Rupert Spira: Notes on his teachings

I spent a day at a Rupert Spira event last weekend. He is not a teacher to whom I would have initially been attracted because, although I didn't know it then, I was looking for spiritual "experiences" -- more and more deeper, better, satisfying experiences. I don't think this is a bad thing -- it's just the way the separate self looks at the falling into emptiness that is our truest nature. But when that emptiness becomes known, it is seen as a lack of "experience" in the sense of "something happening to me" since the "me" is absent. That said, a teacher who aims straight for that, who continually undercuts the ego, would have seemed abstract and inaccessible to me in the beginning.

But what I'm looking for now is more of an explanation of what is realized. Often I lack ways of explaining what is known that make complete sense intellectually. Rupert has a very precise way of using language, and so, as I listen to him, things fall into place.

What I thought I would do, then, is transcribe the notes I took at his day-long satsang. I want to stress that these notes are not any kind of objective account of what transpired at the meeting, nor are they an objective account of Rupert's teachings in general. To get that, you should go to the source. What I'm offering here are just notes on what resonated for me. Perhaps some of them will resonate for the reader as well.

(These statements are approximate -- sometimes he spoke too fast for me to get the words exactly, but when I couldn't, I tried to paraphrase accurately.)

1. Space pervades the body and that's why I feel the body is myself.

2. The name that Knowing gives itself is “I.”

3. Self (capital S) is prior to experience. Small “s” self is the mixture of Self and limited self (personality, qualities, etc). So we need to separate out “Self” from the rest to see it clearly. Then experience loses the capacity to veil or muddy our Being.

4. Ask yourself “On whose behalf am I feeling fear [or whatever the feeling]?

5. We fear our own annihilation but also long for it [and this is basis of fear].

6. The drama of life doesn't cease; it just loses its capacity to veil our True Nature.

7. Maya remains. Ignorance goes.

8. Awareness assumes the form of each of our minds for the sake of manifesting experience.

9. We are the activity of consciousness through which consciousness knows itself in the world.

10. I'm not experiencing 10,000 things; it's always just an indivisible whole.

11. Each of us is a localization of infinite consciousness.

12. Some minds are transparent to their source.

13. Responses to the world are informed by reference to Awareness. If not aware, Awareness is distorted and opaque and doesn't come out with clarity but is influenced by belief in separation.

14. The investigation of the body is not a prerequisite to knowing the Self.

15. After recognition of the true nature of Self is the time to wash the body clean of residue of belief in the separate self.

16. Soul is the deepest aspect of the separate self.

17. Love is the recognition of our shared Being (infinite consciousness).

18. The only thing the separate self really wants is to be divested of its sense of separation.

19. Grace is the movement back to the naturally expanded state. Individually, this is experienced as the desire for happiness.

20. Suffering is the price consciousness pays for manifestation.

21. If you know there is no otherness, this will express as qualities of Love, e.g., peace, justice, compassion.

Embodying the Christian message

I heard something so deeply meaningful on the radio this morning that I haven't yet fully digested it.  But I want to share it while it is still fresh and perhaps gain some insight by doing so.

The man being interviewed was Jean Vanier who founded an organization called L'Arche Communities. (You can find it here: https://onbeing.org/series/. I greatly recommend these podcasts.) In L'Arche Communities, which now are numerous and all over the world, mentally "disabled" and "normal" people live together without being labeled the way I just did. The whole point is love and  movement beyond the separation that is born of ideas about who is better or worse.

I'm not saying it the way Vanier did. This man is full of compassion -- it's in his every word and in his tone of voice. And what he said gave me just a glimpse of what has always puzzled me about Christianity: what is this dying on the cross thing about?

Weakness, vulnerability, and the willingness to suffer are what it's about, according to Vanier. It's the opportunity to let in another's suffering and know it as our own that allows us to become truly human.

I am reminded of something that happened to me long ago: I encountered a beggar on the street. Whereas I usually moved away in fear, this time I felt for some reason I wanted to give him money. I actually went to have coffee while I pondered this! I didn't want to give out of pity or out of an idea of what I "should" do. In the end, I decided that if I felt moved, I should give him something, just a small coin. Maybe I would find out why I wanted to do this in the doing of it.

When I dropped the quarter in his can, the man said "thank you." But it didn't feel like the "thank you" came from "over there" -- our of his mouth. It was as though the bottom fell out my mind, as though I'd fallen down an infinite well of consciousness where there wasn't any "here" and "there." Over the years, as I've experienced this in other contexts, I've come to understand it as the mind opening to the reality that we are not separate, except to the extent that our minds build a "thought barrier" to the "other." In that moment, it was as though the "thank you" came from me, but a much larger "me" than the one I usually knew myself as.

Still, even as I came the experience itself became less mysterious over the years, I always wondered why it happened specifically with this one person, a street person whom I didn't even know. I wrote to my spiritual teacher at the time about it. He responded, "YOU are a beggar." I recall not really liking that response very much. Now I'm wondering if he didn't see more deeply than I was able to follow.  It seems to have been a moment when I myself became the "poorest of the poor." I was not giving out of pity but because something in me -- not my ego or my rational mind but something deeper and purer -- responded with the universal love that comes out of the humanity we all share. This is what I heard in Jean Vanier this morning.

Taking the teacher's words lightly

Last night I went to hear my beloved teacher, Adyashanti, talk. I hadn't seen him in person for almost two years, and still, as always, I felt such a deep appreciation for his being, so much joy in his presence.

A couple things caught my attention. He talked about the "immensity."  I actually find the word "boundless" more accurate, both in my own experience, and in terms of definition. "Immensity" implies size while "boundless" acknowledges that what we are describing is beyond measurement. For me, it's more like falling into a bottomless well -- you just go down and down and there is no bottom.

Nonetheless, words are meant to evoke, not only to denote, and in that respect "immensity" probably does the better job than "boundless." The body can feel that largeness, and I, for one, was moved deeply into that space last night as he spoke of it, as it seemed the whole room was.

Adya also talked about his experience of enlightenment as of first moving out of the body into the immensity (I'm paraphrasing, I hope correctly), and then, in time, the awake energy needing to move back into the body, to become "embodied." This has been Adya's teaching since early on, and for many years I tried to match my experience with his description.

Now I see it a little differently: We already ARE that enlightened presence. It lives us, in fact, whether we are conscious of it or not. So it makes more sense to describe what happens as the awakened energy recognizing itself as (not "in" but "as") the body, as form, as well the formless. It has never been any other way: we've just failed to notice.

The point is not to take what is said by any teacher, or anyone else, too seriously or literally. It is all just a way of trying to describe the indescribable. And when the pointers work, it's wonderful.