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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bob Peck
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August 28 - September 19, 2025
Religion, it seems, has tried to cover up the very spirituality that birthed it.
If we believe we are originally sinful, we have no love for ourselves. When we have no love for ourselves, we have no love for others.
Pelagius suggested that it is on us to choose to listen to our Divine Creator, but Augustine preached that we are even incapable of choosing, suggesting that the very choice requires God’s grace. From the Augustinian perspective, that’s how dirty we are.
Augustine’s false belief of original sin comes from the primordial Adam and Eve story, but it’s primarily a misread of the apostle Paul, not Jesus. If original sin supposedly comes from the Book of Genesis story, why doesn’t the Jewish religion have it? It doesn’t.
The Gnostics were a highly spiritual, esoteric branch of early Jesus followers who were eventually considered heretical by early Church Fathers, as I’ll discuss later. They suggested that the Loving Creator to which Jesus refers—whose love falls on all of us, like the rain (Matthew 5:45)—was an entirely different entity than the god who created this plane of existence.
Institutional Christianity has been so successful at programming so many billions (!) of people to not question scripture. To not question that angry, jealous god (Exodus 20:15). But once you do, what you find is beautiful, enduring, and powerfully transformative. Let’s go from fear to Love together, shall we?
There are exactly zero references to “original sin” in the gospels, the collections of stories of the life of Jesus. He’s more focused on teaching compassion, forgiveness, and how to be truly spiritual.
Unraveling fear-based institutional falsehoods is one of the most useful processes I have undergone in my humble experience on this planet. The evaporation of fear makes way for the True.
Honestly, I think so many of us came to the same questions Marcion and the Gnostics brought up in the second century, mainly: “how can a God of Love condemn us to a fiery eternity?” So we left Christianity. But I didn’t leave Christ.
“The next day, when they had come out from Bethany, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came to see if perhaps he might find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. Jesus told it, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again!” and his disciples heard it.’” —Gospel of Mark, 11:12-14 Very simply, the fig tree represents the old ways of ancient Judaism, which is symbolic to the Temple in Jerusalem.
The fig tree, cursed by Jesus, is a literary device. It is a political, cultural, religious, and even sectarian symbol for mainstream religion. If you don’t understand this, then yes it’s a pretty bizarre nonsensical moment. Hating on a tree. If you do understand the historical context and the symbolic meaning, you can understand that Jesus is bringing about a new interpretation of Judaism—focusing on inclusion, love, transcendence, as opposed to exclusion, dogma, judgment—and that the old ways of ancient Judaism will soon crumble, along with the primary temple of their faith… which falls
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When the vast majority of people read the Bible, they start with the birth narrative in Matthew, read all the way through it, then to Mark, etc, onto the end of John. They all sound relatively similar. This is called "horizontal reading", how we read a book from start to finish. Bible scholarship, however, begins to get quite interesting very quickly through "vertical reading", a scholarly method of analyzing a single plot point of one gospel in comparison to another. Then you begin to see just how distinct these accounts truly are.
To be absolutely clear here, the excessive, uncharacteristically harsh tone of his condemnation in Matthew, is a later addition on top of the portrayal of Jesus, created by the author of Matthew who was reflecting the tense political divisions of his time, decades after Jesus’ death. The author used this scene as an opportunity to denigrate his political opponents beyond the original event, as the two other gospel accounts are considerably more mild-mannered, and not written in that tense political climate. Sadly, Jesus's lengthy admonishment of the Pharisees in Matthew has been used
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The historical context provided does not completely invalidate Matthew, but it does strongly de-emphasize his criticism of the Pharisees as awful hypocrites, and it paints a far less divisive, more loving Jesus. Ultimately it’s a clear example that there have been political and cultural influences upon Jesus's original teachings. And that even before its formation as a separate religion, Christianity was quickly starting to misinterpret Christ.
The main point is that following the explicit, literal doctrine of religion can result in forgetting our common humanity.
Yogananda shares an important note on Christ’s attainment from his own endlessly-perceptive guru: “In this passage Jesus calls himself the Son of God. Though he was truly united with God, his reference here has a deep impersonal significance,” my guru explained. “The Son of God is the Christ or Divine Consciousness in man. No mortal can glorify God. The only honor that man can pay his Creator is to seek Him; man cannot glorify an Abstraction that he does not know.” –Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, quoted by Yogananda
A spiritual mentor once told me that the Christian religion only missed the true teaching of Jesus by one letter. It wasn’t Christianity, it’s “Christ-I-AM-ity”.
One of the most important lines in the Bible—to mystics, but truly to humanity itself—is Luke 17:20-21: “When He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation. Nor will they say, ‘Here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For remember, the kingdom of God is within you.”
The term “Gnostic” comes from the Greek “gnosis” meaning “knowledge”, but not analytical knowledge, more like intuitive spiritual knowledge: awakened information about existence, about liberation.53 This gnosis was accessible by the teachings of the master. It was the kingdom, inside.
“The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us how our end will be." Jesus said, "Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death." —Gospel of Thomas, Saying 18 This is particularly mysterious to the non-adept. No wonder mainstream Christianity doesn’t read this thing. He’s talking about the illusion of time. And how time is ultimately transcended with the inner realizations of presence, of detachment, of liberation.
"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. ‘ If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." —Jesus, Gospel of Thomas, Saying 70 Beautiful verse emphasizing the inner work. It’s not about external rules and doctrine. The practice is about traversing one’s own heart, and one’s own mind.
"He who will drink from my mouth will become like Me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will become revealed to him." —Jesus, Gospel of Thomas, Saying 108 There you have it friends, the explicit declaration that Christhood is attainable by all. It’s a similar read to the John verse on ‘becoming the sons of god’ (John 1:12) but it is especially clear here. By ‘drinking from my mouth’… by understanding my message that I’m preaching, you “will become like me. I myself shall become he…”
Among the variety of metaphysical truths Richard has affirmed over the years, one of the most powerful is that there are many paths up the mountain. One time we asked him if he goes to church. “We’re standing on it!” he said with a smile, implying of course that there is nowhere on this green earth without a sacred connection to the Divine.
He has explicitly confirmed my intuitive understanding: there’s only one summit—call it Liberation, the Kingdom of Heaven, Self-Realization, or Enlightenment—but you can get there, that one destination, in a multitude of ways.
The great saint Ramakrishna explained it simply: “You must know that there are different tastes. There are also different powers of digestion. God has made different religions and creeds to suit different aspirants. …The mother brings home a fish for her children. She curries part of the fish, part she fries, and with another part she makes pilau. By no means all can digest the pilau. So she makes fish soup for those who have weak stomachs. Further, some want pickled or fried fish.
“Where can we go to find God, if we cannot see Him in our own hearts, and in every living being?” —Swami Vivekananda
Laozi called it the Tao, or “The Way”, writing11: “There is a thing inherent and natural, which existed before heaven and earth. Motionless and fathomless, It stands alone and never changes; It pervades everywhere and never becomes exhausted. It may be regarded as the Mother of the Universe. I do not know its name. If I am forced to give it a name, I call it Tao, and I name it as supreme.”
Adi Shankaracharya, the Advaita master, refers to God as the “Supreme Self”: “Like bubbles in the water, the worlds rise, exist, and dissolve in the Supreme Self, which is the material cause and the prop of everything.” 12
Hinduism is the oldest active faith in the world. The Rig Veda (~1900 BCE) is the oldest scripture still in use today.16 “Truth is one; Sages call it by many names.” —Rig Veda
The Vedas carry the early creation stories, rituals, and songs, while the Upanishads came a few centuries later, giving us metaphysical commentaries that detail the nature of our existence.17 They explain the fleeting impermanence of all creation, and these seers (rishis), sitting at the peaks of the Himalayas, mapped our human consciousness with such sophistication that we’re still untangling them thousands of years later.
One of the most famous holy texts of Hinduism is the Bhagavad Gita. It is an excerpt from the Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic fifteen times longer than the Bible and eight times the length of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey combined.22 The Gita is merely a scene within its expansive drama, but it contains vital ethical explanations for Hindus and humanity at large.
Quite simply (reductively), the primary mystical messages of each of these avatars are: The Path to Peace and its Internal Nature Compassion to All Beings Releasing Dependence on the External World
*Yoga as defined by Patanjali in the fourth century CE, is "the stilling of the mind fluctuations", the discipline to do so. Not quite modern 'American gym yoga' but its ancient antecedent.
“Ask, and it will be given you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.” —Jesus, Gospel of Matthew 7:7
“The kingdom of God does not come with observation. Nor will they say, ‘Here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For remember, the kingdom of God is within you.” —Jesus, Gospel of Luke 17:20-21
“Seeking within, you will find stillness. Here there is no more fear or attachment—only joy.” —Buddha, Dhammapada
“Irrigators channel waters; fletchers straighten arrows; carpenters shape wood; the wise master themselves.” —Buddha, Dhammapada
“Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you.” —Jesus, Gospel of Luke 6:28
“The best type of yogi is he who feels for others, Whether in grief or pleasure, even as he feels for himself.” —Krishna, Bhagavad Gita 6.32
“Do everything you have to do, but not with greed, not with ego, not with lust, not with envy but with love, compassion, humility and devotion.” —Krishna, Bhagavad Gita 2.45
“Radiate boundless love towards the entire world above, below, and across unhindered, without ill will, without enmity.” —Buddha, Karaniya Metta Sutta
“We will develop and cultivate the liberation of mind by loving-kindness, make it our vehicle, make it our basis, stabilize it, exercise ourselves in it, and fully perfect it.” —Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya
“When one's mind dwells on the objects of Senses, fondness for them grows on him, from fondness comes desire, from desire anger. Anger leads to bewilderment, bewilderment to loss of memory of true Self, and by that loss intelligence is destroyed, and with the destruction of intelligence he perishes.” —Krishna, Bhagavad Gita 2.62-63
“A mind unruffled by the vagaries of fortune, from sorrow freed, from defilements cleansed, from fear liberated—this is the greatest blessing.” —Buddha, Mangala Sutta “I do not dispute with the world; rather it is the world that disputes with me.” —Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya
Buddha and Christ agree on the reciprocal nature of the universe: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” —Jesus, Gospel of Luke 6:38 “Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a polluted mind, suffering will follow you, as the wheels of the oxcart follow the footsteps of the ox. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.” —Buddha, Dhammapada
Hinduism is a beautiful, ancient amalgamation of beliefs and practices. The name “Hindu” is what the colonizing British called people east of the Indus River. What the Hindus themselves call Hinduism, is Sanatana Dharma. It means “the Holy Science” or “eternal Law”.44
That said, the essence of its greatest beauty to me is ironically one of its most commercialized and appropriated phrases: Namaste. The word on bumper stickers and tote bags and the window of every yoga studio sums it all up pretty well. Namaste is a Sanskrit word that translates to the equivalent of “the Divine within me, salutes and bows to the Divine in you.”
The most common misconception is there are “a million gods!”, which is not quite it. While there is a spectrum of worshipping multiple divine incarnations—some worship Vishnu, some worship Shiva, or Brahma, Shakti, Krishna, Kali, Durga, and so on—the One (or Brahman) is manifesting as the All. Every divine being, and every divine entity has the same underlying Oneness with all, and with Itself.
Within Indian philosophy, there are nine schools of thought. Six of these "orthodox" points of view accept the Vedas: Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Purva-Mimamsa, and Vedanta. The other three—Carvaka (no longer existent), Buddhism (with its wide spectrum of sects), and Jainism do not accept the authority of the Vedas and are considered unorthodox.
Within Hindu scripture, there are two main categories: shruti and smriti. Shruti means divinely-inspired, ultimate authority. Smriti are also very influential as well, but the translation means "remembered", whereas shruti means "heard" [from a Divine Source]. The Vedas are the primary shruti within the orthodox schools, while smriti tends to be consistent philosophically with Vedic thought: the great epics (the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata containing the essential Bhagavad Gita), the Puranas, and the Dharma Shastras.45
