[Music] heat [Music] heat [Music] heat heat heat heat n [Music] hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey heat [Music] heat heat heat [Music] heat [Music] heat [Music] heat [Music] heat hey hey hey [Music] heat heat [Music] heat heat heat heat n [Music] heat heat [Music] heat heat [Music] [Music] [Music] heat heat [Music] heat hey Heat [Music] heat heat [Music] heat [Music] heat [Music] heat heat heat heat [Music] m yeah hey I was stuck inside that grave a long time didn't think I'd make it through those long nights but you never late you always on time remember when you got me all day you got me out back and now I see your blessings see your blessings every day thankful that your kingdom's on the way angels all around me yet I'm saying like "Oh I'll never get used to this i'll never get used to this this is how I want to live forever we'll be singing like walk up the grave yeah I'm alive now told the devil you out of time now your spirit won't leave me on fire now and I know it won't never die out won't ever die out and now I see your blessings see your blessings every day thankful that your angels on the way angels all around me you sing like I never get used to this i'll never get used to this this is how I want to live forever we'll be singing live oh I'll never get used to this hey yeah from the morning to the evening I can sing your praise all day from the prison to the garden you're the God who's breaking chains when I look back on my whole life silver lining of grace I can't wait to take you Jesus i'll never get used to this i'll never get used to this this is how I want to live forever we be singing like I'll never get used to this i'll never get used to this i'll never get used to this this is how I want to live this is how I will be singing like I'll never get used to this yeah hey I was stuck inside that grave a long time didn't think I'd make it through those long nights but you never late you always on time remember when you got me all day you got me out that and now I see your blessings see your blessings every day thankful that your kingdom's on the way angels all around me yet I'm saying like "Oh I'll never get used to this i'll never get used to this this is how I want to live forever we'll be singing like walk up the grave yeah I'm alive now told the devil boy you out of time now spirit don't leave me on my now and I know it won't die out won't ever die out and now I see your blessings see your blessings every day thankful that your kingdoms on the way angels all around me you say like "Oh I never get used to this i'll never get used to this this is how I want to live forever we'll be singing live." Oh I'll never get used to this m yeah from the morning to the evening I can sing your praise all day from the prison to the garden you're the God who's breaking chains when I look back on my whole silver lining of grace I can't wait to take you Jesus i'll never get used to this i'll never get used to this this is how I want to live forever we'll be singing like I'll never get used to this i'll never get used to this i'll never get used to this this is how I want to live this is how I will be singing i'll never get used to this all right welcome for you fam to our natural theology master class we have reached the fourth and final installment my friends of the Jesus way philosophy series and I'm really pumped for today's presentation as I have been for all of them because this is just a subject I love so much just discussing spiritual philosophy and this kind of four episode series we've done in the Jesus way philosophy has really been uh leading up to this so we covered ontology first always have to begin with ontology and then we discussed cosmology the nature of the universe the laws of the universe and so forth last month we dealt with epistemology which is the branch of philosophy that discusses how to arrive at knowledge with integrity consistency reason logic and virtue and so we have those three foundations today leading us to the big enchilada which is theology now theology is one of the if not maybe potentially the biggest problem on our planet in many ways weaponized theology can be one of the most dangerous things in the world because it creates a kind of mind trap you might say for people who ascribe to destructive or fellacious theology because an organization or an institution right or authority figure tells them hey this is these are the correct beliefs to believe so follow this theological belief system and people do that very well-meaning they want to follow what's true but we know the sneaky little ego loves to get involved with everything it can get its hands on right and so what better weapon for the ego to bring into its arsenal than theological beliefs because what is theology theology is the study of God the study of the nature of God and theism itself and so if the ego can weaponize God against you it's got you pretty much cornered doesn't it because nobody who acknowledges that God exists would say that they are somehow superior to God in any way we all acknowledge God is the most high and so whatever your conception of God is no matter how negative or destructive or contradictory it may be that will become the kind of framework around which you orient your entire life and mental paradigm you will see everything through those theological beliefs and so there's nothing more important for us to do with with humanity at this point than to clean up so much of the toxic man-made theology that has wre so much havoc on our planet and so as we dive into today's presentation which is probably just going to be about 90 minutes I just wanted to preface by explaining you know why I decided to to do the Jesus way philosophy series is because first of all I'm very very committed to presenting this to the world as a real spiritual path because I think that in many ways a spiritual path is only inspiring to human beings when it's rich and it's deep and you can really sink your teeth into it right and unfortunately what religion sort of does is it just presents this dry tasteless wafer on your tongue of hey here's the correct beliefs believe this okay you're saved next and the next person comes in line wafer boom there you go believe this confess this you're good next and it kind of takes all of the juice out of spiritual uh transformation right there's nothing really to strive for anymore because we've arrived at all the correct beliefs we already know everything there is to know we've got the answers and so in a way Christianity presents you with like you're a runner in a marathon right you're you're getting ready to run this long race you're at the starting line christianity comes up to you and says,"Congratulations you've won." And it puts a big first place trophy in your hands it's like "Aren't you proud of yourself don't you feel great isn't this rewarding yes you are the first place racer." And you're kind of standing there like "Oh thanks." Uh but I mean I haven't really ran the race yet so I don't feel like I deserve this trophy it doesn't mean anything don't worry about that why run this big long tiring race we've already given you the first place trophy you're good you can now go home it's like would you be satisfied going home with that trophy would it mean anything to you no because you didn't have to do anything to earn it right and so it's our nature to want a spiritual path we can really tread upon and there's levels and layers to it that we can chase or strive after something that is meaningful to us which is really the progressive unfoldment of the self and when religion says "Here's all the right answers believe this confess this you're done you're going to heaven sign seal delivered see you next Sunday." It just robs you of all the beauty and the richness and the wisdom you gain from walking a real spiritual path and of course Christians to that would probably say "Hey that's not true that's a straw man we don't just give people the answers and say they don't need to do anything we encourage people hey now that you have all the right answers go and better yourself you know be righteous because you want to be worthy of you know the the things you believe right so yeah go ahead and do that but if you can't do it that's still okay because you're saved it's like you you just can't have it both ways right you take away everything that's enticing about a spiritual path when you say here's all the right and final answers this is the highest revelation you can ever come across of God that Jesus died for your sins so you can go to heaven when you die it just saps all the motivation out of the spiritual aspirant to really work on themselves right because the ego resists that heavily the ego doesn't want to spend long arduous nights of the dark soul facing its shadows and its demons and healing its traumas what an exhausting waste of time when I'm already going to heaven let's just kind of hold on and get through this human life thing and poof few a great relief is awaiting us upon death and unfortunately such souls will find that there is no great relief upon death but what they have to do is watch their whole life back and realize "Oh crap I missed the entire point of being there it was to love more and strive more to embody divine truth and to become more like the Christ that's what life's all about." And I just kind of wasted my life thinking I was done right although I of course relate to that because I was there as a as a Christian growing up it doesn't stop me from feeling so much empathy and compassion for the millions and millions of souls on our planet who are facing that predicament right now whether they know it or not and most of them don't know it but I I want to help save people from what I consider to be the greatest spiritual trap on the planet which is organized religion it just promises the ego everything it wants to hear and then when it gets the ego's tacid agreement by believing and confessing it sort of leaves the ego dry and hanging right it doesn't actually give the ego anything to do from there other than okay now that you're a Christian and you're saved basically just defend your beliefs for the rest of your life if anyone disagrees with you prove them wrong and make converts that's basically the whole Christian path defend your beliefs and make converts and so what I want to present in the Jesus way philosophy is a enticing intriguing exciting inspiring deep and rich spiritual philosophy that one can study for many many years and continue deepening in in their not only embodiment of it but their understanding of it and so the Jesus way philosophy series we've done culminating in today is just kind of the groundwork I'm trying to lay for this whole philosophy that books will come later and all kinds of stuff like that but this is where we're starting and so the last thing I'm going to say is that here's why what the topic we're going to talk about today is also so important of natural theology because again the greatest spiritual trap on our planet being organized religion tells you hey there's only one place you can go to learn about God in any way and it's this book anything else and everything else is evil and will send you to hell so don't read other books and definitely don't get into any weird new age witchcraft that says that nature reveals God or cre creation reveals the creator that's new age that'snosticism and all this stuff don't don't believe that now I want to highlight the unbelievable irony of such a belief if there was a reward for you know the world's biggest projection of all time this would surely take the cake christians will say this is the only place to go to learn about God and if you go to nature if you think that God is in nature yeah in creation that's evil pagan witchcraft new aism and you're going to hell what could be more ironic than such a belief to say that reality itself is evil but this book in which God commands the genocide of women and children and slavery and all kinds of horrible stuff is good and not evil so reality is evil and a man-made book is good can we see how the opposite must be true right an idea that God commands genocide is what's evil and pagan and nature itself reality itself is God is good is the only place to go for a true reflection of God's nature and so sometimes I'll even say like I actually do believe that God wrote an inherent infallible inspired text and that text that God wrote is creation nature creation the universe the laws that govern it this is the holy word of God which God wrote from time immemorial i mean how can this be argued with right nature bears the very fingerprints of God and we're going to look at this today because when we make man-made wisdom our foundation we're always going to be standing on a faulty foundation faulty ground and what's funny is we talked about this last month too right when you use metaphysics and ontology and epistemology to derive your spiritual beliefs and you try to hold a Christian to the same standard they'll often say "Oh I don't deal with metaphysics." and ontology and epistem this is man's wisdom this is man-made stuff i deal with the holy word of god which is objective and infallible it's like okay so this book written by people isn't man's wisdom but objective laws of logic reason that can be objectively deduced in reality itself that's man-made stuff see the inversion the negative polarity always inverts the truth and makes it appear real and so now we can say that this human book is the only infallible source of truth and reality itself is not the infallible source but in fact even to think so is evil so we want to flip this idea on its head today because this is one of the biggest contentions I receive from Christians is oh you're into all this pagan new age stuff because you look to natural law and stuff like that and I want to show you today why this is absolutely the only place we can go with any level of epistemic reliability is if we want to know what the creator is like literally the only thing we can do is look at creation other than that we're just playing with mental ideas and mental masturbation all day long we can speculate all day long what we think God is like and we all think God is a lot like us right whatever my judgments and anger and you know opinions and biases are God must share that so we don't want to do that right that's not an objective standard what human people think we have to go to something that is universal and unchanging which are the laws of nature so today we're going to look at the natural theology of Jesus that Jesus Yeshua actually taught from natural theology most commonly because again natural theology is let's deduce what God must be like by observing what creation is like it's the closest evidence we have so I'll share my screen and we'll begin our presentation for today actually let's do that cool i found this amazing AI software by the way a couple of days ago called Gamma where you can put in your notes if you guys do like presentations for work or anything you put in all your notes and it makes a slideshow for you that is super high level and organized and amazing but it does take a lot of editing to kind of fine-tune it and I had created this entire presentation in Canva like I have been doing for the last few months and I thought man these slides are so much better than anything I can put together so let me go through the process of transferring all my slides to this program and it took me about three days of non-stop work but I think it was worth it so we're going to look at probably half the amount of slides today because they're so much more well organized um that we normally do but let's begin with the introduction of what is natural theology so natural theology is the study of God using reason logic and observation of the natural world rather than relying on scripture or other man-made traditions it asks can we know anything about God just by using our minds and senses aka logic and reason does creation itself tell us anything about the creator so remember how two months ago we went over pentheism which is our cosmological framework and I showed you guys why pentheism is the only biblically consistent logically epistemically consistent view of the universe that God is both imminent and transcendent at the same time so we have these kind of two maxims of pentheism god imminent means that in the framework of the Jesus way philosophy pentheism holds that God's essence permeates all of creation the divine nature is present within every aspect of the natural world from subatomic particles to vast galaxies you know what's interesting to me is that this tends to be a topic that I find Christians want to debate the most often that God is not present in creation and uh I understand why that is an argument they need to have but it nevertheless always kind of flabbergasts me that that somebody could hold such a belief and when I walk them through the epistemology of okay so you believe God's the only source yes of course so how can something exist apart from God well it's kind of one with God still but it is mostly separate and they'll kind of do this halfway in between argument of um it's kind of both things at the same time one and separate and that of course we showed last month violates the laws of logic such as the law of non-contradiction which says a thing cannot be its opposite at the same time it can only be one or the other so we're either one or we're separate there isn't some sort of weird middle ground between the two what we teach in 40U of course is you can definitely be separate from God in your mind in your awareness and most people are and this is what a course in miracles teaches we're just saying you can't be fundamentally separate which means that at any moment you can become aware of God the potential to become aware of God is ever present in the human being because we're not fundamentally separate so God is imminent but God is also transcendent simultaneously God transcends creation existing beyond its boundaries this dual nature of divine reality means that while God is present in all things the divine is also greater than the sum of creation and this creates the most epistemically reliable framework because natural theology provides a more reliable approach to understanding God than religious traditions alone by observing the patterns and principles embedded in nature we can discern divine attributes without the limitations of man-made doctrines so again it's like we are so blessed by our loving creator that God wrote God's book God's law God's nature God's essence into everything already and we're going to look at tons of examples of this today but what I really hope that this master class does for you more than anything else is to strengthen your belief in God to such a higher level than before because we all on this call would say we believe in God and we do but even belief itself is a spectrum right it's something that we can gradually or progressively increase our conviction of and we always want to have a stronger and stronger conviction that God is aka I am that's what allows us to have real connection to our source is this intense belief and conviction that God is all that there is and in today's master class we're going to look at many different arguments for the existence of God that are commonly used in even debates with atheists or materialists but I want to take you through some of these because they actually are powerful spiritual tools of contemplation when you really sit with some of these arguments for God's existence they will provoke a deeper sense of faith and conviction in you that increases your awareness of God the more that you believe and are convicted in the omniresence of God then more the more of a fixture that God will be in your awareness and that's what I want to help you guys accomplish today so here are what we can say are three maxims of natural law we looked at maxims of cosmology and epistemology now we're going to look at maxims of natural law first is all things begin and end in their source everything that exists originates from and ultimately returns to its divine origin this cyclical pattern is reflected throughout the natural world in countless ways maxim number two all creation is extension the creator extends attributes of divine essence into creation nothing created can be entirely unlike its source all bears the imprint of its maker and three all things seek their fulfillment every created thing contains an inherent purpose or trajectory toward completion from the smallest particle to complex organisms all creation moves towards its divine potential so let's look at some examples of these first maxim all things begin and end in their source the universe exists as a closed system all things exist within God and anything outside of God does not exist so the universe itself is a closed system a singularity so that already sort of proves that nothing can exist outside of its source creation is not independent from its creator but exists within the greater reality of the creator there is no true separation from the divine source so in Hinduism you get uh Brahma Vishnu and Shiva brahma is the creator deity vishnu is the sustainer that power which sustains every creature throughout its life and Shiva is the destroyer that which carries everything back into the void again and that is a cosmological framework right the source is the creator sustainer and destroyer of all matter in the universe and then finally nature demonstrates this very principle from photons to complex living systems all begin at their source and return to it reflecting the divine pattern of existence so this maxim that everything begins and ends in its source is a maxim we see in the natural world it's a rule or a law that consistently applies to everything we can conceivably observe that's how we know it's a true law or maxim so we have this kind of threepart expression of the source right there's unity that unity expresses in multiplicity and then it returns back to unity again um there's a funny phrase called the big crunch which certain cosmologists and astronomers have developed as the name for the anti- big bang meaning the theory goes when the universe coaleses back upon itself first there's the big bang it expands eventually it contracts and it goes back to that singular point which is actually what the law of one says and then boom instantly a new big bang and a new universe forms and Rah likens that implosion explosion of the universe as the heartbeat of the creator and so science also says basically the same thing and they call it the big crunch which is that squeezing back together into oneness again so as cosmologist John Barrow observed the big crunch is a time reversed image of the big bang this cosmic pattern reflects the sacred rhythm that governs all existence emergence from unity followed by an eternal seeking of reunion with the source the original oneness so here are some some examples from the natural world the human body comprises elements from the earth its source through earth water fire and air upon death the body returns to these elemental origins completing a perfect cycle so my blood is made of the water element my flesh my bones are made of the earth element the breath in my lungs that sustains my body with life is the air element and the body heat the electromagnetic signals between neurons and cells and my digestive system all these different things represent the fire element within my body and so our body's source is actually mother earth the four elements we're made out of these four elements and after the physical body dies it returns back to those four elements so right there this kind of dust to dust phrase we're familiar with is an example of the first maxim of natural law everything starts and ends in its source there's also the ocean water evaporates from the ocean rises as vapor forms as clouds falls as rain flows through rivers and mountains before ultimately returning back to the ocean so in other words there's a limited amount of water on this planet and it will our planet will always contain the same amount of water but that water moves around through different life cycles such as rain and and clouds and rivers right and the water is kind of spreading itself out all over the earth in various ways imagine being a raindrop rising as vapor forming in the cloud being born from the cloud it's like a whole lifetime and yet that water always begins and returns to its original source the ocean third example is light from the big bang stars form from cosmic gas and dust hydrogen birthed from the big bang and they forge heavier elements through fusion which scatter into the cosmos when stars die becoming building blocks for new planets plants and people so even light begins and ends in the same source photons in other words they can make elements they can come together to form all kinds of different fusion and matter form gas dust but it's all just photons at the end of the day and they can all be broken down back into that original source of pure light so look at the second maxim all creation is extension so first the divine creator extends itself into creation and creates multiplicity or form and so here's a quote from a course in miracles i think this is chapter 19 says if creation is extension the creator must have extended himself and it is impossible that what is part of him is totally unlike the rest this principle from ACIM reflects the law of proportionate causality a cause can only give its effect what it already possesses and you've probably now heard me bring up this law of proportionate causality in four master classes in a row right we we brought it up from the very first master class and it's made its appearance in all four because it's such a important law for us to keep in mind that you you cannot get out of this you bear the image and likeness of your source because the law of proportionate causality demands it there's no other option something cannot give what it does not have and so this becomes a really strong argument against the idea that God created sinful fallen humans right even even to say that God created humans with the potential to do evil is to say that God created evil so there must be another way of looking at it right and what we said was evil is unccreated evil actually does not exist and so it can't be created god creates only perfection but God allows that perfect creation to have free will and so sometimes creation being veiled from creator given free will chooses in ignorance chooses privation chooses evil in other words but that evil is just an absence of good it's not a second real thing that that exists or was created and so these two laws of privation and proportionate causality are huge to have in your tool belt when you have conversations with religious friends or even atheist friends that talk ask you about your spiritual beliefs or why do you believe the things you believe you can go to these two laws the law of provation and the law of proportionate causality and explain to them how you view the nature of evil and why it doesn't actually exist what that really means and why you believe that you are one with God these two laws really do cover the whole kind of banquet table philosophically speaking last thing here is that throughout nature we see this law at work humans don't birth tiger cubs elephants don't lay bird eggs the sun creates spherical planets not cube or triangle-shaped planets because everything produces after its own image and likeness and even the Bible says this in Genesis 1:26 so I just there's no way somebody can argue you are not made in the image and likeness of God you don't bear the nature the essence of your creator you're something separate it's like sorry too late your Bible already says that I am made all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God and don't you think that's why Jesus probably said "Hey guys when you don't love the least of these just know you're not loving me because they all bear my image and likeness." The third maxim all things seek their fulfillment this is more of the teological side of things which we talked about last month so there's a hidden impulse in every single creature all creation carries an inner drive towards its completion and this is inarguable there's a teological direction meaning that this movement is purposeful not random and then there is of course the final cause or the divine destiny that every created thing has an ordained fulfillment of some kind an end to which it strives towards yeah from the smallest seed to the stars themselves all creation carries a sacred momentum toward the realization of its own purpose this innate drive is teological aimed toward a final cause or ultimate fulfillment planets seek their perfect orbit plants grow towards the light animals fulfill their ecological roles and humans yearn for purpose whether operating through conscious intention or unconscious instinct every being moves toward its divine purpose this universal striving reflects a fundamental truth everything God creates is given a destiny a divine blueprint for fulfillment woven into their very essence an inescapable longing for the fulfillment of purpose this is an important thing to access within yourself what is my purpose what what is my soul's mission in coming here because every single one of us nobody came here without a goal without a purpose in mind and many many goals and purposes in a sense but we all share the ultimate purpose yeah which is to realize the Christ's nature to realize our oneness with God and so I just love this topic so much that everything is seeking its fulfillment because again if you have friends that are atheists or agnostics what they are rejecting is a religious depiction of God right not God itself or reality itself and Christians obviously confuse the two they think that the Christian viewpoint of God is the absolute truth of God and so if somebody rejects my views they're rejecting God right and so they get rightfully very upset by that how dare you reject God and the atheist or people like you and I who are spiritual seekers have to let them know "Oh please my friend hear me out i'm absolutely not rejecting God god is the air that I breathe i'm rejecting your religious view or depiction of God not God itself." That immediately draws a challenge to both the religious person and the atheist because now you're presenting an alltogether different view of what we call God quote unquote and I think if a skeptical materialistic atheist agnosticleaning person hears these kinds of arguments for God a lot of them are going to say "Hey you know this actually makes a lot of sense this is like a theism I could rock with it's not based in this man-made projection of a angry monolithic deity an old man in the sky you know that's the caricature that they're rejecting but when we go to the laws of reality logic reason epistemology thinking people get behind it really quick and that's why it's again helpful to have this tool in your arsenal so to speak that if somebody who's very kind of skeptically minded and reduct reductionist minded questions you about why you believe all these things isn't this all a bunch of hippie new age stuff you can say "Oh no this is just basic philosophy ontology and metaphysics." And you can walk them through it they can say "Oh wow actually this person's beliefs are fully grounded in reality and logic and reason and they're they're relying upon these tried and trueue systems of knowledge not just whimsical Bible verses and whatever the pastor says it means and these really unreliable foundations for knowledge you're showing that person hey I'm actually I have good reasons for thinking what I think and even if they disagree with you at the end of the day if they still hold their atheist or agnostic view at least they can have great respect for this viewpoint and that itself will plant the seed and that's all we want to do right is just plant seeds whether it's to a religious person or an atheist person we're just here to share the good news and let the chips fall where they may so speaking of a seed swower we've talked a lot about Aquinus Thomas Aquinus in this series and again although I don't agree with everything Thomas Aquinus ever taught I don't agree with anything that anybody's ever taught i don't agree with anybody on everything in any subject right neither do you probably but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate things somebody shares or teaches that we do strongly agree with and when it comes to Aquinus's ontology and natural theology I think that's where he really really shined as a unique thinker and spiritual genius in many ways and Aquinus famously has these five proofs for God if you study philosophy at you know past a high school level you're definitely going to come across these five proofs for God at some point and so they are the argument from motion the argument from causation the argument from contingency the argument from degrees and the argument from final causes now these five ways five ways to prove the existence of God are natural theology at its finest these are all arguments from natural theology meaning Aquinus is looking at the metaphysical laws and rules of nature and saying ah based on these rules that govern the universe I can give you five reasons why god must exist so this is natural theology at its best right but it's very philosophical at its heart so we could go an entire master class on any one of these five beliefs there i mean and and Aquinus does if you've read the Suma Theologica at all you know just how incredibly dense and deep Aquinas goes into each one of these so we're just going to do a quick cursory overview of each one the argument for motion says that there is an initial impetus where something must initiate the first movement and we call this the first mover and this was the first concept we went over actually in the ontology class three months ago there has to be an initial mover and then after that there's a chain reaction as each movement causes another movement we talked about this as potency versus action or act versus potency everything has both of those in the material world everything has potential to be something else this this book God forbid this Bible has the potential to be burned right it could go up in flames it has that potential but the this book isn't going to just go up in flames out of nowhere by itself it needs another object to act upon it right it needs gasoline and a lit match or something to set the book on fire and then the Bible this book I'm holding could express its potential to be burnt into ash but not by itself and that's the key everything is a chain reaction from an earlier cause so this is where the logical necessity for a first mover comes in because an infinite regress of causes and effects of which there is no first cause is logically impossible there cannot be an infinite regress and you guys would be surprised how often infinite regress comes up in theological philosophical debates or conversations that the religious person will kind of appeal to this idea at some point without even realizing it and you have to show them well hey that's but that would have to posit a a infinite regression of cause and effect with no beginning and that's impossible and so that leads us to the conclusion of a first mover therefore an unmoved mover must exist so Aquinus wrote whatever is moved is moved by another there must be a first mover this principle is readily observable everything in motion was set in motion by something else yet this chain of movement cannot regress infinitely into the past so that's why scientists posit the big bang for example the big bang is seen as the kind of first mover of the universe but even to that we would say well what caused the big bang because even the big bang is an effect yeah and as uh Terrence McKenna famously said scientists will only ask you to give them one miracle and then they can explain everything else from there is such a great quote isn't it it's very much the truth it's like hey this most magically mysterious epic inspiring thing happened at the beginning of time we don't know how or where but it's unbelievably divine that out of nothing burst forth everything and then from there it's all materialism and reductionist rationalistic nihilism and none of it has meaning it's all random it's like are you sure about that because if we look at and this is where science kind of runs into the wall because science doesn't branch into the realm of philosophy right those are two different uh oftentimes competing branches where philosophers and scientists are just arguing interminably about everything because the scientist says everything that's real and objective can be measured and weighed and proven with scientific data and experimentation and the philosopher says even for you to posit such a thing requires logic and reason and how do you weigh logic and reason on a scale so even to say everything is materialistic everything is just matter interacting with itself there's no meaning that is a metaphysical claim isn't it and so that claim requires a metaphysical justification and to that the scientist says well I'm not a metaphysician that's not my realm it's like well but you're making metaphysical claims so kind of is right metaphysical claims require metaphysical justifications and so even though scientists do this very often nobody does this more constantly than religion religion constantly makes metaphysical and ontological claims about the nature of God and then when you say "Hey can you walk me through your epistemic process for arriving at what I see as a very bizarre and contradictory belief that a loving God has to torture people forever?" Like where do you get this justification and they'll say to you "Oh whoa whoa whoa i don't deal with man's wisdom metaphysics ontology that's man's wisdom." And again you say "Oh sorry my friend it's already too late for you to say that because you already made a metaphysical claim when you said God does XYZ so everything is metaphysics it's not man-made wisdom when did man invent the laws of logic you know these things aren't invented by man they're discovered by man but they eternally exist and so everything is metaphysics at the end of the day and so you can't kind of weasle out of that so this argument from motion is a great way of using this metaphysical constant that there has to be an origin for everything or else we have this nonsensical bizarre universe that's impossible to exist there's the argument from efficient causes which is kind of similar in fact all of these arguments are very similar but if we pick up where we left off with the first cause the first way rather every effect has a cause we just said that an infinite regress is impossible therefore a first cause must exist so in the same way that there's a first mover there's a first cause logic demands an uncaused cause an originator requiring no prior cause this is God so it's basically the same argument as the argument from motion but it's using a different framework in a sense mover versus cause and then we have the argument from contingency which basically just says everything is dependent on everything else and so if everything is dependent on everything else there must be a necessary being at the beginning of that chain on whose existence does not depend on something else and this is very much consistent with Hindu adviteabanta philosophy which gives reality uh a sort of three-fold definition reality is unchanging that's number one reality is selfshining uh self it doesn't depend on anything else it's self-elilluminating meaning uh like the sun is always a good example the sun gives light to everything else but nothing gives light to the sun the sun is self-elilluminating it's independent it it exists by itself so there must be a necessary being like that that exists by itself upon which everything else is contingent so the idea is like any person any creature in the universe could potentially not exist right there's nothing saying that the ant walking across my office floor over there has to exist or the universe can't exist right no that ant could not exist and every form in the universe even planets even galaxies could potentially not exist and the rest of existence would go along just fine right so all of those things all those forms are contingent upon something else and that something else that self-shinging source is what we call God so like candles sharing a flame if no candle was originally lit no light would exist one eternal flame must burn a necessary source from which all contingent existence derives so these three are very similar in many ways but you can see the kind of nuances in each one this one is the most unique I think which is the argument from degrees aquinus says we judge things as more or less good true or beautiful there must be a standard we constantly make comparative judgments describing things as better or worse more true or less true more beautiful or less beautiful these comparisons only make sense in relation to some perfect standard or maximum just as we describe water as warmer or colder by comparing it to something ideally hot or cold our judgments of goodness truth and beauty presuppose an ultimate standard against which we measure all things this perfect standard of all qualities the divine ideal is what we call God so there must be a perfection right a standard by which we can then judge what is better or worse and that's the argument from degrees if everything has degrees to it then everything also must have a perfect standard by which we're judging those degrees and then we have the argument from final causes which is basically teology everything has a final cause a teological purpose plants seek light um intelligent design shows that purpose requires a purposer one who gives purpose animals reproduce to continue their species and celestial bodies maintain precise patterns of orbit everything is working towards its final cause so Aquinus notes that non-concious things act toward specific ends suggesting intelligent guidance throughout nature unconscious entities consistently pursue beneficial outcomes like an arrow requires an archer to hit its target so everything is working towards its target is the idea this purposeful order in nature points to a divine designer directing all things toward their intended ends so it's hard to imagine a universe of randomness and no order could create so much order and teology is the idea now this is what I consider to be the best argument for God from metaphysics alone and it's called the transcendental argument for God or TAG so here's the core logic tag argues that rational thought presupposes God's existence without God we lack foundations for reason logic and morality here's the logical challenge physical matter changes and is limited human opinions vary yet logical and moral truths remain absolute and universal so basically to the skeptic the atheist the nihilist the agnostic who denies the existence of a source of all life which we might call God you could ask this question do you deny the reality of the transcendentals or the absolutes what are those well that's things like universal laws the laws of logic ethics um things like the self like how are you a self with an identity over time like you wake up tomorrow you're the same self what is causing that consistency to remain the same um memories of the past what is that can you weigh that on a scale yet it exists these laws or transcendentals exist outside of physical matter they can't be objectively measured they therefore require a divine source so the person who says "I only believe in what I can prove with my senses," is in big trouble when they confront this argument because they would either have to deny the reality of logic metaphysics identity memory all these kinds of things that can't be weighed or measured and so if you accept that those things do exist even though they can't be weighed or measured you need some kind of grounding like what's the source of those things how did those things come into being and of course the only argument that makes sense is a prior metaphysical source which we call God so these immaterial realities cannot originate from the material world they require a rational eternal being as their source the concept of God provides the necessary foundation for all human reasoning so the argument usually goes something like and I've seen this argument used a lot in debates with different kinds of you know Muslims atheists Christians will bring this up and say you literally can't make sentences without God's existence you couldn't form thought in your mind you couldn't use logic or reason at all without God's existence so just the fact that you can think is proof of God and I think that's actually a pretty strong argument so here is the dilemma of atheism actually there's a logical dilemma first that denying God's existence requires or relies on principles that require God to exist which is what the tag argument kind of shows this metaphysical claim itself demands metaphysical justification what about using logic logical laws are immaterial universal and unchanging attributes impossible to explain with a purely material universe so again materialistic thinkers are in big trouble with this argument because if you say everything's material what about everything that's not material right and then the other problem is just even presuming that something like objective truth exists atheism assumes objective truth exists and is knowable concepts requiring a transcendent foundation beyond physical reality and then similarly relying upon reason without God we lack grounds to trust our mind's ability to discern reason and meaning which requires a source so there's kind of two things there right there's logic and reason itself or truth and then there's my human mind's ability to discern that truth so it's like there might even be an absolute truth for the atheist but how can they know that their minds could ever deduce that truth by what foundation are they grounding that claim that I can understand what's true there has to be a source of truth yes we always go back to everything begins and ends with its source even logic and reason okay now let's look at Yeshua's teachings on natural theology and to me Yeshua really was a master of natural theology and I'm going to show you why yeshua was history's preeminent natural theologian consistently using the natural world rather than just scripture or tradition to reveal divine truths his parables primarily drew from nature to illustrate spiritual principles his approach demonstrated that creation reveals the creator that God's nature is reflected in the created order through observation of flora fauna weather and human relationships jesus showed how we can discern spiritual truth so let's look at some examples so I I love using this idea when Christians call um you know the belief that God lives within everything in creation or you can learn about God through creation they say "Oh that's evil new age witchcraft." You say "Okay so Jesus taught new age witchcraft is what you believe." No Jesus never taught that oh really well let me show you like 50 verses what I'm what I'm talking about here look at all these examples Jesus uses from natural theology jesus taught spiritual principles through natural analogies he used the fig tree to teach about the discernment of seasons and animal behavior to instruct disciples about navigating hostility be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves he compared human parental love to divine care asking what father would give his child a serpent instead of a fish his Sabbath teachings referenced natural compassion which of you by having a having a son or an ox fall into the well will not immediately pull him out now this is another really good argument to use when you're talking to Christian friends when you say "Hey my friend if you would never think about torturing your children in hell for any crime conceivable why do you think that God would do that?" And they say "Oh you can't compare God to a human father god's ways are higher." Right you say "Okay well unfortunately I can compare God to a father because I learned to do so from Jesus." Jesus compared God to earthly fathers more than anybody did jesus even called God the father drawing upon the earthly father archetype that's natural theology so it's like observe the relationship between a good father and their child it's unconditional love divine protection that father would never let harm come to their child in that way and so yes we absolutely can say that if it goes completely against our own nature as human fathers and mothers to even think about torturing our children that means it even more so for God right we are just a small reflection of God not the totality and so that's why Jesus says if you being earthly fathers dot dot dot how much more your heavenly father so it's like fill in the blank if you being earthly fathers blank wouldn't torture your kids in hell forever how much more would your heavenly father not torture his children in hell forever so Jesus set the standard for us to compare God to a good earthly father even though Christians will always say that you can't do that because God's ways are higher it's like no no no god's ways are embedded in God's creation what about divine provision in nature jesus said "Look at the birds of the air they do not sow or reap or store away in barns yet your heavenly father feeds them." So there's an example from natural theology to say "You should be like birds in the respect that you don't worry you trust you surrender." So there's Jesus teaching the spiritual principle of surrender through the birds consider the liies of the field how they grow they neither toil nor spin if so God if God so clothe the grass of the field will he not much more clothe you again speaking to trust and surrender in God's divine provision fruits and seeds every good tree bears good fruit but a bad tree bears bad fruit and he also used the sewer parable to show how spiritual growth follows natural principles so Jesus used fruits and seeds very often in parables and teachings to teach these kinds of principles of like produces like you can always discern if somebody is a quote unquote good tree based on the fruit they produce if somebody's doing bad works if they're creating sin and evil in the world then they are a quote unquote bad tree meaning you shouldn't trust such a person right how do how do we know that we can discern a person based on their actions jesus says because trees are like that that's natural theology jesus is drawing upon examples from nature because nature sings of God's divine design here's some more verses from natural theology he makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good sends rain on the just and the unjust so Jesus is using the sun and the rainfall to show God's impartiality and unconditional love matthew 10 are not two sparrows sold for a penny yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your father's care you are worth more than many sparrows so this this is an example from natural theology of God's love for you and God's care and compassion for you jesus says if you if you don't know that God cares about you just look at the birds see how God cares for them feeds them and not one of them falls to the ground without your father knowing even more so God cares for you and loves you and watches you luke 13 a man had a fig tree he looked for fruit but found none if it bears fruit next year fine if not then cut it down now this is a really cool parable in my opinion of Jesus using the fig tree and how you know a farmer will deal with their fig tree they'll let a few mistakes go by a couple seasons of not bearing fruit but if after a couple seasons of not bearing fruit you got to cut that tree down and plant a new one in its place right jesus is saying look at the way that farmers naturally deal with their own plants the universe is like that there's a a a seed of truth there about the way that the divine mind sees in that we can make mistakes a few times and the universe gives us leeway because we have to learn from our mistakes so it doesn't just want to punish you the very first time you make a mistake in some area but there's such a thing as karma and if you keep making the same mistake you sort of signal to the universe I need help learning this lesson i'm not getting the message by myself and so then the universe brings you what catalysts and catalysts can often feel like punishment if you have a religious mind really they're just a challenge based upon your own actions what you've drawn to yourself that's asking you to meet that challenge with a higher level of spiritual virtue patience compassion whatever it is so Jesus uses a fig tree to teach this very kind of sophisticated spiritual principle of the nature of karma and and even God's nature towards actions in the universe there's a little bit of breathing room at the at the beginning right where you're allowed to make mistakes but if you don't learn really quick and make the change you're going to get quote unquote cut down and that's just an analogy for you're going to get your karma so to speak john 3:8 "The wind blows where it wishes and you hear its sound but you don't know where it comes from or where it goes is the next verse." So it is with everyone born of the spirit so Jesus is teaching that nyanis or enlightened beings sages are like the wind it's like in the same way you don't ever really know where the wind's going to blow where it came from where it's going that's what people who are living in the spirit are like and boy is that true when you study people like Maharaji Nim Curly Baba um Ma Avatar Baba even Yogananda and his guru very reclusive and and hard to pin down always moving here and there they'll say they'll be one place yesterday and they don't show up the next day and they're in some other city you know gurus are notoriously hard to pin down traveling gurus and that's why many of them just sit in a room and let people come to them right you're like "Hey I'll just let the universe bring me people but if I'm going to go out there to find people to be of service to it's going to be hard to catch me it's going to be hard to know what I'm doing because even I don't know what I'm doing i'm like the wind i'm being blown by the wind." Jesus says "That's what it's like when you're truly living from spirit or I am." Pretty cool analogy then there are some more intense parables from natural theology and I think the most intense one Jesus told is the parable of the sheep and the goats so Jesus uses the analogy of a farmer dividing the sheep from the goats at the end of the day and basically says "So also my heavenly father will do on the day of judgment." And the day of judgment of course in the Jesus way philosophy is the day that you die the day that your physical body dies is the day you meet the light the source and have your life review and face the judgment and so Jesus says "On that day of judgment my father divides the sheep from the goats those who have done good from those who have done evil." And there's so many huge implications for Christianity in this parable that we'll unpack let's go to the next slide so the separation criteria Jesus gives between sheep and goats isn't theological knowledge or religious ritual but compassion yeah the Jesus way as we call it feed the hungry give drink to the thirsty welcome the stranger clothe the naked care for the sick visit the prisoner jesus says in this parable this is the famous line where Jesus says to those on his left "Away from me you who practice evil for when I was hungry you didn't feed me when I was thirsty you didn't give me drink." And they say "Lord Lord when did we see you hungry or thirsty when you didn't do it to the least of these you didn't do it to me." And then he cast them into the everlasting fire I think it's says in the verse which is a metaphor for suffering so just as animals act according to their nature humans reveal their divine connection through compassionate responses to the vulnerable and the suffering so it's like how does Jesus know if you're a sheep or a goat or how does God know jesus says God knows that you are good or bad so to speak you are of the kingdom or not of the kingdom based on your behavior the behaviors of sheep and goats are very different they're very unique animals and so not only the way they look is different somewhat but the way they behave is especially different so Jesus uses this analogy of a shepherd dividing his flock at the end of the day sheeps go with the sheep pen goats go into the goat pen and they don't mix jesus says "So it is on the last day those who have done good go to the good place those who've done bad go to the bad place and it's for their own karma it's for their own actions there's nobody to blame but themselves because it's based on the way that you actually lived so think about the explosive implications of this parable like what could be a more clear salvation teaching than this i mean Jesus is literally saying on the on the day of judgment this is how your father your heavenly father will decide who gets to go to heaven who has to go to hell so to speak and it's compassion good works loving action service to others if Jesus's gospel was just confess me as Lord and just believe in my death and resurrection and you are saved your ticket is punched why in the heck hell would Jesus not say that in this parable why would he deceive everybody to think that compassion and good works can earn them heaven you guys know we can't go to heaven by good works that's you know man's faulty efforts we go by faith alone grace alone apart from works well if that's true why in the hell doesn't Jesus say that here here is how my heavenly father will divide the sheep from the goats those who have confessed me as Lord and Savior and believed in my death and resurrection will go to the sheep and those who have not confessed like come on he would have definitely said that if that was his gospel and so what must his gospel have been if this in this parable like many many others he doesn't say any of that nonsense he always consistently points us to good works because saying you have faith means nothing right if you don't do the works of faith you don't have faith if you don't do the works of God you don't have faith in God period end of story closing of the book there's no more argument you can make and so why not just go right to the actions just say look your actions ultimately prove your inner state everyone is expressing their inner state based on their behaviors and so if you want to show the universe I want to graduate into the realms of love and peace and unity well then you probably should live a life of love peace and unity that only makes sense and I think if we were all really pressed on it we would say "Yeah that's kind of the only fair system I could think of let people choose what they want based on the way they live." So we have all of these commandments from Jesus for compassion th this is the way to eternal life these kinds of things this kind of love the most striking aspect of this parable is Jesus's identification with those in need when you didn't do it to them you didn't do it to me this reveals a profound natural theological principle the divine nature is present within all humans including the most vulnerable there is no other way you can slice this teaching right when you didn't do it to them you didn't do it to me when you did it to them you did it to me there's no other conclusion that we can come to than Jesus is clearly teaching the divine nature the Christ is present within all beings okay we went over that already now let's look at a couple of the most important metaphysical laws the ones we went over last month or two months ago in our cosmology class let's look at how these laws are revealed in nature meaning this isn't woo woo stuff or new age stuff that people just invented hippies invented in the 20th century or whatever these are eternal laws written into creation we know that for example the universe is comprised of two equal and opposite forces which thrust away from each other to build the whole polarized universe this principle demonstrates divine design through independ interdependent relationships showing how unity manifests through diversity and transcendence really means balance and isn't that the essence of the 4DU curriculum right there so look at all these examples of polarities in nature and this is just four quick examples i mean we can even go down to the cellular level right every cell needs potassium and sodium in and out and there's this there has to be this balance between those two polarities right we have day and night we have oxygen and CO2 we have male and female we have north and south magnetic poles everything has polarity everything has an opposite or else it could not exist looking next to the law of correspondence fractals repeat identical patterns across scales from microscopic to cosmic and this reveals how creation reflects the creator through consistent design and intelligence the hermetic axiom as above so below expresses how all dimensions of reality mirror each other demonstrating creation's unified nature there's a number of Bible verses that show this we can look at but here's some examples of fractals over here we can see some of us have seen these kinds of images before that the the basic pattern of a tree looks exactly like lungs when you look inside the human body the blood vessels that flow through our entire human body look like river systems of the earth and we have the spiral pattern the Fibonacci pattern that appears in many many shapes and sizes galaxies flowers acorns and so forth snail shells these are repeating patterns that show the law of correspondence that everything is corresponding to the same archetypes the same patterns so now as we get ready to close this presentation we're going to close by looking at Jewish Christian natural theology and anytime we look at Jewish Christian philosophy we're really talking about Athenian philosophy because as we've been really hammering on the Jesus Way podcast in many different episodes the Essenes that aesthetic group of Jews that broke off from orthodoxy in 300 B.CE are the ancestors of the Jesus movement they are the ancestors of all Jewish Christian groups in fact we have a quote from Ucius that says "All Christians were called Nazarines and Essins or Jessines." Jess is the original name of Essins which it's derived from and Jess refers to Jesse the father of David the Messiah in the Old Testament is prophesied to be the Messiah of David's lineage right from the lineage of David you will raise up a prophet who will liberate our people and Jesse was the father of David so by calling themselves the Essins the Jessines Jessines they were basically saying "We are the community that will give birth to the Messiah." And I've talked about this on many Essen master classes we've done here but the Essenes had this really incredible belief in my opinion where they understood the importance of what the law of one teaches that the physical vehicle must always match the level of consciousness of the soul that's inhabiting it and so if we want a Zadik a righteous being a Messiah a Hamashiach to come down from the higher realms of heaven and incarnate amongst us and liberate our people well we got to prepare a physical body that can house that soul and so that's why the Essenes kind of sequestered themselves in the deserts of Kuman to practice their very disciplined physical lifestyle of you know intermittent fasting every day one day a week a full 24-hour water fast regular ritual bathing only eating foods from the earth abstaining from meat abstaining from animal sacrifice living as close to God's original design as possible and they knew the longer we do that the more we will extend the human lifespan and make the body healthier and healthier and eventually if we keep doing that we're going to get to a threshold where basically avatars can incarnate among us such as the Hamashiach and so they had this plan of action that generation by generation we're going to hide ourselves away from the corrupt society the Greco Roman Jewish world or we're going to do our own thing and they were correct and they actually did it you guys which is the amazing thing to me that Jesus was born amongst the Essenes of course the northern stack of Essenes called the Nazarines but nevertheless Jesus was the fulfillment of that prophecy and even the very name Essenes so when we talk about Jewish Christianity we're always really talking about Athenian philosophy so let's look at what the Essenes taught and practiced first of all they believed strongly that the law of God is within us not in a book but written on our very hearts i tell you truly your body was made not only to breathe eat and think but also to feel the law within you and that's very law of one isn't it rah says similar things they believe that nature was the sacred scripture that they followed think not that the law is only written in books you may read the law in the stars and in the trees and in the waters and in the mountains and both of those quotes are from the Essen Gospel of Peace they believed in the idea of innate knowledge of God born within us and this comes from the recognitions the knowledge of God has been written by God on the heart of every human being so this is Amenian natural theology in a nutshell now we have a lot of examples of this kind of philosophy in the Dead Sea Scrolls so if we want to get historical and scholarly with this and say "No this really was an incredible Jewish mystical sect that really existed for hundreds of years and really did practice and believe all these things we can go to the Dead Sea Scrolls for a lot of that to furnish a lot of that evidence." So let's look at some quotes from the Thanksgiving hymns you have engraved your law on my heart from the community rule God has made known to them the secrets of his wisdom and planted them in their hearts from the Thanksgiving hymns again through your spirit in me I have heard your wondrous secret you have caused a spring of knowledge to well up within me and from the instruction 4Q4 417 for God has placed wisdom in your heart to enlighten your mind with understanding to discern between good and evil and to walk in the paths of truth and righteousness so this is already very antithetical to Pauline theology right because what does Paul say in his epistles he says "The heart of man is wicked and deceitful above all things can't be trusted you are pure evil on the inside is what Paul believed and Paul really really hammered this concept to his churches that he was writing to there is nobody righteous not even one and yet asene philosophy Jewish Christian philosophy was everybody has the law of righteousness written on their very heart it's part of our very nature to be righteous it is our teological purpose our final cause to express God's righteousness so those are some very diametrically opposed beliefs aren't they and now the coolest part to me about a scene natural theology no doubt is the 14 communions we did a whole master class on this last and we're going to do a couple of Jesus way podcasts on this in the next few weeks so stay tuned for that we're not going to go in depth today on this practice but some of you are already familiar with it essentially here's what it is there are seven daily practices connecting the seven angels of the earthly mother which are done in the morning so each morning there's seven angels angel of earth angel of life angel of water air sun and then the earthly mother is the seventh um each communion each kind of meditation was designed to activate the different bodily centers the the chakras that correlate to that angel so there's seven roots of the tree of life and seven branches of the tree of life 14 angels in total seven roots of the earthly mother seven branches of the heavenly father and this is the way that the Essenes divided up the divine nature into sort of 14 different expressions so in the evening you do your communion with the heavenly father's angels so you can see how the earthly mother is kind of uh the way we commune with the forces of nature and the the forces that comprise our physical body and give us physical health and then in the evening the angels of the heavenly father are the spiritual dimension of divine powers peace uh wisdom power love eternal life and the heavenly father and so you commune with these angels in the evening and these angels are designed they're really powers or forces right heavenly forces the word is malim in Hebrew which means angel or messenger these are messengers of God these are the aspects of God's very nature and so they develop our higher consciousness when we meditate upon them so this is just such a great spiritual practice that anybody can begin taking up that really does produce beautiful fruits you feel more connected to nature when you're spending each morning communing with you know the element of earth the elements of water the element of air of light these are the things that make up your very body right and so when you do these little prayers to for example angel of earth I think the prayer says "Angel of earth where I stand is holy ground as you make fruitful the seeds of the fields make fruitful also my seeds so you're praying to the the force or elements of earth for abundance and for fertility so that's what that angel comprises right and so you would meditate on the bones the muscles the organs the physical matter in your body as being made up from the angel of earth you can say "Thank you angel of earth for making up my physical body with strength and robust health and life force energy thank you for giving me stronger muscles thank you for making me healthy and fit and fertile and all of these things yeah you can just bless those qualities within yourself." And that's how the Essenes communed with the angels so this is a very advanced form of uh mystical Judaism from which cobbalism is derived is this Esenian Nazarene mysticism from even a few centuries before Jesus and I think there's a lot of wisdom we can gain from this that the Essenes had that they really did understand the earth is divine the earth is sacred and it not only speaks of the creator but it actually delivers us the creator firsthand right when you drink water into your body it's like you're drinking in part of God's essence that water not only is physical but it represents the essence of God and that water is very purifying and cleansing and nourishing and lifegiving and hydrating so those qualities hydration thirst quenching cleaning purification this is what God is like and so there's always a physical and metaphysical dimension that we're connecting with through these elements i think that would not only make us a lot physically healthier to have that mindset and and really live our life with this incredible reverence and sacredness toward creation that we would respect our physical bodies a whole lot more wouldn't we and we would respect nature around us and animals and sentient life once we see the divine essence is so infused within it and the Essenes most definitely had that level of awareness so we have the tree of life with the seven energy centers and I think this is so cool so here's how the Essenes again going back to 200 BC at least this is how this ancient culture understood the chakras is that if you think about it there's a point where each of the seven branches connects to each of the seven roots so there's a connection point a conjunction between each branch of the heavenly father with each root of the heavenly mother so the tree of life is comprised of seven branches of each and there's a meeting point along the spine of the tree where each root and branch connect these seven connection points are the seven energy centers to ascend higher up the tree of life requires us reaching perfect balance between earth and heaven physical and spiritual aspects of ourselves so I'm not going to get all of these correct off the top of my head i have it saved in my notes but the the branches and roots that connect again create each chakra so the Essenes believed for example that where the branch of love the angel of love connects to the root of water where love and water connect is the heart chakra that's the meeting place of the love of the heavenly father and the water of the earthly mother and that creates the heart chakra the green ray they believed that where the heavenly angel of wisdom the branch of wisdom connects to the branch of air is at the third eye center and so that creates spiritual perception the third eye chakra and so on and so forth the crown is the heavenly father and the earthly mother's meeting place that makes sense and so they have a really cool philosophy that really does check out as being metaphysically accurate and it's an it's a very like helpful way of understanding the energy centers because it immediately gives you this view that every energy center is a polarity there's a positive and a negative or a masculine and a feminine and the way we perform spiritual balancing is by balancing the polarities right not trying to get rid of one of the polarities but balancing them in harmony and that always requires us to balance our physicality with our spirituality meaning we can't just be lost up in the clouds and ignore the physical body and our physical life or we're not balanced we need to meet our physical life with our spiritual virtues yeah and that's what balance looks like to not bypass what's happening in the physical realm so each energy center represents a different place of balance we must find within ourselves and so studying these the tree of life and the branches and the roots and what they represent and how they meet together is a great philosophical system for helping you understand how each chakra is balanced and it's very very congruent might I add with the law of one's teaching on the chakras but we're going to go super deep into that in the Jesus way podcast so that's all I'll say for now and then to finish today I want to look at just three natural miracles of nature that again when we go to nature to understand God God's heart God's mind God's intelligence God's nature we find some really spectacular things that you know are kind of better left up to mystery in the end we don't want to put too much definition on everything but they do speak to a very deep level of our soul i think when we really take in this phenomenon such as the mcelium network we're going to look at that it opens our consciousness to be aware of God in new ways and so it's really powerful as a spiritual practice to observe the beauty and the majesty and the intelligence of nature and let it speak to you of what God must be like you know if this creation is this incredible man what must its creator be like so here's one natural miracle the mcelium network did you know that one cubic meter of forest soil contains up to 500 miles of mycelial threads we could call this the woodwide web forgive my dad joke i couldn't resist um enabling trees to communicate and share nutrients across forests so we know this through science right that mycelium will carry nutrients from trees that have plenty to trees that need more it's this interconnected web of intelligence that spreads for sometimes thousands of miles right and really all soil beneath all soil on this planet is the mycelium network and so in this way the mcelium of our planet is like earth's digestive system meaning all matter gets decomposed into the earth and returns back to its source as we said and that decomposing agent is the mcelium network and so the mcelium network is not only giving life to everything giving life to all plants which in turn give life to humans right and animals but they also serve as the kind of um what's the term I'm looking for like the death warden or something the person that comes to clean up the dead body once it's dead and takes that body and disseminates it back into the earth in a way that it can be used all over again and so it keeps this kind of cycle of eternal life going on this planet so the m the mcelium network of our planet is a living miracle and this is just the tip of the iceberg there's whole documentaries done on the mcelium network that'll just blow your mind another one would be DNA in each of our cells every human cell contains three billion DNA base pairs that would stretch over six feet if uncoiled i mean how do you wrap your head around that if you uncoiled the DNA in every single cell of your body every single cell would have six feet of DNA i mean that is unfathomable isn't it what an unbelievable miracle that the creator just casually embedded into our body your 37 trillion cells contain enough DNA to reach the sun and back 250 times that's one of those stats you hear and you're like I just have no idea what to do with a fact like that i can't wrap my head around that this divine encoding system stores information more efficiently than any human computer so we think AI is impressive these days right and it is but the DNA coding system of your body is far more intelligent than any computer or AI system we have and that's also pretty tough to wrap your mind around like the logos written in flesh God's creative intelligence exists within every cell of creation so even your own DNA is a natural miracle and then finally my favorite example is the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly to me God has created the most perfect analogy of spiritual awakening in the insect of the caterpillar that transforms into the butterfly and we'll see why first the caterpillar you know putting itself into a cocoon goes through a dissolution process so inside the cocoon the caterpillar's body completely liquefies its former self dissolves into primordial soup pretty crazy to imagine so these enzymes get secreted that actually the caterpillar secretes the enzymes that dissolve the caterpillar i mean tell me that's not an analogy for spiritual awakening and then it turns into this jelly substance and that gets us into the second phase of transformation mysterious cells carrying the butterfly blueprint survive the destruction they orchestrate the complete rebirth from chaos so somehow there's part of that caterpillar literally a part that was always there yeah just like the self the Christ that isn't destroyed through the fire of spiritual awakening through the metamorphosis process and that surviving remnant of the caterpillar turns into the whole butterfly the the new the higher self that is born out of the spiritual awakening and there's so many analogies we can bring in here the crucifixion and resurrection being another reflection of this principle but this is the universal blueprint of spiritual awakening the old must completely die and dissolve before the new can be born and yet the new that is born is actually the old it's the original cells that were always there present in the caterpillar that have now been manifested this is spiritual awakening in you is the Christ already but if you want to manifest that Christ those Christ cells so to speak and let them recreate you into its image and likeness you have to get the ego out of the way you've got to get all the obstructions out of the way and that's what the caterpillar does in the cocoon and then there's the moment of resurrection an entirely new creature emerges this profound rebirth mirrors our spiritual potential for complete transformation so the the butterfly still carries some of the image of the caterpillar right there's still the kind of caterpillar body a little bit there but everything around it is now totally transformed and so that's also an analogy for spiritual awakening it's like after enlightenment a person looks no different nothing physically about them really changes that much because all the change has been an internal change right and there's one more really cool aspect of this analogy that parallels spiritual awakening which is how does the butterfly know when it's time to break out of the cocoon and the answer is when it starts to suffocate to death when it grows so large that the tight confines of the cocoon are no longer satisfying to it it's too uncomfortable right and so the the butterfly naturally starts to thrash around to try to get free and so it's really not like the butterfly doesn't know it's become a butterfly yet the butterfly doesn't know it has wings yet it has to break out of the shell first and so with much you know uh friction and energy and the desire to escape this fate that it's seemingly going to die from it bursts out of the cocoon and breathes the fresh and open air and now can move and it can expand its wings and it's upon breaking out of the cocoon that the butterfly says "Wow look at these wings." And it knows now that it's a butterfly there's something incredibly divine about this imagery for the spiritual awakening path which is that when you truly wake up to the truth of who you are it's so radically disorienting and transformational to everything about you that you're usually the last person to notice and that other people will notice the changes happening in you before you do because you're still only seeing your ego and all your mistakes and your blind spots right because you're trying to break free you're trying to break out of that shell so all you know is I'm suffocating under the weight of ego consciousness and you want to get free and so we strive we struggle we read books we go to retreats we do everything we can to get free and when we finally break free only then do we really see oh wow I was never that caterpillar to begin with i was always this butterfly in potential so that is why I see Christ as a kind of natural theology for humans or for humanity in that in the same way we've been over today that all of these examples from nature reveal God and this kind of approach of natural theology the same applies to Jesus doesn't it this is why Yeshua the Nazarene continues to be so inspiring to billions of people because whether they know it or not and most of them don't know it jesus set the blueprint jesus Yeshua was the example of what is the kind of final cause of every person to know God to surrender to God and to do God's will to the extent that Christ did this is what is possible for the human being and this is how it's possible jesus showed us he said "It's through repentance it's through forgiveness and non-judgment and nonviolence and loving your neighbor as yourself loving God with all your heart being of service to those in need this is how you transform from the caterpillar into the butterfly." So this is why I never stop taking so much inspiration from Yeshua because I really do see him as the standard for for third density human beings that we all can see and wrap our minds around and say okay one person at least did it and of course there's many other examples Buddha Krishna countless sages we could mention we could say that they're also blueprints and archetypes from natural theology but nobody more stunning and kind of awe inspiring right than Yeshua even to the point of being murdered and still showing this is the kind of love that is possible for a human being to have forgive them Father they know not what they do and so hopefully you can find inspiration from today's venture into natural theology that all of creation around you is truly singing God's praises at all moments and the more you naturally commune with nature and fall in love with nature and appreciate nature I promise you the more close you will feel to God because nature just has this way of silently speaking of God's nature to us it silently reflects God's nature it's like when you look at a stunning painting the Mona Lisa or Starry Night it's like I don't know what that author is like that that artist rather or a good novel i don't know what the author is like but I can deduce that they're very intelligent they have a deep appreciation for beauty and aestheticism and balance and um accuracy and all these things that we see in art you can deduce certain things about the artist just by looking at their work and so we do the same thing with nature but because nature really does represent the kind of divine feminine the embodiment of being here in physical reality and then bringing that heaven to earth through my physical reality you're actually you are actually communing with a huge metaphysical component of what makes up the creator which is the divine feminine polarity there's nothing that has been more obuscated or ignored or marginalized than the divine feminine in religion and is it any wonder why religious people are so unembodied in their spirituality they've got all these high lofty ideas that they just do not and cannot live up to because too many of their beliefs are contradicting each other such as you're unworthy you're unrighteous etc yeah good luck manifesting the Christ in your world when every Sunday somebody's telling you you're inherently depraved and totally sinful by nature kind of cuts you off at the knees doesn't it so when we don't accept beliefs like this because nature certainly doesn't tell us that we say actually everything is beautiful and intelligent and wonderful and so I must be as well i must be beautiful and intelligently designed and wonderful and purposeful in my design just like everything else around me so this goes back to what we talked about on Sunday if you joined our last Sunday call that you've got to include yourself in that oneness if all creation is extension as ACIM said you must be an extension of the creator and so maybe I'll leave you with that today i want you to sit with this today guys as a conclusion for today's master class my personality the every one of us has an essence right a unique essence that when we think about each other like when you think about me you think about Aaron Abkkey immediately an essence comes into your mind right of what Aaron is like the way that Aaron talks and expresses himself and what he likes and doesn't like there's an essence you capture of me and everybody in your life and so you have an essence just like that and when other people think about you and your energy and the way you express and show up and your personality your uniqueness right they are connecting to an aspect of the eternal creator and that's you my friend you are you are a living natural theology you are a living testament to what God is like and as we always say of course you're not the sum total of what God is like no one person can be the sum total of God of course but but this is the nature of oneness is that there is uniqueness in multiplicity there's diverse expressions but one same source one same substance of which we are all a part and so you in a sense must exist your soul must exist because you are a fractal of God you are a little slice of the pie of what makes up the creator and how does that not inspire you when you contemplate that and sit with that of just tremendous humility of much like Jesus said right i can only do what I see the father doing because my father is greater than I for me personally it just compels so much awe and love and reverence and humility when I recognize everything that I've ever been identified with as Aaron aaron's unique expression the the sound of my voice everything about me I am an expression of God what does the course of miracles say i am the holy son of God himself which is this idea of like claim it claim what you are it's not spiritual or virtuous or holy to deny what you are that's lackbased thinking that's separation-based thinking of the ego of religion to keep you small it is humble it is honest it is truthful and it is virtuous to claim what you are i am the holy son of God the Christ itself and I myself am an expression of God therefore I am very holy if you can see the holiness of nature my friends if you can hold a newborn baby and experience the sacredness of that incredible being the the purity the innocence behind their eyes and you you have a holy moment holding that baby doesn't that speak of what God is like and didn't somebody hold you like that when you came into the world didn't somebody see that innocence behind your eyes and they had a holy moment with God because they held you in their arms aren't you not very holy just as everything else is see when you include yourself in the whole there's no room for ego oneness destroys pride oneness eviscerates arrogance and egoic driven thinking because there's no room for it anymore when you recognize I am a part of the whole i am an expression of the whole the ego wants to invert that and say I am the whole and every other part must serve me i'm greater than all the others but humility says no my source is greater than I i'm just an expression a humble servant that is the attitude of oneness you can't be prideful and be aware of oneness at the same time because oneness literally means there is no separate self that can stand apart and be better or be superior all is one and therefore all yes even you is holy and sacred and beautiful and infinitely lovable and the creation of the universe our natural world nature all around us is constantly singing this to us this is what Jesus taught this is what the Essenes believed and this is what you can practice each and every day of use nature from now on as a spiritual practice and when you commune with nature when you drink water you can say "Thank you angel of water for filling my body with your waters of life thank you for nourishing me thank you for giving me sustenance and life to my cells you can bless the water in your mind and it's like hey that's more for you than for the water right that's for you to unlock your awareness of God's omniresence even in water even in the air that you breathe i'm breathing in God i'm drinking God i'm eating God i'm communing with God all day long because God is the inescapable reality that nature reveals to me so I'll leave it there for today and hope you guys have a blessed beautiful Saturday hopefully get out into some nature and enjoy some fun in the sun and uh we'll see you guys back here tomorrow for our Catalyst integration workshop thank you guys so much for attending the Jesus way philosophy series i'm actually going to be turning this whole series by the way into a video course that'll have probably four to eight lessons per master class so ontology cosmology epistemology and natural theology and these are the subjects we're going to keep banging on about and hammering all through the Jesus way podcast but I want to make this resource available so that people who listen to the podcast and say "Wow I love this Jesus way philosophy how can I learn more how can I sink my teeth in deeper?" We can say "Hey we have a whole course for you right here that you can take and go as deep as your little heart wants to go." because as you guys see these subjects are an endless wellspring of knowledge and inspiration we can pull from and uh it's very good to do so so I love you all thank you again for attending and enjoying this series i love you all so much and have a blessed weekend we'll see you all next time peace and love