Tami Simon: Welcome friends to this Sounds True One special on the many faces of Awakening. This is something that I’ve been thrilled every time I think about it over the last several weeks, knowing that it’s coming up. And here it is for the many faces of awakening we have with us. Hameed Ali, he’s the founder of the Diamond Approach, and he writes under the pen name a H Ness.
We’re also joined by Zen teacher Henry Shukman, and let me tell you a little bit about the origin. This special event. It sounds true one in many ways. The seed of it was planted approximately 10 years ago when I had the privilege of recording a series with Hameed Ali on Endless and Enlightenment. And in that series I learned many, many things.
But one of them was, it was a correction in my mind state that somehow I thought enlightenment was kind of like a place I was gonna go to and land there and be a somewhere. And instead it opened my eyes to this notion of endless enlightenment, a living process of new discoveries. Discoveries that who knows what they’ll even be in the future.
Alright, the second input into this particular dialogue is that I was reading Henry Mann’s book, a beautiful book called Original Love. It inspired our team. It sounds true, to release a new meditation series with Henry that’s called Awakening. It’s coming out this month. And in reading original Love, the final section of the book, he offers something called a Taxonomy of Awakening.
And I was like, Henry, you have a taxonomy of awakening. That’s amazing. And he offered four different faces of awakening. So these two inputs together have brought us to this moment where we’ll be having this dialogue between Hameed and Henry. Welcome to you both. Welcome.
Henry Shukman: Thank you so much, Tami. It’s fantastic to be with you. And you too. Hameed a great
A.H. Almaas: Yeah. Good to be here. Both you.
Tami Simon: You’re meeting each other for the first time? Yes.
A.H. Almaas: It is the first time. Yeah.
Henry Shukman: Yeah, Although I’ve met Hameed through some of his teachings, uh, already, but, uh, um, never in any kind of, uh, personal interaction like this.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah, I watched some of your videos. That’s, uh, that’s I know some, yeah.
Tami Simon: Alright. Well, here at the beginning I’m gonna see if we can create some distinctions and I don’t wanna lose anyone in our audience at the same time. I don’t wanna be Miss Muddy, if you will, like I’ve already introduced. Enlightenment as a term. And then Henry, in referencing your work, I’ve introduced the term awakening, and one of the things I’ve noticed is that people often use these terms interchangeably.
That sounds true. We often use them interchangeably, but perhaps they’re not simply interchangeable. And perhaps each of you relates to those two words differently. And I think it would be good, just so we actually know what we’re talking about with some level of clarity, if you would each describe how you use the term awakening, what you’re referring to, and if you use the term enlightenment, what you’re referring to.
Henry Shukman: Okay, I’ll, I’ll recklessly dive in. So I, I must admit that I use them interchangeably these days simply because I found the term enlightenment possibly a little grand. You know, I, and, and so these days I mostly talk about awakening. But I think, I mean by it, what I used to mean and what my teachers used to.
mean when they used the term enlightenment, there’s another issue with enlightenment because in the Western tradition it means something quite different from what it means in the kind of spirituality we are talking about.
You know, there was the age of enlightenment, basically the 18th century starting in the uk, especially somewhat in continental Europe as well, somewhat even in the pre United States, which was thinking about, you know, new possibilities for social reform and for freedom and for the rise of science and, and scientific thinking over religious dogma.
All of that got put under this term enlightenment in the western tradition, which is what I grew up in. So there’s a little bit of murkiness there already for me with the term enlightenment. But if I, so if I just stick to the term. Awakening For me, it, it means a couple of things above all, and then it can mean various other things.
But some sense that my ordinary sense of self and its perceptions of things has been kind of superseded, has been overturned, has either vanished or somehow, I don’t really like the word transcend personally ’cause I don’t think it’s about going up above. I think it’s, I’ve seen through it and I’ve discovered that there’s some other order of existence of experience that’s always been here in which I am not separate. I’m basically not separate from anything else. there’s a, there’s a, it’s another order or register of experience, another dimension, uh. It’s a, it where we, when we taste it, we know that we found something more real the world we’d, world and self that we had previously been of thoroughly convinced by. So for me it’s sort of, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s is, is is gotta have some sense of just discovering and having sort of breakthrough to me that I’m not just what I thought I was, I’m part of something much larger and I’m inseparable from it.
usually don’t use the word enlightenment. I avoid it mostly because when I first encountered it, I encountered it in the Buddhist perspective where enlightenment meant Buddhahood. And I don’t claim to know who the hood, so I avoid the word completely. Awakening makes more sense to me. Many people use awakening or realization and so I agree with Henry Awakening means recognizing what we are that is not the usual self, there’s more to us or, or something different about us. That is, um, because the usual self is, um, our psychology and physicality and, you know, sense of personality that we developed throughout history um, our. Awakening is recognition that we have what I call true nature. I don’t use the word Buddha. Nature, true nature. So true nature means recognizing, I, I, I have a realness to me that is beyond the history that I’m aware of, that is beyond the physical and the mental and all that, that is just pure, um, uh, awareness, uh, sense of ness and awareness and the consciousness that knows itself by being itself. And that is beyond anything that happens. Not emotional, not mental, not physical. And so it is a discovery me. In the beginning it was quite a discovery. It. difference changed my life, you know, changed my life. Now I don’t have a life. It is just to nature.
Tami Simon: I mean, my experience is more like, you.
A.H. Almaas: know, reality just happen. Things happen, things are done, you know? Uh, so awakening, that’s one thing, you know, bring us to the very heart of the discussion. It is not just one thing. We, we don’t just wake up once. I didn’t have just one awakening and continued forever. It wasn’t like that. The waking was the beginning. Because what I call true nature, which is our essential fundamental, you know, inherent, um, nature has many ways it can show itself, which is I think why there are so many, so many tradition each one talking about their, their recognition, the true self or, or through nature, which we, when you study the tradition, you, you see they’re not exactly talking exactly about the same thing or the many similarities. And so in time, at the beginning I thought was the same thing, because you remember, um, till the end of the 20th century, uh, there was, um, um, a view that, um, every, you know, different teaching and talking about the same thing differently. And I first believe that, but then I recognize now from my experience, not talk about the same thing. There are similarities, different phases of the same thing, but it’s not same thing. That’s why it’s not just different in language. actually different in the experience, which for me, opened up thing made think more interesting even than before.
Tami Simon: Well, you know, Hameed, I think that’s okay. Uh, there’s so much to talk about here, but I think you’re making a very important point, and I would say. With 90% of the conversations I have with authors and teachers, that sounds true. Along with our staff, everybody’s always trying to collapse everything to say that everybody’s saying the same thing.
These are all roads leading to the same mountaintop. And whenever I disagree, everyone’s like, wow, aren’t you the downer? You don’t really, you know, come on. But I think you’re making a very important point. Hameed. I wonder, Henry, if you have a comment about that.
Henry Shukman: I, I completely agree. I think you know that idea, you know, many paths. One mountain, see it as many paths, one mountain range, and there are different. So I think of. Reality, true nature, original nature, Buddha Nature it’s a, it’s a sort of, it’s a jewel, it’s a prism and it has different faces and, and typically focus on one of those faces. Mostly they go all in on one. Maybe not exclusively. Some may be more open to, to a few dimensions. Um, so I think, so we can talk about different. of awakened in different ways. One is what is the actual nature of reality, the best that we can know it that sort of ultimate level. It shows itself in different ways, and we could talk about some of those ways, um, sure. But then absolutely, as Hameed was saying, it’s, it never stops being a process itself. It’s, it’s actually even, while we may say it’s unchanging, it’s also constantly unfolding. a DAUs idea that it’s blazing forth all the time. It’s erupting out of nothing, creating this moment, which is ever changing, but there’s something perhaps unknowable or perhaps experienceable yet unknowable, which is not changing. You know, we, we could come to that. I’d love to discuss that at some point if we can. But it’s, but our own. Understanding of it is continually evolving. I mean, Dogan said, you know, he’s got this beautiful line, you know, to you, you, you might well know it. I’ll just, uh, it’s quite short, so I’ll just say it. To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened, to have the body and mind self another drop away. To have that.
body and mind of self, another drop away is to, um, it’s to be awakened by, um, the 10,000 things
A.H. Almaas: Yeah.
Henry Shukman: this and the traceless awakening. This traceless awakening goes on forever.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah.
Henry Shukman: awakening without trace goes on forever.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah. And that’s why I like Doug and Doug and has that view too. He, because he talks about many things, actually,
Henry Shukman: that’s right.
A.H. Almaas: most of some of the things I, some of them I understand, some of them, I don’t know what he’s talking about, but he had definitely talked about many things. He, he doesn’t make, uh, awakening one thing him saying that.
He just does it, you know?
Henry Shukman: Yeah.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah.
Henry Shukman: There’s a, there’s one place where he talks about four dimensions of awakening. One is like, is just all one another is absolutely empty, and another is completely infinitely creative. And the final one is, it’s never apart from you right where you are. I think I, I love. All of the above, but I think it’s really important to remember, especially for folks listening, you know, we are not talking about some abstract thing out there that is sort of not really to do with us where you might be interested in it.
You might not be interested it. You can go and find it sometime if you’re curious. No, it’s about our very own life. It’s sort of, it’s important to me to remember that there’s, you know, it’s not abstract. It’s, it’s about the immediacy of our life right now. Always.
Tami Simon: Now, Henry, you mentioned blazing forth and in original love. That was one of the four faces of awakening that really got my attention. And I wonder if you can say a little bit more about it and then I’d love to hear what Hameed’s senses of how that fits in, if you will, to the diamond approach mapping of awakening.
Henry Shukman: Well, okay. I mean, for me, partly it came out of an experience I, I once had, but it was very sort of vivid and visceral. It was as if I could just suddenly see that the entire moment was pouring out of nothing like a black hole in reverse. It was as if, ’cause I, I once had an experience that actually Tami, you, you asked me about it this other one, one time where there’s just really nothing truly, truly nothing.
And I would say not even consciousness, but we could definitely debate that. But I felt there’s a, there is a zero and that, but everything is coming out of it. And this very moment is sort of, is blazing forth out of it. And actually there’s a Daoist teaching and David Hinton, uh, and Zen sort of writer, poet, scholar, researcher, he talks about this in one of his books that, um, it’s a term meaning. Blazing forth the, the, the Daoist view. There’s a, there’s a fundamental absence, but that fundamental absence is constantly blazing forth as existence tissue, as he calls it, as this moment as it is.
I think, you know, for me, I’ve never really, um, I’ve only got things by experiencing them. don’t really get them just by reading about them or thinking about them. If I don’t experience it, I don’t really get it. um, and in Zen they, you know, again, talking about Dogan, there is a sort of. There’s kind of a, you can tease out a, a view that, yeah, there’s some, there’s some way that everything is, is one, is One fabric, but that fabric is nothing at all. And yet it’s appearing and yet it’s, it’s coming forth Right now there’s a, there was an old, um, there’s an old teaching in Maana Buddhism, dwelling nowhere mind or experience comes forth, dwelling nowhere. this that we’re, you know, our conversation right now and the three of us getting, the four of us getting to meet like this, it’s coming forth outta nowhere. That that sort of, that’s sort of something like this blazing force sense and in other words, again, it’s not something happening somewhere else at some other time. It’s not something to think about. It’s something about the nature of this very moment.
Tami Simon: One way I want to bridge to our listeners here is. If you’re having the thought, well, how does all of this help or inspire me, a person who hasn’t had this experience? One of the things I want to emphasize is the possibility that by hearing the description of these different faces of awakening, it could activate something in you.
It could turn something on. If we’re using this blazing forth, it could light some type of fire inside of you that leads to a blazing forth type discovery. And I wonder if you could each talk a little bit about that, the notion that as people are listening to this description of the many faces of awakening, how they can listen.
Hameed, you said you like listening. I like listening too. But how do people listen in such a way potentially that it inspires their own unfolding journey?
A.H. Almaas: I mean, I was gonna say something before you said that Tami, which is we’re talking about, has to do with something that’s needed by a human being to. To awaken to. So we are not talking about something that’s just nice and wonderful, this and that. It’s needed. I mean, people live in suffering, live in ignorance.
They don’t know who the hell they are. What reality is, people are lost gently speaking. people who come to a teaching, they know they’re lost they wanna find their way. And in a way, look at whichever way they find their way is good. Uh, they don’t need to know about all these different thing. I mean, might be interesting for them at some point. But anyway, any path that is genuine, that lead to some kind of freedom and liberation, Just do it. Do the practices, get into it out who you are, what reality is. Whichever way you, you discover it is good. There might, there are ways, you know, so we are suggesting, but then you are suggesting not to close our mind to just one way, one way is good too. You know, and I mean, most people, they just follow one way that’s just fine. It’s enough for them. I mean, great masters develop just following one way and going deep and deep into it. That’s wonderful. But we are opening up also the, the situation that there are many ways, many facets different, you know, and that just because we experience our awakening to be different from somebody doesn’t mean we are wrong. Doesn’t mean they’re wrong. It doesn’t mean somebody is better than the other. There are real different ways and that way. needed, uh, by humanity about the, at the present time because of all the differences and how people think differences are bad, trying to eliminate differences and make differences be a problem here, differences are to be celebrated there. That’s the nature of reality, that there are difference, nature, reality, nature of the universe, nature of human being, that there are differences, different ways of being, different ways of experiencing different way of functioning, and the point that way has humanity to it has heart to it. That there is compassion and love and sensitivity and caring. That’s what what’s really common to all the different ways. They all lead to what’s called in Christianity the virtues. Which is humility, patience, and know, and compassion and tender. That’s really important. That’s what human race needs. so this perspective, in many ways of awakening gives us freedom be different without being wrong and without being better or less. And to, doesn’t mean everybody just go whatever their experience is and they think that’s it. No, you have to really ascertain it is really true with really genuine, just a belief system. It, it, uh, emerges from, uh, beyond the mind, from beyond history. So it’s genuine like that. It could be whatever it is.
And, and it has a liberating part and it helps life. life is, you know, lot of messes, lot of suffering, lot of trouble. mean, the trouble not necessarily gonna go away, but there is more to life than that. There’s an inner realm, inner way, way of experiencing oneself that has no disturbance, no suffering, has has more equanimity, more beauty, more, uh, peacefulness good to be able to have that place and to abide in it as much as possible in the midst of all the trouble of the world.
The trouble of the world is not gonna go away,
Tami Simon: And then Hameed, if you would continue, and the question that I asked about listening in such a way that our own inner spiritual journey is encouraged and supported to unfold, what are your suggestions about that?
A.H. Almaas: Yeah, I think, I mean, I, what I always recommend for people when they’re listening to not, uh, deny your mind and knowledge, to set aside, to sustain for why And listen with your heart. Because, teaching is not just words. There’s more of the, the state itself is being presented, and if somebody is open, they might a glimpse, they might have a taste, they might be impacted directly. So it’s not just a mental knowing.
Tami Simon: And then if for a moment before we leave this notion of blazing forth, because I think this is a, a powerful face, face of awakening that Henry has named, at least for me, that I think could be palpable. For people and I, I wonder, Henry, say more, help us,
Henry Shukman: Hmm.
Tami Simon: us there if you will. Take us there.
Henry Shukman: I, I want to just say what a joy it is just to sit and listen to you, Hameed. Um, I could, I could do that happily for the rest of the morning. Um, it’s beautiful listening to you and I feel that you are indeed presenting, you know, as you speak. And it’s not just words. Um, let me just say, Tami, if I could, like, it’s a beautiful point and the fact that you bring it up right when you did is just. Kind of amazing because actually the line that I was quoting, dwelling Nowhere, mind comes forth and let’s understand mind in the sense of experience or perhaps awareness, but it’s either way, it’s this very moment is coming forth out of where, where is it coming from? So the the, the, here’s the thing there, there was a great zen figure in the sixth century called, and he, was a, the story behind him is that he was, he was illiterate and he was from an ethnic. Minority in China, and he was his aged mother. He was an or He had only his mother and in his family, his only family was his mother. And he supported them by collecting firewood. And he’d go off into the nearby hills and gather firewood each morning and bring it around to homes and stores in, in the town where they lived and sell little bundles of, of faggots, you know, and, um, make money that way.
And, and he was delivering some firewood. This is the story to a a, a store. the in the storekeeper happened to have a monk visiting who was sort of in the back drinking tea. And the monk started reciting few lines of the diamond suture way nun delivering the firewood. Heard this particular line dwelling nowhere. Mind comes forth. He just heard it being chanted. He was 18 years old. just delivered his load. He hears this line, dwelling nowhere. Dwelling nowhere. Mind comes forth, he suddenly just experienced it. He experienced what it was actually saying. He got that it wasn’t a formulation of words or it was a formulation of words, but they weren’t as important what they were talking about, which was not exactly contained in the words, but the words were from it, were suggesting it, and he got it. He got what it was pointed to that very moment, you know, where, where has it come from? Where is it coming from? And then we might say, well, I, I mean obviously it came from yesterday or it came from a moment ago, or it came from, I traveled here from somewhere where there’s lots of ways our minds might go, but they’re all part of this moment, you know?
And so if we just, if it’s really just a matter of restfully listening and not, not trying to make sense of things as far as possible, sort of not computing, um, or sort of, wait a minute, what about this, what about that? You know, just almost and zen, they sometimes say, listen to a talk kind of in one ear, out the other ear.
You know, don’t worry too much about what sticks. Don’t be trying to remember a bit, oh, that was a good bit. Oh, I didn’t understand that bit. Just let it sort of, almost, maybe just be like a river flowing, the sound of a river flowing by, or a breeze. through and we just see what, what might, because nobody knows how and when, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll come home, you know, and we’ll come, we, we, we we’re all doing it.
We’re all invited to do it all the time somehow to come back to ourselves. And we, it’s very easy for us to get caught up in so many things. There are so many worldly things we kind of project onto and get attached to. And there’s also so many mental things that we can attach our sense of self to. But if we just kind of relax that hold and, and the attaching and just kind of rest and just one little degree more open, I always think it’s just, it’s a matter of a tiny, little adjustment.
Not, not some huge, massive turnaround. It can just be just a little. Tiny releasing, relaxing, you know, there’s a, there’s a line that Dogan loved from an early Japanese ma, a Chinese master take the backward step, just a little half step back, and then it turns the light around and shines it inward and we suddenly, you know, we just come home, come back to who we are. It’s a very natural process. It’s not a, it’s been built up in the west, I think, quite a lot as a sort of accomplishment, achievement, a sort of big thing to aim for these, these awakenings. But I think it’s, in a way, it’s the opposite. It’s just releasing and and, and I just sort of coming back into who we’ve always been, you know, and, and what that is.
Yeah. Not one thing. It can show itself in different ways. But there’s always some sense of a, a deeper reality or a reality that’s, I Hameed put it perfectly without history, you know, and, and it’s, it’s always been here and it’s like sort of climbing out of a roaring stream onto the riverbank or something. There are lots of ways we could analogize it, but, um, yeah. So I don’t know a few words on listening, you know.
Tami Simon: I wanna pick up on something you said, Henry, you said we could talk about that later, which is this notion of one of the faces of awakening being nothing, not even consciousness. And Hameed, I’ve heard you talk about this. As, as well as something that can be known and then understood in retrospect in a way, like, because if there’s not even consciousness there, how do we experience it when it’s happening?
And I have to say, this is one of the very mysterious to me faces of awakening that I could know nothing, not even consciousness. I just go, what the heck are these guys talking about? So, uh, help, help me and our listeners, uh, to, if you will, I mean the idea, I mean, can this be shown, pointed to right here?
Help me.
A.H. Almaas: I think in the Buddha talked about that in his original about the, um, what he called it, uh, the cessation of, Uh, perception and sensation. That’s one stage for awakening. A sensation, perception and sensation. No perception, no sensation. I mean, there’s no consciousness. And, um, it’s scary place for most people.
That mean you’d be gone without knowing you’re gone. And, um, just like deep sleep without being deep sleep way. But that is a stage, way or a step that happens. It’s, uh, and um, it’s has to do with the fact we usually identify with a sense of self and, uh, the consciousness we have is connected to a kind of sense of self, the eager self that to, to get. Two for the awakened condition show itself that sense of self need to be outta the way. And, uh, because it is sense of self is in the way usually. And, uh, one of the main ways over to be outta the way is what’s called death. It, it’s, it, it dies. It doesn’t mean die forever, but at least you have an experience of it being gone. And one of the, there are many ways of it being gone, but one of the ways is, uh, conscious itself, which is so the, the ground of all experience, uh, consciousness, the ground of everything, you know, experience, feeling. So if consciousness ceases, then we don’t know what’s happening. We don. And approaching it will feel like we are gonna die physically. That I’ve had to go through that many times and I see my students going through it, tell her all kind of stuff that has happen and see our attachment, to think our sense of self, our life, the world, all we have to let go, all of that. And then there is condition of sort of dissolving, uh, like, uh, dissolving to the point not being aware of the dissolving so that nothing and then coming back again and complete usually when come back clarity and awai to a different condition that doesn’t include the self that has that dissolved. And that’s one way that is known by many teachings. Although some teaching have difficult, I remember having a dialogue with one, uh, teacher, uh, from, um, with Anton. And I said, you no conscious? He couldn’t believe me. He said, no, no such thing. Everything is consciousness. I say, yes, but I think what he didn’t, he thought I meant all consciousness, cosmic consciousness and all that, all dissolve.
I didn’t mean that. I meant the individual consciousness, own individual sense of reality and perception that dissolves and that’s possible. And it can happen many time in fact, that, uh, and uh. Original Buddhism called a stream. Enter into stream through, uh, cessation, through, uh, annihilation of consciousness. And you could do it many times. You know, steam enter, it can enter many times, you know, uh, at some point you can rise from, that place can wake up while the, that that dissolved, the, the self is still present, which is that, is that the emptiness? Uh, nothing is so the, what I call a sense of non being complete, non being at the same time. Doesn’t go away is part and parcel of all ex expressive. the other side of consciousness, sort of. And then the backside of consciousness, backside of awareness, which is more like being like at very, such than another, you know? Um, and, um, so none being and being become one thing. But now we are getting to the subtleties of some of the possible state.
One of the state of awakening is being in non being are one. And, uh, all of reality is being, but it’s nature. Underlying nature is like nothing. They don’t, doesn’t exist. It just appears that way and it keeps appearing. It keep evolving because it is not static. And that’s the, so the explosion, you could call it explosion, you could call it dynamic creativity.
Uh, call it new creation. Each instance is a new creation as one way of experiencing it. Uh, I, I’m saying that one way because the other way is experiencing, uh, you know, awakening that what we started with before. But since you brought in this thing, the question about the emptiness and about the cessation of consciousness at my understanding, my experience of it,
Tami Simon: Uh, Hamed. One question. When there’s the cessation of perception and individual consciousness, what do you call the knowing faculty then?
A.H. Almaas: well, there’s no knowing when. Jesus. There’s no knowing, like deep sleep, not con, not con is no knowing it. It’s deeper than deep sleep. It, it’s more cessation than that. in deep sleep, you can be, have some kind of awareness. You like when you wake up you realize you are somewhat aware Here. No, you don’t remember anything.
Nothing. I mean, everything is completely got uh, gone. And uh, it is so the chasm, I mean, zen Buddhism have the zero circle, nothing there. And then from out there comes everything come the world, you know? But it is a specific experience. Many tradition have it talk about it, you know, and um. And I think as a, as an important stage, it’s not something, you know, you end up with.
It’s a stage of being free from the limit itself and then?
emerge as, uh, uh, the nature itself as being that and being and recognizing that being the nature of everything we have pre perceiving before. And I, I wouldn’t say, I mean some, I used to think it’s, it’s always there. I’m just haven’t discovered it. I don’t take that view anymore. It is there when it is there other time, what am I to say?
Tami Simon: Well, let, let me ask you both a question because Hameed, you said you work with students in this process and that often people feel some type of fear, I would say terror in the, uh, opening of this possibility, in their experience. W what would you say to someone who has entered the foothills of this, but they know it’s their fear that’s holding them back?
I’m curious how you both work with students who report fear in this part of their journey.
A.H. Almaas: I, I do something similar to what, uh, Henry does, which is just to be with it, not say yes or no, uh, to it like any other thing that you work with. You, you are with it. You let it reveal its nature. What’s it about? And because if we are, if we stay with what is appearing in our experience, it’ll tend to reveal its meaning or where it’s come from or, or significance. And the fear will, will then show that there is an identification. If we, if we stay with the fear, afraid? Are we afraid about? We find out who’s afraid. There’s somebody there self that’s afraid. And what, why is this self afraid? You know? What about it? So that already, so it is through understanding the fear, being with it, understanding it, and the fear will, you know, will end at some point.
Tami Simon: Henry, anything to add there?
Henry Shukman: I, I, I think I, would say exactly the same. And I might just add that, you know, that at some point it’s possible to meet the fear with compassion and, and thoroughly allow it and not, you know, welcome it and not be, that doesn’t have to be a very active thing. It’s just that as Hameed was saying, being with it. And, you know, it may be that at some point. Some kind of compassion joins in, sort of comes up by itself and we feel kindly towards the fear, towards our suffering. And sometimes a little bit of a, a little bit of love or compassion in the mix can be really helpful. It can, can sort of, um, it can open things up. It doesn’t, it’s not the only way, but sometimes a little drop. I, I think it’s like a drop from a teardrop from Qua Y’s eye, you know, is the Bodhi Sattva of compassion. One little teardrop might fall into our, our life, into our path, into our practice. And it can make all the difference ’cause we stop. Resisting. We stop striving, we stop thinking. Things have to be different. Stop thinking that there’s another way I should be, or there’s another way it should be. And instead this, this, this beauty, the, the sweetness of compassion comes into our practice. And, and we might sense somehow this has been here all along and I didn’t notice it, or now it’s come, or whatever it is.
And, and that can often be the thing that opens something up for us. And you know, in repeated ways is sort of the moment when able to seek for it to be different. And then it may show itself in a way we haven’t seen before, because we’re not trying to make it different. We’re not trying to have it be different, know, and I mean, if I, the on, on the subject of. Well in, in some circles it’s called ness. You know, we talk about oneness, but you can also add a g and ness on the subject of and thorough ness, as Hameed was beautifully describing, there really isn’t even consciousness and, and there’s a, you know, it’s in the heart suture. The heart suture says that the awakening of or ra happened because they saw right through, you know, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and consciousness.
They saw that were kind of constructions, all were appearances and as appearances. As compounded things they could be seen through and to see that they were empty. And it’s, it’s that, that’s the pivot for K Yin according to the old story in, in, in Ana Buddhism. And I, I certainly in my own, my own biography and what, to what little extent I’ve had a glimpse of that.
It was, it was a turning point to see even consciousness, somehow the end actually. That consciousness was somehow something appearing and that there was possibility of a, of a, of really of nothing. when, and in my, when I somehow fell into that or whatever, I didn’t, I, I couldn’t know it. I wasn’t there and there was no consciousness to know it, but it was. it, it had turned something on its head. It had turned something around. When, when things came back afterwards, I Hameed put it rather well, you know, there was a clarity and that something had gone that actually did not reconstitute. Um, and I had never known that I’d had a few, what to me were sort of powerful openings or moments of discovery in my life before then, sooner or later they all kind faded. And my old, some of my old troubles anyway, came back and I was working on different fronts, you know, with, with dharma, with meditation and with of different kinds. Relationships, you know, working on creativity, working on several fronts. But after, for in my, my biography after one profound letting go of everything, that was a turning point that really make a sort of difference. And Hameed put it beautifully as well with that, knowing sort of this being going on is always sort of backed by non-being the, the, the ness is here in all of this and neither denies the other that feel really two faces of one fact ness and all this. And, and I don’t know this is so easy to convey, but even right now, you know, we’re having this, you know, I feel lovely conversation. Very interesting, and of, um, to, to the heart of things and certainly I, um, I hope it’s interesting to, to listeners, you know, because it is, it is talking about our very own experience, each of us right now that, you know, sort of is there a way that seeing, we’re hearing, we’re seeing what we’re seeing, hearing what we’re hearing, we’re sensing the body somewhat, you know, there may be thoughts now and then, but what, what if again, it’s, it’s rest.
What is it resting on this sort of box of experience? What’s, what’s, what’s beyond it? Is there, is there, is there somehow, um, a way that it might all be. Appearing within something larger, or is it all coming out of a great but here it is, you know.
A.H. Almaas: I, I wanna, you know, bring back what you said, Henry, about the importance of compassion and love for that transition, a big transition like that, you know, what’s considered loss or something scary? Uh, uh, definitely compassion, love is needed, that’s, uh, because it’s difficult to really make the transition.
If there isn’t, uh, some kind of lovingness and compassion toward the self that is gonna die to feel kind toward it. And, and also, uh, compassion, love can develop the extent that when it, when they are established, results, some kind of an implicit trust, uh, trust that whatever happened will be fine. And we need to have that trust to let that transition happen. And we won. We won’t make it. We won’t let it happen. We’ll, hold on, we’ll resist if we don’t have an inherent trust in reality that whatever happened in experience is fine. You know, it’s my experience. Whatever happens. Will be okay. But that is something that develops through practice.
And I mean, we, different people have it a different degree. Uh, what I call basic trust not like trusting somebody, trusting just in, in reality, in the universe and experience. It’s, uh, and that’s why an important practice, I think, um, um, everybody, somebody need to follow a path, need to uh, whatever practice for some time, because a practice, develop anything, develop, patience develops, fortitude develops also compassion and kindness opens the heart.
All, all, all these are needed for those transitions to happen. So, I mean, sometimes transition happen by themselves, but that’s rare for most people. And, uh, practices. And bring out different qualities, different uh, uh, manifestation of our true nature and whether it’s love or compassion or kindness, sensitivity, empathy, all these things. And trust. And the trust is this. Trust is so fundamental. And, and, and I, I know I’ve learned that different people have that you have to have some kind of trust, otherwise you wouldn’t live life. You’ll die, you know, but the trust can be big enough that we can allow ourself to die inwardly and, and feel that it’ll be okay.
Just like you need to go to sleep. You need to trust to fall asleep. Without some trust you, some people don’t fall asleep, difficult, fall asleep. there?
is some kind of trust, some sometime happens through habit throughout life that you fall asleep. That you wake up. But it a similar kind of trust, but it is, foundational, more basic.
And, and, and for most people, it requires a great deal of practice for the heart to develop to the extent there’s a trust that is beyond the mind. That’s why I call it basic, you know?
Henry Shukman: Oh my gosh. I completely agree. You put it so well. I think that’s, and that’s not often called out as one of the. Key sort of values of practice That is exactly, I sometimes talk about practice as a, as an arena where we can develop courage, but I think it’s actually better put that it’s about developing trust.
I mean, courage may be in the mix as well, but it courage may be a kind of form of trust that somehow we can ride over our fear where it’s gonna be, okay, we’re gonna do it. But I think trust is a, is a deeper way, way to put it. the fact that, um, you know, there’s so much contemporary practice that is happening outside of, um, training, you know, individualistically, like I do my mindfulness on my own. I mean, I think it’s a great thing that that’s spreading because I think by and large good to. Be getting to know our nervous systems and getting to know our psychology a bit better, getting to know our emotional lives a bit better and so on. the, the, the, the traditional context where you have some contact with a teacher, you have some contact with fellow practitioners. Um, it’s, you know?
in the old view you needed to have the three things. You needed to have your daily practice, you needed to have some guidance and some teaching. That’s not just guidance, but sort of framing what we’re doing and recognizing some of the possibilities and recognizing some of the challenges and some of the pitfalls, the ways we can get stuck and so on. but also having. fellowship of others on the same kind of path their own ways. Having those three things traditionally, Buddha, Dharma, Sanger, you know, in the, in the old Buddhist view, you need all three. And I think again, that, that’s in part because then you’ll develop, uh, sometimes they’re called the parameters.
You know, some of these virtues come forth. Like Yeah, exactly. Generosity and, and sort of, um, constancy or, or, or fortitude Yeah. As you put it. I mean, you know, and compassion and trust. Yeah. That we, we to, we need to know that somehow to get some hint already, some little inkling some way that we’re already being held by something much larger anyway. And that, you know, the idea that we’re, we’re clinging. We’ve been clinging to this piece of driftwood called me as if it were all there is just starting to get the sense of, oh my gosh, there’s a larger context. There really is a larger context, you know? And, um, yeah. Then at some point we can let go of the piece of driftwood.
Tami Simon: Henry, I wanna ask you a very, uh, direct and specific question because as you were describing ness, I got the feeling you were referencing a specific day that this occurred for you in your life. Like you had had these other awakenings, and then on this day something happened. Is that true?
Henry Shukman: I would say that I’d had, I’d had. Kind of strong glimpses of godness before, and I’d had some intimations and sense of godness quite a bit in regular daily life and practice. But yeah, there was a particular moment. I know the day and the time, you know, when, well, I don’t, I know the approximate time when, yeah.
Really, I, I, I, I sort of, you know, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m, clearly, it wasn’t physical death, but some kind of death happened. I just was utterly gone and the whole world was gone, and I was just really nothing, not even consciousness. And, and somehow I was rather disoriented. Things started reforming, and I was all a bit of a topsy-turvy.
And, and I couldn’t do anything except laugh and cry, know? And I couldn’t sleep. I was filled with a. New kind of energy. I, I’d known this kind of energy before, but it was very sweet beyond belief and so beautiful. And for about three days, I, I just sat in it and I was very, very lucky ’cause it happened in the presence of my teacher. And he, he just, uh, he told me afterwards, he just left me because he had to go down. It was, it was actually during a retreat and he had to go down and do the closing ceremony of the, it was right at the end of the retreat when everybody was gonna just say a few words and things. And he just left me in the, in the, in the little meeting room, um, laughing and crying, you know, and I mean, I didn’t know that then, you know, but, and then he came back maybe an hour later when they’d finished and sort of got me up and I was, I was just, I was just kind of. I was bewildered. And so I really can’t say much about it now, except that when I was asked to say something myself at the closing lunch of this retreat, the only thing there was to say was, thank you, thank you, thank you. And, and, um, and, and I assumed, you know, give it a day or two, I’ll kind of be back to me with my and my, it just didn’t happen that way. And so for me, the real, I don’t know what to call it, a plunging and immersion, a total, so more thorough dissolving than any I’d done before. Many I’d been through before. Um, was, it was, it really. It, you know, in my particular biography that was how I went over some kind of hump or turned some corner honestly I’d, I’d known that some people might have turned some kind of corner in their practice.
I could see it in my teachers and I could see it in a few other people that I knew and lots of people that I’d read. But I assumed it wasn’t gonna be for me. ’cause I was quite a troubled soul, doing a lot of work on myself, you know? But actually something really did change, you know, that, that even now hasn’t closed again.
Tami Simon: I also wanted to ask for a clarification. Uh, Hameed, you, you mentioned this notion of being and non being as one. And I don’t know if I know what you mean by non being, I could guess, like not being solid or, but then not ex I don’t know if I know what you mean. So I wanted to understand more what I have a sense of being presence, uh, being hood.
I don’t know. I, I feel I have some inroad into that with non being. I just go kind of, I’m back in the blackout space. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah. Um, good question. I think most people don’t wanna know about n you wanna know about n.
It’s just a scary thing being, which turned out to be the essence of freedom anyway. But, you know, but ndi talk about the experiences of, uh, Godness, um, might clarify that some, you know, for me, you are asking the question. It does happen in experiences in the sense that, I mean, there is a gradual sort of, uh, erosion of the self.
And when there comes a point where it, it actually, uh, perceptively obviously disappears in a, in a complete way. And it’s usually an experience. I mean, having my student like this, sitting with me and the lying in the mat and at some point they, uh, uh, be talking with ’em and then at some point, and there’s.
They’re gone and I wait for them until they wake up. And in my experience, I, I’ve had many different, those, those kind of experiences of ness or uh, cessation there. Many of them, just like in talks about stream enter, you could be enter the stream many time until you, you’re in it. I remember one time just to give you the example of how different it can happen one way, it happened one time that I was doing some practice and know all night camp practice and at some point early morning, uh, I was observing.
I was really aware of my mind and my personality and I saw that. It is completely diluted and I couldn’t think in any way that is not diluted. You know, I, I was hopeless and, uh, like the way my mind, my responses, whatever condition, and when it became very clear, it was like I could not get out of it. Like there’s no way.
It is all the network of my mind and thoughts, emotion, history and all of that, all of it is really one conditioned, uh, structure. And basically I sort of, there was, uh, a giving up, not trying to do anything about.
it when that happened. Then giving up. That began a kind of experience, which is the experience of feeling something descending over.
I was sitting up and I felt something descending over my head and dissolving it, physic it felt like as my head was dissolving. And then I was descending and dissolving more and more of me, and after a while I could see and feel what was descending, what was coming down. It’s like almost like rain or some kind of, uh, fluid descending, turned out to be.
Uh, it tasted and felt like honey. It was like sticky, sweet, yummy honey that was coming. As it touches my body and my mind, they would disappear and until and so. I disappeared and compete plete love and, uh, saturated contentment and bliss. And, and I was gone and disappeared. It dissolves me the, the, the love, which is love of being, you know, not my love.
Something that emerged, dissolved, the, the person, their mind, whatever. I don’t know how long until I came out. And, um, and I came out and I ca condition of, uh, awakening. That’s one kind. Another kind. Another time I remember I was, you know, studying, practicing whatever my living room someplace. I was in Colorado, Boulder at that time.
And, um. And I felt like I need to, I lied down in, in, in the living room and, and on the carpet, and I felt I was gonna die. I mean, I said, okay, I’m gonna die. So I lied down to die and I died and I was gone. No ceremony, no love, nothing. It is just lying down and gone and then woke up again from that and where everything was pure awareness and transparency.
Now that awareness transparency, usually it, it is, it is really complete when it is inseparable from the godness. Inseparable to none being because the awareness is, has some kind of a presence, some kind of beingness. The world emerges as it is. The world is, I am everything is at the same time that isness as inseparable of the, from something that negates the ness.
You know, that Tibetan call, the lack of adherent existence, lack of adherent existence is a sense of there’s no existence. And um, and then of course I had many experience getting into that. But then the experience of waking up as the peeing that you talk about. And all of that is one side. The other side can be, not always, but can be recognition of the, if it’s almost, it’s opposite, it’s negation, like
I call it absence, and that’s my technical name for it. Absence instead of eness or non beingness. Non being is absence means it’s absence of consciousness, absence of space, absence of everything. It’s just absence of everything. And, and that absence makes the, the clarity, awareness, c rank compute pure because that absolutely clears up everything, dissolves everything that is not, doesn’t belong to the pure awareness, dissolve everything from history, from mind, from belief, from ideas, whatever.
And what’s left is. The beingness with its awareness and then, then the clarity is sometimes complete trans, there’s a transparency. Everything is transparent. You know, there is no individual here. Being aware of that is more like, is the universe aware of itself as pure empty transparency? Empty Here is TST refers to the non being or to the absence.
That’s what I mean by and is, you know, it’s a, it’s a classical kind of expedience exists in many traditions and, uh, in our. If you read Long Chen, he refers to it many places and many, you know, refer to it. And, um, I, and I don’t necessarily take it to be the final ultimate or, or the only, uh, liberating thing.
That’s just one way of experiencing reality. Remember, we coming back to different ways of faith. This is just one way. It happens to be a classic in the spiritual traditions, uh, the being and non beingness being in several, they’re the same thing. And it’s the nature of all what we perceive.
Yeah, I mean, I, I, ahead of it, I’ve seen it. It’s not my experience, but definitely that is one way it happens. Uh. Uh, the intensity of the loss can take, you know, sort of project one, you know, or
some other place that they, you know, they don’t know, and then they might find themself in a place like that. That can happen. And that’s not, that happens to some people. Usually in most teaching, it’s more the practice that brings it about practice lead to ment of the self. So the cell becomes so denoted, it becomes easier for it to somewhat disappear, but it can happen sometime in the midst.
Somebody’s suffering because of the intensity of it. I mean, I really read about it, seen that. But I wouldn’t say that’s the usual, most common way of that. And we are focusing on that. We don’t need to focus on this, but this is just one phase of, yeah, one, one phase of awakening. But it’s important. It’s a classic and many teaching talk about it.
So it’s good. It’s good that we are discussing it.
Henry Shukman: Yeah. Uh, Tami, sh, may I say a word on that topic? I mean, I, I agree with Hameed entirely, but what I’ve seen is that, um,
A.H. Almaas: When somebody’s faced with a grievous loss, you know, and a catastrophic situation of some kind, there’s, there’s something, I mean, many have said this, I think that, but there’s something about um, grief itself that can be, if we surrender to it and let grief happen, when we find a way to really surrender to it, it can be like another kind of searing face of love. And I’ve seen that a number of times where really, very, very difficult situations, parents losing children and, and things like that, that, where it seems unbearable. And, and the really, it’s beyond how do you navigate it. You sort of, almost, you can’t exactly navigate it, somehow if they learn or find a way to surrender to it, I mean, I think in a way it’s analogous to, to the kinds of awakenings we’re talking about in the sense that they’re, they’re outside what the self knows. They’re sort of beyond what the self has constructed as its understanding of things. and it must be outside that. And, and somehow it’s something greater, larger size list timeless dimensionless outside of the reality that we know breaking in and, and, um, or breaking down the reality. We know, and I think great loss. Has an analogous relationship to our self in that it’s sort of, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s outside what we think we can handle, you know? And, and therefore I think that might be sometimes how the mechanism works, you know, of grievous loss. I have actually, I dunno if this is a little presumptuous of me, but I’ve got a little poem that is on the topic. Yeah.
Henry Shukman: Okay. It’s called Frozen Lake. Frozen Lake. And it has a, an epigraph, it’s, it’s not long. it has an epigraph from Sheikh Abbu. Sayid, you know, nobody, son of nobody, uh, Sufi who said it’s a i, i, it’s just a part of his name. The broken one. Allah says the broken ones are my beloved. broken ones are my beloved frozen lake. When I think of friends who’ve been through the worst, through the dread, love lives with through the terrible fear, anxiety can only dream of, I feel sorry for the rest. those who had it all as they’d hoped, who crossed the frozen lake from one side to the other, never guessing the great dark beneath, but those for whom the lake cracks and opens who fall into its unspeakable night, while still walking upright in the light of this world hearts burst and meet its waters for them, there is no consolation, nor is any needed.
A.H. Almaas: That’s wonderful. I like that.
Yeah, it, it is part of the zen tradition. where it’s called the teaching of totality in Hawaiian. But, you know, it appeared in this teaching by itself, unbidden, unexpected. It is, uh, I, I was mostly into what we were talking about, the emptiness and the, uh, clarity, whatever.
And at some point. Something else happened, which is like, you know, in the sense a non-dual sort of expansive awareness and presence and emptiness, the whole universe is sort of appears, um, I mean it’s infinite and it’s infinity is all reality. And then the, then you realize a thing happened is like, as a collapsing of all of that, as cognize.
Me as a particular contains the whole universe, contain everybody and everything at all times. And so I am myself at all times. I’m everybody else at all times. I’m everybody else’s experienced at all times. It is, you know, so it is basically the technical way of saying it is each point of time and space includes all other points of time and space.
And it is an, an experience experiencing oneself that way, experiencing reality that way. And between, not I am everything but each point. You are everything and everybody, and it is a different facet of reality. I mean, true nature reveals that possibility, which wasn’t obvious in the thing we were talking about.
You see here, it’s like thing that turned around and this is just as real and just as liberating and, um, I don’t know. Nobody else talk. Usually at the present time, teachers who and who talk, don’t talk about, they talk more non-dual, which is what we’ve been talking about before, is the more the dominant thing.
But, you know, like pro talked about, referred to it,
referred to it, the Hawaiian Buddhisms, refer to it, different thing. I, I even don nothing talked about it.
I think of location, like the, the whole world contains all locations here. There’s only one location, like a, a space becomes one point, if we could call it, but that point is not exactly point. So Unlocal and one, one location, one lo local where everything is in one, in one place. And you call the point, you could call the particular, you know, and it’s mostly the A person recognizing themself as they don’t have to get big to become the universe.
They just as they are.
Henry Shukman: Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. I mean, I think that’s, uh, actually quite a common experience in, in the zen world actually,
A.H. Almaas: Mm-hmm.
Henry Shukman: people, um, I mean there’s a, there’s all these little stories, you know, in the Koans of Zen, which Dogan loved by the way. He collected, hundreds of them about lots of them. But there’s, I mean, for example, there’s one where there’s this master who the only way he’ll teach is just by holding up one finger.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah.
Henry Shukman: that’s, we take it to be, that’s what he’s teaching. That one point is everything. So there’s one thing to experience that everything is one, but it’s another thing to experience that. One is everything
A.H. Almaas: Yeah.
Henry Shukman: that, and actually my, my, my own very first, um. Awakening when I was 19 years old without any practice outta nowhere, was, was that, was that I was exactly as I was, you know, was inseparable from the whole universe and, actually dropped into this sort of level of experience where very pocket of consciousness was the very ends of the universe. It included absolutely everything. And, and, um, so it was a great relief to me to find Zen that understood that,
A.H. Almaas: Yeah.
Henry Shukman: know, uh, years later. And I think it, I, I think there’s, we could go on. I mean, I think there are, there are many ways that this reality we’re talking about as what we awaken to it simply shows up in different ways. And I find that the insistence these days on. just one all inclusive awareness. That’s what it’s all about. It just doesn’t do justice to the many ways that it can show up. I mean, there’s a, there’s a way sometimes in Zen where it’s not about one awareness, it’s about one body. You know, you, you feel unmistakably that your very body is part of the, it is the great body of all things.
And there’s zen, Zen and who said, you know, the mountain is my thigh. The is my tongue. they’re trying to convey that. Perhaps it’s another framing or another face of uni locality that this one body is actually, it includes the, the, the, the street outside. It includes the mountain few miles away.
It’s, it’s a single. One body. And sometimes it’s, you know, sometimes it can be rather a physical thing, less an awareness, but an solidity, an actual solidity. And so, I dunno, I think it, it can show up different ways, but I think, but all of them seem to be, I think probably that all kind of freed up by the recognition that you’re talking about earlier of, um, the transparency.
Exactly. The transparency of appearances with somehow ness as part of that. It’s the other face of it. Things are appearing and they’re gone. Things are gone and they’re appearing and it’s, it’s, it’s not, we may get to understand it one by one, but it’s not really, it’s really both at the same time.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah, people also want love. Love is sort of, they can understand love, awareness and what’s that for? You know what that, what is that? But love, people want love, and there is true, real love, which I not do love, which is instead of everything is the clarity when everything is love. And that’s basically recognizing that, uh, there is nothing that’s not pure love.
All sweet, everything’s sweet, all generous, all is aging. You know? So that’s what, what that book was about. And it is, it is, it is a beauty to it. Love brings beauty, appreciate beauty, recognition of goodness and healing. Goodness. Like all is good. Love shows it, it is really good because humor recognized good with love.
How can somebody be good and they’re not loving, you know? So goodness and love go together. So I’m glad you had that thunderbolt of love and recognizing it’s available. Yeah. Love is the most available thing to a human being. Because we humans are characterized by heart
and we are all sweet now, all of us now are, we sit here or we are one atmosphere of sweetness. I.
Henry Shukman: I, I feel it’s the most important thing about the practice actually, is that it opens up love and it can in open, it can open it up infinitely. It can be that there’s nothing but I.
Really that, um, that godness is actually a sort of infinite love in disguise that’s ready to give everything that’s constantly giving, constantly creating, constantly generous, and that everything is made of love because it’s pouring out of what we can’t know, what can never be known. And, um, so this, this, and it’s always this very moment. It’s not down the road and it’s not next week. It’s always now here that we can find this, um, uh, geezer of love, this eruption of love, and, and it looks like this, this very moment. It doesn’t look like something else. And, um, you know, sometimes that, that would be a very challenging thing to say in some contexts, but somehow the, the, the heart of things, it seems to me there’s just, there’s One, empty, boundless generosity and, and love. I, I mean, I agree with the statement. Everything is made of love and it, and it’s, and it’s, and we can feel it here, you know, not in, again, it’s sort of an idea to be filed away for a future time. You know, it’s here that we meet it, you know, as, as we see daylight outside or nighttime outside and in. The room that we’re in, it’s, it’s all appearing as a kind of act of love.
A.H. Almaas: one one thing to say about this, uh, awakening, uh, that everything is love, is that most people, when they hear that it is, it would be easy for them to suspect it, to doubt it, because the world doesn’t appear that way. Be world full of aggression and jealousy and fear and hate. You know, so how can it be all love?
And so we need to say something about that that’s true. People experience about the world is, is also real,
Henry Shukman: Hmm.
A.H. Almaas: is possible to experience. It is one way of experiencing thing that is available to us, a human being. That we could go to level of experience where everything appears as love, just like everything can appear.
Like we know physically everything is atoms or elementary particles and people don’t question that anymore, but we don’t see them
Henry Shukman: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
A.H. Almaas: the same thing. But here in experience it is. Like you, you’re able to see the elementary particles, which is the love, you know, even though elementary, everything, elementary particle, but the body has cancer and there’s all these happen.
It doesn’t change the fact that all made out particle. So it’s good to add that kavi so that people don’t just dismiss it, that, oh, that’s an imagination, it’s a possibility for a human being to experience that.
Henry Shukman: Yes, yes,
A.H. Almaas: Mean everybody is there is the love is everywhere and you know, it’s when we experience it, it is that way, you know?
But I, I don’t assume that everybody having a suffering all of that, they are love, but they don’t know, no, they’re not appealing as love, appealing as what they are.
Henry Shukman: Well, I thought you, I thought Hameed was speaking to it beautifully that, you know, for one thing we might say is that when we glimpses of, um, of our infinite belonging, that we’re not separate. Um, and either that’s through oneness or in fact through godness. a that sense, you know, that when we are coming out of it just enough to recognize something consciously, you know, we, we realize that, that in separate inseparability. Brings on very often a sense of love. It really touches the human heart as I, oh my gosh. It’s sort of an, it’s a, it’s a kind of infinite intimacy and it, it, and, and an infinite belonging. And it has a, it has a, an impact on us of a discovery. The discovery of that degree of belonging has an impact on our hearts awakens love. But I think also it’s at this deeper level and it is exactly as Hemi was saying, really, like, I think we can, we can into. at different levels. We can, we can, the same way that we, we could know, you know, on the vernacular level, on the atomic level, on a sub subatomic particle level, on the level of forces and dynamics and cosmic forces and geo geological forces and so on. It’s sort of like that this, this moment of our experience, we can know our experience different levels and, and I would say some of those levels, not just one, really are kind of infused with a sense of love. I think right down at the sort of generation generative level of the, the, uh, the NCE is I think probably rather like the blazing forth, you know, the Taoists talk about, um, Ian’s NCE is probably rather, I’m not sure that that may be maybe similar, um, that has. A quality of, yeah, unconditional love in it, infinite, unconditional love. So does discovery of oneness, non separateness, um, and so on. So I think there are different sort of levels that of, of way we can experience this moment, any moment that may be sort of increasingly saturated in a sense of unconditional love.
A.H. Almaas: Clarity that you spoke with, uh, Henry. Very clear way of putting out the perspective of love. Everything is love, putting it in context.
Henry Shukman: Well, I, I very much en enjoy hearing you speak Hameed and, being able to exchange With you. and hear your seasoned fresh
A.H. Almaas:
