Paul Chek: ALL IS GOD | How To Find God (Part 1 of 3)

Because without you, there is no universe and there is no Paul, and there is no table and there is no day, there's no night, there's no life. There's nothing. You are the epicenter of everything.

Sat with this conversation is to be a voice of truth and spotlight all the work that you've stood for and that you've learned in your life and just enjoy the process of doing it. Paul. Check. Welcome back to Wellness Force.

And Josh Trent, welcome back to Living 4D with Paul. Check.

This is a really cool moment for me. God, it's a word that's so overused and really misunderstood.

Yes.

And I think that one of the things I've been so looking forward to in all of our email communications and just our friendship is the way that you pepper in knowledge and you drop knowledge on me without trying to teach. It's almost like at times it feels like your teaching is effortless. But I'd love, as a starting off point to read from Rudolf Steiner's work.

Yeah, go for it.

Because we're exploring all things God today.

Yeah.

I think anybody who's a seeker of truth and wants to understand God and the soul and what the hell we're doing here on the planet. Yeah. This is a great way to start this conversation.

Sure.

Many people believe that they must seek out masters of higher knowledge wherever such masters may be found in order to receive teachings from them. There's twofold truth to this. On one hand, if. If our aspiration to higher knowledge is sincere, we will certainly spare no effort and avoid no obstacle in our quest for an initiate able to lead us into the higher mysteries of the world. On the other hand, we can be certain that if our striving for knowledge is sincere and worthy, initiation will find us whatever the circumstances. There is a universal law among initiates that the knowledge due to a seeker cannot be withheld. But there's also another universal law that esoteric knowledge may not be imparted to anyone not qualified to receive it. The more perfect the initiate, the more strictly these two laws are observed. Can you start us there? Because that's the hunger for most people that are here with us.

Yes. If you look at the hero's journey, once the ordeal happens, something that you know, for example, with COVID a lot of us who are more conscious are rebelling. So if you realize that what's going down is not ideal for everybody involved and you want to make a change, well, something as big as Covid, for example, which, you know, this isn't about COVID It's just an example. We can all touch you. Then you have to say, okay, how do I, how do I make a change? You got to go find somebody that knows how to make change on a social scale. So the first thing in the hero's journey is once you have the ordeal that leads you to saying, okay, I've got it. Take the hero's journey. Now, most heroes don't think that way. They don't say, I'm going to go on the hero's journey. They do something like, okay, that's enough of this. I've got to do something about this. I can't watch my women and children being raped or my land being stolen, or the church burning and killing mystics that are telling us the truth or whatever it might be. So the first thing the hero has to do is go find a mentor. The mentor becomes what's called the guardian at the gate. The mentor's job is not only to educate you, but to let you know when you're BSing yourself so that you don't go off and make your life even worse or take people with you in the quest of making things worse. So when you have a true quest for spiritual development or spiritual truth, then that you become like a magnet. And so you're going to draw towards you and draw yourself toward whatever's in harmonic resonance with your deeper truth. You may not even consciously realize you're doing that. Now, in my library here, I could point out, you know, a hundred people that easily hundred that could be excellent mentors. But you will find differences in their philosophy and those differences can be so big. For example, many of the great teachers that I've studied, for example Osho. Osho was a great teacher, but to be with him you had to be a vegetarian. And he had a real problem with same sex relationships or anything other than heterosexual relationships. So if you were lesbian or gay or bisexual or anything else, you probably would have found his teachings quite off putting because it went against something so deep in the fabric of your own self that you were being rejected while you were being educated. And then you might be someone like me, with parents that come from regions in the world where the ground freezes and you have genes that need meat. So you might have all of a sudden become a vegetarian to suit your guru, but found yourself getting sicker and sicker and wondered why all this spiritual practice is making you sick, not realizing that you're following the wrong guy. Now, if you were to go to Rudolf Steiner or Paramahansa Yogananda, both of which were very capable of teaching the Eastern mysteries or the Western mysteries. Both of them wanted their students to become vegetarians for their own reasons, but both of them stated almost identically, no one should become a vegetarian until it happens naturally and they can do it comfortably. So they were not pushing people into vegetarianism, but they saw that over time with spiritual development, people naturally gravitated toward that. So now, with Yogananda, you would have gotten a lot of depth of Indian philosophy. With Steiner, you could have gotten a lot of depth in Greek philosophy, Roman philosophy, Egyptian philosophy. He was a member of the white brotherhood. So it's sort of a sect of very evolved, kind of like the Gnostics, for example. Same kind of concept. And his teachings were very much wrapped in ancient concepts that take a long time to wrap your head around. Yogananda came to bridge the Eastern teachings with Christianity. So he was sort of a rainbow bridge between Christianity and Eastern philosophy and Eastern religion. So he really had a sort of a healthy buffering effect and knew Christianity very deeply, but could help weave the two together in a way that didn't leave the Christians feeling so guilty about a transition like that. So in. In the psychological stages of development of Ken Wilber, you have traditional, modern, postmodern, integral. So first it's magical and mythical, which is the traditional. There's your dogma. Then you go to modern, which means you're willing to look into other philosophies. Postmodern means you see that all of it's just a story, and for every is, there's an isn't. And so you kind of run into a checkmate in postmodernism. But then when you grow past that, you get to integral, where you actually see yourself and everybody and understand these are all stages of development. Just like, you know, you can't just get rid of the first, second, and third grade because little kids irritate you, because you can't take kids from home to fourth grade in one move. It won't work. So all I'm saying is that there's a wide variety of spiritual teachers, and if we listen with our heart and we go where our heart guides us, we end up with the right person. And that person may only be part of the road. You may get to a certain place where you realize that that philosophy has holes that can't be answered through the philosophy. And that's where you find out if you're really. If you've developed enough individuation to step out on your own, or whether you're still a child and need the group to shelter you. And that's a really big transition point. And it really determines a lot who your mentor is. Because mentors that are not developed themselves have a tendency to want to collect people around to. To be worshipped. But mentors that are very well developed have the intention of giving you everything they can give you to set you free, with the intention of knowing that a really good teacher produces students that no longer need the teacher. My goal as a teacher has always been to teach my students how to think, not what to think, and give them the tools that I use to make intelligent decisions for myself so that they can do it for themselves. Because the last thing I want to be is a daddy. For a whole bunch of people, it's hard, too much work, and it also delays their development. So in a nutshell, do you see what I'm saying? There's a lot of options out there. If you listen to your head, you can end up with another father figure that will mirror back to you your unresolved daddy issues and may play the same games for you which spiritually put you right back where you've got to be to grow. If you listen to your heart, you'll end up with someone that will speak to your heart, open your heart and take you to where you need to be to realize what's next on your own accord. And your heart will then change course and you'll go.

We are, as a society, so disconnected right now. I'm 40, and in my life I've never experienced as much disconnection as I do now. And I think so many people are hungry for what is the truth? What is going on with our world? How do I know even what God is? How do I know how to trust God? How do I know that I'm God, experiencing God, Right? There's a lot of questions that we're going to cover. We're going to cover a lot of ground. But I think it's a good place to start, is there is terms. And in spirituality there's talks of consciousness, of self, of ego, of God, of great spirit. Let's start there as a framework for the. The real meat of our conversation, the self. You have a lowercase self and then you have an uppercase self. Let's start with that, because the self really, in my experience, my concept of self is always changing. I don't care what lifespan I'm in, it's always evolving. So what is the capital self and the lowercase self?

Well, there, you're missing one. There's Small case self. Then there's capital self. And then in the model I teach, there's capital S, capital E, capital L, capital F. The self relates to a person's individuality. All you can know for sure is your own experience. Without a self, there is no experience for Josh. You understand that? So the self is any conscious entity that has self awareness. Duane Adyar, a really amazing astrologist who's passed away, but his works on astrology are excellent. And it's not fufu astrology, it's really good stuff. He describes the self really as a pattern of harmony emergent from the universe itself that cannot be explained. You can't use a causal explanation. In other words, what he's saying is who Josh is or who Paul is is the product of the music of the universe itself. Remember, in metaphysics, sound is inclusive of all frequency. It's not just sound versus light, for example, or gamma rays, x rays, and those would be not considered sound. But in metaphysical language, sound is the basis of the universe, which is why in Hindu metaphysics or Hindu religion, they have the term om capital A, capital U, capital M. And that om symbol, the backward E means all sound, which means all frequencies there can be from zero empty nothing all the way to the fastest vibration, which is infinite, which is ultimately everywhere and nowhere at the same time. So that closes the circle. No thing at the level of infinity becomes everything. So the term om means the sound of God. Okay. Or God singing, or God breathing, or however you want to encapsulate it. So why it's relevant is because when we say, well, what is the self? Obviously there's something forming matter and bodies, right? So if you look at cymatics. You familiar with cymatics?

I haven't heard the term.

Well, it's basically the effects of vibration on matter. And so, for example, they can take a thin sheet of metal and put fine particles of dust or sand or.

Oh, and it forms a shape when sound is pushed through. Yes.

So you can play it with a violin bow, or you can use a frequency generator. And you can, for example, generate 432, the frequency of the heart. And it'll make these beautiful geometric formations.

I've seen this.

And as quick as you turn the frequency, all of a sudden, all the material in the plate change. And every time you change the frequency, the pattern changes. And lo and behold, those patterns are exactly the patterns that you see inside of fruits, vegetables, your brain, your heart, your bones. And actually, I saw a cymatic demonstration not too long ago of a scientist in a University who actually figured out which frequencies to combine, that in a fluid medium created a human face that looked like somebody was right there looking at you. And so when you see science like cymatics and then you read metaphysics, you go, wow, there it is. That's exactly what they're saying. So what Adyar says is that the sound of the universe produces life forms and intelligence and entities that are all inherently part of the expression of the universe itself. So what we are as a self is something that has no beginning and has no end, but it's something that is being expressed by the whole universe because it carries a function in the experience of the universe's self awareness. So you could say that each self is like a neuron in the mind of the universe, or God if you will. And each one of us gathers information and has experiences that are fed back into the whole, which would be the mind of God or the mind of the universe. At the speed of now, it's a self referring system. And this is why there's many books now like the Self Aware Universe by Amit Goswami, or I have a whole pile of them in my library written by very well developed scientists that give John Archibald Wheeler, a famous quantum physicist astrophysicist, showed with very solid mathematics that the universe the has no function without conscious entities to engage it and to look at it, it doesn't make any sense. And so even at the level of quantum physics, he shows that each of us is in a real time instant relationship with the totality, with the whole, which is very big, right? We used to think there was a hundred billion galaxies and then we thought there was 200 billion. Nassim Harriman says now current evidence shows there's at least 2 trillion. And every time we build bigger, better telescopes, what we realize is that our previous estimates were wrong.

It's just an unfathomable number.

Well, the thing is, it's not only an unfathomable number, but if you realize that moving at the speed of light, it would take you about 110 light years just to get across the Milky Way galaxy. So if you die today at the edge of the galaxy, 110 years from now, you're still going to be in one of 2 trillion galaxies. Now a trillion is something like a thousand billion. So that's 2,000 billion galaxies. Most of them are about that size of the Milky Way. All of them have pretty much most of all. Most all of them have massive black holes in the center of them. So when you realize the Magnitude of what's playing the music that made. Josh, you're talking about a very big band. And the question is, who's the conductor?

Yes.

Okay, well, that's what the word God means. God means by definition, that for which there is no other. So if you keep asking, what caused that? What caused that? What caused that? The sun, what caused that? The galaxy, what caused that? The universe, what caused that? When you reach the point where there is no possible answer because there's no other question you can ask, you're at the doorstep of the big God.

We can't know God unless we recognize the fact that we are God. But then you said there's three forms of self. There's the capital self.

So the little self is quite associated with one sense of individuality which is heavily linked to the ego, because the ego is really the. It's the programming that we get to enculturate to know how to function in this three dimensional plane. And it is, you know, to get your attention. I have to say, Josh, if I say Bob, you might think I'm talking to someone else. And jeez, I didn't know there was another guy here. Capital self can be looked at many ways. Jung even uses it in several different ways. But the way I teach it is that capital self means everything that sustains you without earth, water, sunshine and warmth, which is fire and air and space and time and movement. Could you be here right now?

That's an interesting question.

The answer would be part of me would be here. Well, not the part of me you can recognize and know.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be in this physical form.

No. And even if you weren't in physical form, even if you were in light form, you'd still have to be able to recognize yourself, order to have any consciousness, or for all intensive purposes, you don't exist. You understand that?

Yes.

So this is why I tell people we have to be very, very careful with the technological age that we're in, because we now have so many people that have come through an education system that has educated them in principles of scientific materialism and consumerism, that they actually don't have a consciousness of the earth or farming or where our food comes from or nature. They're educated in iPhones, iPads, advanced technologies, and they think food just shows up in the supermarket and that money just moves around and you just plug a piece of plastic in the wall and there it is. So they don't really have any idea of what the cost of living that way is. And they don't know how all this is happening. So when you look at the big environmental problems we face right now, all of our waterways are poisoned. With rare exceptions, only 1% of the water on this planet is drinkable. Most people don't realize that it's thought that the next world war will be fought over water. By about the year 2030, we've completely annihilated almost all the farmable or arable lands on this planet with the abuse of chemicals, farming chemicals in particular. The air is very, very toxic. We've even cluttered space with so much junk that scientists are now concerned about space junk crashing to the planet. We're populating the Earth quite heavily, so there's a lot of issues with crowding. So if you start living in the realm of the mind without connection to the Earth, then you can actually be a really smart person that has a lot of cool technology that's confused. One day when all the insects are gone and there's no more pollination and there's nothing to eat, and now you're going, what happened? It would be like if the power goes off and the. You don't know how to find your way anywhere because you've relied on your iPhone for everything. You don't even know how to use a compass or how to fly north without compass. So the capital S E, L, F really is a word that represents everything in the world that we have to have to exist or we can't be here. Sometimes in Jungian psychology, it's referred to as God, capital G, little O, little D, because without the Earth, we can't exist in this form. So Yogananda's philosophy was called self with a capital S E, L, F, realization with a capital R, which means realizing yourself in oneness and harmony in and with the world. And then you then have to say, well, where does everything in the world come from? Well, guess what? The sun is extraterrestrial. It's out of this world. It's millions of miles away.

People forget there's an orb in the sky that helps us.

Yeah, and the sun and the Earth are part of a galaxy which is part of a universe. So, you know, Ken Wilber distinguishes, you know, when you're conscious. A different level of way of looking at consciousness is it starts from I centric me, the child, to ethnocentric my group versus your group, Christianity versus Islam, for example. Ethnocentric consciousness is always about what we believe, whoever you call your people versus anybody else. Right now we have a division between mask Wearers and non wearers and people that believe in a virus that can kill you and make you sick. And those that say no, all you got to do is keep yourself healthy. This virus is not anything that kills you. It's something that updates your DNA so you're aware of what's in the environment. And if you can't handle the update, then you're going to crash because you're too unhealthy to upgrade your software. Like, you can't put new software in a computer that's too outdated because it requires processing power that it doesn't have. It'll actually collapse the computer. So people that get a virus and their systems are too unhealthy cannot upregulate to take in the new information. Just like a computer that's too outdated. And software actually doesn't do anything but collapse it because the system's too infantile to handle that much information. So, capital S. So I was going through Ken Wilbers, I centric, the Child, my group, ethnocentric. Then you go from ethnocentric to world centric. So someone who makes it to the world centric level realizes, for example, there's truths in all religions, there's something true in all philosophies, and it's up to us to decide what that is and use those things intelligently. So that's world centric consciousness. Then from there you go to cosmocentric and you realize that you're a citizen not just of a little tiny Earth, but of an entire cosmos. But Ken Wilber makes a distinction that cosmocentric consciousness is spelt with a K, which is Greek, not a C, because C O S mos relates to the physiosphere, which means anything made of rocks. There's stones littered for, you know, for as far as the universe goes. We call them planets, stars and asteroids and moons, right, aside from the gas bodies. But the Greek conception with a K means it's inclusive of the physiosphere, the biosphere, the noosphere, which is the sphere of mind. So Noah's the sphere of thought. And then the theosphere, which is the divine sphere, which is the ground of being or the source from which it's all emerging. So capital S, capital E, capital L, capital F means the same thing as Christ. Christ means one who is united with all. Christ is not a name, it's a title. Christ would never, Jesus would never have Christ on his driver's license. That would like being, saying Jesus CEO, not Jesus of Nazareth or whatever. Jesus's last name would have been before he was called Christ. So one who reaches that level of consciousness faces the biggest mystery of all. Someone who's world centric realizes they can't be here without the earth, the water, the fire, the air, the plants, the animals. And that's a pretty high level of consciousness, because at that level you go, wait a minute, we got to be careful what we're doing with all this technology. And because if we ruin the earth, we're all dead. But somebody that reaches past the earth says, well, we also have to be aware of that we have a relationship with the sun, and we have a relationship with other planets in our solar system, and we have a relationship with a galaxy, and that galaxy has a relationship with every other galaxy. And science shows that unequivocally. There's no question in science about that. If you look into the, you know, astrophysics and even quantum physics. So at the level of all caps for self, you come into an awareness that what you are and who you are is part of a mystery too big to even explore with the conscious mind. The only way you can really explore it is to go deep enough into meditation or to have a shamanic experience where you become one with it. And then it's unspeakable and it's dangerous, because if you try to tell people about it, then they try to understand it within the context of their own consciousness. And somebody who speaks even one level higher in structure stages is usually thought of as a weirdo by other people in lower structure stages because they don't have a context to handle ideas that big. So they don't really have a framework for it. And to the degree that they feel threatened by it, then they will actually see you as an enemy to their own belief system, even though you're there to help them. And thus we have the story of Jesus and 16 other crucified saviors on record and many mystics that were killed by churches and, and followers all over the world.

One of the things you said that, that hit home for me. I had this moment I was reflecting on, preparing for our discussion, and I was like 12 years old. My grandpa comes up to me in the hallway and he goes, you going to church? And I was like, nah, grandpa, I don't really like the church. It seems like the people are kind of weird. And honestly, like, I'm kind of angry at God, like, he won't make my mom better, he won't. He won't make her mental health issues go away. And I'm kind of Just angry at God. You've reflected in a past podcast that you. Your work on the farmland, and you'd out there be suffering in the rain and doing all this work. And you were angry at God too. Yes, and I've done a lot of work to let go of my anger towards God. But I think one thing my grandpa said that just stuck to my heart, he was like, you know, Josh, if you just go to church and you connect with God, you'll realize that our minds, the man's mind, cannot even understand the concept of beginning, middle, and end not existing. As in God's timeline. There is no timeline, there's no time. Doesn't even apply to God. Yeah, can you extrapolate on that a little bit? Because the three ideas of self, once we know ourself, like, how do we even know that God exists? You know?

Well, you can't know that God exists as an intellectual concept. You can only believe it because somebody else told you, you know, how do you know that two plus two really equals four? Teaching someone taught you that, right? But you see, the whole mathematical concept, 2 times 2 is 4. 2 plus 2 is 4, 3 times 3 is 9. The square root of those are all things that they're formulas that we memorize, and we just believe they're true. But you see, they're all built on a premise. And the premise is that zero equals nothing. So there's a key point there. We all made an agreement that zero equals nothing. But unfortunately, that's not true because zero is the source from which all numbers emerge, which means it's full of numbers. So the point I'm making is a philosophical flipping over of a concept. To answer your question, we all agree to these laws of mathematics. And because we all agree to them, they keep seeming to work out for us because we're all playing the same game. If I play Monopoly with you, there's a certain set of rules, and as long as we play the rules, then we both are in the same game. But when Newton need to figure out, you know, the velocity of bodies in space, he had to come up with calculus because standard mathematics couldn't handle problems like that. So we had to come up with a new mathematics. Well, if you study the history of zero, which isn't considered a numeral, and some branches of mathematics, you find out that people had very different beliefs about what zero was. That range from the fact that it was everything to the fact that it was nothing and it was insignificant. They even left it out. Accounting systems. But I'm only Making one point. If you try to understand God intellectually, all you have is somebody else's ideas being conveyed to you. And that's no different than a virus.

You have to explore God from yourself, from your own heart.

Rumi says no man can get to God until he becomes a heretic. And what he's saying is you will never find God in pages written with words written on them. Jung says intellectualism is a common cover up for fear of direct experience. And you can see this. Usually there's a correlation between the number of references any author uses and how little they actually know of the subject themselves. Someone like Einstein didn't need a long list of references to validate E equals MC squared because nobody could reference a concept that he himself developed. So many academians would look at Einstein's paper in this analogy and say, well, we can't trust that because there's no references. But other geniuses would look at it and say, oh my God, this guy's a genius. Because they would recognize authentic wisdom when they saw it. But what do we have? Most people's concepts of God start right in Sunday school where they're being read to them out of the book. And you know, the philosopher Hindu sage Shankara, who was really amazing and deep, who wrote the Crest jewel of discrimination by Shankara, said something very profound. No man can understand scripture until he's enlightened. And when he's enlightened, he does not need scripture. Okay, well anybody that's spent time doing the research and the practices that I have knows that's very true. So the question I have for you is what percentage of Sunday school teachers and church leaders of any religion worldwide are enlightened?

I would say probably point 001.

And that would be probably a gross overestimate. Yeah, Osho says it takes 6 billion people to produce one truly enlightened being. Now I'm not saying that's factual. I'm just saying the truth is 99.9999999 to some decimal point of people have been taught what God is by people that themselves are just regurgitating someone else's confusion. And they don't actually enter the quest to find God. They believe what they've been told and what they read as though it was an actual fact. And as long as you're with other people playing the same game, then the game is playable. But if you go to someone like Richard Feynman and try to convince him that 2 times 2 always equals 4, he will probably show you that there's many mathematical approaches to that which would make that only situational at best. So the only way you can understand God is to have a direct experience. And you can have a direct experience of God a number of ways. Contemplative meditation is one of my favorites, because what you do is you take something. For example, when people used to ask St Francis of Assisi, how do I find God? He would say, what you are looking for is what's looking. Okay, now that'll spin your mind if you're not ready for that.

It makes perfect sense to me, though.

It does, because you're evolved enough to understand it. But try that one in Sunday school and see what happens.

You would be called a blasphemous.

Well, I'm talking about. Tell that to a kid right now. One of two things is going to happen. They're going to giggle and laugh and say, I get it, or they're going to be totally and utterly confused. If they get it, they're probably already a mystic reincarnated. Okay? But the point is, if someone says, what you are looking for is what's looking in reference to God, that's something to go sit under a tall tree and meditate on and really engage that like a chant. What you are looking for God, is what's looking. Now, what does that look like inside me when I let that take an image? Well, the image I get is a circle. What you are looking for is what's looking. Looking for. Outward going is what's looking. It has to come back in, right? So inside of me, with my clairvoyance, I see a picture of me sitting under a tree with a circle coming out my third eye, going around encapsulating the entire universe and looping right back through me. And so what's happening is, through contemplative meditation, you can go deep enough into a place of honest questioning. When you're asking a question, you by definition have to shut your head off. Or how can you ever hear the answer? Most people's heads are so busy, they don't hear the answers from God or from soul or from spirit or from wherever because they're too busy listening to their own chatterbox going.

Which is also reinforced by society as well, because everything is built from economic and behavioral and psychological to keep us busy, distracted.

Not just distracted, but productive to the very few who set the rig up.

There is some theory about. And I want to go more into these terms too, but there is a grand theory that there is extraterrestrial beings that is potentially controlling a lot here. If you look at the work of Barbara Marciniak and yeah, I'm sure you could go an entire podcast on just that.

Well, we, you know, when you really want to talk about that, we should, because that's part of the truth. But to get back to the point that I'm trying to drive at, there's a lot of ways to have an experience of God. Contemplative meditation really just requires someone who's committed to actually finding the truth. You don't need drugs, you don't need anything except a place to sit down, like a park bench. Preferably somewhere that supports the ability to quiet yourself. Like, you know, I like to go sit by my pond on a bench or a stone or in my reading chair. I like to put on some Stephen Halpern or Jonathan Goldman that opens up the connects the left and right brain hemispheres. Put some frankincense incense to trigger a little DMT release from the pineal to open you up to cosmic reality. So there's things you can use that are supportive. You can chant, you can tone to bring yourself into harmony so that you're vessel is open. You can do plant medicines and you can have profound experiences of union, which is a death experience, right? So you have to die to the ego to really realize what you are. So most people really struggle with that. You can have peak experiences, you can have profound experiences through sex. I've had many enlightenment experiences throughout sex and, you know, no drugs needed. Certainly fun if you can mix the right plant medicine with honest loving sex.

Which is very rare.

Well, it's rare, but if you want to actually find out what God is, then you have to, you have to do what's necessary to create the environment that's supportive of that. Sports sex isn't how you find God, that's how you find pussy. If you want to find God, then you need somebody that you love enough to die into, metaphorically. And they have to be capable of the same with you. And when the two of you realize that there's only one thing breathing you and have this dissolve of the ego into each other, you. You have profound experiences, which is why when you look at the top of that chart up there, the Rivers of Life and Face of All Men by Major General Forlong shows the history of all religious ideas and concepts from the beginning of recorded time. And the first thing we thought was God was trees because we noticed that trees were very important to life and there was food in them and animals lived in them. And it seemed that without trees we couldn't exist. But the second thing was the lingam and the yoni. The lingam is the penis, and the yoni is the vagina. Because Even back then, 10,000 years ago, we found out by observation, whenever those two get together, new life happens. So we figured that the only thing that could make a living, breathing human being would be something so grand and vast that we called it God. So there, you see that? When you bring the sex organs together, it's powerful enough to create an entire human being. So you can see that the power of sexual union, which is in, you could say in tantra, would be the marriage of Shiva and shakti, which is the male and the female. Or, you know, there's many ways to classify it. So all I'm saying is there's another path to God having a peak experience, like being out hiking or sleeping under the stars and laying under the stars and just realizing in a moment of, oh, my God, that somehow you're part of all that and it's part of you and there's a connection going on. I mean, I can just list ways that you can find God that just go on for days.

Share with us some of the ways that people try to find God with the level of consciousness that you see now, where it's really not them finding God, it's them finding, like, a hollow shell of connection to God.

Religion, all corporate religion, all the organized religions have the true underpinnings of religion. But then they have what I call corporate religion, which is religion for profit. And it's. It's very well documented that religion is probably right up there with the defense industry, the most profitable industry in the world. The Vatican is considered to be the richest corporation in the world. And there you go. That's the headquarters for Christianity. So if you don't have a truly evolved teacher or a mystic guiding you, then religion is actually. It's going to bring you into an illusion of God.

Or you have to go to a place of worship to connect with God because the people that stand behind the pulpit are in control of how you worship.

But that goes totally against what Jesus said. So Jesus says in the Bible, lift the stone and I will be there. Split the wood and I will be there. What is he saying? I'm in the stones, I'm in the wood, I'm in everything. What is he saying? I'm in everything. It means I and God are one. I and my father are one. Anything I can do, you can do better. He's saying, as Christ, I am one with all that is. But so are you. And I'm trying to help you realize that I am in the stones, I'm in the wood, I'm in the soil, I'm in the birds, the bees, the flowers and the trees, not in some pile of stones that somebody put up and charges a membership for. So there's the difference between corporate religion and true spiritual teachings. And that's what happens when people that have ulterior motives get a hold of a guy like Jesus.

Yeah.

Assuming that he even lived, which is another conversation. But the, the. Do you see that as long as we have record of civilizations, there is records of kings, queens, emperors and rulers manipulating the spiritual truths of the day to create the illusion of participation in religion, which is really government manipulating you. And if you want a great example of that, just look at the Dao de Jing, translated by Richard Wilhelm Right in the back of the book. He gives a great explanation of notes and he talks exactly how the emperors in China brought in. They went out and sent people out looking for the top teachers of Taoism and any of the, you know, sages, like the Confucius types, and brought them all in and had them teach their court of wise men exactly what the teachings were. And then they restructured them. They got rid of the gurus and restructured them to make it a social policy that ultimately fed money back into the empire or to the emperors. So they manipulated the truth all the time. And that's been going on forever.

Paul. This is the wounding that I think I felt when I had that conversation with my grandpa in the hallway. There's a wounding of a relationship with God for me and for so many people. And I think right now, 20, 20, in the midst of just utter chaos, people are directing a lot of anger towards God. There's something that I wanted to read that relates to this too, and it was Isaiah, Isaiah 45, 7. I form the light and create darkness. I bring prosperity and create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things. Yet there's so much abuse of this even being true and so much anger towards God right now. Can you give us clarity on that?

That's been rewritten. They started rewriting that about, oh, I'm guessing about 25 years ago because the Christians don't really like what it actually says. So if you go far enough back.

I think this was the King James Version.

Well, the King James Version has been changed as well.

Yes.

If, you know, I've got various versions. I probably got about 15 or 20 Bibles in my library from all different types of period, time periods and stuff. So I can see the differences, which, you know, one of the things that Christians say is that the Bible's the inspired word of God. It's never, ever been changed. Well, I can just put you in my library for 10 minutes, and if you have eyes to see, I'll prove that dangerously wrong. But the passage really reads, I create the light and the dark. I create good and evil. I, the Lord, do all these things. You see, the Christians hate that word evil, and they hate it being associated with God because there's an illusion created that God and the devil are separate somehow and their enemies. And you have to fight the devil. But that goes completely against what the word, what God means. If there's a devil, then it has to be a product of God or you don't have God. So, you see, you have to keep asking questions because now you've got two gods, one that fights the other one, the good guy and the bad guy, which is no different than every cartoon or western movie or, you know, Batman and Robin or the Joker and the, you know, the. The whole story. Right. That's the duality that. That which later we can get into. But really that's necessary for mind. You can't have mind without those two opposing forces, which are really not opposing. They're complementary opposites. So, you know, do you want me to explain that passage?

I would love to. And contrast it to the anger that I expressed to you when I was 12. And also the collective anger that I feel from so many people almost being. Accusing God of allowing these things to happen. Why would God allow these things to happen?

Well, the problem that you're running into right off the bat, which is really common at the lower levels of consciousness, is that's an anthropom. Anthropomorphization of God, which means turning God into a man. Until people grow up, they always look at everything through human perception, including God. So they think God is a man in the sky. Yeah, but God's not a man in the sky. In fact, if God's God, God couldn't be a man, because men don't give birth to anything and God gives birth to everything. So if it's a man, it's a man with a vagina. So call it what you want, you know, so for me, looking at all this religious silliness of God as a man, I'm like, okay, guys, I mean, look around you.

God has no gender.

You know, let's just get down to just like Sunday school level consciousness it takes a mommy and a daddy to produce life, but it takes something to produce both of them, and that something isn't a man. Okay, so the point is, whenever you take an anthropomorphic view of God, you're always going to relate to the events in your life as though they're being controlled by another human being. And if you think another human being is behind Covid, well, yes, you're probably going to get irritated at Fauci. You're going to get irritated at Bill Gates, because you can see what their role in all this is. But then you're also falling short of realizing that these are just little tiny dramas on a much bigger stage. Right. What's. What's behind it is much bigger. So the passage is really pointing something out. I, the Lord, create the light in the dark. There's the first step, because you have to have those two polarities before you can have consciousness. If it was all dark, what would you see?

Blackness.

Nothing. So there's nothing to be conscious of right now. Even though you know where everything's at in this room right now, I could flip the lights off, and if I could make it pitch black, even though you've been in here for an hour, you'd bang into everything trying to find your way to the door because you don't have a mental map of the room. But the point I'm making is, is that if it. Now, let's flip it over. If everything was light, what would you see?

White.

Nothing. If I was a photon and you were a photon, we would be like two mirrors looking at each other. So you have to have this contrast. And so what you see is the. You know, an interesting Lao Tzu says of the Dao, it's deeper than deep. It's blacker than black. It is older than God. What's he saying? He's saying that the dao is even older than our concept of God. I, the Lord, create the light, and the dark is saying that whatever the Lord is, is behind even the concepts of light and dark. Right. In Daoism, that's the dao, because God's an idea that people have that starts wars, doesn't it? Right. So you see, when we anthropomorphize God, we think of God as a man. And then you have the Muslim God who wants to go to war with the Christian God. And then you got the Jewish God, and then you got the chosen people, and you. All hell breaks loose. Okay? So when we grow up and become adults spiritually, we realize that God cannot be conceptualized as anything because the instant you do, you circumscribe something that cannot be circumscribed. And whenever we think of a man, we think of, well, something has to be born and die. So it throws the whole thing into just a total snifu. In military terminology, if you look it up in the dictionary, snafu means situation normal, all fucked up. And that's pretty much what goes on in a world full of people that are a lower level of consciousness, which is what the world is. It's a. It's a place where souls emerge into consciousness. It's a kindergarten for souls. So it's. It's always going to have squabbles in the hopscotch area and boys fighting in the hall, because that's what it is. It's a school for young souls to figure out what's really going on. But the deeper point. I, the Lord, create the light in the dark. I, the Lord create there. Means there's consciousness creating something there. I create good and evil. Well, light, dark, good and evil. Aren't those juxtapositions of polarities? Evil is that which draws into itself someone who we associate with evil is someone who wants to rule everybody and own everything, don't they? And what isn't that just exactly what the force of yin does? Yin multiplies power. Yin draws things into it. It's a centripetal force. It winds stars into existence and galaxies. But it fills itself up so fully, it explodes with an expression of yang. Behind every black hole is a white hole that's giving birth to a new star. People forget that. So the concept that a black hole just such sucks everything in and crushes it down to nothing is wrong. Itzhak Bentov showed all the way back in the 70s that black holes are coupled with white holes and that death is the force of life. So when you're looking at the Isaiah 45:7, I create the light in the dark. I create good and evil. Those are just two ways of saying that in order for consciousness to be aware of something and I. In other words, for God to have its own experience of itself, it has to create the illusion of something that is and something that isn't. Well, we generally want things in our life to point to something good. So something that we believe helps us live better, love better, feel better is what we call good. Anything that gets in the way of that, we tend to refer to as evil. But there's a fundamental problem. Those are all relative concepts. What, What Bill Gates thinks is good for you is not what I would prescribe for you and many others. Right? So speaking metaphorically, I think Bill Gates concepts on vaccinations and the way he's manipulating the media and all this restriction of freedom of speech is evil. But I'm quite confident that if you were in his head, he will have great justifications for all this. And he probably sees himself as some sort of a father figure that's protecting the children and thinking he's saving the world. So he would have a very good justification. And the most common cause of war on this planet is religious differences, right? So what you see is it's my God versus your God. And so what I'm really driving at here is that the concept of good and concept of evil are all relative concepts that depend upon your belief system. And all you've got to do is look at the sexual practices and initiation rights of different cultures around the world. There's places in Africa where when women reach puberty, they cut their clitoris out and sew their labia together because that's their practice. But to us, that's freaking evil. Some people think being circumcised is evil. But to the Jewish, it's absolutely necessary to be clean and to be accepted by God metaphorically. So, you know, if you're a little boy and you're getting your head of your. The skin on your penis cut off, that's pretty evil. But if your mom and dad think it's good, well, it's good for them, but they're not the one under the knife. All I'm pointing out is that good and evil are relative concepts that you cannot have without a mind. And you can't have a mind without the polarities described as light and dark or yin and yang, or she and he or is and isn't, or north and south or east and west. So I, the Lord, do all these things means that everything that's going on is God experiencing itself, which it can't do without the illusion of separation.

It's confusing to me because even in the dao it says, the great Dao flows to the left and to the right and it always seeks the low. It does not lord anything over anyone.

It doesn't.

Nothing is lorded over anyone. Yet in all these religions, there's a lording aspect to almost every religion. But there's also clues in these ancient scriptures that whether they were changed by man or not, that's fine. That's open for interpretation. There is some truth in all these religions. What is this common truth that they all share though?

The dao.

The dao?

The source. Yes, but you see, the thing is, is that what's missing in your expression here and so far hasn't been discussed, is that you can't have free will without evil. If you don't have the choice to or not to love, do you have free will?

No.

If your wife or your girlfriend demands that you love her the way she wants it, does that feel like love to you? Or does it feel like coercion and control?

It feels like control.

Okay, so the part that needs to be brought into the discussion is that I, the Lord, create the light and the dark, I create good and evil, I, the Lord, do all these things. Means in order for any sentient being to have its own free will, to make its own journey to find out what it truly is on its own accord and make that choice itself, there has to be free will. Otherwise God would just. Might as well just create a bunch of blow up dolls to pretend that he's deeply in love with and have them dote him, which would make for a very stupid God. So basically what I'm saying, if I anthropomorphize it into human language, God doesn't want to be loved by any of its own creations unless the love is genuine. And the only way God can assure that your love of God is genuine is to give you the option not to love God or anything or anyone else. And that basically turns out to be a behavioral strategy that for most of us looks like evil. Because when we don't love, it means we don't connect. And if we don't connect, we don't feel. And if we don't connect and we don't feel, we don't see. And if we don't connect, feel and see, it's very easy to deny. So we deny each other's rights. And now this goes all the way back quite a ways in our culture. But the reality of it is, if you look into the history of tribal cultures, most of them, at least many of them, had no word in their language to describe somebody from another tribe. So if you came into their hunting territories or the areas that they thought were theirs by their own distinction, they did not see you as another human being. In fact, the plants and the animals were their brothers and sisters. And you weren't even one of those. You were an object. You were not a human being. So you would be killed, tortured, or worse. Okay, and maybe eaten, because many of them were cannibals. At various parts in the world. So they would have just thought, oh, good, we don't have to go hunting today. This thing just walked into our territory and it's got muscle. Let's eat it. What's the point I'm making? We didn't even have a word for other people outside of our own belief system until fairly recently in the history of man. And we would happily kill anything because we did not see it as an animal, a plant, or a human, or anything that was essential to us. Okay, so when we now, we would call that behavior evil, wouldn't we? Okay, so basically evil has its links in the denial of anybody else with a different belief system or whose actions impose upon your own. But the point that's deeper than that is that you cannot have free will without evil, because evil is the choice to be good or not to be moral, which is morality. Morals are codes of conducts that are life affirmative. Ethics are codes of conducts that may or may not be life affirmative. We have ethical manuals for soldiers. We have ethical manuals for UPS men, for anybody that works in a business. Open the doors on time, don't rip people off. But morals are codes of conduct that are life affirmative. And if you go against a moral which is thou shalt not kill is a commandment. Why? Because if you kill, you actually may end up killing what supports you. You could say, thou shalt not kill the oceans or you'll starve to death. Thou shalt not kill the bees or you'll starve to death. Thou shalt not kill the trees, or you will not only not be able to breathe, you will starve to death. Thou shalt not kill the microorganisms in the soil. So you see, those are moral injunctions. But you can freely go against them. And that gives you the power of choice. And it's only through the power of choice that you actually get to experience the results of your choices. And those experiences actually produce consciousness. When I don't love God, this happens inside. That's an experience. When I do love God, this happens inside. That's an experience. When I love people that love God the way I love God, this happens. When I love people that don't love God the way I love this happens when I don't love people that don't love God the way I love God, then something else happens, usually a battle. You see the point I'm making? It's only by being aware how you're engaging anyone or anything that's outside your belief system that you can determine where your own evil is coming from. But when you realize that the function of evil is to give you free will, then you actually have the choice to live within the confines of morality. Which means maybe I don't like you, but is there a way that we can meet our needs together and find a happy medium without destroying each other or the planet? And then you actually get past the obstruction of evil and get into a place where what was evil I want to kill you leads to harmony. Now I understand you. And now that I understand that you just want to raise your family and worship life, then we can figure out a way to do that together. And it's interesting because if you study the history of the Crusades, whenever Muhammad went on crusades and took Christian cities over and places over, he said to them all, you're welcome to stay here and you can even practice Christianity as long as you do not obstruct us from practicing our religion. When the Christians took over the Muslims, they destroyed them. They killed them, they raped the women, they did nasty things to the women and the children. Unspeakable things. They were evil. They didn't even offer them the chance to coexist. They just wiped them out like they were insects. Which goes right back to tribal behavior. They weren't even conscious that these people were also expressions of the divine, even though they claimed to practice monotheism. What a paradox. Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are all monotheistic religions, but they war constantly together over who's right about everything, but somehow overlook the word that mono means one. So maybe you should figure out what the beautiful parts of your philosophies are, and then carefully look at the parts that are in conflict and see if you can figure out how to resolve it so that the philosophy actually matches the stated belief in one God. Because if there is one God, that one God not only created those three religions, but everything else in the created universe that you call evil. That takes a mature person, and it takes a person who has a willingness to sacrifice something that they want for the benefit of the other, whether it be land, food, resources. You know, look, all this Bill Gates stuff, trying to save the world with vaccinations. I say, I have a question for you, Bill. How can you spend all the money you're spending to manipulate the media, put satellites into space to launch 5G towers, do chemtrails to manipulate the weather and not do anything to feed almost 2 billion starving people that have no effective education, no shelter, nothing to eat? Because if you were really a philanthropist, you'd use your money to fix that up. And it would have been far less expensive than the games you're already playing. So what I'm showing you is from my ego's perspective, there's an example of good presenting itself as good that has as much evil in it as it is good. But it's up to each of us to decide what it is that's right for us. And that's what a democracy is, is a bunch of people that get together and discuss things and figure out what's the best thing for all of us. But when somebody starts trying to control it, most of us that recognize that would say that's evil. Why? Because if we perceive that what's being brought forth is anti life, it's evil. And all you got to do is write the word live and read it backwards. L, I V E. Backwards is E V I L. So evil is really that which is against life.

How does it counter? Correct. If there's all this evil, at what point is God satiated by the just evilness in the world? But if God's experiencing God's self in an unlimited amount of ways, at what point is God satiated from acts of evil?

Well, you see, that's an anthropomorphic question because you're suggesting that God has a stomach. The concept of satiation means there's some conscious entity up there that says, okay, enough of that, Bill, or enough of.

That Christians or whatever, or enough of that society.

Yes, but that's really still an anthropomorphic view of God. Let's take it a different way. What if God is consciousness itself? And I don't mean human consciousness, I mean consciousness in all caps. That which is aware of anything and everything within itself because there's nothing behind God. That's why Lao Tzu says in the Tao, all things have their back to the mother. What does that mean? There's nothing to look out at outside of God and look at every creature in nature. Have you ever seen a single animal with eyes in the back of its head?

On the sides, but not in the back.

Not in the back. Why? Because as it says in the Bible, man is made in his likeness. Everything is made in God's likeness. And God has nothing to look at behind itself. So paradoxically, the only way God can look is into itself. So we're all looking into ourselves. We're looking into each other within the sphere of what can be known or experienced, which is what God is that. That for which there is no other. Okay, but God has nothing else to explore but its own potentials. And God can't die. God's not a thing that has a shelf life. God is consciousness. You could say you can't even use these words, but to just try to classify it so it's understandable. You could say God is not only the source of energy and information, but God is energy and information as well. So let me ask you, if you only looked at the good parts of Josh, would you ever really know Josh?

Of course not.

No.

Yeah.

So God's as committed to looking into the darkness of itself as it is into looking into the good of itself. Because if God's not equally committed to both, then God's playing a very dangerous game with itself, which is the self deception. And don't we have a lot of problems with self deception in the world? It's called lying to yourself and believing it's true.

People abandon themselves.

It's called denial. It's called narcissism. It's called, you know, there's many names for it. But basically, when someone deceives themselves, all they do is set themselves up for lots of trouble in relationships, in life, because they're living in an illusion. Okay? So the, the key fundamental principle I'm making is that God has no fear of death because God can't die. In fact, God was never born either. Some of these concepts are quite deep for the average mind. But the reality of it is, is that what we call evil is as important to God's self realization as it is to ours. Because if you don't look into your shadow and you don't witness your thoughts with honesty, not only do they stay unconscious, but you keep doing it to other people and claiming that they're the ones being evil. Right. And anyone. I tell people all the time, you don't need a church. All you need is a committed relationship, right? Yes. All you need is somebody that you love enough to look into each other's shit and grow through it.

Yeah.

And you will find God or you'll find the devil. And some days it'll be God while you're having nice sex and you're getting food, then it's God. But when they want you to show up earlier or they want you to not do something like don't go to the golf range, I want you to stay here with me and do this or that. Then all of a sudden, now your freedoms being limited, so they become evil. And most people just vacillate between good and evil all day. But boy, does that charge consciousness up. Right? And the beautiful thing about evil is it produces pain. And pain is the great quickener of consciousness. Most people won't keep doing things repeatedly that produce enough pain because if they do, they'll die. So paradoxically, God, when embodied, embraces evil because it's a self alarm system. It's a self awareness system. Just like your phone might beep when the battery's low, or if you get enough smoke in a room, a smoke detector goes off and it makes a lot of noise to say you're in danger. Whenever we're moving against the flow of love itself, which is the unity of the universe and of God, whenever we're creating division or we're creating illusions that we have to support ourselves because they're not true in the universe, the universe won't support illusions. It won't provide the energy to support an illusion. Because the truth of the universe is harmony. And the truth of good and evil and the light and the dark is they're not opposites, they're complementary opposites. And the way to make a simple way to make that obvious is say, okay, good, let's get rid of the dark. How are you going to live if there's no nighttime? How long will you last with no night?

I wouldn't be able to sleep.

You wouldn't be able to sleep. Your nervous system would burn out. Sure, right? So night is the complementary opposite of day. Wet is the complementary opposite of dry. If you want to make a cake, you can't have it all wet or all dry. You need a little bit of both. Right? So everything in the created universe is made out of these complementary opposites. And evil is really just a mental distinction made by egos, largely because anything we call evil is stopping us from getting what we want, the way we want it, how we want it and when we want it, which is based on our own belief system. So most evil really turns out to be a clash of belief systems.

Do you feel that? Do you feel that there's soul contracts for people? That no matter what, the free will doesn't exist for them because they're just going to be evil based on their soul contract?

That's possible if you read the Law of One by Ra. Ra says that there are souls. I think he, not he, Ra. It is an. It's an entity. It's very, very impressive set of books. But Ra says that about, if I Remember right, about 5% of the souls on the planet at any given time take the dark path or the path of evil, because their job is to uphold the polarity or Consciousness won't grow.

Wow. So we have to have gratitude for them.

We do.

Respecting the whole process.

Yes. Because they inspire us to grow. Look, just look at Covid. How many people, for the first time in their life started paying attention to their health, looking into the government, looking into the medical system, doing research on vaccinations, this pain. Looked into what love is. Saw for the first time how messed up their family was because they'd spent so much time working, that they were around their kids.

People living together had to really look at their marriages.

Yes, they had to.

Some of them got closer together.

Yeah. And so what I'm saying is that, you know, most people also associate evil with chaos. But Arnold Mendel, an amazing teacher, many deep, beautiful books, developer of process psychology, a Jungian analyst, very knowledgeable in quantum physics, and a shaman, and very, very deep man, says what people don't realize about chaos is it's not something you should run from, it's something you should look into. Because there's information in chaos. And in fact, if you look at almost all the creation stories and the myths of tribes all over the world, they say the world began in chaos. Well, when they see the world, that means life itself. So you have to say, well, if it all began in chaos and countless cultures wrote that in their myths, then doesn't that tell you right up front that what looks like chaos is actually full of order in an occult form, which means invisible or hidden. Right. So the real question is, what's inside the evil? And what's it trying to tell us to help us learn to live and love more fully? Which is the truth of God? The truth of God is good, beauty, truth and harmony. Evil is a necessary illusion that allows you to be aware that you can choose disharmony or harmony, love or hate, love or indifference, etc. God says yes to all of it. Because ultimately, if God is love, then the highest form of love is unconditional love. And by definition, the answer to every prayer is yes. And every thought is a prayer. So the answer from God is always yes. And we are co creators with God. We are not under God's control. Like God's not an old man, a Gestapo in the sky, a prison warden. We are God, experiencing itself as Josh, as Paul, as insects, as birds, as bees, flowers, trees, planets and stars. And the answer is always yes. Because whatever Joss chooses to create, to love or to not love, to cut someone off in traffic and give them the finger, or to say, wow, that guy's having a bad day, I'll just let him in. To listen to your partner's honest needs and share yours. Or not. To priests raping children in Catholic churches all over the world to this very day. Or not. Right. So God gives us unconditional love and we become co creators. And it's only through the choices that we make that God experiences the truth of itself. God's obviously capable of rape, murder, pillage. The difference is God's not worried about it because God can't die. And God knows the truth of itself because God is the sum total of all consciousness, known and unknown beyond our conception. So do you see what I'm saying? What Josh creates is an experience that God's having, but nobody else can have that experience with God but Josh. Because God's making those choices. Right. If you see a rabbit on the road and you say, screw that little bastard. I'm going to get him. And you run him over and kill him, that's a choice that you made. If I see the rabbit, I will try to slow down, but if I can't, at the risk of harming people in the car.

Yes.

Then I have to sacrifice the rabbit and say, I'm sorry you have to be reincarnated today.

It just happened to me. Dodging a rabbit on the road.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh, I feel bad. I had to run over the rabbit.

Yeah.

Because I didn't want to go in the next lane.

Yeah.

And I'm like, well, we're all doing the best we can with the situation we have. And it feels like what you're saying is we are experiencing a huge pendulum swing into the dark so that God can experience what this is. So we can all love one another and use that power of love to come back to more of a middle.

Yes. So you. You see, the pendulum on a clock never swings in one direction. So if you call the right side evil and the left side good, it needs both. Or there's no movement, there's no time, and there's no consciousness. So you can't have consciousness without these two polarities. This is why Edward Edinger, a famous Union analyst and psychiatrist, defined consciousness as a psychic substance produced not blindly, but in living awareness of opposites. Okay, so what is he saying? Consciousness is a psychic substance. It's real. You're listening to me right now. You're looking at me. That's real. It's as real as it gets. It doesn't matter whether your eyes are open or closed, because when you're dreaming, that's real to you too. And those Dreams can't even happen without the polarities of light and dark or you wouldn't see anything, right? So consciousness is a psychic substance produced by opposites, right? Which means we, we have to have these opposites, but produce not blindly, but in living awareness. That means you've got to pay attention, right? So if you drug yourself up, you're not paying attention. If you're caught in a belief system and you're in denial of what you're doing to yourself and other people, like being a vegetarian because you're part of a belief system, but your body's sick and you're running around telling everyone else to be a vegetarian because they'll be healthy. But meanwhile you're hiding the fact that you've got cancer and feel like shit and your adrenals are burned out. So you see, consciousness is a psychic substance blindly. But in living awareness, it means in order to really grow your consciousness and actually begin to ask bigger questions and have a bigger, broader perspective on anything and everything in life, you have to have living awareness. And that's why mindfulness is such an important process. Because the key tenet of mindfulness isn't good or evil, it's awareness. It's just being aware. What are you supposed to be aware of? First and foremost, your own thoughts. And anybody that's honest and starts labeling their thoughts and says, okay, we're gonna make two kinds of thoughts here. The thoughts of good, love, connection, what's best for me and for everybody else. And those of disconnection and those of denial, those of resent, those of anger, those of hate, and those of wanting for myself, even at the expense of others. Well, Deepak Chopra cites research that showed the Average person thinks 68,000 thoughts a day, 90% of which were negative. So the average person has 90% on the negative side, which would be going towards some kind of evil, towards self other or the world. So why, why is that important? Because those thoughts and actions produce pain, which quickens awareness, right? If you go to a new building that has a semi step and you're not used to that, and you stub your toe on it or break your toe, you will be very aware next time you remember, right?

Yes.

So when you start wars and punch people in the face and threaten to inject everybody with viruses and all this shit, it produces pain and it produces awareness and it stimulates people to learn, grow and get creative. And so there, you see, the rototiller does evil to the soil, but boy, does it actually have a positive effect when you Stimulate those microorganisms to start growing. And cows walking and everything, whatever's eating it seems evil. But when you look at the big picture, a forest fire can be very evil. It can kill millions of animals, wipe out homes, but two years later is remineralized the soil. Trees are lush. There's more vegetation, more fruits, vegetables, and wildlife than there ever was before. But if you were caught in it, it's easy to call it evil. But if you get further back, you can see, metaphorically, God's doing some gardening. So evil is necessary for conscious gardening because ultimately the path of consciousness. I'll show you something. Take your pen. Write the word evil in nice. Not evil, sorry, evolution in nice big letters. Okay. What does evolution mean to you?

Understanding who we are through a vessel of love.

Well, evolution means little becoming big something. Bodies changing to adapt to an environment. It means little consciousness becoming progressively greater. The evolution of a baseball player is from a child that barely can play to a probe to a Babe Ruth or something. Right now, from a spiritual perspective, we have to do something magical. So you take your pen and you put. Start from the end, go backwards, N O, put a dash, I T, put a dash U, another dash between U and L. Now, if you want to know what spiritual evolution is, read it backwards. Each word is encapsulated by the dots.

Know it. You love.

Aha. What did Buddha teach us? Don't desire things. Desire life, desire love, desire relationships. But don't desire things because there is a law called the law of impermanence, and everything that you love will disappear. And if God is unconditional love, is there any it God loves, or does God love all of it? Well, God loves God because that's all there is.

God loves God. Yes.

So the highest source of evolution is unconditional love itself. Itself, but because it can't know itself until it creates the illusion of separation. So evolution is. I'm confused about what I am. I seem isolated in this big world, which is in this big universe. And I have to progressively grow up and realize what I am. And then I realize trying to hold on to things and own things leads to lots of pain and lots of problems and lots of wars. But as I grow spiritually, I actually start letting go. My life becomes. I choose to make my life less complicated, more simple, and have more time to experience being one with and being present with all the beauty of life and nature and human beings. And so now you go. I know. I don't care if I'm a Muslim or a Christian or A daoist. None of that is important. But is it important? It is important to love and to realize what I am and what we are and what life is. So spiritual evolution first requires physical evolution. The infant has to become a child, has to become a teenager, has to become an adult, and has to get to the point where has enough life experience to realize, and it may take many lifetimes, that there's really no it you can fall in love with. Because to do that excludes everything else, which excludes God, and it makes God an idol. I love, you know, worshiping this way or that way or the cross or Rastafarianism or I love people that smoke pot, but I don't love people that do this or right. So ultimately, when you grow up spiritually, you have evolved to the point which in Gene Gebzer's model of consciousness would be what's called the integral model, where you see through the world because you have transcended each level of consciousness, yet included it. So now you look at the evil people of the world, the wrongdoers, and you go, oh, there's me when I was a teenager. There's me when I was a little boy, didn't know better, whacking plants with bushes and kicking dogs. There's me when I was an aggressive businessman stepping on the heads of others to get ahead. And, you know, like, I'm 59. I'm right on the door of 60. I look back over my life and I can see everybody in my life and go, isn't that amazing? You know, there's ways and things that I behaved 30 years ago that I wouldn't think of now because I'm conscious of the ramifications. And I can see where my own evil not only produced pain for me, but produced pain for people that I love.

If we. If we were a child. This is so fast. Fascinating. Just want to let that land for a moment. If we were a child, as humanity we are, what age would we be?

13.

And how do we parent ourselves through this time?

Well, the first thing you have to do when you're going through puberty, which is what we're doing, is you have to do two things. You have to take stock of what mom and dad taught you that's worth keeping. And you have to be brave enough to reject the things that you know didn't work because it produced problems in mom and Dad's life. So if you saw your dad saying to your mother that she. That he loves her, but you also know she was cheating, he was Cheating all the time. And you also know that mom knew and how it hurt her. Then you're aware that that kind of living produces pain in your relationships. So it's not really good to recapitulate Dad's habit of not following agreements called a marriage. And it hurts the kids, too, because then it scares the hell out of them. Okay, so when you're at the state of puberty, you have two key functions. We have to decide what do we believe of our parent figures? Well, what are some of our parent figures? The medical system. People think they're gods. They believe everything they say. Well, how's that worked out? The banking system, the science of the scientists behind the earth sciences. We have to say, well, is this really true? Can we really farm effectively with chemicals? Do we really need all this stuff? We have to look at the military system. Do we really need to invest trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons to destroy each other when we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet 179 times over? Or should we reinvest that money into doing the research to find safe vaccinations that are not biased by private industry? Should we look at the legal system and say, well, how is it that vaccinations and drug companies don't have to get any, Almost no compensation and can't be held to task for their actions because they've manipulated the legal system with money? So we have to look at our religious systems, we have to look at our education systems. We have to look at all the systems that basically have anything to do with how we relate to life, how we relate to each other and what the world is, what it means and what it takes to sustain it. So all of the people in these different regions, from the education to science to the military, they're somebody's parent figure, aren't they? Whoever you believe in is. Is your mommy, your daddy figure, right? Be it Donald Trump or Ivana Trump.

Most people believe in the parent of science. It's science, Paul. Yes, it's science. Yes, it's a new. It's science has become a new God.

Yes. And science has long been hijacked by corporate interests. Scientists are the modern prostitutes of the world. They'll make anything valid scientifically for money or they'll lose their job. But you see, the point I'm making is we're at a time of puberty, of humanity.

Yeah.

And puberty is a time when you're going to go off into the world on your own and realize it's just you now. So you either get to be an adult or you stay a child and mommy, daddy, rescue me. Well, if we keep asking the same people to rescue us, the church, the military, the medical system, the banking system, how can we expect anything different in the future when we already know that has not worked for thousands of years? It's left us right back in the same situation. Someone else choosing to control us because they have the power and we let them do it. There's only about a hundred people at the top of the pile. There's almost, what, seven point something billion. They don't have a chance against us if we just grow up and decide to work together.

That's right.

Right. So there's evolution. Right. So we have got to take stock of what not only works for us as individuals, but what works for us collectively. Because we're at the point right now where we realize the world is something that we all have to take care of. We all need each other. We in the United States especially. There's a saying, if you can't find it in California, it doesn't exist in the world. What does that mean? It means every piece of clothing, food, drugs, technology from anywhere in the world makes its way to Los Angeles and San Diego and California. Which means California is made of everybody, isn't it?

Feels like it.

Most countries, the United States, Donald Trump segregating Mexicans and building a wall. That's a great idea. You're. What percentage of your own country is those people? What percentage of those people are the tradesmen and, and the cooks and the cleaners? And when people just wake up and say, we are each other? Yes. We wear clothes designed by people from the other side of the world. You use computer chips made in India and China. I mean, this whole. This is like so stupid. It's unbelievable for me, looking at this as an adult going, wait a minute, you're, you're. You guys are like segregating people. Shit. Get rid of the borders or lines on paper. We all have resources that can be, can support each other. We all have things we need. We all have spiritual philosophies that can be shared. We all have a piece of the puzzle and we need each other. If Covid is doing anything, it's waking us up to the fact that we're going through puberty. If we keep letting daddies play daddies, then we have to go by somebody else's rules. So it's time to stop watching junk television and playing with your sex organs like a teenager and get involved in life and stand up for what we all need together because we're at a point now where the Earth's environmental systems are so fragile. We can't keep being teenagers anymore. We are going to run out of essentials soon and it's going to create a catastrophe that makes Covid look like a fly biting an elephant's ass.

This is just the beginning.

This is just the beginning.

We had a conversation a while back and you were like, 2020 is the year of the mirror. It is the year that we look at ourselves where we actually understand, okay, this is what we've created. This is what we've become. And you have a book that you're working on. And I think money is something in the mirror as well, because in your book there's a quote here. God and money. And money for me has always been, I'm 40 years old. It is, it continues to still be a learning curve where I become.