'Being Aware of Being Aware' | Rupert Spira
The Screen Behind the Movie
You are a self. Intuitively this seems like the most basic fact about your existence. Yet, in the first months of your life, your selfhood wasn’t fully developed. You had some body awareness, but no self-concept. Awareness, then, is even more foundational for our existence than selfhood. Everything that we experience - our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions - is experienced by means of our awareness. Except in our sleep, we are thus continually in the state of being aware. It is the continuous element in all changing experience. But are we ever actually aware of this awareness itself? ‘Being Aware of Being Aware’ is the title of this book by Rupert Spira in which he offers meditations on what is known in the Vedantic tradition as the “Direct Path”, whose culmination is the “recognition of the presence, the primacy and the nature of awareness - or, in religious language, spirit or God’s infinite being - which transcends all knowledge and experience.” One of the first things Spira notes is something that we can probably all confirm from our experience: Being aware itself usually remains unnoticed due to the exclusive focus of our attention on the objects of experience. A helpful image to understand this is the movie screen: Often when watching a movie, we are so absorbed in it that we forget that there is a screen at all, even though the screen is what makes watching the movie possible. The content of the screen keeps changing (just as the contents of our experience), but the screen itself never changes (just as being aware itself does not change). Just as the screen is never affected by what happens in the movie it shows, awareness itself can never be perturbed by anything that happens in experience. In this understanding, awareness (or being aware) is inherently whole and eternal - and this is why Spira equates it with what religious language calls God’s infinite being.
To make sense of this affirmation we need to keep in mind that this is a non-dual perspective which claims that the separation between subject and object does not exist, except as an illusion. While it may seem that I am a person with my own thoughts, living in an actually existing world and interacting with actually existing beings and things, in fact there is only one cosmic mind (or mind-at-large as others have called it). Everything I seem to perceive is an illusion and my separation from all other beings is also an illusion as they are part of the cosmic mind just as I am. While, intuitively, this might seem highly implausible, to me it started to make more sense when I considered the phenomenon of dreaming: In my dream I interact with a world that seems totally real and with other separate beings that act totally independent of me. Only after waking up from the dream do I realize that the world I inhabited in my dream was a construct of my mind, and the other beings that appeared in my dream were also not actually separate from me, but imaginings of my mind. Just as everything seems completely real in my dream while I’m still dreaming, so the distinction between me and different objects, the others and the world seems undeniable. The equivalent to waking up from a dream is the spiritual experience of awakening in which the absence of duality and separation is experienced.
In this understanding my separate self is nothing but a contraction of infinite awareness: “We have forgotten who or what we essentially are and have mistaken ourself instead for a collection of thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations and perceptions.” Spira uses religious language to illuminate this further: God’s infinite being shines through this contraction as the longing for God or the desire for happiness. Original sin is the overlooking, ignoring or missing of awareness itself (or God’s infinite being). The attraction of grace is the pull of inherently relaxed, peaceful awareness on the contraction of the separate self.
If we understand our separate self or mind to be a contraction of infinite awareness, we can see how becoming aware of being aware is not possible by means of the mind. The parallel with the phenomenon of dreaming once again makes this point clearer: A character in a dream cannot know the dreamer’s mind because he is himself a limitation (or contraction) of the dreamer’s mind.
So what’s to be done? In a sense the “Direct Path” is a non-practice in which there can be no effort. Because the separate self is a contraction, more effort just increases the contraction. The required move is more like the unclenching of a clenched fist - letting awareness relax the focus of its attention (the objects of experience) and thus letting awareness be itself and rest in itself. Spira claims that this is the only form of meditation or prayer in which the separate self is not maintained, which makes it the highest form of meditation.
Where do I stand on all of this? After having read this book and a few other perspectives on non-dualism, I can say that it doesn’t seem as absurd as I thought it was initially. The most important question that remains open for me is the following: Why would these contractions in awareness (which manifest as our separate selves), appear in pure awareness (or oneness) in the first place? In religious lingo the same question could be asked as: Why would God create anything at all? Or in metaphysics: Why is there anything rather than nothing? Especially in the first two formulations this question carries particular weight. The existence of separate selves causes a lot of suffering. The good enabled by creation has to outweigh the enormous amount of suffering and evil that appeared in creation. While there are some possible answers to these objections. My second struggle with this perspective is of a more practical nature: Cognitively knowing that I am aware is easy, even self-evident - but, as already mentioned above, the experience of being aware of being aware is not accessible by rational means alone. For years I have been trying different forms of meditation on and off (even did a specific “Direct Approach” guided meditation series more recently) and while I liked many of them and found them to have several positive effects - I came nowhere near this awakening experience. Lastly, I’m not quite sure how to situate love and other values which I find most meaningful in my life, in the framework of non-dualism. If we don’t actually exist as separate entities and if the world and everything we perceive is just an illusion, isn’t love as an inter-personal phenomenon also just an illusion? If I deconstruct my self what is there left for those around me to enter into relationship with? How can there be a meaningful I-Thou relationship when both I and Thou are nothing more than figments of our imagination? Is it God loving himself all the way down? Is this all there ever was?