Are you dealing with any of this?

1. You feel you'll never be able to truly love yourself 

2. You can never be able to fully love yourself if you don't accept all aspects of yourself. 

3. You're confused about what real love is 

In this episode you will learn: 

1. The definition of love as complete acceptance, and how this can be applied to self love and to love for others. 

2. The difference between love and hate, and how hate is often based on dehumanization. 

3. The dangers of propaganda, and how it can be used to promote hatred and bigotry.

"When you have self acceptance, when you have self love, what you have, what you get out of that is you get a sense of discrimination about your motivations for doing certain things."

I was raised hearing a lot of hateful rhetoric. Things like "What is wrong with you?" or "You're not as human as I am." I never wanted to use words like that. To me, love is complete acceptance. And hatred is complete rejection. I try to practice love in my everyday life, but sometimes it's hard. Especially when I see the hate that's happening in the world. There's a movement right now that's trying to program empathy out of people. And I think it's because they want to be able to treat others as less than human. This is a dangerous thing, and I hope that more people can learn to love instead of hate.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. The definition of love as complete acceptance and how this can be applied to self-love and to love for others.

2. The difference between love and hate and how hate is often based on dehumanization.

3. The dangers of propaganda and how it can be used to promote hatred and bigotry.

Chapter Summaries:

[00:00:28] - John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. He is going to talk about love from a spiritual perspective. As someone who practices shamanism today, john usually defines his terms when he's talking about something, and he doesn't try to impose his definitions on others.

[00:02:19] - One definition of love is complete acceptance. Self-love is a form of self-acceptance. It's not motivated by hatred or self-loathing. It's motivated by accepting yourself and not beating yourself up. There is a fine line between external validation and conditional love. We don't have to be in a specific relationship to love somebody. I can love someone I'm no longer in a relationship with because the relationship was unhealthy. But that doesn't mean I don't love them.

[00:12:02] - Shamanism is about exploring the core of who we are and the connection that we have to divinity, to spirit, and to everything in the universe. When my daughter was four, I said something to her that I had told myself for years I would never say to my children. Now, if I ever use that phrase again, I want people to call me on it.

[00:16:52] - Hate is the opposite of love. It's the rejection of the person based on some perceived quality. A movement in the US is trying to program empathy out of people. This is coming from a religious organization that is politically active and gives money to politicians. In the political rhetoric in the United States, people talk about globalism, the global elite, etc. These are white supremacist dog whistles for Jews. Neonazi talking points here. This is all part of this antiJewish conspiracy theory. It's all a part of spreading hatred by making a threat that doesn't exist.

[00:33:13] - Patriarchy has nothing to do with the divine masculine. Patriarchy is all about putting one guy in charge. Shamanism is egalitarian, and there's no hierarchy. As a shamanic practitioner, I view myself as a servant. I'm not taking orders from people.

[00:43:44] - The final frontier for us spiritually is to explore inward. Formlessness is at the very core of your being, meaning not your body, not even your mind. Out of this void is where our experience arises, our physicality, and our thoughts and feelings arise. Hermetic philosophy talks about gnosis becoming aware of us, being a part of the one thing. At its core, it's love. Because it accepts everything, it's difficult to conceptualize, so we anthropomorphize it. A lot of our imagery of Deity comes from that.

[00:54:00] - John ends the conversation on love with a self-exploration on loving Yourself. John recommends subscribing to this podcast if you're not already subscribed.

Connect with me:

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JohnMooreAuthor

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ShamansTent

Website: https://www.MaineShaman.com

Hello and welcome to Speaking Spirit, where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual school teacher. And now here's John.

Hello, everybody. I hope everybody's doing well. I hope this finds you safe and happy and healthy and loved and all of those things you are loved. We're going to talk about love today. I'm going to discuss love from a spiritual perspective from my personal viewpoint as somebody who practices shamanism.

But I hope everybody is doing really well because I love you.

So one of the things, if you listen to this podcast before, is that I usually define my terms when I'm talking about something. When I'm talking about spirit, I'll define what I mean by that or any other thing that I'm really focused on. I'm going to define what I mean because language is imprecise and we all might have a different idea when I use a word like love or spirit, what that means. And we'll say this every time, but I'm not trying to surplant your definitions of things. If my definition of something differs from yours, then that's great.

But I'm going to spend a while today talking about love. The word love, what does the word love mean? Now, it's a little bit of a challenge in English because we have this one word that we use for all kinds of things, right? Like I say, I love my girlfriend, I love my children, I love cheeseburgers, I love jazz music. They're all different things, at least slightly differently.

I don't have romantic love for a cheeseburger. Some people may, and that's fine, I don't shame. But that's not what I'm talking about. So we use it often as a really extreme form of like, I don't like cheeseburgers, I love cheeseburgers, right?

But so much of our preconceptions about love and what love is are shaped by things that may not be so loving. Like movies, like a popular culture.

When we look at romantic love, how many love stories are there out there and fairy tale based stuff. The idea of quartely love, for example. Now, the interesting thing I watched I watched a documentary recently talking about sex in the Middle Ages, in medieval times, right, and they were saying that we placed this romantic idea on courtly love because that's what we get. We get these stories or we get movies or whatever. But back then, Quarterly Love was about single men hitting unmarried women because people didn't marry for love back then.

And so they would write poems and there was a lot, lots and lots of affairs going on, particularly in courts. By court, I mean like kings and queens courts.

There was a ton of sleeping around going on. So we talk about we have words that equate love and sex. They aren't necessarily equated, right? We say making love, we're making love.

It's a euphemism for sex. But it's kind of an interesting thing so when I talk about love, when I talk about love from a spiritual perspective, what am I really talking about?

So I'm going to draw my definition of love that I'll work with today from the Sedona Method, which sort of came from a man named Lester Levinson. Then there was a book written by Hale Dwaskin and their courses and all kinds of things. And I have gone out to Sedona and taken a course with the author. I never met Lister Levinson. He passed away, I think, in the 90s.

But the Sedona Method is really wonderful and I highly recommend it for just about anybody. It's human operating system stuff. It's good for anybody. And it's sort of paraspiritual in that it's not dogmatic or religious or involving enlightenment or anything like that. It's like, what's going on right now?

What's happening right now for you on an emotional level? What are we holding on to? What are we pushing away?

One of the best definitions I heard for love is from that, from the Sonona Method. And the definition of love that I learned from that is acceptance. It's like complete acceptance. Now, how many of us can say that we completely accept another? And we're talking about human to human or being to being loved here.

How many of us can say that we absolutely accept another person fully? Like, no matter what they do, no matter what they say, no matter what qualities they have, do we fully accept them? Or do we say in the back of our mind, gosh, I really wish I could change this XYZ wanting to change somebody, wanting control over somebody, that's not love.

So one of an important aspect of love and lots of spiritual and self help people talk about this is self love. And self love is complete and full acceptance. Now, there's this kind of insidious lie that we might tell ourselves that, well, if I love myself, if I fully accept myself, I will never improve, I'll never change. There'll be no motivation for me to better myself, to deepen my spirituality to, I don't know, whatever, learn how to juggle.

That's just not true. You don't have to be motivated by loathing, by self hatred, by not accepting yourself to sorry, just making a little noise there. You don't have to be motivated by self hatred, self loathing, not accepting yourself, being angry with yourself, beating yourself up. That doesn't have to be your motivation for doing things, for doing anything.

And when you have self acceptance, when you have self love, what you have, what you get out of that is you get a sense of discrimination about your motivations for doing certain things. Right? Now, how many of us would have dated the wrong person for so long or been married to the wrong person for so long or, you know, taken a job we hated, or done any of those things? If we were just fully accepting of ourselves, right? I need to do X to make myself feel good about myself.

I need to be in a relationship. I need to have a certain job. I need to have a certain degree. I need to have a certain title. I need to have X to accept myself.

Well, it's looking in the wrong direction. That's looking for external validation. This isn't to say that external validation isn't nice. It is, it is. It's nice when somebody loves you just for you.

But when somebody loves you conditionally, right? You're in a relationship, I love you, but only when you pick up your socks.

Well, that kind of means that that, you know, means that the love is conditional, that there are parts of you that this person cannot love, they can't accept them.

And this is not again, we walk a fine line here. This is not to say that if there's something dissatisfactory in a relationship that you shouldn't talk about it, you shouldn't discuss it. I don't like X, or I feel upset when X happens. It's not the same as, well, I don't love you if you do X, right? This is also not to say that we have to be in a specific relationship to love somebody.

So I can love somebody that I'm no longer in a relationship with because the relationship was unhealthy. But I don't have to reject the person at the core. And I'll get into that in a second.

I'll get into our core being because this is the gist. This is the thing that we need to focus on.

So in shamanism, in the type of shamanism that I practice, you know, we do what's called shamanic journey. We go into trance and we explore other worlds, we work with spirits, all of this stuff. But there's a great deal of self exploration as well, which involves going into our center of ourselves. Not physically, we can metaphorically envision this as the physical, like our heart center, that sort of thing. But going in and exploring the core of who we are and what we find is at our core is this divine spark, this connection that we have to everything in the universe, to divinity, to spirit, to everything physically in the universe is connected.

And so understanding that understanding that connection is when there are parts of the universe that we don't love. And by love, I mean acceptance.

I don't mean allowing bad behavior.

So there's a difference. See, when my children were little, or even now, I mean, they're great kids, so they don't really get into trouble. But when they were little and they would act up, I would remind them that no matter what you do, I love you completely with my whole heart.

I will never love you less.

And it doesn't matter what you do. Now, I may not like what you do, but I always love you.

And my daughter, one of my daughters, when she was about four years old. I'm so proud of my kids, if you can't tell from how I speak about them. When she was four, I said something to her that I had told myself for years I would never say to my children. But it's one of those things. It's a phrase that I grew up hearing.

And it slipped out in a moment of anger, in a moment of, ugh. This kid is, you know, her behavior's getting my last nerve. And I looked at her and I said, what is wrong with you? I'm, you know, shocked that I said that, but I did. And I own it.

Own your behavior, people. If you screw up, say, I screwed up. We are human beings. This part of self love and self acceptance. So I said that to her.

I said, what is wrong with you? And she looked at me, her parent, her adult, much larger than she is, who she relies on for food and housing and toys and things like that. And she looks at me in the eye and says, there is nothing wrong with me. And it rocked me back on my heels. And I said to her in the next you know, after it took me maybe 5 seconds to pull my thoughts together and I said to her, you are absolutely, 100% right.

And I am absolutely 100% wrong for saying that to you. And I should never say that to you. There is nothing wrong with you. I don't like your behavior right now, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. And I was wrong for saying that.

And if I ever say that again, I want you to call me on it like you did. Now, if I ever use that phrase, you ever hear me use that phrase, I don't care if it's with you or somebody else, call me on it.

We think of the opposite of love as hate, right? And that certainly could be that can be the case, right?

I almost hate to say this phrase, but like, saying I hate you to somebody is about as extreme as you can get. And what do we mean by that?

What do we mean if we say, I don't know that I've ever used the phrase I hate you to somebody? Maybe when I was a kid or something. But as an adult, I generally try not to use the word hate in regard to other people. I might say I hate orange circus peanuts, which, if you don't know, is a type of candy that's rather nasty. If you like them, that's totally fine.

But it's not the same thing. I reject these orange circus peanuts. So hatred is about rejection, right? And when we look at hatred from an ism perspective, racism, sexism, all of these things, what it is is something that social psychologists sometimes call moral exclusion. And what that means is that we look at another person and we say, you are not as worthy of human compassion and understanding as others are.

For whatever reason. I've identified you as a different race. I've identified you as a different gender. I've identified you as having different sexuality, different nationality. All those isms right.

Bigotry. That's what that is. Hatred from bigotry. You are not as human as I am. You are not as deserving of human rights, human compassion, any of those things as I am.

That's what hatred is. It's rejection of the person based on some perceived quality. So looking at love as complete acceptance of another person, we can look at hate as the opposite, as rejection, complete rejection of the other person. And when you see, like, hate speech out there, we can see that. We can see dehumanization is a big one.

And let me tell you, we have to be really careful these days. And I realize I have people all over the world who listen to this podcast, but I'm speaking in the United States. There's a movement right now, it is masquerading as a political movement, but it's an ideological movement that is doing things like banning books and trying to describe masculinity as basically as cruelty and a lack of caring. And this is coming from we know this is not a conspiracy theory. This is not whatever.

This is coming from a particular religious organization, religious movement that is politically active. It donates a lot of money under the scenes to politicians and stuff, and they're doing things like banning books and all of these things. And if you look at it through the lens of they're trying to program empathy out of people, what's the interest in getting rid of people's empathy? Well, if you look at it from the perspective that this ideological movement is a white supremacist movement, this is what has to happen for taking away the rights or killing or whatever, other human beings, treating other human beings as less than we have to remove our human empathy for other people that we can identify as other. We are othering them, the other political party, the other gender, the other gender identity, the other sexuality, the other race, the other national origin, the other religion or spirituality.

This is a dangerous thing, and we see it. I did study propaganda a little bit in school, in both an undergrad and grad school. And of course, really, the people who got propaganda right, with some of the most horrible consequences were the Nazis in Germany, right? We know this. We know they had a minister of propaganda.

And we got, you know, we during the war and after the war in World War II, we captured films from Germany. Now, there was propaganda happening in the United States, too. All nations have propaganda, particularly if they have to go to war, because they have to convince people generally, we don't want to kill other people. So we have to convince people. And a lot of us propaganda is very nationalist.

It's very oh, we're the best, we're number one, whatever, whatever. But there's this sort of subtle thing of everybody who's not American is other. So what I saw from seeing some of these pre World War II and during World War II propaganda films when I was studying it in grad school, is they would equate the Jews with rats so they would show what they considered a stereotypical Jewish person, right, with physical characteristics. They were like, oh, this is the stereotypical Jewish person. And then they would immediately cut to a shot of rats, right, and then we'd go back and then cut to a shot of rats and go back.

And so they were creating this association with rats, right, with these animals that spread plague and were just vermin less than human to be eradicated, to be exterminated for the good of the good people, right, that weren't rats. So they were dehumanizing. They were taking away people's concept of these are human beings. These are human beings just like you and I. Yeah, they have a different ethnic background, they have a different religious background, whatever.

But they have the same types of hopes and fears. They love their family like we love our families.

So we see this taking place in some of the political rhetoric that's happening, particularly in the United States. And I want to tell you that every time we see people, particularly in the US. Talking about the global elite, if you hear that, you hear globalism, global elite, whatever. These are white supremacist, dog whistles for Jews, basically neonazi talking points here. Globalism new world order.

This is all part of this antiJewish conspiracy theory. Goes hand in hand with what they call the Great White Replacement theory, which is that the bad people, whoever they happen to be targeting, the other political party, whatever, want to replace white people and make them the minority. And we are, we white people are so persecuted in XYZ.

It's all a part of this. It's all a part of maintaining ethnic power. It's all part of spreading hatred by making a threat that doesn't exist.

So pay attention to that stuff. Like even if you think it's goofy conspiracy theory stuff, know that there are millions of people out there who don't. So this week, radio conspiracy theory talk show host Alex Jones lost close to a billion dollars in a defamation lawsuit. And why was he why were he defamed the families who lost children during the Sandy Hook School shooting for years? He was claiming that they're actors, that they're fake, that their kids never existed, that they were part of some conspiracy.

None of those things were true. But why were they awarded so much money, 900 and something million dollars? Well, the reason is, and this is important because Alex Jones spreads this global elite white supremacist, even though he's not out there spouting absolute racist hatred. But what he's doing is he's talking using these code words like globalist and global conspiracy of the elite and yadda, yada, yada. This is white supremacist rhetoric.

And the importance of him losing that much money is because he has millions of followers who's making hundreds of millions of dollars a year off his conspiracy laden TV show and selling products on the air and all this stuff. And the end of the world is coming and you better stock up on whatever it is, whatever he's selling and fat burning pills and just all kinds of crazy stuff. But we might look at this guy as crazy, but he's got a following of millions, tens of millions of people. And so these people, these people who follow him believed him when he said the Sandy Hook school shooting in which, you know, he was something like 19 people died, most of them children, very young children. When he said, these people are faking it.

They're trying to manipulate you, they're trying to take your guns away, they're trying to take your rights away, whatever. The people who follow him believed him, a lot of them enough where these people have been harassed for over a decade, they've been shot at.

All a part of furthering this essentially white supremacist agenda and it can be hard to tie these things together. And again, this isn't a conspiracy theory. I'm not making this up and this isn't coming from this has been studied by groups that study hate movements.

But the award was so high, in part, I believe, because he had such a large audience for his hatred.

There's a lot of people out there these days who have realized that keeping people, for lack of a better term, dumb and afraid is profitable.

And these very strong manipulation tactics, and that is hatred. Hatred is dumb and scared, focused on a group, some identifiable group of people or made up group of people, like a global elitist cabal running things behind the scenes. Seven cup of coffee. So anyway, that's enough about hate. I don't want to focus on hate, but it's an important contrast.

It's an important contrast contrast to love.

And so love, as full acceptance is holding space for is a very divine feminine concept. There's a divine masculine concept of love as well. And I'll talk about that in a minute. But so in my shamanic work, we do some work with this dimension, I guess, again, for lack of a better term. This dimension we call the void.

It's a veil of it's hard to describe. It's nothing, but it's also everything. It's the formlessness behind which the universe emanates. It's also referred to as the womb of creation. It's the space behind which everything, including consciousness, plays out or is born and experiences arise.

Not to get too philosophical, but it's a little hard because without experiencing it, or even without experiencing it, it defies words.

So the void sometimes is seen as darkness. And it can be very forever. We've been taught that to be afraid of the dark, that darkness like forces of darkness, the dark side of the force, this dichotomy between light and dark. And I'm going to talk about this in a future podcast episode because I'm going to interview the author of a really great book that I'm reading right now and I'm in touch with her publicity people and she's going to come on the podcast. So don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so we can talk about this.

But her point in the book is called Luminous Darkness and the author's last name is Tall, T-U-L-L if you want to look it up. It just came out in September and I believe I'll be interviewing her sometime in November, which is I just feel grateful that she's probably very busy promoting her book and teaching and all of that stuff. But anyway, one of the things she points out in her book that I really love is that hierarchies any kind of hierarchy is a cognitive distortion. Think about that. So thinking things like men are better than women, or white people are better than black people, or rich people are better than poor people or any of those things, that hierarchical thinking is very dualistic and really a cognitive distortion.

One of the things it's also very patriarchal. The patriarchy has nothing to do with the divine masculine. Let me just set that straight. I've had conversations where with a lot of people, if you go on Amazon.com or whatever country you live in, go on your version of Amazon, or you go on Amazon.com and search for the divine masculine, you'll find, I don't know, a handful of books about the defined divine masculine. Maybe if you're lucky, a handful.

If you search for the divine feminine, however, you will find, I don't know, hundreds of books, lots of books, dozens at least ton of books about the divine feminine. Divine feminine rising this and that and that's. Not having a lot of information about the divine feminine is not a problem. Having a lack of information about the divine masculine is a problem. And so what has happened and my take on what has happened in the world is we have in the Western world in particular, we've been living in a patriarchy for thousands of years, even though there were times during the patriarchy where there were gods and goddesses.

Now, monotheistic god is very much often thought of as a masculine force, right? But patriarchy is all about hierarchy. It's all about putting, like, one guy in charge. And I'm not bashing on Catholicism, but I'm using this as an example of patriarchy, right? You look at the Catholic Church, you have the pope, you have the one guy on top.

Below that you have the cardinals and the bishops. Below that you have the priests. Below that you have the right. So there's this huge hierarchy that's patriarchy. And it comes out of Rome, it comes out of military orders, having generals and lieutenants and centurions and whatever else they had for ranks in the Roman army.

It comes out of military ranking. And that was important when you were warlike, when you were taking over other countries. You had to be able to issue orders and without judgment.

That's how militaries work, generally speaking. You can't just have people doing whatever they want. They work in a giant hierarchy, and that is inherently patriarchal, where more matriarchal systems are more egalitarian, less hierarchical. And so one of the reasons I love shamanism is that there's not really a hierarchy. Yes, I have a teacher who I go to or have gone to for classes and learning things and who I can call upon sometimes when I have questions or issues and that sort of thing.

But that's just because she has more experience. She's a couple of decades older than I am and has more experience and knows more things and has experienced more things. But she's not my boss. I don't have a boss. I'm not the boss of my students.

I tell them I'm a guide, not a guru. And as a shamanic practitioner, as somebody who works with people in a healing way, as well as somebody who's a teacher, I view myself as a servant. Not a servant to be ordered around, but a servant in that my job is to serve. My job is to teach. My job is to provide space for healing guidance, help develop ceremony, which really frees me to do what's best for people.

I'm not taking orders from people. If somebody contacts me and says, I'm ordering a sole retrieval, I'm mailing you a check for $20. Well, that's not how it works, right?

When people come to me for a healing session, even though sometimes they ask me for something specific like soul retrieval, I'll say, Well, I always work this way. I get in there and I asked my helping spirits, what is the work that would benefit you most today? And that might be soul retrieval, but it might be something else. And it may be soul retrieval and something else, right? There might be some work that they want to do before so retrieve.

But let's find out. Let's find out together. Let's find out what will be most beneficial to you. One of my clients, I don't want to brag or whatever, this isn't meant to be a brag. This is meant to be an explanation of something that made me feel really good in working with clients.

So I have a client that I've worked with a number of times and in a couple of different contexts. I've done healing sessions, I've done coaching sessions with this client. And this client said to me once, I'm going to paraphrase a little bit. You're the first person that has ever made me completely comfortable just being who I am, without judgment, without comfortable in my own skin. I cannot tell you how much that means to me.

That is a part or the major part of my life's purpose is to help people understand that they are whole. Complete. And worthy of love. Worthy of much more love than they have ever experienced. No matter who they are.

No matter what their identity is.

Right. No matter what they've done in the past. What their ego says. What other people's egos say.

This can be a tough thing. Right. For people who have done this wrong. Who have caused great harms. That sort of thing.

And again, I go back to how I've tried to deal with my children, that I don't condone the behavior by loving the person, right? And I'm also not declaring it. I never intentionally do anything do this. I would never intentionally claim that I'm perfect at this. I'll never claim that I have gotten to the point where I have developed enough that I do completely accept everyone.

I have unconscious bias. We all have implicit bias. I recognize that I have implicit bias. I think that puts me, in that regard, ahead of a lot of people, maybe just ahead in what I know about myself.

But the real spiritual frontier, you know, people are really fascinated by the cosmos and astral projection and going to other dimensions, all stuff, and that's all great and well and good, but it's sort of like we do space exploration, right? We send astronauts in space. That's important. We send probes. That's important.

But there are still a lot of places on Earth that we haven't explored, and like the deepest parts of the ocean, we're just now figuring out how to explore and finding interesting things about life and very interesting creatures. I was reading an article just the other day about a cave. I think it's in Romania. It's in Europe, anyway. And scientists unsealed this cave that had been sealed for 5 million years.

And inside the cave has its own ecosystem. It was completely dark, of course, because it's sealed off cave. So the the organisms in the cave had to live without light, and so many of them evolved to not have eyes but have complex feelers and sensors and all of that sort of thing. And instead of photosynthesis, the simpler organisms live off of chemical reactions from the rock and the water and that sort of thing. Just fascinating stuff.

Fascinating. And they're still finding they have identified dozens of species that don't exist anywhere else. It's cool stuff. Cool stuff. So just like that, just like there's still more to explore here.

The final frontier for us spiritually is to explore inward.

Now, a lot of us think we do that. I'm going to learn about myself. What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What are this?

What are that? What are my preferences?

But what I'm really talking about here is discovering the love in the formlessness at the very. Core of your being, at the very core of your being is formlessness, meaning not your body, not even your mind. It's just a place where your thoughts arise and your consciousness is what pays attention to those things. But out of this formlessness, we are little voids. We're little microcosms of the multiverse.

Out of this void is where our experience arises, where our physicality arises, where our thoughts, our feelings arise. Yeah. Physically, we have a brain. I do not believe that the consciousness is wholly located in the brain. We can't explain the subjective experience of consciousness through describing binary chemical interactions as complex as they are.

Consciousness is a problem for science. It's not a problem for spirituality, but it's a problem for science, at least right now, it is. Lots of theories. Really hard to start to get into philosophy. We start studying things like consciousness, but spiritually, as somebody who practices the art of the shaman, the whole universe is conscious.

There's consciousness everywhere. Consciousness is what there is. And if we look at Hermetic philosophy, it talks about the one thing, the one thing. And it talks about nosis becoming aware of us being a part of the one thing. Right.

And this is what we might we might term enlightenment. Enlightenment is a word that carries a lot of baggage, a lot of preconceptions. I like the word nosis. nosis is an interesting word, means, like knowledge. But this is experiential nondualistic knowledge of us being inseparable from, again, nondualistic inseparable from divinity, where we are not separate from all there is.

We're not separate from source.

There are lots of spiritual systems, from Hermetic philosophy to Alchemy to Kabula and all kinds of stuff that describes things this way. A lot of forms of Buddhism talking about, you know, form and formlessness being the same.

So the philosophy that I most closely associate with is that in the formlessness, the only thing there is is consciousness. This is the one thing. And out of this one thing comes to many. That's what Taoism talks about, right? And that's Hermetics talks about that, and Kabbalah talks about that.

So there are all these various philosophies that talk about there's this thing that exists before anything else. Right. And Taoism. That's the dow. The Tao that can be seen is not the true dow.

The dow that can be described. It's beyond words. It's formlessness, pure consciousness. It's the source. Hard to grasp, but mentally, a little bit.

But underneath, that all, because this formlessness that is the ground out of which all experience arises, holds everything.

It accepts everything. And this is what I think we mean underneath it all when we say God is love. And I would replace the word God here, maybe, with source, the one the Tao.

Yeah. In Western Abrahamic religions. We anthropomorphize God, right? God made man in his image, meaning that God is a dude with a beard who lives in the sky. The images we have of god are pretty much based on images of Jupiter from classical art, right?

Guy with a long white beard.

Even the word deity, the word deity and the word Zeus and the word Jupiter all come from the same root word or the root name, which is protoindoeuropean diaspotter, who is a god to the huntergatherers, that were the protoindoeuropean speaking people across Europe and Asia. And Diaspatar means the father of the morning sky, or I like to say skydaddy. So we get very synchronistic when we build up our ideas about deity. Deity is often associated with the sky, right? Heaven is up there.

So we have this imagery. But in previously, this god, the sky god, was not the only god. You know, there were lots of gods, but it was also considered that there was a creator or demi urge that created the physical universe. Now, the demiurge, in a lot of gnostic belief, is the antithesis of god, basically, that the physical universe is a mistake, that this spiritual universe is really all that's real. I'm not sure I buy into that.

I'm not sure I buy that the physical universe is a mistake or that it was planned out. But is there a consciousness that created everything?

Instead of giving my opinion on that, what I'll say is that I experience consciousness permeating everything. And there is this sort of oversold in Sanskrit that's called Brahman, right, that we might call god or we might call source, or we might call, quote unquote, the universe. It's actually a multiverse. The source of all there is that is consciousness. That's the best description of what we consider god that I can think of.

And at its core, it's love, because it accepts everything. Everything exists. Everything does not nothing exists separately from it.

It's difficult to conceptualize. That's why we anthropomorphize god. We turn god into a dude living in the sky, walking around in the clouds. A lot of our imagery comes from there, comes from that. A lot of our imagery of deity comes from that.

It's interesting because in other systems so the ancient Egyptians had gods and goddesses that were more or less anthropomorphic, right? But they also had a source god, and they worshiped the disk of the sun sometimes. And there were obviously shifts in religion over time in Egypt and stuff. But try to find non anthropomorphic gods anywhere, you know, try to find a god that is we can find beings. We can find holy beings not usually referred to in the same way we refer to gods.

We can find sacred birds and sacred eagles and this and that. But as human beings, we like to we like to turn things into make things like us, make things anthropomorphic.

But if we can conceive of a formless source that is everything, that contains everything, that is the source of everything, that's the closest I can get to describing source, and that is love. Because it holds and accepts everything there is.

So with that, I'm going to wrap up this little conversation on love. I will leave you with this self exploration should leave you to loving yourself. Even when we're doing shadow work, shadow work is so important. This describes, you know, accepting all parts of ourselves. Even the parts that we have previously rejected is about loving ourselves.

The shadow is are the parts of ourselves that we have rejected. So that is doing shadow work is loving yourself. So that's important. So think about that. I know I've done episodes before on The Shadow.

I will do episodes again on The Shadow. I'm not sure if it's going to be the next episode or not where I interview the author of Luminous Darkness. But it's a really, really good book. I recommend it. And definitely subscribe to if you're not already subscribed to this podcast, subscribe to that because that is going to be an interesting one and I don't want you to miss it.

I want you to know that I love you and stay happy and healthy. And with that, I will leave you till next time.

You have been listening to Speaking Spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact John, go to mainshammen.com. That's mai neshaman.com you.