Nondual Love: Awakening to the Loving Nature of Reality

Almaas (Keys to the Enneagram) offers a rewarding if flawed meditation on “divine” or “nondual” love. Drawing on Buddhist teachings he presented in 1995 at the Ridhwan School, his own organization, Almaas describes a state in which one’s spirit “manifests its unbounded infinity as a shoreless ocean of sweetness.” Those who experience nondual love, he posits, can spiritually transcend their own bodies and reach a state of “boundless consciousness” in which they’re at one with reality. As well, when practitioners stop viewing the self as a “limited entity,” they can “recognize the presence of divinity everywhere.” But worldly attachments keep humans from achieving divine love; to help surmount them, Almaas offers his “Diamond Approach,” in which practitioners use deep self-inquiry to better understand one’s own essence—spiritually freeing them to connect to the divine. Readers will find Almaas’s meditations useful, even if they tend to rely on confusing extended metaphors (“Your sense of who you are has the quality of divine love; a very light, bright, and empty quality, which is also soft, delicate, and melted”). Those with a background in Buddhist practice will gain wisdom from this dense text, though beginners should steer clear. (Mar.)