space spira

Non-Local Phenomena
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R: The space of this room and the space of your kitchen at home are the same space. And yet there can be private objects; an object in this room (or a person, relatively speaking) cannot see what’s happening in your kitchen, or in New York or London. And we think that because of that, because the people in this space can’t see what’s happening in that space, (in other words, because the people are private, the objects are private and limited) therefore the space in which they appear must also share their limits; in other words, they must be private, too. That’s the mistake we make.

When we think of it in space, it makes sense. The tree in this garden is appearing in the same space as the tree in a garden in New York. That doesn’t mean the tree here can see the tree in New York, but just because it can’t see it doesn’t mean that it’s appearing in a different space.

Why do you think that your thoughts appear in a different Awareness from my thoughts? Is there any evidence at all to suggest that they are? …, that they appear in different space? The thoughts are private; sure. But the Awareness in which they appear…, do the thoughts tell us anything about that Awareness? What do the thoughts tell us about Awareness? Absolutely nothing. We presume…, we believe thoughts when thoughts tell us ‘Because I-this-thought am private, therefore the Awareness with which I am known must also share my qualities (in other words, ‘It must be private and limited, like me, like ‘the thought-that-I-am’.)

Q: Or rather that one Awareness should be aware of all thoughts.

R: How do you know it isn’t? [Silence] You’re getting a headache?

Q: Can you say some more about that?

R: Take a thought that you had at exactly 3 minutes past 12:00 yesterday. What were you thinking of? [Silence] No idea. Nor do I.

But do you have any doubt that the Awareness that knew the thought you were having this time yesterday was not the same Awareness that knows the current thought? It was known by you, yes? And the thought you had a week ago was known by the same you, the same I, the same Awareness that is knowing this thought. Yes?

The fact that there is a forgetting in time doesn’t imply that the thought that appeared a week ago was known by a different Awareness. There can be a forgetting in time. Yes?

Why can’t there be a forgetting across space as well?
A similar mechanism could take place across space.

In other words, your thoughts…, you don’t know in your thoughts what another thought..., you can’t see another thought. That’s due to the mechanism of your mind, due to the limits of your mind. It’s not due to the limits of Awareness.

The mechanism of your mind…, I mean, what would it be like now for you to experience your thought and my thought simultaneously? [Silence] Could you do that? Is a human mind [capable]…?

Q: Seven billion thoughts.

R: Just try having two thoughts at the same time. Just try now and have two thoughts. Can you do it? [Silence] No, it’s not possible for the human mind to take two thoughts at the same time. It’s a limitation of the human mind. In fact, it’s impossible for us to even imagine having two thoughts at the same time. That is a limit of the human mind. For a different kind of being it might be possible; we can’t even imagine having two thoughts at the same time. But why not?

Q: A mind reader.

R: But even a mind reader who would know somebody else’s thought…, they couldn’t be having their own thought at the same time. In fact, their own thought would be the other person’s thought. How would they know it was the other person’s thoughts? Because they would be appearing in them, in their thought.

In fact, how do you know that you’re not having the thought that your next-door neighbor is having? It would only appear to you as your own experience (in other words, it would appear to you as your own thought). And in fact, many of us have this understanding. Very often in friendships, intimate friendships, you think of something out of the blue…, you haven’t thought about it for months, and your friend (not necessarily your intimate partner, it could be anyone, but it often happens in close connections) …, your friend mentions the person that you were thinking of, that you hadn’t thought of for three years. I’m sure that these kinds of experiences are familiar. How do we know that that very occurrence isn’t an occurrence of what we’re talking about…, that it’s somebody else’s thought filtering into your mind and being experienced as your own mind, as your own thought?

Wouldn’t that make sense, if Awareness was one? Why couldn’t there be one Awareness with billions of thoughts going around in it?

After all, there’s one space with billions of objects going around in it. Is that so strange; the thought of one space with lots of objects in it? Is that strange? No. Because we’ve been conditioned to think ‘Yes, space is one and there are billions of objects that all appear in it’.

We just haven’t been conditioned to think like that about Awareness. But why not? Why not?
Especially when there is nothing in our experience to suggest that it is not the case. There’s nothing in our experience to suggest that Awareness is limited or separate.

[Silence]

Q: So, are you saying also that the instrument, the body, is the limitation? … that’s why I can’t see seven billion… sights?

R: Yes, the human mind is designed to have a very, very narrow range of possibilities. We think that the human mind is designed to see all there is…, because by definition, all we see is available for the human mind.

But who knows? We have five senses, but imagine if we had a sixth sense, or I mean, a seventh sense? Imagine; what would it be? A sight, a sound, a taste, a texture, a smell…, what would it be? And if we had this next sense, what would correspond to it in the world? It wouldn’t be a sight, it wouldn’t be a taste, it wouldn’t be a texture..., what would it be? We cannot even think of it.

Q: Intuition.

R: Okay, a seventh sense; beyond the range of the human mind. How do we know?

Imagine that you lived on the surface of a lake; that you were a creature that lived on the surface of a lake and that you only knew two dimensions. You were a very primitive kind of creature. You only knew forwards, backwards and sideways. You have no concept of up or down. Imagine being a creature like that. Imagine you’re swimming along…, you don’t know you’re swimming along a lake because you don’t know about water and that. You’re just on the surface; you only know front and back. And the branch of a tree dips down into the lake. [Points his finger from up to down motion] What would you experience? How would the branch dipping into the water enter your world? What would you see? You’d just see a black line. [Makes horizontal movement with this finger] And as the branch dipped further down [Points finger down] the black line would get longer [Stretches out two fingers horizontally] because the branch is thicker. Yeah? And then as the branch would go up again [Raises his finger in upward motion] the line would get smaller. [Brings two horizontal fingers closer together] And then another line would appear over here [Points one finger out to his left] that moved at a completely different rate to this line. [Puts two fingers on the other hand stretched apart to show horizontal line there] So you’d have these two different lines; totally separate from each other.

So, imagine if somebody came along and said ‘No, no, these are not two lines. They’re not lines at all. They’re braches that dip into the [water] and actually, they belong to the same tree’. [Silence] Could you think about that with your two-dimensional mind? You just could not go there. You could not conceive of a third dimension.

So, the human mind knows four dimensions; three of space and one of time. Why couldn’t there be five dimensions? Or eleven? Or a hundred? … that a different mind was able to perceive? Why not?

But the Awareness with which the two-dimensional creature knows its experience…, THAT Awareness is not limited by its mind. Its mind is limited; but NOT the Awareness with which it knows its extremely limited mind. Likewise, the human mind is very limited.

And we make this huge presumption in our culture that: ‘What we are, Awareness, shares the limits of our mind’. That is the mistake we make.

Our entire world culture is founded upon that mistake. It’s a huge presumption. In fact, we believe it, we presume it, to be so absolutely true that we don’t even realize it’s a presumption. We think it’s just the absolute truth because it’s so obvious: ‘Look. Look at all these people, each of them with their own thoughts…, therefore each of them with their own Awareness’.

We don’t stop to think: Actually, there’s no evidence for it.
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Rupert Spira
“Non-Local Phenomena”