Alex Ferrari 0:00
Where do you think he went in those years?

Father Sean O’Laoire 0:03
Now, for the missing years, then I really believe that around the age of 12, Jesus began his journeys. He came many, many times with this court group, you know, and I believe that even around times that spirit is there, that the second coming of Jesus is not so much a return of a physical being, but rather it is the movement, the birthing of this new spirituality. But the most frustrating period of his life was at the Last Supper. I believe belief is a cerebral activity. Trust comes from the heart. It is the trusting in God that that's what's important, not in the belief in a whole bunch of dogma.

Alex Ferrari 0:38
Where do you see Catholicism going?

Father Sean O’Laoire 0:42
Now I actually believe that...

Alex Ferrari 0:54
I like to welcome back to the show returning champion Father Sean O'Laoire. How you doing, Father Sean?

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:00
I'm doing really good. Alex, great to be with you again, my brother.

Alex Ferrari 1:03
Thank you so, so much for being here, my friend. I missed you. I swear to God, I missed you. We should have had you on. You should live here. You should move in into Next Level Soul Studios and just be here all the time. We, I love your energy, Sean. I love what you're doing, and since you and I both came from similar backgrounds, in the sense of Catholicism in our spiritual path. It is that's where I feel there's a deep connection with our parallel journeys, walking, because we both kind of walked in. You went obviously a bit deeper than I did, though I did, though I did run in. I did run home after school one day, and I told my mom in first grade, I'm like, I know what I want to be, I want to be a priest when I grow up, and my mom, and my mom said, Oh God, so there was that, was one of the first things I wanted to be, it was a priest, so what I, well, I mean, I was in Catholic school, I mean, I see power and the respect, and you know, everyone, when they walked in the room, I'm like, oh, that seems interesting.

Father Sean O’Laoire 2:08
Well, instead of having a pulpit to preach to 100 people, you have a pulpit, and you're speaking to millions.

Alex Ferrari 2:15
Well, we're trying to, we're trying to, we're trying to, we're trying to elevate, we're trying to elevate humanity's consciousness a little bit, and as we were saying before, I have to say it, because I think it's so brilliant. As you continue to evolve, maybe one day we get to being Irish, and that's one day, that's obviously the highest, maybe in the next incarnation for me, but I do have some Irish blood in me, but not too much, just a little bit. The good part, obviously,

Father Sean O’Laoire 2:45
Absolutely.

Alex Ferrari 2:47
So, my friend, there's 1000 things we could talk about, but one of my favorite topics to talk about, Sean, is the lost years of Yeshua.

Father Sean O’Laoire 2:58
Yes,

Alex Ferrari 2:59
Yes, yes, I love the lost you, because I always, the joke I always say is like, when I was in Catholic school, they would go, Jesus was born, then there's a story when he's 12, and yada yada yada, he rides in on a donkey, and I'm like, well, wait a minute, what happened in the yada yada yada years is the most important, that's the best part of the story as a storyteller, and like, well, wait a minute. How did.. how did our hero get created, not physically, but like, how did the development of the human being that is Yeshua come in? Because he didn't come in fully formed. No one, to my understanding, maybe some.. maybe some saints that come in that are they're enlightened at three, but from my understanding, Yeshua's path was not that he was definitely special and gifted. There's no question, but when he left at 12, and there's that 18 year window, where do you think he went in those years?

Father Sean O’Laoire 3:57
So I've actually put a lot of time into this, and not so much in studying the possibilities, I know there's literature out there, but in my own kind of deep meditations, you know, I think we can shift timelines, we can be in an altered state of consciousness, there's no past, present, or future, everything is right now, and so I spent a lot of time, particularly actually since we last spoke, which was, I don't know, a year ago, year and a half ago, yeah, yeah, really kind of in altered state of consciousness, trying to trace his trajectory. Now, I actually believe that there was a cohort of souls, I think it was Jesus, his mother, the Magdalene, John the Beloved Disciple, and John the Baptist, that this was a core group of souls, I think that migrated from lifetime to lifetime, from dimension to dimension, from planetary system to planetary systems, doing what Jesus came through here on this earth, that is to upgrade the kind of whatever dimension he found himself in, to try to upgrade the spirituality of the people, whether it was a different planet, different galaxy, and so I think they had lots of ex. Experience in being dropped into difficult situations where people were out of touch with their own core spirituality, and to upgrade them, and so I think that they came onto planet earth, and I think they came onto planet earth many times as a cohort group. I believe you know that the Buddha was a previous incarnation of Jesus. I think that Lao Tzu may have been, I think, that Zoroaster may have been, and so I think that at various stages this core came in to different kind of traditions to try to upgrade the spirituality, and then the kind of the piece de resistance was 2000 years ago when they came back in into Nazareth, and they had brought with them all of the experiences of their previous incarnations and previous lifetimes, and they acted it out now for the missing years. Then I really believe that around the age of 12, Jesus began his - what we call in Swahili - his safaris, his journeys, and I think they may have taken him to Celtic Cornwall in southwest England, because as his uncle was Joseph Armatha, who was a tin merchant, and he traveled around, you know, looking for sources of tin, and there are great tin mines in Cornwall, which is a Celtic-speaking area with a deep into Druidical spirituality, and that Jesus may have been exposed to Celtic spirituality as a little boy of 12, you know, but I think then that he actually, he took off himself at age 12, and he wanted to visit all of the locations in which he had previously incarnated. I think he went down into Egypt first, because he'd spent, you know, two years or three years as a little child fleeing from Herod, you know, and that he visited the mystery schools of Egypt, and then then he went down to Persia and visited the Zoroastrianism and the great teachings of Zarathustra. I think he went to India and indulged in kind of Vedic spirituality and Buddhism. I think he went across to China and looked at the work of Kung Fu and Lao Tzu, and so he's reacquainting himself with all those spiritualities places he'd been previously, and then in my vision I get an notion that about age 19, so he begins this around age 12. Around age 19, a message comes through to him that his foster father, Joseph, is dying, and he comes back into the land of Israel to be with his, his, his stepfather, you know, and to usher him through the death portal, and then stayed around to console his mother, and then he took off again, and he continued for this kind of peregrination, visiting all these sacred sites and these spirit, sacred spiritualities, and then he came back, then joined the Essene community for a little while, you know, was baptized by John the Baptist, and now he's ready to begin his final phase, you know, of trying to upgrade the spirituality of planet earth, and so I, for me, that is who he was, that he kind of became many, many times with this cohort group, you know, and I believe that even around times that spirit is there, that the second coming of Jesus is not so much a return of a physical being but rather it is the movement, the birthing of this new spirituality. So, I think that that spirituality is kicking into life right now. It's like it's like the notion of the perinatal matrices, this notion here that there are four significant stages to the birthing process.

Father Sean O’Laoire 8:17
The first one is to ask the question, is the womb a happy place for a child, or is the mother doing drugs, are being kind of punished in some way, or abused in some way. So, what's the in utero experience like for the little baby? And then the second stage is the contractions begin, but the cervix is closed, so there's no exit possible, and the child is being crushed and is freaking out. The third stage is the cervix opens, and the spelunking is beginning down the birth canal, but it could take up to 48 hours, and the fourth stage is the baby is out, he's slept on the tush, he's hanging upside down, he's having to breathe on his own for the first time, there's loud noises and bright lights, so it's really upsetting initially. Now I think that's what our planet is going through right now, that we're going through the perinatal matrices as a global community, you know that very definitely we ask the question, is the is the womb a happy place right now, and it's not. We're fraught with all kinds of dissensions, so but the cervix seems to be still closed, you know. There doesn't seem to be an exit, although I believe the cervix is actually open, and we're beginning the birthing process, and we're spelunking through the birth canal, and we're going to inhabit a new earth and a new heavens, and it's going to be very, very different. So, in some senses, it's going to be frightening. We think, you know, it's going to be beautiful, it's the new heaven and the new earth, but because we're not used to it yet, we have to acclimatize to that, like little baby learning how to, how to breathe on his own, or kind of sit up on his own, or now, if he, if he's lying in his belly, he can't even switch over and lie on his back, and so it feels to me that that's what we're going through right now, and so we have to kind of, we have to honor that process and not be afraid of it, and see that this actually is a necessary stage of the birthing of Christ consciousness, and for me, Christ consciousness is the permanent awareness of the. The divinity of all beings, every oak tree, every bunny rabbit, every human being. It is the permanent awareness of that, the difference between Christ and the rest of us. Sometimes we get kind of visions, yeah, oh yeah, this is God incarnate, this is God incarnate, but we don't treat them like that. So the permanent awareness of Christ consciousness is the realization of namaste. I can offer you namaste, I can offer no tree, namaste, I can offer a pani rama, namaste, because I realized that everything that exists is simply God and drag, everything is an articulation of the divine. Yeah, so for me, I think that was the kind of that was the recording mission of this group of souls.

Alex Ferrari 10:37
When you say group of souls, it's kind of like a soul family, essentially.

Father Sean O’Laoire 10:40
Yes, yes,

Alex Ferrari 10:41
And then in every lifetime, a lot of times, you know, from my understanding of a soul family, is like sometimes the father would be, if the father's in one life and the next life will be the mother or the child or the uncle or so, but something in that group core that follow everywhere, and from your understanding, why do why do souls decide to connect that way? I mean, to go through.. I mean, this is insane. This experience is insane. It's absolutely ridiculous. It's insane. You're thrown in.. like, if you just imagine just the concept of what life is.. imagine you throw a character into a world that he doesn't know, and the only thing that they have at these strangers, who they, who are their caretakers, and whatever they have learned, they kind of pass on to you, and they protect you, hopefully, or not protect you, that's another path. And then you try to figure everything out along the way. This is insane. So, I, my take is, it like, as a group, a soul group, you're like, "Listen, this is a rocky road we're gonna go down. Let's all let's team up, and we'll be there for each other, and we'll just know each other a lot. Is that what kind of happens?

Father Sean O’Laoire 11:49
It is. So, I had a vision some years ago, at the very, very beginning. If there is only God, if nothing exists except God, then no relationships are possible. If there is only God, and if no relationships are possible, no experiences are possible, and if no experiences are possible, no growth is possible. So I believe with the Aborigines that God sang creation into being, so this unity consciousness fractured itself. The Hebrews will call that net, so it seem the sparks of the soul that God created these souls, holographic fractals of herself, and a hologram is an entity that contains the totality of itself and every one of its component parts, and a fractal is a pattern that repeats at an infinite number of scales, so every soul is a holographic fractal of God, we contain the totality of the divine in a modular form. Now I think that once God had done that, God called - I call it the first pre-cosmic conference - brought all the souls together, said let's do something fun. What shall we do? And the idea we had was let's create a cosmos, so we actually fashioned the cosmos ex nihilo, you know, from planets, moons, galaxies, you know, the entire cosmos, and we were absolutely amazed at our own handiwork, and we watched it with fascination. And then at some stage, God said, Can we do something even more creative? And the second idea was, let's create avatars of ourselves, so we can insert ourselves into the cosmos and experience it from the inside out. It's the difference in Buddhism between Turiya and Turiyatita. Turiya is the witnessing consciousness that's watching stuff at the distance. Turiyatita is the participant observer that's both the witness of the process and the participant in the process. So now these souls, we created avatars of ourselves in various dimensions. Some of us created avatars at a 10 dimensional level, and there'll be angels or cherubim or seraphim, or whatever. And others created avatars at a three dimensional level with this densification. And the really brave soul said, "I'm going to volunteer for because I'll forget who I am, I'd forget that I'm a cosmic being, I'd forget that I'm come from source, and I'd be stuck in this dense situation, and see if I can work my way out of it, and still remember that I'm a divine being. So, the really great souls volunteer for Incarnation Planet Earth, but we come down here in the cohort group, and I think we draw from two kinds of groups, I call one the soul group, and the other the shadow group. And so the soul group are the people with whom we've had many, many previous incarnations. We know their trajectories, we know how they've behaved in every single previous incarnation, we know their strengths and their weaknesses, and we know exactly the times into which we are parachuting. There are no surprises for us in the sense that we volunteered to be here right now, knowing exactly the situation into which people are coming, but we also bring people from our shadow pod, and these are the people who are going to test us, really test us, you know. And when Jesus says you must love your enemies, that's what he means. It's not that he's saying lie down, let people walk all over you, he's saying that there'll be people. Who will test you because they will show you your own shadow material. What comes up in you as a result of interacting with them will show you your own shadow material, and therefore, in some senses, they're also teachers for you. So, we're bringing people into our lifetime from the shadow pod and from the soul pod to guarantee that we'll not become - we won't just become narcissists. If I'm surrounded by people who love me, I become a narcissist. If I surrounded by people who hate me, you know, I'll have no self-esteem. So I balance the equation out by having both, so that I can work with my own shadow material, and also I can be kind of inspired by the love that I experience.

Alex Ferrari 15:34
From your understanding of Jesus and or Yeshua and his teachings, what, what is the most misunderstood thing about Jesus' teachings?

Father Sean O’Laoire 15:45
I think the single most understood, misunderstood thing is the realization that we think Jesus was a one off. You know, there's a great statement at the beginning of John's Gospel, it says, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were created by him, and without him was made nothing. That was made in him was life, and this life was the light of men. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. That one phrase, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. We totally misrepresent and misunderstand that we think that that happened only once, that the word only became flesh once, and it was that the second person of the Trinity became a human being, and what Jesus was actually saying is the Word became flesh. Everything that existed with the Father took on a form of incarnation. Everything that exists is a word of God made flesh. Everything that exists is a word of God made flesh. The only difference between it is there are life forms which don't have a whole lot of self-awareness, like a rock, you know, it's a word of God made flesh in rocky form, but it has no kind of self-awareness. It's responding to kind of the what the environment is doing, whether it's raining or it's windy or it's frosty or whatever. Whereas, you know, bunny rabbits have a greater sense of personal self than how to eat, how to reproduce, how to protect themselves. Human beings have a higher level, and so it's only our level of self-awareness that changes from kind of the form of incarnation we take on, and that the highest form of that is the Christ consciousness, you know, the permanent awareness of the inner divinity of all beings. So I think that is a totally misunderstood statement of Jesus Christ. Christ was saying every single one of you is a word of God made flesh, and if you realize that you'll realize your own divinity, and you'll recognize the divinity, even of your enemies, and you'll realize that they too are a word of God made flesh, and you'll treat them very, very differently from He would if they're just hostile beings who are here to kind of torture you.

Alex Ferrari 17:34
Well, Sean, but Sean, in with Jesus, when with.. and I agree with everything you said, but according to the Catholic Church, that's just not the way it goes, my friend. Like, you know, if you're not of the Catholic, you know, you're not the chosen Catholic, but I find this as a common theme in many, not all, but many religions, is that they have chosen, they're the chosen people, you know, that they're literally the chosen people, and everybody else, ah, too bad, you know, no hostility, just too bad you didn't get born Jewish or didn't get born Muslim or didn't get born, you know, any of that stuff. That's too shit. It's a shame, which I find so fascinating, because Christ was talking about everybody, because really there was very little religion. And please correct me if I'm wrong, when Christ was walking the planet, there was concepts of religion, obviously. Judaism had been around forever. I mean, Vedic traditions have been around forever as well, but and there was other, other forms, obviously. Buddhism, you know, was as well, but it wasn't as structured by any stretch as it is today. There was no Vatican, there was no centralized authority or anything like that. What do you say to people who are Catholic? Let's say, right now, use that as an example, because you and I both, from there, that are Catholics, and they just believe that they're just the only, the only way is our way. Where it seems to, as you see a giant Buddha head behind you, it seems like you are walking, you're taking from all paths, and you're seeing the commonalities between all paths, which is what I do. I see, because of the work I do, I see the common threads of Yeshua and Buddha, and all in Lao Tzu and Guan Yin, and all of these amazing masters. I see the common commonalities between them, not the separation. So, what are your thoughts?

Father Sean O’Laoire 19:22
Let me give you a metro first, and then I'll respond specifically. I live completely off the grid. I'm 10 miles from the nearest little town. I've got my own solar system for electricity, you know. I've got my own septic system, and I also have a well, which is down 260 feet, drilled down to get water, but there are lots of heavy metals in the water, because it's coming up through various kind of levels of the earth, and that, so it's adding a whole bunch of stuff that's not good for drinking. So, I have to do a three part refining system before I can drink the water. Now, if I go down to the water table and I take water directly from the water table, it will be pure water, but because it's. Coming up, it's filtering through all these systems, is taking on all of these toxins. Now, I think pure spirituality is the water table, but when we sink our wells, very typically we're going through it down through strata, which are introducing, you know, hostile elements into it. So, if I wanted to know what the real water table of Sonoma County was concerned, I should visit like 10 different people and ask them to take water, and we compare what have they got in common, and what they have in common is the real thing. So, at the first World Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago, when for the first time ever some great Indian gurus joined kind of the conference, and there was a great dialog in that between two British theologians, one of whom was claiming that you know you have to really sink your well, you know, and focus on one religion, you can't be messed around with a whole bunch of other religions, and the other guy saying no, no, no, you have to see what the others are saying as well and find the commonality, and there was one English theologian that said he quoted an English proverb that says, He knows not England who only England knows. If you've been born in England, lived in England, and never know sight of England, you don't know England because you have nothing in which to compare it. It's only when you travel, you see, what are the Irish doing, what are the Australians doing, what are the Americans doing? Now you've got some sense of what makes England different from this. So he knows not England, who only England knows. From my own belief system is that you have to be able to look at all of the possibilities and find out what they have in common, but then in your spirituality you have to sink your roots really deeply into some more practice, whether for me it's Eucharist, for instance, you're really powerful, although I've been meditating for 62 years, and so that I investigate all of them and I draw what they have in common, so I know what spirituality is, as distinct from religion at the same time, then I have to focus somewhere, so that my liturgy, or my spirituality, or my practice, you know, has a consistency to it. So that's kind of the balance I try to draw there. A few months ago, I gave a kind of a series of homilies to my own community, and I talk about the 10, the slippery slopes from inspiration to inquisition, that every great spiritual system starts out with a great inspiration from source, and then there's some kind of a charismatic prophet that holds that inspiration, and then his teaching is so kind of charismatic that a group of people began to gather on them, so first is the inspiration, then there's the prophetic charismatic character. Then there's a group of disciples who think, wow, this guy is worth listening to. That's stage three. Stage four is, you know, this guy is going to get whacked very definitely. He's going to run foul in the system, the political system, or the established religious system. He's going to get killed. All our prophets, you know, get killed. Stage four. Stage five is the disciples now try to create some kind of an institution in his memory that's stage five. Stage six is some little self-appointed oligarchy will rise to the top of that, that group, and they take charge of it.

Father Sean O’Laoire 22:53
I know slowly, slowly they'll start creating rules that differentiate between us and people who are not us, and so now in order to be one of us, you have to accept, for instance, the Nicene Creed. You have to believe in this creed, you know. You have to believe what the Pope tells you, or whatever, you know. And if you don't, we're going to inquisition you, we're going to pull you limb from limb. And if we have the ability, we start crusades against outsiders. I know we got all the ways from the inspiration down to inquisition, and I see that happening everywhere, in religious systems, in political systems, in economic models, in educational systems, the same trajectory, and we have to keep waking ourselves up from it. So we have to disperse our interests in such a way that we're learning from all the systems, but at the same time creating some kind of a deep, deep practice that brings me deep, deep, deep down into the water table of spirituality, from which all religions emerge,

Alex Ferrari 23:42
Beautifully said, Sean, beautifully, beautifully said. What would there's so much, so many questions are flying into my head with, with what is happening in the world today, and I'll go again back to Catholicism with the Vatican, you know, when I was, when I was blessed enough to go visit it, and, and felt the space, there's something very special about the, the energy in that space, but it's counteracted by the energy of the opulence, the control, all these other things, it was a weird energy, but as you've seen, as well as I have, over the last 50 years, the church is very different. Vatican is very different than it was 50 years ago, when you were starting off as a priest. It was infallible. Where now we all seen the cracks. Where do you see Catholicism going, because I don't, you know, I'm not a lot of people are like, you know, I'm a recovering Catholic, I joke all the time, I'm a recovering Catholic, you know, because of the trauma and the dogma that I dealt with, but I'm very grateful for Catholicism and being born into a Catholic family because it introduced me to God, introduced me to something bigger than me, introduced me to Yeshua and his teachings, and it was up to me to kind of unravel it from the dogma, from the control, from the negative aspects of that religion. As what a friend of mine said once, no one ever leaves Christianity because of Jesus, they leave because of Paul, but that's another conversation. So, where do you see where do you see Catholicism going? Where do you see the Vatican going? Because it's such a powerful institution in the world. Do you, in 10 years, in 20 years, in 50 years, where do you see it?

Father Sean O’Laoire 25:37
So, the first thing I do for myself, Alex, is I differentiate between Catholic with a capital C and capital with a small c, because the word Catholic really means universal from the Latin and from the Greek, whereas to talk about a Roman Catholic is a contradiction in terms. How can you be kind of a universal figure and be confined to a particular city? And so I talk about myself as a Catholic priest, and says that the universality of my spirituality and my kind of a love for all people is universal and is Catholic in that sense, but not Catholic in the sense that I come from this particular tradition based in the Vatican, and that I'm their mouthpiece. So I think that's an important distinction for people, they call themselves Catholic, that they're actually avowing that they're embracing a universal spirituality, not just a kind of a particular brand located in the Vatican. So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing I really believe I wrote a Light Workers manifesto many years ago, and one of the claims I make is that the era of big institutional religion is long past its sell by date, and that the future of spirituality is local communities interfacing like neurons under a cosmic brain, and that little communities, I think, of 150 people or less is important. We know sociologically that if I'm part of a community of 150 people or less, I can know everybody by name. If it goes over 150 now I may know 10 people by name, and the others I may recognize their faces, but I don't know who they are, and so I think that the future of spirituality, I think the future of education, I think the future of medicine, I think the future of entertainment is all about small communities kind of answering their own needs. When I lived in Kenya, I lived in Kenya for 14 years, and when I was, I found a lot of little communities, and had a phrase I used in Swahili, that every community should be Kuji Tegemeyer, which means self-reliant, Kuji Tumikia, which means self-ministering, and Kuji Enese, which means self-promoting. That the ideal of a community is that it should answer all of its own needs, that is, not depending on outsiders to give it its needs, that it should be self-ministering, that whatever the need in the community is, that there's somebody in the community who volunteer and say, "I can do that. You know, I'd be the teacher for the group, I'd be the farmer for the group, you know, I'd be the entertainer for the group, whatever it is. Yeah, and so that all the needs of the community are being answered by members of the community, and that is self-promoting, in the sense that they're what they're doing is so attractive that other people want to imitate it, but they'll spin off, like in the old days, with monasticism, you know, when a monastery got too big, 12 members would leave and start a new community elsewhere, because you don't want an unwieldy community where nobody knows anybody else. So I really believe that maybe not in my lifetime, but perhaps in your lifetime, that you'll realize that Rome and Mecca are a thing of the past. All these great religious institutions have outlived their usefulness, you know, and they'll be replaced by small local communities answering all of their own needs - educational needs, entertainment needs, medical needs, spiritual needs, etc. and that they will network with each other in a way in which there's no hierarchical system of imposing particular laws on the group and I believe that that's where we're headed and I think that's the birth of the new Christ consciousness that it is small independent but connected communities on a global brain worshiping the divine in everything beautifully said but let me ask you, then, Sean, what is the difference between believing in God and knowing God? It's the difference between wisdom and knowledge.

Father Sean O’Laoire 29:08
So, knowledge for me is data which are generated by the sensorium and processed by the brain, whereas wisdom is data that are generated by the soul and processed by the heart, and so faith, you know, and belief, I love the word rather than belief, I prefer the word trust. So I bought an old painting. I was inside an antique shop a few months ago, and I came across this mother and child of Jesus and Mary. I was on sale for 75 bucks, you know. I don't know how old it is, but my great grandmother had the very same painting in our home when I was a little child.

Alex Ferrari 29:45
Hey guys, I really hope you're enjoying this conversation. And the one thing I've noticed recently is that most of you are not subscribed to our YouTube channel, it's free, and it really helps us out a lot. So, if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe, like, and share. This content, so we can continue to help elevate the consciousness of the planet. Thank you so much. And let's get back to the conversation.

Father Sean O’Laoire 30:06
And I actually looked it up, and as to the Virgin and baby, but actually it was a portrait of an 11 year old Italian girl holding her baby brother, and I look at this, and this little girl is totally protective of her little brother, cuddling it and holding it, and little baby is totally relaxed and completely asleep, trusting in her arms. Now, I think that it's not a question of belief. Belief is a cerebral activity. Trust comes from the heart. It is the trusting in God that that's what's important, not in the belief in a whole bunch of dogma, you know, revealed tenets to somebody in Rome with a high hat, and so I prefer the word trust and the word wisdom rather than knowledge and belief.

Alex Ferrari 30:48
I love that, that that trust is from the heart, belief is from the mind.

Father Sean O’Laoire 30:53
Yes,

Alex Ferrari 30:54
Beautifully, that's beautifully said. What part of Catholicism do you cherish the most?

Father Sean O’Laoire 31:00
The Eucharist.

Alex Ferrari 31:01
Yeah, explain, explain to people.

Father Sean O’Laoire 31:04
I think you know it's interesting to me that on the very last night of his life he literally had less than 12 hours of life to live, of all these symbols, and he spoke in parables constantly, and he was you all different kinds of symbols and images of all the images he decided to leave us with at the Last Supper, where he said, this is my body, this is my blood. Now, obviously, he didn't go around the room, and people took a bite of his ear, out of his big toe. He wasn't saying that. What he's saying is, here, I want to give you a symbol, and the ultimate symbol is the symbol of a mother, because a mother grows a baby in her own womb. So, literally, it is her body producing the baby, and her blood feeding the baby, and even when the child is born, she puts it on her breast, and she's feeding her from her own breast. So Christ is saying, if I give you one image, who your relationship with God is, God is the mother who conceived you, carried you, gave birth to you, and nurtured you at her own breast. And so Eucharist, for me, is the simple par excellence of that, and so, for me, every meal is a eucharistic meal. Every meal for me is the realization that, you know, I have three different kinds of mothers. You know, I have Mother Mary in heaven, I have the woman who gave birth to Sean, you know, 80 years ago, and I have, you know, the Gaia herself, the planet herself, who gives me the food I eat, that what I drink, what I wear, the house I live in, all of these things came from her. She gave me everything that I have. So she is my mother. So when I celebrate Eucharist, I think of Gaia. When I celebrate Eucharist, I think of Mother Mary. When I think of Eucharist, I think of Jesus and the Last Supper. So for me, I've been saying mass now for 54 years as a priest. There's not a single time I ever say mass where it is not, I don't go into an altered state of consciousness, because I time travel, and I'm back at the last supper with Jesus, and everybody is capable of doing that, you know. There's a parallel lifetime in which Alex Ferrari is at the last supper, listening to the words of Christ, and receiving the body of Christ, and understanding at the core of his being what's involved there, so of all the kind of the the liturgy, or all of the kind of the symbols, or all the practices, you know, for me it is the saying mass, and I say mass on my own, now, you know, I'm no longer part of the community, but I say mass on my own, and I sing aloud, even when I say mass on my own, so you know, so for me, that's the way in which I, I constantly kind of reconnect with the Christ consciousness,

Alex Ferrari 33:27
So, and, but the Eucharist is something that is straight from Christ, not a Catholic thing, you know, it's not dogma, it's not, it's something straight from Christ, they've, they've obviously changed it a bit over the years, and all of that. Can you explain to somebody who's listening right now, who is listening to this conversation and is blowing their brains apart, because they, they're there. I mean, for you and I, this is old hat, you know. We have these conversations constantly, but for someone, I mean, if this, if I would have heard this in my 20s, my head would have exploded. It would have rattled the foundations of my understanding of the universe, understanding of my place here, and that's why these conversations, you know, can really affect people, because it just really rattles them. From your point of view, if you, if you have somebody watching right now that has read the Bible 1000 times, and it's all about the Bible, and the Bible, and that might not be Catholic Catholicism, it might be Christianity, or one of the, I don't know, 1000 sects of Christianity are out there. What would their, what would your, what would your message to them be if they're having difficulty dealing with these ideas versus what they've been taught from either their religion or what they've been taught from the Bible, which the Bible itself has. Well, we could talk about the Bible a little bit about a lot of stuff that's all. Put the Bible, but go ahead. Can you tell me?

Father Sean O’Laoire 35:02
Yeah, absolutely. So, for me, the first thing to realize is that when Jesus was queried by the audience as to why he's using these ridiculous parables, why didn't he speak in theological language or scientific language or philosophical tenets, or whatever? He refused to do it, and he's asked in two places in Matthew's gospel in chapter 13. Why are you still speaking in these ridiculous stories and these parables? And he gives apparently two different answers. The first time he says, I speak in parables so that seeing you may see but not understand, hearing you may hear but not comprehend. Now, why would somebody speak in such a way that you can hear it but not understand it, you know, or listen to it, but not comprehend it. What he's saying is there are three ways of listening. You can listen with your sensorium, and if you do that, you'll take it literally, and you'll have no idea what that actually means. Or you can listen to it symbolically, and you'll begin to smile, or you can listen to it mystically, and you laugh, because you'll realize you know that there is only love and there is only God, and so the first time he says that I'm speaking in parables because I want you to learn to listen with your soul, not with your mind, not with your ears, you know, not with your intelligence, but with wisdom and with love, and I want you to mediate what you're hearing through those modalities, and then you'll understand, and the second time he was asked, he said, "I speak in parables, so that I may reveal things which have been hidden since the foundation of the world. In other words, there are some truths which are so deep that the only way they can be articulated in some, some kind of story form. And so I coined a term many, many years ago that I call mythish, and I define mythish as sacred wisdom communicated in story form, and what I've seen again and again and again, that stories are the archived wisdom of every culture. I've had the privilege of learning six different languages and working with four different tribes of people in Kenya. You know, I've been raised bilingually with Irish folklore, you know, and I know that you know mythology is the archived wisdom of every culture, and so for me, Irish mythology and African folklore are as much the word of God as the as the New Testament is, or the Bhagavad Gita is, or the Pitta, as the Buddhism are, and so when you learn to listen to the stories with your soul rather than with your ears, then you become enlightened, you wake up, and you, and you realize what it is. And so I would appeal to people who are raised in any kind of religious system to begin trusting your own heart and listening with your soul, rather than just trying to understand with your mind, or taking blind belief, you know, in a sense of dogmas, which were articulated over hundreds of years by a very corrupt organization. You're a child of God. You have everything you need in order to understand the word of God, and the word of God is not just the kind of the text within the covers of a Bible. It is what God writes in your own heart, because you are a fractal of source. You're a bite-sized piece of God, you know, you know, so you're a hologram. Everything that exists in God exists to you in a smaller form. So, listen to your soul. When something makes you laugh, and something makes you smile, and something makes you love, that's the truth. If something makes you feel afraid or prejudice against anybody, that is not the truth. I don't care where you read it or who told you about it? If it creates anxiety and fear and separation and prejudice, it is not of God. If it makes you smile and laugh and reach out, even to your enemy, that is of God. So, listen with your soul, not with your ears.

Alex Ferrari 38:34
Beautifully said, my friend. Now, you mentioned Irish folklore and mythology, and I think you're the person to talk to about what I'm about to ask, because I've always been fascinated with the Celtic imagination and Merlin and the Arthurian legends, but specifically the character of Merlin. What is your understanding of who was Merlin? Was it a title? Was it an actual person? Was it a group of people using it? What is your understanding of Merlin, and what they brought to the world? Because it's not just a story and a character, from my understanding, and at least from the Celtic point of view. So, love to hear your thoughts on it.

Father Sean O’Laoire 39:18
So, the first thing I would say is that for me, Merlin is the kind of the incarnation of a spiritual archetype, which doesn't mean that he's just an archetype or a made-up figure, but that he's actually an articulation of an incarnation of a particular archetype, and the archetype of the altar states of consciousness, in which we have visions outside this reality, and so the Celts and the Druids, in particular, you know, I believe this is not the vision I had many, many years ago, that with the fall of Atlantis, maybe 10,000 12,000 years ago, that it bifurcated, that there's a raptured version and a ruptured version, that the ruptured version of Atlantis was due to some kind of a catastrophe that the island. Sank, so it's ruptured in a sense, but it's raptured in a sense that some of the beings escaped from the island, you know, and went eastward and westward, and when they went westward, they met Meso America, and it became the origin of all the great mysteries, mystical schools of Mesoamerica. When they went to the east, they landed in Ireland and in Egypt and in Europe, and it became the reason for the great mystery schools of Europe, so that's kind of, I call that the kind of the ruptured version. Those who physically survived, there's another I call the rap, the raptured version, that there were beings in Atlantis who actually shifted their state of consciousness into a different dimension, so they, their escape was into a different dimension, not just into a different physical location, and they both continue to exist. So, you've got their ruptured version that just spread geologically and geographically, and they still exist in Celtic countries. And then there's the ruptured version, which is centered into a higher state of consciousness, and are operated from that. Now, for me, then Merlin would be kind of the meeting place of those two. That Merlin is both a raptured version of that and a ruptured version of that, that may be in a lineage of people who escaped physically and landed in England and the Celtic world, you know, and gave birth to this character, and their raptured version, that a very high soul then descended and united with that incarnated version, just like Jesus did, you know, as a child of God, incarnating and identifying with the physical, physical body. So, for me, Merlin then represents not just for English spirituality, but for a global Celtic spirituality, the notion of the ruptured and the raptured meeting, you know, and doing work together. So, it's the incarnated archetype.

Alex Ferrari 41:39
So, Merlin was, so was Merlin one person or was it multiple?

Father Sean O’Laoire 41:46
I think there were many different kind of articulations, but that Merlin was a specific person in a specific period of English history that they articulated that and was well known for his abilities and for his ability to interface between the dimensions, so yes, a real character, and at the same time a kind of an archetype that was repeated elsewhere. Also, it may be at the same time our different periods of human history.

Alex Ferrari 42:12
What do you mean by repeated elsewhere?

Father Sean O’Laoire 42:14
And that Merlin was a kind of a particular incarnation in England at a specific period of time, but that other articulations of the same archetype appeared in maybe in India or Egypt or among the Aztec community or the Mayan community in Mesoamerica that articulated many places, wherever you get a profound mystical spirituality kind of evolving on planet Earth, there's a Marilyn character or a Christ figure behind that movement,

Alex Ferrari 42:40
Very true, very true. So, do you think that because Merlin was known for his magic and his abilities, so is magic just simply forgotten science?

Father Sean O’Laoire 42:49
It is exactly magic, is the kind of the disconnect we have between higher levels of ourselves and the lower levels of ourselves, and the example I gave is like when we don't use a gift, we lose it, use it or lose it. So, for instance, when the little calculators were invented, and kids going to school couldn't add and subtract anymore, they can't. If you go, a typical kid today goes into a shop with a $5 bill and buys a bar of KitKat for $1.50 you know, and the cashier has to hit the calculator to find out how much change did I give him? He can't take 150 from $5 and get 350 so we've lost the ability to calculate because we develop calculators, we develop spell checking, and now nobody can spell anymore.We develop typewriters and we can't write anymore. I look at letters I have from my father that he wrote in ink to me, and it's perfect calligraphy. My grandmother was the same. I have some letters from her. It's perfect calligraphy, that's what they learned in school. No, kids can't write, it's indecipherable what they write. So, if you're not using a gift, you lose the gift. So, I think what we think of as magic actually were abilities we had that we forfeited because we developed alternative kind of skill sets, so I have a belief system, for instance, that the story about the Tower of Babel. Remember this story that you know the gods were jealous that humans were trying to reach heaven, so they came down and they confused our tongue, and that we, who were speaking one language, are now speaking.. there are 7000 languages on the planet right now. I don't believe that's what happened. I think that we were telepathic beings, and the gods came down, and they gave us oral language, and we were so fascinated with it, and we developed it so well, you know, that we lost the ability to be telepathic, so the animals keep it, some of the animals, your dog at telepathy, and with that, you're not, and I'm not, and so when we, when we don't use a gift, we lose the gift, so what looks like magic to us now was the kind of that was the norm then, because people were in a state of consciousness where that was their expectation, and that was their training, and that was the heredity, but we've lost it now. We think it's for instance, do our miracles real? If you ask me, do I believe in miracles, I would say to you, if you, if you define miracle as kind of. God temporarily changing the laws of the world in order to indulge the prayers of holy people. I would say I don't believe in miracles, but if I were to say to you, miracles happen because people understand at a much deeper level the laws of the universe and are able to employ them. So, Jesus walking in water, did he walk in water? I believe absolutely he did, so that he's accessing powers of the universe that the rest of us have lost, so it only looks like a miracle to us because we're not used to it happening, but to people who know the deeper meaning of the universe and the deeper laws of the universe and how to work with these laws, then magic is the norm for them.

Alex Ferrari 45:37
Well, I mean, if you, if you start to think about the technology that we have today, if we go back to 1985 and just pull out a smartphone, I mean, we're magicians at this point, we're mystics, we're magicians, and if you go farther back, then it gets even wonkier and wonkier. So, I get that, I get that, and then all of these, it seems to me that all of these avatars, all of these masters who walk the earth, who are ascended masters, and some walking to this day seem to be as their consciousness continues to open and grow, they have are able to tap into things that we have forgotten from inside. Is that correct?

Father Sean O’Laoire 46:17
I'm looking at the book behind you, Paramahansa Yogananda, right behind you, and you listen to his life story, and the kind of the gurus that he was in contact with, and the extraordinary powers that they kind of manifested. They're only extraordinary to us because we've lost the ability to utilize them, because we've cut ourselves off by our identification with our physicality rather than identification with our soul selves. So I think that our job as human beings is to disidentify with lower versions of ourselves and re-identify with higher levels of ourselves, so in the Hindu model there are seven different levels of the body, there's the gross body, which is vibrating between infrared and ultraviolet, between 407 100 nanometers, and most of us identify with that, we think that's who we are, and then at some stage we begin to identify with our ego, and then at some stage we begin to identify with our ideas, and then at some stage we begin to identify with our professions, and we're not any of those things, we're bite-sized pieces of God who volunteered for incarnation, and so I think our job, every single one of us, is to give birth to God. There was a great famous statement by Mr. Eckhart in the 1300s He was giving a Christmas homily, and he said, 'Of what use to me is it that my Savior was born of a virgin 1300 years ago? If he's not born again in my time and in my heart, every single one of us is meant to be a mother of God. And Jesus said the very, very same thing, but we covered it up, you know. According to Luke's Gospel, Jesus said, 'You must be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate. Now Luke is writing in Greek, but Jesus was speaking in Aramaic, and the word compassion in Aramaic is rachamim, and Rachaimim is the plural of the word for a womb, so here's what Jesus is saying. You must be womb-like as our heavenly Father, except the word He was using was a one in Aramaic, and Abun is the source of all that is the birthing principle of the cosmos. It's not a male figure or a female character, it's the birthing principle of the cosmos. So here's what Jesus is really saying. If you're listening to me in Aramaic, you must be womb-like, as the birthing principle of the cosmos is itself a womb. They say you, me, and you, you must be womb-like, so you must be able to give birth to God. That's that's what we're here for, to give birth to God. But we can only give birth to God if we disidentify with our physical being is not to say that we abandon it, but that we don't identify, we kind of, we kind of experience it, but we don't identify with it. It's Turiyatita, a witnessing consciousness. And so, again and again and again, the spiritual journey is the constant disidentification with lower versions of who I think I am, until I identify with higher versions until finally identify with my soul self, and then ultimately I realize I'm a bite-sized piece of God. I'm a wave that washed up temporarily on the beach, and now it's receding, going back to the ocean, because there is only ocean. The waves are just an expression of the ocean. There is only the ocean. There is only God, and there is only love.

Alex Ferrari 49:16
So then it's what Jesus said, which is everything I can do, you can do, and more.

Father Sean O’Laoire 49:22
Absolutely.

Alex Ferrari 49:23
He was trying to tell us that I'm not special, you can do this too. Yeah, but I can only imagine, and I've had this conversation with others, but when Buddha walked the earth, when Christ walked the earth, when Zoe asked, and walked the earth, you know, and other masters, the frustration it must have been to try to explain. It's like talking to a five year old and explaining quantum physics. It just isn't me thinking about it is infuriating, and and them attacking him, and then you know all. Of this kind of stuff throughout his career, career throughout his mission, throughout his life, must have been infuriating, because he had to speak in parables, because that was the only language that they could understand some basic stories, because if he actually went into the deep teachings, they would just be like they were so, so far disconnected, so by him coming in and going through this light that lifetime he was literally yanking humanity and pulling them up, all of these masters do that right.

Father Sean O’Laoire 50:32
Absolutely, so when I think of the life of Christ, particularly, and I think of maybe the most horrific period of his life was the Garden of Gethsemane, where he sweated blood, or the carrying of the cross, or the scourging of the pillar, or the crucifixion, whatever. They were the kind of most torturous period of his life, but the most frustrating period of his life was at the Last Supper, I believe. Yeah, he's talking to these guys, he's going to be gone within 24 hours, and they still have no clue who he is and what his message was, so he says, 'You know, I'm going to the back to the Father. I'm going to send the Holy Spirit, so the same things I do, you will do, and even greater, just as you quoted. They had no idea what he was talking about, and they said to me, 'No, yeah, we hear you talking about the Father. Show us the Father, and never be enough for us. And crazy, I've been with you for three bloody years. Don't you realize, when you see me, you see the Father. The Father is in me, I'm in the Father, you're in me, you're in the Father, the Father is in you. Don't you get that?

Alex Ferrari 51:29
It's quantum physics. Yeah.

Father Sean O’Laoire 51:35
And then one of them says to me, Lord, show us the way, so Philip, if you see me, you see the way. This is the way. The way is love.

Alex Ferrari 51:47
But Sean, it's like, and that's the thing that's funny. These guys are the one that the Catholic religion is based on. These guys are the one you know, because the Bible wasn't written while these guys were even around, it was written hundreds of years afterwards, Constantine and all of that going on, but wow, it's just the frustration I can only imagine, but that makes so much sense, that the Last Supper, because they, they were, they had enough in them to understand that this was important, and they had enough curiosity to follow this man, but they didn't have the consciousness to put it in. I have to ask you, and this is part joke, but truly a question that I have to ask, because I've seen this joke kind of flying around about the Bible, and I just think it's hilarious to go well, if Jesus - Jesus was a Persian, right, or Aramaic, right? So he was not a white man by any stretch imagination. So, from my understanding, was in Jerusalem and Iraq, the Middle East is basically where we're talking about, so if we're in the Middle East, and there's a guy named Jeshua walking around, where the hell did he meet Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Like, those names are not Middle Eastern names. So, I'm just curious, from your research, are those names they changed them later, or were there. because that doesn't make any historical sense. Am I wrong?

Father Sean O’Laoire 53:23
Part of the reason is that the four Gospels, for instance, and one of them, only one is not Jewish. Luke is not Jewish, he's the only non-Jewish writer of the scripture. In fact, anywhere in Scripture, everything is written by by Jews of some kind. Now, the names, they're bastardized names, so for instance, the name Jesus, you know, that was not shame. Yeshua, exactly. So, the Jesus becomes the kind of the Greek version of that, and the same thing is true of the other names. So, John, for instance, John was a very, very common name, Yochanan in the, in the Aramaic. So be Yochanan, you know, our, you know, Mary would be Miriamu, and so you kind of, you change the spellings and the pronunciations of the words, but they're actually Jewish names in the original formats. Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 54:08
Okay. Thank you for, thank you for clarifying that for me and everybody, because it's what it's a question. You're like, wait a minute, Matthew, like, who, what Middle Eastern guy is called Matthew? So, well, you brought up Mary for a second. Has Christianity forgotten the feminine face of God?

Father Sean O’Laoire 54:27
Hugely, hugely. So, I mean, I told a story years and years and years ago when I was still part of the Catholic Church in Palo Alto, and I nearly got thrown out at that stage for it. It didn't make any sense to me that women could not be Catholic priests, and the example I came up with was, I said, imagine it's like a month after Pentecost, Jesus has gone back, the spirit has come down, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, takes her cell phone, and she phones Mary of Magdala, and she says, Mary, I'd like to go to Mass today, where Saint Peter said Mass. And Mary of my dad, I'll fax you the kind of the location, and she faxes Mary the location, and they turn up, and Peter's inside a little room, and he's got an altar, and he gets back to the people, and he's saying mass in Latin, the people who crucified Greece, they say mass in their, in their language, and it comes to communion, and he turns around with the host, and he offers it, and Mary, the mother of Jesus kneels down and sticks her tongue out, and Peter says Corpus Christi, the body of Christ. So Peter can give Mary the body of Christ. Mary is the woman who conceived, carried, gave birth to, and suckled Jesus himself, and took his body down from the cross and cradled it, but she can't give Peter the body of Christ, because she's only a woman, she couldn't be a Catholic priest, but Peter, who denied three times that he even knew who Jesus was, is giving Mary the body of Christ. I'm thinking, how ludicrous is that, that a woman, because she's a woman, couldn't be a priest, but Peter could be a priest who denied Jesus three times. So the notion, this ridiculous notion, you know, that women couldn't be priests, so we had to write women out of the Gospels very early on, and my theory about is this: there's a passage, actually in the Acts of the Apostles, which most people don't pay attention to, and it was that when, after Pentecost, when the apostles started preaching, hundreds of Jewish priests converted to the Jesus movement, hundreds of them, and we, there's a line in the scripture that says that many of the priests joined the Jesus movement, but we don't, we don't understand that now. What was the problem? You think, wow, this is great, you know, this new movement is going to take off. Many of the priests now have become followers of Jesus, so it's going to really take off. The problem was this: these guys come from a patriarchal system. Many of the communities of the Jesus movement were led by women, and these priests being said we can't have that. Nobody is going to take us seriously if we have women leaders, so we got to get rid of that. Women can't be leaders, and any kind of mention of women's roles, you know, in their letters we're exchanging each other, they have to be taken out of it. Otherwise, nobody's going to take us seriously. And so we wrote women out of the Gospels almost completely, and we turned Mary of Magdala, you know, Christ's companion, into a harlot, a repentant harlot, and so we had to write them out in order to be taken seriously, in order to be acceptable to a patriarchal society.

Alex Ferrari 57:13
So it's basically a marketing test.

Father Sean O’Laoire 57:16
Absolutely, yeah, you want to succeed, get the women out of the way, nobody will take you seriously if you think they're women priests,

Alex Ferrari 57:21
So yeah, because back then it was just not even considerable to think about it, but they did find the lost Gospel of Mary Magdalene, right? They found, they found, they have found Gospels of Mary and Mary Magdalene, correct?

Father Sean O’Laoire 57:34
Yeah, there was one found in, I think, was 1893 in a monk's grave in Egypt called the gospel the gospel of Mary, and many of the Gnostic Gospels, you know, show Mary of Magdalene in a very, very different light as being very close to Christ, much, much closer to Jesus than the others, because Mary got it, Mary understood, because Mary, from a, you know, Mary's relationship to Christ was from our heart, not from her head, the guys were listening with their ears, but they weren't listening with their heart. So she was getting it at a level that utterly transformed her, and they were getting at a level that just confused them. Now, the big difference with Pentecost is this: that Jesus spent three years trying to kind of beat the message into these knuckleheads, and they couldn't get it. Pentecost came, and the spirit was able to go straight to their heart. So, now the people, like Peter, who had been these dumb heads, now are eloquent preachers willing to give their lives for Christ, and they did, because the spirit went straight to their heart. It spoke as wisdom, not as knowledge. And so, it's a radically different kind of interaction with source. And from then on, they're radically committed, they're eloquent, and they're fearless, because the message is coming from their hearts now, not from their heads anymore.

Alex Ferrari 58:48
There's right now, from my understanding, the two, the two ladies that get a lot of attention is Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene.

Father Sean O’Laoire 58:57
Yes,

Alex Ferrari 58:57
But from my research, there was also a grandmother, Jesus's grandmother was also another strong figure in his life, and what do you know about her?

Father Sean O’Laoire 59:08
So that's called Anne, Anne. So his grandparents were Anne and Joachim. There's a, there's an infancy gospel of Jesus, in which Anne plays a huge role at the mother of Mary, the grandmother of Jesus, and in this role, her husband is away on because of the nature of his work for months, and they'd been trying to conceive a child for years and years and years, and had been unable to conceive, and finally, when her husband is away, an angel appears to her and tells her that she's going to conceive, and she does, and her husband was back, and he finds his wife is pregnant, and is pregnant, yeah, and there's a whole gospel written about what happens, and so when the Catholic Church defines the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, we think it means that Mary conceived Jesus without the state of original sin, that is not my conception. The Immaculate Conception means that Mary herself was conceived without. Stain of original sin. Now I don't believe in the most original sin, but at least the Catholic Church got that right, that Mary herself was a pure vessel, you know, that wasn't kind of messed around by original sin, because she was conceived immaculately as a, as a, as Jesus was myself. And so there's this notion that this woman called Anne, the grandmother of Jesus, was also a preparatory stage, so that when Jesus came along, you know, in some senses he hit the ground running, that he was the result of two immaculate conceptions, so that he wasn't kind of disfigured by original sin. So that's kind of the, that was the theory behind it.

Alex Ferrari 1:00:34
Yeah, the original sin idea is ridiculous. Absolutely, absolutely ridiculous. Let me, let's jump into John the Baptist for a minute, because John is another beautiful character in this story in general, and part of, obviously, the soul family that comes, because John is very important, and Jesus is, but can you explain a little bit about what the true source of John the Baptist is, and, and how it's kind of been manipulated and changed over the years through stories,

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:01:05
So it's very interesting that in Luke's gospel, particularly Luke set his gospel up in such a way that there's a parallel between John and Jesus at the beginning, you know, Elizabeth, the mother of John, is conceived as a immaculately, she has a vision from an angel as well, you know, and Mary conceives immaculately, and so there's a parallel in the first two chapters of Luke's Gospel between events around the infant Jesus and the infant John, so their cousins, obviously, Elizabeth and Mary are cousins, and so there's this beautiful story in Luke's Gospel called the Magnificat, my soul magnifies the Lord, remember learning that as a child my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior. So there are very many different translations that Luke is writing in Greek, but the translation I love is, 'My soul magnifies the Lord. There's another translation that says, 'My soul glorifies the Lord, but I prefer the magnification one for this reason. When I was a small boy, my father had a motorbike, 250 cc BSA motorbike, that he went to work on every day. We lived about six miles from the town, and he drove in on his motorbike every day. And so one day I discovered a magnifying glass, and it fallen out of my grandmother's eyeglasses, and my father's motorbike was sitting outside the door, and I went around, and I was playing around with the magnifying glass, and I said fire to some straw, and then I set fire to some paper, and then my father's motorbike. It was a plastic saddle. I set fire to the saddle, and the saddle's on fire. And my father rushes out, claps me upside the head, and gets water, and throws it on top of the fire, because it would be on his motorbike. And for the first time ever, I understood magnify. Here was the sun, 93 million miles away, and it could not set fire to my father's motorbike on its own. It needed me at an intermediary with a piece of glass that focused the rays of the sun on the motorbike, and then it set fire to it. And that's what Mary was saying, that Mary was saying, 'My soul magnifies God. Now, what was it? Obviously, Mary was just a human being, so how could she make God bigger? She wasn't. She was focusing the rays of God's love on specific targets. Now, you know what a magnifying glass is. You have to get the focal length correct. If it's too far away, the rays have focused, and then they're diverging again. If it's too close, the rays haven't diverged, haven't concentrated enough. So, you have to get the exact focal length in order to make to optimize its effect? So that's what Mary is saying. I am God's eyeglass. I'm focusing God's love in such a way that you know I'm setting the world on the world on fire. So that was her great, that was her great gift. And so when she visits her cousins, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth said, Who am I that the mother of my Lord should visit me? And then Mary says, My soul magnifies God. I'm here as God's eyeglass to focus God's love on planet earth. And then Elizabeth says, when the sound of your greeting leach reached my ears, this child in my womb leaped for joy. So it's like the two babies were recognizing each other. So the God in Mary and the God in Elizabeth recognized each other. John the Baptist in Udol and Jesus, Udro recognized each other. Oh my god, we contracted to come in at the same time as part of a cohort that was going to set the world on fire, and our mothers were the magnifying glasses that made that happen. So you've got this extraordinary relationship between them in Udder, and then John the Baptist became a kind of in een, I believe it was in Essen, and lived really kind of in the desert, living on honey and locusts and wild honey, and was dressed just in camel hair, and so they had very few encounters, but then Jesus, when he came back from his journeying, you know, at the age of 30, he began his official ministry by having John, his cousin, baptize him in the Jordan, and the baptism was again of the year, they can, the symbol of I'm ready for my mission right now.

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:04:44
So he's baptized by his cousin, goes off into the desert for 40 days, where he endures final temptations, and then I'm ready for my mission. I've learned from Zoroaster, I've learned from Egypt, I've learned from Buddhism, I've learned from Hinduism, I've learned from the Essenes, and now I'm ready to start my work, and then he. Starts his ministry, so John and he are really, really together now. There's a final thing, a story that I made up myself years and years ago, and it is this: John was beheaded, as you know. So John was put in jail by Herod, because Herod had married his brother Philip's wife, and was living with her, and he had - she had a daughter called Salome, who was a seductive dancer, and Salome danced for her, his birthday, and Herlot, who was in his cups, made a promise, as even, even have my kingdom, I'll give you half my kingdom, and she goes to her mother, says, "What last for? and one says, "The head of John the Baptist on a plate, and she goes back to her and says, "Here's what I want, the head of John the Baptist on the plate. And Herod sobers up really, really quickly. What's he going to do? Everybody's heard him, so he sends the jailer in. They behead John and bring the head back on the plate. Now go back 850 years, and at that stage there's a prophet in Israel, called Elijah, and at this stage there's a princess called Jezebel, and she's married in Israelite, a Jewish prince called Ahab has married to her, and she introduced all the foreign gods into the country, and so Elijah comes along and he has, he has a contest offering with the prophets of Baal on top of Mount Carmel, and he says the God who is really God will make our sacrifices, and you call down your God to set fire to us, and I call down my God to set fire to my holocaust, and we see God, which God wins, and so the pagan priests are dancing around the altar, and they've started their bullet, and they're chanting and sticking knives in themselves, drawing blood, and nothing happens. And Elijah says, "Out of the way. Now we see who the real God is. He says, "Guide, your guide, you know your guide, I know your guide, do your thing. Lightning hits the Holocaust, and explodes. And then Elijah says, "Grab them, and they grab 450 prophets of Baal, and they bring down to the river Jabbok, and they cut off their heads, and Jezebel says, "May my God do such and such to me, if by this time tomorrow I don't have your head. And she waits 850 years, and as the Italians, the Matthew says, "Revenge is a dish best served cold. Yeah, so she waits 150 years, she comes back as Herod's Herodias, Herod comes back as Herod, and now he's gonna, she's gonna have John the Baptist head, so he came back as John the Baptist, Elijah comes back as John the Baptist, and now they're leveling the score. So that was my theory on John the Baptist, where he got beheaded. It was karma.

Alex Ferrari 1:07:45
Wow. So let me ask you, this from my studies of the Bible, I found it very interesting that Jesus, the New Testament, the Old Testament, are absolutely two very different gods, and I'm finding it fascinating that they put both of those to basically the Torah, or version of the Torah, and this New Testament, and Yahweh is very different God than the God that Jesus speaks to. What is your understanding of why those two? Is it just another marketing ploy to be like, 'Hey, Jews, come over, look, we have yours in here, but this is the new stuff that we added. The sequel, is that what it.. what? Because on a logical standpoint, reading it, you're just like, 'First of all, I don't even know who this Yahweh.. this guy, Yahweh, is really petty, angry, vindictive. He's just. and sometimes just evil at some of the things he does in that, where the one that I don't think, and please forgive me if I'm wrong, I don't think Christ ever even said anything about I follow Yahweh, He follows the Father, my Father is what He said, I don't think He said He might have, I'm not sure, so what are your thoughts on that combination?

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:09:01
I wrote, I wrote a whole book on it, Alex. It's called Setting God Free. Yeah, it's called Setting God Free, moving beyond the kind of the fabrication that we created. And so I went through the whole thing. I had a court case in which I put Yahweh on trial, I had a prosecution, and had a defense, and had Bible scholars, and psychologists and contract lawyers and mythologists, you know, and geneticists on both sides of it, and the final verdict was that the God who was on trial was a figment of our imagination, that we fashioned the God in our own image and likeness, the good parts and the bad parts. Now, why is it included? I think it's included because when you look at the evolution of our spirituality, in order to understand, you know, the message of Jesus, you have to understand what he was kind of, where he was coming from, and so it's like, you can't, you know, create a future by ignoring your past, we can't, I can destroy our history in order to grow into our, into our future, so you know, we have to acknowledge, at one stage, you know, I was pooping in my pan. I was six months old at another stage. I was in high school, another stage I was, you know, in Africa. And so we can only stand, we can only navigate the future by understanding the past from which we've come. And so it becomes very important to me that we retain a record of our entire journey to understand exactly, you know, the mistakes we've made, the progress we've made, you know, the tendency to repeat old mistakes, and now we have a record of what happened when we did it in the past. So it becomes really important for me that we not get rid of any part of this document. The entire scriptural tradition is the history of the evolution of spirituality, and to understand where we're headed and what the invitation is, we have to understand where we've come from and the mistakes we've made. Otherwise, you know, we're starting from using a blank slate, and we have no idea what we're gonna write.

Alex Ferrari 1:10:47
What? Let me ask, one of my favorite, another favorite topic of mine is, I've just.. when I discovered this, it.. this really shakes, shook my world, and a lot of people don't know, know about this part of the New Testament, but you know, when my friend said, "No one ever leaves Christianity because of Jesus, they leave because of Paul. Now, Paul is such an interesting figure in this story, because he was - he never met Jesus, him and Peter did not get along. He originally did not like Jesus, and actually wrote tons of stuff against Jesus. Then had some sort of epiphany, or met Jesus in some way, a vision, and then became a marketing machine, where then, when the when Constantine put the Bible together, he's like, "Oh, this Paul guy's got some good stuff. Let's start bringing all his letters in, and on top of it, it's not even Paul's letter, it's actually his disciples' letter, a lot of like his interpretations of Paul's letters that get into the Bible. If I'm incorrect in any of this, please correct me. But I find it fascinating how most of the dogma that we have a problem with, if not all of it comes from Paul, is that correct?

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:12:04
So Paul is a very complicated character, as you imagine. He's a Pharisee to begin with, he had died in the world Pharisee, and who set out actually to go to Damascus to kind of wipe out the Christian community in Damascus, and then has a vision of Jesus on the way, and he's struck blind, and he's told to go to a particular house, and he's blind for three days, and he says to Jesus, as to Paul, or he called him Saul, was his first name, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And Paul says to him, Who are you? And he says, I am Jesus, and you're persecuting me. Go to the house of Ananias, and I will show you the truth. So Paul has a visionary experience, and he does a volte face at 180 and now he becomes a fervent disciple of this Jesus character. Now Paul is a highly educated character, so when you read, for instance, Paul's letters in Greek, he speaks really top classes, right in top class Greek. When you look at, for instance, Mark, or even, or even John, their Greek actually is very poor, you know, and so he's a very highly educated guy, now he takes to this work. The problem is that there are 27 letters in the New Testament between the Gospels, the book of Revelation, and the letters, 27 of them, and 13 of them are ascribed to Paul, but as it is, only seven of them are definitely Pauline. The other six were made up by people who spoke in his name, and that was quite common at those times, if you want your work to be promulgated, you pretend it's written by a very famous character, and then your book sales go up, and so probably the 13 letters ascribed to him, only six, maybe, or seven, are actually Paul's letters. So that's the first differentiation. If you take out the other ones, there's a very different Paul emerges from the ones which really ascribed to him. You couple down with the fact that Paul is talking to a variety of Greek, mainly Greek-speaking communities, and each community is having their own particular issues, and Paul is addressing specific kinds of issues, so he's not offering a one size fits all message about Jesus, he's saying here's the church in Corinth, and here's the crap that's going on in your community, and here's what I need to tell you about that. You know, people are getting drunk during the Eucharist, literally. You know, instead of regarding as a Eucharistic meal, they're literally kind of pigging out on the food and drink. So he's dealing with isolated incidents in every one of these cities. So he's writing on specific topics to various different communities, and so you have to take that into account as well. He hasn't just got one particular message that he's permitting to everybody, and of course he had his differences with, uh, with Peter, but as part of what's happening is Paul is reaching out to a non-Jewish audience, whereas Peter, you know, is dealing with a Jewish audience who have kind of joined the Jesus movement, so they got a very, very different agenda, so when the very first comes to the church was called, was called in the year 49 AD, and it was called to address an issue that was raised by Paul. Paul is now converting 1000s of, you know, Gentiles to the Jesus movement, so he comes back to Jerusalem, and they have a council, and there's only one agenda on the one item on the. Agenda, if Gentiles decide to be followers of Jesus, do they have to become Jewish first? In other words, do they have to get circumcised with their men, and do they have to keep kosher laws? And that was the entire council. And finally, you know, everybody gave their opinion, and Paul gave his opinion. And it's interesting that James, who was the brother of Jesus, stood up at the end, Peter gave his opinion. John gave his opinion. Paul gave his opinion, but James gave the decision. He didn't say it is my opinion. He said it is my decision. We've learned, we've listened to our brother Paul, we've listened to Peter, we listened to John.

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:15:32
It is now my decision, because it was James, the brother of Jesus, that actually took over the young Jesus movement after the resurrection in Pentecost, and James' decision was, we should not impose on Gentile people laws that we ourselves were unable to keep, so no need for, we don't impose kosher laws, and they don't have to get circumcised, and so Paul goes backward and says, "Yeah, I see, I told you, guys, we're good to go, you don't have to connect to restrict your food choices, or you don't have to get circumcised, and so, in some senses Paul is dealing with a very, very different community organization, so he's pitching his message to a Greek-speaking gentiles, whereas the others are dealing with a Jewish followers of Jesus Christ. So we can kind of vilify Paul and say that he had a totally different agenda, and in some senses he did, because he was dealing with very different audiences with very different kinds of problems, and if you can separate the stuff he really wrote from the stuff attributed to him, then a different picture begins to emerge.

Alex Ferrari 1:16:28
And who was his disciple? Was it Mark Luke? It was Luke, right? So then Luke, between Luke and Paul, that's a lot of the New Testament, is those

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:16:39
Luke, Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke, and he wrote the Acts of the Apostles, so there would be regard, actually, as two parts of the same book, but so there are 27 books in the New Testament, so Luke would be responsible then for two of them, for the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, so the other 25

Alex Ferrari 1:16:55
And Paul would be equivalent, well, he would six or seven, but then they, but they attribute more than that,

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:17:01
13, that's 13th time,

Alex Ferrari 1:17:03
That's so that's a substantial chunk

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:17:05
On almost half of the New Testament.

Alex Ferrari 1:17:07
Yeah, is all is a lot of Paul. So the dogma aspects of Christianity, did they did they truly come from Paul? A lot of them, like original sin, like hell, like all of that.

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:17:18
I, in fairness, I don't think you did, because Paul is coming from a Jewish background. There wasn't a Jewish notion of hell in the sense of which Catholics know, so Paul would not have been promoting the notion of hell in that sense. He proposed the notion of what happens when you separate yourself from the truth, and so it's like he used the notion of Gehenna. So Gehenna was the fire pit outside Jerusalem, where they burned all the rubbish, and so when Christ says, you know, he talks about Gehenna, he's talking about people, you know, burning with their kind of own passions around their lack of love or whatever. He's not talking about a place of eternal damnation, he's talking about what happens to the to the psyche, you know, which is which is looking only at worldly success and worldly domination, and lust, and you know, money, and stuff like that, that you're burning your desires are burning your soul until you come to the realization, you know, that only love is real. Yeah, so Paul would certainly, I don't believe Paul would be promoting a notion of eternal damnation,

Alex Ferrari 1:18:15
And what, and reincarnation was originally in the original teachings, right?

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:18:20
Yeah, so there's a very, for me, there's a very interesting notion in the teaching of Jesus. Even so, for instance, the week before he died, he goes up into the top of Mount Tabor, you know, and he has an encounter, allegedly with Moses and with Elijah. Now, Moses represents the law and Elijah represents the prophets, so the Hebrew scriptures are divided into three parts. There's the law, the prophets, and the writings. So, the law is attributed to Moses. The prophets then are these charismatic characters, and the writings were kind of literature dealing with kind of a kind of eschatological issues. And so, the Hebrew scriptures had these three parts, but Moses represented one part, Elijah represented the other. And so, Jesus has this encounter where Moses and Elijah appeared to him. Now Moses, if he existed, is dead 12 150 years, and Elijah, if he existed, is dead 850 years. So you know, how could they encounter them on the way back down from the mountain? There are three disciples with Jesus: there's Peter, James, and John. They're coming down, and one of them says to him, "Why do the scriptures say that before the Messiah comes, Elijah has to come back, and Jesus says Elijah has already come back, and they didn't recognize him. And then, in parenthesis, in Matthew's Gasp, it says here Jesus was talking about John the Baptist, so for Jesus, he's claiming that John the Baptist was the reincarnation of Elijah. There's another passage in John's Gospel, think about chapter nine, where Jesus is coming out of the city of Jericho, and there's a blind beggar sitting at the gate begging for alms, and the disciples say to Jesus, Why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sin or become the sin of his parents? So. Into Judaism at the time, you know that all illness or all poverty is a result of God's displeasure with somebody for some sin they've committed, either they committed the sin or their parents committed the sin. Now, how could the disciples ask Jesus, whose sin caused this man's blindness? Was it his parents' sin or his own sin? If there's no reincarnation, how could his own sin caused him to be born blind. Now, if he had gone born blind at age 25 I'd say, yeah, he was living, living a terrible life for the first 24 years of his life, but he could be born blind because of his own sin, meant obviously that it was a sin in a previous incarnation, which you know he was learning a lesson of some kind. Now, I don't believe that, actually, that karma is a punitive mechanism whereby we are punished in subsequent incarnations for sins we've committed in previous incarnations, rather it is a contract we make to come into life to try to learn the lessons we didn't learn the last time around, so it's a self-imposed, you know, kind of not a sentence but an opportunity, it's an educational possibility, you know, all of these things, and so Christ is saying, then this man chose to come back in a blind state because there was a lesson he needed to learn, but it certainly wasn't that he was a sinner, sinner, or there wasn't because his parents were sins and they gave birth to a blind son, so there's plenty of evidence, even in the New Testament, if you look deeply, that Christ believed in reincarnation and taught it, even,

Alex Ferrari 1:21:20
And but the concept of sin, as well, doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a general statement. If you believe in reincarnation, then there I believe it is kind of like a balancing, like it's an opportunity to balance this, just the way the universe works, it's always an equal yin yang, all that kind of stuff. So the concept of sin is, it seems almost ludicrous to me.

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:21:42
Well, it's a very important thing, because sin properly understood literally means missing the mark. So, I don't know if you've ever been in an English pub, have you ever played darts?

Alex Ferrari 1:21:50
Yes,

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:21:51
Yeah. So, you know, you stand back and you throw darts at the board, and depending where the dart lands, you readjust your aim to try to get the bullseye. Now, suppose I were to hang a cloth between you and the dartboard, and there's a gap over it, and ask you to throw the darts over the cloth to try to hit the mark. You're getting no feedback whatsoever, so you can't prove your aim. So that the sin means missing the mark, so as to identify what I need to change in my behavior. So sin is not a punitive mechanism. Sin is feedback, literally on previous efforts, so I can improve my aim, and so the notion of perfection. Then, when Jesus says, 'You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect, the word He's used in Greek is telos, from which we get the English word teleology, and teleology means to be attracted to a goal. So, perfection is the pursuit of, you know, in some senses of the mission that perfection is not a stainless steel sinlessness. It is the radical commitment to the mission for which I volunteered and said, 'Send me. That's what perfection is. No matter how times I follow, how many high times I follow my touch, I pick myself up, and they walk again, that's perfection. I'm radically committed to the mission for which I volunteered. It's like a little baby learning to stand, and you're going to fall in this tush, and he picks himself up, and he falls again, he picks himself up, and then finally he can stand, and then he can take a few steps, and then he can walk, and then he can run. You know that we keep trying until we learn how to work these physical bodies of ours. So perfection is not a stainless steel, sinlessness. It is the radical commitment to the purpose for which I said, "Yes, send me, and that sin then is the feedback mechanism that allows me to adjust my aim.

Alex Ferrari 1:23:31
You brought Moses up a little bit ago. He's also a very interesting character in the scope of these stories. To my understanding, the Bible says that Moses lived, what, like 900 years or something along those lines.

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:23:44
No, 120

Alex Ferrari 1:23:45
Was 120 okay, 120 that's all it was, right?

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:23:50
So Adam lived to be 912 and Methuselah be 979 Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:23:55
That's where I got the 900 I was confused. So, do you believe that we are capable, our bodies are literally capable of this, or is this just mythology?

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:24:05
I think it is possible. You know, I think that the ways in which we've inhabited these physical space suits, or is, and the lifestyle we've kind of committed ourselves to, you know, that may have been pre-programmed. Now, I'm going to go way out in a limb here. I believe that what are called very often the gods in the, in the Old Testament are actually extraterrestrials who come down and modified us, like the Anunnaki story, and then at one stage that they've, they messed around with our DNA, and that we were originally kind of created to live much, much longer lives, but that big because of our behavior and our noisiness, according to the Sumerian scriptures, that decided, you know, this is intelligent. We counted these guys from neighbors living 900 years. Let's shorten their lifespan to one to 100 and score 120 years of age. And so that's actually said in the book of Genesis, that henceforth I will shorten your lifestyle at 220 years. So I think that it's possible. Know that this space suits we initially inhabited were capable of much, much longer lifestyles, but that you know they switched the gene, the gene code somewhere, and there's evidence that you know that of the 23 human genes that there's been a snip that something has been excised and has been joined up, and so that there was some modification done to the human genome to kind of reduce our lifespan, so I think it's possible that if we could correct that genetically, or if we could change our lifestyle somewhere, or if we could elevate our consciousness, if we wanted to, we could experience much longer lifetimes in these spaces. The question I ask myself is, why the hell would I want to do that? Do I really want 120 more years of this crap.

Alex Ferrari 1:25:43
Yeah, pickleball, a lot of pickleball, lot of, lot of pickleball in those 120 years. It's fascinating. And so Moses, as a character, I want to just go back to Moses really quickly. As a character, he was also, he's essentially an ascended master as well, he was a master that walked the earth. Was he an incarnate of, of any of the masters that we know? Because I mean, he's a major, he's a major figure in Catholicism.

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:26:11
How many, how many heresies are you one from one pod podcast?

Alex Ferrari 1:26:14
Many, sir. I would like as many heresies as possible. We're all going to hell just for having this conversation, or to henia, any, what's it called, Gehenna? We're all going to Gehenna anyway, so might as well.

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:26:26
So, in this last book I wrote, which is called Setting God Free: Moving Beyond the Caricature We've Create in Our Own Image, I make the claim that Moses never existed. Moses is a fabrication, and the reason is this: Moses doesn't appear anywhere outside the scriptures until 300 years after after Jesus, after after his alleged death, it appears in the Greeks around the time Alexander the Great. Now, Moses allegedly lived 1250 BC. So, for 900 years, there's no mention of this character called Moses outside it, but when you look at how the scripture is actually written. There are four sources for the scriptures. They're called by scholars J, E, P, and D. J are the books in which God is called Yahweh, and J and Y are the same in German, because the scholars were German. E is the Eloistic tradition where God is called Elohim, which just means the powerful ones, and it's plural, it's not a singular, it's a plural noun, Elohim, the powerful ones, you know. E was the Elohistic Elohim. Then you have P, which is the priestly document, which is written by the priests, you know, and D was the Deuteronomic books, which were the books of the law. And these books were written at very, very different stages, you know. And they have to invent a character in whose mouth they're going to put this law giving, so they invent this character called Moses, and so when you look at the books were written during the Babylonian captivity at a stage of Jewish history when they were actually in exile in Babylon, they'd been taken by the Babylonian Empire in the year 589 BCE and exiled to Babylon, and then the Persians overcame the Babylonians in the year 539 BCE, and sent a remnant of the Jews back to the land of Israel, where they rebuilt the temple, but in the meantime they're desperately trying to hold the two remaining tribes together, because the 10 northern tribes had been destroyed in 721 BCE by the Assyrian Empire, which was then conquered by the Babylonians, which was then conquered by the Persians, which is then conquered by the Greeks, and so in the middle of all this you have a group of exiles actually in Babylon longing for their freedom, so they invent this liberated character called Moses, and so in some senses Moses is the archetype of the liberator, the most important liberator of all, so they create this story about somebody who liberated them from Egypt. They were never in Egypt, you know, the story that they escaped, and according to the text, there were 603,550 soldiers as part of the group who escaped from Egypt. Now soldiers are between the ages of 18 and 60, so it must mean there was about 2 million people escaped, and they're wandering in the desert for 40 years, and Egypt owns the desert, the entire desert, right up to Turkey, and that 2 million people are wandering in the desert for 40 years, and they're, and the Egyptians didn't notice, so it's totally fictitious, but it provided kind of a hero character who had actually helped get them out of real slavery, you know, and real captivity, and 529 BC.

Alex Ferrari 1:29:27
So, so he's basically a Superman character, a Batman character. He's just.. it's Spider-Man. He's a.. he's a hero that can teach you the lessons that needed to be taught. So it's just basically the hero's journey.

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:29:41
Exactly! Yeah, he's the, he's the avatar of the, he's the avatar of the liberator, par excellence. His function is to act as a liberating figure to give them a kind of hope that they can survive exile in Babylon. They invent this fictitious archetype of Moses, the liberator. Now,

Alex Ferrari 1:29:58
Was Noah, was Noah as well?

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:30:00
It's hard to know Noah's really obviously Noah is borrowed from the Sumerian ghost texts, so a lot of the book of Genesis is actually a reworking of Sumerian writings, which predate them by 2000 years, and so you've got a character called Zio Sudra in the kind of the Sumerian scriptures, who built an ark and saved civilization, he's called Zeusudra, and now he's called Mo, he's called Noah in the Genesis version, so they're borrowing, you know, texts from neighboring mythologies to kind of articulate their own experience of life in Israel,

Alex Ferrari 1:30:38
And it wasn't, wasn't Buddha's life in a lot of ways, there were certain things about Buddha's story that Jesus's story in the Bible grabbed onto. Am I wrong on that?

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:30:49
Yeah, well, there are two things going on here. Of course, you're going to borrow from one culture to another. There's also the truth that there are archetypes which get incarnated in various different cultures, and if it's the same archetype getting incarnated, it will have many of the same kinds of attributes, and so very, very often the attributes have to do with altered states of consciousness, significant birth experiences, like according to the Buddha scriptures, the Buddha was born nine months after his mother had a vision in which an elephant's tusk speared her abdomen, and she conceived the Buddha, so it's a kind of a miraculous conception there, and Jesus is actually conceived, so in very, very often you're going to borrow archetypes and use them to understand the lives of real, actual historical characters.

Alex Ferrari 1:31:34
Interesting, Sean, I can, I could talk to you for date, and you, as you said earlier, you're Irish, so you can talk. I'm Cuban, and I can talk, sir. I've been doing this for, for almost 11 years now, so we can keep.. I mean, I could just go down rabbit holes after rabbit hole after rabbit hole with you, Sean. Where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing in the world?

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:31:56
So, a group of friends of mine, I actually revamped my, my, my website. It's really beautiful. Now it's interactive, it's so you can actually ask questions, and anything I've spoken about over the last 60 years is contained there. All of my teachings, all of my homilies, all of my liturgies are available for free for everybody, and it's completely interactive, and it is spiritsinspacesuits.com So, if they access that, they'll have access to all my material, all my books out there. Yeah, so all the books I've written, I've provided PDF copies, so people don't have to buy them, they can go straight and download themselves.

Alex Ferrari 1:32:32
And Sean, finally, what gives you hope for humanity right now, as we are awakening

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:32:38
People like Alex Ferrari. I'm there, I've come across so many people over the last five years, particularly, who are the new wave, you know, who are spirit-filled beings who are not losing hope, rather they're engendering trust that people can listen to them, being put in contact with their resources. Before we started, you spoke about a new resource you've just created. Yeah, yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:33:01
Mastery yeah, Next Level Soul Mastery. Yeah,

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:33:02
Right. Exactly, that's what gives me.. it's not hope, because hope is kind of a kind of an expectation of the, of the, the impossible. It's trust, the realization it is going to happen. So, I don't say I'm hopeful, I say I'm trusting. I know it's going to happen. It's only a question of timing. Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:33:20
Sean, it is a pleasure and honor speaking to you, as always. I cannot wait for one day for you and I to finally meet, sir. You have to get down to Austin, so we can shoot. We have a, we can have a conversation in person and do a five, it'll be five hours easily, without question. But, my friend, I appreciate you and everything you're doing to awaken this planet, so thank you, my friend,

Father Sean O’Laoire 1:33:42
And big big hug to my brother.