The Daily Journal

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This morning I am exploring the connections between Surrender and Enlightenment as I Surrender the former Law, to take up the latter, for this coming month.

I feel positively giddy with relief after the hard slog last month studying Surrender. Turning to Enlightenment feels like a reward for not giving up. Many kinds of Surrender precede Enlightenment. I hope to have time to investigate the other reasons why these Laws sit together on the northeast side of the Wheel. I suspect it all has something to do with the Surrender of the ego personality before we can achieve genuine Enlighenment.

A genuine Nor'easter blizzard blew through here yesterday. We are still digging out from under several inches of snow. It is impossible to see the Enlightenment stone or visit the outdoor Wisdom Wheel today, but the sun reflects off the white drifts, like diamonds sparkling. Why are diamonds are the gem stones of Enlightenment? Because of their hardness or their brillance?

I turn to one of the books which have enlightened me over the years, to check up on the connotations for the word diamond, in Barbara G. Walkers' Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. According to her research, diamond meant World-Goddess to the ancients. They believed gem stones were solidified drops of the divine essence embedded in the rocks when the world was created. Diamonds ruled all the other stones because of their superior hardness.

Ali Hameed Almaas, the Arab founder of the Diamond approach, is one of the Enlightenment teachers whose writings I will be reading in the coming days. The Arabic name almas means both diamond and adamant. His professed Love for universal truth beyond culture and conditioning resonates with me.

Since we truly want to know, we are willing to surrender our biases. Our objectivity expands as our knowledge deepens. The truth of experience gradually manifests as our biases are exposed and surrendered. One of his earliest books was The Elixir of Enlightenment.

Almass has taken the issue of the ego, and its role in Enlightenment, very seriously. In an interiew about his work, he said just as psychotherapy can help people see where they may be blocked in achieving greater intimacy, so too could psychological techniques indicate where a person's ego defenses were obstructing or distorting their relationship to the divine.

Psychologist and longtime Buddhist meditator Jack Engler said about the ego: You have to be somebody before you can be nobody. Ali envisions the ego as a pale imitation of a more glorious reality, capable of manifesting a far richer consciousness in everyday life than had been thought possible. He believes our spiritual work is not about repairing life situations per se, it has more to do with repairing our sense of disconnection from spirit.

Ali uses psychological inquiry as part of his methodsaying that if we better understand the defenses, attachments, and identifications of our egos, and the childhood conditions that created them, we can better integrate the Self, and digest those parts that were split off or misunderstood. He see the authentic Self as the true Essential personalitywhich is neither spiritual nor worldly, but a synthesis of both.

If human beings are rooted in a broader, more eternal reality, instead of being trapped in conditioned, compulsive or habitual behavior patterns, they can chose to embody a greater range of divine qualities in daily life, like Compassion, Integrity and harmony.

Ali explains how this could be called, God becoming a human person, an individual, instead of the person seeking to become less individual, and more impersonally transcendent and self-less.

He draws upon Buddhism, Sufism, the enneagram and body work, along with other disciplines but claims he does not identify himself with any specific religious or spiritual tradition. He says his teachings arose directly out of his own spiritual odyssey, I did not develop my work by organizing it at the beginning, looking at various theories and integrating them. It was a living and organic process of development, guided by spirit.

Born in Kuwait, and raised in a large Muslim family, Ali came to the USA in 1963 to study physics. His passion for decoding the metaphysical mysteries led him to Chilean psychiatrist Claudia Naranjo, who helped pioneer the enneagram work with groups. Ali has studied with various Buddhist and Gurdjieffian Sufi teachers but he's gone on to develop what works best for him.

Sounds a bit like what happened on my spiritual Journey and how I developed the Wisdom Wheel, with help from spirit. People used to tell me not to mention that part when working with corporate types.