The Two Paths of Spirituality

The spiritual path can be broken down into two stages: first a way of discrimination, then a way of love. The path of discrimination involves initially turning away from experience – separating what is essential from what is not. We recognise that thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions are not what we essentially are; they appear and vanish. We extricate ourselves from content, tracing back to pure aware being. The second stage involves turning back towards experience, but now in the light of recognising our true nature. Like watching a film while seeing only the screen, we allow experience to return but see through it to reality. This is the way of love – embracing everything as an appearance of the one infinite reality. The trajectory moves from ‘I am a person’ to ‘I am nothing’, from ‘I am nothing’ to ‘I am everything’, and finally to simply ‘I am’.

"Can experiences like enjoying food, nature, and relationships have value on their own, even though peace and love come from being? Rupert says: ‘If you go deeply into the experiences that you love, what is it that you really love about being with your daughter, or your partner, or being in the forest, or tasting a delicious meal? If you go deeply into that, what you’ll notice that you’re really experiencing or tasting is the joy of being clothed in sensory or perceptual experience . . . These experiences are beginning to lose their veiling power, you don’t get completely lost in them to the exclusion of your knowledge of your self. And that allows you to incorporate these experiences in your love of truth.’"

"Is vipassana meditation a dualistic approach compared to the non-dual path? Rupert says: ‘I wouldn’t say that vipassana is a dualistic path. But it’s perhaps less direct than the Direct Path. And I don’t mean to imply any hierarchy there or any value judgement, both paths are equally valid . . . If you’re focusing your attention on the breath, you’re still in the subject-object relationship . . . And that, as you rightly say, is a very good preparation to turn your attention around away from your breath and investigate the nature of the mind that is focused on it.’"

"If all time is happening now, why do past and future experiences have such different qualities? Rupert says: ‘Imagine a novel, and you’re a character in the novel . . . Imagine that all the words merge into one black dot. The entire content of the novel is contained in that black dot. But you can’t read the novel, because your perceiving faculties are not sufficiently fine to penetrate the darkness of this dot . . . For your mind to access the contents of that point, you need to expand it and spread it out . . . You find yourself roughly in the middle of the novel, when half of it is the past and the other half of it’s the future. That’s just the way your mind can organise the content, but the past and the future don’t really exist . . . Think of the future not as a means of acquiring happiness, but a means of expressing the happiness you feel now.’"

"How do you reconcile moments of deep recognition with times when that recognition seems absent? Rupert says: ‘What Ramana Maharshi refers to as Jnana, this knowledge of your self, the recognition of the nature of your being, it takes time to stabilise in one’s experience. Why? Because what he refers to as our vasanas, our tendencies, our habits that we’ve been rehearsing for years, for decades, they don’t just disappear overnight . . . All these habits, the way we think and feel, and indeed, the way we act, perceive and relate, they take time to realign themselves with our recognition of our being.’"

"How should we approach motivation and action when not feeling anchored in being or aligned with values? Rupert says: ‘You’re right to want the work you do to be deeply aligned with your core values. You don’t want your work to express the fears and the neuroses and the insecurities of the ego or the separate self . . . So, if you don’t feel these qualities at a particular time in your life or period of the day, don’t make decisions about your future career . . . You want your work to come from somewhere deeper in you, your core values, which are in turn based on the inherent qualities of your being.’"

"What can I do with the emptiness I feel after my only son died suddenly ten days ago? Rupert says: ‘It’s completely natural to be at a loss. This event is so monumental for you, that nothing you could do with your mind could contain it or control it. It’s just too big for your mind to encompass, let alone manage or control . . . I recommend you don’t practise anything now. You don’t impose a practice on yourself. You just allow yourself to feel the intensity of emotions that are flowing through you, with all the questions that accompany that . . . Don’t try and meditate those feelings away. Don’t try and medicate your experience with meditation . . . It’s more the way of surrender for you now, just openness, allowing. If anything at all, just surrender.’"

"Why do we sometimes perceive reality with such striking beauty? Rupert says: ‘When you experience beauty, what you’re actually experiencing at that moment, you are seeing reality as it truly is. When you’re looking at a mountain or listening to a piece of music, the subject-object relationship that enables you to have that experience, collapses, or at least it loses its veiling power, and in spite of the subject-object relationship, you taste reality as it is . . . The subject-object relationship that enables that experience to be known, it becomes, as it were, transparent, and its reality shines through. And that shining of reality is the experience of beauty or love . . . The mountain, or the tree, or the bowl, it shines first with its reality, being. And only after that do its perceived qualities, color, shape, form, and so on, arise.’"

"How can I maintain unconditional love when my child doesn’t show me love or care? Rupert says: ‘It’s a very tough sadhana or practice for you to feel that those closest to you, your children, are not loving . . . That’s your task . . . If you manage to feel love for your children in spite of their lack of care, I think you’ll find it will have an effect on them . . . You have to give up trying to change your daughter. Just give up wanting her to be different in any way, wanting her to be loving, wanting her to be caring, wanting her to be interested . . . You have to just be unconditionally loving towards her. No demands, no expectations, no regrets . . . Just let her go. Love her unconditionally, not because of the way she behaves, but because of who she is . . . As infinite being.’"

"Can you comment on my meditation experience that nothing is really finite? Rupert says: ‘All things are finite. However, things are not really ‘things’. The reality of a thing, which is in fact, all there is to a thing, is not finite . . . An object is not composed partly of its reality, pure being, and partly of its perceived qualities. It’s just composed of one thing, its being, infinite being . . . The things, the objects, are just the way infinite being appears . . . And as all there is, is infinite being, truly, there are no temporary finite things or beings or objects . . . That’s the power of a thought that comes from understanding.’"

"What do we listen to awareness with, and are synchronicities in our experience designed by something to guide us? Rupert says: ‘They are indications of the intimate correspondence between your own mind on the inside, and nature on the outside, a beautiful correspondence between the inner and the outer. Normally, we think the two are separate – what takes place in the world is separate from what goes on the inside . . . Then something [extraordinary] happens . . . three or four times in a row, just to make sure you get the message, just to show you that the deep connection between the inside and the outside. It’s not designed for that reason. It’s just a consequence of the fact that your mind and nature are deeply connected. Why? Because they’re the same system – the inner and outer aspects of the same system.’"

"How can I reconcile different teachings about the ‘I am’ when some call it the highest truth and others call it an illusion? Rupert says: ‘Ramana Maharshi uses the term “I am” in the same way that I do, as the highest truth. Nisargadatta says it’s the seed of ignorance. Is it that one of them is right and one is wrong? No . . . They’re seeing it from two different points of view . . . If reality, the infinite, the One, were able to say something about itself, all it would say is “I am” . . . Reality’s experience of itself must be the only true experience of reality . . . Now, why did Nisargadatta say that the I am was a seed of ignorance? Because in order to express the “I am”, the infinite must first have localised itself or seem to have localised itself as a finite mind . . . Both points of view are true, relative to the perspective from which they are spoken.’"