Libsyn Directory

Waking Up: Dreams, Enlightenment, and the Space Between

Release Date: 04/16/2025

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...

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...

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...

At the Edge of Collapse and Connection: Victoria Loorz on Wild Spirituality

The Gospel of Direct Experience

Jeff and Michael sit down with Victoria Loorz, author of , founder of the , and co-founder of the , for a conversation about finding the sacred beyond church walls. They talk about the experience of hearing God beneath an oak tree, encounters with owls and vultures, and why wilderness has always been the place where spiritual transformation begins. Together they explore what it means to face ecological and institutional collapse without turning away—to grieve, to stay connected, and to treat even loss as part of the holy cycle of life, death, and renewal. You can learn more about Victoria...

Beyond the Psychedelic Renaissance: Devotion, Birth, and Spirit with Justin Levy

The Gospel of Direct Experience

Psychedelics are often framed today as medicines for trauma and therapy—but what if they are something more? In this episode, we sit down with Justin Levy, founder of , Oregon, to explore psychedelics as a path of devotion, surrender, and cultural rebirth. Justin shares his journey from early rave experiences to work with kundalini, capoeira, and ayahuasca, and how these threads wove together into a living spiritual practice. Together we ask: How do psychedelics invite us to crack open and encounter Spirit? What does it mean to center devotion rather than therapy? And how can we midwife a...

The Time Travel Episode

The Gospel of Direct Experience

In this episode, Michael finally shares the wild story he’s been holding back for decades: the day in 2006 when he slipped from a meditation session in his Queens apartment back through time—waking up in his 15-year-old body in 1990. Was it something like a dream, an out-of-body journey, or actual time travel? Jeff and Michael follow the thread from memory and synchronicity into questions of how we experience time itself—linear, cyclical, radial, and kairos. Episode Highlights [00:00:50] Waking Up in 1990 Michael quickly jumps into the story that frames our whole conversation. ...

The Psychedelic Renaissance with Nicholas Collura

The Gospel of Direct Experience

In this episode, we speak with Nicholas Collura—a board-certified chaplain, spiritual director, and Enneagram teacher—about the unfolding intersection between psychedelics and contemporary spirituality. We explore what the so-called "psychedelic renaissance" means for spiritual direction, Christian practice, and the broader search for meaning in a disenchanted world. Topics include integration, cultural appropriation, mystical experience, the challenges and risks of reintroducing visionary substances into modern religious life, and what psychedelics might reveal about the gaps—and...

The City & the City by China Miéville: Seeing What We've Been Taught to Unsee

The Gospel of Direct Experience

In this episode, we explore The City & the City by China Miéville as a powerful metaphor for cognitive blind spots, social conditioning, and spiritual perception. Drawing on Miéville’s layered, dual-city setting—where citizens are trained to “unsee” an overlapping world—we reflect on what it means to overlook not just people and places, but also inner experiences, spiritual insights, and hidden possibilities. Using the novel as a lens, we talk about religious experience, social breach, the boundaries of acceptable belief, and the psychological costs of seeing too much. We...

Spiritual Direction (in a Shattered World)

The Gospel of Direct Experience

What is spiritual direction, really? In this episode, Jeff and Michael explore the practice not as a professional technique or spiritual luxury, but as a vital response to living in a fragmented, disenchanted world. Drawing on their own experiences as directors and directees, they talk about the invisible agreements that shape the space, the role of intuition, the balance between presence and expertise, and what it means to create a container where something deeper—call it spirit, God, or presence—can actually show up. Along the way, they touch on remote viewing, trickster dynamics,...

Ask Us Anything—Live!

The Gospel of Direct Experience

Welcome to our very first live AMA episode—unscripted and full of spirit. Listeners showed up with real questions about prayer, mystical experience, cryptids, and the strange space where the psychological meets the spiritual. We talked about what it means to pray when God no longer fits, how to trust the knowledge of the heart, why some people encounter the sacred and others don’t, and whether Bigfoot might just be a messenger from beyond (seriously). It was thoughtful, honest, sometimes strange, and fun! Thanks to everyone who joined us live—and if you missed it, we hope to see you...

More Episodes

What if waking up isn’t a single breakthrough moment—but a layered, looping journey through insight, fear, wonder, and mystery? In this episode, we explore the complex terrain of spiritual awakening through dreams, false awakenings, mystical encounters, and moments of terrifying clarity. From Michael’s lucid Spirit Train dream to Jeff’s powerful visitation from a fierce divine feminine presence, we ask: What does it really mean to wake up—is it a one time affair or is it a journey, a process?

We dig into the paradoxes of awakening: how it can feel ecstatic or annihilating, grounding or destabilizing—and how most of us live in the space between. Along the way, we talk about Kundalini energy, inflation, ontological shock, the fear of God, and the danger of mistaking glimpses of the Real for the whole story.

This episode is about learning to live with grace and curiosity in the middle ground—where waking up is not an arrival, but a way of being.

Episode Highlights

[00:00:49] Waking Up on the Spirit Train

To get us going, we review Michael's "Spirit Train" dream and the multiple instances of "waking up" within it? The lines between dreaming, waking, illusion, and reality are appropriately blurred. Is waking up a one-time affair or does it transition us between states?

[00:06:57] Red Goddess Kundalini

Jeff recounts a dream in which he met a goddess who tried to awaken and/or annihilate him and he had to run like hell to save himself. Do we really want the awakening we think we want? Do we really know what it will cost us?

[00:15:49] Terror and Illumination

Is waking up always "good?" When it's "bad," is that always bad? Once again we trace the line that runs at once both through terror and illumination.

[00:27:08] Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God Docuseries Discussion

Can waking up lead to trouble in your life? We discuss the docuseries Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God which you can watch on Max.

[00:42:02] The Profound Middle Ground

Can we both awake and embedded in the dream at the same time? In that in-between what might be possible?

[00:52:07] The Sea of Consciousness

Endeavoring to treat everything with dignity, respect, and love in late-stage matter deconstruction.

[01:01:07] The Perception of the Heart and Loving the Middle Ground

Do we wake up in the head? Or in the heart?

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Episode Artwork: Asleep, Awake by Helen Armstrong

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