Josh Jost Transcript

Josh Jost interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over 700 of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the interviews menu where you’ll see them organized in several different ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website and a donations page that explains more. And also, we have a nice team of volunteers that helps with some different things such as proofreading transcripts and so on. So, if you’d like to help with those kinds of things, get in touch.

My guest today is Josh Jost. Josh started out in a family of strict religious Mennonite people. And he later led a healing movement during his youth, where he was the healer. There are some miraculous stories around that. He eventually got married, experienced financial hardship, living in drug-filled slums in Scotland, I believe it was, cleaning toilets in a factory. Eventually, he became an advisor to heads of Fortune 500 companies and billionaires, and is currently working with one of the world’s most renowned private islands. Josh’s journey has been unusual to say the least.

Fueled by his yearning for awakening, his story is about embracing disillusionment as the path to enlightenment. So, he lives in Tahiti, which is why we got our time zones mixed up. I was presuming that was way out in the western Pacific, but it’s actually slightly east of Hawaii, and it’s in the southern hemisphere, and so you’re heading into winter, which is all very confusing, but you don’t have winter in Tahiti, I’m sure. So, you live there with your wife and youngest son, and we’re going to start out, I guess, talking about your Mennonite upbringing and the topic of disillusionment, of which you said you had three major ones.  I always regard that word as having a positive connotation because if not being enlightened is being in a state of illusion, then we want to get disillusioned, right?

Josh: Yeah, I agree with you and by the way, thanks Rick, for inviting me on the show this morning. It’s a pleasure to speak. Yeah, so when you’re early in the journey of enlightenment, I think disillusionment is a very terrifying thing, right? When you’re invested in your illusion, in the illusory world, and you start to see some cracks in the matrix, so to speak, then I think that’s really scary. I think as you progress it becomes something that you learn to embrace and almost enjoy as a part of like, okay there’s another part of me that I can let go or another part of my illusion that I can let go and I know that there’s a greater reality that I’m discovering beyond it. So, I have come to see it as a positive word but I would say, in the mainstream, I don’t think it’s viewed that way.

Rick: Yeah, I’m reminded of that Queen song, “Another One Bites the Dust.” As we shed our illusions.

Josh: There seems to be a lot of that going on right now.

Rick: Yeah. So, considering that we’re going to have a conversation about your profound spiritual awakening, which would resonate very much with Eastern spirituality, the fact that you started out in a strict Mennonite family necessitates your having gone through some major shifts in perspective, hence some disillusionments.

Josh: Yeah, indeed. I think maybe I’ll just start out then at the beginning, since you’ve given me a good segue into that. So yes, I was born in Kansas in a small Mennonite community. There is a spectrum within the Mennonite world of those who are very ultra-traditional and those who are still quite traditional but not quite to the ultra-scale. So, some of them look just like the Amish in terms of how they live and practice and they live as they did when they came to the new world a couple hundred years ago. Others have become a little more modern, we’ve got cars and technology and so forth, but still have a very conservative viewpoint of the world. So, we were a little bit in the slightly less ultra side of things and that had to do with my dad deciding when he was young that he was going to become an airline pilot. My grandfather told him there’s no way you’re going to fly with those contraptions, but he would sneak off before Sunday school on Sunday mornings and get flying lessons and eventually worked his way into a flying career. So, I had this very strange contrast between that and living in a community that was very conservative. We had a lot of cousins who dressed as if they were off the set of Little House on the Prairie and were in that sort of community space. And then my dad was taking me away on trips when I was a kid, visiting London and Paris and parts of the U.S.  So, I was having my eyes opened to the way the rest of the world was. It was an interesting dichotomy to grow up in. But I remember, from a young age, I was very interested in spirituality and purpose and so forth. As a matter of fact, at one point, when we had moved away and were living in California, I had a picture story Bible, like a comic book version of the Bible for kids. I would take that and put it in a little red wagon I had and I’d go around from door to door telling people about the Bible, because I was just so fascinated with the Holy Spirit. So, yes, I guess I was always the good kid and did things the way I was told to while I was growing up, I did what I was supposed to. And then I think my first stage of disillusionment happened when I was in high school because, of course, I went to a Mennonite high school. This one was in a community in California. And I was doing all the right things, yet inside I just felt so unhappy. I felt really miserable. And I was looking around at all my Christian friends and I thought, I think we’re all in the same place here. We were told that we have the life, we’ve got the truth, and it’s all heaven and joy and all that sort of stuff. But I didn’t feel like any of us were actually living that. And so, I just came to this point of personal crisis where I said, “okay, either this is something that’s worth everything or it’s worth nothing. There’s no in between. If what we say we believe is true, then it’s worth everything. And if it’s not true, then what’s the point of spending a life living in these religious confines?” So, I began a journey at that stage where I reasoned that I had several generations of people who had given up everything several times and migrated around the world because of their religious faith. They were pacifists, they didn’t want to fight in wars. That would often be what would cause them to move on to a new country, because whatever country they were in was trying to conscript them into these battles they did not believe in. They felt as if they were a kingdom not of this world. Governments do what governments do, they have got to protect their people and so on and so forth. But we live in a higher order and therefore we don’t believe that it is right for us to participate in war. We’ll be medics and other things. I had family members who were medics and things like that in World War II. So, they moved around the world because of this faith they had. I thought, well certainly, if they were willing to do all of that, there must be something to it. I didn’t know what, but there must be something there worth exploring. And I started this period where I said, “okay, before I decide to just step out and make my way in the world and just have fun with life, I’m going to give all this a try and see if there’s anything real to it.” And so that kind of disillusionment led to an intention I made at the time of, “Okay, I’m going to give this a try, and if I can find something real here, I’m going to give everything to it.” So, I started a period for several weeks where I would just lock myself away in my room and I would just start praying and meditating and just waiting for something to show itself. And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to find it, but I just knew I had to find something. And so, it was several weeks of this where I hit, I guess what you would describe as a sort of transcendental state, but I had this experience where I just felt this incredible ecstatic joy come over me. And there’s a practice that they do in some of the church, which is kind of how it unfolded for me. It has a terrible name. They call it being “slain in the spirit” for some reason. I don’t know how they came up with that. I almost consider it more of a somatic exercise. It’s really an exercise of just surrendering your body physically to whatever experience you’re having spiritually and it sort of helps you to open up to that. And so, that’s what happened. I fell down and I was just in this state for I don’t know how long. But I woke up from it and I was thinking, “wow, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced.”

I was, at the time, working a part-time job after school in this huge factory in our area and my job was basically to be the janitor and clean all the toilets. So, there were something like 200 men there and I had to go in and clean the toilets every day. It was the most disgusting job, but I was really enjoying this experience I was having. When I went to school every day, I couldn’t wait to get there after school and shut the door. I’d lock the door out so nobody could come in and I’d have a couple hours cleaning bathrooms without being disturbed. And that whole time I’m just experiencing this transcendental joy.

So that went on for several weeks and then I had somebody on campus approach me and ask me for some advice. It was very random, out of the blue. And so, I started opening up about this experience that I was having and he got really interested. And this was, as you can imagine, a Mennonite school. There were a few kids there who belonged to somewhat wealthy families, to local families who sent their kids there because they knew it was a good school. So, he wasn’t a Mennonite. He was known as a school troublemaker. He asked me, I told him about the whole experience and I said, “Do you want to try this?” And I had no idea if it would work, but I said, “I’ll let you try it.” So, he said, “Yeah, sure.” So, we went into the school chapel and I prayed for him and he fell down and had the exact same experience as I had. And he woke up and went, “What?” Just this sort of look as if, “What on earth just happened to me?” He was in a complete daze. And he said, “This is amazing. Wait here,” and he ran out of the chapel, then came back about 10 minutes later with this girl who was the toughest girl in the whole school. She actually bullied all the boys. She beat up boys in the school. She was very, very hard. I imagine she came from a really difficult upbringing. And he brought her in. He told me, “Do it for her.” And now I’m unsure, thinking, “Oh no, this is scary, this doesn’t work, she’s going to beat me up.” So, I very nervously put my hands on her and I explained what I was doing and did the whole thing and the same thing happened to her. But in the process, she broke and just started weeping and just crying. And she got up and then they decided, “okay let’s meet here after school” and then they started bringing all of their friends who were basically all the school rebels. And before we knew it, we were having these meetings every night at my house where we were having these experiences. Then, out of that, somebody just got healed spontaneously. I think it was an ear thing or something like that and they were excited and we were all a bit shocked. And this went on for several weeks until summer came, when of course everybody was going off to college in various places. I was a senior. So, the whole thing sort of fizzled out at that stage.

But it really was the start of an awakening for me, to know that there was something more to this life and I had to find out what that was. Of course, this made me a black sheep amongst the Mennonite community, because they were just horrified that all of this was going on and referred to this devil work or whatever it was. So, I wasn’t very popular in my community when I left, but I ended up going from there to spend a year working with an inner-city Christian organization. I was dealing with gangs and stuff like that in Fresno, because there was a lot of gang stuff there, and I did that as a volunteer.

Afterwards, I went and joined a Bible college in Hawaii. I had this vision that I was going to be doing some sort of a Christian ministry, teaching, healing work, that sort of thing. And this was a place that was quite open to that stuff. So, I got to Hawaii and had some pretty challenging experiences, which I mean in a positive way. They were challenging my ego and my commitment to what I was doing and so on and so forth. And I was coming off the back of an experience in Fresno, where I’m from, where I had started attending a church where they had this youth pastor that I absolutely idolized. And shortly before I finished school, it came out that he was doing some inappropriate things with one of the girls in the youth group. I think she was over age. She was 18, but still it was incredibly inappropriate and so forth. And so, overnight, he was fired and moved away. And it really shook me because I just thought that this guy was the closest thing to Jesus that I had met.

So that was really weighing on me when I was in Hawaii because I just thought, I don’t want to end up like that. I don’t want to have some sort of a gift and get carried away with that and so forth, and then someday end up like him because I have not developed the character to contain that. So, that was the second stage of somewhat of disillusionment with the trappings of success and worry that success would become too much for me. I had this feeling of wanting to know that I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing in this world. I made an intentive prayer to say, “Okay, God, whatever you have for me in this life, I want it. I want to live the fullness of whatever I’m here to do, but I don’t want you to release me into that until I’m ready.” I wanted to make sure that I had the foundation right before doing that.

And so, I expected that it would be a couple years of training and development and then I’d start on my way. It was just at that stage, when my whole life took a turn for the worse. It just felt as if everything started falling apart, going wrong. So, at that point, I ended up marrying somebody I met there who is from Scotland. She got pregnant within a few months of us getting married. I had to drop out of Bible college to look after her. We moved to the north of Scotland where I had about five days of sunshine a year. Literally, one year I could count on one hand how many days of sunshine I had. This is rough for a kid from California. I’d come from this fairly comfortable middle class American upbringing. When we showed up there, there was no money, I struggled to find work. I eventually found a job in a restaurant working double shifts, trying to look after this baby that was coming. And so, we had no options. Looking for somewhere to stay, we went to the local government council office, and they have a homelessness division. We went in and said, “We need a house. Can you give us something?” So, they took us to this apartment. You get one choice. They give you one option. And then if you don’t take it, well, you’re in a hostel or sleeping rough in a car. So, they take us to this apartment, and I show up, and it was just horrific. It was where this woman who lived there for the better part of her life was chain-smoking and died in the apartment. So, all of the ceilings and the walls were just covered in years and years of cigarette tar. And she had carpets which had just been put down roughly with carpet staples. So, the council had come in and just ripped the carpets up but they hadn’t removed all the staples. So, you imagine, the floor was just filled with almost thousands of razor-sharp spikes. And I’m thinking, I’m about to bring an infant into this house and I can’t even put it on the floor. And it was just awful in this area. I went to work and told people where we were living and they responded, “no you can’t be living there.” I asked, why? “Because that’s little Bosnia.” That was during the Bosnian war and this was just seen as a war zone locally. And so, we worked and kind of made the best of that place and scrubbed walls and pulled up these needles from the floor. And made our best out of it, but there were times where we would come home in the evening and there was blood all over our door because somebody had been shooting up under our light. The lawn right in front of our apartment was just riddled with hypodermic needles. We had to pull probably about 40 or 50 out of there. And we had people pounding on the windows at night. And it just goes on and on. It was just absolutely one of the darkest experiences of my life. I was seriously in that dark night of the soul. I felt completely abandoned by God. I wondered, “God, where are you? I’ve given my life to you, and this is where you put me?” And so on and so forth.

So, we finally managed to find a better house in a better part of town. And this is where the story almost gets better. We move out of there and it was a private landlord who was going abroad for a year. And I knew we were just on the edge financially of what we could afford. She had done a deal for us on the rent. I said, OK, if we rent this from you and we’re doing each other a favor, because she didn’t want to give up her house if she moved away. So, I said, we rent this from you. We need to know we’ve got a minimum of a year to be able to live here, because hopefully, by that stage, I’d be financially better off. Any less than that we’d be in dire straits. So, she agreed, minimum of a year, it was a handshake agreement, she went off, decided six months later that she didn’t want to be abroad anymore and she was coming home and she wanted her house back immediately.

So, but this happened to happen right over Christmas and we had just broken up work from Christmas, but just before Christmas I basically got let go from my company because they were in financial difficulty. And my wife was six months pregnant again at the time with our second. So, it was Christmas time, nobody was hiring, there were no jobs available at the time. We had no income, we had no savings, and we were just being kicked out of our house again. So, we went back to the council office and asked them for another apartment. And again, we had one option, they took us out to this neighborhood. I later on found out it was where they put all the pedophiles. And now I’ve got a young daughter, I’ve got another one on the way. And the apartment is the exact same story, it’s a rinse and repeat from the first one. We show up, again, somebody ripped up carpets, thousands of spikes on the floor, just completely awful, awful, it was a total slum area. And Scotland has those areas, drug abuse in North Scotland is just crazy. And I’m looking at this place and I’m just thinking, “I cannot do this again.” We didn’t have an option. And it was just somewhere inside of me, I don’t know if it was my inner voice or what, but I just had this thought come to mind of, “I have to believe that life has more for me than this.” I didn’t know what, I didn’t know how, but I just had to believe that there was more in life for me than what we were experiencing. So, I turned around to the woman there and I said, “I’m sorry, we’re not going to take this.” My wife was shocked. She knew we didn’t have any options. But I just said, “I can’t do it.” I told her, “We have to believe there’s more for us.” And so, we didn’t know where to go, so we begged some friends and they let us stay in their guest room on the floor. And also, we all happened to get the flu at the same time. So, it was Christmas, we’re sleeping on their floor, imposing on them, with the flu. I just had nothing, nowhere to go and no ideas of what to do.

So, I put out an email to everyone on my contact list and I said, can you please pray for us because we don’t have any options, we need somewhere to stay. And I got this call a few days later from this very proper, well-spoken English woman, a Scottish woman actually, who spoke with that kind of accent, saying, “Josh, I’ve heard about your situation. You must come, stay with us.” So, I’ve forgotten this woman was on my contact list because I only met her briefly about six months prior. And she was a very celebrated interior designer in the UK. She did work for all sorts of celebrities and for wealthy individuals and so forth. But also, she and her husband were very close friends of the Queen and Prince Philip at the time. And when I say close friends, I mean they came over for dinner every time they were staying in Balmoral and vice versa. They went hunting together. Their kids, Harry and William, grew up swimming in their pond in the front of their house and so on and so forth. And they had this huge Downton Abbey-style manor house on a private estate up in the highlands of Scotland. It was just a whole other world, but it was an hour outside of where we lived. And so, she said, “so we want you to come and stay with us.” And I’m protesting because I don’t really know them. I don’t know how I’m going to live an hour outside of town and find work.

So, I’m protesting, no, we can’t do that. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She just kept insisting, you’re going to come and stay with us. So, finally I said, OK. This woman was a force of nature. I said, OK, and we load up our car. We drive an hour out of the city where we lived. And we were within a mile of their house, it was at night, middle of winter, so it’s dark, it is pitch black. And we’re about a mile from their house and I blow a tire. And so, we’re stuck on the side of the road and we’re already running late. And I’m just thinking, oh, they are going to be so angry at me. We’re keeping them waiting. They’re probably ready with food on the table. And then I sheepishly called her up and I’m thinking, I have to be the most ineffective human being on the face of the planet right now. I can’t even put a roof over my family’s head. I can’t even get them to a place of safety. And so, I was just really, completely broken at the time.

And so, I called her up and told her the situation and apologized. “We’ll get it fixed. We’ll be there shortly.” All that. And she says, “wait right there.” She comes flying down the hill in her Audi and gets out with her shawl on and “get in the car,” that sort of thing and we load all our stuff into the car and they take us up the hill. Driving up the hill, I saw the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen, this house glowing up on the hill. And you come inside and you can imagine, with her being an interior designer as she was, this house had literally been on the cover of the British version of Better Homes and Gardens. It was just immaculate and very traditional, sort of Baroque style, I believe. No, not Baroque, it was Georgian style. So, they take us into the kitchen and all the food is on the table with pheasant and wine and all that. And we sit down and I’m apologizing profusely that we’re imposing on them and all of that and making my assurances we won’t be there long, I will be on my feet, we’ll get out, it will be a couple of weeks. And she says to me, “No, you won’t.” I said, “I’m sorry?” She replied, “No, you’re going to be here for six months.” And, sorry, I always get teary when I tell this story, she said, “You’re going to be here for six months and your baby’s going to be born here and that’s that!” And I was confused, “What?” I said, “I don’t understand.” So, she and her husband started telling us the story, because she and her husband are very spiritual people within their Christian faith, and are very intuitive. Six months before, they had felt that God had told them that the first six months of the new year, they were not to have anybody stay with them. Now, they were the sort of people who had people staying with them every single weekend. There were always house parties at their house. It was just a very popular place. There was a revolving door of guests coming in and out of that place and for six months, they didn’t know why, but they weren’t supposed to have anybody stay with them.

Rick: In other words, they weren’t supposed to plan to have anybody stay with them because you came, but they weren’t supposed to fill the place up with somebody else.

Josh: Yes, exactly. They knew there was a reason for it, they just didn’t know what. So, they didn’t accept any requests from people, they didn’t put out any invitations. They cleared their calendar for six months. And then she was in the middle of Christmas, making Christmas dinner for her family and she had some time while the oven was cooking and she decided, “I’ll go check my email,” which she never does during the holidays. She’s very disciplined about separating work and family. But she said, “I’m going to check my email.” So, she checks her email, sees her inbox and sees my email and said to her husband, “Andy, this is why we weren’t supposed to have anybody stay for six months.” And so, they said, “we know that you’re supposed to be here. We’ve known for six months that somebody was supposed to be here. And we don’t want you to worry about anything. We don’t want you to worry about finding a job. We don’t want you to worry about food, diapers. We have an account at the shop in the village. We want you to go and help yourself. Just put it on our account. We’ll take care of it.” And I basically had a six-month retreat in the Highlands of Scotland in this magnificent home.

I was in quite a bit of shell shock at that time for the few years I’d been through before and then we had six months of just decompressing from all of this experience that we had gone through. And it just opened me up to know that yes, life will take care of us. Life has a plan for us. Life has a purpose for us being here and I can trust in that. And it’s interesting, ever since then, I’ve never struggled for housing. I’ve lived in the most amazing places well beyond my means, throughout, ever since. We just have had the most wild, interesting opportunities come to us. And even now where we live in Tahiti, it’s just been absolutely incredible. We are just so blessed and fortunate. It is just something I’ve never worried about since that time in my life. I always know there’ll be a place for us somewhere. So yeah, so that is the first part of the story.

Rick: Was that disillusionment number one that we just covered?

Josh: That was one and two. The second disillusionment was when I was in Hawaii and I became disillusioned with this sort of external measure of what success looked like or had to be.

Rick: Oh, I see, I see.

Josh: It was about my success, in terms of what was my divine purpose. So that was the second disillusionment. And the third disillusionment is coming, I can tell you about that now if you like.

Rick: Yeah, sure. That is with Christianity, right?

Josh: Yes.

Rick: Okay.

Josh: So, what happened, stepping back to my Bible college days, because that’s important to understand here. One of the things I did when I was in Bible college was, they had a very modular program, so you do one course for a compressed period of time. So, I did a nine-month course called the School of Biblical Studies, which was an inductive course on the Bible. The idea was to set aside all preconceptions about what the Bible is saying in terms of the doctrine that you’ve been taught while growing up. Then you are taught principles of hermeneutics and how to read and understand the history around each particular book of the Bible and apply logic and reason to making sound interpretations of what the Bible, itself, is actually saying. It is meant to be an approach to letting the Bible speak for itself and for understanding it within its context.

So, every book of the Bible is essentially a letter written by someone, to someone for a specific purpose. It has a specific message, a specific idea it is trying to drive home. We were to understand the principle that it cannot mean anything to us it didn’t mean to the original audience. So, the principle is, let’s understand what it meant to the original audience, and then we can understand what might be applicable to us outside of that. Because some of it is cultural, and it was speaking to a specific context, specific issues at the time, and wasn’t necessarily meant to be interpreted in the same way we do in the modern day, which is where a lot of modern Christianity derives proof text things or else it takes things very literally and then tries to apply it to our current situation.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a healthy approach. I wish that certain political factions could do that with the Constitution and the founding fathers as well.

Josh: Indeed, yeah, we should take that approach with anything. If you opened up somebody else’s inbox and started reading through your emails and you’re only getting half the conversation, you know, you’re liable to draw some pretty strange conclusions without being able to see the entire email thread, right?

Rick: Did you have to study Aramaic and Greek and anything like that?

Josh: Well, yeah, ancient Hebrew, I studied bits and pieces here and there, not enough to where I could read it. But you’d have to get into a lot of word studies to understand, because so much of it is locked up in figures of speech and metaphor. And that is where it’s very commonly misinterpreted, because we take things literally that were meant as a figure of speech to drive home a point. And through the course of the nine months that I was in this program, we had to read the Bible five times and write a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the entire Bible. So, it was incredibly intense. You were studying morning till night. But it was also really fascinating, because you studied it chronologically. People don’t know, the Bible’s not chronological in how it’s ordered. It’s ordered thematically. So, you have narrative books, you have prophecy books, and the poetry books and so on and so forth. It’s ordered in that way as opposed to in a chronological order. So, some books are chronological within their set.

Rick: Also, may I ask here, do you believe, as some do, that the Bible is just a minor, a small subset of all the potential information that it could have included and that there are all kinds of things that were either never found or edited out for various political reasons or for doctrinaire reasons? And so, it’s not necessarily as complete as it could have been.

Josh: Well, there certainly are indications in what we have that there are scribal changes. Now, some of those might not be as mal-intended as they were. Some of them might just be because they misunderstood something and thought, “That can’t be right. I’m just going to change that letter to that. And you also see some differentiations in the manuscripts with some of the New Testament books where some of them have additional portions that were put into them that they think were added later. But I think it’s an important segue, I’m glad you brought that up.

Rick: Well, to embellish it just a little bit, for instance, Yogananda, in Autobiography of a Yogi, argued that reincarnation was edited out of the Bible at the Council of Nicaea or some such thing, and that they did not do a really thorough job, because there are little hints and snippets of it that got left in.

Josh: Now that’s really fascinating, and by the way, I loved Autobiography of a Yogi. I thought it was a phenomenal book, and it came along at a very important time in my life. Reincarnation and the Bible is a very interesting topic. There certainly are cases where they believed in it, right? Because they believed that Elijah was going to be reincarnated and became John the Baptist. Well, some of them believed that he was Elijah. And Jesus alluded to that, claiming he was Elijah reincarnated. By the way, Elijah was one of the great prophets in the Old Testament, for those who don’t have that background. And so, there is the example of Jesus of whom many believed he was also the priest Melchizedek, King Priest Melchizedek, who was living a second incarnation.

Rick: As Jesus?

Josh: As Jesus.

Rick: I see.

Josh: Yeah. So, as Paul talks about that, I believe it was Paul, who said, “you were a priest in the order of Melchizedek,” and then he talks about the way that Abraham treated Melchizedek, which indicated that he believed that he was of a higher level of being. He was essentially a divinity because Abraham made a sacrifice to him, which he would not have done otherwise and brought him an offering. So, there are those indications, but then, when you look into New Testament history, there is Origen, who was a very famous New Testament, or early Christian theologian who was a reincarnationalist.

This is jumping ahead a little bit in the story, but what I find most fascinating, there were three main sects within Judaism at the time of Christ. There were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and there was another group, who were a bit more enigmatic, called the Essenes. The Pharisees were the very staunch traditionalists. They were the right wing of the day, legalists, that kind of thing. And the Sadducees were more the contemporary liberal modernists and they were kind of nihilists. They didn’t really believe there was an afterlife. And they were the ones who ran Israel of that day. And then there was this group called the Essenes. They were a bit more enigmatic. They were a mystical group. And they lived in little communes. So, they had one in Nazareth. I believe there was one in Mount Carmel or it was close to Mount Carmel. I know Mount Carmel was very special to them. They had one in Jerusalem. They had one in Alexandria, I believe, in Egypt. There was one in Egypt somewhere. And then they had one in Qumran and they kept a library of documents in Qumran which we now know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. We know from their writing that they were reincarnationalists. They believed in reincarnation. And they also believed that the main priesthood of Israel at the time was apostate and that God never…

Rick: What does apostate mean?

Josh: Oh, apostate, meaning, the right definition, they were fallen, they had lost their way in terms of the truth.

Rick: I see, they were just hypocrites or whatever.

Josh: Well, it was more than that, it was false teaching.

Rick: Right.

Josh: So, the Essenes: they didn’t believe, for example, that God had ordered all of these animal sacrifices to be committed all the time. They were actually vegetarians, they didn’t eat meat, they didn’t kill animals, and they collected works from all over the world, including a lot of works from the East. So, a lot of the Buddhist and Hindu texts were found in Qumran. So, it wasn’t just the ancient Judaic texts that they were reading, it was everything. They kept a whole library of this stuff. And so, when you look at Jesus, Jesus spent time in all the places where they had communes. He was born in Bethlehem, but grew up in Nazareth, spent time in Jerusalem, spent his boyhood, or part of it, in Egypt when they had to flee. So, he lived in these places where the communes were, and a lot of his teachings were actually almost word for word out of their teaching. There were a few kparables and things he told that were just word for word what the Essenes taught.

Rick: What do you make of the theory that he went to India during some of those lost years?

Josh: You know, it’s fascinating because, the first time I heard that I reacted, “Oh, that’s a bunch of baloney.” And then, you hear some of the stories about it and, well, it’s an interesting prospect. I mean, there certainly was this whole long period and when you look at his teachings there’s a lot in it that resembles more of an Eastern philosophy.

Rick: Yeah.  And there are legends in India of him, or someone like him, having come there and all.

Josh: Right, exactly. There’s one particular monastery that claims they have evidence, they call him Iza or something like that, I can’t remember what it was. But they claim he was there and they have the records of it and so forth. And yeah, it’s a very fascinating story. Whether he went there, or whether it’s because he was raised within an Essenic community and had the influence and the teaching of it from within the community, there’s no doubt that there’s an Eastern influence and perspective that he brings, because it was very different than what you read in the Old Testament. I think there is a reason for that.

So, a couple other things that pointed to Jesus being an Essene, apart from the fact that he taught some of their teachings, was also the fact that a lot of the Essenes were called Nazarites because there was a Nazarite vow that they took. And then a lot of Jesus followers were also called Nazarites. So, when they say Jesus of Nazareth, it’s a double meaning. It was Nazareth because that is where he grew up, but it’s also Nazareth because of the Nazarite vow, which although he didn’t follow the Nazarite vow, he was associated with that group among the Essenes, and they were commonly referred to as such. They were very interesting as a group, because they were known for having tremendous psychic or prophetic powers and being readers of the stars. And they foretold to Pontius Pilate that he would rise to power. And they think the reason why Pilate didn’t want to condemn Jesus was because of the fact that he knew he was part of this group and he had this great admiration for the Essenes. And locally, they were also known as the healers. That was probably how they were most commonly referred to, as healers. They dressed in white and they were the people you went to when you needed some sort of spiritual, medical, or physical healing. So, it’s just an incredibly interesting group of people. When you connect all those dots and the fact that the Bible, the New Testament mentions the Pharisees and the Sadducees but doesn’t mention the Essenes, it just all points to the idea that it was the Essenes who were writing the book, it was the Essenes who were the early followers of Jesus and he came out of that group. And they weren’t putting the spotlight on themselves, they were putting the spotlight on Jesus. And that’s where, I think a lot of this had that sort of influence on him. But yeah, coming back to the original question, they did believe in reincarnation. And I agree, there are hints throughout the Bible that could speak to there being reincarnation and reincarnation being true and so forth. So yeah, I think that’s a fair comment, what Yogananda said.

Rick: And just out of curiosity, this is a little off topic maybe, but do you think that the miracles that Jesus was purported to have performed are just exaggerations or do you think that he was such a great being that he might actually have done those things?

Josh: Yeah, I mean, I do believe that those are real. Whether or not any of it has been “story-fied,” I don’t know. But you have the same stories about some of the yogis in India performing exactly the same things. So, if he had trained there, he may have developed those abilities there. He may have developed them within the Essenic community because they were known for that as well. So, for myself, I don’t put any question on that. But at the same time, if somebody else questions it and feels uncomfortable with it, it doesn’t bother me either. I think it’s the message that’s more important. And so, this is where, to your point about has it been doctored, the way I look at the Bible is, I say the Bible and scripture in general is not the truth. It is an account of the truth. It is a window upon which we see the truth or can see the truth. And some windows are a bit more clear than others, but no window is perfect. There are always these blemishes and so forth, that can slightly obscure the picture when you look at the detail, but when you stand back, you can see the big picture of what it is. And so, I tend to think in terms of, if you understand the Bible within its context and you understand the arc of the story and so forth, you get a pretty clear picture of what it’s trying to say if you’re looking for it.

Rick: Yeah.

Josh: But, of course, a lot of people don’t read it that way. What a lot of people do is to read it to validate their own beliefs. So, they start picking and choosing, you know, I like this verse because it makes me feel good about what I believe and it makes us feel like we’re the right ones and they’re the wrong ones. And so, we have a tendency to want to read our own subjective viewpoint onto it rather than letting it speak for itself and being open to the truth, whatever it is.

Rick: Sure. Yeah, the 19th century slaveholders used the Bible to justify slavery. So, you can, yeah. And so, when you say you got disillusioned with Christianity, it sounds to me as if you really appreciate Christianity, but you got disillusioned with the kind of Christianity that you were commonly familiar with, that you had been raised in and perhaps even that tends to predominate today.

Josh: Yeah, or maybe I could nuance that slightly. I’d say that the early followers of Christ didn’t call themselves Christians. That was a label that came later. And I think it was a different entity when that came later because, the early followers of Christ often called themselves followers of the way or so forth, but they didn’t really put a label to themselves. And that’s because Jesus, if you read what he was trying to do, he was not trying to start another religion. I believe very much that he was there trying to help them transcend religion. Where I became disillusioned with it is, so as to finish the story, I finished that course and I decided I was going to write a book about this, what I had learned through seeing the whole picture of the Bible. I wanted to be able to string that story together. So, I spent another ten years, while I was going through all this stuff in Scotland, all these difficulties. I spent another 10 years doing a much deeper, more reflective journey through the Bible to really try and understand how this story strings together and how do you make sense of Jesus and what he taught in light of what, in the Old Testament, seems like a very angry God and so forth. How do you reconcile these? And I came out through the end of that period with a profound awe at the book that is the Bible when I knew it in its context. But at the same time, with just a profound disillusionment with Christianity, because so much of what was being taught in the pulpits was almost the exact opposite of what Jesus was teaching. And that was really frustrating. And then when you try to have conversations with people, they just didn’t want to know. It’s just as if the walls go up, like la la la, you know. Don’t tell me anything that sort of rocks my view of the world. And I was really struggling with that, because Jesus in his context was a liberator. He did things during his time on earth that actually showed that men and women were equal. Like, for example, when he was in Bethel and there’s a whole story about the washing of his feet with the perfume and it said that Jesus had the women sitting at his feet. Well, that would have been a shock in their time, because the sitting at the feet of a rabbi meant that you were a disciple of the rabbi and rabbis didn’t have women disciples. So, he was showing that they have an equal place in the Kingdom of Heaven. And there were just many things like that. He was trying to set them free from the legalism that religion had brought. And what now has happened in Christianity, at least much of it, is what I call a crypto-legalism. We say, okay, you’re not under law, you’re under grace, you’re free in Christ. Right? But, if you really love God, you’re not going to do this, you’re not going to do that, you’re not going to do this, and then you give this whole laundry list of things that you have to do, and you’ll be shunned if you violate those rules. But you’re under grace, you know? And so, it’s this sort of secret, this kind of hidden legalism and Jesus was trying to set them free from all of that. And it has just become the same thing over again. So that is where I became disillusioned with Christianity, because I became disillusioned with the institution of Christianity, not with Christ. And I really wanted to know more and I wanted to grow beyond where I had gone in my spiritual walk at the time.

And so, I remember this time where I had completed this book and I was contemplating what to do, really feeling out of place in the church. I hadn’t left at the time, but I was very much on the fringe. And I was introduced to a gentleman in Vancouver Island, he was an older guy in his late 60s at the time, who was just one of the most enlightened beings I have ever met. And he has similar background to me in that he came out of a Pentecostal church movement, left that, started traveling the world on a spiritual truth quest, ended up in India, spent a lot of time there at the feet of various gurus and learned and was just so open and just so vast in his knowledge. We would start talking on the phone every now and then, we would speak for hours and hours and he was just opening my mind in incredible ways. And what’s interesting is, a lot of the stuff that I had come to understand about Christ was aligning with what he had said. He told me about Autobiography of a Yogi and so forth. And then it fascinated me when I read some of what the Indian writers had written about Jesus. It was the stuff I had found out, but it’s the stuff I had never been taught in the church. And so, we would talk on the phone every night and I was opening up more and more to thought outside of the Christian space. I remember at one point, I was really wrestling, because on the one hand, leaving the comfort zone of what I had grown up in, in the Christian faith, and generations of that, to step out of that and open up completely, fully, spiritually, it was scary. And David Wick was his name. He said, “Josh, what are you worried about? Don’t you think your father’s big enough to get you where you need to go?” And it was as if something in me just let go at that stage. I ended up going out for a walk in the forest. And this was at a period where, again, I was becoming disillusioned with Christianity. My marriage at the time was hitting the wall. That was coming apart at the seams. And I was disillusioned with life because, even though we had done better with housing, nothing that I envisioned, for what I was going to do in life, had worked out. I tried, failed, and I could just never seem to really make any progress in life. And I was just done with everything. I just felt so fed up with life. And I just, I didn’t feel like I necessarily wanted to live anymore. I didn’t want to kill myself. I had kids, all that. It wasn’t as if I was suicidal. But I also just didn’t feel like life had any appeal to me anymore. And so, I went out and took a walk in the forest because we lived in a forest area. I just took a walk and it was along this river. As I was walking, it was just as if that giving up thing just turned to complete silence in my mind. And all of a sudden, I felt like that self-identity started falling away. And the way I describe it is, it felt like that scene out of Avatar where they first stepped into the world and they saw the whole thing glowing and all that sort of stuff. And it was just as if I was seeing the world completely differently and everything felt alive. And I could feel it. It’s just as if I could feel this interplay of connectedness amongst everything. And I felt the most profound peace I’d ever experienced in my life. There was nothing to fight for or struggle for, anything like that. I came back just a completely changed person from that and from then on just knowing everything’s fine, everything’s good, I don’t need to worry. And so that’s where I started my journey slowly progressing out of institutional Christianity and expanding my spiritual horizons, so to speak, and growing in this idea of, I guess, what you call no-mindedness and so forth. So, I started reading Autobiography of a Yogi and I have so many books, of Daoism and Buddhism and Hinduism and all of that. And I was just absorbing it all. I think one of my favorites was the Vindhya Gita. It’s one of the most beautiful books, writings, I’ve ever come across.

Rick: The what Gita?

Josh: The Vindhya Gita.

Rick: Vindhya Gita. I haven’t heard of that.

Josh:  I’m going to slaughter the pronunciation on this, but it is a portion of an ancient Indian text called the Tripura, what is it? I can look it up.

Rick: Rahasya?

Josh: Yeah, Tripura Rahasya.

Rick: Right, yeah.

Josh: And the Vindhya Gita is a portion of it. It’s where all the gods are inquiring about ultimate wisdom, and then wisdom herself shows up and what it says about being is just phenomenal.

Rick: Nice.

Josh: Yeah.

Rick: And you went to India, right?

Josh: I did, yeah. I spent time there. I was there about three months. I had a friend who was from Punjab, so we spent a while going around Punjab together and had a phenomenal time. And it was amazing to visit. Went to Amritsar as well, which is an incredible place.

Rick: The Sikh temple, golden temple.

Josh: Yes, the golden temple, yeah.

Rick: And so how did you transition from all that into advising companies on how to find transcendent purpose and working with the leaders of Fortune 500 companies and things like that? Keeping in mind that we want to budget our time because we have some cool stuff yet to cover.

Josh: Sure. So, yeah, so, from there, I left Scotland shortly after that because my wife and I separated. I was thinking about coming back to the US, but I didn’t want to be that far away from my two daughters who were still there. So, an opportunity came up for me in London and I would travel back and forth between London and Scotland to see my daughters or bring them down. So, I was there, involved with that company for a few years until that came to an end and I was not sure where to go next. So, I had been and I was really fascinated at that time about the idea that companies can have a transcendent purpose. And I think it was at that time that somebody introduced me to the TED talk by Simon Sinek about “start with why,” which I thought was really interesting, about building organizations around the idea of why you exist rather than what you do. And those who haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch on TED. I think it’s the most watched TED talk of all time. And so, I was really fascinated by that idea, but I didn’t know where you would start to work with that. I read his book at the time, and it didn’t really offer anything more in-depth on how you build an organization around why. And so, I searched a load online, trying to find different books that might have some answers to that. No one did. I think there was an assumption that if a leader has their why, then the organization will also have a why. But I felt as if there had to be more than that. And so, I started looking, I thought, well, maybe I can come up with an analogy for this. I can find some way to develop my own model around this, something I could test out. And then, at that point, I came across another talk, another message that was given by somebody in India who was asked to be the spiritual advisor for one of the largest corporations in India and to develop the spiritual life of the organization. I thought, “Oh, this is interesting.” You know, let’s see what he has to say. I expected he would say, so we set up meditation rooms in all of the offices and we have retreats and all of that. And he said, “We started looking at the myths, values, and rituals of the organization.” And I was surprised, “Hang on a second, I didn’t expect that.” And then I started thinking about it. I had spent my whole life immersed in religion and theology. And what if religion is nothing more than a belief system to help us find connection and build a common shared sense of purpose? And what if through that I can find an analogy for how you build an organization on purpose? So, I began almost a reverse engineering of how belief systems work. I looked at religions, I looked at political systems, and so on and so forth and you start to see some common themes that arise through belief systems. And it was just as I said, there are three pillars of a belief system. You have your myth, which does not mean a fable. Colloquially, it’s come to mean that, but it means the story of your origin, the story that you ascribe to your origin. And that story helps us as a people to understand, ask, and answer the question, “Why do we matter?” Because it’s through that story of origins where we see, “Okay, this is how we came to be. This is the reason why we’re here on this planet.” And so, that connects people emotionally, because we share the same story, we have the same sort of core idea about why we are here, and out of that, then you develop your values. Your values are, “Okay, what matters to us?” So, first, this is why we matter to the planet and then, these are the things that matter to us. And then beyond that, the values develop. So those sit and exist in the heart of the belief system and then the intellect of the belief system is the ideology, the set of principles and beliefs that you ascribe to. So, they also develop this set of principles or ideas that help us think alike, “this is how we think the world works.” So, you move from the why question to the how question, this is how we think the world works, how we think the world should work. So, that connects us on an emotional level and an intellectual level. But then there is the third level, which is the physical level. And so, what they do is, they take these ideas and they intentionalize them by creating a set of habits and practices that are related symbolically to whatever these ideas are, so that you have a way of somatically putting into exercise what you believe. This way, it becomes something that engages you on all three levels, and that’s why they are so powerful. They can be a powerful use for good and they can also be a powerful use for evil. It’s a very powerful tool, but it’s something that we all live with, whether or not we’re conscious of it. We all have some sort of an internal belief system within us about how and why we think we’re on this planet, what our values are and habits that we formed around our life because of what we value. Sometimes those habits are positive, sometimes they’re toxic, depending upon our values, so to speak. So, there’s a framework for how we live and operate as humans. And this is because it enabled us as people to move beyond living in tribes. So, Yuval Harari talks about this: before we developed belief systems, the largest that a human group could get to would be about 140 and then they would break off and they would start another tribe. And that had to do with something called Dunbar’s Principle, which was that when you’re in a group of people, say you’re a group of 12 people. Understanding all the relationship dynamics is not just knowing 12 relationships, it’s actually knowing about 144 because it’s 12 times 12. So, say you get to 140 people and the exponential of that would be large. I don’t know exactly, I’m not a mathematician, but it’s a large number of relationships you have to keep track of to know who’s doing what and who can you trust, who can you not trust and so on and so forth. So, civilizations struggle, tribes struggle to grow beyond that number until they develop storytelling and then belief systems enable us to feel that we have a shared commonality between us, even if I don’t really know you.

Rick: It’d be about 20,000 relationships, I just pulled up the calculator.

Josh: Yeah, that’s a lot of relationship dynamics to manage. So yeah, belief systems are what have enabled us to develop as a species both for good or for bad. I see them as belief system itself, not as inherently right or wrong. It’s what you plug into that belief system that determines if it’s good or bad and if it is toxic or healthy. I started using that very openly as a model for developing corporate identity that was holistic, because when I would go in and consult with companies, I would ask them, I’d go through, we’d sit down and I’d say, “What’s your story? Why are you here on earth? What are you here to do that’s more than just making profit?” I sort of take this model, the difference between the money being the purpose versus the reward. So, a carpenter’s purpose is not to make money. A carpenter’s purpose is to serve through carpentry. The reward that he gets from serving and bringing value to others is the profit that he makes. So, in the same way, we confuse this idea that a business should exist for profit. No, a business should exist to bring value to the world in some way that’s beneficial to humanity. The reward they get for that is making profit. The more value they’re bringing, the more profit they make.

Rick: So, it seems like some businesses, if they were to find a transcendent purpose, would have to either shut down or completely change what they do, like a tobacco company, and many others that I could think of, that are just essentially harmful to people.

Josh: Yeah, and it’s funny because I spoke to a guy who was one of the legal counsel to Monsanto. This was at a conference where I was invited to speak, and I asked him about the ethics of what they do. It was just amazing the sort of gymnastics he was doing. (laughs)

Rick: Yeah.

Josh: Ethically, I won’t say what he said, but it was quite humorous.

Rick: Yeah.

Josh: Yeah, I fully agree. I think there are a lot of companies that are more leeching off the planet rather than helping. They’re leeching off our resources, they’re leeching off our health and welfare, and on and on. There are a lot of companies like that. It doesn’t need to be that way. I am fortunate enough to work in a place that doesn’t see the world that way.

Rick: Yeah, now you’re working in a place, the world’s number one private island according to Google, which is also considered to be the world’s most sustainable resort. You’re located on a private atoll, which is one of Polynesia’s most sacred assets. Did you say, did I hear you say that Marlon Brando used to own the island or some such thing?

Josh: Yeah, it’s true. It was his private atoll. It’s not just an island, it’s 12 of them. He came to French Polynesia to shoot Mutiny on the Bounty in the late 50s. And it was where he had a bit of a spiritual awakening. I wouldn’t say he was awakened by any stretch. But he came out of Hollywood at that time. Essentially, Marlon never wanted to be famous. That was never his goal. And he kind of resented the fame that went with it. He took his trade very seriously, but he never had his sights set on that. So, he came here looking for respite and discovered Polynesia and discovered spirituality through Polynesia. Through that period, he discovered this atoll, which for the Polynesians had been seen for the better part of a thousand years as a place of renewal and regeneration. So, in their lore, if you die here, your soul goes there to be regenerated and then comes back again. And there is an incredible energy, what they call mana on this place, which Marlon saw in it and he fell in love with it. So, he wanted it to be preserved for the generations to come, but he also wanted it to be a place that would inspire people to find a way to live more harmoniously and sustainably with their world. And so, what has come today wasn’t built by him, it was built by some hotelier with whom he had become friends here locally. But they conceived it together and it was built to the letter of his wishes. So, yes, it’s a very special place. It sometimes gets a reputation of being a bit of an A-list celeb haunt, but it’s not really about that. It’s very down to earth, a very natural human experience. And you’re just immersed in Polynesian culture and in this natural environment of paradise that is extraordinary. Only one of the 12 islands has been developed. The others are being kept as a private nature reserve. And so, you go there, you’re just immersed in an unbelievable paradise. And it’s a really special place to be. But it’s purpose in life is, number one, to model what sustainable hospitality can look like that works in partnership with community and works in balance with the ecosystem and so forth. And so, it models that and then also educates people on what’s possible when they come. And it’s what has caused an explosion of eco-resorts around the world that have essentially tried to model what they’ve done here, because it was the first to really do that at the sort of level it is done here. So, Leonardo DiCaprio started developing his project down in Belize because he was inspired by this. It is a very special place to be a part of.

Rick: Nice. You mentioned working with a woman who is a leading Polynesian cultural expert and has advised Disney on the Moana film projects. And that she has interesting spiritual insights on how the Polynesian worldview may provide an antidote to the Western imbalance. Is that just what you were just saying in terms of being in tune with nature or is there something more to that?

Josh: Yeah, I can dive a little bit deeper on that. So, Hinano, by the way, is a phenomenal individual, she was a former teacher, so she has all the academic side, but she is also very spiritually attuned. So, she brings that side and she can comfortably work in both sides without a problem. Her story was that when John Lasseter came over, they were looking to developed Disney Moana. He came to Morea, which is a neighboring island where she lived, and he was introduced to her and asked her to be an advisor on the film for Disney’s animated Moana. Later, he told her she cost him millions of dollars in the end because she made him change so much. But it had a profound effect on the country because they were losing their language. The kids didn’t want to speak their local Tahitian language anymore and so, one of her stipulations when she did it, was that she wanted them to make a version in Tahitian for the local kids. When they did that, she didn’t think they would, but they did it and they made a thousand DVDs which they sent to all the schools and all the kids saw it for the first time in their own language. Then they said that for weeks afterwards, the kids would be running through the streets singing all the Moana songs in Tahitian.

Rick: Is it just dubbed in Tahitian? It’s the same film but it’s dubbed in Tahitian?

Josh: Yeah, well, all animated films are dubbed, so…

Rick: Oh, of course, yes.

Josh: So yeah, so she pulled together a group and they went to a sound studio and did all the overdubs and singing and so forth.

Rick: Nice.

Josh: So, it is very special. They have asked her to come back and advise on the second one. And so, coming to your question about the Polynesian culture and what it teaches us. I often wonder some of this is attributed to climate, right? We come from a temperate climate, where life can be tough at times, especially the further to the poles that you get. And we have this idea that, to live well, to live meaningfully means to succeed in life. It is to further and develop your resources so that you can look after your family and bring value to your community and so forth, right? So, it is all about the value you’re bringing to others, which is then translated in the capitalistic society of “more, more, more,” right? And Tahitians have come from very small islands that are closed ecosystems where you don’t have to grow fruit, it grows on its own and the seas replenish themselves. But you can quickly get to a place where, if you overuse your resources, you can end up in a famine. Like Easter Island. Cut down all the trees and then they get marooned and they don’t have any resources, they can’t grow fruit and so on and so forth. So, when they are young, they are consciously aware when of how delicate our ecosystem is and the importance of keeping things in balance. So, they developed a process called “Refuee” which means, when things become too over-fished, over-harvested or fished, they will declare a “Refuee” where they will put a restriction, a taboo on, say, fishing in that lagoon. And they do that by sticking palm fronds up in the sand vertically, along the beach. Then you know that area is “Refuee.” They take it so seriously that if you violate a “Refuee,” it’s capital punishment.

Rick: They kill you?

Josh: Yeah. Not nowadays, right?

Rick: Oh, okay.

Josh: Historically. Historically, if you violated a “Refuee,” you get capital punishment. If you violated another tribe’s “Refuee,” it was an act of war. So, this was the most important thing to them. So, from a value standpoint, they have a perspective that the most important thing for us to do is to learn to live in harmony with our world. And that means, of course, our families, our community, it means our land, but it also means the ancestors and the gods. Their entire life is from the perspective of “how do I find and maintain harmony with everything around me.” So, they have that perspective on the world rather than the sort of “give me more” perspective.

Rick: It would be nice if that could be somehow implemented on a wider scale. As it is now, you have huge Chinese factory ships just parked off the coast of South America just decimating the fish population and there’s not much anybody can do about it.

Josh: There are people trying to bring that concept to the wider world and in different ways and it definitely needs that. Part of what we do through the non-profit here is actually trying to bring restrictions on things that affect the ocean, like overfishing. In our case, what we’re most concerned about is seabed mining, because these companies are going to go and basically just tear up the seabed a mile below the surface where nobody can see what they’re doing, and potentially destroy the ocean ecosystem.

Rick: They found that they can get lithium out of all these little rocks on the seabed, which they can use to make electric car batteries.

Josh: Correct. Yes. So, it’s a huge concern, not just for them, but for native peoples around the world who have communities that thrive on the sea.

Rick: Interesting.

Josh: Yeah. And actually, the ocean is actually alive. The ocean is a living entity and therefore it has rights. So that is their approach, to try and get the nations to ascribe to the rights of the ocean. Because it should be treated as a living entity, not just as an inanimate resource that we can use for whatever we want.

Rick: As should the whole world. The whole thing is a living entity.

Josh: Yes, it is.

Rick: It’s tricky because, as in the case of the seabed, getting all that lithium would be great in terms of making more electric cars, which would have a nice impact on the environment, But then, even now there’s environmental devastation and unfair labor practices and all to get the kinds of minerals they need to make electric cars. So, I suppose, it is hard to find a balance between compassion and environmental sustainability and getting the resources we need to transition to a different technological framework.

Josh: Yeah, and I think it’s going to happen on two fronts. I mean, technology will help, but we also have to change how we view and live with the world and, perhaps not be as materialistic and be content with less, find inner contentment rather than chasing outer contentment. I think it’s not one or the other, it’s both/and. But particularly with the question of the lithium and the batteries, we published a white paper here basically, which was picked up by one of the journals, that we don’t need lithium. Or we won’t need lithium. Very soon, it’s going to be obsolete, because they have new methods for making batteries.

Rick: I heard there is a sodium alternative that might work.

Josh: Yeah. I don’t remember what the alternative was, but yeah, the technology is here. It’s not only something that is possible. They have the technology and a lot of it is just easier for these companies to keep pumping lithium out of the ground because that is what their business model is, rather than to switch to a new business model. So, there is that factor as well.

Rick: Interesting, yeah. Well, that could be a whole other conversation. So, we’ve talked about disillusionment and how the constructive influence that played in your life and perhaps we could shift it a little bit to societal disillusionment and generational disillusionment. You mentioned some of that in your notes, that it’s terrifying for people. But it is the only way in which we can find our freedom from illusion and be awakened to our higher self-consciousness. I’m reading your notes Without facing disillusionment, we end up caught between the ego self and the higher self, trying to escape something or attain something, hence, spiritual escapism. When we face illusion and let it go, we find the truth that is always there. You mentioned you struggle to find anyone who’s gone through great spiritual growth and awakening who hasn’t at some point reached a state of disillusionment with the world. Then you go on to talk about Generations Z and Y because they are collectively disillusioned these days. And you said some interesting things about that, so perhaps we could talk about that.

Josh: I’ve spent some time recently, talking to a lot of Gen Z-ers about what questions they have. What are they looking for in life? And just trying to really understand the generations and where things are going. The answers that I’ve received have been really surprising and somewhat encouraging. Most of, or a lot of the ones that I have spoken to, are looking for some sort of meaning in life, but they are also looking for meaningful work that is in balance with life. They don’t have the same capitalist drive as the previous generations did. I’ve had questions about how to get out of hookup culture. A lot of them are very disillusioned with the hookup culture that’s been going on.

Rick: What is hookup culture? Like transitory, trivial, romantic relationships? Is that what that means?

Josh: Yeah, yeah, one-night stands.

Rick: Yeah, that kind of thing, sure.

Josh: So there seems to be a lot of disillusionment with that. And they want to know if there’s hope for the world, because a lot of them feel very hopeless. And they see a lot of that driven by governments and by big corp, and they don’t want to play the game anymore. I think, I say Gen X, we started getting disillusioned with it, but we were a small generation so we just made some really good rock and roll about it. Gen Y became a little bit more idealistic and thought they could sort of bring change from within the inside. But I think Gen Z-ers are very disillusioned with the world and very uncertain about the future and not wanting to play the game anymore. And they are big enough to matter.

Rick: What age brackets are these? I never get those things straight. All I can remember is the baby boomers because I am one. But then, what do the XYZs represent?

Josh: So, I think X went from the boomers up until just after ’75, ’76.

Rick: People who are born 75, 76. Yeah.

Josh: Yeah. So, I was born 76. So, I am just at the start of the gen X, but then they say, just to confuse it further, there’s a 10 year span that the last five years of gen X and the first five years of gen Y that they call the Z-en-ials X- en-ials, because they were sort of caught in between both, because we were young enough that we adopted technology at a young age, but still also remembered the time before technology. So that’s why they say we are sort of an oddball in the generational mix. So, then you have Gen Y, which goes up until, well, until almost the millennium. Or I think until the millennium, because my daughter was late millennial. My oldest daughter was late millennial, she was 98. So, then you have from there until about, what is it, I think it’s about 15 or so, I think, are the Gen Z. And then you have the Alpha generation coming up.

Rick: Okay.

Josh: So.

Rick: Okay. Yeah, so it’s good. Now, of course, a lot of young people go through a phase like this, and then people like Abbie Hoffman, Reggie Davis, or whatever his name was, end up becoming stockbrokers or something. So, it doesn’t always last.

Josh: Well, that was very true of your generation, right?

Rick: Yeah, yeah. But I think it’s a hopeful, a good phase of life if one can really latch onto it and set one’s life in that direction. If the whole generation can do it, the whole culture could change.

Josh: Well, I mean, the way I look at it though, is that your generation, Rick, played an important part in starting the wake-up process, and then that sort of took time to mature until where we are now, whereas I think that this generation has the potential to further that and it’s not going to be on their own. I think it’s going to be helped by some pretty interesting circumstances we’re going to find ourselves in during the next few years, where a lot of our structures are really shaking up.

Rick: Yeah, elaborate on that, because I think that too, but I’d like to hear what you say.

Josh: Yeah, so I think, and this is just a feeling, that we’re going to see a lot of our power structures really shaken. And I think during that process, we are going to see a polarization, because I think we are going to see people either running forward into technology and transhumanism and the virtual world and then you’re going to see a reversion of a bunch of people who are going to be trying to skate back to traditionalism. So, you see even now, you see guys like Andrew Tate and this sort of machismo, masculine misogyny making a resurgence. And you also see women, there’s this whole trad wife movement where women are basically returning to 1950s housewife. And so, you have that on one hand, and then also political revisionism. And I think some people will be piling back into religion looking for some sort of comfort there. But the thing is that those structures, I don’t think they fit the world that we’re destined for and I think we’re in. It will take some disruption before we are able to get to that world. And so, I think in the middle, there’s going to be a third way of people who are attuned and conscious. They are seeing the world that’s to come, and they’re excited about it.

Rick: Yeah, I interviewed a guy named Dwayne Elgin a couple of times, and in my second interview with him, he actually showed this little graphic, I think we actually had a little video. He feels that there are three possible scenarios, in each of which, everything is going to pretty much collapse. But then, number one was: it stays collapsed for a long time, just in chaos. Number two is: some kind of Chinese-style technological autocracy gets imposed. And number three is: out of the collapse, there’s a spiritual renaissance and we have a bright new age as many ancient traditions have prophesied.

Josh: Yeah. Yeah, and I’m hoping it’s the latter. I have a sense that is where we are going. Because I’m also encouraged by the fact that spirituality is growing amongst millennials and Gen Zs. They’re interested and they are looking for the answers. And so, I have hope that we are going that way and we are going through birth pangs, it’s going to be a process.

Rick: Yeah. And you say, “I expect to see the unfolding world of events as a polarizing force that will either drive people toward their spiritual path through disillusionment, or they will double down on the material world, afraid to let go of the illusion.” I sometimes, when I think about that, I think of the analogy of a rising tide lifts all boats, which is fine for the boats if they don’t happen to be anchored, but if they insist on remaining anchored, they’re going to capsize.

Josh: [Laughter] That’s a great analogy. [Laughter] Time to draw your anchors up.

Rick: Yeah. And I wonder about that, because I would like to see huge changes. I think we need huge changes, but I hate the thought that a lot of people are going to suffer in the process or through that transition.

Josh: Yeah, I agree. I know it’s going to be a trying period, and I think a lot of the suffering is going to be fear-driven, which is the worst suffering. The fear and the terror happen when bad things go wrong. You saw that in COVID, right? The fear of COVID was worse than the reactions of that cause, the result was worse than the pandemic itself. I’m not saying it wasn’t bad. My father almost passed away with COVID, so I know it can be bad, but our reaction to it made things worse. But at the same time, we know that there is life beyond all of this. And this is something I think the seers have looked toward for generations and generations.

Rick: Yeah, some good stuff in your notes here. You said, and we talked about this: the dissolution of the world’s power structures. Well, maybe we didn’t, “which will give humanity an opportunity to transcend ego-based living into a form of life that is aligned to higher self and our divine potential.” So are we seeing, I guess we’re seeing the disillusion, well there’s a disillusion, but there is also the dissolution, the dissolving of the world’s power structures. And I sometimes wonder, there seem to be, there are some very powerful structures in this world, political, economic, technological, and so on, which make it a David and Goliath kind of a situation. How can the so-called spiritual people, if they are going to be instrumental in any kind of transformation, go up against these powerful things and prevail? But maybe, David won, I believe, because God was on his side – I hate to use that phrase, because that is used for football games and things – but he had a larger destiny and power behind him that enabled him to prevail. So, I sometimes think that, if God wills it, to put it in that kind of terms, if God wills it, there is going to be a huge global societal transformation, nothing will be able to stop it. Nothing will be able to, because that power we’re talking about is far more powerful than any mundane power.

Josh: Yeah, I completely agree. And I like how you put that. I think we’re not leading this.

Rick: Right.

Josh: We’re supporting it. And I think if this is happening as we suspect it is, there will be other forces at work which, we’ll be supporting from the, maybe not straight from the sidelines, but we will be supporting through being there and helping to ease the suffering on the planet and helping to bring people to peace and joy and awakening.

Rick: Yeah.

Josh: I think these things will create a hunger for that and it’s going to be a joy to participate in that side of things.

Rick: There’s a great story from the Indian scriptures where there was this huge deluge, rain and rain and rain, and the village where Krishna lived was getting inundated. The people appealed to Krishna who was supposed to be an avatar of God, “Please save us.” So, Krishna just picked up a mountain and held it up over the village like an umbrella and saved the people from the water. But then they thought, well, it’s an awfully big mountain and he might strain his wrist or something, so they all picked up sticks to help hold up the mountain. And of course, their sticks weren’t really doing anything. He was the one who was holding it up, but they felt like they were helping. So, that’s kind of an illustration of what you just said.

Josh: I love it. Well, we are here to be the witness, right? And that’s what people need, as a witness to the truth. But I like that analogy, it’s great.

Rick: Okay, now feel free, I’m starting to talk a little bit more than I was throughout the interview and I don’t want to dominate it.

Josh: No, I’m enjoying the talk.

Rick: So, we’re talking about dissolution of the world’s power structures as a necessary function of a transition to a very different world, which I think many of us idealistically and hopefully, not naively, expect to have happen. Whether or not it happens in our lifetimes, I don’t know. Then, here’s a cool one that you mentioned. We are transcending world religions into one true spiritual religion which has no name. Jerusalem and Babylon are actually archetypes of this. And of course, everyone has heard the term “spiritual but not religious” where, people like you and I respect all the different religions, we don’t feel like any one of them is the true one or any such thing. And perhaps we are harbingers of the kind of spiritual religion you’re talking about where it’s an appreciation of a universal truth. Actually, when I run up against religious fundamentalists, there’s this Amish guy who used to come to the farmer’s market and I would sit down and start talking astronomy with him and try to give him an idea of how large the universe is. I mean, when I think of spirituality, I think of it as being on that scale, the whole universe, and certainly not the exclusive province of even one planet, much less one particular religion on a planet.

Josh: Yes, yes. I think that’s a nice picture, and I guess how I relate to that, first of all, I think having a belief system is useful only as far as it’s useful. And so, there was a verse, the passage in the New Testament where Jesus healed this man on the Sabbath, and others were up in arms. The reason they were, is that it was one of the most sacred laws in all of Judaism, to keep the Sabbath, because it was a symbol of their covenant relationship with God.

Rick: Yeah, these days they won’t even switch a light switch on, it’s too much work.

Josh: Well, yeah, Orthodox Jews won’t. Right, exactly. So, they treated it very seriously because of the symbolic nature. When they asked Jesus about it, he said, “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath for man.” By extension, about religion, man was not made for religion, but religion for man. So, I have this perspective of religion. Paul called it, the best translation being: the teacher, the tutor. So, he referred to Judaism as a tutor that brought him to the place where he could step into Christ, which was the spiritual, universal consciousness, the logos. And so, I view it that way, in terms of not looking back with horror and hatred on the time I had in Christianity. I see it as the school ground that helped me along to where I was able to step into real spirituality. And I think it’s really important, because when we are in school, when we are young, we’re living in a construct of reality that is scaled down. It’s not the real world, right? It’s a microcosm of it in a way that allows us to learn. And, when kids are playing, they’re practicing at being grownups, right? They play with cars, or they play with kitchens, and whatever else, and practicing what it is going to mean to be a grown-up. At some point, they get to the point where they need to graduate from school. And being there any longer feels like they’re in a prison. They just can’t wait to get out of school. Let me free, right? And that’s that difference between religion and spirituality, or what you could say is the true religion, which isn’t any earthly religion. It is a whole spiritual fabric of reality is the understanding that it serves a purpose. There are places you could go to in the world today where if you just walked in and said, well, “let’s eradicate religion as it is,” they’d descend into utter moral chaos.

Rick: Yeah, good point. They need that.

Josh: Right. They haven’t developed the moral compass to the point where they could take away the fear factor and they go, “Okay, well I’m going to be kind to my neighbor because it’s good for the world.” They would go, “Well, what’s good for me is good for me and I’ll take your cows and your wife and your whatever else I want.” Those places still exist and they existed even more so back in the time when the Bible was written. So, it still serves a purpose and I just tend to look at it as people on a different stage of their journey. At some point they’ll run dry and they’ll be looking for something beyond it. And I think that is what we’re seeing with a lot of religions, around the world, a lot of people who were religious are saying, “Okay, I need something more real, more tangible than this.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. There are a lot of examples I can think of such as training wheels on a bicycle, which are really useful when you’re just learning to ride, but they get in your way after you have learned. Or Daoism, the Tao Te Ching talks about how the higher the level of consciousness that predominates in a society, the less rules and the less government it actually needs because people spontaneously flow with the Dao, and they abide by what is right. Hinduism and probably Buddhism also have similar points. Hinduism talks about the yugas, different ages, and it’s in our yuga, which they say is the darkest age, that you need the most structures because people aren’t spontaneously behaving rightly.

Josh: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I had a very vivid analogy of this when my daughter was young, she was about seven years old. From when she was born, I thought, the main thing I want to teach in life is how to love other people. I don’t want to put a pressure on her to be anything or do anything. I just want her to love others. And so, she was young. I was trying to teach her, saying “look, I want you to love your sister, and love the people around you.”  I kept trying to teach her this and she just wasn’t getting it. And at one point she was being really ornery with her sister and hurt her. I got really annoyed with her and I decided, you know what, dammit, we had rules when I was a kid. We’re going to have rules in our house now. So I went to the internet, found somewhere online a set of rules and I printed them off. I went and put them on our refrigerator door and I marched my daughter over to it. I said, “Okay, here’s the rules of the house. I want you not to hurt your sister.”  They were very simple things, “Don’t hurt others, don’t hurt your sister, don’t take from others, don’t steal from others, don’t, you know, on and on. Just very simple rules, graduated down to her level. So, she’s looking at these rules and she just sits there quietly for a minute. Then she looks at me and she says, “You mean that if I follow these rules, you won’t be angry with me?” And I go, “Yeah.” And then I start to feel really bad because I’m thinking, “How poor am I as a father?” This is her response. And then she gets this big smile on her face. I feel even worse. And I realized, to her, in her mind when I say, okay, love your sister, she has no idea what that means. She hasn’t developed the mental capacity to understand what does it mean, the wisdom to love my sister or my parents or whatever. And so, to her, I was like this big bear all the time where I was just randomly getting angry at her because she’d done something and she wondered, well, what have I done? And so, I started, and it just gave me this huge, this whole perspective on the Old Testament, because, when the Israelites, the Hebrew slaves came out of Egypt, they were illiterate and they were raised as slaves. So, if you’re raised as a slave, you’re not taught how to do anything for yourself, you’re not taught how to make decisions, you’re not taught how to make any decisions at all, let alone run a community, let alone build a country. So, these illiterate slaves come out of Egypt, which is probably one of the most well-ordered countries on the planet at the time, and they come into the wilderness without the foggiest idea of what they are going to do. Slaves their entire life. And so, they would have had the mental perspective of the world of a child. No education, completely illiterate.

So then, when you read the story of the Old Testament through their eyes, it’s like the story of an angry father telling a child off. And I remember when my dad would tell me off as a kid. I thought a couple times he was going to kill me. Of course, you grow up and later you realize that wasn’t the case, but in your five-year-old mind, you’ think, “Oh, I don’t know if I’m going to live the rest of the afternoon.” And that makes it sound really bad. It wasn’t. It was just that you have that perspective as a kid where your parents can be really scary at times and unpredictable.

And so, when you look at Judaism from that standpoint, knowing that this is a very exoteric religion, it wasn’t like the Eastern philosophies, which are very internalized, very much about the inner journey. Judaism was about building and modeling community and what a positive community looks like. If you look at all of the laws that were made within that context, with almost all of them, you can find some sort of reason or rationale why those laws were given. They made some sense from a communal standpoint. And so, what you do with a child when you raise a child is, you start out with giving them a set of rules that protect them and which show them what love looks like. They aren’t love itself, but you hope that through having them practice the rules, you’re building the discipline within them. Over time, they’re going to start to get a picture of what love looks like. And at some point, when they’re older, that will translate into actually loving people. When they start having the practice of showing love and seeing the effect it has on others around them, that begins to inspire them to live a life that is loving toward others. And the whole Old Testament, all the laws were built on this idea of do no harm. So, in the Old Testament, it worked in a forbidden, permissive, legal mindset. They had a covenant legal relationship with God.

By the way, all the stuff about God pouring his wrath out on Jesus and all of that, to punish Him for all of our sins was a complete misunderstanding of what the whole affair with the cross was about and what that meant. The Jews had a covenant mindset. They had a legal agreement with God that said, “You and I are one.” It’s the same as a marriage covenant. The two become one, right? As a nation, we and you are one. Somebody does something to us, they’re doing it to you and vice versa. So, they had this sort of perspective. And so, it was always prophesied in the Old Testament that when the Messiah would come, the law would be written on their hearts. That’s the transition from the school ground to spirituality because it becomes “in the heart.”

So, when you read Paul’s writing, he makes it very clear. Throughout five key books of the Bible, five times, he said, “All things are lawful unto me, not all things are beneficial.” Paul worked from a harmful/ beneficial standpoint, not a forbidden/ permissive standpoint. And that was what he was trying to teach the churches. So, all of Paul’s writing in the churches were contextual instruction, addressing specific issues at the time to say “this is how love should look like in your community.” He was not writing a law that said, okay, you have to, every Christian from now on should do this. He was trying to train them and teach them how to have the wisdom of love and how to live as a loving community. That’s the thing that is very often misunderstood about him. It was written to a very specific group of people. Now, you can learn from it by understanding why he was doing it, but it was never meant to be literally applied to our present day. So, sorry, I’ve wandered off. I don’t know if you want to…

Rick: No, that’s okay. No, it’s interesting. As you were speaking, I was thinking about Ken Wilber’s work. I don’t know if you’ve ever read anything from him. And there is also a thing called spiral dynamics in which they have all these colors. I always forget what the different colors represent. But it sketches out the kinds of things we’re discussing, about the various sort of levels of psychological and emotional maturity that humans go through and societies go through and how they tend to view the world based on that. Any particular level of maturity and what kind of society you have to have, what kind of religions you’re going to have if a certain level of maturity predominates.

Josh: Yes.

Rick: Yeah, interesting stuff. You also might want to watch my interview with Father Sean O’Leary who argued that there’s no archaeological evidence that there were ever any Jewish slaves in Egypt or in the desert for 40 years. He claims the whole thing …

Josh: Oh, no.

Rick: I can’t get into that whole argument.

Josh: No, no, no.

Rick: I don’t have a-

Josh: I tell you what, I’ll watch that interview, but look up a guy on YouTube called Robert Feather.

Rick: Okay.

Josh: He was a metallurgist who was asked to review one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is called the Copper Scroll and he found out it was something like 99.99% pure copper, which he said would have been impossible to do at the time.

Rick: Ah. And the scroll was made of copper?

Josh: The scroll was made of copper.

Rick: Wow.

Josh: So, and he was an atheist at the time and he became really fascinated by the scroll. How did these ancient people manage to do this at the time when they didn’t have the technology? And so, he started studying the Dead Sea Scrolls and there was one of the scrolls called the Temple Scroll which describes the building of this new temple and the rebuilding of the temple. But the dimensions of the temple do not fit on the mountain in Jerusalem. It’s too big. And they have never been able to work out why. The scholars wondered, why was this temple so much bigger than the Jerusalem Mount? And so, he’s reading about this and he reads this word in there of Akhenaton. And he said, “What is this?” And he asked one of his esteemed colleagues, who is an expert in that, who said, “Well, that was a pharaoh in Egypt.” I believe it was Nefertiti’s father. And so, he started looking up this pharaoh in Egypt, and he found that this pharaoh existed and they found they had a whole city and a temple mount that matched perfectly with his scroll. And so, they’ve uncovered this, essentially, he brought monotheism to Egypt for a short period and he got rid of the polytheism and he had this group of slaves who were there through that period. He traced the whole story that these were the proto-Hebrew slaves, and he’s got evidence for that. He traced them into the wilderness and actually found the tabernacle mount that’s listed in the Bible, which is in a completely different place than what is traditionally believed. And this is all in the YouTube thing. So, have a watch, it’s really interesting.

Rick: I’ll check it out. Then I’ll connect you with Sean O’Leary, you guys can duke it out. [Laughter] Then, you also said an interesting thing here about how we’re about to transcend worldly government into a spiritual government that is guided by spirit rather than legislation and penalty, which is kind of along the lines we’ve been speaking about. But again, when you actually try to conceive of the changes that would have to take place in the governments of the world in order for that to come about in a meaningful way, you can’t imagine how those changes would take place. I mean, it’s all we can do to get some piece of legislation through the Congress these days.

Josh: Yes. I think where we’re going, it’s hard to imagine what it’s going to be like at all. We’re going somewhere we’ve never been before.

Rick: I hope we are. I mean, I’m not like these Gen-whatevers who are kind of all disillusioned. I have a lot of optimism, but I just can’t conceive of the actual mechanics that will have to be undergone for us to get from here to there in terms of how governments will move there. Because everything seems so recalcitrant, so resistant to change, so stodgy. And everything is locked in, not only in our country, but many countries. So how does it happen?

Josh: I think it’s going to happen at grassroots level. I think what we’re going to see is that we’re going to see governments fragmenting. Where we’ve had a lot of superpowers before, I think we are going to see those superpowers diminish and become more fragmented. I think within that you’ll find spaces that almost might become a little bit more self-governing and futile in terms of how they operate. It’s not to say they won’t be a part of any larger government, but I think we’ll see those governments weakened to the point where you’ll have some places that will be incredible and they will really express what community looks like. I think you have other places that won’t be so much. I don’t see this as being an immediate overnight thing, but I think we will see a transition as these structures shape, we will see a transition toward that. But I have no idea how and how long that is going to take to happen.

Rick: Yeah, it could take a while, but who knows? I mean, the pace of change seems to be increasing exponentially and now with AI, that’s another major accelerator.

Josh: Yes.

Rick: As the internet was, but even more so now.

Josh: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s accelerating at a scary pace, and it may be kind of the “why now” sort of thing, because if that continues at that pace, the amount of self-destruction that we could do would be wild. I mean, it would be incredible. So, not incredible in a good way, I mean vast. It could become very dangerous. Even guys like Elon Musk stood up and said this stuff is dangerous. So, when you hear guys like that, who are very cutting edge on the technology, we can take it seriously.

Rick: Hmm. Well, you’re in a pretty safe place. You can just eat fish and collect rainwater. [Laughter]

Josh: Climate training gets mangoes, you know.

Rick: Right. Yeah. Okay, so we’ve covered a lot here. What haven’t we covered that you want to make sure that we touch upon before we conclude?

Josh: I’d like to actually talk about what made me come to see Christ in a more universalist light. I think that’s really interesting. And I think, Richard Rohr touched on this. I thought what he said was great and wanted to –

Rick: You mean in my interview with him?

Josh: Yes, yes. Sorry, in your interview with him. He talked about how Christ is not Jesus’ last name.

Rick: Right.

Josh: It was a title. It was a function. And it is a function that is incredibly rich with symbolism that we don’t get. So, the first Christ was King Solomon in Jewish history, the first to have that title. It was a king, almost king-priestly type role. And the word literally means anointing, the anointed one. And when you break down the symbolism of what anointing means is where it starts to open up this concept and what it means. So, the anointing oil that they used in Israel at the time, they basically took different elements that were used in the temple worship, including oil, olives, from which they make oil for the lamps, spices they use for the bread, incense they use on the fire, and they would crush it together to make what they call “oud” in the Middle East, which is an oil fragrance, like cologne, or perfume sort of thing that smelled amazing. And it is very symbolic of spiritual awakening, because, if you put on a fragrance and then you walk out in the world and you walk past somebody, all of a sudden, they get a whiff of it and they are awakened to this thing. And so, there is this symbolism, this idea that the work of the Christ is to create unity, to create oneness, where the oil is a symbol of taking separate bitter elements and crushing them together so they become one pleasant substance.

Rick: And here when you say the Christ, you mean the cosmic consciousness or something, not just Jesus of Nazareth, right?

Josh: So, yeah, Christ is essentially the cosmic consciousness.

Rick: Right, right.

Josh: It is the “I Am.”

Rick: Yes, okay.

Josh: But the idea is, that consciousness would dwell on earth through men and it would have an effect of bringing oneness on the planet. So, where we take all of these separate bitter substances, crush them together, they come together and become the beautiful fragrance, is symbolic of what happens when men are brought together into oneness. So, in the Jewish mind, of course, they didn’t see it on quite a cosmic level. They saw the Messiah as being this godly, almost priest-king who was going to create unity between the people of Israel and was going to create unity between them and God so that they would be one and they would have peace. Because, before the kings arrived, they had this history of just being constantly wiped out by their neighbors. They would build up again and then get wiped out, and they build up again and get wiped out, and they wanted peace. And peace would come through the Messiah who would unite them in peace. Before that, everyone did what was right in their own eyes, that is what it said in Judges. So, they had this view that ultimately, there would be the ultimate Messiah who would come, who they were looking toward. Of course, Christians believe this is Jesus, who would do this job once and for all. So, when you have this idea of the anointing oil and this creation of oneness, what is really interesting is when Jesus is at the Last Supper with his disciples, and he says to John, “I and the Father are one. You are one with me, you are one with the Father.” Right? And this whole talk was about the oneness they had together. And then, there is a beautiful verse in the Psalms that said “how good, how pleasant it is when brethren dwell together in unity. It is like oil flowing down the beard of Aaron.” Aaron was the first high priest. So, that’s the picture, right? It is that anointing that just unifies everything. And in the temples, they take this oil and everything was touched by the same substance to show that it was all sanctified, it was all one. So, you have Jesus at the Last Supper with his disciples talking about how they are one with him. He is one with the Father. No one has seen the Father, because the Father can’t be seen, at least in this material form.

And he leaves the Last Supper to go out to the Garden of Gethsemane to spend the night praying and interceding for his disciples because he knows what he’s about to go through. The word “Gethsemane” in Hebrew means “the olive press.” So, that night, his soul was being crushed on their behalf and he was praying that they would be one through that. So, this whole idea about what Christ means and what it stands for is oneness. It is a very simple, purest essence and it is the bringing together of everything into oneness, as Paul said, the summing up of all things in Christ. And so, this is the idea, and Jesus was, of course, the incarnation of that. But the concept stands much bigger than that moment in time. It’s really the logos, the uncarved block, you can almost say it is the uncarved block of the Dao de Ching walking amongst us as a human to show what it looks like to be in a perfect state of peace. And so, I don’t know if that makes sense to you at all.

Rick: Yes, it does. I had a question. What was it? I’m not remembering. Oh, I know what it was. It’s kind of related to what you have been saying about the history of the Jews and so on, how they kept getting wiped out and all. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts or insights about the Middle East situation as it now stands? If we appoint you Prime Minister of Israel tomorrow, what are you going to do?

Josh: I don’t think that would be a job I would want, nor many others. It’s such a sticky situation there because there are so many conflicting interests there that go beyond just two religions warring. If you could get people together and you could get them to share, you could cross that divide. There is a great story, I think it was Adam Sandler, he filmed Zohan, I think, where, in the story, they had some Jews and they had some Palestinians and they were sort of at each other’s throats. And he spoke about behind the scenes, because they used Jewish and Palestinian actors. When they started the film, they hated each other and they were always arguing with each other. They would sit down for meals and just be arguing the whole time through. But, by the end of it, as they had taken time to hear each other’s sides, they started to understand one another and they actually finished the shoot as best friends. And that’s what needs to happen there and in any other place of conflict, but it’s going to be hard when you have other interests that don’t like the idea of resolving these things because conflict is beneficial for them, you know, in some way or another.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah, there’s this fellow named Thomas Hubel that I’ve interviewed a couple of times and his specialty seems to be generational trauma. He is German, his wife is Israeli, and he has done a lot over the trauma of the Holocaust and the lasting impression that it made in the collective psyches of Germans and Jews and so on. And he has, I think he’s been applying it to other contexts as well, but there is a huge amount of that in the Arab-Israeli situation. I think of collective consciousness, just as we individually have our psychologies and our mentalities and we can accumulate grievances and biases and all that, I think that entire cultures do that. And just as it might take a fair amount of therapy or catharsis of some kind for us to cleanse ourselves individually of those qualities, the same is true of societies. And lacking that, failing to do that, we end up with wars, because this stuff just builds up to a breaking point, like static electricity in clouds, eventually lightning has to strike. If there could be ways of de-fusing it before it had to break out as wars, by actually really having some deep fundamental transformational technologies for entire societies and cultures as well as individuals, then perhaps that would be part of the mechanism of transitioning to the more enlightened world that you and I have contemplated in this conversation.

Josh: It’s really interesting because the Mennonite community, one of the things I’m really grateful for about my upbringing was experiencing community like the Mennonites had. And I will answer this in a bit of a roundabout way. They lived in a place where you didn’t lock your door. You didn’t worry about walking down the street. Everybody was there to help one another. They built very, very strong communities. That is to the point that there is a very traditional one in Belize right now, that is actually growing. Even though they are so traditional, they’re actually having people coming from Mexico and Belize saying, “Can we join your community?” Because they are so inspired by seeing real community in action. And they have this very interesting perspective that they saw themselves as a kingdom, not of this world. So, they saw themselves already as living as part of a higher order. And their motto was the Bible and the plow, which meant that they felt as if the way you express your spirituality is through your work.

So, they wanted to build a model, almost a bit like this island, they wanted to build a model of what a real community looks like, what a real spiritual community looks like, so that they could inspire other people to live the same way. And they did. They were so effective with their agricultural that Catherine the Great came to visit them in the Ukraine during her time, to understand how they could be so effective with their agriculture. But they were just very, very hard workers who modeled what community looked like. And growing up, you knew that you had to be a part of this community and you had to fit in with this community and participate and bring value to it and so forth.

I see that as a lot of the antidote to where we are, because we’re part of the problem with all of the mental health issues and everything that we’re going through. We were never meant to be people who lived the way we’re living, isolated individuals. We were meant to grow up and live in community. And in Polynesia, they still practice that. It’s like the village raises a child and everybody is an uncle or aunt. And it is as if, having single mothers is not even remotely an issue here. A woman who is pregnant has a baby, well, auntie and granny and whoever else looks after it and she goes off and she is still a young woman, has a life and she comes home to her baby. The whole family, the whole village is raising the child and they have this very close connected sense that you realize doesn’t exist elsewhere in the world.

And where I bridge the divide of the East and the West, the East has been very much focused on the inner journey. And it is fascinating, you go to India where there is just so much spiritual pursuit and insight and yet people don’t even sweep their own front door sometimes. Where you go to the opposite end where you have very exoteric religions that have been very focused on the external of trying to force community, force countries to live and behave in a certain way, but they have been very much focused on the outward expression of what spirituality should look like. It’s not an either/or. I think the only way we can fully express ourselves spiritually is within community. That is how we are meant to function. And I think that is going to be the next, what I hope is the next stage for us in terms of spiritual awakening is that we will be awakening, but awakening into community. I think there will be a hunger more and more for people to say, “I don’t want to live isolated on my own anymore. I want to live with other people where we can share this life together and, share in love and compassion,” and so forth. And so, to me, that’s what I’m looking forward to is seeing those. I think we will see those communities happen organically in different places, and I think we’ll see them grow. And as people see it, they become the lights, the city on a hill, it is that concept, where it starts to slowly change minds and perspectives of what life can and should look like on this planet.

Rick: Yeah. At the end of the Rig Veda, there is this verse, one of which is, “know your minds to be functioning together from a common source.” That’s one phrase. And another phrase is, “an assembly is significant in unity.”

Josh: Yes.

Rick: And I think both of those indicate that essentially, we are all unified, but it is like these islands that are around you. They are actually all one landmass, but you only see the tips of them because of the water. So, we are all essentially one collective consciousness, but we seem much more individuated than we are ultimately.

Josh: Yeah, yeah, and at some point, we will start to emerge as a more connected landmass, maybe.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, interesting.

Josh: I like that. Nice analogy.

Rick: Right. Which points to the notion that ultimately, the solution to the world’s problems is not political or economic or technological, even though all those things need to be considered and transformed. But ultimately the solution is in the source from which everything derives its nourishment, which is God or the deep inner spirit or our essential nature or whatever you want to call it. If we can all, or if a lot of us, can get in tune with that, then I think things will tend to sort themselves out on the surface in ways that we cannot foresee.

Josh: Yeah, I think the principle is we don’t overthrow, we supplant.

Rick: Yeah, nice.

Josh: So, that was essentially what the Bible taught. The way was not to try and topple the system that is there, it was to supplant it with something better.

Rick: Yeah, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Josh: Precisely.

Rick: Okay, so you don’t have much of a social media presence or a website or anything else, but if people get inspired by this conversation, is there any way in which they can interact with you? Or do you just prefer to remain a private person and you just wanted to have a conversation.

Josh: I appreciate it. I thought I should stick some content out just for people to have it. So, I started slowly putting some stuff on YouTube.

Rick: Okay.

Josh: And, a little bit on Instagram and Tick Tock, although it remains to be seen if Tick Tock will be around in six months time.

Rick: Maybe it will be in Polynesia.

Josh: Yeah maybe. So, I think I’ve sent you a link to a link tree that has all those, but I can send you the separate links to all those.

Rick: Yeah, send them separately just to be safe, to make sure I get them and I’ll put them up on your BatGap page.

Josh: That would be great. I appreciate that. Yeah.

Rick: Okay, great. Well, thanks, Josh. I appreciate spending the time with you. Sorry, I couldn’t make it out to Tahiti to do this in person.

Josh: Part two will be in person.

Rick: Yeah. All right.

Josh: I really enjoyed the conversation today.

Rick: Yeah, I did, too. Very stimulating. And thanks to those who have been listening and/ or watching. So, we’ll see you for the next one.