Standing Nowhere: Why Clinging to Any Belief (Even Atheism) Keeps You Trapped

I reached a point where not existing seemed more appealing than existing. That's a sad state of mind. But something shifted—a paradigm inside me changed everything. Now I'm under just as much stress (maybe more), but I have space inside. Joy. Elation. Enough energy to carve out time for this podcast. How does someone go from daydreaming about a car taking them out to feeling this alive?

This episode is about standing nowhere—not clinging to any rigid concept about reality, whether that's "God is a man with a beard in the sky" or "the universe is random meaningless chaos." Both are concepts. Both trap you. When you stand on a concept, it's got you by the balls, dragging you through the mud, forcing you to interpret everything through that filter.

Here's what loosened the soil for me: You are not separate from the universe. You ARE the universe. An apple tree produces apples; the universe produces people. You can't separate the two. Your body is material. Your mind is the universe expressing itself as you. When you describe your feelings, you're describing the universe. So it's objectively incorrect to call the universe "cold, unfeeling, random, stupid"—because you are none of those things. You are intelligent. You feel love. You came out of the Big Bang, so your potentiality was already there.

Featuring Alan Watts on "you are the universe waving" (the ocean isn't separate from the wave), Genesis as poetry about ego birth (Eve biting the apple = the moment humans could differentiate "this from that," creating the illusion of separation), Jesus' "I am" statements pointing to shared being ("before Abraham was, I am"), the pathetic fallacy being itself a fallacy (depends on illusory separation), opposites creating each other (you can't have up without down, being without non-being, life without death), the stick metaphor (mind abstracts two ends but there's just the stick), Lao Tzu on wu-wei (not forcing, not striving), Paul on "I die to self daily," and faith vs belief (openness vs clinging to rigid ideas).

We discuss: why church attendance is declining (rigid concepts drive people away), "love thy neighbor AS thyself" (not LIKE yourself—because you ARE them), why helping others feels like otherworldly joy (you're not separate from them), Genesis' "knowledge of good and evil" as Hebrew idiom meaning "knowledge of everything" (the ability to differentiate/classify), "Who told you you were naked?" meaning "Who told you you were separate?", why cause and effect are illusory (just one thing flowing), the yin-yang (you can't have known without unknown), and "standing nowhere" as standing NOW-HERE.

If you're a Christian who threw out the faith, a nihilist convinced everything's meaningless, or someone who senses these traditions all point to something but can't see past the contradictions—this one's for you. Let go of rigid concepts. Use them as exit ramps off the NASCAR ring of perpetual clinging. Come to your breath. Stand nowhere with me.

Closing with Alan Watts: "Faith is a state of openness or trust...the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

Transcript

All right. Episode two, y'all, of the Standing Nowhere podcast. I'm your host, Jacob Buehler. I'm happy to be back with you. I'm still learning how to do this. Like I said in episode one, I don't know what I'm doing.

Man! And I want to be real. Gosh darn it. I want to talk about things that you guys... want to hear and things that I want to share. The reason I'm doing this podcast, like I said in episode one, I reached a point in my life where the idea of not existing was more appealing than existing. And that's a sad state of mind to be in.

I'm sure some of you listening can relate. Life is tough. It can be tough. And when we have a paradigm shift inside, it can change everything. And that's what happened with me. And I just want to share it.

Honestly, if I can get one person to reach out to me and say, wow, you really helped me. I would feel complete. I could stop recording and end the podcast right then and there, just one person. So please, somebody message me so I can stop doing this. No, I want to help as many people as possible, of course. So what happened with me, for me to go to a place where I was kind of daydreaming a little bit about a car taking me out to relieve my stress to the point where I'm still under just as much stress, if not more now, and yet I have a space inside of me and more happiness and joy, elation, and I want to share it with people, and I'm finding time to carve out time to do a podcast about it and share it with people.

What happened How does somebody get to that And I was raised in a standard Christian household, pretty vanilla mainstream understanding of Christianity. And it got me through a lot of things in life. But at a certain point, my understanding and my conceptual understanding of what I thought was God, it was not doing it for me. And there's a lot of people nowadays who are leaving the faith. Church attendance seems to be down, and I'm not poking fun at Christians or Christianity. I wanted to dive into the concept of this episode because I spent the week, this last week, thinking about what I was going to talk about, and I ended up originally thinking I was going to talk about decision-making.

How do we make decisions Where do decisions come from That started leading into free will, and then the concept of grace, and And I liked it, but I started making an outline that was like almost three pages. And I'm like, there's no way I can read on this. I did a little practice recording and it sounded so scripted and robotic. And yet I still have the nerve, the nervousness and the heebie-jeebies inside of me right now. I want to share a perspective with you that I find incredibly refreshing and that you might as well. I am not here to sell you anything or convert you to anything or... anything like that, honestly.

I just want to share my perspective because it's brought me a lot of joy in my life. [PAUSE] It's a perspective shared by many, many people in the world, especially in the East. It does not nullify at all what perspective you may have right now. If anything, it may strengthen it. But [PAUSE] this is really... going to get to the heart and meat and potatoes of this episode because we all have concepts about the origins of the universe, of ourselves, of our lives, and those concepts can feel real. Like I mentioned in the first episode, there's the word clap and then there's the And they're two completely different things. The word clap is a vibration through the air that your ears hear and then your brain deciphers and it points to something in reality.

Words, symbols, letters, things like that. These are concepts that we take for real and we confuse the forest for the trees. We confuse the menu for the dinner. I have a lot of Christian friends who love the smell of their own Bible and the look of it, and look how many highlights I've got in mine, and earmarked corners I've got in mine. It's almost like, I guess it is idolatry in a way. You're idolizing Scripture.

And I'm going to be talking about all the various traditions on this podcast, not just Christianity, not just Judaism, but also Islam, and especially the mystics like the Sufis, the Christian mystics, Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta, Taoism. I'm more interested in the common themes that they all share because one of the reasons that people in our time today throw the baby out with the bathwater is because they look at it from a simple, I'm painting with a broad brush here, I'm not trying to say this is what you think or what people think, but generally speaking, and I hope you guys can agree with me, there are some people turned off by the notion of spirituality or religion or anything of that nature non-material, essentially, or what we classify as material, because there's so many of them, and they all say what we think as different things, which one is right, which one is wrong, or it's just a coping mechanism to deal with the facts of life, that everything is, if you follow the nihilist concept of the universe, that everything is random and stupid and dumb, and that your life here is for a flash, and then you're gone forever. Even though you came out of that void, you know, we're afraid to go back to it. And we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about that. Let's talk about that.

Because I mentioned in the first episode, I got feedback from friends and family that when I mentioned... I think it was towards the end, I said, if you believe that God is a man with a beard and a chair in the sky, this podcast is for you. And I said, if you're a nihilist that thinks the universe is random billiard balls or energy bumping into each other and that it's all pointless, a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, to quote Shakespeare, I think that was Macbeth, whatever your concept is, that's fine, because I want to talk to you. Because I'm not an apologist for any particular belief and that's what I want this episode to be about, in fact, is the title of this podcast. The title is Standing Nowhere. standing nowhere. That's a metaphor for concepts, because if you're standing on a concept, it's got you by the balls.

And that concept is going to drag you through the mud, and you're going to have to look through everything through that concept. Have you ever heard apologetics in various faiths try to explain things I've heard people say the weirdest things. There was like a a water bubble around the world, and then God popped it, and that's why we don't live 900 years anymore. I've heard just all kinds of things, even the most prevalent concept of atonement, that we were all born sinners, we don't deserve love, we don't deserve God. But, oh, thankfully, somebody came to reconcile, if you will. When people hear that in 2025, they're like, look, I didn't ask to be born.

I didn't choose to be born. I didn't decide to be born. That was part of the decisions episode that I was going to mention. We don't make a lot of the decisions we think we do. In fact, we make none of them, but that's another story. Well, I'll talk about that in this episode.

But To say to someone, if you believe this, you'll get X. If you believe the same thing I do, then you will go to a place of eternal bliss and joy forever and ever and ever. But you've got to make that decision in the short lifespan you have. What's the average lifespan 72 years for somebody in the U. S. So in 72 years, you've got to decide, do I believe in this or not And if I do, I get eternity.

So maybe the first million years, I'll play volleyball. The next million years, I'll go snowboarding. The next billion years, I'll, you know, the concept itself is a little weird, right It's really not biblical. If you look in the Bible, you don't really see much speaking, you know, much on the topic of heaven or hell. And I'm going to do a whole episode on heaven and hell. And that's another thing.

If I'm supposed to decide to believe in something, can I really say that I did it in an unbiased manner with a gun to my head saying, believe this or else you're going to go down there to this bad place of fire and burn forever Or modern apologists will say, well... It's not quite literally fire. It's more like annihilation or separation. There's all kinds of apologists about everything. And it's all because we hold these concepts and we cling to them. We stand on them and say, this is right.

And let me explain why, because I know it sounds crazy, but da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And then people are like, you know what I'm sorry, but no. I don't believe. And this podcast is not just about Christianity. I've been learning about all the various spiritual traditions throughout history. Taoism, you know, by Lao Tzu, the I Ching, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the various traditions there, like the Theravada, the Mahayana, the Vajrayana, and in Christianity, like Judaism, which branched off eventually into Christianity and Islam, and the various mystic versions of it.

Like in Judaism, you have the Kabbalah. In Christian mysticism, you have great thinkers like Meister Eckhart St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, or more recent times like Thomas Merton, wonderful thinkers that are not talked about or even people are aware of in the public eye outside of the mainstream thinkers. And in Islam, they have the wonderful Sufi tradition and poets like Rumi. I mean, just wonderful stuff that I had never, ever heard of. I had never been aware of.

And Learning about all this, I started to notice there was common threads and they weren't just similar. They were saying the exact same thing in different language. These were people from different time periods that spoke different languages like Sanskrit or Pali or Hindi and I apologize if I'm... I'm mispronouncing some of these, you know, but the Arabic languages or, you know, in English thinkers, you know. So that was the motivation for me to start the podcast, you know, the transformation inside of me, embodying these practices because spirituality nowadays has kind of been reduced to like a weekly car wash where you go to a place for a week, you feel better about yourself. Like I went, it's over, let's get back to life.

It's almost like this thing that... is something you don't want to do, but you know it's good for you type thing instead of something that you're excited about and on fire about. And it doesn't mean that you have to like change your life or drastically alter things or drop things or become a monk or an ascetic. It's something that will change you just where you are. Because the title of this podcast, Standing Nowhere, is metaphorical. It is referring to standing on a concept. So I'm saying with the title Standing Nowhere, don't stand on any concept.

Don't lean on any concept. I don't know what I'm going to call this episode, but essentially the idea behind it is that you don't want to lean on a fixed idea. of what we call this mystery of life. There are definitely things that point to it. Like when I say clap, that word points to, like we talked about in episode one. But clap is not in the same way that the Bible is the menu and the dinner is the spiritual fruits that you experience in day-to-day life. For example, Jesus, when they asked him, how will they know we are your disciples Some of you listening may know the answer.

He said, they will know you are my disciples by the love that you have for one another. He didn't say they'll know you're my disciple by the bumper sticker you have. How many times do you see Jesus bumper stickers Like you need Jesus. Do you follow Jesus this closely It's like an identity. There's that movie with, I think it's Lindsay Lohan. It's called Saved or Faith.

I forget the name of it, but it's like these younger girls who all identify as Christian and they're trying to be holier than thou. We're all familiar with that concept, holier than thou. And that's when these spiritual truths or knowledge become concepts that we lean on, that we identify with. I'm a Christian, and everyone that doesn't believe what I believe is on the out group, because the in group creates the out group. So we have this situation where church attendance is on the decline. And Jesus, if you want to quote him again from the Bible, said, you will know the quality of the tree by the fruit it produces.

I'm paraphrasing, but he said, look at the results. What is the result of what you are doing or believing Well, we can see that it's on the decline. And I don't say that to point at the modern interpretations of what Jesus said in a negative way at all. In fact, Everything that I've learned over these last three years has strengthened my faith. But there's a difference between faith and belief. And this is where a lot of times the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, if I can use that reference again.

Because when you tell people that God is a man and Jesus is his only son, And you, well, you don't deserve his love, but luckily you're going to get it. You're, to quote Paul, adopted. We are children of God by adoption. It has this exclusive tone to it, whereas I believe... that Jesus, when he came, was trying to say that we are all sharing in this divine nature, an inclusive message. That's the good news. That's what gospel means.

So people that hold this nihilist theory that everything is meaningless and random, they're leaning on a concept as well. That's not reality. That's a concept that you have in your mind about the way things are, that things are random, and that we somehow magically popped out of that randomness, and here we are. However, that is not the fault of any individual or the result of science, I believe the Christian quote-unquote church throughout the millennia and the centuries is most responsible for this. Because look at the dark history of the church that really grabbed these concepts and ran with them and solidified them and made them law. I mean, these are people that would tie you to a stake and burn you alive in front of people for your own good, in the attitude of, you know, this is hard for us to watch.

It's going to hurt us more than it hurts you. It's for your own good. And I'm not saying churches obviously think that way now, obviously. Last I checked, I haven't seen any burnings, but there are people who do things, crazy things, extreme things, in the name of these concepts that they hold. And
So standing nowhere, how do we let go of concepts Because you'll always see this theme of letting go. Let go.

Be still. Stop striving across all the traditions. In the tradition of Taoism, which comes from the Chinese, it is emphasizes Lao Tzu. He is the one that wrote a book called the Tao Te Ching, which roughly translates as the book of the way. The Tao means the way, the way things are like the water course. If you watch water, flow down a mountain, it has a flow to it, a path, a path of least resistance.

And they have this concept called wu-wei, which is not forcing, not striving. And that's the same concept in Christianity or in Judaism, where it says, be still and know that I'm God. Be still was a translation in the 1600s from the King James Version, but that is equally understood in modern language today as cease striving, to let go. The concept is always to let go. And even if you ask, even with the mainstream version of Christianity as they understand it conceptually today, the emphasis is always resting into salvation. Jesus says, my burden is light, my yoke is easy.

You don't have to do anything to to earn it. You can't do anything. beliefs are more like the clinging or attachment to an idea that you have about something. So if you if you deep down believe in your mind that the universe is random and you're a product of that randomness, that's a belief. For example, let's shake that concept up a little bit. Let's loosen that soil. For you to say that the universe, or believe that the universe is dumb and random, And really believe that because there's people listening to me right now that might think that.

Whether you think you're a Christian or not, that could be in the back of your mind. There could be that fear or that could be a prominent belief. You might identify as somebody who believes that and that you say, I'm okay with it. That's just reality. I'm facing reality. I'm not afraid to admit it.

And all these people that believe in God or in afterlife, they're not ready to face that, but I am. And you can hear the hubris back in the 2000 thousands. There was a lot of snarky people online, oh, you believe in God, you know, and it was very disrespectful to everyone, you know, in both ways. Christians were equally oppressive to people online that didn't believe in God. But I don't want to get sidetracked with that. But the point is, let's say you have the concept in your mind of nihilism, that everything is random, and you came out of that randomness.

Now, let's look at that. For that belief to hold weight in your mind, you have to believe that you are indeed separate from the universe, that there's the universe and there's you. You're intelligent, the universe is dumb, and somehow you came out of it. But if you look at that closely, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever because you are are the universe. You are. Your body is the material world.

Your mind is the universe expressing itself in the form that is you. So all the thoughts and feelings that you have are as natural as the sun shining on a flower opening its petals, as a bee collecting honey, or as random asteroids in space. From your limited perspective, when you look out at the universe, it might look random because you are so small in this form. At least you think you are small. But let's look at another thing. Let's look at an ocean.

When an ocean has waves that come to the shore, do you look at the wave and say that wave is the wave and the ocean is the ocean and they're two separate things Of course not. You look at the wave and you say the ocean is waving. That's what the ocean does. But in that same way, you are are what the universe is doing. You are the universe waving. You are the universe looking at itself.

And that is as scientific and objective as you can possibly be. Unless you wanna tell me that you're not material matter and the universe is material matter and you're separate from it, you can make that case. But right now, we're looking at reality. You are made of material. You feel. You feel love, you feel hate, you feel... joy and elation, you feel sadness, and all of those feelings are as valid as anything else in this world.

Hurricanes, rocks, ants, the sun. When the Big Bang happened, your potentiality was already there. So what can we learn about the universe So we look at it always in one direction. The Big Bang exploded, it's a bunch of randomness, and out of the randomness, out of infinite, not infinite, but out of immense possibility, you came out of it. But see, right there, we're separating it again. We're saying, I am me, and I came out of it.

But in the same way, to invoke Alan Watts here, he points out an apple tree produces apples. in the same way a universe produces people. You can't separate the two. Your potentiality was always there from the beginning. So when you describe yourself and your own feelings, you are describing the universe. So it is objectively incorrect to say that the universe is a cold, unfeeling, random, stupid place because you are none of those things. You are intelligent.

You have intelligence. You have emotion and feeling. There's something in philosophy, I think it's in philosophy, called the... the pathetic fallacy, which is where we sort of impose our anthropomorphous, anthropological views onto things. Like when you see the moon and it makes you feel kind of warm, like it's looking back at you, we say you're projecting human feelings onto something that's non-human. Or when you look at, or when you, let's say you hear the wind and it has a creepy sound like... And then you say, oh, it's just the wind.

The pathetic fallacy says, well, you're projecting human feeling onto something. But the pathetic fallacy itself is a fallacy because that pathetic fallacy depends on the illusory separation of you from the universe. You are the universe looking at itself, right Do you see how we're already, like this, I hope for a lot of people will loosen the soil a little bit if you are firmly entrenched in this random idea of just pure randomness. It's not. On the flip side, it's not completely preordained either. See, this is where we get into the play of opposites and the play of polarity.

See, if you think of Everything in existence, your mind will always take a knife and cut it in half because that's how the brain and the mind view things, this from that. So if I say up, you'll always have that contrast of down. We view everything from contrast, black and white, hard and soft, long and short. These are two abstractions that are pointing to one thing. For example, if you remove up, down will also disappear with it. You cannot have up without down.

You cannot have hard without soft. Now, if you're thinking to yourself, well, Jake, I can visualize in my head hard or picture it in my head hardness, and then I can pretend to get rid of soft. No, you can't. Have you ever seen those brain games where they'll show you a picture and it'll say, look at these two shades of gray. Actually, they're the same shade. And then you're kind of like looking really hard at it.

I'll see if I can put a link in the description below. if you guys don't know what I'm talking about. But the brain, it sees things differently than they actually are. And if you guys know what I'm talking about, there's plenty of them where you can play tricks with the mind. And it's really mind bending because you're looking at these two shades of gray right next to each other and they look completely different to your eyes and your mind. But they'll kind of show the secret behind it and they'll show you a solid color gray next to it. They try to bend the perspective.

It's really hard to describe in words. You have to see it. So I'll put the link in the description. But it shows you is that what the mind is thinking it's seeing is not reality. So when I say up is contrasted from down, what I'm really saying is up and down are actually the same thing. They're two poles of the same...

They're two ends of the same pole. So let's look at another example, left and right. Left seems different from right, but you can't know what left is without its contrast right. Some of the bigger things that will... make you go, whoa, is the concept of being alive and being dead. You see, you cannot know what aliveness is unless you have the contrast of death, or more specifically, being and non-being. If you read the Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way from Lao Tzu, And this book is not some doctrinal book of wisdom.

It's a kitchen table wisdom. It's very simple. It's not meant to be a very tight thing. It gets you to play with the ideas that you've had in your head. It's like, hey, you've always thought this, but look how silly it is to think that. So in that same vein, high and low, as it says in that book, create each other, being and non-being create each other.

Really try to follow with me on this. If you cannot have being without non-being and they are one and the same, why are we so worried about death After all, where were you before you were born And if you say I was nowhere, And then I'm suddenly somewhere. Could you have been born if you had not been nowhere first You can't be born unless you were not alive yet. You see what I'm saying It may be tough to really describe this and really grasp this, but if you really take a moment to dive into these opposites and you'll see that they're not opposites, but they're one and the same thing. Another way to visualize it, Alan Watts gives a good example of this when he says, picture a stick. Now, in your mind, you can abstract one end of a stick and another end of the stick.

But reality is there is just the stick. That's it. There are no ends. They're not two separate ends that happen to meet in the middle at the occasion of a stick. There is just the stick. But the mind is able to abstract these two apparently separate things that are not separate at all.

Take this a step further. The idea of yourself and what is not yourself. Self and other are both equally illusory. They are in fact one thing. So what this means on a fundamental level is that you are not separate from everything else that is. You can abstract an artificial outline around your skin and say everything inside my skin is me and everything outside my skin is not me.

And eventually when I die, I will disappear and I will never be again. Complete fabrication of the mind. Completely. And it's this fear that you will suddenly not exist forever, that non-existence will triumph over existence. or being that drives people to do the craziest things in the world. There's a quote from Oppenheimer where he says, it's perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. And the only way that we might prevent it from doing so is to not try to prevent it from doing so.

Look at all the different countries in the world. They're all terrified that the world will end from nuclear war. So they have something called MAD, which is Mutually Assured Destruction. So essentially, if a country gets nuclear weapons, you can't mess with that country because they can end the world if they want to by initiating a nuclear war. Everyone's so afraid of it. Consider the concept of us and them.

These gangsters, they drew lines in the sand and said, this is our country, that's your country, but you wouldn't know what you meant by, say, America unless you knew what was not America. But your brain does this instantaneously and without you noticing it. That's why there's so many people trying to point out that we're all one, that we share this world. Michael Jackson, we are the world. And you ever notice too that the idea of a separate self, that you are separate from everyone else, is naturally in our own instinctual wisdom frowned upon. When I say the word selfish, do positive things come to mind What about selfless, no self Good things come to mind, right And you'll notice when you are selfish and you keep more for yourself than you need from others, you don't feel good.

That material gain doesn't feel good. And what did Jesus say when that rich man asked him, I want to be as holy as possible, tell me what to do. And he told the rich man, sell everything. everything you own and give your money to the poor. And of course, he meant keep enough for yourself to survive. Don't put yourself in a destitute situation, but get rid of everything. And what do you feel when you help someone You get a feeling of the most immense...

In Buddhism, they call it an otherworldly joy because it's not from the material world. When you help someone in need, you get... a wonderful, joyous, beyond pleasure. It's just pure joy by helping someone else because you're not separate from that person. That's you. To use more specific language, when Jesus was asked in the New Testament, what is the greatest commandment He said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And of course, Lord means Yahweh, which in Yahweh, all Hebrew names have meaning.

Yahweh means to be, to exist, I am. I want to dive into that too, by the way. But he said the second commandment, which is just like it, is equally as important is to love thy neighbor as thyself. He didn't say love your neighbor like you like yourself. Notice the language here. He says, love your neighbor as yourself.

Ah, interesting. Interesting choice of words. So look at somebody else without the distinction of me and you and just help them. And you do it for the sake of doing it. There's another passage where he says, Don't let your left hand know what your right hand doeth. Be spontaneous.

When you see someone in need, help them. Go to patreon.com forward slash standing nowhere and give me all your money. No, I'm just joking. But seriously, if you do want to help me, please do because I need help. But he said that. He said, be spontaneous.

Don't plan to help someone for your own gain. So where am I going with this Where am I going with this Oh my God. Good Lord. So if you have it in your mind that the universe is this foreign other place, you are always going to be at odds with it. You are always going to look at life as if it is pushing you around. Or in the reverse, you're the one fighting back and trying to push it around.

And you don't realize that you are one in the same with your environment. In ecologists, they have that word organism environment, I think it is, organism hyphen environment. They study, if you remember in school, whenever you study an organism, you always study its habitat, right where it lives, because the habitat shapes the organism just as much as the organism shapes the habitat or the environment. And that's because we separate the two in our mind. See, if you go back to the book of Genesis, a lot of people look at Genesis and dismiss it because of how silly it seems, because a lot of the new Christians today take it very literal. When In my opinion, Moses, he was obviously raised in a royal family.

He was raised as a prince. He was from the Hebrew tradition, but raised with the Egyptians. He was a very educated man. He was capable of beautiful poetry and writing. And it's very obvious that Genesis was a poetic, metaphorical book. And when you look at the beginning of creation, when he talks about the creation story, he uses poetry and metaphor.

And in the creation story, Adam or Adam, which is the word for mankind in Hebrew, and Eve being, I think, means the dawning of, you know, when you say like Christmas Eve, it's like it's giving birth to. So Eve and Adam is like the dawn of mankind, the birth of mankind. And the word Adam, in the first three books of Genesis was used plurally as mankind. And then in poetic fashion, Adam specifically as a figure, Eve specifically as a figure, and they ate from the fruit of knowledge. Now, there are idioms throughout time that mean certain things. Like if you ever watch or if you meet English people or watch like British TV, you'll hear Bob's your uncle.

Now, if I wrote, we know Bob's your uncle, it kind of means like, well, there it is, or I think that's what it means. If you're British or from the UK, you can correct me on that. But when you hear Bob's your uncle, it's like somebody is telling you, make sure you change your oil every 3,700 miles, and then Bob's your uncle, or something like that. But now, if I wrote Bob's your uncle 2,000 years ago, and then that idiom is lost to time, and then we read it today, and we're like, oh, Bob's your uncle. Yes. Bob is your uncle.

Of course he is. Of course. Well, it's the same misunderstanding with the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. When we hear that today, we think, oh, the fruit of knowledge of good and bad, of course. But that is not at all what the ancient Hebrews meant by that phrase, the knowledge of good and evil. See, what that poetry symbolizes when Eve and Adam bit into that apple is the point in which the human species, and again, this is my perspective, take it or leave it, but what if he was pointing at the idea through poetry of when mankind, their brain developed to the point where it could differentiate.

Just like I was telling you with the contrast and the opposites, that's the moment where humans could say this is this and that is that. So the knowledge of good and evil, when it was written at that time was an idiom that means the knowledge of everything. The ability for human beings to essentially classify things, to slice things into objects, like the illusory idea that there is a cause and effect. If you really look at nature, there really is no cause and effect. There's just a flowing this to that. When you think of dominoes, If I push the first domino, you might say, well, the cause was me pushing the first domino, which then pushed the second domino, and all the way down the line.

But what about the cause that started me to set up the dominoes in the first place, right And then the cause that inspired me to push it, and where did that come from And you can keep going back and back and back, and you realize it's just one thing happening. Cause and effect are essentially illusory, we understand them in the conceptual mind, but they're really part of one whole. So look at the poetry in Genesis, the knowledge of good and evil. That's the moment when mankind bit into the apple and poetically we became, our brains cognitively developed to the point where we could differentiate up from down, left from right, black from white, good from bad, you know, things like that. Notice that in the poetry of Genesis, the first thing that Eve became aware of was herself as a separate self. And symbolically, this is when Moses says that we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden.

We lived in paradise, and then we were thrown out. And the only thing that caused us to be thrown out from that paradise is when the mind is able to differentiate This from that. See, if you look at Taoism, their symbol is the yin and the yang. The Chinese philosophy is that yang is like the masculine or visible aspect, and the yin is the feminine or dark, the mysterious. Essentially, the yang would be like the known, and the yin would be the unknown. And you can't have the known without the unknown.

You can't have knowing without unknowing. The two create one another. But in modern times, we are so invested and so lost in what is known, in the yang, in the doing. And that is why all spiritual traditions say, whoa, whoa, whoa, let go, let go, fall back into the mystery. Like we have that metaphor in modern Christianity. We say, Lord Jesus, take the wheel.

And it always comes back to self. So Eve, she bites into the apple and she suddenly becomes aware of herself and she suddenly feels naked and exposed. And then And the first thing God says to her is, who told you you were naked And the first thing Noah does all those years later is tries to get back to that mind space of no concept of self. If you read the Bible, it says he made alcohol and he was obviously trying to do that to forget himself. That's what we always try to do. We try to forget ourselves.

We say, don't be so self-conscious. Don't be so selfish. It always comes back to self because this illusory dividing line of self and not self is the source of all unhappiness in the entire world. I mean, we have billionaires right now who can't get enough, and everyone else is suffering because of it. I don't want to get political or economic here, but you can see throughout all of history and all of nature, any time you divide yourself, bad things happen. But when we live communally, Good things happen.

When we think about the greater good for something other than yourself, we love sacrifice. The whole center image of Christianity is the death of the self, Jesus on the cross. And what do they say in Buddhism You see, Buddhism is what's called an apophatic religion. religion or a negative theology. So a picture, when you look at a picture and you have a film negative, all the colors are sort of inverted. So we think Buddhism is radically different from Christianity, and it's not. But in Buddhism, they would rather say, what reality is not, not this, not that.

So Jesus will use language like eternal life. Siddhartha Gautama, the original Buddha, he would say the deathless realm, right Or the deathless state. So it's like, it's saying the same thing, but in a different way. Negative, not in a negative sense, but in a, well, let's just be quiet and see what we find here. And it always comes back to the self. Look at the beginning of the Bible.

It's the creation of the separate self or the idea of a separate self by biting into the apple. And what's the conclusion Jesus shows up and he says, deny thyself. That word deny also means to let go of, to loosen the grip of. If you read Paul in his epistles, he says, I die to the idea of myself daily, or I die to self daily. And it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And he uses all sorts of language like that. even in the knowing and the unknowing, when he says the peace that surpasses all comprehension.

That same word for comprehension in Greek is also mind or understanding. So when you try to understand things and do things of your own will and accord, you're always going to essentially fail. And that's not to say that you shouldn't take action. That's one of the big misconceptions of the various spiritual traditions that you become a pacifist. Not at all. It's just that you're loosening your hold of your separate sense of self or ego.

You know, another thing that you'll notice with Jesus is he always tried to project oneness and unity in his prayer over his disciples. pardon me, in his prayer over his disciples in the Gospel of John, you'll see language where he says, may they be completely one in us. As I am one with the Father and the Father is one in me, I am in the Father and the Father's in me, may they also be one in us. So it was an inclusive language. Other times, like when the Jews took up stones to throw at Jesus and kill him, he said, why do you kill me Which good work from the Father do you kill me for And they said, not for a good work, but for proclaiming to be on the same level as him. And then he replies, which is often not taught in churches, he said, is it not written in your law that you are gods And that is originally written in the Greek as, is it not written that you are Elohim, which would be better understood as, Is it not written in your law that you are also of the nature of God Well, if it says that and the scripture cannot be annulled, he goes on to say, why do you throw stones at me when I'm the one who is sanctified, which means set apart on a unique mission to share this gospel, this good news with you that we're all one, we're all part of the same Father. And that's why there's traditions like the Eucharist or communion, where you are eating the flesh and the blood of Jesus, and that becomes you.

And if you read the Gospel of Thomas, he says the same thing. If you drink from my mouth, I will become you, and you will become me. In another part of the Gospel of Thomas, he says, when the disciples asked him, how do we enter the kingdom He says, when the two become one. Notice that theme of the separateness, the two becoming one. He says, when the two become one, when the inside is, when you make the inner like the outer, Like, for example, if you were right in front of me right now or if I was in front of you, I would be in your external world. just the same as everything else around me is in your external world. So you would see me and everything that's inside of me, essentially, as one and the same with the road that I'm, or the ground that I'm standing on or the building that I'm in.

And then you create this idea that everything behind your eyes is separate from that. And yet, from my perspective, you're in the outside world, a part of everything else. You see, we're all part of the same fabric or material Like take another example. If you go to a sporting event and you look at the crowd when they do a wave, you can see the wave travel around the stadium or the arena that you're in. And you can say, there's the wave. And there it goes.

Oh, it's coming to me. Now I stand up and then I sit down and it goes around. So there is the wave, but it's comprised of a flowing of everyone in the crowd. In that same way, that's what you are. That's what your body is. Science has looked at matter and discovered that if you took out all the empty space in your body, you would be less than the size of a grain of sand.

So there is... molecular motion that creates the illusion of a solid object. Just like if I took a torch and I twirled it around, it would create the illusion of a circle. So just like a wave passing through an audience or a wave in an ocean, you are the dance and play of form. The Hindus have a wonderful conceptual model of this, or cosmology, they call it lila, the dance or play of form. All of life is a play, it's a dance, it's for fun. If you go to the book of Proverbs, written by Solomon, he speaks about the beginning of creation and he uses a metaphor for lady wisdom and how it was woven into the fabric of reality.

And it says that lady wisdom was dancing and playing with God's creation. That was later changed by the church. That word play was changed to rejoice. But you can double check me on that and look it up and you'll see that the original word meant play. It's like Alan Watts always talks about with music and dance. Music Music is not, it doesn't have a purpose outside of itself.

The purpose of the song is itself. And just like the illusion of a flame, when you look at a flame, you look at it like it's a solid thing. There's the candle flame. It's right there. But in reality, you're looking at gas that is oxidizing the wick inside of the wax. So all the flame is a stream, a steady flow of of the wick, you know, oxidizing or vaporizing, being consumed by the flame.

In the same way, that's what you are. Your form is an illusion, not in the sense that it's not real, but it's not static. It's ever-flowing, ever-changing. You know, in Christianity, we use the phrasing, this too shall pass. Everything that arises will eventually fade away. And they say the same thing in Buddhism.

The original Buddha said, everything that has the nature to arise will pass away. but not you. You're not your form. That's why in science and neuroscience, they call it the great problem of consciousness or the consciousness problem. It's not a problem. You are that which is outside of material, watching the material process unfold. But we're so scared.

We identify with this body. But From your perspective, all the things I'm saying right now are probably generating thoughts in your head, but you'll notice that you are that still, silent observer of your thoughts just as much as you are my voice. You don't know the next thing that I'm gonna say that's gonna come out of my mouth. Yeah, I'm just joking. You don't know the next thing that I'm going to say or that it's going to come out of my mouth, and you equally don't know the next thing that's going to come out of your head. So you are observing your mind and thoughts just the same as you're observing the sounds that are coming from me to you right now.

So what I'm saying is that that observer in all of us is really the same observer. And the language that Jesus used at his time, 2,000 years ago, was was to invoke the name of God. I am, to be, to exist. That being inside of you is the same being in all of us. It is not divisible. It is one thing happening.

And I'm moving close to the finish line here because we're almost at an hour. And I'm going to go into more detail as to why. Why would God blow himself up and forget himself and become the many right Why would he do that Why would he, she, it Again, God doesn't have to be a man. It's an idea. Because again, if you want to look at opposites, you can't have male without female. You can't have masculine without feminine.

The two create each other. But I just wanted to put these out as concepts to kind of loosen the soil of the concepts that we've already had for hundreds of years that are driving people away from looking within. When I say standing nowhere, and I don't want you to lean on a concept, you can use these concepts to go beyond concepts. In Buddhism, for example, they talk about this directly when they say spirituality and spiritual traditions should be viewed as like a ferry boat. Like you get on the boat and you use it to cross the river to the other side, what they call nibbana or nirvana. which is going back to what we said, letting go. Samsara is this perpetual clinging and rebirth.

Every time you think of something, you're essentially reborn and identifying with that thought. And the space between thoughts is nirvana or nibbana. And many strive to attain what they consider enlightenment. And that's a whole nother rabbit hole that we can go down in another episode. But the idea of nirvana, when you cross that river, Nirvana in Sanskrit means the exhale, the blowing out, the releasing of, the blowing the flame of desire out. Essentially, you can be right in the middle through thick and thin and be okay with either.

And that's like when I said at the end of the first episode, even if I have to work 50 or 60 hours the rest of my life, I'll be okay. Because whatever is right in front of you, That's what you can stand on. That's real. That's reality. That's truth. So let go.

If you want to take anything from this episode, let go of the rigid concept of nihilism, that everything's meaningless. It's not. You are the universe, and everything you're experiencing is the universe, and it's wonderful. I want people when they hear this podcast to not cling to a concept. If these ideas are are helpful to you, wonderful. Use them to go beyond.

Use them as exit ramps. Like if you picture perpetual conceptual clinging as like a NASCAR ring and you're stuck on it and you can't get off, use these concepts as off ramps and come to your breath. Come to your senses, as they say. Get out of your mind and come to your senses because when you make an effort or a practice to be with what is. you will feel the deepest peace. You will experience that peace that surpasses understanding because you're going beyond understanding. And when you try to ground yourself in the present, like I said in the first episode, your mind will tug at you a little bit.

And it's not that thinking is a bad thing that should never happen, but it's just that you need to be aware of it because that is what you are. You are that eternal awareness that's always been here. Jesus, his language for it was the I am. Before Abraham was born, I am. I am is the vine. You are the branches.

Or like when he says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, which is the major quoted verse from Jesus, you know, he's saying, and again, this is my perspective, he's saying the I am, because he used several of what we call I am statements. I am, to be, to exist, to is the way, the truth, and the life. Being right where you are, centered, will always guide you correctly. Always. It'll create a space in you. Go to the book of Proverbs.

It says, just be mindful of every step you're taking and let God handle the rest. Put it on, if you use the conceptuality in Christianity, give it to God, you know And for those who may not like the idea of a personified being, that's okay. You don't have to personify them. you know, in the Hebrew and the Christian tradition, they personify God as a father. And that's neither right or wrong. Because to look at the universe as a cold place that is just random, you know, or even if you don't think it's random and you'd rather not use the concept of God, you can use whatever word you want for it. But there's nothing wrong inherently with looking at the universe as a father or a mother or a source.

Because again, that word father in Aramaic means source. And if you think about it, you had a father, he had a father, and you can keep going back and back and back and back, and eventually you'll get to the Big Bang. So it's a matter of just having a reverence for reality, a reverence for life. This is your life. This is you. And you don't have to have these cloudy concepts creating a shadow on it that life sucks and then you die and it's all meaningless.

And part of that is being a community together. So we're going to wrap up here as we come to the finish line. And I'm going to put this out there for you guys that you come back to this podcast, but not just listening but participating there's that old saying, know thyself. I think they use that quote in The Matrix too, like, you're it. The answer lies within. I think I mentioned in the first episode, repent means to turn back, to go within.

The story of the prodigal son that Jesus gave, he went out into the world, into the material world, and found no satisfaction there. So he turned within. And it's just like life. When you are In the moment, each moment is unto itself its own meaning. So we're not doing all the things we're doing in life to get somewhere, to something. It's where we're at now is exactly where we're supposed to be.

And when we really get with that and we get in sync with that, new possibilities start to open up. There's a spaciousness in you. Suddenly you can dance and sing even on the low notes, even when you've lost someone or whatever tragedy is striking, you know. If you're waking up in the middle of the night like I have many times over this last three years, just stress to the max about bills. There's all kinds of down moments we have in life, but you can't have the ups without the downs. The two create each other.

So whenever there's a down in your life, just rejoice because you know there's going to be an up and up. Conversely, when there's an up, brace yourself because there is probably going to be a down. Even these sound waves that are coming at you right now, they go up and down. Everything is on and off. Now you see me, now you don't. So thank you for listening, guys.

This went way longer than I thought. But if I keep it around an hour, sometimes it'll be 45 minutes, sometimes it'll be an hour 15. And... You know, that should be okay. But give me feedback, please. Leave a review.

Let me know if this moved you in any way or helped. And, you know, I'm still finding my voice. This is my second episode. I'll get more organized. But I hope this maybe helped some of you, loosened up some of the soil of solidified concepts so that you can stand nowhere. Nowhere is like two words, right Nowhere.

So be in the here and the now. Stand right here, right now, and you'll be standing nowhere. There's a quote that says, it's better to stand on the firm ground of nothingness than the quicksand of somethingness. So don't rely on rigid concepts. Just trust. That's the definition of, oh, to go back to the beginning, I almost forgot Oh my goodness.

The difference between belief and faith. Belief, again, these rigid concepts and doctrines that we hold ourselves to, or even the idea of the nihilist universe versus faith, which is where you trust what is. You trust. You have an openness. It's not blind faith. It's eyes wide open faith.

What is right in front of me right now What can I see, smell, taste, touch here What thoughts are here Be with the now, because the now is the only And everything springs forth from the now. So be with it. Stand nowhere with me. And I'm going to close out with a reading from Alan Watts, before I do, I just want to say if this conversation touched you, I’d be grateful if you’d follow the podcast, leave a kind review, or share it with a friend. Those small gestures help this grow in ways I can’t do alone. And if you’d like to connect more personally, join us in the Discord community — it’s free, and you’ll find the link right there in the episode description.

It’s a place where we can share our stories, struggles, and moments of grace together. And now from Alan Watts he says: “Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim… the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging… In other words, a person… who clings to certain ideas… becomes a person who has no faith at all… the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”