Conversations with Jacob Ep.75:Cosmo & Me w/ Jim Willis *Tribute Episode*

Today's episode is a rebroadcast of my interview with Jim Willis
Jim sadly passed away on June of 2024

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's going on, everybody, and welcome back to another episode
of Conversations with Jacob. Today's episode was supposed to be
a good one, and my guest was supposed to be
Jim with Us, who had a new book out, and

(00:23):
we was going to talk about the new book and
we was going to have a good time. And then
I got an email yesterday on June eighth saying that
Jim passed away. And Jim's last appearance here on the
podcast was September eleventh, twenty and twenty three, and we

(00:47):
talked about his book Cosmoed Me, which I had a
good time doing. So between the time I heard about
his death until present time for Real Time, which is
a June ninth, I was determining what to do and

(01:10):
should I pay a tribute to Jim in some short
of way or should I just put someone else in
his time slot. Well, I came to the I came
to the choice or decision to uh pay tribute to
Jim with Us because he appeared on the podcast. He

(01:32):
seemed like a good friend of mine, even though I
didn't know him all that well. But but with him
passing away, I've decided to re air his first and
unfortunately his last interview and here on the podcast. Oh.
I won't do this often, but uh, but but the

(01:54):
reason I'm doing this is because Jim did a lot
for my podcast by appearing on it, by sharing it
on Facebook, by talking, uh, by talking nicely of me
through email and through uh oh to think he commented

(02:17):
on a Facebook post one day. But uh, but Jim
was a great guy, you know, and and he had
the wisdom, and you have that soft talking voice that
you could listen to for hours. And I'm going to
miss that, you know, because you know, because today was
supposed to be our day. Today was supposed to be

(02:42):
about him here on the podcast, and unfortunately he's not
here to see it. So today, like I said, I'm
going to re air his first and last interview here
on the podcast. And this interview you he was. He
had trouble getting the camera on and so you only

(03:07):
so so in so when this interview plays and your on,
you would hear his voice because he couldn't get the
camera working. But my thoughts in prayers and goes out
to his family, his wife and his daughter Jan and
his whole family. I'm friends h during this time. So

(03:28):
Jim and the rest in peace. And since you wrote
a book about the afterlife or the near death experiences
and beyond, maybe you know if there is an afterlife.
All right, I'm gonna miss you, Jim. So, with no
further so, with nothing else to say, here is my

(03:50):
first and last interview with Jim with us so another
episode of Conversations with Jacob.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
We got a good episode Fred today and we'll be
talking with with UH with jimwit Us here in a second.
But before we get to jimwitt Us, I want to
tell you guys about the podcast Real Quick, which our
podcast airs every Monday at one o'clock PM. That's UH,
that's on the Eastern time zone. You can find us
on Facebook, Facebook dot com, slash Conversations with Jacob on

(04:21):
yt Twitter is CWJ podcast. Our podcasts and platforms include iHeartRadio,
tune in, Spotify, and every once in a while, you
can find the podcast on YouTube. If you got a question,
I guess suggest just want to say hi, you can
send it. You can email our mailbag Conversations with Jacob
at gmail dot com. Just put in the subject line

(04:44):
you know what you're trying to look for or trying to,
you know, connect with I guess You can visit our website,
Conversations with Jacob Podcasts dot Weebley dot com. You can
find upcoming episodes, past guests, and also a little section
called post from the host. I'm joining me today. It's
mister Jim wid Us, who has a little bit of

(05:05):
camera problem. So Jim, I'll welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Thank you. I can see you just fine, Jacob, but
I guess you can't see me, so that means you're
probably better off than me.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
Oh, absolutely so, Jim. Before we get deep into the interview,
can give a little background on who you are.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
I am a retired Protestant minister. I was in ministry
for forty years, but most of that time was always
part time because I was also a musician and a carpenter,
and a college professor, and within the last twenty years
or so, a writer. When I retired from Christian ministry,

(05:48):
I had a bit of an epiphany, to tell you
the honest truth, Jacob, I wanted to do something a
little different. You know, when you go into ministry early
like I did. I'm back in nineteen seventy one. I
was in seminary and we all had the idea that
what was going to happen was when you go to seminary,
when you get out, you're going to join this community

(06:10):
of people who were interested in spiritual growth and spirituality,
and it was going to be kind of a wonderful
existence of growing together and seeing everybody and answering each
other's questions and being on this spiritual quest, kind of
a search for the Holy Grail, I used to call it.
It doesn't work that way when you're a minister. You're

(06:33):
the CEO of a small company, even though it mostly
just part time like I was, and you discover that
most people don't go to church, especially back in the
sixties and seventies when I was starting out to join
a spiritual community. It's just a social thing something you do,
and you get so busy. You're you're planning meetings, you're

(06:56):
planning church services, you're doing seminars, you're teaching, and for instance,
in my case, I was also a college professor teaching
World religions, and so I had the cream of the
crop in terms of students. I mean, that's the face
that nobody takes a course in a college course and
world religions unless you want to you know, you don't

(07:17):
have to so with me, it was just kind of
an idea of always having to put off my own
spiritual growth. I was just so busy, like we all are.
You joined out, you have a job, you got to
do this stuff you need to do. And so even
though I talked a lot and taught a lot about God,

(07:37):
I discovered at the end of my ministry I wasn't
experiencing what I call now the Holy at all. And well, yeah,
I did from time to time, because during I would
pray and you know, counsel people and do all the
stuff you do, but it wasn't the kind of relationship
that I wanted. I wanted to experience God. I kind

(07:59):
of figured, you know, in the Old Testament, if God
can appear to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all
those people, why couldn't God appear to me? And in
my whole ministry. Aside from a couple of times when
I obviously saw something at work that was from the
other side, people having near death experiences for instance, and

(08:20):
then I was privileged to be there and having them
come back and tell me what they saw and all
this kind of thing. Yeah, there were some wonderful times
and it was great, but my day to day life,
I just didn't feel like I had achieved what I
wanted to achieve in my life. So when I retired
sixteen years ago now, I decided to do something I

(08:41):
always wanted to do. I was always an outdoorsman. I
hunted and fished all my life. I don't do that anymore,
but I used to. I figured, I'm going to go
out to the woods and I'm going to build a
house back in the woods, and I'm going to go
on retreat for one year, and I'm going to wrestle
with God. Even had a Bible verse in mind that
comes out of the Old Testament Book of Genesis. When

(09:04):
Jacob and Esau, the two brothers, had been well, let's
say they had a falling out and Jacob had to
run way up to what is now Anatola, Turkey. And
when he was coming back to reconnect with his brother,
it has been years now, and he didn't know what

(09:25):
was going to happen. He just knew that the next
day they were going to meet. And he was on
one side with his family, one side of a river,
and Esau was on the other side, and Jacob was
up pacing the wall up and down like we all
do when we're nervous and anxious and anxiety filled. And
a man showed up on the river on his side

(09:45):
of the river, and the strangest thing in the Bible,
Jacob started wrestling with him, and they wrestled all night long,
and as the dawn broke, Jacob realized he was wrestling
with God, and he said, I will not let you
go until you bless me. And that was my mantra
when I retired. I had a prayer in my God,

(10:08):
I'm going to wrestle with you. I will not let
you go until you bless me. So when it came
time to retire, I took early retirement at age sixty
two and I'm seventy seven now, and I figured I'm
going to go on to retreat for one year. And
I went out to the woods of South Carolina, the backwoods.
I had to build a road back to where my
house is now. I built my house, just a small house,

(10:29):
and I was going to say, I'm going to live
back there for one year and I'm going to go
on a spiritual retreat and I'm going to wrestle with
God and saying I will not let you go until
you bless me a long loan. Behold, my prayer was answered.
I met God not in a Christian context. I met
God through probably the world's oldest religion, through a paganistic

(10:52):
shaman expression, shamanistic expression. And I still call myself a
Christian because that's my home, but I interpret Christianity in
a totally different way. I'm sure many of my old
Christian friends don't figure. They figure I probably left the fold,
you know. I have to tell you what happened after
I came out here, though after with that expression on

(11:13):
my face, I will not let you go into you
bless me. I was asked by a group in Cornwall,
over in the UK, to go and give a seminar
on the basis of world religions, and so I went
over to Cornwall. I had a wonderful time with him.
But while I was there, and I'd never been to
the to England before, and so I had to go

(11:36):
to this little English village called Fennie Compton because it's
up northwest of London. And I had to go up
there because that was where my spiritual my great great
great great ancestors came from They used to be ministers
in the Church of England, and the church where they
preached is still up there in Fenny Compton. And I

(11:57):
went up there and met a historian from the town,
and she got me into the church, and I was
able to stand in the same pulpit where my great
ancestor used to preach before his family left he came
here to America, and this building was still there. The
stone church was still there, and the same stained glass
windows were still there. And I stood in the pulpit

(12:18):
and saw this one stained glass window that you can
only really see it well from the pulpit of the church.
And lo, and behold it depicted in this stained glass
window Jacob wrestling with God saying I will not let
you go until you bless me. I want to tell you,
the hair stood up on the back of my head.
I couldn't believe it. Somehow, the spiritual genes of my

(12:43):
great great great however many great grandfathers, was passed down
through the centuries, and little did he know that his ancestry,
his descendant, would someday retire from ministry just like him
and have that prayer. I will not let you go
until you bless me. I gotta believe God's got a
set of view. But I came out here. I was
going to live in this house for one year and

(13:06):
just experienced the changing of seasons, and I was going
to try to find God in the woods all by myself.
And that was sixteen years ago, and I'm still here
going strong. I've written something like I don't know, sixteen
or eighteen more books since I've been out here and
had the time, a lot of it based on ancient
civilizations and ancient gods and lost civilizations. I just recently

(13:31):
sent in a book to Visible I pressed they'll be
bringing it out next year on near death experiences. I
wrote a book. Probably my best selling book right now
is a book called The Quantum Acostic Field, which is
kind of a spiritual guide for astra travelers because I
started having out of body experiences when I was here.
Learned how to dows and I've done a lot of

(13:53):
dowsing seminars and that kind of thing. And all of
that came because I retired from ministry and I will
not let you go and to wrestle with God. Turns
out God wrestled back, and I feel very content in
a lot of ways that religion isn't the big focus nowadays.
I don't even like to use the word religion anymore.

(14:14):
I like to use the word spirituality. But I was
very blessed to be able to do that. That's pretty
much who I am.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
Absolutely. Now, you got a book out called a Cosmo
and me, I gotta have and who is Cosmo?

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Oh? There you go. Yeah, that's kind of a spiritual autobiography.
It occurred to me that as I look back on
my life now more than almost eight decades, but the
last seven decades, when I've been since in my childhood,
it occurred to me that almost every ten years, people

(14:51):
who were spiritual seekers, like I've been all my life,
searching for my own metaphorical holy grail. Every ten years,
the spiritual climate has changed in the United States. The
fifties was different than the sixties. The sixties was different
than the eighties, and different than the nineties and all that.

(15:12):
And so I wanted to look back and try to
delineate what that was like. And so I stopped using
the word God a while back, because when I use
the word God, I'm still comfortable using saying the word God,
but I'm I'm not as comfortable as I was, because
I'm not sure that when I say the word God

(15:32):
and people hear the word God, there were talking about
the same thing. It almost seems as though people have
a different concept of God, and so they assume that
when I say God, I must be talking about it
in words that they understand. So I stopped using the
word God, and for a while I use the word cosmos,
but that seemed kind of big and impersonal, so I

(15:53):
switched it to Cosmo. Cosmo to me is that it
equals my definition of the word God. But you can
also use the word source. You can worse the word consciousness.
You can use the Indians just to use the word
manatou up in New England, where I came from. Originally,

(16:15):
it's the idea of that other that's separate from us.
Hindus have a beautiful way of saying and they have
the concept that they call atman and Brockma. Brackma is
the inexpressible idea for the great mystery behind it all,
consciousness or the source. You can't define it in Hindu tradition.

(16:42):
If you try to put the word brakma in a
word box to try to define it. Words fall short
because obviously words were written after you know, they weren't
on this side of our perception fence, and they can't
describe what's on the other. So they use the word
brahman did mean that inexplainable, inexpressible idea of the source,

(17:07):
the great mystery. But they also use the word atman,
which the closest word that comes to it in English
is probably the word soul. And so Brahman is the
out there and soul or atman is the in here.
But the great breakthrough of the Hindu Rishis came when
they said, thou art that that atman and Bratman are

(17:31):
the same thing. What's out there is also in here.
And so when I talk about Cosmo and me a
seeker's journey from religion to spirituality, I'm talking about my
evolving relationship with God basically who I now prefer to
use the word Cosmo. And I knew I was onto

(17:54):
something that it wasn't just in my life. This was
going on because David Campbell and two other people wrote
a book called Secular Surge a while back, and they
said that now thirty percent of America is defined as
what they call the nuns. That's innes. In other words,
they're not part of anything religionists and non religionists and

(18:20):
secularists and the idea of people looking for something that's
spiritual without necessarily being defined by any special religion. So
that's what I mean by Cosmo and me. It's my
search decade by decade, over the last seven decades of

(18:40):
that great mystery, that from which we come and to
which we return.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Now you've written a lot of books, Jim, and what
prompted aut of this to happen? If you write in
the books?

Speaker 2 (18:52):
I wish I knew for sure. It seemed like something
I just had to do. I had read a couple
of books earlier I had written. My very first book
was just written for the fun of it. It was
called Journey Home, The Inner Life of a Long Distance
Bicycle Writer. And because of that book, one of the
editors at Visible Link picked it up and they were

(19:15):
looking for someone to write a book that they wanted
to call the Religion Book, which was this kind of
a one volume encyclopedia of world's great religions. And so
they called me, and I said, yeah, I'd be glad
to do it. I already had a good start on
it because when I was teaching World Religions in college,
I had a pretty big glossary built up already that
I would get to my students of meanings of all

(19:38):
these different terms that we were going to use in class,
and so that became the genesis of it. I wrote
the book Religion Book, and then I just seemed to
take to writing. And some years later, especially when I
retired and had time to write almost NonStop up here,
I felt I had something to say and I just
wanted to say it, and so I started writing, and

(20:00):
I became obsessed with this idea that we live in
a particular culture that has somehow traded wisdom for knowledge.
We have a lot of knowledge nowadays. We can do
a lot of things. I mean everything from nuclear energy
to the internet to tech and all that kind of stuff.

(20:23):
But along with knowledge, just because we know a lot
doesn't mean we have wisdom. Classic example, for instance, you
would look what we're doing to the environment, and it's
very obvious every day that goes by, espercially this summer,
what's happening. We have learned a lot about how we
could do things, but we don't do them. We have

(20:45):
the knowledge about to change things, but we don't know
the wisdom. And you can say the same thing for politics,
for economics, for religion, all of these. In all of
these areas, we have a lot of knowledge, probably enough
knowledge get us through, but we don't have the wisdom
to use that knowledge. And as a result, people just
hate each other. I mean, in politics, the left and

(21:07):
the right, liberal and the concerned, they hate each other.
Religions hate each other, even in particular things like science.
Who where people are supposed to be open minded and
ready to receive all this information, one group believes in
this in science and the other believes in something else,

(21:28):
and rather than just argue the science, the attack each
other's character. To be a string theorist nowadays is to
you know, I've heard scientists actually stand up and say
string theory is not only wrong, anybody who believes it
is stupid. What kind of attitude is that, you know?
And so I said, I've got to right about this.

(21:50):
And that was one of the things I wanted to
do about Cosmo and Me in my book Cosmo and Me,
I wanted to show how this developed decade by decade,
the last seven decades of American history.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Now, you wrote a book called American Colts. Oh yeah,
King tells about that book.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
I'm almost regretting it right now. It seems like the
only people who in that book I wrote about American cults.
Because through my whole life in the ministry, I've been
involved with a lot of breakout cults that started as
Christian groups and then they went by the wayside. You know, everybody,

(22:32):
Jim Jones to Jim Baker to uh David Koresh and
all the rest of them. They began as Christian ministers,
and then they got they gathered a following, and people
began to think that they were not only preachers teachers,
but God, you know. And look it happened to Jim
Jones took his whole group down to Genna, and how

(22:53):
many hundreds of them committed suicide down they drinking drinking
the kool aid when it was broken up. And so
I can't say that I've enjoyed working in cultic groups
and with people who have been victims to cults, but
it certainly was there, and so I'd love to say

(23:14):
there was some kind of great honor in it. And
I said, oh, I'm going to expose all these things.
But that wasn't it. Actually what happened was publisher called
me and said, hey, you want to do a book
on cults, here's your advanced money. And I said sure,
so I did it. But that's what happened. And I
wrote this book. And although I wrote about all these
different cults, I mean, going back in American history, ever

(23:37):
since the Pilgrims were once considered a cult in the
Old Country, and I wrote all, but along with that,
I happened to write about some modern day cults, and
I happened to mention some groups by name that I
didn't particularly call them cults, but I said they use
cultic methodologies to attract and keep their membership growing, and

(23:58):
all this kind of thing. And I guess the only
people who read books about American cults seem to be
right wing crazies. And as a result, I almost regret
writing it now, because I mean, I've had people, you know,
it's pretty easy to try to bully someone from your computer,
So I've had people write to my website and how

(24:20):
people respond to groups I've been in saying that you know,
this guy is a radical left winger, obviously, and he
doesn't get our part. And I'm one guy threatened to
show up and drop a pineapple on my front yard.
And I'm sure he didn't mean a fruit. I'm sure
he was talking about something else, and you know, and
I didn't mean to come out and you know, try

(24:42):
to bring politics, and I was just talking about groups
on all sides of the political spectrum that use cultic methodologies.
But apparently some of the very violent ones, they're the
only ones who read these kind of books. And you
go on Amazon right now and you look up American cults,
and there's one person wrote about American cults and he

(25:06):
gave I think he gave me two stars on Amazon.
And his things said, I'm obviously showing my politics, and
I don't think he even read a book's true, But
what are you going to do? You know? So, yeah,
so that's where American cults came from.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
And he also wrote a book called Censor in God.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yeah, that one got me in some trouble too, for
you know, for fifty years, I've been studying how the
Bible got put together. And obviously, you know, the Bible
was not written by a single author. It was not
written It was written by groups of many different writers.
Most of them we don't even know their names. But

(25:49):
when it came time to put the books together, they
were put together by a committee. Well you know what
committees do. Especially the New Testament, for instance, was put
together by a group of people who met in committee
up up in Turkey, and it was put together during
the time of Constantine's Constantine in the third century for
a particular reason. Constantine was looking for some way to

(26:13):
unify his empire, and so he got together the idea
of doing it through religion. And so if he was
going to have all the people in one religion, then
they could be you know, they were. We went all
the way from what is now the UK over to
the far East, you know, and how could he keep
them all together. They didn't speak the same language, they
didn't have a common history. So he figured, well, I

(26:33):
have a common religion. So the group in Ephesus that
met up there decided for sure that they were going
to put together a book that would unite this whole
religious things. So the group met and over the course
of many, many months, they decided which books agreed with
their agenda, which was a political agenda, and which didn't.

(26:55):
And so what they did was they brought together the
books that we now call the New Testament, and they
got rid of the old ones. Matter of fact, they
ordered them burned. Thank goodness that they didn't all get burned.
Some of them, for instance, were hidden in the desert
in Egypt and only discovered in nineteen forty seven. I
guess they discovered a whole bunch of new books of

(27:17):
the Bible that were scheduled for the Bible, that were
considered by the Group of Ephesus but rejected. And when
you read them, you can understand why they were rejected,
because they didn't agree with Constantine's politics. They didn't agree that.
For instance, the bishops had the idea that if anybody
was wanted to go to Heaven, that they had to

(27:38):
go through the church. They had to go through their
own bishop, and that gave the bishop a tremendous amount
of temporal control. You know, you can do it my way,
or you go to hell, you know that kind of thing.
And so I wanted to write a book that brought
all this out in the open, and so I wrote
Censoring God. And it was mostly about the books that

(27:59):
didn't make the cut, even what Christians called the Old Testament,
the Hebrew Scriptures. A lot of people figured that they
were all written before the time of Jesus. Well they
many of them were, but many of them they weren't
put together until maybe one hundred years after the time
of Jesus. And they met at the town called Jomnia

(28:19):
according to history, according to the mythologically, they met the
kind of Jomnia, and they decided which books were going
to be included and which books are going to throw
out be thrown out. If there was one time in history,
I wish I could go back to the town of
Jomnia at that time and look in their waste baskets
and see what they threw out. But it didn't help

(28:40):
them in the long run, because in nineteen forty six
the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered and up in the
Dead Sea, up above the Dead Sea outside of Jerusalem,
lo and behold, we discovered this great cash of documents
which was hidden buried rather than being destroyed. And so
now we know a lot of the books that didn't
make the Old Testament too. So now that in our generation,

(29:03):
since I was born, I was born in forty six,
and these discoveries were made, one in forty five and
one in forty seven. So it almost seemed as if
I was somehow destined to write a book saying what
books were thrown out, what books never made the cut
when the Bible was put together, And that's where censoring
God came from. But of course that also brings down

(29:24):
a lot of anger, because you know, people like to
believe that the Bible was no question about. The Bible
was authored by God, and the books we have are
gods and no more, no less God said it. I
believe it, and that settles it, you know, that kind
of thing. So I wanted to write that book too,
and that book has been a little more successful than

(29:46):
American cults, because I think a lot of people today
are getting more used to the idea that the Bible
is not quite the document that we always claimed it
to be the only infallible rule of faith in practice.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Now And what does a principal difference between religion have
spiritual out of the Can a person be both at
the same time?

Speaker 2 (30:09):
I think so, But I do like to keep them
apart to my way of thinking. When you go back
and look at the founding of the world's great religions,
especially the monotheistic religions, when you look at the Founders,
when you look at Moses and Jesus and Mohammed, when
you look at Confucius and Loudsu and the Buddha, they

(30:30):
all had at the beginning, sometime in their life, a
spiritual revelation, and it was spirituality in a nutshell. They
had a different way of seeing life, a different way
of understanding who God was. The Buddha, for instance, had
his great knowledge under the bou Tree, the Tree of Knowledge.

(30:51):
Jesus went out into the desert for forty days and
forty nights. Moses spent forty years in the wilderness hurting sheep,
when finally God spoke to him at the burning bush.
Mohammad used to go out and meditate and pray in
a cave outside of his town, and eventually he saw
the angel Gabriel, he said, who came to him and
said right, And the result was the go on. These

(31:14):
people had a spiritual experience, and they came back and
tried to explain that, and in explaining they excited a
group of followers who started following these people, and then
those followers became the start of the systematizing of the
original spiritual vision, so that years after the founders were gone.

(31:35):
The followers had built the infrastructure of a religion based
on that original spiritual almost a shamanistic I think experience.
I think you could all say that they all had
a shamanistic experience similar to what I had to hear
in the woods myself, and similar to what priests seek

(31:59):
when they go out on retreat and when they take
vows of silence or anything like that, what holy men
and women have tried to do. Get away from the world,
get out there and be by yourself, and spend hours
and hours in meditation, in prayer, and in contemplation. And
they had that spiritual experience. But then along came the followers,

(32:23):
and they were the ones that established the doctrines and
the dogmas, and they build all these fences to the
point where now almost any religion you choose, whether it's
Judaism or Christianity, or Islam, or even Buddhism, even Hinduism nowadays,
which was pretty open at the beginning. They built up

(32:44):
this fence around the believers, and they say, this is
what you have to do. You have to live like this,
you have to give this much, you have to believe this,
you have to at least say you do. You have
to live a certain way. And those are the religions
that grew up. I think if these founders came back, man,
if Jesus came back, or Moses came back to he
looked around, he would say, what have you guys done?

(33:07):
You know this is not what I had in mind.
And one only has to read the Sermon on the Mountain,
listen to the words of Jesus about blessed the peacemakers.
Blessed are those who give. Blessed are those who forgive.
And look at the Christian Church today when it's just
criticizing this person and that person and fighting, and I

(33:29):
hear preachers say things like you got to have a
Bible in one hand and a loaded gun in the other.
What would Jesus say to that? Come on, you know
that's crazy. So the religions have gone far afield. So
I believe you can be spiritual and still stay within
a religion, which is why I still consider myself a Christian,

(33:50):
even though I'm looking at Christianity much more metaphorically rather
than historically. Yeah, you can be spiritual and be religionists.
But there's a lot of people in religions who not
spiritual at all.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
And that scares me now, And what does it mean
to be a spiritual seeker?

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Looking for the other, looking for that which is beyond ourselves,
looking for the source of our being. Over the last
well twenty thirty years, I've come to believe that we
are all here because we come from what I call

(34:31):
the Source. You can call it God if you want.
Picture of the Source as a place of perfect stillness
and perfect oneness and perfect unity, love, compassion. All of
that stuff is there. But what's the one thing you
can't have in a place of perfect unity. You can't
have individuality. You can have individual ways of thinking, because

(34:52):
the Source everything is united. So I've come to believe
that each one of us has made a courageous decision
to be born in a world world of duality. We
enter here through various fields. We come through what Stephen
Hawking and Albert Einstein called the mind of God that
begins to conceptualize possibilities. We come through the acocic field,

(35:15):
which is the place of potential and possibilities. We enter
into another field, which is practically pure energy, and from
that energy, the equation of Albert Einstein says that energy
and mass are the same thing. But how does energy
become mass? Well, it goes through the newly discovered Higgs
field until it comes out here into our particular place

(35:39):
where we all live right now and out here in
this out on the rim, so to speak, on the
field of in this field of perceptions, in this field
where we are experiencing individuality, something we can't have in
the source. And we have these experiences, and I think
these experiences are recorded. We learn what it is, and

(36:01):
there are some wonderful, wonderful things about individuality, but there's
also some bad things about them. We understand what greed,
for instance, is, and we understand how ego can run amok.
I think Buddha had the best way in Christianity, for instance.
And then I guess all three of the monotheistic religions,

(36:23):
we're all taught that there is good and there was evil. Well,
those are two polar opposites. There are polls of the
duality that we can only experience as individuals. We can
experience good and evil, But the Buddha in monotheistic religions,
we're told that really what we need to do is
identify with the good and try to reject the evil.

(36:43):
You can see it the old cartoon of a devil
on one shoulder and an angel on the other, you
know that kind of thing. And we're always taught to
do the good and reject the evil. I think Buddha
had a much better concept of this his dharma. His
teaching was to find the middle way, the middle way
through between the two poles, the way that experienced them,

(37:05):
both both good and evil, because they're all part of life.
And I think that's what we're doing here in this life.
We have come here to experience both polls of a
duality and to live this life. I find a great
comfort in this because I know that when life is
going bad, and when everything seems to be against me
or my friends or loved ones or someone, I know

(37:28):
that it's temporary, and I know that there's a reason
for it. There's a purpose for it, and our job
is to experience it both fully, to embrace it. And
that's not to say, you know, just to simply expect,
you know, you know, except all, even though it's evil

(37:48):
or it certainly doesn't mean to do evil, but it
means to experience it. Because I know that one of
our purposes of this life is to take these experiences
back with us and to deposit them in that great
Christians call it the Book of Life, or scientists might
call it the acocic field. Stephen Hawking was very careful
to say that you know, nothing can escape, you know,

(38:10):
no information can escape, even in a black hole. You
know it's imprinted someplace. So that everything we do here,
whether it's good or bad, I'm absolutely convinced it has meaning,
it has purpose. That's why we're here. And it gives
me a great deal of a great deal of comfort
in that it really does.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
Can you talk about the unique opportunities that each unphote
and decade offered to a spiritual seeker such as yourself?

Speaker 2 (38:37):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's a good question. I was really
able to discover a very privileged childhood. I didn't know
at the time, of course, but I was white, middle class,
maybe even a little upper middle class. I was out
in the suburbs back in the fifties. Ninety percent of

(38:58):
people in the fifties were said they went to church.
So everybody I knew went to church. And if you
were going to be a spiritual seeker back then, you
went to church, and you listened to the sermon and
everything else. And the fifties was a very privileged time
as long as you were white, at least middle class,
and raised with you know, you know, somewhat stable family,

(39:23):
if there is such a thing as a stable family.
But as I look back on it, I realized the
fifties I look on it now, and I picture a
beautiful pond. For instance, It's nice and serene on the surface,
and the sun is shining, and there's maybe a duck
floating around, the lily pads are opening up, and oh,

(39:43):
it's gorgeous. It's just a beautiful, beautiful picture. But if
you put on a snorkel and go underwater, you see
something different. Big fish, you're eating little fish, and all
those beautiful stuff that falls on the pond is leaves
and things. They're coming down there making fuck and mire
and you can get stuck down in there. And that's
what the fifties was. On the surface, as long as

(40:05):
you were born into a family that had some money
and loved you, it was a pretty placid thing. But
underneath there was all kinds of oh, sexism and racism
and all kinds of bad stuff going on. So during
the fifties when you went to church, you'd go to
church on Sunday and listen to the preacher and say
the prayers and sing the hymns and figure, there I've

(40:27):
done it. That was spiritual seeking. You know. Basically you
might ask some questions at a prayer group or something
like that, but it was just mostly a matter of
saying the right things and status quote. But all that
underneath stuff that was bubbling around. It wasn't obvious, man,
that broke up in the sixties. And I was in
high school and college during the sixties, and I can

(40:47):
tell you all that placid stuff that we experienced during
the fifties that fell apart beat next turned into hippies
and the Summer of Love and woodstuck and LSD, tune in,
turn on, drop out, all of that. The structures of
the fifties were thrown off in the sixties. So to

(41:08):
be a spiritual seeker in the sixties was a total
different experience. You'd probably wear your hair long, grow a beard,
sing the right songs, play the guitar, listened to Bob Dylan,
you know, later on the other groups that came along,
and if you're going to San Francisco, be sure to
wear a flower in your hair, and that. You know,

(41:30):
they were spiritually seeking something. In the sixties. It was
all summed up that great great sitcom Archie Bunker's Place.
You know. Archie Bunker was the status quo conservative and
his son in law, Meathead was the liberal and they
would fight and fight and fight and everything else. And
during the sixties. So during the sixties, with all of

(41:52):
that stuff going on, the political conventions and the marches
and the Jim Crow laws and all of that stuff.
When that was breaking, I was thinking, Wow, this is
going to change things. But lo and behold, along came
the seventies and all of our heroes fell apart. They all,
you know, Nixon and Vietnam and disillusionment, and the religious

(42:16):
leaders during the sixties fell out and fell down by
the wayside. And we know what was going on in
the Catholic Church with some of the priests during that time,
the whole thing. But during the seventies, man, all of
our heroes had feet of clay, and we didn't know
what was going on. Everything was we just wandered to
be a spiritual seeker. In the seventies, you didn't know

(42:38):
you didn't have anybody to follow anymore, it seemed. And
then along came the eighties and it got even worse.
We became what we despised. We all became greedy, and
hippies became bankers and lawyers and making a good living
and all that kind of stuff. And so the eighties
became a very commercial, economic, greedy kind of time when

(43:03):
all of a sudden, the god was pushed aside and
a spiritual seeker started was one who just made money,
you know, that kind of thing. And so again, when
that all began to fall apart after the big crash
in the eighties and everything else in nineties, we just
went around searching for hope, and we said, well, maybe
the change of Millennia would do something. And along came

(43:24):
the year two thousand and we thought, maybe now this
is going to change, because the Y two K and
the Mayan calendar and everything else seemed to symbolize we're
on the cusp of something different, and we began to
look for help from outside. And during the during that time,
especially the UFO movement just went crazy because we were
just almost hoping that maybe there are some good aliens

(43:47):
out there who learned better and they'd come down to
save us, or maybe Jesus would return and save the
world or something like that, you know. But when two
thousand came and went and nothing base sickly changed. We
come to the twenty first century where we are right now,
and I don't think in my seventy seven years, I've

(44:07):
ever seen people who are more confused and less certain,
less certain of what's going on. And we've all got
these little groups going. There's the new agers or what
used to be called new agers, have their way of
looking at things, and people looking to all of these
different things trying to find the answer. And meanwhile we're

(44:29):
so busy just trying to make a living. In my time,
one man could go out and work at a company
someplace for ford in general motor and one salary can
come by and it would support a family out in
the suburbs with two cars and a nice vacation every year. Now,
husband and wife working as hard as they can, they
can barely make it. Go a full tuition scholarship to

(44:52):
Eastman School of Music, where I went where I went
to school in nineteen sixty four. I want a full
tuition scholarship and for four years cost eight thousand dollars
intuition for four years and now I had a meeting
last night, a zoom meeting with some of my old
trombone buddies, and I asked if anybody knew what it

(45:13):
costs to go to that school now, and tuition alone
is more than fifty thousand dollars a year. And I'm
just finding myself saying, WHOA what is going on? You know,
everything has changed, everything is different, and how do you
live in this world? A kid wants to go to

(45:33):
college to get a college degree, and he knows it's
going to spend the rest of his life trying to
pay it back. A person wants to buy a house
and they know that they're never going to get that
mortgage paid off in their lifetime. And it's all built
upon on this shaky ladder that it's got to keep growing,
it's got to keep getting bigger or else, and there
is a limit to growth. This is a very difficult

(45:54):
time in which we live. A spiritual seeker in this
day and age is very confused. The only way I
find my way was to drop out and go out
to the woods and get away from it all. Even
then I can't do it really all the time. I
have to keep getting back into the world again, and
it's very very difficult.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
Now, how you mentioned all these decades. Do you got
a favorite decade.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
A favorite decade?

Speaker 1 (46:23):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (46:26):
No, I have to say, being a spiritual seeker sounds
like such a wonderful thing. Oh, you're seeking that which
is good. You're seeking the other, you're seeking God. You
know what you get out of it? Depression? Because it's
depressing out here on the edge. You know that things

(46:48):
could be so much better. It's a simple, simple little thing.
I mean, look at all the money we're playing paying,
for instance, for things like armies and navies and for
police and all the rest of the things. Look at
all the money we have to pour into that, and
the lawyers trying to legislate thing, and politicians trying to

(47:10):
make laws to make sure that everybody does what try.
There's a simple way to make the world a wonderful
place to live. And that's it. If every single one
of us to just make a decision right now to
do the right thing every time, the world would be
a better place. We wouldn't need any of that stuff.
But you know it's not going to happen. We are
a fallen, fallen race. I think Christianity is right in
that regard that we all seem to be under this

(47:33):
original sin of you make it for me, greed and
anxiety and sickness, and the day you're born is the
day you begin to die. And unfortunately, spirituality is seeking out.
If spirituality reveals all this, holds it right up in
front of your face and you put it all together.

(47:55):
And it's a difficult life to be a spiritual seeker.
It's much easier in some ways if we could just
kind of ignore it and get through it. And a
lot of people live their lives this way. You get
through it and don't think about it too much, just
you know, do what's here and do what you can
and get out. But a spiritual seeker is always saying,

(48:17):
but there's got to be something more. Life has got
to be better than this. We can't. I mean, we're
sending out all the spacecraft right now, the James Hubble
Telescope and everything else and searching for life out there
in the cosmos, or the spaceships that we send out

(48:38):
with these rovers that just go out and with the
whole idea being man if we could only reach out
there into the stars and find somebody else. Why in
Heaven's name would anybody with half a brain out there
in the universe, if they're spiritually mature at all, Why
would they want to import humanities like we have produced

(49:01):
here on this planet. Why would we want to project
ourselves into some other society that has it all figured
out take advantage of them, you know. And we're even
so negative that people like Stephen Hawking were saying, it's
not a good idea to advertise that we're here because
somebody may come along and try to take advantage of

(49:23):
us or try to take advantage of our resources. See,
we're taking our greed and projecting it out there to
somebody we don't even know if they're there or not,
but we're projecting our greed, our shortcomings onto some alien
race that this is the way they might act, because
this is the way we act. So when you act,
ask was there a favorite decade? No, No, there really wasn't.

(49:44):
I don't see any difference at all. I really don't now.

Speaker 1 (49:47):
And what do you think are the most important things
to spiritual adity today?

Speaker 2 (49:55):
Well, I can probably I can probably that best by
defining what the bad things are division. For instance, we
have lost the ability to be able to talk to
each other. Now we're just fighting with each other. I
remember the days back in the seventies and eighties when

(50:18):
I was up in Massachusetts and we had the Speaker
of the House, Tip O'Neil, and he was a radical
left wing liberal, you know, classic old school liberal. And
he got to Washington and he was always on the right,
the left side of every issue. And then along came
Ronald Reagan from California, and he was the arch conservative.

(50:38):
He and Tip O'Neal didn't agree about anything. They were
totally worlds apart politically, and yet at the end of
the day, those two guys had such respect for each other.
They could kick back, put their feet up, pop open
a beer, and tell each other Irish stories. You know.
They disagreed about everything, but they had respect for each
other and so they could get along with each other.

(50:58):
Nowadays we seem to have lost that. So division is
the biggest problem I think. Although there are others and
just a busyness and noise and confusion, you can't hardly
get alone. Nowadays. A person wants to meditate. After ten minutes,
they want to check the cell phone. You know, it's
so important that we all get plugged in and we

(51:20):
all know what's going on and the noise that's out there.
I go out in my front porch right now, and
sometimes at night, man, you don't hear any sound of
people at all. You sit out there and all you
can hear is the crickets and you know, the tree
frogs and all that kind of thing. You don't hear
any cars. You don't hear people. You don't hear any confusion.

(51:40):
You don't hear any slam banging and all that kind
of stuff, and just the confusion of how to live.
For instance, everybody is tied into their cell phone. Nobody
knows how a cell phone works. I mean, we know
how to push the buttons, but come on, you tell me.
You push a button and you say, well, that's how

(52:00):
you make it work. You just pushed this, but no,
that sends a signal out into some tower someplace, and
that tower sends it up to a satellite, and the
satellite punches it down to a server and the server
connects it to somebody else's cell phone so they can
talk to you right away. Who understands that, you know,
something goes wrong and we're hopeless. We had a power

(52:24):
black out here in South Carolina a couple of days ago,
six hours, and people were panicking because we didn't have
any power for six hours. It was two hours into
it before I didn't realized the power was out, you know.
And with that kind of confusion, how can you grow spiritually?
Really when you don't know what's going on and there's
only there's only one one more thing. And this really

(52:46):
bothers me, especially as a writer. In impediment to spirituality
really is our lack of focus. I used to read
books like I'd be reading all the time. Now I
watch television. I used to read four or five books
a week. Now people are sometimes don't even read four
or five books in a lifetime. You know. It's the

(53:09):
kind of thing that we can't focus long enough. We
can't even sit down. It's very difficult to even have
a decent conversation. If anybody out there questions this, if
you have never tried meditation, I dare you to go
into a room, turn off everything and sit there in
perfect quiet and just meditate for half an hour. I'll

(53:30):
bet you can't do it. Your mind is going to
be running off and running off here and running off
there and doing everything else. So I don't know that
you put that together. We have lost our elders. Basically,
tech rules nowadays, and elders don't keep up with tech,
not just because they can't, but most of them don't

(53:51):
want to. I don't want to. I have to in
some ways, but I mean, it took us ten minutes
just to get this interview going because I couldn't figure
out my you know, So what happens People listen to
the don't listen to elders and the wisdom that they've
accumulated over a whole year, a whole life. Instead, they
just offered them people who know things, knowledge, you know,

(54:16):
serious discussions about the future. Elders can see long term trends.
Young people can't. And so when I was in college,
I had I loved because eighteen years old, right out
of high school, come and take my course in world religions.

(54:37):
But along with that, I'd had people who were eighty
years old who just wanted to come back school to
learn stuff, and they wouldn't monitor the classes. And I'd
call a coffee break and I'd watch them gather, and
here's a group of eighteen year old kids sitting around
talking to people who are eighty years old, sitting at
the same table, having a cup of coffee together, talking
to each other with that you know, sixty years between

(54:58):
them and they were listening to each other. Now, that's
somehow we got to get back to that. But it's
very difficult, very.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
Difficult, absolutely, And you just answered my my next question
about the West of the Elders. So unless you gave
me more to add to that.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Well, it kind of sounds self serving because I find
myself an elder now, and let's face it, most people
don't really want to you know. I mean, I have
some very wonderful fans and people right into my website,
some very good stuff, and I really appreciate that. But
I have a lot of, you know, people who obviously

(55:40):
haven't read any of the books, or they hear five
minutes of a conversation in a podcast and then they
write some kind of a thing, you know, because everybody's
able down to reach hundreds of people on their social media.
And I'm not saying that I have all the answers.
I don't probably don't have any answers. You know. When

(56:01):
I was younger, I used to know all the answers.
Now I don't even know all the questions. But there
is something about that old idea of getting together at
night around the campfire in your tribe and listening to
the elders tell the old stories. And it gave you
a sense of grounding who am I and where are
we going? And I think that was important and we've

(56:21):
lost that.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
Now. And you also like bike trips.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
Right, oh, yeah, yeah, I have long distance biker all
my life. Yeah. I've ridden across country twice, from the
Pacific to the Atlantic and from Florida up to Massachusetts.
And I love biking rivers, So I bike the length
of the Oh Saint John's down in Florida, and you know,

(56:50):
different big rivers around the country and everything else. And
I bicycle along the edge and gather the history as
I go and talk to people and stopping at the
coffee shops. And I loved long distance biking. The last
one I did, the last big bike trip I took,
wound up as a book called Savannah. Matter of fact,
we're just bringing out the second edition of that. I

(57:14):
think it may be out right now. As a matter
of fact, come to think of it, be on my website.
If it was, it was a story of bicycling. I
call it a bicycle journey through space and time because
on a bicycle you have a lot of chance to
think and a lot of chance to put ideas together
and to contemplate things. And it's almost like zen, you know,
the repetitive of the pedals and everything else. So I

(57:39):
wrote this book called Savannah Bicycle Journey through Space and
Time from the source of the Savannah down to the sea,
and that was that was a fun bike trip.

Speaker 1 (57:50):
Now now, and you're in South Carolina, so you get so,
are you getting any of this hot weather?

Speaker 2 (57:58):
Oh? Sure are. It's a way up in the nineties
as we speak, and today is supposed to be one
of the coolest ones we're going to have. Yeah, we're
getting a lot of the hot weather. On the other hand,
I've been talking to people up in Michigan and they're
getting the smoke from Canada, So I don't know which
is better. And then I have friends in Vermont who're
flooded out of their house, you know, So it's a

(58:18):
it's a tough summer now.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
And where can people find your bugs to learn more
about your ideas?

Speaker 2 (58:26):
Probably The best way to do is just go to
the website www dot Jim Willis dot net and that'll
take you to the homepage. And on the homepage there's
also a link to my Facebook page and my video
my YouTube page. We're putting out videos. Oh, a couple
couple just came out recently on some of these same
topics that you and I have talked about. But all

(58:49):
the books are listed on my web page. If you
go to the page that says books, and if you
just click on the book, it'll bring up where you
can buy it through Amazon or barn A, Nobler, Target
or thrift Books or something like that. Or sometimes it
takes you to the publisher. For instance, if anybody's interested
in Cosmo and Me, you can get it through the

(59:11):
through my website. If you click on it, it'll take
you to Uncle Bart who is the publisher. And as
a matter of fact, they're just getting started. Mine was
the first book they published. I was very very honored
by that. But that's the place to start, Jim Willisttnett.
And also a very important part of that web page,
there's a contact page. You know, you and I can

(59:33):
talk to each other and we don't know who's listening,
because we don't know who's out there. But if people
want to get in touch with me, I love to
hear that there's somebody who heard it or had some
ideas or agreed with this or disagreed with that, and
you can just go get reach me through the contact page.
And I'm still to the point where I can still
answer just about everybody's email.

Speaker 1 (59:54):
All right now. At the end of every episode, which
always ask my guests this question, I'm do you get
any closed and fouled or closing statement that you want
to tell the viewers.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
Wow, that's a pretty heavy question. Yeah, yeah, look out,
look out, but also look in your answers. No matter
how impossible it seems, no matter how difficult your life
may be at this time, the answer is not going
to be found from outside. It's going to be found

(01:00:28):
from within. God is within the sources within. You're a
part of that source. You're you're a very important part
of the universe and the answer is in there, and
sometimes the pain and the confusion can drown it out.
But if you if you take the time to sit

(01:00:51):
and meditate and contemplate and go within, you are the
hottest commodity in the universe right now that we know
about and you can make it. You can do it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
I think that's one of the best ones, you know,
that I've heard in twenty about twenty six or twenty
eight episodes.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
Oh, thank you, thank you now, Jim up.

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
It's only things for coming on the podcast and to
talk about Cosmo and me and the spirituality and uh,
of course on some of your new books you know
that you put out. I was you know, on which
I appreciated it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
Well, thank you, Jacob. So I was really good to
talk to you, and I hope you can. Hope you
do it again sometimes.

Speaker 1 (01:01:34):
Oh yeah, of course, yeah, you know, maybe you could
do it again. Uh, whenever you want to, you know,
you know again.

Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
I'll tell you what. I got a new book coming
out next year called It's on Near Death Experiences. We'll
make sure to contact you and we can we can
talk about some wonderful experiences I've had with people who
have died and come back.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
Oh sounds like it, you know, sounds like a date
you know, you know well for me especially, But anyways,
I don't thank you guys for tuning in to another
episode of Conversations with Jacob with my guest Jim Wittis.
Even though he had camera issues, I think the interview
turned out pretty good. So once again, Jim, thank.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
You for coming on. Thank you, Jacob my pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
All right, So tune in next week for another episode
of Conversations with Jacob. Until then, God bless and we'll
catch you down the road.