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

PRESENCE: VOLUME TWO

First paperback edition published October 2011 by NON-DUALITY PRESS

Rupert Spira 2011, 2012
Non-Duality Press 2011, 2012

Cover images by Caroline Seymour
Cover design by Rupert Spira

Rupert Spira has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.

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Ebook edition: Volume IISBN: 978-1-908664-12-9
Ebook edition: Volume IIISBN: 978-1-908664-13-6

Paperback edition: Volume IISBN: 978-1-908664-03-7
Paperback edition: Volume IIISBN: 978-1-908664-04-4

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I would like to thank all those who have helped in various ways with the preparation of this book for their kindness and generosity.

Pure intimacy
Parted by thought
Becomes a self and world

Introduction: The Seamless Intimacy of Experience

In 1998 I was staying with my friend and teacher, Francis Lucille, and we were talking about the nature of experience. At one point a dog started to bark in the distance and I observed that it seemed a fact of experience that the dog was outside, separate and at a distance from myself.

Francis said to me, Shut your eyes and place your hands on the carpet. I placed my hands on the carpet and he asked, Now where does that sensation take place? That was all he said.

At that moment it suddenly became clear that the sensation of the carpet was inside me, that is, inside this perceiving consciousness, appearing in exactly the same place as my thoughts and bodily sensations.

On opening my eyes the carpet appeared to be outside again. However, I reasoned that the carpet was only one thing. As a sensation it seemed to be inside but as a visual perception it seemed to be outside. Well, which was it? It couldnt be both.

In this way I explored and experimented with my experience, always with the same question in mind, What is the real nature of this experience? I didnt want a rational response, couched in the non-dual terms that had become so familiar over two decades of seeking. I wanted direct experience.

I would sit for hours refusing the conventional labels that thinking superimposes on experience, allowing experience to reveal itself as it is. As time went on it became more and more obvious that all experience takes place inside consciousness, that is, inside myself, whatever that is.

In due course I came to see in an experiential way that if there is nothing outside experience there can be nothing inside, for inside and outside are two sides of the same coin. One cannot stand without the other. Experiencing simply remains, neither inside nor outside, and the totality of this experiencing is permeated with, inseparable from and ultimately made out of consciousness, our self. In fact, it is misleading to have three words, experiencing, consciousness and our self, for that which is always one.

Nothing extraordinary happened except the falling away of the concepts with which we normally describe our experience and with which we artificially fragment experience into a perceiving subject on the inside and a perceived object, other or world on the outside.

Over a period of time there were many revelations about the nature of experience, each one seeming to penetrate more deeply to its core and, as a result, the old belief systems with which experience had been shrouded for so long were slowly dismantled.

During this time the fabric of the separate inside self became clear and with it the so-called separate outside world. The separate self was revealed as a dense and intricate network of resisting, fearing, avoiding, seeking and conceptualising. In other words, it became clear that the separate self is not in fact an entity but rather an activity that appears in consciousness.

And as a natural corollary to this understanding, it became clear that all we know of an outside world is sensing and perceiving which, although seeming to take place outside, in fact takes place within consciousness, in exactly the same place as the resisting and seeking that characterise the separate self. In both cases, whether I looked inside or outside, it became clear that there is only the seamless intimacy of pure experiencing itself.

In other words, it was clearly seen that consciousness pervades all experience equally. No part of experience is any closer to or further from consciousness than any other part. In fact, there are no parts to experience. It is one seamless, intimate whole permeated by and ultimately made out of consciousness.

All that changed was that a centre or location where thinking, sensing, perceiving, feeling, loving, acting etc. takes place was no longer imagined. The continual reference to a personal self fell away and with it the imaginary distance, objectivity and otherness of the world dissolved. Only experiencing remains... direct, intimate, vibrant and friendly.

The title of my first book, The Transparency of Things came to me as a way of trying to indicate that all our so-called objective experiencethe body, world, things and othersis made out of the same transparent, open, empty, luminous substance as the consciousness in which they appear.

The current title, Presence, goes a step further. There are no things there in the first place to be transparent or otherwise. There is simply aware presence, ever-present, knowing, being and loving itself, sometimes resting, as it were, in the knowing of its own being and sometimes simultaneously knowing, being and loving itself in and as every minute gesture of the apparent mind, body and world.

As far as trying to share or communicate this experiential understanding, it is legitimate and in most cases necessary to have the freedom, sensitivity and flexibility to begin at any point along the apparent paths of understanding or love, depending on the perspective of the question, and to explore the nature of experience from there, taking the presumption that is concealed in the question as a starting point.

Most of what is said in this book has been prompted by a question, because without a question there is little impulse to formulate what cannot truly be formulated. As such, what is said here will, in most cases, start from the underlying presumption in the question and go from there to as direct a formulation of the nature of experience as is possible in the given circumstance.

However, it may not go there in one leap. It may involve an apparent process in time in which we move slowly, intimately and carefully from our presumptions, whether they be in the form of beliefs or feelings, to our direct experience. How long we take and how directly we go depends on the nature of the resistance of the dualising mind that is being engaged in this conversation. We may go straight from there to the reality of our experience in the shortest and most direct way, or we may proceed slowly and even not quite complete the full exploration, leaving that to be completed by the one who is asking the question.

In this way, the reality of our experience is refracted into as many formulations as there are questions, none of them being absolutely true but each one tailored with love and understanding to the presumptions that are concealed and expressed in the question.

So our conversations are like a dance, intimately, subtly and lovingly following the dualising mind in all its abstract, convoluted and erroneous beliefs, dancing with it for as long as it wishes to dance; never trying to replace one concept with another that is deemed to be absolutely true, but all the time using concepts to dissolve the hardened shell of abstract thinking in which our experience seems to have been imprisoned, thereby leaving the raw reality of experience naked, as it were, shining in and by itself.