How did the concept of ‘original sin’ get into the bible if Jesus never taught it?

Where else did the Bible get it right, and where has it been misinterpreted or manipulated?

In this podcast, I’m joined by Bob Peck who is an author and scholar of not only Christianity, but many spiritual traditions. In this episode, we dive into the manipulative concept of ‘original sin’, the beautiful and true teachings of Yeshua, and how to integrate the wisdom of Jesus for an updated model of spirituality free of the conditioning of ‘Empire’. In Bob’s book “Original Sin Is A Lie” he tells the story of Jesus as a deeply profound teacher of Love and Unity. The concept of original sin that has dominated the last few millennia is a doctrine invented by Augustine of Hippo over three hundred years later.

Bob Peck is a festival award-winning filmmaker, author, lawnmower, meditator, and a spiritual student of Christ, Krishna, the Buddha, and Paramahansa Yogananda. With bachelor’s degrees in Religious Studies & Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas, he has made ‘conscious films’—spiritual & advocacy documentaries—since graduating in 2011. He’s also a Kriya Yoga practitioner through KYI and a certified mindfulness & meditation teacher. He’s also one of the pod leaders pushing forward these concepts of mindfulness at Meta. He’s also a co-founder of The Awareness & Compassion Project, an effort to help teach kids meditation.

AUBREY: Bob, how are you, brother?
BOB: I'm doing good, man.
AUBREY: I feel like this is one of those landmark moments, when an Israeli kid sits down with a Palestinian kid and they realize they're actually friends all along. And you're a Buoy Bulldog, which is your high school, Westlake Chaparral. I didn't think I'd be sitting down across the table civilly.
BOB: We can't have peace.
AUBREY: Peace is possible in this world. When I would go play at your basketball gym, your crowd was so fucking vicious. Like, we'd be on the bench and we'd just feel spit just hitting our back.
BOB: That wasn't from me. I can't speak for those guys.
AUBREY: It wasn't me. I had my best games there. I liked the--
BOB: You guys's parking lot was a lot nicer than ours. We noticed the beamers.
AUBREY: That may have something to do with it. But yeah, man, I'm excited to have you here, and excited to talk about your book, and kind of what you started from inside Meta too, which I think is pretty cool.
BOB: Well, thanks.
AUBREY: But, let's just go right into the book, because "Original Sin is A Lie".
BOB: It's a big ol' lie.
AUBREY: It's a big ol' fucking lie.
BOB: It really is. And we talked about this, about the title, it's provocative. The book is a lot more from a place of love.
AUBREY: Provocative and accurate.
BOB: Yeah. I mean, it's a hill I'm okay to die on. Original sin really is a lie. Jesus never mentions it, for one. The man that the religion is based on never says this. This comes from Augustine or St. Augustine from Hippo, which is about 300 years later after Jesus's death. Augustine is referencing Paul and referencing Genesis. But really, original sin, I think a lot of Christians, a lot of American Christians think that original sin is just chiseled into some divine cement tablet, and it really wasn't. It was very much of a political conversation. And that's how the book opens. Augustine and Palladius were arguing, basically. St. Augustine says, we're originally sinful and Palladius says we're originally neutral. And Palladius didn't have the political power that Augustine has. And essentially Palladius is kicked out of town. History has forgotten him. And original sin and Augustine kind of won the politic end of it.
AUBREY: Won for a while. And the beautiful thing is, it's like this idea is getting less and less traction as we move to and embrace in celebration of our animality. Part of the problem of original sin is it creates separation between us and all of the rest of nature, which is something that I think the great traditions often do. It's like there's humans, and then there's everything else. And they're just here to be used and serve humans, whatever, and so, anything that actually makes us similar to the rest of nature must be bad, because we have to be different. So, it's perpetuating this kind of lie of separation that's there. And I think there's a strong movement. I feel a strong movement even within religious communities that are like, this just doesn't feel right.
BOB: Wait a second, there's a greater harmony between all beings and all creation. Absolutely, yeah. That's beautiful. I think also, at least in America, there's a great book called "American Veda" which talks about kind of the philosophies that I'm interested in, which is yoga, Zen. Particularly, this book is about kind of how yogic philosophy came to America. And really what happened was, Emerson and Thoreau got the Upanishads in the middle 1800s in Boston. And Emerson's going, "This is the deal." As opposed to kind of American puritanical Christianity, which is, you're a sinner in the hands of the angry God, Jonathan Edwards. You're dirty and you need this higher jealous God to save you.
AUBREY: You're a sinner in the hands of an angry God. I mean, if you just replaced God with demon, that would make--
BOB: It would still play.
AUBREY: It would make sense. You're the sinner in the hands of an angry demon. And you're like, yeah, fuck, that's a tough spot. You know what I mean? That's the interesting thing about it–
BOB: It's at odds with--
AUBREY: Yeah, what are you actually trying to project onto God? How much of our human feelings are we projecting on the divine? And how much have we done for so long? These ideas of jealousy, these ideas of anger and wrath, are these not the very same things that we're trying to transcend in our own evolution to divinity? But then we're projecting it on the figure of all perfection in power? And it's like, what are we doing?
BOB: We're really limiting the infinite here.
AUBREY: Omnipotence.
BOB: Yeah, that's so true. What I was going to mention there was, in the book, I talk about there's an early Christian father, who's now called a heretic. They kicked him out of the church. And in retrospect, the guys and gals that the institution had an issue with, check those guys out. They're pretty good.
AUBREY: Yeah, like Giordano Bruno.
BOB: Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for saying heliocentrism, right? Yeah, exactly. Marcion is really the first person to say, the God of the Old Testament, who is jealous, who encourages ethnocide in some places in the Old Testament, that seems like a different entity than the one this Jesus guy is talking about, which is that God loves everyone. God's love falls on the just and the unjust like the rain, this kind of unconditional loving creator sure sounds different than jealous god in Exodus. And he's the first one to say, it's possible that the Old Testament God is kind of this false creator of God in between a higher transcendental loving creator. These aren't necessarily my beliefs, but it's an interesting journey. And what's so cool about Marcion is, he's actually the first person to put together a New Testament canon. That's how early he is. He's the first one to say, hey, these are the right books of Jesus. So, Christianity wasn't a monolith. It wasn't this orthodox institution that's had this clean development this whole time. There's been a lot of different debates over a very long period of time to get to where we are now.
AUBREY: Let me propose some other heretical idea which is somewhat in line with the teachings from Dr. Rabbi Marc Gafni in cosmo-erotic humanism. He's been on my podcast many times. But let's say, instead of there being multiple different gods, let's say that we are participating in, at the very least the aggregation and actually an emanation of the godhead for whatever that is. And so, as our own consciousness evolves, God evolves in us, as us, through us, and beyond us in a way. So, we're participating in the evolution of God. So, perhaps, the aspects of the Yahweh God, the jealousy, the anger, the wrath, were actually part of the level of consciousness of what we valued as the good, the true and the beautiful at that point, and what we actually called into form through our participation, in those levels of consciousness. And then, Yeshua comes and actually breaks through with a whole other model of consciousness, but it's so far ahead of its time, that it's taken us a long time to catch up. And a lot of these other aspects have been projected, shame, all of these other things that are part of the consciousness. And now, as our consciousness evolves, God is also evolving. And you can say, it's just the concept of God, God is always eternal, and it's always been the same. And I think there's an argument for that as well. But I think there's also an argument for that which we see and behold, we're in a participatory universe, just like--
BOB: This is mirror land.
AUBREY: Exactly. It's just like with quantum physics, right? What you try to observe actually becomes manifest. Particles or waves, what we're actually bringing into existence is the God that we're seeing, believing, loving, worshiping.

BOB: Yeah, I like that, that there's an evolution of the conception. Yeah, there's a beautiful, the Hindu gurus again, very influenced by those guys. And the yoga creed of Jesus is a big part of the book. There's a beautiful, they talk in simple parables too. Ramakrishna was very fond of the blind men and the elephants, which is a great teaching story about kind of inclusivity and universality about religion, to your point. The story is, an elephant comes into a town, and four blind men, or several blind men go up to the elephant. And they each put their hand on a different part of the elephant. And they're starting to argue, and one says, this animal is like, he feels the trunk, "Oh, this animal is like a snake." And then another one feels the leg and says, "Oh, this animal is like a pillar." And then another one feels the tusk. "This animal's like a spear." And they start arguing. Then a man with sight comes along, the awakened man, or woman, let's say. She comes out and says, no, actually, it's all of them. You're all right. You're correct. But that's just one aspect. It's a pretty nice example of religious bickering and kind of transcending to say, hey, they're all valid.
AUBREY: That concept from a meta perspective is probably one of the most important concepts we have, that we're all viewing God through a particular lens. And certain people have a clearer lens, certain people have more of their own stuff, their programming, their ethnocentric patterning, their trauma, and all of that. So, their prism actually has distortions. There's a little bit of a funhouse mirror kind of effect going on. Some people have a clear view, but it's limited. We're always limited. We've had our own life experiences, we have our own language. Even our language, how we encode thoughts based upon the words that we have available, changes the structure of how we access reality. We don't access reality, rarely fully unmediated without words. We're always using the words to symbolize and actually store the data of what our experience is, except for brief transcendental moments where we can let all of that go and just be in the field of bewilderment itself.
BOB: Beautiful, yeah.
AUBREY: But that's very, very odd. And I got the term field of bewilderment from a podcast I just did with Charles Eisenstein, thought that was beautiful. But that's a state that is beyond words and incredibly powerful, where we can let all of that go. But very rare. Most of the time, we're seeing through our own limited perspective, our own hermeneutic prism, all of like Hermes being the translator, the messenger. Like the hermeneutic prism, like the way our bifocals focus on anything, including our focus on the divine.
BOB: ACIM, A Course in Miracles, says, projection makes perception, to your point. We're all just seeing it through our own lens. You put that really well. And you also mentioned, which is a big part of my study in the book as well, which is the mystics, and it’s really sadly, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding nowadays about what that means, what mysticism means. People think magic, or magick. And really, mystic just comes from the Greek word mu, mu meaning mute, meaning silent. That ineffability of God. The silence of knowing, kind of to your point, of getting beyond thought, beyond form, beyond words. And the amazing thing once you study the world's mystic traditions is there's a mystical version of every religion. It's called the exoteric and the esoteric. The exoteric is fine. There's some people that need community, and that's wonderful. But, unfortunately, that's where the institution, that's where you have the hypocrisy, the control. The negative aspects of religion typically come from the exoteric.
AUBREY: And often suppression of the other.
BOB: Right. They're afraid of the power really, of the freedom of liberation, yeah.
AUBREY: Of course. So, let's just go through. Christianity, it's Gnosticism and Rosicrucianism. I just had a great Rosicrucian scholar, Dr. Robert Gilbert on. It was really interesting to see his worldview. Then in--
BOB: The Contemplatives.
AUBREY: Yeah, in Hebrew tradition, it's the Kabbalists. One of which I'm studying with, as I mentioned, Marc Gafni.
BOB: You read the Zohar?
AUBREY: Yeah.
BOB: Because that one is--
AUBREY: That one is intense. That one is wild and magical. Yeah, there's a lot of wild crazy shit in there. And then in the Islamic faith, there's some currents of Sufism and whirling dervishes, and some interesting paths that has taken. And even within Buddhism, and even within the Hindu, there's all the Kashmir Shaivism, for example, is like its own little piece of an understanding of this. So, yeah, to your point, it's kind of universal, that there's these two different aspects. One which is offering direct unmediated contact with the divine.
BOB: Exactly, with no mediator. This is huge.
AUBREY: The other has a middleman. And when you have a middleman, well, you can build a lot of towers, you can fill your coffers. And it's very helpful for having and wielding power. If you're the middleman between a person and God, you have a lot of power. Because everybody has that God impulse. We all feel drawn back to source, back to a merger.
BOB: The true teacher, or the true guru is the one that's helping you get closer to God yourself. Not trying to get in between.
AUBREY: That impulse for apotheosis, for that feeling of God in your body, we all have that.
BOB: We're all children.
AUBREY: One thing that Gafni shared with me is like, where were you at the point of the Big Bang? I contemplated that. Well, if I believe in the eternity of self, that we're all participating in the infinite, well, I was there. He's like, exactly. And where was everybody else? They were there too. And well, if you look at what the best information is, from all the astrophysicists, well, the universe at that point was pure, undifferentiated energy. That was the size of a fingernail. So, we're all part of this same story.
BOB: In that ingredient.
AUBREY: Yeah, we're all a single ingredient called energy and potential. And so, everybody's our brother, and everybody's our sister. And that's why we're drawn back, is we have a somatic memory of home, and we carry that. Some would call it the monad, or the Atman, that piece of our universal godhood within us
BOB: Mentioning that reminds me of a line from John. Jesus says, before Abraham was, I am.
AUBREY: Damn.
BOB: I mean, that's as good as it gets, you know? Before Abraham was, I am. And so, he's not speaking literally, necessarily.
AUBREY: Right, he's not speaking as Yeshua of Nazareth.
BOB: As a Nazareth, Galilean dude walking around. He wasn't there in that form, but he was there in the formlessness.
AUBREY: Before Abraham, I am.
BOB: Before Abraham was, I am. I mean, a lot of the book, it starts with Bible scholarship, and basically saying, hey, this thing isn't infallible. It's a human document. Which is really, I think, for people who grew up in a religious tradition that are kind of intrigued by some of the things we're talking about, and seeing kind of some of the spiritual awakening movement I think that you're a big part of, it's like, but, I'm a little afraid to step out of this. Well, step one is really saying the Bible is imperfect. It's a human document. We got the receipts. It's not a conspiracy. There's an academic consensus that this is a variety of authors writing for a variety of communities, a variety of time periods. And once you--
AUBREY: A variety of centuries after the person they're writing about lived.
BOB: It's a very dynamic living document. But also at the same time, it has some real gems. And I think--
AUBREY: Wouldn't have survived if it didn't have real gems.
BOB: We wouldn't still be talking about this stuff, if there wasn't something transformative in there, which there is. There absolutely is. Jesus says, love your enemies. You talk about the true teaching, what's the true teaching? Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. We're not doing that in 2023, let alone the Iron Age. That's a radical thing to say. And so, for me, what I'm trying to do is get underneath the layers of later kind of dogmatic doctrinal stuff, exclusivist stuff, and say, well, what's the real teaching? What's the true teaching?
AUBREY: What I've encountered for most people is, actually, so I have another friend, Ted Decker, who really understands how to interpret the teachings of Yeshua in its full mystical potential. And knows the New Testament incredibly well. So, he can have a conversation with somebody who's more fundamentalist, and very quickly, they realize they're way out of their depth. And there's something really powerful that happens when someone can cite way more of the Bible than somebody else can, and then offer teachings that anthro-ontologically, like through their body, like through my body, envision God, through their body, they feel the truth of it. And they have more knowledge. I think that's one thing that your book also offers, you know more about Christianity than 90%. That number is probably low, but let's just call it 90. But like 90% of the fundamentalist Christians out there, you really actually understand the narrative in a way. And I think that's really helpful, because I think whether it's a stance on COVID, or whether it's a stance on religion, most people don't really know that much. So they're relying on trusted authorities. But then the trusted authorities sometimes don't know that much, or they have vested interests or biases. So, it's a very strange world. But this is a very important service that you're providing, in that you've done your homework, you've done the research, and you understand things from your exposure to other traditions, so that you can actually read a little deeper. You can read and decode the code to liberate the sparks and the gems of what these teachings have to offer.
BOB: Appreciate you saying that, means a lot. Yeah, it's really fascinated me for a long time. My mom told me this story, which I didn't know. How she framed this, which was, a friend of hers asked her why I wrote a book on religion and spiritual philosophy. And she goes, well, when he was little, when all the other little kids were reading Harry Potter, Bob was reading Thich Nhat Hanh. I've just kind of always been into spiritual philosophy books as a little kid in Austin, and finding out, kind of to your point, that these gems exist, but they're unknown by even churchgoing Christians was really fascinating. And I mean, I think to be fair, to a lot of Christians, the pastor really only has them for 20 minutes a week. They're not going to be going into, for example, why half of Paul's letters ain't by Paul. I mean, the Pauline epistles, which is First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus, which we can talk about. Paul didn't write those, but they're in the New Testament, allegedly written by Paul. Bible scholars know, this isn't a conspiracy, again, this is the academic consensus that he didn't write those. They're not really going to go into that on Sunday. That first Timothy isn't actually Paul. They're going to say, here's a quick line about Israel and serving your country, and the Super Bowls coming up, guys. And then have a good day. They are underserved, admittedly.
AUBREY: Yeah, and then started looking at the context. All right, so who are these other authors? Who did they pledge their allegiance and service to? Many times, it was the Roman Empire. All right, what was the Roman Empire trying to do at the time? Well, they're wiping out--
BOB: They're the guy who killed the main guy.
AUBREY: They're the guy who killed the main guy, number one. They're wiping out the Druids, they're wiping out the Hebrews.
BOB: They're pretty brutal guys.
AUBREY: So, if they're a part of that organizational structure, and they're writing into a book that can actually reach and have influence over the masses, to assume that these clearly murderous elements of the Empire exerted no influence on these spiritual scholars is also absurd.
BOB: Exactly.
AUBREY: It's also absurd to actually imagine that no, in this instance, the Roman Empire with all of their bloodthirsty power hungry tendencies, actually, they just let hands off. And they just said, you know what, go for it.
BOB: They were anti-censorship.
AUBREY: Yeah, speak the truth as you see it, as they're burning heaps of books, that the Hebrew people have written, trying to--
BOB: Christian and I were talking about this before you got here. The Gnostics buried the books.
AUBREY: Yeah, why? Because the Roman Empire was trying to fucking combine them.
BOB: In Nag Hammadi Egypt, where you just were, which is super cool, love the Egypt stuff. He happened to be near Alexandria, this monastery. In 1945, a shepherd is just chasing one of his goats and goes under this boulder and finds a discovery of over 50 leather bound books that have been hiding there since the 300s. And we knew about these books, because we have correspondents of early church fathers where they mentioned them. We know that they're the real deal. They were existent in that period, but we never had the originals. Well, in 1945, we found them. They hid them from the Roman Empire for 1700 years. Deep bow to those monks, those crazy bastards that said, this is good stuff, let's really, and then who knows what happened to them? But we have the Gospel of Thomas, we have the Apocryphon of John, we have the gospel of Philip, we have the gospel of Mary Magdalene, shreds of that one. I wish we had more. But it's very powerful that that's what it took, two millennia.
AUBREY: Well, that one was particularly, they sought particularly to throw that one in the fire. Because that really undermines this whole stranglehold that they used sexuality, to actually make people feel guilty, get them to be subservient to a power structure where they would never actually be absolved. Because we're always going to be thinking about sex. Once again, it's built into our animality. So, they found the unavoidable sin, which is our sexual desire.
BOB: Our biological
AUBREY: Our biological nature. I often contemplated writing a short story about a group, a power structure, like a religion, that all of a sudden made taking a shit a sin. This was the world. And so, everybody was hiding all of the times that they would take a shit. And then bathrooms were nowhere to be found. You had to have your secret bathroom. So many people would proclaim that they never took shits anywhere.
BOB: "I didn't do it."
AUBREY: Exactly. And there'd be just secret shit houses and then secret sex parties.
BOB: It's a metaphor.
AUBREY: But it's the same thing. It's as basic to our animality as the processing of food and the breathing of oxygen and then turning it into carbon. This is it. It's the very basics.
BOB: Sure, having a healthy relationship with self, releasing the guilt, releasing the shame. Yeah, it's beautiful.
AUBREY: Yeah, I was really attracted, so I was on a similar path. So my path, and I've told this story before in different episodes, but I went to, so, I grew up in California. I didn't have a lot of exposure to Christianity. Everybody around me was kind of mostly agnostic, sometimes--
BOB: A lot of yoga studios.
AUBREY: Mildly spiritual. But again, it's the 80s, so there's not a lot of yoga studios. There's a little bit of yoga, there's not even Whole Foods yet. There's like a little healthy store. There's a few ideas. There's a Buddhist statue that'll be around here, there.
BOB: Two guys jogging.
AUBREY: Yeah, there's some things. Really didn't have a lot of exposure. Then I went, moved to Texas, and then immediately got tricked into some Christian ski trips and things like that. Like "Come with me on a ski trip, buddy," and it really was like Bible study for eight hours and skiing for four hours. I'm like, what the fuck is? He's tricked me.
BOB: So actually, you're filthy.
AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. You didn't realize that. Then I would argue with him, I think one of the first arguments, and they didn't invite me after this. So, I was like, hold up, hold up, hold up. I was like, so you're telling me that everyone who didn't accept Jesus into their life went to hell? I was like, what about the thousands of years of people before Jesus was born? And the pastor thinks, and he's like, "Well, he could have had faith in the arrival of Jesus." And I was like, how? What do you even mean?
BOB: I got a suspicion this guy's coming.
AUBREY: So, just all these people were just damned to hell? Like that's not a god, that's a demon. If that's the reality, that you were supposed to believe in something that nobody even gave you a heads up about, and if you didn't
BOB: That's a hypothesis. He went down there, and got folks from earlier days. Hear that one?
AUBREY: No, tell me that one.
BOB: The three days that he was missing, one of those was he stopped by hell to grab the Iron Age righteous, to save them. So, they were only in there for a few hundred years.
AUBREY: Oh, only a few hundred years of fire and brimstone.
BOB: I was telling this guy, it's like the Charlie meme, where it's like the guy explaining on multiple papers. It's kind of how it is. You have to come up with all these different formulas.
AUBREY: All these crazy ideas. So anyways, they didn't invite me very much after that. And I would go off and on, and I would talk about great philosophers and great humans. So, you're telling me that, if I go to hell, I'm going to be there with Buddha and I'm going to be there with Gandhi, and I'm going to be there with--
BOB: Yeah, good crowd.
AUBREY: It's like, these may be my people. You know what I mean? I'm not sure that they're not my people.
BOB: Yeah, there's so much wisdom. I mean, I use this word and maybe I shouldn't, but it's honestly adorable to me. That people think that the Buddha, Nisargadatta, Rumi, Anandamayi Ma, these absolute beings of purity and love and compassion and oneness and unity, are burning forever. I mean, it's so preposterous. And it's because the Matthewian Jesus is a fiery guy. The character in the Gospel of Matthew, the Matthewian author is very, very obsessed with it. The word that Jesus uses in the Bible is called Gahenna in Aramaic, which was, it was a landfill basically. It was a trash dump. And so, it's very clearly a symbolic thing. The word Hades, which is the real Greek word for kind of what a fiery underground is, is used a handful of times, a couple of times compared to Gahenna, it's the much more common word. So again, kind of getting really archaeological with the text, you can see that--
AUBREY: Yeah, like being in the dumps.
BOB: Exactly.
AUBREY: Being in the dumps is a lot different than being in a Bosch--
BOB: You trash head.
AUBREY: Yeah, like being in a Bosch painting. It's a lot different than flaming, like, I'm blaming I'm about to go back to Florence. It's one of my favorite cities in the world. At the top of one of the beautiful churches in the whole world, the Duomo, is this picture of heaven and hell. And on the lower ring of the picture of hell are these muscle bound demons looking like they're straight out of a gay club, a live show, with flaming rods of poles that are shoving these poles in men's asses. And it's painted on the church. And then women with their legs spread open and flaming rods with these jacked demons just, and I'm like, in church? Really?
BOB: Yeah, yeah, people are crying with the rosaries. It's grotesque.
AUBREY: Like really? You put this in church? And then of course, there's like the angelic realms up in the top. But it's so clear that there's these impulses. So, as shame built, then anger built. And as repression of homosexuality built, this kind of darker impulses came out. And it's like, come on, y'all. Can't you see what's going on here? Like just some basic psychology, understand that something is not quite right. And I still love the church, it's still beautiful. But it's like, you see some of these patterns.
BOB: Yeah, my father-in-law who's a good Catholic, and I'm a big fan of him, and he is of me, told me about his trip to Italy. And we kind of had a good laugh. It's in the book. We had a good laugh about kind of one of the things, despite his devout religious practice mentioned that, it was bizarre to him to see all the gold plated everything, of again, a guy who you can only worship God or money. You can't worship both. Jesus is not a big fan of greed. And he said, the funniest thing was, he would see kind of similar to your experience with the hellish paintings, you would see these paintings of an ancient Palestinian scene, ancient Judea, and Jesus and the apostles. And then in the corner of the painting is like an Italian, it's the patron. It's the guy who paid the guy, and he's there. He's like, "Yeah, this is really good. Can you get me in the corner? I'm looking at the thing." And it's just very, clearly the egoic nature of those guys that are putting themselves in with the gold, everything. So, you brought that up earlier about the human perception of all this.
AUBREY: Sure. That same trip I went to Italy, and we also stopped, this was it. So, I was first tricked into going to some Christian Bible studies ski trips, so I was annoyed. Then I went to Italy, and also my friends, we're just starting to explore our sexuality, getting into high school. I didn't have sex till like the earliest part of my sophomore year, but nonetheless, it was happening around that time. And just the guilt that my Christian friends would feel. Some horrible things like, they would be with their girl, and then they would have sex. And then she would be giving her virginity, and then the man, I remember the story, this man was so filled with guilt that he called her a whore and kicked her out of the house, like you tempted me. I was like, what a fucking--
BOB: Projection makes perception.
AUBREY: Yeah, what a horrible experience of trauma that you've given someone who just gave herself, her virgin flower to you. And then you're just screaming at her, telling her she's a whore, and to leave the house.
BOB: Here's some trauma, you little angel.
AUBREY: Exactly. So, that pissed me off. And then I went to the dungeons of the Inquisition. And I saw all of the torture devices that were there, 80% of which had to do with people's genitals and I'm still disgusting and revolted. I've almost blocked it out of my own memory. It was traumatic to actually see and imagine people actually having to experience this level of torture in the name of "God". So then I went on a fucking rampage. And I was like, I'm fucking done with this. It was all "God Is Not Great", Christopher Hitchens. And then, "Why I'm Not a Christian from Bertrand Russell, and "Christianity Must Change or Die" from Spong. I was in all of these things--
BOB: The edge boards.
AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. So I was like, alright, we're going to take it all out. Of course, then I had my first psychedelic experience, and I understood that, oh, wow, there's God, and then there's a life review. And the life review is very much like heaven and hell, because you either find yourself in a state of suffering based upon the actions you've taken, but you're the judge of your own self. So, there was this whole synthesis that happened that shifted the course of my life. But I was deep, I was deep on this path as well. I mean, I am a warrior for sanity here. And I also read a lot about Rasputin and ended up having a lot of respect for Rasputin, because even though he was, I think Eastern Orthodox Christian, he had visions of the Black Mary in the forest, and there was all of these animals copulating around them. And the Black Mary said, "See, this is divine nature." And so, he was heretical in that way, and also had huge healing powers and a large sexual appetite. So, I was like, I think I can get down with this type of Christian.
BOB: He was powerful.
AUBREY: Yeah, he was a wizard. He's a wizard, he reportedly had a huge cock and was very good with the ladies. And he could heal people, I was like, Rasputin, let's fucking go. He was almost impossible to kill. They gave him enough cyanide to kill an elephant, shot him 13 times, stabbed him like 20 times, wrapped him in chains, threw him in a river, he still got out of the chains and clawed his way to the shore. I'm like, that person had the power of God in him one way or another. But yeah--
BOB: Then you started on it.
AUBREY: I was like, I have Rasputin power. And, obviously, my feelings and beliefs have softened as I've understood, as you do in this book, the beauty of the teachings of Yeshua, and the beauty of even the Old Testament teachings now, as I've studied the Hebrew wisdom traditions. How you can read these things as metaphors. I can understand what these messages are actually trying to transmit. So, a deep respect and appreciation and compassion has kind of filled in the place where what started as my own version of righteous anger, which was actually a reflection of an opposite type of righteous anger, which was exhibited by the early church.
BOB: I think that's a really profound kind of three-act structure, actually. And I feel like there's a lot of people on the cusp of act one to two, or two to three, I think you're in act three now, which is integrated spiritual respect and inclusivity universalism, whereas it's tough, it's tough to make that jump, but the water is just fine, guys. Come on in. I think when you come back to, for me, the true teachings of Jesus and why that spiritual tradition is worthy of reverence, let me give you this one, and kind of talk about shame and guilt and all those things. If you only know one parable in the Bible, you can tear out every other page in that book. But the parable of the prodigal son, and a spiritual teacher told me this, that's the most important one. That's really the only one you need to know. So, if you're not familiar, it's a story Jesus tells. A rich man has two sons. And one son is kind of the good son and does the right thing with his dad. And the other son, the prodigal son, prodigal means wasteful, goes off, he takes his inheritance. And he kind of has a hedonistic trip. He travels and spends the money and indulges and ends up destitute. He kind of ends up poor in an alleyway and realizes, hungover, and he's like, I spent all my money. This is terrible, my dad won't love me anymore. I'm screwed, but I got to go back to him. I got nothing else I can do. And so, he says, I'm paraphrasing the whole thing. He says, maybe he'll let me be a farmhand, maybe he'll let me work in the fields. Maybe. He's saying there's a chance, and goes back to his father. And his father, who is kind of this dignified man, sees his son on the horizon, and runs to his son, and embraces him and kisses him. He gives him the finest robe. And there's so much to this because even in that period, Jewish men, older dignified men didn't run. It was kind of a lower thing to do. But the father sprints to his son. They have a big party, they kill the fattest calf, and bring out the best wine. And the "good brother" is annoyed, which is humanity, and says, he's the loser, why is he so important? And his father says, oh no, no, your son was lost and now he's found, we're going to celebrate. And that's humanity. That's the mystic read of humanity. You can't escape the love of creator. It's infinite. No matter what you've done, no matter how much guilt, shame, that's all self-imposed. And so, I mean, that's a good one. Hold that one in your heart.
AUBREY: Yeah, that's beautiful, man. In a mystical psychedelic journey, that was one on one with the shaman that I was studying with, he called in the energy of the Christ. And it appeared in the space, through the vision space, as this column of emerald light. And it was the most, I'm getting chills just thinking about it, actually. But it was the most interesting and beautiful sensation I've ever felt. Which was, it wasn't that this emerald light was going to grant me forgiveness for the transgressions that I had. Because I felt compelled to like be, oh my God, fuck. I mean, I'm a sinner, basically, in some other language. I could have been made mistakes, like I could have been better. But it wasn't, I forgive you, my son. It was, what mistakes? What mistakes? Not even the recognition, not even flinch. I love you, what mistakes? I don't register those mistakes. So, this idea of forgiving--
BOB: With the most intimate knowing of all of you.
AUBREY: Exactly. With the radical, like I see everything. I see every action you've taken. I've seen even actions you're not even aware that you've taken, because subconsciously, you've forgotten or you've justified them in a way, and somewhere, but I've seen them too. I see all of it. All of it. And I love you just the same. All of these times that I encounter the Christ energy, I have these unbelievably profound experiences. Another time, another journey. Again, psychedelic medicine is my way to connect to the--
BOB: And it's a profound tool.
AUBREY: It's a profound tool. And it's been my way. I've been a psychonaut for 24 years.
BOB: Yeah, deep bow.
AUBREY: So, another time I encountered, again, I encountered the Christ. And I'm not like always planning for that, like, I'm going to go in and sometimes, the Christ just comes and I'm overwhelmed, like fuck, the Christ. And once again, I didn't learn from the first time. Once again, I start going like, and I start explaining, not necessarily my transgressions, but just all of the troubles that I've experienced. I'm like, "Man, I get sad and I run out of energy. And sometimes I get angry and sometimes I get jealous and stuff." I'm just explaining. It was almost this confessional. And the Christ then takes the form of like the Yeshua, like the person. So, it moves from the Christ energy, like the Emerald light to the actual man. It takes like an embodied kind of image in my mind. And this man looks at me, and just waits for me to finish with all of my stuff. Just looks at me goes "Me too." I was like, "Fuck."
BOB: Unconditional love.
AUBREY: And also, yeah, I share in all of your pain and I share in all of your difficulties, and all of your struggles. I'm right there with you. Me too. No separation. Like, "I'm sorry to hear about that," which has this air of condescension. It's like, "It will get better, my son, or some shit like that. No, it's like, "Yeah, me too." There's nothing more to say after that. It's just like, I was just, I mean, I'm getting emotional just feeling it now because when you really feel that from a divine being, there's nothing more you need. And my encounters with all of these high level ascended master divine beings have always been very succinct, and unbelievably powerful. There's not a lot to say. Whereas like the Jaguar Alligator Therian trope has a lot to say a lot of times. You know, want to be in a dialogue when we go--
BOB: Yeah, the mushroom has a lot.
AUBREY: Yeah, me and the dragon where we have a big conversation, but yeah, at the highest level, like--
BOB: The avatar of Galilee.
AUBREY: Yeah, yeah, the wisdom has just been really, really simple and really beautiful. And again, whether this is actually the Christ, or actually Jesus, or just my own projection of it based upon some gnosis of my own mind, I'm not trying to claim anything, claiming special access, or like I was given something that other people don't have. It could clearly just be a projection in my mind, but the effect of it was life changing.
BOB: There is no going back for you, it's experiential.
AUBREY: Correct.
BOB: And that's the mystical experience. The theologians, what is it, Mr. Eckhart, theologians may quarrel, but the mystics speak the same language. It's that language of experience, what you're talking about. That's really profound. I love that. I think people probably make the assumption that the author of the "Original Sin Is a Lie" isn't a fan of Jesus of Nazareth, or, that real teaching that you're talking about. I'm glad that our conversation is really coming from a real sincere place of adoration. And one thing I wanted to mention too was, when you talk about forgiveness, one thing he says when he's getting murdered. He's getting brutally murdered, an innocent man.
AUBREY: Beyond innocent.
BOB: Beyond innocent.
AUBREY: Like the best of us.
BOB: Not even just innocent. That's right. It's a humiliating death, by the way. Your mom's there, your friends are there.
AUBREY: You got a long walk.
BOB: It's very painful.
AUBREY: With a heavy cross that you can't carry, you're falling down. It's the worst.
BOB: Yeah, just think about it. You're going, this is the end of this mortal frame, you're accepting that this is it. And what does he say? Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. He's forgiving his murderers on the cross. I mean, to me, that's one of the most sublime sayings in human civilization, forgiving your murderers. That's the level of Christ Consciousness. People say, what's Christ consciousness? What does that really mean? It means living in a place that is so unconditionally loving, that acknowledges, like you were saying, the all of it, the totality of it and zooming out, and seeing that they're just ignorant. They're ignorant of their true nature, really. They're ignorant of their own connection to the divine. It's okay, so just forgive them. It's all right, that I'm enduring the most brutal, humiliating death. ever. And so, yeah, deep down--
AUBREY: Yeah, and this is something that now, I mentioned to you, Bobby Kennedy is coming over to dinner tonight at my house. One of the things that I love about what he stands for is, it's a recognition of... He stands strong on a lot of issues, but underneath that all is the desire to bring everybody together. That there is no us and others. Like his campaign's main slogan is Heal The Divide.
BOB: Oh, that's great.
AUBREY: Which is a recognition of no, no--
BOB: There is a polarization, but let's--
AUBREY: Let's unite them. Let's unite this polarity. Celebrate the diversity but recognize the similarity, and recognize that we're all here for a shared purpose and we have to come together if we're going to make it through these trying times ahead.
BOB: Hear, hear.
AUBREY: That goes back to these, forgive them for they know not what they do. So, no matter how many, even the people who've viciously slandered him and tried to assassinate his name in every possible way--
BOB: And his family.
AUBREY: And actually literally assassinated his family. But it's something really beautiful that's kind of emerged. I've gotten to know his kids a little bit too, and there's something kind of special that if trauma is responded to in the right way, and challenge is responded to in the right way, it forges diamonds. It can go either way. It can be too much pressure and it can crack you. But if you have enough resilience, these challenges can actually bring out and liberate something really strong and beautiful. And that's what I've seen not only in Bobby but in his children as well.
BOB: Yeah, and there's a lot of American Bodhisattvas. I reference MLK a lot in the book, who was also, the state wasn't a big fan of.
AUBREY: Cut down. I often ponder like, four, really. There was MLK, RFK, JFK. And it would have been interesting to see how Malcolm X turned out, obviously mad respect for what he was standing for, and how he was fighting, but--
BOB: He's often mischaracterized.
AUBREY: I'm sure. I'm sure his character was assassinated. And then, many, many other countless leaders with civil rights movements to Fred Hampton, tons of other people. So, don't think that because I'm excluding anybody that I don't include them.
BOB: Right, right, right.
AUBREY: But nonetheless, these main characters, these main figures, what would have happened if those timelines weren't cut? Where would we be now? I just saw a video of when Bobby's dad, RFK, after he was assassinated, they drove him on a train, I think, from, I don't know DC to New York, and seven million people were lining the train tracks. People of color, rural people. At a time where America was very racially polarized, everybody was standing together on the train tracks. He was succeeding in doing something at that point. And of course, what Martin Luther King was doing and what John was, all of these fucking people--
BOB: Gandhi was assassinated. I mean, yeah
AUBREY: It's like all of these fucking people
BOB: The world doesn't like it when somebody embodies otherworldliness, if you will. I mean, that's kind of a larger point around kind of the mystic's view of--
AUBREY: Yeah, what would have been the next 30 years of Christ as he was a grandfather, passing on, what if we started to have some kids with Mary and then got to teach them a few things, and they carried on and lineage? So many of these acts of violence that just truncated timelines, in some ways you can say, well, it had to be that way. But I just play out that fantasy another way, and just wonder sometimes what it would have been like. But I think, this energy, the spirit of the Christ, the spirit of MLK, the spirit of all of these great, the spirit of God, all of these, they keep coming back. You can kill the man, but you can't kill the energy, the idea. The archetype.
BOB: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. I think, well, in the Hindu view, the wheel of Samsara, right? This is big in Buddhism as well, and some of the indigenous shamanic traditions, the idea of the Spirit cycling through all these incarnations, all these bodies. Something I talk about a lot in the book, and a near death experience and kind of reincarnation research, all that stuff is super interesting to me. Because, I think, to your point about killing the body, who are we really, the secular materialists aren't crazy about this stuff. When you're dead, you die. You're a meat machine, and you got good thumbs and a strong neocortex. But what a lot of, really all spiritual traditions and even some aspects of modern science and quantum mechanics, near death experience and reincarnation research, which as Dr. Ian Stevenson, if you're not familiar with him, but University of Virginia, studied reincarnation in a scholarly way for decades.
AUBREY: It's not even actually a debate anymore, honestly.
BOB: It's becoming so commonplace, which is beautiful to me. I'm thrilled that we’re getting there
AUBREY: Well, when I'm saying that it's not that I'm saying that people don't still, aren't secular materialists that don't believe it. However, if you actually look at the data and the traditions that actually, like really, you're going to be on the other side of this? Especially after Ian Stevenson's work in University of Virginia, thousands of documented cases. Absolutely inexplicable recovered memories. At that point--
BOB: Xenoglossy, which is a child speaking another language.
AUBREY: Yes. There's no--
BOB: It's a lot.
AUBREY: It's a lot if you actually look at it. So you really almost have to look away, if you really want to believe this kind of other idea that does not accept the continuity of consciousness. Then you really have to go, “la, la, la, la, University of who? Blah, blah, blah”.
BOB: And you had Mark Gober on, who I'm a huge fan of who wrote a great book called "An End to Upside Down Thinking". And I tell everybody about that book. He's terrific.
AUBREY: Mark's a great guy. You guys got to meet.
BOB: His very well researched book about, basically why scientific materialism is outdated. Consciousness is actually fundamental to the universe. It's not this massive shift. It's not that the whole pyramid of the development is off. It's just that instead of consciousness being the last thing after the brain, it's the first thing before matter. That's all. You just switched one little part of it, and that's in line with the ancient Hindus and the mystical traditions, the shamanic traditions, all this stuff. Yogananda, who I'm a big fan of, practically a devotee, and the books that are dedicated to Paramahansa Yogananda. He got here in America 1920. We just hit the centennial arrival, Yogananda in America. He was this very brilliant, loving, articulate, yoga master, Hindu master, who has all these great things. He interpreted Jesus beautifully. He has a great line. He says, we've all been fat, we've all been skinny, we've all been beautiful, we've all been ugly, we've all been rich, we've all been poor. Don't get attached, don't get too attached to the role. The role is just this momentary fragment of time, and you still do your role. And a lot of that kind of is called Karma Yoga. It's Krishna in the Gita. You still have your duty, you have your dharma, you stand up for rights in a political setting, in a community setting. You protect the innocent, doesn't mean don't do nothing. That ain't it either. It doesn't mean be apathetic, but it just means you can transcend all of it. And actually, you get better in the game, in the role by being a little bit detached from it. That's a big part of the mystical experience.
AUBREY: One of the deep criticisms I have of the New Age Movement is that there's a lot of psychics/mediums that go around and they start telling people about their past lives. And you pay that person--
BOB: "Well, I was Benjamin Franklin, buddy."
AUBREY: Exactly. You know where I'm going. You pay that person a couple of hundred bucks. And they don't tell you, "Well, you were a cobbler who died of malnutrition at 35 in Prague." You were a chimney sweep, and then you were a whore in Babylon, whatever. It was never that. No, you were Queen of Sheba, you were fucking Marcus Aurelius. How many Cleopatras are there? You know what I mean?
BOB: That's fair. That's a real bust.
AUBREY: Yeah, there's a lot of this kind of, and it's not that I don't believe
BOB: Well, there's opportunists in every scene.
AUBREY: Opportunities everywhere. And anytime there is some kind of sacred phenomenon, whether it's religious, intuition, or drive or desire, whether it's a spiritualist type of drive, or desire or anything, corruption and self-interest finds its way through that. I see that everywhere. And so, it's not to say also that it's only religion, with a capital R that has its problems. There are lots of problems in the New Age spiritualist movement, as well. There's lots of problems with fundamentalism, in my opinion, in the medicine traditions.
BOB: Yeah, even in the psychedelic--
AUBREY: Renaissance, exactly.
BOB: Mostly amazing that the taboo is going away. You're a big part of this new kind of revival, which is fantastic. But there's a lot of capitalists taking advantage of it.
AUBREY: There's a lot of capitalists, so that's one. They're trying to take advantage of, and capitalize on the sacred. So that's always, it's ubiquitous.
BOB: It's always going to happen, yeah.
AUBREY: But there's also this idea that, because there's a tradition that's been around, that everything about that tradition is right, and doesn't need to be evolved. Which is truly a fundamentalist belief. And so, I see a lot of this fundamentalism, saying, no, no, you can't criticize any aspect. And of course, mad respect. Anybody can practice however they want. You can be an Amish, you can practice as an Amish person, you can practice as an Orthodox Jew. However the fuck. You do you, man, or woman. You fucking go for it, do whatever you want. And if you want to go hardstyle Shipibo, go for it. I'm not criticizing your path, you do what you want to do. However, the idea that the most fundamentalist view is always the right view is something that I categorically disagree with, that I believe everything should be a living doctrine of, all right, this idea came about at this point, let's test it again. Let's make sure that this is accurate. Let's ask fresh questions of the divine anew. Let's have a little bit of skepticism about all of the rules. And this has made me something of a spiritual rebel, where I'm practicing all kinds of heretical acts, all the time. Things that I won't even share on this podcast. And sometimes I get my ass kicked for it. I mean, I practiced something that was quite heretical in an Ayahuasca ceremony recently, goes against all the rules, and I got smoked. And I was like, heard, I understand, deepest apologies, I just had to find out for myself. And actually, the response from Ayahuasca was, yeah, no worries, now you know. Basically, it was like, "Absolutely, I got it."
BOB: And what you reap, is what you saw. Not only is it in the New Testament by the Galilean, the Buddha says the same thing. I mean, word for word. What you reap what you sow. The karmic nature of your actions, what you're talking about.
AUBREY: And other times, we've done things that are also, equally as heretical. But actually, it's been embraced, the spirit of Ayahuasca has been like that was incredible. And the space has been incredible. And the shamans have been like, wow, that was incredible. And we're like, all right--
BOB: You tested their rigidity.
AUBREY: Right, exactly. And so, it's a combination. So, some of these old rules get reified. And some of them get kind of questioned. And I think this is what we need to do with both the old religious traditions, and also the new spiritualist tradition. Let's allow everything to be a living, breathing, it's not that we're trying to eradicate structure and just create no pathways and no rules. Because there's certain guidelines and boundaries that really make sense. And there's certain pathways that are true and beautiful and helpful and really wise. But it feels like part of my own Dharma is to push up against all of the things. Not the things that are going to be legitimately hazardous to my health. I'm not going to take Prozac and then drink Ayahuasca or something like that. I'm not going to try and kill myself. There's certain things that--
BOB: There's rules in the physical universe.
AUBREY: Exactly. So, I'm not doing that type of shit. But, it feels important to really have the courage to just say, alright, let's push up against this. Let's see what really still feels real here. And let's see what doesn't.
BOB: I like that approach. There's a Sanskrit word leela, which means play. Divine play, there's a lightness to all of it. And I think that's a nice way to look at it.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's a great word. Because everything is all too often far too serious. And once you lose laughter, I think you lose the plot a little bit. There's a lot of laughter in the cosmos, because it's the only way to hold paradox. There's no way to avoid paradox if we understand ourselves. And if laughter is the way to hold paradox, and we know that we're a multi-dimensional being, which is a paradox, if we're not laughing, we're off plot.
BOB: It's a transcendental move, for sure.
AUBREY: Yeah, we're off plot if we lose the sense of humor. Yeah, there's going to be some situations that there's no humor in. Such search situations are just sheer grief.
BOB: Yeah, I'm sorry I'm so Jesusy today, but there's a great book called "The Humor of Christ" which talks about kind of his bits that are lost, lost in translation. One of them is a pretty familiar one, which I'll share, which is you're busy criticizing the speck in your brother's eye, while you have a plank in your eye. I mean, that's a joke. It's funny. In church, they read that and go, don't criticize, and it's like this tight thing. But that's a humorous juxtaposition. He's telling the disciples. You guys are worried about the speck. First, take the plank out of your eye, and then you can worry about the spec. That's funny. There's another one that's very obscure that I was thrilled to discover and mention, which is, this guy comes up to him, what happens with a lot of these very high teachers, very high beings, is people come up to them and say, hey, well heal my daughter, or help settle this dispute, or answer this question. And this guy comes up to him, and he says, "Teacher, help me and my brother divide our inheritance evenly." And he looks at his disciples and goes, "Who made me a divider?" I teach unity. Who made me a divider? I'm not a divider, am I? It's a great bit.
AUBREY: Actually, even just to see that happening, and to see him say it in a way that was funny. And then to hear the laughter from his people, and hear the jokes, and then understand that everybody's being so serious that we missed the point. We missed the point that he was saying it with a chuckle.
BOB: He's having a good time.
AUBREY: And that's, I think part of the projection that we have of Jesus the man, which is such a disservice to all of us is, he's serious all the time, he's sexless all the time. He's only basically suffering, or being fucking magically compassionate, or whatever he's being. But we get this very surreal image.
BOB: He's always mean looking.
AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. I want to just see him hanging out and cracking jokes, and what happens when he gets too far into the wine cups, and he gets a little silly. What does it look like when Jesus is dancing? Does he keep it kind of tight? Or does he get wild and dance with his arms outstretched?
BOB: That's the beauty of the avatar. The beauty of the avatar is they're human. They're in this form, they're in this manifestation. They're not separate and that's a big point that the mystics make, and kind of in the mystical Christianity, world mystics view. I had a spiritual teacher who said, on the lesson of Jesus, Christianity was only off by one letter. Christ I Amity.

AUBREY: Wow.
BOB: Just instead of N, it's just an M. That's it. It's not Christianity, it's Christ I Amity.
AUBREY: Wow, that's fucking cool.
BOB: Ain't that good? Yeah, yeah. Not original.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's really cool.
BOB: Citing a teacher.
AUBREY: One of the things that will happen to me is, somebody will come forward, and they'll be like, have you accepted Jesus into your life? And I know what they mean, and I'll answer them and I don't want to get into this. Because they come with this fucking fervent intensity. And I'm like, Jesus, you're like a fucking Crusader.
BOB: Well, it's a mission, literally.
AUBREY: Exactly. And I'll just look at them and with all honesty, I'll say, I've accepted Christ into my life.
BOB: There you go.
AUBREY: And then they look at me like “aahhh”, but usually, they can't argue with that. And then I just move on. And it's true. I think there's a big distinction, like the Christ energy, and also, mad respect for Jesus the man. But really, the power that I've accepted, that I want to bring into my life is the power of the Christ, of the I Am. That's the part that I'm fully radically in acceptance of. And again, mad respect to many of the mystical teachings that he's had to share.
BOB: The Cosmic Christ, the Christ consciousness is everywhere, and it's definitely right here.
AUBREY: Definitely. And if you're going to go look for it, that's the place to look for it because you have access to that spot more than anybody else.
BOB: Yeah. Rumi says, I looked for the divine in churches, temples and mosques. And I found the divine in my heart. I mean, Rumi is as good as anybody too, speaking Sufis.
AUBREY: Always busy in hell. That's the type of--
BOB: That's a damn shame.
AUBREY: That's a damn shame.
BOB: So nice he left all that good poetry, though.
AUBREY: That's somebody, and lapdog of Satan. That's what that sounds like.
BOB: But I look forward to hearing more of his poems that you and I will listen to.
AUBREY: Yeah, no doubt. No doubt, brother. So, I just want to touch briefly, like you took the impetus to start, kind of, a spirituality program inside Meta?
BOB: Well, yeah, I'm happy to go there with you. I'm one of the global co-leads of Mindfulness Meta. Been there five years. Big tech basically came to our city, Aubrey. I was a starving artist for about 10 years. I was making films, religious films. And very fulfilling, very proud of that work. It made me who I am. Couldn't make a living doing it at that period. And so, I said, okay, I'll learn marketing. Actually, I licensed my film to Gaia. We talked about this. But yeah, so I've been in big tech for a while now, in Meta. I've been meditating for 10, 15 years, something like that. And when you work in a big technology company, you get nine million messages a day and emails and notifications and pings and all this stuff. And it's just, I don't know how people do that job, do this work without mindfulness, without having some meditation practice. And so it started, there were already meditators in Menlo Park, which is the headquarters. But in the Austin office, I basically said, hey, I'm going to go into a conference room and play headspace once a week on a USB speaker to two other people, or three or zero, mostly for me. And that's how kind of the Austin branch started, and it snowballed from there. We got hooked up with other folks in Menlo Park. And, I think I made this joke to you, I said global co-lead because we've got a guy in Dublin. But it's mostly North America. But yeah, it's been really beautiful. We do training and programs. It's very grassroots. Leadership really doesn't have a lot to do with it, kind of for better or worse. But yeah, it's a sincere offering to people who kind of burn themselves out, and work very hard. I think Meta is, I like to call it the extra credit kids. Everybody who works there, most of them, I’m not really me. But most of that crowd is like, in high school, they were like, oh, it's only 100? How can I get 105? And so, they're very tired to accomplishment identity. And so, it's a really nice environment for mindfulness.
AUBREY: Yeah, I think one of the reasons I wanted to mention it is, we spent the first hour and people have gotten to, hopefully as I have, love and appreciate your wealth of knowledge, your personhood, your personality, everything that's there. And there's probably still some people who hear Meta, and even though they probably have Instagram, they're still like, these guys are the darkness. This is Saruman's tower of darkness. And we forget, and I think "Star Wars" actually did a good job of that, when Finn takes off his helmet, and they actually humanize the stormtroopers. This idea, again, it's trying to categorize the world in good and bad, black and white, and Meta is, it's far more nuanced.
BOB: There's a lot of good people that work there.
AUBREY: There's a lot of good people that work there. And there's a lot of good services that they provide. And yes, there's a lot of fair criticisms, certain policies and things that have happened. But all of that can be true. I think it's important to just understand that things are far more complex and nuanced. You don't have to have your fucking Saruman worship--
BOB: I call them my daily bread. It's my daily bread. That's my, so I do nine to five, and then kind of nights and weekends, talk about the Cosmic Christ. The mindfulness group, one of our jokes is we're the mystics in the machine. Which I really like. But we've done actually some really good work with the Center for Humane technology. I'm happy to call those guys out. CHT, they're a humane tech dot-org, I believe. And sometimes, well, they made a movie called "The Social dilemma" which most people on planet Earth saw in 2020, I think 21. Which talks about the engagement as the driver on the platforms, and it's pretty antagonistic of Facebook and big tech platforms. And they had a realization at some point where they basically said, hey, we're not mad at you guys, the employees. We're mad at the machine, if you will, what it's become. We're criticizing the steam engine, but we need the sailors. We're trying to steer this thing. The planet needs collaboration, cooperation and partnership. The innocents, the vulnerable. We've got to come together. And that's a lot of what you're doing in the political realm. There really is a social action, social responsibility. And so, you feel that. My just humble role there is to say, how can we get really sincere programs in front of people that are working on a website, Aubrey, that has three billion monthly active users. I mean, I don't think anybody can even conceive of the amount of individuals that use those websites. Every month it breaks a record. It seems like it's slowing down and TikTok catching up, whatever. But there's a lot of people on there. And so, there is a responsibility, I think for however long I'm there in some capacity to say, hey, how can I come from a place of authenticity and presence and share some Thich Nhat Hanh quotes.
AUBREY: Yeah, amen. I mean, I think all of these things are, yes, there's energies that are coming from different places. I think we saw that when the Twitter Files exposed collusion with governmental, political captured agency desires and things like that. And so there's some ugly shit that's involved underneath the surface. But there's also a whole swelling of other people, where, ultimately as consciousness rises within the ranks, the people who are supposed to pull the triggers, now we're talking whether it's triggers of guns or triggers of algos, either way, as that consciousness rises, they still need people to do that. And if the consciousness of people shifts, then the machine has to shift and adapt. Unless they just wipe out the need for people, which I think was what people are worried about with AI, is like AI can handle everybody's job. But we're still a long way from that. But now's the time. I mean, now is the time of a consciousness revolution.
BOB: My mentor, we're a very humbled group. I mean, I'm really proud of it. I love being a part of the community and getting to bring programs to people. My mentor, the first time she led a meditation was for one person. One person came in. It was '17-'18 before remote world. But, she came in, she led the meditation for 15 minutes. And the woman at the very end of it was in tears. She was just like, "Thank you, thank you so much, because I didn't know I needed this, and I just saw meditation..." And it's kind of like the butterfly effect. The butterfly's wings create a tsunami across the earth. It's like, just do a little bit of sincere action. and who knows. Who knows if that person, 20 years from now, is the CRO of some massive thing. And they say, "Oh, well, no, I've cultivated this aspect in myself." Who knows, there's a million hypotheses. But that inspired me and continues to do so, to just say, hey, even if it's one person, it's worth it.
AUBREY: Yeah, amen, my brother.
BOB: So, thanks, yeah.
AUBREY: All right, "Original Sin is a Lie" that's your book.
BOB: Yeah, " Original Sin is a Lie". Originalsinisalie.com. You can read more about it and read more about me, and yeah, it's been a beautiful journey.
AUBREY: Yeah, man. It's been fun getting to know you, brother.
BOB: Awesome. Thank you.
AUBREY: Yeah, appreciate your work and your contributions to just helping open this up. Both the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, all of it, and just kind of share your truth from your heart. I mean, that's what we're here to do.
BOB: Likewise. Thanks for having me, brother.
AUBREY: Thanks, everybody for tuning in.
BOB: Here it is.
AUBREY: There it is. "Original Sin is a Lie". Much love, everybody.
BOB: Thanks, man.