The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 202. Meaning, Awe and Conceptualization of God - pt. 1

00:00:00.000 As a homeowner, some of the most tedious and easily forgotten maintenance tasks are often

00:00:04.340 the most important. Take gutter cleaning. It's one of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind chores

00:00:08.940 that can lead to serious issues if neglected. LeafFilter offers an investment engineered to

00:00:14.440 protect your whole home. Clogged gutters aren't just a nuisance. They can cause extensive repairs,

00:00:19.740 costing thousands of dollars, and causing major headaches. LeafFilter's patented technology is

00:00:25.120 designed to take care of everything from start to finish, making the process hassle-free for

00:00:29.360 homeowners. Their professionals will clean out, realign, and seal your existing gutters before

00:00:34.600 installing the LeafFilter system, ensuring optimal performance from day one. Plus, every installation

00:00:40.120 comes with a free inspection, estimate, and lifetime guarantee. By choosing LeafFilter, you're not just

00:00:45.740 solving a maintenance problem. You're investing in your home's long-term health and your own peace of

00:00:49.980 mind. Protect your home and never clean out your gutters again with LeafFilter, America's number

00:00:55.140 one protection system. Schedule your free inspection and get up to 30% off your entire purchase at

00:01:00.580 LeafFilter.com slash build. That's a free inspection and up to 30% off at LeafFilter.com slash build.

00:01:08.440 See representative for warranty details. Promotion is 20% off plus a 10% senior or military discount.

00:01:13.960 One discount per household.

00:01:16.880 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:01:21.560 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression

00:01:27.040 and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a

00:01:32.820 moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping

00:01:37.440 patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new

00:01:42.680 series. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely

00:01:48.680 possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's

00:01:54.460 hope and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan

00:02:00.480 B. Peterson on depression and anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:02:09.640 Welcome to Season 4, Episode 57 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. In our second weekly compilation,

00:02:17.780 we're investigating the various methods and practices that humans use to conceptualize God.

00:02:24.160 This investigation leads us down the path of exploring meaning and wonder. What does it mean

00:02:29.020 to live as though God exists? Why are we awestruck when viewing a beautiful painting? Why does walking

00:02:34.700 inside a great cathedral render us speechless? What is the relationship between these experiences and God?

00:02:41.480 Dad talks about how living as though God exists is some form of evidence that we as a society hold

00:02:46.700 these values in high regard. I hope you guys enjoy this episode and have a wonderful week.

00:03:07.060 It isn't obvious to me that anyone wants to live a meaningless existence.

00:03:11.100 I don't think you can live a meaningless existence without becoming corrupted because the pain of

00:03:18.260 existence will corrupt you without a saving meaning. And it also seems to me that you can sell the story

00:03:27.660 that meaning is to be found in responsibility. When I've tried to sell that story to myself, I seem to buy

00:03:34.360 it. And when I've tried to communicate it with other people, it renders them silent, large crowds of

00:03:41.100 people silent. And that's strange because I'm not sure why that is. It's perhaps because the connection

00:03:48.640 between responsibility and meaning had never been made for that explicitly somehow.

00:03:54.960 Because meaning gets contaminated with happiness or something like that. But it's to be found in

00:04:03.920 responsibility. And then you can say, well, there isn't any responsibility that's more compelling than

00:04:09.160 trying to aid things in the manifestation of their divine form. That should be an adventure that could

00:04:16.840 be sold. And I don't know why the church can't do it. I don't understand that. And because it seems to me

00:04:27.700 that that's something that I've done, at least in part, and that accounts for the strange popularity of

00:04:34.480 the biblical lectures in particular. Yeah. And but I've also and I do believe that I do believe that that

00:04:44.200 the right striving is to attempt with all your heart to encourage things to develop along that

00:04:55.060 towards that divine goal. Like what else would you possibly do? Once you think that through, it's like

00:05:01.820 you're always aiming at something that's better or you wouldn't be aiming. You're always moving

00:05:06.760 towards something that's better or you wouldn't be moving. So then why wouldn't you move towards the

00:05:12.240 greatest good? Yeah. Well, it's because it's terrifying, I suppose, in part. But then as you know,

00:05:19.020 I've tried to put that into practice in my life and it's tearing me into pieces. Yeah.

00:05:26.760 I asked you to define love and I'm going to define it on my terms now. And that is the best in me

00:05:32.420 serving the best in you. And I think that's the deepest pleasure. That's the deepest and most

00:05:38.100 lasting pleasure. And it is the most fundamental motivation. It's the inexhaustible source. Because

00:05:44.240 if I can do that, whenever I do that, I feel that I'm being properly. And there's nothing better than

00:05:50.200 that. And you can extend that to the world, to situations, places. Well, I think that's what

00:05:58.320 you're supposed to do by accepting the proposition that God is love. I mean, it's God is love and God

00:06:03.740 is logos. Those are both there. So then the question to some degree is the rank order of the

00:06:08.860 two. And I would say God is truth within love. And that's the animating spirit of mankind.

00:06:13.980 And that's a way different claim than the one the atheists are going after, by the way.

00:06:19.120 Yeah. Think about it, everyone. Is truth in the service of love not the best animating spirit of

00:06:25.820 mankind when it isn't pursuing an aberration? We can all ask ourselves that question.

00:06:31.720 I think that's a good question to ask. Thank you, John.

00:06:36.040 What I mean is I think it re...

00:06:38.980 I think it reorients us to the fact...

00:06:43.060 We can put that on a t-shirt. Is truth in the service of love a good question?

00:06:48.980 I guess I see them as more... I see them as more interpenetrating. I want to make a stronger

00:06:56.020 relationship between them than just a relationship of service. I mean, this is...

00:07:00.080 How about her, man?

00:07:01.060 Yeah. That... This is why I like the term realization, that love is a way of affording realization. And

00:07:08.600 the deepest knowing you have of reality is in realization. That's what I... If I had to...

00:07:13.480 Okay. So it seems to me... Okay. So I'll make an appendage to my claim.

00:07:18.280 Right.

00:07:19.240 The reality that is most justifiable is brought about by the action of truth in the service of love.

00:07:25.220 Yeah. But I guess what I'm saying is I see truth... I think you're using it. And I've heard you use

00:07:32.840 true as something beyond a correspondence between the semantic content of a proposition reality.

00:07:39.600 I've heard you talk about...

00:07:40.560 Yes.

00:07:40.900 Right. Right. And we even use that when we use the phrase true...

00:07:43.520 Yes. It seems to incorporate some of those other dimensions that you've been talking about.

00:07:47.540 Exactly. Exactly.

00:07:47.800 Okay. Well, great, man. So fill me in.

00:07:50.400 Well, that's what I'm trying to get at. I'm trying to get at that power is a way of...

00:07:55.200 You know, when your shot is true, your skill has been effective and you're going to hit the mark.

00:08:01.720 Right. But presence is also a way in which things are true to form. Right.

00:08:08.380 And then the participatory knowing is when we're like the deepest sense of true, which is, you know,

00:08:14.340 related to trust and being betrothed to the world in an important way.

00:08:19.860 So if you will allow me to expand what you mean by true to cover all of those dimensions...

00:08:24.880 True to the world in that you extend the same courtesy to the world that you described extending to your partner.

00:08:30.620 Exactly. I think that the answer to nihilism isn't some propositional answer.

00:08:36.360 This is what I get from Nisha Tenya.

00:08:37.700 Yeah, right.

00:08:38.060 It's to relearn. And I mean this deeply in the Buddhist sense of sati, to remember what it is to fall in love with reality, to fall in love with being.

00:08:48.080 And if that's what you're saying is the...

00:08:50.080 You think that's what Sam Harris is striving for in his spirituality?

00:08:55.320 Well, it's not a throwaway answer. It's like, what's he up to exactly?

00:09:00.160 I mean, isn't he on a Sophia...

00:09:04.080 A philia-sophia adventure?

00:09:09.280 I think everybody is...

00:09:13.380 How can I put this?

00:09:14.640 Everybody lives from the non-propositional kinds of knowing emphasized by Plato.

00:09:20.980 And that's what all of the scholastic research is pointing to now.

00:09:24.540 That Socrates was trying to point people to the non-propositional knowing.

00:09:28.360 The procedural, the perspectival, the participatory.

00:09:31.260 I think we all have to live from that, given a lot of things I've said and a lot of things we've said.

00:09:35.800 Maybe you could expound on those a bit more for us and clarify a bit more.

00:09:41.700 So you said the answer to nihilism.

00:09:44.400 That isn't exactly a comment on my comment that the culture war is about a claim that the drive to power is at the core of Western being.

00:09:54.800 I think that's an equally nihilistic claim.

00:09:57.540 That's my point.

00:09:59.100 The claim is nihilistic or my claim about that is nihilistic or both?

00:10:04.880 The claim that power is a fundamental reality is an attempt to assuage the wounding of nihilism, but it is fundamentally mistaken in its endeavor.

00:10:14.900 It is constituted the wrong way.

00:10:17.800 It's like framing a problem the wrong way so that you do not get the insight needed to get to the solution of the problem.

00:10:24.920 So I think of it as a fundamental misframing.

00:10:28.000 That's what I'm trying to say.

00:10:29.160 Okay, okay, okay.

00:10:29.800 And that's why I'm hesitant to say either yes or no to it because I'm trying to say it.

00:10:33.780 Right, I get it.

00:10:34.880 Yeah.

00:10:35.200 Well, I believe that it is misframed because I don't think it would be taking us in such a pathological direction, the whole argument.

00:10:41.160 Exactly.

00:10:41.700 If it wasn't misframed.

00:10:43.240 Thinking psychologically, again, about Christianity, and I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought that predate it, but it looked to me like, and some of those were derived from Mesopotamia, and some of them were derived from Greece, and some of them were derived from Judaism and other sources,

00:11:06.800 but they all seemed to me to be part of the conversation that human beings have been having amongst themselves for thousands of years about what the nature of the ideal human being is.

00:11:18.840 And now I see these cathedrals, these works of art in architecture that took a tremendous amount of labor, produce a dome-like structure that represents the sky, and you see Christ as logos spread out on the sky as a transcendent force.

00:11:35.680 And you ask yourself, well, what exactly is that signifying?

00:11:40.760 And the answer is at least the proposition of a kind of ideal that's associated with, let's say, universal love and truth in speech.

00:11:51.160 That's the logos summed up in two phrases.

00:11:54.340 And if there's no metaphysical reality there at all, there's still this imaginative enterprise that characterizes the entire human imaginative effort, cultural effort, to posit a transcendent ideal that we would live in relationship to.

00:12:14.880 And I just don't see that case being made very strongly, and I can't really understand why, because isn't it rather obvious that at least part of what Christianity has been is the attempt by thousands of people over thousands of years to specify the nature of an ideal?

00:12:30.880 Certainly, I would say that the fact that these principles actually work is proof of their being true accounts of what the nature of the real is.

00:12:52.040 Well, let's approach this from a couple of different angles, Jordan.

00:12:54.680 And, you know, the first is, one of the things that I profoundly believe is that, you know, these young people seeking deeper answers and, you know, however much they may be flailing about, you know, it's not their fault that many, perhaps most of the institutions they will encounter will betray that which is deepest in them.

00:13:19.700 We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll denigrate, we'll tell them, no, none of this thing, none of these things that you're seeking are really real.

00:13:26.440 I mean, I think, you know, I've been talking, thinking a lot over the years about architecture, and what is going on in brutalist architecture.

00:13:34.560 And, and it really does seem to me that in brutalist architecture, I mean, to live in relation to brutalist architecture, it is as if you had a parent that said, you know, you're nothing, you're nothing, you'll never amount to any, I mean, of course, there are terrible people, terrible to say people actually, there are people in these situations who live with, with such dysfunctional lack of love and antagonism.

00:13:58.040 This is the way that there's the home life that they, that some people terribly have, but I'm using this as an example, because I think what brutalist architecture does is it declares to the whole world and to you that you are, there is no truth, there is no beauty, you are nothing, accept it.

00:14:14.260 It's just a concrete, annihilating force.

00:14:20.740 And, and, and, and, and you see this culture of repudiation.

00:14:24.220 I mean, here in, in, in, not here, you're in Canada, I'm in the States and in Savannah now, but you know, the, the Chateau Laurier, I think I misspoke recently, called it the Frontenac, which is in Quebec, but in Ottawa, you know, the Chateau Laurier, there's been a, a desire to expand this sort of beautiful sort of neo-Gothic building.

00:14:41.320 Um, and it went through six rounds of approval to finally, uh, be, uh, to make, uh, a set of plans that would meet the local architectural, uh, uh, or review board, whatever it was.

00:14:54.220 And I thought, well, it can't be that bad, you know, it's gone through that.

00:14:57.080 And I mean, this structure is abhorrent.

00:15:00.220 It looks like a, a cross between a, uh, uh, a Verizon server firm and an American penitentiary.

00:15:06.880 I mean, it is just a, it is a declaration that there, that there is no higher order at all.

00:15:13.340 You know, in Edinburgh, they're tearing all those out, eh?

00:15:15.920 There is, Edinburgh is an unbelievably beautiful, beautiful city.

00:15:19.640 The, the whole central mile of it, square mile essentially, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

00:15:25.920 And it's marred by random placements of 1970s brutalist architecture.

00:15:30.940 And they're just horrible.

00:15:33.200 It's, it's complete lack of regard for the architectural context.

00:15:37.020 And they're all being torn out and replaced.

00:15:39.840 Thank God.

00:15:41.180 So, well, this architectural idea.

00:15:43.660 So back to the cathedral.

00:15:45.040 You know, what's really interesting about a cathedral with, let's say, Christ as Pantocrator on the ceiling is spread, spread against the ceiling.

00:15:52.780 It's that it's not the state that's portrayed up there, right?

00:15:57.220 It's not a, it's not a map of the country.

00:15:59.460 It's not even a map of the world.

00:16:00.860 It's not a geographical locale or a political institution.

00:16:04.080 It's the transcendent individual.

00:16:06.700 And, you know, it's just not obvious to me.

00:16:10.080 It's, it seems obvious to me that that's correct.

00:16:13.460 That, and that if it isn't the transcendent individual, then it becomes the state.

00:16:18.100 And as soon as the transcendent becomes the state, then we have a catastrophe.

00:16:23.860 And I don't see any difference between the insistence that our identity is predicated on our group membership.

00:16:30.260 I don't see any real difference between that and the insistence that we're just handmaidens of the state.

00:16:35.040 It's a totalitarian insistence.

00:16:37.260 And I think part of that, too, is maybe, you know, I learned from Jung that as soon as you posit an ideal, you also specify a judge.

00:16:44.720 And the more, the higher the ideal, the more severe the judgment because of your distance from the ideal.

00:16:51.920 And so part of what we're seeing, too, might be a rebellion against the awful requirements of that ideal.

00:17:00.700 But that doesn't justify, that doesn't justify the rebellion.

00:17:04.160 Because if it's really the ideal, then if you don't act it out, you fail to act it out at your peril.

00:17:11.120 And then we need to have a serious conversation about the metaphysical, about the practical implications of the idea of this ideal.

00:17:19.680 I mean, if we've had this conversation about the transcendent individual as the ideal against which we should all be judged and to which we should strive to emulate, is there any relationship between that ideal and the structure of reality itself?

00:17:37.500 Because that's the hundred dollar question, so to speak.

00:17:41.920 You know, we have a human ideal, and you could say, merely psychologically, maybe even merely biologically, that that's something we originated, that's part of our biological nature, that's expressed in this ideal.

00:17:54.940 And it's nothing more than that.

00:17:57.000 But you could also say, well, perhaps it is something more than that.

00:17:59.860 Perhaps it's reflective of the structure of being itself.

00:18:03.240 I mean, it depends on our position in the cosmos.

00:18:05.940 You know, we are self-conscious.

00:18:08.100 We are that which reflects being itself, or perhaps even makes it possible.

00:18:12.500 It's not that obvious what our role is.

00:18:14.820 It might not be so trivial, despite our mortality.

00:18:20.280 Well, I would say that not only it is as you say, but we can know it to be as you say.

00:18:26.560 I mean, this is what the whole history, in some sense, of literature and philosophy and theology is about, is a, and I want to insist on this, it is a rational grappling with these questions, realities, and indeed truths.

00:18:46.640 I want to come back to something in a minute, but just on this topic, you know, one way into this is to reflect on the, the fact that, that reality is not zero sum.

00:19:01.140 That, of course, we know this economically, you were talking, Jordan, a minute ago about, you know, free, you know, the, the voluntary exchange of, of, of regulated, that is to say, a contractually governed marketplace, that, that in this exchange, you know, it's not, it's a zero sum.

00:19:19.680 We all end up over time better.

00:19:21.680 But you also see this naturally in the, the evolution of the diversity of species, of languages, of cultures.

00:19:28.900 You've written beautifully about play as orienting the child in relation to a deepening reciprocity with others.

00:19:39.420 We know this in terms of knowledge.

00:19:40.880 I mean, you know, how can it be that in a conversation I can be wrong and be shown to be wrong and that be a net gain for me?

00:19:49.820 I mean, you know, I, the whole, the whole point of free dialogue is that we can learn from, we can learn in our not knowing, that the conversation is not zero sum, that even in the, in our, in our, we know this in terms of forgiveness, that even our betrayals of beautiful things can become deepening engagements with what we have betrayed, if we have the humility to see it.

00:20:17.640 And so then, you know, I think, you know, that leads one to, you know, what, geez, you can go back, you can go at the level of subatomic particles in physics.

00:20:28.520 I had a pleasure of talking with Freeman Dyson before he died.

00:20:32.100 And, you know, Dyson will say very clearly that against the determinists, you know, some of the rational optimists are pretty religiously determinist in their, in their worldview, you know, and they want to marshal modern science as, as, as saying that their determinism is what science teaches.

00:20:49.460 But that, you know, Dyson, who was a subatomic physicist at the highest level, you know, expressly said the opposite.

00:20:57.560 He said that the electron, that, you know, you, the, essentially, he says that the electron is free, that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, that at the very most detailed level of subatomic particles, things are not determinist.

00:21:13.420 And the reason I want to go all the way down to that level is because you can go down to the lowest level of resolution, then you can back up to that, to the, to the higher level, and see that there is a non-zero-sum nature to what is real.

00:21:28.160 And then you have to ask yourself, is it good to live in relation to, to what is true, or should I live in a delusion?

00:21:40.320 And we say, well, it's better to live in relation to what's true than to live in relation to a delusion.

00:21:44.680 And, and, and, and then you say, well, what would it mean then for me to live in relation to this, this positive sum, this essential reciprocity, which I think is really what the Christian view of the Trinity is about.

00:21:58.160 This essential reciprocity, which is the bedrock of all reality.

00:22:02.260 What would it mean to live in relation to that?

00:22:03.960 What would it mean to, to, to, to remember that?

00:22:06.440 And, you know, one can approach that in any number of different ways, but certainly that is what, what prayer is.

00:22:12.860 That is what all spiritual exercises are.

00:22:15.360 That's what perhaps walking in nature can be.

00:22:17.640 That's what, what any kind of meditative activity, intellectual or physical, is a recollecting of the self in the deepest way to what,

00:22:28.160 is most real.

00:22:29.460 And I know you've written, for example, about, about gratitude.

00:22:32.580 And I love your words about gratitude because it's an inversion of the burden.

00:22:39.100 It's not that it all comes down to us, but actually just the opposite.

00:22:42.800 That we, we place ourselves in the hands of the eternal reciprocity that gathers us up and puts us back together.

00:22:57.880 And I think that this, frankly, is, is a deeply rational standpoint that can be shown to be, despite my not making it very articulately here today, shown to be true in economics, in physics, in biology, in sociology, and certainly in all of the higher order spheres of human knowing.

00:23:19.980 This is the nature of what, of what we are and, and what the world is.

00:23:27.440 And this is where, you know, your, your, your, your image of the Pantocrator, you know, I think this comes back to this because, because what fundamentally is going on there is that, you know, the logos is in us.

00:23:39.400 You know, it's actually in us.

00:23:41.740 That's why, when you talk about the divine significance of truth and speech, that, you know, we are made to understand ourselves in relation to the whole.

00:23:51.720 That is an intrinsic human need and an intrinsic human ability.

00:23:56.780 And, and, and I think that, you know, this is where, you know, you know, my life is about trying to, in whatever small way I can, you know, open, if the, if the nihilists darken the horizon and close off in the way that brutalist architecture does, close off what we're allowed to become and understand ourselves as, then I think the work of our time is to open it back up.

00:24:17.360 And, and, and, and that is really what the humanities are fundamentally about.

00:24:22.300 You can go back to, you know, one of the things I despise about the current structure of the academy is it acts as though, you know, these things are just for the few.

00:24:30.360 But, you know, you think about, you know, Homer.

00:24:32.340 I mean, Homer was the mode of educating the Greeks for, you know, a thousand years.

00:24:36.280 The Pantheon was right there on the highest hill where everyone could see it.

00:24:40.540 Same with Gothic architecture.

00:24:42.100 You know, J.S. Bach, perhaps the greatest musician who ever lived, was a parish church musician.

00:24:47.720 Anyone, I presume, could walk in the doors and listen to his, to his, to his, to his cantatas.

00:24:52.500 I mean, Dickens, when Dickens wrote, I've heard recently, people would line the docks to wait to see what, what was the next, you know, what was the next installment of Dickens.

00:25:02.000 And so what, what I think, you know, most fundamentally is that the, the antidote to the spiritual crisis, civilizational, cultural crisis we're living in is, is, is, is, is really fundamentally simple in it.

00:25:15.720 At least it's what we can state it as.

00:25:17.540 And that is to, to, to open the horizon again, to turn the lights back on.

00:25:22.440 And what that means is to turn them on so that individuals can better come to understand themselves in relation to these higher order realities in the image of which they are made.

00:25:32.420 And in relation to which their fundamental realization essentially depends.

00:25:37.000 Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.

00:25:43.440 Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.

00:25:45.480 But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?

00:25:51.160 In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.

00:25:54.940 It's a fundamental right.

00:25:56.140 Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.

00:26:05.620 And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.

00:26:08.820 With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.

00:26:16.200 Now, you might think, what's the big deal?

00:26:18.300 Who'd want my data anyway?

00:26:19.860 Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.

00:26:23.700 That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.

00:26:28.540 Enter ExpressVPN.

00:26:30.280 It's like a digital fortress, creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.

00:26:34.980 Their encryption is so robust that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to crack it.

00:26:40.600 But don't let its power fool you.

00:26:42.340 ExpressVPN is incredibly user-friendly.

00:26:44.780 With just one click, you're protected across all your devices.

00:26:47.800 Phones, laptops, tablets, you name it.

00:26:49.900 That's why I use ExpressVPN whenever I'm traveling or working from a coffee shop.

00:26:54.140 It gives me peace of mind knowing that my research, communications, and personal data are shielded from prying eyes.

00:27:00.120 Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan.

00:27:04.860 That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash jordan.

00:27:08.740 And you can get an extra three months free.

00:27:11.240 ExpressVPN dot com slash jordan.

00:27:13.120 Starting a business can be tough.

00:27:18.840 But thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.

00:27:22.960 Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.

00:27:27.220 From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.

00:27:33.960 Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise.

00:27:37.500 And we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.

00:27:41.580 With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools.

00:27:47.520 Alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.

00:27:53.820 Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout.

00:27:58.120 Up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.

00:28:02.180 No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.

00:28:07.940 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.

00:28:14.460 Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.

00:28:19.780 That's shopify.com slash jbp.

00:28:22.240 So we have, so there's critiques of, let's say, thought in relationship to the ideal.

00:28:34.380 That Freudian critique of religious structure that it's infantile.

00:28:41.020 And perhaps that's a consequence of the hypothesis of the divine afterlife that awaits us all.

00:28:47.700 Freud regarded that as an infantile response to the reality of death.

00:28:51.140 And then there's the Marxist criticism that religion only serves power and it's the opiate of the masses.

00:28:57.560 But there's, I, it's striking to me how poorly the alternative position has been defended given its unbelievable power.

00:29:05.600 I mean, look, we all seem to recognize within ourselves that we have moral culpability, as far as I can tell.

00:29:12.680 Because I've never met anyone who hasn't tortured themselves to a tremendous degree as a consequence of their own perceived inadequacies in relationship to the ideal.

00:29:23.300 I see that people take the deepest pleasure that's possible in life in the facilitation of the development of others.

00:29:31.040 I don't believe that, I believe that's wisdom to notice that, to say, well, it isn't the, the service to my momentary desires for pleasure or even comfort for that matter, where I'm going to find the deepest significance.

00:29:49.400 Life-sustaining significance that keeps me away from nihilistic hell and, and the desire to destroy and hurt.

00:29:56.680 It's, it's, it's going to be something like service to the greater good and primarily in the form of, well, other people in their longest possible term interests.

00:30:07.440 And that we have not only a divine responsibility to do that, but a divine capacity to do that, that if not manifested, cripples us spiritually and, and physically for that matter.

00:30:21.020 And, and, I mean, I mean, the ultimate significance of that remains unknowable, but I don't see any logical flaws in the, in the, in the proposition.

00:30:32.620 I mean, I looked at the manner in which the Mesopotamians built their savior, Marduk.

00:30:38.300 Marduk has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words.

00:30:41.660 The, the cosmos comes into being and disappears as a consequence of his utterances.

00:30:45.780 And like, there's this sense emerging in Mesopotamia as the consequence of the aggregation of all these cultures, that the highest order being is extraordinarily attentive.

00:30:56.560 Hence the all encircling eyes and is capable of the deepest and most profound speech.

00:31:03.400 And that's not a realization that's in any means trivial, that the Mesopotamians had wars between all of their representations of their gods.

00:31:11.420 And what they elevated to the highest position was this all seeing truth speaking capacity that also went forward and confronted chaos and built the world as a consequence.

00:31:23.120 And the influence of that set of ideas or the derivation from the set, same set of ideas for the Jewish conception of Yahweh is quite clear.

00:31:32.220 And you see the same thing emerging in Greece with, with the building of a pantheon of gods and the proposition that something occupies the apex, something Apollonian or something of that nature.

00:31:43.560 And then you see that revolution take place with the dawn of Christianity and the insistence that there's something fundamental about consciousness and spoken and what's, and the spoken truth that is constitutive of reality.

00:32:02.420 And you ask yourself, well, do you believe that?

00:32:05.040 And the answer is, well, you treat people like you believe that because you hold them responsible for the consequences of their utterances and you judge their character on the basis of what they say and you, and on whether or not they act out what they say.

00:32:18.080 And so we hold each other to these standards with everything that we do and we berate ourselves when we don't live up to them.

00:32:24.300 And I don't understand how it is that we can be said not to believe it.

00:32:27.840 Now, you know, there's the dogmatic element, the hypothesis, for example, that Christ is literally the son of God.

00:32:35.280 And I mean, my knowledge runs out very, very rapidly when speculating about such things.

00:32:39.900 But I'm certainly, certainly seems to me that Christianity has at least been a very long conversation about what the nature of the good is and that that's spilled out into the humanities and, and underlies our culture.

00:32:52.740 And that, that, that, that, that has very little to do with the expression of power.

00:32:57.940 It's, it's the, it's not the right lens through which to view things.

00:33:01.520 It's devastating.

00:33:02.840 It's wrong.

00:33:04.040 It's cynical.

00:33:05.300 And I think it appeals to envy and the desire to tear down.

00:33:09.480 Well, well, I, I, I, I, I, I think, think that the, well, two things I would say just very quickly, Jordan.

00:33:20.620 The first is that, you know, we have immense resources in the, in our own past and in the past of every culture.

00:33:28.360 I mean, one of the things I love about your work is how syncretistic it is, you know, here you've moved in the last five minutes, you know, moved from Marduk to, you know, the Pantocrater to, to the Greeks and, and good on you for doing it.

00:33:42.500 I mean, that's, that's, I think I want to say that you say people have not been good at making the counter argument.

00:33:51.100 Uh, well, um, uh, you've been very, very good at making the counter argument and, uh, the millions of people who've had their lives, uh, touched and ennobled and deepened, uh, by, uh, by, um, taking seriously the things you point towards, uh, are proof of that.

00:34:13.260 Um, I, you know, I think relative to our spiritual cultural crisis, uh, we should not pretend that we don't have resources.

00:34:23.980 I mean, it's as if, uh, it's as if, you know, the situation is, is if you were to, to give young people, uh, uh, the challenge of building something beautiful.

00:34:35.980 And if you were to, if you were to say, well, you're absolutely not allowed to look at or have any knowledge of any previous building, well, the results are not going to be very good, but as soon as you say, and you can go back to Palladio and Vitruvius and look at all these models and discover all of the things that they give you.

00:34:53.220 I mean, the results will be amazing.

00:34:57.220 And so I, I, what I want to, I want to drive towards a kind of, uh, optimism, not rooted in, in kind of, uh, you know, silly blindness about the depth of our problems, but rather, uh, in, in the, the, the nature of what is most real and the whole treasure house of, of tools.

00:35:20.800 It's like, it's like, we have these spotlights from the, from the past to help us understand ourselves and the, the, the, the, the, the world around us in philosophy and religion and literature and architecture and art and, in, in art and painting and music.

00:35:34.960 I mean, for God's sakes, I mean, we we've got, we've got an unspeakable treasure house here and, and the, it may be that as we dig into that, we see that we uncover ourselves more and understand ourselves more, uh, adequately.

00:35:55.880 You know, I want to, one example, you know, for example, I think, uh, one thing that is, is, uh, uh, I live in the, in, in beautiful, in a very beautiful city in, in historic Savannah and I'm live on the edge of a, just absolutely a stunning civic space, uh, park called Forsyth park.

00:36:13.840 I hope you can come and see it someday.

00:36:16.040 There's a beautiful fountain in the middle of it.

00:36:18.100 And it has these, these, these, these oak trees, these live oaks that were planted by people long dead.

00:36:24.120 Now these oaks of, you know, one to two to even 300 years, uh, old.

00:36:30.300 And I not infrequently see, uh, young couples coming to stand in front of one of the biggest, the biggest oak inside the park proper to, uh, to get married.

00:36:45.340 You know, they stand there with the justice of the peace and, uh, exchange simple vows.

00:36:50.640 And I think we have to ask ourselves what in the hell is going on there?

00:36:55.780 And it seems to me, you know, very beautiful and in a way, very simple.

00:37:01.500 It's that they wish that their vows, they're aspiring to be to each other in some way as the oak tree, as able to live up to the, um, the love that they are called to.

00:37:20.560 And they want to instantiate that, uh, by, uh, by associating.

00:37:26.680 Well, that's why they return to the garden and the tree in the center.

00:37:29.720 Yes.

00:37:30.800 Yes.

00:37:31.460 And act out Adam and Eve.

00:37:33.680 Yes.

00:37:34.200 Reborn.

00:37:35.100 Yes.

00:37:35.740 Yes.

00:37:36.500 The, the incorporation of the host is the, is the embodiment.

00:37:41.180 It's the incarnation of Christ within.

00:37:43.560 That's what it's acting out.

00:37:45.400 That's the idea.

00:37:46.480 I mean, in some sense, it's, it's the consumption of the saving element, but the saving element is actually a mode of being.

00:37:53.820 And this isn't hit home.

00:37:55.520 It's like, look what the church, the church demands everything of you.

00:38:00.840 Yeah.

00:38:01.340 Absolutely everything.

00:38:02.360 And, and the reason that, that people are leaving is because that adventure isn't being put before them.

00:38:09.360 It's like, look, you can have your cars and your money and all of that, but that's nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on.

00:38:16.980 So, yes, I, I wish you'd preach to our people because I think you're absolutely right about that.

00:38:23.520 The language we'd use is be a saint.

00:38:27.540 That's what, that's the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint.

00:38:31.920 A saint means someone who's holy or utterly conformed to Christ.

00:38:35.800 Now, press that to be conformed to Christ means you're willing to go into the dysfunction of the world, to bear its pain and to bear to it, the ever greater divine mercy and love.

00:38:48.160 Now fill in the blank, Francis of Assisi.

00:38:50.300 Mother Teresa, maybe in our time, like when we were younger, if someone said, well, who's a living saint?

00:38:54.660 We all would have said Mother Teresa.

00:38:56.360 But what did she do?

00:38:57.760 She went into the worst slum in the world.

00:38:59.580 I've been there.

00:39:00.180 And she bore the suffering of, of, of the world, literally picking up the dying and, and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering.

00:39:10.240 And, and she, she took on herself the wounds of Jesus.

00:39:13.720 But then think of like, you know, the smile of Mother Teresa.

00:39:16.340 She brought to that place the ever greater, more super abundant mercy of, of Christ.

00:39:22.080 That's being a saint.

00:39:23.200 And you're dead right.

00:39:24.560 I think we're not sufficiently calling our people to that kind of heroic.

00:39:27.420 Mom, look, I can tell you one thing I've experienced.

00:39:29.380 This is, this is really something to see.

00:39:32.060 I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially with a day or two in between and to, to large audiences, three to 10,000 all the time, something like that.

00:39:42.240 And I always paid attention to the audience singly because I was always talking to one person at a time, but also on mass, you know, to see, to hear.

00:39:52.560 Because if, if, if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source, then there's silence.

00:40:02.400 And sometimes that silence can be dramatic.

00:40:04.740 And that's why people say, well, you could have heard a pin drop.

00:40:07.360 It's no one's moving because their attention is 100% gripped by whatever just happened.

00:40:13.840 And one thing that reliably elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility.

00:40:26.380 And people that, and I thought, I thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because no one says that now they say happiness or they say rights or they say privileges or, or, or they say reward or something like that.

00:40:42.260 They don't say, pick up the heaviest load you can carry and carry and care for that matter and stumble forward.

00:40:49.940 And I've seen people cut those ideas and put them on t-shirts and, and play with them.

00:40:55.620 And, and so it's not that the church is asking too little of its people.

00:41:02.000 I'm recommending that we remember that, that meaning in life.

00:41:06.760 And this is also something I'm doing empirical work on, right?

00:41:09.620 That meaning in life is mostly bound right at the non-propositional level.

00:41:13.900 And it does feed into things like sacredness.

00:41:16.400 I think reverence is the proper virtue of all reverence is the virtue that helps us appropriate.

00:41:22.520 Well, reverence means it is hold, is hold in ritual and is hold as a marker or as a, as a pointer for ritual emulation.

00:41:32.660 I think it's, I think that's embodiment.

00:41:35.220 That's, and that's the, that's the pulling in of that personality into the self.

00:41:38.920 I think that's right.

00:41:40.260 But I think what awe, see awe is really interesting because awe, because you can measure this.

00:41:45.740 Awe is one of the few instances where people's sense of self and egocentrism is, is shrunk and they, but they find it a positive experience and they want it to continue.

00:41:55.640 Right.

00:41:55.940 Well, that's, that's how, what we experience in relationship to our current ego.

00:42:00.380 When we hypothesize our ideal as well.

00:42:03.260 I think that's right.

00:42:04.480 And that goes to, I mean, those are the same things because all our capture, all is the ideal.

00:42:09.720 All is our unconscious ideal capturing us.

00:42:13.420 Hmm.

00:42:14.720 Think about it.

00:42:15.440 It's the spirit within.

00:42:16.560 So imagine this, you, we, you already admitted, so to speak, that we're, you know, canonic representations of the central animating spirit of the ages.

00:42:26.520 And that speaks from our unconscious because it's, it's embodied within us.

00:42:32.140 And then it finds its, it's finds its grip on us in, in awe, in admiration.

00:42:38.440 Would you say though?

00:42:40.340 So there's a question, like, would you say that it's not only the, the unconscious within us, but the unconscious without us?

00:42:46.920 Because I think what awe is doing is disclosing.

00:42:49.960 It's the unconscious in the books behind you.

00:42:52.340 Yes.

00:42:52.640 And also the unconscious in the world.

00:42:54.480 Because I think part of what, what we're, I think, I think we got too locked into the notion of the sacred as perfection, completion.

00:43:05.940 This is one of my critiques of Plato, although I'm normally a lover of Plato.

00:43:09.880 And I think you can see in the mystics and in many traditions, this is a claim I can back up, but I'm just going to throw it out there.

00:43:18.480 Right.

00:43:19.000 Even in, even in Jonathan's tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy.

00:43:22.420 Is the sacred, the good becoming better?

00:43:25.020 Well, the sacred is an inexhaustibleness, right?

00:43:27.780 And yes, that's why I'm asking that question.

00:43:29.940 Yes.

00:43:30.780 Because when I've had visions of heaven, heaven is a place that's perfect and getting better.

00:43:36.300 Well, okay.

00:43:37.280 Well, okay.

00:43:38.260 Let me give you my sense, the place where I don't have visions, but the place where I experienced what I'm talking about.

00:43:44.020 I wouldn't recommend them necessarily.

00:43:46.400 Yeah.

00:43:46.560 Well, I mean, we can compare altered states of consciousness another time, perhaps.

00:43:54.160 Yeah.

00:43:54.640 Okay.

00:43:55.760 You'd really like to do that, wouldn't you?

00:43:59.940 Well, let me just finish the point I was making.

00:44:03.100 So for me, go on, be on to another universe, you mean?

00:44:07.700 Yeah.

00:44:08.880 See, for me, I tell people that Plato is sacred, which does not mean that I cannot, that I can't question him.

00:44:14.240 It does not mean that I can't disagree with him.

00:44:16.220 It means the following.

00:44:17.560 Plato transforms me.

00:44:18.740 I go out and live my life for a while.

00:44:20.680 The world then changes me because of the way I've been changed.

00:44:23.700 I come back and I see things in Plato I didn't see before.

00:44:26.940 And then I go back to the world.

00:44:28.380 The thing is, the Bible does that for people.

00:44:31.600 Yes.

00:44:32.020 And that's why the Bible is sacred.

00:44:33.780 And what Plato, I think, argues and what Taoism argues, and I think Christianity argues, where there's also the book of nature.

00:44:42.480 There's always the two books of Revelation.

00:44:44.300 You can actually experience that with respect to nature.

00:44:47.320 I don't particularly like that term, but you can experience that with, right, where the world is sacred.

00:44:51.060 I think introverts do that in particular.

00:44:53.780 That's a hypothesis of mine.

00:44:55.300 And I don't have evidence for it, but I've noticed my introverted clients need to be renewed by nature.

00:45:00.160 When I've tried to reduce this, I mean, that experience of awe.

00:45:03.740 So we went to a whole conference on that.

00:45:06.140 So if you see someone that you really admire, that shades into awe.

00:45:12.680 And you can see that in the effect that celebrities have on the public.

00:45:17.140 It can be paralyzing.

00:45:18.860 So the admiration, there's a continuum between admiration and awe.

00:45:24.800 And then you can easily make the case, I think, that admiration is the felt sense of the instinct to imitate.

00:45:35.160 So you see children, maybe they'll hero worship someone.

00:45:38.040 And then they'll imitate them.

00:45:41.000 They'll copy them.

00:45:41.600 They find someone who's in that zone of proximal development.

00:45:44.680 And they start to copy them.

00:45:46.320 Or they'll take on the identity of a hero or heroine in a movie.

00:45:51.220 My little granddaughter, who's three, for a year now, literally a year.

00:45:57.440 She has two names, Scarlett and Ellie, Elizabeth.

00:46:01.560 And we kind of call her one or the other.

00:46:03.600 And if you ask her, is she Scarlett, she'll say yes.

00:46:07.780 Is she Ellie?

00:46:09.300 Yes.

00:46:09.980 Is she Pocahontas? 1.00

00:46:11.920 Yes.

00:46:13.600 Is she Scarlett, Ellie, or Pocahontas? 0.97

00:46:17.480 Pocahontas.

00:46:18.540 One year.

00:46:19.820 Now, she watched that Disney movie over and over, and she has a Pocahontas doll.

00:46:24.080 But she's picked that figure.

00:46:26.260 And that's quasi-mythological figure, obviously.

00:46:29.400 Not a historical figure.

00:46:30.800 She's picked that as her identity.

00:46:35.500 And I see that as we can imitate people.

00:46:39.040 We talked about reality and hyper-reality before.

00:46:42.060 Well, you can find someone you admire, and they're real.

00:46:45.240 Or you can find someone who's a mythological figure, and they're hyper-real.

00:46:49.480 And the hyper-reality is so adaptive that imitating the hyper-real is more adaptive than imitating the real.

00:46:55.240 And that's, to me, that's the essence of the religious instinct.

00:46:59.140 It's to derive the hyper-real, and then to imitate that.

00:47:04.100 And I think that's what worship means, essentially, with everything stripped away.

00:47:09.380 And so that's a profound instinct, because human beings are unbelievable mimics.

00:47:13.520 I mean, that's a very underappreciated element of our cognitive architecture.

00:47:19.500 A fundamental element.

00:47:21.300 And that instinct to admire and experience awe facilitates that mimicry, and that increases the probability of the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior.

00:47:37.640 Okay, so, and then, what does, what, that makes of the religious domain something real, as far as I'm concerned.

00:47:46.780 Even real from the biological sense.

00:47:49.160 But that deepens the mystery of the involvement of the psychedelics in that.

00:47:52.980 Like, are they parasitizing that?

00:47:55.300 Are they, like, cocaine hyper-stimulates the psychomotor stimulant system.

00:47:59.900 Well, does psychedelics hyper-stimulate the imitation awe system?

00:48:04.540 And is that an illusion, or is it, in fact, a revelation of something deeper?

00:48:13.240 Yeah, to circle back to the ontological question.

00:48:17.560 So, just recently, I listened to a lecture that Francis Collins gave.

00:48:23.640 Now, so, Francis Collins, you may recognize, is director of the National Institutes on Health.

00:48:29.820 And he was also the director of the Human Genome Project.

00:48:37.820 So, he's as strongly credentialed a scientist as one can have.

00:48:44.560 And yet, he's an absolutely confirmed Christian.

00:48:50.220 And so, he was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of, I think he called it harmonization, of a scientific and religious worldview.

00:49:03.340 But he was laying out his arguments for the existence of God.

00:49:09.660 And one of them is what would be his claim, and it's an interesting claim, and you could argue it.

00:49:18.960 But the existence of moral law, that there is an absolute moral law.

00:49:24.400 Well, look, you know, I looked at Jack Panksepp's work, you know, and he shows that you see complex morality emerging rats in play.

00:49:31.920 Play, iterated play, which is a crucial issue, right?

00:49:34.600 What pattern of behavior is sustainably optimal across repeated social interactions?

00:49:41.240 Well, you know, you hear all these postmodern critiques, say, of hierarchical structure because of its predication on power.

00:49:50.600 I think, no, no, corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power. 0.70

00:49:54.760 Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal, on reciprocity, on productive reciprocity.

00:50:01.240 You know, I was talking to this Jocko Willink, who was the commander of Fallujah 20 years ago, and he's a real warrior type, you know, like a real intimidating person physically and mentally, for that matter.

00:50:17.420 He talked about his Navy SEAL training, and, you know, he said, well, we were taught it was pounded into us to have the back of the guy next to us.

00:50:25.640 It wasn't like every powerful, clambering ape for himself.

00:50:30.960 Not at all.

00:50:32.060 In these intensely competitive hierarchies, which would be, you'd think, as pure a manifestation of the power motive as would be possible, power is not the guiding ethos.

00:50:42.280 And he said quite clearly, no, your men won't attend to you unless it's reciprocal.

00:50:46.860 They have to know you have their backs.

00:50:49.800 And he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate in strategizing and also in taking care of your team.

00:51:01.600 And so, I don't believe that.

00:51:07.100 So, what am I getting at in relationship to your last point?

00:51:10.300 This religious, this emergent ethic, this natural law.

00:51:17.040 Okay, so imagine now, hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle, if they're to be stable and productive across long spans of time.

00:51:24.400 And a pattern, that pattern emerges cross-culturally.

00:51:27.580 It's reciprocal productivity, something like that.

00:51:29.900 There's more to it than that.

00:51:31.880 Okay, now, you're selected for your success in those hierarchies based on your ability to manifest that pattern.

00:51:38.600 Because that'll push you up the hierarchy.

00:51:41.520 That increases, as far as I can tell, that increases your attractiveness as a potential mate, substantially.

00:51:47.660 And so, I think you can make a very deep biological case for the, even for the emergent evolution of an ethical sense.

00:51:57.120 And I think that does speak to people in the voice of their conscience.

00:52:02.800 And that is part of, but then you think, well, if that's part of existence, how deep a part is it?

00:52:07.640 How built-in is it?

00:52:10.580 You know, and I don't, and that, I suppose, depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to being.

00:52:18.520 Okay, so back to the gentleman that you were discussing.

00:52:21.980 He was talking about a natural ethic.

00:52:23.700 Yeah, well, I think, as a pointer to God, something absolute about the nature of what moral law is.

00:52:37.520 And from that standpoint, if you're willing to go that route, then maybe these experiences are actually pointing to something that is absolute and true and informative.

00:52:51.860 Do you think that's true?

00:52:55.160 I don't know.

00:52:56.980 I'm a scientist.

00:53:00.320 Look, it's fine to be investigating it, you know.

00:53:03.180 Yeah.

00:53:03.740 No.

00:53:04.500 I don't want to pin you down.

00:53:05.360 No.

00:53:06.140 Let's see.

00:53:08.280 You know, I'm trained as a scientist.

00:53:10.860 My default is to be deeply curious and to be deeply skeptical.

00:53:17.340 Right, which is the right attitude towards all of this.

00:53:21.060 Yeah, and so my response always is that I believe in the data.

00:53:25.540 And so that remains an open question.

00:53:28.960 But it's certainly fun to toy with as an alternative framing of what's going on.

00:53:37.940 I mean, we're in the middle of this huge, huge mystery.

00:53:42.960 I understand and appreciate the symbolic significance of the ideal human being.

00:53:49.560 And that finds its embodiment.

00:53:51.280 And I took these ideas in large part from Jung and Eric Neumann.

00:53:54.620 It's interesting that Christ is at least a representation of the ideal man, whatever that is.

00:54:04.600 And we all, interestingly enough, we all seem to have an ideal.

00:54:09.480 And we, or that ideal has us.

00:54:12.760 Right?

00:54:13.020 And that's where it's very interesting to consider the role of conscience.

00:54:18.240 Because your conscience will call you out on your behavior.

00:54:24.140 And so it seems to function as something that's somewhat independent.

00:54:27.980 Or at least as something that you can't fully voluntarily control.

00:54:31.640 Because if you could voluntarily control it, 1.00

00:54:34.100 then you just tell the pesky little bastard to go away. 1.00

00:54:37.440 Or to pat you on the back continually. 1.00

00:54:39.580 Because there must be few things in life more pleasurable than being a fully committed narcissist.

00:54:47.560 To really believe that everything that you do is right.

00:54:50.220 And that you're a good person.

00:54:51.820 And I suppose if you could wave a magic wand and rearrange your mind so that it was constantly telling you that.

00:54:57.440 You'd do it.

00:54:58.180 But you don't seem to be able to do that in relationship to your conscience.

00:55:01.860 It trips you up.

00:55:03.980 And so it tells you when you're not living up to your own ideal.

00:55:08.980 And that means that you have an ideal.

00:55:11.520 And you don't even know what the hell it is.

00:55:13.040 But you certainly know when you transgress against it.

00:55:15.440 And I know that there's a strong line of Christian thinking that's identified the conscience with divinity.

00:55:21.860 Sometimes with Christ inside.

00:55:24.420 Sometimes with the Holy Spirit.

00:55:26.700 And those are very interesting conceptualizations.

00:55:29.700 But you can think of them psychologically.

00:55:31.460 And you can even think about them biologically.

00:55:33.380 You know, to some degree, because we're so social.

00:55:37.280 If we don't manifest an appropriate moral reciprocity, we're going to become alienated from our fellows.

00:55:45.680 And we won't survive.

00:55:47.580 And we'll suffer and die.

00:55:48.960 And we certainly won't find a partner and have children successfully.

00:55:54.400 And so, to some degree, the conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within.

00:56:02.260 And that's a perfectly reasonable biological explanation.

00:56:05.760 But the thing is, is the deeper you go into biology, the more it shades into something that appears to be religious.

00:56:12.320 Because you start analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself.

00:56:19.200 And it becomes something.

00:56:25.320 Well, it becomes something with a power that transcends your ability to resist it.

00:56:34.240 And so, okay, so you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective.

00:56:39.940 And the critic, my critic, this particular critic that I've been reading, said, well, that doesn't differentiate Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods.

00:56:54.160 And, of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion.

00:56:58.600 Joseph Campbell did that.

00:57:00.080 And Jung, to a lesser degree, I would say.

00:57:01.900 But Campbell did that.

00:57:02.840 But the difference, and C.S. Lewis pointed this out as well, the difference between those mythological gods and Christ was that there's a representation of, there's a historical representation of his existence as well.

00:57:21.060 Now, you can debate whether or not that's genuine.

00:57:24.720 You can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there's credible objective evidence for that.

00:57:29.460 But it doesn't matter in some sense because, well, it does.

00:57:33.020 But there's a sense in which it doesn't matter because there's still a historical story.

00:57:37.420 And so, what you have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth.

00:57:43.900 And in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things.

00:57:47.660 The problem is, is I probably believe that.

00:57:50.560 But I don't know.

00:57:51.080 I don't, I'm amazed at my own belief and I don't understand it.

00:57:55.060 Like, because I've seen, sometimes, the objective world and the narrative world touch, you know, that's union synchronicity.

00:58:15.960 And I've seen that many times in my own life.

00:58:20.900 And so, in some sense, I believe it's undeniable, you know, we have a narrative sense of the world.

00:58:26.540 For me, that's been the world of morality.

00:58:28.780 That's the world that tells us how to act.

00:58:30.980 It's real.

00:58:32.040 Like, we treat it like it's real.

00:58:33.720 It's not the objective world.

00:58:36.340 But the narrative and the objective world touch.

00:58:38.900 And the ultimate example of that, in principle, is supposed to be Christ.

00:58:42.240 But I don't know what to, that seems to me, oddly plausible.

00:58:48.020 Yeah.

00:58:48.760 But I still don't know what to make of it.

00:58:50.400 It's too, partly because it's too terrifying a reality to fully believe.

00:58:57.140 I don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.

00:59:01.780 This critic said that the mere psychologization of Christ was insufficient.

00:59:10.120 Because, and you made the same case, in some sense, that it doesn't make sense unless the narrative and the objective world truly touch.

00:59:19.300 And I think you could debate that, because I think that there's some utility.

00:59:23.980 There could argue to be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth.

00:59:28.900 You know, that the best way to cope with existence is to tell the truth and to face what you don't know forthrightly.

00:59:38.260 And that will enable you to orient yourself within our finite and bounded existence that ends with our death more properly, more accurately, more advisedly than any other route.

00:59:51.600 I've seen people from Orthodox priests to, you know, the most Protestant you can imagine, recognize in the way that you represent reality, something that has value.

01:00:05.780 Something that has value because you are manifesting that pattern.

01:00:11.040 Like what you're saying is true.

01:00:12.560 But I think that if we take seriously this, the problem, the relationship between attention, psyche, and the way the world reveals itself to us, then it scales up.

01:00:28.500 It scales up after that.

01:00:30.280 It jumps up a level.

01:00:31.900 And it also scales up in terms of, because one of the things that you talk about, like looking up to the star and looking up to the highest thing you can look at and then aiming towards that, you know.

01:00:46.460 Once again, one of the things that that does is that the first thing you do is actually where it's a form, it's attention.

01:00:54.940 The people won't like the word worship.

01:00:56.220 It's a form of reverence, a form of veneration.

01:00:58.400 You submit yourself to that aim.

01:01:00.760 So it's not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it.

01:01:04.280 You actually have to submit yourself to that which is to what you're aiming.

01:01:09.240 And so that's what-

01:01:10.380 Sacrifice to it.

01:01:11.280 Exactly.

01:01:11.820 And you have to sacrifice to it.

01:01:13.120 And so that's why, let's say, the religious version of this has to move towards the highest possible aim and also one that we can do together.

01:01:23.940 Because like the lower aims, like you could call them something like lower gods, let's say, or angels or whatever you want to call them.

01:01:29.120 Like these lower aims, they have value, but they're all fragmented.

01:01:33.420 But for this to stack up, we need to be able to look towards the same image.

01:01:39.760 We need to look towards the same aim, and that will bind us together.

01:01:44.260 And so we don't, we don't also, then we don't also end up being just kind of individuals who have the weight of the world on our shoulders.

01:01:51.160 But we're a communion of saints.

01:01:53.500 We're a communion of people who are submitted to, aiming towards worshipping the same point.

01:02:01.780 Yeah, and I believe that that's necessary.

01:02:03.480 And I've had some profound experiences, which I can't really relate here, that of the necessity for that community is that this, whatever our fundamental moral load is, immense though it is, crushing though it is even, requires the participation of others.

01:02:28.760 So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people to be along with you.

01:02:36.340 It's a collective enterprise, even though it's an individualistic, even though it requires the perfection, it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual level.

01:02:46.760 That's not enough.

01:02:47.860 There has to be that communal element as well.

01:02:49.960 You need help.

01:02:51.100 We all need help to aim as high, the highest aim requires communal endeavor.

01:02:55.840 Yeah, and it's also because it actually is the way that everything works, you know.

01:03:02.040 It's like the chair aiming to be a chair is a constitutive of parts which are joined together towards a same goal and therefore hold together as a being and manifest the chairness of the chair.

01:03:15.300 And that's the same with you.

01:03:16.640 You have all these thoughts, right?

01:03:17.580 You have all these feelings, all these contradicting things inside you, and you need, by aiming up towards, you know, the, I mean, I believe that the image of Christ, let's say, by aiming towards the image of Christ, you constitute your being into that being that's able to attend, to sacrifice, to love.

01:03:37.820 And then that scales up with people.

01:03:39.640 I agree.

01:03:40.080 People together.

01:03:40.360 Well, and I think you are aiming, and this is another, something else I tried to point out to Sam.

01:03:46.860 You are, you're aiming, you're either aiming at Christ or something lesser.

01:03:52.060 Yeah.

01:03:52.660 Or if things get really out of hand, you're aiming at something opposite, and you don't want to be doing that.

01:03:58.340 But, and this is a matter of definition in some sense, and it's actually not impossible to understand, is that you aim at something better, generally speaking.

01:04:08.580 I mean, maybe you're out to cause pain, but forget about that.

01:04:12.040 You aim at something better.

01:04:14.340 You wouldn't do it unless it was better.

01:04:16.080 In fact, it virtually defines better.

01:04:19.720 Like, the whole idea of better is predicated on the idea that there's an aim that's beyond you.

01:04:25.140 And then the highest of those aims is the amalgamation, the highest aim is the amalgamation of all higher aims.

01:04:32.420 And that's a perfect mode of being.

01:04:35.420 And that by definition, that's a psychological perspective again.

01:04:38.640 That by definition is Christ.

01:04:40.960 And then, but then there seems to be something too convenient about C.S. Lewis's insistence that that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history.

01:04:54.540 And I'm not, like, I, I, I don't understand why I should believe that.

01:05:08.660 And I don't, I tend not to believe things without a why.

01:05:12.800 There's always a why.

01:05:16.040 And, and I, there's, there's a hurdle there that I, that, that, well, that I waver on constantly because, well, I already said that you're, when you think these things through, at least my experience has been, if you think them through sufficiently, you end up with the choice between impossible alternatives.

01:05:34.520 And so, yeah.

01:05:35.840 But it, it has to do, one of the ways to see it maybe is, is it has to do with the recognizing of the goodness of the world or the goodness of creation.

01:05:46.740 That, that the world is capable of manifesting these patterns, right?

01:05:53.440 So if you want to understand, for example, the big conflict between the early Gnostics and the Christians, that's what it was all about.

01:05:59.560 Because the Gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated Christ. 1.00

01:06:03.820 They were saying, you know, and they have viewed the world as utterly fallen, as having no value, having to be escaped, having to be fled in every way.

01:06:13.580 Whereas Christianity posits that it's a non-dual, it's a non-dual proposition.

01:06:19.720 It's saying it's, it all comes together.

01:06:23.800 That's the, that's the promise.

01:06:25.220 It all comes together.

01:06:26.300 And so it has to come down, right?

01:06:29.320 And so it has to come down at every level.

01:06:32.000 And not only does it have to come down into the person of Christ who's incarnated, but that person has to go down, down into death, to the very bottom of the world, you know, to the belly of the Leviathan, and then come back up.

01:06:44.960 And so the whole world is declared as, once again, declared as being capable of participating in this good.

01:06:54.520 And so, and so you could say, well, maybe, maybe it wasn't that one.

01:06:57.640 Maybe it wasn't, you know, it's like, why would it be that particular, particular place where it happened?

01:07:03.440 Well, it had to be some place.

01:07:05.400 That's the story.

01:07:06.140 I mean, that's where, that's the, there is no other story like that story that we have.

01:07:11.480 And, and so once you recognize that this is part of the declaration, that the world does embody these patterns, that it leads to this, it leads to the, the, this, this story of, of, of a man who embodied them absolutely.

01:07:28.140 And is bringing us in him to also embody them in a way that will transform us, you know, like the, the, the ultimate goal of, of orthodox vision of Christianity is, is theosis.

01:07:40.540 It's to become God, to become God through, through transformation and participation in God.

01:07:47.700 So that's the final goal of everything is to become participant in the divine.

01:07:58.140 So that's the final goal of everything is to become participant in the divine.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 11, 2021

202. Meaning, Awe and Conceptualization of God - pt. 1

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript