Over the past twenty-five years A. H. Almaas--widely recognized as a leader in integrating spirituality and psychology--has been developing and teaching the Diamond Approach, a spiritual path that integrates the insights of Sufism, Buddhism, Gurdjieff, and other wisdom traditions with modern psychology. In this new work, Almaas uses the metaphor of a "spacecruiser" to describe a method of exploring the immediacy of personal experience--a way of investigating our moment-by-moment feelings, thoughts, reactions, and behaviors through a process of open-ended questioning. The method is called the...

Intelligence is one of the defining characteristics of human beings: an inherent ability to respond to the world with awareness, knowledge, learning, and insight. Most considerations of human intelligence are based on the notion that intelligence is a product of brain functioning. A. H. Almaas introduces here a radically different viewpoint, one that recognizes an actual quality of consciousness as the source of intelligence. He calls this source the Brilliancy of our true nature.
The presentation of his understanding of intelligence is followed by in-depth dialogues with his students on...