Does Belief Have Value? The Story of My Spiritual Development | Chance Garton Interviewed on FKN
Chris Mathieu of Forbidden Knowledge News hosted me on his new podcast to discuss the story of my personal spiritual journey. Along the way we delve into a great digression questioning the value of beliefs. This was a good one!
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In this episode
Core themes
From Doubt to Creativity as Spiritual Path
Chance traced his spiritual path from a Midwest Christian upbringing through the film Zeitgeist and a stretch of atheism, and he said there was a power in disbelief that spiritual circles rarely discussed. He credited college writing and meditation classes with restarting his questions and teaching him the value of a daily practice. Chance described a first psilocybin experience and later visions that he took as previews of his future self. He then said he concluded that creativity was the one authentic and universal spirituality, which led him to start the InnerVerse podcast.
Existence Exists as a Philosophical Ground
Chance explained that every cosmology rests on some ground, such as the Big Bang for scientific materialism or a creator in religion, and he chose the simplest ground he could verify, that existence exists. He reasoned that non-existence could not exist, so there was no beginning and no ground beneath it. The host added experience and understanding to that, and Chance compared the growth of questions to the branching of trees, lightning and blood vessels. Chance said belief stops that branching, because a person who holds a belief typically stops asking, which he called a foundational problem with it.
Why Chance Distrusted Belief
Chance argued that belief was not the safe bet people assumed. He read passages from the writings of Reverend Robert Taylor, who called the argument that there is no harm in believing a last and reckless one, and Chance described it as fear-based manipulation. He separated what a person could know from what a person only accepted, and said an experience could count as knowing while interpretations stretched beyond it were the danger. The host described a personal experience that made him a believer in a higher intelligence, and Chance replied that unbelief was safer because it ruled out untruths while keeping possibilities open.
Evil, Imbalance, and the Devil as Symbol
The host asked whether evil came from outside forces, human egregores, or eternal archetypes, and Chance prefaced his answer as conjecture rather than belief. He argued from language that the names for God meant life and existence, so the adversary stood for non-existence. Chance said suffering had eventually made him stronger, though he stressed this was no justification for harming others, and he described the devil as a symbol of the principle that imbalance leads to disintegration. He added that magicians and shamans worked by restoring balance, which he said was also the basis of his own work.
Biofield Tuning, Centropy, and Balance
Asked about his work, Chance described biofield tuning as the centropic process of restoring lost life force to flow, and he said it worked better remotely, using tuning forks and a surrogate body of crystals and candles. He used the metronome example to show a coherent pattern entraining a dissonant one, and he separated stuck energy a client was aware of from unconscious beliefs set long ago. Chance offered a camera settings analogy for old beliefs that were never revisited, and said he was as keen to teach people the method as to tune them himself.
Quotes
“A lot of people have been on the bandwagon for millennia that reality is an illusion. But the truth, at least from my perspective, is that it's not an illusion, it's an allusion. The outer world experiences are alluding to your inner world, but that doesn't make it not real.”
“The only thing that's a real, authentic and universal spirituality is creativity, because that's the faculty that connects us to the very same thing that you would consider to be the divine, the origin, the source. Source makes stuff up.”
“Existence exists. There's no why or where or how, because non-existence does not exist. No such thing as non-existence. That's what non-existence means, no such thing. So for all intents and purposes, there is no beginning. There is no before that. There is no ground under it.”
“There's always going to be varying levels of belief no matter what it is that we're looking at, whether it be religious practices or individual pieces of theological stories or scriptures.”
“Now what about personal material experience that transcends both metaphysical and material realms? I say this because it is the experience I had on May the 4th that made me a believer in, at the very least, a powerful intelligence that is assisting me in my path.”
“The reason unbelief is safer than belief is that one is accepting things as true and narrowing down the possibilities, and the other is ruling out things that are untrue and holding on to the possibilities.”
“I think that as a human species, there's a lack of accountability throughout our existence as to what we consider is the root cause of our problems or evil in this world.”
“The next step on the journey is to learn how to do good for good's own sake rather than because authority told you it was good, and to come to find it within yourself.”
Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
