Windmill Video 5

Solving this puzzle unlocks a video of Rupert Spira, giving a lecture about Nondualism.

## Transcript

Know yourself as the open, empty, luminous presence of awareness.

Open because you say yes unconditionally and indiscriminately to all appearances of the mind, body, and world. Like empty space, you have no mechanism inherent within you that can resist any appearance. We don't have to make this the case; it is already the case.

Empty because although you, I, this aware presence is aware of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions it is not made out of a thought, a sensation, or a perception. It is made out of pure knowing or awareness.

And luminous because just like the sun, relatively speaking, that renders all objects seeable so you, I, this open empty presence renders all experience knowable.

In fact we don't really see objects, relatively speaking, illumined by the sun; we just see reflections or modulations of the sun's light appearing as a multiplicity and diversity of color. In the same way, we don't really know the objects of the mind, body, and the world; we just know our knowing of them.

All we know, all that is known, is the knowing of experience, and you are that knowing. All that is ever known is a modulation of our own knowing presence, modulating itself in the form of thinking, sensing and perceiving, and seeming to become a mind, a body, and a world. But we never actually know a mind, a body, and a world as they are normally conceived. We just know our knowing of them.
And this knowing, this substance of our experience, the only substance of our experience, is our self. In other words, we know ourself alone. Awareness knows nothing other than itself.

Be knowingly this open, empty, luminous presence of awareness. We don't need to do anything special to make this happen. Above all, we don't have to manipulate the mind in any way whatsoever to be this presence of awareness.
This presence of awareness which is simply our self, what we refer to when we say "I", is ever-present. Just check this in your own experience.

Nothing that I am saying this evening, there is nothing that cannot be checked in your own direct experience right now. I bring no special knowledge to this meeting. I don't have a store of knowledge which I am disseminating. I'm just, within the limits of language, trying to describe the current experience.

Ask yourself, do I know anything other than now? Try to experience the not-now. Try first to experience the past. It's easy to experience a thought about the past. But what about the actual past to which this thought refers? Try to experience that.

Can you step into the past, can you go one second into the past? Or one second into the future? Thought can go there, but what about you? Really try to go there, to make sure that this is not just an interesting philosophical conversation, but that it is actually your experience that the past and the future are never experienced. And if the past and the future are never actually experienced, they are only thought about, and that thought about the past and the future is always now, if this past and future are never experienced,
what does that say about time?

Time is a movement between a nonexistent past towards a nonexistent future. It's a theory. A necessary and valid theory, but a theory that doesn't refer to the reality of our experience. Nobody has ever or could ever experience time. When I say "nobody" I mean yourself, awareness, the only one that knows or is aware.

When I arrived off the plane from London in Washington D.C. last weekend before coming here the friend who picked me up asked me how the flight was, and she said, "How long did it take?" and I experienced thought being cranked up like an old motor, a little resistant to get going.

And for a moment I could feel the cogs of thought almost moving, trying to work out how much time the flight had taken. Because in my experience it had been now all the way. I had never left London. London had left me. I had never got onto an aeroplane. A flow of sensations and perceptions that thought abstracts, and calls a body in an aeroplane, flowed through me. And I never arrived in Washington D.C. Washington D.C. arrived in me.
Or at least the cluster of perceptions that thought calls Washington D.C. arrived in me.
In the same way nobody ever walked into this room and nobody is sitting on a chair and nobody is listening to a talk.

A colorful flow of sensations and perceptions appears in awareness, but awareness never goes anywhere or does anything. It is always here and now. Not here a place and now a time. Here, this dimensionless, now, this timeless presence of our own being. That is our experience whether we recognise it or not.

Now the mind may feel a little rebellious when it hears this. It may say yes, yes, yes, that's true, but there is an undeniable continuity to my experience. And this undeniable continuity would seem to be evidence of time.
Where does this felt sense of continuity come from? All we know of the mind is the current thought or image. And thoughts and images are intermittent. The body is known through sensation. And all sensations are intermittent. All we know of the world is perception, that is sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells; in fact nobody has ever experienced a world as such, a world as it is normally conceived to be, we just know the current perception. And all perception is intermittent.

So if the so-called mind, body, are intermittent, from where does this felt sense of continuity come from? It comes from the only thing, if we can call it a thing, that is truly continuous, or in fact not continuous but ever-present now in our experience, and that is our own being, the presence of awareness.
The presence of awareness is the only thing that is known to be ever-present.

Now the mind knows nothing of awareness because the mind only knows apparent objects. So when the mind looks at experience to find what it is that accounts for continuity, it cannot see awareness, and so it manufactures a substance called "time" to account for the continuity of experience.
In other words, continuity in time is what eternity looks like when viewed through the narrow slit of the mind.

Permanence in space is what the infinite, unlimited nature of awareness looks like when viewed through the narrow slit of the mind.Continuity and permanence are pale reflections at the level of the mind of the true eternal and infinite nature of awareness, that is, of our self.

What else can we say about our self from our actual experience? Which means right now, what can we know for certain about our self? Not what thought may tell us about our self, but what we actually know, in this moment, derived only from our experience of our self?
Ask yourself, "Can I, this open, empty, knowing presence, can I be agitated?"
Thought can be agitated. Sensations, or the body, can be agitated. The world can be agitated. But what about you, the one that knows the apparent mind, body and world?

Can you, this open empty presence, be agitated? See, in your experience right now, that you are - and this of course is just an image - are like an open, empty space such as the space of this room. Nothing that appears within this room can agitate it. We are all sitting peacefully now, but if we were to stand up and start dancing, or fighting, would the space of this room become agitated?

You are like that. You, I, the presence of awareness, are undisturbable, imperturbable. We don't need to become imperturbable and this undisturbability of ourself is not dependant upon the condition of the mind.
Right now you, awareness, are utterly imperturbable, and for this reason another name for our self is "peace".

Peace is not a quality that our self has, it is what our self is. Not peace of mind. Minds are more or less agitated. This "peace that passeth understanding", that is not of the mind, it doesn't have to be sought, it is not hiding the background of experience,
This very awareness that is seeing, hearing, knowing, is pure peace itself shining in all experience, however apparently agitated that experience may be.

Ask yourself, "Can I, this presence of awareness, ever lack something?" Thoughts can say that something is missing; feelings can say that something is missing, but what about you?
Without referring to thought or feeling, is there the slightest motive in you to avoid the now and replace it with the not-now?
See that in yourself, this presence of awareness, there is not the slightest impulse or possibility to avoid the now.

And what do we call this absolute absence of resistance to the now? The absolute absence of resisting what is and seeking what is not?
What is the common name we give to this? It is called happiness. We all know that when we are happy we are, by definition, not resisting the now and seeking in the past or the future. By "happiness", of course, I do not mean a pleasant state of the mind or the body. I mean this absolute impossibility of our self ever to resist or seek. To resist what is and to seek what is not.
So happiness, like peace, is just another name for our self. It is not a quality that our self has; it is what our self is.

What else can we say for certain based on this current experience about our self?
When I was driving here, or being driven here, the day before yesterday, from the airport in San Francisco, I was looking in the wing mirror of the passenger's seat, and I noticed the words inscribed at the bottom of the wing mirror, and they said: "OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN YOU THINK."
A statement of pure nonduality. Objects that appear in the mirror of consciousness are closer than we think. How close to a mirror are the objects that appear in it? Are there in fact two things, one, the objects that appear in the mirror, and two, the mirror? Or is it all just mirror?
All we know of the apparent mind is the experience of thinking, and thinking is just a modulation of your self, a modulation of knowing or awareness.
All we know of the apparent body is the experience of sensing, and sensing is a modulation of your self, awareness.
All we know of the apparent world is the experience of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. These are all modulations of knowing, modulations of our self.

In other words, we never truly know a mind, or a body, or a world. These labels are just abstractions that thought superimposes on the intimacy of our experience. From the point of view of experience, which is the only real point of view, experience is much closer, much more intimate. So close as to not admit the possibility of two things, one, myself, awareness, and two, the object that I know.

Even that is an abstraction. It may be a useful stepping-stone, a halfway understanding to conceive of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions arising in awareness, but nothing arises in awareness. The only substance of all experience, the only substance of thinking, sensing, and perceiving, is already awareness.

What do we call this absolute absence of two things? A subject that knows and an object that is known?
Take now the experience of hearing. Go to the sound of the air conditioning. Forget about the labels "sound" and "air conditioning". Our only knowledge of the apparent air conditioning is the experience of hearing. How close does hearing take place to you? Five meters away? Ten meters away?
Refer only to your experience, not to what thought tells you about sound. Where is hearing?
Is it close? Intimate?

And in the experience of hearing, can you find two parts, one part that hears, and another part that is heard? Or is it just one seamless, intimate substance called my self?
And what about this room? Thought says I, the inside self in here, sees the room, the outside world, out there. But what does experience say? All we know of the apparent room is the experience of seeing.
Remove seeing and the room vanishes. In other words, we don't know a room. We just know the experience of seeing.
Does seeing take place five, ten, fifteen meters away from your self? Or is seeing utterly intimate?
And can you find two parts to the experience of seeing, one part that sees, and another part that is seen? Or is it just one seamless, intimate substance?

And what is the name, the common name we give to the absolute intimacy of all experience? It is called love. Love is the most familiar experience that we all know, the collapse or dissolution of the sense of a self in here and an object, other, or world out there. The collapse of this sense of separateness, distance, otherness, not-me-ness, is what we call love.

Love is just another name for nonduality. If we call it nonduality, there's just a few thousand of us in the world
that are interested in it. But if we call it love, or peace, or happiness, then all seven billion of us are interested in it.
So why is it, if love, peace, happiness are the natural condition of all experience, the substance out of which all experience is made, how is it that it seems not to be experienced?
It is because of a single thought that rises in awareness, made only of awareness, which imagines that awareness shares the limits of the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that appear within it.
It is like imagining that a mirror shares the limits of the objects that appear in it.

With that thought alone, the ever-present, unlimited awareness, which is what we are, seems, seems, to aquire or take on the apparent limits of the body and the mind, just as the screen seems to take on the limits of an image when a film begins.

As a result of this imaginary collapse or contraction of our self, unlimited, eternal awareness, into a body and a mind, these qualities of love, peace and happiness are seemingly veiled, and it is for this reason that the self, the separate self that thought imagines us to be, is always by definition on a search in the imaginary outside world for the apparently lost love, peace, and happiness.

However, this imaginary inside self cannot, by definition, find the love that it seeks because its very presence, its apparent presence, is the veiling of that love. All the separate self seeks is love; in fact, the separate self is not an entity that searches, it is the activity of resisting the now and seeking the not-now.
All this seeking ever wants is love, but love is the dissolution of this seeking, the dissolution of this imaginary self.

In other words, the separate self that seeks love is like a moth that seeks a flame. The flame is all the moth wants, but it is the only thing it cannot have, because as the moth touches the flame, it dies. That is its way of knowing the flame. It becomes the flame as it touches it.
That is the separate self's way of finding love, by dying in it.

The death or dissolution of the separate self is the experience of love.

So, simply be knowingly this open, empty, luminous presence of awareness whose nature, whose inherent nature, is love, peace, and happiness.
Not a love, peace, and happiness that is in the background of experience, that has to be sought, but that is shining in full view at the heart of all experience. In fact experience is made out of this substance called peace or happiness.

## Literary context

Rupert Spira is a practicioner of Nondualism; a philosophical movement that states that the idea that the dualism we experience in things (such as between body and mind) are actually illusions that we make for ourselves. Spira explains his belief that the only thing we can really experience is our awareness itself, so that's where you should start in figuring out how your own conciousness works.
The whole video is him explaining thekey concepts of nondualism, where he ends with the thought that the things he is explaining are also known as love and happiness and that these concepts do draw a larger audience than the concept of nondualism.

The beliefs of Spira don't directly belong to any religion, but are part of a larger system of beliefs that a number of people subscribe to and try to live their life in a way consistent with those beliefs. The ideas presented are pretty fuzzy and hard to take in, which leads lots of people, when watching this video in the Witness for the first time, to conclude that this is a cult leader or madman.

## Relation to the six themes of the Witness

This video highlights Theme 5: Preconceptions.

The theme of nondualism in the game tells us that our perceptions are blinding us from seeing the truth of something. In case of Rupert Spira he tells us of the idea that our mind is putting up screens that are showing us what we are calling the real world, but that is just a way to prevent us from seeing how everything is one connected whole. We are all one giant awareness of self and all it takes to see it is just to allow ourselves to start seeing it, since it is already true.

Wether or not these ideas are true or not doesn't matter too much to the game. The ideas presented are mostly that we have certain preconceptions about what the truth is like and prevent ourselves from actually finding out the truth. Rupert Spira has a large number of talks and conversations online where he often uses examples and questions to show how this works.
One fan favourite is the example of a television screen. Are you watching at a screen? Are you watching a show? Once you decide that the things you see on the screen are real, you stop seeing the screen and tell yourself that the screen doesn't exist anymore. The idea here is that our thoughts are also a screen in the same way, preventing us from seeing the reality of our own experience.