The Resonance of Being

"How do I harmonise the universal yes of awareness with the necessary boundaries the mind must maintain? I struggle with this – awareness feels loving, always allowing, yet there are times when setting boundaries feels cold or harsh, like when parenting requires firmness. Rupert says: ‘These two elements of our experience are not incompatible. On the contrary, they’re complementary. If you take your stand as the presence of awareness, what someone says to you doesn’t hurt you. You hear it, it passes through you. You don’t get upset by it, and therefore you do not withdraw from them, nor do you attack them. You remain open. That’s the universal yes. But at a relative level, you also recognise behaviour that is not consistent with love and understanding. And as a result, you are able to hold up a boundary. You’re not hurt by it. In other words, you don’t withdraw or attack. You remain present, but you are able to say that you’re not willing to be abused or violated. A cold no is sometimes necessary. It’s not necessarily unloving, and a warm yes is not necessarily loving. A warm yes sometimes comes from fear or collapse. A cold no sometimes comes from love.’"

I still carry guilt and shame about times I was unskillful with my son, when I was overly reactive and harsh. How do I free myself from this regret? Rupert says: ‘Are there any parents here who do not regret at some stage and numerous times during your children’s upbringing behaving in a way that was unloving? We all just become parents and learn. We practise on our children. It’s natural. We do our best. If you want your relationship with your son to grow up and mature, you have to do your part. You have to free yourself from your guilt, and your shame, and your regret. He will – without your having to explain – feel the difference in you. He wants you to be free. That’s the best thing you could do for your son'.

"In a recent essay you wrote, ‘The art of meditation is simply to be aware of being when experience is absent.’ Can you explain what you mean by this? Rupert says: ‘The ultimate meditation is simply the awareness of being in the absence of experience, or prior to experience, the pure experience “I am”. The ultimate meditation or prayer is to abide as that, without allowing your being to be mixed with the content of your thoughts, without allowing the “I am” to become “I am afraid”, or “I am agitated”, or I am lonely. Just the pure “I am”. The art of meditation is to abide in your being, the pure experience of being without paying attention to the content of experience. The art of everyday life is then to go back to the content of experience but to remain in touch with being. So, when we finish meditating, we don’t really finish meditating.’"

"Bernardo Kastrup said we experience a primordial lack always. You might not agree with that. Could it be that this primordial lack happens when we begin this existence as individuals? Rupert says: ‘The primordial sense of lack is one of the defining emotions of the apparently separate self. When the infinite seems to become a temporary, finite mind, it becomes a fragment. It’s no longer the whole. And as a fragment it is incomplete, and as an apparently incomplete self, it is always seeking to complete itself. Once consciousness seems to have contracted and become a finite mind, it is defined by this existential sense of lack and the seeking that accompanies it. As long as you feel that you’re a temporary, finite mind, a separate self, you experience this sense of lack and the other overriding emotion that defines the apparently separate self, the fear of death. These are the two existential emotions. But I would suggest that Bernardo didn’t really mean always. Everybody without exception experiences times in their life when they are relieved of the sense of lack and touch their true nature and experience its innate peace.’"

"I work at a jail providing medical care. Is reconnecting to the ‘I am’ the ultimate remedy for addiction and the wounds I see there? How do I communicate this to people who may be too agitated to even sit still? Rupert says: ‘You can understand that going directly to being is the ultimate healing for that trauma, their pain, their sorrow, their addictive behaviours. But that doesn’t mean that you’re going to go into the jail and give a meditation like I gave this morning, because it would be almost certain to be out of reach for them. So, you have to go more slowly, take more progressive steps. You may have to do something to calm down their nervous system. Some people are so agitated that they couldn’t even sit still for a minute. So, you’d have to make them feel safe, make them trust you. Your job’s more difficult in a way. They’re probably predisposed against what you have to say. You’ll have to find skillful ways of opening the door. The most important thing is that you deeply feel their innocence, the purity of their being that has never been sullied or tarnished by anything they may have done. They will feel your attitude towards them.’"

"You said this morning that enlightenment is the most ordinary thing, yet people like Ramana Maharshi and Thích Quảng Đức seem to exhibit superhuman equanimity. Isn’t there still a distinction between someone permanently established in being and someone who touches it occasionally? Rupert says: ‘There is a difference between temporarily relaxing the focus of one’s attention and going back to being, briefly tasting its innate peace and then being drawn out again into experience, and being permanently or almost permanently established in being, where experience has lost its power over you. So yes, there is a difference between remaining in touch with being all the time as opposed to visiting it temporarily. But the actual being that we are speaking about is the same, and the method of going there is the same. I think it’s desirable to remain in being as being all the time. But these extraordinary feats don’t impress me. To me, the signs are imperturbable peace on the inside and unconditional love on the outside. Someone could be so-called enlightened and just lead a very ordinary, regular life as a bus driver or a primary school teacher. The people closest to such a person would notice that they were always at peace and always joyful for no reason and loved everybody unconditionally.’"

"You mention how ordinary this sense of being is, yet Anandamayi Ma was known for going into ecstatic rapture for hours or days. Is it just a deepening of being, or is it something else? Rupert says: ‘Sometimes this recognition of one’s true nature is accompanied by unusual signs in the mind and the body. For some people, like Ramakrishna and Anandamayi Ma and Jalaluddin Rumi, this understanding expresses itself in this ecstatic way. But there are plenty of people that we read about in the literature that didn’t express this understanding in this ecstatic way, that didn’t show extraordinary signs in the mind and the body. It was much quieter. Krishnamurti was an example of such a person. There are also plenty of people who, I would suggest, may not have been established in their true nature but were still susceptible to these ecstatic states. And plenty of people who didn’t have any such signs but were still quietly established in their true nature. I think most people fall into that category, just quiet beacons in their local community.’"

"What about the hard problem of consciousness – how inanimate matter gives rise to conscious experience? Rupert says: ‘The hard problem of consciousness is a moot question. It’s like a series of very intelligent people in a dream going to a conference and wondering how the matter in their world gives rise to conscious experience. And then the dreamer wakes up and realises there was no matter in the dream world. There isn’t any matter. There isn’t dead, inert stuff called matter. The only stuff there is, the ontological primitive, is consciousness. So the question of how something other than consciousness gives rise to consciousness doesn’t make sense. What’s a much more interesting question is the hard problem of matter – how what seems to be material stuff arises in consciousness. How this apparently physical universe, which appears in consciousness and is made of consciousness and is known by consciousness, seems to be dead, inert stuff called matter. Now that is interesting.’"

"I’m organising meetings bringing together people from different spiritual paths – yoga, Christian mysticism, Buddhism. What advice do you have for facilitating these conversations? Rupert says: ‘Try to communicate to all the people from these different traditions that both the origin and the final destiny of their lineage and the practices that they elaborate is to abide in being as being, and to recognise its inherent peace and its shared nature. That is what Gurdjieff’s people call self-remembering. That’s what the Christian mystics call the practice of the presence of God. That’s what the Buddhists call your Buddha nature. That’s what the Hindus mean when they say tat tvam asi, ‘thou art that’. All these traditions arise from and ultimately lead to this simple recognition: peace and happiness are the nature of your being, and you share your being with everyone and everything. Your job as a facilitator would be to subtly steer the conversation in that direction, to define the common golden thread, the heart of each tradition, which is this simple understanding of the nature of being.’"

"How do I reconcile the yin and yang symbol, which represents the tension of opposites, with non-duality? Rupert says: ‘At the level of mind, there’s the push and the pull, there’s the tension of the opposites. There’s black and white, and right and wrong, and good and bad. At the level of the mind, pleasure and pain and desire and resistance. But not in pure being. In pure being there’s just pure being. There’s no opposite to pure being.’"

"With AI advancing beyond PhD-level intelligence, won’t computers eventually become conscious of being conscious? Rupert says: ‘It will never become conscious. Nothing can become conscious. Only consciousness is conscious. There is nothing else present to be conscious. The whole question about whether a computer will become conscious is moot. It’s based on the belief that bodies are conscious. If it were true that consciousness were an attribute of the body made out of matter, then it would be possible to build an artificial body called a computer that also had consciousness as an attribute. But it’s based on a misunderstanding, namely that the body is conscious. It’s not. Consciousness is conscious. Nothing other than consciousness is conscious, and there is nothing other than consciousness that could be conscious. Just because something appears in consciousness and is made of consciousness doesn’t mean that that entity is self-conscious.’"

"I’m curious about talents and gifts. Some of us seem to have natural abilities that culture magnifies. How do we navigate this without feeding ego? Rupert says: ‘Your talents and gifts are neutral. They can be used in the service of love and understanding. They can be used in the service of the sense of separation. You have certain talents and interests and a certain level of intelligence and skills, and all of those are available to you, and they are in themselves neutral. Some talents are special. That doesn’t make you special. To attribute the qualities of your talents to yourself, to be aggrandised or diminished by one’s talents, by the faculties of one’s mind or body, that’s the ego. When your sense of yourself is qualified by the content of your experience. But in the absence of that, if you don’t allow your sense of yourself to be dictated by the quality of your mind and your body, the faculties of your mind and body still remain available for you to use in the service of love and understanding.’"

"Because my finite mind cannot comprehend why the infinite would pass through the portal of ‘I am’ into this illusion, I sometimes think: who am I to say I won’t keep playing along? Is it a greater surrender to remember I’m infinite, or to continue playing my part as finite? Rupert says: ‘Why can’t you do both? Why can’t you continue as a finite mind, but open to your true nature as God’s infinite being, and use your finite mind in its service? Why did you put the finite and the infinite in conflict with each other, rather than one being the expression of the other? That’s like saying, I’m afraid that I might feel immense love but feel no impulse to look after my children. Could you imagine feeling immense love and not wanting to express that love as your care for your children? When love shines in a human heart, it’s natural for it to overflow and be expressed in some form, some kind of compassionate, caring work, some kind of artistic creativity. Could you imagine feeling love and not feeling some impulse to share it?’"

"I sat next to someone in meditation and felt an incredibly strong energy, began crying, yet when I asked him afterwards, he hadn’t noticed me at all. Is it possible to interact with a being without that being knowing? Rupert says: ‘Yes, but that was not a transmission. Nothing was passed from him to you, but more a resonance. He was resting deeply in being, and because of your openness and sensitivity, you picked this up. Your mind was in an open and receptive state. So, the peace of his being was able to infiltrate your mind. You felt that. It had a visceral component for you. But that was your body’s response to this resonance of your being with his being. He was taking you to the peace that he was experiencing. So, there was a visceral reaction of your body, this sensation of rising and then of release, this letting go of tension, tears, which is a sign of release as you began to sink into being as well. Yes, that can happen without him being aware of anything, because he was just resting in being, and his being was radiating around him.’"

"When I explore my experience, consciousness feels dimensionless, no edge. But if I were dropped in the middle of the ocean, I wouldn’t know where the edge is either, yet I know there is one. How do I know consciousness isn’t just incredibly vast but does have an edge? Rupert says: ‘The reason that you know there is an edge to an ocean, even when you’re dropped in the middle of it, is that you have at some time in your life seen the edge of an ocean. So even when you’re dropped into the middle of it, you know it exists because you have experienced it before. But you have never experienced the edge of consciousness, and nor has anyone, nor could anyone ever experience the edge. More accurately, consciousness has never experienced its own edge or its own limit. Ask any of the eight billion people on earth: if you explore your consciousness, do you ever find a limit? You always get the same answer. Why would you not trust your experience? Your question is superimposing the mind’s limitation on consciousness and then presuming that the questions that are relevant for your mind are therefore relevant to consciousness. If you ask consciousness directly what is your experience of itself, all it will say is “I am”. It won’t say “I am unlimited” because it doesn’t know limitations.’"