Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience, Volume II by Rupert Spira

Author:Rupert Spira
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781908664136
Publisher: Non-Duality Press
Published: 2012-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

Presence Finds Only Itself

Q: I read somewhere that you say the experience of a separate self and the outside world are two sides of the same coin, that they are inseparable. I understand that there is no separate self but the outside world seems very real. Objects, people, places seem very real.

‘Seems’ is the operative word. It is necessary to distinguish between what ‘seems to be’ and ‘what is’.

Your description of the world as being ‘outside’ implies that there is something inside. That ‘something inside’ is the separate self, the counterpart to the separate world outside.

In this case the separate self has not been seen to be truly nonexistent and therefore the world, as such, has not been seen to be similarly non-existent.

The separate self and the outside world are the inside and the outside of ignorance, the ignoring of reality.

They are both illusions superimposed onto the reality of experience.

Without the labelling by thought, we have no way of knowing what anything truly is. In fact, even with the labelling of thought we do not know what anything really is but we think we do!

Without thought there is no experience of an inside or an outside, a ‘me’ or an ‘other’. Without thought, there is no ‘here’ or ‘there’, no ‘now’ or ‘then’, no ‘this’ and ‘that’.

Without thought, there is just the utter intimacy of experiencing, so completely full of itself as to permit no other, no time, no lack and no need.

It is thought alone that seemingly divides experiencing into the realms of the mind, the body and the world.

These are the three realms of apparently objective experience, in which the reality of experience is seemingly veiled from itself by dualising thought.

However, the mind, the body and the world are only illusory as apparent objects, as seemingly ‘other’. There is a reality to the experience of the mind, body and world, but the only substance to that reality is aware presence, just as when we look at an image on the screen, we do not really see trees, fields, hills and the sky. We always see only the screen. The screen is their reality.

And what is it that knows the reality? It knows and simultaneously is itself. The reality of experience could not be known by anything other than what is real.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.