May 11, 2025 • 58 mins
World Awakenings: The Fast Track to Enlightenment's 205th episode, is a deep and rich conversation with Richard Smoley. He is a literary expert who has published & written widely on the topics of spirituality, A Course in Miracles, Gnosticism, the supernatural, the prophet Nostradamus, consciousness, religious traditions, and even the occult. He is a graduate of Harvard, with a Master’s degree from Oxford, and he has been the editor of numerous academic newspapers & magazines, and he is the author of many, many books exploring the topics we just mentioned, including “A Theology of Love: A Reimagining of Christianity Through A Course in Miracles”. If you are wanting a deeper understanding of A Course in Miracles, and are a seeker of spirituality, this talk with Richard Smoley will help you gain clarity on that which you seek.
To find out more about the "Wizard of Wellness", Dr. Glen Swartwout, and to purchase some of his natural health remedies, go to his website https://remedymatch.com/ When making your purchase, make sure to use the code AWAKE to receive a 10% discount!
And to find out more about Richard Smoley, and to contact him, check out his website https://www.innerchristianity.com/
You can also check out his complete list of books that he has written on his website.
To find out more about the "Wizard of Wellness", Dr. Glen Swartwout, and to purchase some of his natural health remedies, go to his website https://remedymatch.com/ When making your purchase, make sure to use the code AWAKE to receive a 10% discount!
And to find out more about Richard Smoley, and to contact him, check out his website https://www.innerchristianity.com/
You can also check out his complete list of books that he has written on his website.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is World Awakenings, the Fast Track to Enlightenment with
your host Carl Gruber. World Awakenings is a podcast dedicated
to opening your mind, your heart, and your eyes to
the fact that the world's population is now more than
ever awakening to all things spiritual, metaphysical and enlightening and
(00:27):
just how they play an all important role in our
daily life. So join Carl on this enlightening experience as
he interviews metaphysical and spiritual experts to discuss, debate, and
delve deeply into the house and whis of this world
wide awakening.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
World Awakenings is super excited to add this new feature
to each show as we welcome doctor Glenn Swartwoud, known
as the Wizard of Wellness, to answer any and all
health related questions and his suggestion and how to heal
it in a natural and healthy manner. Now, one serious
physical problem that is unfortunately much too prevalent in humans
(01:13):
is something called rheumatoid arthritis. This problem can really limit
a person's physical movement and more. Now, what natural treatment
is the best one for this?
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I've formulated a specific what I call functional formulation botanical
nutritional combination of the key ingredients that we know from
the scientific literature have a beneficial effect, and I call
that comfort. That's a simple name to remember, but there's
so much more than that to arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
(01:48):
So I'd like to talk about some other things. So
that would be certainly the first thing I think of,
And so let's see how you know.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
If you feel better with comfort.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It is truly healing because it's natural ingredients that are
supporting the body to heal itself, which is what inflammation is.
It's the immune system trying to cleanse and repair that tissue.
So if we take anti inflammatory drugs, they're stopping the
process of cleansing and repair and we feel better temporarily,
but it actually makes the condition worse. It's adding another
(02:17):
cause of disease. Drugs kill hundreds of thousands of people
every year and the underlying cause of most of the
chronic degenerative disease that we have.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
So the more you can.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Find healthy, alternative natural solutions, the better. So when you
talk about a couple others that I think are really
important to know about, a couple remedies would be one
called immune modulation. Immune modulation is the scientific the technical
term for mostly natural products that are known to strengthen
(02:50):
the immunity against infection while at the same time reducing
inflammation in autoimmune conditions and also an allergy hyperimmune canitions,
and at the same time just making the immune system
more effective at cleansing the tissue. So it's getting the
job done better, easier, faster, moving it toward health to
(03:12):
relieve the symptoms, rather than pushing you back into chronic
detendative disease to temporarily relieve the symptoms. Just a simple
example that I've come across in the research to illustrate
what's happening in headaches with aspirin. They we all know
that's going to reduce the headache, right, but the studies
show that it increases future headaches, So it's only putting
(03:36):
off the cleansing process that's a valuable process to your
body to maintaining health, longevity, lifespan, health span, so you're
actually reducing your overall health. In fact, it also shows
you increase the risk of blindness from bleed being eyed
these and other bleeding diseases in the body. So we
want to look for a better, a better solution, like
(03:57):
even the origin of aspirin is willo bark. But if
you have willow bark extract for your salicylic content, it's
gonna have it's gonna be green in color. It's can
have bioflavonoids that are some of those or polyphenols you
call them another term in chemistry, that are among those
immune modulators. It's going to help balance the effect of
(04:19):
that chemical effect of neosprin. And one more thing that's
so helpful for people is a soft laser an infrared
and red light therapy. It's called photo biomodulation, the fancy
word but for light therapy. These particular frequencies of light.
(04:40):
And this is a soft laser, so you don't do
it in the open eyes, but it can be on
the eye if the eye is closed, or on the
joints in this case, and very very cleansing and rejuvenating.
You do it every other day so there's time to
finish the cleansing process and also the repair of the
regenerative process that happens after each therapy. We use also
(05:03):
a special frequency that we oscillate the light at that
I found in my research actually attracts the spirit minerals.
The minerals of the ghost in the machine, the body
that's immortal, the part that's sentient, that has consciousness, and
those are super conductive, the superfluid. They have tremendous healing properties.
(05:26):
They can move heavy metals out of the way. They
can reconnect where energy is disconnected, which is what pain
is in oriental medicine. It's blocked energy. So the harmony
laser definitely want to give out a shot.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
If you have that issue, take a listen to what
doctor Glenn said. So we hope you enjoy this feature
and natural and healthy treatments and healing with a Wizard
of Wellness Doctor Glenn's wort. Wow. Now, if you have
a health issue you would like to ask doctor Glenn,
email them to me at Kwgruber at.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
Yahoo dot com.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Kwgroober at yahoo dot com and we will feature your
question on an upcoming show. Also, if you would like
to purchase any of doctor Glenn's natural remedies, go to
his website remedymatch dot com and put in this code
for ten percent off Awake all capital letters Awake to
(06:26):
receive the World Awakenings discount and also a free wickingtoothbrush set.
Welcome once again, my beautiful friends, to the show World
(06:46):
Awakenings a Fast Track to Enlightenment.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
I'm your host, Carl Gruber.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Now, those of you who have followed this show since
I started it in June twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
Know that the core mission of the show is following
and learning about true.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Spiritual awakening, especially following the beautiful nondualistic teachings of the
modern spiritual guide. Of course, in miracles, and yes, we
do explore metaphysical topics, and we have had numerous channels, mediums,
and even self help gurus on this show, but we
always come back to that question, why now, more than
(07:21):
ever are the people of the world awakening to all
things spiritual, metaphysical and enlightening. And this show returns us
to our main spiritual seeking mission. With today's guests.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Join me now as we meet him.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
So with today's two hundred and fifth episode, we are
incredibly honored to meet and speak with Richard Smoley. Richard
is a literary expert who has published and written widely
in the topics of spirituality, of course, in miracles, gnosticism,
the supernatural, the prophet, nostradamus, consciousness, religious traditions.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
And even the on call.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
He is a graduate of Harvard with a master's degree
from Oxford, and he has been the editor of numerous
academic newspapers and magazines. And he's the author of many
many books exploring the topics we just mentioned, including a
Theology of Love, reimagining of Christianity through a course in miracles.
So wow, with that, Richard, I hope I got everything
(08:19):
write on that, But wow, you have a great resume.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Thank you for being here.
Speaker 5 (08:24):
Well, thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to
be here. And I'm very honored by your introduction, and
I very much look forward to our conversation.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Well, yeah, we've got a lot to talk about, because
you know, what you do just absolutely fastens It fascinates
me who has been a long time of course in miracles,
a student and a spiritual seeker. But let's go back
to the beginning for you as a young Richard Smoley.
You obviously were a great student as he graduated from
both Harvard and Oxford, and you were drawn to writing
(08:56):
and literature.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Where did that influence come from in your life?
Speaker 5 (09:00):
I mean writing in literature. Yes, I knew I wanted
to be a writer around from around the age of ten,
and I did some little, you know, sketches and whatnot.
I tried to write. In fact, I wrote kind of
a Shaviyan as in Bernard shaw parlor comedy when I
was in the eighth grade. I don't have it anymore.
(09:22):
And I wrote a couple of screenplays when I was
in high school, and I even took a screenwriting course
during my last year at Harvard, and I wrote a
screenplay about Resputt, which subjects I've revisited a number of times,
because I certainly find him to be a fascinating character,
(09:43):
and he has been explored in film more than once,
well or badly, so it's really been there all a
long time. My degrees are in classics, Latin and Greek,
and I majored him though, because I really felt that
knowing those languages were the best possible training for becoming
(10:07):
a writer. And I still believe that, and I do
not regret one second having majored in Latin and Greek
and philosophy. Whether about her who says those are useless
degrees or not, they were certainly not useless to me.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Well, you know that's interesting too, because when in high
school and in college I studied German. And when I
got to Ohio State University, excuse me, where I graduated from,
I took a German course and I had a great
teacher because he took it back to the Latin roots
and he could show us how it related, you know,
(10:45):
to all languages, not just to German or English. So
I understand where you're coming from with that. But one
other thing I'm real curious about, where did you come where?
Your parents super educated too? Was at a a real
big influence for you?
Speaker 5 (11:02):
Well, my mother was basically a housewife with a high
school education. My father went to college after the Second
World War on the GI Bill. He was in the
Navy for twenty years and he went to the University
of Connecticut. More to the point, I think he in
particular was always a seeker. And you know, when he
(11:25):
was in the Navy for twenty years and he was
in the Orient for a lot of that, he said
he saw a lot of things he just couldn't quite
understand the normal approach. And so he had a lot
of spiritual and metaphysical literature in the house and he
read it a lot. And you know, there wasn't that
much I was growing up right in the sixties, so
(11:46):
it wasn't as much out there then as there is now,
but you know, we had quite a bit of it,
and I read it and I was influenced by it,
so I always had a taste for that. Towards the
end of my time at Harvard, there was a mystic
mystical bookshop in Harvard Square, which of course was long
gone a New Age bookshop, and I started to go
(12:09):
there and I started to read by some of the
books there, So that kind of beginning point of my
shall we say, mature interest.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Well that's interesting because I was just about to ask
you where your interest in religions and spirituality came from,
and obviously it came from your dad.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
Being around your father.
Speaker 5 (12:30):
Yeah, yeah, that's you know. My mother was also sympathetic
to these ideas, and she was extremely intuitive, but she
didn't particularly read a lot, but they were both very
kind of aware of the spiritual and respectful of it.
So that was certainly. Those are certainly a great influence
(12:51):
for me.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Well, and obviously, you know, I mentioned you've got a
number of beautiful books you've written, and we're going to
talk about those in a little bit. But I'm just
curious what attracted you to a Course of Miracles in
the first place? I mean, how did it come into
your life?
Speaker 5 (13:08):
When I finished Oxford in nineteen eighty, I moved with
my girlfriend to San Francisco City, which I knew very
very little about. I was from Connecticut originally, and while
I was on the plane, while I was getting on
the plane, I decided to buy a copy of Psychology
Today to read. And this was what September nineteen eighty
(13:31):
and Psychology Today contained that issue contained an article called
the Gospel according to Helen, which was about of course
in Miracles. It was, you know, half respectful, half disdainful,
and I thought it was kind of interesting. I didn't
think much more about it. But a few months later
(13:53):
I was in a San Francisco bookshop, used bookshop, and
came across, you know, a used set of the course,
and I bought I bought it, you know, almost as
a curiosity. You know. I took it home and I
read about twenty pages of the text, which didn't really
gel for me. But they had these little daily lessons
(14:18):
which seemed easy enough to do in the workbook. So
I started doing the lessons, and you know, I did
the lessons for the next year. About six months into it,
I was curious to see who else was interested in
this stuff, so I called the Foundation for Inner Peace,
(14:39):
which told me about a Miracles group that was meeting
in San Francisco at the time. So I started with
that group and I stayed with them for several years.
And you know, since then, the course has been a
major part of my life. I have studied other traditions,
including like the Cabbala, Tibetan, Buddhism, Gerd Jeff were Uh
(15:00):
and so on, theosophy, but you know, of course has
certainly been a very very central part of my search.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Yeah, and how how I proposed that you should move
to San Francisco and the Foundation for Inner Peace, The
publishers of the ac I m are based right in
the Bay area too.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
Yeah, in those days they were in Tiberan, which is
a very stylish suburb of Marin that's just across the
bay from San Francisco. I even went to a couple
of meetings at the Tiberan Congregational Church, which was kind
of their local meeting place. And Bill Thetford, you know,
one of the scribes of course in Miracles, was there,
(15:42):
so I met him a couple of times. He was
extremely nice, extraordinarily unassuming man. He wasn't he didn't even
run the group. Somebody else was running it, so you know,
I have you know, so I had that connection. There
was another occasion, and I don't know to what extent
(16:02):
it lasted, but I was also part of a Miracles
group that went at a San Quentin prison, and this
was in nineteen eighty three and I went a few times.
It was very interesting. There's a part of San Quentin
called the Ranch, which is its lowest security prison. It's
(16:26):
for you know, unusually well behaved inmates and inmates who
are about the end of their sentence that they're going
to get out anyway. Said, I have to have some
kind of you know, adjustment buffer. So I went to
that for a number of meetings. I don't know how
long it lasted, but it was certainly very good work
and I was pleased to see how receptive they were
(16:48):
to it.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
Very very interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
You know, one thing, you know, you have a lifetime
of research and writing about religions and spirituality. I'm curious
how to, as of course, in Miracles and its teachings
fit in with what all organized religions have taught throughout
all of human history, or does it not fit in.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Well?
Speaker 5 (17:12):
It certainly has lots of resemblances and echoes and similarities
to just about any spiritual tradition that you'd want to name.
But let me focus on Christianity. And one reason I
wrote a Theology of Love is that, of course, in miracles,
among its other merits, it is really the only coherent
(17:35):
and intelligible Christian theology that has ever been done. All
the others make almost no sense. And this is papered
over by Wells just something you have to believe on
faith or something like that. I mean, think about think
about the literal the literal understanding of Christianity means. In Christianity,
(17:59):
God got mad at the human race six thousand years
ago for eating a piece of fruit in our me
He got so mad that he threw them out of
this paradise but condemned them and all of their descendants
to eternal damnation. But then he kind of felt bad
(18:19):
about it after a couple of thousand years, and he
sent part of himself down and managed to get it
tortured to death, and somehow that made it all right,
except not really, because unless you believe this ridiculous story,
you're still going to go to hell. What part of
that actually makes sense? Does any of that make sense?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
No?
Speaker 5 (18:43):
Someone you know from conventional Christianity might object to that,
but they would object to what I'd saying only in
terms of tone and style and not in terms of content. Well,
and by the way, this rather irritable, capricious God is
infinitely loving and could never do anything the arm. So
does that make any sense?
Speaker 3 (19:03):
No?
Speaker 5 (19:05):
But you know, as you know, the theology of the
course does make sense. You know, it's not that we
were expelled from the garden of Eden, but as the
course says, we had this kind of you know, tiny
mad idea that we could be separate from God. And
this idea was so frightening that it freaked us collectively
(19:27):
known as the Son of God out and plunges us
into this world generated by the ego, you know, which
is a world of fear, hatred, and insanity. And the
only way out of this is step one to realize
this and be to step out of this nightmare of
(19:50):
fear and hatred, and that's done through love and forgiveness,
step number one of which is to realize that God
is not mad at us for having done anything all
our own diluted imagination with which we use to torture
ourselves and others.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Wow, what an explanation, and it really explains what the
course says that the world as we know it, the religions,
or the way we live life is completely upside down
from the reality and the truth of all that is
in our unity with our source.
Speaker 5 (20:28):
Very true, very true. And you know, I mean this
is why, you know, even to bring this up outside
of you know, say, a circle like this is very
threatening and people respond in a very threatened way because
it does threaten their worldview, it does threaten the way
(20:50):
they see things, and it should because you know, I
think one point the course makes is that the ego,
which is totally delusory, frames a delusory world around it.
And what I take this to mean is that there's
(21:12):
a part of our mind which we can call the ego,
or we can call something like the world generator. There's
something that takes all our sense impressions in and organizes
it into a world that is the world that we
move around in and function in. Unfortunately, this part of
the mind that does this organizing is completely insane and
(21:38):
as a result, why is the world so crazy? Well,
I think I think what I just said is a
fairly good explanation. And then how do you kind of
realize that this crazy, you know, mental world generator is
not you? And how do you step out from under
(21:58):
its influence? And that's kind of the question. I think
that's the task.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah, what a beautiful explanation of that, And thank you
for that.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
I'm just going to go back.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
I remember you said when you first read the course,
you read about twenty pages and it just didn't really
align with you at that time. And I've had Aci'm
teacher and author Gary Renard on the show three or
four times, and I've got to meet Gary and hang
out with him and his wife at a workshop. The
(22:34):
first time I met Gary was back in two thousand
and seven. He was doing a workshop in Cincinnati, and
I went there and I went up to get my book,
his Disappearance of the Universe book autograph, and I was
talking to Gary and I said, well, I don't know
about for you, Gary, you know, I sure didn't quite
understand it when I first started reading it. And he said,
(22:55):
here's one of the greatest teachers of course in miracles
are well known ones. And he says, yeah, when I
first read it, I said, what the hell is this?
You know this is Gary Renard.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
Tell me.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
But here's a question I'm really curious about. Can you explain,
because the course is what they call a non dualistic
spiritual teaching, can you explain exactly what the term non
dualism means and how how does it apply or not
apply to the religions of the world.
Speaker 5 (23:25):
Well, that's a good question because non dualism is used
in all sorts of ways as a term, not all
of which woul make any real sense. I mean, if
you the word itself, it's contradictory because there's this thing
called dualism, whatever that is, and there's this thing called
(23:45):
non dualism, So you still have two things, so you
still have dualism. So you know, what does that even mean?
And a lot of times it's very unclear, sometimes even
to the people who claim to be nondualistic, to get
really technical about it.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Uh.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
The whole thing idea comes out of Hinduism, and one
strain of the Hindu tradition is the Danta, one of
the many perspectives of Hinduism. And there is Vita, the
Danta uh and Vita which means dualistic kind of posits
(24:32):
a personal god, and they call Ishwara. There's the Atman,
the true self, your capital as self. There's ishwar God,
and beyond that is Brahma kind of the ultimate source.
That is vice. And then there's another one called there's
(24:55):
a fascista Vita, which is kind of someplace in be two.
And then advice of thea it says Atman is that
is yourself is Brahman, and this world is illusory. So
that is one respect to say that the world is illusory,
(25:17):
is one respect in which the course resembles a non
dualistic teaching, such as the Danta. I mean dualism is
used in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it means
uh and Christianity, it's conventional ones sometimes considered semi dualistic,
(25:39):
because a really dualistic religion there are two powers, the
good and the evil, the light and the dark, and
they're kind of never gonna be reconciled. Your task, as
a this is true zoroaster in your task is to
kind of, shall we say, sort out the light from
the darkness. So there's no formal there's no unification at
(26:04):
least not that anyone ever really talks about. Whereas you know,
many religions positive that, you know, everything does arise from
a certain unity, which is God, and we all arise
from it or are created by it. That's another, uh
way of looking at it. And then, of course, then
(26:26):
you come up with a problem of evil, which religions
answer in many different ways, usually poorly. The course has
its own own answer to evil. Evil is something you know,
we ourselves imagined, uh, and the mistaken idea that we
could ever be separated from God or that God could
be mad at us. So that's where evil is. We
(26:48):
created it or made or let me put it this way,
to use the coursal sign, which we made it.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Wow, you know, I'm really you're pointing out some very
very important things here. I mean, you know, our world
is a dualistic world, and I think that's one of
the very hard things for first time students to grab on.
That's why I asked the question to grab on this,
this understanding of non dualism.
Speaker 4 (27:14):
There is no this end of the stick and this
end of the stick.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
It's just all that is so, well, I'm gonna shift
gears a little bit here.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
We're talking.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
We're going to talk about a couple of your books here,
But I'm curious about this. And you wrote a book
called Forbidden Faith. The Gnostic Legacy. Now I know, Gary Renard.
That's a big thing him is that he understands from
his teachers art and in person, that he actually was
Saint Thomas, and the Gnostic Gospels were written by Saint Thomas.
(27:47):
So I mean, I personally I don't know a ton
about the Gnostics. If you might be able to touch
on that.
Speaker 5 (27:53):
Ok, well, that's or a deep subject. The Gospel of
Thomas is a very short text. It's only about eleven
pages long, and it's a sayings collection, the collection of
Jesus's sayings. It was lost for a long long time,
as only rediscovered in nineteen forty five. And many of
(28:16):
the things that Jesus says in it, many of them
are exactly like the ones in the canonical gospels. But
there are things that point to a more gnostic, that
is to say, more mystical approach to Jesus. And here Jesus,
(28:37):
there's nothing said about the crucifixion, about the resurrection. It's
all just a list of Jesus's sayings. Now this is
interesting because even before it was discovered, scholars believed that
there were first writings about Jesus were sayings collections, and
(29:00):
that the authors of the New Testament, the Gospels in
the New Testament use these sayings collections. Now, no one
is saying that they use Thomas for lots of complicent reasons,
but Thomas actually has the form of what scholars are
(29:21):
positive is the earliest stratum of the Gospels. Could lead
one to think, and I do think that it's very ancient.
It could go back to like AD fifty, whereas the
Gospels and the New Testament are conventionally said to have
(29:41):
been written between eighty seventy and one hundred, so it
could be older than those. Now, scholars are reluctant to
admit this, because you know, they see narcissism only evolving
in its first full form in the second century. But this,
(30:02):
if this Thomas is old, that the strain of noster
Christianity would go back to Jesus itself, and it suggests
that Jesus might not have told everything to all of
his own disciples, which would make sense because each student
(30:23):
always has in a particular level of understanding, and a
really good teacher knows what that is and speaks to it.
So he may have spoken rather we would almost think
of orthodox terms, to some of his disciples. He must
he might have spoken in much more mystical, illuminative terms
(30:44):
to others. Now, the people who want to take that
conventional orthodox view at face value are very threatened by
this mystical perspective, and the Gnostics or bitterly posed by
the what was beginning to be call itself the Catholic Church,
(31:05):
and the Catholic Church won over and became the official
religion of the Roman Empire three ninety five, and all
of the religions were pretty much to be stomped out,
including paganism, including gnosticism, and whatever else there was around.
But there's this sense that, I mean, what is the
(31:26):
fundamental meaning of narcissism? That salvation is not, you know,
kind of being saved from sin. It's not a matter
of faith or works. It's a certain kind of illuminative
knowledge that to go back to what we were saying before,
is kind of an intuitive understanding of where we are
(31:46):
really that this is kind of a delusory world and
just kind of waking up to that fact is a
big step kind of in the direction toward knowledge.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
I totally agree with you.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
That's gnosticism is a deep subject and we're just like
glossing over.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
But thank you for that now.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I think a really really important book he wrote, and
I want to address that. One of the main teaching
is of a course in miracles is you know, is
that of forgiveness?
Speaker 4 (32:20):
And you even wrote a book.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Titled The Deal, A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness.
What's so radical about forgiveness? The way the course teaches.
Speaker 5 (32:30):
It, well, the way I phrased it in the book,
and for various reasons, I did not use or refer
to course in the book because in a book that
was meant to be that basic, I did not want
to bring in the concept of the world as illusion
because that's too much for most people and they're not
(32:51):
going to want to do it. It just makes no
sense to them. The deal is you forgive it everything
and you'll be forgiven everything. And it's pretty much it's
an all or nothing thing. If you forgive everyone everything,
you'll be forgiven everything. If you forgive everyone except that
(33:14):
one person. The whole deal falls apart, and all of
the guilt that you feel that you project onto everybody
else and you know you have in yourself, all comes
rushing back, so everybody. And it's a little step by
step process. You know, simply forgiven and you basically do that.
(33:37):
And I think it's well, it's been extremely powerful for me,
and other people have said it's been powerful for them.
The point is, you know, there are no exceptions. And
where does this come from. Well, it's inspired in a
way by a Verse in the Lord's prayer, forgive us
our debts as we have forgiven our debtors. Now, the
(34:01):
way I just translated it is not the way it's
usually translated, but what I'm translating, I'm translating in the
correct way. Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
That is a.
Speaker 5 (34:16):
Verb in the past, in the original Greek. So you
kind of forgive first. It's not just like a you know, uh,
you know, some kind of barter. You wipe the slate
clean for everyone, all of your debtors, everybody who owes
something to you, uh. And that may include you know,
(34:37):
what I perceived as sins, trespasses, or even you know,
possibly literal debts, sometimes the very trivial kind. You know,
you're some people are, are you know, mad at old
friends of ours because they failed to send them a
Christmas card. From their point of view, that person owed
them a Christmas card. That's a debt, and their failure
(34:58):
to send this Christmas card is a debt that they
can't forgive. And you know perfectly well that this happens
all the time. So the whole thing is just cut
through all that. You know, I accept total forgiveness. I
forgive everybody everything, and that makes it very simple, and
in the way I would even go on to say,
(35:22):
maybe it even makes it easy.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
And my understanding is that if you, as we say,
radically forgive, forgive everybody and everything, you're actually forgiving yourself
and thus, as a course, uses the undoing of everything
we've learned, or an atonement of that that erases your
sense of deep sense of guilt from the separation the
(35:47):
tiny man idea.
Speaker 5 (35:49):
That's quite right, and that's that's another implication of what
I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, it is important, and I think, boy, now the
more than ever the world needs a graand I'll grab
on as some radical forgiveness. But as we move on
here again talking about your writing, you speak and write
about the occult, and you've even written a book about
the prophet and Nostradamus and his predictions. Can you tell
(36:16):
us more about this book and why you chose to
write it?
Speaker 5 (36:20):
Well, there are two most one is called Introduction to
the Occult, which is a very basic guide to some
of these ideas. The Nostradamus book, I mean, I'm going
to utterly frank with you. I wrote it because an
editor friend asked me to write it and I needed money.
More books get written this way than one white imagine.
(36:42):
But I took a project seriously and I looked through.
I picked out the most best known, the most important
prophecies of Nostradamus. I translated them from the French literally
more or less literally, and tried to explicate them. Nostronomus
(37:04):
wrote in a very very peculiar style. There were four
line versus called quatrains, and they are very very cryptic.
They're broken in grammar, you know, So if someone translates
gives you a translation of a Nosteronomous quatrain that's grammatically
correct and makes sense, that's that's not a correct translation,
(37:26):
because they're broken and jagged and fragmentary even in the original.
I tried to do justice to that. In the end,
I ended up as a pretty much a skeptic about Nostronomus.
You know, I'm maybe one of very few writers I
didn't try to set out to expose him. But I'm saying,
(37:49):
I don't know, I just don't think I'm just not
seeing a lot here. I can see a lot that
you can read into it, and people have read a
lot into it. And there's these things are are so obscure,
there's so but they're haunting and powerful, and I think
(38:12):
the Nosterronomous live, uh legitimately. I think you could say
he's a great surrealist poet in an age when nobody
had thought of surrealism in any sort of way. So
the verses are very powerful. They do touch you very deeply.
Someone might say that they apply to a lot of
(38:35):
different historical situations, and some of them certainly do. Others
are pretty cryptic. Some you know, you know, so far
as anyone might was able to understand and simply didn't
come true. But he's certainly interesting figure, and he certainly
(38:57):
casts his own or even over this time. I mean,
I'm the only author of Nostrodam's books that said this,
which is this, Well, you want to write a book
(39:18):
about Nostrodamus takes on his quad trains and just say,
you know about how they're going to get come true
in the next ten years, which none of them will.
But that's okay because ten years later, or even five
years later, everybody will forgotten that You've already published a
(39:39):
book on Nostradamus. So you're an astrodonous expert. So you
can write another book like that about the next five years.
I mean you can, you know, pretty much turn it
into a lifelong career and something you'll have. Yeah, I mean,
I don't know how many nostrodomis. If you really want
to look into Nostrodamus, go to a used bookshop and
look at a volume about him from say nineteen ninety
(40:04):
and what was supposed to happen between nineteen ninety and now,
and see how much of it actually did happen according
to these authors. So yeah, I'm basically fundamentally skeptical about Nostradamus.
I mean, he did what he did. Profits are usually
(40:24):
very obscure. They do best when their prophecies could be
read in many other ways. So in a way it
can sound whatever happens, it could sound like they came true.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Is it possible that prophets like Nostradamus, the ego uses
them with these predictions to help mankind focus on the
dualistic world and bodies and happenings within humanity, to distract
them from the truth of of you know, the unity
(41:02):
of all that is.
Speaker 5 (41:04):
Yes, yes, of course. The minute you say that, you
start you start finding that this applies to pretty much
profits of all types, Yeah, including the ones from the Bible,
a lot of whose prophecies never came true. I mean,
(41:25):
one famous example is an Ezekiel twenty six, but it
says that the Babylonian king nemican Nezershell surely conquer the
city of Tire, and Ezekiel twenty nine it says, well,
he didn't exactly kind of conquer the city of Tire,
but you know, he tried real hard. So we're gonna so,
(41:49):
eye God, I'm going to let him conquer Egypt, which
he did or didn't or did partially. So, I mean,
you know, the prophecies in themselves, even in the context
of the Bible are often not true much less all
of the times of the end and other things that
(42:11):
occupy people's attention so much. I can go into that
if you like. Why is this end time prophecy so appealing?
And it's not just in our time, but it's certainly
(42:31):
been the case at least throughout the history of Christianity,
when just about every generation believe that this was really it,
this was the time of the end. Now, when Western
civilization kind of as a whole, lost faith in Christianity,
(42:51):
it lost faith in this kind of apocalypse, but the
fear remained, and the fear now has been secularized since
the Second World War, is a secularized by fear of
nuclear annihilation and now by environmental catastrophe, and both of
(43:13):
those are serious concerns. But notice how the apocalyptic mindset
takes over whenever people start thinking or talk about these things.
And that's a relic of that conventional Christianity with its
doom saturated thinking. Now, to go even a little further
into it, what is the appeal of this idea? Well,
(43:40):
my belief is that comes from a deep seated knowledge
that your world is going to come to an end
in a few decades. So it is mine, so is
that of everyone listening to this podcast, everyone on this planet.
Your world is going to end. You know, maybe tomorrow,
(44:00):
maybe sixty years from now, but your world is going
to end. And this is profoundly disturbing. People do not
like to think about death, and they really do not
like to think about their own deaths. So this fear
is projected, to use a coarse term, onto this fairly
improbable idea of Jesus coming down over the sky, the
(44:22):
skies of Dallas and so on. So and you know,
it's kind of not really true. So you're, in a sense,
you're displacing this fear. So it's a little further off.
Where's the sense that you're going to be physically dead
a comparatively or really short time. It's just too much.
(44:42):
Oh and the other thing is, no people are afraid
of dying alone. That's almost as big a fear as
dying period. So the idea that we'll all go together
when we go is, in it's bizarre way, comforting. So
I think all of this feeds into this, and it's
still going on. You know, it's still going on. It's
(45:06):
taking different forms. That doesn't mean that the environmental crisis
is not a very serious one and needs to be
addressed as thoroughly as possible. But that's a big that's
different from apocalypse.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
I think the key word you said speaking of the
End of Times in the popularity of it is the
word fear that you said, And the ego wants that
fear to be spread because it thrives off it. It
keeps humanity in the state of fear, and it grows stronger.
And perhaps that's one of the reasons why the End
(45:43):
of Times is so popular while through on all ages.
Speaker 5 (45:48):
Actually, yeah, I mean I do this myself. Sometimes it'd
be interesting to observe yourself and just throughout any ordinary
day and see how attractive fear is, you know, and
whether this is about you know, your financial future, your health,
(46:12):
the world, the United States. There's almost something magnetic about it,
and you know, you can see it, particularly today with
so much political uncertainty, that you know, people's egos are
kind of drawn to it. And this drawing to it,
of course increases the projection, which makes the whole situation
(46:32):
seem worse, which means on and on and on, and
the only way to break through that as the course
says is through love and forgiveness. But you know the
world is willing to try every remedy except the one
that actually works.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Yeah, love, that's awesome. You know, one thing I'm really
curious about, what are your thoughts on the current state
here in twenty twenty.
Speaker 4 (46:58):
Five of the religion of the world right now?
Speaker 2 (47:02):
It would seem most of them are really caught up
in the egos dualistic line of thinking. I mean, is
is there even hope for organized religions? Maybe that hope
is the of course of miracles.
Speaker 5 (47:15):
Well, I think so, And that's why I wrote a
theology of love, because it is a reasonable theology. It
does make sense once you understand it. Of course, you
have to understand it intuitively as well as conceptually, because
the old as I said earlier, the conventional Christianity makes
no sense. I mean, you know, stated boldly, it's just
(47:38):
a joke. And you know, I think more and more
people are coming to realize that that just doesn't have
a future, you know, to talk like Demographically, about a
quarter of the population is Catholic in the United States,
and this has stayed pretty even because a lot of
(48:00):
Catholics have left the church. But Hispanic immigration is pretty
much made up for that. There's another twenty to twenty
five percent who are evangelical fundamentalists, you know, many of
them in the South, So that's another fifty percent. Now.
(48:23):
For a long time, the liberal, mainstream moralists, liberal mainstream
Protestant denominations made up most of the rest. And I'm
talking about the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, the Methodists,
some of the more moderate Baptists. These churches have been
hollowed out, and the people, if you look just at demographics,
(48:49):
the percentage of people that used to adhere to these
religions are now well. Some of them are still there,
and the rest of them are non affiliated, some of
them spiritual but not religious, some of them neither spiritual
nor religious. And I think that's because the mainstream Protestant denominations,
(49:12):
as you know, I was instructed in the mainstream theology
and divinity schools, they've already figured out that this stuff
really doesn't make any sense, and they know that, but
they can't exactly admit it because then they would have
to supply supply something in his place, which it can't do.
I have a friend who is a Methodist minister in Dallas.
(49:34):
He actually married my wife and me, and I said,
you know, you know all the stuff. Do you ever
tell your congregation about No? He said, why chickened out? Wow,
he was all of a lot more honest about it
than many clergy are. Of course, people can tell this,
(49:56):
so you know, we might as well stay home and
drink coffee and read the paper on Sunday mornings. So
Christianity has been taken over. You know. Now the mainstream
Protestants is Catholicism, amidst many forms and fundamentalism are starting
to occupy a large portion, not necessarily the population, but
(50:17):
of people who consider themselves believing Christians. I think this
is ultimately a dead end and there will be a
lot more disillusion with it. I mean, Catholics go all
over the place. I mean, you know, Catholics. There are
billion Catholics in the world, So you could say anything
(50:40):
about Catholics and it will be true of someone. But
I think a lot of practicing Catholics, you know, sincere
practicing Catholics, well, you know, they like the mass, they
like the structure of the mass, they like the structure
of the church community and the rest. They don't think
too much about it. Actually, this is interesting. You know,
(51:04):
if you look at poles, just ordinary standard polls, and
this seems been true for several decades now. Some place
between twenty and twenty five percent of the United States
population believe in reincarnation, and in some of those polls,
a greater percentage of Catholics believe in reincarnation than everybody else,
(51:28):
even though the Catholic Church has always repudiated reincarnation. So
you can see, you know, they're you know, people sometimes
complain about supermarket spirituality. Do you remember they ever hear
that this pick and chee you can pick whatever you want.
(51:48):
This is this is I think this is made fun
of in criticalism, but I think it's your obligation. I
think you have the not only the right, but the
obligation to yourself to say, yeah, I believe this, this
makes sense to me, this does not. And if that
kind of overlaps with Dogan's in particular church or not,
well that's that church's problem.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Well just just absolutely a wonderful, wonderful conversation. We are
speaking with Richard Smoley, an incredible author and teacher of
what you call it. You're an author, teacher of spirituality
and religions.
Speaker 4 (52:27):
Do you like that description?
Speaker 5 (52:31):
Really describe myself as pretty much of anything. I mean,
I think I'm an author or writer, but I'm not
a clergyman. I don't profess to be a teacher in
any formal sense. I did teach philosophy at a community
college a few for a few years some time back,
so in that respect, I guess I was more literally
(52:51):
a teacher. But you know, I just kind of say
what I have to say, and I think people can
will and show take it to the extent that it
makes sense.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
And of course, you know, much of what we were
talking here is about a course in miracles.
Speaker 4 (53:09):
I'd like to go back to your.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
Studies of the ACIM. What personal changes have you seen
an experience in yourself since you started studying and reading
the course.
Speaker 5 (53:21):
Well, in a certain respect, that's impossible to say, because
I started studying the course in nineteen eighty one, you know,
which is now for almost forty five years ago, meaning
that I changed so much. Anyway, it's hard to say
how much of it can be directly attributed to the course.
(53:44):
But I think I think one thing got a certain
kind of severity judgmental aspect, of my own character has
been considerably softened. You know. I certainly feel greater personal
peace than I did. I am willing to forgive, and
(54:07):
I do attempt to forgive to the extent possible, you know,
day to day life. And yeah, I think by and
large it's greatly increased my sense of contentment and fulfillment in.
Speaker 4 (54:22):
Life, you know. And I agree with you.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Since I've studied the course since two thousand and four,
my practicing of forgiveness and non judgment, and that is the.
Speaker 4 (54:33):
Biggest change in me.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
In practicing those things, I've had a greater sense of peace.
I just read the other day in a course and
says to have peace, teach peace, to learn it, which
I love.
Speaker 4 (54:46):
I love that.
Speaker 5 (54:47):
Well again, you know, you know, to use another lesson.
All that I get is given to myself, you know.
And if all you have to give is fear and
judgment and persecution, well that's what you're giving to yourself.
And to the extent that you can let that go,
release it and replace it with love, compassion, joy, Well
(55:14):
you're giving that to yourself too. And I entirely convinced that,
you know, if you keep on that way, you will
experience it sometimes immediately, sometimes fairly soon, sometimes down the
road alone.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Yeah, beautiful, beautiful stuff. Well, Richard Smowley, what a blessing
to have you on the show. I love your extensive knowledge,
and I think it's a big help to all of
us to sit down and contemplate these things.
Speaker 4 (55:43):
Now, I know you have a beautiful website. I believe
it's Richard Smoley dot com. I'll put that link in there.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Is that the best way for people to find out
more about you and perhaps connect with you?
Speaker 5 (55:56):
Yeah, I do have an email addressnnected with that, so
that would probably be the best way. I also I'm
also editor of Quest, which is a journal of the
Theosophical Society in America, so I could also be contacted
through the Theosophical Society, which is based in Wheaton, Illinois,
(56:19):
very close to where I live.
Speaker 4 (56:21):
Very awesome.
Speaker 2 (56:21):
So, and of course I will put links in the
show notes to Richard's website into a number of his books,
and I really encourage people to check those out and
very worth it. So, Richard, thank you, thank you for
blessing us and being here on World Awakenings. Awakenings, beautiful conversation.
Speaker 5 (56:43):
Thank you, sir, Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure,
and I hope what I say is some value to somebody.
Let me just say one last thing. I think it's important.
There is a thing in a teacher's manual that says
there's one thought that should be remembered throughout the day.
It's a thought of limitless release, of limitless joy, because
(57:08):
all things are released within it. And I think that's
an excellent daily, even hourly practice. I mean, if you're
doing the workbook to the workbook, but I think that's
an excellent hourly practice as a way of recentering. So
but thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Carl.
I really enjoyed our time together, and I hope we're
(57:30):
passed across.
Speaker 1 (57:31):
From This has been another episode of World Awakenings, The
Fast Track to Enlightenment with host Carl Gruber, a certified
Law of Attraction life coach. We welcome you to tune
(57:55):
in to each and every episode of World Awakenings as
we open your mind, your heart, and your eyes to
the fact that the world's population is now more than
ever awakening to the truth of all things spiritual, metaphysical,
and enlightening, and just how much they play an all
important role in our moment to moment daily life. Much
(58:18):
love and light to you, my friend, and thank you
for tuning into world awakenings.
This is World Awakenings, the Fast Track to Enlightenment with
your host Carl Gruber. World Awakenings is a podcast dedicated
to opening your mind, your heart, and your eyes to
the fact that the world's population is now more than
ever awakening to all things spiritual, metaphysical and enlightening and
(00:27):
just how they play an all important role in our
daily life. So join Carl on this enlightening experience as
he interviews metaphysical and spiritual experts to discuss, debate, and
delve deeply into the house and whis of this world
wide awakening.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
World Awakenings is super excited to add this new feature
to each show as we welcome doctor Glenn Swartwoud, known
as the Wizard of Wellness, to answer any and all
health related questions and his suggestion and how to heal
it in a natural and healthy manner. Now, one serious
physical problem that is unfortunately much too prevalent in humans
(01:13):
is something called rheumatoid arthritis. This problem can really limit
a person's physical movement and more. Now, what natural treatment
is the best one for this?
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I've formulated a specific what I call functional formulation botanical
nutritional combination of the key ingredients that we know from
the scientific literature have a beneficial effect, and I call
that comfort. That's a simple name to remember, but there's
so much more than that to arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
(01:48):
So I'd like to talk about some other things. So
that would be certainly the first thing I think of,
And so let's see how you know.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
If you feel better with comfort.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It is truly healing because it's natural ingredients that are
supporting the body to heal itself, which is what inflammation is.
It's the immune system trying to cleanse and repair that tissue.
So if we take anti inflammatory drugs, they're stopping the
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but it actually makes the condition worse. It's adding another
(02:17):
cause of disease. Drugs kill hundreds of thousands of people
every year and the underlying cause of most of the
chronic degenerative disease that we have.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
So the more you can.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Find healthy, alternative natural solutions, the better. So when you
talk about a couple others that I think are really
important to know about, a couple remedies would be one
called immune modulation. Immune modulation is the scientific the technical
term for mostly natural products that are known to strengthen
(02:50):
the immunity against infection while at the same time reducing
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and at the same time just making the immune system
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job done better, easier, faster, moving it toward health to
(03:12):
relieve the symptoms, rather than pushing you back into chronic
detendative disease to temporarily relieve the symptoms. Just a simple
example that I've come across in the research to illustrate
what's happening in headaches with aspirin. They we all know
that's going to reduce the headache, right, but the studies
show that it increases future headaches, So it's only putting
(03:36):
off the cleansing process that's a valuable process to your
body to maintaining health, longevity, lifespan, health span, so you're
actually reducing your overall health. In fact, it also shows
you increase the risk of blindness from bleed being eyed
these and other bleeding diseases in the body. So we
want to look for a better, a better solution, like
(03:57):
even the origin of aspirin is willo bark. But if
you have willow bark extract for your salicylic content, it's
gonna have it's gonna be green in color. It's can
have bioflavonoids that are some of those or polyphenols you
call them another term in chemistry, that are among those
immune modulators. It's going to help balance the effect of
(04:19):
that chemical effect of neosprin. And one more thing that's
so helpful for people is a soft laser an infrared
and red light therapy. It's called photo biomodulation, the fancy
word but for light therapy. These particular frequencies of light.
(04:40):
And this is a soft laser, so you don't do
it in the open eyes, but it can be on
the eye if the eye is closed, or on the
joints in this case, and very very cleansing and rejuvenating.
You do it every other day so there's time to
finish the cleansing process and also the repair of the
regenerative process that happens after each therapy. We use also
(05:03):
a special frequency that we oscillate the light at that
I found in my research actually attracts the spirit minerals.
The minerals of the ghost in the machine, the body
that's immortal, the part that's sentient, that has consciousness, and
those are super conductive, the superfluid. They have tremendous healing properties.
(05:26):
They can move heavy metals out of the way. They
can reconnect where energy is disconnected, which is what pain
is in oriental medicine. It's blocked energy. So the harmony
laser definitely want to give out a shot.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
If you have that issue, take a listen to what
doctor Glenn said. So we hope you enjoy this feature
and natural and healthy treatments and healing with a Wizard
of Wellness Doctor Glenn's wort. Wow. Now, if you have
a health issue you would like to ask doctor Glenn,
email them to me at Kwgruber at.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
Yahoo dot com.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Kwgroober at yahoo dot com and we will feature your
question on an upcoming show. Also, if you would like
to purchase any of doctor Glenn's natural remedies, go to
his website remedymatch dot com and put in this code
for ten percent off Awake all capital letters Awake to
(06:26):
receive the World Awakenings discount and also a free wickingtoothbrush set.
Welcome once again, my beautiful friends, to the show World
(06:46):
Awakenings a Fast Track to Enlightenment.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
I'm your host, Carl Gruber.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Now, those of you who have followed this show since
I started it in June twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
Know that the core mission of the show is following
and learning about true.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Spiritual awakening, especially following the beautiful nondualistic teachings of the
modern spiritual guide. Of course, in miracles, and yes, we
do explore metaphysical topics, and we have had numerous channels, mediums,
and even self help gurus on this show, but we
always come back to that question, why now, more than
(07:21):
ever are the people of the world awakening to all
things spiritual, metaphysical and enlightening. And this show returns us
to our main spiritual seeking mission. With today's guests.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Join me now as we meet him.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
So with today's two hundred and fifth episode, we are
incredibly honored to meet and speak with Richard Smoley. Richard
is a literary expert who has published and written widely
in the topics of spirituality, of course, in miracles, gnosticism,
the supernatural, the prophet, nostradamus, consciousness, religious traditions.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
And even the on call.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
He is a graduate of Harvard with a master's degree
from Oxford, and he has been the editor of numerous
academic newspapers and magazines. And he's the author of many
many books exploring the topics we just mentioned, including a
Theology of Love, reimagining of Christianity through a course in miracles.
So wow, with that, Richard, I hope I got everything
(08:19):
write on that, But wow, you have a great resume.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Thank you for being here.
Speaker 5 (08:24):
Well, thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to
be here. And I'm very honored by your introduction, and
I very much look forward to our conversation.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Well, yeah, we've got a lot to talk about, because
you know, what you do just absolutely fastens It fascinates
me who has been a long time of course in miracles,
a student and a spiritual seeker. But let's go back
to the beginning for you as a young Richard Smoley.
You obviously were a great student as he graduated from
both Harvard and Oxford, and you were drawn to writing
(08:56):
and literature.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Where did that influence come from in your life?
Speaker 5 (09:00):
I mean writing in literature. Yes, I knew I wanted
to be a writer around from around the age of ten,
and I did some little, you know, sketches and whatnot.
I tried to write. In fact, I wrote kind of
a Shaviyan as in Bernard shaw parlor comedy when I
was in the eighth grade. I don't have it anymore.
(09:22):
And I wrote a couple of screenplays when I was
in high school, and I even took a screenwriting course
during my last year at Harvard, and I wrote a
screenplay about Resputt, which subjects I've revisited a number of times,
because I certainly find him to be a fascinating character,
(09:43):
and he has been explored in film more than once,
well or badly, so it's really been there all a
long time. My degrees are in classics, Latin and Greek,
and I majored him though, because I really felt that
knowing those languages were the best possible training for becoming
(10:07):
a writer. And I still believe that, and I do
not regret one second having majored in Latin and Greek
and philosophy. Whether about her who says those are useless
degrees or not, they were certainly not useless to me.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Well, you know that's interesting too, because when in high
school and in college I studied German. And when I
got to Ohio State University, excuse me, where I graduated from,
I took a German course and I had a great
teacher because he took it back to the Latin roots
and he could show us how it related, you know,
(10:45):
to all languages, not just to German or English. So
I understand where you're coming from with that. But one
other thing I'm real curious about, where did you come where?
Your parents super educated too? Was at a a real
big influence for you?
Speaker 5 (11:02):
Well, my mother was basically a housewife with a high
school education. My father went to college after the Second
World War on the GI Bill. He was in the
Navy for twenty years and he went to the University
of Connecticut. More to the point, I think he in
particular was always a seeker. And you know, when he
(11:25):
was in the Navy for twenty years and he was
in the Orient for a lot of that, he said
he saw a lot of things he just couldn't quite
understand the normal approach. And so he had a lot
of spiritual and metaphysical literature in the house and he
read it a lot. And you know, there wasn't that
much I was growing up right in the sixties, so
(11:46):
it wasn't as much out there then as there is now,
but you know, we had quite a bit of it,
and I read it and I was influenced by it,
so I always had a taste for that. Towards the
end of my time at Harvard, there was a mystic
mystical bookshop in Harvard Square, which of course was long
gone a New Age bookshop, and I started to go
(12:09):
there and I started to read by some of the
books there, So that kind of beginning point of my
shall we say, mature interest.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Well that's interesting because I was just about to ask
you where your interest in religions and spirituality came from,
and obviously it came from your dad.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
Being around your father.
Speaker 5 (12:30):
Yeah, yeah, that's you know. My mother was also sympathetic
to these ideas, and she was extremely intuitive, but she
didn't particularly read a lot, but they were both very
kind of aware of the spiritual and respectful of it.
So that was certainly. Those are certainly a great influence
(12:51):
for me.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Well, and obviously, you know, I mentioned you've got a
number of beautiful books you've written, and we're going to
talk about those in a little bit. But I'm just
curious what attracted you to a Course of Miracles in
the first place? I mean, how did it come into
your life?
Speaker 5 (13:08):
When I finished Oxford in nineteen eighty, I moved with
my girlfriend to San Francisco City, which I knew very
very little about. I was from Connecticut originally, and while
I was on the plane, while I was getting on
the plane, I decided to buy a copy of Psychology
Today to read. And this was what September nineteen eighty
(13:31):
and Psychology Today contained that issue contained an article called
the Gospel according to Helen, which was about of course
in Miracles. It was, you know, half respectful, half disdainful,
and I thought it was kind of interesting. I didn't
think much more about it. But a few months later
(13:53):
I was in a San Francisco bookshop, used bookshop, and
came across, you know, a used set of the course,
and I bought I bought it, you know, almost as
a curiosity. You know. I took it home and I
read about twenty pages of the text, which didn't really
gel for me. But they had these little daily lessons
(14:18):
which seemed easy enough to do in the workbook. So
I started doing the lessons, and you know, I did
the lessons for the next year. About six months into it,
I was curious to see who else was interested in
this stuff, so I called the Foundation for Inner Peace,
(14:39):
which told me about a Miracles group that was meeting
in San Francisco at the time. So I started with
that group and I stayed with them for several years.
And you know, since then, the course has been a
major part of my life. I have studied other traditions,
including like the Cabbala, Tibetan, Buddhism, Gerd Jeff were Uh
(15:00):
and so on, theosophy, but you know, of course has
certainly been a very very central part of my search.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Yeah, and how how I proposed that you should move
to San Francisco and the Foundation for Inner Peace, The
publishers of the ac I m are based right in
the Bay area too.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
Yeah, in those days they were in Tiberan, which is
a very stylish suburb of Marin that's just across the
bay from San Francisco. I even went to a couple
of meetings at the Tiberan Congregational Church, which was kind
of their local meeting place. And Bill Thetford, you know,
one of the scribes of course in Miracles, was there,
(15:42):
so I met him a couple of times. He was
extremely nice, extraordinarily unassuming man. He wasn't he didn't even
run the group. Somebody else was running it, so you know,
I have you know, so I had that connection. There
was another occasion, and I don't know to what extent
(16:02):
it lasted, but I was also part of a Miracles
group that went at a San Quentin prison, and this
was in nineteen eighty three and I went a few times.
It was very interesting. There's a part of San Quentin
called the Ranch, which is its lowest security prison. It's
(16:26):
for you know, unusually well behaved inmates and inmates who
are about the end of their sentence that they're going
to get out anyway. Said, I have to have some
kind of you know, adjustment buffer. So I went to
that for a number of meetings. I don't know how
long it lasted, but it was certainly very good work
and I was pleased to see how receptive they were
(16:48):
to it.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
Very very interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
You know, one thing, you know, you have a lifetime
of research and writing about religions and spirituality. I'm curious
how to, as of course, in Miracles and its teachings
fit in with what all organized religions have taught throughout
all of human history, or does it not fit in.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Well?
Speaker 5 (17:12):
It certainly has lots of resemblances and echoes and similarities
to just about any spiritual tradition that you'd want to name.
But let me focus on Christianity. And one reason I
wrote a Theology of Love is that, of course, in miracles,
among its other merits, it is really the only coherent
(17:35):
and intelligible Christian theology that has ever been done. All
the others make almost no sense. And this is papered
over by Wells just something you have to believe on
faith or something like that. I mean, think about think
about the literal the literal understanding of Christianity means. In Christianity,
(17:59):
God got mad at the human race six thousand years
ago for eating a piece of fruit in our me
He got so mad that he threw them out of
this paradise but condemned them and all of their descendants
to eternal damnation. But then he kind of felt bad
(18:19):
about it after a couple of thousand years, and he
sent part of himself down and managed to get it
tortured to death, and somehow that made it all right,
except not really, because unless you believe this ridiculous story,
you're still going to go to hell. What part of
that actually makes sense? Does any of that make sense?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
No?
Speaker 5 (18:43):
Someone you know from conventional Christianity might object to that,
but they would object to what I'd saying only in
terms of tone and style and not in terms of content. Well,
and by the way, this rather irritable, capricious God is
infinitely loving and could never do anything the arm. So
does that make any sense?
Speaker 3 (19:03):
No?
Speaker 5 (19:05):
But you know, as you know, the theology of the
course does make sense. You know, it's not that we
were expelled from the garden of Eden, but as the
course says, we had this kind of you know, tiny
mad idea that we could be separate from God. And
this idea was so frightening that it freaked us collectively
(19:27):
known as the Son of God out and plunges us
into this world generated by the ego, you know, which
is a world of fear, hatred, and insanity. And the
only way out of this is step one to realize
this and be to step out of this nightmare of
(19:50):
fear and hatred, and that's done through love and forgiveness,
step number one of which is to realize that God
is not mad at us for having done anything all
our own diluted imagination with which we use to torture
ourselves and others.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Wow, what an explanation, and it really explains what the
course says that the world as we know it, the religions,
or the way we live life is completely upside down
from the reality and the truth of all that is
in our unity with our source.
Speaker 5 (20:28):
Very true, very true. And you know, I mean this
is why, you know, even to bring this up outside
of you know, say, a circle like this is very
threatening and people respond in a very threatened way because
it does threaten their worldview, it does threaten the way
(20:50):
they see things, and it should because you know, I
think one point the course makes is that the ego,
which is totally delusory, frames a delusory world around it.
And what I take this to mean is that there's
(21:12):
a part of our mind which we can call the ego,
or we can call something like the world generator. There's
something that takes all our sense impressions in and organizes
it into a world that is the world that we
move around in and function in. Unfortunately, this part of
the mind that does this organizing is completely insane and
(21:38):
as a result, why is the world so crazy? Well,
I think I think what I just said is a
fairly good explanation. And then how do you kind of
realize that this crazy, you know, mental world generator is
not you? And how do you step out from under
(21:58):
its influence? And that's kind of the question. I think
that's the task.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah, what a beautiful explanation of that, And thank you
for that.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
I'm just going to go back.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
I remember you said when you first read the course,
you read about twenty pages and it just didn't really
align with you at that time. And I've had Aci'm
teacher and author Gary Renard on the show three or
four times, and I've got to meet Gary and hang
out with him and his wife at a workshop. The
(22:34):
first time I met Gary was back in two thousand
and seven. He was doing a workshop in Cincinnati, and
I went there and I went up to get my book,
his Disappearance of the Universe book autograph, and I was
talking to Gary and I said, well, I don't know
about for you, Gary, you know, I sure didn't quite
understand it when I first started reading it. And he said,
(22:55):
here's one of the greatest teachers of course in miracles
are well known ones. And he says, yeah, when I
first read it, I said, what the hell is this?
You know this is Gary Renard.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
Tell me.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
But here's a question I'm really curious about. Can you explain,
because the course is what they call a non dualistic
spiritual teaching, can you explain exactly what the term non
dualism means and how how does it apply or not
apply to the religions of the world.
Speaker 5 (23:25):
Well, that's a good question because non dualism is used
in all sorts of ways as a term, not all
of which woul make any real sense. I mean, if
you the word itself, it's contradictory because there's this thing
called dualism, whatever that is, and there's this thing called
(23:45):
non dualism, So you still have two things, so you
still have dualism. So you know, what does that even mean?
And a lot of times it's very unclear, sometimes even
to the people who claim to be nondualistic, to get
really technical about it.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Uh.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
The whole thing idea comes out of Hinduism, and one
strain of the Hindu tradition is the Danta, one of
the many perspectives of Hinduism. And there is Vita, the
Danta uh and Vita which means dualistic kind of posits
(24:32):
a personal god, and they call Ishwara. There's the Atman,
the true self, your capital as self. There's ishwar God,
and beyond that is Brahma kind of the ultimate source.
That is vice. And then there's another one called there's
(24:55):
a fascista Vita, which is kind of someplace in be two.
And then advice of thea it says Atman is that
is yourself is Brahman, and this world is illusory. So
that is one respect to say that the world is illusory,
(25:17):
is one respect in which the course resembles a non
dualistic teaching, such as the Danta. I mean dualism is
used in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it means
uh and Christianity, it's conventional ones sometimes considered semi dualistic,
(25:39):
because a really dualistic religion there are two powers, the
good and the evil, the light and the dark, and
they're kind of never gonna be reconciled. Your task, as
a this is true zoroaster in your task is to
kind of, shall we say, sort out the light from
the darkness. So there's no formal there's no unification at
(26:04):
least not that anyone ever really talks about. Whereas you know,
many religions positive that, you know, everything does arise from
a certain unity, which is God, and we all arise
from it or are created by it. That's another, uh
way of looking at it. And then, of course, then
(26:26):
you come up with a problem of evil, which religions
answer in many different ways, usually poorly. The course has
its own own answer to evil. Evil is something you know,
we ourselves imagined, uh, and the mistaken idea that we
could ever be separated from God or that God could
be mad at us. So that's where evil is. We
(26:48):
created it or made or let me put it this way,
to use the coursal sign, which we made it.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Wow, you know, I'm really you're pointing out some very
very important things here. I mean, you know, our world
is a dualistic world, and I think that's one of
the very hard things for first time students to grab on.
That's why I asked the question to grab on this,
this understanding of non dualism.
Speaker 4 (27:14):
There is no this end of the stick and this
end of the stick.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
It's just all that is so, well, I'm gonna shift
gears a little bit here.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
We're talking.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
We're going to talk about a couple of your books here,
But I'm curious about this. And you wrote a book
called Forbidden Faith. The Gnostic Legacy. Now I know, Gary Renard.
That's a big thing him is that he understands from
his teachers art and in person, that he actually was
Saint Thomas, and the Gnostic Gospels were written by Saint Thomas.
(27:47):
So I mean, I personally I don't know a ton
about the Gnostics. If you might be able to touch
on that.
Speaker 5 (27:53):
Ok, well, that's or a deep subject. The Gospel of
Thomas is a very short text. It's only about eleven
pages long, and it's a sayings collection, the collection of
Jesus's sayings. It was lost for a long long time,
as only rediscovered in nineteen forty five. And many of
(28:16):
the things that Jesus says in it, many of them
are exactly like the ones in the canonical gospels. But
there are things that point to a more gnostic, that
is to say, more mystical approach to Jesus. And here Jesus,
(28:37):
there's nothing said about the crucifixion, about the resurrection. It's
all just a list of Jesus's sayings. Now this is
interesting because even before it was discovered, scholars believed that
there were first writings about Jesus were sayings collections, and
(29:00):
that the authors of the New Testament, the Gospels in
the New Testament use these sayings collections. Now, no one
is saying that they use Thomas for lots of complicent reasons,
but Thomas actually has the form of what scholars are
(29:21):
positive is the earliest stratum of the Gospels. Could lead
one to think, and I do think that it's very ancient.
It could go back to like AD fifty, whereas the
Gospels and the New Testament are conventionally said to have
(29:41):
been written between eighty seventy and one hundred, so it
could be older than those. Now, scholars are reluctant to
admit this, because you know, they see narcissism only evolving
in its first full form in the second century. But this,
(30:02):
if this Thomas is old, that the strain of noster
Christianity would go back to Jesus itself, and it suggests
that Jesus might not have told everything to all of
his own disciples, which would make sense because each student
(30:23):
always has in a particular level of understanding, and a
really good teacher knows what that is and speaks to it.
So he may have spoken rather we would almost think
of orthodox terms, to some of his disciples. He must
he might have spoken in much more mystical, illuminative terms
(30:44):
to others. Now, the people who want to take that
conventional orthodox view at face value are very threatened by
this mystical perspective, and the Gnostics or bitterly posed by
the what was beginning to be call itself the Catholic Church,
(31:05):
and the Catholic Church won over and became the official
religion of the Roman Empire three ninety five, and all
of the religions were pretty much to be stomped out,
including paganism, including gnosticism, and whatever else there was around.
But there's this sense that, I mean, what is the
(31:26):
fundamental meaning of narcissism? That salvation is not, you know,
kind of being saved from sin. It's not a matter
of faith or works. It's a certain kind of illuminative
knowledge that to go back to what we were saying before,
is kind of an intuitive understanding of where we are
(31:46):
really that this is kind of a delusory world and
just kind of waking up to that fact is a
big step kind of in the direction toward knowledge.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
I totally agree with you.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
That's gnosticism is a deep subject and we're just like
glossing over.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
But thank you for that now.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I think a really really important book he wrote, and
I want to address that. One of the main teaching
is of a course in miracles is you know, is
that of forgiveness?
Speaker 4 (32:20):
And you even wrote a book.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Titled The Deal, A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness.
What's so radical about forgiveness? The way the course teaches.
Speaker 5 (32:30):
It, well, the way I phrased it in the book,
and for various reasons, I did not use or refer
to course in the book because in a book that
was meant to be that basic, I did not want
to bring in the concept of the world as illusion
because that's too much for most people and they're not
(32:51):
going to want to do it. It just makes no
sense to them. The deal is you forgive it everything
and you'll be forgiven everything. And it's pretty much it's
an all or nothing thing. If you forgive everyone everything,
you'll be forgiven everything. If you forgive everyone except that
(33:14):
one person. The whole deal falls apart, and all of
the guilt that you feel that you project onto everybody
else and you know you have in yourself, all comes
rushing back, so everybody. And it's a little step by
step process. You know, simply forgiven and you basically do that.
(33:37):
And I think it's well, it's been extremely powerful for me,
and other people have said it's been powerful for them.
The point is, you know, there are no exceptions. And
where does this come from. Well, it's inspired in a
way by a Verse in the Lord's prayer, forgive us
our debts as we have forgiven our debtors. Now, the
(34:01):
way I just translated it is not the way it's
usually translated, but what I'm translating, I'm translating in the
correct way. Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
That is a.
Speaker 5 (34:16):
Verb in the past, in the original Greek. So you
kind of forgive first. It's not just like a you know, uh,
you know, some kind of barter. You wipe the slate
clean for everyone, all of your debtors, everybody who owes
something to you, uh. And that may include you know,
(34:37):
what I perceived as sins, trespasses, or even you know,
possibly literal debts, sometimes the very trivial kind. You know,
you're some people are, are you know, mad at old
friends of ours because they failed to send them a
Christmas card. From their point of view, that person owed
them a Christmas card. That's a debt, and their failure
(34:58):
to send this Christmas card is a debt that they
can't forgive. And you know perfectly well that this happens
all the time. So the whole thing is just cut
through all that. You know, I accept total forgiveness. I
forgive everybody everything, and that makes it very simple, and
in the way I would even go on to say,
(35:22):
maybe it even makes it easy.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
And my understanding is that if you, as we say,
radically forgive, forgive everybody and everything, you're actually forgiving yourself
and thus, as a course, uses the undoing of everything
we've learned, or an atonement of that that erases your
sense of deep sense of guilt from the separation the
(35:47):
tiny man idea.
Speaker 5 (35:49):
That's quite right, and that's that's another implication of what
I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, it is important, and I think, boy, now the
more than ever the world needs a graand I'll grab
on as some radical forgiveness. But as we move on
here again talking about your writing, you speak and write
about the occult, and you've even written a book about
the prophet and Nostradamus and his predictions. Can you tell
(36:16):
us more about this book and why you chose to
write it?
Speaker 5 (36:20):
Well, there are two most one is called Introduction to
the Occult, which is a very basic guide to some
of these ideas. The Nostradamus book, I mean, I'm going
to utterly frank with you. I wrote it because an
editor friend asked me to write it and I needed money.
More books get written this way than one white imagine.
(36:42):
But I took a project seriously and I looked through.
I picked out the most best known, the most important
prophecies of Nostradamus. I translated them from the French literally
more or less literally, and tried to explicate them. Nostronomus
(37:04):
wrote in a very very peculiar style. There were four
line versus called quatrains, and they are very very cryptic.
They're broken in grammar, you know, So if someone translates
gives you a translation of a Nosteronomous quatrain that's grammatically
correct and makes sense, that's that's not a correct translation,
(37:26):
because they're broken and jagged and fragmentary even in the original.
I tried to do justice to that. In the end,
I ended up as a pretty much a skeptic about Nostronomus.
You know, I'm maybe one of very few writers I
didn't try to set out to expose him. But I'm saying,
(37:49):
I don't know, I just don't think I'm just not
seeing a lot here. I can see a lot that
you can read into it, and people have read a
lot into it. And there's these things are are so obscure,
there's so but they're haunting and powerful, and I think
(38:12):
the Nosterronomous live, uh legitimately. I think you could say
he's a great surrealist poet in an age when nobody
had thought of surrealism in any sort of way. So
the verses are very powerful. They do touch you very deeply.
Someone might say that they apply to a lot of
(38:35):
different historical situations, and some of them certainly do. Others
are pretty cryptic. Some you know, you know, so far
as anyone might was able to understand and simply didn't
come true. But he's certainly interesting figure, and he certainly
(38:57):
casts his own or even over this time. I mean,
I'm the only author of Nostrodam's books that said this,
which is this, Well, you want to write a book
(39:18):
about Nostrodamus takes on his quad trains and just say,
you know about how they're going to get come true
in the next ten years, which none of them will.
But that's okay because ten years later, or even five
years later, everybody will forgotten that You've already published a
(39:39):
book on Nostradamus. So you're an astrodonous expert. So you
can write another book like that about the next five years.
I mean you can, you know, pretty much turn it
into a lifelong career and something you'll have. Yeah, I mean,
I don't know how many nostrodomis. If you really want
to look into Nostrodamus, go to a used bookshop and
look at a volume about him from say nineteen ninety
(40:04):
and what was supposed to happen between nineteen ninety and now,
and see how much of it actually did happen according
to these authors. So yeah, I'm basically fundamentally skeptical about Nostradamus.
I mean, he did what he did. Profits are usually
(40:24):
very obscure. They do best when their prophecies could be
read in many other ways. So in a way it
can sound whatever happens, it could sound like they came true.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Is it possible that prophets like Nostradamus, the ego uses
them with these predictions to help mankind focus on the
dualistic world and bodies and happenings within humanity, to distract
them from the truth of of you know, the unity
(41:02):
of all that is.
Speaker 5 (41:04):
Yes, yes, of course. The minute you say that, you
start you start finding that this applies to pretty much
profits of all types, Yeah, including the ones from the Bible,
a lot of whose prophecies never came true. I mean,
(41:25):
one famous example is an Ezekiel twenty six, but it
says that the Babylonian king nemican Nezershell surely conquer the
city of Tire, and Ezekiel twenty nine it says, well,
he didn't exactly kind of conquer the city of Tire,
but you know, he tried real hard. So we're gonna so,
(41:49):
eye God, I'm going to let him conquer Egypt, which
he did or didn't or did partially. So, I mean,
you know, the prophecies in themselves, even in the context
of the Bible are often not true much less all
of the times of the end and other things that
(42:11):
occupy people's attention so much. I can go into that
if you like. Why is this end time prophecy so appealing?
And it's not just in our time, but it's certainly
(42:31):
been the case at least throughout the history of Christianity,
when just about every generation believe that this was really it,
this was the time of the end. Now, when Western
civilization kind of as a whole, lost faith in Christianity,
(42:51):
it lost faith in this kind of apocalypse, but the
fear remained, and the fear now has been secularized since
the Second World War, is a secularized by fear of
nuclear annihilation and now by environmental catastrophe, and both of
(43:13):
those are serious concerns. But notice how the apocalyptic mindset
takes over whenever people start thinking or talk about these things.
And that's a relic of that conventional Christianity with its
doom saturated thinking. Now, to go even a little further
into it, what is the appeal of this idea? Well,
(43:40):
my belief is that comes from a deep seated knowledge
that your world is going to come to an end
in a few decades. So it is mine, so is
that of everyone listening to this podcast, everyone on this planet.
Your world is going to end. You know, maybe tomorrow,
(44:00):
maybe sixty years from now, but your world is going
to end. And this is profoundly disturbing. People do not
like to think about death, and they really do not
like to think about their own deaths. So this fear
is projected, to use a coarse term, onto this fairly
improbable idea of Jesus coming down over the sky, the
(44:22):
skies of Dallas and so on. So and you know,
it's kind of not really true. So you're, in a sense,
you're displacing this fear. So it's a little further off.
Where's the sense that you're going to be physically dead
a comparatively or really short time. It's just too much.
(44:42):
Oh and the other thing is, no people are afraid
of dying alone. That's almost as big a fear as
dying period. So the idea that we'll all go together
when we go is, in it's bizarre way, comforting. So
I think all of this feeds into this, and it's
still going on. You know, it's still going on. It's
(45:06):
taking different forms. That doesn't mean that the environmental crisis
is not a very serious one and needs to be
addressed as thoroughly as possible. But that's a big that's
different from apocalypse.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
I think the key word you said speaking of the
End of Times in the popularity of it is the
word fear that you said, And the ego wants that
fear to be spread because it thrives off it. It
keeps humanity in the state of fear, and it grows stronger.
And perhaps that's one of the reasons why the End
(45:43):
of Times is so popular while through on all ages.
Speaker 5 (45:48):
Actually, yeah, I mean I do this myself. Sometimes it'd
be interesting to observe yourself and just throughout any ordinary
day and see how attractive fear is, you know, and
whether this is about you know, your financial future, your health,
(46:12):
the world, the United States. There's almost something magnetic about it,
and you know, you can see it, particularly today with
so much political uncertainty, that you know, people's egos are
kind of drawn to it. And this drawing to it,
of course increases the projection, which makes the whole situation
(46:32):
seem worse, which means on and on and on, and
the only way to break through that as the course
says is through love and forgiveness. But you know the
world is willing to try every remedy except the one
that actually works.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Yeah, love, that's awesome. You know, one thing I'm really
curious about, what are your thoughts on the current state
here in twenty twenty.
Speaker 4 (46:58):
Five of the religion of the world right now?
Speaker 2 (47:02):
It would seem most of them are really caught up
in the egos dualistic line of thinking. I mean, is
is there even hope for organized religions? Maybe that hope
is the of course of miracles.
Speaker 5 (47:15):
Well, I think so, And that's why I wrote a
theology of love, because it is a reasonable theology. It
does make sense once you understand it. Of course, you
have to understand it intuitively as well as conceptually, because
the old as I said earlier, the conventional Christianity makes
no sense. I mean, you know, stated boldly, it's just
(47:38):
a joke. And you know, I think more and more
people are coming to realize that that just doesn't have
a future, you know, to talk like Demographically, about a
quarter of the population is Catholic in the United States,
and this has stayed pretty even because a lot of
(48:00):
Catholics have left the church. But Hispanic immigration is pretty
much made up for that. There's another twenty to twenty
five percent who are evangelical fundamentalists, you know, many of
them in the South, So that's another fifty percent. Now.
(48:23):
For a long time, the liberal, mainstream moralists, liberal mainstream
Protestant denominations made up most of the rest. And I'm
talking about the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, the Methodists,
some of the more moderate Baptists. These churches have been
hollowed out, and the people, if you look just at demographics,
(48:49):
the percentage of people that used to adhere to these
religions are now well. Some of them are still there,
and the rest of them are non affiliated, some of
them spiritual but not religious, some of them neither spiritual
nor religious. And I think that's because the mainstream Protestant denominations,
(49:12):
as you know, I was instructed in the mainstream theology
and divinity schools, they've already figured out that this stuff
really doesn't make any sense, and they know that, but
they can't exactly admit it because then they would have
to supply supply something in his place, which it can't do.
I have a friend who is a Methodist minister in Dallas.
(49:34):
He actually married my wife and me, and I said,
you know, you know all the stuff. Do you ever
tell your congregation about No? He said, why chickened out? Wow,
he was all of a lot more honest about it
than many clergy are. Of course, people can tell this,
(49:56):
so you know, we might as well stay home and
drink coffee and read the paper on Sunday mornings. So
Christianity has been taken over. You know. Now the mainstream
Protestants is Catholicism, amidst many forms and fundamentalism are starting
to occupy a large portion, not necessarily the population, but
(50:17):
of people who consider themselves believing Christians. I think this
is ultimately a dead end and there will be a
lot more disillusion with it. I mean, Catholics go all
over the place. I mean, you know, Catholics. There are
billion Catholics in the world, So you could say anything
(50:40):
about Catholics and it will be true of someone. But
I think a lot of practicing Catholics, you know, sincere
practicing Catholics, well, you know, they like the mass, they
like the structure of the mass, they like the structure
of the church community and the rest. They don't think
too much about it. Actually, this is interesting. You know,
(51:04):
if you look at poles, just ordinary standard polls, and
this seems been true for several decades now. Some place
between twenty and twenty five percent of the United States
population believe in reincarnation, and in some of those polls,
a greater percentage of Catholics believe in reincarnation than everybody else,
(51:28):
even though the Catholic Church has always repudiated reincarnation. So
you can see, you know, they're you know, people sometimes
complain about supermarket spirituality. Do you remember they ever hear
that this pick and chee you can pick whatever you want.
(51:48):
This is this is I think this is made fun
of in criticalism, but I think it's your obligation. I
think you have the not only the right, but the
obligation to yourself to say, yeah, I believe this, this
makes sense to me, this does not. And if that
kind of overlaps with Dogan's in particular church or not,
well that's that church's problem.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Well just just absolutely a wonderful, wonderful conversation. We are
speaking with Richard Smoley, an incredible author and teacher of
what you call it. You're an author, teacher of spirituality
and religions.
Speaker 4 (52:27):
Do you like that description?
Speaker 5 (52:31):
Really describe myself as pretty much of anything. I mean,
I think I'm an author or writer, but I'm not
a clergyman. I don't profess to be a teacher in
any formal sense. I did teach philosophy at a community
college a few for a few years some time back,
so in that respect, I guess I was more literally
(52:51):
a teacher. But you know, I just kind of say
what I have to say, and I think people can
will and show take it to the extent that it
makes sense.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
And of course, you know, much of what we were
talking here is about a course in miracles.
Speaker 4 (53:09):
I'd like to go back to your.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
Studies of the ACIM. What personal changes have you seen
an experience in yourself since you started studying and reading
the course.
Speaker 5 (53:21):
Well, in a certain respect, that's impossible to say, because
I started studying the course in nineteen eighty one, you know,
which is now for almost forty five years ago, meaning
that I changed so much. Anyway, it's hard to say
how much of it can be directly attributed to the course.
(53:44):
But I think I think one thing got a certain
kind of severity judgmental aspect, of my own character has
been considerably softened. You know. I certainly feel greater personal
peace than I did. I am willing to forgive, and
(54:07):
I do attempt to forgive to the extent possible, you know,
day to day life. And yeah, I think by and
large it's greatly increased my sense of contentment and fulfillment in.
Speaker 4 (54:22):
Life, you know. And I agree with you.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Since I've studied the course since two thousand and four,
my practicing of forgiveness and non judgment, and that is the.
Speaker 4 (54:33):
Biggest change in me.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
In practicing those things, I've had a greater sense of peace.
I just read the other day in a course and
says to have peace, teach peace, to learn it, which
I love.
Speaker 4 (54:46):
I love that.
Speaker 5 (54:47):
Well again, you know, you know, to use another lesson.
All that I get is given to myself, you know.
And if all you have to give is fear and
judgment and persecution, well that's what you're giving to yourself.
And to the extent that you can let that go,
release it and replace it with love, compassion, joy, Well
(55:14):
you're giving that to yourself too. And I entirely convinced that,
you know, if you keep on that way, you will
experience it sometimes immediately, sometimes fairly soon, sometimes down the
road alone.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Yeah, beautiful, beautiful stuff. Well, Richard Smowley, what a blessing
to have you on the show. I love your extensive knowledge,
and I think it's a big help to all of
us to sit down and contemplate these things.
Speaker 4 (55:43):
Now, I know you have a beautiful website. I believe
it's Richard Smoley dot com. I'll put that link in there.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Is that the best way for people to find out
more about you and perhaps connect with you?
Speaker 5 (55:56):
Yeah, I do have an email addressnnected with that, so
that would probably be the best way. I also I'm
also editor of Quest, which is a journal of the
Theosophical Society in America, so I could also be contacted
through the Theosophical Society, which is based in Wheaton, Illinois,
(56:19):
very close to where I live.
Speaker 4 (56:21):
Very awesome.
Speaker 2 (56:21):
So, and of course I will put links in the
show notes to Richard's website into a number of his books,
and I really encourage people to check those out and
very worth it. So, Richard, thank you, thank you for
blessing us and being here on World Awakenings. Awakenings, beautiful conversation.
Speaker 5 (56:43):
Thank you, sir, Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure,
and I hope what I say is some value to somebody.
Let me just say one last thing. I think it's important.
There is a thing in a teacher's manual that says
there's one thought that should be remembered throughout the day.
It's a thought of limitless release, of limitless joy, because
(57:08):
all things are released within it. And I think that's
an excellent daily, even hourly practice. I mean, if you're
doing the workbook to the workbook, but I think that's
an excellent hourly practice as a way of recentering. So
but thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Carl.
I really enjoyed our time together, and I hope we're
(57:30):
passed across.
Speaker 1 (57:31):
From This has been another episode of World Awakenings, The
Fast Track to Enlightenment with host Carl Gruber, a certified
Law of Attraction life coach. We welcome you to tune
(57:55):
in to each and every episode of World Awakenings as
we open your mind, your heart, and your eyes to
the fact that the world's population is now more than
ever awakening to the truth of all things spiritual, metaphysical,
and enlightening, and just how much they play an all
important role in our moment to moment daily life. Much
(58:18):
love and light to you, my friend, and thank you
for tuning into world awakenings.
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