What Would Love Say?

A woman shares some experiences of being forlorn, and of realising that there is really nothing here but peace, truth and beauty. She also realises that she loves Rupert, but doesn't need him. She asks for feedback. Rupert responds that he loves her too, but he doesn't need her. And if she needed him, he wouldn't be doing his job.

A man says he thought he bought a ticket to Persia to sit with Rumi, but instead he finds himself in Rome with Meister Eckhart, and he decides to enjoy the trip. He participated on the 'Heart of Prayer' retreat at home, and he asks about the prayer of getting or asking for something, specifically a medicine man who asks for rain. Rupert responds that he doesn't know enough to know what the medicine man was doing.

A woman asks about Rupert's dialogue with Donald Hoffman, and about why consciousness localises itself and how that brings about suffering. Rupert suggests that consciousness realises the cost of localisation too late. The 'why' question cannot be satisfactorily answered because it comes from the limited, finite perspective.

A woman asks, if we are connected to love, don't our activities always seem to fall short of the essence of being? Rupert agrees and tells her this is something you just have to get used to. The only conversations Rupert remembers are those that weren't connected in love, because they seem like lost opportunities.

A woman says she struggled with whether to attend the retreat but eventually came because of the community. She asks about integrating the felt sense of awareness into our daily life. She says no matter how deeply she sinks into awareness, she still experiences perception. Rupert responds that it's not necessary for sensing and perceiving to go away, but to understand that they are with being.

A woman references the duality of separating the naked being of God from all the vestments. Rupert responds that we only do that in the beginning in order to point attention to the nature of being, but eventually we go back to the world and discover that the isness of all things is the same as the amness of our self.

A man asks about Rupert being his mentor. He's come to rely upon friends at the retreat. And love is his mentor when he leaves the retreat. He asks how he's doing. Rupert responds that he is doing just great. He considers him to be a friend, and apologises that he cannot maintain a one-on-one friendship, for which he feels sad.

A woman discovered she was one of fifty women who were rape victims of the Golden State Killer. She has a sense of what drives other people's cruelty. But she sees it's difficult to have compassion for all. After offering a tragic story of a young girl who was raped by a pirate, she asks, 'What would love say?' Rupert responds that love would say, 'I am the natural condition between the pirate and the young girl. But the pirate doesn't know that. His mind is perverted by the paradigm of separation. The pirate needs to be detained so he cannot continue his violent actions.

A man asks about the phrase 'be willingly the space in which all appears and out of which all is made'. Rupert explains using the example of 3-D cinema with goggles and how the screen appears to present objects like fish, but they're not really there. Consciousness is like the screen, but when the movie begins, the screen vibrates. It's like the 'I am' vibrating as the radiance of consciousness. But it puts on the 3-D goggles, thought and perception, and the vibration appears as the world. However, there are no fish or world. The world is not made out of matter, it's made out of love.

A woman says she gets stuck with the idea of consciousness forgetting itself. How is that even possible? Rupert explains that it's possible in the same way that your mind forgets itself when it falls asleep.

A man asks how to know if he is getting to being rather than staying in his mind. Rupert responds that by 'mind', we mean thinking, imagining, perceiving and so on. He guides the man in self-enquiry to help him answer the question from experience.

A woman asks, when awareness veils itself, does it have an intention behind our unique form? Rupert explains the intention starts when the finite mind begins. Intention is a product of the finite mind.

If there is no intention in awareness, then how does synchronicity work? How has awareness led me to you? Rupert suggests that when awareness localises itself in the finite mind, it leaves a trace, a hint, of itself as the 'I am'. But because the finite mind is directed exclusively toward experience, that 'I am' recedes into the background. He describes a synchronistic event that happened to a friend of his.