[Music]
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.
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My guest today is Josh Jost.
Josh started out in a family of strict religious Mennonite people, and he later led a healing
movement during his youth, and he was the healer.
Some miraculous stories around that.
He eventually got married, experienced financial hardship, living in drug-filled slums in Scotland,
I believe it was, cleaning toilets in a factory.
became an advisor to heads of Fortune 500 companies and billionaires and is currently working
with one of the world's most renowned private islands.
Josh's journey has been unusual to say the least.
Fueled by his yearning for awakening, his story is about embracing disillusionment as the path
to enlightenment.
So he lives in Tahiti, which is why we got our time zones mixed up.
I was presuming that was way out in the Western Pacific, but it's actually slightly east of
Hawaii, but it's in the southern hemisphere, and so you're heading into winter, so it's
all very confusing.
But you don't have winter in Tahiti, I'm sure.
So you live there with your wife and youngest son, and we're gonna start out, I guess, talking
about your Mennonite upbringing and the topic of disillusionment, of which you said you
had three major ones.
And I always regard that word as having a positive connotation, because if not being enlightened
is being in a state of illusion, then we want to get disillusioned, right?
Yeah, I agree with you and thanks by the way Rick for inviting me on the on the show this morning. It's a pleasure to speak
Yeah, so I think that
Disillusionment, I think it's something when you know when you're kind of early in the journey of enlightenment. I think it's a very terrifying thing
When you're invested in your illusion, you know in the illusory world and you start to see some cracks in the matrix
So to speak then I think that's really scary
I think as you progress it becomes something that you learn to embrace and almost enjoy as a part of like, okay
There's another part of me that I can let go or another part of my illusion that I can let go and I know that there's
A greater reality that I'm discovering beyond it
So I have come to see it as a positive word, but I don't think it's viewed that way
You know, I would say in the mainstream. Yeah, I'm reminded of that Queen song and other one bites the dust
as we shed our illusions.
Seems to be a lot of that going on right now.
Yeah.
So, considering that we're going to have a conversation about your profound spiritual awakening,
which would resonate very much with Eastern spirituality,
the fact that you started out in a strict Mennonite family
necessitates your having gone through some major shifts in perspective,
hence some disillusionments.
Yeah, indeed.
Yes, I was born in Kansas in a small Mennonite community.
You know, there's sort of a spectrum within the Mennonite world
of those that are very ultra-traditional and those that are still quite traditional but not quite
to the sort of ultra-scale. So, some of them look just like the
Amish in terms of how they live and practice and live
as when they came to the New World a couple hundred years ago.
Others have become a little bit more modern. We've got cars and technology
and so forth, but I still have a very conservative viewpoint of the world.
So, we were a little bit more in the less
ultra side of things, and that happened to do with my dad decided
when he was young that he was going to become an airline pilot, and you know, my grandfather
told him, "There's no way you're going to fly with those contraptions," but he would sneak up
before Sunday school and Sunday mornings and get flying lessons and
eventually worked his way into a flying career. So, you know, I had this
Very strange contrast between living in a community that was very conservative.
We had a lot of cousins that dressed like they were off the set of Little House on the Prairie.
And being in that sort of community space, and then my dad taking me away on trips,
and then visiting London and Paris when I was a kid, and parts of the U.S.,
and having your eyes open to the way the rest of the world was.
So it was an interesting dichotomy to grow up in.
you know, I was very interested in spirituality and purpose and so forth from a young age.
Matter of fact, I even had at one point, this is when we had moved away, we were living in California,
I had a picture story of Bibles, like a comic book version of the Bible for kids, and I would
take that in my, I had a little red wagon, and I put it in my wagon, I'd go around the door to door
telling people about the Bible, because I was just so fascinated with the Holy Spirit. You know, I kind
I guess was always the good kid and sort of did things the way that I was told growing up and
you know did what I was supposed to and then I think my first stage of disillusionment happened
when I was in high school because I went to of course a Mennonite high school this one was in
a community in California and I was doing all the right things and inside I just felt so unhappy
I felt really miserable you know I was looking around at all my Christian friends and you know
I kind of thought you know I think we're all in the same place here we're told that we have the
life, we've got the truth, it's all heaven and joy and all that sort of stuff, but I
didn't feel like any of us were actually living that.
So I just became a, came to sort of point of personal crisis where I said, okay, either
this is something that's worth everything or it's worth nothing.
There's no in between.
If what we say we believe is true, then it's worth everything.
And if it's not true, then what's the point of spending a life living in these religious
confines?
So I began a journey at that stage where I kind of reasoned that I had several generations
of people who had given up everything several times and migrated around the world because
of their religious faith.
They were pacifists, they didn't want to fight in wars.
That would often be what would cause them to move onto a new country because whatever
country they're in, we're trying to conscript them into these battles and they felt like
they were a kingdom, not in this world.
Governments do what governments do.
They've got to protect their people and so on and so forth.
You know we live in a higher order and you know therefore we don't believe that it's right for us to participate in war
We'll be medics and other things I have family that were like medics and things like that in World War two
So they moved around the world because of this faith they had and I thought well certainly
If they were willing to do all of that there must be something to it
I didn't know what but there must be something there worth exploring and I started this period where I said, okay before
before I decided to step out and make my way in the world and just have fun with life,
I'm going to give all this a try and see if there's anything real to it.
So that kind of disillusionment led to a sort of intention that I made at the time of, I'm
going to give this a try and if I can find something real here, I'm going to give everything
to it.
So I started a period for several weeks where I would just lock myself away in my room and
I would just start praying and meditating and just waiting for something to show itself.
And I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know how to find it, but I just knew I had to find something.
And so it was like several weeks of this where I hit, I guess what you would describe as
this sort of transcendental state, but I had this experience where I just felt this incredible
ecstatic joy come over me.
There's a practice that they do in some of the church, which is kind of how it unfolded
for me.
terrible name. They call it being slain in the spirit for some reason. I don't think they came
up with that. But I almost consider it more of a somatic exercise. It's really an exercise of just
sort of surrendering your body physically to whatever experience you're having spiritually,
and it sort of helps you to open up to that. And so that's what kind of happened. I sort of fell
down and I was just in this state for I don't know how long, but I woke up from it and I was like,
wow, this is the most amazing thing I've ever experienced. And I was at the time working a
part-time job after school in this huge factory in our area and my job was
basically to be the janitor and clean all the toilets so there was something
like you know 200 men there and I have to go in and clean the toilets every day.
It was the most disgusting job but I was so enjoying this experience I was having
as I go to school every day I couldn't wait to get there after school every day
and shut the door I'd lock the door out so nobody could come in and I'd have a
couple hours cleaning bathrooms without being disturbed and that whole time I'm
just experiencing this transcendental joy.
So that went on for several weeks and then I had somebody on campus approach me and ask
me for some advice, just very random, out of the blue.
And so I started opening up about this experience that I was having and he got really interested
and this was the Imagine Mennonite school.
There were a few kids there that belonged to local families who sent their kids there
because they knew it was a good school.
So he wasn't a Mennonite and he was kind of known as a school troublemaker.
I told him about the whole experience and I said, "Do you want to try this?"
I had no idea if it would work, but I said, "I'll let you try it."
He said, "Yeah, sure."
We went in the school chapel and I prayed for him.
He fell down and had the exact same experience that I had.
He woke up and went, this sort of look of like, "What on earth just happened to me?"
It was in a complete daze.
He goes, "This is amazing."
He says, "Wait here."
He runs out the chapel and he comes back about 10 minutes later with this girl who was the
the
She's gonna beat me up.
So I very nervously put my hands on her and I explained what I was doing and did the whole thing and the same thing happened to her.
But in the process she broke and just started weeping and just crying.
And she got up and then they're like, "Okay, let's meet here after school."
And then they started bringing all of their friends who were basically all the school rebels.
And before we knew it, we were having these meetings every night at my house where we were having these experiences.
And then spontaneously out of that, somebody just got healed.
I think it was like an ear thing or something like that and they were excited and we were
all kind of a bit shocked.
And this went on for several weeks and then summer came and then of course everybody was
going off to college in various places.
I was a senior.
So the whole thing sort of fizzled out at that stage.
But it really was the start of an awakening for me that there was something more to this
life and I had to find out what that was.
And of course this sort of made me a black sheep amongst the Mennonite community because
you know, they were just horrified that all of this was going on and, you know, this devil work or
whatever it was. So I wasn't very popular in my community when I left, but I spent a year working
with an inner-city Christian organization dealing with gangs and stuff like that in Fresno, because
there's a lot of gang stuff there, and sort of did that volunteer. And then afterwards, I went and
joined a Bible college in Hawaii. So I had this vision that I was going to be doing some sort of
of a Christian ministry, teaching, healing work, that sort of thing. And this was a place
that was sort of open to that stuff. So I got to Hawaii and had some pretty challenging
experiences, I mean in a positive way, challenging my ego and my commitment to what I was doing
and so on and so forth. And I was coming off the back of an experience in Fresno, where
I'm from, where I had started attending this church there and they had this youth pastor
that I absolutely idolized. And shortly before I finished school, it came out that he was
doing some inappropriate things with one of the girls in the youth group. I think she
was over age, she was 18, but still it was incredibly inappropriate and so forth. And
so he was overnight fired and moved away. And it really shook me because I just thought
that this guy was the closest thing to Jesus that I had met. So that was kind of really
weighing on me when I was in Hawaii because I just thought, I don't want to end up like
that. I don't want to have some sort of a gift and get carried away with that and so forth and then
someday end up like him because I've not developed the character to contain that. So that was a kind
of the second stage of somewhat of disillusionment with the trappings of success and worried that
success would become too much for me and I sort of had this feeling of I want to know that I'm doing
what I meant to be doing in this world. So I made an intentive prayer to say, "Okay God, whatever
you have for me in this life, I want it. I want to live the fullness of whatever I'm here to do,
but I don't want you to release me into that until I'm ready." I wanted to make sure that I had the
foundation right before that. And so I expected that, you know, it would be sort of a couple years
of training and development and then I'd start on my way. And then it was just like at that stage,
my whole life just took a turn for the worst. And it just felt like everything started falling
apart, going wrong, to the point that I ended up marrying somebody that I met there who's
from Scotland. She got pregnant within a few months of us getting married. I had to drop
out of Bible college to look after her. We moved to the north of Scotland where I had
like five days of sunshine a year. I mean, I literally one year I could count on one hand
how many days of sunshine I had. And this is for a kid from California. You know, I'd
I come from this fairly comfortable middle class American upbringing and we show up there,
there's no money, I struggle to find work.
I eventually found a job at a restaurant working double shifts, trying to look after this baby
that was coming.
So we had no options for anywhere to stay and we went to the local government council office
and they have a homelessness division and we went in and said, "We need a house, can
you give us something?"
So they took us as a part, you get one choice.
They give you one option and then if you don't take it, well, you're in a hostel or sleeping
rough in a car.
So they take us to this apartment and I show up and it was just horrific.
This woman who lived there for the better part of her life, chain smoking and died in
the apartment.
So all of the ceiling and the walls were just covered in years and years of cigarette tar.
And she had carpets which had just been put down roughly with carpet staples.
So the council had come in and just ripped the carpets up, but they hadn't removed all
the staples. So you imagine the floor was just filled with almost thousands of razor-sharp
spikes and I'm thinking I'm about to bring an infant into this house and I can't even
put it on the floor. And it was just awful in this area. I went to work and told people
where we were living and they're like, "No, you can't be living there." I was like, "Why?"
They're like, "Well, that's Little Bosnia." Because that was during the Bosnia War and
it was like, this was just seen as a war zone locally. So we worked and kind of made the
best of that place and scrubbed walls and pulled up these needles from the floor and kind of
made our best out of it.
But there were times where we'd come home in the evening and there was blood all over our
door because somebody had been shooting up under our light.
The lawn right in front of our apartment was just riddled with hypodermic needles.
We had to pull probably about 40 or 50 out of there.
And you know, we have people pounding on the windows at night and I mean, it's just on and
on.
It was just absolutely one of the darkest experiences of my life.
And I was serious in that dark night of the soul.
I felt like completely abandoned by God.
I felt like, God, where are you?
I've given my life to you and this is where you put me and so on and so forth.
So we finally managed to find a better house in a better part of town.
And this is where the story almost gets better.
We move out of there and it was the private landlord who was going abroad for a year.
And I knew we were just on the edge financially what we could afford.
She had done a deal for us on the rent.
I said, "Okay, if we rent this from you," and we were doing each other a favor because she
didn't want to give up her house if she moved away.
So I said, "We rent this from you.
We need to know we've got a minimum of a year to be able to live here because hopefully by
that stage I'd be financially better off, but any less than that, we'd be in dire straits."
So she agreed, minimum of a year, it was a handshake agreement.
She went off, decided six months later that she didn't want to be abroad anymore and she
was coming home and she wanted her house back immediately.
This happened to happen right over Christmas.
And we had just broken up work from Christmas, but just before Christmas,
I basically got let go from my company because they were in financial difficulty.
And my wife was six months pregnant again at the time with our second.
So it was Christmas time, nobody was hiring, there were no jobs available at the time.
We had no income, we had no savings, and we were just being kicked out of our house again.
So we went back to the council office and asked them for another apartment.
And they took us out, again, one option, they took us out to this neighborhood.
I later on found out it was where they put all the pedophiles.
And now I've got a young daughter, I've got another one on the way.
And the apartment is the exact same story, it's a rinse and repeat from the first one.
We show up, again, somebody ripped up carpets,
thousands of spikes on the floor, just completely awful.
It's a total slum area.
And Scotland has those. I mean, drug abuse in North Scotland is just crazy.
And I'm looking at this place and I'm just thinking, "I cannot do this again. We didn't have an option."
And it was just somewhere inside of me, it was my inner voice or what, but I just had this thought come to mind of,
"I have to believe that life has more for me than this."
I didn't know what, I didn't know how, but I just had to believe that there was more in life for me than what we were experiencing.
So I turned around to the woman there and I said, "I'm sorry, we're not going to take this."
My wife was shocked. She knew we didn't have any options.
But I just said, "I can't do it." I told her, "We have to believe there's more for us."
So we didn't know where to go. So we begged some friends and they let us stay on their
guest room on the floor. And we all happened to also get the flu at the same time.
So it was Christmas. We're sleeping on their floor, posing on them with the flu.
And I just had nothing, nowhere to go and no ideas of what to do.
And so I put out an email to everyone on my contact list and I said,
can you please pray for us because we don't have any options.
We need somewhere to stay.
And I've got this call a few days later from this very proper,
well-spoken English woman, Scottish woman actually saying,
but spoke with that kind of accent saying, Josh,
I've heard about your situation. You must come stay with us.
So I've forgotten this woman was on my contact list cause I only met her briefly
about six months prior.
And she was a very celebrated interior designer in the UK.
She did work for all sorts of celebrities
and wealthy individuals and so forth.
But she and her husband were very close friends
of Queen and Prince Philip at the time.
And when I say close friends,
I mean they came over for dinner every time
they were staying in Balmoral and vice versa.
They went hunting together.
Their kids, Harry and William,
grew up swimming in their pond in the front of their house.
and so on and so forth. And they had this huge Downton Abbey style manor house on a private
estate up in the highlands of Scotland. And it was just like a whole other world, but it
was an hour outside of where we lived. And she said, we want you to come and stay with
us. And I'm protesting because I don't really know them. I don't know how I'm going to live
stay an hour outside of town and find work. So I'm protesting, you know, we can't do that.
She wouldn't take no for an answer. She just kept insisting, you're going to come and stay
with us. So finally I said, okay, this woman was a force of nature. I was like, okay, we
load up our car, we drive outside an hour out of the city where we lived and we were within
a mile of their house. And it was at night, so middle of winter, so it's dark, pitch black,
and we're about a mile from their house and I blow a tire. So we're stuck on the side
of the road and we're already running late. And I'm just thinking, oh, these are, they're
going to be so angry at me. We're keeping them waiting. They're probably foods on the
table and I sheepishly called her up and I'm thinking I have to be the most ineffective
human being on the face of the planet right now. I can't even put a roof over my family's
head. I can't even get them to a place of safety. So I was just completely broken really
at the time. So I called her up and told her the situation and apologized. We'll get it
fixed. We'll be there shortly. All that. And she says, wait right there. She comes flying
down the hill in her Audi and gets out with her shawl on and you know, get in the car,
You know, that sort of thing.
And load all our stuff in the car and they take us up the hill and it's like driving
up the hill is the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen.
This house glowing up on the hill and you come inside and you can imagine being an interior
designer.
I mean, this house had literally been on the cover of the British version of Better Homes
and Gardens and it was just immaculate, but very sort of traditional Baroque style, I
believe.
Not Baroque, it was Georgian style.
So they take us into the kitchen and all the foods on the table, you know, pheasant and
wine and all that.
And we sit down and I'm apologizing profusely that we're imposing on them and, you know,
all of that and making my assurances we won't be there long, we'll be on my feet, we'll get
out, be a couple of weeks.
And she says to me, no, you won't.
I said, I'm sorry.
She goes, no, you're going to be here for six months.
And I said, sorry, I always get teary when I tell the story.
She said, you're going to be here for six months and your baby's going to be born here.
And that's that.
I said, "I don't understand." So she and her husband started telling us the story,
because she and her husband are very spiritual people, you know, within the sort of Christian
faith, but very intuitive. And they had felt six months before that God had told them that
the first six months of the new year, they were not to have anybody stay with them.
Now, they were the sort of people that had people staying with them every single weekend.
There were always house parties at their house. It was just a very popular place.
There was just a revolving door of guests coming in and out of that place. And for six months,
They didn't know why they weren't supposed to have anybody stay with them.
In other words, they weren't supposed to plan to have anybody stay with them because you came but
they weren't supposed to fill the place up with somebody else.
Yes, exactly. They knew there was a reason for it. They just didn't know what so they,
you know, they didn't accept any requests from people. They didn't put out any invitations.
They cleared their calendar for six months. And then she was in the middle of making Christmas
dinner for her family and she had some time while the oven was cooking and she gets down and sees,
She's like, "I'll go check my email," which she never does during the holidays.
She's very disciplined about separating work and family.
But she's like, "I'm going to check my email."
So she checks her email, she sees her inbox and sees my email, and said to her husband
Andy, she said, "Andy, this is why we weren't supposed to have anybody stay for six months."
So they said, "We know that you're supposed to be here.
We've known for six months that somebody was supposed to be here, and we don't want you
to worry about anything.
We don't want you to worry about finding a job.
We don't want to worry about food, diapers.
We have an account at the shop in the village.
We want you to go and help yourself.
Just put it on our account.
We'll take care of it.
And I basically had a six-month retreat
in the Highland of Scotland in this magnificent home.
And I was in quite a bit of shell shock at that time
for the sort of few years I'd been before
and had six months of just decompressing
of all of this experience that we had gone through.
And it just sort of opened me up to, you know,
know that yes, life will take care of us.
Life has a plan for us.
Life has a purpose for us being here.
And I can trust in that.
And it's interesting, ever since then, I've never struggled for housing.
I've lived in the most amazing places well beyond my means ever since.
We just have the most wild, interesting opportunities come to us.
And, you know, even like now where we live in Tahiti, I mean, it's just been absolutely incredible.
And we're just so blessed and fortunate.
And it's just something I've never worried about since that time in my life.
I always know there'll be a place for us somewhere.
So that's kind of the first part of the story.
Maybe take a breath.
Was that disillusionment number one that we just covered?
That was one and two.
So the second disillusionment was when I was in Hawaii and I became disillusioned with this
external measure of what success looked like or had to be.
Oh, I see, I see.
My success in terms of what my divine purpose was.
So that was the second disillusionment.
And the third disillusionment was stepping back to my Bible college days, because that's
important to understand here. One of the things I did when I was in Bible college, it was a
modular program, so you do one course for a compressed period of time. And so I did
a nine-month course called the School of Biblical Studies, which was an inductive course on
the Bible. So the idea was you set aside all preconceptions about what the Bible's saying
in terms of the doctrine that you've been taught growing up and your taught principles
of hermeneutics and how to understand the history around each particular book of the Bible and
apply logic and reason to making sound interpretations of what the Bible is actually saying for itself.
It's meant to be an approach to letting the Bible speak for itself but understanding within
its context. So every book of the Bible is essentially a letter written by someone to
someone for a specific purpose. It has a specific message, a specific idea it's trying to drive
home. So to understand, it can't mean anything to us it didn't mean to the original audience.
So the principle is let's understand what it meant to the original audience and then we can
understand what might be applicable to us outside of that because some of it is cultural and it was
speaking to specific context, specific issues at the time. It wasn't necessarily meant to be
interpreted the way we do in the modern day, which is where a lot of modern Christianity derives its
proof text things or it takes things very literally and then tries to apply it to our current situation.
Yeah, that's a healthy approach. I wish that certain political factions could do that with
the Constitution and the founding fathers as well. Indeed, yeah, we should take that approach with
anything. You know, I mean, if you opened up somebody else's inbox and started reading through
your emails, you're only getting half the conversation. You're liable to draw some
pretty strange conclusions without being able to see the entire email thread.
Did you have to study Aramaic and Greek and anything like that?
- Ancient Hebrew, I studied bits and pieces here and there, not enough to where I could read it,
but you have to get into a lot of word studies to understand because so much of it's locked up
in figures of speech and metaphor. And that's where it's very commonly misinterpreted because
we take things literally that were meant as a figure of speech to sort of drive home a point.
And through the course of the nine months that I was in this program, we had to read the Bible
five times and write a paragraph by paragraph commentary on the entire Bible. So it was
incredibly intense. You were studying morning till night, but it was also really fascinating
because you saw the way, and you studied it chronologically because people don't know
the Bible's not chronological in how it's ordered. It's ordered thematically. So you
have narrative books, you have prophecy books and poetry books and so on and so forth. It's
ordered in that way as opposed to in a chronological order. So some books are chronological within
they're set.
Pete: Also, may I ask here, do you believe, as some do, that the Bible is just sort of
a small subset of all the potential information that it could have included and that there
are all kinds of things that were either never found or edited out for various political reasons
or doctrinaire reasons, so that it's not necessarily as complete as it could have been?
Well, there's certainly indications in what we have that there are scribal changes. Now,
some of those might not be as malintended as they were. I mean, some of them might just
be, they misunderstood something and went, "That can't be right. We're just gonna change
that letter to that." And you also see some differentiations in the manuscripts with some
of the, you know, the New Testament books where some of them have additional portions
that were into them that they think were added later. But I think it's an important segue,
I'm glad you brought that up.
Just to embellish it just a little bit, so for instance, Yogananda in "Autobiography of a Yogi"
argued that reincarnation was edited out of the Bible at the Council of Nicaea or some such thing
and that they didn't do a really thorough job because there are little hints and snippets of
it that got left in. That's really fascinating and by the way I loved "Autobiography of a Yogi",
I thought it was a phenomenal book and it came along at a very important time in my life.
Reincarnation and the Bible is a very interesting topic. There certainly are cases where they
believed in it, right? Because they believed that Elijah was going to be reincarnated and,
you know, became John the Baptist. Well, some of them believed that that was Elijah and Jesus said,
alluded that, you know, he was Elijah reincarnated. Elijah was one of the great prophets, by the way,
in the Old Testament for those who don't have that background. And then, for example, Jesus,
many believe was also the priest Melchizedek, King Priest Melchizedek, who was living a second
incarnation. As Jesus. As Jesus. And Paul talks about, you know, you were a priest, I believe it
was Paul, you were a priest in the order of Melchizedek, and then he talks about how the way
that Abraham treated Melchizedek indicated that he believed that he was of a higher level of being.
He was essentially a divinity because he made a sacrifice to him which he wouldn't have done
any other way and brought him an offering. So there's those indications, but then when you
look into New Testament history, there's, you know, for example, Origen, who was a very famous
New Testament early Christian theologian who was a reincarnationalist. But what I find most
fascinating, and this is jumping ahead a little bit in the story, but there were three main sects
within Judaism at the time of Christ. There were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and there was another
group, they're a bit more enigmatic, called the Essenes. And the Pharisees were the very staunch
traditionalists, they were the right wing of the day legalists, that kind of thing. And the Sadducees
were more this sort of contemporary liberal modernists and they were kind of nihilists,
they didn't really believe there was an afterlife. And they were the ones that kind of ran Israel of
the day. And then there was this group called the Essenes, they were a little bit more enigmatic,
they were like a mystical group. And they had, they had, they lived in sort of little communes.
So, they had one in Nazareth. I believe there was one in Mount Carmel, or it was close to
Mount Carmel. I know, like, Mount Carmel was very special to them. They had one in Jerusalem.
They had one in Alexandria, I believe, in Egypt. There was one in Egypt somewhere. And
then they had one in Qumran, and they kept a library of documents in Qumran, which we
now know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we know from their writing that they were reincarnationalists.
they believed in reincarnation. They also believed that the main priesthood of Israel at the
time was apostate. What does apostate mean? Oh, apostate, meaning like they lost their
way in terms of the truth. They were just hypocrites or whatever. Well, it was more
than that. It was like false teaching. They didn't believe, for example, that God had
ordered all of these animal sacrifices to be committed all the time. They were vegetarians.
They didn't eat meat, they didn't kill animals, and they collected works from all over the
world, including a lot of works from the East.
So a lot of the Buddhist and Hindu texts were found in Qumran.
So it wasn't just the ancient Judaic texts that they were reading, I mean, it was everything.
They kept a whole library of this stuff.
Nice.
And then when you look at Jesus, Jesus spent time in all the places where they had communes.
So he was born in Bethlehem but grew up in Nazareth, spent time in Jerusalem, spent his
boyhood part of it in Egypt when they had to flee. So you know these places where
they were he lived and a lot of his teachings were actually almost word for
word out of their teaching. There are a few sort of parables and stuff he told
that were just like word for word what the Essenes taught. What do you make of
the theory that he went to India during some of those lost years? It's
fascinating because the first time I heard that I was like oh that's a bunch
of baloney and then you kind of hear some of the stories about it and you're
like, well, it's an interesting prospect. You know, I mean, there certainly was this
whole long period and, you know, when you look at his teachings, there's a lot in it
that resembles more of an Eastern philosophy.
And there are legends in India of someone like him having come there and all.
Right, exactly. Exactly. There's one particular monastery that claims that they have, they
call them Iza or something like that, I can't remember what it was, but they claim he was
there and they have the records of it and so forth. And yeah, it's a very fascinating
story. Whether he went there or whether it's because he was raised within a scenic community
and had the influence and the teaching of it from within the community, there's no doubt
that there's an Eastern influence and perspective that he brings because it was very different than
what you read in the Old Testament, and I think there's a reason for that. A couple other things
that pointed to Jesus being in a scene, apart from the fact that he taught some of their teachings,
was also the fact that a lot of the scenes were called "Nazirites" because there was a sort of
of Nazirite vow that they took. And then a lot of Jesus followers were also called Nazirites.
So when they say Jesus of Nazareth, it's a double meaning. It was Nazareth because it's
where he grew up, but it's also Nazareth because the sort of Nazirite vow, which he didn't follow
Nazirite vow, but he was kind of associated with that group that these scenes were commonly
referred to. And they were very interesting as a group because they were known for having
tremendous psychic or prophetic powers and being readers of the stars. And they foretold
to Pontius Pilate that he would rise to power. And that was, they think, the reason why Pilate
didn't want to condemn Jesus was because of the fact that he knew he was part of this
group and he had this great admiration for these scenes. And locally, they were also
known as the healers. They were, that's probably how they're most commonly referred to as
healers. They're dressed in white and they're the people you went to when you needed some
sort of spiritual, medical, you know, physical healing. It's just an incredibly interesting
group of people. And so, when you sort of connect all those dots and the fact that the
New Testament mentions the Pharisees and the Sadducees but doesn't mention the
Essenes. It just all points to the idea that it was the Essenes that were writing
the book, it was the Essenes that were the early followers of Jesus, and he came
out of that group and they weren't putting the spotlight on themselves, they
were putting the spotlight on Jesus. And I think that had that sort of influence
on him, but yeah, coming back to the original question, they did believe in
reincarnation. And I agree, there are hints throughout the Bible that could speak
toward there being reincarnation and reincarnation being true and and so forth.
So, yeah, I think that's a fair comment from what Yogananda said.
And just out of curiosity, this is a little off topic maybe, but do you think that the
miracles that Jesus was purported to have performed are exaggerations, or do you think
that he was such a great being that he might actually have done those things?
I do believe that those are real.
You know, whether or not any of it's been story-fied, I don't know, but, you know, I mean, you have
same stories about some of the yogis in India performing exactly the same things. So if
he had trained there, he may have developed those abilities there, he may have developed
them within the Asena community because they were known for that as well. Myself, I don't
put any question on that. But at the same time, if somebody else questions it and feels uncomfortable
with it, it doesn't bother me either. I think it's the message that's more important. And
And so this is where, you know, to your point about, you know, has it been doctored?
The way I look at the Bible is, the Bible and Scripture in general is not the truth.
It's an account of the truth.
It's like a window upon which we see the truth or can see the truth.
And some windows are a bit more clear than others, but no window's perfect.
There's always these blemishes and so forth that can slightly obscure the picture when
you look at the detail, but when you stand back, you can see the big picture of what it
is.
And so I tend to think in terms of, you know, if you understand the Bible within its context
and you understand the arc of the story and so forth, you get a pretty clear picture of
what it's trying to say if you're looking for it.
But of course a lot of people don't read it that way.
What a lot of people read it to do is to validate their own beliefs.
So you know, they start picking and choosing, you know, I like this verse because it makes
me feel good about what I believe and makes us feel like we're the right ones and they're
the wrong ones.
And so, we have a tendency to want to kind of read our own subjective viewpoint on it
and rather than letting it speak for itself and being open to the truth of whatever it
is.
Pete: Sure.
Yeah, I mean, the 19th century slaveholders used the Bible to justify slavery.
Yeah.
And so, when you say you got disillusioned with Christianity, it sounds to me like you
really appreciate Christianity, but you got disillusioned with the kind of Christianity
that you were familiar with, that you had been raised in, and perhaps even that tends
to predominate today. Yeah, or maybe I could nuance that slightly. I'd say that the early
followers of Christ, and they called themselves Christians, that was a label that came later.
And I think it was a different entity when that came later, because, you know, I think
the early followers of Christ, they often called themselves followers of the way or so forth,
but they didn't really put a label to themselves. And that's because Jesus, if you read what
he was trying to do, he was not trying to start another religion. I believe very much that
He was there trying to help them transcend religion.
And where I sort of became disillusioned with it is, you know, so to finish the story, I
finished that course and I decided I was going to write a book about what I had learned through
seeing the whole picture of the Bible.
I wanted to sort of be able to string that story together.
So I spent another 10 years, this is while I was going through all this stuff in Scotland
and all these difficulties, spent another 10 years doing a sort of much deeper, more reflective
journey through the Bible to really try and understand how this story strings together
and how do you make sense of Jesus and what he taught in light of what seems like a very angry
God in the Old Testament? How do you reconcile these? And I came out through the end of that
period with just a profound awe at the book that is the Bible when I knew it in its context,
but at the same time just a profound disillusionment with Christianity because
so much of what was being taught in the pulpits was almost the exact opposite of what Jesus was
teaching. And that was really frustrating. And then when you try to have conversations with people,
it was just like they just didn't want to know. It's just the walls go up, you know,
and it's like, blah, blah, blah, you know. Don't tell me anything that sort of rocks my
view of the world. And I was really struggling with that because it was like,
Jesus in his context was a liberator. He did things during his time on earth that actually
showed that men and women were equal. For example, when he was in Bethel and there's a whole story
about the washing of his feet with the perfume and it said that Jesus had the women sitting at
his feet. Well, that would have been like shock in their time because the sitting at the feet of a
rabbi meant that you were a disciple of the rabbi and rabbis didn't have women disciples.
So, he was showing they have equal place in the Kingdom of Heaven. And there was just many things
like that and he was trying to set them free from the legalism that religion had brought.
And what now has happened in Christianity, at least much of it, is what I would call a
crypto-legalism. You know, we say, okay, you're not under law, you're under grace,
you know, you're free, right, in Christ. But if you really love God, you're not going to do this,
you're not going to do that, you're not going to do this, and then you give this whole laundry
list of things that you have to do and you'll be shunned if you violate those rules. But you're
you're under grace. And so it's this sort of secret, this kind of hidden legalism and Jesus
was trying to set them free from all of that and it's just become the same thing over again.
And so that's where I became disillusioned with Christianity because I became disillusioned
with the institution of Christianity, not with Christ. And I really wanted to know more
and I wanted to grow beyond where I had gone in my spiritual walk at the time. And so I
I remember this time where I had completed this book and I was contemplating what to do, really
feeling out of place in the church. I hadn't left at the time, but I was very much on the
fringe and I was introduced to a gentleman in Vancouver Island, he was an older guy, he
was like in his late 60s at the time, who was just one of the most enlightened beings
I've ever met. And he has similar background to me, that he came out of a Pentecostal church
movement, left that, started traveling the world on a spiritual truth quest, ended up
in India, spent a lot of time there at the feet of various gurus and just, and learned,
and was just so open and just so vast in his knowledge. And we would start talking on the
phone every now and then, we'd speak for hours and hours. And he was just opening my
mind in incredible ways. And what's interesting is a lot of the stuff that I had come to understand
about Christ was aligning with what he had said, and he told me about, you know, autobiography
of the yogi and so forth. And then it fascinated me when I read some of what the Indian writers
had written about Jesus. It was like, yeah, this is the stuff I found out, but it's the
stuff I've never been taught in the church. And so we would talk on the phone every night,
and I was sort of more and more opening up to thought outside of the Christian space.
And I remember at one point, you know, I was really wrestling because at the one time,
you know, on the one hand, like, you know, leaving the comfort zone of what I had grown
up in the Christian faith and generations of that.
To step out of that and open up completely, fully, spiritually, it was scary.
David Wick was his name.
He said, "Josh," he said, "what are you worried about?
Don't you think your father's big enough to get you where you need to go?"
And it was just like something in me just kind of let go at that stage.
And I ended up going out for a walk in the forest, and this was at a period where, again,
I was becoming disillusioned with Christianity.
My marriage at the time was hitting the wall.
That was coming apart at the seams.
And I was disillusioned with life because, I mean, even though we had done better with
housing, like, it was just nothing that I envisioned for what I was going to do in life
worked out.
Everything I tried failed, and I could just never seem to really make any progress in life.
And I was just done with everything.
I just felt so fed up with life.
And I was like, I don't feel like I necessarily want to live anymore.
I didn't want to kill myself. I had kids, all that. It wasn't like I was suicidal.
But I also just didn't feel like life had any appeal to me anymore.
And so I went out and took a walk in the forest.
We lived in a forest there. I just took a walk and it was along this river.
And as I'm walking, it was just like that sort of giving up thing just turned to complete silence in my mind.
And I all of a sudden, I felt like that sort of self-identity started falling away.
And the way I describe it is it felt like that scene out of Avatar where they first step into the world and they see the whole thing glowing and all that sort of stuff.
And it was just like I was seeing the world completely differently and everything felt alive.
And I can feel it.
And it's just like you could just feel this interplay of connectedness amongst everything.
And I felt the most profound peace I'd ever experienced in my life.
There was nothing to fight for, struggle for, anything like that.
And I came back just a completely changed person from that.
And from then on, just knowing everything's fine, everything's good.
I don't need to worry.
And so that's where I started my journey, slowly progressing out of institutional Christianity
and expanding my spiritual horizons, so to speak, and growing in this idea of, I guess
what you call no-mindedness and so forth.
So I started reading Autobiography of a Yogi and I have so many books through both Taoism
and Buddhism and Hinduism and all of that.
I was just absorbing it all.
I think one of my favorites was the Vindhya Gita.
It's one of the most beautiful books I've ever, you know, writings I've ever come across.
The what Gita?
The Vindhya Gita.
Vindhya Gita.
I haven't heard of that.
It's a portion, I'm going to slaughter the pronunciation on this.
It's a portion of an ancient Indian text called the Tripura.
I can look at Rahasia. Yeah, I prefer Rahasia and the Vindhya Gita is a portion of it.
It's where all the gods are inquiring about ultimate wisdom and then wisdom herself shows up
and what it says about being is just phenomenal. Nice.
Yeah. You went to India, right? I did. Yeah, I spent time there. I was there about three months.
I had a friend who was from Punjab. So we spent a while, you know, going around Punjab together
and had a phenomenal time. And it was amazing to visit, went to Amritsar as well, which is an incredible place.
The Sikh temple, golden temple. Yes, the golden temple.
And so how did you transition from all that into advising companies on how to find transcendent purpose
and working with the leaders of Fortune 500 companies and things like that?
Keeping in mind that we want to budget our time because we have some cool stuff yet to cover.
From there, I left Scotland shortly after that because my wife and I separated.
I was thinking about coming back to the US, but I didn't want to be that far away from my two daughters that were still there.
So I had an opportunity to come up in London and I would travel back and forth between London and Scotland to see my daughters or bring them down.
So I was involved with that company for a few years and then that came to an end and I was not sure where to go next.
And I was really fascinated at that time about the idea that companies can have a transcendent purpose.
And I think it was at that time that I, somebody introduced me to that TED Talk by Simon Sinek about "Start with Why",
which I thought was really interesting about, you know, building organizations around the idea of why you exist rather than what you do.
For those of you who haven't seen it, it's worth a watch on TED. I think it's the most watched TED Talk of all time.
So I was really fascinated by that idea, but I didn't know where you would start to work with that.
And I read his book at the time and it didn't really offer anything more in-depth on how do you build an organization around why.
And I searched a load online, I was trying to find different books that might have some answers to that, and no one did.
I think there was a sort of assumption that if a leader has their why, then the organization will also have a why.
But I felt like there had to be more than that.
And so I started looking, I thought, well maybe I can come up with an analogy for this.
I can find some way, I can develop my own model around this and something I can test out.
And then it was at that point I came across another talk, another message.
It was given by somebody in India who was asked to be the spiritual advisor for one of the largest corporations in India.
And to develop the spiritual life of the organization.
I thought, oh, this is interesting, you know, let's see what he has to say.
And I expected that he would say, you know, so we set up meditation rooms in all of the
offices and we, you know, had retreats and all of that. And he said, "So, really,
we started looking at the myths, values and rituals of the organization."
And I was like, "Hang on a second, I didn't expect that." And then I started thinking about it. And I
was like, you know, I spent my whole life immersed in religion and theology. And what if religion is
is nothing more than a belief system to help us find connection and build a common shared
sense of purpose. And through that I can find an analogy for how you build an organization
on purpose. So I began almost kind of reverse engineering how belief systems work. I looked
at religions, I looked at political systems, so on and so forth, and you start to see some
common themes that arise through belief systems. It was just as the guy said, there's sort
of three pillars of the belief system. You have your myth, you know myth doesn't mean
a fable, it's you know come to colloquially mean that, but it means a kind of story of
your origin, a story you ascribe to origin. And that story helps us as a people answer
the question why do we matter? Because it's through that story of origins where we see
okay this is how we came to be, this is the reason why we're here on this planet. So that
connects people emotionally because we share the same story, we have the same core idea
about why we're here. And out of that, then you develop your values, and your values are
then, okay, what matters to us? So this is why we matter to the planet, and these are
the things that matter to us. And then beyond the values, then they develop... So those
sit in... exist in the heart of the belief system. And then the intellect of the belief
system is the ideology, the set of principles and beliefs that you ascribe to. So they also
develop these set of principles or ideas that help us think alike. This is how we think the
world works. So you move from the why question to the how question. This is how we think
the world works and how we think the world should work. And so that connects us on an
emotional level and an intellectual level. But then there's the third level, which is
the physical level. And so what they do is they take these ideas and they intentionalize
them by creating a set of habits and practices that are related symbolically to whatever
these ideas are, so that you have a way of somatically putting into exercise what you
believe and so it becomes something that engages you on all three levels and
that's why they're so powerful. They can be powerful use for good and they can
also be a powerful use for evil. It's a very powerful tool but it's something
that we all live with whether or not we're conscious of it. We all have some
sort of an internal belief system within us about why we think we're on this
planet, what our values are, and habits that we formed around our life because of
what we value. Sometimes those habits are positive, sometimes they're toxic
depending on our values and so to speak.
So there's a sort of framework for how we live and operate as humans
and this is because it enabled us as people to move beyond living in tribes.
So before we developed belief systems, Yuval Harari talks about this,
before we developed belief systems, the largest that a human group could get to
would be about 140 and then they would break off and they would start another tribe.
And that had to do with something called Dunbar's Principle,
was that when you're in a group of people,
you know, say you're a group of 12 people,
understanding all the relationship dynamics
is not just knowing 12 relationships.
It's actually knowing about 144,
because it's 12 times 12.
Say you get to 140 people,
and you know, the exponential of that would,
I don't know, I'm not a mathematician,
but it's a large number of relationships
that you have to keep track of
to know who's doing what,
and who can you trust,
who can't you trust,
and so on and so forth.
So civilizations struggle,
or tribes struggle to grow beyond that
until they develop storytelling and then belief systems that enable us to feel that we had
a shared commonality between us even if I don't really know you.
It'd be about 20,000 relationships, I just pulled up the calculator.
Yeah, that's a lot of relationship dynamics to manage.
So belief systems are what have enabled us to develop as a species both for good or for
bad.
So I see them as belief system itself, not as inherently right or wrong.
It's what you plug into that belief system that determines if it's good or bad and if
it's toxic or healthy.
So I started using that, you know, very openly as a model for developing corporate identity
that was holistic.
Because when I would go in and consult with companies, you know, I would ask them, you
know, I'd go through and say, "What's your story?
Why are you here on earth?
What are you here to do that's more than just making profit?"
And I sort of take this model, the difference between sort of the money being the purpose
versus the reward.
So a carpenter's purpose is not to make money.
A carpenter's purpose is to serve through carpentry.
The reward that he gets from serving and bringing value to others is the profit that he makes.
So you know, in the same way, we confuse this idea that a business should exist for profit.
No, a business should exist to bring value to the world in some way that's beneficial
to humanity.
The reward they get for that is making profit.
The more value they're bringing, the more profit they make.
- So it seems like some businesses,
if they were to find a transcendent purpose,
would have to either shut down
or completely change what they do,
like a tobacco company, I'm thinking.
And many others that I could think
that are just essentially harmful to people.
- Yeah, and it's funny because I spoke to a guy
who was one of the legal counsel to Monsanto.
This is at a conference I was invited to speak at,
And I asked him about the ethics of what they do,
and it was just amazing the sort of gymnastics he was doing.
(laughing)
- Yeah.
- Ethically, I won't say what he said,
but it was quite humorous.
- Yeah.
- I fully agree that.
I think there are a lot of companies
that are sort of more leeching off of the planet.
They're leeching off our resources,
they're leeching off our health and welfare,
you know, and on and on.
I mean, there's a lot of companies like that.
It doesn't need to be that way.
I'm fortunate enough to work in a place that doesn't see the world that way.
Yeah, now you're working in a place, the world's number one private island according to Google,
which is also considered to be the world's most sustainable resort. You're located on a private
atoll, which is one of Polynesia's most sacred assets. Did I hear you say that Marlon Brando
used to own the island? Yeah, it's true. It was his private atoll. It's not just an island,
it's 12 of them, and he came to French Polynesia to shoot mutiny on the bounty in the late 50s.
And it was where he kind of had a bit of a spiritual awakening. I wouldn't say he was
awakened by any stretch. But, you know, he came out of Hollywood at that time. It was interesting,
Marlon never wanted to be famous. That was never his goal. And he kind of resented the fame that
went with it. He took his trade very seriously, but he never had a sightset on that. So he came here
looking for respite and discovered Polynesia and discovered spirituality through Polynesia and
discovered this atoll through that period which for the Polynesians had been seen for, you know,
the better part of a thousand years as a place of renewal and regeneration. So in their lore,
if you die here, your soul goes there to be regenerated and then come back again.
And there's an incredible what they call mana or energy on this place which Marlon
saw in it and he fell in love with it. So he wanted it to be preserved for the generations to come,
but he also wanted it to be a place that would inspire people to find a way to live more
harmoniously and sustainably with their world. And so what has come today wasn't built by him,
it was built by some hotelier that he'd become friends with here locally, but they conceived it
together and it was built to the letter of his wishes. So yes, it's a very special place. It
sometimes gets a reputation of being a bit of a sort of A-list celeb haunt, but it's not really about that.
It's a very, you know, when you go, it's very sort of down-to-earth, a very kind of natural human experience,
and you're just immersed in Polynesian culture and in a, in this natural environment of paradise that is
extraordinary. I mean, there's only one of the 12 islands has been developed,
the others are being kept as a private nature reserve, and so you go there, you're just immersed in
unbelievable paradise and so it's a really special place to be. But it's kind of purpose
in life is to number one model what sustainable hospitality can look like that works in partnership
with community and it works in balance with the ecosystem. And so it models that and then
also educates people on what's possible when they come. And it's what's caused an explosion
of eco-resorts around the world that have essentially tried to model what they've done here, because
it was the first to really do that at the sort of level that it's done. So, Leonardo DiCaprio
started developing his project down in Belize because he was inspired by this. So, it's a
very special place to be a part of.
Nice. You mentioned working with a woman who is leading a Polynesian cultural expert and
has advised Disney on the Mona film projects and that he said that she has interesting
spiritual insights on how the Polynesian worldview may provide an antidote to the Western imbalance.
Yes.
Is that just kind of what you were just saying in terms of being in tune with nature?
Is there something more to that?
Yeah, I can dive a little bit deeper on that.
In the West, and Hinano, by the way, is a phenomenal individual, both very, she was a former teacher,
so she has all the academic side, but she's also very spiritually attuned.
So she brings outside and she can comfortably work in both sides without a problem.
So her story was that when John Lasseter came over, they were looking to develop Disney Moana.
He came to Morea, which is a neighboring island where she lived, and he was introduced to her
and asked her to be an advisor on the film for Disney's animated Moana.
And he told her she cost him millions of dollars in the end because she made him change so much.
It had a profound effect on the country because they were losing their language.
The kids didn't want to speak their local Tahitian language anymore.
And one of her stipulations when she did it was that she wanted them to make a version
in Tahitian for the local kids.
And so they did that.
She didn't think they would.
They did it.
They sent a thousand DVDs, which they sent to all the schools and all the kids saw it
for the first time in their own language.
And then they said that for like weeks after the kids would be running through the streets
singing all the Mohana songs in Tahitian.
Is it just dubbed in Tahitian?
It's the same film, but it's dubbed into Haitian.
Yeah, I mean, well, all animated films are dubbed, so...
Of course, yes.
So she pulled together a group and they got in a sound studio and they did all the overdubs and
singing and so forth.
Nice.
So it's very special.
So they've asked her to come back and advise on the second one.
So coming to your question about the Polynesian culture and what it teaches us,
I often wonder if some of this is attributed to climate, right?
We come from a temperate climate where life can be tough at times,
you know, especially the further to the poles that you get. And we have this sort of idea that to live
well, to live meaningfully means to succeed in life, right? It's to further and develop your
resources so that you can look after your family and bring value to your community and so forth,
right? So it's all about the value you're bringing to others, which is then translated in a
capitalistic society of more, more, more, right? And the Tahitians have come from very small islands
that are closed ecosystems where you don't have to grow fruit, it grows on its own and
the seeds replenish themselves, but you can quickly get come to a place where if you overuse
your resources you can end up in a famine.
Like Easter Island.
Easter Island, exactly. Cut down all the trees and then they get marooned and they can't grow
fruit and so on and so forth. So they're consciously aware when they're young of how delicate our
ecosystem is and the importance of keeping things in balance. So they developed a process
called "Refuee" which is when things become too over harvested or fished they will
declare a "Refuee" where they will put a restriction, a taboo on say fishing in
that lagoon and they do that by sticking these palm fronds up in the sand
vertically and they along the beach and then you know that area is "Refuee". They
take it so seriously that if you violate a "Refuee" it's capital punishment. They
kill you? Not nowadays, right? Historically, historically you violated a
Rahui's capital punishment. If you violated another tribe's Rahui, it was an
act of war. So this was the most important thing to them. So from a value
standpoint, they have a perspective that the most important thing for us to do is
to learn to live in harmony with our world. And that means, of course, our
families, our community, it means our land, but it also means the ancestors and the
gods. Their entire life is from the perspective of how do I find and maintain harmony with
everything around me? And so they have that perspective on the world rather than the "give
me more perspective."
It'd be nice if that could be somehow implemented on a wider scale. As it is now, you have huge
Chinese factory ships just parked off the coast of South America, you know, just decimating
the fish population, and there's not much anybody can do about it.
There are people trying to bring that concept to the wider world in different ways and it
definitely needs that.
I mean, part of what we do through the non-profit here is actually trying to bring restrictions
on things that affect the ocean like overfishing and in our case what we're most concerned
about is seabed mining because these companies are going to go and basically just tear up
the seabed a mile below the surface where nobody can see what they're doing and potentially
destroy the ocean ecosystem.
Yeah, they found that they can get lithium out of all these little rocks on the seabed
that which they can use to make electric car batteries.
Correct.
Yes.
So it's a huge concern for not just for them, but for native peoples around the world who,
you know, have communities that thrive on the on the sea.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And the ocean is actually a lot.
The ocean is a living entity, and therefore it has rights.
So that's their approach, is to try and get the nations to ascribe to the rights of the ocean.
Because it should be treated as a living entity, not just as an inanimate resource that we can use for whatever we want.
As should the whole world. The whole thing is a living entity.
Yes, it is.
It's tricky because, you know, like in the case of the seabed, getting all that lithium would be great in terms of making more electric cars,
have a nice impact on the environment, but even now there's environmental devastation and
unfair labor practices and all to get the kinds of minerals they need to make electric
cars.
So it's hard, I suppose, to find a balance between compassion and environmental sustainability
and getting the resources we need to transition to a different technological framework.
Yeah, and I think it's going to happen on two fronts.
I mean, technology will help, but we also have to change how we view and live with the world
and perhaps not be as materialistic and be content with less.
Find inner contentment rather than chasing outer contentment.
You know, I think it's not one or the other, it's both and.
But particularly with the question of the lithium and the batteries, we published a
white paper here, basically on the, it was picked up by one of the journals, that we
won't need lithium.
be very soon obsolete because they have new methods for making batteries. I heard there's a sodium
alternative that might work. Yeah, I don't remember what the alternative was, but the
technology is here. It's not something that is possible. They have the technology and it's easier
for these companies to keep pumping lithium out of the ground because that's what their business
model is than to switch to a new business model. So there is that factor. Interesting, yeah. Well,
that could be a whole other conversation. So we've talked about disillusionment and how
the constructive influence that played in your life, and perhaps we could shift it a little bit to
societal disillusion and generational disillusionment. You mentioned some of that in your
notes, that it's terrifying for people, but it's the only way in which we can find our freedom from
illusion and be awakened to our higher self-consciousness. I'm reading your notes,
"Without facing disillusionment, we end up caught between the ego self and the higher self,
trying to escape something or attain something, spiritual escapism. When we face illusion and
and let it go, we find the truth that is always there.
You mentioned you struggle to find anyone who's gone through great spiritual growth and awakening
that hasn't at some point reached a state of disillusionment with the world.
And then you go on to talk about Generation Z and why, because they're collectively disillusioned
these days.
And you said some interesting things about that, so perhaps we could talk about that.
I spent some time recently talking to a lot of Gen Zers about what are the questions they
what are they looking for in life?
And just trying to really understand the
generations and where things are going.
And the answers that I've had back
have been really surprising and somewhat
encouraging. A lot of the ones
I've spoken to, they are looking
for some sort of meaning in life,
but they're looking for meaningful work
that's in balance with life.
They don't have the same capitalistic
drive that the previous
generations did. I've had
questions about how to get out of
hookup culture. A lot of them are very disillusioned with hookup culture that's been going on.
What is hookup culture? Like transitory, trivial, romantic relationships?
Is that what that means? Yeah, yeah, one night stands. Yeah, that kind of thing, sure.
Yeah. So there seems to be a lot of disillusionment with that.
And they want to know if there's hope for the world, because a lot of them feel very hopeless.
And they see a lot of that driven by governments and by
big corp, and they don't want to play
the game anymore. I say sort of Gen X, you know, we started getting disillusioned with it, but we were
a small generation, so we just made some really good rock and roll about it. Gen Y became a little
bit more idealistic and thought they could sort of bring change from within the inside, but Gen Z are
I think very disillusioned with the world and very uncertain about the future and not wanting to play
the game anymore and they're big enough to matter. What age brackets are these? I never get those
things straight. All I can remember is the baby boomers because I am one. What do the XYZs represent?
So I think X went from the boomers up until just after '75, '76. People who were born '75, '76.
Yeah. Yeah, so I was born '76, so I'm just at the start of the Gen X, but then they say,
just to confuse it further, there's a sort of 10-year span that sort of like the last five
five years of Gen X and the first five years of Gen Y that they call the Xennials, X-ennials,
because they were sort of caught in between both because we were young enough that we adopted
technology at a young age, but still also remembered the time before technology. So that's
why they call us, they say we're sort of an oddball in the generational mix.
So then you have Gen Y, which goes up until, well, until almost the millennium, or I think
until the millennium, because my oldest daughter was late millennial, she was 98. And then you
have from there until I think it's about 15 or so, I think, are the Gen Z and then
you have the Alpha Generation coming up. Now of course a lot of young people go
through a phase like this and then people like Abbie Hoffman, Reggie Davis,
or whatever his name was, end up becoming stockbrokers or something. It doesn't
always last. Well that was very true of your generation, right? Yeah, yeah, but I
think it's a good phase of life if one can really latch on to it and set
one's life in that direction and if the whole generation can do it, the whole culture could
change.
The way I look at it though is that your generation, Rick, played an important part in starting
the wake-up process.
And then that sort of took time to mature until where we are now, whereas I think that
this generation has the potential to further that.
It's not going to be on their own.
I mean, I think it's going to be helped by some pretty interesting circumstances we're
going to find ourselves in in the next few years where a lot of our structures are really
shaking up. I think that too. My feeling and it's just a feeling that you know
we're gonna see a lot of our power structures really shaken and I think
during that process we're gonna see a polarization because I think we're gonna
see people either running forward into technology and transhumanism and the
virtual world and then you're gonna see a reversion of a bunch of people who are
gonna be trying to skate back to traditionalism. So you see even now you
you see guys like Andrew Tate and you know these sort of machismo masculine misogyny sort of making
a resurgence and you also see women there's this whole trad wife movement where women are sort of
basically kind of returning to like 1950s housewife. So you have that on one hand and then also political
revisionism and I think some people be piling back into religion looking for some sort of comfort
there but the thing is is that those structures I don't think fit the world that we're destined for
and it will take some disruption before we're able to get to that world.
And so I think in the middle there's going to be a sort of third wave of people that are
attuned and conscious and they're seeing the world that's to come and they're excited about it.
Yeah, I interviewed a guy named Dwayne Elgin a couple of times and in my second interview with
him he showed this little graphic. I think we actually had a little video. He feels that sort
of three possible scenarios in each of which everything is going to pretty much collapse,
but then number one is it stays collapsed for a long time, just chaos. Number two is some kind of
Chinese-style technological autocracy gets imposed. And number three is out of the collapse, there's a
spiritual renaissance and we have a bright new age as many ancient traditions have prophesied.
Pete Yeah, and I'm hoping it's the latter.
Pete Yeah.
Pete You know, I have a sense that's where we're going.
Pete Because I'm also encouraged by the fact
that spirituality is growing amongst millennials and Gen Z. They're interested and they're looking
for the answers. And so, I have hope that, you know, we are going that way, but it's birth pangs,
it's gonna be a process. Pete: Yeah. And you say, I expect to see the unfolding world of events as
a polarizing force that will either drive people toward their spiritual path through disillusionment
or they will double down on the material world, afraid to let go of the illusion.
I sometimes, when I think about that, I think of the analogy of a rising tide lifts all boats,
which is fine for the boats if they don't happen to be anchored, but if they insist on
remaining anchored, they're going to capsize.
You know?
That's a great analogy.
It's time to draw your anchors up.
Yeah.
And I wonder about that because I would like to see huge changes.
I think we need huge changes, but I hate the thought that a lot of people are going to
suffer in the process or through that transition.
I agree.
I know it's going to be a trying period.
I think a lot of the suffering is going to be fear-driven, which is the worst suffering.
The fear and the terror, you know, when bad things go wrong.
I mean, you saw that in COVID, right?
I mean, it was the fear of COVID was worse than the reactions of that cause as a result
was worse than, you know, the pandemic itself.
Yeah.
I'm not saying it wasn't bad.
My father almost passed away with COVID, so I know it can be bad.
but our reaction to it made things worse.
But at the same time, we know that there's life beyond all of this, and this is something
I think the seers have looked toward for generations and generations.
Yeah.
Some good stuff in your notes here.
The dissolution of the world's power structures, which will give humanity an opportunity to
transcend ego-based living into a form of life that is aligned to a higher self and
our divine potential.
So, I guess we're seeing the disillusion, well, there's a disillusion, but there's also the
disillusion, the dissolving of the world's power structures.
I sometimes wonder, you know, there are some very powerful structures in this world, political,
economic, technological, and so on, which, you know, it's a David and Goliath kind of
a situation.
How can the so-called spiritual people, if they are going to be instrumental in any kind
transformation go up against these powerful things and prevail. But David won, I believe, because
God was on his side. I hate to use that phrase because, you know, that's used for football games
and things, but he had a larger destiny and power behind him that enabled him to prevail. So, I
sometimes think that if God wills it, to put it in those kinds of terms, if God wills that there's
is going to be a huge global societal transformation, nothing will be able to stop it.
Because that power we're talking about is far more powerful than any mundane power.
I completely agree.
And I like how you put that.
I think we're not leading this.
We're supporting it.
And I think if this is happening as we suspect it is, there will be other forces at work
which we'll be supporting from this, you know, maybe not straight from the sidelines, but
you know, will be supporting through being there and helping to ease the suffering on the planet
and helping to bring people to peace and joy and awakening.
Yeah.
And I think these things will, you will create a hunger for that and it's gonna be a joy
to participate in that side of things.
There's a great story from the Indian scriptures where there was a huge deluge, rain and rain
and rain, and the village where Krishna lived was getting inundated and the people appealed
to Krishna who was supposed to be an avatar of God, "Please save us," you know.
So Krishna just picked up a mountain and held it up, you know, over the village like an
umbrella and saved the people from the water.
But then they thought, "Well, it's an awfully big mountain and he might strain his wrist
or something," so they all picked up sticks to help hold up the mountain.
And of course, their sticks weren't really doing anything, he was the one who was holding
it up, but they felt like they were helping.
So that's kind of an illustration of what you just said.
I love it. We're here to be the witness, you know, and that's what people need is a witness to the truth.
But yeah, I like that analysis. It's great.
Okay, now feel free. I'm starting to talk a little bit more than I was throughout the interview and I don't want to dominate.
So we're talking about dissolution of the world's power structures as a necessary function of a transition to a very different world,
which I think many of us idealistically and hopefully not naively expect to have happen,
have happens, whether or not it happens in our lifetimes, I don't know. Then here's a cool one
that you mentioned. We are transcending world religions into one true spiritual religion,
which has no name. Jerusalem and Babylon are actually archetypes of this. And of course,
everyone has heard the term spiritual but not religious, where people like you and I,
we respect all the different religions, we don't feel like any one of them is
the true one or any such thing, and perhaps we are harbingers of the kind of spiritual religion
you're talking about where it's an appreciation of a universal truth. When I run up against
religious fundamentals, there's this Amish guy that used to come to the farmer's market, and I
would sit down and start talking astronomy with him and try to give him an idea of how large the
universe is, when I think of spirituality, I think of it on that scale, the whole universe.
Certainly not the exclusive province of even one planet, much less one particular religion
on a planet.
Yes, yes.
I think that's, it's a nice picture.
I guess how I relate to that, first of all, I think having a belief system is useful only
as far as it's useful.
There was a passage in the New Testament where Jesus healed this man on the Sabbath, and
they were up in arms.
And the reason they were is it was probably one of the most sacred laws in all of Judaism
is keeping the Sabbath, because it was a symbol of their covenant relationship with God.
Yeah, these days they won't even switch a light switch on.
It gets too much work.
Yeah, well, Orthodox Jews won't.
Right, exactly.
They treated it very seriously because of its symbolic nature, and when they asked Jesus
about it. He said, "Well, man was not made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath for man." By
extension, man was not made for religion, but religion for man. So I have this perspective
of religion. Paul called it, best translation, the teacher, the tutor. So he referred to
Judaism as a tutor that brought him to the place where then he could step into Christ,
which was the spiritual, universal consciousness, the logos. And so I kind of view it that way
in terms of I don't look back with horror and hatred on the time that I had in Christianity.
I see it as the school ground that helped me along to where I was able to step into real
spirituality. It's really important because when we are in school, when we're young, we're
living in a construct of reality that's scaled down. It's not the real world, right? It's
a sort of microcosm of it in a way that allows us to learn. And, you know, when kids are playing
they're practicing and being grown-ups, right? They play with cars, or they play with kitchens,
and whatever else, and practicing what it's going to mean to be a grown-up. At some point,
they get to the point where they need to graduate school, and being there any longer
feels like they're in a prison. They just can't wait to get out of school. "Let me free."
That's that difference between religion and spirituality, or what you could say is the
true religion, which isn't any earthly religion. It's a whole spiritual fabric of reality,
is that understanding that it serves a purpose. There are places you could go to in the world
today where if you just walked in and said, "Let's eradicate religion as it is," they'd
descend into utter moral chaos. Yeah, good point. They need that.
Right. They haven't developed the moral compass to the point where you take away the fear factor
and they go, "Okay, well, I'm going to be kind to my neighbor because it's good for the world."
They would go, "Well, what's good for me is good for me, and I'll take your cows and your wife and
or whatever else that I want, those places still exist and they existed even more so back in the
time that the Bible was written. So, it still serves a purpose and I just tend to look at it
as people on a different stage of their journey. At some point, they'll run dry and they'll be
looking for something beyond it and that's I think what we're seeing with a lot of religions,
you know, around, a lot of people who were religious around the world that are saying,
okay, I need something more real, more tangible than this.
Yeah, that's good. A lot of examples I can think of such as training wheels on a bicycle,
which are really useful when you're just learning to ride, but they get in your way after you've
learned. Or Taoism talks about how the higher the level of consciousness that predominates
in a society, the less rules and the less government it actually needs because people
spontaneously abide with the flow of the Tao, you know, and they abide by what is Hinduism
and probably Buddhism also have similar points. Hinduism talks about the yugas, different ages,
and it's in our yuga, which they say is the darkest age that you need the most structures
because people aren't spontaneously behaving. Yes, that's really interesting. I have a very
vivid analogy of this. When my daughter was young, she was about seven years old,
and when she was born, I thought, you know, the main thing I want to teach her in life is how to
to love other people. I don't want to put a sort of pressure on her to be anything or do
anything. I just want her to love others. And so she was young, I was trying to teach
her, "I want you to love your sister and love the people around you." And I kept trying
to teach her this and she just wasn't getting it. And at one point she was being really
ornery with her sister and her, and I got really annoyed with her. And I was like, "You
know what? Damn it, we had rules when I was a kid. We have rules in our house now." So
So I went to the internet, found somewhere online a set of rules and I printed them off and I
went and put them on a refrigerator door and I marched my daughter over to it and I said,
"Okay, here's the rules of the house."
It was very simple things.
Don't hurt others, don't hurt your sister, don't take from others, don't steal from others,
don't, you know, on and on, you know.
And just very simple rules, graduated down to her level.
So she's looking at these rules and she just sits there quietly for a minute and she looks
at me and she goes, "You mean that if I follow these rules you won't be angry with me?"
And I go, "Yeah." And then I'm like, I'm starting to feel really bad because I'm like,
"Poor am I as a father." This is her response. And then she gets this big smile on her face.
I'm feeling even worse. And I'm like, I realized in her mind when I say, "Okay, love your sister,"
she has no idea what that means. She hasn't developed the mental capacity to understand
what does it mean, the wisdom, to love my sister or my parents or whatever. So to her, I was like this
big bear all the time where I was just randomly getting angry at her because she'd done something
and she's like, "Well, what have I done?" And it just gave me this whole perspective on the Old
Testament because, you know, when the Hebrew slaves came out of Egypt, they were illiterate
and they were raised as slaves. So if you're raised as a slave, you're not taught how to do
anything for yourself. You're not taught how to make decisions. You're not taught how to make
any decisions at all, let alone run a community, let alone build a country. So these illiterate
slaves come out of Egypt, which is probably one of the most well-ordered countries on the planet
at the time, and they come into the wilderness without the foggiest idea of what they're going
to do. Slaves their entire life. And so they would have had the mental perspective of the world of a
child, no education, completely illiterate. So then when you read the story of the Old Testament
through their eyes, it's like the story of an angry father telling a child off. And I remember when I
was, you know, my dad would tell me off as a kid, I thought a couple times he was gonna kill me. Of
course, you know, you grow up later and you realize that wasn't the case, but in your five-year-old
mind, you're like, "Oh, I don't know if I'm gonna live the rest of the afternoon," you know?
Pete: [Laughter]
Jeff: That didn't make him sound really bad. It wasn't. It was just that you have that
perspective as a kid where your parents can be really scary at times and unpredictable.
So when you look at Judaism from that standpoint, and this is a very exoteric religion, it wasn't
like the Eastern philosophies, which are very internalized, it's very much about the inner
journey. It was about building and modeling community and what a positive community looks
like. And if you look at all of the laws that were made within that context, there was almost
all of them, you can find some sort of a reason or rationale why those laws were given. They made
some sort of sense from a communal standpoint. So what you do with a child when you raise a child
is you start out giving them a set of rules that protect them and they show them what love looks
like. They aren't love itself, but you hope that through them practicing the rules and you building
the discipline within them, over time they're going to start to get a picture of what love looks like.
And at some point when they're older, that will translate into actually loving people.
When they start having the practice of showing love and seeing the effect it has on others around
them. That begins to inspire them to live a life that is loving toward others. The whole Old
Testament, all the laws were built on this idea of do no harm. In the Old Testament, it worked in a
forbidden, permissive, legal mindset. They had a covenant legal relationship with God. By the way,
all the stuff about God pouring his wrath out on Jesus and all of that, you know, to punish him for
all of our sins was a complete misunderstanding of what the whole affair was about with the
cross and what that meant.
The Jews had a covenant mindset.
They had a legal agreement with God that said, "You and I are one."
It's the same as a marriage covenant, right?
The two become one.
Us as a nation and you are one.
Somebody does something to us, they're doing it to you and vice versa.
So they had this sort of perspective.
So it was always prophesied in the Old Testament that when the Messiah would come, the law
would be written on their hearts. That's the transition from the school ground to spirituality
because it becomes in the heart. So, when you read Paul's writing, he makes it very
clear. He said five times, five key books of the Bible, he said, "All things are lawful
unto me, not all things are beneficial." Paul worked from a harmful beneficial standpoint,
not a forbidden permissive standpoint. And that was what he was trying to teach the churches.
So all of Paul's writing in the churches were contextual instruction
addressing specific issues at the time to say this is how love
should look like in your community. He was not writing a law that said
every Christian from now on should do this. He was trying to train them up and teach
them how to have the wisdom of love and how to live as a loving community.
That's the thing that's very often misunderstood about him. It was written to
a very specific group of people. Now you can learn from it by understanding why he
he was doing it, but it was never meant to be literally applied to our present day.
As you were speaking, I was thinking about Ken Wilber's work. I don't know if you've
ever read any of him. And there's also a thing called spiral dynamics, in which they
have all these colors. I always forget what the different colors represent, but it kind
of sketches out the kinds of things we're discussing about the various levels of psychological
and emotional maturity that humans go through and societies go through, and how they tend
to view the world based on any particular level of maturity and what kind of society you have
to have, what kind of religions you're going to have, if a certain level of maturity predominates.
Yes.
Interesting stuff. You also might want to watch my interview with Father Sean O'Leary
who argued that there's no archaeological evidence that there were ever any Jewish slaves
in Egypt or in the desert for 40 years.
He claims the whole thing, but I can't get into that whole argument.
I'll tell you what, I'll watch that interview, but look up a guy on YouTube called Robert Feather.
He was a metallurgist. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls is called the Copper Scroll, and he was asked to review it.
And he found out it was like something like 99.99% pure copper, which he said would have been impossible to do at the time.
And the scroll was made of copper?
The scroll was made of copper. And he was an atheist at the time, and he became really fascinated by the scroll.
the scroll. How did these ancient people manage to do this at the time when they didn't have
the technology? So, he started studying the Dead Sea Scrolls and there was one of the
scrolls called the Temple Scroll which describes the building of this new temple, the rebuilding
of the temple. But the dimensions of the temple do not fit on the mountain in Jerusalem. It's
too big. And they've never been able to work out why, the scholars, you know, why was this
temple so much bigger than the Jerusalem Mount? And so, he's reading about this and he reads
this word in there of Akhenaten. And he says, "What is this?" And he asked one of his esteemed
colleagues, you know, he's an expert in that, he said, "What is this?" And he said, "Well,
that was a pharaoh in Egypt." I believe it was Nefertiti's father. So, he started looking
up this pharaoh in Egypt and he found this pharaoh existed and they found they had a
whole city and a temple mount that matched perfectly with his scroll. And they've uncovered
this. Essentially, he brought monotheism to Egypt for a short period and he got rid of
the polytheism and he had this group of slaves that were there through that period and he
traces the whole story of how they went from, these were the proto-Hebrew slaves and he's
got evidence for that, traces them into the wilderness and actually finds the tabernacle
mount that's listed in the Bible, which is in a completely different place than what
traditionally believed. And this is all on the YouTube thing. So, have a watch, it's really
interesting.
Pete: Check it out. I'll connect you with Sean O'Leary, you guys can duke it out.
[Laughter]
Then you also said an interesting thing here about how we're about to transcend
worldly government into a spiritual government that is guided by spirit rather than legislation
and penalty, which is kind of along the lines we've been speaking. But again, when you actually
try to conceive of the changes that would have to take place in the governments of the world
in order for that to come about in a meaningful way, you can't imagine how those changes would
take place. I mean, it's all we can do to get some piece of legislation through the
Congress these days.
Yes. I think where we're going, it's hard to imagine what it's going to be like at all.
We're going somewhere we've never been before.
I hope we are. I'm not like these gen-whatevers who are, well, disillusioned. I have a lot of optimism,
but I can't conceive of the actual mechanics that will have to be undergone for us to get from here
to there in terms of, you know, how governments... because everything seems so recalcitrant, you know,
so resistant to change, so stodgy. Everything's kind of locked in, not only in our country,
but many countries. So how does it happen? I think it's going to happen at grassroots level.
I think what we're going to see is governments fragmenting.
Where we've had a lot of superpowers before, I think we're going to see those superpowers
diminish and become more fragmented.
And I think within that you'll find spaces that almost might become a little bit more
self-governing and futile in terms of how they operate.
It's not to say they won't be a part of any larger government, but I think we'll see those
governments weakened to the point where you'll have some places that will be incredible and
they will really express what community looks like.
And I think you have other places that won't be so much.
I don't see this as being an immediate overnight thing, but I think we will see a transition
as these structures shake. We will see a transition toward that, but I have no idea how long that's
going to take to happen. Yeah, it could take a while, but who knows? The pace of change seems
to be increasing exponentially, and now with AI that's another major accelerator, as the internet
it was but even more so now. Yeah, yeah I mean it's accelerating at a scary pace. It may
be kind of the why now sort of thing because if that continues at that pace the amount
of self-destruction that we could do would be wild. I mean it would be incredible. I mean
not incredible in a good way, I mean vast. It could become very dangerous and you know
even guys like Elon Musk have stood up and said this stuff's dangerous. So when you get
guys like that who are very cutting edge on the technology, take it seriously. Well you're
a pretty safe place. You can just eat fish and collect rainwater.
Pete: [Laughter]
Climate training gets mangoes, you know.
Pete: Right. Yeah. Okay, so we've covered a lot here. What haven't we covered that you want to
make sure that, you know, we touch upon before we conclude?
Richard: I'd like to actually talk about what made me come to see Christ in a more universalist
light.
Pete: Okay.
Richard Roar touched on this and I thought what he said was great.
You mean in my interview with him?
Yes, yes, sorry, in your interview with him.
You talked about how Christ is not Jesus' last name.
It was a title, it was a function.
And it's a function that's incredibly rich with symbolism that we don't get.
The first Christ was King Solomon in Jewish history.
He was the first to have that title.
It was an almost King Priestly type role.
And the word literally means "anointing", the anointed one.
And when you sort of break down the symbolism of what anointing means is where it sort of
starts to open up this concept and what it means.
So the anointing oil that they used in Israel at the time, there were different elements
that were used in the temple worship, including olives, which they make oil for the lamps,
spices they use for the bread, incense they use on the fire, and they would crush it together
to make, they call it "oud" in the Middle East, but like an oil fragrance, cologne, perfume
sort of thing that smelled amazing.
It's very symbolic of spiritual awakening because, you know, you put a fragrance on and then
you go walk out in the world and then you walk past somebody and all of a sudden they
get a whiff of it and they're awakened to this thing.
And so, there's this symbolism, this idea that the work of the Christ is to create unity,
create oneness.
Where the oil is a symbol of taking separate bitter elements and crushing them together
so they become one pleasant substance.
And here when you say the Christ, you mean like the cosmic consciousness or something,
not just Jesus as Nazareth, right?
So, yeah, so Christ is essentially, it's the cosmic consciousness.
Right, right.
It's the I Am.
Yes, okay.
But the idea that that consciousness would dwell on earth through men and it would have
an effect of bringing oneness on the planet.
So where we take all of these separate substances, crush them together, bitter they come together,
beautiful fragrance is what happens when men are brought together into oneness.
So in the Jewish mind, the Messiah, of course they didn't see it on quite a cosmic level,
they saw the Messiah as being this sort of godly, almost priest king who was going to
create unity between the people of Israel and going to create unity between them and
God so that they would be in one and they would have peace.
Because they had this history before the kings arrived of just being constantly wiped out
by their neighbors.
They build up again and they get wiped out, and they build up again and get wiped out.
And they wanted peace.
And peace would come through the Messiah who would unite them together in peace.
Because before that, everyone did what was right in their own eyes, that's what it said
in the Judges.
So they had this view that ultimately there would be the ultimate Messiah that would come,
that they were looking toward, and which of course Christians believe is Jesus, that would
do this job once and for all.
So when you have this idea of the anointing oil and this sort of creation of oneness, what's
It's really interesting when Jesus is at the Last Supper with his disciples, when he says,
in John, he says, "I and the Father are one.
You're one with me, you are one with the Father."
And this whole talk there was about the oneness that they had together.
And then he was bringing, there's this beautiful verse in the Psalms that said how good, how
pleasant it is when brethren dwell together in unity.
It is like oil flowing down the beard of Aaron.
Aaron was the first high priest.
So that's the picture, right?
It's that anointing that just unifies everything.
And in the temples, they take this oil and everything was touched by the same substance
to show that it was all sanctified, it was all one.
So you have Jesus at the Last Supper with his disciples talking about how they are one with
him.
He is one with the Father.
No one has seen the Father because the Father can't be seen, at least in this material form.
And he leaves the Last Supper to go out to the Garden of Gethsemane to spend the night
praying and interceding for his disciples because he knows what he's about to go through.
The word "Gethsemane" in Hebrew means "the olive press."
So his soul was being crushed on their behalf that night, and as he was praying that they
would be one through that.
And so, this whole idea about what Christ means and what it stands for is oneness.
It's a very simple, purest essence, and it's the bringing together of everything into
oneness, as Paul said, the summing up of all things in Christ.
So this is the idea, and Jesus was of course the incarnation of that, but the concept stands
much bigger in that moment in time. It's really the Logos, the uncarved block, you almost say
it's like the uncarved block of the Tao Te Ching walking amongst us as a human to show
what it looks like to be in a perfect state of peace. So I don't know if that makes sense
to you at all.
Yes, it does. Kind of related to what you've been saying about the history of the Jews and
so on, how they kept getting wiped out and all. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or insights
about the Middle East situation as it now stands. If we appoint you Prime Minister of Israel
tomorrow, what are you going to do? I don't think that would be a job I would want, nor
many others. It's such a sticky situation there because there are so many conflicting
interests there that go beyond just two religions warring. If you could get people together and
and you could get them to share, you could cross that divide.
And there's a great story, I think it was Adam Sandler,
when he filmed "Zohan" I think.
In the story, they had some Jews
and they had some Palestinians,
and they're sort of at each other's throats.
And they spoke about behind the scenes,
'cause they used Jewish and Palestinian actors.
When they started the film, they hated each other,
and they were always arguing with each other.
They'd sit down for meals and just be arguing
the whole time through.
But by the end of it, as they had taken time
hear each other's sides, they started to understand one another and they actually finished the shoot
as like best friends. That's what needs to happen there and in any other place of conflict, but it's
going to be hard when you have other interests that don't like the idea of resolving these things
because conflict is beneficial for them in some way or another. Yeah, there's this fellow named
Thomas Hubel that I've interviewed a couple of times and his specialty seems to be generational
trauma. He's German, his wife is Israeli, and he's done a lot over the trauma of the Holocaust and
the lasting impression that is made in the collective psyches of Germans and Jews and so on.
And I think he's been applying it to other contexts as well, but there's a huge amount of that in the
Arab-Israeli situation. Because I think of collective consciousness just as we individually
have our psychologies and our mentalities and we can accumulate grievances and biases and
all that.
I think that entire cultures do that, and just as it might take a fair amount of therapy or
catharsis of some kind for us to cleanse ourselves individually of those qualities, the same
is true of societies.
And lacking that, failing to do that, we end up with wars, because this stuff just builds
up to a breaking point like static electricity and clouds, eventually lightning has to strike.
But if there could be ways of defusing it before it had to break out as wars by actually
really having some deep fundamental transformational technologies for entire societies and cultures
as well as individuals, then perhaps that would be part of the mechanism of transitioning
to the kind of more enlightened world that you and I have contemplated in this conversation.
It's really interesting because the Mennonite community, one of the things I'm really grateful
for about my upbringing was experiencing community like the Mennonites have.
Kind of answering this in a bit of a roundabout way, you lived in a place where you didn't
lock your door, you didn't worry about walking down the street, everybody was there to help
one another.
They built very, very strong communities to the point that even in, there's a very traditional
one in Belize right now, that's actually growing.
Even though they're so traditional, they're actually having people coming from Mexico
and Belize saying, "Can we join your community?"
Because they're so inspired by seeing real community in action.
And they have this very interesting perspective.
They saw themselves as a kingdom, not of this world.
So they saw themselves already as part of a higher order.
And their motto was the Bible and the plow, which meant that they felt like the way that
you express your spirituality is through your work.
So they wanted to build and model, almost to be like this island, they wanted to build and
model what a real community looks like, a real spiritual community looks like, so that they
could inspire other people to live the same way. And they did. They were so effective
with their agriculture that Catherine the Great came to visit them in the Ukraine during
her time to understand how they could be so effective with their agriculture. But they
were just very hard workers who modeled what community looked like. And you knew growing
up that you had to be a part of this community and you had to fit in with this community and
participate and bring value to it and so forth.
I see that as a lot of the antidote to where we are because part of the problem with all
of the mental health issues and everything that we're going through is we were never
meant to be people that lived the way we're living.
Isolated individuals, we were meant to grow up and live in community.
And in Polynesia, they still practice that.
The village raises a child and everybody's uncle and aunt.
Single mothers is not even remotely an issue here.
It's like, the woman gets pregnant and has a baby, well, auntie and granny and whoever
else looks at it, and she goes off and she's still a young woman, has a life, and she comes
home to her baby.
And because the whole family, the whole village is raising the child, and they have this very
close connected sense that you realize doesn't exist elsewhere in the world.
Where I sort of bridge the divide of the East and the West is, you know, the East has been
very much focused on the inner journey.
And it's fascinating, you go to India where there's just so much spiritual pursuit and
insight and yet, you know, people won't even sweep their own front door sometimes.
But you go to the opposite end where you have very exoteric religions that have been very focused on the external
of trying to force community, force countries to live and behave
in a certain way, but they've been very much focused on the outward expression of what
spirituality should look like. And it's not an either/or. I think the only way we
can fully express ourselves spiritually is within community. You know, it's how
we're meant to function. And I think that's going to be what I hope is the next
stage for us in terms of spiritual awakening is we'll be awakening, but awakening into
community.
I think there'll be a hunger more and more for people to say, "I don't want to live isolated
on my own anymore.
I want to live with other people where we can share this life together and share in love
and compassion and so forth."
That's what I'm kind of looking forward to.
I think we'll see those happen organically in different places, and I think we'll see
those grow.
And as people see it, they become the lights, you know, the city on a hill, you know, it's
that sort of concept where it starts to slowly change minds and perspectives of what life
can and should look like on this planet.
At the end of the Rig Veda, there's this verse, parts of which are, "Know your minds to be
functioning together from a common source." That's one phrase. And another phrase is,
"An assembly is significant in unity." And I think both of those indicate that essentially
we are all unified. But like these islands that are around you, they're actually all one
landmass, but you only see the tips of them because of the water. So, you know, we're
all essentially one collective consciousness, but we seem much more individuated than we
are ultimately.
Yeah, and at some point, we'll start to emerge as a more connected landmass, maybe.
Yeah, interesting.
I like that. Nice analogy.
Right. Which kind of points to the notion that ultimately the solution to the world's
problems is not political or economic or technological, or even though all those things need to be
considered and transformed, but ultimately the solution is the source from which everything
derives its nourishment, which is the God or deep inner spirit or our essential nature
or whatever you want to call it. If we can all, a lot of us get in tune with that, then
I think things will tend to sort themselves out on the surface in ways that we can't foresee.
Pete: Yeah, I think the principle is we don't overthrow, we supplant.
Jared: Yeah, nice.
So, that was essentially what the Bible taught.
The way was not to try and topple the system that's there, it was to supplant it with something
better.
Yeah, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
Precisely.
So, you don't have much of a social media presence or a website or anything else, but
is there any way in which if people get inspired by this conversation, they can interact with
you in any way or you just prefer to remain a private person and you just wanted to have
a conversation?
I appreciate it. I felt like I should stick some content out for people to have it.
So I've started slowly putting some stuff on YouTube, a little bit on Instagram and TikTok,
although it remains to be seen if TikTok will be around in six months time.
Maybe it will be in Polynesia.
Yeah, maybe. So I think I sent you a link, like a link tree that has all those,
but I can send you those separate links to all.
Send them separately just to be safe, to make sure I get them and I'll put them up on your BatGap page.
That would be great. Appreciate that.
Okay, great. Well, thanks, Josh.
I appreciate spending the time with you. Sorry I couldn't make it out to Tahiti to do this
in person. Part C will be in person. Yeah, right. Alrighty. I really enjoyed the conversation
today. Yeah, me too. Very stimulating. And thanks to those who've been listening and/or
watching. So we'll see you for the next one.
[Music]