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Interested in conversations about the nature of reality, multidimensionality, truth, being, religion, spirituality, life, love, consciousness, and language?
Wondering how to thrive in an uncertain and rapidly changing world?
Do you want to learn about things you've never experienced or heard of?
If so, we might just be for you!
Wendy Frase 0:00
Welcome to Wake Up Call for the Soul with Bill and Wendy. Hello, Bill.
Bill Frase 0:06
Hi, Wendy.
Wendy Frase 0:07
Well, it is very exciting to be with you here today, recording because what the listeners don't know is that it's been quite a while since we recorded. In fact, Bill's been in a little bit of a funk and hasn't really been interested in recording, but today we are back with a new conversation.
Bill Frase 0:29
Since I've been in this, well, Wendy called it a funk. I will tend to refer to it as the void, although it's been a pretty funky void, to be honest with you. And maybe I need to describe the void a little bit. The void is a term that I became familiar with through Orin's writings. That's O R I N Orin's writings through Sanaya Roman.And the void is basically a place that we go through on our spiritual journey. It's the way he kind of describes it, and that I experience it as is kind of like a womb of creation. So it feels like nothing is happening. The material mind has a very hard time dealing with the void. I've been in the void now for what feels like about a month, which is very long for me, and it's been quite unpleasant. But I also know that something always comes out on the other side of the void, just like you're pregnant for nine months. Not that I would know personally, but Wendy would know that. And eventually, someone comes out. You know, someone new comes out of the womb, and that is what the void does for us. It's an opportunity for us to undergo all the inner change, transformation, healing, growth that we need - even if we can't perceive it in the moment - to help us come into the next version of ourselves, the next phase of our existence. And by the way, I have not been a real happy camper in this void. Wendy will tell you that I've been a pretty big jerk a lot of times, and I'm not proud of that.
Bill Frase 2:03
I wouldn't go that far, but...
Bill Frase 2:05
You're very kind.
Wendy Frase 2:06
You've just been a little bit depressing to be around. That's all.
Bill Frase 2:11
I'm not even claiming to be out of the void. I'm not claiming to be out of my funk. I make no claims that way. I have no idea where I'm at in this process. I'm pretty clueless about it. But yesterday, we were at worship in the park at our church, and the story that was the focus was what is often referred to as the parable of the sower in the Bible. And I can't really say that I heard much of what was said there, but the funny thing was, was that in a tiny little graphic at the bottom of one of the pages of the bulletin for yesterday's service, there was a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson. It said, "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant." And you know, one of the things that I've realized while I've been in this funky void space is that I have been really kind of down about what I would call results or the harvest. Whereas before I was in my funk, I was much more focused on on casting seeds, baby, on casting seeds. So what if none of them are doing a blanking thing on casting seeds. And during my funky void experience, I have at many times indulged in some negativity-we might call it-or resistance around the perceived lack of results or harvest from my said seed scattering activities, and the way I'm thinking about this episode is, it's really for me. I don't know if this is what the title will be, but it's almost like, well, what should we be focusing on? And does it make sense to focus on the harvest, or will we be a lot happier if we focus on casting of the seeds, which then maybe it brings us into the actual story that is told in the Bible, that is kind of the leaping off point for a lot of this conversation here.
Wendy Frase 4:12
Well, that does make a lot of sense because in the world we do want to make a difference, which often means we want to see the harvest because then we've known that all those seeds we've scattered has given results, as you said, and made a difference. And it is nice to see it, but unfortunately, we don't always get to see it, and perhaps Source is not calling us to. Ooh, yay! We see how great we've been with all the seeds we're scattering, but no, I love that the focus on the seeds, and I love that quote that you brought forward today. And we've talked about this, Bill, because you have been talking about the parable of the sower for so long. I think it might even be one of your scripture favorite parables from the Bible.
Bill Frase 5:06
Yeah, it absolutely is. Yeah.
Wendy Frase 5:07
And in fact, you wrote back in August of 2018 when you were big into writing your own parables that were versions, perhaps, of the parables in the Bible, and this is on your blog post from 2018, and it is called "The Foolish Farmer." So it's a short story. I'm going to read it now, which is modeled after the stories in the Bible: Mark 4: 1-20, Matthew 13: 1-9, Luke 8: 4-8, and this is Bill's version. "A farmer went out to sow his seed like he did every year. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came out, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still, other seed fell on good soil where it produced a crop, 100, 60 or 30 times what was sown. Every planting season, the farmer did this with the hope that the path would soften, the rocks would erode, and the thorns would retreat, so that the seed could fulfill its purpose in those places as well."
Bill Frase 6:47
Yeah. So the first part of that is very similar. If you were to go to the Bible to those passages that Wendy mentioned in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it's just the very end of it that is different from what is presented in what people call the Holy Bible. Yeah, and I call it the foolish farmer because I actually moved to a farm between fifth and sixth grade, and I got to see my father broadcast seed in the fields. So the fields that we had were largely timothy, which is, I think, a lot of times what you want to feed horses, and he wanted some alfalfa in those fields, because he wanted alfalfa. Well, the way that you get alfalfa in those fields is that you get a whole bunch of alfalfa seed, and he had a broadcaster. You put the seed in the pouch, and then it had a wheel. It was almost like a funnel, where then the seed ran down the funnel into the wheel, and then you turned a crank to turn the wheel. And as the seed hit the center of the wheel, centrifugal force would kind of shoot it out in all directions around the farmer. And I'm not saying that this is the technology that Jesus would have seen in his day, maybe they had something like that. But it's more likely that they they had a bag of seed and they went out there with their hands and literally just threw it in the field for whatever it was that they were growing. So Jesus in this message is not talking about planting seeds; he's talking about casting seeds, which means you throw them, you throw them without controlling exactly where they're going to go. But one of the things about my dad was, and this is why I call this the parable of the foolish farmer, because I think when Jesus would have told this story, part of the point of the story is he's making a distinction between how God is different from human beings, and how we, as children of God, are called to be different from other human beings. I watched my dad cast seed, and we had hard paths because the cows made hard paths. He didn't cast seed there. Why would he? Because it can't grow. We had huge piles of rocks that were piled together to make room in the pasture, okay, or even to clean up the fields. Those piles of rocks were full of thorns. He didn't cast seed there; he only cast seed on what he thought was good ground. And this story by Jesus, I think, when I think about Jesus telling the story, I hear him telling his audience, who most of them are agrarian people. They either know farming directly or have a lot of experience with having friends and family who are farmers. So, anyone hearing this parable saying, "Well, why would he cast seed on the path? Why would he throw it on rocks or in thorns? That's ridiculous. And so, I've taken this interpretation to suggest that God doesn't do things the way that we do, and that we are called to do things differently. And that during my funk, my void, I was focused on the harvest. I was focused on well, I've cast all these seeds, and they haven't produced any fruit, at least in my mind, and. Yet, how do I know?
Wendy Frase 10:03
Yes, Bill, I've heard you talk about this story for a while, and if a farmer is casting seeds in the good earth, it reminds me that we're just preaching to the choir-that saying that they say-versus casting our seeds out to the world, and I love that that God is different from us. Obviously, we we we deep down we know that, but I guess we have to be reminded of this. And I also love how you always talked about that the seeds are like characters in the story too, because in a way the seeds are getting blamed in the story, because the seeds don't have roots or they can't don't be like the seeds and the thorns that are distracted or don't be like the seeds that grow up quickly and they don't really produce roots, but it really it almost seems like you're saying that the story is about the farmer.
Bill Frase 11:12
Well, for me, it's about the nature of the farmer and the nature of the seed. Like these are the two primary aspects of the story that I focus on. Whereas, if you look at the interpretations that are given in the Bible for this story, the focus is on the quality of the soil. Kind of like you were suggesting that that well, the issue is the soil, but for me, I'm much more concerned about well, who is the farmer? Why is the farmer acting so strangely to cast seeds in places that make absolutely no sense to me? Because it's very easy to avoid casting seeds on the path, on the rocks, and on the thorns. Based on my experience, my personal experience living on a farm and watching my dad broadcast seed. Like I've seen it. Yeah, he avoided those places because there was no point in putting seeds there, so why would Jesus tell this story? And and the I have a an unpublished book about the life and teachings of Jesus. So it's a book I've been working on for well over a quarter century. It's still unpublished, but there's a passage in it called Scattering Seed, and in it, the the context for the sharing of of a similar story to this one is Jesus's disciples asking him, "Why are you wasting time teaching people in the Decapolis? Why are you wasting time talking to Gentiles and heathens? Why are you wasting time with these religious leaders? Why are you bothering with any of these people who don't listen to your message, and he tells them this story of the foolish farmer in response to that, saying, and then he comes back on them and he says, "Well, what if I judged you? What if I thought that your soil wasn't good enough to receive this message? What would have happened then? I would have denied you your birthright. I didn't know. I have no way of knowing if anyone's prepared, if anyone's ready for this message or not. I my job is just to do my best to cast these seeds and hope, hope that the quality of the seed cast because the seed doesn't come from me. The seed comes from Creator, right? Right. It comes from the earth. It comes from creation, from creator. So the seed comes from creator. I am just here to spread it out, and hope that it takes root in those places, and and that if this nature of the seed is eternal, which for me the seed is the divine essence, divine love, Source love. We've talked about that on this podcast. If that seed is eternal, then I mean, can it really be taken up by the birds? Can it really be destroyed? Doesn't that potential for it to land and to take root in soil doesn't that exist as a possibility if we go with this interpretation that the farmer is Divinity and the seed is the divine essence and that or again that's one take, or that me as a messenger of God is seeking to express through my own being this eternal, infinite seed of unconditional love.
Wendy Frase 14:11
Well, this is very interesting because oftentimes seeds will grow in thorns, and they will randomly grow in some of the strangest places. In fact, when we hike around Cook Forest, you will see trees growing on top of stones, which is pretty amazing.
Bill Frase 14:35
Yep.
Wendy Frase 14:35
And then the roots just eventually make it their way down to the better soil. So even if the soil there's just a little bit of soil on the stone, the tree can even still grow. So we never know what's going to happen.
Bill Frase 14:52
And I mean, if we think about it, look at nature. What is nature's strategy for spreading seeds? They use the wind. They use water. They use animals. They use all these different means to spread their seeds, and they don't really care. Like there's such an abundance of seeds, they're not planting a single seed in the ground. You know, they are taking all of these seeds and casting them far and wide with the hopes that somehow, some way, they'll find their place, and who knows? Maybe I don't know what the rules of all these seeds are. Maybe some of them find their place in the next season. Maybe some of them wait a while, and then you know it's years down the line. I mean, we found seeds in ancient tombs that you can still sprout today. The seed is-it's one of the most powerful symbols of life, you know. It's this thing that looks dead. It looks like a little pebble or a stone or a grain or whatever, and yet it can turn into a whole plant or even a tree or ultimately into a forest.
Wendy Frase 15:56
And this message, it almost from what we're talking about, speaks of evangelism, but evangelism can be a dirty word to a lot of people because it sounds like we're preaching, but really evangelism is just showing and sharing Sources' love with the world without even people realizing we're sharing sSources' love with the world.
Bill Frase 16:21
Yeah, yeah. I mean, right.
Wendy Frase 16:23
And is that what the story do you think is speaking? We're called to keep plucking away with sharing the love and spreading the seeds and doing what we can, even when we don't even see any results.
Bill Frase 16:38
Yeah. No, I think that is a lot, a big part of the story. I think it's not just the fact that we're to cast seeds, but again, like
Wendy Frase 16:48
and not just keep our soil ready to receive seeds, because a lot of people take it like that. We're supposed to have our heart centered in a proper manner so we can receive the seeds.
Bill Frase 16:59
And yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that interpretation. That's fine. There's truth in that too. I mean, that's the beauty of a parable. Parables are polyvalent. They are multidimensional in their in the multiplicity of their meanings. So I'm not saying that my interpretation or interpretations of these parables are right. They just they make more sense to me. They they resonate more with my own personal experience than what is in the Bible. Especially the interpretations in the Bible make they don't make a whole heck of a lot of sense to me, to be honest.
Wendy Frase 17:30
Because the Bible then goes on and often in some of these gospels to explain what Jesus was thinking, and that's a dangerous path we go down because how can we really understand what message Jesus is trying to convey?
Bill Frase 17:47
Yeah, and and I'm pretty confident that even if that's one of the messages, which I'm highly doubtful of that, it can't be the only message of this story. I mean, because even me, like a kid growing, coming up late on a farm, seeing this story and realizing the story makes no sense. It doesn't make any sense at all that a farmer would do these things, you know.
Wendy Frase 18:10
Right, and the one thing I've understood or hope to understand is that Source is definitely different from us.
Bill Frase 18:19
Yeah, and Source is not about efficiency. Source isn't about this kind of controlled mechanistic view of things. Source is all about abundance. And again, we have a creation that is vastly abundant. Trees produce way more seeds than they will ever need. You know, every plant produces way more seeds. Most plants produce way more fruit than they need, which the fruit typically contains the seeds than is necessary for for mere survival. So we're dealing with...
Wendy Frase 18:52
We have way more love to give than will ever be received, or maybe we don't. Maybe we all don't.
Bill Frase 19:00
Well, Source has infinite love to give, so the abundance of creation...
Bill Frase 19:04
But we're called to do that too. We're called to love.
Bill Frase 19:09
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that this is a parable saying this is what God is like, and this is what we're supposed to be like. We are supposed to be like the one from whom we come, and that's why I have it as the context. I have it in my story in my own unpublished book.
Wendy Frase 19:23
So, Bill, you're supposed to keep plugging along,
Bill Frase 19:26
Yeah,
Wendy Frase 19:26
And not escape to your funky world of reclusiveness.
Bill Frase 19:31
Yeah, no. And so, what I'm trying to do right now, I mean, my mantra right now is seed. That's my mantra that I'm now asking myself. I don't know how long this will last. I don't know if I'll make it a habit or not. But where, you know, I can't say that the questions I've been asking myself lately have been very helpful. They've kind of brought me down. To be honest with you, I won't share those questions with you. You can probably imagine what they are based on the conversation so far. But now the questions that I'm trying to ask in the morning. And even when I go to bed at night, or questions more like, "Well, what seeds did I cast today?" Totally forgetting the harvest, just saying that's not even my concern. Because again, my dad he didn't go out there then and water all of the alfalfa seeds. The alfalfa fell between the timothy hay, and then it came up, and he started getting alfalfa in the fields. So he didn't do anything. That was all nature. That was sun, soil, air, and rain. That's it. That's what caused. And he might have done some fertilizing. Not sure about that, but anyways, basically, nature took care of 99.9% of what was needed after that. And so, for me, this the quote from Robert Louis Stevenson, this parable, my own tellings and retellings of this parable in multiple formats over a number of years now, you know, has me thinking that yeah, I mean, my job is to focus on the seeds, to ask my questions in the morning, like, well, "What kinds of seeds would I like to cast today?" What, and then when I go to bed at night, well, "What seeds have I cast today?" You know, what "What kinds of seeds would I like to cast tomorrow? Similar seeds, different seeds?" Because I'm still in this void. Maybe it's less funky now, but because I don't know, I don't know where I'm going from here, I don't know what's next. I don't know if I'm supposed to keep doing what I've done. If I'm supposed to do new and different things, I don't know. I can't see that stuff.
Wendy Frase 21:28
We don't even know if we're supposed to keep doing this podcast.
Bill Frase 21:31
No clue.
Wendy Frase 21:31
Or having these conversations recorded.
Bill Frase 21:34
No idea. I thought the last one may have been our last one, but it looks like this is either the next one or the last one, I don't know.
Wendy Frase 21:43
That is true. So listeners will have to stay tuned. We don't know if we'll be back next week, but hopefully we'll be back eventually. If not next week,
Bill Frase 21:53
yeah, hopefully. I mean, we'll see
Wendy Frase 21:54
if we if these are the seeds we are supposed to cast, and that is a good question because really, it is probably helpful for all of us to hit these voids because they're moments of time where we stop and we reflect and we ask and seek Source's, hopefully inspiration on what we are to do next. But I like your idea of casting seeds and focusing on that, because we can all cast seeds in such little ways. Who have I smiled at today? Who have I said thank you to today? Who have I interacted with on our walk, or at our community garden, or whatever we do, we are all supposed to spread seeds of God's love, Source's love, in our world. And I love that that is the question you are now asking, Bill.
Bill Frase 22:54
Yeah, yeah, and I think a key component for me is this letting go of the harvest of the results because the material mind it has very specific ideas about what should be, what's supposed to happen, and but it doesn't have the perceptual faculty or faculties to actually perceive the effects of pretty much anything. It it's good with stories. It's okay with processing sensory information. But right, like I express love from my soul to some other person, my material mind might not even be in awareness of what my soul emanated to that person, and it's definitely, my material mind, not in awareness of any response or change from the emanations of love from my soul to that other person. So, yeah, it just, I feel really silly now. The past month, being so, so frequently focused on results, and when it's like it's not my job, and I can't perceive them with my mind anyways. My mind is incapable of perceiving them. Now, my sense is that my soul, at whatever stage in my existence, is can will be aware of all that proceeds from what I express. So, and that was something else I realized as I was kind of processing this is that my my mentor, my first mentor, when I entered upon what people might call this divine love path, I expressed something like, "Oh, well, we don't really know what, or we'll never know what comes of anything that we really do." You know, I was just kind of expressing this in this letter, and she came back and she said, "Well, my my sense of it is that you know we do that at some point in the vastness of eternity of our eternal existence that we do at some moment in eternity perceive. what has flowed from what we have done." And I mean, she was focused on the more positive things. I think that's also that also goes for the negative things, but that those things, and we don't just see like how an expression of love that we had had an impact on an individual. We get to see and perceive at some point in eternity, how that expression of love impacted that individual, and how then that expression of love impacted others, and how those expressions of love, inspired by our expression of love, impact others and others and others. So it's like infinite ripples on a multi-dimensional pond, where and we get to perceive this in the fullness of its multidimensionality at some point in our existence, or at some points in our existence. And that idea is sort of-it's terrifying and inspiring
Wendy Frase 25:52
and exciting. That is very exciting, Bill.
Bill Frase 25:55
You know, kind of all at the same time, and depends on what's.
Wendy Frase 26:00
No, that's true because that just stresses the importance of way of being, as we were talking about, and how our actions, thoughts, and interactions with people will come back to haunt us or come back to inspire, bless us and well done, good and faithful servant, as they say. Yeah,
Bill Frase 26:26
it's like a cosmic echo chamber, you know, that we put things out, and and our mind thinks, oh, I should hear the echo in X number of seconds, but the soul is capable of perceiving those echoes on a much grander, eternal so-called time scale,
Wendy Frase 26:43
that reminds me of that great quote I love from the opening of Gladiator. What we do in this life echoes through all eternity, or something similar.
Bill Frase 26:55
Yeah, Maximus says that to the troops before to the cavalry before they before they enter the battle, yeah. He says, What, yeah, "What we do in life echoes in eternity."
Wendy Frase 27:06
Love it. Well, Bill, it's been a great conversation with you here today. Are there any other thoughts that you wanted to make sure you express to our listeners?
Bill Frase 27:19
The thing that I would like to say before we wrap up here is that the times we're in on this planet are very difficult, and they are going to get, in their own ways, more difficult. And so, it is going to be tempting. Our material minds are going to be tempted to think that what we do, how we are, what we say-that it doesn't matter, and I'm confident that it does matter. My recent experiences have helped me to perceive that that is indeed the case, and so my hope for this episode is that it inspires listeners to keep at it even when it seems hopeless. Because that's part of what this parable is for me. It's the idea that Jesus is talking about Source scattering seeds in hopeless places with hopeless people. My dad didn't scatter seed in the rocks and in the thorns and on the path, because he had no hope that those seeds would do any work there. There was no purpose to it. But I think that each of us, in our own ways, are going to be called to cast our own seeds of love and light in ways that will help other people, even if we can't see it in the moment, even if everything in the world screams at us that what we do doesn't matter, that it's not helping, that it can't make any difference, that we are expressing our love and light in hopeless circumstances, even with people who appear to be hopeless, people that just other people would say, well, it's just a waste of time. That anything that is done or expressed in love is not hopeless. That everything done that way is meaningful and purposeful, and that just because we cannot see the effects, the harvest, the results, the outcomes in a time frame that our minds prefer, that indeed those things expressed echo throughout all eternity.
Wendy Frase 29:38
Well said, Bill. It's been great having this conversation with you, and to all those listeners out there, you got this. Keep doing it. Keep plugging away. Keep scattering those seeds. Until next time.
Bill Frase 29:52
Until next time. Thank you so much for listening to Wake-Up Call for the Soul with Bill and Wendy. We look forward to you joining us next time.