The twenty-four yoga meditations in Transparent Body, Luminous World were transcribed and selected from several hundred guided meditations that Rupert Spira gave at meetings and retreats in Europe and the USA since 2012. The meditations explore the experience of the body and world as a continuously changing flow of sensations and perceptions appearing in, known by and made of Awareness.
In this approach to meditation – which Spira calls the Tantric Yoga of Sensation and Perception – Awareness turns again towards the objects of experience. There is then a progressive infiltrating, pervading or saturating of the objects of knowledge and experience with the peace and happiness that are inherent in Awareness’s knowing of its own being. The density and solidity of the body and the otherness of the world are penetrated and suffused with the light of pure knowing, God’s infinite being, and are gradually outshone by it. The body becomes impersonal like the world, and the world becomes intimate like the body.
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.