freedom

[We can say] ‘I’ am aware of thoughts, sensations and perceptions but am not made out of a thought, sensation or perception. ‘I’ am made out of pure being and knowing. Our only experiential knowledge of the world is perception – sights, sounds, tastes, textures and smells. In fact, nobody has ever found an independently existing object or world; all that is ever found are perceptions. We cannot therefore even say we have perceptions of the world because that world has never been found. We can only say for sure that we know perceptions. And perceptions are never known independently of Awareness.

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All we know of a thought is the experience of thinking, all we know of a sensation is the experience of sensing, all we know of a sight is the experiencing of seeing, all we know of a sound is the experience of hearing etc. And all that is known of thinking, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling is the knowing of them. And what is it that knows this knowing? Only something that itself has the capacity to know could know anything. So it is knowing that knows knowing. All that is ever known is pure knowing, knowing and being itself. And that knowing is your self. All that is known is Awareness knowing itself, the self knowing the self. There is only your self – not a self that belongs to any object or person because there are no objects or people as such to which it could belong. This knowing belongs to itself alone. It is itself and knows itself alone. There are no others or objects there, no inside self or outside world.

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In understanding our self, Awareness, is realized to be the open, empty field of experience, not made of a thing but knowing all seeming things. As such it is nothing – not a thing. In love, the mind, body and world gradually take on the qualities of Awareness – they become open, empty, transparent, pervaded and saturated by the peace and happiness that are our true nature. As such our self, the open, empty no-thingness of Awareness is realized in our experience as the reality or substance of everything. […] 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.

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In this realization true knowledge and love are revealed to be one and the same – the experiential realization 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. […] This is the only true revolution, the revolution in which our view of reality is turned upside down. Awareness – pure Knowing – is not just the witness of experience. It is its substance, its very nature. Everything changes when we begin to live from this point of view. We realize that what we have always longed for in life was present all along in the depths of our own being. It is always available, never truly veiled. To begin with it is often felt as peace in the background of experience but it cannot be contained and before long it begins to flow out into the world as […] love […].

-- Rupert Spira, The True Nature of Experience I Excerpt

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