Spirit Gym: How To Find The Truth of Your Soul + Live Your Dream w/ Paul Chek

We're always blind to our own shadow. That's why it's called a shadow. It's behind you. Your awakening and your realization of what God is will astound you. And it will keep you so inspired to keep going because you'll realize the more you understand about the magic and the mystery of God, the more magical and mysterious life becomes and the more exciting it is to be alive. Paul Check is globally known as the Godfather of wellness. With over 40 years as a spirit guide, medicine man, holistic health, and kinesiology teacher. He is the founder of the Czech Institute, impacting millions of lives and working with athletes and celebrities at the highest level.

Paul, what are the epigenetics around our healing? Generational pain.

Whatever you have not resolved in this lifetime will go with you, and your children will have to work on it. This is why Jung said, all children are tasked with the unfinished business of their parents lives. Even if your kids didn't know about it, they're going to have to carry it out because your soul is is still in resonance with their genes. They teach people how to connect to their own soul. And since only God can give a soul, which is the consciousness within, the day you make contact with your own soul and develop a relationship, you found the only God that you can truly know. That's ultimately what legitimate spiritual development is, doing what it takes to figure it out so you actually come face to face with the truth of who and what you are.

Do you feel like this communion or this experience with God comes to us in these moments of severe pain? Hey, it's Josh, and thank you for watching this podcast. Can you do me a quick favor and click subscribe? It really helps us get this message to more people across the entire world, which in turn allows me to bring on bigger guests so I can bring them to you. There's a lot of podcasts out there. We totally appreciate, 100% appreciate the fact that you tune in to this podcast. So from my heart and my team's heart to yours, thank you for subscribing to this podcast. Now, enjoy the show. Paul. We made it.

We made it. We're here. You're here. I'm here. We're here. The world hasn't flown to pieces yet and we got glue in our pockets.

Exhale for the craziness that we've been experiencing and the beauty that's to come.

Yeah, well, inhale. Turn it into something beautiful and breathe it back out, man. So I start my spirit gym with heart breathing.

I've been absolutely loving Spirit. Jim, we're obviously here to talk about spirit jam and anything else that wants to come through.

I'll let you lead the way.

But holy shit, Paul. To know you is, and I say this authentically, is to love you. Thank you. You're a human. You put on your pants, you poop.

Yeah. Well, they love me or they hate me, and I got them both ways.

But what's been so special is. And I waited until we got on the pod, I wanted to tell you at my house, but this concept of dream, to actually live your dream. Yes, I'm living it, baby. I'm living it. And a huge part of that has been in 2008, when Sean Croxton introduced me to your work and eat, move and be healthy, which is right here on the center cam shot. 250 copies were made.

Well, we did that special 20th anniversary edition. Yeah. So only 250 of that. Well, that's it. And they've all got a number in it, like a piece of art. Yeah, they're all authenticated. I signed a lot of them.

All of them, man. But the journey for me to get here. Yeah. It's so emotional.

Yeah.

Well, I can really feel it in my heart. Like, I. I was dealing with porn addiction, and you helped me with an ayahuasca entity that had attached to me four or five years ago.

Yeah.

And just to be here with you is phenomenal. Can I say that?

Ayahuasca entity. It was an entity from somebody in the group.

Exactly.

Ayahuasca never has entities in it.

True. But it was for my healing. And I remember you told me at the Heaven House, this is back when you had your office there, you said, you know, I'm going to help you because I know you're going to help so many people. And it's been millions and millions of people that have consumed the energy that I put on this podcast. So from my heart to yours. Thank you, brother.

Thank you, buddy.

Thank you so much.

Namaste. As they say in the world of yoga, I. I honor the God in you.

Yes. And we are all God, which we talked about at your house. All is God. Our last conversation.

There's nothing else here. There's nothing else anywhere. Our God does not exist.

Well, the coolest part about knowing you has been watching my beliefs shatter.

I've been helpful in that regard for a lot of people.

And then. And then actually just coming home to myself, you know, there's a book, I think it's over there. Ram Dass. We're all Walking their home.

But be here now.

Be here now. And. And it's so easy to hear these platitudes, but the truth is in plain sight. Man, the emperor is not wearing any clothes. No. Okay, he's naked. But I think so many people, when they hear this concept of God, they have wounding from the past. Christianity may have traumatized the out of them. And they're in this space where they're might. They're not even open to God. They're not even open to the concept of God.

That's why I always have to qualify and define exactly what I mean when I use the term. Because everybody immediately inserts their own beliefs about what that word means. And that's why the Jewish religion doesn't spell the word out. That's why Buddhism does not use the word. They use the word words. Ground of being. The problem with God is God creates as much trouble as good.

How so?

Well, because people, the number one cause of war is religious differences. People, you know, Christianity has 45, 000 branches now, all claiming to have the authentic teachings of Jesus. So when, whenever you use the word God, you're actually making an assumption that everyone else thinks that's that you think it's natural to think. Like, if I see the word food, I have a pretty good idea. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

But when we say the word God, we think we're saying food metaphorically, but people think he's eating Styrofoam or he's eating, you know, LSD or whatever their bent is. So. Because the word God is so highly charged.

Yeah.

If you don't define exactly what you mean when you say it, then the message you're trying to convey can come back to you. So convoluted and twisted. You're like, you think I said that? You know, so you have to make sure you're clear about what you mean. So in spirit, Jim, I give three definitions of God, three levels. There's three different expressions of God that are. That need to be understood or you will be confused and it can cause you a lot of trouble.

I'm excited to go into. I'm excited for this conversation. Man, you were making a bag and you're like, I can feel Josh's excitement because this is a candy store moment for me. I was literally addicted to porn. It was ruling my life. I went to an ayahuasca ceremony with the wrong intention. I got served a slap in the face that honestly, I think I'm still recovering from.

Well, that's good.

And the Beauty of that is that when I came to you, you said to me something so powerful, you put your hand on, if you remember this, at the Heaven house, you put your hand on my shoulder. And I was so stressed out and I was dealing with ocd. And I said, I don't know how I'm going to do it all, Paul. How am I going to manage the family that I want? The career that I want is my dream. How am I going to do all of this? And you put your hand on me and you said, well, who's doing it anyway? And that was the beginning of a shift for me, not just practically how to love myself and be authentically Josh, but more so that it was God. God is doing it all at all times because all is God and God is love.

Yes.

People might hear that and it's confusing. It's confusing because of, like you mentioned, their past projections of their wounding and what they actually think God is.

Well, one of the big problems, of course, as you know, and I've talked about it extensively, is that what religion has done in large part has created the idea of God as a separate from creation. God's outside of creation. Two, God is perfect. So there's no way you can improve upon God. And everybody measures themselves consciously or unconsciously against this God ideal, which is why you have commandments and you have thou shalts and thou shalt nots and rules and regulations, all which are all different in every religion you know. And God is this ruling Lord figure that will punish you if you don't follow these rules yet supposedly loves you. So the, the God creates a lot of problems for people, but most people unfortunately make the mistake of believing. And you cannot actually have a religious experience if you believe something, because by definition when you believe something, you think you know it. So you stop asking questions and you stop exploring. This is exactly why I mentioned in our previous podcast when we talked about God, Rumi said you can never get to God until you become a heretic.

Yes.

What is a heretic? Someone that goes against the doctrine, against the book. You cannot have a God experience by reading stuff and memorizing it. And so James Kars wrote an amazing book called the Religious Case against Belief and what he showed very thoroughly. And he is a very, very amazing man with 38 years of professor in New York University of Philosophy and theology or religion. I see the theology or religion, but he made the point that his that all religions are belief systems. And as soon as you believe, you close the door to the numinous to the sacred to the transcendent. You concretize something in your mind and believe it, and it becomes fixed. Therefore, if anything amazing happens that's not within the context of that, you either don't have a label for it, therefore you ignore it, or you think it's evil, or you know, you can't contextualize it. But in order to have a spiritual experience, you have got to be open to the mystery of God. And you can't know God by definition. It's impossible. And I could go, you know, I talked about this in the previous podcast, so I won't rattle down that road. You can only experience God. You cannot possibly know God because God is infinite. So how do you know something that's infinite? It's impossible to do. The point I'm making is you can't have a religious experience if you have beliefs about God because the belief stops you from being open to a new idea. I say to people all the time, how much Buddhism could you put in the Bible before it wasn't Christianity anymore? Most people would say none. So that's why it's a belief system. All belief systems are closed. As soon as you start adding to a belief system, then people are confused about what it is, what is the practice, what isn't the practice, what is the do is and the don'ts. And so religions keep people in the child archetype, just like we believed in Santa Claus but later realized who it was. If you keep people in a belief system and you can threaten their life with breaking the rules, you've got the world's greatest business model.

Yeah.

And the religion is the most profitable industry in the world based on, you know, it's trippy.

I saw an interview with Carl Jung, and the interviewer was very good. And he said, you know, do you believe in God? And Young looked at him and he said, believe.

Yeah, I know God. Yes.

But then it's counterintuitive to what you just shared, because can we ever actually know God?

Sure you can. You just have to ask the right questions.

What questions would you ask to Young if he was here right now?

I wouldn't need to ask him any because I also know God. I would just knowledge there's a man that I can trust and. And he's obviously had God experiences.

Yes.

But what he is saying is, I don't need to believe because I know. See, if you teach a child math and you say, memorize these math tables and the child's, let's say 6, and they memorize 8 times 8 is 64. But then you say, well, how did you get there? They don't know. They just believe. Because the school teacher said, memorize. 8 times 8 is 64. 2 times 2 is 4.

Yes.

And so they believe. But it's, you know, I'll give you an example of this. When I was in electronic school in the military, which I spent a year in electronic school, I had to go to math school for two months first. That was no fun. They have a policy there. First of all, you're not allowed to use calculators. And it's heavy math. You have to figure out electrical circuits and resistors and capacitors. I mean, it's full on imagining. You know, you're talking about Cobra helicopters here. That's what I worked on. So it's the most advanced electronics, you know, probably next to a fighter jet. But what they. What they do with the instructors do is the instructor's got a good intuition. I mean, that's what they've been doing oftentimes for 20 years, is teaching this stuff. And so if you turn your test in and you got the right answer, but they smell that you don't actually know how you got it, they come over to you, hand you a piece of paper and a pencil, and they say, take me through every step you went through to get that answer. And if you cannot explain how every equation works and why you got the answer, they'll mark it wrong even if you got the right answer. Okay, so what's the difference? Sometimes I would get the right answer because I believed it was the right answer. But the instructor would come over and show me I did not know how I got it, and I would not get the answer right. Because in a battlefield, if equipped testing equipment gets hit by a bomb or a missile, you have to fix it by hand. So you cannot believe. You have to know. Because if you get lucky on a test, but you can't get lucky in a battlefield under heavy stress, then you have to know. So the difference between believing is you don't know how you got there. You just believe when you know you can reproduce it.

So it's not necessarily that you and Jung are saying that you know God in the way that we would, I guess, use the nomenclature of know the word. No, there's a different energy in which you're speaking about.

What he's saying is that I don't need to believe in God like a child believes in Santa Claus, because I have such deep experience of God in my life and in my inner sanctum. That there's no need for a belief for. It would be like saying, Josh, do you believe you have a heart or do you know you have one?

We know.

Well, you say, well, look, Paul, I got a pulse and I got anatomy books. And you, you know, you could take whatever rationale you want because I don't need to believe. I have a heart. I have a heart. Yeah, I know. You saying, I know I have a heart. Take heart out and put God in. That's what he's saying.

Okay. So in so many ways, when I trace back all the different clips that I've seen your team put out, there was one that hit me the hardest. And you were 12, and you had talked about when your dad had passed when you were eight and you were dealing with insane amount of a wound in your heart. Deep in your heart.

Yeah.

And then at many of them. Many of them. But so at 12, you had this really surreal moment where you were out in a field. And we'll link the clip so everybody can watch this. It's truly profound because I think that deep sadness you talked about, I felt that in my life, I was angry at God. I used to, literally, when my mom was sick, she's had manic bipolar my whole life. I used to say something like, fuck you, God. I was so angry at God. Little did I know I was angry at life and not trusting and angry at myself because I didn't have the faculty. That's God, too. But then at 19, you had another moment. So you had these two significant moments. Your father passing at 812 years old. A moment with God out in a field in the rain.

Yeah.

And then 19 years old on an oil rig drilling. I have to wonder, like with all of these moments where you were so seeking this knowing this experience of God, and Now in your 60s, you're literally a conduit, teaching people about how they can have experience with God.

That's exactly what my dream is, not to tell them what God is, but to show them how to engage consciousness. Because if God is not consciousness, then there can't be a God, because how would you know that there was anything without consciousness? So what I'm. What? The way I do that is I teach people how to connect to their own soul. And since only God can give a soul, which is the consciousness within, the day you make contact with your own soul and develop a relationship, you found the only God that you can truly know.

Do you feel like this communion or this experience with God comes to us in these moments of severe pain? Are Those, the tabernacle, is that the proving ground for us to actually know God and experience God.

My first profound God experience. Oh, actually, no, it wasn't my first because you've just reminded me about those, but my first samadhi, where I became one with the entire universe, strangely, which shocked me, happened as I was watching my first son come out of the birth canal. Oh yeah, I was watching his head. And just when his head popped out through his mother's vagina and only his head was sticking out. And I realized that that was somehow a copy of me and her together, which, and I, you know, I really loved her, so. And it was also a very scary time for me because I had just turned 18, my parents were broke, her parents were broke, nobody could support us. And that was when I, when she got pregnant is when I knew I had to become a man and make it happen by myself. And there was no rescue from mommy or daddy on either side of the fence. It was do or die. Her mother tried desperately to get her to get an abortion, but she wouldn't do it. We ended up having to. I basically had to pull up in front of her house in a hurry. She ran out the door with all of her clothes tucked under her arm, dragging a bag and her mother grabbing her by the hair trying to tackle her. And she threw her stuff in my truck, pushed her mother away, got in and we drove away. And then it was us from that moment on. And when Paul Jr. Came out of the birth canal, probably for about, I would guess, two or three minutes, I was in every star, I was in galaxies. And strangely enough, on my first DMT journey, I had the experience of becoming one with everything. But I was millions of eyes looking into the world and I drew a mandala of it and it's just eyes everywhere. Very Alex Gray. And after that experience, I could see a lot more in Alex Gray's art. But when I was in this samadhi experience, you know, like I'm only 18, this is a very profound experience for an 18 year old to have. And I'm in the universe, but my consciousness is so expanded, for about three minutes I forgot that who I was, I, I was just a witness to it all, but somehow it was all me. And then as I started, all of a sudden realized, oh my God, I, my, my sense of self, I am somehow everywhere at the same time. And then I realized my son's being bored. And there was a moment when I looked down and it was as though I could see right through the hospital And I was watching myself stand there while the nurse was bringing the baby out and I was standing like right next to her and I was watching myself seeing my son born. And when, when I finally came back into my body, I was so stunned I couldn't talk. But fortunately, because a birthing is, is quite a powerful experience, nobody around me suspected something was wrong. But imagine taking a full headed DMT and then standing in a birthing process. You know, some people might think, you know, you're a little bit out of it, but because it was a birthing process, they didn't realize that I was actually having a really hard time figuring out what had just happened.

Yeah. Oh my God.

I, the other two experiences you talked about were very different. Yeah, they were equally shocking. But there was no one with the universe. It was me being the first one being very upset with God because the circumstances of my life were so painful. Based on my childhood Christian programming, I thought, what have I done to deserve this? How, how have I sinned so badly? You know, I'm only a child. I mean, what did I do wrong? All I've ever done is what people told me to do. And so I was very angry because the, the pain and the loss and you know, my, my father had drowned and.

Were you angry at God because he drowned? Like, did you have anger towards.

It wasn't about, I was just, I was angry because my mother married a very violent, very abusive man that treated children like farm animals and had no sense of what a child is. And you know, there was no play time. It was work, work, work from the time you get up to the time you go to bed. It was hard farm work and he couldn't give a. About my love of sports or anything. It was, I felt like I was in a prison camp and I, and he was violent and painful and you know, beat my mother up, beat us up. And so I, I was so angry because I didn't, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what did I deserve to do to, to be in this situation. And so I just was standing in the middle of about a 10 acre field picking rocks because there was so many, so many rocks on the soil that it would damage our farm equipment like plows and rakes. And so whenever we were done with our other animal chores and hayfin, hay work, fences, feeding, watering, it was out to the rocks and you know, it's on Vancouver island, it's cold, it's wet, you know, it's like 35 degrees, pissing rain, muddy and I'm like, this is. Somehow I just knew I didn't want to live this way. So I just got pissed off through a tantrum at God, looked up at the sky and started cussing God out and saying, why in the hell? What, what have I done wrong? And after about two minutes of me just rip roaring at God, a voice from every direction at once, above, below, within, around, everywhere, simultaneously said, your life will be one of purpose. Everything will be okay. And I was stunned. I was scared to death because this voice was very deep and profound. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, but it sounded like maybe a deep aboriginal woman speaking. But it could have been Earl Knight. Earl Jones, the James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones.

Yeah, yeah.

Like it was that deep. And I was looking all around me and I'm in an open field, right, surrounded by barbed wire, and there's nothing but me and dirt and rocks and trees around the fence line. And I think I'm, I'm like confused as hell as to how this could possibly happen. But somehow the voice did calm me. It did, it planted the seed in my mind that it would be okay. The second time it happened is, is I was 19 and I, you know, I was having to do every job I could find to feed my wife and, and my son and pay the bills, and unemployment rates were very high. And so I was working in exploration, water well drilling, and I was covered from head to toe in black drilling mud. It was freezing cold. And we were on our way back from a job which was on a remote island, and we were on this big ferry on, and it was a drilling rig that's on a great big giant semi truck. And the guys all went in to have a coffee and kind of just warm up. But I just was at that state where, like, is that what my life is going to be? Drilling holes in the dirt? You know, like, even though I was making really good money at that time, I think it was making like, I was making like 19 an hour, which, which is really high wages at that time. You know, I was 19. So what would that be? It was probably 1980. You know, I just knew I needed to open my heart to God and I needed to be alone. So I stayed in the truck covered in mud and dirt and wet. And I just, I didn't get mad. I just somehow I just knew God can hear me. I, I, that first experience made, made it very clear to me. And then, and then the birth experience that happened about a year before I, I knew God was real. I didn't need to believe. And so I just sat and just talked, open my heart, tears in my eyes and see, you know, God, is this all I'm going to amount to? And as shocking, all of a sudden, the voice again. Same voice from every direction at once. I'm in the bottom of a ferry boat, right? There's nobody around. Everybody's upstairs getting warm and drinking coffee and eating food. And quite miraculously, the voice said, your life will be one of purpose. You will become a massage therapist. You will be able to control your schedule. You will be very successful. Do not worry. And I'm like a massage therapist. I don't know anything about massage. I'm a, you know, I'm a guy that builds race cars and dirt bikes and races motocross and, you know, I'm a martial artist and, you know, a boxer. And. And so the funny thing is, is right after that happened, I remembered that when I was a child, I had asthma. And the only thing that would help it, the inhalers didn't help the medications and help, but when my grandmother would massage me, she would take Mentholatum and rub it into my chest and my neck and on my back. And she would touch me with so much love. And within 10 minutes, my asthma would be gone. And it was the only thing that took my asthma away. And I realized when I actually did become a massage therapist, in fact, I. I started the first massage therapy program in the entire United States army for the boxing team. Before I even had gone to massage school, fighters used to say, you've got amazing hands. Where did you know? How did you learn this? And I said, you know, I don't know. But I realized I had imprinted my grandmother's touch, and I just could feel her working through me. And so I was reading books on sports, massage therapy, but I was practicing. I would read the book and practice, but I, by the time I got to massage school, the instructors said, you know, it's pretty wild that you've never been to massage school because you actually work like someone who's a skilled professional. And. And so the paradox of all this was I did become a massage therapist. I did get out of the army and start a very successful business and set my own schedule and do exactly what I wanted to. And I did find it miraculous that here I am, you know, three years out of the army, making over $100,000 a year, you know, specializing in medical failures, running a super successful practice, which ultimately all that became the foundation of the Czech Institute. And so that's a couple of examples how I know God. I don't need to believe.

See, but this is the part that. And I know you go deep into this with Spirit Gem, which I'm excited. It's 10 volumes. How many volumes?

15.

15 volumes. And volume one is out now.

It's almost out, Penny.

Almost out.

Penny's just putting the last touches, which is an ad for the online mentorship training program, but we've been intensely busy for a long time, so it'll come out on Kindle, and then it'll go to hard copy right after the Kindle edition's done, because the the same book will be put into print edition.

Hey, it's Josh, and I know you're enjoying this conversation as much as I am. This is a deep dive into the things that really, really matter the most. You know, spirituality is a gym, and the gym is spirit gym. If you want to join this thriving community of people like you and I who are growing that part of your wellness Pentagon, the spiritual side, you know, if we're disconnected from God, if we're disconnected from the reality that God is everything and no thing at the same time, or if this is a concept that's resonating deeply with you, as it does for me, head over to JoshTrent.com SpiritGem and use the code Josh15. Paul and his team gave us a very, very special exclusive discount that's 15% off any Spirit Gym membership. The link is joshtrent.com forward slash, spiritgem, and make sure you use the code Josh15 at checkout. Paul has been a huge inspiration to me in so many ways in healing, in motivation, and in holistic health. I trust that you are resonating with Paul, and if you want to go deeper, make sure you head to joshtrend.com spirit gym and use the code Josh15 for 15% off your membership. All right, let's get back to the podcast. Yeah, because I go back to my question of the only times in my life where I've actually been open to God is when I've been in severe pain. Not to where I said, oh, I don't want to be here anymore, but actually in such physical pain, emotional pain, resentment towards my father, resentment towards my mother, that it was like, you know, that was where the crack and the light came in. I was cracked and the light came in. Do you feel like our experience with God that really transforms us typically? I know I'm blanketing. Statementing typically has to come from significant painful events. In our life, I feel like that's how we really have the experience of knowing our pain and knowing God.

It can, but not always. That's probably one of the more common ones because when you have enough pain, the first thought is, am I going to die? Well, whenever anyone faces death, the question of God becomes very vivid. This is why they say there's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole when you got bullets flying at you.

Yeah.

Atheists all of a sudden become very religious because they know the threat of death is imminent. And so, you know, I told you the story of me becoming one with the universe, which I was a legitimate, transcendent, sacred experience which brings you into the awareness that you have become God's body. Put it put to put that into plain language. To become one with the universe is to realize that you are one with the body of God. Universe is the body of God, just like you have a body, but it's not who you are. That's why I say to people, hold up your hand, tell me what you're looking at. Everyone says, my hand. I say, okay, who's in possession of the hand? Because if you wear the hand, you wouldn't use a possessive, you would just say hand, my foot, my body, my pain. The soul is what's in possession of the body and the soul is God individuated to have a unique experience. But so pain brings us. When you get enough pain, you, you, you begin to question, am I going to die? And I've been there many times, unfortunately. And so because pain actually you may not know this, but in. If you study the history of, of various religions and cults, one of the ways that they induced transcendent experiences or God experiences was by doing things like whipping each other and torturing each other. The Christian church is full of this stuff. I mean there's loads of this. This is the cat of nine tails. For example, they used to, the monks used to starve themselves and then whip the out of each other till they were like right on the edge of death. And so if you can get someone as close to death as you can without destroying their ability to heal, like whipping them to death, they will often leave the body, which is what soul loss is. When people are in traumatized enough, they leave the body. The difference is they're often unconscious of where they go. But monks focus and they learn to meditate so that they can actually be aware of what happens when, which is what a spiritual practice is supposed to ultimately develop your ability to stay awake when you die instead of going to sleep when you die. So the point I'm making is torture and pain and starvation and austerities have all been gateways. And now the research shows when you get someone in enough pain, there's a release of DMT from the pineal gland, which dislodges the soul from the body. So we now don't need to whip each other. We can just take a hit of DMT and have the death experience and become one with God. And that's why a lot of these drugs are so popular.

Yeah. Well, what's fascinating about this is I, you know, my 12th ayahuasca journey, I was slapped so hard that it was like, okay, I'm good. I don't need to go back anymore.

Well, that's, that's, that's good. Because it's good.

I'm still integrating it now.

Yeah, I wanted to finish, too. I forgot to finish my point. I'm sorry, but I want to finish something because you're asking a very important question. Yes. So I mentioned watching my son come out of the birth canal was a God experience, but that wasn't painful. That was a celebration.

True, true.

I've had experiences. I remember when I was a paratrooper, the first time I jumped out of a airplane, you know, it was a pretty intense experience. We're in a combat maneuver. I got 163 guys in an airplane all scared to death, and we're jumping out of this airplane and the parachute opens and it's just dead quiet. I'm way above the earth, and I had a, like a religious experience. I'm like, wow, you know, this is like what it must be like to be God, to see everything, you know, so that wasn't a painful experience. It was just a real, you know, you, you, you always pray the guy that packed your shoot wasn't stoned. You know, people do die and perish. Matter of fact, of all the jumps I did in the military, the minimum injury on any jump was a broken leg. There's been many, many plant medicine. You know, I've done over a thousand plant medicine ceremonies either guiding them. I always do the medicine with everybody, so I'm on the same frequency as them, so I know exactly where they're at. But I've had so many intensely profound God experiences on plant medicines. And, and they were not driven by pain. They were driven by the pure willingness to explore the unknown and ask big questions and be brave enough to go look.

Yeah, it's unique to each person. I mean, I Have had experiences same where when Naya was born. I was watching myself watch it.

Yeah.

So. But I had already had so many different painful experiences of God. Maybe at the core of my question, is this as an access point or an entryway to beginning to have experience with God, does it need to come through pain? Of course, of course there can be pleasurable, amazing experiences.

One of the reasons dance is part of sacred rituals for as far back as human beings go is because ecstatic dance can take you right into a DMT like experience or a samadhi experience. I mean look at the Sundance four days, non stop, day and night, no food and no water.

It's crazy.

And every sun dancer that I've ever seen interviews with reached the point where they did not need to eat or drink ever again. I studied Joseph Rael's teachings extensively. He's done the Sundance four times. And he said, after the, he said the intensity of the preparation and what they have to do to get ready. He said after his first Sundance he never had to eat or drink again and his body didn't lose weight or anything. He drew life force energy from the emptiness of space, from the zero point field, which is what a breathitarian is doing.

Sure.

And that's scientifically documented. And so the point is that sacred dance can bring you into these same states, a union without any pain. Oftentimes though, it's because life is so painful that they know they have to keep direct contact with God. And. But native tribes also use psychedelics and sometimes they mix sacred dance with psychedelic ceremonies. So I think pain brings us into a reverent awakening of our perishability as a physical being. So because pain is so undeniable, you know, like I've done ceremonies with lots of people that did not have a God experience at all. Even though I was completely one with God, they were just scared to death. And that's the other thing. You know, God experiences are intensely scary for most people. I've. I've had the living hell scared out of me, losing my ego and not even knowing how I was going to get home. I mean I've been so utterly gone in the abyss. I've been, I've had experiences of flying through the emptiness of God at the speed of light, having no idea if there was ever going to be a bottom or how I would ever return. And, and that is very, very, very intense experience. And, and I mean I could talk for hours about the kinds of experience, but the right next to me is somebody who is having the most painful, profound Realization that they're a complete and that they mistreat their wife, etc. Etc. On the same dose at the same time. And so what. What you come to realize is that our soul only opens the door to the transcendent experiences that are needed for us to awaken to the truth of ourselves at the level of our spiritual development that we're at. So you. You have a God experience when you're ready for it, and until then, you have an awareness of all the parts of you that you've put energy into that are blocking you from realizing truth of yourself. And that's what real spiritual development is, is becoming aware of. Where am I living untrue to reality, to the greater reality.

And the maturity that it takes to hold that truth sometimes can be something that breaks people. Like I said this on our last podcast from Jordan Peterson, and maybe he got it from Young. When it comes to psychedelics or going into these realms, be careful of unearned wisdom. In other words, if you're not ready to receive whatever the ceremony brings, you could have significant soul loss. Some people never come back, Paul. They literally get shattered and broken so deeply.

Well, they could. It's only because they don't know people with skills like I have. That's why, you know, I was able to help you.

That's right.

But sometimes that's the karma of the soul. And just to sort of share an opinion on you. I don't think there is any such thing as unearned wisdom. Wisdom, by definition, is the product or the synthesis of experience and can only come by way of making mistakes. You can't truly know something without the experience of doing it or being it. And you can never get to wisdom without making mistakes.

That's good. I've made plenty.

Right. So the point is, the things that you won't do again because you know for sure, sure, they don't work. That's wisdom. Yes, but nobody could give you that in a psychedelic journey. It's impossible. So everything that's happening to people in psychedelic journeys is exactly what they need. And oftentimes it is the karma they're getting because they are doing psychedelic journeys when they should be at home wiping bottoms for helping mommy or. Or earning a living instead of trying to find another way to cop out on life. So, you know, there are certain circumstances where people should not do psychedelic journeys either because they're psychologically not ready, or they're doing it for the wrong reasons, or they're being pressured into it, or they're doing it with the wrong people that have the wrong motives. Because you can use a psychedelic just as effectively to enter the dark arts as you can the, the light arts or the healing arts. So if you're, if you don't know what the energy of the environment is and who is creating the space for containment, you're playing with fire, dude.

Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, well, let's shift gears thinking about fire. One thing that one thing that I love. This is going to be a fiery point of the conversation. Yeah, one thing that I love, and I was watching this and I think it was video one or two of the spirit gym community, your replay. As you said, God is that for which there is no other.

Yes.

Now that one line, God is that for which there is no other. That's poignant and profound because how would you explain so many different religions? I think you mentioned to me at the house there's 40,000 different arms of Christianity.

45,000.

So wars are fought because my God is better than yours. Lives are taken, blood is spilled. It's so insane. Yet if there truly is a God that is all knowing and the zero point field, nothing and everything at the same time, is it God just knowing God's self through these 40,000 hundreds of thousands of religions? That's the only way that God knows God's self. Yet why would God choose that? There's so much blood to be shed. Is that another way that God knows God's self?

Well, let me add a couple things to you here. One is another definition of God that very few people are aware of. But it's very important. God is the only being that can create and sustain itself. We cannot do that. Satan cannot do that. Satan is created by God. All the angels are created by God. God is the only being that can create and sustain itself. And paradoxically, God is the only being that is and is not a being at the same time. The universe, the multiverse, the omniverse, however you want to slice it, that's God's body and tantra, that's the domain of Shiva. But Shakti is the domain of spirit, which is unweighable, unmeasurable. It's infinite. So it's so vast, there's no scientific measurement. It's so fast and so vast, there's nothing that can measure it. The only measurement for it is inside of you. Like I can talk to God, I can talk to my soul, but you can't weigh or measure a soul.

Right?

So the first thing to understand is by definition, God is the only being that can create and sustain itself. And everything else that you can know of or conceive of is a byproduct of that first reality. Nothing else could be here if it wasn't for that reality. Okay? God is that for which there is no other. It means if you keep asking, what created that? What created the sun? Well, it's part of a galaxy. What created that? A universe. Well, what created the universe?

Right.

You could say a bigger universe. Well, you can play that game until you're dead, but ultimately you have to say, well, we don't know, we don't.

Know the mystery, the honoring of the mystery with our mind. We intellectualize God so much, and I did for a long time that I have to know, well, who even created God in the first place?

Yeah, well, God's ultimately an idea. Idea, right. God's an idea until it becomes an experience. But like I've told you, I've had, you know, I've had the experience of becoming one with God, doing Tai Chi with zero plant medicines. And I've had many samadhis in meditation. I've, I've gone just as far into God as I have with no drugs, as I have with drugs. And it was important to me to do that. And thank God I did it first because, you know, my mother joined the Self Realization fellowship when I was 12, so I learned meditation techniques from monks. And then I went to summer camp with the monks when I was 15. So I had lots of time and training from very skilled, very spiritually evolved people that gave me an underpinning. Then I worked with Master Fong Ha for three years and did Tai Chi daily, sometimes twice a day for 18 years, disciplined. And I've had experiences on Tai Chi where I went so deep into God there wasn't even a paw, there wasn't even a knowing, there's not even words to describe it. And it's very much like a profound DMT journey. In fact, when I came out of one of the deepest experiences I've ever had, first I had the experience of remembering that I'm Paul Check. Like, oh my God, I'm Paul Check. And I had to think about, what does that really mean? I was doing the Tai Chi ruler exercise in my rock garden right next to my water charger, literally like one foot from my water charger. I normally do Tai Chi at that time I was doing typically around 30 minute sessions. The way that, that I got knocked out of it was Angie came out of the house yelling for me, paul, Paul, where are you? And then I heard her and it took me a couple minutes, and she had to walk all the way down into the rock garden from the house, which is, you know, like probably about 60ft down steps into a garden just down below on, like a level lower. And, well, I heard her yelling, and that's what brought me back. But then I couldn't talk until she actually got there. I was like, stoned out of my mind. It was like I was on five hits of liquid clinical grade lsd, but there was no drugs in me. I was like, so fused into everything and so blissed out, man. It was like crazy how blissed out I was. And so when she finally was standing right there, she goes, you realize we've been calling you to come to dinner for over an hour now. What was trippy is I started doing that Tai chi at about 5:15. It was at the time of year where the sun would. Would go down by about 5:30, quarter to 6. And when she got there, it was jet black. The ground was soaking wet from the dew. So I actually looked at my watch. I'd been there for an hour and 40 minutes, and it felt like I'd been there for five minutes. And I was so utterly immersed and not even the universe, it was beyond that. There wasn't not a thought, there was not a color, there was not a knowing. I was in a place that I can't even describe, but it was as though I was the dao. I was the dao. And if Angie hadn't to come out the door and yelled at me, I might still be there. And the funny thing was, you know, the Tai Chi ruler is an active practice, right? My body was sitting there doing that practice and breathing in rhythm all by itself for God knows how long.

You know, it's a transcendent experience that totally. People seek or they. They chase them and they get a little hit of it and then they. They go back to it. But the real ceremony is after the ceremony. Like your life is a ceremony. It's interesting that you're wearing all of our lives. You're wearing almost like a ceremonial. What. What are you. What are you wearing?

This is a scarf handmade in Russia given to me by one of my Czech students probably 20 years ago.

So. So the. The ceremony is life for you and for all of us. Yet we have these peak experiences. It could be plant medicine, Tai chi, and having your wife yell your name for over an hour because you're so.

Deep into it, blown into God with sex many times. And I've been fortunate because, man, if I had some good sex. I mean, I've had sex so good, Josh, probably at least 20 times that I've thought to myself, honestly, if I could. If I died right now, my life is complete, utterly complete.

So. So it's through these experiences, what I'm getting from you, that it's. It's not that we need to know who exactly God is or even what created God.

Because if you're nothing that creates God, that's a false concept.

Exactly. So if you're just. If you're just living your life and you're doing the best to have an open heart, obviously that's just one key. There's many different keys.

Well, God is love. Right? That's. God is the. Love is the verb of God. So that you don't need words, because words are always circumscribing. You know, when you use words, you're talking about, the word about means to go around something, but love goes into something. Like, if I love you, you'll know it because you'll feel it. But if I just say, oh, I love you, Josh, you don't feel it.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, but when someone says I love you or acts with love towards you, it penetrates you to the core of your soul. You know you're being loved. So love is the verb of God. Anything else is a noun. And you cannot use nouns to describe God. And that's why there is so many problems with religion, because you got books full of descriptions of God, it's best to shut the up and. And start loving. Sorry. Sorry for the harsh expression. Yeah, but like, I watch all the silliness and, you know, first of all, to have a God experience gets you completely out of your head. But the more you start reading all this religion and memorizing this, the more you get trapped in your head. And if there's a dangerous place to live, it's in your head. And paradoxically, as many mystics have said, the longest journey you'll ever take is from your head to your heart, and it's only about a foot. And so the key point I'm trying to say is anyone that wants to know what God is, just think about what it feels like to give love honestly and to receive love openly. And you have found God.

Yes.

And the more you do it, the more capable you are of it. That's why I begin my day every day with breathing God's unconditional love into my being. I visualize it filling my whole heart. I see this beautiful pattern in me, like a vortex of vibrant green light with silver in it. And it's just how it appears to me. Then as I exhale, I think the thought, I give God's love to all beings, and I just open my heart and pour it out of every cell of my body. And then I breathe it in. I breathe God's love into my being. And I visualize a centripetal force moving inward from every direction, like a spirit sun sucking toward its center. And I get so high doing that. And I always get a smile on my face. And I like to start my day by remembering it's my job to make love. It's my responsibility to make love. Otherwise, you have to walk around expecting someone else to do it for you. And that's called a codependent relationship. That's exactly why Osho warned everyone the beauty of love is that it never works. And what he was saying is, as long as you need someone else to take responsibility for making you feel loved, you are in a codependent relationship. And the day they stop doing it, you're not going to like them anymore. And that is what a child is. So I take it my responsibility is to fill myself up with enough love so that I have enough to give away without feeling resentful that I'm loving you at the expense of loving me. If you want to get yourself breast cancer as a woman, just make yourself busy loving everybody else and tell yourself you're too busy loving everybody else to take care of yourself. And the day will come when you start resenting the very people you love. And the crystallization of that resent is often breast cancer.

Wow. There's so much there. So what came up for me when you were sharing was my grandfather beautiful.

So I love my grandfather.

I'll hold this right here. Morrow. Joseph Padolino. And my. My son's middle name is Morrow.

Great.

He stopped me when I was like, 11 or 12 in his house. He said, josh, you going to church? And I said, no, I don't like it. They speak in tongues, and they're putting their hands up, and it's just wild. And he said, well, why not? And I said, because I don't. I don't believe in God. How could something be forever? And he looked at me and I'll never forget that I'm 44. And it's like he's here with me right now. He's. He said, well, the mind of man always wants to know that there's a beginning, middle, and end. But when it comes to God, that doesn't apply.

That's exactly right.

And I was like, oh my God. It hit me so hard. I didn't say anything. I just kind of. I was 12. I wasn't ready for it. But here I am. I'm 44 and I'm sharing this memory with you. And so the way in which God utilizes people to get someone else closer to themselves, which is God, well, is so profound, it's so beautiful.

But. But wind up a bit. God does not utilize people. God is people. There's a difference. Because that idea puts God somewhere else. Controlling you like a puppet and utilizing you like you fly, a drone. God's your breath, your heartbeat. It's the movement of spirit. Your thoughts are spirit. Spirit is the flow of energy and information which all comes from God. God is embodied in Josh. There is only one Josh Trent. As I've said before, there will never be another. Every single creation, every. There's no two sand pebbles alike, no two rocks alike, no two snowflakes alike. Even identical twins are not identical. That's scientific fact. No two trees are alike, no two planets, no two stars. God is dreaming itself into existence because that for which there is no other cannot know anything else but itself. So the act of God looking into itself is what creates the sound of om. That is how creation emerges. When God looks into itself in dreams and sees the other, it's God's own consciousness that animates the other. Just exactly what happens when you dream to the T. Yogananda talks about this a lot. So there's many mystics and, and I am telling you from personal experience, the point is, as a someone who's very skilled in dream analysis from many years of study and practice with patience for a long time, the first thing, the first rule of dream analysis is that every character in the dream is an aspect of yourself until proven otherwise. So an example would be a prophetic dream. Like lots of people had a dream they should not go to work the day before the Twin Towers went down. And they lived to tell about it. And when interviewed, I've watched interviews with them, many of them, they said it was such an intense dream that even though I normally don't pay stock in my dreams, I felt it so viscerally, I just knew I shouldn't go to work and I'm alive to tell about it. Okay? So the act of God looking into its own dream and realizing Josh makes Josh become real. And it is God that is the subject of the object that becomes Josh. So when God says, josh, I love you, you're amazing. You're the only one. And you acknowledge and say back to God, thank you, or even say to your mother, I love you. What you don't realize and people don't realize, the subject in you that's listening to me right now is God inside of you pretending to be Josh. And what's looking at you right now in my eyes is the subject of God and me looking out and seeing a Josh. But my mind knows I'm not just looking at Josh, I'm looking at Josh as God. So the point I'm making is God does not use anybody, does not reach out and move people. God is in them as them, breathing them, being them so fully with such great commitment that when we actually wake up to the truth of ourselves, it is just as shocking to God because in Josh, there is no more God than Josh has figured out. And that's why they say God's favorite game to play is hide and go seek. Because God's got all the time there will ever be. So there's no rush for God. What else is God going to do except explore itself? So God just dreams novelty into existence constantly and says, I'm going to be my turtles, I want to be a turtle, I want to be a crab, I want to be a star. And. But God's not actually sitting there going, I want God's dreaming. Dreaming comes before mind. You can dream without a mind. You dream when you're sound asleep at night, your mind is gone. So the paradox of dreaming, dreaming emerges from a non dual reality. But when you have a lucid dream and you go, I'm dreaming. Oh, look at me, I'm in a fight with my girlfriend, I shouldn't do that. Or my wife, I shouldn't do that. Or wow, there's me hugging my kids. Once you realize you're dreaming, you can then actually engage the dream and change the dream. That's why there's an entire practice in Buddhism of lucid dreaming. That's what they focus on. That's why Carl Jung focused so heavily on dreams. I've had countless experiences of being in a dream, realizing I was dreaming and saying, oh my God, I'm running from a dragon. I'm gonna face that and ask it why it's chasing me. And you know, wild stuff happens, like it'll just disappear. Or one time I was doing a lot of alchemical practice, alchemy practices, and I was following an alchemical meditation written by a guy named Steven Rosen. And it has to do with the different stages of awakening and Alchemy. So this particular meditation I was doing, all of a sudden I. I was in a sauna in Alaska on vacation. And I was in a real good state to go deep in meditation. And I first meditated for about a half an hour. Then I started to practice. And all of a sudden I found myself walking in a jungle. And I was dressed in. In like a loincloth, like a native. And I heard movement, like something big. And I looked and there was a snake that was so damn big it scared the living hell out of me. It was black with red eyes, and it was massive, about 30ft long, and probably a body 4 or 5ft wide. I mean a snake as big as a school bus. And I was shocked. And this thing was coming right at me. And I said to my soul, my God, what do I do? It looks like it wants to eat me. And my soul said, let it eat you. I said, are you kidding? My soul said, let it eat you. You'll be surprised what happens. So I did. And so it came and it had this huge fangs and it opened its mouth and it swallowed me. And I just floated up out of its body. Just like when I astral travel or when I remote view or when I do out of body work, I travel in my spirit body. And so I literally. It ate me and I floated right up. And my soul said, now you know why you don't need to be afraid of death? Because the only thing it could eat, even if it was in the physical dimension with you, is your body. But what just floated out of that snake is what exactly is going to happen when you die?

Yes, this is why on the screen right now we have the snake eating its tail, which is God. And this is God. Because God can only eat God, there's.

Nothing else for it to sustain us. There's a meaning to that though. Let me quickly tell you, please. If that snake over consumes itself, it ceases to exist. If it under consumes itself, it gets so big that it can never feed itself. So that snake symbolizes the dao. Not too much. Don't eat too much, but don't eat too little. You eat too little, the snake starves to death and dies. You eat too much, it can't maintain itself.

So then could one say, would it be possible that God knows itself in unlimited ways by almost eating itself to death or starving itself to death? Would that be a reality?

Every possible way.

How would that be practical for us as human beings? Souls inhabiting bodies? That wisdom, the.

The wisdom is, is that you're having a unique experience that nobody else is having. And as you grow spiritually, your awakening and your realization of what God is will astound you. And it will keep you so inspired to keep going. Because you'll realize the more you understand about the magic and the mystery of God, the more magical and mysterious life becomes and the more exciting it is to be alive. And then you'll get to the point where you realize that no matter what happens to your body, you will not die. And that this is an endless game. The only way that it can come to an end is nirvana, which technically means to blow out or extinguish. And this is why Rumi says, you are not a drop of the ocean. You are the ocean in a drop. When your soul returns back to God, you become one with the absolute. And I've been right on the edge of that multiple times. The problem is, you realize beyond a shadow of a doubt you will never remember your family, your friends, your experiences, because you will become no thing and everything and you will have no mind. You'll be in the state of pure dreaming. But there will be no differentiation between Paul and Josh or Paul and Penny, or Paul and my children or Paul in the universe, or there will be no longer a subject object. There will no longer be a mind. Mind is a duality. Dualities are created out of love. Love means relationship. So when God sees Josh in the dream, that's the first act of love between you and God. And when God knows that, you see God. Now, information and energy is flowing between two points of sentience. That's what the qualify that qualifies mind. There's a difference between an information processor, a computer. I can send information from my computer to yours, but those computers don't have a clue whether what those electrons are telling, they don't have any sense of meaning or knowing. A hose never knows the difference between water and wine going through it. It's just a hose. Okay? So it's. It's processing information, whatever's in the water, but it's not conscious of it. Okay? Because of love. Love creates and is experienced by sentient beings of all types, even microorganisms. So when I'm having a conversation with you right now, I am sentient. You're sentient. You're hearing my words. I'm hearing your words. Our words are affecting each of us. They're changing each of us.

Yes.

Right. So the act of love with conscious awareness is essentially what produces mind. And there is a third mind that's being created out of the combination right now. This is why Jesus says in the Bible, anytime two or more get together in my name, I, him representing God will be there. It means anytime two or more get together in my name. There is a third being created out of the harmony of the two of you. You, the marriage of the two of you. And that being is guiding this conversation right now. So if you take, if you could see with advanced photographic imaging, which used to be Kirlian photography, but now they have other techniques, my aura and your aura are overlapping right now, and they're becoming one sphere. And the intelligence in that sphere is what Jung called the third. And that's what Jesus was speaking of when he said, whenever two or more get together in my name, I will be there. It means anytime two of us get together in an act of love, the third being, that is the wisdom and the beauty and the consciousness of both of us, merges into one that carries the wisdom of both of us and can guide us both to a greater realization. And that's the authentic purpose of a religious practice. You get together with people in the name of love, to worship and to share your experiences and to share your pains and to share and to lean on each other out of the real, genuine love and interest of supporting each other. And no matter how many of you there is, there's a being created out of all of you that is the wisdom of all of you, that is more intelligent, more wise, more capable, and more creative than any one of you or any two of you alone. And that's the third. And that is how God always makes sure that there's wisdom to guide.

For whatever reason, I'm. I'm feeling sadness in this moment. I'd love for you to. To share with me here. When I hold my son or my daughter, there's nothing but God, right? There's nothing but God.

What's there to be sad about?

And what I've been working through has been this intellectualism that I. I'm really just seeking some higher level wisdom on here.

Hope I can help.

My. My challenge is that I know one day I won't be able to hold my son. I won't be able to make love with Carrie Michelle. I won't be able to hold my daughter. And it's this personalization that I create where I love them so much. I don't ever want to not be able to hold them. I don't ever want to not be able to shepherd them and share memories and be at the pool and do all these amazing Things. And so there's this construct that I've been struggling with, and the construct is, I love my woman and I love my children so much.

Yeah.

That I don't want to leave them.

Don't.

It's not a fear. It's not a fear. It's a. It's almost like the pain of. Of the loss that I perceive. It just allows me to pour more love onto them, which is beautiful, but it's also painful at the same time. I mean, shocker. Paradox. So what. What am I really trying to understand here? And what are many of us trying to understand by what I'm presenting?

Well, what's. First and foremost, what's happening is you're processing the situation from a dualistic perspective. What you're forgetting is that what's aware of how much you love them is not in time. What's witnessing inside of you is in the eternal now, the eye of all of us. The eye is God's eye inside of you. But what you're doing is you're using God's capacity to witness in time. This is what the Christian cross is telling you. At a deep level, the vertical beam is the zero dimension. It's the eternal now. The horizontal beam represents on the left side, the past, in the middle, the eternal now, and on the right side, the future. So right now you're thinking about your future death, when you won't be here anymore. That's the right side of the horizontal beam. The left is everything you've experienced so far, without which you wouldn't even know that she was your wife or your kid. Because if you had no memory, you'd be like an Alzheimer's patient. And that's why they say the beautiful thing about being an Alzheimer's patient is you get to meet new people every day because even Your wife of 35 years looks brand new to you. Because they're stuck in the eternal now, or they're in their right brain without the left brain, if you want another way to look at it. But you're. What you're stating to me is that you're bringing your awareness to the fact that the arrow of time is always moving forward and that your physical body is going to drop off. And because you're perceiving yourself in the horizontal dimension of the cross, then you're buying into the illusion that Josh will be gone when his body's gone. But what's actually inside of Josh's body, saying these words right now is impossible to kill. Look at physics. If you look at the Laws of thermodynamics. It says, energy produced cannot not be destroyed, only transformed. So when you lose your body, your, your soul is not destroyed, it's only transformed and you live in a light body. Okay, like I can go talk to dead people on the other side. I do it all the time. I do it for people, to give them messages and to help them heal from the pain of loss. I visit my grandmother, I visit family members that this, my wife is an expert at that. You know, there's a great podcast called Death and Beyond where I have Angie Check and Sally Crow, a famous medium, all describing their different experiences and me talking about mine of one of the most listened to podcasts I've had. But the point I'm making is, Josh, because you're perceiving this, your sense of grief is coming from the belief that you only exist in time. But the part of you that you're not aligning with is the fact that only your body is temporal. And it makes it meaningful to be alive. Because if you live forever, you'd say, oh, screw it.

Yes.

Why, why bother? Why work so hard to be a dad? Yeah, here. Yeah, I'm just going to put my kids in the closet till I'm ready. I mean, we would do all sorts of crazy things, but when there's a finality to life, which is why we enter into the field of time. You see, without time, everything would be happening all at once and there's no way to make meaning of anything. God's trying to make meaning of itself through life. That's what life is. It's life as God experiencing itself. But God knows God cannot die, which is why God loves it all. And God's in no hurry because there's nothing else for God to do. This is forever for God. It's been going on forever, and it will go on forever. There's no beginning or end to that which is absolute or infinite. So the key point I'm making is when you die, the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to find yourself looking at your body going, holy. I'm not dead. And only somebody like me or Angie or someone with these skills who's deep enough into their spiritual development to see clairvoyantly. I will see you stand there, I'll say, hey, Josh, how you doing buddy? Congratulations. Do you need me to tell your wife or your kids anything? And I'll be a medium for you and I will teach them. I. I recently had a friend pass, actually my brother in law and My sister was really feeling a lot of sadness and pain because her husband just passed and she's been with him for a long time, and she loves him. And I said to him, her. I said, barbara, he is not gone. He's standing right next to you right now. He's right there. She goes, it's funny you say that. I keep feeling him close to me. I said, yes, because he doesn't want to leave right yet, because he can feel. Feel your emotional pain. He wants you to know he's not dead. So I said, you know, I won't bore you with the long details, but I taught her how to communicate with him. And so I said, this is what you do. This is how you make contact with him, and this is how you know for sure he's there. And I taught her what to do so she would know beyond a shadow of a doubt. And so I texted her a couple of days later and said, how are you doing? She goes, it's amazing. I'm having conversations with him all the time. She says, it's crazy. But she says, not only do I feel him there, but now I'm talking to him and I'm doing what you told me to do, and it's for real. He's here, you know, so we don't want to leave quite often until the people around us have reached a level of acceptance that it's not so painful for us. There's different circumstances for each soul, which is too much to get into. But the. Just to put this in a nutshell, if you switch from the belief that you won't be able to be with your kids and your wife again and go deep enough into yourself through this is what spirit gyms for, by the way, to get everything out of the way of these truths. And I teach you how to do it. You will. First of all, you can talk to anyone that's not conscious that you're there. You talk to them when they're dreaming. How many people do you know that had dreams that their loved ones that passed over came to see them in dreams? It's as common as breath.

Yeah, it's.

There's billions of people that have these experiences. Not millions, billions. So when you die, if you can't access carry your kids, you will wait till they're asleep dreaming, and you will go talk to them and they'll wake up and go, oh, my God, dad came to me last night. Or Josh came to me and he told me, don't forget the will is in the cupboard in the such and she goes, and it'll be there, right? And there's. You could not read all the books with the eyewitness cases of this in it. So the problem is that most people here are so unconscious of these higher dimensions of reality that death feels very final to them. But for people like me that have done the work to grow these abilities, you realize that God is playing an amazing game with itself. But the deeper you go into God, the more of a sense of humor God has and the more this whole play that we're playing is absolutely miraculous and necessary. And to tell you why this happens is because the soul is actually unconditional love. Only God can create a soul and give a soul. And that's what happens when God dreams an aspect of itself into being as a living, sentient being, whether it be a deer, a beaver, or a Josh. The conscious awareness that you have inside of yourself, that's listening to right me right now. That is your soul listening. So when the soul is born, because God dreams it into existence, it has no conscious awareness of itself because it's unconditional love. So it actually doesn't even know it's alive because it's unconditional. So when God dreams it into the play, be it on Earth or any other place in the universe where this life kind of. This kind of life happens, which is many places, God dreams it into a physical body. Because then the soul looks and says, oh, my God, look at these. I got hands. Oh, my. Look at. Look, I got arms. I got a body. And it starts to realize that when it's coming into the womb, actually. And this is why Plotinus says the soul's greatest addiction is to matter. Because until the soul has something tangible to say, I am, it doesn't even know that it exists. It's unconditional. So once the soul goes into matter, the deeper you go into the lower vibrations, which is the crystallization of consciousness. So you start at the causal body, which is the departure from source or zero. So when God dreams, think of a bubble coming out of zero, that's a soul. Then it goes to the higher mental, where it is impacted by the archetypes. So the archetypes program it for the life that it's coming into. So it has a mental structure. This is what Jung Mate called the objective psyche. We all know what a mother is. We all know what a father is. We all know what food is. We all know what hunting is. We all know what money is. We have just like a keyboard has to have the letters of the Alphabet on it, or you can't make meaning with it. The archetypes are then programmed into the soul. And then you go into the lower mental world where you pick up the storyline of your role in the grand play. Then you come through the astral dimension, which animates the mind and gives you in inner imagery and emotion. Then you come into the etheric dimension where the biochemistry of the body is alive, that's the fetus in the womb, and then you are in the physical body. Each step I just described, you go from God down, the soul becomes a little bit more unconscious, A little bit more unconscious because it's taking something that is as vast as the universe. God, something that's unconditional, is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. And as it steps down into the dream to become a character in the divine drama or the divine play, it crystallizes itself into form. And each step it goes, it's less aware of itself in these higher states. Because if you were aware of the archetypal realm all the time, how would you drive a car, you know? In other words, if you are the keyboard, how can you be the story? The keyboard makes the story, the keyboard disappears into the story. There's no way to keep writing the story as a metaphor. So it might take a minute to think about that. You've written a lot of things on a keyboard, haven't you?

Sure.

Okay, well, what if you were writing and all of a sudden the keyboard disappeared? How would you write? You wouldn't. You'd say, what the hell happened? Okay, so the point I'm making is when we pass through these dimensions, we pick up these archetypes, and those archetypes are inside of us. But the story itself has to be separate from the archetypes. So that's why we have mental functions, right? So those archetypes are in us, and we use them to think and to process and to dream so we can make meaning. Then you go down progressively lower into the physical body. Now you're actually so circumscribed in your sense of self, you actually believe this is where you begin and end. So there's. But the soul's now in love with this. Oh, my God, look at this. I got a body. You look in the mirror, it's like, I'm this handsome dude. I got muscles. You know, I got children, whatever. You know, all these things. I got my new house. Right. Well, that's what it means to be in the story. So the soul is now so deep into the story, it forgets that it passed through the angelic realm. It passed through the archetypal realm. It's. And it's living in all these realms simultaneously. But it's only aware here because it has to have its focus here to engage in the story, because it is the story through which God evolves. This leads to something profound. The most important definition of a myth, which I got from James Kars, which just about knocked me out of my chair. Most people aren't deep enough to get it. What is a myth? A myth is a story that tells itself. A myth is a story. The story we're talking about is life that tells itself. Okay? So you have to ask yourself, well, who is the storyteller then?

Who's doing it anyway?

Josh is telling his own story. And the story that Josh is telling is God's story as Josh. And Josh's story has no meaning without Carrie or without Paul or without mom or without dad. And so we are all co creating each other every moment. And how did your children get here? You had a dream. You made love, and you drew two souls into the story, and those souls resonated with the love, and they wanted to be part of the story. And so they came from this very expanded state called the afterlife because they wanted to participate. And they felt sympathetic resonance with you and Carrie and said, that's our parents. And our parents are going to give us the gift of a life so we can continue to realize who and what we really are. And so what I'm showing you is that God falls asleep the more deeply it goes into matter. And alchemy is the science, spiritually, of extracting the spirit out of matter to come. Become conscious that you are not your body. You're what's animating the body, you're what's breathing the body, you're what's living in the body, like a turtle lives in a shell. So the spiritual practice of alchemy, which is why the Christians tried to kill and burn and get rid of all the alchemists, and why they had to code everything in strange images that couldn't be understood by anybody, was because the alchemists figured out, strangely enough, if you're not aware of this, I'll tell you how they did it. The alchemists, of course, were trying to turn lead into gold. The alchemists were the first chemists in the world. So they were, you know, working with beakers and ovens and trying to make gunpowder or whatever else throughout, you know, the last couple thousand years. And all of a sudden, alchemists started to notice if they were in a bad mood. The same chemical composition that they had made before when they weren't in a bad mood, Behaved very differently. And they found that their psychic state Was affecting every chemical reaction that they were working on. And they could not deny that there was something inside of them. That was affecting what they thought was just something materially separate from them. So the alchemists begin to realize. Whatever's happening in me. Is affecting matter all around me. Which is exactly what quantum physics is telling us. Okay, so the alchemist finally came to the realization. That my spirit is penetrating matter. And therefore what I am is beyond matter. So over the period of hundreds and hundreds of years of experimentation, they came up with practices and different types of meditations. Which go through different names Such as calcination, solution, separatio, coagulation, sublimation, etc. Etc. Putrefaction. These are all stages of extracting spirit from matter. Which also represent what you do to do things like make gasoline out of crude oil. Because at each stage of the process, they were learning how material things turn change. Through this process of refinement. But they realized the same thing was going on inside of them. As they went deeper and deeper into their spiritual practices. So alchemy is actually the science. Spiritual alchemy is the science of realizing that what's animating your body and making all this chemistry work. You've got 30 billion billion biochemical reactions a second in the human body. Based on current scientific approximations. You got a hundred trillion cells. And each made of 100 trillion atoms. I mean, that's an alchemical freaking mystery. And it's the spirit doing that. Whenever you use the word soul, you automatically use the word spirit. Because spirit and soul are like two sides of a coin. You can't have a soul without spirit. Because spirit is the flow of energy and information. What would a soul experience without energy and information? And what would a spirit do without something to experience it with? So the soul is the experiential pole of the thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Or stream of consciousness that we call spirit. So the function of the alchemist was to actually go through spiritual processes. That awakened them to the fact that they could actually leave their body. And do what we call remote viewing. And they say, how is it that I can go walk around on the sun. When my body's sitting here in my laboratory? But they could only do that when they got to certain levels of their development. Because until they got over the belief that they were their body. And that they were going to Die. When their body died, they could not make room in their consciousness to believe that they could actually walk around outside of their body. But as they grew spiritually and went through experiences, sometimes almost dying due to chemical explosions or poisoning by gas. You know, remember the oracle of Delphi, sat in a, I believe, a volcano and breathe the gases. And that's how she got it out of all of her prophecies. So there's an example of how nature surprises you. Puts the right drug in the weirdest place that you ever expect. All of a sudden, you're realizing things about yourself you had no idea. So imagine doing alchemy for years and years and years with all these different chemicals and gases, and they're affecting you. So, in a nutshell, alchemy is the practice of extracting the spirit and soul from matter to the point that you realize you don't need to reincarnate anymore. And then you go up another octave up, which would be the astral dimension, which is far more vast than the physical dimension. And you live there. And I could go on and on with this. I mean, you know, this is stuff I've been practicing for years and years and years. But do you understand? I answered the question? The question I answered for you. Just to summarize it, the grief that you were feeling is only a product of the belief that when Josh dies, he will not be here. But what I am telling you, you're going to be shocked when you find out that you'll be walking around on your pool deck. The problem is, your children are not likely to be spiritually awake enough in their waking state to know that Daddy is standing right there, touching their hair, hugging them and whispering in their ear. But when they're asleep at night and their conscious mind is shut off and you're speaking to their unconscious, you'll be as real as you are sitting across the table with me. And they'll wake up and be able to tell Mommy about it.

Yet another spiritual growth moment with Paul. Check on the podcast.

Well, I'm just telling you what I know from a lot of experience.

No, it's beautiful. And the reason it brought up tears in my eyes is because the hardest lesson I've learned here on planet Earth as a soul, Josh, has been unconditional love. And it may seem reductionizing.

No, man, it's hard work, yet it's incredibly hard work. It's hard work to do.

And this is the depths of Spirit Gym, which is almost why spirituality, in a way, is doing a bicep curl or a Squat for your soul.

Yeah.

Because that's the way that you know that maybe there is no death. I say maybe because I'm still learning how to believe, how to actually know what you're sharing. And so the truth that I got from you was this key practice of unconditional love. And I. And I have it. At times it's fleeting, it's fleet. Sometimes I'm really good at it. And then when I'm not practicing, Dr. Diet, Dr. Happiness, Dr. Quiet, Dr. Movement, that's when my, My conduit becomes dirty. And I.

Body and mind are always mirroring each other.

My practices, when I'm not slept, when I'm eating the wrong foods, when I'm not doing the basic fundamentals of being a human, or I'm under stress, or I'm allowing my beliefs and stories about Kerri Michelle, that she's causing me pain, or she's doing this to me. These are all the ways that I allow myself. And I say this with humility. It's amazing.

I mean, how much more real can it get?

It's. That's the realest of the real. So then when I'm forced into these moments that my soul wants to experience, otherwise they wouldn't be happening.

Yeah.

I learn what unconditional love is. And so there was moments where. And it's like a lump in my throat that the, The. The mystery of all of this and what I'm trying to cling on to is that there's this death and I won't be able to hug them or be with them anymore. Yet the more in this life, in this body, I can practice and be committed to the path of loving them and myself unconditionally.

Yeah.

That's where all the magic is. That's where all the beauty is, is right there in that moment.

You know what? It's everything you described. You just told me how real life is, didn't you?

Yes.

Every bit of it.

Yeah.

It's not easy to love unconditionally. This is why Jesus said, if someone hits you in the face, turn the other cheek. That's unconditional love. Love thy enemy as thyself. A Buddha, a Jesus allowed suit, etc. These are all the beings that have. Are many, many, many lifetimes ahead of us in these practices. And they come here to show us what's possible. They're saying, this is how you do it. If I have to get crucified as an act of love for you, I will let you crucify me. Because I know I can't die. Okay, but there's a point I'm driving at. And here it comes. It is so utterly real that it's hard for you to conceive at this point in your life that you can be walking around hugging and kissing your kids when your body's dead. And it is that reality that makes it so exciting that God cannot resist doing Josh or Paul because the reality of it is so rich and so intense. It's irresistible. It's irresistible. It's like this. Let's just say I had magical abilities and I could create a perfect copy of your wife. And you thought she was away on a business trip, and she walked in the front door and said, honey, I'm home. And you would say, what in the world? I thought you were in Florida on a business trip. And she said, I am. You'd be very. Why are you here standing? You're talking to me. Then she goes, but I am here. FaceTime. Me in Florida. And you. She answers the phone and she's in Florida. You would have a very, very hard time dealing with that reality.

Yeah, I think most people would.

You would be shocked. And it would take you a lot to figure out how to feel untricked. But there's many, many recorded cases of spiritual masters like Babaji and Paramahansa Yoga. I'll give you a Paramahansa Yogananda story. The monks told me this, and I was taught by Brother Triananda, who at the time was 75 years old and was a student of Yogananda himself. So here's an example of what these evolved souls can do. There was a famous Olympic athlete that was a sprinter who heard about Paramahansa Yoganand and all these amazing things he could do, but he thought it was all bullshit. But he was also curious enough to want to look into it. So one day he shows up at the. At the meditation gardens in Encinitas where Yogananda lived, where he wrote the autobiography. Oh, you know where I'm talking.

Oh, yeah, I've been there many times. Yeah. Beautiful.

And so this sprinter shows up, meets Yogananda, and he says, you know, I. I hear about all these things you do. And I'm paraphrasing because it's been a long time since I heard the story, but the punchline's very good. And he says, you know, I. I hear you can do all these amazing things in yogi. Says, I'm. I'm. I'm suspicious. But if you can really do these things, I will become a disciple. And I will follow you. And Yogananda said, well, what would it take to get you to believe that this is real? And the guy said, well, I am one of the fastest sprinters in the world and do you think you could outrun me? And Yogananda says, well, let's go find out. So they walked down the steps to the beach, walked out, the tide was out, and there's, you know, down. There's big stones sticking out of the sand. They walked up. Yogananda says, okay, look, you see that stone over there about 40 meters away? He says, yes. He said, if I can beat you to that stone and back here again, will you believe that what I'm teaching is true? And the sprinter said, if you can beat me to that stone and back, I will become your disciple. Brother Triananda said that the sprinter went down like, like a three, you know, three point start, like a sprinter, like starting blocks. He said by the time the sprinter had taken his third step and looked up, Yogananda was already running back from the other stone. And it shocked the sprinter so much he just stopped moving. He could. It just stunned the hell out of him and he became a disciple. Now, most people would think that's bullshit, but somebody like Paramahans Yogananda is not going to lie to you. And if you read the Autobiography of a Yogi, you'll see and there's piles of these accountings out there and many people who are not ready to hear this stuff won't believe it. But I've seen things that blew my mind. I told you God talked to me. That blew my mind. I had a. It took me months to get my head around that. But what do you do when you start talking to your soul and start talking to God and, and you get the answers to things that you could never have gotten the answers to, you know, things you could have never known. Your life gets better and better. You're less and less afraid. And you realize no matter what happens to you, you're going to be okay and you live that way. How do you get around objective proof like that? You know, it's like there's so many counts of people dying and coming back, you know, you got Ian Stevenson with over 2,500 documented cases of reincarnation and people that knew exactly where they lived and what, you know, what, what rank they had in the military, and it's all been tracked that they got shot and they got birth marks or scars right in the place from a past life, and nobody knows why that scar is still There, but they tell you exactly. Then they go find us in the record books. And so when you come to the point where you're ready to confront whether or not God's for real, the hardest part is you've got to actually be brave enough to question whether or not the beliefs that you've been believing that have stopped you from seeing what's possible are stopping you from seeing what's in front of you all the time. People ask me all the time, how do you. How do you. Remote view. And why is it that so few people can do it? I say, well, look, the first thing you got to do is stop believing that you can't do it. And a good example of this is when they teach kids how to bend spoons with their minds. They just use their mind and soften the spoon. And they find that whenever adults are in the class, they have a very hard time doing it. But kids that are younger than about 7 or 8 usually can learn it in 10 or 15 minutes. But their parents have a really hard time doing it. Why? Because their beliefs are too crystallized. You can teach kids all sorts of stuff. I remember when I did Tony Robbins firewalk, he had a thermometer in the coals. It was 2600 degrees. Long story made short, he taught us how to condition our minds in order to get across the fire without getting burned. Got burned. They had about six ambulances there. Every single person that got scared and could not hold the mantra immediately got burned. You could smell dead, burning flesh everywhere. It was all over the place. There was people in the ambulance. I walked across those coals, and they didn't feel hot at all. It felt like a warm forest floor. And. And what he taught us to do was chant, cool moss. Cool moss. And instead of seeing burning coals, you see cool moss on the bottom of the forest floor. And you practice. And we. He warmed us up all day long, practicing and visualizing, practicing and visualizing. So when you stood at the next of those coals, what you're so hot is like burning your feet, getting close to them. And it's like the length of your office here. This is not like one quick jump. It's like five or six feet full steps to get across that. And he had that oak burning all day long. I mean, this was like 5 inches thick of oak coals glowing red hot. And every single person that got scared and could not hold the mantra got burnt. And anyone that could hold the mantra and believe with conviction that they were walking on cool moss did not get burnt. Now, you know, how many things does somebody have to do before they finally realize that your mind is so damn powerful it'll create a reality, for better or worse, based on what you believe. If you believe there's no God, you will definitely believe there's no God. And you will have a big question mark in your head that will drive you crazy if you're even half conscious. Then how the hell did all this get here? What's breathing me? What's making my heartbeat? You know, there's so many mysteries of life that you can either talk yourself out of exploring them or you can say, I must do whatever it takes to figure this out. And that's ultimately what legitimate spiritual development is doing, what it takes to figure it out. So you actually come to face to face with the truth of who and what you are. And then you have to deal with another reality. When you realize that you are God living, having this experience and so is everybody else, then you better act like it. Because if you don't, then you're just bullshitting yourself. You see my point?

I do. And maybe one of the ways that people fall into the trap of knowing that they're God is that they actually say, no, I'm God. And they operate from an egoic space. That can be a big trap.

Trap that, that's, that's really like people.

That say, I am Jesus incarnated. Yeah, right.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's knowing that you're God as an idea. But nobody truly knows their God that doesn't know everybody else's God. Do you understand my point?

Of course.

There's nobody that really, really knows their God. Like Jesus never had that pathology. Buddha never had that pathology. No truly enlightened person ever has the idea that they're God and you're not. That's one of the problems with drugs. They can open your mind just enough to get half a truth and you can think you figured it out and stop there and become a royal pain in the ass for everybody else.

Yes.

Yeah. And get locked up in a psych ward. And that's why plant medicines have to be used skillfully and in a sacred manner. And that's why I have very careful analysis and procedures. And I don't do plant medicine work with people that aren't ready to do it and aren't mature enough to handle the responsibility of an awakening like that. Or what you get is a pseudo worshiper.

Yes. Or somebody that has pseudo safety or pseudo confidence where they may say all the great things and this is really prevalent on Instagram. Right. They say all the great things, they have the great marketing. When it really comes down to it, my system, my body can feel that what they're saying is not embodied in them.

This is why I quote, I don't know the author of this quote. I can't remember. I learned it many, many years ago. But it's very profound. Never judge a man by the creed or woman by the creed he or she professes, but by the life he or she leads. I don't care what people say to me if I don't see evidence of it. Yeah, I know that you're just needing healing. You're looking. You're a kid that looks for attention.

This is why people have been so deeply attracted. So right now, on the third camera, we see your book. 25th anniversary, 20th anniversary. 20th anniversary. And then now with Spirit Jam. It's been 10 years. Culminate bubbling. It's been bubbling inside you for 10 years.

I started doing the development 10 years ago, but I started actually building it four and a half years ago.

But it's the fruit. So I. I spent time with you and your wives. I've spent time at your home. Like, we've shared some really cool experiences.

Yeah. And so I helped me move my library.

That's right. We built a library. So. So I. I trust your life. And your life is an embodiment of that which you speak. Even on one of the first calls for Spirit Gym, you came in and cried because you were so grateful and so relieved. And so this. This concept that. That I've really been feeling that's coming from my soul is this concept of a leader that holds a lantern. It's so easy for people to shine light on others. I did it as a trainer for a long time. I would just be of service to others. It happens with massage therapists, with personal trainers, with everyone. We can get caught up. I was. And not actually shining light on myself. So visualize, Paul, a leader holding a lantern. Like, that's how I see you. You hold a lantern, you come in and cry. You share your. Your imperfections. And that's why people can trust you, because your life is an embodiment of that. And that's the real kind of leadership.

That'S needed on Earth. I mean, with everybody.

That's it.

Like, you know, it's kind of like learning a skill. If I was a professional baseball player and you wanted to learn to be a better baseball player from me, well, you probably wouldn't want to pay me A monthly fee to learn how to be a better baseball player from me if I hadn't prove to you that I was really good at it.

Exactly.

But professional baseball players strike out all the time, and they have problems with their wives and money and drugs, and I'm in the game. Like I tell my spirit gym practitioners, I am in the game with you. I have bad days. I tell them, don't work so hard at your spirituality that you start to resent it. Yeah, it's got to be something that you enjoy doing and you're willing to do and do it out of loving. If you can't do it out of love, lay on the ground until the act, the urge to do it at a duty or obligation passes. And don't get up until you can do it out of love or you're not doing it for the right reasons, and ultimately it will have a negative effect on. You'll begin to resent it. You know, if we don't want to grow ourselves out of a genuine interest just to figure out who and what we are and what we're capable of, then we're in it for the wrong game. We're in it for somebody else's accolades and, like, we're trying to get likes on Facebook or something. But, you know, look, I have two wives because I can accept the greatly accelerated spiritual development that comes with that.

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. I'm good. I'm good with one.

Yeah, right. You know, I tell people all the time that say, oh, I want to have two wives like you. You know, they're always thinking about the sex. I say, look, until you can ride one horse really well, trying to ride two is a good way to get yourself killed. You might want to think about that. Yeah, I mean, I won't go into that. What is my point? But the point. All I'm saying is I grow every day. I still make mistakes. I say things to people I wish I hadn't as said, you know, like, every single way you're growing, I'm growing every day you play baseball, I'm playing baseball in some levels. I'm already two or three levels ahead of a lot of people. But every one of my students, there's something and probably many things that you've done and do better than I do. And if I hung around with you long enough, I say, wow, that's how Josh does it. Okay. He just taught me something. Now I'm gonna go practice that I'm watching. My kids, they're teaching me all the time. My Students teach me. Sometimes I feel bad that my students pay me because I actually learn a.

Lot from my students, how I feel from podcasting. I learned so much by holding conversations. We just had my. My first team retreat here a couple weeks ago.

Yeah.

And I got more healing from leading my team. They flew in from all over the world than they got. It was more profound for me, being able to lead in such a sacred way that I realized I was still holding on to residue that you helped me clear at the Heaven House, my addiction to pornography, and this shame dragon that I finally turned and faced in a breathwork journey two weeks ago. And it's like, wow. The way in which you said in spirit, Jim, you said, keep the beginner's mind.

Yes.

Always keep the beginner's mind. I remember I'd read some things in text that Jesus would put children. When he would speak. He put children right there in the middle around all the adults and say, listen. Like they listen.

Yeah.

Keep the beginner's mind is so profound because you've obviously taken people on a roller coaster ride today already. But the beginner's mind is very important because if we think we know, then we're blocked from stuff that we are unconsciously incompetent about. We don't even know that we don't know. Can you speak to that? This is a core pillar.

You know what I say to my students all the time? The most dangerous word you will ever say to me is, I know that. Because I want you to know if you say those words to me, I will task you with demonstrating it.

How so? How so?

Specifically, if I'm teaching you a meditation technique and you say, I know that. Well, I've been teaching these things for many, many years, and I know what happens to people that do that technique for a hundred days in a row. And if I don't see, feel, smell, or taste it in you, I know that you don't know it, but the ego wants to tell everybody that it knows it so that it doesn't have to do the work of growth and confronting itself. And the ego is very much like Watiko that Paul Levy talks about. It's laced with Latico Watiko. So as long as you can say the words, then the ego thinks it knows what it's doing, so it uses the, oh, I know that I don't need to do any more Tai Chi. Oh, I know that I don't need that meditation. I'm just going to watch tv, you know, so what I'm telling my five year old daughter and she's, you know, goofing around with pans on a hot stove. I see, Zoe, don't touch that frying pan. It's hot. I know that. And she reaches out and touch it and gets burned. I said, I thought you said, you know that. So these. You see, the point is.

Yeah.

A real teacher doesn't teach anything they're not already very skilled at. So when you say I know that to a teacher and they're teaching you something, it's because they know that you don't know it. And you know, I've been doing. I started my institute in 1995. I've had 63,000 students come through my institute. So when I'm teaching things like how to activate the lower abdominals or activate the multifidus or how to do a specific corrective exercise. Right. And my student is saying, I know that. I'm thinking, well, then why am I having to tell you that? Because you're not doing it right now. You know, so my point is, you know, as a teacher, an educator, I'm not a guru. I don't want to be anybody's guru and I don't want to be anyone's daddy. Yeah. My job is to create independence in my students to not need me. I am successful the day you don't need me. When you can be awake to the truth of yourself and you can do what it is that I teach in spirit Gym without my help, then I get to stand the mirror and pat myself on the back and say, finally, you created another adult in the world. Now we're getting some somewhere. Right?

And that's, that's the best kind of mentor, the kind that teaches you sometimes through pain and pleasure.

Yeah.

That they actually don't need you. That you've awakened all the answers inside of themselves. It's a platitude. Everything you have is within you. We've heard this. Right. Everything you have is within you. But it doesn't reach people on a practical level. What reaches people, I believe that you teach. Is this keeping the beginner's mind, because that actually allows someone the spaciousness potentially look into, into things that they've believed are so true. Oh, I already know that. That now they can really look at it and go, oh, that's not the truth of my soul. So look, I have a reductionized question for you. It's completely related to all your work because I want to speak to the people out there. I would love for you to speak to the people that are with Us that are beginning the journey, they've had some pain and they've had issues in their lives. Maybe it's a divorce, maybe it's a loss of a child. I mean, I can't even imagine.

Yeah.

How would someone keep a beginner's mind and be open in the same way that children were open to the teachings of Jesus when they're going through massive amounts of pain and suffering? How can we keep the beginner's mind in a body of pain?

Well, it's actually surprisingly easy when you're in pain, because the fact that you're in pain means you have not figured out what's causing the pain or you would have resolved it. So to keep the beginner's mind open means I must listen to the pain and let it teach me. In other words, the pain is actually a message. But if I don't hear it and I keep trying to drug it or numb it or get rid of it, not get rid of it by engaging it and, you know, doing the things you got to do to heal, which could be changing your diet. It could be using the right supplements, the right herbs, the right essential oils, the right, I mean, enzymes. I mean, it depends on what's causing the pain. It could be emotional pain. You know, like oftentimes, divorces come simply because we're not willing to show enough interest in the other person's wants, feelings, and needs for fear that we won't get our own met. So whatever it is we're not willing to look at into ourself, we project onto the other person, we label it and judge it, and we make them the bad guy so that we can avoid having to do the work of accepting responsibility for our own inadequacies in the relationship. So the simple point I'm making is to keep a beginner's mind means let the pain guide you to the truth of what it is that you need to know. And if you think you know it, but you haven't healed it, you've just chopped the top off of a weed, it'll come back. You know, there's just no question about it. You know, you either pull the weed out by the root or it grows back quickly. So if you're just taking aspirin for headaches, it'll always come back because you haven't addressed what was causing it. Is the biochemical imbalance, Is it dehydration? Is an atlas subluxation? Is it a malocclusion of your teeth? Is it a unresolved head trauma from the Past. I mean, the long list of things that could be. Be cancer. It could be anything. The. The point is, is that if you actually use common sense and say, okay, what am I doing in my life right now that could cause a headache. Well, I'm staying up really late at night, and I've been doing that for a long time. That'll do it. Maybe you ought to listen to your body. Maybe the pain in your head is because your brain's exhausted and it wants you to go to bed. But you got to keep a beginner's mind. If you think, oh, it couldn't just be me not going to bed, you know, nothing would give me a headache like that. That's just not going to bed. Well, now you don't have a beginner's mind anymore. Say, well, what does my body need right now? What am I feeling inside? So when we develop an honest relationship with the pain, it guides us every time.

One of my favorite things from Rumi, one of our therapists and a mentor of mine, Margo Running. She's been on the show. We sat with her and in Maui, and we were on the book, and she flips open a page and says, read this. And it was roomy. And it said, the cure for the pain is the pain.

Yeah.

So it's this universal truth that God is allowing or affording through you because you are God and through her. Whenever I get two or three things that are very wise from people that I trust, I pay attention. Yeah, I pay attention. But there's something in us that we and I speak collectively. Have you seen that social media clip where the woman has a nail in her head and she goes to her husband, she's like, I just have a headache. And he's like, well, maybe it's the nail in your head. And she's like, no, you're not listening to me. I feel like that's really what we're talking about here. Sometimes the truth is so profound, it's right in front of our eyes. Like what Rumi says, the cure for the pain is the pain. Yet we have to develop the courage to actually feel it. We have to have the courage to feel the pain. And it's not to shame or blame myself or anyone, but sometimes that courage is just. It's so challenging to have the courage to actually face our own pain.

Yeah. Well, then, you know, think of the pain as wind and it's. Or thinking. Think of it as a magnetic field. It's always orienting your north star. It's moving the needle on the compass. So this is why I say you always have to have a clear dream for yourself, for your life, and a clear dream for each situation. So if you say I've got a really bad headache, I say, what's your dream for this situation right now? What's your goal? My goal is to not have any pain in my head. Okay, so the pain is actually your North Star is not having any pain in your head. But the needles pointing due east. If you keep going in the direction you're going, you're going to have more pain. So you have to say, okay.

What.

I'm going to do is I'm going to watch this pain really carefully. I'm tired, so I'm going to go to bed, I'm going to wake up in the morning and, and if the pain's less, I'm going to, wow, I got sleep and my pain was 8 out of 10. Now it's 7 out of 10. Now the compass needle is moving from east toward north. Then what? You know, I've been skipping meals because I'm always in a hurry to get to work in the morning because I keep staying up late night watching television and I don't have time to eat heat. I'm drinking coffee on an empty stomach and I'm not drinking any water all day. Maybe I should try eating breakfast and drinking half my body weight in ounces of water for taking me. Oh my God. The pain is now down to 70% reduced. Now the needle's almost at north again. What are you doing? You're listening to the pain and you're paying attention to what makes it worse and what makes it better. Then you might, you know that you might see a, a therapist, a doctor or somebody. And you know, they, they say, how do you feel if you eat a fatty meal? And you say, well, I don't feel very good. I get tired and I actually feel off. And they might say, well, do you ever get pain behind your right knee after a fatty meal? They say, yes, that's a reflex from your gallbladder. So maybe you're actually having a gallbladder problem and we should try giving you some bioptimizers, enzymes that break down fats for you so that when you eat a meal, you have more support breaking the fats down. And they go, oh my God, my headache's gone now. It wasn't just the fat in the meal. It wasn't just the gallbladder problem. It was the sleep. It was the, you know, staying up late at night. It was not Hydrating effectively. You know, it was a combination of factors, but. But you see, I just painted a picture that says the beginner's mind starts watching and paying attention, and almost everything that you do is going to make the pain better or bait worse to some degree. Some things might not shift it at all. Well, you know, it's not that, so. But if you convince yourself that you already know what it is and you talk yourself out of the fact that you know that you don't want to hear that staying up late at night because you're in love with your TV show, well, that's not a beginner's mind, you know, so enjoy your pain.

There's one piece in the practitioner's credo. Now, I'm not going to give the whole program away. And by the way, it's a year. Year program. Yes, it's a year long spirit, Jim.

No, it's forever. You buy a membership that's a year long.

Okay?

It's as long as it takes you to get through the lessons and as long as you want to be there. Because even though the lessons are already developed, I do something new every week that's either a piece of the lesson or I just connect to the souls of everybody in the group and I ask my soul to go talk to everyone and see what it is. That would be the common denominator that we the most helpful for everybody to know. And it's always amazing because I often get 10, 12, 15 emails or messages. Paul, I cannot believe you're talking about. This is exactly what's going on in my life right now. And they, you know, they're always think it's a mystery, but they don't realize I'm just talking to their souls. So each sangha is a fresh presentation that's not in the lessons that are filmed.

And what is a sangha?

Sangha means I get together.

Okay.

A gathering. You know, it's, it's, it's sort of a Hindu conception. When a bunch of people get together to worship together, that would be like.

A song or to dream together, which is my favorite one. It's the one I resonate with most. There's 11.

You can read it.

Number four. We dream together.

We dream. If you want.

So, practitioners, Creator number one. Beloved source or God.

Yeah.

Blessed I am, in you I love. We dream together. Which, when I hear that, I'm just like, ah, that just. It sticks to my soul. Number four. I manifest my life with you. My challenges are opportunities. I create in harmony with the dao. My Highest self is my guide. I abide, reflect, and represent. I grow in wisdom, a gift to all. I embrace impermanence and create anew. We are safe. We are home. We are whole. Aho, Great spirit.

It is.

It is done. It is done. It is done. I mean, all of these make the hair on my arms stand up, but especially number four, because I shared with you, and it's on the screen right now for y' all watching. One of the ways I've been most inspired by your teaching since 2008. Man, so many amazing things. Not to mention our podcast back when it was living 4D, when you said, josh, what do you really want? I said, I want a partner. I want a woman. You're like, well, repeat after me.

Soulmates prayer.

The soulmate's prayer. One of the things I've learned from you that's. That's on the screen right now is my dream is far greater than any crisis.

Yes.

Because that's been a big issue in my life, where I've worked through. It's part of my dharma to just be Josh, to just be authentically Josh and just to feel good about being Josh and to love Josh through that. And when I see this number four, we dream together, that's the credo for me that I just attach to, and I love it so much, because if we're not dreaming together, what the hell are we doing? What are we even doing if we're not dreaming together? So we don't have time to go into all 11. Y' all obviously get to join spirit gym to get all 11 and so much more. It's the tip of the tip. Yeah.

Well, those are. Those are those just so you know, those lines. Each line is the synthesis of what that principle represents in your life. Now, there could be 10, 12 lessons for any one of those principles. Right? But we dream together is number four. So that's the principle of the four, which is the archetype of wholeness. So, for example, you've got the archetype of the child, the warrior, the king and queen, and the wise man, wise woman. You've got om, I awaken, I'm dreaming, I'm falling asleep. Underscore new cycle. So that's the four. So we're dreaming together means we're creating wholeness together. Whether we realize it or not, we're all growing together.

And I'm 44 years old.

44.

Which maybe is part of the numerology that attracts me to that.

Yeah.

I'd like to dream that into reality.

44 is 8. So numerologically, that's the principle of the 8, which is self, reflection and spirit. Jim. So there's 10 lessons on the principle of the 8 in Spirit Gym, all of which is about how to do shadow work, what union complexes are, how to identify them, how to work with them, what soul loss is, how to heal it, and how to do daily shadow work. And what are the four areas we need to look at our life on a daily basis and self reflect so we don't care. Keep making the same mistakes over and we can represent ourselves more dream affirmatively each day.

One practical nugget that I would just love for you to share is something you mentioned on a call, and I'd love for us to wind our conversation into this now, because, Taylor, we love you. Thank you for being here. Paul, you and I could podcast for two more hours, easy.

I don't even know how long.

I don't even know. Time is not here. But you said in someone's question that was very heartfelt. I felt this guy's question so profound, and I felt it in my life, too. When we look at Mark Wolin's work of generational trauma or epigenetic transfer, Mother in utero, where the baby comes out wired for trauma, sympathetically driven. And I think about this question a lot in my own life. The way I show up for my son and my daughter healing, the way that my father will bark at me in my mind at times, he'll literally be in my mind, and I'll meet it with compassion or meet it with judgment. He asked you, Paul, what are the epigenetics around our healing generational pain? And you said, well, your genes are the physical manifestation of the habitual patterns of creation within each family system.

Yeah.

Unpack that in a way that's practical for people, please. Because epigenetics is a hot term.

Well, see, the genes are really like a piano keyboard, and the environment is what's playing the keyboard. Okay. So if you're in an environment where it's hot all the time, you're going to get a different genetic response than being an Eskimo, where it's cold most of the time. So the body's actually going to generate a lot higher degree of thermogenesis if you're cold all the time. So the genes that are involved in controlling thermogenesis will upregulate. But if you're in Hawaii or Texas in the summer.

Yeah.

Then you're not going to crave heavy, fatty foods. It'll make you too hot, especially at night, you'll sweat your ass off. But you'll crave watermelon, you'll crave cantaloupe, you'll crave water, you'll crave vegetables. Raw, like a salad. Because all of those things actually support the body epigenetically. They're coming from the environment, and they help have a balancing and a regulating effect on the body. So, but if people just get in fixed eating patterns, like they always want steak and potatoes, like the carnivore crew, like the carnivore people, then they're not actually interfacing with the epigenetic signals of the environment. And they're basically telling their body, it's winter outside. And so the body is listening to the signals coming in because the food molecules are real and they have an influence on us. Just like every. All your bacteria in your microbiome is also sending signals epigenetically to regulate the body. So essentially, all I'm saying is, is that we must be conscious of that fact, that the physical, emotional, and mental environments are all actually inputs that are playing the keyboard. And what we're experiencing inside of ourselves and in our lives is the response to the epigenetic environment. If we get our minds out of the way and stop resisting, then our body will innately make the adjustments necessary. But if you're on a rigid diet, then your body can't make the adjustments. If you are in a relationship and your partner wants to try different sexual positions, but you've got some idea in your head that says no, you know, that's dirty in the eyes of God, then the epigenetic signals from your girlfriend or partner that wants to play and explore are being shut down by a belief system, which will probably lead to tremendous boredom for the person that wants more play in their life, and it'll lead to a relationship crisis. So if you think of it as an emotional gene or a mental gene, it's not responding to the stimuli, which means there's a lack of love, which means there's a lack of appreciation for the wants, feelings, and needs of your partner. So now you're forcing them into your reality, but not being considerate of their desires, which means you're not in a relationship. You're just looking for a sex toy or a slave or someone that'll do exactly what you want, which isn't a relationship.

It's.

It's. It's a. It's sort of a child attitude toward an adult proposition.

So the healing generationally would be in the same Lane, if I'm healing myself and I'm doing the work in spirit gym or just in my own process, whatever that looks like, then that would essentially mean. Would it be possible that as I heal myself, it sends a ripple into all time space continuum?

It does.

It heals everything from past, present, and potentially future as well?

Yes, based on Mark Willin's work and many others, anytime you heal something such, if there's a history of addiction in the family, say to gambling or to drugs, if you heal that, it knocks it out of the what Rupert Sheldrake calls the morphogenic field, which in spirituality is called a group soul. So what, your genes are tapped into every single family member of your family tree. And so you're actually in a real time connection with the group soul. So all the people that have died are on the other side that have used those genes to express themselves in life. The genes are a cosmic antenna. They are sensitive to light, they are sensitive to spirit. They're soaked in water, which has 65 octaves of vibrational sensitivity, which is a number so vast it's. There's not even a name for it. If you do the math, a piano, piano keyboard is seven octaves. So your water molecules in your body, which are 99 of your body by molecular count, 99.9. If you put all the molecules of your body out on a table and counted them, 99.9 of them would be water. And so water is so, so sensitive. It's sensitive to psychic energy. There's tons of experiments showing all this.

Even the hard drives of the future will be water.

They are water. Have been for a long time. The Cray supercomputer was a long time. The most powerful computer in the world. Hard drives made out of water. Almost all the major computing systems in the world use water as hard drives now. But the point I'm making is your DNA is soaked in water. And so water is sensitive to energy from the spiritual dimension, which is psychic energy. And it's also responsive to the physical environment. So if there's a long history of cancer or violence in the family, let's say, then the souls that have not resolved that are still in the afterlife carrying that unresolved energy.

Yeah.

And so because you're wearing the genes that tap into that soul group, when you're wearing a body with that family jeans, all that psychic influence is still alive because spirit doesn't die. The body dies, but the spirit doesn't die. So that the people that have worn that body plan, that are of that family tree. That's why we have a family tree. This is why almost all native cultures worship their ancestors, because they're still guiding them and they're still trying to help them know.

But there's.

They can also be problematic because they're trying to give you 2000 year old ideas in a modern world. Yeah, then they can also be problematic. So the point is, you know, Mark Woolen's book, it didn't start with you, goes into this very, very well and it's an award winning book. And he's. And I've got a podcast with him. Yeah, you could podcast with him.

I've podcasted with him twice and we, Carrie and I did a private session with him. He'll rip your hair back. He'll grow new hair for you and rip it back.

Yeah, no, he's the real deal.

He's the real deal.

He's a lovely soul too.

Yeah, he is.

But. So the point that I'm making is, you see, this goes back to your, your concern about dying. You don't die. And, and when you, whatever you have not resolved in this lifetime will go with you and your children will have to work on it. This is why Jung said all children are tasked with the unfinished business of their parents lives. That's a fact. So let's just say you still had the porn addiction and you died with it. Even if your kids didn't know about it. They're going to have to carry it out because your soul is still in resonance with their genes. You understand? So everything that's unresolved in you actually is like a flow of desire that's coming through the psychic energy that the DNA of their bodies is picking up because they're in resonance with you as their father. So think of the genes like a D and a spiritual DNA, a spiritual antenna system. And it doesn't matter. And, and there's some researchers that says goes, say it goes back 21 generations. And they do this with tests. I won't explain it because too much to explain. But they do it with tests that are undeniably giving evidence. Okay, so once Josh heals the porn addiction in life, any of your children now will not have to deal with it because you've neutralized that energy. And so now there's no longer the negative factor. That's the desire, that's the drawing factor. Oh, right. So once you knock the desire out for that, it's no longer a desire resonating through the psychic energy in the genes. So they just simply wonder why people have this porn addiction look. You know, like, people that don't like the smell or taste of cigarettes walk around going, who would want to suck on that nasty thing all day?

Yeah.

But if they were from a family of smokers, they would be wondering, why does nobody enjoy smoking like I do? You know?

Yeah. I remember being a young child, it's not to call my dad out like, I love you, dad, and you did the best you could. But I remember when I was 10, I would go, we would visit him twice a month, and there would be like, Playboys on the table. And then I was snooping in his room, which kids do, and I found a porn dvd. And it makes sense to me. It's not to place blame on my father at all because he came from a Pentecostal, very dogmatic father, that probably when I really feel into it, he may have had issues with pornography and sex of his own. So I can feel it back, like there's truth in what you're saying, because I can feel it when you say it.

Just remember the rule. If you can't, you must. Whatever you tell a children a child, they cannot do, they must do. Don't drink the alcohol. I got to. Don't touch. Don't touch your genitals. I must do.

Yeah.

Why? Because it's our nature to explore. And without that desire to explore, evolution would halt. Stop exploring.

So then I loved how you tied in the water and how it's so sensitive to being literally encoded with epigenetic information that passes on through millennia, past, present, and future. The coolest part about that is we have the power to change.

We have the power to.

How amazing that God wants to experience that.

This is why I say to people with addictions like this, if you cannot do it for yourself, do it for your family, Simply do it for your family. Because a lot of people don't have the self esteem, the pride, the libido, the. The. The. The focus to do something for themselves. But if you realize that you're passing it on to your entire family tree until someone steps up to the plate and says, I'm going to heal this.

Yeah.

So if you can't do it for yourself, do it for the people you love.

Yeah. Have you ever had a dragon of addiction in your life that you did the work on to move through, and then you realized it was connected to your father or your mother or someone in your lineage or was it just specific to your life?

If my father was addicted to anything, it was to having sex with a lot of women. You know, my dad was a very good looking man. He was a competitive dancer, a professional drag racer.

He looked very much a good combo dude.

Everybody that's ever seen a picture of my dad, all my friends, he looks just like James Dean. And he does, you know, he was jet black hair, beautiful body. You know, he's a felt just like me, like a boxer. But he just loved women and I really love women. And it was my first marriage of 17 years. I realized I am not cut out to be a monogamous man. I just, I just, I feel like I'm suffocating and it's just unnatural to me. So I made a commitment to myself. I wouldn't get married again unless I married a woman that would agree to having an open relationship under the term. As long as we love each other enough to work through our problems, we stay together. But let's not drag each other through this just because we're, we think we owe it to God to stay married till death do you part, because I've watched that destroy people's lives. So lo and behold, Great Spirit brought me Penny and she's. We've had that agreement and it's been the greatest thing. But there's been many times in my life where I've wondered, like, why do I keep chasing after and making love to all these beautiful women? One Penny deserves more of my love and more of my attention because she's just absolutely, mind blowingly an amazing woman. And so I've always felt like it's hard for me to differentiate how much of it is just being a healthy male and how much of it is my father working through me. Because my mother told me lots of stories about, you know, him running off with his dance partners even when he had kids and not, you know, taking care of her, not providing money and just things that, you know, I wouldn't want in me as a man because it would just, it would be too hard for me to deal with, especially with the level of spiritual reality that I have awareness of. So if there's one thing I think might be coming through my father.

Oh.

Now he also liked drugs and my brother had a real drug problem. I've never had drug problems. I've always been open to exploring. But I absolutely will not do drugs that are addictive like cocaine or anything like that because I'm too committed to my, my legacy. I'm too anchored in why I'm here in the world. And I won't let anything get in the way of me finishing what I came to the world to do because. Because quite frankly, I need a long rest. And I've. I've. I've. I've talked to my soul many times, said, look, I. I need a long rest after this. I can't. I just pl. Promise me we're not going to fall into the trap of trying to rescue people anymore. We need a long rest. So it's been very important to me in my life to finish what I came to the world to do. And I'm very clear about when any kind of drug or anything's going to stop me from. I'm my own best taskmaster. I don't. I've never needed someone to try to encourage me to train. When I was a fighter, I didn't need anyone to push me. When I was a triathlete, I never needed anyone to try to encourage me to train. I often like training alone because I don't like to have to carry along whiners and complainers and poor me. Athletes. So in my work, which is my spiritual mission, I never had the problems my brother had. My brother always had a hard time finding himself. He had a hard time finding north on his compass. There was something in me that was always pointing north at every step of my life, whether it was athletics or the responsibility of being a dad or being committed to making enough money that I didn't have to struggle for money because I watched my parents fight about money all the time. So I knew early, I'm not playing that game. Yeah, I'll do whatever I got to do. So, because you asked the question, I think probably the only thing that I've got to watch is even though I have two wives and we made an agreement to stick to each other, you know, because I used to have, you know, enough women to keep my life very interesting, very exciting, but also complicated.

But wouldn't that pull Chi away from your mission is.

Well, my rule was if you get in the way of what I'm. My work, then my relationship's not in harmony anymore. So.

So then what part of that relationship with multiple women fed your soul and not your father's addiction?

Well, the. The part of the women that I love is. Is what I love to explore. And two, when you travel the world like I do and you're intelligent enough and fit enough, women are very attracted to you because you're interesting to them and, you know, you're the alpha male type. They. Let's just say it's never been hard for me to find beautiful women that wanted to make love to Me. And I like to. You know, all the women that I made love to were women that I had resonance with. They weren't just women I met in a bar. There were people that were either taking workshops from me or were teachers of something that I knew or were great athletes that I'd worked with at one time or another. I mean, they're all, like, really intelligent, highly accomplished people, you know, like, people that I just was so in awe of, you know, just like, I wanted to make love to them just to say, my God, I see God in you, and I want to celebrate that with you. And there was just this in common, you know, And. And so was very hard for me to say no to that. It's like, you know, when someone's beautiful enough to hug and kiss and pet, I don't want to be stopped because I know what it's like to have sexual union with someone and celebrate life at a deep level like that. But with that level of sexual intimacy also comes the complications of a person's life. And because, you know, I often had a lot more money than they did and a lot more knowledge on stuff, certain things. Next thing you know, the phone's ringing, my dad's sick, I need your help. I don't have enough money. I need money. You know, you get five of them going like that, and all of a sudden, your whole life is just everybody's problems and everyone wanting money. And I got to the point where I just could not focus anymore because I felt like I was too busy rescuing people that were less important than the core family and that the sex was not. And the friendship at that level was not bringing me. It was bringing me away from having the time to focus on Penny or focus on Angie or focus on my work. So after about 20 years, I realized, okay, I cannot fulfill going deeper in the most important relationships in my life, and I cannot have the same time I need to finish my legacy if I keep having to go out and be involved in this many lives. And so I did what I had to do to learn what I came to learn. And I needed to learn these things because I've had to coach many elite athletes who are having a lot of these problems, and very rich people and movie stars and all sorts of people I've worked with. You know, people are much more likely to listen to me as a therapist when they know I already know what I'm talking about. And it's not just me being some puritanical Christian saying, God's going to burn you in hell. I mean, I never talk that way. You know, I say, you know, you, maybe you need to go do the exploration for yourself, but here's where the booby traps are. So let me tell you what to be aware of, you know, and like one of them is, don't lie to the woman that you're were married to. Many, many of these people that came to be in really serious trouble emotionally, mentally and spiritually were lying to their wife. Often Christians, often with multiple kids. And I'm talking professional athletes that sometimes have six, eight of these girls going at once, all thinking they're going to marry them. And I would say to them, you must be honest. I, I'm not going to teach you how to tell lies. I'm not going to teach. Teach you how to live in a way that's going to attract more shadow and more darkness into your life, because you don't need to pay me to do that. There's anybody that'll do that for you out there. Any drug dealer, any idiot will do that for you. And so the problem is, is they did not want to be honest because if they did, they had to admit they've been doing this for a long time and they were absolutely sure their wife was going to burn the house down and take at least half of their money. So, but, but a lot of times they were coming to me because they were having health problems and structural problems like chronic low back pain that wouldn't go away, chronic knee pain that wouldn't heal, chronic digestive trouble, sexual impetus, couldn't get it up. Even though they're with the most beautiful women in the world, they can't get an erection. But they're the fittest athletes in the world. And like, what the hell's going on with me? I'll tell you what's going on with you. There's a deeper part of you that knows that if you keep doing this, one day you're going to get caught. And so your soul is shutting your body down to protect you from destroying the lives not only of your wife, but your children. And so what I'm really saying is, if I hadn't have lived through this and had an intimate knowledge of the ropes, so to speak, of the ins and outs of this, I wouldn't have been useful to these people.

Yes. So this was part of your soul knowing itself. The truth of your soul was this journey of. But now it's a clean container, for lack of a better term. Yeah, it's you with two wives, don't master two horses. Until you've mastered one. I feel for my own soul evolution that polyamory can be an incredible distraction from actually doing deeper work. Now for someone that's down your lane, maybe not.

Well, look, if you can't, if you can't have the discipline and the commitment to do the depth of work you got to do to really be in love with and care for yourself and bring the best of Josh to the world that you can. The more women you add to your life, the less time you're going to have to do that and the more problems you're going to have. Because all the shadow material and all the stuff that you're telling yourself you don't have time to fix is exactly what's going to get in the way of those relationships. So the difference is, is because the bombs are invisible, you're always going to blame it on somebody else. And you'll find very quickly that people don't like being blamed. And you see, the problem is other people can see our shadow. They see where we're being an. We don't think we are. They see where we're being judgmental when we don't think we are. They see where we're being short tempered or, or undisciplined when we don't think we are. You know, we're always blind to our own shadow. That's why it's called a shadow. It's behind you. And so you know, and this is why I warn people. As you wouldn't be in such a hurry to find your soulmate because you'd be getting ready for your soulmate. Who's your soulmate? Your soulmate is the person that loves you so much. They will tell you exactly the truth of what they experience with you. For better or worse. They'll tell you when you're lying. They'll tell you when you're being an. They'll tell you when you're not following through on your commitments and if you're not ready for your soulmate, you will reject her and keep looking for the woman that you already had. And the next one one will do the same to you. And eventually you're going to have to stand face to face in the mirror and cry your goddamn eyes out because there's not anyone left to put up with your. So your soulmate is the mirror that God sends to you that will love you enough to let you do that for them. And if the two of you can survive each other, you found your soulmate. If you don't survive each other, you're not mature enough to have a soulmate.

Well, that flies in the face of Cinderella, Paul.

It's.

It's totally different than Cinderella.

Cinderella is a fantasy. A soul mate is a reality. And Penny is my soul mate. And I actually happen to have two of them.

Why do you think you needed two?

I. I think I needed 2 because the magnitude of my mission is not something that's easy for Penny and I to carry alone. And Angie has tremendous skills and abilities that enhances both of our lives. Adds a lot of depth and dimension to the Institute. And she brought children in my life that Penny would not have brought into my life because she didn't want to be a mother, and she made sure she wouldn't be medically. And I think Penny really did want children without the hassle. And so God brought him to her through the back door, through Angie. And I think that I was reaching a point where I felt like I was getting exhausted of the world and that I was like. I felt like I'm, I'm, I'm done. I've done what I came to do. I, I. Lightning can strike anytime. I'm ready to go. But then when my first one, Mana, which is my second, my first one's 45, and I have a grandson. But when Mana came when I was 54, it sparked a realization in me that I had to stay in shape. I had to stay in the game, and I had to stay around because the world had become so dangerous and complicated for a child. I knew that I had to carry the responsibility of preparing my child. And then he needed a sibling because we could tell he just was too alone. And so we agreed to let him have another, whether we didn't know it was a boy or a girl. But it was Zoe. I wish I could tell you some stories about those two, about what they know about each other, but I think Great Spirit sent the kids to put me back in the game, to give me a second wind as, as, as sort of to help me fulfill my responsibility to humanity. I needed something to so close to home that it was undeniable that when I put my awareness to what's going on with children again, as a father, it's scary as hell. And so it reinvigorated my passion for studying Steiner's teachings on children. And me and Angie and Penny are all totally in love with the kids. And we have studied a lot and learned a lot more than I already knew. And we are ever more aware of how dangerous the environment is for children. And so the kids I think were Great Spirit's way of putting a second wind into me, and I needed it because the earth plane was getting flat for me after being a therapist for as long as I had and hearing the same damn stories over and over and the same. And, you know, having such deep spiritual experiences and having everybody tell me I'm crazy. And, you know, I've been a pioneer and an inventor, and, you know, you know, pioneers are always the guys with arrows in their backs, and I've pushed the envelope on lots of stuff, and I just got to the point where I just felt like I was just walking in a sea of, like, you know, very unevolved souls. And I was like, okay, God, when can I finish and get out of here? And, you know, when you get into that state, sometimes, you know, you can attract lightning.

Yeah.

And so it's not like I wanted to commit suicide, but I was saying, when? When am I done? Because I'm. I'm like, I'm not excited anymore. And I've devoted myself in full service to life, so I know there's a lot more out there because I've been there. I'm a remote viewer. Like, I want to go, you know, make love to women in Venus, not here, or something like that as a metaphor. And so I think that the universe just orchestrated it to. Any other thing is, you know, when Penny and I have been married for 28 years now, so, you know, you go through different stages of a relationship, different maturation, your sex life changes. And Angie's, you know, Mexican, and she's full of fire, and she's got a sex drive. Like, you know, I have to stay in shape to keep up to her. I mean, she'll. She's powerful, and so to. To really, you know, be her husband. I don't have enough energy for any women anymore. She sort of just hit the bell and said, you. You want sex? Come get it, buddy.

And so I think it's so beautiful that you were afforded a second wind because it could have worked out a different way. Do you ever reflect on that and just say, thank you, God?

Yeah, I do. Yeah, I. I do. Because if I would have left and watch from the afterlife what's happening to children, it would have broke my heart knowing I. I have a lot of the answers to these problems. Yeah.

Wow. That's a whole nother podcast. Paul, I love you, man.

Thank you. Love you, too.

I have love for you. And the way that you've impacted my life, my family, my dream, we're sitting here part and parcel to the teachings of yourself and many other people who I respect, man.

Yeah, good. Well, that's. That's what growth is all about. And that's. That's proof that God always comes to support God.

As we say goodbye. It seems to me the interwoven in this entire conversation has been you sharing with us how you yourself and how we can live the truth of our soul.

Yeah.

So for people that are watching this for a second time or they've. They're with us all the way to the end, which are seekers, they're. They're seeking the truth, just like I am. That's why it's called wellness and wisdom. I'm seeking both. Yeah. Every moment. And what would be a starting place for someone to know the truth of their soul?

Use your heart to feel what you know. Really, honestly, use your heart to feel what you know. And if you're not sure what to do, just ask what would love do now? And you will have the most profound spiritual practice. You won't need a church. You don't need any fancy equipment. You don't need to spend money, much money. Because using your heart to feel what you know always tells you what your soul really has to say. And doing what love would do now will help put your ego right where it belongs and let your soul shine forth and guide. And if you really want to understand what great masters like Jesus and Buddha were teaching, those two things is all you have to do to be right there with them.

In closing, I'm closing my eyes for all of you that are listening. So if you're in a car, don't close your eyes. Pull over. But the reason I'm sharing this is because this prayer that was inspired by you got me through some really dark times, really terrible internal war. That actually was a gift, and I made it my own prayer. You taught me a much longer prayer, which was the inner sanctum prayer. And I'll leave us with this and then please leave us with spirit gem where people can go get it. Yes, go get involved in the fun journey. Yeah, it's hard, but it's also fun. Because if it's not fun, what the hell are we doing?

As hard as you make.

But it is. When I've had really hard moments, I'll get really quiet, I'll take some breaths, and I'll just ask God, what is it that I most need to learn and how can I be most humble to learn it? God, what is it that I most need to learn and how can I be most humble to learn it. And that statement that I've pulled from working with you has gotten me through so much, because there's so many beautiful things that have come from that. So thank you, man.

Thank you. Thanks for doing it.

Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for being on the journey with me.

Hey, the way the world is right now, we're foolish if we think it's going to change from the top down.

Yeah.

We've got to do it from the ground up.

Yeah.

You know, it's adult time now.

Let's be adults. It's fun. Yeah, being an adult is fun.

Yeah.

You know, let's get in the gym, Paul. Let's literally. Let's literally go to the gym.

All right, bye, everybody.

Before that.

Before that, my spirit gym dot com. My spirit gym dot com. Why? Because it's your spirit gym. I just will meet you there. And use your heart to feel what you know and ask yourself, what would love do now? And I'll tell you, as easy as those words are to say, I still learn and grow every day trying to do that. And so do your best, and I'll meet you there. Aho.

All right, y'. All Tell Paul and I see you on another podcast in the future. We're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon.

Sa.