The Natural State

Happiness is our essential nature, apparently eclipsed and obscured much of the time by the clamour of objective experience but never completely extinguished by it.
Rupert Spira, page 6

So I am about to share some learning that was gained from reading Being Aware of Being Aware by Rupert Spira. First of all, I am going to encourage you to read the book  yourself and again, to  take my interpretation and shared learning with a grain of salt.  This is the type of thing, I firmly believe, that has to resonate internally before it is accepted.

What the book offers is not necessarily new learning or the sharing of novel knowledge.  I have heard it all before in one way or another. I have  studied similar teachings, absorbed it from several previous teachers and have then regurgitated it all over the page here in one form another over the years.  It is not new learning. It is actually quite ancient.  This author, however, is able to teach it in such a way...it is like I am hearing it for the first time. It resonates!

So I would like to go through the ideas presented in this little book slowly and deliberately.

The first idea, I would like to touch on is that of our natural state.

Happiness and Peace Are Our Natural State

This notion that our natural state is one of peace and happiness is probably something many of us have a hard time accepting. We probably feel unease more than we feel peace, right? We would probably say that unease is our natural state and in order to improve upon that in anyway...we need to seek the things that will make us happy and avoid the things that will make us "more" miserable. Peace and happiness seem to be something out there and in order to experience them we have to work very hard to control, fix, manipulate the outside world so we can experience them.

We often carry with us, this malignant feeling of unease, do we not, whether it is always outwardly apparent or not? Happiness and peace are things we believe we earn after hard work.  Suffering is what we experience, more easily,  if we are not doing enough to bring happiness into our lives or to push the "nasty" things away.  In other words...suffering seems easy and natural; peace and happiness require effort. Or so we think.

Yet happiness and peace is who we are! We are the very things we yearn for and seek or work hard to attain out there.

Eclipsed and Obscured

I  love how the author uses the analogy of  the blue sky to describe our natural state.  The blue sky represents our natural happy state. We are happy under blue skies; not so happy under grey skies, right?  The blue sky is always there but sometimes we do not see it or remember it is there because it gets covered with clouds.  When the  grey clouds become our reality, in the sense they are all we can see or perceive, we may fail to see the blue sky beneath or to remember that it is there.  The clouds seem to stand between us and experiencing our natural happy and peaceful state. 


So if happiness is the natural state which is also the state of knowing and being aware...happiness never goes away.  We just do not  perceive it or connect to the experience because we are focusing on the clouds.  We are focusing on objective experience which includes our circumstances, thoughts, feelings, perceptions etc rather than on the natural state within us. So if those things 'out there"  are judged as unwanted because they are perceived as challenging or "negative",  there is a veil of grey cloud between us and happiness.  Happiness is still there , we are just not fully aware of it.

I will leave it at this point for now and I will come back and make better sense in my explanations tomorrow.

Of course, reading the book on your own may be the best thing for you to do.

All is well

Spira, Rupert (2017) Being Aware of Being Aware (The Essence of Meditation Series) New Harbinger/Kindle Edition