Every Time I Open my Eyes

This poem from Rupert Spira appears at the end of the film ‘The Unknowable Reality of Things’. Produced and directed by Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo, this film is a poem, a meditation made of a series of chapters, each introducing a question like ‘What do we mean by ‘I’”, or “The pure intimacy of experience”. For each of them, Rupert Spira, sitting or standing in a beautiful forest environment, brings a clear answer. It is delivered over a succession of elegant and soothing views of nature, like a dance with shapes, colours, and textures, highly conducive to going within…

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Every time I open my eyes,
I invite the world to take shape.
And every time the world takes shape,
I’m invited to open my eyes.

Every time I open my eyes,
I invite the world to take shape.
And every time the world takes shape,
I’m invited to open my eyes
And see the world raw and naked,
Holding out its hand,
Calling me into itself,
Where I am taken into the transparency of thing
And find myself transparent there.
Standing on the edge, looking down and in
To the dark, silent pool in which the world is cradled.
And I am cradled there, held with all things
And hold all things in myself.
Myself, not a thing in the world,
But This, Here, Seeing,
In which the world opens,
Inviting and offering itself.
And every time it is seen, it dies.
And in dying, holds out its hand again
Asking to be taken in.
And every time I take it in,
I, too, die.
And in dying, am known,
As This, Here, Seeing.
Every time I open my eyes.

~ Rupert Spira

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This poem appears in the film ‘The Unknowable Reality of Things’

Painting from Claude Monet: ‘Cliff at Grainval’ (1887)

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Bibliography:
– ‘The Transparency of Things’ – by Rupert Spira – (New Harbinger Publications)
– DVD: ‘The Unknowable Reality of Things’ with Rupert Spira – (Neti Neti Media)

Websites:
– Rupert Spira
– Neti Neti Media

Suggestion:
– Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)