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Level Soul, its host or any of the companies they represent. Now,
let's dive in to today's episode. I like to welcome
to the show Curtis Chiles.
Speaker 2: Hey, Curtis, you doing really well. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on the show. My friend,
I'm excited to talk to you. You have a You're
going to introduce me and introduce my audience to a
very interesting fellow, to say the least, and his work,
and we're going to talk about the afterlife from his perspective,
and it's going to be an interesting conversation. So my
first question to you, man, is what got you caught
up in all of this stuff that you do with
your YouTube channel and the work that you've been doing
for a couple of years now.
Speaker 2: Apparently we have we have more than one thousand videos
made just looking through and explaining and delving into and
exploring Emmanue Swedenborg's material. And that's not like if you're
going to start a growth strategy for YouTube. It's not like, oh,
everybody's searching Swedenborg. Nobody knows who he is.
Speaker 1: It's not a hot topics. He's not trending.
Speaker 2: We will just sell out and talk about Swedenborg. No,
that's not what it is. Yeah, it was twenty ten
when I made my first YouTube video about it, and
that was really back before I even knew that YouTube
had any depth.
Speaker 1: Fut to it or future. Well.
Speaker 2: I just thought, if you fall off your skateboard and
your friend records it, he puts it on YouTube, or
if like a cat jumps into a box, they'll put
that on YouTube. But at the time, I was trying
to figure out how can I get the word out
about the power of Swedenborg's experiences and ideas to change
lives because it had changed mine. And so I was
looking up what's there on YouTube? And when I got
there way way back in the day. It's changed a
bit since then, but there was a very polarized conversation
where you had It was sort of the throes of
new atheism. It was like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett
and Christopher Hichens, Sam Harris and a lot of their
followers were really finding YouTube as this way to kind
of look at what was wrong with Christian theology and
tear it down, and then you had on the whole
other side. Some I feel like Christian fundamentalists who were
were saying, well, just believe, just believe, and there was
nothing in the middle, and I felt like, oh, Swedenborg
fits right in there. The people who are looking for
like a more credible, rational kind of bringing together of
the mystical in the every day but also of the
science and the spirituality, which I know you talk about
on your channel a lot, which I want to really
get to because I feel like Swedenborg is the clashing
of science and uality. I mean, he was absolutely, That's
a news story in itself. But so I was looking
around and I saw actually on YouTube people were having
these these conversations about the big things in life that
does God exist? And so I thought, okay, I'll see
if we can we can find any way to sneak
Swedenborg into that conversation. So, I mean, that's a short
story of how I got on there, and the longer
story is that I had been going through some struggles.
I had some mental health issues. It was like eighteen nineteen,
like everybody does at that age, I was depressed. I
had all these negative thoughts and I was I was
constantly worry about things I had, you know, obsessive compulsive,
or you have to you have to feel like you
have to. I'm not really going to tap the microphone
because that's bad for the sound, but I would feel
like I got to tap this thing seven times? Who
I really did a little and I just I knew
it was stupid, but I also was like, oh, I
better just do it because what if something bad happens.
I was just a mess. And it was around that
time that I had heard of Swedenborg. Before my my
parents had actually read Swedenborg, I knew that it was around,
but it was in that time when I began to realize, oh,
this is describing my mind and how it works. This
is actually a really powerful like what are a lever
that can pry me out of these these sort of
pits that I'm in. And from then on I knew
that it's like if if everybody was thirsty and there
was a drought and you found like there's a there's
actually a well over here that still works, you don't
want to tell everyone about it. So I kind of
feel like I'm just trying to pass along the value
that the Swedenborg's material had for me, so that I
do it probably for the same reason you're doing your show,
which is we're trying to make life better and the
world as it is, and as we understand it isn't
I can't quite do it. So what's that missing piece? Right? Why?
Why isn't life so great? We got all this amazing
technology and everything, but people are not that happy a
lot of the time. To me, I feel like Swedenborg
has something to offer to that missing piece. So that's
what I'm trying to get the word out about it
and how it can help it.
Speaker 1: Do you do you think that like for me, that
was Paramahansa Yogananda like that, that was that was my
guy who I started. That was the That was the
rabbit hole I went down, and it was really interesting
to see how that changed my world view and that
just opened me up to so many different views. And
I always say to people like, you know, there's so
many different ways to climb the mountain, there's so many
different paths to take, but we're all going towards the
same top. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, what has to be you can't. You can't
just say what I'm doing is right and everything everyone
else is doing is nah right. They don't know anything.
And there there have been, you know, there has been
some religious traditions that sort of take that view.
Speaker 1: Oh, no, many, there's many. You're being kind many.
Speaker 2: It's a bit of a maybe it's a feature, not
a bug, because it keeps people in your church because
if they leave it, then you know they got hell
or worse. But there's no way that that's true. There's
no way that that's true. You think about the depth
and complexity of all the human beings on planet Earth
and the way that doesn't matter what your tradition is
or what your rituals are or your background, there's always
like goodness and love and then the opposite of that.
It doesn't matter. It could be a village in India
or in the Philippines. There can be kids and either
they're going to include someone or they're not. That's the
And this was something that was very remarkable about Swedenborg
in his time. I'll start to break into that conversation,
but so Swedenborg time frame. If anyone hasn't heard of him,
he's Emmanuel Swedenborg and he was living. He was born
in the late sixteen hundreds, but really did a lot
of the work that we're gonna be talking about in
the mid seventeen hundreds. He lived in Sweden. That's why
his name was Swedenborg. Actually it started out as Swedberry,
but when he got ennobled it changed to Swedenborg. Trivia.
You don't there it is, but he in his one
of the many facets of this revelatory or mystical journey
he went on was he came out of it saying
that you don't have to be a Christian to go
to heaven. He said he saw this afterlife and it
was full of people from many different religions and actually
more important than your religious ideology, which can actually be
a stumbling block if it locked you into self centeredness.
Materialism was are you, are you following God as you
understand God? And are you living basically a Ten Commandments
kind of style life? Not murdering, not killing?
Speaker 1: Those general things we can all agree on.
Speaker 2: The stuff that if you don't agree, it's like I
don't want to sit next to you. It's not that
other things don't matter, and it's not that they can't
be powerful tools. It's not that there aren't particular truths
that can be really useful. Otherwise why would I be
so locked in on the Swedenborg thing. But the primary
thing that makes your your life what it is is
what ultimately like, what you love, and then how you
try to follow what is good. So if sweden Woor
came out saying, oh, no, you don't have to be
a Christian to go to heaven, and at the time
Sweden was a theocracy, yeah, and he actually his works
got put on trial for many reasons. That was only
one of the shocking things that he said. But absolutely,
you can't you can't believe that if there's a if
there's a divine force behind it all, that only one
little sliver of life matters, one little group of people
where one beliefs and everything else is nothing. What what?
Why would why would you provide such limited access to
the tools necessary to live a happy life?
Speaker 1: Right? And it's just even when I was growing up
as a Catholic, I was just like, so if you
were never if you were born in the congo somewhere,
never heard of Jesus, never heard of Christianity, and all
of a sudden that person goes to hell because he
never has contact with it. It always yes, always kind
of free, like even as a kid of like man,
that's pretty rough, like it's just basically pot luck, Oh
my gosh.
Speaker 2: And you can just if you're sitting here halfway around
the world, you can just like, oh, yeah, maybe it is.
But if you are just sitting there in front of
that little kid who was born in the congo and
you saw them and they're playing with their little friends
and having their little life, there's no way, there is
no way that if there's a god that is responsible
for their existence and mind, that God is just going
to dismiss, well, who cares what happened to you? And
this is that's actually an example that that Swedenborg used
as well to highlight that it's it's a ridiculous and
cruel idea to believe that, and he said it's a
symptom of what he said was the main problem or
malady that can afflict religions, which is what he called
faith alone.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show, which.
Speaker 2: Is where you have doctrinal ideas, but there's no love
that drives them, that they're not in the service of love.
So you can have very different doctrinal ideas than me.
If your ideals are in the service of love, and
love has to be loved for the entire human race.
It can't just be for you or your family or
your particular group you're in. If you're if you're using
your doctrinal ideals to try to move you toward a
life that serves the human race, then basically we're of
the same religion if you want to call it that,
or the same spiritual path because our intent is the same,
which is also the divine intent, which is to make
it so that every bring as much happiness to everyone
as possible.
Speaker 1: Right, And it's just different flavors. It's just it's just
completely different flavors and different spices to the dish.
Speaker 2: If you want to get into some afterlife stuff, I know,
we're just yes.
Speaker 3: That's the first thing I want to get this is
this is this is a great segue into that where
you're talking about different flavors because Swedenborg described the different
kinds of religions that people have not to as it's okay,
we can make it work, but it's necessary and good
that there are all.
Speaker 2: These different religious traditions. Because each of those traditions you
just think about Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, the different kinds of
people that those traditions mold, they end up being different
kinds of people. And Swedenborg says, in the afterlife, you
need all different kinds of people because the afterlife works together.
So what he called heaven, which is just meaning the
other side, the other side, is it works the same
way that the human body works. Okay, so if you
look at the way that your body is, it is
a total model and picture of intimate cooperation. Your heart,
your heart needs your lungs. Your lungs need your heart.
Neither is anything without the other. Even going all the
way down to the cellular level, every cell gets everything
it needs from the body and gives everything it can
back to the body and both thrive from that. And
it is total. So it's total unity, but it's a
unity of incredibly different parts. Think about the difference between
your frontal cortex and your toenail. You couldn't even tell
those came from the same thing, but they both need
to be there. And so we all become different kinds
of people through our different paths of life on earth,
and so some of us are a little more like
like the eyes, Like if you're really into learning and
understanding things, maybe you're kind of like fulfilling the function
of sight so you can serve the grander human race
in that way. Somebody else might be more like the hants.
They're more like a practical doer sort of person. But overall,
you need to have all these different kinds of people
so that we can make this ultimate sort of ultimate
manifestation of the human form, which sweden Work calls heaven,
which is when everyone's working together, just like all the
parts of the body work together.
Speaker 1: That's so beautifully and elegantly put it really is.
Speaker 2: It's cool, man. This is why this is why I
do YouTube video because the ideas they're very cool in there.
But Swedenborg is like, what, he has a weird sounding name,
he came from a long time ago. He's like, it's dense,
it's philosophical. But I know that there's really cool things
in there that are helpful, so we're trying to take
the time to like open it up and add it
to people's repertoire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because these are and it's similar to some of
the old yoga texts. I mean, you start going into
the old yoga texts in the Hindu tradition Jesus Man,
I mean you try to get into the vedix. I
mean just I mean thousands and thousands of scrolls and
really dense, but there's gold in those pieces. So trying
to grab little pieces here and there and trying to
rework it for a modern conversation is very important. Is
what I do in my show. It's what you do
in your show. That's why I wanted to have you
on because I think these you know that one little
bit makes so much sense the human body, and it's
all about cooperation, and it's all about love. And you've
spoken to near death experiences. I've spoken to a ton
of near death experiences. The threat, as there are many
with these stories, is love. That there is love, unconditional, crazy,
some some unspeakable kind of love, like it's almost a
currency up there or there next to the other side,
wherever it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if it wasn't that, if it wasn't love,
I don't think you and I would be doing what
we're doing.
Speaker 1: I agreed.
Speaker 2: If it wasn't I think that if I didn't feel
like trying to move in a spiritual direction and educate
people to try to move in that way. If it's
not leading us towards something where there's more love, where
and that love leads to life being better, then what's
the point that Then I don't care about spirituality. Then
if it's just because think it has to be moving
us towards I think about just the different kinds of
pain I've suffered in my life and the pain I've
seen other people go through. Unless we're working on fixing that,
I don't care. Yeah, I don't care. Things can change
a ton, but not necessarily get better. It's not just
if we do any if we're all spiritual, but it
doesn't mean things are gonna get better. I think about
pre social media, pre Internet, and it was like, Wow,
this amazing technology is coming. And now anyone in the
world you can see what they're doing and you can
click like it. And now I've got a seven year
old daughter and everybody's like, how do we keep kids
away from social media? Because it's enjoying their mental health.
So it's like, okay, things. It would have sounded really cool.
You can connect with anyone anywhere, but unless there's love
in the social media. Unless there's there's love driving it,
it doesn't didn't necessarily make anything better.
Speaker 1: So you mean to tell me, les it's not all
about likes and bigger cars and more bling.
Speaker 2: Everybody, please subscribe to my channel if you're watching, by
the way, I mean.
Speaker 1: It's not about I mean it's yeah, I would agree
with you because if it was a if any of
the things that I would talk about or had people
on the show talking about, would be talking about more materialism.
I've never heard somebody say happiness is outside of you,
like and when you hear that, run the opposite direction.
And that's that goes with organized religions sometimes that it's
outside of you, that we are the ones who can
help you guide you through to the afterlife. All of
that or materialism or money or you know, the flesh
or food or whatever it is. I if I hear that,
it sings, it just rings, puts flags up so high.
It's all but every major spiritual teacher that I've ever
heard of, including all the top guys from Jesus the Buddha,
that all of them say the same thing, that the
power is within you and you have to go within
that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you, and so
on and so forth, and that's what meditation is, and
that's what you start going in deeper and deeper and
you start to realize that the happiness is truly You
could have a billion dollars, it doesn't matter. Man, if
you're not that hole inside, you can only be filled
by something inside. You're not from something exterior. Would you agree?
Speaker 2: I think you could probably find billionaires that are unhappy
and people with it with meager means that are happy.
So the key must be somewhere else. I don't think.
I think it would be unrealistic to say money makes
no difference, Likes making the difference, because they sure can.
But it's about what's your priority that you're saying. If
somebody says that the thing, the most important thing, that
thing that is is God or that we're looking toward
is money, or it's likes or it's any other measure
of external stuff, then you got those alarm bells going off.
But for example, it's good that your channel has as
many subscribers as it does because it can provide a use.
It allows a megaphone for these conversations to happen. That
hopefully make people's lives better. And I know, just knowing
the YouTube channels that I watch, it's such a cool
feeling when you've had a hard day and your favorite
creator has got a new video. You know you can
just sit there and you're in your happy place and
watch it and learn something and kind of return to
that sphere. I've had people say with our stuff, they'll
put it on when they're going to sleep.
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too, mean too, Okay.
Speaker 2: It sort of at first sounds like, hey man, you're
going to sleep with but I only do that. You
can only do something like that with something that you
trust and you feel safe and you know that that
the love is gonna is going to be guiding it. There.
So absolutely that there can be a drive to but
it can't be to materialism in an end, and it
can't be to eminence in an end. Those things have
to serve usefulness, which is making a difference. That was
a bit things Swedenborg was really big about. Is it's
not like you can't say I want to bring my
podcast to the next level, or I want to take
my business to the next level, I want to earn more,
but why why are you doing that? And if it
is because I want to be able to better serve
the human race, then then that that's suddenly spiritual.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now back to the show, right absolutely, And that's
the thing. A lot of people think that you have
to be, you know, penniless and meditate for thirty years
in a Himalayan cave to be spiritual, which I think
the way you just stated it, and I am in
a complete agreement with you. The more money you have,
the more resources you have. But it's at the end
of the day, what is that for? Because at a
certain point, man, you know, you and I have both
been around the block a couple of times. I'm a
bit older than you, but generally speaking you you know,
you're a parent, so you already definitely got some some shrapnel,
if you will, of life. And at a certain point,
the house could only get so much bigger, the car
could only get really so much fancier, really the close.
At a certain point, you're good, like your basic needs
are covered. And when you that's why I see these
people like I need ten billion, I need twenty Why, Like,
what is the purpose of it? But if you're using
those resources that are being funneled through you. And I
do truly believe that it's a responsibility that you have
a lot of followers, if you have a lot, if
you have a large audience, if you have a lot
of money coming through you, how you funnel it and
are responsible for it to better humanity, to serve others.
That is the most important. Not to build a bigger
castle for yourself. You know, at a certain point the
castle is going to be big enough, like you don't
need anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well it's just like, ah, you know, I built
this new wing, but now I want another wing on
my castle because it.
Speaker 1: Just keeps it just keeps going and going and going.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: It's an endless, endless uhit that you fall into.
Speaker 2: Well, I love what you said about Oh sorry, sorry ahead,
No got ud. I'm just saying I liked what you
said about it's a responsibility because if if everybody who
is going to try to follow a spiritual path goes
off and they're in a cave meditating and they don't
have any money, then who's going to define the culture
and who's going to shape the conversations? There has to
be people if anyone's watching and you feel like I
shouldn't try to affect the world. You've got to go
impact the world, but doing it seeing it as a responsibility.
The way Swedenborg describes it is the negative way. The
ego way is to say, well, this position i'm in
of whatever exists to serve me. So if you think
if you're a politician and you think I want to
become the governor, so that I'm the governor and I
live in the governor's mansion and everyone invites me to
these parties and that's very cool, and I can, you know,
call up my friends in high school and say, look
how much better I am than you, Or you can say, well,
the governor's office. That is a great responsibility and the
real honor here goes to the office. So I better
not screw this up because there's a lot of good
that can be done. Then I feel like that's that's
a great, that's a great this side of ambition that
that really works for the human race.
Speaker 1: I forgot who said this, but I think it was someone.
I think it was a yogiar or this is a
while ago. They said that the Yogis had to get
out of the caves and go into the boardrooms and
start running these companies in a spiritual way because they
wield so much power in the world that if you
had a spiritual and you can see it with companies now.
In the eighties you never saw that, but you started
to see it in the nineties, in the early two thousands,
and currently that there are companies who are becoming like, well,
how can we help Yes, we need the bottom line,
but how can we help humanity? And it's so important
that you just don't sit alone and it's just you
alone doing it. Spiritual path and the spiritual growth is
a solitary thing in many ways. It can be a
group thing, but at the end of the day, we
leave the planet the same way we came into it
alone and naked. But you could do it, you could
help others do it around you, but it is something
that you really need to kind of go out and
into the world and help shape reality, help shape people's ideas.
That's why we do what we do every day.
Speaker 2: Totally. I love it. Yeah, we can. People can give
tools and I've got I've been on the receiving end
of so many cool tools. But in the end, the
change happens one person at a time. So any organ
religious organization, or anything that's telling you your spirituality depends
on us, that's not true. The only real spiritual force
is us looking inside and saying what do I should
not want to act on? That wells up inside me?
What do I want to act on? If I get
the impulse to steal that person's cookie, I wouldn't want
that to happen to me. So I'm actually not going
to do it, even though I want to. If I
get the impulse to go and help that person, I'm
gonna act on it because I know I would want
that on a basic level. That that's the force that
changes the world. But it just takes buy in from
a large group of people.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm without questions. So there was Let's get into
a little bit into the afterlife because this is something
that my audience loves to talk about, and I think
it's a conversation that almost everybody at what point or
another is going to have in their life, like, Hey,
what's on that other side? What's when this runs out?
What happens? So I know Swedenberg has a real clear
idea of what happens immediately after My question is what
is it and how did he come upon this information.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, as I said before, anybody's interested in
out of body or near death experiences, spiritual experiences in general,
and particularly the way that those and the scientific world intersect,
absolutely should know about Swedenborg. Because Swedenborg was up until
his mid fifties just a successful renaissance man polymath guy.
So he was in Sweden, which was a world power
at the time, and he was doing everything. So he
was a the assessor of minds, which was Sweden's mining
industry was one of the most important industries on the planet.
He was in this position where he's overseeing a lot
of the mining there. He was an inventor. He had
invented military equipment for the Swedish military as well as
mining equipment, all kinds of things there. But he's also
a very well respected scientist, had written these huge principias
on anatomy, founded the scientific branch of crystallography, first person
to suggest the nebular hypothesis, first scientific journal in Sweden
he started that went to he was part of the
Swedish government House of Nobility, so on and so on
and so on. Very smart guy and very well known
to the point, where as I understand it, if he
would show up in London, Let's say the newspaper would
say Swedenborg came to London. I don't know who his
equivalent would be today. I feel like the Kardashians. He's
the Kardashians back then. If you think about what would
happen today if Kim had out of body experiences, well,
I think it might be like a Neil de grass Tyson.
Although back in the day individuals could do so much
more scientifically because science was a lot less complex than
so he was. He was a huge deal, very well known.
Think if Neil de grass Tyson tomorrow set got on
Twitter and said, I've been having spiritual experiences and I
now have the ability to have them at will. I'm
going to spend the rest of my career cataloging and
explaining how the afterlife works. That's what Swedenborg was. So
he the entire thing is documented from the time when
he was in his mid fifties to the end of
his life in his eighties. He in his mid fifties
was keeping this travel journal just because he's saying, I'm
going from London to Amsterdam or something, and it was
just keeping track of that. Back in the day, it
was dangerous to do that. You could your boat could sink.
There was actually pirates. There's a lot going on, so
you want to keep track of your travels when where
you're headed. But in that he starts to record his
dreams and he starts to analyze his dreams, which is
back before dream analysis was a thing. Actually nowadays psychology
has been very influenced by Swedenborg. Carl Jung read a
lot of Swedenborg. William James a lot of psychology and
particularly sort of mystical psychology has been influenced by him.
But he started to write down his dreams and they
got vivider and more strange, and eventually he started to
have experiences that were outside of that dream box, Like
just in the hypnagogic state when he's waking up, he
would see something or talk to someone, and he writes
every one of them down and writes down when he
thinks the interpretation is. And then at some point he
has a couple of really powerful experiences and visions which
really changed the trajectory of his life. And something seems
to have like snapped open, because from then on out,
for the last three decades of his life, he was
having these experiences at will every day and catalog the
entire thing. So it's between then and the end of
his life. He wrote thirty volumes worth of material that
he's accustomed to writing big, long scientific works, so his
afterlife stuff reads just like that. It's very organized, it's
very it's both descriptive, like he will tell stories, but
he's also very philosophical and will tell you it's like
a physics lesson on how the after life works and
why people see what they do when they go where
they do. So he published, Yeah, not only like thirty
volumes that he published, but he also kept a journal
of all his spiritual experiences. You get so much raw
data and then insights from that that I feel like
anybody who's looking to have a complete picture of the
after life to you know, stitch together what's in between
near death experiences, those sorts of things. Sweden Morgue is
definitely worth checking out. He did talk about, and again
this is a couple hundred years before Raymond Moody coined
the term near death experience in Life after Life, which,
by the way, there was a whole section about Swedenborg
in that book Life after Life is yeah, which is cool.
So right in the beginning, because Raymond Moody was looking
to find we've got this more phenomenon of people having
these experiences. This has got to have happened in history.
Where did this pop up? And there was a couple
of chats. He had a comparison to the Bible, to
the Tibetan Book of the Dead, one other one that
I can't remember, but also Swedenborg because there's so much
similarity to the world near death experiences to described.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: So the life after death process, actually our channel is
called off the Left Eye, and that was me starting
out my journey on YouTube, thinking how is anyone going
to be interested in this stuff at all? I just
flipped open one of Swedenborg's books and I looked for
a cool phrase. They didn't have any religious baggage attached
to it, and it said off the left eye. This
is from the story of him waking up being shown
what it's like to wake up in the afterlife. He
wasn't his body wasn't in physical danger like you have
with a lot of near death experiences, but he says
that he has shown it, but kept in a state
of consciousness enough that he could recall it and write
it afterwards. And he said that at first he could
feel his body kind of shutting down and his breathing
slowed a lot, but his spirit, he could feel his
spirit breathing and that started to rise. And then he
said it felt like there was a pull, and his
spirit left his body and then went through this series
of awakening steps in the spiritual world. According to Swedenborg,
all of us are in the spiritual world right now.
You have a body, and then you have consciousness, and
your consciousness is your spirit, so that part of you
exists in the spiritual dimension, or he called it the
spiritual world. So that's the terminology I like to lease
the spiritual side of life. You're already there in terms
of the spiritual part of you. And he said that
your spirit has all the features that your body has,
so you have spirit. Your spirit has eyes just like
your body has eyes. So to him, initially he was
surrounded by what he calls angels, but I know in
Christianity that word sometimes means these specially created beings that
only live in the afterlife. But to him, angels that
just means people who had been living here and who
have died and crossed over to the other side, so
that's an angel. He's surrounded by these really loving angels.
He called them celestial angels, which those are people who
are particularly devoted to love. And they made sure that
when he was experiencing this transition that no disturbing thoughts
or feelings came into his mind. They were kind of
shepherding him, protecting him and just sitting with him there
until he was starting to stir in the spirit. And
then from there new kinds of angels came up to
him because his mind was starting to stir, and so
there's angels that are more mind focused, and so those
said he said, it seemed like they pulled the covering
off of my left eye, and that's when I received
the gift of spiritual sight. Because everything is symbolic. There's
so much symbolism in the afterlife. I think that's part
of why I know you. You started and are still
in film and in movies so much. There's like, here's
the scene where the hero finally grabs the sword, and
it's like there's just it's meaningful beyond this. Oh now
he has a sword. It's just like there's a meaning
in this moment. Swee Moore would call that a correspondence
because to him, a sword is a symbol of the
truth and the power of the truth. So when we
see somebody, when you know King Arthur or I've just
been rereading Lord of the Rings, so I'm thinking about
that a lot. Oh yeah, like Eric Gorn has got
that sword, and why does it matter so much? Because
this is a symbol of the kind of power that
the truth can have in your life. So the spiritual
world is full of that symbolism that we actually get
our appreciation for it by our sort of that the
spiritual world seeping in. So they pulled the covering off
of his left eye, and then from there it's kind
of shooes your own adventure. So you get angels are
there and they'll show you anything you want and do anything.
But you get to follow your heart then and you
kind of gravitate toward people who love the same kinds
of things that you do. So love on the other
side plays a role similar to what gravity plays here.
The gravity. Yeah, so that's a correspondence as well. So
in the physical world. Why am I in this chair?
It's because of gravity. Why is the earth around? It's
because of gravity. I'm not a physicist, but I think
that's the basics of how it is. So gravity is
what holds you to where you are there. Love does
the same kind of thing, So people who love and
care about the same sorts of things will gravitate toward
each other, and this forms spiritual communities. It's the reason
why you end up with sort of your your soulmates
or your people or something. Because love there is absolutely
a primary force that shapes everything, because the whole afterlife
is spirit based rather than physical based, and spirit is
love and thoughts to the things we expect. It's in
our consciousness. So it's like both similar to the world
we have here, but yet fundamentally different in the way
that it's organized and what it does. So after you
wake up, you then are free to go. Freedom is
a hugely important thing. You're free to go and pursue
what kind of things do I want to love and
what and what kind of people do I want to
hang out with? And then from there there's as many
different you know, afterlife situations as there are different people
because everyone is unique, right.
Speaker 1: Everything's custom made for you, kind of like in your
death experience. Every in your death experience I've heard is
custom made, even though there are elements that are similar.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and the spiritual world because it's spirit based. So
because it's consciousness based, even your surroundings are a reflection
of what's inside you. So the kind of house that
you have. You know how people will have dreams and
in dreams they'll be in this house and you'll be like, well,
this was my house, but it wasn't really my house.
It didn't look like my house. And almost from what
I can find in almost every school of dream interpretation,
a house is a symbol of the mind. And I
know if I have dreams where oh, like the attic
is getting expanded, it just feels like, Okay, I'm learning
something new, I'm thinking of something. So there the things
that are in you, So the kind of things that
you love and the things that you think about. That
creates the environment, so that the home that you're in
is a reflection of your mind and heart. It would
be particularly who you are, that even the landscape and
like the flora and fauna there and will react and
match a certain community, so the people that are living there.
And this is a lot like in movies as well,
because if you go into Let's keep on, Lord of
the Rings, if you go into Mordor, there's not like
bunny rabbits living there and butterflies, because it doesn't fit right.
So we just know it would ruin the mood, but
spiritually it would be because the gentle, kinder animals correspond
to loving kind affections and scarier, more brain of animals
correspond to harmful ones. So you actually see in the
spiritual world this kind of cinematic life playing out. Okay,
there's a few things I could go on forever, but
I won't.
Speaker 1: All right, all right, So is this more of his
adventures in the afterlife or does he have an actual
layout of what happens after someone dies.
Speaker 2: Yes, so when you die, you start out in what
he calls the world of spirits, which he talks about heaven,
the world of spirits and Hell. Heaven and Hell are
psychological states. This is another way in which he wildly
diverges from the traditional Christian understanding, yet still uses similar terminology.
Heaven is fundamentally a state in which you enjoy doing
what is good to other people. Heaven is the joy
of doing what is good to other people. Hell is
the joy of harming other people. And that might sound
strange because we don't really think of it like that,
But really, why why do people like why do you
flick that guy off in traffic? Why do you try
to get the last word? And why do you try
to rule? Why do people conquer each other and try
to rule? Because there's this Hey, I like to be
on top of ego. Ego, so the joy of ego, right,
So the world of spirits. Here here in this world
you don't know. You don't know if a person is
wrapped up in the pleasure of help and service or
the pleasure of ego. This is why you have to
lock your door because you don't know who's going to
come down the street, what they're going to if they're
going to think it's all right to steal from you
or not. So here it's all you don't know. But
in the spiritual world afterlife, things get sorted out. So
the world of spirits, he says, it's this midway between
heaven and hell where you have a chance to really
get down to the core of what what you want
to do and what you want to love, and then
you go and you kind of commit to one or
the other. Am I going to be committed to ego
or am I going to be committed to love? Because
us those two things need to be separate, because if
you're committed to ego but still have some good love
and you and stuff, that's actually going to be painful
for you and the other people you're interfacing with. And
then if you're committed to what's good but bring ego along,
that's going to be painful. So you have this chance,
and everyone takes a different amount of time there. Some
people just know right away, like, no, I'm going to heaven,
that's what I want to do. Some people they have
to sort out and find out who they are. But
nobody gets forced to go anywhere.
Speaker 1: You go.
Speaker 2: Your own love leads you to go where you want
to go. So you get you get into the world
of spirits. You spend your time figuring out who you
really want to be, basically unpacking and uncovering who you've
become throughout this life on Earth based on what you
loved and what you believe in how you acted on that.
And then you go and you find your community is
where are the people who are most living the same
kind of life that I am, And not just live
like we all like to, you know, play golf, but
who who loves the same kind of thing that you love,
and who who has the same kind of belief about
life that you do, and those people, like I said,
that gravitating force of love pulls you in to this community,
and that's where you really get to begin your eternal life,
or your meaning your timeless life. In the spiritual world,
there's not time and space the same way that there
are here. It sort of seems like it, but it's
really more about your psychological state. So if you're excited
about something, if you're eager about something, it will seem
to go faster. But so you get into these communities
and then you start to play your part in the
bigger I talked about the human body. It's like each
little cell is like one of those communities that starts
to do what you do. And to Swedenborg, the thing
that makes human life interesting as well as the afterlife is.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: The joy of doing something good for the human race
so it's we were talking about. You can't just go
live in a cave and meditate, get bored of that.
And you can't just have money. You can't just sit
there and have a ton of money. You get bored
of that. The only thing that's like evergreen in terms
of the joy it gives is the joy of doing
something meaningful and useful. It's like again if yeah.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, Well let me ask you this though, because
there's a bunch of stuff I want to unpack there.
So when you're in the afterlife and you're finding your
soul family, if you will, that's a term that's used
a lot, the sole family of souls that you spirits
or souls that you live with or not live with,
but are like connected to. Yeah, what does Swedenberg talk
say about the concept of incarnation and multiple lifetimes? You know,
because that's the one thing that always caught me too
in Christianity. I was like, so, if I was born
a dude in you know, of a certain color, in
a certain country, I would have either power or I
would not have power, or I would have this experience
or not that experience. If I was born a woman here,
I was like, didn't make a whole lot of sense
to me that you only had the one shot. This
is just my personal opinion. And then when idea if
reincarnation came in, I was like, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 2: What did he say, Yeah, well, I think that I
like the idea of something that makes sense. So if
you're saying, hey, this opens it up, so I don't
want to argue against that. I will give you a
possible alternative to reincarnation. That's that's Swedenborg because back in
his day, I don't think that reincarnation was a thing.
It wasn't in Europe, in Western Europe. I don't think
you had the idea of that. But he does kind
of offer a a sort of solution to the idea
of why do so many people experience past lives sort
of unprompted because to him, Okay, so spiritual world has
a lot of characteristics to it, and one of them
is lack of time and space. One of them is
the gravitation of love. But in the other one is
the fluidity of mind. So there's a much more effortless
transfer of information and feeling. There here we can talk,
you and I can talk, and it can go into
this microphone and go all the way through the servers
and get there and people can listen and then try
to picture what it is I'm talking about. But there
there's a lot of people in your those experiences will
say I can just tell what he was thinking. I
got a download. There's like instant. It's an instant, it's instant,
it's permeable. Even Sweetwork says that actually, if you go
into a community in the afterlife, you start to think
sort of like they do. You're influenced by there. He
talks about auras like the sort of emanation of your
life and mind going out from everyone, so you're able
to do that, and you're also able to share feelings.
He talks about people who are feeling a certain kind
of joy able to just really tangibly and directly pass
it to somebody else and say, hey, check this out.
Here's some joy that you can have. So there, and
not only that, that we actually, while we're on the
earth are constantly surrounded by spirits because we actually couldn't
have consciousness. That the link of consciousness goes from the
divine through the spiritual world ends up in the physical world.
So we're constantly surrounded by spirits. Actually, our spirit even
now is traveling from community to community based on the
way we change in our life. It's just a nice
long way to get to the answer I want to
give you. But I feel like I got to have
this background here when with the reason why little kids
are like they are, Why are they so spontaneous and
open and joyful and free. It's a distinctly different phase
from what I remember of it than what we have now.
Is because when you're little, your spirit is around those
celestial angels or the deepest angels that sweden talks about.
As you grow up, your spirit it changes and it
starts to go around more spiritual or intellect oriented angels.
And you have to have that if you're going to
be able to build a mind and grow. But the
point is that your spiritual company changes what you experience,
and there's enough permeability, so much so that Swedenborg just
just offhand in his book Heaven and Hell says that
usually when your mind interacts with spirits, you do so
out of your own memory, so that they don't bring
in what they've experienced from their life into the interaction.
They actually take on some of your memory and from
there influence you in certain ways, hopefully to do what's good.
Sometimes though, there there's some the equivalent of a leak
or something where you can actually experience someone else's memories
as your own. So it would be yeah, so it
would be like my wife's friend one time was describing
to my wife and her friends, remember when we did
this thing. Remember when you were over there and we
went to this, and we went to that, and they
were all trying to remember what she was talking about.
And finally they were like, oh, no, that was an
episode of friends that you're talking about that didn't happen
like you think it happened. So that that can the
idea that that you can get a feeling that you've
been somewhere, just even through the crudeness of media, but
that there is the possibility for you to experience someone
else's memories and so you feel like I've lived that
life now. So to Swedenborg, it was like, no, this
is it's like the womb, Like you develop in the
womb for nine months and there you set up the
big You don't set up who you're going to be,
but you set up the basics, like the foundation of
who you're going to be, and then you're born and
you go and live your life. So this life is
like the womb to the spiritual world, so you don't
define who you're going to be forever. Swedenborg is very
clear that you continue to grow and change and do
a lot of the stuff that I think we did
this whole show called do We Reincarnate because there's sort
of like a yes and no, and that a lot
of the aspects of like the cyclical development that people
talk about in reincarnation, sweden Worg does describe, but he
talks about it happening on the other side. He doesn't
talk about changing your entire personality, but at times you
forget who you were and these kinds of things. Well, yeah,
so it's this interesting mix. But to him it was
this is the foundation point. That is to say, though
I do anytime someone saying like, hey, this, I like
reincarnation because it makes me think, yeah, yeah, that makes
more sense that you'd have a shot at different things,
and it brings me more toward love than I'm like, well,
then who knows there could be something in it. So
I don't feel like I want to say no, there's
not reincarnation, even though I see a different possible alternative
in the way Swedenborg describes it. I think the idea
that we're both looking at, which is like, how would
you really get it? So you can empathize with people
and not just how, and that everyone gets a fair
shake at life, So there's got to be some truth
that makes that happen.
Speaker 1: But also to me now to go on the other
side of that, and I agree with I love his
point of view in this that it's kind of like
the reincarnation happens on the other side, right, he also
could have been seeing it through the the the lens
of his time, and that that concept that never even
been brought up to him. He wouldn't even know what
it was in many ways, so the concept of reincarnation
is still happening, but on the other side, because that's
how he could explain it, So it could Who's to say,
is the bottom line?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yes, who's to say, is you know the Vedic text
the right you know the right way, or but the
concepts are the same, which is very interesting to me.
That the idea that there's an evolution of the soul,
whether it happens here or on the other side. According
to Swedenburg is a very interesting idea. Again, different paths
to the same top of the mountain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what's it? What's it for? What's it for?
Like you were saying, I ran into the idea of
reincarnation and I like it because it didn't make sense
to me how you could just live this one life
and you kind of have a silver spoon in your
mouth and then you don't really know because what's that about?
If you drill down, it's about fairness and is God
or is life really fair? So I think ultimately that
that's even kind of the mountain on the mountain that
everyone's trying to get to in their different ways.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean to answer your question, No, life is
not fair. No one in the in the manual said
I got the man. You don't know if you got it.
But there's no in the Life Manual no one said
life is fair. My kids say that all the time.
That's not fair. Like where anywhere does it say things
are supposed to be fair? Yeah, you know that concept
of fairness is irrelevant in the world. Anyone who spent
any time down here it knows that because we've all
seen good things happen to bad people. All the time
and our ourselves as well. You know, things happen to
us and we're like, why did that happen to me?
I'm a good person, I do this, I take care
of people. I'm like, why why did it? It's it's
not that fairness is irrelevant in this conversation. It always
has been. But if you understand the idea of everything,
the idea that I kind of lived my life by,
is everything happens for me, not to me, or through
me not to me. That changes the perspective of living
so much, so rapidly, because if you believe everything that's
a struggle or something happens to you is an opportunity
for growth. And it could be something as simple as
dubbing a toe, or it could be something as losing
a loved one in everything in between. We'll be right
back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
to the show. That's a growth experience and that makes
sense to me because there's nobody walking the earth that
doesn't have struggle. That's what this place is built for.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think that's very well said. And if there
was nothing good that could come out of struggle, then
wouldn't wouldn't God just want to get rid of struggle
right entirely, otherwise it doesn't seem doesn't seem fair at all.
Swedenborg calls it divine providence that the to me threw
me that you're talking about, where he says, and this
is something I've really that's really come in handy for
me in dark times in my life, is that everything,
even though things certainly are going to be pain can
be painful and can be demoralizing and confusing and unfair
in all of their ways. There's nothing at all that's
allowed that good will not come out of eventually, or
that will not ultimately lead to good. So I've had
I've had difficult things happen to me, but even I
can look back in some cases my initial depression period
that I was talking about. Without that, I don't know
if I would have gotten into spirituality as much as
I have. I did have when I was When I
was six, my sister died in a car accident. I
think that I think that that was the moment when
I was like, we got to fix this life thing,
you know, like this is this is not good enough,
this is not okay. Right. So I think that in
the picture that Swedenborg paints when you get to the
other side, like there's certain certain stuff that's temporary and
certain stuff that's eternal. So the pain that I go
through is temporary, but the lesson I learn is eternal,
or the growth that I go through it stays forever.
So in the end, let's say somebody has this really
difficult childhood, but they grow up to be someone who
becomes then an advocate for the welfare of children, which
is always how it goes. It's always somebody who had
something difficult, right about Bill Wilson and alcoholic holics, anonymous,
whoever it is, they struggle with it, and then they
come out and do this great good. The fire they
have and the understanding of human beings and how they
suffer and how they need to be cared for, and
the difference between what's good or not good to be
done to a person that stays with you forever. So
anytime I go through something the way Swedenborg describes it,
there's a couple of things that might be happening with it.
One is I could be learning. Contrast, if I learn
the difference between what is good and or what is
right and safe and anything that's positive. If I know
what isn't, then I'm so much happier in the positive
when it comes. It could be for the sake of
freeing me from my own ego. If I had just
set out in my career, for example, and everything had
just always gone completely right all the time, I would
be absolutely I'll be so full of myself, I'll be
so self centered, and those things you never have to break.
But it's been the difficult things in my life that
make me say, okay, okay, maybe I don't have to
be better than every other person. Maybe we can all
just be a big family together. I really think that
that's the way, the essential way that you grow s.
So sometimes hard things allow that to happen. And sometimes
Swedenborg talks about how in Providence he has this phrase
evils have to be seen before they can be removed.
So sometimes I have to either personally, I have to
like blow up at someone and to realize, well, I've
got a problem, Like I got a problem, and I
got to get at that. But in society, when tragic
things happen, don't we point back and say, well, we're
now We're never going to let that happen again. We
are going to come together and make sure that that
we now we understand this thing that maybe was just
tolerated in there. Now we know that's not good. We're
not going to let that happen. So I do. I
love what you're saying about things almost almost things happen
for a reason, but nothing can be going on that
good can't come out of. I feel like that's one
of the most powerful tools you can get.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's so beautifully said as well, because I mean, look,
if I wouldn't have almost made a twenty million dollar
movie for a mobster when I was in my twenties
and was my life threatened for a year and had
post traumatic stress disorder for three years after it, and
I wouldn't be doing the work that I'm doing now,
which started with trying to help people prevent them to
go through what I went through in the film industry,
which then respawned into now spirituality. But without that, I'm
not who I am without that event, right, So if
you start taking these events out of your life, you
start devoiding who you were. And you're absolutely right, by
the way, when I was young, I had a lot
of success, very early, made a lot of money, for
my age, and I was unjust could not be in
the room with me. My ego was so out of control.
I was an I mean it was I think I
was still a sweet guy, but I was just so
into my It was just so Finally, the universe, God,
whatever you want to call it, just said okay, it's time.
And the pounding starts little by little until it just
starts getting harder and harder to all of a sudden
you look around, You're like, am I almost bankrupt? That
I had my life threatened for a year? Like what
what's going on? Like I don't even know when to
get out of my house anymore? Like it was, it
was that, But you need those those things because those
were the lessons I needed to learn, because if not,
I would have never been a useful part of society,
useful for myself, useful for my family. I would have
a family an ego like that would not allow to
get her father. Can you imagine when you were like twenty,
like to just be like, oh, I must sacrifice for
this thing or this creature that I don't even know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, stop messing with my five flow here? Yeah, I mean,
I mean.
Speaker 1: For the first what is it the first I would say,
the first month of my of having kids. They destroyed
you mental life, men physically.
Speaker 2: But it was so gary. When it got to be
like six or seven o'clock, it started to get dark,
you know, in the evening, and I remembered, like, oh,
we're not going to sleep it all tonight. I forgot. Well,
it was like the day was so fun, We're not
going to sleep this entire night.
Speaker 1: And you know what the funny thing is is that
I would just look and I was just like be
upset at them. I'm like, you know what, Like, I
don't even know you. You're destroying my poor wife. I'd
known her for years. I don't know you. They don't
give you eye contact, they don't acknowledge your existence, but
they just want and want and want. And then the
day is respectful, very disrespectful and newborns. But then the
day comes when they connect with your eyes and they
smile at you, and then you're done, and then it's
over and you've now for me. I mean, of course
I'd love my children from the moment they were born,
but dude, the beating that you get for that first
thirty days, but when they finally connect with your eyes.
I just remember that moment so clearly they look at you,
they acknowledge your existence. Yeah, and then they smiled, and
I'm like, damn.
Speaker 2: It, ah right, you got me, you got I'm in
it for life. So thank you for sharing a couple of,
you know, important moments from your life. And I just
see what we were just talking about so clearly in there,
Like if you if your babies had not put you
through that boot camp before that, would that eye contact
have meant what it meant? Would you still have the
bond that you have right now? That's like comparison, Like
I know what it's like to be doing all this
for somebody that that maybe like doesn't have the same return.
But then I really get how special it is that
if there's a human in there looking out at me,
but also your your story about your early success and
your ego. You from how you're talking, you wouldn't have
wanted to still be that guy. Wouldn't rather be that
guy than this if you just kept succeeding the whole time.
So because now you have this depth to you, you
understand like you've been on the other side of there's
a lot of people who want to have what you had,
which is I want to be successful and I want
to have fame. But you can come and tell people
here's the reality of it, and the depth that you
gained and the understanding of what's right and wrong that
you have that in you forever, Like that's always going
to be a part of your spirit and it's well worth.
Like I wouldn't wish the pain you were talking about
in those three years after the guy threatened you and
the money going down, Like I don't think. I don't
think God or anyone is like, haha, look what's happened
to you? But I just know there's this treasure that
comes out on the other side, which is like a
human being that understands something about love. Right.
Speaker 1: And I think Jim Carrey is who I want to
get on my show one day. I'll call him up.
Speaker 2: I can you call it Jim up?
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. No, But what he said, so he
said this statement and it just was so rank so true,
goes I wish everyone on the planet could have everything
they ever wanted, because so they would know that it
means nothing because he's literally a guy got all his dreams. Yeah,
super rich. One of the most famous human beings on
the planet, was making people laughed, did what he wanted
to do, had power, have fame, had money, had every
luxury or of the flesh and of the money and
physical material. And then at a certain point he said,
this means nothing, and you could start seeing him switch
and he's like, now he's become who he's becoming. He's
an artist now. And I think he's semi retired, if
not retired from acting because he's like, I don't I'm good.
I don't need to keep doing this anymore. That is
such a powerful lesson. But I could tell you that
and you'd be like, that sounds philosophical. Yes, he's lived it,
and that's the part that we're talking about. You have
to go through it yourself. We'll be right back after
a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show, right.
Speaker 2: I think how many kids I remember being at whatever,
like thirteen and being all in secure and just thinking, Yeah,
if I was just super famous, super rich, super talented
and everything, that would fix it all, that would fix
it all. Like that, that's the only there's one problem
with life. It's I'm not that. Let me get that.
And for Jim Carrey to have gone through what he
went through and to be able to say, credibly, think
about how many kids he can help now, to be like, listen, there, Yes,
we have a sort of a hole in us that
we're trying to fill, but that's not this this sort
of ego dream coming true doesn't feel that it actually
literally doesn't fill that hole. Then that points us to
how can it really be full? Because you want everybody
to be as happy as they think they would be
if they got all their ego dream. You want everyone
to feel full, and you want everyone to feel comforted
and like they're connected and they're part of something. That's
why I'm excited about Sweden Morgan's spirituality is because I
think it slowly uncovers the reality of a world in
which everybody can win together, rather than there's a couple winners.
The truth the truth set you're.
Speaker 1: Free and I look and I've had the pleasure of
speaking to some as the winners and having deeper conversations
with them about what had happened after He's like they
like said always the common thing was like it's cool
for a little bit. At the end of the day,
it just turns into something you put on a shelf. Yeah,
and you know, one guy's like, I don't pay for
lunches anymore. You know, I haven't paid for a lunch
in eight years in this in Hollywood because everybody wants
to buy me lunch because I'm still an Oscar winner.
But overall it doesn't mean a whole lot. It's just
you know, and but the thing is that so many
actors and so many people in that industry, that's the pinnacle,
and they think that'll fill the hole. Oh, once I
win the Oscar, I'm good for the rest of my life.
Or I win the super Bowl, I'm good, or I
win the Masters, I'm perfect. Everything will be perfect. It's
not about the destination. It's always about the journey.
Speaker 2: And that there's a that's the sort of hollow promise
of self centeredness. It's like, if I'm going to focus
on myself and I get myself to the place where
myself wants to be, there's nothing actually to that. Whereas
Swedenborg what he discovered and saw played out in the
spiritual world. It's funny because his books are yes, they're
this travelogue through heaven and hell and world of spirits
and everywhere, but that always comes back down to basic
human psychology. What we care about that actually, the only
thing that is fulfilling is doing things that make everybody happy,
make the human race better. When you think the good
of everyone, that's something you can you can never have
achieved enough. You think I did that great thing made
these people happy. I want to get out and do
it more that. That is what he calls heaven, because
that's something that can get bigger and better forever. And
the more that you win at that, the more the
rest of us win, rather than it being a zero
sum game. Because the more that you're doing your thing
and helping the world, I get helped by you. The
more that I'm helping the world, I help you. And
it's this positive feedback loop. And it's actually just like
the human body, like we're talking about before, the way
Heaven is organized. The healthier you're spleeing is, that's better
news for the brain. The healthier the brain is, it's
better news for the elbow. It's not like one of
them is like I can't believe that the right foot
gets so much attention Without either one, you're going to
fall down. So that that's anybody like we're talking about before,
kid in the congo, person born into privilege. Everyone's got
the human body. They can see right there. That's kind
of the map of the destination, you know, right in
front of you.
Speaker 1: And that's such a powerful idea because if you understand
that you need to help that kid in the congo
or that other person on the other side of the
world somewhere that's not right in front of you, that's
your left foot over there. You know that is your
left foot, and you know the person up in Sweden
is your eye. And you have to put it all together,
and you have to help everyone together, because if you
don't all work together, like the body, then the body
breaks down. Then we all start to break down. And
I think that's where I'm hoping that that's where we're
starting to go with this awakening that is happening around
the world. I think you've probably seen it as well
as I have, with our numbers and what people are
watching and things like that, and you specifically from twenty
ten to now, I'm assuming things have gotten better. More
people are more interested in these ideas, are just curious
about spirituality and deeper questions than they were before, and
are opened.
Speaker 2: For this off I think that. I was surprised right
away and how interested in spirituality people were, how independent
they were, that they were, that they were willing to
take that journey, and how many people had had some
kind of spiritual experience themselves, but also just how willing
people are to work on the spiritual path. It's been
like a good dream the past ten years. I didn't
ever think this many people will be interested, and it
absolutely changes the way I think about humanity. When I
think out there, I just I think, oh, there's so
many people maybe don't hear about on the news, but
they're living good lives. They're doing their little good things,
and if you knew any one of them, you could
fall in love with them. I absolutely think that there's
way more good out there than we usually see.
Speaker 1: Now, there's one thing I wanted to talk to you
real quick because on your YouTube channel, you what you
did a video called the Reunions, the five types of
reunions you get in the air. Can you just to
touch on those, because I thought that was fascinating.
Speaker 2: Getting to see someone who's you thought was dead but
they're still alive. On the other side, I know, like
recently my grandma died, who was really close to and
when she did, I started to feel like, man, like
I almost know more people on that side than here now,
or there's really starting to be a gravity shift that
since I do think our consciousness survives, and I think
that those people are still alive there, and I think
we get to go see them, I'm starting to get excited.
I feel like I can't wait to see all these
people and see how they're doing, and what do they
look like now? What are they up to now? So
I just think, and I've had a concept of afterlife
my whole life. I think somebody who maybe even didn't
and thought had just given up hope they'd ever see
their wife again, to get reunited like that, that is
the coolest thing in the world. And Sweenborg describes this,
he doesn't He's as I said, it's very he is
a man of the Enlightenment, very practical minded. So he'll
he'll describe it in terms that aren't that sensational life.
So it'll say people were overjoyed see their friends again,
and their friends overjoyed that they had come back, which
you don't get the kind of richness and depth to
getting some NDE experiences. But he talks about not only
people reuniting with each other, but the means to which
by which, because of the nature of the spiritual world,
you can really be made whole and reconnect and uncover
things that you can't in the way that you're here.
The one particular scenario that he talks about and we
covered in that episode, is he talks about a family
where there had been two brothers, and one brother had
died young and the other one had not. So by
the time the whole family has lived through, the parents
have died, the younger brother who was already in heaven,
he was there. The older brother finally dies, and when
he gets to the spiritual world, there was a little
bit of tension between him and his family because this
older brother had become really kind of a jerk, because
he had become self centered and he i had always
resented the attention his younger brother got, and that had
kind of distanced him from his parents. And so it's
this whole mess. But because their time and space are
not fixed in the same way, you can actually be
and this is I guess a little reincarnation. E. You
can be brought back into like younger stages of your
life you can be brought back into a younger state
of mind. And so because of that they were able
to do this almost like processing session where the abrasive
older son was brought back into being like ten or
eleven years old, and he was able to just like say,
like what he felt like wasn't fair, and it softened
his parents' hearts and they really made his breakthrough. And
his brother, who had died and had been at what
Swemore would call an angel the whole time, was just
so loving and accepting and like I, I, you know,
all I want is for you to have all the
happiness I have. And the older brother just broke down,
was crying, and it was this power of this stuff
that had been hardened and calcified in life, and people
didn't get along. It just melted away because in the
spiritual world you can really get to what's important. So
it's this touching scene of like the possibility of human reconnection.
Speaker 1: That's beautiful. Now there's another thing that you talked about
in your channel, which I think my audience was really
interested in, is what happened immediately after Jesus Christ passed.
Speaker 2: Yes, So Swedenborg is is fascinating in that there was
a guy named Dt. Suzuki who was by a lot
of people credited with bringing Zen Buddhism into the West.
He was one of the early I think it was
in the twenties. He was one of the early guys
in that. But he wrote this book about Swedenborg which
was called Buddha of the North because he felt like
Swedenborg's material was so compatible to similar to compatible way
and similar to Buddhism that he would say, look, this
is this is like Buddhism from from the North.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: That So, even though Sweedenborg resonates with a lot of
different things, he is uses a lot of Christian terminology
and things that Christians thinks are important, like the Bible
and particularly Jesus Christ he thought were of total importance.
So he talks about Jesus is like the there's the
unknowable divine that's infinite and you can't comprehend it, and
Jesus is that divine saying hey, I'm going to get
into a form that you you can give a hug
to and you can understand. And so to him Jesus
was absolutely important, not in the same way where you
have to there's a lot of Christians to say you
have to know the name of Jesus Christ and say
it or else you get in trouble. But to him,
Jesus Christ is love personified. So anybody who's living this
life of love really sort of knows Jesus, you could say,
because you know the character. But so the advent of
Jesus Christ, though on the earth, was really important spiritually.
It was essentially God writing this balance that had gotten
out of whack in the world. So many people were
choosing the ego and violence, and it was just like
destroying the whole spiritual environment and making it so people
were really at risk of just the human mind being
destroyed basically. And so Jesus Christ was this amazing phenomenon
where he came back in to clear that up, teach
people what love was. But even though you'd see some
stories in the Gospels, there was this huge spiritual meaning
to everything that he was doing. So after Jesus Christ
got crucified, it wasn't according to Swedenborg, it wasn't like
you get in I guess Catholic, I'm not sure and
other doctrines where there's a father go God was angry
at the human race, and so Jesus Christ is a
sacrifice that appeases the anger of Father God, which I
have some issues with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a couple there's a couple holes in that plot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly exactly. I'm not sure about the motivation, not
believable character so but but yeah.
Speaker 1: But just in general, that God's angry alone is a problem.
Speaker 2: One of the first one of the first videos that
I made is called why God Can't Get angry? And
it just was just a simple thought experiment that was
we were just talking about babies earlier, and you think
about the you getting angry grows proportionately more ridiculous and
humiliating the less powerful that person is compared to you.
So if if like you and I are about peers
and we bump into each other's cars and we're mad
at each other, it's still like, you don't want to
blow up like that, But it's not the same as
if there's a little kid or even a baby, and
you're like, I hate you your little baby, because the
baby has no power, doesn't know what it's doing. You're
so much more cognitively adapted. So for God, let's take
that and prank it up to infinity. For God to
get angry at me at Curtis, who like barely knows,
like like I like, oh, where's my keys? I can't
find my keys, Like I don't know anything compared to God.
Speaker 1: And you're in an EVA.
Speaker 2: I'm in AIVA best case scenario. And for God to
get mad at me, like, you've really triggered me. There,
I'm mad at you.
Speaker 1: That's triggered. That's amazing. All right. So you were saying,
so let's go back to Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying. Sweden Works has as a as a
line in his book True Christianity where he says it's
it's impossible for God to even look at us with
a frown, all right, because to do that would be
against assassins. Okay, So so Jesus is that's not the truth.
Is not to appease the anger of God. Jesus Christ
is there to save us from ourselves because we are
just unmasked choosing the things that are destructive. So that
it wasn't just you can't just take the physical world
in isolation, because there's people in the spiritual world and
people in the physical world. So not only was everyone
the physical world is like downstream from the spiritual world.
So one of the reasons why everyone here was getting
so callous and cruel is because that's the way it
was going in the spiritual world. So many people were
there were choosing the same kind of thing. So Jesus
was having to go in and set everything in order
and get it because again, even the worst person who's
doing the worst things to people, still God is not
mad at them. God does not feel like I hate
you and near my enemy. But he is going to
say I have to you have to go over here,
because if you're here, you're harming other people, and that's
harming you like that is getting you more entrenched in
the evils that you've decided to grab onto. So we
had to take like this master kind of sorting and
take these people, put them, put everything in order so
that people can't harm each other, and that there's freedom restored,
so people can choose spiritually. There's this whole complex process
that Swedenborg describes over many many books of what was
going on there, but essentially it was to create balance
again so that we would have the freedom to choose
what we want to do and what we want to
love and who we want to be, because that's essential.
You can never choose anything good if you don't have
a free choice. Because you think about love. If anyone says, hey,
let's love me or else, there's no love there, like
it has to be freely chosen. If you say to
your kids, like you have to visit me, it's not
you know, it doesn't work. So so the nature of
love is that it can only happen when both parties
are free to accept it. So people have to have
the choice to love what's good or not. And that
was that was going to go away if Jesus didn't
make a move right then. So it was kind of
like the last ditched effort. But it really worked, my friend.
Speaker 1: I could talk to you for another two three hours
with that question. Man, But I'm gonna ask you if
your questions, ask all my guests, what is your definition
of living a fulfilled life?
Speaker 2: Being useful, being useful, and really organizing your life around
how can I be useful? And I would say I've
watched in myself the desire might sort of ego turn
into it. I'm slowly turning into a desire for usefulness.
I can see it when things are starting, the good
that I do starting to matter more than how I
come off. Even before this interview, I was like, well,
I was feeling like, I hope I don't screw this up.
I hope I sound like I know what I'm talking about.
But what I'll say now is like, Okay, well I
hope some good comes out of this. And I'll say
like a little prayer and I'll say like, just like,
help free me from my concern for the ego so
that I can just get in there. And I know
somebody's gonna be watching this and get something positive out
of it. Let me think about them so I feel
like I can see myself. And then the more I
can move my life to support that, I've started to
like go running and those kinds of things so that
I can have a clearer mind so that I can
do this better. The more I put the different part
of my life around usefulness, that's fulfilling. I think to
have people to which you want to pursue their happiness,
so I think about we're talking about building up houses
and trying to get them better. I do that now,
But like what's exciting to me a lot of the
time is like, I know my wife would love that,
Like if we were if we could have that, my
wife would think that was really cool. So so to
be able to do things for people, Yeah, that plus
usefulness and then not but not trying to go too
hardcore on the spirituality. Don't think I'm going to be
spiritual every single minute and I'm only gonna be reading
Vedic text in a cave my whole because I like, man,
I gotta play man. The news Elda game came out,
I gotta be playing that. You know, I gotta be
go go do some rock climbing, Like, there's other stuff
I need to be doing because I'm a I'm a
spiritual and a physical being at the same time, so
I got to take care of that physical side. I
just can't let it lead things.
Speaker 1: What advice would you give your younger self if you
could go back.
Speaker 2: In time, Relax and don't don't try to hang on
to stuff so much. I used to think I could
just like ring anything like if I'm thinking this, I'll
change this and we'll do that. Don't do that. Don't
do that, and don't worry about don't worry about all
that stuff. Just just trust the process, I say, trust
the process. You're fine. Where I am now is good
and I didn't get here because I engineered it or something.
Just trust the process. He'll be Okay.
Speaker 1: How do you define God? God?
Speaker 2: So God is love and love is love is human,
so that everything that I strive to try to become
is to try to imitate and emulate that humanity and
the thing that I recognize and other people that I love,
that that is all kind of a reflection of this
this God, who is is a person, is somebody that
I can love like I love other people. And I
don't know. I don't have the clearest picture of everything
that he's like, but sometimes I get this sense of like, Okay,
there's my hero. Like that, that's my hero, and I'm
gonna try to like do what would make him proud.
And I really believe he's trying to make the world better.
So it's it's kind of like this this thing I
can be inspired to follow and know that ultimately eventually
I'm gonna be living very intimately with God in whatever
way that is. But it's sort of looking forward to
that time.
Speaker 1: And what is the ultimate purpose of life.
Speaker 2: The ultimate purpose to life is to create a world
in which everybody is cared for in every way they
need to be cared for, and to take joy in
doing that. We would all be in this state where
it's like, no, we're not happy unless every kid has
got a table of friends to sit with, everybody's got
their health, and just the effort toward that, the constant
effort toward that. That is I can't think of anything better.
Speaker 1: And where can people find out more about you and
the work that you're doing in the world.
Speaker 2: Sir on YouTube dot com, slash off the left eye.
You search Swedenborg on YouTube. You'll get there.
Speaker 1: Dude.
Speaker 2: That's a great place to start. We've got a ton
of videos with this and if you just leave a
comment or anything like that, we can direct you anywhere
you need to go.
Speaker 1: And do you have any final words for our audience?
Speaker 2: Well, I want to say thanks to you for not
only having me on, but for pursuing what you're pursuing.
And from the conversations I've seen you having, I feel
like you've got a good heart and you're like setting
a good example to people. The people that's watching will.
Speaker 1: Be right back after a word from our sponsor. And
now back to the show.
Speaker 2: Everything is going to be okay. I mean that's what
I found out in my life and the work that
you're doing to pursue spirituality, which is why you're watching
this channel, that it means a lot. It's not going
to waste. There's been times when I felt like it
doesn't even matter, but it totally matters. Keep going, not
just me, but even even there's like angels on the
other side cheering for you, like you got this, you
can do it. Keep going. So I would say, keep going,
URTIs Man.
Speaker 1: I appreciate you for being on the show and this
great conversation and for the amazing work you're doing in
the world Bey front. Keep it up, and I appreciate
you man.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. That was so fun.
Speaker 1: Thank you for spending this sacred time with us today.
If you feel called to explore this conversation further, you'll
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