Beyond EXCESS. A History. A Healing. GODSEARCH Episode 8
Hi, welcome to God's Search. This is Michael Shevak. We're here to have the experience called God, the experience called God. We're not here to prove God. We're not here to debate God. We're not here to do any of that stuff that has ripped and shredded the world apart for centuries upon centuries.
We're here to begin the task of teaching people mainstream, people who are religious, people who are not religious, people who are atheists, people who are humanists, people who are agnostics, how to have an experience, the experience that's called God.
Call that goodness, call that good, call that anything you want. It's a real experience. You can have it anecdotally yourself. Other people can too. And when we put this together and we all compare notes, we're going to realize that there is an objective reality, meaning something we can all experience together.
And we can call it anything we want, but I'm calling it good or God. That's my bias. You pick your own terms for it. So let's continue. We're going to continue here. This is podcast number eight, eight, four and four, four cardinal directions.
We've already talked about four on podcast four and four consciousness or mind directions above sky, earth, four and four. Podcast eight is about restoring balance, restoring balance. But we're going to continue first on what we've been doing for the past eight podcasts, which including this, of course, and we're going to continue on the theme.
Now, please, if I'm being excessive about excess, I apologize excessively because excess is the thing. It's all about excess. The problems in your life, the problems in your home, your problems in your relationships, the problems in governments, the problems in education, the problems in social services, the problems everywhere are all due to excess.
Excess. Excess. So we're going to finish that a little bit. We'll return to it many, many podcasts in the future, but right now we're going to just get our basics finished on excess so we can get into the good stuff, which is experiencing God, which we're going to begin today.
We're going to begin that directly one tiny step at a time. We're going to approach that incredible, amazing, sublime experience that I'm calling God. You pick your own term for it, that's all right.
But I just wanna give a little bit of a quick cartoon of history. Because we talked about in the last podcast, how excess is the single thing that creates polarities and it creates a conflict within us where one thing is irreconcilable with something else.
And before you know it, you have what I called mind cracks. And the mind cracks we talked about between male and female, between capitalism, between socialism and all these things. These are mind cracks, whoop, Freudian slip, mind cracks that actually destroy the fabric of God in our experience.
So let me give you a little bit of a history. I've lived it, you know, it's my generation. If you're a different generation, please learn from my mistakes. You know, in the 1950s, we came back from World War II and it was, you know, very, very successful.
We had, you know, killed the enemy and the enemy was incredibly vicious and incredibly dangerous. And we came back and it was all military and it was all structured and it was all formal. But something incredible, amazing had happened at that time.
You had Hiroshima in the East. You had the Holocaust in the West. We'll go into it in more detail in the future. But they are parallel events because the Holocaust was there to exterminate people who had become identified philosophically with lower and more earthly and material.
And that's a Gnostic contamination. And that was considered evil and they were trying to eradicate them. And then you had also in the East with Hiroshima, as we saw in this great movie, Oppenheim, we saw that the human mind had ascended to actually break the veil on matter, you know, from the Latin mother.
In both situations, we're breaking what is materia, what had been identified as materia, meaning people who had been identified with materia and the devil, because certain Gnostic teachings, as early as the third century, identified material things, creation as the source of evil.
The two things were parallel events and as an astonishing synchronicity. After that, after the 1950s, you had the most amazing thing take place. All of a sudden, a massive birth of children. Perhaps, if you believe in reincarnation, all of the people who died in World War II needed bodies, and we had a birth explosion in the United States.
Now, then you had a revolution. Instead of black and white and gray and militarism, all of a sudden, the bohemian aspect, the Beatles came into play, long hair, colors, day glow, aquarium age, psychedelic drugs, all of which were mind expansive.
Instead of a militaristic formalized government that was like what Eisenhower warned was a military industrial complex, you had a revolution of spirit, a revolution of consciousness instead of formalized western religion.
You had inspired philosophical thinking that came from the east, American transcendentalism, the idea of an over soul, which we're all sharing an over soul together, we're all part of that. We had amazing consciousness expansion and we had drug, sex, rock and roll.
All of this let out the naturalism, the naturalism that had been repressed for centuries as human society and western civilization built the power of human mind, the supernatural mind, to be able to be dominant over a material earth so we could create our supernatural miracles like this I am recording on.
It's a wonderful thing but it caused excess and that excess was immediately followed by a counterbalance in the world and that world created Hindu inspired eastern teachings, Buddhism, teachers from the east came in to balance the west, you had the rise of feminism, you had the rise of the African American civil rights movement, you had Chicano movements, you had gay and lesbian movements, you had Aquarian age movements and philosophies around the Aquarian age,
you had the rise of ecology. And you had this very curious thing, which we can talk about more, which was the return of the people of Israel to land. Now, notice all of these things are all natural based things.
Women, black people, Aquarian age, you know, ecology, all of these things that were labeled, you know, naturalist by the philosophy was more related to the earth. You know, Jews were called the the covenant as to the flesh, you know, in in in early Christian thinking.
So what happened was after after the atomic bomb was released and after the Holocaust, what happened was a resurgence of all the natural components and all that was perfectly great until later on after the 70s, it began to turn.
it reached an excess and it began to turn and the drugs sex and the rock and roll got a little out of control as we all know we had one of the worst venereal disease um um plagues in the history of humankind it was it it caused death and then right after that it's very curious you had a neo-biblical resurgence in the united states to put back some of the traditional lines of western civilization upon which western civilization was built to balance the post-60s thing and this gave rise to these two camps that we're still dealing with in the blue camp and the green and blue camp and the red camp which is a kind of neo-pagan natural feminism and a kind of neo-biblical um traditionalism that we're dealing with if we do not solve this excessive polarity between ascendant mind over matter and nature on the earth if we do not solve this problem that we have been living now for well over 50 years we will continue to cycle and cycle and cycle and cycle excess to a limit which will create its opposite excess which will go to a limit and create its opposite excess and we will go around and around and around in a circle that's why we need to do an authentic intelligent secular scientific spiritual re-evaluation of our religion our philosophy our political philosophies all of these things which i think is impossible without an honest god's search now We are in a moment in history where we are beginning to become released.
There is an amazing revolution of spiritual awakening that is taking place all over the planet. It is largely quiet. Some people would say it's invisible, but it is an enormous force. It is happening in religions.
It is happening outside of religions. It's happening in scientific life where you have renowned mathematicians and physicists who are trying to develop mathematical systematic analysis of consciousness.
It is happening all around the world. We need to feed that because what we have to admit that from that watershed event surrounding World War Two, we have to admit that using our supernatural minds to dominate matter was it created incredible miracles, and I am not saying at all that we should disband them.
I'm not an extremist. They're wonderful. They need to be refined like a car that doesn't poison the air. But what I am saying is that for the past, oh, probably 2000 years, right, but even more accelerated since the scientific revolution and since the industrial age, is that we have been building our civilizations in our supernatural minds, in our supernatural minds.
We've been building it in our philosophies. Our beliefs have been opinions. They're opinions that we contrast with other opinions. They're opinions that we debate with other opinions. And then we get confused about who's the authority?
Podcast lesson number one, who's the authority? Well, here, if you're going to tune into God Search, you're going to have only one context that holds all of it together. Don't take my word for it. Experience it.
And that context is life. Life, human simple life, everyday human life. We need to put all of these political philosophies or all our economic theories or our government biases and opinions and ways of doing things on a context which is extremely, extremely simple.
What enhances life? Life for human beings, sure supernatural creativity, you know, let's get the technology even more advanced, even more advanced, more refined, more creative, more powerful. Supernatural stuff is great, but As we said earlier, we also have a natural aspect of ourselves, we have bodies and we have bodies that are part of a larger body called the planet.
And it's life, not just for human beings that we want to enhance, but it's life we want to enhance for all creation. All creation, think very, very carefully. The ant is such a tiny little thing, a tiny, tiny little thing.
But if that little tiny ant were not there to aerate the soil, we would not have any food. That little thing, maybe not as intelligent, as fancy as we are, that little thing we depend on, that tiny little ant, that tiny little ant.
You know, I remember when I was eight years old and very much experimenting with life, I had a magnifying glass and it was my great sadistic delight to focus the sun. burn the ants on the ground. I pretended it was a laser beam from space.
But my whole life, for a good portion of my whole life, I was wondering why I was doing it and what was the meaning of it until one day I read about the importance of an ant. And then it was not small, it was not tiny.
And to incinerate it wholesale was very, very wrongful. Not that we have to be infested with ants, we're entitled to a human life. The point is, we're not pushing everything towards ecology, we're not pushing everything towards technology.
As we said earlier, the supernatural consciousness and the natural consciousness can become one, but it requires something higher, a trans natural consciousness that we might attach to the word God. So here we are, we're ready, we basically finished a lot of the messes, a lot of the sins, a lot of the good and the evil debates, and a lot of the problems with religious excessive authority and all this stuff.
We just basically finished it up and it's now time for eight to create a balance, but we're gonna start from basics. We're gonna start from the earth and we're gonna go up because we all have bodies, all have bodies.
And it's very interesting. So I'm gonna ask you a question. This is a really interesting question. Okay. What is the most important thing there is in life? Remember, life is our context here. What's the most important thing?
I'll give you a couple seconds to think about it. It's the Final Jeopardy theme. Okay, enough of that. Some people will say love, some people will say relationships, some people will say money. I guarantee you the vast majority of people do not give the correct answer.
Correct answer is obvious when you realize it. The most important thing in life here on earth, okay, is air. Air. There is not anyone, unless they're trained, really trained, who can go more than five minutes without air.
You can extend that. There are people who can train themselves and there are yogis who can extend it for even astonishing periods of time. But air is the most important thing to our lives. We don't have it for five minutes.
We're dead. The next most important thing is water. You don't have it. Yeah, you're going to die in a couple of weeks, then food, right, or clothing, depending on where you live. You know, it can be different if you're in a place that's really warm.
Obviously, you don't need as much clothing. You see, we are so used to building our lives on our minds and our supernatural creativity and our fear of the body and fear of nature on the earth. You know, primitive times when lightning would strike and we would burst into flames, or it would rain and it would be a torrent of bad weather and we'd have to hide in a cave or someone or some animal would attack us.
We have such a deep fear of nature that we built our supernatural minds up in part as a defense, that we have forgotten what the foundation of life actually is. And life is the context for truth. As we experience it, we can't experience it outside of life.
So here's your basics. Air, water, food, shelter, and add in all the other stuff. No one can be without it. So when we are looking at our God search, unlike other approaches which have been up in the sky, the sublime unity of all existence, release the earth, release the human things, release the mind, release all these things to go higher, we're going to start on the most basics, the most basic of basics.
So we're going to let's restage our God search. Just to remind you, there are basically three aspects to God. good, because I consider God to be a contraction of the word good. It's not academically correct, but I think it really works.
There are three aspects. Truth, unity, and causality, that which can be caused and affected. Truth, unity, and causality. You put them together, you got basically the Creator God, what people will call the Creator God.
Now the most important thing, if you're going to enter onto a God search, is you have an appreciation for truth, which we've talked about. Unity is pretty obvious, it's getting along, but we're going to talk about unity in much, much greater detail later on, because there are many levels of that, and that's not an easy one to deal with.
But the one that is most direct, and we always talk about it. Religions love to talk about it, it's called free will, is how to use our creativity. How do we use the image and likeness of God that we are in a way that produces good, that doesn't produce a mistake where we do not gauge reality correctly, and we act and we bring ourselves back a difficulty.
We sow and reap problems. How do we do that? It's not easy, but we begin with basics. You sow and reap in a way that supports life, that is good for life. You know, many, many years ago, we had an incredible economic downturn in the United States.
I hope you remember the gigantic crash that was so much like the depression, and everyone was so very frightened. And if you take a look at what had happened, is that the government had supported economic programs where there were new investment plans based on taking defaulted mortgages, packaging them together, and turning them into the greatest investment opportunity in the entire world.
Well, that stuff had a little life value to it. It did help life, it fed mortgages and schools for people who were traders on Wall Street, not Wall Street, it's not a nasty thing, it's a wonderful tool of human society.
Let's not get crazy here. And what happened is it had a certain amount of life value, got homes for certain people. But the whole concept... of taking defaulted loans and turning them into an investment that you gamble on had such little such little life value that it just expired it things that do not have a richness of life value they don't last very long that is a law that is a law of creation and as you proceed on your God search as you experience good you will see that for yourself that those things that do not have life value of any amount that's sizable expire I gave you an example the last time the Soviet Union collapsed in less than I the lifespan of a human being it had a ridiculous idea that an economic class was the foundation of truth it just didn't last,
okay? It didn't last. Evil doesn't last because there is no absoluteness to evil. It is a texture. It's an excess within overall the good that exists. So when we use our ability to cause an effect, when we embody the ability of the creator, the source, whatever you want to call it, the mystery of existence, and we embody it and we act, we have to do so in a way that is harmonious with the way life is designed.
We have to do so in a way where we embody the value of life and enhance life. That is the secret beginning to God's search. We talked about in podcast two, we need to grow, but you cannot grow unless you have a pool of life force and a pool of energy that can surge upwards, like a tree, like roots to a tree.
The mistake in the past is that we were on a head trip and that's okay. We needed to develop a supernatural power over nature. We need that help. Birth rates are dropping. We should be very, very happy.
We have technology that's reproductive technology so that if it drops dangerously low, we can help ourselves out and not get extinguished as a species. Very, very important, okay? But life is not just a head trip built into us, okay?
We are not merely a human created algorithm spitting out ourselves without anything in between. There are inner feelings in this algorithm. There are internal feelings there are. Interpersonal feelings, this is an algorithm, this is one hell of an algorithm, and it's not very readily predictable.
It's an unpredictable algorithm that transmutes its own self in a way that we can't even duplicate right now mathematically. It's life. It's life. And it is a mystery. No matter how we try to duplicate it with our AI, it's still AI.
It's still artificial. But life is not a head trip. And we have to be very, very careful these days. There are a lot of very valuable new age philosophies and a lot of very, very valuable teachings, for instance, prosperity gospels, which are teaching people how to use their supernatural ability to advance their lives and to make their lives more beautiful and more wholesome.
This is a wonderful thing, okay? But the tendency is to begin to think that everything is created in our own minds and everything is just simple wish fulfillment. That's the tendency of these kind of philosophies if you overgeneralize it, okay?
We start here on our God search on the most circulating energy. There's no doubt about we're circulating energy. But if we're merely energy, then if a baby dies, big deal. It's just circulating energy.
And if you believe that circulating energy is never destroyed or never created, the baby lives eternally. But what do you tell the mother or the father who is weeping over the baby? What do you tell millions of people who are beleaguered and who are hurt and displaced by governments and nations that do not realize that these are individual souls.
These are individual images and likenesses of God. Individual. So when we start to sow and reap cause and effect, you know, create, okay, and experience, we have to be aware of the boundaries upon that.
The boundaries upon that are not just what we want. You know, oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? Mercedes Benz are great. I love them. Okay, they're my favorite car, frankly, because they're comfortable.
And I really just love them. I always bought used Mercedes cars. But it's not just our desire. There are so many out there that are all desire driven, but they don't have, again, context. Context. It's okay to make tons of money.
It's okay. But when you derail an entire industry to consume through gasoline, when you could have created an economy with electric cars, you know, 70, you know, 100 years ago at this point, okay, and you're not thinking on the larger terms of what you are doing with your creativity, and you're not thinking beyond yourself to include future generations.
You're going to sow and reap maybe goodness for yourself temporarily, and that goodness will serve you temporarily and serve other people temporarily. But you always pay the piper because there is a boundary here built into the experience called God.
What you do must have life value. Everything has life value, to some extent. Even an act of evil, as we said last time, because I, you know, following Plato, has a certain tiny measure of good do it, okay?
If it didn't, you couldn't do it, because the world is designed to permit these things. I mean, the laws of the universe permit you to do things that are not the ideal good, but that are somewhat evil.
But when we want to experience good, to have an experience called God, we have to do so in truth, substantial truth, as we talked about. How does it feel? How does it sense? Does it bring joy? Does it bring happiness?
That's substantial truth, not what I call propositional truth. You know, the sky is blue, prove it. Substantial truth, unity, meaning there is a connectivity, a harmony, and a mutuality that takes place.
And also, we cause an effect. You know, Hebrew, it says, midah, can I get midah? Measure for measure, okay? What we do is we sow and then we reap. We cause an effect, and we create our input. Our input into creativity upon the earth, we add our input, and we create something that's even better, something that's made for the human being as well.
So, in order to do that, and in order to save ourselves from these excessive mind cracks, which we're dealing with every... single day and it's snowballing, it's getting worse. You must become conscious initially.
As we continue our God search, we can make this stuff unconscious and easier. But to begin a God search, you've got to grow more conscious of what you're doing so you can make change and not repeat the same habits.
In order to do that, you need values. I'm going to not sit here like a school teacher or an old preacher and I'm going to not teach and preach and tell you what to do and do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this.
Well, I'm not going to do that. I'm an American. I like free will. I like choice. I believe that human beings should be set free from the strictures of excessive governments, including religious or secular governments, to experience life and learn spirituality from just being alive, right?
But I want to help. So I want to give you some pointers that my life experience has taught me and great pain, great suffering, and I don't want you to have the pain and the suffering that I've been through.
So I'm going to give you some value priorities, I call it value priorities. If you go onto my website, yourgodsearch.com and the publications thing, you'll see a book called The Six Fix. And I put them in there if you want to read them.
The first most important value priority after air, water, food, shelter, that basic stuff, once you're alive, the most important value priority in life, because life's our context here, not political debates, not currency fluctuations, not bond markets, you know, life is health, is health.
Health is the most important thing. If you don't have your health, you do not have anything. If you store up money and you get ill, you're going to spend your money to get well. Health is the most important thing.
We talk an enormous amount about health care, but we don't do much talking about health. Health. Many, many years ago, there was an advertising campaign and a concerted effort on the part of our society to stop pervasive cigarette smoke.
We did it in a relatively short period of time. Now it's not even fashionable to light up, except in certain communities. So I want to leave you with the beginning of our God search, and we're going to continue continue with health the next time.
The single most important value priority is health. Health comes before anything. It's more important than love. It's more important than money. It's more important than politics. And you can't very well have an experience of God in the body if you don't have health.
So we're going to continue with value priorities and how to sow and reap your God's search on the most basic of human levels next time. So thank you, thank you, for being here. Thank you for joining me on God's Search.
Whoever you are, whatever you believe, whatever you don't believe, it doesn't much make a difference. What you believe, there's a reality here, and this reality is good, and you can experience it as good.
It's your God's search. Discover it for yourself, uncover God for yourself, and recover. Please recover from bad thinking and bad ideas that just create mind cracks and excess. Okay, I've been excessive about excess.
I'm going to give it a break, and we're going to go on to something else and have a good time and learn. All right, thanks for being here. It's been terrific, and I'll see you next time. This is Michael Chevak for God's Search.
