Author Michael McPadden and host Johnny Guidry discuss the Spiritual Wisdom of Genesis. Pulling from his book, “Genesis to Revelation,” Michael shares his insights on how the stories in the book of Genesis are layered through with spiritual and metaphysical significance. He discusses his perspectives on heaven and hell, the creation story, Abraham, and more. He then weaves connecting threads through the Gospels and the book of Revelation. Join Refractive for an enlightening episode that encourages listeners to look closer at some of humanity’s most treasured stories in order to uncover rich guidance for spiritual growth.

Learn more about Michael McPadden and his book “Genesis to Revelation” at www.Michael-McPadden.com. To contact host Johnny Guidry for spiritual coaching or to book him for speaking events, send a message to RefractivePodcast@gmail.com or visit www.refractivecoaching.com.

Episode Transcript:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Refractive. I’m your host, Johnny G. Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Michael McPadden to the show. He’s the author of Genesis to Revelation, Abraham’s Promise, finding Christ, and seeing God. Growing up in Virginia, Michael Dreamt one day of becoming a naval aviator. He reached that goal, eventually became a commercial pilot, and spent a satisfying career doing that.

As he approached retirement, Michael decided to spend his time doing something that was a bit more of a passion project, and he turned to researching not only the Bible and stories of Christianity, but also mythology in general.

Through this study and research, Michael published his first book, Genesis to Revelation. We’re here today to discuss some of his views on the messaging that is contained within the Bible and how it relates to a wider spiritual path of growth. This is an exciting conversation we’re going to have about what wealth there is in the Bible for those of us who are christian or non Christian and how we can apply this to living a better life, feeling a little more fulfilled in our time on this planet, and connecting in a deeper way, not only to our creator, but to each other. So I’m happy to have you here. Michael, thank you so much for joining me on the show.

[00:02:10] Speaker B: John, it’s a real honor to be here with you. I really appreciate you having me on, and let’s have a really good discussion today. Let’s provide a benefit for your audience. I’m really looking forward to it.

[00:02:21] Speaker A: I love it. When you and I first started to speak about how, I don’t know about your views, your understandings, the way you’ve absorbed the messaging of the Bible, I found that it really harmonized with how I see things. And one of the most exciting things for me that I’ve experienced over the course of this spiritual path that I’ve been on for the last, I don’t know, six or seven years, is that when I look at the mystical roots of almost any faith, they never argue with each other. When I look at the mystical roots of Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Zen. Right. When I look at Taoism they don’t argue with each other. They’re all saying the same things. And this has been something so comforting to me.

Having grown up deeply rooted in a traditional christian faith that unabashedly claimed to single handedly have the best path to God.

[00:03:35] Speaker B: The only path.

[00:03:37] Speaker A: Yeah. I never quite absorb that authentically. And I feel comforted that in my own research, I found that that doesn’t need to be the case.

[00:03:47] Speaker B: I agree 100%.

As far as the Bible and the study of the Bible goes, I kind of like that. If I could just take some time and give an overview of what occurred or what came out from my work, because I didn’t start with any goal in mind. I just wanted to learn like you’re talking about. I wanted to find out what is the truth. And I agree with you. I couldn’t agree more that these other religious traditions, spiritual traditions, have wonderful, profound statements of spirituality, how to live your life, what’s going on in our lives, to help direct us. And while the Christian Bible, or actually the Bible, just say the Bible, while it has some of those things in it, I always felt there was a lot missing. A lot missing. I would go to church and I would listen. I’m thinking, does this guy really know what he’s talking about? This doesn’t really jive with what I think things are or how I feel in my heart that something is. And so my first step was to study the New Testament. And I found some anomalies in the New Testament, nothing terrible, things like. So we hear that Jesus taught about eternal life. This is just an example. He never said that. He never used those words. He used Aeonian. And this is real key to understanding the message that Jesus left us with. He came to bring life to our life. So the word Aeonian means age. And the way the Greeks used it in the first century ad was age was the age of a man. So Johnny Giddy, for example, he was born on such a date, and he’ll die on such a date. And the time span and the life that Johnny lived in that time span was Johnny’s age. Okay? That’s exactly how the word was used. So Jesus said, I have come to bring you a onion. Life. Life now, not when we die. Life right now. So I saw that. I said, yeah, but you can read that anywhere on the Internet. People know this or the information is out there. It wasn’t stunning. And then for some reason, I was compelled to read Genesis, reread it. Actually, I’ve read it once I went, there’s no way I read Genesis. It’s boring. It doesn’t make it. It got a man and a woman. They’re naked. They’re hiding in a tree. There’s a talking serpent. I’m not interested. A little more background. I was trained as an engineer and a mathematician, and what I’m about to go into is mythology and reading the symbols within mythology. This is not engineer material. This is what’s so weird about, like, I don’t even believe in symbology, I don’t think, right?

[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:06:31] Speaker B: I start reading these myths, and I’m going, why am I reading this? Doesn’t make any sense. And all of a sudden, I’m reading Genesis one. I’m going, wait a minute. This is poetry. No, I’m not a literature guy, but I know poetry when I see it. These days are split in two. Every day has two parts to it. And then I thought, what was God’s name again that he gave to Moses at the burning bush?

So I go to Exodus. First thing I discover, and chapter three is like a long legal brief. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. You just go to the very end where it says, God’s real name is, I am, and I become.

I am the consciousness within, and I become the universe without I am and I become. That’s our God. He’s dualistic. There’s no triune God. He’s dualistic. He’s consciousness and he’s material.

So are we, coincidentally, right? So I went, whoa, wait a minute. So now I go back to Genesis one. All of a sudden, you know where it says, let there be light? Yeah, it’s clear. Look, I don’t speak Hebrew, but I know how to read the rules for grammar. And when you translate the Genesis one, it says something completely different. It wasn’t, let there be light. God says, I am light. And the way the Hebrew reads is, let’s see, elohim. And Elohim said, elohim is the name for God. And Elohim said, I am light, and he became light. Get it? I am, and I become also. I said, whoa, wait a minute.

There’s, like, 50 times within Genesis one where God’s name, as I am and I become, pops out at you as a reader once you start looking for it. That’s what I did. I started saying, well, wait a minute.

If I know this now, then this changes Genesis one and how it’s supposed to be read. So the way it works is the first part of the day I am consciousness. Declares what will be. And the second half of the day I become, becomes those things. Okay, well, this is completely different. This is profound. Now we have a profound bible. Now we have something that, this is better than all the rest of the writings I’ve ever seen, because this is fantastic.

It tells us how God creates reality. Now, I can keep going on if you want, we could talk about that, but just as a brief overview. Genesis one tells us how God creates reality. Genesis two tells us how God and man, working together, create man’s reality. Genesis three tells us how we lost our connection to the creative divine.

Then we jump to the next chapters are all about the New Testament. We need a messiah. We need someone to come along who went to the other side, came back. Okay, this is how it’s done. This is how you can have your own hero’s journey. Then the next chapter is about the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. We’re all on a spiritual hero’s journey, every one of us. There are 17 gates that we must pass through, and the very end is resurrection is the ultimate boon, as Joseph Campbell calls it. But it’s Resurrection, and resurrection is uniting with consciousness.

All right, so then that’s what the New Testament does. So Jesus teaches us how to pray and how to believe. That’s how we move ourselves further along the Path. Paul tells us what to look for. These are the gates of the awakening. As Paul understood, Paul was an awakened master. He knew what the gates were, and he tells us in his epistles what they are, what to look for. And then revelation is a very concise, it’s not concise, it’s a very elaborate. Hero’s journey starts at the beginning, when we hear the call across the threshold into the unknown land, and it ends with all of us, all of us as brothers walking into the holy city together.

A lovely story. And that’s what the Bible really is. That’s the story of the human soul, and that’s the Story that the Bible tells. There you go. I’m done. Look, I got it out.

[00:10:56] Speaker A: That’s quite the journey. And there’s so many different aspects of this we could talk about today. And I’m glad that you kind of gave us a bit of an overview of some of the high points. And I want to focus on the topic because you said something that I found very interesting when we were initially speaking together about how, in your view, the idea of heaven and hell, as we’re traditionally taught through dogma and religious traditions, seems to have really missed the point that you have a slightly different. Well, a very different understanding of what heaven and hell is. And I personally also have a very different understanding of heaven and hell than what I was taught as a kid in catholic school. And so I thought that this would be a really interesting area of focus for us because, well, it’s so central to the life of faith that so many of us were brought up in this idea of heaven and hell being the be all, end all.

And when I begin to look through it through different perspectives, it changes my entire relationship to spirituality. So I wonder if you could kind of walk us through.

First of all, what do you see as?

How do you define heaven and hell?

[00:12:44] Speaker B: Okay, so, first of all, that was a great question, by the way. I want your audience to understand that I’m not making any of this up on my own. I’m finding evidence of the Bible. If I found heaven and hell in the Bible, that’s what I would put in my book. I don’t have a horse in this race. No one asked for my vote. I didn’t get a choice. I’m here. I’m just telling you what the Bible says. So the metaphor for our lives is given to us in the days of creation. And God says he becomes the evening. He becomes the morning. He’s not part of the darkness of night. The darkness is the journey into the material world of egoism. See, that’s where we lose our divine connection by becoming egoic, and we all do this. This is eating from the tree of knowledge. And a lot of people understand. They say, they think that what Yahweh Elohim tells the man in Genesis two is that if you eat, he didn’t say that. He says, in the day that you eat, meaning we will all eat from the tree of knowledge. We will become a goic, and we’ll lose our connection to God. The journey is to reverse that. That’s what the spiritual journey, trials and tribulations. We end with resurrection for all men. I’m trying to make point here, okay?

And so the model of it is, we become the evening when we are children. Jesus said, for truly theirs is the kingdom of heaven. In other words, kids live in the kingdom of heaven. And unless we become like them, we won’t.

So they come in the evening, then they enter the darkness right around puberty. I guess it’s a transition, and it’s a process. You don’t become egoic overnight. You transition.

[00:14:27] Speaker A: Wait, let me jump in here, Michael, because you’re referencing evening and morning and things and I don’t think that we’ve established what you mean by that. So can you go back and kind of lay some groundwork on what you mean by evening and morning? What are you talking about?

[00:14:43] Speaker B: Okay, so every day of creation, it ends. Okay, so first God declares what will be. Then God, as I become, builds. He doesn’t create. He builds in time the things of creation. So he declares that he builds, and every day ends with. And he became the evening, and he became the morning. Day 1234 and five. Right? Okay, so you have this picture of the light. I am light. So God is the light. He’s the sun in this metaphor. And so all the building and creating goes on during the day. And then it says, he becomes the evening, the fading light of evening, as we. His creation fades into the darkness of egoic existence. Okay, so we’re traveling, John, you and I, buddy, we’re traveling through the darkness together. Yes, but there’s light, and we’re going to the dawn. We’re moving towards dawn. And dawn begins the resurrection. So as you approach got. As you approach the end of your life, people who are older are so much more spiritual. And it’s because I think, I’m writing another book, but I have a feeling it has to do with the degeneration of the human brain that doesn’t allow us to be as egoic as we are when we’re younger. I don’t know. I’m guessing there, but basically the metaphor is evening, darkness, dawn, resurrection, back to God in the light.

[00:16:19] Speaker A: Right?

[00:16:20] Speaker B: Okay, that’s what you believe, right?

[00:16:22] Speaker A: Okay. Yes. And I want to wrap as we continue to move on.

This feels right to me, because.

[00:16:36] Speaker B: What.

[00:16:36] Speaker A: I believe is that we’re all sparks of the creator, and we’re all on an inevitable journey towards reunification with the creator. And that in order for me to experience reunion, reunification, communion with the creator, I have to.

I have to go through this ego experience, which, the way I see it is I’m like a gem that’s full of fissures and imperfections. And as I move through this and find love as my natural response to this gunk, rather than a lack of love ego. In response to the gunk, I heal the fissures one by one by one. And as I eventually become a perfectly clear diamond, right, without all of that ego gunk that I got in the darkness, I am then capable of reunification with the creator.

That’s how I see my journey of moving through the evening and back towards the resurrection. It’s heal. Find God’s love. And perfection in all things, not just the pleasant, not just the beautiful. And as I do that in heal, I become more able to see the light of God without obstacle, without blocking.

And I’m thus prepared to be in God’s presence more directly. And the thing about this belief that I really like is that I can speak to catholic dogma, because that’s what I was raised in. The Catholics are so close. This idea of purgatory, right, instead of this idea of, like, purgatory is this between world my soul goes to after death. Purgatory is now, like purgatory is the process of healing and cleansing and becoming again able to stand in the presence of God, unobstructed, because I have healed, because my energy has risen in quality, in clarity, in vibration, that I can actually withstand the presence of God.

Anyway, I just wanted to kind of layer my own beliefs on top of yours. And to me, they align very closely.

[00:19:41] Speaker B: They’re exactly correct. The only thing I would change from what you were saying is that you were saying that then you become capable.

You want to push those two together and say, as I get clearer, I do stand in the presence of God more and more. It’s not something. There’s no options here. It’s like, as you throw off your egoic chains, you become free. That’s what being in God is. And so Paul described it. He said, now I look through a glass or a darkened glass, but later, face to face.

That was Paul. Paul was brilliant. I love anything he wrote. He’s a brilliant man. But anyway. No, you just described what I did.

But you believe what Genesis teaches already, and you haven’t even read it. I don’t think.

Not the decrypted version. Right. Because these are myths. Now, let me take a minute to explain a myth.

[00:20:43] Speaker A: Okay.

Some people might bristle when they hear this.

[00:20:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So a myth. This is my definition. But a myth is any story, either fiction or nonfiction, that is written in a particular format. And I call it mythical literature. So when you write a story as mythical literature, it can be about a real person. For example, the story of Abraham.

I think you’ll like this. The story of Abraham is the myth Abraham. My book depends. Almost a lot of my book depends on the fact that Abraham brought the first eleven chapters of Genesis with him when he left sumer. So I fully believe Abraham was a real person. But his story is written as mythical literature to teach us a lesson. Here’s a story, quick and dirTy. So Abraham leaves Sumer, and he and his wife Sarah cannot have a child. She’s barren. And so Abraham really wants an heir. And so Sarah says, hey, go sleep with the slave hagar and let her bear you a son. So he does. And so Hagar bears Abraham’s first son. His name is Ishmael, but he was born as a bond servant because he was born to a slave. But then, miraculously, God raises something from the dead to living again, which was SaraH’s womb.

This is what we read in revelation. God raises the kingdom back alive again so that we can have this resurrection experience. So he raises something that was dead to life again. And Sarah becomes pregnant with Abraham’s second son, and his name is Isaac. And so Isaac is born to a free woman. So he’s a free man.

Ishmael, the first man, represents Adam, the man of bonDage, our ego. And Isaac, the second man, represents the man of freedom, which is Christ. So this is, in a nutshell, the journey of the human soul. We are born as Adam, but we resurrect as Christ.

Okay, cool. Pretty cool, isn’t it? I like that every story in the Bible is written like that. And I want to throw this out to your audience. Maybe some of them aren’t all that interested in pursuing a spiritual path or what I’m describing. If they’re interested in mythology, my book does a real good job of teaching how I’m doing this decoding. Anyone can do it if you know what you’re looking for. So you can take what I teach you in my book about decoding the Mythology, you go through the Bible yourself and decode it. There’s hundreds of these Things. I scratch the Surface. So all you sleuths, all you mythological, and you can do this. Like, I’ve decoded greek myths and sumerian myths using the same method. It’s just not that hard. You have to know they’re written in symbolic language.

That’s kind of an off thing. But anyway, GeneSis, all the Genesis stories are Myths.

All of the characters that you see are symbolic of other things, like the man and the woman. In Genesis, two people call them Adam and Eve, but the woman is a symbolic entity. She represents human self awareness. Yeah. So the fall from grace was us as consciousness, entering into human self awareness, creating our ego. The ego comes out of our belief system. That’ll be in chapter one. And the belief system is what locks us into ego.

When consciousness creates reality through believing.

But when locked into your belief system, in your egoic consciousness, all you can believe is what? Your belief system, right? Yes. Okay. Does that make sense?

[00:24:46] Speaker A: Yes.

[00:24:46] Speaker B: Oh, this is great. I’m so happy.

So all you know is Johnny giddy. That’s all you know? You live where you live, you eat what you eat. Your world is what it is, but you probably see it in your life, changes in yourself, affecting how your world comes to you.

I had to take a day off yesterday. I went snowboarding for the first time in ten years, so it was a lot of fun. And I was in such a good mood just for everything, right? And I get out there, and guess what? This is weird. Everybody else was in a really good mood, too, with me. Yeah, that’s okay. And I’m sure there are people who are giving me sideways glances for various reasons, cutting them off on the slope or something. I didn’t notice those people. So as we change, our world changes. But as we’re in Goic, we’re locked into the belief system and what it believes. When we free ourselves, it’s just us in our mind, and we can believe whatever we.

[00:25:47] Speaker A: Right. That’s right.

[00:25:49] Speaker B: That’s what Jesus taught us.

[00:25:51] Speaker A: Yes.

Okay, look, like you said, there’s so many rabbit holes I want to jump down. There’s so many quotes and verses that I want to go into, and we just don’t have time for that.

I’m like a kid at the candy store, and I want to try it all, but okay, I’m going to bring us back.

[00:26:14] Speaker B: Oh, heaven and hell. Let’s go to heaven and hell, because you did ask that question.

[00:26:18] Speaker A: I know you read let’s go to heaven and hell. So I want you to tell me, I want you to contrast for me, if this feels right for you, what your view of we’ll start with heaven is. What is your view of heaven, and how does it contrast with the view of heaven that we tend to be taught by christian dogma?

[00:26:44] Speaker B: Well, I don’t believe in that heaven at all. It doesn’t exist. Nothing exists after our death. Nothing. I’m not saying we’re going to nothing. I’m just saying when you’re dead, you’re dead. So that’s number one.

What Jesus talked about wasn’t a heaven. He talked about the kingdom of the heavens. While you live right now, we can experience the kingdom of the heavens like the children that I talked about earlier. But it requires some spiritual practices. The most important one is spiritual believing. You have to believe there’s a kingdom of the heavens, and you have to believe that you’re worthy of it. Knock on the door and it’ll be open. It’s that simple. You just have to change your mind and believe. That’s what Jesus taught. So let’s say I was going to write you a letter, and I’m one page Dear John, I can’t ever talk again, but this letter is for you to try and live your life by. There’s a heaven and hell. How much of that letter would you think if I really was your friend, how much of that letter would be focused on stay out of hell?

You don’t need to know a thing about heaven. Just don’t go to hell. We’re crying out loud. The Bible doesn’t even talk about hell. So if there was a hell, most of the Bible we about stay out of that place. We’re crying out loud. It’s terrible. So the jewish tradition in the first century was there was no talk of the afterlife.

When you died, the righteous and the unrighteous went to Sheol. Shiol is a hebrew word for grave, the beyond, the unknown. When they wrote a book called the Septuagint, which is the greek version of the Hebrew Bible, back about 250 BC, every time the editors would come across the word shiol, they replaced it with the greek word Hades.

So when Jesus and Paul talked about the unknown, death, things like that, they would refer to shield. No one knows what happens in shield. The righteous and the unrighteous go to the same place in this tradition, and that’s what Jesus and Paul taught. But the word they used was Hades. So every time you see hell in the New Testament, it’s Hades.

Did Jesus believe in Hades, the God Hades, or did he believe in the land called all that’s. They don’t exist anyway. That’s why you just don’t find hell spoken of in the Bible whatsoever when they talk about heaven. Heaven isn’t what these early translators tried to understand. They took their egoic minds and tried to take these spiritual ideas and put them into the physical. They couldn’t understand what it was to be in the kingdom of the heavens, so they assumed that what would happen is when you die, you went to heaven. But Jesus tells us what happens when we die. We go to paradise. We don’t go to heaven, we go to paradise. When he was on the cross talking to the thief, and he says, truly, I tell you, today, you and I will be in paradise.

Okay, so heaven and hell, no resurrection. Yes. That’s all Jesus ever talked about. He never talked about heaven and hell. Paul didn’t. It’s not in revelation. Revelation tells us, as brothers, we all walk into the city together, we all rise at the same time. Oh, there’s another rabbit hole we’re going to go down. Now, since I said that we all rise together, what that means is we are leaving different points of the axis of time that we live in, right? But we’re going to the same time together. So when you die and you get ready to cross that line, you’ll do it with your parents, you’ll do it with your grandparents, you’ll do it with everyone you’ve ever known. You’ll do it with Jesus, you’ll do it with Napoleon, you’ll do it with Joan of Arc, whomever. But we all are traveling into the eternal moment.

[00:30:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:54] Speaker B: Okay, so that’s why Paul says we all rise together in Christ.

[00:31:01] Speaker A: Okay?

[00:31:02] Speaker B: That’s why revelation says we all walk into the city.

[00:31:07] Speaker A: Yeah. All right. I’m here for that.

And when you say in Christ, are you referring to Christ consciousness, that perfectly crystallized united soul entity that is purely prepared to stand in the presence of the creator? Is that what you mean?

[00:31:30] Speaker B: Yes, but it’s more complicated than that. As you might have imagined, it’s not too much more complicated. So Christ is the creation.

Christ is the whole thing. It’s your birth, it’s your walk through life, and it’s your death. So the way John, the author of Revelation, puts it, he says, I, your brother John, or I, John, your brother. Ready? In the trials, the tribulations, and the kingdom, which are all found in Christ.

So our entire life is Christ?

Yes. We’re going to have Christ consciousness. That’s part of the blueprint. That’s how this works. Very simple. So you’re going through all this stuff you’re going through in life and the trials and the tribulations and the learning and the setbacks and all these things going on, but slowly but surely, you’re passing through one of the 17 gates, and as you pass through that gate, you have less to go, and you get closer to the purification that you’re talking about. Right? So you’re on track.

You don’t even need to read my book. You got all this stuff figured out.

Look.

[00:32:46] Speaker A: This is all I. All I. You know, all I really kind of have to say is that I believe that. That return to the creator is inevitable.

It is not something that I believe is to be earned through righteousness.

It is that there are these near infinite pathways to return to the creator, and every pathway returns to the creator eventually. Time is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether I dedicate my entire life right now to living in a remote monastic environment or whether I go on crime sprees, I do not ever impede my return to the creator. There’s no guarantee of efficiency and timeliness. But I can’t possibly get in the way of my return to the creator because it is, even from a physics perspective, it’s the return to zero. It’s the return to zero.

It’s the endpoint of entropy. It’s the beginning and endpoint. It’s the alpha and the omega. It is, like, unavoidable.

And we’re all along for the ride.

And this idea of an eternity in either a reward state of heaven or a penalty state of hell, it doesn’t fit for me.

[00:34:34] Speaker B: It doesn’t fit.

[00:34:35] Speaker A: And I don’t want to just willy nilly disregard the deeply held beliefs around this by millions and millions of people. Who am I right?

[00:34:49] Speaker B: Yet.

[00:34:51] Speaker A: When I look at the soul’s journey based on my discernment and based on what I perceive in the discernment of people whose journeys I trust, heaven and hell, to me, and I wonder if you’d agree, is simply the state of.

Let me see.

It is simply the decision to be aligned with this soul journey or the decision to resist the soul’s journey. As if I ever really could. And to completely devote myself to my ego’s definition of survival and security that is hell.

And complete surrender to the spiritual path as arranged by not Johnny, whatever. Not Johnny is heaven.

And the way that I can test this is that. Michael, I don’t know about you, but for most of my life, I tried so hard to do everything right. I tried to study, I tried to work hard. I tried to build loving relationships. I tried to establish my physical security and welfare. I tried to manage my finances. I tried to create peace in the world. I tried to be a good person. And yet, everything hurt. Everything was uncomfortable. And none of these things could I truly say I was successful even in my career, where I got applauded and promoted and recognized I had an unhealthy relationship with my egoic attachment to my career. So even that with pats on the back, wasn’t painless. It was painful because it was wrought from fear.

And so that is hell, to do everything right, quote right.

And still life is painful at all turns, as opposed to heaven, which is to say, I’m here, I surrender. I catch the wind like a kite. I go where the wind blows me. I’m here for the journey. I open myself up to receive all. I open myself up to be all. I open myself up to experience all.

There’s no room for stress in that perspective. There’s no room for pain in that perspective. In that perspective, the death of my child is not an obstacle to joy, as weird and revolutionary as that sounds. I know I sound like a crazy person, but I’m going to say it again. When I adopt the perspective that I am only here to surrender when things happen that I don’t like, it has no bearing on my potential for joy.

[00:38:23] Speaker B: Right, exactly.

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is life’s supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to be suffering. It’s like, what? That’s nuts. But it’s true. We’re here because.

Okay, so in chapter three of Genesis, the man chooses the tree of knowledge, right? When he chooses the tree of knowledge, the woman comes alive as human self awareness and begins talking.

And then her children are the various manifestations of ego that we deal with in life. They never go away until we conquer them. They never go away. In revelation, it’s referred to as the beast with the mortal wound that lived. These are our expressions of ego and habits that we develop in our lives. Let’s say I can’t drink alcohol. I’m an alcoholic. I hate to say that, but it’s true. It’s like a failure for me, but I don’t really care anymore. I can’t drink alcohol. It’s terrible for me.

That beast that I created by drinking whatever I created, it was part of my life plan, however you want to look at it, but it’s still a beast, and it’s a beast that should be dead because I said I’m not going to drink anymore. But that beast is alive. I know it is. I know it is. It has a mortal wound, but yet that beast still lives. So we’re going through the darkness. We are dead spiritually.

You can’t have a greater hell than being dead, completely cut off from God, I don’t think.

But then we start to awaken, and then we leave hell. And that would be heaven? Yeah, I guess if you wanted to imagine the resurrection as heaven. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I just don’t use the terms because they’re fake terms in the New Testament. They don’t talk about some heaven as a place. There’s a kingdom of the heavens that we experience. That’s the tree of life. And then there’s Hades, which is the grave, the unknown. What happens when we pass? What happens? We don’t know. And so we don’t talk about it. I guess so. I don’t use heaven and hell particularly for that reason. They’re not really in the.

[00:40:42] Speaker A: If, as we kind of get to the closing of this arc that we’re talking about here, I don’t know if you would agree with me, and I certainly invite you to share your perspective on this, but I guess what I would encourage people to do is to go within, turn within, enter the stillness within, and ask yourself, how do you define heaven and hell? Read everything that you can. Read spiritual texts, listen to people who study this, internalize it all, and then come up with what feels right to you. Because if there’s anything that I truly believe, it’s that you already are.

You already know.

And the answers are in the stillness.

[00:41:34] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. And this is what Paul teaches in his epistles. He constantly. So one of the things they do in the interpretation of the New Testament, it’s very irritating to me, is that they misconjugate words sometimes or they’ll put wrong translations to them. For example, when Paul talks about gifts of the spirit that you received in Christ, he doesn’t talk about them as something that will happen. He says, you already have them. They’re already there. Like, you have already been seated with Christ in the kingdom of the heavens. That’s already happened. You haven’t realized it yet in time, but it’s there. It’s not something God has withheld. God’s done all these things. And so what you just said is just a reflection of what Paul taught, what Jesus taught, too. But the point is that, yeah, all these things that are supposedly waiting for us are already done. They’re just waiting for us to realize them in our awakening path.

[00:42:34] Speaker A: Yes.

[00:42:35] Speaker B: Everything that we believe or that we understand to be true about spirituality is found in the Bible one way or another. One of the things I do, I have a Twitter account. So what I do is I’ll go. And I have followed a lot of these Twitter sites that basically put out eastern philosophies. Good stuff. But I’ll read it, and then my response will always be where it says that in the Bible. Yeah, right. And so it’s just the way, it’s like, I’m not trying to say you’re wrong. In fact, I’m agreeing with you. What I’m saying is that all of these teachings are in the Bible, too.

[00:43:10] Speaker A: All align.

[00:43:11] Speaker B: If we just wake up and look at. Yeah, that’s it.

[00:43:16] Speaker A: That’s it. I love it. Michael, I really enjoyed doing a bit of a deeper dive here. I don’t know if I’d call it philosophical. I don’t exactly know how I’d refer to it, but it’s been a really nice deep dive. And if listeners would like to learn more about you, your path, your book, where would you direct them?

[00:43:38] Speaker B: I have a website. It basically is just going to direct you to Amazon to buy my book. But the book is genesis to revelation, and it’s by author Michael McPadden. It’s on Amazon Kindle, paperback, hardback.

I have a Twitter account.

It’s Genesis two, underscore Rev. Okay, yeah. And if I could leave your audience with just one thing that I would encourage them to do, and this is in my book, chapter nine. The book talks about prayer and belief and how it’s done. But if you could just take something away, believe me when I’m telling you that consciousness creates reality, and this is what Jesus taught. If you could just believe, you can do so. It’s so simple. And yet why don’t they teach that church? I don’t know.

[00:44:35] Speaker A: That’s it. I love that. The ultimate empowerment there.

[00:44:39] Speaker B: Absolutely. It’s all within us. We just have to make the choice.

[00:44:43] Speaker A: That’s beautiful. Michael, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us today. And I have deep respect for anyone who dedicates this kind of effort to his spiritual path. And as I said earlier, we don’t all end up following the same path, we don’t all end up with the same beliefs, we don’t all end up adhering to the same principles, but we’re all ending up in the same place.

[00:45:16] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.

[00:45:17] Speaker A: It’s unavoidable. So I see you, and I’m glad to walk this parallel path with you, buddy.

[00:45:24] Speaker B: This is fantastic. Johnny, thank you so much for having me on. It really has been an honor and a privilege and I just enjoyed the conversation. I could talk about this stuff all day, but this has been great.

[00:45:34] Speaker A: Same here, everyone. Thanks again for tuning in to an episode of Refractive. And as you go out in your day, always remember to aim your light. Take care.