Introduction
Rupert Spira is an international guru of the “direct path” of meditation. This is a method of spiritual enquiry which is done through talking and writing. He was also a notable English potter and a studio potter who had his works exhibited in public and private collections.
Rupert Spira was born in the year 1960 in London. He took his graduate degree from West Surrey College of Art. He later took an apprenticeship at Wenford Bridge Pottery. Here, he first studied with Henry Hammond and then with Michael Cardew from 1980 to 1982.
Teachings of Rupert Spira
Rupert is also a spiritual teacher and a writer in the branch of non-duality which is also known as Advaita in Sanskrit. His works explore the nature of experience in his essays and texts. As if this is not enough, he has also published several books, and a few DVDs laced with interviews.
Rupert holds regular meetings and discourses in the UK. His retreats in Europe are discussion-worthy. The top echelons of people attend his seminars in the US. He strives to continually investigate the nature of mind and reality through his pottery and his philosophy.
His pottery is a direct result of the artist’s ambition to make elegant and stylish pieces that will be in harmony with nature and human awareness. The following lines will talk about an introduction to perennial non-dual understanding. According to Rupert Spira:
- Enlightenment is the identification of our true nature. It is the essential experience of ‘being aware’ of Awareness itself. This does not share the limits or destiny of the body. This understanding is then integrated into every part of our daily lives.
- God is infinite. The self-aware Consciousness is an unlimited, empty, open field. A field in which all the experience appears, with which all experience is known. We derive all experiences out of this.
- Enlightenment is the identification of our vital nature of ever-present, limitless consciousness. It is not a new experience but rather something which we have overlooked. This occurs due to our fascination with the drama of thoughts, sensations, feelings, and perceptions
- Our suffering revolves around an illusory separate self.
- When we wake up from a dream, we understand that we are not a self in the dream but rather that the entire dream took place in us. Likewise, when we awaken ourselves from the ‘dream’ of everyday life, we find out that consciousness is not in the body. We discover that the entire body, world, and our mind are in consciousness.
- Our experience is real, but the world is formulated by the mind. It made of dead, static matter. Everything appearing outside consciousness is an illusion.
- Painful emotions and feelings are generated and sustained by the sense of being a separate self, which, if investigated, can never be found.
- Conflicts usually arise because other people threaten or fail to fulfill the separate self that we imagine ourselves to be. The true and only self of pure Awareness cannot be diminished or aggrandized by experience and, thus, does not need to be defended or fulfilled.
- Desires which originate from an isolated self and, as a result, are fuelled by a sense of lack cannot be fulfilled by the objective experience.
- Our belief in free will is based on the instinct of the freedom inherent in the essential nature of the mind, pure consciousness.
- Acquisition of objects, substances, activities, and relationships cant bring lasting happiness. It resides in the simple knowing of our own well-being as its true sense.
- Meditation is neither an activity of the mind nor the cessation of the mind.
- Just as the sun is self-luminous, so Awareness is self-aware. It knows itself by simply being itself. Each of us is aware of this experience of being aware. That experience is Awareness’s knowledge of self.
- Self-inquiry starts with an investigation into the essential nature of ‘I’. It ends with the dissolution of the mind in the heart of Awareness. It reveals Awareness itself as the ultimate reality of all experience.