Dharma Combat

Where Spiritual Giants Duke It Out

A. H. Almaas
Taking Hits

Ken Wilber:

(Note: Wilber also praises Almaas's Diamond Approach: "I myself can recommend the Diamond Approach as probably the most balanced of the widesly available spiritual psychologies/therapies.")

 

That said . . .

 

"The Diamond Approach . . . contains several pre/trans fallacies that render it dangerously unstable . . . It confuses per-egoic impulse with trans-egoic Essence, just because both are non-egoic. That's a classic mistake."
". . . Essence is an emergent that comes down, not a recontacted infantile state coming back up. It is God descending, not id arising."
"There are two very different things going on here, and they have thoroughly confused them. To begin with, if you repress a preconventional impulse - say, early joy - then that repression is a wall that seals off not only the lower impulses trying to come up, but the higher impulses trying to come down. In other words, a strong repression against id will also tend to block out God, simply because both id and God can threaten the ego, and a defense against one helps defend against the other. Thus, if you relax the wall of prepression - a preression first created against a lower impulse when you were perhaps two or three years old - you can simultaneously open yourself to the descent of a higher impulse, which itself was never repressed in the past but is now emerging for the first time. Essence is an emergent, not an infantile regurgitation."
"The Diamond Approach is powerful enough to stretch the rubber bad for a short period, but it always snaps back."
(From One Taste pp. 169-174)

"Becoming a student of the Diamond Work is too expensive for the average person. Apparently these days some people just can't afford to get enlightened." - from an anonymous reader

Dharma Combat

Spiritual Arena