The Price the Infinite Pays

"If staying in the infinite brings complete happiness with no need for anything, when do we follow personal desires – to build a business, learn a language, have a child? How do we balance abiding in being with pursuing individual goals? Rupert says: ‘You follow those desires when their impulse is impersonal – when they come from love or understanding. The expression is by definition personal because it comes through your particular body-mind, but the impulse arises in service of love rather than a personal self. There’s a story of Muhammad, who once wanted to be a famous orator for egoic reasons. After recognising God’s being as his own, he lost all desire to do anything. But God said: you developed those skills – now I’m going to use you to speak about me. So, the skills remained but were no longer used in service of the ego. They were used in service of God’s love and understanding.’"

"If the infinite is complete in itself, why do we exist? What is the purpose of our being here? Rupert says: ‘From the point of view of the infinite, your purpose is to provide the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and tactile sensations through which the infinite can manifest its potential in form. You are the vehicle of manifestation. From your point of view as an individual, you have just two purposes: first, to discover who you truly are – because without this you won’t find peace and cannot be of real service to humanity – and second, to express that knowledge in your life in whatever way feels right for you. There are almost as many ways of expressing love and understanding as there are individual people.’"

"If happiness is the nature of our being, why do we have to make an effort to find it? Shouldn’t it simply be present without any practice? Rupert says: ‘You are absolutely right – if happiness is the nature of being, we shouldn’t have to make an effort to be happy, just as we don’t make an effort simply to be. But our innate happiness has been clouded over by thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions. We have become so mixed up in our experience that although we are still essentially our being, and our being is essentially peaceful, we are not in touch with that peace. It’s like an actor, John Smith, who is inherently happy but feels miserable when lost in playing King Lear. King Lear must trace his way back through the layers of character to rediscover he is John Smith. That’s why we must make an effort to recover our innate happiness.’"

"I feel miserable, scared and lonely most of the time. I had an expansive state years ago, but since then I’ve been isolated in suburban Washington, DC with no friends or community nearby. Everything I’ve tried – meditation, various activities – nothing works anymore. How do I get out of this? Rupert says: ‘Look who you’re surrounded by here. You’ve been to retreats at all over – you have incredible friends around the world. Why deny yourself access to them by superimposing the belief “I can’t connect on the phone”? You just cut yourself off. Who says you can’t connect? Start with WhatsApp groups – there are dozens of them from these retreat communities. You can fly anywhere for free. You’re doing this to yourself – no one else is doing it to you. You’re a lovable guy. Don’t shut yourself off. Just open yourself and people will come forward. But you have to be open.’"

"You said to someone that they’ve never been hurt. The infinite part of us has never experienced disease, entropy or any of the terrible things that happen to the separate self. How do we become so suffused in the infinite that ageing, death and suffering have less of a hold on us? Rupert says: ‘Close your eyes. Whatever you essentially are is fully present now – you don’t need to refer to memory. This is the first experience you’ve ever had. Do you have a body? No. An age? No. A gender? No. A nationality? No. A history? No. Have you ever been hurt? No. Is anything missing? No. That’s the rainbow body. You are free from sorrow, trauma, pain, history. And how long did it take to access? Twenty seconds. This knowledge of yourself – is it ever not available to you? It’s always there. At any moment of your life, if you pause and want access to this knowledge, it will never be withheld from you.’"

"A professor once told me “happiness is for turnips.” Here the guidance is to look inside for happiness. But if every young person simply looked inward and found happiness, what happens to everything else? Is there a balance between being and becoming, and how does one attain it? Rupert says: ‘Becoming is always on the horizontal line of time; being is the vertical dimension, the ever-present now. If we regularly interpose pauses in our experience and sink down into being, that peace begins to stay with us when we return to the horizontal flow. Desires get a bad reputation because the ego uses them to seek fulfilment from a sense of lack. But there’s another category of desire that doesn’t come from lack – it comes from fullness. Have you not felt happy and peaceful, and from that called a friend to share dinner or a walk? That desire arises from the fullness of being. It’s the means of bringing happiness out into the world, in service of love and understanding rather than the ego.’"

"When you asked a previous participant questions about standing as awareness, she gave the answers you were expecting. But if you’d asked me the same questions, I think I would have given different answers. I’m not sure I can access that perspective without pretending. Rupert says: ‘You’ve acknowledged your being is present and accessible now – you don’t need to refer to your past. So I’m just helping you not to refer to the past. This is the first experience you’ve ever had. How old are you? You had to refer to memory – that answer’s invalid. Do you now experience having an age? No. A gender? No. A name? No. A colour? No. A nationality? No. A size or shape? No. Are you located anywhere? No. Try to describe your experience of yourself. You said “nothing” – you’re not a thing, that’s right. But you’re present and aware. That’s it, Esther. You weren’t faking. You were referring to yourself – not your memory, not your narrative, not your belief. Yourself.’"

"During the morning meditations, as I sank deeper into being, heat began to rise through my core and into my head. I felt very expansive, almost suspended. Sounds passed straight through me with no resistance. It happened twice, and each time it subsided, the separate self seemed to take back over. Could you offer some thoughts on this? Rupert says: ‘The separate self is a belief and a feeling, but it has its counterpart in the body as tension or contraction. When you sink into being in these meditations, that contraction relaxes – you feel less constricted, more expansive. Sometimes there’s a corresponding release in the body. In you, it expresses as heat rising. In others it may be tears, laughter, shaking, or sometimes more dramatic movements. These are all examples of the tension in the body – the bodily location of separation – relaxing and expanding as you sink more deeply into being.’"

"I’ve experienced a stronger knowing of love this week than ever before. But I still don’t understand why that love would manifest a world with such extreme suffering – the Holocaust, the killing fields in Cambodia. Not just suffering that leads to growth, but truly horrific events. Rupert says: ‘In order to manifest its potential, the infinite must localise itself as a finite mind through whose perceiving faculties it can perceive itself as the world. But this comes at a price – it must overlook or forget itself. As a result, it loses touch with its innate peace and seems to become a temporary, finite self whose overriding emotions are desire and fear. Desire because it feels incomplete and seeks fulfilment; fear because it feels vulnerable and must defend its illusory existence. When this forgetting is very deep and a mind is almost completely impervious to its reality, that belief in separation enables behaviour towards others that one would never direct towards oneself.’"

"I’ve experienced a stronger knowing of love this week than ever before. But I still don’t understand why that love would manifest a world with such extreme suffering – the Holocaust, the killing fields in Cambodia. Not just suffering that leads to growth, but truly horrific events. Rupert says: ‘In order to manifest its potential, the infinite must localise itself as a finite mind through whose perceiving faculties it can perceive itself as the world. But this comes at a price – it must overlook or forget itself. As a result, it loses touch with its innate peace and seems to become a temporary, finite self whose overriding emotions are desire and fear. Desire because it feels incomplete and seeks fulfilment; fear because it feels vulnerable and must defend its illusory existence. When this forgetting is very deep and a mind is almost completely impervious to its reality, that belief in separation enables behaviour towards others that one would never direct towards oneself.’"

"It seems we’re not all equal in manifestation. I could do something nasty to someone else and they receive the consequences of my forgetting – even if they’re a two-year-old who didn’t deserve anything. Why did I get to be here while others are on the front line in Ukraine? Why are things so unequal? Rupert says: ‘The traditional response is past lives – that you reap in this life what you sowed in previous ones. I find that profoundly unsatisfactory. It suggests a child who is abused somehow deserves it because of past actions. I would far rather say: at the level of manifestation, things are not equal. Why that is, I don’t know. Why do two siblings raised by the same parents go off in completely different trajectories – one deeply interested in these matters and happy, the other rejecting them and miserable? What accounts for that? I don’t know.’"

"Experientially, love feels different with different people – with my child, my partner, a stranger. Even with the same person it fluctuates. How is this different from the love you speak about, from God’s love? Rupert says: ‘You’re associating love with a feeling, an emotion that fluctuates. When I speak of love, I mean the felt recognition that you share your being with someone – not an emotion, but an acknowledgement that what the other person is at the deepest level is what you are. Shakespeare understood: “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” If your relationship comes unstuck and you separate, the love does not change. You may need boundaries, you may not smile sweetly anymore, but in your heart the love doesn’t waver. Likes and dislikes belong to the mind – it’s natural to prefer some people. But love is deeper: the recognition that beneath the mind, we are one being.’"

"When you love someone and that’s solid, and you can access your own happiness independent of circumstances, how do you make a decision to leave a relationship? Rupert says: ‘If you leave, you want to leave out of love and understanding, not out of hostility and animosity. My personal view – and this is general, not individual advice – is that if you’re in a relationship, especially a long-term one, you owe it to your partner to try, and to try again, and to try again. To do everything you possibly can to salvage the relationship and bring back the love that presumably brought you together. Only then, if you’ve tried everything at least three times, can you say you’ve given everything, looked at it from all possible points of view, taken your time. And if it still doesn’t work, that would be a place possibly to separate from.’"

"My question is about creativity. My tendency when I get involved in any creative project is to become obsessively thinking about it twenty-four hours a day. I would love to enjoy my creativity without my mind becoming so involved. Rupert says: ‘Creativity requires your mind – it’s the vehicle that manifests your creativity. Many artists tend to be a little obsessive-compulsive because they feel this energy inside them, they can barely contain. It keeps them up at night, wakes them at three in the morning. Creativity has an impersonal source – it’s the infinite flowing through your veins, wanting to give birth to itself in some new form. It’s a lot for a body-mind to handle. Being an artist is a kind of sacrifice – you have to sacrifice your body-mind for a cause bigger than itself. Your faculties and skills are being used in the service of love and understanding, an impersonal force way bigger than the body-mind can really contain.’"

"I suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I’d describe myself as an artistic person – always quite good at painting, drawing, music. But I’ve got chronic pain, nerve pain in my arm. I can’t play guitar anymore. That creative force is still within, and it drives me crazy when those outlets are taken away. Rupert says: ‘Use your faculties, whatever they are, in service of this energy you feel pulsating through your body. Whatever your faculties are, use them to express this energy. There was a painter called Sargy Mann who went slowly blind but never considered his blindness a handicap – he would feel his wife sitting in a chair and paint what he felt. My mother was the same; as she lost her sight and developed Alzheimer’s, she made exquisite little drawings. And there’s the true story in the book and movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – someone completely paralysed who could only blink one eye, yet wrote a beautiful book. Use whatever faculties you have to express love and understanding.’"

"How does one deal with times when the non-dual understanding seems discordant with other spiritual approaches? I have origins in Catholicism but have lived close to people with this understanding. I can ride two horses comfortably most of the time, but recently someone I love faced unspeakable cruelty. At that point, being attuned to ‘an infinite being that knows nothing of the material world’ wasn’t where I needed to be – I needed to pray for a miracle. Rupert says: ‘It might surprise you to know that I sometimes pray to God in the way you’ve just suggested. I deeply feel that God doesn’t know me as an individual because there is no individual me apart from God’s being. Yet there are times when I have knowingly come down from that understanding and prayed from the perspective of a person – for something I felt would bring love and understanding into the world. It’s possible to have the highest non-dual understanding and yet, in particular moments, be humble enough to take the position of a finite mind and pray to God as that finite mind. I find both approaches completely compatible.’"

"Can we say that we are the activity of consciousness refining itself so that it doesn’t pay the price of forgetting while it enters manifestation? Rupert says: ‘Yes, and we are the proof of that. Imagine if what we have here was a microcosm of our civilisation – what kind of civilisation we would have. As for whether this refinement would eventually end manifestation itself – no, I wouldn’t go that far. There’s no need for manifestation to end. Even if everyone on earth were to recognise their true nature, manifestation wouldn’t come to an end. The purpose of a finite mind is to enable the infinite to unfold the potential within it. And there is, by definition, endless potential within it. So no, I don’t see manifestation coming to an end.’"