The Screen That Lies Behind the Movie

Just come back to the experience of being – what you essentially are before any experience has been added to you. Being is the pure, simple, intimate experience we refer to when we say ‘I am’ before adding qualifications like ‘tired’ or ‘excited’. Our being is like a screen that both lies behind the movie and pervades it – prior to experience yet intimately permeating all experience. You are always experiencing your self, but you have allowed it to become mixed up with content. In meditation, we simply return to the ordinary, familiar self we always already are but may have overlooked. Notice that although your being pervades all experience, it remains unconditioned by it – just as a screen is never stained by images in a movie. You are already free, already at peace. Your being needs no perfection through effort or enlightenment through practice, as it cannot be diminished or enhanced by experience.

"What practices might help overcome the mind’s persistent habit of placing the ‘I am’ inside the body despite my non-dual understanding? Rupert says: ‘It’s very natural that you feel located. Why? Because you do perceive the world through your eyes or through your sense faculties . . . Therefore, it is natural that you feel that whatever it is that is perceiving the world lives or resides just behind your eyes or inside your head . . . That illusion, the illusion that you are a localised perceiver doesn’t go away . . . Perception takes place in subject object relationship . . . Your understanding overrides the apparent evidence of sense perception, but sense perception carries on giving us an illusory picture of reality.’"

I experience feelings of expansion, radiance, and generativity during meditation – are they qualities of essential being? Rupert says: ‘These are your mind’s attempts to describe the experience of being on its own terms . . . Being is not expansive or expanded. It has no dimension . . . But for a mind that is accustomed to believing that it is localised and limited . . . when you go to your being and the mind then tries to describe that experience, it tries to describe it on its own terms . . . The mind used to think I am contracted. So it now says I am expanded . . . Radiance, the mind’s activity is characterised by agitation, and sorrow . . . So the mind describes [being] in contrast with its previous darkness as a state of radiance.’

What exactly do you mean when you say ‘what’s being seen’ and ‘the finite mind’ arise simultaneously? Rupert says: ‘The seer and the seen arise together and subside together . . . When I say the seer, in this case, I’m referring to the apparently limited consciousness that is each of our minds. I’m not suggesting that consciousness arises with perception, nor am I suggesting that the essence of the world arises as a result of perception . . . The appearance of the world, the way what the world really is, appears to us, arises when the faculty of seeing arises. And when the faculty of seeing subsides, the appearance of the world, not the reality of the world, the appearance of the world subsides.’

[Sharing experience of spontaneous devotion and reading a poem rather than asking a question] Rupert says: ‘You don’t have to say anything else. There’s nothing else to say. And I’m not going to say anything else because what you say in your poem, I find them very, very touching, very sincere, very beautiful. I can’t add anything to that. That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with us.’"

How can I live from love and understanding without imposing teachings on others, especially when triggered by people’s suffering or attempts to impose their ideas on me? Rupert says: ‘Your desire to help someone that is suffering is not an egoic response. It’s not an old, egoic, emotional reaction that arises because you’ve been triggered by them. On the contrary, it’s because you are relatively, you are free to a large extent of your own personal feelings, that you are able to feel another person’s suffering as your own . . . You would tailor your understanding and your feeling of love to the person in question. And you would do something that would really help them . . . You just do what you can in the moment in the situation, whatever is appropriate.’

Your advice to ‘let go of experience and experience will let go of you’ – is this a distinct step or an inner posture of self-abidance? Rupert says: ‘Normally, we are lost in the content of experience. And we give experience power over us, we consent to allow our thoughts and feelings to overwhelm us. No thought or feeling is overwhelming . . . It’s not experience that does it to us. It is we that consent, albeit unconsciously, to losing ourself in experience . . . So the first step, let go of experience, come back to your being . . . And then when we let go of experience, we find that experience loses its hold over us . . . Both [Vedantic and Tantric] are legitimate approaches. They both lead you to the same recognition.’

"What is the place that our decisions are made from, and what happens at the crossroads of choice? Rupert says: ‘All responses, however conditioned or unconditioned, they all come from your finite mind. That’s not the issue. The issue is, do your responses to any situation come from the felt sense of separation? . . . Imagine someone has said something to you that hurts you . . . Now, there are two places from which you can respond. You can respond from the feeling of hurt . . . Or you can pause, you hear the words, you feel hurt . . . But you go one step further back from the hurt feeling to your being . . . Your response to the person can either come from the hurt feeling, or it can come from your presence with its inherent peace and sense of sufficiency.’"

"Why does awareness need to localise itself into a mind, and how do we value life while understanding it’s an illusion? Rupert says: ‘Infinite consciousness cannot realise its infinite potential in the form of the universe, without the aid of a finite mind. Because it’s not possible for the infinite to know the finite directly . . . You cannot perceive the Caribbean beach directly from your bed in San Diego, you have to localise yourself on the Caribbean beach within your own dream . . . An illusion is not something that is unreal. It is something that is real, but is not what it appears to be . . . The world is an illusion . . . It’s not really like that, but there is a reality to the illusory world. What is that reality? Infinite consciousness or love.’"

"[Expressing gratitude rather than asking a question] Rupert says: ‘When your mind is ripe. It’s only necessary to hear one sentence like that. And the sentence doesn’t require a lot of explanation to another person, it might not mean anything at all. But if your mind has been ripened, then you just hear one sentence.’"

"Do feelings such as those moved by music, art, or compassion have a different level of alignment with being compared to feelings moved by anger or delusion? Rupert says: ‘In our language, we don’t really have two different words to distinguish the two types of feeling you describe . . . However, some feelings are filtered through the sense of separation, and as such, arise on behalf of the separate self that we seem to be. And some feelings come as it were, straight out of the heart of being, and are not triggered on account of the sense of separation . . . These are not emotions that come from feeling that you are a separate self. On the contrary, they come because of the absence of the separate sense of separation in you. In other words, they are just expressions of pure being.’"

"Does life consist of continuous moments or discrete, separate moments of experience? Rupert says: ‘When you’re watching a film, there are numerous discrete frames . . . but we don’t experience a movie as numerous discrete, still shots. The movie has a continuity to it . . . Where does the oneness of the movie come from? It’s the screen. It’s the screen that is the continuous element in the always changing images . . . It’s exactly the same with our experience . . . What is the continuous element in all experience? It is consciousness. Consciousness is the screen, the ever present screen, on which the intermittent experiences come and go.’"

"Should a toxic relationship be ended, or could it be transformed as a playground for spiritual growth? Rupert says: ‘No relationship ever stands still. In a relationship, and this is especially true of intimate relationships, you’re either getting closer, or you’re getting further apart . . . The fact that you say, you’ve been in a toxic relationship for five years, that’s a long time to be in a toxic relationship . . . Five years is a long time to spend in conflict. So you may need some new intervention . . . I would encourage you to resolve the situation . . . You have this deep love of truth . . . you want a relationship that is a reflection, a celebration, a reflection of this understanding . . . The relationship should be rooted in love, and the difficulties should not be the major part of the relationship.’"