I Feel I Don’t Belong in the World | Rupert

Well, I've known your work since 2016. And I've attended one retreat, which was a year later in California. And ever since I can remember, when I was a very little girl, I felt in this world foreign, in a way. And at the same time, from the same early age on, I loved the world very much with all the senses. And I still do. And I still have both these feelings of feeling somehow I'm not part of this. Like I don't belong here, but I love it so much. And in the meditations you have led here so far, specifically in the last one, I felt myself crying the whole time. And it felt like such a huge relief. So I wanted to thank you specifically for that. And also ask you if you can comment on this sense of conflict inside. Because I've had it all my life, ever since I can remember. Yes, Pam, you explain it beautifully. Not feeling that you are really of the world. And many of us feel this, that we don't feel we belong. And that's right, because what we are is not of the world. It's not of the flesh. It's of the spirit. So we feel this restlessness, this discomfort. And for many of us, certainly for me, and by the sounds of it for you, in the early stages of our spiritual quest, this caused us to turn away from the world, to reject the world. I don't belong here. But then the more deeply you go into it, my experience is the more deeply you go into this sense of who we really are, that we are not of the world. We are not of the flesh. We are of the spirit. And you actually begin to love the world more, not less. There was a time, as I said earlier, where I did turn away in my teens and 20s when I first became interested. I thought, OK, I'm not of the world. Therefore, I need to turn away from the world. It's not of interest to me. But now I feel the opposite. I just love the world. I love the world more and more deeply as the years go by. I love people more and more deeply. And I don't mean just all of you. I love all of you deeply. I consider you my family. But people, oh, Simon, the guy that does my gut, that comes in a couple of mornings a week and helps with the garden, I mean, he just melts my heart. He's got no idea about anything like this. But I just love him. I don't even know that he knows what I do. I don't think he knows that I've written a book or I do retreats. We don't talk about it. We just talk about the weather and the traffic in Oxford and the plants and all of his kids. But he melts my heart. I love him the same way that I love you. I love him the same way that I love my son. And I notice that that gets stronger. I get touched by people more easily, by strangers. I love the world more. I feel more passionate about the world than I used to. And yet I feel that I'm less and less of the world. So it's a sort of, it's a paradox. It's not a contradiction, but it's a kind of paradox. Yes, it feels like a paradox. It's a paradox, yeah. That's what it feels like. And it feels, it's, I experience the same thing that you describe, especially in nature. I get blown away by a daisy. Yes, yes. A daisy can bring me to tears, literally. Yes, yes. And the paradox that I find myself experiencing in this world is also very much, I don't even know how to articulate this very well. The frame of time and space that we seem to be navigating here. I understand that both are an expression of consciousness and I understand that the senses plug us into space and the thinking plugs us into time. And more and more, I experience that paradox too, specifically in time where I seem to experience that it's, that there is no linear time. Although we experience linear time, I've had it very much this day here during the meditations. It feels like it might've been one minute ago that I attended the retreat, which happened 2017. It feels like it was just now. Yes. And I'm wondering, how do I even know that all the so-called experiences that happened between then and now, weren't just downloaded from somewhere? Where's the time? If you didn't refer to thinking, you wouldn't know that the time you experienced in 2017 and the time you experienced now, you wouldn't know that they were not the same now if you didn't refer to thought. And so your intuition is right. It's thought that refracts eternity, the eternal now, and makes it appear as time. It's thought that spreads out eternity and makes it appear as time. It's perception that spreads out the infinite and makes it appear as space. And every time you fall asleep at night, thought and perception disappear, and surprise, surprise, time and space disappear. I love that state very much. Of course, they're profoundly connected. If I were to ask you, how long does the experience of deep sleep last? You can't answer that question. You cannot say it's a moment. You cannot say it's an hour. The question is irrelevant. It doesn't take place in time. Or where do you experience you are in deep sleep? The question doesn't make sense. There's no reference to space or time in deep sleep. That means in the absence of thought and perception. So you're right, your intuition that the moment you experienced in 2017 is this moment. It's not a moment. It is this eternal, ever-present now. You're correct. And so thank you for the confirmation in that. It seems like all these different various experiences seem to be embedded in this big, huge paradox where sometimes I feel like I'm literally losing my mind, which would be a good thing, I guess. Say that again. I feel like I'm losing my mind, sometimes finding myself embedded in this paradox. I feel the same. Sometimes I just feel I'm just going stupid. Thank you. I do, I just, yeah, I just feel stupid sometimes. It's like, but then when your mind is required, you can use your mind. But you have the freedom of going back and forth. When you need your mind, then you can use your mind, and your mind is sharp and present and focused, and you can use your mind well. But then when you don't need your rational faculties, you don't need the ideas of time, you can let them go. You can go freely back and forth between the two worlds. I wanted to say one other thing when you were talking about this. Partly I thought of it when, sorry, what's your name? The aggressive Viking. Paul. When Paul was talking about this playfulness that we lose and then we regain again. And also what you were saying about not being of the world, and yet loving the world. And it just reminded me, what was the program we watched? Which one? With Desmond Tutu, and? Oh, Mission Joy. Mission Joy, Kiri and I watched Mission Joy. If anybody's seen Mission Joy, and it's a charming, beautiful documentary about the friendship between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. It was a conversation between both of them, and they were just both sitting. These two profound thinkers, one who has plumbed the depths of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the other who's plumbed the depths of the Christian tradition, both coming together at the end of their lives in their 80s. And they were having a conversation, and it's called Mission Joy. And it was just, it was so beautiful. It was just like these two eight-year-old boys teasing each other, playing with each other. And it was, you could feel both the depth of their understanding, but they didn't need to speak of it. They had so eternalized it that they were just, they just exuded joy and playfulness. And it was, we were both very moved by it. It was, I felt these are two men who have gone profoundly into their traditions, their practice of meditation and practice of prayer have suffered a great deal. But they have come through that, and they've come back to the world with this simplicity, totally engaged in the world, but not of the world. You felt their freedom, but you felt their joy and their humanity, the way they spoke to each other and of the world, of people, of sorrow, injustice, and so on. It was really, really beautiful. It's this contagious joy that was simple and profound. You felt the depth of understanding that informed the joy, and yet it was so light and playful. And that was a beautiful example of two people that in a way had transcended the world, but loved the world. It's called mission joy. I recommend it. Thank you.