The Heart of Prayer by Rupert Spira (Deep Book Summary)

This is a book summary of The Heart of Prayer (The Essence of Meditation Series) by Rupert Spira (Amazon).

Here’s a video intro:

Quick Housekeeping:

All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s paraphrased).
All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents:

What is Prayer?
The Divine Name
Subject & Object
Separation & Union
The Path

**The Essence of Meditation: The Heart of Prayer by Rupert Spira (Book Summary)**

What is Prayer?

“Prayer is to understand and feel that the only being in us is God’s being, and to abide as that.”

What is prayer?

“Prayer is simply to remain as the ‘I am’ before the words ‘I am’. To abide as that. Simply to be.”
“From the individual’s perspective, prayer is a movement of itself towards God. In reality, prayer is emptying ourself of ourself, the subsidence of ourself in God’s being.”
“To live a life of prayer means to be in constant communion with being and not allow it to become mixed with or veiled by experience.”

Interior/exterior prayer & via negativa/positiva:

“Interior prayer is the pathway we take from ‘I am something’ to ‘I am nothing’. Exterior prayer is the pathway from ‘I am nothing’ to ‘I am everything’. The former is the journey to God, the latter the journey in God.”
“When the journey to God comes to an end, the journey in God begins … For the journey to God, we turn away from thinking and perceiving, while the journey in God requires that we turn back and recognise that we share our being with everyone and everything.”
“If the way of negation, the Via Negativa, culminates in the understanding that God is nothing—not a thing—then the way of affirmation, the Via Positiva, culminates in the understanding that God is everything. The way of negation is the way of prayer or surrender; the way of affirmation is the way of praise or love. In prayer, we sink into the depths of being; in love, we embrace everyone and everything as that being.”

How to pray:

“In prayer, we travel inwards through the layers of experience thinking, feeling, sensing, perceiving, acting and relating until we come to our essential, irreducible being. Divested of the qualities that our self derives from the content of experience, it stands revealed as God’s infinite being.”
“We allow being to emerge from the background of experience, where it lies unnoticed most of the time, into the foreground, and we allow the content of experience, which occupies our attention most of the time, to subside into the background. The disentangling of our self from the qualities of experience is the essence of prayer or meditation. In everyday life, experience obscures being; in prayer, being outshines experience.”
“When everything that can be taken from us is removed, all that remains is God’s being, and we are that. That is the practice of the presence of God.”

The Divine Name

“Jane, Sophie, Peter and John are the names we give to each other, but ‘I’ is the name we give to our self.”

God / ‘I’:

“In all the great religious and spiritual traditions, the one reality, the supreme being, is given numerous names: Brahman, Buddha, the Tao, Consciousness, Being, Shiva, Allah, Spirit, Love, Jehovah. Indeed, God itself is one such name. However, to name anything, we must first stand apart from that thing and know it from a distance. Therefore, anything we name cannot be our self and cannot, as such, be the name of God, for God is our very own being. God’s true name can only be the name that it would give itself. What would God call itself? ‘I’, for ‘I’ is the name that that which knows itself gives to itself. Therefore, God’s most sacred name is ‘I’.”
“Of all God’s names, ‘I’ is the highest and most sacred, indicating God’s subjective knowledge of itself. It is the divine name.”
“‘I’ is the name that whatever knows itself gives to itself.”

Being / Awareness:

“Being knows itself directly.”
“The awareness of being cannot be removed from us. It is our essential, irreducible self.”
“Our being is not our being. It is simply being, God’s being. Being does not belong to us as a person any more than the space in a room belongs to its four walls.”

Subject & Object

“To know anything, we must stand apart from the object or experience that is known as a separate subject or knower. It is only from the apparent distance of a separate subject that an object or experience may be known.”

Subject-Object relationship:

“The mind refracts reality, God’s being, making it appear as a multiplicity and diversity of objects and selves. Thus, the mind superimposes its own limitations onto the reality it perceives, causing it to appear in a way that is consistent with and an expression of its own limitations.”
“For the one there are no objects, because an object would be something that exists in its own right. If there were objects as well as the one, then the one would not be one. In the absence of any objects, it cannot be said to be the subject, because there is nothing for it to be the subject of. Therefore, there is no subject-object relationship for the one.”
“As long as the object persists, the subject continues.”

God is not an object:

“If we are approaching someone or something, even if that thing is the ultimate object of our longing – God, enlightenment, salvation and so on – we stand apart from it as a separate subject of experience. As such, our movement or approach is a movement of separation.”
“God’s knowledge of itself—absolute knowledge—is unknown to the mind, which can only know in subject-object relationship.”
“Just as we cannot pay attention to awareness, we pay attention from awareness; likewise, God’s being lies at the source of our longing and can never be an object of our longing.”

Separation & Union

“There is concealing and revealing, but never separation or union. Separation and union belong to a preliminary stage of understanding that credits the separate self with its own independent existence.”

Concealing & revealing:

“For one who knows their being as God’s being, the world loses its concealing power and becomes a revealing power.”
“Ultimately, there is no separate self either to be separate from or united with God. There is only God’s being, concealing itself in human experience and revealing itself. To die before we die means to go deeply into ourself, through the layers of personal experience, until we get to simply being, the raw experience ‘I am’. That experience is utterly intimate – it is our very self – but is impersonal and unlimited. It is God’s being.”
“It conceals itself with itself and reveals itself to itself.”

Separation & union:

“To speak of separation and union, distance and closeness, forgetting and remembering is a compassionate concession to the separate self. From its perspective, there seems to be separation and union, distance and closeness, forgetting and remembering. God knows nothing of such things, although all such knowledge is a refraction of God’s knowledge of itself.”
“The individual and God cannot unite, for they were never separate to begin with. As a concession to the apparent individual, what is traditionally referred to as ‘union with God’ is the revelation of our prior unity. But not even that, for there was never a time when there was a being apart from God’s being, either to be separate or unified.”
“There is no question of an individual either being separated from or united with God’s being. This understanding is expressed in the Vedantic tradition as Ayam Atma Brahma: the individual self and the ultimate reality of the universe are one and the same. In the Christian tradition, ‘I and my Father are one’. In the Sufi tradition, ‘Whosoever knows their self, knows their Lord’.”

Duality & nonduality:

“A mind that is accustomed to resting in God’s presence, subsiding in the heart and losing its limitations, is gradually and progressively washed clean of the dualising concepts that divide experience into self and other, mind and matter, God and the world. When such a mind rises again out of the heart of being, it emerges with insight, inspiration, understanding and creativity.”
“The non-dual understanding is the revelation of the oneness of reality, the unity of being, behind and within the multiplicity and diversity of appearances … In their wisdom and humility, the ancient masters of the Vedantic tradition simply referred to it as advaita, or ‘not two’, preferring to say what it is not rather than what it is, thus preventing it from being confined to the finite mind.”
“The non-dual teaching is the means by which we see through appearances to that one reality. In other words, the non-dual understanding is always the same understanding—the revelation of oneness—whilst the non-dual teaching varies: it is the means by which we approach this oneness.”

The Path

“First our being is lost in the world; then our being returns to itself and, divested of the limitations that it borrow from the content of experience, stands revealed as God’s being; then the world is lost in God’s being.”

Path stages in a nutshell:

“Early on in this investigation, the objects of experience we turn away from are considered to be other than the one reality. We make a distinction between the one reality and everything else.”
“Whilst this is a legitimate step, eventually we must abandon it. If there is only one reality, then everything must be that. What is there to turn away from and who would turn away from it?”
“In the later stages of our exploration, we need to turn towards the experience from which we previously turned away and recognise it not as a veiling of God’s being but the shining of God’s being.”

Path of devotion (based on separation):

“As individuals we look at the universe and wonder where it came from. We presume that whatever creates the universe must precede and transcend it. Hence, the conventional idea of a creator God that lies beyond the world, at an infinite distance from ourself, arises as a result of the belief in ourself as an individual. Thus, the trinity of the individual, world and God arises, each aninevitable consequence of the individual’s point of view. Believing God to be the creator of the world and ourself, we then enter into a devotional relationship with it. We could say that the highest state of the individual is to enter into a relationship of devotion to this creator God, surrendering its will to the will of God. This relationship, which is enshrined in much of the world’s great religious literature, places the individual in the right relationship to God – one of devotion, adoration, thanksgiving, praise and surrender.”
“This path of devotion and surrender gradually purifies and attenuates the individual until the question arises, ‘If God’s being is infinite, how can there be room for an individual being within it?’”
“Just as it is not possible to have a subject without an object, or an object without a subject, so it is not possible to have a beloved without a lover or a lover without a beloved. Perhaps the most difficult thing for one on the path of love or devotion is to recognise that by maintaining the object of their devotion they are maintaining their self as a separate subject of experience and ultimately, as such, denying their beloved.”

Surrender:

“In this understanding, the distinction between the devotee and God gradually diminishes until there is no difference between them. In the absence of any distinction between the one who prays and the one that is prayed to, the devotee and the beloved come closer until there is a great recognition: our being is God’s being. There is no room for an individual in this understanding. There is just God’s infinite being and we are that. That is the ultimate surrender.”
“We come to understand that there is no room for the finite in the infinite. The individual is not a finite being that exists at a vast distance from infinite being but is an apparent limitation of God’s infinite being, the only being there is. The individual does not surrender; it is surrendered.”
“Self-surrender is simply to give up the belief and feeling that we are separate from or other than God’s infinite being.”

No pathway or distance:

“Sooner or later, all spiritual and religious traditions culminate in a single recognition: there is no pathway from the person we seem to be to the being we essentially are. There is no distance from our self to our self. There is no practice that can take us from the sense of being an individual to God’s infinite being, because the former is simply an apparent limitation of the latter.”
“There is no distance from God’s being to itself and, therefore, no room for a method, pathway, practice or discipline.”
“The place where it started would be itself; its practice, effort or discipline would be itself; and the place at which it arrived would be itself. It would not, therefore, have done anything or gone anywhere.”

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