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.
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This unstoppable dynamism is unsettling for many of us because we want to find a place to land. We need to have some place that we think of as reality, as a home base that we can come back to. In the dual perspective of the first turning, even though we experience true nature, we tend to settle in the ego identity. The home base in the second turning of the wheel is the boundlessness of true nature, the nondual condi- tion. The fourth turning of the wheel offers no refuge. There is no fixed home base. The freedom of the fourth turning comes with absolute insecurity.
In the Diamond Approach, the central practice of inquiry embodies this open-ended view of reality. From the beginning of doing this work, we find where we are, recognize where we are, and understand where we are. This wholehearted exploration of “where I am” includes exploring the “where,” the “I,” and the “am.” All of them are up for grabs. Proceeding with this kind of open-endedness respects how reality is presenting itself through you, to you, and as you in the moment, and, at the same time, it embraces the particularity of what is happening in your location.