Why Does Understanding Feel Both Liberating and Nihilistic?

I’m a therapist wrestling with how liberating this understanding feels, yet there’s also a nihilistic side emerging. When you say there’s no purpose for infinite consciousness manifesting, it leads me to wonder: if a client asked why not just kill themselves to liberate into being, what would I say? There seems to be both death and liberation required in letting go of the separate self. Rupert says: ‘Did I ever say it doesn’t matter? At the level of our everyday lives, it does matter. For the separate self that we seem to be, there is a purpose. Their primary purpose is to recognise who they truly are. Their secondary purpose would be to express the implications of that recognition in the world. If we are suffering, built into the experience of suffering is the impulse to seek relief from it. There’s no guarantee that ending your life will put an end to your mind. If you want to find peace, you have to go to your being. Being is inherently free of suffering. Suffering exists in your mind. The best thing you could give your patients is the recognition that their being is free of sorrow. Yes, there is a death or dissolution of the apparently temporary finite self, and with it, the feelings that rely on it. The feeling of sorrow, shame or guilt can only arise if there’s a self for them to be attached to. So, if that self is seen to be an illusion, then all its train of feelings dissolve with it.’

From event 07 - 14 September, 2025 Seven-Day Retreat at Mandali, 7–14 September 2025 – ‘Meister Eckhart and the Love of God’

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