rupert

Q: You know Robert, if you ever met Rupert Spira you would probably like him. He is humble, and compassionate. He actively discourages guru worship. He makes no great claims about anything, and suggests we only take heed of our direct experience.

A: Hi, Mark.

Thanks for providing me with an opportunity to clarify this matter which seems to have captured so much attention here rather unproductively.

I don't know if you have read 4T, but I was asked about Rupert Spira, and responded this way on page 3:

“I heard Rupert Spira on the radio once. He seemed to speak both factually and humbly about his experience of awakening—both good signs in my book."

So without having met him or even seen a photo, I picked that up from only his voice. That was years ago. Recently I saw Rupert on video. I had the same impression. He seems to be a sweet, well-intentioned cat. But after a few minutes, I had to stop watching the video. Rupert may imagine that he is speaking about what he calls “direct experience,” but I hear a version of experience that is not direct, but conditioned by traditional dogma. I don’t listen to that kind of talk.

The value of propagating traditional dogma is under discussion here, not Rupert's personality, or anyone else's. As for personalities, we each have one, like it or not, and do not get to choose the one we have any more than we get to choose our face or body type. We may try to hide the aspects of personality we don’t want others to know about, but sooner or later it all comes out in the wash.

If others want to adulate or demean a public figure based on personality, OK. I don't think that way. You can be the sweetest-sounding voice in the room and still be talking drivel. On the other hand, the nastiest cat around may be speaking truly and productively. Charm does not equal truth, nor the lack of charm, falsity.

So anyone might speak truly at any moment, and often that entails a silent conversation with oneself or with imaginary others—what Heinz Kohut called “self objects”—that we call “thinking.” Honest speech is important, whether spoken aloud or tacitly, because you are the primary audience for everything you say, so if you lie or dissemble, you will be the first deceived.

Now in certain spiritual circles--Advaita Vedanta is the circle containing Rupert's rap--the word “Truth” has a special meaning. There, the word “Truth” refers to a definite metaphysical conception, a certain weltanschauung, a fixed, specific, comprehensive conception of the universe and humanity's relation to it, about which Vedantists have no doubt. That particular worldview declares and asserts that our ordinary selves are just a kind of dream that "Consciousness" or "God" is dreaming.

My purpose here is not to say that one weltanschauung is wrong and another is right. I am not standing outside reality with a comprehensive view of truth any more than Rupert is, so I am in no position to say he is wrong. Nevertheless, I have noticed that passing down such worldviews through the generations seems to strip them of vitality and freshness, leaving such ideas crystallized and inorganic without much relation to what we feel as human beings.

As those metaphysical conceptions are repeated, they become hypnotic, calcifying into an overblown cocksureness about ultimate matters. Those certitudes, those axioms, have a name, “Truth,” that, in my view, may have no relation to what is true factually.

This aliveness wants to experience each moment nakedly, like a child, and without the explanatory structures of Advaita Vedanta or any other so-called “Truth” imposed upon it.

I find “Truth” stultifying and bogus even in normal discourse, but even worse is the setup where the speaker sits on a raised platform lecturing to an awestruck, adoring audience. Voilá Rupert and his ilk selling tickets to hear “Truth.”

Such “Truth” is deadening, not enlivening. “Truth” takes you away from here and now and gives you an imagined goal, "enlightenment," elsewhere in space and time.

To be clear, I am not bad-mouthing teaching and learning. What matters is what is being taught and how. If the teaching is called “Truth,” I say, find another teacher, or, even better, just cut out the middle man and find your own mind right now.

We have just been through yet another discussion of the merits of famous teachers. Most of it felt like gossip—not so different from dishing about Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and the rest of the celebs. Who gives a fuck?

I am not interested in personalities or the views of famous experts on “Truth.” Here, I point to the credulity, hypnotism, and self-hypnotism that enables this spirituality business in the first place. I do not want any part of it. It is corrosive to real understanding, and I refuse to abet it.

So, to be clear, I have nothing personal against Rupert Spira, nor do I care to evaluate his strengths and weaknesses as a personality. His subject matter, in which it is assumed axiomatically that consciousness exists prdior to and superior to brains and the rest of the material world, engages me not in the least.

If you want to sit at his feet or buy his next book and consume it like candy, that’s your problem—not mine.