And when the imagination gives birth to the forms of things we do not know, the poet's pen transforms them into shapes and gives a fleeting nothing a place to dwell and a name. William Shakespeare
A very special potter
Rupert Spira is a potter by training. A graduate of West Surrey College of Art, he learned pottery at Wenford Bridge Pottery. His work has been exhibited in the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Sainsbury Collection, among others.
Large open stoneware bowl, with poem inscribed through black pigment onto a white glaze, this covering entire exterior and interior surfaces.
In harmony with nature and human consciousness
But he doesn’t just make beautiful pottery. He received spiritual training from Raman Maharshi and Francis Lucille – among others – and thus learned about non-duality. He has developed into a spiritual master and has published a number of books on non-duality, which is best translated as ‘there is only one consciousness‘, Some titles:
- Being Myself,
- The Essential Self,
- A Meditation on I Am,
- Being Aware of Being Aware,
- The Nature of Consciousness.
Rupert regularly organizes meetings and events where he teaches non-duality. Sources: Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christian mysticism, Sufism, and Zen.
Spira is constantly working to explore the nature of mind and reality through his philosophy and pottery. The pottery is the result of the artist’s desire to create elegant pieces, in harmony with nature and human consciousness.
The reason he is discussed here, on a website about quantum physics and consciousness, is that he, like me but in a completely different way, has arrived to the conclusion that our experience of the world is best explained by assuming that there is only one consciousness of which we are all fragments.
The Nature of Consciousness and Time
In this interview by ManTalks on YouTube, Spira conveys his message in a very understandable and sympathetic way: the myth of materialism – which is the myth of separation – as the cause of our current problematic situation in the world. All is one. Time and space are experiences that the one consciousness offers itself, its individual fragments. Listening to him is for me a feast of recognition. Quantum physics comes briefly up but is only mentioned as an aside. That’s how it should be.
The experience of unbroken unity
Very appropriate in the context of quantum physics, and also what Rupert Spira is saying about the unbroken unity of everything, is this excerpt from a lecture of Professor Kurt Dressler, Professor of Molecular Spectroscopy at ETH Zurich, for the 1997 Mystics and Scientists conference:
Quantum theory describes the world as an unbroken whole which does not consist of parts. Our consciousness can analyze and cut the world, and it can do this in many different ways, for instance, into separate objects, into self and non-self, into spirit and matter, force and substance, space and time. Our consciousness can cut the cosmic event of quasi-simultaneous genesis, evolution, and existence of the universe into a sequence of apparently separate moments, spread out along a coordinate called 'time': the disentanglement of an essential, true, and unbroken whole, or onenness, or unity. To our mind reality appears to consist of individual objects. But a scientifically complete physical theory [of isolated objects] is the temporary product of philosophically completely self-satisfied physicists.
The entire lecture of Dressler can be found in ‘The Spirit of Science – From Experiment to Experience’ by David Lorimer, chapter 4, ‘The experience of Unity’.
Paul J. van Leeuwen graduated in applied physics in Delft TU in 1974. There was little attention to the significance of quantum physics for the view on reality at that time. However, much later in his life he discovered that there is an important and clear connection between quantum physics and consciousness.
What he learned between then and today resulted in a post academic course in quantum physics for non-physicists. A little bit later he decided to put the contents of that course, and more, in a book published in Dutch: Kwantumfysica, Informatie en Bewustzijn – and started a website on the subject. He translated the Dutch version of his book in English, titled: ‘Quantum Physics is NOT Weird’.