The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 292. The Language of Creation ｜ Matthieu Pageau

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I'm extremely pleased today to be engaging in a discussion with Mr. Matthew Pajot,

00:01:16.420 who is the brother of Jonathan Pajot, whose name may be familiar to many of you who are watching and listening,

00:01:24.400 and if it's not, it probably should be.

00:01:28.040 Matthew Pajot lives in Quebec, Canada.

00:01:31.680 Matthew has been engaged in discussions about the deepest religious matters with his aforementioned brother,

00:01:37.340 Jonathan Pajot, a fine artist, Orthodox Christian thinker, and frequent guest on my podcast for many decades.

00:01:44.000 On Matthew's side, these discussions and the accompanying thoughts resulted in the production of his 2018 book,

00:01:54.960 The Language of Creation, Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, a commentary which we are going to walk through today.

00:02:03.860 That book manages the difficult combination of extreme depth and extreme clarity.

00:02:09.820 In some senses, it reads like a programming manual of mythic narrative,

00:02:16.740 laying out the foundation of the language of creation employed by the authors of the biblical story

00:02:22.480 that, for better or worse, undergirds the entire culture of the West and, increasingly, the rest of the world.

00:02:29.980 I hosted Matthew once previously on my podcast,

00:02:33.100 although as a consequence of my recent illnesses, I don't remember that at all,

00:02:37.360 but I am extremely pleased to welcome him back again today.

00:02:41.020 I read his book in depth in the last weeks and was struck by its utility on many fronts

00:02:50.660 and the remarkable manner in which Matthew manages to render what are often otherwise impossibly complex

00:03:00.620 and mysterious symbolic representations, both lucid and clear in a manner that depends on a tremendous knowledge

00:03:09.040 of the interrelationship between all of the different aspects of the biblical text

00:03:13.500 and the interpenetration of all of its verses.

00:03:16.060 And so I thought it would be extremely useful for me and hopefully for everyone who's listening

00:03:20.960 and perhaps even for Matthew to walk through his book in some detail

00:03:25.720 and then to talk about what his next set of ambitions might be.

00:03:31.820 And so, welcome, Matthew.

00:03:33.780 I'm very much looking forward to talking all of this through with you.

00:03:39.300 Yes, thanks for having me.

00:03:42.080 Thanks you for that great introduction.

00:03:44.020 Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure.

00:03:45.720 It was really something to read your book.

00:03:48.940 It's not like any other book on religious thinking that I've encountered.

00:03:53.600 I'm very familiar with work by Mircea Eliade, as I say, and Carl Jung,

00:03:58.360 and they're much more tilted towards the imagistic and technically religious side

00:04:05.120 and become symbolic and narrative in some way that's akin to, say,

00:04:11.740 Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.

00:04:14.060 They're more on the poetic side of things.

00:04:16.520 But your work is oddly positioned, in the best sense,

00:04:21.120 on the rational and propositional side,

00:04:26.060 even though simultaneously it manages to lay out the symbolic grammar

00:04:31.600 of the entire biblical narrative and really the entire narrative.

00:04:35.940 And so maybe you can start by introducing some of that.

00:04:39.060 Your book has six parts.

00:04:40.800 I'll just go through them and we'll start with part one.

00:04:42.900 Part one is salvaging creation from the scientific worldview.

00:04:49.000 Part two is heaven and earth in biblical cosmology.

00:04:54.100 Part three is heaven and earth on the human scale.

00:04:58.040 Part four, time and space in biblical cosmology.

00:05:02.800 Part five, time and space on the human scale.

00:05:06.080 And then part six, transcending the scientific worldview.

00:05:09.500 And in part one, you juxtapose the scientific worldview with the biblical worldview and make a strong case.

00:05:18.320 Well, I would say for the utility of both.

00:05:20.260 But you make a strong case for the utility of the latter, the biblical narrative,

00:05:25.260 and then attempt to outline what it's attempting to accomplish.

00:05:28.420 And so maybe you could give us a bit of an intro to that.

00:05:32.180 Yeah, so basically what I was attempting to do in the first part of the book is move away from a materialistic worldview

00:05:39.700 towards an ancient worldview where meaning is at the center of everything.

00:05:45.980 So basically, Logos is the driving force of everything.

00:05:52.540 Whereas in a materialistic perspective, it's about, like I explained in my book,

00:05:59.820 it's just about understanding how things work, basically, how things function.

00:06:04.180 And the other perspective is pretty much the opposite of that.

00:06:09.740 And we've completely lost, I think, the other perspective in many ways.

00:06:13.980 So it was relegated to the artistic domain.

00:06:17.260 That's basically what happened.

00:06:19.420 So it still is out there.

00:06:21.760 But for people who are more rationally minded, it's not satisfactory.

00:06:27.700 To me, it wasn't, at least.

00:06:29.280 I enjoy a good painting, but my mind is not satisfied with that.

00:06:34.580 I need something more precise and concrete and also usable.

00:06:40.060 Your work is predicated on the idea that there is,

00:06:47.160 that the act of cognition and perception is a consequence, and correct me if I'm wrong,

00:06:53.180 of something approximating simultaneous top-down and bottom-up processing.

00:06:59.280 And so the top-down processing is something like the imposition of a structure of order

00:07:05.420 on the multiplicity of the world.

00:07:08.520 And that order is implicate.

00:07:10.860 It's intrinsic to being itself.

00:07:13.200 And it manifests itself to us psychologically and existentially and phenomenologically,

00:07:18.780 let's say, in the sense of meaning that imbues our perceptions and actions

00:07:24.060 if we're acting in proper accordance with the hierarchy.

00:07:28.220 And so for you, there's a pyramid of perception and action.

00:07:33.820 The top of the pyramid is associated with heaven, symbolically and cognitively,

00:07:39.840 and the bottom of the pyramid with the multiplicity of earth.

00:07:42.420 And the heavenly domain is the pinnacle, but also a spirit that saturates the entire hierarchy.

00:07:50.020 And it's a spirit of unity and order, and the order that is good.

00:07:56.520 And it's also reflective of the implicate order.

00:08:00.500 And so that would be the logos of the world.

00:08:02.580 Does that seem approximately correct?

00:08:06.120 Yes, exactly.

00:08:07.060 The idea is kind of like in mathematics.

00:08:10.200 You have some first principles, and then everything comes from the meaning

00:08:15.520 that's implicit in the first principles.

00:08:18.840 So, I mean, you have some axioms that seem like they don't contain a lot of information.

00:08:24.560 But when you unpack them, you end up explaining a lot of phenomenon.

00:08:31.860 And part of it also is it becomes your lens to view reality.

00:08:35.800 So, it's always incomplete in a sense, but it provides reason for things, order for things, purpose.

00:08:44.880 So, it's unlike science, which claims to just be about discovering the laws of nature.

00:08:53.520 It also has a purpose.

00:08:57.160 It imposes a purpose on reality.

00:08:58.880 It doesn't just claim to explain phenomenon.

00:09:05.200 There's a difference.

00:09:06.340 Well, and the thing that I think is so relevant in all of that, the prime issue of relevance

00:09:12.280 is the issue of what John Verveke, the cognitive scientist, has been calling relevance realization.

00:09:19.360 We have the problem of what to focus our attention on.

00:09:24.840 And that's actually an unbelievably pervasive problem and a deep problem

00:09:28.540 because there's an infinite multiplicity of phenomena that we could attend to

00:09:33.720 and combinations of phenomena that we could attend to

00:09:37.300 in such massive numbers that it's very difficult to understand how we don't become overwhelmed.

00:09:43.600 And the way we don't become overwhelmed is that we impose something like a point on things.

00:09:50.520 And a point is the point of our perceptions and the point of our actions.

00:09:54.400 And the point, in the ultimate sense, is also the ultimate thing towards which we're striving.

00:09:59.400 And that ultimate thing towards which we're striving is, as far as I can tell,

00:10:04.820 elucidated in no small part in the biblical cosmology

00:10:07.880 because it's an attempt to lay out the characteristics of the spirit

00:10:13.000 that would orient us towards the highest good

00:10:16.080 as we go about our job of perceiving the complex world and acting in it.

00:10:20.580 And so, I mean, part of the revolutionary element of your thinking is that

00:10:27.020 even our confrontation with the material world per se

00:10:31.400 and our ability to derive the facts upon which a materialist worldview is hypothetically based

00:10:39.220 is dependent on an ethic of perceptual prioritization and action

00:10:45.640 that's described in the biblical cosmology and mythic narratives in general.

00:10:54.300 And so, it's a priori.

00:10:56.500 It exists prior to the act of perception that even enables us to make contact with the material world.

00:11:02.900 Yes, yes, exactly.

00:11:03.820 We have some spiritual principles that we're often not aware of.

00:11:09.400 And then, the reason we're not aware of them is because they're extremely simple.

00:11:15.180 So, sometimes we can't see things because they're too complex

00:11:18.420 and they appear to us as darkness or clouds.

00:11:22.840 But when things are too simple, we also don't see them for a different reason.

00:11:30.160 It's like they're transparent.

00:11:31.640 We don't even see their existence, basically.

00:11:34.420 Those seem to me to be the axioms upon which our perceptions are founded.

00:11:39.000 And they're implicit, right?

00:11:40.820 So, they're part of the structure through which we actually view the world.

00:11:43.820 I'm going to read something from your book, okay?

00:11:45.960 And maybe then you could comment on it.

00:11:48.020 The words heaven and earth, as quoted in the verse above,

00:11:53.440 which was, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,

00:11:57.420 can no longer refer to what we now call heaven and earth from our scientific viewpoint,

00:12:05.080 the third planet from the sun and its atmosphere.

00:12:08.360 Instead, the archaic concept of earth refers to the lower material half of the entire universe.

00:12:18.480 And the archaic concept of heaven refers to the upper spiritual half.

00:12:25.840 In general, a complete redefinition of cosmic categories like heaven, earth, time, and space will be needed.

00:12:33.500 The implications of these concepts will then trickle down to every level of human experience

00:12:38.820 to redefine all things in the context of the Bible.

00:12:44.400 So, I think of your work as a programmer's guide to phenomenology, in some sense,

00:12:53.160 is that the world of experience, which is the reality that we know,

00:12:58.060 and the only reality we know, has a material half, and it has a psychological half that's conceptual.

00:13:05.300 And there has to be a union between the conceptual half, the half that exists in abstraction,

00:13:10.520 and the half that exists concretely.

00:13:13.060 And it isn't obvious that the abstract half is any less real, or perhaps any more real,

00:13:18.900 than the material half, because the abstractions that constitute the spiritual half

00:13:24.380 are abstracted in part from the patterns that are implicate in the material half.

00:13:29.460 And the material half can't be encountered, or made sense of, or interacted with,

00:13:35.020 or perhaps even brought into being without the imposition of the upper spiritual half.

00:13:40.420 And so, the description of the cosmos in Genesis is a Taoist-like description

00:13:46.900 that assumes order and chaos in some fundamental sense,

00:13:52.400 and the meaningful interaction between the two.

00:13:54.820 And your claim is that not only is that a more comprehensive description of reality,

00:13:59.560 it's also a necessary description of reality to stave off such phenomena as a kind of corrosive nihilism.

00:14:06.620 Yes, yes, I think that's a good description of it.

00:14:09.040 It's actually difficult to understand the concept of heaven, I would say.

00:14:14.300 I wouldn't even use the word order, necessarily, although I understand why you use that word.

00:14:20.040 It's hard to find an adequate word for it.

00:14:23.180 And similarly, the earth, I also have trouble with the word chaos for different reasons.

00:14:29.780 And I also understand, though, why you use that word,

00:14:32.440 because I don't really have better expressions to use.

00:14:36.120 Because there's always a little bit of something missing in any word that's chosen to describe these concepts.

00:14:44.380 But I'd say the best way I describe it, in my view, is the earth presents itself as a riddle.

00:14:52.420 So, in a sense, it's related to chaos in the sense of being unordered,

00:14:58.920 but more in the sense of being meaningless.

00:15:02.380 Because you can have an ordered reality that's still meaningless.

00:15:07.340 You see the distinction I'm making?

00:15:09.060 Something can be extremely ordered, but have no meaning to it.

00:15:13.260 Have no higher purpose to it, or no higher meaning to it.

00:15:15.940 And similarly, something can be chaotic, and you can still see it as a meaningful experience.

00:15:24.880 But I understand why you use the words chaos in order.

00:15:27.620 I completely understand.

00:15:29.420 I don't have necessarily better words.

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00:17:07.480 While 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.

00:17:23.220 And 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.

00:17:38.840 We lose our self-conscious neurotic preoccupations in the immersion in the moment, and there's something that's deeply paradisal about that.

00:17:49.480 And I do believe that that's a reflection of the deepest instinct that we have.

00:17:53.500 It's much deeper than mere cognition or mere semantic and propositional content.

00:17:59.820 Yeah, 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.

00:18:13.200 We're not satisfied with just meaning.

00:18:15.040 We're not satisfied with just things or facts.

00:18:17.920 But then when there's a perfect joining of these realms, that's what we're looking for as humans.

00:18:24.880 That's what I think.

00:18:25.880 Like, that's what we strive for.

00:18:27.160 We strive to understand abstractly things, and then we strive to concretely express them.

00:18:33.940 Like, just understanding a concept is not much.

00:18:37.540 And then you have to express it in reality, in concreteness.

00:18:41.560 And you even have to experience it.

00:18:43.000 So I think this is something that's a little bit missing in science, in general, like modern science.

00:18:49.660 The concept of experiencing knowledge, personally experiencing a principle.

00:18:56.020 So it's always about describing the outer world.

00:18:59.700 And even when we talk about ourselves, we're describing it as if we're looking at ourselves from a, like a detached perspective.

00:19:07.860 It's interesting because there are people who've objected to that characterization of science quite strenuously.

00:19:13.780 I mean, Thomas Kuhn, for example, spent a lot of his writing in his work on scientific revolution,

00:19:22.360 insisting that much of science was, in fact, an embodied practice as a practice rather than as a result, right?

00:19:29.540 Because 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.

00:19:44.980 And so it's embedded inside something that has to approximate a religious ethic.

00:19:50.540 Otherwise, it's pointless.

00:19:52.840 Otherwise, 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.

00:20:03.140 And the living facts grip even the scientist.

00:20:06.440 And the scientist, this is also relevant to something that you talk about in the book.

00:20:10.620 You talk about, we'll jump ahead a little bit, I guess.

00:20:13.900 You talk about the distinction between a stumbling block or a stumbling stone and a foundation stone.

00:20:19.120 And 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.

00:20:32.300 And 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,

00:20:44.260 that 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.

00:20:54.720 I thought the stumbling block and foundation stone discussion was particularly brilliant, by the way.

00:20:59.900 Yes, yes.

00:21:00.420 I think what you were saying before about the practice of science, I think that's how I view it now.

00:21:06.200 Now, 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.

00:21:18.560 But the practice itself is analogous to a traditional worldview.

00:21:24.960 Like what you said, you have some principles that you try to see in the world.

00:21:29.880 So that's your scientific theory, right?

00:21:31.460 And then you expect to have some obstacles to your theory.

00:21:36.940 And when you find obstacles, you don't necessarily get discouraged.

00:21:39.760 You see it as a possible way to grow your own theory to make it even more inclusive, to make it even more explanatory.

00:21:49.760 So that process, that is what the Bible is talking about, that very process.

00:21:55.240 And you refer again to, in the beginning, God created the heaven, spiritual reality, and the earth, corporeal reality.

00:22:04.260 And then you quote Genesis 1-2.

00:22:07.860 The earth was confused and meaningless.

00:22:11.120 Darkness was on the face of the deep.

00:22:13.260 And the breath of God hovered over the face of the waters.

00:22:16.420 God said, let there be light.

00:22:18.440 And there was light.

00:22:19.240 And that confused and meaningless chaos, that's the tohu vabohu, that's the dragon of chaos in some sense.

00:22:27.120 And so you could imagine, and I believe that your work refers to this, this plenitude of multiplicitous and potentially meaningful, meaningless, confusing facts.

00:22:38.480 And 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.

00:22:50.560 And that pattern is established right at the beginning of Genesis, in Genesis 1-2.

00:22:55.540 And it's most usefully understood in that light.

00:22:58.480 And 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.

00:23:15.260 But it also has this material element which is symbolized by water or the darkness or the deep.

00:23:21.220 And, 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.

00:23:33.600 I mean, we refer back to that symbolic language axiomatically and don't notice the metaphorical structure of our own utterances.

00:23:41.140 Yes, definitely.

00:23:42.520 If 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.

00:23:53.900 In 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.

00:24:04.400 So Adam is like a scientist who's trying to understand reality and try to impose his theory upon reality.

00:24:14.540 So that is, Adam names the animals, that means he's trying to impose meaning on reality.

00:24:21.680 And then this answers kind of the question, why did God create Eve in the narrative of Adam and Eve?

00:24:27.300 Because that's actually a good question.

00:24:28.660 He might have just created this, the man, without the woman, right? 0.97

00:24:32.220 But if you're a scientist, you can easily understand that because the reason why he creates Eve is to counter what Adam is doing.

00:24:43.400 And it's pretty clear in the language.

00:24:45.260 If you can, if you read it in the original Hebrew, there's a lot of hints to that.

00:24:49.580 So what happens when God creates Eve, he puts Adam to sleep.

00:24:55.180 Okay.

00:24:55.700 What does that mean?

00:24:56.660 It means it's an attempt to renew Adam.

00:25:00.640 Okay.

00:25:01.100 So he loses consciousness.

00:25:03.920 So sleep is like a little taste of death, basically.

00:25:07.360 It's like a cyclical thing where you lose your ability to control and to name and to command things.

00:25:16.200 So that's what happens when we fall asleep.

00:25:17.800 Our mind loses the command of the body, right?

00:25:21.120 So that, it's like a counterpoint to what Adam just did.

00:25:24.880 Adam just names the animals.

00:25:26.140 He's naming everything.

00:25:27.120 He's using his authority to say, this is the name of this phenomenon.

00:25:33.940 This is it.

00:25:34.320 This is like a scientist who has a theory and he's seeing if it works and it's working, it's working, it's working.

00:25:39.720 And then it says it's not good that Adam is alone, basically.

00:25:45.060 Because why?

00:25:45.760 Because he needs a feedback mechanism for his, what he's doing, for his naming.

00:25:50.900 Because he can name phenomena, but he can't name himself.

00:25:54.640 He can't see himself.

00:25:55.880 Because 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.

00:26:05.980 So what he needs is what's called sometimes a foreign perspective, okay?

00:26:12.400 So he needs, this is what Eve is, represents.

00:26:18.340 So he falls asleep and then it says, God took a side, his side, and built a woman into it.

00:26:26.200 See, the word for side also means stumbling, stumbling stone.

00:26:30.760 See, so the side of, that he took, it also means a stumbling stone.

00:26:34.820 So that is exactly what it is.

00:26:36.560 But it's a good stumbling stone.

00:26:38.040 And this is very important.

00:26:39.000 Ben 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.

00:26:49.900 It's because it says, God created a help against him.

00:26:55.620 That's literally what it says, a help against him.

00:26:58.980 But obviously, the purpose of God creating Eve is not to destroy Adam.

00:27:04.920 You know, this is a pretty obvious thing.

00:27:07.040 But 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.

00:27:18.740 And then right away, it says, it's not good that man is alone.

00:27:23.220 So you see, it's directly related.

00:27:25.500 The creation of Eve is related to the fact that he just told him, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of evil or you will die.

00:27:30.880 And then, okay, Adam names all the animals, but he doesn't find a help as his opposite.

00:27:38.920 You see, he doesn't find his opposite.

00:27:41.920 He needs his opposite to see himself.

00:27:45.380 That's the idea.

00:27:46.460 He needs like a mirror to look into where he sees an inverse image of himself.

00:27:51.960 So the left and the right are flipped.

00:27:53.600 Women 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.

00:28:05.140 And that's partly because they're hypergamous. 0.65

00:28:08.120 And so women judge men more harshly in many ways than men judge women.

00:28:13.540 Now, it's ambivalent, but there's some truth in it.

00:28:15.820 So, 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.

00:28:31.480 And 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.

00:28:40.740 The 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.

00:28:49.280 And so Eve provides, as you pointed out, a corrective reflection of Adam.

00:28:55.460 And 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.

00:29:04.040 And 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.

00:29:18.100 And Eve is allied with that force in Genesis and is the root to self-consciousness for men. 0.65

00:29:26.480 And that seems to me, again, from a scientific perspective, pretty damn accurate.

00:29:30.200 And 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. 0.97

00:29:39.500 And because women become pregnant and because they give birth to extremely dependent and fragile infants, 1.00

00:29:46.640 they are more conscious of life's catastrophe and tragedy and more conscious of the necessity of knowledge serving life

00:29:53.940 and 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.

00:30:04.040 That all that abstraction still has to serve life.

00:30:07.620 Yes, yes, exactly. She represents the opposite of Adam, really. That's exactly what it is.

00:30:13.280 It's actually pretty—once you know these things, you can see it very clearly in the story.

00:30:17.260 So, 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.

00:30:27.360 So, why is she talking to the snake? This is a question nobody asks themselves, which is interesting.

00:30:32.880 People sometimes say, wait, why is this snake talking in this story? Because that's obviously an anomaly.

00:30:39.040 I mean, snakes don't talk, right? So, why is this snake talking?

00:30:41.940 But the real question they should be asking themselves is, how can Eve understand the snake?

00:30:47.700 How does Eve know how to understand what the snake is saying? Because that's what Eve has.

00:30:53.280 Adam has the ability to name the animals. So, this is what you are, this is what you are.

00:30:57.760 And it's a general—it's a way to symbolize the general idea of assigning meaning to things or imposing meaning upon things.

00:31:05.380 And 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,

00:31:15.780 and also with things that Adam has named, but that are not satisfied with the meaning that Adam has given.

00:31:23.400 So, we can actually think that that's what the snake is up to a little bit in the story.

00:31:27.180 So, it represents basically—so, we can say Eve is mediating the perspective of the earth or of nature.

00:31:37.520 So, it's actually—this story is really, really deep.

00:31:40.340 I mean, it represents basically the right wing and the left wing, if you look at it at a bigger scale, at a political scale.

00:31:47.460 Adam is the traditional perspective.

00:31:49.900 He represents—we have tradition, we have the past, we have our insights from the past, and we order things according to that.

00:31:57.940 So, that's what Adam is doing.

00:31:59.760 Eve really represents the left wing.

00:32:02.440 She 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.

00:32:15.040 So, the ecological movement represents basically what Eve is doing.

00:32:21.660 It represents the feminine aspect, as described in the story.

00:32:25.120 So, it's about—maybe the snake is not happy with the name that Adam gave the snake.

00:32:32.020 You see what I'm saying?

00:32:32.800 But it's just a general symbol for anything that you can impose meaning upon can then turn around and say, complain about it.

00:32:40.520 No, I disagree.

00:32:41.260 I mean, every phenomena has a finite aspect that's categorizable and that can be subdued and brought into a kind of cognitive order,

00:32:49.140 but it has a transcendent element that constantly escapes from that and that has to be taken into account.

00:32:56.040 And the problem with imposing an order that's final on anything is that you lose the connection to the transcendent.

00:33:03.120 And so—and then you can think about that on an even broader scale, which, of course, you've done,

00:33:08.280 which is that the garden that Adam and Eve inhabit, where everything is named, is a kind of order that's imposed,

00:33:15.480 and 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.

00:33:23.940 And 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.

00:33:35.820 There 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

00:33:46.580 and 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

00:33:58.080 as a culmination of the entire biblical narrative.

00:34:02.340 And there's some implication there that to become innocent once again, like we were in the garden of paradise,

00:34:09.620 but 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

00:34:18.700 before we became self-conscious, let's say, in the Garden of Eden.

00:34:23.400 I think it was T.S. Eliot who said something like,

00:34:25.620 we need to return to the beginning and know the place for the first time.

00:34:30.540 And that's a—well, that's a—that's a—that's the fundamental theme of the, let's say, the Exodus narrative,

00:34:38.180 where there's a fall from tyranny into the desert and then a movement toward the promised land,

00:34:42.480 but it's the meta-narrative of the entire Bible, and it's something like a description of the structure of cognitive and conceptual revolutions

00:34:50.640 towards a higher and higher form of unification, differentiation, and plenitude.

00:34:58.300 That might be a good way of thinking about it.

00:35:00.720 Yeah, there's definitely—this is the thing.

00:35:03.620 The fall, though, is not—it's not a good thing, but I understand what you're—what you're getting at.

00:35:09.500 The—every piece of the puzzle that you're describing was there in the garden.

00:35:14.300 So if—if Eve wasn't there, then there'd be a problem.

00:35:17.700 She's—but she's there, though.

00:35:18.960 She is there to mediate with the serpent.

00:35:21.560 So the sin of Eve and the sin of Adam is not that they listened to the serpent.

00:35:26.420 Is that—that was a good thing, actually.

00:35:29.100 You have to listen to the serpent, but the serpent tricked them.

00:35:33.820 That's the whole thing.

00:35:35.020 And how does it work?

00:35:36.260 I mean, there are certain facts or certain puzzles that we don't have the ability to solve yet, okay?

00:35:43.600 And then when you try to integrate those facts into your system, but you don't have the ability to solve them yet,

00:35:51.200 then it causes some problems because once you have inside of you or inside of your system something that is against you,

00:36:02.760 but not in a good way, like I was talking about Eve.

00:36:05.320 Eve is like the—she represents something like the curse that's good for you, the curse that loves you, right?

00:36:13.940 She—she criticizes, but she loves her husband.

00:36:18.080 So it's a loving criticism.

00:36:20.140 It's a loving complaint.

00:36:21.960 But that's extremely dangerous in a sense because you can also encounter the curse that wants to kill you.

00:36:28.860 And this is often something—I mean, you don't want to have your enemy—integrate your enemy inside of you

00:36:34.960 if you don't have what it takes to give him an identity that he'll accept.

00:36:39.420 So 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.

00:36:52.820 That's actually—to me, that is an example of the story of Adam and Eve because Newton is like Adam, okay?

00:36:59.600 He just names everything according to his theory.

00:37:02.420 It all works.

00:37:03.580 Great stuff, you know?

00:37:04.620 It's like a revolution—it's still a revolutionary way of thinking that he's obviously a genius.

00:37:08.560 I mean, he figured out simple, simple laws that explain vast amounts of phenomena.

00:37:14.500 So that's pretty amazing.

00:37:16.140 But then Einstein comes along and says—he puts the mirror, basically, in the theory of classical mechanics.

00:37:25.280 And he says, where are you in the theory?

00:37:28.380 So that's the mirror, the feminine mirror. 1.00

00:37:30.640 Look at yourself in the—look at yourself.

00:37:33.700 So—and then—so what does Einstein do?

00:37:36.600 He says, basically, all these categories that we're creating, classical mechanics, they all think they operate from a point that's outside of reality.

00:37:48.780 So—but then he says, look, you're also in reality.

00:37:53.640 So 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.

00:38:06.800 So you have to define things, considering yourself as part of the reality that you're explaining, right?

00:38:13.940 So—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.

00:38:26.500 They all get warped because now you're in the system.

00:38:29.360 So basically, that's what Einstein does to Newtonian physics.

00:38:34.660 He forces the perspective to be in the system that they're looking at.

00:38:39.580 So that's like a—like a cyclical view of yourself, right?

00:38:42.000 You're looking at yourself in the mirror now.

00:38:43.680 And then he transforms all the equations in a way—and this is why this is a good thing.

00:38:50.780 Because he was able to find an equation or a formula that included Newton's physics.

00:38:57.840 It didn't totally dismantle it and say, this is worthless.

00:39:00.660 Right.

00:39:01.060 It integrated it.

00:39:01.780 It added a little something.

00:39:03.140 Yes, it added a little something so that Newtonian physics is a special case of the other physics that he found.

00:39:12.180 Well, 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.

00:39:33.620 And so now you said something that was quite mysterious and sideways that I want to refer to.

00:39:40.820 You said that Adam and Eve were tricked by the snake.

00:39:44.540 It wasn't that they listened to them, that they were tricked.

00:39:47.160 And that you associated that with premature conceptualization.

00:39:51.240 So let me riff on that for a second.

00:39:52.980 So one of the things that's really bothered me about the postmodernists more than anything else wasn't the problems they posed.

00:40:00.820 It was the solutions they generated.

00:40:02.960 And 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?

00:40:25.580 And they investigated that and thought, well, we don't know how to make canonical sense out of even a single text.

00:40:34.260 And so—and we don't know what to do about the fact that we don't know how to do that.

00:40:39.660 How do we rank order the importance of texts or facts?

00:40:42.940 And that was a stroke of genius because that is a key question.

00:40:47.540 But 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.

00:41:03.840 And that our perceptions, all of our perceptions, serve nothing but compulsion, self-interest, and power.

00:41:09.820 And 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.

00:41:22.140 And 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.

00:41:36.300 And 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.

00:41:53.220 So, what do you think about that response to your proposition?

00:41:58.100 Well, I just wanted to say something about what you said, which is really important.

00:42:03.380 You 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.

00:42:15.320 Like I said, Adam was put to sleep in order to bring forth Eve.

00:42:19.340 That's a taste of death, but it's not death.

00:42:21.460 So, what's the difference?

00:42:24.740 Kind of like the example that I gave about Newtonian physics being transformed by Einsteinian physics is, I put you to sleep a little bit.

00:42:36.000 This 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?

00:42:43.500 It looks like you're finished.

00:42:44.800 I'm going to replace completely.

00:42:45.960 But then, oh, it's a little tweak.

00:42:47.560 And this, in biblical language, is called a woman crowning her husband.

00:42:54.060 That's the name of it.

00:42:55.160 It means there's a little bit of transformation that was done, but it's not a lethal transformation.

00:43:01.840 It's a transformation that puts something above the head.

00:43:05.400 So, the head is the first principles that are used, or the perception that was used in the first place.

00:43:09.760 So, it creates something above that, and that opens up the theory to explaining even more.

00:43:16.600 But it doesn't destroy it completely.

00:43:18.700 I mean, you can look at it politically, too.

00:43:20.880 It doesn't have to be just, like, scientific examples.

00:43:23.060 You can look at it politically.

00:43:24.700 If the left says, for example, the left, what's basically the purpose is the same as Eve.

00:43:32.700 It's to listen to the marginalized.

00:43:36.260 So, what are the marginalized?

00:43:38.220 The people who are maybe not satisfied with the names or the identity or the function that they were given.

00:43:43.680 So, she listens to the marginalized.

00:43:45.500 They're the serpents on the edge.

00:43:46.920 Yes, exactly.

00:43:47.640 So, yeah, she listens to the complaints of the marginalized, and then she tries to formulate some slight modifications without destroying completely. 0.64

00:43:59.420 I mean, you don't want to marry your enemy.

00:44:01.780 You don't want to join with your enemy.

00:44:03.460 That's when all the problems start.

00:44:05.820 If you join with your enemy, Eve is not Adam's enemy.

00:44:09.140 Right.

00:44:09.280 She could, she can be.

00:44:10.420 She's a corrective. 0.70

00:44:11.000 When she's fooled by the snake, then she becomes.

00:44:12.880 Yeah, she's a feedback loop of knowledge. 1.00

00:44:16.700 And what happens, how do you know the difference?

00:44:20.400 See, that's the thing.

00:44:21.120 You said it before.

00:44:22.180 It was a preemptive attempt to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

00:44:28.720 So, and this is actually interesting, by the way, the word that's used when Eve says, I was tricked, the word means lending on credit.

00:44:40.020 So, see, it's the meaning, all the meaning is there.

00:44:42.540 A couple of things here.

00:44:44.000 I want to quote something by Alfred North Whitehead.

00:44:47.060 The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.

00:44:51.820 And 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.

00:45:07.740 And 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.

00:45:25.760 And so, there's an optimal level of correction.

00:45:27.840 And 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.

00:45:41.920 And that's a very deep instinct for adaptation.

00:45:44.960 And so then, let me finish that by trying to clarify something you just said, which I think is of crucial importance.

00:45:51.260 So, 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?

00:46:07.080 The presupposition of a comprehensive knowledge, a prideful presupposition of a comprehensive knowledge while still in a state of insufficient ignorance?

00:46:16.020 Is it something like the presumption of personal omnipotence?

00:46:19.200 I 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.

00:46:27.760 It sounds like it doesn't say a lot, but it says everything.

00:46:30.660 Because 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.

00:46:44.900 If you read the story, there's most of the stories in the Bible are about that, actually.

00:46:48.580 If you read the story of Samson, that's what the story of Samson is really about.

00:46:52.920 It's about Samson joins with his enemy.

00:46:56.200 He falls in love with his enemy.

00:46:58.360 Okay?

00:46:58.640 He's always wants a foreign woman, but that's also his enemy. 1.00

00:47:03.420 And 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.

00:47:12.280 And he, like, falls for the ones that hate his guts.

00:47:15.360 That's what it's, the story of Samson is all about.

00:47:17.380 So what happens, then he joins with his enemy, and once you join with your enemy, then you're in big trouble.

00:47:24.180 Because then, when you try to attack your enemy, you're attacking yourself.

00:47:31.020 So you're now in a cyclical pattern of self-destruction.

00:47:35.400 And that is what the story of Samson is all about, because, and at one point, he figures it out near the end.

00:47:42.440 He figures out the whole mystery of it, is once you join with your enemy, then if you kill your enemy, you kill yourself.

00:47:50.480 Okay?

00:47:50.740 And other stories in the Bible are about that very problem.

00:47:53.760 But 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.

00:48:03.280 And that's the conclusion of this story of Samson.

00:48:05.560 He basically kills himself.

00:48:07.500 He makes the pillars fall, and he knows very well he's going to kill himself. 0.63

00:48:11.280 And the conclusion is, but he killed more of his enemies.

00:48:14.000 The idea is, it's about a pattern of overreaching?

00:48:22.360 Yes, it's overreaching.

00:48:24.460 Well, this is what I was saying before.

00:48:26.480 When it says that the snake tricked Eve, the word it's used is lend on credit.

00:48:33.920 The reason is because when you buy something on credit, it means that you obtain something that you can't.

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00:49:49.500 Cover.

00:49:49.980 Okay, okay, okay, so let me ask you about that then.

00:49:54.260 So 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.

00:50:07.200 But the snake is not one of them, even though the snake's in the tree.

00:50:10.180 And what that would mean, so we should be eating, in some sense, the low-hanging fruit that's actually within our grasp.

00:50:16.940 And 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.

00:50:32.780 That'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.

00:50:40.500 So I'll add one more thing to that.

00:50:42.200 I've been thinking about this lately.

00:50:44.260 So we have, we're being informed constantly that we're on the brink of an ecological catastrophe.

00:50:50.640 And that brings in the idea of the left and the corrective voice of Eve and the marginalized, let's say.

00:50:56.380 And I might say, well, okay, is that true or not?

00:51:00.300 And that's one question.

00:51:01.520 And the second question is, if it's true, who should guide us through that potential catastrophe?

00:51:07.960 And 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,

00:51:18.400 and that we have to be very apprehensive and careful about such things as long-term sustainability.

00:51:24.800 And because we're very powerful now and things are moving quickly, that's come to a head.

00:51:29.460 But then you might say, well, who should lead us through that crisis?

00:51:33.260 And here's an idea.

00:51:35.180 If you're facing a dragon, an apocalyptic dragon that's so large that it frightens you into paralysis and turns you into a tyrant,

00:51:44.940 then 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,

00:51:56.540 but you're not the man for the job.

00:51:58.680 And if you insist too assiduously that you are, you're only going to make things worse.

00:52:04.520 And 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.

00:52:13.020 Does that seem even vaguely sensible?

00:52:17.240 Yes, yes.

00:52:18.140 It's always about, like you said it exactly, biting off more than you could chew.

00:52:22.100 And there's an expression in French.

00:52:23.680 I can translate it, and you can tell me if it's also an expression in English.

00:52:26.820 But it's something like, your eyes are bigger than your stomach.

00:52:31.500 Right, right.

00:52:32.120 Is that an expression in English?

00:52:32.940 Yes, it is.

00:52:34.660 Or your reach exceeds your grasp.

00:52:38.640 And that is a sin of pride.

00:52:40.780 So you think, it seems to me, that you're, and this is a great mystery as far as I'm concerned,

00:52:45.340 because it's not obvious exactly what the error is in the Garden.

00:52:49.660 But you think, at least in part, it's an error of overreach and pride.

00:52:54.060 That makes real sense to me, because it's definitely the case.

00:52:57.040 You know, if we have to encounter the world in a spirit of gratitude and ignorance in order to learn,

00:53:03.980 then the thing, and to learn optimally, which would put us in that meaningful domain,

00:53:09.220 then the fundamental spirit that opposes that is something like the spirit of totalitarian certainty

00:53:15.580 about the fact that we've incorporated the entire serpent.

00:53:19.600 And that's what totalitarians constantly presume, is that we've got it right,

00:53:24.440 and our theory is complete, and there's no exceptions to be allowed.

00:53:27.860 And if you say anything contrary to that, there's going to be hell to pay. 0.99

00:53:31.160 You're heretical, and you need to be damned and alienated and removed. 1.00

00:53:35.460 And maybe that's an echo of that same sin in some real sense, 0.98

00:53:41.320 rather than the humility that would enable you to encounter the proper,

00:53:45.720 to ingest the proper-sized fruit and to contend with the proper-sized snake.

00:53:50.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:53:51.020 There's two types of sin, let's say, that are really basic,

00:53:54.960 and you can see in this story or this whole cosmology.

00:53:59.680 One of them is the sin of Adam would be something like not listening at all to nature,

00:54:04.980 just I'm going to impose meaning, and whatever doesn't fit can go to hell or something like that.

00:54:10.080 It doesn't matter.

00:54:11.120 So that's one kind of sin.

00:54:12.360 But then there's another kind of sin, which I think we're actually seeing a lot of nowadays.

00:54:18.100 It's Eve.

00:54:19.760 The job of Eve is to provide riddles for Adam.

00:54:23.100 I'm giving you some riddles, right, that you need to solve now.

00:54:26.420 Now, the purpose of these riddles is to refresh a science,

00:54:31.840 if we're talking about science again, refresh a theory.

00:54:35.340 Show that it's not complete, but in a way that usually doesn't totally destroy it.

00:54:40.100 But you can also do something else.

00:54:41.560 The sin of Eve would be something like,

00:54:43.660 I'm going to give Adam a riddle that can't be solved and see what he does with that.

00:54:49.600 So a problem that can never be solved.

00:54:52.140 Here you go.

00:54:52.840 Adam solved that.

00:54:54.140 That's how Eve becomes a tyrant. 1.00

00:54:55.760 That's how Eve can totally dominate Adam, 1.00

00:55:00.260 by giving, like, making him go through a labyrinth that doesn't have an exit,

00:55:04.880 you know, and he's stuck in there forever.

00:55:06.760 Maybe that would be reflected biologically in the potential proclivity of women 1.00

00:55:12.340 to set standards for men that are so high that no productive union is actually possible,

00:55:18.040 and to never reward attempts to move towards the good because it deviates and indicates insufficiency in relationship to this unobtainable ideal.

00:55:30.900 Because 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. 1.00

00:55:41.000 Yes.

00:55:41.680 If Eve loves Adam, or if the left wing, let's say, if we say the left wing is like Eve, which it is,

00:55:50.420 if it loves its country, the goal is not to destroy the country.

00:55:54.480 If 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,

00:56:06.300 even if it's our enemies, you know, you don't go to war with a country and then bring them in.

00:56:11.080 And that's a recipe for disaster.

00:56:13.120 It's an obvious recipe for disaster.

00:56:14.820 And anyone who engages in that, I think, is being tyrannical and has a purpose that's nefarious.

00:56:21.100 And they want to destroy the country or they want to destroy whatever organization.

00:56:25.360 I mean, you create, anything you create is limited in a sense.

00:56:30.340 And if you think you can bring in all the floodwaters, it doesn't make any sense unless you're trying to destroy it.

00:56:36.400 And this is how you tell the difference between Eve and Eve that's tricked by the serpent.

00:56:43.240 Eve, when she's tricked by the serpent, she thinks she can integrate absolutely everything.

00:56:47.980 But it's a trick.

00:56:49.920 Everything at once instead of sequentially and incrementally.

00:56:52.860 Yes, everything at once.

00:56:53.980 Yes.

00:56:54.620 Not incrementally.

00:56:55.800 That's always the problem.

00:56:58.860 Everything eventually can be integrated.

00:57:01.420 But then if you do it too quickly, that's when you join with your enemy and then you're screwed.

00:57:06.900 And then after that, you're in a deep, deep trouble.

00:57:09.480 OK, 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.

00:57:27.720 And 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.

00:57:37.160 And in doing so, we're going to bring about the very catastrophe that, in principle, we're trying to avoid.

00:57:43.060 Yes, exactly.

00:57:44.040 It's absolutely what's going on, I think, today is we want to create.

00:57:48.640 We, 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.

00:57:58.840 It doesn't really matter.

00:57:59.540 Something that includes everything.

00:58:01.300 And they're real anxious to do it real fast.

00:58:04.700 And that's the real, that's the end problem.

00:58:07.040 You want to do it faster than you can handle it for whatever reason.

00:58:10.040 I mean, who knows what the reason is?

00:58:12.140 Well, because you just don't know enough.

00:58:13.760 I mean, the thing about integration, so here's another way of thinking about it.

00:58:17.140 You tell me what you think about this.

00:58:19.100 So I've been toying with this notion is that one of the hallmarks of inappropriate public policy is the use of compulsion.

00:58:27.220 Now, 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.

00:58:38.760 And 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.

00:58:45.240 But under normative conditions, if you have to use compulsion to impose your vision of paradise, then it's not an adequate vision of paradise.

00:58:55.180 It isn't motivating and it isn't integrated.

00:58:57.340 And 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.

00:59:12.840 And it is one of pride and Luciferian presumption.

00:59:16.200 And maybe that's also part of the temptation of the snake, right?

00:59:20.200 Because 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.

00:59:33.460 Yeah, well, the snake often, usually what it represents, you're not wrong though, but maybe to add to that,

00:59:38.860 the snake usually represents something like a perspective that's close to the earth, something like matter, the perspective of matter.

00:59:49.080 But it's basically the perspective of that which is furthest from the meaning that was given to things.

00:59:56.480 Right, right.

00:59:57.120 So in any system, you have things that get pushed to the margin.

01:00:00.000 So that's the fringe perspective.

01:00:02.860 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:04.060 And you can view it at different levels.

01:00:06.940 I mean, the ecological movements are that because they represent nature or they claim to represent.

01:00:14.420 It doesn't matter if they really are or aren't.

01:00:16.600 That's what they embody.

01:00:17.900 They embody a mediation between nature and civilization.

01:00:21.600 So they're basically taking the perspective of nature and saying, okay, don't go too far with your civilization dominance, you know,

01:00:30.340 because there's nothing wrong with civilization, but obviously you can go too far.

01:00:33.520 But you can also go too far in the other direction.

01:00:35.860 You can start saying things like, we can't have any human activity anymore.

01:00:40.820 That's bad because it harms nature, you know?

01:00:43.620 That's the other sin from the other direction.

01:00:46.240 Yeah, 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

01:00:58.840 and I'm perfectly willing to impose by force on others rapidly and in an emergency panic.

01:01:05.480 Yeah, the emergency is a big part of it.

01:01:07.740 Well, I'm looking at what's happening, for example, with the Dutch farmers.

01:01:11.500 And the Dutch farmers are among the most sophisticated farmers in the world, assuming that they're not the most sophisticated, which they might be.

01:01:19.840 And now they're having these edicts from the nature worshippers forced upon them.

01:01:26.260 They're not being consulted with.

01:01:27.840 They're not being brought in.

01:01:29.620 They're not being integrated into the game.

01:01:32.120 There's an imposition by force of a particular vision.

01:01:35.260 And one of the consequences of that, apart from the devastation of their livelihoods and the destabilization of civil society,

01:01:42.080 is 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.

01:01:52.040 And 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.

01:02:05.580 So, 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,

01:02:15.620 where you lay out a relationship between abstraction and concrete examples that's akin symbolically to the relationship between heaven and earth.

01:02:26.060 And so, earth, you describe here as a set of concrete examples, and heaven as an abstract principle.

01:02:37.480 And so, you say, for example, there are two concrete examples, might be boat and chariot.

01:02:43.680 So, that's indicative of a multiplicity of modes of transportation.

01:02:47.600 But they can be united in a transcendent reality, in some sense, that constitutes vehicle.

01:02:53.920 And that's really the nature of abstraction, is that you have a multiplicity of phenomena from which you can abstract a common principle.

01:03:01.360 And part of that is the ordering of things, and the sub-doing of things, and the putting of everything in its proper place.

01:03:08.960 But it's also a union of that multiplicity into a higher order.

01:03:12.960 And your comments about Eve, and I've noted this, I would say, in my own marriage, is that,

01:03:19.020 imagine that I have a conflict with my wife that's akin to the kind of conflict that we're just describing.

01:03:23.920 And we want to mediate that conflict.

01:03:27.020 And one way is for her to submit to me.

01:03:30.240 And another is for me to submit to her.

01:03:33.420 And a third is that we can compromise.

01:03:37.100 But a fourth is that, as a consequence of the dialogue between us,

01:03:42.320 which would be the masculine proclivity to impose order,

01:03:45.580 and the feminine proclivity to speak for chaos and multiplicity, 0.97

01:03:49.540 we can come up with a third solution that transcends both our problems

01:03:54.720 and that offers a union that's preferable to compromise and certainly preferable to slavery and submission.

01:04:02.020 But that would involve a full dialogue, right?

01:04:04.760 And a bringing together of all the concerns into a true higher order that did account for all the multiplicity.

01:04:11.080 The pattern you just described, if anyone wants to understand the stories in the Bible,

01:04:17.480 it's always the same pattern being repeated over and over.

01:04:20.560 You just have to be able to look at different scales of it and just get used to thinking fractally.

01:04:26.200 This is something I think is completely lost.

01:04:28.480 There's a way to see things in a fractal way where every piece of a story expresses a certain pattern

01:04:37.260 and the whole thing expresses a certain pattern.

01:04:40.260 It's very easy to get lost when you do that, but it's basically very simple.

01:04:46.920 Like any story in the Bible, you can use the pattern you just described.

01:04:49.820 Any story in the Bible, you can use that and you understand it, basically.

01:04:53.680 So I guess that would require some examples, but...

01:04:56.200 Well, let's use the examples of the cherubim. 0.92

01:05:00.000 So maybe you could elaborate because I found that...

01:05:02.640 Let me just read something from the tetramorphic cherubs from Ezekiel 1.

01:05:07.820 And I found this part of your discussion particularly illuminating

01:05:11.760 because I had no idea what the cherubs represented.

01:05:14.520 And as far as I can tell, there's something like the monstrosities that exist

01:05:18.600 on the fringes of cognitive and perceptual categories.

01:05:21.800 And they're part of the support mechanism for the divine unity that any given category represents.

01:05:29.580 And so I'm going to read this and I'll read a bit of your commentary

01:05:32.060 and then maybe you can comment on it.

01:05:35.100 As I was...

01:05:35.760 This is Ezekiel.

01:05:36.540 As I was among the captives by the river Shabar, or Chebor, the heavens were opened

01:05:44.060 and I saw visions of God.

01:05:46.860 A stormy wind came from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing up.

01:05:52.380 From its center came the image of four living beings that looked like the image of a human.

01:05:56.980 Each cherubim had four faces, a human, a lion on the right, a bull on the left, and an eagle.

01:06:03.440 Over the heads of the living beings was the image of an expanse, and it was on the throne.

01:06:09.260 And on it was the image of a throne.

01:06:11.220 And on the image of the throne was an image that looked like a human.

01:06:16.400 Ezekiel's vision is the perfect example of a narrative that seems cryptic from the wrong perspective.

01:06:22.180 Conversely, in proper context, cosmic categories like thrones, cherubs, and wheels

01:06:27.180 are just as fundamental as space, energy, and time are to materialism.

01:06:30.720 The tetramorphic cherub described in this vision is an obvious example of the symbolic template

01:06:37.540 that we just described.

01:06:39.260 At the top of the structure, the eagle flying in the air, and above everything, and capable

01:06:45.220 of great vision, by the way.

01:06:47.440 The eagle represents a spiritual or heavenly principle, which is too abstract to be grasped

01:06:52.280 without tangible expressions.

01:06:54.100 At the lower end, the lion-bull duality represents the corporeal or earthly basis that provides

01:07:01.600 concrete support for that principle.

01:07:03.760 At the center, the human is the knower that unites spiritual and corporeal realities.

01:07:10.360 Even though these living beings might seem random at first glance, they perfectly describe the

01:07:15.260 inner structures of this cosmology.

01:07:17.520 As a prophet, Ezekiel was using this symbolic language to describe the very process of obtaining

01:07:24.080 divine knowledge.

01:07:26.980 There's a tendency when we want to interpret symbolism to focus on the weird stuff, right?

01:07:34.060 Because when you see something in a story, it seems weird.

01:07:38.280 It seems unusual.

01:07:39.260 We have a tendency to want to interpret it symbolically, because we don't want to imagine

01:07:44.760 some kind of weird chariot with animals in it.

01:07:49.540 You know, we have a tendency to immediately say, okay, this is symbolic of something, right?

01:07:54.220 It's like a dream.

01:07:56.080 Yeah.

01:07:56.680 It's like he's seeing the categories of, he's seeing the metaphysics directly.

01:08:04.400 That's what it's all about, that vision.

01:08:07.140 And he's describing the process of the visions of a prophet.

01:08:12.040 He's not even describing his vision.

01:08:15.160 He's describing the process of how he got to the vision, which is, I don't think there's

01:08:19.680 any other place in the Bible where we see something like that.

01:08:21.900 Maybe in Elisha, maybe, he describes a process through which he gets the vision a little bit,

01:08:28.400 I think, if I remember correctly.

01:08:30.700 But it's entirely different to describe a vision and to describe the process that brought

01:08:34.900 you to the vision.

01:08:35.500 And the chariot is, he's describing the very process of a prophet.

01:08:42.120 So we've got like a special glimpse into his world there, which is, I think, is a very

01:08:47.120 interesting thing.

01:08:48.340 Right.

01:08:48.700 So we get a case there with this vision that the visionary is apprehending the structure

01:08:57.480 of the structure through which structure is viewed.

01:09:00.700 Yes, exactly.

01:09:01.400 That's a vision of the heavenly structure in some real sense.

01:09:05.780 And so that made me think, tell me what you think about this.

01:09:09.300 When I read this section on cherubs, I remembered that at the, when God chases Adam and Eve out

01:09:16.040 of paradise, he puts cherubim to guard the gates of paradise and they hold flaming swords. 0.82

01:09:23.000 And that's always been a great mystery to me, both the cherubim and the flaming swords.

01:09:27.480 And so then I was thinking about that.

01:09:29.140 And I thought, well, a sword is a tool of judgment and carving.

01:09:34.680 You carve up things with the sword and you dispense with your enemies with the sword.

01:09:39.120 And Christ uses a sword in Revelation to separate the wheat from the chaff.

01:09:43.860 And a flaming sword is even more of a sword than just a sword because it's a red hot sword.

01:09:50.440 And so not only is it going to cut and discriminate and differentiate, but it's going to do so in

01:09:55.220 a manner that burns like the burning bush.

01:09:58.080 And then I was thinking, well, if you want to reenter paradise, you have to subject yourself

01:10:04.420 to this flaming sword of judgment in the real sense, because you have to carve away from yourself

01:10:11.600 everything that isn't fit to be in paradise.

01:10:15.160 And that would be almost everything.

01:10:17.180 Well, that would be everything that wasn't perfect enough to be paradisal.

01:10:20.540 And given how imperfect you are, the probability that you would experience whoever was wielding

01:10:26.760 that sword as a monstrous cherubim with a sword of flames strikes me as extremely, the probability

01:10:34.860 that that's how you'd experience it strikes me as extremely high, especially, and that

01:10:39.140 would be in proportion to some degree to the magnitude of your sinful nature.

01:10:43.780 And so, and I think that's associated with the notion of the passion in the Christian story

01:10:51.460 that Christ has to voluntarily accept not only death, but hell itself in order to reconfigure

01:10:58.000 and also associated with the symbolism in Revelation that an apocalyptic judgment has

01:11:03.860 to precede something like the reestablishment of a paradisal state.

01:11:09.220 And so that all came out for me out of your description of the cherubim, which I thought

01:11:13.940 was extremely helpful, by the way, the notion that these monstrosities on the fringes support

01:11:18.600 the conceptual structure that's united by the overarching eagle vision with the human

01:11:24.700 between the overarching vision and the multiplicity of earthly categories.

01:11:31.260 Yeah, yeah, the cherubim and the flaming sword, I have to admit, it's also been something

01:11:35.680 that I found intriguing for a very long time.

01:11:40.380 And I think I have a good grasp on it now, more than when I wrote my book, actually, because

01:11:46.980 it's directly related to the story of Adam and Eve again.

01:11:50.680 If you have Adam naming the animals, and then there's a fall, it means he lost his ability

01:11:55.880 to name the animals, so there's a confusion that enters into it.

01:12:00.280 And the cherub, that's what the cherub is.

01:12:04.380 It's a confusion of species.

01:12:06.080 It's an animal that has a confusion of different species within it.

01:12:09.180 A confusion of identity.

01:12:10.160 It represents, yes, so it represents Adam's inability now to name all the species correctly

01:12:16.680 and separately.

01:12:17.480 So he fell into confusion.

01:12:19.020 So the cherubim is that confusion.

01:12:20.860 It's a beast, a hybrid, right?

01:12:22.860 A hybrid of species.

01:12:25.020 So it represents his inability to name the animals correctly.

01:12:29.020 And then, like you said, the sword is the principle that would separate them back again.

01:12:36.680 Like, it's the logos, it's logic, it's light.

01:12:40.520 That would separate the cherub again into separate species.

01:12:45.600 And like you suggested, the bigger your sin, the bigger the sword you need, and the bigger

01:12:50.300 the monster you have to face.

01:12:51.880 So the bigger the confusion.

01:12:53.480 Right, well, and I can't help but see, you know, when all this confusion about naming

01:12:58.940 of human identity came about in the last 10 years, all this confusion with regard to pronouns

01:13:04.340 and subjectively defined identity, I couldn't help but think about that as, well, I believed

01:13:09.980 at the time when the government mandated a certain type of pronoun use that that was a

01:13:15.500 form of extreme conceptual, couldn't be a more extreme form of conceptual confusion that

01:13:21.940 now are very agreement about what constituted the most fundamental categories of reality.

01:13:27.300 Because I think you can make a real case that male and female are the most fundamental

01:13:31.940 categories of reality.

01:13:33.980 You know, and I think you can make that case biologically because sex has been around for

01:13:37.960 a very, very, very, very long time.

01:13:40.800 For hundreds of millions of years.

01:13:43.280 And the proper perception of sexual dichotomy is absolutely crucial to survival itself and

01:13:50.320 reproduction, obviously, and mating, but also a precondition for the stability of society

01:13:55.360 as such.

01:13:56.580 And the insistence that to bring in the marginalized, we have to demolish the entire structure of 0.99

01:14:02.380 categorization itself, seems to me tantamount to this sin that you described that Eve would

01:14:07.760 produce if she insisted too assiduously that everything be integrated at once.

01:14:13.180 Yes, exactly what you're talking about, the idea that I give you my pronouns.

01:14:20.940 It's just an example of what I was saying before, that Eve mediates with nature.

01:14:28.040 And then if Adam names something, it's possible that there's a reaction and there's a complaint.

01:14:33.940 Like, no, you don't name me.

01:14:35.820 I name myself, basically.

01:14:37.080 That's what it represents.

01:14:38.140 It represents the same thing as I was describing earlier.

01:14:40.440 So anything that's named can decide at one point to, you know, answer back and say, no,

01:14:47.260 that's, you don't tell me what I am.

01:14:49.620 You don't tell me what my name is.

01:14:51.160 I, I'm the one who decides my name.

01:14:53.500 And by the way, the, the, the flaming sword in the text is the flaming sword that turns on

01:14:58.980 itself.

01:15:00.100 Well, that's also part of it.

01:15:01.700 It's very interesting.

01:15:02.640 If you translate it literally, that's what it says.

01:15:04.860 A flaming sword that turns on itself.

01:15:08.060 Right.

01:15:08.500 So that, well, that's interesting, you know, because I would say to some degree, the harshest

01:15:13.080 judgments that we are made subject to do come from within and that a lot of totalitarian

01:15:20.660 presumption is the attempt to escape the flaming sword of personal conscience by insisting that

01:15:27.500 the current theory of categorization is sufficient and all that there should be.

01:15:32.380 And that dichotomy between fundamentalism and doubt, I think is an expression of that conflict.

01:15:39.020 So you think that sword that turns on itself, is that part of an interior psychological process?

01:15:44.320 It represents sort of, yes, it's, it's all part of a psychological process for sure.

01:15:49.480 Everything in the Bible is, is, has like an inner meaning, but the sword that turns on itself is like what I was saying before.

01:15:58.800 The role of Eve is to show a mirror to Adam and then, then he sees himself.

01:16:03.640 Okay.

01:16:03.880 But when there's a conflict between the two, when there's, when they're enemies, this is when everything's working out, right?

01:16:09.860 And they love each other.

01:16:10.560 But when there's, there's a conflict, then Eve shows the mirror and it can't be solved.

01:16:16.900 And then he turns, the sword is the logos trying to answer, and he can't solve the puzzle.

01:16:23.480 But so he turns on himself.

01:16:24.880 Is that the same as the figure of the Medusa, do you think?

01:16:28.000 The snake-headed woman that paralyzes the man so completely that he turns to stone? 1.00

01:16:32.940 Is that a mythological reflection of the same imposition of an insolvable problem?

01:16:38.320 I haven't, I've never thought about it, but it seems like it's very similar.

01:16:41.560 Yes, it's like an intractable problem that if you look at it, you're, you're finished.

01:16:46.900 Right, right.

01:16:47.500 It paralyzes you.

01:16:48.600 Well, that, and that thing is, you know, that, that fear in the face of a formidable opponent,

01:16:55.660 which would be the inability, let's say, to reach a mediating arrangement with nature and the feminine, 1.00

01:17:02.540 that's, that's the ultimate opponent in some sense when it turns against you, that paralyzes you.

01:17:08.520 And paralysis is that freezing in place that's characteristic of a prey animal.

01:17:14.760 And that's represented symbolically as turning to stone in the face of the snake-headed woman.

01:17:21.720 Yeah, 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.

01:17:28.560 But, 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.

01:17:36.320 And 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.

01:17:44.500 You're never going to go out.

01:17:45.320 So it's, it's, it's a form of paralysis.

01:17:47.360 What you do as a clinical psychologist, especially as a behaviorist, is very much relevant to this discussion.

01:17:53.760 Because you might say, well, you need to set someone a problem and a task in order to encourage them to develop.

01:18:02.180 And so then the question becomes, well, what size task should you set them?

01:18:07.340 And there's two, there's two extremes to, to the answer to that question.

01:18:12.380 And one is a task so easy that the person can do it without effort.

01:18:16.860 And the other is a task so difficult that no matter how much they try, they'll never manage it.

01:18:22.120 And what you do to avoid both those errors is you establish a personal relationship with the person that you're trying to help transform.

01:18:31.120 And 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.

01:18:50.400 And then you think, well, that is what you should do in your relationship with your wife and your husband, right?

01:18:55.000 You 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.

01:19:01.620 And 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.

01:19:25.680 And 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.

01:19:50.840 Yes, 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.

01:20:03.940 And 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.

01:20:15.360 He represents the foreign perspective that was brought in slowly and carefully through generations and then became the power of renewal.

01:20:29.120 So the first king of Israel is Saul, right? And he makes a lot of mistakes and he basically is unfit.

01:20:37.200 And then so a renewer has to be brought in and that's David.

01:20:42.200 And David represents exactly something like what you said. He's the adversary that loves you.

01:20:50.480 And 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.

01:20:58.900 They're both the king at the same time. So it's like he understands the mystery that I was describing earlier.

01:21:04.180 You don't want to be joined with your enemy and then kill your enemy because you're killing yourself.

01:21:10.080 So the whole story of David is about all the problems we've been discussing since the beginning.

01:21:16.340 Basically, it's David is a foreigner that was brought in correctly, slowly through time. 0.99

01:21:22.860 And David loves his people, but he's a foreigner. David comes from a foreign line and then he becomes king. 1.00

01:21:33.560 Well, when the king has become tyrannical, so when your own order has become tyrannical,

01:21:38.160 you have to bring in something foreign that's outside in order to counterbalance the tyranny.

01:21:43.520 You know, you see the same pattern reflected in Egyptian cosmology because in Egyptian cosmology, you have Osiris.

01:21:51.180 And Osiris is basically Saul. He's the old state. 0.95

01:21:54.840 And Osiris is old and anachronistic and willfully blind. 0.85

01:21:58.640 And he has an evil brother, Seth, whose name becomes Satan through the Coptics, the Egyptian Coptics. 0.98

01:22:07.020 And Seth waits for an opportunity to overthrow Osiris and he becomes the ruler of the state.

01:22:14.020 And he chops Osiris into pieces.

01:22:16.940 So he breaks up the order completely and destroys it and now rules as a malevolent power.

01:22:22.840 Now, when Osiris falls apart, Isis, who's queen of the underworld, comes up again, emerges out of the underworld.

01:22:32.760 And so that would be the material realm in some sense in your cosmology.

01:22:37.140 And she finds Osiris' phallus and she makes herself pregnant with it.

01:22:41.900 And then she gives birth to Horus.

01:22:44.020 And Horus is the eagle and the falcon and the eye of attention.

01:22:48.420 And he grows up outside the kingdom, alienated from it.

01:22:52.200 And then he goes back to retake his kingdom.

01:22:54.760 But he, and he dispenses with Seth in a battle so cataclysmic that one of his eyes is torn out.

01:23:03.040 Because that's how damaging that encounter with that malevolent spirit can be.

01:23:07.940 He gets his eye back and he banishes Seth.

01:23:10.760 But then he goes to the, instead of ruling, now as victor,

01:23:14.260 he goes to the underworld and he finds the ghost of Osiris,

01:23:18.400 who's sort of fragmented and in pieces and three quarters dead.

01:23:22.140 And he gives him the eye.

01:23:24.740 And then they unite.

01:23:26.420 And it's their union that constitutes the model for the pharaoh in Egyptian political theology.

01:23:35.020 So the idea is that you don't overthrow the state.

01:23:38.540 You overthrow the, you separate the chaff from the wheat and you conserve the state.

01:23:43.720 And you do that by giving the dead state living vision.

01:23:48.060 And the proper ruler is the combination of the living vision and tradition that can keep

01:23:53.160 the archetypal enemy of the state at bay.

01:23:57.460 So that's an echo of the same idea that you just described as characteristic of the relationship

01:24:02.500 between David and Saul.

01:24:03.920 And you see this necessity for relying on the stranger quite often in the biblical narrative.

01:24:09.580 So when Jethro tells Moses how to set up the proper alternative to the pharaoh in the desert,

01:24:18.200 Jethro is an outsider too and a priest.

01:24:20.340 He's a Midianite priest, if I remember correctly.

01:24:23.080 And he tells Moses to set up a distributed system of power and responsibility

01:24:27.900 as an alternative to top-down pharaonic judgment,

01:24:32.740 which is the trap that Moses is falling into in the desert at that point.

01:24:36.720 So this introduction of the foreign element, the proper leavening of the tradition by the

01:24:44.200 introduction of the foreign element or the foreign woman, for example,

01:24:47.200 or the foreign agent who acts morally despite their foreignness,

01:24:50.920 that's a recurring motif in the Bible and another reason for radical hospitality.

01:24:56.340 Yeah, yes.

01:24:57.180 It's almost the universal motif of the Bible.

01:25:00.120 Almost every story, if you understand this pattern of the need to find a foreign perspective

01:25:05.820 in order to renew yourself, you can understand a whole lot of stories just with that basic understanding.

01:25:12.940 But, I mean, there's always a language that has to be understood

01:25:16.500 because things obviously aren't said in such a direct way, you know?

01:25:21.820 So you have to understand certain patterns that are, like, for example,

01:25:25.700 the pattern of women drawing water from a well.

01:25:30.160 That's one way to represent the woman's role of mediator with the earth. 1.00

01:25:35.420 So she goes and takes water from below the earth and she brings it up.

01:25:41.200 And the purpose of the water is to refresh and renew a system that needs it, right?

01:25:47.220 Yeah, a system that's become too desert-like and it's sterile presuppositions.

01:25:52.680 Yes, and can't, doesn't have a feedback mechanism for its errors.

01:25:59.320 I mean, if you have something that's too rigid and an error inserts itself into it

01:26:04.060 and you don't have a feedback mechanism or a way to cleanse it, like to wash your feet,

01:26:09.820 this is how it's described in the Bible.

01:26:12.320 If you can't wash your feet, then you'll end up with gangrene or something, you know what I mean?

01:26:17.520 You'll end up with a serious problem.

01:26:19.680 But, so, there's the woman that draws water from below the earth and brings it and waters. 1.00

01:26:26.900 It's about renewal and refreshment of something.

01:26:29.720 But, so, I'm just using this as an example, but it's the idea that almost every story in the Bible

01:26:34.820 is describing some very basic patterns and then you just have to learn the language

01:26:39.700 that's used to describe it because it doesn't speak in a mathematical way, you know,

01:26:44.440 it doesn't speak with categories, it speaks with stories.

01:26:46.920 But the stories are actually a lot more precise than people might imagine.

01:26:50.540 It's not vague.

01:26:51.460 They're also precise, and you point this out very well in your work,

01:26:55.420 and your brother does this extraordinarily well too.

01:26:58.040 They're precise, their precision is amplified and bolstered by this fractal quality that you described.

01:27:06.700 Because people like Sam Harris, for example, this is not a criticism of Sam,

01:27:12.020 are prone to say, you're just imposing an interpretation on the story,

01:27:16.840 and how do you know that your interpretation is correct?

01:27:19.760 There's actually a technical answer to that, which in psychology is known as a multi-method,

01:27:24.880 multi-trait construct validation process.

01:27:28.380 And the idea is that if you want to see if something's actually there,

01:27:33.840 you have to view it from a number of perspectives, as many perspectives as you can manage,

01:27:39.640 and then you have to see if each perspective provides the same view.

01:27:45.380 And so one of the things that you do that's so remarkable in your book,

01:27:48.560 which I think gives it an extreme level of validity and reliability,

01:27:54.340 is that you say, well, here's a pattern I inferred from Genesis 1.

01:27:59.860 And then look, this pattern replicates itself 300 times.

01:28:06.700 And how in the world?

01:28:08.100 So either you've done a remarkable work of imagination,

01:28:11.800 imposing an order that isn't there,

01:28:13.580 and you've managed to pull out 300 exemplars showing the existence of that pattern,

01:28:18.800 or you've actually found something that's implicate in the text itself.

01:28:23.680 And I was certainly convinced by your book that you had done the latter and not the former.

01:28:29.600 And I would also say that it wasn't merely a consequence of reading your book,

01:28:33.120 because your book doesn't exist in a vacuum.

01:28:35.600 And the symbolic language that you lay out so clearly,

01:28:39.300 and with a tremendous dearth of references, which is quite interesting,

01:28:44.080 is very much akin to the same pattern that emerges out of the writings of people like

01:28:49.560 Mircea Eliade and Eric Neumann and Carl Jung and the great investigators of myth

01:28:55.320 who have made propositions, put forward propositions that are very similar.

01:29:00.380 And so Camille Paglia told me once, I thought this was extremely interesting,

01:29:04.200 I'm a great admirer of Eric Neumann, who wrote a book called The Great Mother,

01:29:07.880 and another called The Origins and History of Consciousness.

01:29:11.180 And he provides a very acute and deep summary of Carl Jung's thought.

01:29:17.440 He was a student of Jung's, and Jung wrote an introduction to The Origins and History of Consciousness,

01:29:23.340 and said it was the book he wished he was able to write,

01:29:27.000 which is pretty damn high praise.

01:29:29.420 And Neumann's work is analogous to your work in its symbolic language.

01:29:34.040 And Paglia said that had the postmodernists turned to Eric Neumann instead of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida

01:29:42.120 and the French continental philosophical neo-Marxist crowd,

01:29:46.960 that the entire history of intellectual endeavor in the humanities in the last 60 years

01:29:51.320 would have been written very differently.

01:29:54.420 And I think that's absolutely true.

01:29:56.420 I had come to the same conclusion independently of her,

01:29:59.100 and we're quite different as thinkers.

01:30:01.020 And so it was quite striking for me to have her, to hear her say that,

01:30:06.820 especially about a work that's as relatively obscure as The Origins and History of Consciousness,

01:30:11.180 which is a great book.

01:30:12.860 It's a truly great book.

01:30:14.300 And I definitely see your work in the same tradition.

01:30:17.140 Yeah, I think one of the maybe main differences with what I'm doing,

01:30:20.820 maybe I come to similar results,

01:30:22.920 but one thing I didn't want to do was to do a work of comparative religion.

01:30:29.200 I tried to avoid that.

01:30:31.240 Not that I find anything wrong with that,

01:30:33.740 but I tried to write something that only was based on the imagery of the Bible.

01:30:40.600 I didn't want to get into comparative religion.

01:30:43.800 I just didn't want to do it.

01:30:44.780 There's already work like that that exists.

01:30:46.760 Well, you did your comparisons within the biblical stories.

01:30:50.180 So you took a comparative approach, but it was a within-text comparative approach,

01:30:54.600 which I thought was very powerful and very compelling.

01:30:57.860 And one of the things I should tell everyone who's watching and listening is that

01:31:01.240 Matthew's book is very, very straightforward.

01:31:05.040 It's, there's no, there's none of the murkiness, let's say,

01:31:08.600 that characterizes Carl Jung's work for better or worse.

01:31:11.540 And believe me, I'm not making myself out to be a credible critic of Jung.

01:31:16.880 He was unbelievably brilliant in 50 different ways.

01:31:19.900 But Matthew's book is, I described it to my son, who is a computer programmer,

01:31:25.020 as a programming manual for the biblical narrative.

01:31:28.880 And you mentioned before we started talking today that that is in part your background,

01:31:34.360 that you do think like a programmer.

01:31:36.180 And so maybe you could explain that a little bit.

01:31:38.220 Well, for sure, my thought processes were definitely influenced by mathematics and computer science.

01:31:45.340 The mathematics may be just for the rigor of it.

01:31:49.260 I mean, not every discipline, academic discipline, has the same level of rigor as mathematics.

01:31:56.320 And there's a little bit of slackness sometimes in certain areas, I think,

01:32:00.440 which lead to just things kind of being just opinions, you know.

01:32:03.920 But when you study mathematics, you get used to just the basic habit of not dealing with opinions.

01:32:12.160 You know, I'm dealing with derivations from principles.

01:32:15.900 You can agree with, you could disagree or agree with the first principles in mathematics if you want.

01:32:20.020 But you can hardly disagree with the derivations they come up with.

01:32:25.040 And so that's, I guess, influenced a lot of my rigor.

01:32:28.320 And then the other aspect, I would say computer science definitely prepared my thinking for a fractal way of understanding things.

01:32:37.180 Because one of the rare, I would say, disciplines that exist that study fractal thinking, I would say, is computer science.

01:32:44.920 Okay, expand on that, because I don't understand that.

01:32:47.220 I understand the fractal issue with regard to the stories, but I don't understand its role in computer programming.

01:32:54.500 Well, I mean, part of computer programming is to learn how to think with recursion.

01:33:00.860 So recursion is fractality, basically.

01:33:05.280 It's just you have a pattern that includes itself and defines itself within itself.

01:33:12.080 So it's just a different kind of thinking.

01:33:15.080 You need to get used to that kind of thinking.

01:33:17.100 You can't just pick it up like that.

01:33:19.400 You need practice.

01:33:20.480 Okay, I just released an essay writing app called Essay.App with my son.

01:33:28.220 And it's also based, in some sense, on the principle of recursion.

01:33:31.260 And so it teaches people to edit their writing while simultaneously apprehending multiple levels of interpretation.

01:33:38.040 And this is relevant to the layered structure of reality that you lay out in your book.

01:33:43.100 And so, well, what are you doing when you're writing?

01:33:46.040 Where's the meaning?

01:33:47.220 Well, you could say, you would say, well, it's in the lines that make up the letters of each word.

01:33:53.060 And then it's in the letters themselves.

01:33:54.920 And then it's in the words.

01:33:56.200 And 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.

01:34:07.020 And 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.

01:34:17.200 And you point out in chapter 11, when you're talking about the spiritual and material dimensions, something akin to that.

01:34:23.880 Again, 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.

01:34:38.100 And so, imagine that we're moving from dark and heavy to bright and light.

01:34:43.140 And dark and heavy would be earth and the multiplicity of forms that are characteristic of the earthly domain.

01:34:48.800 And then above, and that's solid and multiplicitous and meaningless in some sense.

01:34:55.320 And then above that is water, which is more like fluid and light and air.

01:35:00.840 And then above that is air.

01:35:02.240 And then above that is light.

01:35:03.680 Light and that's a pyramidal structure.

01:35:05.940 And light is associated with apprehension and tension and with the pinnacle of the pyramid.

01:35:14.040 And that's a recursive language that's fractal in nature that's reflective of the structure of heaven and earth.

01:35:20.120 And those images recur consistently throughout the Bible as well, as well as in ancient writings that use this earth, water, air, and light cosmology.

01:35:29.520 Yeah, yeah, it's about seeing the always miniature versions of things within themselves.

01:35:35.760 But 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.

01:35:45.120 And that's exactly what it is.

01:35:47.200 If you can find the patterns that you're describing at multiple levels of the story.

01:35:52.280 And also, there's other patterns.

01:35:54.200 I mean, I think a lot of people who criticize the Bible, many times atheists, I guess, they're just being dishonest.

01:36:00.240 They don't know the stories.

01:36:01.680 They don't know what they're talking about.

01:36:02.840 So, I mean, it's a very unsatisfactory criticism in my opinion.

01:36:08.360 So, it's like me criticizing a language that I don't even understand and not even trying to learn the language.

01:36:13.260 Or it's also like a scientist casually criticizing deep literature.

01:36:19.680 It's like, well, someone like Dostoevsky, let's say, is extraordinarily deep and writes fiction.

01:36:25.700 And the notion that that fiction is somehow meaningless is absurd.

01:36:29.240 And the notion that there aren't depths of fiction is equally absurd.

01:36:33.520 And the idea that there are depths means that there's a hierarchy.

01:36:36.680 And the idea that the deepest parts of the hierarchy of meaning are the divine parts is a matter of definition.

01:36:45.900 It's not a matter of interpretation.

01:36:48.440 It's like, well, we experience deepest things at the deepest levels.

01:36:52.580 And to not regard the Bible in some fundamental sense as the deepest of literature is only to reveal your ignorance about the subject.

01:37:02.340 It's as simple as that.

01:37:03.800 Whatever the Bible is, it's certainly deep and mysterious.

01:37:07.680 And not least because it's so intensely cross-referenced, right?

01:37:12.040 And has this immense, amazing fractal structure that you described.

01:37:16.440 Here's an example.

01:37:18.140 So, in the beginning, God created the heaven.

01:37:22.140 You say, immaterial meaning.

01:37:24.120 And the earth, meaningless matter.

01:37:26.400 And then you go on to say, in biblical cosmology, the universe was created as a union of heavenly and earthly components.

01:37:35.880 Therefore, everything in it has both a spiritual and material dimension.

01:37:40.820 These 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.

01:37:50.800 Top layers are light and supple.

01:37:53.720 And bottom layers are heavy and solid.

01:37:55.280 Then you analyze Genesis 1-2, the layers of vertical space.

01:37:59.740 Earth.

01:38:01.120 The earth was meaningless and confounding.

01:38:04.340 Water above the earth.

01:38:06.960 Darkness was on the face of the deep.

01:38:09.260 Air above the water.

01:38:11.080 The wind of God hovered over the face of the waters.

01:38:14.040 Light above air.

01:38:16.460 Light.

01:38:16.920 God said, let there be light.

01:38:18.760 And there was light.

01:38:19.600 This topography of vertical space is illustrated in the following diagram.

01:38:24.980 You present a pyramid with the earth at the bottom and light at the top.

01:38:29.060 Multiplicity of earthly phenomena, let's say, and a singular unity of light at the top.

01:38:33.640 However, there is no need to associate the dots of that illustration with atomic theories of matter.

01:38:40.620 Instead, they simply illustrate the varying densities of tangible stuff for each of these levels.

01:38:45.300 The top levels are more implicit than the bottom levels and therefore have a less corporeal presence.

01:38:52.720 In addition to their degree of corporeality, these layers are also defined by their degree of brightness.

01:39:00.160 So, earth is dark and heavy and light is obviously bright and light.

01:39:04.500 Together, these two dimensions provide a complete picture of vertical space in ancient cosmology.

01:39:10.840 The material dimension goes from heavy to light, while the spiritual dimension goes from bright to dark or from clear to obscure.

01:39:21.820 There is also an inverse relationship between these characteristics.

01:39:26.020 Highly corporeal things will naturally be low in brightness and vice versa.

01:39:30.320 To fully understand this inverse relationship, it is important to realize that matter was inherently connected to darkness in ancient cosmologies.

01:39:39.380 In practice, this is the phenomenological aspect, this is due to the fact that matter causes obscurity depending on its degree of opacity.

01:39:49.520 In other words, earthly substances block the light completely, while more fluid substances, like water and air, have greater degrees of transparency.

01:39:59.460 Hence, there is an inverse relationship between the degree of corporeality of a substance and its degree of clearness.

01:40:06.420 Substances high in corporeality are obscure due to their complexity, while substances that are low in corporeality are clear due to their simplicity.

01:40:15.860 And we'll close with this.

01:40:18.160 This pyramidal structure is a fundamental pattern of interpretation in the Bible.

01:40:22.180 It attaches a spiritual quality to objects and events based on their position in vertical space.

01:40:28.760 In this context, something may be depicted as too high when it is too simple to understand and too low when it is too complex.

01:40:38.440 True knowledge is usually depicted as central in the sense that it is complex enough to be tangible and simple enough to be meaningful.

01:40:46.420 It's brilliant.

01:40:47.840 It's a very short chapter, chapter 11.

01:40:49.780 We read most of it.

01:40:51.380 A marvel of, what would you call that, centrality of meaningful clarity.

01:40:57.100 And so, hooray for that.

01:40:59.120 You do the same thing in the next chapter in some sense with Nebuchadnezzar's dream.

01:41:05.160 Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

01:41:06.140 As I was listening to you read that, I was saying to myself, oh, that's why I use diagrams in my book.

01:41:12.940 Because when it's just a description like that, it sounds very complicated.

01:41:17.160 And when you just look at the picture, it's like, okay, yeah.

01:41:20.480 So, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

01:41:23.620 I found an analogy between your use of diagrams in this book and my use of diagrams in my first book, Maps of Meaning.

01:41:30.380 While I was working out the ideas in that book, which are analogous in many ways to the ideas that you're presenting,

01:41:37.500 we're definitely sniffing down the same trail, let's say.

01:41:41.580 I found that in order to understand what I was doing, I had to make the diagrams.

01:41:47.460 And then I decided to include them.

01:41:49.140 There's some 70 diagrams.

01:41:50.560 Yours are, you have many more diagrams.

01:41:53.740 They're more differentiated than my diagrams by quite a margin.

01:41:58.940 I'm going to read Nebuchadnezzar's dream from Daniel 2.31 because I think it's a great example of this isomorphism of pattern.

01:42:07.420 And in such a surprising sense, right?

01:42:09.100 Because in the previous chapter, we have the image of the cosmos that God creates laid out in four lines

01:42:15.180 and the relationship between the different levels.

01:42:17.740 And then we see the same thing reflected in a dream using entirely different imagery.

01:42:22.080 But the pattern is the same.

01:42:23.760 So, this is from Daniel 2.31 to 2.33.

01:42:26.800 This image, which was large and whose brightness was surpassing, stood before you.

01:42:36.100 Its head was fine gold.

01:42:38.440 So, that's the sun and the ethereal and eternal realm because gold is incorruptible and eternal and shines like the sun.

01:42:45.280 Its head was fine gold.

01:42:46.960 Its chest and arms were silver, moving down the hierarchy.

01:42:50.400 Its belly and thighs were brass.

01:42:52.480 Its legs were iron and its feet were iron and clay.

01:42:55.940 So, it gets heavier and more material as you get closer and closer to the earth.

01:43:00.720 And it gets, in some sense, more vulnerable, too, as you move down the...

01:43:04.920 It's more vulnerable, in some sense, as you move down the hierarchy.

01:43:09.100 That's why we use the expression feet of clay.

01:43:12.320 Yes, it gets harder but more corruptible.

01:43:15.160 Yeah.

01:43:15.260 Yes, the top of the statue is a head of gold, which is the brightest and rarest of metals.

01:43:20.160 Conversely, the bottom layer is made out of iron and clay, which is the hardest and most common of metals.

01:43:26.860 So, this statue is a microcosm of the elemental hierarchy of light, air, water, and earth that stretches from heaven to earth in biblical cosmology.

01:43:35.180 Yeah, brilliant, I thought.

01:43:37.020 I thought.

01:43:37.500 So, all right.

01:43:39.920 So, let's turn to Jacob's Ladder.

01:43:46.080 Okay.

01:43:47.480 Do you want to delve into that momentarily?

01:43:49.880 Because that's a very striking image and one that's rooted in ancient shamanic tradition as well.

01:43:54.740 The notion of a liana between heaven and earth.

01:43:57.500 Jacob's vision is definitely that.

01:43:59.440 So, that's another example of a hierarchy.

01:44:01.620 Yeah, 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.

01:44:16.000 But if you use just the basic categories of these cosmologies themselves, then they become pretty self-evident.

01:44:24.040 Like, why is there a ladder between heaven and earth?

01:44:26.960 I mean, if you're thinking materially, why is there a ladder between heaven and earth?

01:44:30.100 It doesn't make any sense.

01:44:31.000 But 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.

01:44:39.660 And, 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.

01:44:49.860 And that has to be a structure with some intermediary levels.

01:44:55.060 Yeah.

01:44:56.100 Yeah, exactly.

01:44:57.260 Yeah.

01:44:57.400 So, so you can always look at things with different lenses.

01:45:00.660 And 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.

01:45:14.920 So, like, why is there a tree in the Garden of Eden?

01:45:17.580 Self-evident.

01:45:18.260 Why is there a ladder in Jacob's dream?

01:45:19.960 Self-evident.

01:45:21.000 It's always just the connectors of heaven and earth.

01:45:23.680 Boom.

01:45:24.540 Problem solved.

01:45:25.340 You know what I mean?

01:45:25.840 It's, it's all, it all depends on how you look at it.

01:45:28.840 Sometimes you look at something in one way, it seems very complicated.

01:45:31.180 You look at it in another and it's like, oh, okay.

01:45:33.480 Right.

01:45:33.920 Well, and you described earlier, and I think this is worth revisiting.

01:45:37.240 I mean, we're going to revisit the Sam Harris or even the postmodern critique.

01:45:41.920 And 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?

01:45:50.660 And, and then how do you know that your arbitrary interpretation just doesn't serve your need and motive for the expression of power?

01:46:00.660 And 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.

01:46:13.200 Jesus, that's definitely throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and it's a very simplistic interpretation.

01:46:19.060 You could say the same about science, too.

01:46:22.140 I mean, anyone who claims to have a theory about reality, you could say, how do you know it's not just in your head?

01:46:27.820 I mean, you could say that about anything.

01:46:29.780 The answer is the same.

01:46:31.040 How do you know?

01:46:31.620 You experiment, and you prove that your, your, your ideas and your theories are, explain the phenomenon.

01:46:39.500 It's the same thing in a story.

01:46:40.900 If you, you say this is all about a certain pattern, that's like your, your theory.

01:46:45.200 Well, I can prove it to you.

01:46:46.300 I'll show, I'll read the story, and I'll show you that it's always an expression of this pattern.

01:46:51.280 So you prove it in exactly the same way as science proves its theories.

01:46:54.980 You can also prove it the same way that Kierkegaard and the existentialists, existentialists insisted.

01:47:02.780 And 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.

01:47:09.620 You can use it to govern your perceptions and to rule your actions, and then you can see what happens in your life.

01:47:17.100 And 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.

01:47:32.200 And 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.

01:47:45.080 And that is a fundamental test, and I do think that's something that has to be done at the level of individual, the individual.

01:47:51.440 That's definitely something that Kierkegaard stressed immensely, and that people like Solzhenitsyn and Jung and Dostoevsky, for that matter, also insisted upon.

01:48:00.700 Not that there's not a communal element, right, because we need to strive to do that together to manifest our individual responsibility.

01:48:07.600 But fundamentally, the test is pragmatic, and, and almost like an engineering test, which is, take the story, act it out, and stress test it.

01:48:18.920 See 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.

01:48:34.060 And 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.

01:48:43.680 Yes, exactly. Yes, you can test it within the text to know if, if your interpretation of the text makes sense within the text.

01:48:50.180 And like you said, that's even a higher level, I would say. You could test it with reality, and then it's another story.

01:48:56.080 And 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.

01:49:09.840 Yes, 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.

01:49:16.860 And he meant a story. And you better figure out what the myth is, because it might not have the ending you want.

01:49:25.680 And 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.

01:49:43.660 And we value stories because we want interpretive patterns to make sense out of the complexity of things.

01:49:50.240 And then the question is, well, what story are you acting out?

01:49:53.660 And the, the premature neo-Marxist rejoinder to that is, well, we're all acting out a story of power and domination.

01:50:02.880 And I think that's preposterous.

01:50:05.300 We act, we act out a story of power and domination when the proper story is corrupted and demented.

01:50:13.660 So, if your relationship with your wife is governed by power and authority, then you have a pretty appalling marriage.

01:50:19.940 And if all you do is dominate, tyrannize your children, well, good luck with that.

01:50:24.940 And if you bring the same attitude towards your friendships and your business relationships, you're not going to have any friends.

01:50:30.980 You might have cronies or bully henchmen.

01:50:34.200 And you're certainly not going to be successful in any voluntary business arrangement.

01:50:39.560 So, there's a different ethic that governs our perception and our actions.

01:50:43.980 And it is oriented towards this higher spiritual realm that, well, that you laid out conceptually.

01:50:51.300 And that's detailed out as a characterization of the spirit that we should mimic in the biblical corpus.

01:50:57.360 I think that's all become quite clear on the cutting edge of cognitive science, let's say.

01:51:04.380 Yeah, you can't, part of the narratives of the Bible is to move from a state of competition where it's just raw competition.

01:51:13.300 I think kind of what you were describing here with just imposition of power.

01:51:16.380 So, there's the realm of competition, and that's symbolized by a cycle.

01:51:21.760 And 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.

01:51:30.740 And it's a painful experience, right?

01:51:32.260 So, what you want is to have a solution to that competition at one point.

01:51:37.340 So, a lot of the stories in the Bible of competing brothers are about exactly that.

01:51:41.680 So, Jacob and Esau.

01:51:44.160 Right, 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.

01:51:57.060 It's not competition over a finite set of limited resources.

01:52:01.140 Yeah, and there's a name for that in the, let's say, the Jewish cosmology or biblical cosmology.

01:52:08.420 There's the concept that there's a difference between what's called an outer cycle and an inner cycle.

01:52:14.980 An outer cycle is when you're in competition, like a war.

01:52:17.780 That's an outer cycle.

01:52:19.380 And then an inner cycle is a contained competition, usually made for selection, and not always.

01:52:26.000 There's other reasons for it.

01:52:27.240 And the contained competition is what you want.

01:52:29.380 It's basically what I was talking about, the role of Eve.

01:52:32.580 It's something like a contained competition.

01:52:35.000 Like, for example, let's say in medieval, it's like a tournament.

01:52:38.280 A tournament.

01:52:38.920 That's a contained competition for selection processes.

01:52:43.300 And that's like a female, it's the female role that does the tournament. 1.00

01:52:47.320 Piaget, the developmental psychologist, identified that as a hallmark of appropriate developmental play.

01:52:53.140 And so that's the idea that you unite your striving towards a common direction.

01:52:59.300 That's what a game is.

01:53:00.960 And then you compete for the purposes of selection.

01:53:04.680 Well, 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.

01:53:19.560 Because 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.

01:53:29.020 Yeah, yeah.

01:53:29.440 Yeah, exactly.

01:53:30.960 It's a contained...

01:53:32.540 And so that's not a zero-sum.

01:53:34.340 Yeah, no, it's not zero-sum because it's not a real war.

01:53:37.280 You're not trying to obliterate your adversary.

01:53:40.420 You're in a war, but part of a system.

01:53:43.260 It's the, like I said, the feedback mechanism for a system is called an inner cycle.

01:53:50.500 And when you lose that, then you fall into an outer cycle, which is war.

01:53:54.920 Now you're in a constant state of war and competition.

01:53:57.620 When you lose that, you fall out into an outer cycle.

01:54:00.360 So 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.

01:54:24.780 That's the alternatives.

01:54:26.080 Yeah, and you don't have an arbiter when you're in that level.

01:54:31.400 When you're in the other level, you have a...

01:54:33.880 Is that how you say it in English?

01:54:34.780 An arbiter?

01:54:35.720 Yeah.

01:54:36.320 Or a referee.

01:54:37.580 Arbiter is fine.

01:54:38.480 A referee.

01:54:39.600 Yeah, okay.

01:54:40.140 You don't have that in the war domain, so it might be a never-ending conflict.

01:54:45.600 This is actually one of the...

01:54:47.480 If you are familiar with the story of Jacob and Esau, we have that in that story.

01:54:52.880 It's pretty clear.

01:54:53.520 It starts with the mother, which is Rebecca.

01:54:58.860 She says that inside her womb, they're fighting.

01:55:03.320 She has twins, right?

01:55:04.520 Inside her womb. 0.72

01:55:05.340 They're fighting inside her womb. 0.98

01:55:07.920 So this represents what I was...

01:55:09.780 This represents the inner war, the inner cycle that's mediated by her inside her womb. 0.72

01:55:15.580 So she has the wisdom to mediate that, and so she decides who is worthy to be the inheritor of the father.

01:55:30.760 You see what I mean?

01:55:31.380 So there's an inner conflict inside the womb, and she decides it.

01:55:35.500 She does some little tricks there, a little bit of deception there. 1.00

01:55:40.120 But she decides who ends up on top.

01:55:44.420 And the reason she does that is if she didn't decide it correctly, there would have been an outer war. 0.63

01:55:49.880 Probably that would have lasted forever between Esau and Jacob.

01:55:54.700 But then, so basically, what she did avoided a never-ending conflict between the two brothers.

01:56:01.960 And the reason is...

01:56:03.120 Well, I don't necessarily want to get into too much detail, but the reason is something like...

01:56:07.620 Esau represents the firstborn in general in the Bible represents the idea that you have to solve the problem now. 0.51

01:56:20.440 That's the firstborn.

01:56:21.740 Because that's his job.

01:56:23.120 Because the firstborn inherits the problems.

01:56:25.020 He inherits the wealth, but he also inherits the problems.

01:56:28.580 And he inherits the times that he's in.

01:56:31.160 So if you're living in a rotten time, and you're the firstborn, it's actually not a good thing.

01:56:36.220 You might think it's always better to be the firstborn, right?

01:56:38.900 But no. 0.57

01:56:39.720 If you're born in a state of inversion and clown world state, you know, like right now.

01:56:44.960 If you're born in a state of corruption, then you don't want to be the firstborn.

01:56:50.140 Because you're going to have to deal with that problem right now.

01:56:53.160 And the secondborn or after, the youngest or whatever, represents a time span that will happen before it becomes your problem.

01:57:02.080 So in a way, when you're in a corrupt world, it's better to be the secondborn.

01:57:06.840 And a lot of stories in the Bible relate to that.

01:57:08.920 So Cain and Abel is the same thing.

01:57:11.560 So in the story of Cain and Abel, the fall just happened.

01:57:16.820 So everything's...

01:57:17.680 The earth is cursed.

01:57:19.560 And Cain is the firstborn, so he has to work the earth.

01:57:23.920 That's his job.

01:57:24.580 He inherits this world.

01:57:26.340 This is a way to describe it.

01:57:28.600 This world.

01:57:29.820 And he...

01:57:30.480 So he's in a corrupt world where the earth is cursed.

01:57:33.600 So it might seem like a great thing that he's the firstborn and he inherits the land.

01:57:38.140 But it's not because it's cursed.

01:57:39.980 Okay?

01:57:40.420 So he's in a bad position, really.

01:57:43.020 So what happens is Abel, he...

01:57:46.040 What he does is basically nothing.

01:57:48.340 He just...

01:57:49.180 He doesn't advance his knowledge.

01:57:51.840 He just preserves the traditional knowledge.

01:57:54.340 So in a way, Cain represents the scientist in a way.

01:57:58.120 And Abel represents the priest or the traditional...

01:58:02.440 So let's say, for example, in Christianity, Abel would be something like the continuation

01:58:07.140 of the tradition of Christianity.

01:58:09.600 While Cain would be the one who's got to solve the problems as they are right now.

01:58:15.100 And then when there's a fall, a fall away from understanding what tradition means and

01:58:20.460 how it applies to reality, then Cain is in trouble because he has to still solve the

01:58:25.260 problems of the earth.

01:58:26.640 So like a scientist, he has to see what's in the earth, see what's the facts that are

01:58:30.700 before him, and he has to solve them.

01:58:33.280 But he doesn't have the higher knowledge to solve it correctly so that it doesn't destroy

01:58:39.380 him.

01:58:39.680 Right.

01:58:40.060 So sometimes the firstborn, who's the cardinal inheritor of the tradition, is cursed because

01:58:47.120 the tradition itself is cursed.

01:58:49.340 And the secondborn, and often lesser, so to speak, son, is the preferable alternative.

01:58:55.340 And that pattern is repeated very, very frequently.

01:58:57.340 Yes, because he has time.

01:58:57.940 Right?

01:58:58.200 Yes, because the secondborn has the time to like ruminate on the problems.

01:59:04.180 He doesn't have to solve them now.

01:59:05.420 He just takes his sweet time.

01:59:07.040 And when he solves it, then he acts.

01:59:09.060 This is what Jacob and Esau represent too.

01:59:11.600 It's a very interesting story.

01:59:12.920 By the way, Esau, at first he thinks he's angry when he gets his inheritance stolen or whatever.

01:59:20.160 But then later when he encounters Jacob, he's not even angry.

01:59:24.240 And this is a weird little event that happens in the story.

01:59:27.460 It's like, why isn't he angry?

01:59:28.720 Like Jacob is afraid he's going to be killed by his brother, but then he meets his brother

01:59:31.820 and he doesn't really care.

01:59:33.620 And the reason is because he gets the land right away.

01:59:39.740 And that's what he wants.

01:59:41.380 So it's illustrated by, it says he has 400 men with him.

01:59:45.880 Okay, the 400 men represent the land, let's say, the potential of the land.

01:59:49.700 He gets them right away.

01:59:51.260 And Jacob, he doesn't get 400 men that follow him.

01:59:55.700 He gets 400 years of exile.

01:59:58.040 Okay, so the 400 years of exile is the time needed for the rumination to solve the problem

02:00:05.120 correctly and slowly and patiently instead of rushing into it.

02:00:08.640 Instead of, it's a solution to not eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

02:00:13.180 You need to wait for the solution and then you can do something.

02:00:17.060 So in certain cases, it's better to be the second born that you can wait.

02:00:22.180 Take your sweet time.

02:00:22.920 You don't have the responsibility of solving the problems of the land.

02:00:26.260 And the other guy has a harder job.

02:00:28.300 Well, right.

02:00:28.620 And there's, well, there's an injunction there to the kind of patience that also enables

02:00:33.340 you to allow the solution to present itself instead of assuming that you're the man to

02:00:37.960 take on that particular dragon right here and now in the way that you think is fit.

02:00:42.480 Yes.

02:00:42.960 And that's the burden of the firstborn.

02:00:44.960 That's the burden of the firstborn.

02:00:46.240 He has to do it now.

02:00:47.660 It's his job.

02:00:48.340 Is it also relevant that Jacob is the person who becomes Israel, that becomes the person 0.73

02:00:55.100 who's wrestling with God?

02:00:57.340 I mean, if your interpretation, if I riff on your interpretation, it's something like the

02:01:03.420 firstborn is the inheritor of the proper tradition.

02:01:07.740 But Jacob is someone who's wrestling actively with God.

02:01:12.560 He's engaged in the process of trying to come to grips with what's meet and right and to

02:01:19.360 put that whole hierarchy in order.

02:01:21.580 And maybe his mother prefers him because he has that spirit of active engagement rather

02:01:27.540 than the imposition of traditional, what would you say, traditional values?

02:01:32.440 No, I don't think so.

02:01:34.180 I think it's the other way around.

02:01:35.540 I think it's the other way around.

02:01:36.800 I think Esau is trying to impose not necessarily tradition.

02:01:40.740 He's just trying to solve the problems that present himself to him in the land where he's

02:01:45.400 in, which is Canaan, right?

02:01:46.900 And the problems are huge when he gets there because there's enemies everywhere, right?

02:01:52.440 He's in a strange land.

02:01:53.400 So he's supposed to inherit the land right now.

02:01:56.160 But this is a big job.

02:01:57.600 He's alone against a sea of adversaries.

02:02:00.760 You know, the land is cursed.

02:02:01.760 The land is corrupt.

02:02:02.720 So what does he do?

02:02:03.760 He hires.

02:02:05.120 It doesn't say he hires them, but he gets 400 men to follow him.

02:02:08.900 But the idea is that these aren't reputable men.

02:02:11.860 You know, they're like mercenaries or something like that.

02:02:14.360 That's the general idea.

02:02:16.020 It's not a well-chosen 400 men to follow him.

02:02:20.420 While Jacob, he has the advantage of being forced, in fact, to wait.

02:02:25.980 What is he waiting for?

02:02:26.780 He's waiting for the problems to resolve in an easier way.

02:02:31.500 And then maybe he can intervene at one point later.

02:02:34.280 Well, 400 years later, according to that story.

02:02:37.460 But the wrestling thing is kind of difficult to explain.

02:02:41.600 I can explain just a little bit.

02:02:42.780 Maybe you might find it interesting.

02:02:44.680 What happens when he wrestles the angel is the angel strikes his leg, curses his leg,

02:02:51.040 it says, or plagues his leg.

02:02:52.440 And then what happens after that?

02:02:53.980 It says, now he's limp.

02:02:58.200 He limps, right?

02:02:59.860 Because his leg has been hit by the wrestling.

02:03:04.440 So, again, the word for limp here is the same word that it's used to say that Eve was taken

02:03:10.640 from the side of Adam.

02:03:11.980 It's the word side.

02:03:13.460 So, he limps means that one of his side is not functional.

02:03:18.200 It's limping.

02:03:18.780 It represents Eve, okay?

02:03:20.280 Does it also represent this sort of small death that's an antithesis to a great death?

02:03:26.480 Yes.

02:03:26.620 Okay, okay.

02:03:27.920 Yes.

02:03:28.400 And what happens, because he's plagued in his leg, this looks like a bad thing, right?

02:03:32.120 It looks like a curse.

02:03:33.120 But because he's limping, he can only go slowly now.

02:03:38.060 He only walks slowly.

02:03:39.680 And this is what happens.

02:03:40.600 He meets Esau.

02:03:41.840 And Esau is like, let's do our journey together.

02:03:45.380 Because Esau thinks he's got it figured out.

02:03:47.120 He's got 400 men behind him.

02:03:48.540 He thinks he's the best, right?

02:03:49.620 He thinks he's got it figured out.

02:03:50.940 He's a tough guy now.

02:03:52.160 But Jacob is like, oh, sorry.

02:03:53.940 I can't follow you.

02:03:55.620 I'm limping.

02:03:56.340 You know, I'm going to go at the speed of the children in the flock.

02:04:00.000 That's what he says.

02:04:01.360 What does that mean?

02:04:02.060 It means I'm forced now, because I wrestled with the angel.

02:04:07.400 This has forced me to take my time to go slowly, because one of my legs has been cursed.

02:04:12.560 But now, it's a bad thing that turns into a good thing, because he has to go extremely slowly.

02:04:17.120 And he has to take care of everyone while doing so.

02:04:19.860 Yes.

02:04:20.060 And he has to wait for the right time to solve the problem, when he's able to solve the problem.

02:04:24.880 And this represents also, it represents the 400 years of exile that he has to go to, in a sense.

02:04:30.280 One of his legs is injured.

02:04:33.500 And that represents the time also that he has to go into exile.

02:04:38.200 And 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.

02:04:51.460 See, what that means is, it's the equivalent of saying, oh, we're not eating from that part that we can't handle.

02:04:56.640 The part that we can't handle right now, we're not going to eat that.

02:04:59.240 That's like saying, we're not going to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil right away.

02:05:02.540 That means you pick a monster that's the right size for you, and you do that judiciously and with great care.

02:05:10.720 And that makes real sense to me, an increasing sense.

02:05:13.680 We 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.

02:05:20.940 And so, what are you working on next?

02:05:23.180 Well, 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.

02:05:34.220 I guess that's what's in my mind right now, so it comes out.

02:05:37.540 So, 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.

02:05:46.260 Because 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.

02:05:55.240 But 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. 1.00

02:06:07.040 And 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.

02:06:18.960 It 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. 0.99

02:06:25.920 So, I wanted to learn about the Bible, I didn't want to become a feminist.

02:06:28.600 So, 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.

02:06:39.200 And that's basically, we could say, the story of my first book.

02:06:42.520 I kind of steered away from academia, and I decided, okay, I'm going to just focus on this myself.

02:06:48.060 But now, since then, since I've written my first book, I've had the chance to try to look at it from another perspective.

02:06:55.400 And I really have been doing that, and I've been doing, trying to look at it from Eve's perspective.

02:07:00.060 And I've shared a little bit of what I've discovered in our conversation about Eve listening to the snake, and what that means.

02:07:07.580 So, again, it has a lot of implications.

02:07:10.360 And 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.

02:07:18.840 How far are you through your next book, then?

02:07:22.100 I'm still in the planning stage.

02:07:25.400 Just figuring out what I'm going to talk about.

02:07:27.740 Right.

02:07:28.020 Well, I've got to say, I'm very much looking forward to it.

02:07:30.440 And 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.

02:07:41.500 I think it'd be very interesting to see how you would approach the problem of the feminine.

02:07:46.040 I mean, my wife and I have been talking about that an awful lot.

02:07:49.120 We'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.

02:08:03.840 And then how to formalize that and conceptualize that and to communicate it.

02:08:08.640 It'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.

02:08:21.060 And the same isn't true in reverse.

02:08:25.060 And 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.

02:08:40.460 And 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.

02:08:54.420 And 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.

02:09:10.420 Yeah, 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.

02:09:22.240 Because like I said, it's the criticism of it.

02:09:26.220 Tradition has its own criticism within itself, right?

02:09:29.780 It's like, that's the Eve criticizes Adam.

02:09:32.980 So every tradition has in it a feminine aspect which criticizes the tradition.

02:09:38.620 But this is done discreetly, right?

02:09:43.380 It's done lovingly and discreetly.

02:09:45.360 So, yes, so you have to read between the lines.

02:09:48.980 Right, well, the criticism should be one of encouragement rather than denigration, right? 0.99

02:09:53.700 I 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.

02:10:03.520 But 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. 0.83

02:10:18.540 And that's a purpose that's part of love because love isn't just acceptance.

02:10:22.260 It's also encouragement.

02:10:24.440 That's the judicious part of love and the antithesis to what would otherwise be an overwhelming and drowning mercy.

02:10:32.200 Yes, yes.

02:10:32.840 So, yeah, basically, yeah, we've been a little bit discussing these questions.

02:10:37.360 I guess, like I said, it's because what's going on in my head.

02:10:39.980 That's the subjects that are interesting to me right now.

02:10:42.200 So, I can't help but communicate them, I guess.

02:10:45.640 But, 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. 1.00

02:10:57.040 And when you can find it, it's hard to find.

02:11:00.260 If you can't understand it, it's hard to find.

02:11:02.360 If 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.

02:11:09.680 But it's discreet, because when it stops being discreet, then it becomes an adversary.

02:11:15.700 So, there's a proverb that says, how does it go?

02:11:19.820 It says, a golden ring in a pig's snout is a woman without discretion, right? 1.00

02:11:26.140 That's the whole symbolism that I'm describing can be summed up in that proverb.

02:11:30.660 And the word in that proverb, without discretion, the word is actually taste.

02:11:35.740 Literally, it's translated, you could say, without taste.

02:11:38.060 And what that means is taste, the ability to taste is part of the female role. 1.00

02:11:44.240 It means eat just a little bit.

02:11:46.020 That's what tasting is.

02:11:47.000 Yes, women actually have a much more differentiated sense of taste and smell, by the way, than men, too.

02:11:53.400 Oh, really?

02:11:54.020 Biologically speaking, yes, they do.

02:11:55.080 I didn't know that.

02:11:55.200 Yes, it's the case.

02:11:56.260 So, that's interesting.

02:11:56.980 So, the idea is, you have to have a sensitive taste, where you can taste the poison, even if you eat just a little bit.

02:12:05.040 So, if you eat just a little bit, it's like the taster of a king, basically, right?

02:12:09.060 The idea is, a taster of a king doesn't die every time he does his job. 0.99

02:12:12.560 That's ridiculous.

02:12:13.280 He has to have a sense of taste that is extremely refined, so that if he tastes something, he can know, 0.99

02:12:20.160 ah, this is poison, don't eat it.

02:12:22.680 So, that's part of the mystery of the female role in the Bible. 1.00

02:12:25.900 It's like a woman with taste.

02:12:27.740 The female can identify what's poisonous early, so that it doesn't become so poisonous that it's destructive. 1.00

02:12:33.520 And that's part of that discretion and judgment.

02:12:36.600 Yes.

02:12:36.880 And she can bring that to the attention of her mate. 1.00

02:12:40.100 Here's a potential place of danger and peril that you're overlooking.

02:12:44.020 That would also make sense in relationship to women's finer tuning on the negative emotion side, 1.00

02:12:49.320 because women do feel negative emotion more intensely than men.

02:12:53.160 And that means that they're bellwethers or alarms in a real sense.

02:12:59.940 And they need to be that because they also have to be sensitive to the more,

02:13:03.660 what would you call it, vulnerable needs of children.

02:13:07.020 Yes, that makes sense.

02:13:07.960 Yeah.

02:13:08.660 Well, Matthew, it was a great pleasure speaking with you.

02:13:12.860 I appreciate it a lot.

02:13:14.260 I really liked your book.

02:13:15.220 I would say to everyone who's watching that you could do a lot worse than to spend a couple

02:13:20.320 of hours reading through Matthew's extremely clear book, The Language of Creation, 2018,

02:13:28.000 Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, a commentary that's available broadly on, well, the easiest place

02:13:33.040 to get it is Amazon.

02:13:33.980 It's very well reviewed on Amazon, especially for a self-published book.

02:13:40.220 And I think it's a travesty in some sense that it had to be self-published, because I do think

02:13:44.920 there's some real possibility that it's a great book.

02:13:48.420 And a great book is a very difficult thing to manage, especially when it's simultaneously

02:13:52.400 deep and clear.

02:13:53.840 And I found it extremely useful.

02:13:56.160 I'm going to read it again.

02:13:57.400 And I'm really quite in awe of your capacity to unite the highest and lowest in such a clear

02:14:03.960 and concise and straightforward and rational manner.

02:14:07.860 So to the degree that you were serving the masculine logos in relationship to that book,

02:14:12.660 man, I think you nailed the target dead on.

02:14:15.680 Hello, everyone.

02:14:16.620 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 29, 2022

292. The Language of Creation ｜ Matthieu Pageau

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