Father of Lies, Thief of Trust: Disbelieving the Devil and Giving Our Attention Back to God

What if obedience isn’t about mindless rule-following, but about whose voice we trust to help us interpret our reality? January Jaxon and Andrew McRae dive into the linguistic roots of the word “obedience” and draw parallels with René Girard’s concept of méconnaissance, or misrecognition. Moving from the neuroscience of human attention to Simone Weil’s theology of affliction, they look at how “The Father of Lies” warps the human imagination and how the Crucifixion re-orients us to the truth that God withholds nothing from us — not even God’s own life.

You’ll hear:

• The roots of obedience as “listening toward” and why that might change how we understand the Fall
• Why Jesus calls Satan “a murderer from the beginning,” even though we never see the devil raise a blade
• How Jesus exposes the lie at the heart of accusation without retaliating against his accusers
• Why disbelieving lies requires more than tearing false stories down — it requires learning what truth feels like in the body

PLUS January demonstrates The Work of Byron Katie, a practice of embodied inquiry that can help us stop obeying the lies that keep us trapped.

“What I feel most is the infectious enthusiasm and life force that is created between the hosts. It holds a spark that can rekindle faith. Their connection is palpable and the perspectives they’re bringing to the conversation breathe life back into the teachings.”
—Jessica Peterson

Ideal for listeners interested in Girardian mimetic theory, Internal Family Systems as a spiritual practice, and the neuroscience of human attention.

Chapters:

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:10) - Presentation: Disbelieving the Devil's Lies
• (34:11) - Is background listening "listening toward"?
• (39:51) - Is willful disobedience even a thing?
• (43:08) - Are lack and abundance really opposites?
• (54:59) - Wait. Does that mean life is a bigger reality than death?!
• (01:04:26) - Compassion, attentive presence, and Girardian mediation
• (01:11:09) - What does it mean to "stop listening toward" our shame & blame?
• (01:20:40) - How do we learn to recognize truth, then?
• (01:32:05) - Introducing The Work of Byron Katie
• (01:45:09) - January demonstrates The Work
• (02:07:48) - Questioning our misrecognitions renders violence less contagious
• (02:13:26) - End credits

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Note: This podcast is a personal exploration of theology, creativity, and human experience. January Jaxon and Andrew McRae are not medical or mental health professionals, and nothing in this podcast should be understood as medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Our discussions are general and are not a substitute for personalized care. If you need medical or mental health support, we encourage you to seek care from a qualified professional.

Creators and Guests

Host

Andrew McRae

Co-host

Host

January Jaxon

Co-host

What is Theology Kills?

Toxic theologies have been weaponized to wound, but the gospel was always meant to be medicine. January Jaxon and Andrew McRae blend Internal Family Systems theory with the mimetic anthropology of René Girard to uncover a Christ-centered theology of integrity that heals shame, fosters embodiment, and creates contagious peace in the midst of a world at war. Balancing scriptural insight with personal reflections and simple everyday practices, each episode explores the ways that violence warps our creativity, our relationships, and our sense of self — and how divine love sets us free.

[00:00:00] Andrew: I’m not so sure that, “Oh, misrecognition is bad, so we just need to recognize reality!”

[00:00:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:00:06] Andrew: I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the Real is,

[00:00:08] January: I’m not even sure that’s possible.

[00:00:10] Andrew: It’s too big, right? It’s like, the Real is God. And you’re not just gonna be like, ‘Oh, God! I got it.’

[00:00:17] January: Yep.

[00:00:17] Andrew: Click! I took a picture with my smartphone, and now I can text to my friends, ‘Hey, check it out. What I saw, it’s God!’ Like, no! I don’t know that we’re actually gonna ever recognize the Real, but we will come into a recognition of our misrecognition as a misrecognition, and that will be instantaneous.

[00:00:41] January: If you’ve ever wondered why religion that proclaims unconditional love can feel so full of hatred, shame, and violence, you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong to want something more from Christian faith.

I’m January Jaxon,

[00:00:56] Andrew: and I'm Andrew McRae,

[00:00:58] January: and this is Theology Kills, a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive.

My favorite name for the Devil in scripture is the Father of Lies. In chapter eight of John’s gospel, Jesus calls the devil “a murderer from the beginning.” But here’s a question I’ve never heard a church talk about. Where in the Christian Bible do we ever see the devil kill someone?

Well, spoiler alert, we don’t. We see the devil point fingers. We don’t see him personally raise a blade. So what’s Jesus talking about?

When we began this season of Theology Kills, we explored the cycle of the Creative Journey as a movement from anxiety driven Doing to trust oriented Being. We used pregnancy as our guiding metaphor because creativity, like pregnancy, is about experiencing a process — not achieving an outcome.

First, we looked at Eve. We watched what happened when a perception of lack fractured her trust in God. Accusation colonized her imagination. She stopped trusting God as her good and loving provider, and instead she trusted the serpent’s story that God was withholding something from her, that God was an obstacle to her enoughness. This image of herself as lacking something she ought to have led to shame. And that shame later escalated through her children into blame, rivalry and murder.

Eve’s imagination, distorted by the serpent’s lie made way for violence in the world.

And yet then we read about Mary. At Cana, Mary launches the revelation of Jesus to the world with four words: “They have no wine.” Where Eve tried to eliminate her lack, Mary just held it out to God and trusted that God would do something interesting with it. Instead of imagining her natural creaturely limits as a character deficit she should hide or strive to fix, Mary perceived it as a site of creative opportunity, a place for God to “do a new thing.”

Mary’s imagination, oriented toward God’s reality, made way for the Messiah in the world.

You are never not creating. If you still don’t believe me, eight episodes in, just think about the batshit scenarios your anxiety invents at 3:00 AM.

Your imagination is clearly alive and well. The question isn’t whether you’re creative. The question is what you’re creating, and what spirit is moving you when you do — either the fragmenting spirit of the serpent, or the integrating Holy Spirit of Christ.

We tend to imagine creativity as some elite skill reserved for artists or entrepreneurs or people who are otherwise doing some kind of artsy thing professionally. But that’s our culture’s definition of creativity, not God’s.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines create as, “To bring into being. To form out of nothing. To cause to exist.” In other words, like pregnancy, bearing something into the world that’s never existed before. And the truth is, we’re doing this all the time. Every single choice we make is a layer in the collage that is our life.

While some of the elements you’re using to compose that collage might look like some of the elements that show up in the next person’s life too, the total effect over time is never gonna look anything like the next person’s. Your very existence is a singular work of art.

The original sin that exiled humanity from paradise is usually characterized as a disobedience, and it is. But I want to nuance our understanding of that word beyond what most of us absorb from pop culture.

The colloquial meaning of obedience is something like an imposed obligation to follow someone else’s rules, whether you want to or not. But in Latin, oboedire is made from two components. The prefix ob—, meaning toward, and the verb audire, meaning to hear. Taken together, the word literally means something like to listen toward. And so linguistically, obedience is rooted in the idea of listening attentively to someone.

In classical usage, the act of listening toward someone carried a clear implication. The person being listened to had authority. To obedire someone was not simply to hear them in a neutral way; it meant to comply with them or follow their direction. The hearing in question was responsive hearing, listening in such a way that one’s actions aligned with what had been said.

The implication is similar in Koine Greek, where hypakōe, which I’m sure I’m mispronouncing, translates as “to hear under.” And so obedience in both the Latin and Greek traditions combines these ideas of attention and action: listening carefully to another voice, then acting in accordance with what one hears.

To obey someone is not merely to register their words. It is to let those words shape what you do next because you have granted the speaker authority.

This history reveals something subtle about how obedience functions in the biblical imagination. If obedience begins with listening, then the deeper question is not simply whether a person’s actions are quote-unquote “correct.”

The deeper question is, whose voice are they granting the authority to determine what’s correct?

Scripture repeatedly frames human faithfulness in exactly these terms. “Hear the word of the Lord,” says Jeremiah. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” says Samuel. “Hear, o Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” says chapter 6 of Deuteronomy. Jesus describes his followers by saying, “My sheep hear my voice,” and “Let anyone with ears to hear, listen.” So in the biblical sense, obedience is less about mindless obligatory rule keeping and more about whose voice you trust enough to shape your mental picture of reality.

It’s that trust that’s murdered in chapter 3 of Genesis when the serpent says to Eve, “For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you’ll be like God, knowing good and evil.” That’s the moment when Eve stops trusting God’s version of reality and starts trusting the serpent’s instead.

She gives ultimate authority to the wrong relationship. She “listens toward” someone who does not love her. She trusts her newly imagined perception of lack instead of her lifelong experience of abundance. That’s what makes the devil “a murderer from the beginning.” That’s what makes him the Father of Lies.

Because here’s the thing: attention is not neutral. It is creative.

The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil argued that attention is the most fundamental act of the human soul. For Weil, attention is not merely concentration or mental effort. That’s a kind of grasping. Undistracted attention is nothing less than the orientation of the whole person toward reality.

For Weil, love itself is a form of attention. To love someone is to look at them without reducing them to a role in our own story, without turning them into an obstacle, rival, or resource. Loving attention allows us to receive the other person as they actually are.

In this sense, attention is the opposite of accusation. Accusation narrows our gaze until we see only the fragment of reality that confirms our suspicion. Attention opens our gaze so that the full truth of a person and the full context of God’s loving presence can come back into view.

Seen this way, the serpent’s deception in Eden is not simply a lie about God. It is a distraction of her attention. Eve’s gaze is redirected away from the abundance of the garden and toward the single symbol of what she does not possess. Her attention collapses onto lack, and once that narrowing takes hold her entire mental map of the world reorganizes around it.

Eve’s grasping after the fruit is the material outcome of this mistaken perception, of “attending toward” a voice who isn’t telling her the truth. It’s mistaking the serpent’s lie for God’s reality. Disobedience in the sense of misbehavior is merely the downstream result of looking at the world from a creature’s perspective instead of from a divine perspective; through the serpent’s eyes, instead of through God’s.

When we mistake God as our withholder and not our provider, we build our inner and outer lives around defending ourselves from God instead of partnering with God.

In René Girard’s mimetic theory, the French word méconnaissance, usually translated into English as misrecognition, points to exactly this distorted perception as the heart of human violence. We misrecognize our rivals as the cause of conflicts we’ve participated in creating and this misrecognition spirals mimetically into scapegoating. Communities sincerely believe that our victim is guilty and that our violent response toward them is justified.

For Girard, culture itself is built upon and sustained by this foundational misrecognition. He argues, and I agree, that the reason the biblical revelation is unique among sacred texts is that it progressively exposes and disrupts misrecognition by unveiling the innocence of our victims and the self-deceit of our accusations.

But Girard’s work focuses on how this story unfolds socially and interpersonally. I wanna talk about how this misrecognition begins inside each and every one of us, and how Christ shines the light that exposes its lies.

This misrecognition of reality has its roots in our biological mediation as well as our social mediation. Humans are mimetic creatures, but we’re also embodied creatures. We are shaped simultaneously and interrelatedly by the voices around us and by the structure of our own nervous system.

One of the defining features of the human brain is that it operates through two hemispheres that attend to reality differently. Both hemispheres are always active, and both are necessary, but they’re doing very different jobs.

Broadly speaking, the right hemisphere is oriented toward relationships and systems. It takes in the world as a whole. It tracks the broader situation we’re part of — the physical, emotional, social, and environmental context that gives meaning to what we’re experiencing. In other words, the right hemisphere allows us to encounter reality as it is, as something alive and relational.

The left hemisphere’s specialty is precision and control. It narrows its focus to particular details, breaking the interrelated world down into manageable pieces so that we can categorize, analyze, and manipulate them. This capacity is essential. Without it, we couldn’t build tools, learn language, or organize complex societies. But the left hemisphere works by simplifying reality. It constructs an internal model, a reduced representation that’s easier to handle than the full complexity of what is.

Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist puts it this way: the left hemisphere gives us a map of reality. Maps are incredibly useful as long as we remember that they aren’t the actual landscape.

Under healthy conditions, the two hemispheres work together in a kind of rhythm, and in McGilchrist’s view, it’s this unusually high degree of integration between the left and right hemispheres that primarily distinguishes humans from other animals with this kind of brain hemisphere specialization.

The right hemisphere encounters the world first, receiving the broad field of context. Then the left hemisphere steps in to analyze discrete elements within that context. When they stay in that relationship to each other, with the right hemisphere primary and the left hemisphere supporting it, our perception stays pretty grounded in reality. The details we notice remain connected to the larger situation they belong to.

In other words, these hemispheres each mediate our perception of reality. When the left hemisphere mediates our perception, the world appears as a collection of separate objects to analyze, control, or compete over. When the right hemisphere mediates our perception, the world appears as a living web of relationships we’re already part of.

But McGilchrist notes that the left hemisphere is especially prone to a particular kind of certainty. Because it works with simplified representations, it tends to mistake its own model of reality for reality itself. It becomes convinced that the picture it’s constructed is complete, even when enormous parts of the living context have actually been filtered out.

Biologically, the left hemisphere misrecognizes its simplified model as the whole truth.

When our perception organizes itself around this misrecognition, something crucial disappears from our view. The living world gets flattened into a set of objects. Other people stop appearing to us as subjects to relate to and start appearing as problems to solve, competitors to defeat, or resources to acquire.

And that starts to look eerily familiar, if you’ve spent time with the biblical story of humanity’s Fall.

The serpent doesn’t introduce Eve to a completely fabricated world. The serpent simply reinterprets the world she’s already inhabiting. God did say something about that tree. Eve really doesn’t have the fruit, or — evidently! — wisdom. The observation itself isn’t totally false. The context is.

The serpent offers Eve a new interpretation of her experience, one that strips the fact of her lack of wisdom from the context of her lived experience that God loves her and provides for her needs. Without this loving relational context, of course lack seems like a scary thing, a deficiency that needs fixing. Quite naturally, this lack of context produces in Eve an interpretation built on suspicion instead of trust.

Through the serpent’s eyes, suddenly God is withholding instead of providing. God is the obstacle to what she needs. Once that deceitful frame is accepted, her perception reorganizes itself around the false story. The same garden, the same tree, the same God suddenly appear in an entirely different light.

When our perception collapses into the left hemisphere’s narrow frame, accurate observations can still be made, but they become dangerously misleading. They’re fragments of truth severed from the larger story they belong to. They feel convincing precisely because they’re built from real details. She does lack wisdom! But in isolation, those details no longer tell the truth. What began as a shift in obedience from listening toward God’s voice, to listening toward the serpent becomes a shift in perception, and that shift in perception is the misrecognition in which accusation, rivalry, and violence take root.

It would be easy, from this perspective, to see humanity as doomed. To see this tendency hardwired into our nervous system and assume that nothing can be done to rescue us from our self-deception and violence if our own biology is working against us.

And unfortunately, that’s where René Girard seemed to lean toward the end of his own life. He saw that the scapegoat mechanism no longer worked to restrain our violence, but he couldn’t see anything else emerging to take its place. He saw humanity’s only options as violent apocalypse or repentance and conversion, and I don’t think any of us can blame him for thinking repentance seemed unlikely.

But with every respect for the brilliant Girard, I wonder if perhaps he was, in his own turn, missing a bigger context within which these facts of our biology and our rivalry are located. The Maker of Heaven and Earth is just as alive and active today as They were in the Garden of Eden. We have a Creator who loves us, and who never stops trying to rescue us from the lies we’ve bought into.

Our God inhabits creation alongside us in order to transform us from within.

The problem began with a voice we listened toward. Our imagination was captured by a misrecognition of reality. Humanity has been inducted into a perspective that distorts everything we see. That means the healing has to take place at the level where the distortion occurred. Instead of bypassing the system of mediation, God enters into it.

This is the staggering claim at the center of Christianity. God does not attempt to correct humanity’s misrecognition from outside the human condition.

God personally comes down into it.

In Jesus, God becomes human, not simply appearing among us like an angelic apparition, but inhabiting the same mimetic and material world we do. Jesus lives inside the same system of influence, imitation, rivalry, and imagination that shapes every human life.

He doesn’t arrive as a teacher spouting truer facts about God. He arrives as a revelation of a truer context.

Jesus becomes our Divine Mediator, a human life that corrects our misrecognition by revealing unambiguously what God is actually like. Throughout the gospels, Jesus embodies a God who is never against humanity, never withholding from humanity, and never violent toward humanity.

But of course, here’s where things get tricky, because from the moment that new mediation emerges inside human society, it comes into conflict with the system already in place.

From the instant Jesus is born, he is perceived as a threat by the deceived powers of this world. God came to earth in the most vulnerable, the least threatening position possible — that of an infant born to a financially poor family from a historically scapegoated and politically oppressed people. King Herod sees this infant as a threat so dire it leads him to slaughter an entire generation of babies in self-defense.

2000 years later, that misrecognition is so obvious to us, it’s appalling, but Herod couldn’t see it.

The misrecognitions only pile up from there. Jesus is called a false teacher, a law breaker, a political threat. The interpretations of reality he offers destabilize the religious and political institutions that depend on fear, wealth, and social prestige for their stability — interpretations grounded in relational trust rather than bureaucratic control, in divine abundance rather than economic competition, in a God who is a loving Father and a humble servant instead of a powerful conqueror and bloody avenger.

The religious officials insist that his teachings are spiritually and socially dangerous. The authorities blame him for provoking civil unrest. Leaders who fear the collapse of everything they’re responsible for protecting — and who among us wouldn’t fear such a thing? — manipulate their people.

The community are misled to see Jesus as a problem to eliminate. Eventually, the entire misguided system unites in a single conclusion: this man must die.

Jesus becomes the victim onto whom the tensions of the community are projected. The accusation appears unanimous. The priests, the politicians, and the people all participate.

Jesus is violently and unjustly crucified.

Jesus, God’s anointed Messiah, the man who fed 5,000 hungry souls, who walked on water, who cast out demons, who raised the dead, could presumably have rained down fire and brimstone on those who accused him. And yet instead of responding with reciprocal violence, instead of defending himself or retaliating against his accusers, Jesus remains faithful to the divinely loving context he has trusted throughout his life.

Bloodied, beaten, humiliated, and nailed to a cross, Jesus does not misrecognize us.

“Father, forgive them,” he prays, “for they do not know what they are doing.” When he dies, the lie at the heart of our serpent-mediated perception is exposed once and for all. God withholds nothing from us, and never has — not even God’s own divine life.

The cross does something far more radical than settling a cosmic legal dispute. It reveals the true context of human existence: all powerful, all encompassing, all forgiving love. By refusing to retaliate against us to the last, Jesus introduces a new nonviolent model into our mimetic system. His freely chosen death makes possible a whole new world, a world in which violence is now recognizable for the utter injustice it is.

The cross that seemed like the defeat of God’s project was, in fact, its culminating achievement. At the moment when fearful accusation reaches its most violent expression, God reveals whose side God has been on the entire time. Not with the crowd pointing fingers. With the victim they pointed at.

And recognizing that truth, my friends, is our invitation to repentance.

We’re going to talk more about repentance in our next episode, but before we talk about what we can do differently, we have to talk about what we can quit doing. We have to quit giving the serpent our attention.

For Simone Weil, the concept of affliction is central, and by this she doesn’t mean simple suffering. She uses the term to describe a bone deep degree of human devastation — a condition in which suffering penetrates so deeply into a person’s existence that it picks apart their very humanity.

Weil insists that ordinary suffering, even severe suffering, doesn’t automatically sink to the level of affliction. People can experience tremendous pain, illness, grief, or loss while still retaining a sense of dignity, meaning, and relationship. Affliction occurs when suffering collapses the structures that normally hold a human life together.

One of Weil’s most quoted descriptions appears in her book, Gravity and Grace. She writes that affliction is suffering that, “seizes the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery.”

What she means is that affliction does more than hurt us. It reduces the afflicted person in the eyes of others. Their agency is stripped. Their voice is silenced. Their suffering isolates them from their social context and even from their own sense of self.

In affliction, a person begins to experience themselves as something less than human: invisible, contaminated, outcast.

For Weil, affliction almost always includes three intertwined dimensions. The first is physical suffering: illness, violence, poverty, imprisonment, or other forms of material deprivation.

The second is social degradation, in which the afflicted person becomes marginalized or treated as disposable.

And the third is through psychological and spiritual disintegration, in which the suffering is so overwhelming and isolating, the afflicted person’s inner world collapses. Meaning disappears. Hope becomes nearly impossible. Even the sense of being loved by God can feel inaccessible.

Yet Weil also insisted that affliction has a peculiar theological significance. Because affliction strips away every illusion of control or self-sufficiency, it exposes the radical vulnerability at the heart of human existence. In that stripped condition, a person is freed to encounter God, not as a reward for virtue, but as pure grace. A love that comes from entirely outside the mechanisms and machinations of the world.

This is why Weil was so drawn to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. She saw Christ’s death not only as suffering, but as the ultimate affliction. On the cross, Jesus experiences physical torture, social abandonment, and the inner spiritual desolation expressed in the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In Weil’s interpretation, Christ enters fully into the condition where the afflicted feel abandoned by both humanity and God. By doing so, he reveals that even in the deepest experience of abandonment, divine love remains eternally present.

But another crucial aspect of Weil’s thinking is that affliction tends to destroy attention. When suffering becomes overwhelming, the mind often collapses into numbness, panic, or obsession. The afflicted person struggles to perceive reality clearly because pain hijacks their field of awareness.

This is why Weil believed that the highest form of compassion is attentive presence, the willingness to remain gently and patiently focused on someone who is afflicted without trying to explain their suffering away or impose our own meaning on it. For Weil, genuine love in the presence of affliction means allowing the afflicted person to remain a subject rather than reducing them to a problem to be solved.

She claimed that attention restores, however slightly, the humanity that affliction attempts to unmake.

And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for eight episodes, I hope you’re hearing a resonance right now, because patient, compassionate, undistracted attention is exactly the mechanism by which Internal Family Systems, or IFS, restores a person to wholeness.

IFS is a model of psychotherapy that emerged from an understanding that the human psyche is naturally multiple. I’m not a singular ‘me’, but a system composed of distinct parts. And these parts can come to be shaped, or burdened, by past experiences of what Simone Weil would probably call affliction: trauma, neglect, or dehumanizing interpretations of reality inherited from our social context.

If the pain these parts carry becomes overwhelming, some parts of me can exile the parts of me who feel that pain, essentially ganging up and kicking out a scapegoat in order to restore a fragile stability to the psyche, just like in René Girard’s mimetic theory.

But these exiled parts of me aren’t gone. They’re just relegated to my unconscious. They still carry my pain, and they can still hijack my imagination, perception and behavior. IFS teaches us to engage these inner voices with patient attention, noticing their presence without judgment and attending gently to their experiences of pain.

And this is where McGilchrist’s neuroscience resonates, too. Practicing IFS helps us operate more automatically from the right hemisphere’s relational, integrative orientation, taking in the broader context of all our parts without excluding any of them. Our wounded inner exiles are no longer ignored or suppressed. They are received with hospitality, fully seen with all the nuance of their hopes and fears, and integrated back into the larger system inside us.

In doing so, IFS makes Simone Weil’s prescription practical, giving attention to each part of ourselves and receiving it as a subject rather than an object. By giving our parts this kind attention, the system gradually begins to reorganize itself around trust and relationship rather than fear and fragmentation.

The result is a shift in perception that extends beyond the self. When we learn to approach our tender inner parts with the care and attention Weil describes, we also cultivate the capacity to perceive other afflicted people as full complex beings rather than as rivals.

IFS in this sense is not merely a form of therapy. It’s a spiritual practice of detaching from the serpent’s accusations and giving our attention to love and truth instead.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to reduce Christian repentance to the exercise of a spiritual discipline. “Christianity,” as my pastor is fond of saying, “is not a self-improvement project.” Repentance isn’t a goal to achieve. It’s a transformation to receive.

Repentance is the nadir of the Creative Journey, the descent to the Ground of All Being. It’s the return to reality so that we can begin the redemptive arc of trust and integration. It’s the relinquishing of our misrecognition and the remediation of our perception through the loving eyes of the Holy Spirit of Christ.

Sin entered the world by colonizing the human imagination. So its antidote begins by letting Jesus heal our imagination. It’s the healing of our imagination that heals our méconnaissance.

The work of the Holy Spirit, then, is to induct us into this new imagination, to “guide us into all truth,” and teach us to see the world the way God sees it: peacefully, lovingly, attentively.

This is why conquering the serpent cannot mean going to war against him. To fight him head on would be to give him our attention, and the serpent’s power depends on our attention. Rather, when we stop listening toward our stories of shame and blame, when we refuse to obey the serpent by giving him our mental bandwidth, those lies begin to lose hold on our imagination.

Moment by moment, we commit to the discipline of withdrawing our belief from shame and blame. As we devote our attention back toward Christ’s love, the neural pathways that reinforce our false perceptions gradually weaken and decay.

We are creative beings made in the image of a Creator God, and by listening toward God, we create toward the Kingdom of Heaven. And slowly, the world begins to look different. Not because reality has changed. But because we are finally remembering how to see the whole picture.

[00:34:12] Andrew: I was curious if in your mind the idea of listening toward can be associated with… you know how folks can just have the TV on in the background

[00:34:21] January: Mm.

[00:34:21] Andrew: or music that you’re listening to, but you’re doing something else. But it’s just, it’s there. it’s atmospheric. As I was thinking about ‘listening toward,’ sort of, it brought to mind that. And it’s worrisome!

There’s some talk radio that people have got on the background, and I think it puts bugs in their brains and rots their way of thinking in ways that are not helpful.

Is ‘listening toward,’ as you’re using it here in the presentation — well, number one, am I right to think it can’t be one-to-one? Because could anybody in the ancient world have been ‘listening toward’ in that sense? Like anybody gonna have

[00:34:53] January: Right!

[00:34:54] Andrew: just content playing in the background, not ‘cause you care about it, just ‘cause it’s gonna fill the air. But I don’t, I don’t know. As you were writing this, did you make any connection at all to that sort of atmospheric listening that people do?

[00:35:07] January: That’s an excellent question. That wasn’t what I had in my head when I was writing it. I was thinking of listening as a synonym for attention, just in terms of ‘attending toward.’ Which is not what people are doing when they’re listening to that kind of atmospheric background noise.

But you’re bringing up a really important point that even when we’re not paying full attention, if we’ve got that stuff in the background, it’s still registering in our brains in some way. And it’s contributing to our mental Everybody.

[00:35:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:38] January: We all have an internal quote-unquote “everybody.”

[00:35:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:41] January: You know, we’ll make a joke about, “Oh, everybody thinks—” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out that everybody does not think that. You have a very specific and narrow mental Everybody.

[00:35:52] Andrew: Yeah. Oh, I’m gonna derail this. I shouldn’t, but that mental Everybody, I — yeah, there’s a certain president that is fond of tweeting, “Many people are saying—!”

[00:36:02] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:02] Andrew: And, and I got to the point whenever I would hear, “Many people are saying,” I would just mentally replace “people” with “billionaires.” And so, “Many billionaires are saying—”

[00:36:13] January: You’re not wrong.

[00:36:14] Andrew: And it started to make sense… what he was saying, a little bit better.

[00:36:16] January: Yep. Yep. That’s exactly what we’re talking about here.

[00:36:20] Andrew: But yeah. I get how there’s a certain non-attentiveness to the atmospheric listening that I’m talking about.

[00:36:25] January: Yeah.

[00:36:26] Andrew: But at the same time, I would—

[00:36:27] January: But it does form us! Yeah.

[00:36:29] Andrew: Yeah. And when it’s not there, if you’re in the habit of doing it and it’s gone, you do notice that.

[00:36:35] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:35] Andrew: Right? And so that speaks to the fact that it is grabbing a part of your attention. If its absence means something, then

[00:36:42] January: Absolutely.

[00:36:42] Andrew: you are attending to it in some way. Or it is, maybe it’s attending to you in a way. I don’t know. I dunno how to make sense of that.

[00:36:51] January: Well, it — you know, it’s funny, ‘cause one of the things that I’ve had to confront the last year is how much time I’m spending listening to us talk!

I so often have the recording on in the background while I’m washing dishes or whatever and I’m making mental notes about like, oh, I need to make this edit, or that edit, or whatever. And it has occurred to me that, like, should I be worried about this?

Are we necessarily the people that I want forming my attention to this—?

[00:37:18] Andrew: No, that’s, yeah.

[00:37:21] January: But the content has felt so rich. I mean, you ask any of my friends how much my life has just blossomed in the last year as we’ve been working on this. And that’s partly cause the theology is good that we’re talking about. At least, it’s life giving for me.

[00:37:35] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:37:35] January: And it’s also ‘cause our friendship is really rich. So,

[00:37:39] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:37:39] January: in that one specific case, I feel like it’s been a very good influence for me. Even though I, I definitely— once we’re done with it, I’m gonna be taking a break for a few months just to be able to get back into some of the silence in my own head, because it’s too much listening!

[00:37:53] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that sounds, that sounds about right.

[00:37:58] January: Yeah. But yeah, if that was news in the background or if that was, critical voices of family members in the background of my mental, like — that would be really, really toxic.

[00:38:08] Andrew: Yeah. Well, to what extent is obedience an appropriate term for what’s happening to people’s brains, do you think?

[00:38:17] January: It doesn’t feel inappropriate. Listening to it in passing is one thing, but giving it that much room even in the background of our mental attention all the time — that is a conscious creative choice that we are making.

[00:38:30] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:38:31] January: Or an unconscious creative choice.

[00:38:32] Andrew: Hmm. Yeah.

[00:38:34] January: And it is creating something in us. It is forming us. And I would use the word obedience for that now, after doing this research and writing this episode. I am thinking about obedience very, very differently than I did.

[00:38:48] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:38:49] January: And I’m gonna be a lot more discerning about the stuff that I have on in the background while I’m doing things, cause I have been able to notice the differences between different influences, if you will. So, yeah, I would invite people to be more consciously aware of that, and just be thinking about that as they come away from this podcast.

And maybe there’s all kinds of resistance in them, and they’re like, “No, absolutely not! I’m not obeying anything that this news station is saying.”

[00:39:17] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:39:17] January: Okay. I’m not in your head. I don’t know. Maybe you’re entirely correct about that. I’m just extending an invitation to consider it. I have noticed it in myself.

[00:39:28] Andrew: Does it, does that mean our listeners are obeying us, January? I’m freaking out all of a sudden.

[00:39:33] January: If they’re doing like I’m doing and listening to it 1700 times, then we might have a problem.

[00:39:43] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:39:43] January: But I’m not really worried about anybody doing that with our content.

[00:39:47] Andrew: Yeah. I don’t think that — yeah. Nobody’s gonna put us on loop, that’s for sure.

[00:39:49] January: I, I don’t see it happening.

[00:39:51] Andrew: Okay, so here’s a question. If we take the biblical understanding of obedience as you describe it in the presentation, are acts of disobedience, are they even a thing?

Or is it just distraction? Is that all we’re talking about?

[00:40:10] January: I mean, the short answer is yes, I do think that what we call disobedience, in the sense of quote-unquote “incorrect” behavior, I think that that comes out of distracted attention.

[00:40:22] Andrew: Mm.

[00:40:22] January: And I’m saying that as somebody with ADHD, right? So like I don’t have any expectation of undistracted attention for humanity. That’s not a thing.

[00:40:32] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:34] January: I don’t mean to set us up with a different set of shoulds that we gotta be listening to. That’s not what this podcast is about. But what I do want to do is orient us in a direction that we can keep moving toward when we realize we’re out of it.

I’m using a lot of technical language here, but yeah, in terms of disobedience simply being, “the direction of my attention has been mediated to me by the wrong mediator,” I’m looking at the world through the Serpent’s, clingy, achieving, correct-behavior, everybody’s-a-rival-for-me-to-be-in-competition- with eyes instead of God’s loving gaze.

And I think that that’s one of the things that God sees when God is forgiving us for all of these things. It’s not like we had any say in the matter. We inherited that mediation from the foundation of humanity, whenever the heck that was. It’s not our quote-unquote “fault.” We’re responsible for what we do with it; we as individuals get a choice about how we’re gonna respond to that and what we’re gonna do with it.

I am responsible for the choices that I make in that regard. But. There is not a human being in existence, including Jesus Christ, who did not inherit the social influence of the serpent’s gaze. And as far as we know, Jesus is the only person who ever managed to not fall into that temptation. But from that perspective, like... of course God forgives us. Of course he does. You didn’t have any choice about the influences that you got born into.

[00:42:05] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:42:07] January: Were you thinking something different about it?

[00:42:09] Andrew: No, no. I, I’m with you. Disobedience in the frame of a rule-based, here’s what you ought to do—do it. Okay, I understand what I’m supposed to do. Now, am I gonna do it or not?

And then if you decide, no, no, I’m not gonna do it, even though someone tells me I should — maybe I believe I should, but I’m not gonna do it. That sort of willful disobedience is still a form of attention, but it’s that displacement again with regards to God. If you ever think you’re willfully disobeying, God, you’ve created something in your head.

[00:42:43] January: Yeah.

[00:42:44] Andrew: That’s, that’s—

[00:42:45] January: You’re imagining a picture and then disobeying that picture.

[00:42:49] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

[00:42:51] January: Yeah.

[00:42:51] Andrew: That’s willful disobedience of God. It’s a misrecognition as you say in the presentation.

[00:42:56] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:57] Andrew: And I can’t, I can’t tease that out. I wish I could just turn and exposit a bit on that, but I’m not sure I can off the cuff, but I am pretty confident that’s, that’s how I feel about it.

Alright. You say that Eve trusts her newly imagined perception of lack instead of her lifelong experience of abundance and—yeah, I think I’ve said before, I’m tracking this whole episode. It’s really fun to jump around from Genesis to John to Simone Weil to IFS to everything. It’s really cool. But, yeah, I’m being nitpicky here.

[00:43:29] January: Good.

[00:43:30] Andrew: Her newly imagined perception of lack — this, she trusts instead of her lifelong experience of abundance. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Maybe I’m just rephrasing things that you’ve already said in the presentation and I just need to say it myself out loud in my own words in order to get it. But initially, when I saw lack and abundance put side to side, as if one instead of the other, I found it troubling.

[00:43:59] January: Mm.

[00:44:00] Andrew: And I’m asking myself, and I wanted to ask you, what if lack is not on par with abundance? And by that I mean, what if these two aren’t oppositional, or at least not necessarily so?

Suppose there’s a type of abundance that just transcends any and every lack? And notice that I didn’t say an abundance that fills

[00:44:22] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:23] Andrew: any and every lack, or, or makes them go away. No. If you’re bothered enough to drive something off, then you ain’t transcended it yet, have you? So the lack is still a lack. It’s just that this abundance, and I’m gonna say this divine abundance, is so

[00:44:41] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:42] Andrew: God-blessed abundant — and I mean that quite literally, I’m not being euphemistic! — this God-blessed abundance, that it’s not the least bit bothered by any lack whatsoever.

Now, you can allow what you’re lacking to define you.

[00:44:57] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:58] Andrew: And that’s what Eve did. And she believed a lie. Because the truth is, what’s gonna define you is what you choose to do with the lack.

[00:45:09] January: Exactly.

[00:45:09] Andrew: And notice that I say choose, because it does, it boils down to choice. If you don’t have a choice — if the lack demands one thing and only one thing fill it — then, firstly you’re believing something that isn’t true. And secondly, unfortunately, you’re allowing the lack to define you, at least in your own mind.

It, it never does actually define you, but we can believe that that lack defines us.

And that’s where I feel like this does verge toward the giant theme of Season One of Theology Kills: creativity. A lack is an openness; it’s a space. It’s an opportunity.

I feel like, to parse that sentence exactly: she — Eve — listens towards someone who does not love her. She trusts her newly imagined perception of lack instead of trusting her lifelong experience of abundance. And if you trust your lifelong experience of abundance, then when you run into something that’s missing or something that’s gone, something that’s withheld, it doesn’t have to be threatening. It doesn’t have to be unnerving.

[00:46:26] January: Exactly.

[00:46:27] Andrew: I actually saw this in a, in an episode of a comic you’ve heard me mention before: Space Boy. It turns out — this was actually a really beautiful thing, and I’m spoiling so much for you, but Amy’s the heroine.

And so she has this encounter with one of the other characters where he’s sort of mysterious and nobody knows who he is and like he’s at school, but nobody talks to him, and he’s very aloof, and he’s kind of weird.

Anyway, her friends get worried about her spending time with this guy, and they find out that he said his name’s Oliver, but they’re like, oh, who’s Oliver? And they try to look, and there’s no records in the school of anybody named Oliver.

[00:47:02] January: Mm.

[00:47:03] Andrew: And so they are like, “There’s nobody named Oliver in the school. And, uh, if he’s lying about his name, what else is he lying to you about?”

[00:47:10] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:11] Andrew: And she’s, I mean, she’s a sophomore in high school, and I’m imagining in that state, like, this is real drama. This is really—

[00:47:19] January: Yeah.

[00:47:19] Andrew: Anyway, she just presents her doubts of like, “My overly curious friends have done this thing.

[00:47:24] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:24] Andrew: And there’s nobody named Oliver, and like, what’s going on?”

She just, she does exactly what Mary would do!

[00:47:32] January: Yay!

[00:47:32] Andrew: And with regards — and the opposite of what Eve would do. Like it was just the perfect literary instantiation of the theme, of like, if something’s missing and wrong, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost trust, right?

[00:47:43] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:44] Andrew: It just means you’ve got something that needs to be talked about.

[00:47:47] January: You’re curious about!

[00:47:48] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, I don’t know that we need to plug Space Boy in our podcast, but that, that was fun to see that.

[00:47:57] January: Yeah. And It’s a great illustration! So I love that. That’s darling. Thank you for sharing it.

But now I’ve lost track of the actual question. Where were we before?

[00:48:06] Andrew: Yeah. The actual thing was with regards to lack and abundance being not on par.

[00:48:11] January: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah! Not, not oppositional. Yes. Thank you, yes. Absolutely, absolutely. Abundance is so far beyond lack.

[00:48:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:48:21] January: And that’s part of the point that I want to communicate with this whole thing that Eve is going through, is that she’s lived her entire life in this transcendent abundance of the Garden of Eden. That’s literally all she’s known, up until this moment with the serpent.

[00:48:34] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:48:35] January: And to then get suckered into seeing this lack as something wrong with her, as something that needs to be fixed, as something that’s distressing — if that is held within the context of this lifetime of abundance that she has already experienced, no big deal. Right? Something to get curious about. Go ask God.

But if we’re gonna borrow the language of neuroscience, which I wanna be clear that I’m not trying to reduce scripture to neuroscience, but the lack becomes a map that she’s mistaking for the landscape. She’s got an idea about it. She’s got a story and interpretation about it

[00:49:15] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:49:15] January: and she’s mistaking that interpretation for reality when it isn’t.

[00:49:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:49:22] January: And her own lived experience has gotten exiled in the process of that. But the abundance is the bigger reality. That is still her experience, and the experience is right there for her to return to. It’s not lost to her just because she’s bought into this.

[00:49:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:49:38] January: It’s still there to bring her attention back to. And that might take effort and that might take practice we need help from mediators, maybe, to shift our attention back. You know, if her only mediator is the serpent from now on, she’s gonna be in trouble.

[00:49:53] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:49:53] January: And that’s another reason why it’s so important that God comes back in and gives us Abel, and gives us Seth, and isn’t leaving us to these mediators who have had their attention formed by the serpent’s stories. We do have God’s stories in the world. Always.

But yeah, you said it so brilliantly, they’re just not the same thing. They’re not equal.

[00:50:17] Andrew: Yeah. Okay, abundance is such that lack can be included.

[00:50:21] January: Yes. For me, it connects back to the Nagoski sisters and their book Burnout. How they talk so much about the oscillation

[00:50:29] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:29] January: going from one to the other and back again. That’s what we’re supposed to do with lack, is going from the abundance to the lack, and then back to the abundance because the abundance is trustworthy. But it’s the movement that is the growth and the creativity and like... the generative engine of that movement is what is supposed to create us.

[00:50:47] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:50:48] January: And maybe could have created us in a more positive direction, if humanity hadn’t happened in the particular way that it did. I think that other ways were possible.

[00:50:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:50:57] January: I don’t think my imagination is big enough to articulate what they could have been, but that’s just a thing that I feel in my bones, that

[00:51:04] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:51:04] January: it didn’t have to be this way. And because I feel that, I am confident that it does not have to be this way. And I’m determined to do whatever tiny, microscopic movement I’m capable of doing

[00:51:17] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:51:17] January: toward a different way of being human.

[00:51:20] Andrew: Yeah. I’m, I’m totally with you with that inclination that the feeling of just like, it didn’t have to start this way, but I’m convinced that it did. The particular lack that formed itself in us, we filled it with scapegoating.

[00:51:32] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:32] Andrew: We did that, and now it’s there. And it became a part of how we became who we are. And so to me that’s analogous to Christ’s wounds. He’s, he’s gonna have those wounds. His body will always carry those.

[00:51:46] January: Yeah.

[00:51:47] Andrew: And I think our species will carry that as well, the wounds of our origin.

[00:51:51] January: Yeah.

[00:51:51] Andrew: I do think that’s how humanity stumbled into its humanness. And it didn’t have to be. But if it’s true, if Girard’s theory of hominization is true, and I’ll just go ahead and call it a fact. I mean, it’s a theory, but then the fact of the matter would be: We are here. This is the world we live in.

[00:52:09] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:10] Andrew: Another thing, though. Lacan, who I know nothing about yet, I’ve just read a third of a book, and, and listened to some podcasts, he talks a lot about lack

[00:52:20] January: Mm, mm-hmm.

[00:52:21] Andrew: and excess. And everything I just said about lack — you don’t let lack define you, it’s how you respond to your lack that defines you — I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten that from Lacan. I don’t know, but think that’s right up his alley, that sort of thing. And so…

[00:52:35] January: Interesting.

[00:52:36] Andrew: But thinking through this, there’s a difference between lack and abundance, and lack and excess.

[00:52:44] January: Yes! Yes, there is.

[00:52:46] Andrew: Because I’m not sure that lack and excess aren’t oppositional. That might be like the number of donuts left in the box

[00:52:52] January: Yep.

[00:52:52] Andrew: at breakfast.

[00:52:53] January: Yep. Yep.

[00:52:53] Andrew: Like, either you got too many or not. Excess and lack might be. But abundance, I think there might be a, an interesting distinction to make between abundance and excess.

[00:53:04] January: Brené Brown has something that she says about that, and the language is gonna get confusing here because she’s using words differently than we’re using them. But she talks a lot about scarcity,

[00:53:12] Andrew: Mm.

[00:53:13] January: and fear of scarcity being a thing that really drives people. Which is lack, right? That’s what we’re talking about there. And she says that the opposite of scarcity is not abundance. The opposite of scarcity is just enough.

[00:53:27] Andrew: Mm-hmm. Okay.

[00:53:29] January: And I think that’s the difference that we’re getting at. I think what we’re calling abundance is what she would call enough.

[00:53:34] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:53:35] January: And what we’re calling excess is what she would call abundance.

[00:53:38] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so. I think you’re right. Yeah.

[00:53:41] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:42] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:53:43] January: But yeah I think that’s absolutely spot on.

[00:53:46] Andrew: And when you mentioned the Nagoskis talking about a swing back and forth.

[00:53:50] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:51] Andrew: What were the poles that were swinging back and forth that one?

[00:53:53] January: They’re talking about the oscillation between having energy and needing to rest.

[00:53:58] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:53:58] January: Because the point is to avoid getting all the way to the burnout thing, we have to rest before we get to burnout. We’re meant to be moving back and forth between having energy and refilling our energy. And when we try to stay in doing, doing, doing mode all the time, that’s when we end up in burnout.

[00:54:16] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:54:17] January: ‘Cause we’re not doing that oscillation, we’re not doing that movement that we need to be doing, that we are wired to be doing.

And I especially love their point about how much rest we actually need, scientifically speaking.

[00:54:29] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:54:29] January: Something like 42% of our time should be spent resting, and people just kind of go, “Blneagh?!”

[00:54:36] Andrew: 40?!

[00:54:37] January: Say what?!

[00:54:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:54:42] January: But I mean, if we took those numbers — just as a thought experiment, if we took those numbers in terms of abundance and lack. If we had enough fifty eight percent of the time and we had lack forty-two percent of the time, we probably would not feel like we had enough! But we would.

[00:54:59] Andrew: Yeah. So the big jump I’m tempted to make, but kind it’s kind of an outlandish claim — what we’re saying about abundance being transcendent and encompassing lack and being like, okay, yeah, lack’s here, and what are we gonna do with that?

Can we say the same thing about life and death? Where life is so transcendent that it’s just like, okay, death’s here. What do we do now?

[00:55:26] January: I, I mean, that has been my experience. I’ll tell you what.

[00:55:30] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:31] January: I can’t remember if I’ve said it on the podcast in previous episodes or if it’s just been conversations that you and I have had but I do have this very strong feeling of life and aliveness being sort of the default state of the universe, and that I’m pretty unbothered by the idea of my material death.

That has never distressed me meaningfully in my life. And I know I’m kind of weird that way. I know a lot of people who are very, very worried about it. I’m very worried about the pain that might happen on the way there.

[00:56:06] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:56:06] January: I don’t like that idea at all. But the idea of ceasing to exist in this form, in this particular consciousness, I’m just like, okay. Whatev.

[00:56:16] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:56:16] January: The atoms that make up me will disintegrate from this particular physical form and will become something else — like soil and bacteria and whatever consumes the remains of my body. And I will be no less alive as soil and bacteria than I am as a human.

[00:56:35] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:56:36] January: I don’t know what my consciousness is gonna do at that point. As far as I can tell, that’s pretty linked to the actual physical structure of my brain matter, so I don’t expect to have that anymore once my body passes away. But who knows? I mean, people have been having all kinds of crazy spiritual experiences for the entirety of human history and

[00:56:54] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:56:54] January: without an experience of my own to refer to, I don’t know what to think about any of that.

[00:56:59] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:57:00] January: But yeah it does seem to me that at least what the Christian story is talking about is that life is the bigger reality.

[00:57:09] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:57:10] January: And that if we start by telling ourselves that story instead of a story of death, all kinds of things become possible that did not seem possible from within a story of lack, a story of death.

[00:57:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:57:22] January: And that has reflected my experience very much. You know, James Alison talks about “living as if death is behind us,” and that has been my experience of Christian conversion in a big way.

I’ve already gone through the worst thing that will ever happen to me.

[00:57:39] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:57:40] January: I’m not saying that terrible, terrible things aren’t coming down the pike. I’m sure they will. That’s just human reality. But

[00:57:47] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:57:47] January: none of that can threaten me anymore. There is a bigger reality within which all of those experiences are now situated in advance. I just don’t have to worry about it.

It doesn’t mean I’m not going to worry about it, let’s be honest.

[00:58:01] Andrew: No, yeah…

[00:58:02] January: But yeah,

[00:58:03] Andrew: we’ll still worry about that.

[00:58:04] January: I don’t have to.

[00:58:05] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:58:06] January: I can let go of that as I encounter those experiences and just reground in trust when I encounter them. It’s not gonna make life easy, but it will make life a lot less suffering.

[00:58:18] Andrew: Yeah, ‘cause — how do I say this? I was gonna say the common sense usage of the word, but it’s more than common sense, it’s just, like, what is, right? If you murder someone, if there has been a murder, means somebody’s dead.

[00:58:33] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:34] Andrew: And that question, you’re like, well, when did we ever see the devil murder anybody? I don’t wanna call it an inconsistency ‘cause I, I think there’s a way to connect the dots here, but it’s just like, that hangup. I’m like, well, wait a second. Who did the devil kill in scripture?

Is it ‘cause we need to stop defining murder with death?

There’s one way to interpret, yeah, you won’t surely die if you eat of the fruit, and, and there’s linguistic reasons, apparently, to understand that as you’ll be doomed to death or you’ll be sentenced to death. It doesn’t necessarily need to be rendered as you’re gonna drop dead.

[00:59:06] January: Hmm.

[00:59:07] Andrew: But was there something about Eve that was murdered at that moment, even though she didn’t drop dead? With regards to how Jesus labels him: a murderer from the beginning?

[00:59:18] January: Yeah. I mean, the argument that I make in the presentation is that it’s her trust that was murdered.

But the way that you’re asking that question, I think the way that I would phrase it here in this moment in the conversation that we’re having is that murder isn’t just about a physical death, but it’s as much about an impediment to aliveness. A stumbling block to aliveness.

[00:59:43] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:59:43] January: And that’s what the serpent introduces, is a stumbling block that’s preventing her from receiving her aliveness from God as was intended. As she has been. Does that get at what you’re pointing at?

[00:59:57] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, that shift away from her lived experience to just some map. The serpent gave her a map, and not a helpful one.

I’m assuming you’d wanna draw distinctions between, some maps are useful for some things, in certain contexts, and some maps might never be useful, but are just easy to pick up.

Do you think God ever gives out maps? Or does God just give life?

[01:00:24] January: Mm. Uh huh. Is that why Jesus is the word of God? Is Jesus the map?

[01:00:31] Andrew: Hmm. Yeah.

[01:00:33] January: Becoming a finite human, he’s necessarily a reduction from the giant reality of what is.

[01:00:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:00:40] January: He is a symbol, pointing.

[01:00:42] Andrew: No, I really like that. I really like that. That any map — any map! — that God’s gonna construct would have to be alive.

[01:00:49] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:50] Andrew: Reductions, okay. Abstract away and make a map. Okay. But make something that’s dead? No, no, no, that’s not, that’s not what God’s gonna do, I don’t think.

So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I like that. I like that. To the extent that God’s theologian and coming up with theology, God is incarnating amongst us.

[01:01:12] January: Yes.

[01:01:13] Andrew: No less than incarnation.

[01:01:14] January: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this to you before, but one of the things that I experienced probably in the couple of months after my quote-unquote initial “conversion” experience, which is one of those weird things where I have a hard time using that word because it was a specific moment and also it unfolded over a year and a half, both at the same time. So like what even is time?

But one of the things that I had experienced — and I think it had a lot to do with the mental state that I was in at the time — my life had completely imploded. My identity had been torn down to its foundations. You wanna talk about affliction? That is the state that I was in.

All three of those boxes that Simone Weil lays out, I was checkin’ all three of ‘em.

[01:02:00] Andrew: Check, check, check.

[01:02:01] January: Better believe it. And so I was just wrecked, and I was in a profoundly receptive state of mind as a result. Just like she talks about it has a particular theological blessing hidden within it, if you will.

Which unfortunately not everybody accesses, but that was exactly, exactly what I experienced, was that I had been completely wrecked. And because of that wreckage, I was then able to receive something that had been invisible to me until that point.

But I remember sitting in my apartment one afternoon. It was middle of COVID, everything was shut down, everybody was still in major what is even happening? When’s the world gonna start back up? Kind of uncertainty mode. So I spent a ton of afternoons just sitting on my couch, watching the view out of my windows. We had a beautiful fourth floor corner apartment, so we had huge views of the sky and the weather rolling across the world, and yeah I could entertain myself for hours just watching that go by.

And I was sitting there one afternoon and had this, I mean, I don’t know what to call it other than a mystical experience, but it was a visceral experience of, God is in everything that I’m looking at. The entirety of Creation is one big tarot card that’s trying to speak to us about God.

[01:03:17] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:03:18] January: And we just don’t know how to listen. We don’t know how to hear it. It’s talking to us, all the time, and we’re just deaf.

[01:03:26] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:03:27] January: Which of course then turns out to be in scripture. I didn’t know that at the time, but there’s a lot of like, your eyes have been closed, and your hearts have been hardened, and your ears have been made deaf, and all of these things. I was like, yep, that’s relatable. But yeah, the sense of God in everything that was alive.

[01:03:43] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:03:44] January: And that ALL of it was alive! The, the clouds and the weather were alive, even if it was just in terms of movement. I don’t know that it was just in terms of movement. But I could feel Spirit, for lack of a better word, moving in and through everything I was seeing.

[01:03:59] Andrew: That’s cool.

[01:04:00] January: Yeah, I mean

[01:04:01] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:04:02] January: all of it. All of it is God’s map for us. There’s nothing through which God is not coming to us. Even if some of it has gotten distorted. We’ve managed to do some pretty terrible things with and to Creation. Even that does not impede God’s revelation, if we can slow down and listen for it and receive it.

[01:04:25] Andrew: Yeah.

Okay. For Weil, genuine love in the presence of affliction means allowing the afflicted person to remain a subject rather than reducing them to a problem to be solved.

If you’re a subject, as far as Girard’s concerned, you’re a mediated subject. You’ve been mediated to. That’s just what it means to be human. But if you’re a subject, you can also mediate to others.

[01:04:51] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:53] Andrew: And I think that’s what it means to be divine. There’s a certain form of mediation that can always happen. Nobody ever says God the Father is fully human. I don’t think that’s the point. Jesus is fully human.

[01:05:07] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:08] Andrew: But the God who is never mediated to — like that’s how we get at the transcendence of God, I think.

[01:05:13] January: Mm.

[01:05:13] Andrew: Nobody’s

[01:05:14] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:14] Andrew: showing God how to be a good god.

[01:05:16] January: Yeah.

[01:05:17] Andrew: Like that’s just not happening.

[01:05:18] January: Yeah.

[01:05:19] Andrew: But there’s something about the God who just so happens to be The Maker of All That Is and Ought To Be that can always, in every circumstance, be followed.

[01:05:29] January: Yeah.

[01:05:30] Andrew: There’s never a moment where you’re, oh, well we can’t do a divine thing in this mess. No.

[01:05:36] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:37] Andrew: There are certain mediators who are clueless and get themselves bound up in places and shackled by their own contrived understandings. And there are times when yeah, you can’t follow them, just ‘cause it’s impossible. Because they’re unfollowable in some way. They don’t make sense with regards to what actually is. But that’s not who God is.

[01:05:59] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:00] Andrew: The divine can always be followed.

[01:06:02] January: Yep.

[01:06:02] Andrew: And can always mediate a means of being a, a presence in the world. And Jesus likewise, fully God, same thing. You can always do what Jesus would do, right?

[01:06:13] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:14] Andrew: And yet he’s fully human. And Jesus was always mediated to.

[01:06:18] January: Yeah.

[01:06:19] Andrew: Yeah. So anyway, that line about the affliction. Genuine love in the presence of affliction means allowing the afflicted person to remain a subject. A subject who can be worthy of attention, even in this harrowing, distressful, disintegrating… yeah.

There’s some sort of “formation from below” in mimesis, where this mediated subject is mediated to, but by allowing your subjectivity to be mediated to by the mediator, you’re holding them in place.

And that’s how God comes to us, because of Jesus. Apart from Jesus — if it’s just God the Father — then no. ‘Cause God the Father’s never gonna be mediated to. But Jesus, being fully human, can be mediated to.

[01:07:03] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:04] Andrew: He will allow you to guide him into the dark, scary places that are terrifying and, and destroying your understanding of yourself and the world.

He won’t allow himself to be led just anywhere, I think. I think Jesus will say no. There’s certain forms of mediation that Jesus won’t attend to, listen toward.

[01:07:24] January: Yeah. I think that’s exactly what he’s doing with his temptation in the desert.

[01:07:27] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:07:28] January: The serpent is making that effort of, “God said this thing—” and God does say that thing! That’s in scripture! And Jesus is like, “Yeah, no. I don’t accept your context. I just don’t.”

[01:07:38] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. And I think was aware of the fact that he might! That he could.

[01:07:43] January: Yeah.

[01:07:44] Andrew: And that prayer in Gethsemane — “not my will, but yours be done” — I don’t think this was some kind of resignation. Like, oh, okay, if I have to die. He’d already been telling his disciples he was gonna die.

[01:07:57] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:57] Andrew: Like that may have been a real struggle. I, I’m sure it was, but Jesus was about to enter a cauldron of mimetic uproar, and it would be so easy, so natural, so human to just allow that to be his mediator and respond in kind.

[01:08:13] January: Yeah.

[01:08:14] Andrew: To lose compassion for those who were killing him. Who wouldn’t?

[01:08:17] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:18] Andrew: And he prayed, “Not my desire, but your desire.” Even in the midst of that, may I want what God wants.

[01:08:27] January: Yeah.

[01:08:27] Andrew: May I want what you want, God, for these people.

[01:08:30] January: Yeah.

[01:08:30] Andrew: I don’t think it had anything to do with what’s actually gonna happen tomorrow. It had everything to do with what was the state of Jesus’ heart gonna be tomorrow?

[01:08:38] January: Mmm. Mm-hmm.

I mean, ideally it’s an act of service. Hopefully it’s a profound humility and a willingness to receive the other person exactly as they are, without any need to fix them or change them because we are uncomfortable with their pain.

[01:08:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:08:57] January: Which means we gotta do the work to get comfortable with our own. ‘Cause if we can’t be with our own [pain] , we can’t be with anybody else’s.

But you know, I, I have noticed in my own life that the places where I have finally experienced affection or whatever, after a lifetime of feeling, for lack of a better term, starving in that regard.

Like, I think I’ve said before my, my mom still looks at me and is like, who the fuck is this person and what do they do with my daughter? Like, because I have grown so much in the last five, six years

[01:09:30] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:09:30] January: since, y’know, having this Christian conversion. And it’s because I suddenly have access to attention and love that I didn’t have access to before.

[01:09:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:09:38] January: And the, the seed of me has just taken off like a f*ckin’ shot as a result. And, that’s maybe a little bit different than what exactly we’re talking about because that’s God and a divine source of attention that will never run out. So like, great.

[01:09:53] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:09:55] January: That’s different than a human being’s capacity for attention. I’m not holding other people to that standard, but any moment that we can embody that divine attention to another person, it is a transformative thing. And it goes straight into those places in us that are afflicted. And I do, I mean, personally speaking, I do believe all of us have parts that are afflicted.

[01:10:17] Andrew: Mm.

[01:10:17] January: And that’s the reason for all of this fragmentation in us that is what IFS is meant to heal. We’re not all in total person affliction, obviously.

[01:10:27] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:10:28] January: But that’s, I mean, you know, to go back to the metaphor from last episode of the airplane, right? We have redundant systems. We can be a little bit in affliction and still look like we’re flying, or at least still look like we’re gliding. We’re not, we’re not totally crashing.

But then there’s a level of breakdown at which, yeah, no, we’re going down. We’re somebody better do something because we got nothing left. And that’s, that’s what I think Simone Weil is talking about as affliction.

But that any moment of attention that we can bring moment by moment can’t help but have a healing effect on the world. I really believe that.

[01:11:07] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

“Conquering the serpent cannot mean going to war against him —” Check. Yes, totally. “Rather… we stop listening toward our stories of shame and blame, when we refuse to” rehearse them or give them “our mental bandwidth.” Yeah, when we do that, our “lies begin to lose hold on our imagination.”

That line tracked with the journey we went on through this essay, but part of me was like, wait a second, we do eventually stop listening to certain stories of shame and blame, but the IFS practice, the unburdening process, it’s a more complicated cessation. And I was curious if we could flesh this out a bit,

[01:11:50] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:11:50] Andrew: about what it means to stop listening to those stories. ‘Cause it isn’t just like, okay, I’ve heard it enough, I’m not gonna listen to it again.

[01:11:57] January: Right.

[01:11:57] Andrew: Because that’s what the protectors do! Right? That’s exactly what a protector does, and makes that part into a poor exile, it’s when we finally allow ourselves to hear them, to actually hear the full story. I don’t know, it just felt like, to stop listening to our stories, to not give them our mental bandwidth, refuse to rehearse them. It seemed like we needed more there in order to get at what I felt like you were saying.

[01:12:22] January: Thank you for bringing that up. You’re exactly right, that simply refusing to listen is to exile those stories and the parts that are carrying them. And that’s not what we’re after. That’s absolutely not what we’re after.

And at the same time, there is a point at which continuing to listen to the same story over and over again is giving someone a space for self-harm.

[01:12:43] Andrew: Mm.

[01:12:44] January: It’s giving someone a space to rehash a story that is actively damaging them.

What I think of here is — and I can’t remember what the scripture reference is off the top of my head, unfortunately — but where Jesus is talking about, it’s not enough to sweep the demons out of the house. You’ve gotta actually fill the house up with something good.

[01:13:02] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:13:03] January: There has to be something good is that is present in this space or else the stories are gonna move right back in. So it isn’t as simple as the cessation of the stories. It’s the active cultivation of compassion and curiosity and creativity and all the other ‘C’ words that IFS talks about, that are the qualities of the capital ‘S’ Self, that I would attribute to qualities of the Holy Spirit.

[01:13:31] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:13:31] January: The gentleness, the patience, the self-control, the fruits of the Spirit, that as we approach these parts of ourselves with that positive regard, the active cultivation of compassionate regard for ourselves and others — that is the way that we remove our attention from the stories of shame and blame, is the active cultivation of this other thing instead. Not just, “ Oh, I’m going to distract myself from this story,” which is what the protectors do.

[01:14:00] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. I really like how disbelieving lies it becomes so clear that if that happens, it will inevitably be done in the context of truth, right?

[01:14:11] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:12] Andrew: Within a fuller context. There is a sort of disbelieving of lies where you could be like, “Well, I know that ain’t true anymore! So, uh, guess we’re gonna—” and then whatever follows from that is gonna be a big mess. You can ricochet your perspective on life like a ping pong ball of just like, “Oh, so it’s a lie! It’s all a lie!” And just end up in some place that’s just as bad. And that’s not an encounter with the Ground of All Being.

[01:14:40] January: That’s a pile of rubble ‘cause you kicked everything into pieces. Yeah.

[01:14:44] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:14:45] January: Which, you know, then you’ve got a bunch of bricks to build with. Okay. But you better build something with ‘em, ‘cause just leaving it all in rubble is not helping no one.

[01:14:54] Andrew: Yeah, yeah. No I, I feel like if we think about truth as a proposition, you know, “This is that,” and then you come along and you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t that! That was wrong, and anybody that says ‘this is that’ is lying. I’m not gonna believe ‘em.” That’s, it’s not enough. It’s not enough for truth to be propositional, and it’s not enough to disbelieve a lie. If you think you’re just gonna say, “Well, I won’t affirm this proposition anymore!”

What are you going to affirm?

[01:15:21] January: Yep. Exactly.

[01:15:22] Andrew: What is the structure by which you affirm anything? What have you learned? What is true? You don’t disbelieve a lie without perceiving something of the truth, I don’t think.

[01:15:32] January: I hope! ‘Cause otherwise we’re just disbelieving one lie so that we can attach to a different one.

[01:15:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:15:39] January: Which helps nobody.

[01:15:40] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:15:41] January: We can do that. We do plenty of it. Lord knows I’ve been guilty of that shit.

[01:15:46] Andrew: Uh, I just imagining somebody fully self-aware of what they’re doing, and that sort of disbelief in lying. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll, I’ll disbelieve some lies. Yeah. I’ll disbelieve some of ‘em.”

[01:15:58] January: Yeah. And that’s why the practice of The Work of Byron Katie can really come in handy. And that is the practice that I wanna associate with this episode. I specifically wanted to do the work of Byron Katie because it is exactly that practice of attending to both a lie and a truth — or, well, attending to a thought that we’ve had, and then attending to its exact opposites. And I say opposites, plural, because there are always multiple ways to flip it around.

[01:16:26] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:16:26] January: But sinking back into our bodies and letting our bodies inform, which of these answers feels like pain, and which of these answers feels like freedom? Because that’s gonna tell us a lot more information about what is truth and what to move toward than intellectually trying to figure it out.

[01:16:45] Andrew: When Self is approaching parts and understands there is an exile somewhere, but before proceeding there, we’ll start talking to protectors. The Self will not listen to the stories explaining why the exile needs to be in exile.

[01:17:01] January: Oh, it’ll listen. It will listen, but it won’t believe ‘em.

[01:17:04] Andrew: Yeah, yeah. I guess maybe it’s not wrong to say that that Self has an agenda, but it certainly seems like the therapist has an agenda to, would you please step aside?

And if not, if the protectors won’t step aside, then okay. It’s not like they’ll enforce the agenda and say, I have to go talk to this exile. So I, I guess in that sense, there’s not an agenda.

[01:17:22] January: I would make an important distinction there that it’s not an agenda. I think it doesn’t work if the therapist is bringing an agenda into the room.

[01:17:29] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:17:29] January: At least it doesn’t work for me if I’m bringing in an agenda in the room, which as I think I’ve said before, always means I’m in a part. What the therapist is extending there is an invitation.

[01:17:39] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:40] January: Would you be willing? It’s an asking for consent. And if the answer’s no, the answer’s no! Okay.

[01:17:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:46] January: Cool. We’ll stay right here and give you more attention. Nothing has to happen here. Which I get stuck on that a lot as my poor therapist can attest. That I have a lot of parts that are like, man, we only got an hour, we gotta get shit done.

[01:17:59] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:18:01] January: Can we get on with it already? And Joe’s always just like, “Yeah, it’s cool. We can sit here as long as they need to.” And I’m like, “NO, WE CAN’T!”

Yes, we can.

[01:18:10] Andrew: So this line here, “We stop listening toward our stories of shame and blame.”

[01:18:16] January: Mm-hmm. Not that we stop listening to them, but we stop obeying them as if they’re fact.

[01:18:22] Andrew: I gotcha. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Here’s a question. Have you ever had the Self ask a Byron Katie type question of like, “Yeah, but is that true?” Or is that a little too pointed a question to come from a capital ‘S’ Self?

[01:18:39] January: That’s a good question that you’re asking. I think that when I’m doing IFS work, I don’t think it would ever occur to my Self to ask in that way, because it does sort of imply an agenda. And yet at the same time, the reason that we’re attaching the Byron Katie work to this particular episode is exactly because it is intended as a practice of attending to the stories that we’re telling ourselves.

[01:19:02] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:19:02] January: The point is not to make an intellectual assessment about which one is most accurate.

[01:19:08] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:19:08] January: That would be a left brain assessment of facts, an analyzing. We’re not doing that, although I think a lot of people do it wrong and do it that way. What we’re intending to do with the work of Byron Katie is to get into that right brain and do a very meditative experience in the body what this thought feels like. Then experience in the body what the complete opposite of that thought feels like.

And that’s it. Make no assessments, make no judgements. You don’t have to decide which one is more true. You are just letting your body notice: I experience this thought in this way, and I experience this thought in this way.

And gradually, over time — again, this is something to receive, not something to achieve — but your neural pathways will attempt to move you toward health, will attempt to move you toward what feels better. And so as it begins to realize, oh, these things over here that are lies, like those, those actually don’t feel good. I feel constricted. I feel weighed down. I feel pain when I believe this thing.

It will start to let go of those beliefs. You will find your mental grip loosening on them and they will have less traction in your psyche over time.

[01:20:25] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:20:26] January: But it’s all about just being attentive and totally present to the embodied experience that that thought is producing in you, rather than trying to make an analysis of it.

[01:20:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:20:40] January: Whatcha thinkin’?

[01:20:41] Andrew: Yeah. Have I, did I talk about in college when I sort of like, I was never complete like five-point Calvinist, but I, I had a moment where I changed my mind completely about the concept of predestination and anyway, I went to a Christian university and, that meant you take Gen Ed classes. New Testament survey, Old Testament survey, and then Historic Christian Belief, and then Contemporary Christian Belief.

And so in the Historic Christian Belief, the teacher is an avowed Calvinist and he’s not saying you ought to be or you should be, but like he just thinks it’s right and is pointing it out. And so he’s presenting all the Five Points of Calvinism. I don’t know if, is that stuff that you even run into?

[01:21:19] January: I, I got nothing.

[01:21:20] Andrew: Really?! Okay. So I mean, I,

[01:21:21] January: I know that they exist, but I couldn’t tell you what they are.

[01:21:24] Andrew: Well the acronym is TULIP because they were Dutch, Calvin was Dutch. And so Total Depravity, Limited Atonement... Yeah, I can’t, I can’t even remember the five points. Oh, shoot, I used to know these.

But anyway, just the idea of asserting free will that humans would have free will in the context of where God’s — and not the way we talk about God being a Creator in this podcast! — but the idea that God’s creativity is always a testament to divine power and omnipotence, divine knowledge and omniscience, and you know, that kind of stuff. It really is just a matter of dominoes to be like, yeah, what I do is a result of God, down to salvation, life, the universe, everything.

But still, like, I was very resistant to predestination stuff as it was being presented to me in this class. Arminianism is the response to Calvinism, that it says the opposite of most all five of the points.

[01:22:22] January: Mm.

[01:22:23] Andrew: And at one point I, I, I remember I was just sitting there thinking to myself, and I remember being like, you know what? It’s even harder! It’s even harder to believe Arminianism, right?

[01:22:33] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:22:33] Andrew: Like that, that we have free will. Because it doesn’t make sense! And so, I do remember my physical sensation, and it was a tension. And I was like, wait. Am I gonna believe this outta spite? Am I gonna assert the freedom of the human will just out of spite? That, “Yeah, it’s harder to do it and I’ll do it the hard way!” I was like, that’s ridiculous! That’s no reason to believe anything!

And my body just relaxed, and I became a determinist, like for the next 10 years. Like I, I, I, I grew, I grew out of it! I grew out of it. But for solid 10 years, yeah. Uh, I, I,

[01:23:12] January: Wow.

[01:23:12] Andrew: I think why I was never fully Calvinist is like I, I added a universalism into the determinism and I, I put those two together. And that — Calvin was not, like...

[01:23:22] January: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:23:23] Andrew: That didn’t fit his definition of limited atonement.

[01:23:24] January: Not having it.

[01:23:25] Andrew: No. Yeah, he wouldn’t have… But yeah, no, it was what you’re talking about, that in Byron Katie’s Work, just thinking through what it’s like to believe the two things could be enough to actually change your mind. Your body can just think through what it feels like. Like, I think that’s what I was doing.

[01:23:43] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:23:43] Andrew: I think the form of Arminianism that I was holding onto was a very tense and combative, and “I’ll show you” kind of thing.

[01:23:52] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:23:53] Andrew: And then once I recognized what I was feeling, I think I’ve always thought of that as a rather instantaneous — it was an instantaneous change. Very instant. But I always thought of it as a cognitive thing.

[01:24:05] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:24:05] Andrew: And now I’m starting to think, wait, I don’t think that was co—I, if it was just cognitive, I would’ve found a way to be Arminian, because there’s plenty of reasons to continue doing it. I would’ve come up with one. Or heard somebody else’s and adopted it.

But I think the fact that I changed so abruptly — it sounds exactly like The Work, doesn’t it? I think it was because I was appreciating what these beliefs were doing to my body.

[01:24:28] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:24:28] Andrew: And there was a clear preference. Yeah.

[01:24:33] January: And that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about things like humans being able to recognize truth and lies. It’s not that we can get them cognitively. We tangle ourselves in all fucking kinds of knots trying to figure out

[01:24:47] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:24:48] January: what’s true.

[01:24:49] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:24:49] January: But subjectively, for you specifically and individually, this belief that you were trying to cling to did not feel like freedom.

[01:24:59] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:25:00] January: And I think that truth, what is true for us, what is true for me, will always feel in the body like freedom. If it feels like constriction, if it feels like a trap, if it feels like, in Simone Weil’s words, slavery, that is an affliction.

[01:25:17] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:25:17] January: And that is not truth. It is not kindness. It is not Christ. It is not God.

[01:25:22] Andrew: I’m sorry, I’m, I’m giggling to myself ‘cause I’m imagining a divine eye looking at 19-year-old Andrew in his dorm room or, and just being like, “Yep. He’s got the freedom to choose determinism,” and not being the least bit bothered by it.

[01:25:40] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:25:41] Andrew: Not the least bit.

[01:25:42] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:25:42] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:25:43] January: And it’s complicated too, right? This is an ongoing practice for us as humans, because what is true for us at one point in our lives might not be true for us five years later, 10 years later. We change. We are time bound creatures that are moving through an experience, and there’s a really important distinction between a rationalization that I come up with to kind of get myself off the hook for something mentally. We can talk about that as a freedom, but for me — again, I can only speak to my own experience — when I check in with my actual body, when I’m doing that, when I catch myself doing that, it doesn’t actually feel like freedom.

[01:26:26] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:26:26] January: It might feel like familiarity. It might feel like an absence of friction. But that’s not actually the same thing as freedom — it just means that I’m frozen sufficiently that I’m not touching anything for a minute.

[01:26:39] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:26:40] January: Which isn’t aliveness. Aliveness requires that friction and that contact with what is other than us. So when I say freedom, I don’t mean rationalizations that allow us to self justify our bullshit. That is not what I’m talking about.

[01:26:57] Andrew: That is not, yeah.

[01:26:59] January: I am talking about that it can go the other way too. I had an experience of having to confront something about myself that was the most painful. I did not want to see myself in that light. Yet when I finally accepted it and was like, oh, okay, the police have just kicked in my front door. This is clearly who I’ve been. If that’s not a wake up call, I don’t know what is.

When I finally did accept that, my whole body relaxed in a way that I didn’t know I was capable of. And I, I don’t mean that I suddenly felt good about what I was going through. I didn’t. It was still a horrible experience, for years.

[01:27:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:27:39] January: But within 48 hours of my ex’s arrest — of the police imploding my life — I could walk again without pain for the first time in three years

[01:27:50] Andrew: Really?

[01:27:50] January: because that was the degree to which my body was constricted against the reality that I was living in. I mean, I was in so much pain I couldn’t walk to the mailbox without crying for half an hour afterward, and nobody could figure out what was wrong with me. My body was just so trying to reject my reality that everything in me was decomposing and coming to pieces. And I was trying to numb out that pain with alcohol, which helped nothing.

[01:28:19] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:28:20] January: And the minute — the minute! — that I gave up those defenses and came back into reality, 48 hours later, I could walk again. I still had a long healing journey after that. It wasn’t a magical one and done, everything is fixed.

[01:28:34] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:28:34] January: I’m still working seven years later on trying to repair my health from the damage that was done. But the shift was instantaneous. The healing did begin instantly.

[01:28:45] Andrew: Wow.

[01:28:46] January: And undeniably.

[01:28:48] Andrew: Wow. No, I didn’t know that. There’s some element here, I’m hearing, that you’re very intent on conveying to us that this was an instantaneous change. And yet it’s held with the fact that, yeah, it’s gone on for years since that moment. Can you tease out a bit the instantaneous side of this and the ongoing...? Or is that—

I, this is an intensely personal thing, too! And so like, maybe that’s not a fair question for me to ask in a couple different ways, but we are turning to a practice that is gonna guide folks to something that could be rather instantaneous. Do you have a comment that could clarify a bit on what’s the instantaneous part of this as opposed to the ongoing?

[01:29:33] January: It’s a good question. I think what I would say feels instant is that there’s a moment of recognition. And I’m deliberately using that word in contrast to Girardian misrecognition, which is what we’re usually stuck in.

[01:29:49] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:29:50] January: But I’m also using it just in the regular sense of like when you were talking about your experience with Calvinism and Arminianism. Your body recognized something.

[01:30:01] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:01] January: Which was, “Oh shit, this is painful. I don’t actually like this. What happens if I just don’t do this anymore?”

[01:30:08] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:09] January: And so the recognition, even if it’s not fully conscious, is pretty instantaneous

[01:30:16] Andrew: I got you.

[01:30:17] January: and it’s irreversible, right? Like once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.

[01:30:20] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:21] January: But then the consequences of that shift continue to develop. And have further consequences. Does that answer the question enough?

[01:30:30] Andrew: Absolutely! Yeah. No, that’s, yeah, that’s the word. Recognition. And it seems so obvious to be like, oh, if there’s misrecognition, I mean, it’s rather crucial to his theory. For Girard, the origin of how things hold together is effectively a shared misrecognition, and there’s something calming and relaxing, realizing that we live in the world, and like there is reality and the Real will always be problematizing the pictures and images we create that are misrecognitions, right?

That’s just what the world is gonna do.

[01:31:07] January: Yes.

[01:31:07] Andrew: It’s gonna unsettle that. And so when we’re bumping up against misrecognition and recognizing it as such, that’s gonna be instantaneous.

[01:31:17] January: Exactly.

[01:31:19] Andrew: That’s all rather abstract and out there recognizing misrecognition for what it is. ‘Cause I chose those words very, very carefully because I don’t, I’m not so sure that, “Oh, misrecognition is bad, so we just need to recognize reality!”

[01:31:35] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:31:35] Andrew: I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the Real is,

[01:31:38] January: I’m not even sure that’s possible.

[01:31:40] Andrew: It’s too big, right? It’s like, the Real is God. And you’re not just gonna be like, ‘Oh, God! I got it.’

[01:31:46] January: Yep.

[01:31:47] Andrew: Click! I took a picture with my smartphone, and now I can text to my friends, ‘Hey, check it out. What I saw, it’s God!’ Like, no! I don’t know that we’re actually gonna ever recognize the Real, but we will come into a recognition of our misrecognition as a misrecognition, and that will be instantaneous.

Okay, if, if there’s any poor listener out there that’s just like, “What is Andrew talking about right now?! ‘Recognizing the misrecognition as a misrecognition. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m sure there’s people that have turned off the podcast just listening, but for those that have hung with us, you’re about to be rewarded, because we’re gonna bring this all down to earth with some very simple, straightforward steps that you can take to lead yourself toward a—

[01:32:32] January: — a recognition of your misrecognition.

[01:32:34] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:32:34] January: Yeah. I think that’s what The Work does,

[01:32:36] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:32:37] January: is it helps us notice, oh yeah. This thing that I was telling myself, that wasn’t actually reality. Or at the very least, reality is more complicated than this.

[01:32:49] Andrew: Yeah. So I think it’s time for us to do our practice and it is called The Work. Now, when people talk about The Work, it can sound almost proverbial in the sense of like, “Well, you gotta put in the work if you wanna—” whatever. I don’t know. And that’s not what we mean, when we talk about The Work. We’re using it in a very specific sense.

January, can you please explain what sense?

[01:33:14] January: It is a proper name for a very simple process that was discovered by this woman named Byron Katie, who just goes by the name Katie, and she popularized The Work as this process for loosening our mental grip on the stories that are causing us suffering. Physical, emotional, psychological distress — you can use this incredibly simple four question process to question it. To not only examine who you are when you believe that thought, but then also flip it around and look at the opposite, and how is the opposite of that thought just as true or truer?

And so I love this process because not only can it expose our own blind spots to us, we can use it to see places that we would never normally look inside our own internal landscape. And then one of the long-term effects for me of practicing this has been that I am less inclined to believe my own bullshit, if you will.

[01:34:21] Andrew: Hmm. Yeah.

[01:34:22] January: That I’m less up on a high horse I’m not as antagonistic toward other humans, because I know that — I mean, first of all, I’m less invested in my own being right. I’m much more aware, in practice, that probably the story I’m telling myself isn’t the whole truth.

[01:34:41] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:34:42] January: And that probably there’s truth in their perspective as well. And then I’m also able to recognize that they’re doing the same things that I do, and they’re telling themselves a story. And maybe they’re really stuck in their story, and maybe that story is causing them pain that’s causing them to behave toward me in a way that is not great.

But I can have so much more compassion for that when I know the degree to which I do that.

[01:35:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:35:08] January: So it helps to not only break down those beliefs and discover other possibilities, and kind of help our thinking become more flexible in that way. But then also it can help me relate to other humans with much greater compassion and patience, because I’m aware that even if they’re showing up in a way that is painful or potentially toxic, that like, I know my own capacity to do that same thing, and I’m less inclined to judge them for it.

[01:35:39] Andrew: Yeah. Okay. Now, we’re gonna hear a recording of you doing The Work. And this is from about two years ago. Our listeners will no doubt recognize your voice, but there’s also Jessica. She’s facilitating the session. So could you tell us who Jessica is and — I think it’s important — do you always have to have a facilitator with you when you do The Work?

[01:36:06] January: Hmm. Good questions. So Jessica is my coach. I am a trained Wayfinder life coach, and part of being a coach means that you have to get coached as well. I have no business coaching other people if I am not also getting coached to examine my inner landscape and deal with my stuff.

So Jessica is one of the people who does that for me. She holds that space for me to do that work.

[01:36:31] Andrew: Cool.

[01:36:32] January: And to that question about whether you have to have a facilitator. No, you absolutely don’t. There are worksheets that can walk you through this process. You can go to thework.com, T-H-E-W-O-R K dot com, and there are free downloads available. You can even watch Byron Katie walk people through this process. She runs a live online Zoom twice a week, I think, Mondays and Wednesday mornings.

[01:36:57] Andrew: Oh wow. Okay.

[01:36:59] January: But the short answer is no. You don’t need a facilitator. You can do it just yourself with the worksheets.

The longer answer is when you’re just getting started with it, you may find facilitation helpful. Because in an ideal world, this process is a bit meditative. It’s embodied. You’re really tuning into your nervous system, and checking in with what your system is feeling in any given moment, and it can be difficult to maintain that awareness alongside language.

It’s difficult to be in both the left brain and the right brain at the same time.

[01:37:34] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:37:35] January: So if you have someone holding the space and remembering what the questions are so that you don’t have to think about ‘em, that can be really helpful if you’re just getting started and this is a new practice for you.

[01:37:45] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:37:45] January: But it is not a requirement.

[01:37:47] Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so, people can just sit back and listen to what’s coming. But I, I think it’d be worth the time to tell ‘em what’s coming, just so they can hear it when it happens. ‘Cause The Work follows a step-by-step process, right? It’s always the same sequence. It starts with a single thought. There are four questions, and always the same four questions. And then there are the turnarounds. And that’s it.

So we start with a thought. What kind of thought are we supposed to start with?

[01:38:18] January: Well, let’s see. Is there a painful thought that you’ve been having recently?

[01:38:21] Andrew: Oh!

[01:38:21] January: I’m gonna put you on the spot here a little bit. Sorry.

[01:38:24] Andrew: Yeah, no, I thought I was asking the questions in this segment. Uh, let me think. Painful thought.

Yeah. I was, I was very annoyed with myself over the weekend. Like I got a lot of things I wanted to get done, and I did next to none of them. The thought I had was, “the amount of time I spend playing online chess is stupid.”

[01:38:46] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:38:48] Andrew: And not in a good way. I don’t know, kids these days. Maybe stupid means something else. I, I don’t know. But I, I, I mean it in a bad way.

[01:38:57] January: Fair enough. So, yeah, we’re looking for a single thought, first of all. We don’t want language that attaches two different thoughts And we’re looking for just a straightforward what’s the thing underneath that’s actually causing the suffering. So, we could go with a statement like, playing online chess is stupid.

[01:39:16] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:39:16] January: But it sounds to me, and tell me where I’m wrong, like maybe the underlying painful belief is I do stupid things. Or I’m stupid.

[01:39:27] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. I do stupid things. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:39:31] January: Okay. Yeah, so do you see the relationship between the original thought and then kind of what we’re aiming for?

[01:39:37] Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The first feels a bit surface level, like it fits this weekend, but yeah. It’s an instantiation of something that’s a little bit bigger. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so, then with the thought framed, you turn to four questions, the same four questions every single time. Pretty straightforward. Questions one and two are kind of a pair. Question number one, is it true?

[01:40:02] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:40:02] Andrew: Question two, can you absolutely know that it’s true?

[01:40:07] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:40:08] Andrew: And How do you react? What happens when you believe that thought? That’s question three. And question four, who would you be without the thought?

So, is it true? Can you absolutely know it’s true? What happens to you when you believe it, and what would happen if you didn’t, basically. Right?

[01:40:26] January: Yeah. And the first two questions are very simple. They’re just yes or no answers.

[01:40:30] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:40:30] January: There’s gonna be a lot of temptation, a lot of hemming and hawing of like, well, yeah, it’s true in this circumstance or with this person. We’re not looking for the qualifiers, we’re just looking for a straight yes or no answer, period, end of story.

[01:40:45] Andrew: Gotcha.

[01:40:45] January: And if it’s not, yes, it’s no. Or vice versa if it’s not, no, it’s yes. You’re not making a case. You’re not trying to argue it. We’re not trying to rationalize anything here.

[01:40:55] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:40:56] January: You are inquiring, of your body, what it believes. What it’s holding onto.

Between those questions three and four, the idea is to compare who am I when I believe this thought? with who I am when I don’t believe it? And even if I’m just imagining that second scenario because there’s never been a moment of my life where I didn’t believe it. We can use our imagination as a tool to conceive of possibilities beyond just what we’ve experienced.

The idea isn’t to intellectually decide which one’s better or worse, or which one I should be doing, or anything like that. That gets back into our Being versus Doing that we’ve been talking about this whole season. We’re not trying to add something else that you can do.

[01:41:41] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[01:41:42] January: We’re trying to let go of what’s getting in the way of you receiving your being freely, joyfully, peacefully.

[01:41:50] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:41:51] January: All of this that we’re talking about all season, I hope, is about letting go, not about adding something else to your plate.

[01:41:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:41:57] January: And so the idea is really to sink into your body and notice what the experience is of believing this thought, and then notice what your experience is, or even just what you imagine the experience would be, of not believing this thought.

And just that act of noticing one versus the other, over time, if you keep practicing this, will start to shift your belief, because your body will try to move toward health all by itself. It’s wired to do that.

[01:42:28] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:42:28] January: Your body will try to move toward what does not feel painful.

And so as you practice bringing your attention to your experience of your thoughts, and your body starts to realize, oh, this thought causes me pain. It will do its own work in the background to start loosening your grip on those painful beliefs, and gradually you won’t be able to believe them as well.

[01:42:53] Andrew: Gotcha. Yeah, and, and for me, like I thought when I was learning about it, I really saw question three as the moment where I’m really moving away from the thought to myself. But in, in your explanation here, it’s, it is clear to me that, no, that’s from the beginning. Questions 1, 2, 3, and 4. All of these are questions that are supposed to be guiding us to what’s going on inside and how do we feel. What feelings arise from this particular belief?

[01:43:19] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:43:20] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We’ve got the four questions. Once you get through the questions. Then comes the turnarounds. And personally I, I think it’s important to say that there’s more than one.

[01:43:31] January: Yes. Again I wanna make the point that it’s not about intellectually assessing a bunch of statements to see which one’s true or truest. It’s simply looking into our blind spots and looking for the things that we’re not necessarily seeing when we look in the world. But we can deliberately look at the reflection of what we’re seeing in the world and kind of use that mirror effect to see into areas that we wouldn’t normally perceive on our own, if we were just looking at the world. Those mirrors can give us a different angle on things.

[01:44:07] Andrew: Gotcha.

[01:44:08] January: That’s another important thing about this exercise: please do not use this to gaslight yourself. There are people who want to use it to question every single experience that they’re having that’s causing them — like, sometimes the pain is clean pain because something actually painful is happening to you.

[01:44:23] Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

[01:44:23] January: If somebody just made a racist slur, yeah, of course that hurts.

[01:44:27] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:44:27] January: That is actual, physical, nervous system pain. That’s not pain that’s coming from your belief about it.

[01:44:33] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:44:34] January: But if 10 years down the road you’re still telling a story about what an asshole that guy is, and you won’t let him be anything other than an asshole in your internal world because you need to be against him in order to prop up your identity. That’s the point at which we can get into The Work and The Work can be really helpful.

[01:44:51] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:44:52] January: It’s very important to me that if you are a person who struggles to trust their inner reality, maybe don’t start with this tool.

[01:44:58] Andrew: Okay. Yeah.

[01:44:58] January: Okay? There’s plenty of other tools to use. Do not use this if you already have trouble questioning yourself too much. It is okay to put this one down and walk away.

[01:45:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:45:08] January: Fine.

[01:45:08] Andrew: Yeah.

Alright. Let’s hear how you turn around, “Everything is dying,” that’s the thought you bring into The Work. Yeah, how do you turn that around after those four questions? Well, let’s give it a listen.

[01:45:22] January: Sounds good. Let’s hit play.

[01:45:25] Jessica Peterson: Okay. So, what is the thought that you’re wanting to frame up?

[01:45:30] January: The thought that keeps coming up for me, I’ve been having my first existential crisis this week which I figure if I got to 40 without one, I’m probably overdue and I don’t really need to worry about this too much.

[01:45:41] Jessica Peterson: I know! I was like, really? Your, your first? Like, this month, or...?

[01:45:44] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I’ve had identity crises before for sure, but this feels like something different. I got a little too deep into reading climate crisis data this week and just had that moment of what are we even doing? What is the point of anything? That kind of what is the meaning of all of this

[01:46:02] Jessica Peterson: Mm-hmm.

[01:46:02] January: if we’re really just gonna toast ourselves? And so the painful thought is, “Everything is dying.”

[01:46:10] Jessica Peterson: Mmm.

[01:46:12] January: And the existential panic that seems to be going along with that.

[01:46:16] Jessica Peterson: Okay. So when you think that thought, “Everything is dying,” is it true?

[01:46:27] January: Yes.

[01:46:29] Jessica Peterson: Okay. Can you absolutely know that it is true?

[01:46:38] January: No.

[01:46:40] Jessica Peterson: Hmm.

[01:46:41] January: No.

[01:46:43] Jessica Peterson: So when you believe the thought, “Everything is dying,” how do you react? What happens when you believe that thought?

[01:46:53] January: Hmm.

There’s kind of a cringe sensation immediately. Like my shoulders want to curl in on themselves and my whole body goes into this protective posture. There’s a sinking feeling in my gut. My anxiety brain starts running on its hamster wheel.

It seems to me like it just goes straight into this litany of what’s even the point of anything. And it’s interesting to notice that I have trouble identifying what the feeling is, what the emotion is, that’s producing those thoughts. I can get the physical sensations and I can get the thoughts, but I’m, I’m struggling to identify what the emotion is that’s coming up

[01:47:39] Jessica Peterson: Hmm!

[01:47:40] January: there.

[01:47:42] Jessica Peterson: Can you describe more about what that feels like?

[01:47:47] January: It’s really hard to breathe. I feel like I have to struggle to take a deep breath. I can feel my jaw kind of trembling a little bit, like I’m trying to clench my teeth maybe. It’s interesting that I’m not noticing. What I’m not getting is tears coming up or there’s usually like a knot at the base of my throat when it’s grief that I’m trying to hold back and I’m not noticing that, which is really interesting. My biceps feel kind of trembly. The top of my chest feels a little fluttery.

[01:48:19] Jessica Peterson: And how do you treat yourself in this situation?

[01:48:24] January: Hmm.

There is a real, like, what’s even the point of anything? Because I’ve been working really hard this year on taking better care of my physical health and pulling back from trying to take care of everybody else in order to take care of myself a little bit better. And so there’s an immediate, like, why am I even bothering to do that?

[01:48:44] Jessica Peterson: Uh-huh.

[01:48:45] January: Kind of a, a desire to go back to some familiar coping mechanisms of the past that maybe weren’t so healthy. And it feels good to notice that the desire to do it is coming up something fierce.

There’s anxious questioning about what is my work in this world. If I’ve been approaching my coaching and my theology and all of this stuff as this creating a healthier platform for future generations to move from, it’s very frightening to my system to think, okay, are we, is that what we’re about? Or are we actually doing palliative care here? Which is a very different thing.

It is interesting to notice that the actual work that I’m doing doesn’t seem to change in either of those situations. I’m still doing the same things in either of those scenarios. But the way that I approach it and the way that I would talk about it is different and for some reason, the idea of it being at an end-of-life cycle as opposed to a beginning-of-life cycle, there’s some part of me that’s super distressed by that and wants to go like lie in bed and be a sack of potatoes for a year. Just not even bother doing anything because what’s even the point?

[01:49:58] Jessica Peterson: Mm. And so when you believe this thought, that everything is dying, how does it change how you treat other people?

[01:50:09] January: Hmm. I’m less energized. I’m less engaged. It feels like there’s just a wall that has come down between me and everything else, not just other people, but like me and Creation. I’m looking out my living room window at sunshine, and birds pecking about, and squirrels scampering all over the place and fighting over peanuts, and this giant fuchsia bush that’s just so bright and beautiful in the sunshine that my eyes hurt. And I can’t be there in any of that because my brain has this story about what’s going to happen to all of it.

And because I’m not able to receive the energy that all of that is giving me, it makes it much harder to show up for people through the work that I want to do and the things that I want to give. I’m not able to give energy that I’m not getting.

[01:50:58] Jessica Peterson: Mm.

[01:50:59] January: So that seems like it’s getting in the way of that.

I don’t really seem to have a lot of judginess, exactly, about other people and the choices that they’re making, which is interesting. I kind of would’ve expected some resentment of like, how dare you all behave this way and leave us with this problem? And I can kind of, I can recognize that story in the mix of all of this, but it doesn’t feel like mine. It feels like a thing that I’ve inherited from culture more than a thing that’s actually in my head.

So yeah, I think that the way that I treat others is that I’m putting artificial distance in there. I’m putting separateness where there isn’t actually separateness.

[01:51:42] Jessica Peterson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Is there anything else coming up when you think about this thought being true that you’d like to share?

[01:51:53] January: I think it’s surprising me that it’s upsetting me so much. Because I am less afraid of death than just about anybody else I know. I’ve had a lot of personal experience with it. I’m not generally distressed by the idea of my own life ceasing to exist. I’m just so aware of the connectedness of nature, and death just being a part of that cycle that I think the thing that I’m scared of is disconnection, generally. So things like social shaming are terrifying to me, and that is a kind of death. I’m terrified of that kind of death. But the idea of my body transitioning into being dirt instead of person-shaped is so not distressing to me.

So it’s very, I’m like kind of almost beating myself up for the fact that this is upsetting to me. I’m like, why is this a problem? You know that this other thing isn’t a problem, so why is this a problem? Like, come on. Which is interesting.

[01:53:01] Jessica Peterson: Mm-hmm. Adding insult to injury.

[01:53:04] January: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

[01:53:05] Jessica Peterson: Mm-hmm.

[01:53:06] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:53:08] Jessica Peterson: Okay, so now let’s just imagine that this thought evaporates from your mind. You are incapable of believing that everything is dying. Who would you be without that thought?

[01:53:28] January: Hmm. I immediately get a rush of goosebumps all over my body. I feel like electricity without that thought. And it’s interesting to notice that the electricity starts in my knees and kind of goes all the way up. Whereas the previous feelings were like, my gut and above. There was nothing in my legs before. There was just nothing.

So that’s interesting to notice. I can feel myself starting to smile at the idea of not having that thought. I have access again to the aliveness of things, I think. I can feel the energy moving again. It doesn’t feel stuck in my body anymore.

Mm. It’s easier to take a breath. There’s a loosening in the chest. The tightness is gone from my gut.

Oh, interesting. Okay. So I think what the emotion was before, rather than specifically being grief, which I’m more comfortable with than not, I think. It’s fear of loss. It is that fear of disconnection. It’s almost a fear of abandonment, but it’s a sense of being attached to something.

I wanna say the physical world, but I also don’t wanna say that it’s just that, because again, my component atoms might break down, but that doesn’t take me out of the physical world in any way. I’m still, I’m still there and I’m still part of it. But what I’m realizing is that without that thought, I am less afraid of the loss, because I’m more aware that that loss is just a shift in form,

[01:55:08] Jessica Peterson: Mm!

[01:55:08] January: if that makes sense.

[01:55:09] Jessica Peterson: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:55:11] January: I’m able to recognize the previous thing by the contrast that I’m experiencing on this

[01:55:16] Jessica Peterson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:55:17] January: side of the question. Yeah.

[01:55:22] Jessica Peterson: And from this place, how do you treat yourself now, when you can’t believe that thought?

[01:55:28] January: Hmm. Wow, this is interesting. There’s an immediate desire to make some really big changes to the way that I’m living my life.

You know, I have a day job that of all the day jobs that are available to me is probably the best one that I could possibly hope for. And I’ve been there for 10 years and I love it. But it is still a corporate marketing job, you know? And part of me is just like, why?

If we’re down to the wire and we’re talking palliative care, like peace out, I’m done with that. Let me go do the work that’s actually gonna matter. Let me go do that work of repairing relationships within myself and with others and with our environment. That’s the important stuff. This other way of being in the world that I inherited, that’s not what any of this is about at that point.

So that comes up.

There is a desire to still be much kinder to myself and my physical body because there’s a sense of kind of, like, what does it mean to be a healthy cell in a terminally ill body? Right? I don’t want to just buy into the ill health. I want to stay as healthy as possible, for as long as possible, and that health doesn’t lose meaning just because the system is unhealthy.

I’m much kinder to myself. I’m not beating myself up for, I mean, the question stops having meaning like, what even is beating myself up? What would be the point of something like that? Just because I got born at a particular moment in history? Who had choice in that?

Yeah. It just feels like kindness and connection are so obvious that it’s the only choice. But it’s also not the only choice. Like I absolutely could make a different choice. It’s, it’s a complete freedom to make any choice that I want, and from that place of complete freedom, kindness and connection are the only choice, right?

[01:57:23] Jessica Peterson: Mm-hmm.

[01:57:27] January: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that answers a bit of the next question of how do I treat other people? There’s still a bit of a struggle to feel connected.

And I think that that, now that I’ve seen it, I think that that’s coming from the part of me that is afraid of the loss and is afraid of being separate. It still wants to put that distance in there to try to protect us — like me, as my system, us — from the pain of loss. But instead of being in charge of the whole system, it’s suddenly just a part.

And the other parts of me are like, okay, we hear you. That’s a thing. We understand that you’re doing your job. That’s your role in the system, is to have those thoughts. We can hold you and witness you and also not let you drive the bus, ‘cause you’re a toddler.

[01:58:21] Jessica Peterson: Absolutely.

[01:58:23] January: So there’s much more of a movement toward others, even though it could hurt. And realistically, I mean, the rational part of me is like, okay, but if we all end up dying, we’re not gonna be in pain ‘cause it’s gonna be done, there’s not gonna be a body left to feel the pain. So why is this a problem again?

But yeah. The desire is to move towards connection and engagement and not the despair, to just give it a safe container in which to express itself, but not let it overflow the container.

[01:58:56] Jessica Peterson: Yeah.

So how could we turn around this thought to make it more true than the thought everything is dying?

[01:59:13] January: Well, I think that the thought, “everything is living” is at least as true.

[01:59:18] Jessica Peterson: Mm, mm-hmm.

[01:59:19] January: I don’t even know how to come up with evidence for that, because I feel it so keenly. The aliveness of things exists in my body. That’s my lived experience of everything, my whole life. And so it just feels like, well, obviously!

And, you know, in the meantime, just day to day from this moment to the next, things are still living. I am still that healthy cell. There are still squirrels outside my window. There are still birds pecking at things. There are still fuchsias.

Things are still alive, and if I scale that up, there are cells in my body that are part of the collective body that is me, and then I am a cell that is part of the collective body that is humanity. And humanity is a cell that is part of the collective body that is the earth ecosystem. And the earth is a cell in the collective body of the cosmos.

All of that is all alive, you know, and it probably goes the other way too. I’m sure it goes down to the particle level as well, in ways that I don’t understand that are just beyond me. But even if the whole of planet Earth ceased to exist, the cosmos would still be alive, right?

So there’s that one. The other turnaround that immediately comes up for me is, “Something is being born.”

[02:00:46] Jessica Peterson: Hmm.

[02:00:48] January: I get, yeah, I get the all over goosebumps with that one again. I think that again comes from my tendency to observe nature and to watch cycles happening, but there’s nothing in nature that dies without nourishing the life that comes after it. That’s just how that works.

There might be some grief involved, if we are collectively the thing that dies and whatever life comes after us isn’t us. I, I don’t know if that might be. That is beyond my scope of understanding.

But I trust that life will keep going and that something, something is coming into being which will have meaning through all of this. I don’t know what it’s gonna be, but I don’t feel like I have to know, if that makes any sense.

I guess another turnaround that occurs to me is, “My thinking is dying.” Which is definitely true! This, this way that I have thought about and interacted with the world is passing away, and that’s not a bad thing. That’s part of remaining in relationship with reality, is just constantly letting go of the things that are not reality.

And that, that I think is the place where I’m super comfortable with this notion of death. Like, okay, okay. I know how to do this. I know how to die. That’s fine. I don’t need to worry about that. Is it gonna be painful? Yeah, probably. But we know how to do that part. That’s okay.

I’m kind of sitting now with the turnaround of, “Dying is everything.”

[02:02:32] Jessica Peterson: Mm-hmm. I had that one coming up for me.

[02:02:35] January: Yeah. It feels like there’s something really big there.

It’s hard for me to get a handle on specific ways that it feels as true or truer, but I can immediately, I can immediately relate to it through my own faith journey of, there’s this whole weird-to-me subset of Christianity, and especially American Christianity, that really got into this whole prosperity gospel thing of “believing in Jesus means that we’re going to be spared the suffering and we’re gonna be spared the death that we’re gonna be, you know, raptured up and taken away from earth before anything bad happens.”

[02:03:17] Jessica Peterson: Hmm.

[02:03:20] January: That is all bananas to me. First of all, it’s just bad theology. It’s not actually what scripture says! But the point of the story is that we are asked to follow Christ all the way to the cross. If you wanna live a resurrection life, that means going through the death. You get resurrected on the other side of the death, you don’t get magically pulled out before the death happens. You take that death with you into resurrection life.

And that’s ringing that echo of “death is everything” for me. That some of the work here is gonna have to be about reclaiming — reclaiming our ability to just face death, first of all. ‘Cause as an American culture, at least, we’re just in total denial about that even existing.

But then also building a relationship with it and learning how to engage it and face it and go through it with dignity and integrity, and not let it pull us out of being our, our essential selves because we’re trying to panic and manage and control all the things.

How do we face death and go through this process in a way that doesn’t create victims? Of ourselves, or anyone else?

And it’s really funny hearing myself say all of that. I was talking about this a little bit with some friends last night and I was remembering I was a goth in middle school, high school, early twenties. Well, late twenties too.

But, but the reason for that was because I looked around at my world and I saw all of these people who were in such toxic positivity mode. They didn’t wanna admit that there was anything bad that could ever happen. Anything painful got brushed under the carpet. Feelings of grief and loss were denied completely.

And so I kept seeing my classmates, I mean fellow children, who were completely unequipped to deal with bad stuff when it inevitably happened in their lives. It was a mess, and I was like, I’m gonna be in the midst of this and I’m just gonna be as loud as I possibly can about death being a thing.

Everything was skulls, everything was black clothes. Yeah. It was such a thing. And it, it’s funny to me because I have stressed before over that question that Martha asks about what is the thing that you did as a kid that you were super into, that people talked you out of as you grew up?

And I have a hard time thinking about that, ‘cause most of the things that I was super into as a kid, drawing and stuff like that, I’m still doing those things! So that’s a benefit. But none of them really feel like my calling or my purpose, in that sense. They’re things that I do for fun and they’re things that I do for play and that is good stuff and they enable me to live whatever the heck my purpose is. But they don’t feel like The Thing.

Now I can see myself remembering that this death thing was a thing even when I was a kid, which is hilarious to me. And I’m like, oh, maybe there’s something here that’s a piece of that. Maybe there’s something here that I need to integrate from having disowned it.

Not that I disowned it exactly. I didn’t reject that part of myself, but I haven’t, I haven’t fully integrated it. For sure, for sure. And this feels like an invitation to do that.

[02:06:59] Jessica Peterson: Mm.

[02:06:59] January: So that’s really interesting. Yeah.

[02:07:02] Jessica Peterson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm.

Wow. That was such an insightful journey and an unbelievable transformation from that existential crisis of “everything is dying” to “something is being born,” “everything is living,” “my thinking is dying,”

[02:07:23] January: Mm-hmm.

[02:07:24] Jessica Peterson: and “dying is everything,” which in some way is a reclamation of your soul’s work.

[02:07:33] January: Yeah. Yeah. There’s something there that I need to spend time with and sit with, for sure. Thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your facilitation.

[02:07:42] Jessica Peterson: Yeah, you’re so welcome. That was beautiful work.

[02:07:46] January: Thank

you.

[02:07:49] Andrew: Yeah. So, the questions are pretty straightforward. I think we could hear all four of the questions. And then you got into the turnarounds, and can I ask is the point of the turnarounds, do I have this right? It’s not that you’re gonna be like, oh, I was wrong before and I turned it around and I found the true one.

It’s not like you’re trying to find the one true of all the different, you just by turning it around in multiple ways, you’re allowing some complexity to enter into the system. It’s more of just let’s experience more than one thing, right?

That’s the goal of the exercise. The point isn’t to, like, disabuse ourselves of a lie by replacing it with the solitary truth. It’s kind of a bigger disabuse ourselves of the general misunderstanding lie that there’s only one way to ever look at a thing.

[02:08:35] January: Yeah. It helps us maintain the complexity of the actual reality of whatever’s happening.

[02:08:40] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[02:08:40] January: But it also protects us against overly rigid thinking. It protects us from that myopic narrowing of our perception, which helps to prevent misrecognition, Girardian misrecognition. It’s a way that we can, in fact, use our own misrecognitions, knowing that they’re there. We can use them

[02:09:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:09:01] January: to then help illuminate the areas that we’re not seeing.

[02:09:06] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. ‘Cause misrecognition for Girard is a thing that has to be believed.

[02:09:12] January: Mm-hmm.

[02:09:13] Andrew: You have to find a myth to make sense of the chaos and blood that was in the scapegoating, ‘Cause if you don’t, then it falls apart and it’ll turn into a story of vengeance. So you have to find the story, and you have to stick to it. You cannot question it. You cannot doubt it. You can’t. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, it…

[02:09:33] January: has to be the only story and everybody has to be on board with it.

[02:09:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:09:38] January: Yep.

[02:09:38] Andrew: In order for it to work. Yeah. It collapses otherwise, and it’s not beneficial for keeping the society together at that point.

[02:09:46] January: Mm-hmm.

[02:09:47] Andrew: This helps me ‘cause it’s just like, it doesn’t mean that you’re getting closer to the truth or further from the truth when you do these turnarounds, it just means here’s another experience, here’s another vantage point, and what does it do for you? But yeah, when you guys stumbled, because you, you started with everything is dying, which is...

[02:10:06] January: Mm-hmm.

[02:10:07] Andrew: Yeah, that’s terrifying.

[02:10:08] January: Yeah!

[02:10:09] Andrew: And, but of course, you know, like everything is living, like that’s, that’s a cool turnaround, but when you got to the turnaround that said, “Dying is everything.”

And I was like, what? Wait a second. And, and Jessica was like, “Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about that one too. You got to it first.” And I was like, you were thinking that?!” Like, what?!

I, and I was just, I was, could you fill me in a bit more on like dying is everything? Like, what, what did that feel like in your body? What, what did, what was that?

[02:10:34] January: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that’s another really fun thing that can happen with these exercises is that they don’t have to make sense, and they can turn into these kind of zen koan sentences of like,

[02:10:46] Andrew: Okay, yeah.

[02:10:46] January: that makes no rational sense, and yet my body reacts in such a strong way. There’s something there and I can’t let go of it.

[02:10:55] Andrew: Wow. Okay. Okay.

[02:10:56] January: And that was one for me where I still don’t know that I can rationally articulate what that means to me as a sentence, even two years in. The closest I can get is what we were talking about with life is the bigger reality than death, and that even any death that I’m experiencing, is still gonna serve the bigger reality that is life. And I can just not worry about that.

[02:11:19] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:11:20] January: All of the death ultimately serves the new life that’s coming after it, and that is a beautiful thing. But that’s as close as I can get to articulating that. Definitely in the moment I wouldn’t have had that language for it. But for me, it was a whole-body goosebumps.

[02:11:34] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[02:11:34] January: Like there’s an electric tingle kind of feeling that I get sometimes. There’s a deep, deep peace and relaxation when I hit on one that feels really true to me. My whole nervous system just goes down a notch.

[02:11:47] Andrew: Hmm.

[02:11:47] January: Like yeah. I can just relax into it in some way. Yeah. I don’t know what else to say about my example. I wanna share one of Martha’s, ‘cause I think this was so brilliant.

[02:11:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:11:58] January: She wrote a book about her experience of discovering abuse and then ultimately leaving Mormonism. The book is called Leaving the Saints.

She did enough emotional processing to be able to talk about the experience of what she went through without hatred in her heart. Just wanting to be clear about this is reality. This is actually happening to people and I’m not the only person it happened to.

[02:12:19] Andrew: Wow.

[02:12:20] January: And then, horrible scapegoating experience. Literally, I mean, death threats. So when she was undergoing that, going through this scapegoating, she had this thought in her head that she couldn’t let go of like, “Something terrible is gonna happen to me because I wrote that book.”

Like, that’s a perfectly legitimate belief, right? Given the situation that she’s in?

[02:12:39] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:12:39] January: It’s not—

[02:12:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:12:41] January: But the turnaround that she came up with — and she was like, “This made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever,” was, “I’m going to happen to something terrible because I wrote that book.”

And I do, I get full body goosebumps when I hear her say that. Like still, sitting here. I’m just like, “Yeah, you are!”

[02:13:03] Andrew: No, I know. It’s beautiful. Yeah, yeah. No, that’s beautiful, isn’t it? Oh, wow. Yeah.

[02:13:09] January: Yeah. So this can be an incredibly powerful exercise in allowing our body to help us unpick the knots that we’ve tied in our own heads, and to remember that there is a bigger reality than just the stories that we’re telling ourselves.

[02:13:25] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:13:27] January: Well I’m gonna cut our audience some slack and start wrapping things up there ‘cause we’ve been at this for a minute, but tell us what we’re gonna have next time.

[02:13:34] Andrew: Next week we’re talking about creativity and repentance, and surprise! We’re not gonna ask you to attach repentance to guilt. We won’t do that. Hopefully, you know us well enough to know that that’s not what’s coming at you.

[02:13:48] January: We’re really gonna spend some time reclaiming this notion of repentance and talking about it not as some shameful self-castigation that we have to go through, but as a creative adventure that we are invited to go on with God, that we are empowered to go on with God, I would even say.

We’re gonna talk about metanoia as a transformation that we receive rather than a goal that we achieve, coming all the way back to our first episode and the Heroine’s Journey. I’m gonna keep harping on this; you’re gonna keep hearing it.

And ultimately I hope that we land at a picture of the simultaneity of both urgency and mercy. That there are real consequences to unchanged lives. And so we really need to take these steps with God to transform our creativity in the world so that we’re not creating violence anymore, so that we’re creating love and connection and service and beauty and all of these good, nourishing things in the world instead of misusing our creativity to create violence against ourselves and each other.

[02:14:54] Andrew: Yeah, the discussion of repentance as a new mind, a transformation. And January’s got a presentation for us that starts off with how this has taken place over the course of human history which I, I found to be really fascinating, and I think you’ll find it a interesting conversation. Please come back and join us.

You’ve been listening to Theology Kills, a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive. Your hosts are January Jaxon and Andrew McRae, and Season One was written and produced by January Jaxon.

[02:15:34] January: Our theme music is “Things To Do In a Day” by Simon Lepine.

[02:15:40] Andrew: Theology Kills is exclusively listener funded. If you’d like to support our work or go deeper with practices, bonus content, and community conversations, join our Patreon at patreon.com/TheologyKillsPodcast. You can find everything we’re making at www.theologykills.com.

[02:15:59] January: That’s everything we have for you today. Thanks for listening, take care of yourselves and each other,

[02:16:04] Andrew: and we’ll see you next time.