Rewilding the Soul: Wilderness, Apocalypse, Practice
The Gospel of Direct Experience
Release Date: 01/15/2025
Real Good Drugs: Molly Baskette on Psychedelics, Calling, and Leaving Church Well
The Gospel of Direct Experience
Molly Baskette has spent decades helping progressive churches come alive. A longtime UCC minister, preacher, author of Real Good Church, and self-described transformation junkie, Molly has recently made a major vocational turn: leaving parish ministry and stepping into work as a psychedelically assisted spiritual care provider. That's plenty to talk about right there! But we also discuss calling, burn out, and leaving church well: not in bitterness or collapse, but with loads of gratitude, honesty, grief work, and devotion. We also reflect on the gifts and limits of the church, the pastoral...
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Robert Bly and the Alchemy of Poetry with Haydn Reiss
The Gospel of Direct Experience
Documentary filmmaker Haydn Reiss joins us to talk about Robert Bly, poetry, translation, longing, grief, and the mysterious art of finding the right words for what the soul knows. We explore Bly’s cultural impact, his gift for speaking to the hunger of men, the strange alchemy poetry can work in a life, and what it means to preserve voices that still have the power to change us. Along the way, we also discuss William Stafford, Rumi, Coleman Barks, and why poetry may matter even more in dark and distracted times. Watch the Films Visit Haydn's to watch his outstanding documentaries on...
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Let the Dead Be Your Teachers with Perdita Finn
The Gospel of Direct Experience
What does it mean to live in relationship with our dead? In our episode “Speaking with the Dead,” we discussed Michael’s recent contact with his deceased best childhood friend. We knew we needed someone with real experience and insight to help us think through the meaning of that encounter, so we called on . You may remember Perdita from our episode “Portal to the Great Mother,” where she and her husband Clark Strand joined us to talk about their rosary practice. But alongside that work, Perdita has spent decades in relationship with the dead. She is the author of and , out...
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Baptizing Yourself: Meggan Watterson on Thecla, Love, and Spiritual Authority
The Gospel of Direct Experience
In part two of our conversation with feminist theologian and bestselling author Meggan Watterson, we explore the radical story of Thecla from the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Refusing the roles assigned to her by society, Thecla claims her own spiritual authority by baptizing herself in the arena designed for her death. Tied to our exploration of Thecla is a conversation about love as the deepest spiritual power: not love as sentiment or romance, but love as force that arises from within and cannot be controlled by institutions or empires. Drawing on the Gospel of Mary and traditions of...
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I Will Teach You What Is Hidden: Meggan Watterson on the Gospel of Mary and "Real" Theology
The Gospel of Direct Experience
Feminist theologian and best-selling author Meggan Watterson joins us for a crackling conversation about the Gospel of Mary, the "apocryphal" Christian text that gives voice to Mary Magdalene’s spiritual authority and visionary insight. In this episode, Meggan shares the moment she first encountered Mary’s words, “I will teach you about what is hidden from you,” and the profound experience of direct contact that convinced her this overlooked gospel has the power to speak to us and transform how we understand Christianity, theology, and our own selves and souls. Together we explore...
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Speaking with the Dead
The Gospel of Direct Experience
On the anniversary of a friend’s death, a simple ritual—a candle, a glass of tequila, a cigarette, and Pink Floyd's —becomes something neither of us can easily explain. In this episode, we're sharing direct experiences of communicating with loved ones who have died. We can't prove anything, but we will discuss what it means when the contact feels real—when grief opens up into presence, when imagination is more than fantasy, when the boundary between the visible and invisible thins. Why have we in the modern West severed ourselves from our dead? What happens to a people who forget...
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Living Into the Dark: Matt Cardin on Creativity, Horror, and the Daemonic
The Gospel of Direct Experience
In this episode of The Gospel of Direct Experience, we’re joined by , acclaimed writer of cosmic horror and author of the new book . What unfolds isn't just a discussion of creativity; it's also an initiation into darkness—darkness as terror and generative source and spiritual/cultural necessity. Matt reframes the "demon muse" or "genius" not as a benevolent guide from beyond but as an abducting, inner organizing force that destabilizes our egoic certainty and is the true wellspring of art, vocation, and transformation. Our conversation ranges from the chapel perilous and cosmic horror,...
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A Portal to the Great Mother: Clark Strand & Perdita Finn on the Rosary
The Gospel of Direct Experience
What if the rosary is not a relic of patriarchal religion, but an ancient spiritual technology—older than Christianity itself—designed to open a living relationship with the Sacred Mother? In this episode we're joined by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn, founders of The Way of the Rose and co-authors of the book by the same name, for a deeply embodied conversation about the rosary as a portal: tactile, erotic, ecological, and alive. Drawing on paleolithic bead traditions, Marian devotion, mystery cults, Buddhism, and direct visionary experience, Clark and Perdita reframe the rosary as...
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The Age of Disclosure: UFOs, Psyops, & Ontological Shock
The Gospel of Direct Experience
We finally discuss the new documentary The Age of Disclosure and what it suggests about UFOs, government secrecy, and the possibility of non-human intelligence. Already convinced of the reality of UFOs, your hosts explore the deeper challenges of disclosure itself: psychological operations, selective truth-telling, and the difficulty of knowing what to trust when intelligence agencies are shaping the narrative. We discuss why so many credible insiders are speaking publicly now—and their suggestion that there's more—much more—they can't say. Drawing on UFO research, the work...
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Christianity as Mystery School
The Gospel of Direct Experience
What if Christianity began not as a set of doctrines to believe, but as a mystery school—an initiatory path meant to awaken direct experience of the divine? In this episode, wel trace the ancient roots of the Christian story through the lost mystery traditions of the ancient world. From the Eleusinian rites to the “dying before you die” experience, we explore how Jesus may have carried forward an older, hidden stream of spiritual practice—and what it might mean to recover those inner mysteries today. Episode Highlights [00:00:49] Inner vs. Outer Mystery We open the episode by...
info_outlineWhat if our deepest spiritual experiences aren't found in churches or meditation halls, but in lonely wilderness and abandoned subway tunnels?
In this week's episode, Michael and Jeff explore how their earliest encounters with the divine came through wandering in the woods, which later developed into seeking out the "in-between spaces" of disused urban landscapes. From a transformative 2,200-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail to trespass in the post-apocalyptic spaces of New York City, they reveal how conventional spiritual practices often try to recreate what wilderness and devastation free offer: direct contact with another world, hidden right next to our own. The conversation weaves together their experiences as ministers, meditation practitioners, and eternal seekers, examining the paradox of trying to cultivate through discipline what might be more readily available through surrender.
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