Christopher is joined again with his guest co-host, Shiloh Logan, to talk about the fifth Beatitude. After the last episode's conversation concerning meekness, there is a better foundation for understanding and experiencing, at least in part, what it means to "hunger and thirst after righteousness." What is this hungering? How do we experience this in our daily lives, and are we--in our actual lived experiences--truly feeling "filled." We may say with confidence that we feel the "peace" of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but do we feel the inspiratation of the gospel's awe and wonder? Is our religious experience reduced to a checklist of things believed and tasks completed, or…

Christopher and guest co-host, Shiloh Logan, talk about the third Beatitude on meekness. When we read of Jesus' temptations after 40 days of fasting and when Satan showed him the whole earth, our typical interpretation is that Jesus recognized and rejected the temptation--from a rather contemporary Lockean standpoint--because the world was already His (because He had already mixed his time and labor in creating the world). Why would Jesus worship Satan to receive something that was already His? Yet Jesus would soon explain that this was not the reason the world was His. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ taught us that the meek inherit the earth. The earth…

Christopher and Riley have guest Travis Patten back on the podcast to discuss the soul’s descent from, and ascent to, God in light of Dante Alighieri’s journey from that “point midway on our path in life,” when we find ourselves in “a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost,” unable to commence our ascent to Paradise, to the presence of God, the “love that moves the sun and other stars.” Only through our descent into the Inferno God created to reveal to us our false selves can we reach the point of ascent of the mount of Purgatory to purify ourselves to fly to God’s presence.

Riley and Christopher and guest, Travis Patten, go all the way back to Classical Antiquity to explore contemplation from the incubation practices of Pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles—something like today’s sensory deprivation tanks—to the influence of the Late Antique philosopher Plotinus on the mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Plotinus’s invitation is to “withdraw into yourself and look” to see that “we are not separated from spirit, we are in it” since “to set oneself above intellect,” rather, “ is immediately to fall outside it.”

Christopher and Riley explore the spiritual exercises of cosmic consciousness and cosmopolitanism as practiced by the Roman Epicureans and Stoics, and the early Christians. These spiritual exercises were taught by Roman philosophers Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca. They were also taught by Jesus of Nazareth, who was Seneca's contemporary, as recorded in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas as well as in canonical Scripture. Cosmic consciousness and cosmopolitanism are a way past cherubim and the flaming sword back into the paradisiacal garden of Eden where we can experience the peace of the presence and love of God in unity with Him in the eternal now free from duality and enmity.