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"What is the true nature of reality? And what is reality without the people or the individual consciousness that knows it?"

-Hameed Ali, Ridhwan founder

"It is a living, palpable presence, a process of bursting forth from within. This presence comes from inside, runs in our veins, and pushes things out for us to see."

-Karen Johnson, Ridhwan co-founder

"We come to the Diamond Approach to wake up to more of who we are. This necessarily means waking up to difficult places as well as beautiful places. The Diamond Approach uses those difficult places as doorways to deeper waking up and understanding."

-John Davis, Diamond Approach teacher

"We are here to inspire people to take the risk to go within, to face the sorrow, the demons, to trust the transformation. We don’t have to leave this earth, or live in a cave."

-Jessica Britt, Diamond Approach teacher

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The Teaching

The Diamond Approach offers an immense and precise body of knowledge about the nature of reality and the process of spiritual realization. Rather than positing an end goal or condition, it points to an open-ended, continuous process of discovery. Even nondual realization is recognized as a step toward greater mysteries and forms of freedom. This leads to deepening realization of the fullness of being human—a being who experientially embraces and expresses the totality of the cosmos in all its physical and spiritual dimensions. Our potential is to be free: to be anything, everything, or nothing at all, as we live the simplicity of ordinary life.

Spiritual reality is seen to have many qualities important for us as human beings. These essential aspects of our nature include love, compassion, will, peace, strength, joy, and clarity. Each aspect has a unique flavor and particular function for the human soul and the realization of its ground. This ground includes boundless love, universal consciousness, transparent awareness, profound emptiness, nonlocal truth—unities of many kinds.

With penetrating clarity the teaching articulates how these natural qualities have become obscured and how they can open and emerge into our lives. Recognizing and integrating our inner qualities is understood as an organic maturation toward fruition of our humanity and awakening of the transcendent—a process of both liberation and endless discovery and development.

One of the wonderful things about inquiry is that you can inquire into anything, even into inquiry itself. You cannot bind yourself when you are inquiring, you cannot get cornered, for any corner can be inquired into. It is the very nature of inquiry that nothing can escape it. You cannot say that inquiry will push you against the wall and trap you, because the moment you get trapped, you can ask, “What’s making me feel trapped? What is this trap?” You can always ask a question. There are an infinite number of questions because the mystery is inexhaustible.

So as we inquire into where we are, experience the truth, and follow the thread of truth, that thread eventually will connect us with the truth of what we are. That is why truth brings more reality. Truth and reality are related; they are two sides of the same thing. The more we see the truth of where we are in the moment, the more we recognize something about the relationship between where we are and what we are. That recognition makes the distance between them shorter, and we feel more real.

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