from Judgement to Mystery 🏔️

Judgement and ideology are alive and well everywhere. But what if we left them behind and stepped toward Mystery?

Listen in, and learn how to stop avoiding the Mysterious path and find the antidote to separation.

We discuss —

• Why we choose judgement + ideology instead of uncertainty
• What we’re really craving when we reach for God
• How to embrace the path toward Mystery
• “Everyone is God in drag.” — Ram Dass
• Why your body is not better or worse than your spirit
• Humble stewardship + discerning difference without judgement

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thanks for listening. peace, be well. 🙏

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to the Erotic Devotion Podcast. I'm your host, Grace Allardyce.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Welcome everyone. You're listening to what used to be called the Homebody Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

We're still here on the same feed with our entire back catalog still here, but we've updated the name and the cover for the show to match who and what the work has grown into. We're kicking off this new chapter for the show by re-airing some of our past favorite episodes during this month of June, and we'll begin publishing fresh new episodes beginning July 5th. We appreciate your patience, encouragement, and enthusiasm as we've been updating our digital presence, and we're so happy to be back in your hearts and your ears.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Thank you for listening and enjoy. God is the name of the blanket we throw over the mystery to give it shape.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

God is the name of the blanket that we throw over the mystery to give it shape. This is a quote attributed to Barry Taylor, who was a road manager for ACDC. And I learned about it in a comedy special by Pete Holmes. Not all, but most of my students' clients have somewhere in their past experiences with institutional religion. And I can safely say that for most, if not all of those people, that this concept of God is the name of the blanket we put over the mystery is very far from what they were introduced to as kids at church or Catholic school or wherever you encountered it. Not only was God probably not introduced as the best we can do with naming the mystery, but the divine was probably presented in stark contrast to that, probably God was presented instead as or reaffirmed as this like crucible of judgment and it got you to behave, right? If we weren't good little boys and girls, or if we didn't say a special prayer or go to confession, we'd not only face suffering in this life, but we'd also meet some form of eternal punishment in the next one. It's this fundamentalist idea that God is always watching and judging and just waiting for you to fuck up or not clean your room or waiting for you to make too much money or wear pants or smoke a cigarette or say, God damn it, or have sex when you're not supposed to, or be gay, or whatever the list of unacceptable sins or actions was. It's giving judgy Santa Claus version of the G-O-D, and it fosters a great sense of alienation and separation and also a feeling that you're never going to be good enough. And the substance of judgment is now so infiltrated into our psyches, our collective waters that we often take it for granted and assume that it is so. It's really become the water that we're swimming in. And the environments where judgment is the God's superpower, super priority. There's usually an in-group who's in with the divine. The in-groups feel entitled and correct in bearing the tale of that judgment to others, deciding and letting other people know what they think about their eternal belonging, letting them know that those who are out are in fact out. The in-group thinks it's a public service, usually. Conveniently, the picture of God that they have also looks like them, has the same politics as them, and therefore the divine reinforces all of their pet ideologies, worldviews, cultural preferences. Obviously, this creates wounds of separation and rejection, especially if you know you're not considered in the in group, especially if the exclusion story also means that you're subject to some kind of eternal divine displeasure and abandonment. Clearly, that's a painful story to be told and also to uphold. For most people my age, in the sort of the elder millennial category, this rejection story was eventually enough to make people leave religion altogether. And I've been interested in my own life and in others as I carve out space in this world of spiritual development and spiritual spaces that are not affiliated with institutions or religions. A question that I've been observing is what happens when we chop off the wounded limb that's caught in the trap just to get away from the institution, a place that we experience as a wall of judgment? What happens when we chew off the trapped limb or the heart and still have this unreckoned with God wound that's been ostracized to the forest? And as all the healing savvy people know, it doesn't just go away. If the wound goes unreconciled, unhealed, it can keep us from maturing into something that's wild and robust and ripe in our own spiritual experiences, our own perspectives stay kind of hurt or immature, and it leaves a huge void in our cosmic backpack of myths and meanings and symbols that we could use to fuel our own alchemy and development into a greater and grander perspective. So, what happens after we chew the limb off from the trap and get out? Well, some people abandoned all spiritual pursuits and spiritual development completely, fully ran the other direction towards all out rational materialism where reason is everything, what is physically manifest is it. Some people are depressed about this, other are incredibly high-performing materialists who are super invested in being very smart, very successful, achieving all of the checkboxes, tend to be very busy, very smart, and very avoidant of anything to do with spirit or spiritual pursuits. Others turn to their spiritual life. They kind of kept it, but drew in things that are just more anemic, something that doesn't touch the wound, but it also doesn't challenge them or take up any real space. It's more like a hobby or an interest, something they can pick up and put back down. It makes them an interesting person. They're listening to witchy podcasts and buying crystals and lighting candles, but nothing's really getting alchemized. Other people stay skittish and afraid of anything that sounds remotely like God, even the word God or gods or goddess, they they may be externally living a very free life, but on the inside, they're still very afraid, sort of battling this abyss of unworthiness and fear of judgment, still spending a lot of time in martyrdom or trying to at least appear to be very, very good or acceptable to whoever the they is that they perceive as judging them. Others, in an attempt to piece back a spiritual journey, ran towards like a new age spirituality, which, similar to above, it tends to lack any friction or context, like everything is fine, everything is how you feel. It sort of became the mainstream self-care. There's no edge to it, there's nothing wild about it. It tends to be very self-absorbed. And others responded with this like teenage-like, ragey rebellion that's created an oversimplified anti-identity or a whole identity around not being something, an identity around a negative statement. And these are some of the most common examples of different ways that we've learned to cope and work around the judgment god wound. These coping mechanisms, they tend to have diminishing returns as we progress through different chapters and thresholds of our life. And we may not fit into one of those boxes. We might have a nice little charcuterie board of some of those different um reactions that we've gone through or that we're doing right now. I know for me, some of my last thoughts and words when I left church, I think it was like right in the middle of the service. I was just like, shut up, like, shut the fuck up. I was so mad. I was, there was this like resounding chorus inside of my head the day I left church and I just never went back. I left in the middle, I just could not stand one more minute of someone standing on some kind of platform with this super old book and telling me about their certainty and why I should do all this work to reconcile everything my life to it. I was livid. And, you know, I grew up in evangelical churches. I had a lot of direct, mystical, miraculous encounters with the unseen that really fueled my innate hunger for the divine. And as I became older, though, and I became more complex, I had an adult life that was, or trying to be an adult life that wasn't conveniently fitting into this sort of kiddie pool worldview. It was trying to mature and come into something 5D and interesting. But I kept being in this container that reinforced that life had to be 2D and I had to follow all these rules in order for God to like me, et cetera. And the thing is, when you've like tasted direct encounters with God, you are into them. It's food for this world, it's food for the next world. And it's very powerful and life-changing. And I'd only experience them inside of church or inside of quote Christian containers. And I thought that was the only way that I could experience these experiences, which is why I stayed so long. But on this particular day, I had really reached my limit. I was angry, I was bitter, I was disappointed, I was full of resentment. I could have set the whole place on fire. I was so done. And I had done, for me, I had done all the quote right things. I'd been the nice person, I'd followed all the rules, I had like waited to have sex and all these other things. And you know what? My life sucked. None of my dreams had come true, and I was fucking miserable. I felt like I lived in jail. And I did. I was living in jail. I was living in good girl jail and trying not to be in judgment jail, but I realized that the only thing that was keeping me in this building and playing this game was fear that I would be ostracized from grace forever. But inside, I was like a fucking volcano about to explode. And I left and went towards something that had to really disintegrate and go far in the other direction first before it became back into any level of synchronicity and story. And what I went towards, and what ended up being the antidote is the mystery. On that last day I was at church, I remember thinking, I just want everyone to shut up and say, it's a mystery, and then be silent for like a really long time, maybe forever. It's a mystery, and therefore don't judge. We can't really judge because it's a mystery. And when we meet an invitation to the mystery, it asks us to reckon with and reconcile, sort through this wound of judgment, whether we've been the victim of it or the perpetrator of it, most likely we've been both. When we turn towards this wound and we offer a medicine of mystery, a tremendous level of healing becomes available across all levels of healing. And when I look around the people and communities that I serve and that I'm close to, the culture at large, I see the effects of some of that wounding or ignoring the wounding, the malaise, like a purposelessness, this uninteresting spiritual anemia. The wound is left a hunger that's not satiated by institutional religion. It's even harmed by it, I think. It's it's a hunger, it's an appetite for the mystery. Institutions need knowns and they need answers, but the appetite is for the mystery. It's not knowledge of metaphysical, multiple choice philosophy exam answers, but not that kind of knowledge. Knowledge like you would know a person, a smell, a lover. People are craving that kind of knowledge, something more mysterious, something more embodied, something with real potency, something bigger than certainty and uncertainty, something sword-like and inviting, something that resonates, but also challenges them, a real paradox, a real story to really wrestle with and get blessed by. People are craving something that inspires them to become that isn't influencers on social media. The new age moment was probably needed and an understandable reaction from where it came out of, but it sort of devolved into this shallow pool of you are how you feel or you are who you affirm yourself to be. There's no real sandpaper to it. It doesn't ask you to become anyone. There's no hero's journey in it. There's no alchemy, there's no friction. At the same time, on the other hand, judgment and dogma is very confined in a shallow way, I think, to force oneself to become into a box. And as usual, paradox and mystery, it has a razor's edge somewhere in the middle of the unanswerable void it creates. And from time to time, we'll find ourselves on that razor's edge. If we determine ourselves to play somewhere in between these supposed extremes, these supposed opposites, if we play on that razor's edge, from time to time we'll get cut open and then we see it makes me think of I can't remember which Pirates of the Caribbean movie it is, but there's this moment where they're not understanding what it is they need to do. They're really stuck. And the conclusion is we've got to flip the boat upside down. So they flip over the black pearl so that the top of the boat is now rolled into the water, the bottom of the boat is up. And instead of drowning, then the world pivots around them and suddenly they are right side up in an upside down world or an apparently upside down world. And I think this is a very magical confronting metaphor for how different layers of what is true are or could be interacting with one another, some of the choices available to us. But judgment feels good, you know, especially if, you know, someone has judged the shit out of us. We want to serve them right back. We may have left church dogma, but now we're steeped in political dogma and scientific dogma. There's very few who are willing and able to leave behind their current judgment and dogma because humans seem to like judging people. And frankly, it's a lot easier, it's very fast food, to be a follower of dogma. It's a lot easier to do that than it is to be an initiate to the mystery. It's a lot easier to sit comfortably inside of fixed ideologies and answers than it is to step humbly into uncertainty in the unknown. Especially in an age where now we have social media, we have the internet, and we've become really addicted to judgment and criticism. If you want to get a million likes, just make a video where you shit on other people and you will win the internet. But when we court mystery, that's honoring an esoteric place, some inner place. And it's a place where we could have and grow a meaningful, developed, mature spiritual person. But courting the mystery opens us to a place where we could become ourselves mysterious and live a mystical response to an encountered presence of divinity, which is what I think a spiritual path is. We could step towards the mystery, but we would have to leave that pedestal. But that asks humility of us. It asks us to acknowledge our earthliness and willingly step into what if I don't know, instead of I do know and you are wrong. Stepping towards the mystery from this inner place asks us to know and acknowledge our temporality, our limitation, our situatedness, and from then, from there, invite in even more I don't know. And humility is acknowledging the ground on which we stand, like to be fully there, be all the way in your backpack of stories and myths and gnosis. And remember also that it is what is apparent. It is how up to this point something has been revealed to you. It is up to this point what has resonated with you. And that if it's alive, it can and likely will change and hopefully grow. It's completely valid. Your bundle of knowledge of the mystery fuels you down your path of becoming, it's a gift. And unless you're fully enlightened, in which case you don't need to listen to this podcast, unless you're fully enlightened, you're holding a fractal. And that fractal can expand and increase in brilliance and truth as your own coherence grows, as your alignment constellates. But what you know, what you have, has an edge. You aren't yet holding totality, you're holding a fractal of mystery and truth. And what it looks like to grow towards the edge of that, an increase in coherence and capacity, what it takes to do that looks different on different people. What's in your cosmic backpack, what's your fractal, my fractal, it's not the new mono myth. It's a myth. And it's one that if you're a growing, becoming person, it's also gonna grow and change. And there's humility in acknowledging that limitation, which also could step us closer to mystery. There's this perception that everyone who's realizing looks the same. You know, everyone who's on a path to self-realization believes the same things at the same time, and that again creates an in-group which we love. This idea that once people all believe the same things and are educated into the quote right way, then we'll be all like each other. But someone you absolutely don't like could be in their ultimate and absolute realization for right now, acting out some very pivotal and important role in the divine game happening on this plane. Everything is how it is apparent to us, how it has been revealed to us. What you know you do know it, but you know it as it appears to you. So embody that truth and also be humbled by what could be true, hovering close to mystery. And when we do this, when we stand in this paradox that we know and we don't know, when we do this we cannot judge. Maybe someone is being some terrible transgressive sinner, or maybe they're transgressing a new path into grace. I don't know. Maybe there are things that we don't know and fully understand. Maybe someone is being a giant pimple of the awfulness of humanity, or maybe something is trying to die incomplete and they're helping that process along. I don't know. It is a mystery. Generator. Operator, D, destroyer. Sounds a lot like Kali Ma to me. Stepping close to mystery will ask us to relinquish this narrative that the divine is very, very concerned with whether or not you go to church and that there's this figure in the sky guaranteeing your certainty about other people's eternal destinies. Or if you're on more of like the woke liberal side, stepping close to mystery will ask you to relinquish ideologies that offer a false sense of security about who is good, who is bad, who's saving the world, who's not. It's the same game. They're just different faces. Any enslavement to ideology is the patriarchy. It doesn't matter if that ideology is fundamental religious doctrine. Or feminism or wokeness or terrorist propaganda, if the ideology is the thing that is our fixed throne, then it's the same immature hierophant. It's still patriarchy. The immature hierophant projects the boundaries onto the outer world so they can appear fixed and very secure and controllable and understandable. And it's often to compensate for a lack of internal freedom or fear of other people being free. Enslavement to ideology, regardless of what the ideology is, squishes out all wonder, all grace, and it distances us from the mystery because it's a rigid consciousness, regardless of what the ideology is. If we don't look at the costume or the mask and we just look at the core, we see it's the same thing. It's black and white, rigid consciousness. And isn't it interesting that the two quote sides would say the same thing, depending on what side of the pool you're standing on? The costume is different, but the core is the same, right? Conservative fundamentalist religious people are like, woke liberals are the source of all evil, and everything is going to hell in a handbasket. And then woke liberal science's religion people are like, the conservative right-wing planet killers are the source of all evil, and everything is going to the metaphorical hell in a handbasket. They're saying the same thing. They're doing the same thing. The core is the same, the costume is different. And for me personally, that points to a greater realization, which is that judgment and dogma and fixed ideology as God is alive and well on all sides of the street. Whether God is old man judgy pants in the sky, or God is science, or God is organized political movement, or God is whatever the ideology is, judgment and dogma enslavement is alive and well. And it's not getting us anywhere remotely close to mystery, which is the antidote. It's not pulling us towards something more whole. Other people's eternal destiny, I think, is unknown to us. And it's also none of our business. Unless someone has invited you into that mysterious inquiry and space holding with them, it's really not our business to judge it. And as Reverend Mother Oprah says, there's your business and then there's God's business. And those are wise words. There are some things that are just none of their business. For instance, other people's eternal destinies. And we've all been on the receiving end of that judgment. We've all been told how awful and terrible or sinful or ugly or selfish we are. We've all experienced being not chosen or being on the quote, other side of this line of the wound of separation and judgment. And ironically, those who are the loudest advocates for their in-worldview and the distinction from bad others are people who have been the most hurt by this very same dynamic, but in a different field. They've been the victim in one narrative and they become the perpetrators in the next. We toss the ball back and forth and back and forth. We get bad, othered in conservative morality and religion, and then we become the loudest, bestest, most educated liberal democrat who hates the opposite side on principle, or vice versa. And again, the adjectives are different, the costumes are different, the wound is the same. It's perpetuating the same story, the worldview is the same. It's perpetuating judgment and in and out, access to permission and no access. Access to grace and compassion, no access. It's perpetuating God as judgment. And it's clear to see the division this creates in culture, but it also creates division inside of ourselves. We start to slice and dice and sort out the parts of ourselves inside in the same way that we slice and dice and judge outside. There's this part of me that's the good part, and there's this other part of me that's the bad part. There's the part that's the God of the moment doesn't like, the part of me who this group just can't know about or isn't in compliance with the ideology I subscribe to. And the longer we do this to ourselves and we play this slice and dice game in the world and inside our world, the greater that chasm becomes. We start to perform, overperform, and perfect the said quote good part. And then we repress and repress and repress and hide the quote bad part until it inevitably explodes, usually, um, personally or collectively. And this approach, the separation, it prevents that which is rejected and wounded from becoming integrated. It keeps it from healing, it shuts out harmony, it prevents wholeness. It erases all tension that the mystery needs and provides. And it stagnates any possible alchemy because of that. We do get a short-term dopamine hit because judgment is great for boosting the ego and winning on the internet and feeling like you know everything. And we do love that, everyone does, but it's not great for the magic of synthesis. And it's not great for hovering close to the mystery. We like to know. Humans love to know. We love an explanation, we love to decide who is deserving and not deserving. We love to make a meaning from something that gives us a content nugget of do this and not that. Oh, those people who got wiped out by a tsunami, what bad stuff did they do? Oh, those people who lost everything in a wildfire, it's because they're so rich, and being rich is bad, and therefore they don't deserve our compassion. It's always because of all this bad stuff, and they're so bad. In-group and out-group, people who deserve grace and compassion, people who don't. Oh my god, she was so good and so pretty and so sweet, I can't believe that happened to her. The mystery is the antidote. What if being good and bad doesn't have something to do with it? Maybe it does. But maybe it's more mysterious. God is the name of the blanket we put over the mystery. What is is a great mystery. This is an essential art, cultivating a robust, mature spiritual life for oneself. It's reckoning with this living question with your life, what is mystery and how do I hover close to it? We acknowledge the limitations, we are in the humility of trying to name or even use a covering blanket, and we say, Hail mystery. If the world is not on trial and you don't have to be judge, then you're also not on trial. Ram Das said, everyone is God and drag. And that would be a great mystery to contemplate indeed. What questions, thoughts, or stories challenge you to move closer to mystery? If we play with this mystery for a moment, if everyone is God and drag, and if the divine is something that encompasses all, then again, someone could be in their realization and destiny and also be the complete opposite of you. Who are we to judge? It is mystery. And if our knowing, as in our soul knowing, our gnosis, if that comes in fractals and bits and stories and resonance, then the least we can do and what the mystery does is constantly grow and agitate and blaspheme the part of us who thinks we know it all. It's never boring because it's always evolving. Truth evolves, truth weaves. Yes, truth is like a sword, and also truth is ultimately the mystery, and it's challenging, and it's the mountain. And if it's the mountain, it looks different based on where we are in it or on it. The mountain looks different if you're on top. It looks different if you're below or if you're at a cave inside, if it's the winter, if it's the summer, are you on the south side or the north side? It's the same mountain. But everyone has a different story to tell about what it is and what's true from here. We can try to avoid the mystery by taking refuge in apparent safety and the illusion of control. We can try to avoid the mystery hiding out in materialism or taking refuge in the mind and our favorite answers and ideologies. We can avoid the mystery by defending and protecting our image or becoming obsessed with security and making our lives and choices smaller and smaller and smaller so that it lives inside the realm of our knowns and control and ideology. And if we do that, every threshold gets a no. Every mountain gets a no. It's safer to stay in the valley at the base. And so our world gets smaller and smaller until it can live inside and confirm our box of goods and bads, who's in and who's out, what makes sense, what's reasonable, what supports our arguments, what's comfortable. But if we do this, we deny the mystery. And if we deny the mystery outside, then we're missing out on it inside of us as well. We're missing out on what is great and unknowable inside of us as well. And I think the mystery includes the body. As I mentioned earlier, judgment without also creates judgment within, and vice versa. And so with this in mind, I do want to touch on body for a moment. For thousands of years, a simple answer from spiritual and religious worldviews, or many of them, not earth-based spiritual worldviews, that are steeped in transcendence and dogma, told everyone their spirit was good, your body is bad. And this is also a judgment that can be at the rotting core of the God wound for many people. The world is bad, heaven is good, what's here is bad, just like your body is bad. All that is matter, all that we can see is not worth investing in, don't love it, it's false. But a more mysterious agitation, a more interesting paradox. What if your body is a gift? What if being here is a gift? What if spirit is matter and matter is spirit? Look for the paradox. Find its razor's edge and let it work on you. When we have these transcendental or puritanical inheritances, if they've stayed singular, it creates a belief that the body is something to be conquered. The body is full of wants that are bad and they need to be controlled and denounced. A subtle story that every transcendent, out-of-body, next life, afterlife desire is good and it's of God and spirit, and everything here is impermanent and therefore base and bad. It's not hard to see how this went hand in hand with catapulting us out of an alive, dynamic, wild, divine world and moved culture into something disembodied, industrial enlightenment where rationalism and the rational mind have become absolutely everything. If we've been super wounded by this body is bad judgment dualism, then often we take refuge in the mind and in being super smart or succeeding in the things of the mind. Others have taken refuge in the transcendence or in spiritual worldviews and practices that avoid the body, whether that's, you know, mind over matter crossfit culture, where it's the body is something to be conquered, or if we're leaving the body altogether where you're in constant meditation or extreme asceticism, it can fuel disembodiment and unworthiness when we feel into the body. Sometimes people are hiding inside of frequency only, vibes only, energy only spirituality, where everything is about what's inside. Or maybe we're hiding in mental achievement and superiority, or if we're then the rebellious teenager response, it's just whatever the complete opposition of this is, taking refuge solely in matter and whatever your body wants at any time is good. And again, what if we don't judge? What if everyone's in an edge that's different? What if there are people who are here to meditate all the time? What if there are people who are here to be that mind over matter crossfit coach and so it's honest and realized for them? Everyone has a gift to share, everyone has a fractal, everyone is at a different place on the mountain. Some people might have blindfolds on, some people might be handcuffed to a side of the mountain by someone else or maybe by themselves. Some people have their eyes all the way open and have been at the top, and now they're looking very ordinary and boring on the outside as they live their life at the bottom, they've come back down. Other people are at the bottom and coming up with all the reasons they can not to go even near the mountain. Two people can be doing the exact same thing on the outside, but for one person it's authentic and mysterious in realization, and for someone else it's not. Who are we to judge? You can be a powerful magician inside or outside of religion. You can be a fully realized celebrity or a fully realized impoverished ascetic. We are accountable for our journey and for our coherence, for what we are bringing to the table, our conscious destiny, the magical marriage of our inner and outer. We are responsible for our connection to the mystery and our humble stewardship of what we've been shown to date. We can discern difference. We're not bypassing limited embodied reality here, but discerning difference doesn't have to be judgment. There's a difference between this is what's happening and therefore it is God awful and you are terrible. Your body is simply human and of this beautiful nature. And where you are is the current pinpoint of your story, and so is someone else's. Doesn't mean you have to be best friends, but it also doesn't mean that they're going to hell and you're not, or whatever the equivalent of that is. Your body is not worse or better than your soul, it's simply different. The cave of the mountain is different from the east-facing upper side of the mountain. They're the same mountain, they're just different experiences, different revelations, different parts of the journey, hologram. Your soul is not better or worse than your spirit. They're simply different things. You are a bunch of different things that have come together in this paradox of being human, which is mystery. Parts of you are limited, others are less limited. It's not a judgment, it's just truth. Doesn't make limitation bad. Limitation is we can discern difference without it being judgment. Body and spirit, soul and matter all paradoxically positioned, and that makes it interesting. It gives us a dynamic to live with and live into. What if what they want to need are intention? They probably are intention, and that's the beautiful dance that you're called to take. Get in that paradox. That's your alchemy. Your body is an exquisite time bomb of experience and beauty and limitation. It's the animal for the wild god. It's not the only thing that's true about you, but it is true about you. Your body is not a vibe, it's not a concept. They can both be true. All of you can be true. We are spirit and we are matter. We are here, we are of here, and we're more than here, and it is mystery. We have a limited perception and resource, and we are infinitely resourced. We are the infinite obeying limitation. And so is everybody else. It is mystery. When you live close to mystery, just when you think you've got it nailed down, the hologram changes. The mystery does seem to have a flavor, and people know when they've met it, and a lot of language starts to sound the same to describe it, especially from the mystics, rooted in all different traditions and times and places around the globe. They're standing in different places and practices, but the realizations they come to are remarkably similar. The symbols might be different, but the language, the flavor is remarkably similar. And none of what's true in those encounters has the flavor of dogma or judgment. Isn't that interesting? They have the flavor of paradox and parables and poems. The truth is hidden in a symbol, a kohen, because it's designed to confound you into humility and turn you toward the mystery. And in our mysterious, limited bodies, we have things we like and we don't like. And that is what it is. It doesn't have to be king. I like this, I don't like this. This hurts, that doesn't, it might change in two years. Your physical preferences are not a measure for some eternal scale of who is worthy, who is judged, how they are judged, what's ultimately true. We can feel our physical limitations and preferences, and I think we should. We can see and hold and grieve what we see. But our physical preferences and limitations, what we feel and see and hold, it doesn't have to become a judgment. Our judgments are excuses to not love the world as it is. To not love ourselves as we are. Accepting the challenge to become love for the world and for ourselves, that's going to ask us to alchemize. What a mystery. And I think there's a great hunger for this. Judgment is getting really boring and really old. It's like if there's a movie director, a cosmic movie director, they're like, this movie sucks. Like scene change, please. I'm so bored. I know exactly what's coming next and what this person's gonna say and what they're gonna do. People miss things that take them to meet the unknown or the greater than known. I think we're ready for someone to stop pointing at answers as if it's a five-step, twelve-step program. Ready for someone to point us towards something unexpected, confounding, confronting, a story, a question we can live into rather than a period that finishes a sentence. It's awe and wonder and a sense of deep beauty and grace in the moment that I think we're craving, and only mystery can give us that. How do I start? You ask. Well, we've already talked about humility and questions and paradox. At the very least, we can start suspending judgment as a practice and see what opens up for us, what discomforts arise, what interesting questions emerge. And when in doubt, at the very least, I think we can praise worship what's here, worship what is, what is now, as a way of praising what you do not understand, which is also praising your life, which is also praising life. Experiment with worshiping not knowing as a gateway to awe and wonder, which are keys to mystery. Welcome mystery is the antidote to judgment. Welcome mystery, a gateway towards some inconceivable wholeness, which might be grace. If we need to be right, there is no mystery, there's no wonder, there's no grace. Everything is apparent, everything is as it appears to us right now. Let us be humble in that beautiful, limited sight. Who are we to judge? What if instead you hold softly and reach towards alchemical, confounding questions? Less life is dogma, more life is art. You could relinquish the pedestal of judgment. We all have many inside of us, I know I do, and instead we could play with choosing a beautiful story and make living that story the art piece. Your dynamic dance that's in response to this ever shifting, alive, breathing hologram. Make the life art response to the living questions that. Is devotion to the mystery. Federico Garcia Lorca said only mystery allows us to live.

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Only mystery.

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Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to subscribe to the show, leave us a review, or share the episode with someone who would enjoy it. Check out the show notes below for more about our guests, plus links to gifts and other resources to take you deeper. Our podcast music was produced by Santiago Paramo, our podcast art graphically designed by Sarah Mendoza, and photography by Charlie Watts. Thank you for being here, and we'll see you next time. Be well. Peace.