Almaas - The Inner Journey Home: The Souls Realization of the Unity of Reality

This informed and scholarly work effectively counters a materialist view of reality. Its value is further enhanced by appendixes presenting different cultural concepts of the soul and extensive endnotes grounding the authors views in other historical and philosophical works.

Library Journal

This profound book offers a visionary understanding for anyone who wishes to know and traverse the territory of the psyche and the soul, the spiritual and the psychological. Almaas is among our wisest and most illuminated teachers, and this is one of his masterworks.

Jack Kornfield, author of After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Through his own wise and passionate inquiry, Almaas brilliantly illuminates a transformative path to inner freedom.

Tara Bennett-Goleman, author of Emotional Alchemy

The Inner Journey Home is a profound and brilliant masterwork. A. H. Almaas presents a clear and comprehensive overview of the Diamond Approach that reveals the breathtaking sweep of this work. The book guides readers through the powerful dynamics and subtle dimensions of the soul, then takes us through the various obstacles and stages to its transformation. Revelatory for those already familiar with his approach, yet accessible to new readers, this book is sure to become a classic of spiritual and psychological literature. Indispensable.

Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, authors of The Wisdom of the Enneagram

A brilliant synthesis of the best in traditional spirituality with the best in modern psychology. Almaas is among that select company who can combine spiritual depth with a profound and insightful intellect.

Richard Smoley, author of Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition

ABOUT THE BOOK

What is the soul, and how do we come to know it? What is its journey in life, and what stages and obstacles are encountered along the way? These questions are explored here in detail according to the Diamond Approach, a spiritual path that combines systematic inquiry into personal experience, the practice of traditional spiritual methods, and the application of modern psychological research. The Inner Journey Home is the centerpiece of the Diamond Approach literature, providing a complete overview of the teaching with references to the authors other books for more details on certain topics.

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.

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The

Inner Journey Home

Souls Realization of the Unity of Reality

A. H. Almaas

Shambhala Boston & London 2012

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2004 by A-Hameed Ali

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.

Almaas, A. H.

The inner journey home: souls realization of the unity of reality / A. H. Almaas.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2441-6

ISBN 978-1-59030-109-8

1. Spiritual life. 2. Self-realization. I. Title.

BP624 .A46 2004

204.4dc22

2003017239

Dedicated, with love, to humanity, in its inexorable, though excruciatingly slow, development toward maturity and completeness.

Contents

Every name from which a truth proceeds is a name from before the Tower of Babel. But it has to circulate in the tower.

Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

IN THE COURSE of a persons transformation of identity, the meanings, resonances, and connotations of words in his or her thinking inevitably shift. This is so even in our ordinary experience: A romantic encounter may find us saying, I thought I knew what love was! Insight in meditation might leave us exclaiming, I thought I knew what emptiness was!

The meanings of words as they appear in a living discoursewhether it is scientific, artistic, or philosophicalalso change over time. Changes of usage occur within shifts of context: as understanding progresses, the new conceptual and historical matrix in which discourse occurs alters the sense of the words and concepts that operate in that matrix.

In time, A. H. Almaass thinking as presented in Inner Journey Home may contribute to a transformation of the meaning of the word soul. His original thinking on the nature of the self has already appeared in The Pearl Beyond Price and The Point of Existence. The present thinking on the soul deals with the fundamental underpinning of these works. A powerful understanding of the nature of the human being that facilitates psychological and spiritual liberation, Almaass approach to the soul also honors the human being as a mode of reality that cannot be reduced to an object. The perception and understanding of the soul as a multidimensional living field addresses many questions in consciousness studies and brings to bear an understanding of self-organizing systems.

As well, Almaass understanding is resonant with the deepest levels of various traditional spiritual teachings, even though it does not depend on those teachings. For example, the nonexistence of the separate self, which appears in Buddhist as well as other teachings, is elucidated here through discovering the qualities of the soul. The impressionability of the open field of the soul allows it to be conditioned in the negative sense, but enables it also to be consciously articulated in its life in the world, without losing contact with its deepest primordial nature and without identifying with separating boundaries. The perception of the nonseparateness of the soul from the world or from Being itself comes to pass not as a result of an effort to arrive at that perception, nor from a corrective orientation (although these factors might be present), but primarily from direct and open investigation of ones experience, and thus of the soul herself. The soul discovers her very nature to be free of separating boundaries.

Almaass use of she as the pronoun for soul is a good example of how the process of understanding affects the way words are used. The changes in discourse can in a sense go backward as well as forward, as the logic of the traditional uses of words is revealed through insight. Although this usage may appear awkward, sexist, limiting, or simply strange, it makes more and more sense as our appreciation of the nature of the soul develops. The use of a personal pronoun is necessitated by our knowledge of the soul as the conscious substance of the person. You are not an it! We see also that the various qualities of the soul are archetypally associated with the feminine.

The method of inner work developed by Almaas is not connected with a religious or mystical tradition, although it draws on the wisdom of several traditions as well as on psychology and various scientific orientations. Because the main method of this work is open and open-ended inquiry, the orientation of the work itself has a scientific sense to it: the extensive practice of suspension of identification with the content of thoughts, for example, is done not primarily with a certain end state in mind, but more in an experimental mode, as part of an inquiry into ones experience. Here it resembles Husserls phenomenology, which attempted a scientific (in the sense of suspending ones assumptions and beliefs as much as possible) inquiry into consciousness. The practices and inquiry are done always with reference to understanding and its effect on the soul, and always with reference to ones actual lived experience in the moment. The application of psychological understanding helps to make conscious and thus render transparent various mental structures, removing the veils of identification with those structures, not by an effort to move ones awareness somewhere else, but simply by understanding the patterns and the status of those patterns relative to other modes of experience. As openness of mind develops, the process of understanding and disidentification with the souls ego structures becomes increasingly fluid, even as the uncovering of increasingly primitive or archaic structures presents a challenge to the souls ability to persevere in her open inquiry. This perseverance is supported by an increasingly clear love of the truth of reality itself; ones intimate experience of what in Sufism is called nearness to God brings growing courage and devotion to the souls process.