Couverture de The Building 4th Podcast

The Building 4th Podcast

The Building 4th Podcast

De : Doug Scott
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Welcome to the Building 4th Podcast where we explore the Perennial Philosophy from various lenses including the psychological, theological, spiritual, conventional, and esoteric. Our points of emphasis include the Hebrew and Christian scriptures (including the non-canonical Christian texts), the Law of One material, the Enneagram, Process thought (ie Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism) integral theory, and developmental psychology.Copyright 2024 All rights reserved. Science Sciences sociales Spiritualité
Épisodes
  • The Jesus Prayer: Efficacy and Metaphysics
    Mar 5 2026

    In this episode, community member Troy Caldwell — a retired psychiatrist with decades of training in spiritual direction — presents on the Jesus Prayer as a practice of contemplative recollection. Originally prepared for a spiritual formation class at his church, this teaching invites us into one of the oldest and most widely practiced forms of Christian meditation.

    Troy begins by distinguishing petition from contemplation: where petition asks God for things, contemplative prayer is simply about being with God — and allowing that proximity to transform us. The still point, drawn from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, is the inner axis of the soul: the place where the ego's striving falls quiet and the living water of God's presence can be found.

    The Jesus Prayer — Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner — has been used continuously for over 1,500 years in Eastern Christian traditions. Troy walks us through its technique (breath-synchronized repetition, gentle return from distraction), its biblical roots (the blind beggar Bartimaeus, the parable of the tax collector), and a careful unpacking of its words. Sinner means one who has missed the mark — a person in need, not a condemned person. Mercy translates from the Hebrew chesed — steadfast love, covenant faithfulness, enduring kindness.

    The group practices three minutes of the Jesus Prayer together, then opens into shared reflection. Members describe varied relationships to the prayer's language, adaptations that have made it their own, and the consistent experience of being carried to stillness — a drop from head to heart where something larger than the self moves through.

    The Law of One is woven in: Yehoshua carries the meaning "the Whole incarnates as a particular," and Ra's teaching in Session 10.14 provides the metaphysical complement — "The moment contains love. That is the lesson/goal of this illusion. The exercise is to consciously seek that love in awareness." The mercy asked for in the Jesus Prayer is precisely this: eyes opened to the wholeness already present.

    The episode closes with a discussion of sin, separation, and paradox. If sin is the active reinforcement of the illusion of separation — and if separation itself is the necessary condition for the experience of return — then both the fall and the recovery, as Julian of Norwich saw, are expressions of divine mercy. The opportunity for wholeness is always available. Every catalyst is an invitation to choose it.

    "The moment contains love." — Ra, 10.14

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    42 min
  • One Seeker's Perspective on Ra's Notion of Simultaneous Time
    Feb 4 2026

    Episode: Simultaneous Time Presenter: DeMarcus December 16, 2025

    The Eternal Present

    What if the past isn't gone and the future hasn't yet to arrive—but both exist right now, accessible from this very moment?

    In this Ra Contact Night presentation, DeMarcus guides us through one of the Law of One's most mind-bending concepts: the simultaneous nature of time. Moving from the macro scale of the Creator's experience down to the intimate terrain of our personal lives, he explores how the illusion of linear time serves as a deliberate construction—a container created by the Logos so that the Infinite might experience itself through focused, sequential unfolding.

    We examine how higher density beings navigate time as freely as we navigate space, how the higher self operates from what we would call our future while remaining available in the eternal present, and how probability/possibility vortices branch endlessly from each moment of choice. The conversation turns practical as DeMarcus shares how engaging with these concepts has opened access to forgotten memories and dreams that later manifest in waking life.

    The group wrestles with the paradox at the heart of this teaching: How does the Creator learn if everything already exists? How do free will and determinism coexist? Nathan offers a striking analogy using AI to describe how the mind/body/spirit complex totality renders all parallel lives simultaneously, while Doug explores how the higher self might receive our experience in wholeness even as we live it moment by moment.

    Films like Interstellar and Arrival are recommended as experiential portals into these concepts that language struggles to convey.

    As Ra reminds us: "The seeming contradictions of determinism and free will melt when it is accepted that there is such a thing as true simultaneity."

    Key Topics:

    • The eternal present and the Creator's 360-degree access to all experience
    • Why third density alone experiences time linearly
    • The higher self, mind/body/spirit complex totality, and life programming
    • Parallel existences and crossover between incarnations
    • Why time seems to speed up as we age
    • Practical applications: quantum leaping and engaging the past

    Ra Material References: Sessions 13, 16, 36, 70, 82

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    56 min
  • Mystery-Clad Being: The Primal Rhythm of Being and the Heart of all Reality
    Feb 4 2026
    Mystery-Clad Being The Primal Rhythm of Being and the Heart of All Reality by Doug Scott, LCSW I. The Nature of Mystery We have just heard [previous presenter] speak beautifully about the theme of mystery. I want to build on that foundation with a particular question: What is the nature of the mystery that we are exploring? Mystery is not that which cannot be known. Mystery is that which can never be exhausted in all the ways of knowing. It is infinitely knowable—which means we can spend eternity exploring it and never arrive at complete comprehension. Not because it withholds itself from us, but because it is inexhaustible in its richness. This is a crucial distinction. Mystery is not ignorance. It is not a wall we cannot penetrate. Mystery is an ocean we can swim in forever, each stroke revealing new depths, new currents, new wonders. The fullness of mystery—what we might call gnosis—is not a destination we arrive at but a horizon that recedes as we approach, always inviting us further. Ra describes this with precise language when speaking of the fundamental rhythms of intelligent infinity: "The basic rhythms of intelligent infinity are totally without distortion of any kind. The rhythms are clothed in mystery, for they are being itself." (27.7) Clothed in mystery. Not hidden by mystery. Clothed in it—the way a body is clothed, the way we wear our appearance. Mystery is not what conceals being from us. Mystery is being, wearing its own inexhaustibility. So tonight I want to ask: If being itself is clothed in mystery, can we nonetheless discern something of its shape? Its flow? Its fundamental rhythm? Can we, while honoring the inexhaustibility, trace patterns that appear consistently across Ra's teachings—patterns that might illuminate something primal about the nature of reality itself? II. Being as Verb: Does It Have a Shape? Notice that Ra says the rhythms are being itself. Not that being has rhythms. Not that being does rhythms. The rhythms are being. This is being as verb, not as noun. Not a thing that exists, but existence itself as dynamic, self-processing oscillation. What does Ra tell us about the shape of this rhythm? In Session 27.6, we find a remarkable description: "Intelligent infinity has a rhythm, or flow, as of a giant heart beginning with the Central Sun... the presence of the flow inevitable as a tide of beingness without polarity, without finity; the vast and silent all beating outward, outward, focusing outward and inward until the focuses are complete. The intelligence or consciousness of foci have reached a state where their, shall we say, spiritual nature or mass calls them inward, inward, inward until all is coalesced. This is the rhythm of reality." A giant heart. Beating outward, outward... then inward, inward, inward until all is coalesced. This is the shape of being itself: a circulation. Not linear progression, not random chaos, but rhythmic circulation—emanation and return, expansion and coalescence, systole and diastole. III. The Primal Desire: Joy Seeking to Know Itself But why? Why does being beat outward and then inward? What drives the circulation? Ra gives us the answer in the most fundamental teaching of all: "The Creator will know Itself" (27.8). This is the First Distortion, the primal movement from undifferentiated unity toward manifestation. Not "wants to know" as if lacking something—but will, an active, ongoing, generative drive. Here is the crucial insight: This desire is not experienced as lack. It is experienced as Joy. The Creator's desire to know Itself is not a hunger born of deficiency but a fullness seeking to express and discover itself through infinite perspectives. Joy is the fundamental affective quality of being itself. And this Joy can only be fulfilled through experience. The Creator cannot know Itself through static contemplation. Self-knowing requires circulation—going forth into differentiated expression and returning enriched by what the journey has gathered. This means experience is circulation. The going forth and the returning are not separate from experience—they are experience itself in its most fundamental form. IV. The Heart as Locus of Circulation If experience is circulation, and circulation has a pattern—outward, inward, coalescence—then we can ask: Is there a center to this circulation? Is there a locus where the three movements meet? Ra speaks directly to this in Session 82.7: "There is a center to infinity. From this center all spreads. Therefore, there are centers to the creation, to the galaxies, to star systems, to planetary systems, and to consciousness. In each case you may see growth from the center outward." A center from which all spreads. This is the ontological definition of a heart—not merely an organ that pumps blood, not merely a chakra that processes emotion, but the locus of circulation itself. Wherever being localizes—whether as universe, galaxy, star, planet, or person—there exists...
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    46 min
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