Sense of Soul - Pause - A Spiritual Power

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Today on Sense of Soul podcast we have Robert Wykes. A former builder turned Chaplain and then charity Chief Executive who now writes on spirituality and faith. His friends describe me as a visionary and storyteller. Exploring purpose, as we some times do, as a young man travelled across Europe, Iran, Pakistan, and India challenging how he saw the world. What I found was a spirituality that transcends tribalism and Western aspiration. After training in Biblical Studies I became a chaplain, which opened the world of loose ends for him. Whilst working he took a post-graduate degree in Applied Theology and came to realize knowledge is great but it’s not faith. He’s joining us to share his new book called ‘Pause - A Spiritual Power; Discovering the Entrance to Our Spirituality,’ he shares accounts of his own journeys - physical and spiritual - that have helped him discover his own spiritual self. Learning to find pause in life's experiences and to enter those spiritual places yields profound meaning and pleasure many have never before known. Visit www.robwykes.com As mentioned:  My Utmost For His Highest | Our Daily Bread Ministries Learn more about Sense of Soul Podcast: https://www.senseofsoulpodcast.com Check out our NEW affiliates! https://www.mysenseofsoul.com/sense-of-soul-affiliates-page

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world. Sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes,

monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we have Robert Weix. He is a former builder turned chaplain, charity chief executive, and his friends describe him as a visionary and storyteller. He now also writes on spirituality and faith, and he's joining us today to tell us about his new book, Pause, A Spiritual Power, Discovering the Entrance entrance to our spirituality, where he shares the accounts of his own journeys, physical and spiritual, and how they helped him discover his own spiritual

self, learning to find pause in life's experiences. So please pause and welcome Robert Weix. How are you doing today? I'm good, thanks. I'm really good. Thanks so much for being with me. Where are you at? So I'm in Cheshire in the UK, south of Manchester and north of Birmingham. So around the middle of the country, yes. Okay. I'm in Colorado. One of my closest friends, Ken, lives in Colorado Springs. I'm in Colorado every two weeks on a tuesday but

not for real on zoom oh really yeah and i've never been to visit him we've met a few times in grand rapids because i go to grand rapids once a year i'm part of a charity um a trust that that owns the right to some literature and um we have our meetings in college it's called our daily bread i don't know if you've heard of that as a daily reading thing so they are our publisher um of the book that we own the rights to so we go to their offices in grand rapids every may wow sometimes in October, but mostly in May, yeah. The book we hold the trust to is called My Utmost for His Highest. It's a daily reading book. It's been around since 1927 it went into print.

My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers. It's an incredibly well-received book, I would say, yeah. Okay. I mean, very well-received book, I would say, yeah. Okay. I mean, very well-received. I think we've sold like 20-odd million copies already or something. But that's been a lifetime of us doing it, you know. Wow. So it's Oswald Chambers.

It's actually his wife that compiled it. It's a long story, but the short version is he and his wife were missionaries and he taught in a bible college in britain and then in the first world war they served in egypt in a camp looking after actually canadian soldiers as well as british soldiers and he used to speak and she used to write down, type up his messages. And then when he died, he died very suddenly at 42 during the war. The troops asked if they could have a copy of one of his messages or a couple. They obviously found him a good speaker, you know, very accessible.

So she came home back to the UK, compiled a 360 day daily thought from all of his writings and what have you and his thoughts in 1927. And it still sounds like hotcakes. That's so interesting. It reminds me of like Edgar Cayce's secretary that never got any credit. Interestingly, we've done quite a lot to give her some profile. Casey's secretary that never got any credit. Interestingly, we've done quite a lot to give her some profile. It was her absolute clear wish she didn't want to be named, you see. It would have been an error as well. You know, it was in those days when it was considered not to be known. You know, there wasn't a celebrity, I suppose, vibe about things really.

Yeah. Actually, I never met her. I've only been doing it for 20 years so but that's opened me up to a whole world of stuff i would never have imagined you know was it spiritual like esoteric was it just yeah if you actually it's very interesting if you read his stuff it's very hard to pin him down so i would say he was right on the border of being a mystic a bit aloof in some ways because so you could read one of his readings one day and you'd think he's a died in the world calvinist you know and and the next day you think dear me he's just everything goes you know he he was one of those people. He died at 42. And I think he unusually came to an experience of God and spirituality quite young. Yeah.

And seemed to have an advanced wisdom that I don't know where it came from. Interestingly, one of the people he read the most of, I think, was a guy called MacDonald, who wrote about angels. And I can't remember all the stuff he wrote but he wrote he wrote fairy tales really and um he wrote fiction but it was often involving leprechauns and angels and you know the very ethereal stuff very interesting so it's very allegorical kind of very yeah very, yeah, very. I like that. So, yeah, so that's what my connection with the States is, really. Okay, well, that's interesting. Thanks for sharing that.

Yeah, well, it's been a part of my life in some ways for quite a while, yeah. Has it inspired you to write the book that you just did or any of the books? Yeah, so, I mean, my brief history is that I ran a charity for 25 years, which was an old church building. So, you know, typical British church building in the middle of a pretty run-down neighbourhood, usual thing, big pointy roof and a clock tower on the side, you know, and all that, a bell tower. So I took that over and

converted it with i put floors in it and rooms and had it's very diverse so we had a cycle workshop fixing bikes um but it was never about the bikes it was about getting guys that were on drugs or you know involved in all sorts of things and a bit lost and lonely, get them in and mix them in with some other folk, fix a few bikes, learn some skills. And then actually directly at the other end of the building, there was a lot of other stuff directly in the building, was All About You, which was a ministry for women who had difficult and challenging lives.

It could be cancer and it could be coming out of prison. And it was really massage and beauty treatments and we used to say it was it was basically an hour out of the madness and joy who ran that she would say you know the women used to come in feeling rotten about themselves and hopeless in a way and often they would go out being reminded that they're a person of beauty you know that they're worth spending time on that you know there's you know all that kind of stuff yeah and then in between we had furniture referrals we give restored and gave away furniture food banks so it's all very very much about people on the margins actually i love the people that nobody else is interested in that's been my life so i always wanted to kind of build a path for them um yeah so that's i did that for 25 years

and um and then about well whenever in 2000 in 2017 i wrote a book called it's not about the furniture which is a book to say everybody looks at like the charity and i just kept saying forget the furniture it's the hands that are carrying it you know it's it's the person whose head is lying on the bed that we gave away that's of interest not the bed so and then I left the charity in 2020 and I decided I had to write pause because again in tandem with my interestingly my life has always been about very physical tangible problem solving you know people are hungry how can we get them food but all the way through that i've had this long experience of knowing deep down that life is much much more than the body and the mind and that's what the book is the book is saying you know there are there's if you like

there are three parts to you as a human being and it's too easy to concentrate on the intellect and on the body. And too easy to forget that there's a spirit within you that also is hungry for food and for life and exposure and recognition. So yeah, that's my real kind of passion. So that's what the book came from. Yeah. I love that, Rob. That's's so amazing I really align with that and and have a deep respect for that it's very inspiring and I think that I'm similar so I've always been that type of person if you've got a problem I'm gonna I'm gonna love you because I not that you know I think it used to be in some way. I thought I could fix them then, you know, there was a tendency.

And then there was this opposite thing for me where I was like, I'm not going to be codependent ever again. So I'm going to let everybody just help themselves. I'm only going to focus on me. And it went way on the other side. But there's this natural thing in me, you know, that desires to see the unfortunate or those who struggle, you know, find their light within to the misfits. Yes, yes. Yeah. And I'm a seeker as well. I grew up Catholic, kind of. I mean, I was born to a deeply, deeply rooted Catholic family, you know.

I'm like the first person who went to a public school on both sides of my family. And I had to like kind of shed all of my conditions and everything I'd been told and seek from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Yes, I understand. I completely understand that. Yes. In fact, one of the challenges for me writing the book is that, I mean, in a sense, I grew up with absolutely no context for religion. You know, my father wasn't interested at all. I don't know if he knew what an atheist was, but he didn't have any interest in the possibility of anything else. And then my mum was forced to be brought up a Catholic. Her mother married a guy and she promised that she would bring the children up Catholic, even though

she herself wasn't. So my mum kind of always harked back to that as her religion. But we never went to church. I was, I think I was 22, maybe 21 when I first entered a church building, first even considered anything religious. So yeah, so I had that kind of journey of being an adult, in a way, before I started to wonder, is there anything there? And also, I then became a Christian within the framework of a very unquestioning expression of the faith. So a bit similar to what you were just saying, really. I mean, I had a very, I call it a Damascus Road conversion. I probably was programmed to call it that by what I was taught but I was literally smoking pot and then a week later I was in a church building and there was a baptism you know a full immersion baptism

and the thing that was has always been unique for me and special is that I didn't have anything to hang any of this on it was just a bunch of really weird people singing weird songs that didn't rhyme around this around this big tank and then there was this poor young guy about my age being drowned in it you know so and i just remember sitting there at first thinking you know they're all on acid or they've all smoked something that I haven't been given you know I remember sitting there thinking this is so weird and then um I had a very much I would call it an out-of-body experience I had a definite sense that I was not in my body and I wasn't present in that room but I was looking at it from outside or above it.

And it's, you know, lots of people will say this, you know, they've had this experience. And I had not an audible voice, but I had a voice in me or from outside of me say, you will never feel right or clean until you also are baptized. And I think I added a lot of that in because I don't believe it was about me getting in the water and being baptized. And I actually didn't because I'm a very stubborn person. But it was just a voice saying to me, there's something else. There's something so different that you've never encountered before and you're tasting it that i i always look back and think you know that was the moment that i was in a way introduced to the reality that i am also spiritual i have a spirit

within me that communicates and accesses and understands the world, the universe in a way that my mind never will and my body will never really truly grasp. So I think that was the beginning of an interesting journey. Again, I pick up on something you said that I, you know, it's taken me many years to keep looking and looking and looking and asking. I've got this wonderful book here in my hand called the bible you know that it's it's got all this this interesting literature in it and i remember thinking very often why does everybody read this so differently to every other piece of literature we have in our hand you know and it doesn't do any damage for me in terms of my belief in j that I'm a solid Christian.

I'm convinced Christ is Christ. And I get the whole thing hangs together in terms of how we might understand God. But I'm not sure about the exclusivity. I'm not sure about the dogmatic approach. I'm not sure that any. Well, it's not that I'm not sure. I'm just, I don't need anymore to be so exclusive that I'm the only person in the room that knows the truth. I was just having a conversation with a friend this morning who her background is very deeply Jewish in her family. Mine of course is deeply rooted Catholic, but yet her and I come eye to eye on many, many things because we both kind of separated ourself from the dogma

and we have these deeply rooted genetic, not only genetic, but also just what we were told. And so it's interesting you didn't. And then, then when you experience, it's a totally different experience. So I'm having to undo to be able to get to where you are and to receive it more raw without this is what I was told, you know, or this is the way it was translated to me or explained to me. When I picked up a Bible and just read it for myself without, you know, with new eyes, right. Without really having to shut the voices down, you know, like they try to come in and be like, no, I want to receive this word. Yeah. I have a totally different view now. So it's interesting.

You're right how we can read this one book and all have different ideas on it. Yes. But I think a lot of it, there were so many conditions behind a lot of it i mean it's kind of i've always said to many many of my friends it's true in almost every aspect of our lives if you join the bowling club you discover that the bowling club five miles away has got a different way of going about it and they they think bowling is different you know your rules are different to our rules we all do this and i mean the approach that i'm taking and i find for me the beauty in it is it i'm i'm trying to say look before we discuss you know god whatever that means before we discuss a perspective on religion or expression of can we first just accept that we are body mind and spirit that and then no human being is excluded from spirituality and then we can start walking

down the road of so where do we touch where do the where do the things i think are important and matter touch with the things that you or you find One of my early light bulb moments was reading a guy called Bede Griffiths. Bede Griffiths was a Catholic priest, Benedictine priest, and he went out to India in the 70s, I think, somewhere in the 70s. He went out there and I just remember reading his story where he sort of set up a table and he had a monastery really and he had a table and he sat down to eat his dinner with his brown robe on with his tie and he said he looked around and realized everybody else was sitting on the floor eating with their hands and he said he came to it to tell them something about God they were never going to

listen because they were on the floor and he was on a chair and it then got even more in a sense outrageous for him within his context was he then got rid of his his brown habit and he put on you know one of those bright yellow which is and one of the things i love about him is he constantly then writes on for 20 odd years he writes in a way that you think well this hasn't changed his view of god and christianity he remained quite he remained a devout catholic and and carried on with lots of things that you perhaps think you would let go of on this journey but he didn't need to let go of them. And I find there's a fear sometimes in us that we think we have to let go of things and we don't. If they're important to us, it's important and you can hold on to it. Reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh as well.

Yes. Something that always sticked out to me in his book, Buddha, Living Christ was, he said, I think it would be a travesty if someone read this book and they lost their religion. I was lucky to find him as one of my first teachers in my journey. And I would have to say that, you know, I've expanded, I've read all kinds of ancient texts. I've been studying Gnostic gospels for years now. And one of the things that was like the most important thing of my entire journey was to use my discernment. I wanted a raw experience. And thankfully I did because I'd never been taught the Gnostic gospel. So it was really raw to me, but to pause and to sit with myself, sit with this story I just read. Yes.

It was a process of pausing, of using that discernment, like really sitting with it. So I've probably read some of the books, I don't know, like four to 10 times, depending on which book it was because of that. It was like, I read it initially and it was like, wait, what, what, what? No wonder why they buried this stuff like you said about the book that you have trust to it is secret knowledge because the average person would pick it up and think this dude was crazy we gotta get rid of this one yeah there's there is a sense in which it's it is hidden yeah partly because you don't understand it so it's you know that phrase hidden in plain sight you know you can have it in your hand

but it doesn't mean to say you're going to get what it says i remember one of the things on my journey too that's been quite powerful is that i started to read a lot of the desert fathers and mothers you know so you know in the in the know, in the second century, in the third century, the scores of people, St. Anthony was one of the famous ones, decided to leave the cities and the towns and then go off into the desert in Egypt and find a cave and sit there and go into the present, go into that silence. And I remember one of the startling things was that they always got there and discovered the noise they were trying to leave behind had followed them because it was inside them.

And you have to get past your own mind. But then the other thing that struck me was we're in a sense on the same journey, but we have to travel on different paths. Because I at one point was thinking to myself, it would be great to go and live in the desert, you know, in a cave and contemplate my navel for the next 20 years maybe for 10 minutes but i'm happily married i've got two children grandchildren i've got a life you know and i don't i don't want to lose that so it's finding your own desert place finding somewhere which is your desert and i and you know one of the things i i think i think i've heard you say this because i've listened to a couple of your podcasts but one of the things that's really important as well is and what i say this in the book pause that i cannot tell you if you do this

this and this this is going to happen so it's no good me saying if you sit down with your feet on the ground and your palms facing down and close your eyes and you know listen to Beethoven's symphony you will have an experience like this I can't all I can say is that we have to build in our lives pathways that we travel and sometimes they're circular pathways so I say you know I used to do a lot of cycling I still do a bit and when I first know, I used to do a lot of cycling. I still do a bit. And when I first went out, I used to go round Cheshire where I live. And I like, you know, maybe 40 or 50 mile route. And I like round routes. I hate going in one direction and going back in the other. So what I would do is I first I used to go out with my map and every other junction I had to stop.

Do I go left? Do I go right? And I could do the same route four or five times. And I learned that actually after a while, I never got the map out. I just went. And that's when I enjoyed the cycle ride. That's when I didn't think left or right. I just enjoyed a natural sense. And I think spirituality is like that. We sometimes find a groove in life where I can't say every time, but I do know there's certain things that I do, you know, sitting quietly. There's a river not far from me. I love to sit and watch just the reeds waving. And sometimes I can sit there for an hour and I realise I've not been aware of anything I've been somewhere else

and that's a pause moment and so I don't know if I go down to the river this afternoon and sit in the same place I might just be wound up by the kids in the playground but I might have a pause moment but I know that if I don't attempt to go down there, I'm not going to have anything. And so it's building those rhythms and places in your life. And it's the desert places I call them. Where is your desert? Is it the living room, the kitchen, you know?

Exactly. Mine's in the backyard every morning. It used to be me and the hawks. The hawks were every day with me. Huge hawks too. And it shifted this summer for the first time. And I've lived here for years. I'm getting these little hummingbirds, which come and they get right in front of me and just stay still.

Amazing. And the hawks are gone. So it's like I'm almost in a new place in the desert. But yet I'm in the same place. But things are shifting. You know, I don't know if you've read much of St. Francis, Francis the Sea Sea. But one of the big things with him was was animals. He he had a real affinity and it was because he saw them as brothers and sisters so you know he saw yeah Francis saw well he saw the whole of creation as as no different to you and I um in a way it was

very magical because he was able to look at a tree and a bird you know whatever a snake and he could look at them and see the beauty and mystery of creation. He could see redemption. So, you know, again, he was a devout Catholic, you know, if that was such a thing when he was around. You know, he assigned to that kind of religious expression, although he was one off on his own. But he still had this view that the universe in its entirety was at work with god and i i used to love listening reading uh reading anything at all about saint francis he it's a great story of him

speaking to birds in a tree and they he was speaking to a bunch of people and and the birds were making a lot of noise and he turned around and asked them to be quiet and listen. And there's this story that, you know, for an hour, the birds sat in the tree and never made a sound. You know, there's loads of stories like that. And I find, you know, like Mahatma Gandhi, you know, Buddha, whoever, we find in this world, people have travelled through it who have made a connection with the reality of existence nearly always anyway all the ones that i have ever read and they're people that have come to

understand the mystery of silence and the sense of presence the lack of need to rush they discovered that you don't have to do everything, just do what's in front of you. All these things are part of this journey of recognizing that we're more than the mind and more than the body. I love that. You're so spot on. And Robert, when I was reading the Gnostic text for the first time, very confused. Like, I don't understand what that means. And then I'd go outside to my backyard with my trees and my hawks and the moon and the sun. That's how I understood. That's how I learned the Gnostic text was just sitting outside in that desert and nature showing me. And that's what i'm writing a book about

because it's how i understood the text in those present moments and is that because we sometimes take information in and then we try to understand it rather than allow it to teach us you know i think for instance the stories of jesus the life of jesus if you read the life and words of jesus in an attempt to get some set of instructions you're going to just read a set of words and start compiling thoughts whereas if you just look at the story and you think you know wow he touched that person he listened to that woman you know he wow, he touched that person. He listened to that woman. You know, he walked down that street. He sat with these people. You get to discover a human God. One of the things about Jesus is that I think he probably was, in our reading anyway, the person that was most comfortable

in his own skin. And that's a, we have that saying, don't we? Oh, she's comfortable in her skin. He's comfortable in his skin. But when you come down to the incarnation, if you want, the thoughts of God becoming human, then it's quite interesting to look at Jesus and say, yeah, that's God comfortable in skin. And I think he didn't rush. he walked everywhere and he sat very often we don't need to get so hung up in the words the nitty-gritty of it there's a great saying i can't remember who said it we get into the thick of thin things yeah what you were saying there was earlier you said it earlier you just said it now is again a great one for me is that you can take a few words and sit on them for a day a week a month and they'll make a greater impact on you than reading

a thousand books oh i just had one recently just look at what you're saying so you know in thomas um the kingdom is inside of you and it's also outside of you when you come to know yourself you will be known so for some reason and I don't know what led me to you know sitting with this and having this moment but I said I think that maybe that last word to be known might be just to know when you come to know yourself, you will know. Rather than you will be known. Yes. And for some reason, in the way that I was receiving it before in my brain was saying, oh, you know, you'll be known like god will know you but this deeper meaning came through that it was more of the understanding that comes from within that you know that you know yourself

like know thyself to me just popped in my head it was just like one of those epiphanies you know like that is when you have your connection to source i describe that as a point of you no longer require any questions in your life you don't need to be known there are no questions left yes yes and that that is the ultimate mystery isn't it one of the things i do i've done it for a long time i take fun funerals because I was, you know, in the ministry, as it were. And when I was at the charity, I just left Bible college and I was the railway chaplain. And so I'm, you know, preaching churches. I do all that bit of being part of the church. And part of that for a long time has been to conduct funerals. And so I do that now quite a bit.

It's just interesting to speak with people who have no religion. They always say, you know, oh, there's nothing after this. Once you're dead, you're dead, it's all over. There's no sense of spirituality. But it takes literally a 10 minute conversation to help people to just question, well, what do you really think is going to happen now then? Where do you think Marjorie has gone? And I discover that inside everybody is a longing. There is much more to this universe than the bit we can see. Getting back to what you just said is that one of the ways I say to people about comfort, if you like, or, yeah, release,

is that what will happen once we give up this fleshy body and this questioning mind is we'll be so complete, there won't be any questions. There's no, there is, you know, I know it's in Revelation, which is one of the most bizarrest books that was ever attributed to the Bible. But actually you know there are some great lines in there and that that line that says there'll be no more pain there'll be no more questions you know there'll be no more death there'll be no more of these things that with that restrict us in this world so and i think what you and i are talking about and obviously what you pursue avidly and express greatly, is that there's so much more than just an intellectual understanding of the world. And that knowing isn't about knowledge.

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Bede Griffiths said that as well. One of the things B griffith said which i think was a trigger for me many years ago um was that however hard i try however hard you try you're never actually going to grasp in your intellectual capacity and and we use our mind and our intellectual capacity to reach out to god. And he says, it's very interesting, he says, but God will never inhabit that. We don't discover God in our mind. We discover God in our spirit.

Yeah. And we then have these great conversations where we're struggling to express what's happened through a different medium. It's true. You know, it's a bit like you know i i've got a teenage grandson who's absolutely lovely he's lovely but he's going through being a teenage boy and um and i've got two daughters two granddaughters and a wife and a couple of daughters so um and i've realized that my talking to my wife and my daughter they don't really get what's happening to him because they've

never been a 13 year old boy whereas i have and so and i have to think about that that we're sometimes trying to understand something with the wrong tools and so yeah when we try to understand the spirit it's through the spirit we understand it's not through the mind yeah which is something that i just recently have been going through as well robert i was such a hard seeker for the past few years which can take you down some rabbit holes, which can be very distracting. And my kids were like, if you mentioned Sophia one more time, we're going to grow up. Okay. We don't want to hear about her.

I'm like, okay. But then there came a point where I paused and I just stopped seeking. I don't know what happened because I mean, I was going hard. It's not that I came to all knowing it's not that wasn't it. But what happened was in that pause, I started processing things. So it was like, I, you know, when you, if you could remember going back to school, but you do, you feel like, Whoa, this is so much like you can't even process it all and then you know you once I started processing things it was coming like full circle and so I don't know if my book will ever be finished because yeah so I'm having to rewrite this because I've you know now had an epiphany

about this and yeah that's that's interesting because i yes i would say that my book came out immediately thinking well have i did i actually put everything in i wanted and what did i did i want to express that differently do i want to unpack this there must come a point when we release those things a bit like healing in a way you've got to let it go and let it do its own job and i completely resonate with you when you you get to a point where you're not sure have you researched it enough do you need to research it anymore and also there's a stronger point in that sometimes it's a cathartic experience you've you've got all this out and you've done what you set out to achieve because you have come to a new place but you know i'd say all i'd encourage you is the rest of us need to

know too we want to do the journey you've been on and we can't do it unless you release it so you you know you get to that place you know what i mean someone suggested too you could always come out with a second book yes yes stories i often tell as an illustration of how hard it can be because there is a fight isn't there i think there's a there's a wrestling that goes on for our spirituality is why i you know the title of my book is Pause, a Spiritual Power, but the subtitle is Discovering the Entrance to Our Spirituality, because I think there's almost a hidden entrance. There's a doorway somewhere, and we seem to struggle to scratch at it. When I was really younger, I used to, I come from a place called Coventry, which is further south than where I'm currently living. And we had an

Olympic swimming pool. And me and my friends, when we were about 12 or 13, me and my friends used to go there. And it got an Olympic diving board. So you know, I don't know, they're like three, four, five meters high. I think it's five meters is the top one. And we used to dare each other to go up and dive up. And I was useless, absolutely useless at it. But I remember that the plan was not to dive off it, but to get to the bottom of the pool because it was a 60, I think it was 16 feet deep. And I remember that we'd get in and you'd be swimming for life,

you know, holding your breath, trying to get to the bottom, forcing through the water. And sometimes you just, you'd touch it with the end holding your breath, trying to get to the bottom, forcing through the water. And sometimes you just, you touch it with the end of your fingers, but you then have to return to the top for air because you'd better die. You know, there was no way you could linger. And I often think spirituality, spiritual moments, pause moments are a little bit like that, that we, we seem to wrestle through something

and occasionally all we get is this tiny little glimpse i'm very conscious that we must never regret that never regret that we we set out to have a moment in the garden with the hawks or whatever it is and you know we only got three seconds or we only got five minutes because you know ultimately they all add up to a greater consciousness of our spirit well you know one of the things i say in the book is that if as long as we pursue rationally and reasonably the spiritual moments at some point it will be in our dna one of actually one of the sentences i've got in there is is that we should teach our hungry body and our ravelous minds to stand to one side occasionally and let the spirit just let the spirit through and not to inhibit and hold the

spirit back and it's quite difficult i think it's really hard it's very hard for a westerner it's very hard for somebody intellectual and i don't mean clever i just mean if you enjoy books you enjoy ideas you enjoy philosophy and exploring all these things i love it makes it really hard for my brain to switch off you know because i'm analyzing you know is this the spirit you know is it the cheese i ate last off you know because i'm analyzing you know you know is this the spirit you know is it the cheese i ate last night you know you know it's all this thing getting those moments is not easy it's not easy it isn't it's really worth pursuing you know what's so interesting is what you said about the dna what did you mean about that well yeah dna is obviously that's a physical tangible it's in the

material world isn't it but by the dna i mean we use that phrase dna to represent our entirety don't they you know they say you you know they can they can write your dna down you know stick it on a computer you know exactly who you are yeah that's a medical it's a mathematical reality. They can tell you exactly what you are as a person, humanly speaking. Well, somehow we don't have a DNA for our spirit. But I think that we are taught to understand ourselves and see ourselves in just those two dimensions. You're an emotional being. You're a mental, rational being. You're a physical being. But we never really taught. We're a mental rational being and you're a physical being but we never we

never really taught we're also a spiritual being and the spiritual part of us and this is my personal belief and what i've come to understand is i'm utterly convinced that the spirit within me is the only bit of me that will ultimately continue to exist within the universe. Now, I have a very clear view of that. I'm a Christian. I believe that there is a God. And I believe that my spirit will be present for all eternity with God. And that's a long debate in another five books. But that principle, I believe, and it's that that convinces me that I need to invest a bit more in the vehicle that's going to carry on, not the one I'm abandoning. You know, it's like having two cars on the drive and, you know, one of them is close to the end of its life. There's nothing you can do to stop it going to the scrapyard.

So you don't want to spend Saturdays cleaning that. You want to spend Saturdays on the one you're keeping. And so I look at my spirit and I think, well, that's the bit that's staying. You know, that's going to carry on. So I don't want to neglect my body and I don't want to neglect my mind, but I don't want to pretend that those two things are going to still be knocking around in 200 years. But actually, there's a bit of me that will be. And that's the bit that i really want to get to know yeah it's it's a little bit like you know in the church we and there's nothing wrong with

this but we talk a lot of getting to know god and getting to know the spirit and spirituality through the holy spirit for instance within the christian Christian faith. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's great stuff. But I think, first and foremost, we need to get to know our own spirit, too. I have a spirit that I need to understand, and that it exists, and it's who I am. And that, to me, in faith terms, I don't say this exclusively at all, in faith terms, to me, when I say I'm a Christian, I believe that it's that part of me that the God who is spirit is connecting with. Otherwise, it would be an intellectual faith and all it would be is knowledge. That's what I meant with the come to know yourself. Yes. You will know. You will know as you have been known. Yes.

So, yeah, I'm quite excited. I'm excited about the next million years. Well, it should be interesting. And I thought a lot about this, too, right now, because the reason why I was bringing up DNA is because, you know, we're all made of the same as nature. You know, we're made of the same stuff. And so of course, we're going to see similarities, right? I think about how Mother Earth is reacting to being polluted, to being abused, to being burned, and just raped. And I think of humans, how we are reacting to being abused, being separated, putting all this toxins in our bodies. And now we're having cancers and all of these viruses. And also, which has to do with mother earth, there's viruses that are surviving in areas that would

have never. And also there's a cycle of how earth has destroyed itself. And I think about us where we evolved to very quickly, just in my lifetime. I'm Gen X. Yeah. I'm chicken nuggets. Okay. That's how I think about chicken nuggets, my generation. And so much has happened.

And I look and I speak with my elders i love to talk to someone who's like in their 90s yes yes i mean and listen to the way they have perceived everything happened so quickly and what they've gone through and experienced it's crazy just in 100 years well we've accelerated the destruction of the world. And it's because we don't value it. And interestingly, when you speak about cancers and things, none of us wants to catch anything. You know, we want to live forever. We think there are choices.

Because I worked so long with people in poor situations, there's very little choice when you're poor. But when you step back and look at it on a global level, it does seem to me that we've misunderstood our responsibility to the earth. And, you know, right back in Genesis, I have this discussion several times with people. In Genesis, there's this terrible phrase that we are to subdue the earth. Like somehow God created the world, gave it to us as a toy to play with and wreck. Whereas I think it's totally the opposite. I think it's actually that we're guardians.

We're supposed to protect. And we don't. We've stopped protecting it. And you use that word, which is absolutely true we're just raping the earth and it is now speaking back and it may be again i you know am i speaking out of turn i don't know but it may well be that we've misunderstood that the earth is this small little ball in a universe and we may think that we have got the upper hand but if the this world is part of a universe and it's more powerful than we think and and its kickback might be harder than

we can ever imagine so i i think and have you heard of gaia you know the the theory of gaia there is something about if you leave your garden and go away for six months or a year you'll come back it's just been taken over by everything that it wants to vegetation comes back i think it wants a rest and it's going to tell us it's going to have a rest surprise it just you know during covid if, one of the interesting potentially good news stories was that the skies were given a break, you know, pollution was reduced, less car travel. All those things happened. I read an article today about subsistence farming,

and I was thinking it was written in the context of people in sub-Saharan Africa trying to eke out some food, you know, eke out a bit of a living. But actually we use that word small farming, if you like, as a description of something that's poverty and not good. But surely it would be better for us all to be growing our own food if we could. Is the answer a combine harvest at the size of a small city? I mean, does that really do us any favours? You talk about food. The more we mass produce something, surely the greater the damage we're going to cause. Or what would happen? We're so reliant on the outside world that i know i am yes we are yes i mean i don't have a garden in my backyard thank god you know i do know someone who

does if anything ever happens you can go get some carrots i don't have the green thumb i need to maybe it's interesting it's interesting you say that just again a thought comes straight straight to me when we speaking about speaking to elder older people whenever you speak to people that are that have been around a while with a quite mature um and if you particularly speak to people of a deep sensitive spiritual nature they often use a lot less you know they're very often and very often vegetarian or semi-vegetarian they're much more conscious of their their footprint on the earth and then of course you go to the great masters you know you find they they fasted for 40 days or whatever it was or sat under a tree their damage to the world around them was limited by their depth of spirituality. And so I'm utterly convinced that the more present we become, the more conscious of our environment,

and the more conscious, the more kind we are. You know, we're kinder to the world around us. So, yeah, I think the world needs to pause. Yeah. You know, I also think about the indigenous people indigenous teachings even still today you know to honor earth to honor it yes yeah it's really sad that we've moved so much out of it because of materialism and money and power which is very masculine and i feel like we've been on one side of the scale for a long time it's actually yeah that well that's that's another a great topic is dualism why do we have to have an

in and out and us and them are you and hey you know you know that dualism is about division um and and we're actually much better off together than we are apart, aren't we? And that's just the reality. So, yeah, I completely get that. Interestingly enough, and a very personal story, is that because I grew up with three sisters, I never had any brothers. And I've obviously got a wife and two daughters. Yeah, you're in touch. Interestingly, though, we used to have our office at this charity where I worked was pretty sexist, really, in the sense that the division of labor was all the guys were grunting, lifting furniture and all the all the all the ladies were typing.

You know, it wasn't a terribly sexist environment. It was a very good environment, actually. but i was known as the honorary woman in the office they they all they all used to say how come you understand that and i say well i've been around it all my life yeah but i get your point actually that you know again you know i'm very conscious these days i wherever wherever I can, I try not to refer to God as he or she. I think God is God. We we we sort of we sort of bind up our belief systems in these things. The white guy with the beard on the. Yeah, that is the image we have put in. And it takes us right back to the beginning of our conversation that actually we sometimes arrive at a conclusion that someone else gave us. So if you just opened the Bible and just began to read, would you conclude certain things? You know, I'm neither for it or it against it but would you find the trinity if you weren't told it was there you know there's all kinds of stuff or what about angels they don't

look like campbell soup babies it clearly describes something totally different michelangelo made cute angels yes and that's you know that's like the jesus image isn't it you know this bearded gentle guy i i just think that we we need to move away a little bit from that and that's probably for me the great attraction of of exploring spirituality and trying to come to terms with that you know in terms of spirit there is no male or female. There is no old or young. There's no gender. There's no race.

There's nothing. There's nothing. And that is really, really key. And actually within spirituality, I think that's probably true in terms of even people that are exploring spirituality may be likely to have a more open view of the world, partly because you're not invested so much. You know, your investment is not in the material, is it? Yeah. And also spirituality for me certainly takes me on a path of being less anxious about what people think about me

or you know where my place in the world is it's all that stuff seems to be stripped away within spirituality so that's why i think it is good to be curious because you're going to be curious during your spiritual journey i mean when you get to have to be yes I mean you wouldn't you wouldn't be to where you are had you never showed up to that baptism no no and also to explore you know and ask questions and challenge things you know um yeah yeah I call it looking over the fence there's no harm in looking over the fence right discernment that's important you know i had to shed a lot of things and so i was open to all of these new things and so i think people can't easily be pulled in because it's in our dna to be part of things yes and belonging yes yes i think that's why in the book as well i

talk a lot quite a bit about trying to discern is this my thinking, is it my thoughts, is it my feelings and my emotions, or is it spiritual? And then understanding, you know, I mean, I do talk a little bit about the reality that the things we fear either never really happened, or they're never going to happen. Because fear, for instance, isn't primarily living in the past or the future, not in the present, you know. And it's the same with religion and religious expression and understanding. It's about stripping it all back. But mostly it's about finding about who am I?

I mean, I know, for instance, you'll be the same. Most of us have got quite a good idea of what sort of character we are and when we're reacting wrongly to something so i get all that and so i know that when it comes to spirituality i i know i know the difference between for instance when i'm praying i know the difference between me trying to negotiate intellectually with myself convincing what i believe to be God is not really interested in getting my own way that's and I so that's not praying that's a that's an internal conversation um because I've probably done something wrong I've upset someone I'm trying to find a way to

get forgiveness you know instead of owning up and going and saying sorry. So that goes on inside us, you know, which is all psychological. And then there is the spiritual interaction, the real journey. And that's when we enter the presence. When I talk and I think about prayer, there are moments in my life when I just know there haven't been words but there's been an interaction a conversation beyond my intellect with the god of the universe and it was a spiritual thing so I can't tell you what it felt like really I can't tell you what words were exchanged because none of that happened it was a spiritual happening yeah it's not the word deep is always inadequate because it's not that it's deep it's so different that we can't really truly grasp it but my whole

point of my book is if we don't intend to or desire to we're probably never going to you know it's a bit like the child that that says don't like spaghetti, but never, ever tastes it. They don't know. We have to be willing. I actually hate spaghetti, by the way. Have you tasted it? I have tasted it. OK. For me, yeah. Pausing. I chose the word pause because it's simply for me it isn't just the stopping it's the being something doing something else in fact the word pause came to me when i was writing the book i had always used the phrase and couldn't understand it the trigger came i was watching um home alone actually with my grandson he literally paused the movie he picked up his phone had a conversation with his mom

switched his phone off and went back to the movie and i remember that we missed nothing right and i thought that's it we reason we don't stop and pause truly pause so to truly pause is not to sit down and think about something a different way it's literally to stop everything just freezes the world freezes and and the reason i use the word pause is because it reminded me that when i come back everything's still going to be where it was wow no time and space nothing's moved you know carlo rivoli he wrote a book he's a scientist he wrote a book about time he's into time in a big way it's his concept and he talks about time not past and present not existing because everything that is it that we think was in the past is only existing

because we've dragged it in our mind to the present. And the future is something we dream of and conjure up. It's not happened yet. So the only thing we really have is this very moment. And that's why I think pausing is the answer in this moment. What a deep, profound moment with your grandson. I've had moments like that, too. They're in the oddest places. And you have to pause to be able to get to those moments. Yes. Yes, you do. Yes. You're just full of wisdom. Thank you so much.

It's great to talk. It really is really is yeah i often have said lately that rabbis have been some of my greatest teachers lately when it comes to spirituality but now i'm going to have to add the chaplain to my thank you thank you very much yeah i appreciate your time in in your book so tell everybody where they can find it so yeah the book's called pause a spiritual power um and it's by me rob weix and you can get it you can get on amazon barnes and noble all the usual book outlets tell me what you think i'm easy to find my website's dead easy my name.com you know robweix.com so it's rob not robert yes rob yeah yeah like only robert when you get in trouble

absolutely yes if i hear robert shouted i duck yes well thanks so much rob it's been yeah and i appreciate you so much for this time thank you yeah and uh bless you yes you too i'll let you know in this pause yes yeah i'm sorry what did you say is it enjoy many moments of pause oh i need to sit with that. I'm going to pause and just sit with that. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. And thanks to our special guests for joining me. If you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com, where you can work with me one-on-one or help support sense of soul podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.