How Reality Makes Itself Known to Us
“Understanding is to our thoughts what love is to our feelings and what beauty is to our perceptions. They’re three different ways that reality communicates itself to us, breaks through our normal dualistic way of seeing.”
We live most of our days in the doing: thinking, planning, remembering, acting, reacting. Reality appears as a stream of events, and we move through them as if we’re someone inside the flow.
Yet every now and then, something intervenes this rhythm. Like a vertical line meeting a horizontal current, it interrupts the ordinary flow, and through that another kind of presence reveals itself.
Three ways reality shines through
Imagine the moment when you’re looking at a painting, listening to music, or contemplating the glow of a rosy dawn, and suddenly a wave of new reality enters your being. And you feel, for a brief moment, there’s no separation between you and what is being observed.
That’s beauty pouring through your perception.
You can’t capture beauty or explain it, but you recognise it immediately. It takes you out of yourself, and at the same time, more deeply into yourself. For a moment, you’re not the one looking at something beautiful – you are the experience of beauty.
Rupert Spira often reminds us that what we call “beauty” in the world is the recognition of our own being shining back at us.
Or think of the moment when the pure presence of love rises in you. Not the restless love that reaches outward to hold or possess, but the simple presence of love that arises when the heart is open.
Love flows through your feelings and changes the way you experience yourself and others. The sense of distance dissolves: it feels as if the barrier between “me” and “you” falls away. And what remains is warmth and intimacy without edges.
Love works the same way as beauty. It’s the recognition of one shared being.
When you fall into love, what you really fall into is the absence of separation. The “me” that stands apart collapses, and what’s left is unity. Love isn’t something you generate. It’s the nature of consciousness when the sense of division disappears.
And then there are the moments of understanding. When in conversation, a sudden clarity lights up your mind. It’s not the mind figuring something out, it’s just knowing – through direct recognition. It comes as a soft alignment, when everything becomes transparent.
This kind of understanding feels alive because it's reality shining in thought-form clarifying itself. It carries the same flavour as beauty and love.
Each of these is a doorway. Beauty speaks through perception (senses). Love speaks through feeling (emotions). Understanding speaks through thought (mind). We perceive, we feel, we think. And in each channel, reality has a way of making itself known and remind us of what we truly are.
Beauty, love, and understanding are expressions of one and the same – our shared being.
The pure knowing of “I Am”
Have you noticed how time stops when beauty, love, or understanding touches you? For a moment, you’re lifted out of duality (sense of being a separate self moving through time) and dropped into eternity.
Reality breaks through the layers of dualistic habits of seeing, feeling, or thinking, and shows itself directly as presence.
Beauty, love, and understanding are reminders that beneath all our activity, there is something stable, timeless, and whole – the knowing of I Am.
This being is always present. It was there before the thought of “I am this” or “I am that” appeared. It’s the ground of all our experiences.
When we fall into beauty, when we are swept by love, when we are illuminated by understanding, what we’re really is pure being. That’s why these moments feel so intimate and timeless. It’s not something out there, it’s the reality reminding us of ourselves.
The practice is simple
Just notice these openings.
When beauty enters your heart, don’t rush past it. When love floods your being, let yourself remain in it. When understanding dawns, recognise the truth it carries.
Each moment is pointing to the same ground, the same silent presence of your being, our shared being.
Beauty shows you your own presence reflected in the world. Love shows you that you and the other are not-two but one. Understanding shows you the clarity of consciousness itself.
All three return you to the same recognition: what you truly are is not limited to a body, a mind, or a story. You are the open space of awareness in which all experiences arise and unfold.
And here’s the extraordinary thing: this awareness, this knowing of I Am, is always present. It doesn’t come and go with the experiences of beauty, love, or understanding. Those experiences only make it more obvious.
Beauty, love, and understanding are just the clearest ways our true nature is communicating itself to us, as body-minds in the world of duality.
