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Direct Experience of the Body

DIRECT EXPERIENCE OF THE BODY
(Contemplating the reality of the body guided by Rupert Spira)

"Allow the experience of the body to come to your attention. 

Drop the label 'body'. 

With our eyes closed and with no reference to thought or memory, we have no knowledge of either having or being a body. 

We are the new-born infant, just a field of sensitivity, pure openness, pure knowing or experiencing.

 And in the middle of this field of sensitivity, there is this tingling amorphous pulsating vibration, which we will later label 'my body'. 

Just stay with the raw experience without knowing anything about it."

"For instance are any of you now (unless you have a headache) actually experiencing the back of your head? 

Go to the part of your experience called 'the back of your head'.

 Is there something solid and dense there or is it just open and empty?

 Is there a head there? 

Are any of you experiencing a head? 

All there is is a vibration of knowing that may have a certain intensity, and due to your memory you say it is dense, it is solid. 

It is not. It's just a vibration of empty knowing. 

There's nothing dense there at all.
You're superimposing a memory on your experience.

 Okay so I grant there may be some tingling there but for most of us, there's no experience of the head at all. 

What about your shoulders, are any of you experiencing your shoulders at the moment? 

Unless you have a pain in your shoulder or on your back, for instance, can any of you experience your back?

You see if we stay with the experience of the body, unless we're in pain, it's mostly empty space with a few little tingling amorphous vibrations floating around, unless there's a physical pain or a contraction of feeling. 

But even if there's a contraction of feeling, there will just be a slight density in this area.

 Without reference to memory you have no idea that that intensity is jealousy or fear or anger, it's just a little vibration.

Are any of you at the moment experiencing your eyes? 

Do any of you know that you have eyes or ears?

There is the experience of hearing but that wasn't the question.

 If I were to ask you 'Are you experiencing hearing now?' You would all answer 'Yes.

 There is something in my experience that corresponds to the word 'hearing'.' 

But is there anything in your experience now that corresponds to the word 'ear'? 

Unless you have an earache, no. 

When you go to the place in your experience that you used to call 'ear', is it not mostly just emptiness?
Try to find your head now. 

What is your actual experience of your head? 

Is it not just the space in which your experience is appearing? 

You sense, period. 

You're not sensing something, you're just sensing. 

'I sense my jaws' is a label that can only be supplied if you refer to the past. 

All you can say is 'I sense'. 

But you have no idea what you're sensing. In fact you have no idea even that you are a self that is sensing. All you can say is 'there is sensing'.

The new-born infant - the reason I go back to a new-born infant is that the new-born infant cannot refer to the past - is experiencing sensing. 

It's experiencing something but it has no idea what it's experiencing, and it has no idea that it is a self that is experiencing. 

There is just sensing, just hearing, just seeing. 

And if the new-born infant were to touch the stuff out of which seeing, hearing, or sensing was made, without any past knowledge or idea of it and it were able to say what it is, it would say 'all that is there is experiencing or knowing.'

 It would have no knowledge of having a jaw or a head."

"Rupert Spira : there's no difference between a small child's experience and your experience. 

The only difference is that you interpret your experience through the filter of your past experiences.

 In other words, you overlay your past onto your current experience, and you seem to experience your current experience through the filter of your past interpretations. 

The new-born infant doesn’t interpret its experience.

 It just experiences its experience.

Questioner : so where does that take me to like illness, disabilities and things like that of the body?

Rupert Spira : so, close your eyes again. 

Evoke the new-born infant again for the only purpose that you’re not able to escape from the now into a past. 

You're not able to conceptualize your experience. 

All you know is your current experience. 

Now referring only to your current experience, do you have any knowledge of being ill? 

Does anyone in this room, referring only to their current experience, have any knowledge of being ill?

I do not mean to deny at a relative level illness and pain. 

And I certainly do not mean to suggest that we shouldn't take whatever steps are necessary at a relative level to take care of the body. If it is sick or in pain, of course we should.

I'm just giving you this direct access to the highest healing, which is the knowledge that what you are now, not what you might become, but what you are now, is always in perfect health.

But as I say, please don't think that I'm suggesting that one shouldn't take care of the body at a relative level, of course one should, nor am I denying the functioning of the body. I'm just upgrading the matter model to a consciousness model."

"It is true that you are that which sees, hears, etc. 

However, you, awareness, don’t see or hear through a body. 

In other words, awareness is not located in a body, looking out through the eyes, or behind the ears hearing. 

The idea that we see through the eyes or hear through the ears is simply another mistaken interpretation by thought superimposed upon the reality of our experience.

Let us take the experience of hearing.

 Normally thought conceptualizes a ‘me’ inside the head hearing a sound that is considered to be outside the head. 

Take a sound that you are hearing now, for instance, the traffic.

 And take the experience of the head, in which hearing is supposedly taking place.

 Our only experience of the head is a tingling mass of vibration.

 
Now, is it your actual experience that the sound of the traffic is taking place inside the tingling vibration we call 'the head’? 

Go directly to the experience.

 Or rather, is it your experience that the tingling vibration called 'the sound of traffic' and the tingling vibration called ‘the head’ both appear in awareness?

 
Or we can ask ourselves, do we experience the awareness that is hearing the sound of the traffic as being located in the tingling mass of vibration called the head? 

In other words, do we experience awareness inside a sensation but outside a perception?

In order to find the answer, try to look at this awareness.

 Do you know where to look for it?

 Can you see it or find it? 

No! 

Whilst awareness is undeniably present, it cannot be located anywhere. 

Therefore, it is our simple, direct experience that awareness is not located in the sensation we call 'the head', and therefore it is also our simple experience that hearing, which takes place in awareness, is also not located in the head.

 
Our only experience of the head is through sensing and our only experience of the sound of the traffic is through hearing, and sensing and hearing both take place in the same place, that is, in the placeless place of awareness. 

In fact, it is not even true to say that hearing and sensing take place in awareness. Rather, awareness, as it were, takes the shape of sensing and hearing from time to time.

 
Awareness then takes the shape of a thought which conjures up a fairy tale about an individual entity that lives inside the head, which hears a sound which supposedly takes place in an imagined space outside the head.

 
However, this fairy tale doesn’t change the fact of our experience, which is that there is only awareness, which sometimes takes the shape of thinking, sensing and perceiving, thereby giving birth to the appearance of the mind, body and world."

"Feeling the body in a way that is consistent with our understanding that the reality of the body is pure consciousness. 

We understand that, we all understand that now or we're very close to understanding it. But we don't just want to understand it, we want to feel it.

 We want to live our lives in a way that is consistent with this new understanding. 

We don't just want to think about non-duality when we're alone in the privacy of our home, we want to feel it.

Don't forget what we're doing is countering decades of conditioning, so don't expect this knotted feeling of 'me' in the body to evaporate one morning.

 It takes time. 

It takes some time and we do it over and over again, and each time we do it (the body may go back to the old feeling of being solid and dense, but it doesn't go all the way back, it only goes 90% the way back. And the next time it only goes 90%. And in time, over the months and years if we just do this for a while, the body just becomes more transparent.

We don't feel there's a whole well of old hurt living in the chest, dictating the way we think, feel and act. We feel that the body is washed clean of the tyranny of the separate self. 

And then your body becomes open and sensitive and you feel in touch with the environment, you don't feel defended."
Rupert Spira

Open Your Heart,Let Go

I AM the Substratum of All Existence

Samskaras Dissolving