Your Being Is Never Tarnished by Experience

"How should I understand and respond to situations where I see acts that violate love, such as a man beating his dog? Rupert says: ‘Love is the nature of reality, love is the absence of separation, the absence of otherness . . . if you’re walking down the street, and you see an action that violates love, then you may want to respond to that . . . You do care if you see somebody beating their dog. Why? Because deep inside you, you feel that the truth, that love is being violated . . . Sometimes in the non-dual teaching, people conflate illusion with unreality. They think that something that is an illusion is something that is unreal. This is a mistake. Nothing is unreal . . . All illusions have a reality to them.’"

See that your being is constantly present behind and pervading all your experience, though typically overlooked in favour of more demanding aspects like thoughts and feelings. Just soften your attention from content and return to the simple fact of being. Your sense of personhood is a mixture of essential being plus experiential content – this amalgam creates the feeling of being a temporary, finite, separate self. In reality, being never truly acquires the characteristics of experience. Like a crystal that appears coloured by nearby objects while remaining transparent, your being only seems conditioned by experience while always remaining pure, unlimited, and at peace. When Zen asks ‘Who are you before you were born?’ or Christianity states ‘Before Abraham was, I am’, they provoke recognition of your essential nature – not as it might become after meditation, but as it already is. Your being has never been damaged or sickened, and therefore needs no purification or perfection.

"What is the difference between beauty and pleasure, and who is the one who enjoys or delights in beauty? Rupert says: ‘The experience of beauty is the collapse of the subject-object relationship. Beauty is what consciousness tastes like to itself. It’s not an experience that a finite mind or a separate self has, although it may be precipitated by a perception that takes place in subject-object relationships . . . Some perceptions have this power in them to collapse the subject-object relationship and then reality in that timeless moment shines as it is . . . Pleasure is an experience that a finite mind has, the experience of a sensation . . . When you experience pleasure, the seeking activity of the mind comes briefly to an end, and in that ending of the seeking activity of the mind, the mind briefly collapses . . . In that extinction of the mind, your true nature of joy shines.’"

"What does it mean when you say the world is half perception, half creation? Rupert says: ‘When you look at white snow, imagine you’ve got contact lenses on and your contact lenses are tinted orange. But you’ve been wearing contact lenses all your life, so you’ve forgotten that you’re wearing contact lenses . . . So you don’t actually see white snow, you see orange snow . . . It’s a mixture of the white snow, plus the orange filter through which you perceive it . . . The appearance of the world is created by your perceiving faculties . . . Corresponding with those faculties, the world appears to you as sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells . . . The reality of the world . . . exists prior to perception and independent of its being perceived . . . Our perceiving faculties confer their qualities on the world . . . We half create the world, and we half perceive what’s really there, namely the activity of infinite consciousness.’"

"How can the finite mind experience the infinite when they seem incompatible? Rupert says: ‘The finite can’t see the infinite as it truly is. For the same reason that if you’re wearing orange contact lenses, you can’t see the snow as it is . . . When the finite mind looks at the world, we are seeing reality, because reality is all there is . . . But we’re not seeing reality as it is in and of itself. We’re seeing how reality presents itself to a finite mind . . . There is one experience that is not experienced through the faculty of either thought or perception, and that is the awareness of being . . . It is therefore the only experience there is that gives us direct access to reality.’"

"How can I resolve the inner push and pull between wanting to retreat from the world and wanting to enjoy it without fear? Rupert says: ‘Don’t see these two impulses in you in opposition to one another. In fact, it’s the opposite, the more deeply you go inwards in meditation and taste the nature of your being, the more you’ll find yourself able to go out into the world and feel confident and relaxed in your activities and relationships . . . You’ll go back out into the world established in your being as your being, no longer seeking validation or approval from the world . . . This quiet confidence will begin to build in you which will enable you to navigate the world easily.’"

"How can I reconcile that knowing appears expanded, yet I still feel localised and separate from it? Rupert says: ‘Because you know the world or perceive the world through your perceiving faculties, through the faculties of sight, and hearing, and smelling and tasting, you feel that this knowing is located inside your head. It perceives through your perceiving faculties, but it’s not located in your perceiving faculties . . . What you essentially are is what everyone and everything essentially is. . . . Try to feel that you share your being with everyone and everything. It’s easier experientially than understanding that consciousness is the nature of the world.’"

"Is the consciousness in me the same consciousness that is in everyone else? Rupert says: ‘The space in your room seems to be a temporary finite limited space, and the space in my room seems to be a temporary finite limited space . . . But we all know there’s just one vast unlimited indivisible physical space in the universe. It’s exactly the same – the consciousness with which you know your experience and the consciousness with which I know my experience . . . seems to be a separate individual finite consciousness. But I would suggest it’s just one consciousness, the same consciousness looking as it were through numerous minds, looking out at the world through numerous eyes.’"

"Can you explain the Progressive Path, Direct Path, and Pathless Path, and do we need to choose just one? Rupert says: ‘All the practices that anybody in whatever tradition has ever engaged in . . . are really one of these three essential pathways: the Progressive Path, the Direct Path and the Pathless Path . . . The Progressive Path, you progress to your true nature via an object of experience in this case, a sensation in the body. If you were to ask yourself, “what is it that is aware of my experience?”, that’s the Direct Path . . . The Pathless Path, we just stand as being . . . You could just choose one of the paths and stay on it, or you can use them progressively and go from one to another.’"

"How can I experience naked pure being unmediated by the mind? Rupert says: ‘Your being is present 24/7 . . . But where does this feeling of existence come from? Did you derive it from your thoughts? . . . What you really mean when you say “I am” is “I know that I am”. Which is another way of saying “I am aware of being” . . . Being would not say “I am peaceful”, or “I am happiness”, or “I am eternal” or “I am infinite”. That’s what the mind says about being . . . The mind says that being is formless because it’s used to experiencing form. All being would say about itself is “I am”. There are no qualities there.’"

"Does consciousness include the realm where spirits or the deceased might exist? Rupert says: ‘Our waking-state experience is just a narrow slither of reality . . . When we fall asleep at night, the tight parameters of the mind that we experience in the waking state soften and expand . . . In the dreaming state, we have access to a realm of the mind that we don’t have access to under normal circumstances in the waking state . . . Some minds are particularly sensitive, transparent, porous; they may be configured slightly differently from most people’s minds, and this makes them susceptible or available to content in the broader medium of mind.’"

"If we become one with consciousness after death, where is karma stored until rebirth? Rupert says: ‘When you die, you don’t become one with consciousness . . . Your seemingly individual consciousness is already the vast consciousness, the only consciousness there is . . . Imagine your apparently individual existence is like a wave on the ocean . . . When that wave vanishes, the energies that constituted the particular form of the wave are now dispersed into the ocean . . . They continue to exist as ripples in the ocean long after the wave has disappeared . . . Those ripples won’t necessarily lose their form completely. Some of them will coalesce again and form the basis of a new wave . . . You – who you truly are – does not accrue any karma.’"

"How do I transition from my current devotional practice to a more effortless abiding as being? Rupert says: ‘What you describe is very natural . . . For decades you’ve been giving your attention exclusively to the content of your experience, and now you’ve had this taste of your being and you’ve tasted its innate peace and you want to go back there . . . There’s this back and forth going on and that’s inevitable, it’s natural . . . Each time you’re drawn back to your being, you weaken the power that your experience has; it gets easier and easier . . . until after a while you notice that you’re lost in the content of experience . . . and you just go quietly back to your being.’"