® Copyright 1999 by John Davis. This material is excerpted from the author's book, THE DIAMOND APPROACH, and published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston.

The Diamond Approach is a spiritual path based on new insights and timeless wisdom. It has the advantage of recent knowledge about psychological development and spirituality which was not available before. Thus, it provides us with a better understanding of profound, but difficult, spiritual concepts, and it gives us more effective ways to work toward spiritual realization.

Hameed Ali developed the Diamond Approach and has taught it to small groups of students for over twenty years. His background includes the study of physics, bioenergetics, depth psychology, and spiritual work. He credits his early teachers and his studies of Sufism, Buddhism, and the Gurdjieff Work, among other systems, with helping him to open to the discoveries that led to his understanding. Ali founded the Ridhwan School in 1977 to facilitate his teaching. Until a few years ago, the Diamond Approach was known only by the relatively few students who studied directly with Ali. Now, it is becoming more widely available.

Its two main centers in California and Colorado have grown, and there are branches in Seattle, New York, Boston, Hawaii, Michigan, Montana, Canada, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere. Writing under the pen-name of A. H. Almaas, Ali has also described parts of this system in two series of books. The Diamond Heart Books are based on transcriptions of talks given to groups of his students. The Diamond Mind series provides detailed explanations of various theoretical and applied aspects of the Diamond Approach, supported by case histories.

Recently, more people interested in spiritual work and the relationship of psychology to spirituality have recognized its value. Jack Kornfield, a popular Buddhist meditation teacher, psychologist, and writer, dedicated his latest book, A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life, to Ali. In The Eye of Spirit, the well-known writer and theorist Ken Wilber writes, "As of this writing, I myself can recommend the Diamond Approach as probably the most balanced of the widely available spiritual psychologies/therapies." Tony Schwartz, in What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America, called it one of the most useful blends of Eastern and Western insight he found in his many encounters with transformative systems and schools. Schwartz went on to recommend Ali's books Essence and Diamond Heart Book One as among the half-dozen best books to begin exploring a "path of wisdom."

Brant Cortright included Ali's Diamond Approach as one of the main approaches to "transpersonal psychotherapy" (although he acknowledges that it is spiritual work rather than psychotherapy). Cortright places it alongside the work of Ken Wilber, Carl Jung, Stan Grof, and others as being important in the integration of spirituality and psychology. Chapters by Ali have also been included in several anthologies on spirituality and personal growth. Graduate courses on the Diamond Approach are taught at The Naropa Institute in Boulder and the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, and workshops on the Diamond Approach have been part of Esalen Institute's program for several years.

As more people come to be interested in this method, the need for a brief introduction and summary has become evident. While personal practice is essential to anyone wishing to really know it, and while the books by Ali describe its philosophy and perspective in great detail, a brief overview introducing the Diamond Approach may support sincere seekers in integrating its various insights.

This book began as notes I was using to teach about the Diamond Approach in my undergraduate and graduate classes. I gradually put them into a form that could be distributed to students. They were reading some of Ali's books and doing exercises to explore their own experience, but they appreciated the overview my notes provided them. Here, I have added material to describe its most important concepts and central methods, and I have supplemented the overview with selections from Ali's writing.

On this web site, I have included this Preface, Chapter One (without the selections of Ali's writing), and the Epilogue. I have also included some comments on Ali's teaching by others and a page with a few relevant links.

The Introduction in the book gives a flavor of working with the Diamond Approach through my own experiences. While the rest of the book may be somewhat more abstract, I hope you will get a taste of the personal journey that underlies the concepts. The first two chapters introduce the path and orientation of the Diamond Approach and summarize its central method, Inquiry. The next four chapters present its basic concepts. Soul, space, Essence, and the Theory of Holes are key beginning points for understanding the Diamond Approach. The last three chapters present more advanced material. Two particular qualities of Essence&emdash;Personal Essence and Essential Identity&emdash;are especially important in the Diamond Approach. They speak to the tricky questions of realizing and integrating our spiritual nature into our lives in the world. The last chapter presents a summary of the advanced teaching on the boundless and egoless dimensions of Being. The Epilogue brings the book back to your journey and to some of the qualities which will support that journey.

This is a very detailed and thorough teaching, and I have had to be selective about what I included. While this book covers the most central aspects of the Diamond Approach, I have had to leave out others. For example, Ali incorporates the Enneagram into his teaching in several ways. He has significantly expanded the understanding of the Enneagram by showing its connection to Essence and to the Boundless dimensions of Being (see his new book, Facets of Unity). He has also provided very detailed and useful descriptions of many states and aspects of Essence which I have chosen not to include here. These are important, but I felt it was equally important to keep the size and scope of this book at a more introductory level.

The Diamond Approach is a whole, and its central features cannot be cleanly or completely separated from one another. The threads which I have teased apart and discussed in separate chapters in this book are really interwoven elements of a larger and infinitely richer tapestry. Thus, we see the same threads turning up in many different contexts within Ali's teaching. The concepts of soul, space, personality, self-image, and Essence, for example, appear in a number of chapters.

Each chapter begins with a brief discussion of an important aspect of the Diamond Approach followed by selections from Ali's writing. These will give you a taste of the Diamond Approach in Ali's original voice and illustrate and expand on the concepts. They may give you a sense of his range, too. Some selections are from talks given to students, which are intended to evoke a certain experiential quality in the students listening to them (for example, the Swamp Thing talk in Chapter Three and some of the excerpts from the Diamond Heart Books). Some are carefully detailed conceptual presentations (those from The Pearl Beyond Price and The Point of Existence, for example). Others are personal accounts from Ali's journals describing his own experiences (such as the selection from Luminous Night's Journey in Chapter Two).

I have, with Ali's permission, shortened and edited some of these selections. However, he has reviewed them to ensure that they preserve the meaning he originally intended. In several selections, I have deleted comparisons Ali makes between his understanding and a comparable understanding from a spiritual system or psychological theory. I value these kinds of comparisons and honor the wisdom in other spiritual systems. However, in the interest of staying brief and straightforward, I chose to not include very much comparative analysis. I encourage readers to pursue the various books written by Ali (that is, Almaas) in order to get a more accurate and penetrating view. They are listed in the Bibliography.

For those who do not know the Diamond Approach, I hope this book will introduce you to it in a way that is clear and not too complicated. I have assumed that you have a sincere interest and some personal experience with deep psychological growth work or spiritual work. I hope it will enable you to take another step on your journey. I also hope that, if any of the ideas and experiences I describe here are too confusing, they will become clearer along the way.

If you are already involved in a spiritual path, I hope this book will enliven and enrich your study. In many places, it should complement and expand things you already know. In other places, it may challenge you to explore new areas of your own understanding.

For those readers who are already working with the Diamond Approach through the Ridhwan School, I hope this book will support your work. You have probably spent months or years working deeply on material covered in just a few pages here. You may have also encountered these concepts in an order very different from the more linear presentation here. Nevertheless, the overview and descriptions offered here might help give you a sense of the bigger context of your work.

Readers interested in comparative studies of spiritual systems, transpersonal psychologies, and the like should find some help from the Diamond Approach. In particular, it shows the continuity of psychological and spiritual knowledge more clearly and thoroughly than anything available before now.

I would add a caution to all readers. Reading this book is not the same as understanding the Diamond Approach first-hand. It will be useful if it provides clarity about what is already happening in your life and especially if it opens new doors for you. My deepest intention for this book is to offer the Diamond Approach in a way that will facilitate your direct experience of awakening, your development, and the realization of your potential as a human being.