From Chapter 1: Why Inquire?

When we think about ourselves, what do we experience? What do we see? What are our lives like? Most of us live in a continual struggle of seeking pleasure and pushing away pain. For long stretches of time, we persistently feel that our lives aren't "enough"—full enough, rich enough, complete enough.

Once in a while, we find ourselves experiencing contentment; everything seems just right. But usually we feel this contentment only briefly. We then try to "improve" something, or worry about the future, or in some other way fail to simply be with the contentment.

Suppose it is a beautiful day at the beach. Perhaps you are sitting on your blanket, sipping iced tea and basking in the sun. Everything is fine, but after a while you start getting a little bored. You take a book out of your beach bag and begin to read, but you find yourself feeling irritable. Then you realize that the main character in the story reminds you of your father, who never let you have any privacy. Even though you are by yourself, you suddenly get the feeling that someone is standing over you, judging you for relaxing on the beach and getting a tan rather than cleaning out the garage. You decide that it's probably not a very good book and put it away. What you really want, you feel now, is something to eat. Halfway through eating your sandwich and chips, though, you realize you weren't really hungry. Maybe a nap would make you feel better. You close your eyes, but now you are completely restless. The contentment of an hour ago is gone, and you don't know how you lost it.

This is how we live—trying to manipulate the outer world so that our inner world can be at peace. But this struggle is a hopeless task; it is not what will bring us to a state of contentment. This example of our internal process points to a basic fact of our ongoing experience:

We don't know how to leave ourselves alone. Every internal action involves some kind of rejection of our present state, our actual reality. And there is a deeper consequence to this attitude of rejection: By rejecting what is so for us in the present moment, we are rejecting ourselves. We are out of touch with our Being. Aiming toward the future, we sacrifice the present. By looking outside ourselves for what is missing, we subject ourselves, our souls, to the pain of abandonment.

But the fact is: Nothing is missing! Our true nature is actually always there. Our true nature is Being. And everything is made of this true nature: rocks, people, clouds, peach trees—all the things in our life. However, these things do not exist independently, the way we think they do. What we are really seeing are the various forms of Being. To understand Being itself, the nature of what we truly are, we must penetrate the inner, fundamental nature of existence. To be open to this fundamental nature, we must question what we think we are: Am I really a white male, of a certain height and weight and age and address, who is defined by my personal history? And if that's not me, what is?

We are like the river that doesn't know it is fundamentally composed of water. It is afraid of expanding because it believes that it might not be a river anymore. But once you know you are water, what difference does it make whether you are a river or a lake?

Your Being is what is constantly manifesting as you. It thinks by using your brain. It walks by using your legs. But in your daily experience, you think you are a bundle of arms and legs and thoughts, and do not experience the unity that underlies all of your experience.

When we are not in touch with Being, we experience a kind of hollowness. We lack a sense of wholeness, or value, or capacity, or meaning. We might search endlessly for pleasure or contentment, but without an appreciation of our true nature, we are missing most of the pleasure that is possible in our lives.

Our nature, our Being, is the most precious thing there is, yet most of us lose touch with it as we dream, wish, hope, scheme, and struggle to have what we think is a good life. We want the right diploma, the best job, the ideal mate. But without some appreciation of our true nature, we end up on the outer fringes of life, always tasting a bland imitation of the nectar of existence.

The Soul

Being manifests itself to itself through us, as human beings. In us, Being beholds its beauty and celebrates its majesty. Our experience of ourselves in our totality and our tangibility is what in the Diamond Approach we mean by the term soul. The soul is what experiences, and it is the lived experience itself. It is the inner, psychic organism, the individual consciousness that is the site of all experience. The human soul is pure potentiality, the potentiality of Being. It is also the way that Being, in all its magnificence, opens up and manifests its richness.

To experience the richness of our Being, the potential of our soul, we must allow our experience to become more and more open, and increasingly question what we assume we are. Usually we identify with a very limited part of our potential, what we call the ego or personality. Some call it the small self. But this identity is actually a distortion of what we really are, which is a completely open flow out of the mystery of Being.

A human being is a universe of experience, multifaceted and multidimensional. Each of us is a soul, a dynamic consciousness, a magical organ of experience and action. And each of us is in a constant state of transformation—of one experience opening up to another, one action leading to another, one perception multiplying into many others; of perception growing into knowledge, knowledge leading to action, and action creating more experience. This unfolding is constant, dynamic, and full of energy. This is the very nature of what we call life.

The Dual Dynamics of Experience

The beauty of life is that it can be a continuous opening to the full range of experience and richness possible for the human being—the dynamic unfolding of the human potential. This life can be a celebration of the mystery of our Being. We can live a life of love, taking joy in ourselves, in other human beings, and in the richness of our home planet. Our life can be full of appreciation, sensitivity, and wonder in all that surrounds us. Such a life can be a thrilling and exciting adventure of learning, maturing, and expanding.

But it can also be a life of strife, struggle, misery, and depression, which frequently becomes filled with suffering, frustration, envy, and aggression. We can easily find ourselves leading a life of selfishness, antagonism, and exploitation. When this happens, life soon becomes dull, boring, superficial—while the undertone can feel sadistic and brutal.

At these times, life never loses its dynamic and transformative character, but the unfoldment of Being reveals mostly the dark and destructive possibilities of our potential, the negative and depressive side of human experience. The freshness and creativity of the human spirit is eclipsed, the joyous spark dulled and muted, and the sharpness of our clarity blunted and mutilated. We tend to live in ignorance, driven by primitive needs and desires. The sense of humanness leaves us: Even when we know we are human beings, we forget the value and exquisiteness of our gentleness, kindness, and vulnerability.

Our lives are rarely the pure manifestation of only one side of our potential—whether it is the freedom or the darkness. Most of us live a mixture of both in constantly varying proportions. Naturally we all work very hard to maximize the freedom and joy, but we know from bitter experience how hard that is to do. We try this and that, listen to this teacher or that authority, lose heart and renew our resolve, but rarely do we feel certain about what will bring us to the states we desire. Rarely do we experience the positive human possibilities we yearn to embody. Yet even when they do manifest in our experience, we frequently fight them or become afraid of them. We yearn to expand and complete our humanity, and make great efforts to do so, but so often end up thwarted and frustrated. Our successes are meager, and never seem to last.

When the dynamism of our Being unfolds our experience in its dark and negative possibilities, we find ourselves trapped in repeating patterns and closed loops. Although these closed loops of perception and action are dynamic, they are also compulsive and repetitive, robbing our experience of its freshness, our dynamism of its creativity, and our life of its expansion and adventure. The vast universe of human possibilities becomes restricted to a very limited region of habitual experience. Freshness, newness, development, and the thrill of discovery are all stifled.

The situation is not hopeless, however, and we all know this someplace in our hearts. We know—perhaps vaguely, perhaps incompletely—that the human spirit possesses the possibility of enlarging its experience, of opening up its richness. We have many strengths to draw on: sensitivity, intelligence, discrimination, the potential for investigation and insight. We have, most of all, the capacity to learn.