hi this is mythical and you are listening to Catholic versus other if you would please just tell the listeners a little bit about yourself who you are what you believe and how you came to believe it okay my name is mythic guy and actually if anyone out there has Netflix you can actually watch me I'm on the TV show skin Wars which is the first body painting reality competition show and it's on Netflix and it's pretty easy to find go look up that kind of thing and I was born and raised Catholic Irish Catholic grew up in Virginia was the youngest Eucharistic minister in my family and in my church I was thinking I was going to be a nun when I grew up because of my relationship with the divine kind of thing I went to a church called Epiphany which was at the time in the eighties sort of a more progressive Catholic Church and I also have had three near-death experiences my mother said that happened to me once as a baby and the second time was when I was in the second grade I had a fever between 106 and 108 and I had double pneumonia and bronchitis and I was in st. Mary's Hospital which is in Richmond Virginia and I've actually had two near-death experiences in the same Catholic hospital twice I'm a documented medical miracle twice in the same hospital on the same ward on the same floor I keep joking and I just need one more miracle to have my three miracle minimum two sainthood can you talk to us a little bit more about your childhood like the very early days where you sort of start to be able to think for yourself maybe six seven eight years old and some of the influences around you like some of the people that you remember that had an aura of religion about them a godliness or saintliness or some sort of aura of religion if you could just touch on some of those memories for me please yeah well actually I was very conscious from an extremely early age my earliest memories are right before my second birthday and one of the things that I remember is when we were at church and basically instead of going to confession it's not solution unless everyone filed out of the pews and the priest was in the center aisle and he puts his hands on you when he says i absolve you of all your sins both the ones that you can fasten the ones that you don't know and I remember that quite distinctly because I actually felt tingling and the energy on me and after we left the Ireland stuff I'm like mom he actually did something I felt it like he actually did something and then also you know I went to Sunday school just like all the other kids and I remember that we had a book and even had different exercises and things to draw and do and on one of the pages it was like draw your picture of God so I drew a picture of an old man in a white beard in light blue robe with knobby knees sitting on a gold throne in clouds and that was my picture of God and so shortly afterwards is when I had my second near-death experience and I was in the second grade and I went to what my child's mind because you know you don't have the words you don't have the vocabulary for things at that age I was like six seven years old and when I was in the hospital I was in a coma for a week and during that time I went to what I called the in-between place that's what just my child's mine defined it as and I still call it that to this day and while I was there is a huge ball of light and I called it the heart of the in-between place because it was unconditional love like even now when I say it the words are idiotic coming out of my mouth because we can say words like unconditional love but nobody here really has any idea what that is but that's with the heart of the in-between places and years and years later I ended up seeing all these near-death experiences like dannion brinkley and saved by the light and a few of these other people who actually started recounting their near-death experiences and also there's a there's a physician who started interviewing children who had near-death experiences and he found that their experiences were no matter which culture he went to no matter what part of the country that there were similarities and I'm like oh my god that's what happened to me but at the time I had no idea that it was a near-death experience it wasn't until later and I bred what other happened to other people and I'm like oh yeah all that happened to me kind of thing so it was only in retrospect that I realized what happened and who did you reach out to in terms of real-life human beings on this planet and that could relate to what you had gone through or that could relate to spirituality that could guide you or help you or teach you to pray or teach you to worship God was there any resource that you had around you and the family or friends or even a priest or somebody uh no things were very different from me I would be in church and I would have a vision like when we would stand together in church and like hold hands do the the ah father together I could actually feel the direction of the energy that it flowed through us I could feel everyone in the room like he'll individual people and then several different times one was a feast of Mary we had a permanent font of water for baptism and one time I saw a blue white column of light coming out of it and I saw Mary floating on the inside of it and then another time I was in the back of the room and at Epiphany the word of the Lord would be read from on the inside of the room so there was a podium in the center of the room instead of up at the dais at the front so like the first and second readings would be done from up there but the priest would walk the book through the everyone because they liked it to represent Jesus being amongst the people and that's where the word of the Lord would be read and so one day the the priest was doing the reading and he kissed the pages and then the vision split there was this white flame that came up and in reality everything was happening at normal and on the other side there was this vision that was happening where this white flame was coming up he backed down the white flame softened to smoke in like before anyone else in the room knew it was going on like I knew who who was in the flame I like knew who was in the smoke and I knew that it was Jesus and except for I don't call him that I always have I don't know why but I've always called him Yeshua so anyway that the flame and smoke finally solidified until it was until it was Yeshua and then after was solidifying he saw me and then at one point he just put his hand out and then I floated up with him and then we floated up together to being over in front of the dais and turned towards everyone and then the vision ended and so I grew up with these things happening to me and not really having any understanding of what was going on so a lot of people had a reverence for me and people thought I was going to be a nun in all these kinds of things and actually I remember when I was a child thinking like I want to be a priest when I grow up and then finding out that women could not be priests in Catholic Church and I was very upset you should be an Episcopal I'm like no I'm Catholic I'm not enough Pisgah pelean that's not the real Church well there are women there are women that ordain each other and they claim to be Catholic so you could be one of those dissident Catholics if you wanted to yes well I would definitely be in the naughty Catholic category for sure you could join Sinead O'Connor yeah so anyway like I have these experiences and stuff growing up like I said and were they all good or did you have any period in your life maybe puberty or shortly thereafter were you straight from God and you started to indulge in sin sex drugs and rock and roll and this sort of thing there was a short period of time in middle school where I lied a lot and I shoplifted and did all this kinds of thing and and it was just it was really not good but when my mom and mom and dad caught me in it I remember it being sat down and getting the talk and my mom was like so when you think of a white sheet of paper and that's your soul and you sin it's like putting one dot on the paper she is right now your paper is black so you can't have eucharist right now that was like the worst punishment ever for me this was like wow you are really in trouble like deep you know how would you describe your worldview today are there any labels that you're comfortable with or are there labels that you're not comfortable with but which people put on you anyway well the first thing I say is that there is no other person in the entire world that has my point of view because like honestly I mix star wars in with what I believe I have a black Buddha on my altar and Quan Yin and in in Buddha's lap is baby Jesus and in front of Quan Yin is Mary and in between the two of them is Yoda and my lightsaber all you're missing is Bart Simpson in spongebob you know depending on who I talk to I say different things so first of all I am an ordained minister in the Church of universal light can you talk a little bit about the history of that organization well the history of that organization is that essentially they realized that there were lots of people who didn't fit the only the Christian categories of being an ordained minister so they created the basic precepts for the Church of universal light is that you believe in the basic goodness of people that you believe that the divine exists by whatever name and means it is and that you accept all people so it's loose enough that a lot of different people from different traditions can become ordained in it without compromising whatever their religious belief is that may not be accepted by the mainstream so depending on who I'm talking to I may say that I'm pagan taken being an umbrella term for anything anything at all that is not one of the main three which is Christian Jewish or Muslim so anything that's outside of those three is an umbrella term for paganism the other the other umbrella term for paganism is nature based religions I have a friend of mine his name is River Higginbotham who wrote a book called crystal paganism on being a Christian which essentially so that's another term that if somebody has enough background and understanding I would say I'm a Christian which because for me personally I didn't leave Catholicism I just added to it now when I say that I was really into being a Catholic like I had my own copy of vatican ii and i actually read it and I remember getting I used to know the exact page number in Vatican 2 I got to this place where the church is talking about other religions and the line specifically in Vatican 2 says we do not deny these things which are holy and true in other religions and I just stopped and I went what the church actually admits there are other things that are holy and true in other religions well I gotta go check this out and so that's what led me into a journey of researching about what other people believed and like okay so what are these other things which are holy and true and other religions and that's when I met my ex-husband who was two pagan and he started saying well first of all Easter is actually Ostara he goes didn't you ever wonder where the bunny rabbit came from and be eggs and he went over a holiday by holiday what the holidays were and how they were absorbed by the Catholic Church in order to retain membership and then go through the provinces and and how that all came about so then I started to understand why we did what we did why you use frankincense and myrrh and why it's important and how it's used to me ritual and why we put relics in the altar at the front those are pagan traditions and what I came to understand was that the Catholic Mass is is high magic and I was like this is amazing this is mind-blowing and it's not because it was what he told me it was an obvious conclusion to come to you based on the things that I was learning about paganism and about ritual and why you do things in a rote manner and how it becomes automatic so that everyone can be of the same mind and all these things and I was like oh my gosh this just makes everything makes so much more sense so that's when I started adding to my Catholicism as opposed to abandoning it there's no danger involved in drawing on pagan truth because pagan truth is God's truth it's Christian truth it belongs to us so my point is that we don't need to reject the truths of Judaism and Islam and or even out of Wicca or or of Satanism we don't need to reject the truths we can embrace them but we're depriving ourselves of the fullness of religious truth if we're depriving ourselves of Catholic prayer life Catholic community and most importantly the Catholic sacraments so that's my challenge to you you think that you're adding to your Catholicism but I would accuse you of depriving yourself of access to the sacraments and to the prayer life and the community life of the church so how do you respond to that I know my beloved if my beloved were to have left me and the the miracles that happen as a result of that relationship were to leave me then I could agree with you so the proofs in the pudding you continue to have mystical encounters with God and this sort of thing absolutely yeah so I'll give you another one I was with my husband and we went to a pagan retreat it was a camping retreat I had had a dream of Yeshua that she was in the sky and it was a blue moon and I felt my knee so hard that I literally invented the ground with my knees that's what happened in the dream so that happened before this retreat had happened and when we were there there was a nun a woman who used to be a nun who is now pagan and she was having a struggle with the reconciliation of what you're exactly talking about and there was another man who was who was awful ways who was singing a song and he was actually personally at war with the Catholic Church but he was singing a song about God and so I was talking to her she's telling me about her personal struggle and I'm like you are still absolutely loved you are still absolutely cherished you were still absolutely adored you know even if you're doing this but I wouldn't be here with you talking about this if you weren't still loved and cherished and I said seek him over there he's singing personally a song about God a guy who's at war with the Catholic Church he's being touched right now to sing that song to prove to you that you're not lost to him and my my husband and I ended up doing a little ritual to bless her even though I'm not ordained as in the Catholic Church or anything like that I had my little emergency altar kit and set up everything and then so while we're having this little ritual to bless her and help her be at peace I hear a voice in my head that says get up and stand like this and it kind of shows me like a soul with my hands behind my back and you need to say these words and then move like this and I'm like look if I stand up like a soldier swing like a gate and there's nothing there I'm gonna look like a freaking idiot I don't want to look stupid get up stand like this swing like a gate and say these words and I'm like you're not gonna quit until I do this and I could feel a sense of a smile so like okay fine so I get up and I said he who loves you is here now and stands behind me and I swung like a gate and there was Yeshua and he walked like a ghost through the altar past me I could actually smell what he smelled like you know the scent of him and then he walked past me and he walked into her and I guess the common term is slain in the spirit she laid out she just went out and my husband was behind her and caught her and later on the ground and her arms fell to her side and she was lain like a cross on the ground and my husband who is pagan and he goes well I'm not stupid I know the love of God when I see it and so I hugged him he held me and it just seemed that I needed to make the sign of the Cross over her while she was having her experience whatever it was her eyes were closed she couldn't see me and as I move my hand in the sign of the Cross her body shivered in the directions as I moved my hand and I looked at my own hand like oh my god that I've never seen that before and so if things like that didn't happen and miraculous things like that didn't happen then I could agree with you that God has left me that Yeshua has left me and that that it would even be possible for me to be separated from him I didn't actually say that I would just like to clarify that I just said that the fullness of religious truth is to be had in the Catholic Church as is what the Church teaches and so you would be depriving yourself by moving away from the sacraments I didn't actually say that God would have left you or Jesus would stop loving you or anything like that that's ridiculous but we're told to test the spirits and there are such things as demons and fallen spirits so how do you protect yourself from being deceived by Satan because he can disguise himself and he's very fond of disguising himself as an angel of light and he's a lot smarter than you are and he doesn't sleep so how do you protect yourself against the wily enemy I have had personal interaction with demonic presences and I've actually had to deal with them and I've actually had what people would traditionally think of as doing an exorcism or casting out or banishment or protection or any of those things and in the beginning yeah things may be a little muddy but once you've established hey I see you then all pretenses drop do you invoke Jesus and Mary to control or to banish these demons Mary know Yeshua is always there but Malachi is always present when these things go on I call them Malachi you call him Michael okay but how do you know they're not counterfeits like a counterfeit Yeshua a counterfeit st. Michael that are fooling you and leading you astray away from the Catholic Church that's what my fear is well I understand that that's your fear but the thing is is that these good people have these horrible horrific experiences and lives where their kids are being hurt they've got scratches on their arms or bruises from being beaten up things are flying around the house and after I'm done that's not happening to them anymore and they get to go back to having a good life without having those things happen to them okay so to buy your fruit that we know that the tree is good yeah I mean if if after I left and all the bad guys came back well then yeah you could call me a fraud or you could call the divine a fraud or you could call what I am calling these angelic presences a fraud but these people get to return back to their good lives afterwards so I don't went by your fruits show you know them and it's very simple like they get to have a normal happy life after I'm done so if that's the devil tricking mean well then it's a damn good trick Hey well I firmly believe that the devil is doing good work and that's part of his punishment he doesn't want to be helping but I think he is helping inadvertently and even if God forbid you are being fooled and you are sort of being manipulated by dark spirits even then I think that God will bring good out of it I'm just I just want you to have the maximum happiness that you can have for all eternity so I want to make sure that you're not being fooled by false fruits yes but here's here's the thing of the two of this I've been to the place that you have not yet been I'm pretty sure I've been there most people have to have faith in God I don't have faith I have knowledge yeah I'm the same I don't it's not a question of faith for me God the Father is a scientific fact I do have faith in Jesus Christ and the Trinity and the Catholic Church and these sorts of things those can't be proven by pure reason or natural reason alone but God the Father yeah that's not there's no leap of faith required at all for me to believe in God the Father so speaking of the Trinity do you believe that God is a Trinity that's one of the things I believe do you want to elaborate on that is there any is there any contradiction among the things that you believe or do they all go here amongst themselves and rationally there's a there's a really great cartoon that explains it perfectly for me in terms of my experiences of the in-between place and also my experiences of the in-between place after my second grade experience at the in-between place there's this picture of st. Peter in the clouds and he's showing a new angel around heaven and they say so what's behind the brick wall and they're like oh well that's the seventh-day adventists but they don't know the rest of us are here you know you can only perceive what what you can perceive if you don't believe that there are any black people in heaven you won't see them until your understanding grows larger there's nobody on Planet four 6:39 that knows who Jesus is because Jesus lived here as a human and on Planet four 6:39 they're nothing but an insect race with hive minds and so they have no concept of what we think of here on earth it can have no personal experience of Jesus because Jesus is a man that lived on this planet and there's a very large universe yeah the church teaches that we're all going to be on the same page in terms of understanding the truths about not only about God but about humanity and history and the universe and and everything else so just to wrap up the episode what would you say to anyone that might be out there listening though what I would say is that a lot of times it's very difficult to believe in the concept of God it's it's hard to believe in in something that it's difficult to have a direct experience of and I on my second Mehrdad experience had the option of leaving I have the option to die or stay and I chose to stay because when I was in the in-between place I could feel how much the divine loved everyone but I had one thing that the divine did not tie it one thing that God did not and that was arms and legs and a life and so I'm here so that human beings can know there is one person on this earth who gives a damn about you in your life in your existence and that's me for the time being that I'm alive one person cares what is going to happen to you and I'm very open about this because if I'm on social media anyone is welcome to reach out to me so don't give up you're loved even even if I'm a stranger I'm still saying that you're loved now yes absolutely God loves you absolutely Jesus loves you and there is there are places that love and care about you no matter what Dogma or religious decree says that if you're trans that if you're gay that if you're polyamorous that you're whatever it is that that isn't accepted that I personally love and care about you and that you still have hope and that you're welcome to reach out to me in any way that any way that you want