50 - Source to You
B-RAD with Brad Toews
It is the dynamic interplay between spirit and matter that provides the flow of energy in my own life, and I believe, this is the spiritual movement of the whole universe.
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49 - Imagine That
B-RAD with Brad Toews
Literalism helps us explain the world. Know the world. Name the world. But it bumps up against its limits when it meets a more powerful tool of language - metaphor. What does this look like in the context of the Christian faith?
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48 - Unknowing God
B-RAD with Brad Toews
Our claims to knowledge (what we know, how we know, the extent of what we know) changes over time. At least it does if we're growing and evolving.
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47 - Past Lives
B-RAD with Brad Toews
We all have past lives, a collection of moments, strung together that make us who we are.
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46 - Something to Say
B-RAD with Brad Toews
I'm learning how to communicate better, both on this podcast and in my personal and professional life. I'm learning I have Something to Say, and how to say it.
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45 - Back-to-School for Adults
B-RAD with Brad Toews
Something about the shift in season, summer turning to fall and kids back in school, inspires an air of possibility for new habits and making change in your life.
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44 - Follow You
B-RAD with Brad Toews
I have a strong tendency and bias to depend on outside information and inputs, constantly seeking more knowledge to inform my choices.
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43 - When Marriage is a Let-down
B-RAD with Brad Toews
An interview my wife Dawna about her perspective on expectations, disappointments, and the let-down’s of life, in the context of marriage and our closest relationships.
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42 - Find your Frequency
B-RAD with Brad Toews
As if integrative medicine, transcendent spiritual experiences, and quantum physics weren't interesting enough in exploring energy and frequency, let's add harmonics theory to the mix.
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41 - Make Some Noise Drew Brown
B-RAD with Brad Toews
In this interview Drew and I sit down in his kitchen to talk about music and being a musician. We talk about how writing, playing, performing and producing honest music tells the story of our lives and gives expression to a re-imagined faith.
info_outlineJohn Maxwell, renowned leadership expert, New York Times Bestseller List author, well-known speaker and septuagenarian says that as he has matured, the things he truly “knows” can be summarized with the five digits on one hand.
Those are the things he knows that he knows and he can’t be budged on those points. But he has learned to let go of everything else he thought he knew.
I love knowledge, studying, researching, and reading. I'm a learner.
But I wonder if we've elevated knowledge to something it's incapable of providing.
Do we look to knowledge, as a society and as individuals, as something that will sustain, save, and validate our existence?
Two ancient prayer practices brings old-new insight to how we understand knowledge, at least in a spiritual sense.
Kataphatic knowing is the use of images, words and thoughts to guide and cue our knowing. Our senses pick up on what is seen and from that we gain a sense of knowledge or discernment.
Apophatic knowing is a knowing drawn from silence beyond words.
I love how Richard Rohr describes it:
Apophatic knowing is the empty space around the words, allowing God to fill in all the gaps in “unspeakable” ways.
This type of knowing requires access to another set of senses, the ability to perceive reality in ways that can't be formally taught.
I personally enjoy the formal process of learning. But in the silence and the spaces in between the words there is another kind of knowing that can direct and guide me towards knowing what is unknown. Knowing by "participating with" instead of "observing from a position of separation. Knowing, subject to subject, instead of subject to object.
What is required to know what is unknown is to come to the end of ourselves; to know that I don’t know.
Join me in this episode as I get honest about my need to not look stupid, consider different ways of knowing, and visit outer space with Jody Foster to boldly take the journey to the the place of unknowing.
Show notes, video and other links at bradtoews.com