C.S. Lewis says the following in his book, The Abolition of Man…
The Chinese speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar….This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.
We’ve lost the grip on this truth of objective value – that we as humans are part of a grand design that includes conforming all activities to that great exemplar. The Tao, C.S. Lewis’ best word for communicating this ultimate truth, is also the best translation from Greek to Chinese for St. John’s use of the word logos in his very first sentence in sacred Scripture where he said, In the Beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God.
In the West, we have diluted the strength and scope of the word logos by rendering it into the English word word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
This is not a mistranslation, because logos can mean word. But it also means way, or road or the overarching truth that describes the governing force of all creation. It is simply unfortunate that English readers most often see the word wordand take it to mean nothing more than a written or spoken unit of speech.
This is why Chinese translations of John 1:1 are often translated as In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.
Today, we are going to attempt to restore the essence of Saint John’s logos in order to rediscover that Jesus is not merely the Word of God. He is the Tao. He is the Way. He is the ultimate Truth. And He is the Life.
Source Scripture
This is the Way: John 1:1-18
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
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The state of mind and body that blocks any awareness of the presence of greater being inevitably produces a special kind of suffering….We must strive to reach a state where our transparency to Divine Being endures….It is essential to discover within ourselves an attitude – even a physical posture – in which we can be open and submissive to the demands of our inner being while at the same time allowing this inner being to become visible and effective in the midst of our life in the world. And for this to happen we must so transform our ordinary daily life that every action is an opportunity for inner work. Karlfried Graf Durckheim
None of us want to be ordinary. We long for the extraordinary. Our inner being – our soul – longs to soar above and beyond the mundane.
And so we strive for greatness, searching for whatever will help us clamber….higher.
But too often, we confuse the extraordinary with what seems to be the highest peak in the realm of the ordinary. And yet a caterpillar does not seek transformation by climbing the highest tree to feast on the best leaves or becoming the fastest on its many feet or seeking a name for itself amongst all other caterpillars. No, a caterpillar eventually reaches a stage in its life when it seeks to go beyond the ordinary entirely. To seek the truly extraordinary. And to do so, it spins a beautiful cocoon out of silk, ceases all of its normal ways to living, and enters a place of silence. Stillness. Here it allows the natural unfolding of metamorphosis to transform it into something entirely new.
We humans are equally designed for such transformation, but unlike the caterpillar, we resist the call to cocoon and change because we don’t like stillness. And silence.
And you will remain unchanged as long as you ignore the call within. As the villain in the book S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst illustrates, you will remain firmly planted in the ordinary…
As long as you choose extraction over creation, as long as you mistake commerce for art and destruction for progress, as long as you remain drunk on the juice that issues from the crush of a thing or place or person…. as long as you conflate power with influence, primacy with honor, goal with purpose, duty with responsibility.
These earthly shadows of the extraordinary are no substitute for the divine.
Today we will review the last six episodes of Awestruck to see the overarching depiction of how we can live in the tension between the external demands of an ordinary world and the internal yearning for transcendent being.
Source Scripture
Eradicating Evil: John 1:35-51
Muditation: John 2:1-11
Telos – Why You’re Angry: John 2:13-25
Love Like So: John 3:1-21
None Compare John 3:22-36
Who is Really In Prison? Matthew 14:3-5; Mark 6:17-20; Luke 3:19-20
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
Suggested Movie: The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise
TikTok User @PonderingWorshipper
It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly. – J.R.R. Tolkien
When someone calls us out for doing something we know is wrong, it hurts. It stings. It hits us where we live.
And the cognitive dissonance that erupts in that moment elicits action. The ego’s impulse? Defend itself with one of its all-too-familiar tactics against the voice of rebuke: muffle, muzzle, discredit, destroy.
In the rush to defend ourselves, however, we would be better served to harness our swelling psychic forces and use them in service of the soul’s deep longing to know truth – even when that truth wounds us.
A rightful rebuke exposes our inner darkness – whether buried unknowingly in our shadow or in plain sight but hopefully hidden from others by some cunning veneer.
And that darkness within us is the true source of the indignation we channel toward the rebuke. The very reason we have that reserve of repressed resentment at-the-ready is due to our extant spiritual dissonance over harboring the darkness in the first place.
And so we must choose. We can protect the ego with misdirected energies that assail the rebuke, which only tightens the noose of inner tumult, or we can let those striking words find their intended mark and bring about the illumination that leads to transformation.
Source Scripture
Who is Really In Prison? Matthew 14:3-5; Mark 6:17-20; Luke 3:19-20
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Comparison is the thief of joy. Theodore Roosevelt.
When we live centered in the self, we analyze the world around us in terms of what will benefit us most. And to do so, we must compare. And the easiest way to compare is to divide things into two parts and choose the one that seems better.
This habit is so foundational to the ego that it cannot imagine any other way to live. I prefer this to that. I have done more for you than you have done for me, so it’s your turn to serve me. My political party is better than yours. This sunset is not as pretty as yesterday’s.
The result of our habitual comparisons, we think, will be a better life. After all, we have surrounded ourselves with a collection of better people, places, and things.
The real result of this lifestyle is frustration in a number of ways…
In short, the ego’s dualistic and frazzled search for contentment produces just the opposite. It’s an endless dance
Today, we’ll look at the non-dual, soul-centered approach to finding contentment – and keeping it.
Source Scripture
None Compare John 3:22-36
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Overcome us that, so overcome, we may be ourselves: we desire the beginning of your reign as we desire dawn and dew, wetness at the birth of light. C.S. Lewis
We rarely present ourselves as we are to others. Instead, we produce a carefully crafted facade designed to impose one or more of the following on the truth. Limitation. Concealment. Obfuscation. Fabrication. We do this out of fear that the whole truth of who we are would surely earn us immediate rejection.
Over time, this habit of cloaking the truth becomes second nature. We graduate from hiding the things we have already done and move on to stealthily planning ahead to doing things we know we can keep hidden in the dark based on our diploma.
On rare occasions some outside agent may confront us and attempt to shine light into that darkness. Our response is almost always fight or flight. But there is a third choice: enlightenment.
Welcome to one of those rare occasions. The goal of today’s episode is to allow the divine light of truth to confront you. To allow it to pierce the darkness, overcome fears of exposure, and offer the exhilarating immersion of your soul in the freeing light of truth.
Let the confrontation – and the immersion – begin.
Source Scripture
Love Like So: John 3:1-21
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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Recommended TikTok User: @PonderingWorshipper
We should not be ashamed of anger. It’s a very good and a very powerful thing that motivates us. But what we need to be ashamed of is the way we abuse it. —Mahatma Gandhi
Everyone gets mad sometimes. The important thing is what we do with the mad that we feel in life. – Mr. Rogers
The powerful force of anger arises in all of us – sometimes slowly after brewing over time, and sometimes in an unexpected instant. Regardless of its speed, it always has a directional component to its velocity. It begins within and travels outward towards a target – someone or something that we perceive threatens us or others in some way.
We all want everything to be right in our lives. And when someone or something threatens that rightness, we focus on what we believe to be the source of the problem. That focus often takes the form of anger.
Today we will grapple with what do with the powerful force of anger that we all possess, and in so doing we will scrutinize the rightness we seek from which anger springs as well as the target our anger longs to extinguish.
And we will view both the source and target through the lenses of telos, which in itself can mean target, but carries the weight of an ultimate aim or purpose.
Today’s story will telos how to deal with anger.
Source Scripture
Telos – Why You’re Angry: John 2:13-25
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Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.” ― G.K. Chesterton
Our eyes capture the images we upside down on the retina, but our brain turns them right-side up again so that what we see is oriented accurately.
Our minds – our rational thoughts – do the same thing as our eyes when it comes to our circumstances.
Our minds process what is going on around us, but what we understand is upside down as it were. Our souls are what make everything right, orienting the external events within their proper context.
If our brains did not reorient the retina’s misleading images, we would find ourselves stumbling and holding tightly to walls as our feet carried us tentatively through the world. Likewise, if we do not allow our souls to orient us to see the real view of the world we need to see, our lives will be filled with chaos.
Take, for example, the way we see the fortune, or misfortune of another human being. If this person is close to us, we may find ourselves properly oriented by the power of love. We rejoice with them when they rejoice and we grieve with them when they grieve. If, however we observe someone we have chosen not to love – whether due to distance or grievance – we find ourselves somewhere on a spectrum of apathy at best and schadenfreude at worst.
Schadenfreude – or the attitude of sinister glee over the misfortune of another – is a pristine example of the ego blocking the soul’s work to orient the scene. The ego has left us seeing upside down, and though we may feel a temporary tingle of satisfaction, in the long run it poisons our ability to love even those close to us.
When we allow the soul to do its work, and we observe the misfortune of another, we respond with an inward empathy that drives an outward compassion. We strive to take measures that might relieve that grief or trouble. We may even go so far as, when possible, to reach into the well of our resources to help transform the other’s anguish into joy.
The culmination of the soul’s work in such a situation is a correlative joy with the other. Though we did not personally experience the beginning grief or final elation, we find ourselves inextricably bound, soul to soul, and share the joy. As the Swedish proverb says, shared joy is double joy.
The Sanskrit word mudita captures the essence of the human soul’s ability – its longing – to bring joy to others and share that joy. Mudita is the subject of today’s podcast.
Source Scripture
Muditation: John 2:1-11
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity
We all possess a deep sense of longing – a force deep within the soul that compels us to seek – to hunt – that which will make us complete.
Too often – most often, really – as this singular force wells up within us to propel us on the journey toward wholeness, the ego intercepts it, misinterprets it, and splinters it into numerous, disorganized fragments that, bereft of potency and purpose, cling briefly to the nearest pleasure. Even in its anemic state, however, these fragmented forces of longing realize that they have not yet found their mark and make another go at it.
The outcome is what we might call the human condition. Our lives are a frenzy of attachments that fail to fulfill, leaving us at best confused but determined to find the so-called right attachment or at worst defeated and dismayed that there may be no real way to be made whole.
Today, we’re going attempt to go deep into the soul and rediscover that original, wholistic force of longing as it exists before its disintegration and debilitation to see if we can allow it to re-emerge, uninhibited by the ego, and do its intended work in us. This is the only way to transcend the human condition and finally find our home in the divine.
Source Scripture
Eradicating Evil: John 1:35-51
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
Suggested Movie: The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise
There is a powerful human need to locate evil—that is, to contain it by assigning it a specific, bounded place (in some cases, a particular person)—even though this is impossible. The boundaries of evil are blurry and porous, if they can be said to exist at all. Doug Dorst, from the book co-created by he and J. J. Abrams, “S”.
We all want to be rid of the evil in our lives. In some cases, an individual or entire groups of people define themselves by their singular devotion to locating a particular brand of evil and eradicating it.
The challenge, however, is isolating the actual location of evil. And in our efforts, it might go something like this. We see a person caught on video commit an indefensible and unspeakable atrocity. This person, we reason by the evidence, is evil. But the boundary cannot be contained to this one individual. No. We see that he has some characteristic that identifies him as part of a larger group. We detect some sort of “uniform” that indelibly marks him as part of a team. And that team must be held responsible for its team member’s evil. This team could be a race, an authoritative power, a political party, a religious organization, an educational institution, or any other identifiable group.
Once we determine that the entire team is evil based on one or more of its members being caught red-handed, we set our sights on a righteous quest to topple it in the name of defending the innocent and ridding the world of darkness.
The problem, as we will see in today’s episode, is that our quest to locate evil is sometimes greatly misguided. Rarely does the guilt of one imply the guilt of all, and often the apparent guilt of one may be misinterpreted by the limitations of our perspective.
Worse yet, we may define some person or people as evil solely to justify our own desires to obtain something we want or protect something we believe to be rightfully ours. This itself is evil, and eventually someone will see it for what it is and go on a quest to defeat it.
And so the cycle repeats itself.
How do we break the chain of evil? How do we identify and locate true evil and rid the world of it once and for all? Where is the compass that guides us on our quest?
Let’s find out.
Source Scripture
Eradicating Evil: John 1:29-34
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Mahatma Ghandi We too often fall prey to the delusion that our identity is rooted in doing something uniquely or supremely that sets us apart from – or above – everyone else.
Such a foundational fallacy can lead us into a lifetime of anxiety and frustration and failure. The few who do manage to clamber to the apex of this approach to identity become to us a dangling carrot that perpetuates this perversion of who we are and who we are meant to be. And meanwhile, those on top of the world looking down on the rest of us find themselves yet unsatisfied and searching for more.
This strategy is doomed to fail, because it is rooted in the centrality of the ego and its expectation that the world gravitate towards it. Happiness, the ego insists, comes only when things outward flow inward.
And yet the soul – our very ground of being – is never satisfied by what comes from without. It, as we have seen culminating in previous episodes, finds identity only in opening itself to divine presence and allowing that to flow outward to others.
Today, we are going to place these two strategies side by side to see how and from where they originate, what influences us to choose one over the other, and where they ultimately lead.
The goal today is to leave you with your true identity revealed and with safeguards in place to avoid being lost to one of the greatest tragedies you could face in this life: identity theft.
Source Scripture
Who are You? John 1:19-28
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras