The Spiritual Teaching of Emanuel Swedenborg with Curtis Childs

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1:17 and statements expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or positions of Next Level Soul, its host or any of the companies they represent. Now, let's dive in to today's episode. I like to welcome to the show Curtis Chiles.

1:32 Hey, Curtis, you doing really well. Thanks for having me on.

1:35 Thank you so much for coming on the show. My friend, I'm excited to talk to you. You have a You're going to introduce me and introduce my audience to a very interesting fellow, to say the least, and his work, and we're going to talk about the afterlife from his perspective, and it's going to be an interesting conversation. So my first question to you, man, is what got you caught up in all of this stuff that you do with your YouTube channel and the work that you've been doing for a couple of years now.

2:02 Apparently we have we have more than one thousand videos made just looking through and explaining and delving into and exploring Emmanue Swedenborg's material. And that's not like if you're going to start a growth strategy for YouTube. It's not like, oh, everybody's searching Swedenborg. Nobody knows who he is.

2:23 It's not a hot topics. He's not trending.

2:26 We will just sell out and talk about Swedenborg. No, that's not what it is. Yeah, it was twenty ten when I made my first YouTube video about it, and that was really back before I even knew that YouTube had any depth.

2:40 Fut to it or future. Well.

2:42 I just thought, if you fall off your skateboard and your friend records it, he puts it on YouTube, or if like a cat jumps into a box, they'll put that on YouTube. But at the time, I was trying to figure out how can I get the word out about the power of Swedenborg's experiences and ideas to change lives because it had changed mine. And so I was looking up what's there on YouTube? And when I got there way way back in the day. It's changed a bit since then, but there was a very polarized conversation where you had It was sort of the throes of new atheism. It was like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hichens, Sam Harris and a lot of their followers were really finding YouTube as this way to kind

3:25 of look at what was wrong with Christian theology and tear it down, and then you had on the whole other side. Some I feel like Christian fundamentalists who were were saying, well, just believe, just believe, and there was nothing in the middle, and I felt like, oh, Swedenborg fits right in there. The people who are looking for like a more credible, rational kind of bringing together of the mystical in the every day but also of the science and the spirituality, which I know you talk about on your channel a lot, which I want to really get to because I feel like Swedenborg is the clashing of science and uality. I mean, he was absolutely, That's a news story in itself. But so I was looking around and I saw actually on YouTube people were having

4:07 these these conversations about the big things in life that does God exist? And so I thought, okay, I'll see if we can we can find any way to sneak Swedenborg into that conversation. So, I mean, that's a short story of how I got on there, and the longer story is that I had been going through some struggles.

4:26 I had some mental health issues. It was like eighteen nineteen, like everybody does at that age, I was depressed. I had all these negative thoughts and I was I was constantly worry about things I had, you know, obsessive compulsive, or you have to you have to feel like you have to. I'm not really going to tap the microphone because that's bad for the sound, but I would feel like I got to tap this thing seven times? Who I really did a little and I just I knew it was stupid, but I also was like, oh, I better just do it because what if something bad happens.

4:54 I was just a mess. And it was around that time that I had heard of Swedenborg. Before my my parents had actually read Swedenborg, I knew that it was around, but it was in that time when I began to realize, oh, this is describing my mind and how it works. This is actually a really powerful like what are a lever that can pry me out of these these sort of pits that I'm in. And from then on I knew that it's like if if everybody was thirsty and there was a drought and you found like there's a there's actually a well over here that still works, you don't want to tell everyone about it. So I kind of feel like I'm just trying to pass along the value that the Swedenborg's material had for me, so that I

5:35 do it probably for the same reason you're doing your show, which is we're trying to make life better and the world as it is, and as we understand it isn't I can't quite do it. So what's that missing piece? Right? Why? Why isn't life so great? We got all this amazing technology and everything, but people are not that happy a lot of the time. To me, I feel like Swedenborg has something to offer to that missing piece. So that's what I'm trying to get the word out about it and how it can help it.

6:02 Do you do you think that like for me, that was Paramahansa Yogananda like that, that was that was my guy who I started. That was the That was the rabbit hole I went down, and it was really interesting to see how that changed my world view and that just opened me up to so many different views. And I always say to people like, you know, there's so many different ways to climb the mountain, there's so many different paths to take, but we're all going towards the same top. Would you agree with that?

6:34 Yeah, well, what has to be you can't. You can't just say what I'm doing is right and everything everyone else is doing is nah right. They don't know anything. And there there have been, you know, there has been some religious traditions that sort of take that view.

6:50 Oh, no, many, there's many. You're being kind many.

6:55 It's a bit of a maybe it's a feature, not a bug, because it keeps people in your church because if they leave it, then you know they got hell or worse. But there's no way that that's true. There's no way that that's true. You think about the depth and complexity of all the human beings on planet Earth and the way that doesn't matter what your tradition is or what your rituals are or your background, there's always like goodness and love and then the opposite of that.

7:21 It doesn't matter. It could be a village in India or in the Philippines. There can be kids and either they're going to include someone or they're not. That's the And this was something that was very remarkable about Swedenborg in his time. I'll start to break into that conversation, but so Swedenborg time frame. If anyone hasn't heard of him, he's Emmanuel Swedenborg and he was living. He was born in the late sixteen hundreds, but really did a lot of the work that we're gonna be talking about in the mid seventeen hundreds. He lived in Sweden. That's why his name was Swedenborg. Actually it started out as Swedberry, but when he got ennobled it changed to Swedenborg. Trivia.

7:59 You don't there it is, but he in his one of the many facets of this revelatory or mystical journey he went on was he came out of it saying that you don't have to be a Christian to go to heaven. He said he saw this afterlife and it was full of people from many different religions and actually more important than your religious ideology, which can actually be a stumbling block if it locked you into self centeredness.

8:29 Materialism was are you, are you following God as you understand God? And are you living basically a Ten Commandments kind of style life? Not murdering, not killing?

8:41 Those general things we can all agree on.

8:44 The stuff that if you don't agree, it's like I don't want to sit next to you. It's not that other things don't matter, and it's not that they can't be powerful tools. It's not that there aren't particular truths that can be really useful. Otherwise why would I be so locked in on the Swedenborg thing. But the primary thing that makes your your life what it is is what ultimately like, what you love, and then how you try to follow what is good. So if sweden Woor came out saying, oh, no, you don't have to be a Christian to go to heaven, and at the time Sweden was a theocracy, yeah, and he actually his works got put on trial for many reasons. That was only one of the shocking things that he said. But absolutely,

9:24 you can't you can't believe that if there's a if there's a divine force behind it all, that only one little sliver of life matters, one little group of people where one beliefs and everything else is nothing. What what? Why would why would you provide such limited access to the tools necessary to live a happy life?

9:43 Right? And it's just even when I was growing up as a Catholic, I was just like, so if you were never if you were born in the congo somewhere, never heard of Jesus, never heard of Christianity, and all of a sudden that person goes to hell because he never has contact with it. It always yes, always kind of free, like even as a kid of like man, that's pretty rough, like it's just basically pot luck, Oh my gosh.

10:08 And you can just if you're sitting here halfway around the world, you can just like, oh, yeah, maybe it is. But if you are just sitting there in front of that little kid who was born in the congo and you saw them and they're playing with their little friends and having their little life, there's no way, there is no way that if there's a god that is responsible for their existence and mind, that God is just going to dismiss, well, who cares what happened to you? And this is that's actually an example that that Swedenborg used as well to highlight that it's it's a ridiculous and cruel idea to believe that, and he said it's a symptom of what he said was the main problem or malady that can afflict religions, which is what he called

10:46 faith alone.

10:48 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show, which.

10:58 Is where you have doctrinal ideas, but there's no love that drives them, that they're not in the service of love. So you can have very different doctrinal ideas than me. If your ideals are in the service of love, and love has to be loved for the entire human race. It can't just be for you or your family or your particular group you're in. If you're if you're using your doctrinal ideals to try to move you toward a life that serves the human race, then basically we're of the same religion if you want to call it that, or the same spiritual path because our intent is the same, which is also the divine intent, which is to make it so that every bring as much happiness to everyone as possible.

11:36 Right, And it's just different flavors. It's just it's just completely different flavors and different spices to the dish.

11:44 If you want to get into some afterlife stuff, I know, we're just yes.

11:48 That's the first thing I want to get this is this is this is a great segue into that where you're talking about different flavors because Swedenborg described the different kinds of religions that people have not to as it's okay, we can make it work, but it's necessary and good that there are all.

12:06 These different religious traditions. Because each of those traditions you just think about Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, the different kinds of people that those traditions mold, they end up being different kinds of people. And Swedenborg says, in the afterlife, you need all different kinds of people because the afterlife works together.

12:26 So what he called heaven, which is just meaning the other side, the other side, is it works the same way that the human body works. Okay, so if you look at the way that your body is, it is a total model and picture of intimate cooperation. Your heart, your heart needs your lungs. Your lungs need your heart.

12:51 Neither is anything without the other. Even going all the way down to the cellular level, every cell gets everything it needs from the body and gives everything it can back to the body and both thrive from that. And it is total. So it's total unity, but it's a unity of incredibly different parts. Think about the difference between your frontal cortex and your toenail. You couldn't even tell those came from the same thing, but they both need to be there. And so we all become different kinds of people through our different paths of life on earth, and so some of us are a little more like like the eyes, Like if you're really into learning and understanding things, maybe you're kind of like fulfilling the function

13:31 of sight so you can serve the grander human race in that way. Somebody else might be more like the hants. They're more like a practical doer sort of person. But overall, you need to have all these different kinds of people so that we can make this ultimate sort of ultimate manifestation of the human form, which sweden Work calls heaven, which is when everyone's working together, just like all the parts of the body work together.

13:53 That's so beautifully and elegantly put it really is.

13:56 It's cool, man. This is why this is why I do YouTube video because the ideas they're very cool in there. But Swedenborg is like, what, he has a weird sounding name, he came from a long time ago. He's like, it's dense, it's philosophical. But I know that there's really cool things in there that are helpful, so we're trying to take the time to like open it up and add it to people's repertoire.

14:18 Yeah, because these are and it's similar to some of the old yoga texts. I mean, you start going into the old yoga texts in the Hindu tradition Jesus Man, I mean you try to get into the vedix. I mean just I mean thousands and thousands of scrolls and really dense, but there's gold in those pieces. So trying to grab little pieces here and there and trying to rework it for a modern conversation is very important. Is what I do in my show. It's what you do in your show. That's why I wanted to have you on because I think these you know that one little bit makes so much sense the human body, and it's all about cooperation, and it's all about love. And you've spoken to near death experiences. I've spoken to a ton

14:58 of near death experiences. The threat, as there are many with these stories, is love. That there is love, unconditional, crazy, some some unspeakable kind of love, like it's almost a currency up there or there next to the other side, wherever it is.

15:16 Yeah, and if it wasn't that, if it wasn't love, I don't think you and I would be doing what we're doing.

15:21 I agreed.

15:22 If it wasn't I think that if I didn't feel like trying to move in a spiritual direction and educate people to try to move in that way. If it's not leading us towards something where there's more love, where and that love leads to life being better, then what's the point that Then I don't care about spirituality. Then if it's just because think it has to be moving us towards I think about just the different kinds of pain I've suffered in my life and the pain I've seen other people go through. Unless we're working on fixing that, I don't care. Yeah, I don't care. Things can change a ton, but not necessarily get better. It's not just if we do any if we're all spiritual, but it doesn't mean things are gonna get better. I think about

16:03 pre social media, pre Internet, and it was like, Wow, this amazing technology is coming. And now anyone in the world you can see what they're doing and you can click like it. And now I've got a seven year old daughter and everybody's like, how do we keep kids away from social media? Because it's enjoying their mental health.

16:19 So it's like, okay, things. It would have sounded really cool. You can connect with anyone anywhere, but unless there's love in the social media. Unless there's there's love driving it, it doesn't didn't necessarily make anything better.

16:31 So you mean to tell me, les it's not all about likes and bigger cars and more bling.

16:36 Everybody, please subscribe to my channel if you're watching, by the way, I mean.

16:41 It's not about I mean it's yeah, I would agree with you because if it was a if any of the things that I would talk about or had people on the show talking about, would be talking about more materialism. I've never heard somebody say happiness is outside of you, like and when you hear that, run the opposite direction.

17:00 And that's that goes with organized religions sometimes that it's outside of you, that we are the ones who can help you guide you through to the afterlife. All of that or materialism or money or you know, the flesh or food or whatever it is. I if I hear that, it sings, it just rings, puts flags up so high.

17:25 It's all but every major spiritual teacher that I've ever heard of, including all the top guys from Jesus the Buddha, that all of them say the same thing, that the power is within you and you have to go within that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you, and so on and so forth, and that's what meditation is, and that's what you start going in deeper and deeper and you start to realize that the happiness is truly You could have a billion dollars, it doesn't matter. Man, if you're not that hole inside, you can only be filled by something inside. You're not from something exterior. Would you agree?

18:03 I think you could probably find billionaires that are unhappy and people with it with meager means that are happy. So the key must be somewhere else. I don't think. I think it would be unrealistic to say money makes no difference, Likes making the difference, because they sure can. But it's about what's your priority that you're saying. If somebody says that the thing, the most important thing, that thing that is is God or that we're looking toward is money, or it's likes or it's any other measure of external stuff, then you got those alarm bells going off.

18:40 But for example, it's good that your channel has as many subscribers as it does because it can provide a use. It allows a megaphone for these conversations to happen. That hopefully make people's lives better. And I know, just knowing the YouTube channels that I watch, it's such a cool feeling when you've had a hard day and your favorite creator has got a new video. You know you can just sit there and you're in your happy place and watch it and learn something and kind of return to that sphere. I've had people say with our stuff, they'll put it on when they're going to sleep.

19:13 Yeah, me too, mean too, Okay.

19:14 It sort of at first sounds like, hey man, you're going to sleep with but I only do that. You can only do something like that with something that you trust and you feel safe and you know that that the love is gonna is going to be guiding it. There. So absolutely that there can be a drive to but it can't be to materialism in an end, and it can't be to eminence in an end. Those things have to serve usefulness, which is making a difference. That was a bit things Swedenborg was really big about. Is it's not like you can't say I want to bring my podcast to the next level, or I want to take my business to the next level, I want to earn more, but why why are you doing that? And if it is because I want to be able to better serve

19:57 the human race, then then that that's suddenly spiritual.

20:03 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show, right absolutely, And that's the thing. A lot of people think that you have to be, you know, penniless and meditate for thirty years in a Himalayan cave to be spiritual, which I think the way you just stated it, and I am in a complete agreement with you. The more money you have, the more resources you have. But it's at the end of the day, what is that for? Because at a certain point, man, you know, you and I have both been around the block a couple of times. I'm a bit older than you, but generally speaking you you know, you're a parent, so you already definitely got some some shrapnel, if you will, of life. And at a certain point,

20:46 the house could only get so much bigger, the car could only get really so much fancier, really the close. At a certain point, you're good, like your basic needs are covered. And when you that's why I see these people like I need ten billion, I need twenty Why, Like, what is the purpose of it? But if you're using those resources that are being funneled through you. And I do truly believe that it's a responsibility that you have a lot of followers, if you have a lot, if you have a large audience, if you have a lot of money coming through you, how you funnel it and are responsible for it to better humanity, to serve others.

21:28 That is the most important. Not to build a bigger castle for yourself. You know, at a certain point the castle is going to be big enough, like you don't need anymore.

21:37 Yeah. Well it's just like, ah, you know, I built this new wing, but now I want another wing on my castle because it.

21:44 Just keeps it just keeps going and going and going.

21:47 It is.

21:47 It's an endless, endless uhit that you fall into.

21:50 Well, I love what you said about Oh sorry, sorry ahead, No got ud. I'm just saying I liked what you said about it's a responsibility because if if everybody who is going to try to follow a spiritual path goes off and they're in a cave meditating and they don't have any money, then who's going to define the culture and who's going to shape the conversations? There has to be people if anyone's watching and you feel like I shouldn't try to affect the world. You've got to go impact the world, but doing it seeing it as a responsibility.

22:24 The way Swedenborg describes it is the negative way. The ego way is to say, well, this position i'm in of whatever exists to serve me. So if you think if you're a politician and you think I want to become the governor, so that I'm the governor and I live in the governor's mansion and everyone invites me to these parties and that's very cool, and I can, you know, call up my friends in high school and say, look how much better I am than you, Or you can say, well, the governor's office. That is a great responsibility and the real honor here goes to the office. So I better not screw this up because there's a lot of good that can be done. Then I feel like that's that's a great, that's a great this side of ambition that

23:01 that really works for the human race.

23:03 I forgot who said this, but I think it was someone. I think it was a yogiar or this is a while ago. They said that the Yogis had to get out of the caves and go into the boardrooms and start running these companies in a spiritual way because they wield so much power in the world that if you had a spiritual and you can see it with companies now.

23:25 In the eighties you never saw that, but you started to see it in the nineties, in the early two thousands, and currently that there are companies who are becoming like, well, how can we help Yes, we need the bottom line, but how can we help humanity? And it's so important that you just don't sit alone and it's just you alone doing it. Spiritual path and the spiritual growth is a solitary thing in many ways. It can be a group thing, but at the end of the day, we leave the planet the same way we came into it alone and naked. But you could do it, you could help others do it around you, but it is something that you really need to kind of go out and into the world and help shape reality, help shape people's ideas.

24:12 That's why we do what we do every day.

24:14 Totally. I love it. Yeah, we can. People can give tools and I've got I've been on the receiving end of so many cool tools. But in the end, the change happens one person at a time. So any organ religious organization, or anything that's telling you your spirituality depends on us, that's not true. The only real spiritual force is us looking inside and saying what do I should not want to act on? That wells up inside me?

24:38 What do I want to act on? If I get the impulse to steal that person's cookie, I wouldn't want that to happen to me. So I'm actually not going to do it, even though I want to. If I get the impulse to go and help that person, I'm gonna act on it because I know I would want that on a basic level. That that's the force that changes the world. But it just takes buy in from a large group of people.

24:58 Mm hmm without questions. So there was Let's get into a little bit into the afterlife because this is something that my audience loves to talk about, and I think it's a conversation that almost everybody at what point or another is going to have in their life, like, Hey, what's on that other side? What's when this runs out?

25:16 What happens? So I know Swedenberg has a real clear idea of what happens immediately after My question is what is it and how did he come upon this information.

25:28 Yeah, I think, as I said before, anybody's interested in out of body or near death experiences, spiritual experiences in general, and particularly the way that those and the scientific world intersect, absolutely should know about Swedenborg. Because Swedenborg was up until his mid fifties just a successful renaissance man polymath guy.

25:53 So he was in Sweden, which was a world power at the time, and he was doing everything. So he was a the assessor of minds, which was Sweden's mining industry was one of the most important industries on the planet. He was in this position where he's overseeing a lot of the mining there. He was an inventor. He had invented military equipment for the Swedish military as well as mining equipment, all kinds of things there. But he's also a very well respected scientist, had written these huge principias on anatomy, founded the scientific branch of crystallography, first person to suggest the nebular hypothesis, first scientific journal in Sweden he started that went to he was part of the Swedish government House of Nobility, so on and so on

26:38 and so on. Very smart guy and very well known to the point, where as I understand it, if he would show up in London, Let's say the newspaper would say Swedenborg came to London. I don't know who his equivalent would be today. I feel like the Kardashians. He's the Kardashians back then. If you think about what would happen today if Kim had out of body experiences, well, I think it might be like a Neil de grass Tyson.

27:05 Although back in the day individuals could do so much more scientifically because science was a lot less complex than so he was. He was a huge deal, very well known. Think if Neil de grass Tyson tomorrow set got on Twitter and said, I've been having spiritual experiences and I now have the ability to have them at will. I'm going to spend the rest of my career cataloging and explaining how the afterlife works. That's what Swedenborg was. So he the entire thing is documented from the time when he was in his mid fifties to the end of his life in his eighties. He in his mid fifties was keeping this travel journal just because he's saying, I'm going from London to Amsterdam or something, and it was

27:46 just keeping track of that. Back in the day, it was dangerous to do that. You could your boat could sink. There was actually pirates. There's a lot going on, so you want to keep track of your travels when where you're headed. But in that he starts to record his dreams and he starts to analyze his dreams, which is back before dream analysis was a thing. Actually nowadays psychology has been very influenced by Swedenborg. Carl Jung read a lot of Swedenborg. William James a lot of psychology and particularly sort of mystical psychology has been influenced by him.

28:18 But he started to write down his dreams and they got vivider and more strange, and eventually he started to have experiences that were outside of that dream box, Like just in the hypnagogic state when he's waking up, he would see something or talk to someone, and he writes every one of them down and writes down when he thinks the interpretation is. And then at some point he has a couple of really powerful experiences and visions which really changed the trajectory of his life. And something seems to have like snapped open, because from then on out, for the last three decades of his life, he was having these experiences at will every day and catalog the entire thing. So it's between then and the end of

28:55 his life. He wrote thirty volumes worth of material that he's accustomed to writing big, long scientific works, so his afterlife stuff reads just like that. It's very organized, it's very it's both descriptive, like he will tell stories, but he's also very philosophical and will tell you it's like a physics lesson on how the after life works and why people see what they do when they go where they do. So he published, Yeah, not only like thirty volumes that he published, but he also kept a journal of all his spiritual experiences. You get so much raw data and then insights from that that I feel like anybody who's looking to have a complete picture of the after life to you know, stitch together what's in between

29:37 near death experiences, those sorts of things. Sweden Morgue is definitely worth checking out. He did talk about, and again this is a couple hundred years before Raymond Moody coined the term near death experience in Life after Life, which, by the way, there was a whole section about Swedenborg in that book Life after Life is yeah, which is cool.

29:55 So right in the beginning, because Raymond Moody was looking to find we've got this more phenomenon of people having these experiences. This has got to have happened in history. Where did this pop up? And there was a couple of chats. He had a comparison to the Bible, to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, one other one that I can't remember, but also Swedenborg because there's so much similarity to the world near death experiences to described.

30:19 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.

30:28 So the life after death process, actually our channel is called off the Left Eye, and that was me starting out my journey on YouTube, thinking how is anyone going to be interested in this stuff at all? I just flipped open one of Swedenborg's books and I looked for a cool phrase. They didn't have any religious baggage attached to it, and it said off the left eye. This is from the story of him waking up being shown what it's like to wake up in the afterlife. He wasn't his body wasn't in physical danger like you have with a lot of near death experiences, but he says that he has shown it, but kept in a state of consciousness enough that he could recall it and write it afterwards. And he said that at first he could

31:03 feel his body kind of shutting down and his breathing slowed a lot, but his spirit, he could feel his spirit breathing and that started to rise. And then he said it felt like there was a pull, and his spirit left his body and then went through this series of awakening steps in the spiritual world. According to Swedenborg, all of us are in the spiritual world right now.

31:26 You have a body, and then you have consciousness, and your consciousness is your spirit, so that part of you exists in the spiritual dimension, or he called it the spiritual world. So that's the terminology I like to lease the spiritual side of life. You're already there in terms of the spiritual part of you. And he said that your spirit has all the features that your body has, so you have spirit. Your spirit has eyes just like your body has eyes. So to him, initially he was surrounded by what he calls angels, but I know in Christianity that word sometimes means these specially created beings that only live in the afterlife. But to him, angels that just means people who had been living here and who

32:10 have died and crossed over to the other side, so that's an angel. He's surrounded by these really loving angels. He called them celestial angels, which those are people who are particularly devoted to love. And they made sure that when he was experiencing this transition that no disturbing thoughts or feelings came into his mind. They were kind of shepherding him, protecting him and just sitting with him there until he was starting to stir in the spirit. And then from there new kinds of angels came up to him because his mind was starting to stir, and so there's angels that are more mind focused, and so those said he said, it seemed like they pulled the covering off of my left eye, and that's when I received

32:53 the gift of spiritual sight. Because everything is symbolic. There's so much symbolism in the afterlife. I think that's part of why I know you. You started and are still in film and in movies so much. There's like, here's the scene where the hero finally grabs the sword, and it's like there's just it's meaningful beyond this. Oh now he has a sword. It's just like there's a meaning in this moment. Swee Moore would call that a correspondence because to him, a sword is a symbol of the truth and the power of the truth. So when we see somebody, when you know King Arthur or I've just been rereading Lord of the Rings, so I'm thinking about that a lot. Oh yeah, like Eric Gorn has got that sword, and why does it matter so much? Because

33:33 this is a symbol of the kind of power that the truth can have in your life. So the spiritual world is full of that symbolism that we actually get our appreciation for it by our sort of that the spiritual world seeping in. So they pulled the covering off of his left eye, and then from there it's kind of shooes your own adventure. So you get angels are there and they'll show you anything you want and do anything.

33:55 But you get to follow your heart then and you kind of gravitate toward people who love the same kinds of things that you do. So love on the other side plays a role similar to what gravity plays here. The gravity. Yeah, so that's a correspondence as well. So in the physical world. Why am I in this chair?

34:17 It's because of gravity. Why is the earth around? It's because of gravity. I'm not a physicist, but I think that's the basics of how it is. So gravity is what holds you to where you are there. Love does the same kind of thing, So people who love and care about the same sorts of things will gravitate toward each other, and this forms spiritual communities. It's the reason why you end up with sort of your your soulmates or your people or something. Because love there is absolutely a primary force that shapes everything, because the whole afterlife is spirit based rather than physical based, and spirit is love and thoughts to the things we expect. It's in our consciousness. So it's like both similar to the world

35:03 we have here, but yet fundamentally different in the way that it's organized and what it does. So after you wake up, you then are free to go. Freedom is a hugely important thing. You're free to go and pursue what kind of things do I want to love and what and what kind of people do I want to hang out with? And then from there there's as many different you know, afterlife situations as there are different people because everyone is unique, right.

35:27 Everything's custom made for you, kind of like in your death experience. Every in your death experience I've heard is custom made, even though there are elements that are similar.

35:34 Absolutely, and the spiritual world because it's spirit based. So because it's consciousness based, even your surroundings are a reflection of what's inside you. So the kind of house that you have. You know how people will have dreams and in dreams they'll be in this house and you'll be like, well, this was my house, but it wasn't really my house.

35:57 It didn't look like my house. And almost from what I can find in almost every school of dream interpretation, a house is a symbol of the mind. And I know if I have dreams where oh, like the attic is getting expanded, it just feels like, Okay, I'm learning something new, I'm thinking of something. So there the things that are in you, So the kind of things that you love and the things that you think about. That creates the environment, so that the home that you're in is a reflection of your mind and heart. It would be particularly who you are, that even the landscape and like the flora and fauna there and will react and match a certain community, so the people that are living there.

36:37 And this is a lot like in movies as well, because if you go into Let's keep on, Lord of the Rings, if you go into Mordor, there's not like bunny rabbits living there and butterflies, because it doesn't fit right. So we just know it would ruin the mood, but spiritually it would be because the gentle, kinder animals correspond to loving kind affections and scarier, more brain of animals correspond to harmful ones. So you actually see in the spiritual world this kind of cinematic life playing out. Okay, there's a few things I could go on forever, but I won't.

37:09 All right, all right, So is this more of his adventures in the afterlife or does he have an actual layout of what happens after someone dies.

37:19 Yes, so when you die, you start out in what he calls the world of spirits, which he talks about heaven, the world of spirits and Hell. Heaven and Hell are psychological states. This is another way in which he wildly diverges from the traditional Christian understanding, yet still uses similar terminology.

37:44 Heaven is fundamentally a state in which you enjoy doing what is good to other people. Heaven is the joy of doing what is good to other people. Hell is the joy of harming other people. And that might sound strange because we don't really think of it like that, But really, why why do people like why do you flick that guy off in traffic? Why do you try to get the last word? And why do you try to rule? Why do people conquer each other and try to rule? Because there's this Hey, I like to be on top of ego. Ego, so the joy of ego, right, So the world of spirits. Here here in this world you don't know. You don't know if a person is wrapped up in the pleasure of help and service or the pleasure of ego. This is why you have to

38:26 lock your door because you don't know who's going to come down the street, what they're going to if they're going to think it's all right to steal from you or not. So here it's all you don't know. But in the spiritual world afterlife, things get sorted out. So the world of spirits, he says, it's this midway between heaven and hell where you have a chance to really get down to the core of what what you want to do and what you want to love, and then you go and you kind of commit to one or the other. Am I going to be committed to ego or am I going to be committed to love? Because us those two things need to be separate, because if you're committed to ego but still have some good love and you and stuff, that's actually going to be painful

39:08 for you and the other people you're interfacing with. And then if you're committed to what's good but bring ego along, that's going to be painful. So you have this chance, and everyone takes a different amount of time there. Some people just know right away, like, no, I'm going to heaven, that's what I want to do. Some people they have to sort out and find out who they are. But nobody gets forced to go anywhere.

39:28 You go.

39:29 Your own love leads you to go where you want to go. So you get you get into the world of spirits. You spend your time figuring out who you really want to be, basically unpacking and uncovering who you've become throughout this life on Earth based on what you loved and what you believe in how you acted on that.

39:45 And then you go and you find your community is where are the people who are most living the same kind of life that I am, And not just live like we all like to, you know, play golf, but who who loves the same kind of thing that you love, and who who has the same kind of belief about life that you do, and those people, like I said, that gravitating force of love pulls you in to this community, and that's where you really get to begin your eternal life, or your meaning your timeless life. In the spiritual world, there's not time and space the same way that there are here. It sort of seems like it, but it's really more about your psychological state. So if you're excited about something, if you're eager about something, it will seem

40:33 to go faster. But so you get into these communities and then you start to play your part in the bigger I talked about the human body. It's like each little cell is like one of those communities that starts to do what you do. And to Swedenborg, the thing that makes human life interesting as well as the afterlife is.

40:52 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.

41:01 The joy of doing something good for the human race so it's we were talking about. You can't just go live in a cave and meditate, get bored of that. And you can't just have money. You can't just sit there and have a ton of money. You get bored of that. The only thing that's like evergreen in terms of the joy it gives is the joy of doing something meaningful and useful. It's like again if yeah.

41:23 Go ahead, Well let me ask you this though, because there's a bunch of stuff I want to unpack there. So when you're in the afterlife and you're finding your soul family, if you will, that's a term that's used a lot, the sole family of souls that you spirits or souls that you live with or not live with, but are like connected to. Yeah, what does Swedenberg talk say about the concept of incarnation and multiple lifetimes? You know, because that's the one thing that always caught me too in Christianity. I was like, so, if I was born a dude in you know, of a certain color, in a certain country, I would have either power or I would not have power, or I would have this experience or not that experience. If I was born a woman here,

42:09 I was like, didn't make a whole lot of sense to me that you only had the one shot. This is just my personal opinion. And then when idea if reincarnation came in, I was like, that makes sense to me.

42:18 What did he say, Yeah, well, I think that I like the idea of something that makes sense. So if you're saying, hey, this opens it up, so I don't want to argue against that. I will give you a possible alternative to reincarnation. That's that's Swedenborg because back in his day, I don't think that reincarnation was a thing.

42:43 It wasn't in Europe, in Western Europe. I don't think you had the idea of that. But he does kind of offer a a sort of solution to the idea of why do so many people experience past lives sort of unprompted because to him, Okay, so spiritual world has a lot of characteristics to it, and one of them is lack of time and space. One of them is the gravitation of love. But in the other one is the fluidity of mind. So there's a much more effortless transfer of information and feeling. There here we can talk, you and I can talk, and it can go into this microphone and go all the way through the servers and get there and people can listen and then try to picture what it is I'm talking about. But there there's a lot of people in your those experiences will

43:31 say I can just tell what he was thinking. I got a download. There's like instant. It's an instant, it's instant, it's permeable. Even Sweetwork says that actually, if you go into a community in the afterlife, you start to think sort of like they do. You're influenced by there. He talks about auras like the sort of emanation of your life and mind going out from everyone, so you're able to do that, and you're also able to share feelings.

43:57 He talks about people who are feeling a certain kind of joy able to just really tangibly and directly pass it to somebody else and say, hey, check this out. Here's some joy that you can have. So there, and not only that, that we actually, while we're on the earth are constantly surrounded by spirits because we actually couldn't have consciousness. That the link of consciousness goes from the divine through the spiritual world ends up in the physical world.

44:26 So we're constantly surrounded by spirits. Actually, our spirit even now is traveling from community to community based on the way we change in our life. It's just a nice long way to get to the answer I want to give you. But I feel like I got to have this background here when with the reason why little kids are like they are, Why are they so spontaneous and open and joyful and free. It's a distinctly different phase from what I remember of it than what we have now.

44:49 Is because when you're little, your spirit is around those celestial angels or the deepest angels that sweden talks about. As you grow up, your spirit it changes and it starts to go around more spiritual or intellect oriented angels. And you have to have that if you're going to be able to build a mind and grow. But the point is that your spiritual company changes what you experience, and there's enough permeability, so much so that Swedenborg just just offhand in his book Heaven and Hell says that usually when your mind interacts with spirits, you do so out of your own memory, so that they don't bring in what they've experienced from their life into the interaction.

45:29 They actually take on some of your memory and from there influence you in certain ways, hopefully to do what's good. Sometimes though, there there's some the equivalent of a leak or something where you can actually experience someone else's memories as your own. So it would be yeah, so it would be like my wife's friend one time was describing to my wife and her friends, remember when we did this thing. Remember when you were over there and we went to this, and we went to that, and they were all trying to remember what she was talking about.

46:03 And finally they were like, oh, no, that was an episode of friends that you're talking about that didn't happen like you think it happened. So that that can the idea that that you can get a feeling that you've been somewhere, just even through the crudeness of media, but that there is the possibility for you to experience someone else's memories and so you feel like I've lived that life now. So to Swedenborg, it was like, no, this is it's like the womb, Like you develop in the womb for nine months and there you set up the big You don't set up who you're going to be, but you set up the basics, like the foundation of who you're going to be, and then you're born and you go and live your life. So this life is

46:45 like the womb to the spiritual world, so you don't define who you're going to be forever. Swedenborg is very clear that you continue to grow and change and do a lot of the stuff that I think we did this whole show called do We Reincarnate because there's sort of like a yes and no, and that a lot of the aspects of like the cyclical development that people talk about in reincarnation, sweden Worg does describe, but he talks about it happening on the other side. He doesn't talk about changing your entire personality, but at times you forget who you were and these kinds of things. Well, yeah, so it's this interesting mix. But to him it was this is the foundation point. That is to say, though I do anytime someone saying like, hey, this, I like

47:26 reincarnation because it makes me think, yeah, yeah, that makes more sense that you'd have a shot at different things, and it brings me more toward love than I'm like, well, then who knows there could be something in it. So I don't feel like I want to say no, there's not reincarnation, even though I see a different possible alternative in the way Swedenborg describes it. I think the idea that we're both looking at, which is like, how would you really get it? So you can empathize with people and not just how, and that everyone gets a fair shake at life, So there's got to be some truth that makes that happen.

47:56 But also to me now to go on the other side of that, and I agree with I love his point of view in this that it's kind of like the reincarnation happens on the other side, right, he also could have been seeing it through the the the lens of his time, and that that concept that never even been brought up to him. He wouldn't even know what it was in many ways, so the concept of reincarnation is still happening, but on the other side, because that's how he could explain it, So it could Who's to say, is the bottom line?

48:32 Oh?

48:32 Yes, who's to say, is you know the Vedic text the right you know the right way, or but the concepts are the same, which is very interesting to me. That the idea that there's an evolution of the soul, whether it happens here or on the other side. According to Swedenburg is a very interesting idea. Again, different paths to the same top of the mountain.

48:56 Yeah, and what's it? What's it for? What's it for? Like you were saying, I ran into the idea of reincarnation and I like it because it didn't make sense to me how you could just live this one life and you kind of have a silver spoon in your mouth and then you don't really know because what's that about?

49:13 If you drill down, it's about fairness and is God or is life really fair? So I think ultimately that that's even kind of the mountain on the mountain that everyone's trying to get to in their different ways.

49:25 Well, I mean to answer your question, No, life is not fair. No one in the in the manual said I got the man. You don't know if you got it. But there's no in the Life Manual no one said life is fair. My kids say that all the time. That's not fair. Like where anywhere does it say things are supposed to be fair? Yeah, you know that concept of fairness is irrelevant in the world. Anyone who spent any time down here it knows that because we've all seen good things happen to bad people. All the time and our ourselves as well. You know, things happen to us and we're like, why did that happen to me?

50:03 I'm a good person, I do this, I take care of people. I'm like, why why did it? It's it's not that fairness is irrelevant in this conversation. It always has been. But if you understand the idea of everything, the idea that I kind of lived my life by, is everything happens for me, not to me, or through me not to me. That changes the perspective of living so much, so rapidly, because if you believe everything that's a struggle or something happens to you is an opportunity for growth. And it could be something as simple as dubbing a toe, or it could be something as losing a loved one in everything in between. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. That's a growth experience and that makes

50:59 sense to me because there's nobody walking the earth that doesn't have struggle. That's what this place is built for.

51:07 Yes, I think that's very well said. And if there was nothing good that could come out of struggle, then wouldn't wouldn't God just want to get rid of struggle right entirely, otherwise it doesn't seem doesn't seem fair at all. Swedenborg calls it divine providence that the to me threw me that you're talking about, where he says, and this is something I've really that's really come in handy for me in dark times in my life, is that everything, even though things certainly are going to be pain can be painful and can be demoralizing and confusing and unfair in all of their ways. There's nothing at all that's allowed that good will not come out of eventually, or that will not ultimately lead to good. So I've had

51:51 I've had difficult things happen to me, but even I can look back in some cases my initial depression period that I was talking about. Without that, I don't know if I would have gotten into spirituality as much as I have. I did have when I was When I was six, my sister died in a car accident. I think that I think that that was the moment when I was like, we got to fix this life thing, you know, like this is this is not good enough, this is not okay. Right. So I think that in the picture that Swedenborg paints when you get to the other side, like there's certain certain stuff that's temporary and certain stuff that's eternal. So the pain that I go through is temporary, but the lesson I learn is eternal,

52:34 or the growth that I go through it stays forever. So in the end, let's say somebody has this really difficult childhood, but they grow up to be someone who becomes then an advocate for the welfare of children, which is always how it goes. It's always somebody who had something difficult, right about Bill Wilson and alcoholic holics, anonymous, whoever it is, they struggle with it, and then they come out and do this great good. The fire they have and the understanding of human beings and how they suffer and how they need to be cared for, and the difference between what's good or not good to be done to a person that stays with you forever. So anytime I go through something the way Swedenborg describes it,

53:12 there's a couple of things that might be happening with it. One is I could be learning. Contrast, if I learn the difference between what is good and or what is right and safe and anything that's positive. If I know what isn't, then I'm so much happier in the positive when it comes. It could be for the sake of freeing me from my own ego. If I had just set out in my career, for example, and everything had just always gone completely right all the time, I would be absolutely I'll be so full of myself, I'll be so self centered, and those things you never have to break.

53:48 But it's been the difficult things in my life that make me say, okay, okay, maybe I don't have to be better than every other person. Maybe we can all just be a big family together. I really think that that's the way, the essential way that you grow s. So sometimes hard things allow that to happen. And sometimes Swedenborg talks about how in Providence he has this phrase evils have to be seen before they can be removed.

54:12 So sometimes I have to either personally, I have to like blow up at someone and to realize, well, I've got a problem, Like I got a problem, and I got to get at that. But in society, when tragic things happen, don't we point back and say, well, we're now We're never going to let that happen again. We are going to come together and make sure that that we now we understand this thing that maybe was just tolerated in there. Now we know that's not good. We're not going to let that happen. So I do. I love what you're saying about things almost almost things happen for a reason, but nothing can be going on that good can't come out of. I feel like that's one of the most powerful tools you can get.

54:52 I mean, that's so beautifully said as well, because I mean, look, if I wouldn't have almost made a twenty million dollar movie for a mobster when I was in my twenties and was my life threatened for a year and had post traumatic stress disorder for three years after it, and I wouldn't be doing the work that I'm doing now, which started with trying to help people prevent them to go through what I went through in the film industry, which then respawned into now spirituality. But without that, I'm not who I am without that event, right, So if you start taking these events out of your life, you start devoiding who you were. And you're absolutely right, by the way, when I was young, I had a lot of success, very early, made a lot of money, for

55:39 my age, and I was unjust could not be in the room with me. My ego was so out of control. I was an I mean it was I think I was still a sweet guy, but I was just so into my It was just so Finally, the universe, God, whatever you want to call it, just said okay, it's time. And the pounding starts little by little until it just starts getting harder and harder to all of a sudden you look around, You're like, am I almost bankrupt? That I had my life threatened for a year? Like what what's going on? Like I don't even know when to get out of my house anymore? Like it was, it was that, But you need those those things because those were the lessons I needed to learn, because if not, I would have never been a useful part of society,

56:26 useful for myself, useful for my family. I would have a family an ego like that would not allow to get her father. Can you imagine when you were like twenty, like to just be like, oh, I must sacrifice for this thing or this creature that I don't even know.

56:45 Yeah, stop messing with my five flow here? Yeah, I mean, I mean.

56:49 For the first what is it the first I would say, the first month of my of having kids. They destroyed you mental life, men physically.

56:58 But it was so gary. When it got to be like six or seven o'clock, it started to get dark, you know, in the evening, and I remembered, like, oh, we're not going to sleep it all tonight. I forgot. Well, it was like the day was so fun, We're not going to sleep this entire night.

57:12 And you know what the funny thing is is that I would just look and I was just like be upset at them. I'm like, you know what, Like, I don't even know you. You're destroying my poor wife. I'd known her for years. I don't know you. They don't give you eye contact, they don't acknowledge your existence, but they just want and want and want. And then the day is respectful, very disrespectful and newborns. But then the day comes when they connect with your eyes and they smile at you, and then you're done, and then it's over and you've now for me. I mean, of course I'd love my children from the moment they were born, but dude, the beating that you get for that first thirty days, but when they finally connect with your eyes.

57:55 I just remember that moment so clearly they look at you, they acknowledge your existence. Yeah, and then they smiled, and I'm like, damn.

58:04 It, ah right, you got me, you got I'm in it for life. So thank you for sharing a couple of, you know, important moments from your life. And I just see what we were just talking about so clearly in there, Like if you if your babies had not put you through that boot camp before that, would that eye contact have meant what it meant? Would you still have the bond that you have right now? That's like comparison, Like I know what it's like to be doing all this for somebody that that maybe like doesn't have the same return.

58:31 But then I really get how special it is that if there's a human in there looking out at me, but also your your story about your early success and your ego. You from how you're talking, you wouldn't have wanted to still be that guy. Wouldn't rather be that guy than this if you just kept succeeding the whole time.

58:48 So because now you have this depth to you, you understand like you've been on the other side of there's a lot of people who want to have what you had, which is I want to be successful and I want to have fame. But you can come and tell people here's the reality of it, and the depth that you gained and the understanding of what's right and wrong that you have that in you forever, Like that's always going to be a part of your spirit and it's well worth.

59:09 Like I wouldn't wish the pain you were talking about in those three years after the guy threatened you and the money going down, Like I don't think. I don't think God or anyone is like, haha, look what's happened to you? But I just know there's this treasure that comes out on the other side, which is like a human being that understands something about love. Right.

59:25 And I think Jim Carrey is who I want to get on my show one day. I'll call him up.

59:32 I can you call it Jim up?

59:33 I appreciate that. No, But what he said, so he said this statement and it just was so rank so true, goes I wish everyone on the planet could have everything they ever wanted, because so they would know that it means nothing because he's literally a guy got all his dreams. Yeah, super rich. One of the most famous human beings on the planet, was making people laughed, did what he wanted to do, had power, have fame, had money, had every luxury or of the flesh and of the money and physical material. And then at a certain point he said, this means nothing, and you could start seeing him switch and he's like, now he's become who he's becoming. He's an artist now. And I think he's semi retired, if not retired from acting because he's like, I don't I'm good.

1:00:27 I don't need to keep doing this anymore. That is such a powerful lesson. But I could tell you that and you'd be like, that sounds philosophical. Yes, he's lived it, and that's the part that we're talking about. You have to go through it yourself. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show, right.

1:00:54 I think how many kids I remember being at whatever, like thirteen and being all in secure and just thinking, Yeah, if I was just super famous, super rich, super talented and everything, that would fix it all, that would fix it all. Like that, that's the only there's one problem with life. It's I'm not that. Let me get that.

1:01:11 And for Jim Carrey to have gone through what he went through and to be able to say, credibly, think about how many kids he can help now, to be like, listen, there, Yes, we have a sort of a hole in us that we're trying to fill, but that's not this this sort of ego dream coming true doesn't feel that it actually literally doesn't fill that hole. Then that points us to how can it really be full? Because you want everybody to be as happy as they think they would be if they got all their ego dream. You want everyone to feel full, and you want everyone to feel comforted and like they're connected and they're part of something. That's why I'm excited about Sweden Morgan's spirituality is because I think it slowly uncovers the reality of a world in

1:01:50 which everybody can win together, rather than there's a couple winners. The truth the truth set you're.

1:01:56 Free and I look and I've had the pleasure of speaking to some as the winners and having deeper conversations with them about what had happened after He's like they like said always the common thing was like it's cool for a little bit. At the end of the day, it just turns into something you put on a shelf. Yeah, and you know, one guy's like, I don't pay for lunches anymore. You know, I haven't paid for a lunch in eight years in this in Hollywood because everybody wants to buy me lunch because I'm still an Oscar winner.

1:02:27 But overall it doesn't mean a whole lot. It's just you know, and but the thing is that so many actors and so many people in that industry, that's the pinnacle, and they think that'll fill the hole. Oh, once I win the Oscar, I'm good for the rest of my life. Or I win the super Bowl, I'm good, or I win the Masters, I'm perfect. Everything will be perfect. It's not about the destination. It's always about the journey.

1:02:56 And that there's a that's the sort of hollow promise of self centeredness. It's like, if I'm going to focus on myself and I get myself to the place where myself wants to be, there's nothing actually to that. Whereas Swedenborg what he discovered and saw played out in the spiritual world. It's funny because his books are yes, they're this travelogue through heaven and hell and world of spirits and everywhere, but that always comes back down to basic human psychology. What we care about that actually, the only thing that is fulfilling is doing things that make everybody happy, make the human race better. When you think the good of everyone, that's something you can you can never have achieved enough. You think I did that great thing made

1:03:44 these people happy. I want to get out and do it more that. That is what he calls heaven, because that's something that can get bigger and better forever. And the more that you win at that, the more the rest of us win, rather than it being a zero sum game. Because the more that you're doing your thing and helping the world, I get helped by you. The more that I'm helping the world, I help you. And it's this positive feedback loop. And it's actually just like the human body, like we're talking about before, the way Heaven is organized. The healthier you're spleeing is, that's better news for the brain. The healthier the brain is, it's better news for the elbow. It's not like one of them is like I can't believe that the right foot

1:04:16 gets so much attention Without either one, you're going to fall down. So that that's anybody like we're talking about before, kid in the congo, person born into privilege. Everyone's got the human body. They can see right there. That's kind of the map of the destination, you know, right in front of you.

1:04:33 And that's such a powerful idea because if you understand that you need to help that kid in the congo or that other person on the other side of the world somewhere that's not right in front of you, that's your left foot over there. You know that is your left foot, and you know the person up in Sweden is your eye. And you have to put it all together, and you have to help everyone together, because if you don't all work together, like the body, then the body breaks down. Then we all start to break down. And I think that's where I'm hoping that that's where we're starting to go with this awakening that is happening around the world. I think you've probably seen it as well as I have, with our numbers and what people are

1:05:14 watching and things like that, and you specifically from twenty ten to now, I'm assuming things have gotten better. More people are more interested in these ideas, are just curious about spirituality and deeper questions than they were before, and are opened.

1:05:29 For this off I think that. I was surprised right away and how interested in spirituality people were, how independent they were, that they were, that they were willing to take that journey, and how many people had had some kind of spiritual experience themselves, but also just how willing people are to work on the spiritual path. It's been like a good dream the past ten years. I didn't ever think this many people will be interested, and it absolutely changes the way I think about humanity. When I think out there, I just I think, oh, there's so many people maybe don't hear about on the news, but they're living good lives. They're doing their little good things, and if you knew any one of them, you could

1:06:12 fall in love with them. I absolutely think that there's way more good out there than we usually see.

1:06:19 Now, there's one thing I wanted to talk to you real quick because on your YouTube channel, you what you did a video called the Reunions, the five types of reunions you get in the air. Can you just to touch on those, because I thought that was fascinating.

1:06:30 Getting to see someone who's you thought was dead but they're still alive. On the other side, I know, like recently my grandma died, who was really close to and when she did, I started to feel like, man, like I almost know more people on that side than here now, or there's really starting to be a gravity shift that since I do think our consciousness survives, and I think that those people are still alive there, and I think we get to go see them, I'm starting to get excited.

1:06:57 I feel like I can't wait to see all these people and see how they're doing, and what do they look like now? What are they up to now? So I just think, and I've had a concept of afterlife my whole life. I think somebody who maybe even didn't and thought had just given up hope they'd ever see their wife again, to get reunited like that, that is the coolest thing in the world. And Sweenborg describes this, he doesn't He's as I said, it's very he is a man of the Enlightenment, very practical minded. So he'll he'll describe it in terms that aren't that sensational life.

1:07:27 So it'll say people were overjoyed see their friends again, and their friends overjoyed that they had come back, which you don't get the kind of richness and depth to getting some NDE experiences. But he talks about not only people reuniting with each other, but the means to which by which, because of the nature of the spiritual world, you can really be made whole and reconnect and uncover things that you can't in the way that you're here.

1:07:52 The one particular scenario that he talks about and we covered in that episode, is he talks about a family where there had been two brothers, and one brother had died young and the other one had not. So by the time the whole family has lived through, the parents have died, the younger brother who was already in heaven, he was there. The older brother finally dies, and when he gets to the spiritual world, there was a little bit of tension between him and his family because this older brother had become really kind of a jerk, because he had become self centered and he i had always resented the attention his younger brother got, and that had kind of distanced him from his parents. And so it's this whole mess. But because their time and space are

1:08:33 not fixed in the same way, you can actually be and this is I guess a little reincarnation. E. You can be brought back into like younger stages of your life you can be brought back into a younger state of mind. And so because of that they were able to do this almost like processing session where the abrasive older son was brought back into being like ten or eleven years old, and he was able to just like say, like what he felt like wasn't fair, and it softened his parents' hearts and they really made his breakthrough. And his brother, who had died and had been at what Swemore would call an angel the whole time, was just so loving and accepting and like I, I, you know, all I want is for you to have all the

1:09:09 happiness I have. And the older brother just broke down, was crying, and it was this power of this stuff that had been hardened and calcified in life, and people didn't get along. It just melted away because in the spiritual world you can really get to what's important. So it's this touching scene of like the possibility of human reconnection.

1:09:28 That's beautiful. Now there's another thing that you talked about in your channel, which I think my audience was really interested in, is what happened immediately after Jesus Christ passed.

1:09:39 Yes, So Swedenborg is is fascinating in that there was a guy named Dt. Suzuki who was by a lot of people credited with bringing Zen Buddhism into the West. He was one of the early I think it was in the twenties. He was one of the early guys in that. But he wrote this book about Swedenborg which was called Buddha of the North because he felt like Swedenborg's material was so compatible to similar to compatible way and similar to Buddhism that he would say, look, this is this is like Buddhism from from the North.

1:10:14 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.

1:10:23 That So, even though Sweedenborg resonates with a lot of different things, he is uses a lot of Christian terminology and things that Christians thinks are important, like the Bible and particularly Jesus Christ he thought were of total importance. So he talks about Jesus is like the there's the unknowable divine that's infinite and you can't comprehend it, and Jesus is that divine saying hey, I'm going to get into a form that you you can give a hug to and you can understand. And so to him Jesus was absolutely important, not in the same way where you have to there's a lot of Christians to say you have to know the name of Jesus Christ and say it or else you get in trouble. But to him, Jesus Christ is love personified. So anybody who's living this

1:11:05 life of love really sort of knows Jesus, you could say, because you know the character. But so the advent of Jesus Christ, though on the earth, was really important spiritually. It was essentially God writing this balance that had gotten out of whack in the world. So many people were choosing the ego and violence, and it was just like destroying the whole spiritual environment and making it so people were really at risk of just the human mind being destroyed basically. And so Jesus Christ was this amazing phenomenon where he came back in to clear that up, teach people what love was. But even though you'd see some stories in the Gospels, there was this huge spiritual meaning to everything that he was doing. So after Jesus Christ

1:11:53 got crucified, it wasn't according to Swedenborg, it wasn't like you get in I guess Catholic, I'm not sure and other doctrines where there's a father go God was angry at the human race, and so Jesus Christ is a sacrifice that appeases the anger of Father God, which I have some issues with it.

1:12:09 Yeah, it's a couple there's a couple holes in that plot.

1:12:12 Yeah, exactly exactly. I'm not sure about the motivation, not believable character so but but yeah.

1:12:18 But just in general, that God's angry alone is a problem.

1:12:22 One of the first one of the first videos that I made is called why God Can't Get angry? And it just was just a simple thought experiment that was we were just talking about babies earlier, and you think about the you getting angry grows proportionately more ridiculous and humiliating the less powerful that person is compared to you.

1:12:46 So if if like you and I are about peers and we bump into each other's cars and we're mad at each other, it's still like, you don't want to blow up like that, But it's not the same as if there's a little kid or even a baby, and you're like, I hate you your little baby, because the baby has no power, doesn't know what it's doing. You're so much more cognitively adapted. So for God, let's take that and prank it up to infinity. For God to get angry at me at Curtis, who like barely knows, like like I like, oh, where's my keys? I can't find my keys, Like I don't know anything compared to God.

1:13:19 And you're in an EVA.

1:13:22 I'm in AIVA best case scenario. And for God to get mad at me, like, you've really triggered me. There, I'm mad at you.

1:13:29 That's triggered. That's amazing. All right. So you were saying, so let's go back to Jesus Christ.

1:13:35 I'm just saying. Sweden Works has as a as a line in his book True Christianity where he says it's it's impossible for God to even look at us with a frown, all right, because to do that would be against assassins. Okay, So so Jesus is that's not the truth. Is not to appease the anger of God. Jesus Christ is there to save us from ourselves because we are just unmasked choosing the things that are destructive. So that it wasn't just you can't just take the physical world in isolation, because there's people in the spiritual world and people in the physical world. So not only was everyone the physical world is like downstream from the spiritual world.

1:14:12 So one of the reasons why everyone here was getting so callous and cruel is because that's the way it was going in the spiritual world. So many people were there were choosing the same kind of thing. So Jesus was having to go in and set everything in order and get it because again, even the worst person who's doing the worst things to people, still God is not mad at them. God does not feel like I hate you and near my enemy. But he is going to say I have to you have to go over here, because if you're here, you're harming other people, and that's harming you like that is getting you more entrenched in the evils that you've decided to grab onto. So we had to take like this master kind of sorting and

1:14:54 take these people, put them, put everything in order so that people can't harm each other, and that there's freedom restored, so people can choose spiritually. There's this whole complex process that Swedenborg describes over many many books of what was going on there, but essentially it was to create balance again so that we would have the freedom to choose what we want to do and what we want to love and who we want to be, because that's essential.

1:15:18 You can never choose anything good if you don't have a free choice. Because you think about love. If anyone says, hey, let's love me or else, there's no love there, like it has to be freely chosen. If you say to your kids, like you have to visit me, it's not you know, it doesn't work. So so the nature of love is that it can only happen when both parties are free to accept it. So people have to have the choice to love what's good or not. And that was that was going to go away if Jesus didn't make a move right then. So it was kind of like the last ditched effort. But it really worked, my friend.

1:15:54 I could talk to you for another two three hours with that question. Man, But I'm gonna ask you if your questions, ask all my guests, what is your definition of living a fulfilled life?

1:16:04 Being useful, being useful, and really organizing your life around how can I be useful? And I would say I've watched in myself the desire might sort of ego turn into it. I'm slowly turning into a desire for usefulness. I can see it when things are starting, the good that I do starting to matter more than how I come off. Even before this interview, I was like, well, I was feeling like, I hope I don't screw this up.

1:16:29 I hope I sound like I know what I'm talking about. But what I'll say now is like, Okay, well I hope some good comes out of this. And I'll say like a little prayer and I'll say like, just like, help free me from my concern for the ego so that I can just get in there. And I know somebody's gonna be watching this and get something positive out of it. Let me think about them so I feel like I can see myself. And then the more I can move my life to support that, I've started to like go running and those kinds of things so that I can have a clearer mind so that I can do this better. The more I put the different part of my life around usefulness, that's fulfilling. I think to have people to which you want to pursue their happiness,

1:17:07 so I think about we're talking about building up houses and trying to get them better. I do that now, But like what's exciting to me a lot of the time is like, I know my wife would love that, Like if we were if we could have that, my wife would think that was really cool. So so to be able to do things for people, Yeah, that plus usefulness and then not but not trying to go too hardcore on the spirituality. Don't think I'm going to be spiritual every single minute and I'm only gonna be reading Vedic text in a cave my whole because I like, man, I gotta play man. The news Elda game came out, I gotta be playing that. You know, I gotta be go go do some rock climbing, Like, there's other stuff I need to be doing because I'm a I'm a

1:17:50 spiritual and a physical being at the same time, so I got to take care of that physical side. I just can't let it lead things.

1:17:56 What advice would you give your younger self if you could go back.

1:17:58 In time, Relax and don't don't try to hang on to stuff so much. I used to think I could just like ring anything like if I'm thinking this, I'll change this and we'll do that. Don't do that. Don't do that, and don't worry about don't worry about all that stuff. Just just trust the process, I say, trust the process. You're fine. Where I am now is good and I didn't get here because I engineered it or something.

1:18:22 Just trust the process. He'll be Okay.

1:18:24 How do you define God? God?

1:18:26 So God is love and love is love is human, so that everything that I strive to try to become is to try to imitate and emulate that humanity and the thing that I recognize and other people that I love, that that is all kind of a reflection of this this God, who is is a person, is somebody that I can love like I love other people. And I don't know. I don't have the clearest picture of everything that he's like, but sometimes I get this sense of like, Okay, there's my hero. Like that, that's my hero, and I'm gonna try to like do what would make him proud.

1:19:02 And I really believe he's trying to make the world better. So it's it's kind of like this this thing I can be inspired to follow and know that ultimately eventually I'm gonna be living very intimately with God in whatever way that is. But it's sort of looking forward to that time.

1:19:19 And what is the ultimate purpose of life.

1:19:22 The ultimate purpose to life is to create a world in which everybody is cared for in every way they need to be cared for, and to take joy in doing that. We would all be in this state where it's like, no, we're not happy unless every kid has got a table of friends to sit with, everybody's got their health, and just the effort toward that, the constant effort toward that. That is I can't think of anything better.

1:19:51 And where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing in the world.

1:19:54 Sir on YouTube dot com, slash off the left eye. You search Swedenborg on YouTube. You'll get there.

1:20:00 Dude.

1:20:00 That's a great place to start. We've got a ton of videos with this and if you just leave a comment or anything like that, we can direct you anywhere you need to go.

1:20:06 And do you have any final words for our audience?

1:20:09 Well, I want to say thanks to you for not only having me on, but for pursuing what you're pursuing. And from the conversations I've seen you having, I feel like you've got a good heart and you're like setting a good example to people. The people that's watching will.

1:20:25 Be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

1:20:36 Everything is going to be okay. I mean that's what I found out in my life and the work that you're doing to pursue spirituality, which is why you're watching this channel, that it means a lot. It's not going to waste. There's been times when I felt like it doesn't even matter, but it totally matters. Keep going, not just me, but even even there's like angels on the other side cheering for you, like you got this, you can do it. Keep going. So I would say, keep going, URTIs Man.

1:20:59 I appreciate you for being on the show and this great conversation and for the amazing work you're doing in the world Bey front. Keep it up, and I appreciate you man.

1:21:06 Thanks for having me. That was so fun.

1:21:10 Thank you for spending this sacred time with us today. If you feel called to explore this conversation further, you'll find the show notes for this episode at Next levelsoul dot com. Forward slash two nine seven and if your soul is craving an even deeper journey, step into Next Level Soul TV, our streaming sanctuary for spiritual films, documentaries, original shows, guided meditations, channeling sessions, audiobooks, and transformative teachings.

1:21:37 It's a space created to support your awakening, you're healing, and your return to the truth of who you really are. Begin your journey at Next levelsoul dot tv. Until next time, Keep expanding, keep seeking, and keep walking your path towards the next level of your soul.