Speaker 1: We all have emotions. Whether we can access them or
Speaker 1: not is another story. So at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: path is learning to access our emotion by seeing what's
Speaker 1: in the way of them. Welcome to the one you feed.
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think, ring true, and yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is a h Almas, which is the pen name
Speaker 1: of Hamad Ali, who has been on the show once before.
Speaker 1: He's the creator of the Diamond Approach to self realization.
Speaker 1: The Diamond approach is a contemporary teaching that developed within
Speaker 1: the context of both ancient spiritual teachings and modern psychology theories.
Speaker 1: He has authored eighteen books about spiritual realization, including the
Speaker 1: Diamond Heart series, The Pearl Beyond Price, The Void, The
Speaker 1: New Love Unveiled, and many others. Hello Hamid, Welcome to
Speaker 1: the show. Good to talk to you again, Eric. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's a pleasure to have you on for the second time.
Speaker 1: We will get into your work here shortly, but let's
Speaker 1: start like we always do with the pair of old.
Speaker 1: In the parable, there is a grandfather who's talking with
Speaker 1: his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves
Speaker 1: inside of us that are always a battle. One is
Speaker 1: a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
Speaker 1: and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
Speaker 1: grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and he looks up at his grandfather says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. It reminds me of some
Speaker 1: of the story that's one of the teachers you used
Speaker 1: to use, which is the story of the two heaps.
Speaker 1: And the story is that everybody who comes into the
Speaker 1: path he has two heaps, and then one big one,
Speaker 1: one small one. The big heap is mostly of negative
Speaker 1: emotions and tendencies and difficulties, the small heap of positive one,
Speaker 1: and by engaging the path and the practice, a small
Speaker 1: heap that keeps growing, growing, growing, until at some point
Speaker 1: the big heap becomes a small heap, but a small
Speaker 1: heat becomes the big It reminds me of that a
Speaker 1: similar thing. So, yeah, that's a good approximation. And I
Speaker 1: like that idea because it's not necessarily that either heap
Speaker 1: goes away completely, right, It's just that the balance is shifting.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about your work. Your work is known
Speaker 1: as the diamond approach. And in order for us to
Speaker 1: talk about the Diamond approach at all in any useful way,
Speaker 1: we need to use the word essence. And so tell
Speaker 1: me what you mean by the word essence. So essence
Speaker 1: is like the essence of what we are, meaning the
Speaker 1: true nature of the human being, which ultimately means the
Speaker 1: true nature of our consciousness. We are conscious being, and
Speaker 1: consciousness pervades our body in our mind. And when you
Speaker 1: realize that which is the true nature, which is the
Speaker 1: essence with the stron nature, that's what I call essence,
Speaker 1: and it's as usual only experience. It is aluminous light
Speaker 1: and presence. It's a both a goodness and the truth
Speaker 1: at the same time. And we find that to be
Speaker 1: what we truly are and at the deepest level, so
Speaker 1: it is the very nature of the good d Wolf.
Speaker 1: You say that essence is forgotten and that instead of
Speaker 1: essence we now have personality. The essence is replaced with
Speaker 1: various identifications. Talk a little bit more about the difference
Speaker 1: between say, personality or identifications in essence. Well, what most
Speaker 1: people know as themselves is what I call personality, because
Speaker 1: the way human beings developed seems almost everybody, maybe except
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. If we if we take the story that
Speaker 1: when we're born we are essential with our essential nature
Speaker 1: is still present with us, but withe their animal tendencies
Speaker 1: and desires and all that, but we still have our
Speaker 1: pure nature and innocence. And through encounters of life and
Speaker 1: to the action with parments, that nature becomes eclipse. It
Speaker 1: becomes covered over by tendencies and impressions in oneself and believes,
Speaker 1: and basically, experience impresses our consciousness and leaves impressions. Those
Speaker 1: impression time become organized into a sense of self that
Speaker 1: we know ourselves to be. And that's why sometimes called
Speaker 1: the personality, so their personality or the sense of self,
Speaker 1: or what I call the ego self. It's really it
Speaker 1: is still our usual consciousness, whose essence is the spiritual essence,
Speaker 1: but it becomes impressed and conditioned and formed by various
Speaker 1: experiences all the way to the exclusion of our original assense.
Speaker 1: So some few people grow up with some contact well
Speaker 1: then goodness and innocence, and that's purity. They have the
Speaker 1: tendencies and all that, but the actual presence of itself
Speaker 1: and most people are not touch with it because that's
Speaker 1: the spiritual essence. And that's why people engage in spiritual
Speaker 1: work to reconnect or discover this spiritual essence, which when
Speaker 1: we discover it is not just what we are. It's
Speaker 1: not on the goodness, but it is also freedom. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about what is personality and what's not because one
Speaker 1: of the things that's interesting if you look at a
Speaker 1: little child is you notice right away that children have
Speaker 1: preferences of some sort they're not a complete blank slate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they have the preferences, they have qualities and the differences
Speaker 1: in the quality each each baby is unique in terms
Speaker 1: of other quality and pure good qualities and also desires reaction,
Speaker 1: all of those. Yeah, the child has a mixture, and
Speaker 1: in some sense, the child is born with the two wolves.
Speaker 1: You could say we're born with our essentially, but we're
Speaker 1: also born with instinctual drive, constinctual forces that are force,
Speaker 1: revible and propagation, all of that, and those are the
Speaker 1: animal level. They are primitive and they just want to
Speaker 1: live and survive and sometimes irrespective of our good nature,
Speaker 1: so it becomes self centered. And so even the child
Speaker 1: can be self centered. Right, babies seem to be very much.
Speaker 1: So what sort of way might you raise the child
Speaker 1: that you would preserve as much of its sense as possible.
Speaker 1: First of all, you cannot raise a child who will
Speaker 1: for sure be in touched with their essence consciously. It's
Speaker 1: just like part of our nature human being that we
Speaker 1: develop an ego or call the ego self. But you
Speaker 1: can help a child be closes the essential nature or
Speaker 1: essential nature more easily accessible by the way you raise them,
Speaker 1: partly through love, through love when you really love your
Speaker 1: child for who and what they are, not because their
Speaker 1: your child, because their innate qualities. You see your essential
Speaker 1: nature and you love them for it. So that love
Speaker 1: and that care and giving them the protection and the care,
Speaker 1: and and also recognition of what they are, the unique
Speaker 1: qualities and supporting that for to mature and develop. They
Speaker 1: will still have, you know, reaction and all of that,
Speaker 1: and and that we don't want to reject them, but
Speaker 1: have an accepting attitude that also guide them that well
Speaker 1: it's okay, you're mad now, but other ways you could
Speaker 1: get what you want. Yelling and screaming doesn't do it.
Speaker 1: So it's a skill really to be a good parent.
Speaker 1: Most parents don't have some of that skill, but not
Speaker 1: to the extent where the child can develop with some
Speaker 1: kind of openness to the session nasure because most people,
Speaker 1: most parents don't have their own connect you with the
Speaker 1: sentential nature. They don't know what it is. It needs
Speaker 1: somebody who's already awake into the session to mature and
Speaker 1: it filled with it to and both parents have to
Speaker 1: be there or three pairs, whatever the situation is, to
Speaker 1: actually raise a child like that, and still that will
Speaker 1: not make them completely pure. Just give them more than
Speaker 1: most people, than the average person, more openness and capacity
Speaker 1: to connect to that in the nation that really on
Speaker 1: human being at some point. I'm looking forward because it
Speaker 1: is them and they've lost contact with it, so of
Speaker 1: course they're going to be look for it, and they
Speaker 1: tend to look for it outside and to think that
Speaker 1: will make them happy whatever. But what will make them
Speaker 1: happy is really the happiness that is their heart, and
Speaker 1: that the movement inward that at some point happens for
Speaker 1: many people excellence. So let's talk about what is the
Speaker 1: theory of holes? Yes, so a thief whole I developed
Speaker 1: at the beginning of my work as a new contribution
Speaker 1: to spiritual understanding and spiritual practice, which is that as
Speaker 1: a person developed from childhood and they are first open
Speaker 1: to that is such a nature and the SUCHI A
Speaker 1: nature has many qualities as said, love, passion, strength through will, peacefulness, gratitude, stillness,
Speaker 1: all of these qualities that are part of such a nature.
Speaker 1: Is not one monolithic, uniform medium. It is a medium,
Speaker 1: but it can manifest itself as a different qualities. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the child is innocent, Sometimes the child is a search
Speaker 1: of or strong. Sometimes the child is quiet, and serene.
Speaker 1: All these are qualities that we originally have. That's part
Speaker 1: for all essential nature. I call them essential aspects, aspects
Speaker 1: of essence. So depending on what happened, we lose contact
Speaker 1: with each one of them in a different way than
Speaker 1: we do that depending in our situation, a certain interactions,
Speaker 1: certain events that happened in our ear a few years
Speaker 1: will disconnect us from one partical quality. As we become
Speaker 1: disconnected on our partic quality, we develop something instead of it,
Speaker 1: which is part of our personality. As we go through
Speaker 1: that part of our personality and sort of deconstructed and
Speaker 1: see through it, we will encounter the emptiness, which is
Speaker 1: the disconnection of the quality, and that emptness will feel
Speaker 1: like a whole in our consciousness and whole in our soul,
Speaker 1: like something is missing. So that where the theory of
Speaker 1: whole comes. That we all have many holes when we
Speaker 1: begin our spiritual search, but we're not aware of the whole.
Speaker 1: We're just not in touch with many of these qualities.
Speaker 1: So as we study and explore the construct our personality
Speaker 1: part by part, because I don't do it all at once,
Speaker 1: which many teaching do, you just get rid of yourselves
Speaker 1: and that way you become awakened. Well, that's when way
Speaker 1: of doing it it works. But the one way I found,
Speaker 1: and this teaching which has very handy, very useful for
Speaker 1: many people, You could deal with one segment of your
Speaker 1: personality lack your self esteem, difficult self esteem, or feeling
Speaker 1: of losing your sense of well or any of those
Speaker 1: things by working with them, understanding them and seeing what
Speaker 1: is their history without the beliefs around them. That opens
Speaker 1: up to some kind of emptness which we go through
Speaker 1: we will begin to reconnect with that quality that we
Speaker 1: have lost at some point. Usually we see a history,
Speaker 1: in particular history that we've come through personal power. Person
Speaker 1: has seen. It's either encounter our parents, accident, illnesses, diseases.
Speaker 1: I think that happened in school, many things. But you
Speaker 1: know there's a lot of fears or a lot of
Speaker 1: pain that allies is a reaction, believes and all that.
Speaker 1: It's a constellation around each of the qualities which when
Speaker 1: we made transparent it opens up to some kind of
Speaker 1: emptiness that that called the whole, but that would become
Speaker 1: the entry, the portal to that partic quality of our
Speaker 1: essential nature. Then we begin to experience it like if
Speaker 1: we disconnected from course of for our love, we feel unloved, unlovable,
Speaker 1: and we deal with the sense of being unlovable or
Speaker 1: experience it and not fight it, and not to try
Speaker 1: to prove to ourselves we are lovable or our love.
Speaker 1: Were just feel the feeling of being unlovable, and you
Speaker 1: believe that that in our heart there is an emptiness
Speaker 1: as a whole, and I feel unlovable. There's no love there.
Speaker 1: And when you feel that, we might feel what does
Speaker 1: it happen? My father didn't love me, or I just
Speaker 1: believe there was out love because some they love somebody
Speaker 1: else more than me. There is a herod to the
Speaker 1: wom that our eyes that's open to an empty Then
Speaker 1: the love of all eyes is that the heart becomes
Speaker 1: full of love like sweetness and love and goodness, sense
Speaker 1: of feeling both loving others and loving oneself and also
Speaker 1: feeling that love is part of me, part of my heart,
Speaker 1: part of my essential nation. So what we're saying here
Speaker 1: is that as essence disappears, then it leaves a hole,
Speaker 1: and most of us see that whole as a deficiency
Speaker 1: of some sort. But by looking deeper in that way
Speaker 1: is a path back to essence. Exactly the deficiency is
Speaker 1: actually the path to us because it is the disconnection.
Speaker 1: On essence, it's confronting the disconnection. Let me dig into
Speaker 1: this just a little bit deeper then, because for a
Speaker 1: lot of people there is a sense of Okay, I'm
Speaker 1: feeling an emotion. It's pretty popular in spiritual circles these
Speaker 1: days to say, feel the emotion. Don't go up into
Speaker 1: all your stories, but stop and feel the emotion. But
Speaker 1: for a lot of people, they don't really know how
Speaker 1: to do that. So this is I think would fall
Speaker 1: under a pretty big category in the Diamond approach, which
Speaker 1: was inquiry. But what are some ways to inquire into
Speaker 1: emotional states that are actually useful? Well, first of all,
Speaker 1: that's true, many people might not even be able to
Speaker 1: feel their emotions. First, we need to be able to
Speaker 1: have access to our We all have emotions. Whether we
Speaker 1: can access them or not is another story. So the
Speaker 1: beginning of the path is learning to access our emotion
Speaker 1: by seeing what's in the way of them, the beliefs
Speaker 1: or fears or whatever it is. And we use breathing
Speaker 1: techniques and as you said, inquiry, which is you inquired
Speaker 1: into your state, whatever you're experiencing right now. What is
Speaker 1: it what I my experiencing. I might feel well, um,
Speaker 1: I don't feel anything. And what's that like to not
Speaker 1: feel anything? If somebody has just let themselves feel I
Speaker 1: don't feel anything. There is some kind of hardness in
Speaker 1: their hearts or some kind of gauzy kind of thing,
Speaker 1: and if they feel it, let it happen. Priven to it,
Speaker 1: it will disappear. And then emotional arizes as fear or
Speaker 1: sadness or jealousy or any of those things. And then
Speaker 1: the point is not just to feel. Over then we
Speaker 1: need to ful feel our emotions. But our emotion is
Speaker 1: just part of our experience. There is emotion, the or sensation,
Speaker 1: their thoughts and images, their memories are connected with them.
Speaker 1: So when I say in our path to inquire, I
Speaker 1: need to inquire into what is happening right now, A
Speaker 1: bush is a very important part of it. But that
Speaker 1: does not mean I should forget about what I'm thinking.
Speaker 1: Does not mean I should forget about what does get
Speaker 1: associated to the emotion. All of it is the data
Speaker 1: that the inquiry uses includy basically means I have all
Speaker 1: these all these parts of my experience. What are they
Speaker 1: all about? What is the meaning of all of them together,
Speaker 1: and by asking the question what are all they about?
Speaker 1: They be? They begin to change and transform and become
Speaker 1: more focused until it becomes clear what is the meaning
Speaker 1: of what's going on? That then opens up to another
Speaker 1: level of emotion or another level of experience. And I
Speaker 1: inquired into that, and equity keeps happening. Even if I
Speaker 1: get into my essential nature and I feel love or
Speaker 1: I feel a sense of presence or strength, question continue,
Speaker 1: what is that? What that feel like? What does a
Speaker 1: sense like? Doesn't have a textion? Does a smell like?
Speaker 1: Something doesn't make me feel one way or another? Inquiry
Speaker 1: opens the doors of consciousness to create and create a
Speaker 1: discovery of what and who we are and what we
Speaker 1: can be. Now For a lot of people, myself included
Speaker 1: certainly at points, right, inquiry stays in the realm of
Speaker 1: mental it's just thoughts. What you're saying is to inquire
Speaker 1: into the totality of our experience its thoughts, emotions, sensations, sounds, smells,
Speaker 1: the whole, the whole kitten caboodle. Right, And so I
Speaker 1: know that the diamond approach is not based on tips, right,
Speaker 1: So I'm not expecting you to summarize huge amounts of
Speaker 1: work that you've done in in one little sentence, but
Speaker 1: any general ideas for principles that can ground us in inquiry. No,
Speaker 1: it's a good question. When I say inquiry, I don't
Speaker 1: mean mental cuority. I mean inquarities to the totality if
Speaker 1: our experience, not only that totality of my experience at
Speaker 1: the present moment. So we stopped with the question of
Speaker 1: where am I now in the experiential universe. Suppose there's
Speaker 1: gonna check with myself or somebody check with themselves and
Speaker 1: experienced some anxiety, and then the question is what's the
Speaker 1: anxiety about? There might be thoughts with it, but what's
Speaker 1: the anxiety about? My presson my No, No, what's anxiety about?
Speaker 1: There's something you feel, of course in your psyche, in
Speaker 1: your heart, and if you're asking in my d real,
Speaker 1: Oh I have a date for the first time, or
Speaker 1: this person I am anxious about meeting. I wonder why
Speaker 1: am I anxious about that? You see you ask about
Speaker 1: what is alliesing, and then you find out, well, the
Speaker 1: answer allieses is because I'm afraid I won't know how
Speaker 1: to be myself, how to be real? Well, you ask yourself,
Speaker 1: what's the big deal about that, and then the answer
Speaker 1: all your heart, I like this person, I want to
Speaker 1: be real through with them. That becomes what I mean
Speaker 1: by meaning, the meaning if you experience, you realize you're
Speaker 1: anxious because you really you want to be truly yourself
Speaker 1: with this person you're going to meet who you really
Speaker 1: like very much. So you start with anxiety, but you
Speaker 1: end up with feeling of liking and love and some
Speaker 1: kind of society, as it says, all staying with the now.
Speaker 1: And so in what ways does this differ from or
Speaker 1: in what ways is it similar to a lot of
Speaker 1: what somebody might be doing in psychology. I've heard you
Speaker 1: sort of say that the advent of psychology and everything
Speaker 1: we know about psychology is a great boom for spiritual seeking,
Speaker 1: but that oftentimes people separate the two, and the diamond
Speaker 1: approach tries to integrate the two. Very true, there are
Speaker 1: similarity of psychology in the sense we use some psychological
Speaker 1: understanding and knowledge that developed in the twentieth century essentially
Speaker 1: at the same time, as different from psychology in the
Speaker 1: sense it's not a therapy because I begin here luck
Speaker 1: with anxiety, and I'm not encoding into anxiety because I
Speaker 1: want to get rid of it, which is what therapy
Speaker 1: wants to do. I want to get rid of get
Speaker 1: all of an anxiety. I want to unders and it.
Speaker 1: I don't know what's the anxiety about, so I really
Speaker 1: want to know it's truth. So the motivation is a
Speaker 1: little different than therapy. And the result that allises is
Speaker 1: a feeling not just a feeling of love, but the
Speaker 1: feeling of presence of love, which is a spiritual quality,
Speaker 1: which usually therapy doesn't get to. So both the orientation
Speaker 1: and what we get to is different from what psycho therapy.
Speaker 1: Psychology does. Lost the psychology does not include think like
Speaker 1: our essential nature or essence, right, and so is just
Speaker 1: by having a different orientation is that enough to make
Speaker 1: what happens and how it comes out different? In big
Speaker 1: part of the orientations. The other part is the view
Speaker 1: of reality m hm. The view that includes our our
Speaker 1: essence such a nature. Psychology doesn't. It's view doesn't have that.
Speaker 1: You see the view, I mean the perspective you take
Speaker 1: about yourself. And of course when you're working spiritual worker,
Speaker 1: frequently you have a teacher, and the teacher already have
Speaker 1: that view, already has not only the view but the fruit,
Speaker 1: the fruit of the fruit of the view, which is
Speaker 1: such a nature itself. So their intention the teachers already
Speaker 1: is the person is coming from the presence of goodness
Speaker 1: or love or whatever, and so it's a inquiry, is
Speaker 1: a guidance. But the orientation part of it, the views
Speaker 1: part of it, And it's difficult to really know how
Speaker 1: it's different until you actually do it. And you see
Speaker 1: in therapy, for when you get to the emptiness, they
Speaker 1: think it's a bad thing. You want to get away
Speaker 1: from it. For us. For me, when I get to
Speaker 1: the emptiness, I welcome down. I'm getting someplace, you se,
Speaker 1: I'm getting to the entry door. It's not a problem.
Speaker 1: It is actually the beginning of the solution. Now psychology
Speaker 1: doesn't have that perspective at all. Right, it's a very
Speaker 1: different orientation. And so is doing inquiry something that we're
Speaker 1: really capable of doing by ourselves or is it really
Speaker 1: take someone to help us inquire and guide the inquiry.
Speaker 1: I think some people can do it by themselves to
Speaker 1: some degree. Having somebody skilled in it who really done
Speaker 1: it for some time helps a great deal. And some
Speaker 1: people can do it. I don't know how whether everybody
Speaker 1: can do it some people can do it. I've written books.
Speaker 1: Purpose of the book is that's what people can learn
Speaker 1: how to do it. We have online courses actually about
Speaker 1: inquiry now that some people can take and because we
Speaker 1: believe people can learn to do it. Just like mindfulness
Speaker 1: or something people can do, you can learn to do.
Speaker 1: Inquiry is similar so mindful, it's start with mindfulness and
Speaker 1: goes a little further by its more dynamic, more engaged,
Speaker 1: and mindfulness because it engages, the experience is still just
Speaker 1: being aware of it. Got it. And so if people
Speaker 1: are inquiring, the idea is to keep coming back to
Speaker 1: what the direct experience is and the direct response that
Speaker 1: you're getting from your inquiry. That's very central for the
Speaker 1: inquiry is the direct immediate experience because really, if we
Speaker 1: stay with the direct immediate experience, in time, we will
Speaker 1: get in touch with the source of immediacy itself, which
Speaker 1: is our essential nature. I've done a few different types
Speaker 1: of inquiry, but I once did a little bit of
Speaker 1: work with somebody who had been trained in the diamond approach,
Speaker 1: and what I noticed was, I think sort of what
Speaker 1: you've described, which is when they asked me what's going on,
Speaker 1: I had a lot of like, I'm not really sure
Speaker 1: because I'm not used to paying attention in this way.
Speaker 1: Very true. So we teach first people how to pay attention.
Speaker 1: We have meditation practices. Some of them are awareness of
Speaker 1: what's happening, some of them have concentration on some parts
Speaker 1: of it. The person needs these initial skills to be
Speaker 1: able to engage inquiry. Just like meditation, you need special skills.
Speaker 1: So these skills are are given at the beginning of
Speaker 1: our teaching, the beginning of the path. Because some people
Speaker 1: have them to some degree, many people don't have them.
Speaker 1: How to feel oneself, how to stay able to feeling oneselves,
Speaker 1: set of rationalizing or running away from it, and then
Speaker 1: staying with it in a way that we can inspect it,
Speaker 1: we can ask questions about it, level to it. That's
Speaker 1: another capacity that people need to develop. So you're right
Speaker 1: about all these things. It's a skill. And that's why
Speaker 1: inquiry is not your learner that you don't learn it.
Speaker 1: It's more you learn a little piloting and you get
Speaker 1: better and better at it, and the better you get
Speaker 1: at it, the easier it is. And the fact that
Speaker 1: goes the deeper you go. In a short period of time, excellent.
Speaker 1: You have said once that this is not about changing yourself.
Speaker 1: The quote is you do whatever you do in your
Speaker 1: life and then study what's happening. That's all you need
Speaker 1: to do, study your life to understand it. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: I try to change myself, it means trying to change myself.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not letting myself experience what I'm experiencing
Speaker 1: right now, So how can I inquire into it if
Speaker 1: I am trying to change it. If I wanted to
Speaker 1: change I'm already interfering. So one thing to change experience
Speaker 1: is the interference of the experience or rejection of the experience,
Speaker 1: which mean experience is not that just by itself and
Speaker 1: has to be thereby as it is for me to
Speaker 1: find out what what it is, what its meaning. The
Speaker 1: motivation though, to often do inquiry or spiritual work, is
Speaker 1: because the experiences we're having are generally not pleasant or
Speaker 1: they're not what we want them to be. So there's uh,
Speaker 1: this is always that paradox we talked about with spiritual work,
Speaker 1: which is, on one hand, I need to leave it alone.
Speaker 1: I need to leave experience alone enough to truly observe
Speaker 1: it and let it be. And yet the beginning, motivation
Speaker 1: tends to come from because I don't like what experience
Speaker 1: is giving me. Yes, for most people, that's how they stopped.
Speaker 1: So it takes time for somebody to learn the pure motivation,
Speaker 1: which is to love truth. I call loving truth for
Speaker 1: own sake not very unfined skill. Human being kind of
Speaker 1: elop at the beginning. Yes, we have motivation, we have
Speaker 1: the goals and aims. We don't like this, we want
Speaker 1: to change that. So the way we deal with that
Speaker 1: is we include that, and the include that's part of
Speaker 1: what's there. If I feel anxious, but I also feel
Speaker 1: I don't want to be anxious, I'm aware also I
Speaker 1: don't want to be anxious. That's part of what I
Speaker 1: inquire into. Why do I not want to be anxious?
Speaker 1: You see what I mean? So I inquire into the
Speaker 1: desire to change it. I enquire into the desire to
Speaker 1: make it different so I don't like it. That's frequently
Speaker 1: the beginning of what I enquire into. We include the
Speaker 1: reaction or the attitude, and then Corey, we just keep
Speaker 1: circling back to what am I experiencing? What am I
Speaker 1: experiencing exactly? Because if I want to change it, that's
Speaker 1: part of what I'm experiencing, right, everything is included. Oftentimes
Speaker 1: when we're described mean this sort of thing to people
Speaker 1: will say something and I do it, something along the
Speaker 1: lines of allow everything to be exactly the way it is,
Speaker 1: which is a wonderful teaching except when you can't do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you see a loud thing to be what it
Speaker 1: is is the highest teaching there is, meaning most teaching,
Speaker 1: their highest state is to let themselves be just be
Speaker 1: themselves without any attempt to change. However, that's not an
Speaker 1: easy place to be, and it's the final final result. However,
Speaker 1: we use it in our practice as a beginning. We
Speaker 1: don't have it completely, but we we are oriented that way.
Speaker 1: We know that trying to change something is not going
Speaker 1: to work for us, that we were standing in our
Speaker 1: own way, so little by little we developed the attitude
Speaker 1: of just the love to know, the love of discovery,
Speaker 1: which we all have. Yes, if you were to sort
Speaker 1: of sum up what you keep saying about inquiry, one
Speaker 1: way of saying it would be become consistently curious about
Speaker 1: what's happening, consistently curious, loving to find out what does
Speaker 1: it's going on with me? And what turns out. What
Speaker 1: am I? What does the meaning of my experience? Was it?
Speaker 1: The meaning of my existence? All will come if I
Speaker 1: keep staying with my experience. One of the things that
Speaker 1: pulls us out of curiosity most often is pain, and
Speaker 1: so on one hand, the antidote for pain is to
Speaker 1: be curious. But what are other qualities that can help
Speaker 1: us stay with the curiosity. Obviously, different levels of pain
Speaker 1: are different. There are people who have severe trauma. That
Speaker 1: level of pain to remain with is a different animal.
Speaker 1: And I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking more about,
Speaker 1: you know, the run of the mill types of pain
Speaker 1: that that a lot of us experience, emotional pain that
Speaker 1: we want to turn away from. So curiosity is is
Speaker 1: one sort of key orientation. Are there others? Oh? Yeah, many.
Speaker 1: Curiosity is one of them. The other one is courage,
Speaker 1: kind of boldness, because to stay with pain it acquire
Speaker 1: strength and boldness and adventtion of spirit. That is another
Speaker 1: spiritual quality. Because curiosity is really expression of one aspect
Speaker 1: of assets. Boldness or carriage is an expression of another
Speaker 1: aspect of essence. And the steadfastness, which meaning you stay
Speaker 1: with it, you have bold to go into it, but
Speaker 1: your steadfast you keep staying with it, you don't get distracted,
Speaker 1: you don't go away from it. And there's the love,
Speaker 1: the love to know, to know the truth, the love
Speaker 1: to know reality, which becomes the love to know God
Speaker 1: or whatever could develop. So these are some of the qualities.
Speaker 1: So there are others that these are the some of
Speaker 1: the basic ones. Another one is kindness, kindness stared oneself.
Speaker 1: It's not a matter of pushing oneself. It's not what matter.
Speaker 1: Being hard in oneself does a matter of being gentle oneself.
Speaker 1: There's approaching our experience with gentleness because we're already having
Speaker 1: a hard time. So we don't want to push. We
Speaker 1: don't want to do it from a hard place. If
Speaker 1: we do it from perspective, I want to change just
Speaker 1: a hard place rejecting it. So part of the letting
Speaker 1: it be is a kindness, is a loving kindness that
Speaker 1: is there with the pain, and the pain requires really
Speaker 1: kindness more than anything else. And the more kindness we
Speaker 1: feel ourselves, the more we were able to stay with
Speaker 1: the difficulty with the pain. In fact, the main thing
Speaker 1: that helps us stay with the pain is kindness and
Speaker 1: the love and kindness that all human beings have. But
Speaker 1: they might not have complete access to it, but we
Speaker 1: can access as more and more as we see what's
Speaker 1: in this way. Yes, I have found all those qualities
Speaker 1: to be imminently useful and critical. And then you know,
Speaker 1: all of it turns into realizing that all those are
Speaker 1: qualities that I only possess some of the time. You know.
Speaker 1: That's where I think that kindness sort of comes in
Speaker 1: most importantly, is to go, well, you know what, I
Speaker 1: gave it my best effort there. I'll come back and
Speaker 1: give it my best effort again and again and again,
Speaker 1: because I think perfectionism is is a great enemy. Perfectionism
Speaker 1: is being hard in oneself, you know, because you can't
Speaker 1: be perfect, and to accept our limitations and to be
Speaker 1: with them, be gentle with them. And another quality also,
Speaker 1: I want to mention the clarity and precision, meaning I
Speaker 1: don't just want to know what I'm experiencing. I want
Speaker 1: to know it exactly as it is. So it's not like,
Speaker 1: well I sort of feel a little bit disturbed. You
Speaker 1: might find that little disturbed mean I'm really piste off.
Speaker 1: That is more precise, you see what I mean. So
Speaker 1: precision meaning you really want to know, be exact about
Speaker 1: what you are experiencing. The exactness is important. Is some
Speaker 1: of that just a broader emotional vocabulary? What are some
Speaker 1: things that guide us in exactness or precision? Precision, clarity, specificity,
Speaker 1: particular nous, All these help us recognize what is it
Speaker 1: really happening? Like sometimes people cannot tell the difference between
Speaker 1: sadness and kindness, you see, because there's very close. The
Speaker 1: boss had a warmth to their materials to them, but
Speaker 1: they're really slightly different. The sadness is an emotional happening
Speaker 1: in the heart, while the kindness is a subtle warm
Speaker 1: atmosphere that is gentle, and it's not exactly sadness. It
Speaker 1: has more of a healing energy to it, and you
Speaker 1: could differentiate separate the two if you stay with them.
Speaker 1: It's that you want to be more precise about what's happening.
Speaker 1: That's a really good example as someone who often feels
Speaker 1: great emotion which can manifest his tears, but realizing it
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with sad exactly. That's a great
Speaker 1: example of an emotional precision. Yes, and that's very important
Speaker 1: for our inquiry. More precise we are, the more effective
Speaker 1: the inquiry excellent. Well, any other ideas on how to
Speaker 1: strengthen our power of inquiry that are easy to describe
Speaker 1: well than many of them. All the qualities of our
Speaker 1: essential nature are actually needed. The more of them are
Speaker 1: they're more effective our inquiry. If we have a couple
Speaker 1: of them, we're doing pretty good. But the more of
Speaker 1: them we have, the more effective and powerful inquiry, which
Speaker 1: means the bigger is the openness and the expansion and
Speaker 1: the deeper we go. Another quality is what I call
Speaker 1: intelligence or brilliance, And what intelligence means is the capacity
Speaker 1: to synthesize. You hold everything together in a way where
Speaker 1: you could see their interconnectedness. So synthesis is a capacity
Speaker 1: some people have and but we can develop. So it's
Speaker 1: not a matter of just it's just this, and it's
Speaker 1: not that when you see all the pieces, what is
Speaker 1: it that bring them together, because we're putting them together,
Speaker 1: is what will reveal the meaning of them all. That's
Speaker 1: another equality and aspects and beating, which has to do
Speaker 1: with radiance or brilliance of our essence. The radiance shines
Speaker 1: through from underneath through all the parts, revealing their and
Speaker 1: the long unity, but connects them. That would be the
Speaker 1: insight to them. Excellent, well, I mean, I think this
Speaker 1: is a great place for us to wrap up. But
Speaker 1: thanks so much for spending some time with us going
Speaker 1: deeper into how inquiry works and how we can make
Speaker 1: it useful in our own lives. Appreciate the opportunity to
Speaker 1: talk about inquiry and the fact that I haven't talked
Speaker 1: about inquiry. We have online course now about inquiry, an
Speaker 1: audio course inquiry too, and we'll have links in the
Speaker 1: show notes to all of your different pieces and things
Speaker 1: that people can learn from you. I know you did
Speaker 1: a couple of courses, which sounds true also, so there
Speaker 1: is there is a lot of material out there and
Speaker 1: we'll have some links to it. And one thing I
Speaker 1: wanted people to know it's important that's coming up is
Speaker 1: an online course. So we're calling Spirituality in a Fractioned World,
Speaker 1: which you will begin next year, and it is really irrelevant.
Speaker 1: It's is inquiry into our experience. But in the world
Speaker 1: we are in, which is a difficult world these days,
Speaker 1: with religion and polarization and politics and all of that,
Speaker 1: many people are scared or angry whatever. We are doing
Speaker 1: a course of how to deal with these things using
Speaker 1: the inquiry we're talking about. That's great that's a great
Speaker 1: course idea which I think will be very useful because
Speaker 1: many people don't know what to do all these things
Speaker 1: that's happening with them. Yes, so how to use spiritual
Speaker 1: qualities and practices to deal with these things, and how
Speaker 1: to also act with other people from this place so
Speaker 1: there can be more harmony, more understanding. Where we can
Speaker 1: certainly use more harmony and understanding, there's no doubt about that,
Speaker 1: especially these days, you know, Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. I mean, it's been a real
Speaker 1: pleasure talking with you again. Plas just talking to you. Eric.
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