The Real Beneath the Imitation

Most of us have spent a portion of our lives trying to become something. Whether it be something better, more spiritual, more present, or more whole, we have both earnestly and exhaustively hoped for an arrival that never arrives.

And for many of us, underneath all of that striving, there has been a quieter and more painful assumption, which is that the reason we have not yet arrived is because something is fundamentally wrong with us. That the gap between who we are and who we are supposed to be is evidence of a deficiency that must be overcome, corrected, or at the very least, managed so others do not see it too clearly.

The message of deficiency seeps in from many places, and despite our best intentions it follows us around like a ball and chain. However it arrived most of us know this feeling from the inside. The sense of being, in some way, not quite right. But what if that assumption is the very thing that has been making the arrival so difficult? What if the starting point of deficiency itself has been wrong all along?

This is the revolutionary idea I found myself sitting with in the pages of A.H. Almaas. Almaas is a contemporary spiritual teacher and the founder of the Diamond Approach, which is a path of inquiry that takes seriously both the wisdom of ancient traditions and the discoveries of modern psychology. In his book The Pearl Beyond Price, he offers a definition of what he calls Personal Essence that I find delightful. He describes this quality of Essence as neither spiritual nor worldly, but rather the true human being. Someone full of a personal presence that is devoid of falsehood.

Devoid, now there is a word you don’t use to describe yourself with very often. It is such a thorough word. The dictionary describes devoid as completely lacking, empty, vacant, and without possessing. At first the word can sound like an absence, as though a devoid person would have nothing to offer or bring to a situation. Almaas, though, has different in mind with the word. He means a presence so clear of pretense, so unencumbered by the accumulated layers of ego performance, that what comes through is entirely real. Devoid not of substance, but of falsehood, empty of the ego self that has been standing in for the real.

This, I am finding, is a very different starting point than the one many of us were handed.

My church and family environment were the starting point for my deficiency training. I received the message that something was wrong with me, and my work was to identify, correct, and overcome it. The lack was often defined from the outside according to someone else's idea of what needed fixing. The advice handed to me came before my own inner intelligence had a chance to blossom.

That is why what Almaas offers feels like Good News. He writes that there is a truth in the heart of all ego strivings. That most of humankind are not astray in the usual sense of the word. That the ego, rather than being an enemy to defeat, is instead a reflection of a true reality. It is true that the reflection is imperfect, even painful, in its strategies for living, but nonetheless it represents something genuine.

I find this idea not just intellectually interesting but personally liberating. This concept means that the patterns I have struggled with, the places where I have watched myself minimize or withdraw, these are not evidence of fundamental wrongness. They are imitations and distorted reflections of something real that has been trying all along to come forward. The ego is not the obstacle to Essence, but an awkward way of pointing towards it.

For me, as someone who lives at Point Nine on the Enneagram, the shape of the imitation is particular and recognizable. The Nine's ego copes by minimizing, by making the self small, keeping the world smooth, placing bandages on what genuinely needs a tourniquet. The message I received growing up reinforced this pattern with extraordinary precision. I was taught that the proper order of a life well lived was captured in an acronym: JOY. This acronym stands for Jesus, Others, and You, and in that order, always in that order. You, the actual living person, belonged last; always last.

I see now how perfectly that message landed in the soil of a Nine's particular vulnerability. Not because the acronym was entirely false, but because it supplied a pattern that was already present in me the authority of God. It told me that my tendency to disappear was not a wound to be healed but a virtue to be cultivated. I believed that smallness was holiness and that getting pushed to the back of the line was exactly where I belonged.

What Almaas offers in place of this message is a reorientation so complete it can only be called freedom. The Nine's Essence, the real beneath the imitation, is not smallness or self-erasure, but the ease and grace to engage the world exactly as it is, without manipulation. I can be a presence that does not need to manage or minimize or disappear. Essence is what was always trying to come forward.

If you are at the beginning of this journey and finding it heavy going because you have caught glimpses of your own imitation that is normal. There is discouragement when watching the same pattern arise again, and again, despite every good intention. I know that place as I have stood there myself. There is uncertainty, exhaustion, and a wondering whether you have the strength to continue or whether real change is even possible.

What I can tell you from the other side of that threshold is simply this: it is possible. I know this because I am doing it. Imperfectly on many days, but with gratitude and a joy in the work that I could not have imagined at the beginning. The practice does not become effortless, but it eventually becomes something you want to show up for, even desire. It is possible to go from burden to genuine willingness at some point.

In my own experience two things supported that shift. The first is staying with the work even when it felt impossible. This is no different from any other practice of genuine transformation, it will not happen if you do not stay with it. The second is companionship. A teacher, a guide, someone who can not only help you see the pattern but who can also point to the essence qualities when they begin to emerge.

One of the most delicate thresholds in this journey is learning to trust what fills the space when the imitation is released. This trust may sound straightforward, but in my experience it is one of the more demanding aspects of the journey. We have been living inside the imitation for so long, identifying with it so completely, that when the real emerges we often do not recognize it. We may even distrust it, or feel that something so quiet and so simple cannot possibly be what we have been looking for. This too is part of the learning, to say yes to what is genuine even when it arrives without fanfare.

What this opens for us is a life time of compassionate practice. Not a life of arrival, or of having finally gotten it right, but a life in which each ordinary day becomes an opportunity to notice the imitation as it arises, to meet it with curiosity rather than condemnation, and to practice recognizing and receiving what is real underneath it.

So, the good news is we are not as lost as we thought. All the patterns, strivings, and imperfect reaching is the very material the work is made of. We do not need to go anywhere else or become someone different before we begin. We only need to show up, with as much honesty and curiosity as we can manage, to what is actually here.

The imitation has been pointing to something true all along. Our work is to listen to what it is pointing toward, and to trust, slowly, what we find underneath.

Where in your own life might your ego be pointing towards the real? What is waiting to come forward?