In this exclusive interview, J Jaye Gold (Justin) takes us on a journey from his eclectic upbringing in the Bronx to his spiritual adventures around the world. With a rich tapestry of experiences and profound insights, he shares how his unique path has shaped his approach to spirituality and offers wisdom for those seeking deeper self-understanding and inner peace. MysticMag has the pleasure.
Can you please introduce yourself to our readers and share a few details about your journey?
I grew up in the Bronx with an extended family of Muslims, Jews, and Russian Orthodox Christians, my ancestors having emigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s from a small village in southern Russia with a tight-knit, multiethnic group. Despite the colorful stories I could tell about those days, I ultimately felt little attraction or fidelity to the religious sentiments presented to me by my well-meaning relatives.
My parents were both lawyers. The professional path, too, held little appeal for me. As a restless youth, I was always looking for excitement and action, and pretty early on I got involved in gambling. I became a regular at the racetrack and ran popular poker games.
By some fortuitous twist of fate, a family friend from Peru invited me to visit one summer. That encounter markedly changed my life path. Throughout my teen years and beyond, I came to know this man as a mentor. As my hunger for self-honesty and self-knowledge grew, I spent extended time with him in his village near Lake Titicaca and traveled with him in South America, Paris, India, Iran, and at a school in Afghanistan as well.
Perhaps due to the doors I walked through – or maybe by virtue of the doors I didn’t avoid out of fear of the unknown or the unfamiliar – I managed to learn an incredible amount about myself, human nature, and our human predicament.
What is your approach to spirituality and what are some ideas and principles you base that approach on?
A significant amount of what I teach is preparation for a meditation that offers a tangible connection to what created and maintains us at each breath. Much of the work I do with students focuses on this preparatory phase.
In our natural state, we have all the beautiful capacities we aspire to. But in the course of growing up in a big and complex world, we’ve taken on protections and add-ons that obscure our innate goodness. We don’t need to learn new skills or gain new capacities to become spiritual, we just need to remove the obstacles (e.g., self-pity, competition, pettiness, blame, etc.) to our natural state and innate human gifts.
Life is the school. By living boldly and not avoiding the challenges that naturally present themselves in all the varied circumstances of our lives, we can learn to see ourselves as we are, which can result in the falling away of some of our coarseness. I’ve developed some very precise methods suited to people from our fast-paced culture that’s so oriented to immediate self-gratification. By studying the micro-moments of our life, we can come to recognize our relative size and significance in the creation and feel the humility that is a prerequisite for meditation.
I’ve spent my adult years as a student of life and observer of human nature. I’ve paid attention to each step and pitfall along the way and can pass that on to others who seek elevated consciousness and inner peace. If someone is going to be able to help you spiritually, that person has to be there with you. That rules out everyone no longer alive and not close by—all of them.
Ultimately, I’m a meditation teacher. But there’s so much to learn and understand and leave behind before one is a candidate for connecting with the energy that keeps us alive.
As a successful author, what books have you written and why would you recommend them to our readers?
I’ve written five books, all reflecting my philosophy towards life and the spiritual pursuit, but each quite different from the other. My views are not conventional. If that attracts you, try one of my books.
My most recent, The Currency of Moments, is a hardcover coffee-table book comprised of color photographs I’ve taken from my travels paired with a sentence or two I wrote that was inspired by the images. I’m an enthusiastic traveler and have been all over the globe—from the tip of South America to the Arctic Circle and from Cambodia to California, traveling both east and west. Much of what I’ve put forth as a spiritual teacher is encapsulated in the book in a very condensed form. It’s geared towards these times when people have busy lives and short attention spans.
In Justin Time: Autobiographical Stories from an American Spiritual Master, I decided to recount episodes from my life, with each chapter revolving around an event that was the backdrop for something I learned.
In Highway of Diamonds, I wove the messages I wanted to convey through a story of adventure travelers who journey through Morocco, the Sahara Desert, remote eastern Turkey, and rural Thailand—all places where I’ve had wonderful adventures, both external and internal. When the story evolves into a high-tech kidnap/rescue operation—that part is fictional!
Another Heart in His Hand was my first book. I’m a big fan of novels and fairy tales and analogies because I think people absorb life lessons best through stories. I created a fictional story about two poker players who strike up a friendship based on their unlikely common interest in spirituality. As the two travel to different poker venues, one of the players becomes a spiritual mentor to the other. I’ve played poker myself and have learned some significant lessons about the nature of human behavior around the poker table. But I picked that setting for the story mostly because I love anomalies. I appreciate the juxtaposition of things that aren’t usually put together.
All my books are available on Amazon and the proceeds go to our non-profit organization, ccns-inc.org. If anyone interested in reading my books can’t afford them, they can contact me at [email protected], and I’ll send them one.
What services do you offer?
For the past 40+ years, I’ve made myself available to anyone who seeks my guidance. I’ve never asked to be compensated for my help, monetarily or otherwise, as in my opinion, spirituality and commerce don’t mix.
I’ve set up a community in the Sierra foothills of California for students to practice the methods I’ve developed to assist in the process of uncovering our natural state. I currently live and work with about 25 students. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that life is our school, so we involve ourselves in normal life activities—gardening, playing music, construction, traveling, and doing service projects around the world, etc.—and use these circumstances to explore unexamined concepts and expanded consciousness.
We have weekly Sunday Meetings where some of my students speak, and occasionally I talk and respond to questions. For those interested who can’t attend in person, they can connect via Zoom, and sometimes we post the meetings on social media.
On my website JustinGold.net, you can find audios, videos, and written talks I’ve given that will give you a pretty good idea of my perspective and approach to the spiritual undertaking. There are also links to my YouTube channel and Facebook.
My students have their own website, ServantsandHeroes.net, with info about public talks, special events, monthly newsletters, and social media sites. It gives them a platform to pass on perspectives they’ve learned from me––and verified for themselves.
They also put together a book called In the Company of Servants and Heroes, a collection of my public talks, including questions and answers. It’s geared to those already involved in the spiritual climb.
We have a non-profit organization, the Center for Cultural & Naturalist Studies ccns-inc.org, that offers disaster relief in the U.S. and works with underprivileged children worldwide.
To learn more, you can visit justingold.net and ccns-inc.org
