Brilliancy: The Essence of Intelligence

"A.H. Almaas is one of the foremost spiritual teachers of our time. His methodology for realizing true nature is precise, teachable, and remarkably clear. This book gives the reader a sense of what it is like to do "The Work" of the Diamond Approach, incorporating both lecture material and transcripts of interactions with students. His
insights on intelligence as a fundamental aspect of our innate essence rather than as a mental activity-- the Absolute unfolding as creation-- provides a framework and a method for experiencing the reality that underlies ordinary perception."

Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.

In this potent and luminous work, the master teacher A. H. Almaas brings clarity concerning the spiritual ground of Intelligence which evokes and quickens the reader into a remembrance of her true nature. The teachings of the Diamond Approach are at once evolutionary and experiential. The once and future gnosis offered here reveals both the journey of consciousness and the quality of brilliancy that is its realization. Throughout this astonishing work, the presence of the teacher is evident in actual facilitation with his students as well as in words that themselves are transparent to transcendence.

Jean Houston, Ph.D.

Almaas’s work evidences its own brilliancy in its capacity to ... [guide us in that inquiry and] help us to contact the subtlety and power of intelligence as a presence in our experience. With great depth of insight, he articulates both the sychodynamic and the phenomenological barriers to this aspect of our true nature. In addition to the talks where Almaas shares this understanding, Essence of Intelligence offers us a unique glimpse of the power of the method of inquiry that Almaas has developed. Transcripts of the author’s work with his students make up the latter half of this book. And it is here that we witness his students discovering the blocks to their own essential intelligence. Through Almaas’s open curiosity and the guidance of his questions, they confront their conditioning, and in that process begin to experience intelligence directly. (from the preface - Brilliancy: The Essence of Intelligence)