Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
described Christianity as both the belief system and that it has a
potentialism mirror; is it all in the eye of the beholder?
RICHARD YOUNG: Is it all in the eye of the beholder?
TRIP: Yes, I mean Christianity, for some people it's a belief
system, and then for others they look into it and it's a mirror into
the Truth of who they are. It's both; it depends on who's doing the
looking?
RICHARD YOUNG: Yes, I believe that's true. And I've certainly
been in both places with Christianity where it was a belief system,
and I pursued that belief system with rigor, and came to the end of
it basically. I've always said that organized religion plays a very,
very important role I think in the lives of people, and I don't ever
want to diminish that, it was incredibly important to the journey
that I took. But I also say that organized religion is probably
something you have to graduate from sooner or later.
WIZARD: Yes, school's out.
RICHARD YOUNG: Yes, school's out and then you're on your own
to discover your own Truth, and so I've seen it from both sides.
TRIP: One last question about Christianity. What's the difference
between Christianity and Christian Mysticism?
RICHARD YOUNG: Oh, wow. It's night and day in my mind.
Growing up as a Christian in a traditional southern Baptist
tradition, I never heard about the mystics. And I discovered them
through Merton actually. And then when I started reading the
Christian mystics, especially Meister Eckhart, I was blown away,
where these people have been all my life [Laughs]. Why didn't
somebody tell me these people were here? And so I made a study
of the Christian mystics and actually taught a long series of classes
on each of the mystics, and was just blown away by that tradition.
They know and they knew exactly what we're talking about this
morning, they knew that the inner landscape, that the inner
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