Indestructible Innocence (Diamond Heart, Book 4)

by A.H. Almaas

If the personality is abandoned rather than integrated, the totality of life cannot be lived.

Rather than simply transcending the personality or physical existence, this state involves actually embodying essential existence in one’s life.

In embodiment, the personality itself becomes permeable, and thus it is influenced by the essential realization. True essential personal life becomes possible only when essential realization permeates the personality so that you are living according to your realization.

Human life is not complete until the realization can be integrated into every aspect of you, so that all elements of you are in harmony and have an understanding of the situation.

Embodiment becomes possible as the personality is clarified. The idea of clarifying the personality can be confusing because we often experience the personality as the source of our trouble.

As long as one side is dominating the other, there cannot be peace. In order to resolve this conflict, we need to understand the actual nature of the personality.

Essence is a substantial presence, but we are surprised when we realize that it is not only Essence that is substantial; the personality itself is a substantial existence. You can observe that even your personality itself is a material. It has an inner substance.

personality is not just a collection of thoughts; it exists as its own kind of material or medium.

As long as there is conceptualization, your personality exists just like anything else, just as Essence exists.

the personality manifests at the beginning as a kind of resistance, a leadenness, a cloudiness in the mind. When the personality is unclear, the personality exists as an unclarified, impure substance.

What are the impurities of the personality? What will be clarified from the personality? The answer is simple: the past. The thickness, the dullness, the suffering that you experience as the personality are there because the personality does not exist in its pure form. It carries the past with it, and the past exists as conflicts, memories, undischarged feelings, misunderstandings, ignorance, and all the reactions, associations, and fantasies corresponding to all the ignorance from the past.

The personality, however, does not usually discard old defenses that are no longer needed, and these old defenses constitute much of the unclarity and dullness of the personality.

we are beginning to understand something about the unclarity, the opaqueness of the personality: It contains elements that were supposed to have been discharged, but have not yet been eliminated.

A major part of what needs to be eliminated is conditioning that was once useful for protection and defense, even for physical survival.

Each time you understand an issue or an identification with a past conflict or a now-unnecessary defense, you discharge feelings associated with the issue and work through the feelings and the beliefs about it.

the arising of each essential aspect will shed light on a certain element of the ignorance in the personality.

when a person experiences these states without looking at the issues, which is a common occurrence, there is no clarification of the personality. The personality stays the way it is. It is this development that is often called spiritual realization: The person is in an essential state, and in some sense identified with it, but the personality remains as it is.

Spiritual realizations or essential states may lighten and harmonize your daily life or make you feel more fulfilled, but the struggle of the duality continues.

When you explore this underlying something, an awareness will emerge that the duality itself is the source of the conflict. You will discover that the fact that you feel that there are two entities—Essence and personality—instead of one, is the problem.

Before your awareness of Essence, you identified with the opaque part and wanted the good stuff. But after experiencing these wonderful states, you realize that these experiences don’t solve the problem.

When you first begin to work on yourself, the personality is all you experience and 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 and years. So the next stage is that there is a struggle in which the development of Essence increasingly exposes the personality.

The personality is operating, working on itself, becoming realized, achieving this and that, and all this activity is what creates your suffering.

your very identity is an inner activity.

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

If you look at the activity in the head, you’ll see concern and worry. In the heart, it’s a sense of guilt and frustration. Looking at activity in the belly, you’ll see it as attachment and desire. But it is all the same thing: ego activity....

Essence is Being, and Being is complete stillness, with no action. When you act, the movement of your thoughts or desires separates you from Essence.

a very interesting thing happens when you become aware of the movement of your personality and you don’t go along with it. What happens is you realize that 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 metho...

the second method, we need to understand more thoroughly what is meant by immersion in the personality. There is a willingness to clearly and 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.

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 but of the actual churning itself. When you become aware that you are the machine in action and you are completely convinced that the activity itself is what is churning up problems, only then is it possible for the wheels to stop. When the wheels stop and there is no activity, there is also no defensiveness. You’re not defending yourself in any way because, as we have seen, the very basis of personality activity is defense. When the activity stops, you recognize that most of your thoughts and desires and efforts are resistance and what you have been resisting is the present moment, the now.

This experience enables you to see that the activity of resisting the present moment is exactly what has been separating you from Being.

The moment you become aware of the vicious cycle of the activity of defensiveness, you will see clearly that what you have been rejecting is yourself, and that the rejection is useless and unnecessary. Then you will relax and stop.

You must see the totality of your personality in the present—all the thoughts, desires, feelings, and dreams, which are continuous with your past. You may also see your personality, at all times continuous with the social structure around you, in all your relationships, the influence of your society on your personality, and so on. You will see that your ego activity is what connects you to the social network of personality, making you vulnerable to the various external influences that obscure the truth of who you are, and what reality is.

In that instant you see that you and the supreme reality are one. For the first time, you can perceive the actual substance of the personality without the past.

Your mind makes these separations, and sets up all situations so that this part is always struggling with that part.

Personality is not something to be eliminated. It is simply full of fear because it does not know its true nature. The personality needs to be completely and thoroughly understood and cherished. Only with that compassionate, accepting, objective love is it possible to understand the true reality of the personality.

What is the most loving and compassionate thing one can do to create peace, both personally and universally?

the most loving and compassionate thing you can do for peace is to do absolutely nothing.

Peace is the absence of suffering. One reason for suffering is that most people are not looking for peace; they are looking for pleasure. Peace is not a top priority for most people; pleasure usually comes first.

seeking pleasure assumes that pleasure is somewhere else, some other time, in a different situation, and not here and now.

When we seek, we are moving away from the pleasure or peace and from the source of pleasure and peace.

implicit in the activity of seeking is that there is something to do, or to arrive at.

People tend to believe that first they must find what they seek and then they will stop. The truth is that the finding can happen only when the search stops.

we are seeking something and by this very act of seeking, we get farther away from that which we seek.

If you seek pleasure, you will tend to produce only suffering, sooner or later.

All activities in life—all accomplishments, all situations, all relationships—are empty, if you are not there, if you are not present in them. This is a basic law of human nature.

In working with people, it seems to me that my work is just helping to reveal that what they believe is not really true.

Everyone suffers because they act according to certain beliefs or views of reality with such conviction that they will fight for these views to the end.

if we just rest, forget all the searching and give up the seeking, the world becomes beautiful and full. When you are seeking, you separate your consciousness, your soul, from your being, from your source, so that your whole perception then is perception devoid of being. Regardless of what you acquire or achieve, you are poverty-stricken because you are operating from an impoverished perspective.

In all seeking, and in the activity inherent in seeking, there is an assumption that you are deficient.