Franco Cado: The Beautiful Problem | Sacred Sundays

Ross Tayler: Hello, I'm Ross Tayler, your host and guide for Sacred Sundays, a space to slow down, tune in, and return to what's sacred within and around you. I'm also a life coach walking alongside those who are ready to come home to who they actually are. These conversations are part of fulfilling that purpose, a collective exploration of what it means to live in connection with the sacred. Some weeks you'll hear a sound-based offering to open the space. Other times we'll simply begin in conversation. As it unfolds, this is an invitation into presence, connection, and the beauty of the unseen. If these conversations find you, please subscribe, rate, and share so others can find their way here. Pour a cup of tea, settle in, and let's begin.

Ross Tayler: Today on Sacred Sundays, our guest is Franco Cado. Born and raised in Mexico, Franco had a spiritual crisis at a young age, which led him to explore world religions, various spiritual paths, psychology, philosophy, myth, psychedelics, mysticism, healing, and more in search of answers. His questions included the nature of God, why are we here, and where are we going? Identity, the soul, suffering, evil, love, the purpose of creation, free will, truth, and more. To that end, Franco has worked as a counselor and youth worker and has used his own life to experience and experiment in search for his answers. Welcome Franco to the podcast. So great to have this conversation with you and to meet you, and I look forward to what we share together.

Franco Cado: Hi Ross, thank you for having me.

Ross Tayler: You're welcome. Franco, I believe you're going to start by reading a poem for our listeners, and I will hand it over to you to do that.

Franco Cado: Okay, so this is a weighty poem, so I'm going to give it a bit of an introduction. This is one of my favorite ones, and I think it really touches on a lot of the things that I have explored. It's by Kahlil Gibran, I don't know if you've heard of him. This is a poem in his book, The Prophet.

When love beckons you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you, yield to him, though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you, believe in him, though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. For even as love crowns you, so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth, so is he for your pruning. And even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, so shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn, he gathers you unto himself. He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husk. He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant. And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not, nor would it be possessed. For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God." And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love, and to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy. To return home at eventide with gratitude. And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

Ross Tayler: Thank you. I really appreciated hearing that. I have read The Prophet, and years ago I would have read that poem, so it was good to hear it again from a different stage in life. Thank you for sharing that. I think there's lots to mine from that poem. I want to start with what it is for you that the poem really speaks to. You said that this journey of exploring love has been a lifelong question for you. Where would you like to start with that?

Franco Cado: I started wondering about love when I was young. The first exposure that I had to love was my mother, so I asked my mother, what is love? I don't remember her explanation. But I remember asking her if she loved my father and why she loves him. She gave me some reasons. Then I wondered, okay, if he wasn't those things, would you still love him? My mom is a very practical woman and she said, no. So I started thinking, well, that sounds conditional. Isn't love supposed to be unconditional?

Then I started hearing about Jesus, because I grew up in Mexico and was taught about Jesus at school. I heard that he had unconditional love for us. The obvious question that follows is, if God loves us, Jesus being God loves us, why is there suffering in the world? That's been a big, big question that's taken many decades of exploration. This poem alludes to it in a way. It talks about love as a perilous journey, a process of purification, and an offering to the world. He brings this metaphor of the corn turned into bread, which I think is an excellent metaphor, because the corn goes through quite a process to become edible. But in the end, he says it becomes sacred bread for God's sacred feast. There is something there that really catches my heart's attention about love and suffering as perhaps a transformation for some sacred purpose. I'm not fully complete in that answer, but it's a beautiful poem.

Ross Tayler: I agree. As you were sharing that, it made me think of a few things. One of them is that love has definitely brought me to my knees more than once in excruciating ways. As much as there's beauty when love ends, it can be very difficult and challenging, at least the version of love that I was experiencing at those times. At the same time, I'm grateful for the process I went through in learning about that. I think about all the shadows, because relationships are a reflection, but that's not where love only lives. It's in so many places.

I also think about a specific psilocybin journey I had, when the medicine showed me basically what came down to a beautiful problem. On one hand you've got love and on the other side you've got the pain, and together it makes this beautiful problem. I kind of understood it, but I've been really contemplating that for a while. So I think I'm with you, because we've all been sold the Hallmark version of love and the movie version of love, but I think there's so much more to it. As you said about the poem, the bread being served to God, there's a piece of us playing out something that we might not fully understand, or why. I imagine us all playing a certain part and a certain role. Anything that I've said that you'd like to respond to?

Franco Cado: There are several things coming at the same time. You're talking about the pain and love. What is your insight about what the pain is? Because I have an idea and I think there's something in there in the poem as well, but I want to hear your take first.

Ross Tayler: Well, what I didn't say is that grief and love seem to be interchangeable. They're interrelated. The loss of someone in relationship brings on that grief, but it's the pain associated with losing love, or at least the perception of losing love.

Franco Cado: Wow, okay, you're opening up so many doors here, Ross. Let me see how many tabs I can keep open in my mind. You're talking about grief and love being together. One of my teachers would agree. He would call it grief and praise. I think grief and love is just as interchangeable in terms of the meaning of it.

I remember when my cat died, a very dear being to my heart, very, very close. It was a soul connection. She was a very, very special creature, and she had a horrible, agonizing death. It was brutal. When she passed, this well of grief just poured out of me. It would seize me and it was cutting and deep. But if I was able to be still and clear in it, I could see that the grief was really only about two things. For me, I'll speak about my experience. At its depth, it was about the times that I remembered failing to love her as much as I could have, and also the unbearable sweetness of the love that we did share that now had come to a close. So the grief, I realized, was about love. It was an expression of love, but so sharp and so cutting that it came out in this beautiful pain, unbearable but beautiful. So I do think you're right that there is a deep connection between grief and love.

Ross Tayler: Yeah. I wish I knew who to attribute this to [?], but someone said that grief is the love that didn't get to be expressed. The love that can no longer be expressed, which is essentially what you just said.

Franco Cado: Yeah. Rumi said it best. In one of his poems he has a couple of lines where he says everything has to do with loving or not loving. That's all there is, all the drama of human life is about two things. I remember thinking about it really deeply and thinking, I think he's right.

Ross Tayler: Yeah. I'm really a lover of acknowledging and finding and being curious about the patterns that we play out in our lives. I love these simple truths. There was another book, Emmanuel's Book [?], and it said fear or love. In that book it was expressed the same way, that we're expressing either fear or love. It's like, wow, if it all comes down to those two things, but it's also all of the experiences in between. I have a love for shadow work, and that's about becoming more whole, which can also be expressed as love. The more whole I am, the more I am a reflection of love and all the versions of love.

Franco Cado: In this quest for truth and for understanding God and creation and all these things, I kept thinking about what's at the bottom. What is the fundamental source? Because it can't be two things. It can only be one thing, one source. So there's this binary of love or not love, love or fear, love or hate, this or that, self or other. I think at some point those things collapse. But what needs to happen is that our understanding of love has to expand beyond what we're used to and beyond what maybe we're comfortable with. The poem alludes to it in some of the lines.

For example, being a counselor, we're taught that there are six primary emotions: fear, anger, sorrow, love, calm, agony. You can substitute different emotions, and there are different theories about that. But if I reflect on it in my own experience, in my own feeling, I think they're all expressions of love in a way. I am angry when something that I love is being threatened, myself possibly. Fear is another expression of love. I'm trying to protect something that I love, namely myself or something else. All the emotions, I think, in some permutation can be traced back to love. I think so. I'm not 100 percent sure, but as far as I've gotten, it seems to be around there.

Ross Tayler: I resonate with what you're saying about perhaps our limited understanding, or limited ability to express it through words. Again, to go back to plant medicine, I had an experience which was not just this side of the coin or that side of the coin. It literally felt like in order to see what I was trying to see, my body was contorting. I find with some of these experiences it's hard to put into words very clearly, but in order to try and understand it, I was contorting and twisting to try and see what it was, and I couldn't. I couldn't understand it from this perspective.

Franco, we'll switch gears a little bit. You said you had a spiritual crisis when you were young. Would you like to speak about that?

Franco Cado: Sure, yeah. I grew up in Mexico, which is Catholic. I was always a child with a vivid imagination, sensitive to ideas. I like to imagine. I grew up with Catholicism in the background. I knew the basics: God is up there, God is good, the devil is down there, he's bad. If you're a good person, you go to heaven. If you're not, you go to hell. That's all I needed to know, as far as I was concerned. In my mind, someone is minding the world. Someone is holding everything together, existentially, metaphysically, in the ultimate sense. So I had really no worries.

Then in high school, learning about science, chemistry, physics, biology, I'm putting two and two together in my mind and realizing, wait a minute, what you're teaching me here as scientific fact contradicts what I've been taught about the spirit world. I approached my teacher at the end of class one day, and I could sum up everything into just this one question. I asked her, what happens when we die? She said, very matter of fact, well, your brain rots and that's it. Just like you turn off the TV, lights out. I thought, holy crap, you're right. I could see it. I could understand that from everything I'd been learning about biology and chemistry. I thought, yeah, that checks out. That's it. There is nothing outside of this, nothing beyond this. And the implications are enormous. If there is no ultimate source, no ultimate being holding everything, morality is subjective. Purpose and meaning are also subjective. They don't exist. So I was thrust into nihilism literally overnight.

I was shocked that there weren't any alarms blaring and people weren't running around in a panic trying to figure this out, because this breaks the world. I saw we're pretending to have meaning and purpose when we're not really sure that there's anything beyond here, and trying to invent meaning and purpose through money or power or whatever. I saw a lot of that in Mexico because it's very corrupt in terms of politics. I saw a lot of people looking out for themselves at the expense of others, chasing some sort of security. In that moment, I decided I wanted to find answers. So the rest of my life was really about looking for answers in any way that I could.

Ross Tayler: That is a massive awareness in terms of questioning what is real. I can understand why you've been exploring those questions for what is now a lifetime so far.

Franco Cado: I started with philosophy first because I thought it would give me answers. Then I realized at some point it was all castles in the sky, all just mental construct, and I was plunged into such a deep depression. I was already sort of depressed from the nihilism of realizing that there's possibly no meaning to anything, and then this was another big defeat. So I switched my majors in university a few times and started studying other religions. It was like one gigantic maze after another, for so many years, looking, finding teachers, reading hundreds of books, all sorts of things. Eventually I was led to psychology, because I realized that if I want to apprehend the truth, how will I know that I'm not distorting it with my own biases, with my own cognitive distortions? So I studied psychology. That's what I graduated with from university. But then I realized it has to go deeper. It has to be about healing, trauma. So I became a counselor. And then here we are.

Ross Tayler: Amazing. You're reminding me of a book I read called Eastern Body, Western Mind. I'm not sure if you ever came across that one.

Franco Cado: Yeah, yeah.

Ross Tayler: I think it attempts to merge these esoteric teachings and look at where they match up with Western psychology. I loved that book. I thought it was really helpful to look at it from those two perspectives.

Franco Cado: Was that the one about the chakras and psychology? Yeah, I've read it. I really liked it.

Ross Tayler: Yeah. One of the things I'll ask you about is something I've heard recently and over the years. We're trying to look at things from the science perspective, and then we're also trying to look at it from the spiritual perspective, and because we're looking at each silo individually, apparently we're going to come to a time when those things start to merge and that's where the true answers come from. To your story, science hasn't been able to really explain consciousness and what that is, and consciousness seems to exist outside of science.

Franco Cado: Okay, I have some thoughts on that. My first education was university, which of course was very science based. Eventually, having left that environment, I realized how much science is like religion. They have their dogmas, they have their biases, they have their hallowed beliefs. To really understand science, I had to understand history. The scientific revolution really took off, as I understand it, and I'm sure some historians would have some nuance here, as a counter swing from the Dark Ages, with the oppression of the church in the Western world. If you look at history, there are a lot of swings from extreme to extreme. We went from that age of oppression and superstition to, no, no, no, we're done with that because that brought us so much collective pain. Now we need physical facts, verifiable. Now we're sitting in this other direction that is so stringent about its views that it limits itself.

But at the core, science is about the scientific method, which is basically that you witness some phenomenon you don't understand, you come up with a theory, and you test it and refine it over and over again. That's it. So things like consciousness or mystical experiences shouldn't be outside the purview of science. They really aren't. I think what you're talking about is the merging of the Western spirituality of scientism and the Eastern spirituality of mysticism, without the dogma on either side. That would be nice when we get there.

Ross Tayler: It would be brilliant. So many of these wisdom traditions are thousands of years old. I had a short experience studying Tao in the Okanagan. This was Tao that was passed down through the generations through Chinese people, and it was taught underground. I remember this one moment where this teaching was brought forward, and literally it was the medicine wheel, the colors of the medicine wheel, the corners of the medicine wheel. I was like, wow, this precedes so much of what we see here in North America in terms of those teachings. I thought, isn't that interesting? Where did this all really come from? What is the actual origin of this information? That's just anecdotal, but what I wanted to ask you is, there's this theme that I notice when I talk to people on the podcast, which is that we put so much emphasis on looking for answers and things outside of ourselves, and really it seems like we're being invited to look internally. In other words, the answers are in us, in our DNA, in our makeup, and yet we're being so distracted to look outside. When you talk about the origins of religion, my take is that it was both helpful but also a distraction, because we're so powerful individually, and that's what these mystic traditions speak to. What would you want to add to that?

Franco Cado: See, I love playing devil's advocate. That was one of my main tools to find truth, always trying to find the other angle. I guess my question becomes, if we're supposed to look inwards, then why is there an outward? Why the world? Why create it? Why multiplicity? I think what we need is a balance. As an example, I know people that are very inward and they only listen to their own intuitions and their own ideas and beliefs and perceptions, and they can be quite deluded in my mind and not have balanced, healthy lives. So I think it's an interplay between the outside and the inside that has to be matched up in harmony. The outside will reflect whatever is out of harmony in you, then you go inside looking, and you fix that, and it reflects on the outside, and then it gives you feedback.

Ross Tayler: Sure. I presented it very simply, so you're right, it is both. It's ultimately coming into balance with both, as you very nicely stated. What I loved about Eastern Body, Western Mind was that they spoke about these imbalances and how they play out on the other side, the polarities. Voice is such a great example. If you have someone who is talking too much versus someone who doesn't have a voice, those are two extremes. We want to find the middle ground, which is having a balanced voice.

Franco Cado: That reminds me of the theory of the archetypes, if I may take it in a bit of a different direction, or open another Pandora's box here.

Ross Tayler: Please do.

Franco Cado: I'm assuming you're familiar with archetypes and I'm assuming your listeners are too. For example, the archetype of the king. When it becomes imbalanced or split, you get too much king energy, leadership energy, or too little of it. On one end of the spectrum you have a weak link, somebody who gets stepped on all the time, has no decisiveness, has no capacity to lead. On the other hand, you have a tyrant, where it's all about what they think is right and screw everybody else. The interesting solution is not to be lukewarm in the middle, a little bit of this or a little bit of that. You actually have to embrace the totality of the polarity, but have the discernment and the wisdom to know when to yield and how much, and when to be decisive and how much. So you have access to the full polarity and you know exactly the right use of it at the right time.

Ross Tayler: That brings you back to what we were talking about before, that moment I shared about trying to understand each side of the coin and having to contort. You just expressed that in these archetypal energies. It's about flexibility, about being able to weave with things rather than be one or the other.

Franco Cado: Yeah, that's right. It's not about being lukewarm, but knowing when to be cold or when to be hot, and being flexible enough to weave through the totality of it at any point. That's true freedom.

Ross Tayler: That reminds me of the infinity symbol, the yin and the yang, right?

Franco Cado: Yeah. I'm curious about your medicine experience. What were you trying to see when you were contorting?

Ross Tayler: I don't know that it was about trying to see something. I think I was being shown something. There was some symbology that I had seen in psilocybin journeys frequently. In the ayahuasca journey, which was very recent and my one and only time having done ayahuasca, it was showing me that same symbology, but I was able to take it a bit further and start to rise through it. It's really hard to give it words because it doesn't match up with things I could describe in this world. But essentially, if I had to give it words, whatever it was that I was looking at was at the edge of death.

Franco Cado: The edge of death.

Ross Tayler: It was a slow diminishment of life force, you could say. The experience was getting to see the other side of that, the rising up of that energy. I had never really been able to get to that energy rising up again. I was able to contort and see this other perspective and shift to it. That's the same kind of imagery that I saw when I was shown this beautiful problem. So these very deep things have unfolded over time.

Franco Cado: Wow, so life and death. Death is huge. That's a big one.

Ross Tayler: Yeah, life and death. I'm not even sure why I was being shown that. Sometimes these experiences link very clearly to life experiences, but this one, I've always felt like I'm being shown something that is much bigger than I understand.

Franco Cado: Maybe it's homework for you to unpack over your lifetime.

Ross Tayler: Yeah. In terms of your work, what has your attention right now? What are you excited about? What's your most recent discovery that you're integrating or working with?

Franco Cado: I can speak personally, or about what I'm working on understanding about reality. Personally, I have been exploring hope. My years in this existential wasteland searching for answers, nihilism, really made me a bit of a pessimist of sorts without really meaning to. Also the sort of environments I was in as a youth worker, I saw the worst kind of suffering. I realized hope is such a courageous act of opening. That's really at the edge of my growth at the moment, to have hope for a better tomorrow, for healing, for things turning out okay.

Love and connection is another thing I have been exploring very deeply with my new partner, and this idea of interdependence. We're sold in the West this idea of radical independence. Even in the counseling world, you're taught to be emotionally self-sufficient. It goes so far as to say that you don't really love anybody else, that other people just inspire you to open up your own love. It's almost like solipsism, like nothing exists outside of yourself and your own experience. On the other extreme, of course, is total codependence. Finding a union of those polarities is what I have been exploring. In terms of my metaphysical explorations, I've been exploring how identity creates your reality. That's where I've been at.

Ross Tayler: There are lots of places we could go with that. I think I'll stick with the personal side, because what you said about working with youth really reminded me of working in treatment. I worked in addictions as a program facilitator, and I saw people struggling at the depths of big life decisions, some decisions that were made under the influence that they couldn't necessarily shift or change. They were trying to step onto a new path, but they had experiences where in some ways they weren't in control, and they had to really address those things. I hear you about that part, and about how, when you talk about hope, I kind of lost hope about how to help in a good way, how to support those people in a good way. Is this treatment model even helping? Is it about making money or is it about really helping people? I really believed that people came for four weeks to stabilize and that's all we could really do during that time. To really heal takes years, and probably at least a year of wraparound support and programming. So I can relate to that piece about hope. And yet the people who showed up at the table around the circle had tremendous hope, and that served them well in a lot of cases. In other cases it didn't. I think hope is an important piece that helps us continue moving forward. Can it be misplaced? Of course. But there's something very inspiring about our capacity as humans to keep going even though things are very challenging, and hope is a part of that, I believe.

Franco Cado: Yeah, I think you're right. I think there is a certain magic to hope. Even on a more psychological level, if you're always expecting the worst and you're bracing for it, you're in this contraction because you're hopeless. How is that going to inform your choices? You're going to make smaller choices, smaller and smaller, and then it gets harder and harder to leave the hole that you're in. But with hope, if you're thinking, okay, this can get better, you start making bolder choices and you can chart a different path. I think hope on some levels is essential for healing. I don't think you can heal unless you truly believe you can heal.

Ross Tayler: You just reflected what the medicine was trying to show me. That's literally the way it was shown to me, this rising up of energy, and the hope was very subtle. It actually showed me a children's storybook. The book was originally this story that was just going down the hole, and then just by changing a word or two, all of a sudden it became a more sunny picture. All of a sudden there was life again. It's fascinating that you shared that in that way, and not surprising, of course.

Franco Cado: I'm glad, and I've lived that. I reached a point in my journey when I was so hopeless, so worn out. I was like the living dead. I was faced with a choice. I realized I can keep living like this, in living death, until my body physically perishes, still hopeless, small, not happy, not content, not living, or I can choose to believe I can get better and things can get better. It was just a switch. Like you said, you change a couple of words in that story and it spirals out. At the beginning it was just a very slight change of angle, but over time it compounded and I ended up having a completely different life that I couldn't have even dreamed of back then. So even a little bit of hope can make a big difference.

Ross Tayler: I think it's important to highlight that one isn't clear without the other. The experience on one side helps you more deeply understand the experience on the other side. That's the piece of the beautiful problem as well. You can't have one without the other. They coexist, and they might coexist for reasons that we cannot really understand. You talked about having that question, not your words exactly, but if we have this loving God, why is there so much suffering? It doesn't make sense. Somehow they're both interconnected in that experiential way, if we choose it. To that end, we're all living out some iteration of that, perhaps for Creator, perhaps for God, whatever that looks like.

Franco Cado: God's sacred feast.

Ross Tayler: Exactly.

Franco Cado: On the cosmic level, I don't know that I can answer that question of why there is suffering. But on the personal level, I agree with you. I had to touch rock bottom so thoroughly that I was able to make that choice. I know this path of hopelessness really well. I am no longer interested in it. I want to choose something different for myself. On some really, really unconscious level, I was just trying to explore the totality of that terrain of hopelessness and hope, but you cannot know one without the other. I had to fully explore one before I was ready to take the other. A lot of people in addiction say they have to touch rock bottom before they can start getting better.

Ross Tayler: Yep. I think we're nearing the end of this conversation for today, anyway. I think that's an interesting piece, because the only people who can make that decision are the people who are suffering. It's interesting being in professions where we're trying to help and guide, when really someone has to hit that place on their own before they can realize true change. Can we hold them in that space? Can we guide them? Yes. But it's very subtle. I remember working at a specific treatment center where the staff really wanted to help and fix, and it wasn't helping, because that person needs to realize their own moment of, I want this, or I want to strive toward this goal. We can't give that to anybody. They have to find it themselves, and until they do, those around them need to watch them suffer, but we can be there. I learned that as a support staff when I was doing that, that my job was just to be with these people who were having their experience. It doesn't feel like enough, but it is enough.

Franco Cado: Yeah, I agree with you. That's profound. I know that feeling well and I get what you're saying.

Ross Tayler: Thank you. All right, Franco, there's always a moment where we could go down more rabbit holes and have more conversation. I always throw out the seed that maybe that's an invite to have a second conversation at some point. And I always close with the same question, so I'll ask that question of you. What is one simple way someone could connect with the sacred today?

Franco Cado: In light of our conversation, I would say to have the courage to hope in something in your life that you're hopeless about right now. Just even in the safety of your imagination. What would it be like to have hope about this hopeless thing? How would it feel? That might be enough. It was enough for me at one point.

Ross Tayler: I appreciate that contemplation. I think that's a great perspective to have someone explore. Beautiful. So Franco, I really appreciate this conversation and the places that we went and the exploration that we had, both sharing back and forth. I can really feel the experiential aspect of your journey, and how you haven't just explored what you've talked about in a textbook. You've been living it, walking it, being curious as you walk through life, and it really shows. So thank you for sharing that with our listeners and being willing to have this conversation.

Franco Cado: Thank you, Ross. My pleasure. Nice meeting you. Thank you for having me.

Ross Tayler: You're very welcome. If anybody wants to reach out to you, you've given me some contact information, and I'll put that in the show notes.

Ross Tayler: Thank you for joining us on Sacred Sundays. I hope something in today's offering spoke to your spirit, stirred something true, or simply gave you a moment to breathe. If this conversation resonated, please subscribe, rate, or share. It truly helps this work reach the people who are meant to find it. Until next time, may your day be slow and sacred.