Indestructible Innocence (Diamond Heart, Book 4)

by A.H. Almaas

Seeking is the basis, the very fabric, of suffering.

Our Work, as you know, is to understand yourself, to come to awareness of your true nature. What does it mean to understand yourself? What is the process of inquiry if I am not trying to look into all the nooks and crannies, finding all the yummy things and trying to get rid of the terrible things? To understand the practice of inquiry we need to come from the perspective of not seeking, from the perspective of pure being, from our own inner nature and source.

You perpetuate your suffering by the very activity you think is going to release you from suffering.

The consequence of this activity of trying to get something and trying to get rid of something else, is that you identify with the activity of searching. You are doing it, the activity is always present, and you take it to be you. Thus, you continue projecting outside the thing you are looking for.

Understanding is there when you are not searching. You do not need to look for understanding; it is not something to pursue.

Understandings, realizations, and insights appear when you are relaxed, when for a moment you have stopped your seeking.

your deep insights, the true and deeper understandings, arise when you are not doing anything in your mind, when you just are, simply present.

What I mean is that you need to be compassionate and loving towards yourself and let yourself be. If you let yourself be, there will be a spontaneous curiosity about what arises. To simply live and rest and let yourself be, allows this spontaneous inquiry.

that true understanding is not a matter of searching; to seek understanding is the same thing as trying to seek wealth or love or anything external.

Always you seek more and more activity, never stopping and settling into your present experience without having judgments about it. The simplest thing is just to relax and be there, to live without ideas about it, to drop the judgments, the ambitions, the seeking. That is what most people do not do.

if we engage in the practice of inquiry we will see that the activity of seeking is actually the source of our pain and suffering.

Understanding is actually a kind of meditation; it is not a seeking, not a figuring out, not an attempt to find information outside oneself. It is spontaneous, an effortless insight. To engage in the process of understanding does not involve doing anything. If there is anything to be done, it is a matter of attention—just being sure you are present. When you are present in your being, the insights will arise naturally and understanding will arise naturally.

True understanding has to do with transformation. If there is no transformation at the moment of understanding, then there is no real understanding. Without transformation, understanding is just a mental activity, part of the seeking activity.

True understanding that arises on its own is simply your own essence touching your mind, or being in contact with the situation.

Insight or understanding are nothing but your being eating your experience, metabolizing it, incl...

Absorption of experience leads to true growth and development.

The only thing that needs to happen for you to absorb, digest, metabolize, and assimilate your experience is to be there—simply to be.

From this perspective, the work of inquiry and understanding that we do is nothing but the metabolism of unmetabolized food in your mind.

You have had many experiences throughout your life that you still have not digested, that remain in your mind as the unconscious: memories, thoughts, identifications, feelings, actions, patterns, and the like. They are giving you trouble because you have indigestion—mental indigestion—because these reactions need to be digested and absorbed. Your mind is meant to be empty, not full of all your history and reactions and identifications.

By being fully present in your experience you metabolize it and grow.

Without experience Being cannot be in the world. Metabolism leads to the capacity to be in the world, and that is what it means to have a human life.

if we fail to metabolize our experience—for example, by rejecting it and thus stopping the metabolic process—we retain undigested experience, which in time will become suffering.

What stops any person from digesting their experience (inner or outer) is the unwillingness or incapacity to be present in it or with it.

Being, of its very nature, absorbs and metabolizes experience.

When you are present in your experience without defenses, then there is contact between this beingness or presence and whatever happens in internal or external experience. When this contact happens, there is a process of transformation which we call metabolism or absorption. This process of transformation causes you to get bigger or more expanded.

your soul develops by eating experience.

Genuine understanding leads to greater maturity, to an enhanced capacity to live in this world harmoniously.

This activity of seeking and trying to change things is nothing but moving undigested food around; pushing it around doesn’t help digestion, so it cannot lead to transformation.

understanding is not a matter of searching, hoping, desiring, or going after anything. It is a matter of being here, now, in your very experience, and coming in direct, undefended contact with your experience. It is a natural process of development and unfoldment if you don’t resist it; it is what is supposed to happen to a human being anyway.

Understanding arises spontaneously when you let yourself be.

In the Work we just focus on it. We isolate the process of digestion so that in time we become more efficient.

All experience is food, and if you are really present, you will digest more of that food, faster and more completely.

every time you search, what you do more than anything else is push away that fullness of your being.

The less a human being is seeking the more he is fulfilled.

A miserable human being is one who is see...

You could be engaged in very intense outer activity while inside you are still, but most of the time external activity is an outer reflection of the activity of the mind.

We are busy externally because our minds are busy. We are not being present in our activity. That is why many teachings say to slow down, to be a little quieter, to make your life simpler.

The world is like a magic show—you manifest whatever you have inside you. If you have suffering, you will manifest suffering, and if you have happiness, you will manifest that happiness and the world will be a happy place for you. If you have fear and hatred, you will manifest these things. The world is like your dream life; it is as simple as that. Your dream life is very dependent on your mind; it is not God who determines your dream life. No one else is coercing you to dream one way or another. Your dreams are an expression of who you are; there is a whole universe going on in your dreams.

Part of my understanding is that we have to inquire into all of that so that the forces and energies that motivate the search will decrease and eventually disappear.

we need to see that searching is suffering, and that seeking, by its very nature, is abandoning ourselves, that the action of looking separates us from our natural unfoldment and pushes away Being.

If there is something arising from within you that is natural and spontaneous and deep, that is not seeking. Your being can flow in a certain direction, and be acting, without it being ego activity.

why you love something is another factor. Usually, if your being is present while you do something you love, it does not have just to do with you; it has to do with something larger.

When we go into the area of seeking, we cut ourselves off from these things and we feel deficient.

Our problems, our conflicts, our suffering, our disappointments, and our lacks are not due to the causes we ordinarily ascribe them to; they are primarily the result of the fact that we are not living the way we are supposed to be living.

Only living in a way that is natural to us will free us from unnecessary struggle and strife, only living in a way that is truly human.

We must first accept that since there is unnecessary strife, struggle, and pain in our lives, this means that we really don’t know what it’s like to live as human beings.

The first thing we need to confront, then, is the ever-present, arrogant belief that we know what a human being is, what it’s like to live as a human being, what a human being’s life is about, and how a human being is supposed to conduct herself.

The forces that rule the life of the ordinary human being are not those that are meant to rule the life of someone who has grown into the full potential of an adult human being.

To truly understand what it is to be a mature human being, we must begin by questioning our assumption that we know what a human being is, how a human being should conduct her life, what principles should govern the life of such a person, and what kind of things a mature person does.

Security needs such as the need for money, power, prestige, acceptance, and approval are actually the needs of a child. These needs express the part of the human being that remains undeveloped and unrefined.