The Imaginary Birth of the Self and the World

     There is no separate entity that experiences and there is no object, person, mind, body, world or other that is experienced. 

     The mind, body, world, people, places, objects and entities are all abstract conceptions that are superimposed by thinking onto experience itself. 

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

     From time to time this ever-present seamless totality, out of its infinite creativity and freedom, takes the shape of thinking, which goes something like this: ‘I, the seamless totality, am not the seamless totality. I am this little fragment, this little cluster of bodily sensations, and everything else that is not this fragment, is not me.’ 

     With this thought the apparently separate inside self and the apparently outside world, including all ‘others’, are simultaneously born. 

     From this moment onwards the world becomes the known, the experienced, and ‘I’, which has apparently contracted into a tiny location somewhere behind the eyes or in the chest area, becomes the knower, the experiencer, the thinker, the feeler, the chooser, the doer. 

     The ever-present seamless intimacy of pure experiencing gives birth to two apparent things, a subject and an object. Experiencing seems to become the experiencer and the experienced. However, this separation never actually takes place. It is a virtual birth. 

     If, as a result of this imaginary separation, objects are considered to be real, aware presence will be conceived as their witness. However, if we take our stand as this witness and go deeply into the experience of the apparent object, other or world, we do not find anything subjective there. We find only knowing, only aware presence. That is, aware presence finds or knows itself. 

     As objects lose their apparent object-ness in clear seeing, so aware presence loses its apparent witness-ness and stands revealed as pure awareness alone, pure presence.

      Rupert Spira. “Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience.” Non-duality Press, Salisbury, UK, 2011.