Episode 22 - Who Am I?

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so everybody welcome to the liturgist podcast it's been a little bit of a hiatus since we've talked things have been very busy for mr science mike and myself and uh it's been a busy summer but we're excited to get back into it for the fall so welcome back um we have a list of subjects that were on the on the docket that we can't wait to to get into for this next little stint of uh podcasting but this one it's just mike and i today so we we saved some of the fun strange existential topics for just he and i because we enjoy going down rabbit holes that uh some other people might not as most of you know probably we discuss issues through the lenses of science art and faith and so today what am i [Music] i'm a homo sapien experiencing the contents of this crazy ever evolving beautiful mystery that we call consciousness you know the last podcast we talked about our new record and we have this song called mi and some of the existential questions that we all come up against i for one grew up in a christian home that was a sort of a dualistic world um maybe even three-part spirit soul and body um i was taught i am a spirit and i have a soul and i live in a body and and that has some interesting uh philosophy and and theology attached to it that i don't necessarily buy into anymore but i thought we could discuss all that mike you mr orange reductionist i am a body man where do you want to start mike maybe we could start with with the spirit self and how did you were you raised what did baptists think how were you taught about that it's kind of strange because baptists are for people of faith relatively uncomfortable with the supernatural um because they'll they'll talk about god they'll talk about the devil even as a as a personal force they will talk about people's spirit and the holy spirit but when you talk about those things acting on the world uh baptists want to make sure you're not just making it up so they're they're oddly almost materialistic in the way that they approach the supernatural so there was never any clear distinction described to me theologically between like a spirit and a soul in the baptist church although people joining the church from other traditions would bring some of that language i was basically grown up in a strictly dualistic framework where you have a spirit that's your true self that's eternal that lives in a body that body will die one day and then your spirit will be freed from it and then at the time of the rapture or after the rapture depending on which type of millennialist you were you would get a new body so there was this belief that for some period of time you would be bodyless but with god um but definitely firmly dualistic you know material immaterial world uh kind of stuff um of course today i'm just i'm just i'm just a materialist [Laughter] that's not to say that i don't think that spirit and soul are valid terms i think those are real things that describe phenomenons that are likely materialistic in nature and that if there are immaterial realms i'm just agnostic about them not agnostic many i don't know if it can be proven i'm agnostic meaning we haven't even described the terms enough to have a determination of fact or theory in relation to these ideas i'm currently an overthinking adventurer trying to find god's fingerprints and be okay with my doubt okay so ghosts do baptists believe in ghosts most baptists i would say don't believe in ghosts although oddly enough belief in ghosts is trending up in society across belief systems more and more people every year especially as you look at younger and younger people self-report that they believe in ghosts and ufos frankly ufos and ghosts are getting more and more belief behind them while you know specific forms of theism or identifying as a specific religion are going down so it's not like we're having this like rational awakening it's we are trading where we place our um immaterial experiences interesting yeah lisa's uh lisa's a ghost believer i always have wanted to be a ghost believer well the last few years i wanted to be a ghost believer but i just i can't do it i can't believe what do you do with the stories though i mean she's got stories if she's seen things we met this guy the other night it was like uh he was basically i don't know if he was an atheist but he was certainly not a self-proclaimed spiritual man he doesn't said he still doesn't believe in ghosts but he's was at this place he's at this hotel that claimed to be a haunted hotel or whatever and he just thought it was bs and then somebody said this girl will probably appear tonight this little girl and he went by this ice machine and there was this little girl that matched the description or whatever that he saw and he looked at her it was like whoa and he said she just turned around and walked back through the wall he said he saw this with his own eyes they just this girl walked through the wall and i was like what what do you mean what is that he goes i don't know i don't believe in ghosts but i saw a ghost i think i'm gonna bust a gear right out of my skull with that story i can't even laugh because i'm so busy like what of the million thoughts i have do i actually want to say um so one there is this thing you do and i i hate that that i know this because my own story involves this which is why in some ways i don't like my own story where when you are trying to share information that someone will be incredulous about you empathize with their incredul incredulity how do you say that incredulity maybe maybe you become as incredulous as they are about your own claim and so that sense of commonality can help convince people so for example i when i tell my story and i get to the mystical parts i explain how uncomfortable i am with this idea and how crazy it sounds and that actually disarms some people of course i don't do that on purpose i'm being genuine like i really am uncomfortable with saying i heard the voice of jesus because it sounds crazy especially because that voice was in english and as far as i know modern english didn't exist in the time of christ but you know so i kind of get where this guy's going but i still don't believe in ghosts even hearing that account i don't really trust human testimony at all even when people are are being completely truthful the way human memory works it's such a flawed mechanism for conveying the facts of a narrative or the facts of a scene that i'd really i want some kind of forensic or physical evidence to support a claim testimony is not going to do it for me he could have had an experience that genuinely did spook him that in the retelling and in the excitement he slightly amplifies so maybe he walked past the girl and came back and she was gone and then when he retells that story he amplifies that fact slightly to say he saw her walk through the wall because it's more convincing that may not even be a conscious thing that's that's a unconscious mechanism that humans do when they tell stories and i think when you dig into most ghost lore and other types of urban legend what you find is a human uh capacity to see patterns where none exists that then get codified and amplified by the way that human beings tell stories and i think that's the root of ghost lore i would i would tend to agree but there's so there's so many stories and the other thing that i've found odd are a lot of those places that are the like locations of the haunted sites and stuff that's the one where they filmed or supposed to film the shining or whatever in colorado [Laughter] do you know that hotel uh i don't yeah i mean i've heard of it it's a real famous haunted hotel that but the people maybe they're all great actors but they see the people that work there seem to actually believe that there are ghosts there and that's crazy to me because they're there every day like what surely eventually you see like people are just using their imagination but the people that work there day in and day out when i really tried to press them they were either amazing actors or they actually do believe that they're seeing ghosts on a regular basis i think they really believe it i i believe that they believe it i just believe that they're mistaken because if if you tell someone like you're building this expectation we're in a haunted hotel and so when they hear some creepy sound or there's a low light situation and they're they have their visual cortex kind of burps and fills in the scene with something that's not there instead of just going oh that's a weird thing then go ghosts it's proof texting it's confirmation bias now again i could be wrong but the way i'll know i'm wrong is someone will bring me physical evidence that demonstrates the presence of ghosts in some institution and that's kind of my point there's so many ghost stories but so little ghost evidence so when people have uh somewhat seriously and somewhat pseudo-scientifically attempted to investigate ghost claims we've never been able to build a credible bit of evidence that ghosts are active in moving in our world so what would you what would be and i'm talking to myself is here i'm just playing you know i've gotta i've gotta play the other side um because i'm always i'm always taking your side when i'm talking to lisa but we we have because she loves to talk about this with people so in talking about it with people we keep coming across stories like this one guy was an engineer for one of our records and he was telling us same kind of thing like he doesn't really quite know what he certainly didn't believe in ghosts but then he lived in this house and he made the claim that it was haunted and um and but he didn't believe that at first he said but he kept having these experiences where you know like one of the experiences he mentioned he would be having a conversation with his wife um and then his wife would walk in the front door and he'd be like what how did you just do that i've been talking to you she's like what i'd stop it and then she had the same experience where she's talking to him she hears his voice like across you know like she's in the kitchen he's in the living room and talking to him and they both were having these experiences where neither of them were actually home like what are you guys crazy are you making this up are you yeah so i'll just i'll be honest like that story makes me deeply uncomfortable it makes me uncomfortable like i get an unsettled sense of like um because you know like socially i want to assume well somebody that knows and associate with michael is a pretty solid person generally so not a total wacko yeah this guy's not a total man if his wife says the same thing now we have two accounts uh and there's no way my wife would back me up in a story like that it wasn't true and so it starts leaning on those you know social mechanisms we have that frankly are how we come to trust and believe the accounts of people uh i mean yeah that's a powerful testimony but it's such an extraordinary claim like it's a huge claim to say that the dead walk the earth so still like even a first-hand account of a couple of people that they had a conversation i'm gonna like let's start with a brain scan let's start with a a psychological diagnosis is there you know is there something in the environment that uh is there some maybe unknown hallucinogen uh present in their home somehow i'd be looking for more plausible explanations than oh you know dead people talk in our house here's the thing we have an amazing audience and there's a lot of like fellow super orange science people in the liturgist audience but there's also i bet a ton of ghost believers who listen to this program and they are screaming into their iphone right now at me because i don't get it i'm not saying those people are wrong or stupid i'm just saying as a skeptic i haven't found something to move my needle out of the null hypothesis yet yeah i i haven't either but it's it's certainly it's enough i've seen i've heard enough stories that occasionally i will uh you know we stayed the night on this haunted ship apparently in uh long beach there's this ship and i heard some weird things in the night and i can't say that my brain didn't go ghost that's called the scooby-doo effect it's a technical term yeah i mean i can't the thing that why i what i can't push into being a believer is because i don't have a container for of reality that makes sense of that we're like okay so all these invisible people around how come it's only sometimes uh what what are these people do like there's no framework to contain that why you know what baptist would say demons demons yeah not ghosts demons but whatever it is invisible spirits that what and also like so these things they they can connect to the material world sometimes and in small ways but not enough to leave actual evidence necessarily just like knocking something over but not leaving fingerprints or you know what i mean like what how how do these things interact they have like little uh there's like a spiritual radio shack that sells like little adapters to connect to the material world in little ways but that that's exactly what i mean so let's take the example of the man talking to his wife and she's not home so presumably two things are happening if the account is true one a ghost is hearing him and two a ghost is audibly responding somehow in order for the ghost to hear sound it has to do what humans do it has to receive pressure waves sound is nothing but pressure waves moving through an atmosphere unless it's not right but if it's oh i mean i'm sure i'm sure a word of faith person would tell you that our words are not just moving pressure air well our words have an origin the origin is a relationship between synapses dendrites and neurons in a in the fabric of a brain but the only way that gets transmitted from one point to another is to travel through a set of nerve endings to manipulate a diaphragm lungs larynx mouth tongue cheeks lips teeth jaw muscles to then create very particular pressure waves and move that information via a pressure wave where it's received and then turned back into you know electrochemical information through an ear and back into a human brain and in other forms of sound capture where we turn pressurize and information like microphones and tape decks or computers the same thing is happening somehow we're converting the mechanical energy of pressure waves in the atmosphere back into electrical energy a ghost would need to intercept some part of that signal chain in order to understand that words are being spoken so even if they're somehow oh wait maybe not what if uh because in this world in the go and let's we move to the ghost surreal world and the ghost is actually speaking why how do we know that someone speaking is not also sending sort of some sort of psychic message into the ethos well we don't know that but we also don't know that we're not you know all a different flavor of psychic ice cream that is slowly melting you know what i mean like you can make any kind of claim that yeah but you don't nobody's nobody's saying that they experienced a psychic reality where we were all psychic ice cream that was melting this guy was saying he had a conversation right but i'm saying when we talk about mechanisms by which that happened unless we can go to evidence we have no way to you know say which mechanism is more likely that's that's my point like once you've gone it's nothing we can measure any claim is equally valid and i guess i'm showing my philosophical uh baggage as an empiricist here and i kind of reject other forms of philosophical knowledge um you know if you can't there's no evidence there you know you can say anything you say whatever you want there's no way logic alone won't get you to truth you've got to have evidence you want to hear my favorite uh my favorite explanation for ghost stories that i've ever heard absolutely so the best ghost explanation i've ever heard it comes from our very own joel marchand hello everybody my name is joel podcast editor and aspiring pseudo-scientist yes have you heard this before no i just love joel oh boy so my hypothesis that i tongue-in-cheek call the unified theory of haunting is based on a fringe idea about the nature of space and time and that is that time is a spatial dimension not necessarily a temporal dimension so just as we experience spatial dimensions in a classical sense the height width and depth we can experience time that way or rather we are objects within the dimension of time i use the classic flatlander story to explain it i would recommend reading this story but essentially it's about a man in a two-dimensional world who comes in contact with an object or a person from a three-dimensional world and this three-dimensional object is a sphere but the man in the two-dimensional world only interacts with it on his plane so he experiences it as a circle that grows and shrinks as it passes through the plane of two dimensions so the idea is that all the change we experience in three-dimensional space is actually the passing of four-dimensional objects through our plane so if we can think of it that way we can step outside of our idea of time as linear and come into this place where all of time is happening in a spatial dimension very much like the visualization near the end of interstellar if you've seen that so theoretically everything that has ever happened in say an old house is currently happening though we only experience the moments that we're in but if we were to have some sort of biological malfunction or perhaps mutation that would allow us to perceive time in a four-dimensional sense we could possibly see things that are happening in the past or the future that are in the current location we're in which to me explains why it's generally old things that are haunted more has happened there therefore there's more of a possibility of some element of past or future to intersect with the present imagine a world where we've not developed the biological ability to perceive color it's still there just waiting for us to understand it and experience it but we have no means have you been speaking of it and we don't even think about it but imagine someone develops the ability to get a glimpse of color every once in a while i imagine the others would probably consider it a supernatural or fringe experience but it would be completely normal because the person with the mutation would have the biological ability to interact with something in the universe that doesn't make it weird or crazy it just makes it culturally unacceptable i suppose obviously it's all conjecture but it's fun to think about [Music] i'm loved beyond reason i am a member of god my father's royal priesthood and i have been appointed to partner in his good work of redeeming creation to unity harmony and love the core of this identity was smith in the forge of heartache hardship and shame with many small decisions of love and acceptance of others and myself were the only clear way that i could continue functioning it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed 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by saying from what scale or reference frame right i don't just mean that soul and spirit are interesting poetically i think those were early attempts to describe what we're only now starting to see in science if we go to the smallest scales we understand firmly i'm this unfathomable sea of atoms which is made of an even more unfathomable we don't have a term for universe almost of subatomic particles that are interacting probabilistically with each other and there's actually no from that perspective clear point at which i end and begin and then different from my surroundings as those particles are constantly whizzing across boundaries that i see at a macro level that just don't exist at their level and then we assume that because the standard model of physics and relativity don't line up all that well that subatomic reality is not all there is to reality that there is some even deeper layer beneath it some people probably the vogue in physics today is to talk about one-dimensional strings and super string theory a lot of physicists are now looking at things like quantum foam where there's this very very very very very small layer in which everything is simply manifestations of fluffy quantum foam that you just get a lot of foam and you get a cork basically everything is made of this single fabric absolutely everything in our experience everything everywhere in the universe is waves through foam or strings that vibrate that's incredibly mystical that i don't have any firm boundary and i am innately connected to everything else in the universe that sounds spiritual so if i look at a different level of like you know a more macro level uh where my i have a consciousness where does that consciousness comes from as near as we can tell and there's pretty good arguments where this that consciousness emerges from the relationship between activity in my brain and that consciousness is influenced by all the functions in my entire body uh my my gut affects my mood and my emotional well-being uh the positions of my arms and facial muscles affects my mood and well-being i can't say that there's some division between my mind and my body the mind-body problem is an illusion everything we see in science cells of these things are unified so it's not that i don't have a soul it's just that my soul is part of my body and my body is part of my soul they are indivisible uh and my spirit the spark of life is a way the universe manifests you know metabolism and awareness and so it's not that those ideas are are archaic or stupid or wrong they were ahead of their time today we have better ways to articulate i think what those terms mean the thing about spirit language and soul language for me the thing frankly about jesus and the way jesus lived is the ability to make this idea of a kingdom of heaven near and real today to actually in the greek orthodox manner see the salvation of the world through its healing it's drawing towards that which we call god human understanding is a model of reality that is necessarily limited so i i know that whatever reference frame i pick i'm going to give you an incomplete representation of reality if i see reality from just a human scale and i just am this bag of atoms and tissue that's separate from everything else it seems to be very reductionistic to me so i get my arm cut off am i am i actually less of who i am now because i've lost a percentage of myself our atoms are constantly changing our cells are constantly dying and being replaced as all that gets replaced and my body is an actually totally different thing you know a few years from now am i actually a different person entirely what unites me as me what unites me presently to the infant me i mean anybody that knows me has an experience of me and that's in some way me as well i feel like you know we've talked about ken wilbur on the sorry on the spiral dynamics episode and uh mike and i have a always have a good feud about about which direction of spiral dynamics we like and he's not the biggest fan of ken wilber's direction uh and i like it i think it's fun but their philosophy is that consciousness precedes and transcends the universe altogether even the big the big bang formed in from this i am-ness from this sort of deeper consciousness that you might call god and that our our consciousness our small egos are sort of just rising out of that what do you think about that mike well i mean first of all to say like reductionism like to say that we're just a collection of atoms and cells and tissues i think is a little semantically dismissive of the idea when in fact it's like really amazing that we're atoms and cells and tissues that become an entity that can wonder why it's made out of atoms and cells and tissues and systems and that from like my own faith experience you're describing something that's similar to how i understand and relate to god that god is kind of the source of all this stuff we're doing now and what spiritual practice does is draw us closer to god and lets us connect with that source i just don't make that as a fact claim because how do i know my confidence in our origins begins to decline precipitously at anything before the cosmic microwave background radiation because that's as far back as we can get a direct signal today so i don't mind living in the tension i feel like he kind of tricked me here you put me in the wilber camp but i don't mind saying like god is the source of all and i'm open to the idea that god is conscious obviously and that somehow the image of god is consciousness awareness and a creative capacity but these are ideas that are steeped in what happens when i meditate and when i worship and when i approach god they're not ideas that are steeped in the kinds of fact claims about reality i make through science and those are two separate things for me so like on the one hand it's a very beautiful and useful idea but on the other hand it's a profoundly unscientific one i am one of billions of iterations of god's character but i'm not god i'm dependent on god in my parents i am a dear possession of his and because of that i'm a peaceful human who lives in peace because i know that the creator of all existing order is my friend and will carry me through until life is over as i know it does having a christian faith necessitate a dualistic view of a spiritual world of some sort it depends on which christians you ask right i think a lot of christians say absolutely that's a necessity i think that percentage might be higher today than it was in the first century i don't know a lot of first century christians when they talked about a messiah and a risen and coming king they were talking about a guy that was going to come back and remake the world in their lifetime you know ideas about the afterlife that we take as timeless today in the church weren't present in the first century and certainly weren't present in first century judaism or judaism that predated christianity yeah it go the phrase go to heaven is not in the bible precisely precisely which i'm sure some heads just popped yeah like the idea that some part of us goes away to heaven that's just never found in the scriptures so for me personally no a belief in the immaterial is not essential to christian faith and practice to me the core the essence of christianity is following jesus christ that's it that's christianity it is taking on jesus as a teacher and authority in your life attempting to live as he lived and follow what he taught and from the word christian it's also important to reflect on and follow the christ not simply the man who we say was an incarnation of god but the christ this reconciling and unifying aspect to god the fact that god desires a healing and a reconciliation with the world that's the christ and so for me to be a christian that only two essential aspects are following jesus and doing the work of christ if we are really nothing but mere stardust then i really don't know who i am i just don't know paul said or you know purportedly said if jesus was not resurrected then our faith is in vain and we should be pitied above all men but i to to say that christianity has always only been about following the teachings of jesus i just i mean that's my favorite thing about christianity but i don't know if it's the ultimate uh historical accurate way of summing up what christianity is well i mean i think i got a pretty good answer for that uh i wish pete ins was here because he'd have a better answer but i'll i'll give my shot uh i'm a christian not a not a paulist so like man the church loves paul and i accept that because i'm part of the church like they've just decided that all these writings attributed to paul are important but like not for a second do i think paul is super authoritative or the author and finisher of the christian faith most historians don't ascribe all the things that we say were written by paul to paul a lot of that is chronicling later discussions in the church which doesn't mean i reject them it just means i don't take anything in the bible at like face value i actually look at the scholarship around it and so there are some ideas in scholarship that the original ideas about jesus referred to a spiritual resurrection and not a bodily resurrection and that it was later church movements that started adding bodily resurrection stuff and so i just sort of listened to those ideas and frankly they're all out of my pay grade you know what i mean i'm not a bible historian i don't speak fluent greek or aramaic so where i go um is because i've had this ridiculous couple of experiences with jesus in my life uh and that resurrection seems to me to be the pattern of reality death and rebirth is kind of written everywhere uh i'm comfortable going okay i'm gonna take on faith that there was a bodily resurrection that guy named jesus actually rose from the dead i'll go there but if i have friends who can't go there i don't put up a velvet rope and say you guys don't belong because of that i think more and more people struggle with this idea of resurrection and i don't necessarily agree with this pauline idea that if there's no bodily resurrection that this whole faith is ridiculous and a waste of time i don't buy it i think our faith is even more valuable than paul thought it was or even quote paul thought it was the exciting thing to me is here i am i talk like i talk and i go into a room every week well every week i'm in town in tallahassee florida and we all talk about how to remake the world and our hope through faith that god the source of everything is part of that process and all things are being made new and that is beautiful and that is powerful and that is life-giving in the beginning there was a rapid expansion of a singularity 380 000 years later there was light and when there was light there was hydrogen and there was helium and there were stable fundamental forces of physics they worked together to birth the first stars and those stars lived for hundreds of millions of years before they died and exploded and spread their essence across the sky into clouds of heavier dust than existed before the forces of physics work together once again to craft new stars now tightly packed into the first galaxies and the cycle repeated that cycle had to happen several times before we could have planets planets could only exist because a few generations of stars died and were reborn and it was from that process that this planet that we live on was allowed to exist this planet we live on is covered with a film of life unlike any we've seen in the universe as far as we know today it's unique that life is fed by a process where carbon from the air minerals in the soil are attached together with the energy of photons through photosynthesis and so everything on this planet lives by the constant sacrifice and dying of the nearest star every single blade of grass every tree every bush on this planet is a resurrection of the sun's energy and i exist because i steal that energy by consuming other things that have died that dead matter literally returns to life in my body through my metabolism and one day i will die and a lot of my atoms will go right back to being alive in something else one day our sun will explode and spread its guts and its essence across the sky and will then form new planets and new stars resurrection is the pattern of the physical reality we see today resurrection is the language of creation death burial and renewal is the way that change occurs and so do i find it that incredulous that somehow the source of all left his signature on our civilization through resurrection i don't know that seems to be poetically appropriate as a outgoing brilliant young lady i was told i was too much women don't speak in church and a lot of things that just didn't align with who i felt i was and as i have grown up i've kind of wandered away from that for there to need to be at some other unseen realm that's like not this realm i don't need that for wonder anymore there's so much within this realm that is beyond comprehension that is worthy of like spiritual language to think of this universe as a reduction for me sometimes feels like sacrilegious to see how the sun gives itself to us and to not see a spiritual thing about that without needing like but are there angels and demons and ghosts like doing that you know what i mean like it is magic in itself the whole thing is spiritual and is magic and is this marvelous supernatural thing down to the base of it whether it's vibrating strings or foam or whatever it is it's all it's insanity and it's magic just opening my eyes and seeing what's in front of me is enough to overwhelm me to a place of gratitude humility worship so that's enough for me for now i'm so with you like i guess the difference between me and dawkins is the fact that i don't um kind of cast as silly all of my christian brothers and sisters who have a foot firmly in that supernatural world of angels and demons and afterlives and uh unseen things i don't i don't think those people are are stupid or unsophisticated or or foolish i go to a church full of people like that i'm also with you that everything we have is already a profound gift i don't need anymore to say that there is something mystical magical or spiritual about our reality other than physical reality to me the natural is already supernatural and miraculous that this is an utterly false dichotomy but i am also genuinely i'm not an atheist i do believe in god a source of everything a ground of all being and i do experience that source in a personal way a way that seems to reflect and denote consciousness and awareness and responsiveness and so kind of where i'm at with angels and demons in heaven and hell and you know a lot of ideas like that is i just kind of trust those things to that source and i stick with what i know and what i know is i have been gifted with a life i've been gifted with awareness i have been gifted with what appears to be agency and through my actions i may either be happier or less happy satisfied or less satisfied and through my actions i can either help or hinder other people in achieving those states and so when i look at this jesus who i'm so fascinated with and the way that he devoted himself to a life of serving and healing others when i do the same somehow my life is also more satisfying and dare i say more abundant so i'm happy sitting with what i know the gift that god has given me to use that gift to do the work of what i understand the gospel to be while still being open to these other ideas you know every time my mom or my pastor talks about intercessory prayer or god's will or even you know unseen forces working against us i don't wash my hands and go you guys are ridiculous i say at least they are speaking in a metaphor that's useful and applicable in some way and i'm also open to the idea that somehow they are reflecting some higher aspect of reality i just don't nail it down with fat claims the reason we have spirit and trees or rocks don't especially rocks is we have this ability to reflect back into the universe with consciousness and intent and awareness and creativity that is the essence of the human spirit to me yeah i've always loved like the art faith science thing um spirit soul body there's something about that three there's something about soul and spirit that does express part of reality to me and what it means to be a human being you know saying a soul left a room when a person died can be a much more accurate way of speaking about what actually happened in that room than to just say that this person's heart stopped beating and then the spirit thing yeah when you start talking down to that deepest level what better words do we have than spirit even within the christian judeo-christian tradition there's been so much disagreement and evolution through the centuries about the essence of metaphysical reality but i do love how jesus always calls us to the now to tell us stories and tell us parables and say look around you look at the birds and you don't need to worry about tomorrow you don't need to worry about a lot of this other stuff god is like a father to you you didn't need to go on these long philosophical treatises of the essence of spiritual reality versus physical reality or anything you know just look at the birds look at how dads love their kids that's how reality is i love that about jesus [Music] well guys thanks for listening to liturgist podcast i know we've been away for a while uh we're not gonna let that happen again too soon we're gonna have a steady string of episodes and what we're loosely calling series two or season two uh if you'd like to tell us what you thought about this episode if you've got more thoughts or questions or concerns head over to the liturgist.com podcast you can see us on facebook at facebook.com the liturgists or talk to us on twitter at the liturgists now we do let you know we've got some things coming up one we are planning on doing a small tour for our liturgy called lost and found so if you're interested in hosting us and having us come to your town just go to liturgist.com for more information uh we also want to let you know that we are planning uh another belong in london november 13th and 14th uh maybe by the time this episode comes up we're gonna have something on the web about that but you'll be able to learn more at theliturgis.com belong dash london or just go check us out on social media uh we've got a lot going on 2016 is gonna be a big year for our liturgical releases we're starting to get going on those again we're talking a lot of really interesting and compelling people about contributing so hopefully we're going to have a really busy 2016 for the first time ever pushing forward on both our liturgies and our podcast at the same time we're going to walk and chew gum thanks for listening guys so excited to be talking to you again i'm science mike i'm michael gunger thanks for listening everybody