"Psyche awakening" Almaas

[Guest guest]

I am also acknowledging Amanda's reference to how the personality might inflate

after realisation, & cause some havoc setting oneself up as a guru or some such

thing. Here is a quote from the Sufi Almaas who has an aproach he calls the

Diamond Approach.

 

"You might have many experiences of Essence - yummy, powerful, sweet experiences

like Merging Love, Value, & Truth.But as long as your identification is

primarily

with personality, these experiences tend only to inflate the personality & you

develop an inflated ego, believing yourself to be a personality that has

Essence.

 

So then you might feel proud that you are someone who knows God, who communes

with God, right? You feel that you are important, that you have accomplished

something. All of this experience happens & you may become full of richness,

power, clarity &

will. But eventually you begin to realize that this sense of 'filling' the

personality

with Essence is a problem.

 

You become to be aware that the problem is you, yourself - your very identity, &

the way you look at all things. The issue is not what you get or don't get. At

this

point in your process, the suffering doesn't come from the content of your

experience or from

any object of your perception. It comes from the operator in you, the one who

perceives,

acts & experiences. That's the problem: you as the doer, the actor, the

observer. You

begin to see that something needs to hapen to 'me'. You begin to see that you

suffer because

of the split, the duality.

 

This understanding becomes accessible only when you have experienced Essence in

a

very deep & integrated way. When you first begin to work on yourself, the

personality

is all you experience & so of course you want to make it better. Then you begin

to perceive

the more real part of you - Essence - perhaps in the form of Value or Truth.

It's not

that it wasn't there before, but you had just never seen it, or at least it had

been hidden for

years & years. So the next stage is that there is a struggle in which the

development of

Essence increasingly exposes the personality.

 

Now you have an opportunity to develop a new understanding of the duality

between Essence & personality. You see that despite your essential experiences,

the

personality continues to act, thus maintaining its identity. This perpetuates

the duality;

this very activity of doing something is the problem. The personality is

operating, working on

itself, becoming realized, achieving this & that, & all this activity is what

creates your suffering. The mere fact that you do, that you hope, that you

desire, is the problem.

 

So you turn towards the issue of identity, & see that your very identity is an

inner activity. The past exists in us as activity, & the content of personality

is an activity, a movement.

Ego activity is the substance of suffering; it is contraction itself .. And ego

activity is always

connected with issues from your past. It is what is called personal karma, or

the wheel of

life or death. It is the movement of your mind, your personality, your choices,

preferences,

judgements, resistances - anything you do actively.

 

The moment you choose to do something or to reject something, you are acting, &

that inner activity is the content of personality that makes the personality

unclear. It muddies the water & separates the personality from the clear

stillness of Essence.

Essence is Being, & Being is complete stillness, with no action. When you act,

the movement of your thoughts or desire separates you from Essence. You're not

Being.

 

But a very interesting thing happens when you become aware of the movement of

your

personality & you don't go along with it. What happens is you realize when you

don't go along with it, there is no one to go along or not go along.

 

There are actually two ways of working on the personality: one of them is seeing

the personality, thus becoming separate from it, which is called

disidentification.

The other involves complete immersion in the personality. In the state of

self-realization, based on disidentification & separation from the ego, the

personality is not matured & integrated with Essence; it is not clarified

completly. The personality has been merely set aside, not worked through &

transformed.

 

In using the second method, we need to understand more thoroughly what is meant

by immersion in the personality. There is a willingness to clearly & completely

experience the personality itself without resistance, without the attempt to

escape from or

'transcend' it. In this process you have to be the personality itself, to

completely embody it. You see, conceive & experience yourself in action as the

personality. You have to

experience for yourself that. 'I am the personality completely, I am that & my

very movement is

suffering.'

 

This must happen completely, not be disidentifying - by looking from above &

witnessing -

but be being it. The experience must be sensual, physical, & intuitive. It is

not a reflection

or thought. This is direct perception beyond the discursive mind. At this point

we see the importance of clarifying your personal issues. It is difficult to see

the ego activity as a whole when you are identified with one part of the

personality which is engaged in unconscious conflicts. In this condition you are

controlled by an unconscious issue that keeps you stuck in ego activity without

realizing it. When the issues are clarified, it is easier to become aware of the

movement itself, of the wheels in motion - not of what is being churned out, but

of the actual churning itself."

 

~Almaas~