Rupert Spira Quotes

We take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal.

However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply other names for our self.

Only that which is always with you can be said to be your self and if you look closely and simply at experience, only awareness is always ‘with you’.

That is, a single sensation/thought/perception appears in consciousness and thinking alone conceptualises

Cease being exclusively fascinated by whatever you are aware of and be interested instead in the experience of being aware itself.

I am that which knows or is aware of all experience, but I am not myself an experience. I am aware of thoughts but am not myself a thought; I am aware of feelings and sensations but am not myself a feeling or sensation; I am aware of perceptions but am not myself a perception. Whatever the content of experience, I know or am aware of it. Thus, knowing or being aware is the essential element in all knowledge, the common factor in all experience.

And this ‘knowing’ is our self, aware presence. In other words, all that is ever experienced is our self knowing itself, awareness aware of awareness.

No formulation of the reality of experience is completely true. Once we acknowledge this, we relieve words of the impossible burden of trying to express the nature of experience and, as a result, leave them free to be spoken and heard in playful and creative ways that evoke Reality itself without trying to frame or grasp it.

In reality, which means in our actual experience, all experience is one seamless substance. The duality between the inside self and the outside object, world or other is never actually experienced. It is always imagined.

This perpetual longing for happiness—which can, by definition, never be fulfilled because that very search itself denies the happiness that is present in our own being now—condemns us to an endless search in the future and thus perpetuates unhappiness. It is for this reason that the poet said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Nothing ever happens to the knowing with which all experience is known.

Understanding is the dissolution of the mind into its support, into its ground. It is the experience of Consciousness knowing itself, returning to itself knowingly.

Seeking happiness in objective experience is the activity that defines the apparently separate self.

the separate self is not in fact an entity but rather an activity that appears in Consciousness.

It is impossible to experience the appearance of awareness. We are that awareness to which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no experience that we, awareness, are born. Likewise, in order to claim legitimately that awareness dies, something would have to be present to experience its disappearance. Have we ever experienced the disappearance of awareness? If we think the answer is, ‘Yes’, then what is it that is present and aware to experience the apparent disappearance of awareness? Whatever that is must be aware and present. It must be awareness. When we are born or when we wake in the morning, we have the experience of the appearance of objects. When we die and when we fall asleep at night, we have the experience of the disappearance of objects. However, we have no experience that we, awareness, appear, are born, disappear or die. That

See clearly that we have no knowledge of our self ever having been born, changing, evolving, growing up or growing old and that we can never have the experience of death.

In other words, in reality, there are not two things—one, the screen and two, the document or image. There is just the screen. Two things (or a multiplicity and diversity of things) only come into apparent existence when their true reality—the screen—is overlooked. Experience is like that. All we know is experience but there is no independent ‘we’ or ‘I’ that knows experience. There is just experience or experiencing. And experiencing is not inherently divided into one part that experiences and another part that is experienced.

The belief that we were born, that we change, evolve, grow old and die is simply a belief to which the vast majority of humanity subscribes without realizing that they are doing so. It is the religion of our culture.

Our true nature of eternal, infinite awareness is never completely forgotten or eclipsed by objective experience. However agitated or numbed objective experience may have rendered our mind, the memory of our eternity shines within it as the desire for happiness, or, in religious language, the longing for God.

We do not have to eradicate a separate self in order to be knowingly eternal, infinite awareness or God’s infinite, self-aware being. There is no separate self to be eliminated. To attempt to dissolve or annihilate a separate self simply perpetuates its illusory existence. To discipline the separate self is to maintain the separate self.

It is the self-aware screen of awareness, upon which the drama of experience is playing and out of which it is made, that becomes so intimately involved with the objective content of its experience that it seems to lose itself in it and, as a result, overlooks or forgets its own presence, just as a dreamer’s mind loses itself in its own dream at night.

In other words, in reality, there are not two things—one, the screen and two, the document or image. There is just the screen.

However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply

Nothing new needs to be added to experience for us to become aware that our self is always being

Knowing or experiencing is not what it does; it is what it is.

This absence of otherness, objectness, selfness is love itself. It is what we are and all we know.

There is only experiencing from moment to moment, and this experiencing is one ever-present, seamless whole.

aware Presence loses its apparent witness-ness and stands revealed as pure Awareness alone,

There is no knower of this experience and nothing that is known. There is just the knowing of it,

Awareness has no experience of its own appearance, beginning, birth, duration, disappearance or death.

The known always changes; knowing never changes.

Love is the experience of our shared being. When we love another person we feel, to a greater or lesser extent, that the separation between us dissolves.

mind is awareness in motion; awareness is mind at rest.

The mind that seeks awareness is like a current in the ocean in search of water. Such a mind is destined for endless dissatisfaction.

Being aware of being aware is the essence of meditation. It is the only form of meditation that does not require the directing, focusing or controlling of the mind.

the way a person sees or understands him or herself deeply conditions the ways he or she sees and understands objects, others and the world.

although seeming to take place outside, in fact take place within Consciousness

The true non-dual understanding is like an explosion – it cannot be contained in any form.

reveal themselves as none other than the shape that our self is taking from moment to moment.

For anything to be known, its apparent ‘thingness’ must dissolve in Awareness and become pure knowing.

It is experience itself. Experience is not a collection of objects known by an inside self. ‘Experience’ is just another name for our self,

But the utter intimacy of the knower and the known is a well-known and familiar experience.

When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything will appear as it truly is, infinite.

Awareness takes the shape of thinking and appears as the mind; it takes the shape of sensing and appears as the body;

That is, it knows itself as the totality of experience. This could be formulated as, ‘I, Awareness, am everything’,

It is prior to all thinking, feeling or perceiving.

unclouded Awareness, knowing-being-loving itself. It is not known by someone.

we do not really see trees, fields, hills and the sky; we always see only the screen. The screen is their reality.

An object is only an object from the point of view of the mind.

Knowing or being aware is never modified by experience. It never moves or fluctuates. It is the only

There is just knowing. And what is it that knows that there is knowing? Only that which knows can know knowing. Therefore, only knowing knows knowing.

Every word on this page is in fact only made of paper. It only expresses the nature of the paper, although it may describe the moon.

The abstract concepts of the mind cannot apprehend Reality, although they are an expression of it.

Nor have we, aware presence, ever become sad, angry, anxious, depressed, in need, agitated, jealous, etc. At the same time, we are intimately one with all such feelings when they are present. Although we are the substance of all such feelings, just as the screen is the substance of all images, we are inherently free of them. Unhappiness is made out of our self, but our self is never unhappy.

Security and happiness cannot be found in anything that comes and goes. Find whatever it is in your experience that doesn’t appear, move, change or disappear, and invest your identity, security and happiness in that alone.

when the Indian sage Atmananda Krishna Menon was asked how to know when one is established in one’s true nature, he is said to have replied, ‘When thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions can no longer take you away’.

In this exploration the deeper layers, such as feelings of fear, guilt, shame, inadequacy, unlovableness, etc. are allowed to surface without resistance or agenda and slowly reveal the sense of separation that lies at their heart.

When the fan, the hand or indeed anything else are experienced, their apparent existence is not separate from awareness. All experiences are equally close, equally ‘one with’, awareness. When the apparent object disappears, awareness remains as it is.

a mind that is accustomed to repeatedly dissolving in its source or essence becomes progressively saturated with its inherent peace. When such a mind rises again from the ocean of awareness, its activity makes that peace available to humanity. Such a mind may also be inspired by knowledge that is not simply a continuation of the past but comes directly form its unconditioned essence. This inspiration brings creativity and new possibilities into whatever sphere of knowledge or activity in which that mind operates.

Allow your self to be coloured by experience temporarily, but do not become limited by it. To say and identify with the statements ‘I am sad’, ‘I am lonely’, ‘I am tired’, ‘I am hungry’, ‘I am a man’ or ‘I am a woman’ is to allow infinite being to become limited and personal.

Awareness is inherently whole, complete and fulfilled in itself. Thus its nature is happiness itself--not a happiness that depends upon the condition of the mind, body or world, but a causeless joy that is prior to and independent of all states, circumstances, and conditions.

The great secret that lies at the heart of all the main religious and spiritual traditions is the understanding that the peace and happiness for which all people long can never be delivered via objective experience. It can only be found in our self, in the depths of our being.

It is impossible to experience the appearance of awareness. We are that awareness to which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no experience that we, awareness, are born.

In fact, we don’t know objects; we just know ‘knowing’. And who is it that knows ‘knowing’? ‘Knowing’ is not known by something or someone outside or other than itself. ‘Knowing’ is known by ‘knowing’. In other words, all that is experienced in the experience of an object, other or world is ‘knowing’.

The apparent separation of experience into two essential parts is similar to imagining that a screen is divided in two when two images appear on it side by side. If thinking imagines that the screen is only contained in only one of the images, then thinking will also have to imagine a substance that is ‘not the screen’, out of which the second image is made.

Just as the screen does not share the qualities, characteristics, or limitations of any of the objects or characters in a movie, although it is their sole reality, so the knowing with which all knowledge and experience are known does not share the qualities, characteristics, or limitations of whatever is known or experienced. Thus, it is unlimited or infinite.

What remains when we have let go of all thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations, perceptions, activities and relationships? Our self alone remains: not an enlightened, higher, spiritual, special self or a self that we have become through effort, practice or discipline, but just the essential self or being that we always and already are before it is coloured by experience.

If we look closely at the actual experience of the body rather than the idea we may have of it, we find that our only experience of it is the current sensation or perception. All sensations and perceptions appear and disappear, but our self, aware Presence, remains throughout. This ever-present ‘I’ cannot therefore be made out of an intermittent object such as a sensation or perception.

I’ve been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would ‘let go of them’ is itself simply one such pattern.

I’ve been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would ‘let go of them’ is itself simply one such pattern. These patterns of thinking and feeling have taken their shape, over the years, from the belief that we are a separate self, without our making any particular effort. In just the same way, as our experiential conviction that we are not a limited, located self deepens, so our thoughts, feelings and subsequent behaviour will slowly, effortlessly and naturally realign themselves with this new understanding. In order to know our self we do not need to know the mind. No other knowledge than the knowledge that is present right now in this very moment is required to know our self. What does it mean to know our self? We are our self, so we are too close to our self to be able to know our self as an object. Our simply being our self is as close to knowing our self as we will ever come. We cannot get closer than that. In fact, being our self is the knowing of our self, but it is not the knowing of our self as an object. To say ‘I am’, (in other words to assert that we are present), we must know that ‘I am’. Being and knowing are, in fact, one single non-objective experience. But we do not step outside of our self in order to know our own being. We simply are our self. That being of our self is the knowing of our self. This being/knowing is shining in all experience. This experiential understanding dissolves the idea that our self is not present here and now and that it is not known here and now. And when our desire to know or find ourselves as an object is withdrawn, we discover that our own self was and is present all along, shining quietly in the background, as it were, of all experience. As this becomes obvious we discover that it is not just the background but also the foreground. In other words, it is not just the witness but simultaneously the substance of all experience. Completely relax the desire to find yourself as an object or to change your experience in any way. Relax into this present knowing of your own being. See that it is intimate, familiar and loving. See clearly that it is never not with you. It is shining here in this experience, knowing and loving its own being. It runs throughout all experience, closer than close, intimately one with all experience but untouched by it. As this intimate oneness, it is known as love. In its untouchable-ness it is known as peace and in its fullness it is known as happiness. In its openness and willingness to give itself to any possible shape (including the apparent veiling of its own being), it is known as freedom and, as the substance of all things, it is known as beauty. However, more simply it is known just as ‘I’ or ‘this’. Who Is? Q: All these questions about consciousness

As we sit allowing these thoughts and, more importantly, uncomfortable feelings to arise, it is important not to have any subtle agenda with them, not to ‘do this’ in order to ‘get rid of them’, That would be more of the same. Just allow the full panoply of thoughts and feelings to display themselves in your loving and indifferent presence. In time their ferocity will die down, revealing subtler and subtler layers of thinking and feeling on behalf of a separate entity, until we come to the little, almost innocuous background thinking about which we were speaking earlier. This is the sense of separation, the ‘ego’, in its apparently mildest and least easily detectable form. Be very sensitive to this. Be sensitive to the ‘avoidance of what is’ in its subtlest forms. It is the sweet, furry baby animal that later turns into a monster! As time goes on we become more and more sensitive and we see how much of our thinking and feeling, as well as our activities, are generated for the sole purpose of avoiding ‘what is’, of avoiding the ‘this’ and the ‘now’, It is this open, un-judging, un-avoiding allowing of all things which, in time, restores the ‘I’ to its proper place in the seat of awareness and which, as a natural corollary to the abiding in and as our true self, gently realigns our thoughts, feelings and activities with the peace and happiness that are inherent in it. Nobody Has, Owns or Chooses Anything Q: While allowing the body, mind and world to be as they are, different thoughts arise, some not so savoury and others that might be better left not acted upon. You have said that, once one begins to abide knowingly as presence, responses to situations will flow naturally from there. Some thoughts will engage the body, others

And what is it that experiences our self? Only our self! There is only one substance in experience and it is pervaded by and made out of knowing or awareness. In the classical language of non-duality this is sometimes expressed in phrases such as, ‘Awareness only knows itself’, but this may seem abstract. It is simply an attempt to describe the seamless intimacy of experience in which there is no room for a self, object, other or world; no room to step back from experience and find it happy or unhappy, right or wrong, good or bad; no time in which to step out of the now into an imaginary past or into a future in which we may become, evolve or progress; no possibility of stepping out of the intimacy of love into relationship with an other; no possibility of knowing anything other than knowing, of being anything other than being, of loving anything other than loving; no possibility of a thought arising which would attempt to frame the intimacy of experience in the abstract forms of the mind; no possibility for our self to become a self, a fragment, a part; no possibility for the world to jump outside and for the self to contract inside; no possibility for time, distance or space to appear.

If we are absorbed in a movie it may seem at first that the screen lies behind the image. Likewise, if we are so captivated by experience that we overlook the simple experience of being aware or awareness itself, we may first locate it in the background of experience. In this first step, being aware or awareness itself is recognised as the subjective witness of all objective experience. Looking more closely we see that the screen is not just in the background of the image but entirely pervades it. Likewise, all experience is permeated with the knowing with which it is known. It is saturated with the experience of being aware or awareness itself. There is no part of a thought, feeling, sensation or perception that is not infused with the knowing of it. This second realisation collapses, at least to a degree, the distinction between awareness and its objects. In the third step, we understand that it is not even legitimate to claim that knowing, being aware or awareness itself pervades all experience, as if experience were one thing and awareness another. Just as the screen is all there is to an image, so pure knowing, being aware or awareness itself is all there is to experience. All there is to a thought is thinking, and all there is to thinking is knowing. All there is to an emotion is feeling, and all there is to feeling is knowing. All there is to a sensation is sensing, and all there is to sensing is knowing. All there is to a perception is perceiving, and all there is to perceiving is knowing. Thus, all there is to experience is knowing, and it is knowing that knows this knowing. Being all alone, with nothing in itself other than itself with which it could be limited or divided, knowing or pure awareness is whole, perfect, complete, indivisible and without limits. This absence of duality, separation or otherness is the experience of love or beauty, in which any distinction between a self and an object, other or world has dissolved. Thus, love and beauty are the nature of awareness. In the familiar experience of love or beauty, awareness is tasting its own eternal, infinite reality. It is in this context that the painter Paul Cézanne said that art gives us the ‘taste of nature’s eternity’.

The apparently separate self or finite ‘I’ around whom all experience revolves is the true and only ‘I’ of eternal, infinite awareness – the ‘I’ of God’s infinite, self-aware being that shines in each of our minds as the knowledge ‘I am’ – temporarily coloured by thoughts, images, feelings, sensations and perceptions but never being or becoming anything other than itself.

There’s nothing that we’re saying that is incompatible with leading a very regular life. Having a family, if you want a family. Having a job, earning your living. Going on holiday, paying the rent... What is being suggested here is not in conflict with any of that. And its indeed possible to lead a very ordinary life without there being any sense of being a separate inside self. And still to be in a relationship, to have a family, to have a job, earn a living.

That is, only gradually, in most cases, will it become clear that meditation is what we are, not what we do, and that the separate self or finite mind is what we do, not what we are. Until this is recognised, meditation will seem to require an effort, and if this is the case, and for as long as it seems to be so, we should make the effort. In time it will become clear that we cannot make an effort to be or know our self – we can only make an effort to be or know something apparently other than our self – and at that point our effort will come spontaneously to an end.

the presence of awareness becomes increasingly our natural condition, until there is no longer a distinction between meditation and life.

time is only in thought. Experience is eternally now.

See clearly that the breath takes place in this vast open space of Awareness, not in an imagined, confined body.

The breath and the body are both sensations. One sensation does not appear in another sensation,

me’ and the ‘not me’ is imagined with the thought that thinks it.

constructs an image of a person moving around in space and time, being born, growing old and dying.

it is only a thought that says this experience is new.

Only a thought compares the present with an imaginary past, creating the old and therefore the new.

Even to talk of sensations and perceptions is too much.

Thought is only thought from the point of view of thinking. Experience, that is, our self, knows no such things. Our self is too

Thinking cannot itself go to the heart of experience; it can only go to an imaginary past or future.

The separate entity we imagine ourself to be cannot reside in the present.

Experience itself does not know agitation. Only the mind knows agitation, and the agitation it knows belongs to its own activity alone.

objects and entities are all abstract conceptions that are superimposed by thinking onto experience itself.

No thing ever ceases to be, because no thing ever comes into existence.

The subtle effort not to love what truly is, is known as the separate self,

What we call the outside world is simply the absence of love.

One of the hardest things for the apparently separate self to understand is that there is no real ignorance.

It is never possible to love a person or an object. Love is defined precisely by its unconditional quality.

how close is the knowing element in any experience to the experience itself? Closer than close! They are one and the same thing.

Experience is too intimate to admit of two entities between which there might be relationship.

If we go deeply into the experience of whatever is known or loved we find no substance there other than Awareness itself.

This division of experience into a perceiver and a perceived, a knower and a known, a lover and a loved, is like a mirage.

Both the experiencer and the experienced are made of experiencing,