 All right, so in this video, I'm going to share with you the history of my evolution in terms of my spiritual worldviews. I thought that it might be interesting for some of you because I have talked about my spirituality over the years, and I haven't ever made a single video that basically shares from when I was born until this moment all the spiritual stuff, the worldviews and the books and the religions and influences basically that has made me who I am today. And anyway, if this is interesting, maybe you should make a video for yourself as well. It might be interesting to remember all this and to have a bit of a personal history on this. So I've got some notes here. I'll be glancing down to the notes that we've known. And so it begins, obviously, when I was a child. A lot of people don't know I was born in Taiwan, Taipei, Taiwan. And back in the 70s and 80s, and maybe even still today, Taiwan's main religion, spiritual worldview, was what I've been researching this. And apparently we might call it Taiwanese folk religion or Chinese folk religion. A lot of people don't know Taiwan is, you know, people in Taiwan identify themselves as Chinese, even though this very politically fraught. And anyway, Taiwanese, Chinese, anyway. So Taiwanese folk religion or Chinese folk religion, the couple of deity. So basically we worshiped various deities. And I remember going to temples when I was young with my family brought me there. And these temples had different departments, different little rooms. And each room had a different deity. And this deity would be helping you with, you get incense and then you pray to that deity for blessings. Please help me with my homework or, you know, another room. Like, oh, please help my parents with their business. Another room. Oh, please help my family with their health or whatever. So these different deities would like, supposedly bless your life in different ways. And I remember two deities in particular that I don't know why I still remember them. One was Guan Gong. I'm probably mispronouncing it. Guan Gong. He was like a, like a red faced deity. And apparently I've researched this a little bit before this video and he's the Chinese God of War. So he was a warrior. He represents, you know, war and I guess maybe courage and fierceness and all that stuff. And so, and that was on the one hand. And the other deity was completely opposite that I remember, which is Guan Yin. Guan Yin is actually much more famous around the world. The Goddess of Mercy. The Goddess of Compassion. Guan Yin, Guan Yin, however you want to pronounce it, you can look these up. So these two deities were large in my childhood. One was a God of War and one was the Goddess of Compassion and Mercy. And so that's how I grew up. And, you know, most households that I went to as a child in Taiwan had altars that had a picture of an ancestor. So it was like ancestral worship, deity worship. Like it was a mix between Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. That mix along with sort of like folk religion was how I grew up in my first basically, you know, seven years of life. And whenever I visited, I got influenced by that again in the first couple, you know, my first 10 years I say. And then I moved, my family moved to Southern California, Orange County in the 80s. And back then it was, I mean, maybe now too, but it was very conservative Christian, like evangelical born again Christian was the main religion in that area. And not surprisingly, because I went to school there, I had friends there. I got converted from, I guess, I never really was a religion. I mean, when I say it was like a mixture between Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, it wasn't like we meditated and we reflected on the Taoism. No, folk religion was very superstitious and sort of like praying to the deities for blessings, that kind of thing. It wasn't, there wasn't much focus on personal development, you know. And so it was really when I converted to born again Christianity in my teens in Orange County, California, that was really when I feel like my personal development journey began, because that's when I started reading the Bible, mostly the New Testament, but some of the Old Testament and learning how to love others, learning how to be humble and to be disciplined. And basically it was the Billy Graham Crusades that converted me. I don't know if you know Billy Graham Crusades, rah rah, like giant stadiums and awesome music and just a lot of like feeling like, oh, come to the front if you feel the spirit, very charismatic Christian type of thing. And then that was true of my religion throughout college. And I really, I still really value and respect evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity. I know, I know, it scares away a lot of you, right? But bear with me here for a moment. There is so much good there. I'm no longer that today, but I respected so much fundamentalism, born again Christianity, evangelicalism, evangelizing. I learned how to evangelize, how to convert people. That's another story I'll mention briefly. But there's so much goodness there. I felt such a depth of emotional development there. Deep gratitude for the Lord, for God, for life, essentially. Deep gratitude for the spirit world. Profound sense of friendship and camaraderie with my brothers and sisters in Christ. It's almost, well, some could say it's a cult. Now, cult, religion, what's to say what's a cult, what's a religion, what's a spiritual community? I mean, those terms are all melding into each other. I would say the more tight-knit the spiritual community and the stronger the teaching, the more cult-like it is. I mean, that's just the way it is. But the stronger the cult, I mean, if you've watched documentaries of cults, you'll understand this, the stronger the cult, the more kindred spirit-ness you find there. I've never had such a strong feeling of family and brotherhood and sisterhood. Anyway, that was my high school and college years. But also, I would say this, and then in my college years, I tried converting one of my professors, and it backfired, backfired. My professor said many things to me, mostly listened actually. But the thing he said that I won't never forget is, George, I can tell that you have such a passion for truth with a capital T, like ultimate reality, like you really want to find and live the truth. I can also tell, because of your Christian worldview, that you're very compassionate and you really want to listen to other people, to really help other people, to support other people. Well, how can you really support and help other people if you don't really open up to listen to their experiences, right? To really understand their experiences. And that really opened me up to start listening to the histories and the experiences of people from other religions, to really be open to that. If I want to live like Christ and to have that kind of true compassion and openness, then I want to listen to other people, truly listen and be with them. And not only do I listen to other people like in my school, but I also listen to other people in books. I went to the used bookstores near Berkeley and went to the religion and spirituality section, and my mind was completely opened as I really listened to other people. And my professor also said, and I started to have a bit of a crisis of faith, right? My professor said, George, this feeling you have of doubt is part of growth. He said, don't run away from uncertainty. If you're always so certain about what you believe, then how can you be open, truly open to listening to other people? If you're so certain, like I'm right and everyone else is wrong, who doesn't believe the way I do, how can you really learn the vastness of the world and of life and of reality? Because you're just only believing this. And that idea of uncertainty being a healthy thing changed my life. Because I started being, okay, maybe I can settle in and not be so scared and unstabilized by uncertainty. But be open to say, well, let me learn. Let me learn. Let me better understand the real experiences of other people. So that got in. The New Age books at Berkeley got me looking at the New Age at that point. And I should also say, let me look at my notes here. So yes. So I went from being a conservative, evangelical, born-again, fundamentalist Christian with a very narrow worldview about what is true, only what my pastor says about how to interpret the Bible. That must be true. They gave me lots of reasons, obviously, to believing everything. And I even had a couple of months where I started an online forum with my pastor and my friends who were all trying to save me, trying to save me back to Christ. And I had honest conversations with them on the forum. And they couldn't answer my questions about reality and about philosophy and things. All they could answer was their little tight, tight worldview. That's all they saw. That's all they understood. They weren't really open to listening to others. And I started listening. And of course, they always said something like, well, if you are so open-minded, it's kind of like you'll never find the truth because you're so open-minded and you'll get deluded and you'll get deceived by Satan and the devil and all that stuff. And I said, maybe, maybe I can always come back, but let me explore a little bit first. And so I did. And so I started believing everything, all the New Age stuff, UFOs, the paranormal. I started reading about everything and fascinated by everything. It was kind of like a bounce, a bouncing from one side to the other. And that became unitary and universalist, unitary and universalist. Everything's cool, all good, all religions, everything's good, right? Let's all learn about everything. Which, like I said, I so appreciate the good in all of this. I'm so grateful I had those experiences because then I could really appreciate the goodness of fundamentalist religion and I could really appreciate the goodness of everything is true, post-modernism, essentially. Like I believe and I accept everything and everyone and everything is true. And then I had some moments, I had another period where I leaned into Buddhism more, Zen Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism and I also became more, it was during the unitary and universalist period that I learned about integral spirituality, integral Ken Wilbur, spirit, spiral dynamics, which I still value very much today, spiral dynamics, very cool idea. You should look into it if you haven't looked into it before. And then a little bit of Buddhism. And then I came across a historical figure called Chico Javier C-H-I-C-O-X-A-V-I-E-R. Look up Chico Javier, Chico X-A-V-I-E-R, Javier on Wikipedia. There's a whole long Wikipedia entry about him. Remarkable, remarkable medium person. The medium is somebody who supposedly channels this embodied spirits through writing or through speaking or whatever. They channel the spiritual world basically. And this Chico Javier guy is unlike any other that I've ever heard of since. He was able to supposedly channel dead Brazilian, he was a Brazilian. He channeled dead Brazilian authors, philosophers, poets, and the academics would study Chico Javier's writings the same. This is right on. This is exactly the same style as these dead poets and philosophers and whatever. And this Chico Javier guy doesn't have much education, didn't have advanced education. Very basic, very like humble guy who was like a government administrator. And he channeled all these books. In his lifetime, he channeled a total of, get this, almost 500 books, 496, as of discounting, they're still discovering things. And he donated and get this, he sold, in his lifetime, he sold an estimated, you know how many copies of his books he sold? 50 million, 50,000,000 copies of his books. And so was he a wealthy beyond measure? Guess what? He donated 100% of his books royalties to charity. So his book royalties ended up founding something like 20,000 community centers all around Brazil. And so he was hailed as one of the greatest Brazilians of all time. He was such a humble guy, never like try to get rich, just donated all his money away and he's lived on his very humble government salary. Just try to help as many people as possible. And so that converted me for a while, for a couple years, into his religion called spiritism, which is kind of like a spin-off of Christianity, but believing that spiritism is very humble itself. Well, we are not a religion. We believe that you should learn science, you should learn other things. We are just wanting you to, now they believe in Jesus Christ as the Lord, but they believe that it was opposite from Christianity in that they believe that you go to heaven by doing good things in life, which I think is not a bad thing to believe. It makes people good, right? You do good works, you become a good person on the inside, and that's how you rise in the afterlife. You become lighter in the afterlife and rise more towards those fears of the spirit world to hang out with other people just like you, with the goodness inside of you. Anyway, so that was what I believed for a couple years, really, really supportive. Again, I saw the good there, really supportive. That took me into this whole world of mediumship and afterlife studies, and I really got influenced by Roberta Grimes. I interviewed her on my YouTube channel. You might want to look it up. You can look up George Cowell, Roberta Grimes, G-R-I-M-E-S. Wonderful interview about what happens when we die and all that stuff, and it really got me into the afterlife studies and, you know, after death. And it brought me back to something that... I'll go back to it. A couple other influences I don't want this video to go too long is I also got influenced a lot by Michael Singer's writing. Some of you really probably appreciate that. The Untethered Soul. The main one that got me first was the Surrender Experiment. Amazing book. Highly recommended. It's a page turner. You can hardly put it down. It's the story of his life. It's not a biography, but it was a story of a bunch of surrenderings of his life. It's a remarkable, remarkable story. He just surrendered to ultimate reality, to God, you might say. You know, like not worrying so much about his life. Michael Singer, you know, and then brought me to Untethered Soul, his most famous book. And I made a whole video about this on YouTube. You can look it up. George Cow, Witness Consciousness. Witness Consciousness. You can look it up. That brought me, eventually, somewhere in there, mixed it in, was Peace Pilgrim. She's still... I would say she's still my spiritual hero, my main spiritual hero today. Peace Pilgrim Lookup. Peace Pilgrim Audio Book. It's free. You can listen to it online in its entirety. That audio book has brought me so much peace in my life. Peace Pilgrim was someone who lived in her adult years, of 30 years in her adult years when she was alive. She lived without money. She just walked from one end of America to the other end of America, like several times, like just on foot. Never asked, never begged, only slept on the sides of roads, just kept walking until she was able to help people and never asked for money or food. She only received what was given to her. So she often was hungry on the side of the road, ate berries from bushes and things like that. But she gave so many people so much peace and her teachings have given a lot of people peace. Peace Pilgrim Audio Book. Highly recommended. Changed my life. And then I had some. About a year or two, I was really into the law of one, the raw material. I still really appreciate the podcast called LL Research Podcast. You can look it up, Google it. LL, the two letters, LL Research Podcast. It's about the law of one and it's kind of channel material. I don't know if I believe in all that stuff about the background of it, but I really appreciate a lot of their teachings. It's about service to other versus service to self, et cetera, et cetera. And then ultimately what has brought me back where I am today. Eventually I came back to something I started looking into in high school, which is near-death experiences, NDE's. And I was deeply affected by reading those stories. Started with Embraced by the Light. Betty E. Embraced by the Light was very famous in the 90's, I think. Anyway, near-death experiences. Today, these days, I listen to a lot of them on YouTube. I'll put a link to my favorite playlist that I've gathered all these NDE experiences. And the last thing I'll say is my favorite music today is still Christian music. I think influenced by my early days of becoming a Christian and the music was so unliving and not living for me. I'll put below a link to my Christian favorite Christian songs playlist. So anyway, I'm going to end this video. It's getting too long. So that's my history. Oh, last thing I'll say. Last thing I'll say, I promise. I also still really admire and respect atheists. I might be like surprised by hearing me say this. Because I believe that we are here not to have to remember everything we did in our past lives and believe in God. I believe we're here really to work on ourselves. Work on our inner selves. And you don't have to believe in a particular religion to do that. And I think I believe there's afterlife and all that stuff. But it's almost like a lot of the NDE's I've listened to almost say that it doesn't matter if you believe or not at all. It's almost like you're looking at a cheat sheet if you believe that stuff. Because it's like you know about the afterlife. It's almost like you're a little bit cheating a little bit. Not cheating. But it's kind of like you're getting some shortcuts. Whereas those who don't believe and still are able to work on themselves and really believe in this reality being the only one and work on themselves and become the best that they can be truly that is the hardest and that maybe is where they grow the most. I'm not saying believing in the afterlife is bad but I really respect atheists who work on themselves and be the best person they can be in their lives and to the people around them and bring as much love as possible to everyone. So that's what I believe today. That's where I'm at. I look forward to seeing if you connect with any of this and share with me any of your spiritual history below that you like. Thank you. Thank you for watching.