The belief in individuality, the belief in separateness, the belief in the ego boundaries is what causes the suffering. As a separate individual, you can't help but be insecure, one individual in contrast to other individuals, always surrounded by forces beyond you. Even though you might have true will, a separate individual is always insecure. As you explore the actual condition of being a separate individual, you will inevitably encounter fear and helplessness. The insecurity, fear, and helplessness of being a little, separate entity in a world of greater forces is the condition of every individual.

We each take some part of our identity from the past and live our life as if we are that object in our memory. We have a powerful, entrenched belief that we are our history. This belief is a much deeper cause of suffering than what actually happened in our childhood. If you just stop believing that you are your history, if you really let go, if you see that’s not you, all that happened in your childhood will be gone. You will be completely new. What happens now might cause you suffering, but what your mother did, what your father did, whatever depression or war you lived through is gone. They exist only in your mind. So we realize that a deeper cause of our suffering is that we hold on to the past, and we hold on to it in a certain way. We use the past to determine what we are. The past generates our concepts, our beliefs about who we are and about what reality is.

The belief that you are contained within the body, bounded by the body, related to the body, part of the body will be wholly challenged. You will come to see that belief as one of the major sources of suffering. At some point in our work we realize that our true nature doesn't have boundaries, that who we are is not bounded by physical partitions. If we continue believing in the solidity of those partitions, then we are trying to compact our true nature to fit into our idea of ourselves. This will bring a lot of tension!

It is possible to see that the reason you’re suffering is that you’re always filling your self with the activities of the positions you take. When this is happening you cannot experience things freshly, directly, purely. You even experience your body as heavy and sluggish. If you allow emptiness, your body can become light, rather than a hindrance or a boundary for your experience. Your body is your orientation in the physical universe but your experience does not have to be limited by its shape or contour. You are basically an openness and a sensitivity which has no point of view, which is not restricted by any boundary of any kind—emotional, essential, physical or mental. When you allow yourself to be that openness and freedom, you will experience yourself as giving, as a flow of love. The point of view of the ego is what stops love and the true abundance that flows like a fountain. The fountain isn’t thinking of giving or not giving. The fountain is just there, flowing. A point of view, which is automatically a restriction, blocks the heart. The heart cannot pump its essential juices. As long as you believe you are a separate person with boundaries, with the attitude of getting things and protecting your self, you will block love. Love destroys boundaries. Love has nothing to do with you or me. Love is just the activity of that creativity in that openness. Love is the outcome of non-restriction, of freedom. When the body and the mind are not restricted by that point of view, the harmony of the body and the mind will be expressed in a lovingness, an abundance. The natural movement of our being is to be in love.

Also, there have always existed a few people with the knowledge that most of this suffering is due to man’s alienation from himself. Most of our dissatisfaction comes not from sickness or material problems, but from not being ourselves. Not much can be done about the suffering caused by sickness or ageing. Some people have seen, however, that the emotional suffering is not inevitable in the same way. It is this alienation which leaves us with a sense of emptiness, of deep suffering. In time, physical difficulties, psychosomatic diseases and the like, result.

The process of inner work has two threads: seeing the negative causes of suffering, and seeing the positive causes of suffering. The negative causes of suffering involve the negative experiences, often from childhood, that created suffering. What I call the positive cause of suffering is the actual blockage of our potential, our essence. The positive cause is the alienation from true reality. After a while the process of understanding involves these two threads working together. You understand personality, and you understand essence. You understand your history and you understand your nature. You understand your mind and you understand your beingness. These two threads are inherently intertwined in our work in the Diamond Approach.

Our work exposes the extent to which we blame our parents for our suffering. When we delve deeply into the matter, we realize that the lack of understanding is more basic than what happened with our parents. What happened in childhood caused the suffering in some sense, but not knowing those causes, forgetting about them, not understanding them is what perpetuates our suffering. Our work is based on the insight that understanding the causes of suffering is the best way to relieve it.

Personality without Essence is suffering. Personality with attachment to Essence is a disaster.

The question of ignorance and delusion is a profound one. Just as it manifests beauty and luminosity and love and goodness, Living Being also manifests ignorance and delusion, which are the bases of suffering, violence, and insensitivity. As we have seen, living our realization requires continual practice. Because of the persistence of our ignorance, practice continues not only before realization, but also after realization. And we have seen how, at some point, practice is not at all separate from realization. Our continual practice illuminates the ignorance and delusion that endure beyond realization.

So to really deal with the issue of suffering, we need to understand reality. We need to go all the way through the process of realization. The process of realization, of understanding the truth, is a process of understanding and relieving oneself from suffering. There is no shortcut; there is only one way. What's causing suffering cannot be surmounted, cannot simply be dropped, cannot be ignored, cannot even be erased by some essential awakening or realization. Suffering is a fundamental factor in our lives that has to be dealt with. We need a lot of study and understanding; we need to go through all the dimensions before we can exit the realm of suffering. Many of us hope we can exit right away, hope we can transcend our problems through spiritual experience. But unless we actually penetrate our beliefs and identifications, our life will always involve suffering.