Ep32 In The Shadow Of The Mountain C.L.Knox stories

The speaker discusses their experiences with sexuality and the hippie lifestyle as a child. They mention being exposed to sexual perversion and receiving a book about sex at a young age. They also talk about their mother's involvement in a spiritual group and an incident where they walked in on her with another man. The speaker reflects on how these experiences have shaped their beliefs and their understanding of God's role in their life. They discuss the concept of being born again and the role of the Holy Spirit. They mention different theological beliefs and the desire to share their faith with others. The speaker emphasizes the importance of having a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit and the difficulty of fully understanding and explaining these beliefs to others. Episode 32. I got a lot of things rattling around in my head. There's one thing I never talk about much and that's sexuality and my experience as a child in the hippie life. I touched on it with that story about Chuck and then when I was 10 I talked about that time I stayed over at Madonna's house and it turned into an orgy. There was a lot of exposure to, I'm going to call it perversity, sexual perversion. When I was 13, it was like on my 13th birthday, I became a Christian. I think I was baptized on my birthday actually, or three days after my birthday, I can't remember. When I turned 13 I left and when I did come home, I came home at least once in the summer I think. At some point between March and October, maybe it was in October, my mom gave me a birthday present that was a book called The Joy of Sex. It was a, or is, an encyclopedia of sexual terms, ideas, sexual stuff. Everything from A to Z, I mean you can use your imagination, but I'm sure it doesn't go as far as mine because of my experiences as a child. That book was, I was a Christian already when I got it, that book was, there was no pictures in it, there was drawings, but it was, for a 13-year-old, it was a burden. I have to say it was a burden. I had already experienced so much in that realm, and I would say that most of it wasn't good for a child to experience that. I don't think it's good for anybody, I think sin is sin. After I got back, the commune was still going, my mom became a disciple, or an initiate of Sharon Singh, an Indian, East Indian guru, and her mother had been an initiate of his, so they followed him, sought his attention, to learn about the truth of life from him, and it was called Sat Maat, the science of the soul. I haven't talked about it before. Anyway, so on the one hand she's given me this book, on the other hand she's moving into her spiritual life, which would be her life for the rest of her life. We all struggle with our beliefs, it seems, to live them out, or to live them faithfully. What I discern from that, there was a time, and I can't remember if I was 12 or 13 when this happened, the commune was still going, and this is by far not the worst thing I ever experienced, but it was kind of traumatizing. There was a time that I came home, and in my memory I came home from school, which means I was 13 or 14 years old, but I don't remember if I was coming home from school, or coming home from, I don't know where, but I walked into the house, and I was still living in the house, so I wasn't out in my cabin yet, and my mom was in bed with another man, a fellow from the commune. And, like I said, my memory is that I was 13 when this happened. It was distressing for me, though I had seen my mother in... I had seen stuff with my mother before, so that wasn't the shocker, but this fellow was a guy on the commune that I had a great deal of respect for. I liked him a lot, and probably would say that he is the guy that taught me to play guitar. I had a close relationship with him at that time. I haven't seen him in years. I'm hoping to maybe connect with him this summer, although I haven't... Anyway, I'm hoping that. Anyway, so later when I talked to my mom, she said that she was in bed with him, that she slept with him, that she had sex with him because Bryce wanted her to. Now, I don't doubt that Bryce wanted her to have sex with other people. I would have thought he would have been there watching, and perhaps he was, and he left, but that's not in his character. I don't know what the motivation was. All I know is how it affected me, and it burned into the retinas of my soul, my spirit even. And that's only one thing. There's so many things. I'm never going to talk about them. I recorded one incident and was going to play it as an episode here, but I just couldn't do it. I don't know that I'm called to do that. I don't know that it would be beneficial. Anyway, as I live my life and question the reasoning behind stuff like that, I constantly come back to a belief that God is my God, and He protects me, and He uses all things, every experience in my life, He uses to form me, make me who I am, to give me the gifts that I need to have, to give me the strengths and the abilities. And so I have to accept that. Did He cause it? That doesn't fit my theology, though many Christians would say in a way, I mean, I'm reading in Isaiah, and it says, I am the Lord. There is no other besides me. There is no God. I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know from the rising of the sun and from the west, there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light, and I create darkness. I make well-being, and I create calamity. I am the Lord who does all things. Now that's Isaiah 45, starting like the whole of Isaiah, and Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all of those prophets, they're all constantly talking, and the whole Bible, constantly talking about God and His purposes and His ability. There is no other God. He's the God. All the other gods are not gods, and we make a choice to believe that, or I mean, there are some Christian sects or groups that believe we don't make a choice. We're chosen. Now, both of those are scriptural. We are chosen, and we choose to be disciples of Christ, which comes first, chicken or the egg. I would say we're chosen, but at the same time, I don't want to diminish... I don't want to call it autonomy, but who I am. I don't want to diminish who I am because I don't think God wants to diminish who I am. God doesn't want to remove me from the equation and for me to be an automaton and just do what I'm told. He wants me to do what I'm told, but there's a reason for me to do what I'm told. And the motivation for me to do what I'm told is one of love, not one of fear, though there is fear. I mean, there's these conflicting ideas. And the whole of my life, the whole of my being, and virtually everyone, is to understand what these things are, how they work in my life, how they work in your life. I mean, and in John, we all know the scripture of John 3.16. I mean, I talked about it before too. He must be born again. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believed in Him, that's 3.16, would have eternal life. But before that it talks about you must be born again. He's talking to a religious man, one of the leaders of the Jewish people. And he tells him, he's a religious man, and he comes and he says, I know you're God, I know that you... The religious man, Nicodemus, says to Jesus, we know that you are sent of God and you do the works of God. And Jesus' response to him acknowledging that Jesus is sent of God and a messenger of God tells him that he must be born again. This is where this struggle comes in. So, he must be born again. He can do nothing to determine if he's born again or not. Can he? I mean, can any of us? We didn't determine when we were born to begin with. We had nothing to do with it. He goes on to talk about the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. This is a person. The Holy Spirit is a person, not an it, not a thing. Part of the Godhead. The Holy Spirit is like the wind. When the wind blows, how do we know there is wind? How do we know what the wind is? We don't know where the wind comes from. We don't know where the wind is going. We don't know anything about it. It's just we feel it. We hear it. We sense it. We see the work. We see the effect of the wind. That's the Spirit. That's the Holy Spirit. When that wind-like occurrence happens in your life and you meet the personhood of the Holy Spirit, you are born again. You cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven without being born again. There's these sects, like I said. There's basically what we call Arminianism and Calvinism who talk about man's will and God's will. Then there's a third one that's actually probably more common than people would acknowledge. I think it's called Molinism. Some people even consider it to be heretical. Molinism is basically God chooses and I accept. There's both in there. There's both things at play there. It's kind of a balance between a balance. It's kind of a sharing of philosophy between Calvinism and Arminianism. This is history. It's theology, historical theology. It plays a big part in that, especially in the Protestant faith, these guys. Whatever. I can't determine. I want people to know God. This is an intrinsic sort of anybody that is born again will have this desire to want to spread the word, to want to get people to believe. It's intrinsic. There's nothing we can do about it. You can't not want it if you're born again. You cannot do anything about it. That has some effect in your life too. Those that are ashamed of Christ, he will be ashamed of. Does that mean they're not born again? I can't answer. Some of the questions we have don't have answers that are achievable or receivable. If we know the Holy Spirit, if we have a relationship with the Holy Spirit, if we are intimately involved with the Holy Spirit, then those things become clear to us. Whether we can communicate them or not to other people, I don't know. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Again, that's the work of the Holy Spirit, the wind that comes. The wind comes when we don't know where from. It goes and we don't know where it's going. That's the Spirit working in our life. That's what Jesus is talking about when he talks about the Holy Spirit. We don't know. We live inside the Holy Spirit, inside the life of Christ, inside the Godhead, inside the Father God. We live in them. We live through them. And we are adopted as family. We become part of that organism, part of that. It's a phenomenal idea to me. You know, I read this part in Isaiah, and there's only one God, and people want to argue that point. I can't convince you. I don't want to convince you. I mean, I want you to believe something different, but I don't want to convince you. I want the Holy Spirit to move in your life, and that would be my prayer, that the Holy Spirit would work in your life, that you would know the Holy Spirit, that you would be born again. There's another thing. When I was 13 and I lived, I mentioned this before, I lived with a Catholic woman. She had kids. They weren't at home. I was in the dormitory with the men, the children of God, and it was determined that I shouldn't be there. And I mean, that's back to the sex thing. Like, there was sexual, there was reasons of appearance. Because hippies had a reputation, and they were, you know, dirty. Dirty hippies. They were, you know, free sex, free love. Like, once when we were hitchhiking, Woody and I hitchhiking back from California up to Canada, we got picked up by this guy, and he turned and looked at Woody, and he said, you want to... Excuse my language. Like, he's just a redneck guy, but we're hippies, right? And she's like, no thanks. And we're in a pickup truck, and she's sitting right next to him, and I'm on the outside, which is unusual. That's the way that Woody positioned it. And then the guy looked over at me, and he said, does she? And Woody said, no, I don't think he does. And he pulled over. He said, get out then. And it's like... But that's the opinion. That was the view of hippies. You know, we're dirty still to this day. I mean, and we were dirty. And we were. I mean, there was, like I said, there was a lot of sexual promiscuity and a lot of perversion and a lot of... You know, there may have been some other hitchhiker that would have said, yeah, sure. Who knows? I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. There was a lot of things went south when the hippies came around. There was a lot of... There was some good stuff came out of it. I'm not going to say it was a whole totally bad movement. There was some good stuff came out of it, but there was also a lot of stuff... Like, we're... As a culture, we're experiencing the backlash of that generation right now. And it's not good. You know, so... But anyway, this Catholic lady, I stayed with her. And she gave... I think I mentioned this before. She gave me a little plaque that I still have. It's quite damaged. I mean, it's 50 years old. Over. And it's a plaque that has a scripture written on it from 1 Corinthians 2. And it's quoting another scripture. I don't know if it's Psalms or one of the prophets. I can't remember right now. But it says, Eye has not seen and ear has not heard all the things that God has prepared for those that love him. That's a sustaining, encouraging passage. And that's what it boils down to. If you love Christ, if you love Christ, and you love God the Father, and you love the Holy Spirit, you're born again. And there is no... There's no way to comprehend what that means. I mean, I keep saying things like, you're adopted. You're part of... You cannot comprehend it. There is no way. You can use imagination. And I mean music. You can use art. These are third degree philosophical conduits. That's what I call them. I don't know exactly how to put it. But it's like, It's not the main way that philosophy is relayed to somebody. But it's like the second or third way that philosophy is relayed through song and music and art and play, dancing, the creative aspects of humanity, writing stories. This that I'm doing, it's a philosophical transfer. I'm letting you know I'm relaying my philosophy. I'm relaying my philosophy. That's about as far as you can go with explaining. Because eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard. Neither has entered into the heart of man. See, what does it say? What no eye has seen and what no ear has heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him. I mean, that's an ESV translation. The one on the little plaque that I have is probably King James Version because it was in the early 70s. And there weren't a lot of versions. Although she was Catholic, so it may have been some Catholic version. But at that time, Vatican II, I guess, they weren't encouraging people to read the Bible. That came a little later. I don't even know still if the Catholic Church encourages people to read the Bible. That was one of the main disagreements the Protestants had with the Catholic Church was the lack of liberty and free access to Scripture. Anyway, kind of rambled a bit. And I got other stuff, you know, saying, I'm going to try and get at least one more of these done. And then I'm thinking I'm going to start a different podcast. I'm going to call it something different. And this one, I'm not finished. I don't know if I'm finished with this or not. I'm finished for a while. It's becoming more and more difficult for me. But people are asking me questions about what happened after, in my life after. And I've touched on some of that stuff, you know, like when I black slid when I was 16, when I went back into doing drugs. And then again, I talked about when I was a young adult involved in a church locally. Anyway, lots of stuff happens. And it's all for the good. It's all for me to learn and for me to share. Anyway, thanks again for listening. I was hoping to get a song recorded. I'm just not happy with it. I think I've raised my standard of what's acceptable. The song is a song I wrote called Only God Knows the Heart of a Man. That's what I'm calling it. It probably will have a shorter name. I wrote it in the early 90s. And I've rewritten it a couple of times. And that's part of the problem I'm having, is I'm not totally happy with the words. And so then when I'm singing it, it doesn't come out right, because I'm changing the words or forgetting the words. Anyway, whether I play that one or not, I don't know. I may just replay something that I've already played. But again, thanks a lot. And feel free to comment. Most of the platforms that this is shared on have spaces where you can comment or ask questions. And most of them also have my email address attached so you can email. And I'm open to talking to people if you want to FaceTime or WhatsApp. You just have to let me know and we can set that one up. Anyway, thanks a lot. Peace. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. See you later. 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