The Law of oneness: podcast with Aaron Abke

Hello, thank you for joining me for this new kind of video. This time I wanted to try something a little bit different, not my usual NDE videos with a lot of editing, with a lot of music and illustrations and so on. I will still make these kind of videos but I wanted to try a new kind of podcast where I will be asking questions myself. So my first guest is Aaron Apke. Thank you for joining me for my very first podcast and can you present yourself, your background, how did you grow up and did you have any spiritual or religious background basically? I grew up in evangelical Christianity as a third generation pastor's son and very much wanted to follow in my father and grandfather's footsteps and so I went to ministry school at ORU in Tulsa, Oklahoma and I got my bachelor's degree, double bachelor's in music and theology and off I went in my full-time pastoral career by 23 as a worship pastor in San Jose and had a very rude spiritual awakening out of my religion about six months after that and was kind of forced into a corner to accept that I no longer believed in the version of God that I was brought up to believe in, the Christian God. So that was a difficult transition to make having just gotten hired as a full-time pastor and realizing I'm no longer a Christian. So I had to pretty much deconstruct my whole life and start from scratch at that point. I had been married at 23 years old to my Christian ex-wife and that ended up obviously not working out so it was a quite a dark night of the soul to go through to transition out of religion and sort of explore a new territory of who is God to me, what do I believe about the divine and I had to start from scratch in that regard and so I began really looking into the eastern traditions especially Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism and began to understand God from a very more non-dualistic lens and that eventually led me back full circle to the teachings of Jesus and realizing that Jesus who I had grown up worshiping and believing was God was actually an enlightened spiritual master who was teaching all the same core principles that all the eastern philosophies teach and actually may have had some influence in eastern philosophy himself and so that's where my real spiritual awakening began after that around 28 years old I had a really profound sort of life-changing spiritual awakening when I was working at Google, funny enough, and that was my sort of experience of ego death for the first time of experiencing what is beyond the thinking mind and the self-identity I was holding on to and so from there I began pursuing a spiritual path of how do I sort of get back to that state of consciousness again because I was actually in that state of Buddha consciousness if you'd like to call it that for a full two-week period a 14-day period until eventually it wore off and the ego came back online and I had to figure out what do I do to get back to that heavenly state of consciousness again what do I need to identify and release and let go of to be able to experience that freedom once again somewhere along that journey of seeking there was a couple texts that the universe brought into my field the first being the law of one and the second being a course in miracles which I have right here it's never too far away from me this book was really pivotal and maybe the most pivotal in my journey because if you've read the course you know that it sort of uses the gospel language to package its non-duality teachings and it takes a little bit of learning the language to get past the language barrier but suffice to say all the terms I grew up with atonement the holy spirit christ god the son of god all these terms were redefined by a course in miracles and allowed me to actually hang on to a lot of the tradition I grew up with and re-envision it in a much more expanded sense and so yeah I just kind of sunk my teeth into this text and I felt like it was my lifeline in many ways of if anything is going to help me get back to that non-dual state of consciousness that I got to enjoy for those two weeks it's got to be this text because the course begins by saying nothing real can be threatened nothing unreal exists and herein lies the peace of god and as soon as I read that man I went oh this book has the codes for me because that's exactly what I experienced for those two weeks it was just this very sort of ordinary very obvious and very childlike realization that yeah nothing unreal exists therefore there's nothing to fear in god's universe and only love is real and just knowing that creates a foundation of peace in your state of being that can't be shaken by the illusions of the world and the mind anymore and I knew that that book was holding the keys to yes but then people could ask how do you embody all these teachings especially right now it feels like a lot of people feel like either depressed or they lack a meaning or they feel something is wrong with this world and it's like why am I even here you know the big questions who am I why am I here and so in your own life how how did you manage to embody these teachings basically it's a great question because I don't know if I know the answer technically to that question other than just that it was clear to me that these teachings won't do me any real good if I don't strive to embody them because the main kind of teaching of the course I mean there's a number of main teachings but the primary kind of idea the course sets forward is you are the christ you're already the christ so you're not becoming something that you're not and the ego doesn't really exist so you're not really getting rid of something but you are under the mistaken belief that you are the ego and not the christ and so it's like you've fallen asleep in a dream at night and you know this is the interesting thing right is that when you're dreaming at night the part of you that wakes up from the dream is not the dream character and so I began to realize this interesting paradox of the awakening journey is that the part of me that's seeking to awaken is not the part of me that actually wakes up the part of me that wakes up is the christ it's as if the christ my true nature has just fallen asleep and is having a dream of some sort and so in the same way that if I have a dream about running away from dinosaurs or something and I wake up in the morning I don't go phew thank god I'm free from those dinosaurs right I'm not under the dream identity anymore it's an immediate identity shift and the only realization that happens upon awakening is oh none of that was real oh it never happened and so the course is like that's the realization you need to have in your awakening state but when you talk about the christ consciousness can you explain what it is because a lot of people could say that sounds nice but I'm not religious myself so I respect that but I don't want to to go into religion and talk about Jesus Christ and everything it's uh it's not for me you know what could you say to that what's it's a great question because we're not talking about something religious when we use the term christ all of these words that the course uses the christ holy spirit the father atonement these are just like stand-in terms for metaphysical truths or non-dual truths so the christ is the term the course uses for your true eternal essence so it's the part of me that is one with god and if I had to define what that is which you can't really write but if we have to try to wrap primitive human language around it we can say that the christ is simply the I am nature or the I am principle through which you experience yourself so every single one of us is constantly experiencing ourselves or knowing ourselves as the first person in the present tense and this is inescapable you can never experience yourself as the second person not even when you into a mirror right you're still the subject looking at a reflection of yourself and likewise you cannot experience yourself outside of the present moment you can't experience yourself in the past or the future and so that's actually that sort of eternal conscious principle we call I am is what god is because there's only one I am there's only one subject and that is where we all share oneness together is that we all know ourselves as the first person present tense I am and so that's the christ and we see jesus in the gospel of john especially speaking from that state very often I am the way the truth and the life I am the bread of life I am the door he's really speaking to this principle in all of us and in john 17 he prays that we would all know the same oneness that he knows with god so it's what's interesting is that the first christians who were called the nazarenes which jesus was of the sect of the nazarenes right but there was a whole sect of these nazarene jewish christians and the history is very clear on this the first christians believed that the christ was something separate than the person jesus but that at the baptism under john the baptist the oldest gospel account is called the hebrew gospel of matthew written in hebrew it has the dove actually entering the chest into the chest of jesus and that represents the eternal christ the divine nature entering jesus the human person and sort of animating his body and becoming the the messiah and so this was the the original belief of the christians as well that the christ is an eternal principle it's it's like a teleological idea of who we truly are the divine idea of man the perfect idea that god has in god's mind we all actually are that but we're undergoing a state of evolving into it of becoming that and that is the great revealing of the christ in the universe so everything's happening perfectly there's no accidents but nonetheless the course says it's like you're asleep in a dream and you forgot your true nature and so you're trying to wake up from this dream that we call the ego yes and you wrote a book recently called free beliefs of ego could you quickly define what is the ego and how could we break free from it if we have to this is the most fascinating topic for me i love studying the mind the ego the mechanisms of the ego the ego is not an entity but an activity and specifically the ego is the mental activity of identifying with form so identifying yourself with some kind of form and a form can be obviously the body that's the first form the ego really identifies with but a form can also be an idea husband father wife mother sister employee you name it the ego is this mental activity that's always going on if i am this i am that and what's really happening is that i am principle we talked about which is what you truly are and it's unchangeably what you are ego takes that knowing that i exist i am and it just projects it onto objects and says i'm this i'm that i'm this idea i'm that idea and it goes on collecting these identities and every single one of these identities which i call selves runs a particular sequence of these three beliefs and every identity every self it creates always follows this exact sequence in some way which is lack attachment and control and the ego cannot do anything outside of this sequence it's first born in the mind through the belief in lack so going back to childhood anytime that you have an experience that seems to imply to your mind that a need is lacking that could be a lack of love a lack of safety a lack of purpose you name it the mind then creates a self an identity who can cope with that lack who can live in the reality that is devoid of that need right and so the ego and its selves that it creates are problem solvers in that way they're created by the mind to solve a problem which is lack and so the the lack belief gives birth to the self and the sequence of that self and so this is the important thing to understand is that the ego and every little mini ego it creates every self a self is what it does right because it's not an entity there's no ego in your skull you can't find it you can't draw a picture of it you can't weigh it on a scale it is an activity it's a verb not a noun so lack gives birth to it and then attachment sort of defines the goal of that self let's say that in childhood you felt unsafe to express your emotions because your father said stop crying big kids don't cry you know immediately your mind created a self a new identity who could cope with that lack of safety and we could call it something like the unsafe self so this self is always now scanning your environment for threats to its emotional safety so it's going to have different ways of protecting itself from feeling unsafe emotionally so lack gives birth to that self attachment i don't want to feel unsafe right that defines the goal of that self or program and then control is the third belief or function which is how it goes about avoiding that lack so it's going to push people away before they get too close right because it doesn't want to feel unsafe it's going to avoid intimacy and different kind of coping mechanisms like this but you can boil it all down to this sequence and it's actually in identifying the sequence all three points the lack the attachment and control is how you actually identify the ego or the self and the identifying of it creates the distance now you can name it now you can understand how it functions and then you can see it happening in real time so when you get triggered and you you notice yourself going back into those controlling behavior patterns you can say wait a minute there's the unsafe self i'm trying to protect myself from feeling emotionally threatened or whatever so you can now have a space to respond to that program rather than just react and be swept away by it yes but then a lot of comments under my youtube videos are like that i didn't choose to be here if everything is so nice on the other side as you say why am i here you know i didn't choose to come and the ego i may be like what you described but it's it's not because of me it's because of this world i have to protect myself in this world i have to earn money i have to i have to so basically my question would be like it's a big question but what's the nature of this reality because you talked about the nature of who we are now now we have to talk about the nature of where we are from what i understand and i don't pretend to have all the answers but it seems clear to me especially through studying like near-death experiences which i know you've done a lot of work on you get this one unequivocal message from ndes people that have experienced an nde from all the kind of eastern philosophies esoteric ancient texts it all kind of comes back to this idea that we incarnate into the physical universe our souls incarnate to experience evolution and growth and that incarnating is the only way the soul actually grows and learns lessons so the idea is if we're just in the let's say the heavenly plane or heaven where everything's perfect there's no problems there's no suffering then it actually although it's wonderful it can't catalyze any growth or learning in the soul or if it does it's very very minimal compared to what you can learn in a human lifetime and so i think the challenging thing we all have to accept to go beyond this voice that cries victim and says i don't want to be here i didn't choose to come here i don't like all these challenges is we have to accept you're here in this body because your soul chose to come here because there's certain lessons that your soul wants or needs to learn to go to its next phase of growth and evolution and so accepting that allows you to begin learning those lessons and really it's it's not life itself that's so challenging and painful it's our resistance to life it's our playing the victim and saying oh i don't want to be here this is too hard when we engage with life from that framework or mentality we completely blind ourself to all the lessons life is trying to teach us but when we actually just accept look i must be here because i chose to be here so while i'm here in this relatively short human lifetime let me do the best i can to learn these lessons when we have that attitude all of a sudden life becomes like a classroom and we find that everything we experience actually is teaching us profound spiritual lessons and we're growing in wisdom it's the ability to keep your heart open to every experience that actually transcends suffering because the the working idea that i use is that all things exist in relationship in this universe and that relationship is a framework we need to begin perceiving that everything happens through relationship and you can't get out of this right you cannot escape the relationship you have to your own thoughts your mind your feelings the people in front of you that you meet the food you eat the water you drink the air you breathe everything you experience is being experienced through relationship and here's the key is that you're actually choosing what kind of relationship you want to have with everything that you experience but it's actually a program making that choice 99 of the time it's the ego and all of its different lack attachment control mechanisms defining what kind of relationship it wants to have with things and if you're not aware that that choice is being made on your behalf then you can't step in and consciously make it yourself and so we have to become aware of this and say okay if everything exists in relationship then i want to learn and practice how to be in loving relationship with everything and i talk about what loving relationship is and looks like but suffice to say i think that a much better sort of working definition of enlightenment this buzzword we hear all the time is that enlightenment is the ability to be in loving relationship with everything at all times so the defining distinction there is that enlightenment is an ability not just a state that you access it's something that has to be cultivated and developed through discipline and practice and being in a human lifetime and engaging with your life catalysts and challenges is the only way to develop that ability yes and what you said is very important i think like when we hear everything is perfect i think it doesn't mean everything is very nice and oh it's it's uh it's so nice it means everything has a deep meaning even if we don't or we cannot get it so if reality is always meaningful like that every little detail we experience is meaningful does it mean that this reality is uh we often hear about a simulation a matrix maya is this reality just a simulation basically a dream i think it all depends on what your definition of simulation is but if you mean by simulation that it's not ultimately real it's not the highest reality then yeah of course our soul is what's real and the physical body the physical lifetime we're all experiencing is technically an illusion now that's another confusing idea right what do we mean by that do we mean it's an illusion so you're not experiencing it and stuff no that's not what an illusion means right here's the definition of real versus unreal there's three criteria that qualify to identify something as real okay the first one is that what is real is eternal so it has no beginning and it has no ending second quality is that what is real is unchanging so it doesn't undergo evolution and flux and change from moment to moment and then the third criteria of what is real is that what is real is self-sufficient or self-shining which means it's not depending on something else to exist it's not borrowing its existence from something else so if we flip that around we also have the three criteria for an illusion what we mean when we say something is an illusion in spiritual philosophy so what is an illusion means it's not eternal it has a beginning and we'll have an ending it does undergo change or it is subject to change and it's not self-sufficient it does depend on something outside of itself in order to exist so for a physical example we can look at a shadow right a shadow absolutely seems to exist and if there's a shadow in the room we're in we can all point to it and say there's the shadow so if someone says well that shadow is an illusion we might feel gaslit for a moment and say what do you come on are you saying i'm not looking at a shadow no that's not what i'm saying i'm saying it's not eternal it undergoes change and it's not self-sufficient a shadow depends on three different things right there needs to be a light source there needs to be an object to obscure the light and a flat surface for the shadow to project on and if you get rid of any one of those three things you can't have a shadow so although it seems to be there we can all walk up to it and we can outline it with chalk and stuff we can't actually grab it or touch it or make it tangible in any way and that's what an illusion means our life is like that it doesn't mean you're not experiencing this moment as a person you are it just means this life is not eternal and it undergoes change and it's not self-sufficient right to be in a human lifetime depends on the whole universe around you like you are your body your human nature is fully dependent on the universe around you when we start to understand these principles it actually speaks of so much wonder and beauty that everything is connected everything is happening through relationship and unity and that's what makes the illusion of a human lifetime like a beautiful dream that you're having we all like having good dreams and when we have a good dream we don't want to wake up from them right it's the nightmare that we want to wake up from and when does human life become a nightmare when we mistake it for being real when we think all i am is this body that's all there is to me you know that's what makes it painful and full of suffering and so the eastern traditions have long said the body's an illusion the world is an illusion of course a miracle says the same thing but again it's important we understand what that means so that we can actually grasp the freedom that's available in that pointing and i think the buddha summarized this the best in one of the stories from the sutras his disciples ask him sort of like hey lord buddha this is your last lifetime right like you're definitely not coming back here in your next lifetime right kind of implying like because this place sucks you know and the buddha responds and he was perceiving the underlying question they were really asking and he said if you could see what i see you would want to come back here for a thousand more lifetimes and i think that speaks to one who has transcended the illusion of the world you know jesus also famously said fear not for i have overcome the world so be in the world but not of the world he's speaking to this idea i've overcome the illusion of the world in my mind it's not real to me anymore only god is real and then i interact with the world from that perspective that's real freedom and transcendence yeah exactly it means like the soul is more real than this 3d reality we experience who we really are is more real than what we experience and we are one with the reality we experience so it means that we can have some effect some power on the reality we experience it can explain the law of attraction visualization but i know it's a tricky subject because some people will start to say oh no it's just new age it's uh not good to talk about the law of attraction it's not uh highly spiritual but i think it works because of what you just said basically yeah absolutely in fact it's so not that i think the best law of attraction teacher who's ever lived is j money himself jesus has all kinds of law of attraction bangers in the new testament mark 11 24 for example anything you ask for in prayer believe that you've already received it and it shall be yours ask and it shall be given seek and you shall find luke 6 37 the measure you give is the measure you get back he taught many parables of sowing and reaping and the wicked servant and the good servant in so many ways jesus unpacked this divine law that you attract what you put out and so we can call that the law of attraction if we want but i think like a better way to redefine it might be the law of congruence the universe will bring to you not what you want or desire but what you're congruent with so if you're congruent with what you desire then yes you can definitely have what you desire but for example if i want to have a lot of money but i have all these underlying lack beliefs and i feel like a victim and i'm jealous of wealthy people and stuff i'm not congruent with abundance in that way i'm not congruent with the reality i want and so i don't have access to it i can't attract it to myself so jesus really defined it well when he said the measure you give is the measure you get back and this has to do with what i mentioned earlier that all things exist in relationship to me that is the ultimate code of the universe is relationship because now i understand through this lens right that the universe has given me free will the creator has given us all free will so although there's infinite trillions of different things we can go be in relationship to the universe isn't going to force us to be in relationship to something you've got to choose to be in relationship with it and if you're in a loving relationship with something you attract it to yourself if you're in a negative or resistant relationship you repel it from yourself and all of that is going on in your mind in your subconscious what you believe what you fundamentally believe is real about yourself and reality so it's we're not actually aware of what we're congruent with most of the time unless we do that deep inner spiritual work to find out where we're not congruent and begin releasing and requalifying those blockages so it is to me it is the deepest inner work there is if you want to manifest anything you have to do the work it takes to become a match for that and so in that way i think even though yes law of attraction teachings tend to be seen as like the entry point into real spiritual teaching a lot of people look down on it as you know kindergarten spirituality oh come on it's not just about you getting what you want grow up a little bit at the same time i think everything is serving its purpose right and the law of attraction is easily the biggest lead magnet for the world for people in the world to be attracted to spirituality the ego kind of needs a carrot on a stick sometimes right just say hey come over here you go oh you can you can have what you want over here and then as it's approaching the carrot it starts to realize oh to get the carrot i've got to heal my traumas and you know whatever else and so it suddenly is willing to do these things that it wasn't previously willing to do and so it does initiate the ego into spirituality which can have its problems too right you can become a big fat spiritual ego and i'm going to be the best manifestation teacher ever or something but even that's serving a purpose and it's getting that person to the next step they need and i think eventually if someone does succeed at manifestation they'll attract all the things they want and they'll come to that final conclusion that nothing in this material world can ultimately satisfy me because again it's not actually real so it can't bring you lasting fulfillment but the things that can bring you lasting fulfillment are already inside of you they're the essences of those things you desire the love the connection the peace the purpose the prosperity it's all an essence within me and i chase the forms in the world that i think reflect it but eventually they show me ah it was always in me to begin with so i think the law of attraction as a spiritual teaching is actually a lot better than most people give it credit for but yes we do have to go beyond that need to have our material desires met and into the real spiritual teachings which are what is it in you that is causing you to attract painful realities that cause you to suffer it's your limiting beliefs it's your traumas it's your blocked emotions and eventually someone who's on the manifestation path is going to realize that i think yes but then what about the very naughty people very bad people let's say in the world if the law of attraction works if the mind creation works then how can god prevent you get my question bad people from doing whatever they want in this world yeah it's a big question it is but it's a fun question because it allows us to unpack the whole concept of polarity and this i think this is kind of the premier confusion people have about the law of attraction is they'll learn all these principles and they're like but if i have to be humble and kind and loving and generous to manifest things how come all these evil people are so wealthy you know and uh the answer to the question is actually quite simple which is that there are two polarities in consciousness which a person may choose and either polarity the creator is not going to blink an eye at you can choose the light or the darkness but there are different rule sets for how we attract things on each polarity and so one of the biggest mistakes that people who are on the positive polarity make which is the path of light love truth is that they'll try to use negative polarity principles to manifest the things they want because that's what they see mostly demonstrated in the world right and so the negative polarity is about separation from power over and coercion control manipulation you'll notice that any wealthy billionaire there's always corruption and collusion and stuff that's going on for them to acquire that kind of wealth because that's how you do it on the negative polarity they're not generating that wealth by being of service to others and loving their neighbor as themselves you know that's the positive polarity so it's like you have to know which polarity you want to be and then learn the rules of that polarity and so when jesus said these things like the measure you give is the measure you get back he's speaking to those who are choosing what jesus called the way of life the kingdom of heaven we got to play by our rules the rules of our polarity right yes and i know it's not a an easy topic for me because when i ask questions about evil forces dark forces in my own interviews on on my youtube channel i often get the comment like well it's useless to talk about the evil and the dark things and etc because oh yeah on the other side there is no right and wrong you know it's all the same so don't even bother talking about the the dark things here because it's uh it's it doesn't really exist there is no again there is no right or wrong and but i think that it's wrong because i think here you have as you said you have good and bad here in this world you know yeah i see a lot of the same comments it's a it's a popular viewpoint in modern spiritual circles i think because uh to me it's it's kind of a trauma response to the amount of evil in the world it's hey let's use a convenient non-duality principle to dismiss away this really ugly scary thing i don't want to reconcile with yeah and i get that but i agree with you that no good is going to come from us not understanding the reality we live in i think to say oh we shouldn't talk about what the negative polarity does or how it works or what their what their goals are like that'd be like a basketball team saying hey look we don't need to worry about that other team it's about our team okay all that matters is us and if we play strong we're gonna win and if you give no concern or care to the opposition's strategy they're going to outplay you they're going to usurp you and that's what we've seen happen on our planet is that these beings who've chosen the negative polarity which by the way there's very few of them on our planet in comparison to those who are on the positive polarity i think it's 95 percent or more positive on this planet but the people that want positions of power are obviously going to be the most negatively polarized people on the planet because good people people on the positive polarity don't want to seek power over others and so we have to become wise to this and say look although none of us want to have power over others like we need to be able to fill these spots these power gaps in our society in government and big business and all these different positions we need to put people of the light in these positions at the very least to prevent people from the darkness from occupying those positions because if we just secede all positions of power on this planet to the negative polarity they're going to fill all those roles and dominate the planet the way that they have more genocide more corruption more stealing our life force energy on and on and on and none of us want to live on a planet like that so i see a lot like shadow work it's like we got to become self-responsible as a planetary civilization and in the same way that you know nobody on the spiritual path would say oh yeah you should totally ignore your shadows don't even think about your traumas and blockages right just be the i am maybe some people think that but i think most people would say no that's called spiritual bypassing you have to look at your darkness if you're going to heal it that's exactly what we have to do as a planetary civilization so people who are saying ignore the darkness don't even talk about it to me i say that's planetary level spiritual bypassing we can't afford to do that now what we shouldn't do is hate it judge it be scared of it of course we shouldn't make it real by fearing it and hating it and judging it but we should be aware of what the negative polarity wants to do so that we can as jesus said be as wise as serpents but as innocent as doves you know wisdom is also part of the positive polarity not just love we need love with wisdom in a balanced way to truly be of service to others i had a question when i was preparing this interview what about you in your life basically my question would be do you still have challenges in your own life or is it like i don't know very easy for you right now you know i appreciate the question but unfortunately for you and your audience i actually am enlightened and don't suffer so i can't uh can't help you with that one no i'm just kidding yes i definitely suffer i definitely have challenges i don't want to be perceived as a guru or as an enlightened being like i just want to be real and i want to be relatable more than anything and so i i do try to talk a lot about my own challenges and how i learn these things from my challenges so that people know like i'm no different than you if i've uncovered these truths and have embodied them you can too and so i guess the short answer is i definitely still experience suffering but i think the nature of our suffering evolves a lot as we evolve let me put it this way i like to use the terms suffering downwards or suffering upwards when we begin the spiritual path we're just like suffering downwards right we're just spiraling we don't know what to do we're lost confused terrified afraid and we find these enlightenment teachings or whatever and we try to strive towards the light and eventually at some point a transition is made where we stop resisting our suffering and even just trying to not suffer and we sort of accept look there's going to be suffering in some form in this life i can't really escape that i can only use my suffering for the highest good right if i'm going to suffer i might as well learn how to suffer beneficially and learn the lessons that it's teaching me and suffer upwards right and i think to a large extent like even ascended beings even non-physical beings you know in the astral planes i think they probably still experience what we would call suffering in some regards but i think the difference is that they are masters of suffering itself i think that they suffer upwards in a tremendous way such that whatever challenges they have they're learning and extracting all the data from it and that's all i think we can hope for in this life but i say that with a caveat that suffering upwards is night and day better than suffering downwards it's not like they're both the same but you know might as well just suffer upwards no it's like when you start to suffer upwards your life gains meaning your challenges have purpose and you actually feel a sense of fulfillment from your suffering from the challenges you experience it doesn't mean it's easy in the in the moment it's always challenging that's that's the point right is the challenge brings out the wisdom and the gold in you but it is that you start to feel more connected to yourself to god to your life purpose and so you can more and more begin to have that what jesus called the peace that passes understanding that peace that kind of peace jesus is describing is suffering upwards to me it means everything is happening ultimately for my highest good that has to become a rock solid foundation of knowledge for you right i never suffer without a reason there's always a reason i suffer so i can learn that reason and i can transcend it and when you have that bedrock to stand on you actually find that you can face your challenges no problem and you can suffer through them without resisting them at all and that's why i called the subtitle of the book a sufferer's guide to freedom because suffering is not just pain or challenge but it's resistance to pain or challenge it's not wanting to go through it that is the real suffering it's the existential suffering and when we do away with that resistance suffering has a beautiful silver lining to it that causes us to stop resisting it and even sometimes look forward to it knowing that every time i face a challenge it transforms me and upgrades me into a better version of myself and i think that's what we should all aim for in this life not to uh stop suffering or avoid suffering yes and you also talk a lot about a very important goal in this life the golden rule loving other people as yourself it's a very very simple idea but it's very hard to practice obviously if you can find a way to love your greatest enemy as yourself it's uh it's a very important key i think but it's uh again it's a very simple idea this golden rule but it's very important to practice in the in the daily life yeah that's the um being in loving relationship to everything jesus actually said that the entire law of god which to me is the universe right all the laws of the universe are summarized in this one commandment love god with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself and that speaks to the non-dual nature of yeshua's gospel there's many non-dual teachings that yeshua gives famously he rebukes his disciples for not seeing him in the poor beggar on the street and the orphan says hey when you didn't love the least of these you didn't love me which is clearly him implying that what i am is also in them you know the christ nature is in them so you better perceive it you better see it that way but he also said things like if you make your eye single your whole body will be full of light single meaning non-dual not seeing duality the gospel of thomas is just absolutely loaded with incredible non-duality sort of koans from jesus saying when you make the two one only then do you enter the kingdom of heaven so he was touching on this idea over and over but the best of them all is love your neighbor as yourself for this summarizes the entire law jesus said this is the greatest commandment of all and so to me it's just such a shame that christianity doesn't predicate itself on that teaching that hey salvation is the golden rule salvation is love your neighbor as yourself if you do this you are in right standing with god no question about it jesus told all these parables about god doesn't care about what you say or what you believe in your brain god cares about the condition of your heart it's like every parable jesus tells practically is speaking to this exact idea god judges by the condition of your heart not perfect blemishless behavior or something jesus is very clear hey if you if you sin if you make a mistake just repent and god forgives you but you can't be forgiven by god if you don't forgive your brothers jesus said if you withhold love from your brother your heavenly father must withhold it from you and that to me is just speaking to universal law the universe is built on perfect balance and so when i judge someone when i make a problem in my mind you're bad you're dumb you're evil you're wrong it's like i'm trying to imbalance the universe a little bit and that's impossible you can't imbalance the universe and so instead what happens is you have to wear the imbalance you have to pay the consequences of that imbalance which is that whatever you withhold from others has to be withheld from you because the universe can't be imbalanced so jesus was trying to liberate us from this trap of the soul of not realizing the you know reflective nature of the universe that look as long as you're giving love to everyone you are forgiven you are loved you are healed but the second you withhold anything your heavenly father must withhold that from you so therefore love your neighbor as yourself is the royal way the golden rule as it's called yes and i and i think it's very logical because love your neighbor as yourself this golden rule it is oneness it's because we are one i have to love my neighbor as myself because i am this person too but since i don't know who i really am this doesn't make any sense like the me right now i'm obviously not you but since i don't know who i am i cannot get this idea from this 3d level but again it's the it's the same idea so as a conclusion i would like to how could you describe your idea of god today yeah great question to end on there's different ways i would define what god is to me the one i try to focus on the most is love i think that that's the most difficult definition of god for the mind to swallow and accept and so it's probably the most powerful definition to live by and it's one it's a it's the framework i use for god by far but beyond that because that's a bit open-ended and ambiguous what is love what does that mean god is the relationship between all things we can say that i think we can also say god is the first person in the present tense i am and that speaks to what you just talked about of if i don't know who i am if i'm mistaking myself for a body then i can't love my neighbor as myself because i can't them as myself i can only see them as an other and if you're an other in my mind then i must keep you separate from me to a certain extent i can't fully let you in but when you let someone in that's what we call love love is the recognition of a shared essence a shared being because as we said the body is not ultimately real the body is born and it will die even your physical personality is changing day by day so that's not even really what you are and so that also means that that's not what they are they're not really their body they're not really their personality and expression those are like temporary expressions of what they are but i think acim defines it best in one of my favorite quotes from the course it says christ's vision the vision of christ has one law it says it does not look upon a body and mistake it for the son whom god created it sees no separation and not even the slightest fading of the light in anything it looks upon so it's this idea that christ vision the christ consciousness if you prefer is to when you look at someone are you identifying them as a body a person in time and space well the christ in you doesn't do that the christ in you is immediately aware of the indwelling presence of god in that being and therefore you become incapable of judging harming or putting that person out of your heart because you're fully aware of the oneness the shared being you have with them and so that is what the spiritual path requires of all of us is to go beyond the surface level perception of you know body consciousness if we want to call it that and realize that the animating spirit in every form is the same presence everywhere it's god it's the christ it's the divine essence and if you can always be aware of that divine essence then you are in the kingdom of heaven you are in the non-dual state where you're seeing no separation so it's not easy to do but obviously jesus gave us a really powerful roadmap for doing that which is just begin by being of service to others taking the widow and the orphan love the prisoner you know all these things because when we go beyond ourselves to love and serve and bless others it has the most powerful implications on our mind on the ego it literally forces the ego to start recognizing that shared oneness and many famous indian sages ramana maharishi maharaji nisargadatta have all said this that you know how do you go beyond the ego serve others feed the poor it's called karma yoga in india but it's the underrated way of enlightenment through continual service to others you can force the mind to accept the reality that you are not separate from others because every time you serve someone you feel this incredible warmth and fulfillment and connection that is just indescribably satisfying in a way that nothing else is and so i think we we want to need to give ourself that experience more and more if we want to truly awaken our consciousness to the reality of oneness okay it was a really really good interview i really love this kind of topic so thank you for being my first guest for this kind of podcast i'm honored man for people who want to know more about you where can people find you basically yeah it's pretty simple to find me it's just my name on any platform so youtube.com slash aronabke instagram aronabke.com and then for all my programs and sort of teachings packaged into course formula you can go to 4duniversity.com okay perfect so thank you again and i hope we will one day experience a better world a better society whatever i don't know if we will get there but let's have hope and thank you again thank you for having me brother always a pleasure