Sublime

A. H. Almaas, the revered spiritual teacher and founder of the Diamond Approach, in his seminal work Essence (1986),

your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing.

With this stage comes a deep yearning for wholeness—bringing together the ego and the deeper parts of the self; integrating mind, body, and soul; cultivating both the feminine and masculine parts within; being whole in relation to others; and repairing our broken relationship with life and nature.

When we live with the tension of the personal will directed toward an imagined future, we live in a mind-world maze of possibilities instead of the vivid aliveness of intimacy with what is.

It is useful to understand that enlightenment itself is not fixed. It is not limited to any particular insight or moment of awakening; it is also the fluid and dynamic functioning of the totality of conscious life. That is why, with the dawning of enlightenment, there is nothing to attain or grab hold of—there is only the truth as it appears and

Enlightenment or ascension to an exalted form of existence is the simple acceptance of each new moment as being perfect, with everything you are, whatever that may be.

Everybody knows it, but almost everybody is deluded into thinking there’s something more to learn, something hidden and esoteric that is revealed only to a special few. Only after years of searching do we find that there’s nothing more to find. Will we be relieved or disappointed? What is there to gain from practice, after all? We realize that our