What The Church Won't Tell You About God | Aaron Abke | Align Podcast #542
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Aaron Apke. We're here, we're here. Good to be with you, bro. Yeah, thank you for being here. What is the root of suffering, Aaron, from your perspective? Well, you know, the root of suffering is definitely the belief in separation. But I find that to be a concept that by itself is usually not super helpful alone, and it needs a little bit of clarification. Further, I would say suffering arises from

three root beliefs that the ego has. The ego is the part of our mind that believes we're a separate entity, right? Apart from God. So me believing that I'm just limited to this physical body in this physical lifetime,

is what creates ego. And so the ego is like a mental activity that just identifies with everything that is placed in front of it that you give attention to. I am this, I am that, my this, my that, I mean my. And as your ego goes along collecting identities, the more identities your ego collects and that you believe in, you can almost say like the heavier the weight becomes on your soul.

And so collecting so many identities over a lifetime, I'm this person, this and that happened to me in the past, I've been abandoned, I've been abused, etc. It starts to weigh the soul down to a point that, you know, almost like alchemizing the coal into the diamond, that downward pressure the ego creates on the soul becomes the spark for spiritual awakening eventually.

And so the sort of three beliefs, the way that I dice separation down is into these three beliefs that the moment I think that I'm separate, I'm not one with my source. I'm not one with the universe, one with you, one with all. The moment I believe I'm not one with everything, the first sort of mental belief that's created is the belief in lack. If I'm separate, that implies that I must be lacking.

And the ego doesn't really know what it's lacking, right? It just feels that it's lacking something. Love, acceptance, worth, purpose, value, something like that. And so it goes out in search for fulfilling its lack. And that's the second belief is the belief in attachments or the idea that an outcome can actually fulfill me. Something out there, something outside myself can complete me and complete this lack.

So attachment is the second belief of the ego. It wants to attach to anything that it believes can enhance itself and therefore resist anything that will not enhance itself. And then the third belief also flows downstream of the second, which is the belief in control or personal doership. And this is really where the ego fully comes online as a unique entity in the mind is this belief of

I am the doer of actions. I make all my own decisions in a sort of isolated container of the universe of me. I'm uninfluenced by the cosmic laws and forces all around me, certainly by God's will and things like that. I am choosing every action independently, moment by moment. And that's a belief that is very difficult to see in yourself because we all believe I'm this body, therefore I am the doer of whatever this body is doing.

But really what the body is, is just this conditioned kind of unit, right? That's been patterned to want, crave, think, feel certain things. And we sort of just become automatons to those habits.

but because we identify with them, we really believe that they're me. Like I am choosing to feel like a victim right now. I am choosing to think this thought, feel this feeling rather than this is just happening. It's just arising in the field of consciousness. I don't really know why I have the urges I have. I don't really know why I react the way I do, but I'm the witness. I'm the observer of the reactions.

So that's the third and final belief that kind of creates the ego. It's I'm lacking. I need to fulfill my lack. And because I need to fulfill my lack, I'm the doer. I'm in control of life. I bend life to my will. I make things happen. So it's this kind of total blindness to the will of God and a total lack of trust in God. Whereas, you know, Jesus admonished us of myself. I can do nothing. I can only do what I see my father doing.

And so be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. So Jesus was kind of advocating for us to deny the self, as he said, take up the cross, follow me, which means don't try to be in control of your life. Don't try to be, you know, the king of the hill, but let God take the reins. Lean not on your own understanding, as the scriptures say, but in all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make your path straight.

So beginning to overcome suffering has to begin with surrender, I think. We got to work backwards from the problem we've created, right? Back engineer the problem. We got to learn how to surrender fully to the flow of life, the will of God in our life. And that's not an easy thing for the ego to do. Ego likes control and it likes to resist what's not comfortable to it.

So suffering is resistance to what is, and we resist what is because we believe we're separate from what is. For clarification of language to you, what is, how do you define God and how has your definition or perspective of God evolved or changed over the years? That's a great question, bro. It's evolving by the minute sometimes, but to me now, I just love...

making it so simple when we ask this question, what is God? Well, if you read the story in Exodus where Moses encounters God at the burning bush and Moses asks God, who shall I say sent me? Who are you? God says, I am that I am. And so this has been known as the divine name for thousands of years, the I am. And so when we really parse that out, what does that mean? It means that God is the first person in the present tense.

I am. Meaning the way that you know yourself, the ability that you have to know that you exist, like that's what God is. God is the consciousness, the sentience, the first person principle by which we all know ourselves and everything in the universe knows itself. You never say like, there is water.

Or there is a podcast. You say, I am on a podcast or I am drinking water. You know what I mean? You're always knowing yourself as the first person in the present tense.

And so I believe that's the recognition Jesus was speaking from in the book of John, for example, when he used all the I am statements. I am this, I am the way, I am the bread of life, I am the door. He was pointing to the I am itself, not himself as a personal ego, but the I am principle. And when he said things like, I and my father are one, if you've seen me, you've seen the father. I also believe he was alluding to this idea that

God is the first person in the present tense. And so God's actually so close to us that there's no room to see God. You know, it's closer than that. It's more intimate than that. And the fact that we're one with God is inescapable, an inescapable fact of what we are. And so from that definition that God is closer to us than our own thoughts, God is the very way we know ourself, then we also get the definition that God is love.

Because to be the first person in the present tense means I never want to harm myself. I never want to suffer for any reason. I always want to be happy. You know, the first person present tense always wants happiness and it never wants suffering. And so the only reason we cause suffering to others is because we see them as something other than that. They're the second person in the second tense. They're outside of me, separate from me.

And we're not aware of the same divine principle in them that's in us. And so then therefore we can, we think it's okay to do harm to them. But when we know ourself as I am, we instantly recognize that divine principle animating everything. There's just one being, one power. And we become aware of that being in everything. And because of that, all we can do is love.

So I think the I am and love are synonymous for that reason, because love is the recognition of shared being, right? Of oneness. And so when you know others as being one with you, love is the natural result. So you utilize Christ consciousness, Christianity, the Bible as your reference point for a lot of these concepts. I feel...

I was raised like quite Christian and then I've kind of shifted in different directions and now I'm, you know, I'm open to various different things and I'm re-evaluating and, you know, open to the value of Christianity particularly, but really all religions. Like most all of the conical texts that have survived for thousands of years, I feel like if you go through them, which I haven't gone through all of them, but I've at least, you know, gone through

Most of them, some degree went through a phase where I would get, I would get the books on audible and just like you're writing those pretty much live your life off of all of those books from what I've gathered in my subjective experience. And you do pretty good. How does one parse and differentiate, uh, what to take as literal quote unquote gospel and what to take as metaphor and allegory allegory in the Bible, for example? Yeah.

Yeah, such an important question, man. And this question comes up a lot on my videos on YouTube and Instagram, because I think the Bible is a phenomenal spiritual asset if you know how to interpret it correctly. The idea that God writes infallible books, I think probably everybody watching this podcast would likely agree that that's an unrealistic thing to believe about God.

God doesn't need to write infallible books because as the Bible says, God has already written God's laws on our hearts. And we call that a conscience, right? We all have a conscience and we feel what's right from wrong. But that doesn't mean that there's not inspiration in the Bible because I definitely believe there is. I think the Bible is a very inspired book, but that also doesn't mean there isn't also a lot of human influence in it. And we need to, as Jesus said,

um, be good money changers or be able to differentiate between truth and falsity. You know, Jesus told many parables like this about a farmer sowed seed and then an enemy came at night and sowed tares among the wheat. And so the weed and the, and the tares grew up together and they said, master, should we pull up the weeds yet? And he said, no, no, no. You got to wait and let both mature so you can spot the difference. And then you can go tear up the weeds. Otherwise you risk pulling up the chaff with the weeds or whatever.

And that's the idea of like discerning truth from falsity is it takes a certain level of spiritual maturity to be able to discern what is true from what is false. And so the way I like to help others gain that discernment is going to ontology that, and to me, this is the, one of the chief mistakes that,

the Christian religion makes is that they let their theology inform their ontology. Ontology is the study of being or existence. So when we're talking about ontology, it's a segment of philosophy that deals with like the nature of God. What is the nature of God's being? The immutable aspects of God's being, right? Theology is like doctrines and creeds and doctrines

philosophical ideas about God as a person, how God acts in the world, all this stuff. So you have to let ontology come first. Like what do we know is the nature of God? And you have to hold everything to that standard. And what Christianity does is the opposite, is they let their theology come from their own kind of subjective interpretation of the Bible. Whatever I believe the Bible is saying here is what it really is saying, right?

And so then they use that as a dogma and they cling to it and beat other people over the head with it. And worst of all, Christians have to sacrifice the ontological nature of God on the altar of religious dogma in order to preserve that dogma. Meaning any good Christian will tell you, if you say, do you believe God is omnipotent? They'll say, absolutely, brother. Yes, amen. God is omnipotent. Praise God. All power belongs to God. I say, great. So then how do you pay God?

with blood or, you know, a sacrifice on the cross.

How does one pay God something if God already owns everything? All power, life, energy in the universe already belongs to God. How do you pay God? They say, oh, well, you know, brother, we sinned and so our blood needs... And they go back into separation and they go back into this belief that God doesn't have all power because my sin has somehow affected God in a negative way. And now God needs a payment, man. Like God's in trouble if God doesn't get some blood.

And you say, don't you think that egregiously violates the principle of omnipotence? Don't you think that kind of makes God like a beggar or something, like looking to be fulfilled? And that, well, no, and they don't really know how to answer those questions because they don't think about God's nature first. They think about the Bible first. So I do the opposite. I say, okay, what do we know is true of the nature of God? And then let's interpret the Bible through that lens. And so I call it the five O's.

These are the five aspects of God's nature. One, meaning God is one and cannot be divided. God is indivisible, right? You can't like split God in half and make two gods. So God is one. God is omnipotent, all power. God is omniscient, all knowledge. God is omnipresent, meaning there is nowhere that God is absent. You can't have an absence of God ontologically. And then fifth is omnibenevolent, meaning God is all loving or all good.

And I think that fifth one is really important too, because it means that everything God does goes towards the health, the life and the flourishing of creation. It means that God is not capable of inflicting harm on God's own creation. God is love.

So you have those five principles and you arrive at those principles through epistemology, by the way, like logic and reason, using the laws of logic, using metaphysics. How can we deduce if there is a creator of all existence, what must be the fundamental aspects of that creator? It's like, well, if you create the whole universe, you got to have all power in the universe. If you created the whole universe, you got to have all the knowledge in the universe, et cetera, et cetera. So these are the facts we can deduce at a minimum. These must be true.

And so then we read the Bible from that lens, or at least I advocate that people should read the Bible from that lens. Meaning any scripture you read that lines up with or does not contradict those five O's of God's nature, you can say, great, that's a divinely inspired passage because God will never contradict God's nature. If there's a passage such as God advocating for animal sacrifices or genocide and all this horrible stuff in the Old Testament,

you say, well, that violates like all of these ontological facts of God's nature. So that is a man-made inspired verse. Like that's man's inspiration, not God's. And for me, that lens is the simplest lens through which to interpret the Bible

in a way that keeps you safe from all the damage that dogma can do to somebody when they read the Bible through a dogmatic lens. - Yeah, it seems like a minimization of the concept of God to be like, I'll pay you back. Like God gives a shit. There's a couple things that come to mind. One is the quote from probably Ram Dass is the greatest thing you can do for me is work on yourself. The greatest thing I can do for you is work on myself.

And that's it. Yeah, great quote. That's the payback. And something that I've experienced that I've noticed that I find intriguing.

is doing certain uh like psychedelic ceremony things ayahuasca or whatever peyote something something that involves a shaman or guide uh and music or sound or some type of of guidance of the thing uh particularly like music at the end of say shaman's ayahuasca singing the ikaros for example or if there's instruments in the maloka or wherever the heck you're doing the thing

Uh, it would be weird and disrespectful to like snap at the end or clap at the end of the thing. It's just like the greatest thing that you can do as a, as a, as a showing of like gratitude and appreciation is just to heal is like an exhalation is like a down regulation of your nervous system is a release is like, like just

allow that medicine that you've experienced in that process to actually like penetrate your system and be supportive to you and the idea that like I'm gonna like get you back or something it feels like It just feels like that like a minimization in a way. Yeah well I mean it undoubtedly is because you have to you have to claim that sin has negatively affected God in some way right and

These are the things that are never talked about. And when you press a fundamentalist on something like this, they'll really like run for the hills to avoid these kind of arguments, because these are the things that are not factored into Christian theology. But what it's like, what are you proposing has happened to God?

when I sin, that I must then pay God something. And in the Old Testament, it was an animal sacrifice, right? Ox, goat, bull, something like that. God needs blood for some metaphysical reason. There's something that happens when I sin to God that then causes God to require a blood payment, and that blood payment sort of metaphysically offsets

The sin debt I created like this is what is being implied and so I just say how do you cost a debt to an omnipotent being right it metaphysically, it doesn't make any sense and

But most people, again, most people don't think that far because religion plays on the guilt that we hold of like, I'm such a bad person. And religion comes in and says, yes, you are. And don't you think a just and holy God would require a payment for that guilt? And it just sort of naturally seems to fall like, yeah, I should do something to appease the angry God. But Jesus came to dispel this notion of God. Could the blood be a metaphor? It could be a metaphor, but it wasn't. And in biblical times, it was very literal. Well,

What camp are you? Like, who do you fit in with? What dogma do you align with? Oh, that's a fun question, dude. Like, from a Christian standpoint, you mean? I don't know. Sure. Yeah. From a religion standpoint? Yeah. Religion, spiritual, patch pants, beads, you know, dreadlocks, like Christ, Buddhism. Like, is there a camp that you align with?

No, there's definitely no camp. I like a little bit of everything. I like to taste all the flavors. All Christian denominations that I know of would consider me a heretic because I don't believe that Jesus died so that God could forgive my sins. But to me, I teach a, I have a podcast called The Jesus Way where we kind of are laying out a

spiritually sound and uncontradictory version of Christianity, which is really just, let's go back to the red letters of Jesus and let's just read what Jesus said. Let's leave out Paul and church fathers and all the later people that came along to commentate on Jesus. And let's just see what the master himself said.

Because I believe personally that Jesus did teach a complete gospel and that Jesus showed us the perfect way to God if we're willing to follow it, which is repent,

the word is metanoia in Greek for repent. It means to change your mind. It's like if you're living in sin, you know, living in selfishness, greed, all this stuff, the idea is turn away from that and change your mind of, hey, I can't get fulfilled in that. That can't make me happy. I need to turn my heart to God. And that's the turning, right, of repentance. So Jesus said, repent from your sin, turn your heart to God,

Jesus said in no less than three verses, if you do not forgive other people their trespasses, your heavenly father cannot forgive yours because the measure you give will be the measure you get back. That's the law of attraction, the law of reciprocity. It's like, why should the universe forgive you if you're not forgiving everybody else? It has to hold you to the same exact standard. And so judge not lest you be judged was Jesus's big teaching.

And then the third principle really is the greatest commandment, the golden rule, which is love God with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself. All three occasions Jesus was asked, Matthew 19, 16, Mark 10, 17, Luke 18, 18, Master, what must I do to be saved and have eternal life?

And it's funny, man, because if you ask any Christian pastor that question on a Sunday morning, they'll say, we got to confess Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior and believe he died and resurrected for your sins, brother, and then you will be saved. It's from Romans 10, 9, where Paul said that. But it's like, well, did Jesus say that? Actually, I'm wearing the shirt. I don't know if you can see that. Jesus never said that.

Actually, Jesus never said such a thing. He never told a single person that they needed to confess him as Lord or that they needed to believe he rose again. Like, dude, after Jesus rises from the dead, he still doesn't tell people that they have to believe in his resurrection. He literally just says in Luke 22, go and preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins to all the world. That's it. No blood confession, no any of this stuff that we teach in Christianity.

So it's like, what did Jesus teach about salvation? And all three of those occasions, he was asked, Rabbi, what must I do to be saved and have eternal life? Jesus said, keep the commandments. What are the greatest commandments, Lord? Love God with all your heart. Love your neighbor as yourself. And if you do these two commandments, you fulfill the entire law.

So like he couldn't have made it more clear. Like all God wants is your heart. And if God has your heart, God has everything. So just love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. And you are justified before God. That was the gospel of Jesus. Are those commandments synonymous with each other? Yes, I believe they are. I think that's why Jesus says the first and greatest commandment is love God with all your heart. And the second is like it, love your neighbor. Because

God is non-physical. God is immaterial. So you can't just say, I love God. Your love for God has to demonstrate itself in some tangible way.

And so the way that Jesus taught us to demonstrate that we love God is by loving God's people. And that makes all the sense in the world. And Jesus, on multiple occasions, he rebukes his very closest disciples who come calling him Lord, Lord, saying, Lord, Lord, we did, we prophesied in your name and all this stuff. And he says, get away from me, you who practice evil, because when I was hungry, you did not feed me.

etc, etc, right? When you did not do it to the least of these, you did not do it to me. So like Jesus rebuked people who confessed him as Lord.

But didn't follow his greatest commandment. So it's like for the life of me, I can't figure out why Christianity today is not predicated on these commandments and teachings that are unequivocal from the mouth of Jesus. But it's because a later person named Paul came along and started writing a whole bunch of different stuff and ideas about Jesus. And the whole Catholic Orthodox Church kind of took Paul's teachings and made that the crux of Christianity.

And so I call it Paulianity for that reason, because it's really not the religion of Jesus. It's Paul's religion about Jesus. And so I just say, look, time distorts everything. Every good holy person that lives on this earth

Has a religion made about them that gets distorted? This always happens in every instance. Let's just go back to the beginning, to the source of, hey, if we think this guy was the son of God, then for crying out loud, maybe we just read his words and his teachings and follow those. And maybe that's good enough. And I have a hard time, or I guess Christians have a hard time arguing with this philosophy that Jesus's words alone are sufficient for salvation rather than just confessing

you know, he's Lord and believing in him. It's like, no, maybe actually follow him, make him your Lord. As Jesus said, John 14, 15, if you love me, keep my commandments. John 14, 21, the one who has my commandments and keeps them is the one that loves me. So to Jesus in the Bible, he seems pretty clear that to believe in him means to obey his commandments.

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you'll know this better but it's like forgive them for they know not what they what they've done and and you know it's like it seems like like like christianity from the lens of what i

I would say deeply aligned with, I'm developing my relationship with that more and more with time, would be Christ consciousness, which I think there's a lot of in the, however you said, the polyamory, polytanary. Polyamory. In that version, it seems like it's actually quite contradictory. And that's the thing that's the biggest challenge for me is it seems like Christ consciousness would be one of forgiveness and one of unconditional love.

And if you're not in alignment with this specific book or teaching or whatever the thing is, it's like I forgive you for you know not what you do. I still love you to your core. And that I think creates liberation for all, including particularly the individual that's actually projecting that out into the world. And if a person can live in Christ consciousness...

forgiveness, compassion, love, grace, you know, acceptance, surrender, things of the sort with discernment is a really major one. I believe that creates a reality or sensation of heaven on earth. And if not, you experience dissonance, cacophony, dis-ease and hell on earth.

How do you define heaven and hell? Well, you absolutely nailed it, man. That's another big part of Jesus's gospel was bringing heaven to earth versus Christianity. Today is about let's get the hell out of here. This awful planet, the devil runs it. You know, it's all going to hell. Let's get out of here and go to heaven. When's the rapture coming? You know, when's Jesus going to rescue us?

And again, Jesus never said that. Jesus never said, the earth is terrible. We need to get out of here, go to heaven. It was exactly the opposite. It was your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is already at hand. The kingdom of heaven is right here. So to Jesus, heaven was not an afterlife location with a longitude and latitude somewhere in the cosmos, right?

It was a state of consciousness that we can access right now by living in alignment with God's law. And God's law is the law of one. It's the law of love, which really can all be boiled down to do no harm, right? Doing no harm, living your life in such a way that you strive to do no harm to anyone, whether mentally, emotionally, physically, or otherwise. I want to be of service to all beings and love all beings. And I want to do no harm. If we live according to that one law,

We are in perfect right standing with the universe and we get to enjoy the universe's abundance and harmony and alignment. And as Jesus said, all good things come to us when we just seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. So heaven is the state of awareness of oneness with God here and now. Likewise, hell then is just the lack of awareness of God. Hell is also a state of consciousness.

But the better way to understand it is as a privation. Privation is a word that means like a deterioration of something. So in metaphysics, we have the idea of good versus evil. And this is duality, right? There's good and there's also evil. And these are the two powers in the universe. And they're duking it out. Heaven and hell.

And so Christianity really holds to this kind of Gnostic dualism or platonic dualism of heaven good, earth bad. God versus the devil. They're duking it out, right?

But philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle have a much different view of evil, the nature of evil that I personally ascribe to as well, which is called pervation theory, which just says evil is just the absence of good, not a second power apart from good that's equally powerful or something. So the analogy would be like a rotten food, rotten tomato or rotten apple.

It's like the rottenness in the tomato isn't a second thing separate from the tomato. Like the rottenness didn't sneak into the tomato and start causing havoc, right? It's a natural process of the tomato deteriorating, losing its health, losing its vibrancy and so forth. So you can't separate rottenness from the rotten tomato and hold them both in each hand, right? They're indivisibly the same because it's just a pervation of what's there.

So if God is good, then what is evil is, uh, if, if God's being is good, then evil is basically non-being. It's the absence of something, not the presence of something. Evil is the absence of love, truth, the awareness of God and so forth. And so that's what hell is, is it's a probation of awareness, right? It's a probation of good because we're, we're spiritually blind. We're spiritually ignorant, but, uh,

Although it isn't a second power, that's not to say it doesn't seem to be or have the effects of such a thing. Evil very much seems to be a real power in our world, and it should, in a sense, be taken like that, in that we have to know the metaphysical laws of how do we actually eradicate evil.

was Jesus said, you don't get rid of evil by fighting evil because fighting is evil. Fighting is another evil act. It's kind of like the idea of being able to atone for a sin with another sin. Like, oh, I just murdered somebody. That's a sin. Let me go murder a goat to compensate for that sin. It's like, no, a negative can't offset a negative. Jesus taught us to overcome evil with good.

So it's like, hey, if you want to actually offset that sin you just committed, maybe go take care of a goat and be loving to a goat, you know, do something kind. That's what can metaphysically offset the balance. So all that to say, heaven is the awareness of oneness with God, which is a state absolutely available to us now.

And that's not to say that there isn't an afterlife because there definitely is, but it's more of just a continuation of how we live on earth, right? This is what near-death experiencers say classically is it's like whatever kind of state of consciousness you exit your lifetime in, you kind of go to an afterlife realm on that same frequency. So as you alluded to earlier, Aaron, like

Our spiritual growth is for our own benefit. It's my benefit to work on myself and it benefits everybody else in the universe when I work on myself because there's no skipping grades in the universe, right? You can't jump from where you are to a higher level of consciousness. You've got to go step by step to make your way there through spiritual discipline and practice each and every day. So this is why Jesus said the way to eternal life is hard. The way is narrow. It's not easy to die to yourself every day.

But the way to hell is easy and broad, and there's many who find it. So it's like, choose your heart. You know, do you want the hard road of destruction and ego and sin? Or do you want the hard road of spiritual discipline and devotion to God? These are really the only two options a human has. Is the concept of evil or the concept of good reliant on the existence of the concept of evil? The concept, yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

I feel like the words, it seems like it can feel almost like an elementary game that we play, good and evil. And it's like we're at that layer of consciousness where we're perceiving things as good and evil. And it feels like, not to say what you're saying is elementary, but I feel like that layer of good, bad, subjective, good, bad, good guy, bad guy. It feels like there's another layer of witnessing of that, of seeing it's actually just polarity.

And perhaps in some ways, it's just about balancing the polarity of the light and the dark and your subjective concept of the good and the evil. And something that I find interesting, I wonder your perspective of, I have a...

theory, feeling, idea that most of the things that the church is trying to cast out, they are actually in fact the progenitors of because they're filling energy into the

All of the kinky, weird, fun, sexy things that people are doing that the Catholic Church is like, no, no, no, bad, bad, bad. It's actually infusing energy into that space. So they're actually like the creators and the progenitors of the thing that they're casting out. Does that make sense? Absolutely. It's a metaphysical law, man. What you fight, you strengthen. Christianity succeeds in making...

like sex, for example, right? Super off limits. If you're a Christian, you have no right to participate in this act outside of these strict boundaries of marriage, right? So it's like, if you make sex so taboo like that, all you're doing is making sex even more interesting and more tantalizing. As a Christian kid, man, I'm sure you grew up Christian too, so you probably get this.

Like the fact that it's like, don't even think about it. Don't even want it. Don't even imagine it. Like all I can think about is sex. You just made it way more awesome, bro. Thank you. Yeah. A hundred percent. Keep doing that. Yeah. Like if you could make it more awesome, that would do it. Right. It's like, yeah, you're, you're not going to scare people away from stuff. You've just got to explain like there is for sure a cause to teach children about sex

sexuality and sacred sexuality and how to have a healthy relationship towards sex and all that. The consequences of abusing sex, all of that should be explained to young people for sure.

You just can't do it in a way that tries to control their behavior. You've got to let people make decisions on their own. And if people just, if kids just understand like, hey, this isn't an evil thing that God hates. God created sex. Sex is very good, but it's also very powerful. And so with great power comes great responsibility. You probably shouldn't go out and just

squander this sexual energy in every possible way you want to or think about because there could be some big consequences to that. Learn how to express your sexual energy in a healthy, responsible way. That's what we should teach kids. But when you don't teach them that and you just say it's bad and evil and God hates you if you do it, well then, only one of two things can happen. Somebody's sexual energy will be so suppressed to the point where, as we see happen very commonly, right, in Catholicism especially,

These poor priests spend decades of their life angrily suppressing their sexuality. And so you can't suppress something that's real, right? You just force it to go somewhere else. And so their sexuality gets distorted in all these weird ways because it's not being allowed a healthy expression. So it's like, how do we teach kids to have a healthy expression of sexuality and a healthy respect for it such that they just, of their own self, they don't want to go be irresponsible with their sexual energy.

They want to use it in a responsible way. If Christianity did that, there would be way less sexual scandals and promiscuity in Christianity. But it's like either someone's going to suppress themselves into a nightmare, a sexual repressed nightmare, or they're going to go out and just be like, screw this. I can't do this anymore. I'm just going to go sleep with every person I can get my hands on.

And from my experience, bro, most of my Christian friends that I grew up in youth group with eventually took that route because the suppression for so long becomes insufferable, especially at that age when your hormones are going nuts, right? It's like you're literally forcing these kids to have a prodigal son moment because you're not going to, they're not going to be able to suppress this forever. So, I mean,

sexuality, I think, is one of the most damaging, if not the most damaging aspects of fundamentalist religion. Yeah, it seems like the path towards integration would be inviting in the shadow, like loving the shadow and not being afraid, not looking away. Say, oh, cool, tell me more. And I think that it's like the tell me more.

I think is a really important concept and leaning into the thing that scares you most approach it with curiosity. Tell me more. Yeah. You know, and, and eventually you can get, you can get to the other side of that, but that's why I, I said like the elementary ness of like good and evil. I think it's like, you know, just isness and tell me more. And then that allows for, I think probably, you know, a sensation of, of, you know, like wholeness as opposed to playing this,

this game, this good bad game that we're doing. But I might be, you know, I don't know how wise I am with this. This is just kind of, I'm just spitballing here. What do you think about that? No, yeah, you touched on it earlier when you said it's just polarity. This is one of the most helpful teachings in the law of one for me was the understanding of polarity.

The law of one describes it as the positive and the negative polarity that there's only two polarities in consciousness Which you could think of it as there's only two directions Consciousness can move towards the positive or the negative and so what is the positive and negative represent? Well first is that these terms represent their meanings in like chemistry meaning every particle has to have a charge in order to do work and

Work is a term that means the ability to create change in the environment. So unless a particle has a charge, it can't create change in its environment. So like protons have a positive charge, electrons have a negative charge. So everything in the universe has to have a charge. And so the law of one explains that you and I are kind of like quantum particles that are trying to choose our charge. And so positive doesn't mean good and negative doesn't mean bad.

Positive means expansive or outward moving, radiating. That's the nature of what is positive, like a sun or a star. Negative means the opposite. It means contracting or magnetic or absorbing. So what is negative is inward moving. What is positive is outward moving.

And so they actually call, I hate you. I love you. There you go. Perfect. And even you can feel that within yourself and there's all this stuff, you know, you put right stuff on, on bottles or, you know, play loving music around plant charging your water, you know, whatever the thing is, but you can just feel that with yourself. Just say like, I hate you. You might have fear. There might be actually a sensation of fear or resistance around the concepts of saying like, I hate you, you know, because it's the, we don't, I think it's,

There's the fear around words I think as well probably gives them more power. And then there's also another simultaneous reality of there is great power in words. Anyway, sorry, I'm interrupting you. But that I hate you, I love you, I think is a very clear like, ah, I love you open. You feel your body open, you feel your heart open, you feel your heart open. I hate you. You feel yourself close. But anger and closing is also valuable because it's like the immune system for the body.

And so there is that can be a part of, you know, the human experience of like, sometimes I open, sometimes I close. Yeah, it's really good, man. I love that practice of like, here's how you can know what a contraction feels like, because you can say, I hate you. And then what does that feel like in my body when I say that? Our negative emotions absolutely serve a very important purpose.

But our negative emotions, I call it the emotional guidance system in that every emotion you have is actually trying to guide you towards a perception you're having. It's like your emotions are trying to show you the quality of your thinking. And so when we think in alignment with reality, with truth, which is love,

then we feel positive emotions. We feel expansive because what is true feels good. And likewise, when we think and perceive in ways that contradict the nature of reality, separateness, fear, lack, victimhood, then it feels contracting in our body because our emotional guidance system is saying, that's an incorrect perception of reality.

So it's like helping to clue us in on where our thinking needs to be upgraded. So this is why it's so important not to suppress negative emotions. Because if you just suppress the emotion every time you feel it or you run from it, you'll never know what the cause of that feeling is. And the cause is always some kind of deeply held belief about myself. So the way I break it down is these three beliefs are the three negative emotions.

Our three negative emotions are sadness, anger, and fear. And there's many variations of each one of these three that we could name, but these are the three root negative emotions. These are the only three negative feelings we essentially have. Different forms of sadness, different forms of anger, different forms of fear. And so each emotion being unique, like sadness feels very different than anger does, or fear and vice versa.

is because they're all signaling a unique belief that needs to be corrected. And so sadness, the emotion of sadness, is signaling the first belief of the ego that we touched on a minute ago, which is the belief in lack. All sadness is from a feeling of lacking something. I've lost something or I don't have something that I want or need. A loss of a loved one, loss of success, whatever it is, beauty,

all sadness is the belief in lack at some level with anger all anger is the attachment to something when we're attached to an outcome and we don't get it anger is the result so anger is the emotion that signals hey you've got an attachment to an outcome here i want to figure out what that outcome that you're attached to is and then fear when we feel any kind of fear anxiety stress paranoia worry fear

That's the signal that we're trying to take control over something that we need to surrender to God. It's the, I'm not in control. I'm being lived. God is in control. So let me live from this surrendered state of trusting in God's will.

So these are the only three really root causes of suffering is sadness, anger, and fear. And they connect to these three distinct beliefs. And so a big part of what I do in my courses and programs in 40U is I teach people how to identify the beliefs that are causing these emotions in real time, how to use the emotional guidance system

to be more self-aware of my inner world and begin to requalify some of these beliefs in real time. So like when I feel triggered to anger, I can practice remembering that this represents an attachment of some sort so that I can then welcome the anger and say, oh, thank you, anger, for showing me, cluing me in. But I've developed an attachment. I need to be right. I need to have my way, something like that. And let me just surrender that outcome.

And it's such a simple practice, man, but it's so incredibly powerful when you really commit to it and say, whenever I feel one of these three negative emotions, I'm just going to go to the root of it and I'm going to requalify it positively. Yeah, I think the most important

efficient way to keep yourself stuck in hell would be to have judgment on how you feel. Yeah. If you're in a place of good, bad, you know, this is why I was kind of poking at the concept of good, bad. It can get you stuck in a double bind where you label certain emotions as these are good emotions and

and certain emotions as these are bad emotions. And as long as you're in that place, then you will not be able to actually feel through the entirety of that sense or that emotional experience. And so you'll always keep yourself kind of a little stuck and frozen in that space. And so what happens from your perspective if a person suppresses anger or sadness, for example? Well, suppression just creates fragmentation.

And fragmentation just means there's all these different aspects of myself that I don't love, that I don't think are lovable, that I don't think are acceptable. They're not going to earn me love from other people, whatever it is. And so I try to shave these parts of myself off and reject them, suppress them, bury them. And so it's like a shattered mirror, or actually a better analogy is

you know, a car crash and a bunch of broken bones. All of the bones are still in your body. You can't actually get rid of your bones in that sense, but they can just be there in a fragmented state or a state of wholeness. So when we live with traumas, traumas are a sign of fragmentation. These are different parts of us that we have deemed unlovable or unworthy of love in some way and have therefore tried to reject from the self.

And so, as you said, very rightly so, this is why living in the duality of good and bad will always perpetuate this suppression and fragmentation until we can learn that there's nothing bad in God's universe. Everything serves a purpose. It may be challenging.

It may be difficult, but that doesn't make it bad because how do you define what's bad anyway? You know, we've all had experiences of something we thought was bad and it turned out to be one of the greatest things that ever happened to us and it taught us wisdom and things like this. So as A Course in Miracles says, all things are lessons that God would have me learn. So if everything was a lesson God would have me learn, then right there, nothing is bad in God's universe as if it doesn't have a redemptive purpose of some sort.

So we have to just come to see our negative emotions, not bad emotions, negative emotions, as lessons to be learned, as catalysts for growth and expansion. And when we realize that all emotions are like messengers from our inner world coming to give us helpful information, then we naturally stop resisting them because you would never resist somebody you believed was trying to help you, right?

but I understand that it is not easy to feel sadness and perceive it as something that's trying to help you. It's not easy to do that. But with practice and repetition of, oh, thank you, sadness, and really honoring the energy of sadness and grief when it comes up, of like, this is a sacred energy. It's good and it's right to feel this if I feel it. Everything in God's universe has a purpose.

But what is that purpose? And with sadness, for example, the purpose of sadness is to point you to something you believe is lacking. And eventually you have to question that belief that you're lacking that thing. Otherwise, the sadness will always continue to perpetuate itself. Yeah. It seems like every point of dissonance that you experience within yourself in the form of being out of shape or being in judgment of yourself, maybe for being out of shape or being...

angry or being resentful or being greedy or feeling contracted, feeling hateful, feeling all of the things that you could put into like the kind of dark category. It seems like an a reef, a really great reframe of that is like, these are all breadcrumbs towards self-actualization and enlightenment and openness and love and Christ consciousness and all of those things.

As long as you're in that bind of these are the bad things, I got to cut these away. You will just keep perpetuating that. And it's actually the perfect medicine for you because it's going to create so much pain and so much separation within you until eventually you need to snap and you can't take it anymore. And your ontological lens on things has been corrupted. But it's actually also simultaneously perfect because it's going to lead you to so much dissonance and pain that eventually you have to open up into something else.

So it's like even your dissonance and your judgment is perfect. It's beautiful. It's all a part of your path. Absolutely, man. I actually just did a lecture on this very topic a few weeks ago in 40U and I just posted the video today on my channel.

about this idea that Jesus taught that it's the sinners, it's those who mourn, it's the poor, it's the downtrodden that are truly blessed by God, right? Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Jesus had a very subversive view of this stuff in his day, where he looked at the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the priestly class and said, you guys are the farthest ones from God's kingdom. Everybody's like, what? How could he possibly say these are the priests for crying out loud? But Jesus had a different idea about sin than we do.

To Jesus, the worst sins clearly are the private sins of pride and self-aggrandizement and believing yourself to be superior to others. Self-righteousness, right? This is what the priestly class was full of, was self-righteousness.

and to the people who are gambling and going to the prostitution house and doing drugs and drinking. He was like, these people are closer to the kingdom than you guys are. In fact, one of my favorite quotes from Jesus is he looks at the Pharisees and says, truly I tell you, whores and tax collectors enter the kingdom of God ahead of you. He's just like, oh man, what a scathing indictment.

for Jesus to give to a priest of his day. I mean, you imagine telling a priest, prostitutes and tax collectors are closer to God's kingdom than you, are entering God's kingdom ahead of you. And it's because Jesus knew what you just said, Aaron.

that our suffering brings us closer to God. When we suffer, we're humbled, right? It's again, it's the refiner's fire that turns the coal into a diamond. It's the downward pressure that really humbles us before God and causes us to repent. And this was seen as well, many passages I could name, but let's look at the thief on the cross, the famous story, right? The thief doesn't confess Jesus as Lord or do any mighty works or believe in his death and resurrection. He

He literally just acknowledges, I am a sinner. And remember me, Lord, when you come into your kingdom. He wasn't even asking Jesus to let him into the kingdom. He was like, hey, I know I deserve what I'm getting. You know, the other thief tries to tell you, hey, if you're the son of God, man, get us down from these crosses, dude. And the other thief on the other side says, hey, shut up, dude. This guy, he's a holy man. We actually are the sinners. We really stole. We're really criminals. We're getting what we deserve. But this man is innocent. He's done nothing wrong.

And then he says, remember me, Lord, when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus is like, oh, I won't have to remember you, buddy. You'll be there with me. Like that to me shows the heart of God, that those who suffer, who are broken by their suffering are so pleasing to God. And King David said this in Psalm 51 as well. You do not delight in sacrifice or else I would give it. You do not delight in burnt offerings, but the sacrifices of God.

are a broken and contrite spirit. And this, O God, you will not despise." It's this idea that the poor, the suffering, the downtrodden are truly blessed because they're the closest ones to realization.

The same idea that it's always darkest before the dawn, right? The darkest moment is right before the light breaks through. And so if you're going that direction of like, look, religion fails a lot of people, dude, they with sincere hearts, they come to religion, whether it's Christianity in our day or Judaism in Jesus's day, people are let down by religion. And so they just say, look, I've tried it all, man. I've prayed. I've been a devout Jew or Muslim or Christian.

None of it worked, man. I just want to have sex with prostitutes and drink and gamble. I'm sorry. I want to do that. And they just accept how they feel. It's like you finally started your spiritual path, bro. Well done. Exactly, right? Get ready for the pain. Welcome to the spiritual awakening path.

And it's like, at least they're being honest, right? At least they're being humble. They're like, yeah, I'm a sinner. I want to go gamble. I'm going to do it. Jesus is like, God likes that attitude better than the priest with the pointy hat. He was like, I thank you, Father, that I'm not like these sinners out here. I mean, Jesus condemned those people the hardest by far. And Jesus called them. He said, woe to you, Pharisees. You are like unmarked graves. Men stand above you and are unaware.

It's this amazing Jewish dis from the first century where the Jews believe that if you stand over the grave of somebody, it defiles you. You have to go do the seven ritual bathing sessions and all the purification rituals to clean yourself.

So Jesus said, you guys are literally like unmarked graves that are contaminating everybody you come in contact with. Like that's how foul you are, is what Jesus was saying. He was trying to show us like God really, really resists a prideful heart.

And so whether we're on a spiritual path of Eastern mysticism or Buddhism or Hinduism or Christianity, it makes no difference, right? What our religions are. The laws of the universe are the same. And anyone who gets puffed up with a spiritual ego, who thinks they're better than, more than, superior to in any way, it's like, well, you're asking for a humility check from the universe and you're going to get it sooner or later.

Yeah, you're just distancing yourself, you know, and it's like it's like the it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than someone who's rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. You know, and I think that what probably what's what's meant in that I've experienced this recently. I've been experiencing like suffering within myself and I have tools to.

to be able to be with that suffering. And I'm observing that the suffering actually is an entrance into spirituality and spirituality is just coming closer to God. And, you know, a vehicle that I'm utilizing right now, particularly because we're we just launched a breathing program. So breath class, it goes through mechanics of breath and how to use it to regulate your nervous system, et cetera. So I'm using all the breathing practices in the program.

Amidst the kind of stress and quote unquote suffering that I'm experiencing and I'm witnessing what I've heard you share about before. It's like a burning away of that which does not serve you. It's like burning away of like the the I think that the analogy I heard you use was it's like paper inside of a stone temple.

and like all of your karma and all the stuff, you need a little fire in there to get rid of what you've been hoarding. And if you can burn it away, what remains is you. And what you is this deep, sincere relationship to God. You become closer to God because you've burnt away the

that which does not serve you. And the idea in another, another idea is like, is like nobody doesn't suffer. Somebody suffers. I think that's from us or somebody like that said that as well. And so the more of somebody you are,

It's a metaphysical law. The more suffering will arise to burn up your somebody-ness because the universe wants you to be in alignment. It wants you to be synchronistic. It wants you to be harmonious. And I believe that is a relationship with God. That's really good, man. Your analogy is perfect of the burning of the paper or whatever. It's like if you just light a piece of paper on fire, that's not going to hurt you to watch a piece of paper burn.

But if you're holding onto the piece of paper and then you light it on fire, yeah, it's going to hurt because you're attached to, you're identified with what's burning. So it'll feel like you're burning.

And that's the ego death process. And Jesus made that a prerequisite to being his disciple. He said, if any man wants to be my disciple, let them first deny themselves, take up their cross, and then they can follow me. It's like Jesus literally was saying, you got to crucify your ego on the cross of love every day if you want to be my disciple. And I think it's like if Jesus was commanding his other disciples to follow

have an ego death before they could be his disciple, I'm pretty sure that stands to reason that Jesus had probably transcended his own ego already. You know, in order to make that a requirement to be his disciple, he must have done that himself. And so Jesus is never speaking from the position of a personal ego or a somebody, as you said. When Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," he means the "I am" is the way, the truth, and the life. He's speaking from the "I am" position of God-consciousness.

And we all have the I am within us right now. We all know ourselves as the first person in the present tense. So to your point, Aaron, the spiritual path is all about that. It's all about developing a true relationship with self, which has to begin by knowing yourself as consciousness itself, awareness itself, I am. That is what's fundamental to me. That's what can't be burned away by the flames of life, you know?

So then if that's what I fundamentally am and I can't be removed from me, then what do I have to fear letting everything else burn away? It's like, then we can just invite God to begin showing us what is, uh, what we've identified with that is not fundamental to us and let God remove those things. But the process is always made worse when we are in resistance to what's burning. And all, like we said earlier, all suffering is resistance. So if something's going to burn, uh,

you might as well just let it burn because resisting its burning only makes it doubly difficult, right? It's like you can't live unless you, I mean, I can't, but it's a lot harder to live unless you're able to die before you die. Like if you can die before you die, suddenly everything else starts opening up and become a lot easier. And so if you're in that place, if you're holding on to all of the material attachments or stories, concepts, if you believe yourself to be whatever it is, then I think it's something that's interesting is like a lot of people

Really, their deeper, highest, most self-actualized self wants anything that is not true to burn away. And then the other self that they're occupied by presently, almost like a parasite occupying a host in a way, that parasite...

doesn't want to lose those parts. And so I think a person ought to be careful with what they wish for. If a person is wishing for their highest expression of their self or the most self-actualized version of themself or to really tap into their spirit, there's a good chance that energetically things will fall away that perhaps an aspect of yourself does not want to fall away.

Relationships might fall away. Resources might fall away. Materials might fall away. Like the whole concept of who you believe yourself to me may start to fall. And probably in that process, it would feel like a fucking fire. Like it'd be scary. And then.

you know, on the other side of that. Is there such a thing of coming into self-actualization or quote unquote enlightenment without a fire and without pain? And if so, how do we do that? I don't think there is, man. I really don't. Perfect. We all play by the same rules, bro. I think in cases of like a Ramana Maharshi or a Jesus Christ or these extremely enlightened kind of avatars,

They're coming here. They've already been through, you know, third density like we're in right now. Many lifetimes ago, they're very advanced. So maybe those advanced beings who come here can sort of have the one shot awakenings like Eckhart Tolle or whatever.

But even Eckhart's awakening came through a lot of pain, right? Even Ramana Maharshi's awakening story at 16 came through suffering. So even in that regard, I think it is absolutely the essential catalyst for awakening, which is why we can't label our suffering as bad.

our suffering is the cause of everything we learn in this life. And everything we learn expands our state of being and makes us better. So how can we say that that's bad? You know, it really is the dualistic labeling that gets us into trouble because we're implying that God created an imperfect universe when we say that. That there's a mistake in God's universe called evil or sin. And I've got to eradicate it because God won't because God screwed up. So let me fix God's mistake.

And that is the mentality of religion, believe it or not, is like fixing God's erroneous universe. I got to rebuke the devil everywhere I see the devil and stuff. I got to clean up God's messes wherever I go. Christians don't know that they're implying that when they resist evil, but that's what you're implying. And I mean, Jesus even said, resist not evil, right? Jesus said, to your point earlier, whoever wants to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

It's this idea of like, get rid of your stories, get rid of all these attachments and these things that aren't essential to you. These are things you've learned since you came into this lifetime. They're not what you are. And so they can't save you. They can't bring you happiness. Only what you fundamentally are can save you. And so in the gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, if you bring forth what is within you, then what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is in you, then what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And I think right there, that's pervation, right? If I don't bring forth the truth of self, then the absence of the truth of self will destroy me. That's evil. That's sin. It's the absence of truth. It's the absence of good.

And there's many other passages in the Gospel of Thomas where Jesus alludes to this fact. But this is a metaphysical principle, man, that's taught in every religion on earth, especially the Eastern mystical religions. And Jesus was a master of teaching these kinds of universal principles. Only what I have not given can ever be lacking. What does that mean to you? Well, that is a line from A Course in Miracles. And that line...

Absolutely changed my life years ago when I was coming out of suffering in my 20s I went through many years of intense depression in my 20s and was doing everything I could to get out of my depression Meditating reading watching videos all this stuff and it helped a little bit But I was still in a really bad spot and it wasn't until I started discovering what I've been sharing today with you about the three beliefs of ego and that our emotions are trying to tell us that

what our misperceptions are in our mind, that I started to realize my sadness, my depression was a belief in lack. I believed I was lacking love in my life. And so when I read the Course in Miracles, I'll never forget reading that line that said, only what I have not given, or it says, only what you have not given can ever be lacking in any situation. And the Course teaches this principle that metaphysically, like in the kingdom of heaven, in the universe,

Giving is increasing. Giving is expanding. What you give, what you put out is what you get back, as Jesus said. And so if you're always putting out negative thoughts, you're amplifying those thoughts. You're amplifying those beliefs. So if I want love,

Rather than, you know, begging the universe to give me love, I'm just letting out more lack when I do that. I'm literally coming from the perspective of lack. Help me, I don't have love. I need love, I'm lacking it. And so you're just gonna get more of that feeling of lacking love. So instead, the course says, come from the position of love. And how do you come from the position of love if you don't feel love inside yourself? Well, you've gotta give love to other people, right? The only way to come from love is to be loving.

And so the course teaches forgiveness of others and loving others, loving your neighbor as yourself, as the path to awaken love within you. So it's like when we truly do what Jesus said, we get beyond ourselves. We say, look, life isn't all about me feeling loved. Life is equally about me loving others. And I have been seeking the latter and forsaking the former my whole life.

Let me switch the order around. Let me actually be more concerned with loving others for once and see where that gets me. And as the course teaches, man is so true. Like when you really learn to care about the needs of others as much or more than yours, it begins to transform your state of consciousness so quickly because you start to tune into the reality of oneness. Like

Like actually loving somebody, feeding somebody, the things that Jesus taught us to do are so important as a spiritual practice because it truly does awaken divine love within us.

in a way that nothing else quite can. And so in India, the Hindus have been practicing karma yoga, right? For thousands of years, because they've understood this technology for millennia, that there's really nothing you can do that's of more spiritual benefit to you than loving people and being kind and serving them. And so karma yoga is literally the discipline of like, let's just make our whole life about serving people. And to the ego, that sounds like a total drag, right? Ego doesn't want to serve others. It wants to serve itself.

But you find a different kind of happiness from loving others rather than I call it like mountaintop happiness versus valley happiness. Mountaintop happiness is like the peak moments, getting pleasure, a reward of some sort, right? Being in the limelight, you know, the ego chases the mountaintop moments and it's always climbing up another mountain.

Whereas valley happiness, it's like, it's deep, it's wide, it's pervasive, you can't escape it. It's always there. It's surrounding you, right? We want to be in the valley of happiness rather than chasing the mountaintop and chasing

Happiness in the valley is predicated on peace of mind in this moment, non-resistance to the moment, loving other people, being of service, forgiveness. These are the qualities that produce lasting happiness that isn't predicated on a circumstance. And the only way to get that is to get beyond yourself, like Jesus said. So

Only what I don't give can ever be lacking is a metaphysical principle that shows us that everything we want is inside of us. But if we're not in the business of giving it and extending it, how can we ever know it? You know, we have to make ourself the source of the thing we want to experience by giving it.

I think why people, many people have a little bit of like resistance or allergen to the word spiritual or a person that identifies as spiritual or someone that just seems to project themselves as quote unquote spiritual is a lot of times. I think that there's an idea or story that we need to do something really different.

special and amazing and we need to go to a yoga retreat and we need to go to an ashram and we need to get prayer beads and we need to do breath work and we need to like all these things uh but one of the most spiritual things a person could do is just be intentional with being kind to as every time you come in contact with someone be kind like offer them help offer them support

Be kind to yourself. Be compassionate to yourself. And if you can do that, I think that's like karmic yoga or karma yoga or whatever. You're going out and you're just like that's spiritual AF, but it's not that sexy. It's just authentic. It's like it's like real.

you know and so a lot of people the reason there's an allergen to spirituality is because a lot of people are using spirituality actually as a guise to bypass uh aspects of themselves that they don't want to look at and they don't want to be with they don't actually really do the work they want to buy the you know the flowy pants and the beads and the fancy rings from morocco or whatever that's like okay i project this concept that i have ascended something

But the more a person ascends, the less they will probably project and the more normal they will probably become. Yes, that's very perceptive, man. I think you're very right about that because there's something about... There's nothing wrong with loving to dress in a certain way or whatever. Yeah, whatever feels true. Totally. And at the same time, if...

you know, there's some people you'll run into in like the new age spiritual world or whatever. And it's like, they're kind of going the next, the next degree with their, they're really trying to peacock how spiritual and yogi they are. Right. And to me, that just says that that might be somebody who is because there's a lack of embodiment. They want to make up for it or compensate for it with this outer demonstration. Like look how many beads I wear and how long my hair is and all the flowy clothes I wear in the robes. Like I'm so spiritual. Um,

It's like they're trying to prove something, right?

Not in every case, but a lot of cases. And I've been sort of guilty of that myself. And this is why, dude, and I'll just like end with this because we've been talking about Jesus a lot. And this is why I've come back full circle, man, to the Jesus way. I was born and raised as a third generation pastor's kid. I was a former pastor myself. I got a bachelor's degree in theology. I was immersed in Christianity my whole life. But Christianity didn't teach me correct gnosis or knowledge of God.

Christianity does a really good job at the sort of feminine aspect of spirituality, which is love and worship and devotion to the Creator. Christianity is great at that. Lots of worshiping, lots of loving and devoting and praying and all that. But the masculine side of Christianity is very distorted and very lacking. The theology, the understanding of God is really twisted. And so I got so sick of the contradictions in my faith that

that when I left Christianity at 23, 24, I dove headlong into Eastern mysticism and Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and spent about seven or eight years doing nothing but studying and practicing those traditions. And that really helped me a lot because it gave me a healthy masculine foundation of non-duality and understanding the ontological nature of God. But

I started to miss out on the feminine side that I grew up with, which was the love and devotion and worship to God. I'd kind of spent seven or eight years really not doing that at all. And so I was still having a lot of suffering in my life. And one day I cried out to God and said, God, what do I got to do to heal this last remaining bit of depression and loneliness that I live with? I've done everything, man. I pray, I meditate, I read books, I read the Bible. I've studied every religion on earth. What do I got to do?

And I just felt this ray of light almost, you know, come from heaven and pierce right through my mind. And I felt a voice say, Aaron, did you forget that you used to love me? And I just laughed and threw my head back and went, yeah, yeah, I did. I did forget that before you were knowledge and philosophy and theology and all these cool concepts I love to read and geek out about. Before that, I just loved you.

You were just my beloved, my creator, my God. And that was good enough for me at a young age. And so I need to bring that element back into my spirituality. And so when I came back to Jesus's teachings and started reading them from a new lens, I realized, oh, this guy was undoubtedly a mystical enlightened master, like a Jewish, a God intoxicated Jewish mystic who was trying to show people the inner path to God realization and God union.

And so Jesus taught us the greatest commandments, love God with all your heart. That's what a lot of people in spirituality, man, are missing. It's like, you can talk about God all day. You can read books about God, but that's not necessarily the same thing as loving God. It's like, do you spend time each day just like feeling God's presence within you, feeling God's love within you, telling God, you know, worshiping God, I love you, Lord. Thank you for your blessings in my life.

Having a real relationship to God was something that I lacked for many, many years. And the Jesus way to me really brought that back. And so after spending years practicing Kundalini yoga and Kriya yoga and Hatha yoga, I started to realize that a lot of the, I hate the word new age, but let's just use that as a convenient catch all term.

A lot of the new age world gets too distracted with the tertiary stuff, like you said, beads, crystals, Reiki, tarot decks, astrology, yoga, whatever, even meditation. And they make that the pillars of their spiritual practices. But that stuff isn't real spirituality.

it can be very helpful. All those things can be very helpful, but they're not the foundations. The foundations are what you said a minute ago. It's loving others, being kind to every person you meet, forgiving people, not judging others, repenting. These are the staples of spirituality. If you're not living your life in such a way that these things are the most important aspect of your day, being kind, being of service, being humble, not exalting yourself, forgiving others,

then you're not really practicing spirituality yet. It's something else.

And so I feel like the New Age world could use a lot more Jesus in that regard of like, let's come back to the basics of spirituality that Jesus, the master, taught and emphasized his entire gospel of like, this is the way to God. Make no mistake about it. It's not in how many times a day you pray, how many beads you have on your necklace, how many crystals you own. It is, do you love others like you love yourself? Can you treat others with kindness?

I mean, when people die, bro, and they go to the astral plane in a near-death experience, this is the unanimous report of every NDE, basically, that I've ever read. Thousands of them. They say, life is all about how you treat others. It's really all it is. It's really that simple. It's a morality test. Can you love your neighbor as yourself? And a lot of times, Jesus is there to greet people, right? And I've read Christian NDEs, many of them.

where they're expecting to be ushered into the pearly gates. And Jesus is like, wait a minute, we need to look through your life really quick. And they have this life review and they realized that they were an asshole to everybody and they hurt people. And rather than inviting them into heaven because they confess Jesus as their Lord and savior, Jesus looks at them lovingly in their eyes and says,

would you like a chance to go back and love your neighbor as yourself and with tears in their eyes to say yes lord thank you thank you for one more chance to love my neighbor it's like that's the gospel man and if that's not your life you're missing the picture in some way you know you're distracted by something yeah i feel myself becoming emotional as you're as you're talking it feels like uh and i know you do go so it's the last thing i'll say and then we can terminate this conversation for now uh but it feels like the

path towards applauding God as though God needs that. But if you have the story that God needs that or the way to make God smile is by smiling and the way to make God smile is by dancing and by celebrating and really like just opening your heart to this moment, to this experience, to forgive yourself, forgive those around you, just to fill the world and life and yourself with more love.

And that is the only way to applaud God. If you're trying to do so, that's the only way to make that smile. And that's like that, that is the fluid that fills the cup. Then a lot of people are very, they're stuck in the cup because it sounds nice on podcasts, but they don't actually, they're not actually filled with Christ or whatever language you want to, you want to put on it. And that's like the feminine masculine, you know, dynamic and symbolism of that. Uh, I believe, um,

Thanks so much, man. It was a good time. Thank you as well, brother. This has been great. Yeah. If people want to go deeper into your realm, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for sharing it. Where can people go to go deeper with your stuff? They can find me on AaronAbkey.com, at AaronAbkey on Instagram, or YouTube.com slash AaronAbkey. Easy.

more than aaron apke aaron alexander quad a's a squared what's your middle name scott mine's daniel say that'd be creepy if you're ada all right bro well i appreciate you thanks for bringing me closer to my heart being a being a facilitator getting closer to my heart this conversation hopefully that that gets similar effects for other people uh thank you all for tuning in that's it that's all i'll see you next week

Hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. I want to invite you over to the Aligned Podcast YouTube channel if you want to see the quality of both of our skins IRL.

or as close to IRL as you can on the internet with video and check it out, subscribe, leave comments. I love reading the comments over there. And also if you have interest in improving the quality of your skin, they did give us a discount code at OneSkin, which was kind of them. You go to oneskin.co slash align. I believe you get 15% off your order.

which is pretty cool. So if you want to try it out and get yourself a discount, jump over to their one skin.co slash align. I appreciate y'all. That's it. That's all. I'll see you next week.