Faith is Quiet Confidence in Your Being

Expressions of gratitude.

How can people with dementia, learning difficulties or Down syndrome express such profound love and wisdom when their mental faculties seem limited? Rupert says: ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they’re closer to being, but I know exactly what you’re referring to. Some 5-year-old children have it as well before their faculties have really condensed a sense of separate self within them. And their minds are still informed by the broader medium of consciousness in which they are immersed. They have this kind of luminosity and poignancy and this ability to say these disarmingly profound and simple things.’

At what point is effort needed versus effortlessness on the spiritual path? Rupert says: ‘Effort is required on the spiritual path for as long as you consider your being to be distinct from God’s being. Once it is clear to you that your being is God’s being, and the only being that lives in you is God’s being, then your efforts have fulfilled their purpose and come to an end.’

Why don’t we sit one hour in perfect silence so we can go to that place where you and your presence can really help us quiet our minds? Rupert says: ‘I don’t plan my meditations. “My presence” is the presence of being. It’s your presence. There’s no difference. Sitting in my presence and sitting in your presence is the same. Don’t sit in complete silence. Sit in complete being, then it won’t matter to you whether the mind is silent or not. Why not just 24/7 in God’s being? That’s what it means to pray without ceasing.’

Do you have a 10-minute way to help young people connect with their being before discussing what they can accomplish in the world? Rupert says: ‘I’m going to send you a link to a preview of the app that I’m making. There are 12 ten-minute introductory meditations, very experiential and no prior knowledge of these matters is required. No belief in anything is required. They just start with your simple direct experience. And it was designed to be comprehensible for a 14-year-old.’

Is being always offering a quiet yes, reassuring us that we’re perfect as we are? Rupert says: ‘Your being is always offering you a quiet yes, you are perfect as you are. Nothing needs to be improved. Nothing needs to be changed. And the more you are in touch with that quiet yes in being, the more your shyness, your social anxiety, your self-deprecation will just fall away without your having to do anything about it. That’s the way this quiet yes of being works from the inside, and it’s the way the community works on us from the outside.’

What’s the place of faith, which isn’t often mentioned in non-duality literature? Rupert says: ‘Faith is normally equated with belief, but it’s something very different. Belief is a faculty of your mind. But what is referred to as faith is a quality of your being. It’s the quiet confidence in your being. You don’t believe in your being – you are your being. That’s faith. The one thing you can have absolute faith in is your being.’

How can I overcome the residual pull to fall back into hating myself and self-criticism? Rupert says: ‘You need the help of friends. You won’t be able to do this on your own. This pull to go back to this self-image you have in yourself is too strong. The teaching by itself will not be enough for you. You need friends. It’s the teacher, the teaching and the community. This community is a very powerful, perhaps the most powerful, vehicle of the understanding.’

Can you talk about the fear that can arise from the subject-object split? Rupert says: ‘The fear doesn’t come from the subject-object split itself. What is inherently problematic is to identify yourself exclusively as the limited subject, because it’s limited, it feels incomplete and vulnerable. So, desire and fear, seeking and resistance are the two fundamental emotions that characterise the apparently separate self. When you discover the true self you are, your being, that fear leaves you because your being cannot be harmed.’

Observation about the Celtic Cross expressing the sweet spot between being and expression of being.

My brother had AIDS that attacked his brain, and his mind wasn’t functioning anymore. But when I told him ‘I love you’, the smile would come. This shows me that being understands and doesn’t need the separate self anymore. When I was a very small child, I suddenly realised I was losing something very important – something I knew that was going away and I couldn’t grab what it was. All my life I’ve wondered what that was. Do other people have this experience? Rupert says: ‘There’s a passage from William Wordsworth: “But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy . . .” You’re talking about that time in your early life when heaven lay around you in your infancy. In other words, you were still in touch with your being. The apparent evidence of sense perception had not obscured the recognition of your own being. But then as you grow older, the evidence of sense perception emerges into the foreground of experience, and your being begins to vanish into the background of your experience. And as a result of that, in the growing boy, there is this pain in his heart, because he’s lost his connection to his source.’

Is Meister Eckhart’s teaching about ‘rebirth in the soul’ referring to self-recognition and being born from divine parents rather than physical ones? Rupert says: ‘You are born not from the bodies of your parents, but you’re born out of God’s being. Your individual soul rises out of the ground of God’s being. It doesn’t come from the physical union of two people. The real core of your being is love. When you go back to your parents, just go back with imperturbable peace and unconditional love.’

Expressions of gratitude.

How can I let my born-again Christian sister know that I’m okay spiritually? Rupert says: ‘To be “born again” means to recognise that the self who you previously believed yourself to be is God’s infinite being. You cannot speak about it so directly with your sister as we do here – you have to demonstrate it rather than explain it. And the way you do so is imperturbable peace on the inside and unconditional love on the outside.’

Expressions of gratitude.

Gratitude for how the teaching helped overcome childhood fear and trauma around the word ‘God’ from Catholic upbringing.

Explains how grace led to acceptance of the word ‘God’ despite atheistic background.

I met someone at this retreat and experienced deep connection and love. But the spiritual work has always been such a deep solo thing for me. I’m fearful of the projection that can happen when you’re in love, where you see completeness in somebody else rather than going for it in yourself. How do you maintain the individual spiritual journey while in a loving relationship without projecting completeness onto the other person? Rupert says: ‘You’re all the face of God in my life. Everyone is the face of God in my life, but my wife, Kyra, is the first face of God, and I treat her as such. Our relationship is grounded in God’s being, and that deeply felt sense that we are the same being,we express that in many different ways in our relationship. Our relationship is grounded in and informed by God’s being. And our life in the world together, our life at home together is a celebration of that, an expression of that, the sharing of that in the whole spectrum of relationship from the tiny, inconsequential acts that constitute most of our day.’ "