A Journey Through Near-Death Experiences from the media The Crackling Aliveness of Being

A woman involved in interior design asks how to apply Rupert’s teaching about making one’s home a reminder of true being. Rupert explains that a home is an exteriorisation of one’s inner life, and an interior designer’s job is to create spaces that take clients to their true home through their own visual language. He notes that good design doesn’t draw attention to itself but becomes transparent, allowing people to feel relieved of their burdens without knowing why. A designer must accommodate clients’ tastes while creating environments that lead them back to the peace of their true nature. The work requires sensitivity, skill, knowledge and experience – all hidden ‘beneath the surface’ while allowing the experience above to flow naturally. He mentions an architect who wrote a book called The Quiet Spaces as an example of someone working with this understanding.

A man begins with gratitude for Rupert’s teachings, which helped him discover that he is ‘the core essence of infinite being’. He then questions the Consciousness-only model, suggesting that while our experience is limited to knowing through consciousness, this doesn’t disprove the existence of matter. He proposes a thought experiment: if materialists were correct and matter were primary, wouldn’t our experience be identical to our current experience? Rupert responds that there would be one crucial difference – if consciousness emerged from matter, consciousness would be temporary and finite, contradicting our experience that consciousness is neither temporary nor finite. He adds that since all we can ever know is knowing itself, why build a model of reality with something we could never experience (matter) unless consciousness alone is insufficient as a foundation? The man acknowledges that understanding the model isn’t required for recognising one’s true nature.

A woman says she notices Rupert sometimes says ‘peace, joy, love’ and sometimes ‘in love’, and describes feeling inundated with love when considering ‘what if God was so in love with me?’ Rupert affirms this feeling, quoting William Blake: ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. He explains that God is so intimately one with us that there isn’t a hair’s breadth between us – God is our very being. When the woman expresses confusion about how being can be ‘in love with’ being, Rupert clarifies that love is not a relationship between subject and object but rather the collapse of relationship. Love is the absence of otherness, not something a separate self feels or has. Love can be expressed in relationship, but love itself is the collapse of the felt sense of ‘me and you’. The separate self dies in the experience of love, which is why we all love love.

A woman describes feeling a ‘crackling aliveness’ during meditation rather than just peace, wondering if this indicates moving back into the immanent after reaching the transcendent. Rupert confirms this is natural, explaining that when people first recognise their true nature, they typically experience it as peace – quiet, without much activity. Over time, the joyful nature of consciousness begins to emerge, eventually overflowing as love and creativity. He points to the energy felt in retreats, where by the end there is more celebration, laughter and noise as the love aspect emerges. This crackling aliveness, energy that overflows into laughter, creativity, comedy, music and friendship, is not just quiet peace in the background but has an ‘overflowing creative quality’. He connects this to the Turner’s moon metaphor he’s mentioned previously, affirming that this is where ‘God rushes in’.

A man admits not understanding the King Lear/John Smith metaphor, trying to relate it to Batman and Bruce Wayne. After clarification from Rupert that it’s about the actor and the part they play, he then asks about Rupert’s careful use of language – specifically saying ‘I am feeling sad’ rather than ‘I am sad’. Rupert confirms this is intentional, explaining that the separate self feels ‘I am sad’, while in reality, ‘I’ feels sadness – sadness is what I know, not what I am. Just as we don’t say ‘I am the sound’ when hearing an airplane but rather ‘I hear the sound’, similarly sadness is what we know, not what we are. If sadness were what we are, it would always be present, but nobody is always sad. He encourages experimenting with different formulations (‘I am sad’ versus ‘I feel sad’) to notice how words condition experience, emphasising that in the phrase ‘I am sad’, the truth is concealed in the ‘I am’ – all that’s necessary is to emphasise that instead of the sadness.

A woman shares an experience from the 1980s when, during a guided visualisation workshop in Boston, she mentally visited her sister’s apartment in Paris. Though her sister wasn’t there, the woman later discovered that her visualisation precisely matched her sister’s actual apartment, down to details like the radiator placement. Rupert explains that the consciousness-only model accounts for such phenomena more effectively than materialism. He suggests that while minds appear separate in waking consciousness, they overlap at deeper levels – particularly minds with close connections like siblings who originate from the same source. The woman adds another example of sensing her brother would have a car accident before it happened. Rupert notes that some minds are more ‘porous’, allowing information from the broader field of consciousness to filter through more easily. When the woman mentions sometimes referring to herself in the third person (‘Ginger is sad’), Rupert suggests this approach has merit but prefers ‘I feel sad’ or even ‘I am sad’, as the truth is concealed in the ‘I am’ – one need only emphasise that aspect rather than the sadness.

A woman asks about the necessity of ‘tuning out’ the senses to better be aware of awareness. Rupert explains this isn’t his approach – he doesn’t tell King Lear to tune out experience to recognise he’s John Smith. Instead, he directly asks, ‘When you say “I am”, who are you referring to?’ This direct approach bypasses the need to control the mind or tune out sensations. Rather than saying ‘get rid of the snake’, he suggests ‘see the rope’, which takes care of the snake as a by-product. The woman expresses concern about only being able to sustain awareness of being aware for brief moments due to sensory distractions. Rupert emphasises that trying to control thoughts leads to decades of struggle, whereas Ramana Maharshi and Atmananda Krishna Menon’s great gift was showing we can go directly to our true nature. When asked if this approach is scary, Rupert acknowledges it may be frightening for the illusory character (King Lear) whose existence is threatened, but asks, ‘Are you interested in truth or not?’

A woman expresses gratitude for the love in the room before revealing that when first attempting to speak, she experienced a visceral terror of being burned at the stake or considered insane for speaking her truth – despite having no personal history with such persecution. She compares this fear to how sharks can be trapped by an illusion of a wall created by air bubbles from a hose. Rupert reassures her that in our current culture, one need not fear being locked up for expressing unconventional ideas, though this might have been true in other times and places. Returning to her original question about creativity, she explains that unlike Rupert who seems to have had a ’well-worn path’ of creative expression throughout his life, she experiences a narrow capacity for creativity that she wishes to expand. Rupert encourages her to be quietly confident, start creating regardless of others’ opinions, and recognise that criticism and praise are inevitable companions to creative expression. He suggests using criticism as an opportunity to examine what in oneself feels diminished, since awareness itself is never affected by praise or blame. When the woman realises this approach opens creativity as a form of devotion, Rupert affirms this, advising that her desire to express gratitude should be stronger than her fear of criticism.

A woman describes experiences where life circumstances feel like God pulling her towards God, expressing awe at the all-knowingness of God and asking whether even awakened beings cannot fully be that all-knowingness. She wonders if the finite mind limits the full expression of the divine. Rupert explains that divine omniscience knows whatever each person or animal is experiencing, but for an individual to have a coherent experience, consciousness must narrow itself to exclude the billions of other thoughts, feelings and perceptions occurring simultaneously. He illustrates this by asking her to imagine having two opposing thoughts simultaneously, or eight billion thoughts at once – the mind would be unable to function. Thus, while infinite consciousness knows all thoughts simultaneously, not all thoughts appear in any individual mind. The woman understands that the finite mind serves as a protective, functioning mechanism that narrows infinite consciousness to know one thing at a time.

A musician expresses her concern about the competitive, judgmental nature of music education that traumatised many of her peers. She wants to change how music and creativity are taught, using the non-dual understanding. Rupert acknowledges her concern while noting there’s value in the discipline required at the highest levels of artistry. He references conductor Benjamin Zander as an inspirational teacher whose enthusiasm and love of music are contagious, while recognising that professional musicians must submit to rigorous discipline to perform flawlessly. Comparing it to the Federer-Nadal tennis rivalry, he suggests that competition can elevate performance, provided there’s respect off-court. The life of an artist, he explains, is a sacrifice – submitting one’s body-mind to an ordeal so spirit can speak through a ‘clean vehicle’. When the woman notes that devotion to craft differs from false perfectionism, Rupert agrees that devotion provides the energy to endure necessary challenges, as the fire that tests and hones an artist.

A man asks Rupert to comment on a quote from Simone Weil: ‘Religion as consolation is an obstacle to true faith. Love is not consolation, it’s light. There’s only one fault – our inability to feed on light’. He specifically struggles with understanding ‘our inability to feed on light’. Rupert explains that light is often used in spiritual traditions as a synonym for consciousness, as the sun’s light renders the world visible just as consciousness renders experience knowable. Weil is correct, he says, that our mistake is deriving nourishment from objects of sense perception rather than going directly to consciousness or being – the source of peace and happiness within ourselves. He clarifies that this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t desire activities or relationships, but we shouldn’t seek them for peace and happiness. The man adds that understanding this gives a key to reading great traditions with new appreciation.

A woman seeks clarification about free will in the King Lear metaphor. Rupert explains that King Lear doesn’t really have free will because there is no entity ‘King Lear’ either to have free will or not – there’s only John Smith appearing as King Lear. The recognition ‘I am John Smith’ isn’t part of the script; it occurs in the pauses between King Lear’s lines and actions. This recognition represents a vertical intervention of being in the horizontal line of time comprising thoughts, actions and relationships – a moment of stepping into eternity. When ordinary consciousness returns, the mind knows something has happened but cannot find evidence of it in the object world, so it often appropriates the experience, claiming it as part of its narrative. Rupert describes various ways this recognition can occur: spontaneously (often overlooked without proper interpretation), through conscious enquiry, through intense grief that breaks through coping strategies, through intense pleasure where separation dissolves, and through psychedelics that expand perception beyond normal limits.

A woman involved in interior design asks how to apply Rupert’s teaching about making one’s home a reminder of true being. Rupert explains that a home is an exteriorisation of one’s inner life, and an interior designer’s job is to create spaces that take clients to their true home through their own visual language. He notes that good design doesn’t draw attention to itself but becomes transparent, allowing people to feel relieved of their burdens without knowing why. A designer must accommodate clients’ tastes while creating environments that lead them back to the peace of their true nature. The work requires sensitivity, skill, knowledge and experience – all hidden ‘beneath the surface’ while allowing the experience above to flow naturally. He mentions an architect who wrote a book called The Quiet Spaces as an example of someone working with this understanding.

A man begins with gratitude for Rupert’s teachings, which helped him discover that he is ‘the core essence of infinite being’. He then questions the Consciousness-only model, suggesting that while our experience is limited to knowing through consciousness, this doesn’t disprove the existence of matter. He proposes a thought experiment: if materialists were correct and matter were primary, wouldn’t our experience be identical to our current experience? Rupert responds that there would be one crucial difference – if consciousness emerged from matter, consciousness would be temporary and finite, contradicting our experience that consciousness is neither temporary nor finite. He adds that since all we can ever know is knowing itself, why build a model of reality with something we could never experience (matter) unless consciousness alone is insufficient as a foundation? The man acknowledges that understanding the model isn’t required for recognising one’s true nature.

A woman says she notices Rupert sometimes says ‘peace, joy, love’ and sometimes ‘in love’, and describes feeling inundated with love when considering ‘what if God was so in love with me?’ Rupert affirms this feeling, quoting William Blake: ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. He explains that God is so intimately one with us that there isn’t a hair’s breadth between us – God is our very being. When the woman expresses confusion about how being can be ‘in love with’ being, Rupert clarifies that love is not a relationship between subject and object but rather the collapse of relationship. Love is the absence of otherness, not something a separate self feels or has. Love can be expressed in relationship, but love itself is the collapse of the felt sense of ‘me and you’. The separate self dies in the experience of love, which is why we all love love.

A woman describes feeling a ‘crackling aliveness’ during meditation rather than just peace, wondering if this indicates moving back into the immanent after reaching the transcendent. Rupert confirms this is natural, explaining that when people first recognise their true nature, they typically experience it as peace – quiet, without much activity. Over time, the joyful nature of consciousness begins to emerge, eventually overflowing as love and creativity. He points to the energy felt in retreats, where by the end there is more celebration, laughter and noise as the love aspect emerges. This crackling aliveness, energy that overflows into laughter, creativity, comedy, music and friendship, is not just quiet peace in the background but has an ‘overflowing creative quality’. He connects this to the Turner’s moon metaphor he’s mentioned previously, affirming that this is where ‘God rushes in’.

A man admits not understanding the King Lear/John Smith metaphor, trying to relate it to Batman and Bruce Wayne. After clarification from Rupert that it’s about the actor and the part they play, he then asks about Rupert’s careful use of language – specifically saying ‘I am feeling sad’ rather than ‘I am sad’. Rupert confirms this is intentional, explaining that the separate self feels ‘I am sad’, while in reality, ‘I’ feels sadness – sadness is what I know, not what I am. Just as we don’t say ‘I am the sound’ when hearing an airplane but rather ‘I hear the sound’, similarly sadness is what we know, not what we are. If sadness were what we are, it would always be present, but nobody is always sad. He encourages experimenting with different formulations (‘I am sad’ versus ‘I feel sad’) to notice how words condition experience, emphasising that in the phrase ‘I am sad’, the truth is concealed in the ‘I am’ – all that’s necessary is to emphasise that instead of the sadness.

A woman shares an experience from the 1980s when, during a guided visualisation workshop in Boston, she mentally visited her sister’s apartment in Paris. Though her sister wasn’t there, the woman later discovered that her visualisation precisely matched her sister’s actual apartment, down to details like the radiator placement. Rupert explains that the consciousness-only model accounts for such phenomena more effectively than materialism. He suggests that while minds appear separate in waking consciousness, they overlap at deeper levels – particularly minds with close connections like siblings who originate from the same source. The woman adds another example of sensing her brother would have a car accident before it happened. Rupert notes that some minds are more ‘porous’, allowing information from the broader field of consciousness to filter through more easily. When the woman mentions sometimes referring to herself in the third person (‘Ginger is sad’), Rupert suggests this approach has merit but prefers ‘I feel sad’ or even ‘I am sad’, as the truth is concealed in the ‘I am’ – one need only emphasise that aspect rather than the sadness.

A woman asks about the necessity of ‘tuning out’ the senses to better be aware of awareness. Rupert explains this isn’t his approach – he doesn’t tell King Lear to tune out experience to recognise he’s John Smith. Instead, he directly asks, ‘When you say “I am”, who are you referring to?’ This direct approach bypasses the need to control the mind or tune out sensations. Rather than saying ‘get rid of the snake’, he suggests ‘see the rope’, which takes care of the snake as a by-product. The woman expresses concern about only being able to sustain awareness of being aware for brief moments due to sensory distractions. Rupert emphasises that trying to control thoughts leads to decades of struggle, whereas Ramana Maharshi and Atmananda Krishna Menon’s great gift was showing we can go directly to our true nature. When asked if this approach is scary, Rupert acknowledges it may be frightening for the illusory character (King Lear) whose existence is threatened, but asks, ‘Are you interested in truth or not?’

A woman expresses gratitude for the love in the room before revealing that when first attempting to speak, she experienced a visceral terror of being burned at the stake or considered insane for speaking her truth – despite having no personal history with such persecution. She compares this fear to how sharks can be trapped by an illusion of a wall created by air bubbles from a hose. Rupert reassures her that in our current culture, one need not fear being locked up for expressing unconventional ideas, though this might have been true in other times and places. Returning to her original question about creativity, she explains that unlike Rupert who seems to have had a ’well-worn path’ of creative expression throughout his life, she experiences a narrow capacity for creativity that she wishes to expand. Rupert encourages her to be quietly confident, start creating regardless of others’ opinions, and recognise that criticism and praise are inevitable companions to creative expression. He suggests using criticism as an opportunity to examine what in oneself feels diminished, since awareness itself is never affected by praise or blame. When the woman realises this approach opens creativity as a form of devotion, Rupert affirms this, advising that her desire to express gratitude should be stronger than her fear of criticism.

A woman describes experiences where life circumstances feel like God pulling her towards God, expressing awe at the all-knowingness of God and asking whether even awakened beings cannot fully be that all-knowingness. She wonders if the finite mind limits the full expression of the divine. Rupert explains that divine omniscience knows whatever each person or animal is experiencing, but for an individual to have a coherent experience, consciousness must narrow itself to exclude the billions of other thoughts, feelings and perceptions occurring simultaneously. He illustrates this by asking her to imagine having two opposing thoughts simultaneously, or eight billion thoughts at once – the mind would be unable to function. Thus, while infinite consciousness knows all thoughts simultaneously, not all thoughts appear in any individual mind. The woman understands that the finite mind serves as a protective, functioning mechanism that narrows infinite consciousness to know one thing at a time.

A musician expresses her concern about the competitive, judgmental nature of music education that traumatised many of her peers. She wants to change how music and creativity are taught, using the non-dual understanding. Rupert acknowledges her concern while noting there’s value in the discipline required at the highest levels of artistry. He references conductor Benjamin Zander as an inspirational teacher whose enthusiasm and love of music are contagious, while recognising that professional musicians must submit to rigorous discipline to perform flawlessly. Comparing it to the Federer-Nadal tennis rivalry, he suggests that competition can elevate performance, provided there’s respect off-court. The life of an artist, he explains, is a sacrifice – submitting one’s body-mind to an ordeal so spirit can speak through a ‘clean vehicle’. When the woman notes that devotion to craft differs from false perfectionism, Rupert agrees that devotion provides the energy to endure necessary challenges, as the fire that tests and hones an artist.

A man asks Rupert to comment on a quote from Simone Weil: ‘Religion as consolation is an obstacle to true faith. Love is not consolation, it’s light. There’s only one fault – our inability to feed on light’. He specifically struggles with understanding ‘our inability to feed on light’. Rupert explains that light is often used in spiritual traditions as a synonym for consciousness, as the sun’s light renders the world visible just as consciousness renders experience knowable. Weil is correct, he says, that our mistake is deriving nourishment from objects of sense perception rather than going directly to consciousness or being – the source of peace and happiness within ourselves. He clarifies that this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t desire activities or relationships, but we shouldn’t seek them for peace and happiness. The man adds that understanding this gives a key to reading great traditions with new appreciation.

A woman seeks clarification about free will in the King Lear metaphor. Rupert explains that King Lear doesn’t really have free will because there is no entity ‘King Lear’ either to have free will or not – there’s only John Smith appearing as King Lear. The recognition ‘I am John Smith’ isn’t part of the script; it occurs in the pauses between King Lear’s lines and actions. This recognition represents a vertical intervention of being in the horizontal line of time comprising thoughts, actions and relationships – a moment of stepping into eternity. When ordinary consciousness returns, the mind knows something has happened but cannot find evidence of it in the object world, so it often appropriates the experience, claiming it as part of its narrative. Rupert describes various ways this recognition can occur: spontaneously (often overlooked without proper interpretation), through conscious enquiry, through intense grief that breaks through coping strategies, through intense pleasure where separation dissolves, and through psychedelics that expand perception beyond normal limits.