Fr. Seán ÓLaoire

And then instead of kind of identifying an enemy, you realize that all people are my brother and my sister.

We're all sparks of the divine.

So it's the very opposite, you know, of kind of identifying the enemy.

The third one, dehumanizing it,

You divinize it.

You realize they're all God in disguise.

And the fourth thing, instead of making war on it, you make love to it.

So when you look at the mystic and the fundamentalist, they're going in exactly the opposite directions through those four stages.

Yeah.

It's a powerful, powerful question.

And for me, when I think about it, it's that, you know, when we decided this vision I had where we created this, what I call a pre-cosmic cosmos, where we decided to create a cosmos, you know, and be observers, mere observers of it, and delight in how this cosmos was articulating itself.

And then the second one was, what if we were to create avatars, you know, and take up and play parts in this and experience it from the inside out?

What would that look like?

And at that stage, then, you know, there was the gift of free will.

What if you can do whatever you want, you know, as an avatar in the system?

Initially, the system was so devised or programmed or set up that it was actually perfect in all its orientations.

Everything worked perfectly, like a great clock.

There was no problems.

It just kept ticking over, you know, and it was delightful to watch it, you know, galaxies forming and stars being birthed.

But once you introduce participation in it, and you add to that the gift of free will, which means faced with any situation, you're making any choice you want.