Being Aware of Being Aware

by Rupert Spira

Meditation is what we are, not what we do.

In order for the mind, the separate subject of experience, to disappear or, more accurately, to lose its apparent limitations, the separate object of experience must also dissolve.

In order for love to be experienced, both the lover and the beloved must vanish.

Being aware of being aware – abiding in and as the self, resting in the ‘I am’, practising the presence of God – is the only form of meditation or prayer in which the ego, the apparently separate subject of experience, is not maintained.

From the perspective of the mind, this non-practice of abiding or resting in the experience of being aware or awareness itself seems to be a blank or dull state. However, in time, awareness’s innate qualities of imperturbable peace and causeless joy emerge, in most cases gradually.

It is the non-activity in which the path of knowledge and the path of love or devotion meet.

‘What is the essential nature of myself? What cannot be removed from myself? What happens to awareness when the body dies?’

‘Who am I really? What is it that knows or is aware of my experience? Am I aware?’

To discipline the separate self is to maintain the separate self.

the finite mind will continue to arise from its source or essence of pure awareness, but its sense of separation and limitation has been neutralised in the clear light of this self-recognition. Although its ability to mislead us may linger for some time through force of habit, it is only a matter of time before it fades.

Atmananda Krishna Menon was asked how to know when one is established in one’s true nature, he is said to have replied,

‘When thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions can no longer take you away’.

The returning of attention to its source is the essence of meditation;

In being aware of being aware – the knowing of our own essential, irreducible being – the mind loses its agitation and the heart is relieved of its yearning.