EPISODE 135
Ryan Meeks: The Heretical Enlightenment
Do you have a real relationship with God or do you believe in what someone taught you to believe about that Higher Power?
Former minister Ryan Meeks describes his walk away from a very successful career as a minister of an evangelical megachurch and how he discovered true healing and a far greater life purpose in this very spiritual Living 4D conversation.
Learn more about Ryan’s work at his website and social media via Instagram.
SHOW NOTES
- Ryan shares an interesting connection with Carl Jung. (11:57)
- The person Ryan was a decade ago would scare the crap out of him today. (30:00)
- Fundamentalism + business systems = megachurch. (35:10)
- The sandcastle of Ryan’s faith began to wash away as he was exposed to different worldviews. (41:58)
- The Time magazine articles reporting on EastLake Community Church’s public support for the LGBTQI community were the tsunami that ended Ryan’s career in organized religion. (47:35)
- Fundamentalist religion plays off a very human felt sense of separation with “a cure” for a manufactured problem. (54:40)
- Ryan never really knew God in a spiritual way until after he left the ministry. (1:04:56)
- Ryan’s father, a longtime minister, handled the news of his shift away from evangelicalism remarkably well. (1:16:31)
- How do people get programmed into faulty belief systems? (1:34:12)
- What is your unmet task? (1:52:58)
- “We need to learn the way nature works.” (2:08:05)
- “It’s not that Christianity failed. It’s never been tried.” G.K. Chesterton (2:19:18)
- A Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosed in 2017 helped Ryan better understand that life is a gift and love is the point. (2:32:09)
RESOURCES & FURTHER READING
- Time magazine pieces by Elizabeth Dias on the evangelical fight over gay marriage and how evangelicals are changing their minds about it
- Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination
- The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
- Carl Jung’s Individuation Process
- The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
- Tao Te Ching: The Book of Meaning and Life by Richard Wilhelm
- The work of Huston Smith, Ken Wilber, Joseph Campbell, Terrance McKenna, Bill Plotkin, Matthew Fox, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and Thomas Keating
- Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work by Gary Lachman
- The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore by Deepak Chopra
- Oneness vs. the 1% by Vandana and Kartikey Shiva
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