(Auto-generated)Hello, you wonderful people who matter so very, very much.
And welcome back to those of you returning to the laughing matters podcast.
I'm WS Walker.
And for those of you who are just joining us, nope, not going to work.
There's a lot of it that we're going to go over today.
We're going to need all of the previous episodes to follow this episode.
We're going to be building off of the idea that we're all made of God and looking at
some of the other stuff that makes more sense when we apply that theory to it.
So go back to episode one and start there.
That's you've got to have that.
You got to have the rest of it, please.
And thank you to you.
Good, great, wonderful.
So before we get started today, I do want to make a small reminder to the listeners,
even though I'm going to be pulling several verses from the Bible in this one and verses
from other texts and other ones, it does not matter what belief you hold.
Look into your own understandings and beliefs after I've given you my tea and see if it
holds up.
They're pretty much one size fits all concepts.
And if that tea line did make sense to you or me telling you to go up to your cup, that's
because you haven't listened to episode one yet.
So go back.
Seriously, go.
And for the rest of you, let's empty our cups, hold on to our hats and let's get it started.
Chapter four.
Here's the why.
Okay, so you and everything and everyone else are made of God, right?
So now what?
Now I've heard a lot of theories on this, including in the book, stranger in a strange
land where the protagonist becomes very fond of proclaiming thou art God.
It was also once proposed to me that we're all God experiencing himself through his own
creation, which I think has a certain lovely ring to it and makes sense.
Imagine creating the universe and then getting to experience every single atom of it.
It seems like a pretty great way to spend a few quadrillion eons if you're an eternal
being, right?
And it would also add such a new layer of perspective to several things that most of
us have learned about the statement that which you have done unto the least of you, you have
done unto me.
It truly fits the idea of each of us being a piece of God.
But my personal favorite is also one of the most important parts of the New Testament.
Now the New Testament is the part of the Bible where essentially Jesus Christ is sent down
to us as presenting both a second chance and a setting of the rules straight.
Some look at it as a complete rewriting of the rules.
And it's in this book that my favorite correlation occurs.
So Jesus is attending a wedding and he's informing people about the new way.
And the Pharisees who, well, they see Jesus as a threat.
They convince an expert in the law to try and trip Jesus up by asking, what is the greatest
commandment?
If these are the new rules, what's the biggest one?
So that would be a pretty massively important part of the rule book, right?
Well Jesus replies, thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and greatest commandment.
And then the second is like unto it.
Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
What?
I remember reading that again about a year deep into discovering the breaking love and
immediately questioning the translation of the phrase.
And the second is like unto it.
I mean it makes a point of stating that the first commandment mentioned, love God with
your all, is the greatest and first among them.
So that answers the law expert's question, right?
I mean, boom, done.
It seems a bit odd that that level of focus on stating is clear as it can be made.
That the first one, that's it, that's the one.
And then to immediately turn back around and state, but this other one, which is similar,
it's just as important.
And how are those two similar?
Ones love God with everything and the others love all the rest of them and yourself.
Apparently the book of Matthew, as far as we can tell, was originally written in Greek,
from 30 to 70 years after Christ died, passed along orally before this and some written
versions of this.
Now there are some that believe it was initially written in Aramaic and translated to Greek
soon afterwards, but there's no real evidence that's been found to support this.
Now the phrase originally used that was translated to English as, and the second is like unto
it, was the Thera Omaeos.
And the most agreed upon translation for these two Greek words that I was able to find were
Thera, which is second, and Omaeos, which is the adjective version of homos, which means
equally, evenly, identically, the same as.
Now I got very excited as you might expect.
Remember these were passed along orally, so it's possible that when it was translated
or when it was put down from one person to another, entirely possible that someone just
thought they meant to say, well, it's like it, you know, they didn't mean it's exactly
it.
And most of the probable translations from the original text that rule one is the same
as rule two, not only indicates heavily that we're all made up of God, but also supports
that concept in the other two possible translation of Omaeos.
And after all, if we are all literally made up of God, then loving your fellow man very
literally is the same as loving God.
And then another passage and Catholic practice occurred to me, one that got a lot of exposition,
but never really seemed to get much of an explanation, at least none that really struck
me as the obvious definitive truth of its meaning.
Paul, who's one of the apostles, he details a moment that happened during the last supper
that Jesus had with his apostles.
Jesus, quote, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is
my body, which is for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.
In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, this cup is the new covenant
in my blood.
Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.
When you think about this action, telling them that this bread and this wine are his
body and blood, it makes for a rather simple way of demonstrating that these two things
are made of God, just like him, God offering God to God.
I think he tried to put a pretty complex idea into a very simple demonstration.
These things are all me, so when you drink this or you eat this, remember me.
He might have grabbed water or grapes or a fork or a chair because all of them are him.
And once you realize this, there's a lot of exposition of this, I am this and this and
this and all of this in Corinthians one.
He who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.
John 14 20.
In that day, you will know that I am in my father and you in me and I in you.
He's saying this all over the in Corinthians three 16.
Do not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you.
John 17 20 through 23 I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe
in me through their word that they all may be one as you father are in me and I and you
and that they also may be one in us that the world may believe that you sent me.
If you think about when God told Moses during that burning bush moment, I am who I am.
He added, say this to the people of Israel.
I am has sent me to you.
If there wasn't anything that was not you in the whole of reality, what would you adequately
have them call you that would fit the concept of totality of that magnitude outside of I
am?
I mean that kind of cuts directly to the point.
And while that also kind of plays into the the made in God's image aspect, I think that
it goes further beyond that.
I think there's something that's there's a part of it that's quite a bit more like God.
The design of the human form is is absolutely astounding.
Even without examining it on a microscopic scale, our body systems are dumbfoundingly
brilliant.
We have a bilateral symmetry that runs up the middle of her body.
It mirrors itself.
This is an external symmetry, of course, because not all the organs follow that pattern.
But we're bipedal.
We walk on two legs with toes on each foot for balance adjustments.
They're perfectly suited for the amount of gravity that we experience.
The design is amazing.
Our primary method of information intake is seeing, and it is a masterpiece of design
genius.
We capture errant radiation of a very, very limited wavelength with the eye.
The current estimate of how much of the electromagnetic spectrum, as far as we can detect anyways,
is made up of visible light has been speculated to be about one 10 billionth.
But it could also be zero percent as the heights of those wavelengths.
They could be infinitely short or they could be infinitely long.
Either way, the reality is that we don't see much of what's going on around us.
But even with that extremely limited scope, we still manage to be able to identify nearly
everything we see.
You really should just take a minute to look up how the eye works, if you haven't, and
just marvel at the brilliance of the design.
And then in conjunction with all that, when something moves or vibrates, the air molecules
around that object get knocked into the surrounding air molecules, which do the same to the ones
around them.
And that continues outward.
And this happens billions and billions of times in slight variations.
And we have this fine tuned bones and membranes that are specifically designed to capture
these molecule bumpings.
And we call that hearing.
Not only can we identify a staggering amount of sound sources with only our ears, but we
can also determine where it's coming from by the sound alone.
My point is, our physiology is specifically crafted and coordinated to facilitate our
very precise and delicate existence on this physical Earth.
Our toes are made to work in tandem to meet gravity's challenge and make tiny little
adjustments to even the most precarious of balances.
God, however, by all logic, would exist outside of the constraints of gravity, of time, space,
and all the other laws of the universe that we've found to be immutable.
In other words, it would be very pointless for God to have eyes or ears as an omnipotent
being.
God don't need feet.
In fact, there isn't anything about us that's similar to a non-corporeal, omniscient being
that's part of everything.
Not anything that shows up under our one 10 billionth vision anyways.
Everything about us seems almost opposite of that.
Omnipotence?
A view?
Every view?
No.
A single point of view.
Our cells and our skin and our bones, they're not eternal.
They rot.
Every part of our body is smellable, touchable, tasteable, viewable, weighable, and every
inch of it is measurable, improvable.
Except for one thing.
There is one thing about us that doesn't seem to age and then end.
It just moves on after the body goes.
We can't touch it or taste it.
We can't view it.
And so far as we've been able to detect, it's not been measurable or provable.
But we feel it.
In the center of our torsos.
It's a thing that turns over in disgust when we act selfishly at the expense of another
person or when we betrayed someone we care about.
And when we're in love, it absolutely glows within us.
And when we lose a loved one suddenly, it's that thing that feels like it had a hole punched
right through the center of it.
It never lies.
We feel so strongly that this center chest area is the origin point for so many of our
emotions that we refer to the origin point as our heart.
The heart's responsible for love.
The heart's responsible for compassion.
The heart is a muscular organ that pumps our blood.
While it is arguably one of the most important organs within the body, it doesn't think
or feel.
To be fair, there is a small array of neurons in your heart, but their sole purpose is the
regulation of cardiac activity.
But simply, the heart doesn't care.
But something in there does care.
There's this something that dwells within us, something that loses its footing when
we get horrible news about the loved one.
That part of you, that's the origin point of your empathy, your love, your compassion.
It's the starting point.
Now we're still on the very edge of the discoveries of how our brain is involved with our emotions,
but mostly what we've found is reactionary.
It's how the brain triggers specific physical responses.
As far as my research has taken me, we still have no idea where the origin point of love
or sympathy or empathy or compassion or any of the emotions related to them is.
Now these are emotions that are all based in that direct connection between human beings,
a connection that can't be measured or detected by instrumentation, just like the emotions
that that connection influences.
It's a connection that truly makes us thrive, that truly gives our lives meaning, and that
keeps us alive here after we're gone.
Both books are the legacy of one's words, people are the legacy of one's emotional connections.
Every single one of us has this immeasurable emotional source within us, and so I'm just
going to go ahead and refer to that as the soul.
Let's strip it of any specific connotations applied to any religion and just say that
the thing that's in you that's unmeasurable, that's the origin point of your emotions,
that doesn't lie to you.
Good deal.
Everybody good with that?
Good.
I recently thought back on the idea of all of us being parts of God experiencing His
creation and then leaving behind the material parts of ourselves to be reclaimed by nature
when we die, which is also made of God, and the soul rejoining God, pieces of God returning
to God, modified with an entire lifetime of understandings and experiences, and then I
did a bit of a double take.
This behavior, it's awful familiar, right?
The desire to share what we know and have experienced, our accomplishments and our own
creations that which we put our time, energy and thought towards, these are the driving
motivations to share that we already have here.
So with this in mind, it makes the staples of being in love make complete sense.
They become every bit as important to you as you are.
You feel complete.
You laugh easily.
And you feel, well, you feel right.
You feel great.
I always felt like, like I was operating at maximum efficiency, you know?
And when I was kissing someone that I was deeply in love with, it always felt like I
was finally catching my breath.
When I feel myself falling for someone, I just, I drop more and more of my defenses
at their feet.
I shut them off.
But as we get more and more comfortable into those relationships existing for a long time
with that love, we tend to notice it less and less.
See, our brains have a sensory gating setting to them.
They filter out new information that's redundant or unchanging.
Say you spend time in a monkey house at a zoo and you first walk in, you notice there's
this distinct odor.
Ten minutes later, you don't really notice it unless you're thinking about it.
If you walk past a window in your home and you glance out the window at your backyard
or at the street or whatever, and nothing catches your eye, nothing's out of the ordinary,
the brain filtered out most of the information captured just because there's nothing new
to report there.
No need to waste mental focus on it.
And love can be like that sometimes.
Sometimes we forget how great our lives are because we love consistently in them.
And we're just too used to that love.
We forget how loved we are by those that love steadily because we don't perceive that to
be in jeopardy.
There isn't anything that's changing up and the brain tends to slide past to the next
bit of informational intake.
And you know what else is like that?
God.
And more so when you think about it because He literally makes up everything.
That's forever unchanging.
No matter what changes in this universe, that's always going to be the case.
There will never be something that's not made of God.
Our existence becomes so permeated by God that He becomes the easiest thing to overlook.
Especially when we're surrounded by man-made structures, and I'll explain that, don't
worry.
In the earliest recorded histories of man, we see nearly every tribe believes that there's
something greater than themselves, right?
That they owe a great debt of gratitude to.
And I think one of the reasons that belief is so prevalent in those early days is because
being surrounded by God was so unmistakably evident.
Everywhere they looked, they saw God's designs as He designed them.
When you made something out of God's designs, like tools or clothes or shelter, a needle
made out of bone was still clearly made out of bone.
You could see the grain in it.
They could see what all of it was made out of originally.
The furs, the leather, the wood, the stone, sinew, it all showed through the item that
was made out of it.
But now?
Look around you.
Unless you're in a room full of people or animals or outside in a non-big city setting,
most likely more than 80% of what you're able to see, you are unable to see what the
material started their journey as.
But that doesn't mean that it has to be hard to love God.
So yeah, sometimes it's hard to spot Him, but that doesn't mean it has to be hard to
love God.
I know.
Loving God is really hard sometimes.
It's like trying to swim upstream.
And I get that.
You'll never get to hug Him or nudge Him with your elbow, playfully.
You haven't seen His face, and most of us are never going to hear Him with our ears.
But even so, isn't it a bit strange that this is the case?
I mean, that we should be designed to love each other and be created with the most important
law out in front.
Love God with your everything, and in a different wording, love each other and love yourself.
And yet, loving God would be so difficult.
If you've ever been in love before, you know how much the opposite of difficult falling
in love with someone is.
It's effortless, like falling.
In fact, some people are pulled into it despite their very best efforts to resist it.
But loving God is hard until you realize that you are seeing Him in literally everything.
It's God or nothing that we are made of.
And I've learned to love the soul of a person and that which they are made up of.
After all, I can get a lot closer to hugging a soul than I can God directly.
Side note, this also allows me to hug God through a dog.
So that is a decidedly awesome aspect to it that I highly recommend.
Anyways, back to the book.
When I look at people now, I see them as the created body that carries around and conflicts
with their soul.
I see the enormous amount of conflict between, as they say, the head and the heart.
All those people, they're all flawed, sometimes cruel or hateful.
But their soul isn't.
It's essentially the puppy dog of the human body.
It's easy to love someone's soul.
It's the home of their love, their compassion, their joy and their innocence.
It's the brain that hates.
It's the brain that angers and assigns the blame.
The soul does not.
A soul in pain?
That's easy to pity, forgive or be generous to.
The jerk gets riding along inside of not so much.
But if you love their souls, you can kind of quickly find out that human beings, they
suck at choosing who it is we should limit out our love to.
Every single soul deserves your love and the love of your fellow man.
I say, don't pick who deserves it.
Just love them all and let God sort them out.
Because if you spend your life loving and getting closer to people, it makes sense that
after your soul leaves this physical form, you would continue that trend.
Try thinking about it this way, in the simplest of terms.
You, your consciousness, your soul, you find yourself no longer bound to your physical
form.
You've died.
You're not tethered to viewing the world through eyes like you have been the entire time you've
been attached to that physical form.
So now, now you don't navigate with your legs or have a thought process because your brain
dead.
You just are.
And you're not limited to three dimensions anymore.
So you know, or probably not the fourth dimension either.
You're free to move around the cabin.
The seatbelt sign is way off.
The directions around you that you could go are limitless and you don't even know how
to move.
And you were so new at this that you can't concentrate because your brain is brain dead.
And then you feel it.
Among the emotions flowing through you, you feel love.
And falling love back to its source is not a go left, four blocks down and then you hang
a Louie.
It's not that kind of thing.
You just go towards it.
Like you, you spend a lot of your life making those loving connections with other parts
of God.
Your desire to be near others and your familiarity with genuine love has led you back to rejoin
the rest of God and yourself and the all because you are made of God.
But what if you didn't?
What if you didn't live that kind of life?
What if you turn your life's goals toward that which you could get for yourself?
Toward that what you could get out of other people rather than what you could do for them,
how you could improve their lives, how you could bring them joy?
What if you didn't act out of love, but motivated self interest?
What if your trend is inward instead of outward?
In my research for the book, I happened upon a quote from the Bahá'í faith that summed
it up quite nicely.
The quote was, heaven is nearness to me and hell is separation from me.
I'd say that tracks.
And when it comes to hell, theologians aren't totally certain where the imagery of hell
took on its heat.
It's not in the Bible that hell is hot.
Now some believe that it's confusion of the lake of fire at the end of revelations, which
is never named as hell.
That's not hell.
And some believe that it was associated with the underground and the belief that volcanoes
were passageways to hell.
In the Bible, the actual description of hell is a dark, cold place that those in it are
in a complete absence of God's love.
The name hell was taken from the Norse god Hel.
Go figure.
And she ruled over an underworld that's described as a cold, monotonous place.
And the word that gets frequently translated as hell, Geinah, was actually the name of
a gorge near Jerusalem.
And it's where they, it's where children were sacrificed to the Canaanite god Molech.
The really messed up part of it is the method.
I mean, outside of child murder, the really messed up part of it is that the method of
sacrifice was typically burning.
And there'd been a lot of speculation that this was the reason that Jesus named hell
as Geinah.
But I believe that Jesus latched onto this location for a different reason than the method
of the deaths, at least partially.
I believe that Jesus chose to use that name because the murders themselves.
After all, it was where countless acts of the deepest separations from God occurs, the
murdering of innocent children by way of one of the most horrific ways of dying in order
to gain themselves the favor of a god.
How damaged must your compassion be to do this to a child for something you want?
How strong must your desire be for that which you want for yourself?
What better example of separating yourself from God and love for others?
And there's no better example of that.
What better example of something that will land you in hell could there be?
Of course, Geinah would become synonymous with hell.
Personally, I believe that when you trend towards self, when you do not put others as
a priority, when you deliberately live against the very design of you and them and all of
this, you put yourself further and further from that beacon in the dark and confusion,
and you become less and less likely to recognize and head out to it out of habit.
I don't believe that it's God casting us out.
I don't believe that there's a moment that this giant book of your life is opened and
God brings down his gavel.
I think that those that recognize him in the dark and confusion naturally gather towards
him and rejoin him.
And that those that don't, well, they don't.
And they're lost, separated from God in the dark and the confusion and the wailing and
the gnashing of teeth.
And it gives a whole new understanding to whatever you bind on earth will be bound in
heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
But when you think about it, God's been pretty clear across the board on getting the message
out that we're supposed to care about the rest of them.
Across all the major religions, we're taught the golden rule, which is a rule that flatly
states to treat everyone well and then kind of hints that we should be doing this anyways
because we care about each other.
But I personally favor Judaism's statement of the golden rule in the Torah, which beautifully
says, whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man.
This is the entire Torah.
The rest is commentary.
Go learn.
Even the very design of how happiness works seems to indicate that we're supposed to
care about each other.
We're supposed to do for others.
Think about the last time that you were really excited to get something for yourself.
Most of the happiness I'd be willing to bet was in the wanting and acquiring.
The moment you had it, whatever it was, the happiness immediately began to recede and
that shiny thing that you acquired began to tarnish and lose its luster.
It's like trying to hold onto water cupped in one hand.
Doing for self most often offers diminished returns in happiness, but doing for others?
Well, that's a bit different.
Sometimes you do for others with money, which is bought with your time, effort and attention,
and often you just do for others with your time or your effort or your attention.
You take a bit from yourself to help someone or to bring happiness to them.
What's really cool about this is it's a gift that so often becomes so much more to the
receiver than what the giver took from themselves.
But the happiness the giver gets back, oh, it's palpable.
It's a happiness with the texture and consistency of real sustenance.
It's the kind of happiness that nourishes the soul, you know, that goes hand in hand
with feeling important as you watch yourself make an impact.
It really is some of the best of what we do as human beings.
So for the moment, let's stick compassion and empathy and generosity, those into a circle
and label those things as good.
They're things that bring us closer to God and to the rest of God here and bring genuine
happiness to those that practice them.
So the opposite, of course, under my definition would be bad and evil.
When I think of evil, I don't think of it as this sentient force.
The way I most closely identify evil is that which separates you from God here amongst
us and elsewhere.
If I had to summarize evil as a sentence, it would be I can get more for myself if I
care about others less.
If good is doing for others, sometimes at the sacrifice of self, bad is focusing only
on self and evil is taking deliberately from others for self.
If good is what gets you closer to others and to God, then evil is what moves you further
away from them.
And when you move further away, God gets quieter because you're moving further away from them.
Those trends continue, countless intelligent people have stated that you become that which
you focus your time, energy and attention on.
Whatever you put those into, you become that.
And it is my sincerest hope that you will finish this book and decide to become more
connected.