Today we sit down with Margaret Placentra Johnston, author of Faith Beyond Belief, as well as her newest book Overcoming Spiritual Myopia.   We talk about the spiritual journey hitting on concepts like leaving binary thinking and ethnocentricity, developing an inner authority, and the battle between belonging and authenticity.

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I sit down with a dear friend, Elise Brown, to discuss her deconstruction of the unhealthy spiritual system she was raised in seemingly letting go of Jesus.  As she embarks on the Human Journey and get curious about science, Buddhism, Witchcraft, as well as other spiritual and secular systems, she keeps feeling the invitation of Jesus.  Finally after seeming to hit dead ends in each of these systems and in her personal life she embarks on tackling the New Testament but with new eyes, laying down all the interpretations she was handed and the limited lens which she was handed to see the world.  In the end does it may matter if something is true if it works, if it helps, if it gives us purpose and peace? And maybe that is the very kind of true we should have been concerned with the whole time.

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Today we dive into Mark 9 and discuss Jesus announcing that some who are alive will not taste death.   And we talk about how Jesus and his peers contemporary in time are always seeing demonic possessions rather than scientifically and medically explained health disorders like epilepsy and mental illness.  We end discussing how in order to really be first rather than running constantly in the rat race, one must be last and serve others.

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Mark 7

Today we address Jesus Teaching that what goes into a man does not defile him but rather what comes out of a man.  That what goes in goes into his stomach but what comes out comes from his heart.

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Today we are in Mark 6:45-52 and exploring the first instance in the scriptural timeline where Jesus walks on water.  The main take away is to reinforce one of the points of the previous episode , which is that the Christ narrative seems to utilize Christ as symbolic of “the way” or leaning into awaken-ness and how when we perceive problems we are in as having no solution, simply living brings solutions to those problems to pass.

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Today we are in Mark 6:30-44 and the feeding of the 5000 with 5 loaves and 2 fishes.  We discuss the balance between self care and serving others and how even Jesus was being pushed and pulled in his navigation of such.  We then discuss the feeding of the 5000 as a symbolic of the times life seems to exhaust us only for life to show up once again and move us back into living.

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Today we are in Mark 6:14-29 dealing with the beheading of John the Baptist.  In this episode we deal with the inability to pin down Herod as a good or bad man, our flaw as humans to over-promise, and also speak briefly about the criterion of embarrassment as a scholarly tool to pin down a greater level of certainty as to what really occurred within the narrative.

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Ego needs to create nice clean boxes for everything to fit in.  It ties itself to forms to identify you and all around you.  Today we discuss that and use Mark 6:7-13 to discuss this.  We also borrow a section from Oprah Winfrey’s podcast SuperSoul Conversations where she sits with Eckhart Tolle to discuss his book, “A New Earth” where they discuss Ego and the Formless.

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Jesus teaches that a prophet in his own hometown is without honor in Mark 6:1-6.  What the Christ is really saying is that those who know us most intimately before we awakened will struggle to hear the wisdom that comes from us once we awaken.   The ego is always looking to make sense of the world and it likes to keep everyone in nice clean boxes.  On top of that we each feel pressure to fit into the nice clean boxes others create for us.  We each have wisdom to offer but it is not for us to compel others to sit with that wisdom.  So we must make peace with it.

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Jesus in Mark 5:21-43 is faced with having to choose between rushing off to help the daughter of Jairus or stopping to interact with the woman whose issue of bleeding had just been healed by touching the garment of the Christ.  We in our minds prioritize these events but the Christ seems to recognize that to each person their needs are felt as monumental even though each’s needs are different.

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