A. H. Almaas

A. H. Almaas

A. H. Almaas is the pen name of Hameed Ali, the Kuwaiti-born originator of the Diamond Approach, who has been guiding individuals and groups in the United States since 1976. Over time the teaching has found a home in Europe, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Almaas is the author of many books, including Love Unveiled, The Unfolding Now, and Runaway Realization.

A. H. Almaas

A. H. Almaas is the pen name of Hameed Ali, the Kuwaiti-born originator of the Diamond Approach, who has been guiding individuals and groups in the United States since 1976. Over time the teaching has found a home in Europe, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Almaas is the author of many books, including Love Unveiled, The Unfolding Now, and Runaway Realization.

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GUIDES

Dive-In with Heart | Free Online Workshop

Dive-In with Heart Online Workshop

Journey into the depths of your heart with author Dominic Liber as he introduces the powerful practice of diamond inquiry in this free, 90-minute workshop.

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Diving in the Inner Ocean

$16.95 - Paperback

By: Dominic C. Liber

Diving in the Inner Ocean

This session will include:

Orientation:

An introduction to the Diamond Approach and diamond inquiry from Dominic Liber.

Guided inquiry:

The opportunity to practice inquiry, and to witness others inquiring into what’s naturally emerging in their experience.

The first steps towards:

  • Getting to know and understand yourself better
  • Discovering the freedom and satisfaction of spiritual transformation
  • Learning how to explore your everyday life with love, meaning, and a sense of belonging

30% off Dominic Liber’s book, Diving in the Inner Ocean!

Influenced by ancient traditions such as Sufism and Buddhism as well as by modern psychology, the Diamond Approach is a modern contemplative practice that offers dynamic, new perspectives on the true nature of reality and human potential.

Diamond inquiry combines the depth of meditation with the power of psychological insight. Developed by A. H. Almaas, founder of the Diamond Approach and a leader in the integration of spirituality and psychology, this simple yet powerful practice is ideal for anyone wanting to explore their inner world.

In this free, 90-minute workshop, you will discover how to apply the powerful practice of Diamond inquiry to the realm of the heart.

WHO: Dominic Liber is a Diamond Approach teacher who has been rigorously trained in various spiritual modalities and psychological knowledge over many years. He is the author of Diving in the Inner Ocean: An Introduction to Personal Transformation through Diamond Inquiry.

WHEN: Online Workshop on Saturday, March 25, 2023, at 1:00 p.m. ET

We hope you will join us for this special event.

Dominic C. LiberDominic Liber is an explorer, teacher, and writer, following a lifelong passion for both the magical and mystical, and the scientific and rational. He leads groups and courses on the Diamond Approach, does research, and works one-on-one with students in the UK and in South Africa. He personally has found the Diamond Approach to be the most resonant and powerful way to discover, understand, and liberate the mysterious and limitless potentials of a human being.

A. H. AlmaasAlmaas is the pen name of Hameed Ali, the Kuwaiti-born originator of the Diamond Approach, who has been guiding individuals and groups in the United States since 1976. Over time the teaching has found a home in Europe, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Almaas is the author of many books, including Love UnveiledThe Unfolding Now, and Runaway Realization.

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Dominc Liber on The Diamond Approach

Author Dominic Liber, author of Diving in the Inner Ocean: An Introduction to Personal Transformation through Diamond Inquiry spoke with Shambhala Publications about his book.  Hear the full discussion, along with the author leading a practice.

Listen here or on your favorite podcatcher:

Diving in the Inner Ocean

$16.95 - Paperback

By: Dominic C. Liber

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The True Flavor of Love

The Babylike Sweetness of Love

Love Unveiled

An excerpt from Love Unveiled

Let me see if I can give you some feel, some taste, some flavor of what love is like when it is active, manifesting, and we are feeling it.

When we say “I love you” to somebody, what do we usually mean? Many of us use those words more often than we should. I am of the opinion that it’s better to not say “I love you” unless you actually are feeling it in that moment. Saying “I love you, honey” before going to sleep or hanging up the phone can become just a habit. After a while, I wonder what kind of love these people are talking about. If they really meant it all those thousands of times, the phone would have melted from being exposed to so much love. But when you look at the phone, you don’t see it melting.

Beginning with the word “I” means that I’m experiencing and feeling something directly; I’m tasting a certain flavor, a certain presence, a certain consciousness. I can taste it, feel it, smell it, see it, and it makes me feel a certain way, have a certain attitude. It makes what I do go in a certain direction. When I feel love, there is the feeling, a sense—at least in the heart, if not all the way through—of something very soft. A consciousness that is soft, delicate, smooth, that is gentle and tender. And as you feel it, it is doing something to your insides. It’s tickling your insides in a delicious way; it’s tickling your heart from the inside in such a way that your heart can’t help but relax and melt. It caresses your heart as though an infant were touching you, caressing you on your cheek.

You know how an infant’s skin is soft and tender, and it smells almost like baby powder. I think the makers of baby powder wanted to duplicate the softness, the powderyness, the fluffiness, of how a baby’s skin feels and smells. Imagine the softness, the tenderness, of the skin on an infant’s cheek. Love is even softer, more malleable than that, because it doesn’t have the form and substance of flesh. Your heart is that softness, that gentleness. It’s as if its very atoms were constantly getting softer and melting.

And this softness has a sense of being light, of being fluffy. Take baby powder and make it even softer, much softer and fluffier, until it becomes like a cloud, and you’ll get closer to what I’m describing as the nature of this love. But even then, the cloud still has some substance; it’s not as though absolutely nothing is there. That cloud is as fluffy and tender as cotton candy. When you touch cotton candy, it is so soft, but it still has a form. But when you put it in your mouth, it disappears; it just melts in your mouth, into a soft sweetness—and then it is gone.

Now imagine your heart being just like that—your heart is a mouth tasting a softness, a tenderness, a melty sweetness. There is nothing like it; it is not exactly like sugar or any form of sweetness you can find. The closest to it would be to take a strawberry—a very ripe, sweet strawberry—make it fluffy and soft, and add a bit of rose water. That’s close to how it tastes and smells. It has that nice light pink look to it too. That is why I sometimes call the aspect of love that we are working with “pink cotton candy” (candy floss). It is as though your heart were full of pink cotton candy that is always melting—but always replenishing itself too. The more it melts, the more it replenishes itself.

And love is not simply a sweetness all by itself; in its very sweetness is a feeling of liking. When you deeply love someone, it not only tastes sweet but you also like it. The sweetness itself is an affect of the liking, of the loving, of the very feelings themselves: “It’s so wonderful; I really like her!” When you think of somebody you really like, you may not even be able to say why she is wonderful. There’s just some kind of wonderfulness to her. You find in her a beauty that you can’t quite call beauty, because it’s more like yummy, sweet, magnificent, exquisite.

All of this brings into your heart a sweetness that feels like an appreciation, a liking, as if that wonderfulness you are feeling were your very own heart. That wonderfulness itself is the liking of the wonderfulness; and that liking of the wonderfulness is that melted sweetness; and that sweetness is itself the softness that is melting into itself.

Love makes your head disappear; you swoon, in some sense. Everybody has had that happen when they’re in love, right? And everyone has the idea that this only occurs in the presence of somebody else—for example, that you have to look into that person’s eyes for it to happen. But you only need to feel the love inside yourself. The swooning is not created by looking into the other person’s eyes. It’s the love in your heart that is melting you within, dissolving you from the inside out.

When I say “I love you,” I am feeling that it’s what I’m experiencing about you—the sight of you, your presence—that is making me feel all those feelings in my heart. This wonderfulness that you make me feel has to do with you. It’s not necessarily that you are giving it to me, but I feel it about you and toward you. And this wonderful pink, soft sweetness and liking that I’m feeling about you and toward you is not only in my heart; I’m feeling it in your heart as well. So when I say “you,” I am taking this pink cloud and placing it in your heart.

And if that feeling increases, if the love gets stronger, it goes beyond even feeling that what is in my heart is in your heart too. It’s more like the love inside of me expands and expands until it melts my chest. After a while, the love expands so much that it becomes a cloud that envelops me and envelops you and melts your heart at the same time that it is melting mine. It melts the boundary between us.

How Sweet It Is!

At that point, what does “I love you” even mean? It gets difficult to say who is loving who! When love gets that strong, it reveals a unity between my heart and the heart of the other person. If love decreases, then “I” am separate from my heart, and then it’s more accurate to say “I have love in my heart for you.”

Many people think of love as “I love you, and I really, really want to be with you”—with all the longing and sadness and tears that go with that. Most movies portray love as inseparable from pain and sadness. That’s not what I recognize love to be. For me, love is a joyful, happy, light feeling. When I feel love, it’s more like, “Isn’t it wonderful? I like you so much. You’re so beautiful, you’re so wonderful.” After a while, I can’t even tell who’s wonderful. Is it you? Is it me? Is it the love that is wonderful?

No wonder Rumi talks about flying. Love has a lightness, a carefreeness, a spontaneity, because the mind that is self-reflective, that is self-controlling, is melting away through that force of love. And that melting away is what we call rending the veils—the veils that are around our heart, around our soul . . . wall after wall after wall. Love is like a wonderful sweet acid that melts those walls in complete pleasure. The effect of love on the soul is to melt her boundaries while the soul feels ecstatic. You’re being consumed while you’re feeling wonderful. It’s a palpable feeling.

When love gets that strong, it reveals a unity between my heart and the heart of the other person.

You see, love is not a strong desire; it’s not a longing. Nor is it “I know I love you.” These things can be there, they can mix with love—but they cannot be love. They are actually the limitations of love. Love itself is the wonderful, beautiful sweetness that makes you happy. And when you feel it, you can’t help but want the other person to be happy. That’s because love eliminates boundaries. As it is melting your boundaries, it’s natural that you feel happy when you make the other happy. That’s because you are getting nearer. The soul is doing its thing. It’s getting ripe. It’s bearing its fruits.

And the pink that I’m talking about is a very beautiful pink. It is very light and has a purity to it. It is so purely pink that it exudes innocence. You know how innocent and tender infants are. That innocence, that purity we are perceiving in the infant is love. We’re not only perceiving skin that has not yet been hardened by life but we’re also seeing skin that is soaked with love. It has not hardened against love.

Love has that effect. It makes you luminous, it makes you radiant with happiness, with delight, with lovingness, with liking, with an appreciativeness.

S: Can you talk more about liking and loving, and the difference between them?
AH: Liking is easier for us to feel; it is closer to everyday life: “I like this dessert. I like this flower. I like this movie.” As I say these things, feel the affect itself of liking. I don’t mean our ideas about why we like this or that—there’s an actual feeling, an actual enjoyment, an actual sweetness to the liking. And that sweetness is not just the sweetness of sugar; it is a sweetness that is a feeling, an affect. So, the sweetness, the appreciativeness, and the liking are the same thing. Now love has this quality of liking, but that liking now has an ecstatic, pleasurable quality; so we say that what we love is wonderful.

S: When I feel the pink, it’s almost like I’m blushing.
AH: That happens to people. They blush, they get embarrassed, because their heart is showing. Love tends to open you up just like a flower. This is one of the things we will discover more about: how love expresses itself. It’s as if the atoms of your skin were moving and creating space between themselves so that there’s more room between the molecules when the pinkness and wonderfulness and appreciativeness start coming through.

The Purity of Love

Each time we focus on another characteristic of love, it helps us to see more about the veils that need to be rent. Let’s take a look now at what it means that love not only has a softness and a tenderness and a fluffiness but also a sense of purity to it. This purity is like the purity of the newborn infant, like the purity of the flower when it opens up. The purity of its own nature is newly arising. It’s virginal. It hasn’t been contaminated by anything. Nothing has touched it.

This purity will be experienced as a spontaneous innocence, as though your mind were not there—or at least not relevant. An infant can be full of love, but he’s not thinking “I love you” or whether that feeling is good or bad. There is an innocence, a carefreeness, a lack of self-consciousness and self-reflection. When we feel that type of innocence, that purity, it will feel like an unknowingness. We don’t know what is happening. Our thoughts themselves are melting, becoming syrupy. There is a softness, a fluffiness that melts easily, and could disappear like a cloud. And along with that, there is a virginal innocence and sense of purity.

But those qualities also bring in certain barriers to love. When we become adults, that innocence, that purity, that delicacy, can be threatening. We’re scared to experience ourselves that way. Those are the most important qualities of love, but the adult who is not used to the experience of love will see them as a loss of protection. That is because our mind and our knowingness have become a protection for us: “I know who I am. I know who you are. I know what to do.” Right? The fear is that love will erase that hedge of protection. If you really allow the love, you might end up sitting and staring at nothing, feeling wonderful but without the vaguest idea that there’s a world still out there. For all you know, it might have disappeared when you began staring into space—and you don’t care!

But if you’re not used to allowing love in, you say, “Wait a minute. What’s going on? I’m not going to be able to take care of myself. Not only that, I’m not going to have any protection. What happens if somebody comes in, somebody who is mean? Or somebody who doesn’t understand? She could crush me just like that! I’m so soft and delicate. If I let her in close, I’ll lose all the structure that gave me that padding, that thickness, those metal doors, those rubber tires surrounding my castle.” So, if a Sherman tank comes through, what is going to happen to you?

Imagine taking a whole lot of pink-cotton-candy love and putting it all around you for protection. Anybody can just lick through it. They can just lick you out of existence. That is how it will feel if you let your heart be full and effulgent with love. Pretty scary. You have learned very early on that “I need some padding, I need some doors, some walls.” So, in allowing love to reach you, you will feel as though you are that vulnerable, unprotected, delicate, fluffy presence.

When we become adults, that innocence, that purity, that delicacy, can be threatening. We’re scared to experience ourselves that way.

Part of our fear or hesitation about love comes from the nature of love itself, and part of it is the result of our associations with feeling love when it was full in us as infants. So love brings with it a sense not only of unprotectedness but of helplessness as well. We associate our delicacy with helplessness, weakness, incapacity. We think that if we allow ourselves to feel the fullness of love, then we are going to be a helpless infant. When did we feel ourselves as this ball of pink, sweet fluff? When we were three days old or, if we were lucky, maybe six weeks old. Allowing ourselves to be this ball of fluff again will bring in all these fears: “I’ll be weak . . . I’ll be helpless . . . I’ll be at the mercy of everybody . . . I won’t have any protection.” The innocence, the softness, the purity . . . even though all of it is wonderful and we want it, it scares the hell out of our ego. And that fear generates various barriers, various veils.

So, let’s begin an inquiry into our experiences of this innocence, this purity, this delicacy, by becoming more familiar with one of the veils that arises—the barrier against babylike sweetness. Each one of us is somewhat babylike when we allow our heart to come through. I don’t mean babyish in the sense of slobbering all over ourselves or needing diapers. I mean that whatever it is, we feel it purely and in an undivided and wholehearted way. In this case, what we’re feeling is the lovingness, the liking, the enjoyment, and the celebration that go with the openness and softness. That’s what I mean by babylike sweetness.

Everybody has a babylike sweetness, because that is just the nature of love. You could be a mature person, see yourself as a grownup, and still have that babylike sweetness. Babylike sweetness does not have to go away just because you’re grown up. It does not mean you have to be a baby. It’s simply the softness, the delicacy, the innocence, the purity of love. We want to rend that veil, penetrate that particular puzzle of the heart.

Practice Session 1

Time to explore. You will do a repeating question with one other person, fifteen minutes per person, or you can practice by writing out answers yourself: What prevents you from experiencing your babylike sweetness?

Questions and Comments

S: During the exercise, it seemed that there were a lot of reasons why experiencing my babylike sweetness is bad—especially if I didn’t get recognized when I was young. It also seems that if I were to experience it even now, as a grownup, I’d still dissolve.
AH: Right. So that becomes a big fear. And that has to do with not understanding the nature of love. As long as we take ourselves to be that which is going to dissolve, love is scary. The more we recognize that the love is who we are, the easier it becomes to let ourselves dissolve.

S: One thing I noticed is that there was much more of a childlike playfulness in this exercise and less of a serious, adult feeling. I sort of melted away. I think that is one of my barriers, that I should be serious. I have some kind of image about that.
AH: Can’t be serious and innocent at the same time, right? You might giggle at any moment! And you might not even think that’s wrong.

S: My experience was almost the opposite. It felt dangerous and incredibly powerful. An image that came up was of a tiny, powerful bomb with a very short fuse. I couldn’t really touch it because it would overwhelm me and everything else.
AH: Yeah, it’s very dangerous. And it’s not so small; it’s much bigger than you imagine.
S: Well, that’s all I would let myself see of it.
AH: Right. You saw it as only so big, so you wouldn’t be scared.

S: A big barrier for me has to do with having been deeply hurt in that place and being taken advantage of. I think that is why I was sexually molested—I didn’t have any barriers or boundaries and was totally trusting. So now it does feel dangerous to be without any barriers.
AH: Very good. That’s why we have built up all these protections—because we felt danger at that time. Our environment wasn’t empathic to that softness, that innocence. It didn’t understand it, see it, respect it. Not only that, it sometimes exploited it. But with these types of experiences comes the belief that as adults, we are as helpless as that little kid—which is not the case.

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By: A. H. Almaas

A. H. AlmaasA. H. Almaas is the pen name of Hameed Ali, the Kuwaiti-born originator of the Diamond Approach, who has been guiding individuals and groups in Colorado, California, and Europe since 1976. Learn more.

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A. H. Almaas's Introduction to the Diamond Approach

The Diamond Approach

$19.95 - Paperback

By: John Davis

A.H. Almaas' foreword from John Davis' The Diamond Approach: An Introduction to the Teachings of A. H. Almaas

I never intended to create the Diamond Approach. It emerged and developed under its own intelligence and dy­namics. It is true I am the primary person responsible for presenting it, but I have been more a vehicle and, much of the time, a guinea pig than one who intentionally developed it.

At the beginning, I had no idea that a particular complete teaching was unfolding. With an intense interest in the inner journey of liberation, I was doing all I could to be real and open to the timeless truths of spirit. I was passionately com­mitted to finding the truth of what a human being is, what spirit is, and what reality is. It was not easy, and for some time, not much seemed to be happening. Yet I noticed that at times when my love of truth became selfess, when I was loving truth for its own sake and not for any personal gain, my experience opened up and deepened in ways I did not expect. I thought that my work was beginning to bear fruit when the first discov­eries of soul and spiritual Essence occurred, but it has gone far beyond that. My experience increasingly became a flow of discoveries, realizations, and insights, revealing amazing and unimagined qualities and dimensions of Being. As these discoveries emerged, I found that they were accompanied by pre­cise and detailed knowledge about them. My inner journey became an adventure that was thrilling and, at times, terrifying.

It took me a few years to recognize that this surprising unfoldment and revelation of the mysteries of Being was not only for me personally. The arising of the inner spiritual guid­ance of Being, and my recognition of it as such, led me at some point to recognize that a wisdom path was unfolding. I came to see that a contemporary teaching appropriate for our times was forming. I began to see that it was spirit itself, the true nature of Being, that was revealing this knowledge and devel­oping this teaching. I became a willing and happy guinea pig, going through the various experiences that Being was revealing in my consciousness. I saw that my accompanying struggles with the barriers were necessary for Being to reveal the knowl­edge of how Essence is related to egoic experience in a very precise way.

Being has revealed its mysteries in my experience in a way that has profoundly impacted my consciousness and trans­formed it. The person that I am has steadily become a vehicle, servant, and mouthpiece for the truth that is being revealed as the Diamond Approach. The result is the deepening and expanding realization of my real identity as true nature. This identity is the same ultimate spiritual truth that I humbly and gratefully serve. And the beautiful thing is that this process turned out to be identical with the development of the new teaching of the Diamond Approach.

A few associates and my first students also became guinea pigs for the development of the new teaching. The teaching developed as my own personal needs, and those of my associ­ates and the students I was working with, invoked Being to present the qualities and dimensions that were necessary. The Diamond Approach thus developed as a response to real needs in our contemporary times and not as a theoretical construct or a synthesis of existing teachings.

The author of the present book, Dr. John Davis, is one of the first students who joined this work at its inception. As one of my first committed students, he has witnessed its develop­ment and has personally undergone the path of transformation of the Diamond Approach. He writes not only from what he has heard from me but primarily from his own personal expe­rience and understanding of this new path of wisdom. The fact that he is also a psychologist who teaches transpersonal psychology at the college and graduate levels preeminently quali.es him to give a coherent and accessible overview of the Diamond Approach. He has a great deal of experience in teach­ing and working with students in the Diamond Approach, and it is clear that he puts it to good use in the present book. The result is a very clear, detailed, but simple overview of the Diamond Approach, written by one who knows the subject matter both intellectually and experientially. Dr. Davis has ren­dered a great service here, both to the Diamond Approach and to the many readers who want a fresh look at the human po­tential and its spiritual dimensions.

Hameed Ali
Berkeley, California

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