In this episode, Christopher sits down face to face with Riley on a visit to Heber, Utah from Bakersfield California to talk about arriving at certainty through methodological doubt. The conversation begins with the uncannily similar methodological doubt of medieval Muslim philosophical theologian and Sufi mystic al-Ghazali (1056 or 1057-1111) and the first modern philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650), by which each arrives at certainty through direct experience of what Descartes calls “clear and distinct ideas” and Riley and Christopher share their own experience.
In this episode, Riley and Christopher tackle the question of the actionability of Christian contemplation, given the fact that it is often misunderstood as mere navel gazing. In the spirit of the saying of the great Sufi, Algazel, who wrote that, “Knowledge without action is insanity and action without knowledge is vanity,” Christopher and Riley make a case for the conjunction of contemplation and action as each side of this seeming pair of opposites is incomplete without the other. ...
Christopher and guest co-host Shiloh Logan talk about the power of the stories that we tell ourselves and the impact that they have on our lives. It has been said that “we don’t live in reality, but, rather, we live in our stories about reality.” What does this mean? Human beings are story and meaning-making entities. We are what makes meaning out of reality, and we do this through the stories that we create around and about events and ourselves. Stories are how we make sense of our world, and they are helpful and beneficial to us until they’re not. A primary problem for human beings is when we can’t differentiate between reality and the stories that they have made about reality. This is problematic because once a story is no longer helpful for us, we often can’t shed it from our lives, repent, and move on, because we confuse the story-of-out-own-making for reality itself. One way of first being able to help us differentiate our stories from reality is to see that our stories can never be purely objective, as anything that we create is going to be inherently and necessarily limited. The entirety of our worldview is constructed from the things we-know-we-know and from the things that we-know-we-don’t-know. However, beyond these two things is the entirety of reality of things that we-don’t-know-that-we-don’t-know. Our stories are made by what we-know-we-know and what we-know-we-don’t-know, and because of this, they will never be entirely objective in accounting for the infinite reality of things we-don’t-know-that-we-don’t-know. ...
Mysticism, properly understood, is a process or pursuit of divine oneness or communion with God. While that seems like a worthy aspiration, many can feel uncomfortable with mystical practices such as transcendental meditation. Mystics over the centuries have largely been misunderstood, characterized as heretical, or marginalized to protect orthodox authority. Indeed, Joseph Smith was treated similarly by religious leaders of his time; and yet today within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints there exists a strong, literal, materialist tradition which becomes the filter through which we view God, leaving many with unmet spiritual needs. In this episode, Riley and Christopher suggest that our image of God and the ways in which we represent the divine, are inherently incomplete, and were never meant to be the truth of all things. While structure, dogma, practice, and liturgy are all important in pointing us to the truth of God, the first-hand, spirit-filled experience of divine communion itself, untranslated and ineffable, is far more profitable. Fortunately, this pursuit is not only possible but a present reality. ...
