The Almaasary

(ahl • mahs • uh • ry)
1. A glossary of key passages from the works of A.H. Almaas.
2. A collection of diamonds (from Arabic "almaas" meaning diamond, and Latin "-ary", a collection).

Glossary: P

• Pain
  

  To try to avoid pain and to always seek pleasure will mean, much of the time, the non-acceptance of truth. It usually means the rejection of what is there. It means rejecting your experience. It means rejecting your consciousness. It means rejecting yourself. Now how is that going to lead... more »

• Past
  

  The past exists in us as activity, and the content of personality is an activity, a movement. Ego activity is the substance of suffering; it is contraction itself. You can see this more specifically if you look at the activity in the centers of the body. If you look at... more »

• Pattern
  

  The "true pattern" of the self refers to the intrinsic possibilities one is born with. It is considered a reflection of an archetypal reality. This concept corresponds to our view that the soul has a blueprint, analogous to the DNA in the cell nucleus, which shapes the pattern of development. more »

• Pea
  

  The true identity will expose the false identity, the personality. So the death experience is needed to see the true identity, which in turn will reveal the false identity, what most people call “myself.” There are many other levels. When you ask people “What is your self?” they respond according... more »

• Peace
  

  Peace: It is not any emotional state or merely the absence of conflict; it is rather the presence of stillness, which is an aspect of Essence. It is the Presence of Being as absolute stillness and calmness. This stillness is not experienced as dull or vague, but as an exquisitely... more »

• Pearl Beyond Price
  

  The pearl beyond price, the incomparable pearl, the personal aspect of Essence is central for many important reasons. It is actually the true essential personality. It is the person. It is experienced as oneself. When the individual finally perceives it, the contented expression often is "but this is me!" The... more »

• Perception
  

  Objective perception requires that we apprehend or perceive without the usual filters, without the projections of the past onto the present. What is, obviously must be in the moment – now, because only now exists. Only this very moment exists. You can see that logically for yourself. I’m not saying... more »

• Perfections
  

  We learn from this virtual dimension that all aspects and forms of essence are nothing but the absolute, inherent in the very fabric of the absolute. They are its inherent, implicit, nondifferentiated, and nonmanifest perfections. When they manifest they are basically the manifestation of the inherent perfections of the absolute... more »

• Person
  

  We can manifest as a person, or as love, joy, or compassion. The person is just one of the essential aspects. Being a person is the most difficult of the essential aspects to understand because we have lived an imitation of it, which is the false person, the personality. In... more »

• Personal
  

  So the sense of feeling personal is a sense of feeling close to, and intimate with, oneself in a personal way. One feels very close to oneself as a person, as a being, as a human being. One feels involved with oneself, immersed in one's unique beingness. One is intimately... more »

• Personal Essence
  

  The Personal Essence, in contrast, is a sense of being a person independent of ego structures. It is the awareness of Presence qualified by personhood. This sense of personhood is independent of one's personal history; it is a direct recognition of a pure form of Being. This form of Being... more »

• Personal Mind
  

  The personal mind or the realm of personality is not what actually exists in reality. The content of the personal mind is determined by one’s particular history and conditioning, including all kinds of cultural forms and values in addition to concepts formed by one’s individual situation. The process of constructing... more »

• Personality
  

  Personality is nothing but a boundary that separates us from other people so that we can protect ourselves from what we think is noxious to us. But when you block part of yourself, you create tensions and armoring in the body. Not only do you have a pain that cannot... more »

• Personality Sectors
  

  We find that each of the essential aspects -- such as will, love, truth, compassion-- is related to a certain part of the personality, to a definite sector. We will also find that each aspect of Essence is not only related to a certain sector of the personality, but also... more »

• Personalization
  

  So the development of the Personal Essence, through the personalization of essential aspects, is actually a change in the qualitative character of the personality, and hence is bound to be resisted by the established self of ego, which is closely related to it. This personality character is largely the outcome... more »

• Perspective
  

  The perspective, which assumes the ultimate reality and value of the physical universe, to the exclusion of other dimensions of reality, is the source of the difficulties of the egoic mind. This perspective creates most of our suffering – the way we approach death, sickness and disease, pleasure and pain,... more »

• Physical Matter
  

  In complete coemergence, Reality includes not only the boundless dimensions of true nature, but also the dimension of shakti energy and that of physicality. The physical dimension is more difficult to understand, because it is not a dimension in the sense we have been discussing. It is basically physical matter... more »

• Platonic Form
  

  Each of the aspects of Essence is a Platonic form, eternally and primordially itself. Love is always and eternally love, so is peace, so is joy, so is intelligence, and so on. Each cannot be anything else, cannot evolve and cannot devolve. It cannot be contaminated and cannot be improved... more »

• Pleasure
  

  One cannot seek happiness, for it is the result of realizing the Truth. The personality, which has security and pleasure as its aims, cannot be happy. Pursuing pleasure or safety will entail covering up any unpleasant or frightening truths. This automatically closes Joy. For Joy is the radiance of the... more »

• Point
  

  When you are who you are, when you are just precisely yourself, you are your "point." Just that. This has nothing to do with any qualities, functions, capacities, and skills you may have. It has nothing to do with your status in the world, and nothing to do with living... more »

• Pomegranate
  

  Through my turning towards the absolute, and loving it exclusively, risking the loss of the divine being and the unity of existence, the absolute reveals itself as the inner nature of this unity. The immense silence discloses itself as the self of the divine being. I recognize that what I... more »

• Positions
  

  It is possible to experience reality without taking a position about it, to be completely open about experience whether you are enjoying it or disliking it. If you look at yourself at this moment, objectively, you will see that you're taking a certain position within yourself about what I'm saying... more »

• Possessions
  

  However, having possessions naturally tends to become possessiveness, an important support for the sense of self, which is ultimately false. The more a person is selfish or egoistic and the less he is in touch with deeper reality, the more it is important for him to have things. Havingness is... more »

• Potential
  

  As the soul unfolds her potential she changes not by disposing of the old forms, but by integrating them into a more complex organization, in which more elements and levels are integrated into a functional whole. As forms emerge and develop they subsume the previous ones, creating a more complex... more »

• Power
  

  See Black Latifa: http://glossary.ahalmaas.com/phrases/black-latifa more »

• Practicing Period
  

  When the Essential Identity arises in the practicing period, the child feels these grand qualities. However, as we have discussed, she is not consciously aware that she is being the Essential Identity, so her realization is different from the mature self-realization of an adult. She is the Essential Identity completely... more »

• Prayer
  

  The question of prayer is profound and vast, and many traditions are built upon it. I can only address it partially here, as it relates to our exploration today. As long as you take yourself to be a separate ego, prayer is good. Prayer could help you to eliminate the... more »

• Preciousness
  

  Nothing touches us more deeply than the implicit value of our own beingness. It is value beyond mind, beyond concepts, beyond ideals and hopes and dreams. This preciousness of simply being here now with awareness and understanding fills our heart with contentment and satisfaction. We realize that where we are,... more »

• Preferences
  

  So, one thing we can learn from True Nature is to have no preference, no choice; we don’t need to choose what to experience. Our experience always simply happens. If we try to choose and say, “This is good, this is bad, this situation should include this and not that,”... more »

• Prejudice
  

  When we use the word "prejudice," we don't mean just its common restricted usage: having fixed ideas about a particular group, race, religion, or set of beliefs. Prejudice, as we are using it, means anything that distorts the objective perception of reality. In other words we consider prejudice anything that... more »

• Presence
  

  When we can finally be ourselves fully, we recognize ourselves as Presence, and apprehend that this Presence is nothing but the ontological reality of consciousness. We feel our Presence as a medium, like a material medium, such as water or clear fluid. This medium is homogeneous, unified, whole and undivided,... more »

• Primal Self
  

  Actually, the Essential Identity is an element of the primal self in the stage of primary narcissism, but in the experience of the primal self (the unstructured soul), it is not differentiated. The primal self does not distinguish between surface and core, between self and identity, or between self and... more »

• Primary Self-Realization
  

  In the original condition of primary self-realization, which coincides with that of primary narcissism, the child does not possess enough discrimination to differentiate between his essential Presence and the various contents of the self. In the next stage, where the Essential Identity is his dominant presence, the child's capacity for... more »

• Process of Understanding
  

  For the process of understanding to happen, three elements need to be there at the same time. The element of disidentification is one of them, involvement is another. The third element is the quality of allowing. These elements can be there when there is harmony among the three centers --... more »

• Projection
  

  Our projections, of course, determine many of our actions, our feelings, and even our life plans. Paranoia is one of the most well known forms of projection but projection is very prevalent in other forms. Sometimes you project your fear or your jealousy, so that you won’t have to experience... more »

• Psyche
  

  So for Freud, the psyche or the mind consists of a structure composed of three units: the id, which is the reservoir of all instinctual forces and energies, and which is merged with the physical organism; the ego, which forms mostly the functional self that is in direct contact with... more »

• Psychic Impressions
  

  Strong and/or repeated impressions tend to become fixed in the soul, becoming part of the overall ego restructuring. These impressions can be positive or negative, pleasurable or painful. Some of the most well known and problematic one's are those due to painful or intensely conflictual experiences of early life. These... more »

• Psychic Metabolism
  

  We have seen that metabolism is complete and can lead to the Personal Essence only when it reaches the stage of absorption. We also noted that an identification system can become ready for absorption only when it is completely purged of falsehood. For an identification system, which is an aspect... more »

• Psychic Structure
  

  Psychic structure can be seen, then, simply as the structuralization of the substrate or consciousness, the ground of experience of the self, under the impact or imprint of the organized systems of images. Image is a content of organized memory, but structures the substrate of the self in the present. more »

• Psychodynamic Issues
  

  The concept of separation has to be there before there can be any issue about separation from mother. And the concept of separation implies the concept of mother and the concept of self. The whole issue of separation would not exist if there were no concepts. All psychodynamic issues ultimately... more »

• Psychological Constellations
  

  Psychological constellations will present themselves both inside -- as emotional conflicts and physical tension -- and outside -- as difficulties, conflicts, issues, dissatisfactions, and lack of understanding of the environment and the people in it... the psychological constellation, when understood exactly for what it is, will lead spontaneously to a... more »

• Psychopathology
  

  We have observed that these defenses, which are generally associated with psychopathology -- regressive refusion with psychosis, grandiosity with pathological narcissism, defensive detachment with schizoidism, and splitting with borderline conditions -- do not really completely disappear in normal ego development. Our exploration of the deeper layers of the normal personality... more »

• Psychotherapy
  

  Psychotherapy's goal is to resolve the conflicts only on the psychogical level. It attempts this by working on understanding the conflicts and their origins in childhood. It believes that through this understanding and the discharge of repressed emotions the conflicts will be resolved. But how can that be, when the... more »

• Purpose
  

  What is traditionally referred to as purposelessness and motivelessness, and sometimes as indifference, but more accurately understood as the transcendence of purpose and motive, is not something to try to emulate. One cannot say that there is no such thing as purpose and motivation, and that it is therefore fine... more »