Below you will find an extract from an interview by Conscious.TV where Faisal talks about how the three relate to one another:
Seven and nine years old. The ego mechanism begins to run by its own self – a momentum we start – and runs by itself until it crystallizes.
And that crystallization is the ego preserving its own identity.
It’s like the ego working very hard to take a picture of the real self and holding [on] to the picture for dear life.
So in the unfoldment, the ego will not go. It can survive enlightenment. Mine did. It can survive enlightenment.
It would not go. Because there is an illusion that the ego is not in the Absolute, is not in the enlightened space.
The personality is, the mind is, but the ego is the holder of the lineage of the real self inside.
So the ego – I call it the madden lover – it’s part of our soul that is madly in love with its Source.
It is a part of our soul that is separated from our higher self and the programming in it is to go back to that higher self.
So, in the journey I started offering this ego, to heal it in every kind of way. It enjoys this quality, that quality, but then leaves it.
It’s just like a child: you try to give it this mother, or that mother… it doesn’t want them. It wants its own mother.
So even with the Absolute, the ego survived the Absolute. It was there, hiding and next day, I’ll tell you, it shows up, “But how ‘bout me?” And you say, “I have no time, you’re still here – let’s kill the ego.”
So then I realized no, you cannot kill the ego.
The ego’s afraid for me, a lover, seeking its beloved.
And when I had this realization, this guidance, the ego began to ease. The ego began to reveal what it’s longing for, but forgot.
Then I realized it’s really longing for the individuated higher self, not the cosmic self.
The cosmic self, the Absolute, yes, we need to all go back home, feel that we’re in the ocean, but each fish longs for its own uniqueness.
And that’s when the teaching about the point of light, about the higher self, started opening.
That’s when I shifted from being Absolutist, to being Pointist.
Iain: [laughing] Absolutist to Pointist.
Faisal: [laughing] To Pointist.
It’s about individuated soul, its uniqueness in existence, the soul journey – [that’s] what’s it about – and how to discover the soul, how to support it to know itself, awaken to itself, awaken to the holding environment we live in and then to walk our walk.
That’s the shift of paradigm.
In my teaching now, the human being, the human entity, the human soul, is the center of the mandala of existence, while the Absolute is our nature, is Buddhahood, is belovedness of who we are.
But we are the beloved.
You and I are the beloveds and [expanding arms to indicate the whole world] this is our ‘belovedness’ of our beloved nature.
This shifted the paradigm and brought sanity, brought everything home, here, to everyday life – to deal with my children, living my life, to navigating a better life for now, and for the future
AH Almaas provides his perspective on the relationship between the Absolute and the
Point:
