The Nature of God, Spirits, Other Realms and Death
How to connect with God according to Jesus
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The Nature of God
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Defining God
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What are Spirits, Angels, Demons, Souls and how do we interact with them?
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What happens when we die?
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Transcript: How to connect with God according to Jesus
The way Jesus taught to connect with God—well, for starters, it was completely non-intellectual. It was a very personal and deep experience. Jesus said to come as a child with a child’s mind. When Nicodemus came to Jesus, he was, you know, a real head-trip. Nicodemus was high up in all the intellectual and religious circles. If there had been a Bible college back then, he would have been the dean. He apparently had the Old Testament memorized, and his mind was like a steel trap of religious information. But Jesus was like, “Start over.” No, really—start over. Go back into your mother’s womb and be born as a new person. You’ve gone a million miles on the wrong road, so just hit reset and go another way. Because this reasoning device—this intellect—is not where your relationship to the divine resides. Jesus understood that. He knew that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, that it’s right here, right now, and that true spirituality is a matter of connection. He talked about the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, a desire to give. There isn’t a lot of “head stuff” in those. There’s not a lot to figure out about love. There’s not a lot to figure out about peace. If we have war, it’s not something to be reasoned out. It’s about us being stuck in a mental washing machine of chaos instead of connecting to authentic spirituality. And when we are connected authentically, things sort themselves out. The decisions become obvious. The truth becomes inherent. It’s simply true. I think that’s something Jesus taught so well, and I’m so grateful that I was able to learn how to connect to God through the words of Jesus.
Transcript: The Nature of God
The God that I know, and that Jesus knew, is not a patriarchal individual God out there who has a dualistic relationship with beings down here and interacts with them like a king or some sort of ruler. God is something entirely different that we could never truly conceptualize, and we exist within God. God is non-dual. There is no subject–object relationship in the experience of God. There is no time, no past or future, and no particular point of view with God. Because of this, there is much that God cannot know.
God can know what it is like to be me, but God cannot know what it is like to be me without also simultaneously knowing what it is like to be everyone else. God cannot know what it’s like for me to be in a relationship, because when I have a relationship, I only know my own perspective, not the other person’s thoughts or the future of what will happen. I live within ignorance, in the not knowing, and I work it out with others. God does not have the ability to experience that. If God ever wanted to, it would feel like this—incarnated as a being—because the uniqueness of human life is in what we cannot know. Being human means being limited and experiencing life from that point of view.
We are made of God. There is nothing outside of God. If there were, then there would be something greater that contained both God and that other thing. Since God is the highest reality, everything is made of God. There is nothing in existence that is not part of God. Beyond that, not only are we literally composed of God, with God holding our atoms together and animating us, but there is also a spiritual connection within us that bridges the non-dual realm of God and this dualistic world.
We can connect to that presence within. When we do, it is not about receiving fixed opinions or rigid instructions. Instead, we experience the fruits of the Spirit: peace, gratitude, generosity, and love. Filled with these, we can live as God’s hands and feet in the world. When we lose that connection and retreat into purely intellectual thought, we are living in man-made paradigms—human inventions like language and logic. These are just surface layers. To find authentic truth, we must connect inwardly, not just in our heads. This connection is somatic, embodied, and experiential. Through it, we are empowered to live the way Jesus taught.
This is what it means to “be still and know that I am God.” Jesus spoke often of the inherent divinity within everyone. Traditional Christianity teaches that Jesus was exclusively God, but Jesus never claimed this. His words suggest instead that what he taught applied to all people. When he said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” the original Greek can also be interpreted as “I am is the way, the truth, and the life.”
The phrase “I am” was already used in Jewish tradition as a name for God, but it is also a deeply personal spiritual experience. If you quietly say “I am” and let silence follow, you will feel something. “I am. I am. I am is the way, the truth, and the life.”
This is what Jesus was teaching—that connection to “I am” is how we align with the divine source, the God that empowers and animates all of us. “I am is the way, the truth, and the life.”
Transcript: Defining God
The great sin of Christianity is not the misrepresentation of Jesus—although that is very egregious—but it is actually the misrepresentation of God and who and what God is. God exists above this realm, at a higher dimension. Within that higher dimension lies the heavier dimension in which we exist, where matter can appear. At the higher dimension there is no time, no matter, no space—only spirit.
We live in a slower, heavier dimension within that higher one, where aspects of God have been separated into their opposites. This separation allows for individual concepts that interact with one another, and when that happens, time becomes necessary. Another aspect of God is that God is the very essence of love. We are loved as part of God and within God, much like a good parent loves their children—but it is even more profound than that. We are within God, and God is only love.
In Christianity, apologetics often tries to convince people of God’s existence, as though that is the central debate. Yet it’s quite possible to reason that God exists: first, because a cause is required for the universe to come into being; and second, because many people have had spiritual experiences that reveal a reality beyond our material world. Belief in this reality is even recognized as necessary for healing—12-step programs famously include the idea of a higher power. Even the most secular organizations, when serious about healing, find they must tap into something spiritual beyond this realm.
However, when people leave Christianity, they’re often labeled “atheists,” as though they’ve stopped believing in God entirely. In reality, that label is still bound within Christianity’s paradigm. The Christian God of the Old Testament—the masculine, patriarchal, jealous, angry, judgmental ruler god—is a fiction. It never existed. It was invented to control and frighten people.
Jesus himself was aware of this. If you listen to how he described God, it was never in those patriarchal, vengeful terms. That image of God belonged to the cultural context of his time, not the truth of God. That version of God is actually quite small and humanlike: partial, insecure, in need of constant appreciation, obsessed with judgment and voyeuristically watching people’s behavior. This “Christian God” sounds more like an insecure ruler than an infinite being. When we reject that God, people say we’ve stopped believing in God—but what we’ve actually rejected is a patriarchal myth.
Spiritual development for those leaving Christianity often involves rediscovering the true nature of God. Real healing begins when we reconnect with the reality of who and what God actually is. When you grasp that you are animated by God, created as an aspect of God, and that all of God somehow exists within you, a profound truth emerges. We carry a direct connection to pure God within ourselves, even as we live in this material plane.
It’s important to understand that God exists beyond time, space, and matter. For creation to happen, God had to divide itself into opposites—positive and negative polarities—which balance each other to form the universe. This is what we see in the cosmos: planets, black holes, and all of existence are part of the tapestry God wove by dividing the oneness into duality. Before creation, God was a homogeneous being of pure love, but without contrast, without drama, without arc.
Now, through creation, God experiences duality. From God’s perspective, all history has already happened—every beginning and every ending are simultaneous. But we live inside it, experiencing the drama of time and opposites. This world is where God learns what it means to love within duality.
Before creation, God was a ball of pure love with no recipient—utter oneness and aloneness. Now, in this realm, the question is being answered: can we embody pure love in a world of opposites, tragedy, growth, and conflict? Our lives become an arc of experience, a drama through which we learn to love.
That is what we are doing right now—learning how to return to God within this physical plane, experiencing the fullness of life while reconnecting with the infinite love that is our origin.
Transcript: What are Spirits, Angels, Demons, Souls and how do we interact with them?
At the highest level where God exists, there is absolutely no duality. There is no way to hold a concept and for individual beings to interact. Down here on Earth, it's the opposite—we can only experience reality through opposites and through the friction of opposites interacting.
It’s a little more complicated than that. There are actually levels in between. In the realm where God exists, you literally could not have a discrete thought. Thought is meaningless there. Down here, however, we are constantly having discrete thoughts. All of our interactions and activities are discrete. This tree behind me is separate from me. We’re different. I can pick a leaf because I live in a dualistic world.
Between these extremes, there are levels that allow for spirits and beings that exist in a state that is not fully non-dual and not fully dual. As you move upward toward the non-dual realm, time disappears. As you descend toward our world, time slows down. Time speeds up as you ascend, so in a higher dimension, time might be moving a hundred times faster, while the ability to interact with matter is a hundred times less. There is a spectrum between total non-duality and total duality.
This is why people interact with spirits. Christians speak of angels and demons; shamans speak of spirits; and many people, even secular ones, have experienced something spiritual. What I want to emphasize is that everything happens in a physical way, up and down this spectrum. There is no “magic.” If our scientists had all the data, they could build models to describe this. Everything reconciles at every level, all the time.
When we die, I often say that we return to non-duality and, in some ways, may even miss the drama and pain of life. But I don’t know if that’s completely accurate. It’s possible that some part of our soul exists in one of these in-between levels. That’s why we sometimes feel the presence of loved ones who have passed, why we can pray to saints, or connect with spiritual forces.
There are also collective spirits—forces like nationalism, patriarchy, romance, acquisition, or outdoorsiness. These are supported by our collective neurology, etched into our nervous systems and electric fields. We adopt them, and as they change collectively, they change within us individually. Humans exist like Venn diagrams: partly physical selves, but also partly formed by the spirits we adopt.
For example, the collective spirit of conservative fundamentalist Christianity has changed drastically in the past 30 years. When I was young, the church was concerned about morality, evil spirits, witchcraft, and Satanism. By the 1990s, it shifted toward morality issues, parading against gay rights and attacking political figures like Bill Clinton. Today, those issues no longer dominate; instead, the focus is on nationalism and authoritarian structures. I don’t think each believer decided this change individually—it was the evolution of the collective spirit that lived in their heads.
The Vedic teachings describe nine levels between duality and non-duality, but the simple truth is that everything is a spectrum. Some beings are too dense to exist in the physical plane but not light enough to exist in total non-duality, so they float in between. These spirits can be parasitic, helpful, or collective. Some guide us positively, like the spiritual aspects now influencing psychology. Others, like patriarchy, are parasitic and feed on us.
It’s important to understand that spirits only have as much power over you as you give them. You have 100% of God within you. We live as dualistic beings, but paradoxically, the entirety of God is still available to us—like a Möbius strip. The power spirits have over us is based on our fear of them.
Personally, I am unafraid of anything spiritual. Whatever the hierarchy is, I’m at the top of it, because I am a child of the Most High God. I am God’s animation on Earth right now, and any disembodied spirit is beneath that. These spirits follow my commands. I can tell them to leave, declare I am not afraid, or even treat them with compassion.
Most frightening spirits are only scary because it’s the only way they can feed. They are lost and trapped in these middle spaces. By asking them to leave, we actually help them find their rightful place in the greater realm of existence.
Transcript: What happens when we die?
To grasp what happens when we die, you have to have some experience and conceptualization of non-duality. And I'm going to try to talk about non-duality here, but it is completely impossible to talk about. Alan Watts said it's like trying to bite your own teeth—it’s impossible. The reason it’s impossible is that we are dualistic creatures living in a dualistic world. It's like a fish to water for us; we have nothing to contrast with in order to truly manage it.
We might imagine that everything happening in our life is first-person, and that “I” am the center of everything. But in fact, you are a particular point of view. Every perspective you carry is from where you sit in the universe. In the realms outside this one, there is no duality, no particular points of view.
Non-duality, however, is something you can experience in various ways. My favorite is through the use of psychedelic plants, but you can also experience it in a dark night of the soul, an extreme moment of grief, the birth of a child, or even through a heavy fever where hallucinations blur time and reality. These experiences push the senses to the point where reality begins to crack, revealing glimpses of the higher level in which this drama of life is unfolding.
In the non-dual realms—where we come from and where we return when we die—there is no separation. We came from there, and we go back there. It’s important to reflect on what we mean when we talk about eternal life. What are we describing? What’s actually possible there?
In the Christian framework, heaven is imagined as a physical place, still dualistic. You have a new body, perhaps with arms and legs, but without hunger or destruction. It’s described in odd terms. What you may find, if you really sit with this, is that what you’re clinging to is your memories. You want to be a being in the future who can remember this life. I believe that’s true to some extent. When we die and are reabsorbed into the great love-plasma cloud of God, I believe our memories are etched into the fabric of that reality.
But they will not be experienced as they are here. Imagine trying to recall your life in a realm where there is no time. Imagine connecting with a loved one when you simultaneously know everything else about them and about existence—past, present, and future all at once. There is no drama there, no ache for resolution or connection. That is all absent.
So this earthly experience, as difficult as it is, is actually our opportunity to embrace the richness of tragedy and drama—love and loss, longing and fulfillment, craving and disappointment. These are only possible here. We may see them as painful, but drama is what we are here to experience. The question is whether we can navigate it to the point of laying it down and saying, “Okay, I’m ready to love and accept everything the way it is.” That’s the opportunity of this life.
Living only for the other side doesn’t make sense. You are here on Earth, having an Earth trip—so have it. You have spent infinity already in that plasma cloud of oneness, and you will return to it for infinity again. This life is your one chance to experience duality, to experience not knowing. Here you truly don’t know the future. You don’t know what others are thinking. You don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
That not-knowing is the gift of life. It isn’t something to try to escape; it’s something to embrace. That uncertainty, that unfolding, that mystery—that is what we are here to live and experience.