It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it. [00:27.6]
Bob: Well, folks, a few episodes back, I did an episode on the history of Satan, right. To really lay out in terms of the chronology of the scriptural texts and stuff, where the idea of Satan and stuff came from. And I figured that it would only fitting if we also turned the tables and talked about the history of God. Now I, if like me, you're shaking in your boot chair because there's some fear that, oh my gosh, we're going to get sacrilegious here, or we're going to turn this into something that's not very helpful. Let's back the truck up a bit. And let's remember why it is that I broached these topics. Why is it that I'm willing to step on to sacrosanct territory on the ground that has been held from for so long in order to be able to look at it in a new light? And the reason why is because my life was a mess, my entire life history was a mess. I was raised by good people. I didn't have a ton of trauma in my life. I didn't have a lot of other things that I still ended up in a, in a really big hell hole in many ways. And I needed a way out and everything that everybody was preaching at me, wasn't helping. Doesn't mean that they were wrong. [01:43.1]
It means that in some way, shape or form the communication between their heart, to their mouth and from their mouth to my ear and from my ear to my own heart and mind, somewhere along that communication chain, what they thought they were communicating was not coming across. And I needed to find a new way to look at things. So, when we're talking about the history of God, the whole point of it is to give you a way out of something that has been amply attested to be one of the greatest contributors to addiction, particularly pornography and sexual addiction. Not that that's a thing, but compulsive habitual use of pornography and running towards sex as a way of solving problems or escaping life and things of that nature, right. What, what has been found in the literature is that this one of the single most consistent factors with the people who are struggling with compulsive porn use or other addictive behaviors, is the amount of internal guilt and shame they carry from religious upbringing, which means that shame has been used as a motivator. You've probably seen this right shame on you is not exactly a phrase that's new to English. On top of that, you shouldn't be doing that. That's bad, that's wrong. That's evil, that's viral. These are all outward attempts to shame another person into changing their behavior. [03:01.4]
What's interesting is that in the history of the Bible, that type of behavior, maybe I'll go into this in another episode. But that type of public shaming of an individual was a very, very common way to correct people who were errant in their ways, but it came in a culture that wasn't riddled with all of this internal guilt like we deal with today. We're living in a very different time, and so, a person has a lot of internal guilt anyway and then if you lump shame on top of it, they tend to internalize that shame. And it makes them feel like there's something irrevocably wrong with them and that becomes a problem. What's happened in these addictive cycles is that people are so ashamed of it, that they put themselves emotionally and psychologically into a situation where they feel helpless, worthless, whatever that poisons the body in such a way that it's seeking a way out. It's looking for a coping mechanism. And lo and behold, the coping mechanism that knows happens to be the one that drove it here in the first place, but it's the only one on the top of the list. So, they go back to it, repeat the behavior and then they are alleviated from that feeling of guilt and shame for a period of time, because ultimately the feelings you have are chemical, and then the dialogue starts over again. [04:16.7]
So, it would be natural to come to the conclusion that a lot of psychologists have come to, which is, well, you don't have a porn problem. What you have is a religion problem. Yeah, I kind of cringe at that, because it's not that religion is a necessarily an evil thing. It's not that religion is necessarily to blame or to guilt. What's the issue is they have a shame problem. They have some sense of self that is the problem. And it's been reinforced by certain beliefs they have about the nature of God and the nature of themselves. So, what I thought I would do is let's take a minute and let's look at the history of God or the history of people's thoughts about God and how that has evolved over time so that you have a chance to go and ask yourself this one question or, or state it in this way. What if the, what I believe about God and what God thinks about me, isn't actually right? What if I have some ideas about God that are actually wrong and those ideas are actually perpetuating the behavior. And what if there's a better way to think about the creator of all this that actually alleviates me from it. [05:24.4]
Now, if you're quaking in your boots, cause you're afraid someone's going to challenge a religious belief. This is not my intention here. I'm going to lay out some of the history of the way people have thought about God. In Christian Judeo-Christian history, since that's most of the people I work with, and then you get to choose, however you want to work with it. This is not an attempt to rob any faith at all from you, but rather to help you see clearly that almost all the ideas we humans have about God have evolved over time from traditions and histories and most of them may not be the truth. They may be ad-ons, it doesn't mean that the real God or the real creator of all this stuff, isn't something that we're pointing to. That's very obvious, right? There is something that's holding all of this together, but what we think about and believe about that, something can lead to problems. So, are you ready? You're ready to dive in. Okay. Do you don't have to take a deep breath or anything? You don't have to treat it like it's anything significant. It's just some guy on the other side of the microphone blabbing. Okay. So don't, don't treat me like I'm some special kind of person. These are just some considerations that may help you, right. [06:31.4]
First and foremost, we start back in Judeo-Christian history and we're going to start in the time of Abraham because there's plenty of archeological evidence at that period of time to indicate what was going on in Sumer and the region that he came from and around the cul-de-sac or of the Kaldi's or whatever, wherever that was that he came from. But that Mesopotamian region at that time, the common belief about God, and this is one that Abraham would have held is that Gods were made by people. There were figures and figurines that were created by people. They were dressed by people. They were given offerings by people and they were supported by people and made alive in such a way as to enhance their life. In other words, they understood and that culture and that society, that gods were in a sense, a kind of technology, something that you could bring into your life to enhance the quality of your life, no different than a cell phone. [07:32.5]
Nowadays, they might actually think that we worship cell phones the way we carry them around and love on them and app them and, and B deck them and all kinds of other things. I'm sure there's people that are be jeweling things. It wasn't at that old anyway, be dazzling things. There you go. And then we put special cases on them and then we keep them inside of wallet and then we're always checking them and always stroking them and everything else. People might think that we worship cell phones. What we do have is a technology in our hands. It has been made by humans with the intent of enhancing the possibilities for human life. Now these old gods were created in a way to enhance life on other levels, not just in terms of survival, not just in terms of making money or putting food on the table or getting a door dash or arranging a meeting or anything like that. But these other gods were made with a certain understanding of life itself and processes by which being in the presence of these things would create kind of spiritual experiences. Anybody who's been to some of these archeological sites in Egypt and Greece and Mesopotamia, and these other ones can feel the energy in that place. And it's still existed in Christianity. This isn't something that's gone away. [08:46.3]
We build cathedrals and we build temples. And Mormons, build temples, and we have rituals and we have dedications and we have, you know, the Catholics, they have certain relics that are there that are holy objects and whatnot. And we all, Christianity it's all over the place that there are physical structures or physical things that have been built with the intention that they become a kind of technology, something that can enhance human life. And Abraham was steeped in this culture, ee was there. Now the gods at that time were local gods. They had reign over a certain territory or a certain city or something else like this, this sort of extended into Roman times as well. So, if you went to a certain city, you had to give offerings to the God of that city. If you went to another town, you had to go to the and give offerings to that God and so on and so forth. So, you have these gods or these powers or these something that sort of ruled certain geographical terrain. And in that geographical terrain, those gods were continually maintained by people. [09:50.2]
Now outside of Christianity, even today, this continues, some people would call this idol worship, but I think that that is a misnomer. I think that comes from fear, that's a label that comes from people freaking out about what is or is not okay because of certain languaging in the Bible. We'll get to that. But I want you to see that this isn't some ignorant backwoods pagan way of looking at things. This came from people observing life and trying to find a way to interact with it. Abraham being one of them. Now in, in India, they still do this. They make these things called lingas or energy forms. Often, they're ellipsoid and say in shape, sometime they're appointed ellipsoid. This shape is actually something that has been shown by certain theoretical physicists in modern science and stuff to be the shape that would be the first form that would have appeared after the big bang. This certain sort of ellipsoid thing. So, I don't know all of the science behind it, don't understand all of it, but it's a shape that looks a little bit like a pill, I guess you could say, but it's something that's been around for a long time. People mistake it for genital regions and other things, and they start, start to look at it like worship of certain body parts, but it's actually just a form that is a really conducive form for holding energy really well. [11:08.3]
So, you'll see these things in India. And if you've ever been in the presence of one, there's a Dhyanalinga in Coimbatore and a couple of smaller ones that have been made there and a Bairavilinga there, a Devilinga and stuff that, and they have different types of activations inside of them, different types of energies. So, when you just walk by them, if you're sensitive at all to life, something shifts inside of your body responds naturally to it. And so, these were created by people they're called yantras or lingas. They were created by people as a kind of technology to make it so that a person who is using them or around them can enter meditative states better, can feel the presence of the divine better and so on and so forth. So, there are around, I have been in the presence of some of them, they are exceptionally powerful. They're beautiful things to experience, maybe not so beautiful to be whole, but definitely to experience. And they're absolutely incredible powerful phenomenon. And you can feel some of that inside of Christian, temple, cathedrals, and Mormon temples and stuff. I haven't found it as powerfully there, but it's still there. I think Yogananda also created just a temple that doesn't have a form, but it's just a space like an architectural space in, I think there's one in the Phoenix area. That's a really powerful area as well. [12:24.1]
And so, the original idea, or one of the early ideas that have been around for a long time and are still around, around gods is the, that God is a word or something that we put on something that humans make in order to enhance their ability to experience divine states. So, it wasn't something out there in the cosmos, because from their perspective, if you point up it's a, it's a spinning globe, which way is heaven. We're spinning on a globe that is spinning around a sun that is spinning around the middle of a galaxy. At some point you've pointed to everywhere in the cosmos. So where exactly is heaven, if heaven is just up. They understood that heaven was an experience within or as Jesus would say that the kingdom of heaven is within you. And so, anything that they would point to as a God is literally something that they would look at as a technology designed to help you access that kingdom of heaven within you. [13:19.0]
Now, I know that might smack of idol worship still for some people and everything else. I know the Muslims don't like energy forums or paintings of any kinds. So, they really worship the word and they would use Arabic script and other types of word language to do things, but they don't usually use visual imagery as much. And so, each religion has its own way of looking at it, but all of them have in some way, whether it's architecture or particular votive statues and statuary and energy forms, or whether it's words and word art, or whether it's the Tura itself and the word of God itself and these sacred scrolls, which the Jews, literally, if it had the name of Jehovah in it, they will bury it. They will not burn the scroll. They will bury it as if it's a living being. And so like, no matter what tradition you're in, every tradition has had this idea that there's a certain technology, a certain way of approaching or creating things that can evoke the divine spark within a human being. And that's what they would have called Gods. [14:21.8]
Now, Abraham leaves and he's following a God that doesn't have a form attached to it. So, he's already shifted some ideas there. He's moved into some areas where, you know, with Jacob and everybody else, they're talking about their God and they're no longer local gods. So, it's a God that doesn't have boundaries. It's a kind of invisible, God, it's not one that you would go and necessarily do worship to that had a statue in front of it. And so, it definitely had some uniqueness in what was going on. But even at that time, even at the time of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, there was still polytheism going on. And everybody there, including them totally accepted that there were other Gods in the world. Did you hear that right? Even from the 10 commandments, it was accepted that there were other gods in the world. Otherwise, the commandment wouldn't be, “Thou shalt, not have any other gods before me.” That statement alone makes it implicit that there was already accepted that there were other Gods in the world, tt's just that number one in line had to be their Lord, their God, that was it. But it was already understood that there were other Gods, otherwise, the priests of Pharaoh who were worshiping these other gods in these other technologies, you could call them or using these other forms, wouldn't have been able to do the same feats that Moses was doing. Now, maybe they weren't doing them as spectacularly. Maybe there was some other issue there. Maybe they weren't really able to access as deeply into whatever is possible for humanity as Moses was with his form of worship, but either way, there was other gods. And these Egyptians had an entire culture built up around it to where they looked at God a certain way. And they thought about God a certain way. And they worship in a certain way. And they saw miraculous things happening. Really, they saw miraculous things happening because they worshiped what they thought were, was God. [16:22.6]
Now they weren't worshiping necessarily some pie in the sky figure, though some of them, it probably evolved into that, but they were worshiping specific technologies, understanding that they could do certain things. And if they maintained this practice and these rituals, other possibilities of experience were open to them that weren't open to other people. You can see this in all of Egyptian architecture. You can see the way that it's related to the human skull, to the human body, to what it opens out. The layout of the temples were built in such a way that they map onto the human body, perfectly. Even certain things that happened in certain areas of the temple map out to certain areas of the human brain or to the human heart and so on and so forth. It's uncanny the amount of understanding they had about the human system and the way that they could build architecture to evoke that. Even some of the statuary that at the time, you know, early on, we used to think were these fertility, goddesses and stuff. We started to look at them and you can start to see that they're actually maps of the human brain. And they map out certain areas of the brain, certain ganglia that are holding from the brain. And then they're just disguised as gods and goddesses made to look like a goddess of fertility or something like that, but their actual anatomical studies of the human brain. [17:35.1]
So, they were creating these things because they recognize that they, there was a way to evoke something within themselves. And at Abraham's time, it was, it was relevant. And at the time of Isaac and at the time of Jacob and all of these other times, all the way up to Moses, there were other gods in the world that had different powers, all throughout Israel's history, different powers. [17:56.5]
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It only starts to show up in early Christianity, that things start to shift. Everybody was okay with other Gods and you were allowed to have a preference. But things start to shift in early Christianity because of the idea that there is only one God, and there's only one true religion that shows up in that period of time. Now at first, everybody's like, okay, cool. Well, let's explain it away by saying all of these different Gods are really just different facets of the one God. But shortly after Christianity shows up that there's only one God and everything else is being demoted to either being a demigod or for God like an angel or against God that there's only one truth and one religion. That's where you start having a lot of these issues with, with people going, okay, cool. There's only one, God, this is the God that I believe in. The God you believe in is false God, it's everything else. And it's no longer just some other character or God or some other aspect of God or maybe another name for God, it's now a false God. It's a false worship or it's an idol worship. But consider how divided Christianity is. Just consider how divided Christianity is, what we've looked at so far as an evolution over time that hasn't gone away. There's still these remnants of all these things all the way down to the idea that there's only one true God and one religion, and one faith. But then you look at the faith that espouses that and Christianity is among the most divided religions that there are on the planet. [19:54.7]
If you just sit in one congregation and you interviewed everybody in your congregation about God, no matter what religion you are, how likely is it that you guys would actually have the same ideas about God? If you were to grow up in the faith that I grew up in, they claim around 15 million members or something like that. If you interviewed every single one of them on the outside, it all say, we believe in the same God, this is a God that has a body, which is different than a lot of the rest of Christianity. And Jesus has his other body and so the Godhead is actually three different percentages and so on. But if you actually started talking to them about the quality characteristics, insights about God, how he works or behaves, you would end up with 15 million different religions, different views of this one strain of thinking about God. And if you look at every Christian religion, it's the same. Why is it that it's so divided? Why is it that some believe God had God doesn't have a body and others do? Why is it that it's believed that anything that you can ascribe to God as a characteristic has already limited where others would say no, no, he's this, that, and the other end, he's only the good things. Why is it that someone say, God is the bringer of all things good and evil and others will say, no he only brings the good? And Satan is the only one that brings the evil. Why is that? I'll submit to you that just like with all of these other emerging evolving ideas about God, it came from your upbringing, it really did. Where you were born, determines your God very much. If you had been born in some indigenous tribes somewhere that talked about God as the mountain spirit or something like that, and that was all you knew growing up, it would be very natural for you to hold that as something sacred, as something powerful to have had really powerful experiences with it, it would be very natural. Would you believe in the same God, the way that you do now today? No, not at all, because it's something that you were taught and you were taught that by people who were taught that by people who were taught that by people who were taught that by people and these people are not exactly, always the clearest thinkers or always on point and their ideas about God have evolved. [22:03.9]
Do you believe in God the same way now, as you did, when you were a young kid? Or have your ideas about God changed? In like manner, those are things that you pass on to other people over time. And some may remember one teaching that you said 10 years ago and another may remember another one that you said yesterday. Which one is correct? In your view, it's the one that you're at now and yet for them, they may have taken the one you said 10 years ago and then gone off in a totally different direction. So, it's really easy to see that all of these ideas that we have about God and whether he disproves of you, and whether or not he's satisfied with you, or whether you're somehow lacking in his eyes all have come from a bunch of people doing their best to try and make sense of what they've been handed of the traditions they've been handed. And in many cases, the technology of creating divine states in people has been lost to the dogmas about what God is. [23:02.3]
And most of the time the rituals were in place for a very specific reason because of what they allowed for a human in terms of possibility and those got lost in dogma and tradition. And so even if the rituals there, a lot of people don't understand it. And then they start talking about God in these ways that have nothing to do with what's really happening because they lack perception. So, suppose you were born in that in indigenous tribe. And then for some reason you got out and you got, you came to the U.S and you decided to be to go to college. And then you hear everybody preaching you about God and all the different ways and you take a religion class. Would it feel like that, that those other versions of God are real? Or would they feel like, wow, those are interesting tales and stories and myths. We, I mean, we even call Greek mythology, we call it mythology. We don't call it Greek theology. We call it Roman mythology. We don't call it Roman theology. We call it Egyptian mythology. We don't call it Egyptian theology. But to them, it was a study of God, a study of the divine. So, what you believe in God is largely determined by your upbringing, and that then starts to affect how you feel about yourself in relation to that, which is divine. [24:10.9]
So that's been a lot, let's take a step back and take stock. Here, we are 24 minutes into this. And I want to wrap up in a really powerful way. The reality is I think you and I can both admit this, that there is something that is holding life together. And at the moments in your life, when you've really been in touch with it, they have been some of the most glorious experiences that you've ever had. Is that true? It is for me. When that is a living vibrant perception in my life, there, there is no comparison for the quality of my life experience that people have called all kinds of different names over the centuries, over the millennia. The common name for it is God, because they're describing a kind of experience that can happen. They're describing a kind of state of being, and being in touch with something that feels so much bigger than them, that they call that something, God, but they're a part of it when it's happening. Does that make sense? That's as much as we really know, most of the rest of the stuff that we claim to know is really just conjecture or ideas or stories we've inherited. [25:20.7]
But if we can be really honest about what we know, now really honest about what other people actually know versus what they believe we can free ourselves of a lot of the shame and the guilt that have come with the stories about God that aren't actually founded in and rooted in real experience. I I've told you way back at the beginning of this podcast, tn the episode, I think three called ‘finding God,’ an experience I had where in the middle of this massive questioning and seminar experience, where one of my teachers was rude, grilling some people in the audience about who they were. And we'll talk about that in another episode. Some part of that really hit home. And I remember sitting in the toilet of all places freaking out and crying my eyes out because I realized for the first time in my life, ready to admit that I didn't know anything about God. That all the stories I've been given from the time I was a kid, all of the information I'd been handed, none of it was something I actually knew. It was something I had believed in. It was something I had hoped in. And it had given me comfort from time to time, but I didn't actually know that it was true. [26:32.9]
And I remember being devastated and it all fell apart on me and I was sitting there crying, and then I left the bathroom and I'm sure people thought I had been constipated or something because they were sitting there going, you know, he must have had a rough time. And I walked out along the, the pond and then this massive experience of something that I would call divine, just enveloped me and filled every part of me. It was so deep and so intense and so profound and I thought, oh, I may not know really much about what people have called God, but I do know this, this has been there the whole time, and this is enough for me and I can start here. And starting there immediately eliminated so much guilt and shame about me because all the beliefs I'd had about a God who was disappointed in me and who needed me to be a certain way and to be different than I am for him to be happy with me, started to evaporate in that moment. [27:34.4]
If indeed the creator created you to be you, then there is no reason to suppose that he would want you to be anything other than what you are. And most of your misery has come from you trying to be something different. Consider the possibility that there may not be anything wrong with you other than the fact that you're having an experience of life, that isn't divine. And that all of this ritual and all these beliefs around God, the whole point of them is just to get you to experience something divine in your life. And if you can run with that and really work with that, you'd be surprised what starts to leave your life. So, we wrap up this discussion around the history of God, not to rob you of faith, but to help you be honest about what you truly know versus what you like to believe. What you like to believe may bring you comfort. It may bring you joy from time to time and may bring you excitement. But it isn't what you know. [28:35.3]
And if you start with what you know, from there, many things are possible, but if you start with what you don't know and are just hoping is true, it's possible that you could be right, but it's also possible that it's bringing you more guilt and shame than you ever need to live with. I will always stand here and defend what I have seen, which is I've never seen a flawed human being anywhere. I've only ever seen people who have believed some negative things about themselves in such a way that they have felt flawed and they have felt like there's something wrong with them. And as a result, have behaved in ways that have really negatively affected their life. And as soon as we help them perceive the nature of what they are as little perception as they may have and all of that guilt and shame go away, and that sense of worthlessness goes away. So also go away their behaviors, their addictions, their anxieties, their stresses, and they get to live life in a really profound way while still maintaining their religion. It's just that their view of God has changed because they've let go of the stories about God. That they used to believe to be true and realized, oh, maybe those just came from a bunch of misinterpretations over time. And maybe the best way to start is to start with what I actually perceive and actually know, and work forward from there. You can do the same. [30:01.3]
This is my invitation to you to take a moment to step back and consider how much you actually know, because the moment you're really honest about your own ignorance, which I'm ignorant of a lot. You'll find a tremendous freedom to not have to pretend to know something that you don't know and did not have to be controlled by those stories anymore. [30:22.7]
And that's it for todays “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice. [30:40.9]
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