Aaron Abke Jesus & the Law of One

(0:00 - 1:15) All right, everybody, welcome back to Here for the Truth. I'm Joel Rafiti. I've got my co-host Erasmus with me, as always. Obviously, this past week has been incredibly rough for the LA region and devastating for many. Erasmus, kind of briefly speak into your experience and kind of how you're coping, because I'm sure many of our audience is probably intrigued and interested. Yeah, and I also realize a lot of our audience isn't maybe connected to me on Instagram or have my number. So there were definitely tons and tons of people reaching out to me, and I wasn't updating too much. But it was an extremely close call from a personal level. The fire got very close to our home. Unfortunately, several friends of ours lost their homes. And if you go one degree of separation, that number just skyrockets. The level of devastation that has occurred in a place like Los Angeles with neighborhoods pretty much leveled to the ground is unfathomable. It's one thing to see pictures and videos, which I think we've all been seeing. But for me, I know once I get in my car and drive around these neighborhoods, I think it's going to get even more real. But yeah, man, I mean, it was a dicey situation. (1:15 - 2:27) Like I've said before, I hiked back in around the police blockade to be on our property, just in case things got dicey, to be able to protect it as best I can. A couple of my neighbors stuck around as well. Fortunately, I didn't get to that point. I want to really, really give a shout out to the fire personnel. I know it's easy to shit on governments and all that, and not to say that there weren't things that maybe could have been planned or prepped better beforehand. But a couple days into the fire, as more and more fire personnel came in, air support, ground support, they really did an amazing job saving Topanga. I mean, that's just a fact. I mean, there were multiple instances where the fire was encroaching onto our place and friends' places in Topanga, and planes came in and dropped fire retardant, water, and ground crews were working around the clock to put out these flames. Obviously, my heart goes out to people that weren't as fortunate as us and lost their homes, but it's just another opportunity for people to come together, show kindness and support, and see the silver lining, what can come of this, what can come from this. (2:28 - 2:47) Yeah, I mean, the last nine days have been a trip. It was nice to get a little sense of normalcy and be able to record a podcast this morning, that's for sure. Yeah, totally. Thanks for that, babe. Thanks for the update, man. I'm glad you're okay, glad you got your home, and glad we still get to record a podcast, for sure. (2:50 - 5:06) All that being said, guys, today we're joined by Aaron Abke. We dive deep into... Aaron was raised as a third-generation pastor kid, as you'll find out, and he had a kind of, I guess, an awakening that led him to question some of the foundational tenets of fundamental Christianity. We get deep into his take on the teachings of Jesus, and I guess, mystical Christianity, and his overall view spiritually of God and of life. It's just a beautiful conversation, which I think is another piece to the puzzle, more nuance to add to one's overall outlook, and yeah, I think you get a lot of value from it. Just quickly before we dive in, I want to shout out to our premium membership community, Friends of the Truth. Thank you so much for supporting us and for being premium members. Our premium members enjoy five live calls a month. And plus, if you're on the Platinum membership, you get access to a private Telegram group as well. With us and all the other Platinum members, you get direct access to us and direct access to other in-house facilitators and practitioners and coaches to basically address whatever's required on different levels. We have Melissa Gray in there answering all German medicine-related questions. Sophie Fletcher, Erasmus' wife, is in there on a nervous system front, on a somatic front. Sarah DeHaven's inside on an astrological and divinatory front. My wife, Alyssa, is in there on a conscious birth front. The value really is... It cannot be understated what you get for the monthly cost in terms of support. Most importantly, just in terms of being connected to community and a community that is on the same page and is genuinely interested in living authentically and thriving. So you can head to hefethetruth.com and press Friends of the Truth on the menu button to learn more about the community and join, and hopefully jump inside and say hello. All right, guys, please enjoy this episode. You are now listening to the Year for the Truth Podcast, hosted by Joel Graffiti and Erasmus. (5:09 - 6:23) Aaron Abkey is a paradigm-shifting spiritual teacher offering a fresh perspective on self-realization through his teachings on the law of one, mystical Christianity, and spiritual intelligence. Aaron is dedicated to providing humanity with the tools, knowledge, and practices to deepen self-awareness and spiritual growth. His passion and purpose are to inspire collective shift towards a thriving and enlightened civilization. Aaron, thanks for being here for The Truth, man. Thanks for having me on, guys. It's been a pleasure to have your friendships for a number of years now, virtually at least. So glad we get a chance to finally pod together. Yeah, absolutely, man. Been connecting in various ways off of here, but it's nice to be able to connect in this way and have this conversation for sure. One way we always like to kick these off with first-time guests is we want to dive deep into your personal hero's journey, some of the major rites of passage that you experienced, and just those really key catalyzing moments that kind of led you down this path in and throughout your life. Sure, yeah. Well, I guess I don't even know if you guys actually know my background story, but I was born and raised as a third-generation pastor's kid in evangelical Christianity. (6:24 - 7:36) And for 23, 24 years of my life, I was a super devout Christian, Protestant Christian. And I graduated from Oral Roberts University in 2012 with a double bachelor's in music and theology to become a worship pastor full-time and kind of follow in my father and grandfather's footsteps. And I got a full-time job at 23, a full-time worship pastor position at a church in San Jose, where I was born and raised. And my dad's church, our church growing up was what we would consider not very religious. We were like spirit-filled and didn't emphasize all of the more dogmatic doctrines of Protestantism. And so when I got hired at this church, it was very much the opposite. They were very legalistic, very fundamentalist. And the big thing that kicked it off for me was on my very first Sunday there, I just got introduced, I led worship for the first time and I'm sitting in the front row and then we have the offering testimony and this woman gets on stage to give an offering testimony. And if you've ever gone to church, you know what one of those are. (7:37 - 7:57) And there's a guy standing behind her with his arms kind of behind his back, almost like he looks like a security guard or something. And I sat there and thought to myself, please don't let this be what I think it is. Because there's a passage in, I want to say it's in first Corinthians where Paul says, uh, it's a shame for women to even speak in church. (7:57 - 8:23) If a woman has to speak, her husband has to stand behind her as her covering and all these things. And he, Paul's like super misogynistic against women. And so I'm like, please don't tell me this church actually believes women are inherently more sinful than men. And men can actually sanctify women with our more holy aura or whatever the belief is like, I cannot rock with this stuff. Wait, that's not true. Not as far as I found brother. (8:25 - 9:38) Maybe it is. And I'm destined for hell. We'll find out. Um, so I I'm watching skeptically and then sure enough, they walk off stage together, hold hands and sit down next to each other. I'm like, ah, shit. Like that really was her husband, not a security guard. And so they really do believe this stuff. And that was a big wake-up call for me and my, my then a new, new Christian wife. I was 23. She was 20, uh, also is seeing this. And she's like, oh my God, do they believe this stuff here? And I'm like, yeah, I think unfortunately they do. And so we're kind of like, oh man, we're stuck at this crazy religious fundamentalist church. We don't want to be at. Where was this again? Where was it? San Jose. Okay. Yeah. It's called Crossroads Bible Church in San Jose. And a couple more events happened that really like pushed me over the edge, but it was that first event that, um, I got so kind of triggered by the whole thing of like, you guys really think this is what God is like that God thinks men are superior to women and, oh my, give me a break. And so I go into the scriptures trying to harmonize as good apologists do, uh, with other verses of Paul. Well, you know, Paul said this one good thing about women somewhere, Ephesians. I'm sure he didn't really mean it in first Corinthians. (9:38 - 10:23) And I'm trying to do what apologists do, which is to grab any other context I can get my hands on to dismiss away this obvious passage. And I couldn't, and it just, the more I tried, the worse it got. I found more of Paul's bigotry in first Timothy and second Timothy, and it just got worse and worse. And at a certain point I started to question biblical inerrancy and like, I mean, if I know in my heart, there's no way the God of the universe is misogynistic like this and would, would inspire this passage. What about the other parts of the Bible? And then that, that belief started unraveling. And really for me, it was seeing the discrepancies between Paul's teachings about Jesus's gospel versus what Jesus actually said about his gospel. (10:24 - 11:11) And really coming to understand that these are actually two completely diametrically opposed gospel messages. And so I've got to choose which one I believe in. And of course, I'm going to choose Jesus over Paul every time. So I kind of ended up leaving Christianity for Jesus in that way, because I was like probably the most devout Christian kid you've ever met. I was so passionate and zealous for my Christianity that I really, I was probably way too judgmental about this, but I just thought like most Christians are like milk toast Christians. They're not really about that life. They just go to church and read the Bible. Like no one's really all in for Christianity. Like very few people are, but I was, and I'm like a Bible carrying Christian if there ever was one. (11:11 - 11:24) And I'm trying to save my faith by doing this research and it just deconstructed it more and more. So that's what kicked off my hero's journey. And we can get into more of it if you guys want, but I'll pitch it back to you for commentary if you'd like. (11:24 - 12:35) Yeah. Well, I guess my first question is once you started having these realizations, what was it like with your family? Yeah. Well, I kept it a secret for a while and it wasn't until, let's see, it was at least a year or two into my whole deconstruction process that I, that my parents either found out or I told them about it, but I didn't want to like have these conversations with my dad because I didn't want to ruin our relationship in any way. We've always been very close, but I think what really got me into trouble was I started to, I needed an outlet to talk about this stuff. And I just came to realize like the Jesus I know and experience in my heart. And I read in the red letters of the gospels is not the Jesus I see or hear preached in church today or the Jesus Paul preaches or the Jesus Christians represent. And so I would go on Facebook and debate Christians about these topics and get into these long debates with people. And one or two of them were like kind of well-known Christian pastors and ministers. And I'm just like going ham on Facebook, debating these Christian pastors and my dad sees it and then maybe somebody sent it to him. (12:36 - 12:52) But he was like really disappointed and like, oh no, my son's getting into heresy and all this stuff. But long story short, that was, you know, 12, 13 years ago, something like that. My dad, my parents have suffered greatly at the hands of the church. (12:53 - 13:18) They were, you know, betrayed and backstabbed and lied about as almost every pastor who's ever lived has been by their fellow, you know, church elders or church staff who want to take their position. These things are like really, really common in church, these political takeovers and coup d'etat attempts. There's so much never ending political dissension that happens at churches. (13:18 - 14:12) And my parents received a lot of it and it just really disenfranchised them from church and church culture because they're like, man, this is so un-Christ-like the way these people behave. So my dad and my mom were already like, they had a really bad taste in their mouth about religion because of that. And so God really used that for good in the end because the story my dad tells is that he would watch a YouTube video of mine every so often and it would trigger him because I would be using language he doesn't use or, oh, this sounds new age or whatever. And he got really triggered one day by a video and he turned it off and he said, I heard or I felt God say to me, Scott, this is your son. Like this is, he's not a heretic. He's not a cult leader. This is your son. Like, you know, your son, listen to the video, listen past all the language you get triggered by and like, listen to the heart of what your son is saying. Listen to his heart and the message here. (14:12 - 18:56) And so my dad re-watched the video and he said, by the end of the video, he was like, tears streaming, just fully resonated with the message. And he said, I saw your heart for the first time past the labels I had put on you. And I realized, wow, my son really has a love for God, like that's unparalleled. And he's really trying to teach it in his own way. And it's so pure and it's so good. And so then at that moment, he kind of opened up to my content and started watching more of it and fast forward a few more years. Today, my dad is like literally fully on board with everything I teach and believe as far as I know. He doesn't believe in like biblical inerrancy or Bible worship. He doesn't believe in the traditional ideas of like, you got to confess Jesus or you go to hell forever. He has totally transcended those limiting religious beliefs that he held for his whole life, you know, 60 plus years. And I'm really proud of my dad for that, because it was hard enough for me to do it at 23. You know, imagine trying to accept at 60 that all these things you've believed your whole life are kind of nonsense. I think there's a core of truth to them all, but like, ultimately you've been believing stuff that's not literally true. And my dad did it because I think I get that trait from my dad of like, I really truly want to know God with all my heart. And I'm willing to give up anything that seems to be in the way of that, even if that happens to be my own beliefs. Yeah. Amazing story. Yeah. You converted your dad without trying, bro. Um, uh, what happened with your, I don't know, are you still with the same person or is this no, no, no. Like, okay. Yeah. Was there a split there in terms of like, she still wanted to believe in your views were kind of going off into territory that maybe she wasn't down with for sure. Um, she, she was coming out of fundamentalism as well and very much also questioned the things I was questioning, but I think I definitely went a little too fast for her on the deconstruction. And there were, there was just so many other problems in our marriage. Really one big problem in our marriage that stems from the, I mean, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the term purity culture in church. Have you guys heard of that phrase? I think so. It's like the term, you know, Christians use to describe the culture that, that youth group leaders and stuff try to set for their youth kids is they call it purity culture, where it's like, we're going to talk a lot about how important it is to never have sex before marriage. And we're going to like, not so casually shame the idea of sex before marriage so that, you know, the women feel young girls feel really horrible about the idea of even thinking about losing their virginity. They'll be tarnished forever. Never find a real husband. This is the purity culture ideology that Christian kids are, most Christian kids are brought up with. And I certainly was, and my ex-wife certainly was. So she had that plus some other things just created a lot of trauma around the, even the idea of sex. And so there was a lot of issues in our relationship because she more so than me, but me as well, but especially her, like really couldn't get past this stereotype that is just like etched into our brains from childhood, like sex is evil. And if you do it in any other context outside of marriage, you're practically a murderer. That's how evil it is in God's eyes. And what I found is that even on our wedding night, neither one of us could shake that belief system that sex is evil and wrong. And God is displeased with it because, hey, we did it right. We're married and now we're supposed to be allowed to do this. And now it's not evil, but good. And we couldn't make the shift. It always felt like we were doing some kind of sin and that contributed to many of the other problems downstream of that. So it was more so the fact that I was a little too radical and how fast I pivoted for her, but coupled with a lot of other things from just like religious baggage growing up. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that, man. Because I'm always so curious about interrelational dynamics, especially around like polarizing viewpoints. I mean, even just with everything happened in 2020, so it was disintegrated. So I appreciate you sharing a bit of your story. It's kind of insane, the psychological stranglehold that some of these ideas and particularly dogmatic ideas like have on young people growing up and like they live their whole lives in this limited frame of view because of this indoctrination that took place very, very early on. And yeah, it's hard to fathom, man. Like some people never really shake that. I was raised as a driver's witness. So we have a similar story in that regard, like never did Christmas, never did birthdays, similar things around sex. (18:56 - 19:03) No birthdays. No. Driver's witnesses don't do Christmas, don't do birthdays. Why do they know that? Yeah, man. Everything is pagan. Everything is devilish. (19:03 - 19:47) Everything is evil. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, like for me in my process, this idea of Jehovah God being this almighty force that is overlooking every single thought that I have was so strong. I had to go through revocations to kind of feel like a dislodge of this thought form. And that was a tough process to go through that. And so yeah, I just think about this on a mass scale and it's freaking intense, man, the amount of psychological damage and limitation that takes place through these ideologies. Yeah, I mean, don't get me started on this topic, brother, unless you want me to. Let's go. Yeah, man, let's go. (19:47 - 24:43) I think it's really important. I do too. I really do. I don't know if you guys have followed into my recent work, but in the last year, especially, I've been just really revisiting my Christian roots a lot more and teaching what I believe is the real Jesus way, which, you know, ironically, people literally get their minds blown when I share this with them, but we've come to know Christianity as the religion of confess Jesus as Lord and Savior and believe in his death and resurrection and you go to heaven, right? That's Christianity. The problem is neither one of those two pillars of Christianity appears anywhere in the mouth of Jesus in any of the four gospels. Jesus never once comes close to equating salvation to confess me as your Lord and Savior or believe in my resurrection and you'll be saved. Not only does he not say those things, he vehemently condemns them in multiple passages. There's Matthew 19, 16, Mark 10, 17, and Luke 18, 18, where Jesus is asked, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And he says, if you want to enter eternal life, keep the commandments. If you pulled a Christian off the street, like a casual Christian, and you said, hey, can you try to complete this verse for me from Matthew 19, 16, when Jesus says, if you want to enter eternal life, blank. Do you remember what Jesus said? Most Christians are going to say, oh, he said, confess me as Lord and Savior and believe in my death and resurrection, right? Like, actually, no, he didn't say that. He said, keep the commandments. And then he lists the 10 commandments. And then he says, chief of all is the first commandment, love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. And then Jesus says, if you do this one commandment, you fulfill the entire law and the prophets. So Jesus made no small punches about what his gospel was. If you want to enter eternal life, basically, obey God's laws, which are to love others and not do harm. All the 10 commandments are just different ways of doing harm to people, right? Lying, cheating, stealing, committing adultery, fornication, whatever. So, the law... What about the beholding graven images thing? Like, I've always had a problem with that. Like, it always seems to me like, it's like a war on the right hemisphere of the brain, you know, when it comes to these graven images, whether it's symbols or tarot or whatever it might be. Like, there's so much richness and depth and psychological wholeness and integration that can be achieved by studying the symbols and by letting beauty and art impact you in that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what's very clear about what Mosaic Law is trying to delineate there, and I think it's the third commandment, thou shall not have any idols before me or make any graven images. It's like, don't worship any form as God. Don't make any form to be God itself, and that especially applies to a person. Like, don't make any single person to be exclusively God. God absolutely can reveal itself through human beings and does, and every human's a manifestation of God, but that doesn't mean any one person can be God or an idol or a statue or a symbol or whatever. So, I don't think there's anything wrong with deriving meaning from symbolism. I mean, everything is symbolism. Every single object around you is a symbol, technically. Yeah. That you can derive meaning from, but it's about where are you placing your understanding of the divine? Are you limiting the divine down to a symbol? Well, then you've made a mistake, you know? Yeah. So, it's an interpretation issue, probably. For sure. Yeah. But the bigger point here is that Christians totally get this wrong, that Jesus thought that the 600 plus liturgical laws of Leviticus and the Old Testament, that those laws were given by Moses and are God's law. And yet the truth is emphatically the opposite. Jesus and his Nazarene, the Nazarene sect of Jews, which became the Jewish Christians, they were in total opposition to the 600 plus man-made laws of the Old Testament as being corruptions of the Torah. And we have a lot of attestation from early church fathers about this, but there's two quotes in particular. I could throw them on the screen if you guys want, but from Eusebius in the third, fourth century, who's known as the father of church history. Eusebius says very clearly, Jesus did not command any of the other precepts of Moses, circumcision, obey the Sabbath. He didn't command any of those things, animal sacrifices. He abhorred those. Jesus only commanded the spiritual laws of Moses, which he bade us to observe. And that is the 10 commandments. So to the Jewish Christians that the Jesus movement, the law was just the 10 commandments. (24:43 - 27:34) And they believe that the first law, especially summarizes all of them that, Hey, if you just do the first one, you've already done all the other ones. If you love God and love your neighbor, you won't steal, you won't kill, you won't commit adultery, et cetera. And so Christians misunderstand that and they say, well, nobody can obey the law. It's impossible. And that's actually what gets into what I think is the ultimate story the Bible is telling is that at some point in Jewish history, between 1700 BCE, this pagan practice of animal sacrifices infiltrated into Judaism and they began practicing it as well. But in the beginning, Moses never commanded it. And the prophet Jeremiah goes into great detail about this, that, Hey, he's speaking for God saying, I never commanded you sacrifices when you came out of Egypt. Uh, this was your idea, not mine. And about 50% of the old Testament prophets just vehemently condemned sacrifices. And so Jesus and his followers emerged from this sect of Judaism, usually called the Essenes, people know them as the Essenes that were in opposition to the temple system of animal sacrifice and trying to reform Judaism back to the heart of the law. And we see Jesus doing this in the new Testament, condemning the Pharisees for forsaking the heart of the law and going after manmade rituals to basically make money off of people. Because in the, in the time of Jesus and for hundreds of years, the temple sacrifice system was the central banking system, big pharma, big food, like all rolled up into one. You have the scribes playing the part of big food, you know, big food is the, their job in the scheme is to poison humanity with as many pollutants and stuff in our food as they can so that we stay sick. And then big pharma says here, we've got your drugs for you to help you with these problems. So you have big food and big pharma in cahoots, right? Doing this whole profit scheme. In Jesus's day was the scribes and the priests doing the exact same thing. The scribes were writing and adding hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ritual laws to the old Testament to make it so that it's literally impossible not to sin. There's so many laws who could remember 600 plus laws, it's not possible. And so this, this was a way the scribes were guaranteeing every single Jew is going to be a horrible sinner that's going to need to offer lots of sacrifices for themselves and their families for forgiveness. And that's where the priestly class comes in and they are the ones who offer the sacrifices. And they're just making, I mean, hand over fist money in those days. I don't know exactly what it costs to buy a goat or to buy a bowl or something. You're asking what's the cost of goats? What's that? You're asking what's the cost of goats? Do you know, bro? Are they cheap? I don't know. We were thinking about getting some now, but I don't know how much they cost back then. (27:35 - 28:03) Maybe, maybe it was more relatively speaking back then than now, but I mean, you don't, you don't get your sins forgiven unless you kill an animal in that system. So like you literally don't have a choice not to purchase animals every year. And so like Josephus, for example, writes that in during, um, during the Passover, they would slaughter over 250,000 goats on one day would be slaughtered in the temple where it's just impossible to imagine the scale of such a thing. (28:04 - 28:50) But Josephus writes that the blood, there was so much blood in the temple that they built these huge, um, like ravines out of the temple to carry the river of blood out of the temple. Cause the priests, Josephus says will be like covered in blood up to their hips, you know, from slaughtering so many animals. And it's just this disgusting genocide that you can imagine Jesus and his disciples seeing this being like, you think God wants this? And Jesus says, no, go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice, Hosea 6, 6. And Jesus said, if you all knew what this means, you would not have condemned the innocent speaking about the animals. And, uh, there's a lot of other passages where Jesus opposes the temple openly. The most notable one is when he cleanses the temple, right? And kicks the tables over of the money changers. (28:50 - 29:23) He opens all the cages of the bulls and the goats and the doves, lets all the animals fly out and then starts condemning the whole thing. And in, in Mark chapter 11, after Jesus does this, it says right there in the Bible, after Jesus said these things, the priests sought to put him to death because he came in and opposed their prophet system. It'd be like trying to expose big pharma today. It's like, we know what they do with people that try to call them out for corruption. And that's what Jesus did. And then of course, that very same week he gets crucified. (29:23 - 31:30) So I believe that Jesus was ultimately crucified for opposing the temple system of the day, which was one of his main missions of his gospel was, Hey, God does not want death and murder and violence to forgive sins. God wants a humble, repentant heart. That's it. And Jesus told numerous parables. I could give you examples of, to prove this, God wants a humble, repentant heart and God freely forgives anybody who repents. So what is with this need? We seem to have in Christianity for blood, blood, blood. It's gotta be through blood. Well, my problem with that is Jesus never said that. Yeah. You'd be proud, Aaron. I grew up Greek Orthodox, um, and I was Sunday school and I, I won a religious speaking competition in seventh grade on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, which is nice. Nice story there. Epic dude. Um, I've, I've, I have a question for you. What, like if someone asks you right now, what is your view of the Bible? Like what, what the Bible is? Yeah. Because obviously there's controversy from a theological standpoint, there's, there are gospels and other writings that were left out. There are a bunch of people coming together, however many years ago and going, this is what the Bible is going to be like. How do you reconcile all that, that this is a book that was put together, uh, versus maybe potentially some stories that were left out? Yeah. I mean, to me it's simple in one sense. It's, it's such a complex subject because the Bible is extremely complex document, but obviously the Bible is a library of books. That's what the word Bible really means. Collection of books. And it's 66 books by 40 different authors written over thousands of years. And so the idea to me of what's called univocality, uh, which means the Bible has one singular message across all the pages, every book, it's the same message from God. Everything is consistent. It's all saying the same thing is, uh, laughably ludicrous, laughably ludicrous. Every single book in that, in the Bible has a different message. (31:30 - 34:40) Every single book is written by a different author. Most of them written by different authors with different rhetorical goals, historical contexts, reasons for writing. And I think it's very disrespectful to what the Bible is to say, Oh, this is just a handwritten letter from God dropped out of heaven. It's like a manual for humanity, you know, of how we're supposed to live and stuff. It's like the Bible couldn't be further from that because what it really is to me is this book documents the unfolding narrative of humankind's understanding of the divine and how it has dramatically changed even just in the course of this book. And then of course, the 2000 plus years since this book, humankind has always been evolving in our understanding of God. And so I, I like to break down the Bible in sequences, actually beginning with the Adamic sequence, moving into the mosaic sequence and all of this, there's a progression in the Bible of a story that's being told. And really it begins in the ancient world where the pagan practice of sacrifices was rampant in the world. We, it's no different in Judaism than any other, you know, pagan religious group of the day of their time. Every religion in those days believed that there's a pantheon of gods that are kind of, they're like lower gods. And I'm pretty sure that most cultures would believe or admit that there's ultimately one God source thing that they all come from, but that God is way too high and beyond what we are that we can't even, you know, interact with it at all. The lower gods that are rulers of the planets and the worlds, those are the ones we interact with and they bless us or they curse us. So the idea that historians have researched about this relationship to deities is that in very ancient times, it began with cultures and tribes attempting to keep a God like almost like a pet, where they build a temple for the God to live in. And then they offer sacrifices on the altar to feed the God and keep it appeased. And hopefully if they provide a good home in their tribe for this deity, it will bless them and give them back prosperity and favor and battle and stuff like that. And so we know this for thousands of years, this is what the ancient world did. And the Jews were essentially another pagan religion at a certain point where Yahweh, which originated as a storm deity, believe it or not, is kind of the, it was originally the Canaanite God, I believe. And then the Jews kind of became formed out of the Canaanites and they kept the Yahweh deity as their deity and it evolved from there. And so this ancient world is where the Bible begins, where, hey, we offer sacrifices to our God, they're angry, they're wrathful, they're punitive. And eventually you get to Moses, right? Mosaic laws introduced. And this really progressive statement is given in Deuteronomy 6, where Moses says, hear, O Israel, the Lord, our God is one. And we hear that and go, yeah, of course, everybody knows that. But it's like, no, not back then. That was a very radical statement back then. (34:40 - 35:46) All these other gods, they're not even real. There's only one God, forget about all this other stuff. And they basically said, our God, Yahweh, is that one real God. So Moses reformed Judaism in a big way by introducing Mosaic law saying, hey, the one God that is the only God that exists actually has a law system for us human beings to follow that where we can live in alignment with that God and that God will bless us. And so supposedly what the Essenes argued for and what there's some really great proof for, which I'll get into in a second, is that it was just the 10 commandments. And that's the story we actually have is, and I always thought this was weird as a kid, and maybe you did too, Erasmus or Joel. I don't know if you, Joel, if you read the Bible a bunch as a Jehovah's witness. But Moses brings the 10 commandments down and the two tablets and he sees them worshiping Baal and he strikes them on the ground and cracks the tablets and then goes back up the mountain and beseeches God on behalf of the people and comes back down again with another set. Where did the 600 laws come in? He was only given 10 from God on Mount Sinai. (35:47 - 37:18) So then, but we read Leviticus and all of a sudden it's just a whole book of ritual laws that were supposedly given by God. But it's like, we don't have record of when those laws were given. So it's kind of suspect right away. And so the Bible describes this unfolding narrative of mankind's understanding of like many gods, no one God, punitive and wrathful, no, holy and sacred. And the ideas of God are evolving, right? Now we don't obey God's law because God's so angry in heaven. If we don't, it's like, oh no, that God is holy. And if we want to be in alignment with that God, we have to live as that God lives. So the ideas are developing over time. Then you get to the prophets who start to call out animal sacrifices and say, this is an abomination to God, which God never commanded us ever to do. And God turns away his nose at the scent of our offerings. God wants nothing to do with it. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Or as first Samuel 15 says, obedience is better than sacrifice. And that really to me culminates with Jesus showing up in the gospels, echoing the same exact message as the old Testament prophets. And in fact, the two most anti-sacrifice prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, some of the followers of Jesus say, when Jesus says, who do people say that I am? They say, some of them say you're the prophets, Jeremiah or one of the other prophets and actually named Jeremiah as one of the prophets people thought Jesus was. (37:18 - 39:06) And Jeremiah has all these amazing passages, such as Jeremiah 8, 8, where he says, how can you say we are wise for the law of the Lord is with us when behold the lying pen of the scribes has turned it into a lie. Meaning like, how do you guys boast about, oh, we have the law of the Lord. You guys corrupted the law of the Lord. The scribes did by adding all these fake laws in. And then he just goes in this long passage condemning sacrifices. So a lot of the Jews apparently thought Jesus was Jeremiah reincarnated and he's like the anti-sacrifice prophet. So Jesus carries this message to me from old to new Testament, where in the old Testament, we have these two atonement doctrines running side by side through almost the entire old Testament. One is there's no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood. God has to kill something before he can forgive you. But then curiously all through the old Testament, there's all of these passages that say, God just wants humility and repentance and God happily and freely forgives anybody who repents. And then it even says, God forgets your sins as if they never occurred. God will cast your sins as far as the East is from the West and remember them no more, as long as you truly repent. So it's like, which of these two atonement doctrines do, are we supposed to believe in? In the new Testament, we see them again, mirrored identically with the old Testament through Paul and Jesus. Paul, who has five times more words in the new Testament than Jesus does, two thirds of the new Testament are Pauline epistles. Well, he's all about blood atonement because he was a lifelong Pharisee. So Paul interpreted Jesus through his lens of Phariseic Judaism that was steeped in the temple sacrifice system. God's got to kill something. God's angry. (39:06 - 40:09) God's full of wrath. He needs to unleash on something. And so Jesus became that last animal sacrifice of God. Yes. After God butchered Jesus, he was finally able to forgive us all. So that's Paul's message. But Jesus, as we have already said, was teaching the opposite. Nope, it's repentance and forgiveness and humility. Jesus said, if you don't forgive your brothers, their trespasses, God can't forgive you. The measure you give out is the measure you get back. And he tells all kinds of parables about people being justified when they just repent with a humble heart before God. So those two atonement doctrines are also in the new Testament, exactly like they are in the old. And so I think that's the real, to me, the real story the Bible's telling is what does God really want? Wrath and vengeance and anger or obedience and repentance? Yeah. Aaron, do you think people who eat meat are going against God? I wouldn't say that. I ate meat up until a year ago, January of last year, actually. (40:09 - 41:26) I think it's a decision that everybody comes to on their own terms. I can only speak for myself. And I don't like preach to anybody that they need to be a vegetarian. I almost never even talk about my dietary preferences, but I was a huge meat eater up until a year ago. And at a certain point, it just became so spiritually obvious to me that being involved in the killing of a sentient creature is obviously negative because there's nothing more precious to a living creature than its own life. And so if somebody else, you know, I didn't slaughter this creature, of course, that I'm eating, but I think there's a karmic implication of if I'm eating the meat of an animal that was slaughtered against its own will, I'm sort of complicit in that karma. So for me, it was just like, I don't want to participate in that at all. I want to err on the side of loving all creatures equally and doing my best in that regard. So it was just a decision that made itself for me. But I understand why deeply spiritual people who eat meat have their reasons for doing it. And, you know, I have no personal issue with it. Oh, man. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah. It's such an interesting subject to get into. I mean, I'm a meat eater. Occasionally I have moments where I'm like, oh, do I want to keep eating meat? But I've tried it once before and it didn't feel great. (41:27 - 41:32) Yeah. But it's an ongoing internal conversation. So yeah, I just appreciate you sharing that. (41:32 - 44:30) Yeah. Well, one thing I can say to that is the diet that I eat, I call it the Jesus diet, kind of affectionately, because I got it from a book called the Essene Gospel of Peace, which I think is just an incredible book. And Jesus in that book, according to the text, is he lays out like the best possible way to eat that the creator designed us to. And even in the Bible, like Isaiah lays this out that at the beginning of creation, God's intention was to set up an earth where there's no killing or murdering or harm done to anyone. And that God is trying to back to this picture of his holy mountain, it says in Isaiah, where the wolf lies down with the lamb, the child plays with the serpent and no harm comes to anybody. And it's like peace on earth is the idea. Well, Jesus lays that out as well. And peace on earth has to start with no longer killing sentient creatures for our own benefit. And so he really pushes raw milk as a very healthy food substance for humans. And then he doesn't specifically say eggs as one food source, because, I mean, it's written from the perspective of first century Palestine. So I don't even know if they had like chickens in those days or whatever, but he gives criteria for food that is spiritually aligned to eat. And Jesus says, you know, God intended you to eat it because it's in a lot of abundance. It's a food source that's very abundant, you know, fruits, vegetables, herbs, nuts, and seeds, very abundant. But of course, eggs would definitely fall into that category because chickens lay an insane amount of eggs in their life that no way they could all be ever fertilized. And then the other criteria he gives is that the food should be alive when you eat it. And that's the bigger reason why Jesus goes against the idea of eating meat, because he's sort of describing like when you kill an animal, the life force energy, the soul leaves the animal, and you're just kind of left over with the packages of proteins and whatnot. And so it has, it has the energy of death in it. So Jesus says, he who eats the flesh of slain beasts, eats the body of death and death can only produce death, whereas life can only produce life. So Jesus advocates for eating things that are still alive. So you get the life force energy from them, like fruits and vegetables, like eggs, but actually eating a live cow is preferable to eating a slain cow, I guess. So under that logic, an egg would be technically still alive in that sense. So my diet actually is, I thrive on raw milk and eggs for my protein sources. And I did vegetarianism like five years ago for about a year. And I didn't do it right. I was just eating rice and veggies, and my hormones tanked and crashed, everything crashed. So this round for the last year, I've been eating a lot of eggs, about six eggs a day, and solid amounts of raw milk every day. And my hormone levels are fantastic, better than they've been in my 30s. (44:30 - 44:46) I feel better, I'm leaner, I feel awesome. So I think people just don't know how to do it. You look great, bro. You look nice and vital and healthy. How old are you, RM? 35. Yeah, it works for me. It really does. Yeah. Well, I mean, the raw milk and the eggs, I mean, that's, that's. (44:46 - 44:50) Oh, for sure. It's there, you know. I mean, two super complete protein sources right there. (44:51 - 45:05) Yeah. We have chickens. We get eggs from our chickens. It's pretty awesome. Nice. I want to ask you, so like one of the key teachings or core teachings of, you know, Jesus that you mentioned is this whole idea of forgiveness, you know. (45:06 - 45:58) How far does one take forgiveness? Because at what point do we even have the right to forgive evil? And secondly, at what point does forgiving evil proliferate evil? Yeah, it's a great question. It's the central question to the topic of forgiveness. And so the caveat that I like to give is that forgiveness has nothing to do with the behavior of somebody or like I have to approve of their behavior to forgive them. Absolutely not. Forgiveness to me is really just about perception and how you're choosing to perceive this person. And this is where my ontology is seen as, it's a little bit extreme for Christians because I take ontology to the absolute all the way. (45:58 - 46:30) Meaning I believe God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. Those are the four Os that I define as my ontology. So God has all power in the universe, which means there is no second power. There's only one power, God's power. And so then that begs the question, what is evil then? Because I mean, who would deny that we experience evil? I certainly don't deny that. And what it is, is that evil is just an absence, not a presence. (46:30 - 50:13) Evil is not the presence of a second simultaneous power alongside God's power, if that makes sense, that are then duking it out. God and the devil, good and evil battling for the universe. I don't believe in such a dichotomy. Evil becomes the absence of God, the ignorance of God, spiritual blindness, and so forth. And even in speaking mentally on a metaphysical level, when you have the wrong ideas about reality or God, when you believe yourself to be separate from God or separate from reality, fear creeps in, lack creeps in. It's as if a void is created in the absence of truth. When we're ignorant of truth, it's like a void is created in the mind, where then all of the antithesis ideas about God's nature can creep into the mind and begin to be believed in, such as separation, fear, lack, et cetera, wrath, punishment. And so, we have to keep our minds as in alignment with the truth, the ontological truth of God's nature, if we want to perceive reality correctly, because God is reality. So, if I'm perceiving two simultaneous powers in the universe, I have a misperception in my awareness. And so, when I say evil doesn't exist, I absolutely don't mean we don't experience the effects of evil or darkness or sin. I'm making an ontological claim about the substance of evil, that evil is not its own source. It doesn't have its own power apart from God. It's what I call the negative polarity. There's the positive and the negative. The negative polarity relies on deception, right? This is what the controllers of our planet do. They can't actually take away our rights. They can't actually take away our freedom or free will, because they have no power over our free will. They can only manipulate, censor, obfuscate, deceive, and so forth. That's evil. That's the negative. It's deception. It's inversion of truth. It's twisting what's real into what is unreal. And so, to get back to your question, forgiveness just means recognizing what is true and what is real, which is that if anyone is behaving in opposition to love, they are insane in that way and require healing. They have a misperception of reality that needs to be healed in their mind. And so, I'm not going to help this person heal their misperception by judging and hating them. I have to let God be the only judge. So, to me, forgiveness is just the ultimate surrender to God and the ultimate act of humility that says, God, I don't know this person, their motives, why they're really doing this. Only you know these things. So, I refuse to step into the seat of God and try to judge somebody. I leave all judgment up to you because I believe God has already established perfect and mutable laws in the universe that are guaranteeing everybody will experience the consequences of their actions. So, I don't need to try to add judgment to somebody that the universe is already going to give them at one point or another. I need to just allow the universe to do that. And so, if someone's doing harm, we absolutely should prevent them from doing further harm, right? Because that's the law of one, do no harm, love others. So, anyone that's doing harm, absolutely, we should keep them safe from the public until we can rehabilitate that person. So, it's not about like not giving practical consequences in the world to sin and evil and things like this. It's about our perception of them, of I don't want to see anybody as being outside of God or hating anybody in my heart because that creates an absence of God in me. So, it's really more for me than anything else. I want to live in alignment with God's truth. (50:13 - 50:22) And so, I let God remain the judge. Yeah. No, my question here is just giving an example and how you view this and perceive this. (50:22 - 51:03) Let's say you're with, you know, your partner and someone's trying to hurt your partner or take her life, you know, and then you step in and take the other person's life. Like, how do you, how does that work under this philosophy? Yeah. Well, I believe we have total right to defend ourselves based on free will. And so, I, if anybody was trying to take someone's life, I would try to prevent them from doing that in a way that didn't force me to take their life. But if there was some kind of situation that necessitated that, I honestly don't know what I would do to be frank with you. I think probably the human side of me would take over and I would pull the trigger before they pull the trigger or whatever. (51:03 - 54:11) But I also don't know if I wouldn't find myself in an existential crisis of like, I don't want to play God in this situation. So, what do I do? I would probably try to prevent this person by sacrificing my own life rather than theirs. But I think at the end of the day, like the karma is on that person, not me. And so, even if I did end up pulling the trigger, I think there'd be very little, if any, karma to that if I'm not doing it out of hatred. Like, I'm not shooting you, brother, because I hate you. I love you. And I wish you weren't doing this, but I can't allow you to do harm to these people. That's the place it would come from. And so, I think there'd be very little karma probably involved with that. So, for you, is God like a separate singular being? Like, what is your actual perspective of what God constitutes? Yeah, I don't believe in any concept of separation because I can't find a way that it's metaphysically possible to be fundamentally separate from God. I believe that we can be separate from God in our minds. Absolutely. And most people are. Because again, it's the wrong understanding. It's a misperception of truth or reality. But I mean, if we just look at the idea of separation on a metaphysical level, if everything needs a source, everything has a source, there's nothing that exists in a vacuum without a source or without relationship. And so, if something was separated from its source, and we know that God is the only source of life, there is no second God, right? That is another source of life. So, if something becomes separate from God, how could that thing go on existing if it's separate from God? What would be the source, the metaphysical correlate that allows that thing to exist when it has just detached itself from the source of all existence? I see that as a metaphysical fallacy. So, fundamental separation to me is impossible because only God exists. There's only one being. But in the matrix world of physical reality, I think God creates duality and impermanence for the purpose of experiencing the illusion of separateness. I appear to be in a body in a world that seems to be separate from God, but as I raise my spiritual awareness, I start to tune in to the reality of God in everything. In every blade of grass, in every person I meet, you start to actually taste and experience God's presence in everything. That yes, everything here is nothing but a manifestation of God. And so, nothing is fundamentally separate from God because there can't be such a thing. Only God exists, as the Bible says. But my mind is definitely split in that sense and needs to be healed. And that's what I think the goal of all spiritual practices are, is to heal our minds, lack of awareness of the divine. Yeah. So, it's like, it's the singular unified creative energy which kind of like emanates and animates the entire cosmos and everything. (54:13 - 54:58) 100%. Yeah, there's a lot of ways I think we can define God. And I don't know if any of them get really close to it, other than maybe the definition I like to use the most, which is that if we have to really answer this question, which I don't like trying to answer it, what is God? To me, we have to say God is the first person in the present tense. I am. God is never a second person or a third person. God is never in past tense or future tense. God is always here and now as the very awareness that I have. God is the way by which I even know I exist or can have this experience right now. God is the sentience itself, the I am feeling itself. (54:58 - 55:10) So, the first person in the present tense is the way everybody knows themselves. Nobody knows themselves as the second person, right? Nobody talks about themself in third person, but everybody says, I am. That's what Erasmus does. (55:10 - 55:16) No, I don't. Okay, well, you're the one exception. I know, but when I hear people do that, I'm just like, cringe. (55:17 - 55:34) In third person or second? Like people talk about themselves in the third person often, you know? I know, I know. And I'm just like, okay. Yeah, it's tough, but it's something the ego likes to do. So, we can let the ego do that. But you know, Erasmus by goat today. Oh my God. (55:34 - 55:55) Erasmus by goat. Anyways, continue. Yeah. Well, creative force, creative principle is another definition I like. God is the creative principle or we can even say God is the eternal conscious principle. That is the I am feeling. (55:55 - 58:26) We can even say God is love. To me, it's the ontology that I hold ontology as the highest threshold of what informs everything else about my spiritual beliefs. And Christianity does the opposite. They let this book, in the words of this book, inform their ontology, which I think is getting the epistemic process backwards. You have to let something that is provably and demonstrably true be what informs something that you absolutely cannot prove this text is objectively, literally true. You can definitely prove it's not by showing all of the numerous contradictions, but nobody can prove the claim that this is actually the literal physical and spiritual truth of all reality in this book. That's a very extraordinary claim, which would require some extraordinary evidence. So I don't think relying on any text or form or book can be the right way to understand reality. But if we all agree that there's a creator, I think we could all agree on what that creator's nature must be. And it must be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and in my opinion, omnibenevolent. Really the fourth one is based on the first three. If God already possesses everything, God has all knowledge for all of eternity, and God is everywhere all at once, then that would necessitate that God has to be all loving. You cannot be unloving to somebody if you don't need anything from them and you already know everything about them. Judgment is something that arises only in the absence of understanding. You judge what you do not understand. What you do understand, what is there to judge? You already understand it, right? Same as power and possession. If God already possesses everything, God does not want or need anything from us. And so the idea that God needs bloodshed and violence to forgive sins is to me an ontological fallacy. It's purporting a God that sin by us incurs some kind of debt against God or a blight against God that Christians say God is too holy. God can't just let you sin and get away with it. God has to punish you for that and it needs to be a ritual sacrifice to make up for it. Well, you're implying that God has to do something, which is an ontological fallacy. A God that's omnipotent and omniscient doesn't need to do anything. It has no needs at all. (58:26 - 59:11) So God doesn't need to do something to offset sin and then you can be right with God. This is all man-made nonsense that violates what we know is true of God's nature. The atonement's for us, not for God. We ourselves have to atone for what we do that violates reality and that's the purpose of forgiveness. That's Jesus's gospel where he says, guys, you cannot be forgiven unless you forgive others because whatever you hold against another has to be held against you. This universe, it's all for you. It's for your learning and growth. God doesn't need anything from you. And that's a difficult idea, I think, for the religious mind to understand because religion is steeped and predicated on the idea that God has to do something to deal with sin. (59:12 - 1:02:17) Well, there's kind of like a self-punitive mechanism built into reality. Like, you know, if you deceive or lie or manipulate, like, your unconscious is not going to let you get away with it. Like, there's going to be this ongoing psychological systemic issue which you're going to have to resolve eventually or you can just keep piling on the shit heap until, you know, you self-destruct. 100%. You cannot get away with any violation of what I call the law of one. I believe that our universe is really governed by one ultimate law, which is do no harm or the law of one would be love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus summarized it as the golden rule, we call it, which Jesus said, whatever you do not wish to suffer yourself, do not make another person suffer. Very simple. And Jesus said, if you do that, you've done the whole law. And I think what else could be more obvious than this? If God, as as Christianity says, wants us to express free will and Christianity will even say, God can't interfere with your free will, and I agree with that. But if that's true, then why would God want anything else from us than for our hearts to be right with God, to be right with reality and creation around us, to be in harmony with the people in our world and everything. God wants us to be in harmony for our sakes, not because God gets angry when we're not in harmony. And so God has already established God's eternal laws that govern the whole universe forever and forever, you know, karma and cause and effect and all these things that we know we can't escape. When you do evil to another person, you're going to experience evil being done to you at some point, whether it's the same way or not, who knows, but it always comes back around. And Jesus taught about this over and over in the gospels. He would call it the law of sowing and reaping. We call it like law of attraction, but you cannot escape universal law. And so to me, the universal law says everything is based on perfect balance because God is perfect balance, perfect equanimity. And so if I try to do harm or if I do harm to another person, it's as if I'm trying to violate the universe in some way. I'm trying to violate the laws of the universe, and that can't be so because God is perfect balance. And so what happens is I have to pay the debt of my own violation, not God. God can't be imbalanced. And so the idea is that the very extent to which I violate the law by doing harm in any way, well, then the law must violate me in equal measure to counterbalance it, to counterbalance my imbalance. You cannot imbalance the universe by doing harm to it. So ultimately, the imbalances come back upon you. And we call that karma. Jesus called it sowing and reaping. But I mean, I don't think anybody would deny that this is true. No, I mean, I agree. Yeah. It's hard to deny. Yeah. After you were questioning, obviously, your beliefs and Christianity, and you're evolving in your own personal process, were there things that you were drawn to? I know you talk about the law of one. (1:02:17 - 1:03:51) When did you come across a law of one? What is the law of one? Can you get into that a little bit? Yeah. Ask a single question before we get into the law of one. Which story was on my mind? So, are you a literalist when it comes to the gospel? Because obviously, there's clear astrotheological connotations throughout the story as well. So, that's just my question there. When you say literalist, do you mean like, I take it all to be literally true? Like Jesus literally existing in predominantly accurate terms and forms, relationships, etc. Yeah. I'm a big fan and student of biblical scholarship. So, I really study the Bible from a historical critical perspective, which means like, I want to study the history of this author's time period and why were they writing this book? What was the goal of why they wrote? And so, when you look at the goal of why the gospel writers, whoever they were, we don't know, wrote the Greek gospels, it's clearly to establish, well, to preserve Jesus's story and ministry and teachings, but also to establish him as the Messiah, the Son of God who came to die for our sins. And the goal of the gospels is to put forward this message of Jesus was the Savior who died for your sins, at least Mark and John, for sure, and maybe Matthew, but not Luke. But that's a whole nother thing. They are trying to just tell the story of Jesus to me. And so, I definitely don't read them as literally accurate, like, oh, for sure, all these things happened. (1:03:52 - 1:03:56) I don't know. A lot of these stories could be made up. I don't hang my hat on that. (1:03:57 - 1:05:29) What I really hang my hat on is are the red letters of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, because the idea that Jesus wasn't a real character, didn't really exist, he was made up, kind of the mythicist approach just doesn't make any sense to me. Another emanation of the quote-unquote son, you know, sun gods, etc. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any perspective that says, you know, these teachings are made up, Jesus was made up, all those theories people have are just, they don't make sense to me, because number one, we have a lot of historical attestation of Jesus actually existing outside of the Bible. But the teachings of Jesus themselves are so clearly teachings from a truly enlightened being. And you can only really know this when you study Eastern traditions, you study the Buddhist sages and Hindu sages and the way that they speak about their own God consciousness. When you study the Eastern mystics and sages, you come back to Jesus and go, oh man, this guy was exactly like all of them. He was just super tapped in to metaphysical reality and he knew his oneness with God. And I mean, that should be obvious, right? As inspiring and worshipful even as Jesus was, that's not what inspired Jesus. Jesus was what he was because he I and the father are one, not because he confessed Jesus as his Lord and savior. So, I want to be inspired by what inspired Jesus and that was his understanding of the divine. (1:05:29 - 1:06:46) So, I read the teachings of Jesus and say, there is no way another person just made these up in order to forge a document or a story, because you would have to be essentially a spiritual genius on the level of Jesus to write these parables and teachings. And imagine somebody who's enlightened forging a document or making up a story that's not true. To me, that seems like quite a contra indication. So, to me, the teachings of Jesus originate probably with very close to what he actually wrote. I think the gospel of Thomas is good evidence for that as well. The narratives, I mean, I think Jesus was crucified for sure. And did he really raised from the dead? I don't know. I'm totally open to the possibility that he did, but I think the idea of telling people, you will roast in hell forever if you don't claim to know something that you cannot possibly know. That's so disingenuous. Why would the creator of the universe, who is all truth and therefore has nothing to prove, why would God want me to say I believe an event happened 2,000 years ago that I can't possibly know happened? I wasn't there. I can't time travel and go verify. Yeah, Jesus really did rise from the dead. I know it. I know it and I believe it. No, I don't know it. (1:06:46 - 1:07:26) And it's dishonest to say that I know it. But more importantly, Jesus, to me, whether he rose from the dead or not, has no bearing at all on the Jesus that I follow. Because it's about his teachings and his ministry and what he revealed about God that I think matters the most. So, to me, it's like Jesus's life and teachings are far more important than his birth and his death. And yet, in Christianity, it's the virgin birth and the crucifixion that gets all the emphasis. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that clarification. For sure. Do you want to get into the law of one? Yeah, let's get into that. Cool. Do you guys know about the law of one? I mean, I've been aware of it for a while, but I've never explored it deeply. (1:07:26 - 1:09:19) I think backstory to how the law of one came about would be useful for the audience to start with. For sure. I found the law of one when I was about 25, I started reading it. I'd heard the text number of times come up, and it always sounded intriguing. But I don't know why I didn't read it for a number of years until one day I was like, I just got to read this thing. And I was just astounded at what I was reading. Because the law of one has this unique way of making people feel, this is the feedback that everybody gives about the law of one. When they read it, they say, man, it's like, I always knew these things. But I didn't know that I knew them. But when I read the law of one, I'm like, yes, that's the way that it really is. And so what the law of one is, it's a channel text from the 1980s, from a group of extraterrestrial researchers. The name of their group is called L&L Research. And they were led by a scientist named Don Elkins, who was, I want to say he was a physics professor, or maybe a chemistry professor. And he put together a group of people that were practicing channeling because he and his researchers were observing the UFO phenomenon, which was really ramping up in those days. There's a lot of UFO sightings happening. And they were like, man, how do we get behind this phenomenon and understand it? And Don Elkins had the pretty brilliant idea of saying, well, if we want to understand who these creatures are and why they're here, we should probably get more interested in their philosophy and spirituality than in their technology. Because like, how do they get here? That's an interesting question. But why do they come here is an even more interesting question, you know? And so they thought maybe we can find out by communicating with them through channeling. (1:09:19 - 1:10:23) Because if these beings are on these super high frequencies of consciousness, they probably don't use verbal language like we do. They probably have like mind-to-mind telepathic communication. So they practiced channeling for like 12 years. And the big mistake was that they was a group of only men with no women. And for some reason, women just tend to be way more natural channelers than men do. And so it wasn't until a girlfriend of one of the guys in the group, her name was Carla Rucard, joined a session one day because she wanted to check it out, that she like fell in love with the art of channeling and was like, well, I want to learn how to do this. And so within, I think a few months, she's like really taking to it and having some success. And she becomes one of the chief channelers of the group in a very short time. And so the story goes that she was teaching a channeling session with students one day. And so she goes into a channeling state to demonstrate what it looks like. And this entity comes through that identifies itself as Ra, says, I am Ra. And it's communicating. (1:10:24 - 1:11:17) And Don Elkins is listening. And they'd said they'd only had a couple of what they thought were really genuine contacts, but they were very brief and they couldn't reestablish contact. But when he heard this one, he was like, whoa, this is really profound. Like we need to dedicate a session to this. So Don, Carla, and then a third man named Jim McCarty, he served as the scribe of the channeling sessions. He's the only member of the three still alive today, Jim McCarty. And they did a channeling session over four years, they did 106 channeling sessions with this entity named Ra. And this entity comes through in their channeling sessions. And what they identified as is a group or a civilization of extraterrestrials that came to earth like 11,000, 12,000 years ago and visited Egypt. (1:11:18 - 1:11:48) Because what they said is that they saw Egypt was stuck in this kind of perpetual spiritual childhood because they were only living to 30 some odd years old. And so if you're not living past 30, I mean, as we know, like you, you can obviously grow spiritually earlier than 30, but like, you really don't know yourself very well until your thirties. And that's when you really start exploring your inner world and spiritual growth becomes a lot easier after you've had those initial 30 years of life experience, but then people are dying at 30. (1:11:48 - 1:12:12) And so it's just not enough lifetime to really grow and evolve spiritually. And so Ra says, this culture was a very pantheistic culture where they believed God was everything. God is the sun, God is the moon. And they worship these things as like symbols of God. And so they said, we didn't see it as infringement to come openly among them because they already believed God is everything. And that is the law we come to teach is that there's only one God, one creator. (1:12:12 - 1:17:11) So they supposedly came to the Egyptians to try to teach them how to, um, use pyramids as healing centers. And that's what the pyramids were built for according to the law of one healing and initiation centers. And so they said that the Egyptians sort of corrupted the law of one by making it a hierarchical thing where the knowledge was used by the elites, the Pharaohs or whatever to establish power and hierarchy. And they said that that's the opposite of the law of one, at least the positive polarity of the law of one. So they said, we need to leave this civilization because it's, we're now doing more harm than good type of thing. So they said, we've been waiting, uh, for, you know, these many thousands of years around your planet for a group that is harmonious enough for us to come back and reestablish the law of one to your planet. And it wasn't until this group of Don Carla and Jim started channeling that they found this harmonious, uh, energy frequency they were looking for and said, okay, this group is pure enough that we can deliver this message and they won't corrupt it hopefully. And so over those four years, they just kind of do a Q and a with raw about the nature of the universe and the law of one. And why do our souls come here? And why do we evolve and reincarnate and all these things? And a lot of one just gives incredibly satisfying answers that are very kind of scientific in their nature for these very esoteric questions we ask about, why are we here? And why do we come to the earth plane and all of this? So if you're, if you're somebody that's interested in those kinds of questions, I think you'll find the law of one to be an extraordinary read in very interesting, like, um, I guess potential correlation. So this system was channeled, I think, 81 to 84. And then the human design system was channeled in 87 by Robert Allen Krakauer, who changed his name to Ra afterwards, Ra Uruhi. So I'm just curious if this is like the same kind of voice because he just, he just called this channel the voice. I'm curious if this is like in the 80s, I wanted to come through and kind of, you know, it could be the same thing. A bunch of relevant knowledge. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good theory. I think there's, you could make the argument for it. I, who knows, but, um, it is interesting that he changed his name to Ra. Um, Ra is the sun God in, in Egyptian mythology and the Egyptians named this extraterrestrial civilization. They named them Ra. They didn't come down and say, we are Ra. They were named Ra because they came from the skies. And they said, the Egyptian saw us, Oh, you must be the sun God Ra. And so they just took the name that humanity gave them. And they, they refer to themselves the way humanity referred to them, but they described themselves as the planet that originated or the civilization that originated on Venus. Some odd 2 billion years ago, they said Venus was in the habitable zone and was like very hospitable for life. And so they had, um, it's kind of cool actually. They described that on Venus, Venus is one planet closer to the sun than we are. And so they said our, we were on a very harshly bright planet compared to yours. And so the idea is like almost like a sci-fi movie, like the sun comes out and it's extremely hot and not very hospitable to life. So you've got to live almost like in your homes or caves or whatever, while the sun is out. And then you come out at night. It's a do whatever you're going to do. They said it was a, it was a catalyst for our civilization that we didn't have the luxury of infighting and tribal warfare when we're all trying to survive on this planet and make a home for ourselves. So they said, we evolved through the densities, third and fourth and fifth density very quickly compared to earth, because we have the opposite problem. We have this perfect luxurious planet that is full of gorgeous nature and perfection and perfect weather. And we have, it's so good on this planet that we have the luxury of fighting over it and going to war over it that they didn't have. And so their species evolved a lot faster than ours did supposedly because they faced this big challenge. So that's another cool, uh, example of the way that the universe uses things that appear to be negative or positive reasons. And in opposition to that, too much positivity can actually lead to negativity. The two polarities are always kind of implying one another or inferring one another. So the, the path is perfect balance between the polarities, which, uh, is what they call graduation. When you spiritually, metaphysically within yourself, come to peace with both polarities, such that you don't hate or judge the negative, you understand the role it's playing in creation. And yet you choose to be positive because you realize both polarities are playing their role. (1:17:11 - 1:17:28) The negative polarity represents, uh, the law of one calls it the path of that, which is not meaning the negative polarity is the illusion. As we said earlier, it's based on the ignorance of, of truth and reality, but yet it's given a place to express in creation. It has a purpose. (1:17:28 - 1:18:12) The positive is the awareness of truth and reality, oneness and relationship. And so to be on the positive polarity, you have to come to love and appreciate the negative for what it is while not participating in it. Does that make sense? That's what the balance actually looks like according to the law of one. Interesting. Yeah. It just seems like, you know, again, all these teachings kind of have a core similar message, you know, and even the purpose, I would argue of like psychotherapy is to, you know, breed balance and congruence and coherence, you know, with within the self, like understanding the dark and the light, being able to hold the tension of opposites. Um, right. Yeah. It's very interesting. (1:18:14 - 1:20:18) What are some other main tenets of the law of one that you focus on? Well, I just mentioned the densities and that's, that's the core, I think framework that the law of one lays out that, uh, to me is the most translatable to our direct experience of reality. When I said earlier, like this book gives really satisfying answers. It's because the answers it gives, you can actually see them in your own experience of reality. So one of those is the densities of consciousness. They explain that consciousness is evolving through these seven layers or levels or whatever you want to call them, but they're really densities of light. So the more dense with light, uh, a density is the more high frequency. It is the more light there is the less dense it is, the lower in frequency it is. So we start with first density and these seven densities correlate to the seven energy centers. And so our, our chakras in that way are like a microcosm of the densities of the universe. Or we could say the densities are like the chakras of the universe. So they're the same exact metaphysical representation. So first density represents the density of pure beingness. So that's the five elements, earth, water, fire, air, and space. So the idea is consciousness begins at the first density level and every density represents a certain speed of vibration or rate of vibration. So when consciousness is vibrating at this speed or frequency, it experiences pure existence in physical reality. So that's again, the elements, right? As the photon speeds up and its vibration, it moves to the second density and that becomes like anything that has awareness or movements or interaction with its environment. So in the first density planets are forming and solidifying earth, water, magma, hardening, becoming a planet, ocean forms, and then life forms begin to evolve in that, on that planet. That's when the second density begins, which correlates to the second chakra, the sacral. (1:20:18 - 1:22:42) And then eventually those animals, insects, species will eventually evolve into what's called self-awareness, which is the third density. So when consciousness is vibrating fast enough to be aware of itself, we call that third density consciousness. And that's where human beings have been for a very long time on this planet, is we've been on the third density level, which correlates to the third chakra. Now, if you know anything about chakras and like Hinduism or Eastern mysticism, the third, the solar plexus is kind of known as like the ego chakra, because it's the center of personal will power, personal control. Our intellectual world is all governed by the solar plexus. So now humanity is trying to emerge from third to fourth energy center. We're trying to move out of ego consciousness into heart-based consciousness. And so the fourth density of consciousness is when the photon is vibrating fast enough for us to perceive the oneness and the connection of everything, that actually nothing here is fundamentally separate, but all of it is fundamentally connected in one of the same substance and source. And so that awareness allows us to love each other finally. And to say, look, it doesn't matter if you're in that body, I'm in this body. There's one reality, one creator, one source of which we are all a part. And so if we want to live in harmony with this universe, we find ourselves in, we have to love each other. Hey, Aaron, real quickly, I want to jump in there because as we talked about before you came on, I'm in Los Angeles. We've been dealing with the fires here. Things got very, very close to our home, but fortunately, we made it out safely. I mean, our home is safe. I'm here in our home. What is it about catastrophe that brings people closer towards this fourth density, as you call it, consciousness? Because when you see people coming together, you see people gathering, you see people donating, you see people on the front lines helping each other out. No one gives a fuck about who you voted for, whether or not you got a vaccine or not, whatever the case may be. It's like this beautiful representation of what humanity can be. And yet, once the catastrophe passes, people go back into their little bubbles, into their ideologies. (1:22:43 - 1:23:45) And it's like, do we need catastrophe all the time to show people to care about one another? Well, he was kind of saying, they said they lived on Venus where survival was the only thing and that led them to evolve at a quicker rate or whatever. But yeah, it speaks to him. You're exactly right. That's the kind of unfortunate side of our karma as a species is we've always had it so good on this planet that we have the luxury of fighting over stupid shit that doesn't really matter. And when we do that, we lose sight of the metaphysical truth of reality, which is oneness. We're all one and there's no possibility we can have a harmonious, happy planet if we're making our differences the most important thing. We have to start paying attention to our similarities and what makes us the same and what makes us one. And disasters do that better than anything, right? They remove all of our luxuries from us and force us to look at the bottom line basics of what it means to be a human. We all have the same needs. (1:23:45 - 1:25:11) We all have the same desires. We all have the same wants. And so we can only make a happy, equal planet by loving each other. If any other way, we're going to keep recreating this planet of dissension and strife and conflict we've seen since human history began. We've tried it, right? That's third density. We've spent 100,000 plus years going to war against each other and we still haven't created a happy planet yet. So we're, I think humanity's doing a lot of karmic healing and purging from third density, which a lot of these natural disasters represent that, but they are being used in a big way to push us forward into the fourth, I think. How dare you assume LA was a natural disaster? I know, I know. It was natural because someone started it, right? Yeah. I mean, that's a whole nother conversation. It's the space lasers for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's been a trippy nine days. That's for sure, man. But also beautiful to see people coming together and wanting to support, wanting to help and having compassion to this degree. And it's just like, there's a part of it that breaks my heart like in like a month or a few weeks, like people are just going to go back to like screaming at people on the internet and like- Losing sight of what matters. Their family members that voted for orange man or whatever the case may be. (1:25:11 - 1:25:15) Yeah. It is interesting. It is an interesting observation for sure. (1:25:15 - 1:25:45) And I think, I think we can move past the need for catastrophe and disaster to, you know, live more heart-based most of the time. I hope so, man. I kind of feel like humanity keeps showing the universe, like we're literally not interested in love and oneness until you do something horrible to us, you know? And I think we're just going to keep getting what we're sort of asking for until we can start showing the universe that we can prioritize loving each other without the need for disasters, which I think is happening to some degree. (1:25:46 - 1:26:40) I think people are coming together on our planet thanks to the internet and social media, but we still have a long ways to go. And I think we're going to, we're going to still have to manifest oneness through calamity and disaster for, for quite a while on our planet, a hundred years, 200 years, who knows? Yeah. Well, even, you know, on the micro level, you think about as an individual, you know, you know, the painful moments in our lives and how they expanded us and opened up our heart. And, you know, one of my favorite quotes is from Rumi, it's like, you have to keep breaking your heart so it could open. And so I love that, you know, on the collective level, like all these catastrophes, all this shit that goes down and it's like, all right, let's keep breaking hearts so we can open more and more and more and, you know, understand and have more compassion and love one another and not care about these, this petty bullshit that we argue over. Yeah. Have you guys done psychedelics, I'm guessing? In the back in the days, a long time ago. Okay. On a very mild level. (1:26:41 - 1:26:57) Okay. Well, I don't know if you guys have ever had a bad trip on like psilocybin or something, but, uh, I had probably three total bad trips in my twenties. I really took to psychedelics to like help me go through the period of time I was going through and man, were they the miracle I needed. (1:26:57 - 1:29:20) But what they did for me probably better than anything was the bad trips. Um, I had tons of really amazing trips where I would see my future and what I can be and how God sees me. And I would always come back really lit up on myself and on life, which is very good. And we need that. But I had a big spiritual ego or just a regular ego that was overbalanced and I couldn't see it. And so the, the psilocybin, um, the intelligence of the medicine had to slap me around a little bit and show me my arrogance to instill humility in me. And I'll never forget. Um, I accidentally took nine grams of mushrooms one evening trying to take about four. And, uh, yeah, I got a big wake up call from the universe there. And it was such a bad trip that, um, it, I left that trip. I did not speak a word for 24 hours. I refused to open my mouth because I, I saw my arrogance and selfishness and things like this at such a visceral level that I really was like disgusted with myself. I didn't even want to hear myself talk. And that sounds extreme, but like, it was really good medicine for me at the time. I needed a humility check. I was getting too high on my horse. I was blazing through life way too fast. You know, I was cruising down the diamond lane at a hundred miles an hour and blowing past really important things in my life that I wasn't being mindful of. And the mushroom showed me that in a way that was painful and difficult to accept, but man, it gave me so much humility I needed. And the other two bad trips did as well. So those things taught me like nothing is really bad in the universe. It is what you make it. And when people play victim, well, then yeah, you're going to get what you're asking for. If you feel like a victim, you'll get no redemption from this. You won't learn anything from this for sure. You can be a victim if you want, but I've found through not only my own life, but friends, family, clients, I've worked with people that have been abused and traumatized beyond belief. There is no trauma. There's no experience in life that does not elicit good in the end. If you're willing to learn from it and heal from it, there's always transcendence that happens through our biggest challenges and catalysts, and they make us better. That doesn't mean it's easy, but nonetheless, God uses everything for good when we trust God. (1:29:20 - 1:30:23) And so even though bad things happen, like I'm not seeing necessarily evil happening in the world when the tyrants are taking control of countries and instituting vaccine mandates. I don't see it as evil in the sense of a real second power that's opposing God. I don't see that anything opposes God. I see it as ignorance of God or distortion of truth manifesting itself. And so that just makes me want to bring light and correction to it, but not like punishment and anger, because that's another negative energy, right? You can't really wipe out one negative with another. And that's one of the harder parts about the Jesus way is Jesus taught us overcome evil with good. That's a very paradoxical or counterintuitive way of thinking for most people. Yeah. But do you think at any point you need to kind of meet people where they're at and set a boundary? Having a connection to that part of you where maybe even anger lives allow someone to set a very strong boundary and to say, no, you will not speak to me this way. (1:30:23 - 1:31:13) You will not encroach on my territory or my family's territory. How do you dance with those qualities within a human being? Yeah. Great question. Anger is a very useful energy. All negative emotions are useful. They're all good in the sense that this is something I teach about pretty regularly is the emotional guidance system, that your negative emotions are actually messengers from your inner world, trying to tell you what's out of balance in you, what beliefs you're holding onto. So for example, sadness is the belief in lack, meaning whenever you're sad, there's a belief in lack somewhere in your mind. I'm lacking something, or I lost something that I want or need. Anger is the belief in attachments that if I don't get what I want, it makes me angry because that thing I want can fulfill me. (1:31:14 - 1:31:39) So it's like this attachment, this goal gets blocked and I feel angry. And then fear is the third negative emotion, which is all about control. And whenever I feel like I'm not in control, I get afraid and anxious and stressed out. So these emotions are very good in this way. Go ahead. Why would you label them negative? That's my question. Fear can save people's lives. Sadness can open up a person's heart. Anger can set a strong boundary with somebody. (1:31:39 - 1:32:37) For sure. When I use the terms positive and negative, and this is the way the law of one uses them, it is not a value judgment at all. So negative does not mean bad and positive does not mean good. Good and bad are subjective judgments. Negative and positive refers really more to the way it's used in chemistry, meaning that which is negative is that which is inward moving or absorbing, magnetic, pulls inward. And that which is positive is radiating, expanding, outward moving. So the negative polarity means you're completely self-focused. You have no concern for others. You just want to take from others to benefit yourself. That's what it means to be negative is like inward moving. And positive is the opposite, right? Outward moving, loving and blessing others. So does that clear up your question? Yeah. Yeah. Negative emotions are emotions that are inward moving. They cause you to feel something about yourself that is, that is, you know, a guilt or something like that. (1:32:37 - 1:32:42) It's a call to attention in yourself. So it's not bad at all. It's really a very good in that way. (1:32:42 - 1:35:39) It has a dual purpose and function, but we have to, we have to balance our emotions and listen to the messages that they convey. So in terms of setting boundaries and things like this, it's always about doing no harm. We have to remember that. And I think all of us would agree that if you're, let's say in a relationship with an abusive partner, let's say you're a woman with an abusive, narcissistic husband or something. Um, is it loving or beneficial to them to enable their dysfunction? Obviously not. Is it helpful to them to give them, to, to be their target board, to just continue in their dysfunction? They, they want someone to abuse. I'll be your person to abuse because I love you. Is that really loving though? I would argue it's absolutely not loving because you're perpetuating that person's problem. And so you can actually see boundaries or even leaving a relationship as a very loving act because number one, you, that person needs a wake-up call. The only way somebody gets out of a pattern is through a wake-up call, a pattern interrupt. And when you divorce or break up with somebody and leave their life, you force them to have a pattern interrupt, a huge one that gives them a very big opportunity to actually look inside themselves and say, did I do something wrong here? Like where am I might be out of balance here. And that doesn't always happen, but at least you're giving the opportunity for it to happen, right? So it's always a loving action, whether you're drawing boundaries or not, everything should come from love, which is, I truly care about this person and I want their good in this situation. And nobody would argue that perpetuating abuse is helpful to that person. They need to be healed from their abusive behavior. So I don't even see them as boundaries in that sense. I see them all as acts of service to others, but love also means I cannot allow harm to be done to myself because if we're all equal, that means I can't martyr myself to help somebody else because now I'm making them more important than me. It's like, no, your needs are as important as mine. So if I'm getting abused, I should want to save myself from that abuse with the same speed I would save anyone else, my daughter, my brother, my friend. I don't want anybody I love to be abused and I would immediately want to help them get out of that situation. I got to turn that same self-love back upon myself as well, right? Yeah. I mean, to me, what's becoming clearer and again, which is, you know, not something new that I've thought of is that these words, God, love, it's just synonymous for truth. And when you respond truthfully to a situation, God or love is working through you in that sense. Absolutely. You got it. And you give the, you know, the laws of the universe and the laws of balance, the chance to actually play out without interfering them when we just decide to respond in truth. Perfectly said, bro. Perfectly said. (1:35:40 - 1:37:47) Aaron, I really enjoyed this conversation. Do you have any final messages or final message for our audience? Well, I would highly recommend if this conversation interested you, definitely check out The Law of One. If you were intrigued by any of the Bible-based mystical Christianity stuff, I have a big presentation coming up next Sunday. So it'll probably be out by the time this podcast airs called The Gospel Conspiracy. And it's actually the second part. I did a first part in September and it's titled The Lying Pen of the Scribes. So it's all about the orthodox corruption of scripture and a lot of the stuff we talked about of how and why did this corruption begin, a whole lot of scholarly evidence for it. And what is the overall message that this means for us as people who, whether you're a Christian or not, people who love the Bible, how do we read and see this text if it's not this infallible book dropped out of heaven? So that'll be a really fun presentation that's about, it'll be like four or five hours long probably. So maybe we'll put the link for that in the description. What's your website where people can find you and your work? Yeah, it's just aaronabkey.com or youtube.com slash aaronabkey or aaronabkey on Instagram. Yeah, we'll have all those links below. Yeah, we're turning this one around real quick. It'll be out on Sunday, so a week before your presentation. Okay, perfect. Yeah, but people should definitely look out for that, no doubt about it. Man, so great to finally connect in this way. Thank you for being here and thank you for walking the path because I think it's really, really, really important. So yeah, everyone, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Thanks guys. Thanks for listening. Another amazing episode in the books. All our episodes can be found at hereforthetruth.com, which is basically just an awesome hub for grounded truth seekers. We like to consider ourselves a home base for the grounded truth seeker. Over 220 episodes now as well. (1:37:48 - 1:38:43) If you want to go a step further, please consider joining our premium membership community, Friends of the Truth, and engaging and connecting with us directly, getting five live calls a month plus, a resource vault now of over multiple hundreds worth of hours of content available there for all members. We will be making an announcement probably in the next couple of weeks for the new dates for Rise Above the Herd, which is our 10-week group coaching program. This will be our 12th time running this program. So if you'd like to join the waitlist for the 10-week program, Rise Above the Herd, you can do that from hereforthetruth.com as well. Just press on, I guess, Rise Above the Herd or go to the coaching office page and press on Rise Above the Herd, and you'll get the chance to join the waitlist and be first invited to claim a spot for that program, which will probably be running in the next month or so. All right, everyone. (1:38:43 - 1:38:44) Thanks for listening. Take care.