Among the world’s many religions are shadow traditions that express the esoteric or mystical experience of divine union. In Christianity this is manifest in ecstatic, revelatory examples, such as within restorationist movements, in monastic cloisters, and through spontaneous re-emergence among individuals and small groups accessing truth through mystical experience. Parallel to the ascendance of the Islamic faith was a movement that drew from a deep and ancient well of mystical practices and understandings, called sufism. In this episode we welcome Sufi master, al-hajj Daud, also known as Dr. David Peck to discuss his fascinating discovery of sufism as an active and participating latter-day saint, how it has enhanced his faith, and what we can learn from his journey and discovery. His upcoming book and podcast, Of Saints and Sufis, will both challenge and intrigue those with the courage to continue the path of the seeker.
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. ...
Christopher and Riley have guest Morgan Aldous back on the podcast this week to explore correspondences between the alchemist’s ascent of the Mountain of the Adepts through seven stages of alchemical transformation and our own ascension of the eight rungs of the ladder of the Beatitudes to personal transformation as taught by Christ in His Sermon on the Mount. The correspondences they find between the widespread idea of the eight beatitudes as rungs on a ladder, ultimately leading us upward to the presence of God and the peace found therein, point the way to personal transformation and peace, and peaceful community with our fellow man in a Zion society. ...
In this episode, guest-host Lindsey Ohlin is joined by educator Tom Bogle as they discuss their similar experiences with an unhealthy relationship surrounding the idea of knowing. What stumbling blocks might we encounter in our pursuit of perfect knowledge and how might that influence how we see our place in the world? What is the relationship between knowledge and faith, and where does wisdom fit into that equation? The pursuit of knowledge can often lead us toward better answers, but can the pursuit of wisdom lead us down a path toward asking better questions? ...
