Laura opens by asking: ‘What is the Direct Path?’
Rupert replies that it is the path that leads directly to the non-dual understanding underlying all spiritual traditions, which can be summarised thus: ‘Peace and happiness are the nature of our being, and we share our being with everyone and everything’.
He adds that all the complexities and practices that have developed over the millenia are a result of our resistance to the simplicity of this truth. Thus, in response to such perfectly legitimate questions as ‘If happiness is the nature of my being, why don’t I experience it all the time?’, the teaching began and then became more elaborate.
In the Direct Path approach, we start by turning away from the content of experience, the ways we define and conceive of ourselves – ‘I am twenty-seven, forty-three, married, a bus driver, happy, lonely, etc.’ – which are all states of being, qualities that bolster the sense of an individual self, and are subject to change. Instead, we turn towards the fact of being, or awareness. This is the raw, unqualified-by-any-experience ‘I am’ itself.
All experiences are possible, says Rupert. They appear like motion picture images on a screen, ever-changing, while the screen itself – the ‘I am’ – is undisturbed. Our essential being is, as T.S. Eliot expresses it in Laura’s favourite of his poems, the ‘still point in this turning world’.
Laura asks, ‘So what about authenticity?’ Rupert replies that ‘the more deeply we are in touch with our essential self, the more authentic we are’. If someone is dissatisfied with their life, it is because they have lost touch with their true being and have therefore also lost a sense of meaning or purpose in what they do.
The two discuss the pursuit of satisfaction, which leads Rupert to explain that people feel dissatisfied when their work and activities are not an expression of their deepest selves.
Also, searching for happiness in objects, activities, substances or relationships – in anything outside of ourself – is destined for failure. But when seeking comes to an end, happiness is revealed. If we can break the habit of perpetual seeking, starting by, say, pausing before we reach for the fridge or iPhone in order to fill a perceived gap; if we can do so for even just ten minutes, the impulse will eventually die down, and the underlying peace, which has been hidden there all the time, emerges.
Laura says that many people’s first experience when they ‘drop back into themselves’ is anxiety, so Rupert asks her to imagine she’s anxious, and through a series of questions, he takes her more deeply to the sense of being that is describing the experience. This can be done with any feeling-state we find ourselves gripped by, such as depression. He quotes Camus, ‘In the depths of winter, I finally realised there is in me an invincible summer’. Rupert describes those qualities innate to human beings, such as love, joy and intelligence, as sacred.
When Laura says that so much of the spiritual world talks of the great illusion, which seems to lead to nihilism, that nothing matters, Rupert replies that those who equate ‘illusory’ with not being real will understandably want to rebel. But something illusory is real. The world is real; it’s just not what it appears to be. The world appears as ten thousand separate things, made out of what we call matter. Why does it do so? Because we perceive through the lens of our sense faculties, which isolate and distort. Whereas the world in reality is one infinite and indivisible whole. That is what is meant by the great illusion: there is no such thing as ‘matter’ outside and separate from ‘mind’, or ourselves.
Laura ends by asking: ‘What is enlightenment?’
Contrary to popular belief, Rupert says, it is not some extraordinary experience, one that’s bigger and better than the best experience we could imagine. It is simply the recognition of the nature of our being, which we can return to at any point; always present, beneath all experience, and thus not an experience in the way we usually conceive of it.
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