A. H. Almaas - Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery

Beyond duality and nonduality, the realizations voiced here are like the immediacy and laughter of Zen, expressions of untethered freedom beyond fixed view, the joy of letting go, embracing paradox, liberating wisdom, a gift of grace.

Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart

Its exhilarating to see a master teacher break free and cleareven of his own teaching! This book confirms suspicions that have long been growing in me and encourages me even more to trust my own inner compass as I bushwhack my way along the pathless path. Runaway Realization offers an inviting and hopeful alternative vision of the mature stages of spiritual life, served up with the authors signature clarity and a newfound note of gentleness.

Cynthia Bourgeault, author of The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three

As we awaken to the field of aliveness in which we live, we enter the realm of this magnificent and important book. Almaas combines penetrating insight with clear communication to describe the self-sustaining fire of awareness awakening to itself. He challenges us to see the profound depth of our freedom as beings of cosmic aliveness who are learning to live in a living universe. A gem of a book!

Duane Elgin, author of The Living Universe, Awakening Earth, and Voluntary Simplicity

ABOUT THE BOOK

The teaching in this book is off the mapbecause reality itself cannot be captured in a map. In fact, reality is far more alive, far more mysterious than anything we can conceive of. It is always revealing itself by knowing itself; and knowing reality and living it becomes the fulfillment of our life. A. H. Almaas, the originator of the Diamond Approach, here presents a new paradigm for understanding reality: the view of totality. He reveals that our life can become an endless revelation of reality, an adventure with neither beginning nor end.

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 Colorado, California, and Europe since 1976. He is the author of Spacecruiser Inquiry, The Pearl Beyond Price, Facets of Unity, and other books.

Sign up to receive news and special offers from Shambhala Publications.

Or visit us online to sign up at shambhala.com/eshambhala.

RUNAWAY REALIZATION

Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery

A. H. Almaas

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2014

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2014 by A-Hameed Ali

Cover art: plain picture/Image Source

Cover design by Katrina Noble

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Almaas, A. H., author.

Runaway realization: living a life of ceaseless discovery / A. H. Almaas.First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN 978-0-8348-3028-8

ISBN 978-1-61180-202-3 (paperback)

1. Philosophy. 2. Spiritual life. I. Title.

B53.A42 2014

158.1dc23

2013048464

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

WILLIAM BLAKE

CONTENTS

AT THE HEART OF MOST OF our human activity is the search for meaning. We look for it explicitly in all sorts of places, from tiny, invisible particles to grand, transcendent states. The point of the search is to find a place to rest, an ultimate truth that can bear the weight of the entirety of our human experiences. Our sciences chase elusive supersymmetrical particles in the hope of finding a unified theory of everything. Our spiritual traditions travel the inner realms looking for the final dimension of reality. Our philosophies investigate being and nothingness for master concepts with maximum explanatory power. And each of us mirrors this impulse for finality in our daily calibrations of who we are and what we are all about. We can even see our conflictsbe they personal, intellectual, political, religious, or culturalas a clash of competing ultimates.

Looking for the one thing that will make sense of all things often has the paradoxical effect of obliterating the particularity of each thing. Unity becomes a matter of sameness and equality a matter of equivalence. We want to get either to the bottom of everythingsay, the Higgs bosonor beyond everythingthe absolute emptiness of reality. But life happens across a broad scale of things: quarks, Aunt Cathy, the Pacific Ocean, a traffic jam, boundless awareness. The impulse to subsume this multiplicity into a single, fixed, and overriding unitywhether quantum, macro, or bothsprings from our need for stability, for knowing once and for all, for shoring ourselves up against insecurity. In our inner life much as in our outer, we tend to trade freedom for security.

In Runaway Realization, A. H. Almaas, the founder of the Diamond Approach to inner realization, presents another possibility. What if reality is not limited to any single ultimate? What if there is no fixed truth that unifies all human life? What if the search for an ending is a vestige of subtle concepts of the self? What if unity includes particularity? What if freedom means never coming to a final rest?

Almaas introduces us here to the view of totality, a view that holds all possible views as valid without limiting reality to any one of them. Rather than holding fast to any one ultimate truth, the view of totality recognizes that no single view or combination of views can exhaust the richness of reality. The view of totality includes all possible viewsthe dual, the nondual, the unilocal, the theistic, the scientific, the philosophic, and otherswithout reducing them to mere iterations of a single truth (as do the perennial philosophers). Although each view is a complete understanding of its own particular truth, none of them is a complete understanding of all of reality because reality is inherently free and cannot be fully captured in any view.

Something novel is happening in the view of totality. It goes beyond the dualism of This view is better than that view. It goes beyond the nondualism of all views reflecting one truth. And it goes beyond both of these views not by discounting either but by seeing them as two legitimate possibilities among an infinite number of ways to view reality. The view of totality neither negates views nor tries to reconcile them; it is neither syncretic nor centrist, neither a chaotic jumble nor a mud puddle of compromise. At its core is a radically new conception of identity and difference, one that is not relative but absolutemeaning that unity does not come at the expense of particularity, or infinity at the expense of the finite. The view of totality is infinitely comfortable with actual and irreducible difference.

By challenging the idea that reality can have a bottom or a top that is fixed and final, Almaas does away with the idea of reality either as a container or as containable. Reality is limitless in the ways it reveals itself. It can accommodate all manner of different views and remain still indeterminate, which indeterminacy is not ambiguity but rather, radical openness. So a quark, Aunt Cathy, and the Pacific Ocean can be one without ceding their particularity; they can be one exactly as they are, without resorting to the level of subatomic particles or nonduality. This is only one of the insights that is possible from the view of totality. Throughout this book, Almaas takes up many common notionsof practice, of emptiness, of time and space, of relationship, of nondoingand refigures them from the perspective of totality.