41 Quotes by Rupert Spira

I am that which knows or is aware of all experience, but I am not myself an experience. I am aware of thoughts but am not myself a thought; I am aware of feelings and sensations but am not myself a feeling or sensation; I am aware of perceptions but am not myself a perception. Whatever the content of experience, I know or am aware of it. Thus, knowing or being aware is the essential element in all knowledge, the common factor in all experience.

The apparent separation of experience into two essential parts is similar to imagining that a screen is divided in two when two images appear on it side by side. If thinking imagines that the screen is only contained in only one of the images, then thinking will also have to imagine a substance that is ‘not the screen’, out of which the second image is made.

However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply other names for our self.

In this exploration the deeper layers, such as feelings of fear, guilt, shame, inadequacy, unlovableness, etc. are allowed to surface without resistance or agenda and slowly reveal the sense of separation that lies at their heart.

And this ‘knowing’ is our self, aware presence. In other words, all that is ever experienced is our self knowing itself, awareness aware of awareness.

See clearly that we have no knowledge of our self ever having been born, changing, evolving, growing up or growing old and that we can never have the experience of death.

In fact, we don’t know objects; we just know ‘knowing’. And who is it that knows ‘knowing’? ‘Knowing’ is not known by something or someone outside or other than itself. ‘Knowing’ is known by ‘knowing’. In other words, all that is experienced in the experience of an object, other or world is ‘knowing’.

It is impossible to experience the appearance of awareness. We are that awareness to which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no experience that we, awareness, are born.

Understanding is the dissolution of the mind into its support, into its ground. It is the experience of Consciousness knowing itself, returning to itself knowingly.