What the World Really Is

"After a kundalini experience during yoga practice, intense bodily sensations and pressure have emerged, sometimes making it difficult to function. Is this physical reaction normal? Rupert says: ‘All sorts of things can happen when you’re in contact with your being . . . It could be that your body is reorchestrating itself around this understanding. Some old tensions are dissolving and that could be causing a disturbance. But if it’s as intense as you describe, you may want to get some specific help with it, because you should be able to get out of bed in the morning . . . There’s absolutely nothing about exploring or recognising the nature of your being that suggests that you should not be able to look after your son. On the contrary, those things should get better, not worse.’"

When resting back into being, the mind begins to panic and pulls attention back into thinking. Is this normal? Rupert says: ‘It’s sometimes normal for the mind to begin to panic as you sink more and more deeply into being. There’s less and less for the mind to do . . . And the mind doesn’t like to be redundant . . . So as you sink into being your mind fears that it is dying. And in order to perpetuate itself, it will panic. It will try and get you to become involved again with the content of your experience. It’s a little rebellion of the mind that is natural . . . It’s like a child who has a temper tantrum. You don’t collude with them, but you don’t go against them. You don’t cease loving them. You just don’t collude with the tantrum.’

As a musician and father seeking intimate partnership, one feels caught between two seemingly different directions. The horizontal process involves wanting creative work to flourish and building loving relationships in time, whilst the vertical process points towards awakening and liberation. Rupert says: ‘These movements in your life are not in any way incompatible or contradictory. Ideally, your life on the horizontal plane, your life in the world, should flow from the depths of your being. They should be in line with that. They should express that . . . Think of it as the same interest rather than two separate interests. One is the inner aspect and the other is the outer aspect. Your activities and relationships should ideally come from your being, should be totally in line with this understanding and an expression of it.’

After years of pain from past trauma and the world’s suffering, I now feel compassion and love instead. Should I feel guilty for not suffering as much? Rupert says: ‘Don’t be silly. Don’t feel guilty because you’re not suffering. To be at peace and to be unconditionally fulfilled is a sign of profound intelligence . . . The fact that you suffer less than you used to is because of your intelligence. You’re beginning to see through all the narratives and beliefs and ideas that you inherited from your culture about who you are . . . You’re much more in touch with your true nature now, and as a result of that you’re tasting more and more the peace and unconditional joy that is the nature of your being . . . The freer you are from your own internal sorrow and agitation and anxiety and so on, the more open you are to other people. You feel other people’s sorrow as your own. You become more compassionate, not less compassionate as a result of this understanding.’

If the world is described as an illusion and not as it appears to be, what does it actually look like? How can there be real suffering if the world isn’t real in the way we think it is? Rupert says: ‘An illusion is not something that is unreal. An illusion is something that is real, but is not what it appears to be. When you touch the stuff the world is made of, you don’t find dead, inert matter. If we go deeply into what the world truly is, its fundamental nature is being . . . We are upgrading the world, not downgrading it or dismissing it. Evil happens when the reality of the world, namely the unity of being, is overlooked or ignored. Evil is an extreme but inevitable consequence of the paradigm of separation, whereas love and harmony are an inevitable consequence of the paradigm of unity.’

Most people would think I was just incredibly lazy because I love doing nothing. On tour with a quartet, while everyone else played chess or did crossword puzzles, I would sit by the window for hours, just watching – wonderful thoughts of jumping off the train into a village in India, wanting to enter the lives of the people I saw. But then I felt apart from everything, observing, observing, observing. Was this simply laziness? Or was I in fact experiencing an unloading of self – was ‘not trying to do anything’ actually a losing of ego? Rupert says: ‘By filling this emptiness with thoughts and activities, they perpetuate the sense of being a separate self. In your case, that was not the case. On the contrary, there was very little impulse to perpetuate the separate self and its train of thinking and doing, and therefore you found yourself just open and empty, and you spontaneously placed yourself in the position of the witness, the observer . . . I would suggest that it was because you were able to go to that place in yourself, and to stand as the witness, as the observer in yourself, to stand in your being, in other words, I would suggest that your work as a musician, as a cellist, that the depth and beauty of your work was very closely connected to your ability to go deeply into your being.’

After feeling trapped in anxiety for over ten years, I can recognise awareness but still feels caught. Will life improve by relaxing and letting go of patterns? Rupert says: ‘Your awareness is never trapped. It’s always free . . . When you say, “I feel trapped”, it’s like imagining that a screen is trapped by the movie that plays on it . . . The you, who you really are at the deepest level, your being, or the presence of awareness – that is free. It’s not trapped . . . Until recently, you’ve been immersed in your feelings, in your anxiety and so on. Now, you’re beginning to realise, “I’m not my anxiety. I am aware of my anxiety” . . . You are not your anxiety. You are aware of your anxiety . . . And because you’re beginning to take a step back into the presence of awareness, you’re beginning to feel peace instead of anxiety. That’s very good. And that will not only give you deep relief from your anxiety, but it will make you more present with your partner, with your family, more present at work.’

After practising self-enquiry and experiencing a profound six-week period of recognition and peace, old patterns of emotional reactivity have returned. Why hasn’t the initial glimpse of my true nature brought lasting transformation? Rupert says: ‘When you first recognised your being, that was like a gift, like you took a holiday from the content of your experience. But now the vacation has ended. Some of the old deep-seated habits have returned. They weren’t completely uprooted by this first recognition of your true nature. They were dealt a mortal blow, but they weren’t completely dissolved . . . Don’t expect the recognition to come back with the same feeling of elation or ecstasy. Your true nature is not wonderful or marvelous – it has no qualities, strictly speaking. The elation you felt was simply the contrast with your previous suffering, not an inherent quality of being itself.’

As a therapist who feels dread before seeing clients, despite having brought this understanding into my sessions, I’m questioning whether to change professions or expand my current work. Rupert says: ‘You shouldn’t dread going to work. Ideally, you should look forward to going to work. So if you dread it, you’re either not doing the right job, or because of your deep interest in these matters, your understanding has outgrown the modality in which you are working. You’re working in too small a sphere now. And the modality in which you’re working can no longer accommodate this understanding. So you feel you’re not being true to yourself. You feel your work is no longer an expression of your deepest love and understanding . . . You have to try to find out, can my work evolve? Can it expand so that I feel freer in it, that I’m more able to express this understanding? Or is there some inherent limit in it that’s just going to go on frustrating you, in which case you want to find work that truly you feel you can express your deepest love and understanding in it.’

If dreams at night seem real until waking, are all eight billion of us living in God’s dream, and will everything disappear if God wakes up? Rupert says: ‘First of all, it’s not that your dream last night was not real. It was real. It’s just not what it appeared to be . . . It was an illusion as a Caribbean beach, but it was real as the activity of your own mind . . . The Caribbean beach or the world that we see in the waking state is not identical to the dream world, but it’s a similar kind of dream in the sense that it’s real, but not what it appears to be. So when God’s infinite consciousness wakes up, so to speak, does the world disappear? The appearance of the world disappears, but its reality remains because God or infinite consciousness is the reality of that world . . . When infinite consciousness wakes up to itself and perception dissipates or disappears, the appearance of the world disappears, but its reality, infinite being, remains.’

After discovering our true nature, how does we know whether to continue divesting our sense of being from experience and abiding as pure being? Rupert says: ‘One way to know is: have you come to complete peace in yourself? Do you feel this causeless, imperturbable peace in yourself? . . . That would be one of the hallmarks of this understanding. Another would be complete, impartial, unconditional love for everyone . . . Is my peace imperturbable? Do I feel happy for no reason all the time? And do I love everybody without exception, unconditionally? If the answer is no to any of these questions, then keep going, exploring your being. Keep sinking more and more deeply into being. Because imperturbable peace, causeless joy, and unconditional love are the nature of being.’

"Having dedicated my life primarily to self-realisation without fully engaging in worldly activities or career, should I now give more attention to life in the world? Rupert says: ‘It is natural to want to participate in the world and be engaged in the world. And if you feel that you haven’t, that your love of truth has prevented you from going out fully into the world, to the world of activities and relationships, I would encourage you to do that . . . The world is not just an opportunity to express this understanding. It tests this understanding and shows us all areas in ourselves that have not yet been fully permeated by this understanding. And in that sense, it cooperates. The world cooperates with the deepening of this understanding in us and the deepening of the stabilisation of this understanding . . . It’s easy to love everybody unconditionally from a distance. Up close, it’s not always quite so easy.’"

A spontaneous smile has been arising throughout our sessions. I wrote a short poem about it, and I wanted to share it as a way of expressing my question: where does this smile come from? Rupert says: ‘I hope you’re not going to ask me to comment on your poem. I wouldn’t dream of commenting on it. There’s nothing I could add to it. It’s exquisite. Absolutely exquisite. It’s beautiful. No more to say.’

During meditation, when guided to soften attention and turn away from the content of experience, confusion arose about whether the goal is to have no experience at all. Rupert says: ‘I didn’t say there should be no experience . . . I just meant don’t be involved with it . . . You don’t have to turn away from the wall or turn away from the soles of your feet. You just don’t give them your attention. In fact, all day long you’re quite used to not giving your attention to elements of your experience, which nevertheless are within the field of awareness . . . Soften your attention. Relax the focus of your attention . . . Because when you soften or relax, you feel you’re sinking back into yourself . . . If you make having no experience at all a goal, then you are objectifying or reifying your true nature. And you’re trying to make the absence of experience an experience to be reached.’