Matthew Pajot's 2018 book, The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, is a commentary on the scientific worldview and its relationship to the Bible. In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Matthew discuss the value of the book, its methodology, and the potential implications for our understanding of creation and creationism. Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients with similar conditions and a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, Dr.'s new series provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that, while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. . Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to get immediate access to all the newest episodes of Daily Wire and get access to the most popular shows on the airwaves wherever you get your news and information. You'll get the most up-to-date updates on what's going on in the world, and more importantly, your chance to become a supporter of the show wherever you consume your favourite shows and listen wherever you go. Subscribe today! Subscribe and comment to stay up to date with the latest episodes on all things Dailywireplus. Thanks for listening and sharing this podcast! to stay connected with us on social media and social media! so you can be a part of the movement! Thank you, too, for listening to the conversation and sharing it everywhere else that matters! and much more! - Jordan Peterson - The Jordan Peterson Project. - P.S. and P.E. (The Jordan Peterson Podcast in the future of The Daily Wire + Podcasts by P.O. (Pajot) and is coming soon! P.B. , (p=1Q&p=2p&p&t=1&q=1 & p=3&qid=8&q_t=3 P&q&a=3Q&q = 3PJOT=3q&q
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We 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.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone. I'm extremely pleased today to be engaging in a discussion with Mr. Matthew Pajot,
00:01:16.420who is the brother of Jonathan Pajot, whose name may be familiar to many of you who are watching and listening,
00:01:24.400and if it's not, it probably should be.
00:01:28.040Matthew Pajot lives in Quebec, Canada.
00:01:31.680Matthew has been engaged in discussions about the deepest religious matters with his aforementioned brother,
00:01:37.340Jonathan Pajot, a fine artist, Orthodox Christian thinker, and frequent guest on my podcast for many decades.
00:01:44.000On Matthew's side, these discussions and the accompanying thoughts resulted in the production of his 2018 book,
00:01:54.960The Language of Creation, Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, a commentary which we are going to walk through today.
00:02:03.860That book manages the difficult combination of extreme depth and extreme clarity.
00:02:09.820In some senses, it reads like a programming manual of mythic narrative,
00:02:16.740laying out the foundation of the language of creation employed by the authors of the biblical story
00:02:22.480that, for better or worse, undergirds the entire culture of the West and, increasingly, the rest of the world.
00:02:29.980I hosted Matthew once previously on my podcast,
00:02:33.100although as a consequence of my recent illnesses, I don't remember that at all,
00:02:37.360but I am extremely pleased to welcome him back again today.
00:02:41.020I read his book in depth in the last weeks and was struck by its utility on many fronts
00:02:50.660and the remarkable manner in which Matthew manages to render what are often otherwise impossibly complex
00:03:00.620and mysterious symbolic representations, both lucid and clear in a manner that depends on a tremendous knowledge
00:03:09.040of the interrelationship between all of the different aspects of the biblical text
00:03:13.500and the interpenetration of all of its verses.
00:03:16.060And so I thought it would be extremely useful for me and hopefully for everyone who's listening
00:03:20.960and perhaps even for Matthew to walk through his book in some detail
00:03:25.720and then to talk about what his next set of ambitions might be.
00:17:07.480While I wouldn't identify meaning with chaos or order either, it looks to me that meaning is actually the instinct that emerges to signify, in your terminology, the proper union of heaven and earth.
00:17:23.220And I do think that's how we experience it, because when we're engaged in something deeply meaningful, hopefully like this conversation, then we have a sense that everything is in its proper place and in balance, and we lose our self-consciousness and we lose our sense of time.
00:17:38.840We lose our self-conscious neurotic preoccupations in the immersion in the moment, and there's something that's deeply paradisal about that.
00:17:49.480And I do believe that that's a reflection of the deepest instinct that we have.
00:17:53.500It's much deeper than mere cognition or mere semantic and propositional content.
00:17:59.820Yeah, there's a, yeah, there's a, what we want basically I think is knowledge, what I call knowledge in my book, which is we're looking for a union of meaning and fact.
00:18:13.200We're not satisfied with just meaning.
00:18:15.040We're not satisfied with just things or facts.
00:18:17.920But then when there's a perfect joining of these realms, that's what we're looking for as humans.
00:18:43.000So I think this is something that's a little bit missing in science, in general, like modern science.
00:18:49.660The concept of experiencing knowledge, personally experiencing a principle.
00:18:56.020So it's always about describing the outer world.
00:18:59.700And even when we talk about ourselves, we're describing it as if we're looking at ourselves from a, like a detached perspective.
00:19:07.860It's interesting because there are people who've objected to that characterization of science quite strenuously.
00:19:13.780I mean, Thomas Kuhn, for example, spent a lot of his writing in his work on scientific revolution,
00:19:22.360insisting that much of science was, in fact, an embodied practice as a practice rather than as a result, right?
00:19:29.540Because the result might be a description of the objective world, but the practice itself is something like the seeking of truth in relationship to some orientation to the higher psychological and communal good.
00:19:44.980And so it's embedded inside something that has to approximate a religious ethic.
00:19:52.840Otherwise, the scientists themselves wouldn't be motivated to pursue it because there's an infinite set of dead facts, but there's a finite set of living facts.
00:20:03.140And the living facts grip even the scientist.
00:20:06.440And the scientist, this is also relevant to something that you talk about in the book.
00:20:10.620You talk about, we'll jump ahead a little bit, I guess.
00:20:13.900You talk about the distinction between a stumbling block or a stumbling stone and a foundation stone.
00:20:19.120And one of the things that's very interesting about scientists is that they assume the existence of a transcendent object outside the domain of their ordered presuppositions.
00:20:32.300And then what they search for is the stumbling block or the anomaly that will falsify their presuppositions on the assumption that that relationship with the transcendent object will be corrective,
00:20:44.260that it will expand the domain of knowledge, that it will be something to pursue in the pursuit of the psychological good and the common social good.
00:20:54.720I thought the stumbling block and foundation stone discussion was particularly brilliant, by the way.
00:21:00.420I think what you were saying before about the practice of science, I think that's how I view it now.
00:21:06.200Now, what is similar to ancient cosmology in what we do today is the practice of science, not the result of what we find practicing science.
00:21:18.560But the practice itself is analogous to a traditional worldview.
00:21:24.960Like what you said, you have some principles that you try to see in the world.
00:21:29.880So that's your scientific theory, right?
00:21:31.460And then you expect to have some obstacles to your theory.
00:21:36.940And when you find obstacles, you don't necessarily get discouraged.
00:21:39.760You see it as a possible way to grow your own theory to make it even more inclusive, to make it even more explanatory.
00:21:49.760So that process, that is what the Bible is talking about, that very process.
00:21:55.240And you refer again to, in the beginning, God created the heaven, spiritual reality, and the earth, corporeal reality.
00:22:19.240And that confused and meaningless chaos, that's the tohu vabohu, that's the dragon of chaos in some sense.
00:22:27.120And so you could imagine, and I believe that your work refers to this, this plenitude of multiplicitous and potentially meaningful, meaningless, confusing facts.
00:22:38.480And then the attempt by the scientists to shine a light on that set of facts and to thereby bring something into illumination and the habitable order that is good.
00:22:50.560And that pattern is established right at the beginning of Genesis, in Genesis 1-2.
00:22:55.540And it's most usefully understood in that light.
00:22:58.480And that chaotic deep that God confronts, that horizon of potential in the biblical language, is a strange amalgam of the psychological because it's confusing and off-putting and strange and mysterious and potentially awe-inspiring.
00:23:15.260But it also has this material element which is symbolized by water or the darkness or the deep.
00:23:21.220And, you know, we refer to that automatically when we speak about what scientists are doing, especially great scientists, because we say things like, well, they think deeply or they've encountered deep phenomena.
00:23:33.600I mean, we refer back to that symbolic language axiomatically and don't notice the metaphorical structure of our own utterances.
00:23:42.520If we just look at science as a process instead of what science comes up with as a model of the universe, then we see the same patterns as what's described in the Bible.
00:23:53.900In fact, if anyone today that has more of a scientific mind wants to understand the story of Adam and Eve, you should read it as a scientist.
00:24:04.400So Adam is like a scientist who's trying to understand reality and try to impose his theory upon reality.
00:24:14.540So that is, Adam names the animals, that means he's trying to impose meaning on reality.
00:24:21.680And then this answers kind of the question, why did God create Eve in the narrative of Adam and Eve?
00:24:27.300Because that's actually a good question.
00:24:28.660He might have just created this, the man, without the woman, right?
00:24:32.220But if you're a scientist, you can easily understand that because the reason why he creates Eve is to counter what Adam is doing.
00:24:43.400And it's pretty clear in the language.
00:24:45.260If you can, if you read it in the original Hebrew, there's a lot of hints to that.
00:24:49.580So what happens when God creates Eve, he puts Adam to sleep.
00:25:55.880Because he has a perspective, he's using his own perspective to view the world, but then he never bothers to, or he can't, rather, look at himself.
00:26:05.980So what he needs is what's called sometimes a foreign perspective, okay?
00:26:12.400So he needs, this is what Eve is, represents.
00:26:18.340So he falls asleep and then it says, God took a side, his side, and built a woman into it.
00:26:26.200See, the word for side also means stumbling, stumbling stone.
00:26:30.760See, so the side of, that he took, it also means a stumbling stone.
00:26:39.000Ben Shapiro told me that the original Hebrew for what's translated as help meet in the King James Version is actually something like beneficial adversary.
00:26:49.900It's because it says, God created a help against him.
00:26:55.620That's literally what it says, a help against him.
00:26:58.980But obviously, the purpose of God creating Eve is not to destroy Adam.
00:27:04.920You know, this is a pretty obvious thing.
00:27:07.040But because if we look at the narrative and we give importance to each of the events, it starts with God saying, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or you will die.
00:27:18.740And then right away, it says, it's not good that man is alone.
00:27:46.460He needs like a mirror to look into where he sees an inverse image of himself.
00:27:51.960So the left and the right are flipped.
00:27:53.600Women really do, and this would be associated with their association with the serpent in the Garden of Eden as well, is women really do provide a critical mirror for men.
00:28:05.140And that's partly because they're hypergamous.
00:28:08.120And so women judge men more harshly in many ways than men judge women.
00:28:13.540Now, it's ambivalent, but there's some truth in it.
00:28:15.820So, for example, on dating sites, women rate 80% of men as below average in attractiveness, whereas men rate 50% of women as below average in attractiveness in relationship to potential short-term or long-term mating.
00:28:31.480And so the—and it's clearly the case that Eve becomes self-conscious in the story of Adam and Eve and then makes Adam self-conscious.
00:28:40.740The scales fall from both their eyes, and now they can see their own nakedness, and their own nakedness is, in some deep sense, their own vulnerability.
00:28:49.280And so Eve provides, as you pointed out, a corrective reflection of Adam.
00:28:55.460And you're also stating—and this must have something to do with the association between Eve and the serpent—because the serpent is the thing that lurks in the well-ordered place.
00:29:04.040And there's always something that lurks in the well-ordered place, because no matter how much order you establish—and that would be true of a scientific theory—there's always something left over that speaks of the infinite that isn't encapsulated within your theory.
00:29:18.100And Eve is allied with that force in Genesis and is the root to self-consciousness for men.
00:29:26.480And that seems to me, again, from a scientific perspective, pretty damn accurate.
00:29:30.200And then you might think as well that part of the reason that women make men self-conscious is because they're mediators between men and infants.
00:29:39.500And because women become pregnant and because they give birth to extremely dependent and fragile infants,
00:29:46.640they are more conscious of life's catastrophe and tragedy and more conscious of the necessity of knowledge serving life
00:29:53.940and always serve as a reminder to men that their capacity for abstraction and naming, let's say, isn't sufficient to exhaust the proper possibilities of life.
00:30:04.040That all that abstraction still has to serve life.
00:30:07.620Yes, yes, exactly. She represents the opposite of Adam, really. That's exactly what it is.
00:30:13.280It's actually pretty—once you know these things, you can see it very clearly in the story.
00:30:17.260So, like I said, Adam, his job is to name the animals. So, what does Eve do? She listens to the animals. That's one way to see it.
00:30:27.360So, why is she talking to the snake? This is a question nobody asks themselves, which is interesting.
00:30:32.880People sometimes say, wait, why is this snake talking in this story? Because that's obviously an anomaly.
00:30:39.040I mean, snakes don't talk, right? So, why is this snake talking?
00:30:41.940But the real question they should be asking themselves is, how can Eve understand the snake?
00:30:47.700How does Eve know how to understand what the snake is saying? Because that's what Eve has.
00:30:53.280Adam has the ability to name the animals. So, this is what you are, this is what you are.
00:30:57.760And it's a general—it's a way to symbolize the general idea of assigning meaning to things or imposing meaning upon things.
00:31:05.380And what Eve does is she does the opposite. She mediates with the earth, that means with matter that has no meaning or that has not been given meaning,
00:31:15.780and also with things that Adam has named, but that are not satisfied with the meaning that Adam has given.
00:31:23.400So, we can actually think that that's what the snake is up to a little bit in the story.
00:31:27.180So, it represents basically—so, we can say Eve is mediating the perspective of the earth or of nature.
00:31:37.520So, it's actually—this story is really, really deep.
00:31:40.340I mean, it represents basically the right wing and the left wing, if you look at it at a bigger scale, at a political scale.
00:32:02.440She represents, I'm going to listen to nature, and if I don't—if it doesn't agree with what Adam is doing, I'm going to try to mediate that.
00:32:15.040So, the ecological movement represents basically what Eve is doing.
00:32:21.660It represents the feminine aspect, as described in the story.
00:32:25.120So, it's about—maybe the snake is not happy with the name that Adam gave the snake.
00:32:41.260I mean, every phenomena has a finite aspect that's categorizable and that can be subdued and brought into a kind of cognitive order,
00:32:49.140but it has a transcendent element that constantly escapes from that and that has to be taken into account.
00:32:56.040And the problem with imposing an order that's final on anything is that you lose the connection to the transcendent.
00:33:03.120And so—and then you can think about that on an even broader scale, which, of course, you've done,
00:33:08.280which is that the garden that Adam and Eve inhabit, where everything is named, is a kind of order that's imposed,
00:33:15.480and it's reasonably well-balanced, but there's still always that possibility that something that hasn't been taken into account yet is going to upset the apple cart.
00:33:23.940And then there's an even broader possibility that, in the highest possible sense, that it's good that the apple cart gets upset because it produces an advance towards the next stage.
00:33:35.820There is a sense in which—and Christianity makes this—the Christian corpus of thought makes this quite clear—there's an aspect in which the fall from paradise is a cosmic cataclysm
00:33:46.580and that it propels human beings into the suffering of history, but it's also the precondition for the emergence of the higher order that's symbolized by the voluntary sacrifice of Christ
00:33:58.080as a culmination of the entire biblical narrative.
00:34:02.340And there's some implication there that to become innocent once again, like we were in the garden of paradise,
00:34:09.620but to be self-conscious and knowledgeable as adults at the same time is actually better than the kind of unconscious paradisal state that we inhabited
00:34:18.700before we became self-conscious, let's say, in the Garden of Eden.
00:34:23.400I think it was T.S. Eliot who said something like,
00:34:25.620we need to return to the beginning and know the place for the first time.
00:34:30.540And that's a—well, that's a—that's a—that's the fundamental theme of the, let's say, the Exodus narrative,
00:34:38.180where there's a fall from tyranny into the desert and then a movement toward the promised land,
00:34:42.480but it's the meta-narrative of the entire Bible, and it's something like a description of the structure of cognitive and conceptual revolutions
00:34:50.640towards a higher and higher form of unification, differentiation, and plenitude.
00:34:58.300That might be a good way of thinking about it.
00:35:00.720Yeah, there's definitely—this is the thing.
00:35:03.620The fall, though, is not—it's not a good thing, but I understand what you're—what you're getting at.
00:35:09.500The—every piece of the puzzle that you're describing was there in the garden.
00:35:14.300So if—if Eve wasn't there, then there'd be a problem.
00:36:21.960But that's extremely dangerous in a sense because you can also encounter the curse that wants to kill you.
00:36:28.860And this is often something—I mean, you don't want to have your enemy—integrate your enemy inside of you
00:36:34.960if you don't have what it takes to give him an identity that he'll accept.
00:36:39.420So this basically is—if you want to take it as a scientist, a good example of this process would be the difference between, like, Newton and Einstein.
00:36:52.820That's actually—to me, that is an example of the story of Adam and Eve because Newton is like Adam, okay?
00:36:59.600He just names everything according to his theory.
00:37:16.140But then Einstein comes along and says—he puts the mirror, basically, in the theory of classical mechanics.
00:37:25.280And he says, where are you in the theory?
00:37:28.380So that's the mirror, the feminine mirror.
00:37:30.640Look at yourself in the—look at yourself.
00:37:33.700So—and then—so what does Einstein do?
00:37:36.600He says, basically, all these categories that we're creating, classical mechanics, they all think they operate from a point that's outside of reality.
00:37:48.780So—but then he says, look, you're also in reality.
00:37:53.640So your concept of simultaneity is false because you—you think you're not part of the things that are moving, but you are actually one of the positions that's also potentially moving.
00:38:06.800So you have to define things, considering yourself as part of the reality that you're explaining, right?
00:38:13.940So—so what happens is all the categories that are of classical mechanics that are important, such as speed, distance, simultaneity, things like that, they all get warped.
00:38:26.500They all get warped because now you're in the system.
00:38:29.360So basically, that's what Einstein does to Newtonian physics.
00:38:34.660He forces the perspective to be in the system that they're looking at.
00:38:39.580So that's like a—like a cyclical view of yourself, right?
00:38:42.000You're looking at yourself in the mirror now.
00:38:43.680And then he transforms all the equations in a way—and this is why this is a good thing.
00:38:50.780Because he was able to find an equation or a formula that included Newton's physics.
00:38:57.840It didn't totally dismantle it and say, this is worthless.
00:39:03.140Yes, it added a little something so that Newtonian physics is a special case of the other physics that he found.
00:39:12.180Well, that's what John Piaget said happened to children during their cognitive revolutions is that—and that's why there's progress in science and conceptualization contra some of the more simplistic interpretations of people who read Thomas Kuhn—is that each successive theory accounts for everything the previous theory accounted for plus something additional.
00:39:33.620And so now you said something that was quite mysterious and sideways that I want to refer to.
00:39:40.820You said that Adam and Eve were tricked by the snake.
00:39:44.540It wasn't that they listened to them, that they were tricked.
00:39:47.160And that you associated that with premature conceptualization.
00:40:02.960And so the postmodernists were among the first thinkers to note that there was a real mystery bedeviling perception, which was how do we make sense of the multiplicity of facts that constitute the world or that constitute even the entire corpus of the potential interpretations of a given text?
00:40:25.580And they investigated that and thought, well, we don't know how to make canonical sense out of even a single text.
00:40:34.260And so—and we don't know what to do about the fact that we don't know how to do that.
00:40:39.660How do we rank order the importance of texts or facts?
00:40:42.940And that was a stroke of genius because that is a key question.
00:40:47.540But the prideful error was the presupposition that was smuggled in under the guise of a kind of neo-Marxism that the way that we solve the problem of perception is through the imposition of power.
00:41:03.840And that our perceptions, all of our perceptions, serve nothing but compulsion, self-interest, and power.
00:41:09.820And so the question was formulated properly, but the answer was literally Luciferian, which is the spirit that orders the world is predicated on nothing but the imposition of compulsion and power.
00:41:22.140And what I see happening with you and Jonathan and John Verveke in particular, and my work bears on that, and so does Ian McGilchrist, and there are others, is that, no, the lens through which we see the world is an ethic.
00:41:36.300And that ethic is described in stories, and the fundamental foundation piece of the stories through which we view the world is biblical, and the biblical corpus has a language of symbolic representation and grammar that you're outlining in your book.
00:41:53.220So, what do you think about that response to your proposition?
00:41:58.100Well, I just wanted to say something about what you said, which is really important.
00:42:03.380You said, because I think what we have to understand is where the difference lies between the good curse, which is what Eve was supposed to bring, or a taste of death.
00:42:15.320Like I said, Adam was put to sleep in order to bring forth Eve.
00:42:19.340That's a taste of death, but it's not death.
00:42:24.740Kind of like the example that I gave about Newtonian physics being transformed by Einsteinian physics is, I put you to sleep a little bit.
00:42:36.000This is when Einstein is like, look at yourself in the mirror, and then it seems like your whole physics is going to crumble for a little minute there, right?
00:43:47.640So, yeah, she listens to the complaints of the marginalized, and then she tries to formulate some slight modifications without destroying completely.
00:43:59.420I mean, you don't want to marry your enemy.
00:44:01.780You don't want to join with your enemy.
00:44:44.000I want to quote something by Alfred North Whitehead.
00:44:47.060The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.
00:44:51.820And so, this idea of a salutary minor death is extremely important because even biologically, as we progress through time, our cells and our structures are dying optimally to maintain their vitality so we don't have to die completely.
00:45:07.740And it's definitely the case that psychologically that you can make minor correctives when you hit a stumbling block that help you reformulate your theories without having to become pharaonic and tyrannical and then have everything burn in a conflagration that you might not survive.
00:45:25.760And so, there's an optimal level of correction.
00:45:27.840And I think that's also manifest in the experience of optimized meaning because what I think meaning does signify is information flow that's optimally corrective without being pathologically destructive.
00:45:41.920And that's a very deep instinct for adaptation.
00:45:44.960And so then, let me finish that by trying to clarify something you just said, which I think is of crucial importance.
00:45:51.260So, do you believe that the trick that Adam and Eve fell for that was presented by the serpent was the presupposition of a comprehensive knowledge because of the taste of the fruit of the tree of good and evil?
00:46:07.080The presupposition of a comprehensive knowledge, a prideful presupposition of a comprehensive knowledge while still in a state of insufficient ignorance?
00:46:16.020Is it something like the presumption of personal omnipotence?
00:46:19.200I would say it's something like there's a, it's, like I said before, what you want to avoid is joining with your enemy.
00:46:27.760It sounds like it doesn't say a lot, but it says everything.
00:46:30.660Because when you join with your enemy, once you're united to your enemy, then you are, you fall into a paradoxical realm of cyclical cannibalism and things like that.
00:46:44.900If you read the story, there's most of the stories in the Bible are about that, actually.
00:46:48.580If you read the story of Samson, that's what the story of Samson is really about.
00:46:52.920It's about Samson joins with his enemy.
00:46:58.640He's always wants a foreign woman, but that's also his enemy.
00:47:03.420And he does, like, he doesn't make the distinction between a foreign woman that loves him, and that's actually not his enemy, and just a foreign woman that hates his guts.
00:47:12.280And he, like, falls for the ones that hate his guts.
00:47:15.360That's what it's, the story of Samson is all about.
00:47:17.380So what happens, then he joins with his enemy, and once you join with your enemy, then you're in big trouble.
00:47:24.180Because then, when you try to attack your enemy, you're attacking yourself.
00:47:31.020So you're now in a cyclical pattern of self-destruction.
00:47:35.400And that is what the story of Samson is all about, because, and at one point, he figures it out near the end.
00:47:42.440He figures out the whole mystery of it, is once you join with your enemy, then if you kill your enemy, you kill yourself.
00:47:50.740And other stories in the Bible are about that very problem.
00:47:53.760But then, at the end, he figures it out, and he figures it out, and he says, okay, if that's the case, then if I kill myself, I also kill my enemy.
00:48:03.280And that's the conclusion of this story of Samson.
00:48:24.460Well, this is what I was saying before.
00:48:26.480When it says that the snake tricked Eve, the word it's used is lend on credit.
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00:49:49.980Okay, okay, okay, so let me ask you about that then.
00:49:54.260So then what that made me think was that, well, there's the tree with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil hanging from it, and there are elements of that that we can ingest safely.
00:50:07.200But the snake is not one of them, even though the snake's in the tree.
00:50:10.180And what that would mean, so we should be eating, in some sense, the low-hanging fruit that's actually within our grasp.
00:50:16.940And if we try to consume, let's say, or incorporate the entire snake, then we do that on credit, and we do that to our own detriment, and that's going to knock us out of a paradisal state of being into the catastrophe of history.
00:50:32.780That's what happens when you bite off more than you can chew, or that you decide that there's enough to you to face a serpent that's too big.
00:51:01.520And the second question is, if it's true, who should guide us through that potential catastrophe?
00:51:07.960And the issue of whether or not it's true is probably resolved by noting that it's always true in some sense that we're on the brink of an apocalyptic disaster,
00:51:18.400and that we have to be very apprehensive and careful about such things as long-term sustainability.
00:51:24.800And because we're very powerful now and things are moving quickly, that's come to a head.
00:51:29.460But then you might say, well, who should lead us through that crisis?
00:51:35.180If you're facing a dragon, an apocalyptic dragon that's so large that it frightens you into paralysis and turns you into a tyrant,
00:51:44.940then you've bitten off more than you can chew, and that your pride has set you up as someone who can stand as an antithesis to this particular apocalyptic serpent,
00:51:58.680And if you insist too assiduously that you are, you're only going to make things worse.
00:52:04.520And it seems to me that that idea is analogous to the idea that you're putting forward about the serpent as an inedible fruit in the Garden of Eden.
00:54:55.760That's how Eve can totally dominate Adam,
00:55:00.260by giving, like, making him go through a labyrinth that doesn't have an exit,
00:55:04.880you know, and he's stuck in there forever.
00:55:06.760Maybe that would be reflected biologically in the potential proclivity of women
00:55:12.340to set standards for men that are so high that no productive union is actually possible,
00:55:18.040and to never reward attempts to move towards the good because it deviates and indicates insufficiency in relationship to this unobtainable ideal.
00:55:30.900Because Eve has to be judicious and selective, but she has to make allowances for a human frailty that's on the same scale as her frailty.
00:55:41.680If Eve loves Adam, or if the left wing, let's say, if we say the left wing is like Eve, which it is,
00:55:50.420if it loves its country, the goal is not to destroy the country.
00:55:54.480If the left wing starts to talk about completely changing a founding document or the constitution or all the laws or bringing in anyone that wants to come in,
00:56:06.300even if it's our enemies, you know, you don't go to war with a country and then bring them in.
00:56:58.860Everything eventually can be integrated.
00:57:01.420But then if you do it too quickly, that's when you join with your enemy and then you're screwed.
00:57:06.900And then after that, you're in a deep, deep trouble.
00:57:09.480OK, well, so I've been thinking about that on the environmental front, too, because it seems to me that that's exactly what we're trying to do right now is we're trying to solve the problem of sustainable economic development in an emergency crisis instantly right now for all time or else.
00:57:27.720And the consequence of that is we're trying to integrate way too much at once with our totalitarian presumption that we already know what to do.
00:57:37.160And in doing so, we're going to bring about the very catastrophe that, in principle, we're trying to avoid.
00:57:44.040It's absolutely what's going on, I think, today is we want to create.
00:57:48.640We, well, when I say we, I'm not talking about myself, but somebody somewhere wants to create a totalitarian government or a world government or whatever you want to call it.
00:58:12.140Well, because you just don't know enough.
00:58:13.760I mean, the thing about integration, so here's another way of thinking about it.
00:58:17.140You tell me what you think about this.
00:58:19.100So I've been toying with this notion is that one of the hallmarks of inappropriate public policy is the use of compulsion.
00:58:27.220Now, I would say compulsion should be restricted to cases of severe criminality and psychopathy to that tiny minority of people who just cannot play fair by any rules whatsoever.
00:58:38.760And perhaps if they were told the right story in the right way, they'd play fair too, but we don't know how to do it.
00:58:45.240But under normative conditions, if you have to use compulsion to impose your vision of paradise, then it's not an adequate vision of paradise.
00:58:55.180It isn't motivating and it isn't integrated.
00:58:57.340And so when our politicians are doing things like driving up the cost of energy so that people who are poor will suffer, so that their vision of utopia can be brought in hastily, it seems to me that they're committing this same cardinal error.
00:59:12.840And it is one of pride and Luciferian presumption.
00:59:16.200And maybe that's also part of the temptation of the snake, right?
00:59:20.200Because the snake is associated symbolically with the Luciferian intellect and pride and also with the force that wants to overthrow the heavenly hierarchy, that thinks it can replace it in this Tower of Babel sense.
00:59:33.460Yeah, well, the snake often, usually what it represents, you're not wrong though, but maybe to add to that,
00:59:38.860the snake usually represents something like a perspective that's close to the earth, something like matter, the perspective of matter.
00:59:49.080But it's basically the perspective of that which is furthest from the meaning that was given to things.
01:00:17.900They embody a mediation between nature and civilization.
01:00:21.600So they're basically taking the perspective of nature and saying, okay, don't go too far with your civilization dominance, you know,
01:00:30.340because there's nothing wrong with civilization, but obviously you can go too far.
01:00:33.520But you can also go too far in the other direction.
01:00:35.860You can start saying things like, we can't have any human activity anymore.
01:00:40.820That's bad because it harms nature, you know?
01:00:43.620That's the other sin from the other direction.
01:00:46.240Yeah, well, and I think the other sin there is that we can't have any more human activity because it harms nature by the ethical preconditions that I've adopted in relationship to my worldview
01:00:58.840and I'm perfectly willing to impose by force on others rapidly and in an emergency panic.
01:01:05.480Yeah, the emergency is a big part of it.
01:01:07.740Well, I'm looking at what's happening, for example, with the Dutch farmers.
01:01:11.500And the Dutch farmers are among the most sophisticated farmers in the world, assuming that they're not the most sophisticated, which they might be.
01:01:19.840And now they're having these edicts from the nature worshippers forced upon them.
01:01:29.620They're not being integrated into the game.
01:01:32.120There's an imposition by force of a particular vision.
01:01:35.260And one of the consequences of that, apart from the devastation of their livelihoods and the destabilization of civil society,
01:01:42.080is going to be a radical increase in the cost of food, as well as seeing simultaneously on different fronts a radical rise in the cost of energy.
01:01:52.040And so, and this is, this is, so you're associating this with this proclivity to undergo a insufficiently sophisticated critique of the imposition of civilization.
01:02:05.580So, one of the things you do in your book, which I really like, that's germane to this, is, I'll turn to a diagram that you have on page 31,
01:02:15.620where you lay out a relationship between abstraction and concrete examples that's akin symbolically to the relationship between heaven and earth.
01:02:26.060And so, earth, you describe here as a set of concrete examples, and heaven as an abstract principle.
01:02:37.480And so, you say, for example, there are two concrete examples, might be boat and chariot.
01:02:43.680So, that's indicative of a multiplicity of modes of transportation.
01:02:47.600But they can be united in a transcendent reality, in some sense, that constitutes vehicle.
01:02:53.920And that's really the nature of abstraction, is that you have a multiplicity of phenomena from which you can abstract a common principle.
01:03:01.360And part of that is the ordering of things, and the sub-doing of things, and the putting of everything in its proper place.
01:03:08.960But it's also a union of that multiplicity into a higher order.
01:03:12.960And your comments about Eve, and I've noted this, I would say, in my own marriage, is that,
01:03:19.020imagine that I have a conflict with my wife that's akin to the kind of conflict that we're just describing.
01:16:48.600Well, that, and that thing is, you know, that, that fear in the face of a formidable opponent,
01:16:55.660which would be the inability, let's say, to reach a mediating arrangement with nature and the feminine,
01:17:02.540that's, that's the ultimate opponent in some sense when it turns against you, that paralyzes you.
01:17:08.520And paralysis is that freezing in place that's characteristic of a prey animal.
01:17:14.760And that's represented symbolically as turning to stone in the face of the snake-headed woman.
01:17:21.720Yeah, I'd have to think, I, to be honest, I'd have to think about it for a while probably to figure out what that, what that image means.
01:17:28.560But, but I think it, from a, at first glance, it looks like something very similar to what I, it's like a problem that can't be solved.
01:17:36.320And then it, like I was saying before, if you get, if you enter a labyrinth that there's no way out, in a way you're paralyzed because you're stuck in the labyrinth.
01:17:45.320So it's, it's, it's a form of paralysis.
01:17:47.360What you do as a clinical psychologist, especially as a behaviorist, is very much relevant to this discussion.
01:17:53.760Because you might say, well, you need to set someone a problem and a task in order to encourage them to develop.
01:18:02.180And so then the question becomes, well, what size task should you set them?
01:18:07.340And there's two, there's two extremes to, to the answer to that question.
01:18:12.380And one is a task so easy that the person can do it without effort.
01:18:16.860And the other is a task so difficult that no matter how much they try, they'll never manage it.
01:18:22.120And what you do to avoid both those errors is you establish a personal relationship with the person that you're trying to help transform.
01:18:31.120And then you experiment with a range of stumbling blocks until you find one that they're willing to take on, that requires some transformation, that they will, in fact, implement, and that carries with it a reasonable probability of success.
01:18:50.400And then you think, well, that is what you should do in your relationship with your wife and your husband, right?
01:18:55.000You want to set them a challenge that moves you both to a better place, but that's not so burdensome that it's impossible for them to fulfill.
01:19:01.620And it's absolutely and 100% what you do when you're trying to encourage children to develop because you put them in the zone of proximal development, which is a term derived from Vygotsky, that signifies the existence of the place where the challenge is optimal to produce cognitive transformation without paralysis and tyranny.
01:19:25.680And that's all dependent on relationship, right? You have to know the person. That's partly, I think, why hospitality is emphasized so much in the Old Testament, is that in order to set the optimal challenge, you have to set up a social interaction that's based on generosity and love to come to understand the person so that you can set the tasks between you mutually so they're optimal and not paralyzing and tyrannical.
01:19:50.840Yes, yes, exactly, yes. It's all about finding a foreign or an outer perspective that loves you. That's basically the secret of almost all the stories in the Bible are about that.
01:20:03.940And the culmination of that in the Bible, there's like a thread of narratives, which is all about King David, because that's what King David represents in the Bible.
01:20:15.360He represents the foreign perspective that was brought in slowly and carefully through generations and then became the power of renewal.
01:20:29.120So the first king of Israel is Saul, right? And he makes a lot of mistakes and he basically is unfit.
01:20:37.200And then so a renewer has to be brought in and that's David.
01:20:42.200And David represents exactly something like what you said. He's the adversary that loves you.
01:20:50.480And David never kills Saul, even though he has many chances to do it. He doesn't kill him because he sees himself as united with Saul.
01:20:58.900They're both the king at the same time. So it's like he understands the mystery that I was describing earlier.
01:21:04.180You don't want to be joined with your enemy and then kill your enemy because you're killing yourself.
01:21:10.080So the whole story of David is about all the problems we've been discussing since the beginning.
01:21:16.340Basically, it's David is a foreigner that was brought in correctly, slowly through time.
01:21:22.860And David loves his people, but he's a foreigner. David comes from a foreign line and then he becomes king.
01:21:33.560Well, when the king has become tyrannical, so when your own order has become tyrannical,
01:21:38.160you have to bring in something foreign that's outside in order to counterbalance the tyranny.
01:21:43.520You know, you see the same pattern reflected in Egyptian cosmology because in Egyptian cosmology, you have Osiris.
01:21:51.180And Osiris is basically Saul. He's the old state.
01:21:54.840And Osiris is old and anachronistic and willfully blind.
01:21:58.640And he has an evil brother, Seth, whose name becomes Satan through the Coptics, the Egyptian Coptics.
01:22:07.020And Seth waits for an opportunity to overthrow Osiris and he becomes the ruler of the state.
01:33:56.200And then it's in the phrases and the sentences and the organization of the sentences and the ordering of the sentences within paragraphs and then in the ordering of the paragraphs.
01:34:07.020And all of that has to, everything at each level has to reflect the totality as a whole in order for the piece of writing to be edited properly.
01:34:17.200And you point out in chapter 11, when you're talking about the spiritual and material dimensions, something akin to that.
01:34:23.880Again, working on this idea of a hierarchy moving from earth to heaven, using the old cosmology of light, air, water, and earth as a representation of that cosmology.
01:34:38.100And so, imagine that we're moving from dark and heavy to bright and light.
01:34:43.140And dark and heavy would be earth and the multiplicity of forms that are characteristic of the earthly domain.
01:34:48.800And then above, and that's solid and multiplicitous and meaningless in some sense.
01:34:55.320And then above that is water, which is more like fluid and light and air.
01:35:03.680Light and that's a pyramidal structure.
01:35:05.940And light is associated with apprehension and tension and with the pinnacle of the pyramid.
01:35:14.040And that's a recursive language that's fractal in nature that's reflective of the structure of heaven and earth.
01:35:20.120And those images recur consistently throughout the Bible as well, as well as in ancient writings that use this earth, water, air, and light cosmology.
01:35:29.520Yeah, yeah, it's about seeing the always miniature versions of things within themselves.
01:35:35.760But I think, like you said before, there are tests that you can do to know if your interpretation is just your opinion or your fancy or if it's actually something legitimate.
01:37:26.400And then you go on to say, in biblical cosmology, the universe was created as a union of heavenly and earthly components.
01:37:35.880Therefore, everything in it has both a spiritual and material dimension.
01:37:40.820These dimensions are often symbolized by a series of layers in vertical space with the relationship between each layer's position and its degree of corporeality.
01:38:19.600This topography of vertical space is illustrated in the following diagram.
01:38:24.980You present a pyramid with the earth at the bottom and light at the top.
01:38:29.060Multiplicity of earthly phenomena, let's say, and a singular unity of light at the top.
01:38:33.640However, there is no need to associate the dots of that illustration with atomic theories of matter.
01:38:40.620Instead, they simply illustrate the varying densities of tangible stuff for each of these levels.
01:38:45.300The top levels are more implicit than the bottom levels and therefore have a less corporeal presence.
01:38:52.720In addition to their degree of corporeality, these layers are also defined by their degree of brightness.
01:39:00.160So, earth is dark and heavy and light is obviously bright and light.
01:39:04.500Together, these two dimensions provide a complete picture of vertical space in ancient cosmology.
01:39:10.840The material dimension goes from heavy to light, while the spiritual dimension goes from bright to dark or from clear to obscure.
01:39:21.820There is also an inverse relationship between these characteristics.
01:39:26.020Highly corporeal things will naturally be low in brightness and vice versa.
01:39:30.320To fully understand this inverse relationship, it is important to realize that matter was inherently connected to darkness in ancient cosmologies.
01:39:39.380In practice, this is the phenomenological aspect, this is due to the fact that matter causes obscurity depending on its degree of opacity.
01:39:49.520In other words, earthly substances block the light completely, while more fluid substances, like water and air, have greater degrees of transparency.
01:39:59.460Hence, there is an inverse relationship between the degree of corporeality of a substance and its degree of clearness.
01:40:06.420Substances high in corporeality are obscure due to their complexity, while substances that are low in corporeality are clear due to their simplicity.
01:43:15.260Yes, the top of the statue is a head of gold, which is the brightest and rarest of metals.
01:43:20.160Conversely, the bottom layer is made out of iron and clay, which is the hardest and most common of metals.
01:43:26.860So, this statue is a microcosm of the elemental hierarchy of light, air, water, and earth that stretches from heaven to earth in biblical cosmology.
01:43:59.440So, that's another example of a hierarchy.
01:44:01.620Yeah, so, well, I think it's another example also of if you look at these stories, these ancient stories with the wrong perspective, they look completely arbitrary and random and as if they were just inventions, pure inventions.
01:44:16.000But if you use just the basic categories of these cosmologies themselves, then they become pretty self-evident.
01:44:24.040Like, why is there a ladder between heaven and earth?
01:44:26.960I mean, if you're thinking materially, why is there a ladder between heaven and earth?
01:44:31.000But if you think in terms of an ancient cosmology where everything is based on the idea of heaven joining earth, then obviously there's a ladder between heaven and earth.
01:44:39.660And, well, and a relationship between the abstract and the concrete and a relationship between the infinite and the finite and the relationship between the psychological and the material.
01:44:49.860And that has to be a structure with some intermediary levels.
01:44:57.400So, so you can always look at things with different lenses.
01:45:00.660And if you look at the stories in the Bible with the lens of the basic patterns of heaven and earth and things like that, then a lot of the questions that seem unsolvable, they become not only unsolvable, but self-evident.
01:45:14.920So, like, why is there a tree in the Garden of Eden?
01:45:33.920Well, and you described earlier, and I think this is worth revisiting.
01:45:37.240I mean, we're going to revisit the Sam Harris or even the postmodern critique.
01:45:41.920And so, because it's quite interesting that Sam and the postmodernists do the same thing, which is, how do you know you're not just imposing your arbitrary interpretation on a set of stories?
01:45:50.660And, and then how do you know that your arbitrary interpretation just doesn't serve your need and motive for the expression of power?
01:46:00.660And those are good questions, but you can't rush right to the answer that all interpretation is nothing but the self-serving imposition of power, and it's all arbitrary except at the behest of your whim.
01:46:13.200Jesus, that's definitely throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and it's a very simplistic interpretation.
01:46:19.060You could say the same about science, too.
01:46:22.140I mean, anyone who claims to have a theory about reality, you could say, how do you know it's not just in your head?
01:46:27.820I mean, you could say that about anything.
01:46:46.300I'll show, I'll read the story, and I'll show you that it's always an expression of this pattern.
01:46:51.280So you prove it in exactly the same way as science proves its theories.
01:46:54.980You can also prove it the same way that Kierkegaard and the existentialists, existentialists insisted.
01:47:02.780And I would say this is basically an act of faith, which is you can take the pattern, you can act it out in the world.
01:47:09.620You can use it to govern your perceptions and to rule your actions, and then you can see what happens in your life.
01:47:17.100And I think a lot of, a lot of the injunction in the Bible in relationship to faith isn't the command to accept a certain description of reality at the propositional level, but to act in accordance with this divine cosmology.
01:47:32.200And then to, to see the manifestation of that, that's the fruits, right, by which the tree is known, to see the manifestation of that decision to act and perceive in that manner in the world.
01:47:45.080And that is a fundamental test, and I do think that's something that has to be done at the level of individual, the individual.
01:47:51.440That's definitely something that Kierkegaard stressed immensely, and that people like Solzhenitsyn and Jung and Dostoevsky, for that matter, also insisted upon.
01:48:00.700Not that there's not a communal element, right, because we need to strive to do that together to manifest our individual responsibility.
01:48:07.600But fundamentally, the test is pragmatic, and, and almost like an engineering test, which is, take the story, act it out, and stress test it.
01:48:18.920See if it helps you overcome the insuperable obstacle, and see if it protects you from nihilism and despair, and see if it orients you properly in relationship to yourself and other people, and see what it does with your relationship with women and, and, and with children and with your parents.
01:48:34.060And you can test the story that way. And as far as I can tell, the Bible is the compilation of stories that have been tested in that way.
01:48:43.680Yes, exactly. Yes, you can test it within the text to know if, if your interpretation of the text makes sense within the text.
01:48:50.180And like you said, that's even a higher level, I would say. You could test it with reality, and then it's another story.
01:48:56.080And if you start, if you know the Bible very well, and you understand the stories, you'll, you'll, you might start to discover that the patterns that are described in the Bible will also, are also happening to you all the time, whether you want it or not, by the way.
01:49:09.840Yes, well, this is something Jung pointed out, you know, he said, look, whether you know it or not, you're in the grips of a myth.
01:49:16.860And he meant a story. And you better figure out what the myth is, because it might not have the ending you want.
01:49:25.680And I read that, and I was quite convinced by that, because I'd started to understand, that was years ago, decades ago, I'd started to understand that the reason that we're attracted to stories is because a story is a description of the pattern through which we view the world and the pattern that we enact in the world.
01:49:43.660And we value stories because we want interpretive patterns to make sense out of the complexity of things.
01:49:50.240And then the question is, well, what story are you acting out?
01:49:53.660And the, the premature neo-Marxist rejoinder to that is, well, we're all acting out a story of power and domination.
01:50:05.300We act, we act out a story of power and domination when the proper story is corrupted and demented.
01:50:13.660So, if your relationship with your wife is governed by power and authority, then you have a pretty appalling marriage.
01:50:19.940And if all you do is dominate, tyrannize your children, well, good luck with that.
01:50:24.940And if you bring the same attitude towards your friendships and your business relationships, you're not going to have any friends.
01:50:30.980You might have cronies or bully henchmen.
01:50:34.200And you're certainly not going to be successful in any voluntary business arrangement.
01:50:39.560So, there's a different ethic that governs our perception and our actions.
01:50:43.980And it is oriented towards this higher spiritual realm that, well, that you laid out conceptually.
01:50:51.300And that's detailed out as a characterization of the spirit that we should mimic in the biblical corpus.
01:50:57.360I think that's all become quite clear on the cutting edge of cognitive science, let's say.
01:51:04.380Yeah, you can't, part of the narratives of the Bible is to move from a state of competition where it's just raw competition.
01:51:13.300I think kind of what you were describing here with just imposition of power.
01:51:16.380So, there's the realm of competition, and that's symbolized by a cycle.
01:51:21.760And then it might look like a fun thing to be in the realm of competition, but it's not because you always end up, sometimes you're on top, sometimes you're at the bottom.
01:51:44.160Right, it's zero-sum competition, because you do have a competitive relationship in some sense between Adam and Eve, because there's an adversarial relationship there, though, that's bound in a higher order.
01:51:57.060It's not competition over a finite set of limited resources.
01:52:01.140Yeah, and there's a name for that in the, let's say, the Jewish cosmology or biblical cosmology.
01:52:08.420There's the concept that there's a difference between what's called an outer cycle and an inner cycle.
01:52:14.980An outer cycle is when you're in competition, like a war.
01:53:00.960And then you compete for the purposes of selection.
01:53:04.680Well, the selection is the victory in the game, but it's also the tuning and adjusting of yourself as an ever greater player, both at the skill level, which would be dependent on the particular sport, but also as a team player as such.
01:53:19.560Because you also need to facilitate the development of your team, and you have to learn to abide by the rules that constitute the fair structure of the tournament.
01:53:34.340Yeah, no, it's not zero-sum because it's not a real war.
01:53:37.280You're not trying to obliterate your adversary.
01:53:40.420You're in a war, but part of a system.
01:53:43.260It's the, like I said, the feedback mechanism for a system is called an inner cycle.
01:53:50.500And when you lose that, then you fall into an outer cycle, which is war.
01:53:54.920Now you're in a constant state of war and competition.
01:53:57.620When you lose that, you fall out into an outer cycle.
01:54:00.360So that means that if you don't conduct yourself in some fundamental sense, according to the rules of advanced development fostering play, that the alternative to that is that outer cycle of real conflict in the world where negotiations and unity break down, and you're forced into a state of tyranny or slavery or war.
02:04:33.500And that represents the time also that he has to go into exile.
02:04:38.200And see, it says in the story, when he gets his leg injured, it says, to this day, the children of Israel don't eat from the sinew of the, basically the place where he was hit, where he was cursed.
02:04:51.460See, what that means is, it's the equivalent of saying, oh, we're not eating from that part that we can't handle.
02:04:56.640The part that we can't handle right now, we're not going to eat that.
02:04:59.240That's like saying, we're not going to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil right away.
02:05:02.540That means you pick a monster that's the right size for you, and you do that judiciously and with great care.
02:05:10.720And that makes real sense to me, an increasing sense.
02:05:13.680We talked at the beginning, before we entered this conversation, that we were also going to discuss some of the things that you're working on now.
02:05:23.180Well, actually, since we didn't really control the conversation, as what always happens in a conversation, I guess, I kind of started talking about what I was working on.
02:05:34.220I guess that's what's in my mind right now, so it comes out.
02:05:37.540So, yeah, what I'm working on, basically, is my first book, I wrote it from a really, we can say, male perspective, I guess, like, logocentric perspective.
02:05:46.260Because that's totally lost anyway, it has to be dealt, not dealt with in a negative way, but we have to understand this, because it's been lost.
02:05:55.240But then, since then, I've had time to look, try to look at it from, let's say, Eve's perspective, or the female perspective in the Bible, which is something that feminists do, actually.
02:06:07.040And this is one of the, when I was in university, I studied religious science, and I had this strange interactions with the Department of Religious Studies, because I realized it was, let's say, taken over by feminists.
02:06:18.960It was totally taken over by feminists, and that kind of put me off, right, because I wasn't looking to become a feminist or anything like that.
02:06:25.920So, I wanted to learn about the Bible, I didn't want to become a feminist.
02:06:28.600So, that's one of the reasons why I sort of quit that academic world, and I just decided I was going to do it on my own, which is what I did.
02:06:39.200And that's basically, we could say, the story of my first book.
02:06:42.520I kind of steered away from academia, and I decided, okay, I'm going to just focus on this myself.
02:06:48.060But now, since then, since I've written my first book, I've had the chance to try to look at it from another perspective.
02:06:55.400And I really have been doing that, and I've been doing, trying to look at it from Eve's perspective.
02:07:00.060And I've shared a little bit of what I've discovered in our conversation about Eve listening to the snake, and what that means.
02:07:07.580So, again, it has a lot of implications.
02:07:10.360And all the stories, basically, I'm interested in the feminine roles in the stories of the Bible, because I think it's something that's very misunderstood.
02:07:18.840How far are you through your next book, then?
02:07:28.020Well, I've got to say, I'm very much looking forward to it.
02:07:30.440And maybe if you would find it useful to have discussions along that dimension as you're moving forward through the book, I'd be more than happy to do that.
02:07:41.500I think it'd be very interesting to see how you would approach the problem of the feminine.
02:07:46.040I mean, my wife and I have been talking about that an awful lot.
02:07:49.120We're trying to puzzle through, as we tour around the world and talk to people, we're trying to puzzle out the role, well, the role she plays in relationship to what I'm doing and what we're both doing in our lives and exactly what that role should be.
02:08:03.840And then how to formalize that and conceptualize that and to communicate it.
02:08:08.640It's a very complicated problem, partly because, for example, because women are hypergamous, they want males who are of equivalent or higher status than them socially.
02:08:25.060And so what that seems to indicate is that women, and the data bears this out, by the way, women are not happy if they are associated with a relatively low status partner in comparison to their own status.
02:08:40.460And what that seems to me to mean is that, to some degree, it's incumbent on women to support their husbands to the degree that's possible in achieving and maintaining the status that would make them as women satisfied.
02:08:54.420And I don't exactly know what that means practically in relationship between a man and a woman, but I know there's something that's deep about it and that it's something that our culture has done a very bad job of sorting out conceptually and technically.
02:09:10.420Yeah, yes, I think it's, even in tradition, the feminine role or the female role, it's kind of, it represents a little bit the esoteric side of any tradition.
02:09:22.240Because like I said, it's the criticism of it.
02:09:26.220Tradition has its own criticism within itself, right?
02:09:29.780It's like, that's the Eve criticizes Adam.
02:09:32.980So every tradition has in it a feminine aspect which criticizes the tradition.
02:09:45.360So, yes, so you have to read between the lines.
02:09:48.980Right, well, the criticism should be one of encouragement rather than denigration, right?
02:09:53.700I mean, if I'm going through someone's essay and criticizing it and all I do is tell them how terrible it is and how stupid they are, that's not going to be helpful.
02:10:03.520But if I say, you know, here's the way this sentence could be reformulated to make it clearer and here's something you wrote that's really quite stellar and I help them separate the wheat from the chaff, then the criticism serves the higher purpose of having them develop.
02:10:18.540And that's a purpose that's part of love because love isn't just acceptance.
02:10:32.840So, yeah, basically, yeah, we've been a little bit discussing these questions.
02:10:37.360I guess, like I said, it's because what's going on in my head.
02:10:39.980That's the subjects that are interesting to me right now.
02:10:42.200So, I can't help but communicate them, I guess.
02:10:45.640But, yeah, it's so it's because it's discreet, because the female role of criticism of a tradition is discreet, it ends up being hidden in a way.
02:10:57.040And when you can find it, it's hard to find.
02:11:00.260If you can't understand it, it's hard to find.
02:11:02.360If you start to understand it and you see it, then you see it a little bit everywhere and you see the female role is just as important as the male role in the tradition.
02:11:09.680But it's discreet, because when it stops being discreet, then it becomes an adversary.
02:11:15.700So, there's a proverb that says, how does it go?
02:11:19.820It says, a golden ring in a pig's snout is a woman without discretion, right?
02:11:26.140That's the whole symbolism that I'm describing can be summed up in that proverb.
02:11:30.660And the word in that proverb, without discretion, the word is actually taste.
02:11:35.740Literally, it's translated, you could say, without taste.
02:11:38.060And what that means is taste, the ability to taste is part of the female role.