To be real, we need to put ourselves on the line, to take the necessary risks. We need to decide that we’re going to be real even if it means everyone we know will abandon us. We’re going to be real even if it means we won’t eat for days. We’re going to be real even if it means we’re going to get sick. If we don’t take that kind of risk, we’re just not going to be real. How else could it be? If we don’t feel that our truth and our integrity are valuable, then we won’t take that risk. We will remain a shell, a hypocrite pretending to seek the truth. How will we find rest if we know we’re a coward who prefers a little bit of comfort to the integrity of who we are? We can’t lie to ourselves about these things. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, Ch. 8
So what is the practice of being real? It is the same as the practice of being oneself. To be real means, “I am not an idea of myself. I am not pretending to be myself. I am not being in reaction to something or someone or their image of me. I am being what I actually am.” But it is not as though one can just stop being unreal and start being oneself. After all, who knows what that actually means? How are you going to try to be yourself? It is not as though you have many selves on a shelf, and you can take the real one down and put it on.
The good news is that no matter how distant you are from yourself, something in your experience in any given moment expresses who you really are. You can wander far from your realness—you can even become disconnected from it—but who is it that is far away or is disconnected? It’s still you. Whatever your experience, wherever you are, whatever you are perceiving, is connected to what and who you really are. – The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, Ch. 2
If I am being my True Nature, it is not an identification; it is just simply being, which is not an activity. Now the word “being” is a little tricky in English. Because the verb is “to be,” “I am being” implies that I am doing being. But that is not what the phrase means. It means that I am not doing anything to be myself. I am just myself. I don’t need anything to be it. I am it. However, when I am it, there is nobody, no I, that is being it. There is no separation. I and it are one thing; there is no I to claim it. So, when I say I am the light, I am the presence, I don’t mean that there is an I that is identifying with light or presence. It is just a recognition, a knowingness, a seeing, an awareness of that which is here. – A. H. Almaas, The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, pg. 146
Being real is a risk and an adventure. What will be left when all of the concepts are gone? Who will we be? How will we see the world? What kind of feelings will we have? How will we see other people? We do not really know, and there is no way to find out until we do. We can see it as a movement toward ontological independence or autonomy. However, even these are approximations, familiar concepts from the past that we are now applying to something that we still do not know. It is difficult to talk without creating another boat. We destroy one boat, and the moment that we say another word, we create a new boat. It is difficult to be and not think of being, to really forget our entire mind, to take our mind and put it into one of our pockets and zip it up for a while. But this is precisely what we need to do if we are going to find out the truth for ourselves. Such freedom and such boldness are not easy. The boats cannot be sunk all at once. Usually we sink a few boats at a time; otherwise, we may get overwhelmed, flooded, totally disoriented. To sink all of our boats we have to confront all possibilities. We are completely and absolutely at sea then: nothing above, nothing below, nothing to hold us from any side. At this juncture, we cannot expect anyone or anything to help us. It is useless even to think that Christ will be your guide, or an angel will descend, or a bodhisattva will help. These are some of the boats that we need to abandon. Work schools have been created to help us reach this juncture. They are useful for most of the way, for almost the totality of the inner journey. We need the boat to traverse the course, but not to finish it. We have to be completely alone at some point, absolutely independent, not simply from other people’s minds but also our own. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, pg. 64