of all the profound chapters in this book. True Nature. John is on fire with questions. And so John, I'm turning it over to you.

Thank you, Roger Hamid, True joy to be back with you. And I have been immersing myself in this book for two and a half months and I find it's a really great companion to the inner journey home because it's, it's a first person account largely of how the teachings came to you or the revelations or whatever you want to call them and how you went through it and integrated it. And it's, it's really spectacular and it's been work in me. So my first question is about presence, which is a word that you use a lot and you talked about. I think it was EB Gold that helped you learn about presence. And how did you discover that? And what is the phenomenological experience of presence? What is it when you sense or feel presence?

Yeah. E.J. gold. E.J. gold, the teacher who, the fourth wave teacher who I met in the 70s, I recognize as embodying presence in a very distinct, clear way. That's when I first recognized it in somebody else before I actually recognized it deeply in myself, which happened later, a few years later. But presence is a thing, the central thing that's been going through our discussions and talk about its qualities and dimensions and all that. Presence is an ontological experiencing, the ontology of consciousness, like ontological mode of consciousness. Consciousness that is that sense like the Amnes, the I am is the am part of like in the Advaita Vedanta talk about true nature as Satchitananda and sat mean truth. Or being, which means truth or existence, originally used interchangeably. So presence is experiencing one's existence and phenomenological immediate. Not luck recognizing existence, but feeling it, feeling the sense of existing. So presence is the field. It's consciousness as a field, as a medium of different degrees of substantiality and fullness or lightness that we could feel impregnated with. We feel presence, experiencing presence. Feel like a full substance, a substance that has a sense of aliveness and fullness. I used to call, at the beginning, I first discovered, I called it substance, spiritual substance. It is like a substance. However, it's not a physical substance. It's a substance made out of pure consciousness. So presence mean what I am that is here in a consciousness sense. Not my body here, but me as the consciousness that is here. I am seeing my hereness, my essence, my beingness. And this beingness is what I call presence. So I am present because I am the presence, the presence is. And here they feel it is. Here it is present because it is the immediacy of the nowness of consciousness.

Is that equivalent to the soul? Hamid?

Well, the soul can be created as a presence. However, the soul, when I talk about presence, I talk about the essential nature of the soul, the true nature of the soul. We call it presence. The soul is. Is. I call it a living presence. It's a flowing, dynamic kind of consciousness that can feel like presence when it is full of its nature. However, most of the time, as you remember from our discussion, the soul is structured by our history. Appears as our ego self that, when it is that way, doesn't feel like presence. It's disconnected from its presence. Because by identifying with its history or images of itself, it disconnects from its nature, which means it disconnects from its presence. So when the soul becomes open to its presence, then soul can feel like presence. Both the essential nature and soul are presence of a slightly different kind. The soul flowing, dynamic, growing organism of presence. While presence itself. That's true nature of consciousness or the true nature of everything. It's hereness, it's factness. And it doesn't grow, doesn't change. It's completely perfect, completely what it is. The soul grows and learns. But the presence of the true nature just. It is what it is. Yeah.

It doesn't need to be taught, doesn't need to be healed. It doesn't need.

No, it's perfect and complete and totally blissful. Yeah.

And amid you talk about the fact that the recognition of presence or essence, as you call it in the soul, matures into a deeper recognition that this nature is or true nature is actually the ground of all phenomena. All manifestation.

Yes. So depending on how we discover presence, you know, and the way I teach it, I do it gradually because most people cannot go to the deepest level. So the individual at the beginning, it's presence within oneself, within the consciousness of the soul. So it's localized and like filling the body or appearing in the heart, or however that is the beginning between present. Presence is not physical. The physical doesn't bound it. When we recognize that the physical, the body doesn't bound presence and it doesn't end at the boundaries of the body. If it doesn't enter the boundary of the body, then where does that end? It doesn't end. It's indefinite. And that is how most teaching think of presence as the ground of everything. Not just the nature of the soul, but the nature of everything. It is what it is everywhere. Sometimes people talk about consciousness is everywhere and the nature of everything. Presence is talking about consciousness. But about as I said, Sat Chitananda means existence, consciousness, bliss. These are the three properties of true nature. I mean, according to that tradition, the first one, the essential one, the existence which is the presence. Then the fact that's conscious, the presence conscious, conscious of itself, knows itself. And then under the fact, it feels good.

That's good. I just wanted to mention too, as you talk about. We talked about it before, but the. The essential qualities that are necessary for this work is love of the truth and curiosity. I've taken that into studying your works and that just keeps coming back as a. As a refrain. It's very moving to me.

Yeah. For the path, for the inner journey, what really works is loving truth, not because I want something from it, but three love. When you love something, love somebody, for instance, the true love, it's not because you want something. You just love them. You just. You think they're wonderful, Right? Same thing with loving truth. You love it for itself. Not because we want something from it. And this kind of love naturally appears at the heart at some point when the soul matures. Thus loving the truth. I mean, we know it exists in our science and general society. People want to find the truth. They keep talking about the truth. And these days they say the truth is lost. Nobody would know what the truth is because of misinformation, information, all of that. And that's true making things. But the truth that science talk about is external truth. That can be ascertained with experiment. Here we're talking about truth that is experienced, you know, that Is known as certain through direct experience. And that brings certainty of what it is. So, you know, to go from the simplest thing to the most profound thing, truth, it's not one thing. Although there is an aspect of truth that help us know what. Whether this is true or not. However, the content of what we call truth can be anything, can be the fact that we're talking this is truth. And the fact that we are pure existence, that is truth. You know, so loving the truth, wanting to find the truth, because the truth is a dynamic, evolving, transforming, deepening. If we really love the truth, the truth can reveal more and more of what it is. And that becomes the most powerful way of what's called the enlightenment drive, the drive toward liberation. People sometimes talk about, I want to be free, I want to be liberated. I want to be free of suffering, I want the meaning of life. All of those are different ways of saying, I love the truth. I want the truth. So love the truth is the most obvious, most specific, clearest expression of that deep, true movement of the heart for its own sake.

As the discovery of truth deepens and opens into true nature. You talk about the paradox of this, that this is as profound a realization as a human being can have. And yet it's. There's a real challenge in describing it, that this is beyond our concepts and categories. So before maybe we dive into true nature itself, maybe you could talk about some of the challenges that we find here and even discussing it.

Well, that's one thing is many of the teaching take the position that it is better not to describe, you know, and many teachings shy away from it. And the concern is that if you describe will stick in the mind. And people will make it an aim and start looking for something, but they'll be looking for something that idea in their mind, which is not necessarily exactly what the truth is. And there is a truth to that. I think I see that happening in some student. However, I don't take that route. I think actually giving a very detailed phenomenological description of the truth of whatever true nature I manifest. I'm teaching while I am in the state. Help. The transmission orients the mind and heart toward receiving the transmission of the truth. I am teaching, so describing it can become really. Even though some people can use as a barrier, it actually helps more. More people access truth that way than by not describing it. That's my.

Yeah, you do it brilliantly in this book, Hamid.

Yeah. So you signed it, you find it in the book.

Oh, my God. I have a couple of passages I would like you to read that have just, just. They're exquisite.

John, since not everyone will be watching the video, maybe you could just give the name of the book you're talking about.

Yeah, it's Lumin this Night's Journey, an autobiographical fragment. So these are. He was writing these. You were writing these down as they were coming to you. And we get to experience how they came to you and kind of the conflicts between absolute and being a human being in life and how you. You were able to integrate that. And I'm not going to say all that stuff that's for you to say, but, yeah, it's an amazing book. And let me. This is a partial paragraph from the introduction. Towards the second part of the spontaneously unfolding revelation of being, my process became focused not on the experience of being and its essential manifestations, but on the shift of identity to being. This led to the development of self recognition in an increasing subtler and more profound dimensions of being, culminating in the realization of the absolute. Then this ushered into a subtle process of the clarification of the soul to the degree necessary for it to be a personal vehicle for absolute nature.

So that sort of basically sums up why I wrote the book. And I wrote it for a specific reason, John. Because it's difficult to find a book or a teaching that actually spells that out. Yes, you see, everybody talks either about the soul or about the absolute. You know, the non dualists talk about the absolute. You go to the Sufi, the Kabbalah talk about the soul mostly. But what is the relationship between them? You know, because each, like the non dualists, they think of the soul as an illusion. They don't believe it's just an individual. Any individual is an illusion as a form that appears in the absolute. And it is not. Here I show that the soul is significant. Without it, there is no experience of the absolute. And not only that, the absolute need to purify the soul so that the soul become a vehicle for expressing it. And this is actually the other. Another person who wrote about is St. John the Cross in the Dark Night of the Soul. In fact, it's the same direction he takes, how the soul becomes infused by the darkness of the absolute, so it becomes its own, its expression. So I wrote that book really, because I thought it's needed in the literature, because there isn't clear. Even St. John doesn't go into the details of what happens in the state. He talks only the purification process, you know, the denudement. But here, this talks about all the different sides and what happened in the Experience of the soul and the absolutes and how they integrate and they become one. I don't know.

That's largely what this book is about.

Yeah. And I think of it as a very important book. Many people don't get it, don't know how important it is. Well, part either because they don't know the absolute is experience or they don't know the soul. But if you know both and you wonder what happened, then you know.

And Hamid, in you're speaking about it, and I'm going to read a passage later that just kills it. You talked about the absolute being darkness, yet intimate. And in one part you said there's no consciousness, only awareness remains. Another passage, you said that once you're there, there's no place deeper to go because if you start going in any direction, you start running into manifestation again. So the absolute is absolute.

Yeah. So this is the depth of the. What I call the second turning of the teaching. Because we here, we're transitioning about true nature of presence from the individual to the. To the impersonal or the boundless dimension of true nature. And the absolute is the depth of that depth or the ground of all manifestation of presence and world. This is for the second turning. You know, as you know, in this teaching, I have third, fourth turning, other things different than the absolute, but the absolute as we experience it, we experience it as the final nature of everything. And that is how many teachings take it, including the Sufis and the Kabbalah. Even though they don't focus on the pont and non dual, it's still, for them it is the mystery, the deeper mystery. Of course, for the Indian, it's the Brahmin para Brahman. They describe it that way. For the Buddhist, it's what they call it dharmakaya, you know, so it's the fundamental ground of awareness. So, yeah, so we're transitioning in this meeting into talking about true nature as not as what we experience within us, but as a more fundamental, larger category, which is that what manifests with us is just how we experience it, but it is really possible to experience it as everywhere.

And Namid, you emphasize that one really needs to acknowledge that there are two expressions of true nature. Usually refer to them as unmanifest and manifest, and that both have to be. Both need to be recognized and investigated.

Yes. Yeah, because some teachings talk about that the manifest is what appears in experience. And manifest is a source that is invisible, that we can feel or know that everything comes from someplace invisible. We just don't see it. But we know from Experience it is. That's what I mean by unmanifest. And everything that is we you experience, it appears from non manifestation to manifestation. Because one of the dimensions I describe how everything happens. How everything happens is. Is not from the past to the future, to the present and the future, but from non being to being, from non manifestation, instant to instant. That's what Monarabi called new creation. New creation mean every moment is a new creation.

Yeah. And that. I have to say that that just was like a 180 degree on my mind. It's like that's a radically different conception of change and transformation, etc. Etc.

Yeah. I have one. One passage I want to read here again. And I'll stop reading passages, but I just had to get this in and I think it's an exquisite.

You're both involved in slightly different thing.

Yeah, yeah, but I. I just had to get this one in. And this is from page 26 of the Women's Night's Journey. You say, I am not the body, not the personality, not the essence, not the mind, not God. I am nothing that is a content of experience. Yet all experience happens within me. Everything at all levels, from spiritual to physical, happens within me. I am not touched by any of it. I am untouched, untouchable. I am unchanging. I am deathless, I am unborn. I am uncaused, unoriginated. I was never born, will never die. The concepts of life and death do not apply for me.

Yeah. And that is really a description that many teachings have, you know, about the. They call it the ultimate nature of the Brahmin or the Dharmakaya or the Dao. When they describe it, they could sometimes use language like that, you know, because it is unborn, because it's. It is the source of everything. You know, it is a mystery of thing, of truth that if we follow truth, remember we talk about truth, we arrive at what I call the absolute truth, which is a truth that cannot be encompassed by any concept. That is a mystery that liberates. And not only liberates, it makes everything happen.

Why does it liberate, Hamid?

Because it's. If we experience it, it's really our identity has shifted to some place that is inherently free. And its impact on the minor personality is that it dissolves it and dissolved it. It's like everything sort of the Absolute is what I call it, the universal solvent. Everything dissolves in it. It comes, it dissolves, it become the nature of the absolute. Nothing remains for what it is, because it is. Everything comes from it. Everything returns to it, but returning to it means dissolving, becoming it. It's like the absolute formulates its expression into our experience and takes it back instantly into nothingness.

It's almost as though the absolute. This phrase doesn't sound quite right, but I use it the absolute. APPLAUSE Fixation of any kind.

Yeah, of course, any fixation will be an impediment to experiencing the Absolute.

Yeah, yeah.

Has no. I mean, if you really have realized the Absolute, one thing, you know, if I, if I am completely the Absolute, I don't even care about being the absolute. I don't even call. Call myself the absolute, you know, I'm simply the what gives everything its awareness and luminosity. But there's no self reference. No, no, no thinking of self or no self at that time.

You said at one point that the absolute is not the light, but it is the source of light.

Yes, that's why it's darkness. It is not darkness in the sense of absence of light. It's a darkness before light.

Yeah, that's helpful. That's helpful.

Many people, when they talk about encountering the spiritual nature, they see light, white light, most people, but that is just the outer luminosity, the absolute. They don't go deeper because it's scary to go deeper. Black, dark, I mean, everything is going to be gone. And light means, you know, still there's the existence, there's perception, there's awareness, and to go beyond it, the source of that light is that everything can be gone. You know, but the interesting thing about that blackness, luminous blackness, is that it is not only black, it's radiant black, it's so black, it illuminates. And that its luminosity is what we call awareness. And the blackness is so pure. And because it is not darkness in the usual sense of darkness or absence of light, it's more like it's the non beingness, where the feeling in it is lightness is so empty that makes the heart feel complete intimacy. Sense of intimacy. And also the other thing arriving at the absolute is the feeling, this is home. This is home. The soul feels it. Rafael. Oh, I'm home. I can just rest. I don't have to do anything. I've done my job. I got home and found my home. So it feels actually, I mean, the feeling of home is very palpable and the feeling of intimacy is very palpable. And the feeling.

Yeah, that doesn't sound like a dark, scary thing. That sounds like a. Yeah, ultimately amazing thing, Beautiful thing.

Yeah, it's not that a scary Thing at the beginning, before person feels it, it feels like it might be scary because. Scary because it will dissolve the self. That's what's scary about it. And dissolve any individual identification. It is, as I call it, universal solvent. It dissolves everything that it touches. And but being it, you're, you know, you're this, this mystery that is complete freedom, complete depth. It's the depth of all, all real and sense of depth is amazing. It's like infinite depth. And same time it's a total intimacy and being at home and. And the sense of like we've been carrying a weight and traveling now we could drop the weight and just rest.

And Hamid, does. In this absolute, does awareness remain the witness?

Well, it depends. I mean that's something in the cigar. The other Maharaj try to explain to people. Most people didn't get it. If you look outside, you see there's awareness of the world. If you look inside, you don't see anything. You'll be gone. So if you look into the absolute, there is no awareness of anything because it dissolves whatever is aware. If you look from within it, to the outside of it, to its own manifestation. You see? Manifestation, you see. Well, that's thoughts, feeling, all of the world.

And Amit, it feels like this gets very tricky in the descriptions of it because it's sometimes described as a profound not knowing or ignorance. Yet it seems like there is still some subtle awareness, but no phenomena or no objects of any kind. Does that resonate?

Well, it is not one answer. Two possibilities. You can be aware of the absolute mostly and then not knowing what it is. However, for there to be any awareness, there has to be something manifest, even with just a little thought or a sensation. When that thought sensation is gone, there is no awareness. No, that's what's called cessation or fanatic. This is the annihilation of everything, of consciousness itself.

So there's no awareness of the absolute because I guess awareness is a thing maybe, or a man.

And also there's nothing to be aware of.

I mean, I'm still unclear here because you. And this has been a long time confusion because it sounds that you, you mentioned for example cessation, which is the Buddhist term experience or fana, the Sufi experience, but cessation. In cessation there's a recognition of something, but it's usually incomprehensible, certainly trans conceptual, but there's also nerode, which is in which there's not even awareness that something has happened. There's just a moment of going into it. And a moment of coming out of it. So.

Yeah, but in between those there's no nothing, no content, yeah?

Yes.

Yeah. Sensation. Yeah. The moment going into it. You. Sometime there is a feeling I am disappearing and sort of dissolving until it's completely dissolved and there's moment coming out of it. Everything appears again new, as if completely born. And you.

And if my understanding is correct, in cessation between the dissolution of all phenomena and the new manifestation or arising of phenomena anew, there is still an awareness within that, but within the road, no awareness whatsoever. Is that right?

Yeah. I mean that is some teaching. Don't understand that. Don't mention. I remember talking non dual teacher. When I said cessation, he didn't get. He said no consciousness is always conscious. He can't be no consciousness. That is true if your station is consciousness. However, the absolute is deeper than consciousness is the ground of consciousness. Consciousness is the luminosity, the absolute, you know.

And you're drawing a distinction between consciousness and awareness here.

Good question.

I do. You do my teaching. I draw awareness between consciousness and awareness. And the reason is what made me see that distinction is seeing how the Advaita Vedanta talks about consciousness and the Buddhas talk about awareness. And you see their description consciousness for the Advaita Vedanta is Satchitranda. It is Sat Chit. It's conscious of bliss. So it's characterized by bliss and also beingness, existence. While awareness for the Buddhist is characterized by none being.

Okay.

I am Tenness, you see. So for me. So that's why I think. I think aware. Consciousness has the sense of beingness and awareness doesn't have a sense of beingness. Awareness is empty, rageous, empty perceptuality. It has no sense of being or even. Which means no sense of presence or existence. It's just. It's a non being that is at the same time is awareness of whatever while consciousness is conscious of its beingness at the same time. When awareness is conscious of beingness, there's nothing there to be its beingness.

And you describe also with awareness. And he. You acknowledge your. It's coming out of your own experience. But also very congruent with the Tibetan Buddhist. So Jing, the inseparability of awareness from emptiness and from luminosity.

Yeah, well, I mean awareness is just luminosity and emptiness inseparable.

Yeah, you mentioned that you talk about the universal witness where you're just everything exists within you and you just witness it.

Yeah. That's one way of experiencing the absolute witnessing Ground. So we're jumping around a little bit in terms of focus. Let's see which one we want to focus on.

Okay. Where would you like to go? That would take us into some. Anywhere will take us into interesting topics. But is, is there somewhere you'd like to go?

We don't want to confuse the listeners though.

Oh, I think we're going to blow their minds. I think this is.

Moving from one thing to another. I mean, to talk about a monastony and then talk about the universal wisdomness. I mean they're related, but they're not the same thing. And they're very big difference in table experience.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm very curious about the. Intrigued by your description of awareness emptiness. Because emptiness is so central to the Buddhist tradition. I've been trying to make sense of it for a long time. And I have to say your discussion illuminated it in a new way. And you point out that really emptiness is an attempt to point to the deepest, the ultimate nature of existence. And you point out that things, phenomena just don't have the substantiality and solidity that we usually attribute to them. And that the, even the very experience of something solidly existing is a superimposition of the mind.

Yeah. So if you go to Zangchen or Mahamudra or any of those higher tantras of the Tibetan Buddhism, awareness is clarity and emptiness. The union of clarity and emptiness and emptiness means. And the way they define emptiness is the lack of inherent existence. That is the description. That's actually the lack of inherent existence. Nothing has inherent existence. That's the deepest Buddhist teaching. That's what Buddha brought to the Indian tradition. There is a condition that's. That is experienced as a lack of inherent existence. Nothing has inherent existence, has a parent existence and not inherent existence. To experience that lack of inherent existence is experiencing emptiness, recognizing emptiness. You see. But the lack of healing existence is in the zoxianta. It's always inseparable from the luminosity of awareness, the clarity. So it is always an empty clarity or transparent clarity. And that they call that rigba or pure awareness. That's why I like that distinction between awareness and consciousness. And both are true. Consciousness has a sense of being, fullness in ness. But awareness is completely empty, completely light. It has no weight of any kind, no medium, you know, and emptiness, you know, lack and healing existence. Although we experience it as a vastness, vastness of awareness, awareness, awareness become vast. In both cases it's vastness. But really existence, I mean, emptiness is not space, not empty space, Lakam here existence not space. Doesn't say space mean everything that we experience its nature is non being. So it is the unity being and non being. So what manifests called being and its nature non being. So there's two opposites are unified merit here and this experience pure awareness which is amazing sense of lucidity when you experience it. Lucidity and clarity. And it's like awareness is exploding with clarity. And because the emptiness magnified the awareness makes it much more complete, transparent, illuminating. But it is also the ground of everything. The nature of it is not just our regular awareness. No it's awareness that is nature. Everything the sea of awareness.

Stay tuned for part two. As we dive deep into the fundamental nature of reality and and our nature.

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