The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 156. The Perfect Mode of Being

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.800 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:53.860 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. My name is Michaela.

00:00:57.420 This episode featured Jonathan Pajot and Jordan Peterson discussing the issue of conscience, narrative with objective reality, the perfect mode of being, the responsibility to move things towards the divine, the inevitability of religion, the significance of the virgin birth, the idea of heaven, and much, much more.

00:01:18.080 It was recorded on February 14th, 2021.

00:01:20.580 Jonathan Pajot is a symbolic thinker, YouTuber, and class carver of orthodox icons.

00:01:26.640 He makes the most amazing icon carvings.

00:01:29.580 Big news. Dad's book is coming out Tuesday, March 2nd, Beyond Order.

00:01:35.480 Available at his website at jordanbpeterson.com, Amazon, wherever you buy books.

00:01:39.540 And he has posters for sale with absolutely incredible illustrations on it from the book.

00:01:45.400 I like them better than the last book.

00:01:47.220 Check them out, but mainly the book, available Tuesday or for pre-order now at jordanbpeterson.com.

00:01:52.760 Enjoy this episode.

00:01:53.900 Also, if you want to know about Tammy Peterson, my mother and my dad's wife, I released a podcast with her on my podcast.

00:02:00.600 The video is on YouTube at Michaela Peterson Videos if you want to meet my mom.

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00:04:10.720 So today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Paggio, whom I know primarily as a thinker,

00:04:36.800 who's a carver of orthodox icons that are absolutely beautiful.

00:04:42.160 I have one in my house of St. Michael and the Dragon, and an increasingly prominent YouTuber,

00:04:47.840 prominent among intellectual YouTubers, I would say, essentially,

00:04:52.540 particularly those who are interested in religious and philosophical and artistic ideas.

00:04:56.860 And Jonathan and I have been talking back and forth for, I would think, about six or seven years now, eh?

00:05:02.540 I know, we met in 2015. Yeah, it's time. It's crazy. Time flies.

00:05:08.320 It's crazy, that's for sure. So we haven't spoken for two years, maybe?

00:05:15.580 Yeah, we saw each other, I think, when your book came out and you came to Montreal for a little event,

00:05:20.340 and I picked you up at the airport. That was the last time we saw each other. Yeah, it's a while.

00:05:25.380 A lot of water under the bridge.

00:05:27.420 That's right, indeed.

00:05:28.840 And in your case, literally.

00:05:30.660 Yes, exactly.

00:05:31.620 Mm-hmm. Jonathan's house was flooded out. That was when?

00:05:36.660 It was in 2019. But we just moved back into our house this Christmas, and so it was a long,

00:05:42.400 kind of a long thing. It lasted a very long time, so.

00:05:45.500 And are you in your house right now?

00:05:47.120 Yes, I am in my house, all fixed up, and so we're really enjoying it. We're happy to be back.

00:05:53.000 I bet. It must have been unbelievably dislocating to be flooded like that. Your whole basement filled

00:05:58.540 with water, if I remember correctly. Yeah, exactly. It was a dike broke in the city, and I think it was

00:06:06.160 thousands of people got evacuated within an hour. And so for my kids, especially, it was my kids and

00:06:11.320 even my wife, it was a little bit of a trauma because it was water. We could see the water

00:06:16.000 coming, and there were cops and, you know, all these firemen and everything. And so it was a pretty intense moment.

00:06:22.980 Yeah. And where were you living when your house was underwater?

00:06:26.980 We moved around. We lived at my parents'. Then we rented a place. Then we had to move. And so we ended up living in

00:06:31.880 three places during about a year and a half that we were gone. But it was one of those things where,

00:06:38.880 you know, we say symbolism happens. You know, a lot of the things that even you talk about or that I talk

00:06:43.740 about just manifested themselves. This problem of the dike and the idea of, you know, corruption or

00:06:51.780 inattention to the situation and then thinking you're safe when, in fact, you're not aware of what's

00:06:57.700 kind of looming on the margins. And so for me, it was a real learning experience. I hope that I've

00:07:03.880 come out of it stronger and more attentive, let's say. Yeah. Well, I hope so too. I mean,

00:07:10.200 we all hope that we come out of unpleasant experiences stronger than when we went in,

00:07:15.820 although that isn't always the case. It's the case when things are functioning optimally and when

00:07:21.800 you're fortunate and courageous and, I suppose, as honest as you can be. But fortunate definitely

00:07:27.200 ranks high among all of those necessary preconditions for successful recovery, I would say.

00:07:35.140 Yeah. And I have to say that I am, we are, I'm so grateful to see you back online. You know,

00:07:41.120 that I know you've heard this, but there have been thousands of people thinking about you,

00:07:45.020 praying for you and really rooting for you. And, you know, I actually saw Tammy last year when I went

00:07:51.180 to bring your icon. And, and I just remember just feeling helpless and, and, you know, she was like,

00:07:58.000 would you go to Russia? And I was like, I'll go to Russia. I'll go see Jordan in Russia. It didn't

00:08:02.140 seem like it was a reasonable thing to do. And it's probably better. It didn't happen, but we've

00:08:06.340 definitely been praying for you and routing for you and think about you, Jordan.

00:08:09.900 No, I appreciate that a lot. And I, I'm back to some degree, I would say,

00:08:14.560 I still think I'm running at about 5%. So yeah. And that's partly why I was concerned about talking

00:08:22.180 to you today. We're generally discussed things that are relatively deep and it's still difficult

00:08:29.900 for me to go deeply into anything that's happening to me because it's so unbelievably awful. And it's,

00:08:37.080 it's, it's been hard on my faith. I would say, you know, and then I, my book is coming out,

00:08:42.900 hey, my new book, I should show it to you. I just got copies of it yesterday.

00:08:47.360 That's awesome.

00:08:48.080 Beyond order.

00:08:49.040 It's an, it's unbelievable that you wrote that during all of this. I can't believe that

00:08:53.100 when you say you're running at 5%, I think that your 5% is, is pretty close to the 100%

00:08:58.840 of most people.

00:08:59.740 Yeah. Well, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's 5% for me and getting the book was

00:09:06.300 actually somewhat of a traumatic experience, I would say, because it reminded me like it's a,

00:09:10.520 it's a, it's a, it's a concrete reminder of everything that's happened over the last three

00:09:17.420 or four years. And it, all things that I found very difficult to process both on the social front

00:09:23.900 and on the, let's say, biological health front. So I was reading, oddly enough, I got a book sent to

00:09:33.780 me by Bishop Barron, the first draft of a book. And it's written by a couple of professors.

00:09:39.660 It's called Jordan Peterson, God and Christianity, the search for a meaningful life by Dr. Christopher

00:09:45.720 Caxor and Dr. Matthew Pretzczyk, Word on Fire Institute. It's a Catholic response to my biblical

00:09:52.040 series. Hopefully they won't be too upset about me talking about it today, but I won't talk about

00:09:58.000 that much. The book itself, it was rather a shock to me. They're at Loyola Marymount University.

00:10:05.500 And it was kind of a shock to me to see them talking about my, I mean, these are religious

00:10:10.540 scholars talking about my biblical series. But I think people are just, people don't, a lot of people

00:10:18.620 didn't understand. And I could see it in my reaction with the way people were reacting to your

00:10:23.600 biblical studies, the biblical interpretation. People didn't understand how is it that he, we can barely

00:10:29.020 get a hundred people in our church. And Jordan has a million people listening to him kind of struggle

00:10:35.000 to get through these passages and do it in a very improvisational kind of existential way. And to me,

00:10:43.760 it's funny because, I mean, I think I have a group, I have a deep affection for your, the way that you

00:10:50.680 approach thing. And I, and obviously we connect together in the way we think. And so to me, it was

00:10:54.880 like, this is what you guys should have been doing for a while is trying to understand how it is that

00:11:00.760 this stuff is talking about reality and not just a bunch of arbitrary things that you need to believe

00:11:06.680 or that you need to kind of attend to. And, and because these stories, they really are telling us

00:11:12.600 about the structure of being. And so I think that that's the way that you approached it. And, and that's

00:11:18.140 why people are resonating to what you're saying, because they're like, finally, someone can, can,

00:11:23.900 can help us make sense of these stories that we're somehow strangely attracted to or frustrated by or

00:11:30.180 disgusted by or whatever it is, but there's this push and pull with these stories. And so, so I think

00:11:36.260 that I've seen a lot of Christians listen to your biblical talks. And of course, sometimes you say

00:11:40.580 things and they're like, okay, that's way off the rails. And then other times you say things and

00:11:44.860 they can't believe the insight that you're able to pierce. And so, so I, I'm not, not all surprised

00:11:50.780 that Catholic scholars would, would kind of look at what you're, you were doing. And we all hope that

00:11:55.600 you're going to do more of that for sure. Yes. Well, I would like to, I'm thinking about trying to

00:12:00.360 attempt a book on Exodus and lecture to lectures as well, although I wouldn't say that I'm in any

00:12:04.640 shape to do that yet. I'm, but it's a dream, let's say. I mean, I'm pretty much completely

00:12:12.240 non-functional for the first three or four hours of the day. I get up and I can barely stand up

00:12:17.420 and I go have a sauna for an hour and often sleep during that period of time. And then

00:12:23.620 at the same time I cook breakfast, I use an air cooker and then I go walk for anywhere between

00:12:28.740 seven and 10 miles. And even though I can, by the time I get out of the house, I'm dizzy as,

00:12:34.180 as can be. And it's difficult to stand up, but after about a mile or two, I get my legs under me to

00:12:40.640 some degree. And then by two o'clock, I'm kind of functional and although extremely anxious. And

00:12:47.680 then I'm able to do a little bit of work and often to sit down at four o'clock. My mind seems sharp

00:12:53.980 enough, although my memory isn't good. I can't bring things to mind like I used to, which is quite

00:12:58.940 distressing. And I have very little emotional resilience. And I'm worried for that reason about

00:13:05.040 the release of this book. I mean, I just did a Times interview, London Times interview, that was really

00:13:09.780 difficult, let's say. Yeah, we followed that. It's that frustrating. I mean, it's funny because

00:13:17.060 this, you know, again, it was like the same stories are playing out again. This person goes after you

00:13:22.240 and then it just turns against that person. And it's just, she's exposed for the fraud that she

00:13:29.100 was being during that interview. And so, you know, I think in the end... It's so strange that it keeps

00:13:33.820 happening over and over. I mean, I've really decided not to do mainstream interviews now for

00:13:38.820 a good while because I've... It seems to me that I've gone to the well of public sympathy,

00:13:44.200 so to speak, enough times. And that if this happens to me two or three more times, let's say,

00:13:49.580 people are going to rightly say, you know, how many times does it take for Peterson to learn?

00:13:55.160 And so, I don't want that to happen. I mean, I've been... You know, I feel an obligation to my

00:14:00.520 publishers, obviously, to talk about the book. Although that interview had virtually nothing

00:14:05.740 to do with the book. We hope that I would be able to discuss my health issues with someone

00:14:10.680 who would treat them squarely and then I could ignore them from then on in. But that isn't what

00:14:19.240 happened. Well, it's been... It's a sign of the politicized discourse. Like you... It's a sign of

00:14:27.440 the breakdown that we're going through that we see this capacity to have so entrenched aside

00:14:33.560 that people are... It doesn't matter what they do. It doesn't matter what they say.

00:14:39.600 They don't feel like they're responsible because in a way, you're the enemy. And, you know,

00:14:44.380 and it's not just you. It's other... It's between different groups. But if you're the enemy,

00:14:48.340 then everything is justified. And so... Well, I think a huge part of this is driven

00:14:53.880 by the desire to have an enemy. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's... It's... It's very difficult

00:15:00.440 to feel... It's an easy route to self-righteousness to have an enemy. Exactly. And it's a great place

00:15:08.000 to put all evil. Yeah. And because you attract so much attention, you're an easy... You're

00:15:14.300 definitely an easy target. Well, that's the theory. It seems not to turn out that way.

00:15:18.760 Yeah. But it's also was the timing. You know, the way... When you kind of came up in the public

00:15:25.520 sphere, there was a massive shift happening in culture. And I think that's one of the things

00:15:30.720 you could feel and that was happening around us. And to some extent, you know, Donald Trump had

00:15:35.980 something to do with that as well, in the sense that it was this malaise that was there. And this

00:15:40.780 kind of... This jostling and this... And this is what led to all that kind of discourse. And so

00:15:47.360 I think that you were identified. You became identified almost mythologically, I guess,

00:15:54.020 as a character. And people, you know, have... Treat you that way. And they act with you that way

00:16:00.740 in many respects. Yes. And it becomes very difficult to... It's become very difficult for me to understand

00:16:06.660 what character I am. You know, so much has changed in my life over the last five years. I've been on

00:16:16.340 leave from the university. So that's very destabilizing. I don't have my clinical practice

00:16:21.000 anymore. And so I was, you know, seeing 20 people a week. So that's a huge transformation in my life.

00:16:27.260 My house has been completely renovated. It was renovated while my wife was ill. And so we didn't...

00:16:32.660 Well, the renovation went on in our absence. And so I'm a foreigner in my own house, which is...

00:16:39.300 Which is... Although I'm starting to become accustomed to it. And there's some things I like

00:16:43.000 about the new house, but I don't feel at home in it, I wouldn't say. And I've only been here for two

00:16:47.360 months in the last three years, because I was on the road. And then, well, all this... And so that...

00:16:57.000 And everything that's happened has been very disruptive for my family. And of course, Tammy got so

00:17:02.060 unbelievably sick and with something that was supposed to be fatal and recovered more or less

00:17:07.000 miraculously. And then I've been so unbelievably ill or still am. And I have just... I just don't know

00:17:15.080 where to put any of this.

00:17:17.680 Yeah.

00:17:18.220 I can't think about the past at all, because so much of it is incomprehensible, especially

00:17:24.700 over the last five years. I can't think about the present because I'm in so much pain.

00:17:28.940 And I can't think about the future, because I don't know what I'm going to do. And I have

00:17:33.100 no idea how long this pain is going to last. It's been... I've been in pain, really severe

00:17:39.740 pain for two years now.

00:17:41.480 Yeah.

00:17:42.940 And that's... It's a strange thing, because in this book, one of the chapters, the last chapter

00:17:50.660 is called, Be Grateful in Spite of Your Suffering.

00:17:53.320 You know, and I went through every sentence in that chapter a very large number of times,

00:18:00.900 because much of the time while I was rewriting it, particularly, I was in a lot of pain.

00:18:07.220 And like it's... It's a pain level that's hard to fathom in some sense, because I would say

00:18:14.320 every single day I have now is worse than any day I ever had in my life before I got ill.

00:18:20.560 Mm-hmm.

00:18:21.860 So... And then I know very well that adding bitterness to your malaise is a very bad idea.

00:18:31.940 You know, it doesn't help. But that... I can certainly see the attraction in that. I feel

00:18:37.600 like shaking my fist at the sky and complaining bitterly. And... But it doesn't help. But there

00:18:47.280 doesn't seem to be any relief either. And so that's... It's so perverse. It's shaken my

00:18:53.280 faith, I suppose. I'm in this perverse position where my work has, in principle, helped so many

00:19:03.640 people. And yet I don't seem to be able to dig myself out of my current circumstances.

00:19:09.660 So... Well...

00:19:14.660 Or even to make sense of them.

00:19:16.080 Yeah. I think that... I think that the role that you've... You've played is a... Is a kind

00:19:26.300 of a transition role. And that transition manifests itself to you as a... As a... Trying to have

00:19:38.020 your feet on two sides of rifting of two islands that are floating away from each other. And

00:19:44.560 you... You're trying to hold on. You're trying to kind of help people focus on the middle and

00:19:50.320 help people avoid radicalization and avoid falling into camps in a manner that will lead

00:19:56.680 to God knows what. And so I think that... I think that that's the role that you played.

00:20:05.020 And it's... And it's been... Like I've seen, for example, people transition through your work,

00:20:11.440 transition from worlds, moving worlds. That's really what I've seen happen. It's more than

00:20:16.300 just changing the way... Changing your opinion or changing your mind about something. It really

00:20:21.060 is about changing the world you inhabit. And so that's a... That's a crazy... That's a crazy role

00:20:28.440 to play. And especially because, like I said, you have your foot... It's like you kind of have your

00:20:33.840 one foot or one eye, let's say, looking towards... I would call religion or looking towards Christianity

00:20:41.760 or something like that. And then you have another eye, which is still very much immersed in a kind

00:20:48.340 of secular humanism. And you have one leg that is... You know, you understand people that are more

00:20:55.080 left-leaning. You understand people that are more right-leaning. You have this capacity to kind of

00:20:59.020 understand everybody, but you're... Yeah, it's... That means that you make enemies on all sides too.

00:21:07.600 Well, you know, the overwhelming response that I've got publicly has been,

00:21:11.400 I would say, traumatically positive. Yeah. And you wouldn't think that that would be possible,

00:21:17.640 really. But I find it that way. I mean, partly, it's overwhelming to have people constantly tell me

00:21:24.640 in person their responses to what I've been doing. It's very emotional. And I get caught up in that

00:21:33.240 quite quickly. And of course, on YouTube and the social media platforms, YouTube, particularly the

00:21:40.160 bulk of the comments about me are very, very positive. It's 99 to 1 often in terms of likes and

00:21:49.380 dislikes. Yeah. And it's too much. Well, I don't know how to... I don't know how to... I don't know

00:21:57.980 what category to put it in. I don't know how to conceptualize it. I mean, part of me, the practical

00:22:03.420 part, of course, says, well, I just happened to adopt a new technology at a time when it started

00:22:10.120 to boom and filled a kind of niche that was empty in that technology at that time. But in some sense,

00:22:16.580 that doesn't really cut it, you know, because it doesn't have anything to do with the content.

00:22:22.120 And then I think, well, I have been dealing with these, well, borderline religious issues. Well,

00:22:27.200 certainly not just borderline. There's lots of religious people who seem to think that I'm dealing

00:22:31.200 with religious issues. And well, and that's really what I wanted to talk to you about tonight.

00:22:37.940 So this book I mentioned earlier

00:22:40.840 talked about disagreements with my conceptualization of Christ, let's say,

00:22:49.940 and I'm not sure what that conceptualization is, by the way, exactly. It's a mystery to me.

00:22:55.200 But I can say some concrete things about it. I mean, I certainly, I understand and appreciate

00:23:04.500 the symbolic significance of the ideal human being. And that finds its embodiment. And I took

00:23:10.680 these ideas in large part from Jung and Eric Neumann, that Christ is at least a representation of

00:23:19.780 the ideal man, whatever that is. And we, we all, interestingly enough, we all seem to have an

00:23:26.740 ideal. And we, and that I, or that ideal has us, right? And that's where it's very interesting to

00:23:34.820 consider the role of conscience. Because your conscience will call you out on your behavior.

00:23:43.060 And so it seems to function as something that's somewhat independent, or at least as something that

00:23:48.360 you can't fully voluntarily control. Because if you could voluntarily control it,

00:23:53.380 then you just tell the pesky little bastard to go away, or to pat you on the back continually.

00:23:59.900 Because there must be few things in life more pleasurable than being a fully committed narcissist,

00:24:06.340 to really believe that everything that you do is right, and that you're a good person.

00:24:10.640 And I suppose if you could wave a magic wand and rearrange your mind so that it was constantly

00:24:14.940 telling you that, you do it. But you don't seem to be able to do that in relationship to your

00:24:19.720 conscience. It trips you up. And so, and so it tells you when you're not living up to

00:24:26.480 your own ideal. And that means that you have an ideal, and you don't even know what the hell it is.

00:24:31.960 But you certainly know when you transgress against it. And I know that there's a strong line of

00:24:36.220 Christian thinking that's identified the conscience with divinity, sometimes with Christ inside,

00:24:43.360 sometimes with the Holy Spirit. And those are very interesting conceptualizations. But you can

00:24:49.040 think of them psychologically, and you can even think about them biologically, you know,

00:24:53.060 to some degree, because we're so social. If we don't manifest an appropriate moral reciprocity,

00:25:01.040 we're going to become alienated from our fellows. And we won't survive, and we'll suffer and die.

00:25:07.880 And we won't, we certainly won't find a partner and, and have children successfully. And so,

00:25:14.860 to some degree, the conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within. And that's a

00:25:21.640 perfectly reasonable biological explanation. But, but the thing is, is the deeper you go into biology,

00:25:28.700 the more it shades into something that appears to be religious, because you start

00:25:32.240 analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself. And, and it becomes something.

00:25:44.340 Well, it becomes something with a power, with, with a, with a, with, with a power that transcends

00:25:51.560 your ability to resist it. So, okay, so you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective,

00:25:58.880 and the, the critic, the critic, my critic, this particular critic that I've been reading,

00:26:06.000 said, well, that, that doesn't differentiate Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and

00:26:11.480 resurrecting mythological gods. And of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion.

00:26:17.220 Joseph Campbell did that. And Jung, to a lesser degree, I would say, but Campbell did that.

00:26:22.520 But the difference, and C.S. Lewis pointed this out as well, the difference between those

00:26:28.160 mythological gods and Christ was that there's a, there's a representation of, there's a historical

00:26:36.700 representation of his, of, of his existence as well. Now, you can debate whether or not that's genuine.

00:26:42.300 You can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there's credible objective

00:26:47.520 evidence for that, but it doesn't matter in some sense, because this, well, it does, but

00:26:52.060 there's a sense in which it doesn't matter because there's still a historical story. And so what you

00:26:56.900 have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth. And in some sense,

00:27:04.400 Christ is the union of those two things. The problem is, is I probably believe that,

00:27:09.160 but I don't know. I don't, I'm amazed at my own belief and I don't understand it. Like,

00:27:14.340 because I've seen

00:27:16.540 sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch,

00:27:32.340 you know, that's union synchronicity. And I've seen that many times in my own life.

00:27:39.160 And so in some sense, I believe it's undeniable. You know, we have a narrative sense of the world.

00:27:45.340 For me, that's been the world of morality. That's the world that tells us how to act.

00:27:49.880 It's real. Like we treat it like it's real. It's not the objective world.

00:27:55.280 But the narrative and the objective world touch. And the ultimate example of that in principle is

00:28:00.180 supposed to be Christ. But I don't know what to, that seems to me, oddly plausible.

00:28:06.740 Yeah.

00:28:07.700 Well, I still don't know what to make of it. It's too, partly because it's too terrifying

00:28:11.920 a reality to fully believe. I don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.

00:28:19.160 If you believed in the story of Christ, or if you believed that history and,

00:28:24.740 and let's say the narrative make meat.

00:28:28.380 Both. I think, I think you, because when you believe that you buy both those stories,

00:28:33.240 you believe that the narrative and the objective can actually touch.

00:28:37.080 Yeah.

00:28:37.280 I mean, we saw that you and I, I mean, this is a trivial example, but

00:28:40.900 we had a, when we were discussing, we had a sequence of discussions around frog symbolism

00:28:46.780 four years ago.

00:28:50.200 Yeah.

00:28:50.540 That was very bizarre to say the least.

00:28:53.060 You know, and that was a trivial example, relatively trivial example of the narrative

00:28:56.900 world and the objective world coming together.

00:28:59.340 Didn't feel that trivial at the time.

00:29:02.680 Well, the way, the way that I like to deal with this is that one of the things it, it's

00:29:08.980 already there in your thought, it's already there in the way that you talk about reality,

00:29:13.560 which is that one of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to

00:29:20.440 us is something like attention, right? It's something, there's a hierarchy of, of manifestation

00:29:27.460 because everything that have, that appears to us in the world has an infinite amount of

00:29:32.800 details, right? It has an indefinite amount of ways that you could describe it, that you could

00:29:37.120 angles by which you could analyze it. And so nonetheless, the world appears to us through

00:29:44.620 these hierarchies of meaning, right? I always kind of use the example of a cup or a chair,

00:29:49.460 like a chair is, is of just a multitude of things. It's a multitude of parts. How is it that we can

00:29:54.180 say that it's one thing? There's a, there's a capacity we have to attend and this capacity we have

00:29:59.760 to attend is something like a co-creation of the world. And so the world actually exists.

00:30:05.900 A chair is a good example because, you know, you can try to define it objectively, but you end up

00:30:10.600 with beanbags and stumps and they don't have anything in common. Well, they're both made of

00:30:15.620 matter, you know, for whatever that's worth. It's pretty, pretty trivial level of commonality,

00:30:20.560 but you can sit on them. Yeah. And that's what they have. There's a mode of being, which defines them.

00:30:25.320 Well, and that's so strange. So many of our object perceptions are projected modes of being.

00:30:31.100 And so even the objective world is ineluctably contaminated with its utility and therefore with

00:30:37.740 morality. Exactly. And so I think that that's the key. The key is that once you understand that

00:30:43.240 the world manifests itself through attention and that consciousness has a place to play in actually

00:30:48.740 the way in which the world reveals itself. And so you can, you can try to posit a world outside of

00:30:54.900 that first person perspective, but it's good luck. It's a diluted activity.

00:31:00.160 Well, it's also, it's very, very difficult because you don't, you don't know what to make

00:31:05.560 of something like time because time has an ineradicably subjective element and duration,

00:31:12.460 which is different than time. I mean, time is kind of like the average rate at which things change,

00:31:17.560 but duration is something like the felt sense of that time. And if you take away this objectivity,

00:31:24.420 it isn't obvious what to do with time. And I think physicists stumble over this all the time,

00:31:28.860 so to speak. So, and this is something that this, this intermingling of value in fact was something

00:31:35.120 that I never thought, I never thought I made much traction with, with Harris, with Sam Harris.

00:31:39.540 He, he didn't seem to me to be willing to admit how saturated the world of fact is inevitably with

00:31:49.160 value. And I actually think he's denying the science at that point, because for everything I

00:31:54.620 know about perceptual psychology, there's a great book called Vision as a, oh God, now I can't remember

00:32:04.880 the name of the books. That's memory trouble. I'll remember it. No worries. The idea is that

00:32:10.500 if that is true, then there are certain things which come out of that. There are certain necessary

00:32:18.020 things down the road from that, that insight, which is that attention plays a part in the way the world

00:32:24.640 lays itself out. And that one of them, and one of them is that the stuff that the world is made of

00:32:31.380 is partly something like attention, something like consciousness. And that has a pattern.

00:32:35.320 And that pattern is the same pattern as stories. It just, it's just, it doesn't lay itself out

00:32:41.400 exactly the same, but things exist with a pattern, which is similar to stories. They have identities,

00:32:47.520 they have centers, they have margins, they have exceptions. And that's how stories lay themselves out.

00:32:53.160 Like, so a story happens in time, how an identity, let's say, is broken down and then reconstructed.

00:33:02.840 You could say that that's basically the story of every story, how something breaks down and is

00:33:07.920 reconstructed. And so that is a way for us to perceive the identity of things. And so if the world

00:33:15.260 is made of this, then it's actually, it's actually our world, our secular world, which is a strange

00:33:24.660 aberration on how reality used to exist for every culture in every time from the beginning of time,

00:33:32.160 which is to take that for granted, to take for granted that something that they didn't call it

00:33:37.700 consciousness, but intelligence and attention are part of how the world lays itself out. And it lays

00:33:43.620 itself out in modes of being. And one of the things that comes out of it is not only that, but

00:33:48.860 like you said, it's not only that you have ideas, but it's that ideas have you, or that it's not only

00:33:56.960 that you engage in modes of being, it's that modes of being have you. And that recognition means that

00:34:05.200 the first level of, the first level of attention to that looks something like worship. It looks like

00:34:15.440 celebration. It looks like a, it, it's like a, the, the thing which makes the, let's say the National

00:34:24.040 Hockey League so successful has more to do with celebration than just a bunch of guys on skates on a

00:34:31.920 piece of ice, you know, throwing a puck around. There's a celebration of the purpose of that

00:34:37.500 thing. And it manifests itself through a bunch of stuff, which one is like a trophy that stands in

00:34:43.360 the middle on the top of a bunch of, on a stand and everybody looks at it and kisses it. And, and,

00:34:48.340 and so there's this, this veneration, you know, and there's mascots.

00:34:51.160 The hockey league example is very interesting because it's a, it's a, it's a social game and

00:34:58.420 no, all the players are, they're attempting to aim right. Right. So there's a symbolic element to that

00:35:07.480 sin is misplaced aim. And so you hit the, you hit the small space in the net block, though it may be

00:35:16.280 by your enemies and everyone celebrates that. And you do that in cooperation with other people and

00:35:22.840 in competition with other people. And if you do it properly, not only are you a brilliant player

00:35:27.540 from a technical perspective, but you're also a great sport. And so there's an ethic there and

00:35:32.740 a morality. And, and this is why people are so upset when hockey players or any other pro athlete

00:35:37.860 does something immoral in their personal life is because it violates the, the ethic that that's being

00:35:44.320 celebrated as a consequence of this great game. Yeah. Right. So you can see that, that the striving

00:35:50.800 for an ideal mode of being, the religious striving for an ideal mode of being is central to what it

00:35:56.600 is that makes hockey, um, addictive. That's right. Yeah. It necessarily. And the, and so

00:36:03.800 God, I saw that in pro wrestling. There's a great documentary, uh, uh, Bret Hart called Hitman

00:36:10.660 Hart. It's one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. And it portrays pro wrestling as a stark

00:36:17.560 religious battle between the forces of good and evil. And Bret Hart, who at one point was the most

00:36:23.920 famous Canadian in the world was overwhelmed by his, the archetypal force of his representation as the

00:36:31.840 good guy. It's a great documentary, Hitman Hart. And, and it shows you how, how, you know, pro wrestling

00:36:38.740 is, is it's not the world's most intellectual activity to say the least. And people can easily

00:36:44.900 be dismissive of it. But one of the things I loved about the documentary was that it attempted to

00:36:50.000 understand from within what was compelling about what was being portrayed. And it was a religious drama.

00:36:56.820 It just was shocking and brilliant. And so, so that is, that is actually, there is a, there's an

00:37:04.900 objective part of that, that there's an objective way in which these patterns kind of come together

00:37:10.780 and manifest, let's say, higher and higher versions of this drama. Uh, and so the sports drama has a

00:37:18.000 certain level, but it's, it's limited to a certain extent because it still happens as a confrontation,

00:37:24.120 let's say, between two irreducible sides. And so what happens in something like the story of Christ

00:37:29.620 is that that gets taken into one person. And so all the opposites become the king and the, the,

00:37:40.180 the, the, the criminal, the, you know, the highest, even in the image of the cross, you have this image.

00:37:45.580 Sandy, as Christ is being crucified, they're putting a sign above his head saying that he's the king.

00:37:50.140 As Christ is being beaten, they're giving to him a crown. And so Christ joins together all the

00:37:57.660 opposites. And so in his, in his story, you see, if you, if you're attentive to these patterns, you see

00:38:05.040 the highest form of this pattern being played out. And one of the aspects that has to be there for it

00:38:12.260 to be the most revealed or highest form is that it also has to include the world of manifestation.

00:38:18.260 I mean, it can't just be a story. It has to be connected to the world. So that's why Christians

00:38:24.200 insist on the, the, the fact that Jesus is not just a story, that he's an incarnated man, that he was

00:38:30.940 incarnated. But I don't believe their insistence. I don't believe that. Well, this is, this is because

00:38:37.300 I don't, it isn't obvious to me. And I think maybe I derived this criticism from Nietzsche, but

00:38:45.240 people have asked me whether or not I believe in God and I've answered in various ways. No, but I'm

00:38:53.960 afraid he probably exists. That's, that's one answer. Um, yeah, no, but I'm terrified he might

00:39:00.420 exist. That, that would be truthful answer to some degree, or that I act as if God exists, which I think

00:39:07.080 is I do my best to do that. But then there's a real stumbling block there because

00:39:11.560 there's no limit to what would happen if you acted like God existed.

00:39:19.480 Yeah.

00:39:19.920 You know what I mean? Because I believe that, that acting that out fully, I mean, maybe it's

00:39:32.280 not reasonable to say to believers, you aren't sufficiently transformed for me to believe

00:39:37.180 that you believe in God or that you believe the story that you're telling me. You're not,

00:39:41.700 you're not a sufficient, you're not, the way you live isn't sufficient Testament to the truth.

00:39:46.180 And people would certainly say that, let's say about the Catholic church, or at least

00:39:49.560 the way that it's been portrayed is that with all the sexual corruption, for example, it's

00:39:53.760 like, really, really, you believe that the son of God, that Jesus Christ was the son of

00:40:00.020 God. And yet you act that way. And I'm supposed to buy your belief. And, and it seems to me that

00:40:06.640 the church is actually quite, um, guilty on that account because the attempts to clean

00:40:14.580 up the mess have been rather half-hearted in my estimation. And so I don't think people,

00:40:20.460 people don't manifest, Christians don't manifest this. And I'm including myself, I suppose, in

00:40:26.220 that description, perhaps, um, don't manifest the transformation of attitude that would enable

00:40:37.840 that enables the outside observer to easily conclude that they believe.

00:40:43.280 Yeah. Now the way, the way to deal with that, or the way to understand that is that it, they

00:40:50.820 do, but they do in a hierarchy. There's a, there's a hierarchy of manifestation of the

00:40:56.500 transformation that God offers the world. And we kind of live in that hierarchy and those

00:41:01.060 above us hold us together, you would say. And so in the church, there's a testimony of

00:41:05.960 the saints. There's, there are stories, there are hundreds and hundreds of stories of people

00:41:10.860 who live that out in their particular context to the limit of what it's possible to live

00:41:17.100 it. And even today, there are, there are saints, living saints who, for example, like in the

00:41:23.560 Orthodox tradition, we have this idea of what they call it, the gift of tears or the joyful

00:41:28.600 sorrow of, of people who live in prayer with weeping, constant weeping. Uh, and it's this

00:41:36.860 kind of strange mix of joy and, uh, and sadness, which they, which kind of overwhelmed them.

00:41:42.100 And they live in that joy and sadness nonstop and they pray, you know, without end. And so

00:41:47.280 that exists, but then we in this, that's one of the reasons why that's kind of one of the

00:41:55.240 reasons why, when I talk about this idea of attention, like it manifests itself in the,

00:41:59.740 in the church as well, is that you often say, and I understand it when you say something like,

00:42:06.600 you know, I act as if God exists, or, you know, I I'm afraid to say that God exists. Uh, and I think

00:42:12.760 it's because you, you think, or you tend to think that the moral weight like of that is so strong

00:42:20.660 that you would, we would crumble under it, that you would just be crushed under it. And,

00:42:25.700 and I think that, and I think that that's, I think that I, I, I understand that, but

00:42:32.620 the first thing that to act as if God exists, let's say it this way, to act as, as if God exists,

00:42:41.780 the first thing that it asks of you is not a moral action. The first thing that it asks,

00:42:48.100 asks, asks of you is attention. That's why to act as if God exists is first of all,

00:42:55.700 to worship. Like that's, and it's, I know people are going to hear this.

00:42:59.880 Well, then I have, then I have a terrible problem with that too, at the moment, because I'm in so

00:43:04.700 much pain. Like one of the things that one of these theologians discussed the idea of, and sorry,

00:43:11.280 I want you to let you get back to your point, but he discussed the idea of the yoke of Christ being

00:43:16.540 light and that there was joy in it. And, and there's a paradox there, obviously, because

00:43:23.780 it's, it's also a take up your cross and follow me sort of thing. But

00:43:28.240 the fact that I've been living in constant pain makes the idea of joy seem cruel, I would say.

00:43:41.580 And so, and I have no idea how to reconcile myself to that. I mean, I've reconciled myself

00:43:46.780 to that by staying alive, despite it, you know, um, although by staying alive, despite it, but

00:43:56.160 there's very little worship and it doesn't mean I'm not appreciative of what I have. I'm, I'm not

00:44:02.080 only am I appreciative of what I have, I do everything I can to remind myself of it all the

00:44:07.140 time. And so does my wife. I mean, she's changed quite a bit as a consequence of her struggle with

00:44:11.840 cancer, you know, has become much more overtly religious, I would say. And, you know, we say grace

00:44:18.340 before our meal in the evening and it's very serious enterprise and it always centers around

00:44:24.200 gratitude, you know, for, well, for, for the ridiculous volume of blessings that have been

00:44:34.180 showered down upon us at a volume that's really quite incomprehensible. But

00:44:41.300 despite that, um, well, let, despite that I'm struggling with this because I don't know how

00:44:50.060 to reconcile myself to the, to the fact of constant pain. Yeah. And I don't, I feel that

00:44:57.600 it's unjust, which is halfway to being resentful, which is not a good outcome.

00:45:02.720 No, I, I, I agree. And I can't speak like, I can't, I don't know how to speak to that because

00:45:10.160 I don't necessarily don't have that experience. You know, I don't, I, I, I don't have that.

00:45:15.760 I don't live with constant pain. And so I don't know what that would do to me. Probably, probably

00:45:20.760 one of the reasons why it might ruin me, you know? And so, um, it's very difficult to answer

00:45:28.200 that. I think that the answer, like the answer has been the cross. Like that's been the answer.

00:45:33.280 It's an ease, maybe, maybe easy for me to just say it that way. Uh, but that's always been the answer

00:45:39.220 of, of Christianity, which is that, that God went to, to the cross and that God went down into death

00:45:49.000 and, and plunged down into death. And there are, that there are mysteries hidden and there,

00:45:54.600 maybe they're very well hidden, but there are mysteries hidden in that, than that depth. Um,

00:46:00.240 but, uh, it's not, I don't think it's my job to, uh, to, to moralize to you at this,

00:46:09.680 at this particular moment.

00:46:13.400 So we talked about the narrative and the objective touching. And so I wanted to touch on that again,

00:46:18.700 is that like, I, I, I understand C.S. Lewis's argument and, you know, I'm even inclined

00:46:25.000 from time to time to think, well, I've got the choice between believing two impossible things.

00:46:30.760 I can either believe that in the world is constituted so that God took on flesh and was

00:46:36.760 crucified and, and, and died and rose three days later. Or I can believe that human beings invented

00:46:43.380 this unbelievably preposterous story that stretched into every atom of, of culture. And it isn't

00:46:53.680 obvious to me that the second hypothesis is any easier to believe than the first, because the more

00:46:59.340 you investigate the, the manifestations of the story of Christ, the more insanely complicated and

00:47:05.600 far reaching it becomes. So I read Ion, for example, and for all of those who are listening, if you want

00:47:10.900 to read a book that will completely make you insane, then you could read Jung's Ion. And it's a study of

00:47:19.180 Christian symbolism in astrology, which doesn't sound particularly dangerous, but, or, or, or,

00:47:25.400 or even particularly necessary to read, I suppose. But

00:47:29.320 Jung describes the, the juxtaposition of astrological and Christian symbolism. And it's a brilliant book.

00:47:39.080 And it's terrifying because he, he, he outlines the concordance between the levels of symbolism over several

00:47:44.780 thousand years. And it's obvious when you read the book that no one plotted this. It's not a conspiracy.

00:47:53.720 Whatever's going on to make that concordance occur isn't something that we understand. And it seems to be best

00:48:01.300 understood as one of these situations where the narrative and the objective touch, the saturation of

00:48:08.080 Christianity with fish symbolism, Jung associates with astrological movement of, of, of, into the house

00:48:15.520 of Pisces. And, and so he, he describes how a drama, so ancient people saw a drama played out in the sky,

00:48:26.340 and that was a projection of their imagination. And that projection contained symbols that were

00:48:31.980 associated with the emergence of Christianity. And so you, you can see in that the, the, the alternative

00:48:38.680 explanation is that there's this, there's this unfolding of a symbolic landscape over centuries

00:48:45.220 or millennia that's part of human biological and cultural evolution. But that, that starts to

00:48:52.740 touch on the religious anyways, when you, when you describe it in those terms, like it's, it's,

00:48:58.640 it's the operation of a, of a cognitive, of a natural cognitive process, let's say natural

00:49:04.380 slash cognitive process that supersedes any one individual or any one culture. And so I've never

00:49:11.220 seen a critique of ION, you know, I think people read that book and they think, oh, it's like John

00:49:17.580 Allegro's, uh, the sacred, the mushroom and the sacred cross. Do you know of that book? I believe that's

00:49:23.080 the title. Well, that's another book you read and you think, well, I have no idea what it, it's a study of,

00:49:28.360 mushroom symbolism in Christianity. And it's another book that, you know, it, it claims that

00:49:35.660 Christianity was heavily influenced by psilocybin use and it was published in the 1960s. It's an

00:49:42.100 amazing book, but it's another book you read and you think, I have no idea what to do with that. I

00:49:46.620 have no place to put that book. So, but ION is really like that. And.

00:49:52.600 Well, one of the things that, for example, you know, you talked about just before the idea that,

00:49:57.980 um, you know, the idea of Christ being a dying and resurrecting God and, you know,

00:50:03.260 that's really actually not the case. If you actually just look at the story of Christ and

00:50:08.480 not just the story in scripture, but let's say the whole story as it kind of developed in tradition

00:50:12.260 and kind of melded together in the ancient world, you had this idea of gods that went down into the

00:50:17.040 underworld, you know, either that went down for some reason to visit or went down to save somebody

00:50:22.200 even, or, you know, or, or, or died and then, and then rose again. But that's actually not the story

00:50:28.640 of Christ. Because if you, if you understand the full tradition of the Christian story, we think that

00:50:33.660 Christ died, went into Hades and then destroyed death and he pulls everybody out of death. And then

00:50:41.660 that's it. Like what other story are you going to tell after that story? You have a story of someone

00:50:49.440 who dies, goes into death and then, and then destroys death. And then that's it. Like that,

00:50:55.840 that's the thing with Christ's story that every story, every aspect of his story reaches the limit

00:51:01.580 of storytelling. And it's, it's impossible to go beyond it. Right. That's right. That's right.

00:51:07.340 Well, even from a psychological perspective, that's correct. And that in itself is a kind

00:51:12.060 of miracle. And so you're stuck in some sense, constantly having to choose between miracles. It's

00:51:16.900 like, okay, it's a, it's a figment of the human imagination. Fine. But it's the limit figment in

00:51:23.820 multiple ways. How did that happen? And also, but as soon as you start to start to think that the

00:51:29.900 world is made of attention, the idea of just a figment of somebody's imagination, especially

00:51:36.040 just a figment of someone's imagination, which is happens, like you said, over thousands of years

00:51:41.560 within communities of thousands of people, it just becomes a ridiculous statement. It doesn't,

00:51:46.580 it doesn't mean anything. It's like, yeah, it only means something if you assume that,

00:51:50.380 and Jung pointed this out, it only means something. It only,

00:51:54.180 to say it's a figment of imagination and have that brush it aside means that you think that

00:52:02.400 imagination is nothing. And Jung pointed out constantly that you should not attribute nothing

00:52:08.940 to the psyche. It's what you depend upon. It's the ground of your existence. It's, it's, it's,

00:52:16.700 it's not nothing. It's the thing you, that you take for granted more than anything else.

00:52:22.460 So any, anything that you can recognize as a story will definitely be manifesting patterns

00:52:28.840 that you can recognize. And so they can't just be brushed aside from this, from the most insane

00:52:35.140 conspiracy theory to the, the most, you know, like childish fairy tale, anything that manifests itself

00:52:41.300 as a, as a pattern of story that you can recognize is, has a certain level of value has enough level

00:52:50.300 that if you pay attention to it, you actually can gather some, some, some nuggets of, uh, of how the

00:52:57.060 world works and how the world lays itself out. Uh, you know, and that's why, like, if, if I do

00:53:01.640 symbolic interpretations, I can do it for scripture, but I can also do it for some Marvel movie or some

00:53:07.500 video game or whatever it is, because that's just the, for you to even recognize something as having

00:53:13.420 being, it's already part of that world. It's already manifesting these patterns.

00:53:18.020 This critic said that the mere psychologization of Christ was insufficient because, and you made

00:53:28.800 the same case in some sense that it doesn't make sense unless the narrative and the objective world

00:53:35.560 truly touch. And I think you could debate that because I think that there's some utility there

00:53:41.260 could argue to be, be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth, you know, that the best

00:53:47.140 way to cope with existence is to for, to tell the truth and to face what you don't know forthrightly.

00:53:55.200 And that will enable you to orient yourself within our finite and bounded existence that ends with our

00:54:02.680 death more properly, more accurately, more advisedly than any other route.

00:54:08.680 I've seen people from Orthodox priests to, you know, the more, the most Protestant, Protestant you

00:54:16.180 can imagine recognize in the way that you represent reality, something that has value, something that

00:54:23.340 has value because you're, you are manifesting that, that pattern, like what you're saying is, is true.

00:54:29.680 Uh, but I think that, I think that if we, if we, if we, if we take seriously this, the prop, the relationship

00:54:38.660 between attention, psyche, and the way the world reveals itself to us, then it scales up. It scales up after

00:54:46.920 that. It, it, it, it jumps up a level. And, uh, it also scales up in terms of, because one of the things that,

00:54:54.520 one of the things that, that, that you talk about, like looking up to the star and, and looking up to

00:54:59.280 the highest thing you can look at, and then aiming towards that, you know, once again, one of the

00:55:05.060 things that that does for, is that the first thing you do is actually where it's a form, it's attention

00:55:11.840 that people like the word worship. It's a form of reverence, a form of veneration. You submit yourself

00:55:16.840 to that aim. It's not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it. You actually have to submit

00:55:22.800 yourself to that, which is to what you're aiming. And so that's what. Sacrifice to it. Exactly. And

00:55:28.980 you have to sacrifice to it. And so that's why, let's say the religious version of this has to

00:55:35.420 move towards the highest possible aim. And also one that we can do together because like the lower

00:55:42.180 aims, like you could call them something like lower gods, let's say, or angels or whatever you want to

00:55:45.900 call them. Like these lower aims, they have value, but they're all fragmented. But for this to

00:55:52.620 stack up, we need to be able to look towards the same image. We need to look towards the same aim

00:55:58.840 and that will bind us together. And so we don't, we don't also, then we don't also end up being

00:56:04.480 just kind of individuals who have the weight of the world on our shoulders, but we're a communion

00:56:09.540 of saints. We're a communion of people who are submitted to aiming towards worshiping the same

00:56:16.960 point. Yeah. And I believe that that's necessary. And I've, I've had some profound experiences,

00:56:24.320 which I can't really relate here that of, of the necessity for that community is that this,

00:56:30.860 whatever our fundamental moral load is immense, though it is crushing, though it is even

00:56:40.720 requires the participation of others. So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people

00:56:50.780 to, to be along with you. It's a collective enterprise, even though it's an individualistic,

00:56:55.940 even though it requires the perfection, it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual

00:57:02.720 level. That's not enough. There has to be that communal element as well. You need help. We all need

00:57:08.740 help to aim as high, the highest aim requires communal endeavor. Yeah. And it's also because

00:57:15.000 it actually is the way that everything works. You know, it's like the chair aiming to be a chair is

00:57:21.180 a, is a constitutive of parts, which are joined together towards a, a, a same goal and therefore

00:57:28.020 hold together as a being and manifest the chairness of the chair. And that's the same with you. You have

00:57:33.940 all these thoughts, right? You have all these feelings, all these, these contradicting things inside

00:57:37.840 you. And you need, by aiming up towards, you know, the, the, I mean, I believe that the image of

00:57:45.960 Christ, let's say by aiming towards the image of Christ, you constitute your being into that being

00:57:51.980 that's able to attend, to sacrifice, to love. And then that scales up with people. I agree.

00:57:57.320 People together. I think you are aiming, and this is another, something else I tried to point out to Sam.

00:58:01.600 Um, you are, you're aiming, you're either aiming at Christ or something lesser. Yeah.

00:58:09.720 Or if things get really out of hand, you're aiming at something opposite and you don't want to be doing

00:58:15.080 that. But, and this is a matter of definition in some sense. And it's actually not impossible to

00:58:21.380 understand is that you aim at something better, generally speaking. I mean, maybe you're out to

00:58:26.720 cause pain, but forget about that. You, you aim at something better. You wouldn't do it unless it

00:58:32.580 was better. In fact, it, it virtually defines better. Like the whole idea of better is predicated

00:58:39.780 on the idea that there's an aim that's beyond you. And then the highest of those aims is the

00:58:44.480 amalgamate. The highest aim is the amalgamate amalgamation of all higher aims. And that's a perfect

00:58:50.700 mode of being. And, and that by definition, that's a psychological perspective. Again, that by definition

00:58:56.580 is Christ. And then, but then there seems to be something too convenient about C.S. Lewis's insistence

00:59:03.520 that that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history. And I'm not like, I, I,

00:59:20.700 I don't understand why I should believe that. And I don't, I tend not to believe things without a why.

00:59:30.820 There's always a why. And, yeah. And I, there's, there's a hurdle there that I, that, that,

00:59:36.580 well, that I waver on constantly because I, well, I already said that you're, when you think these

00:59:43.580 things through, at least my experience has been, if you think them through sufficiently, you end up with

00:59:49.120 the choice between impossible alternatives. And so. Yeah. But it, it has to do, one of the ways to

00:59:55.580 see it maybe is, is it has to do with the recognizing of the goodness of the world or the goodness of

01:00:02.940 creation that, that the world is capable of manifesting these patterns, right? So if you want

01:00:11.420 to understand, for example, the big conflict between the early Gnostics and the Christians, that's what it

01:00:15.600 was all about. Because the Gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated Christ. They were saying,

01:00:21.760 you know, and they have viewed the world as utterly fallen, as having no value, having to be escaped,

01:00:27.920 having to be fled in every way. Whereas Christianity posits that it's a non-dual, it's a non-dual

01:00:35.980 proposition. It's saying it's, it all comes together. That's the, that's the promise. It all comes

01:00:42.800 together. And so it has to come down, right? And so it has to come down at every level. And not only

01:00:50.340 that it's had to come down into the person of Christ who's incarnated, but that person has to go

01:00:54.640 down, down into death to the very bottom of the world, you know, to the belly of the Leviathan and

01:01:00.920 then come back up. And so the whole world is declared as once again, declared as being capable of

01:01:09.200 participating in this good. And so, and so you could say, well, maybe, maybe it wasn't that one.

01:01:14.720 Maybe it wasn't, you know, it's like, why would it be that particular, particular place where it

01:01:19.940 happened? And that's the story. I mean, that's where that's the, there is no other story like

01:01:26.400 that story that we have. And, and so once you recognize that this is part of the declaration

01:01:33.680 that the world does embody these patterns, that it leads to this, it leads to the, the, this,

01:01:41.620 this story of, of, of a man who embodied them absolutely, and is bringing us in him to also

01:01:48.680 embody them in a way that will transform us. You know, like the, the ultimate goal of, of orthodox

01:01:55.200 vision of Christianity is, is theosis. It's to become God, to become God through, through transformation

01:02:02.440 and participation in God. So that's the final goal of everything, is to become participant in the

01:02:10.380 divine. And how do you, how do you distinguish that from Catholicism? No, I mean, in terms of that, I

01:02:18.260 think that it's a difference of emphasis. I think for sure, the orthodox emphasize theosis more than

01:02:24.440 the, than the Catholics. The Catholics are kind of iffy about theosis in terms of, it's there in some of the

01:02:31.540 thinkers, but it, I would say it's probably not official Catholic doctrine, but I think without

01:02:35.800 theosis, you're missing the point of the whole thing, right? You're missing the point of, of

01:02:41.460 everything. Like why, why do things exist, right? Like why do things exist? And so I think that the idea

01:02:49.140 that they exist to participate fully in their most perfect form, like that's what they're called to,

01:02:55.680 to, to, to, to, to do, you know, and it ends up being a declaration of the ultimate possibility for

01:03:03.040 goodness in the world. I think that that's, yeah. Well, it, it seems, it seemed to me, I've observed,

01:03:14.160 let's say that it's possible to, it isn't obvious to me that anyone wants to leave, live a meaningless

01:03:28.400 existence. I don't think you can live a meaningless existence without becoming corrupted because the

01:03:35.780 pain of existence will corrupt you without a saving meaning. And it also seems to me that

01:03:43.260 you can sell the story that meaning is to be found in responsibility. When I've tried to sell that story

01:03:50.800 to myself, I seem to buy it. And when I've tried to communicate it with other people, it renders them

01:03:56.920 silent, large crowds of people silent. And that's strange because I'm not sure why that is. It's

01:04:05.200 perhaps because the connection between responsibility and meaning had never been made

01:04:09.120 for in, in that explicitly somehow, because meaning gets contaminated with happiness or

01:04:19.300 something like that, but it's to be found in responsibility. And then you could say, well,

01:04:23.340 there isn't any, any responsibility that's more compelling than trying to aid things in the

01:04:29.420 manifestation of their divine form. That should be an adventure that could be sold. And I don't

01:04:36.580 know why the church can't do it. I don't understand that. And because it seems to me that that's

01:04:46.380 something that I've done, at least in part, and that accounts for the strange popularity of the

01:04:52.780 biblical lectures in particular. Yeah. And, but I've also, and I, I do believe that I do believe

01:05:01.620 that, that the right striving is to attempt with all your heart to encourage things to develop along

01:05:12.740 that towards that divine goal. Like what else would you possibly do? Once you think that through,

01:05:19.220 it's like, you're always aiming at something that's better or you wouldn't be aiming. You're

01:05:24.200 always moving towards something that's better or you wouldn't be moving. So then why wouldn't you

01:05:28.540 move towards the greatest good? Yeah. Well, it's because it's terrifying, I suppose, in part,

01:05:35.280 but then I was, you know, I've tried to put that into practice in my life and

01:05:39.420 it's tearing me into pieces. Yeah. I don't know though, if, if one of the reasons is because you're

01:05:51.380 also alone and I, you know, because you, I mean, at least to my understanding, you're not in a,

01:06:00.200 in a, in a community. Um, well, it's hard to say. I mean, it's hard to say

01:06:06.260 because fans aren't certainly haven't last. Well, they've been a community. I mean,

01:06:12.520 one of the things that has held me together certainly is the commitment that I feel to,

01:06:17.720 to the people who've been so positive towards me and my family. I do feel that as a community,

01:06:26.400 I understand what you mean. Why the hell not go to church? You know, I know you're going to come

01:06:32.800 right out and say it, Jordan. Yeah. I know you're not that blunt about it,

01:06:37.960 but it's not just that, you know, it's, it's not just about going to church. I, one time I,

01:06:42.540 I told you something and, and I don't know if I could drive, if I was able to drive it through

01:06:47.200 there, there's something about being in a hierarchy that is that, because there's an

01:06:53.040 aspect of being in a hierarchy that you talk about, which is this kind of striving to, to kind

01:06:57.540 of be the best within that hierarchy. But there's an aspect of being in a hierarchy, which is that

01:07:02.400 the hierarchy covers you. Oh, definitely. There's no doubt about that. Yeah. And so there's something

01:07:08.160 about submitting. That's why the lowest, the lowest status members of a chimp group will still fight

01:07:13.820 off interlopers. Yeah. And so there's, there's a value in being in a community and a, and a hierarchy

01:07:22.080 where you, like, I go to confession, right? I go to confession. I go to my priest and I confess my sins

01:07:28.640 and, and I give that to him. He actually takes responsibility for, for an aspect of listening to my

01:07:38.140 sins and, and kind of participating in my salvation. And he, and so the weight ends up being distributed

01:07:44.440 across the community. It's not, so you don't actually just bear it on your, on yourself. And it's not just

01:07:51.080 even, and it's not just a living community. It's a, it's not just those that are alive in the,

01:07:55.300 in the hierarchy, but those that are, that have left their story. All the saints are part of this

01:07:59.840 hierarchy that you engage in, that you participate in, and that you see as consolation, as examples,

01:08:06.320 as, you know, as examples of people who have lived through difficult things that you can kind of,

01:08:13.060 that you can shoulder up against, you know? And so that's one of the reasons why I, I kind of insist

01:08:18.600 with, at least for the people that watch my videos is, is when I say go to church, it's not just

01:08:23.420 because I'm trying to moralize you into doing something. It's because it's a, it's actually

01:08:28.320 a participation in how the best vision of reality works.

01:08:35.500 I've got no objection to any of that.

01:08:37.860 But I've seen you, I've seen you, I've seen you, I'm probably one of the only people in the world

01:08:44.460 that has actually seen you in church and seen you squirm and squirm in church.

01:08:51.880 Why?

01:08:56.100 See, the other thing I was reading again, I was reading this book and it's mostly a jumping

01:09:01.760 off place for me to think. It's like, there's also something, because I'm not inside the church,

01:09:10.020 so to speak, it's hard to say what the utility of that is.

01:09:15.380 The utility of being inside the church?

01:09:18.940 Of being outside it.

01:09:20.340 Oh, being outside.

01:09:20.740 Because I'm an outsider talking about religious matters.

01:09:23.940 Yeah, but I think that, I think that, I think that it has played a great role. Like I,

01:09:29.080 I've often said something that, I've often said that you're something like King Cyrus.

01:09:33.100 If you know the story of King Cyrus, in scripture, King Cyrus was a Persian king

01:09:38.020 who told the Jews to go back to Israel and build their temple. So he wasn't Jewish. Like he wasn't,

01:09:44.300 he wasn't an Israelite. He wouldn't believe in the God of the Israelites, but he was like,

01:09:47.780 hey, you know, that temple of yours looks pretty nice. Why don't you just go back there and,

01:09:51.320 and rebuild your own, own thing. And so that's definitely an effect that I've seen you have,

01:09:57.040 you know, the number of people that have become Christian because of you is hilarious.

01:10:01.880 Sorry, it's not hilarious, but it's just kind of, it's just kind of this strange thing. Cause you,

01:10:06.200 you, you kind of stand outside and you look at, you're looking at the door and you're looking

01:10:09.780 at the church and you're saying, Hey, this isn't not so bad. You know, look at this. What is,

01:10:13.760 what is going on here? Like, what is this about? And, and then because of that,

01:10:17.620 Oh, it's also, do you think you've got something better? You know, I was talking to a friend of

01:10:22.400 mine the other day when we were walking, because as I said, I walk about 10 miles a day right now,

01:10:27.840 try to keep myself under control. And, you know, he, he was raised a communist in Poland and,

01:10:35.460 and, and, and then an atheist. And he was complaining. I think, I think this is what he

01:10:41.740 told me that he was complaining to his parents at one point about a religious wedding that they were

01:10:46.080 going to, despite not believing. And he said, as he got older, he realized he had nothing to

01:10:52.880 replace that with. It's like, okay, throw it out. Fine. Okay. Now, where are you? Well,

01:10:59.020 you're just as bad off as you were before, but you also don't have that beautiful thing.

01:11:03.520 It's like, what would happen if we dispensed with Christmas?

01:11:07.800 Well, it's logical. It's a good thing to ask Sam Harris and the new atheists. It's like,

01:11:12.520 let's, let's get rid of Christmas. Or we could say we could make it entirely secular,

01:11:16.980 but then it would just disappear. But you know, that's not what's going to happen

01:11:20.760 because religion is inevitable and we're seeing it coming back in very strange ways. It's going to

01:11:26.760 be a weird, woke, uh, identitarian religion, which is, which is going to come back. That's why

01:11:32.620 And primitive, you know, part of it's part of it's going to be intense. It doesn't matter.

01:11:37.520 Oh yeah. Can you believe that? Yeah. So it's a, it's a scary thing. Like that's what you could

01:11:42.880 say that that's one of the failures of the new atheists is that they led to the, what they partly

01:11:48.220 led to the new woke, uh, phenomena because they, they didn't realize that you can't get rid of

01:11:55.080 religion. You can't get rid of rituals. You can't get rid of the problems and opportunities of

01:12:00.840 identity. All of these things are going to come back. If you try to just, if you try to brush them

01:12:05.820 aside, then they're going to come back in varied, weird ways. And without you realizing what's going

01:12:10.460 on, you'll have people kneeling to a shrine of a man who was killed by police and putting a halo on

01:12:16.560 his head and, you know, and self-mortifying themselves and doing all kinds of insane things

01:12:21.580 or that look to you insane, but that you need to understand. It's just, it's just this religious

01:12:26.700 impulse gone, gone off the rails. So. Yes. And then the question is, what's the right place for it?

01:12:33.920 That's right. That's right. You know, I've, I've, I've thought in my, I suppose it's a form of comedy

01:12:39.220 that Catholicism is as sane as people get, you know, it's Baroque, right? And, and, and it's Gothic,

01:12:49.380 not Baroque. It's Gothic. It's dark. It's, it's, it's, it has the same aesthetic in some sense as a horror

01:12:58.180 film. And I'm not being, I'm not being, I'm not saying something denigrating by that. I mean,

01:13:03.520 it's part of its strange mystery and all that strangeness is necessary because people would be

01:13:09.000 much more insane without it than they are with it. And it's a container for that religious impulse

01:13:15.400 and that impulse is to the, to the good. Yeah. And, and, and the image of the, of the crucified

01:13:23.900 Christ and also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together, right? It's like,

01:13:31.020 if you think of the symbolism of communion, you'll notice that it gathers in every extreme from the

01:13:35.880 highest to the most transgressive, all of it comes together. It's worth unpacking that it's ritual

01:13:42.220 cannibalism in the service of God. Yeah. Yeah. And it, but it's also, it's also seen as a,

01:13:49.860 as a normal, like meal of communion. And it's an also seen as a, as a, as a sexual union because

01:13:58.100 you, there's a relationship, there's a notion in which then in the altar and in that moment of

01:14:03.760 communion, there's the joining of heaven and earth, you know, the raise up the chalice and there's this

01:14:08.020 joining, which is, which is this image of this, the sexual union between God and the soul.

01:14:12.220 between God and his church. And so all of it, it just jammed into this, into, into this ritual as

01:14:19.040 a, as a kind of center of reality would call it. And so, like you said, if you get rid of that,

01:14:24.640 then you're going to have all kinds of strange factitious versions of it that are going to pop

01:14:29.560 up and are going to try to replace it. And it's leading to the fragmentation of our world and to

01:14:34.960 the breakdown of the West for sure. So back to this idea of the, the, the, the mythological level

01:14:44.320 and the historical level conjoining. And I thought of that as convenient, you know, it's that, that's a

01:14:50.880 stumbling point for me in relationship to the Christian story. It's, you say,

01:14:57.600 it has to be like this. If the world is constituted in a good manner and it's the, has to be, I mean,

01:15:06.400 is that, so how about, how about if it's constituted? Just let me say one, just let me say this one

01:15:12.080 thing because I've been struggling towards it. This whole, it's an act of faith. And so let's say

01:15:20.360 that your faith is that you decide to make the notion that reality is good. The, the cornerstone

01:15:27.960 of your faith, it's something that you, that you, what, that you believe, or is it something that

01:15:32.980 you courageously assume? And is there a difference between that and belief? And if you courageously

01:15:38.320 assume that the world is good, that reality is good, then the touching of the narrative and the

01:15:44.240 objective in this manner, that's demonstrated by Christ, that becomes necessary. Is that the idea?

01:15:52.100 So I, to me, it's funny. I don't see it as an act of faith in the way that we think of an act of

01:16:00.220 faith, like this jump of faith or whatever. I see it as an act of trust, faith as trust, you would say.

01:16:06.060 That's fine. That would be a courageous assumption if it's trust.

01:16:09.600 And, and it's trust in the sense also of, so when we talk about the good, we always have to be

01:16:15.680 careful not to just limit it to the good, to the moral good. There, there is the moral good. But

01:16:20.480 when we talk about the good, we're talking about the good in a, in a much larger way. And the good

01:16:26.120 is the, the, is the pattern of, of the things, right? And, and, and the sense that the, the fact that the

01:16:34.760 world lays itself out as ordered as pattern inevitably, that there is no way around it.

01:16:41.000 You cannot avoid the order of the world because, because the, in order for you to even perceive

01:16:47.160 anything, it has to have an identity. It has to have a hierarchy, has to have a margin, has to have

01:16:52.820 all these things. It's all there in every aspect of perception. Exactly. And so in every act of

01:16:58.080 perception. And so it's that. Every act of perception presumes a value hierarchy. Exactly.

01:17:03.860 You can't avoid it. And so it's not, so it's not like an act of faith in the sense that I, I, I, you

01:17:08.820 know, I, at the outset think the world is nihilistic and, and, and, and, and chaotic. It's like, no, I

01:17:15.380 don't. I think that on the contrary, I think that you could say it in a religious way that the love of

01:17:21.040 God holds the world together. And it's inevitable that things are held together by these, by these,

01:17:27.180 these patterns of being that are always aiming towards the good, even in the very identity of

01:17:32.880 whatever it is that you're, you're encountering.

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01:20:23.320 Let me ask you something personal then. I mean, you weren't born an orthodox Christian.

01:20:34.000 This is something you came to. How?

01:20:38.560 Well, I think that it has something to do with what you said before. It does have something to do with

01:20:43.840 the sense that Christianity had fallen away from its original story and its original all-encompassing,

01:20:51.320 let's say, cosmic narrative. And so it was really, I would say, in searching for that and kind of

01:20:58.140 discovering symbolic thinking on other fronts and feeling like I was confronted by this, like,

01:21:04.160 okay, so I can see these patterns. I can see the world through this coherence. And it's like,

01:21:10.420 why is it then that Christianity doesn't have this? And then after more looking and more searching,

01:21:17.660 I realized that it did, that not only it did, but that some of the earliest more, some of the most,

01:21:22.680 you know, powerful early saints talked about the world exactly this way, you know? And so when I

01:21:29.700 discovered that, then I looked around and I saw, for example, that iconography, that the relationship

01:21:35.500 between icons and architecture and liturgy, and all of this was like this amazing giant pattern,

01:21:42.960 which was reinforcing, manifesting, making you participate in the way the world actually

01:21:48.720 existed. And so it was like this kind of self, you know, this positive feedback loop, I guess you

01:21:54.860 could say it in a good way, where it's like you recognize these patterns, you engage in them, you

01:21:59.740 see them, you sing them. It's like this whole thing where you're engaged. And so I realized that it was

01:22:06.620 really in the Orthodox Church that this was the most, that had been the most preserved and the most

01:22:11.400 alive. And that I would hear, you know, contemporary Orthodox speakers or thinkers or theologians who

01:22:18.120 talked about the world exactly in that way. And so I thought, okay, so this is the place. And also

01:22:23.080 because they kept the idea of theosis as the ultimate goal. Because I think that that's, you know,

01:22:28.560 very, very early, St. Irenaeus, which is, you know, like early third century, said,

01:22:33.440 the logos became man so that man would become God. It's one of the, some of the earliest saints said

01:22:39.140 that, you know, and so it's like, that's really what Christianity is. And so that's what, that's

01:22:44.000 what ultimately led me to, to. Well, it is the greatest of all possible visions. Yeah. Yeah.

01:22:52.800 And so, but I think that, you know, I think that it's there latent, even in, in, in other forms of

01:22:58.620 Christianity. And I, one of the things that I've been trying to do is help people kind of

01:23:02.780 wake up to that reality and try to see it wherever they are.

01:23:06.220 And how's that going for you? Well, no, I'm really serious. I haven't talked to you for a

01:23:10.760 long time. I mean, you've got this, I mean, you've had a strange few years as well.

01:23:16.400 I've had a strange few years as well. It's all your fault, by the way.

01:23:19.480 Yeah. It certainly feels that way.

01:23:22.640 But it's a, it's a good, it's a good in that sense. I mean, I've, I've been surprised in the past

01:23:28.060 four years since I met you and you kind of put me on out there in the world, you know,

01:23:32.880 right now I have like 90,000 people following me on YouTube and there's a community of, I would say,

01:23:40.340 symbolic thinkers. I'm giving them a place to, to, to write like on my, on my website, I'm putting up

01:23:46.720 a blog. There's communities that kind of get together and talk about, about this, trying to

01:23:50.700 reinvigorate it in their own communities, whether that, wherever it is they come from.

01:23:54.100 And so I've been just nonstop excited about, I mean, in a way, sad to see that I think the

01:24:01.240 breakdown of Christianity is, is going to continue. Like I'm not, I don't have short-term hope for,

01:24:08.960 let's say the situation, but I do believe that there are, that there are seeds, which are kind of

01:24:15.660 being planted and there are people who are getting ready and, and, and will bear fruit. So, so it's been

01:24:22.480 just, it's been amazing. I have to say, and thanks for that, by the way.

01:24:29.520 I hope, I guess you're welcome to the degree that I had something to do with it.

01:24:37.420 Yeah.

01:24:42.180 Did you want, I know one on Twitter, you, you asked about the virgin birth. I don't know if you want to,

01:24:47.060 if you still have juice, if you still have energy to talk about that, or if, or if, or sure, why not?

01:24:56.020 Well, the, the, the, the, one of the things that is important, I would say in Christianity is

01:25:02.140 understanding that the, the role that Mary has to play, let's say in the same, in the same,

01:25:09.980 in the same way that we talk about how the reality of Christ came, let's, I had to manifest itself in

01:25:17.380 the world for us to understand that the possibility of this thing, the possibility of how everything

01:25:23.640 comes together, right? In the same way. So in, for example, in the old Testament, you have theophanies,

01:25:29.980 you have places where God and humanity meet. So on the mountain of Moses, in the temple,

01:25:36.120 in the garden of Eden as well. So you have these, they're usually at the top of a mountain or they're

01:25:41.960 at the end of a temple. Okay. So it's still a mountain in that sense.

01:25:45.500 So that's a place where two worlds meet. That's the narrative world and the objective world,

01:25:49.120 really.

01:25:49.980 Exactly. So the, the, the invisible world and the visible world, the world of, of, of logos,

01:25:54.800 the world of pattern, and then the world of possibility, right? They come together. And then that's

01:26:00.280 when the, the, the coming together, that point is where you see something. So it's like that for,

01:26:06.420 for everything.

01:26:07.120 That's where miracles occur.

01:26:08.700 Yeah. But that's it. Yeah. Miracles are like super events. Like they, they, they show us the

01:26:12.760 pattern of reality in a more, in a, in a more concise way, but everything is like that. Right.

01:26:17.600 So even a chair is a bunch of possibilities, right. That encounters an idea can encounter the purpose

01:26:23.780 and logos. And then, then you have a chair, you can't have just a bunch of stuff or else you don't

01:26:28.960 have a chair. You need that to meet. So at the center of every thing of everything that exists,

01:26:34.200 there's a little temple, a mini temple, and there's a little incarnation, right? A little,

01:26:39.000 like a mini one. It's not, I'm not, I want to, don't want to seem heretical or anything,

01:26:44.800 but there's this little like mini thing that happens. And so that aspect has a, has a, a lower

01:26:50.820 part, which is the, the nexus of possibilities, the coming together possibilities. And then this thing

01:26:55.220 that this logos, which comes down. So this nexus of possibilities, you could call it a mountain,

01:27:00.300 a house, a temple, a body that's Mary, right? That's, that's her, that she's the place of

01:27:10.260 manifestation. So she's the arc of the covenant. She's the temple. She's the mountain. She's all

01:27:16.840 of that. And so, and then, and then we play that role. You could say the church, the body of Christ,

01:27:24.780 we play that role. We come together in love. And then the divine logos descends and manifests to

01:27:30.940 unite the body, right? Together and to reveal himself in that unity of the body. So we see Christ

01:27:37.240 in the unity of love. So Christ says, they will know you by how you love each other, because that's

01:27:43.260 how you know that a body exists is that it's coherent. It holds together as a body. And so

01:27:49.320 this body has to be dedicated. It has to be dedicated to the thing, which it's manifesting.

01:27:58.700 So like, let's say, let's say you have a Turkey, you know, a car and two bits of grass, and you think

01:28:07.580 I'm going to make a chair out of that. Well, it's not going to happen, right? It's not going to happen.

01:28:12.580 I didn't think you were going to go that route. But that's what this is it. This is what it's

01:28:17.160 about. It's not going to happen because that's not dedicated. And so, and the same way of a woman

01:28:23.040 and her husband. So a woman has to be dedicated to her husband for the union to be recognized and

01:28:29.660 fruitful. So if a woman is not faithful to her husband, then there's confusion on the identity

01:28:36.460 of the child, right? But if a woman is dedicated to her husband, which means that she's actually

01:28:41.960 a virgin to all other, other identities, she's virginal to all other identities, and she's

01:28:50.200 dedicated only to the one thing. So this idea of virginity is super important because it's about

01:28:56.700 dedication. It's about not being mixed or not.

01:28:59.940 Uncontamination. Uncontamination. And so then you can understand that in order for something

01:29:07.440 to manifest the entirety of the whole pattern, right? So it's like, so for someone to be the

01:29:15.300 place of manifestation for the whole thing.

01:29:18.980 Well, that is what a mother does. Like, right. It's what a mother does because she dedicates

01:29:23.220 herself great to a greater or lesser degree to bringing someone perfect into being. And

01:29:29.540 the more she loves, the more she dedicates herself to that in every possible way.

01:29:33.840 So now the Virgin Mary is the extreme cosmic version of that, where she has to be perpetual

01:29:40.540 virgin. She is a cosmic virgin. She is perpetually virginal because she's like, you can imagine

01:29:47.740 like, in order for the sun to reflect upon the waters, it has to be still.

01:29:51.140 You know, and all those men who don't believe that sort of thing should take careful stock

01:29:55.320 of the fact that they're frequently terrified out of their skull whenever they encounter someone

01:29:59.580 they're attracted to. They project that or see it instantly and it demolishes them. And

01:30:07.500 then if they're rejected, they're crushed. And you can think of that as a projection, but

01:30:12.300 you can also think of it as seeing more deeply what's there and that you only see that

01:30:16.900 when you're actually attracted to someone. And then that attraction has a basis because

01:30:21.180 you're seeing what they could be, even if you're not seeing what's there.

01:30:26.020 And so that's, so that's why the necessity of virgin birth, because she, she is revealing

01:30:34.280 the highest, right? She's like the, she's like a still ocean, which is on which the sun is

01:30:39.120 reflecting. And if it was mitigated, then it would only reflect a mitigated manner. And then

01:30:44.540 everything in between is mitigated. Like I said, it's like a woman who's faithful to her

01:30:47.860 husband, obviously he's not a virgin in a technical sense. You could say she's, she's a virginal

01:30:52.080 to others. She's untouched by others, but she's dedicated to the one man, just like.

01:30:57.900 Well, and you know, the degree to which that's entangled with genuine virginity off also isn't

01:31:02.860 the case also isn't so obvious. Yeah. You know, it isn't, we don't know what the preconditions

01:31:07.860 are for, for setting up the ideal relationship. And, and it's certainly the case that we bring

01:31:13.900 the baggage of our previous relationships into our current relationship. And maybe sometimes

01:31:17.960 that's for the better, and maybe the virginity can be symbolic, but people can certainly be

01:31:23.900 sullied by their past behavior. And sometimes in a way that they can't figure out how to,

01:31:27.920 how to, how to repair. Yeah. Well, for sure. The Christian ideal has always been

01:31:33.620 the, the, the union of virgins in the sense that then the dedication ends up being tighter,

01:31:40.980 right? And so you are dedicated to your husband and your husband is dedicated to you and, and then

01:31:45.940 you're unmitigated mentally even, right? Like in terms of memories and in terms of comparing and in

01:31:50.940 terms of all of these things, which we do as human beings. Uh, and so it, it, it can prevent

01:31:55.920 slippage in terms of your dedication. Yeah. So I don't know if that makes sense in terms of

01:32:02.280 understanding why. It wasn't, I mean, you know, these things, grasping these things slips out in

01:32:08.400 and out of my capacity. And I mean, I, you, you did a lovely job there of, of, of, of making a

01:32:15.720 symbolic account for the virginity of Mary. I understand that. And I understand, well.

01:32:21.080 But no one's going to prove the virginity of Mary historically. I mean, that, that, that's not,

01:32:25.740 that's something which is not, that obviously is not possible. It's a secret. There's a secret

01:32:30.500 aspect to virginity, which is actually part of its function. And it's also part of its,

01:32:35.860 how can I say this? It's part of its, of its mystery, right? Which is something which is,

01:32:42.320 which is not public. You know, it's, it's, it belongs to the identity. It belongs to the,

01:32:48.020 you know, it's like the, the dedication of something belongs to that, which is, it's dedicated,

01:32:52.240 right? We can talk about this to some degree. I mean, I,

01:32:55.040 imagine that you wanted to form the perfect union with someone. Let's say it's the perfect

01:33:04.940 sexual union for that matter. I think that requires love. I, whenever I've had in my life,

01:33:12.940 a sexual experience that wasn't associated with love, I didn't feel right about it.

01:33:20.820 My conscience bothered me very much, very rapidly. And maybe that makes me an outlier. Although I

01:33:28.280 don't think so. I think, I think that that is how people react, but they refuse to notice.

01:33:35.240 Now I might be wrong about that. Maybe I'm a prude. It's possible, although I don't think so,

01:33:40.940 but it's possible. But it always struck me that sex was best undertaken within the confines of a

01:33:49.400 committed, of an ultimately committed relationship that otherwise it was lesser. It was the lesser,

01:33:57.040 it was less than it should be. It was sullied. And now, well, I don't have anything more to say

01:34:07.480 about that than that. That's been my experience. And so, and I don't know what the preconditions are

01:34:14.540 for establishing the perfect marriage, let's say, and the perfect marriage would be one that

01:34:18.180 brought about the best possible children. These are not trivial things. They're very difficult

01:34:23.000 things to get right. Certainly, you want the least amount of animosity, unnecessary animosity

01:34:28.980 possible between the parents. You want the union to be tight. You want it to be based on love and

01:34:34.100 commitment. That seems clear, even from the psychological literature.

01:34:38.080 Yeah. So I have another question for you. Yeah, go for it. Go for it.

01:34:49.400 This idea of theosis. I think it's lack of... I'm tormented by the possibility that it's lack of

01:34:59.840 courage that stops people from... from bringing into being that union with God. Do you think

01:35:12.440 you think that possibility, that possibility there sits there in front of all of us and

01:35:21.640 it was actually realized once in history? Well, it... I would say that, at least in the... in the

01:35:29.820 tradition of the church, it was perfectly manifested in Christ, but there are... there are other saints

01:35:36.760 that have reached theosis. And that... that's what we're all called to. That we're all called to...

01:35:42.920 to become one with God to the extent that that's... that that's possible.

01:35:48.000 Well, then I guess we're stuck with the old problem, which is, if that's the case, then

01:35:52.360 what... why does the world seem so unredeemed? Yeah. Well, because we're... we're distracted,

01:35:59.880 you know, with reason, where we... we tend to attend to the lower things. You know, we... we get

01:36:07.340 distracted by our... our emotions. We get distracted by all these things around us that are trying to get

01:36:15.040 our attention. And then we aim towards these smaller things. You know, we... we aim towards

01:36:22.540 whatever it is, right? We aim towards making money. We aim towards getting this or having some

01:36:28.380 prestige. And these... because the problem is that these things all give us as a small sense of

01:36:33.240 satisfaction. And so they... they're like little idols, I guess you could call them.

01:36:38.420 Um... and so we just aim towards these... these lower things. And... and that's one of the reasons why we

01:36:45.800 struggle to see this higher ideal, you know? And so that's one of the reasons why, I guess,

01:36:53.540 what's one of the reasons for church as well is that, you know, it's kind of forces you, even if

01:36:58.780 you're distracted or whatever, to come together at least once a week or whatever, stand...

01:37:02.920 Yes.

01:37:03.300 ...together and sing together and...

01:37:05.260 Yes, yes. Well, and to... and to constant... I know, I... I understand that, that...

01:37:08.580 Yeah.

01:37:10.100 No... you know, I remember

01:37:11.920 cynicism that was sort of in the air, I suppose, when

01:37:17.340 the Christianity of my youth started to decompose, when people started to

01:37:22.840 not attend church in droves. The cynical justification in part was, well, those are

01:37:29.880 one-hour-a-week Christians. How hypocritical can you get to claim allegiance to this high

01:37:40.740 ideal and then to go back and live your tawdry life? How could anyone participate in anything

01:37:46.080 like that? And what we've replaced it with is never doing it, even for an hour a week,

01:37:50.340 which is actually quite a lot of time compared to none.

01:37:54.320 Yeah.

01:37:54.820 So the replacement has not been an improvement by any stretch of the imagination.

01:37:59.880 Yeah. And so, and then we replace it because we need to come together and we need to commune

01:38:05.200 and we need to celebrate. And so we end up doing it in these kind of secondary places like sports or

01:38:11.400 politics and all these other places, you know, we'll replace that. But ultimately, like I said,

01:38:19.660 one of the things that help us to trust, let's say, or to find some respite is that we do...

01:38:26.580 It's together. Like we're doing this together. And so when you see, there's some comfort in knowing

01:38:32.960 that some people have dedicated their life to God and have lived that way. And it serves as a smaller

01:38:41.120 example, but also as a comfort in those moments. Because usually in the stories of the saints,

01:38:47.120 you'll find times when they're struggling, when they're completely off the rails, when they're not,

01:38:51.880 you know, when they're struggling with thoughts, with passions, with desires.

01:38:54.980 No, you see that in the Old Testament stories. I mean, Abraham is all of the patriarchs. I mean,

01:39:00.900 they lived full lives, complete with catastrophic failure and malevolence and murder and genocide and

01:39:08.740 war. And I mean, and yet we're redeemed.

01:39:11.920 Hmm. And so I think that that's one of the things that helps us to, to, like you said, to, to, to see,

01:39:20.780 it's like, you don't, you don't have to, obviously, you don't look at the person who goes to church once

01:39:24.840 a, once a year or whatever, that person has their own thing to deal with. You, you, you, you find,

01:39:30.760 and you see these, these people that are the opposite, that really live. And everybody has met,

01:39:36.140 I would say, probably a few people like that. At least I've met a few that are just,

01:39:39.920 I've met some priests, uh, monk priests that are glowing, like they're just glowing and the,

01:39:46.200 and you see it in their eyes that they live at a level of, of peace and acceptance that I don't

01:39:51.640 have access to. And so it's like that type of encounter is also part of your transformation

01:39:57.440 because it gives you, it tells you like, Oh yeah, I see it in your eyes. Like I can see

01:40:02.380 that, that, that this exists, you know, it's not just something we talk about.

01:40:06.500 I want, I want to, uh, talk a little bit about heaven.

01:40:13.180 And so I talked to Matt Ridley a while back and, and, and Bjorn Lomberg, and I'm interested

01:40:20.020 in their thinking because they're trying to plot an optimistic course for the future.

01:40:26.920 One where at the highest levels of social integration, we decide how human society should

01:40:36.500 look, at least insofar as we conceptualize how it might look if we address some of the

01:40:45.180 major problems that beset us. But it's an attempt and it's an attempt to make things better.

01:40:51.180 It's an attempt to bring about something increasingly resembling heaven on earth. I mean, heaven is

01:40:57.940 generally conceptualized. You can conceptualize it as a state of being. It might be the state

01:41:03.040 of being that those people that you described live in. I've had paradisal experiences where

01:41:09.920 everything transformed itself into something that was perfect, that appeared perfect. And

01:41:14.460 I was unable to stay in those frames of mind. The, the heaven, is that something we build? Is that

01:41:23.900 something? I don't understand the relationship between the heaven that awaits us, let's say,

01:41:30.360 after we die. That's the, the idea. And what we build here on earth, do those touch? Is that the,

01:41:36.220 is that the doctrine? There's so much of this doctrine I don't understand at all.

01:41:42.000 Well, I think, I think a way to, to see it has to do with, with attention again, and it has to do with

01:41:48.480 a hierarchy of attention. If you try to build heaven, you're going to fail. You're going to fail

01:41:56.220 miserably because you, because you're not aiming high enough, right? You're, you're aiming and then you,

01:42:02.680 you get stuck in this, in these weird world of opposites that you don't even understand the

01:42:07.720 side effects of what you're doing, you know? And so for one person, heaven will look like if

01:42:13.280 everything could be perfectly ordered then, right? And then we know what that looks like. And another

01:42:18.100 person will look at heaven and think if everything could be free, we could all just be free. And then

01:42:23.220 that we know what that looks like. And so the idea is to look higher. You know, there's a,

01:42:29.040 there's a, there's a story that I've been. Well, we have to strive for something better, but then we

01:42:33.660 end up in, which is what you're saying is that we end up with the tower of Babel or we end up with

01:42:38.120 the flood or we end up with, with the catastrophe, continual catastrophe of unintended consequences. But

01:42:45.460 as you yourself said, we are aiming for something better. And so, so the question is, how do you

01:42:50.220 pursue, pursue utopia while avoiding the pitfalls? And that's a theological question. I would. Yeah,

01:42:56.560 it is. And I, I think it, I know this, people are going to hate that I say this, but it has to do

01:43:01.760 with worship. It's, it has to do with what you worship. So if you worship, if you worship those

01:43:08.600 things that you're aiming towards, the lower things, if you worship the, the making a safer society,

01:43:14.780 if you worship the making a freer society, if you worship making a stronger society, all of these

01:43:20.200 things are going to go off the rails because they, they have unintended consequences that you don't

01:43:27.160 understand because they're, they're a fragment of reality. They need to be encompassed together in

01:43:32.600 order to reach something higher. And so that's the danger of ideology. It's the part takes the place

01:43:38.820 of the whole. So the, the, the, the, the idea is that if you actually, if you worship God,

01:43:45.300 then those other things will, will kind of lay themselves out slowly and you won't be able to

01:43:52.180 force them. They'll kind of lay themselves out slowly and they'll start to manifest, uh, you know,

01:43:57.100 progressively and, and, and as you, but you have to attend to the highest or else, like I said,

01:44:02.860 you know, and there's a, there's even like a, there's an image of antichrist, which is related

01:44:08.140 to this problem. You know, uh, in scripture, you could, one of the first antichrist, you could say

01:44:13.940 it was Judas who betrayed Christ. Well, there's a story with Judas, which is very fascinating

01:44:18.620 because Christ doesn't talk to Judas very often. But one of the places where Christ talks to Judas

01:44:23.800 is when a woman comes in and wants to anoint and wash Christ's feet with a very expensive perfume.

01:44:32.660 And then Judas says, what, what are you doing? Like, why are you doing this? You need to,

01:44:37.800 why don't we give this to the poor? Right. And Christ says, you know, the poor will always be

01:44:43.900 with you, but the bridegroom, Christ, the Messiah is there for a short time.

01:44:50.220 Yes. That's the other kind of story. It's very difficult to understand how anyone could

01:44:53.820 have invented that story. Like it's not the story of propagandists. No, it's in fact,

01:44:59.700 it's the opposite. Yeah. But that story has to do with attention. So Christ obviously isn't saying

01:45:05.520 you shouldn't help the poor. Christ has said to help the poor. He said it many times. You have to help

01:45:09.180 the poor, give to the poor, of course, but he's saying, get your hierarchy in order.

01:45:13.780 And you'll help the poor more effectively than any other. That's, that's the case. There is,

01:45:17.880 that is the case. It starts with worship and the acts that she's doing. If you look at what she's

01:45:22.440 doing, she's, first of all, she bought something expensive. She's sacrificing it. She's, she's

01:45:27.720 sacrificing it to, to, to bow down and to wash the feet, to submit, to sacrifice to, and to worship.

01:45:35.260 So those three things, like when I talk about the aim, how you end up having to submit to that aim.

01:45:40.840 And so this is what, so Christ is saying, first comes worship, then the world lays itself out

01:45:47.240 below that in a, in an appropriate way. And those that are. That's what the Sermon on the Mount says

01:45:51.460 too. Yeah. And those that are, are saying help the poor as their ultimate goal in the, in scripture,

01:45:57.420 it says that Judas didn't even want to help the poor. He wanted to take the money for himself,

01:46:00.980 really. Like he was a thief actually. And he was taking the money out of the purse. And so those

01:46:06.160 that just want to. Well, I suppose the truth of the matter is, is that the genuineness of your desire

01:46:14.060 to help the poor is precisely proportional to the degree that you embody Christ. That's right.

01:46:20.820 And it can't be otherwise. It cannot be otherwise. I, I, I see that. I see that clearly

01:46:26.200 because otherwise things will go astray. So that's one of the problems with the modern

01:46:31.760 projects of utopia is that they're, they're babblesque in their attempts. And you can see

01:46:38.080 like the type of gestures that the world authorities are posing in terms of, in terms of safety extreme,

01:46:47.680 like, you know, with COVID and everything, this desire to create absolute safety, this desire to

01:46:52.080 create absolute identification and, and tracing and all of these weird, these kinds of weird gestures

01:46:58.900 that show that they think they can control reality is, is, uh, it's leading us towards a very dangerous

01:47:06.360 place. Well, one of the things I noticed, I did some work on a committee at one point that was

01:47:11.860 advising the UN in relationship to the establishment of its millennial goals. And there was hundreds of

01:47:19.820 goals never, not rank ordered. And so it was a tower of Babel because you can't have hundreds of goals

01:47:27.900 that aren't rank ordered and have any goals at all because the goal to have a goal means a hierarchy.

01:47:33.640 Something has to be more important than something else. And there isn't anything more important than

01:47:38.820 getting your act together, so to speak, you know, well, I'm going to have to think about all this a lot.

01:47:46.520 Hmm. Yeah. But there's the question that keeps lurking in, in the back of my mind, which is

01:47:57.560 does the fact that that's how it should be mean that that's the way that it is?

01:48:05.940 Yeah. Yeah. And it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a question of trust with, which ends up manifesting

01:48:21.060 itself in love, you know? Um, and I think that like the love that you have for the world, which is,

01:48:29.780 which is, which is, which is clear. Anyways, it shows me that you might be closer to that,

01:48:38.120 to that trust than, than you might want to admit to yourself, maybe.

01:48:42.900 Well, I don't know what to do with it, I suppose is the real problem, especially in my current

01:48:47.080 circumstances. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm the most confused person I've ever met.

01:48:53.140 Hmm. I would say. Yeah. And I've met some pretty confused people, so.

01:49:04.420 Well, thank you. That was really something.

01:49:08.360 Yeah. You know, it's a, it's a really a joy to talk to Jordan. And, you know, I, like I said,

01:49:12.720 there are thousands of people who are praying for you and, and.

01:49:16.440 Well, they're keeping me alive.

01:49:17.640 And your story isn't, isn't, your story isn't over yet, you know?

01:49:23.680 So much the pity for me.

01:49:29.820 Well, you know, I, I, I really, all I can do is really pray that you've, that you, yeah, that you,

01:49:36.940 I don't know how to, how to formulate it, but I, I hope that you, that you, that you encounter

01:49:44.280 a moment of grace and that you can also find, find a, a, a body to join with.

01:49:55.220 And I'm always here, you know, like I, I, we haven't talked in a few years, but, uh,

01:49:59.720 obviously you're more part of my life.

01:50:01.820 I can stand talking to you.

01:50:06.000 You're, you're more, you're definitely always a part of my life.

01:50:09.460 You know, even if, if it's through weird YouTube videos and everything, you know, and, and

01:50:13.960 people remind me that you're a part of my life all the time, because a lot of people that

01:50:19.040 watch my videos, you know, they, they come, they come from you.

01:50:22.560 They're always, they always start with, well, I was watching Jordan Peterson videos.

01:50:25.920 And so, so you're a, you're a gateway to, to, uh, you're, you're a gateway to what I'm

01:50:32.040 talking about, you know?

01:50:33.400 So I, well, that's a good gateway.

01:50:36.160 Thank you for the carving.

01:50:38.300 It's beautiful.

01:50:39.460 I'm happy to know that it's there, that it's in your house.

01:50:41.860 And that St.

01:50:42.240 Michael is, uh, is at least holding that dragon at bay a little bit.

01:50:48.360 We hope.

01:50:50.120 Yeah.

01:50:53.080 Good talking to you.

01:50:54.500 Yeah.

01:50:54.720 It was good talking to Jordan.

01:50:55.480 Anytime.

01:51:09.460 It was good talking to Jordan.

01:51:11.920 It was good, but it was good talking.

01:51:14.180 Oh.

01:51:15.140 Yeah.

01:51:16.080 Yeah.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 28, 2021

156. The Perfect Mode of Being ｜ Jonathan Pageau

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