Transparency of Things - Sample
Transparency of Things - Sample
Contemplating the
Nature of Experience
Rupert Spira
Non-Duality Press
First published November 2008 by Non-Duality Press
Rupert Spira has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.
ISBN 978-0-9558290-5-5
www.non-dualitybooks.com
This book is written with gratitude and love for Ellen, my
companion, and Francis Lucille, my friend and teacher.
Contents
Foreword · xi
vii
Changeless Presence.................................................................... 131
Time Never Happens .................................................................. 137
Unveiling Reality ........................................................................ 143
We Are What We Seek ............................................................... 145
Nature’s Eternity ......................................................................... 152
Consciousness And Being Are One ............................................ 166
The Fabric Of Self ........................................................................169
The True Dreamer ....................................................................... 173
The Here And Now Of Presence ................................................ 185
Consciousness Is Self-Luminous ................................................ 188
Consciousness Only Knows Itself .............................................. 192
Consciousness Is Freedom Itself ................................................. 194
It Has Always Been So ................................................................ 202
Sameness And Oneness .............................................................. 205
A Knowing Space .........................................................................210
Consciousness Peace ‘I’ ............................................................... 215
Just This ....................................................................................... 218
The Doer ...................................................................................... 221
Origin, Substance And Destiny ................................................. 225
Love In Search Of Itself .............................................................. 227
Openness Sensitivity Vulnerability And Availability .............. 234
Time And Memory ..................................................................... 243
The Moon’s Light ........................................................................ 249
The Natural Condition ................................................................ 257
viii
“That which is, never ceases to be. That which is not,
never comes into being.”
Parmenides
Foreword
‘David loves Jane,’ ‘Tim saw the bus.’ Our earliest formulations
divide experience into ‘I’ and ‘other,’ ‘me’ and ‘the world,’ a subject
experiencing an object. From that time on, our experience seems to
validate these formulations.
xi
This has been expressed in many different ways. ‘Atman equals
Brahman.’ ‘I and my Father are one.’ ‘Nirvana equals Samsara.’
‘Emptiness is Form.’ ‘I am That.’ ‘Consciousness is All.’ ‘There are
not two things.’ ‘Sat Chit Ananda.’
Every spiritual tradition has its own means of coming to this under-
standing, which is not just an intellectual understanding, but rather
a Knowingness that is beyond the mind. And within each tradition
itself there are as many variations on each approach as there are
students.
In some ways this book is written like a piece of music in which a sin-
gle theme is explored, questioned, modulated and restated. However,
each time the central theme is returned to, it will, hopefully, have
gathered depth and resonance due to the preceding contemplation.
Having said that, the conclusions drawn are only meant to uproot
the old, conventional and dualistic formulations that have become
so deeply embedded in the way we seem to experience ourselves and
the world.
Once these old formulations have been uprooted, they do not need
to be abandoned. They can still be used as provisional ideas that have
a function to play in certain aspects of life.
xii
The new formulations are perhaps closer or more accurate expres-
sions of our experience than the old ones, but their purpose is not to
replace the old certainties with new ones.
There are many ways to come to this open Unknowingness, and the
dismantling of our false certainties through investigation is just one
of them that is offered here.
Now what about the awareness itself, which is aware of the paper? Is
it not always present behind and within every experience, just as the
paper is present behind and within the words on this page?
And when our attention is drawn to it, do we not have the same
strange feeling of having been made aware of something that we
were in fact always aware of, but had not noticed?
xiii
Is this awareness not the most intimate and obvious fact of our expe-
rience, essential to and yet independent of the particular qualities
of each experience itself, in the same way that the paper is the most
obvious fact of this page, essential to and yet independent of each
word?
Is this awareness itself not the support and the substance of every
experience in the same way that the paper is the support and the
substance of every word?
Does anything new need to be added to this page in order to see the
paper? Does anything new need to be added to this current experi-
ence in order to become aware of the awareness that is its support
and substance?
Every word on this page is in fact only made of paper. It only expresses
the nature of the paper, although it may describe the moon.
xiv
It is so obvious that it is not noticed.
Rupert Spira
October 2008
xv
The Garden Of Unknowing
The abstract concepts of the mind collapse here. They cannot go any
further. There is no adequate name for that into which the mind dis-
solves. We are taken to the utmost simplicity of direct experience.
1
same path of apparent objectification, to recreate the appearance of
the mind, body and world.
And using the same names and forms, mind describes the apparent
process through which That-Which-Cannot-Be-Named discovers
that it never becomes anything, that it is always only itself and itself
and itself.
2
Each is an agent of Truth, but never true.
*The word ‘mind’ is used in two ways in this book. The first, as in this
sentence, includes (a) thinking and imagining, (b) sensing (referring to
bodily sensations) and (c) perceiving (referring to seeing, hearing, tast-
ing, smelling and touching, through which the world is ‘known’). In this
case the body and the world are understood to be projections of the mind.
The second refers only to thinking and imagining. In most cases the latter
meaning is intended, but occasionally mind is referred to in its broader
meaning.
3
Clear Seeing
4
We simply look at the facts of experience. “Is it true of my experi-
ence in this moment?” That is the only reference point.
The few core beliefs and preconceived ideas that we hold about the
nature of ourselves and the world are exposed in this disinterested
investigation. We do not do anything to these beliefs. We are not
trying to destroy them but rather to expose them.
Belief and doubt are two sides of the same coin. When a belief is
exposed it is found either to be true, in which case the belief becomes
a fact and the doubt that was implicit in it is dissolved, or it is found
to be false, in which case both the belief and the doubt will naturally
come to an end.
5
However, the purpose of this investigation and exploration is not to
change anything. It is simply the clear seeing of what is, and clear
seeing is the shrine on which Being shines.
This line of enquiry comes from the truth of direct experience and
therefore leads back to it. It leads to the Reality of experience, to the
experience of Consciousness knowing itself, knowingly. It is ruthless
and tender at the same time, and utterly simple.
6
In this case it has not yet been seen that what are considered to
be our normal, common sense assumptions, are in fact themselves
intellectual and abstract – that is, they have little to do with the facts
of experience.
By the end of the book I hope it will be clear that it is in fact our
conventional ways of seeing that bear little relation to our actual
moment by moment experience.
However, it is precisely the idea that the body and the world exist as
objects in time and space, independent and separate from Conscious-
ness, that is intellectual and abstract. It is not based on experience.
And by the same token, the idea that there is only the experience
of Consciousness knowing itself in and as objects, becomes a self-
evident, obvious and indisputable fact of experience.
The body and the world continue to appear in the same way, but it is
clearly seen that the experience of the appearance of the body and the
world takes place simultaneously with the experience of Conscious-
ness knowing itself. It is the same experience, one experience.
7
The experience of Consciousness knowing itself knowingly in and as
all appearances, becomes as obvious and self-evident as the previous,
apparently obvious and self-evident experience of objects existing in
time and space, independent and separate from Consciousness.
8
What Truly Is
Therefore, if we do not know what Consciousness is, what ‘I’ am, but
we know that it is, and if everything that we experience is known
through or by this knowing Consciousness, how can we know what
anything really is?
All we can know for sure about an object is that it is, and that quality
of ‘isness’ is what is referred to here as Being or Existence. It is that
part of our experience that is real, that lasts, that is not a fleeting
appearance. It is also therefore referred to as its Reality.
9
If we think that we know something objective about ourselves or
the world, then whatever that something is that we think we know,
will condition our subsequent enquiry into the nature of experience.
So before knowing what something is, if that is possible, we must
first come to the understanding that we do not know what anything
really is.
Many of our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and the world are so
deeply ingrained that we are unaware that they are beliefs and take
them, without questioning, for the absolute truth.
We believe that we are the subject of our experience and that eve-
rything and everyone else is the object. We believe that we, as this
subject, are the doer of our actions, the thinker of our thoughts, the
feeler of our feelings, the chooser of our choices. We believe that this
entity we consider ourselves to be, has freedom of choice over some
aspects of experience but not others.
We believe that time and space are actually experienced, that they
existed before we did and will continue to do so after we have died.
10
We believe that objects exist independent of their being perceived,
that Consciousness is personal and limited, that it is a by-product of
the mind and that mind is a by-product of the body.
The only field available for enquiry is experience itself. This may seem
almost too obvious to mention, but its implications are profound. It
implies that we never experience anything outside experience. If there
is something outside experience, we have absolutely no knowledge of
it, and therefore cannot legitimately assert that it exists.
All experience takes place here and now, so the nature of Reality,
whatever that is, must be present in the intimacy and immediacy of
this current experience.
11
§
The mind has built a powerful edifice of concepts about Reality that
bears little relation to actual experience and, as a result, Conscious-
ness has veiled itself from itself. These concepts are built out of mind
and therefore their deconstruction is one of the ways through which
Consciousness comes to recognise itself again – that is, to know itself
again.
Concepts are not destroyed in this process. They are still available
for use when needed.
These ideas have convinced us that there is a world that exists sepa-
rate from and independent of Consciousness. They have persuaded
us to believe that ‘I’, the Consciousness that is seeing these words, is
an entity that resides inside the body, that it was born and will die,
and that it is the subject of experience whilst everything else, the
world, ‘other,’ is the object.
12
In the disinterested contemplation of our experience we measure the
facts of experience itself against these beliefs.
The falsity of the ideas that the mind entertains about the nature of
Reality, about the nature of experience, is exposed in this disinter-
ested contemplation.
13
However, this is a very different situation from one in which the
mind has been denied any provisional credibility on the basis that
nothing it says about Reality can ultimately be true.
We are open to the possibility that there is only one single, seamless
totality, that Consciousness and Existence are one, that there is only
one Reality.
Our experience itself does not change but we feel that it changes.
Reality remains as it always is, for it is what it is, independent of the
ideas we entertain about it.
14
However, our interpretation changes and this new interpretation
becomes the cornerstone of a new possibility.
In reality this separation has never taken place. If we look for it, we
can never actually find it. Ignorance is an illusion. It is an illusion
that is wrought through the conceptual powers of the mind, through
erroneous beliefs.
15
Our beliefs are the root cause of psychological suffering and they
are dismantled by a process of contemplative investigation.
Through its reasoning powers the mind is brought to its own limit
and, as a result, the edifice of mind collapses. This is the experience
of understanding, the timeless moment in which Consciousness is
revealed to itself.
16