We are true reality communing with itself, and we are fundamentally the essence of reality expressing itself as you, as me, and as all others. As I see it, when our love of the truth becomes total, we cannot help but follow where reality leads. Reality itself begins to live our life in all its daily expressions. Our life can become an endless revelation of reality, an adventure with neither beginning nor end. – Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery, Introduction
Whosoever knoweth himself knoweth the truth. When you know yourself, you will know the truth in the totality of its various manifestations. The world we see, this physical universe, is the surface expression of a multifaceted reality. Those black volcanic rocks look pink inside, and within the pink there is bright yellow, and inside the yellow is this living, roaring purple, and within the living, roaring purple are mysterious lights. Usually you can’t see that by looking at the rocks. You have to look at the sensory organ itself, the human being. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, ch. 7
It is so unknowable that the moment you begin to get a glimpse of it, your mind is blown to smithereens. You realize that your mind lays a kind of curtain over things, a veil, a colored sheet with drawings on it that overlays our reality and says, “That is reality.” But the reality is beyond that: you open that curtain, open the window and it is unknowable. If you truly look, you do not even know you are looking, and you disappear. Your mind is there, but nobody’s looking. The reality is there and you do not say there is mind or there is reality. And then, what you perceive, although it is mysterious, it is unknowable, we give it a name. We call it truth, we call it God, we call it reality. These are just words, words to refer to the unknowable, to the unknown, to the mystery. We can say these words knowing that they do not describe something, but are pointers to what is ultimately mysterious. It is not somewhere else—it is not inside, it is not outside, it is not in heaven. It is nowhere. It is all that exists without even saying “all” or saying “that exists.” You see? You cannot say anything after a while. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch.13
You have to see that reality is more than three-dimensional. There’s more to us, there’s more to me, there’s more to you, there’s more to this world, there’s more to this school than the physical things we see. We have to look beyond the dimension of objects. The perspective of the physical world and positivist science that posits only what is visible as true is limited. We have to see the world as it is. The world that we see, the world of objects, is not the complete world. – Diamond Heart Book Five, ch. 9
Freedom is the freedom of reality to reveal its dynamism, to express itself as form, as formlessness, as both, or as neither. No single feature and no combination of features can exhaust the potential of reality. It is a mystery without end. Reality is always revealing itself by knowing itself; and knowing reality and living it becomes the fulfillment of our life. The purity of reality expresses itself to us, through us, and as us, all at once. Our life becomes the life of true nature—the purity at the heart of reality—living consciously and expressing itself as us, using us by being us. This is the miraculous heart of human freedom. – Runaway Realization
The Diamond Approach views reality as inherently indefinite, and this indefiniteness lies at the heart of its aliveness and freedom. Even in its indefiniteness, reality reveals that it possesses a distinct purity—what I have termed at different times “true nature,” “essential nature,” or “being”—as the ground of all manifestation, as the irreducible perfection at the very heart of all and everything. I have described this ground as being composed of five coemergent dimensions—not as absolute givens but as a way of viewing and understanding true nature and its relation to the forms that we experience. These are universal love, pure presence, nonconceptual awareness, absolute emptiness, and creative dynamism. I have referred to these dimensions as boundless or formless because of their pervasiveness and omnipresence— sometimes conventionally referred to as the nonlocality of this purity. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, Introduction
Physical reality is the most difficult to perceive as part of a whole unfolding pattern. We usually think of physical reality as static, clunky objects outside of ourselves and we have the sense that time passes—both are very difficult perceptions to get beyond. But when observing your inner experience, it is easier to see that there is always an unfolding occurring that you are not making happen. Your sensations, thoughts, and feelings are unfolding and manifesting constantly. In fact, they are unfolding regardless of what you do. Can you stop your thoughts? There is a continual renewal of inner experience going on all the time. It is easy to see that it is not as though our inner experience is happening inside the body while time passes outside it. In reality, our body feels different in each moment. When you become aware of this, you begin to perceive the inner unfoldment of the soul. You might even experience the substance of the soul itself as a dynamic flow with an energetic aliveness. This is close to the sense of the overall unfoldment of reality, in which the flow is not happening just inside of you but everywhere. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, Ch. 19
Once you can see reality, when you wake up in the morning you won’t see anything you’ve ever seen before. When you can truly see, perceive and taste something, you will see that you have never actually seen it before. Then you know you are looking without your mind. But as long as you recognize something, in the sense of remembering it in the sense of giving it names and labels, then it is not reality yet and you are not yet truly seeing. To penetrate to reality involves a process of unlearning, a shedding or a dropping away of mind, getting rid of all that we know. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, pg. 144
Reality is beyond any teachings that can be formulated and promulgated. Reality simply is. Everything we say about it is extra, a creation of the human mind. We cannot adhere to teachings as if they are reality. We use teachings, benefit from them, but then we discard them, we drop them. To carry teachings with us after we learn to live in reality is to carry an extra load. We need only reality, and the teachings are simply vehicles through which to reach and live in reality. Reality is beyond tools, methods, and helpful perspectives. Reality is innocent of it all. — A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, pg. 58