Professional MMA fighter converts to Orthodox Christianity!
Have you ever witnessed a fighter transform, not just in the ring, but spiritually? Our latest guest, Joshua Williams, a former MMA fighter and current black belt in Jiu-Jitsu, takes us on a gripping odyssey from the highs of his fighting career to the depths of his soul, and the extraordinary spiritual renaissance that followed. His journey from the self-focused doctrines of New Age thought to a profound spiritual awakening, finding Orthodox Christianity, is not just a story; it's a testament to the human spirit's relentless quest for truth.
Throughout this episode, Joshua details his global pilgrimage from the monasteries of Thailand to the peaks of the Himalayas, delving into the world's religions, cultures, and the universal yearnings of the heart. His encounters range from the mystical to the harrowing, as he grapples with personal loss, confronts enigmatic gurus, and uncovers the dark underbelly of a controversial spiritual school. Each chapter of his story peels back the layers of his evolving faith, culminating in his unexpected gravitation towards Eastern Orthodoxy, influenced by modern thinkers and ancient traditions alike.
As we close this chapter of our podcast, Joshua's narrative encourages us to reflect on our own spiritual journeys and the communities that shape our path. His profound transformation into a life centered around Christ's teachings of humility and trust is both inspiring and thought-provoking. Join us as we share in the celebration of his new chapter, where martial arts and spiritual insight converge at his coming San Diego gym and through his YouTube channel—a fitting arena for a fighter reborn.
This episode will take you full throttle. Please leave us your thoughts.
**************
Visit Joshua at: https://www.youtube.com/@thewaymma/videos
Thank you for journeying w/ the Saints with us!
Professional MMA fighter converts to Orthodox Christianity!
Have you ever witnessed a fighter transform, not just in the ring, but spiritually? Our latest guest, Joshua Williams, a former MMA fighter and current black belt in Jiu-Jitsu, takes us on a gripping odyssey from the highs of his fighting career to the depths of his soul, and the extraordinary spiritual renaissance that followed. His journey from the self-focused doctrines of New Age thought to a profound spiritual awakening, finding Orthodox Christianity, is not just a story; it's a testament to the human spirit's relentless quest for truth.
Throughout this episode, Joshua details his global pilgrimage from the monasteries of Thailand to the peaks of the Himalayas, delving into the world's religions, cultures, and the universal yearnings of the heart. His encounters range from the mystical to the harrowing, as he grapples with personal loss, confronts enigmatic gurus, and uncovers the dark underbelly of a controversial spiritual school. Each chapter of his story peels back the layers of his evolving faith, culminating in his unexpected gravitation towards Eastern Orthodoxy, influenced by modern thinkers and ancient traditions alike.
As we close this chapter of our podcast, Joshua's narrative encourages us to reflect on our own spiritual journeys and the communities that shape our path. His profound transformation into a life centered around Christ's teachings of humility and trust is both inspiring and thought-provoking. Join us as we share in the celebration of his new chapter, where martial arts and spiritual insight converge at his coming San Diego gym and through his YouTube channel—a fitting arena for a fighter reborn.
This episode will take you full throttle. Please leave us your thoughts.
**************
Visit Joshua at: https://www.youtube.com/@thewaymma/videos
Thank you for journeying w/ the Saints with us!
So I'll just tell you right away, and within the first retreat he revealed that he was God. He was an incarnation of Vishnu, who is God Hi this is Jeremy.
Speaker 3:Hi, this is Nick. This is Clow to.
Speaker 2:Witnesses Radio thinking like the Saints Very, very special episode we have for you today. We have in studio with us Sinax's podcast.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's good to be with you again. This is Jordan, by the way, for the listeners yeah, I'm Josh.
Speaker 2:The real guest of today is Joshua, who's with us right now. Joshua, thank you for joining us. Thank you for taking the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:For the audience listening right now. Joshua is a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu. He had a professional career as a MMA fighter. He has an incredible story that he is going to tell us today and that we're going to share in together. So, Joshua, we're genuinely blessed to have you with us and I can tell you just kind of on a personal note, because I've known you now for about a year through our parish it's been an absolute pleasure to be getting to know you and to call you my brother. Thank you likewise Amen.
Speaker 1:Likewise.
Speaker 2:God. So, joshua, as they say, sometimes the best place to start is at the beginning.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so back in 2009, I was very wrapped up in new age ideas, spiritually, along with Buddhist ideas and, believe it or not, there's plenty of tension just between those two things. So at that time I was running a boys and girls cup teen center and then I was also fighting professionally part time in mixed martial arts and I had the goal of going full time in mixed martial arts. But I also started to feel less and less satisfied with my supposed spiritual knowledge. I was reading things like Eckhart Tolle, lee and you know it was. It was sort of a cherry picking, make your own religion kind of new age thing that was mixed with law of attraction and everything like that, and so I had experimented with that to some extent and, you know, manifested this car and whatever in this and that. And then I'm like, okay, you know, but is there something more? You know? Is there, is there, is there? Is there more meaning than this? You know, I had a girlfriend that I could have married. I could have continued doing what I was doing and I could have called it a life, but I had this restlessness in my soul and this and this feeling that I was just missing something, like I had all this spiritual theory. But how could I find out what spiritual reality was? And I started thinking about traveling. I figured that if I could travel around the world by myself, that would tear me out of my bubble of what I thought reality was and open me up to what it could be that I, that I never could have imagined.
Speaker 1:And so I first quit my job and started training full time in MMA, and I trained for about two and a half months for a fight and I and I got injured and did not make that fight trained another two and a half months and had a perfect storm, what you could call a perfect storm of events that led to me suffering a pretty devastating knockout, and it was pretty traumatic for me because up to that point I had felt pretty invincible, you know, and I was having all this success in MMA and I was manifesting and I thought, well, how did I manifest this?
Speaker 1:You know, how did I manifest this knockout? And I was completely spun out by it, and that's what told me that it was time to let the fighting take a back seat and I needed to focus on finding spiritual reality. I needed to go on this trip, but even still, I couldn't completely let go of my, of my mixed martial arts aspirations and I thought, well, I'll go to Thailand, I can meditate with the Buddhist monks, but then I'm right there for training and Muay Thai and things like that. And so when I finally did leave on that trip, I just did it 10 short days in Japan and then I ended up in Thailand for three months.
Speaker 2:The kind of want to set the scene a little bit. That's that fight where you were knocked out. Was that your second professional fight?
Speaker 1:No, it was. It was my sixth professional fight.
Speaker 2:See, I knew you were leaving something out, because you had added successful fights, hadn't you?
Speaker 1:Many successful fights, and that's and that's why I had that sense of invincibility. Invincibility and I had lost once before, but it was it, was it barely, it barely phased me because it had it made perfect sense with. In a sense you could say, I manifested that first loss because my only goal on that fight was to feel comfortable. And then I was like, well, I guess that means it doesn't matter if I win or lose, and I lost, but I felt comfortable. I was like, ok, well, I've done that experiment, I've done that thought experiment, now I don't need to like lose anymore, or so I thought. Yeah, so they were, they were interwoven. And I became more interested in spirituality when I started to realize that there's this self control that you can gain through meditation. So I naturally am a fairly anxious person and and that did help to a certain extent.
Speaker 3:May I ask what was your spiritual background before that Protestant atheist? Just to give a little bit more in that background of where you were and are coming from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fair. So I was. I was baptized Lutheran, but my family really only continued going to church until I was about eight years old and then after that point, when it became more clear that my mother wasn't really serious about Christianity, on the weekends, instead of going to the grandmother would take us to church. We would go to the grandma. That would give my mom more time alone, and so I didn't really have guidance and I just had my friends and I had a lot of unsupervised time and my friends and I attended even at a young age towards Eastern religions and and Buddhism and things like that. And there was also a shop near our house called Inner Journey which had Buddhist and Hindu things, crystals, you know all that kind of new agey stuff. So that that was fairly influential as well. So my friends and I obviously we all came from a Christian background.
Speaker 1:So the way that we very naively are how you want to say it, put Jesus on the back burner. Oh, jesus was a cool guy, oh, he was the first hippie you know, saying these really just kind of dismissive things. Basically, how we could just again put Jesus on the back burner, not really face that, because that's like a hard question. That's a Jesus made some pretty strong claims Like so we, we didn't really want to get into all that because that was kind of a buzzkill, you know.
Speaker 1:And so in high school, you know, I was into smoking weed and doing LSD and I think that those things had an effect on me spiritually to to at least bring me to being agnostic rather than atheist, and I think in some ways I had a psychological addiction to LSD that led to a bad trip, because I was really sort of trying to break through to this other reality. The problem was, once I broke through, it was basically insanity, you know, and so I had, I had that bad trip, but yeah, I can. I sort of continued, like even even in my late, late teens. You know, early, late teens, early even from early teens, it was really more towards Eastern, far Eastern religions.
Speaker 4:So that that bad trip did that happen before your MMA loss.
Speaker 1:Yeah, did that bad trip happens when I was like 15 years old.
Speaker 3:Oh wow, lord of mercy, I'm so struck by a couple of things already.
Speaker 2:One is the influence of that. You mentioned that shop that was nearby where they sold crystals and all that. For some reason, that just that's heavy. You know, that sits like it's just this shop and yet it evidently had an influence on you. You know and this is then that Jordan was asking about like it's obviously made an impact. I mean, I can see why, right, that kind of memory doesn't leave and just these, these little seeds, you know, in these early parts of your life, I don't know. Well, let me ask you. I mean, what do you see? Do you see the hand of God through all of that? Do you see demonic influences? Like where? How do you meet all that out?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think a very orthodox, orthodox, but yet both hands. Sorry, it's a, it's a both hand. And so, to touch on another thing now that you mentioned it, you know my aunt who babysat us, if you want to call it that. She was into all that new age stuff and she gave us tapes and one of them was called the Atlantis crystal chamber and all of that was was new age stuff.
Speaker 1:You know, I think honestly, like it's very helpful for me to talk this through, because it's hard for me to see all the possibilities of how dark a lot of these influences could have been from from early in my life, like it never even really dawned on me, because I'm still colored by what I thought it was at that time, which was just like interesting, it was just culture.
Speaker 1:Oh, look like these people, like there were a lot of people who were like their religion isn't just a belief, it's like it's a culture and they like live it every day, and that was like so interesting to me. Of course, I had no idea that Eastern Orthodox Christianity existed, which would have been, like, you know, the perfect answer because it is a lived faith, but it was completely, you know, off my radar and I was just impressed that there was something that was more connected to a way of life. That that's what was attractive to me about it. But I also see a lot of God's protection. I see a lot of things that could have been worse and there were certain things that I did cry out to God for from time to time when things got really bad. So I guess this is the point where I mentioned that my brother was a black magic practitioner from the time that he was a teenager.
Speaker 4:Older brother.
Speaker 1:Yeah, two years older, and he ended up taking his life in 2006. Oh, but you know, spiritually that's no small thing either to be just right there in proximity to that. And you know, at the time I didn't take any of those things seriously, you know. So I didn't really have a way of framing that at the time, or nothing like what I have now. But that was another thing that was going on.
Speaker 3:you know, since we've gotten all the way back to teenage years, so when you to zoom forward a little bit in your story and God of Mercy on the soul of your brother, when you decided to go on this trip, right, zooming forward. Now to you, you, being in the MMA, your idea of a spiritual journey is what? Probably India, right, you were talking about Thailand, but like, obviously it was still eastern, far eastern, right. So that kind of paves a little bit more of that road and sets that up. So what did that journey look like for you? What were you expecting out of that journey?
Speaker 1:I had full faith that whoever or whatever God was, that he was going to reveal himself to me. I mean, at the time I would have said jokingly to my friends I'm quitting life to be a new age hobo. And I would have said to the more serious people I'm throwing myself into the arms of the universe, trusting that wherever it leads me will be the truth and it will be where I'm meant to be, you know. So I had all the hopes. I didn't think I would come back to the US After a year I would find you know my truth. Maybe at that time I still believed in relative truth. Find my truth or a truth. I figured it would be so rare. You know I find this rare truth, but it would be the truth and I would settle my whole life around it and it probably wouldn't be in the US and I would live the rest of my life and maybe never come back to the US.
Speaker 4:Something that struck me about what you were saying early on about how you were the one manifesting the things in your life, and but then it seems to contrast with the way you were just talking about God revealing himself to you, and it makes sense that you would hold those two seemingly incompatible things together and try to make sense of those. But that's, I guess, attention that I'm sensing in your story, where it's like maybe I am God but also God is outside of me somehow, or I don't know. Maybe you can speak to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I think intuitively I knew, even if I couldn't articulate it, I think intuitively I knew that created meaning is arbitrary meaning and therefore no meaning at all. Yeah, you know that if that, if we create our own meaning and it was it was a feeling you know, it was like it was looking at I'm like OK, so if, even if I can manifest everything, then at best that means that I'm limited by my own imagination. You know, I did believe in objective truth. That was the thing that I did come to believe, and I believed that you could contact objective truth through meditation.
Speaker 1:I basically believe that our perceptions were just so muddy that that prevented us from directly observing objective reality, which was God, and so I still sort of had more of an impersonal view of God, but I still imagine that God was objective, objective reality. And looking back, I can see that what I had to work through, and what I think a lot of people have to work through coming out of the New Age, is that a personal God encroaches on our own sense of personhood, like we're losing our originality somehow, or or almost like an alien personhood is coming to encroach on ours, which, of course, is a complete misunderstanding of who God is, since we are derived from him. But nevertheless, I think that that's what I was basically working through on on that, on that trip.
Speaker 2:Joshua, you kind of piggybacking off what Jordan asked about. Because I'm I'm seeing that kind of tension too, because I hear you talking about God. Right, you said that you know that you had this sense of God, and yet you also were talking about the universe, right, you were kind of, at the most, the universe. Would you say that at that time you equated in some way God with the universe or some sort of? Can you say a little bit more about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was. It was a way out of acknowledging the Supreme Personhood of God. Like I said, it was a way. It was a way for me to feel like I had more autonomy, more control, while there was still so the idea, you know, so the idea to kind of skill man, which I hate to do the idea of what people are talking about when they're talking about the universe, they're talking about like, everything that exists as one thing, but implicit in what they're saying is that the universe has a will. So that's the part where they don't tend to face up is that if the universe has a will, then it's, it's actually a personal God and the universe even in, even in, like a Hindu framework, the universe is only the manifested aspect of God, but then you also have the unmanifested aspect. So it was actually I don't want to jump forward too much, but it was a conversation that I had later where somebody challenged me directly on that, on that using the word universe for God.
Speaker 3:To go back, I guess chronologically speaking, to this trip of yours. So you're in Thailand, you ended up in Thailand, you went from Japan to Thailand.
Speaker 1:You said yeah, I was in Thailand for three months.
Speaker 3:And then you were training there doing kickboxing, you said Not much, that's what you were planning. Yeah, not much.
Speaker 1:Not much. So as soon as, as soon as I got away from the pressures of Western society, there was no motivation within me. My body was also pretty broken. It was like stopping training showed me how messed up my body was, getting off of that hamster wheel and I just wanted to decompress. I did almost nothing in Thailand, to be honest, except for just kind of decompress and do some meditation at some monasteries. No extended stays, just day visits and, yeah, just just being a bum.
Speaker 3:And that, and that was only one leg of your journey, if I'm, if I'm correct right. So what happened? What you were just taking a day by day in Thailand and then figuring out OK, next is India, or how did? How did this whole trip play out in that sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I was. I was actually, I was actually afraid to go to India. I had, I had somewhat hit a wall with traveling at three months, even not doing a ton of traveling. So I'm actually a major introvert and so part of this trip was me forcing myself out of my comfort zone, you know. And so I was pretty burnt out on traveling and some of the harshness of being in a developing country rubbed me the wrong way, even in Thailand where I was almost afraid to go face it in India.
Speaker 1:But I did go to India. I was much less familiar with Hinduism than I was Buddhism. So my host in India interestingly, later on I found out that he was actually a Christian, or a nominal Christian. But he doesn't attribute his Christianity to any more modern or recent missionary trips, but all the way back to the impossible of Thomas. So that's kind of an aside. I didn't even know that at the time and he's just kind of humoring my, my, my musings and whatever you know I was.
Speaker 1:I was into at that time nothing, nothing too clear. I was just kind of searching and not even super intentionally, the one thing that I didn't want to do. So so into that trip I actually almost went on a 10 day meditation retreat, but then somebody talked to me out of it and said rent a motorcycle, go into the Himalayas. And so I went to. I passed through Haridwar as they were getting ready for the celebration of Holy, so I've never been the biggest student of any of these things. I've always been more on the side of just kind of throwing myself into an experience and and I'm all about practical knowledge and how can I apply something? How can I? How can I make progress? So then I ended up from from from Haridwar, I continued north, and I ended up in Rishikesh, which is where the Beatles found their gurus and, spoiler alert, well, we'll see. So I had the sense, though, that this really was the place where you could go shopping for your spirituality. You could go to any ashram, you could even go to like a free sex ashram or something like that, but that seemed very artificial to me, and I didn't want to go shopping for my spirituality. So I remember I went out in the middle of the night one night and I was just seeing if somebody would appear to me like if some guru or something, anything. But I wanted it to be real, I wanted it to be organic, you know. And so this is. This is the point in my journey where there, there, there came to be a coherent pattern of like, how reality was laying itself out to me Wherever this was coming from, how much of it was based on my expectation of the time.
Speaker 1:So, when I was going from two different points on that, on that journey, on that motorcycle journey, I remember that I was just afraid of getting lost. I'm in a third world country, I'm all by myself, I'm on this, I'm on this motorcycle, I'm definitely getting noticed as a white person and people are not afraid to come up to you and just be like money problem, money problem, you know. And I just I really felt like a target and I just didn't want to get lost. So I go, I go into an internet cafe and I print out these exact turn by turn directions of how I'm going to get between two cities. And then, as soon as I start doing that, I realize it's not going to work at all because Google doesn't know anything about engine. And so then I realized how I was like holding on right, like I was trying to control things, and I basically put myself in a state of like feeling like I was in hell by trying to control things. So, seeing this, I said, ok, well, how can I completely turn this on its head? So I threw away the directions, I just bought a map. I just I printed out just a map. And then I bought a local map and I bought a sleeping bag so that even if I did get lost or ended I didn't quite reach a hotel or something before nighttime, I've got, I've got a sleeping bag and it was something like spring, you know. So there was like there was like a little bit of snow left in some places, but it was. It would have been manageable if I had to sleep outside at night.
Speaker 1:And when I made that decision and I just and I, you know, I let go it went 180. I felt like I'm in heaven, I'm experiencing all this beautiful landscape because, also, I went off the beaten path. You know, I just went into the lower Himalayas, just beautiful time of year, and it was the first time where I had this sense of peace, where, like, could have been a false sense of peace, I don't know, but I had the feeling like God. I'm so grateful for everything that I've ever experienced. You know, god, universe, whoever like. If I die right now, I'm OK with that. Now, looking back with a tragedy, that would have been.
Speaker 1:But that's the contrast that I felt between trying to control and then just sort of let it, let it go, and having some more, some more trust, some more, some more faith that, even if I couldn't see every step, I was going to get to where I needed to be.
Speaker 1:And so what would have been a one day trip if I had just stuck to these, these turn by turn directions, turned out to be a two and a half day trip, but I was able to barely make it to a place where I could get lodging each night right around dark, and it was just the most amazing part of my, of my time in India just just me on the motorcycle. And so that pattern would would repeat. And so we had this whole group of travelers that we ended up meeting and kind of going from city to city together and we went searching for some person who was supposedly clairvoyant at one point, but we're never able to to find that person, and ultimately I left India without any kind of a guru, without having really attained any kind of any kind of spiritual knowledge.
Speaker 2:That's what I was curious about, joshua, because you, when you were telling that story earlier of how you were, you went out that night. You said, looking to maybe have a guru appear to you or whatnot. I was kind of on the edge of my seat. I was like wondering what did someone appear, you know? So, if I'm hearing you correctly, no, you know, nothing happened.
Speaker 1:Nothing significant happened, yeah. So I guess, leaving, leaving India, you know, like that openness towards a guru within me, what I was acknowledging was like I was not the most wise person on the planet, which you know, that wouldn't be like a big shocker for most people, but I'm pretty prideful, and you know so, like I really always thought of myself as a spiritual person and like a wise person and people really always, even when I was in high school, really liked getting advice from me and this and that. So I really fancied myself that way, right? So so now I left India and I went to. I went to London for a little while and then I went over to. I went over to Italy because I had supposedly I had a free place to stay from somebody that I had met in Thailand. So then from, I spent a certain amount of time in Italy and then you know, honestly, in Italy is where I was exposed to some of the most overtly demonic stuff.
Speaker 3:More than India. Yeah, oh yeah. Wow, really, lord of mercy, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:So I was staying in Rome, and so I was staying with people through couchsurfing, ok, which is like a very, very there's a very liberal looking backs and extremely liberal global community, if you want to call it that. I ended up staying with this one for about a month in total and we stayed at different places. She had different houses and her family that we went and stayed at at different places In the countryside and things like that, and then we eventually ended up in Rome with some of her friends and two of the people who were staying in the house at the time fancy themselves as magicians, and none of them pretended to be about the light. Yeah, I just didn't take any of it seriously. If anything, I just thought they were dorks.
Speaker 2:And they probably were yeah.
Speaker 3:You could call them dark dorks.
Speaker 1:Dark dorks. I like that Dork magic. So yeah, so that was where that was where. So I so, before I left on the trip, I listened to a lot of Joe Rogan too, and I was really determined to get my hands on some DMT.
Speaker 1:And so the other cast the other character in the cast over there was this like 60 year old Austrian hippie who actually had DMT on him, and so I smoked like a low dose of DMT, but it wasn't like the full on blast you into another dimension. It was more like barely kind of seeing the door to the other dimension where, just looking at physical reality, it started to almost take on like a fourth dimension or something like that. But then I purchased from him the full dose of DMT and then we were going to go to the forest and do that. But then things got complicated between me and that woman and I ended up leaving like right before her birthday, yeah, and then ended up in in Croatia at another couch surfing house and then met a young woman who I started traveling with for for a while and then she ended up becoming part of my story because we decided together to go to Romania, and that's where the story really picks up.
Speaker 3:So yeah, your time in both Italy and Croatia. You weren't really interested in Catholicism. There wasn't much no, it wasn't much interest there.
Speaker 1:Zero, zero. Yeah, I remember in Croatia. I remember seeing some Hare Christians on the street and just thinking to myself man, those guys look really sad.
Speaker 2:I want to thank you in advance for doing this, because I think this was a tough question, I think. But I think it's important because, having spoken with you over the past year, I know that the loss of your brother was obviously a very, very impactful event in your life. And yet, interestingly, in the course of this story so far these travels I haven't heard you mention it and I'm wondering was there? How were you dealing with the loss of your brother? What? Did you just completely suppress it? Did you push it down? Were you like what was going on there?
Speaker 1:Honestly, at the time I attributed my ability to sort of face it head on because I was living with my brother at the time and I found him. I had to tell my sisters and I had to tell my mother. I felt like I I mean the initial shock. Of course I reacted the way anybody else would no, no, no, just like not accepting it. But then as soon as I came down from that initial adrenaline of finding him, it was acceptance and then it was a lot of like new age. You know the new age cope as much as you know that's deception, man, is it some copium? So even the way that I gave his memorial, it was just all new age, cope man. I hate to say it, but I just tried to make it seem like this was not a tragedy. Every person, because an idea in the new age is that every person is a suicide. That's, an idea in new age is that every person chooses their death. You choose your parents, you choose. So it's like this, almost like this Hardcore right handed reaction against victimhood that you can find in certain currents of the new age. And so my mom wasn't religious, so she completely accepted how I led this, this memorial. We like celebrated his Norse protection symbol that he had tattooed on him. That was like they kind of look like an A. His name was Adam, his name is Adam, and so that was kind of like the whole theme. Everybody just got up and said whatever it meant to them.
Speaker 1:Somewhere in there I was still struggling With do I really believe in anything beyond the physical? So it I think that his death gave me the courage to face a lot of my fears. I had actually trained for four years and had seven fights fall through before my brother died, and it wasn't until after my brother died that there was this fear and anxiety, because it's like, once you experience something so horrific, a lot of other things just don't stack up, stack up, including all this anxiety I had about fighting. Even though I wanted to fight, I still like sort of had this fear. So so I think the overall like experience with my brother's passing it just finally gave me the courage but also the urgency to like settle this, like figure this out, like eventually figure out what's real.
Speaker 2:Hmm, the perfect segue to Romania.
Speaker 3:Were you aware of Romania's cultural and spiritual heritage? Or was it your choice? Was it this woman's choice? How did you guys choose from Croatia to Romania?
Speaker 1:So so I talked about the pattern that started happening in India when I was trying to do turn by turn directions and then finally just went into the mountains with a sleeping bag, totally feeling the opposite of loneliness. And so now here's the setup for sort of the finals Time. On that trip is myself, and this it was a Danish woman that I was traveling with at this point, and we were on a night train supposedly, and I was afraid we had like three hours of stop that we could do in one place or break it up between two different stops. I was afraid if we had three hours we would fall asleep, stay asleep and miss our train change. So I said, no, we're going to break it up between two. And then when that happened, I was like I'm going to break it up between two. And then when that happened and we got on the final, that worked out for us to get on the final train, but it's a night train with nowhere to sleep. And so I started getting really, really upset about that fact. You know, like I was like oh, I'm like I'm entitled to my eight hours of sleep or something like that, and so I started sort of having a temper tantrum.
Speaker 1:And then I realized what was happening and I kind of caught on to the pattern and I'm like, wait a minute. I'm like, ok, I just need to feel better. Like how can I feel better? And then, when I opened to that, a memory came back to me all the way from junior high school when my art teacher. I overheard him saying that when he couldn't sleep that he would just meditate for three hours. And I had never meditated more than 40 minutes in my entire life. But just that thought and sharing that out loud gave me relief.
Speaker 1:And then, when I said that, this guy who's sitting across the aisle from me says to me I thought you had something to do with meditation. And then we ended up talking all night, forgot about sleeping, and he told me about his enlightened guru and it sounded it honestly sounded very strange to me, but it was like in line enough with the New Age stuff. He's like, oh yeah, my guru wears nice, nice clothes and this and that, and he's OK with like having material things. I'm like, oh, I get to keep my materialism. Oh, cool, yeah, sounds like a guru I want. But it sounded kind of silly to me. It sounded kind of silly to me and I thought I'll just go check this out. He invited me to come stay with him and you know we were on our way somewhere else. Come to find out. We were completely going the long way. This guy was like why are you on this train? Why are you on this train? This is completely the long way to get to get where you're going Right.
Speaker 1:And I stayed with this guy and she wasn't very spiritual. That was a point of tension between us. She was more of just like scientific materialist. That's when I started staying with this guy, who I developed a very close friendship with and what I can say, like my initial impressions, like I didn't know what the heck it was, you know as far as the spiritual school and this guru, but it definitely presented itself as way more serious. It's something that I had to take way more seriously than my initial thoughts of this just being kind of like a tourist attraction for me and ironically, I was on board with everything that this Guru was saying, except for when he quoted Jesus, and so I was not really open to hearing the words of Christ.
Speaker 1:I felt like anybody who was quoting the words of Christ had an ulterior motive and they were going to try to control me or whatever. But I actually saw, like my own hypocrisy. I saw that supposedly I was so open, right and not judgmental, but I wasn't open to Christ or Christianity. And then I'm thinking to myself, I'm like having this internal monologue, you know this tension, and I'm like, yeah, because Christians are judgmental. And then I hear myself and I go, wait a minute, that's a judgment. I just made a judgment against Christians. And so you know wherever the Holy Spirit was in all of this. I have to think that the Holy Spirit was there or near, just enough for me to see my own hypocrisy in how I was being closed off towards Christ.
Speaker 2:Can you paint the picture a little bit Like where is this? Because you say this school, like is it a house? Are they in the middle of nowhere? Are you in the city? Kind of paint the picture for us a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's in the city.
Speaker 1:The school, for its week to week meetups, essentially met in like a medium size office space with like a bigger room and maybe two or three smaller offices, and the room was set up with Hindu statues, buddhist statues.
Speaker 1:It was just, you know, the general lip service of you know all the religions that teach love ultimately come from God.
Speaker 1:It was interesting because in some ways, in some ways it was perennialist in that they were still believing that if somebody was just on one path, like that's okay, like they'll probably get to God. But we're on this other level, like if you want to have, like literally this was the teaching, like if you want to have so all the different religions, like they'll have their heavens and you'll be able to access, like that area of the heavens. But if you're a practitioner of, you know, of this school and you're on this highest level of enlightenment, you're going to have access to the level that only we have, plus access in the world to come of, like all the other end of it, because you know their religions and because we learned, you know all well, supposedly up to a certain level, but it also wasn't new age because it was trying to take the religions in their traditional forms, just only up to a certain level of depth. So it's in Romania, it's a Romanian guru.
Speaker 3:It's something that sounds much more. You know, something that you'd find in India, or something as opposed to.
Speaker 1:You know, a traditionally Orthodox Christian nation, so yeah, if I didn't care about the differences between the different religions, how much less did I care about the differences between different forms of Christianity. The broader Hindu cosmology was considered like the larger spiritual truth. They believed in reincarnation and it was like well, if you don't have 100% faith in Christ, then you'll probably have to reincarnate to deal with that part of your sin that you didn't put full faith in Christ to handle. It's kind of like that idea basically making Christ sort of like the ultimate safety net, but not necessarily like 100% essential, like oh, but if you can do it on your own, then you're probably pretty awesome, you know. But you should love Christ though, because anybody who doesn't love Christ there's something wrong with them.
Speaker 4:I was. I was finding myself wondering how influential this guy is I don't know what to call it sect or whatever His movement is in Romania and like if, if he as a guru had some kind of of his own mythology of where, how he became enlightened and how he became this teacher with this privileged knowledge. I find myself curious about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he definitely, he definitely did. So it has to do with the genesis of the school and how the guy who's like the number two in that school, who was just an Orthodox Christian who came to be in the school, so this guy who ended up being the director, who is also believed to be the reincarnation of Saint Peter, so this guy had a dream, a very disturbing dream, and went to somebody who then told him you have to go. You know, you have to go see this guy. And this is before there was a school. You know, this guru, before he had the school, was was basically known as as a clairvoyant and a healer. This guy goes and he's thinking to himself you know, I need this, this answered and I need this answered and I'm going to need this question answered about Jesus Christ. And he goes and, as the story goes, mostly they just sit in silence for hours, they exchange some words excuse me and then, as they're parting, then the guru says to him and you'll also have that question answered about Jesus Christ. I personally believe that the director is sincere, but I do consider he's a very knowledgeable person, but I also consider him to be somewhat naive and gullible, while also being extremely intelligent, if that makes sense. Yeah, but then other students had similar experiences, so it started with just a small core group and then when the guru's future wife came into the picture, she was the prima ballerina of that city in Romania and she had a ankle injury and she was having problems with it right up until the moment when she was about to go perform. And then that's when he supposedly performed his miracle and then she was able to go out and perform. You know, like there was no problem. So those are some of the key things to their to the Genesis story. You know, that sort of drew people around. Supposedly he had resurrected somebody, although they died soon enough after the death.
Speaker 1:I had seen video of supposedly enlightened people at cartoli, some others online, and this guy was beyond any anything I had ever seen in terms of that calm, that sense of calm, intelligence, coherent answers. There were even times when I asked questions about scripture, I asked about the Tower of Babylon. I felt like the answer that he gave me gave me like a spiritual experience. Now, that doesn't mean that he's true, but there was something going on there. It could be completely demonic and you know, it's like my understanding of the demonic now is like they actually have pretty serious spiritual knowledge. They are spiritual beings, right, so they obviously have access to a certain amount of spiritual knowledge. But again, it was so interesting because I didn't believe in the demonic Like I said before, I didn't believe in evil before the school, but this school actually made me believe in it.
Speaker 1:When I first came to the school I was like, oh, angels and demons. Like one of my five years old, you want me to believe in angels and demons? And so, interestingly, this school was very big on understanding and avoiding the demonic, supposedly. And they were anti-shamanic, they were anti-witchcraft, and it was actually this guru that convinced me. It was actually this guru that convinced me not to smoke that DMT that I still had at that time. And I can't wonder too much. I have to just leave a lot of things to God. I can't try to perfectly understand everything.
Speaker 3:Joshua, may I ask how long were you a part of this school? How long were you a disciple?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the first retreat that I went to, so every summer they would ever retreat. The first retreat that I went to was the summer of 2010, when I basically just encountered the school and I just stayed in Romania until until this retreat time and I was. I was there around them for about three months and then it was the first time ever that the guru went to his branch in Toronto, canada. I followed him there as my way back to the to North America and I had another. I had another month with the guru there on my way back home, and then every summer up to 2018, I would go back and I would sell cars, I would sell motorcycles.
Speaker 1:I would drove myself deep into debt to get there every year because I didn't want to work full time, I just wanted to have free time to meditate and so I would just take whatever job, mostly during that time. It was different jobs, but mostly I worked at a special education school, so made almost nothing. It was kind of living like an urban monastic. Yeah, I would just. I would just do. Whatever it took to get back there every summer Was this guru?
Speaker 2:did you, did you do obeisance in front of him? Did you, did you treat him differently or did like oh no, it was definitely.
Speaker 1:It was definitely more treating him like a God. So I'll just tell you. I'll just tell you right away, and within the first retreat, he revealed that he was, he was God. He was an incarnation of Vishnu, who is God in.
Speaker 1:Hinduism that's like the main deity. Yeah, yeah, and that was his main consort. And then this other younger woman who lived with him and his wife was his other consort, and that they were all. It was one guru in three bodies, one divinity in three bodies, and that followed the archetype of all the highest incarnations of Vishnu always had two female consorts, and so it was also said that this was true of Christ, the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, lord of mercy.
Speaker 3:Lord of mercy.
Speaker 2:And Joshua, this you said this came out right away in that first retreat and so to your mind then you were obviously in a place where you were open to that.
Speaker 1:Or were you? Yeah, I was resistant. I was resistant at first. And well, this, this guy was able to. So I'm there and me and many other people were thinking what's this guy doing with two women? And so he proceeded to break down the whole room. Explain to us how we're projecting, how, when a nun looks at a prostitute, all she sees is holiness, but when a prostitute looks at a nun, all she sees is her own vileness and projects it onto the nun. And he says this, and it worked. And I started sobbing like a baby, sobbing like a baby, and I felt like I'm having this, this breakthrough with my ego. I realized that I had set myself up as my own, the judge of my own goodness, and how now I'm going to serve others and I forfeit my claim that I can judge my own goodness, you know. So I had some kind of repentance surrounding that's that situation. I'll be honest with you.
Speaker 1:The whole time I was in the school, I was running two stories in my mind, because this is how much of a basket case I am. I'm like the most conflicted person you'll ever meet. I was running one story that he was who he said he was, and then another story where he was a charlatan. I was running both stories. I was, I was writing both stories the whole time and actually, before I went to the first retreat, I had a dream that he was a mad scientist. His hair was all turned white, he had this lab coat on, he had these glasses. I had this dream and I'm like, well, that's clearly a mad scientist, like he's acting totally crazy. And then I just dismissed it. I'm like, well, he doesn't act like that, he's not crazy. Looking back, it could have been, it could have been prophetic, it could have been a warning, I you know. So, truth be told, the whole time I was very conflicted and this made me miserable, because I would come home and I'd be fighting, fighting, fighting, trying to reach enlightenment, trying to meditate, not really having the results I would have hoped for, for how hard I was trying, having doubts, having doubts because you had to pay for certain things, you know. But the thing is is like I really believe that everybody in the school at that point was totally sincere, like just 100% sincere, and I think that the love between us, even though it might have been based on some false pretenses, was real and so far as like we knew love to be real, you know. So I don't. I don't fault. I don't fault like any, any of the people in this group, and I still pray. I still pray for them.
Speaker 1:So I was conflicted and every year it would come up to the point where now it was time to decide am I going to drive myself further into debt? Am I going to sell this car to get to the retreat? And then some years I would say I'm not going to be able to make it? People would throw down a thousand dollars to just be like Joshua, just come, wow, you know, to help me. But I was basically all alone and I was trying to get disciples. That's actually the only reason I went home is because the Guru said to me you'll go to America, you'll become a teacher. And I'm like well, this is my destiny. I know, I know I know Jesus Christ in the flesh, you know I know God in the flesh, like that's my responsibility. And again, it's not like I.
Speaker 1:Never I struggled with it. I'm like, really me. I had enough pride at the time to be like, but like who's like? Are there really people that are that much more advanced than me? Not really, you know, that's kind of how I worked it out, so yeah. So I just kind of went on that cycle where every year I would have my doubts, that would come right up to the critical moment, and then boom, I would break through. And then even sometimes, getting to the retreat, I'd be like I don't know, is this real? And then I would kind of suffer, suffer, suffer, and then by the end of the retreat, boom, I would have my breakthrough. At a certain point it also just seemed very complicated that we needed to practice like all all these, like to practice Hinduism, buddhism and Christianity just felt very complicated to me at a certain point.
Speaker 3:It was doing stuff. It was working for you for a while, it sounds like, but then did it just kind of like I was having sanctification, yeah, but I think a lot of it was like pride, you know.
Speaker 1:It was like about me gaining self control, to be like look how much self control I have, stopping certain sins. Like I became celibate because I'm like OK, if Jesus is real, then the Christian, spiritual or sexual ethic is true.
Speaker 2:So you said before that this school ironically, in some ways I'll say it, but you can correct me brought you to Christ or opened you up to Christ. Can you talk about that part?
Speaker 1:I have no doubt in my mind that had Christ been presented to me in any other package at that time, I would have completely rejected it, because even in that package that was like, so tailor made for me, like, honestly, the only thing that wasn't tailor made for that to me for that package was that it included Christ. You see, like I wanted everything except for Christ. So I, looking back, I truly believe that God met me where I was, but he wasn't going to leave me there. Yeah, I mean, I still barely accepted him. You know, it still came down to that, to that really, me having to actually face my own hypocrisy, like, and it was also me finally being willing to give up my moral autonomy.
Speaker 1:At some point I finally realized that if I really want to know the truth, I have to be willing to sacrifice my moral autonomy, which basically meant becoming celibate. Like that was the main thing that I didn't want to accept. And then I accepted it. Nobody imposed it on me. Once I believed that Christ is who he said he was. Even though I believed extracurricular things, we'll call it, you know I still came to believe that Christ was the Son of God, he was God, he was, he was basically who he said he was, and that, for me, just flipped the switch. Like, then, I have to, I have to stop fornicating.
Speaker 3:So, at the same time, though, you were still believing in the Hindu deities, then it sounds like yeah, yeah, but, like you said, it was still God met you where you were at, in the sense that you had all that extra baggage, very interesting.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's amazing and I was. I wanted to ask earlier but now that we kind of circled back to it because you had talked about that knee jerk reaction that you had when this guru started quoting the words of Christ and that you had this sort of resistance to it, when do you think that came from? I guess maybe you're upbringing and Lutheranism or what do you think, made that resistance.
Speaker 1:That's a that's a great question, and it took me a lot of reflecting to actually come to realize or believe. I believe that most of it came from watching movies and just seeing negative depiction after a negative depiction of Christians and how they were portrayed in movies and popular media.
Speaker 3:You know that's a scary thing because actually I was wondering the same question. I was, I was wondering was it personal experience? But I was wondering is it just simple, plain propaganda? And in many ways isn't that wild?
Speaker 1:That's scary and I had very few like I could count on one hand the actual negative interactions that I had with Christians, and they were very mild and most of it you could just also chalk up to weird Protestantism. Like one of the weirdest interactions I ever had with a Christian was in junior high and he asked me are you saved? And my, I couldn't articulate why. That was just the most loaded question ever. But from an Orthodox perspective we know that just that comes from so many erroneous theological presuppositions, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is an awkward question to be asked.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so. So, like the broad strokes of it is, is that over those eight years I could say that I was coming into a deeper and deeper relationship with Christ. I was becoming more and more sure about Christ. Everything over time that was not of Christ seemed more weird to me. So that was a general trajectory over those, over those eight years.
Speaker 3:Was it this slow I guess you could say slow burning enlightenment towards the gospel that kind of slowly turned you off to the spiritual school you were in? Is that kind of what happened then? Yeah, what did happen.
Speaker 1:Well, all right. So here's, here's. If I, if I say this last part, then then we have to. We have to get all the way through, guys. Okay, here we go.
Speaker 1:So in my very first retreat, I was trying to find the angle and, of course, one of the angles that popped in my mind was this is like a sex cult thing, or what is it you know round about. Let's just call it, let's just call it 2014. There was a mild, casual mention of just theoretically studying sexual tantra. So again, mind you, like I've become celibate, right? So I'm like, okay, no big deal, sexual tantra, like people can learn about this. And then they can like practice with their husband and wife, you know, using the sexual energy to try to reach enlightenment, yada, yada. So then, so that was the first mention of it we kind of, we kind of have a meeting and then the Guru is like oh, I saw all your thoughts, all your minds, all your thoughts. They were so dirty. We can't do this, we can't, we can't even talk about sexual tantra. It's off the table now. But then the subject gets brought up again in secret with select students, of whom I am one, and then the discussions get a little more serious year by year. We'll call it. I don't know if it was 2016 or 2017.
Speaker 1:I had been sharing some of my doubts about the Guru with some of my closer friends in the school. That stuff got leaked to the Guru and right before there was going to be this new spiritual practice, this new initiation, the Guru called me out in front of the whole school and said you know, so I hear you've had some doubts about me and you're saying I'm a charlatan and this and that, and so I kind of defended myself a little bit and then he was like oh, it's not as rosy as you painted. And I said well, it's not as bad as you painted. So I kind of stood up to him a little bit and then he said well, you don't represent me in any way. You say you've made efforts to expand the spiritual school in the US, but now I see that you'll be the first one to plant seeds of doubt in anyone's mind over whether or not I'm truly enlightened.
Speaker 1:It's that it sends me away and I allow myself to be manipulated, I blame myself and crying in the room all by myself, you know. So he calls me out in front of the whole school, but then he comes and he does something that he never does to anybody, which is I'm in the middle of a conversation, standing in a common room, and he approaches me. The Guru never does that. You go to the Guru, he approaches me and everybody just scatters. He goes Joshua, can't you feel that I love you? And it was the weirdest thing ever. I could not, I could not feel in any sense, I could not feel any love coming from me. It was so eerie, so so eerie. So I have that experience and you know, I go away thinking, god, it's just me, like, it's just my problems, it's my defensiveness, it's my over vigilance, you know, because I kind of had a rough upbringing and stuff.
Speaker 1:The last retreat that I went to was 2018 and I'm still having doubts. So we're at the 2018 retreat. The Guru is kind of like do you trust me or don't? Or don't you? But I'm still a part of this secret group chat for the sexual tantra, right? So basically, it's time for that final meeting. So the Guru meets me outside the tent with a translator and says this is how it's going to go down. We're going to discuss how things are going to be, but when the initiations finally happen.
Speaker 1:The initiations for sexual tantra are going to happen, with sexual contact with somebody who's higher than you in a school, who's a woman. He and I go. Well, man, I thought the only person I would ever have sex with is my future wife. And he goes your wife can never know. Wow, that's really weird. So then he goes. So look, this is how it's going to happen. Are you comfortable with this? And in my mind I'm thinking nope, and out loud I say yes, and basically at that moment I went undercover. I went undercover and I'm like, no, I'm not comfortable with this, but I'm going to go in there. I'm going to act like a normal self. I'm going to ask a bunch of questions. And so I go in there. I basically ask sucky best questions and throw everybody off my scent, just offend all the women, and yeah. So he says, oh, it's going to happen. Very naturally, the two people have to be attracted to each other. You'll be invited to a place where you'll both be comfortable, this and that. And that's how it's going to happen.
Speaker 1:And at the time I was like you know, I wasn't, I wasn't fully a Christian, you know. And so, even though I had become celibate, I was tempted by this. You know that there was some, there was a level of temptation to it. So in a way, you know, I was undercover, but I was still kind of entertaining like, oh well, like, is there an excuse for me to have some kind of a heat and a stick pleasure out of this? You know, I wasn't really sure you know what I was, what I was going to do with it, yet you know. So then the meeting breaks and I'm just like, yeah, I'm like I don't know if this doesn't actually like both. Well, because, like I said, there was this in the background, this building and building and building of my relationship with Christ. And now here I am Very interesting.
Speaker 1:So now it came up to, to an initiation in Krishna. So we were taught that, like Krishna is a it was never fully explained, but the idea is basically like all the avatars of Vishnu, or incarnations somehow, of like God, the Heavenly Father, but not in incarnation as the son. So in that way, christ was still somehow considered like a unique incarnation. We're starting, then. I stand up, and it's time for us to like receive these initiations, and the way that you receive an initiation is that you take your turn for the Guru to touch you in what they call Ajna chakra with his, with his finger.
Speaker 1:And so when I get in line, this is like the moment I'm like is this, I need guide? Like who am I going to call out to for guidance? So I said, heavenly Father, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, I'm praying silently in my mind while I'm in line and I'm towards the back of the line and if this is my path, show me. But if this is not my path, take me far away from here. And before I could kind of like close out the prayer with like in the name of whatever you know, like Jesus Christ or whatever I was going to say, to sort of like feel like I'm done praying now, before that could happen, I was called to the front of the line by my friend, my friend who had initially brought me to the school. He thought to himself all these people who are lower than Joshua in the hierarchy in the school are being initiated before him. He needs to come ahead of them.
Speaker 1:And so then I come in front of the Guru and I received this initiation into Krishna and I feel the energy rising, you know, and we're supposed to take that as a positive spiritual signal, and so I'm like this is real, I'm taking it as confirmation, this is real, the Guru is real, it's all real. I go sit down and then I feel like I'm continuing to have this spiritual experience and I'm like, yes, vishnu is a direct incarnation. So I'm just thinking this is it, this is the confirmation that I need. So I go home rededicated from that in 2018, summer 2018. I start a meetup group and I'm trying to attract disciples again. You know like I'm going to build this, this branch of the school, so I'm being faithful, but all I'm attracting is weirdos on meetup Nothing but complete weirdos, go figure. Some time goes by and then remember that there was the Guru, his wife and the other younger woman. So the other younger woman just drops a real casual message in the group chat. I'm leaving. This just doesn't resonate with me anymore.
Speaker 2:Oh, one of the Godhead.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I was about to say one of the in-neutrinity isn't feeling, it Isn't quite. It's been a couple of eons. It's been a couple eons and incarnations.
Speaker 2:He must have really made her upset.
Speaker 1:So one of the ways that, so supposedly, they were also like reincarnations of, like Louis the 16th or whatever, the Sun King and Marie Antoinette and all this, and so they also one of the main symbols that they used to represent themselves was the fleur de lie. You familiar with the fleur de lie? So then one of the students replied in the chat, how are we supposed to see this? And then he just put the fleur de lie with the central pedal, one side pedal and then the other side pedal, just completely missing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So at first it started with this nonchalant message and then it turned into this just complete pale storm in the group chat when, of course, nobody was going to be satisfied with that. So then it just started to erupt. So the woman who left the school when pressed, she said okay. So actually after her 12 years in the school, she's not satisfied with her spiritual progress. And now, looking back on everything that's happened, it was kind of like a me too thing. So she I don't want to get too explicit. You know there was a lot of explicit things shared. I don't want to get too explicit, but that basically now her sort of revisionist history which may be the true history was that he was just kind of taking advantage of her sexually from the beginning. When he was supposed to be giving her healing sessions. He was basically abusing them domestically and just having his way with them his wife and her.
Speaker 1:Supposedly there was some audio of the guru getting really upset and putting a knife to his own neck and saying like what do you want me to kill myself?
Speaker 1:And of course this didn't square with us, because this is like the Buddha, this is like the guy who never loses his temper and if he has anger, it's righteous anger and of course, they gave that defense to people who stayed with.
Speaker 1:The guru gave that defense, and at first I'm just completely well okay. When things first started coming out, I was only hearing things from the side of the other woman who left the school and now she was siding with women who the guru started having sex with once the sexual tantra actually started happening Now, and so that's what was presented to me, right? And so there's those young women who the guru had sex with who were even younger and more beautiful than the woman who was part of the Godhead before and then, on that side of things, there is also the biggest womanizer in the whole school, who is actually one of my friends who would always take advantage of new disciples long before the guru ever had, and he had become romantic with the other woman guru immediately following that 2018 meeting, immediately when we left that meeting, they went and got together.
Speaker 3:This sounds like Greek mythology all over again. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on folks.
Speaker 1:And what I really think happened is that is that the guru, the younger, more beautiful guru woman, who is used to being the younger, more beautiful woman, got jealous once the guru started sleeping with even younger and even more beautiful women. But then so I'm thinking, oh yeah, this is all over, Everybody's gonna leave and it's gonna be an easy decision. But then my very best friends in the school, my very closest friends like by a long shot my closest friends all stayed and supported the guru, Did the guru's wife stay and supported him.
Speaker 1:Yes, now there's a whole bunch of stuff I didn't tell you. I also didn't tell you that kind of stacks up not in favor of the guru. There was an Australian woman who came all the way back in 2010 who came specifically to be healed of cancer. She eventually died of cancer. Kind of like having some doubts but then in the end still like believing in the gurus. But then, because of that little doubt that she had, at one point, the director of the school blamed her death on her lack of faith.
Speaker 1:Then also the founder of the branch of the school in Canada who was supposedly the reincarnation of the apostle John, john the theologian he committed suicide. Oh mercy, he committed suicide. And supposedly right before that, his wife, who was also in the spiritual school and who had been with a lot of different dudes in the spiritual school, was kind of like not taking him seriously, even when he was saying he was gonna kill himself. And then the guru from what I heard, the guru was saying you're a demon, marius, and then he ended up killing himself. So but get this. So the disciple who killed himself, his wife had always wanted to be with the guru, had always wanted to be with the guru, and so she moved to Romania and started meeting with the guru yes, mercy and it's so dysfunctional.
Speaker 4:It's. I will say, though, it's kind of. I was waiting for that shoot to drop, and it just sounds like classic guru behavior at this point.
Speaker 2:I was not to make light of it. Yes, no, I was thinking the same thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that new age copium you were talking about, yeah.
Speaker 2:I know, I know.
Speaker 1:I know, I know Copium.
Speaker 2:This is still to this day, to your knowledge.
Speaker 1:I haven't looked into it. So it's really interesting, because I basically just started playing it like this. I'm like, hey, if Jesus Christ is both necessary and sufficient spiritually, why do we need anything else? I got to figure out what's going on here because I feel like I'm safe with Christ. I don't know about any of this other stuff.
Speaker 1:I mean, obviously I had a lot invested in it, so it was hard for me to just completely let go, and it was also hard for me to admit that I had been duped because of that pride that I mentioned, you know. But then there was this new possibility that was emerging, you know, but that was slowly emerging is that I would just follow Christ. But I wasn't there and I was trying to date this Christian woman online and we were about to have our first date and I was like, look, I listed myself as Christian. I see, you're just a Christian. I want you to know. I believe in some other things too, and there was also some really nice Western marketing in there. She said try following only Christ for 30 days 30 days, and see what happens with your life. And she was like I think you're going to have, you know visible generation, generations of inheritance.
Speaker 1:What's that?
Speaker 3:visible results Shiny or skin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right. So so I did that and during that time I think I was going to like Torrey Pines Church, which is like part of East Lake Church. It's a very big, very kind of commercialized I do. I do that for 30 days and there's definitely a change. I actually had a super powerful vision. I was out, I was up at Mount Laguna, and I was because I was reading the Old Testament and about an altar of unhewn stone. So I see this stone and I'm like, okay, well, here's my altar, I'm going to kneel down, I'm going to pray and I'm praying and I'm just pouring out my heart to God and he gives me this vision of a valley. And then the valley has a dam and it's like not barren but not flourishing. And then the dam opens and the water comes in and then everything starts flourishing. And then it's my five year old self who comes to me, offers his hand and then leads me down into the valley and it's like this abundance that's in the valley, so put a pin in that one, that'll. That'll come back up a little bit later.
Speaker 1:So then I finished the last Sunday to make 30 days and I go up. I go up to Mount Soledad. I walked down the mountain enough that I'm completely by myself and I'm praying. I'm praying to God and I use the name of God. That that that guru told me, like this is his unique vision of God. Name of God, and basically, basically, what I'm saying to God is like is that you Like? Are you that God Like? Is that the true God? And it was actually the charismatic woman who tried to convince me, and did convince me to some extent, that I could like just ask God a question, listen real, quietly and just like here's voice, you know. And so, ultimately, the answer that I got from whatever voice was there, was that yes, the guru was true, the guru was God. This was a true vision of God. Okay, and so this is not the only thing. This is happening.
Speaker 1:A blinding light comes directly in my eyes and I'm like, where is this light coming from? Like this is not a spiritual light, like this is a physical light. Like what is this? And I look out from where I'm sitting and I can see the source of the light. It's that glass pyramid, or it's at least partially glass pyramid on Miramar Road and where, for exactly where I was sitting at that moment, the sun was reflecting off directly into my eyes and I interpreted that in the moment as yep, god comes down, his light comes down, yep, guru is real. And then, like the hummingbirds are like coming down and going up, coming down and going up, mom, yep, yep, yep, gosh, god incarnates. And so it's funny because on a certain level I'm interpreting all of this as like that, that spiritual school was real.
Speaker 1:I just say to myself that's just too much to bear. I just no longer see that I'm that special, that I'm special enough to be one of the only you know, 200, 150, 200 people on earth to know that God is incarnate on earth right now. And I'm the only one in America just that little ounce of humility to be able to say that's too much. I'm not the guy. That's the simplest way I could say it. I just couldn't be sure about anything but Christ anymore. I just couldn't feel safe. There was this strangeness to all these different just Hinduism. I don't know. I just wasn't getting a very coherent picture of who God was. I felt like the only way that I was getting a coherent picture of who God was was in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. So then it was still a few years from that point, before I became Orthodox, obviously.
Speaker 3:So what were some of those next steps you had to take to really shed those vestiges of the school and all the new ageism?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so trying to date Christian women was helpful and challenging, so I ended up trying to try to circle back around for that one chick that I was trying to date online. That's kind of a wild story too, because I really liked her, but she had had a word of knowledge that her husband was going to be Samoan and I wasn't Samoan, yeah, so maybe in the past life you were.
Speaker 2:No, because to my mind, hearing your story, joshua, and hearing all that happened with that school, and for you to be on Mount Soledad experiencing that and still saying to yourself the guru is true, the school is true, I mean I just would be like I'm like the guy sitting in the movie theater going no hey believe it, you know. I'm like turn around.
Speaker 3:You know, I will be completely honest, I thought the story was going to end when you were lining up to get enlightened in front of the sextent thing and I thought for sure the alarm bells were going to go off and some eagle was going to pick you up and, you know, drop you back in San Diego, california, you know, in a sleep night.
Speaker 1:So let's go back and talk about that because I said that prayer, right, yeah, but I said that prayer, god, if this is my path, show me, and if not, take me far away from you, right. So in the moment, I'm like, oh well, you gave me an experience, you confirmed it. Well, what if my prayer was the prayer that broke the school? And if it's not my path, send me far, far away from here. I mean, now you are, I never went back.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I never went back another summer and the school Didn't exist in the same way it did ever again after months, after that prayer. So you could also interpret it that my prayer broke the school. Yeah, I mean, take your pick. Obviously I don't believe in any of this stuff anymore. And this is the point where you guys make it very, very clear that this is all demonic. And it is pretty clear to me. And but here's the thing is like only an orthodoxy. So look, I'm still new to orthodoxy. Right, only an orthodoxy. Are you going to find the full, unadulterated smack in the face? With how many things are demonic? You know, like with Father, father Seraphim Rose and everything like that. The first few times that I read Father Seraphim Rose, I was like, oh, that's you. Like that's demonic too. Like everything works Like. You know, like we're pretending to be a demonic. Like you know, like we're teddy bears demonic oh, they are. Oh, my bad.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Well, it's funny because something that's been kind of reverberating in my head is that quote from St Anthony that gets repeated all the time, where he had the vision of all the snares that the demons lay across the earth and he said, God, how can anyone avoid them? And he heard the voice of an angel say humility.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and it sounds like you know, you had these little moments of humility that helped free you from the snares, and I'm dying to hear how you became orthodox. That's kind of like what I'm on the edge of my seat about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know it's like this elongated and like where? Where is it?
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it's definitely not the most unique thing ever. So it was basically 2019 and really catching on to some Jordan Peterson stuff on YouTube and then, all of a sudden, I see this video about the divine logos and it's Jordan Peterson, jonathan Peugeot and two orthodox priests and I hear this talk and I'm just like this is it, like this is the thing that makes sense of who Christ is. You know that basically, the logos the divine logos is the fabric of reality. Jesus Christ is the fabric of reality, like he is what's holding everything together, and it just so completely blew my mind and gave me this depth of understanding of Christ, where I was like I don't need anything else, this is it.
Speaker 1:And I immediately named I was going through all this turmoil, all my other odd jobs had failed, had basically spat me out and I was no longer capable of being an employee and the only option I had left was to start my own business teaching MMA, and I named it a logo, a jiu-jitsu and MMA. And then I just kept, kept watching videos. I was still into a lot of Western apologetics, unfortunately, at the time, because I needed something that was just totally antithetical to the hyper mystical stuff. So unfortunately that in a way I think it slowed me down getting into orthodoxy because I was a little bit spooked by the mysticism. So but it's like at the same time I knew I think I basically knew from that video on the logos that eventually I was going to become an orthodox Christian. I just didn't want to have to learn Russian. I thought I was going to. I thought it's only, it's only, it's only Russian orthodox, like that's all there is around me. I'm really intimidated about going and being the outsider.
Speaker 1:And somebody like invited me to a Baptist church, actually somebody whose kid I was teaching jiu-jitsu and it was never fully satisfying to me. But out of every Protestant church I'd ever been to, it was at least had like a sobriety to it, like it was, you know, not overly emotional or whatever. So I was basically at that Baptist church, is asking God like when is it going to be time for me to actually go to an orthodox church? I was watching more Jonathan Bergeau, father Josiah Trannum, father Peter Hears, father Spirit on Bailey, kind of your typical YouTube lineup and then yeah, and then that led me to reading Religion of the Apostles. I do read sometimes, so I actually read Father Stephen D Young's Religion of the Apostles. I found that extremely persuasive For me.
Speaker 1:All I needed to know was that the orthodox church was the historical church. For me, that settles all the other arguments, like, because it's like, how do we know what truth is Like if Christ passed on his teachings to people like who are those people and who are the people who kept doing things and passing things on that way? And for me, just looking at the historical argument, it can't be anybody else but the orthodox church. So at that point for me it was like I'm going to trust the church because there is this normative authority that comes down through history. Right, because I didn't trust myself in the same way anymore also, which I never should have. So, like I said, I was intimidated. Actually, during COVID I went to a Greek orthodox church that's really close to my house, but nobody welcomed me, and so I just went back home and I said, okay, god, I guess it's not quite time yet, huh.
Speaker 4:And then well, that's scary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and then continued going to the Baptist church for like another year and then I did another search online and I don't know, sometimes I'm just an idiot when it comes to like searching or researching. Like I just don't find, like like I'm the worst person at actually finding the information I'm looking for. I don't know if I just wasn't searching on maps, or maybe these churches didn't have their profiles up on Google Maps. Maybe that's it when I looked before, but this time when I looked you know, this was 2022, I see all the different churches and then I'm looking through the photos, trying to get a feel for the different communities, and then Father John had posted like a two minute video clip on St Anthony, and so he's saying we worship in English. He's saying Antioch is where the followers of Christ were first called Christians, and all of that appealed to me and I went. I went that Sunday and I've basically gone every Sunday since. Wow, this is crazy.
Speaker 3:Glory to God. That's wild, absolutely. Wow, yeah, that's crazy. You know, I've heard bits and pieces here and there, but man to hear the whole thing, yeah, that is why I've heard of God. Truly glory to God. It's a very unique story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you guys so much for being so generous with your listening and, yeah, it's helpful for me too, you know, because obviously it's a pretty convoluted past, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was saying we're all working out baggage. You know you had said you still have some baggage to work through. I was going to say I'm right there with you, brother, we're all working out our own baggage in the hospital for the soul. Thanks be to God.
Speaker 3:The way I see it, you just spent a decade at the wildest summer church camp ever. Basically yeah, I'm just kidding Pretty much. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:I like the jokes too. I like the jokes too, you know, because I mean, honestly, I know this isn't all about my sins or whatever, but, looking back, pride was a lot of my trap and there was a lot of stroking of my pride and that's the thing in the new age and I mean, come on, like demonic deception in general. So much of it has to do with stroking the pride. And something that I can genuinely say, like with my experience coming into orthodoxy, is that humility is unavoidable, like it's not just lip service, it's not just something that people talk about, like I have seen in my experience with every, every person that I've had, like everyone will be humbled. Like it's built in, it's just built into orthodoxy so many things that are taken seriously. And also like the church having the historical claims that it has, and then still this emphasis on not judging the souls of others. I also find that to be so genuine and unavoidable.
Speaker 1:And so my experience coming into the church I've joked about this, but I think it's true. It's like I felt like I was getting worse coming into the church, but obviously, honestly, I think what it is is is yeah, you know, like my Godfather said well, yeah, christ got baptized and then immediately the devil came to tempt him, right, you know. But I also think that there's some some of God's providence in the fact that I'm not able to hide whatever's really going on inside of me, whether it's ugly or not, and that's a great thing, because now, with my rough edges exposed, the other members of the body of Christ can help me to wear those things down smooth. And I feel like that is just something I never could have imagined, I never would have asked for it, because it's not comfortable and it's it's truly humbling, even humiliating, like there's times when I just flat out embarrass myself and I want to be like oh no, guys, but actually I'm better than that, and it's like but am I really? Yeah, it's such a blessing.
Speaker 4:I can see God's providence all over that story for sure, and so I'm really glad that you shared that with us. It was awesome. I remembered some things about that holy festival in India, where I said that it was the celebration of light overcoming darkness, but there was like a myth that I remember wrapped up with that and it was about Vishnu and how there was like this evil demon king and there were prophecies about it something to the effect of like no man could ever conquer this king of the demons or something.
Speaker 4:And it's kind of like Lord of the Rings, where, like the witch, the witch king, and then no, no man can conquer him, and then it's a woman and a hobbit.
Speaker 4:But in this story, vishnu transforms himself into, like this lion creature and ends up conquering the Lord of the demons by deceiving him that way and taking this different form, and there's like this weird parallel with your journey where, like you had this resistance against Christ and he, like, took this like circuitous form and guided you towards himself in a way that he knew that you would become receptive to through this.
Speaker 1:It seems like drawn out, but he was there the whole time, like leaving you along, and it's amazing to hear that.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love that imagery, me too. Jg, that's huge man it almost gave me a chance.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do feel like, yeah, like he was there. And you know, I probably won't know until I'm in the kingdom which visions or feelings I had were genuine or not. But I remember one day when I went out for a drive and I just was like God guide me, and I was using the signs and everything. And I went out to this hiking spot I had never been before and I started walking and I just got the sense that Christ was walking with me I don't know how else to say it and it just brought me.
Speaker 1:It just brought me to tears and the main idea that really broke me down, especially being an MMA fighter and everything like that. But every time I thought about Christ and how he flips things right side up again right and so totally flipping my notion of masculinity and power on its head, how like he is the most powerful human being to have ever lived and the way that he used his power completely for self-sacrifice and mercy. So that would always, that always got through to me and I think that that's something genuine from Christ. That's a genuine piece of the gospel, especially for men to receive that, to be informed on our notion of masculinity, and that was the main current that always broke my heart towards Christ, every time that I turned towards Him.
Speaker 2:All right. So thank you, guys, so much for listening through to this amazing story. Joshua, thank you for joining us. This has been a fascinating journey with you through your you know a good portion of your life. Also, huge thanks to Jordan and Josh from Sinexus podcast. You guys, thank you.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having us, thanks for having us, thank you guys for coming on, all three of you guys, thanks for thinking about us.
Speaker 1:Thank you guys.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so, joshua, we're going to give you the last word today. Tell us about where can our listeners find you, and all that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks so much for listening. I hope it's been edifying. I'm starting up a YouTube channel to share my journey. It's called Son of None from Slave to Warrior. I also have a small existing YouTube channel for my Mixed Martial Arts teaching. It's called the Way MMA and I'll be opening up a gym by the same name soon in San Diego, probably in the Miramar Curnimesa area. So if you're an Orthodox Christian and you want to really learn martial arts from another Orthodox Christian, you can stay plugged in through that channel and I'll be updating things there.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Or if you're not Orthodox and you want to learn Jujitsu.
Speaker 1:And you want to learn to read.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, awesome, all right you guys Thank you guys so much.
Speaker 4:Have an awesome time We'll see you on the next one, bye, bye, god bless, god bless, god bless.