Posts Tagged with r spira

Etc., Teachers
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In my multi-year plan to transform lifestyle and focus, 2019 is the year designated for returning to the work place, an effort I’m now coming back to after a summer spent helping friends and family move to the area. Before diving back in, I thought I’d share some of the teachings that have been running through my mind as I peruse the job market. After stepping away for a few years from a lengthy career in healthcare project/program management, I now confront the tricky question that comes to many after awakening; how to reconnect to the working world from a very different state of mind.

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Joseph Campbell
"The Power of Myth"
"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be....People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

Dr. Julia Mossbridge
"Feeling Stuck? Here's An Exercise To Help You Discover Your Life's Purpose"
"Successfully bringing your gifts into the world has been called self-actualization by psychologist Abraham Maslow, who also emphasized the importance of self-transcendence...All intelligent and reasonably sane people, as long as they have their basic needs met, have the desire to achieve both self-actualization and self-transcendence. To do both is to pursue your calling...pursuing your calling is not logical—it's experimental. As a scientist, I see it as deeply scientific."
Ram Dass
"Discovering Your True Work Path"
"Many, many years ago, many incarnations back when I was a professor at Harvard, I used to run a course called “Career Decision Making.” It was interesting to start to lead with your wish list of how you would like to live, how you would like to serve, and then start to tune very, very slowly. If you have that option, you’ve got to be ready to fall on your face and make mistakes. That’s a very important part of this game of hearing your uniqueness. Because what you listen to until your mind is really clear is always colored by all these kinds of attitudes, prejudices, cultural preferences and so on."
Eckhart Tolle
"How Can I Find Work That Will Give Me Joy?"

"If you come into alignment with the present moment….there is an added dimension of aliveness that comes in….And it is often then that change comes into your life, when you align with the present moment instead of trying to get away from it….. You are so aligned that actually Power begins to flow through; that's why I call it the Power of Now. It is the Power of Life itself. And gradually the Universe, or Life, notices that you are in a different state of consciousness. And often it is then that change comes into your life, either through a chance event or chance encounter or sudden idea or realization…to fulfill your purpose on this planet and in this form which is to be a vehicle for consciousness to come into this world."
Alan Watts
"What If Money Was No Object?"
"What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?...If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living - that is, to go on doing things you don't like doing. Which is stupid!...And after all, if you do really like what you're doing… you can eventually become a master of it - it's the only way to become a master of something, is to be really 'with it'… But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like, in order to go on spending on things you don’t like, doing things you don't like…it's all retch and no vomit, it never gets there."
Rupert Spira
"What Is The Right Job To Do?"
"It's natural ... to want to use the body-mind in the service of this love and understanding. For so long, the body-mind has been used in the service of the ego, trying to fulfill its impossible demands and fears. Now the ego is no longer in place, or at least is largely diminished and in its place - love, peace and understanding is in charge, is wanting to be expressed. And your body-mind is what you have been given to express that love and understanding, to share it, to bring it out into the world. So use your body-mind for that purpose. In relationships, in activities, in employment…"

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Format Gallery
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Wrapping up this round of posts on the arts with a few more, beginning with these short video clips in which six teachers share their perspectives on the role of art and the artist in society. Teachings of this type have deeply informed my mindful journey back into the world of form and have helped me to glimpse the larger human story embedded in all works of art and creation.

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Terence McKenna
'Art & Artists'
"I have great hope now for art produced by the interaction of human beings and computers."
Deepak Chopra
'The Role of the Artist in Society' (excerpts from the documentary 'Mythic Journeys')
"The artist is the social conscience of a society."
Dr. Carol Becker
'Art's Role in Society'

"Society has to be able to observe itself … and what allows a society to do that are the producers of art and culture"
Eckhart Tolle
'The Source Of All Creativity'

"But there is a vaster, much vaster intelligence in every human being that is non-conceptual, not words and concepts. You can't analyze it but everybody has that within, potentially, and I believe that is the source of creativity.."
Jordan Peterson
'Why You Need Art in Your Life'

"A real piece of art is a window into the transcendent."

Rupert Spira
"'Why Make Art?'
"The purpose of art is to take the senses on a journey back to the source of perception, which is pure awareness."

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Format Gallery
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What happens to our sense of ‘me’ after death? Does our consciousness reincarnate in another form to live another life? How should we prepare for our death – and what does that even mean? Insights of the type shared by these six teachers in this video gallery helped me discover a new perspective from which to grapple with such questions about the transformation that is death.

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Alan Watts
"A Happy Death"
In this 8-min excerpt from one of his many lectures, Alan invites us to embrace the other half of the natural rhythm that is death.

"You can only die well if you understand this system of waves… that you are just as much the dark space beyond death as you are the light interval called life. These are just two sides of you because 'you' is the total wave. See, you can't have half a wave. Nobody ever saw waves which just had crests and no troughs. So you can't have half a human being who is born but doesn't die; half a thing. That would only be half a thing."
Shakti Maggi
"Nothing Dies, The Endless Kaleidoscope"
Though the video quality is less than ideal, Shakti Maggi's concepts on death and 'reincarnation' (my term, not hers) come through with the loving clarity that is her hallmark in this short 4-min. video.

"The body, it is simply a movement of energy arising from the stillness of your being …[during death, this movement] will be simply receding back into stillness."
Adyashanti
"Death: The Essential Teachings"
In this 5-min. video, Adyashanti describes how the process of aging can lead to the wisdom and freedom of letting go.

"But certainly, enlightenment is absolutely intrinsically linked with death. There is no deep lasting liberation without death, without dying before you die, without the psychological self giving way. They're intimately linked; you don't get one without the other. They're absolutely linked together."
Rupert Spira
"What Happens to Awareness After Death"
Rupert explains why we experience different states of awareness and offers a description of 'reincarnation' (my term, not his).

"Remember, the body is an appearance in the mind. So when the body dies, just a particular localization of consciousness disperses… Consciousness doesn’t dissolve."
Terence McKenna
"Life And Death"

A 6-min lecture snippet in which Terence comments on the origins of the body and exploring the after-death space with psychedelics.

"So I think what biology is, is the intrusion into 3-dimensional space and time of hyper-dimensional objects. And the other clue to that, that seems an argument for it, is that we do have this thing called 'the mind' but we can't find it anywhere. It doesn't seem to be anywhere… [at death] I think probably these objects retract back into hyperspace - higher space ... we clothe ourselves in matter but we are not matter and so to actually complete a human cycle of existence, you have to go into death. It's where you came from..."
Eckhart Tolle
"What Happens At The Time Of Death?"
In this short excerpt from an audience Q&A session, Eckhart talks about the transformation consciousness will face after the body's end.

"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal ultimately exists….. Beyond the appearance on the level of form, which is the only level where death exists, it is a transition from one form into another form or from one form into formlessness. That is what death is, no more than that. Nothing real dies…. It's a transmutation of form."

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The Nature of Consciousness

Books
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The Nature of Consciousness

The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter (2017)
Rupert Spira

Within the sciences there is what's known as 'the hard problem of consciousness' - the missing explanation of how consciousness arises from physical matter, as materialist science claims.
"I hope … to bring the non-dual understanding out of the closet of dogma and esotericism and reformulate it in a way that is accessible to those who seek understanding, peace, fulfilment and friendship beyond boundaries; who do not feel the need to affiliate themselves with any particular group, tradition or religion; and who have become wary of referring to any doctrine, authority or institution at the expense of their own direct experience." -- Rupert Spira, 'The Nature of Consciousness'
In this collection of essays, Rupert attempts to persuade the reader that the time has come for humanity to release these old materialist ideas about reality and evolve to new understanding of human consciousness, an understanding he goes on to describe with his usual penetrating insights. I have always found Rupert's meditations especially effective for confronting the illusion of ego; this book offers many of the same kinds of sharp perceptions and, with its essay format, is a handy tool for quick refreshers.

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Rupert Spira

Teachers
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Rupert Spira

Website, YouTube

Rupert Spira began his spiritual journey early in life, reading Rumi's poetry at the age of 15. His studies went on to include teachings from Dr. Francis Roles, Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, Krishnamurti and a number of others (I'd never heard of); his website has a nice bio. Rupert's teachings are also heavily influenced by Francis Lucille (SAND videos).
“Only that which is always with you can be said to be your self and if you look closely and simply at experience, only awareness is always ‘with you’.”  --Rupert Spira
What's been helpful: I may always have a 'complicated' relationship with Rupert's teachings. My ego thinks of them as 'relentless' because they are very clear, very inescapable and very persuasive rationales on the illusion of ego. It was while meditating in a hypnogogic state to Rupert's series The Light of Pure Knowing, (track #6, if you must know) that the message suddenly sank all the way into my awareness: I needed to experience the 'death' of my ego identity, Laura. Needless to say, it was a challenging next few days.

Rupert's new book, The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter, felt to me like a similar exercise in ego disassembly. Reading the book felt like a practice in accepting that I am not this egoic identity ... whether I wanted to hear it or not! Fortunately, being 'no self' also means I can be 'any self', which brings a wonderful freedom and yet still, the egoic self is hard to let go of. If I feel myself sinking back into old conditioning, this will be a wonderfully effective book for scrubbing away the illusion of the egoic self.

Which brings me to what I will always hold dear about Rupert's teachings; it was while practicing his 'fill-the-body-with-awareness' meditation instruction that I experienced a second profound shift in consciousness, which I wrote about in the post: Re-awakening To The Grateful Dead. Rupert's teachings helped open the door to that experience and for that I am eternally grateful.

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