Written by Rupert Spira
Reviewed by John Cowan (July 2021)
This book can change your meditation practice, be ye Quaker, Zen practitioner, vipassana student, or just plain anybody plugging away at something you were taught long ago. Rupert is a teacher of the Advaita. I expect you could gain from him even if you are a student of the Advaita yourself. I may be such a student. I read several books by Jean Klein, a very noted teacher, several times and a book by Jean’s teacher twice. Never understanding enough to give myself credit for much of anything. After this book, I think I can at least claim to be a student.
If you are already committed to a perspective on how the spiritual world works, this reading may proceed more easily for you if you think not like a theologian but as a scientist. In science we have not truths but hypotheses, some more likely than others. As I read books of spirituality based on a view of reality quite different than the view I was given as a child, I do not ask if they are true, I ask if this hypothesis works as a description of reality and if it does then I use it to the extent that it works. The view of reality I was taught as a child works barely at all, so for me this transition is relatively easy.
Rupert has a specific belief that he teaches here, a belief I find acceptable even as a professed Christian. His hypothesis is that what we refer to as God, and he also calls God, is “Awareness.” It is this Divine awareness that creates what we call reality and continues the process of creation that we call evolution. Each of us participates in this divine awareness continuing to create ourselves and continuing to create the universe.
Meditation is being aware of what is going on primarily in you and then your surroundings as they reappear in you, and then the universe as it appears in you. Your awareness will continue the act of creation.
Your identity is to be awareness. That is you. You are awareness. This means that all events and problems occur in you. They have a reality in the world exterior to you, (your mother really died,) but all the memories, feelings, responses, effects are real to you only in you. It is there you will confront them and allow them to be healed by your tender awareness. Rupert is a non-dualist and as such believes himself to be one with God. So the power of God to create and heal rests also in him. You do not have to be non-dualist to think either that you are one with God or that through that oneness your awareness has creative and healing power.
The meditation practice itself is as gentle as is awareness. While you may feel that meditation is a struggle to be aware, it is not. The struggling meditator’s basic struggle is to prevent the self from becoming aware. To avoid awareness the meditator is squeezing self revelations to avoid reality. Meditation releases the clamp. The meditator becomes aware of reality revealed. And then things change.
This release can become easy in the meditation room and with practice this facility can perdure into life beyond the quiet moments, until all events are responded to first on the screen of the aware you. Then rolled into the arena of life with others.
This is a taste of the book and not the book. Although only a 102 pamphlet size pages the book is much bigger and better.
Being Aware of Being Aware, Rupert Spira, publisher Sahaja publications, Oxford, co-publisher New Harbinger Publications, Oakland CA. (Yes, Amazon has it.)