Film Transcript
00:00:12:03 – 00:00:17:07
[Loch Kelly] – Awakening is the next natural stage of human development.
00:00:17:14 – 00:00:22:12
[Rupert Spira] – So awakening is simply to recognize that the nature of our essential being.
00:00:22:20 – 00:00:32:07
[Lisa Natoli] – Is not some weird, mystical, all religious experience that’s only available to the few. It’s available to everyone.
00:00:32:09 – 00:00:37:13
[Rupert Spira] – What we essentially are is already fully awake, fully aware.
00:00:38:03 – 00:00:40:08
[Lisa Natoli] – And it’s totally unlimited.
00:00:40:13 – 00:00:46:19
[Dan Schmidt] – Your true nature is closer than the you that you think you are.
00:00:47:12 – 00:00:51:07
[Rupert Spira] – Consciousness is the ultimate reality of the universe.
00:00:51:10 – 00:00:55:17
[Donald Hoffman] – The next step in science is to see that consciousness is fundamental.
00:00:56:11 – 00:01:07:13
[Neale Donald Walsch] – What is awakening, anyway? Somebody explain that to me.
00:01:11:21 – 00:02:02:00
Narrator
What is awakening? Whether you call it the true self, the imminent self or no self, or Buddha nature, Tao or Christ consciousness. It really doesn’t matter. In this film, we’re going to refer to it as awareness. Awareness is not the property of any religion. Awakening or realizing awareness is like waking from a dream. The dream of your character in the play of life.
00:02:03:17 – 00:03:16:16
Narrator
Through our characters, we experience the world in all of its beauty and its ugliness. We can call this experience of life and death duality. Around and around we go, fixated on the characters thoughts and sensations. Good and bad. War and peace. Light and darkness. Birth and death. Until we wake up and find out we are not the character in this film,
00:03:17:10 – 00:03:51:21
Inquiry I
We are extending an invitation for you to directly experience your true nature, to find out directly, not intellectually.
Who are you?
We will repeat this invitation in different ways.
When inquiring into who you are, let everything be exactly as it is. Don’t move the mind to make something happen or to find some answer on the level of mind. And yet, don’t try to push away the mind. Simply intend to directly experience who you are. Letting the mind be a don’t know mind.
00:03:51:21 – 00:04:23:20
Dan Schmidt
Awakening is the answer to all of the world’s problems on every level. And if the world’s problems stem from a delusion, the fundamental delusion of the mind, and that delusion is that I am this limited character.
00:04:24:16 – 00:05:04:06
Loch Kelly
When we’re living from a small, separate self, there’s always some kind of perpetual dissatisfaction. So this can be big dissatisfaction like trauma, or it can be just this background feeling. Something’s not right. Something’s wrong. I’m missing something. Even when I have some pleasure, even when I achieve something in world. Even when I have a good relationship. If I just have a pause for a moment, there’s this dissatisfied feeling like I’m isolated or cut off from something. So this feeling, which it seems like most people have, can motivate us to awaken from that small, separate self whose nature is a kind of separation anxiety.
00:05:21:01 – 00:05:54:20
Dan Schmidt
This limited character has a tendency to grasp for what it wants. It’s just a collection of conditioned patterns, of craving what it wants or trying to push away or what it doesn’t want. It’s this endless process of you can say a pleasure principle, you know, going after pleasure, avoiding pain. And if we believe we are this, this character, this conditioned pattern, then we suffer and we create suffering in the world. The world becomes a reflection of that egoic consciousness. The benefit of awakening is that you suffer less and the people around you suffer less.
00:06:10:18 – 00:06:43:23
Neale Donald Walsch
There’s no doubt in my mind that my initial connection with my understanding of God was an awakening for me in my life. The biggest awakening that I’ve ever experienced. It is much as if I had been asleep really for 50 years. Walking around like a robot, just doing the things that I was taught to do from the time I was a young man, you know, I had the whole formula down, get the girl, get the car, get a job, get the house, get a spouse. A formula that I thought was how life was supposed to work. Until I got to be around 53 years old. And I realized that while I had done most of those things and had become professionally successful to a degree, then I realized that it doesn’t matter. I woke up somewhere around the age of 53, and realized this doesn’t matter and I was shocked to find how little this lreally meant…how pointless it all was.
00:07:31:12 – 00:08:11:01
Narrator
When you stop following the script that has been laid out for your character, the one inherited from parents, society and biological conditioning, then new dimensions open up within the game. The path opens up, but it is not a path to reach some destination. It is a pathless path, a stripping away of illusion to arrive exactly where you are in the now.
00:08:12:16 – 00:08:59:01
Rupert Spira
My name is Rupert Spira. I speak about the essential non-dual understanding that underlies all the great religious and spiritual traditions. And I write and lead guided meditations and have conversations whose purpose is to lead to an experiential recognition of this understanding. Understand that the peace and the happiness for which we all long above all else, can never by definition be found in objective experience. It can never be provided by objects, substances, activities, and relationships. And I would suggest understanding that clearly and not spending the rest of one’s life seeking fulfillment where it cannot be found. Anyone who is watching this movie is doing so precisely because they have either understood or at least intuited that the peace and happiness for which they long cannot be found in objective experience and have begun this investigation into their true nature. That is the most important investigation, one can make, and it is the investigation upon which depends our happiness.
00:09:57:02 – 00:10:22:22
Neale Donald Walsch
The biggest question of my life, of course, which I believe is the question most people look at sooner or later, is what is the point? Actually? What is the point of life? Much to my surprise, I was told that the point of life had nothing to do with anything that I was doing. It wasn’t about my job,
It wasn’t about my career, it wasn’t about hardly anything in my physical life. Those are aspects of my life but they were not the point of our life. The point of my life as I have come to understand it, was for me to experience, express, demonstrate and fulfill my true identity. Who I really am. I think that the biggest question that most people face is a question that hardly anyone ever asks themselves or never answers. The biggest question of life, in my understanding, is who am I? Who am I? Am I simply a physical entity like a bird in the sky or fish in the sea? You know, perhaps more sophisticated ID, but just a physical entity. I’m born, I live, I die. I just. The beginning and the end of it. Or is it possible just possible that I’m more than that? Is it possible that I’m a spiritual entity simply having a physical experience?
00:11:56:01 – 00:12:07:05
Inquiry II
Every experience in your life has brought you to this one universal question.
Who are you?
Don’t look for an answer with the mind. Let everything be exactly as it is.
Who is aware of the mind?
Feel everything that comes up.
Who is aware of those feelings?
Have a complete experience of everything that comes up as a result of your inquiry.
00:12:47:01 – 00:13:12:20
Donald Hoffman
I’m Donald Hoffman. I’m a professor emeritus of cognitive sciences at the University of California at Irvine. My work has been teaching students, although now I’m emeritus so I don’t teach. And now I do research. I do research on consciousness, mathematical models of consciousness, and how physics and spacetime might arise from a theory of consciousness that’s completely mathematically precise.
My own journey has been both from the spiritual side and from the science side. So my father was a minister, a fundamentalist Christian minister. So I got that on Sundays and I got science at school and they conflicted right. And the stories I was getting were contradictory. And so as a teenager, I realized I needed to figure things out for myself. So I decided the question I wanted to answer was, are we machines? Are people just machines or not? From the physical point of view, we were just being machines. From a spiritual point of view, we wouldn’t be machine but it wasn’t precise enough to say what we would be. And so I decided to ask the question scientifically, are we just machines? And the best way I thought to do that would be to study artificial intelligence. And so I went to MIT and was in the artificial intelligence lab studying artificial intelligence and also was in the brain and cognitive science department studying the human side of things. Because I wanted to do both. I wanted to see what can machines do and what special, if anything, about humans and human neuroscience to answer that very question are the spiritual traditions right? Are we more than just machines or is the physicalist, scientific point of view right. And we are just machines. And consciousness is just an artifact of brain activity.
00:14:48:04 – 00:15:31:20
Narrator
The scientific materialist paradigm that has been predominant in the last century denies the existence of anything beyond the physical, anything that cannot be verified by the scientific method. Science is an impasse. It cannot move beyond the paradox that is fundamental to quantum physics, which brought it face to face with the observer, with consciousness itself. Likewise, religions are, for the most part, functioning only on the level of belief they’ve lost their original purpose, which was to lead to direct experience of the truth of who and what we are.
The split between science and spirituality has rendered both impoverished religions and spiritual systems desperately need rigorous methods, which can be shown to create conditions for awakening to happen. And science desperately needs an openness to the possibility of something beyond the physical. It is not about giving up religion or science, but about going deeper, being willing to change ourselves so that we become a better tool for investigation.
We are the ones doing the experiment, and the experiment itself.
00:16:15:09 – 00:16:54:17
Loch Kelly
Religion has been the language and the container of these traditions of meditation, spiritual authority that have been written down and passed on through the generations. Now, certainly there is some language that is very literal, which divides religions and divides cultures when things are taken literally. But if you feel the spirit of religion, you can follow the thread back to authentic awakening. Anyone has the potentia to awakenl, whether they have belief or no belief, because awakening is inherent within our human consciousness, just by our human birth. So whatever you call it, and whenever language is used, there’s certain principles that seem to be the same throughout these different religions and spiritualities and meditation traditions.
00:17:22:07 – 00:17:57:13
Rupert Spira
When I was younger, this understanding was mainly available in the Eastern spiritual traditions. It was available in the Western traditions, but it was so disguised and codified in those traditions as to be almost inaccessible. So many people of my generation went physically or at least intellectually, to the east to find this understanding and Eastern culture by comparison with Western culture is exotic. And so this understanding acquired a flavor of the exotic from the cultures in which it was expressed. And many people, myself included, had thought as a result of this that there was something exotic about the non-dual understanding that it required some extraordinary way of life. You had to give up family life or grow your hair or get a special name or subscribe to some kind of art teacher ortradition or engage in strange practices All these kind of things which had nothing to do with a core understanding, and they were to do with the culture in which the understanding was expressed at a particular time. So now the understanding has been completely divested of the traditional cultural packaging in which many of us first heard about it, and now just that essential understanding is available in a way that enables us to carry on leading our lives exactly as they are. Family life work life. It’s not necessary to make any external changes in one’s life.
00:19:18:12 – 00:19:48:17
Neale Donald Walsch
The challenge we have on this planet is that we think there’s more than one essence. So we live in a world of what I would call duality. This male and female, black and white. Big and small, fast and slow up and down here there, before and after. But in fact, there’s only one thing. All things are one thing. And there is only one thing.
So it turns out when we look deeply at everything, we see that, here and there, big and small, fast and slow, up and down, left and right, male and female are all the same thing, simply expressing different characteristics but in no way separate from each other. I believe that all of us are individuations of God. I believe that God exists in as and through every human being, and for that matter, every sentient being in the cosmos.
So I see then that I am in relationship to God as a wave is to the ocean. A wave is no different from the ocean. It’s simply an arising of the ocean in individual form. And when that individuation is complete, the wave recedes back into the ocean where it came to arise again on another day. So I believe that we are all individuations of divinity, and when we see everything as divine, we change our relationship with everything and everything becomes different in our experience. That’s how the world changes.
00:21:21:13 – 00:21:51:23
Rupert Spira
Consciousness is the ultimate reality of the universe, so we might well ask if consciousness is the ultimate reality of the universe and everything, and everyone is obviously that, then how come the world appears to us as a multiplicity and diversity of discrete and independently existing people and animals and things all made out of stuff called matter. How can we reconcile this statement that consciousness is the ultimate reality of the universe, where it appears as a multiplicity and diversity of objects made out of matter?
00:22:03:02 – 00:22:30:21
Donald Hoffman
So the evidence that that I’m using to suggest that consciousness is fundamental has many aspects to it. One is that physics itself says that space time isn’t fundamental and evolutionary theory also agrees that space, time and physical objects are not fundamental reality. Now, both of those theories tell us only that that space time is not fundamental. They don’t tell us what is beyond space time. And so I my argument is that what the physicists are finding beyond space time, they’re finding mathematical structures. But what those are about is not really clear. What is this realm beyond space time about? And so I’m proposing that the realm beyond space time is about consciousness.
00:22:50:17 – 00:23:32:17
Rupert Spira
And I would suggest that infinite consciousness has the ability to localize itself as numerous separate subjects of experience, that is, all sentient beings or people or animals. Each of us are localization of infinite consciousness, in infinite consciousness made only of infinite consciousness from whose perspective it views its own activity as the outside world. So what appears to us as a world made out of matter from our localized perspectives, is from the point of view of reality, simply the activity of the one infinite consciousness. In other words, in the ultimate analysis, there are no discrete or independently existing things or people. There is one infinite, indivisible, whole. The unity of being that is only refracted into an apparent multiplicity and diversity of objects and things. When the one looks at its own activity through the perceiving faculties of the finite mind.
00:24:04:04 – 00:24:39:06
Dan Schmidt
If we are awake, we realize that there’s one awareness that is disguised as all of these different beings on the planet, one awareness shining through everyone’s eyes. Then we literally see ourselves in others. And that tendency to operate as an ego, that the tendency to take for oneself falls away because we directly realize the truth. The truth is that we’re all one consciousness.
00:24:40:14 – 00:25:14:07
Neale Donald Walsch
The experience of my spiritual self was only possible in the realm of the physical for a very good reason, because only in the realm of the physical was the opposite available. In other words, just use simple example. If I wanted to experience myself, if could speak metaphorically as the light, I couldn’t experience the light if I was amidst the light, nothing else around me but the light, which is a perfect definition of the realm of the spiritual. So I would come to a realm which I call the realm of the physical, where there is something other than the light. Because if I want to experience myself as a light, not just know myself as that, but experience it, I could only do that Where there was the opposite of the light, in this case, the darkness. So I brought myself to the physical realm where the light and the dark exist simultaneously, and then in that outward expression of myself as the light, I could be who I really am.
00:25:50:03 – 00:26:13:01
Rupert Spira
And this understanding suggests that behind our differences we are all the same, being not a similar being, but we are all literally one the same being. And love is the held experience of this oneness or shared being.
00:26:13:11 – 00:26:41:03
Donald Hoffman
It’s a theorem of our theory that there is ultimately one consciousness. So we have this theorem of many, many conscious agents. But the theory is, tells us that ultimately all those conscious agents are really just projections of a single one consciousness.
The current paradigm in science has, and it has been for centuries, is that space and time are the fundamental nature of reality. They’re irreducible and they are the foundation of everything. And prior to Einstein, space and time were viewed as separate. Now, space and time together, a unified into space time are viewed as the fundamental nature of reality. And science has then assumed that space, time and objects in space time are the foundational reality. And so, for example, when we talk about consciousness, consciousness itself then must be somehow a product of objects in space and time in that physical framework space and time and physical objects without any consciousness are the fundamental reality. And consciousness comes later on in the evolution of the universe, right? So that the big bang, there was no consciousness, there was just space, time and energy. The energy coalesced into massive particles and eventually life emerged after who knows how many millions or hundreds of millions or billions of years. Then after that consciousness came even later. From that point of view, when you die, the physical complexity that gave rise to consciousness dissolves and so your consciousness dissolves. And so the physical framework really does eliminate consciousness as a fundamental thing, although all together and says that when your body dies, your consciousness goes with it.
From this other point of view, what I’ve done with my colleagues, we’ve used evolutionary theory to point out that it’s an implication of evolutionary theory, that space and time is not fundamental. So the physical interpretation of evolution is wrong. The idea that that space and time and particles somehow have evolved due to human organisms is the wrong framework, because space time itself is not fundamental. We’re positing a dynamics beyond space time that’s much richer, the dynamics of consciousness. What we do not do is throw away our old theories. When physicists say space time was doomed, that doesn’t mean we no longer pay attention to Einstein. Absolutely not. We pay attention to Einstein. Any new theory beyond space time that the physicists come up with better project into space time and give us back Einstein in a better give us back quantum theory or you’re wrong. All of our old theories are wonderful, wonderful friends and we’re going to keep them as special cases of a deeper theory. So in our theory of consciousness, we have to do the same thing. We can’t just propose anything we want. We have to have a theory of consciousness that projects back and gives us back space time. It gives us back quantum theory, it gives us back special and general relativity, and it gives us back evolution by natural selection. If we cannot do that in precise mathematical detail, then there’s no reason for scientists to take our theory of consciousness seriously.
00:29:28:17 – 00:29:55:07
Rupert Spira
It’s as if infinite consciousness puts on a virtual reality headset. Infinite consciousness puts on a VR headset made of thinking and perceiving. And in doing so, the moment it puts on the VR headset, it localizes itself within its own activity. And through that headset it looks out through the perceiving faculties of a finite mind seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. And it fragments the unity of its own being and makes it appear as 10,000 things. What I’m suggesting is that there is very much more to the universe than the finite mind. I’m not suggesting that the universe only appears in each of our finite minds. The universe exists outside of our finite mind, but inside consciousness. But it is the limitations of our finite mind that give the universe its appearance. So when we look out at the universe, we’re seeing the reality that exists prior to its being perceived. But we are seeing it through the lens of our perceiving faculties, which gives it its appearance.
00:30:50:01 – 00:31:14:11
Donald Hoffman
So the idea of awakening in many spiritual traditions has been the idea that what we have taken in reality, objects in space-time, our physical bodies and so forth is not the final reality, that there is a much deeper reality, a reality of consciousness that transcends space-time and physical objects, and that we’re not divorced from that reality. That reality is, in some sense the essence of what we are. And so awakening is awakening from the illusion that I’m just a little body in space and time to the fact that I am in fact the author of everything I see inside the space and time and I create it on the fly as I look and perceive.
00:31:40:21 – 00:32:24:08
Rupert Spira
One becomes awakened by recognizing that what we essentially are is already fully awake, fully aware, complete, whole, fulfilled at peace. It’s like asking how does the sun become illuminated? Its nature is light. It is already fully illuminated. The nature of our essential being is already peace and happiness. It’s not clear to us all, because our essential being is so thoroughly mixed with the content of experience that innate peace and happiness is shrouded by experience. And for that reason we think that our essential being needs to be enlightened. No our essential being doesn’t need to be enlightened any more than any more than the sun needs to be lit up in the early morning. The sun’s always shining with the same brightness. Our central being is always shining with the same peace and joy. But that peace and joy are dimmed by the agitation and lack that characterizes our thoughts and feelings.
00:32:51:21 – 00:33:37:08
Dan Schmidt
There’s no person that awakens. So the I that awakened from this Dan structure at a meditation center. It was a Zen center. We were doing a Zen session, which is a long period of intensive practice. So Zen is amazing for creating this container where there are these conditions of no escape. So the Dan character that had learned meditation, the Dan character had been doing all this meditation, realized that it couldn’t awaken. It’s like all the meditation tricks, all the practices that had been learned were of no use. It got to the point where that character who was trying to awaken, failed to awaken and had to fail. That the character that I had been living, the character that I had been playing all my life, had to let go or die and what was left, what was left when that character, when there was no more doing or when there was no meditator meditating or doing something called meditation, what was left was my true nature. Or me, just me.
00:34:25:07 – 00:35:10:01
Loch Kelly
When we awaken from this small, separate sense of self, it’s not that we’re killing the ego or we’re fighting it. It’s actually we’re allowing it to semi retire from its job of ego identity and then relax to be part of our team, part of our consciousness. And this gives us a sense of freedom immediately that we’re not looking at the world through a small lens, that we’re we’re open hearted and open minded in a way that’s expansive and yet at the same time, more intimately connected.
00:35:10:05 – 00:35:25:12
Rupert Spira
Enlightenment is not about becoming awakened. Nobody becomes awakened or enlightened. It’s a recognition of the light, the light of pure knowing whose nature is peace and happiness. But we always and already are.
00:35:30:02 – 00:36:19:19
Lisa Natoli
My name is Lisa Natoli, and I’m known as the spiritual teacher I teach about an awakening and transformation. Awakening is the recognition of your true nature, and it’s the realization of what you really are, which is consciousness. And consciousness is just one word for many words that people use for awareness, life, love, God, light. So waking up to the recognition that I’m not this body that I am, that which never dies and that which is never born. That was a very difficult idea for me. I’ve been on a spiritual path since 1992. I started with A Course in Miracles. I was studied it religiously. I mean, I was someone who was so committed to knowing this self, knowing God, waking up. I couldn’t get it because I was under the belief that awakening was something mystical, that something would happen, that something would occur, and it would be like Jesus or Buddha or all of these enlightened masters and it wasn’t happening for me. I couldn’t understand why. Why am I so committed? And I’m having deep moments of peace and happiness and joy and still struggling. I started to realize the simplicity of our true nature, which is awareness. So for someone who’s listening to me right now, the awareness says hearing this voice, that’s what we are. And it doesn’t have a location, it doesn’t have a gender, it doesn’t have a color, it doesn’t have a body, and it’s totally unlimited. So awakening is where we wake up to our true nature. We wake up to the realization that I am the awareness of this experience right now as I’m as I’m here. And it’s so ordinary. We miss it. We think it can’t be that simple.
00:38:03:04 – 00:38:24:10
Rupert Spira
The recognition of our true nature doesn’t lead to happiness. It is happiness. The nature of being is happiness itself. So the recognition of our true nature is the experience of happiness.
00:38:24:10 – 00:39:00:02
Inquiry III
Who is aware in this moment?
The mind will look for something or try to complicate it. You already are that which the mind is looking for.
The mind will always miss it. So don’t look to the mind for an answer.
Don’t push away your thoughts and don’t get caught in the thoughts. Simply let go of the interest or attachment to thoughts, ideas and beliefs.
Intend to experience who you are.
Don’t try to negate the mind or to achieve some state all doing all manipulation, all movement is more controlling by the mind. Allow the mind to be as it is.
00:39:48:21 – 00:40:27:02
Dan Schmidt
Sometimes people can awaken just in day-to-day life. They don’t necessarily need a practice. So sometimes things will happen in life where there’s an interrupt in the pattern of you and there can be a spontaneous awakening. But if someone’s life is just going on in a kind of robotic pattern or repetitive pattern, then some sort of intervention is necessary. If one is called to awakening and that interrupt in the pattern of you is sometimes called sadhana or spiritual practice. And these practices are always conditioned. There’s something that we learn with the conditioning of the mind so they can make it more likely for awakening to happen, sort of by loosening the bonds within the self-structure.
Sometimes they say that awakening happens by accident, but the practice makes you more accident prone. The techniques, the practices can be very useful to make you more accident prone. But then at a certain point they have to be let go. Because if the mind is continuously doing some practice or something, then the mind has the reins, mind is in the driver’s seat.
So the practices are useful, very useful as steppingstones for making the self-structure, you can say less dense or enlightening up the self-structure so that it becomes more permeable to our true nature. The paradox with practice is that when you finally awaken, you realize that all of the practices were being done the false self, the character in the VR game, and that you the true self was never bound.
All you have to do is give up the preferences of the ego, to give up the fixation on things. Anything within the field of changing phenomena is not the true self.
The you that you think you are, the you that you’ve always identified with will never awaken. You awaken from that character. You awaken from the delusion that you were this conditioned character.
So when people come to these retreats, they, they think, you know, this little me is going to awaken and some great thing is going to happen. But at a certain point, the little me will never do it. It has to give up, it has to fail. And it’s only in that failure we realize who we are, that we’ve always been aware, we’ve always been present. We just got hooked into this character and we believed we were that.
00:42:46:14 – 00:43:28:14
Rupert Spira
I started my spiritual search in the classical advice of Vedanta tradition, which was a devotional path that involved mantra meditation, which I practiced very diligently for 20 years. And mantra meditation involves focusing your attention on a on a sound and then gradually the sound fades. However, it was really when I came in touch with the direct path that my spiritual side really reached its culmination. Because in the in this direct approach, we don’t give our attention to any object, however subtle, for instance, like a mantra, the sound, the breath…we allow our attention to sink inwards or backwards into its source.
00:43:48:21 – 00:44:16:22
Narrator
Let’s use an analogy. Imagine that you were watching your life on a television screen. You are identified with the character on the screen. Day after day. Year after year. You are involved with the story of the character when suddenly you wake up out of the story to notice the screen on which the character appears, and you realize you are not the character you’ve been watching.
Objects can come and go on the screen. Characters come and go, but the screen remains unchanged. The character can get wet. The screen does not get wet, the character can be disturbed, but the screen is not disturbed. Without the screen, the characters would not exist yet the screen goes unnoticed. The characters go about their scripted lives.
Awareness is like the screen. It is like the space in which all thoughts, motions, all states of consciousness come and go, thoughts, sensations and the entire outside world appear on the screen, constantly changing. But the screen does not change. It’s the mind that changes states through the human experience. But there’s something inside of you that remains, something that is ever present, that is aware of those changing states and that is consciousness or our true nature.
As long as there is attachment to a character on the screen, the sense that I am a character, then there will be suffering, Maya, the illusion of the self. Nothing you can do as the dream character will help to free you. Whether you follow the script in the drama of your life or rebel against the script. If you act from the point of view of the character, then you’re caught in the illusion.
Stop identifying with what appears on the screen, recognize that it is all impermanent, stop reacting to thoughts and treating the program as real. If I withdraw attention from the screen, turning awareness towards itself, an unfathomable thing happens. Awareness itself wakes up.
This is not a happening. Happening is what happens on the screen. Awakening is just recognizing the screen that was always already there.
Do not believe your next thought. Instead turn awareness towards awareness itself.
00:47:03:17 – 00:47:38:02
Rupert Spira
I have always been myself. My sense of myself runs throughout my life. It remains consistently present throughout my life. What is present in me now? That was present yesterday, last year, ten years ago, and when I was a two-year-old child. What is this essential I or self? To whom all my experience happens? That the recognition of the nature of that one is the great secret to life. It is the direct path to peace and happiness.
00:47:41:22 – 00:48:15:19
Neale Donald Walsch
It’s not something that a person initiates. It’s something that a person recognizes. To re-cog-nize that is to know again what we’ve known from the beginning but have simply forgotten or denied or failed to believe, so we cannot initiate closeness to God, we can simply recognize that it’s always been there and always has been.
00:48:15:19 – 00:48:29:22
Loch Kelly
It was only this direct pointing to awakening this opening to what’s already here that allowed me to find a new way of being a new stage of development.
00:48:30:07 – 00:48:55:12
Lisa Natoli
Many people think it’s a very impossible or out of reach goal to know the self and my own sort of purpose as a teacher just because of my own awakening, has really been wanting to make it very practical, very down to earth. I love to teach people it’s available to everyone.
00:48:55:12 – 00:49:30:02
Rupert Spira
If we believe and feel that we are a temporary, finite, separate self, we are, whether we know it or not, searching for peace and happiness. In other words, it’s not possible to be a separate self, to feel oneself as a separate self and not be in search of happiness. So what is required in this case is to reorientate one’s search for happiness. Instead of seeking for happiness in the objective content of experience, to seek happiness in oneself. So the spiritual practice that is required is to direct one’s attention or more accurately, to relax one’s attention into its source.
Pure awareness, rather than directed towards an object, substance activity, relationship, and so on. So the spiritual practice, if we can call it a practice, would be this relaxing of the attention, this subsidence of the attention into the heart of awareness, resting in being as being
00:50:12:04 – 00:50:27:05
Neale Donald Walsch
Love. Love is my true self. This my true nature, pure love for everyone and everything for every aspect of life. Even those things with which I disagree.
00:50:27:19 – 00:51:00:12
Rupert Spira
For one who has recognized the nature of their being, they know their being as the source of the peace and happiness for which they long. So the world no longer becomes the place in which they seek happiness, seek fulfillment. That doesn’t mean to say that such a person no longer has desires, but the desires are not there to fulfill the sense of lack that is characteristic of the separate self.
As such, a person has found the source of happiness within themselves, and their desires come from that sense of happiness. They do not go towards it. For instance, in the realm of relationship, it makes a big difference to our relationships. We no longer seek another to fulfill the needs of ourself. We seek another to share the experience of happiness that we already have. And this relieves our friends of the impossible burden of providing happiness for a voracious, unsatisfied self.
00:51:42:12 – 00:52:14:23
Neale Donald Walsch
Nothing occurs in my life that has not brought me benefit or will not bring me benefit in the sense that every moment, every activity, every outcome moves me forward in the process of the evolution of my soul. And that’s why I came here to the physical realm, to evolve,
00:52:16:12 – 00:53:20:14
Inquiry IV
Remain open.
Feel your inner aliveness, letting energy circulate freely. Don’t try to make anything happen.
Who is aware of that energy, that inner aliveness?
Notice the mind’s tendency to control and manipulate to get involved without the use of your memory or language.
Who are you beyond the mind and senses?
Who are you?
Who is aware?
00:53:20:14 – 00:53:42:08
Lisa Natoli
Many people who are hearing these ideas for the first time, they’ve never even heard of the idea of the self. There’s many. In my mind, there’s two different camps of people. There are those who are on a spiritual path and they have heard this idea about trying to reach the self. They’re trying to be thyself. They’re seeking, they’re searching. And then there’s other people who have just been living their life. You know, they they’ve never heard of these ideas before. They’ve never heard of Know Thyself. And many people think know thyself means know the body. Know yourself, be yourself, be authentic. What it really means is to know thyself is to know what you are, to know what you are, in truth. To really know your true nature.
00:54:13:01 – 00:54:47:23
Rupert Spira
The words, “Know Thyself” were carved on the entrance of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, and as such, stand as an invitation at the dawn of Western civilization to humanity. Suggesting that to know thyself is really the foundation of all civilization. Why? Because ourself is at the center of all our experience, whatever we are experiencing, it is we who are experiencing it.
Whatever we think and feel, our thoughts and feelings arise on behalf of our self. Whatever activities and relationships we are engaged in, we engage those activities and relationships in service of our self. So our self stands at the center of our experience. So what could be more important than to know the nature of our self and would it be possible to know the nature of anything else if we do not first know the nature of that which knows it?
00:55:28:00 – 00:55:38:05
Neale Donald Walsch
I think awakening is about ending the nightmare and stepping into the dream. By that I mean, we deserve to finally abandon the nightmare of what we’ve been told about life, about God, and about ourselves. And we step into the dream of our grandest notion. I often ask, What do you think your life would be like if you’ve found yourself stepping into the highest, Grandest most wonderful idea you ever had about God and about life and about yourself.
00:56:08:04 – 00:56:43:16
Rupert Spira
So this recognition of our true nature is not only the recognition that brings our desire for happiness in the world to an end. It is also the recognition that enables us to live in a way that is consistent with the understanding that at the deepest level, everything and everyone is one. This understanding would bring kindness, compassion, justice, tolerance, understanding into our society. Our society would be revolutionized by this understanding as humanity.
00:56:51:23 – 00:57:44:23
Narrator
If we let go of ego-based approaches then science, religion, politics and economics start to reflect the perennial wisdom. Whether it is the native traditions who realize great spirit in all things, or the Egyptian comedic traditions who describe the human evolutionary journey from the lowly scarab to the one source. Or when we hear the words of the mystics of the Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist traditions, or the teachings of Plato and Plotinus, we find that those who have realized their true nature speak of groupings, of conscious agents, of course, they used the language of their culture and times to express the one perennial truth.
Science is now starting to see not a world of unconscious particles and fields, but a universe made of conscious agents, something new is emerging in the world of science. As Nikola Tesla said, the day science begins to study nonphysical, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. That day is today.
00:58:23:12 – 00:58:25:10
Donald Hoffman
Every time that we’ve had a mathematically precise advance in science, it has opened up new technologies that look like magic compared to what we had before. So my feeling is that this theory of conscious agents beyond space time will give us technologies that will be truly mind boggling. For example, right now, most of the galaxies that we see, I think 97% of the galaxies that we see, we can never go to their receding from us faster than the speed of light so that they’re not moving through space faster than the speed of light. Space itself is expanding so quickly that they’re speed moving away from us is greater than the speed of light. So we could never travel through space to go to 97% of the galaxies that we can see. So there’s all this real estate out there that’s waving at us and saying, hi, we’re out here and you can never come to us.
That’s if you go through space. But what if you realize that space-time is just your headset? It’s just the format of a game and you’re not stuck inside the headset. You can play with the software that’s running the game. So it’s like someone who’s like in Grand Theft Auto. You’re you’re. A Wizard of Grand Theft Auto, so you know how to use the car and drive the roads and you can beat everybody in the game. But suppose you actually know the software that runs Grand Theft Auto. So you step outside of the Grand Theft Auto headset and you can play with the software. Well, you can take the gasoline out of the tank of the of the wizard. You can give them a flat tire. You can change the geometry of the roads. You can do whatever you want to.
So once we understand our space time headset, we won’t have to travel to the Andromeda Galaxy through space time, which would take us 2.4 million years. We can just go around space time.
01:00:23:04 – 01:00:48:09
Neale Donald Walsch
I see the world around me as stepping into a quieter expression and experience of what it means to be human and what it means to be an aspect of divinity. I don’t think that we have an endless amount of time. I get a sense that time is running out, that it’s now or never time. I think we’re on the right path. I have a sense of optimism that because of the kinds of opportunities that we see today in the world to communicate powerful and important ideas we said we didn’t have even a few years ago are creating the possibility that we can get to that place of critical mass, that we can reach critical mass before our time runs out. But we will be mistaken if we think we have an endless amount of time on this planet.
01:01:21:00 – 01:01:37:14
Dan Schmidt
When each individual decides down to size from their condition conditioned character, then they’re no longer acting as an egoic entity. And that brings about a transformation on the planet. This brings a new earth.
01:01:37:20 – 01:01:50:00
Neale Donald Walsch
For life as we know it right now on this planet. I think we need to make some changes and make them quickly, dramatically and radically. If we want to see that tomorrow for which we’ve all dreamt.
01:01:50:12 – 01:01:58:05
Rupert Spira
So, could this understanding become mainstream in our lifetime? Look, why not? Yes.
01:01:58:05 – 01:02:31:16
Neale Donald Walsch
The challenge we have right now is nothing is working and the time has come for us to stand up and say that’s true. Surely we can do better than this. Surely we can expand our understanding of who we are and our expression of our true nature. We need to pay attention to our environment, to our politics, to our economics, and to our spiritual process and this planet.
Because the problem in the world today is not a political problem. It’s not an economic problem. It’s not a social problem. It’s a spiritual problem that has to do with our commitment. We are just tapping into the highest spiritual trust. This is not New Age philosophy. These ideas have been around for thousands of years.
01:03:06:06 – 01:03:42:06
Narrator
The perennial wisdom has been expressed through countless traditions and cultures and like awareness itself, has always been hidden in plain view. In Christianity, the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas contains direct pointers to our true nature. The disciples asked Jesus, When will the kingdom come? Jesus said, “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying, Here it is or there it is. Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it.”
The Kingdom is not here or there, awareness is not here or there. It is not fixed in time and space. If you are waiting for something to happen, for some outward event, or some state, some ascension, some healing, or some energy, then your conditioned mind is still seeking. It is still mediating your experience of the now
In Buddhism they say samsara, the world of suffering, and nirvana, the world of liberation are not two separate worlds. They are one and the same.
We don’t manipulate or change things to arrive at some mystical reality. When we awaken, the perfection of the world is revealed directly as it is.
01:04:55:09 – 01:06:00:10
Inquiry V
Is it possible to simply be here and now in this moment, unmediated by the seeking mind?
Is it possible to be okay with this moment as it is?
To simply be?
