Know Thyself - E121 - Rupert Spira: The Essence Of Non-Duality: Ego, Love, Awareness, Death & Happiness

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Rupert Spira provides a profound exploration of non-dualism, addressing fundamental questions about our true nature and the essence of existence. Beginning with the inquiry “Who Are You, Really?” Spira guides us through a journey that challenges our habitual thoughts and beliefs, encouraging a deeper connection to our being. He delves into our inherent longing for happiness and the qualities of awareness that shape our experience. As he explains how the universe separates itself to know itself, he highlights the implications for morality and our relationships, viewing them as containers for growth and understanding. Spira also discusses the transformative journey of enlightenment, the different types of meditation, and the potential pitfalls of spiritual ego. This exploration not only sheds light on the nature of thoughts but also offers practical guidance to embody your true self, making it a must-watch for anyone seeking deeper understanding and fulfillment in life. André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro1:55 Who Are You, Really?11:01 When Thoughts Lead You Astray, Being Leads You Within16:28 Investigating Our True Nature 24:48 Our Inherent Longing For Happiness28:49 The Steps to Recognize Your True Being33:10 The Inherent Qualities of Our Awareness47:39 How the universe separates itself to know itself 59:32 What Love & Happiness Are1:07:50 The Implication This Has on Morality & How We Experience the World1:10:48 Relationships as a Container for Growth1:18:18 The Journey & Experience of Enlightenment1:25:14 3 Different Types of Meditation1:31:30 Spiritual Ego & The Pitfalls of Intellectualization1:41:15 Beyond Suffering: The Meaning of life1:43:35 What Happens to Our Identity When We Die1:53:48 How Non-dualism Sees Uniqueness1:58:41 Properly Relating To Our Emotional Experience2:05:27 Practices to Embody Your True Self2:09:41 Embracing the Wholeness of Your Human Experience2:14:55 The Nature of Our Thoughts2:21:51 A Reminder: Spirituality is Simple2:26:29 Conclusion___________From an early age Rupert Spira was deeply interested in the nature of reality. At the age of seventeen he learnt to meditate, and began a twenty-year period of study and practice in the classical Advaita Vedanta tradition under the guidance of Dr. Francis Roles and Shantananda Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of the north of India. During this time he immersed himself in the teachings of P. D. Ouspensky, Krishnamurti, Rumi, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta and Robert Adams, until he met his teacher, Francis Lucille, in 1997. Francis introduced Rupert to the Direct Path teachings of Atmananda Krishna Menon, the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism (which he had received from his teacher, Jean Klein), and, more importantly, directly indicated to him the true nature of experience. Rupert lives in the UK and holds regular meetings and retreats in Europe and the USA.Website: https://rupertspira.com___________Know ThyselfInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/Website: https://www.knowthyself.oneClips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKgListen to all episodes on Audio: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927André DuqumInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

If you want to know the nature of reality, you have to know the nature of yourself. It's the only way. Why does everybody seek happiness? In each of our hearts, there is this wound, there is this longing, there is this memory of our eternity. If we didn't know the taste of happiness, we wouldn't know what to see. Many people, they've been failed often enough by the world. They begin to suspect that happiness can't be fined in the conventional world. And then we start on a great spiritual search. We arrive at one experience, namely the awareness of being. We really really We really want to know the nature of awareness. We must, as it were, in some expressions of the traditional non-dual teaching,

there is this initial turning away from body, I'm not this, I'm not this, I'm not this. If that's as far as the teaching gets, then this leaves us with rejecting the world and rejecting the body. We need to then turn back again and realign it with this new understanding. We fully inhabit our life as an individual, but our life is then used in the service of this understanding. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today for many years has been inspiring countless people through his books, his talks, his retreats, and courses. And he's been supporting really us, recognize the true nature of ourselves as awareness itself.

The teachings of non-duality have immense implications in daily life. And it also feels like the main reason I started this podcast, named it Know Thyself to begin with. And so I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I'm about to, Rupert Spira. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Very nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me, Andre. Yeah.

It really is my honor. I've loved your talks and your shares and pointings for many years. And so this is a cool moment. The question, who am I? Let's just start right there. Because we grow up often in an education system, learning so many things about the external world, not really given much spaciousness to look inwards and to examine oneself internally. You have said that the greatest service one can render humanity is the recognition of one's true nature.

That's so profound, and I'm just curious what has led you to that conviction. All our experience revolves around ourselves, and the common name we give to ourselves is, I, and that is why everything we say about our experience contains the word, I am, I'm having a conversation with you, I'm seeing this room, I'm experiencing such and such. So our self stands at the very heart of our experience. Ourself is the most important element of our experience, and therefore there can be no more important question than to know the nature of ourselves. Our whole life revolves around ourselves.

We live our life in service of ourselves. So the most important thing to know in life is, what is the nature of myself if my entire life is lived on its behalf? if my entire life revolves around it, then should we not know the nature of ourselves before we know any other thing? Could there be a more important question

than to know the nature of ourselves? And it is for this reason that the words know thyself were carved above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi because this understanding, the importance of self-knowledge stands at the very foundation of Western civilization. Of course, your podcast is named after that.

You undertake all these interviews in honor of that quest to know oneself. So, yes, self-knowledge is, I would suggest that self-knowledge is the most important knowledge that anyone could ever attain. And anything we know about the universe

is filtered through our knowledge of our self, as William Blake said, as a person is so they see, as we understand ourselves to be, so we understand the universe. So we can't really understand the nature of the universe before we understand the nature of ourselves. So, yeah, self-knowledge is the most important,

the highest knowledge, and the greatest service to know the truth by oneself must therefore be the greatest service one could render humanity. If you could elaborate a little bit on why specifically it is the greatest service, what implications once one is self-realized that transforms radically all their behaviors and the energy in which those behaviors are infused? And so why is it the greatest service one could render humanity? As you said, the illusion of separateness starts to fall away and you realize our inherent

interconnectedness and then your service starts to be really towards all of life around you as you see it as an extension of yourself. Yes. And so if you would like to share some more thoughts on that. Yes. So everything we know or could ever know about the universe is filtered through our finite minds, filtered through the perception, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. And then thought then adds its own layer of concept.

knowledge to the knowledge that our sense perceptions give us. So everything we know about the universe appears through our finite mind and appears in accordance with it. Our finite mind consists of thought and perception, perception, that is, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. And it's no coincidence that the universe appears to us in the form of sight, sounds, tastes, textures and smells. a direct correlation between our perceiving faculties and the way we perceive reality, the universe. So it's not possible to know the nature of the universe if we approach it through the finite mind. All we will ever know when we look at the universe through the finite mind is a reflection of the limitations of our finite mind.

If you look at white snow through orange tinted glasses, the snow is always going to appear in accordance with the limitation of the medium through which you see it. The white snow will always appear orange. You cannot see the nature of the snow. If you're looking at it, looking at it through orange tinty glasses, it's not possible to know the nature of reality when we view it through the lens of the finite mind. And obviously, knowing the nature of reality is important. It's the quest of science, philosophy, the spiritual traditions. So we have to ask, is there any experience we have that is not mediated through the finite mind? Only that experience would give us direct access to reality.

Any other knowledge gives us mediated access to reality. and therefore cannot be absolutely true. So if we want to know what's absolutely true, we have to go to an experience that is not subject to the limitations of the finite mind. So do we have any experience that is neither a thought or a perception? And in order to, we can't go outwards into the universe

to find the answer to that question because everything we know appears in accordance with the limitations of the finite mind. So if you go inwards, what happens. If we travel as it were backwards, through the layers of experience, thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, all of these are limited. So they can only give us a limited or relative view of reality. But if we go all the way back behind, as it were, the content of thought and perception, we arrive at one experience, namely,

the awareness of being, or aware being, awareness itself. And this experience we have, the experience of being aware or aware being is the only experience there is that is not mediated through the finite mind. And therefore it is the only access we have to reality. And that is why the words know thyself were carved above the temple of Apollo, the early Greek philosophers, to realize if you want to know the nature of reality, you have to know the nature of yourself. It's the only way to know the nature of reality. And this is, this truth is expressed in many different ways in the, in the Sufi tradition, as you know, Baliani, whosoever knows their

self, knows their lord. That's religious language for whoever knows their self as they truly are, knows the ultimate reality of the universe. So that's why all the religious and spiritual traditions, one way or another, point to self-knowledge as the key to understanding. And the principle really which on civilization must be founded, if a civilization is going to evolve in a way that is consistent with truth, rather than evolve in a way that is consistent, in a way that is consistent with the apparent evidence of sense perception, in other words, separation. Our world culture now is predicated on a paradigm of separation because we have allowed our sense perceptions to dictate their model of reality. Everything and everyone is separate. That's the foundation

on which our world culture is based. And of course, we all know this paradigm. It leads to sorrow on the inside and conflict on the outside. So this self-knowledge must be the foundation of a peaceful, harmonious, loving society. Meister Eckhart, we briefly mentioned before recording talking about. One thing that he said was that theologians of the world may quarrel, but the mystics of the world all speak the same language. Absolutely.

And there seems to be those. that speak from direct experience seem to agree, and those that study through the mind intellectually often can disagree. So what is it, I suppose, and it's a bit of a provocative question, that through immediacy of their direct experience, they get to know reality intimately as it is for all of us versus the finiteness of the mind you spoke to earlier. We could disagree for millennia. Yes, exactly.

If we go through the finite mind, that is through thought and perception. Thought and perception fragment reality and make it appear as a multiplicity and diversity of objects and selves. So, yes, at the level of thought, thoughts are always different. There are always going to be disagreements at the level of thought. Is there one experience that is absolutely true? Is there one experience that everybody agrees on? Is there a knowledge that is prior to the differentiation of the finite mind? That is this knowledge that Meister Eckhart said is the one knowledge that all mystics agree on.

And yes, there is. And it's not an extraordinary, mysterious knowledge that only a few special enlightened people had. It's the knowledge that lives in everybody as their very own self. It is just the awareness of being. So let me try and illustrate that. Let's take a Christian and a Muslim and a Hindu and a Jew and ask them all about their vision of their idea of God, or their vision of reality.

They will all have different ideas about it. and they'll express their understanding in different language, different terminology, different. But if we were to ask each of these four people, turn your attention away from the content of your experience and just go back as far as you can in your experience to your primary experience of yourself before any thought or perception arises. What do you find there?

And as long as they understood the question, and participated in the experiment, they would all go back just to the experience of being. And let's add in a few other people as well, a saint, a criminal, an atheist. We do the experiment with a whole range of different people. We ask them to talk about their thoughts and feelings. They'll all describe different thoughts and feelings,

and there'll be conflict between them. But we ask them all, turn your attention away from the content of your experience. Just go into yourself. Keep on going back until you come back to your to your primary not some marvelous extraordinary

enlightened just your your essential experience of yourself it's just the simple feeling of being the experience

of being the awareness of being and there can be no doubt there can be no difference in people's

experience of being the experience of being is always the same experience it's like let me give you

an analogy It's like if we were to ask several people, describe your bedroom. Or let's say you describe your kitchen. And everyone would describe the shape, the size, the color, the contents, that everyone's description would be totally different. Now we say to everyone, okay, but now describe the space in your kitchen, which is, after all, the larger part of your kitchen. Describe the space. Everyone's description would be identical. Whether the kitchen was vast and spacious and airy or time.

tiny and dark and cozy. The space is always the same. It's not qualified or conditioned by the four walls within which it seems to be contained or the objects that it contains. It's always the same. Our being is like that. Just as there would never be any argument

to the nature of the space in all these different rooms so there can be no argument about the nature of being in all these different people. That's the essential knowledge. All the great, religions and spiritual traditions are founded on that knowledge.

They've only, it's only when that knowledge has been overlooked and people start squabbling about ideas and the names you give to that being, that all the conflicts being, but all the great religious and spiritual traditions are founded on this simple recognition of the nature of being. And I would suggest that also, that knowledge also has to be the foundation of any peaceful, harmonious society. It must be the foundation. It must be the paradigm on which any truly civilized society must be based.

And the deeper examination of our fundamental longing for happiness, which you pick a person randomly off the street and you ask them, do they want to be happy? Everyone's going to say yes, right? Yeah. And the I that wants to be happy, many of us have different perceptions on, but we tend to feel

it is this kind of locus of thoughts and emotions localized in our head, and we have this identity, personality structure in which we engage the world with. And it's through the perception of that separate self that happiness is perceived

to be gained through the possessions and gain of exterior material possessions and an arrangement of relationships, something happening a certain way outside of us. And you're inviting the perspective to realize the source of who you are, which is happiness. And I often think of this metaphor of like a lighthouse, illuminating a beach.

In many ways, it has been said that what we are looking for is the place we are looking from. And a lighthouse that's illuminating is almost like looking for its own light, failing to recognize that it is the source of its own illumination. And so as we start to peel back the layers of our preconceived notions of self, to see who we are more fundamentally, that field of awareness that we can tap into. I would love for you to reflect on that and start to guide us with the direct experience of that, because I think non-duality can be seen as a philosophically dense topic of exploration,

but it's also very simple, and the immediacy of direct experience one can come into contact with it. So what say you? Yes, okay. So there's one physical space in the universe. There are not numerous physical spaces. There's just one vast, boundless physical space in the universe that seems to be contained within numerous buildings

or within numerous rooms. And each of those rooms, like the room we're sitting in now, lends a quality to the space. The space seems to, as soon as the building is put up, the building seems to limit, put a boundary around a certain portion of space. And the space then seems to share the qualities of the building, large, small, dark, light, and so on. The space never actually becomes limited. The space in this room is not actually limited by the four walls of this room. If we were to take a sample of the space inside the room and investigate it and we were to take a sample of the vast space outside the room,

they would be identical. Now, imagine that the space were aware. And if we asked the space in this room, describe yourself, It would look around and it would say, I'm small, I'm dark, I'm cozy, I'm full of objects. And it's not describing itself. It's describing the walls within which it seems to be contained. But if we said to it, no, don't tell us about the walls and the objects and the people. Tell us about yourself.

We want to know about the nature of yourself. The space would, so to speak, look at itself, taste itself, become aware of itself. And if it were then to describe its quality, it would never say, I'm small, I'm dark, I'm limited, it would just say, I am vast, I am without limits, I am boundless. The space hasn't become boundless as a result of doing this. It was always that. It just mistakenly identified itself with the four walls within which it seems to be contained. And just one clear look at itself, liberated, not from its limitation,

that it was never limited in the first place. It liberated it from the belief that it was limited. So instead of the space now feeling, I am confined, I'm limited, I'm a fragment, I need something, I'm incomplete and so on, the space now feels I'm whole, I'm perfect, I'm complete, I need nothing. Okay, that's the analogy. So let's go back to our experience, try to make, Yeah.

Contact with this in our experience. Leave the analogy of this vast boundless space. Go to the analogy of being. Consider one being whole without borders, unlimited, infinite, a single being like the single space. And now consider the single being temporarily enclosed within the body mind and mixed with the content of our experience, by content of our experience,

I mean thoughts and feelings, sensations on the inside and perceptions of the world on the outside. So our sense of ourself is a mixture of the fundamental being or being aware or awareness itself, plus the contents of experience. So I would suggest that our being, is like the space.

It's fundamentally unlimited. And this is easy to check in one's experience. We could perhaps go there later. It's easy to check in one's experience that one's being is without limits. It has no shape, no size, no gender, no color, no age, and so on. But in each of us, our being, our essential self is mixed with our experience.

with our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions. So we don't experience ourselves as this complete, inherently peaceful, whole being. We experience ourselves as a being that is limited, temporary, finite, and therefore lacking, because we're a fragment, we feel incomplete. This mixture of infinite being plus the contents of experience makes for a finite being, The space in this room seems to be a finite space. So although infinite being is whole, it lacks nothing. So it's, the common name for the absence of the sense of lack is happiness.

It's complete. It seeks nothing. It needs nothing. It's in a state of equilibrium, sufficiency, plenitude. But when our sense of ourselves, the fact of being or awareness itself is mixed with the content of experience, mixed with our thoughts and feelings.

It seems to acquire limits. I no longer feel that I am this inherently free, inherently peaceful, unconditionally fulfilled being or awareness. I feel that I am a temporary finite self that is made partly of being or awareness and partly of the content of experience the body and the mind.

And so we feel we're a fragment. And as a fragment, we feel I'm missing something. So this sense of missing something and the attendant longing to find something is the core feeling of the separate self that we seem to be. It's the one feeling that defines the apparently separate self,

this feeling I'm incomplete, I lack something. And therefore, in response to that feeling of that, all separate selves, all apparently temporary finite selves, are motivated by one thing to be completed, to be whole again. Because in the memory, deep in the hearts of all temporary finite selves, there is this memory of our essential nature, this memory of our eternity, this memory of our innate happiness. But it's been veiled.

Our innate happiness has been veiled by the content of experience, and therefore everyone is longing. Now, to begin with in life, we try to relieve this longing through the acquisition of objects, substances, activities, relationships, and so on. And what for many people, I suspect for many of your listeners, when most people, or at least many people, people, they've been failed often enough by the world. The world has failed to produce the happiness they seek often enough. They begin to suspect that happiness can't be fined in the conventional world. And then we start on a great spiritual search. We rebrand the search for happiness in the world, the search for enlightenment.

But it's just the same thing. It's just a rebranding of the same longing for something. Only now what we're longing for is a little bit more refined. And the objects or activities in which we seek it are a little bit more refined than the objects and activities that we used to seek it in the world. It's no longer substances and so it's meditation practices and teachers and teachings and traditions and disciplines and so on. But they're all, in effect, activities of the mind that we engage in for us, one, a sole purpose, bringing to an end this longing. this existential longing that lives in each of our hearts. We now call it the longing for enlightenment,

if we're in a religious tradition, we call it the longing for God, but it's all the longing for something, something that's going to put an end to this unbearable longing. The dissolution of a separate self? Yes, so most, if not all the, I would say all the great spiritual and religious traditions, in one way or another,

say that what we're really seeking is not an object, however refined and noble that object may be, it's within ourselves. And for this reason, all that the religious and spiritual traditions have elaborated numerous different pathways, basically to come back to the recognition of the nature of our being. Because when we recognize the nature of our being, we like the space in this room recognizing its essential nature. It recognized that it is already free, it is already whole,

it is already perfect, it is already complete, and it is that recognition that brings to an end this unbearable longing. So that is why, in one way or another, all the religious, spiritual traditions

say, know thyself. It's only that self-knowledge that will put an end to this, to this longing. So let's examine a little bit deeper the direct qualities of that awareness because

and perhaps if you'd like to start by what do you think is the usefulness of examining what we are not like in the realization or the dissolution of self and the acknowledgement of recognition

of one's true nature do you feel it's useful to examine essentially the things that are in the space of this room that we can see and we are not, like the ephemeral nature of thoughts and emotions, how they come and go. I don't think it's necessary to examine them or to go deeply into them.

The space in this room doesn't have to examine each object in this room to know that it is not essentially any of those objects. It's just enough to take one look at itself and see, I am obviously not the four walls in this room. I am obviously not the cameras and the lights. It doesn't need to, investigate the cameras and the lights. But would you say for people that are closely identified with their body as a separate self?

Yes. For some people, I would say for many people nowadays, certainly for many people that are interested in this, that the community of people that are interested in these matters has grown in maturity over the last 20, 30 years to such an extent that I feel that this, very direct approach, not examining the thoughts, the feelings, the histories, the narratives and so on, but just going directly to one's true nature of being or awareness itself is for many people sufficient. But you're quite right. There are some people for whom their experience is so intense, so distressing, so traumatic, that it's too big a leap, too big a step to go

straight from their very distressing, traumatic experience all the way back to their being in one step. And for them, it's important and necessary to interpose various intermediary steps. And the first of those steps may well be to explore the content of their experience. So the approach that I'm suggesting is very direct approach is sometimes called that the direct path because we go directly from the content of our experience, whatever it is, straight back to the fact of being or being aware or awareness itself. And then what is sometimes referred to as the progressive or indirect approach would be an approach where we go more slowly.

There are some intermediary steps. For instance, given an example of one such step, if someone's experience is very intense and distressing and it's too much to ask a question such as what is it that is aware of your experience, that question takes you straight back to the fact of being aware, irrespective of what you were aware of. If that's too big a, if their attention is so identified with the content of their experience, One such intermediary step would be, okay, and pay attention to your breath. That's not such a radical question. You're paying attention to your thoughts and feelings,

and you just take your attention off your thoughts and feelings, and you pay attention to your breath. So you're dissociated to a degree from your thoughts, and you're taking a step back from your thoughts and feelings, not all the way back to your being, but you've unhooked your attention from your thoughts and feelings, and you're now resting your attention. on a neutral object, not a painful emotion, but a neutral object, and indeed a neutral

object that shares many of the qualities of our being. It's transparent, it's empty, it's silent, and so on. So it's a very good object to give one's attention to. Then when one's attention has steadied on the breath for a while, you can then ask the question, okay, now what is it that is aware of your breath? And then you take one step back to your being. That would just be one example of a more gradual approach, which is equally legitimate, equally appropriate, depending on the person. Yeah, amazing. So now further examining the qualities of awareness, it creates immediate freedom and the experience of that fundamental being that we all share. And I think it's useful to now have a more direct experience of what are these qualities

that one could attribute to the fragrances or the things that exude from our natural state of being of self? And so, yeah, for those that want to go a little bit deeper in this moment to experience their direct nature, how would you guide us to do so? So if we start with the content of our experience, let's take our thoughts. Thoughts by definition are always agitated, that is they're always moving. Emotions, and by emotions I refer to afflictive emotions, sorrow, loneliness, shame, fear and so on.

So our feelings have a sorrowful aspect to them. So if we ask ourselves the question, what is it that is aware of our thoughts? What is it that allows our thoughts to be known? What is it that illuminates them? What is it that knows them? That's what we essentially are the presence of awareness. The presence of awareness is them. So here we're separating our experience into a subject and an object.

But instead of considering the subject of our experience to be the body mind, which is what we normally do, we're raising no. The body mind is something I am aware of. I am the light of awareness, the lighthouse, I'm the light of awareness that knows or is aware of my thoughts, indeed, the entirety of my experience. And the awareness that illuminates or knows our thoughts doesn't share their agitation. It just observes them. The sun that illuminates the earth, it doesn't participate in what, is taking place, it just illuminates it. It doesn't share the qualities of the content, the

activities of the earth. And likewise, the presence of awareness that is now listening to our conversation or knowing our thoughts is just silently witnessing those thoughts. It doesn't need to be made peaceful through effort or practice or discipline. It is already such. It is just this inherently peaceful, silent, witnessing, knowing presence. And the same with our feelings. The sorrowful nature of our feelings is known or lit up by awareness. They also appear within the space of awareness. So awareness has both this spacious quality and this illuminating or knowing quality.

It's why in the Buddhist tradition it's sometimes referred to as luminous emptiness. It is empty like space, not a physical space, but it's an aware space, a luminous space that both contains all our experience and knows all our experience. But this aware space in which our sorrow and loneliness and shame and fear exists doesn't itself share those qualities, just like the space in this room. if we were dancing in this room now or fighting in this room now, that the space would not be modified by it. The space would remain as it essentially is, at peace, unaffected. And awareness is like that.

I'm not talking about an enlightened awareness. I'm not talking about awareness how it might be if we meditate for 30 years. I'm talking about the awareness with which everybody, everybody, all eight billion of us, the awareness with which all eight billion of us now know our experience is already inherently peaceful and without any lack. It lacks nothing and therefore we say its nature is happiness. By happiness, I don't mean an emotion of happiness that comes and

go. It's just this complete absence of lack, this complete ease, this fullness, this sufficiency, plenitude. So it's in relation to the content of our experience, in relation to our agitated thoughts that we say the nature of awareness is peaceful. It's in relation to our sorrowful feelings that we say the nature of awareness is happiness. And one other quality important to mention that from the point of view of the finite mind, reality is broken up into separate objects and selves. So that's finite mind that's a paradigm of separation.

Whereas for awareness, it's like the space in this room. The space in this room, once it knows itself, how it really knows nothing of separate. It doesn't feel separate from the space outside the room or indeed the space in your kitchen.

It's, from the point of view of the space, there's one space. So likewise, from the point of view of awareness or aware being, there's just, there's just itself. with it's infinite without borders and without divisions. So from its experience of itself,

there's no separation, there's no otherness in it. And this absence of otherness is the experience that we refer to as love. That's why love is sometimes said to be the nature of reality. So peace, joy, love. These are the qualities of awareness. But I'd like to add one thing to that. that strictly speaking, we shouldn't assign any qualities to awareness or name those qualities because all the qualities and the names we give them

are really qualities that we give to our experience, to our objective experience. It's legitimate to say that the nature of awareness is peaceful in contrast with our agitated thoughts. It's legitimate to say that the nature of awareness is joy in contrast with or with reference to our emotions. It's legitimate to say that the nature of awareness is love with reference to the separation that we normally feel. So these are legitimate concessions that we make.

But what we're doing is we're still using the mind. In these cases, the mind is trying to name the qualities of awareness within its own frame of reference. However, the mind cannot know awareness how it is, because as we saw earlier, everything the mind knows is refracted through its limitations. Therefore, the mind cannot know the nature of awareness. Only awareness is aware. So only awareness can know about itself or indeed anything else. So if we really want to know the nature of awareness, we must, as it were, ask awareness, what is your experience of yourself? That can be the only true knowledge of awareness.

So if we were to do that, if we were to say, I'm caricaturing awareness now, if we were to say to awareness, what is your intrinsic awareness of yourself, what is your knowledge of yourself prior to the arising of experience? So thoughts and feelings and objects haven't arisen yet. Imagine they haven't arisen yet. It's just empty space. There are no buildings in the universe. It's just empty. We say to awareness, what is your experience of yourself prior to? In other words, don't refer to experience.

What is your experience of yourself? Awareness would never say, I am peaceful, because it hasn't yet known agitation. It would never say my nature is happiness because it hasn't yet known. Sorry. It would never say my nature is love because it hasn't yet known separation. What would awareness say if we asked it? What is your experience of yourself?

Well, it would remain silent. But imagine we were to press it. Tell us something true about yourself. The only thing it would say is, I am. That is a true statement about itself. That's the statement that it would make about it. itself. We ask the mind to tell us something about awareness. The mind says it is peaceful. It is loving. So that's the mind viewing awareness as an object. But in awareness's experience of itself,

there are no other finite minds from whose point of view it may be know. There's just itself. And in its own knowledge of itself. And that must be the true knowledge of awareness. So that's why it's said really that the highest teaching is silence. And if we have to say something about truth, that would be awareness's knowledge of itself would be the highest truth. And awareness's knowledge of itself is just the expression. If it were to express that knowledge, it would be I am. And that's why I am is said to be the absolute truth, all other truth, even that the knowledge awareness is inherently peaceful. It's relatively true.

It's true relative to the finite mind's experience. But if we want a truth that is not subject to the limitations of a finite mind, then all we can say is I am. The I am is the absolute truth. And going back to our conversation about the different religions and traditions, that they would all agree. They would have to agree on that. that the nature of reality prior to the arising of experience,

if that reality were to say something about itself, it would just say, I am, which is why in the Old Testament God's name is said to be I am, that that is the highest expression of the ultimate truth. Well said. The recognition of that I-Amness throughout our whole life and what we have memory of from being two years old to 20 to maybe one day 100 years old, the continuity of the self that has been the same, the awareness, the I-amness, the isness,

the recognition of that is inherently liberating and the recognition that there is something unchanging amidst all that is changing in the apparent separation between all life. And yet we have these different states of consciousness or filtrations, the mind that give us different you know the dreaming state the waking state consciousness and so when you examine these different states of consciousness i would like to hear your opinion of i guess the utility and uh i guess the yeah the filtration levels from the dreaming state all the way up to consciousness yes i would suggest that they're different states of the mind they're not different states of consciousness there consciousness as it were it's like

like the screen and the different states of mind of the different programs that appear. So the different, so consciousness doesn't pass through any states. Take, for instance, the transition we go through from the waking state, the so-called transition we go through from the waking state to the dream state. In the waking state, we're aware of the waking world, we experience perceptions of the world, sensations of the body, and internal thoughts and feelings. And then when we fall, and we awareness are our, our,

aware of those. Perceptions, sensations, thoughts and images, thoughts and feelings. Then, when we fall asleep, what really happens is that, first of all, perceptions of the word leave us, sights, sounds, tastes, textures and smells, leave us. And then our sensations, I use the word sensations to describe our felt experience of the body. Sensations leave us. So when we fall to sleep, perceptions and sensations leave us. And only thoughts and images, or thoughts and images are left. We call that, and we awareness in the so-called dream state, instead of being aware of perceptions, sensations, thoughts and images,

are now just aware of thoughts and images. But awareness hasn't undergone any change. It's just remained exactly as it eternally is. Only perceptions and sensations have been removed from it. The finite mind believes, I've passed from one state of consciousness to another. No, not at all. Consciousness has just remained as it is.

Perceptions and sensations have been removed, and now only thoughts and images appear. We call that the dreaming state, but consciousness hasn't transitioned between any state. And then at some point, thoughts and images vanish, and we say we've now entered a deep sleep state. Consciousness hasn't entered a state. It hasn't transitioned from mind.

It just remains as it is, and in the deep sleep state, the so-called deep sleep state, It is just aware of being. It's not aware of thoughts and images or aware of sensations and perceptions. So consciousness remains, as you rightly said, it's this golden thread that runs throughout all our experiences

and all our different states and whatever other states there may be. But consciousness doesn't, we, we awareness, I use the words awareness of consciousness synonymously, awareness don't transition through any of those states. We just remain as we always are, or more accurately as we eternally are, because in the absence of the finite mind, there's no, there's no time. So, I was watching a video where you were talking about this, and I wrote down what you said, if I may speak it back to you, I thought it was a very concise breakdown. I said, consider that what we experience as the waking state is a kind of dream in the

universal mind of consciousness and that each of us as individual people are localized perspectives of infinite consciousness within infinite consciousness from whose perspective it perceives its own activity as the universe yes okay would you like me to to elaborate that yeah i'll show on that a little So I'm using our experience of a dream. So in a regular nighttime dream, you fall asleep here in L.A. And you dream that you're walking the streets of Paris. But you don't experience the streets of Paris directly from your bed here in L.A. In order to experience the streets of Paris, you simultaneously imagine.

Imagine them within your own mind, within your finite mind, and then you simultaneously locate yourself within your own dream as an apparently separate subject of experience, from whom's perspective you see what seems to you to be the streets of Paris. But when you wake up, you realize, no, it was just the activity of my mind. So what is the activity of your mind appears as a material world, the streets of Paris, only from the local. perspective of the person you seem to be within your own dream. So your own mind divided itself into a subject and an object. And you had to do that. That's the only way you can experience the streets of Paris is by dividing yourself into an apparently separate subject and object. And you view the object, the streets of Paris, from the localized perspective of the subject. You can't experience the streets of Paris from your unlocalized mind asleep.

in LA, unlocalized with reference to the dream. Okay, that's the analogy. Now, consider that exactly the same thing happens, but one step up, that in just the same way that your finite dreaming mind is infinite with respect to the dream. It doesn't appear anywhere within the time and space that the dream takes place.

Well, consider that, and that the knowing with which you know the streets of Paris. You've localized yourself on the streets of Paris, and you still know or perceive the streets of Paris, but the knowing with which you know your experience is not located in your body. It's not located anywhere in the dreamed world. It's located in your mind asleep in L.A.

Now, consider that the very knowing with which each of us is now knowing this experience is not located in this body mind. Indeed, is not located anywhere in the time and space that seems to be real from the perspective of this finite mind, that it's unlocated, that it's infinite. And it's infinite with respect to the time and space that we seem to experience in the waking state.

So now imagine infinite consciousness, infinite awareness, dreaming, as it were, imagining within its own infinite mind, the universe, but it cannot perceive the universe directly because the infinite cannot know the finite directly. There's no room for the finite in the infinite. So in just the same way that you cannot know the streets of Paris at night directly, you have to localize yourself within your own dream.

The infinite, if it wants to, prior to manifestation, consider infinite awareness a realm of, of infinite potential in which there's no form, there's no manifestation, there's no creation. But if that potential is to be realized in form, infinite consciousness must simultaneously imagine the universe within itself and localize itself as an apparently separate subject of experience. That's all of us.

From whose perspective it sees itself as the outside world. Now, from the point of view of our finite minds, the outside world seems to be something other than mind. We feel our minds on the inside. And what we see as the world is outside the mind, we call that matter, we call that material stuff. In just the same way that when you're on the streets of Paris in your dream,

your mind seems to be inside you, the world made out of matter seems to be on the outside of you. wake up you realize, wow, it's all the activity of my own, the homogeneous activity of my own mind. Well, from our point of view, experience seems to be separated into a self and another, mind and matter, subject and object. But that's just how it is from our local, limited point of view. What's really taking place, I would suggest, is that the one infinite whole reality whose nature is consciousness or awareness or spirit or love, whatever we call it, is, as it were, imagining the entire universe within itself and simultaneously knowing that universe from a localized

point of view. So awareness has, as it were, divided itself into a subject and an object. All manifestation can only be known from a subject-object point of view. Can I go into more detail about why that is the case? Take any object. The reason we can see, see an object is because we stand at a distance from it. Now, try now to see your own eyes. Nobody can see their own eyes directly. Why? Simply because we cannot.

You have to stand apart from something that you see. You need separation to have. You need separation. You need a subject-object experience. The eyes are, of course, not the subject of experience. But let's imagine in the context that the eyes of the subject. of experience. Everything else is the object. The only thing, and therefore

everything else appears, it has an objective quality to it because we perceive it from the point of view of a subject. But when the subject tries to see itself, when the eyes trying to, when you look now to see your eyes, there's an emptiness there, that there's a blind spot there, that there's no objective experience there. There's no manifestation, there's no creation, there's nothing. So it's exactly the same.

In the infinite's view of itself, there is just itself, infinite, formless. There's no creation, no form, no manifestation, no. If the infinite is to manifest the potential that lies within it in form, that the mechanism by which it does that is this apparent division of itself into a subject and object. in other words duality, the subject-object relationship is the mechanism by which the manifest, the potential that lies unmanifest in the infinite is realized in form.

But it comes at a price. In order to do just as you forget that you are sleeping in L.A., you are perfectly peaceful and happy when you fall asleep in your bed and labour, but you locate yourself on the streets, parents and there you can be miserable. You can have a nightmare. You've overlooked your natural state of happiness when you're asleep in it.

Likewise, awareness is nature, if we go back to the conversation about its qualities, if we can ascribe qualities to us, awareness is nature is peace, plenitude, sufficiency, happiness. But in order to manifest its potential in form, it must overlook itself. It must forget itself. It must localize itself as something temporary, finite, small, limited, located. So you could say that awareness pays for manifestation with its innate happiness. It localizes. It becomes a fragment or seems.

It never really does, just as your mind never really becomes a separate person on the streets of Paris. and your mind always remains as it is. It's the same. Consciousness always remains as it is. Whole, infinite, perfect, complete. But it seems to divide itself into a subject and an object in order to realize itself in form. It comes at a price.

And that's why the individual, the separate subject of experience, that's all of us. That's why in each of our hearts that there is this wound, there is this longing, there is this memory of our eternity. everybody why does everybody seek happiness if we didn't know the taste of happiness we wouldn't know what to seek everybody retains the memory of happiness in their heart and if that happiness is concealed then the the overriding motivation of that individual is to seek that happiness

whether we call it happiness or god or enlightenment it's all the same search and the search is not really for an object, a substance. It's not even for a marvelous vision of God, or it's not, it's just a search, it's just the longing to be divested of the limitations that we seem to acquire from the content of experience and to stand revealed again as we really are. I love that perspective that suffering in many ways is the price of a admission that the unmanifest one consciousness must pay to have a localized perspective and apparent separation of itself.

Yes. In many ways, for the joy of becoming one again, but also on this, the discovery, like, there's surely something that the one consciousness learns through having each unique perspective. an infinite amount of perspectives. Yes, it learns about the potential that lies within it. And that's an endless learning. As each of our finite minds go on learning, as there is an expansion of knowledge in the mind,

consciousness through the agency of each of our minds is learning about the potential that lies within it. It's not learning anything about itself. In other words, it localizes or seems to localize, itself as a separate subject of experience in order to know itself as the universe, in order to realize the potential that lies within it. It doesn't do so in order to know itself. The idea that awareness has to become or seem to become a finite mind in order to know itself is absurd because everything the finite mind knows is by definition finite. It's impossible

to know the nature of awareness through the agency of the finite mind, just like it's impossible to see white snow through orange tinted glasses. So awareness doesn't assume the mechanism of the subject-object relationship in order to know itself. It does so in order to realize its potential in form. But in order to know itself, it must cease localizing itself in the finite mind. It must divest itself of the qualities that it borrows from the finite mind. the content of experience.

It must go back to itself. And that's why this is some, most meditation practices in one way or another are an attempt to travel back through the layers of experience until we get to that one experience that is prior to thought and perception, namely the awareness of being. It seems like for those that are very densely identified with their body, we will continually meet harsh realities kind of

guiding us, bringing us back to the essential nature that cannot be realized other through the recognition of itself and love

I've heard you share is the recognition of our shared being. Yes. So do you see love is essentially who we are or is it in the recognition

that we are? It's who we are. It's who we are. Love is the nature of being. Being is shared, like the space in this room is shared with all other spaces. The being in all of us is shared. We appear to be separate because we look at each other through the lens of perception. My perceiving faculties make it seem as if you're a separate body and I'm a separate body.

So if we believe the apparent evidence of sense perception, we're going to feel that you and I are separate. I'm going to feel I'm a separate person and you're separate. And therefore, it's for this reason that not only do we love friendship, because friendship is an expression of the being that we are behind the appearance of separation and diversity. But it's why we particularly love intimate relationship, because intimate relationship is really, it's not really the desire to merge with an other person. It's really a desire to be divested of the sense of separation. And for a human being

intimate relationship is one of the ways that happens. But if we then attribute, if we believe that the purpose of the other is to provide love for us, then as we all know, that's the source of conflict in intimate relationship because the person can never provide love. Love is our nature. The intimate relationship can be an expression of that shared being, but it is not a means to it. If we use another person as a means to experience love, then as soon as they do something or say something that we don't like, or then immediately the feeling of love is the love which was dependent on them is then broken and the relationship goes towards conflict it really feels like god will pull us in through the face of many things until we realize that is what we are you know like the the intimate relationships

that we have and you think about the the moment over or orgasm, there is this complete loss of a sense of a separate self in a way. There's this inherent pleasure and the dissolution of feeling like a boundaryed, isolated skin-encapsulated ego, you know? Yes. And again, the longing for happiness where we really seek it for through so many different things and we realize the futility of it coming back into the recognition of it or originating in ourselves. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's deceptive that there's a kind of deceptive twist in our experience,

because you're right. The moment of orgasm or any intensely pleasurable experience, we do experience happiness. We don't just experience pleasure. We experience happiness. So we can be forgiven. And that's true throughout our lives. So, you know, when we were children, the ice cream, all through our lives, we have had innumerable experiences.

And they do all seem to have delivered the experience of happiness. So we can be forgiven, at least to begin with, thinking, well, you know, when I got the ice cream, I did experience happiness. When I won the game, I did experience happiness. When I had this intensely pleasurable sexual experience, I did experience happiness. Therefore, happiness must be caused by objects, substances and relationships and so on. But I would suggest that the hint in all of those experiences is that the happiness we experience on the acquisition of each of those objects, substances, it's always the same. There isn't a particular kind of happiness that tastes like ice cream and another kind of happiness that tastes like winning a game or another kind of happiness that tastes like sexual intimacy. that the experience of happiness is always the same experience,

and that's the hint, that what you're actually tasting in that moment is the nature of your being. Happiness is what being tastes like. So let's finish this. So what's happening? The separate sub is a fragment, as we've already seen,

it's always in a state of incompletion and therefore seeking to be completed. So it lives in a state of tension, anxiety, seeking. longing. And when it gets the object, the substance, the activity or the relationship, that tension does come to an end because we've got what we think we want. And when that tension ends, the activity of the mind ceases. And as the activity of the mind ceases, we taste our true nature of happiness. And then the mind rises again and wrongly attributes the happiness we experienced to the ice cream. The game, the relationship. The relationship.

relationship. So after a while, but then we realize, oh, it's always the same experience that the object, substance, activity, or relationship just put an end to my seeking. And when my seeking, when the seeking mind subsided temporarily, my true nature of happiness, which was always shining, it is always shining, it's shining now, but it's veiled by the content of experience. But when the seeking mind subsides, then our happiness shine, that's, that's, that's the taste of being. That's the, that's the experience of joy. So after a while we read, oh, the happiness is never, it's not, why don't I just go there directly? I don't need to go via an object, substance activity, or I can just go directly. It doesn't mean to say that I may not still seek objects, activities, and relationships,

but I no longer do so for the purpose of finding happiness or peace or love. I do so for the purpose of expressing it and sharing it and celebrating it and communicating it. There's something about the word happiness in which I don't like using fully here because I think there is this cultural linguistic familiarity seeing happiness as dopaminergic pleasure rather than a deeper, which you're pointing to, a deeper cessation of the recognition of oneself. It is almost like the happiness you're speaking to is. actually the absence of the search for happiness. And there is a quality of well-being that exudes from that.

Yes, absolutely. I think that's a very legitimate objection. It's more like just a taste of the plenitude, the fullness of one's being, the sufficiency of one's being. I use the word happiness just because it's the common name for that experience. But you're quite right. It also has an association with a superficial passing state of mind. So I'm not

attached to the word. Sometimes I use the word quiet joy which feels more that doesn't have that same association. Yeah. Yeah. I love quiet joy because it feels I mean it feels

a little bit more precise, I suppose for me. In the recognition of that quiet joy, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on morality because in the recognition of our shared being, suddenly you don't need to teach morality as you may have conventionally needed to. Because in the acknowledgement of our shared being, I experience you as self in many ways. Yes. I do not need to be taught to hurt you just as I don't need to be taught

to cut off my own hand because that just seems stupid, right? Absolutely. And so what implications do you feel like the recognition of our essential nature has on how we relate to. And how we relate to the recognition. relate to where we see it in our surroundings as well and how that changes on our daily life, how we interact with it. Yes. St. Augustine said love, in response to a similar question, I don't know what the question was, but I imagine it was in response to a similar question. St. Augustine said love and do whatever you want, by which he meant.

Recognize, first of all, that there is one being and that everyone and everything shares that being. Now, as long as you lead your life in a way that is consistent with that understanding, you don't need to be told, don't kill anyone, don't steal anyone, don't hurt anyone. And so those behaviors are the inevitable consequence of the felt sense of our shared being. So the Ten Commandments are for people who don't yet know, the Ten Commandments in whatever form, for people that don't yet know and feel that they share their being with everyone and everyone. They're just meant to keep everyone, the moral precepts that they're, ideally, they're based, they should be based on this recognition of our inherent oneness. And they're just telling people how to behave in a way that is an expression of that oneness before they know that for themselves.

When you know that for yourself, then once, and it's a progressive thing, more and over, over, over, period of time, and I think it's over an endless period of time, one's entire experience is gradually and progressively pervaded by this recognition. It begins to inform our thoughts, feelings, actions, relationships, and so on. In the deepening of that recognition, how do you engage with what used to have been the extraction of joy from relationships, meaning if we're under the illusion that we're going to get happiness from somebody, then we're going to approach that relationship completely differently than if we come at it from the energy of sharing joy

and the recognition of our shared being, then we're not looking to extract so many things from the external world. And so from your own experience, I would love, as you've grown in the deepening of the sense of recognition of who you are, how has it changed how you relate to the world? The first thing I know and first, feel about anyone is that their being is my being and my being is them, that we share our being. Whether I like them, whether I agree with their ideas, whether I, that's all secondary.

That's got nothing to do with whether I love them. So that's the very first thing I feel when I meet anybody or with anybody is that I share my being with them. And then I relate to them, physically, emotionally, intellectually, in a way that is informed by that felt sense of our shared being, which will express itself one way with my intimate companion, expresses itself a different way when we're having this conversation, it expresses itself in a different way with the Uber driver

that brought me here this morning, and indeed expresses itself a different way again with someone whose idea. For instance, let's say I'm watching the news, seeing someone express their ideas, I may disagree with those ideas vehemently. But my first thing I know about that person is that I share my being with them. It doesn't make me agree with them. If I met them, I probably wouldn't smile sweetly at them. Because sometimes a very firm know is necessary.

but that can still come from a sense of your shared being is just the appropriate response. You may see someone that is either thinking or behaving in a way that violates love, that violates the unity of being. And you may have to meet that behavior with something very forceful. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, with your intimate companion, that the whole relationship has grown up out of this shared sense of being.

And the purpose of the relationship is to express this and communicate it and to celebrate it. So it's the same shared being, the same felt sense of shared being can be expressed in many, many different ways depending on the relationship. but it's always the same shared being, the felt sense of shared being underneath. Now, go on to the second part of your question about how does that look in intimate relationship? Just to add to what I've already said about that, the main thing is that I don't look to my companion

to provide joy or love for me. That's not, if I, that would be an impossible demand to impose on her. And what is she, it's not possible for somebody else to produce or to provide happiness or love for us. And to project that onto another person is a recipe sooner or later for conflict because you're going to be disappointed. They blink the wrong way. They react the wrong way or something. And then the felt sense of shared being the love. is then failed by them.

So I don't project my joy or peace or love onto my companion. I don't hold her responsible for it. And that keeps the relationship free of this demand and expectation and disappointment and it keeps a relation free to be a celebration of our shared being, a celebration of love. Surely there is, in the love that we share together, there's something deeper in the recognition that we otherwise may have not been able to recognize fully on our own. Do you think that's true?

It's possible that in the relationship, particularly in an intimate relationship, that any areas in us that are not yet aligned with the understanding that we're speaking of will sooner or later be exposed. So that's a very valuable thing, apart from being a celebration of love, an intimate relationship, will sooner or later shine a bright light on all those hidden parts of us

that are not yet exposed to the light of truth, to the light of awareness. So a relationship could be very valuable from that point of view, but an intimate relationship is much more than that. And I would suggest also much more than just companionship. It is really, I think, at a human,

for most people, and for many people at a human level, it's the, it's the, it's the most potent, objective experience. It's the most potent experience of our shared being.

It's the experience in which our shared being manifests most fully. This felt sense of of oneness and that deepens in my experience it goes on and on and on deepening it's it's it's what marriage truly is

it is it's a real it's a in a way a marriage isn't between two people the marriage is the dissolution of those two people it's why traditionally a marriage is said to be a marriage in God God is the religious name for our shared being So it's like a sacred marriage in which the sense of separation falls away progressively more and more and more in the relationship.

And this felt sense of our shared being shines more brightly in the relationship. I love that the big obviously through line is the dissolution of separation. And there are a myriad of different mirrors in which we can come continually. as a reflection and reminder of who we are and what we are in our true sense. Earlier, we talked about the difference between the dream state and the waking state, how from the perspective of consciousness, our waking state experience is very much so also like a dream. And perhaps enlightenment, if we want to use that word,

and the recognition of our true essential nature is becoming lucid in the dream, meaning we become aware that we are in the dream, we're still in it but we're no longer under the veil of just like we would become lucid in a dream state. Yes, yes.

That's a very legitimate perspective, yes. Just going back to what you said about the waking state being like a dream the English Pope William Wordsworth said our birth is but asleep and a forgetting and he was referring to

to justice, go back to the model infinite consciousness dreaming as it were the universe within itself and simultaneously locating itself as a separate subject of experience within that dream so you could say infinite consciousness as it were falls asleep and this is what we said that consciousness pays for manifestation with its innate happiness that it falls asleep to itself this is what in the Vedantic tradition is what's referred to as ignorance I don't use the word because it's equated in our culture with stupidity.

That's not what's in. Ignorance, it means more just the ignoring consciousness, as it were, overlooks or forgets itself, ignores itself. Just as you overlook your sleep, you asleep in L.A., you forget yourself when you seem to become the character in the dream. Consciousness, as it were, forgets itself, localizes itself in the form of each of our finite minds, from whose perspective it sees itself as the world. but it's fallen asleep within its own dream. So what is from the, when you're on the streets of Paris in your dream,

you feel you're wide awake. You feel the streets of Paris, I'm in the waking state. When you wake up in the morning, you had no, you rest, no, that was a dream, that was an illusion. But this,

we now feel we're in the waking state from consciousness's point of view, which is the only real point of view. Conscious is dreaming. We think we're in the waking state. We're not. This is a dream. It's the waking.

dream that you refer to. So in the context of that, could enlightenment be considered lucid waking, as opposed to lucid dreaming? Yes, yes. Just as in lucid dreaming, the dream goes on, but you're no longer located exclusively as the person on the streets of Paris. You've also taken a step back and you know you're dreaming. Well, this enlightenment could be conceived of lucid waking. We still view the world from the perspective of fine amounts, the only way it's possible to view the world. But at the same time, we have taken a step back,

and we know and feel that we are also the one whole, of which all of this is an appearance. When you reflect back on your own journey, has there been a predominant experience or two that really shifted you? into becoming more lucid? Like did you, or was it a gradual, a more gradual series of small moments?

For me, it was a series of small recognitions. Story I tell sometimes of the Zen teacher, Shunriyos Suzuki, who was holding a meeting and somebody asked him, why do you never talk about your enlightenment experience? and his wife who was sitting at the back of the hall stood up and said, because he never had one. He never had that moment where everything just...

Some people do, and, you know, we know, Roman Mahashi is obviously one of the examples of that. And those that they make... There's something to talk about. They make good stories. You know, Roman Mahashi went to live in. cave for the next 10 years. I've got totally ended up on a park bend for...

These very sudden recognitions. But I would suggest for the vast majority of people, it doesn't happen like that. And they're obviously very inspiring stories, but there's also a downside to them. It's that they equate enlightenment with an exotic experience, so exotic that you end up living in a cave

for 10 years or completely dysfunctional on a pub and you think, well, that never happened to me. I'm just a regular guy. Therefore, this marvelous experience hasn't yet happened and you go on seeking. Well, and so-called enlightenment or awakening is not a marvelous experience. It's the simplest experience. It's just the recognition of the nature of being. It's the simplest experience. They're just a simple recognition.

Oh, I used to think and feel I was temporary, finite, limited, lacking. I'm complete. I'm whole. I lack nothing. I'm full. I'm one with everything. It can just be a... The mind cannot even notice to begin with.

It can be so quiet. Only later, three months later, the mind thinking, oh, that's funny. I hardly ever react to anything anymore. Nothing upsets me anymore. I feel so friendly with everyone. The mind can just notice in retrospect. It can be so quiet. I think for most people, it's like that.

Certainly from having been speaking and writing about these matters for 15 years or so in my retreats and meetings, vast majority of people just have these repeated recognises. these repeated tastes of the nature of their being and these and these and they become cumulative and in time our being or the fact of being aware it ceases to be something that we visit from time to time in between all our other our other experiences we begin to live there we move in we begin to live as that and then the peace and the quiet joy and the feeling of love that comes through that just gradually becomes more and more of our felt everyday experience. And we never say, oh, we never say, I'm enlightened or we never feel I'm enlightened.

And you can't point to a time when it happened. You just find it becomes more and more your natural condition. That's how it was for me. On the path, how has your relationship with formal meditation change? because I think the formal, you know, spiritual practices and meditative techniques and contemplative meditation, like carving time out for that is, you know, particularly useful in the beginning stages of one's discovery. And then one kind of, I feel, becomes meditative and it becomes less of something we do and more of something we are. Of course, still having its place.

but I'm just curious how has the formal sitting down a meditation practice been for you? And has it, do you feel like shifted to, I guess, needing less of that? Yes, yes. Okay. Can I talk about three different types of meditation in order to fully answer your... Okay, can I talk about three different types? I'm not going to say no. So we spoke earlier about the progressive and the direct path, and then there's another path

which I sometimes refer to as the pathless path. So on the progressive path, meditation practice involves directing our attention to an object. It might be the breath, it might be the mantra, it might be gazing at the sky, it might be imagining a flame,

some kind of objective experience, we direct our attention towards it. And there are numerous types of objective, objective meditations, meditations where we give our attention to some kind of an objection. subject, subtle object. That's the progressive path. Then there's the direct path, which is a turning around of the attention. Who am I? What is it that is aware of all of these objects?

So there's really only one, many forms of objective meditations, there's really only one direct path, although it can be formulated in very different ways. Rahman Mahashi formulated it in one ways, but there are many other ways the direct path can be formulated, but it's always the same experience at the turning around of attention, not really the turning around, it's more like the sinking of attention, not directing our attention outwards towards an object, subtle object or a gross object, the thinking of it, the relaxing of attention back into the source, that's the, that's the direct path. And then there's the pathless path, which is not doing anything with one's attention. You're neither directing it towards an object, nor are you tracing it back towards the subject.

You're simply resting in being. Because you've, the direct path has fulfilled, whichever path, the progressive path or the direct path, they've fulfilled their mission. They've taken you back to your being. Once you're there, there's nothing to do. It's what my staircartes referred to when you say. When we arrive at the one who gathers all things into itself, there you must stay. So all the practices, whatever our practice was, it's taken us to the awareness of being. Then there's no more practice.

There's just an abidance. So self-inquiry has turned into self-abitance. So this self-resting. And that's not really a path. There's no longer a practitioner doing something or even ceasing to do something. You're just resting, not resting in being because there's no entity to rest in.

You're just resting as being. So there's the three types of meditation. Now, to answer your question, I spent 20 years on the progressive path-practicing mantra meditation, and I loved it. It was a beautiful practice. That then kind of spontaneously, at the end of that time, it turned into self-inquiry.

I began to ask myself the question, but what is it that is aware of my experience, or who am I really, or what is it that cannot be removed from me, or what is always with me, all these very different questions that lead. to the recognition. So I then stopped practicing mantra meditation,

although the mantra continued to pop up in my mind, and indeed still does from time to time, just because I practiced it for so many years, it was just, it became like my breathing, but I stopped practicing that and then started engaging the self-inquiry, and I did that for 15 years or so.

But then even that now has given way, I don't practice self-inquiry now. I just abide in being as being. That's my become my it's become my home.

It's the place I live. I still sometimes choose to close my eyes and just rest in being, rest as being. And someone looking from the outside might think, oh, Rupert's meditating, but really I'm not doing anything. I'm just being what I am. I'm just

being being, being. Just being aware being. And then the rest of the time I'm out in everyday life, having conversations and activities, but I'm still doing the same thing. It's not something I'm doing. I'm still remaining as being, as awareness. And this is what they mean in the Orthodox tradition, when they speak of praying without ceasing.

A more superficial interpretation of that would be when you're out in the bachelor and the waking state, you're continually repeating your prayers. That's not what they really mean. They mean remaining in touch with God's being, in religious language, with God's being, with infinite being, your being, all the time. So then really the distinction between everyday life and meditation no longer holds, although I do still sometimes just sit and close my eyes and rest as being, but I wouldn't really be doing anything else, something different from what I'm doing the rest of the time. I think that for those that have a proclivity towards the intellectualization of philosophy and non-duality, perhaps being one of the most enticing, I guess, philosophies to latch onto with their mind as like a theory instead of coming back into the direct experience of it, Freud has to quote, intelligence will be used in the service of the neuro. meaning oftentimes the mind and its desire for more and more philosophical novelty. And there can be the pitfall of the intellectualization of a lot of this understanding.

And so I would just like to ask you, I guess, a couple questions about the struggles on this path. There can be this identification with this knowledge, oftentimes to build it as a superiority complex. and there can be spiritual ego that comes online. And I feel like for many of us, it's an inevitable part of our path that we encounter at some point of our journey for many. I know I've experienced it. And what do you do, I guess?

How do you support people that may experience that or have or currently are experiencing a little bit of that kind of inflationary energy? using spiritual concepts really disguised to infatuate or kind of embellish the ego in a way. I never have an agenda with anyone's ego. I'm familiar with what you're saying. I've experienced it in myself in the past

when I thought that I was privy to some special knowledge. I now feel that I have no special knowledge at all. I feel that I have rather less knowledge than most people. The only thing I'm really, really sure about is just the nature of my being. And there's nothing special about that. But so when I see what you're suggesting in other people, I notice it, but I have no agenda with it. I would never, I don't have an agenda with people's ego. I'm not on a mission to, I see everyone as infinite being.

And I just, I treat them like that, however they, however they behave whatever they that's wonderful and for your own personal path where you've experienced that I suppose just reflections on that as a part of the path which we encounter so maybe not how you would navigate it yourself yes it's

the ego or the sense of separation cannot stand by itself because as we said earlier if pure awareness were able to say something about itself all it would say is I am am. As soon as anything's added to the I am, instead of the, as soon as the I am becomes, I am this or I am that, it becomes limited. And this limited awareness is the separate person that we seem to be. If the space in this room only looks at itself, all it would say is I am.

And in that experience, it experiences itself as the vast space of the universe. As soon as you add something to the I am, as soon as you say, I am small, I am dark, then the vast infinite space of the universe seems to become a temporary finite self. So as long as we just say I am, that refers to who we truly are. As we add something to it, we become an apparently finite separate consciousness. That's what the ego is, an apparently finite separate self. So the ego, the pure eye, pure words cannot, the ego cannot stand without identifying itself with something. If nothing follows the I am, that's pure consciousness. So the ego is always pure consciousness plus some objective experience. And that creates the ego, the consciousness or awareness

plus thoughts and feelings. So in order for the separate self to survive, it must always identify itself with something or someone. It doesn't matter what. It can be something positive, it can be something negative. It can be I am depressed, I am enlightened. I mean, even I am enlightened is as much ego as I am depressed because you're qualifying the I am. The I am is not an egoic attempt for survival. It's a qualification of the pure I am. And as long as the, from the, from the ego's point of view, as long as it's attached to something, as long as it feels that it's identical to something, then it survives. I am, I am this, I am that. It doesn't matter what the this or that is. It can be depressed. It can be enlightened. It doesn't matter. So even non-attachment.

I am non-attached. Exactly. I am non-attached. That's a position of the ego. I am, I am a teacher. That's ego. I am a student. That's the ego. I am plus anything is the ego or the separate self. I am divested of all objective content is the pure I am. So, It's natural. I certainly went through it myself. As you go from your ordinary everyday seeking in the world, you start seeking in the spiritual traditions, you become more refined,

your understanding becomes more refined, what you're seeking becomes more refined. You just begin to identify yourself with slightly more refined objects. And of course, you mistakenly believe that this is a sign of enlightenment. It's not, it's just a more refined attachment. And I certainly went through that. I felt at a certainty that I was privy to some special knowledge. I had some special understanding, which was just a kind of very slightly more refined ego than the ego that I used to be.

And to be honest, I prefer just regular egos. I sometimes say, I'm careful where I say, but I sometimes say I don't like spiritual people. I just like, by spiritual people, I mean refined egos. Yeah, yeah. Enlightened egos. It's ego with a desire for even more refined specialness. It's an ego who's pretending not to be an ego. I would just prefer a regular ego.

Just content with being a regular ego. It has no pretensions. But at the same time, I recognize it's a natural progression for many people. I certainly fell into it. So I don't judge it when I see it, but I don't collude with it by taking an interest in it. I just ignore it. Was there a moment that sticks out for when you were coming out of it? No, I didn't notice and notice.

I think it just gradually, I think there were, I'm not sure that I can give you any examples, but there were times when something about my circumstance reflected back to me, a feeling that I had that I was special. I can't remember a particular time, but I remember that feeling often enough to think, oh, Rupert, you now invested your identity. in having some special spiritual knowledge. So, yes, there were definitely times when I feel that. Now I just feel so ordinary and regular.

Do you think that all forms of attachment are essentially self-referential, meaning Ramadan Maharishi would refer to this I-thought? There's this fundamental referencing of this, I-this, I-that. in relation to attachment to the physical world, do you feel it's all self-referential? Pure awareness is prior to the I-thought. However, if awareness were to say something about itself, it would first have to give itself a name in order to refer to itself, in order to refer. Well, it can't really reflect back on itself because

or to reflect on yourself, you have to stand apart from yourself and look back. So it's the finite mind that reflects back on itself. Awareness doesn't reflect back on itself. It's like the sun. The sun doesn't have to reflect on itself in order to illuminate itself. It just illuminates itself by being itself. So awareness just knows itself by being itself. It's only when it localizes itself as the finite mind that it has to become self-reflective.

So if awareness were to say something about itself, it would first give itself a name, and the name it would give itself is I, because I is the name that that which knows itself gives to itself. So I, we could say, is the first form of infinite awareness in the finite mind. And as long as that eye, as long as nothing is attached to the eye, that I represents, that I is the name of the infinite. As soon as something is attached to it, it seems to become a finite self or a finite mind. So the I thought is like a, I see it like a portal.

Take a prison door. If you're outside the prison, you go through the door in one direction, you lose your freedom. You enter captivity. If you're in the prison, you go through the same door in the opposite direction. You gain your freedom. I like that. The I thought is like a prison door. If the finite mind takes the thought I or the thought I am and goes through that portal, as it passes through that portal, the finite mind loses its limitations and it stands revealed as the infinite.

So the finite mind passes through the portal I or I am and regains its freedom. It passes out of time into eternity. However, when the infinite, when awareness passes through the portal in the opposite, direction. As long as it stands at the portal eye, it's still free. The moment it goes through that portal and acquires the limitations of experience, as long as something is added to the eye-am, it loses its freedom and becomes an apparently separate self. Can I, I want to put, I guess, a creative linguistic restraint. If you had to answer these couple questions in like one sentence, what is your definition of suffering? Suffering is the veiling of our innate joy.

And so similarly, the cause of suffering is the overlooking of our essential nature. The overlooking or forgetting of what we essentially are. And then the solution or liberation of that cause of suffering. The remembrance of our true nature. When I say remembrance, I'm not talking about remembering something in the past. I'm talking about this deep remembrance of what we are now, deep remembrance of what lies in the heart of ourself, but is for many people obscured by their thoughts and feelings.

So this deep remembrance or recognition, not of what we might become if we practice hard enough, this recognition of what we are now, essentially. Do you feel that there is any inherent meaning to life outside of our own projections? From the point of view of the finite mind, yes, there's a meaning to life. from the point of view of the finite mind yes but for the point of view of awareness that there's no there's no meaning there's no purpose there's no not for awareness itself but for the finite mind yes there is meaning there's purpose and that would be whatever we describe the primary purpose of every finite mind and indeed the primary motive of every finite mind is in one way or another to be divested of its limitations and to stand revealed as it essentially is is the eternal, the infinite. That's the primary motive of every finite mind.

The secondary motive would be then to express the fruits of that recognition in everyday life and share it with humanity. I'm curious what you feel as we see that we have this localized perspective of awareness, right? We have the finiteness of mind. We come to remember and experience the infinite, I guess, awareness within ourselves. What do you then perceive, I suppose, both from the limitation of the mind and our true nature, the moment of death of the body? What could you have any, yeah, how could you get as close to absolute reality of truth of what that moment is and what happens to our portal of consciousness? So if you're, going back to our analogy of space, if you think of the body as the four walls of this room,

and our thoughts and feelings as the contents of this room. Death would be like removing all the objects from this room and demolishing the building. Absolutely nothing happens to the space. It just remains as it eternally is. Some would say that what makes a room, or any room, what makes a kitchen, a kitchen, a bedroom, a living room, a living room, is the contents in which one is in the room. Yes.

Similarly, the limitation of our perceived self, our personality, Rupertness, Andreanus, instead of the furniture of the room, it's our personality, our silliness, our cultural background. All of that seems to have been largely acquired since coming into this life from birth. And if the walls of the building are demolished at the moment of death, would any, of that uniqueness, do you think, if it's just empty space, transition into another portal? Yes. Can we switch metaphors now? Because I think the metaphor of the oceans and waves and currents in the ocean is a better metaphor to respond to this question. So now instead of empty space and what we essentially are is the water, the ocean, formless. and what we are

is a what we are as individuals is a bundle of thoughts, feelings, sensations and so on. So imagine that what we are is like a like a current in the ocean like a vortex of

thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations and so on made only of the water of the ocean but a localization of that water. The only stuff that's there is the one indivisible ocean. But we are a localization. And each current in the ocean is a slightly different shape, slightly different configuration of energies,

just as every individual is a slightly different configuration of thoughts, feelings, and so on. So each current has its own uniqueness. And when one current looks at another current, it appears as a form. It has its own unique form and everything. Now, what happens when that current, I think this is your question, what happens when the current in the ocean, this vortex of energies, what happens when it dies? It disbands.

It loses its integrity. It expands back into the ocean. And it gives up its content to the, the ocean. So that what before was a tight vortex of thoughts and feelings which constituted the individual and that from a second person point of view looked like a body looked like a form. The form that the energies disperse, they just disperse out into the ocean as ripples. It's as if it's current, it donates its experience to the ocean.

as it loses its form. I think something similar happens with us. The finite mind, the totality of our finite experience, our thoughts, our feelings, our utter uniqueness, our individuality, our memories, which now tightly configured, when I look at the bundle of energy, the bundle of thoughts and feelings that you are,

I see your form, and it clearly defined form. But as the form dies, this tight vortex of energy, it disperses out into the broader medium of consciousness. and each of our finite minds, as it were, donates the entirety of its knowledge and experience

to the broader medium of consciousness. So I don't think anything's lost. We lose our integrity. We use our form. But every thought and feeling, we just donate it to the whole as we lose our form. How could what was simply acquired in this life, life, perhaps cultivated, perhaps conditioned in the form of identity, personality, form.

So like a vortex of, I guess, energy of if those are qualities and the wave of the ocean, you know, returns, donates itself back to the ocean. It seems like what it truly is, its real essence is the only thing that can join back with it. And so in terms of like us as individuals and our memory of self, do you think, and is it in your experience that that carries over to other existences, perhaps in other life, reintosh of reincarnation? Possibly. Remember, all there is to a current or a wave in the ocean is the water. The water never ceases being water and becomes a finite wave. The ocean is always the ocean.

So the same thing, there is only the one infinite reality, call it consciousness, awareness, infinite being. It localizes itself or seems to localize itself as the activities of each of our minds. But it never actually ceases to be itself. So just as the wave and the current is the activity of the ocean, but always remains the same, the same. Likewise, each of us, as apparently finite minds,

are the activity of infinite awareness. So nothing new ever comes into existence. New forms appear, but the reality of all of those forms, of all of us, is the one infinite reality consciousness, just like the waves and the oceans are just, No new substance comes into existence when a new wave or current appears. And likewise, when they disappear, nothing goes out of existence.

The ocean just loses a temporary name and form. Well, when we come into existence, awareness assumes a new name and form, and then it loses that name and form, as the ripples that constitute our current or our wave are dispersed into the broader medium of the ocean. And to now answer your question, there's nothing to suggest that those ripples that have lost their integrity of this form but have been donated to the ocean may not coalesce later, or some of those ripples may coalesce later and begin to form the beginning of a new wave or a new current, in which case some of the contents of the previous current will reappear. in the new current. So the new current will share some of the characteristics of the old current,

because the new current is made out of the residual energies that were dispersed into the ocean when that current dissolved. And that would be a theory of reincarnation that was consistent with this understanding. So that's possible, yes. And just to respond to one last thing, you said that there could be some feeling

continuity. The parent current has given rise to the reincarnated. But the real continuity is not the content of the two currents. It's the water that

is the reality of both. Just as the sense of continuity that we have in our lifetime. We all now feel that a continuity that our life has been one long life. We always feel it's been my life. We always feel I've been the same me. I feel I'm the same me now as I was two minutes ago or two days ago or two years ago.

Or when I was a two-year-old boy, I feel there's this continuity. It's always been me. Well, what has been continuous in my life? My thoughts, my feelings, my sensations, my perceptions, my if we consider the body is physical, So even a physical body is changing all the time. So from where do we get this conviction that I've always been the same, it's always me.

I've been getting older, I've developed, but we always feel it's me. There's always a me that's this continuous. What is that? Well, the only element of our experience that is continuous is awareness. It's from awareness that we derive our essential sense of our self. how do you then reconcile the impersonal nature of awareness with the unique expression of individual forms there is this emerging distinction kind of being pioneered by friend mark gaffneyed ken wilbur about the unique self meaning we must wake up and it's inevitable to wake up beyond the illusion of a separate self

to our true self, which we've been speaking to. And then now there is this unique perspective, once realized the true self, there is this unique perspective in self that emerges, like it's to be shared with the world. And so once one awakens to true self, there is still this uniqueness in the way that life, the universe, is seeing through your eyes. And so I think that because there can often

be this dismissal or bypassing in non-dual circles where it's like the human experience is supposed to be diminished and viewed as this dreamlike illusory thing which in perspective it is and it without the authentic realization of it it kind of shuns it away and dismisses it so what do you think about the emerging of the unique self yes i i think it's a it's a very very strong valid point that in some expressions of the traditional non-dual teaching and some expressions of classic expressions of ad vit of adity, because it is recognized that what we essentially are is not our thoughts, our feelings, the body and so on, there is this initial turning away from body, I'm not this, I'm not this, I'm not this.

And if that's as far as the teaching gets, then this leaves us with rejecting, rejecting the world and rejecting the body. But that's just that process recognizing, I'm not my thoughts, I'm not my feeling. That's only necessary for one who was previously completely identified with their thoughts feeling sensation. So as a temporary stage, we have to turn away from that in order. to recognize that element of our self that is that is then but then we we we need to then turn back again towards the experience from which we previously separated ourselves and realign it with this new understanding so we and i think that's what you're you're talking about this realignment process where where we we come back as it were to the the person the body and the mind that we

from which we previously turned away solely for the purpose of recognizing our true nature But now we turn back towards it, and all its faculties are still there. If you were a brilliant mathematician before, you'll still be a brilliant mathematician. If you're a good gardener, your interesting gardening will still be there. All your unique individual faculties will still be there. But now they are upgraded. I think this is what you mean by the – that all those faculties are no longer used in the service of the separate self that we once believed ourselves to be.

They are now used in the service of the true self and its innate qualities of peace, joy and love. So we then go back to being a, we fully inhabit our life as an individual, but our life is then used in the service of this understanding, this love and understanding, whereas previously it was used exclusively in the service of the separate self with all its anxiety. and fears and demands and so on. Chopping wood, carrying water, perhaps servicing something different. Yes. Well, you may go back to chopping wood and carrying water,

but you may also choose a different activity. You may realize actually the activity that I was engaged in before. I engaged in it solely for the purpose of fulfilling my existential sense of lack. Now that I no longer have that, I feel the full, of myself, I don't actually want to engage in that activity anymore. It's not the right activity for expressing what I might I now want to express. You might choose a different activity that you feel is better able to express your new love and understanding. So you don't necessarily go back to chopping wood and carrying. Or you don't necessarily go back to the same activity.

You have the same faculties, but you use them in service of love and understanding. How does this similarly affect our relationship with emotions? because some spiritual traditions suggest the transcendence of emotions, while others suggest fully feeling our emotions and fully feeling them. And so what do you feel is the proper relationship to our emotional experience? The emotions that rely on the existence of a separate self at their heart diminish in direct proportion to the diminishing of that separate self. So as the sense of separation disappears,

in some people it disappears like that, in most people it's a gradual diminishment. The emotions that attend that sense of separation diminish with it. Without your having worked specifically on each individual emotion, there's a whole train of emotions, all of which rely on the sense of separation for their existence. If that sense of separation diminishes,

then the whole train of emotions that were dependent on it will also diminish without your working on your feeling of abandonment, your feeling of jealousy, your feeling of lack, you're feeling because you've cut the root. It's in the recognition that awareness is the container of all experience. how have you noticed emotions arise differently and how we relate to them from that sense of recognition of our true self?

First of all, there's less engagement with afflictive emotions because you feel more, I am the space, and this emotion is just an old habit and not of hurt, upset, jealousy, irritation, anger. So you feel, whereas you previously used, to feel I am that emotion and we used to even express this in our language I am sad you now feel I feel sad I feel the sadness I'm not the sadness but I feel it

so that's that's already one step back you may not formulated to yourself in this way but you have actually taken a step back you're standing in your true nature I feel the sadness but I'm not the sadness so there's this distance your your emotion that they still arise to begin with, but they don't have that persuasive power. You don't lose yourself in them. They still appear.

They're still unpleasant, but they appear, there's less resistance to them because you know that's something you experience. You don't have such an agenda with them. There's no need to get rid of them because you know that deep down, that they're a passing cloud.

So you tend to be more, more compassionate with yourself. There's not this agenda. There's not this judgment of emotions that there's a allowing of them. But then in time, because we're no longer engaged with the emotion, we're no longer feeding the emotion,

and in particular, we're no longer feeding the separate self around whom the emotion or on whose behalf the emotion arises. In time, those emotions begin to diminish. Because you're no longer standing as the hurt self. you are standing as the open, empty space of awareness that cannot be hurt.

So then the feeling of hurt, it can no longer arise because the self that feels hurt, you can't hurt this space. When you feel that, when you feel the space of awareness that I am, can't be hurt by what someone says. Not only do you no longer need to defend yourself against what anybody says because you know that it can't hurt you, but the feeling of that doesn't arise so much. It really feels, at least in my experience,

there's lessened, there's less of this immediate reactionary energy to defend a sense of personhood. Like when the identification has been lessened and it's not as strongly gripped, then like you're mentioning, we don't have the feeling or the need to immediately defend it. And of course that has a profound effect on our relationships

because you say something that I think is untrue or unjust or unkind, and I don't immediately defend myself by attacking you. I just hear what you say. It may provoke a feeling of resistance, but then I don't act on that. Just resistance rises, it falls, and we carry on our conversation. It may be necessary to address what you said or not, but it doesn't break the feeling of shame.

shared being. But normally the emotion rises up and immediate that feeling of connection and the feeling of love is then lost, you feel hurt and angry and we all know where that goes. So yes, that has a profound, not only to have a profound effect

on one's own internal emotional state, it has a very profound effect on one's relationships, intimate or otherwise. Ramdaa said if you think you're in light and spend a week at Thanksgiving with your family or something along those lines, it feels like we are tested most in our familiar relationships where there's the historic conditioning and perception of who you have been in relation to them through development.

And so there's a sense of expectancy of that personhood to continue showing up. And is probably the most testing area or arena to see if you can still create that sense of spaciousness when responding. Yes, and a very good preparation for that is not only when you've gone home for Thanksgiving and you're in the midst of your family, but even now, you know, a month away, you can think of members of your family that you have conflict with, that when you're together with them, the old habits are so strong that you just immediately get into a state of tension with them, but you can think about that person now, and when you think of them, all you know about them

is that they are the same being that you are. Whatever the conflict, whatever's happened in your childhood, whatever that's happened in the intervening years, you see that person primarily as the same being that you are. That is tremendously healing. Would you say, because that's very practical, like as we go home for the holidays or, you know, meet with our family,

is there another additional, I guess, tool we can use in the immediate moment where we would typically be conditioned to react what have you found is something that we can either remind ourselves in, like perhaps the other is self or with our breath to give us a chance at more. Not just thinking of the other as the same being that you are, but really feeling it. So feeling the other as your own being irrespective of the history, that's the best, I think it's the best one can do,

in relation to the other, but in relation to one's self, in relation to the reactive emotions that may be provoked in you as a result of media, then it's to resolutely remain as this open, inherently peaceful, aware space. And to remain as that when circumstances are easy, when circumstances are neutral, it's relatively easy like now to feel ourselves as that.

But the more established we are as that in relatively benign circumstances, the easier will be to remain as that when the bar is raised a little bit. And really that's the test. Somebody once asked an Indian sage Admananda Christerman, how do we know when we're established in our true nature? And he said, and I'm paraphrasing, when thoughts feel. feelings, sensations, and perceptions can no longer take you away. They've lost their power.

Experience has lost its power, objective experience, has lost its power to take you away from yourself. And usually, as you say, that relationships with our nearest and dearest are the last, some of the stickiest experiences, that they are the ones that retain their power to take us away from ourselves for the longest. and therefore they're the best places that we should look forward. Sometimes on retreats, people on Satania. It's all very well when we're here, these peaceful, loving, benign circumstances, but I'm dreading going home, you know, there's conflict in my way. And I said, no, no, no, you should look forward to that.

Because if your peace, if you can only maintain your peace in these loving, easy, benign circumstances, is then it's a fragile piece, it's a state of mind, it's not the real piece. You should look forward to going to a difficult family situation or whatever it is, to test your stability in your true nature. It seems like that shift of perception to see difficulties in our relational world as opportunities for awakening as they are. Even that alone, that perception shift, I feel like changes how we engage with it. Absolutely, yes.

Yes, yes. Yes, you look forward to it. It's an opportunity because it's an opportunity. There are two possibilities. Either you lose yourself in the conflict and sorrow and is the inevitable consequence. Or you use the situation to establish yourself more fully in your innate peace. You feel you're more peaceful, strong. You feel that your being, you feel the independence of your being.

You feel nothing can hurt me. And therefore I don't need to defend myself. I can go fully into life. I can be open. It doesn't make you invulnerable in the traditional sense of the word. It makes you open. You can be very sensitive. You don't need to defend yourself.

Because you know, and I say no, I mean you experience, you feel at the deepest level that you can't be hurt. Your peace is imperturbable. It's unshakable. you mentioned that Indian sage I believe who was referring to the various perceptions and experiences that could pull us away from the state of recognition and I just want to get your opinion on this because I think there can be again this withdrawal of the human experience as like the place to get to and I know you're take on this really the deepening of the truest sense of who we are in our essence and there's this human experience that's to be lived i think this non-dual perspective can be seen sometimes you know from

the outside in as sort of this inert like uh kind of boring reality that we get to is like oh it's just like peaceful people sitting over there that really don't do a whole lot to me getting in touch with this place intimately is very exuberant also. It is very enlivening and at times yeah, you know it's very peaceful

and still and that quiet Joey that we were talking to but it seems like sometimes the language that's used is almost a pushing away of aliveness when I feel like it's actually the opposite. Yes. Yes.

I agree with you. As I said earlier, some expressions of the traditional classical Advaiter teaching only emphasize what I refer to as the inward-facing path, the turning away from the content of experience. I'm not my thoughts, I'm not my feelings. And that's a legitimate path. Most pathways start with that in order to recognize the nature of our being. That's what I call the inward-facing path. But equally important is the outward-facing path.

when we then go back to the experience from which we previously separated ourselves, which means going back to the body mind and to the world, being fully engaged again in activities and relationships. And I think a balanced path is a balanced path in which these two approaches, the inward facing path and the outward facing path, are both honored, both engaged in, both respective, but they're in balance with each other. And traditionally, I think that the Vedantic approach

emphasize the inward facing path the outward facing path was implicit in it Roman Mahashi said the world is an illusion only that Brahman is real that's the inward facing path turning away from the illusory world back to Brahman infinite consciousness only that is real

but then he said but Brahman is the world there he's going back to the world there. First of all, there's the world. We turn away from the world. We go to ourselves, but then we go back and unite our self-consciousness with the world. Consciousness is the world. The world is consciousness. But in a lot of those teachings, the inward-facing path was emphasized, and the outward-facing path was implicit, but not often spoken about in the Vedantic tradition. In the tantric traditions, I think the opposite is the case.

The inward facing path, the recognition of our true nature of pure awareness is implicit and often spoken about, but it's not emphasized in the way it is in the pedantic tradition, but our oneness with the entirety of experience, including our difficult emotions and everything that comes up is emphasized. There's something beautiful in that, but there's also a danger in that, just as there's a danger of remaining exclusively on the Vedantic approach, that the danger that you describe of this negative attitude towards the body in the world, a rejection of human experience. But it also has something very beautiful about it, this emphasis on the recognition of the nature of reality. That's really the great contribution that the Vedantic tradition made to society.

The Vedantic approach, the danger is that you can get, think you're engaging in spiritual life and actually just use it for an excuse for being lost in the content of experience. And we're in California, I don't need to describe that to you. But the very beautiful, so that's the danger of it, but the very beautiful, the great contribution of the tantric approach is this reintegration of the understanding with all aspects of our life. So I feel that the Vedantic and tantric approaches, usually exponents of the two different traditions, take shots at each other, to try and assert their superiority. I don't see it like that. I feel that there are actually two aspects of the same tradition.

The one emphasizes the inward-facing path, the turning away from experience, the other emphasizes the reintegration of this understanding in all aspects of our experience. think a balanced path is one in which these two approaches are really balanced. A quote that really embraces that paradox beautifully is Srinasargetata's wisdom tells me I am nothing, love tells me, I am everything, and between the two my life flows. Yeah, exactly, it's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, exactly. In our everyday life, we have on average about 60 to 70,000 thoughts per day, and largely we are troubled with the ones we are invested in.

And I'm curious, similarly as we explored, the implications Awakening has on relating to our own emotions, what do you feel like the implications to our own thoughts? I think our thoughts arise for many different reasons. One, a response to a practical situation. I have to be here. by 10 o'clock, I'm not sure where we are, so I'm going to get there at 9.30, I must call an Uber,

et cetera, et cetera. That's a whole series of thoughts. I don't know how many thoughts that was, probably 20 thoughts, but they were all in the service of enabling this conversation to take it. Absolutely nothing problematic. They're not particularly interesting thoughts, but they're not problematic thoughts. I'm invested in them for as long as they last, but when they've gone, they've gone because they've brought me here.

I don't need to think about that. Practical thoughts, perfectly legitimate. There's no... of being a separate self in those thoughts. They just arise on behalf of the practical situation. There can be creative thoughts. Your desire to have a podcast and to share this understanding and to talk to people about this understanding

and to everything that you need to do to put that on. What are you really doing? You're sharing your love and understanding and you're wanting not just to keep it, your own heart, you're wanting to share it with thousands of people. That's creative. So those are creative thoughts. They involve a degree of practical thoughts, your cameras and your lights, but really the idea behind that, it's creative. You're bringing something new into humanity, into society. And you've thought a great deal about your work and who you're going to interview

and you do your research. And so a lot of thoughts go into that. There's no ego in those. thoughts. Those thoughts arise on behalf of love and understanding. No problem with them at all. If you get sick or if you need lunch, practical thoughts that arise not on behalf of a separate self, but on behalf of your body. Your body needs taking care of or the body of anybody else that you have to take care of. Those are perfectly legitimate thoughts. But then there's one, and then there are other thoughts that arise on behalf of our love of truth. truth, are the investigative thoughts, that the kind of questions that you've been asking me and the kind of questions that we've all asked ourselves, who am I really?

I can't really by my thoughts, because they're always coming and going, I can't really be my acting, who am I, all the reading we've done, all the exploring, that those are thoughts that arise on behalf of our love of truth. There's no ego in those thoughts. There's just one small category of thoughts that we have that contains their origin and concealed within them, the sense of being a temporary, finite, psychological self. Those are the only problematic thoughts. And those are the thoughts that diminish. All the other thoughts, the thoughts that are necessary for me to come to visit you, the thoughts that are necessary for you to take

care of your body, the thoughts that are necessary for you to put on this book, the thoughts that you have with a friend or a companion to share your love and celebrate your love, there's no ego in those or that they continue, it's just the thoughts that are based on the separate self that diminish. And as fairly large proportion of our thoughts do indeed arise on behalf of the separate self, there is a reduction in thinking. The mind quietens. Only those thoughts remain that are in service of love and understanding or practical situation or investigating our true nature or in, yeah, yeah. I think I don't need to repeat it.

Yeah, thank God. It's much more peaceful. Yes, and actually, now that your mind is not occupied, for the most part, with thoughts that arise on behalf of the separate self, the mind is then free. For much of the time, it will just be quieter, and there'll be periods of stillness. But also, you're then free to use the mind. This is going back to your, what was the phrase you,

about the self, not the Ken Wilbur's. the unique self. The unique self. The mind the mind becomes part of the unique self. It's used in service of love and under. And actually you're freer. You tend to be more creative because you've got so much more spare time and energy to use in service of your creative projects, expression of love and understanding, whereas previously all those all that time and energy would have been spelled on your feelings of separation. Yeah, it feels like there's

so much energy that is freed up when we're not continually recording things mentally on a personal basis. I feel like that takes up an immense amount of bandwidth. Yep. Yeah. And like you beautifully said, that energy can then be rerouted to the unique self and the service of others and our creative impulses and a lot of those other thoughts, which are amazing. As we're, because I could, you know, time is flying by with you. We've been going for about two and a half hours. This is amazing. Really? Time indeed is flown by.

I mean, on that note, it really does feel the more that we're in that space of it is like a timeless experience. It's absolutely because time only exists or seems to exist when we think about it as thoughts diminish and you live more in your being than in thoughts than a sense of time also

because you have a conversation like this And it's why the phrase we have, time flies when you're happy. Yeah. And it's the opposite. When you're happy, you're in your true being. You're not on the horizontal line of time and your thoughts. You're in the vertical dimension of being and there's no time there. So it seems that I'm surprised we've been here for two and a half.

And on the contrary, for the times that we feel very identified in our suffering of a self. They're going forever. A minute. There's an eternity. Yes. When is this meeting going to end? Having the context, the understanding of the conversation we just had, I'm curious, is there anything else that you'd feel like you'd want to uniquely contribute

for the audience and community of listeners that are tuning into this conversation that if you have made it at this point, this far into the conversation, it's quite incredible how substantial this level of this level of, devotion of inquiry is growing on the planet right now. There is more and more this matured deepening of a sense of self and desire to truly grow one's self-knowledge and to share that in the service of others in our own unique capacity creatively in the world, whether it's through teaching or podcasting or art and music or whatever. It could be also in the silence of beautifying your garden, whatever it is, right?

anything else you'd like to contribute as we are all waking up to the shared consciousness that we have and are building towards systems in the world that are representations of love, anything that you like to share. So open floor for you. I think that just one thing to add, we've spoken about it a little bit,

that it's inevitable that wherever this understanding has arisen on the planet, in whatever place and whatever time. It's expressed in the language of that time and place. So for that reason, there are many, many different expressions of the same understanding. And sometimes the expressions are so different

that they seem to conflict with each other. But the deep understanding that they express is the same understanding. And also that as people struggled with this understanding and asked questions about it and didn't know what the teacher or whoever it was. It didn't know what they meant. They would ask questions,

and the person speaking about it would then develop methods and pathways and techniques to help them to try to understand it more clearly. So as a result of this, a great proliferation of ideas and methods and techniques. And you referred to this earlier. Sometimes it seems to be just a sort of a maze of complexity of ideas. and no, it's so simple. That's what I'd like to say. What is being pointed to is so simple.

The complexity is just due, one, to the different time and place in which the expressions have been said over, the expression of this understanding has been expressed over the centuries. And two, are difficulties and objections which have caused the teachers in the past to have to elaborate all sorts of different methods and pathways and it all seems so complicated. It's so simple. it's just about the recognition of the nature of our being. That's it. You could take 3,000 years of religious and spiritual tradition,

put it into chat, GPT, and say, you could feed every scripture that has ever been written or spoken by anybody in the last 3,000 years, put the whole thing into chat, GPT, and say, express this in a sentence. It would give you numerous. variations but one such sentence would just be peace and quiet joy are the nature of your being and you share your being with everyone and everything that's it it's the simplest it's just the recognition just the simple recognition of what we are now at the deepest level it's inherently

peaceful it's fulfilled and we share it with everything with with everything and with everyone that's it's That's all you need to know. It feels the more that we reside in that place, the more that we make space for something unique, true and profound to emerge from within us. And so any thoughts you have on that as we close? Yes, and not only the more we reside in that, something profound emerges within us,

but as you say, unique, because that that understanding, it's the same understanding in everyone, but it's then filtered through our particular mind and body. So we all, those of us that express it in one way or another, I don't mean just in words, but there are so many ways that you can express this love and understanding, not just in words, but in so many different ways. For those that want to really,

they have a deep desire for the deepening, for the longing for the deepening of this recognition of their true self, where can people find what you're doing, you have amazing retreats and books and things, and just anywhere you can point people towards... Yes, the first place I would go is YouTube. I've got, I think, over a thousand clips now on YouTube, conversations that I've had with individuals on retreats and meetings and guided meditations. So YouTube is the main resource, but also on my website, there's a...

There's a vast archive, everything I've said or written for the last 15 years is there, all my books. But YouTube would be the place to stand. YouTube and then my website, rupertspara.com. Amazing. And we'll link all that down in the description below. I'm so grateful to be able to do this podcast where I could not only have these conversations, but make friends with individuals such as yourself. and just truly grateful to have a friend and brother on the path.

And I love this conversation and the many different nuances we explored. And the distillation of the simplicity that you offer as well is very unique in how life is using you uniquely. So thank you immensely for the work that you're doing and the continued efforts. And looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future. Likewise as well. Thank you very much.

It's been a pleasure, Andre. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Everybody that's been tuning into this episode of the Nile-Lyself podcast, as always, curious to know in which way this resonates with your own path, with your own journey of understanding your own true nature. And until next time, be well.