Editor's entry
~1 min readBeing Aware of Being Aware is the first volume in Rupert Spira’s Essence of Meditation Series and the shortest serious English-language introduction to the Direct Path approach to non-duality. In four chapters Spira works the same question from progressively closer angles: what is the awareness that is reading these words, what are its qualities, why is it almost always overlooked, and how does one disentangle it from the objects of experience. The argument is set out in patient, plain prose with no requirement of prior reading.
Spira draws his idiom from his teacher Francis Lucille and Lucille’s teacher Jean Klein, who in turn carried the line from Atmananda Krishna Menon and the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. The book’s claim is unusually modest: the recognition that one is aware, and that this awareness has been continuous through every experience, is itself the practice. Where Tolle’s The Power of Now teaches by aphorism, Spira proceeds by argument; the resulting text is closer in temperament to Atmananda’s Notes on Spiritual Discourses than to anything in the popular mindfulness genre.
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First lines
opening of the bookEverybody loves happiness above all else. Even if we deny ourselves happiness for the sake of another person or an impersonal cause, we do so ultimately because it makes us happy. In order to fulfil the desire for happiness, most people engage in a relentless search in the realm of objects, substances, activities, states of mind and relationships.
Contents
4 chapters- Knowing, Being Aware or Awareness Itself
- The Nature of Awareness
- The Overlooking of Our Essential Nature
- The Disentangling of Awareness
Reception
editor-collectedA small first-print run by Sahaja Publications in 2017 (with simultaneous co-publication by New Harbinger) quickly went into multiple reprints; the book is now Spira’s most widely owned title and the standard entry point to his teaching. Goodreads ratings sit around 4.3–4.4 across multiple editions, with several thousand reviews — a high figure for a 102-page non-dual primer with no celebrity endorsement. Within contemporary nondual circles the book is treated as a canonical short text alongside Spira’s longer Presence (2012). Critics outside the tradition observe that Spira leans almost entirely on the Direct Path / Kashmir Shaivism lineage and gives little space to other contemplative frameworks; sympathetic readers consider this discipline a strength rather than a limitation.
Index reception note
Frequently asked
3 questions- What is Being Aware of Being Aware about?
- It is Rupert Spira’s short introduction to the Direct Path approach to non-duality. Four chapters work the same question — what is the awareness in which all experience appears — from progressively closer angles, ending with the disentangling of awareness from the objects it knows.
- Where does Being Aware of Being Aware sit in Spira’s work?
- It is the first volume of The Essence of Meditation Series and the shortest entry point to his teaching. Longer works like Presence (2012) and The Nature of Consciousness (2017) develop the same argument across hundreds of pages; this book is the 102-page primer.
- What lineage does Rupert Spira draw on?
- His teacher is Francis Lucille, who studied with Jean Klein. Through that line the teaching descends from Atmananda Krishna Menon and the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, with the framing of the Direct Path that is most associated with Atmananda and Klein.
Catalogue record
- Author
- Rupert Spira
- Title
- Being Aware of Being Aware
- Publisher
- Sahaja Publications
- Year
- 1 November 2017
- Pages
- 102
- Language
- English
- ISBN
- 9781626259966
- Shelf
- Non-duality · Awareness · Direct Path
Availability
By the same author
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