Speaker 1: Welcome to the God's I View Podcast. I am your host, Trevor.
Today is what I like to call an accidental podcast.
This is a podcast by default. Let me explain. So,
I think you've all heard me say complain. No, I
wouldn't say complain, but you've heard me say that. You know,
the podcast does not make money, and that's fine because
that's not really the intention. You know, however, you know
it would it. It'd be cool if it made money, right,
you know, that'd be nice. So I don't know if
you guys know, but a buddy of mine who I
co host a podcast with and I started a publishing company.
And it's that word is those words are doing a
lot of work, as the kids would say, because really
it's just you know, he's he's a writing coach and
an editor. And so he edited my book. I formatted it,
I made the cover. We got it all typeset and
formatted it correctly, and we went through Amazon and so
you can buy the book on Amazon. And I recorded
the audio book and stuff. So hold on, want to
said anyway, So we did that and afterwards we're like, well,
we could do this for people because it's a bit
of work. Actually, and you know, it's not really a
good business because like, when I wrote a book, my
instinct was not to give anyone any money, you know.
That's why I did it myself. With help though, with
my friend David. Anyway, so we have this thing, it's
called Hemospheric Press. There's a website, there's a substack, and
so he mostly he I do very little, is helping
other people write books. But it's not really a good
business because it takes forever to write a book. So
like he's been working on books with people for like
six months, eight months, you know. And we've also done
a lot of royalty only contracts, which means you don't
pay as the author, you don't pay anything. You just
give a percentage of your sales to us. And because
it's like such a long lead time to actually get
products out, it just ends up being a lot of
free work. So I've been kind of trying to think
of ways to make money, not really for the podcast,
but for him, because he's doing all this work. And
you know, I'm a co owner in the company, but
I don't expect really to ever get money. We'll see
maybe in five years. But so I was thinking, I
don't want to edit. I don't want to format. I
want to let him keep doing all that work. But
is there anything I could do that would help bring
in some money? And so my idea is this, tell
me what you think about this. Email me at Godsy
view book at gmail dot com. There are a lot
of books that are in what's called the public domain.
What this means is that they're either I think, one
hundred years old, or they the author has died more
than seventy five years ago. There's like all these rules
for what becomes public domain, Like the Bible is public domain.
That's why you know you can listen to a million
different versions of the Bible on audible, and I think
you're supposed to make some modifications, like maybe you write
a short introduction or something. Anyway, So the problem with
this if you want to try to make a business
of it, is most one hundred year old books suck,
and the ones that don't suck have already been reproduced
and you know, the the updated edition ten times by
ten different people. So it's just like a difficult way
to make money. But I have found a category of
books that for some reason has not really been reproduced,
and so my idea was that I was going to
start recording these books on audio. Now I'm not probably
you know, I'm not Morgan Freeman, right, so it maybe
doesn't make sense for me to record audiobooks. However, no
one else is doing it, you know, and so this
category of books, it's it's all of these books that
are important to the early Christians, you know, it's big
and Orthodoxy, and then also other books that aren't necessarily
specifically orthodox, but are you know, ancient virtual texts. Now,
many of these are pretty unreadable, but some of them aren't.
Some of them are actually really good, like they really
hold up. And so I thought I would start recording
these and then probably either like put publishing them on
our substack, also audible, but somewhere that we control, because
if you don't know, Amazon, like they take like eighty
percent of the money when you buy an audiobook something
like that, and so whether that's an app or a
website or so or they actually is really cool. You
can make a paid podcast feed, so maybe you pay
a dollar a month or whatever, and you get a
podcast feed email to you, and you can enter it
into your existing podcast app that you already use. So
anytime we publish a new book, it pops up, and
so I thought that'd be kind of cool, like a
subscription based audiobook thing for books. A lot of these
books don't even have audiobooks. I looked up some and
one of them had like an ai voice, but most
of them didn't even have an audiobook. And there's other
books that I can't believe don't have audiobooks, like some
of the Deutero canonical books that are in some Bibles
but not others, you know, like the Book of Wisdom
or even some of the now most of the apocryphal
books like Book of Knoch. There's tons of audiobooks. So
I'm trying to find this niche, you know, of really
interesting ancient spiritual texts that in my opinion, are not
like going to lead people astray. You know, they're not
like weird pseudo apick or full gnostic texts have been
like discredited as heretical, you know. Now, I will say,
some of these books, if you are a modern Christian,
might kind of shock you. And it's interesting. It's interesting
reading what the first Christian's thought, and I will admit
it's it's more gnostic than we are. And what I
mean by that is, you know, there's a lot of
emphasis on becoming God's ourselves, but lowercase G like becoming
a son of God, not actually becoming God, because the
desire to be God this is like a Satanic impulse, right,
This is the lucifer, the rebel who's cast out of heaven.
He wants to rule heaven and be God. It's different.
The word they use for it is Theosis. And there's
actually a book called Theosis. And stop at Google AI,
I google, you know, public domain first century or No,
I didn't say that. I said like early church, Church
father books something like that, So it should have it should
have been like fourth century. That's kind of what I
was assuming, and much of them were. And one of
the books was called Theosis that came back in the
search results, and I started reading it and I'm like,
this is good. This sounds like it could like it
could have been written yesterday. So I recorded the first
chapter and towards the end of the first chapter they
have the word television in radio, and I'm like, oh,
this book wasn't written sixteen hundred years ago. So I
look it up and it was written in nineteen ninety,
so it's still under copyright, so there's a waste of time.
But that doesn't mean I can't play the chapter I
recorded for you all right now. Now this is a
this is what is called if you're interested in copyright stuff,
this would be called like fair use. You know, we're
we're commenting, we're talking about the Osis, and we're going
to listen to one chapter, only a sample, and I'll
kind of explained to you why it's relevant. So I've
commented on it, so I think it's okay, but we'll
see the monks of saying atmos can can send me
a cease and desist and I will happily remove it
if not. Anyway, So it's very short. I don't I
don't even know if the top of my head along
it is probably like five minutes, ten minutes. And so
that's going to play now or briefly once I finish
wrapping this up, and then we'll get back to our
regular style podcasts soon tomorrow or something. But just wanted
to put this idea out there, curious if anyone would
be interested. I mean, the idea is that they would
sort of be curated, you know, So there's all of
these public domain texts, and ninety percent of them are
just tedious. So the idea is I would try to
find the decent ones, ideally kind of on the short side,
like under one hundred pages, and we could record. We'd
make an ebook too for those who are interested, but
then we would record the audiobook and they'd go into
like a library, like a a Patristic early Church library,
but also other stuff, not necessarily just Christian stuff or
just Early Church stuff, just things that I think are
interesting and helpful, and some of them are pretty helpful.
The one I'm working on right now, I'll tell you
it's called the Ladder of Divine Assent, and it's thirty
rungs of a ladder, and the idea is that you're
sending this ladder towards, you know, on your journey to
be a son of God. I didn't realize how central
that was to Orthodoxy, and I think most Protestants would
sort of criticize that as gnostic, but it's it strikes
me as there are some key distinctions, you know, but
we can get into that on another episode. Well briefly. Briefly,
I'll just tell you, like the thing about narcissism is
that they They believe that the physical is evil and
that the spiritual is good. And so therefore the kind
of fallen being called the Demiurge that created this universe
is a imperfect being. He is flawed and his creation
is flawed, and it's sort of our job to escape.
It's weird. What's weird, though, is most Gnostics consider themselves
Christian Gnostics, at least the early Gnostics did. I think
that's less true today. But and so there is this
like positive attitude towards Jesus, but they tend to view
the God of the Old Testament as evil. And this
is supported by some early like theoretical ideas in the church,
like Marcianism, obviously gnosticism. Val what are they called Valentini's
I don't know what that other one is called. But
there's all these guys who kind of are struck by
the difference between Jesus and some of the things that
happened in the Old Testament which they are interpreting as
being evil. And most of these things have pretty good rejoinders.
Like there's the bear that attacks the bald the kids
who criticize him for being bald. I don't know if
you know that story, but there's there's rejoinders for these
Like the Hebrew word they use for young kids actually
means like military age, like this is how soldiers are described,
and it's not a kid, it's like forty kids. And
so this man, this prophet is being fronted by forty
men outside a city who worships a different God. And
the content and maybe that context means like that they're
basically it's a confrontation, and so God protecting his prophet
causes a bear to attack them. I don't know, listen,
I don't know. But the point is like there's rejoinders
for much of that stuff, but some stuff there really isn't.
I mean, some stuff it's like, man, that's rough, you know.
So there were early Christians who saw this and kind
of drew this parallel between the God of the Old
Testament and then Jesus. Here's the problem though Jesus didn't
draw that that distinction. So so what I find is
that like often the insistence that Jesus is good and
the old God is bad, people really just say that,
but they're actually they tend not to be very pro Jesus.
Like I know gnostics who are mythicists, and they don't
think that Jesus ever existed. And so I know gnostics
that are basically like pretty openly uh you know, I
think most traditional Christians would call them Satanists, you know.
And there's obviously a lot of gnostics who think the
serpent in the garden is a good guy. And I
think that's all fine, like, if you want to feel
that way, it's just I don't. I don't think there's
a way to call that Christian gnosticism, but people do.
And I think this is kind of like a almost
like a recruiting tactic, you know. It's like, oh, yeah,
you're a Christian. Well, I me too. I love Jesus
as well. However, you know, the God of the Old
Testament is evil, and it's like, well, but Jesus said
that's who he was. You know, we've we've done a
bunch of those episodes, and he's constantly referencing Old Testament scripture,
constantly referencing Old Testament prophecy, and that he's the fulfillment
of that prophecy. So you can't have it both ways,
that's my opinion. Of course, I don't know what the
truth is, right I'm just that is an internally inconsistent
argument in my opinion, but it's very popular, very popular.
So just something for you all to just be aware of.
I mean, I'm I'm all for exploring. It's just it's inconsistent.
So it's it's been explored as far as I'm concerned.
I've explored it. It's internally inconsistent, and so in order
to continue exploring it, I would have to like radically
change my belief system and basic basically just stop. I
think you basically have to throw it all out to
be a quote unquote Christian gnostic. So so that is not,
in my opinion, what these books that I will be
showing you do. These books are very clear about who
God is. There's no inconsistencies, there's no hereticism. It's just
you know, Jesus is the God man. He is the
incarnate God of the universe. And our job is to
similarly ascend to improve ourselves in these very specific ways
which we will describe in the book, so that we
can become like God's ourselves, which they would argue is
what God always wanted for us, because if you remember
in the garden, you know the serpent says, God just
doesn't want you to be like him. He doesn't want
you to eat the fruit. But a careful reading kind
of kind of makes it seem like God always intended
for us to eat from the tree of life and
perhaps from the tree of good and evil, knowledge of
good and evil, just on his terms when we were ready,
you know. And of course we violated the first instructions
we were given. We were deceived, and you know the story.
So so I think you could argue that that is
still God's intention for us. Certainly if you read the
New Testament. There's many places that you could many there's
many things that Jesus says that Gnostics use to support
the idea, like, you know, the Kingdom of God is
within you kind of a thing. So anyway, So well,
I like that. I think it's cool. I like ways
of sort of uniting the aspects of the different religious
practices that all make sense to me. Like I like
trying to find coherent theories that sort of tie all
the interesting things together without contradicting things. I think, you know,
I like that in physics, I like that in neuroscience,
and I also like it in theology. So let me know,
what you think. Let me know if that's something you're
interested in. There could even be old scientific books we read,
although I kind of suspect that would be boring, you know,
one hundred year old science books. But maybe not, maybe not,
you know, we could read Tesla's autobiography or something. Anyway, Yeah,
so God's I view book at gmail dot com. Until then,
enjoy the first chapter of Theosis. God bless Theosis. The
true purpose of human life. The question of the destiny
of our lives is very serious, as it concerns the
most important question for man, for what purpose are we
placed on earth? If man takes a correct stance on
this issue, if he finds his true destiny, then he
will be able to take a correct viewpoint in relation
to particular questions that arise in our daily life, in
our relationships with our fellow men, in our studies, profession, marriage,
and the bearing and upbringing of children. If he does
not relate correctly to the basic issue, then he will
also fail in life's particular purposes. For what meaning can
a particular purpose have if human life as a whole
has no meaning. Our life's purpose is declared in the
first chapter of the Holy Bible, when the Holy Author
tells us that God created Man and his image and likeness.
From this we discover the great love the Triune God
has for Man. He does not wish him simply to
be a being with certain gifts, certain qualities, a certain
superiority over the rest of creation. He wishes him to
be a God by grace. Externally, Man seems to exist
in a purely biological way like the other living beings,
the animals. Of course, he is an animal, but an
animal which is in the process of theosis through its
inclination towards God. As Saint Gregory the Theologian says, in
his characteristic way, he is the only being that is
distinguished from all else in creation because he is the
only one which can become a God. The phrase in
his Image describes the gifts which God gave only to
Man in order to complete him as an icon of God,
and not to any of his other creatures. These gifts
are a logos related news, conscience and individual sovereignty i e. Freedom, creativity, eros,
and the yearning for the absolute and for God, personal
self awareness, and anything else which puts men above all
other living beings in creation and makes him a man
and an individual. That is to say, everything that makes
man a person. These are the charismata by which we
are formed in his image. Having been endowed in his image,
man is called upon to be completed in his likeness.
This is theosis. The creator, God by nature calls man
to become a God by grace. The charismata that form
us in his image we're given to man by God
in order that he may reach very high, so that
through them he may attain a likeness to his God
and Creator, so that he may have not only an
external moral relationship, but a personal youthinion with his Creator.
Perhaps it is very daring for us to even say
or think that our life's purpose is to become gods
by grace. However, neither the Holy Bible nor the Church
Fathers have hidden this from us. Unfortunately, ignorance not only
exists in people outside the church, but also in many
within the Church, because they assume that the purpose of
our life is at best simply moral improvement to become
better men. When we are told by the Gospel, by
the tradition of the Church, and by the Holy Fathers
that the purpose of our life is not just that
man should become better than he is, more moral, more just,
more self controlled, more mindful. All these must happen, but
none of them are the great purpose, the ultimate purpose
for which are Maker and Creator molded man. What is
this purpose? Theosis? For man to be united with God,
not in an external or a sentimental manner, but ontologically,
in a real way. Man is placed so high in
orthodox anthropology that if we compare that with the anthropologies
of all the philosophies or social and psychological systems, we
will very easily find out how poor these are, how
little they correspond to man's great yearning for something very
great and true in his life. Since man is called
to be a god, i e. Was created to become
a god, as long as he does not find himself
on the path of theosis, he feels an emptiness within himself.
He feels that something is not going right, so he
is not joyful, even when he is trying to cover
the emptiness with other activities. He may numb himself, create
a glamorous world, or k and imprison himself within this world.
Yet at the same time he remains poor, small, limited.
He may organize his life in such a way that
he is almost never at peace, never alone with himself,
surrounded by noise, tension, television, radio, continuous information about this
and that he may seek to forget with drugs, not
to think, not to worry, not to remember that he
is on the wrong path and astrayed from his purpose.
In the end, wretched contemporary man finds no rest until
he finds that something else, the highest thing, the thing
which actually exists in his life, which is truly beautiful
and creative? Can man unite with God? Can he commune
with him? Can he become a God? By grace step