You Are The Happiness You Seek: A Mindful Mondays Book Review
“Every living being longs always to be happy, untainted by sorrow; and everyone has the greatest love for their self, which is solely due to the fact that happiness is their real nature.”
—Ramana Maharshi
I recently finished reading You Are The Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being by Rupert Spira. It’s one of the best spiritual books I’ve read in the last few years.
Rupert Spira is a British teacher of nondual spirituality as well as an accomplished potter. In addition to his spiritual teacher Francis Lucille, he studied with Michael Cardew, one of the founding fathers of the British Studio Pottery movement. While these facts may seem unconnected, I suspect that the combination of deep, rigorous training in both spiritual practice and art have shaped who Rupert is as a teacher.
If you’re unfamiliar with the terms nondual, or nonduality, they refer to the philosophical and spiritual teaching that reality is ultimately ‘not two.’
That is, there is only one reality, classically seen as an infinite awareness or consciousness from which everything arises, including you, me, dogs, trees, cars, stars, and everything else we could possibly perceive or experience in the universe. The fact that we experience ourselves as separate subjects in a world of objects is seen as what Albert Einstein called “a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.”
Nondual teachings are found in some schools of Buddhism and Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism, and even a few places in Western philosophy and mysticism.
In this book, Rupert starts by arguing that the happiness we are all looking for is not only within us, but that we are it.
In other words, our essential nature, underneath our thoughts, feelings, sense perceptions, personalities, identities, traumas, and so on, is simply awareness. (This is similar to the concept of the Self in IFS or self-as-context in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). The experience of this awareness, Rupert says, is what we commonly call happiness. As such, he concludes that happiness is our true nature.
But, it bears saying, this isn’t the ordinary kind of happiness, the kind we might associate with eating gelato on a summer day, or a kiss from our partner. It’s more like a quiet, inner sense of peace and wellbeing. In Sanskrit, it’s sometimes called ānanda, bliss. The meditation teacher Shinzen Young recently referred to it on a podcast as “the okayness that’s always there.”
Starting with this recognition of happiness as something we are, rather than something special we have to do, Rupert goes on to show how suffering is something we do, by getting caught up in thoughts, emotions, stories, objects, substances, and identities, and mistaking them for our true selves.
It’s not that we have to do anything special in order to find happiness—we just have to stop the habitual mental activity that takes us away from our true nature, which is always already present.
This is easier said than done, and in this book, Rupert doesn’t go into detail about the how. Like most nondual teachers, he emphasizes self-inquiry and “awareness of awareness” meditation as ways to withdraw attention from objects and return it to the Self. For those who might be curious, Rupert has many guided meditations and inquiries available online.
From here, Rupert goes on to talk about love as a recognition of our shared being with other people and animals, and beauty as an experience of our non-separation from nature and the universe.
My favorite chapter in this book is Chapter 19, “The All-Pervasive Spirit,” which is a kind of nondual treatment of aesthetics, featuring insights from the English Romantic poets and the painter Paul Cézanne, among others. Here, Rupert really shows his dual training as an artist as well as a spiritual teacher.
Rupert writes, “When we stand in awe in front of nature, become absorbed in a piece of music, are moved by the sight of an object or enjoy a delicious meal, the distinction between ourselves and the object dissolves. We experience the reality we share with that object. That is the experience of beauty!”
I appreciated this book for two main reasons. First, it’s a clear explanation of nondual philosophy in plain English terms that anyone can understand. Rupert’s teachings are faithful to the ancient spiritual traditions, but he uses original analogies and metaphors to make his meaning clear and to guide the reader toward understanding.
Second, Rupert’s writing style is not only clear, but often lovely, as well. Perhaps thanks to his study of the Romantic poets, he has a unique ability to translate ancient spiritual teachings into English in a way that reveals their beauty as well as their significance.
In short, I highly recommend reading You Are the Happiness You Seek. If you’re interested in meditation and philosophy but new to nondual teachings, this book would make an excellent primer. And if you’re an experienced student of nonduality, I think you’ll enjoy the clarity with which Rupert presents the teachings.
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Love Ramana Maharshi quote, and coincidentally I am listening to "How to win friends and influence people" on audio book for the first time by Dale Carnegie. He says in the book that connecting with others is a matter of ancient wisdom, which recognizes that everyone is basically focused on themselves, and by acknowledging their significance and importance you are setting them at ease. I like the notion that self-importance, while usually held as a negative thing, equated with egoic motivation, is actually in part a function of the search for Self with a capital "S"
Really appreciate this summary Chris. I've listened to Rupert on a few podcasts and find it beautiful how he articulates the concepts of awareness. Although it can be hard to follow when you're tired 😅 I came across a great analogy from Buddhism (which I think I've heard from him too) which was about a room full of furniture. Essentially, the furniture can attract, repel, excite us, just like thoughts, feelings, perceptions etc. But the space between is all neutral. This is our awareness. So when we focus on the space we are less influenced by the objects in the room (i.e. thoughts, feelings, experiences, perceptions etc).
One of my favourite ever podcast episodes was him talking about elite level sport, which I found truly fascinating. All about presence, awareness, flow states etc. According to Spira, flow is the feeling of being released from the everyday thoughts, feelings, perceptions and sensations which limit us. It’s the feeling of us returning to a pure state of limitlessness, which he refers to as consciousness. Here's the podcast if you're interested, it's so good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMKFiyFmHPQ