From Spirits in Space Suits to Souls on Safari with Fr. Sean OLaoire

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to what is going on for New Thought from
the Edge of Am. Each week on home Time's flagship
radio show, veteran broadcaster, author, and media consultant Sandy Sedgeber
conducts thought provoking interviews with inspirational authors, artists, musicians, scientists,
speakers and filmmakers who are working at the point where

(00:31):
spirituality and science meet consciousness, at the very edge of Am.
Here is your host, Sandy Sedgeber.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Hello and welcome Spirits in Spacesuits, Souls on Safari and
Setting God Free. These just three intriguing book titles bear
in the name of this week's guest, Adam mister Christian
great grandmother, a Druid grandfather who immersed him in the
folklore and music of ancient Ireland, and an Irish Army

(01:06):
Lieutenant Colonel seminary speaking instructor for his mentor. And you
will not be surprised to hear that Father Sean o'learra
is a long way from being your average Roman Catholic priest,
a poet, storyteller, scientist, researcher, wisdom keeper and a licensed
clinical psychologist in private practice with an MA and PhD

(01:30):
in trans personal psychology. Father Shawn o'learra joins me today
to discuss some of the provocative topics addressed in his books,
including who is God? What is truth? Was Jesus a Christian?
Did Moses really exist? What was really behind the mandate

(01:50):
of circumcision? And who the heck was? Yahweh Father Shawn
a Lera welcome. You're not your average.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
I hope I can live up to that description.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
What is it about you that makes you a rebel?

Speaker 3 (02:09):
I think having a grandfather who was he was a
next door He was a druid in many many ways,
but he was always standing up for the underdog. So
he's a brilliant Irish step dancer. In fact, he has
his own school of Irish step dancing. So my mother
from the time she was a little child, was step dancing.
So she told me a story. One time he was

(02:31):
in Cork City. He lived a way outside. He lived
near Blarney, the famous Blarney Castle, and they were good
to town every Saturday through their shopping and there was
one bus went in in the morning and then they
went back in the evening. So there was an area
called the bus Oris in Cork, the place where all
the buses came to and they're coming home one day
and they come down to the bus oris and there's

(02:51):
an old man sitting under ground, scratching on a fiddle
and he's got his cap in front of him. Tried
to collect a few pennies and everybody courses ignoring him.
And the guy can't fiddle for nuts. He's terrible. But
my grandfather was a great fiddle player and my mother
was a great step dancer. So he said to my mother, Peggy,
start dancing. And she's like a twelve year old girl,

(03:12):
she's really really embarrassed to be dancing in public in
front of a guy, a beggar, sitting on the ground
with a cap in front of him. My grandfather took
the fiddle and started fiddling, and Peg started dancing, and
he collected more money that day than he probably did
in a year before that, and was with her head
over a heel. So he was always a rebel. He
was always looking out for the underdog, and my mother

(03:34):
was the very very same thing. So fast forward thirty
or forty years, my mother is in Cork City. She's
shopping one evening and she's going down the side street
and there's a blind beggar outside efficient chip chop, and
he's singing. He's a ballad deer, so he'll sing a
ballad and then he'll try to sell the sheets for

(03:54):
a penny each, and he's singing his hers and people
are coming in out of the chipper, and at once
the big thug came and grabbed the man's his cap
and ran off with the money. And my mother saw
it and she took up after him, all the ways
up Oliver Plunkers Steet, and the guy would look back
you could see her, big, big bulk of a guy,
six feet six, not two hundred and fifty pounds. And

(04:14):
my mother is a little slip of a girl. And
she keeps following him, and he threatens her and she'll stop,
and then you go on again and she'll follow him.
And friendly goes into a pub, and she went outside
the pub for two hours and he comes back over
another guy and they go off down the street and
she's following them and they split up finally, and she
follows the guy and at some stage she sees a

(04:34):
gord Sejana, an Irish policeman, and started screaming and the
cop ran over and she says, this guy's after beating
up a little a blind buyer. So they grab him,
and the cop says to her, this guy's been arrested many,
many times, but nobody will give evidence against because they're
fed him. She said, I give evidence. So he's frog
marching the guy to the prison and my mother's walk
behind him and she's kicking him in the toush every

(04:56):
five or six hours in the backside family of standing
up the underprivileged and the marginalized. So that's where I
got it.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
So that's where you got it. Did you also get
a step dancing as well?

Speaker 3 (05:10):
I didn't. My grandfather was a step dancer, a musician,
and a storyteller. I got the storytelling, my sister got
the dancing, and my brother got the music.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
I'll tell you what you got for your mom though,
I mean she stood up to that guy. You stood
up to the Catholic church.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
I did. I did? You did?

Speaker 2 (05:34):
Just tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
I've been thrown out of more places, and then most
people have gotten into Sandy, Kenya after fourteen years working
as a missionary in Kenya because of our work I
was doing on social justice, and so at one stage
the area I lived in called the Bringo Desert. There
was a very bad famine going on there, and I
was bringing in food from the World Bank. Of all places,

(06:00):
I was getting three loriy loads of food every month
and I was distributing it to the nineteen villages in
my parish. And I found out that a local politician
who was like an assistant minister in the government, was
using government troops to take the food from his own
people and he was selling it. So he and I
clashed furiously at public meetings, and at one day, the

(06:20):
president of the country was from the last tribe I
worked with a guy called Daniel Tooritite Cherup Moy was
coming to address a big rally in the area. So
I put on my white sutan and I got on
to this meeting and I got grabbed it by the
Special Branch CID chief of police and dragged before the
district commissioner and I was give for forty eight hours
to leave, and so I was like Probably the saddest

(06:43):
day of my life was the twentieth of May nineteen
eighty six when I left Kenya for the last time.
So then I came in. I lived free year in London.
I was studying hypnosis then I came to the States
in nineteen eighty seven and I was working within the
Catholic Disis of Lukuru to eight years there. That threw
me out because I was advocating for women priests and

(07:04):
the Catholic Church, and I was talking about reincarnation, which
I believe very strongly and have had several experiences. So
I got some of the Catholic Diocese in Kuru and
then about on the Feast of Saint Francis October fourth,
twenty ten, I get a two page letter in Latin
from the Vatican telling me they no longer required myself,

(07:26):
that I could no longer represent myself as a Catholic priest.
I couldn't teach in any Catholic college or not even
a primary school. The only way I could exercise my
priesthood was if I came across somebody who was dying
and there was no other priest there to hear the
confession and shrive them. I could then hear the confession
and give them absolution. Part from that, I was.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Also so that the Pope did Donald Trump on you
find it?

Speaker 3 (07:51):
I got fired.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
I just love it.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
I love it, you know.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
I read in something reportble you that the local priests
complained to the bishop that you were taken away their
truitioners because you was such a good story each other.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
It's hard to be a good story tellers. Yeah, I
got so an old of the Diocese Santas And then
I had a friend who was the head master, the
principal of a big Catholic school in the next diocese,
and he'd be not after me for a few years
to be to work as a chaplain for the school.

(08:31):
So I said, I tell you what I'll do. I'll
work as a chaplain one day a week if you'll
give me the school auditorium to send Mas and Sundays.
So we agree to that. So the first Sunday we
went there, there were five hundred people packed into the
school auditorium and we had drained the local parishes. The
Catholics mother parishes were coming in. And that went on
for about six or seven months, and then somebody sent

(08:52):
a complaint to the Archdiocese of San Francisco that that
this was happening, and he ordered the school principal to
shut up down. He said, people should be going to
Mass in their own parish, is not in the school auditorium,
so that got shutdown is in Yeah, well you.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Know what a great advertisement. Great advertisement for you and
for the church, not so great for them. So so
you and Matthew Fox must be good for INDs.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
Then, yeah, I've met I only met him once ever,
I heard him speak once. I was very impressed by him.
But I love what he did. So matt actually took
refuge in the Episcopal Church, so they took him under
their under their wings. I actually set up an organization
of my own called Companions on the Journey, which is
still going strong twenty seven years later. And so I'm

(09:41):
a spiritual director for that group. And it's a non
denominational group, so we have people from all kinds of
backgrounds Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Christian. And what I advocate is
that people need to work on what I called you,
their own personal cosmologies. You can't imported. But most of
us are living driven by some kind of an internalized

(10:04):
philosophy of life which we have unconsciously acquired. And you
put us in any situation and it would be unconsciously accessed.
So we were given it by the churches, by the
school system, by television, by politicians, by newspapers. So we're
constantly being given told what we're supposed to believe. And
I say, all the great teachers have told us, you

(10:25):
have to think for yourself. Socrates would say the unexamined
life is not worth living and gout to mister Darka
would call himself Buddha, which means I'm awake. And Jesus
Christ would say if the householder knew at what stage
the thief was going to break in and steal, he
wouldn't go to sleep. So again and again, it's about
coming awake, you know, and figure out what do I believe?

(10:48):
So I use this kind of example sometimes that there
are three parts of philosophy which are really important here epistemology, ontology,
and cosmology. So homology is how do we know what
we know? So, for instance, you know, is it because
we were told something? Is it because we had the
experiences for your for ourselves? Is it because we works

(11:10):
the fuck and the're on? How do you know what
you know? How do you how do you gather the
data in So that's a pistemology. Then ontology is how
do you decide what's true among all the data that
you're gathering? And then cosmology is, now that you've figured
out what are the kind of the truths, how do
you put it together inside the kind of a jigsaw?
So I use this kind of weird example. Imagine you've

(11:31):
just bought bought a big jigsaw puzzle, five thousand pieces,
and you bring it home and you rip off the
cell of phane and you open the box. You ever
loook and then you grow to work in the garden
and your child comes in, five year old child, and
he sees this, and he scatters the pieces all over
the house. There's some in the bathroom, some in the
in the in the in the kitchen, some in the
dining room. They're all over the place. And the dog

(11:52):
has joined in the fun. And the dog has kind
of taken out a corplex box and showed it up,
and there are hundreds of pieces of the complex box
scattered among the jigsaw puzzle pieces. And you come in
and you see this mess. So first thing you have
to do is you have to gather up all the pieces.
That's epistemology. The second thing is you got to figure
out which pieces belong to the jigsaw puzzle and which

(12:13):
pieces belong to the corn flace box. That's ontology. And
then the third piece, once you figured out what he
looks to the jigsaw, Now you got to create the jigsaw,
and that's cosmology. And so I can tell people go
out there and find the pieces and then figure out
for yourself what are the true pieces. And when you
find the true pieces, put them together and create the
jigsaw puzzle. And the jigsaw puzzle will show you the

(12:34):
face of guide. That's exactly what the jigsaw puzzle is.
And you can't borrow it from anybody else. You know,
you can listen to others, but you have to kind
of figure it out on your own. How do you
gather the information on which you decide to create your cosmology?
And that's a lifelong process, and if you do it properly,
it seems to me, you know, it should do four
things for you. The first thing is, if you have

(12:56):
your own personal cosmology, it should make your soul saying,
because it's in resonance with your core being. Secondly, it
should stretch you out of your comfort zone because it's
going to wake you up the stuff to the illusions
that you under which you've been living. Thirdly, you've got
to constantly update it and Fourthly, you have to kind
of be part of a community that will kind of

(13:19):
support you in your search for truth, but challenge you
in your belief systems. And so that's the message I
constantly to tell people. Figure it out for yourself. I
don't care what kind of a background you came from,
but you're living under an illusion. All of us are
living under the delusion. So there's this great passage and
the Nasty Gospel of Thomas where Thomas says there are
six stages to the journey. He says those who seek

(13:43):
should not stop searching until they find stage truth. When
they find, and when you find, you will be disturbed.
And when you are disturbed, you will marvel. And when
you marvel, you will reign, and when you rain, you
will rest. So what's he talking about. He's saying, most
of us are living a cosmology. You're not that we've
been given by others. If you're serious about your spiritual journey,

(14:06):
you have to go on the search. You have to
begin the hero's journey. But when you find what you're
looking for, you're going to be really distressed because it
won't jibe of what you've been told. And now the
temptation is let me go back to my mother church.
We go back and clink or cottails, taking the serenity
and the security of dogma. But if you have the

(14:26):
courage to keep searching after that, then you're kind of
you're going to marvel because you're going to begin to
see the world with totally different eyes. And when you marvel,
you will rule because now you're the master of your
own destiny. Nobody else is calling the shots for you.
And when you're master of your own destiny, then you
can rest because you've found who you really are. And
now the journey of love is going to take you

(14:48):
all the way back to source.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
That's beautiful and that you absolutely right and that you know.
That's how I look back on my journey, brilliant constantly searching, searching,
and things away that didn't feel right, and embracing those
that did, until eventually it all comes together.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
Absolutely absolutely chosen your rock, Sandy. When you look at
what you've achieved, what you're at, and you're you're pushing
the envelope in all these areas, so that's you're demonstrating
extraordinary courage and perspicacity and a vision because you're seeing
what most people aren't open to seeing yet. So thank
you for doing much. You're doing well.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Thank you for saying that. Let's talk about these books.
I love the titles. You know, you're great. I mean,
you could have been a publisher an editor. You know,
the titles you come up with, Spirits in spaces and
menu for every day mystics. Tell us a little bit
about that.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
I came to the realization many many years ago, and
it's based on a statement of he said, we are
not you know, human beings have no occasional spiritual experiences.
We're spirit beings having a human experience. And that felt really,
really real to me. And then I have the practice
of seeding my dreams before I go to sleep at night.
I've been kind of collecting my dreams since about nineteen

(16:10):
seventy nine. And so I'll ask a question, you know,
of my angel guardian, or my higher self or my
soul self, whatever world I want to give to it.
So I'll pose a question before I go to sleep,
and then expect an answer. So when I was about
to write my first book in English, I wanted a
good title that were kind of encapsulate what I was about.

(16:31):
And I woke up in the morning, you know, And
this phrase on my burden in my in my head,
call it Spirits in Spacesuits, a manual for everyday mystics,
because we're all mystics. Mystics are not special people who
live on mountaintops, you know, you know, sit in Zasen
for their entire lives. Every one of us is a mystic,

(16:51):
every single one of us. You know, we're sourced from
Guide and we volunteered to come down here, you know,
we choose to be here, and we choose to be here. Now,
we volunteered for three dimensional density. Only the bravest souls
in the universe do that. So every one of us
is an innatei mystic. But we're born into a system
of forgetting because when we agree to incarnate into three dimensionality,

(17:16):
we accept four huge limitations. And the first one is
we trade our cosmic being for these tiny little spacesuits,
you know, one hundred and fifty pounds spaceit my case,
and we trade a cosmic intelligence for this little three
pound massive webwear that we carry between our ears, we
call a brain. And then since this brain is so small,

(17:39):
it kind of grock the entire gelt of our experience.
So we have to break it up into bite sized
pieces and process them, you know, sequentially, giving rise to
the illusion of time. And then finally we agree to
have amnesia for who we are, why we've come, and
we're our homes because the discovery is the is the adventure.

(18:00):
If we had all the answers, there would be no adventure.
The hero would never go into the dark forest, you know,
if she had all the answers already. And so there's
these four limitations there, our cosmic size or cosmic intelligence,
you know, illusion of time, and then forgetting the amnesia
for who we are, so we're extraord All of us
are mystic, So I say, every day domestics. You look

(18:22):
around you. Everybody is a mystic. But we are mystics
with amnesia. So the trick then is to wake up.
So our the first job is to wake myself up,
the second job that had others wake up, and the
third job is to create you know, christ consciousness and
our cosmos. So that's the journey every single one of
us have agree to. So it's a question of can

(18:43):
I roll back the amnesia before I croak, before I
shoffle off this mortal coil.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
You followed that book up with another one with the
great title Souls on SAFARII and guide it to mystical wisdom.
We are souls on Safari.

Speaker 3 (19:01):
Absolutely, absolutely. So it's interesting that typically it kind of
in the in the English speaking world, when we hear safari,
we think it's an exotic kind of trip to Africa
watching lights and you know, I'm kind of a big game.
But actually fact in Swahili, the word safari just means
a journey. Any journey is it called safari. So going
to the grocery store for milk is a safari, and

(19:24):
so a safari is any journey. But journeys look ordinary,
but there is no such thing as an ordinary journey.
Anytime you set out, you know with a purpose, you're
on the journey of the soul. The soul is saying
to you, Sandy, here's the situation in what you're going
to kind of reveal your mystical nature to the world. Now,

(19:44):
it's just saying hi to the person who sells you,
send you the milk. You know, it's waving at somebody
in traffic whom you may or man notal recognize them.
They're giving them the right way. And so in a sense,
every single journey is a journey of mysticism. So indeed
it is a safari. You're going to meet the exotic
animals of East Africa, you know, as you go grocery

(20:05):
shopping in Palo Alto, a few ways to see what
really is.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's an infinite.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
Absolutely absolutely infinite. It has no beginning, has no end.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
You know, I think I have a night you know.
Another clue as to why the Catholic Church kicked you out,
you know, I mean, if they were to embrace the
way you explained things, far more people would still be
going to church.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
Absolutely absolutely, So one of the things I say, Sandy,
is that I think religion is the training reels for spirituality.
The religion is important that says that it helps to
create community, and we all need community various kinds, and
if it's doing its job properly, it's creating an altered
state of consciousness. Really good liturgy should create an altero

(20:55):
state of consciousness, and the Catholic Church got that, got
it really well at some stage with particularly the High Masses,
because great ritual and great liturgy it should activate all
of the senses in order to create an ultra state
of consciousness. So yourself like incense, so you're affecting the
olfactory part of us. You're looking at your stained glass

(21:16):
windows in the church. Now that's a visual impact. You're
kind of you're greeting people, So that's a tactile version.
You know, there's great music, so there's an auditory to
mention to it. The holy community should be it should
be tasty. The wine is terrible, but it should be,
so there should be. It should be a gustatory experience.
So great liturgy actually should be activating the entire sensorium.

(21:38):
And that's the best way of elevating into an alto
state of consciousness. Because ultimately, the objective of all ritual,
of all storytelling, of all art, of all music, of
all dancing is to create an altero state of consciousness
in which your soul is singing the kind of the
symphony of the of the cosmos itself. And so religion

(21:58):
should be able to do that first. And then let
us go free, sell us free go after college and
colleges has missed us. As now you're free to let
go of the dogma that supported you and the training
wheels that stopped you from falling over as a child,
and now you're on your pedling on your own, and
you're going where nobody has gone before because you're in
a unique articulation of source.

Speaker 4 (22:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
Absolutely, So I want to devote the rest of the
show to this wonderful book that you wrote called Setting
God Free. Moving beyond the character that we've created in
our own image. You created a courtroom scene to bring
your way to trial for crimes against humanity. I mean,

(22:43):
this book is very irreverent, it's very in use in
and it's field with solid research that does debunk a
lot of the information presented as gospel in the Old Testament.
What gave you the idea to use the courtroom.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
I'm not the first one to do it. The Book
of Job did it, you know, twenty six hundred years ago,
where Job is really upset with God and he calls
him to task and there's this back and forth between
between the two of them. Joe comes out at the
wrong side of that that debate. But there was actually
an event in in House Fitch during when six million

(23:23):
Jewis were killed for il v Sell as a young
boy and a group of Jewish lawyers held a trial
and put God on trial for abandoning his people. No,
I think the difference between the book I've written and
Job Job is just a kind of advocating for himself,
you know, and taking God to task for his treatment

(23:43):
of Job. In the in Oustrich, they were taking to
task for his treatment of the Jewish people, the chosen people.
I'm taking God to task for his abandonment of humanity
or what appears to be, you know, God's abandon of humanity.
And of course, in the course of the book I took,
I had Bible scholars and kind of archaeologists and psychologists

(24:07):
and legal experts on both sides, prosecution and defense. You're
putting God in trial, and the ultimate realization was that
this God is actually a projection or own shadow material
as individuals and as particular cultures. But I wanted to
walk people through the script the scriptures themselves, you know,
showing that this is evidence coming from allegedly God's own mouths.

(24:30):
So I'm putting the God of the Scriptures on trial
because of the God of the Scriptures is mythology, and
once we understand what mythology is about, you know, it
has a very powerful message. I was lucky enough to
be raised bilingually and Gaelic in English, and then to
learn four African languages and their mythology. And with the

(24:51):
conclusion I've come to is that mythology is the archived
wisdom of a culture. And in some cultures they do
it in the kind of a literary form, have books.
Other cultures it's just storytelling, or it's proverbs of various kinds.
And so I remember this as a young man, when
I was still in high school, spending an entire summer

(25:11):
vacation in a little village in Westcark called kole A,
in which Gaelic is still the spoken mother tongue. And
I was collecting proverbs, and in Gaelic we call them
shan ochel, which means ancient words. And I will go
out to all the elders in the village and ask
them give me a proverb and tell me in what
context you might use it. But I remember, so I

(25:31):
collect four hundred and thirty two proverbs during that summer.
But I remember one old man saying to me, he said,
if Christianity had never come to Ireland, we could live
according to the proverbs. He's absolutely right. And when I
went to Africa as a missionary. You know, and I
learned the mythology of four different tribes. I would say
to the people, if Christiandrey had never come to Africa,

(25:54):
you guys could live accarding to your proverbs, because the
mythology is the archived wisdom of culture, and proverbs are
the distillation, the one liner distillation of this great teaching.
And so I put the Bible, I put the bag Gita,
I put the the Picctnicaus of Buddhism. I put the
Quran into this category of mythology. There are stories that

(26:16):
our ancestors told to try to make sense of where
they've come from, to allow them to survive present vicissitude
and to have hope for the future, which is better
than the present. And so they make up these stories
to support each other. From that point of view, they're
really really important. We always have to be the good
guys in every mythology. We're the good guys and our
enemies are the bad guys. So you have to create

(26:38):
an enemy for us in order to feel good about yourself.
So once you understand that in his mythology, then you
begin to see the meaning, the deeper meaning of what
it is to be kind of stuck in the vicissitude
of incarnation, you know, in a particular culture, in a
particular family system, and still kind of make sense of
it and survive, you know, the tragedies of family life

(27:01):
and cultural life and global life.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
Is there a difference between God and Yahweh? I mean
some people say there are two gods in the Bible.
There's Jesus is God, you know, compassionate father, and we
have the very punitive and dictatorial yahwey Absolutely huge both myths.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
Huge difference. So in fact, the word jahveh, there's no
there's no etymological origin that they can't figure out. It's
not it's not a Hebrew word. It's that doesn't have
from any of these Semitic languages. They cannot figure out that.
In Hebrew is called the tetragrammatron, the teto grammatan, the
four letters you'd have of hay. But there's no way.

(27:46):
We don't know how to pronounce it. And when you
look at the Semitic languages, there's no etymological basis for
this this word. So it's a made up kind of
a kind of a clue in somewhere. Now the God,
you know, when we talk about God, there are four
things that I don't believe about God. The first thing,
I do not believe that God is a person. I

(28:07):
don't believe that there's you know, a dude sitting in
the sky with a long graybeard called God. So God
is not a person. But I can only have a
personal relationship with God or source. I live in the
middle of the forest, in my nearest neighbors half mile
the way, you know, I'm surrounded by wildlife. I spend
a lot of my time just trekking knows a creek here, forest,
I spend a lot of time. I've been living here

(28:27):
now for twenty nine years. I have a personal relationship
with the forest. But the forest is not a person.
But because I'm a person, the only kind of relationship
I can have with the forest is a person. So
God is not a person. But the only relationship we
can have with God is a personal relationship. I don't
think God is a creator. God doesn't go into his
workshop on a Monday morning say today, I'm going to

(28:49):
let me see I'm going to create elephants, and then
tomorrow he says, uh, today I'm going to create mosquitos.
So I don't believe that's how it works that rather,
everything that exist is an emanation from Source. So here
this powerful, powerful vision. Just last year I had always
I had a very bad fever, and everything I got

(29:09):
a fever. I get these powerful visions. I got it
in Ken every single year from malaria. I have malaria
and the nut of these fevers in the nat of
these visions. But in this vision I could see, you know,
Source or God, whatever you want to call her. There
are source sources lonely in a sense, because if God
is all that exists, then no experiences are possible. If

(29:32):
there's nothing with which to relate, you can't generate experiences.
So the only way in which God could generate experiences
was through what's called you know in Hebrew nets. It
seem self fracturing into kind of bits ofself. So I
call these, you know, holographic fractals of Source. No hologram
is an entity that contains the totality of itself and

(29:53):
every one of its component parts, and a fractal is
a pattern that repeats at an infinite number of scales.
Vision which there is God, and God decides, you know,
to self fracture in order to be able to generate experiences.
Because our function is like we're like bees leaving the
hive to generate experiences for the queen bee and bring

(30:13):
back pollens that will be converted into honey. That's the
function of incarnation. And so God generates these net soo
seam billions of souls in order to generate experiences for herself.
And then AT's some state God calls I call it
the first conference, where God invites us to be co
creators together and God says, let's do something fantastic, you

(30:36):
and I. So we all get together with God and
we decide to create a cosmos. So the cosmos is
co created. It's created by God as source and by
the nets seam as kind of you know, holographic factors
the source. And so we're witnessing this extraordinary cosmos, all
of the various creatures in this cosmos. So we're we're

(30:56):
like what Buddhism called turia witnessing consciousness, the awareness of being,
to observe all that is. And at some stage God says,
I want to call a second conference. Let's get together
if there's something even more exciting we can do rather
than the observers of this cosmos, which we have co created,
and the decision was, yes, let's create avatars so we

(31:20):
can insert ourselves into the cosmos and experience it from
the inside out as creatures, you know, as bunny rabbits,
as oak trees, as human beings, as angelic beings or whatever.
And so we co created a level of the cosmos
in which we could be avatars, you know, and experiencers.
And Buddhism we call this to the ability to both

(31:42):
observe but not identify with, and at the same time
to participate in. It's not cultural anthropology. We call the
participant observer the realization that you can't go into a jungle,
you know, in the Amazon, you know, with a notepad
and watch what the natives are doing. Very fact that
you're their influences their behavior, and so you have to

(32:03):
be a participant observer. And so here we are then
that you know, we are co creators with God of
a cosmos, you know, and co creators of our own
participation in these cosmos. So God, then, for me, is
not somebody who just created something ex nahilo, you know
on the Monday and something else on the Tuesday. That God,
you know, is everything that exists, is an emanation of

(32:25):
source which was co created by the first wave of
this emanation. And so God, for me then, is not
a creator. God is not a judge. God is not
partisan in anyway. God has no chosen people, and God
is no special religion. So when when Roman Cathosism says
extra ecclesium nula salus, I don't believe it, you know,

(32:46):
extracclasium nola sALS outside the Catholic Church, there is no redemption.
I don't believe that for a moment. There's no chosen religion,
there's no chosen scripture, there's no chosen people. Everything around us,
every rock in the river that I sit on, is
an articulation of the divine. Every spider building a web,
you know, is the divine dance in this incarnation. So

(33:09):
there is nothing which is not of God. There is
nothing which does not speak to us of God. And
pretend that God only speaks in one language and just
made a revelation to one protectar group of people, and
you can only be saved through one particular avenue. That's
total micha Gas as far as I'm concerned. So there's
no way I can get behind that anymore.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
And so we are not creatures that are in school
to learn how to improve ourselves so that we can
come before God.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
There is no way we can be separated from God.
You can no more be separated from God than a
ray of sunlight can be separated from the sun. I
can put up an umbrella and not a field effective anymore,
but the sun is still shining. God is Love. There
is nothing. I talk sometimes about the five l's. You
know that ultimately there is only love but love birth twins.

(34:02):
I call them light and logus. So we know from
pantum mechanics that all matter is frozen light, literally frozen light.
If you could take the light hidden in one human body,
you could light up a baseball stadium for at one
million wats for three and a half hours. That's how
much light a single room body contains. So all matter

(34:23):
is frozen light. So that's the second L light. The
third ell is logus. Logos is the Greek word is
a kind of a morphological agent, that which brings kind
of a form to matter. If you imagine a potter
with the lump of clay, you know the matter is
the clay, but it is the genius of the potter
that creates a cup or a bowl out of it.

(34:44):
And so the logos is the morphological agent that creates
form out of matter. And then these two dance together
form and not a light and logus dance together, and
they create life. And so life is the offspring, you
know of what happens when you're get light and the
logos dancing together. And the entire objective of life is

(35:07):
to learn how to laugh, to wake up to the
realization that we're living in Maya, to realize, you know
that there is nothing except love, that birth and light
and logus that gave life, whose objective was to learn
how to laugh. And so for me when I think
about when I think about God, that that's what I think.
Love is the ultimate source. God is love. There is

(35:27):
no way anything can be permanently separated from the source.
We can prop our umbrellas of our cosmologies, we can
put up the umbrellas or fundamentalists thinking, we can put
up the umbrellas of cultural divides, but ultimately you take
that artificial thing away and there is guide. There is love.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
That is the best description I've ever heard of who
we are. And we're going to take a short break
now and when we come back, I want to ask
you about some of these questions from your book and
some of the ones that I mentioned at the beginning.
So you're listening to what is going on? I'm Sandy
Sedigbier and my guest today is poet, storyteller, scientist, wisdom keeper,

(36:10):
and clinical psychologist Father Sean o'lera, and we're talking about
the revelation shared in his books. And after the break
we will be talking more about setting God free, moving
beyond the caricature we've created in our own image. We'll
be back with more from Father Shawan a Lera after
this break.

Speaker 5 (36:33):
Sometimes TV.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Hello, I'm Sandy Sedbrier, host a Mob Times flagship radio
show What is going On? And as an author editor
and Thirteen Times Book judge who's read thousands of books
and interviewed hundreds of authors, I'm constantly asked what's really
worth reading and what's not? So I created the NOBS
Spiritual Book Club to help you save time and money

(37:01):
by picking the brains of discerning names who walk this
path before you. There's no catch, no fees, and no bs,
just an ever grown library of ten best spiritual book
lists from some of your favorite authors and teachers, plus
three book exerts, audios and video interviews with people like
Don Miguel Ruis Junior, David g Lee, Harris Martnpo and

(37:22):
mon from well known classics to hidden gems you've never
heard of. It's the only Nobs guide to the best
spiritual books to enlighten your journey of self discovery. So
why not join the club, Get inspired and save money
at the Nobsspiritual Bookclub dot com.

Speaker 5 (37:43):
Imagine becoming a super influencer, reinvent yourself, invest in your brand,
and then manifest your success with a robust, spheric approach.
Own Times Media and Broadcasting offers a unique and multifaceted
way to become the spiritual and conscious influencer you deserve
to be. By putting your message across our powerful platform

(38:06):
with its proven record of integrity and excellence. Through our
produced shows, Own Times offers the opportunity to become a
social media TV personality, a radio show host, an Own
Times magazine columnist, and a syndicated podcaster all in one shot.
By live streaming your show on Home Times TV and

(38:26):
broadcasting it across the extensive Home Times Radio and TV networks,
you become more than a host. You become an ambassador
and a force for positive change own times. Open yourself
to the possibilities.

Speaker 6 (38:43):
Everything that we do, we can do in a contemplative manner.

Speaker 7 (38:47):
Through the art of contemplation, you can use the gene
Keys in a really powerful way.

Speaker 8 (38:52):
Gen Keys is basically the codebook of life in the
gen Keys, the book is made up of these three
levels shadows, gifts, and cities, and the journey is from
is through those three levels kind of unpicking of the
shadow states, the releasing of the gifts.

Speaker 6 (39:08):
And then the embodying of this higher consciousness called the city.

Speaker 7 (39:12):
And the cities are very exalted words, and it's not
like we kind of suddenly are all these exalted christ
like beings, but we have flashes and illuminations along the journey.
And the more we get stuck into the journey, the
more illumination comes to us, because the more we're releasing
the light from in these codes inside our DNA, so

(39:34):
all those revelations are inside us.

Speaker 6 (39:38):
So the contemplative way is the inner way.

Speaker 4 (39:49):
There are sixteen million children struggling with hunger in America.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
That's one in.

Speaker 4 (39:53):
Five daughters, sons, neighbors, and classmates who don't know where
their next meal is coming from. Yet, billions of pounds
of good f you go to waste every year. It's
time we do something about it. Feeding America is a
nationwide network of food banks that helps provide meals to
millions of kids and families in need. Visit Feeding America
dot org to help them feed even more. Together we

(40:13):
can solve hunger. Together, we're Feeding America.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
Welcome back, Father Sean Eleira. Let's debunk some of those
meats that are debated in the courtroom in setting God free.
So exodus now is ark slaughter of Egyptians Moses. By
applying mathematical and scientific calculations, none of these work out.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
So here's the kind of the story behind it. Every
people are going to try to create a mythology that
allows us to understand where do we come from. So
in Africa we have the house stories and the white stories,
and so every group, every culture who was trying to
figure out where do we originally come from? And we
imagine even where do we come from as a species,

(41:06):
let alone as in particular culture. The second thing is
we're in a particular situation right now. Every culture is
you know, how do we survive the vicissitude, or how
do we optimize the opportunities for the moment? And that
the next part is how do we prepare for the future.
So great mythology should explain the past, kind of energize
us to deal with the present and give us a

(41:28):
vision for the future. And that's what all the great
mythologies of the world do, including the alleged revelation experiences.
So the Hebrew scriptures as we've read them now, they're
coming from two different periods of Jewish history. So David
conquered Jerusalem in the year ten ten BC before the
Common Era, and he united twelve kind of warring tribes.

(41:51):
There were probably nomadic pastoralists. They hadn't come from Egypt.
There were there were Cananite groups actually, and we know
from kind of from the art geological evidence that the
only difference between this particular group of tribes and the
surrounding other Canaanites was the absence of pig bones, you know,
in their fireplaces. Everything else, that part of everything else
was identical. So there actually Canaanite tribes who've amalgamated together

(42:15):
about the year at ten ten BC under King David,
and he establishes his sone in jury captures Jerusalem in
ten ten BCE, and he rules for about forty years.
Then he succeeded by his son Solomon. Solomon died in
the nine thirty three BC. But when he died the
kingdom fractured and there was the ten Northern tribes seceded

(42:37):
and the two Southern tribes, Judah and Benjamin, were around
the Jerusalem and there's an ongoing civil war between the
two groups for a period. Then in the year seven
twenty two BC, the greatest Syrian and part came in
and had conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and it
deported ten tribes who were never heard of again. They
called the Lost Tribes of Israel. The two Southern tribes
survived for another one hundred and thirty years, and then

(42:59):
the Babylonian Empire overcame the Assyrian Empire, and it came
in in a conquer Jerusalem in five ninety eight PC
and it made it installed the puppet king, and then left.
But the puppet king rebelled, so the Babylonians came back
in in five to eighty nine BC. They gouged out
his eyes, they killed his kids right in front of them,
and they destroyed the first temple, the one that Salomon

(43:22):
had built about about nine to fifty you see. Now
at this stage, the last two tribes are taken into
exile in Babylon, you know, and they're therefore about fifty
years before another empire, the Persian Empire, overcomes the Babylonians
and sets the exiles free to go back into the
land of Israel, and they now build the second Temple,
which they've begin building about five point fifteen PC. Now,

(43:44):
in the period of exile, particularly they realize, we don't
want to go the way that or the ten tribes
in the north went. We need to create some kind
of a cohesion among us. So at this stage they
start kind of putting down all of the stories, the
mythology of the past, all these stories of their origin
stories and their survival stories and whatever, and they put
together a bunch of rules. So, for instance, it's at

(44:07):
this stage that they begin circumcising their kids, the boys,
to separate them from the surrounding tribes so they're physiologically different.
At this stage, they create the notion of the Sabbath.
The Sabbath was not created by Moses in twelve fifty BCE.
The Sabbath came at this day to separate the holiday
of the week from the ordinary days of the week.
They're separated at this stage tref from kosher. Trefisier unclean food,

(44:31):
and kosher is clean food. That separate the foods, they
separate what's called table fellowship. You can't eat meals with
non Jews, and so in everywhere they're trying to maintain
their cohesion by creating this bunch of laws. So that's
when the laws come from about five point fifty BCE.
They'll be put into attributed to Moses, who lived allegedly
seven hundred years before that. I know they're going to

(44:53):
amalgamate all the traditions, the kind of the stories that
came from the north, the ten northern tribes, and the
story through southern tribes, and then they create, you know,
they'll put all these together. And the great scholars have
been able to differentiate four different actually literary streams. Here
they're called j E P and d J stands for
Javist because the scholars were German, and so the jny

(45:17):
in German are identical. So these are stories in which
God allegedly is called jave that the question you asked earlier,
So that's the Javist tradition. Then the e is the
eloistic tradition. Because the word that's used for God, mainly
in the in the first five books of the Pentateuch,
you know, is Elohim. Luhim is actually a plural, and

(45:38):
it means the powerful ones. It does not mean God
in the sense of some kind of a divine oligarch.
It's a group of organizers, a group of colonizers and
subsets who came to Earth. Could call them ets or space,
people of whatever you want to call them, So they're
called Elohim. That's the second tradition of stories. The third
one that's called the Deutynomic, and this was a bunch

(46:00):
of material that was put together and ascribed to Moses,
but it was written seven hundred years after Moses put
to existence. And then the final one, it was p
the priestly tradition, which was written in Babylon by the
priests to hold the people together. So you got four
very very distinct strands of literature in the Bible. Now

(46:20):
at some stage they're amalgamated, whether they're still in Babylon
to try to bring cohesion, but it was very, very
badly edited. So in many cases you get totally contradictory
stories about the same events side by side with each other.
So even the story of the flood, there are three
different accounts of the flood juxtapole's side by side because
they were amalgamated. But they weren't edited very very well.

(46:43):
And you appreciate this. How do you mixed up writing
spirit sources? How do you get it to flow? They
didn't do a very very good job in it. They
come back to the land of Israel in five thirty
nine PCE, and now they're trying to build from scratch
again and they're enshrining this tradition as kind of the
thing that's going to hold them together for the future.

(47:04):
So in that sense it's really powerful. You look now
two five hundred years later, and this extraordinary people that
have been subjected to the more harassment and persecution than
any other tribe in the history of the planet, and
they're still holding themselves together. And what's holding together is
the sex or only mythology. Now, whether there's any kind
of real truth in it in the sense of being

(47:27):
of ontologically true, that's irrelevant the fact that it became
a mantra, an extended mantra that held this people together
and gave them the courage to face all these persecutions
and still survivors of people. That's the job of mythology.
And you look at any people who survived persecution, what
holds them together their mythology. It's not political leaders, you know,

(47:50):
it's not an agenda of any kind. It's the stories
that grandmothers and grandfathers are telling their grandkids about the
good old days.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Yeah, makes so much sense. So when I'm aware was
reincarnation removed from Christian doctrine.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
So it's very interesting that and the vast bulk of
the spiritual traditions of the world all believe in reincarnation
because they are great nature observers, and you look at nature.
Nature is constantly reincarnating itself. The trees that dropped off
your tree and autumn are suddenly going to appear again
in spring. So everything regenerates in a cyclical format. So

(48:33):
all the great spiritual auditions realize that reincarnation or remanifestation
is how you know the system works. Now you can
find it in Judaism and in the kind of mystic
of Judaism, very strong belief that you find it in
Hinduism and Buddhism, in Celtic mythology. You find in all
these traditions, and you find it a New Testament. There's
two great stories in the New Testament. There's one in

(48:55):
Matthew's Gospel of Chapter seventeen where Jesus, a week before
he died, takes Peter and James and John and they
go up into the top of Mount Tabor and he
has this extraordinary experience where he has a shift in
consciousness which are so profound that he's having an encounter
with Moses and Elijah. Now Moses, you know, the putative figured,
the mythological figure, would have lived, you know, twelve fifty BC,

(49:19):
twelve hundred and fifty years before Jesus. Elijah would have
lived seven hundred and fifty years before Jesus. But Moses
represents the kind of the Law, and Elijah represents the prophets.
And these are the two great legs of Jewish mythology,
the Law and the prophets. So Christ is having an
encounter with the Law and the prophets because He's going
to bring them together and conclude it in some way.
And his experience is so profound that the other three

(49:42):
guys can see as well. There is a kind of
a participatory mystical experience. And so he's coming down the
mountain at the end of it, and the disciples said
to him, why do the scriptures say that Elijah has
to come back before the Mischiah before the Messiah comes?
And Christ responses, Elijah has already come back, and they
didn't recognize him. And Matthew adds, apprentices here Jesus was

(50:06):
talking about John the Baptist. So if Jesus pointing out
that John the Baptist was the reincarnation of Eligia, now
there's another story. It thinks about John chapter nine where
Jesus and his disciples are coming out of the city
of Jericho and they're walking out and there's a blind
beggar sitting at the gates, a guy who has been
born blind. And the disciples look at him and they

(50:26):
said to Jesus, whose fault was it that he was
born blind? Was it his own fault or was it
his parents' fault. Now that that question doesn't make any sense.
How could somebody be born blind for their own sin
unless there was a previous incarnation. Now this is karmik
in the payback in some stances. So you have this
very strong notion Christ was here unless a man is

(50:48):
born again a wat and the spirity with entering the
king of family. So Christ is very strong on reincarnation. Now,
in five point fifty three a d. The Christian churches
got rid of it, and it was courtesy of the
empress at the time. I think she was called Theodora's
her name, and she was she'd been born in the
very lowlyest state and had walked her way up and

(51:10):
was married by the emperor. Now she's the empress of
the Byzantine Empire, and there's no way she's going to
agree to reincarnation. She's not going to come back and
risk being a kind of slave girl in the future incarnation.
So she prevents upon her husband, who was calling the council.
I think it was the second constant of Constantinople to
outlaw the notion of reincarnation, and it gets thrown ouse.

(51:32):
So for the first five hundred and fifty three years
it's accepted. Now it continues to sneak into Catholic theology
in the guise of what's called probatory. So purgatory is
a disincarnate place in which we continue to refine the soul.
So when you die as a Catholic, you're going to
go to one or two places, one of three places.

(51:52):
You go to heaven. You know, if you've been guiltless,
you know, and you met a priest just before you
died and he shrived you, you've got a bit of
all your say, you go straight to heaven. If you
die with a sin on your soul, like you just
ate meat and it was a Friday, you're going down,
or as a Sunday and you didn't get the mass,
you're going down. But there's another place if you weren't
that bad, but you weren't that good, there's a place

(52:13):
in between where will burn you for forty thousands years
and to refine you, to get rid of all against
the bad stuff. And that's called purgatory. So what does
it mean. It means some kinds with disincarnate kind of refining,
a factory before you're fit for heaven. So that's in
some stances, the Catholic version that survived of reincarnation, someplace
where you continue to refine your soul or you're good

(52:35):
enough to get to nirvana.

Speaker 2 (52:40):
Okay, you don't believe Jesus was a Christian and he
didn't come to found a new religion. So who was
he and what was his purpose?

Speaker 3 (52:53):
I actually believe that Jesus reincarnated many times. I believe
that Jesus was a reincarnation of the Buddha. The same
figure who appeared in five fifty BC in India appeared
in Israel, you know, two thousand years ago. And there
were in some senses, I think in the course of
the evolution of human life, that having decided to experience

(53:17):
three three D density as human beings and forgetting who
we really are, periodically there are great avatars and great
souls who come among us to kind of on stick
the stock wheels of human evolution. And I think that
there was a group came in at that stage. I
think it was a cohre group, because I think great
avatars always come in a group. So I think there's

(53:40):
a group of four souls that came in at that stage.
The first one was Jesus, who was bringing a christ consciousness,
and just a few nights ago I got a download
about that. I asked what is Christ consciousness. And the
message I got in the dream was Christ consciousness is
that permanent is the permanent awareness of the inner divinity
of everything that exists. That's Christ consciousness. So to be

(54:02):
Christ conscious, or to have Buddha nature, you are to
be enlightened or self realized, is to live in the
space of the realization constantly that everything I see. I
look at my window, I'm looking at trees. There's a
bunny rabbit on hill up there. I can see right
now that that's a divine articulation. So christ consciousness is
that permanent awareness of the iner divinity of brother is.

(54:22):
So here Christ came to bring that. His mother came
to bring what I call christa consciousness. What does the
feminine version of that look like? And then the court
consisted of Jesus, his mother, Mary of Magdala, and I
think John, the Beloved Disciple. So these were four great
souls who came in again to try to unstick the

(54:43):
stock wheels of the human evolutionary trajectory. I think he
may have come back, since I think perhaps Francis Vesisi
may have been further incarnation of Jesus. I think that
more importantly than reincarnating as a specific human individual. I
think Jesus may incarnate, you know, as a movement, as

(55:04):
a movement of christ consciousness, not in a specific personality,
but in fact as a as a as a kind
of a tendency in the human family to move back
into love and to move back into compassion for all
that exists. So I think he's among us again. I
think the Buddha is among us again. I think these
great these great sages are among us again. But they're
among us not so much as individual kind of avatars

(55:26):
as much now as they are by movements of the spirit.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
Fascinating, I mean, truly fascinating. I wish, I wish we
had more time to go deeper and further. But perhaps
you'll come back.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
I would love to come back. It's a pleasure. I
have so many more questions, and I'm irish. I'll talk
at the drop of a head.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
Of course you will, of course you will. Yeah, well
we're out of time now, Sean. Thank you so much
for joining us today. And my goodness. Yeah, if you
want a good read, if you really want a good read, yeah,
you've got to read Setting Godfree's It's quite a book.

(56:10):
Sean thank you, you too, you too. Okay, we'll make
another date, okay, Father Shawn Oleah. You can find out
more about his work, his book, his events, blog posts
and homilies at the website spirits in Spacesuits dot com.
That's it for this week. I'm Sandy Saigber. I'll be

(56:32):
back at the same time next week with another edition
of What Is going On? Till then, it's goodbye for
me and thanks again to Father Sean hell Leah

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Crime Junkie

The Brothers Ortiz

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}From Spirits in Space Suits to Souls on Safari with Fr. Sean OLaoire

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Crime Junkie

The Brothers Ortiz

All Episodes

From Spirits in Space Suits to Souls on Safari with Fr. Sean OLaoire

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang