No one writes like Rupert Spira. The first time I ever opened the pages of The Transparency of Things I felt like someone had entered my heart and was whispering to me from it. I could feel his words, and hear them even better than I could take them in visually and process them intellectually.
These are words of love from a Lover. I pray they will touch you as much as they do me. If they do, they will change you, I promise you that. Their author changed me. I ask you to open, and open some more. Open to a Lover at the height of his powers.
Fred Davis
10-7-13
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Foreword
How strange.
We can burn.How strange and stunning: we can burn from top to bottom and yet find ourselves in fullness.
Each stanza in this book is a blazing firebrand. To really come close, trusting and open, is to torch the jumble of beliefs and delusions that sustained us in quiet desperation, which we had finally considered inevitable. Each stanza in this book burns what we are not and reveals what we are.
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We are freedom itself, joy without a cause and peace without an enemy. Furthermore, how striking: never ever have we been limited in the first place.
This book is a distillation of penetrating statements, gleaned from the numerous teachings of Rupert Spira: at times borrowing the musicality of a haiku, the terseness of a pith instruction, or the persuasive power of an oration. But no matter their shape, each one bears the treasure of a full teaching.
We can only marvel at the simple and effortless nature of this rediscovery of the truth within ourselves. For there is nothing to do; it is done without us, in the simple releasing of all that can be released. In fact, we see that the greatest effort lies in the ceaseless creation and maintenance of an illusion, the illusion of believing oneself to be a separate entity in the face of our actual experience of undivided and universal identity.
In this way, the baseless ideas and beliefs we took on, unquestioningly, are burnt to a cinder, and their cremation is felt as a dissolution. Without us really noticing, the understanding spreads through us and takes full possession of the territory in a broad sweep that is not a movement of the mind but a wave of love.
For love is fully present here. Love is the main character in this book, because it is love that is the core of what we are.
Rupert Spira is an artist. He sculpts words into condensed forms of pure intelligence to which there is nothing to be added or removed. He sculpts our understanding until it becomes pure light, pure flame.
Truth seekers familiar with his teaching will find its essence here: concise, sharp as a diamond, overwhelming with its awesome higher reasoning, whilst bathing us in unconditional love. Others will be struck by the clarity and profundity of Reality as conveyed by this Master of Advaita, and illumined by the glimpse of an inner revolution.
Monique Proulx
January 2013
(Translated by Ellen Emmet and Caroline Seymour)
ASHES OF LOVE
by
Rupert Spira
From the viewpoint of the earth, the sun comes and goes, whereas it is, in fact, always present. Likewise, from the viewpoint of the body and mind, our essential nature of pure Awareness comes and goes, but, in its own experience of itself, it is ever-present.
All experience is illuminated, or made knowable, by the light of pure Knowing. This Knowing pervades all thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions, irrespective of their particular characteristics. We are this transparent, unchanging Knowing.
Our Self – luminous, open, empty Awareness – cannot be enlightened. It is already the light that illuminates all experience. Nor can a separate self be enlightened, for when the separate self faces the light of Awareness, it vanishes, just as a shadow does when exposed to the sun.
To invest one’s identity and security in something that appears, moves, changes and disappears is the cause of unhappiness.
The separate self is not an entity; it is an activity: the activity of thinking and feeling that our essential nature of pure Awareness shares the limits and the destiny of the body and mind.
Just as a screen is intimately one with all images and, at the same time, free of them, so our true nature of luminous, empty Knowing is one with all experience and yet, at the same time, inherently free of it.
We are the open, empty, allowing presence of Awareness, in which the objects of the body, mind and world appear and disappear, with which they are known and, ultimately, out of which they are made. Just notice that and be that, knowingly.
When everything that can be let go of is let go of, what remains is what we desire above all else.
© 2013 Rupert Spira
© 2013 Non-Duality Press
Links
Rupert's on Amazon
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