5 Journeys Wrapped in The Inner Journey Home
One’s process of spiritual development is often referred to as a spiritual or inner journey because the sense of it is that we are going deeper into our subjective experience, deeper into our awareness, knowledge and understanding of ourselves and objective reality.
This journey covers all aspects of human experience and though it feels like we are going deeper or traversing a vast realm of potential and possibilities, we, in fact, go nowhere. If anything, we emerge into more immediacy and intimacy – with what? With all experience.
THE INNER JOURNEY IS MANY THINGS. It is:
- a journey of adventure and discovery
- a journey of maturation and completeness
- a journey of truth and authenticity
- a journey of love, devotion, passion, and union
- a journey of compassion, giving, and service
- a journey of realization of the nature of the soul and reality
- a journey of insight and learning
- a journey of fulfillment of life and human potential
- a journey of liberation from suffering and limitation
- a journey of inner freedom
A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Epilogue
In the Diamond Approach, we use three conceptualizations of a spiritual journey to help explicate the depth and breadth of the soul’s or individual consciousness’s development. These three journey concepts are simply different perspectives of the same unfoldment.
- The Inner Journey Home – This is the overarching vision of the spiritual journey. The spiritual journey is an inner journey; it is intimately personal. The inner journey reveals our most fundamental nature to us, a nature that is part and parcel of the nature of existence.
- The Three Journeys – The three journeys are the journey to essence/presence, the journey with essence/presence, and the journey as essence. The three journeys look at the inner journey as a process of moving from ignorance to embodiment.
- WE HAVE SEEN THAT ESSENCE is central to the process of the soul’s inner journey of liberation and development. From the perspective of the relationship of the soul to essential presence, the inner journey can be divided into three subjourneys: the journey to presence; the journey with presence; and the journey in presence. – A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, ch. 15
- The Journeys of Ascent and Descent – The journey of ascent describes the process of transcendence of the soul from the life of ego duality to awareness of Absolute, nondual realization while the journey of descent articulates the embodiment and integration of nondual realization “into the world.
- We can view the inner journey home as comprising two parts, the journey of ascent and the journey of descent. The journey of ascent includes the journey to presence and the journey with presence, as described in chapter 15. These two journeys include the discovery of the soul, that of essence in its aspects, and finally of the diamond vehicles. The last part of the journey of ascent is the revelation of the five boundless dimensions. The integration of each of the five dimensions is like a journey on its own, similar to the two first journeys. It includes understanding the body, emotions, and thoughts on this dimension. It also includes the integration of the soul, essential aspects, and diamond vehicles. – A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, ch. 16
The Three Journeys
The spiritual journey most often begins as a response to a longing for something more: more real, more heart, more knowledge, more fullness, more satisfaction… As such, it begins in what the Sufis refer to as ‘the world of lies,’ where our beliefs and conditioning and the nature of our dualistic mind obscure our awareness of our deeper nature.
During the first journey, in the initial phases of the practice of inquiry, the fabric of experience is our thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, actions, and all of our life situations. Later, in the second journey, the fabric becomes more continuously colored by presence itself. By the third journey, there’s nothing but the fabric of presence. Then all experience is presence, with the various discriminations in it. So the immediacy and intimacy with experience is complete only in the third journey. During the first journey, we only see isolated parts of the fabric—a pattern here, a pattern there, but with gaps in between. In the second journey, we recognize that there is presence as well. This presence is inherent consciousness that is part of these patterns and moves through them as the most meaningful thread. In the third journey, we recognize that presence pervades all the patterns. In fact, we recognize that the patterns are nothing but patterns in the presence itself. Then the immediacy is complete. Then we are the understanding of our experience at each moment. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, ch. 15
The Overlap & Conflation of Journeys
The journey in presence includes this part of the journey of ascent, i.e., the integration of the five boundless dimensions, but also the journey of descent. The journey of descent includes the integration of the five boundless dimensions into a unified whole, recognizing and understanding them as dimensions of the same true nature, coemergent in such a way that they simultaneously structure the full experience of nondual self-realization. In the journey of ascent the soul climbs up the ladder of Reality until she reaches the most subtle dimension of true nature, the absolute. Then she descends by going back and integrating the various dimensions she has passed through in the journey of ascent into this most subtle dimension. – A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, ch. 16
Where the Journey Happens
In the first journey, your identity is on the ego level, which is the familiar sense of self-recognition. This identity is a reflection of the particular ego structure that defines you in relation to your experiential field. In the second journey, the identity is the Point, the point of light and existence, the Essential Identity. In the third journey, the identity is the mystery of Being itself, the Absolute. These differences create some variations in the nature of the thread in each journey. – A. H.Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, ch. 10
All of these perspectives on the spiritual journey or spiritual path speak to a shift in identity from ego, a historically constructed sense of self as a separate entity, to an individual boundless consciousness of presence.
Through the recognition of the soul we develop the vessel of the inner journey, the consciousness that goes through the clarification and purification. The second phase of transition from the first journey to the second journey is the activation of the subtle centers of the lataif, which is a system of centers through which the primary essential aspects operate. We activate the lataif through concentration meditation and color visualization with music, in the context of a guided process of inquiry into the relevant elements of one’s experience. These methods can open the soul to the arising of essence in its various aspects, and to her recognition of essence as immaculate and perfect presence. We have discussed in detail this process of the discovery and experience of essence as presence in our books Essence and Diamond Heart, Book 1. The recognition of essence as presence is the fundamental insight of the first journey, without which we cannot move to the second journey, the journey with presence. In this recognition we directly and immediately experience and know what our true nature is, beyond mind and history. – A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, ch. 15