What does it mean to come to terms with our vulnerability? It means recognizing it and seeing it for what it is. It means identifying all the beliefs we have in our unconscious about real and imagined dangers and the way we have been trying to deal with them. It means seeing how our defensiveness doesn’t work, how it only cuts us off from ourselves and from our resources.
It also means being able, at some point, to appreciate the vulnerability we feel, because vulnerability means openness. If my consciousness is vulnerable, that means I am also vulnerable to the manifestations of my True Nature. If I defend myself, I am not open to my True Nature and its manifestation. I am not only protecting myself from other people, I begin to protect myself from True Nature itself, with all its qualities.
The wonderful thing is that vulnerability becomes the door to intimacy, to being ourselves, to being real, to being where we are. But for that to happen, we have to be willing to be vulnerable to what is. Being vulnerable means that our soul is open for things to arise in it. It is not defended. – The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, Ch. 5
To be human is to be like delicate water, very clean, very transparent, very fresh. It doesn’t have any opaqueness; it is completely colorless. You can see all colors through it. It’s very fluid, transparent. Whatever impression comes from within you goes through you like light through water. To be vulnerable is to flow like water. To be like a running stream with the freshness of running water. There is a clarity, a lucidity, a delicacy. Vulnerability is like water, but the water is very delicate. It’s like the water of tears—so delicate, so fine. If you are like tears, if your very nature is like colorless tears, then you feel what it’s like to be vulnerable. – Diamond Heart Book Three, Ch. 13
If you look at the physical vulnerability of a human being, you see that that vulnerability itself is also an asset. This vulnerability gives us the capacity to adapt better than other creatures. Vulnerability ultimately means sensitivity, transparency, penetrability. We see it as influenceability, which we think is negative, but it actually means that we’re open, we can be penetrated, we’re sensitive to impressions coming into us and going out of us. This leaves us at the mercy of all kinds of influences, but also gives us the possibility of greater versatility and flexibility in terms of what we can do, how we can respond, what environments we can live in. We can adapt and respond differently to different stimuli. Human beings have been able to adapt to and live in all kinds of environments. Most other creatures can’t do that because they have a narrower range of responses. We have been able to adapt because of our mental, emotional, and physical vulnerability. – Diamond Heart Book Three, Ch. 13
Vulnerability in openness indicates the presence of beingness. When there is no presence then there is no expectation of danger, even with openness, and hence no feeling of vulnerability. This was clear in the case of a young woman student who always had some good reason why being personal was not desirable. Whenever she worked on being personal or on making personal contact she entered a state of impersonal expansion. The state was a very deep one of no self and no boundaries. She felt light, open, happy and boundless. But she sensed no particular presence or fullness. It was a long time before she realized she was using this state, which she developed through extensive Buddhist meditation, to avoid feeling present in a personal way, because she found it difficult to tolerate the feelings of vulnerability. – The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, An Object Relations Approach, Ch. 6
Our vulnerability is also the quality of our humanness. It is a heart quality of openness, of gentleness, that is needed for us to recognize where we are and to abide there. We cannot truly recognize where we are without that gentleness, that humanness, that humility. But that means we will find ourselves in a vulnerable condition. Vulnerability in the face of danger feels frightening, but in the absence of danger, vulnerability can simply mean feeling naturally, undefendedly yourself. – The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, Ch. 5
As far as I can tell, we are the only beings who are permeable to everything that exists, from the most painful to the most sublime. We’re sensitive not only to experiencing the pleasures and pains of our bodies, to feeling our emotions, the painful and the pleasurable, and to sensing our thoughts, but our vulnerability also gives us the possibility of experiencing, being aware of, being in contact with all levels of reality. We’re permeable to not only physical, emotional, and mental stimuli, but to essential and spiritual stimuli as well. So, not only are we vulnerable in the sense that our feelings, our preferences, even our identity can be influenced, but we are also vulnerable to being aware, conscious, and permeable to our true identity, and to the nature of all existence. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, Ch. 13
Being vulnerable is the watery way to Being because transparency in our individual consciousness in its sheer state is necessary for the consummation of the marriage of individual consciousness to its true nature. Defenselessness is threatening, even seems foolish, when all we want is to survive; for spiritual awakening, however, it is a necessity. Without total vulnerability and openness to essence, there is no essential development and no essential marriage and hence no possibility of attaining nonduality. – Karen Johnson, The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 24