Father Greg Boyle (Homeboy Industries) | You Made It Weird

Father Greg Boyle (Homeboy Industries! Author: Tattoos on the Heart!) makes it weird!
#gregboyle #peteholmes #fathergregboyle #podcast

[@jeffreypressley41]

Pete is one of my all time favorites. He has always been hysterically gifted, and I’m completely addicted to this podcast. And I LOVE when it gets deep and spiritual. I’m not even done listening to this episode and I’m going to immediately replay it. Thank you Pete and Father Greg for sharing this conversation!

[@nickhughes4800]

I grew up Catholic but didn't continue going to church as an adult because some of the terrible things the catholic church has been involved in. Its people like Father Greg Boyle that give me hope that the catholic church still has incredible people.

[@michaelhill4183]

Thanks for interviewing Father Greg !

[@JustOneAsbesto]

Charles Joseph Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter, didn't just write in his will about his concern for his brain; he was trying to get help for like a year, and he saw multiple doctors and specialists, and they didn't take it seriously. They didn't have MRI or CT scans (really) back then, but it still seems like pretty gross negligence. He even told them he couldn't stop imagining doing exactly what he ended up doing.

[@thehaleybird]

After hearing you praise Father Greg in multiple episodes I'm so excited to hear you have a conversation together!

[@seanfinney6732]

Pete Graduated the same year as me and at the same high school in 1997 in a 250 person class and I can honestly say I only heard of him for the first time back in 2010. Either he was a real hermit crab in high school or miraculously we just happen to never meet in any case life is weird like that

[@jumowagames]

just discovered your channel. i have to watch everything

[@matt12.8]

I've been where you're at my guy. You're in for a treat

[@nataliewilliams3365]

Weird compliment: but i like the background music for the ads. It makes them more tolerable and it's a nice beat. You also don't change your tone to a weird fake tone which I appreciate.

[@ATHRUZEE]

Holy fuck. My mind is blown...

[@jonastronaut2942]

When will you interview Gerardo? the man behind the classic hit Rico Suave?

[@Vulpas]

You should do more video game content, that stuff was hilarious.

[@tingtang9302]

7:58

[@jokoch9288]

😊❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤😊❤😊😊😊😊😊😊😊

[@KingMinosxxvi]

I didnt delete it

[@nobodymorefailed9785]

kunimi xD

[@The_Matrix_I_Am]

Who is this "Richard" they keep mentioning?

[@nancyshriver3104]

Richard Rohr- another very open minded priest!

[@Denny_7782]

So he's Michael Imperioli from "This Fool"! Fuck yeah

[@DailySource]

A good interview, but since people on podcasts almost always only agree with each other and never debate in order to go deeper, here is some feedback: 1) Being cherished can be a positive thing, but much of the time it’s the opposite. For example, the person who was most cherished in Germany was Hitler and the most cherished person in Italy was Mussolini, and people cherishing them had bad results for tons of people. Also, many children in rich countries are overly cherished by their parents, and much of the time it results in narcicism, entitlement and expectations of (and attachment to) being cherished as adults. So they get upset or sad if enough people aren’t cherishing them enough, and/or they do things to try to get more cherishing… and so forth. 
 Also, even for people who weren’t raised like that, being cherished has a tendency to inflate our egos. So people being cherished is not a consistent solution. Yes there should be more of it in many places, but I think they overstate the case in this video. Likewise, there are better, higher levels of human development such as developing a consistent prayer practice and a strong relationship with God. By the way, I wrote this post not just for here, but to use a lot of these thoughts and explanations in the future on a website I’m creating about psychology and spirituality. I find it easier to write in response to things I come across, so I take the opportunity when it’s there. If you’re curious and open-minded about those topics, read this whole post, even if right now you don’t agree with a few of the things. I used not understand half of them when I was young.
 2) There are five very good reasons for giving praise and worship to God. a) it helps to reduce our ego; b) it helps connect us to a big, boundless love and peace. c) it helps to attract other people to want to look into God and try it out. Just like when you hear someone praise a musician, it often makes you want to check them out. d) it helps us put more focus on doing God’s will because part of praising God involves consciously or unconsciously realizing that God has more intelligence and wisdom than us. That realization helps us put more energy towards following God’s will rather than our own petty cravings. e) it feels good especially on a soul level. 
 

 Given those 5 benefits to us humans, it makes total sense for God to want us to praise/worship God. Pete and the priest are criticizing others as being too puny or making God too puny. But in this case, I think they’re making God too puny by thinking that: just because God doesn’t need our praise/worship, that God is not big enough to still want us to praise/worship because of how much good it does for us. God still wants this for us, even though God is smart enough to know that some people will misunderstand it and use it to attack God or to attack those who believe in God.
 
 Nasim Taleb, who is fairly secular and only mildly religious, makes a great point that the longer something has existed, the more likely it is true. He gives lots of evidence of this, and several reasons for it. One is that the thing has stood the test of time across multiple ages and eras. A lesson for people who think they’re “integral” and or who think they’re non-dual: you might consider being less quick to criticize the majority of long-term traditions in Christianity because a lot of them have very good and helpful reasons for existing. Consider trying to open your mind wider and bigger. For many years I was Buddhist and for some years I was Sufi (with a heavy emphasis on being integral and universalist), and I was quite anti-Christian. Over time, I’ve realized I was wrong about the vast majority of my prior thinking on Christianity. 
 3) While I’ve had plenty of mystical experiences including of unitive consciousness, one pitfall of a lot of mystics is to miscontrue what their unitive mental state means for the entirely of reality outside of their mental state. This tends to result in another pitfall, which is to oversimplify / flatten a lot of things. It tends to go kind of like this: “Since I had short or long states of unity in my own mind and it seemed simple, I therefore know a lot of things about the realities of the universe outside of my mind including that I know for sure that “everything is one” including that there is no such thing as good or evil, and that all of the evil in the world is simply God. And other various over-simplifications of a complex world. 
 The understanding of Christians is much more nuanced, which is along the lines of: ... Post is continued in the reply below ...

[@DailySource]

The understanding of Christians is much more nuanced, which is along the lines of: We’ve been given the gift of free will by God, so that we are not machines or puppets. The gift of free will inherently includes getting to decide whether to do good things or evil things. So God allows us to do evil against his will, but God itself isn’t evil. When we do evil, it falls into a void that exists outside of God. That is what Julian meant when she said that evil and sin don’t have a substance: they’re in a void. Some amount of people like Hitler do so much evil and turn away from God enough that they in essence choose to be in this void. 
 
Christians are told to refrain from making judgments on exactly who’s going to heaven and who’s not because only God knows based on multiple factors about each person. One of the factors is the trauma level of people like father Greg notes. But he kind of oversimplifies and flattens by then concluding that the existence of trauma makes sinning basically meaningless. Trauma is one factor, but there are others. God can hold multiple thoughts and truths at the same time, even if we (including myself and father Greg) can’t. Likewise, God is different from us, though we can connect with and eventually join into communion with God. As Bono and U2 sing: “We’re one, but we’re not the same.” A lot of non-dualists get too caught up on unity and are dogmatic about denying any and all dualities. The vision of Christianity is bigger and wider than that, and is aligned with the great Greek philosophers. The Greeks understood that there is more than one part to God: there is the Godhead which is the source (that Christians call God the father). There is also the Logos, which is the creative force that emanates from the source and creates the universe. Christians call that both Logos and Christ the son. The Holy Spirit is the love that flows between God and Christ. So God is all 3 of those, but is also “one” at the same time. The Buddha said that we have so much bad karma from our negative actions and sins that it will take countless lives of meditation and improving our virtuous qualities before we can burn off all the karma and reach heaven. Most of these lifetimes would be suffering as insects, rodents and reptiles. People who have unity states or awakenings will still have to come back for many more lives. For Christians, human beings being so off track and broken resulted in Christ volunteering to become a human as Jesus, and do various things to help humanity. This included giving very wise and helpful teachings including about how to treat each other, and how to make personal sacrifices for the good of humanity. It also included providing a model life that we can follow, including how to be forgiving when we are suffering as the victim. By taking on human form, it also allows us to more easily relate to and connect with Christ and the divine. Anyone who has developed a relationship/connection with Jesus will know how this is helpful. I thought it was total BS before I gave it a try. It also involved taking on a huge amount of our karma/sin so that we wouldn’t suffer the consequences of that karma. Jesus is offering an easier way, which involves a combination of trying hard to help the needy, trying to be virtuous and connecting/having trust and faith in him. The latter is needed in order for the first two to occur. If you don’t connect with him, it’s hard to have enough love to really tackle the first two. Unless you think he is divine, you also won’t believe what he’s saying about what we need to do to reach heaven in spite of our flailings. As a result, you won’t really pursue them. It’s a symbiotic interaction and synergy between all of the above. 
 Catholics put somewhat more emphasis on “doing good works” than Protestants. But both agree that we can’t do enough good works in our lifetime to make up for how off track we have been and still are, which is exactly what the Buddha also says. Both agree that plenty of help from Christ is needed. While some Protestants mistakenly say that if a person one time says they believe Jesus is divine etc., they’re set forever. But the majority say that if a person really believes in Jesus (which includes believing the things he said about what we need to do, including good works) … then that person will be doing a sizable amount of good works. So the good works aren’t what get them to heaven. But if they actually believe, good works will be the fruit of it. 
4) I think Pete and Greg are not understanding what the bishop said about God standing with the victims. Actually God is being compassionate towards the victimizer by not standing with him - in order for him to learn the right lesson from his wrongdoing. If God were to send lots of consolations of peace/love to the victimizer in the weeks/months after the wrongdoing, the victimizer would learn the wrong lesson. If God were to try to influence the people around the victimizer to make his life go better, it would also increase the probability of him learning the wrong lesson. In the period after the wrongdoing, generally the most compassionate thing God can do for the victimizer is to not stand with him. 
 And the most compassionate thing God can do for the victim is to stand with him as much as possible within the laws of the universe. I say “as possible” because God can send extra peace/love to the person, but she might not be open to it. God can send thoughts to the people interacting with the victim to try to get them to do and say things to help the victim. But the minds of a lot of humans are flooded with their own personal desires, fears, cravings, angers, memories and many other things. If they’re drunk or high, information from God doesn’t get through because God’s “wifi” signal is subtle, and drugs/alcohol cloud awareness and subtlety. 
 Most people aren’t even trying to listen for God and to discover God’s will. Even when they try, most haven’t been taught or learned how to do “discernment” of God’s will. So even when the information God sends to us does show up in our minds, most of us usually ignore it in favor of our desires. 
 Thus, most of God’s will falls on “deaf ears” and the amount of help that goes to victims is usually tiny. This is especially true in poor countries. In the US, there are 900,000 nonprofits and 95% of American donations go to nonprofits that only help Americans, where almost everyone is in the richest third of people in the world. Only 4% of donations go to the bottom half of people in the world, all of whom are trying to survive on less than $3,500 a year for all of their needs. 1/5th of them are trying to survive on less than $500 a year. 
 So in the US, most victims have about 1,000% percent more help than people in the bottom half in the form of nonprofits, government programs and their friends/family/neighbors who are in the top third of the world, and can help them. If a majority of people were listening to and following God’s will, they’d be consuming far less, and sharing far more with people in the bottom half. 
 ... Post continued in the next reply.

[@DailySource]

Part 3 of 3: 
5) When Pete talks about having big anger or absurd sexual fantasies 10 minutes after sitting in meditation or prayer, it raises a key point that’s present in both Buddhism and Christianity, which is the importance of the ongoing, long-term practice of virtues and morality … in addition to having a regular practice of prayer/meditation. This is a major blind spot of many liberals, including many of the so-called “integral” thinkers. One of the most impactful Buddhist teachers in the West was SN Goenka. His silent meditation retreats are deep and powerful and transformative. During the retreats, you clear a lot of the stuff out of your system that results in great anger and great lust. The practice is mostly mindfully observing your emotions, feelings and sensations with peace, and you end up letting go of and dissolving a lot of trauma, cravings and internal fallout from past misdeeds. 
 
For an hour each night, he gave a dharma talk. He frequently talked about the importance of morality, and said it and awareness/peace were the two wings of the bird to get to enlightenment. If you have strength in one, but not the other, the bird will tend to either fly off course or go nowhere or crash. This is partly because on one side, you’re cleaning up your past junk and karma, while on the other side, you keep creating more of it through unvirtuous living. A metaphor is it’s like if you just cleaned up part of a dirty pool of water, then dump a wheelbarrow of dirt into it. By morality, he meant the main Buddhist precepts of: a) not stealing; b) not having sex outside of a long-term committed relationship; and not sexually abusing someone. c) not having intoxicants that affect the mind. d) not killing. and e) not lying. 
You could do a 10-day silent retreat if you had been breaking the 5 rules. You couldn’t do a 20-day retreat if you had broken the first 4 rules since your last retreat … because they had found too often that people who were doing those things couldn’t handle a 20-day retreat. Things related to people’s unhealthy behavoirs would cause them significant emotional problems during the retreat. They would either have an emotional breakdown or need to receive a very high amount of extra support from the instructors. That wasn’t fair to the other retreatants who then got very little support, and were significantly negatively affected from not having support. Also meditation instructors are not psychologists trained in handling emotional breakdowns. While a lack of moral living isn’t the only cause of things like great anger or lurid sexual fantasies intruding on our lives, it is definitely a sizable cause - sometimes from our recent unvirtuous living and sometimes from our long ago unvirtuous living. Way too many western Buddhists and liberal Christians ignore this fact. Yes it’s true that Jesus forgave the adultrous woman, but he also commanded her to stop doing it. Liberal Christians should care much more about personal moralilty because it greatly affects the capacity of people to help others and make the world better. When a person is drunk, baked or hungover, it’s reducing their capacity. Also, the proportion of sexual abuse, violence, vandalism, stealing and lying that takes place when people are drunk or on drugs compared to when people are sober is a huge contrast. When people are having casual sex, it’s affecting their emotional health in negative ways, and reducing their capacity. 
 Capacity is negatively affected in many ways including: 1) our ability to be truly present for people in our lives who need us; 2) our ability to refrain from overconsumption and buying unneeded stuff in order to donate the money to those in great need. 3) our energy levels. 4) the amount of free time we have to serve. All the hours spent on unvirtuous living, plus on recovering from it, are hours not available to help with the numerous bad problems of the world. 
 
The Catholic Church and some other churches do a great job of “holding more than 2 thoughts” at the same time on this topic. On one hand, we shouldn’t be excessive about trying to be perfect all at once. It’s a process, and most of us don’t become perfect by when we die. On the other hand, we should push ourselves to improve. Spending only 3% of our time in sin is far better than 30%. On one hand, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up after we sin. Catholics refer to this as having excessive scruples, and should be avoided. On the other hand, we should confess after we have sinned, repent and try to do better. 
 
By the way, it seems Father Greg is likely taking Julian’s quote about sin out of context. She’s sort of means that sin doesn’t have a physical substance, like a chair has. She clearly says sin exists and that evil exists. She is actually making the same points that St. Augustine made in the 5th century and St Maximus the Confessor made in the 7th century. Augustine was one of the greatest philosophers in history. Here are links about Julian’s views on sin. The 2nd link also cover Augustine and Maximus:
 link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-011-9309-6 
 afkimel.wordpress.com/2017/11/09/the-nought-of-sin-and-the-blindness-of-god/ christianhistoryinstitute.org/incontext/article/julian Here’s a quote from the last link: She comes to such a sense of the awfulness of sin that she reckons the pains of hell are to be chosen in preference to it. Indeed, to one who recognizes the horror of sin, sin itself is hell. “And to me was shown no harder hell than sin. For a kind soul has no hell but sin.” So trying to use Julian to downplay sinning seems inaccurate to me. Jesus did spend considerable time with sinners, and was forgiving of them, though it was in the context of them repenting, and doing their best to reduce their sinning. He also put a huge emphasis on helping the poorest, and multiple times tied it to going to heaven. As described above, it’s very hard to really help the poor if your life is caught up in immoral living. So a reasonable degree of moral living, and capacity to help others go hand in hand. 
Interestingly, all of the great wisdom traditions of the world and the greatest spiritual masters in history (including Jesus and the Buddha) came upon this essential truth on their own in far away parts of the globe. It's curious how many people display pride in thinking that they somehow know better than all of the great wisdom traditions and most of the masters. Unsurprisingly, they especially do this in the area that gives themselves the most benefit: that they don't have to concern themselves much with virtue and morality ... and yet they'll be just fine in terms of going straight to heaven. They also tend to benefit from it in another way: by getting liked much more by a lot of people. If they informed people of the importance of morality, many would attack them as old-fashioned or being a downer. Of course, trying to help people isn't a downer, it's a positive. And the teachings of love and kindness are also roughly as old, so they are old-fashioned. But still some people take only the parts that are good for them and for how others like or praise them. And they leave out one of the two wings of the bird that could take them and others to enlightenment and God. At any rate, I hope you seek and find peace and goodness in God.

[@mskellye11]

I can see where you are coming from and I am going to disagree with your use of cherished. Hitler was not cherished he was idolized through propaganda. Same with Mussolini

[@SuperBrentendo89]

1:10:31 just had the funny mental image “God is Hamburglar”. Even though that’s not what he said. Haha

[@lilystargazer1343]

I wonder who the "cancelled" person was

[@travisk4215]

Easy on the gluttony, Greg. I’m totally kidding. Carry on. “If we were all to sit in a circle and confess our sins, we would laugh at each other for lack of originality.” -Kahlil Gibran

[@ebridgewater]

Re-upload?

[@thykix7483]

Your video’s too long :)

[@videogajima]

7:57

[@videogajima]

7:57