Diamond Heart: Being and the Meaning of Life

by A.H. Almaas

Why am I here? Where am I going?

When you answer them with your mind and you think you know, the question is gone. When you believe you have answered such questions, the flame is gone and there is no more inquiry.

A life with no fundamental questioning is a life lived according to formulas, according to what one has heard from others.

If you look at every moment of your life, such as this moment, you will see that most of the time you believe that you know what is the best thing for you at that moment.

Whatever the source, conditioned knowledge is useless in answering the fundamental questions, such as the question of why we are here.

The conditioning is simply a mechanism for survival.

You don’t really know whether any of these ideas are relevant or true for you. You can’t know with certainty until you have experimented and learned from your own experience.

We comfort ourselves by believing that others know, and that we can use their knowledge.

You need to keep the question alive while you investigate for yourself. Our questions about why we are here and where we are going are uncomfortable, but they are real questions for every human being. If you do not ask them, and allow them to be ongoing questions, you will never know for yourself what it’s all about. You will never know who you are, why you’re here, and where you are going.

begin with the awareness that you don’t know the answers.

Can you let yourself have that question intensely—can you let that flame burn in you without needing to put it out with an answer?

It is a motiveless search, a search that does not depend on any ideas about going somewhere. There is no goal in sight, so it becomes a flame that continues to burn and deepen with time.

Can you exist as an inquiry, an inquiry into the truth?

Can you remain completely ignorant, unknowing; can you let your mind go, not impose anything on your mind, and at the same time not go dead, not become unconscious?

Is it possible to let your mind be free?

You need to let your being be ablaze like a flame, an aspiring flame, with no preconceived ideas about what it aspires to. To be just burning intensely, deeply wanting to know, wanting to see the truth without following any preconceptions, totally in the present with the question itself, and let it burn away all the ideas, all the beliefs, all the concepts, even the ones you learned from the great teachings.

it is a completely personal quest. It is your situation, your life, your mind; no one else can answer these questions for you.

Without the flame, any work is done simply according to ideas and beliefs.

true questioning, sincere questioning doesn’t have a particular goal.

It’s true that there’s a question and that you don’t know the answer—that is the truth. The most honest answer you can give to the question “Why am I here?” is that I am here because I don’t know.

the fact that it is an idea, instead of a direct perception, puts out the flame of the search, and your unfoldment is blocked. Whenever the answer is not a direct perception it will block or distort your experience.

The fire of inquiry needs to be fed, needs to grow, to intensify, to deepen. Our inquiry needs to be directed not at trying to reduce it, but to letting it grow.

The fire of that inquiry can burn away all the dross, all the resistance, all the ideas, all the accumulation of the past so you can actually see what is really there, the whole picture in the present moment without needing to depend on anything from the past or on anyone else’s experience. When you know in the moment without any influence, then you can completely be alone with your own truth.

This Work is to encourage your own inner development, whatever that may be, to help you remain alone with your inquiry.

We are not usually supported or encouraged to let our being just be, to be authentic, and not an imitation or a reaction.

You need to be completely open, and not use what you hear to comfort yourself. You need to use it to add fuel to your inquiry.

Are you aware of being present here, and of your actual experience in this moment? Or are you lost in thoughts, fantasies, plans, emotional reactions? Are you here, or are you busy liking and disliking? Are you here, or are you busy judging yourself and everything else?

“Are you completely filling your body?”

For your direct experience, only the here and now is relevant. Only now is real.

Regardless of the ideas about past and future that dominate your experience, right at this moment only this moment exists, and only this moment has any significance for you.

Are you giving yourself the simple privilege of being, of existence?

If you are not in your body, you miss the source of all significance, meaning, and satisfaction.

We are the pleasure, we are the joy, we are the most profound significance and the highest value. When we understand this, we see that it’s ridiculous to think that we will get pleasure and joy through these external things—by doing this or that, or receiving approval or love from this or that person.

Happiness, value, and pleasure are not the result of anything. These qualities are part of our fundamental nature. If we simply allow ourselves to be, this is our natural experience.

You abandon yourself, then start looking for satisfaction. You feel that something’s missing, so you are always searching, becoming more and more frantic as all the things you acquire or accomplish don’t fill you.

If you just let yourself be there, there is nowhere to go, nothing to look for, because it’s all there.

The only thing we need do is to let ourselves be.

If you simply feel yourself at this moment, even if you don’t feel your being in a full, satisfying way, you will naturally become aware of what is blocking your being.

Your beingness is what senses, what looks, what feels.

We are a beingness, an existence, a presence that impregnates the present and fills our body.

But the significance of any experience is our mere presence, nothing else.

What stops you from being, from being present, is nothing but your hope for the future. Hoping for something to be different keeps you looking for some future fantasy. But it is a mirage; you’ll never get there. The mirage stops you from seeing the obvious, the preciousness of Being. It is a great distortion, a great misunderstanding of what will fulfill you. When you follow the mirage you are rejecting yourself.

When the illusions dissolve, what is real, your nature, will surface and remain. You go through a process of purification, not because Being itself is sullied, but because you have so many accumulated assumptions and beliefs about reality.

Our work here is not to get somewhere or to accomplish something, but to allow our being to emerge.

You are important because without your actual presence, there is no significance in life, no value in life.

“Who are you?”

we are not assuming that there is an answer, or that there is one answer, or that there is no answer. We are not assuming that if there is an answer, it can be said in words. We want to be open to all the possibilities.

We are not assuming that a self can be found, or that if it can be found, that it can be described. We want to investigate who you are—if there really is such a thing; and if there is, what it is, and if it can be known.

One thing that can help our investigation is to connect the feeling of “I,” the feeling of self, to what is called “identity” or “identification.”

we want to investigate what or who you are taking yourself to be at each moment and question it.