Essay 4 of 12

The Pathless Path

“Youth belongs to time, but the soul belongs to eternity.”

— Alan Watts

The Framework

We now review a framework that efficiently and effortlessly encompasses all teachings in a manner that makes them readily accessible. The author on which we focus is Rupert Spira (www.rupertspira.com) who has studied both Eastern and Western religions and practices extensively, and whose most relevant books are listed in Suggested Readings below.

The elegance and simplicity of Mr. Spira's approach will, I believe, immediately establish a foundation for realizing happiness based on a Pathless Path (Terms such as "The Pathless Path" are defined at the conclusion of the Introduction). Other noteworthy teachers who proffer the Pathless Path include J. Krishnamurti; Jean Klein; Nisargadatta Maharaj; Francis Lucille; and Adyashanti. What is especially relevant, however, is that this elegance and simplicity culminates in a meditation practice, described in the following discussion, that is unusually straightforward and easy to use throughout the day.

(In the paragraphs that follow, content is drawn from the notes obtained during Mr. Spira's retreats. Details concerning these retreats may be obtained from www.rupertspira.com; these retreats occur in webinar format as well as live events. Archival videos may also be obtained through this website.)

Mr. Spira's approach begins by maintaining our true identity to be pure consciousness, and bifurcates that which comprises consciousness into two domains: experience and being. Quite simply, experience is that which changes, and being is that which does not. Our mental, emotional and spiritual conditions therefore result from the choices that we make to abide within these two realms.

Being versus Experience

As an overall summary, stress, anxiety, depression and so on result from our attention to experience, and in particular from the entanglement of being with experience. On the other hand, being, as changeless, reflects that which is perpetually unaffected – eternally changeless. Thus, being is actually God’s Being and is as a result, peaceful, reflecting divine love. It is not localized but, as God’s Being, extends infinitely, without boundaries, and is shared universally.

Experience, on the other hand, reflects impermanent events that are time- and space-specific. Our attachment and aversion to these events carry with them the suffering with which we are all familiar. This suffering manifests as the mixing of the contents of experience with being, whereas we eradicate this suffering by abiding as being without becoming attached to, interacting with, or becoming affected by, the contents of experience.

Let’s examine this more closely:

Entanglement

Most people live with their essential being fused to the ever-changing content of experience, resulting in an entanglement that generates an appearance of a separate, limited self. To envision this, make a clear distinction in your experience between your essential self – the fact of being, being conscious, or consciousness itself – and the content of your experience -- your thoughts, memories, feelings, activities and relationships. This includes the sensations that originate from the body as well as the perceptions that make up your impressions of the world.

For most people, these two – their being and the content of their experience – are merged together, fused into a single entity. This entity consists of their essential self (being), mixed with, and thus seemingly colored by, the content of their experience.

This mixture of your essential self – the fact of being, being conscious or consciousness itself, which is inherently peaceful, whole, complete – with the content of experience, creates the person you seem to be: an occasionally unstable, limited, separate self. Yet at the same time, the consciousness of being runs like a luminous thread throughout your entire experience – unchanged by instability, untouched by success or failure, unaffected by events as a whole.

The Great Healing

This consciousness results in the recognition of the inherent wholeness of being as itself the great healing, and ultimately explains why, to realize happiness, the legitimate efforts of experience required in everyday life must be left outside the sanctuary of your being – like shoes at the door of a temple.

In short, to realize happiness, we simply abide as being, divested from the content of experience. This is also the essence of meditation.

An analogy serves to illuminate the role of experience versus being. It’s like two people watching a movie: one is absorbed in the story (experience), the other notices the screen (being). They’re both looking at the same thing, but each is emphasizing a different aspect of the event. One allows the movie to veil the screen (experience); the other allows the screen to shine through the movie (being).

In just the same way, some of us let our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions obscure our being. Others allow being to shine through the layers of experience, through the drama of life.

The one caught up in the movie suffers or enjoys depending on how the story unfolds. The one who sees the screen is at peace, whatever the story contains. If you’re entirely absorbed in the drama of experience, you suffer or enjoy accordingly. But if you remain in touch with being throughout experience, you are always at peace.

And just as you don’t need to look away from the movie to notice the screen, you don’t need to turn away from experience to remain in touch with being. It takes only the smallest shift in attention, but that subtle shift is the difference between sorrow and peace.

When a movie ends, you don’t have to clean the screen. Throughout the film, the screen was one with every scene, briefly taking on the colors and forms that played across its surface. Yet nothing of the movie leaves a trace. It does not stain, harm or alter the screen. The screen remains in its pristine, transparent, open condition – utterly available to whatever appears, one with whatever appears, yet entirely free of it.

It is the same with your being. Your being is totally and intimately one with every experience, whether it be a moment of ecstasy or a period of deep depression. Yet when the experience comes to an end, you do not have to cleanse your being. The experience leaves no residue. Your being is not stained, harmed or qualified by any experience whatsoever. It simply remains as it permanently is: pristine, luminous, empty, free, whole, perfect, at peace.

Notice that the experience of being accompanies and pervades all experience, irrespective of its content. There is nothing extraordinary or spiritual about the experience of being. Being is the most obvious, intimate and familiar experience there is – so obvious, so intimate, so familiar that we almost always overlook it.

Your being does not need to be enlightened. It does not need to be improved. It does not need to be healed. It does not need to be purified. The recognition that you are already perfect, whole and complete – that your being requires no healing – is the great healing. This is the Pathless Path.

The Sanctuary of Your Being

When you take off your shoes as you enter a meditation room, it is a symbolic act. You set aside all the effort – to achieve, to acquire, to become, to know, to understand – that characterizes everyday life. You leave it outside.

This simple gesture symbolizes the complete and utter freedom of your being from the content of experience. Doing, becoming, practicing, progressing, achieving – all of this is legitimate and necessary for the body and mind in everyday life. But do not let it enter the sanctuary of your being.

Take off your shoes before you enter the sanctuary of your being. In the sanctuary of your being, there is no movement. There is nothing to know, nothing to become, nothing to do. And above all, there is no sorrow.

No experience can give you the happiness you seek

Much of life is shaped by a subtle expectation that something will eventually give you the happiness or fulfilment you long for. Be aware of this expectation as it appears, the sense that you are going to find or acquire something that will bring what you deeply desire. Sense the underlying feeling that something is missing, that something needs to change before happiness can be present. Notice the expectation, even the demand, that your life’s circumstances or a future experience will supply what is lacking, as though something needs to be added to you for life to feel complete.

That feeling may be intense, and the expectation may take the form of a particular object, relationship or experience, including a spiritual teaching or teacher. Or it may be more subtle, appearing as a diffuse sense of longing or expectation, not directed toward any specific object, person or experience.

Anything that you find or acquire is necessarily something objective, that is, an object, substance, relationship, state of mind, experience and so on. There is nothing wrong with any of these, but sooner or later they pass. Whatever appears also disappears. When happiness is tied to objects, people or circumstances, it appears when they are present and fades when they change or fall away. At best, such experiences offer moments of peace or happiness, followed by disappointment, and the cycle of seeking is set in motion again and again.

Finding a lasting peace

What you seek is not a temporary state of peace or joy, but a lasting peace, a deep happiness that runs through all experience and remains present irrespective of changing circumstances.

See clearly that no object, person or experience can be the source of lasting peace or happiness. When happiness is invested in changing circumstances, disappointment inevitably follows, because whatever changes cannot provide what is enduring. Happiness is not found in the content of experience; it is the nature of your being.

Nothing and nobody can give you this happiness, nor need they. It is already present in your being. It cannot be given, and it cannot be taken away. You can be reminded of it, and at times its remembrance may be evoked by a person or teaching. Yet as this becomes clear, reliance on such reminders naturally fades.

This understanding gradually becomes self-sustaining. Whenever you notice attention moving toward objects, people or circumstances as the source of happiness, your own understanding naturally returns you to the peace of your being, which is always and already present. Happiness is never bestowed by circumstances, and it is never removed by them. It remains as the stable ground of all experience.

Each time you return to your being, you settle more deeply into it. In this settling, a natural gravity well of peace gathers within you. At first, you may touch this peace from time to time, but gradually it becomes your ground, your home, your sense of identity. You live there, as that. As this happens, the need for reminders from outside falls away, and your being draws you back into itself, again and again. This is the gravitational pull of grace.

You feel this pull from within, and it guides you home without effort. Life is then lived from your being, as your being, and thoughts and feelings are simply visited as they arise, welcomed and released within the larger space of what you are. You may still engage fully with the world, but no longer as a source of happiness. You no longer use the world in service of your happiness; you allow your happiness to express itself in service of the world.

This sense that something is missing can be very subtle, so subtle that it often goes unnoticed. Yet much of life may be spent moving away from the discomfort it carries. Even a glimpse of your true nature may not immediately dissolve it; a faint residue of lack can remain.

In ordinary life, the pursuit of objects, substances, activities and relationships often serves as a way of moving away from this discomfort. In spiritual life, the movement can continue in a more refined form, through teachers, teachings, traditions, practices, books, videos and similar avenues. There is nothing wrong with any of these; each has its place. Yet at a certain stage, they are naturally set aside, and attention turns toward this core existential sense of lack, the one that no object, person or teaching can resolve. Its resolution is found in your own being. That is where peace resides. That is your home. That is what you are.

Freedom from the Tyranny of Experience

In the constant flow of daily experience, thoughts arise and pass, feelings come and go, sensations appear and disappear. Yet something essential remains throughout all this activity – a refuge from the tyranny of experience where peace is always to be found. This refuge is your source of happiness.

Ask yourself: What am I in the absence of all thinking, feeling, sensing and perceiving? Thinking, feeling, sensing and perceiving are not essential to us. They are, in a sense, added to us: they last for a while and then disappear. What am I when there is no thinking, feeling, sensing or perceiving? I’m just being.

It is not necessary to get rid of thinking, feeling, sensing and perceiving, but just to discern the fact of being, or being conscious, amongst them, amidst them, like discerning the screen in a movie. Meditation or prayer is simply to know yourself as that and to abide as that; to see that thanks to simply being, the “I am” shines as your source of happiness behind and in the midst of all experience.

Coming back to your being, it’s like coming back home after a busy day at work. You just come back to the peace of your home, take refuge in your home. It’s exactly the same in this understanding – you take refuge from the tyranny of experience in your being, where it is always peaceful.

The Transparency of Being

If I were to ask you now to become conscious of your breathing, you would suddenly notice it. In fact, you were already conscious of it, but your breathing was so quiet, so familiar, so close, that you overlooked it in favor of the more colorful, dramatic, or engaging elements of experience – a rush of thoughts about your day, the pull of an emotion, the warmth of the sun on your skin, or the sound of a passing car. As a result, the ordinary, familiar, intimate, almost transparent experience of breathing receded into the background. You ceased to notice it.

Being is like that but even more intimate, more familiar, more ordinary, more transparent. It lies, so to speak, behind even your breathing. And like your breathing, being is so quiet, so subtle, that it is almost always eclipsed by the brighter, more attention-grabbing content of experience.

In everyday life, your attention is caught by a stream of thoughts, passing moods, physical sensations, and the sights and sounds around you. As a result, your being fades into the background and is overlooked.

In meditation or prayer, you simply bring being into the foreground. Rather than focusing only on what’s happening – your thoughts, feelings, sensations or surroundings – and overlooking the quiet sense of being itself, you allow your attention to relax away from all that content and rest instead in the simple experience of being.

Being shines in the midst of all experience. In fact, you could say that all experience is a coloring of being, just as the movie is a coloring of the screen. Countless colors, yet always the same colorless screen; countless experiences, yet always the same transparent, silent, peaceful being.

And just as changing the movie has no effect on the nature of the screen, so the changing content of experience has no effect on your essential being. Being remains in its own peaceful, luminous, unchanging condition. You cannot even say it is ‘your’ being. Being does not belong to you as a person. You, as a person, belong to being.

When stripped of the qualities it temporarily seems to acquire from thoughts, feelings and sensations, being reveals itself as open, undivided, ever-present and deeply peaceful. It is not something you possess; it is what you are.

The Peace of Your Own Being -- Noticing What Is Always Here

Take a moment to soften your focus. Let your attention relax from these words and become conscious of the physical space around you. The moment I suggest this, something shifts. You find yourself noticing the space – not creating it, not imagining it, but simply recognizing what was already there. You didn’t suddenly start experiencing the space; it was present all along, quietly in the background. You just hadn’t noticed it.

Why not? Because your attention was caught up in the more immediate or compelling features of experience – these words, your thoughts and feelings, the movement and noise of the world around you. The space itself was always part of your experience, but it faded into the background until it was pointed out. And now that it’s noticed, it feels so natural, so self-evident, you wonder how it could ever have gone unseen.

Your being is like this. If I were to say, ‘Become conscious of being’, you would suddenly become conscious of the simple fact of being. In truth, you wouldn’t become conscious of being; you were already conscious of it, but simply hadn’t noticed. The clamor of experience had obscured it.

Just like the space around you, your being was not absent a moment ago. It has always been here, quietly present beneath each thought, each sensation, each breath. It is not hidden. It is simply so close, so familiar, that your attention slips past it. The mind tends to search for something distant, something novel or dramatic, yet your being is closer than any of that. So close, in fact, that it is often missed.

Resting in Being

Now, allow your attention to turn towards that simple, quiet presence – the sense of being. Not being someone or something. Just being.

This is not an experience you have; it is what you essentially are. It is not a feeling that comes and goes; it is what remains, no matter what comes or goes. Notice that simply being requires no effort. You do not need to do anything to be. You already are, effortlessly.

Let yourself rest in this, not as a practice or technique, but simply by being knowingly what you already are. There is no need to change or manipulate anything about your current experience in order to return to your being and rest there, just as it is not necessary to change what is taking place in the world to become conscious of the space around you.

Being is like the open space of this room, untroubled by anything that appears within it. It holds everything without resistance, without preference, without clinging. It is simply present, conscious and at peace.

It is the quiet context of your entire experience, not dependent on, or conditioned by, any particular event or state. There is no need to grasp it; no need to hold on to it. You cannot fall out of being, because you are being.

"The Peace That Passeth All Understanding"

At first, you may notice your being – and the peace that comes with it – only now and then, when something in your day comes to a natural pause: walking alone through a quiet field, sitting with a cup of tea, watching the light change across a wall. In moments like these, the background presence of being can quietly reveal itself.

In time, though, you learn the art of remaining in touch with being not only in these pauses, but in the midst of everyday experience, even in the movement and noise of ordinary life. Then you taste a peace that truly “passeth all understanding,” a peace that is always present, that does not come and go with experience -- the peace of your own being, and the quiet joy that accompanies it.

Gentleness, Slowness and “Not-doing”

Unhappiness is something we do. It is a choice. The establishing of happiness entails the presence of love, which is linked to gentleness and slowness. Gentleness and slowness are sometimes wanting in the task-oriented environments in which the audience for this work often finds itself.

In everyday life, the ego will continuously pull you away from being and into becoming involved, or entangled, in experience. To abide in being will require a sense of vigilance, peacefulness, equanimity and serenity. To incorporate these qualities in your day-to-day behavior, mindfulness is required as your constant companion.

The ego is all about doing. Its goal of establishing separateness and specialness requires a prodigious and sustained effort, which it is well-equipped to expend. The realization and experience of being, on the other hand, requires doing nothing. This is an egoless state. The ego cannot abide with doing nothing, or what Don Juan told Carlos Castaneda (in the book Journey to Ixtlan) is “not-doing.” This is the “happiness by subtraction” paradigm that was discussed at the outset.

A rather humorous quote from Mr. Spira, together with another more serious observation from Mr. Clary, point to the idea that happiness comes from the mastery of not-doing --doing nothing:

“Happiness belongs to that supremely lazy person for whom even blinking is too much trouble.”

— Rupert Spira

“Something I noticed about genuinely happy people. They’re doing less than you. They have fewer goals. Fewer appointments. Fewer obligations. They’ve learned that addition by subtraction is real. While you’re optimizing energy every moment, they’re sitting on their porch drinking coffee. They figured out that most of what we chase doesn’t matter. Busy is a choice. Peace is too. One looks successful. The other actually is.”
— Scott D Clary

Overview of meditation approaches

The Pathless Path approach of simply being as described in this chapter and as summarized elsewhere by Rupert Spira [The Shining of Being, Sahaja, 2025] is the pinnacle of knowledge and the highest form of meditation. The Direct Path methods described in other chapters, while also helpful, may not always be as expediently utilized in busy environments. Simply being, however, is the meditation for which all others are a preparation and into which they all eventually resolve.

For example, the mantra described in the chapter entitled “The Way of Devotion;” Self-Inquiry from “The Way of Wisdom;” and Awareness Watching Awareness from the “Awakening Together” chapter, all eventually lead the practitioner into the state of simply being -- abiding as Self -- which Mr. Spira shows us is the resting place in his method, The Pathless Path, as described in this chapter.

Mr. Spira puts it like this:

“Simply being is also the ultimate prayer and the consummate act of devotion. Divested of the qualities that our being seems to derive from the content of experience, it stands revealed as infinite being, God’s being, the only being there is. In other words, in simply being, the separate self that we seem to be is utterly subsumed in God’s infinite being.”
[Rupert Spira, The Shining of Being, Sahaja, 2025, p. 6-7]

The following is an explanation as to how meditation by simply being can become a working part of life “on the go:”

Implementation of simply being* as meditation is simple and straightforward*

In meditation or prayer, you do not reject experience or attempt to change it. You simply shift attention from the foreground of thoughts and feelings to the being that has always been present in the background. Here, the simple reversal of priorities gradually transforms your relationship with experience itself, revealing meditation or prayer not as a practice set apart from life, but as a way of living in which the distinction between contemplation and everyday life comes to dissolve.

Just allow your experience to be exactly as it is, without any attempt to change it. Be completely open to your current experience, without resistance to any aspect of it and without focusing on any particular aspect.

Notice now that the simple fact of being lies in the background of experience. It is as if the foreground of experience – that is, thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions -- gradually goes out of focus and your being, which has been present in the background all along, comes into the foreground.

In everyday life, experience occupies the foreground of attention and being recedes into the background. In meditation or prayer, being moves in to the foreground and experience recedes into the background.

Experience is not rejected. Nothing is done to stop it, change it or remove it. You simply cease giving it your love and attention and, as a result, it fades naturally and effortlessly into the background as being comes forward.

When the distinction dissolves

At a certain point, the distinction between foreground and background softens. The difference between everyday life and meditation or prayer gradually diminishes.

Experience loses its power to veil. What once appeared to conceal your being becomes increasingly transparent. You no longer need to turn away from or neglect the content of experience in order to know being.

As experience becomes transparent to being, you come to sense that your being does not merely lie behind experience but shines through it, present in the midst of experience, not only in its absence.

You may still choose, from time to time, to turn off your phones, shut your eyes, or close the door and engage in what from the outside appears to be formal meditation or prayer. Yet nothing special is taking place. You are simply doing what you do throughout the day, remaining in being, remaining as being.

The final stage – the appreciation of Oneness

Abiding as being results in the dissolution of separation, which becomes known at the human level as love in relation to others and beauty in relation to objects. Love is not primarily an emotion that arises between two people. Rather, it is the recognition that the apparent boundary between yourself and another has no reality at the deepest level. Our characters and personalities differ; they are distinct, individual and separate, yet the essential being that lies beneath them is shared. In other words, love is not a relationship, although it may be expressed through relationship. It is the collapse of relationship, the fading of the felt sense of separation between self and other. It is the dissolution of two and the revelation of one.