Al Ali was working on his PhD in physics when he reached a turning point in his life that led him more and more into inquiring into the psychological and spiritual aspects of human nature.
Being is understood as the inner source and true nature of reality, which is the focus of the great spiritual traditions of both East and West, and is known as Dharmakaya, Shunyata, Brahman or Tao.
Being is understood as consisting of five co-emergent "boundless dimensions": Divine Love, Pure Presence, Nonconceptual Awareness, The Logos, and The Absolute.
While most spiritual paths conceive of Being as universal, the Diamond Approach also pays a great deal of attention to a more individual way of experiencing Being, called Essence.
It is experienced as a substantial fluid Presence which can differentiate into various qualities or aspects, such as compassion, strength, will, joy, peace, love, value, humanness, personalness, identity, and space.
[3][independent source needed] As our soul develops it is faced with a double challenge: it must learn to function in the World, while also remaining connected to Spirit.
For various reasons, some innate and others environmental, we slowly become alienated from our Essence through the development of fixed patterns of perception and behaviour known as the personality or ego.
[citation needed] The practice referred to as "presence" is based on two methods, learning to sense one's body (especially one's arms and legs) in an ongoing manner and regularly focusing one's attention on a point in the belly called the "kath center" (known in Chinese philosophy as the dantian and in Japanese culture as the hara).
These methods help a person to become more grounded in the body and in physical reality and also, in time, to develop the ability to experience oneself as the presence of Essence.
One starts by wanting to find out, living a question, while recognizing preconceptions, preconditions and expectations as to the nature of what one may learn and instead attending to one's immediate or present experience.
[5] However, the founder and lead teacher, Hameed Al Ali, regularly (in Berkeley, California, and in Boulder, Colorado) points out that the Diamond Approach is only one path to truth and cannot in itself be all-encompassing.
The work of Almaas has received praise from spiritual teachers and explorers such as John Welwood, Gabor Maté, Jack Kornfield and Ken Wilber.