Karen Johnson: The Jeweled Path

Karen Johnson is a longtime colleague of A. H. Almaas and co-founder of the Diamond Approach. They have been teaching together for many years. Karen Johnson was educated as an artist and then received an MA in psychology. The Jeweled Path invites the reader to enter into the story of how the modern spiritual path of the Diamond Approach emerged. With humor and intimacy, Karen Johnson, co-founder with A. H. Almaas, reveals the personal experiences that birthed the teaching and furthered its development. These profound awakenings—occurring amidst ordinary life—became the building blocks of a remarkable new approach to human nature and our understanding of reality. How does a spiritual tradition arise? We rarely have the opportunity to ask the founder of a spiritual path that question, but this meeting offers such an opportunity. Karen Johnson, along with A. H. Almaas, was the cradle of the Diamond Approach. She tells us frankly how her personal and spiritual experiences created a path of growth and transformation that now appeals to people worldwide.

An Interview with Karen Johnson – The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization

 

OMTIMES: What is the Diamond Approach? How is it different from other spiritual traditions?

KAREN JOHNSON: It is hard to answer this question without getting too esoteric. This was one reason I wrote the book; I wanted to make this work more accessible and understandable by describing the inner feeling of it. Otherwise, I have to put ideas and perspectives that are hard to capture in a nutshell, but I will try. The Diamond Approach is a contemporary spiritual path that can lead to liberation, maturation, and actualization of the Human Being. The name itself is a description of what it is—a direct, precise, clear approach to one’s experience. Understanding any experience fully will naturally lead to the understanding of our True Spiritual Nature, like a stream that naturally flows into the ocean. I think we might be the only teaching that uses the term True Nature. We mean the natural underlying essential basis of what we are and what everything is. This is one way we are unique, but it’s not the most important one.

Trying to enumerate all how the Diamond Approach is different are too many to list. That is another reason I wrote the book. I can name a few unique features of our work that are important: the True Nature of everything and being an individual in the world authentically are valued equally. Most traditions value the transcendent state over the individual or visa versa. From the Diamond Approach point of view, you learn how these two inextricable sides are each real, of great value, and interdependent.

The Diamond Approach teaching includes how to be an embodied presence in the world. The spiritual presence that one recognizes as one’s self can arise as qualities that the usual person in the world can recognize such as strength, clarity, joy, tenderness, willpower, and love among others. These are distinctive understandings of the Diamond Approach teaching. They are all expressions of the truth of our nature and cleansed of our personal histories.

The Diamond Approach uses psychological knowledge to aid us in understanding the development of the ego and help us navigate through the layers of it, which is crucial to the development of a real human being in the world. However, it is not therapeutic; it is simply what we encounter on the way in. Through understanding what we find—whatever it is—we become more transparent to our inner light. It is like taking off old clothes we don’t even know we are wearing because we have been wearing them so long we think they are part of us. Then we discover beautiful jewels that have been hidden underneath.

We encounter many kinds of understandings and realizations of what we are. We are sometimes separate creatures, sometimes connected to our deeper self or others. We may feel part of a vast shoreless ocean, and then we can feel we are the entirety of the universe and everything in it. We don’t feel we must be in any particular state. For the Diamond Approach, there is no end point or place to get to. This is rare in most traditions and radical.

The adventure is goalless, yet another very important difference between our work and other spiritual paths. There is no end to the discoveries of new inner universes of experience.

 

OMTIMES: What Inspired you? How did this book, ” The Jeweled Path” come to be?

KAREN JOHNSON: It made me do it! As the Diamond Approach work began to spread throughout the world, it became obvious that it was a teaching that would live on beyond Hameed and me and the original teachers and students alive today. Since people often asked me how it all began and “What was it like in the beginning? Who was there? How did you decide what to include and what to exclude when using the modern psychological material or ancient spiritual traditions?” I felt it would be useful to chronicle the events, people, and places that were instrumental in the development of the work. I realized I needed to dispel the idea that this was a synthesis of a lot of other traditions. I felt this could only be effective if I showed, not told, what happened from the inside out. Hameed has written about the Path, brilliantly elucidating the knowledge of our discoveries. But I saw the need to demystify it by illustrating how we didn’t just get blessed with falling diamonds from the sky, or come up with a great system in discussions over tea. No one, no matter how brilliant, could have come up with this kind of illumination on his or her own. It is a path that erupted into the world through our souls. It found us and worked us until it taught us how to decode it, articulate it, and embody its perspective.

 

OMTIMES: What was it like going through Almaas’s material?

KAREN JOHNSON: Going through all the thousands of pages of handwritten records in his handwriting was illuminating, to say the least. And quite a task since his English resembles Arabic! I delved into each journal and read them cover-to-cover, and it was an amazingly alive venture for me. We saw new connections to things we had not seen before. There are many details to the teaching that have never been taught, and I was reminded once again of how much beauty and precision there is in this knowledge. Some new areas of the teachings were discovered waiting to be unpacked. I always had access to these materials, but it had a very specific purpose this time. I went through the path again from beginning to the present from another perspective.

OMTIMES: Did anything surprising or unexpected arise from writing the book?

KAREN JOHNSON: Yes. Many things. The first was finding out I could write! Then, when writing, I found I would become exactly the condition I was writing about, so the book is alive with the energy of my authentic experience. I felt the textures and saw the people, places, and events as though I was there or it was here. It was like time traveling. As a result, what I wrote welcomed readers into the book with me.

Another astonishing thing was how the force behind this book that kept me on task was similar to the dynamic thrust that birthed the teaching itself. A new kind of energy was unleashed, and I am still reeling from it.

 

OMTIMES: What can we learn from The Jeweled Path?

KAREN JOHNSON: You can see what it is like to witness a spiritual path manifesting, and in particular how the Diamond Approach emerged and developed. The individuals who have read it tell me that the opportunity to peek into the lives of the founders of teaching is a learning experience in itself. But most touching to me is how it has ignited their desire to know more about life, themselves, and spiritual reality and trust in their own experience. As if some kind of love fire got fueled and the desire to get in touch, to grow, know more, and follow their truth to the mother lode. I guess the energy of the book was truly contagious.

The Diamond Approach is a painful journey sometimes, but it also opens the human potential for greater joy and inner freedom than you can ever explain to anyone.

Every experience has meaning and is a potential portal to a deeper sense of you. If we dismiss our experiences, no matter how joyous or painful, we miss an opportunity to explore and be surprised by what lay underneath. It is an adventure of a lifetime. And it is fun, too!

OMTIMES: Can you share a story of Inner Realization?

KAREN JOHNSON: There are many of them in the book. Choosing one is hard. There was the time I tried to melt a very strange feeling in my stomach for about a week. Then one day while talking with Hameed on the phone in the mid-1970s he suggested I just sense it and be interested without assuming it shouldn’t be there. I had been inquiring into many kinds of things related to the teaching and my place in it, what it meant for me, what my true interests were, and so on. I also wanted to get clearer about the teaching itself.

So as we inquired into my felt experience, I began to feel the presence of something I had not known before. Although I had experienced presence in many ways, this was new. I felt fresh dense and extremely present. Then I felt facets emerging. It was centered in my solar plexus and shimmered with scintillating light. Then I shrieked with delight.” OH my God! Hameed! It is a diamond!”

That was my first recognition of presence in the diamond form. Then I became it over the following weeks, which then would be realization—to become present as a self-knowing medium that knows its existence.

This also brought understanding about the teaching for me, and it became clear, with diamond clarity, that this presence was making its way into the world and using me to that end.

 

OMTIMES: What are your hopes for the future of the Diamond Approach?

KAREN JOHNSON: That anyone who might resonate with the Diamond Approach finds us. We want to be visible to those who would feel pulled to what we have to offer and are on an authentic search. Each has to discover for oneself what their soul will feel called to. When the yearning awakens, and the light begins to shimmer, it will find the way. It might take a while, but it will happen.

The Diamond Approach Teaching has always taken care of itself and will continue to do so. I have no wishes or plans to make it do anything, but I am waiting for what it wants me to do it. My hopes for the Diamond Approach aren’t needed. People need hope, and this teaching is one response to that need.

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