• Live here. Deal with what is present rather than with what is absent.
• Stop imagining. Experience the real.
• Stop unnecessary thinking. Rather, taste and see.
• Express rather than manipulate, explain, justify, or judge.
• Give in to unpleasantness and pain just as to pleasure. Do not restrict your awareness.
• Accept no should or ought other than your own. Adore no graven image.
• Take full responsibility for your actions, feelings, and thoughts.
• Surrender to being as you are.”

― Claudio Naranjo, Terapia Gestalt: La vía del vacío fértil

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“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 heart when Truth is appreciated.” ― A.H. Almaas, The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, an Object Relations Approach

“Your environment wasn't supportive, wasn't loving, did not respond to you ... The fundamental thing that happened, and the greatest calamity, is not that there was no love or support. The greater calamity, which is caused by the first calamity is that you lost the connection to your essence. That is much more important than whether your mother or father loved you or not.” ― A.H. Almaas

''You abandonne(d) yourself, then start(ed)looking for satisfaction.''

“Practice is the interest, the love, the drive, the tendency, the movement, to be as authentic as possible, to be as real as possible.” ― A. H. Almaas, Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery

“Sometimes being real means allowing pain or accepting a painful truth. Yet something in us aligns with an inner ground of authenticity when we are real. We love it because of its inherent rightness in our soul, the sense of “Aha, here I am and there is nothing to do but be.” ― A.H. Almaas, The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence

“When we blend courage and compassion, assertiveness and gentleness, our essential strength and kindness support us in being where we are.” ― A.H. Almaa

“Hatred wants to annihilate, but it annihilates by destroying, by making our awareness dull, by suppressing, by dividing. True Nature does not really annihilate, because something is not wiping out something else--there is no duality. The kind of annihilation that True Nature makes possible is more of a recognition, a precise understanding that Being reveals in us. We have no inner agitation in our attitude; we see and understand whatever impediment is arising, but we do not give it energy in the form of reaction, and thus it becomes still on its own and does not appear. We experience this as a dissolving or a melting, but what is actually happening is that the energy fueling the obstacle disappears, the obstacle loses its dynamism, and it simply stops arising.” ― A.H. Almaas ---

F: The personality is a big mosaic composition. There are so many pieces to it. Sometimes you deal with anger, or you deal with fear, or you deal with mother, or with father. You deal with the unconscious in so many layers. When you move with one aspect of the personality at a time it will eventually lead you to our natural state of being. Lets say for example somebody is much in anger, he is angry or is afraid of anger and he does not know how to be angry. When we explore anger and what it is about and how it is happening, then the hole underneath it opens up. The hole reveals that the person does not have enough strength and he is using anger to either produce strength or he is afraid to be strong, so he blocks anger. He may feel he has no strength, he may feel very collapsed inside. When he sits in the hole of no strength, then a certain quality of essence comes up and fills the system with courage, with strength, with vitality and with aliveness. Then another hole may open up, another issue comes, the person feels strong, but has no joy. We then explore the issues around joy. We go to the hole of no joy, look how he is either faking it, by having fun, fun, fun, or he is always depressed. When we continue to explore, he might realize that he really does not know joy. He does not have joy. When he stays with that, with the hole of joy, the joy gets born. If you begin to resolve so many of those issues, you start seeing that underneath them the whole personality is based on a vacuum, there is nothing there. All of the personality is like a fabrication and underneath it is a big emptiness. When the person reaches the big emptiness, the ground of being comes up, call it god, call it enlightenment, or call it being. That is experienced as a great resolution. So many essential states come to resolve the parts that are unresolved. -FAISAL MUQQADAM