Diamond Heart: History, Traditions, and Practices

The following is a part of my paper about Diamond Heart.  This post illustrates the traditions and practices of Diamond Heart.

Traditions and practices

              This section indicates the traditions and practices of the Diamond Heart.  There are a number of spiritual methods in the Diamond Heart.  In fact, private sessions or small study groups use emotional, cognitive, and intuitive processes, breathwork, and subtle energy exercises.  In addition, teachers of the Diamond Heart use a combination of lectures, experiential exercises, and meditation.  Then students of the Diamond Heart explore their own truth little by little with teachers.     

              Especially, this paper pinpoints on the central practice of the Diamond Heart.  It is called Inquiry.  As Davis (1999) points out, “inquiry encourages and enables open-ended exploration into your immediate experience without preconceptions or prejudice about the outcome of that exploration” (p. 25).  The subject of inquiry can be every experience and then inquiry begins and proceeds.  As the inquiry proceeds from one experience to another, our consciousness broadens and finally reaches at our Essence.  Moreover, as inquiry goes on, the depth and width of our Essence are enhanced gradually.  Davis (1999) describes “In this way, Inquiry leads to growth, healing, release, and fulfillment.  Its ultimate outcome is freedom and the experience of your true nature and full human potential in whatever way it manifests (p. 25-26).                   However, there is one point we look out for about inquiry.  Inquiry is always open and it does not have any particular goal.  In addition to that, at first, I misunderstood that inquiry was like a free association technique.  However, Davis (1999) points out that “Inquiry is not free association or mindfulness meditation, although these practices are useful in supporting Inquiry” (p. 27).  In other words, free association and mindfulness meditation supplement inquiry but they are never inquiry itself.  

              Last, in a word, the role of inquiry is to shift our experiences.  We may feel this shift as an insight, a release of energy, a powerful emotional state, or spaciousness in our consciousness (Davis, 1999).  However, this shift is not similar process of psychotherapies and spiritual practices.  Whereas a lot of psychotherapeutic techniques tend to aim at a change of our inner experiences, inquiry in the Diamond Heart never aims at that kind of change.  Instead of that, inquiry shifts our experience and opens us to a deeper level of experience.

Reference

1 Spacecruiser Inquiry (Diamond Body Series)

2 The Diamond Approach: An Introduction to the Teachings of A. H. Almaas

3 Psychosynthesis: A Psychology of the Spirit (Suny Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)

4 Joy of Sects, The: A Spirited Guide to the World's Religions