Excerpt from Rupert Spira’s Exploring the experience ‘I am’:
True knowledge is the experiential understanding that there is only ever-present, unlimited awareness or knowing. Nothing other than this is ever known even when it seems that a mind, body and world are known. This ever-present, unlimited awareness, which is simply the intimacy of our own being, is the fundamental nature of the apparently inside self and its corollary, the apparently outside object, other or world.
All religions are founded upon this understanding. In Christianity it is expressed as, ‘I and my Father are one’. That is, I, awareness, and the ultimate reality of the universe are one and the same reality. In Buddhism, ‘Nirvana and Samsara are identical’. That is, the transparent, open, empty light of awareness, which is not made out of any kind of a thing – nothing – is the substance of all appearances – everything. It is nothing taking the shape of everything.
In Hinduism, ‘Atman and Param-Atman are one’. That is, the individual self, when divested of superimposed beliefs and feelings of limitation, stands revealed as the true and only self of eternal, infinite awareness. And in Sufism, ‘Wherever the eye falls, there is the face of God’. All that is seen is God’s face and it is God that sees it.
All these phrases are conditioned by the culture in which they appeared but they all point towards the same unconditional truth – the reality of all experience. The realisation of this truth dissolves the beliefs in distance, separation and otherness. The common name we give to this absence of distance, separation and otherness is love and beauty. It is that for which everyone longs – not just those of us that are interested in non-duality but all seven billion of us.
In this realisation true knowledge and love are revealed to be one and the same – the experiential realisation that the true nature of the apparently inside self and the apparently outside world are one single reality made out of the transparent light of awareness, that is, made out of the intimacy of our own being.
Christianity…
‘I and my Father are one’.
Buddhism…
‘Nirvana and Samsara are identical’.
Hinduism…
‘Atman and Param-Atman are one’.
Sufism…
‘Wherever the eye falls,
there is the face of God’.
