What If?

     If creative imagination materialized continuously, in real-time, each piece of material could perceive only "self" - who or what they are. Might not myriad pieces of material mistakenly assume separate individual identities, forgetting their true identity, nature or origin?
     But what if the materials began to realize that their properties were impermanence, unsatisfactoriness & not-self?

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.

 

Liberating our Thoughts

Rupert Spira : Thoughts are what I call ‘objects’. Anything that has an objective quality is what I call an object. By 'object' I don’t just mean physical objects (eg glass of water). A feeling of loneliness has an objective quality to it. It’s not the taste of tea. It’s the feeling of loneliness. It has distinguishing features. 
     Those distinguishing features are objective. We know them. I feel lonely. The feeling of loneliness has a particular quality that is observable or feelable or knowable. The taste of tea has other particular qualities that are knowable or perceivable. So yes, thoughts are, in that sense, objects.

Questioner : So my relationship to thought can be much the same as my relationship to the world?

Rupert Spira : Yes.

Questioner : In that I can’t really control what happens in the world and I can’t control what thoughts come in, I think that there’s a tendency to identify my quality of being by the thoughts that arise.

Rupert Spira : No. Identify the quality of being just by the quality of being. 
     The screen doesn’t derive its qualities from the image. Your relationship to thoughts and perceptions is the same as the relationship between the screen and an image. In other words, the screen is intimately one with the image. It’s closer than close (clasps hands, fingers interlocking) to the image, but at the same time, it is completely independent of it. 
     That is you. You – this experience of being aware – are totally intimate with all your experience. Every experience you have - that is every so called inside feeling (points to his own chest), but also so called outside perception (points away from himself) - are this close (clasps hands) to you, totally intimate, not even intimate because there are not two things there to begin with. There isn’t a screen and an image. It’s just you, just knowing. 
     So in that sense, you are intimate with all experience, equally intimate. Not more intimate with this (touching to his own body), than you are with this (touching glass of water) – equally intimate with all experience. 
     And at the same time, you, the experiencer, simply being aware, are absolutely independent of all experience. So it’s this mixture of total intimacy (clasps hands) and total freedom (opens hands).

     As we understand ourselves, so we see the world. So if we think (hands on his chest) ‘I am a finite, temporary self that shares the limits of the body’, if we think ‘I am a finite, temporary object’, then our experience will appear (one hand on his chest, other hand pointing outwards) in conformity with that belief. In other words, your experience will be a multiplicity and diversity of finite objects. You will feel that you are separate from everyone and everything, related to them through an act of knowing, feeling or perceiving. I know such and such, I love you, I see the tree. 
     These are the three channels – knowing, feeling and perceiving – through which the inside self, the apparent subject, is connected to the outside object, other, or world. That’s if you believe that you are a temporary, finite subject, made of a mind, living in a body. 
     But if you know that you are simply this unqualified, experience of being aware, then you find yourself equally pervading all experience. You cannot say ‘I am closer to my thoughts than I am to the sound of that car.’ Thoughts are made out of thinking. The sound of the car is made out of hearing. Both appear equally in me. And when I try to touch the stuff that they are made of, all I find is this empty knowing.

Questionner : I know that, but I have thoughts that are in direct contradiction to that experience.

Rupert Spira : So you have to recondition your mind as well as your body. That is part of what we do here. It’s one thing to understand that – and you obviously understand it. But just understanding it is not enough, because your mind and your body have been laboring for decades, serving for decades, the demands and the fears and the neuroses of an illusory, finite self. So just the recognition of your true nature is not enough to put an end to those habits. They come back with a vengeance, very often stronger than they were before, because the separate self feels, quite rightly, that its existence is threatened by our new understanding. It is threatened. Its days are numbered. And it’s going to do everything it can to prevent itself from disappearing. So this tidal wave of thoughts, and more importantly, feelings are going to come back and assail you and try to persuade you of the validity of the separate self. 
     And so much of what we do here is not just about the recognition of our true nature, it is about the realignment of our thoughts, feelings, activities, relationships and perceptions with that understanding. 
     So when these thoughts keep coming back, you have to be firm with them. When a thought appears on behalf of the separate self, the thought’s going to take you off down a journey of activity or relationship or whatever it is. Before the thought tells you to act, question the self on whose behalf that thought is arising. Who are you representing? Ask the thought ‘On whose behalf have you come to me?’ 
     And if it is a thought that is based on being a temporary, finite self, then instead of following the thought, question the validity of the self on whose behalf that thought is arising. And be relentless about that. Every thought that arises on behalf of the finite self, question it rather than doing what the thought wants you to do. And eventually, you will erode this old habit of the mind rising on behalf of an illusory self. And more and more the mind will begin to rise on behalf of the qualities of the true and only self of pure awareness. 
     You won’t stop having thoughts, but your thoughts will be an expression of what you truly are, not what you previously imagined yourself to be. So it is not a getting rid of thoughts, it’s a liberation of our thoughts, indeed our feelings and perceptions from the tyranny of a nonexistent finite self.

Questionner : So do you ever have any thoughts that you have to say ‘no’ to?

Rupert Spira : Yes. Occasionally an old thought arises in me based on old habit of believing myself to be a finite self, and I do exactly as I’ve just suggested to you. 
     To begin with, when a thought rises on behalf of a finite self, it takes us maybe 20 minutes to question the ‘I’ around whom that thought revolves. And we may have to take some time to slowly walk ourselves back to find the true ‘I’ of simply aware being. That may take some time. The first time it may take 20 minutes, and then the second time 15 minutes, and then the third time 10 minutes, and as we become more practiced at this we find shortcuts – we don’t have to go every single step – plod, plod, plod – because we’ve done it before, we go quicker, we find shortcuts. 
     And in the end, we find that when that thought arises on behalf of the finite self, it doesn’t really require time anymore to walk ourselves back. It’s just like an instant recognition, and it falls.

Questionner : There’s often great physical resistance along with the thought.

Rupert Spira : Yes. We’ll spend a lot of time this week exploring just that because the separate self, the apparently temporary finite consciousness that is the separate self, is not just concealed in our thoughts as beliefs. More importantly, it is concealed in our body as feelings. And that in fact is the deeper root of the separate self. And in fact, long after the separate self has been flushed out of our beliefs, it remains present, hiding in our feelings. And in this approach we spend a lot of time, as you know, exploring this deeper root of the sense of separation. First if all exposing the sense of me in the body, gradually encouraging it to come up out of its hiding places, and then gradually allowing it to dissolve.”

Above transcribed from this video:

Attention & Awareness of Awareness

     “When we are asked the question, ‘Am I aware?’, in order to answer the question from experience, our attention has to go to the experience of being aware. So our attention removes itself from any object – from the door, from the sensation, from the thought – and it looks for the experience of being aware. But it can’t find it. Because attention can only be directed towards an object. So the attention vacillates for a moment between objects, looking for the experience of ‘being aware.’ Whether it goes outwards or inwards, it cannot find the experience of being aware. Anything it focuses itself on is not the experience of being aware, it is what we are aware of. So the attention vacillates for a moment, and then it begins to subside. It sinks back, and it goes back, and back, and back, and back, until it reaches its source, at which point it ceases to be attention. 
     Because attention can only stand by being directed towards an object. Without an object to be directed towards, the attention cannot stand. It falls, or collapses back into its source. And at some point, is revealed as pure consciousness – that is, consciousness without an object. We can define attention as consciousness directed towards an object. 
     In the absence of an object, upon which to focus our attention, attention cannot stand, and it falls back, through lack of support, into its source. It is a non-process, a non-practice. 
     The rising of attention is an activity. The sinking back of attention is the cessation of that activity. It’s often called meditation and it seems to be an effort that we have to make. It’s not an effort that we have to make, it is the cessation of a previous effort which we didn’t realize that we were making. So this non-practice of sinking the attention into its source is in Sanskrit called atma vichara, which for many years has been misleadingly translated as ‘self-inquiry’. Because when people hear ‘self-inquiry’ – what is an inquiry? An inquiry is an activity of the mind, directed towards an object. So when we hear practice self-inquiry, the first thing we all think - and I thought this for many years – is that self-inquiry is an activity of the mind searching for the ‘I’. And then of course the question arises ‘which I’ and ‘where is the I’ and we’re all aware of the confusions that have arisen around which I are we inquiring into, and what is the process of inquiry? Atma vichara is better translated, not as self-inquiry, but self-abidence or self-resting. 
     In Ouspensky’s tradition it is referred to as self-remembering. Again, that was, in most cases misunderstood because it’s only possible to remember something with objective qualities. That was not what was meant in that tradition, but it was misunderstood. So again, the mind went off in search of a self it was supposed to be remembering. No, it’s a non-objective remembrance of our eternal nature - its recognition, its re-knowing of itself.
     Why is it called a recognition? It’s because previously, the attention or awareness or consciousness rises in the form of attention in order to know something other than itself. When consciousness knows something other than itself – such as an object, or person or world, or thought – it, as it were, turns its back on itself. It ceases gazing at itself, rises in the form of the finite mind or attention, and in the form of the finite mind or attention, it can look away from itself and this apparent looking away from itself involves the forgetting or overlooking of itself and this is in the spiritual tradition what is called the primal ignorance – the ignoring of the reality of consciousness. 
      So when attention sinks back into its source, it doesn’t know something new, it recognizes something which it’s always known, but seemed to overlook because of the exclusive focus of its attention on objects."

Rupert Spira

https://batgap.com/rupert-spira-2nd-interview/