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.