You Are the Happiness You Seek Quotes

“However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply other names for our self.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

“It is impossible to experience the appearance of awareness. We are that awareness to which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no experience that we, awareness, are born. Likewise, in order to claim legitimately that awareness dies, something would have to be present to experience its disappearance. Have we ever experienced the disappearance of awareness? If we think the answer is, ‘Yes’, then what is it that is present and aware to experience the apparent disappearance of awareness? Whatever that is must be aware and present. It must be awareness. When we are born or when we wake in the morning, we have the experience of the appearance of objects. When we die and when we fall asleep at night, we have the experience of the disappearance of objects. However, we have no experience that we, awareness, appear, are born, disappear or die. That”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

“I’ve been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would ‘let go of them’ is itself simply one such pattern. These patterns of thinking and feeling have taken their shape, over the years, from the belief that we are a separate self, without our making any particular effort. In just the same way, as our experiential conviction that we are not a limited, located self deepens, so our thoughts, feelings and subsequent behaviour will slowly, effortlessly and naturally realign themselves with this new understanding. In order to know our self we do not need to know the mind. No other knowledge than the knowledge that is present right now in this very moment is required to know our self. What does it mean to know our self? We are our self, so we are too close to our self to be able to know our self as an object. Our simply being our self is as close to knowing our self as we will ever come. We cannot get closer than that. In fact, being our self is the knowing of our self, but it is not the knowing of our self as an object. To say ‘I am’, (in other words to assert that we are present), we must know that ‘I am’. Being and knowing are, in fact, one single non-objective experience. But we do not step outside of our self in order to know our own being. We simply are our self. That being of our self is the knowing of our self. This being/knowing is shining in all experience. This experiential understanding dissolves the idea that our self is not present here and now and that it is not known here and now. And when our desire to know or find ourselves as an object is withdrawn, we discover that our own self was and is present all along, shining quietly in the background, as it were, of all experience. As this becomes obvious we discover that it is not just the background but also the foreground. In other words, it is not just the witness but simultaneously the substance of all experience. Completely relax the desire to find yourself as an object or to change your experience in any way. Relax into this present knowing of your own being. See that it is intimate, familiar and loving. See clearly that it is never not with you. It is shining here in this experience, knowing and loving its own being. It runs throughout all experience, closer than close, intimately one with all experience but untouched by it. As this intimate oneness, it is known as love. In its untouchable-ness it is known as peace and in its fullness it is known as happiness. In its openness and willingness to give itself to any possible shape (including the apparent veiling of its own being), it is known as freedom and, as the substance of all things, it is known as beauty. However, more simply it is known just as ‘I’ or ‘this’. Who Is? Q: All these questions about consciousness”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

“That is, a single sensation/thought/perception appears in consciousness and thinking alone conceptualises”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

“As we sit allowing these thoughts and, more importantly, uncomfortable feelings to arise, it is important not to have any subtle agenda with them, not to ‘do this’ in order to ‘get rid of them’, That would be more of the same. Just allow the full panoply of thoughts and feelings to display themselves in your loving and indifferent presence. In time their ferocity will die down, revealing subtler and subtler layers of thinking and feeling on behalf of a separate entity, until we come to the little, almost innocuous background thinking about which we were speaking earlier. This is the sense of separation, the ‘ego’, in its apparently mildest and least easily detectable form. Be very sensitive to this. Be sensitive to the ‘avoidance of what is’ in its subtlest forms. It is the sweet, furry baby animal that later turns into a monster! As time goes on we become more and more sensitive and we see how much of our thinking and feeling, as well as our activities, are generated for the sole purpose of avoiding ‘what is’, of avoiding the ‘this’ and the ‘now’, It is this open, un-judging, un-avoiding allowing of all things which, in time, restores the ‘I’ to its proper place in the seat of awareness and which, as a natural corollary to the abiding in and as our true self, gently realigns our thoughts, feelings and activities with the peace and happiness that are inherent in it. Nobody Has, Owns or Chooses Anything Q: While allowing the body, mind and world to be as they are, different thoughts arise, some not so savoury and others that might be better left not acted upon. You have said that, once one begins to abide knowingly as presence, responses to situations will flow naturally from there. Some thoughts will engage the body, others”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

“the separate self is not in fact an entity but rather an activity that appears in Consciousness.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“we do not really see trees, fields, hills and the sky; we always see only the screen. The screen is their reality.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“An object is only an object from the point of view of the mind.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“unclouded Awareness, knowing-being-loving itself. It is not known by someone.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“What is real for Awareness is abstract and utterly mysterious for the mind, and what is seemingly real for the mind is utterly non-existent for Awareness.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“There is no knower of this experience and nothing that is known. There is just the knowing of it,”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“Awareness has no experience of its own appearance, beginning, birth, duration, disappearance or death.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“aware Presence loses its apparent witness-ness and stands revealed as pure Awareness alone,”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“There is only experiencing from moment to moment, and this experiencing is one ever-present, seamless whole.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“The separate entity we imagine ourself to be cannot reside in the present.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“This absence of otherness, objectness, selfness is love itself. It is what we are and all we know.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“time is only in thought. Experience is eternally now.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“That is, it knows itself as the totality of experience. This could be formulated as, ‘I, Awareness, am everything’,”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“Awareness takes the shape of thinking and appears as the mind; it takes the shape of sensing and appears as the body;”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything will appear as it truly is, infinite.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“But the utter intimacy of the knower and the known is a well-known and familiar experience.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“It is experience itself. Experience is not a collection of objects known by an inside self. ‘Experience’ is just another name for our self,”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“For anything to be known, its apparent ‘thingness’ must dissolve in Awareness and become pure knowing.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“reveal themselves as none other than the shape that our self is taking from moment to moment.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“Knowing or experiencing is not what it does; it is what it is.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“Nothing new needs to be added to experience for us to become aware that our self is always being”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“The true non-dual understanding is like an explosion – it cannot be contained in any form.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“although seeming to take place outside, in fact take place within Consciousness”
― Rupert Spira, Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience

“However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

“I’ve been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would ‘let go of them’ is itself simply one such pattern.”
― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience