E01“Suffering in Things We Can Control"

In this debut episode of "Spiritual Hot Sauce with Chris Jones," we look at the battle within as we navigate suffering in what we control. Chris delves into the internal compass and it can guide us through adversity. Join us as we uncover strategies, insights, and a different perspective into religion. 

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Episode 1 of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  
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Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:04

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Welcome, I'm Chris Jones. This is where believers and skeptics alike are invited to embark on a journey of faith, philosophy, and life from a different perspective. Whether we are joined by an insightful guest, or we just jump into the deep end, this exploration promises to challenge us all. Are we getting it right? This is Spiritual Hot Sauce.

UNKNOWN: 0:33

Spiritual Hot Sauce

SPEAKER_00: 0:39

I want to talk about suffering. And we're going to be on the subject for a little bit, a couple episodes anyway. I want to explore some different aspects of it. But when I say suffering, I'm using that very generally. It's everything from pain, suffering, adversity, good suffering, bad suffering, because there's such a thing. But it's all the earmarks that life is happening and how a human experiences it. Adversity sorts us out whether we know it or not. And I'm not saying that everything in Life is pain because that's not true. But there are important times of our life that it's there. I think of it as in two parts. It's suffering and hope. It's the carrot and the stick. And I don't think it's like our mentors that teaches us. What I think it is, is it's just the prompts. It's the prods that keeps us, as in humanity, moving in the right direction, where we need to be, where we need to go. The stick keeps us moving forward. The carrot is what we're trying to get to or what we're trying to get away from. Now, I would also say that in the carrot, we can superimpose our ideas of what we want and follow it out into the weeds and get lost and end up in a much worse state of suffering, which we'll get to in a minute. But it's emergent life. It's how we experience emergent life. It's how our brains are hardwired that just keeps us moving in the right direction. If you think of, and this is a very overused analogy, but if you think of a seed and its life cycle, that it goes into the ground and then it germinates, pushes through the earth, has to break ground, fights for the oxygen and the sun. And then grows and expands and then flowers and produces seeds so it can propel its own species. As we hear that, we think of it and how we experience it and what we hear is suffering. We hear adversity because the truth is in our growth, there is pain and that the pain and the suffering pushes us onward towards where we should be fighting to get to. Now, there are some religions that would tell us that in their religion, and you can circumvent the suffering. And I think that's an odd thing. But there is this teaching that, well, there's this word, it's from the New Testament, it's parosmos. And Jesus uses it, James uses it, and Peter uses it. In a negative context, that means temptation, being tempted of things that we want. Again, it's the carrot that pulls us off our path. But in the positive context and how they use it, it means trials, tribulations. It means testings. Suffering is what it's talking about, suffering. And they say that through suffering, we grow, we mature, we are defined, we transform. That doesn't speak to something that's to be circumvented, but something that's necessary. Matter of fact, Jesus says, I think it's in Luke 8, verse 13, and he says that those who receive logos, the word, and they receive it with all joy, in a time of parasmos, the suffering, they'll fall away. Their roots, they don't have any. That your roots grow during a time of suffering. And he goes on to say through 14 and 15 that the beautiful stuff, the good stuff, as we push through the suffering, we grow into it, through it, and we get to a much, much better situation. And if we keep going with that thought, let me say this. If you think about all scriptures, not just all scriptures, whatever you consider to be the scripture, we'll even throw philosophy in there. Anything that's higher thought that helps us get to a better place. If you take... Everything that was inspired in suffering out of Scripture or higher thinking writings, then there's very little left of anything at all that we are elevated through this process in a strange way. And again, I'm not saying that we go there and live there. It's more like a season that we go through that takes us to kind of a better place. So that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about suffering and things that we can control. But I want to start with this question of why does God allow suffering? But I want to start with what we fight with within ourselves as we go through these sufferings, because there's two pieces. It's our duality, what I would call our duality. It's the battle within us. of how we navigate. And it's two parts. The first part is our emotions. Now our emotions are gauges of what we want, what we need, how we feel, our desires, our fears. But emotions don't understand a culmination of choices of behaviors. Emotions just want immediate gratification. They're like a five-year-old running around in our psyche. That's exactly what they're like. It's not to say they're bad. They're just gauges. Now, the thing that fights with them is a word that the Greeks used was kardia, which is your heart. But in their definition of kardia or heart, It is your center, your essence. It is how you choose. It is your will. But in their definition, emotions wasn't there. It's not in that definition. But it is your will and your emotions that fight, and they're what we struggle with, the battle within how we choose to navigate through these sufferings, these times in our lives, the carrot and the stick. So I have this concept of the compass. I'm going to share north and south with you in this episode. We'll get to the east and west in the next episode, but I want to share with you the concept of north and south. Think of north representing our emotions. That's immediate gratifications, our needs, our wants, our desires, our fears. That is north. Think of south as discipline. That represents our will and how we move through things, how we choose to move through things. Now, these two will fight against each other to get to, well, I should say we navigate through these things and we often and sometimes find ourselves fighting with our emotions because that happens a lot. But we try to get to the center. The center is where the good stuff happens. If you think of life as a marathon, how you choose and the longer you can stay in the center of the compass is where the really good stuff happens. It's in that balance. However, there's going to be seasons and times in your lives, periods where you're going to have to be disciplined. And there's going to be things in your life that you deal with that you're going to have to be disciplined. And these things, I think, as discipline is micro-dosing and suffering, that you can micro-dose and suffering in order to avoid the big bad suffering later on. It's like, let's say if I want a whole dozen donuts every single morning, that's what I want to eat. That's what my desire is for. If I allow myself to do that and give myself that, there's going to be long-term repercussions of those behaviors, okay? But if I microdose in suffering and don't allow myself that and I exercise moderation, I can avoid the problems that come with obesity later on because I microdosed in suffering every day. In religion, a lot of different religions and thinking and philosophies, water fasting is practiced. Now, And I think water fasting is a fantastic way to identify these two aspects of ourselves. Because in water fasting, you're going to find out really quick where your will is and where your emotions are, north and south. It becomes a battle of attrition. But it helps you kind of strengthen up your will or realize where you have opportunity to grow as a person, to strengthen your will. Now, north, sometimes you need to listen to north. There's healthy things. emotions. It's not to say emotions are bad. They're not. You know, there's healthy fear, but there's also fear that you have to overcome. And I get also when I say microdosing and suffering, it starts to sound like a gym mantra, but that's not what I mean. You can also, it's in all aspects of life. If we think about somebody that's alone in their life and they want a mate, they want to find a partner, and they're so tired of being alone, they just start to look for anybody that's available, that's an opportunity. And maybe what they should be doing is exercising, microdosing, and suffering, which means stay alone and start investing in yourself. Start building value in yourself so you start giving yourself better options. You start getting a higher caliber of selection of potential suitors where you have better options. But immediate gratification would say, no, I'm alone. I don't want to be alone. Let's just go find somebody. But think of that in terms of, okay, now you have children with somebody that in the long term isn't right for you. So there's suffering to that. Now you're also having children with them, which means you have 50% of somebody's DNA that you may not even like, and you see that behavior in your children. Now you have guilt because of some of your feelings. Do you see how this could give itself to long-term suffering? So microdosing and suffering can take you to a much better path and a much better place. Now, I make it sound really easy and simple that if we choose between North and South, but the truth is we all have emotions that we can't control. And it's easy for us, if we can control our eating, to sit in judgment of somebody that can't, that struggles with it, right, I should say. But at the same time, we all have something that we struggle with that gets us into trouble. And it gets really complicated. There's a lot of variations to this. There's a lot of things that impacts and influences and reacts with how it all comes together. And the truth is, to really get this compass working in your favor, we spend as much time as you possibly can in the center. It's going to require a whole lot of education and learning and studying. There's a whole lot to it. and navigating through this process, if it's a good religion. To me, a good religion is one that is meant to serve man. A bad religion is one that requires man to serve it. Two different ideas going on. A religion that creates a mountain that you have to climb in order to earn your way to God, to me, is a bad religion. I think a good religion serves you and helps you, gives you the tools you need to choose and how to move forward to get to the good things in life. It's there to serve and help humanity, not have humanity serve it. I'm not talking about... a good religion serving man as in worship. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm serving man as in tools that help man get further and better, get to a better place. And I know that might come off sounding funny to some people. And I get this idea. It's actually from the teachings of Christ. It's a story of Christ. It's in Mark 2, verse 27. And it's the Sabbath. And Jesus is with some of his disciples and they're walking by a crop on the Sabbath. And some of the disciples start pulling the grain off, which is a big, big no-no in Judaism. And some Pharisees see the disciples doing this, so they challenge Jesus hard. Well, who are the Pharisees? Well, that's an interesting story of itself. They represent the religion. They represent the idea of you have to climb the mountain and earn your way to God. But they superimpose themselves in this pecking order or this... caste system of importance, of how you earn your way, kind of of earning respect of others, where others would aspire to be like you and see you as important. It's a demeaning system, but you got to earn your way to God through it. And that's what the Pharisees represent, that man is to serve the religion. That's exactly what the Pharisees serve. Now, every place in the Bible where Jesus calls anybody that tells them that their father is Satan or that there are pit of vipers or anything like that. It's always Pharisees or people that are religious that completely follow this belief where Jesus says, well, your father is Satan. So he's not saying it to be nasty or mean. It is in making you aware that the religion you're using is poison. It's not helping you get to a better place. It's tying you up because that's what a bad religion does. It keeps you from moving on. So this is how Jesus responds to the Pharisees that challenged him hard on his disciples pulling the grains. And Jesus says this,"...the Sabbath is meant to serve man, not man serve the Sabbath." In Judaism, the Sabbath is the seal. So when you say the Sabbath, it represents the complete law, the complete religion, everything to do in this promise between man and God. And Jesus just said that the Sabbath is meant to serve man, not the other way around. So he is saying that the whole thing was meant to help man in his journey and his path. That's a whole different way of thinking. Let me give you an example of good religion, of what Jesus is talking about. If you think of a restaurant and think of the owner who's not there physically to do this, but he's got people there in this restaurant, and he has provided utensils, he's provided tools, everything you need to do your job, which is produce food for others to eat. because that's the job of the chef. So he's hired a chef that are in there. The chef is to produce food with all these fantastic tools and utensils that the owner's provided, which represents God. The chef is us in life. Now, the Pharisees represent other people that work in the restaurant. Other people that work in the restaurant begin to tell the chef, these tools that are given to you to serve other people are meant for you to serve. They are what is most important, is that you observe these as the owner and you see these as the owner. They are to be served and worshipped and respected as you would the owner. And what happens once you start doing that is the purpose of the chef never truly gets fulfilled. They don't really prepare the food anymore. They get sidetracked with these tools and they end up in a weird little circle of this little cycle in this weird place that they don't ever fulfill their purpose in life and they never get to a good place. And that's exactly what a bad religion does, is it has the person serving the religion. So, the good stuff that it's meant to do, to serve them and help them as tools, they never realize or get to the good place. Jesus, and what I was talking about earlier in Luke 8, verses 12-15 or 11-15, Jesus is teaching his disciples. Now, this isn't with the crowds. His disciples, after he gives this teaching, they push in. He's talking about the sower and the word, and they say, hey, we don't know what this means. Can you tell us? And he starts teaching in ways of, this is what's to come. And he says, those who receive his logos, which we talked about, the logos, his word, and their cardia, their center, their will, how they choose to move forward, and how this grows And we talked about how they had to go through parasmos, so this testings and trials that grew it in them. He gets to a place that's in 14, I think Luke 8, 14, and he starts talking about thorns, which is interesting to me. He doesn't say anything about sin. He says nothing about punishment. He just talks about thorns, and he identifies the thorns in three ways. The first word he uses in the Greek is meramana, which means cares, worry, anxiety. You know, it's the place of fear. You get so wrapped up and you train your mind to live in this place of anxiety. And I'm not trying at all to mean that I do know there's some disorders of anxiety. And I would urge anyone to get to professionals that can help with that. And there's medications and therapy. But he is saying that this is some of the thorns that you can teach yourself and train yourself on. to let this go on. You can submerge yourself into that. The other thing was mammon, which is making money your God. And he's presenting money here like it's just a resource. But he's saying, basically, as I take it, that money, you do need to make it part of your resources, but prioritize it correctly. It is not the number one main thing. If you make it the number one thing, number one main thing in your life, then you make it And once you do achieve the resource of money that you want and wealth, because that is what you cultivated, all of the beautiful things in life won't be there because you never grew those. You was only focused on money, only the resource. And you will find yourself in a very desolate area, void of life. The third thing he says is hedone, which is the root word for hedonism, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a lust and things that we desire and of the flesh. But he doesn't present these things as sin and then punishment. He presents them as thorns, which is interesting to me because in the area I live in, we have what we call blackberry picking. And we have, I don't even know what the technical name is. We call them briars. But But on briars is where the blackberries grow. And you have to get into the briars, which are thorny, like kind of thicker vines. And the thorns grow back towards the root system. So that means as you go in to get the blackberries out and the more briars there are, the more blackberries there are. So you go deeper. When you go to get out, they catch you and you can't hardly get out. So you tip go with somebody else, and they'll peel the blackberries off of you so you can ease your way out with getting minimal cuts and pokes and everything that goes along with blackberry picking. But he gives it to us in those terms, which is interesting to me, because now he's presenting it like we were talking about with the carrot. As you superimpose these thorns on your carrot and you start to go into immediate gratification, things that is not wise to choose, as you keep going back, you eventually get stuck. And there's a great analogy for this, and it's addiction. Addiction is a horrible, horrible thing that the person that goes to feel better and get immediate gratification and immediate relief of life and the stress of life eventually can get caught in the thorns. And here is what's so horrible about getting caught in these thorns. in the way Jesus presents it. Because now this person has to watch their life kind of fall away from them. Life keeps moving on, but as you're in the thorns, you don't. So people that you love and relationships, in order to be with you, they're going to have to come to the thorns to be there. And most people aren't going to do that. And you also have to watch your health and your finances, your job, everything in your life that you love kind of falls away from you because you're stuck in these thorns. This is not presented as punishment or sin, or this is presented as what happens in the thorns of trying to keep us out of the thorns and help us to get to a better place. So, when I think of some of the teachings in the church, and I'm not trying to slam the church here, but when I think of some of the teachings in the church, it's almost implied of the punishment. But when I start to hear it the way Jesus taught it in and how I'm kind of sharing it with you, it's not punishment. It's trying to help us stay out of the thorns. It's trying to help us stay out of the bad things. It's trying to serve us to get to the good place in life. It's tools to help us navigate life and get to a better place. When I hear that, and I come back to the original question of why does God allow suffering or why does God create suffering? I don't think God created suffering. I think we did. And And I think we did it through a culmination of all of our behaviors. What I mean by that is, if you think of every human being that's ever drew breath or has ever made a selfish choice or decision, every choice we make, even though we think it's not significant, everything is significant in humanity. that we live downstream of everyone that's ever lived and their choices they've made. And through poor choices and selfishness, we now live in an experience that has suffering. So it sounds like to me that God didn't create suffering. We did. God gave us a way to navigate it and still get to life because Jesus in here where he talks about this logos and this word and how we receive it, he talks about getting to life, getting to better stuff of how we navigate, that it's not intuitive and that if we'll choose, not only do we have a better experience, But those who will come after us, humanity begin to have a better experience as we choose differently. And these tools of a good religion can help us choose better. Thanks for joining me here on Spiritual Hot Sauce. I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out with questions, comments and or concerns. And don't forget to like, subscribe and review us. You can follow us on Facebook for updates and information. And if you enjoy the flavor of the sauce, then please share it with others. I would appreciate that. We'll see you next time.