The Lost Teachings of Jesus Christ with Paul Wallis

Paul Wallis 0:00
And by choosing the violent God to be the God, it empowers the crown to enact violence in the name of that God. It's right in front of our eyes. So there's a lot of mystery as to where the stories begin, whose stories they originally were, and where exactly the story of humanity begins. And I find when I get to the the teachings of Jesus in the gospels, whether it's the canonical or gnostic, you get down to the root meanings of his sayings.

Alex Ferrari 0:31
But no one ever leaves because of Jesus's true teachings.

Paul Wallis 0:32
And they show him as bringing laws that delete and replace the laws of Yahweh. When he describes his encounters with Jesus, he's not talking about encountering a reanimated body. He doesn't talk about encountering a flesh and bone human being. He has an experience of light.

Alex Ferrari 1:08
I like to welcome back to the show returning champion, Paul Wallis, how you doing Paul?

Paul Wallis 1:12
Good day Alex, I'm fantastic. Thanks. And how you going?

Alex Ferrari 1:15
I'm doing good, my friend. Thank you so much for coming back on the show at last, our last conversation was so like we went so deep down the rabbit hole on so many different things. I just adore talking to you, man, and you are just a wealth of information about so many different things. So I can't wait to get into it this time.

Paul Wallis 1:36
Likewise, let's go,

Alex Ferrari 1:38
All right, so, so let's, let's, um, let's walk into a really interesting concept of Jesus. We're going to talk a bit about Jesus. We're going to talk about a bit about your new book, The eat an enigma as well. But in one of my favorite things as a recovering Catholic is is going back to really understand Jesus's teachings and kind of liberate his teachings, his story, from the dogma that was created by the Vatican, by created by other other people along the way, but even before the Vatican and so on. So there was a very intriguing question you posed, I saw you on YouTube pose, which is, what did Jesus believe? Who did Jesus believe in, as far as a deity or a a God of some sort, who did he? Did he? Did he worship Yahweh? So who did he actually worship? And as far as from the historical texts can tell us?

Paul Wallis 2:37
Well, that really is a key question, and it was the central controversy, really, in early Christianity. Now you and I have grown up with a book called the Bible with two hard covers on it, and in between them, you've got the Old Testament and the New Testament glued together. And the moment that book was created, that the message that sends out is that there's continuity between the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. And you make the assumption that the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, is all about God, and the New Testament is all about God, and it must be the same God. This is God's book, isn't it? That's sort of the starting point for many of us who have grown up with the Christian faith. But as soon as you start reading the gospels and listening to the teaching of Jesus, it raises a huge question, because if Jesus is a Yahwist worships the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, Yahweh. Then why isn't he a proponent of Yahweh's laws? Why does the religion that came from the teachings of Jesus not include the laws of Yahweh? And why does Jesus not mention Yahweh once through all the Gospels. Now, some would say, Well, that's because the Gospels are written in Greek, and so you're going to get a Greek translation, you're going to see the word corios, which means sir or Lord, instead of the the name Yahweh. That's probably why it doesn't mention him. Except that answer doesn't quite pass muster, because there are key words that the gospel writers have left in Aramaic because they were so important to Jesus's teaching and ministry, and they were so strongly associated with his teaching and ministry, Jesus would have spoken in Aramaic, the spoken form of Hebrew he would have taught in Aramaic. And here are these four Aramaic phrases that give the character of what Jesus was on about. And so those sayings would be amen, amen. I'm about to tell you something important. Talitha, co owner, the next. Will be EFA, which is deaf ears be opened, and then Talitha, cool, arise, awaken little one, and then Abba. And here's a way to relate to the source of the universe, to discover an intimate connection with the source of the universe, and know the source of the universe as a father. So here are four Aramaic phrases. You put them together, and you've actually got the character of a lot of early Christian teaching around Jesus, amen. Amen. I'm going to tell you something important. Defi is open. Talitha Kawan, little one, arise, wake up, and now you can relate to the source of the cosmos. You could say that really is the nub of all the Gnostic literature, that that is the heart of their message. But nowhere is the name Yahweh. And there are other moments where Jesus seems to be pitched against Yahweh, instead of representing a continuation. And so some examples of that would be in the Gospel of John, chapter eight, where Jesus is addressing the Jewish leaders, and he refers to their father. He says, your father the devil. Your father was a liar. Your father was a murderer. He's a false father. He's the father of lies. Well, who could he possibly be speaking about if he wasn't speaking about Yahweh in that moment? Now I say that, and this is a terrible shock to a lot of Christian believers, because they never heard it preached that way. But if you go back and look in that chapter John eight, you'll see he's pitching himself against the false father of the Jewish leaders. Who is he talking about? And how is it that Jesus comes along doesn't talk about Yahweh? Instead, he talks about the Father, the one in the heavens, to distinguish his father from all others, the heavenly Father, who he addresses as Pater, which means father, and Abba, which means sir or daddy, and Jesus says no one has ever seen the Father that I'm talking about. Well, how can he say that if Yahweh is the father, because Moses spoke to Yahweh face to face, and Yahweh was physically seen many times in the old stories. Yet Jesus says no one has ever seen the Father I'm talking about. And he says, both to his big audiences and to his 12 what I'm bringing you is something completely new. Philip says, Show us the Father, so they know they don't know what he's talking about. He's bringing something new. And then there's another amazing moment where Jesus puts a lot of distance between him and the Yahweh stories and the Yahweh character, when he says, Which of you fathers, if your children were thirsty and asked for drink or hungry and ask for food, would give them a stone, or would give them a snake. And you or I would listen to that and think, Oh, what a strange, perverse, random scenario he's come up with there. Except the Jewish hearers in the beginning would say, Oh, hold on. Yahweh gave his people a stone when they were thirsty. Yahweh sent snakes when his people were hungry. And here's Jesus saying, What kind of father would do that all the gospel writers in the canonical gospels I'm talking about are eager to show that Jesus is a a successor to and replacement of Moses, the prophet of Yahweh, and they show him as bringing laws that delete and replace the laws of Yahweh. That's really the big picture. It's a picture of discontinuity. And so I go further than this in my book The Eden conspiracy in particular, and I show that Jesus really did intend to set people free from the laws of Yahweh, and was bringing something very different. The Gospel writers understood it. There's the moment of Transfiguration, where we've even got a dramatic handover of the baton, where those of his ancestors who had to do business with Yahweh. That's Moses and Elijah handing the baton over to Jesus, and a voice from the heavens, there's the father in the heavens, speaks and says, This is my son. Listen to him. And so in that moment, we've gone from the old to the new, and the new is something completely new. So it's very clear by the time you're in the book of Acts, in Acts 15 and the Jerusalem Council is happening, the early church has worked out Christianity is not yahwehism. There's clear blue water between what Jesus was all about and all the old stories and laws of Yahweh. It's very hard to get that discontinuity into our. Minds when we've been taught a story of continuity for so long. But the only way the story of continuity works is if you ignore all the nastiness and violence of the Yahweh character that are totally incompatible with the teachings of Jesus. And that's the clue for most people that some things awry.

Alex Ferrari 10:20
That's such a that's a I've never really sat and thought about that. I've always won. I always said like, well, you know, I'm not a real big fan of the Old Testament. You know fire and brimstone, you know, you know punishment. Kind of God or the the use the term God for lack of a better word. But in the New Testament, the God that Jesus speaks of is extremely different. Or the father that Jesus speaks of. It seems extreme night and day. It's like if you're writing a story or a novel, the character changes of Yahweh changes so dramatically between the first part and the second part. It's like if Darth Vader was Darth Vader in the first, first part of the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, he's a dancer who loves to paint, and he's very kind to people using the Force. That's essentially the the dichotomy we got here with with Yahweh. But that's really interesting. And the funny thing is, is the work that you do and so many others like you in the world who are trying to bring this truth out. It's right in front of our eyes. This is not like you've we could talk about the things that have been discovered, the Dead Sea Scrolls, other texts and gospels, but just looking at it from what we have right now, that is considered canon, if you will, of Christianity, it doesn't add up. Hasn't added up ever. If you look at it with a critical eye or even a questioning eye, just ask basic questions. There's so many holes in the plot, so many holes. It's crazy.

Paul Wallis 11:53
But there's a great problem in what happens when you ask basic questions. And my inbox is full from week to week of messages from people who grew up in church, grew up in Sunday school, and who got thrown out of Sunday school for asking obvious questions, how does God do such awful, violent, wicked things? We know they're wicked because we know the teaching of Jesus. We know they're wicked because we've got a basic conscience. How can we be higher than the morality of this god character? Children have their own ways of asking those questions, which are obvious questions, and then they get thrown out because the Sunday School teacher or the Bible Study leader can't answer. And I'm not talking about this happening to people 100 years ago. I'm talking about people my age and younger who've been thrown out of groups not because they're being disruptive, but because they're asking obvious questions, to which there are obvious answers, but people don't want to give the obvious answers. It is the moral behavior of the Yahweh character gives us a problem, because it doesn't square with all the qualities of divinity listed in the New Testament, with all the qualities we're supposed to aspire to according to the teaching of Jesus. And I think when the church has answered these questions in the past, it's essentially been by telling people to ignore their own conscience, that if God does it, it must be all right, and if you worship God, then you better come to terms with who God is and stay on his right side. The problem with these answers, where we have to shut down our conscience, is simply that if you worship a God who's violent, you have to justify violence, and once you've justified violence, then you might use violence in God's name, and we've had 2000 years of history showing that's certainly the case. If you worship a God who's a xenophobe, you'll have to justify xenophobia and start thinking in xenophobic terms. These are my people. These are not my people. That's the way Yahweh thought. If you worship a God who is a misogynist, you have to justify misogyny, And Yahweh was a misogynist. He hated adult women. He found the whole idea of menstruation disgusting and horrible, and women while menstruating aren't even part of the community.

Alex Ferrari 14:36
But if he's the creator, He's created,

Paul Wallis 14:38
Yeah, exactly. If he's the creator, how can you have a problem with that? And it's one of those little clues you're dealing with a very eccentric being who should not be worshiped and should not be excused. But as soon as we get into the track of justifying his misogyny, his violence and his xenophobia, you can draw a straight line between that. That and and so many injustices and abuses done in the name of God because we're prosecuting God's will. So it's very important that we stop making mistakes of this order, because they lead to disastrous results.

Alex Ferrari 15:13
The thing I always found fascinating about the Yahweh character, and I've never actually called him the Yahweh character, but he is exactly that. Is that he I always like, wow, he seems really insecure. Uh, he seems very egotistical. He seemed like, there's a lot of these, these things that you attach to him because of the way he acts. You must, you must worship me. You must do this. And that Jesus never said anything like that. Jesus was all about the power, yeah, the powers within you, the Kingdom of Heavens within you. You can do what I can do, and even more. And he thinks like, that's it was so

Paul Wallis 15:51
Well, this is 180 degree difference, isn't it? Because Jesus said I did not come to be served, whereas Yahweh says, If you don't serve me, then it's, I mean, that's right, 80 degrees different,

Alex Ferrari 16:04
Is it? So Paul, is this why? Because, look, I've had a lot of scholars on who've spoken about Jesus's life and his teachings and things, but I always like talking like I spoke to the Grand Master of the Templars. And I go. So when you guys went out and started the Crusades, that didn't seem very Christ, like when you're going out, like you don't believe in Jesus. Now I must kill you if you don't believe in Jesus, that's generally not his teachings. So how did that get so transmuted that I will now fight in the name of Jesus. I will kill you in the name of Christianity. Of Jesus makes no sense. Is that now it kind of makes more sense because it's kind of like this adoption of the Old Testament, Yahweh, that they get mixed. It gets mixed in with Jesus's teachings, because it's all in one book. Is that a fair assumption?

Paul Wallis 17:00
Yes, I that is half the equation. So for instance, in my book The Eden conspiracy, I talk about the process by which Judaism changed from a canon of paleo contact, a memory of contact with all kinds of beings, to monotheism. And this change was done really to empower the monarchy in Jerusalem and the high priesthood in Jerusalem. So all the other priesthoods serving all the other entities that were remembered, so Asherah, Milcom, Jimash these were Jewish priesthoods that were servicing installations commemorating these beings. They were shut down. Sometimes they were slaughtered. Their temples were adopted or gotten rid of. Their altars were broken and then from King Hezekiah, high priest Hilkiah, Royal scribe, shafan, Senior priest, Ezra, boy King Josiah. These are the key figures in getting rid of the memory of these other entities, of defacing the carvings showing the many Elohim of the past, so that people would forget who they were, what they looked like, and coming up with a list of books that would be the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures. So this change happens so that from being a group of tribes who remember ancient helpers, now we've got a religion of monotheism, one God, one king, one high priest and high priestly family, one temple in Jerusalem, all the tides coming to that one temple. So a huge centralization of economic power. One high priest telling you what's what, what to believe. He's the news agency. He tells you what's news, what's fake news. So it's a great centralization of power, and by choosing the violent God to be the God, it empowers the crown to enact violence in the name of that God. If you've got a violent God, then the king can go to war and threaten the violence of their god against other people. So it was empowering in that way. And Christianity had a similar thing happen to it at the time of Constantine. So Constantine wants, essentially to hijack an emerging religious movement called Christianity, which is very popular among his soldiers, and he wants all those who are worshiping this new God Jesus to think that in order to worship Jesus, they have to obey Him, the emperor, and be good citizens. And he wants all the believers in the empire to believe that God is endorsing the power of the state. The state can enact violence against its own people to maintain order, and can go to war with other territories to get more lands and possessions. And the way he does this is to ask a bishop to rewrite world history, and in particular, to rewrite his own story. He wants a biography of himself written by this bishop, Eusebius. And the reason he picked this bishop is that he had read something he'd written before, which had described the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in a way that he really liked. And what he liked about it was really some passing comment that God must have favored Constantine since Constantine won, and so he makes friends with Eusebius, includes him in his royal circle. And after a while, he says, I want you to write a new history, and I want you to beef up that God must have been on Constantine's side section, because I really liked how you did that. So in the new book, The New Story of the Milvian Bridge says that before that battle, a sign appeared in the sky, a cross which everybody saw, and the words written in the sky were in hoc seniors signo Vince, which means conquering this sign. So it's a show that Jesus is supporting Constantine's emperor and is endorsing the violence of his army and his military campaigns. So now it's Jesus and the Emperor, sort of hand in hand, battling for the expansion of Constantine's empire. So it happens in literary form, and then we start seeing it in the art where Jesus is being depicted looking rather like an Italian foot soldier in the Imperial arm. In fact, he's wearing the uniform of a foot soldier of the Imperial Army, which now means he's somewhat junior to the Emperor, supporting all of the Empire's military feats. This is the beginning of the story of colonization and enslavements done in the name of Jesus. Constantine is the great pioneer of that and he brings the cross in as the central symbol of Christianity, and he puts it on all his military flags. And now the soldiers start wearing things with the cross on it, but it's a form of cross that fuses the idea of military power with divine power. And so there's the story of the Divine Right of Kings and people equating the violent expansion of the empire with exporting Christianity. So the confusion has been very deliberately created by rulers who wanted to hijack religion and use it to put a divine imprimatur on anything and everything they want to do, even if it's grotesque and violent. So not much is not much has changed roughly how that happened? No,

Alex Ferrari 23:04
Not much change. No, not much. Not much. It says in our, in our current political systems around the world, they, they, they use religion to to get to what they want and manipulate the the Pope, the public. It's, it's insane. You were talking about the the early Hebrew beings or gods, that it was like a it was a poly, poly, a poly, I can't say poly. This

Paul Wallis 23:32
Is a polytheistic

Alex Ferrari 23:34
Thank you. Polytheistic world view. Yet there were multiple so it's very Hindu esque in that sense, that doesn't seem like in India, that there was somebody that came in and said, Okay, let's, let's take Ganesh, let's take Vishnu. Let's take them all together. And there's only the one dude there. Wasn't that that happened there. But there were more. I didn't know that. There were multiple gods, if you will, in early Hebrew, in the in the Hebrew teachings, originally,

Paul Wallis 24:02
Yes, and of course, we have the vestiges of that worldview still in the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures. So if you go to the 10 Commandments, uh, Yahweh begins by saying, I don't want you working for any other elohim. I don't want you to bow down to them, and you're not even allowed to depict them. And of course, we're not supposed to ask, sorry, don't depict who, what other elohim are we talking about? Are we just talking about images and statues, or are we talking about other beings? And as you read the Elohim stories in the Hebrew Scriptures, it turns out he's talking about other beings. And Yahweh has a very competitive relationship with these other beings, Joshua. In Joshua 24 he's a successor to Moses. Says to the people you need to decide who you're going to serve. Will you serve the Elohim that you answer? Served in Mesopotamia. Will you serve the Elohim of Egypt, or will you serve Yahweh? So we've got this plurality of beings to choose from, but you're only to work for Yahweh. And so some scholars say, strictly speaking, Judaism wasn't polytheism. It did believe in many gods, whatever they were, but you must only worship one, and we call that henotheism. But within henotheism is an acknowledgement of other beings. We have a vision in one kings 22 by the prophet Micaiah, who describes this council of beings, this council of Elohim, which he calls the but a dot, who are all stakeholders, apparently, in Project Earth, and they're in some kind of uneasy truce among themselves as to managing the project. Moving forward, you've got wars among the Elohim, where they send their humans to war against each other. So there's no question that there are plural Elohim in the texts, which is why it's a plural form. Word, plural verbs, plural behaviors. They have conversations, they have conflicts, they go to war. But then, as I say, we get to the eighth to sixth century, BCE and the scribes want the story to change so that we think of these old gods, these other gods, as if they were just totems and statues and images. And there's only one real God, and that's Yahweh. But there are still stories left behind that show you know, these beings are sort of going toe to toe against each other, and many of the stories of wars are incomprehensible until you frame them that way. So you can frame them by going to Psalm 82 or Deuteronomy 32 which describes a moment post invasion. So we're invaded by a group called the seva Hashem IIM, which means the airborne armies or the or the sky fleet. So just picture that for a moment. What are we looking at there? And then they arrive, they start governing things as the Ba Adat and El Elyon, the senior among these Elohim, then carves out the lands, giving this land to this Elohim, this land to this Elohim. This land to this Elohim. Yahweh seems to be a junior member of that council because he gets short shrift. He gets a people group with no land. So El Elyon has created this artificial scarcity, so that now conflict and warfare has been built into the system as they compete for resources. So the first thing Yahweh does is rescue his people group from another Elohim land. He has to go into Egypt of Ach and retrieve his people group and then go to war with other elohim so his people group can have some land. And so this is the great outrage and injustice that's built into the story as Yahweh people look for some kind of homeland, and it doesn't matter who the people group is. If you've got a people group with no citizenship and no land, whether we're talking about the Middle East today or if we're talking about the Rohingya people, it creates appalling problems, and it's those appalling problems we see playing out in the Hebrew Scriptures, none of which makes sense if there are no other elohim. But we're told from the beginning there are many, but that's the story that had to be changed in the great reform, so that now we think of the other gods as idols, so that now we think of serving the other elohim as if it were idolatry or backsliding. But before those editorial changes, it was just the world, many lands, many Elohim, and it's the same worldview that you can find in the ancient story of cultures all around the world.

Alex Ferrari 28:58
Now the the Hebrew religion. I've really never gone deep down that rabbit hole, in the sense of looking past, going farther back, like, How old does it go? What is the origins of it? Because I pretty much just like the Bible, Old Testament, that's it. But there was something before, as you're talking about the Elohim and all of that stuff. How many years does it go back that you know of, at least from from the historical record?

Paul Wallis 29:26
Well, many of these stories have been borrowed from earlier sources. So we've got Elohim stories in the Bible that are retellings of Anunnaki and anuna stories from ancient Mesopotamia. We didn't know this until the 1830s when we discovered the translation key to all the cuneiform tablets those ancient cultures had left behind. And then we started recognizing, oh, my goodness, this looks like where the flood story came from. This. Looks like where the story of the fall came from. This is where the story of Asherah came from. And so those stories go back six, 7000 years, to the emergence of Sumer, which is a fascinating topic all itself, because Suma seems to appear from out of nowhere. We've not had civilization before. And all of a sudden, not only do we have modern agriculture, we've got civil engineering, we've got city building, we've got written language, money systems, legal systems, and they told stories which were older than their own culture. They told stories that went back 200,000 years and more, if we include texts like the Kings List and those stories talk about cataclysms, talk about interference in the development of Homo sapiens. Talk about times when we were enslaved as the working class to invaders from off planet. That's all in the stories of the Anunnaki, and they're all echoed in the Bible. But then I think it goes back even further, because when you look at the stories of beginnings in the book of Genesis, by the time you get to chapter 12, you've read five stories that strongly suggest planetary level cataclysms. So that could be one Cataclysm remembered five times over, and the stories have been brought together, but there are hints that there are a number of cataclysms and resets being described, which takes the memory in those stories far further back than anything we know about Homo sapiens. So we could have stories that are millions of years old, that have been told to us by others who knew about them, or by visitors or observers who knew about them. So there's a lot of mystery as to where the stories begin, whose stories they originally were, and where exactly the story of humanity begins.

Alex Ferrari 32:06
So let me ask you about Paul, because Paul has become one of my new favorite things to talk about. I had a guest to come on, and he kind of blew the lid off of Paul and his part in the whole in all of Christianity, and we've all heard the term, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul and and that, apparently Peter and Paul were besties, and it was all good in the hood and all that kind of stuff. But so, from my understanding, and please, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this that he said to me. His name is Aaron apke. Aaron said to me once, it was just a profound statement. He goes, No one ever leaves Christianity because of the teachings of Christ. And I was like, that's absolutely true. They go, they leave Christianity because of the teachings of Paul. He goes all the dogma, all the negative, all the Be careful, or you're gonna get punished, all of that stuff that people can't stomach. Is why people leave Christianity or leave the or leave following Jesus. But no one ever leaves because of Jesus's true teachings. So from what I understand Paul, they referred to him as an apostle, but he was not, to my understanding, was not one of the original apostles that walked with Jesus. He never actually met Jesus, which is not really talked about much. People always think that Paul's an apostle. He was never there. He was never there with Peter. He came after the fact, after Jesus had passed and and from my understanding, he basically was just writing stories, sending them around. And some people, somebody Constantine or whoever, grabbed on to these and started to make construct the story plot and story line that we all know today. Please tell me how how right I am or how wrong I am, and please add anything that you can, can you could throw in there, because I'm sure you know a little bit about Paul.

Paul Wallis 34:07
Well, I agree with Aaron when he says that people who leave Christianity don't leave because of the teachings of Jesus. I think that's right. Paul is interesting, though, and I'm very interested to know to what extent I can redeem Paul? Because, okay, I think Paul has, I find sayings by the apostle Paul, which I think are just so super inspired. So my favorite definition of God is the one the Apostle Paul gives, for instance, in Acts 17, where he's talking to a non religious audience. So he has to clarify what he means by God. And he uses the Greek word for God again, sayos, the same word that Jesus used. And he said, by Theos, I mean the source of the cosmos and everything in it, that in which we all live and move. Us and have our being, of which we are all offspring. As one of your own poets has said, we are all his offspring. And I love that definition because it's really a non religious definition. It says that my consciousness is a participation in a property of the cosmos. My intelligence is a participation in the intelligence of the cosmos, and there's no separation between me and source in that vision. And if there's no separation, there could be no separation anxiety for religion to manipulate. I don't I couldn't be possibly closer to the source than I am by that definition. So he says some really wonderful and profound and inspired things. And then he says things that people struggle with. And you say, some people leave Christianity because of those things. I think people leave Christianity when those things have been turned into law. So if Paul says, look, there's there's no other practice than this in my churches around the role of women. If we turn that into law, we could have a problem. Yes, if we, if we take it as a statement of history, then it's not so much a problem. Okay, that's how they ran the churches back then, 2000 years ago, in that culture. That's not a problem to me. It's a problem if I turn it into a law. And I think in a lot of Paul's writings, he's actually doing the same as the gospel writers, which is to subvert the whole idea of sacrificial religion. In fact, in that same speech in Athens, he says, how can the source of the universe need anything from you? How can we possibly serve the source of the cosmos? Everything's coming from the source. We're not providing the source with stuff. And so he, like the gospel writers, is subverting the idea of sacrificial religion so that sacrifice stops meaning you you harm yourself or lower yourself in order to honor the deity, and changes to mean we love one another. You you want to love God. Well, love one another. You want to love God. Well, look after the poor and the widow and the orphan. They're all going in that same direction, and I don't see clear blue water between Paul and the Gospel writers in that way. But Paul represents a strand within early Christianity, and you mentioned about Paul and Peter being besties, and obviously, by the end of the New Testament, that's what the New Testament writers want us to go away feeling Paul and Peter are on the same page. Everything's cool, but the way the story is told in Acts, the way Paul reports it in Galatians, shows no, they were not besties, and Paul did not have respect for the super apostles, by which he means members of the original 12, including Peter. He says that what he learned he learned by direct revelation from Jesus and the super apostles, added nothing to his message, and he taught the probations about meeting Peter, and I opposed him to his face. He says, so we know there was a conflict, and the conflict was around the central question we mentioned before, what's the role of yahwism in Christianity? And Paul was essentially saying it has no role. So again, I see Paul as a great rescuer of people from yahwism. So all this is in Paul's favor. And then just recently, on the Paul Wallace channel, I put out a video about resurrection? Yes, because we think of when we talk about the resurrection of Jesus, or our resurrection in in mainstream Christianity, we think there's one doctrine of resurrection, and it's the developed orthodox view. And the developed orthodox view is that Jesus died on the cross, and then his body was reanimated, but reanimated in some transformative way. That means now it's indestructible, and we just go on forever. And that's the classic orthodox view of resurrection. It's what you will find in Matthew, Luke and John, where the resurrected Jesus can cook, can eat food, you can touch his wounds. But that is not how Paul understood resurrection. And Paul's writings are the earliest writings we have that found their way into the canon. And when he talks about resurrection, he says that the material body is corruptible, that our material body will die and then decompose, and what's raised, what goes on after that, he calls a spiritual body. Now, when Paul says that he's really echoing the mainstream view of Greek society at the time, very informed by the Stoics and. Plato and Plato believed that you and I, before we became material human beings, were beings of consciousness, that we were simply elements of the cosmos itself, the consciousness of the cosmos. Then we individuate, then we incarnate as human beings. We have this material experience, and then we go on as beings of consciousness to have another experience. That was Plato's teaching, and it's there in Paul as well. And you go to one Corinthians 15, where Paul is talking about resurrection, and that's what he's describing, that the corruptible dies, and we are raised as spiritual entities, spiritual bodies, and when he describes his encounters with Jesus, he's not talking about encountering a reanimated body. He doesn't talk about encountering a flesh and bone human being. He has an experience of light, apparently, if we read the Luke acts stories, an experience of light, an experience of love and restoration. He hears a voice. That's his experience, and that's very similar to my own experience. When I became a Christian, I had an experience just like that. Paul equates what happened to him with the appearances to the 500 the 12, Peter, James, the apostles, and that's a different story. And having that kind of subjective spiritual experience, that's something you could have, even if Jesus's mortal remains were decomposing in a grave somewhere. And that's a continuation of Jesus that entirely fits within platonic thought. It's very similar to the understanding of Buddhism, or Hinduism. It Paul's views are really part of an international spectrum at that point, and he is, of course, the great international apostle. So today, when we talk about Paul, we think as if he is deeply embedded right at the heart of modern orthodoxy, and he isn't. He doesn't believe in the same resurrection that orthodoxy believes in. He doesn't believe in the same God that mainstream Christianity believes in having imported Yahweh back into the story. So I think actually, we have to do a lot of deconstruction and go back in and say, What did Paul really say? And if he's not endorsing Matthew, Luke and John, what is his view? And if we can sort of dethrone him a moment and not seeing see him as a giver of laws for all time, and he's just describing his own practice. Does he then become a little bit less threatening and more approachable? And my feeling is that he does, but it's, it's something I'm really, I'm in process with. I'm continue, continually revisiting the New Testament and thinking, how does this work? Is this an area where yahwism still has its hands on Christianity? Is this a bit that's more inspired than another bit? And this was a way of thinking that was anatomy to me in the past, I would call that cherry picking, but I what I'm actually doing is going back and trying to reframe my understanding of the text, because I have to peel back layers and layers of assumption, centuries of religious entrainment, centuries of preaching to get back to the text and ask afresh. Sorry, what did he just say and what does that mean?

Alex Ferrari 43:40
Paul, so you mentioned the resurrection. There has been many who believe that the resurrection did not happen exactly the way it was portrayed in the Bible, where many believe that he was crucified but survived, literally survived. He didn't die on the cross, that He because many people were it was a punishment. They go up there, they they would hang, they would that's their punishment, and then they would be brought back down, and that's the end of it, which is sacrilege to say, as a as a Christian. But there is many stories of Jesus going on, leaving, going towards India. There are stories of of Mother Mary dying on that trip, and that there's an actual grave site in between Pakistan and India where they that many people, they they surrounded it with a fence, and no one's allowed in, that kind of thing. And that he had offspring and that he was married with, there was this lovely lady named Mary Magdalene and all of that. So what do you from your from your research, I'm assuming you've come across these stories. What is your take on that?

Paul Wallis 44:56
I find it very interesting. If you take the. Developed orthodox idea of resurrection, the reanimation of his body, transformed, now indestructible. If you hold that view, then the stories of Jesus surviving and going to other places is impossible. If you take Paul's view of resurrection, then it is possible, it is possible that Jesus did not die, or that he died decomposed, and that people's resurrection experiences was something else, something something subjective, something spiritual. I find interesting. The idea that Jesus may have survived, because I can see where people would go to find clues, even in the canonical texts, that something like that may have happened. So with crucifixion, this was the Roman way of terrorizing the mainstream population and making them very afraid of offending the state. Because not only would they crucified people, they would leave the bodies up to be picked up by the birds and gradually decompose. Cultures all around the world did things like that. I mean, Great Britain used to do that. England used to do that with its traitors, where people would be executed publicly, and then their heads would be left on pikes to decompose for the world to see as a reminder, you do not cross the crown. You do not cross the state the Romans were the same, and so people point to clues that something else was happening in the case of Jesus, he wasn't left up there to decompose. His body was taken down. It would take a long time for people to die on a Roman cross. Jesus comes down after only six hours, Jesus loses consciousness after he's given something to drink when he stabbed, blood and water flow from his body. What's that telling us do dead bodies bleed? There are all these little clues there. And then Joseph of Arimathea whisks the body away, and there are little clues there that something very unusual is happening. And some people point to those and say there's another story being told here that's hidden in plain sight, and it's a story of survival. And if he survived, then where did he go? And if you're asking that question, that's when you start listening to other stories about Jesus, told in India, told in Japan, for instance, Japan, and

Alex Ferrari 47:49
I didn't know they there was stories in Japan.

Paul Wallis 47:52
Yes, that's right. So in the past, the church has just considered this absolutely impossible. The Church has to have all the information in the world about Jesus. And if another country comes along and says, Oh, he was here, and we have some stories about him. So in at lay, at the monastery of Hemis, there is a long standing narrative that the young Jesus was there. So not after the cross, but the young Jesus, between the ages of 12 and 30, was there. This doesn't interfere with the Orthodox story at all, but the church doesn't like the story because it doesn't like another authority having information about Jesus. So automatically, it says that cannot be true. So before assessing any evidence, it just cannot be true. Stories of them surviving and going to India, I find really intriguing because they are very long standing local stories, and you have to ask them, What basis do we reject them? A lot of Christians would say, Well, look, it contradicts the stories for which we've got a lot of evidence, and that's only hearsay. But when you look at it, all we have is hearsay. It's not that the Orthodox story has all this physical evidence proving it to be right. It's all stories. It's all narrative traditions. So how do you weigh one narrative tradition against another? Do you say, well, I prefer this narrative tradition because it became the mainstream, and therefore we then ignore Paul and squeeze him in try to force him to say what the mainstream later said. Do we believe the Jerusalem Rome story because it became the Imperial department of religion and reject the stories told by the other Christian groups, groups that produced other texts that didn't make their way into the canon. Do we just accept the Jerusalem Rome story and de facto automatically ignore every other country that said it had sight of Jesus? Why? How do we do that when all we have is narrative traditions? We don't have external corroboration of any kind, and apologists often like to exaggerate how much support the Orthodox story has, and they'll point to ancient writers like Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and who's the other one, Josephus, and say, Well, look, there you are. They're outside of Christianity, but they're all They're all endorsing the mainstream orthodox story. Well, no, they're not, because they are writing a couple of two or three generations removed from the actual events, and they're just sort of rehearsing what had become the Christian story. We don't have anything from the time of Jesus that's outside of the Christian corpus saying, oh, Jesus came to this town and he did such and such. We don't have anything saying we we crucified three people today. Jesus of Nazareth was one of them. We don't have anything like that. Really. There's nothing proving the one tradition over against the others. And so that's why I like to go back to these other narrative traditions and give them a second hearing and say, Well, what so? What do you say happened? Or what did your people, what did your ancestors witness? And realize there was this kaleidoscope of stories in the beginning, all of which might carry wisdom and or actual information with them.

Alex Ferrari 51:27
So you mentioned the missing years of Jesus, also one of my favorite topics to talk about. I call that the yadda, yadda yadda, years like Jesus was born, yada yada yada. He comes on a donkey. I always look I love always looking into that, because there are so many stories of Jesus going to India, Jesus going to Tibet, Jesus going to Egypt. Now I heard Japan. That's the first time I've heard that. From your research. What have you seen, or what have you heard about Jesus's missing years. And on a more critical standpoint, anyone listening was like, well, if it's not part of the canon, you really can't talk about it. If there's so many stories about Jesus and about what he did and the miracles he performed in all these things, it just seems, as a storyteller, teller, not very logical to pull out 18 years of arguably some of the most interesting parts of the story, the hero's journey of Jesus, because he's still a boy when we leave him at 12, and then that's when he starts Becoming a Man that's those 18 years is when he becomes Jesus, because at 12, there's indications it's essentially Michael Jordan in high school, you see that there's some brilliance there, but we haven't seen but so it's kind of like Jordan, Jordan. Jordan doesn't make his high school team, yada yada yada. He wins six championships with the bulls, you missed the most important story of how he became, who he became, and why was that left out? Why was that never no one even made up stories to put in the canon, to kind of piece these things together. So I'd love to hear what you've come from.

Paul Wallis 53:19
Well, I find it really intriguing, because the gospel writers present Jesus to us as a human being, but very often, I think we leapfrog to the Orthodox story of Jesus as God, and if we leapfrog to that conclusion, then we don't have to explain his intelligence or his his spiritual awareness journey or his abilities that you don't need the journey. If he's God, of course, he's going to be brilliant, but the gospel writers present him as a human being. He's the carpenter's son. And if you are willing to engage with Jesus as a human being before leapfrogging to that theological conclusion, of course you're going to want to know, how did he get this and the crowds ask that, how did he get this wisdom? Isn't this the carpenter's son? They actually put that question. And when you take the New Testament out of its bubble and you start reading the New Testament in the context of Greek thought in which it belonged, you begin realizing that the New Testament writers are playing with Greco Roman scenes, and They're playing with Greek ideas, and they are taking Greek world view and sharing it and then putting a little spin on it. They knew Greek thought like the back of their hand, because it was the world in which they lived. The apostle Paul knew Plato like the back of his hand, and he. Was clearly a huge fan. He admit that I think there are about 12 sayings of the apostle Paul that are really Plato quotes where he's just changed a word here or there. And if Jesus's followers were that well informed, were citizens of the world in that kind of way. Were philosophers and thinkers and were were playing with language and ideas that came from the east, that came from Egypt. If his followers were like that, might not Jesus have been like that too, when we've got the Gospel of John, where it's hard to put a piece of paper between John, the writer and Jesus the teacher. Is it not possible that Jesus knew these platonic ideas that form the Prolog to the Gospel of John, that form the whole framework for the Gospel of John? Is it not possible that Jesus was a seeker of Truth and a scholar and a philosopher, and if he was then, how did he get that? Did he get it by reading at the local libraries? Did he get that by sitting at the feet of people who read at the local library? Did he travel? And in the enigmatic figure of Joseph of Arimathea, a very wealthy person, there's the hint of a possibility he may have been able to travel because the legends around Joseph of Arimathea is that he was a merchant, an international trader, that he traveled internationally. If he could do it, then could Jesus have done it? It was a period in history where international travel was uniquely easy. You could travel the world in a way that would not be repeatable. Between the end of Rome in the West and the 1800s is entirely possible. Jesus traveled and sat at the feet of other teachers, read things, learned things, visited other communities, and I I lean to the view that Jesus did go to India. I don't have any physical evidence I can bring forth and say, and here's the proof, but it's a direction that I'm interested in looking. And if I did want to find an artifact that would really give legs to this idea it would be to the monastery in Hemis that I would go, in the hope that I might get sight of the extensive records of that community that go all the way back to the period of Jesus. And the story from out of that Monastery at Hemis is that there are records that refer to an individual who was there at the right time and whose name and behavior and character would sound very familiar to someone familiar with the Jesus of the Gospels. I'd like to see that the monastery hasn't made that public, even though the narrative of the place has remained, but that's what I'd like to probe. And I just, I have a feeling that that's the most solid place to go if you're looking for evidence of Jesus's travels.

Alex Ferrari 58:13
Well, isn't there a and I think Billy, our current, our friend, Billy Carson, he actually, when he takes people to Egypt, there is a place where you can visit where, this is where Jesus stayed. So for, you know, in Egypt, and since it's not, you know, a heavily Christian country, to create a tourist trap 1000s of years ago or hundreds of years ago saying, this is where Jesus, like, come on in everybody. This is actually where Jesus slept. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but this has been, this is, as far as I understand, a story that's been going on for a long, long time. So there is well places that and also went to bed as well with the Dalai Lama, saying, yes, Jesus was here. So there's multiple stories outside of the narrative of the Orthodox narrative.

Paul Wallis 59:04
The tricky thing is that even though you're pointing to a specific place, they are still just narratives going Jesus going to Egypt is not controversial. That is in the canonical story that Jesus began his life as a refugee in Egypt. I take your point that it might not be a place where you would create a tourist trap, whereas places you know, closer to the center of the Roman Empire, perhaps, perhaps you would. But even now, I mean, if you travel and you're shown, or this is, this is the this has been built around. This you know where Jesus was born, or this is the house that Jesus lived in in Capernaum. Well, it may be, it may be, and it's a long standing narrative tradition, but it's still just a story, and we all want to get beyond that to know what really happened. And I think it's, it's in a. Way, it's something I've I've moved away from a little bit because when I was a young, zealous evangelist and apologist, I really wanted to be able to prove my orthodox understanding of Jesus. And all this time later, 43 years, I believe, I had to come to terms with the fact that you might not be able to prove, you might be able to prove to your own satisfaction, or you might draw some confident conclusions. But in all this 2000 years, we haven't been able to prove that Matthew, Luke John stories are correct and that Paul's a little bit off, or prove that that's where Jesus was born, or, or prove that that's what happened on the cross. It's, it's always going to be, I think, a place where we have to explore and reach tentative conclusions. Meanwhile, though, people are having very powerful experiences within the Christian tradition. And I think one thing that confused me in the past was, if I have a powerful life changing experience in this church, do I now have to believe everything they teach, and I've had to learn, no, no, you don't. And in fact, the kind of experiences that Christians report are experienced by human beings all around the world. And so things that I thought were the monopoly of Christianity when I was a young believer, you know, things like supernatural healing or prophetic insight or words of knowledge, these are actually human experiences that happen all around the world. They're not endorsements of a particular theology or orthodoxy, they are part of the human experience, and every time we have these experiences, they should signal to us that we are more fascinating and amazing beings than ever we've been taught at school, and it should send us on a journey of curiosity and exploration of working out well, what is possible if I can have that prophetic insight is that something I can develop, if we saw that person get well by a mechanism we don't understand, is that something we can explore and develop, and I find when I get to the the teachings of Jesus In the Gospels, whether it's the canonical or gnostic, you get down to the root meanings of his sayings, and it is an invitation to explore what is possible for us in this cosmos, as human beings. And it's a it's a message of empowerment and a message of invitation that's very different from the religion of compliance, worship and obedience, pay, pray and obey, that we've grown up with, with institutional Christianity.

Alex Ferrari 1:02:48
Now I wanted to talk about your new book, The Eden Enigma and the carvings that you've discovered in Turkey. What is? What is? What is your what is that book about? And what do you what? What are these mysterious things you discovered in Turkey?

Paul Wallis 1:03:04
Well, here is the Eden Enigma. It's it's coming out on the 15th of March, at eight o'clock in the evening, American Eastern Standard Time. And I called it the Eden Enigma because I'm sort of decoding the mysterious symbols carved into the rocks of the mountains of Turkey and ancient Armenia. And the tagline is, do ancient carvings in the mountains of Turkey carry memories of 80 contact from the dawn of civilization? And what I found was I was there in Turkey with Matt mccroy, scouting for Matthew's new movie. And Matt is very interested in the timeline for humanity and the story of previous civilizations. That's what we were there investigating. While I was there, I was very taken with the symbols that were used at the sacred sites. You can find the same symbols at ianas in the van province. You could find them at Yerevan, which is now the capital of Armenia, at Erebuni, the fortress of blood, those symbols very similar to symbols used by the artists of ancient Assyria, you can go down into what was Persia and find carvings that are incredibly fine, show in great detail. And the emblems that repeat tell a story. The emblems that repeat are to do with others, mysterious others who came and visited humanity at a time in our story when our survival hung in the balance, just on this side of the Younger Dryas cold period. Now, I'd heard stories like this before. I find echoes of it in the Bible. I find it referenced in the Babylonian Anunnaki stories, the Sumerian and Nuna stories you can hear echoed in the Norse stories of the I see you can hear in meso American stories, the Guatemala Maya stories of the Pope orvu. But what I found with these symbols in Turkey is there's a lot of detail as to what this visitation was, who it was, who came and helped, and what the help was that they came with. These are stories that were world changing. And so we've got symbols of beings, which, if you look at them, you'll think straight away. Well, that looks like that looks like Merlin, that looks like some wizard that looks like a conjurer. And they're even in that classic he Presto pose that you would expect a classic conjurer to be in. They even look like they're dressed like a conjurer, but what they're conjuring up is symbols of time and eternity, indicating that they've come and they've done something that has changed history, and then they've got tools in their hands that shows that they're doing something very fine motor and very specific. And in the Eden Enigma, I show that as we go into these symbols and as we decode the cuneiform inscriptions of the oratian civilization in ancient Turkey. The story that emerges is of a reboot of the ecosystem. They're telling a story where something has gone catastrophically wrong with the ecosystem and humanity is set to be part of a mass extinction event, other than for this visit that gets down into some real nitty gritty of agricultural science to show them how to reboot everything. So that's the story I tell in the Eden enigma. It's an ancient, ancient story, if you listen to the story of the I see told by Snorri Sterling in the 1200s This is where we get our Viking legends from. Snorri Sturluson points to Turkey and Armenia, saying that is the place where civilization came from. That's the place the gods, the Icer came from, more advanced than all the people who lived in North Europe and Scandinavia, and when they migrated, they brought with them higher knowledge, higher wisdom. Now today, DNA research confirms that story goes to Anatolia and says, here is where agriculture began. And as we follow the DNA record, we see modern agriculture and civil engineering, moving with that people group to the west. And I tell a story about a corpse that was found under the floor of a pub in Northern Ireland, and when they examined the corpse, the whole story of this migration emerged. Archeology confirms it so archeology finds the earliest evidence of Iron Age human beings in that same part of the world, classical writers from ancient Rome and Greece wrote about the beginning of the Iron Age in this part of the world. You go to the Mesopotamian stories, and they'll say, yes, that's where zudra landed after the flood, and human history was rebooted there. The biblical story says it was here in Ararat, in the same region, that Noah landed and started farming, planted the first vineyard, and the repopulation began from there. You've got all these vectors pointing to the same lands saying there was a massive catastrophe, a massive reboot. But when I get into the symbols I find in these carvings, what emerges is the details of that reboot, who came, where they came from, how they came and exactly what they did to turbo charge the story of humanity. So that's the Eden Enigma coming soon.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:00
So, so Paul, though you mentioned a little, you kind of talked a little bit about this earlier, that in the Hebrew in the Hebrew history, that there's, there's stories that not only were before the younger dryers, but up to 200,000 years before the this, the latest Younger Dryas. How far back? How far back do these stories go? And from your understanding, and now we're gonna go down a little bit of a rabbit hole, from your understanding. What was humanity like 100,000 years ago? Now we're getting into the world of Atlantis and Lemuria, and that wasn't that actually was fairly recent in our human history, as far as the legend is concerned. But those civilizations, if they did exist, didn't just start 12,000 years ago. They were towards the end of their the end of their cycle, 12,000 years ago. So they might have been around for 50,000 years, 100,000 Years what, what did society according to what you've seen in the artifacts and the history, what kind of societies did we have back there? What did humanity look like? Because, I mean, Atlantis is always, I mean, that's the one to go to, because Plato and Plato had a great, great PR team with the Atlantis story. So everybody's like, Oh, the technology was more advanced than we have now. They didn't have cell phones, but they had advancements in other areas that we don't have energy, all that kind of stuff. So I'd love to hear what you've come up with, what you found.

Paul Wallis 1:10:31
Well, the I think the most detail and the most sort of international corroboration of story is around the most recent intervention, which is the 10,000 years ago intervention. And at that point, we were already Homo sapiens sapiens. We just needed help to recover after a cataclysm that had nearly extincted us. But recover meant learn how to farm again. Because prior to that, we were living like the animals lived. We were living just to survive. We were hunting, fishing, foraging, and so it was a huge change in the human experience 10,000 years ago. But when we go further back the stories, they become a little sketchier, but themes still overlap from culture to culture. And so we go back, for instance, to the Sumerian stories, if we go back to the Enuma Elish, for instance, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and go to the portions of those stories that talk about human development. Now we're looking at humanity that's slightly different, because there we are intelligent enough to work in someone else's mind, but not intelligent enough to know how to farm. So we may have been physically the same, but we were quite a ways back in our development towards civilization in those stories. Now, those stories are not the stories from the time of Sumer. They are the stories of the ancient past told by Sumer and the daughter cultures. So we've got that period, and if we look at the Kings list for a framework, we've got a period going back just over 200,000 years, where we're in that kind of boat. But the stories go further back than that, and we've got stories about the the conceiving and designing of Homo sapiens in the Enuma Elish, for instance. And it echoes in the Mesopotamian, Mesoamerican stories of the feathered serpents. And I like the the Mayan telling of this story in the Pope Paul Vu because it gets quite nitty gritty in the story of how we were developed. And it's very honest that it was a very long process, and it was a process with a lot of dead ends in it, as the feathered serpents tried to produce a species intelligent enough to work for them, but not so intelligent that we didn't want to work for them. And so there are dead ends in that process where they produce very capable beings, but which had no interest in working for feathered serpents. It would be a mistake at the level of engineering a gorilla who's very capable physically, but has no interest in bringing you your breakfast and slippers. And so they make some mistakes like that, but the story shows that what the feathered serpents were doing, whoever and whatever they were, was interfering in the development of species on Earth, before Homo sapiens. So this is a long, long, long time ago, because it says that their experiments resulted not only in Homo sapiens, but in the ape like creatures who live in the forests. So they're doing work before we've separated off from the other primates. They're doing work at the time of the common ancestor, shared by apes and human beings. So this suggests that life on Earth has been curated for a very, very long time before the story line of Homo sapiens, as we know ourselves to be and during and after. And so there's a period where we are animals, and then we're upgraded to being more intelligent and more conscious. That moment is there in the Pope orvu it's there in Genesis three. It's there in the Sumerian stories. Then we've got a period where we are brought in to the places where these. Other beings live, the feathered serpents, or the reptilians, to use the biblical imagery that's in the text, which we always take as metaphor. We never believe they actually were reptilian entities. We take it all as poetry, but they're overlapping with the Feathered Serpent stories of Meso America. They're overlapping with the Feathered Serpent stories of ancient China, and in those stories, we are the working class. We don't create our own communities. We are simply there as much as we might have cattle in farms. We're there to do work, and we only get stories of human civilization, human city, building, much, much more recently. Now there is a period, and I would place this around 60,000 years ago, when there's another visitation. And this relates to the stories of Asherah in the Bible, Ashari in the Enuma Elish, it echoes in stories, in Indigenous Australian story, Native American story, where others come and they teach a form of farming at that time, different to the lessons we had 10,000 years ago, because these lessons are about living in balance with nature, living in harmony with your environment. And it's very interesting listening to the character of story from these cultures. Now in Australia, Aboriginal Australian story takes us back at least 60,000 years, and it's that culture that's that, that we're looking at, this living in balance with nature, very similar to the Native American story. These stories are often quite specific about where our helpers came from, what region of space the visitors came from, and the Pleiades is the place that keeps getting a mention in those ancient stories. So in terms of time stamps in the story, I think the time stamps I would spot are the pre the separation of apes and humans from our private ancestors, and then just before 200,000 years ago, where we're being colonized and exploited, and there are some upgrades as we go along. And then around 60,000 years ago, another visitation that helps us to live more independently on the land. And then 10,000 years ago, roughly where we are given a much fuller education by beings, the Babylonians, called the apkallu. And we're now at the point where not only can we farm but we can build cities, we can become a civilization. We can dominate the planet. So those are the timestamps that I would locate. But the story of civilization as we know it is a much more recent one.

Alex Ferrari 1:18:00
And in the other thing that I would love to ask you about is this legend, or the myths of giants, these creatures that are throughout all cultures. It's even in the Bible, David versus Goliath. Goliath was as as it was portrayed in that story. I don't know what I forgot. What the exact was, was like twice the size of a normal man or something. It was like a 12 foot being, um, that David beat with his little stone. Um, but there have been, every culture talks about a moment in time where humans also walk the earth with giants. And when I say giants again, 10 feet, 12 feet, 15 feet tall, which would be, I mean, can you imagine someone like that walking around? I've stood, I've stood next to a seven foot man, and I felt like a child. Yes, I felt like a little boy. So what have you come across with that?

Paul Wallis 1:19:01
Well, you're quite right. The stories of us living among giants are told all around the world, including in the Bible. And there are a number of demographics named in the Bible that are giants, and their size is reported, and we find it in Josephus saying, Is there a Giants at this time? He said, I think they are descendants of the giants of the the refim and the Anakim. And he said, these are the Giants referred to in Greek story of the Titans. So it's interesting. He's telling that as history. And he's saying that when we see giants today, which he says they are a throwback to these people among whom we used to live, I don't know why it's such a has such a sort of cringe fact or a ridicule factor around it today, people struggle to take stories of giants seriously, and yet. Yes, we know there was a time when Homo sapiens had more neighbors, when there were more kinds of human beings on the planet. When I was in school, the evolution of man, as it was called at the time, was, you know, very simple line where we we start off as ape like, and then we become Australopithecus. And then who comes next? You know, Homo erectus. And gradually, we evolve into people as beautiful as you and me. And it's a very simple, gradual, seamless story. Now we know it's much more complex. Now we know that we lived alongside Neanderthals, that we lived alongside Denisovans, that we lived alongside the dragon people of China, that we lived alongside Hobbit size people whose remains we found in Indonesia. That's Homo floresiensis, and we know that there was Gigantopithecus as well giant human people living around us. We've had short people super tall people us in the middle for a long time. That was the human experience. So we should not be surprised to find that memory in our narrative traditions, and if if it was so in the past, then how recently did that mix continue? Are there any places in the world today where there might still be very, very tall hominids that we don't know about? Why is it treated as fairy tale when it's part of the fossil record? And the question, as I say, is, how far back do our memories go and how far into the present do those populations continue? So I have no problem when I read the story of the Rephaim and the Anakim, their height is described of taking that at face value, they are describing in physical terms what they saw physically. And this ancestral story has survived. And again, it's the agreement of story from culture to culture that ought to catch our attention and say, Okay, what's being remembered here, and what's the point of this? Is there any hint that this has been made up to teach immoral and the answer to that is no, it really is just cultural memory.

Alex Ferrari 1:22:26
Paul, I have about another 1000 questions for you, but I don't want to take up your entire day, sir. We will definitely have to have you come back on the show, because you are just such a wealth of information, and I appreciate you coming on now I'm going to ask you a few questions I ask all of my guests, what is your definition of living a fulfilled life?

Paul Wallis 1:22:46
Living a fulfilled life. I've found Plato's perspective on life very helpful, but that that is the view that we pre existed this life as beings of consciousness, and we're here to have experiences as a material being, and then afterwards, after our bodies expire, we will go on, hopefully enriched by the experience. Now, if I see things that way, then the purpose of my life is to learn as much as I can and have as many interesting experiences as I can and be enriched by it, and hopefully enrich the whole by that. And when I approach life that way, I just find it gives me a bit more courage to take a few more risks, to live a bit more confidently. And that's really how I see it. I'm here to learn how to enjoy this life not in a selfish way, but enjoy it as part of a community, part of society, and find out just how amazing being a human being can be.

Alex Ferrari 1:23:53
You had a chance to go back in time and speak to little Paul. What advice would you give him?

Paul Wallis 1:23:57
Well, everyone says they should go back and tell themselves not to stress so much. So we'll take that as a given. I will certainly say that take it easy. Nothing matters as much as you think it matters right now, so take it easy. Yeah, I would probably say buy real estate as soon as you can

Alex Ferrari 1:24:19
Buy gold. Buy gold

Paul Wallis 1:24:22
While you can afford it.

Alex Ferrari 1:24:25
Buy apple at $7 yes, yes.

Paul Wallis 1:24:29
And the other thing is, I, and I wouldn't need to say this, because it's what I did do. I would just say, Keep writing. Just keep writing. You little things, your little stories that only you read because you're developing your skill, and it's going to be very important when you grow up

Alex Ferrari 1:24:46
Beautifully said, how do you define God or Source?

Paul Wallis 1:24:49
Well, as I say, I love Paul's definition, the source of the cosmos and everything in it, that in which we all live and move and have our being, our. We're all offspring. I share Plato's view that source is really consciousness, and that before there was the material universe, there was consciousness, and that consciousness precedes everything. I think that really is Plato's most profound description of God, and that's the view I take.

Alex Ferrari 1:25:21
What is love?

Paul Wallis 1:25:23
I think the universe is kind of an experiment, that before there was the material universe, there was a unified field of consciousness, and as soon as that becomes expressed in a material universe, what does that mean? It means order, it means harmony. And so the question the universe is asking is, can we do order and harmony as a community of individual entities exercising free will? And everything that answers yes to that question is good. And I think the things that answer yes to that question. Are love. So this is, this is where the other is as important as myself. This is everything I do that makes for harmony and well being. So I think love has to be understood. Can only be understood sort of in the plural. It's a plural set of behaviors. It's a plural experience, and it's the environment in which we all thrive. It's like sunlight to plants. That's what love is to conscious beings.

Alex Ferrari 1:26:32
If you could ask God or Source one question, what would it be?

Paul Wallis 1:26:36
I'm pretty sure the question would begin, how can I? Because I really am interested in having the best experience I can have, and the most meaningful one.

Alex Ferrari 1:26:48
Fair enough. And what is the ultimate purpose of life?

Paul Wallis 1:26:51
I think the ultimate purpose of life is to learn love, to learn to give and receive love. This is fresh in my mind, because my mum passed away a couple of years ago, and she was she would often say, I don't know what it's all for. Don't know what the purpose of life is. I'm not sure if I found my purpose. And I remember saying in my mum's eulogy, if you have learned to give and receive love, then you've done what you came to do.

Alex Ferrari 1:27:23
And where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing in the world, sir?

Paul Wallis 1:27:27
Well, on YouTube, you can find me at the 5th kind and at the Paul Wallis channel. You can find my websites at 5thkind.tv and paulanthonywallis.com if you go to Amazon from the 15th of March, you'll find this book, The Eden Enigma, and all my other books in the Eden series. If you get my books and want to talk to me about them, then come to paulanthonywallis.com and we'll get into a conversation.

Alex Ferrari 1:27:51
And do you have any parting messages for the audience?

Paul Wallis 1:27:52
I think, just be very intentional about your state of mind and your emotional state. There is so much happening in the world right now that is frightening and disturbing, and if you expose yourself to continual news or continual social media, then you're likely to go into a funk or a state of anxiety. So don't do that. Decide each morning what emotional state you want to live the day in, pick it and then do it, and that's what I try to do, morning by morning.

Alex Ferrari 1:28:24
Paul, it is always a pleasure and an honor speaking to you, sir. Thank you again for this amazing conversation, and thank you for helping awaken this planet, my friend. So I appreciate you.

Paul Wallis 1:28:35
Thanks, Alex, it's been a pleasure.