Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
RUPERT: Yes, absolutely, that’s the case. Whenever we fall in
love with an apparent person, we never truly fall in love with a
person; it’s always the true Self or love itself that we truly fall in
love with.
TRIP: Other interviewers have spent a lot of time on your
storyline and I found it fascinating, but this is such a rare
opportunity for us to go deeper down the rabbit hole of ordinary
experience I didn’t want to spend too much time there, but there’s
one part of your storyline that I did want to ask you about. You
were uncommonly introspective as a teenager and you spent
decades voraciously reading. You might want to talk about some
of your teachers, but there was still a gap between your
understanding of life and life itself. I think that many on the path
feel that way. Can you elaborate on that some more?
RUPERT: Yes. As you say, I spent a lot of my teenage and 20s
studying, meditating, and attending spiritual meetings. I was
brought up in the classical, advaita nondual tradition so I received
the neo advaita teaching first of all and become Indian, a classical
Indian form but I spent a great deal of time reading and studying
Ramana Maharshi. And from a very early age, from the age of
about 15 or 16 I had a deep intuition of what these people were
talking about; it was truly--well, it resonated so deeply in me,
something in me said, “Yes, I know that this is true.” But there
was a connection that I couldn’t make so that after about 20 or so
years, in my mid-thirties or so I felt that I had read everything, or
at least everything in the tradition that I was interested in. I had
started with Krishnamurti, Rumi, Nisargadatta and Ramana
Maharshi and others in that tradition.
But there was, in a way, I couldn’t make it my own; it wasn’t my
lived, felt experience. And this precipitated a crisis in me--there
was--I didn’t know what else to do. I had been meditating every
day for twenty-odd years. I had learnt the Sufi turning. I had
learned that they’re just movements. I was reading voraciously, I
had done everything I knew how to do. But still the teaching was
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