Dear Rupert,
What is meant by the phrase ‘The world is within you’? I think you are adhering to that when you say, ‘Allow everything to take shape, evolve and disappear in you’. I guess my problem is that if we are not the doer, then how is it that the world is within us? Again thanks, and yes your book is excellent. I just have to not intellectualise it and allow my heart to unfold around it.
Love,
Paul
Dear Paul,
The phrase ‘The world is within you’ is said to one who believes that the world is ‘outside’ of him or herself. In order to believe that the world is ‘outside’, one must first consider oneself to be an individual entity, separate from the world. In other words, this is said to the apparent one who believes in duality, in the existence of an entityhere, the subject, ‘I’, and an entity there, the object, the ‘other’ or ‘world’.
If we look towards our self, this ‘I’, that apparently knows or experiences the ‘world’, we do not find any objective qualities. However, what we find is undoubtedly present and knowing (in the sense of ‘experiencing’). That is, we find knowing presence. And what is it that finds or recognises this knowing presence? Whatever it is, is both knowing and present. This knowing presence knows itself.
Having seen clearly that we are this knowing presence that cannot be found as an object, it becomes clear at the same time that it cannot be located either in or as the body. So instead of thinking that ‘I, the body-mind’ experience the world, we realise that ‘I, knowing presence’ experience the body-mind-world’.
If we look closely at the experience of the body-mind-world, we find that it is made only of sensations, thoughts and perceptions, and that all sensations, thoughts and perceptions are inseparable from knowing presence. We have already seen from our own intimate, direct experience that there is no boundary to knowing presence, and we therefore have no experience of anything outside of it.
At this point it becomes clear that the world, that is, the current perception, appears withinknowing presence and hence the saying ‘The world is within you’. Up to this point this phrase is true and replaces the less true belief that the world is outside us, but on looking more deeply at our experience, we find it to be untrue.
Although the world may be felt to appear withinus, there is still a distinction between the world made of perceptions and the knowing presence in which it appears. In other words, there is still a subtle duality. However, if we go deeply into the actual experience of these perceptions, we find no substance there other than knowing presence itself.
At this point, the phrase ‘The world is within you’ is seen to be limiting and can be abandoned. It becomes clear that it was a mistake to start with the world and to think of it arising in knowing presence. We only started there to meet the initial presumption that the world is outside on its own terms. In reality, there is nothing else in the experience of the world other than knowing presence itself, and knowing presence does not arisewithin itself. It is already fully present as itself with no separate parts capable of arising or disappearing within it.
So we start with knowing presence which is our primary and in fact our only experience, and we see that it is this knowing presence that ‘takes the shape of’ perceiving and, as a result, seemsto become a world, but never actually becomes anything other than itself, just as the screen we are looking at now seems to take the shape of numerous documents and images but in fact always simply remains the screen.
And what is it that experiences knowing presence seemingly taking the shape of all experience? Knowing presence! That is, it is knowing presence that is always only ever knowing and being itself, and all seeming things, objects, others and worlds are simply modulations of this knowingbeing.
At this point it is seen clearly that there is not one thing (a world) withinanother thing (myself) but rather that there is just knowingbeing, with no inside, no outside, no object, no world, no other, no self. There is just itself knowingbeing itself.
Even this formulation is not completely accurate, and as the mind searches for a word or a phrase that would adequately express the nature of experience, it dissolves in the impossibility of the task. It is like a candle that burns itself out. And all that is left is knowingbeing, knowing and being knowingbeing eternally, taking the shape of all seeming things, objects, others, selves and worlds but never knowing or being anything other than itself.
With love,
Rupert
