Being Aware of Being Aware

by Rupert Spira

Meditation takes place in the space between words.

Everybody loves happiness above all else. Even if we deny ourselves happiness for the sake of another person or an impersonal cause, we do so ultimately because it makes us happy.

seeking and resistance are the two main impulses that govern the thoughts and feelings, and the subsequent activities and relationships,

As a result, most people set out again in pursuit or rejection of some form of objective experience in the hopes of repeating the experience of happiness. In this way we become addicted to the endless cycle of lack, seeking and temporary fulfilment that characterises most people’s lives, and to which Henry David Thoreau referred when he said that most people ‘lead lives of quiet desperation’.

Vício em novidade!

The turning of the mind away from the objective content of experience towards the source or essence from which it has arisen is the essence of meditation or prayer.

Peace and happiness are not, as such, objective experiences that the mind has from time to time; they are the very nature of the mind itself. Happiness is our essential nature, apparently obscured or eclipsed much of the time by the clamour of objective experience but never completely extinguished by it.

It cannot be acquired; it can only be revealed.

‘The truth needs to be reformulated by every generation’.

Knowing or being aware is not inaccessible, unknown or buried within us. It is shining clearly in the background of all experience, just as it could be said that the screen is clearly visible in the background of a movie.

Meditation is what we are, not what we do.

What remains cannot be given a name, for all names refer to the objects of knowledge and experience, and yet it is that for which all minds seek and all hearts long.