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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.

In the work of self-realization, the first and most important part of working on the narcissistic constellation involves exposing the shell. This means realizing directly that what we take ourselves to be is not real, that it is an empty shell, a facade constructed from images and identifications. For most students in our work, this happens completely naturally, in the course of self-exploration. It is not necessary for the teacher to introduce or create these perceptions.

Action based on ambitions and ideals disconnects the self from its innate dynamism. The activity is bound to be somewhat unauthentic, for regardless of how near the ideals and ambitions are to the actual condition of the self, they cannot be identical to its condition in the moment because they are based on structures most likely laid down in early childhood. In fact, activity based on ambitions and ideals is a kind of substitute activity, reflecting our inability to contact the real dynamism at the center of the self.

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