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Nonlocality

Diamond Approach

Glossary of Spiritual Wisdom

From the teachings of A.H. Almaas

What is Nonlocality?

Diamond Approach Teachings About: Nonlocality

Essence of Being, Seen as Dimensionless Nonlocality

I think this is a very clever and subtle way of understanding the indeterminacy of the essence of our Being. However, the adventure of inquiry is based on a slightly different perspective on the mystery. Some would say that you cannot say anything about the mystery because whatever you say is going to be inaccurate, and therefore it is better not to say anything. The perspective I prefer is that the essence of Being is amenable to descriptions. You can actually say a great deal about it, just as the mystical poets have been doing for thousands of years. You can say it is emptiness, you can say it is mystery, you can say it is stillness, you can say it is peace, you can say it is neither existence nor nonexistence, you can say it is the ultimate beloved, you can say it is the annihilation of all ego, you can say it is the source of all awareness, you can say it is the ground of everything, you can say it is our true identity, you can say it is dimensionless nonlocality, and so on. Each one of these descriptions is saying something about it. Thus the mystery of Being can be seen as having two different implications. I believe the more fruitful one is not that there is nothing you can say about it, but that you can never exhaust what you can say about it. We can describe it and talk about it forever. So instead of calling it indeterminacy, I think a better word is inexhaustibility: The mystery is characterized by the fact that it is inexhaustible. You can never know it totally. 

Nonlocality of Boundless or Formless Dimensions

The Diamond Approach views reality as inherently indefinite, and this indefiniteness lies at the heart of its aliveness and freedom. Even in its indefiniteness, reality reveals that it possesses a distinct purity—what I have termed at different times “true nature,” “essential nature,” or “being”—as the ground of all manifestation, as the irreducible perfection at the very heart of all and everything. I have described this ground as being composed of five coemergent dimensions—not as absolute givens but as a way of viewing and understanding true nature and its relation to the forms that we experience. These are universal love, pure presence, nonconceptual awareness, absolute emptiness, and creative dynamism. I have referred to these dimensions as boundless or formless because of their pervasiveness and omnipresence—sometimes conventionally referred to as the nonlocality of this purity.

Radical Nonlocality where the Meaning of Unity of Existence Becomes Nonspatial Unity

Another example is that of radical nonlocality, where the meaning of unity of existence goes through a profound transformation. It becomes nonspatial unity. This nonspatial sense of unity recognizes that each form of manifestation is at once all the other forms. Each form of reality is totally united with all other forms—not in terms of perceived space, which has the sense of all forms being differently located waves of the same ocean, but absolutely, in the sense that all the waves are actually the same wave, all the points are actually the same point. So the feeling of unity is that I am everything, not because I am a medium that manifests everything, but I am everything in a much closer, more intimate way. We can experience it as: “I am one with you not because we are all parts of the same thing, but because I am you. Your heart and my heart are the same heart, and not figuratively.” The thoroughgoing understanding of emptiness is, as far as I can tell, the same thing as the thoroughgoing understanding of presence. Emptiness reveals itself to have mysteries upon mysteries. The realization of emptiness keeps moving and revealing itself, because the dynamism and the emptiness are not separate. We can experience dynamic emptiness, dynamic nonbeing. The identity of emptiness and dynamism is freedom. This freedom that ceaselessly creates the totality of reality is what I call runaway realization.

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