[Bad Bearded Dad] So, John Bliss, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and I want to get into the book because I’m really interested in some of the stuff you got going on in it.

[John Bliss] Okay. So, about me. It’s hard to really describe yourself because I think I’m just another normal dude, but I’m not normal. I’ve kind I’ve always been like an eccentric or an oddball. My superpowers: I’m good at everything, but I’m not great at anything. That’s my weakness. And at least I recognize that. But I am good at everything. I can play music. I can paint. I can write. I can do engineering calculations. And I can speak. So that’s my superpower. But like I said, I’m not great at anything. I started an engineering business. I had 20 people working for me. So I’m good at business, too. I kept the business for about 25 years or so, and then I sold it.

[John Bliss] I’ve been writing this book for 13 years. I finally published it finally.

[Bad Bearded Dad] So what’s the name of the book?

[John Bliss] Yeah, the name of the book. After people finish books, they always have regrets. And one of mine is the name of the book. It’s too long. So I don’t even know the name of it. I have to read it myself. It’s “The False Paradigms of Today and The Timeless Truth of Tomorrow.” It just seemed so appropriate when I wrote it, and actually it is. That is what it’s about.

[Bad Bearded Dad] it actually seems kind of appropriate for what we’re going through right now, John. And to be honest with you, , I tell you what, everyday things seem to get a little weirder and weirder and history seems to be repeating itself over and over and over again. It’s quite amazing, isn’t it? It’s weird to see. It’s weird to experience and you’re not sure as a person. I’m not sure if anybody else is seeing it the way I am. And it’s kind of interesting that we have this chance to come together and discuss things like that.

[Bad Bearded Dad] So what I wanted to ask is what mysticism is. I had to look that up. And. go ahead.

[John Bliss] No, keep talking. I’m want you to talk more.

[Bad Bearded Dad] So I looked it up. And for me, I felt a lot of those things. So I’ll look up the definition right now. As a matter of fact, I have the computer right in front of me. I need to use it.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Mysticism is belief that union with or absorption into the deity or absolute or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect may be obtained through contemplation or self-surrender. And the second definition would be a vague or ill-defined religious or spiritual belief, especially associated with a belief in occult forces or supernatural agencies.

[John Bliss] That is so lame. That second one especially was written by someone who’s never had a mystical experience. They’re totally dismissive of it. They say it’s vague. It’s not vague. It’s just it can’t be expressed in words, but it is not vague. It’s very real to those who have had them. And mysticism is not a belief. Mysticism is, now that I think of it, I never really thought about the definition of mysticism. I don’t know what it is. But I know what a mystical experience is.

[Bad Bearded Dad] So, the way I see it, you’re very correct in that you can’t express in words, right? I have difficulty expressing the experiences that I’ve had in words. And I’ll tell you how I got there. It’s the use of illicit drugs and psychedelics. I cannot describe it to someone who’s never felt that way. And it’s more of a feeling. And the way I describe it to people is it is the difference between believing and knowing. You know what I mean?

[John Bliss] Yes. You’ve heard the word gnosis before, right? G N O S I S. That means knowledge. And it’s how do you get that? you just know. You just know. And it’s from this mystical experience. It’s not from looking and seeing with your eyes and touching with your fingers. It’s knowledge received through mystical experience. Yeah, absolutely. I’ve taken plenty of hallucinogens myself. So we are in the same camp. I used to think that I could you can line up 10 people and I could pick out which ones had taken hallucinogens, he’s done it, she’s done it, right? I don’t know if that was true, but I always believed that I could tell. But now I’ve lost that feeling. I’ve been around so many normal people for so long that I’ve lost that ability.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I spend my life around what are considered quote unquote normal people and it’s like being awake but everybody else is asleep. That is how it feels like to me. It’s very wild. And as a matter of fact, I did a psychedelic experience out in public once. I was with my wife and went into like the AT&T store of all places and it was a very cold environment, very sterile. I felt like I had to get out of here. And so I went back outside and it was like blazing hot outside. It was in the middle of the summertime and I was so comfortable out there in the heat. I felt the warmth wash over me and I was like, “Ah.” It was a very wild experience. I can’t advocate for people to do that, but I would if I would if I could.

[John Bliss] Why can’t you?

[Bad Bearded Dad] I’m not sure because it’s illegal, number one, .

[John Bliss] That’s a good reason. Okay.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yeah. I would love to if I could say anything to anybody, if you could go to a place where it’s legal and it have an experience with a babysitter obviously, that’s what I’d do. I do recommend it. Everybody over the age of 25 at some point needs to experience something.

[John Bliss] Yes. If you can’t experience it naturally on your own, you can through the use of psychedelics. Politicians especially. Well, and accountants, right? And engineers. And lawyers too. So I guess that you’re saying is that people should go to Costa Rica and take ayahuasca. That’s what you’re saying.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yeah. That would be cool. I just recently started growing my own cannabis and the experience of growing it myself has been an incredible learning experience and I’m not quite finished with my first grow yet, but it’s been one of those experiences where it started as one thing, and I was doing it to get cheaper product and to have control of my supply and all that. And it started as that, but now it’s more of like I’m very excited to get in here and see the plants every day and take care of them. And the experience of growing has been almost as pleasurable as partaking. I’m very excited about that.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I’ve come to a theory of one consciousness. We are all part of one consciousness. Like the plants can feel you when you’re around and you talk to them and you hang out with them a little bit and it’s really cool. It’s a really cool experience to know that we’re all part of something bigger.

[John Bliss] I understand. Look it’s it sounds like what you just said, if you’re not careful, can sound really trite right?

[Bad Bearded Dad] It’s not. It’s real

[John Bliss] Yes, but it can sound trite. For example, suppose you ran into Jesus on the bus or at a bus stop and you say “What’s your deal? You say you’re a speaker. What do you speak about?” He’s like “I think you should love everybody. Love. It’s all about love. Don’t follow the rules. Just love everybody.” And people would be thinking, “ok, whatever” and just turn their back and talk to someone else. And it because it sounds trite, they have heard it before, and nothing comes of it. But it’s not trite. The problem is when you try to explain some things in words, you cannot convey the profundity.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yeah.

[John Bliss] What you said, I totally I’m on board. Yes, I do feel that. I do. In fact, this book, I’m not going to be pushing heavy on the book. I’m just here to talk. It’s a great book, and I think you’re going to like it if you read it.

[John Bliss] But let’s talk about the book. What you just said is partially the conclusion of the book. We are all one. Here’s a metaphor. When some people look at a beehive, what do they see? They see all these bees. Right? And the bees come, they sting you or they make honey or whatever. But the beehive could be considered like it’s really just one creature. The hive is the creature. It’s not the bees. Just like I’m a combination of cells. The cell isn’t the creature of importance. It’s me. Right? Or you can say, well, no, humanity is the creature that matters. It’s not me.

[John Bliss] Humanity is the creature. It’s not about me. I’m going to die just like my cells die and no person really matters. My cells will die and different ones will replace them. It’s the same when I die, I will be replaced, I will be forgotten. It does not matter. Humanity goes on. Humanity is the is the real entity that matters. And that’s pretty much what this book is about.

[Bad Bearded Dad] What’s pretty funny about that though is then you get wrapped up into your emotions sometimes, and things maybe get a little overheated. You may get overly sad or overly angry and this point becomes harder to remember. Well for me particularly it gets harder to remember when in the heat of the moment that none of this really stuff matters.

[John Bliss] or you can also take a historical approach: How many millions or hundreds of millions of people have felt this before or been through this same situation before?

[Bad Bearded Dad] I’ve actually had that thought. I’ve actually had that thought a lot, to be quite honest with you. Especially in those deep reflection moments when I’m frustrated. When I’m in a situation with more than one person, I often think of the other person and how frustrated they must be. If I’m this frustrated, imagine how the other person standing in front of me feels. And it often deescalates things and helps.

[John Bliss] That’s just basic emotional intelligence, right? Yeah. I do the same. The same thing.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I wouldn’t have felt none of any of this like when I was 25 or younger. I think I think a lot of this comes with age and wisdom. So what made you want to write a book about these things?

[John Bliss] You’re going to like this. I was I was probably 25 or so and I was on the beach near Santa Cruz. I don’t know, maybe it was Santa Cruz. I was with an older brother and his friends, and we all decided to take mushrooms. And they all felt the effects of mushrooms. I didn’t. They all just kind of disappeared. They went off together somewhere. I don’t know where. I don’t remember the next six hours. I don’t know what happened, but I do remember the last couple hours and I remember it was about 4 in the morning and I found myself laying face down on my stomach on the beach and this song kept playing over and over. It was it’s to me it’s the most beautiful song ever written. It was “O Que Sera” and by Milton Nascimento and Chico Buarque. They’re Brazilian singers from the 60s and 70s. I don’t know what the song is about. It’s in Portuguese. I’ve read translations. It seems really intense, but who cares what it’s about? It’s what it meant to me. In the song there are these repeating chorus’ and trumpets that seemed so sad. They just this repeating in my head. It was just very sad but beautiful at the same time and I saw and felt deeply like everything in our lives is futile. Everything we try, it just doesn’t amount to anything. And their voices were also so sad. Their verses all trailed off into that same sense of futility. But that was only the theme song. The image in my mind or what I really experienced was I saw my life from a from perspective far away, and I saw myself as young and idealistic. I had these great ideas of these great things I was going to do with my life. I was going to get married and then I was going to have children, get a job, and then die. And then my child, my boy would be a youth, have the same type of great ideals and get married, have a child, and then die. And then his child would do the same thing. and that my father did the same thing and my father’s father did the same thing and that this has been going on for centuries. The same story.

[John Bliss] Yeah.

[Bad Bearded Dad] For all of humanity, it’s been going on. And I realized this is my place in history. I’m just a link in this whole chain of humanity’s lifespan. And that changed everything. I became a history major after that.

[John Bliss] That’s really what was the I would say was the main impetus for the book. I didn’t start writing then. I probably started writing about 20 years later, but that experience is what really changed everything

[Bad Bearded Dad] Man that’s incredible. I’ve had a lot of those same thoughts myself of being just a moment in time. And then I go back and think, well, what is time when time is a completely made up construct? And it takes me down a weird rabbit hole. Most days I spend a little bit of time reflecting on things and thinking on things like that.

[Bad Bearded Dad] So about 11 years, 12, it’s been a while, like 12 years ago, I became a stay-at-home dad. And so I found myself with a lot of time. When I’m consumed by chaos most every day, all day, I have to have a little time to myself at the end of every day to just kind of decompress and unwind. And those are the times that I spend in my head. And when I’m waiting on people, too. I’m It seems like I’m waiting on people an awful lot. But as I get older, I find myself making time to do those things, making time to have reflection, sitting outside and just kind of enjoying the nature of things and being with myself. And I if I don’t get time like that every day, I make time every day. And I think there’s a big difference between the way we prioritize things, right? I think that’s a big difference between me and a lot of people is I prioritize that part because I enjoy so much of it. I prioritize it and then I implore my family members to do the same thing. Like my wife for instance, sometimes she’s so caught up in the every day, she forgets to breathe sometimes. And so I told her, “Look, something that really helped me when I was working is just take a few minutes on the way home from work, turn the radio off, sit in silence, and when you get home, just sit in the driveway for a few minutes and just let the day wash off of you.” And then come inside. I don’t know if she does that, but it really did help me out a lot. And now, so I prioritize that time even now after 12 or 13 years of not doing it at a job I. still prioritize those moments.

[John Bliss] Do you do you meditate?

[Bad Bearded Dad] I wouldn’t call it meditation. I guess that is what I’m talking about. It’s just like a different form of meditation. In meditation, people say you have to clear your head and my brain never shuts up. It’s constantly on.

[John Bliss] I think everybody’s wired differently and I don’t know what your experience is or anyone else’s. I only know my own. I know in my experience it takes about 25 minutes but for those for those thoughts to go away. Last year, I stopped meditating, but I used to meditate just about every day for several years. I’m in transition right now. But anyway, you just focus on your breathing, a thought comes up and one thing you could do is just say “thought.” I found one thought. it goes away. You go back to your breathing. The thought goes away. And then another one arises. Repeat the process. You say “thought,” and it disappears. And this goes on and on. But after about 20 25 minutes, there’ll be spaces between the thoughts. And then if you go a little longer, about 40 minutes, I’m not saying you should do this, but if you go 40 minutes, the spaces are longer. And it’s kind of like tea leaves. Well, no one has tea leaves anymore. They have tea bags. Now, I don’t use tea bags. I hate tea bags. I’d throw the leaves in my water and let them sink to the bottom. But it’s kind of like that. They’re all floating on the top, but give it enough time, they’ll start sinking to the bottom. That’s like our thoughts dissipating.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yeah.

[John Bliss] Even if you sat for only five minutes and you never got any of that time between thoughts, what some people say, and I believe it, is that by just doing that, just the breathing and identifying the thoughts, what you’re doing is you’re defragging your mind.

[John Bliss] It’s like defragging your hard drive. You may not have this problem, but other people might, like maybe your wife, people who are busy, and who don’t relax. But if you can defrag a little bit every day, when crises happen, you don’t get excited, because you’re not holding onto 50 other thoughts. Those have all been filed away already. Your mental desk is clean and you can handle something new. And so, there is value in it. Even though you’re not going to be a Buddha. I’m not going to be a Buddha either.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Well, have you ever used a sensory deprivation tank?

[John Bliss] I’ve been in one once.

[Bad Bearded Dad] My wife keeps wanting to try that. At the very mention of it at first, I was very freaked out. I’m not quite sure why, but now I’m thinking, “Yeah, let’s do that. We’ve got to try that.” They rent these tanks out for an hour, right? And you get in there and maybe I could try to do that, and do some breathing exercises and while I’m in silence.

[John Bliss] You don’t even need to do exercises. Just to keep it simple, just watch your breathing. That’s it. Breathe however you want. Just watch your breathing. And when you recognize a thought, you say, “thought.” I found a thought. Or for me, it’s I often have music playing in my head. So I just say “music.” And sometimes it goes away, but sometimes it won’t. That’s the hard one for me is music.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Well, I’m just finding out that not everybody thinks the way I do. When I was younger, I thought that everybody thought like I do and everybody had an inner voice or a mind’s eye. And now I’m finding out there’s people that don’t have a mind’s eye. Are you kidding me? When I read books, the images in my mind are far more vivid and alive than any movie I’ve ever watched—no matter how impressive the special effects. Everything I see happens inside my head, page by page, and it’s more real and cinematic than anything Hollywood can put on screen. I’m finding out that not everybody has that and I don’t know if it’s sad for them or happy for them. But I’m glad that I have that ability.

[John Bliss] It’s your superpower. But they might have other ones, like maybe they can play basketball better than you or something.

[Bad Bearded Dad] That’s for sure. I’m terrible at sports. I am. So, I can’t even bowl good. I used to get trained when I was a kid. I was in classes for bowling and my parents were good bowlers, my grandparents were good bowlers, and I just I was terrible at it. My coordination kind of sucks. But like you said in the very beginning like you’re good at a lot of things but you’re not great at any one thing. That’s kind of me. I tell people like I know a little about a lot but not a lot about anything. I’ve always told people the only thing I’ve ever been good at is being a dad. And hence the name Coffee with Bearded Bad Dad. It’s one of those things. But so how old were you when you first started writing the book?

[John Bliss] I’m 62. So 13 years. That’d be 49. I was 49.

[Bad Bearded Dad] And it took you how long to complete it? 13 years? Wow, that’s a long time.

[John Bliss] Just it’s like an hour, an hour and a half a day. And there’s a couple periods where for three or six months where I did nothing where I. . .look, every person who’s writing a book for the first time, there’s these thoughts that come through their heads just like maybe you had when you first started your podcast, “who the hell are you to write a book?” “Who’s going to read your book?” Right? And so. . .

[Bad Bearded Dad] so that would sometimes get a hold of me and then I would stop and . . .that’s kind of where I’m at right now as a matter of fact. So, I’m actually coming down off of that. So September 10th, Charlie Kirk was assassinated and of course I was very sad about his assassination. I didn’t know Charlie personally, but I wanted to get him on the podcast. I wanted to talk to him and I talked to some of his friends. So I was very emotional about it. But that’s not what really got me. It was afterwards. I have to use social media for work and I got on social media and I was just stuck on it for like two or three hours and it was so negative and everything was hate and it was. . .

[John Bliss] that’s right on both sides.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yes. And I just I had to put it down and I’m like I had to take a moment away and that moment turned into a week. That week turned into two weeks. That two weeks turned into three weeks. And now I’m getting back into it and that’s actually why it took me so long to respond to you is because I was kind of stuck in this moment where I know that I’m going back. [John Bliss] I know that I just had to take a step away because I couldn’t let all that negativity impact me personally. I couldn’t let it in and affect how I felt. So, I just kind of had to put it down and walk away from it.

[John Bliss]That’s what I’ve done. So I think about three weeks ago I stopped. I used to read X. I don’t touch it anymore. It’s just there’s too much hate.

[John Bliss] If you look at it enough your feed’s going to convince you that all these different groups of people are terrible and really need to be out of our country and we really shouldn’t have anything to do with them. And I don’t want that. I don’t want it. I do Substack and I’ve deleted or muted or unfollowed anyone who does anything political even if I agree with them. I don’t want it. I don’t want it. And now I’m getting really cool stuff on Substack on my feed now. Just philosophical thoughts like. . .

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yeah. That’s crazy how that happens, right? I kind of get political on the podcast. For instance, I was talking to my brother yesterday and we got political and were talking about different ideologies and I don’t really have an ideology, but I do like to speak my mind on different topics and I do have an opinion on lots of things, but I try not to. I try not to be overly negative about things because number one, it impacts the way I feel for the like the rest of the day. But I also I also don’t want to impact anybody else negatively. So I try to tone down like how I really feel about some things. But I have to be on a podcast. It’s kind of a weird thing because how you feel in the moment right now and you just say things, but maybe you’re not going to feel that a week from now.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yeah. And right now there’s lots of things out there that are just forever and I might not feel that way tomorrow and or I might come across new information that makes me sound like an idiot. So I’m consciously aware of that while I’m talking and it makes for interesting conversations sometimes that have to be edited down for length sometimes. Like I think the longest with podcast we’ve done was four hours.

[Bad Bearded Dad] So, let’s talk a little bit about religion. Have you have you noticed like an uptick in Christianity and religious religiosity over the years?

[John Bliss] I saw a down tick for many years where a lot of the kids I was running into were atheists. Maybe it is an engineering thing. I ran an engineering company.

[Bad Bearded Dad] People who said that they were atheists and really didn’t understand the meaning of the word.

[John Bliss] Yes, that’s right. They weren’t really atheists, or really hadn’t thought about it too much. I actually I think I think that most people don’t really think too deeply about religion.

[John Bliss] But yes, that’s what the media is saying, that there is an uptick in uptick in religiosity and I think it’s probably true. And certainly there’s a resurgence in Christianity here and in Africa, Christianity’s taken off supposedly in Africa.

[John Bliss] One interesting thing I explore in my book is how, back in especially the 1950s and the 1960s—Arnold Toynbee’s massive work A Study of History was everywhere. It was an epic 12-volume set that analyzed the rise and fall of civilizations, and just about every household that read seemed to have a copy on the shelf. Usually it was the two-volume abridged edition. Although he was detailed, he was a lay historian. The academics hated him, but the people loved him. And his main theory was that you can look at civilizations, and they rise and then they fall. They rise and they fall. Well, we all believe this now, but that’s a Toynbee thing. Actually, Oswald Spengler, a historian before him around World War I came up with that also. But Toynbee also said, and by the way, he’s had many mystical experiences, and not using drugs. He would just like he’d go to some battlefield and he was there. he would return to the actual battle, transcending time. But anyway, he believed that when societies or civilizations are at their low point, that’s when new religions are were born. It’s because the old systems are not working anymore, right? Nothing’s working. No one trusts the elites anymore. All the systems are breaking down and so people are looking around and that is when religions form. At least that’s what he claims. So, for example, when did Islam come? The Persians were fighting the Byzantines for quite a long time. Those wars had wiped out the Middle East. So many people died and the economy was ruined. And this had happened over maybe 80 or 100 years. And then came then Islam. For Christianity, the Roman Empire was decaying and then all of a sudden a new religion appeared. He projected that the new religion that is coming is going to be some kind of an amalgamation of all these other religions we have.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I could see it. I see I see a lot of things changing and the more things change, the more they stay the same. I often wonder like how many times have we been in this these exact spots in these exact moments before in history. And I often think about like what was it like right before World War I popped off, World War II popped off, so on and so forth. And that’s kind of where we’re at right now, is right before a major conflict.

[John Bliss] Okay, that may be true. But I think that right before World War I was way different than now. My thinking is that up to 1914 we were an incredibly positive people really believed in progress. All of Europe did. We believed in science. We believed science was bringing us forward in a greater and greater prosperity, greater everything and people were really hopeful. And then World War I destroyed all that. We went into the war to end all wars. There was going to be no more wars after that. That is what they promised us. That’s what we believed. It didn’t happen, right? And what we learned was, science just made better ways to kill people, and that our leaders are really stupid. Twenty million people died in World War I doing stupid things, just sitting in trenches and rushing towards machine guns in other trenches. How stupid is that? And that experience ushered in an incredible change in American feeling at least towards incredible negativity. Disillusionment. And if you look at the literature came after World War I, you get what? Existentialism. Oh, there’s no meaning in life. You just got to make it for yourself. Or a lot of novels where the characters are just a cog in the big machine. A cog in the wheel of the big machine. There’s nothing of particular meaning in life. There was just meaninglessness. And then what happened to art? It went from beauty to this abstract, well, frankly, garbage, I think. I just think that we went from a belief in progress and an appreciation of beauty and human potential, to. . .it just went to hell. So I don’t think this is at all like before World War I at all.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Well, I a lot of the people that I talk to right now are kind of wanting to go back to simpler times in their own lives and now granted like when we get off social media, we’re still in our own little bubbles, right? We really only talk to people who have the same type of thoughts as we do. So, no matter what, social media or not, we’re going to have these echo chambers. But when I talk to the folks I know, people are wanting to go back to a simpler time. Most the people I know are very family-centric. And I see that, like here in the Midwest, I don’t like it. We’re very insulated from a lot of the world’s problems. Maybe insulated is not the right word. We don’t have the economics here to really care about more than our little community here. And so I think that for a lot of people national politics has really taken over the conversation.

[John Bliss] Everywhere. It really has. But I don’t think that’s any different than what it always has been. I remember when George Bush was president, we had a lot of issues. I remember Clinton, he had a lot of issues.

[Bad Bearded Dad] So I don’t think I don’t think it’s really politics. I think it really comes down to socioeconomics and for the people who can afford to progress and go that direction, that’s where they’re going. And I think the people who see things for the way they are or can’t afford to do that are like “well, let’s go back this way and do those things that used to work.” As a matter of fact like we do a lot of the same things here at my house, like we bake our own bread here because the price of things, and then you get to looking at the ingredient list of what’s in bread and then you’re like “but I can make bread with three ingredients.”

[Bad Bearded Dad] I do see I see the resurgence in religion. I think there are a lot of silent people out there. There’s a lot of people that aren’t talking or sharing their feelings. And I see that through working relationships with all kinds of different people that we’re probably more similar than we give ourselves credit for.

[John Bliss] That’s all true.

[John Bliss] It’s social media. They just it just divides us and all of that. You know, one thing that’s interesting about this whole religiosity trend is I can think of two, but I know there’s more, like Steve Bannon. So, he’s on the right. He’s Catholic. Candace Owens. Catholic. I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I actually I think he’s Baptist. I’m not I’m not a 100% on that.

[John Bliss] Yeah. But he’s certainly Christian and he’ll he lets it be known. So that’s unusual because I don’t remember Rush Limbaugh talking about this kind of stuff, right? Maybe I was I didn’t listen to him much. I never liked him, but he was very talented.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Well, I was just speaking about Charlie Kirk a little while ago and that’s one of the things that he talked about the most was his faith and Christianity and he had a lot of followers, millions and millions of people. And I the way I feel about religion is. . .I don’t know. I know other people have felt this way. I’m not into religion per se. I’m not. I’m a Christian for sure. I believe those kind of beliefs, and that’s how that’s where I get my morals. I have Judeo-Christian beliefs.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I understand that and but my religion is I don’t really like organized religion really because I understand from a certain point it was designed to it was designed by man for man. But I always think like there’s a lot of truth in the Bible. So for me I always say I’m more spiritual than religious and I do believe in God or some form of God or some form of creator. I do believe but I come just short of being religious. So. . .

[John Bliss] Let me jump in there a little bit. So I’m similar to you. You’ve heard of Abraham Maslow, right? He did that whole hierarchy of needs pyramid. I don’t remember the pyramid, but I think it’s like you need shelter first, then you need food and water, then you need a community to protect you, then you need love, and then you need something to live for, etc. But you don’t need something to live for or ideals or any of that stuff unless you have shelter and food. That comes first, right? You don’t need love until you have food.

[John Bliss] And so he also did a study on religion and it was really good. And in it he talks about two kinds of people. There are peakers and there’s non-peakers. Peakers are people who touched God and who had mystical experiences or he called them peak experiences but not the peak experiences we talk about. We’ve redefined the term. If you jump out of an airplane, we call that a peak experience today. That’s not a peak experience. Or if you win the lottery, that’s not a peak experience. That’s an exciting experience. That may be something you remember for the rest of your life. But what he meant by peak experience is touching God and feeling that oneness and that wholeness and just the that you will never die. And he said, first off, you can’t communicate peak experiences to anyone. We already we already went over that. You can’t communicate it, right? You can’t explain to a blind man the difference between blue and red. You just can’t do it. They’re not going to get it. So, Jesus Christ, he goes and touches God and is with God, and knows everything at least momentarily, or maybe for a long time, I don’t know. And he can’t express it. So, what’s he do? He talks about what these maidens with oil lamps and some of the oil burns out, or he talks about the kingdom of God. These are so it’s so abstract. It isn’t like “Look! this is what I felt. I felt this and I felt this and I felt this.” You can’t express it. And he was reduced just like every other teacher to telling stories, parables, right? And the thing is though, that even if he could express it, even if he had he was able to and had this incredible capacity of language that no one else has, the people around him wouldn’t understand it anyway because they’re non- peakers. So peakers can experience God, non-peakers cannot. And non-peakers don’t get it. They’re the blind man who can’t tell the difference between red and blue. They can’t get it. And peakers are, as I see it, they’re the artists of religion. They’re the artists and if you think of human spiritual potential as a normal distribution, a bell curve, the peakers are at the very edge of the tail, the top tail, it’s like the 1% or 0.0001%. That would be Jesus or Moses or Buddha or whatever. And then the rest of us, most of us, are in the middle of the bell curve, right? Back to Jesus. He can’t explain his experience and what he learned. Even if he did explain it and could and had incredible capacity language, the people around him wouldn’t understand him.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yeah.

[John Bliss] Because we’re the blind man. We wouldn’t understand.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Exactly.

[John Bliss] And peakers, these are spiritual artists, and artists are not very good businessmen,

[Bad Bearded Dad] Right? They are not.

[John Bliss] They’re artists. And peakers generally cannot organize a religion. They cannot write a canon, and say this is what we believe. We believe this, we don’t believe this. Let’s write it down. Okay, here’s the rules. And, here’s the church. This is the hierarchy. We have a pope. We have bishops. We have cardinals and all that stuff. This is how we do it. This is how we do a mass. You know, we say this, then we do this. We do this. No, he didn’t do that. His followers did that. Just like you said, it was man-made. And it was man-made by people who never touched God. So, they lost. . .

[Bad Bearded Dad] Sometimes when you read some things in the Bible it could be interpretated as psychedelic use, like the burning bush and

[John Bliss] That’s Old Testament stuff. I’m talking more about just New Testament stuff.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Oh yeah. the New Testament stuff is when people in charge in back in the day, if they wanted to change some of the rules, they just rewrote them.

[John Bliss] That’s what they did. So, let’s see, Christ died. 40 days later, they started a church. His brother James, his half-brother from Joseph, headed the church and he was eventually killed. And so then was Jesus’s cousin, Simeon, who was the second leader of the church. And then there were maybe about another 12 or 16 of them who were leaders in this succession. All of which were Jews. The early Christians were Jews. They weren’t Christians. They were Jews who thought Christ was really cool and had a really nice way approach to Judaism, but they were Jews.

[John Bliss] And so then we had St. Paul and Barnabas show up and they talk to some of the apostles and the apostles say, “Yeah, go ahead. You can preach to the Gentiles.” So they go out and preach to the Gentiles and decades later, these cities like Rome and Corinth and I don’t know, Alexandria or whatever, they’re have more followers of Jesus than Jerusalem. (Well, actually, the people in Jerusalem, they got kicked out and they were in Jordan by that time.) But and so these new gentile Christian communities became the real center of power and they just started pushing the Nazarenes away. It’s like, “What? We’re not doing this Mosaic law stuff anymore. Nah, we’re not doing that. That’s not the Christian way.” And so the original Christian church got erased. This original church, the Nazarenes, they followed the Gospel of the Hebrews for like 300 years, 400 years. It’s gone now. Doesn’t exist anymore. As for the first century gospels that we have, St. Paul was around. His letters and the writings of Clement of Rome, who was the third pope, are the only writings we have from the first century AD. That’s it for first century Christian writings. And neither Paul nor Clement met Jesus.

[John Bliss] The gospels we have were written 80 years after the last apostle died. So assuming the apostles were the same age as Jesus, assuming they died at 80 years, the gospels were written around 160 AD.

[Bad Bearded Dad] It’s like a game of telephone.

[John Bliss] That’s exactly what it was. And I think what happened was they didn’t just write them from scratch. They had all these other gospels that existed (that we don’t have now). They would expand on the older gospels, and integrate some of them. Take some of this gospel and I’ll take some of that gospel. And then they make a “better” version. The gospels we have just evolved. And we end up with these four gospels but they weren’t written by the apostles.

[John Bliss] And another thing that was really interesting is that the whole idea of virgin birth and the miracles didn’t come about until the second century. Paul never talked about that. And then Paul never even talked about a resurrection in bodily form. He said Jesus resurrected as a spirit. These miracles all came about in the second century.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yeah.

[John Bliss] And so just as you said, it evolved. Men made it up and they formed this organization and now they’re at the head of the organization and it’s like, “Yeah, I’m the head of the church.” And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s great. I’m just going to do whatever it takes to keep me in power because this is a good gig I got going.”

[Bad Bearded Dad] Exactly. Exactly. That’s exactly how I feel about organized religion.

[Bad Bearded Dad] And you were talking about peak experiences and I’m talking about people jumping out of an airplane like skydiving. I can I can kind of sympathize with that because like that’s how I feel when I go on roller coasters like it’s a peak experience. It’s like I love roller coasters. I know they’re probably safer than what I imagine them to be, but I know accidents can happen, too.

[Bad Bearded Dad] But when asked why I love roller coasters more now as a 40-year-old guy with kids and everything, and I’m like, “After you have kids, nothing else is scary.” And they were like, “Well, what do you mean?” And I’m like, scariest thing that could ever happen to me is something to happen to one of my children. And I think my peak experience would have been having my children and the fact that they are my history. That’s a piece of me that will be in the future and then they’ll have their own kids and so on and so forth. I’d have to say one of the greatest things that I’d ever done is to have kids. But nothing is scarier than having something happen to one of my kids.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I can empathize sympathize with the folks who would think that jumping out of an airplane is a peak experience. Well, maybe that is their peak experience. That’s what they think.

[John Bliss] Well, I’m not denigrating jumping out of an airplane. It’s just that it’s a different thing than touching God. They’ll always remember jumping out of the airplane, but it may not change them as a person. It may not. Whereas you touch God, it changes you forever. You’re not the same.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Absolutely. I don’t know if I’ve actually had one of those experiences. I’ve had what I would consider mystic experiences where I’m touching on something that ordinary people can’t see sometimes.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I’ve been in those spots where I’ve experienced things that I can’t explain in words. Beauty and warmth and sometimes terror. Sometimes scary. I’ve experienced those things. but I’ve not I don’t know if I’ve had that experience where I’ve had just touched God.

[John Bliss] Have you felt an overwhelming sense of love towards all people, you have had those experiences?

[Bad Bearded Dad] Absolutely. I’ve actually felt that in normal everyday life.

[John Bliss] So, I’ve had a few. The one I mentioned I don’t know if that was really a mystical experience but the ones that I have had there’s this overwhelming sense of love towards everyone and also a feeling of indestructibility like I can never die. I will never die. Those are two of the things that I’ve felt.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I’ve felt both of those.

[John Bliss] So maybe you have had maybe you’ve had mystical experiences. It’s not like you see Jesus looking at you and talking to you.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Right. One experience that I can really describe really well was one night I was on under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms and I went outside and I felt everything. I felt the wind move. I felt I felt like the trees were talking to me with their leaves rustling and I could hear and feel the grass as the wind was blowing through the grass and in that moment I was like, this is it. we are all together. And I guess that’s is probably is probably as close as I could say that I felt to having a truly spiritual experience where it didn’t feel like I was me. I felt like I was everything and that we are all I

[John Bliss] by definition mystical experience.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I say this one thing that when I talk about religion. I talked about religion with my brother one day and I said we are all God and he took that as a blasphemous statement, I guess.

[John Bliss] Yes, of course.

[Bad Bearded Dad] We’re all in this together. Like literally, not just figuratively. We’re all in this together. It’s we are God. We are part of the whole.

[John Bliss] You’ve got to read my book. You’re going to really like it. So, as I see it, we’re all manifestations of God. We’re all different. We all have different goals in life, different talents. We all have to do different things, we have different roles we’re supposed to play. And a lot of us will never figure it out. Most of us, that’s all fine. But we are all God. Absolutely. In the 1850s there was a guy named August Comte. I don’t know if you ever heard the term positivist. He was the founder of the positivist school. They used to believe that if you can’t know the truth about something then don’t even bother with it. So, I’m not even going to argue with you about the existence of God because we can’t ever prove it true or not true. So, it’s a waste of my time. I’m not going to go there. That was part of positivism. He was, some people say, the founder of sociology, certainly of statistical methods in sociology. But he put together a church, the Church of Humanity, and basically said what you just said. The Church of Humanity worshiped humanity, that we are God. it didn’t last that long. But I wrote about in the book. Actually, the Brazilian flag has two words on it. It’s ordem e progresso. progress and order. And that comes from the Church of Humanity. Actually, the revolutionaries in Brazil were positivists. They were they were followers of this whole thing.

[Bad Bearded Dad] So, let’s switch gears a little bit. I’m a big UFO fan. Have you been paying attention to the news lately or over the last few years on UFOs or what are your thought on UFOs?

[John Bliss] Well, I have a couple thoughts. So one thought I have. . .this is a little bit of a derivative of what you said, but people talk about how did we get here? There’s like the fundamentalists say there’s the seven days of creation. The evolutionists say that we evolved from pond scum. I don’t believe either of those theories. Let me just go into evolution real quickly. You know, they can do experiments and they can make creatures change a little bit. Mutation. Right. But what they’ve done with the Theory of Evolution is they’ve extrapolated. They said, “Okay, we can do something. This creature changes a little bit. Therefore, people used to be pawn scum.” I’m like, “Wait, what?” That’s a massive extrapolation, and it’s just something as an engineer, I know, extrapolation doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. I just see it over and over and over again. And so, I don’t buy it. There is another theory is that we are the remnant of some alien race that was here. Some people believe that we they maybe intermarried with apes or whatever creature was here on earth. I think that all three theories are equally plausible. All three theories require a massive leap of faith. We cannot know.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Absolutely. And the reason why I asked that is because like I’ve been I’m a huge UFO subject fan. The whole topic is very interesting to me. and the more I get into it, I think there’s some kind of religious tie to it that. It’s very interesting. It’s very interesting. And even the government. There’s some government leaders that are coming out and saying that there’s evil and there’s good and some of these things may be angels. And I just wanted your take on that.

[John Bliss] Have you heard what Tucker said about it?

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yes. He was saying it before anybody else was in the media. And there’s an author named Diana Pasulka. She had done some research on religion. And some of these UFO stories had popped up and she wanted to investigate some of those stories and so she has some theories that it’s all interconnected. And there’s government deal where there was a crashed UFO that was transferred from Italy to the United States in 1933 and the Vatican facilitated it.

[John Bliss] Crazy.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Yeah. So it’s becoming public information now and it’s very interesting, especially that the Vatican’s involved in the incident in 1933 and I wonder how much information they have that we don’t know about, and then the Library of Alexandria was lost. We don’t know what was in there. And they say that the Vatican has a lot of that stuff, too.

[John Bliss] Have you read Zecharia Sitchin or heard of him?

[Bad Bearded Dad] I have heard of him, but I have not read him. I would like to get into some of that.

[John Bliss] So, maybe you’ve heard this before, but I’ll just describe a couple of his theories. I’ll probably bastardize it a little bit. He went and read all this cuneiform, all this ancient Sumerian and Arcadian language stuff and he thought that modern translators had translated one word wrong. If you change this one word to another, that he thought was the proper translation, everything points to aliens interfacing with people. He wrote about how every city had a god in the old days, and those gods were aliens, and that those old pyramids and temples and ziggurats, somehow they launched rockets from them. I don’t remember the specifics. When the gods the gods would fight each other for dominion, they would use the towns to fight. It’s crazy stuff. And then he talks about the Jews, when they left Egypt, right? In the daytime God was a tower of smoke and at night time a pillar of light. Sitchin suggests that a spacecraft was leading them. Although it didn’t lead them very well. It took 40 years to get where they were going. So maybe that poor alien leadership ruins that story. It’s really fascinating.

[Bad Bearded Dad]It really is. You know, if you’d have asked me 20 years ago what do I think about UFOs and aliens, and I would have said that it’s all made up crap. And now with a little bit of age and wisdom now, I just don’t know. It’s very interesting to think about. It’s very interesting to talk about. Some of these things we might be able to prove.

[Bad Bearded Dad] I also like thinking about revisionist history. Sometimes revisionist history pisses me off. But sometimes, it’s interesting to think about and have those thought experiments. What if what if this was true or what if these things were happening? Most likely some of it’s true and some of it is fake.

[John Bliss] That’s probably the answer.

[Bad Bearded Dad] That’s a very good take on it.

[Bad Bearded Dad] So, John, this has been a very great conversation. It’s We’ve been a little all over the place and I’ I you’re right. I’ve got to get your book. So, where can people find your book?

[John Bliss] I think you’ll like it. It’s 450 pages, and it’s 13 essays. There are essays on religion, on history, on science. I question science. I explain the problems with science. It’s great in some ways. It will take us to Mars and things like that. But in other ways, it’s really deficient, like explaining what is love, what is it? It’s not a chemical reaction. Well, many scientists think it is. You can find on Amazon and the title is long, so it’s hard to remember the name of the book, but if you can remember my name, John Bliss, and then type in “essays,” you’ll find it. The whole point of the book is that believe a lot of things that are just not true. You mentioned that the in the intro. and a lot of those untrue beliefs are based on basic postulates. We have basic foundational assumption which are wrong, and if those are wrong then whatever we believe that is based on those wrong assumptions is wrong. The “timeless truth of tomorrow” is the outlook that I think is more correct, which is that the whole of humanity is the creature that really matters. Not you, not me, humanity as a whole. If people believed that, everything would change. Society would change. Your life would change.

[Bad Bearded Dad] Absolutely.

[John Bliss] So, it’s on Amazon. Just search for “John Bliss essays” or you can look at do “John Bliss” and “Paradigms,” but that’s a little harder. So, essays might be easier.

[Bad Bearded Dad] And you’ve actually got a website set up, correct?

[John Bliss] I do. It’s Skeptica Press, but it’s spelled wrong on purpose, instead of C’s, there’s K’s. So, it’s Skeptika with K’s. Skeptikapress.com, [John Bliss] and that tells more about the book. there’s a bunch. I’m on Substack, too. Look for skeptikapress, remember K’s instead of C’s.

[Bad Bearded Dad] We’ll put all the links and everything in the description down below.

[Bad Bearded Dad] John, it’s like I said, it’s been a very, very awesome conversation. Very great conversation. let’s keep the lines of communication open. Let’s do this again sometime.

[John Bliss] That sounds great to me. Thank you very much.

[John Bliss] Awesome. You’re welcome. See you next time, guys.