André Duqum

Who We Really Are and the Nature of Reality | Rupert Spira

Rupert Spira spends two and a half hours with Andre Duqum making one argument from fifteen angles: everything we know about the universe arrives through a finite mind, so the finite mind can never report what the universe actually is, and the only unmediated experience available is the plain fact of being aware. From that he derives an idealist model where matter is what consciousness looks like from a localized point of view, the way the streets of Paris look solid to the dreamed character while the dreamer sleeps in Los Angeles, and where duality is the mechanism by which the unmanifest is realized in form. The practical half is unromantic and specific: happiness always tastes the same whatever produced it, the ego is I am plus anything (so I am enlightened is as much ego as I am depressed), awakening is usually cumulative and undramatic, and emotions that depend on a separate self diminish when that self does rather than one at a time. He is equally hard on the half of nonduality that rejects the body and the world, insisting the return trip matters as much as the departure. He closes by compressing three thousand years of scripture into one sentence: peace and quiet joy are the nature of your being, and you share your being with everyone and everything.