In this conversation, Rupert Spira and Hale Dwoskin, who is the founder and director of Sedona Training Associates, discuss awareness – our true nature – and how it can be explored and expressed both privately and with others.
Rupert shares a saying from the Kashmiri Shaivite tradition: ‘Our true nature is more hidden than the most concealed of things, yet more obvious than the most evident of things’. All spiritual traditions continually point to this paradox; and it is up to practitioners, driven by recognition of their own suffering and the wish for it to end, to discover its truth.
If ‘I’, the sense we all have of being ourself, is the only element in our experience that can never be and has never changed, then that ‘I’ is synonymous with awareness, with that which experiences everything we call ‘our life’.
Rupert suggests a series of questions about awareness: Does it have a size? A shape? An age? A gender? A nationality? A density or weight? In short, does it have any of the qualities or identities we ascribe to ourselves? He says the point of the questions is not to find answers. Rather, it is to pause in the moment after asking a question and before any answer presents itself, and to find openness and spaciousness there.
Each question takes us deeper and gives us a greater firsthand experiential knowledge that our own being has none of those qualities. This, Rupert says, is liberation from the belief that we are confined. For it is not that the discovery liberates us from our limitations so much as it brings about the realisation that the limitations never existed at all. The exploration of our true nature reveals our innate wholeness, or happiness, and is therefore the end of suffering.
You can listen to this episode on the Rupert Spira Podcast
https://rupertspira.libsyn.com/episode-24-hale-dwoskin
If you enjoyed this conversation, we think you'd like Rupert's conversation with Simon Mundie
