Deepak Chopra is a doctor and well-known author and speaker on integrative medicine and personal transformation, with a keen interest in Rupert’s teaching. He is co-founder of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing.
They start by defining the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, materialism and panpsychism. Rupert then gives a guided meditation to lead the audience to an experiential understanding of non-duality. This includes the non-objective experience of being aware, an investigation into whether Consciousness has any boundaries, and an enquiry into whether there is more than one unlimited awareness.
Rupert explains that the mind superimposes its own limitations on all experience. He uses a dream analogy to illustrate how the mind divides up experience into an apparent subject and a multiplicity of objects. However, experience is always one indivisible field. We are the dreamed subjects of experience through which Consciousness views its own activity. Both subject and object are made out of Consciousness – they have no real, independent existence of their own.
As requested by Deepak, Rupert leads the audience to the experience of being aware of being aware. He explains that this is the only experience that is not constrained by the limitations of the finite mind. There is nothing difficult or mystical about it. That experience, which is available to everyone, is the source of the peace and happiness for which we all long.
Subsequent discussion covers deep sleep, lucid dreaming, Rupert’s John Smith and King Lear metaphor, maya as illusion or creative display, the habit of getting lost in the drama of life, and problems experienced during meditation. Rupert explains that meditation is neither an activity of the mind, nor the cessation of the mind’s activity. It is what we are, not what we do.
