How many more spiritually-inclined, in-your-face, can’t-get-any-clearer-than-this kind of books does one need to drive the message home?
Apparently, one more.
The hazy contours of spirituality may in many ways stand in contrast to the sharp-cut lines of science, but there is one crucial element about the abstract that matches the solid reliability of the experimental – every person who goes beyond words and thoughts to step into the mind-defying Silence and rest as the Primordial Awareness has the exact same story to tell in terms of their takeaway.
Be it a karmically-progressed teacher or a spontaneously-transformed amateur, mortals who were thrust into awakening unawares or yogis who meticulously sought the Silence, there seems to be a universal quality to the wordless wisdom these people acquire. Their vantage points may be different but the knowledge they gain is the same across the board.
But asking the awakened teachers to share their knowing with uninitiated observers like us is akin to teaching differential calculus to someone who just figured out two-digit addition. It is simply not possible to squeeze the expansiveness of Awareness into the confinement of words. These teachers risk distortion when they try to articulate the insight from the other side wholly and accurately to an audience whose foundation is overcomplicated with layers of conditioning, but boy, they persist. And when it takes a special kind of dumbing down to make us grasp with our minds that which is not of the mind, we have teachers like Rupert Spira to peel the layers and show the way.
Play back your last eye checkup at the optometrist’s office where you had to sit with your forehead stuck to what looked like a dragonfly’s space visor while the doctor deftly flicked the lens and asked, “Which is clearer, one or two?” More than often that would sound like a trick question because the difference between the two would seem insignificant, but this hairbreadth’s distinction makes a whale of a difference in how sharply we see things. Spend some time with Spira’s teachings and you will notice that he only suggests the slightest shift from how we have been viewing our experiences to how we should view them, yet that small change is sufficient to jolt our spiritual acuity from hazy to crystal-clear in a heartbeat.
One such delicate shift comes from Spira’s question – “Am I aware right now?”
This is a simpler version of Raman Maharshi’s “Who am I?”, where one questions the nature of the self, an inquiry into the “I” that identifies itself with thoughts and perceptions. The “who am I?” has a good chance of starting us off on a wild goose chase, because after all, we are the breed who likes to approach blunt questions with smart-alecky retorts. It takes a great deal of meandering through “to whom has this thought arisen?” or “where does this I come from?” or “who asks whom?”, to finally find the Source and abide in it. But Spira’s “am I aware?” bypasses that dance and takes our attention directly to the heart of the inquiry.
Ask yourself if you are aware of the noise of your surroundings. Notice how you immediately move your focus toward the sounds in the room to answer that question, paying attention to the ticking of the wall clock, the hum of the equipment around, and the muffled sounds.
Ask yourself if you are aware of your birth date and you will directly move your attention to your memory of the numbers and recall the date to answer the question.
Ask yourself if you are aware of your breath and you will turn your attention to the sensation of air through your nose and the movement of your chest to know the answer.
Now ask yourself, “am I aware right now” and see where you have to direct your attention to find the answer.
Even before your mind could frame the answer y-e-s, in the pause between the question and your reply, you already knew the answer, almost felt the ‘yes’ in your being. You did not stop to think. You did not refer to any memory or sensation. You felt the experience of awareness directly, even if only for a brief moment, that was resting in you as the source of all knowledge and experience.
The mind knows the world by directing attention towards objective experiences like thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, and perception, and it does so upon the background of an ever-present, unchanging awareness. The mind gets intimately involved with the objects of experience that it overlooks the presence of awareness through which all the activities are known.
So what does it take to draw back the veil and be as Awareness?
“Knowing or being aware is not inaccessible, unknown or buried within us. It is shining clearly in the background of all experience.”
Rupert Spira
