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#3947 - Friday, July 9, 2010 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
An Interview with Rupert Spira
Part II
Photo: Rupert Spira
Visit Rupert's website, http://rupertspira.com, for more information about his work.
The following interview was conducted by email [by Paula Marvelly].
Q. Is a teacher necessary?
In almost all cases, yes. For most people, the identity is so intimately and exclusively associated with a body and a mind, that the help of a friend in pointing out our true identity as Awareness, is necessary.
Even for those apparent ones who spontaneously awaken to their true nature without the help of a friend or teacher, the presence of such a friend after this non-objective recognition of our true nature, will greatly facilitate the realignment of the mind, body and world with this new perspective.
Q. How do you regard the people who come to your meetings and what can they expect to get from you?
I see them as I see myself, that is, as Awareness. What can they expect? They can expect to be seen and treated as Awareness, not as a separate entity. This may or may not involve conversation, but that is not really important.
Q. Do you consider that your teaching is the same as traditional Advaita, Neo Advaita, the Direct Path or something else?
In all these paths or teachings the Love and Understanding that is inherent in the knowing of our own Being, is present. How it is expressed varies enormously from one case to another. I identify myself with the Love and Understanding that is at the heart of all true teachings, not with any particular form or expression.
Whatever I hear or see that comes from this Love and Understanding, irrespective of the form in which it is delivered, melts my heart over and over again.
Q. How do you go about teaching what you teach?
If I am taking a meeting I sit in silence and wait for the first thoughts to appear, usually in the form of a short contemplation on the nature of experience.
If a question is asked I go in my imagination to the heart of the question. I become the question. I offer this question to my experience and respond from there.
It is the same with written responses. I feel the question deeply and respond from experience.
Q. What do you tell your students to do (practices, mental preparation, meditation, etc.)?
I do not have a prescription, formula or set practice. However, broadly speaking there are two aspects: firstly, to notice that what we are, is Awareness, that is, to notice that ‘I’ is both ever-present and aware, without limit or location, and secondly that this Awareness is the not just the witness but also simultaneously, the substance of all seeming things.
The belief and the feeling that we are something other than Awareness, that is, a separate independent entity, seems to veil this knowing of our own Being and, as a result, veils the Peace, Happiness and Love that reside there. In our meetings we first know ourselves as impersonal, ever-present Awareness and, taking our stand as that, proceed to investigate and explore the beliefs and feelings that suggest otherwise.
Read the rest of the interview here:
http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/teachers/spira_marvelly1.htm
Eric Chaffee sends the
following...
ZEN SUFI HUT by
Jim Conrad
Tropical Storm Alex passed over us
last weekend so all
day last Sunday it rained and was nice and cool. A
friend agreed that hot tea sounded good and that she'd
fix a pot of soup for supper if I'd tend the campfire.
The topic of discussion was the question of what I,
with my education, experience, and at age 62, am doing
in a dirt-floored Maya hut with pole walls, staring in
the face an old age without money.
But, it was a discussion with long intervals between
words, so I put music on the computer, something to
complement the sound of raindrops on the thatch roof,
of robins singing in the rain, of the campfire
crackling beside us.
It was a kind of meditation music, Zen in structure,
the lone crystalline chime-tone suspended in space,
its trailing, interrelating subtones and harmonics
long-lasting, attended by random taps of dry wood on
dry wood, the emptiness around the taps defining the
shocking instance of each note itself, purifying it. I
said:
The emptiness between this hut's dry wood wall-poles
admits calls of frogs and robins from without. Those
song-sounds are interrelating harmonics and subtones
defining the shocking instance of my being here, and
they purify me.
Then with campfire smoke drifting outside between the
hut's pole walls, dispersing into wet greenness, there
came Sufi music, music evoking the spiritual through
dance. Hypnotically rhythmic dancing melodies easily
and unendingly intertwining and unraveling, caressing
and moving away, always there, more and more, but
always letting go, the climax just beyond. I said:
My own dance of life, always simplifying, always
intense, always letting go, has led me into this hut.
My being here now is the music we hear as it is to us
at this very moment, no past and no future, but is not
its caressing and embrace and the dance itself a
wondrous thing?
Soft, soft the night, without and within, the hut, the
Sufi, the Zen.
*****
Jim Conrad's site:
http://www.backyardnature.net
Trailer for An Extraordinary Absence: Jeff Foster. A new film from Neti Neti Media