Runaway Realization Book Talk
November 2014
Runaway Realization, Almaas's 17th book articulates what he refers to as the View of Totality.
The video titled "Runaway Realization - Endless Enlightenment (A.H. Almaas)" is a discussion on the concept of totality and realization in the context of spirituality. Here are the key points:
- The video discusses various experiences of totality on the spiritual path. This can be experienced as the individual soul being aware of itself as the totality of our experiences and what we are. The soul, with its organs, capacities, and histories, is where all our experiences happen.
- Totality can also be experienced in a boundless dimension, not being the individual soul but being the totality of the universe. In this experience, we are everything. We are the totality in the sense that we are the nowness or the awareness that contains everything - all thoughts, feelings, objects, and phenomena are part of this totality.
- The video discusses the understanding of emptiness, which is closest to the understanding of emptiness posited by the Prasangika Madhyamaka tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. This dimension, referred to as that of the absolute, is not simply emptiness. It is emptiness totally inseparable and not differentiable from presence, which is the fullness of self-knowing being.
- The video emphasizes that reality is far more indeterminate and mysterious than anything we can conceive of. No single view, whether dual, nondual, unilocal, or something else entirely, can capture the dynamism of reality. Freedom is the freedom of reality to reveal its dynamism, to express itself as form, as formlessness, as both, or as neither.
- The video introduces the concept of the freedom vehicle, a new diamond vehicle that manifests as part of the journey of descent. It clarifies where lies the true freedom of the soul, and how this freedom is inseparable from the life of service. The freedom vehicle contains the objective wisdom of what an individual being is in relation to the cosmos, and what his or her function is in actuality.