Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
WIZARD: Beautiful.
TRIP: We’re going to talk a lot today about consciousness and in
Ramana Maharshi’s teachings, the word awareness is used a great
deal. These are very important terms, are they interchangeable?
Those two terms, consciousness and awareness?
RUPERT: The way I use them, yes. They’re identical. That’s not
the case for everybody. And that is--of course, it is fine; everyone
uses words in their own way. But, yes, the way I used them and
for this conversation they are identical.
TRIP: You say that and I want to go through some of your basic
stuff and then there’s some more subtle stuff that I want to go
through but I think it would be good to go through some of your
basic teaching here first. And so, you say that consciousness is
both witness to and the very stuff of reality. Can you get into that
more fully?
RUPERT: Yes. We’re going to go right into the deep end.
[Full laughter]
TRIP: I thought that was the basic end.
RUPERT: Okay. Let’s start with the first thing, that
consciousness or awareness is the witness of our experience. We
normally think that I, the body mind, is the witness of the world.
In other words we think I, this person, witnesses, knows or
experiences the world. But if we look very simply at our
experience, we realize that actually our thoughts and our feelings
are known in just the same way that our perceptions are known.
In other words, we know the perception of the world – we might
look out of the window and we see the sky, we see the perception
of the sky. We experience or are aware of the sky. But, if we take
the thought, “I wonder what we’re going to have for dinner
tonight.” That thought is known in exactly the same way as the
perception of the sky. And likewise, if we were to, let’s say, rub our
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