April Retreat with Rupert Spira Week 2

I have just completed my second week of online retreat with Rupert Spira. The retreat was based on the teachings of Sufi mystic Balyani and his writings in Know Yourself: An explanation of the oneness of being.

Going into the retreat I was living by Rupert’s mantra “The nature of my being is peace and happiness and I share my being with everyone and everything”. After the week with Balyani I have upgraded this to “My being is God’s being and I share God’s being with everyone and everything”.

When I first started going to Rupert’s retreats four years ago, there were two things which jarred with me. The first was his use of ‘I’ or ‘I am’ to describe our true self and the second was his use of the word God, which I used to call the ‘G-word’.

I was brought up a Christian and turned away from Christianity as a teenager as it felt very old fashioned and out of touch with the science which I was becoming more interested in. I was taught to believe that God was a man with a white beard in a cloud somewhere a long way away, who was omnipotent and was judging me. Hence, my reactivity to the ‘G-word’.

Then in my thirties I turned to Buddhism, which seemed to agree with modern science. Here I got the message that we were trying to rid ourselves of our ego-centric sense of self, which was at the root of all our destructive emotions. Hence, my reactivity to the regular use of ‘I’ or “I am’. Surely, I thought this will reinforce my sense of a separate egocentric self.

However, I stuck with Rupert’s non-dual teachings and practices and now understand what he means by ‘I am’ and ‘God’. Interestingly, I also feel that I have a better understanding if Christianity and of Buddhism.

The thing that we all know about ourselves and which is most essential to us, without question is that ‘we are’. If I were to say that about myself, I would say ‘I am’. It is essential to me in the sense that it is always there. It never changes and never leaves me. I always am. Every other aspect of my experience - sensations, thoughts, emotions - comes and goes. But I always am.

The ‘I am’ is awareness or aware being. It is what I truly am. It is always peaceful and happy. It is never impacted in any way by troubling thoughts or overwhelming emotions. It just is. Meditation is about letting go of any doing and simply being or abiding in aware being. So, I am now comfortable about the use of the word ‘I’ or the phrase ‘I am’, because it refers to aware being. It does not refer to the separate ego-centric self created by thought and perception. We usually believe that we are the separate self and this causes us to suffer. If we abide as the ‘I am’, what we really are, the suffering subsides.

Rupert teaches that my experience of aware being or ‘I am’, is also God’s being. ‘God’ in this context is the infinite aware being, within and from which everyone and everything manifest. If God is a sea made of infinite aware being, then we are all waves on that sea, also made of infinite aware being.

To use another analogy, when I go to sleep and dream, my one mind, my awareness, creates the whole dream, including the dreamed character who I appear to be in the dream and the world in which the dream character lives. Similarly, God’s mind - infinite aware being - dreams the universe, including all of us and the world around us. So, we are each a character in God’s dream. We are all one.

Interestingly, this is completely consistent with the teachings of the Buddha as well as the mystical teachings within Christianity and Islam. It is also completely consistent with emerging theories in cognitive psychology and physics, which postulate a universe made of awareness as opposed to a universe made of matter.

Using the word God, which I related to as a child, is much more powerful in connecting me with my aware being, than the phrase Buddha Nature, from the Buddhist teachings I have practised for over twenty years.

There is a lot of detailed philosophy and science that can be gone into, for those who need to. I do, but most people don’t.

The point is that for every human being our most intimate experience is our aware being. But we tend to overlook this in favour of the thoughts and perceptions we experience. The experience of aware being is available to us all the time and if we are able to recognise this and live from this, we can tap into an ocean of peace and happiness, that is our true nature.

If you are interested in becoming more peaceful and happy, then why not join me for A Year of Meditation. Just £9.99 per month. You can cancel at any time so what have you got to lose? Potentially, there is much to be gained.