Introduction and Acknowledgments from
LUMINOUS NIGHT'S JOURNEY (1995)
A.H. Almaas
The universe is a luminosity,
a transparency,
a robe for you.
About Luminous Night's Journey
This book (Luminous Night's Journey, Diamond Books, 1995) follows
a particular thread in the process of self-realization.
Each chapter describes a self-contained segment of this process.
Thus even though the book as a whole consists of one thread, each
chapter is independent. The thread that runs through all the chapters
is a chain of processes and experiences I have gone through personally,
and selected for this book out of a much larger field of experience.
I chose this particular thread partly because of my personal
interest in reviewing it, and partly because it illuminates a process
rarely discussed in spiritual literature.
Most serious spiritual writings focus on the process of realization
of true nature, the
absolute or divine essence.
This is the ultimate nature and source of ourselves and of everything.
The thread I follow in this book sheds light on the obscure process
of how the soul, the individual
consciousness, becomes integrated into this absolute nature, as
and after the source of all experience is realized.
I want to relate my experience and understanding
of the fact that individual consciousness
does not merely die away or get discarded, and to describe how it
becomes clarified and integrated. This integration turns out to
be the process through which the absolute manifests as an individual
human being who embodies
this ultimate truth in a personal
life in the world.
I began this writing as my own personal contemplation, with a desire
to explore this process in the form of creative writing. I was not
thinking of publishing. I selected entries from my journal, which
are mainly succinct and disconnected notes, and rewrote them in
detail, fleshing out the nuances of my experience. In the course
of this writing I agreed to give some public lectures, and decided
to read some of this material as the subject of these lectures,
with commentaries and clarifications. I viewed this approach as
an experiment, for it is new for me to talk about my personal experience
of spiritual realization in public. I did not know whether such
public discussion of personal experience would have much value
for the listeners. The response was so consistently positive, with
feedback about its usefulness for many individuals, that I finally
thought of publishing these writings as a book.
Personal Transformation
The process of my personal opening and transformation
began many years before the experiences related in this book. This
transformation has been a continual process of revelation of Being,
our true nature, in various qualities and dimensions,
accompanied by the development of a body of understanding of these
manifestations and their relation to the experience of the ego
self. These processes, experiences, realizations and insights
have formed the major source of the teaching I have formulated,
the Diamond Approach,
which is the teaching of the Ridhwan
School. I think that this book will provide at least a taste
of the realizations and their associated processes that generated
this body of knowledge,
and will also provide a glimpse of how the Diamond Approach works.
I am indebted to many individuals and teachings for my personal
transformation and continuing learning. The true source of my personal
transformation and realization is Being itself, and its essential
guidance. Yet I doubt that this process would have happened without
the influence and grace of the various individuals and teachings
I have come in contact with.
I was a graduate student in physics when my interest in and search
for inner spiritual understanding began. I was studying physical
science because I wanted to discover objective truth, truth independent
from personal bias. By this time I was becoming convinced that the
truth I was interested in was not what is explored by the physical
sciences, but had more to do with the nature of being human.
I began with some experiential workshops focused on inner growth
and openness, in the late
sixties. This led me to undergoing a few years of bioenergetic analysis,
with Michael Conant in Berkeley, which contributed a great deal
to my opening up emotionally and physically. At the same time I
began to study Sufi and Zen thought, reading mainly ldries Shah
and D.T. Suzuki.
Spiritual Teacher/Ministers
In 1971 1 joined a group in Berkeley, where I was going to the
University of California. The group was led by the Chilean Psychiatrist
Claudio Naranjo. That group was the beginning of my direct contact
with spiritual teaching, and the conscious launching of my inner
journey. Dr. Naranjo, whom I related to as my teacher
at the time, taught spiritual
practice, mainly meditation,
combined with psychological exploration. He combined his experience
from Gestalt therapy and Karen Horney's self analysis with the map
of the enneagram to teach the group
to do in-depth psychological work. He lectured on many facets of
spiritual development,
and taught various meditations and spiritual exercises side by side
with the intense psychological work. I credit him for teaching me
that psychological work and spiritual practice can help each other
and work together. I also learned from him various forms and structures
for group and interpersonal work, some of which I later incorporated
into my work with students.
The work I did with Naranjo extended the emotional openness I had
experienced with Conant to the spiritual dimension, bringing about
my first experiences of Essence,
chakra openings and some
development of the three
centers as taught by Gurdjieff. Dr. Naranjo used the Gurdjieffian
concept of the contrast
of Essence with personality.
This notion had a great impact on the direction of my journey.
My few years of work with Dr. Naranjo provided many rich resources
for my inner exploration, as he introduced his students to several
excellent teachers from various ancient traditions. Through this
connection I had the opportunity to work intensely for a couple
of years with Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche. I learned from Rinpoche the
basics of the Tibetan Buddhist view of reality,
as well as numerous spiritual practices. Rinpoche taught Buddhist
philosophy, especially regarding emptiness
(sunyata) and Buddha nature, and Tibetan
Buddhist psychology and its relation to spiritual practice and enlightenment.
I also learned to practice vipassana meditation from Dhiravamsa,
an ex-Theravada monk from Thailand. This association with Buddhist
teaching and meditation led to various experiences of openness,
spaciousness, emptiness and clarity.
The work with these teachers and therapists helped me open to deeper
aspects of myself, and I
will always be grateful to them. I had many inner and spiritual
experiences during this work, but they were disconnected and I did
not have much understanding of them, nor of their relation to my
usual experience. I view this period of working
with various teachers as a stage that preceded the discoveries and
transformation that became the source of my work, the Diamond Approach.
Discovering Essence
The transformation began with my discovery of Essence as presence,
and my learning to stay anchored in this presence. This personal
discovery of who and what I really am was a surprise, for it did
not exactly correspond, as far as I knew, with the teachings I was
familiar with. This recognition and realization of my essential
nature as an ontological
presence had volcanic effect on my life and my process. It became
the center and meaning of my life from then on. This living presence
began gradually to expand and deepen, revealing many aspects of
Essence qualities of presence like love,
will, truth and so on-and various
dimensions of Being. This process was a spontaneous unfoldment,
what felt like a magical unveiling, a self-revelation of Being's
mysteries.
This unfoldment disclosed not only many of the mysteries of Being,
revealed as my nature and the nature of everything, but an amazing
wealth of knowledge and understanding. The body of understanding
that developed during my process is largely the product of the realization
of a particular manifestation of Essence, which I came to recognize
as essential guidance. This precise, diamond-like
guidance became the inner guide that has functioned more truly
than any external guide I have ever known. In fact the functioning
of this guidance is so specific to the exact state,
situation and understanding of the soul that no external guide could
substitute for its realization and functioning as the guidance for
an individual's spiritual awakening
and development.
The understanding that developed was not merely an experiential
comprehension of Essence in its various aspects and dimensions,
but also a precise and detailed understanding of how these relate
to the various manifestations of the ego
self. I had learned that it was possible to do psychological work
side by side with spiritual practice. In the course of my own transformation,
I came upon a particular path in which the two are inseparable,
and function as elements of the same method. It slowly dawned on
me that what was happening was not only a personal transformation,
but the development of a particular teaching that has a much wider
applicability.
Inquiry into personal experience
became the main method, in which psychological understanding opens
the soul to deeper experiences, and also connects specific elements
of the ego self, self-images,
object relations,
ego structures,
identifications,
personality patterns, emotional
issues, etc.-with specific essential aspects and dimensions. The
inquiry is mainly a matter of being aware of one's experience, both
inner and outer, recognizing what is and what is not understood,
and curiosity about it
that expresses a heart-felt
love for the truth. An important element in this inquiry is to be
present with one's feelings and thoughts without expressing them
or acting them out externally, thus opening the way to understanding
them and their underlying dynamics.
Development of the Diamond Approach
The knowledge that developed has demonstrated such precision and
universality that I have continuously been in awe of it. This awe
led me to appreciate that this knowledge was not my personal creation,
but the action of the guidance
of Being. This knowledge became the basis of the Diamond Approach.
In other words, the Diamond Approach did not develop as a result
of an intellectual synthesis of what I read, heard and experienced,
but rather as an articulation of the terrain of an actual personal
process of transformation. The synthesis
is a discovery, not something created by an individual.
Shortly after my discovery of the nature of Essence, and its initial
unfoldment, I shared my experience with two friends, who became
important supports for both my personal unfoldment and the development
of the Diamond Approach. When I discussed my experience with my
friend Karen Johnson, who was living at the time in Colorado, she
was able to perceive the essential presence in me, and this made
it possible for her to begin experiencing it. As I shared my experience
with my then old friend,
Faisal Muqaddam, who had just come from Kuwait to California, he
was also able to connect to and begin experiencing the essential
presence. My exploration of Essence intensified and accelerated
through the participation of these two friends. It helped a great
deal that each of them already had a capacity for inner seeing,
more developed than my own. My exploration expanded into intense
collaboration and joint exploration with both Karen and Faisal.
A couple of years later, when Karen moved to California, the three
of us were able to explore the unfoldment together. We spent several
years intensely exploring Essence and its development, both jointly
and separately.
During these years I was introduced to psychoanalytic developmental
psychology by Perry Segal, a friend who was doing his psychiatric
residency in Denver. My attention was guided thus to the extensive
study of the field of depth psychology, including Freud's work,
ego psychology, self psychology, object relations theory, Reichian
therapy and others. At the same time I studied the literature of
several ancient traditions: Buddhism, Vedanta, Sufism, mystical
Christianity, and others. I particularly benefited from the study
of the works of, and sometimes contact with, teachers like G. I.
Gurdjieff, Idries Shah, Ibn Arabi, Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta Maharaj,
Ramana Maharshi, Aurobindo, Tarthang Tulku, Trungpa Rinpoche, the
fourteenth Dalai Lama, and others. The exploration of these fields
and teachings contributed to the development of the Diamond Approach,
even though knowledge always arose from personal and direct experience
of the perspectives and understandings of these teachers.
The applicability of the developing knowledge was amply confirmed
not only by the perception and experience of Faisal and Karen, but
mainly by the experiences and realizations of many of the students
who worked with it. I began working with students in 1976, using
the knowledge that was arising
to guide the process of inner awakening
in others. Some years later I began training teachers in the Diamond
Approach. I have always been surprised by the power and efficacy
of this emerging body of knowledge and the method accompanying it.
Continuing Transformations & Gratitude
For close to twenty years now, Being has been continually revealing
to me its many facets and dimensions, always in spontaneous and
unexpected revelations. This has transformed my consciousness and
life in ways I never dreamed of, and led me to states of realization
I never imagined existed. The collaboration with Faisal and Karen
continued for about eight years, until Faisal decided to go his
own way, about nine years ago, for personal reasons and because
he felt it important to be on his own. I will always be grateful
and indebted to him for his part in my personal unfoldment and his
contribution to the development of the Diamond Approach. Karen and
I continue the intense joint exploration, which has taken the unfoldment
to ever more subtle dimensions and realms, and to a deepening and
clarifying of both the perspective and the method. My indebtedness
to Karen is not only for her deep friendship, her contribution to
my personal unfoldment and the development of the Diamond Approach,
but also for shouldering the difficult responsibility
of helping me develop and run the Ridhwan School. Our friendship,
rooted as it is in the exploration of the truth of Being, has traversed
depths and domains unknown in most friendships.
I would like also to express my gratitude
to my long-time friend Ronald Kane, for the supportive deep friendship
and for the many discussions and exchanges of views and experience
relating to both inner experience of Being and work with students.
My gratitude also goes to Larry Spiro, Ph.D., who quickly became
a friend after I did some classes and workshops for him as part
of the Melia Institute. We engaged in many discussions of the logoi
of East and West, and he introduced me to the teachings of Dzogchen
and Kashmir Shaivism. Coming into contact
with these nondual teachings helped me to clarify some of the subtle
questions that have emerged
in my continuing unfoldment and transformation. This has helped
my understanding of the Diamond Approach become sharper and more
complete.
Towards the second part of the spontaneously unfolding revelation
of Being, my process became focused not on the experience of Being
and its essential manifestations, but on the shift of identity
to Being. This led to the development of self-recognition in increasingly
subtler and more profound dimensions of Being, culminating in the
realization of the absolute. This then ushered me into the subtle
process of the clarification
of the soul to the degree necessary for it to be a personal vehicle
for the absolute nature, setting the ground for further revelations
of unexpected dimensions of experience. After the first few chapters,
which set the stage for this process, it is this thread of experience
that Luminous Night's Journey addresses. It must be mentioned that
this process occurred at the time within a larger process of unfoldment,
discovery and understanding. This book focuses on only a small part
of the overall process, tracing the particular thread of integrating
the soul into the absolute. This subtle process occurred as a thread
that lasted for a few years, but my overall process of unfolding
continued beyond this subprocess, and still continues.
This book, and all my previous publications, owe a great deal to
the various editors who prepared them for publication. My debt to
my chief editor, Alia Johnson, is inestimable, for without her and
her great dedication, energy and intelligence my work would not
have been available to interested readers in such excellent form
and quality. I am also indebted to Morton Letofsky for the energy
and care he contributed toward the development and structuring of
the Ridhwan School and its various organizations. My gratitude also
goes to my wife, Marie, and to many of the students and teachers
in the Ridhwan School, whose dedication and effort have been a great
support for the development
of the school and the publication of the books. Many have contributed
to making this work available to a widening circle of individuals
looking for a fresh outlook on spiritual experience and integration.
A.H. Almaas
January, 1994
Kona, Hawaii
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