What is interweaving faith? Do you believe that the measures of success are beyond material and worldly things? In this episode of the Science of Superpowers, host Tonya Dawn Recla and guest Sy Garte talk about the value and importance of interweaving faith and everything connected. Sy Garte has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. For most of his life, he is a research scientist yet believes that music and writing are his superpowers. Tune in and join Tonya and Sy to tackle more about the Law of Attraction, Law of Reciprocity, spiritual enrichment, and walking your path.
Tonya Dawn Recla:
Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us again at The Science of Superpowers. We have another really delightful conversation today with the author of the book The Works of His Hands: A Scientist’s Journey from Atheism to Faith. So I know I’ve got your attention now. And so I’m going to tell you a little bit about our guests and about this topic before we jump in. We’re going to talk today about interweaving faith and everything. And as you know, one of my passions is making sure that we are really getting clear with ourselves about what we believe, because that dictates where we create from, and where we create from dictates the world that we get to live in alone and with each other, what we get to experience. And so for those of us who are really very interested in creating an enjoyable experience here for ourselves, this is the conversation. At the root of that is ultimate, we have to walk it back to what do we really believe about who we are, why we’re here, and on all of that fun, the meaning of life stuff.
And while it may sound like it doesn’t have anything to do with finding your next job or deciding where you’re going to live or what career, or should you marry this person, or should you stay with this person? Maybe that seems like those conversations happen in a vacuum outside of that. And they often do. And I propose that that’s part of the reason why people feel so confounded about them and don’t know how to kind of get ahead of that. And so we’re going to talk today about the value of and the importance of and kind of how to interweave faith, how to thread that into everything. And for those of you who aren’t really sure you like that word faith, right, you can certainly replace that with love, with truth, with connection, with the divine, with all kinds of ways to describe it. But ultimately, it’s the willingness to align yourself with something bigger than how you’ve known yourself, and thus knowing yourself then as that bigness. It’s a beautiful dance that we all get to do here.
And when we do, then we start to understand things like the law of attraction and the law of reciprocity and how divine design works, and why we’ve been budding up against it all this time. And so this is a pretty big conversation. We’re going to chunk it down a little bit, because Sy Garte is such a beautiful, beautiful embodiment of this amalgamation of worlds, right, this walk of faith, this divine energy. You’ll feel it as soon as he starts speaking, and tied into these very practical rooted world. He has a PhD in biochemistry. This is the kind of work that’s being done, and I just feel so incredibly honored to be able to sit in this space and to invite in these conversations. So settle in and relax, and be ready to receive and join me in welcoming Sy to the show. Sy, thank you so much for joining us.
Sy Garte:
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having.
Tonya Dawn Recla:
Oh, absolutely, our pleasure. We’re going to start with our quintessential question here. What are your superpowers, and how are you using them for good?
Sy Garte:
Well, I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I can really admit to myself that I have superpowers, but I think if I had to describe something that I think I do well and for good, it would be writing. But I think of it more as channeling the word of the Holy Spirit, which infuses me at times, not always. Some of my writing is mediocre, but when it’s good, I like it. And I think other people have liked it as well, at least they’ve told me so. So I think that’s one. I think that another one is music. I grew up in a family where a lot of music was played and listened to. Since my family was also strong atheists, music sort of served as a, I would say, substitute for anything spiritual. You didn’t have any other kinds of spirituality. So music always has been very important to me. And we’ll probably discuss that a little bit more when we talk about interweaving faith in many things.
What I really think is important in my case is that as I became a scientist, and as you said, I was actually a very active research scientist for most of my life. I also was able at some point to understand that just being one thing, although sometimes it’s a path to success if you really worked very hard at one particular thing and don’t do anything else. But I think that success can often be hollow if you are ignoring other aspects of life which are really important. They may not seem to be at an early age. But everyone I know, including myself, has discovered at some point that there are other measures of success which are far more important than material and worldly success.
Tonya Dawn Recla:
I love that you said that. I do think that there’s an inevitable point that through the actualization process, given how most of us are programmed in developed societies if you will, where you kind of hit the point of, but what else? Right? What else is there? And for me, it’s like I had to check a lot of boxes. I really thought that… I matriculate through school. I was always smart, right, gifted, excelled in programs, graduated from the honors college, graduated the master’s degree. And it was just kind of this assumption that you just keep checking boxes, right? And it’s like without really stopping, going to what end, right? And at that point, it was to get a good job.
And I remember the moment, I think I’ve talked about this before on the show, but it bears witness again because I was counterintelligence. I was running around chasing spies. And it’s like, I remember the moment I sat there and realized, and yet it’s still just a job, right? Yes, it was national security. Yes, I stood behind it. Yes, I believe in what I was doing. But at the end of the day, when I was really, really honest with myself, there was something missing. And then I went and found my husband and we had our daughter. And even that was amazing, but I remember a moment there where I looked him in the face. I said, “Raising her cannot be everything for me.” And it broke my heart to say that. And I was like, what am I saying? What else could I want? And it wasn’t speaking to any sort of deficit of material things. It was me. I didn’t know where to find that wholeness for me. And I was so close, which was why sometimes those layers come off, right, as you burst into your wholeness.
But it was so important for me to say, “Yes, I have the most amazing life ever, and yet there was something that was missing.” And some people describe it as like this God-shaped hope in your heart, right? It’s like you. Where’s the fullness of you? And if we’re not willing to look beyond the material, we won’t find it. Once you stay in that long enough, that world becomes so much more real, and you start to look at the caricature, the cartoon that I described as like a perpetual funhouse, right? When I started looking out at the world. People playing their little roles and all of the threads of wait, what is going on here? Because when you have a vantage point that’s in alignment with the divine, you can see things, and you kind of get Plato’s allegory of the cave, right? You get the matrix. This is like a surface-level existence until you interweave that divine energy into things.
I love your story. And your book about walking that path from being an atheist. Can you maybe for folks who are like, eh, I don’t… They’re not totally sold on this notion, that’s not true, all of our people are in alignment. So the question would be now is how do you do that? How do you, like I get it, I believe that I want that, but my life is so not that. Where do I even start?
Sy Garte:
Well, I think maybe a key thing is the idea of openness, to be really open to the world, to everything that’s out around you, and that’s trying to tell you things. The story I like to use, and I don’t believe it’s in the book, but I’ve told it a few times, is I was driving one time in a place I didn’t know, in the middle of the country, and I was trying to find a particular location. It was very dark. It was pouring rain, thunderstorms. I was very nervous. I couldn’t see where I was going. I didn’t know where I was, where I was going. I couldn’t get to a map. This is before GPS. And I had the radio on because I often listened. As I said before, I loved music and I was listening to some music, but I didn’t hear it, because I was so distracted by all my worries and concerns and driving the car and watching out for traffic and wondering where I was. And on the verge of panic, I didn’t hear anything.
And then all of a sudden, I heard the music. And it dawned on me that this music was beautiful. I’ve never heard it before. And I had missed so much of it. And I pulled over the car. I stopped the car, and I closed my eyes. And I listened to the music for about 15 minutes until it ended. And then I just drove right to where I have to go. It was two miles away. That experience taught me that lesson that I think we spend a lot of our lives that way. We’re so busy. We’re so involved in so many things. And it’s not that we shouldn’t be involved. We do have to be careful. We have to take care of ourselves. We have to fight back on it. But we also need those times when we just stop and listen. And we may hear music, we may hear the voice of God, we may hear something. And if we’re open to that, we will get a lot of guidance and a lot of just spiritual enrichment that we’re not expecting.
Tonya Dawn Recla:
Oh, I love that. That’s so beautiful. We’re going to cut to a quick break. I want to touch on a couple of things that you talked about here. But before we go, where can people go to find out more about you?
Sy Garte:
Well, I do have a website which is sygarte.com. And there, you can find obviously, links to the book if you like, but also you can sign up for a newsletter. And if you want to know anything about me, it’s all there in various tabs. So, sygarte.com.
Tonya Dawn Recla:
Beautiful. And we’ll have a link to that on the episode page, folks. And for our world over here, make sure you know what your next step is on the path that you’re hanging out in the network and listening to one of the episodes a day, tuning yourself. You’ve been in the middle of step one, and you might be ready for step two, which is our IM series, which are our videos, our weekly videos where you can learn with us as we can start to integrate some of these concepts into your life. Again, that’s our gift to you. It’s completely free. If you’d like to learn more about that, you can go to superpowerexperts.com, and click on step two. And for those of you who’ve been camping out in step two, start looking at step three into coming into those programs. You’ll know when you’re ready, follow your resonance. But for now, stay with us, because we’re talking with Sy Garte about interweaving faith in everything. And we are going to be right back after this break. Stay here.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Podcast: Play in new window
