Top 60 Rupert Spira Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Happiness is simply to allow everything to be exactly as it is from moment to moment.”

— Rupert Spira

2. “In ignorance I am something; in understanding I am nothing, in love I am everything.”

— Rupert Spira

3. “The discovery that peace, happiness and love are ever-present within our own Being, and completely available at every moment of experience, under all conditions, is the most important discovery that anyone can make.”

— Rupert Spira

4. “Give your attention to the experience of seeing rather than to the object seen and you will find yourself everywhere.”

— Rupert Spira

5. “Love is the natural condition of all experience before thought has divided it into a multiplicity and diversity of objects, selves and others.”

— Rupert Spira

6. “We don’t have to wait for the right circumstances to have happiness.”

— Rupert Spira

7. “The greatest discovery in life is to discover that our essential nature does not share the limits nor the destiny of the body and mind.”

— Rupert Spira

8. “Looking for happiness in the body, mind or world is like looking for the screen in a movie. The screen doesn’t appear in the movie, and yet, at the same time, all that is seen in the movie is the screen. In the same way that the screen ‘hides’ in plain view, so happiness ‘hides’ in all experience.”

— Rupert Spira

9. “Love is the experience that others are not others. Beauty is the experience that objects are not objects.”

— Rupert Spira

10. “Time is the eternal now, seen through the narrow slit of the mind.”

— Rupert Spira

11. “The mind, the body and the world are made out of Consciousness but Consciousness is not made out of them. It is made out of itself. Therefore everything is made only out of Consciousness.”

— Rupert Spira

12. “Many of our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and the world are so deeply ingrained that we are unaware that they are beliefs and take them, without question, for the absolute truth.”

— Rupert Spira

13. “When feeling is divested of the feeler and the felt, it shines as love; when seeing is divested of the seer and the seen, it shines as beauty.”

— Rupert Spira

14. “We take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal.”

— Rupert Spira

15. “Only that which is always with you can be said to be your self and if you look closely and simply at experience, only awareness is always ‘with you’.”

— Rupert Spira

16. “This perpetual longing for happiness – which can, by definition, never be fulfilled because that very search itself denies the happiness that is present in our own being now – condemns us to an endless search in the future and thus perpetuates unhappiness. It is for this reason that the poet said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

— Rupert Spira

17. “In other words, in reality, there are not two things – one, the screen and two, the document or image. There is just the screen.”

— Rupert Spira

18. “The belief that we were born, that we change, evolve, grow old and die is simply a belief to which the vast majority of humanity subscribes without realizing that they are doing so. It is the religion of our culture.”

— Rupert Spira

19. “I’ve been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would ‘let go of them’ is itself simply one such pattern.”

— Rupert Spira

20. “In reality, which means in our actual experience, all experience is one seamless substance. The duality between the inside self and the outside object, world or other is never actually experienced. It is always imagined.”

— Rupert Spira

21. “Nor have we, aware presence, ever become sad, angry, anxious, depressed, in need, agitated, jealous, etc. At the same time, we are intimately one with all such feelings when they are present. Although we are the substance of all such feelings, just as the screen is the substance of all images, we are inherently free of them. Unhappiness is made out of our self, but our self is never unhappy.”

— Rupert Spira

22. “When the fan, the hand or indeed anything else are experienced, their apparent existence is not separate from awareness. All experiences are equally close, equally ‘one with’, awareness. When the apparent object disappears, awareness remains as it is.”

— Rupert Spira

23. “No formulation of the reality of experience is completely true. Once we acknowledge this, we relieve words of the impossible burden of trying to express the nature of experience and, as a result, leave them free to be spoken and heard in playful and creative ways that evoke Reality itself without trying to frame or grasp it.”

— Rupert Spira

24. “Being aware of being aware is the essence of meditation. It is the only form of meditation that does not require the directing, focusing or controlling of the mind.”

— Rupert Spira

25. “It is the self-aware screen of awareness, upon which the drama of experience is playing and out of which it is made, that becomes so intimately involved with the objective content of its experience that it seems to lose itself in it and, as a result, overlooks or forgets its own presence, just as a dreamer’s mind loses itself in its own dream at night.”

— Rupert Spira

26. “In this exploration the deeper layers, such as feelings of fear, guilt, shame, inadequacy, unlovableness, etc. are allowed to surface without resistance or agenda and slowly reveal the sense of separation that lies at their heart.”

— Rupert Spira

27. “And this ‘knowing’ is our self, aware presence. In other words, all that is ever experienced is our self knowing itself, awareness aware of awareness.”

— Rupert Spira

28. “I am that which knows or is aware of all experience, but I am not myself an experience. I am aware of thoughts but am not myself a thought; I am aware of feelings and sensations but am not myself a feeling or sensation; I am aware of perceptions but am not myself a perception. Whatever the content of experience, I know or am aware of it. Thus, knowing or being aware is the essential element in all knowledge, the common factor in all experience.”

— Rupert Spira

29. “The apparent separation of experience into two essential parts is similar to imagining that a screen is divided in two when two images appear on it side by side. If thinking imagines that the screen is only contained in only one of the images, then thinking will also have to imagine a substance that is ‘not the screen’, out of which the second image is made.”

— Rupert Spira

30. “Security and happiness cannot be found in anything that comes and goes. Find whatever it is in your experience that doesn’t appear, move, change or disappear, and invest your identity, security and happiness in that alone.”

— Rupert Spira

31. “However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply other names for our self.”

— Rupert Spira

32. “This absence of otherness, objectness, selfness is love itself. It is what we are and all we know.”

— Rupert Spira

33. “See clearly that we have no knowledge of our self ever having been born, changing, evolving, growing up or growing old and that we can never have the experience of death.”

— Rupert Spira

34. “Every word on this page is in fact only made of paper. It only expresses the nature of the paper, although it may describe the moon.”

— Rupert Spira

35. “Love is the experience of our shared being. When we love another person we feel, to a greater or lesser extent, that the separation between us dissolves.”

— Rupert Spira

36. “Allow your self to be coloured by experience temporarily, but do not become limited by it. To say and identify with the statements ‘I am sad’, ‘I am lonely’, ‘I am tired’, ‘I am hungry’, ‘I am a man’ or ‘I am a woman’ is to allow infinite being to become limited and personal.”

— Rupert Spira

37. “It is impossible to experience the appearance of awareness. We are that awareness to which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no experience that we, awareness, are born.”

— Rupert Spira

38. “Understanding is the dissolution of the mind into its support, into its ground. It is the experience of Consciousness knowing itself, returning to itself knowingly.”

— Rupert Spira

39. “Our true nature of eternal, infinite awareness is never completely forgotten or eclipsed by objective experience. However agitated or numbed objective experience may have rendered our mind, the memory of our eternity shines within it as the desire for happiness, or, in religious language, the longing for God.”

— Rupert Spira

40. “In fact, we don’t know objects; we just know ‘knowing’. And who is it that knows ‘knowing’? ‘Knowing’ is not known by something or someone outside or other than itself. ‘Knowing’ is known by ‘knowing’. In other words, all that is experienced in the experience of an object, other or world is ‘knowing’.”

— Rupert Spira

41. “The abstract concepts of the mind cannot apprehend Reality, although they are an expression of it.”

— Rupert Spira

42. “The mind that seeks awareness is like a current in the ocean in search of water. Such a mind is destined for endless dissatisfaction.”

— Rupert Spira

43. “The great secret that lies at the heart of all the main religious and spiritual traditions is the understanding that the peace and happiness for which all people long can never be delivered via objective experience. It can only be found in our self, in the depths of our being.”

— Rupert Spira

44. “What remains when we have let go of all thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations, perceptions, activities and relationships? Our self alone remains: not an enlightened, higher, spiritual, special self or a self that we have become through effort, practice or discipline, but just the essential self or being that we always and already are before it is coloured by experience.”

— Rupert Spira

45. “Cease being exclusively fascinated by whatever you are aware of and be interested instead in the experience of being aware itself.”

— Rupert Spira

46. “We do not have to eradicate a separate self in order to be knowingly eternal, infinite awareness or God’s infinite, self-aware being. There is no separate self to be eliminated. To attempt to dissolve or annihilate a separate self simply perpetuates its illusory existence. To discipline the separate self is to maintain the separate self.”

— Rupert Spira

47. “There is just knowing. And what is it that knows that there is knowing? Only that which knows can know knowing. Therefore, only knowing knows knowing.”

— Rupert Spira

48. “There is only experiencing from moment to moment, and this experiencing is one ever-present, seamless whole.”

— Rupert Spira

49. “Awareness takes the shape of thinking and appears as the mind; it takes the shape of sensing and appears as the body;.”

— Rupert Spira

50. “When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything will appear as it truly is, infinite.”

— Rupert Spira