How Our Expectations Rarely Match the Paradoxical Reality of Life

You’re still expecting something to happen. That’s the problem.

Enlightenment is not an event. It’s not a marvellous event. It’s not a mundane event. It’s not any kind of event. It’s not something that happens.

Enlightenment is not something new. It’s not something that was lost and now has to be found. At best, and even this is not quite true, but at best we could say it was overlooked…

In fact, awareness doesn’t have problems, doesn’t know problems. Why? Because in order for there to be a problem, there needs to be resistance. There needs to be the, “I don’t like this.” That’s what makes a situation a problem.

But awareness is like empty space. It’s never saying to the current experience, “I don’t like you.” And therefore, it doesn’t have problems.

So it’s not saying, “My separate horrible self needs to be got rid of. I’m fed up with her.” The “I” that is fed up with her is another form of herself. In other words the separate self is perpetuating itself by trying to get rid of itself.

So you’re caught in this mind from which you are understandably tired of trying to get rid of yourself. “I, the separate self, want to get rid of myself, so that I, the separate self, can experience enlightenment.”

And you’re going round and round and round. And you’re rightly frustrated and disheartened because you’re engaged in a never-ending endeavour which is perpetuating the separate self by trying to get rid of it.

It’s just see the situation clearly. You cannot get rid of an illusion.

What can you do to an illusion, what do you need to do to an illusion, just to see that it’s an illusion? Don’t spend your life trying to get rid of an illusion. It’s a waste of a lifetime.

Just live what you understand. Take your stand there.

In other words, enlightenment is a fancy name for the most simple, the most ordinary, the most well-known experience there is. And all seven billion of us know it. However, because it cannot be found by the mind, in most cases it is deemed missing. And as a result of that, the peace and the happiness that are inherent in it are also considered missing. And hence, the imaginary self goes off into the world in search  for the missing peace and happiness.

And as we all know, it doesn’t live there. Where does it live? In the simple knowing of our own being. It’s knowing of itself. That is awarenesses awareness of awareness.

Instead of mistaking yourself for a cluster of thoughts and feelings, just noticed, “Oh no. I am the one who is aware of those. I’m not a cluster of thoughts and feelings. All those flow by. But I’m not flowing by, I’m just always here.”

Just allow that to come from the background into the foreground, more and more.

Rupert Spira

Rupert uses an amazing metaphor for life within this video as thought one were looking at a movie screen and seeing their life play out upon it (which mirrors Plato’s Allegory of the Cave) but then forgetting that what we’re seeing is an illusion cast upon a screen. (I, myself, prefer a more modern metaphor for this whereby life is playing out upon a VR headset screen that is covering our eyes which is why it’s hard for us to realize this.)

Thus this “screen” is what is often overlooked, as he notes.

Compared to the woman who Rupert is speaking to, who is experiencing this problem, I would say it mirrors my own experience in that I’m seeking some transitory and transformative event that will shift my perception but that in looking for it, even expecting it, I’m actually preventing it from happening.

In effect, so often how we think things will turn out is completely different than how they will because we often misinterpret the meaning of the experience itself, thinking we know it. When it’s actually much more paradoxical than we imagined it would be.

At the same time though, the reverse of this also happens! In effect, we often do things that we think are “wrong” but they are actually naturally right. Like I kept feeling like having a blog and taking things only one step at a time and just writing that thread of an experience separately, wasn’t enough. So I put a massive expectation upon myself to try to force it all out at once which only made it worse and made me stuck even more.

Yet you can’t force a seed to grow. You have to give it time, space, and room to grow on its own. Thus when finally in the right fertile environment and conditions, it flourishes rapidly upon its own.

It’s funny. I remember saying something a while back about the quote, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I said that the teacher is actually always there, they’re often just not noticed. This is remarkably similar to what Rupert is saying here. Our awareness, which is constantly with us, is always there.

BTW Rupert’s mention of defusing your vision to become aware of our awareness is also remarkable close to an experience I had many years back, while I was in a liminal state while preparing to fall asleep. Effectively my deep rhythmic breathing and a state of focus that was out of focus, both between what was I looking at and what I was, caused this experience to occur. But as I noted before, I never replicated this experience, even though I knew I could, because I was too afraid of the feeling of the experience of not being my “self” and thus potentially losing my “self” permanently in the process.