Love, Peace and Happiness

     “Seeking and resistance veil our true nature, aware presence, and therefore veil the love, peace and happiness that is inherent within it or rather that is it.”

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

     Greed (craving), aversion (hatred) & delusion (ignorance) are, in Buddhism, considered to be the "three poisons" - the basic mental states that cloud the mind, manifest in unwholesome actions, and cause suffering.

Love

"Love ... is the natural condition of all experience."

 

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

A Garden Beyond Paradise - Rumi

Rumi expressed the fragrance of non-duality through poetry:

A Garden Beyond Paradise

Everything you see has its roots
    in the unseen world.
The forms may change,
    yet the essence remains the same.

Every wondrous sight will vanish,
every sweet word will fade.
    But do not be disheartened,
The Source they come from is eternal--
growing, branching out,
    giving new life and new joy.

Why do you weep?--
That Source is within you,
and this whole world
    is springing up from it.

The Source is full,
its waters are ever-flowing;
    Do not grieve,
    drink your fill!
Don't think it will ever run dry--
This is the endless Ocean!

From the moment you came into this world,
a ladder was placed in front of you
    that you might transcend it.

From earth, you became plant,
from plant you became animal.
Afterwards you became a human being,
endowed with knowledge, intellect and faith.

Behold the body, born of dust--
    how perfect it has become!

Why should you fear its end?
When were you ever made less by dying?

When you pass beyond this human form,
no doubt you will become an angel
and soar through the heavens!

But don't stop there.
Even heavenly bodies grow old.

Pass again from the heavenly realm
    and plunge into the ocean of Consciousness.
Let the drop of water that is you
    become a hundred mighty seas.

But do not think that the drop alone
becomes the Ocean--
    the Ocean, too, becomes the drop!

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.

 

Choosing Identity

     There are basically two possibilities open to us at any moment when a situation like this arises. Am I going to respond on behalf of a separate entity - or - am I going to respond as if I was this aware presence? Those are the two basic choices. A train of thought or a reaction or a response to a situation comes up and at any moment you’re free to say to yourself, ‘This train of thought and activity that I’m now engaged in, is it dependent upon the belief and feeling that I’m a separate entity – or – is it based on the understanding that I am open, transparent presence, and therefore, the so-called other is also that?’ And the answer to that question is always clear. So that’s the question.
     Or maybe you find yourself after ten minutes down the line in a full-blown reaction about something and suddenly you think, ‘Oh, hang on.’ Then, you’re at the crossroads. Are you going to carry on? What is the deep feeling-understanding that is motivating your thoughts and your behavior at that moment? Is it coming from the belief that I’m a separate self – or – is it coming from the felt understanding that I am this inherently peaceful, free, aware presence, and therefore that the so-called other is also that? You have a choice then. Which way are you going to go?
     The way that we choose radically changes the situation. It doesn’t mean to say that it magically clears up the issue. No. That may take time to resolve. But if we become accustomed to being this aware presence, instead of pretending that we’re a separate entity, to take our stand as that (aware presence), it just becomes more and more natural, just as in the past it was natural to us to take our stand as a separate entity. And the world strangely, in a way magically, the world reflects whichever position we choose. If we choose the position of a separate entity, somehow our experience in the world will confirm to us, will support that position, that belief. It will seem to confirm that the position we are taking is true. But magically, if we take the position, if we abide as this presence, if we live as that, think and feel from that, act and relate from that, the very same world, the apparently same world confirms that our feeling-understanding is true. That’s the beauty of it.

     There’s really no such thing as ‘theoretical understanding’. There’s either understanding, or there’s belief. There’s really no such thing as a theoretical understanding that 2+2=4. You either understand it or you believe it equals 5. So understanding is never theoretical. In fact, understanding doesn’t take place in the mind. So either we understand, which means we have seen in our own experience that there is no separate inside self, or we believe that that is true because we have read it, or we have an intuition that it is true but may not have made it our own experience yet. So there’s no problem with any of those positions.

     We may have a taste, it seems very clear what we are not. It becomes obvious to us that we are not a separate inside self. The reactions, thoughts, activities that we have based on the inside self seem so absurd. And then, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, two days later we find ourselves acting along the same old lines, betraying our deep feeling of being a separate self. So at that moment, whenever the invitation is presented, we stop and say ‘Hang on, am I this separate self?’ Now to begin with, we may have to slowly trace our way back. We may have to go through the kind of exploration I went over earlier: exploring my thoughts ‘I’m not my thought’; exploring my body ‘No, I’m not my body’ … and this may take time. We may have to, as it were, walk ourselves back, take ourselves by the hand and walk ourselves all the way back to ourself till it becomes ‘Yes! It’s so obvious, I’m not a separate self. I am this presence of awareness which knows these thoughts and images.’ Then, it becomes our experience, we begin to recognize it. Something in us goes ‘Yes!’ And the old habits of thinking and feeling peter out.
     Then, we find ourselves involved, we get completely caught-up, we seem to lose this experiential understanding. Our self seems to get covered over again. We seem trapped inside the body-mind again. Off we go again down a train of reactivity and whatever it is, until again the invitation comes up ‘Wait! Hang on a minute. I’m acting and feeling on behalf of a separate self. Am I that separate self? So this time as we trace ourselves back – we’ve been here now several times – it doesn’t take three quarters of an hour, it takes two minutes. And then, after a while, we find the invitation comes (snaps his fingers), and as the invitation comes, the sense of being a separate entity just collapses, there’s no more inquiring left. Because we’ve been there so many times, we truly understand. So then the old habits of thinking and feeling on behalf of the separate self rise up, they’re seen to be empty of a real separate entity, and they just drop. And this leaves us more and more in our true nature, or rather, as our true nature of presence. When I say more and more, it’s not quite right because it’s not happening in time, but for longer and longer periods of time, we find ourselves abiding as presence, and less and less things seem to pull us out. The kind of thoughts and feelings and situations that would previously have immediately have precipitated the sense of separation, they no longer have the power that they used to. Maybe just the beginnings of an old habit would rise up and poof it just peters out. And we just find ourselves naturally abiding more and more as this presence of awareness. And it becomes experientially obvious that in fact that we were always that. It’s not that we suddenly become that, we were always that, we just failed to notice it. And it cannot be disturbed, even when it seems that we’ve been taken out, that’s only for thought, only for imagination, it’s an imaginary self that goes off down the road of separation. Our true self never goes anywhere, it’s always just peacefully at home. It becomes clearer. We laugh at ourselves, the silliness of our separate self.

Iain : What do you find are the biggest obstacles to people finding who they truly are? 
Rupert Spira : The belief, and the subsequent feeling, that we are something other than this presence of awareness. All obstacles are really a variation on that one obstacle. It’s just a simple, childish belief that we all have, that what I am is a cluster of thoughts, and images, and feelings, and memories, coupled together with a series of sensations that make this amalgam, this dense, deep entity made out of all these thoughts, and images, and feelings. The belief that that’s what I am – it all comes down to that. All our problems, all our psychological problems, are problems of the imaginary self. If they’re traced back to their origin, it always comes down to mistaking ourselves for a cluster of thoughts, images and sensations. If we can call it an obstacle, that is the only obstacle. It’s that simple. Of course the ways that obstacle expresses itself may be colored differently in different people. But it’s always the same obstacle. 
     And at a certain stage, we see that clearly in ourselves. We see that spiritual life is not complex. It’s not about lots of different ideas, lots of different experiences, it’s really about one thing. And when this becomes clear, it kind of focuses our interest and our love for the truth. ‘What am I really?’ And ‘What is the nature of this self that I am - this aware presence that I am?’ And if we go deeply into it, we find that its nature is pure openness, peace, lack of resistance - which is another word for happiness. And then we realize at some point, all I ever longed for in my life, when I was out in the world searching for objects, situations, relationships – all I was searching for was happiness, was my own being. This topic is not just confined to the few thousand people interested in non-duality, everybody, everybody, all six billion of us seek it. If we believe we’re a separate entity, there’s no such thing as a separate entity that is not in search. In fact, a separate entity is not an entity. It is an activity of resisting what is, and seeking what is not. So a separate entity is an activity of seeking. That is unavoidable. 
     And what we are seeking, is always the same thing. It’s the dissolution of separation. The dissolution of the apparent entity that is seeking. That’s all we are seeking, all of us. Whether we call that peace, happiness, a new relationship, it doesn’t matter what we call it, but it’s the simple intimacy of our own being. That’s all we long for. As soon as we feel we’re a separate entity, the peace and the happiness that are innate in our own being is veiled. It doesn’t disappear but it seems to be veiled. And therefore, the separate entity that we imagine ourselves to be is by definition unhappy. Happiness seems not to be present. And hence the separate self is always on the search out there in the world for happiness. And our culture says to us ‘You’re unhappy. The way to get happy is to go after this series of objects.’ Our culture is bombarding us saying ‘If you do this, if you acquire this in the realm of the body, the mind, or the world, you will get happiness, you will get love, you will get peace.’ That’s the message that is being spoon-fed to us 24/7 in our culture. It’s just a mistake. It’s just not true. We all know it’s not true otherwise the search would at some stage come to an end. We get the object we want, everyone sooner or later gets the drink, the relationship, the job … and then we’d be happy. Does it work? No. The search goes on forever. It doesn’t work. Someone should ring the bell. Our culture has so much invested in this search, invested in our staying separate entities that there’s a tremendous resistance to this of course in our culture and of course individually.
     Although we long for this, it’s the thing we long for most of all, it’s also the thing we fear most of all. It’s like the moth attracted to the flame. All the moth wants is the flame. But the only thing the moth cannot experience is the flame, because the moment it touches it, its only way of knowing it is to die and become the flame. So the search for happiness is like that. It’s all we long for, happiness, love, peace, but there’s a terrific resistance in use as well. Because in order to do that, everything we imagine ourself to be has to die, has to dissolve. And for that reason (he clutches his chest). And people very often experience this in intimacy, it’s very common in intimate relationships you approach intimacy, and at the last moment you say ‘No. I don’t want to die’. And so there’s this play – this desire for happiness, and the fear of happiness, the fear of the dissolution of separation repeats itself in cycles until it’s either pointed out to us or we spontaneously come to it on our own. What we long for can never be found in the realm of the mind, the body or the world. At some stage we have to have the honesty, the courage, the clarity, and the love to face that fact, and not to dance around it.

Above transcribed from the video below:

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:

Intimate Relationships & Realizing Our True Nature

     What happens when we recognize that we are awake loving timeless, limitless awareness itself?

     “The implications of this recognition is that the happiness – and by happiness I don’t mean that we always have to be smiling or laughing, it’s more like the peace, the sense of fulfillment, the absence of any sense of lack – the happiness that we previously sought in activities, substances, states of mind, relationships, and never fully found there, has now been discovered to be a quality of our essential nature – this sense of fulfillment, this sense of absence of lack. 
     The motivation to seek happiness in any kind of objective experience doesn’t disappear overnight, because there is a habit that we have been rehearsing for decades (seeking happiness in substances, activities, relationships). That habit doesn’t come to an end overnight, but it winds down, because the source of happiness in oneself or as oneself has been touched, known. And that has an impact on the desire to find happiness in any kind of objective experience. It winds down slowly. 
     That, for instance, has a profound effect on relationships. Anyone who believes or feels themselves to be a separate self is seeking one thing alone in life, and that is happiness. The reason, in relation to relationships, a separate self seeks relationships is not because they want the other. It’s because they want to be happy. If you knew the person you are dating was going to bring misery to your life, would we go on dating them? No way. It’s not the person that we want, or the activity, or the substance, it’s the happiness that we believe will be derived from them. So if we are no longer seeking happiness in activities, in relationships, does that mean that we simply stop having relationships? No, of course not, because we can have relationships either to fulfill our need for happiness, or to express and share and celebrate the happiness we already feel. We still have relationships, but we relieve the other person of the demand to fulfill our our sense of lack, to fulfill our sense of emptiness. So we’re not using the other as an object to continually fill up this sense of emptiness, which of course another can never do. And that is why relationships fall apart, because sooner or later we realize this other person is not fulfilling me, no person can fulfill us. As soon as we realize they’re not fulfilling me, the conflict begins and the relationship begins to fall apart. 
     But now, we don’t want to be in relationship with the other for the purpose of finding happiness. We relieve our friend of this impossible burden of providing happiness for an insatiable self. That attitude gives our relationship the best possibility of being truly intimate, truly loving, open, undemanding, and an expression of our shared being. It’s not a guarantee that an intimate relationship, for instance, will work, because there are many elements that go into the make of an intimate relationship, but this is the most essential part – the recognition that the other is not there to provide love for us or happiness for us. 
     That’s just one example of how it has a profound effect on relationships – relationship with our neighbors, with our children, with our parents, but particularly intimate relationships. I would go further and say that it was the prerequisite for true intimacy; that as long as we consider ourselves separate entities trying to derive happiness from one another, that position, and true intimacy are mutually exclusive. There cannot be true intimacy if we are demanding the other to fill up our sense of need, or lack, or want. 
     Isn’t true intimacy what everybody wants? Isn’t that why we have relationships? Because we all have this deep intuition of real intimacy – that’s what we’re looking for in a relationship. We all know deeply at some level the potential of a relationship. And over and over and over again we find that our relationships are spoiled by our projecting our needs and our fears onto the other person.”                 Rupert Spira

Above transcribed from this video: