49: Religion vs. Spirituality, Ego vs. Intuition, and Choosing Love Over Fear

The most openly outspoken I have felt on any podcast yet.

🌱 What religion & spirituality actually mean and how they intersect

🌱 Understanding the difference between ego & heart-led intuition

🌱 Why it is safe to trust yourself WITH discernment

🌱 How intuition is innate to all humans

🌱 My honest questions about religion & the discrepancies between operating from love vs. fear

🌱 Reflecting on what system of beliefs actually bring you closer to love

🌱 My thoughts on what it means to follow & live like Jesus

& more!

Join the  Oreaganic community:

Instagram: @organicreagan https://www.instagram.com/organicreagan/ 

YouTube: @Oreaganic (https://youtube.com/@oreaganic?si=-G95qvftDopdbCWv)

Xoxo, Reagan🤍🌱

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello my friends and welcome back to the organic podcast. Today's episode is going to be the most powerful episode that I have ever recorded. I have never felt so much conviction behind just like just the energy, everything that is moving through my system right now and my body and just like everything that I have to share on this topic is so so far like so far overdue. So long overdue. It is extremely important. And it has just been like suppressed in my system and the desire to talk about it and kind of just like the wounds around why I've felt scared to talk about this have just been festering. And I very much so am feeling like extremely, extremely, extremely called to finally share this conversation on the podcast. It is also incredibly important for me to feel like I can speak from a place of grounded neutrality. Like I have pretty strong opinions on the topic of religion versus spirituality, intuition versus your ego, love versus fear. And even still, one of like my greatest strengths, something that I just have inside of me, is my ability to balance two kind of opposing forces, one might say. And just bringing these things into balance and being able to come to a perspective, a like higher perspective that is more all-encompassing of just both sides of things, or at least being understanding of like where these thoughts come from is something that is just like one of my innate skills and traits. And this is what I'm going to try to bring to this episode today. So whether or not you are religious, a Christian, if you believe in anything, I think that there's going to be something in this episode for everyone who listens, like doesn't matter what you believe, because a lot of what I'm talking about has to do with your own ability to connect to your internal sense of power and intuition and connection to God, to the creator of all things that I feel and know so deeply lies within every single living thing. Like everything that has life breathing through it has God breathing through it as well. Like they're they're one in the same. So not to get too deep into it already, but I'm going to do my best to stay just like respectful and chill and just not be super like yelly about everything. But I will say I do have very strong opinions when it comes to freedom and personal empowerment. Because another thing about me is I can see through systems of control with like extremely easily. Like it is it is blaringly obvious to me when something actually is coming from a desire for people to be controlled, especially if it's coming through being controlled through fear, rather than something that is actually coming through like the truth of God and of love. So today's episode is going to be spicy. It is going to be, I don't even want to say spicy, like it's just it's I'm I'm gonna speak with passion. And I invite you to listen with an open mind and similarly a neutral perspective. And if any part of this episode either makes you feel more validated or makes you think a little bit more, or just makes you just have some gears turning in your head that I would love to actually like engage in conversation with you guys and talk through this more. So without further ado, this episode is going to be all about, like I said, religion, spirituality, intuition, ego, and discerning what actually comes from love, what comes from fear, and how to calibrate yourself to be operating from a place of love as Jesus would. So without further ado, long, long, long awaited, let's get into the episode. Mechanic Podcast. I'm your host, Reagan, mechanical engineer, lifelong athlete, and recovered overachiever, here to empower you to pursue your highest potential and live freely as your happiest, most organic self. Every week we'll dive into topics ranging from personal growth, mindset hacks, psychology, and a blend of science and spirituality to give you all the tools you need to stop living on autopilot and start creating a life of freedom, meaning, and fulfillment as your most organic self. If you're ready to become the ready to be yourself, just to everyone clear on my background and where my beliefs are coming from. I was raised a Christian, Protestant Christian in particular. I grew up going to church. My mom would take me and my sisters to church. I was baptized, I got my communion, I got my confirmation, and everything was fine. It was great. I never had a problem with Christianity, like I never had a problem with church. I mean, outside of being a kid and being like, oh my god, I don't feel like going to freaking Sunday school at 8:30 in the morning or going to church at like 9 when I already have to wake up super early for school or sports or band or whatever, like every single day of the week, and blah blah blah. Like just stupid kid shit. But church, I always appreciated, especially as I got older. I appreciated the piece of it. I respected my faith, and I still do respect my faith, and I also respect the faith of literally everyone else, but obviously, you know, Christianity, like I have high value in my faith, and still two things can exist at once, which is basically gonna be the theme of this episode is that two things can exist at once, and everything pretty much exists in this gray space. Like, there are very few things, especially when it comes to the depth and nuance of understanding our place in this world, our greater spiritual understanding of where we go after we die. Like, there's a lot of complexity and nuance to this conversation, and my main beliefs are that like to not have any kind of gray space for this understanding is where I just really, really, really struggle to kind of understand like why that is or where that comes from with some people. But moving forwards, I never had a problem with Christianity. I did have things that I naturally questioned as a child where I would have this feeling, like genuinely a feeling in my body, just like a very like kind of neutral, but kind of just like a ping, like back of my head, kind of thoughts where I was just like, that's interesting. Like, I don't know if I really truly fully believe that or if that really makes sense to me. And this wasn't for everything that I was learning, it wasn't for every word in the Bible that we were being preached, it wasn't for that by any means, it was just for certain things, and a lot of these certain things that made my little intuitive questioning ping go off were centered around themes that either just logically did not make sense to me, or themes where I felt like I was basically being told that we as humans are innately born like less than and not worthy, and we are like not worthy of being, I don't know, like just just the concept of like I have to be saved because I am innately worthless or less than, or my heart is impure, and Jesus's only mission was to save us lost us to save us lost sheep, like something about that just did not feel fully correct, and I'll get into that in a little bit, but it's not as much that I completely disagree with that, I just I just see it in a different way, like so. The main themes that I just I kind of questioned, as I said, were things that logically didn't make sense to me, and things that basically told me that like you do not have any kind of ability to trust yourself, and you don't really come with anything that's of value, and the only value that you really have is that that's given to you through believing and being saved by Christianity. Like, that is just a concept that I struggle with. So that just gives you guys a peek into my background, and again, I invite you to listen with an open mind. We listen and we don't judge. To open up the space for the rest of this conversation, I would love to bring definitions of the following words just into light so that we're all clear on what I'm talking about when I'm talking about these things. Okay, first off, religion. Merriam Webster Dictionary defines religion as an organized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices. I laughed because I use religious in the definition. Also, the religious beliefs, observances, and social practices found within a given cultural context, and or commitment or devotion to a god or gods, a system of beliefs, or religious observance, the service and worship of a god, or of the supernatural. That is the general definition of religion, and I'm particularly talking about Christianity today, but from this lens, religion is just an organized system of belief based on faith in God or a higher power. The general definition of spirituality that I'm going to use is the idea of seeking meaning, purpose, and a sense of connection to something larger than yourself. So, under this broad lens and definition, spirituality is inclusive of religion. Like, religion is inherently spiritual. I think a lot of people are on the same page about this. Religion is inherently spiritual. But people do not see spirituality and religion obviously as the same thing. They see spirituality as this more overarching, like quote-unquote woo-woo, probably kind of just like broad topic. But my personal opinion is that everything that is alive is inherently spiritual and like spiritually connected. I mean, to me, like a spiritual connection just already exists in everything that has life flowing through it. Next definition: the ego. This is going to be an extremely important distinction for all of us to remember as we go through this conversation together. Because the ego and your intuition are two incredibly different things. And this is going to be extremely relevant to this conversation in particular because I fear that a lot of people justify saying that like you cannot trust yourself on the basis of the assumption that like every human being is making decisions or having their own set set of beliefs through the lens of their ego. And that is simply not the case. So, what is the ego? The ego is kind of hard to explain, but it's like the perception of yourself, it's like it's like the observer of your reality, but also the source of your decision making. If that center of yourself is where you decide to tap into. What I'm trying to say is that there are multiple parts of ourselves, of our mind. There are different layers to our conscious understanding of the world and also how we operate. So I think all of us probably know when we say, like, oh my god, someone's so egotistical that they're probably operating from a very kind of selfish, self-centered perspective and way of being, way of life. But the ego is not necessarily all a bad thing, but in the context that I'm gonna talk about it today, I mean it as the part of human beings that is more focused on the self and is self-interesting or self-interesting, self-interested, more self-important, and not so much attuned to actually like what is best for them, for others, and for a greater picture, particularly a sense of living that comes from a place of love. In contrast to the ego, your intuition slash like the energy that you have when you make a decision from a heart-led space, that is a very sacred, divinely connected kind of experience that people have. Your intuition is just as much a part of yourself as it is your ego, but it is way more divinely tapped in. Like your intuition is something that to me comes directly from God. Like it is God speaking to you and through you. And if you are someone who has not had the experience of like hearing your intuition, or you feel like your intuition is blocked, or you're like, that's just a bunch of bullshit, I guarantee you that like you are not someone who does not have the ability to hear your intuition. You are just someone who has had your intuition be clouded by a lot of external factors, whether it's trauma or limiting beliefs, or constant stress, or constant stimulation, like your intuition is something that is very inherent to you and is inherent to every single human being. But we kind of just like wean out of being deeply connected to it after being children. So intuition is just like a feature of all human beings, like everyone has the ability to do it, but it's not something that is super easily connected to unless you are actively consciously able to like clear your own mind and your own kind of energetic field to be able to receive it. Not to sound woo-woo, like I'm saying that from a scientific perspective here. I'm serious. But as a definition, intuition is the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference. So it's basically this idea that you have the ability to just know things without having someone tell you. Like you just know, you just know. And intuition is never ever ever going to be harmful. It is never going to be harmful to yourself or others. It is simply to me a connection to God, to the divine, to this divine wisdom that is God trying to channel through you for the sake of the greater good for yourself and others and the world that is just innate to you. Like, intuition, when I talk about it today, it's the feeling in your body when you just already know something. It's the feeling when you walk into a room after people had an argument and you can just tell that like there is tension, like, or it's just having a bad gut feeling about something before you go somewhere, and then seeing why that happened. Like it's gut feelings, it's a very body-centered kind of emotion, and it is inherently a deep, deeply spiritual experience. As I said before, religion is also spiritual, so I'm not saying that as like one side or the other. I'm saying that inherently like applies to everyone. Intuition is a deep spiritual connection and something that you have the ability to tap into. So, as we can see here, intuition versus ego. Oh, I didn't add. Intuition is also very like heart-centered, heartfelt, heart-led. Like when you have an intuitive pull to something, or you feel a nudge, or something is just telling you like that is off, it is very deeply connected to the energy of like your heart and a loving place, and like a very sacred, positive, benevolent thing. It's not this, like, like it's like the master discernment that comes from God. It is not just like saying that you get to believe whatever you want to believe because your intuition tells you so. Like when you are embodied in the practice of believing and connecting to your intuition from a heart-centered, heart-led place, it is never going to be harmful, bad, and it's especially not dangerous for you to trust it. If anything, I feel it's dangerous for you to not listen to your intuition because that is God speaking to you directly within you. But as we can see, ego versus intuition, both a part of you, both are voices that can be speaking within you at the same time, nearly synonymously. Like you can hear thoughts of your ego and your intuition back to back. And if we're not given the discernment of understanding the difference between the two of them, and we just believe what we are told that like your heart is impure and you cannot trust yourself and don't look to yourself for your own understanding, then we inherently miss out on this divine, wise consciousness that lives through us, that comes from God, that is our intuition, because we are looping that in with egotistical, self-serving, human-based thoughts. Do we see here already, not just in the religious perspective, but well, mostly because I'm talking about the idea that like you can't trust yourself or that it's not safe to trust yourself, like that is fundamentally just incorrect. That is incorrect because when you are operating from your intuition, from your heart, that comes from God. And if it is not safe to follow something that comes from God, which you can tell through your own discernment, through understanding if it leads you more to love, or if it leads you more to fear or harming others, you know what I mean? Like it's very clear and easy to discern. Like, you already know what is right and wrong. We do, like you have the internal intrinsic guidance system within you. That is your intuition that comes from God that lives within you that tells you what is right and wrong. And this kind of intuition, like my experience talking about the things that I questioned when I was in church, or just things that I like thought twice about, the feeling that I was experiencing was my intuition telling me, like, hmm, something feels weird here, like something feels a little wrong, or just like a little off. Like that is intuition, which comes from God. That is not, I don't feel like following the rules, so I'm gonna decide to do whatever the fuck that I want and just say that it's my intuition. Do we understand here? Like, there are two very different things when it comes to ego and intuition, and to go beyond that, when we as Christians talk about the Holy Spirit, to me, the Holy Spirit is your intuition, like your intuition like channeling through you, guiding you forwards, is the Holy Spirit. So it just feels a little bit backwards to me to hear anyone who's a Christian talk about how like you cannot trust yourself and you cannot trust the guidance that comes from within you when from my perspective, the exact guidance that I'm receiving is coming from the Holy Spirit, which is coming from God. But conveniently, this seems to only apply to the things that question the church's authority from a very human perspective and not a perspective that I actually feel is deeply connected to Jesus or God or the actual greater mission of uniting humanity under the sense of love. Moving forwards, the last two comparison definitions I want to have are fear versus love. And I think a lot of us already know the basis of these definitions in that I could tell you right now what is fear versus what is love, particularly love. I see love as God. Like God is love. Love is the unconditional, unwavering care, compassion, acceptance for others outside of yourself without expectation of getting anything in return. The definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary will say love is a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties. But for me, love is extremely important to understand mostly through feeling it, mostly through understanding like how love actually feels in the body. Like love feels warm and welcoming and like unconditionally compassionate, caring, like accepting. And that is not to say, when I say unconditional acceptance, that that means, oh, do whatever the fuck you want, and there's no consequences for it. It just like unconditional love, quite literally by definition, does not have conditions with it. So you kind of need to have discernment and understanding here that when I say that love, unconditional love is like this this form of acceptance, of like unconditional acceptance, that does not mean that like except that you can harm others and it's okay. It is just like love for all other things unconditionally. I hope this is making sense. But that is how I see love. And you can tell, like, all of us have a very clear ability to tell the difference between love and fear when we are operating from a place of not being blocked by like all of these, I don't know, thoughts, beliefs, fears, whatever, just like clouding our system. Like it's very easy to tell the difference between fear and love. They have two very different energies to them. But fear, by definition, is an unpleasant, often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger. And where I bring fear into this conversation when it comes to religion and spirituality is fear and love. Love cannot exist at the same time. Like they cannot exist together. They do not, it's like oil and water. They are two completely different things. Like when you are feeling just like a sense of love, when you are when you deeply feel love inside of you, like in your heart, in that moment, like you cannot simultaneously feel fear to me. At least not nearly in the same way that you would if you're just feeling one at once. You know what I mean? Like, love and fear are two kind of opposite energies here. And what I struggle to understand, and my goal of this podcast and kind of bridging the gap between religion and spirituality, or sharing my perspective, is mainly to say that a lot of my questions and a lot of the main things that I notice when it comes to Christianity are things where I see a clear difference between what is motivated by fear and what comes from love. And I know, like I said before, that God is love. Jesus is love. Like that should be where we are aiming towards. Like if we are trying to do anything in the name of Jesus, it should be to love more, to love others and that like to love your neighbor as thyself. Like literally, it should be to love more, to be more loving, to be more caring, compassionate, serving of others from a heart-led space. Like, love is the goal here. So if love is the goal, which I know is truth to me, like love is the goal of Jesus. Like Jesus came here to spread more love in this world for us to connect more to God, who is again love. Like this is all we're all talking about the same thing here. Okay, we're talking about the same thing. Like the goal is love. God, the energy of creation, Jesus, all love here. So if that's the truth, Jesus and God are love. And we as humans, after Jesus lived, this is after Jesus was alive, after slash during Jesus' life. We take all the lessons that we learned from the people who witnessed him and anyone else who has accounts, and also, guys, I'm gonna sound like I don't I I'm not fully researched on this, but I have seen things that say how Paul like never met Jesus, but also wrote like a solid chunk of the Bible. I'm like, interesting. Anyways, we take the life of Jesus, we have human beings across nations, across you know, the earth go to spread his message and write down the word and take an account of his life. Never mind the fact, like, this is already through the lens of other human beings, which again innately imperfect. And I know Jesus spoke in a lot of parables and metaphors, and those were written, but to me, there's already gray space, even in human beings back then, accurately interpreting everything that Jesus was trying to convey in a way that they could actually scribe and write down and preserve. Like, not to say that all their accounts are like wrong or misled. I'm just saying, like, that's already a factor of logic to me that just like adds a layer of like a need for discernment to the Bible to me. But, anyways, we have Jesus' life, we have accounts of it. This is the record of his life, this is going to be the basis of the Christian faith, the basis of the future institution of the church. And where I struggle with this idea that, like, to be a good Christian means that you can only believe that the Bible is 100% absolute truth, every single word is completely factual, like, no questions whatsoever, is in the fact that all of these interpretations being compiled into one book. Who got to decide which books got to stay and which books got to go? Because that was a process, like that that was a thing. And knowing intuitively how human beings are, particularly human beings who would not have been pleased by the idea that Jesus was a man who was in part trying to remind people that they're innately connected to God already, and they don't need something outside of themselves to connect to God, like reminding them of their power, reminding them of their ability to change the world through being more loving, through being more connected, through being more serving to others with the power they hold within themselves. That concept is innately dangerous to any kind of system of control that wishes to keep people confined and to keep them disconnected from their own sense of power. So these power dynamics to me, and just the logic of this experience, is something that already creates a sense of doubt, not in Jesus, not in every single word of the Bible, but just doubt in the people who got to decide what things got to say and what things got to go, and who actually got to write the narrative of what Christianity has, you know, been shaped into over the hundreds and thousands of years that it has been a major core theme of, for example, empires like the Roman Empire. You know, Constantine sat down, the Council of Nicaea, like decided to unify the Christian church and decide on like the theological basis for basically basically getting to decide like what gets delivered to the masses when it comes to the condensed version of Jesus' message. Do you think that someone like Constantine, an emperor, someone who wishes to rule over people and not have their authority be questioned, would leave in a lot of texts that point to an internal intrinsic sense of knowing within yourself and the fact that you don't need some system or structure or anything outside of you to live a life that is divinely connected to God. To me, that's an obvious no. And again, this is is hard to explain, and this is why this is a podcast, because this is not a distrust in Christianity as a whole. This is not a distrust in Christianity from the lens of it being a desire to follow Jesus Christ in the most accurate way based on how he actually lived his life and what he actually came here to tell us to do. So where I have a problem and what I struggle to mend when it comes to balancing religion and a more spiritual, broader perspective, is that I inherently believe that this whole combining of the Bible and deciding like what books got included and what didn't was not this like neutral goal of just like actually unifying people under the message that Jesus wanted to spread. It was more so an opportunity to get people to all unite under one way of belief and then use the exact word that Jesus said, the accounts of Jesus' life, as a mean of control by saying if you do not believe every word of this Bible, then you are a heretic, then you are Gnostic. That must mean that you are evil, you are a sinner, you are, you know, bespelled by evil spirits. It basically gave a really good opportunity for the Empire, the Roman Empire, to completely squash any kind of dissent based on the Bible, because they are the ones who had the pen. They are the ones who got to decide what was the story that got told. Oh my god, what was the story that got told, what stayed in, what stayed out, how things got shifted, how things maybe got translated, who decided to get their accounts written, and who decided to have their accounts just lost to the ether, such as Mary Magdalene. Like, there is there's just so much room for debate here that I really this is where this is like why I mainly struggle to say that like every single part of the Bible is God, breathes, and the absolute basis for all of Christianity, no discernment needed, every single word is correct because that is just innately ignoring logic. Human beings had a hand in creating the Bible. Human beings like Constantine, like King James, had a part to play when it comes to the version of Christianity that we have actually been delivered as modern-day Christians and the version of Christianity that has existed throughout societies for millennia, hundreds of years, if not thousands. So if that's the case, if Jesus were here right now, I guarantee you that he would be more upset at the use of his life and his name by corrupt empires for the sake of control and fear, he would be more upset at them than he would people who are looking to actually understand Jesus Christ through a broader lens that is maybe not necessarily confined to only seeing life through the lens of the Bible. Because to me, these two things, as we're going back to it, operate from ego versus intuition, fear versus love. If we go to these empires, the people who had a hand or influence in not only the compiling of the Bible, but also just the translations of it and the interpretations of it and just the message that got pushed to everyone, the motivation behind Constantine, King James, like, do you really think that they were motivated by love when it comes to creating Christianity or like making Christianity like their law, basically? Do you really think they were actually motivated by love, or did they see the opportunity to use and like depict the Bible and Jesus' life in a certain way so that people would be fearful of disobeying? Because logically, to me, option B, making people fearful of disobeying by telling them that trusting themselves is evil, is a very smart move if you are an empire who wants to control an entire population. And if you want to control people, what would be a very dumb move is to operate from a place of love and remind them that they actually don't really need to listen to your rules and listen to your tyranny or listen to the structure that you're providing them when it's based out of fear, because they always have the choice to operate from a place of love. Do you see what I'm saying here? There is a major difference between following rules of religion out of fear and out of judgment of others for not doing the same as you, versus late leading and living a life from a place of love for others, for yourself, and for the pursuit of the actual truth of this world and how to live more like Jesus, how to follow in Jesus' footsteps and use the gifts that you have been given to do so, rather than seeing Jesus as like a person who is completely separate of you and someone you have to worship. But when I personally don't think that Jesus even came here to be worshipped, I think he came here to lead and to have us follow him, not be worshipped and see ourselves as less than him. He was trying to remind us that we have the same kind of connection to God that he has, which is not to say that every single person is just like Jesus, and that means that his life was any less meaningful or that we can do all the same things as him. It is to say that Jesus literally said, The kingdom of God is within you. Like you always have the ability to operate from a place of love. We have been given, like, there's a whole freaking Bible verse on spiritual gifts that basically speaks to how after Jesus died, after Jesus rose again, we have been gifted, like people are spiritually gifted for the sake of continuing Jesus' mission to spread more love on this earth. Like that is a divinely God-led thing. And if that's the case, that people are given heightened spiritual gifts in an effort to continue Jesus' mission, to connect people back to a place of love and unity, then why are so many Christians so fearful of things like energy healing, a spiritual gift, heightened intuition, mediumship, a deeper connection to the divine and channeling, a spiritual gift? Like, why are we so fearful of these things? And why have these things been depicted as these extremely dangerous, harmful things that you have to be terrified of? Because it's literally written in the Bible that, like, spiritual gifts, the whole point of them is to continue the mission of Jesus. And when you see the mission of Jesus, not as something that is a rule book of an institution, but as a way of life that operates from a place of love, you will start to understand that a lot of these people who probably seem like new age woo-woo are actually probably operating from way more of a connected, divinely like heart-led place of love than a lot of people who see themselves as Christians who are following by the book and quote unquote doing all the right things, but not like they would not know Jesus if he literally like slapped them in the face. I'm not talking about all Christians, by the way, nor am I trying to slander any Christian who like is very vehemently believing of every single word of the Bible. I I promise you guys, please trust me when I say I am not trying to offend anyone when I say this. I'm simply trying to point out the clear divide that I have noticed through observation and through my own intuition in these observations that apply to a deeper sense of desire for me to share that I don't think Jesus Christ himself would be happy with how a lot of us are operating as Christians, particularly when it comes to claiming that trusting anything within yourself is dangerous. I don't see that as something that Jesus would want us to be believing. I think it's something that Jesus would be flipping tables over. And I think if Jesus were here with us in the flesh right now, he would be really fucking pissed off at how Christianity has been so watered down and given to us by emperors thousands of years ago that had literally like it created the template of Christianity that was mainly followed. Because who was going to oppose the will of an entire empire that was using scripture wrongly from an egotistical self-serving perspective, which is innately disconnected from God, in a backwards attempt to present this message to the masses that, like, the only way for them to be accepted and safe is for them to listen to the rules that they come up with, basically. Which is again, I'm really not trying to paint the Bible as like only a giant rule book that is all just like bad and doom and gloom and super restrictive and whatever. Like, that's not the case at all. And if I can make it extremely clear, my main struggles when it comes to like my experience with understanding religion more deeply, as I said earlier in the episode, are mostly just logical arguments, but especially now, it is very clearly where I see a differentiation between people who are spiritually gifted, who have an innate connection to God, who are operating from a place of love, who are helping people, who have the Holy Spirit working through them, but might not openly be saying every single word that this is all because of Jesus, or this is all from Scripture, but like their heart and their character and like the fruit of what they are doing is exactly what Jesus led us to do, those people who might be seen as more spiritual, who might be seen as having wider perspectives, are seen and cast out as like these backwards, devil-worshipping, crazy people. But to me, that is just extremely hypocritical and just not the truth. And if there's anything that I have my ability to do, it is to speak out when I see things that are inconsistent with the actual message of what I believe Jesus was put here to remind us to do. There is way too much grace base to not be able to have discernment over how you should actually be basing your beliefs, like what you should be basing your beliefs off of. And given the fact that the Bible itself has so many different ways to be interpreted, understood by different people, different metaphors, different parables, on top of being translated over and over and over again, printed a bajillion different times, made into so many different forms, have certain books included, certain books not included. Like there is just way too much room for variation in all the versions of the Bible that have ever existed for me to not be able to say that. For me, yeah, for me to not be able to say that, like you cannot read it unless you have discernment. And your discernment cannot be just everything in this book is 100% factual. It has to be like what leads me back to love, what leads me closer to God, what leads me closer to being the best version of myself that can be most of service to God and to others. And honestly, a lot of the time, the things that lead you closer to God, these things that people deem to be so evil and so dangerous, like I don't know, meditation or energy healing, or I don't know, just there's pretty much anything that people deem as woo-woo are things that Jesus has done. Maybe not meditation, I feel like that one's pretty chill. But like Jesus to me was an energy healer, like Jesus healed people miraculously. Do you think people back in the day had an understanding of like how that was possible? Like, energy healing now still exists, like it has never gone anywhere. It is an ancient practice. Energy healing is real. Jesus did it. Jesus also told us that you are going to go on and do greater things than me. And that's not to say you are better than me. That is to say that, like, continue this mission of love and and helping us rise to a greater place of love and unity as a collective group of humanity. Like, that's the whole goal. And I feel like my struggle again with religion is that a lot of it is very caught up in the ego, it is caught up in fear. And as we were saying before, the definitions, ego and fear do not live in the same place as listening to your intuition and operating from a place of love. And I know that between these two polarities, Jesus is operating from a place of love. And Jesus is speaking to us through intuition. So to blatantly ignore that and to write off any source of and any any kind of internal ability to source your own discernment, particularly when it opposes the word of the Bible, given everything that I said about like the variation there in the gray space and all the interpretations and translations and how it was compiled and everything, like anything that is saying that if you trust yourself and if you listen to your intuition and your intuition tells you anything other than what is in the Bible, then you are wrong. That just does not, that's genuinely just not coming from God. That's not coming from Jesus, that is coming from the human ego and a desire for understanding of control, of certainty that comes from a place of fear. Because we have been so deeply, we've had it so deeply ingrained in us that like we have to constantly be in fear of God. We have to fear that we are sinners, and unless we do A, B, C, D, E, F G, H I J K L and whatever, we are going to burn in hell for an eternity. There are two other parts of religion that I often question when it comes to this stuff, and one of them is even the idea of hell. Because I have seen plenty of things, I've I've seen people with research about the idea that hell is not actually this giant burning inferno. Like in nowhere really in the Bible is it depicted, like hell is not universally depicted over multiple, multiple times as like this burning pit of fiery hell for eternity that you go if you are not a perfect human. And to me, it also just does not make sense to think that God has existed forever. So human beings who existed, you know, before Jesus, who had no way of knowing Jesus, so like where did they go when they died? They all just like evaporated or went to hell. Like, that doesn't really make sense to me. I don't know. Do you really think they went to hell because they didn't even believe in in Jesus? Like, there's just discrepancies, even with my understanding of like hell and the picture of heaven and like things that I think can be applied to even experiences that you can have as a human being on this earth right now. Like, I think you can experience both heaven and hell on earth at the same like within the same lifetime. Like you can experience all these different ends of the polarities. So to base an entire kind of like like centuries or generations of understanding Christianity through this lens of not wanting to go to hell is another part that I'm just like that just it just doesn't it just doesn't really make sense to me. It doesn't make sense to me. And I also struggle to understand why people are so fearful of astrology. And I feel like this can get into a whole separate topic but astrology is not like I I feel like people use like this one line of scripture that says not to listen to astrologers and don't trust them as the entire basis for writing off anyone who desires to more deeply understand the like innate ancient wisdom that we have collected over thousands upon thousands of years of human existence like witnessing and observing the stars and observing patterns that occur within collectives of humanity and societies and cultures like to just ignore astrology and act like it's not real or something that is of the devil when it is literally just an understanding of rhythms and patterns that already exist and we are just putting words to it. Never mind the fact that God as the creator of all things is the one who also created the meaning behind these signs that I think humans are just picking up on to write that off as just something that is complete bullshit to me feels very strange. Like it makes me question and wonder like why why are we being told that it's dangerous? And this is obviously in the context of like using astrology as something that does not rule your life it does not get to decide like it doesn't decide for you like oh I can just be a piece of shit or I can be you know harsh to someone because I'm an Aries or I can't commit 'cause I'm a Sagittarius like whatever stupid I don't know generalizations there are about the zodiac signs like there is way more innate wisdom to astrology and I'm also pretty sure that like ancient zodiac like there are references to the zodiac signs within the art of the Vatican that does not add up to me. And it's also very weird to me for anyone to think that like any kind of wisdom or teaching or lesson that does not come directly from Christianity must be bad. Once again I think Jesus would be judging us not through this lens of are you being a good Christian by following the Bible exactly. I think that he would be judging us through the lens of our character through how we love others and he would also judge things that come from maybe even other religions like Buddhism or anything else as does it lead you closer to love or does it lead you closer to hate or further away from God and the whole synopsis of this entire episode because I know I've kind of gone off a little bit for the past I don't know 15-20 minutes here but the whole point of this episode is to say that there is a difference between the modern day understanding of religion versus the overall conceptual understanding of spirituality and a lot of these things that are written off as new age mysticism and dangerous based on the Bible and Christianity are not actually things that like it's not actually true. They don't hold weight to them and they are very deeply influenced by greater power structures and a deeply rooted sense of fear based off of a desire for control of populations where the best way to control someone is to tell them that you cannot trust yourself and you can only trust what I tell you directly. The easiest way to completely take someone away from their power is to say that your discernment means nothing. Don't listen to that don't trust your heart I got you I can do the thinking for you like you don't need to worry about it. And I'm someone who just sees these structures very clearly and I cannot just wait and sit on the silence anymore and not call out this kind of experience here because it affects a lot of people and if anything it keeps us from operating from a place of love which was the whole point of Jesus's life and his teachings like love above all was the thing that he wanted us to do in following him so this episode is just my goal my my first step in the goal of helping to depict how I see things and understand things for the sake of helping other people see things more clearly as well and there's just there's so much nuance to this I feel like there's so much truth that has been hidden from us there is so much wisdom that has been buried especially when it comes from women and like divine feminine intuition I feel like that's something that creates a lot of fear inside of you know men thousands of years ago who were not able to control women or who did not understand that women are extremely intuitive and have like a very deep innate sense of connection to God. This is a whole other tangent but there's just there's a lot to this conversation and my final summarizing point is that if you do not carry a sense of discernment based on your judgment of what actually brings me closer to a place of love versus what brings me further away from God and closer to a place of fear you will not be able to more like you will limit yourself and your ability to actually have a higher capacity for love and to be able to live more like Jesus which to me was exactly the mission of his life. There is a podcast by Samantha Daly called 11 Realistic Wellness Practices I swear by because they actually work from February 4th 2025 her podcast is called Makeshift Happen if you want to listen to this excerpt she at the end of this episode in the last like 10 15 minutes goes into depth about her experience with faith and her perspective on it and she I I remember this so vividly like this this part of the episode really was just so healing for me because she exactly described how I feel about this whole conversation around religion and spirituality and she said a quote that very deeply resonated with me where she said the left thinks the right is brainwashed the right thinks the left is brainwashed. Jews think that Muslims are brainwashed Muslims think that Jews are brainwashed. Christians believe that new agers are brainwashed new agers believe that Christians are brainwashed. Actually overidentifying with any collective ideology or form of group think that minimizes the responsibility of discerning for yourself and forming your own personal system of beliefs and values that are open to adjustment upon new experiences and better information makes you brainwashed. I truly do feel like the grand grand majority of people already have a compass within themselves that will lead them back to love if they let it. And the only ways that we truly sin against ourselves are when we intentionally close out love and close out God and choose to believe in a system that is fueled by fear instead of being fueled by love and unity. And if we are going to change this earth if we are going to change this world for the better we cannot keep operating in these old systems of fear that do not completely match the reality that our world is moving into which is one of love and of unity and this is not to say that all of the Bible needs to go and Christianity is all wrong. It is to say that we need to actually start living like real true proper Christians and spreading love and spreading the mission of Jesus Christ through embodying the same kind of behaviors perspectives teachings and the gifts that he had and he used to help bring this transformation to this world and as I said in the beginning if you are not a Christian and you listen to this whole episode I still encourage you to just reflect on the source of your beliefs how you see the world and whether or not it makes you a better person a more loving more capable more confident inspired like embodied version of yourself that is so truly authentic and is doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing by the mission that God has put on your heart not in any religious context not in any other context besides listening to the truth of your heart and your intuition because as I said to me that is God that is infinite divine consciousness speaking through all of us. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode I hope that if this is a conversation that you really resonated with that it just gave you a sense of comfort knowing that you're not alone in how you see things I have been afraid to broach this conversation because it has been very very directly tied to a very intimate part of my life and I am I'm just feeling so empowered with the courage to actually be able to share this whether or not people resonate whether or not it gets freaking to listen to I there's for five seconds each I don't care this needs to be out into the world and at this point the fear of me getting backlash about talking about this is not nearly as important or significant to me as the actual importance of talking about it and sharing it. Like the it is so vital for me to be able to share this perspective and to help play my part in shifting us back to a state of love and unity and getting us closer to God. Go be your most organic selves and I will see you in the next one.