In this podcast called Almost Heretical, this woman, Shelby Bennett, is talking about her background in linguistics and Bible scholarship and she's discovering there's a whole lot that's been left out of the canon. And why is that? So, as she's delving into which books have been left out, she realizes it's whole books about women like Susanna and Judith. And these are really amazing stories. Why were they left out? “Well, because they didn't have any Hebrew originals. So we're going to leave those out. Because scholarly ways of thinking about what the origins of Scripture are, “Well, it needs to be in the original tongue of the chosen people,” would be one of the criteria. And so, “Well, we don't have the original, so let's put that into what we'll call the Apocrypha and we'll just kind of splice that in the middle of the Old Testament and the New Testament in our Protestant version. So that came about during the time of Luther. In the time of Luther, he's like, “Well, I don't really like this book. I'm gonna take it out.” Because it's the way they're pushing back against the Catholic Church. “You think you have authority over all of this and what goes into this canon and we're skeptical about what you've included here.” So, it's the original deconstruction movement that evangelicals, now, are pushing back against—and it's ironic, because that's how they started. And so, when we look into apocrypha, it means to hide away, and it has to do with these hidden secrets. And so the original meaning of Apocrypha is about this knowledge that is just too dangerous for the uninitiated. So you need to kind of hide those things away from people who are dabbling with this secret knowledge because if it gets into the wrong hands or it's used in the wrong way, then things can go very awry. But then the church gets a hold of this idea and says, “Yeah, there's some things that actually need to be hidden away those those things we'll just exclude from the authorized versions of what we're going to copy.” And so that double meaning of the word, it just feels like there's a whole novel there around, Why were those things excluded? Who was excluded? Whose voices were involved in deciding what was something that was safe and something that wasn't? And so now it's just opening up this huge world of well… now everything outside of the Bible seems way more interesting.
I love that! How would you describe those two meanings, in summary?
The two meanings so one would be… um, I have a document open somewhere. I can get it up quickly. That already has it there. So I'm going to try to find that. So, I'm quoting it from Wikipedia.
Sometimes, these applications are trying to do things that just get in the way trying to be helpful here.
“Apocrypha are works, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin. But the word Apocrypha was first applied to writings which were kept secret because they were the vehicles of esoteric knowledge considered too profound or too sacred to be disclosed to anyone other than the initiated. Apocrypha was later applied to writings that were hidden, not because of their divinity, but because of their questionable value to the church. In general use, the word Apocrypha has come to mean “false”, “spurious”, “bad”, or “heretical.”
So, that, to me, feels like the same thing that Trump did with the phrase “fake news.” First of all, it was a charge against him, like, “You're just throwing out fake information.” And then he just turned around and said, “No, you're fake news.” So now, the mainstream media is considered fake news by all his followers. It's that kind of thing that the patriarchy does: it takes a word and then turns it into its opposite.
Powerful. And that's inspiring you today? In your transformation process, in your creation process, where is that leading you, do you think?
It was in The Artist’s Way. I'm doing this practice: I do my meditation, and then I do a kind of written meditation where I'm getting three Morning Pages out of the way, and that's where, well, I was inspired by what I was listening to on this podcast beforehand. And then I just went into a rant for three pages. Yeah, I could write write a whole book about this.
Yeah, that's amazing. And rich—a very rich idea.
Yeah. And the interesting thing is that as I'm looking into other connections it goes into—now I can't even think of how to pronounce this, but—Rudolf Steiner was exploring theosophy. (Is that what it is? Yeah.) And then, reading a little bit about that… He has connections to Atlantis and… Okay, now there's all these rich connections that are coming out of that. And, it's also sort of connected to the experience that Mark and I had with meeting up with Della and Dale in Nanoose Bay on Sunday. So, this was the first in-person meeting that I experienced with some Design Science Studio people, and they were delving into like, “We've been on this 30-year druid quest.” Or, I think it's been longer than that. It's been since the early 70s. So kind of as long as I've been around. Yeah. There's a lot of interesting connections cropping up there. It's opening up a lot of curiosity about about the idea of how mystery lures us towards our creativity. And then it's answering the question, “Well, why? Why is everything so hidden?” And if I was divine, I would maybe have a game where I invite people into a kind of treasure hunt. And it's, everything is just hidden in plain view. But you have to have the ability to perceive it to see it. And so, it's actually a lot of times getting out of the human bias of the sense of sight and then going into all of the body sensations and the emotions and you know, all those things that… So, part of the story was recognizing that here's this woman who doesn't have a name, who comes to Jesus with a bottle of perfume and anoints him. And so, Shelby Bennett is noting that. “Well, isn't this interesting that Jesus has been anointed by a woman? And what does Messiah mean? The Anointed One. So there's so much meaning wrapped up in this act that the men are oblivious to in that room, and they're questioning this man's authority. And here's a woman who believes everything and is willing to make this huge financial sacrifice, noting that you're a king but also you're going to your death. So this is also like preparing you for your burial in one act. And so, one of the phrases that comes out of this story is Jesus saying to the men, “Why are you bothering her?” And they say this should be embroidered on a pillow or something? Yeah, we should. We should make merchandise maybe a hoodie. Why are you bothering her? Jesus?
I love that. So much.
Yeah. I think it should happen.
I see a whole body of work in this spark here, and it feels so resonant with who you are and your experiences and your expertise, your gifts. And I just really appreciate the way that you honed in on what it is that the Divine Feminine does—to sanctify, and it is simply seeing, acknowledging, believing. That's it. That's all that she had to do. It wasn't some like mystical act of witchcraft. It was just, “No, I believe you are the Messiah.” And thus, you are. And we all have that power, just as we all have that feminine energy. And what that is is self-creation. We are all creators, right? And it's through that act of belief through the bringing to the light of conscious awareness that we're creating. I was thinking about when you're introducing this idea of apocrypha, how there's this hidden knowledge that's too dangerous for the uninitiated. And it made me think about how often when we're children, we have this light, this brilliant innocence, and we don't know how to relate to it, because nobody teaches us, sometimes. And, you know, all the adults around us have forgotten their own light and so they can't recognize our light as something precious and holy and sacred. And so they go about, just the factory-producing adults and just, you know, mechanically shipping us down the line of industrialized capitalist society. Like, “Okay. Quick! Grow up! Quick! Get a job! Hurry up and wait for death.” There's this sense, I think, of, “The knowledge of self is too dangerous for the uninitiated.” And so we do this thing where we push ourselves into the shadows. We push our true self away, because it doesn't fit in this world. This love, this pure light of our true self, this essence of innocence and purity and divinity that exists in every human being as the soul and the spirit which animates that soul connects us to that light. It it's like in order to survive in the world. We have to push that away. It's too dangerous. It would destroy the whole world. So I feel you, you know, looking at this powerful truth in a really unique way, and I am so happy to hear it. I really, really want to support you, bringing this exploration into manifestation.
And that's why I'm here.
Bravo!
Yeah, I'm really excited about what can emerge from this collaboration.
And you did something really potent, too, which is you're starting to talk about the game of the Divine treasure hunt, and how those with eyes to see, those with the ability to perceive will see. And then you did a really beautiful thing where you went into body sensations as a form of sight. And I think that is the real—in business terms—differentiator, because so many people will talk about the light and the Christ and the mystery and the divinity and the game and being able to see. But man, it’s that body. It's this body that we have not woven back into this story. And it's time, right?
There's gotta be a reason why we have these kind of game pieces. Because we're not using the full faculties that we've been given so and then it's also part of what I was writing this morning was connecting to the other living beings around us, recognizing that they're part of this game as well. And they have… they’ve been learning the language, the secret language for billions of years. And so they're holding the secrets except we're destroying them by what we're doing with our industrial society. And so the secrets are disappearing with them. And so we're really you don't know… What if that shift in awareness about what's actually going on here means that the value that we're putting in these even “so called” inanimate gold, and precious metals, and so on, they're precious in other ways that we have no idea about. But we're just starting now to recognize: Oh, the fungi are communicating. The trees are communicating. What else is communicating, and what messages are we missing? Because… Yeah.
I love that so much! I love that you're going into the mineral consciousness, like that geological scale of intelligence and that feels like a beautiful chapter. Yeah, like the inner being with the mineral kingdom with the fungal kingdom with the animal kingdom with the plants and then you can circle back to the fact that in this body in these cells that make up this body is the maternal haplotype. That's the DNA from the original mother of my lineage 150,000 years ago. My I still have material that connects back to a single being 150,000 years ago. And I, that's a kind of memory. Those secrets are still here somehow. Yeah, yeah. And so what I feel in in this subject is how much that says, without explicitly having to say it. You know what I mean here that the, the wisdom of the new paradigm of the free thinkers of the self creators of the self governed, self organizing organism, planetary organism, it's, it's unspoken, right? I don't know what it means that I can. I am 150,000 years old. But I am and that that must mean something. I can feel it. There's a subtlety that's present. And that's the mystery luring us toward creativity.
Yeah. And, and so this embodied practice, you know, of meditation where I'm breathing in and out. I'm enough. And I'm into that. There's so much in there that I know I'm getting something different every time I'm going through that process. of recognizing, oh, it's kind of like gravity pulling in but also radiation expanding outward and then draws me to the heart of Mother Earth. Recognizing Oh, there's been an ongoing communication here at the cosmic level going on for billions of years, as this earth has been information and what secrets must be held in, in all of these relationships that are just there, everywhere around us for us to notice that we're too busy, to no surviving to notice. Just the magic of of who we are and and where we are. So, it almost feels like this is such a rich vein of storytelling that there's got to be somebody who's already doing this and so, like I'm, that's where I was exploring Rudolf Steiner. It was just through a quick search of the Akashic Record this morning, like trying to understand what that is, and then recognizing Oh, that's the that's the quantum entanglement. Um, so when we're asking the question, what is time What does energy what does matter? It's the medium that we're that our presence is. It's like the brush tip on the on the substrate of, you know, the rice paper or whatever that that's our life being being drawn across the surface, and that's what we're experiencing. But you know, it's the whole medium of all of it happening at once and all of it is inseparable if you can't separate time from space and so at the quantum level, it becomes nonsensical to try to do that. So, what you're left with is we've been so busy studying the parts we didn't notice the whole and so now we're we're discovering a new way of sensing
Wow. That is so big. And it makes sense. And you said there's gotta be somebody who's done this, and I really want you to hear this with all certainty. That all of being has needed you and that nobody has done this. This has never existed completely unique expression of consciousness in this very moment. In the same way that it's not right. Yeah, nothing is original. Right. But I love this discovering a new way of sensing. I really feel like that gets at it, but that's a really powerful seed here. That is a contribution. And so revolutionary, so holistic, and it makes sense, right? We've been looking at the parts so intently, going into going through this process of evolution, where we're our intellect is expanding super rapidly and technology is you know, shooting off exponentially into who knows what's going to happen, right? The singularity or something like that. What if that's the singularity, this new way of sensing? What if this this dawning of 150,000 years of intelligence being at activated and available to us, if the sound of the voice of the earth and the scale of geological time is available to us? Those things are all new ways of sensing. Oh my God, I want I want to read this.
Yeah. Well, and so that's what this is. I feel like it's this is totally a co creation. So like, it's not so much reading as much as writing it together. And I think that's kind of the invitation of the design science studio or, you know, humanity is, is the creator saying hey, come play, let's co create and, and part of that is the vulnerability of the Divine going. You're going to change me through this relationship, and it's going to hurt but it's going to be worth because when amazing things are going to come out of this co creation when you realize the power that I've granted you here is this opportunity to play. And it's going to take some time to get to that place of knowing you know this, who you are who we are, right? But what's going to happen with that realization of you mean, all these limits we placed on ourselves were just in the mind and, and it's only because we thought that was the extent of who we were. And yeah I feel like I've been walking into bookstores and going why is the imagination so small here?
Makes me think of a few years ago, like 2018 I was on a bus going to the Caribbean, and just had this flash. Time is the petri dish that we humans created in order to observe creation. We needed something to put life into an order to get it under the microscope of our conscious awareness and observe it. times not real. We created it to serve our purposes. This really I think, gets at why the imagination is so small, because we wanted to go to those levels. We wanted to understand something about the experience of separation and the utility of separateness and individuality and the function of the part. And I think we've really gotten at that we've really mastered separation over the last 7000 years, perhaps if we think about, you know, separation as a polarity to union and we think about union as the circle as the feminine as the matriarchy, where we started from, and then we went down this halt this this path of the line of discrete entities of the masculine of the patriarchy, right. And so now we get to like, come back, or rather it's not coming back. It's completing the circle. It's going around the spiral and we can look down as now both of those polarities together and transcend those limits and move past those self imposed rules.
Yeah. So I've been looking out at the sky thinking, you know, as it's changing depending on on the light that's coming in and being bounced around in the atmosphere, and then it turns and then that light goes away long enough that you can see what's beyond it. And, and then we're going through the cycles of different ways of seeing but recognizing that the atmosphere is a lens. And, and so it becomes a kind of metaphor for it's just something that we're recognizing, you know, within the last 500 years, and maybe more so within the last 100 That's a very thin sliver of time where we're just discovering Wow, this this is way bigger than we thought. And so the imaginations just firing like, now, what, what are we doing here? And then to have this crisis that we're living through like it's heartbreaking to know that now there's 30 million people in Pakistan who have been displaced. Now, what do we do with that? So there's a sense of urgency around all this potential. Of of all this human life that could be sensing you know, what amazing world this is, except we were focused on the wrong thing, to the point where we've caused a climate crisis and how are we going to respond to that? So I feel like this. This becomes a huge part of the the story of the Apocrypha is what we thought was what we were supposed to pay attention to. is just this miniscule thing of the economy is something we, you know, we imagined into existence and like, if we believe that thing that we imagined into existence like what if we recognize the reality that we're in and responded to that? How would that change us?
The balance is so profound, and I really see the train here of thought carrying us around to, to wholeness, to union to love to peace, joy, and the way that our crises are urgently calling us back to the whole and that feels like the message here is we are discovering a new way of sensing ourselves as the whole, as the whole of Mother Earth as a whole of humanity as the whole of the cosmos. And this idea that what we thought we were supposed to pay attention to, turned out to be this imaginary thing that we created. It's it's so profound to think about it through this lens of Apocrypha, because there's grief there. There's self forgiveness, oh my god this whole time. I was looking the wrong way. And what have I been doing? I've I've been wasting my life. All my time and energy and money and attention you know, all of this was for was for nothing, right? There's that that sense and in the collective now and so I think you've got medicine for that, Steven. You are the medicine for that.
That's like a lot of responsibility. I could see that. But it also because it's an invitation to play. Then it's still being part of the how do I notice how do I be aware of those clues all around me? And so
I think the the level of responsibility goes away when I know that it's co creation. Like it's not all dependent on me. And we are all doing this together. So then it's like, oh, now it becomes an invitation for all of us to discover this together. Right and yeah. So that that brings me to the question of okay, I've been talking a lot What are you inviting me into into this and soul meant part to
love it? Yes. Oh, skillful. I feel your evolution there in that in that. That shift. Thank you for asking. Um, there's a tool that we talked about in the transformation section. It's Exercise number five, and it's the wheel of life. And that wheel of life is still a powerful tool that I want to invite you into a practice with, because this work is so profound. And it is a great responsibility, in a sense, right? Although it's not yours alone. It is a co creation. It's as much responsibility as a child. It's a life it's a being and it's yours to nurture and create or help to create itself. Maybe, yeah. So that turn of phrase is really important as to what this invitation is, is you're not creating this book. It's creating itself through you and so your actual task now is to take care of your life to really hold yourself and your life in in the most tender, nurturing, playful and wise way that you can. So do these are this is an amazing intention that has been set here, and I'll send you my notes. I think during this phase, it will be helpful if I give you my notes from each session. So that you can really feel that feedback and get the the reflections really into, into your inner architecture. And and continue on this self creation process. And the invitation here is really to look at those that the wheel of your life, the mandala of your being and be so present with it that this book writes itself.
Yeah. And, and part of that, I think has has been thank you for the message yesterday. The celebration of my continuation, I love the way you you express that as a Yeah, that's really resonant with what I'm feeling now of the birth and the death being kind of like the No Birth, No Death of I am a continuation of, of a lineage and I was exploring that idea of what what is lineage? And we usually think just in terms of a genetic lineage but I started leading into the nonlinear reality of the network's the relationships of energy that we are. Even the books that I'm reading are a continuation of someone's being that has been translated into textual form that has been absorbed into my life in some way. And you know, I was thinking about the the evolution of the written language that allows us to connect with those beings, who, like the princess of the lake, or the queen of the lake. And how that kind of esoteric knowledge, that Apocrypha within the Christian context of, well that's also informing who I am now because of a different kind of lineage. And yeah, it's just changing the way I'm thinking of and and what kind of legacy Am I leaving as well? Within this short window of time? No feels like that sense of time. Scarcity then starts to go away. Yeah, there's there's a limit. And that's part of the the design constraints of this particular iteration. But I don't know what has come before what comes after because it's just not part of my memory or my current knowledge, but but actually it's there. For us to perceive, and we happen to be in a place where we get to perceive it in real time as human experience. Now that's such a gift.
I feel something really powerful there, which is that the future is not here yet. The past is gone. There's only here and now. And when you write from that place, when your life is an offering to presence with a capital P. What you say will be so much bigger than the words that you write. So you will be writing as Steven Mao or Luna soltera. But the words will resonate as your entire lineage. It will resonate as all of humanity speaking through you because you know that and so you'll be holding this awareness of you know, I'm using the word I and you know, maybe writing or maybe writing in the third person, you know, whatever it is, but all of it will say, this is not me, this is us and that will create that sort of timeless literary essence that speak speaks you know,
Yeah, yeah. Well, Struppi was inviting me into thinking of pronouns differently. You know, he's learning English as a second language. And so he has this interesting perspective of it, where, what if you use the pronoun one, because it can be individual but it can also speak to the oneness of all at the same time. And yeah, I thought that was pretty profound way of thinking about that. I'm not sure how that would weave into our narrative yet, but
beautiful meditation for sure. Yeah. I'd love to spend a few minutes hearing about your health journey, your family, you're thankful for real things here that that are of apocrypha.
Yeah. It is a bit of a cankle right now. It actually came down in in swelling but it swells up with use so I feel like I still have to slow down rest and heal.
Is it elevated right now?
It's not elevated. And so I'm getting contrary advice from depending on who I'm listening to a doctor say elevated nice it and then I'm noticing physiotherapist are saying don't elevate a nice head because that's restricting the circulation and the movement of the lymph and what you want is movement. And so muscle contraction is the way the lymph move moves around to be able to heal that area. But at the same time, if it's the foot and it's really delicate, all those bones, all those ligaments, you can continue to reinjure it over and over and it's not going to heal very, very well. So I'm sort of like how do I listen to my body? Yeah, and all these different professionals saying different things. So two weeks into it. I was like, Alright, I've been following the doctor's advice and then I came across this other advice. Well, what's real and then I started trying it out and then oh, I can walk. I can put my weight on it seems alright. But then I'm noticing it, it puffs up and and I get some purple, blue bruising kind of on the on the skin. Most of that has gone away but now that's appearing just at the toes, which is really strange. How the injury is, is the ligaments along the side but yeah, it's the body is treating the foot as a whole, the whole foot needs to heal from this injury. So it was just really interesting to watch. Oh, yeah.
Don't you feel that when you have it down? It's sort of like fills up? Yeah. And like throbs.
Less so now, at the beginning. Yeah, that was really uncomfortable. But that's okay. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah, I want to I want to encourage you, from my body from this body to another body. Yeah. Elevating is just so helpful. And
I would tend to agree with that. The more I'm recognizing. Healing is slowing down and going into a different phase right now. And my foot seems to be telling me you can do a little less walking on me for for the moment.
I want you to keep giving voice to your foot. Let it be a practice if you're open. of you know, what is what is your foot saying? I just saw a video today of a man who had injured his ear and he's giving voice to his ear. I'm gonna send it to you because it's powerful the way relating to this part of his body, right and so now Now, this is the micro of the macro. Your ankle is 30,000 people in Pakistan. They're just parts of a hole, right? Learning how to care. And communicate.
Yeah, yeah. And feel like I've been sensing that no recognition of this is a mind and a heart that have been given the responsibility of caring for this particular body, this manifestation of the soul. And so taking care of the whole means, yeah, listening to oh, those cells are trying to communicate and they know their part. But they also need to be able to figure out okay, how do we communicate to this mind that is controlling this body that is making us do things that is beyond the limits of what we need right now if we want to focus on healing and and we've been sensing that a little bit as a community as are like Roxy we know you're trying to lead something here. And you think you're being called back to where your heart is, but your body's saying, please know, this is going to cause possibly some real long term damage. And we prefer it if you wouldn't listen to us right now to stay home. It sounds like she did like from, from what I've been able to follow in that thread is there are enough people saying, you know, including her sister and her mom and all these friends going? I don't think so Roxy. You need rest now.
So hope that's the case. Yeah,
so it's it's really interesting how when you're talking about micro and the macro and the even the intermediate
I want to talk about the intermediate. How are things with Jane? I know you've been going through like a dietary change and supplementation and she's been a part of that.
So she's learning to recognize that and she needs to take care of herself. She has been spending all this time taking care of other people to the neglect of herself. And that's part of what I wanted this journey to be was. I can't make you take care of yourself. But if I model that, what can happen? And so she's doing her best to try to figure out like how do I change my habits to fit with Stevens, you know, and she's resisting. And, and her she's gotten used to a certain way of like, this is all my body can handle. It's interesting night. I was looking looking up the word sacred circle. Just curious to see what Google would bring up and it came up with sacred circle counseling in Surrey, British Columbia. Well, that's just a couple cities away from us. And so I read into it, and I thought, oh, it's kind of, you know, interesting, similar to the kind of ideas that we're exploring here. In this container. But then when I read a little further, it said, Oh, I've I've done work with women's hospital BC Women's Hospital and the Center for pelvic pain and endometriosis. Oh, no, sorry. Ask Jane. Have you ever heard of this? No. So it's interesting she she just decided a week ago. I can't see I can't read anything. I really need to get glasses now. And she's put this off for like a decade. Like, you have full permission to do this. And finally she decided she's going to do it. So she's gonna get her glasses in a week. And so she wanted me to be there. Kind of holding her hand helping her choose the frames and and help her get past the anxiety because the last experience she had was with a male optometrist and and the I don't know if there was an another assistant who was just not very kind to her and was blaming her for like, oh, we can't we can't help you here because you've got diabetes so so completely dismissing her needs and making her feel like it's her fault. And that she just has that has been kind of an ongoing experience that she has just internalized, and so it's her, her own parents, my family and me you know, reinforcing this sense of her needs don't matter, and it's all her fault. And and so that's why I'm trying to figure out well it's so internalized that me saying things it's not it doesn't really mean that much, how can I demonstrate somehow some support, and so she's making small baby steps. And, and finding ways to even now, even though it's excruciating, finding moments to share a ton of intimacy and so like, it's getting beyond so what gender are you now? This sort of discomfort of I feel weirded out by this because I don't know what our relationship needs to be now.
And so we're getting past these sort of hurdles of man still me. It's just me having a different perception of what gender is and what those roles are supposed to define and, and not being constrained by those expectations anymore. It's not that I'm any different, essentially, from what I was before. So it's, you know, those little baby steps of navigating relationship and so we're just finding trust in different ways and, and and feeling I think, cared for and held by God are universally she's more into still using the word God and I'm, like, could use any of those terms at this point? Cuz what are those words? really mean? But it can't define the ineffable. But just finding ways to come alongside in different ways that are are supportive. So,
so beautiful
and maybe just to give a quick update on Alex narron have found a new home this week and that they can move into so that was a bit of a crisis because they knew that the funding was going to run out for the hotel that we're staying in. By the end of September. So the help that we're giving them kind of shifted things for them. So it changed their perception of we got to do this on our own and we're overwhelmed as it is and and then recognizing No, we're doing this together. Oh, oh wow. And so it just changes the way that no, we're still faced with the patriarchy and the genocide and all of these things except you actually have way more agency over how we can operate within this framework. So
powerful, powerful. Well, we have to finish for today. Yeah, sorry. No apology necessary. cut you off if I needed to. But I just want to say celebrate. This is a beautiful seed of beautiful emergence, and I feel the beautiful emergence to come. It's already here.
Well, thank you so much for inviting me into this process and
manner. So take a look at exercise five from the transformation. Okay. And you know, meditate on that. And there's a lot of questions there to help you with this intention learning process. And I'll send you my notes and the little video about the guy talking to his ear.
Right yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you. So much, Veronica.