After reading 6 of the 17 chapters, it was time to start to summarize each chapter here. The summary was what each chapter communicated to me. It may or may not be what was intended to communicate to the readers by the author. Also, I might just copy and paste from the book, or I might also write based on my understanding.
1. In the World but Not of It.
You are in the world and in it when you allow the world around you to drive and guide you. You pursue your career, your roles as a mom, a dad, a husband, a wife, and so on by just letting your life goes along with the flow of outside values believed to be great or outside critics against you believed to be horrible by the world around you.
You are in the world but not of it when you pursue your career, your roles as a mom, a dad, a husband, a wife, and so on but you do not let the world designate or shake your true value, your Personal Essence. Instead, you live your life by trying to understand that part of it, your true value, your Personal Essence, in yourself and actualize it.
2. The Theory of Holes
Everyone was born with his/her true value, his/her Personal Essence. Love, Peace, Value, Strength, Will, Courage, Humility, Truth and so on are aspects of Essence. Through the process of childbearing and growing up in the world, the essence got lost and instead was replaced by HOLES.
The holes originated during childhood, partly as a result of traumatic experiences or conflicts with the environment. Perhaps your parents did not value you, did not treat you as if your wishes or presence were important. They ignored your essential value. Because your value was not seen or acknowledged, perhaps even attacked or discouraged, you got cut off from that part of you, the part of your true value, and what was left was a HOLE, a deficiency.
Emotions like sadnesses, hurt, jealousy, anger, hatred, fear, all of these are the result of holes. If you stay with the hurt and the pain of loss, without trying to cover it or fill it with something else, it is possible that you will feel the emptiness.
Take this as a sample. When a hole developed by lacking love from your parents during your childhood, you tried to fill the hole by finding someone to love you. Filling the hole this way is not permanent yet could result in a much bigger hole or different holes.
The loss of essence like this actually can regain but not by filling the holes from external objects, ideas, words or other feelings.
The first thing to start is to allow yourself to feel the holes and not fill them so you can see what they are all about. You work to tolerate those feelings, to stay with them and not try to fill the holes with something else.
3. The Diamond Approach to the Work
Everyone was born with his/her true value, his/her Personal Essence. Love, Peace, Value, Strength, Will, Courage, Humility, Truth and so on are aspects of Essence. These aspects of Essence are just like facets of Diamond. Diamond Approach offers the Work of which participants, after joining, could gradually and eventually actualize their own personal Essence and should be able to fill their holes from within instead of external force. But how does the "Work" work?
First, you must learn to sense yourself, to pay attention to yourself, so that the necessary information is available. You must not avoid self-awareness. You must feel the holes, the emptiness, the falseness, the something-is-wrong feeling.
Next, the Work uses various forms of the old techniques, such as meditation, to strengthen different parts of the Essense. The Work also uses psychological techniques to understand the blocks against the issues around the aspects of Essence.
In the Work, you will see how different qualities of Essence are related to specific issues from the past. The relationships between the essential state, the hole that resulted from the loss of that state, the emotions and beliefs we create to fill the holes, and the conflicts that arise from the resulting false personality are all understood. These relationships and patterns are the same for every human being.
You have to see through all your conflicts, your fears, your guilt, your anger, your love, everything, so that in time, more and more essential qualities will be realized in you. If you can do this work thoroughly and completely, in time, you will be complete. No hole, just solid Essence.
4. Faith and Commitment
Faith is seen more on the emotional level than as something that has to do with knowledge. It has to do with devotion or trust. Commitment is essentially dedication, bringing yourself closer to what you want to do. You use will to push yourself closer to what you want, to your aim. At the essential level, there is no such thing as faith; there is only knowledge. There is no such thing as commitment; there is just being. When you are your essence, you are not committed to yourself, you ARE yourself.
5. Nobility and Suffering
To be noble is to not let your superego or other people's superegos sway you, but to act according to the real truth. If you value anything over what is true in you, there is suffering. We can become deeply content simply by being in harmony with the truth.
6. Value
Value is an aspect of Essence. You are Value yourself. When you experience Value in yourself, you will see that Value is the ground, the basis, of what is called the Personal Essence, what is in you that is you. You are based in Value.
7. Truth and Compassion
Compassion leads to truth, truth to compassion. When you see the truth, you feel hurt, when you allow yourself to feel the hurt, compassion comes. The hurt or suffering is just something in between that we go through and us irrelevant to the Essence. The important part is truth-the truth about who we are-no matter how much hurt, suffering, and fear it takes to get there. Sometimes the pain is there so that the person will learn the truth.
8. Trust
Compassion leads to trust, trust leads to compassion. Both are linked to truth. Hurt and vulnerability are what happen in between. They are some of what people to through in going from trust to truth or from truth to trust.
The deeper level of compassion is to see the way things happen as truth and allow people to feel hurt so, they learn to be compassionate which later on, they can also get to the deeper level of compassion which is seeing what happens in life as truth.
9. Essence is the Life
Essence is Ridhwan. Ridhwan is a verbal noun in Arabic that not only means "satisfied," "fulfilled," "contented," but also means "satisfying," "fulfilling," "making content."
The satisfying can only be owned by you only if it comes from inside. As long as you hold onto wanting something from the outside, you will be dissatisfied.
To protect, nourish, and nurture Essence, or to really live the life of Essence, you have to take the responsibility, the will to actualize the truth. The will and the truth need to be objective and universal. Objective means not influenced by your emotional state or your unconscious. It has to do with how things are, how they function which are facts. Universal means not only the truth about you, but the truth about the whole situation, about everything and everybody.
When the will and the truth are in harmony and both are objective and universal, they become citadel to protect Essence, the Ridhwan, the true values.
10. The Value of Struggling
Genuinely grappling and confronting whatever issues, whatever problems, whatever conflicts whatever situations you have in your life. Completely embrace them. Do your best to observe and experience what is happening and to understand it. Ultimately, the struggle with yourself leads to what is called "Black Death." When you get through the center of "Black Death," you will recognize that the heart of this death is pure compassion.
(My comment - and the compassion also leads to truth - see 7. truth and compassion. This also resembles Buddhist the Four Noble Truths and the Four Divine Virtues.)
11. Truth
The truth will set you free. Facts are not the truth. Facts are just like atoms that when putting them together, they form the whole situation, the truth. If you understand the facts and the causes of your fears, angers and hurts, and you are able to relate them together to form the whole situation, the truth, this truth with set you free. Your personality that used to be developed under the influence of your fears, angers and hurts without understanding the truth, will eventually have less influence on you. Instead, you will be more free in your actions and your interactions with others.
When you seek truth, you seek yourself, the truth will set you free by allowing you to be yourself.
(My question - free from ?)
12. Allowing
To allow the process of growth, you need to allow that anything can happen. Anything is possible. The attitude of trusting without knowing what will happen, of allowing things to emerge, is needed at all levels and stages of the process of inner development.
Allowing is not passivity, and it not an act of determination. It is neither of these. It is between passive and active. In a sense, you are actively passive to your experience.
When we allow the natural process of growth, there is expansion, happiness and joy.
(My comment - I do not quite understand this part.)
13. Growing Up
Growing up means to become an adult and not a child. To be an adult, it means;
_to become aware, to become conscious
_to do the best you can do in the situation. If something does not go right, an adult will look at the situation, see what to do to get out of it if the situation is not desirable
_to learn how to give yourself love, compassion, approval, recognition, support, and strength and stop believing that you need those things from the outside
There are two main ways of working with it. One is the theistic approach and the other is the nontheistic approach.
The theistic approach is the main approach in the West. These traditions say that if you look toward God. What is needed is complete faith, complete surrender toward God. God is the essence of the Essence.
The nontheistic approach is for example, the Buddhists and Taoists. The Buddhists speak of the Four Noble Truths; dukkha (suffering), samudaya (the cause of suffering), nirodha (there is a way to out of that), and magga (the path to come out from suffering).
Buddhists also speaks of the Four Divine Virtues; metta (loving kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy or empathy) and upekkha (equanimity).
14. The Student's Relationship to the Teaching
The relationship between student and the teaching cannot be forced. If you want to be connected to the teaching, you need to put effort into understanding the relationship and actualize it.
15. The Impeccable Warrior
Uncertainty is the enemy of the impeccability. Uncertainty is due to incomplete awareness, incomplete knowledge of what is there. Impeccability is concerned with now, with complete presence at every moment.
(My comment - Buddhist meditation is the teaching of Now, of being mindful.)
16. Curiosity
Curiosity is the joy of the truth. Just like children, their curiosity is spontaneous, in the present, full of joy, and not goal oriented. You need to be like a child. Curiosity is the motivation from the Essence itself.
17. Gathering Honey
In the work, you work individually most of the time just like collecting nectars, of whatever quality and density you can collect. Then, it is necessary for everybody to get together and engage in a certain activity that, at its deepest level, is the gathering of these nectars in one place, so that by a certain process, the nectar can be purified and distilled, made as concentrated as possible.
