Post date: Dec 15, 2014 3:3:2 AM
This excerpt from Rupert Spira's Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience - Volume II is on of the clearest, most powerful, descriptions and metaphors of the true nature of our experience that I have read:
Imagine going to an Imax cinema where we are given a special pair of three-dimensional glasses. Without the glasses the image appears in two dimensions on the screen as normal, but when we put on the glasses it seems as if the film is taking place all around us in the entire space of the cinema, and that we are situated within the three dimensional image, under the sea with the fish or on the plain with the lions.
If we take off our glasses at some point we will see all the children in the cinema (and some of the adults!) stretching out their hands trying to catch the fish. But they grab only empty space.
It is exactly the same with the world. When we try to catch it, to hold it, to see what it is made of, we find only the empty space of presence.
We are like children grabbing at the fish, thinking that the fish are real and trying to touch them. But when we look clearly at our experience, we find nothing objective there and, by the same token, nothing subjective.
Presence, as it were, puts on the mind, which as a result, appears to project a world outside of itself. But the mind is itself made out of the presence from which it seem to be separated.
The world is separate from presence in the same way as the sky is separate from space, that is, in no way at all.
Thinking seem to objectify, divide and fragment the seamless intimacy of experience, creating an apparent multiplicity and diversity of thoughts, objects, selves, others and the world.
Thinking creates the appearance of time out of timeless presence and this appearance is called the dream state.
Thinking creates the appearance of space and objects out of spaceless presence and this appearance is called the body and the world, that is, the waking state.
But when we 'stretch out our hand', as it were, and try to find time,thought, space, a body, an object or a world, we find only presence.
Presence finds only itself.