We Are the Happiness We Seek

In this meditation we explore how the happiness we seek is revealed as the happiness we are. In order to discover the nature of our self, we turn away from everything that is not essential to us. We start with the process of discrimination or negation, ‘I am not my thoughts, feelings or perceptions; I am that which knows them’. In this way we come to know awareness, or the knowing element in all experience. We recognise that awareness is utterly one with our experience yet free from it, so we are not qualified or conditioned by any particular experience. Awareness does not lose or gain anything from experience. We, awareness, are complete, whole, perfect and inherently fulfilled. The absence of a sense of lack is felt as happiness. When we are happy, we feel complete and fulfilled, and this is the experience of our true nature. Happiness is simply the awareness of being.

A young man describes a long essay he wrote after the last session, from which the question arose, ‘Why is there activity at all in consciousness?’ Rupert suggests investigating the presumption that there must be a ‘why’.

A man asks about the mystery of consciousness. Rupert asks in return whether consciousness is a mystery to itself or to the finite mind. He shares a quote from the Bhagavad Gita about mind and knowing.

A woman describes an experience of oneness during the meditation that turned into panic after the session. She asks what is happening and whether there are strategies for coping with such feelings. Rupert explains that there appears to be a conflict between her true nature and everyday life, and suggests she try bringing the open quality of the beingness experienced in meditation gradually into her daily life.