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Ep. 5: The Miraculous is a Mode of Thought

Updated: Aug 24, 2023

Listen to this episode on Spotify here, or Apple Podcasts here.


The key points in this "speaking":


“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”― Albert Einstein


  • “You Americans are so obsessed with miracles, it’s like you don’t believe in God.” Is the miraculous simply a supernatural happening? Like God is a supernatural entity?

  • Why I love Jesus and am hesitant to talk about him, Richard Rohr’s distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and the universal Christ, Jesus as a pattern, archetype, and meme.

  • “The more transformative a thing is, the less it becomes a thing and the more it becomes a particular mode of sight.”

  • Beliefs are about objects in the world (about facts). But the whole of reality is no object at all, and so cannot be captured by beliefs.

  • A particular spiritual framework is not about facts, but is a lens through which one sees the world, or a way of cleaning the lens of perception.

  • A lens is always clear and silent. If you see your glasses lenses, it's because they have a smudge that needs to be cleaned. Perhaps this is the origin of the sense of the sacred in religious belief: one senses that to make the lens an object (i.e. by taking off the glasses and examining them) is to be blind while one does so, or to abandon the very lens that you are examining. To speak of the sacred is to always distort it, though sometimes these distortions are necessary.

  • In the same way, the miracle is not a supernatural happening. Rather, the miraculous and the mundane are relative modes of sight, always conditioned by context.

  • We can learn to see the world as miraculous.

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