https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tnB8X213Wh8
Hello everybody. I’m here with Jules for another episode of Unfolding the Soul. I know Jules through the Discord and I think we’ve been brought us by him. So that’s great. Yeah, he’s chosen a really hefty subject. He wants to talk about developing a relationship, personal relationship with God and how that affected his life. And he even got so far to develop a sort of a presentation for us. So yeah, Jules, let’s hear it. Sure. Okay. Well, hi, Manuel. Thank you very much for having me as well and for the invitation. I’m actually really grateful for the chance to revisit this question. It’s kind of a privilege actually to have people who know you to sort of say, hey, tell me something about yourself that you care about. So thanks a lot. And even this afternoon, in thinking about our discussion, it’s gotten me to sort of go over some very old territory in my life. Stirred up some feelings, for sure. So trigger warning if I get a little bit emotional at some point, that may happen. So, you know, in response to your series, Unfolding the Soul, I got your invitation and was considering how to interact with it. I think as usual with these things, I tend to go with what’s on the top of my mind, for want of a better word. And as I was saying to you just before the recording, something that’s been on the top of my mind is my young son. He’s four years old. And I’m really interested in how he’s developing. And there are times when I’m conversing with Leo where I’m thinking to myself, you know, if I would be talking honestly with any other person, I would express myself with some reference to God at some point. Now, just sort of another warning for anybody who’s sort of participating in the discussion and watching and so on. My aim here is not a kind of overly religiousy, overly churchy kind of discussion. This is about Unfolding the Soul. And part of my story is that that whole question is indefinitely tied up with the question of God, no matter how you conceive of God. So there are times going back to my son where I’ll be in a state of gratitude, for example, and I want to express it. I want to sort of say, you know, I’m just really thankful for the weather today or I’m just so grateful that things are good at the moment and so on. And I start thinking about, well, if I said I’m grateful to God for those things, what does he think about? Like, and it’s pretty clear every now and then, like every few weeks, I might just pop that word in there. He has no idea what I’m referring to at all. He has a sense of that I’m grateful in a kind of general way or what have you. But, you know, that’s interesting to me. So anyway, going back to how that relates to myself and your question of getting into the soul and how that all unfolds, I guess I did have to go back to the question of when did that connection to God become real to me? When did it become something that mattered? And it really came between the ages, or most especially, I would say between the ages of 12 and 15. And I better just start the slideshow here so you can, I can sort of key people into what I’m talking about here. Vin, can you see that okay? Yeah, we’re good. Great. So when I was around about eight years old, my dad came to me in the back of our suburban home. And I remember this distinctly. It was sort of a warm, possibly summer’s night. Maybe you want to do it full screen because I see some taskbar and stuff. Oh, the taskbar or this sort of thing? You want a full screen thing? Sure. Is that better? Yeah, I think so. Yep. All right. So you should be seeing plain white right now. Mm hmm. Yep. And my dad said to me, in his way, which I think was always great, here’s an opportunity for you that you don’t have to do, but we think it would be a good idea. Which is if you join this choir, which we saw in an advertisement in the newspaper, they’re saying if you join this choir, you get to go to a very good private school. And if you want to do it, he made the offer to me and my brother, my elder brother, then what we’re going to do is go off to the city and we’re going to audition. And then you can decide if you want to do it. So we did go off to the city, Melbourne city, which is where I’m from here in Australia, and did the audition. My elder brother was totally uninterested. I was kind of more willing and succeeded to be accepted and became what’s called a chorister at roughly the age of eight. And it turned out to be a very big commitment. So every day after school, you would get a taxi from the inner city to the city of Melbourne, paid for by the cathedral. You would go, I think school finished at three, you would get there at four, you would practice together with your fellows for an hour, and then you would go into the cathedral and you would sing what was called even song. So you’d sing these ancient songs together with a sort of a grand pipe organ. You’d finish up around about six and then I’d catch the train home for about an hour and get home, I don’t know, seven o’clock or something like that. And so that was kind of the routine for about seven years of my life. And then on Sunday you’d go in there twice a day. So anyway, this is the cathedral, that photo is by a guy called Khan. This is just sort of an idea and this is the perspective of that train station. So it’s one of the two major cathedrals in Melbourne. That’s saying my internet is unstable. Is that still coming through, Manuel? Yeah, you’re choppy sometimes but you’re audible. Got it. So that’s the view from one of the spires just to keep people in a bit pixelated. I think that guy was helping fix the top so you can see the view of Melbourne is kind of a global city and the Yarra River there and so on. There’s another aspect of the cathedral there. I’m trying to give a sense that I was thrust into an ancient world and surrounded by a very modern world and that was quite striking for me. Go ahead. Those skyscrapers, are they new or what else? Yeah, that’s a great question. Actually, if you look directly behind the spire of the cathedral there, that building came up during my time at the choir and so did the other one that looks similar to it. The ones in the background were there at that time. They were kind of 18-style building. And my father actually ended up working in that building with the satellite dish there for a financial company. So you experienced the modernization. Was that disenchanting? Two worlds really contrasting? That’s a great question. That’s a perfect question. I don’t know that it was disenchanting but it was very affecting, Manuel. So I distinctly remember, and this goes to our question about unfolding, when you’re eight years old, nine years old, 10 years old, you’re just very open to influences. And you’re also kind of aware of yourself developing. You kind of get a feeling that all of a sudden you start thinking things. You know what I mean? You’re no longer just wherever you are. All of a sudden you start having thoughts about things. And that sort of becomes progressively more and more frequent. So to your question, I remember distinctly walking out one day from the cathedral, having just done one of those five o’clock services. I remember it was probably again a fairly warmish night in Melbourne and walking down the steps. That green dome that you can see there is the main train station in Melbourne, Flinders Street Station, one of our other icons there. And opposite the cathedral, was a McDonald’s, the universal McDonald’s. I remember walking out from the cathedral thinking, okay, we just did this work. We were just singing and there was about four people in this massive, beautiful cathedral. And there’s a lot of effort that went into it. There’s a lot of people teaming up and coordinating and so on. In this massive place we know can seat 2,000 people. Four people are there. Why are we doing this? And I got outside and I looked around and there’s all of the hustle and bustle of the city. And you can see the people are interested and absorbed in whatever it is they’re doing. But they’re not interested and absorbed in what we’re doing by any stretch. That’s the majority. So there was this kind of stark awareness that what we are doing is all right. It’s kind of hard to describe what it’s like for a young person. It’s quite all encompassing, I think, is how you would say it. And then you can tell that it’s also it’s not relevant. That was the overwhelming sense. Yeah, so that’s a nice picture, a contrast between a cathedral and McDonald’s, right? Like it’s two icons of the modern age competing all over the world. Yeah, I like that. Yes, I like McDonald’s. So yeah, I could tell they were a lot more popular than what I was doing. Even with me. So anyway, here’s when I was trying to sort of, again, think about how can I keep people into what this was all like? Actually, the cathedral has now started putting out some videos. And this two minute video, Manuel, I think does a good job of showing what it was like. This I think they call this behind the scenes. And really, that’s what I wanted to talk to you today about is that kind of formation experience for me, which was very much a behind the scenes thing, you know, with respect to there being a something in the front scene. So all of this kind of ceremony, tradition, the art, and so on is very much out there and public, but behind the scenes, there’s other things happening. So I’m just going to see if my video. Can I play you? Spare with me, buddy. Okay. I’m just going to have to play it that way. That’s fine. Thank you. No, the program might disagree. I think it’ll happen. If not, I’ll just sort of skip out. Well, we can definitely put a link to it in the description. Otherwise, I will just give YouTube a try. I think it’s competing with zoom a little bit here. So if it is, okay, this works. Can you still see my Yes. Okay, great. This revolutionary new device can be a bit of an ad supporting YouTube guys. Yeah. There we go. Okay. So you had problems with is There we go. This was much more what it was like for me coming in the back way. Yeah, we sometimes forget all the work that goes into things. Yeah. So that’s all fancy equipment that you were handling as a You can see the boys there. That’s the uniform I would wear from that school. So they changed the colors there a bit. That is very typical behind the scenes. Kids just mucking around. Yeah. This is prepping. I remember all of that. And then you go from the background into the foreground. So All right. Thank you for attending that. So getting back to where we were. Yeah, I got a couple questions there. Yeah, go ahead. So it seems that there was a lot of lavity, but there’s also this, you’re part of this important performance, right? So how did you deal with that? Did you have anxiety around that? Wow, that’s a really good question. I would have to say again, going back to the development side, Manuel, that anxiety was a continuous latent presence in my life for multiple reasons. So yeah, you definitely have performance anxiety. Although you use the word levity, the practice sessions that we had were incredibly professional. I’ll show you a picture in a minute. And at the time, the leader of the choir and the organist, which I think is an important position for like a major institution like this, her name was June Nixon, and we called her Ms. Nixon. So I think even now I would refer to her that way. She was, you know, for us pretty terrifying. She brooked no bull dust. If you were late, she would call you out, sometimes yelling at you. And all of us were just, to be honest, terrified, really, really scared of her. So there wasn’t mucking around when the practicing was on. And I think as you’ll see, like as we go along, I’ve just got maybe three, four more pictures or so, and then I’ll get back to the discussion. But there were times in the life, and this was, of course, as you could see, its own world. There were times in the world of the cathedral where performance, and I don’t mean that in terms of sort of a hypocritical demonstration of, you know, virtue or something like that, performance in the sense of you’ve got a job and you need to perform it. You know, that was fairly present. And because Ms. Nixon had this very high standard which she enforced, I think, you know, I was always anxious to do a good job, you know, despite being predisposed that way. And so there were times, like for example, when I was there that there would be visiting dignitaries. You know, one that I remember is Princess Diana and Prince Charles came. And, you know, we got to meet them and there’s press there and there’s, you know, a lot of people. So you are there and you’re there to do a job and you better not stuff up. So, yeah, I think I had a good dose of anxiety. So just going back to it, there’s a, you know, speaking in the press, like, you know, photographer from the newspaper came in and really I wanted to share that photo because part of fitting into that world was, you know, it was very, very hierarchical. So when you start out, you get a certain colour of robe and you’re called a probationer. And, you know, if you’re okay, then you move on to become what’s called a chorister. And then the more and more you stick around basically and behave yourself, then you start getting higher levels of award. So you become, I think at first glance, you become a leader and then you become what’s called a senior chorister. And then you become the head chorister. And I actually ended up becoming the head chorister. And I think that was what I’m trying to get to here. That was a very transformative experience for me. Because it came at a time, going back to what we were talking about before Manuel, where in my personal life at home, you know, my family of origin was on the, on the verge of blowing up. It was always unstable. And, you know, I think I became the head chorister there at around about 12 years of age. And that was, as I said, at a time when at home, things were very chaotic. So I was moving between these worlds of instability at home and a sort of, a kind of stability at my job. I knew that if I could be professional and whatever else, there was stability there. What’s also interesting, you know, as I said to you, this is bringing up memories that the photo reminded me that there was this sort of public aspect to what I was doing. You know, you can tell you’re again, not quite performing for other people, but you are a public person. You’re not just yourself. You’re a part of something. Incidentally, so at that time, I’m really working hard at being good at my job. In fact, I remember, tell me if I’m going on too long here, but it’s Jermaine. I remember sitting in the bath, I think I must’ve been younger than 12 and thinking alone, I was in the bath, I must’ve been 11 or a bit younger. What do I want to do with my life? I remember thinking that and I remember saying to myself, well, who do I really want to be like? And at that time, my dad was working as a manager, I think, in a government agency. And I thought he was great, you know, as kids do. He was my hero. I really thought he was charming and dapper and well-spoken and just really all around good at everything. And I thought, yeah, I do want to be like dad that way. On the other hand, I thought, you know who else I want to be like? I want to be like Miss Nixon, this lady who scares me. And I thought about that for a bit because I thought, you know, I don’t have warm feelings about Miss Nixon, but I admire her. When I really sit back and I think about it, I go, she’s not unfair or anything. She’s not a bad person. She’s just really professional. I thought, that’s good. She seems to be stable and succeeding in the world and all of those things. So I remember really at that point deciding I want to be an amalgam of that kind of example. So you can see in that photo, I’m really trying quite hard to be good. And there is a note on the back of that photo, which until you made me do this, I actually hadn’t read for about years. That June had signed the back of that June Nixon. I haven’t looked at this for maybe 20 years or something. Did you get that? Yeah. And she writes, Julian, many thanks for all you do for the choir, a magnificent job. And boy, even reading that, I can feel the impact of that encouragement and how it made me want to do better. He’s someone I respect and admire, really telling me whatever it is I’m doing, and I don’t feel like I know exactly what I’m doing by any stretch, he’s going in the right way. And actually, she and I developed this partnership. It wasn’t a partnership. She was definitely in charge. But we had this very good relationship where I was acting on her behalf with the choristers. And that was a very formative thing for me. I sort of do want to reference with you and give it back to you in just a second. But it was those experiences of being the head chorister and all of the challenges and interesting things that happened and looking after people and caring about people that you felt responsible for. I realized in thinking about our discussion today that it was like a womb for me. It was like a womb for my consciousness. Anyway, yeah. So there you have it. I want to say something, right? She was a strict person and I also think emotionally detached maybe a little bit, right? Or reserved, that’s maybe a better word. And the fact… Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very strict. I can tell you a story about the emotional side of it if you want. No, no. I just wanted to highlight on the picture, there’s an underline on all you do and it’s magnificent, right? And I think that’s really, really meaningful because I think she’s displaying a sense of affection there and a sense of highlighting that is unusual to her. But maybe I’m projecting too much there. No, I think you’re exactly right, Manuel. Yeah. No, I think you’re really touching on something important, which is, you know, this whole experience for me of being a responsible person and having someone who I admired, who was making their own way in the world, treat me as a professional. That gave me a sense that I was engaged in something special. And I really do mean that word as it said. I felt there was almost a sacredness to what was happening that was beyond my control with one exception, which is, you know, I was intuiting in this role a few important things, which is my job here is to keep my head down, to be a servant. There was a lesson there about being a servant that, you know, I was so keen to do well and so keen to work out how to do well that, you know, I kind of stumbled in a way on this philosophy or method of service, not explicitly. You know, it actually came completely phenomenologically. I stumbled into it. This is sort of another story. But I think the element of a lot of this being unintelligible because you’re so young, you know, nowadays you sort of say, oh, okay, that sensation that I’m experiencing, if I look it up on Google, for example, and ask a psychologist or whatever, they’re going to say, oh, you’re experiencing an X. And then once it becomes intelligible, you say, oh, okay, that’s good. I feel like I’m in charge of it. And that’s a good name for it. But back then, there wasn’t anything like that. You had to kind of be in the moment. And you didn’t, I didn’t have a sense of qualification, you know, that there was a beginning and an end to all of this, anything like that. I had a sense of, I’m involved in something that’s way bigger than me. And way bigger than my capacity, for sure. What can you imagine? Yeah. Yeah. So that, I’ve got two more pictures and then I’m done. There, that was the fairly ugly, I have to say, green cassock, it’s called a cassock, which is this robe that you wear. And there is the middle of the first sort of stage after being a chorister and you become what’s called a leader. And so you get sort of minor privileges of grading other people and that sort of thing. At the time I became a leader, there was no strong hierarchy or anything like that. So it didn’t mean anything other than, you know, gold star, good job, well done, keep going. If you have a look on the right there, this picture, that’s me. And I think you know that guy on the left, that’s Pope John Paul, when he came to visit the cathedral, just out of interest, this is called a high Anglican cathedral, it’s not Catholic as such. It’s sort of Catholic in a lot of its tradition, but it belongs to the Anglican Church. So John Paul, when he visited the Pope, it was a big deal. And if you look towards the centre, you’ll see Ms Nixon herself there. And yeah, I remember after this, there was one of the parents of the other kids came up to me in the car park and said, hey, listen, you’re going to want to get that photo that they’re selling out the front for 15 bucks, because later in your life, you’re going to want to remember this. And something about the way he said it stuck with me, and I was sort of conscious I didn’t want my parents to spend money and all this sort of thing, but I did go up to them and tell them that and they bought the picture. And I think it just sort of says a lot about that, how being thrust into this world and connecting to the wider world through the life of the cathedral, in a sense, you kind of don’t get much wider than the Pope, do you? Expanded my understanding and my awareness beyond the difficulties that were happening at home, which were severe. They really were. I mean, at the age of 15, my parents divorced, it was a complete explosion in my life. One that I was definitely expecting, but the way it all happened absolutely blew me apart. And at the same time, I had an awareness that all of the good things that were happening with me being the head chorister and enjoying that role and feeling like I was making a huge difference, I was ready to put it down and sort of deal with whatever was coming up next. So I’ll stop it there and thanks again for listening. We’ll stop sharing and go back to you. So yeah, like that last thing, right, where you’re effectively reminded, right, like you’re living a life and the future is going to relate back to now and it’s going to be a moment that is going to stick with you. Did that have any impact beyond just getting the picture? Oh, you mean the insight from the Pope? No, no, I mean the insight that the visit of the Pope was going to be something that would reverberate or something, right? Yeah, you were talking about effectively being in the flow, right, and in some sense, you’re getting this contrast, certainly. So I’m looking for that. Yeah, look, I have to say, I don’t know if it was like part of the culture that I grew up in, but we were kind of, both maybe the family culture and both maybe the family culture and the wider Australian culture at that time, there was a sort of sense of, oh, do you think you’re special? I don’t think you’re that special, you know. It’s almost the opposite of what we have today where sort of celebrities are forn over and all this sort of thing. So I remember, you know, when the Duke and Duchess visited and so on, I was determined this is no big deal. And then we lined up outside the cathedral and she was shaking hands with us and she shook my hand and I was so starstruck. I remember going away in the car with Mum, I think afterwards and saying, I’m not going to wash my hand, you know, I think I, yeah, anyway, it was the same with the Pope. So really what I was saying about that being an important photo, I think it was more for the sake of explanation for times like this, that, you know, there was, as I said, this public dimension to what I was doing and it does make these kind of conversations easier that it was documented at the time. I suppose to your question about how that sort of parlayed into thrusting forward into the future. Yeah, I was excited, Manuel, that I had a sense of accomplishment and honestly, a sense of partnership with God as I was going through this experience that I felt was far beyond me. Really, genuinely, I felt it was just so far beyond me. Yeah, I suppose that is emotional for me to talk about that because I’m reminded how genuinely afraid I was most of the time at the challenges that I was involved with and I think the emotion of that is, you know, a very real fear that at the same time, a sort of a desire to do good and to be good and to live up to something. I think I just remember developing out of that combination of what you called anxiety before and what I’m calling fear and contrasting that with a really, you know, huge motivation, desire to excel and to be good. I really want to be the best that I can be, to do really well. I really do want that. And realising that the kinds of dynamics that you come up against, when you have those as a starting point, you know, interacting with other people who are at all levels of development that you really have no idea about. Some people you find, you think that they’re better than you are, like intrinsically, and yet somehow you’re meant to be serving them and helping them or on the other hand, you’re dealing with people who are obnoxious and horrible and how do you treat them with dignity and at the same time have a degree of authority to keep the semblance of order. All of those challenges were incredibly formative and I sort of say that I think what I accomplished in stepping up to those challenges was something that connected me with what I would call God. I remember on Sundays you had to go in on the morning, because I think there was a 10 o’clock service, more people than four would come, and then there was also an evening service. That was a lot of work for my parents to kind of ferry me back and forth and so on. Sometimes I would stay in the city. Probably my lasting memory of that was walking around the city of Melbourne, which is nothing like it is now. A lot of hustle and bustle, but on a Sunday it was very dead. Those were still the days where Sunday was kind of considered an off day and if a shop was open that would be, whoa, what are you doing? That’s how I remember it. But I distinctly remember walking around and I wasn’t lonely. I was alone. I have such a clear and fond sense of the nearness of what I could only call God as being there with me. Anyway, so I think I had a sense of accomplishment and that I could do things and then when the family fell apart, I think this ties into another question about what we call God, what Jungians might call synchronicity, that I had a sense of the timing that I had done a good job being head chorister and had received enough feedback to know that I was doing something really useful and helpful. At least that’s how I was sensing it. And then on the other side of it, this situation at home really blowing up and I got a sense at that time that I needed to put everything down, all of the, I don’t know what to call it, but all of the accoutrement that comes with doing something political. If you’re officially a leader, you are officially doing something politically. And there are so many questions that revolve around that. And I remember thinking that the higher level questions like if you achieve something politically, successfully for example, and let’s say you manage to persuade people to do something you think is better for everybody, there is something that talks to your ego there that, oh, you know, you’re able to persuade people. And I remember wrestling with those kinds of questions and sort of thinking, you know what, the sense that I get out of getting my own way, you know, one of the leaders that I like to listen to says it pretty plainly that if you are a leader, you are imposing your will on other people. And that’s a very touchy subject. And that’s not something I inherently like, I’ll be honest with you. I’m a big free will guy and a big, each person should be as fully free and free from the imposition of other people’s wills as much as possible. But that was a journey. But I remember distinctly being self-absorbed, I think, as we all are at a young age, realizing, you know, I get what I want fairly easily, like not too easily, but I enjoy the cut and thrust of it. I enjoy persuading. I enjoy arguing. And I enjoy that if I can reason with people, they are persuaded. I find that absolutely wonderful. I think I even remember saying to myself, this is what I want to do. I found what I want to do. Just to bear that out, what I mean is I want to lead people and persuade them, but on the grounds of reason, not on the grounds of manipulation, because I could very clearly see from that perch, it is possible to manipulate people and I absolutely hate that. But the rising to the challenge of reason was absolutely enticing. But I also realized Manuel that I was definitely unsatisfied with that in itself, that being able, the way I was talking to myself was saying, being able to get my own way is not great. That doesn’t interest me as a motivation. That’s not what I’m after. And so this new challenge of family breaking apart, I took as to be something from God, sort of saying, here’s your next challenge. You know, we’ve done well so far. Do you think you’re up for this? You’re not going to have any of the trappings of an official position. People don’t listen to you because you’re the head chorister as such. They need to listen to you because you reason. And so that was my vision into the future, as you were saying. Yeah, I might be skipping ahead. During the whole time that you were talking, keep talking about my will, my will, like was God’s will in there somewhere? Mm-hmm. Well, that’s a good question. No, I don’t think so. Explicitly. Because to me, that was, you know, I think it’s a lot easier to look back, you know, 30 years ago, and sort of say, oh yeah, I was thinking this or I was thinking that. But, you know, by no stretch was it like that. I wasn’t sitting there thinking, oh, I’m talking to God right now, necessarily. Maybe I was, to be honest. Maybe there were times that I was because there was the Bible getting read every day. And I do distinctly remember at times referencing when I needed to convince people of some correct action. I remember referencing a parable or something like this of Jesus. So, no, I think there was a God consciousness. That language of doing God’s will definitely was not part of my thinking. That came much later. Much, much later. Do you think that would have helped with your struggle? That’s a good question too. I think that’s a hypothetical that I, I’m best to answer by saying the fact that there wasn’t a lot of qualification around what was happening with me. There wasn’t a lot of instruction. And a lot of it was intuitive and mysterious. Perhaps that was the seedbed that I needed at that time. Maybe that’s what was helpful to me at the time. I don’t know. So, I imagine that being in the hierarchical structure provided you a structure. And you gave me the sense that when relating to your family, it was, yeah, like it was the Wild West in some sense. Yeah, that’s a great way of looking back at it. Yeah. So, how did you deal with the Wild West? Yeah, well, I’ll stop saying that’s a good question because you seem to be asking what are good questions. I think, you know, to be honest with you, I had, um, first of all, I was completely emotionally destroyed by the events around my parents’ divorce. I actually didn’t realise until, you know, time went on after 15 and through till 19, just how devastated emotionally I was by all of the events surrounding this family explosion. And it was, you know how Jordan Peterson talks about the effects of certain family or relational dynamics. It’s like a bomb going off. I remember him talking about that. And that was the level of personal disintegration I felt about the whole thing. Just like there was nothing left. The whole thing had been blown up. So, I didn’t sort of say to myself, oh, I’m now going to impose the hierarchy on my family or clean up the Wild West. I just sort of thought, you know, what really broke me now that you mention it was that whole time that I was engaged in the world of the cathedral and going back home, there is no doubt about it that my heart, my heart’s desire was to keep the family together, to keep the unity. And I think when it blew apart in such an epic fashion, because that was my heart’s desire, I blew apart in an epic fashion too. I mean, at first quietly, it was like maybe one of those undersea implosions. Yeah. And so, no, I think it wasn’t until I turned 19 and was faced with the idea that I needed to get away from everything that was happening in the home such as it was and go my own way that I had to pick a mission. Yeah. I had to pick a mission and sort of say, there’s no way I’m letting all of this take me under. So, I need to decide what am I going to do? And I, yeah, to be honest with you, I thought, I do think it’s right that my family ought to be unified and I’m just going to focus on that. So, I stuck myself in psychologist offices, basically actually from the time I was 15 onwards. Yeah. So, I found all of that. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. How’s that connecting to God? Like you having a well, I think when you map that back to the spirit of the age, you know, God was very much on the decline. Certainly that private school that I was going to, although it was Anglican, God was, I don’t think even in the background, to be honest, to be honest, in terms of what people were doing and what they were pursuing and what the teachers were doing and what the teachers were pursuing. It was all about business. And so, I am not a particularly person. Maybe that’s a bit disingenuous to say, like, you know, I deeply feel for God. Yeah. And if you want to call that devout, fine. But I don’t, I’m not interested in making a show about that or dressing it up in a lot of tradition or that sort of thing. You know, to me, it’s more, I find through that experience that God is a deeply functional and necessary thing for me. So, yeah, that’s why I decided to go the secular route for fixing those problems, psychology and so on. And through that process and it kind of not leading anywhere that I found satisfactory for answers. At 19, when I wanted to thrust into the world, I knew I needed to make a significant change. And at first, I put it this way, like, I had no job, I had no money, I knew I had to do it on my own. And I had no skills to speak of, I had no qualifications. And at that particular time, it was all about qualifications, the world. It was a very propositional thing. You’ve got this degree, using John Vivekhi’s language there, you’ve got this degree, it shows you know, this much stuff, you’re worth that much money. It’s all box, box, box. And I was completely intimidated by that. I’m like, I don’t know anything. But I also realized, intuitively, that I needed something deeper, I needed discipline. I wasn’t able to move myself about in the world in a disciplined way. And that that wasn’t going to come from anything that I could see around me. It was, it might come from the army, I thought. Yeah, yeah. Well, I realize I’m doing a lot of talking, so I don’t want to. Well, no, I want to, I want you to build the tower, right? Like, like, how’s this going to go? Well, look, ultimately, when I went through all of the beliefs and thoughts that I had about the army, I thought, you look, I do like the, the idea of discipline, I’d be willing to put myself through it. But I don’t love that idea. And I don’t love the purpose of the army, I think is roughly what I came down to. So I, in shorthand, I decided what I need to do is join the army of God. I know that sounds a little bit terrible, but that was roughly the map that I had produced. And then I just sort of, you know, because I had felt like secular psychology was empty. I really, I really did. And certainly, most of that, a large part of that probably had to do with my own immaturity. But I really was going there, asking people, can you tell me what’s wrong with me? And infuriatingly, like one of the first psychologists I went to, we’d say in a very quiet AMSR voice, what do you think the problem is? I’d say that’s what we’re paying you for, sir. Anyway, I was very dissatisfied with that route. And so I realized there was, I was willing to buck the trend of God is not a thing back then. This was in the mid 90s, 1995. I was willing to buck the trend because I felt so terrible. Like, I don’t mind if people think that I’m a bit of a nutter. All I know is that the roiling emotional sort of whirlpool and sense of distress that I feel daily and sort of separateness from myself is sufficiently bad for me to say I’m willing to give something else a go. And so I did look into various religions. I think the joke that I usually make is that I was willing to let the Mormons tell me about what they would do, and I was willing to give them something else to do. And so I did look into various religions. I think the joke that I usually make is that I was willing to let the Mormons tell me about what they were doing if they were willing to let me play the electric guitar for them and tell me if they thought I was good or not. But yeah, I checked out those as best I could and Hinduism to a small, very small degree. And I was just willing to give anything a shot. And then in a roundabout way, I eventually came to Christianity again. So when you say giving a shot, when you look back, did you give it a real shot? Oh yeah, oh yeah. No, no, definitely. No, look, I was willing to be atheist about it. I was willing to be what I considered to be a morally bad person. I will not outline the tests that I did. But you know, it’s sufficient to say that I broke traditional moral codes. So that I was able to say to myself, you’re a bad person. You’re being bad. That was an important thing for me to do. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a desperation. Well, I don’t, yeah. Well, if you want to be bad, then you’re desperate, right? You know what it was? It wasn’t desperation. I’ll be honest with you. It was more that desire for thoroughness, Manuel. Which is to say, yeah. That’s more an ego thing then? I can’t say explicitly. I can tell you what I was thinking, which is that, you know, morality for me, to me at that point from my upbringing was inextricably tied to God and being a Christian. So my theology, such as it was, you know, you know that that was a big kind of dreamlike experience for me at the time. My theology was roughly be a good boy and good things will happen. And so this sort of test that I was doing was, well, clearly being a good boy does not equal good things happening. Everything’s falling apart. So let’s try being a bad person and do all those things that people in the rule book tell you don’t do that. Whatever it is. I think there’s a psalm about that, right? Oh yeah. Which one? Sorry. Yeah. I don’t know the numbers, but it’s like, why do good things happen to bad people? Right? And there’s a lamentation. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, I think a lot of people probably would think that story about Job. But, you know, the references to the Bible I had were from listening to, you know, those people on a Sunday or every day, sort of snippets. It wasn’t a cohesive theology by any stretch. And that’s all right. That’s not on anyone. So I didn’t know the book of Job back then, for example. I couldn’t reference that. But I think, yeah, that was more a desire of going to your question, like how serious was I about giving it all a go? Yeah. Serious. And those other religions, like, you know, when I said I was interested in Hinduism, you know, I went to a talk, a very big public talk, by some guru, lady. And I was just guided by my intuition. It’s like, do I feel like this is the truth? And I go in there and I pretty quickly go, no, this isn’t what I’m looking for. That’s not to say anything about truth, this, that or the other. I’m just telling you how I got there. Yeah. And again, there was some sort of, some sort of desire to connect with, well, let’s say, through a process of elimination, that I realized that if there wasn’t a God, I was stuffed, as in, I couldn’t see a way forward. And so if there was a God, it better be something cohesive to my interaction with the world. It can’t be just airy-fairy, fancy-pancy, floating in the air, just whatever. It needed to be something I could connect to. But back to your argumentation skills, you have to be able to convince by the argument. Yeah, look, I think, yeah, that’s right. I was becoming very cynical, Manuel, because I was very unhappy. And I felt entitled, it’s a horrible word, but I felt slightly entitled to be very skeptical. And certainly when I came back to Christianity, I came at it full skeptical. Full skeptical on the one hand, full aware of my utter complete brokenness and ineptitude on the other. So. It sounds like two parts of yourself in. Oh, yeah. Very much. Yeah. So yeah, what happened? Well, at the time I was working in the city as a deli hand in one of the upmarket department stores and really feeling horrible because people don’t treat you very nicely, unfortunately, when you’re not in some kind of high status role. And I was feeling it. I felt utterly terrible. And I remember the time I was spending a lot of time with my then best friend at his kind of dump of an apartment. And, you know, we were into this thing of like, we’re breaking the rules, we’re bad boys, and we’re smoking marijuana and doing all this sort of stuff every weekend. And he actually said to me, I his dad just out of interest was a minister. And he was also a mess. And I remember one time, Manuel, he he said, I’ve started going to church. And I looked into his eyes, and I saw that thing that I was looking for. Couldn’t tell you what it is. I just again, the synchronicity of it all. I’m like, wherever he’s going, that’s the thing I’m looking for. So I went along to this Baptist church was a really big one in the suburbs of Melbourne. Pretty intimidating, I remember, for me. And what reason anyway, this friend had hooked up with this guy who was a real. I know I just had a lot of anxiety, social anxiety. You know, I was pretty I had my sort of group of friends. But again, it’s just something of also facing God. Was that a big deal? No, no big deal. No, no big deal. I think I think what I was more interested in was that connection of personal experience and someone actually caring or some entity caring about what you’ve been through. And so you have a kind of when you’re in despair, as I as I really was, you obviously are looking for some sort of a hope, some sort of a real hope. And so that skepticism I had about the claims of Jesus Christ, I’m like, look, man, if this is seriously an option and he’s sort of talking about a way, and if you follow the way and if you believe by faith, then you’ll have eternal life and so on. I was skeptical about all of that. And obviously, we’re getting into theology a bit there as well. But anyway, my best friend at the time was a Christian, and he was a Christian. My best friend at the time had found this guy who was a member of the church who’s a young guy. 2025 at the time we were 19. And he was a really dynamic sort of a live wire. You’ve talked Manuel in the past about charismatic people. He was one of those people. And I remember looking at this guy, his name was Jay, and going, he’s free. I whatever he’s got, I want what he’s got. He’s free. He’s got this freedom. And that’s what I want. I sort of had this picture in my soul for one of the better word of being shackled, of being heavily chained by something. And that whole church was very dynamic and lively and vital. And there were books about being in bondage and all this sort of stuff. And I found it quite relevant, spiritual bondage and stuff like that. And I found it all very relevant. But I still didn’t have a sense of how to make a jump. And so I asked, I remember going to Jay’s house, and I was just so impressed with him. He was kind to me. But at the same time, he was a cool person. And he was loving. And I remember, to be honest with you, that was the kicker for me with the Christians was the love. I remember even saying it to one of the other sort of young leaders at that place. Look, I said, my life is a mess. And I know like the one thing I really know is I need love. And he’s like, Yeah, well, this is the place you’ll get it. I said, I hope I can believe you, at least I’m sure that’s what I would have been thinking. Anyway, I remember going to Jay and do his house and he had his own house and he was newly married. And he was cool. And he was funny. And he had this thing that I wanted. And I remember being confident enough in my determination to say, Jay, look, I will do anything you want. But please mentor me, tell me how I can get that thing you’ve got. I said, I’ll wash your car. I do whatever you want. I’m serious and so on. And he took me on and, you know, really changed my life. I would say that with full sincerity. He really did. So what was your conception of God in that process? So at that point, I, you know, it’s funny. It’s a funny question. I don’t think my conception of God changed. I think I just came closer to that thing that was always in the background. And it just became more a center of attention. But you don’t understand that at the time. You know, there are so many other things that have your attention, that really have your attention. And if God isn’t something you’re centrally attentive to, it’s just either, as I said, it’s not like God doesn’t exist necessarily or anything like that. It was really a question of where is God in your priority list? Where is God in my priority list? So that was my conception. And I suppose my conception was changing. God isn’t something that is in the background. God is something somewhere between always there and always requiring not a half-hearted level of interest. It’s not like that. You clearly, going back to this process of elimination, God is an interactive concept and you have to decide your level of interaction. Or one has to. That’s the conception that I was coming to. And just to kind of round that out, how did I approach it? I just became a full-on imitator of Jay. I would talk like him. I would, you know, use his words. I mean, I was aware that I didn’t want to look goofy or like a complete, whatever the word is, like a clone. But at the same time, like, who knows how to proceed forwards towards God exactly? I don’t want to do it in that traditional way. I don’t like that. I find that empty and vacuous and boring and irrelevant. I want to do it in this dynamic and interesting way. So he’s slightly crazy, this Jay guy, but he just throws himself at it, you know, in the worship and in the talking and the praying. It’s like he doesn’t talk like, he talks like he would talk to someone he really likes. And he would help me. He would coach me. Gosh, you know, Jay made just all of the difference in the world to my life and was a gift of God. We fell out much later. But he was just so good. And I’ll always honor him to the day I die as someone who was willing to help me when I really needed help. So when did you get conscious of what God was? Oh, well, that’s another good question. So the process that Jay put me through was, I suppose, getting back to it, one thing he said that I think is really important, he says, please don’t put your faith in me. I will let you down. Put your faith in what the Bible says and in God and go from there. So, you know, he, he would help me when I had questions, but I realized that he was putting me in this thing of like, right now you need to do the grunt work. And so I think I remember Manuel for about six months or thereabouts asking him questions. So I didn’t know the Bible, but just sort of reading the Bible and praying and asking God through Jesus, you know, help me get this breakthrough, help me connect to you and so on for many months. Right. And I would come to Jay and say, I’m not feeling, feeling at all. This happened in my life. Like I remember calling him up on a road trip and saying, you know, I did something morally bad. I went back to the old ways and he’s like, you know, this is theological, but he’d talk about the grace of God, you know, that everything’s forgiven. You just need to get back on the bike. And he would encourage and encourage and encourage. But I remember one time on a train, it was late at night, roughly like it is now you can see behind me. And I was reading the book of Romans in the New Testament and I remember getting it. I think it was somewhere in there because Jay, my mentor, he, he would just keep on saying, nothing you can do is ever good enough for God. Seriously. The whole message is you’re not good enough. Jesus did the thing, except what he’s done. He’s, he’s, he’s the only thing that’s good enough for God. And if you accept that and you understand that, that no amount of your hard work is contributory to your relationship with God as such, that it starts with that, that gift. That was, that was amazing for me. I couldn’t believe that I found that hard. Because again, I’m going to that functional thing. It’s like, no, you put in the effort, you get the reward. That whole concept of, okay, whatever effort you make isn’t, isn’t going to cut the starting point. That, that was something I couldn’t get until I just walked with it. And again, like my personality is that I try too hard. I always overdo things. That’s my thing. And that kind of led to a kind of a neurotic profile as well. But I was really recognizing that way of doing things isn’t flourishing at all. Sorry. Yeah. So that makes me going back to you saying that you’re not devout. And I’m like, yeah, no, you are, right? Like you are devout. Only, yeah, maybe, maybe some, sometimes a bit misguided in the devotion. Oh, misguided? Yeah. Should I be insulted? I don’t think that’s an insult. But yeah, like, like, Oh, misguided. Like, yeah, like you’re trying your best, but you’re not, you’re actually you’re aiming wrong. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good point. That’s a good point. I totally agree. Yeah. And we all have that, right? Like we all have, I’m good at this, right? Or this is the way I do it, right? And then we end up going a bit too far on our side. But so yeah, right? So, so, so in some sense, you internalize the hierarchy a little bit, well, a little bit too much. And now you’re, you’re getting this sense of, okay, there’s a freedom to be found in the letting go and of responsibility, right? Because I think that’s the major struggle with the responsibility and having God play a part in you instead of you playing a part in God. Yeah, I think, you know, you’re succeeding in, in doing the unfolding the soul bit there, because you sort of managed to touch on an aspect of my personality, which is sort of crucial to the whole question, like, you know, why do I care about God and so on? You know, when I was growing up, you know, and you’re looking for role models and everything like that, you know, there was the kind of, I’m not going to call it a myth, but there was the philosophy, which is like, you know, the guy who gets the applause, the guy who gets the medal, the guy who is celebrated, is the one who works hard, who puts in the practice, who works on his art. Michael Jordan keeps coming to mind, for example, not that I cared about basketball, but you sort of think, okay, right, so it has to do with how hard I work. And so you work hard. And maybe you achieve a few things, which happened to me, nothing significant, but I could see, okay, well, if I keep doing this long enough, maybe I’ll be celebrated and be successful, you know, being successful was everything. That’s the Protestant work that’s out there. Oh, gosh, you know, if you really want to unwind it, I’m sure you could get back to it. But it was more than that. I think during the 80s and 90s, being successful was its own sort of cultural touchstone. And maybe it still is, you know, people, when you talk about Manuel, aiming, you know, what are people aiming for? I think, you know, a lot of people aiming at being a celebrity. And, you know, I’m no different, no different, or being rich, or whatever else. Well, yeah, but you have to aspire to something, right? Like, you were trying to aspire to be like, what was his name, Jay, or something, right? Like you were aspiring to be like him. Yeah, yeah. So there’s always this aspiration that we are trying to follow, right? And this is where I go back again to the misguidedness, right? Like, if we don’t have a good sense of the object of the aspiration, I don’t like that word, of the talus in the aspiration, then we end up going astray, right? And so, so what do we do, right? Like, in order to perceive something, right? Like, we need something concrete, right? Like we need something embodied. And so we play at a place that we think we can grasp, and then we lose sight of the ideal behind it, right? So now we’re idolaters in our relationship. So yeah, that’s the way I would frame that. Oh, wonderful. Just so you know, by the way, I’ve got about 15 more minutes, just so that we can set our aim. And I’m really enjoying it. You’re a great listener. Thank you. So I think, like you said, you do have to have something concrete to aim at. That’s just part of learning. But I think one of the attractive things about Jay was that he came from a really wealthy family. And he was also charismatic and interesting, like a famous person. And yet, and he also had a sort of political interest, which was interesting, like he used to preach communism out the front of the church to be a rebel. So we had a lot in common. And yet he was preaching to me, I’ve been rich, it’s not the answer. I knew he could be famous as he wanted to be. And he’s saying it’s not the answer. And he was powerful in his own position and so on politically. And he’s saying it’s not the answer. And yet he had that spiritual freedom that I was aspiring to. And I could also, through that process of elimination, say for myself, I agree, those things aren’t in themselves the answer that I want, that I need to connect to to find my way. Let’s just say that, to find my way. And I think it bears mentioning that, you know, I’m now 46, those kinds of, going back to your starting point, developments in my conception of God, you know, as I proceeded down that path, you know, it led to a flowering of internal capacities. So my ability to think and to articulate and to, let’s say, see internally, were greatly enhanced through genuine spiritual practice. I went through the whole Pentecostal way of doing that and completely think it’s great. But lately, as my development is continuing, you know, I find myself interested in people like Thomas Aquinas, for example. And you know I like Kant. And Aquinas and Kant talk about those things that we’re describing as gifts of fortune, I think. And Kant was arguing on the one hand, well, let’s start with Aquinas. He was arguing on the one hand, why gifts of fortune, like money, fame, wealth or power, do not make you happy. And he talks about the limits of that. And then Kant on the other side of it say, why are gifts of fortune, so that they’re things which you can get along the way. So they’re not necessarily bad in themselves. You don’t need to eschew them. You don’t need to be able to be able to say, well, why aren’t those things the highest good? Why aren’t they good in themselves? Or what we might say in our discussion, sufficient, why aren’t they enough? So look, now I can say, having had my experience of the Pentecostal way of doing things, I think, is that I’m not going to say, why aren’t they enough? So look, now I can say, having had my ability to reason and to intellectualise greatly enhanced through stepping out in a faith first method. So take the step, you don’t know everything. You don’t have it all in front of you every day. You actually just need to head towards the light, so to speak, and to adhere to it somehow. Which is where I think some spiritual practice with the framework of a scripture, and not the other way around, if you don’t mind me saying, you need that spiritual bit first and then the scriptural framework afterwards, allows you to enhance those capacities that are natural. And then you do come to a place where you can talk to someone on the other side of the world and make some sort of intelligible sense of the fact why being famous in itself is insufficient, or being rich in itself is insufficient to finding your way. So, so now, yeah, like, I think we’re falling a little bit short on parts of the story, but now you’ve got this message and pointing that towards the future, right? Like you want to convey that to your son. So how are you going to go about that? Well, I would say off the top of my head, Manuel, that I am completely committed to the idea of the free will. I know it’s kind of uncool to talk about the free will, like scientists might sort of say there’s no such thing and blah blah blah. I don’t care. I think the free will is sacred. I really believe in it. So that means from my point of view that my son’s free will is absolutely sacred. It shall not be violated. So what does that mean? What that means is I have no plans to indoctrinate him into my religion in terms of a way forward, but at the same time, I’m treading a line by sort of saying to me there is a wealth of riches in the Christian tradition, especially and certainly the Jewish tradition, you know, my mum’s from a Jewish background and so on, that I want him to be able to access if he comes to an awareness of it. There’s a tension there, right? Because, like your story was you needed to get in and when you were in you could see, right? So if you’re never going to get someone in, then how can they see? So like how are you planning to relate to that? I think you’re right to call it a tension and I think the tension is the nature of it. You know, some people I think would call that the tension between faith and doubt possibly and that tension is inherent in the quality of that domain, by which I mean unless you’ve got serious doubt, you don’t really have a place to have some faith. And faith is different to knowledge. That doesn’t mean it’s not knowledge of a certain kind, but it’s not the same as the kinds of knowledge John talks about necessarily, for example. Yeah, because it’s relating to potential. Well, I would say yes, by all means it relates to potential and just to put a fine point on it, that way of being, the way of faith, which you know is defined by not knowing, literally, you know, okay, there are lots of arguments you could make, some people call faith loyalty, some people call faith commitment and so on, but you know, if you listen to say the author of the book of Hebrews, who I think most people think is Paul the apostle, he talks about faith as being demonstrated by someone like Moses, who says, you know, by faith Moses led the people into the desert not knowing, not knowing what would happen, but just believing in the promise that they would get there in the end. So that to me is a better description of the activity of faith. It is related in some way to knowledge, but it’s not a knowledge first process, it’s a knowledge comes after you step out. Yeah, it’s the discovery, it’s what allows for the discovery. Oh yeah, oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you could even tie that back to science if you wanted to and talk about the inductive message. You know, I really like, I just don’t remember who said this, but there was a chap in the mid-century, last century, who said something like, each of us is a scientist and our lives are the experiment, something like that. But I think what gets squeezed out in going back to John Verbecky’s critique in that overly propositional way of looking at science, what gets squeezed out is that actually most good science starts by a lot of stuffing up as you’re trying to get closer to the mark. So you described the place where you were able to develop as a womb and for some reason I got the word cradle in my hand. How are you trying to provide that for yourself? For my son? Oh, that is super easy. One of my heroes growing up is a guitar player called Tommy Emanuel. Do you know Tommy Emanuel? No. He’s a homegrown guitar virtuoso from Australia, worldwide famous, lives in Nashville now I think and he’s just absolutely brilliant. I went to one of his concerts and for his encore he sang a song by James Taylor called Shower, The People You Love With Love. That’s my secret strategy. I’m just going to shower that kid in love. So that’s where your fate lies, right? Like that the love will guide him? Oh yeah, I mean that’s entirely scriptural. The book of John says, one of the John’s letters I think it just says very simply, God is love. That’s an equation. That’s an equation. And again, I think it’s the same guy John, he would say, if you love God, you will love your brother. I love you. That’s me experiencing God. Well, I think that’s some good words to end on. I’m going to invite everybody to partake in a new tradition that I want to introduce. Write down in the comments the lesson that you took from what we talked about so that we can share our perspectives. I want to thank Jules for being a wonderful guest. Also, we’re going to provide the video and maybe some other stuff how to relate to Jules in the description of the video. I hope to see everybody again soon with my next recording.