podcast Transcripts

Welcome back as we delve further into this the experience of the mysteries of Christ.

When I ended last time, I had finished with the vision that I had explained as the Ascension to the Temple of the Father, and that I would explain why I call it the Temple of the Father the next time.

As I said, I even saw myself returning back through the roof of my house with my awareness returning to me, seated back in my chair.  Amazed would be the word to describe what I felt at this point of course. Now what was interesting was, my mind simply swept out over the horizon of religions and began to survey all the great religions in order to see and understand the symbolic language that described this very same truth that I just experienced regarding the ego worldly mind versus that which lies beyond.

Now, I haven’t fully described in depth the breadth of how much of the world’s religions I’ve studied.  So, I won’t speak entirely about what I saw here yet, I will return to it since seeing the symbolic nature of the texts and traditions beneath the theology, the foundation of the theology and being able to take my mind beyond historical fact is difficult for those that haven’t had such experiences, especially to understand and or accept.  Let’s simply say that I saw depth towards this mystical understanding of the destruction of the ego in order to experience the divine God within each of the great religions of the world.  And as a Catholic, the most important one that I saw probably and experienced was regarding Islam.  As I said I’m not entirely ready to discuss this yet.  But I was amazed when I saw this interpretation, again, which may or may not be true to the Muslims that understand this since this is based on my limited knowledge and study of the Quran, and not a lifetime of, or with the experience of it.  Though I’d assume the Sufi order would understand my interpretation since typically what’s found is that mystics agree, where theologians do not.  But I saw its truth through my own lens.  Nonetheless, differences of course remain, but I think suffice it to say that, as a Catholic, acknowledging the contribution of Islam to these the mysteries, is no small feat and neither do I say this lightly.  So, we’ll come back to this later, for there was some type of a vision or a visitation, a voice, regarding this in particular.

Now I just mentioned the idea of seeing beyond historicity and going beyond one’s physicality and thus, in one’s understanding of physical history, versus symbolic language, is not as easy a state of mind to come to in order to break down and see the symbols within the text and the language.  To help with this contrast or understanding that I’m trying to explain here, let’s discuss real quick, one of the parables or teachings, the Gospel story of Christ that utterly dominated my mind during the sojourn in the Desert of the soul and leading up to this the Ascension of the Temple of the Father experience, something that I alluded to when I said I’d forgotten my 2001 experience, the purposeful forgetting of this experience in order to gain the true dark faith.

It was because of what Jesus tells doubting Thomas in the Gospel of John 20, line 28 to 29.  “Have you come to believe because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” (Catholic World Press, 1997)

What I came to understand and what I’m alluding to here is that one should question if they believe in Christ because of the historicity of seeing him, of him actually having walked around.  Because per these words of the Christ, he makes it seem as if you are not blessed if you believe for these reasons, much how I was in a constant quagmire in the Desert of the Soul towards giving up my dependence on this visionary Awakening experience in 2001 as the basis of my faith because in my mind, I had seen and thus per the Lord’s words, both to Thomas as well as to me reading the text, I was not blessed as those that believe without seeing.

So, the humblest way that I can show this is that while I would stand in mass and look at the other parishioners, wondering in my mind if they’d seen the mystical things I’d seen, or if anybody else there had seen or experienced what I’d seen and experienced, I’d comment to myself about how much more powerful their faith seemed in comparison to my own.  For they were in church believing without seeing, whereas I was in church, having seen in order to believe.  And I saw my faith, myself, as a meager maggot that was so weak and requiring of such a tremendous saving grace that I needed to see in order to believe, whereas these champions of faith that surrounded me believed without seeing.

But what this triggered in me was the inner awareness and intuition that there must have been a deeper understanding to Jesus’s words, then to doubting Thomas, just as now, namely, what I spoke to you of regarding worldly thought, or thought rooted in the ego, versus the thought that occurs and exists within the kingdom of heaven, touching the flesh, versus believing that the flesh was real without touching.

So I’ll come back to all of this after we take a stroll and sojourn further a while and after you understand the great respect I have for the religions of the world, while also understanding while even after everything I will tell you that I’ve seen and understood everything that I’ve read and studied, that I do remain Christian and Catholic, and why the church’s stance on there being streams of truth and the mystery of God found among the other religions of the world, but that they all end and find their fulfillment in Christ, was and has only been strengthened in seeing and learning the great depths that I have been shown regarding especially the second person of the Blessed Trinity, and how spectacularly precise our church fathers were in the formation of that Nicene Creed.  And I’ll leave this at that.




Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.