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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Karen Johnson. Karen is the codeveloper of the Diamond Approach, along with longtime colleague A. H. Almaas. Karen has received a master’s degree in psychology from JFK University, and has been teaching with A. H. Almaas for over 40 years. Karen has written a new book called The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, where she reveals the personal experiences that birthed the teaching of the Diamond Approach and furthered its development.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Karen and I spoke about the origins of the Diamond Approach as a contemporary spiritual path, how she first met A. H. Almaas (which is the penname for Hameed Ali), and how the remarkable discoveries of this contemporary path occurred right in the midst of the suffering and trials of her very human life. We talked about how she first discovered presence as something she describes as palpable, dynamic, viscous, a weightless weight, and how this became an igniting force of spiritual awakening. We also discussed how “wisdom vehicles” appeared to both her and Hameed as part of the unfolding of the Diamond Approach. She helped us understand what wisdom vehicles [are], and she introduced us to the vehicle of diamond guidance and the freedom vehicle. Get ready to meet the Diamond Approach. Here’s my conversation with Karen Johnson.
Karen, you’re known as the codeveloper of the Diamond Approach, and I feel very fortunate to have this chance to talk to you and to introduce to listeners of Insights at the Edge what the Diamond Approach is. In the spirit of full disclosure here at the beginning, Sounds True has produced several online learning programs with you and A. H. Almaas, which is the penname for Hameed Ali. The work of the Diamond Approach that I’ve been exposed to, both through those programs as well as through Hameed’s books, has been incredibly helpful to me. It’s really influenced my own growth and development. I wanted to let our listeners know that because part of my goal with this conversation—once again, full disclosure—is to introduce people who are brand new: What is the Diamond Approach? So let’s start right there. What is the Diamond Approach?
Karen Johnson: It’s right there in the name of it, which is a certain precision to approaching our experience, whatever it might be. We have a map, and we have a whole view of reality that opens up, but really what the most important thing is is to really honor whatever experience we’re having at the moment. It isn’t that you’re supposed to get somewhere, be something in particular, have a certain state or condition, but it’s a teaching of: What are we finding at this moment? The practices are all about becoming aware of what’s here right now, and using whatever is going on with us as an entrance into a deeper level of understanding. The Diamond Approach is an approach that has precision, clarity, and so on, but it’s also really an approach to our experience.
TS: Let’s talk a little bit about that. Sometimes I imagine, as the listener to this program, that person who can’t sleep in the middle of the night and might actually be suffering in some way. Maybe there’s some sense of grief or meaninglessness that’s in their life. So let’s say somebody right now is working with something difficult. That’s why they’ve tuned in to a program like this, for some good soul medicine. How would the Diamond Approach help them be with that experience in a meaningful way?
KJ: We have many different ways of engaging, but what I would invite someone to do if they’re awake in the middle of the night [is] to see what kind of feelings are there. Emotional feelings, but also what kinds of sensations are present. What are they trying to push away from their experience, what are they allowing into their experience, what kind of ideas are going on? All of these different parts of ourself are an interactive matrix that we often don’t stop to just view and say, “Oh, well, I’m anxious. I’m feeling this clutch in my chest, or it feels like something heavy is sitting on it.” Or we don’t even sometimes name what the feeling is, and just getting to know the territory is a beginning.
What kind of ideas [am] I having as I’m sitting there? Am I winding myself up even further by, “Oh my God, I’m anxious. I’m never going to get to sleep,” without stepping back just a little bit and going, “Oh my. What’s happening there?” By sensing into this sensation of anxiety. What is that, and what’s the fear that comes with it? That might be the beginning. What we learn is how to approach our experience with interest, not just to get rid of it, but to actually—it’s the most self-respecting thing we can do, isn’t it? If somebody came to us in the middle of the night, and shook us awake, and said, “I can’t sleep and I’m really scared,” what would our response be?
If it’s someone you cared about, were very close to, saw every day—that’s who we are to ourself. We’re with ourselves every day. We’re very close. If somebody shook me awake and said, “I can’t sleep,” I would say, “Oh, OK, just a minute. What’s happening? Tell me. Tell me what’s going on.” It starts with interest and approaching ourselves in a way that is giving some kind of a friendly attitude, rather than ideas about where we ought to be and what we ought to be feeling. But really that we need to learn to be a friend, a friend to ourselves, and that friendliness can invite—if somebody says, “Well, just go back to bed and shut up,” that’s not an invitation to find out what’s happening. But if someone says, “Tell me more. What is the fear? What’s the anxiety? What does that feel like? Did something happen, or did something start this?”
Those kinds of questions invite you to say more, to get it out, express it, but it also helps you to go in and go, “Oh, I don’t know. What is that feeling? Is it fear, or anxiety, or what is it?” It’s an attitude correction, too, that we have toward ourselves, that helps us to be friendlier, kinder, [and] more interested in what we’re experiencing.
TS: Now, Karen, from the outside, I’ve heard people who have some level of cursory knowledge of the Diamond Approach say something like, “You know, when I hear about this path, it sounds a little bit like some of the teachings from psychotherapy combined with some aspects of Vajrayana Buddhism.” This is what I’ve heard a couple of people say. It sounds like some kind of synthesis, and yet I know that’s not accurate. What would you say to that person who has that impression?
KJ: I would say that it does look that way, and that is how it appears from the outside. What this teaching really stemmed from was a great deal of experiences that were coming through Hameed and I that I write about in a book I just wrote, The Jeweled Path. It describes the way that that knowledge showed up, and that the attitudes of kindness and giving ourselves—allowing attention and space around the different things that are going on. It hardly matters to me what it looks like. If people want to see it as a mixture of this or that, I think that’s just fine, and it works.
As we go deeper into our experience, we are able to reveal more of the layers that are there that keep us from feeling the real origin of what kindness is. We can actually tap into the essence of kindness, so that we’re not just taking an attitude, a position. “I’m supposed to be nice to myself.” If we really feel into the kind of suffering that’s in waking up at night scared—and if we attend to that, and move into it, sense it, feel some of the content that’s arising for us—over time we can begin to feel something emerging from within that has a tender, kind, very gentle texture to it. [It] feels much more fundamental than just an attitude we’re having toward ourselves, or a way that we learned to move into our experience.
That’s the beginning. That we try to cultivate those attitudes. But when we do—as we move through the layers and as we understand our anxiety and fear and suffering—when we really feel that emotional pain and sensation of it, it is the wrapping over something very true, and very real, and very responsive that’s a part of our nature. You can call it anything you want, but neither therapy nor Vajrayana Buddhism talks about these essential qualities, that by using our experience as doorways, we move into our experience and deepen into these little tributaries that are messages from the beyond that are coming through and [we] respond. When I feel this kindness, it helps me to tolerate the pain and the suffering in a way that lets it open up [and] lets me disidentify from it more and more.
So those essential qualities are really the pooling of truth in our bodies that we can get in touch with, that neither therapy nor many, many spiritual traditions have. That’s some of the humanness of it. They’re part of the human qualities that we have.
TS: Now, you mentioned, Karen, that you’ve written a new book called The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization. There’s a biography, meaning a story. You’ve written the story of over the past four-plus decades how the Diamond Approach [came] into being. Just to begin, I think if somebody said there’s a biography of Buddhism, or a biography of Christianity, or a biography of the Bahá’í Faith, of course we would discover the story of the visionary founder and their central teachings. This is true of your book, too.
This is the story of Hameed, and his discoveries, and his relationship with you, and the discoveries you made together along with a small group of other people who were part of the articulation of the Diamond Approach. Somehow I think people think, “It’s one thing for a spiritual path to come into being 2,000 years ago or 2,600 years ago. But today, in our world? Really? I don’t trust that.” I’m curious how you respond to that, like it’s OK 2,000 years ago, but not today.
KJ: If somebody said that to me, I’d ask them why. We need it now more than ever, from my point of view. But also I think one of the reasons I call it as a biography is not just to look into Hameed’s and my lives and see the way they became intertwined—and the way that the teaching moved through us, and became articulated, and felt, and experienced, and formalized into what it is today, as the Diamond Approach—but I also chose the word because it is a living teaching that really is erupting during our lifetime. That is so crucial that neither Hameed nor I take credit for its wisdom. What we feel we are are carriers for it, that we have brought it about, and it worked its way through us, basically.
That’s the whole meaning of the word “biography” for me, is to really speak to the fact that this was a force coming through, that we were unsuspecting individuals, we didn’t really have an idea and certainly didn’t set out to have this become a bona fide spiritual path. We recognized that at some point.
TS: Now I’m curious about this point I made, just to circle back around to it for a moment, because somebody else made this comment to me recently about how we love innovation in certain parts of our culture. When it comes to science and medicine, let’s be innovative. New is terrific. But when it comes to spirituality, we like to go back into ancient history, and we don’t like innovation. I’m curious: Why do you think that is?
KJ: I think that’s very interesting. I like the juxtaposition in the question that we are so compelled to come up with new things, but not spiritual paths. I would say I two thoughts about that. I do see people wanting to come up with their own spiritual paths, and taking steps to try to identify new ways of doing things, blending new kinds of practices, coming up with things. So I do see that some, but there is a trust in the tried and true. I think that that has a lot of validity to it that the practices and the worldview, the spiritual view, of the ancient traditions has really brought about a great deal of beauty, and wisdom, and realization that they actually work and have proven to do so over time. They work in certain ways.
But I like the question. I feel stimulated about thinking about that further, so I do have to say that I do see that some people want to come up with their own spiritual paths, and I do know of a few people who claim to be doing that. I think with Hameed and the small group that surrounded him—at the time, I happened to be participating very intimately with this—we weren’t interested in innovation. That wasn’t really the point for us. What Hameed was very clear about is that he knew what presence was. He did not start teaching anything and wasn’t interested in teaching anything until he was very clear that it was real, that it was true, and that he had a truth to share. That really started out as the simple message. Practices of presence, being present, and he knew what presence was. He didn’t begin it as a teaching right away.
Over time, as students began to experience presence the way we describe it in the school—not just being present to the moment, not being just attending to what’s happening, but actually in touch with a certain palpable, substantial sense of reality—then he started to talk about the way he understood those. The teachings of ancient times have such a grounding, and have a lot of respect, and have been around for so long that people don’t really question them. I think that [it] is easier to imagine them having very basic truths than people coming up with something in the 20th, 21st century that claims to be a timeless wisdom.
TS: Now one of the things you write about in The Jeweled Path is presence, and you write, “Presence is the igniting force of awakening.” I thought that was a very profound statement that in the Diamond Approach, presence is the igniting force of awakening. What I’d love to know more about is how you experience presence, and how Hameed introduced you to presence, and did that become an igniting force of awakening in your own life?
KJ: That’s a big story. How I experience presence over the years has changed depending on different states and conditions that show up. I would say I experience presence very fluidly, and at the same time, I feel myself in a different condition than just presence. But for the sake of our interest and what presence is these days: how it began for me was experiences of openings over time. In my twenties, I would feel heat, and I would feel tenderness, or I would feel joy, and realize, in speaking with Hameed, that these weren’t just affects. They weren’t just emotional; there was actually some kind of substance to them, like light. That light had a weight to it, but it was weightless weight.
It really felt palpable, it felt real. It came in different qualities, and I would move in and out of feeling those from time to time in our inquiries. But when it became an igniting force was one evening when Hameed and I were talking about our process, and he was beginning to talk about some changes in his life, and his value for presence and what it was, and I saw he was so touched. I saw something so real. He was glowing with light as he spoke about his—it was almost like taking a vow as I was watching him talk about these things. If he was in a vow, expressing a vow, and how much he wanted to convey that, and I realized I wasn’t quite getting the profundity of it.
When I felt joy and I felt light, it was like, “Well, that’s great. That’s really good, and yes, I feel it. It feels really light, and happy, and it feels like I have a little lightbulb in my chest.” But I realized I wasn’t getting something profound about it, and he stretched out his hand into the air as he asked me to put my palm up. As if he was extracting some kind of fluid from the air—which I realize now he was just motioning his hand to distill something into the palm of his hands from within him—and he poured this viscous presence, we would say, this viscous light, this viscous liquid, into the palm of my hand. At that moment, I also felt the transmission of the value of it, because it had weight, but it wasn’t physical.
It had a texture that wasn’t physical. It had a quality that I couldn’t describe in any other way other than some kind of divine presence. It had a light to it that wasn’t photons, and it began a journey through my body that made me feel that it was awakening at every point this viscous substance touched me. It flowed through my hand into my arm, through my arm and shoulders into my chest, and throughout my body. I felt lit up, and that was the ignition.
I felt like I had been initiated, and we don’t usually have that kind of transmission in our work. We do it more slowly. We do a different kind of igniting process, where we try to really elicit that flame from within people. My flame had been lit. I was curious; I was interested. I was really on a spiritual-seeking mission, but this put that to rest. I felt I’d found something, and it began to unravel me from the inside.
TS: OK, Karen. I’m imagining a listener who says, “I’m not sure I know what presence is in the way that Karen’s describing it: a viscous substance, a weightless weight. When I previously had thought about presence, I thought of it as some kind of ‘I am’ quality. Yes, I get it. Being. I’m here, this moment, being. OK.” But the description you gave had a lot of nuance to it, and a sense when you talked about the viscous fluid, somebody might say, ‘I’m not sure I’m there.’” How could you help that person?
KJ: Being shows up in many ways. When you asked me how that force got ignited for me in a real way, that was how it occurred. That isn’t how it occurs for everyone. Being can show up in many ways, and it does have “am-ness” in it. I am-ness. It is a consciousness. It’s conscious of itself by its very being, and sometimes that feels like a presence in the chest of love, softness. Within that softness, it doesn’t feel like a physical softness, it feels like a softness that when you feel it you know it’s love, because there’s a way in which you can’t describe it as anything else.
You can feel a sweetness to it, or you can feel, as you were talking about, a being. I am. I am, and I know that I am because I feel it. It can just feel like a solid or some kind of a presence that’s just: I’m here. I feel I’m here, and I know that I’m here, and it’s undoubtable because it feels like I’m feeling the reality of me. It can come in many ways. All of them, each way, is a way presence can emerge, but all of them have the sense that this is fundamentally true and I know it. It can be dynamic, it can be still, it can be loving, it can be gentle, it can be bright, it can be happy, but all of them have that sense of “I am.”
TS: It’s helpful, and I think we’re giving listeners here a sense of the—you started by talking about the precision, that this is the Diamond Approach. Because I think most of the time previously, if people had heard the term “presence,” they would have thought of it as one thing, not as this multifaceted, dynamic, changing thing.
KJ: Right. Well, and responsive. Yes, it’s not just one thing. It’s all things, including any possibility of experience. But to get in touch with a spiritual presence, many different traditions talk about the condition of “I am” in very, very different ways, and those are all valid. But you’re right, it’s not just one thing.
TS: Now tell me why beginning with presence—at least as you were talking about how Hameed started by teaching about presence—why this is such an important starting point.
KJ: For us, that is the goal—the first goal. We’re goalless with many, many goals, because the perspective from presence is a perspective that is really from a basic reality. It’s something that we all are capable of being in touch with much more easily than we know. We often think we have to be very transcendent to get in touch with it. We often feel we have to be very expansive, [to] go beyond this individual. But for us, what we have found is that presence is really knocking at the door all of the time, every day. It is a matter of shifting our focus enough to notice what are the hints we’re getting each day that are messages that are saying, “Look over here. Look a little deeper than what you’re looking at right now, but I’m right here. I’m peeking out. I’m in your smell. I’m in your eyes that are seeing. I’m in your reactivity. I’m in your sensations, but don’t assume that what you’re feeling, sensing, and knowing is all that there is.”
The practice of presence—many of our practices are practices that help us sensitize our bodies so that we can feel deeper than we usually do. We work with our emotions so that we can open them up to understand: What is the energy behind all those reactions? We engage in using our minds in certain ways that let us go beyond just the known. So opening these doorways of the ways we usually experience, you find presence not so far behind those things. Then as you get more in touch with presence, presence will naturally take you deeper to its source. It’s like finding the little stream that leads to the river that leads to the ocean, and all of that happens by just looking at the raindrop on the leaf that falls into the stream and letting it take you to the river.
TS: Now, Karen, for someone, once again, who’s new to the Diamond Approach, is listening to this conversation and says, “This is all really interesting, but who is this Hameed guy anyway?” Who is he? Karen, how did you meet him, and how did you start working together? I know this is what you describe in great detail in The Jeweled Path, but for our listeners, give them a sense.
KJ: Hameed. He’s a very unique individual that doesn’t think he’s unique, and that’s one of the unique things about him. I first met Hameed through a friend that I was going to art school with. He came over to pick her up to go to a meeting that evening, and that meeting was a meeting of Seekers after Truth that Claudio Naranjo used to facilitate. He came in the living room, and I was sitting on the floor, and he was this skinny fellow. He looked down at me with this broad grin, and I was disarmed. I was quite shy at the time, and when he looked at me, he looked interested. He looked happy to see me. He greeted me in just such a lovely, open way, and I looked back at him, and I was perplexed that somebody was so open and kind and friendly right off the bat with me. That’s how we first met.
Two years later, we were in a car on our way to Boulder. We had been brought together by that same friend because they were going to go out to Boulder to start to do the Fischer-Hoffman Process with people, and I had nothing to do. I had just left my boyfriend, and they asked me to go along. There I was, in the car with him, and we spent many, many hours talking. That ride in my little VW bug, I consider that VW bug the first vehicle of the Diamond Approach because it was a very friendly and open conversation, and it set the tone for many, many conversations to come. When we lived together, we would stay up very late at night discussing things, and posing questions to one another, and venturing into our experience. It was around then that he was beginning to wake up to presence.
He’d had many experiences, of course, of transcendence and all kinds of things, but in the last—I guess by the time we got in that car, he already was onto something about presence. [He] had already been discovering and writing in his journals about it, and had started to investigate it further. That’s when our conversations began to take off into realms that I had not really entered before, and we were just immediate good friends. It was immediate, and we still have that kind of intimacy—although it’s developed further—but Hameed as a person has always had a certain innocence, and openness, and interest, and inquisitiveness.
I’ve never met anybody so inquisitive, so curious. He had a lot of training that got his mind to be able to make a lot of different kinds of connections. He has trained in physics, and was at the University of California, Berkeley, and about to get his PhD when he decided, “This is not the truth for me. This is not right.” He walked into the—I know this is a long story, but there’s so many pieces to it.
TS: I’m appreciating it, please.
KJ: There’s so many pieces to it. He walked into the cafeteria—this is a riot—he said all of a sudden he had this vision of all these brilliant guys, and most of them were guys at the time. There are many more women there now, but mostly guys walking around. He saw all these brilliant heads with no bodies, and to him, that was a nightmare. He said, “I don’t want to be like that. That’s not what I want.” I think that was the moment that he began to realize that this wasn’t the trajectory he really wanted to be on.
From that day forward, every time he went to work, he was supposed to be working on these incredibly intricate, and elegant, and beautiful equations. He found math just gorgeous, but he’d fall asleep every single time. So that’s when he began to realize something’s wrong, and he left.
TS: OK, now you made a joke that your VW bug was one of the first vehicles of the Diamond Approach, and the reason I know that’s a joke is because within the Diamond Approach you talk quite a bit and there are many teachings that are on “wisdom vehicles.” Part of your book The Jeweled Path is that you introduce listeners to the discovery of a whole “fleet,” as you call them, of wisdom vehicles that you and Hameed discovered together. What is a wisdom vehicle?
KJ: I would say that most spiritual traditions have messengers of some sort or another that are conduits for the experiences and the actual felt wisdom that has to be part of any spiritual path. Unless it’s felt and known as an actual illuminated experience, it’s just intellectual, or emotional, or something. The wisdom vehicles for us are forms of presence that showed up in our experiences that opened us up to the perspective of the Diamond Approach. So we consider them our wisdom vehicle because they brought the wisdom, they brought the perspective, and they also illuminated our consciousness in such a way that took us through the process of moving through the various kinds of barriers: emotional barriers, conceptual barriers, and many of the kinds of ego structures. These illuminated presences were the wisdom vehicles that brought that knowledge of how to approach our experience, and what brought out our experience to view, in certain ways.
TS: Karen, can you give me an example of a wisdom vehicle that you and Hameed discovered and what it was like?
KJ: This gets into a little bit of detail and depth, but I’ll try to keep it simple. The first and main vehicle that really opened up a certain way of using mind to go beyond mind and to help us to get more precise about our experience is what we call the Diamond Guidance. That started as a pulsing in the forehead. Hameed began to feel this pulsation, and this pulsation got stronger and stronger. He actually began to experience it not just as a pulsation, but it began to feel like a tingling and a delicate presence.
That delicate presence—he has the capacity to really sense detail in his experience over years and years of practice and opening his body to sensate experience, but he could feel that the pulsing had little immaculate light diamonds. He also recognized that this particular presence in the forehead was implicitly in the background, guiding the way that he would enter experience all along.
In other words, to be interested, and curious, and suspend your ideas about what you know, but to feel the real love to know that you want to know what the truth is. As he began to make the connections between his usual way of practicing and our approach to our experience, he began to realize that this was the source of that practice, of our inquiry. So we began to realize that this presence had the wisdom inherent in it of presence, diamondness, clarity, but it also allowed him to use the knowledge of presence and historical knowledge, and make connections between things of content of experience—at the same time being able to stay in touch with and be in touch with presence itself. That was a big awakening for us. Does that make sense?
TS: It does. I think the question I have about it is: Why call that the vehicle of Diamond Guidance instead of, “Oh, there was some internal subtle body opening process that was occurring at the forehead?”
KJ: Both are true, that there needed to be an openness to that possibility, but it also can extend beyond the body. It can be outside the body, and it isn’t reliant on the body. Even though it uses mind, it doesn’t have to be in the head. Also as that particular vessel began to bring out more wisdom, Hameed saw it as a vehicle for the teaching, that it was a way that the teaching was disseminating its wisdom. Just like, for instance, angels coming and bringing a certain kind of vision that shows somebody something. It was very much like that. It was really showing us something and bringing out wisdom that helped us make connections that we wouldn’t have made without it.
TS: Now one of the things that I thought was so interesting about the way that you wrote [The] Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach is as the book moves on and on, the reader meets a series of these different wisdom vehicles that you and Hameed encounter, and that bring different teachings to you. Interspersed between the meeting of these powerful wisdom vehicles, you and Hameed are having human lives, human lives that are filled with the trials and tribulations that we humans go through. You tell a story at a certain point of a breakup you were going through, and the loneliness you were feeling right after the discovery of one of these wisdom vehicles, and I thought, “That’s so interesting. These are humans going through their life while they’re having these incredible spiritual breakthroughs.”
KJ: Yes. That’s part of why I wrote the book is to demystify the teaching. It shows the human side and that the teaching is for humans, that spiritual teachings are not for gods and goddesses, they’re really for human beings. How we worked the teachings that were coming, and the issues we went through. We really digested it, and it really educated us as we integrated the insights [and] the illuminations. But we went through a lot of suffering and really encountered our innermost demons, and difficulties, and barriers, and lack of development of certain things that we needed to apply ourselves.
That’s partly the reason I wrote the book is to show how the work really came through. It didn’t just land on our head, open itself up, and begin reading itself through us, you know? We didn’t just have these golden plates fall on our head, that really we were worked by it and of it. I wanted to show the human side. I wanted to bring in the context for all the incredible books that Hameed has written and really contextualize them, and show how the wisdom emerged, how the teachings showed up. Not just the end product of what the teaching is—which is amazing, and beautiful, and so precise, so clear, so intelligent—but it’s also something that came through us as human beings. It also displays the practice in action of our willingness to attend to our experience no matter what it was, and that’s really important.
TS: I wonder if you could share with us, because it was so moving in the book, that moment in time when you’re going through the end of your marriage. What you went through, and how it related to the unfolding of the teaching in your experience.
KJ: For me, I had had experiences of my heart in various ways, and deepening over time. That’s part of my need to have left the marriage is the depths I was beginning to experience. I knew that that was my calling, and I had to find a different situation that would allow me to focus there.
It was so hard to leave, and I was very lonely, but it also put me in touch with a truth in my heart that I felt great intimacy with when I went into that loneliness. I felt the rightness, and the realness, and the goodness of the direction I was taking. Again, presence arose in a way that I knew this was right. It wasn’t just intuitive, although leaving my marriage was—I had a sense for a long time that I needed to, and so there was an intuitive movement in that direction. But at this point, after I had left and I was lonely, and sad, and touched in, there was a clarity of certainty and this steadfast feeling in my heart that: “Yes, I’m going in the right way.” It was really something from within that gave me a sense of direction, and precision, and intimacy with myself, and that loneliness was a doorway for me to feel my heart in a new way.
TS: One of the special moments for me in reading The Jeweled Path was reading about how Hameed and you together discovered the freedom wisdom vehicle, and I wonder if you can share that story with our listeners.
KJ: That gets very esoteric, and I don’t know how many people would really relate to that so much. But one thing I do want to say is that part of the intent in writing this is to show how such incredible experiences that seem so esoteric and so far out really do occur within daily life, and that daily life is not only the entrance into them, but that each step into presence—all the way through boundless dimensions and expanse to the freedom vehicle that you’re talking about—really is also a way. All of the teaching is not just for the movement into ourselves more deeply, but ways of expressing that in the world, and coming into the world, being able to step and walk in the world as those various presences, and responsiveness, and those dimensions of experience.
The freedom vehicle was a long time coming, in terms of understanding it. It showed up in the late ’80s, 1980s, but we really didn’t understand what it was. So I’m not exactly sure which story you’re referring to, because it’s sprinkled throughout from the ’80s.
TS: I was referring to the connection between you and Hameed about—
KJ: Toward the end of the book?
TS: Yes, towards the end of the book. Tell me how the freedom vehicle showed up in the ’80s first. Take us through this a little bit.
KJ: How it showed up was a certain kind of malaise at first. We got bored. We had been through all the boundless dimensions, we had been in the absolute depths for many years by the end of the ’80s, and something started to occur that felt like it wasn’t boundless and it wasn’t not boundless. It felt very gray and almost depressive until we began to realize that there was something to it. It felt very dispassionate, and we began to realize that we were stepping into another arena in our experience, and that that experience was a different kind of opening. I described that pretty well in the book; I don’t know that I need to go into all of that right now. But as this nothingness began to show up, we began to experience something changing in our relationship to space, and that relationship to space was—what we felt realization was changed because it no longer felt expansive. It no longer had an extension to it.
The freedom vehicle is something that opened up the whole arena really beyond time and space, where space—we used to talk about it as space collapsing. So there was no sense of distance, and that the particular became very important again. The very particular of me, of you, of things, they just became so evident that they were what they were. They were not arising any longer in a field of consciousness or a medium, they were just what they were. We began to experience that. In fact, this new way of experiencing was . . . (We’re getting a bunch of noise and I don’t know why that is. Sorry.)
That new way of experiencing felt like the universe was inside us, but not only that, but you could relate to another human being in a way that there’s no distance between you. But at the same time, you can feel this interpenetrating of the two without it actually taking—it’s not like merging; it’s like you remain fully autonomous yet interpenetrated. It was a whole new way of experiencing things. Hameed and I, at one point when we were sitting together, practicing and studying this new condition, we looked at each other and were pulled toward one another. Our foreheads met, and there was a huge explosion, and it was like a quasar going off in our foreheads. Then our entire being became one being. That we felt we were no longer two, and we also weren’t one. We weren’t merged.
That was the full experience of interpenetration, where it was like a—if you can imagine a crystal becoming very big, [with] two consciousnesses inside it. There’s facets to this crystal, and each one is completely open, and each one has a very specific view of reality, and each view of reality isn’t from a particular source where they all meet. They’re all very different, they’re all valid, and they’re all portals that you can move through into that universe.
Our meeting in that way was feeling that we were two but not two. That we were one, but not one. There was a way in which we still had some sense of, “I’m me, he’s he, but we are this one vehicle.” So this is quite esoteric, really. I don’t know how to talk about it in a simple way, other than it was a recognition of what our bond had been all along. A recognition of what that first moment was when we said hello—the simplicity in it, the openness in it, the innocence in it. This felt like the source of that bond that had been there, the source of our friendship, and that it was all for the sake of the teaching. It also feels like that vehicle is the source of the Diamond Approach, and that that’s where the origin of it really arose from.
TS: Very beautiful. Very beautiful. I pulled a quote from your book that was powerful, and I think is an extension of this discussion of the freedom vehicle, and I want to read it. Here’s the quote: “There is no single, final, ultimate truth waiting to be discovered. Being keeps revealing new ways to experience and know reality if we’re not attached. And finding some ultimate condition, we will have the privilege of experiencing truth in its endless display.”
I wanted to bring that forward in that Sounds True has created a whole teaching series, an online course, on endless enlightenment with A. H. Almaas, as well as an online course that you and Hameed created together—along with two senior teachers from the Diamond Approach—on Inquiry, the core practice of the Diamond Approach. Inquiry, the course, is called The Vehicle of Endless Enlightenment, and I wonder if you can make a comment on this idea of endless enlightenment.
KJ: Yes. There are many, many comments that if you watch that, and engage in that course, you’ll find out about. But I think if we look at reality as a static and stagnant thing that we’re going to find some basis, some foundation that this is real and that’s it.
There’s several things. One is: reality never appears that way to us. It’s always changing in our experience. What is it that makes us feel that we have to get to some basic, fundamental condition that is going to be the basis for all? The other is that we all have experiences of being with another person, being in different situations where new things arise, new things come up. We have different kinds of responses when we’re with another person. Each person we’re with brings out a whole different kind of opening, different kind of relationship, a different way of entering experience. So when we engage in discovery of truth, we begin to understand that the display is constant and it’s always new and fresh. There’s all kinds of ways that the truth can manifest that you’ve never thought about before—never knew about.
The same is true in getting in touch with essence of all kinds, dimensions of all kinds. And when essence and our nature is free, all kinds of things elaborate on themselves, and change, and evolve. Just the way creatures evolve in the world, our ability to experience new universes within ourselves is quite similar, and it’s not always the same. There’s different combinations of things, and that can lead to a whole new and different kind of experience. So I think to see the universe as static, we have nothing that gives evidence to that anywhere. The same is true for the inner universe.
TS: Karen, as we come to a conclusion here, I’m curious to know: What do you feel is your promise, or your role, your purpose in the Diamond Approach moving forward? What’s your inner commitment?
KJ: My inner commitment is to—there’s several. One is that I’m building a parsonage that I’m going to live in on our property. I want to serve the work in any way I can that brings people to it who are touched by it, who relate to it, who resonate with it, and also to make some kind of an impact on spiritual discourse in general. I feel that the Diamond Approach has an offering and has wisdom that can bring those traditions very beautiful nuggets for their own openings, their own learnings. So I look forward to more discussions with people from other traditions so that there can be a crosspollination of views and discussions, where the wisdom that we all have can be supportive and help one another.
TS: Then just finally, what’s your hope for the Diamond Approach and its impact in the world? What do you hope will result from it—from this teaching and its impact in the world—in the years to come?
KJ: That people are more able to value the individual consciousness, the human soul, the way that the individual is a display of a magical, beautiful universe. It’s not an illusion [and] it’s not something to get over; it’s something to develop and love so that we can really be here in the world, have real human contact, and help each other learn how to be free in a more real way. I don’t think that’s going to happen for everyone in the world, but I think that it can happen for those of us who are fortunate enough to be engaged in spiritual practice. That we can value one another as individuals, as well as the depth that connects us all.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Karen Johnson. She is the codeveloper of the Diamond Approach, and she’s written a beautiful new book called The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization. She’s also the coauthor, with A. H. Almaas, of a book called The Power of Divine Eros, and with Sounds True, she has co-taught an online course on Inquiry: The Vehicle of Endless Enlightenment. I’m happy to say [she] is also one of the co-teachers of an upcoming online course that will be released in 2019 on presence.
Karen, thank you. Thank you so much for helping introduce new people to the Diamond Approach. Thank you.
KJ: Thank you, Tami, and I hope they got a spark of delight out of it.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
