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