Jonathan Pajot is a French-Canadian artist and storyteller and philosopher. He is the author of Snow White and the Widow Queen, a new book about the need for awakening. In this episode, he talks about how we can reclaim Christianity as a meaningful ideology in the post-atheist period, when the devil has had all the best tunes and the intelligentsia have had the best riffs, when people seem more and more adrift from even the most rudimentary morality, and when a time that sometimes feels like revelations is being played out among us. He also discusses how the story of Christmas is related to the winter solstice, and how the sun is going down in the summer because the same way it is in the winter Solstice, because the sun s going down, and the next world is going to die in darkness, and that s a preview of the beginning of something that is, or preview of something, which is, let s say, a candle lit in the darkness. Enjoy this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand: A Christmas Special! Stay Free with Russell Brand! Remember, there s an episode every single day, 7 days a week, to educate and elevate our consciousness together. Stay Free, and enjoy the episode. You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they're not covering them, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth. Enjoy, and stay free! - Russell Brand - Stay Free! (featuring guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Veena Shiva, and Gabor Mate, and many more). . Thank you for joining us for joining our festive sessions of intellectual analyses. - and we really appreciate you, our listeners. ! by Russell Brand and the rest of the Awakened Wondering Wunderlist in a podcast delivering a podcast that elevates our consciousness, on all things of course, stay free, by staying free with us. by You Awakening Wonders to stay free with you, and to you, my dear friend. and thank you, and , so much, - Thank you, R. R.E. , R.K. (and R.J. ( ) - R. & J. ( ), and R. ( ).
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
00:00:05.000We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content.
00:00:08.000We will be delivering a podcast every day, seven days a week, every single day.
00:00:13.000You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are covering, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth.
00:00:23.000Once a week, we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate and many more.
00:00:31.000Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:34.000Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.
00:02:25.000On Zoom with Jonathan is much better for Christmas.
00:02:29.000I suppose let's think about where we are in this period of time.
00:02:33.000There are some people that will say this is the winter solstice.
00:02:36.000There are other people that will say that this period of festivity has long lost its meaning or perhaps has become a true symbol of the one global faith of materialism, rationalism, commerce and commodification.
00:02:53.000I wonder, Jonathan, how intelligent and awakened people can reclaim Christianity as a meaningful
00:03:03.000ideology in the sort of post-atheist period, when the devil has had all the best tunes,
00:03:10.000when the intelligentsia have had all the best riffs, when it can be harder and harder to
00:03:15.000access divinity, when people seem more and more adrift from even the most rudimentary
00:03:21.000morality, a time of despair, a time that sometimes feels like revelations is being played out
00:03:29.000How do you, and I understand that you use, like, you know, when we spoke briefly before,
00:03:35.000you said that, you know, sort of Eastern orthodoxy, I think is what you said, like, there are
00:03:40.000How is it that we find our way back to Christ, or at least back to the divine, in such a rational, materialist, reductive, and at some points painful time?
00:03:51.000Yeah, well, first of all, I would say the story of Christmas is a good story to think about that.
00:03:57.000You know, the story of Christmas happens during, you know, Caesar Augustus's rule, and You know, there's a sense in which Roman tyranny is established at the beginning of the story.
00:04:13.000And then you have these characters that can't find a home at the same time as they're facing a tyranny.
00:04:22.000And so, in some ways, the story of Christmas is related, by the way, also to the summer solstice, because the winter solstice is also the same, right?
00:04:30.000The sun's going down, the sun's going down, the sun's going down, and you think, that's it, right?
00:04:34.000We're just going to die in darkness, you know, things are going to get worse and worse.
00:04:38.000And then there's a surprise that happens at the bottom of the world, where, you know, a candle is lit, a flame gets, a candle is lit in the darkness, which Let's say is a preview of the of the next world or preview of something which is beginning.
00:04:55.000And so that is what happens when we feel like everything is out of control is we have to look for seeds.
00:05:01.000That's the best way to think about it because the big system is going to run out.
00:05:05.000And what's left to find is the new beginning, or the new seed.
00:05:10.000And this is what the story of Christmas is.
00:05:13.000And obviously, the story of Christmas is a very dark story, by the way.
00:05:16.000You know, we tend to think about it as being very hopeful, but when the seed appears in the world, King Herod sends his soldiers to kill all the children.
00:05:55.000It's like as we're drowning in porn and video games and mumble rap and, you know, a kind of a culture that's and, you know, Hollywood is failing, Disney is going bankrupt.
00:06:06.000You can feel everything is running out.
00:06:09.000And in that moment, the surprise of finding that being a Christian, for example, is the most rebellious thing you can do or that You know, getting married and having children and, you know, and trying to live a decent life is the most punk rock thing that you can do at the moment.
00:06:25.000So I think that there is, in that type of attitude, to look at it like, you know, you are going to be against the world.
00:06:35.000And it has a cost, but it also has a... There is a kind of secret hope in that, you know, to know that that's how it's going to go.
00:06:44.000So I love your retelling, your interpretation of the nativity as a time where hope is found in opposition to tyranny.
00:06:54.000When you said we feel like we have no home, I know that a lot of people that I've spoken to say that people that in the post-60s period would have been regarded as classic anti-establishment liberal lefties, that Do not trust authority, that know that free speech is vital, that know that the state is bad, that you can't trust the legacy media, you can never trust the man.
00:07:18.000And if the authorities want you to do it, whether it's a mandated medication, a lockdown, the support of a war, whether it's the foreclosure of free speech and advocating for furthermore censorship and the ability of the powerful to shut down your individual rights, these ideas would have once been opposed.
00:07:39.000Now somehow the neoliberal left became authoritarian.
00:07:43.000They became about centralised authority.
00:07:45.000The tyranny that you described, the Nazarenes of escaping, I would say now that is the establishment in the USA.
00:08:00.000Like that little country to the south of you there, their Democrat party, or your Trudeau over there.
00:08:07.000Liberalism now, I would say fascism now, is garnered in neat little haircuts, sweet little riffs, the language of compassion and kindness masks an incredible drive for authoritarianism and control.
00:08:24.000And I like your reference to, Jonathan, to the slaughter of the innocents, an aspect of the nativity that's sort of understandably overlooked because it would be difficult to recreate in decorations.
00:08:40.000I prefer the manger myself, personally.
00:08:46.000But you also touched on something that somehow traditionalism, conservatism even, certainly Christianity, might be the most rebellious thing that you could do in this.
00:08:58.000Do you think this is because We've reached a kind of moral singularity in our times where we are on the precipice of near-nihilism.
00:09:11.000That materialism has brought us to an absolute crisis of meaning.
00:09:16.000That people are still trying to metabolise individual identity into some kind of manner.
00:09:25.000Some alchemy is being practiced where gold is trying to be wrested from the prima, when the prima materia is literally just materia rather than something transcendent or ulterior.
00:09:39.000Do you think that that has left us at sort of a junction of nihilism, Jonathan?
00:09:45.000Yeah, there's a relationship between individualism, nihilism and tyranny, which is something people might think is funny.
00:09:53.000But, you know, the way that societies normally work is that we have these buffered structures, right?
00:09:59.000We have this hierarchy of structures where, you know, we're individuals and families and communities and churches and clubs, and there's a sense in which all these buffers, they protect us from the glaring sun of the authority up there, right?
00:10:11.000Because, you know, I don't know, like the The different clubs that you can participate in, we all kind of give each other support so that we don't have to always deal with the highest authority.
00:10:22.000Now with the 60s, it's a good example, the 60s as it moved towards individualism and rebelled against family structure, religious structure, you know, and then social structures, schools, all these intermediary structures, it actually opens up a door for the government and the Authorities to come and take that space because that space has to be filled.
00:10:44.000We actually need to have the roads paved and we need things to happen.
00:10:48.000So as we kind of move towards this materialism, it gets filled up.
00:10:52.000So there's a relationship between a movement towards materialism and the tyranny coming to compensate for our own kind of selfish desires that we As we move towards our own selfish little idiosyncratic desires, somebody has to cover all the bases.
00:11:09.000And that ends up being the state, however you want to phrase it, these growing power structures that start to impose themselves on us.
00:11:18.000And it looks invisible at first, but then when a crisis appears, like what happened in COVID, then all of a sudden you can see the tendrils.
00:11:54.000So it cannot be, you cannot have an omnipotent state without tyranny.
00:12:02.000You cannot demand the kind of surrender that, you know, Galatians would ask of us, say.
00:12:09.000I've been thinking lately, Jonathan, about like the solution to my crisis of identity is to die on the cross with Christ, that He can be reborn in me.
00:12:23.000These ideas can be found outside of Christianity.
00:12:27.000I suppose the word Islam itself means surrender.
00:12:29.000I suppose Marcus Aurelius spoke of, you know, you are dead, now live the rest of your life properly.
00:12:38.000But do you think that there is something uniquely benevolent or uniquely nourishing about the idea that we, obviously you do because you're a Christian, but what is uniquely nourishing about the Christian surrendering the self, not to the state, your new material God, whether you live in a communist or capitalist country, but to something higher. And indeed,
00:13:05.000does that make you, and is that a radical proposition? And does that radical proposition involve the
00:13:12.000taking up of arms? I mean that metaphorically. I mean that metaphorically. Well, this is
00:13:19.000the place where Christianity, in terms of politics, is complicated. In the sense that
00:13:27.000what Christians believed, at least at the outset, is that you will be able to transform the
00:13:35.000That in fact, the Christians were actually quite They were submitted to the state that persecuted them.
00:13:41.000If you think of the early centuries when Rome was authoritarian over them, persecuting them, they would submit to all the rules that Rome gave them except for the ones that betrayed their conscience, except for the ones that were against what they believed to be true beyond what the state proposed.
00:14:34.000That was the end of the gladiators fight in Rome.
00:14:36.000Everybody walked out of the stadium and there were no more fights.
00:14:40.000And so that is in some ways the image of the Christian, which is that through, you know,
00:14:47.000holding on to the true light and then be willing to sacrifice your own desires for that, rather
00:14:52.000than thinking, you know, that we're going to raise up and cause a revolution.
00:14:58.000The rising up and causing revolution is actually what brings about tyranny most of the time, if you think of the way that revolutions happen in our history.
00:15:05.000The French Revolution leads to Napoleon, the Russian Revolution leads to Stalin.
00:15:10.000These revolutions usually lead to tyranny.
00:15:14.000Why did you not include the American Revolution?
00:15:17.000Well, the American Revolution is an interesting one, it's true, because it's the exception to the rule, and it would be interesting to see why.
00:15:26.000And maybe there are good reasons to look at that, to understand why the Americans didn't lead to autocracy, not at the outset.
00:15:37.000Obviously, in the long run now, America is moving towards autocracy as well.
00:15:42.000But it did take a few centuries, which is not bad.
00:15:47.000I suppose we would offer from the outset, Jonathan, that it was ultimately an external colonial settler power that they were rejecting.
00:15:56.000So there was the opportunity to sort of actually reclaim that land.
00:16:00.000And there weren't, I suppose, the need for the type of brutality that would have been, I don't know if it was justified, but certainly happened in the French and Russian revolutions. But then if it is sliding towards
00:16:12.000technocracy now, if we are even seeing a kind of a migration towards autocracy that requires
00:16:19.000really the sublimation of the idea of nation, is that what we're really experiencing now? That
00:16:26.000America is just a sort of a panacea for the ordinary people, while the real business of power
00:16:33.000takes place on a strata that transcends national boundaries?
00:16:37.000Indeed, isn't that the essence of global corporatism?
00:16:41.000And then what becomes the duty of the Christian citizen if we are sliding towards the kind of global tyranny that I imagine both of us sense is happening?
00:16:55.000It's true that that seems to be what's happening.
00:16:58.000It's interesting to see both things happen at the same time, which is on the one hand, hand in hand with globalism comes the Rainbow Coalition, this self-identification, this idea that I can be whatever I want to be to extremes that are so radical, you know, that even people in the 60s would have been surprised to hear that you can, you know, that you can transform yourself so much.
00:17:21.000So you can see this move towards complete idiosyncrasy, like a kind of pornification of society where your every little single idiosyncratic desire finds its niche, you know.
00:17:32.000And at the same time, you can see the tyrannical structure get bigger and bigger and become indeed transnational.
00:17:39.000And I think that your Approach and your position and you know a few people they've been aware to that it's no longer a question of capitalism and communism that's not like to remain with those categories is is to blind us to what's actually happening the gigantism is is corporations and governments or whatever is beyond governments holding hands together uh and so we we have to see it that way or else we're we're going to we're going to find ourselves in a fight that's useless like it's at this point google is
00:18:09.000is no better than the World Economic Forum and these giant corporations.
00:18:13.000We saw it again during COVID, how they just locked hands and just acted in unison towards not clear goals, goals that were not clear to us, let's say, or at least not transparent.
00:18:30.000Some might argue that the efficacy of Christianity is its sort of utility, its plasticity, that cults of Christianity around the world can morph into what that geographical territory requires of it.
00:18:44.000A friend of mine says that, like, that In Latin and Central America, the type of Christianity has the theatricality of the paganism that preceded it there.
00:18:54.000In Africa, the facet of Christ as the healer is prominent.
00:18:59.000Maybe in Northern European, as the kind of Lutheranism, Calvinism and the new Protestant movements demonstrated, you get a kind of ardent Christ.
00:19:10.000Stealed for the chill winds of the Northern Hemisphere.
00:19:17.000And perhaps what we have now is a sort of a...
00:19:42.000Christianity is a sort of a vaccine against opposing tyranny.
00:19:49.000You know, kind of a settled insular private little altar in my mind rather than an overt form of Christianity.
00:19:59.000And if there is something to be said for this sort of plasticity being the reason for the ascendancy of Christianity rather than some built-in veracity in connection to a sublime truth, then ought we be revisiting some of the pagan precursors That certainly many of the aspects of the myth of Christ retains, whether it's Osiris and the rebirth, or whether it's even aspects of the, I know the figure of the green man is one that interests you and one that seems to be resurgent in the international imagination, or what Jung might call, I suppose, the collective unconscious.
00:20:35.000So firstly, first part of my question is, Is there something implicitly true about Christianity, or is it just sort of a bit like what I consider democracy to be these days, a kind of brilliant veil for advanced tyrannies?
00:20:48.000And the second part of my question is, if Christianity isn't, or in either event, why are there these re-emergent, pagan, pantheonistic, mythic themes emerging in our culture?
00:21:01.000Yeah, so I think the best way to understand Christianity is that it's, at least the Christianity that I care for, is that it's yes and.
00:21:11.000It's not a yes but, which is that Christianity is not something which stands completely and exclusively against pagan Culture, that's ridiculous.
00:21:25.000It doesn't just kind of plop out and that everything before it was completely false or completely wrong.
00:21:31.000You know, there are intuitions in paganism and there are truths in paganism which made it that it could hold societies together for so long, for thousands of years actually.
00:21:44.000And Christianity, when it comes, it offers in some ways the key to those things.
00:21:49.000It kind of brings a lot of those stories to their end.
00:21:53.000Like, I'll give you a little example, a simple example, which is, you know, in the 19th century there was a lot of fuss made around the idea of the dying and resurrecting God.
00:22:02.000And a lot of people, even the new atheist types, would bring that up, right?
00:22:06.000That all these cultures have dying and resurrecting gods and they'll find different strategies.
00:22:10.000Or people that go into Hades, you know, to get someone.
00:22:12.000You see that in every In every epic you have a character that goes down to death and either goes to see someone or brings someone out or tries to bring someone out and fails.
00:22:20.000And they would show that in some ways Christ is just another version of that story.
00:22:25.000But the thing is that Christ is the end of that story, not another version of that story.
00:22:31.000Because according to the Christian tradition, Christ, first of all, doesn't just go into death as a visitor.
00:22:50.000The icon of the resurrection shows Christ taking Adam and Eve and pulling them out of death.
00:22:57.000And so the idea that in Christ's resurrection we are all looking towards resurrection, no matter how you imagine it in terms of phenomena, that doesn't matter, but to understand that it is the end of the story.
00:23:08.000It's like, what story do you say after that?
00:23:11.000After death has been conquered, and death has been transformed, and now death has lost its sting, that's the end of the story.
00:23:20.000And so Christ does that for all, actually, a lot of the pagan stories.
00:23:24.000He kind of brings them to their end in very surprising ways.
00:23:27.000We're so used to the story of Jesus that we're no longer as shocked as we should be about how how big it is, you could say.
00:23:38.000So that's maybe the answer to the question about its relation to paganism.
00:23:41.000And so what Christianity does is that it includes paganism in it.
00:23:46.000Obviously, the Protestant people watching this will hate that, but if you look at how it happened, that's how it happened.
00:23:52.000It takes the good things of paganism and then brings them in.
00:23:55.000It takes the good things of, let's say, Scandinavian culture, brings them in.
00:23:59.000It takes the good things of African culture, brings it in.
00:24:02.000A good Christian way of saying it is that it baptizes things.
00:24:05.000It takes things from the old world, baptizes them, and raises them up, and involves them, and brings them into the new world.
00:24:14.000Which is why Christianity looks the way it does.
00:24:15.000And that also answers your other question, which is about how plastic it is.
00:25:16.000He's like, no, I slaughtered all these people and that's to my glory.
00:25:19.000And that's a transformation in the state.
00:25:22.000There are many others that Christianity brings about.
00:25:25.000So Christianity ends up acting as a check on the Roman Empire.
00:25:29.000It doesn't mean that it's perfect, but this is to show how Christianity transforms reality, takes these things, baptizes them, and includes them in its life.
00:25:39.000We didn't get to the Green Man bit, but we don't need to yet, because I've got a few follow-up questions there, then we'll make our way to that if we're able to, Jonathan.
00:25:49.000This image of Christ as the redeemer and the emptier of hell, if you ain't seen it yet, you'll like it, I think.
00:25:58.000There's a British near contemporary painter, I think he was painting in the 1950s,
00:26:04.000called Stanley Spencer, who did these beautiful depictions of biblical scenes
00:26:09.000in very mundane settings, like he would do Christ on the high street.
00:26:15.000And when he did Christ and the resurrection happening in the churchyard in Cookham,
00:26:22.000which is where he painted, he was a nationally and indeed internationally
00:27:06.000Reborn unto yourself, present in the moment, the flesh man dies, that the transcendent man may be eternally reborn.
00:27:15.000Joseph Campbell's idea that there is no point in Christ being resurrected 2,000 years ago if you and I can't be resurrected moment by moment into a continual present, the only place that God can truly If it's not like a theological proposition that could be understood and appreciated and even to a degree practiced by a secularist, what is it?
00:27:36.000Because when people say stuff like that about Christianity, like, it's better because, you know, you get to be reborn or you get to be resurrected.
00:31:04.000There's a puzzle, and I see it in paganism, and I see it in other religions.
00:31:07.000There are puzzles, but they come together in that one story.
00:31:11.000So you're saying almost that in this sacred truth there's something truer than material truth, almost like a homeopathic exposure to a distilled version of that which is true.
00:31:26.000I notice too, actually, Jonathan, that if you have a facility for language communication and thought, perhaps that can be a disadvantage in The felt carnal, given that we're talking about incarnation, carnal sense of what it is to live in the experience of God.
00:31:46.000Lately, as I know you're aware because we've sort of spoken, I've gone through like some personal challenges that have been very, very painful and have amounted to some degree to a kind of ego death, which has not been without advantage, even though it has also encompassed extraordinary pain and revealed to me the depth
00:32:05.000of my attachment to other people's impressions, my personal well-being, materialism,
00:32:11.000ability to have influence over others, you know, all of just a list of things that could
00:32:18.000I wonder, though, you know, what you feel about the sort of simplicity available in
00:32:24.000Christianity as well as the complexity, because there was a point very recently where I was in a
00:32:29.000pretty despairing and despondent state and like someone sent me unbidden a kind of,
00:32:36.000perhaps you've heard of, Rick Warren, who I understand is a sort of southern evangelist,
00:32:41.000Who like just said to camera, you know, in a sort of a TV Christianity.
00:32:46.000I like to think of myself as a pretty refined and intelligent guy that I wouldn't be getting my Eucharist via like a Southern Christian TV where there's like a handsome white couple sat on a couch with a Southern evangelist.
00:33:03.000I watched this very simple prayer to camera from Rick Warren where he talked about his
00:33:09.000own son took his life and then he talked about the subsequent despair, even though by that
00:33:14.000time Rick Warren had already sold millions of books and been a very successful pastor
00:33:41.000In a time of crisis, Perhaps in an attempt to get beyond the ego or perhaps in an attempt to cling on to it.
00:33:50.000I've become, you know, the hucksters and charlatans come at me from every angle, offering sort of counsel and advice and like, you know, I could be highly susceptible to any of that stuff.
00:34:04.000And in this sort of prayer, That was just, Jesus, I don't need to understand everything, but I'm calling on your name.
00:34:20.000So I wonder what you make of the sort of potential for this to be sort of quite simple, and maybe in a sort of an ultra-rational, post-enlightenment, advanced approach in singularity culture, are the difficulties of accepting such a proposition that
00:35:17.000God wants us to be the best version of ourselves.
00:35:20.000He wants us to be shining images of His glory and His love.
00:35:26.000And whatever it takes, man, And so suffering is, you know, it's like you said, it's sometimes a way to see our attachments and to see our passions and to see the things that are our actual gods.
00:35:46.000Even if they're good, even if they're good things in themselves and they're a call to see through them, to see through our desires towards something else.
00:35:56.000Because like you said, sometimes we're being ripped apart, and so there is nothing to hold on to, right?
00:36:02.000If you lose the things that you're holding on to, at some point, you know, and this is obviously the whole image of hitting rock bottom, but that doesn't have to be, you don't have to be drunk at the bottom of an alley for you to hit rock bottom.
00:36:15.000It can happen in more subtle ways, where you can see that these things that I hold on to, they are They're superficial compared to what is behind them and what is true.
00:36:29.000I was sorry to hear about a lot of the things that you've been through.
00:36:34.000I hope that they will be for you a kind of way to see through everything.
00:36:42.000But as for the simplicity, Christianity offers a way in which things scale.
00:36:52.000And this is one of the things that people struggle to understand sometimes about religion, is that the way that Christianity presents itself is that it's as accessible to, you know, your great-grandmother who couldn't read, as it is to the great scholar, you know, that spent his entire life studying theological texts.
00:37:10.000And so there's both an immediate simplicity in that abandon that you describe, And then there's also all the subtlety and all the philosophy that the West has to offer.
00:37:26.000But it scales in a lot of ways, which is that Christianity has Christianity calls us to experience it also amongst each other.
00:37:36.000It is not presented to us as an individual thing.
00:37:40.000So we do, of course, have an individual part where we give ourselves to God and we abandon ourselves to Christ, like you described.
00:37:48.000But then that calls us to then enter into communion with others, right?
00:37:52.000And that's what the life of the Church is, is to be with others, people that you wouldn't have chosen, people that aren't like you, people that are annoying and are wonderful, and to kind of enter into that communion.
00:38:08.000Both in terms of worship and in terms of just living life, because that's life.
00:38:16.000We aren't individual, just individuals.
00:38:19.000Our individual transformation has to overflow into our communion with others.
00:38:28.000That's why Christianity looks the way it does.
00:38:29.000That's why it's not just something that happens on your couch, although it is.
00:38:34.000It has buildings, and meetings, and common worship, and common prayer, and it scales all the way up to, you know, to the bishop crowning the king or a prayer at a political event, which you think, ah, it's annoying.
00:38:51.000I wish it was just this individual transformation.
00:38:54.000But that's actually the nature of what it is, is that it can flower up and kind of participate in all aspects of society.
00:39:03.000Yeah, it's difficult, that whole unto Caesar, what is Caesar's thing, because it leaves us with a kind of The sense that perhaps that it's incomplete.
00:39:17.000It gives us a sense that it's incomplete.
00:39:19.000While I recognize what you're saying in terms of scale, like, you know, there are questions about the sort of the historic Catholic Church.
00:39:30.000There are questions about Yeah, indeed, the coronation of a monarch and what that, and that's why you get, I feel like, a vast swathe of, you know, like the last great, most recent intellectual movement is anti-church because it's so easy to equate church power with centralist power and to see Christianity as a palliative,
00:39:58.000And as a, you know, palliative, panacea, placebo, and kind of tranquilizer, you know, like, and yeah, it's like that kind of the kind of martyrdom of the early Christians and the sort of sacrifice of Christ and the obvious radicalism of the, shall we say, the historic Christ.
00:40:28.000You know, I feel that that feels like a call.
00:40:33.000And yet there are many aspects of Christianity that seem to be counselling a kind of acceptance of, you know, we're not going to go turn over the tables.
00:40:44.000We're not going to be marching on the great centres of power.
00:40:50.000And sometimes I feel that Particularly with what's happening now, politically, that that feels like a limitation rather than an advantage.
00:41:39.000For the tyrant to rule, the road had been paved with lies by everyone, not just from above, but everyone through the system is corrupt for that to happen.
00:41:57.000The image that Christians are trying to, at least the Christianity that I care for deeply, is trying to promote is to say that in that world, a revolution or a standing up against authority, it will only perpetuate the same system.
00:42:14.000Because who are you going to replace the tyrant with?
00:42:28.000And so the answer is to become a saint.
00:42:30.000And by the way, if you think about Christianity, the whole history of Christianity, and you talk about the popes and priests, that is true.
00:42:39.000There's always corruption which sets itself up in any system.
00:42:43.000But Christianity Christianity rests on the saints, it doesn't rest on the authorities.
00:42:50.000Although the authorities are necessary, we need the authorities.
00:42:53.000But the story of Christianity is told through the saints.
00:42:55.000And the saints are not bound by the authority, they kind of stand above it.
00:43:00.000They are shining lights to which the authorities are meant to look at and to model their behavior over.
00:43:06.000And so, of course, it's always going to be corrupt, but there's a way in which, for example, the figure like Saint Francis in the West, you know, his way of transforming the medieval society was amazing, because he didn't do it with revolution, right?
00:43:22.000He did it through the very strange behavior where he could humiliate a priest by humbling himself before him, right?
00:43:31.000He could kiss a priest's hand, In a manner that would shame the priest into transformation.
00:43:39.000And these are the types of gestures that Christians pose all through the history of Christianity that are similar to the man standing between the gladiators, which is the way in which true transformation happens without opposition.
00:43:52.000Because one of the problems with revolution is that it's a dual thing.
00:43:57.000It's the same with the culture war, let's say, that's happening in North America.
00:44:37.000But nonetheless, if you run it through your mind, you'll see that It's really the only transformation that can have long-term effects, is one which doesn't increase polarization and doesn't increase duality, but is like this seed that is planted that ripples out, right?
00:44:54.000And then attracts people like magnets to that transformation.
00:44:58.000And so you become like a shining example in your family, in your community, in the people around you, and you inspire people to change rather than fight them off or, you know, oppose them in that simple way.
00:45:11.000Is that, Jonathan, do you think why asceticism remains so important in Christianity, but perhaps in all faiths, even in cults?
00:45:21.000If you can see that people have material carnal attachments, if you see that people are interested
00:45:27.000in sex or pleasure or food or domination or status, then there's always a suspicion that
00:45:35.000everything else they do is mobilized behind the pursuit of goals that anybody can easily
00:45:47.000But when someone seems to be able to invert, subvert, reverse the polarity of the charges
00:45:56.000of the material world, it seems there is a genuine power in it.
00:46:02.000And indeed I suppose that is another that exemplifies further this ability to die unto yourself because perhaps among the more obvious dualities of male female dark night and these might be false dichotomies who are we to know how the universe works at depth although there seems to be a pretty interesting wave particle duality going on down there in the true true poetry of the sub molecular that if you even if death and life
00:46:35.000overcome by your personal conduct, then that truly, yes, it does become, it becomes
00:46:42.000like a, it becomes a crucifixion, it becomes, it becomes a living sign that's
00:46:50.000radiant, seductive, and powerful. Is that what you're saying?
00:46:55.000Yeah, that's true and that's why the...
00:46:58.000For example, the ascetics are shining examples.
00:47:02.000It's really, in some ways, the best way to understand what saints are.
00:47:05.000They are shining examples of things that you, normal us, have to deal with that in every day.
00:47:12.000It's like they take that to the extreme and so become like a summit.
00:47:16.000So, you know, an ascetic that lives in a cave somewhere, that just prays all day, does prostrations, you know, eats three leaves a day or whatever, like all these crazy stories that you hear about ascetics, you know, we don't have access to that.
00:47:29.000But if they become shining examples for us, then maybe I can sacrifice that second beer because I love my son.
00:47:35.000Like maybe I can not I can not do the things that bring me immediate pleasure in moments where I need to cement that to a higher good.
00:47:46.000And so they become examples for just our everyday life.
00:47:50.000And hopefully, in terms of Christianity, in the Church also, they become examples.
00:47:55.000Even the fact that we set them up as examples.
00:47:57.000You know, an ascetic will shame a Pope.
00:48:01.000If the Pope is extreme, he might be extreme, but having that image of the ascetic as being the highest will shame them and will ultimately have an effect on the way in which religious authorities act, which is different, again, like we have to understand, which is different from the pagan Lord, that just rapes and pillages and kills anybody they want and, you know, subjugates people without any excuse.
00:48:28.000We always forget how, you know, when the Scandinavians came down onto Christian society, you know, they had a completely different set of values, which was basically just kill, rape, pillage, dominate and brag about it, not feel bad about it in any way, not feel ashamed.
00:48:53.000Do you think that what you've described around saints, do you think that they are idols and are not attainable, or is the function of Christianity to create the conditions of sainthood in all of us, or as you've just indicated, merely to provide us a sort of a scale where we can, you know, in our own lives, make offerings?
00:50:36.000When that power is encountered, it's pretty beautiful.
00:50:40.000In my own life, once in a while, I've encountered saintly beings, and I feel like you couldn't get them to go... They wouldn't suddenly go, Oh no, my car!
00:51:06.000That there is an energy source within us that will provide limitless bliss.
00:51:11.000It's available and we cannot access it because of the sediment of our carnal nature.
00:51:21.000Like an idea that we've got caught in the heaviness.
00:51:23.000We've got caught in the heaviness of self.
00:51:27.000It's very beautiful to encounter that power but I've also heard of people that live for many years in monasteries or You know, live mendicant lifestyles and then come back into a culture and like it's quite common.
00:51:40.000I feel like in the sort of 60s, a lot of those guys that went and lived ashram life and got enlightened with great gurus came back and just lost themselves in hedonism.
00:51:50.000It's like there's not a continual inoculation.
00:51:54.000I wonder, do you think, because I wanted to, like we're coming to the end of this particular Christian conversation that we're embarking on, Jonathan.
00:52:04.000Do you think that the stories are sufficient?
00:52:07.000And how do we deal with the lexicon and the syntax of this?
00:52:11.000the lexicon and the syntax of this because, you know, when a figure like CS Lewis...
00:52:18.000Lewis is able to mobilise Christian thought because, for me at least, my take on him is that he's able to re-engage academics and able to re-engage intellectuals and he's able indeed to tell stories in a new way or Tolkien, who I know you care about and stuff, Like he's able to revivify the imagination of a version of Christianity that starts to feel arcane and not in a good way.
00:52:45.000That starts to feel like a little encrusted in candelabras and dust.
00:52:50.000I wonder if you feel that there are new ways to tell this story or new ways to live this story.
00:53:00.000Yeah, I think that this is actually a crucial time because, like you said, we're in this meaning crisis where all of a sudden people are noticing that their little life of Netflix and porn is just not enough.
00:53:15.000And we saw it because we were given it in abundance during COVID, right?
00:53:19.000It's like, just stay at home and And just revel in your own desires.
00:54:09.000In terms of stories, I think it's the same.
00:54:11.000You know, as I said, as Hollywood is running out of steam, as the culture machine is basically now just...
00:54:20.000Turning over the same crap that they've been, you know, putting out for the past two generations, there is an opportunity of storytelling.
00:54:28.000To recapture storytelling and to retell even, you know, the fairy tales or these ancient stories, to retell them with a bright voice.
00:54:38.000That's one of the things that I'm doing, for example.
00:54:39.000I think you probably know that I'm starting to publish these fairy tales again.
00:54:45.000I just published Snow White, and I'm going to publish a series of fairy tales that are going back into the tradition with a celebratory tone, a joyful tone where we look at the stories and celebrate them, really.
00:55:00.000Now that there's been cynicism since the 60s, it's like there's actually a possibility of re-celebrating these ancient stories in a way that points towards their meaning.
00:55:09.000And I think we can do that for a lot of things right now.
00:55:13.000Right now, there are many opportunities for transformation.
00:56:03.000Yeah, well, in terms of post-modernity, it's interesting.
00:56:08.000I do take some aspects of post-modernity quite seriously.
00:56:12.000I think that post-modernity is useful because, you know, let's say the really modern or the Puritan approach to fairy tales, for example, was horrible, right?
00:56:22.000It's like, let's take these stories that have a kind of grit to them, that have a kind of a darkness or a messiness to them.
00:56:28.000Let's make them into simple morality tales.
00:56:30.000And so we take out all the kind of grungy bit out of the fairy tales, we present them as these very clean stories.
00:56:37.000But that's not what the fairy tales were.
00:56:41.000And so they just said, well, let's, they just said, let's expose all the grit.
00:56:45.000Let's expose all the cynicism, all the dark power dynamics, all the sexual stuff in the fairy tales, you know, and let's ignore these Puritan versions.
00:56:55.000I think, I think the stories are powerful, beautiful, shining examples of how to be and not to be, but there's also in them, A way of exploring some of these darker themes.
00:57:06.000And so the way that I'm doing these stories, you know, I'm not taking out all the sexual references like they're there in the story, but I'm also not emphasizing it in a way that is kind of dark and cynical.
00:57:20.000And so I think that that's one of the solutions to the postmodern morass is to be aware of the kind of Let's say the grittier part or the sliding part of the stories and including it in the higher tale, right?
00:57:37.000To have the margins and the center together.
00:57:39.000To not just have the center or the margins, but to bring them together in one story.
00:57:43.000So that's been my approach to the fairy tales.
00:57:46.000When you do that with something like Snow White, I'm guessing that there are sort of functional, no folklore would succeed if it did not have a functionality, I suppose.
00:57:57.000So I suppose there are social codes and ethics and things to do with Chastity baked into Snow White, the inability of Snow White to evade her own female darkness if she's not willing to voyage into the forest.
00:58:11.000I'd like to know what them underground miners go down into the unconscious and they mine for jewels.
00:58:28.000It features in the origin story of our kind and of obviously Christian mythology and the idea of the poisoned apple, that which looks whole being toxic, that the mother, the dark mother, will give you a toxic gift.
00:58:43.000Tell me how some of that Jungian stuff comes out in your retelling.
00:58:48.000I mean, there are a lot of things going on in the story.
00:58:51.000So, in terms of the dwarves, one of the best ways, I think, to understand the dwarves is you imagine Snow White.
00:58:57.000Obviously, she reaches her teenage period.
00:59:11.000And so, she gets cast into the forest and she deals with, you could say, The problems of femininity at the outset.
00:59:21.000She deals with the problems of puberty and not the solution to it.
00:59:25.000And so she has to learn to work, she has to learn to clean the house, she has all these kind of annoying parts of what the female role was traditionally.
00:59:33.000And then also she's surrounded by these idiosyncratic men that are all, you know, That are just like little men that aren't really men.
00:59:45.000They're just, you know, and Disney gets that right too.
00:59:47.000It's like, it's like all these weird aspects of manliness, you know, like sneezy and dark, like, and, and kind of dopey guy.
00:59:54.000And they're, they're, they say they're fragmented masculinity.
00:59:57.000And then what she has to find is ultimately her mate.
01:00:00.000She has to find her prince, the one that can show her what this transformation is for, which is ultimately to be married and to have children.
01:00:08.000That's what puberty is leading towards, is fertility and the capacity to engage in sexual union.
01:04:09.000When it remains ineffable, it remains in the territory of divinity, it's still sublimated.
01:04:16.000Once it's objectified, then you've just cast more territory into, you've given yet more unto Caesar.
01:04:23.000Why do you think that Why do you think that more female-centric folktales have succeeded than, you know, you have to dig around for male fairy tales, you know?
01:04:36.000Do you think it's because there's customarily more pressure on females to socially conform because of the sort of biological challenges that females traditionally and more generally have?
01:04:51.000I mean, I think that for sure that there's a...
01:04:54.000For sure, when girls hit puberty, they have to deal with it, like, in a way, more than guys.
01:05:03.000Guys, we have to deal with it too, but there's a reality to transformation which is way more risky for girls than it is for men.
01:05:11.000It's like, you can get pregnant, You know, that's a big deal.
01:05:15.000That'll change everything in your life.
01:05:16.000And so, I think for sure the fact that a lot of these stories have to do with the transformation and kind of learning about this transformation are part of our, let's say, the fairy tales that have risen to the surface in the modern world.
01:05:30.000But there are a lot of fairy tales that also have male characters.
01:05:34.000They're just a little less known in the modern world for some reason.
01:05:37.000But, you know, we have Jack and the Beanstalk.
01:05:40.000That's part of the series we're going to have.
01:05:43.000We're going to have different versions of those more male-led fairy tales as well.
01:05:48.000That's pretty cool, that'll be a cool one.
01:05:49.000Jack and the Beanstalk, what he has to do, he gets that magical seed, he exchanges it for something practical, the bloody idiot, then he can reach the sky in this magical plant and then he's got to confront a giant and then he's essentially a king if he does that.
01:08:21.000So it's functioning on a few levels there because you've got to trade the milk for the sperm at some point to become an actualized male.
01:08:28.000Then there's the potentiality of the beast and I like that the template of sky father and earth mother is a strong pagan ideal that the father is sky.
01:08:44.000You would think it would be Because of Mars and martiality, that men and steel and men and flesh would be a sort of a perpetuated theme.
01:08:54.000But continually, theologically and theosophically, you find maleness and air equated.
01:08:59.000And I reckon, yeah, you nailed it there.
01:09:01.000It's because it's the unembodied potentiality.
01:09:09.000Then you get the ability to generate it, as well as the sort of the chicken-egg famous folk maxim.
01:09:17.000And then ultimately, yeah, you get the ineffable, ethereal, ulterior reality from which reality is played.
01:09:25.000And whether that's the harp in Gaelic mythology, or the flute in, you know, Krishna and many other, like there's sort of that music of the spheres thing.
01:09:34.000As well, yeah, and in the beginning there was the word, the vibration, the vibration that precedes matter.
01:09:40.000That there's presumably some point where matter, where vibration materializes, or as Bill Hicks' joke used to have it, that all matter is energy condensed to a slow vibration.
01:09:54.000That at some point we have to straddle this space between the unrealized, the unmanifest, and the manifest.
01:10:13.000You don't want societies full of awakened, oppositional males.
01:10:18.000And with females there's the obvious functional requirement that all of those fairy tales that we've touched upon deal with. That's pretty cool. You want anything on the Pied
01:10:28.000Piper? I once wrote a version of that, which I should have put more effort into. I got the
01:10:33.000ambiguity of the figure pretty, pretty good, but I never truly understood the nature of the bargain. You
01:10:39.000know, he goes to the town, he's got some weird Christianity in it.
01:11:48.000Now, the problem is that once you include something in a town or something that's not part of it and then you give it responsibility and power, you have to be aware of that.
01:12:01.000You have to pay the piper or else Or else that influence will take over.
01:12:50.000If you pay them, if you give them what they ask for, then they'll remain ambiguous and they will play the role that they're playing.
01:12:58.000But if you don't Manage that relationship properly, then at some point they'll take your kids.
01:13:08.000These are dark stories really about how reality works in ways that a lot of red pill realities, let's say.
01:13:18.000Yeah, I mean, I was thinking then about the nature of the mercenary, that the mercenary has no attachment.
01:13:24.000And I was relating that to something you said earlier in our conversation, that we've noticed one of the trends of globalism is the breakdown of these intermediary institutions from family to church to community.
01:13:35.000You know, like, a hundred years ago, I reckon anyone you spoke to would belong to a church and a cricket club and, like, various little organisations.
01:13:42.000And now, increasingly, people are sort of looped off, staring just into solitary mirrors, like, trapped in that, you know, trapped in the device in narcissism, solipsism and onanism.
01:13:56.000And to break out of that, yeah, you do require the transcendent experience.
01:14:00.000And I feel like these kind of pacts, the Pied Piper Pact, the Barbarian Pact, Might be at a contractual tipping point right now.
01:14:09.000Like what I feel is one of the macro arguments, Jonathan, is that the technological and communication power that has been harnessed could lead to mass decentralization of power.
01:14:20.000It could lead to communities becoming democratized, sharing of resources.
01:14:28.000The ability for revolution, overthrow, Fast turnaround of power, end of dynasty, emergence of mass decentralization, localism, the slaying of the titans, the behemoth could be slain, the serpent could have its head cut off.
01:14:46.000So to maximally oppose that power requires barbaric Centralisation.
01:14:53.000But because those kind of tropes have dropped out of our discourse, they have to be ornamented as, this is to protect the vulnerable!
01:15:02.000To protect the vulnerable we have to censor everything that you're saying is going to hurt vulnerable people!
01:15:10.000It's been the most awful type of inversion, the sort of dark alchemy of the tyrant, you know?
01:15:18.000Yeah, well, it's interesting because the technology question and the phone question and all of these are actually a good example of the Pied Piper story.
01:15:30.000If you want to understand the Pied Piper story, it's a great way to understand it, which is that we create powerful technologies that are added to us.
01:16:12.000But then if you're not attentive to it in the proper manner, obviously, then it will rule over you and take your children.
01:16:19.000Neuralink is the scariest technology to ever come about on the horizon of human experience.
01:16:27.000Like you said, a lot of these technologies are promoted with the desire to help get rid of the rats.
01:16:35.000But ultimately, if we're not careful, they'll take our children.
01:16:38.000And that's what happened with cell phones, right?
01:16:39.000It's like now our kids are completely taken up by TikTok.
01:16:44.000They're hypnotized, you know, by the music.
01:16:49.000Because in a sense, yeah, say Jonathan in it, safety and convenience, like think how many measures are into all measures now, all globalist centralizing measures, safety or convenience are always the lubricant that is deployed to gain entry.
01:17:05.000And I feel like... Maybe sometimes we have to do with a few rats.
01:17:39.000It was a beautiful journey from Christianity to pagan folklore, all the while cruising gently through personal and cultural morality and what may be transcendent of that and from what it might be ultimately derived.
01:17:53.000Some unifying sense of oneness, the possibility of the divine being realized here.