On the Fruit of the Work
This article is not written to draw attention to a life, but to speak into the lives we are each in the midst of living. If it serves anything, my hope is that it serves the movement in a few of us who sense that becoming human is not yet finished.
When I was nineteen, something happened that radically changed the orientation of my life. Not gradually. Not in hindsight. Immediately. I knew it in the moment it occurred, and I have known it ever since.
At the time, I had no language for what was happening, no spiritual framework, and no interest in anything metaphysical. I was in my first year of college, living a fairly ordinary life — concerned with ordinary things, getting a job, meeting girls, consuming experience, and staying out of serious trouble.
I was not seeking awakening. I was just minding my own business. And then came a day when something like a thick, living presence began descending through the top of my head. “Substance” is still the closest word I have, though it was not liquid, not light, not quite energy — yet it had density, warmth, and an undeniable presence.
As it moved downward, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Goosebumps spread across my skin. I remember thinking very plainly, What the hell is this? But what remains most striking to me is what was not there — there was no fear, no sense of threat. If anything, it was profoundly comforting — the kind of comfort that does not come from reassurance but from recognition.
When it reached my shoulders, there was a sudden and unmistakable message: “Welcome home.” No voice. No words. Just knowing.
When it reached the center of my chest, it felt as though something pierced my heart. There is no elegant way to describe what followed. Agony and ecstasy — not alternating, but simultaneous. And in that instant…something woke up. Not a belief or a thought. Something alive. It was not subtle; it was radical.
It felt like a waking up, though at nineteen, I had no idea what that meant. But I knew with absolute certainty that my life had tilted in some irreversible way. If it is too strong to say my life changed in that moment, it is not too strong to say the entire orientation of my life changed — what drew my interest, what stirred my curiosity, the direction my attention began to move.
I knew it then. And I have known it ever since.
Only much later would I come to call that descending presence “essence.” At nineteen, I had no language for what was happening. I would not encounter that word until the mid-1980s, when I began reading A.H. Almaas and found him describing something that felt uncannily familiar.
It was one of those rare recognitions that does not feel like learning something new so much as remembering something you already know. Until then, the experience remained largely uninterpreted — not forgotten, but quietly alive in the background of my life, like a sentence whose meaning had not yet revealed itself.
Looking back now, it seems less accurate to say the experience gave me answers than to say it introduced a question that has quietly guided my life ever since.
The Years of Seeking
That shift in orientation drew me onto a spiritual path. Not out of ideology, and certainly not out of sophistication, but because life and reality began challenging my myopic and naïve understanding
I stayed on that path for thirteen years. During that time, I experienced many spiritual states. At the time, I assumed these experiences meant I was moving in the right direction. Yet gradually, something became impossible to ignore. For all the depth of those states, my fundamental sense of identity remained largely intact. The one who was having the experiences…was still the same one.
Over the years, I have sometimes told friends — only half joking — that spiritual experiences are a dime a dozen. That may sound dismissive until you understand where it comes from.
For quite some time, I was having what many would consider mystical or transcendent experiences. And yet something increasingly obvious stood beside them: “I” was not changing.
The personality organizing my life remained remarkably familiar — reactive in the same places, defended in the same ways, still capable of being the egotistical jerk I had known myself to be for much of my life.
It is a sobering realization to see that one can have expansive experiences while the structure of the self remains largely untouched. Experiences were happening…but the one having them was still the same.
Eventually, I could no longer look past that discrepancy. So I stepped away, not only from the path I had been following, but from what I thought of then as “the spiritual quest” itself. Because a quieter but more insistent question had begun to take shape in me: “How do I become a real human being?” Not a spiritual one, not an elevated one, a real one.
Looking back now, I can see that this was not a departure from the Work at all — though it certainly felt like one then. It was the beginning of a deeper sincerity. And it was that sincerity, more than any experience I had ever had, that eventually led me to A.H. Almaas.
Recognition
When I first encountered Almaas’s writings in the mid-1980s, something in me recognized the terrain. Not as a new set of ideas, but a resonance, as though a bell that had been struck long ago was sounding again.
Some recognitions enter our lives long before the understanding that can hold them. Until language arrives, they live in us as felt knowing — shaping the direction of our lives even when we cannot explain why.
At nineteen, I did not know what essence was, but something in me knew that what had touched my life was real, and that knowing had already begun to lean my life toward it.
Boundlessness
Later, while reading The Pearl Beyond Price, something radical happened again. As I drifted toward sleep, there was a flash of brilliant light and a concussive force that knocked the wind out of me. In the next instant, I was no longer located in my body.
There was no sense of inside or outside; only consciousness — aware of itself, not observing something, being itself. The phenomenological experience was not emptiness but a boundless isness, and within that field an infinite wave seemed to move through itself. Yet “move” is not quite right — there was no distance to cross, no time passing.
The wave was everywhere at once. And as it touched every point of this isness field, each point erupted in indescribable ecstasy — not sequentially, but simultaneously. The mind cannot hold such a thing, but the experience did not ask the mind to hold it.
It was self-knowing, self-luminous, complete. If the earlier experience awakened a question, this one dissolved the assumption that what I am is confined to the person I imagine myself to be. Yet even this did not feel like an answer. If anything, it deepened the mystery.
Basic Knowledge
There is another distinction Almaas explores—one that has moved increasingly into the foreground of my experience over the last decade: the difference between ordinary knowledge and what he calls basic knowledge.
Ordinary knowledge is comparison. It is memory at work. It references the past, projects into the future, and makes sense of things by relating one known to another. It is immensely useful. We could not function without it, but it always knows about.
Basic knowledge is different. It knows without the machinery of reference. It is immediate. Not as an idea, but as a direct apprehension — an intimate sense of recognition that does not arise from thought, and does not require thought to confirm it.
This kind of knowing has no goal because nothing is missing. It has no pull toward the future. It has no connection to the past or the future in the way ordinary knowledge does. It belongs entirely to the immediacy of this moment.
What is strange — and deeply relieving — is that the emergence of basic knowledge does not stop the mind from doing what minds do. The mind continues with its ordinary comparisons and problem-solving. Ordinary knowledge still operates, but it no longer dominates my attention or awareness.
Basic knowing is more foreground, and when it is foreground, the whole relationship to experience changes. Not because the content of life changes, but because the distance from life begins to disappear.
Immediacy
There was another moment, years later, at a Diamond Approach retreat on non-conceptual awareness, that continued to illuminate these earlier events in a quieter way.
I was speaking with Hameed, and before I even reached my question, I heard myself say, “A couple of years ago I asked you something at a retreat, and this feels like a continuation of that — except it also feels as though no time has passed between the two.” I had not planned to say it, it simply appeared.
As we talked, something in my experience began shifting. The closest image I have is like watching a rain squall approach across open land. At first, you see it in the distance — a translucent curtain moving toward you. Then it is closer. Then suddenly the rain is right in front of your face. And before you quite register the transition…you are standing inside it. Then you are it.
What approached in that moment was not weather, it was immediacy. I could feel it revealing itself until there was no longer any sense of it approaching at all. It was simply here. For a brief moment, there seemed to be a single point of reference inside — as though everything had gathered into one location — and then even that disappeared. There was no center from which I was speaking, only immediacy, living the dialogue.
Words were spoken. Listening was happening. Nothing outwardly unusual. Yet the entire exchange unfolded inside undivided presence. What stayed with me was the recognition that immediacy is not something we create. We imagine we are in the moment…while leaning slightly away from it. And then, sometimes, the leaning stops.
Inclusion
During that same retreat, another experience emerged — less dramatic than the earlier openings, yet in some ways more reassuring.
There was a sense of “me” as awareness expanding in all directions, accompanied by a quiet but unmistakable feeling: “I will have all of me.” A declaration of certainty from the depth of my isness. Not as an effort, more like a movement already underway.
It felt as though awareness itself was gathering parts of me that had long existed at the periphery — places that had been disconnected, disowned, or simply never included in the field of conscious living.
What struck me most was the manner of this gathering; there was no force in it, no attempt to fix anything, no demand that anything change. Just awareness, lighting up the dark and hidden places of my psyche without disturbing anything. Just inclusion. A kind of compassionate gravity.
So much of our psychological life is organized around improvement — becoming better, freer, more evolved. But this was the opposite. Nothing was being edited. Nothing left behind. Only welcomed. Only held.
The Fruit
Looking back, these no longer appear as separate experiences but as movements in a single unfolding — the radical awakening at nineteen, the years of seeking, the recognition of essence, the glimpse of boundless consciousness, the immediacy of presence, the quiet emergence of basic knowledge, the gathering of what once felt fragmented — it no longer feels accurate to describe them as separate events.
They feel more like one intelligence unfolding across a life. What began as an interruption has gradually become an orientation. Less something that happens to me…more the ground from which happening occurs.
At nineteen, something woke up. Years later, I tasted consciousness without boundaries, and now what moves me most is not the extraordinary moments but the growing sense that nothing stands between this moment and its knowing — except the habit of leaning away.
Perhaps this is the fruit of the Work, not perfection, not constant transcendence, but a life that is gradually less organized around departure and more willing to include what appears, more willing to be here.
I once thought realization would take me somewhere else, but now it seems increasingly possible that realization is simply teaching me how not to leave. When I feel into my life today, it does not feel as though I am getting closer to reality. It feels more like the distance I once assumed was there is quietly disappearing.
Realization does not arrive all at once; it unfolds, and if I have learned anything, it is this: the fruit of the Work is rarely dramatic.
More often, it shows itself in the quiet recognition that what we have been seeking has been patiently present — waiting, perhaps, for us to stop turning away long enough to notice. If there is a thread running quietly through all of this, it may be the gradual shift from conceptual living into phenomenological ground.
For much of our lives, the conceptual organizes our reality. It helps us navigate, communicate, build, remember, and anticipate. It is not an error in our design; it is one of our great capacities. Entire worlds open because we can think, compare, imagine, and understand.
But at some point, at least for some of us, it becomes clear that concepts know about life, while phenomenological presence knows life directly. And yet this is not a call to abandon the conceptual. We do not have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The conceptual continues to serve its essential role. It carries its own intelligence and its own forms of realization.
What changes is something quieter. We no longer have to leave our ontological ground — the immediacy of being — in order to think. Conceptual understanding can arise within presence rather than replacing it. Thought becomes an expression of being instead of a departure from it.
This may be part of what maturation looks like — not choosing one over the other, but discovering that the mind functions most beautifully when it rests within the very reality it is trying to understand.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and writer devoted to the ongoing process of human development and realization.