Every Time I Open My Eyes: A Poem by Rupert Spira

This poem is about waking up – not just from sleep but from the delusion that the world is one thing and I am another, and that they are separate. It’s also about life cycles, birth and death, creation and dissolution, happening moment by moment as everything arises and passes away. 

What I normally take to be ‘me’ is nothing more or less than a continuously changing flow of experience, and this experience I call ‘mine’ includes the world. We experience the world and our body via our sense perceptions, which thought then names.

In the poem, we find gentle repetitions of seeing, looking, cradling, holding. With mirror-like reciprocity, I invite and am invited; I am taken into the transparency of things and am myself transparent; I am cradled and I hold all.

Open, invite, cradle, hold, see, offer, take, die, become: as I do all these, so does the world. As above, so below.

I am the world, and the world is me.

To explore more of Rupert’s poetry, consider his rendition of the ancient Chinese classic poem Hsin Hsin Ming .