Stay Free - Russel Brand - What Happens When a Civilization Forgets Its Stories? — Jonathan Pageau - SF668

00:00:07.000 Ladies and gentlemen, Russell Franz Russell trying to bring real journalism to the American people.

00:00:17.000 Jonathan, I've got a lot of things to ask you.

00:00:18.000 Can I start?

00:00:20.000 Yeah, whenever you want.

00:00:21.000 Thanks for sending us those.

00:00:24.000 Thanks for sending us those books.

00:00:27.000 Can you frame them for our audience so that the audience knows what I'm talking about when I say thanks for those books?

00:00:33.000 Yeah.

00:00:34.000 Snow White, Rapunzel.

00:00:36.000 Oh, they're beautiful looking, by the way.

00:00:37.000 Jack and the Beanstalk, isn't it?

00:00:38.000 That you did?

00:00:39.000 Jack.

00:00:39.000 Yeah.

00:00:40.000 Yeah.

00:00:40.000 They're so good.

00:00:42.000 It's beautiful.

00:00:42.000 We read me.

00:00:44.000 I've got a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old and a two-year-old.

00:00:47.000 That's pretty.

00:00:48.000 Yeah.

00:00:48.000 We read it to Mabe's, my daughters.

00:00:50.000 I read it to my daughters and we took in turns to read it.

00:00:53.000 We read, we started a Rapunzel.

00:00:56.000 We did Snow White.

00:00:56.000 We haven't done Jack and the Beanstalk yet.

00:00:59.000 Jack and the Beanstalk, I now tell the story.

00:01:01.000 When we last spoke, Jonathan, I said to you, oh, it seems to me there's less folk tales for men than women.

00:01:08.000 And I sort of proselytized on why I thought that would be.

00:01:11.000 And then you listed a few and I said, but I don't understand Jack and the Beanstalk.

00:01:15.000 And gosh, I've just come off a podcast, Jonathan, where I've just publicly claimed on record, I go, I don't think I ever talk to anyone and think that they're cleverer than me.

00:01:25.000 I said, like, sometimes I talk to people and they know stuff I don't know.

00:01:28.000 Of course, that happens every second of every day.

00:01:30.000 But like the faculty, and I used like Jordan as the example, like I don't often, I'm not often listening and thinking, I don't understand this unless they're talking about maths or astrophysics or something like that.

00:01:41.000 And now God has put me in front of you because like when we spoke and I said, Jack and the Beanstalk, I don't understand that.

00:01:48.000 And you said, you said to me, he has to exchange the milk for the seed.

00:01:52.000 And I was like, oh, man, that's so cool.

00:01:55.000 And since then, I've been telling, I've been telling when I have to mentor or advise or chat to young men, I tell them that story.

00:02:04.000 And I don't give you any credit.

00:02:06.000 I say that I've worked that out on my own.

00:02:11.000 It's the story itself.

00:02:13.000 It's in the story.

00:02:14.000 So if I found it there, it's because it's there, you know?

00:02:16.000 So you don't owe me anything.

00:02:18.000 Thank you.

00:02:19.000 So what, like, you, what is your, with these, in particular, these brilliant and beautiful books, the illustrations are incredible.

00:02:26.000 Your storytelling is fantastic.

00:02:27.000 I was very surprised that you created one sort of meta narrative where the three stories are interconnected.

00:02:34.000 I thought that was interesting.

00:02:35.000 I wonder what challenges that presented and why did you embark on this project as a whole.

00:02:40.000 Give us a sort of a general overview.

00:02:42.000 Yeah, I think, I mean, the biggest thing is that it felt like Disney was dropping the fairy tales.

00:02:47.000 It didn't want them actually.

00:02:49.000 And so in the last few live versions they've made, they've been very cynical.

00:02:53.000 And then the Snow White version they made was horrible because they don't know what to do.

00:02:57.000 They don't like the fairy tales.

00:03:00.000 They don't know how to handle them.

00:03:02.000 And so I thought this is a sign for us that those of us that actually love these stories, that care for them and they care for our heritage, you know, it's time to pick them up and to tell beautiful, celebratory, smart versions of the tales.

00:03:17.000 Not cynical, not trying to make them into some kind of political commentary, but rather just kind of tell them in a celebratory way.

00:03:24.000 Yeah.

00:03:24.000 That was the plan.

00:03:26.000 That's very good.

00:03:26.000 And I think you've executed that plan.

00:03:28.000 They're beautiful.

00:03:28.000 And I'd recommend them to anyone.

00:03:30.000 I love the copies that you've sent me.

00:03:32.000 And normally when I interview people, I haven't looked at the thing that I'm meant to be promoting, you know, like sometimes quite complex things like films that are about COVID or, you know, great tracts about geopolitics.

00:03:46.000 And I have to sort of go, yeah, yeah, I get the idea.

00:03:49.000 But this, I've actually read it and engaged with the material.

00:03:52.000 And it's really, really beautiful.

00:03:54.000 And I can't recommend it heartily enough.

00:03:56.000 And there's a link in the description and a QR code if you want to get Jonathan's books, these sort of beautiful triptych, this trilogy of excellent retold fairy tales, then you can get them here by clicking on that link.

00:04:10.000 Hey, Jonathan.

00:04:11.000 And one of the things I want to say, one of the things, I want to say one thing is that one of the problems we have too is that a lot of the people that are complaining about culture that are complaining about the state of culture, that's where they stop.

00:04:22.000 They just complain and then they don't do anything.

00:04:25.000 And so I've been complaining for a few years about the state of culture, but there's something nagging in the back of my mind saying, well, Jonathan, if you don't like the state of culture, what are you going to do about it?

00:04:35.000 And so that's why we started the Symbolic World Press and we started telling these fairy tales, but we're going to take it into a larger direction where we're going to try to retell all of the great tales of our heritage, you know, from the Greek myths all the way to King Arthur and try to tell them in a beautiful, celebratory way that's also relevant to modern days.

00:04:57.000 So what a brilliant project.

00:04:59.000 Also, all the IP is free, so it's viable financially.

00:05:05.000 That's fantastic.

00:05:07.000 Now, a minute ago, in your first answer, you said that Disney is not retelling folk tales well.

00:05:15.000 I think I know why that is, but will you tell me why that is?

00:05:20.000 Well, I think one of the things that happened, of course, in Disney is that it got taken over by, I guess, what you could call the woke mind virus.

00:05:27.000 It wanted to, it started with a kind of feminism trope where they wanted, they didn't like the idea of the princess that meets her prince. 1.00

00:05:34.000 They wanted to liberate her.

00:05:36.000 It started with, I think, with Rapunzel, actually, where this whole story is about her own self-development and the guy is just a detail in the story.

00:05:45.000 And then it just kept getting worse and worse as they moved down the progressive line to a point where the images in the fairy tales didn't make sense to what they wanted to make anymore.

00:05:56.000 So by the time they got to Snow White, that's why it took like, I think, three, four years to make Snow White is because the first version they made was so political and they realized that no one is going to want this because it's Disney, Disney is, you know, that's that story, particularly Snow White, it was the first full-length animation.

00:06:14.000 It was a massive moment in culture when Disney made that movie.

00:06:17.000 And they were basically dragging it through the mud by making it into a kind of postmodern commentary.

00:06:23.000 And so I think that's what it is.

00:06:24.000 And now the problem they have is that they realize that they realize that they're in trouble.

00:06:30.000 Nobody wants to see their movies anymore.

00:06:31.000 Nobody cares.

00:06:32.000 But it's hard to get rid of people.

00:06:34.000 Once the company itself is made of people that think in a certain way, I don't know.

00:06:40.000 I don't think they can recover from this.

00:06:43.000 No, nor do I.

00:06:43.000 Yeah, in a sense, they've been stymied by their own peculiar and sort of spiraling gen agenda there.

00:06:51.000 I was just thinking, though, how do we align these peculiar parcels, Jonathan?

00:07:01.000 Like that, you know, initially, Disney takes a cultural artifact like a Grimm or a Hans Christian Anderson fairy story that's redolent with relevant imagery and ideas precisely because it's somehow presumably accessing deep archetypal truths.

00:07:19.000 Then Disney in its earlier incarnation is somehow able to, in a sense, amplify or at least reiterate those principles through the medium of animation.

00:07:33.000 A hundred years later, Disney is not even able to stay true.

00:07:38.000 Isn't it amazing how fast our culture moves?

00:07:40.000 It isn't even able to stay true to its own interpretation of source material.

00:07:47.000 Like I noticed it a bit.

00:07:48.000 I watched like the live action Pinocchio and I see it seemed like they weren't comfortable with lying or something like that or consequence. 0.98

00:07:55.000 So I was like, this is fucking pointless. 0.91

00:07:57.000 What are they even talking about now at this point? 0.97

00:07:59.000 And it's a shame because, you know, there's a darkness in human beings.

00:08:02.000 And there's four, there's a darkness in fairy stories and folk stories because there's a darkness that has to be addressed.

00:08:09.000 And if you'd sort of deny that darkness, I wonder what happens to a culture.

00:08:12.000 But now I've like this is my set of questions, having made that point.

00:08:17.000 See something like Snow White, right?

00:08:18.000 That's a folk cultural object, should we call it?

00:08:22.000 And likely pagan. 0.88

00:08:24.000 It's a sort of a pagan object.

00:08:26.000 How do we as Christians, Jonathan, align pagan cultural artifacts with Christian interpretations in a culture that's in a sense a neo-modern progressive paganism?

00:08:42.000 And one would think that the original paganism of some of the source material, taking paganism to mean the worship of entities and essences found within nature, both inverted commas, external and internal.

00:08:56.000 How do we as Christians, and how did you as a Christian, given you've been doing it, how did you manage that?

00:09:02.000 How do you make sure that Christ and the truth of Christ is present in these pagan artifacts as well as tackling the political sort of vicissitudes of political thought?

00:09:15.000 Yeah.

00:09:16.000 Well, there are a few things to your question.

00:09:18.000 I would say the first thing is that I don't think that that's, I don't think it's true.

00:09:23.000 I think that the idea that these are pagan stories, I think is something that was made up by 19th century anti-Christian thinkers that tried to do that for everything.

00:09:35.000 They told us that Christmas is pagan, Easter is pagan, pretty much everything that's Christian is pagan. 0.99

00:09:40.000 I think it's just bullshit. 1.00

00:09:42.000 I think it's just bullshit. 1.00

00:09:43.000 I think that these stories, although they clearly take sources in pre-Christian stories, like they're a development, they're a continuation of pre-Christian stories. 0.98

00:09:55.000 But by the time that they're transcribed, they have a very, very deep Christian structure, right?

00:10:02.000 They've been transformed, you could say, from these ancient, ancient Greek myths, and they've been in some ways fiddled with, they've been retold, they've been remembered in a manner that in fact has a deep Christian root to it.

00:10:15.000 And so when I told Snow White, for example, I tried to pull the threads of the story that would make you see that this is a Christian story.

00:10:24.000 I mean, the story of Snow White is a story about resurrection.

00:10:26.000 It's a story, you know, it's like it's a song of songs.

00:10:29.000 It's about a bride that finds her lover.

00:10:34.000 If you watch the early Disney version, you can see that when the prince kisses her and wakes her up, he actually takes her to heaven.

00:10:41.000 Like he takes her to a castle in the sky.

00:10:44.000 And so Disney knew very well that this was a resurrection story, that it was a very deep Christian story.

00:10:51.000 And so, but I can, if I can back up a little bit and say, how is it that Christians deal with these?

00:10:57.000 You know, early Christians and the kind of late classical Christians, they had no problems with the Greek myths in the sense that they, you know, St. Basil said that you had to read the Iliad and the Odyssey before you read the Bible because you had to be a cultured person to be able to have a kind of story track in your mind.

00:11:16.000 You had to have these stories kind of ingrained into your thinking so that when you read the Bible, you could understand the stories there.

00:11:23.000 It's the same with the supposedly northern myths.

00:11:26.000 You know, everybody talks about Thor and Odin and how these pagan myths, but you know who wrote those stories down?

00:11:32.000 It was Christians.

00:11:32.000 Christians are the ones who actually wrote down the Greek myths.

00:11:35.000 They were written when the people in Iceland converted to Christianity.

00:11:43.000 And so there's a very deep misunderstanding about this in the Christian stories.

00:11:49.000 C.S. Lewis talked about how, in fact, Christ is the true myth.

00:11:53.000 And so in all the pagan stories, there's a hint, there's like a little glimmer, there's something of Christ in those stories.

00:12:00.000 And it's our job in some ways to be able to make that little something shine and to help point it in a direction that is positive.

00:12:09.000 So that's what I think about that.

00:12:12.000 Thanks.

00:12:12.000 Because I suppose to truly be Christian, you accept his atemporal and a spatial nature, meaning that even pre-incarnate, his presence will be felt in story and myth and culture universally.

00:12:32.000 I mean, I wonder sometimes, as someone that's read a little of the Maharabha and some of the Vedas, that when encountering aspects of, say, well, specifically the aspect of Krishna, Krishna is very Christ-like, a very Christ-like deity.

00:12:51.000 I mean, he sounds like Christ, and there's a child, Krishna, and he's kind of a playful kid.

00:12:58.000 And, you know, I don't know that it has the sort of key and necessary tropes, but I'm not making the claim that it's absolute.

00:13:04.000 But are you saying, are you in a sense, and did C.S. Lewis to some degree do this too, collapsing the separate category of paganism?

00:13:14.000 Because to accept it as a separate category would be to deny the universal nature and ubiquitous presence of Christ.

00:13:24.000 I think that's the right way to see it.

00:13:26.000 But I mean, we can be cautious.

00:13:28.000 So you can imagine in the early Christian fathers, there's two strains.

00:13:32.000 You know, is Justin Martyr and Tertullian as the kind of two extremes?

00:13:36.000 So you have Tertullian saying, you know, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?

00:13:40.000 All of this pagan stuff.

00:13:41.000 We have to get rid of it.

00:13:42.000 We have to kind of cut it out.

00:13:43.000 And then you have people like Justin Martyr who said, all truth is God's truth.

00:13:47.000 All place where you find the truth of the Logos in the past is God's.

00:13:51.000 And he said that the ancient philosophers were Christians before Christ.

00:13:55.000 And this is in the second, like early third century.

00:13:58.000 Okay.

00:13:59.000 So this is very, very early.

00:14:00.000 So I think that that's the way to think about it is that, yes, sometimes there's some things in the pagan stories, obviously, that we can't stomach and that we kind of have to weed out.

00:14:08.000 But the things that point to that which is true, sometimes even in the negative, even sometimes there are things that are kind of a counterpoint that you can understand as an image of evil or an image of excess, that those things can be, I think that those things can definitely not only be preserved, but they can be part of the story.

00:14:25.000 You know, we just finished reading Dante's Divine Comedy, which is in some ways the great synthesis of medieval thinking, of the great synthesis of medieval Christianity.

00:14:34.000 And the pagan references are everywhere in Dante's Divine Comedy.

00:14:38.000 All the way up to heaven, he will reference these kind of pagan images as a deep cultural baggage that he can use to talk about the Christian mystery that he's encountering.

00:14:50.000 And so I don't see a problem with that at all.

00:14:53.000 You find, you almost describe them as notes in the symphony and melodies that to do without would be, would create a kind of deprivation.

00:15:06.000 So if there is these kind of symbolic truths that somehow, if not lose their luster, become less articulate when transferred into language, do you believe, helping me with my new journey into scripture, Jonathan, that there are points where in, like, say, at the moment, I've been spending some time in like Daniel and Ezekiel and I'm reading Revelation.

00:15:30.000 And we are clearly in a terrain where building the sort of narrow bandwidth of language, whether you're talking about, you know, obviously I only speak English.

00:15:43.000 Let me declare that right up front.

00:15:46.000 Whether it was in Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic or King James Version or New International Version, the primary translation you're dealing with is from the mind of God to the mind of man.

00:15:58.000 So when I'm encountering whether it's burning bushes or apples or lampstands or the potter and the clay, and actually, Jonathan, I'm having an empirical experience of this.

00:16:14.000 I was meditating under instruction on the light, on the coming of the light, that I am the coming of the light, and that we are not separate.

00:16:25.000 We're not separate from the light.

00:16:27.000 And somewhere in the midst of this experience, the Isaiah, I think it's in Isaiah, but I think it's in Psalms also somewhere.

00:16:36.000 And I think Paul references it, of the clay, I feel like I felt the prima materia of me that is not language, that is, that is expressed in language, but not language, being changed and molded.

00:16:52.000 I feel like I felt it, Jonathan.

00:16:55.000 So to read, whether it's folk tales or the Iliad or the Odyssey or Norse myth or whatever, are we saying that the point of it is to allow it to lure you into a pre-verbal state?

00:17:14.000 Okay, there's a lot in what you said there.

00:17:18.000 You could say for sure there is this sense definitely that all that which is communicated, that is all the revelations and then everything that's downstream from the revelation is pointing to something which is beyond.

00:17:33.000 And so if you think of the hierarchy of the tabernacle, you get a sense of that, which is in the deep center, right?

00:17:39.000 In the center of centers, there is a place that is inaccessible to anyone except for one person.

00:17:47.000 And that person, you know, is in great danger going there if they're not completely pure from all their sins.

00:17:53.000 And so this is where the glory of God appears and the glory of God is beyond, like you said, all of expression, all of word, all of language.

00:18:04.000 And then it unfolds within the world through images and then through structures and then through laws and et cetera, et cetera.

00:18:14.000 And so in Orthodox theology, we have this idea of what we call apophatic theology and cataphatic theology.

00:18:23.000 And therefore, this idea that God is always beyond, like what you're saying, that there is the true reality of God is beyond all expression, all word, you know, even being itself.

00:18:32.000 God is beyond that.

00:18:34.000 And then we have what we call cataphatic theology is also understanding that all things are in some ways expressions of God.

00:18:41.000 You know, all things that are good are expressions of God because he is the source of all things.

00:18:47.000 And therefore, we have to always find a balance between those two.

00:18:50.000 If we're not careful and we focus too much on the apophatic sense, we become Gnostic.

00:18:58.000 We start to have, we believe that the world is Maya.

00:19:01.000 We believe that the world is illusion.

00:19:03.000 We believe that all the things in the world are evil in themselves.

00:19:07.000 And that is definitely, that's an error, at least from a Christian point of view, because God is a God of love.

00:19:12.000 But if we focus too much on the external parts, then we become idolaters.

00:19:15.000 We start to confuse the expressions for that which is being expressed.

00:19:22.000 And so there's always a kind of sway between those two.

00:19:25.000 There's a play between both understanding how God is beyond all things and that God is present in all things and being careful of not going into only one direction.

00:19:37.000 Is that the sort of transcendent and imminent argument in some way recounted?

00:19:43.000 Is that comparable or similar?

00:19:46.000 Yeah, those two are not opposed.

00:19:48.000 That's important.

00:19:48.000 Like the idea that transcendence and imminence are not opposed, but that in fact one is the cause of the other.

00:19:53.000 It's because God is transcendent that he is fully imminent in all things because he is the source and the origin and the kind of transcendent source of all that exists.

00:20:05.000 Yes.

00:20:06.000 There's something in the idea that at some point a vibration collapses into matter.

00:20:15.000 through pattern and symbol.

00:20:17.000 It's very difficult, isn't it, to try to physically track what we're talking about when we say that vibrations appear to create mandala and symbol.

00:20:29.000 And at some point, these detectable mandala and symbol undergird more discernible and detectable reality.

00:20:39.000 And at some point, must transform, become flesh is a very difficult thing to understand.

00:20:46.000 And what I want to sort of say as well, as I'm sort of as I touch the hem of esotericism as best as I can, at least, is that while I'm in all this, Jonathan, I feel myself like it's close to not, I don't want to say madness, but a kind of, how does, how do we keep our feet on the ground?

00:21:09.000 How do we remain rooted?

00:21:10.000 How do we remain, how do we remain earthed?

00:21:13.000 How do you earth yourself?

00:21:14.000 How do you do it?

00:21:15.000 Well, I mean, you have to go to church.

00:21:20.000 That's how you do it.

00:21:21.000 In the sense that you have to be part of a body and you also have to acknowledge some kind of authority.

00:21:29.000 And of course, we understand that these relationships, like let's say the body, the participation, the going to church, the liturgy, and also the structure of authority is not everything.

00:21:39.000 It can become corrupt.

00:21:41.000 It can become, but it's necessary in some ways to keep you grounded and to avoid what the church fathers or the ascetic fathers call prayless, which is spiritual delusion.

00:21:51.000 Because that's the problem if you're alone and you're just kind of having these spiritual experiences and you have nothing against which to test it.

00:21:59.000 You have no one to help you discern and to help you know how to live it.

00:22:04.000 You have nobody that you're knocking your elbows against that have, you know, that are annoying you at church and that are being, you know, all these things that happen in the community.

00:22:13.000 Those things are there to help you ground you so that you don't start to have spiritual delusions.

00:22:19.000 Yeah, you don't go crazy.

00:22:20.000 Yeah, that happens to me.

00:22:22.000 Okay, so there's a few things.

00:22:25.000 Yeah, because, but I wonder, you know, like, I wonder what it was like for Elijah.

00:22:30.000 You know, I wonder what it was like.

00:22:31.000 Now, like, are we then to assume that like that actually, well, given, let me try and sketch out.

00:22:40.000 You know me well enough to know there's not going to be any sort of actual questions, just sort of a great deluge of sound that I want you to make a tune from.

00:22:49.000 And here's the next set of sound.

00:22:53.000 You're looking at Jung's red book and seeing those peculiar geometric shapes.

00:22:59.000 And I know that he says it's, you know, Siegfried and stuff.

00:23:02.000 Like, but what's all that early egg geometry and all them reptile drawings in there?

00:23:07.000 What is all that?

00:23:08.000 And this weird concerto of matter that seems like someone trying to track and trace vibration becoming form and the interstitial material between it, vibration and form.

00:23:21.000 How does that connect to something that seems so boldly literal, like Elijah seeing and hearing and actually being able to take it to the test and burn up altars and stuff like that?

00:23:37.000 Do you feel, Jonathan, that in this age, we're gonna, it's not gonna be enough to be getting some sort of geometric clandestine insight in the way that Jung did. 0.94

00:23:48.000 Aren't we gonna need like Elijah to start blowing shit up? 0.89

00:23:55.000 I mean, I think that we definitely need holy people, that's for sure. 0.99

00:24:01.000 And we need we need holy people.

00:24:03.000 And a lot of holy people are they can become very harsh.

00:24:07.000 You know, there are, there's a, you might not know about him, but there's a monk, an Archimandrite who passed away recently, Elder Ephraim.

00:24:19.000 And he started, you know, dozens of monasteries all across North America, came from Mount Athos.

00:24:25.000 And his monasteries are known for being quite harsh.

00:24:28.000 And a lot of people kind of fear his monasteries because they're quite demanding of the monks there.

00:24:34.000 And in some ways, he's establishing that harshness as a root, you know, a kind of living in the desert and living out the more difficult aspect of Christianity.

00:24:45.000 But then those monasteries have been quite fruitful.

00:24:47.000 We have one that's close to my house, maybe about 45 minutes.

00:24:50.000 And it's actually a wonderful place where you can feel the fruits in the community.

00:24:54.000 You can feel the transformative effect of that holiness on the people.

00:24:58.000 And so I do think that we need kind of Elijah type characters.

00:25:05.000 We need Elijah type figures.

00:25:06.000 But you have to remember that Elijah, although it feels to us like he's alone in the story, it says that he saved the prophets, you know, that he hid them in a cave and he wasn't alone.

00:25:16.000 He was actually in a kind of, we don't know the structure exactly, but the structure of prophetic brothers that probably lived somewhat like monks at the time.

00:25:27.000 And so I think that we still have that.

00:25:29.000 You know, I met the abbot of a monastery in Mount Athos just a few years ago.

00:25:36.000 And when I saw him, he was glowing, you know?

00:25:39.000 I mean, he wasn't like, I mean, it's hard to explain because obviously he wasn't glowing like if you had taken some kind of measuring tool that you had seen if there was, but there's no other word I can use besides that he was glowing because his presence was so arresting and his and his eyes were so piercing that it reduced everyone in the room to absolute silence.

00:26:04.000 And I was there with like two billionaires and Jordan Peterson and all these like very, very high level people.

00:26:12.000 And everyone was reduced to absolute silence and everybody became teary-eyed.

00:26:17.000 And if you and if it's weird because if you had, if you had like a transcription of what was said, you know, what the monk said, you would say, well, this is just, you know, it's just saying what Jesus said.

00:26:28.000 He's not saying anything that sounds so intellectual and extremely, but it was really just his presence and him saying the words of Christ and saying simple words of encouragement with so much presence that made you feel like, yeah, you were standing in front of someone like Elijah, you know.

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00:27:38.000 Presence.

00:27:39.000 Presence is the word, I suppose, that presumably, I suppose, in that instance, one might try to understand that he must have undertaken so many practices and disciplines that by the time you had that encounter, there's yeah, more Christ than, you know, less of the man and more of the Lord.

00:28:02.000 And yeah, okay, I'm trying to think of my own encounters with that.

00:28:05.000 Say when I think of someone like Amma, the hugging saint, when I met her, very earthly, very warm.

00:28:11.000 She has like a 10,000 person ashram.

00:28:13.000 And I can tell she's, you know, as best as I could tell, she's living like a saint.

00:28:18.000 She's not going around the back and having sex or something. 1.00

00:28:20.000 You know, there's not some secondary motive.

00:28:24.000 And another person, Krishna consciousness man, I met Radhanath Swami, who I became friends with actually and spent times with.

00:28:31.000 The first time I encountered him, Jonathan, I like, I sort of got very elevated and enervated.

00:28:39.000 I was young and I was only just off drugs, huh?

00:28:41.000 And like, and I remember I goes, oh, so what?

00:28:43.000 This isn't the final level of reality.

00:28:45.000 You know, it's just like a video game and there are other levels of reality.

00:28:48.000 And I started talking real quick and stuff and he just laughed and held my face and I sort of then I nearly cried and I felt embarrassed, like as if I was attracted to someone like I would be sexually.

00:28:58.000 It wasn't sexual, but it was a level of attraction, you know.

00:29:01.000 And then, so like, and that His Holiness the Dalai Lama, when I met him, because he was such a sort of sanctioned figure of holiness, I was trying to think, right, Russell, objectively, come on, is this holy what you're encountering, or is this because you've been told in advance it's the Dalai Lama? 0.98

00:29:18.000 And man, I tell you, Jonathan, I was so fascinated by the amount of paraphernalia, you know, the followers, the literal carpet being laid down, like shit like that.

00:29:28.000 You know, so it's interesting because almost part of the deal with Christianity is you, one has to sort of enter into what one might regard as a sect like, you know, even Eastern Orthodoxy for its scale and then sort of monasteries within that. 0.91

00:29:45.000 And then an individual, like you said, with the tabernacle, the holiest of holies, you know, you have to, it seems like to encounter it somewhat pure, you one has to undertake that kind of journey.

00:29:57.000 And what I feel like, you know, my mission, ministry, some sort of felt pressure internally, externally, I don't know anymore.

00:30:05.000 Like where you've gone, I'm going to contribute to the culture by do it.

00:30:08.000 Look, you know, I can do this.

00:30:09.000 I'm going to do it.

00:30:10.000 Mine, it feels so like fast and karming and so radical, Jonathan.

00:30:17.000 This has all happened from, you know, like in such a succession of harsh, real incidents that felt like I've been dragged out of one life and just thrown into another one like that.

00:30:31.000 Like I was going one direction and God went, you're going that way.

00:30:36.000 And, you know, and I'm just acclimatizing to it and trying not to impose my hubristic, egotistical, selfish rustleness all over it again.

00:30:51.000 Because, you know, I've always known grace.

00:30:53.000 I've always known glory.

00:30:54.000 I've always known light. 0.99

00:30:56.000 And at various times, I've transformed that into, why don't I have sex with loads of women? 0.98

00:31:00.000 Or why don't I become famous? 0.63

00:31:01.000 And now it's, I feel it coming again.

00:31:03.000 You know, the grail comes a second time.

00:31:05.000 I feel it.

00:31:06.000 And I'm afraid.

00:31:09.000 You know, I'm afraid.

00:31:11.000 I'm afraid.

00:31:12.000 I know that it could be unto death.

00:31:14.000 I know all of these things.

00:31:16.000 I know about my grandiosity.

00:31:18.000 And I'm trying to marshal it all.

00:31:20.000 And I don't know what to do is the truth.

00:31:26.000 Well, you should, you should let me take you to take you to Mount Athos and meet some holy men, you know.

00:31:35.000 Maybe you need someone to like to maybe kick you around a little bit.

00:31:38.000 That could be helpful.

00:31:40.000 Yeah.

00:31:40.000 Okay.

00:31:41.000 Monathos.

00:31:42.000 Where is that?

00:31:43.000 And what happens?

00:31:44.000 It's in Greece, Mount Athos.

00:31:45.000 Yeah.

00:31:47.000 It's one of the most, it's an island of around in all maybe like 60 monasteries.

00:31:54.000 There are official ones, but like 60 monasteries.

00:31:58.000 I mean, there used to be 10,000 monks there.

00:31:59.000 Now there's about 1,000.

00:32:02.000 And now there's no women are allowed. 1.00

00:32:04.000 It's only men. 0.93

00:32:05.000 And it's a kind of, only a few people are allowed to go a day.

00:32:09.000 It's very restricted, but it's actually a magical place.

00:32:13.000 It's one of the few places that it's a very thin place, you know, to use those terms.

00:32:19.000 It's quite a magical place.

00:32:22.000 Okay.

00:32:23.000 You should look it up.

00:32:24.000 Mount Athos.

00:32:26.000 Yeah.

00:32:27.000 Do you know Paul Kingsnorth then, Jonathan?

00:32:29.000 Do you know him?

00:32:29.000 Yeah, of course I know Paul.

00:32:30.000 Yeah, I know him well.

00:32:32.000 He's down that row with you.

00:32:34.000 Have you talked to Paul?

00:32:35.000 Have you had a chance to talk to Paul?

00:32:37.000 Yeah, a couple of times.

00:32:38.000 Yeah.

00:32:39.000 He's interesting.

00:32:41.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:32:42.000 He's had a similar experience.

00:32:44.000 I mean, he wasn't the same kind of person as you, but he's had a similar experience as you had, a kind of being just pulled out of his life and thrown into the life of Christ in a way that he didn't, that he could never have predicted, you know?

00:32:57.000 What I feel like my offering is, and I don't know, because, you know, who knows, but I feel like when what surprised me most is that I thought I knew what was in the Bible and I thought that it wouldn't be robust enough to cope with my, I don't know, anti-authoritarianism, my poeticism, my psychedelia, my mysticism, you know, all of these things.

00:33:20.000 And then I get deeper and deeper into the word and I become more, it's transforming me.

00:33:27.000 I'm being transformed by the word and by the experience and by Christ.

00:33:31.000 And I can't believe how it's sort of like the, I feel some protein thing within me being reformed around it.

00:33:38.000 But of course I feel the additional tension of my flesh, of my humanness.

00:33:43.000 You know that bit you alluded to in Elijah when like God or Yahweh or whatever, excuse me, Yahweh says like, yeah, there's 70 others.

00:33:52.000 I remember now I'm like, how dare you?

00:33:56.000 That's my response to that.

00:33:57.000 Like I really want an important part in the merging of the kingdoms.

00:34:03.000 So I still have that, man.

00:34:05.000 I still have that.

00:34:06.000 I still have that self-ness that I'm trying to shirk off.

00:34:10.000 And maybe that does require, in the same way that I'm looking for it in martial arts, you know, like I get sort of beat up and stuff.

00:34:17.000 Like maybe I need that kind of that monastic encounter.

00:34:21.000 I don't know what it will do to me.

00:34:23.000 I don't know what that would do to me.

00:34:25.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:26.000 I mean, it's also, clearly you're someone who wrestles with authority.

00:34:32.000 But it would be, maybe it would be good for you to have just like one person that you're accountable to.

00:34:39.000 You know, it's hard, but I think it's useful.

00:34:43.000 You know, I think it's useful.

00:34:44.000 Someone who gets to know you, someone who you can trust, but then you, that, that can, that you also are willing to, to in some way submit your will to their wisdom, you know.

00:34:56.000 How do you do that, if I may ask?

00:34:59.000 I mean, I have my confessor, you know, my confessor in some ways is someone that I trust very much.

00:35:06.000 And he guides me and he gives me advice.

00:35:09.000 And, you know, I take his advice very seriously.

00:35:12.000 You know, and if he tells me to do something, I try very hard to do it.

00:35:16.000 You know, so it's a good way to have an external person that is some kind of that you're accountable to.

00:35:23.000 What's your practice?

00:35:26.000 In terms of what?

00:35:26.000 In terms of confession?

00:35:28.000 When you get up every day?

00:35:31.000 I try to do my, we have, I have morning prayers, you know, the I try to do my morning prayers, and then I mostly do the Jesus prayer on and off during the day.

00:35:41.000 You do you know about the, I mean, I'm sure you know about the Jesus Prayer, right?

00:35:44.000 It's a, it's like the basic spiritual practice of the Orthodox Church.

00:35:49.000 And so it's a very simple prayer.

00:35:51.000 Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

00:35:54.000 And usually it's, it's done with just a kind of breathing, or you breathe in the first part of the prayer and you breathe out the second part of the prayer and you kind of try to still your thoughts and to not, you know, to get rid of the all of the noise.

00:36:09.000 You know, and so it's a good way to resist temptation, but it's also kind of a good, good, just a good practice to have during the day.

00:36:15.000 You know, and a lot of Orthodox Christians practice that.

00:36:18.000 And then obviously I go to church.

00:36:19.000 I try, you know, I travel a lot.

00:36:21.000 It's difficult, but I try to at least go to liturgy once a week and then for feast, maybe if I can.

00:36:28.000 Those are my practices.

00:36:30.000 Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

00:36:32.000 Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

00:36:35.000 How do you align those words in English with the idea that Christ may be hosted within the field of your individual consciousness?

00:36:52.000 Well, the idea is that in some ways Christ is, of course, Christ is in you, that Christ is your center, you know.

00:37:02.000 And so, but there's also this sense that you're always falling short of that, you know, in your individuality, you could say.

00:37:09.000 Sometimes we differentiate the idea of person and individual, that is, as a person, as a full kind of embodiment of a human in the center of you because of Christ's incarnation.

00:37:20.000 You could say that Christ is in you, he's in your heart.

00:37:23.000 You know, that's a nice kind of even Protestant way of saying it.

00:37:27.000 But that with all the distractions and everything else.

00:37:30.000 And so, in the invocation, if you think of the prayer, there's two parts, right?

00:37:33.000 There's an invocation.

00:37:35.000 Say, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God.

00:37:37.000 So you're kind of invoking Christ into your heart, although He's already there, but you're kind of, let's say, entering into your heart.

00:37:44.000 That's how the fathers talk about it.

00:37:46.000 You have to enter into your own heart, and there you will find Christ.

00:37:51.000 And then, in some ways, you ask Him to compensate for your insufficiencies.

00:37:54.000 You say, Have mercy on me, a sinner, because I know that I'm not always in my heart.

00:37:59.000 I know that I'm not always in that center.

00:38:01.000 I'm not always in that place where I'm fully myself and fully united with God, but I'm distracted, I sin, I'm prideful, all of these things.

00:38:12.000 And so, I think that that's the best way.

00:38:14.000 Does that help answer your question?

00:38:17.000 Yes, yes, it does.

00:38:19.000 I wonder how we are to for you, like you've chosen or been chosen for the path of Eastern Orthodoxy.

00:38:28.000 And I understand as best, you know, peripherally and superficially, I suppose, what you're saying, the advantages of that.

00:38:38.000 And as a person that lives in the Florida panhandle, and I attend a kind of a, what I feel like the jargon, the language to describe it is an Acts 29 church.

00:38:52.000 That's the vernacular, an Acts 29 church, you know, and it's kind of, it seems like much of the focus is ethical and moral.

00:39:00.000 And even in this relatively small and not super populated area that I'm in, there's churches everywhere.

00:39:06.000 Like up one road, there's like a vision church, which, as best I can tell, they're more into the flags and the speaking in tongues.

00:39:14.000 Then there's like a destiny church, which has a like that's really gotten it down with the music.

00:39:20.000 And, you know, the one I go to is in what I think they call a set up, tear down church, Redeemer, where they're, again, that, but you see this thing you mentioned about authority.

00:39:32.000 I can see how what I might regard as the sort of institutional paraphernalia, the outfits, the candelabras, the sigils of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy might lend themselves to sort of submission.

00:39:50.000 And isn't that the nature of apostolic authority and of these symbols and the paraphernalia?

00:39:59.000 Is it sort of like, does it, is it about authority?

00:40:02.000 And is it about submission, submission of the culture and submission of the individual?

00:40:09.000 I mean, yeah, there's a way of seeing it that way.

00:40:12.000 In some ways, there are two ways of understanding the outward aspects of the church.

00:40:16.000 Let's say the way that the way that the priest dress, let's say the music, the architecture, the icons, all of that.

00:40:23.000 In some ways, you could say it is a manner in which we submit to God, obviously.

00:40:29.000 But we can also understand it also as a way that it's a celebration.

00:40:33.000 It's actually the way that creation can celebrate, can worship, can, you know, resonate in, if I use a language that you would understand, in God's will.

00:40:44.000 And so it's like God's will has a, looks like something in the world.

00:40:48.000 God's will has a shape.

00:40:49.000 And therefore, when we kind of shape the world like that, then we're celebrating God's presence and we're participating in God's presence in the world.

00:41:00.000 But in terms of the actual hierarchy, let's say the hierarchy of bishops and of priests, of course, there's an aspect of that which has to do with authority.

00:41:10.000 But the church also has saints, you know, and saints are more like they're more like the prophetic, you could say, in the sense that they, because the hierarchy is always corrupt, you know, the hierarchy, the priests and bishops.

00:41:22.000 I mean, there are wonderful priests and bishops, but there will always be corrupt bishops.

00:41:27.000 There will always be bishops who make decisions for the wrong reasons.

00:41:32.000 And that's from the beginning.

00:41:33.000 We know that we have all the stories of all the corrupt bishops from the beginning.

00:41:38.000 But then you also have then ascetics and saints that come and shake things up, you know, and usually get abused by the church somehow and ultimately get vindicated.

00:41:48.000 So there's a way in which these things end up balancing themselves out.

00:41:54.000 So there's, yes, of course, you have to have to submit to authority and participate in that, but there's always other things around that are there.

00:42:02.000 You know, we even have the tradition of holy fools in, you know, especially in the Russian church, where you actually have characters that act completely out of line, that they do all kinds of wild things in the church in order to break the sense that this is just an institution with just a kind of simple, simple submission, you know?

00:42:23.000 And so we have all kinds of things to balance things out. 0.59

00:42:27.000 Because if it can't incorporate chaos, how can the institution endure?

00:42:32.000 What about when St. Francis says, if like in response to his father's condemnation in court, as I understand, this is based on Chesterton's writing about St. Francis. 0.95

00:42:45.000 If I am to be a fool, I'll be the fool in the court of King Jesus Christ. 0.90

00:42:52.000 I like that. 0.99

00:42:52.000 I like that, of course, for obvious reasons, I suppose. 0.99

00:42:56.000 But also, also, anytime that we pick an institution or a lineage or a livery, it's, of course, many doors closed.

00:43:06.000 Hopefully it's the doors that he wants closed that are closed and the doors that he won't open open, as David says.

00:43:14.000 But I do, as I've said to some of my friends that are Catholic, like, do you think then when Christ returns in the cloud and the light and the bronze boots and the, you know, however we're to understand these images, is it going to be like, okay, who's Catholic?

00:43:31.000 Or, okay, who's Eastern Orthodox? 1.00

00:43:33.000 Everyone else, fuck. 1.00

00:43:36.000 Like, you know, that's collapsing. 1.00

00:43:39.000 You know, so do what do you, how do you, how do we reconcile the improbability of that outcome with a personal decision to belong to one particular discipline, Jonathan?

00:43:50.000 Yeah, I mean, the way that I see it is I tend to see it rather in the positive, you know, which is that if you ask me what is the tradition, what is the church that is the fullest, that has the fullest of the revelation of Christ, that has the most sure way towards, you know, theosis and union with God, I would say that that's the Orthodox Church.

00:44:17.000 And that's why I am Orthodox.

00:44:19.000 And that's also why I would tell people to become Orthodox. 0.71

00:44:23.000 As for the others, it's just not my, it's not my prerogative.

00:44:27.000 Like, I'm concerned with my salvation and I'm concerned with, you know, living that out as best as possible.

00:44:35.000 And so that's all I can really speak for.

00:44:37.000 The rest, you know, how God's mercy functions and how these divisions in the body of Christ, what they mean and what fruits they're going to yield.

00:44:49.000 In some ways, I kind of leave that up to silence, you could say.

00:44:55.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:44:57.000 What do we, I've got two areas that are on my mind.

00:45:01.000 One is our mutual friend, Jordan Peterson, and my prayers for him and his wellness.

00:45:07.000 And I don't know even if this is the right sort of thing to talk about in this context, really.

00:45:14.000 And then the other thing I'm thinking about is recurrent, again, recurrent images and how one might be spoken to and through from and through image.

00:45:28.000 And, you know, like the appleness of an apple, the burning bushness of a burning bush, what we're to do with this language of symbol and whether that, once you've made the choice, of course, no, yeah, once you've made the choice that you're Eastern Orthodox and that you're concerned with your own salvation, then why have a venture about folk tales? 0.59

00:45:53.000 You know, because I'm having these conversations with the people around me.

00:45:57.000 I'll tell you, I'll give you as much background as I can and as quickly as I can.

00:46:00.000 We watched this movie on Netflix that's called Jay Kelly, in which George Clooney plays an actor very much like himself, experiencing a crisis of confidence and meaning towards the end of his career.

00:46:14.000 And it's very difficult not to sort of watch the film, which is brilliantly made by Noah Baumburg, who's an excellent filmmaker.

00:46:20.000 He's got a great cast, Adam Sandler, like brilliant actors and stuff.

00:46:24.000 What's weird, though, when you watch the film is you think, well, this is a film about the kind of hopeless meaninglessness of being inside an institution like Hollywood, and in this instance, specifically Hollywood.

00:46:37.000 And yet there is the possibility of real friendship within it and things that are real.

00:46:42.000 And yet the artifact and object itself is a film.

00:46:46.000 That's what you've ended up with, is a film.

00:46:47.000 Now, any story, one of the things I've sort of felt like I've understood about Christ is the, and, you know, which I guess is merely an extemporization on C.S. Lewis's observation that the maker of meaning, the reason that there is meaning, appears to instantiate and incarnate meaning.

00:47:07.000 And he tells stories during his mission and ministry that further illustrate meaning.

00:47:13.000 And then his story is all about meaning, whether it's the vulnerability and innocence of the child Christ or the crucifixion of the Antichrist.

00:47:20.000 Anyway, so how do I, and of course the resurrection, an ascension, like, how do I, though, as me, old Russ in the world, reconcile these like these sort of concussive and successive and endless sort of tidal revelations with, right, now I'm going to sell reborn supplements or now I'm going to, you know, do my job.

00:47:49.000 How are you doing it?

00:47:53.000 So I would say that I find great joy every time I see, let's say, the light of the Logos refracted in anything.

00:48:05.000 You know, every time I see the light of God reflected in anything, I find great joy, whether it is the way in which, you know, we can find joy in our own stories, you know, our own heritage, whether it is in our own family, in our own friendships, in our relationships.

00:48:25.000 That's when I find joy.

00:48:26.000 You know, it's like every time I encounter someone who has become a Christian, I rejoice no matter what, even if I think that Orthodoxy is better than their version of Christianity, I still rejoice. 0.83

00:48:38.000 Every time someone finds meaning, someone who is an alcoholic, who finds sobriety in some kind of submission to a higher reality, I rejoice because every place where I see, you know, the light of truth refracted, I find joy.

00:48:53.000 And so I would say that's how I live my life.

00:48:57.000 And that's what motivates all the things that I do.

00:49:00.000 You know, of course, I'm particularly concerned with beauty.

00:49:03.000 I believe that in some ways, beauty is a way in for many people, you know, through the fairy tales or through the icons or, you know, all kinds of ways.

00:49:12.000 And that's a way in which a film can play that role because a film can be an object of beauty, not in the saccharin way, but in, you know, but it can be even harsh beauty, but it can elevate certain aspects of the world and help us see them properly.

00:49:28.000 You know, and if you have to, if in order to make a living, you have to, let's say, sell things or you have to advertise for things, you know, I would say to just choose them properly, you know, to not be a hypocrite and to pick the things that you believe in and things that you think are powerful.

00:49:49.000 Like if you're, if you're, I don't know, if you're selling beef tallow, you have to, you have to think that beef tallow is a good thing.

00:49:55.000 You know, don't, don't, don't try to sell things that you think are, that, that you're cynical about, you know, and I think that would prevent kind of schizophrenic, you know, a kind of breakdown of your psyche.

00:50:08.000 Oh, yeah.

00:50:09.000 Thank you.

00:50:10.000 Thank you.

00:50:10.000 Yeah.

00:50:11.000 Stay away from the hypocrisy and the lying.

00:50:14.000 These are pretty rudimentary.

00:50:16.000 They're pretty basic, pretty simple thing, you know?

00:50:18.000 Yeah, they are quite simple principles.

00:50:20.000 And yeah, I'm doing my best with that.

00:50:22.000 It's just there's such a lot of stimulus.

00:50:24.000 Hey, what do you think about okay?

00:50:27.000 So, yeah, because I guess what that was with that film to unpack it a little bit is, you know, I've been an actor and I've had an entourage and I've had lots and lots of attention.

00:50:40.000 And it's a world that I've ultimately been, it felt like in some ways, expelled from or exiled from or left in a, you know, and I, and what is interesting for me, particularly since being charged with rape and knowing like I'm standing trial in June, knowing that I, through my objectification and selfishness, have obviously hurt people.

00:51:04.000 Obviously, I've hurt women with my conduct, but very faithfully believing I've never done anything that was non-consensual, never needed to, never wanted to, don't feel like it's even in the flow of what I'm about or what I do.

00:51:19.000 But plainly, here I am in this situation.

00:51:23.000 I must have done something and God must want it to be happening because here it is happening.

00:51:28.000 And already I can read the obvious benefits of the situation.

00:51:31.000 You know, I feel differently in my marriage now.

00:51:34.000 I feel different as a father.

00:51:35.000 I've been really refined by it.

00:51:38.000 I've been refined.

00:51:39.000 It's been a furnace.

00:51:40.000 It's burned away a lot of dross.

00:51:43.000 It's burned away a lot of dross.

00:51:45.000 But I'm a very, I guess I have in me a certain amount of, I don't know, will or robustness or something, determination.

00:51:54.000 I don't know.

00:51:54.000 It's both a positive and negative attribute in some ways.

00:51:57.000 So when I look at things that glorify celebrity, I feel a kind of anger towards it.

00:52:03.000 I also do think that the world is not, what do you do with the scriptural assertion throughout the New Testament that the world is in the thrall of the evil one?

00:52:19.000 It is the devil that runs the world.

00:52:21.000 And one might argue the function of the world to distract you from God and to keep you from God.

00:52:28.000 Not to deny its beauty, the beauty of nature, the beauty of people, the beauty of art, beauty, all of that I recognize.

00:52:33.000 How do you handle that in yourself and as an operator in the culture?

00:52:41.000 Yeah.

00:52:42.000 Well, I think, I think really think that the best way of thinking about it is that, you know, in the book of Revelation, as you said you were reading the book of Revelation, you could say that there are two images of civilization.

00:52:54.000 You know, one is a beast with a whore on its back, you know, and so it's a mix of dilapidation and power and greed and corruption, but also control and power and all of these, you know, both of like the kind of loose aspect of civilization and the very harsh controlling aspect of civilization. 0.99

00:53:15.000 And then you also have this image of the heavenly Jerusalem as being the one which is properly submitted to God, you know. 0.98

00:53:24.000 And I believe that those two realities are always there.

00:53:28.000 These are always present realities and that the same, the same world both has an aspect which is pulling it apart, you know, which is making it with bringing it to submit to evil forces.

00:53:40.000 And there's also in that there are true things that can shine.

00:53:45.000 And, you know, I would say that, you know, how do I go through it?

00:53:50.000 I think that I try to focus on those things that are bright and those things that are truly that are truly moving towards the good.

00:54:00.000 Obviously, I don't succeed all the time.

00:54:02.000 You know, like all people, I'm sinful and I have all my all my faults, obviously.

00:54:09.000 But hopefully, you know, in the end, that's the play, you know, is to try to focus on those things.

00:54:16.000 You know, and then like there are certain disciplines that I've developed, you know, and everybody has their own kind of practice.

00:54:23.000 Like I, but these are not necessarily appropriate for everyone.

00:54:27.000 Like I actually practice forms of anti-attention, you could say.

00:54:31.000 And so I actually try to not comment on events in the world.

00:54:37.000 And I usually wait.

00:54:38.000 I'll wait like three weeks before I comment on anything that's happening, if I'm going to even comment on something.

00:54:45.000 And so, and so, you know, and obviously it's a competition because obviously I do have to have attention or else I won't be able to do this.

00:54:52.000 But it's always trying to find the balance between, you know, obviously being able to do what I do and say the things that I think are insightful, but then not being in that whirlwind of attention that the, especially the internet, can cause, you know, because it's like a, it's like a wheel and you have to feed it, you know, or else, or else it starts to, the algorithm kind of pushes you out and you know that's true.

00:55:14.000 And so you have to keep the outrage and the excitement and the and the and the clickbait going.

00:55:20.000 But but, you know, I mean, you can also accept the kind of lower level of attention and just find joy in that.

00:55:28.000 I feel like I'm, I love the place that I'm in.

00:55:30.000 I, I, I'm not famous, like in the sense that I have people that respect me and sometimes people recognize me once in a while.

00:55:38.000 I make enough money to support my family, but that's that's great.

00:55:42.000 Like that's what I want.

00:55:42.000 I don't, I would, I would actually flee from being super famous because it's probably not good for me.

00:55:50.000 No, it's not good for I'm not sure that it's who it's good for.

00:55:53.000 And, you know, like in the Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, when he sort of contests that if you come to our Lord, you will look back and see that your whole life was heaven or the holy city.

00:56:06.000 And if you reject our Lord, you will look back at your life and see that the whole thing was. 0.98

00:56:11.000 He sort of is offering sort of purgatorial, I think, rather than a beast with a whore on its back. 0.99

00:56:18.000 You know, sort of so awfully diabolical, it almost might be quite good. 0.99

00:56:24.000 When so it gets that evil, you might enjoy it. 1.00

00:56:27.000 Like a beast with a whore on its back. 1.00

00:56:28.000 That sounds like a potentially good evening. 1.00

00:56:30.000 I think a party.

00:56:32.000 Yeah.

00:56:33.000 So like this idea that you say that it's, I mean, I guess when he's talking about my ways are not your ways, I guess it might be beyond comprehension, only understood in the most peripheral.

00:56:51.000 I guess when I say lucid, I actually mean the opposite of how it's normally meant, like a kind of light, like you say, the eminence and the eminence from the abbot of the monastery you described.

00:57:01.000 And I was when some of something I'm reading at the moment talks about the light by which we even experience light, the light that is beyond light, a kind of light that's not photons.

00:57:14.000 It's difficult not to see it as analogous or to consciousness, to the consciousness itself, that this might be our participation in the kingdom may be that we are co-creators with him through consciousness itself.

00:57:31.000 And that do you think of the cross as having some geometric?

00:57:37.000 How do you break down in a Jonathan Pagot way the cross?

00:57:42.000 The cross?

00:57:43.000 I mean, I mean, the cross is a union of heaven and earth.

00:57:47.000 You know, it's a vertical and a horizontal.

00:57:48.000 It's a very simple symbol, but it actually is a cosmic one.

00:57:53.000 And then, you know, the union of the vertical, which is the hierarchy of heaven, and the horizontal, which is the expanse, yields a heart, a center, you know, and that center is, you know, it's in Catholic thinking, it's the sacred heart of Christ, you could say, you know, and it's the holy of holies.

00:58:14.000 It's the, it's the place where the glory of God, you know, reveals itself.

00:58:21.000 And I think that, you know, the surprise in some ways that Christ reveals is that that appears as a, as a self-giving, as a sacrifice, you know, because we tend to think of the center as something that is real and is radiating, you know, like the center is this real thing that's radiating.

00:58:39.000 But Christ reveals that that center is actually an offering.

00:58:43.000 It's a self, a self-offering.

00:58:46.000 So that's how I see the cross.

00:58:48.000 I think it's probably the most Probably the most powerful image because it's so simple.

00:58:54.000 It's such a simple image, but it contains everything in it, you know.

00:58:58.000 The tearing of the veil of the curtain there, the tearing of the curtain in that moment.

00:59:05.000 How do we do?

00:59:07.000 What do we do about that?

00:59:08.000 You know, let's say at the very top of our conversation, Jonathan, he goes, I've seen you talking to people everywhere.

00:59:13.000 I guess some of that's, you know, Candace Owens. 0.65

00:59:16.000 I've chatted to Candace Owens, and she, you know, where I feel like she's living is she's newly Catholic.

00:59:24.000 She's a type of star that couldn't have existed even 10 years ago.

00:59:28.000 Any person in the Candace Owens position 10 years ago has got to have been gatekept.

00:59:34.000 You like you would either your Warner Brothers or NBC or News International or Condé Nast or some big owned institution is going to hold your stuff.

00:59:48.000 Now, Jordan Peterson, our mutual friend, has been where she has been before and has endured it.

00:59:56.000 Joe Rogan has been there before.

00:59:59.000 I've had a little go, you know, like I've had a little go at that.

01:00:02.000 Now, so I wonder what you feel is the significant revelation in the story of Christ that seems to bring us into such strong adversity with the world, such clear combat, such conflict.

01:00:18.000 That why is it that telling the truth if that's what you take Candace Owens to be doing, you know, and of course, any person, as you say, the logos refracted through a person, it's going to bear some, it's going to pick up some flesh, you know.

01:00:36.000 Because I, what I feel like is I'm doing turning point.

01:00:39.000 Like on the 18th, I'm going there with Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro.

01:00:44.000 Any one of these people now, there's probably, maybe there's people, Jonathan, in the world, maybe there's people in the world, Jonathan Pajot, that regard you with like fury.

01:00:54.000 How dare he rewrite Snow White?

01:00:59.000 You know, and so, man, what is it?

01:01:03.000 What this tussle for power that seems extraordinarily to center around the holy land, its inhabitants, have you got a way of handling that?

01:01:16.000 Do I have a way of handling that?

01:01:20.000 I mean, I think that, you know, for sure, what we're seeing happening is, I mean, it's been happening, been happening for a while, which is that we're seeing the breakdown of a common story, the breakdown of the, it's really the World War II story that's breaking down, and it's breaking down in all kinds of ways, ways that actually don't care about your political allegiance.

01:01:49.000 They don't care about whether you're right or left or conservative or liberal, whatever.

01:01:52.000 It's like it's the narrative that's kind of breaking down.

01:01:55.000 And, you know, in that moment of chaos, there's obviously a desire to retell a new story and to kind of find a new story.

01:02:04.000 But it's something that you can't totally force, something that in some ways will only just happen, like a Kairos or revelation.

01:02:15.000 But I think that that's what's going on.

01:02:16.000 And, you know, in some ways, you know, Israel is the World War II consensus. 0.74

01:02:23.000 It is the incarnation of it.

01:02:25.000 And so all of the contradictions, all of the taboos of that consensus, all of the, you know, all of the ways in which it served us and the way in which it betrayed us are all contained in that place and in that imagery.

01:02:41.000 And so it's not surprising that that's the place where the narrative combat is happening.

01:02:51.000 And I don't know what the solution is.

01:02:54.000 I don't have a solution.

01:02:55.000 I can see the problem and I can see that it's breaking down and it's going to continue to break down.

01:03:02.000 And that's going to lead to possibly war, possibly, yeah, at least more and more conflict.

01:03:11.000 But I don't completely know it seems like an intractable problem until the solution starts to become clear.

01:03:22.000 And not just about Israel itself, but the entire story of the liberal West since World War II and the way in which we advocate for open societies, that we advocate for diversity, that we advocate for that we are afraid of identity, we're afraid of nationalism, we're afraid of race, we're afraid of all these categories.

01:03:39.000 And now they're crashing back and we don't know how to deal with it.

01:03:42.000 And they're crashing back in all kinds of insane, wild ways.

01:03:46.000 And we don't know how to manage it.

01:03:47.000 And so you have all of these characters that are basically yelling at each other and don't understand each other.

01:03:53.000 That's really important, by the way.

01:03:56.000 You probably saw the Fuentes Piers Morgan interview that was the last one.

01:04:02.000 And when you watch it, you realize that these two worlds, they do not, they're not, they're talking and they don't know what they don't understand what's happening on the other side.

01:04:13.000 You know, Piers Morgan doesn't understand anything about the world of the Groypers. 1.00

01:04:18.000 He has no idea.

01:04:19.000 And therefore, he thinks he's doing something, but he's not.

01:04:24.000 And he doesn't know what's going on.

01:04:26.000 He can't measure the results.

01:04:27.000 And he doesn't know what's happening because all of these stories are kind of crashing together right now.

01:04:34.000 Oh, that's a brilliant bit of analysis to take it all the way from World War II to Nick Fuentes and Piers Morgan.

01:04:40.000 I mean, that's, clip that, send that out.

01:04:43.000 I mean, because as best as I could follow it, it's like the World War II, even though it was, of course, an incident of conflict, was in its own paradoxical way a unifying event.

01:04:58.000 It was a unifying event.

01:05:00.000 The great, it seems, enduring symbol by your analysis there, and I recognize you're just a man on a podcast.

01:05:07.000 You know, it's not like a treatise you were offering, was like that Israel is one of the sort of offered up consequences, results, some would say, objectives of the Second World War. 0.91

01:05:19.000 But of course, the total collapse of British imperialism and colonialism could be another one and the rise of American imperialism, one might argue.

01:05:27.000 And of course, communism, Russian Soviet communism.

01:05:33.000 But what I see and think is interesting because we've got a conversation that's sort of been fused with conversations, even though it's only been an hour, a discourse diverse enough to include why Disney can't make fairy stories no more.

01:05:48.000 That's a good title for a video, a clip, by the way.

01:05:52.000 And related to the World War II consensus, too, by the way.

01:05:56.000 Yes, because there's no agreement on what reality is and what myths are and what stories we should be telling each other.

01:06:02.000 And, you know, like, and I'd love to throw this your way, even though I'm supposed to be going and doing something else.

01:06:06.000 Like that Breitbart, Andrew Breitbart says, of course, famously, you know, politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of technology.

01:06:14.000 And what is technology other than human ingenuity, unmanifest consciousness being instantiated into matter and systems, i.e. the system of mass communication now has gotten so vast and efficient that it's collapsing time.

01:06:33.000 How can you measure time in the same way in the pre-Gutenberg print and press era and now when we can simultaneously make a claim, have that claim go around the world, have it debunked, dismantled, reinstantiated, sects emerging from it?

01:06:51.000 I mean, you can sort of see it happening now, like that, like one unified object for a minute.

01:06:56.000 Like once you would have said Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, that's one thing, Ben Shapiro, one thing.

01:07:05.000 Now that thing, those people you put them in a room, they might kill each other, you know, like it's extraordinary.

01:07:10.000 It's extraordinary.

01:07:11.000 So fragmentation and like there's it's brilliant.

01:07:14.000 I had this argument with Chat GPT.

01:07:17.000 Check this, man.

01:07:18.000 Like I had an argument with Chat GPT because I'm writing a book, How to Become Christian in Seven Days, asterisk, make take 50 years of sin and fake rape allegations to get to day one.

01:07:32.000 That's there.

01:07:33.000 Do you know like that subtitle?

01:07:36.000 Or is it the title?

01:07:39.000 And then anyway, so like I was writing, I was doing my best because I end up like a lot of my time, Jonathan, is I talk to like working class men because of the conditions of my origin about scripture now. 0.97

01:07:53.000 So like from telling my mate Joe the story of David, I'm like, right, so what it is is, you know, then David, he obviously fights Goliath and we all know that, but his quality was he was happy to die either way, but also he did have the skills, he had the skills, you know, from killing the lions or whatever, but he was also, he was like, if God wants me to win, this motherfucker's got no chance.

01:08:13.000 And like, and then, but then Bathsheba, and then the consensus, and the place where the atonement for the census is made is where God will come and live with you eternally.

01:08:26.000 The site of the temple will be the site of your deepest, where you atone for your deepest wound.

01:08:32.000 And maybe even the father, but God, how do you break that down into metaphysics?

01:08:36.000 Where the father atones for his greatest transgression is where God will finally come to live in all perpetuity, or at least till the temple is sacked and ransacked and bought down.

01:08:46.000 Anyway, so I'm telling these stories as best as I can in working class vernacular to working class men, and it forms a big part of the book.

01:08:54.000 There's one bit where obviously I'm checking in with Chat GPT, Jonathan.

01:08:58.000 Like, oh, what order did that happen in?

01:09:00.000 And is that story told different from Chronicles and Kings and Samuel?

01:09:04.000 And what are the distinctions?

01:09:05.000 And da-da-da-da-da.

01:09:06.000 Anyway, I get into it with ChatGPT where I say, I ask it, I wish I'd kept it, man.

01:09:13.000 I go, was Bathsheba into it?

01:09:16.000 Right?

01:09:17.000 I asked ChatGPT.

01:09:18.000 And ChatGPT goes, well, may it, no, actually, you might actually categorize it as rape because the differentiation, this is by the way, this is Disney execs talking, right?

01:09:31.000 The pattern, the differentiation in power dynamics between David and Bathsheba means that it might as well consider it a rape.

01:09:38.000 Now, obviously, that touches a nerve with me, right?

01:09:41.000 And so I'm like, well, hang on.

01:09:44.000 She marries him later.

01:09:45.000 And ChatGPT is like, well, even that could be imposed, particularly in the hindsight of how our culture has evolved and progressed in our understanding.

01:09:55.000 And I said, wait a minute.

01:09:57.000 Are you assuming that we're progressing when matter deteriorates?

01:10:02.000 Why would we not degenerate over time?

01:10:05.000 Why do you not think that we're degenerating over time? 0.99

01:10:07.000 Like, I'm arguing with my own fucking phone at this point, of course. 0.96

01:10:10.000 Anyway, there's a point where I feel like ChatGPT is like, oh no, abort, abort in every sense of the word. 0.98

01:10:17.000 Like, you know, I see ChatGPT sort of rescinding and trying to get out of it.

01:10:22.000 Like, well, you know, it's a complicated subject, obviously.

01:10:25.000 Now, I guess the reason I heaped all that.

01:10:30.000 Where are we going?

01:10:31.000 Where are we going, Russell?

01:10:32.000 Where are we going?

01:10:33.000 Yeah, where are we going?

01:10:34.000 I mean, that's what I want to, you know.

01:10:36.000 Look, I want to, look, one of the things I'm trying to offer to this medium is my raw authenticity, my confusion, my bafflement, my doubt, my wild oscillation between certainty and total collapsing doubt.

01:10:50.000 And where I suppose I was going with that, well, maybe, I mean, that is a good question, Jonathan.

01:10:55.000 I mean, where were we going?

01:10:56.000 Where was I going?

01:10:57.000 I started it with it about Chad GPT.

01:11:03.000 You said you had a conversation.

01:11:04.000 That's how you started this whole thing, but I didn't.

01:11:06.000 No, that was about 10 minutes into the question.

01:11:08.000 Oh, okay.

01:11:10.000 I mean, that was so much, but there was so much before that.

01:11:12.000 I guess what I was, I guess, oh, yeah, there was the Disney bit.

01:11:15.000 It was the Disney bit.

01:11:16.000 Where I was going, Jonathan, where I was going with it was that what's happening now is that time itself is changing.

01:11:28.000 We're living in a different reality.

01:11:30.000 And as you say, there's not one story that can accommodate, well, there is one story that can accommodate it, but people are denying that story.

01:11:38.000 And it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be wild.

01:11:43.000 But you went from, listen, you went from World War II to Fuentes and Piers Morgan.

01:11:48.000 So don't Russell brand me.

01:11:50.000 It was quite coherent, though, I think.

01:11:56.000 No, but, okay, so let's talk.

01:12:00.000 Let's just talk about the, I think that your insight is right.

01:12:05.000 That is that the stories are breaking apart and that we, you know, even in even in the supposedly right or the conservative or the people that are supposed to in some ways be this, those that like the center in the sense of something solid, something, you know, that because of how the story of World War II is breaking apart, now we don't know where to look and we don't know how to,

01:12:33.000 let's say, reconcile some of the problems that are being presented to us, you know?

01:12:38.000 And so I do believe that Christ obviously is the solution.

01:12:44.000 I do believe that Christianity is the only thing that can really, because the problem, okay, so think about it this way. 0.98

01:12:50.000 So the problem that's coming towards us is that since World War II, and for good reasons, we've objected to tribal identity.

01:12:58.000 We've objected to racial identity.

01:13:00.000 We've ultimately then moved to objecting even to family hierarchies, to religious hierarchies, actually to anything that is kind of identity that stabilizes.

01:13:11.000 And we've moved towards openness and diversity and difference, right?

01:13:16.000 This celebration of difference ever since rock and roll, this idea that rebellion and difference and you have to show how different you are from everyone else.

01:13:24.000 All of that is happening.

01:13:25.000 But that, see, that doesn't, obviously, at some point that breaks down.

01:13:28.000 That becomes furries and it becomes fetishism.

01:13:31.000 It becomes SNM.

01:13:32.000 It becomes all of like these kind of idiosyncratic ways of being.

01:13:36.000 And that doesn't hold.

01:13:37.000 The world can't hold together.

01:13:39.000 And so the question is, how do we reintroduce identity into the world without repeating the fascist mistake, without repeating a kind of absolute identity, right?

01:13:52.000 Or a kind of absolute nationalism or all of the problems that started appearing at the beginning of the 20th century.

01:14:00.000 How can we now reintegrate identity without falling into the problem that we had?

01:14:05.000 And that's the problem.

01:14:06.000 We don't know how to do it.

01:14:07.000 I do really believe that Christianity is the only solution because it is a self-sacrificial identity. 1.00

01:14:14.000 Christianity has the sense of identity and authority, but that authority is always posited as service.

01:14:21.000 It's always posited as giving itself.

01:14:26.000 And the tribal identity, not necessarily so, right?

01:14:29.000 So if you fall into a kind of nationalism or tribal identity, it can just be, and you see it a little bit in Trump, a little bit in like America only.

01:14:37.000 And I don't care.

01:14:38.000 I'll screw everybody over.

01:14:39.000 It doesn't matter as long as my thing is solid.

01:14:42.000 And you see that even in some of the right-wing commentators now.

01:14:45.000 They're like, you know, I only care about my thing.

01:14:48.000 And as long as it's solid, I don't care about anything else.

01:14:52.000 That's not a proper that you can't exist in the world that way.

01:14:55.000 There has to be, obviously, you do have to care about your thing, but you always have to care about your thing in a way that is in communion with others.

01:15:01.000 There's no other way or else you're going straight towards war.

01:15:05.000 Like, let's just, let's just plow towards war.

01:15:07.000 Let's just, let's just not care about anything else that happens in the world.

01:15:10.000 Just care about ourselves and screw everybody over until we've accumulated so many enemies that now war becomes inevitable.

01:15:18.000 And so, anyways, this is to say, this is the issue that we're facing: how do we reintegrate identity in a manner that doesn't lead us down the dark path that happened in the 20th century?

01:15:29.000 Yes, I understand.

01:15:31.000 The church has to be the center.

01:15:32.000 The technology affords decentralization and the church can be localized.

01:15:38.000 I think it's, Jonathan, I could talk to you forever, especially when I ask very long and may I say brilliant, if difficult to follow questions, if you're not clever enough to concentrate. 0.99

01:15:49.000 Say it might come across as incoherent to someone who spends their time writing children's books, but to me, I'm dealing with grown-up shit. 0.97

01:16:00.000 I put aside childish things, Jonathan. 0.99

01:16:03.000 I put aside childish things.

01:16:07.000 I'm happy.

01:16:08.000 You know, we actually had a like a little bet in our team, on my team.

01:16:14.000 And the bet was, is Russell going to wear a shirt in our interview?

01:16:20.000 That was the bet.

01:16:21.000 And oh, no, and he take off crabs. 0.96

01:16:23.000 He takes off.

01:16:26.000 I've got nothing to hide.

01:16:28.000 That's right.

01:16:32.000 Thanks, man.

01:16:33.000 It was great to talk to you, though.

01:16:34.000 This is, I always enjoy this.

01:16:36.000 This is fun.

01:16:37.000 You're fantastic.

01:16:39.000 I'll come to that monastery at some point in the terrifying future.

01:16:43.000 At some point in the terrifying future, I'll have to stay away from my.

01:16:47.000 I cling to my family.

01:16:49.000 I've got to tell you, I cling to them guys.

01:16:51.000 But I'd like to be on Mount Athos with some monks really and not caring about my, or my, my treasured identity dashed on the rocks.

01:17:05.000 Thanks, man.

01:17:06.000 That's great to talk to you as usual.

01:17:09.000 Praise Jesus.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - December 26, 2025

What Happens When a Civilization Forgets Its Stories? — Jonathan Pageau - SF668

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