Discover The Amazing Power Of The Spiritual Pause with Rob Wykes EP 365

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are the things in life that cause us the greatest pain? The things that bring us grief are challenges. Challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried, but what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith. Welcome back to another episode of Grief to Growth. If you're coming back, if this is a first-time listener, welcome to Grief to Growth. I'm your host, Brian D Smith, and I'm here to guide you through the complexities of life, helping you to understand who we are, where we came from, and why we're here and where we're going. Today, we're going to go into the realms of spirituality and personal growth with our guest, Rob Wykes. Rob is a man whose life journey took him from the physical structures of buildings to spiritual structures within our hearts. From his early days traversing the landscapes of Europe, Iran, Pakistan, and India, to his profound work as a chaplain and a charity chief executive, Rob's experiences have been nothing short of transformative. His latest work is the book Pause: A Spiritual Power, and it also offers a gateway into understanding the separate existence of our spiritual life beyond our rational and emotional selves. In a world that seldom stops to breathe, Rob invites us to discover the spiritual pause, which is a powerful tool for transformation and clarity. But what does it mean to truly pause? We're going to talk to Rob about that. And how can this pause lead us not just to spirituality, but to a deeper understanding of our very existence? His insights challenge conventional beliefs and invite us to explore spirituality that's not confined by religious boundaries, but instead is a universal human experience. So join us today for the, for the podcast, and make sure afterwards to stop by grieftogrowth.com/community to continue the conversation there. With that, I want to welcome Rob Wykes.

Great to be with you, Brian. Really looking forward to spending some time with you.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to being with you too. We were— I saw in your bio, you're a world traveler. Just let everybody know you're in Abu Dhabi today. So you, uh, but you live in the UK, so it sounds like you've had quite an adventurous life.

Yeah, I mean, I consider myself incredibly fortunate, really. You know, we, we kind of travel through life, um, experiencing whatever the world throws at us, and sometimes it's positive and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Um, and usually it's in the moment that we're in whether we determine whether this is a good or a bad experience. But I think I'm, I'm, I'm very, I'm very blessed that I'm able to stop and look back a little bit. I'm 61 years old, so I've got a few, a few years under my belt. And it's just nice to be able to say, actually, life is often about a journey more than an immediate experience that we're in, which I think is what stalls a lot of people in life. They, you know, we all can do it. We focus on our feet, don't we, rather than what's up ahead of us. And I don't know if it'll help you, but I just share a little bit of my own background, really. I, as you said, you know, I come from, uh, from— I actually come from a place called Coventry in, uh, in, in, uh, in the Midlands, in the middle of the UK. And, um, when I went to school, um, it was very interesting. I went to what was called a grammar school, but I went the year after they changed it from a grammar school. It may mean nothing to many of your listeners other than to get into a grammar school you had to pass an exam. It was really a way of selecting off the brightest and the best. And, um, unfortunately for me, that system ended just before I was going there, and I, I got in because I could never have passed any test that they would have set me. Um, and it was a very interesting experience, you know. So I did sort of 5 years at senior school, and I left, um, illiterate, which was just shocking. Um, absolutely shocking. My, uh, both my parents, my mother and father, were semi-literate, very difficult. They found it very difficult to read, never saw a book in the house. Um, so that's the kind of environment— in fact, my parents' motto was, as long as I didn't bring the police home and I was, I was, I was attending somewhere, they were happy. Unfortunately, I failed on both of those, those expectations on a few occasions. But yeah, so I went through school, and when I left school, I always remember It's ironic that I'm here talking to you about a book that I've just published, because when I left school, my housemaster, we called them, sat me down and he wrote the final statement on my report. And he wrote, "Wykes"— that's my name, Rob Wykes— "Wykes is an amiable lad but functionally illiterate." And he read it out to me and I said, "What does it mean, sir?" And he said, Exactly. He didn't need to say anything more, you know. Um, so, so, and also in terms of faith, I would say, um, I grew up in a home with no real faith. My mum was a lapsed Catholic, um, and she, she basically, she was made to go to the Catholic Church when she was a child. She didn't attend as an adult. And, um, you know, no, no slight on the Catholic Church, but my only experience of faith or otherworldliness was that Mary would solve every problem we ever encountered. You know, you know, if you cut your knee, I think Mum would invoke Mary on it, you know. So that was the closest, closest, um, I think the closest I got to faith, really. And then I had a very brief dalliance, I would say, for 2 or 3 years, where I got involved with some mates who smoked a bit of dope, and I got myself into a right knot. Got in trouble with the police a little bit, um, and fortunately for me, probably at the height of that process of slipping down the slope, um, I was invited along to a church service, um, and something that was really odd to me and strange. And, um, it was as a result of my eldest sister that I was invited. And I— all I can say is I had what's often called a Damascus Road conversion, when you literally are going in one direction and your whole light turns around and you start heading in a new direction. Um, took me many, many years to understand what really happened, but I would say this: that was the first honest, first time, or authentic moment in my life when I came to recognize there was something beyond me, or something outside of me, um, that was neither physical or emotional or mental. It wasn't an intellectual understanding. And I think that started me on quite an interesting path. And interestingly, coming on to spend some time with you, Brian D Smith, I, I, I've listened to a few of your, um, podcasts. And, uh, you know, as you have to research, don't you? You know, you never know who you're following, you know. But, um, I, I've given a lot of thought about this because one of the, one of the elements in my life that's brought me to this space of spirituality was, um, if you like, a number of deaths, and they're quite poignant in life. One of them, um, my first ever experience of losing someone was my nan, my, you know, my mum's mum. And, um, I remember on the day of the funeral, absolutely incapable of going along, and my mum was very upset, um, and I was, what, 12 years old. But I remember, I remember knowing Nan wasn't going to be there. And there was something about me that said, you know what, Nan's not there. Whatever is going on, Nan's somewhere else. I had this sense of that. And actually, throughout my life, I've been very involved in funerals as part of my job, really. And my, my life, my calling, my ministry, whichever way you want to put it. So but yeah, I had that experience very early on, which I always link really to this sense when I was in that church becoming a Christian, you know, being, being, you know, experiencing this spiritual experience in that again, that was something that said there's something to us that's a bit more than what we can quite work out or, or add up or, or articulate. Um, and it was, it was when I had this great experience of faith that I, I did another crazy thing. One of the things that's true about me is I do lots of crazy things. Like, my wife, if came in this room would tell you that it's quite true. Um, and I thought, okay, I've, you know, I've become a Christian, um, I'm a different person, and I need to do something. So I went and bought a Bible, um, and on the way back from buying this Bible in our, what we called our town center, I bought a ticket— this is completely random— to Athens. So I'm living in England in the middle of England. And I virtually— I've been to France twice as a school trip, and now I decide I'm going to go to Athens. So I bought this ticket, it was a one-way ticket, and I could— I won't bore you because I would have you here all day, but that— I got to Athens and ended up in India. So work that one out. I am— and the best way to express it is I found myself drawn, um, towards the East. Again, no real experience of the East, um, but I, you know, I went into Turkey, and then when I went from Turkey over to Iran, I began to— I began to encounter people of faith whose faith I didn't understand, whose language I couldn't speak, and yet there was a connection between us. I then went on into Pakistan, and I met some beautiful people, spent some time with them. And I ended up living in India for a while. And all of this, for me, was an introduction to a spirituality that wasn't bound by a specific religion or a specific worldview. But these were human beings, people like you and me, Brian D Smith, who are just, just in a way, normal average people who recognize there's something extraordinary and not average about us. And so yeah, I— that's— that was— and then I was 12. No, I'm only joking. I was a bit older. I got to my 20s by then. And yeah, that's— that was really my— I think my introduction to what it must mean to be spiritual. And I'm very blessed because I think I learned quite quickly that to be spiritual is not the same as to be religious. And that's quite important. And so it's okay to be religious, many of us are religious people. And that isn't spirituality, that is a route, or that is a rung on the ladder towards spirituality. And so that's really where I began my journey of— that I could articulate, I suppose. Yeah, I returned to England. By the way, stop me if you want to stop me anywhere along the line here. But I then returned to England and met a beautiful woman called Cheryl and fell in love and got married. And we got two beautiful daughters. And, you know, I was in the building trade quite quickly. My, my whole family were in the building trade, bricklayers and carpenters. But quickly, I my wife and I actually felt that we wanted to do something with our lives that wasn't about generating money or being involved in commerce or business. Um, so the only option we thought we had was we went to Bible college, and we went to a small college, like a theological college. Um, spent 3 years there and got to know a little bit of knowledge and some interesting people. And that's when I, I got offered the role and took it as the railway chaplain for the northwest of England. So, um, I don't know if in the States you have chaplains. I think you must have.

We do.

Um, you definitely will have prison chaplains and, and, and, um, hospital chaplains. Well, we had an organization— still do have an organization which is primarily, um, facing towards the staff on the railway. And I became the railway chaplain for a huge chunk of, of England. It was the northwest of England, and I couldn't possibly get around it all. And that's where I began to understand that people are spiritual and deep and longing. And, you know, in your introduction, you use a couple of phrases, just classic reminders, you know, where are we from? Where are we going? What's it about? And I— part of my, part of my job was— part of my job was to listen to broken people. I remember For instance, encountering a driver who had had a suicide. So, you know, some poor person had gotten to the end of their, their ability to cope with life and thrown themselves in front of a train. And of course, he was the one driving it. And, and probably until he's, you know, his last breath, he felt guilty. But you can't stop hundreds of tons of metal, you know, 150 miles an hour. But you know, that frailty within humanity, um, that some people would say could never be fixed. And yet I discovered in time and with patience— and sometimes I remember that particular man, I would visit his house and we'd get a cup of tea in his kitchen. He'd make a cup of cup of teas and we're going to sit in his garden. Sometimes we'd sit for 30 minutes and never say a word to each other. And yet, and when I come to leave, he would thank me for all that I'd said and done. I think I haven't said anything, you know. Yeah. Because there's a connection, you see, the connection between us that we can't really grasp. And so yeah, I also did a lot of funerals when I was a railway chaplain. I've done— I've taken, by the way, I've taken funerals for 30 years as again, part of what I do. And, you know, I sat with some, some interesting people. I remember one train driver said to me, I met him in a hospice. I know in the States, you have hospice care come into the home. But he was in a, in a place like a hospital really called a hospice. And he was, you know, moving towards the end of life, he was in end of life care. His name was Trevor, I'll never forget him because I sat and he said his his life was a waste. He'd done nothing with it, achieved nothing, and he was leaving nothing behind, you know. He was very depressed. And after about, you know, whatever, 10 minutes or so, I said to him, so will it just be me and you at the funeral? And he said, oh no, he said, I've got a family. I said, oh, right. So, and I discovered he had 6 children. And, you know, if I tell you, Brian, one of them was the captain of a nuclear submarine, you know. 2 of them were head teachers in schools, you know, they, all of them were really captains of industry, they'd really done well for themselves. And here's this poor man couldn't see that that was his achievement. And again, you know, it's just a reminder to us sometimes that, do we have to be the ones that do it? Can we not be the ones that encourage something to happen? And that's another great fulfillment in life. You know, I, In the charity that I ran, we had a food bank, and I remember, you know, knowing and having to discuss with people that you don't have to hand the food to a hungry person, um, to be part of the journey. You could just buy some and put it in the basket, and you could donate some money. You know, you could be part of somebody else's journey. And so, yes, so I— yeah, Trevor was a very interesting— and then one other, other chap that I think has been formative in my thinking His name was Lee. Lee was, um, I met Lee, he was a homeless guy, um, and had mental health problems, terrible drug addiction. His drug addiction was ultimately self-medication, you know. He often, because he was homeless, couldn't get his prescription for his mental health problems, and as a result, you know, he would get something from the street which would help him in a way but obviously harm him too. And I spent a lot of time with Lee. He used to come to my office. And actually, I'll tell you some interesting stories about Lee. He used to come to my office and have a shower. I had a shower fitted in my office so that anybody that came that wanted a shower could have one, you know. And so he used to come and shower. I remember once he came out of the shower room, which was combined with the toilet, and I, I'd heard some spraying sound, and he came out and he said, 'I don't like your deodorant.' And actually it was air freshener for the toilet. He was, he was a great character. Um, but you know, I always remember, um, that one night he was in a hostel and he had to be thrown out. I happened to be there at the time, and I was so gutted, you know, to see this man. It was a very cold night, he got into trouble and then people run in the hostel and asked him to leave. And he was gonna have to sleep on the street that night. And, you know, I said to him, I don't know what to do. I'm so sorry for you, Lee. And he just, he just put his hand on my shoulder. And he said, you wouldn't last 5 minutes in this world. He said, I'll be fine. I'll be here in the morning. And there he was in the morning, happy and smiling. He knew how to cope. And again, that again was a reminder to me. Before I wrote Pause, I'd written another book called It's Not About the Furniture, which was about these people. And it just again was a reminder that we all kind of fit in somewhere. And, you know, some of us cope with certain parts of life and some don't. And so whenever I speak about spirituality, I always want us to be sensitive and conscious, that if I say spirituality, some people, they immediately think of religion, church, the mosque, the synagogue, you know, the gurdwara, they think of something like that. Whereas other people, if I say spirituality, they might think of planets and reading the stars, or something New Age. And when I speak of spirituality, and when I speak of pause, And this is what I'm really talking about. And this is the point of my book, that I believe that we are body, soul, and spirit, or body, mind, and spirit. That there are— I would say, I think we're pretty close when we think of ourselves as having 3 elements to our existence. Now, there may be 10. I don't know. I'm not, you know, I don't know everything. But I think it's been useful for us in history, and it's been recognized that we often think of ourselves in that way of having an intellect that's capable of working things out, um, an emotional side that's able to feel, and then this bit that we don't know what to do with. And that's, that's what my book is about. We just, um, you know, mysticism, the word mysticism and mystics, they're called that for a reason. It's because we just don't know where to put them, um, and we find it hard to categorize spirituality. Because even now, you know, I'm, I'm rattling away here talking about spirituality. And I'm trying to use words to explain something that does not operate in that field. It doesn't use our intellect. And that's why when I say pause, when I describe pause, there are moments in our lives when we allow ourselves, allow our consciousness to take a moment, to take a break. And, and also we allow our feelings, our emotions to take a break. And often when we use the word pause, and I do understand why I selected this word, we probably think we mean stopping something because that's what that word is most used for. And I don't mean that. I think when I use the word pause, it's not what I've stopped doing. It's what I've then entered into during that stop. So, and that's the mystery bit, because that's the spiritual realm. I often say to people, if you, if you have a moment of pause, if you— some people will access it by meditation, by quietness. And some people will maybe use the phrase mindfulness, but the trouble with mindfulness is just in the word. It's about your mind being active, and pausing is about stopping your mind being active. But in that space is where we experience the essence of our being that I believe, um, in a way I believe will never die because it was never born, because it's eternal. And I— and that's where I think back to when I was a 12-year-old boy thinking about my nan, and I knew that body in that box was not my nan.

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And I could never explain where she was, but she still was. And that's what I mean by pause. Where, where does that soul exist, that spirit? Yeah, exist in the universe. And that's really helpful to me, because it helps me to know that I will live forever in that sense. I'm, you know, never going to cease to exist. And the fact that you won't be able to see me or hear me And the fact that, you know, there are people in my life that can't touch me, their emotions want me close, and their mind wants the security of knowing I'm around. But actually, in their spirit, they'll be fine with the fact that I still go on. And that, that to me is what pause is about. It's not actually about death and life and heaven and hell or all those things. It's about knowing that as a human being, we are so much more than than our thoughts and, and our feelings and our emotions. One of the first verses in the Bible that came to me is— that's probably the verse that I most adore, um, and have held it very deep in, in my heart. And I didn't know why at first. There's a book called Hebrews in the Bible, in the Christian Bible. There's a book called Hebrews, and there's a very famous verse in it in chapter 11, and it's, faith is the assurance of things hoped for the certainty of things yet unseen, or not seen. And some translations take that word, or the phrase, not seen, and they rephrase it as— if I can remember the actual words, I think they rephrase it as not revealed to the senses. And so, and I know that because I read that in many, many different versions. And And that to me again is a reminder, um, that actually I don't have to feel it for it to be true. I don't have to understand it to be it for it to be true. And therefore, if my spirit operates outside of my intellect and outside of my feelings, or without the need for them, then my spirit continues to exist whether I feel it or not. And that's really important for us, I think, as human beings, to know that there's this, there's this part of us, um, which we find so difficult to explain. If you don't mind, I'll read it. I just read, um, there was a guy called Hapold who wrote on spirituality in the late 1800s, really early 1900s, and he talked about mystics. And he said that mystic, or the mystic experiences a world that's beyond, um, that's beyond, which is of something which, uh, which through it, or although it— let me rephrase it. What he actually said was the mystic experiences a world beyond. It's of something which, though it is interwoven, um, with the world around us, it's not of that world. It's of the eternal world. It's not the material phenomena. And I remember reading him and recognizing again, it's something outside of me, something beyond me. And at the same time, it's something within me. Because it's, it's my spirit that interacts, right? It's my spirit. And so yeah, I mean, I, you know, there's, I could give quotes all over the place. We all could do that, can we quote from everybody else's book, and everybody else's thoughts, which is very useful. Um, I'm really kind of excited that, um, as I— and I, I'd like your listeners, I'd like the listeners to, yeah, to acknowledge this. Sometimes we come to a revelation ourselves. This is not a cultish idea. This is that in living out our lives, maybe listening to people like yourself, Brian D Smith, and others and reading and then thinking things through, we do come to a place sometimes where we recognize there's an element of truth in that. And it's great when you recap. Remember at the beginning of me speaking, my, uh, when I left school, I couldn't literally string a sentence together out of a book, right? My comprehension was pathetic. My comprehension was terrible. I could try and read a paragraph, I wouldn't understand what I'm read, you know, because there were words I couldn't quite work out. Um, and being able to read— I learned to read very quickly when I got into this spirituality— and read of some of the great writers, Gandhi, you know, great, great people, stuff about Jesus, great stuff. Um, all these great writers that I came across, and the mystics, what you start to see is there's a grain of something that's in you that was in that's in them. And you, you get, you get on, on, on a kind of tide of truth, a, a wind of something which the scientists might tell us it's rubbish. The psychologists might tell us, it's all in your head, Rob. And, or, you know, or somebody else, a counselor might say, I think it's just your emotional needs, trying to convince yourself of this, you know, actually, I don't think that's true. I think there's enough weight of people throughout history. You know, um, Henry Nguyen talked— a guy called Henry Nguyen, he's a Catholic priest, um, who I, I love dearly. He's no longer with us, um, but he broke the mold. He practically got thrown out of the Vatican, which is always a good sign, isn't it? But he— yeah, Henry Nguyen wrote prolifically, wrote, and in one of his books he talks about the desert Mothers and Fathers. And so, you know, back in the 3rd and 4th century, these are men and women who, who, um, who realized that there was something profound spiritually that you could tap into, but they just couldn't do it in their communities. And so for them, they thought the answer was to go into the desert. That's why they were called the Desert Mothers and Fathers. They would find a cave and they'd sit cross-legged, you know, and, and, and, and listen in silence. The silence is the place. And I remember reading, he talks a lot about how the desert fathers— and Anthony was one of the most famous ones— he, they would go out to get away from all the noise, only to discover that the noise came with them because it was in their own head. And they had to learn to pause, to stop that conscious racket in order to enter the silence. Where they discovered their own spirituality. And what Henry Nguyen suggests in his book, and I, my book, Pause: Spiritual Power, is full of these ideas. How do I carry on living in a busy city? How do I hold down a job with a wife and 9 kids or whatever you've got? You know, how do I, how do I live out my life and access this spirituality? Is it just for people that run off to the desert and join monasteries or whatever? And the answer is no. All of us can do it. I, I discover not far from my house, within actually within 10 minutes' walk, I found a little river where it seems nobody else wants to sit on the bank, which is really helpful. And I just sit and I listen to the water go past. Sometimes the— a bird will come and talk to me. And, you know, that's a whole other subject. Is the bird really speaking to me? And sometimes I lean on a tree and I sense there's something ancient and again, deep and spiritual even about a tree. And in that place, I found my own desert. And that's where I enter my pause. There are famous, there are famous people throughout history who have found these, and we don't have to go and sit under a tree. Like Buddha for however many weeks it is. You don't have to go like Jesus did into the desert and starve yourself however many times. There are ways that we can discover, um, moments in our lives when we become acquainted with the spirit within us. And it's really important because it's the acquaintance with the spirit within me that has allowed me to acknowledge that others have a spirit within them too. And, you know, when I think of Lee, that homeless man, I don't know if I'll ever meet him again. That's one of the great hopes of many religious people, is that they'll meet somebody again. I don't know if I will know I've met him again. But I have no doubt he continues to exist. I just can't see him. That's really important. And again, as a Christian, I'm a Christian, I don't hide that at all. I, for me, Christianity is a context and a vehicle through which I have discovered my spirituality. And that's not true for everybody. I've got friends that have got faith and no faith. But the most important thing is that discovering the spirit in me has helped me discover what I would describe as God, you know, as some people would say, the Great Spirit, some people say the one, the universe, that the more you read, the more you discover, we're all kind of chipping away at the same rock. But we often as human beings insist on calling it by the name we want to give it, you know, that's the sort of, I, you know, I took a funeral last year, I said, I take many funerals, and I consider it one one of the privileges of my life, actually, to be invited to spend that moment in, in the family's history when they've lost somebody. And, um, but I, I— there was one in particular, um, last year that I took, and I sat with the family, and they were absolutely adamant there's no such thing as an afterlife. There's— when you're dead, you're dead. It's over. It's just flesh and bones, you know. You rot away. That's it, it's all over. And, um, they didn't want any religious words, they didn't want any suggestion there was a God or a heaven or an eternity, all this. And, you know, I let them, I let them say all these things and I tried to respect it, but I said, so, you know, we're at the end, it's quite traditional, many people have the curtains closed, you know, if you're at a, if you're at a, at a cemetery or a cremation they have the curtains closed. And I said, do you want the curtains closed or open? And they said, oh no, we want them closed. We don't want, we don't want to see the coffin afterwards. I said, what do you want me to say when I hit the button to close the curtains? Oh, can you say he's at peace now? I said, no, I can't. I said, you just told me he doesn't exist. How can he be at peace? Right? You know, 'You know, please help me out,' you know. So we had a great conversation. And, you know, that's where I started using a phrase. I said, 'Can I just say,' um, you know, call him John for argument's sake, 'that we're now gonna let John go into the mystery beyond our sight, where we may also one day follow.' And, and so I now, I now try and encourage people to think, you know, because you don't you don't have a faith doesn't mean to say there isn't something there. Yeah, I read, I read last week, you know, a quote about a scientist who, who came to the conclusion that all science is— I've got no problem with science because we're stuffed without it. But, but that all science is, is, is untrue, because whatever you prove, somebody else disproves it within the next 12 months. You know, you find, you find an atom is this big, and you discover it's that big, and, and so on and so forth. So, um, so the thing we can depend on most is, is, do you know that there is something about you that is more than your thoughts and more than your body? And most people, most people sitting quietly would accept that. And my encouragement is then let's pause let's give— you know, I remember walking to the top of a, of a fairly reasonable size hill, wasn't a mountain, with my wife. And we stopped at the top and we looked out over a beautiful vista. We lived in a place called Yorkshire. If you ever visit the UK, Yorkshire is a great place to go. And, um, and she stopped and took a breath, and I'll never forget it because she said, she says, this does for my soul what a good meal does for my belly. Yeah, yes. How do we feed our spirit? Yeah, we're very apt to feeding our mind and feeding our body. But how do we feed our spirit? Yeah.

Yeah. Rob, I do have a few questions for you.

Yes, please do.

You mentioned your, your, let's call it a conversion experience, that experience you had in the church with your sister. You called it a road to Damascus type experience. What happened there?

Oh, yes. Sorry. Yeah. So I don't know if you're familiar. It's very religious language. But it's in the Bible.

Oh, I know the Road to Damascus. What happened with you?

Oh, yeah. Sorry. Okay. Yeah, I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure you knew the content. So yeah, what happened was, so you've got to remember, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a 20-year-old guy. I've got an offense for the illegal possession of a controlled substance, so drugs. Um, I've been hanging out with crooks, um, for the best part of 3 years, and I've never darkened the door of a church. I never went to Sunday school. I wouldn't even know— if I was to go in a church, it would be to pinch the collection plate, probably, or get the lead off the roof, which we commonly do over here. And so anyway, um, yes, she invited me to this service, and I went along because I'd been feeling leading up to that, I'd been feeling rotten. I'd begun— so in the church, we might use the phrase convicted, you know. I'd started to feel rotten about what I was doing, and I wasn't doing good things, you know. I, you know, admit that I was doing bad things. And, um, I sat in this church. They were nuts. It was a Pentecostal charismatic type of church.

Oh, wow.

Okay, so So there was, there was lots of very, very lively singing. And, and, uh, I grew up Pentecostal, so I understand. There you go. So they were speaking in tongues. So I was— wow. So they, you know, they've gone for it, you know. They— it was great. And, well, I'm saying it's great now, but at the time I was thinking, this is the weirdest people I've ever met. And there was a baptism. It was a full immersion baptism. So there was a there was a tank, you know, and, um, and there was a young man, probably similar age, I think, if I recall, to me being baptized. And I sat kind of back, you know, I made myself— I had a wall behind me, you know, um, you know, I didn't really want to get too involved. And, um, and they, they got this guy into the water, and, um, I vaguely recall— I mean, I, you know, you, you look back, it's been 30 years, but you know, I remember that they were asking him questions about did he turn from his old life? Did he repent? You know, the usual language. And, and it was very interesting, because I suddenly felt that I wasn't in the room. It was the most amazing experience, to be fair. I, I know I've sat on a chair, I know I could see the tank. And I know that I could see people around. You know, I remember there was someone with a towel and all this stuff. And I just went, I was not in the room, I, I felt almost physically like I lifted in the air, and I was looking down or at what was going on. I wasn't part of it. And I heard, so, so I had a voice, but it wasn't an audible voice, something that spoke, which I believe I believe it was God speaking to my spirit. And so it wasn't, it wasn't the language that you type on a typewriter. But effectively, what I heard was, you will never be clean or right until you go into the water. Now, I didn't get baptized. But I had a burst of energy and an overwhelming sense of joy. Maybe, you know, some people would say I was having a breakdown. I don't think I was. I was nowhere near was I emotionally fraught. And I, I just had this absolute certainty. In fact, a certainty that I still say to this day, it's one of the most profound, authentic, real experiences I've ever had, that God existed, that I had a spirit and something inside me connected with whatever that was, you know, I would have used the phrase God. And, but I didn't get into the water. And I just remember they splashed him under and they lifted him back up. And, and they started singing a song called I'm Forgiven, I'm Forgiven. And it was, you know, it was good. And I went away and then actually spoke the next day to my sister. And she said to me, you know, I think what's happened to you, and it all, it all kind of knitted completely. I have to say, I have to say something here that lots of people will find, I know they find difficult, is that I've had, that was 30-odd years ago. I've had doubts, questioned my, my religious belief structures. I've I've questioned the church and which denomination, all this stuff. But I have never had a single moment of doubt that that day, I encountered my own spirit. And my own spirit connected with what I would describe as, as God. I can't use any other phrase, really.

Yeah. So, so did you ever get baptized?

Oh, I did. Yes. Yeah, yeah, I did. Yeah.

Okay.

I actually got— I got baptized in India.

So in the Christianity?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, so I mean, again, that could be a whole new show. But so, you know, I went on my journey across the world, right? And when I, when I got to India, I went to a place— well, I went to a group called YWAM, Youth With A Mission. Actually founded by a group of Americans. So they were an evangelical Christian outreach.

Okay.

And they had a house in, in Dilaraam House, it was called, in New Delhi. And I lived with them and did a bit of training with them. Actually, I was very fortunate. I got to know some great, great Christian people. And yeah, I got baptized in a swimming pool in New Delhi with a load of other people, you know, That was special. It was very special to get baptized in a country, really, in a country that wasn't a Christian country, you know.

Yeah, that's why I was confused when you said in India.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, oh, absolutely. Yeah.

So you were, you were raised, we'll say nominally Catholic, your mother has some Catholicism in her background, but you said you hadn't gone to a church and you, and you go, for people that don't know Pentecostal or Apostolic, those if you're going to go into a church service that's going to like blow your mind, that's, that's where you go. Uh, you said people speaking in tongues, full immersion baptism. I grew up in all that. Um, but you also were going these other places and seeing other religions. What is it about Christianity in particular that, that draws you?

It's the faith of my— it's the faith of my birth, really.

Oh, okay.

You know, in terms of spirituality, I, you know, I, I, um, it— I mean, it's actually a very valid question because I am utterly sold out to being a Christian. I, I have total respect for other religions, and I, I have studied other religions and looked at them I, I would say that I'm not confident enough to be so cocky as to believe that I'm the— we're the only ones who've got it right. Yeah, if that's okay. And so as far as I am concerned, I absolutely am sold out to Jesus Christ. He is— Jesus Christ is, for me, God's representative. And, and his life and ministry, and the things Jesus taught, those are the things that guide me, that inspire me. But I see, I see, I see very much, in fact, I do talk about this in the book, that I see that my belief system, originally, I thought my belief system was my spirituality. And I then come to realize it isn't. Especially because some of your beliefs when you start out are not the same ones as you go a bit further down the road, are they?

Right, right.

You kind of, you know, and so, so I then discovered that my spirituality isn't, isn't, isn't within the context of what I believe. I also got involved a lot for a while with, I suppose, yeah, probably 4 or 5 years into my faith. I got really into the emotional stuff, the Pentecostal, even charismatic stuff of speaking in tongues, of what do I feel, is, is this what God is saying to me? And, and I came to a conclusion that I was looking in the wrong place for my spirituality. I was looking, I was looking at words in books, you know, theological intellectual stuff. And I was also looking in whether I felt God loved me or not. I mean, what a ridiculous thing to, to imagine that God, God's love for us is based on our behavior. You know what I mean? I mean, it's a no-brainer really, because I'm not saying that we should behave badly, but, um, you know, I've got 2 daughters and 3 grandchildren, and I've got lots of reasons not to love them, but I'm never not going to love them. Do you know what I mean? So yeah, I think relationship might be an issue.

Yeah. Yeah, I want to just kind of pause there for a second. Because it's the interpretation I believe a lot of Christians have, and you say, how could not God love me? Well, a lot of many Christians believe that God will eternally damn people. So that's why sometimes people come to that conclusion about Christianity, like, you know, Well, you know, that, that could be problematic.

It's very problematic. It really is very problematic. And of course, that's what it does come down to, interpretation, because I, I am— yes, I belong to a, I suppose, a growing number of Christians who accept that the interpretation that we've always had handed down to us is quite binary. And, um, and, uh, and I think, I think, for instance, um, we, we hook into the Old Testament, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna sound like a complete heretic here. So, um, we hook into the Old Testament in particular, and we draw a lot of what I think the Old Testament was recording as happened. And this is where I become perhaps a bit heretical. Because Abraham said God told him to kill his son. You know, I'm— he did, he did tell us this after he didn't kill his son. And other things got in the way.

Right.

But you know what I mean? So, you know, no, that's not a very, you know, people don't like that, that view of the scripture. But I think a lot of it is how we read the scripture. And why do we take the Bible, for instance, and read it the way that we read no other literature on the planet? Nobody picks up literature of any sort and takes it so literal, um, without engaging that, you know, the hermeneutics around it.

And it wasn't meant to be taken literally.

Absolutely.

Jews didn't take it literally. Yeah.

I don't think so. And, and so I— it's— for me, I think I look at the weight of the message of the Bible, okay? And, uh, and I look at the weight of the message of Jesus. And Jesus was very much about love and acceptance and forgiveness. Yeah. And, and when, when we then get into heaven and hell, and will God eternally damn somebody, um, they're very difficult conversations to have because because what we're asking is, there's a loving, loving God who, who's so loved us that he would give everything he possibly had, which was his son, in order to— on the— because we don't, we don't say the right words, we don't go to the right buildings, we happen to be born in the wrong country. You know, and you know, I, so I spent a lot of time around Christians that would say, for instance, that you could be born in the middle of the desert, God would send somebody to tell you about Jesus. And I'm thinking, why does he need to send anybody? Jesus has already done it. Interestingly, one of the other books that I'm working on is, you know, if Jesus has completed it, what is there left to do? Why do we need to do anything other than enjoy?

Yeah, right. Well, I, I was, I was raised in in, in Pentecostalism, Apostolic Church, Evangelical— because it's become Evangelical now. And a lot of Christians actually evolve out of Christianity because people believe these things. Um, and I remember when I was going through my crisis, because I'm like, after I had my children, my baby, my first daughter, and I was like, if God loves me nearly as much as I love her and he supposedly loves me infinitely more, there can be no hell because I would never condemn any of my children to eternal torment. I might be angry with them, but I would never do that. Um, so I discovered a different way to read the Bible like you're talking about, and I discovered this group, it's called Christian Universalism. And then I real— then I, when I did my studying, I realized for the first 500 years of the church, that was the majority of the church. They believe just what you said. Jesus did it. Jesus completed everything. There's nothing left to be done. Everybody is redeemed. But that became a minority message in the church. Um, so it's, it's interesting how I think hopefully we're coming back around.

Yeah, I, I think so. And I also think that the assumption that people who are not Christians aren't accepted by God is very tenuous one. Um, because, because very often if you— as soon as you say God doesn't accept somebody because they're not a Christian, however, what if their life measures up to all those values that we're all holding as Christians?

Right, right.

You know, it's, it's very, very difficult. Um, and, and actually, to be fair, I'm sure you're the same. Um, you know, I've met some rotten people, and most of them were in the church, and I've met some really, really godly and gracious, kind-hearted people, and they never go anywhere near a church. So yeah, it's kind of— yeah, which, which in a sense is why in my book Pause, I've specifically aimed it not at— not as a religious book, but as a book for people that want to ask the question, is there more than just what I think and more than what I feel? To me. And there is. And in fact, one of the premises of the book is that— and again, I believe this, um, I think it's in the scripture, any— that all— everybody— it says in the scripture, and I'm trying to quote a verse and I can't remember where it is. I think it's Job. But you know, um, the, the spirit of man— I think it's in the Psalms actually— goes back to God. Whatever happens, the body goes into the earth and the spirit goes back to God. Um, and then you get entangled in— so the spirit's gone back to God because it was always is the body's gone to the earth because it's always been matter. What's the bit that got saved that goes into this special bedroom, you know, with Jesus?

Right.

It's kind of a bit odd. So yeah, I, I'm a great believer, and I'm quite clear in the book about this, that I think it's impossible to be human and not have a spirit.

Yeah.

And I believe that that spirit is, is actually— it's, it's a part of God. It's a gift from God. All human beings will be given a gift, and it's the Spirit of God. And I think, you know, I just— I know you're going to challenge that, so, but just to clarify what I mean by that is, I think what we fail is that our conversation becomes too much about whether the theology adds up, as opposed to— I remember, and I remember very early on as a preacher, um, listening to somebody in a Reformed church, um, and I then spoke in that church a few months after this chap, and an old lady came up to me and she said, you've just preached exactly the same message as this other chap. She said, except he spent all his time telling us about who's going to hell. And you spent all your time inviting us all to go to heaven. And I think that's the message. There is no other message. God loves us. He's got a big heart. Yeah, there's, there's room for everybody. And in a sense, universalism is saying, it's hard to imagine Why, if there's enough seats on the bus, why would God drive past and leave you on the side of the road?

Yeah, right, right.

Sorry, I interrupted you.

No, I just, I did want to ask you, we have a little bit of a delay. I did want to ask you a question. Because I think I heard you say, I don't know if I'm going to see Lee again. And I don't know if I'm going to see, you know, maybe this person again. I'm curious about this, because doesn't Christianity teach that we are going to be reunited with our loved ones?

Yeah, it does. Yeah. Well, it does. But in what way? What does that actually mean? Because we— it says we're going to be reunited. And unless, of course, we've had 6 husbands prior, which husband are we going back to be with? Jesus says, well, you're not, you're not given in marriage in, in, you know, in the afterlife. So what I think what I mean is by that, I don't know if I will see them. It's not that they won't be there. It's that I don't know if we will require that, that acknowledgement, that conscious emotional awareness that we've seen that we are seeing that person. And I say that because I think I've come to a position— I'm probably a universalist, but I've come to that position where I have absolutely no doubt Lee will be there, wherever that is. And I don't need to have that confirmed now or in the future. So if, if, if what I'm saying is, if, if what actually— if the reality of when I cease to breathe air, is that my spirit, um, will, will know or not know whoever I knew or didn't know here. That those things, I think, are— they're earthbound. Is, and I'm going to see all my friends. Yeah, I don't need to. I think the fact that God loves them, you know, they're in his hands. I think we've got a bit of an unstable internet going on, aren't we?

Yeah, a little bit. You just, you kind of froze up there. So when you say the spirit goes back to God, Let's talk about— I think you said body, mind, and spirit is who we are. Um, are these three separate things? I mean, obviously the body is a separate thing, but spirit, mind separate, or—

um, well, again, I, I— these are all my own thoughts and they're very philosophical. Um, but I, I can't see any reason for our existence other than that we, our spirit is gaining personality.

Hmm, okay.

So, so back to your other question, which is quite apposite really, is it? So I think that at the beginning of my journey, um, well, as a baby when I was born, um, you know, but the gift of God was that my, he gave me a spirit which is, which is Rob's spirit, you know. And however long I exist in this format, that spirit, he's gaining some kind of personality, some kind of, you know, yeah, personality. And so yes, when that spirit returns to God, I don't believe there's a separation between— here's the spirit, he puts it back in his, in his, in his spirit box. And then takes this Rob guy and says, well, you were a bit, you were a bit of a terror. I'm afraid you're going with the goats. I just don't get that. Right. So, so the answer to your question is, I don't believe the body, mind, and spirit are actually separate things. Except I believe we don't get to truly understand our spirituality unless we begin to see them as operating in different realms, different ways, right? And in my book, I use an illustration, um, really to do with this, and that's that, you know, the young lady comes home from school, she's not right, and her mum says to her, has something happened at school? No. Have you fell out with somebody? No. Um, have you, have you got a test tomorrow you're worried about? No. Are you not feeling very well? Is your stomach not No, what's happening is mom is going through all the categories that she knows to identify what's going on with this daughter. But actually, what if there's something going on of which there is no category known? Hmm. And so to explain that, what I say is, if you think of the spirit, everything we apply to it is a category to do with our intellect or our feelings. And I've just gone at pains to say, actually, your spirit doesn't operate with intellect and feelings. So every time we try and interrogate our spirit mentally, what we're doing, we're trying to make sense of it with a, with a category that doesn't exist in it. And, and that's another reason why I say to people, only you will ever know if you have encountered the spirit within you.

Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. It's really interesting as we try to put language to these things. I'm reading a book right now, and this guy uses ego, unconscious, and inner conscious to, to kind of talk about these things. And he says the ego, which we would maybe consider our mind, doesn't communicate directly with the inner conscience. And I think this is kind of what— so it— these concepts are really interesting because I don't think they're actually separate entities, but they're ways that we have to define it, because there's something about being in the body and having the ego and having the mind where the spirit is. As you said, operates in a different realm and operates in what we consider to be a non-physical realm. So we have to use this language to try— like models, you know. It's like when we— you mentioned atoms earlier. Well, scientists used to tell atoms were these little balls in the nucleus, so the protons and the neutrons and the electrons are little things circling around it. And that was a great model. But that's not the way— it's not the way atoms really are.

Exactly. Yes. And we learn as we go along, don't we? Right. So the other thing that's been interesting, thinking back to the religious side of things, is I, I tend to, tend to recognize that we're often manipulated through the emotional, mental, the ego, um, but we can't really manipulate each other's spirit because we don't interact that way, right? So I'm very conscious of that. There's something— which is why I, I kind of go back to, you know, that book of Hebrews, which I don't think— I don't think we fully grasp. But, you know, Hebrews talks a lot about that spirituality that's deep, um, and unfathomable. And, um, and, you know, it's not to do with the intellect, not to do with theology, it's not to do with how we can work things out with our senses. It's something beyond that. And that, to me, is what just keeps circling and circling around. And I often say to people, if you, if you seek a moment of pause, which we all do, to be fair, we're all looking for a moment within the spirit within us, and away from the madness of the world. But if you seek a moment of pause, the reward is there with it. You don't bring something back with you. I always say, if I, if I've had a moment of pause, it does affect my day. It makes it slightly better, I'm sure. But I don't go— I don't go and pause in order to bring something back with me to affect my mental world or my physical world. The fact that it does is a completely separate thing.

Hmm.

That, if that makes sense. And because my— in fact, one of the other things I've come very, very conscious of, and I, I say very often, is my body and my mind can improve and deteriorate. And in fact, my— I know I'm only 61. Now I've got— now I've got metal plates in my feet and screws sticking out. I know my body is deteriorating. But one day, my mind and my body will deteriorate and cease to function. My spirit cannot deteriorate, it is complete in every way.

Right?

Which is, which is why I think the Bible says it goes back to God. It's probably the only bit that's left of us that goes back to God. But my, my I hold on to the bit that goes back to God. I am also my personality. It's now called Rob.

Right, right.

Sounds a bit weird, doesn't it? But yeah, of course, if we were Hindus, or, you know, even, yeah, probably Hindus, but, or of other religions, we might just say that, you know, your body goes into the ground, it becomes energy, it never ceases to exist. Our thoughts, particularly now we're articulating them, are retained within the human family. Yeah. So, so in a way, nothing ever ceases to exist.

Right.

But I think, I think you and I are really interested— well, not just you and I, but folks listening too— we're really interested in this extra element of our existence that's, that is, that is, that's not going to deteriorate, not going to cease to exist, not going to disappear from sight. It's going to continue for all eternity. And I just think, I think that is what the Christian message is, and everything else that we've hung around the sides of it, of mechanisms to keep the church going. Absolutely. So, and I say that with, you know, I love the church, I Christianity. I'm a Christian, and I've got brothers and sisters, you know, in the family of Christ. But I'm not, I'm not fooled by the reality that I don't need to put my money into a little box, or I don't need to tick a box and turn up every Sunday. I don't, I don't need to stand on a corner with a placard, tell everybody what I think they should do. You know, one, one of the, the key things that I, I think I came to myself was that if we, if we believe, if we truly believe that God is an all-powerful, unsurpassable, uh, being, um, whose will can't be usurped, then can we not trust God with a few people? Yeah, to work things out.

That, that actually reminds me, I always plug this book whenever I can. There's a great book by a guy named Thomas Talbot called The Inescapable Love of God. Where he makes a philosophical argument for universalism. So it's biblical, but it's also philosophical. And he makes kind of the same point you're making, because there's always been this argument, well, God's all-powerful, then he should be able to save everybody. If God's all-loving, then he will want to save everybody. But the church tells us that he's both of these things, but he doesn't save everybody. And that does not line up. And so the message of universalism is God is all-powerful and God is all-loving. Therefore he will save everyone. Uh, that's just a real short synopsis of it.

It is. And that's because, um, they often— and I think we all to some extent get tied up in justice— that God is also all, you know, he's perfect justice, so his justice has to be satisfied. There's all this language. That's why you get sacrifice and all this stuff.. But my, my, yeah, my view is Christ came, he solved the problem. I often use this description that, that Jesus didn't just make a way to heaven, he ripped the door off. So he's not standing there letting somebody in and letting somebody out. There is no door, there is no restriction. And of course, he's— there are lots of verses that we can always You can always hang on a verse here or there, but ultimately his sacrifice was for all, for all time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he says, he says, you know, upon this rock I'll build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. And people don't realize that gates are designed to keep things out. They would build gates around the city to keep things out. So he's like, I'm smashing down the gates of hell, is what that, that verse actually means.

Yes.

Um, so anyway, I could go on and on about this, but I, I, Rob, I really enjoyed having you here today. So remind people the name of the book and where they can reach you.

Yeah, sure. So, uh, the book's Dead Simple: Pause: A Spiritual Power. Um, and my name is Rob Wykes. You can get it on Amazon, um, or if you just Google my name, Rob Wykes, pause, it'll all come up. And, uh, you can get it in most Barnes Noble, you get it most bookshops. Um, yeah, and my email address is, is pause@robwykes.com.

Awesome. Well, Rob, thanks for being here today. Thanks for sharing your insights with us. Uh, it's been, it's been a pleasure getting to know you.

Thank you. It's been great to get to know you too, Brian. Yeah, God bless you.

Enjoy your afternoon.

And you.

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