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

At some point in the 1980s I came to see that the Diamond Approach is a contemporary teaching appropriate for our times, and it is continually unfolding to reveal greater knowledge and wisdom. I now see that it is a path needed for humanity in this challenging twenty-first century, and maybe beyond. The teaching has always integrated whatever knowledge or tools were available at the time to express itself. Spirit itself, the true nature of Being, has revealed this knowledge and developed this teaching. It is not the creation of an individual or group of individuals. It is not the result of one persons awakening, but of a stream of awakenings.

For over forty years, I have been a willing and happy guinea pig, going through the various experiences that Being has revealed in my consciousness. In the early stages of the teaching, 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. The realization of Being happened simultaneously with the capacity to live this realization in life. There was no separation between transcendence and embodiment, for they are the two sides of the same reality.

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. In other words, the unfoldment of the teaching showed that I am both a complete human being and the transcendent timeless truth of the spirit. I am both and I live as both, inseparably. And the beautiful thing is that this process of navigating the embodied and spiritual aspects of my identity turned out to be the very way that the teaching unfolds on this path.

By the time John Davis had written the first edition of this book, the teaching had developed from the first phase of resolving personal obstructions to true nature and experiencing it as an individual to the realization of nondual reality. The realization of nonduality unfolded differently from the classical, ancient teachings of nonduality. It happened as the individual I used to be recognized his own individuality as a barrier to truth. Along with these developments, the nondual truth appeared as various dimensions, each revealing different secrets of how nonduality can be realized. Another difference from the classical teachings is that the sense of being an individual consciousness did not simply disappear but was reborn as a true person, a person of Being, the complete human being. This is true nature or spiritual nature appearing as a person expressing it and living it. This gave more depth to the principle in this path of being in the world but not of it.

By the time John had written his book, I had already taught the nondual dimensions of true nature. But my own process was leading me toward other areas or potentials of spirit. The nondual truth turned out to be a springboard to other, unexpected realizations. I did not feel permitted to teach these new realizations that reveal very interesting truths of spirit until the twenty-first century, when I began presenting them as the Third and Fourth Turnings of the wheel of the teaching.

A few associates, most notably my friend and colleague Karen Johnson 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. It turns out that our times require as many secrets of our spiritual nature as possible for us to access, not simply the nondual or the transcendent. It turned out there are other views of what true nature is, and what experiencing it and realizing it mean. Our times need all the secrets that all teachings have uncovered as well as new secrets that are only now becoming revealed. The teaching is still manifesting new and unexpected secrets of spirit, potentials of true nature that I did not conceive, hear of, or think I needed.