podcast Transcripts

As I’ve shared repeatedly during this season of podcasts, when an idea strikes a chord in me, I tend to take it to the ultimate of extremes. It’s just the way that I am. As irrational as it was to shelve my book as some sort of sacrifice to God, I chose to follow that small intuitive voice within. That I did not fully know what I had written was the internal impression that I had in my thoughts, but that if I shelved it for the time being, and gave it to God and trusted God to lead me, I’d learn and understand it better. This was coupled or supported I suppose by the emotion of fear I had, that since I didn’t fully understand what I had written, the work may lead others astray, and in no sense of the concept did I desire to do such a thing to another. Leading myself astray was one thing. Leading others astray was infinitely more pressing on my mind and not something I was going to do, having already abandoned my desire to work in advertising long ago after realizing its subliminal power over the mind, especially my own, when after a day of seeing Coke ads everywhere in the external, I had a Futurama-like dream where I dreamt of the old Coke ads with the polar bears drinking Coke and when I woke up I wanted to drink some Coke.

Regardless of my decision, this entire scenario made me angry. I thought I’d been following the path God had set for me by writing this blasted book, like I had a path, like I had a purpose, and now, I had exited the woods following this path I’d been treading and had expected the endpoint, yet all that lay before me was more and more empty desert and a broken road beneath my feet covered and obscured by horribly hot and constantly shifting sand and a voice within telling me to trust and continue the journey.

And because I was angry that such a thought had entered my mind and angry that I loved God enough to follow the intuitive voice within and shelve the work, I not only put that book aside but ceased writing entirely, even journal writing, as a big giant middle-finger to God. Expletive deleted you, expletive deleted writing, expletive deleted whatever and wherever you’re trying to lead me towards. “I’m done. I know you’re there, I’m not making the same mistake as I did before and deny you, but shelve and sacrifice this book? I’ll one up you and shelve all writing. When the time comes, maybe I’ll get back to it if your will is powerful enough to move me. If this is what you want, fine. Just don’t drop the Sword of Damocles on me since this is your will.”

Something like that is what I thought. Though I had no idea what I was doing at the time, no idea what this sacrifice was, I’ve mentioned it prior and will mention it again. The idea of success from writing this book had become my Golden Calf. At the same time I was trying to follow and trust this mysterious will of God, I was also trying to follow and trust the work of my hands as a writer to lead me to the promise land. If you don’t know what the Golden Calf is, please re-read the story of Exodus in the Bible, and after you do, think about what in your life may be your Golden Calf, or that which you have placed your trust in, above the will of God. I would see this similarity later on and not at this point. But quite the eye-opener when I realized what had actually occurred at this moment of sacrifice. The act would simply take four years to mature.

Also, in case you’re wondering, especially if there were any gasps at the things I’ve screamed out at God in my mind and heart, I have a theory that pertains to the lukewarm saying Jesus gives in the New Testament, alongside my having referenced it several times. God can work with angry, or you being angry with Him, or in this case me being angry with Him. The relationship is still there, even if it’s the little human being angry with the mysterious Divine Emperor of the universe. Sure, we all like to think of this happy, loving graciousness that we give in devotion to God with our Amen’s and Alleluia’s, or the Disney effect of faith in God. But that’s not always the case. And to deny or try to repress being angry with God is no different than trying to shut the emotion of anger up for any other reason.

I’ve never liked spiritual teachings that downplay or speak of anger as some weak emotion. Yes, it is volatile, yes it is explosive. But channeled correctly, it gives such pinpointed and accurate focus as long as you can define the anger and what’s causing it, and then dive deeper into what’s causing the cause of the anger, etc., that one can use that to develop and implement the desired change. Unfortunately, society, civilizations, governments, religions, families, have to teach the suppression of anger since it is so volatile and explosive, and can lead to causing physical harm to oneself and to others. But used wisely, experienced and expressed wisely, it can motivate one to change their life.

I wasn’t quite there yet at this point, but neither was I backing down from my anger being expressed to God in prayer. It was childish, I admit. “Oh look, time to pray to the God that does nothing anymore, but I guess I gotta do it so a meteor doesn’t fall on my head or a Looney Tune Acme bottomless pit hole suddenly appear under my feet again. Oh yes, you do so much like to bring the pain and the punishment to those that don’t follow, worship or love you. You’ll do something then, won’t you? You’ll appear and act then, like in my apartment with that moment of eternal hell, won’t you? So expletive deleted this love business. You get my anger and resentment now and nothing else.” And many other such thoughts and prayers with a similar vein.

I know it sounds strange but God can work with your anger if you give it to Him. He is God after all.

You would think that a meteor should’ve fallen on my head from my defiance of God even as I was following His guiding spirit telling me to shelve the book so that I could learn more what I had written. But it was actually the opposite. Having my mind now freed from this double-mind of trying to succeed in work as any of the many forms of sales person I had been while also trying to write, I got promoted and then promoted again, and then again until I hit being a General Manager. Income rose, company car, all that kind of stuff the world tells you is important.

But most importantly, which is bringing both a shudder of emotion and a watering to my eyes as I think of it, my first daughter was born almost exactly nine months after this shelving of the book in June 2014. Any parent that truly wanted to be a parent, and though ridiculously difficult and frustrating at times to have this little person defy and challenge your every word (hint, hint further of the reflective nature of the spiritual life if you re-read the previous paragraphs), any parent knows the feeling that I’m talking about. There’s no greater wealth and pool of emotion possible and available than what is received from one’s child. Children are one of the great equalizers for both rich and poor alike. I’m the best at everything to my daughters. I’m the most handsomest, the strongest, the smartest, the best cook, the most creative, the fastest, the best at everything to them other than drawing and coloring since though only four and seven, they’ve both already surpassed me in this since this is one of the least developed skills in my repertoire. No amount of money or accomplishment can buy that feeling of self-worth that my daughters have already given and give freely and unconditionally to me, and from any child to any parent that sticks around and gives a damn. It’s quite sad that many in this society have completely obliterated or seek to obliterate that relationship between parent and child for whatever the media-driven political flavor of the month may be pushing. Not in my house.

What was also interesting about this no longer writing, was that it manifested physically. I have to go into esoteric or eastern religious stuff to explain it, but literally a month or two after July, 2013, when I’d offered up and sacrificed what had become my Golden Calf of writing, and I think I already mentioned this, I had to get a physical done and they said I had a thyroid issue after the blood work. The thyroid is in the throat, and having essentially abandoned my writing, or the seat of my expression or creativity, it was like it manifested in this weird physical and spiritual thing since in the esoteric and eastern type teachings, creativity and self-expression are both in the energies found in the throat, obviously since it’s where we speak and vocalize from but that it goes deeper than the physical and reflects the inner spiritual. So as much as I try to stay away from such type teachings, or at least try not to implement them into a daily coherence since thinking too much about that kind of stuff can bog down the mind, I can’t deny that at least in my experience, I am able to see a cohesiveness to the physical block that suddenly occurred and how it translates to the esoteric understanding of the internal life force found in that part of the body.

There’s not much else to say over the next several years. I knuckled down with work, took care of my first daughter and then second, took them to church, though that was essentially just following the motions since there’s little to no focus or attention at church with children unless they’re in the baby carrier and sleeping. It was literally just to check the box in my head of having done it and having received the host, kneeling as I did so with either of my daughters in my arms over the years, hoping I didn’t drop her, and hoping the priest landed the host on my tongue and didn’t drop it as well. There are some very pious things I had learned of during my RCIA stuff fifteen years ago that I never thought would come my way when it comes to the reverence to the host. Let’s just say it missed the mark once and I had to pick it up off the trampled and dirty floor and still put it in my mouth.

As I explained in an earlier episode this season, when you manage to create a vacuum within the mind, entropy or chaos or whatever principle you want to call it kicks in, and the mind works to suck things back into it to fill the void. If I hadn’t fully power gamed prior to this time, which I would go through spurts of here and there, I fully, fully power gamed during this time since I wasn’t even trying to battle it away anymore in favor of writing. It’s kind of interesting though since other than those Marvel shows that were on Netflix, the focus on gaming during my free time annihilated movie and television watching. That buffet line of worldly distractions sort of narrowed with the only break occurring when the next season of Game of Thrones came on.

But as I mentioned earlier, the gaming became more like work, and no longer a past time, but became the non-alcoholic method of killing brain cells with one brain cell for each bad guy that gets killed in whatever game while stupefying oneself. Older now, a husband and a father, I could no longer game for hours on end as when I was using it to get rid of smoking weed. But it became a routine, coming home from work late at night, eating something, showering, seeing the time on the clock at around midnight, telling myself game until 2 AM, checking the clock periodically until it hit 2 AM, then telling myself just a little bit more and routinely finding myself going to bed between 3 and 4 AM. Then rinse and repeat the next day.

At some point the internal battle returned. The thoughts and the internal intuitive voice questioning me day in and day out and though I could hear it, I wasn’t listening. You could be writing again. You could be doing this or you could be doing that. Do you have any idea how much time you’ve spent doing this and not doing that? But I pushed the thoughts aside and kept at my routine. I was succeeding finally at work. I’d moved up into management stuff and was no longer the legal street hustler. I felt more secure because the success and stress of landing the next client, landing the next deal, was gone; even though it was still there, it was just gone from a personal point of view since it was flowing through the sales people I was now managing. Maybe all this time I just had to accept that I wasn’t really a writer, didn’t really have anything interesting to say and was never really meant to write? Maybe all I’d experienced in 2001 was just some crazy drug stuff and everything over the years has just been my mind re-organizing and undoing all the drugs in life? Did I even believe in God without that experience? Yeah, I’d answer myself, but with that idea of the gulf and chasm of existence when God is pondered, that I, little man here on Earth, and God, this mysterious presence or will of the universe beyond all mortal understanding, as impersonal as the attempt at personalizing this universal will has been across all human time, that I am but micro dust compared to this non-being being of infinity, or this non-being being’s footstool as I had thought during the Century Club experience.

What does my little prayer do for God anyways? What does my devotion to God accomplish and does God even recognize it? Kind of like when you think of the procession of servants bringing gifts to the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh just sits there and maybe you get a nod of recognition, but nothing further even if it’s all you had to give. Why worry about this God any further? He made me to think like this, so ultimately, it’s His fault if I no longer really care to learn about or worship Him. In fact, if I picture myself as like a single neuron in the infinite brain of God, then I’m one of those neurons that tells it like it is to Him. In a results driven society, if prayer doesn’t produce results, then what’s the point of praying to this God any further? Give thanks for the initial work of creation and the reminder brought again by Christ so you don’t get a lightning bolt up your ass, and that’s it. That’s all that’s really required to appease the angry God of Israel.

By this point, I was now getting sick of video gaming and was feeling more and more like it was becoming work but didn’t care enough to stop the routine. But something did start to occur that I began to notice. It’s not so much that I couldn’t think or focus anymore, but that Ferrari paced mind just suddenly started to feel like it was driving through mud. I know that may sound counter-intuitive since from a meditation and discipline standpoint the goal is to control and organize and yoke the mind to work as one desires instead of how the world has created, but this was different. The thought I had was that I was starting to feel slower in my mind, sluggish, and it started to bother me. Nobody around me could notice or feel it, but I did.

Somewhere leading up to Ash Wednesday in 2017, I’d finally taken the Pepsi-challenge the small intuitive voice kept whispering in my ear of how much time I’d spent gaming and sat there and mathematically tried to quantize it. I say this because I know I was ready to give up video gaming on Ash Wednesday for the Lenten season instead of that usual while sitting in mass on Ash Wednesday thinking up something quick to give up to check off the boxes of the church routine. I didn’t go all the way back in my life, just until the time after my near-death experience, accounted for the time I hadn’t gamed, accounted for the time instead of gaming all I did was mess around with 3D gamemark settings and. . . geez, I can’t even remember the name of what it’s called when you check the max settings your computer can handle on a game since I’ve so obliterated video gaming from my mind. It’s not resolution check, it’s when you run a. . .benchmark, there it is, a benchmark. Benchmark settings. I then thought even deeper, and this is where the culture aspect to these obsessions or addictions I mentioned earlier comes into play, since I had to account for all the time spent researching gaming, watching game reviews, looking up games, reading message board stuff on games, all the things tied into the matrix of mental activity surrounding a given thing that occupies the mind internally and is expressed in the external action. I don’t remember the exact number I reached while averaging the hours all out, but I want to say at least a year of the entirety of my life, and I probably just rounded it up, which I’ll do here and say ten thousand hours spent in the universe of video gaming. It’s actually not that much if you divide it by twenty years and then divide that by three hundred sixty five days, which I just did, but then, it really, really is. 1.4 hours daily, every single day over the course of twenty years. And if I lower the year count since I haven’t gamed now in close to four years, that daily average actually goes up for the time period of actual gaming, but twenty years is such a nice big number versus sixteen years to wrap one’s head around.

Seeing this number then, just as now, made me angry. I already gave my expression of anger and using it as ignition fuel to spark change. This was one of those times in my life. I slapped myself in the face then just as I want to slap myself in the face now, just as I wanted to slap myself in the face when I read that book on the science of expertise since in it, the author said that about ten thousand hours on something creates expertise, and back when I read that book and had this video gaming number of hours fresher in my mind, I didn’t like knowing that I’d become an expert in the world of video gaming while not actually being an expert since I’d never honed my skills in actual gaming but had spent a tremendous amount of that time reading about the gaming world and doing all those benchmarking tests since I liked twiddling with the settings in my BIOS to see if I could get an extra framerate or two in this or that game.

But without this as my daily activity, if I chose to give it up, what did I have? Without this as that daily routine, what aspect of myself remained, since I was also no longer meditating, reading or writing? Just a worker-bee closing the next deal and writing up the next contract? Was that all that I was meant to do? Hadn’t I believed that I’d experienced something rare? Hadn’t I seen and experienced what has been called God?

If you can see it, if you have followed along with these podcasts, with the Vision Explained Deeper material on my website the logosofexperienceandtruth.com, if you’ve heard what I’ve said regarding the mysteries, regarding this phase in the spiritual life of the Desert of the Soul, perhaps you can see where I’d finally reached. For now I was ready for the true work of God. For without this, that last vestige of unlimited distraction that had plagued me from the start of this spiritual journey, the lesser evil at the time versus smoking weed but now that which primarily held my attention when I had time to focus my attention, without this, what else did I have to occupy the primary space in my mind alongside wife and children?

One simple three letter word. God. For all else had been stripped away from my mind.

And thus, we return to and highlight once more the greatest commandment and hopefully you can see the depths one has to reach to achieve it. All your heart, all your mind, all your soul, for God will not be alongside any other gods. Translation: any other mountains of thought in your mind if you can look past the physical statue of some handmade idol in an ancient temple and see what other gods actually represents, or the Golden Calf’s made by human hands within your mind. But to get there, the human being must be stripped away entirely of their own worldly freewill to actually find their own internal spiritual freewill, and as the very name of Islam translates to, must submit this worldly self’s will to the will of God. The final step in the process. But to get there, the human being must be destroyed in their own internal apocalypse for the new being that God wills to be created, or to be born, or reborn, or re-birthed.

I was now ready for the Christ to be born within. This is the ultimate secret of the Mysteries of Christ that are laid out in plain view and handed out freely to the entire flock of Christ’s Church. All must walk the Narrow Path of Christ if they would be reborn or resurrected, just as Christ showed. However it happens in the particulars of each individual life, the decipherment of those particular moments and symbols of one’s life must be seen so that you recognize that your life is reflected in the life of Jesus. The exact details can never be the same for no person is the same as any other. But embedded in one’s own life, if one has the will and the patience to see it, the Mysteries of the path of Christ manifest reality within each and every one of us that partakes in them. Whether I knew it or not, praying the Rosary with the dedication that I had performed had done its job well in laying out the various mysteries of Christ in the foundation of my mind and heart.

For the old must make way for the new. It’s a fact of life and nature itself. The symbol surrounds us daily, seasonally, yearly. And for human beings, the old mind must be discarded for the new mind to be blessed within. Or why the snake is said to be wise, for the snake sheds the old skin for the new, or why wine isn’t poured into old wineskins, but is poured into new wineskins, just as the Lord teaches. Many, many creatures have a skin shedding or moulting process that removes the old and brings about the new. And especially for the snake, this is a visible struggle. But once completed, the new arises. Still the old, but new and refreshed and regenerated. The Mysteries of Christ are how this is achieved in the mind of the Catholic Christian, for the old mind is what must be shed in the human to make way for the new mind of the human. It’s an internal process, and not external, just at it is external, and not internal.

Even if you see and understand this though, one must still walk the path and one will still falter. I went through Lent in 2017 without gaming and did what I had not done for nearly four years. I started re-reading my shelved book, realizing how much I’d written in the land before time and was at least proofreading and editing it a bit. No real writing, but tinkering with this dusty book again. But once Lent was over, the itch to game returned. I fought it for a few weeks, but it was still in there and this time, instead of trying to fight it, I did the opposite and decided I’d work through it. I told myself, “Okay gamer man, you want to game, let’s game.” I did it so often, for so many hours, consecutively over so many days and weeks without pause, that once September 2017 hit, I’d burned myself out completely and the path was opened. This is the opposite path of self-discipline, though I suppose was extremely disciplined gaming. Very dangerous to tread this path for you may never emerge, but read carefully what is occurring in the Purgatorio of Dante to see how some of the purging occurs, or how a saint, I can’t recall which one, warns that if you must sin, sin bravely.

I had just received another phone message from Rite Aid about needing to pick up my Levo-whatever prescription from the pharmacy and that this was the last day I could get it. I’d been out of the medication for a couple weeks, lazy about going to get it, annoyed completely about needing to take this tiny little pill daily just because some PA had read some little numbers in a report that said I needed it, and my weak little mind had conformed to authority and had instantly believed it and now I was enslaved to this little pill and the idea of needing to take it to fit the mold of medicine that medicine wanted to mold for me so that they stay in business.

I was in my bathroom, at my sink, in the medicine cabinet with the now empty bottle of thyroid medicine in my hand. And I turned and looked at myself in the mirror, which instantly reminded me of the acne healing I’d mentioned had occurred in 2001. I asked myself essentially what I just expressed in the previous paragraph. Why did I so quickly believe what the PA had told me? Why was I so dependent on this medicine that literally produced no discernible results since there had been no discernible issue prior? I had healed myself of acne, healed my wife of her back pain. I used to pray and meditate daily. I had a connection to the spirit of God that had allowed me to see and experience wonders. Did I no longer have this connection? Had I lost it? Had I ever truly had it, whatever it was?

I know I hadn’t done a serious prayer in quite some time because of how I started the prayer. I stared at myself, deep into my eyes in the mirror before I began. “I have not prayed to you truly for many moons. You have been calling, but I have not been listening. I have lost all faith in myself, but not in you. If you be the God of the living then hear me oh Lord. I need a sign of thy presence. I need a sign that I wasn’t just imagining all that I believed to have transpired. No drug experience, no synchronous events. I pray that this thyroid issue be lifted from me. I believe that all power rests in thy hands and that you have immediate power to lift this from me and I believe that you will and have lifted it.”

There was no bolt of lightning, no dreams, no visions, nothing like that from this prayer. I pulled my gaze away from the mirror and I simply knew I had been healed.

A few weeks later, my perceptive police wife asked me why I hadn’t been taking the pill. “I prayed that I was healed and believe I’ve been healed,” I answered. She’s a PA herself, so naturally I love the business of medicine, but she said, “Um, you can have serious issues from not taking that pill.” “It’s not a problem. God has healed me.”

It was the time of year again to renew the health benefits, which required the same yearly physical exam and blood work. I walked into the initial appointment giddy, waiting for the moment to tell that physician or PA that God had healed me, confident in the face of the over-confident obsession that science has of itself. She did all the physical exam stuff and then sat down at the computer to review my file and set up the blood work order. “Looks like we need to add the thyroid test as well. How’s taking the medicine been going for you?” “I stopped like two months ago.” “Why did you stop?” “I was annoyed at having to take it so I prayed to God to heal me and I am healed.” She laughed and I just kept smiling confidently at her. “You’re serious.” “Yup. But you can order the test. I know it will show that my levels are normal.”

She ordered it. I got the blood work done and went back in for the results a week or so later. The moment of truth came since it felt like she was just as eager as I was to see my results. “So, how are my thyroid levels?” I quickly asked. She scrolled down, looked, and then glanced at me with that now common look of eyeballs moving to the side while wearing a mask since she wore a mask in the exam room, pre-pandemic. “They’re normal,” she said with hesitation. “But you shouldn’t look too much into it since it takes time for the medicine to fully leave the system. I’m going to schedule you to take another test in a couple of weeks so we can see the results again.” I laughed in my head since I could hear the shock and disbelief in her science of medicine not capable of providing her any answers, even though I’d given her an answer. God.

I never took the test she ordered since I knew this thyroid thing had been lifted from me, but a year later during the same time period and same routine of a physical required for health benefits, I had a different experience with a different PA. She went through everything she thought she needed to from the blood work and the visit was over, without a single question towards the thyroid. “Anything about my thyroid?” I asked. “Thyroid? Why?” I explained things and she checked. “Everything normal. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

I would come to refer to this experience as the Mustard Seed of Hope since I remembered the parable and saw a likeness to how tiny that little Levo-thyroxin pill was. I haven’t taken the test since, but I’m sure it’s normal.

I’ve already mentioned it was sometime between this prayer to heal this pesky thyroid thing and the Lenten season of 2017 that I made a comment to myself and formulated a thought inside of my mind. “There had to be a way of showing the experience or reality of God, or the invisible world of religion, spirituality, mythology, because everywhere I look, everywhere all around me, were sayings, writings, teachings about such things going as far back as human records go that speak of this invisible spiritual reality. The entire world and history of humanity can’t all have been or continue to be superstitious dimwits the way the militant atheist scientist has been exclaiming, can they? Was there a way of showing this? Was there a way of showing the unity of the experience of God across the entirety of human history, and if so, what was that way?”

It seems that what propelled me forward was the confirmation from this thyroid test coupled with this recurring thought since the work began after seeing those results. I took and received the results for that test late September, October 2017, and would begin reading and studying anew by the beginning of November, since again, if you can believe it, even after hearing of all that I had read, other than some fiction here and there, the reader in me had also been shelved during this time. Interestingly, it was a couple science books concurrent with a C.S. Lewis book, the “Abolition of Man,” that were the first reads. I also had to use what I had used 10 years earlier to read: audio instead of reading, since I was still knocking out after a couple sentences of reading during this time and after avoiding a job that required an actual daily commute over the course of my career, I finally had an hour to hour and a half commute each way, five days a week.

Having already done the hours of gaming calculation I did the same with audiobook listening, and my notes show that December 18th, 2017 was the last day I gamed over reading or writing. I knew that just from my commute, I could get ten hours of a book listened to each week. Once the pattern began, I started listening while in the bathroom and during lunch, and added another five or so hours to the week. Then I added the bathroom time while at home which was another couple of hours, added the time while working out the here and there I tried to each week, which added another couple of hours, and then exchanged the gun ear protectors for headphones while doing yard work each week and added another couple of hours.

Doing this, and sticking to this for days, weeks, and then months, created an explosion in my mind.

What brought the mysteries back into my consciousness was one of the neurology books I’d read. I was driving home, late at night since one of the hell’s of being a general manager for a car dealership in Southern California is how late everybody shows up at the dealership to buy cars. Anyways, the author, and again I apologize I can’t remember which book it was, but if you check the works cited you can at least see each of the neuroscience/ thought and consciousness studies and research books from a scientific point of view I read. The author had gone through an overview of the conscious, subconscious and unconscious and as I was driving, the small voice within was responding with, “I remember reading this type of stuff fifteen years ago. I remember making the connection of this with spiritual realities back then and it appears science is sort of doing the same now. I remember all of this.” I remembered thinking of the similar connection to mind/body/soul, or body/soul/spirit depending on which school is teaching the breakdown and how similar the ancient method of breaking down the layers of the human being had been done in science as well. I remember all of this.

And I went to bed that night thinking further, remembering more. And oh, the dream that I had. I don’t have an exact date for it, since it was this dream that activated my journaling and writing down dreams again and lacking any organization, but my notes say first week of December. I no longer kept a journal by my bedside to write into and not only wrote for the first time in years, but had to type it out in my phone since I had refused to use the available technology for anything having to do with reading or writing. Having already broken that barrier by listening to audiobooks, now I broke that thought process and limitation by writing out this dream.

I was inside some sort of underground cave. It reminded me of the Mines of Moria from the Lord of the Rings movie, but instead of pitch black, it was all bright and lit up. I was naked, as was everyone else. There was no shame or anything like that, I just noticed I was naked for a moment and so too was everybody else and even in the dream I thought it somewhat Edenic. I looked ahead and there was like a bar serving drinks and food in the middle of this great mountainous valley with part of the mountain above forming the ceiling of this bar, like those rocky arch looking things in Utah. I went towards it, motioned to the barkeep and he brought me a drink of water and some food, like cheesy nachos or fries, which would be weird since I don’t like those, but something with orange looking cheese on it. I was sitting there about to start eating when the view of what was behind this bar came into focus. Along the wall of the mountain behind this bar were little shops. It reminded me of the little booths you see at a farmers market or a swap meet, so not like what you see in a mall, but like outdoor booths at a county fair. What caught my attention was the design of the shop. It was old. Ancient. I left the chair I was seated in at the bar and walked towards it. At first I thought it looked Egyptian, due to the giant statue of the head of Anubis that filled the booth. Anubis is the jackal-headed god of the underworld in Egyptian mythology that transports the souls of the dead from the land of the living to the underworld, for those that don’t know or remember. But as I got closer, the booth or room now since the dream image sort of shifted and I was now inside of it, but it also possessed designs I wasn’t that familiar with and even in the dream I figured it to be Sumerian since it’s the other supremely ancient civilization I knew of. Then out of the wall, close to the ceiling, what looked like artwork, came to life. It was a woman dressed in a golden bird outfit with wings on her back attached to her arms and sides with a beaked cowl and the feathers were all golden and glistening from the light reflecting off of them as she floated down from the wall in front of me. In the dream, I didn’t know who she was, but as I write this, you can pick any of the Magna Mater’s or Great Mothers of antiquity: Isis, Ishtar, Hera, Inanna, etc., though obviously with the statue of Anubis, more likely Isis, even though as I said, the design wasn’t entirely Egyptian and even in the dream her outfit reminded me of the Aztec costumes worn during their ceremonies and parades. And she smiled at me and then asked me a question. “Do you dare to gaze through the eyes of the golem?” The giant ceiling tall statue of the head of Anubis came to life and turned towards me, but now with glowing red eyes. I nodded, and a door opened from the ground and up came a chair, and down from the ceiling came what in the dream I compared to as some type of a virtual reality mask. Very Matrix-ey is what I remember thinking in the dream. I sat down on the chair and the mask came over my head and she flipped the visor down over my eyes. I looked into the visor screen and it was like hitting light-speed in Star Wars for a moment and when it reached it’s endpoint, I instantly woke up from the dream with eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling.

The quick interpretation I can give you was that I needed to study anew, by going back in time to the beginning, to Sumerian and Egyptian. But once I understood this, the old machine in my mind began to wind and crank, old gears that had collected dust, shook and rattled and began to churn and spin.

Just to be clear, the golem we’re speaking about here, isn’t the nasty little creature from the Lord of the Rings. The golem we’re talking about here is the rock or mud formed creature that is given life by the mage in various myths and legends. I knew what this golem was from having murdered endless numbers of them from the various video games I’d played, but intuitively, I understood far more deeply what the question asked and the dreamt dream, meant. In these myths and legends, there are wizards and mages that create these autonomous rock creatures, but each of those are just fantasy, or are trying to point to something deeper. For if looked at deeper, which is what I intuitively did and understood, we are the golem, and God is the mage. For out of the dust were we made and God breathed his spirit within to bring about life for human beings. Thus, her asking, “Do I dare to look through the eyes of the golem,” meant, do I dare to become or experience being human?

So, this is the other dream I’ve mentioned that points to some possible pre-existence for me, or at least points to pre-existence itself. It could just be referring to my pre-existence in this life as well, the same as reincarnation can be referring to, I’m wise enough to see that, but that was the general feel I had from this dream: a push to study the ancient, and some type of message or knowledge of pre-existence and that experiencing being human was a choice.

I also checked through my database, and I have a very interesting note about this time period as well. I’m not sure if anybody will remember it, but it was during this time when an interesting astrological event occurred. I don’t remember the details of it, something having to do with the position of each and every planet in the sky and that it was interpreted as the Virgin giving birth to the son. I’ve mentioned my stance on such things prior so I won’t go in depth with it, I just wanted to toss that out there in case somebody more attuned with these celestial type things wants to look into it and possible meanings.

But this dream was my lightning rod. I had to go back to the beginning to study everything I’d studied before, anew, with fresh eyes, mind and heart. And the way that I can describe what was occurring in my brain if we want to talk sciencey, I had so developed my reading literary mind with my eyeballs, that it had become stagnated, or couldn’t grow any further unless it was coupled with something else. Hammering audiobook after audiobook into my mind developed reading through listening, or sound in and through the ears, and though still processed as language, it essentially develops an entire different part of the brain than reading with the eyes. But eventually, the more I did this, its like it activated my reading mind since I was suddenly able to read with the eyes once more without falling asleep. And then, the general neurological saying of neurons that wire together, fire together. Once I started listening to things I had read long ago, a merging of the differing neurological networks inside my brain began. Every book I listened to felt old and new. Old because I remembered I’d read similar things long ago, new, because I was listening to it. And the connections began to be made. The similarities began to be seen. The patterns became apparent.

There is a saying or a legend in the Hermetic works that Hermes Trismegistus knew the secret to the regeneration of the mind. From everything I’ve experienced, this is about as close to whatever that method was in ancient times to regenerating and rebuilding, or resurrecting aspects of the brain and mind that lay dormant. Learning the same thing, but in a new way, through a different sense perception in particular, builds the new knowledge in the brain alongside the old. If done enough, eventually there’s some type of merging in the brain of the new with the old that had been learned, and then, whatever you want to call what occurs next is what occurs next. Supernova, creation, liberation, enlightenment, rebirth, resurrection, regeneration, the second birth, the philosopher’s stone, receiving the apple of Hesperides, drinking the nectar of the gods, the elixir of life, receiving the fruit from the tree of Life. These all refer to the same thing. Christ is born, or resurrected, within.

We have almost returned to where we started in Season 1. The last episode will dive deeper into these connections made and patterns seen that led to the Ascension to the Temple of the Father mystical experience on March 25th, 2018. Until next time.

If you have yet to visit logosofexperienceandtruth.com and born witness to and made the connection of the near thousand images portraying what is seen during the mystical vision throughout all time, all peoples, all cultures, all traditions, the visual representation of the epitomes of science and all religions, make sure to visit and see and judge for yourself if what is shown equals my claim to experience and truth, and that which potentially unites all the deeper hidden invisible mysteries of humankind.