I’m finally beginning to settle into my Zoom Diamond Approach retreat that began July 25. I’m meeting with the co-founding teachers of this psychological-spiritual work, Hameed Ali and Karen Johnson, along with 1,300 friends from around the world who follow this path of soul-development.
Yesterday afternoon I was in a group of five other teachers of this path for an inquiry. It was twilight for a female colleague in Switzerland, and a male colleague in Australia was downing cups of coffee since it was 4 am his time. This “all-school” retreat is usually held at the beautiful Asilomar Conference Center off the Pacific Ocean near Monterey, California—imagine one of our state parks with lodges, cabins, and dining halls, but with boardwalks running throughout with a short walk to the beach. Not surprisingly, I found it more difficult to settle into this virtual retreat with all the distractions of home and laptop programs.
The Diamond Path, as we call it, focuses on trusting the awareness of our present-moment experience as a guide—if we are sincere and honest in exploring right where we are in any moment, even if it is a painful or stuck place—to reveal any and all blocks to the recognition of our ultimate oneness with the Beloved, the Divine, and hence, our oneness with all creation and all beings as arisings of the Divine Love.
This work enables soul-development, or the maturation of soul—what mystic paths have called purification, or as William Blake called “cleansing the doors of perception.” Here’s Blake’s exact quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
[Note: see the Sounds True “Resilience” series’ video in this newsletter for a current interview with Hameed Ali (A.H. Almaas) by Tami Simon for more awareness of the Diamond Approach. It includes comments about his new book of teachings that I’m currently reading, Love Unveiled: Discovering the Essence of the Awakened Heart. Or link directly HERE]
Richard Rohr often writes about “experience” being the missing leg of the spiritual-development stool. Those legs may also often include sacred texts, spiritual traditions, and reason (although Rohr believes we’ve overemphasized reason in the West so much that we need to leave it off the spiritual path for the time being).
Throughout my 20 years on the Diamond Path, I’ve valued seeing how the transformation of consciousness occurs for people with strong religious faith, and for those from no religious tradition, or those who have given up on religious faith, in this process of painstakingly—and sometimes painfully—reconnecting with their true nature as unique expressions of the Divine.
Just this week in two different inquiries, one of my dear friends on the path was disclosing how something in her just could never “belong” to the Roman Catholic tradition that seemed to be so important a devotional path for the rest of her family. She is one of the most heartfelt, compassionate, and giving people I know, and knows the Beloved in a way that does not correspond to that tradition’s “God.” Meanwhile, a woman from Europe was describing how the experiential work of the Diamond Approach had actually helped her understand, and actually experience, her Catholic faith from the inside, and had made the teachings and practices of that tradition come alive and be real for her.
I can relate, in that the beautiful concepts of incarnation, death-and-resurrection, the God in whom we live and move and have our being, the presence of the Divine in Jesus, and the personalness of the Living Christ, all pale in comparison to actually knowing experientially what it might mean to be an expression of the Divine (the “Word made flesh”), the path of dying to each moment as each new moment begins in the Mystery of new life, the complete immanence of the ever-present Beloved as who we truly are, hence as our true Presence as well as the true Presence of the world, and the uniquely personal way each of our particular histories pushes us into the path of liberation and freedom if we are open, as Parker Palmer says, to “letting our life speak.”
My first immersion into the depths of spiritual work was a 5-day retreat 40 years ago while I was struggling in my first full-time pastorate in a tiny church. The workshop was called “Experiential Theology,” and this to me, puts things in the proper order; our life experience should inform our understandings of the Sacred, not the other way around, although the intellectual understanding may be the starting point for all of us, as it was for me. But then our experiences in life challenge us to keep rethinking our beliefs. This calls for a questioning of our beliefs all along the way about life, God, the world, and especially about who we are, as we journey toward becoming our true selves. As another poet, T.S. Eliot, said so well, that journey is the long way around to coming back to who we truly are:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Each new realization along this path is the awareness that once again we’ve arrived home, and continues with the surprise that home is where we always are.
– David Hett is the Spiritual Director of The Burkhart Center
