A.H. Almaas Interview

Questions this interview answers

• How can spiritual realization be both universal and uniquely experienced?
• Is there a conflict between intellectual development and spiritual growth?
• Why do different spiritual traditions describe ultimate reality in different ways?
• What is the value of precise discrimination on the spiritual path?

Key takeaways

• Spiritual realization is not just intellectual but must be directly experienced.
• Training the intellect and discrimination enhances clarity in spiritual experience.
• Different traditions experience and describe ultimate reality in distinct, valid ways.
• Being manifests itself through individuals to experience reality in various forms.
• No single experience or tradition fully defines the ultimate; it has many faces.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Hameed Ali, whom you may know as A.H. Almas, his pen name. Hameed was born in Kuwait in 1944. At the age of University of California in Berkeley. Hameed was working on his PhD in physics when he reached a turning point in his life and destiny that led him more and more into inquiring into psychological and spiritual aspects of human nature. Hameed’s interest in the truth of human nature and in the true nature of reality resulted in the creation and unfoldment of the diamond approach. I think I’ll just read, I’m sure you’ll be explaining a lot about the diamond approach, but here’s a quick summary of it. The diamond approach is a path of wisdom, an approach to the investigation of reality and work on oneself that leads to human maturity and liberation.

Because of our particular vision of reality, it is not completely accurate to think of this approach as spiritual work, for this work does not separate the spiritual from the psychological, neither does it see these two as separate from the physical everyday life and scientific investigation of the content of perception. However, because we live in a society where the prevailing thought is that of the separated facets of reality, the closest category recognized in this mentality to our approach is that of a spiritual path or exploration. So good. And incidentally, in preparation for this, I’ve listened to a number of interviews, you’ve done some very nice ones with the Conscious TV folk, Ian and Renata McNay, and maybe I’ll even link to those on your page on my site, so that if people want some more variety or depth in terms of your personal background, yeah, they can find that.

But as usual, let’s start, if you don’t mind, with as much of your history as you feel is relevant to the discussion. That always fascinates people, how someone first got bitten by the spiritual bug and what kind of changes and challenges they went through as they moved into that direction and began progressing. Where would you like to start?

✨ Exploring the Nature of History and Self

Hameed: Interesting question, because when you ask about my history, I wonder, history of what? Which part of me? There are parts that have individual history, which probably what you mean is that this part has the history of the universe, and which part has no history. So you mean probably the individual history.

Rick: Well, I think it sounds like it would be interesting to talk about all three, especially if you’re implying that all three are part of your direct experience, like when you think of my history as the history of the universe, part of your experience that we refer to by that term.

Hameed: Yes. Good. The idea is that what I am, when you ask about your history, bring me back, what am I? So a good way to look at it is that I am both a formlessness, right, that is at the same time everything, everything at all time and space. So that’s why it includes the history of the universe, because all time and space. At the same time I am an individual being through which the formless experiences, and that individual being has a body and a mind and lives in time and space, and that has the particular history in Earth. And then there is the indefinable, the fact that I’m not anything. I’m not anything, form or formlessness, and that you can’t speak of a history.

Rick: I think almost everyone listening would understand and be able to relate to what you’re saying, because the people listening to this show would tend to be familiar with such ideas, but for many people, if not most, those, the things you just said remain to a large degree ideas, as opposed to direct concrete experience. And often on this show I try to emphasize that point that the kind of realization that we should really be interested in is not merely an intellectual understanding, it’s something much deeper than that, much more experiential. And sometimes I think people mistake an intellectual understanding for some sort of realization, but I believe you’re not referring to mere intellectual understanding.

Hameed: When I refer to intellectual understanding, I’ll be saying so.

Rick: Okay, good.

Hameed: Yeah, sometimes I do, and I’ll make clear. But yeah, I agree with you, and a lot of the things we’ll be talking about, some people understand, some people won’t understand. It is the nature of spiritual experience that it is mysterious, and you don’t really get it until you have the taste, until you have a direct encounter. Otherwise you just form some ideas around it, which might be accurate or not. So I’m hoping, you know, some people understand this, you know, and hopefully people understand something new, not just hear something they’ve already heard.

It is the nature of spiritual experience that it is mysterious, and you don’t really get it until you have the taste, until you have a direct encounter.

🕊️ The Practical Value of Spirituality

Rick: I always have a kind of a practical orientation to this stuff. I feel like spirituality is not just some pie-in-the-sky realization, but it actually has nitty-gritty implications in terms of one’s life, and that understanding something, reading a spiritual book or listening to a spiritual interview, I hopefully would actually have some practical outcome in terms of either inspiring a person to attain the same level of experience the interviewer is talking about, or clarifying their experience if they’re already having it, something like that. Is that your orientation?

Hameed: That’s my orientation. I want people to benefit. I want people to benefit. Benefits are a different kind. Some people get the direct experience. Some people get a confirmation of something they already know. Some people just get an intellectual level. They’re all useful in various ways. It’s fine with me, you know. It depends how deep we go. If we go pretty deep, we’ll lose most people, you know. If we stay in the general, more people, you know. I like to sort of get to some real particular things that are useful for people, instead of talking about generalities that people heard and read about all the time.

Rick: I agree. So let’s backtrack a bit. So I heard in your interview with Ian, you were saying that you were a physics student and you were quite far along in your studies, and there was some story about when you went into the dining hall at Berkeley and you saw all these eggheads sitting around having lunch. And your feeling was, “I don’t want to end up like that. That doesn’t do it for me.”

Hameed: Exactly. That was an interesting perception. I wasn’t expecting it. Realizing I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to be just a smart brain, you know, and not much life beyond that. I didn’t know I was thinking that way, but that was my impression that turned me around. I realized that’s not what I’m going to do. For a long time I thought I’m just going to become a physicist, be a research physicist or theoretician, and study general relativity, study nuclear physics, and I was really into it. Because I thought I’m going to find out what the truth is. And I found out some truth, but it wasn’t exactly what I was, the truth I was looking for. And that’s true. That turned around the individual mind.

Rick: So that kind of relates to what we’ve just been saying the last few minutes. You realize that the truth that you were, the truths you were discovering through physics didn’t go deep enough into your own direct experience. They were merely conceptual and that wasn’t satisfactory for you.

Hameed: Well, let’s put it this way. I just, I wasn’t experiencing myself as an individual who’s going through school until at some point I recognized, no, I’m not really the individual. I’m this beingness that is at the basis of all of existence was experiencing itself as an individual. And it woke itself up at that point to the fact that not the right direction. Although it has taken itself through scientific training because that was necessary for the function of what was to come later. So all the time it got spent in science, studying math and physics and all that was very useful. It’s trained and developed the mind and and the discriminating intellect to a way so that the spiritual teaching that ended up being taught can be taught with the precision and rigor of science.

🕊️ The Role of Intellectual Discrimination in Spirituality

Rick: Yeah, I often wish I had been a better student myself. That I was kind of flaky.

Hameed: I see you’re interested in physics and science and you use those metaphors and those ideas.

Rick: Yeah, I interviewed John Hagelin a few weeks ago. You know John from the conference and the stuff fascinates me but I have a very rudimentary layman’s understanding of it all. But nonetheless I think the point you’re making is valuable which is that there certainly isn’t any conflict between the acquisition of relative knowledge and the sort of the training of the intellect and the discrimination in the regular academic context and spirituality. Would you agree?

Hameed: Yeah. There’s no conflict. It’s really useful.

Rick: Useful

Hameed: because many people who get into spirituality, they have fuzzy minds and their experiences tend to be sort of vague and generalized and with no precise and clear insights into what or description of what the experience is because their mind hasn’t been trained that way. You see, they can’t experience because the training of the mind doesn’t only make precise and clear the thinking and articulation but the actual experience, the visceral experience, it can’t become precise and clear and delineated but the whole consciousness becomes trained like a diamond.

The training of the mind doesn’t only make precise and clear the thinking and articulation but the actual experience, the visceral experience, it can’t become precise and clear and delineated but the whole consciousness becomes trained like a diamond.

That’s an interesting point and it’s one that I don’t think has come out too many times in this show which is that the culturing of the capacity for fine subtle discrimination is an essential or at least very valuable quality on the spiritual path. You don’t hear too many people talking about that.

Many traditions do it. If you look at the Tibetan tradition for instance, if you look at the tradition of Dalai Lama, part of their study is intellectual, they train the mind, studying the scripture and they do debates between each other so everything is clear and then when they debate, they talk about a very fine thing discrimination because awakening and realization, it has to be very precise and clear to know what is true what is not otherwise you write your subjective kind of emotion, overlay it in a subtle way without you knowing it.

Yeah, Shankara was famous for that too. In fact he wrote a book called the “Crest Jewel of Discrimination” and he went around the country having these deep debates with other spiritual teachers and scholars.

That’s why I like him as a Vedanta teacher. He had a completeness that way in his realization.

✨ The Many Faces of Realization

Rick: It’s a good point and it’s one that actually I’m very interested in and try to bring out in these interviews which is that to my way of seeing things spiritual development is really multifaceted, to use again that gem metaphor. There are so many subtleties and nuances and avenues of development and avenues of exploration that it’s kind of a shame really that sometimes it seems to get oversimplified and dumbed down to just one thing and everything else is dismissed or rejected as frivolous or superficial or irrelevant.

Hameed: Well, it becomes dismissing in many people’s experiences too. There’s so much variety in experiences of spiritual experience, so much variety in what’s called awakening and realization, so much variety in what’s called enlightenment. People think it’s all in one thing. It isn’t one thing. Each tradition has their own path, they really experience something they call realization, it’s not exactly what the other path experiences, but there are realization, there are liberation, because the spiritual world is not like the physical world where it’s determined in the classical Newtonian sense. It is more like the quantum world—it’s not determined, it’s dependent on the observer. In the quantum theory, nothing is there until you observe it, and spirituality is like that. It is like the spiritual nature is indeterminate until you experience it. When you experience it, then it’s real.

However, the other person next to you, when they experience it, they experience something different. Have you ever thought how come a Vedanta teacher could be sitting in Bombay and experiencing everything as pure consciousness and they say that is the nature of reality? A Lama sitting in Tibet and experiencing reality and it’s all emptiness. A Sufi someplace in Morocco experiencing reality, this is all love. Well, which one is it? And they’re all saying that I’m experiencing the ultimate. You see?

It is like the spiritual nature is indeterminate until you experience it. When you experience it, then it’s real.

Rick: So how do you answer that question?

Hameed: They’re all correct and they’re all different, they’re all different.

Rick: So is it a blind man in the elephant situation where they’re all actually experiencing different qualities of the same thing or, and so, you know, to step out of the metaphor, there is an ultimate reality but according to one’s makeup, one’s nervous system, one’s culture, one experiences different flavors of it? Or are you saying that there isn’t an ultimate reality and that each of these guys is experiencing something deep and fundamental yet somewhat different in its essential nature?

Hameed: I don’t think the blind man and the elephant applies because these are realized people who know reality and are liberated. They’re seeing the full reality then, however they’re seeing it in one of its manifestations. The ultimate is not a determined truth that has only one way of experiencing it. It’s more mysterious than that. My experience, my view of it, because I experienced it in many ways myself—I experienced it the Vedanta way, experienced it the Sufi way, Buddhist way, many ways—and all of them are real and they all say something about reality and the liberation is complete and beautiful and all that. But then I’ve gone to the next one, it’s really completely different, completely different, and it’s a completely different view. It’s like I have to use a different part of my brain or something.

So for a long time I was dealing with trying to find the way to—how do you, how does that mean? First I thought somebody must get the right thing, the other approximation, but further learning I realized no, they are all approximations because the ultimate cannot be defined, cannot be defined and cannot be known entirely by one experience because the ultimate is like a chameleon, it presents itself in what I call different faces. We can experience one face at one time and face another face at another, and you could keep saying, well maybe I’ll experience what’s behind the face. What’s behind the face is another face, and it keeps moving like that. So you end up, for me as a result, the realization is not the realizing one of the faces, the realization is the freedom to move itself from one face to the next without impediment.

The ultimate cannot be defined and cannot be known entirely by one experience because the ultimate is like a chameleon, it presents itself in what I call different faces.

Being, Individuality, and the Experience of Reality

Rick: So from that, could we summarize or conclude by saying that human beings aren’t capable of experiencing some ultimate universal reality without any kind of flavoring of it based upon their individual makeup, that there’s always going to be like reflections of the sun off different colored reflectors, there’s always going to be some quality or some influence imparted into the experience by the individual’s makeup?

Hameed: I won’t blame it on the individual.

Rick: Okay.

Hameed: It’s not because of the individual, that’s the relativistic post-modern way of looking at things. I don’t agree with the post-modern thinking, I think they don’t know what they’re talking about. The individual is not what determines experience, but determined experience is true nature itself.

Rick: Through nature or true nature?

Hameed: True nature, true nature or spiritual nature, whatever you call it, or the truth. The fundamental truth is, experiences itself in different ways, experiences itself through those individuals. So it manifests itself through a particular individual, particular way, because it’s true that individual allows it to experience itself that way. So you’d like, like let’s call Being, you use your Being, something—Being is experiencing itself as Rick right now. So Rick is giving Being the opportunity to experience itself as Rick in your office, you see. So it’s Being who actually experiences itself in different ways through different individuals. The individuals, that’s when you ask me what is my, what’s your history, right? You know, there is the history of the individual which we can talk about, which is useful, everybody is an individual beside being the fundamental, right?

And the individual is a lens through which Being or the spiritual nature experiences itself. But it is Being is really what manifests the individual anyway, what gives the individual its particular proclivities and capacities, and it is the Being that gives the individual this history. Like how did I choose to study physics? You think I thought it was a personal choice? No, it was Being that put the individual through that course so that that individual will become honed as a particular instrument for Being to manifest a certain way. It knows Itself and can express Itself.

✨ Different Paths, Different Flavors of Realization

Rick: So you’d say then the Vedanta way and the Tibetan Buddhist way and the Sufi way, they’re all experiencing Being in its fullness, but there’s a different flavor to it somehow based upon that particular path or that particular culture?

Hameed: It’s not based on the particular path or particular culture. Being created the culture and the path to manifest itself in that particular way and to experience itself in that particular way, that particular way.

So for us, the Vedanta, the experience, the realization is Being is a pure consciousness, satchitananda, right? Being, consciousness, bliss. For the Buddhists, that sounds good, but that is only a step for them. Being is clear, empty awareness, transparent and non-existent at the same time, and hence not—nothing has true existence, only the appearance, appearance of existence. So they call that pure awareness characterized by emptiness, which is a very different—I mean, when you experience it, a very different flavor, very different. I mean, everything is transparent, everything is really empty, there’s no gravity, everything is sort of nothing, nothing exists. When I say nothing, I mean everything has the nature of non-being, the emptiness of Buddhism, which is rarely understood.

When Buddhist Dalai Lama says the absence of inherent existence, they mean you experience the thing but you realize it doesn’t exist, that its nature is a non-being. Vedanta doesn’t go there that much, they mention it once in a while, but for them existence is the real thing. You see, existence and non-existence are very different ways of experiencing. Existence has a fullness, has richness, right? And has emptiness. Non-being is more spaciousness, more nothing, and that nothing brings out the luminosity, the clear luminosity of everything. But they’re both non-dual, both non-dual.

Rick: Yeah.

Hameed: But they’re different and I appreciate both. I thought they’re both a good contribution to, you know, to reality.

✨ On the Diversity of Spiritual Realization

Rick: I do too, but I still—well, I’m gonna pursue this with you a little bit more. Like, you know, on a superficial level you have religions fighting each other and that’s been going on for a long time, wars and arguments, even within particular religious groups like the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, you know, and that to me is pretty superficial level because none of them are real mystics, they’re just battling over, you know, cultural differences and belief differences and so on. But then even when you get to the mystics, people who are actually focused on experiencing this stuff, you see these sorts of differences that you and I have just been discussing.

And so the question that keeps coming to my mind is, and actually even among the mystics some of them will say, well, we’ve really got a fuller truth than those guys, you know, they only took it so far and now we’re taking it farther to realize these things. So what I’m wondering is, is that true? Are there sort of qualitative differences between different experiential schools or approaches, or is it really as we’ve been suggesting just, you know, you can’t say one is deeper, more complete than the other, they’re just different ways of experiencing based upon whatever causes those differences?

Hameed: Yeah, good question. You know, I’ve worked with it for many years and I have my own solution, my own understanding and realization around it, which is true, the different schools of different religions adhere to their truth as the true truth, that this is, and others may be good but they’re all approximation and they all say it. You know, the Dalai Lama says, “I’m Buddhist because I think it’s the best path.”

Rick: Yeah.

Hameed: See, he says that, and in some sense they have to—you see, he has to—well, he has a position. But the thing is, there are differences, and that is where the postmodern philosophy comes in about the identity and difference religion. The spiritual teaching—they haven’t integrated the postmodern view where there can be difference and identity at the same time. We can be different and we can be friends, and the true realized people are friends even though they know they are different. When you get outward to the religious part, who don’t have the experience, they don’t have the realization, so their hearts are not open, their minds are not open, they’re prejudiced. But that prejudice can seep even into the mystics to some degree if they have parts of them that are not clarified, so they get to stick to their way of looking at things as better than the other.

The truly realized person, they don’t care who’s better than the other—they’re happy for what they are, what they know, they’re happy with their path. “I’m free, the other person, they’re free—great, they’re free different from the way I’m free. Be good friends, we’ll learn from each other.” In fact, I like that there are differences; otherwise, it’s always going to be the same thing—boring.

The truly realized person, they don’t care who’s better than the other—they’re happy for what they are, what they know, they’re happy with their path.

You see, in fact, you might have noticed I’ve been having dialogue with different teachers from different traditions because I think there needs to be dialogue between these people, because they can learn from each other. I don’t want them to have dialogue so that they come to see they are talking about the same thing. No. I think people should bring out their similarity and also differences. The similarities make them friends, the differences give them something to talk about that’s interesting.

Reality’s Infinite Faces and the Freedom to Explore

Rick: Well, what they’ll do then—well, I agree. And now you just said reality appearing differently through all these different people.

Hameed: Yeah.

Rick: But then the question is, is the reality itself different, or is it just appearing differently through the different people?

Hameed: It is one reality, right? But the reality does not show its true ultimate essence—it doesn’t have a true ultimate essence that is experienceable or knowable. What is knowable is the ways it manifests itself. See, I know reality in many ways, but I feel there are still many other ways I could see it, and none of them will be the final one. You see, one thing about this perspective I’m giving you is that there is no end point. It removes the end point, it removes the goal as a matter of greater maturation, openness, and freedom, so that life becomes a life of discovery—discovering Being in the way Being is. I’m not discovering Being; Being is using this individual as a lens through which to discover itself, because Being loves to know Itself.

There is no end point. It removes the end point, it removes the goal as a matter of greater maturation, openness, and freedom, so that life becomes a life of discovery—discovering Being in the way Being is.

The Qualities of Being: Intelligence, Compassion, and More

Rick: Let’s move on to talking about intelligence, since you just brought up that word. So far we haven’t really dwelt on that quality, but I think it’s really important, and rather than even just asking a question here, which I might start pontificating, let me just invite you to say a bit about intelligence.

Hameed: Well, first of all, the way that Being manifests Itself through this individual you’re talking to, first it showed Being has particular qualities, particular flavor, as you said. I call them essential qualities or aspects, and each one of them reveals something about Being, and these are qualities that human beings can relate to. Human beings, even if they’re still not realized, can relate—like compassion, right? People can relate to love, people can relate to power, clarity, people can relate to clarity. People cannot relate to consciousness or emptiness easily, but tell them love—oh yes, I want love, I want to be loved. But tell them emptiness—most people, that sounds uninteresting. Tell them everybody’s got consciousness—what’s the big deal?

But if you tell them love, you tell them compassion, you tell them strength, you tell them power, tell them intelligence—these are the stuff that human beings need to live their life. So Being has—these are what I call the perfections of being—implicit in being, but can manifest them specifically in one’s individual experience.

So one of those qualities that manifests is intelligence, and shows that—because each one of them shows something about Being throughout all of manifestation of Being. When it shows compassion, it doesn’t mean only at that time it’s compassion—it’s whichever way it experiences itself. However, it can manifest itself as pure compassion, with tenderness and softness and empathy and attunement and sensitivity. But it can manifest itself as intelligence, and then it’s brilliant, it’s economical in the way it operates, you know, and it is like the whole system becomes sort of oiled—your brain is oiled, your nervous system, everything moves smoothly, like silver—it’s like, not silver, like mercury.

Rick: Super fluid.

Hameed: Super fluid. And you recognize, what is intelligence? Intelligence is a quality of Being, which means characteristic of Being, and that intelligence can manifest as a quality that a particular human being manifests. Let’s say this human being has intelligence—when a person is being intelligent, you look at them, their face is shining, their forehead is shining, because intelligence is brilliance, pure brilliance of light. Like, people sometimes see brilliant light—what is that? Why is the brilliant light different from love golden light? Brilliant light has to do with intelligence, intelligence of being, pure brilliance that is like—it’s a fluid brilliance, the way mercury is, like super fluid. But that’s Being manifesting its intelligence in an explicit way for it to know it through a particular individual, and it shows that Being is characterized by intelligence.

Pure intelligence—it’s beyond the intelligence of what human beings call intelligent. What human beings call intelligent is the outer expression of that intelligence.

Intelligence is a quality of Being, which means characteristic of Being, and that intelligence can manifest as a quality that a particular human being manifests.

Omniscience, Omnipresence, and the Nature of God

Rick: It’s way beyond it, I mean, yeah, all the technologies in the world couldn’t create a single human cell from the raw ingredients that make up a cell, and all the computers in the world combined couldn’t govern the functioning of that cell once it’s been created, and yet we consist of trillions of cells, all sort of functioning properly within themselves and among themselves. So what level of intelligence would have to exist for that to happen?

Hameed: Yeah, and it’s not only that, it’s a non-thinking intelligence, non-deliberative intelligence. It organically, spontaneously functions, and its functioning—spontaneous without deliberation—is totally intelligent.

Rick: Just thinking and deliberation are human faculties, right?

Hameed: Yes.

Rick: Yeah.

Hameed: Yeah, thinking and deliberation are human, but that is one of the ways human beings experience intelligence—thinking and deliberation and insight and research and all of that. But the intelligence of Being is behind that, is invisible usually to most people, but we can experience it. We can experience intelligence as intelligence. I can experience myself as pure intelligence—my Being can be all intelligence, pure intelligence, you see. And when you have that, I’m experiencing Being, then it’s not the intelligence of the mind or the heart or the body, it’s just the pure intelligence that is non-conceptual, that is non-deliberative, that is very organic, very—you know, it’s organic in the spiritual sense, totally spontaneous, totally in the moment, but it also considers all time and all space. The intelligence of Being has the knowledge of everything, everywhere, and everyone.

Think of it that way.

Rick: So it’s omniscient.

Hameed: It is in touch with omniscience, so it’s intelligence, it’s operating intelligence because it knows everything. Now, when I’m intelligent, I’m not knowing everything—I don’t have a, the brain doesn’t have the capacity to know everything—but the intelligence, underlying intelligence, is informed by everything that ever happened, that will ever happen, so it operates in amazing and infinite—let’s call it infinite intelligence.

Rick: And it’s also omnipresent, right? And it’s omnipotent—it can do anything, it’s obviously doing everything, so it sounds like we’re talking about God here.

Hameed: It is close to the idea of God, it is doing everything. If it is not doing everything, then who is doing the other things? Right, you see that’s the one thing I sometimes think some of the non-dual teachings don’t address, which is they say there’s only non-duality, there’s only one reality. Then, however, when they talk about unenlightened people, they say what’s their ignorance, they’re ignorant. Well, who’s ignorant if there is only one being? How can there be another person who’s ignorant? You see, they blame the ignorance, the difficulty, on the individual. In fact, the moment they say, “You’re ignorant, that’s why you’re not enlightened,” they have ratified you as a separate individual, which means they have abandoned their non-duality.

Non-duality as an experience has not pervaded the mind, has not pervaded the thinking and the philosophy. So in reality, it is always done by the same Beingness, including the mistakes, including the ignorance.

✨ Self-Realization, God-Realization, and the Mystery of Change

Rick: Would you in your own experience distinguish between self-realization and God realization? Would self-realization perhaps be the sort of the cognition of the abstract unmanifest pure being or consciousness, whereas God realization is a more advanced or more rich appreciation of the intelligence that we’ve been talking about and almost an observation of its governing activity in the universe?

Hameed: I don’t use the word God that much.

Rick: It’s a kind of a simple three-letter word to kind of summarize a lot of what we’ve been saying here.

Hameed: It sounds like we’re talking about God, and I think many people, they will call it God realization. Some of the Indian traditions talk about God realization, you know, like Meher Baba was not only God realization, he was God incarnate, for instance, and he even said, “I make the stars move, I’m the one who’s making you think those thoughts,” and all that. So I think there is, it is true, there is, because there are many kinds of realizations. So even realization of consciousness or awareness, there are many kinds, and there is a realization of realizing how things happen.

For instance, in dual, non-dual realization, when you realize everything is one, right, the one, no separation, how do we explain changes? How do we explain that somebody’s walking? It’s all one. How can there be movement in it?

The Manifestation of Experience

Rick: Yeah, well some people use funny terminology. They’ll say like the being is walking or the being is walling or the being is flowering. In other words, it’s just taking on this appearance of different things happening, but it never loses its nature as being. It just kind of puts on this illusory show that is ultimately insubstantial and unreal.

Hameed: Yeah, some people say that. Why will being need an illusory show if it is the master of creation?

Rick: I can’t answer that question.

Hameed: Yeah, you see why. I mean, I know some of the Vedanta say the individual is a convenient fiction needed by Brahman to realize itself. I said, Brahman, the ultimate, needs a fiction to know itself? Isn’t that, in Western philosophy, that would be considered illogical, you see, but many people believe it. The fact of it, there are kinds of realization. I don’t know if you read some of my books, a kind of realism non-duality where you see how things happen. Being in its Beingness is manifesting everything all at the same time. The big bang didn’t happen only three billion years ago, it just continues to happen. Every instance, creation is happening, so Being is creating everything and all dimensions, all simultaneously as one big picture.

Just like you look at the movie screen. The movie screen looks like many things happen, but the light is really creating all of it, right? It looks like somebody’s walking, somebody’s fighting, there’s a car chase and all that, but only the light is manifesting all of that. The realization where you see everything is Being manifesting as this moment and is basically manifesting all these, its own appearance, it’s changing its own appearance as a manifestation of the world. So that’s how we see one way of understanding how change happens. The change happens from one frame to another, one frame of perception to another, that’s the real change. So there’s really nobody walks, there’s no car chases, there’s only one frame followed by another frame, that’s how Being functions. So then you could say maybe that’s God, God creating.

I’m fine with that language, but I tend not to use the word God because everybody’s got their idea what God is.

🧘 On Practice, Inquiry, and Ongoing Evolution

Rick: I know you’ve in previous interviews, like with Ian and so on, you have talked about the various stages of practice and teachings you studied and I don’t want to go through all that in great detail because we don’t have the time and people can watch Ian’s interview on Conscious TV, but do you have a spiritual practice now? And as part of the reason I ask is that some people have insisted to me that if one is really realized that spiritual practice becomes irrelevant, it becomes superfluous, there’s nowhere to go, therefore why would you sit to meditate for instance or do anything, you just live. Maybe sometimes you close your eyes and enjoy a little silence but spiritual practice drops off, they say.

Hameed: I take the view of Dogen again, who says realization is practice, practice is realization. Realization realizes further realization by practicing, so practice continues because practice is the way Being lives its life truthfully. So practice can be sitting and meditating, can be just the way I am, the way I am living my life is a practice. So practice continues because there are infinite possibilities for Being to manifest Itself. So to say, well I’m enlightened I don’t need to practice, I did that for a while actually, you know

Rick: How’d that work for you?

Hameed: And didn’t work very well because it’s like I realize that’s true but the thing becomes static, you see, becomes and would become static, they become stale. So practices, my main practice is inquiry. I just inquire into whatever the experience is happening to find out do I understand it? By understand it I mean do I feel it completely, do I sense its nuances, do I perceive it and what’s in the way of perceiving it and knowing it completely, that’s what I mean by understanding. There’s an ongoing inquiry and experience but I also meditate, I do certain meditation and I teach certain meditation which are useful. Meditation are useful to develop certain capacities of the consciousness because there’s no end to developing those capacities.

Realization is practice, practice is realization. Realization realizes further realization by practicing, so practice continues because practice is the way Being lives its life truthfully.

Rick: Some people, I can mention, I heard you mention with Ian that you learned Transcendental Meditation at one point and you still like it. Does that mean you still practice it or you just think that was a good thing?

Hameed: I don’t, I haven’t practiced it for some time. I did for a few years, I learned it when I was in college

Rick: Right, well

Hameed: and got my mantra and did it, that’s good, I liked it and once in a while I sort of get into it but my meditation and my inquiry are two sides of the same practice. Meditation is when I’m sitting still and inquiry is when I’m living my life and things happen. Inquiry meaning there’s something I don’t see, don’t experience, don’t understand, I question it and I question even the truth I’m experiencing. Well, I am experiencing things non-dually, well what does that mean, what is this non-duality and what does that mean about my dual experience? That’s inquiry. And even if I’m experiencing non-dual, what is the nature of non-dual, what is the consciousness, is it just a Beingness, is it just a luminosity or is it spaciousness? And if it is spaciousness, what does that mean?

I realize, oh spaciousness means there is a concert space and if I see the concert space that develops experience, oh the space has disappeared, the moment space disappeared I realize everybody is here. That inquiry for me, that’s the practice and continues.

🧘 Inquiry as a Living Practice

Rick: So, what is the outcome of that inquiry? Do you have experiential breakthroughs as a result of that? And I infer from what you’re saying that this is a kind of a 24/7 process, you might be doing it while driving down the freeway or eating lunch or something, it’s just something that is automatically running in you. But what is the outcome? I mean, has that proven to be really significant in terms of progressing to deeper, more comprehensive levels of experience?

Hameed: As the central most effective practice I know, it is the Socratic inquiry developed to include spiritual qualities, so spiritual qualities express themselves as inquiry that includes heart, mind and body. So the mind with its capacity to discriminate and know, the heart and its feeling and responsiveness, and the body with the sensation activity are all involved in the inquiry as a process of investigation, process just openness, curiosity, you wanting to know what is reality. And there are breakthroughs, like what people call awakenings, I call them breakthrough, quantum jump, quantum leap, and they happen every once in a while.

There is an ongoing experience, there’s always developing, there’s always evolving, there was what people call the gradual path, but every once in a while there’s a quantum jump that people call sudden realization and then it’s like jumping from one universe to a parallel universe, sort of, and seeing reality through a different eye. So that continues and for once in a while I thought I arrived at the end, you know, right, just like everybody looking for the end. I arrived at so many ends, after a while I gave up about the question of end, it’s really just my mind

There is an ongoing experience, there’s always developing, there’s always evolving… but every once in a while there’s a quantum jump that people call sudden realization and then it’s like jumping from one universe to a parallel universe.

the same thing. And you do need to—a person needs to follow a genuine path with a real teacher. Yes, I don’t believe in what people talk about, “everybody got their own path, just follow your own thing.” Most people will be lost if they do that. Most people really need a teaching, need a path, need a teacher. It’s a rare individual who can do it on their own.

Rick: Right, no, as you say, it’s rare. Yeah.

Hameed: It’s better to err on the side of humility.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hameed: Because that’s a spiritual quality, humility, that makes us see that we have our limitations. And this is really important—why waste my time? Let me find a real teaching, a real teacher, a real practice so that I can really get into, commit myself to, until I begin to have some freedom, some light, some realization. Then I could think of the possibility maybe of doing it by myself. That’s the way we train our teachers, for instance. Our school, we give—it’s a seven, eight years training. You know, after being in the school for years to have some experience or realization, then there is rigorous training, and then when they teach, they teach the way they were taught

It’s better to err on the side of humility. Because that’s a spiritual quality, humility, that makes us see that we have our limitations.

On Incompleteness and the Beginner’s Mind

The human being is always incomplete.

Rick: Yeah.

Hameed: Did you know that, did anybody tell you that from those—the human being is always incomplete?

Rick: I think I’ve noticed it.

Hameed: Yeah, regardless how realized they are, they’re incomplete because their potential is infinite.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hameed: So they cannot be complete. Completion means closing the book, means you’ve reached the end. I mean, there is no more development, no more learning, so we are bound to be incomplete and then completeness can show itself in various ways.

Rick: Yeah.

Hameed: So as a human being I’m incomplete. I know what I know, what I experience is still minuscule to the possibilities.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s a really good attitude.

Hameed: So I’m contented and happy where I am. I’m not looking, I’m not searching. People talk about the end of the seeking, that happened, you know, a few decades ago. I haven’t been seeking but I’m interested, I’m the turned on kind of guy, to life.

Rick: Yeah.

Hameed: Find out what is life, what is reality, what is God, what is Being and keeps going.

As a human being I’m always on my way. I mean, how else can it be? Because the human consciousness is what expresses Being and Being is infinite in its possibilities and the human consciousness can never know it all, we can’t.

📚 Dialogue, Teaching, and Ongoing Discovery

Rick: Good, well I guess we better wrap it up. So we’ve alluded to the possibility of future interviews and I would like to do that. You and I were talking before this interview about my doing one with Karen Johnson who is your associate and then maybe you and Karen doing one together sometime. And we’ve also brought up the possibility of maybe you and Tony Parsons having a little group interview. That’d be interesting if Tony—

Hameed: I like dialogue, I organize dialogue each year actually, with different people.

Rick: Yeah.

Hameed: I like to bring different points of view and have them interact and inform each other, it’s a nice way because, you know, each teacher goes off on their own niche, their own people, do their teaching, they don’t communicate and they don’t talk to each other. Traditions are like that and I’m thinking because we’re all here it would be interesting conversation.

Rick: It would be, it’s like cross-pollination or something.

Hameed: Yeah, yeah, something new can arise.

Rick: Some hybrids can come out of it.

Hameed: Yeah.

Closing Reflections

Rick: Good, yeah.

Hameed: Yeah, I think it’s possible. I think Karen, as I mentioned, I talked to her, she’s open.

Rick: Sure to it, we’ll do that.

Hameed: She’s willing to do it. You can interview her and then after that we’ll see whether we could organize something for two of us together since we collaborated—

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Hameed: Most of this development of this teaching, this is amazing thing. See, people have this idea about teaching—somebody gets awakened or gets realized and they go on teaching. It’s not how it happens in this path. This path is being evolved, some human beings and through them revealed more and more of itself. There were many awakenings, many realizations, but there’s a continuing revelation, an expression of reality. It’s a different way that this teaching has happened. I’m not just teaching, “I had an awakening, I’m teaching my awakening.” That’s not the story. Here is a path that’s been unfolding where that addresses many people in different places where they are.

There’s a lot of knowledge about how to teach this person and that person and the differences between them and different stages they get through and what are the obstacles and how do you deal with the obstacle in a way that’s more optimal, more efficient.

Rick: That’s good and we haven’t really done justice to teaching in this interview, I don’t think, so that could be more something for a future discussion. But obviously people can look into it and they can look at your books, you’ve got your website, you’ve got your Ridwan School out in the Bay Area, and I’ll be linking to your website from mine so that people can—and listing some of your books so that people can explore all that, you’ve written about a few of them. So let me thank you for this interview and make a few wrap-up points. I really enjoyed speaking with you, we could probably go on all day doing this because we both enjoy it so much but we’ll—

Hameed: Haven’t you, don’t you know, I’m experiencing something I wanted to know whether you’re experiencing—

Rick: Which is?

Hameed: Which is we have the same heart.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hameed: I don’t feel my heart and your heart are two hearts.

Rick: I don’t know if I experience it as clearly as you do but I feel a connection, a kind of a—I feel it’s the same heart and it’s full of nectars.

Yes, yes.

Hameed: It’s like, I don’t know, it’s my heart or your heart or it’s a combined one because we’re talking about things we’re both interested in, so there’s a meeting of the heart.

Rick: Yeah.

Hameed: Yes, that’s not just—sometimes with some people it’s a meeting in the mind. Here, it seems a meeting of the heart somehow.

Rick: That’s the way I think I do experience that in most interviews and even in daily life situations. Going in the supermarket checkout line, you experience some deep connection with the person you’re interacting with. It’s not just what you’re saying or anything, there’s a resonance on the level of being or something, or on the level of the heart as you say. It’s good. Okay, so let me conclude. I’ve been speaking with you a—

Hameed: We’ve done the interview and it is good.

Rick: It is good. What was that, that’s from some movie?

Hameed: Remember the Bible?

Rick: Yeah, yeah, they would say the—

Hameed: One that said, “It is good.”

Rick: It is good.

Hameed: And so we say our interview, it is good.

Rick: And it didn’t take us seven days and seven nights either.

Hameed: Couple of hours.

Rick: Yeah.

Hameed: Not bad.

Rick: Not bad. Well, maybe our universe isn’t completely built yet, we’ll have to see.

Hameed: Yeah.

Rick: So, I’ve been speaking with Hameed Ali, perhaps better known as A.H. Almaas—that’s his pen name—and he is based in the Bay Area, but he’s got books and a website and all sorts of ways you can interact with him if you’d like to do that. This interview is one in an ongoing series, as you’re probably aware. There are well over 200 of them now. You can find them all on batgap.com, b-a-t-g-a-p, and there are several different indices: there’s a chronological, alphabetical, and we’re even working on a geographical one where you could look in Bay Area and you’d find Hameed listed. Also there you’ll find a few other things: there is a discussion group, a forum, which we’re in the process of perhaps moderating a little bit more strictly than we have, much to the chagrin of some of the participants, but we want to keep it a little bit more civil than it has been at times.

There is a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. There is a donate button, which I appreciate people clicking—that’s my sole means of support in doing this—and there is also a link to an audio podcast which you can subscribe to through iTunes. Someone just contacted me this week and couldn’t find that link—it’s on every interview, towards the bottom you’ll see it there, it says “in the podcast” and you can click on that, you go into iTunes, subscribe, and then you can get all these interviews in audio format. So there’s all that, check it out, thank you very much and see what—

Hameed: When you say discussion group, the online discussion?

Rick: Yeah, it’s like a forum where people can go in and chit chat about the interview, this particular interview, and each forum has its own little section for each interview.

Hameed: To have discussion, back and forth kind of discussion?

Rick: Yeah, you know, about things that were discussed hopefully, and a lot of times it veers off topic and becomes completely irrelevant to the interview that was done, but we try to keep it on topic as best we can.

Hameed: Yeah, that’s interesting, so people can follow up, discuss it between them.

Rick: Yeah, and if there’s some interesting questions that come up, you know, if you have the time you could even come in there and answer some questions or whatever, that’d be good. Okay, so that’s about it. There’s one each week and so stay tuned and we’ll see you then. Thanks.

Hameed: Yeah, thanks Rick.

Rick: Thanks Hameed, great talking to you.

Hameed: Yeah, good talk to you.

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