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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.

All kinds of issues might arise as we realize that even though we need to continually practice, we cannot do anything and all of reality is the self-illumination of true nature. We might feel that we are useless or helpless, that we don’t have the power or the capacity to do anything. And for a while, we might think this is a bad thing. But it is actually true illumination: The usual self that we ordinarily tend to take ourselves to be can’t do anything. And as we experience how helpless and incapable we are, true nature is waking up—its light is getting more intense and more brilliant.

At this point the soul may reach depths of despair about ever being released from the trap of isolation; whatever inner efforts she makes only dig her deeper into this dilemma. Eventually she begins to see the futility of doing anything to free herself, even the spiritual practices of meditation, prayer, concentration, contemplation, inquiry, attention, and so on. Whatever she does is her own individual action, exercising her own will and intention, and it is becoming clear that this is an expression of the dilemma itself. It is all based on her own individual desire.

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