Rupert Spira > Quotes

“We take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal.”
― Rupert Spira, The Transparency of Things

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

“However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply other names for our self.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

“I am that which knows or is aware of all experience, but I am not myself an experience. I am aware of thoughts but am not myself a thought; I am aware of feelings and sensations but am not myself a feeling or sensation; I am aware of perceptions but am not myself a perception. Whatever the content of experience, I know or am aware of it. Thus, knowing or being aware is the essential element in all knowledge, the common factor in all experience.”
― Rupert Spira, The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter

“Only that which is always with you can be said to be your self and if you look closely and simply at experience, only awareness is always ‘with you’.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Art of Peace and Happiness

“Cease being exclusively fascinated by whatever you are aware of and be interested instead in the experience of being aware itself.”
― Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware

“No formulation of the reality of experience is completely true. Once we acknowledge this, we relieve words of the impossible burden of trying to express the nature of experience and, as a result, leave them free to be spoken and heard in playful and creative ways that evoke Reality itself without trying to frame or grasp it.”
― Rupert Spira, The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience

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

“That is, a single sensation/thought/perception appears in consciousness and thinking alone conceptualises”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

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

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

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

“And this ‘knowing’ is our self, aware presence. In other words, all that is ever experienced is our self knowing itself, awareness aware of awareness.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Art of Peace and Happiness

“In reality, which means in our actual experience, all experience is one seamless substance. The duality between the inside self and the outside object, world or other is never actually experienced. It is always imagined.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Art of Peace and Happiness

“the separate self is not in fact an entity but rather an activity that appears in Consciousness.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“Seeking happiness in objective experience is the activity that defines the apparently separate self.”
― Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware

“a mind that is accustomed to repeatedly dissolving in its source or essence becomes progressively saturated with its inherent peace. When such a mind rises again from the ocean of awareness, its activity makes that peace available to humanity.

Such a mind may also be inspired by knowledge that is not simply a continuation of the past but comes directly form its unconditioned essence. This inspiration brings creativity and new possibilities into whatever sphere of knowledge or activity in which that mind operates.”
― Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware

“Nothing ever happens to the knowing with which all experience is known.”
― Rupert Spira, The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter

“Understanding is the dissolution of the mind into its support, into its ground. It is the experience of Consciousness knowing itself, returning to itself knowingly.”
― Rupert Spira, The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience

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

“See clearly that we have no knowledge of our self ever having been born, changing, evolving, growing up or growing old and that we can never have the experience of death.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Art of Peace and Happiness

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

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

“We cannot know happiness as an objective experience; we can only be it. We cannot be unhappy; we can only know unhappiness as an objective experience.”
― Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware

“The belief that we were born, that we change, evolve, grow old and die is simply a belief to which the vast majority of humanity subscribes without realizing that they are doing so. It is the religion of our culture.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Art of Peace and Happiness

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

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

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

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

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