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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.

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From The Glossary
Explore More Glossary Terms >>
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without qualities, infinite, pure potentiality, stupendous, mind-blowing, amazing, bedazzling

We have discussed how true nature is timeless and spaceless, but this does not say much about the actual experience of timelessness and spacelessness. Such an experience is so miraculous and magnificent that describing it in metaphysical language ends up sounding empty and drab, heavy and dull. We say that true nature is without qualities, but we also say it is infinite. Here, infinity is not the endlessness of time or space, but rather of lack of limitation. It points to the pure potentiality of true nature, from which arises the universe of myriad things.
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what we are regardless of how we experience ourselves

And true nature is also what we are. It is what we are regardless of how we experience ourselves—whether as pure presence or as pure awareness or as pure emptiness or as essential identity or as personal presence. So when I say that we are true nature, I mean that we continue to be the individual we are and that we are also this mysterious philosophers’ stone that can be everything at one time or another.

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