https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=J-4mo5GkyLM
Good evening and happy Sunday. I don’t have any brilliant philosophical discourses to begin with, but I do have a little story of something that happened to me this week. Not a terribly exciting story. You know, I’m not even sure quite why I’m telling it, but it won’t take more than about two minutes of your time. So my job as a priest right now is bishop secretary and director of the liturgy office. And in my capacity as bishop secretary, part of my job is to make sure that anytime he goes outside of our chancery building, goes to celebrate a mass or something like that, that everything is smooth and arranged properly for him. Now we had arranged a couple months back for the bishop to go to one of our local nursing homes and to celebrate a 50th anniversary mass for some of the residents there. And one of them was quite sick, might not have all that long left in the world. And the person who arranged this was a religious sister. She’s the one who called me, got the bishop to come out there, found the weekend, all of those little arrangements. And she called me this week and she just had a little question. See, there’s this other priest that goes in at about four o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday to celebrate mass for the residents at the nursing home. He’s got a parish assignment right now, he’s filling in. And so, you know, what do we do about this? What do we do about this? And she was just explaining to me all the different little complexities about this. Other residents aren’t used to having mass at 10 o’clock anymore, they’re used to having mass at four o’clock, about how the local lay chaplain thinks that it would be better just to continue to have the 4 p.m. mass and all of that. And somehow, by the end of that conversation, I had made up my mind to give this other priest and the lay chaplain at this nursing home a call. I don’t even recall when I made my mind up. This wasn’t the sort of thing I was all that terribly excited to do, because it sounded like work and it frankly didn’t seem like that big a deal to me. But somehow, somehow I just made up my mind easily. And by the end of this phone conversation with this religious sister who was arranging these things, I just felt this strong sense that that’s really what I should be doing. So anyway, not that terrible, terribly interesting of a story. But with eyes to see, there might be something interesting in there. Being in a man for Father Eric’s services, being at a choir that visited a nursing home was one of the best services that I have participated in. I wasn’t even able to go to this this week because I was on my way back from my cousin’s wedding in Wisconsin. But this was such a simple mass that the bishop didn’t really need me. It was just him. And, you know, because the rest of the residents didn’t come there was a very, very small and intimate mass. So he didn’t didn’t have me attending to his hat and to his stick. Another more exciting news, I’ve got something very exciting coming up for me later on this week. We’ve got the dedication of the church at the Newman Center in Fargo. So a Newman Center is a Catholic college chapel. And yeah, they had outgrown their space for quite a while and needed something bigger to worship in. And so they’ve been doing this massive construction project with numerous, numerous problems. But now it is completed. And so, yeah, I can get you an exterior shot here. We’ll see if Mark Lefebvre actually likes this one. He’s very, oh, speaking of Mark Lefebvre, there he is. There’s an exterior shot of that church I was talking about. Okay, we finally got a thumbs up from Mark. Let me see if I can get an interior shot without the organist. Well, that’s the organist in there. No, no interior shots. Oh, I think that’s the old building right there. Oh, wow. It was very dark. I didn’t like it. Anyway, anyway, I think we’re on to just the open chatting now. I’ve done enough story time. How you doing, Mark? I’m hanging in. You’re hanging in there? You’re gonna survive? Gonna make it? Yeah, yeah, it’s been moving stuff all weekend. Moving? Yes, yes. You’re not visiting anytime soon. The back room is taken. So let’s pull this stuff now. Oh, okay. Well, I think I’m actually going to try and make it out to the Symbolic World Conference in February. That one’s in Florida. And Florida is where I want to be in February. Right before confirmation season gets crazy. So that should actually work out really well. That will be good. But for all of you listening, you need to look at the link below. And you need to sign up to come to Arkansas to hear me and friend of the show Ted Stiritz. And not friend of the show, but very smart fellow, Dr. Jim talk about poetry as perception. And I’ve got to think that Arkansas would be beautiful this time. Oh, yeah. And Cory is going to be there too. Cory is planning on be there. There will be optional paintball. Also hi to Cory. And me and especially Ted. Yeah. That’s the order of operations, I think. Yeah, I got to work out my way over there. So I’ll be I’ll be looking into that this week. See if I can make that work. Yeah, it’s a 20. No, no, no, no. What was it? It was like a 15 hour drive from where I’m at. And if I really pushed it, I could get that done in a day. But, oh, that would be painful. So that’s on the upper end of me too. Yeah, I’m I’m I’m right about I’ve done it. But oh, there’s trouble. It’s nice. And then Cory came in. How you doing, Cory? It’s good to see you. It’s good to see you guys. How are you all doing? Yeah, it’s just another day in paradise here. Yeah, Florida in February sounds pretty nice in it. It does. It does. You have no idea, actually. Literally zero idea. No, I don’t, because I live in the far south anyway. So February is about as hot as it is any other time of the year. But I’m going to try to go to that too in February. And in fact, my whole family is going to try to go to that. So we’re kind of excited about some of the stuff we’re going to be talking about. Uh huh. Oh, we’re in the negotiation with the grandparent units to maybe make a vacation to Florida out of it. Yeah. Well, I mean, so it’s kind of what like nearby Tampa. There should be some nice Gulf Coast beaches for people to check out. So I’m thinking of trying to drag one of my buddies down there making a week out of it. Yeah, that’s going to be out if he’s doing the Camino this summer, because that would kind of take up a lot of his vacation time. But he says he’ll know by Thanksgiving. I’m a strong believer in walking tours now. Yeah, you were with Ted on that two day pilgrimage, right? Yeah. Yeah. Life changing. Say right now, anybody’s listening. You know, and I’m a brand new Catholic, so everything’s kind of novel for me still. But I’ve never even done anything like that. It was, oh, oh, you should try to go. You should try to go sometime. It was Ted and I are planning on doing something like that. Oh, that’d be great. There was a there was a lot of weeping, a lot of joyful weeping going on. It was so, so cool. Well, Ted has admin privileges. You’re free to use my stream yard to record that. And if you can’t find a channel to host it, this channel will. But not the content. That’s great. I know Ted has a Ted has a channel, too, so it’ll be up to him. I’ll just go wherever the people are. You can. Yeah, you can probably throw it on my channel, too. Yeah, sure. Mark’s all about embodied participation. So that that fits with the patterns. Well, patterns. I mean, you’d be talking about the pattern of the right. So anything that’s really I mean, I talk about history. I mean, I think it’s a little bit of a different kind of thing. So hey, you know, that’s history. Like it was so, you know, John Van Dong talked about the Camino at Chino. That was kind of like his whole big thing. That was the context of the story. And he was trying to get us to watch the movie about it the way which we finally found. It’s not actually available in the United States on Amazon Prime. Like it’s on there, but it doesn’t let you know. It’s not available in the United States on Amazon Prime. No, no, no, no, I paid for it. But I did have to use a VPN to put myself in a different country in order to make it recognize my purchase, which was weird. But anyway, that aside, I’m pretty sure I didn’t admit to doing anything illegal just now on the Internet. But yeah, it was it was a decent decently good movie. And then I was like, well, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it. But you’re fine. Yeah, it was it was a decent decently good movie. And then, you know, Ted had told me about The Walking Pilgrimage and it was he didn’t advertise it as much except that it would hurt. So in that sense, yeah, it was as advertised. Plus much more. You guys with twenty three miles in two days. Yeah. Well, some people have to do that in two hours. Easy. Blanky Kenyans. Sounds like you should be there next year. We’ll see. We’ll see if the bishop lets me run off and play. It’s nice when we schedule vacations at the same time, because then I don’t have any work to do. But I also have to take online classes now. That kind of ties me down. I can watch recordings later, but your online classes are going to be a lot more fun. Your online classes are still through Catholic University, right? They are. They are actually through Zoom. But yeah. Do you recommend the Augustine Institute? The what? I think that’s what I’ve called right. Augustine Institute. Augustine, the Augustine Institute. Augustine Institute. Yeah, no, no, the the the Catholic pronunciation is Augustine and the town in Florida is Augustine. Oh, I don’t know why. The Spaniards. They have an E at the end of that name, though. Like to me, I read Augustine with an E at the end Augustine. And then if it’s no E, then it’s Augustine. But that’s that’s the correct English way to do it, Corey. But the Catholics are coming out of the Roman tradition and Rome doesn’t know how to spell or pronounce things. They did back in the day. But yeah. They’re not as bad as the French. The French like look at it. So le fi. That’s how you’re supposed to pronounce my last or le fev. I don’t know how you get that out of the French. You’re just like completely bonkers. Well, I’ve always called you le fev because that’s the way you pronounce Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s name. So why would you be pronouncing that name, Father Eric? Now you’re suspect. Well, I’m allowed to use his name, you know. No, guilt by association. I’m pretty sure we have to fire you now. Just don’t get excommunicated. Like look, you’re always going to know that’s coming. Just just don’t go there. You know, just just shut up if you have to. Always an option. So yeah, Augustine Institute. That’s out of who runs that? Not me and not Augustine. It’s got Grant Petrie on a lot of things, doesn’t it? Yeah, he’s dead. Grant Petrie is dead? No, Augustine. It’s not Augustine. I think he’s dead. I don’t think he runs the Institute. I mean, you know, only the first death. So it could be. He hasn’t faced the second death yet. Yeah, but people talk about it a lot. It seems like a good online theology education. Yeah. I don’t know if they’re actually I should probably find out they’re credited. Not that I don’t know. Online theology resources. That’s the words that describe what that is. So, yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. And I don’t think that’ll make you crazy. What will make you crazy is the comment section of the National Catholic Reporter Web site. That’ll make you crazy. I’ve noticed. You’ve noticed. You’ve been there. I had I’ve warned you about that specifically, Corey. Yeah, I actually think you did. I think Mark was there when you warned me about it. Yeah. No. Yeah. That’s I mean, you know, in the hierarchy of attention thing, this is this is I think this is what Jonathan’s been pushing more and more. It’s like the hierarchy of attention thing. I still think that we should come up with like a food pyramid. That’s like a way to design your attention the way that you live. So you can only give a certain amount of attention to like, you know, the sugars, the white processed sugars is like Twitter and like comments. I know I have to figure that out, too. It’s almost like an inverted pyramid. It’s like, I don’t know, the thing at the top is the thing you should pay the most attention to. That’s right. Maybe the food pyramid people were doing that on purpose. Yeah, we’ll put the oils and sweets at the top and like, oh, it’s the smallest. So you shouldn’t have as much. Turns out the food pyramid is totally wrong anyway. Oh, yeah, no, you’re just going to sit there eating bread all day, which doesn’t sound bad. But then that’s probably why I’m not as thin as I should be. Well, it’s it’s it’s not the problem is not the bread. The problem is the bread in the United States. That’s actually the problem. 100 percent. What isn’t it like most loaves of bread sold in the United States would be classified as cake or European Union regulations? No, I think most of them would be classified as plastic like building material under any same designation. That’s a great little tidbit, though. That’s true. I’m going to start quoting that. Well, also, there so there is actually a lawsuit. They had to subway had to change how they were doing business in Europe because they were getting billed under the cake tax because they’re there subway loaves are actually cake under the European Union. So, yes. OK, so that’s that’s what I was thinking about. That’s a real I looked it up. I actually somebody told me that I was like, that’s interesting. I wonder if they’re right. And I looked it up. And yes, I saw the lawsuit designation and the whole thing. And I was like, OK, I mean, the thing is, and I saw I saw this YouTube video of going through the industrial process by which modern American sliced bread is made. And they want it to last forever. Right. And they want it so that it’s always soft and they want it so that you can spread things on it without tearing it up. And that’s like three things that are actually really hard to all get together. But if you put enough sugar and chemicals into it, yes. But, bam. Well, then that is that is the problem. Because Subway bakes their own bread locally in the store. So it’s not actually a bread freshness problem at all. It’s a sugar content problem that makes it cake. And so, yeah, even if you solve the freshness problem, you still haven’t solved the sugar problem. And the problem for us is that, you know, crazy people like myself like to shop once a week. Well, if you want fresh bread, unless you’re actually going to make it in your house, which is not I used to do that, actually, it’s an option. It’s not a big deal. You’re not getting fresh bread without shopping every two, three days. And that’s really the difference. And in Europe, it’s not a problem because the grocery stores right down the street. And in fact, there’s three, you know, within walking down the street, you don’t even need a grocery store. It’s like an actual little. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. My bad. Yeah. There’s a bakery. There’s a fresh bakery down the street. Right. No, Margaret, my wife just started picking up sourdough baking and she did not know what she’s getting herself into because she loves doing it. And we all love the bread. But we love it so much that whenever we run out, it’s like, Mom, mom, mom, you make my bread, make my bread until she’s doing it. Like, you know, if she’s not doing it twice a week, then she’s going to be bread and process 24 7 for the hungry boys. Yeah, one boy. We’ve got three little girls. Oh, we’ve got bread machines, don’t we? We do. My parents actually did that for us growing up, and that was actually it’s pretty good as well. Mix and then get hot and mix and then get hot. It’s a real simple thing, and it’s exactly what women in the ancient world would have done. But Father Eric, that’s not nearly as much embodiment. If you let a machine do all of your not enough participation, that’s where’s there’s no you cannot legally put love on your list of ingredients. You just stuff into a machine and turn it on. That’s right. Objection. Objection. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Every Saturday night growing up for at least a period of about four years, my mom would put dough into the bread machine. And then we would go off to Saturday night mass, and then we would come back and she would roll it out. And then she would put tomato sauce on it and then she would put cheese on it and then she would put pepperoni or ham on it. And she would throw it in the oven and we had pizza and I could taste the love, Corey. Well, that sounds like a very different process. That’s that’s also pizza, not bread. I just I don’t think that the bread machine automatically took the love out of it. Doesn’t automatically take the love it. So the bread machine I have was 400 bread maker for 35 bucks. That was their business model. New England was nice for that. Like any anything Louis Vuitton bags or whatever you want, you get it for short money. You might not be able to get it when you want it, but you could get it. You know, Marshall’s TJ Maxx, they’re actually headquartered up there, but there were dozens of companies like that. So I bought a bread machine there years ago because they went on sale. My friends found out. They said, it’s this Building 19 store. Go to that one and went there. I got a bread machine for like 35 bucks or something stupid. And I used it for years. It worked great. Had a bunch of settings. Did make small loaves, small square loaves. They were kind of funny shaped, but whatever. I didn’t care. But yeah, I mean, they there was no love process. You kind of just jump the ingredients in and a couple hours later, however many I forget how long it took. Three or four hours, something like that. There was bread and it was wonderful. But yeah, there’s definitely no variation in the bread whatsoever. But it’s it’s I’d still take that over store brought sliced bread like any day of the week. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. I mean, there’s a compromise because most grocery stores now have a bakery. And if you want long lasting bread, it just so happens. Or if you have a problem with digestion like I used to have in a bad way, it just so happens that sourdough is the bread for you. But sourdough lasts longer and it’s less likely to upset your stomach. And you can buy it fresh made at the grocery store that day. And you can have it for four days, which is very unusual. You can’t do that with any of the other bread you buy. And it tastes way better than all the other breads. And it is the best tasting bread that could possibly be made by humans. That is also true. Yes, true, true, true, true story, true story. And you can even make your own yeast, your own sourdough starter, right? I’ve done that. I’ve made sourdough from scratch with my own starter. Yeah. No, but I mean, like you, I think in order to get a starter, you have to have a yeast culture, which I think normally you have to inherit from somebody else’s. I don’t know how you would start. It’s just crazy process. I didn’t believe it either, but Mark’s about to explain it. You leave it outside. Literally, you just let whatever get into it. You put like a cheesecloth over it, right? So you don’t have flies landing it. Yep. And you let it sit for some ridiculous number of days, I think, actually. And it self starts. And the thing is, if you self start it, this is one of those things. It’s like local honey. I don’t know if you know the local honey trick. Oh, yeah. You always have local honey so you don’t get allergic. You always have local sourdough starter made, you know, started by you because it contains all the local things that you need to get used to anyway. So you don’t have allergies. That’s interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You can make your own starter. It takes a ridiculously long time, as I recall, like six or seven days just to make the starter. And then you’ve got to cultivate the starter before you can use it. Because you’ve got to divide it in half. Yeah. I’d be worried about just like random cultures of because you want you want yeast specifically. Like there’s there’s other sorts of things that could end up in your. I don’t know if you boil the water first and then let it sit. There’s a trick to it. And what you’re supposed to do is they justify it with math. I justify it with magic because I’m a mystical person, right? Of course. But effectively, the stuff you want overwhelms the stuff you don’t. That’s effectively what happens. And so it just. It just wins. Yeah, it just manifests correctly. So I think you I think you clean it with vinegar or something at some stage. I don’t remember the process. I tried it once. I wasn’t successful, but it’s what happens. I try to do things when I’m sick, like I tried to make my own, you know, my own kombucha. And I had it all set and I lost the tracking because I track everything in my head anyway, because I don’t look at lists when I make them. And I lost the tracking on on how long it had been there and all the bottles went, who and I lost all my kombucha. So, yeah, I I lost my starter for sourdough back when I was sick. I should do it again because I can probably track. About 14 days now without too much trouble. Yeah, that’d be a really interesting experiment, too. I always liked the idea of having like I could trace the genealogy of my East culture back to like, you know, San Francisco in 1849 or something like that. But tracing back to Texas in 2023. Sure. Why not? And like, you know, I don’t know. That would be interesting to see how they how they compare. Crazy material. I was asked if I’m the one who stole a rando slot and I am that individual. I know someone else is going to get it. Apologies. Nathaniel, who I saw. Yeah, I got one. Nathaniel’s interview was great, though. I’m glad you got one, too. No, that’s that’s fantastic. Did you did you have your talk yet or? Yeah, I already did. And actually, we decided not to record it for a variety of reasons. But, you know, I just have to ask what you still have rando slot. And we’re not going to get that. That’s criminal, sir. That’s criminal. I have my reasons that there will be there will be other times. That’s fair. Listen, the gospel reading on Friday was there’s nothing that will be said and whispers that won’t be proclaimed on the housetops. So you just have to be patient, Mark. Yeah, literally, I will be revealed. My extremely boring life story will be proclaimed from the rooftops if you so desire to hear it. Oh, no, absolutely. Well, that’s what the randos convo’s are are are good for. Yeah, I mean, somebody was was equating me with a rando. Oh, my. No. Marcus know rando. We looked down our nose and slowly people and clay was like, please come and talk to me. And I was like, all right, man. Sure. No problem. And big for slots. No. Yeah, like flea. Yes. Flea. This is correct. That’s right. We can’t monetize it. It’s the 30 percent that YouTube takes that. Don’t give don’t give P.V.K. a piece of your soul for money. Don’t give him that three dollars and fifty cents, Corey. I pay him anyway. I don’t care. I believe it. P.V.K. actually owes me money. I forgot. I forgot. Oh, you heard us. Oh, Charles. He started an Internet flame war. Charles, I knew Charlie was also not a random. I knew that. You know, the randos from the non randos. Come on. We know. We know. Yeah, I have to tell people you’re not a rando than you’re a rando. I forgot to bug P.V.K. last time I was when I was in California there. He does owe me money. So said it on the Internet, man. That’s that was his mistake. So they could have half his half is six dollars and fifty cents that he made off my first first convo. Maybe I’ll hit him up for the other convo’s too. I bet he made some bank on them. You can’t even get a five dollar footlong for that. And it’s like not it’s not in Sacramento, California. I’ll tell you that much. Geez, man. That place can’t get a gumball for six dollars. Massively expensive. I freaking nuts out there. And oh, my goodness, if I ever see another white test, I’m going to scream. Yeah, that’s that’s California. California. Dude, it’s mad. It’s mad. They’ve got they’ve got stoplights to get on the highway. And they were on on the weekend. That was like their freeways are way better, though, like as somebody who’s lived in like five other states now. I know. OK, so people talking about our cycle there. No, people talk. That’s that’s not wrong. But they’re they don’t have it here either. And the roads are oh, I hate the Texas version. So like they have this thing where they just have parallel streets one way on either side of the freeway. And like you have to like cross over the freeway or under the freeway any time you want to just turn and you get on it. It’s instead of on and off ramps. You have pulled it. There’s so much traffic. It’s frustrating. I hate it. I miss California sometimes. Sometimes the Bay Area, dude, going into San Fran from Fremont. I was like, you know, because they’re like, we don’t know what to do about the traffic. And I’m like, do you count? Do you not understand you can’t go from five to three to two to three? Do you with lanes like you can’t do that? You’ve done I say California like idiots. San Francisco and L.A. are like a separate thing from California. I do not. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Yeah. There’s the north the north of that valley, the south of that valley. And then there’s the rest of California is really three parts to California. Well, they want to divide it into like six states. I’m like, OK, but she would do three would do. That’s fine. Well, because that would flip the entire country. See, people don’t realize that you cut off. It won’t happen. Yeah. It’s like New York. You cut off southern New York and all of a sudden. Like the Democrats never win another federal election. You cut off Southern California Democrats never win another federal election. Right. So, yeah, people don’t realize how how bad it is, how badly gerrymandered everything is in those two states alone. So Massachusetts is the same way. That’s why that’s why they keep electing Republican governors. It’s because if you actually look at the numbers, there’s way more Republicans than Democrats. But the way things are jiggered, those states are run by Democrats, like overwhelmingly, which is weird. It’s just not representative government. But not that I’m complaining about non representative government. I’m just saying people don’t realize if you had real democracy, your side wouldn’t win. Just saying you’re not representative. We should go back to real Athenian democracy. Direct ballot on every initiative. I thought that was like that’s leadership by demons. Right. No, no. Carl Benjamin has this right. Pottery shards. That was his version. We need to go back to real Athenian democracy. Pottery shards. I’m like, yes, pottery shards. No pottery shard. No vote. I’m I’m all in. Well, and if you actually read Plato’s Republic and you comprehend it, which apparently is too big a bar for like almost everybody right in the middle of book eight, when it starts talking about the destruction of democracy or how democracy ends. If you read that that section into tyranny, you can kind of read a line, look around and go, oh, I see what you’re saying. And then read the next line, look around and go, oh, yes, I recognize it. And it’s weird that no one’s mentioning this. Mark, this is really easy. We just print more money and give it to poor people. Oh, I’m sorry. That’s my bad. You know, somebody somebody said something really, really interesting today on Twitter, actually. Was it you? No, no. I mean, look, I’ve got I didn’t know this till the other day. I’ve got tweets with four thousand views. It’s like what? I’ve got a bunch with three thousand views. I got a bunch of two thousand views. I got a bunch with a thousand. I had no idea. No, it wasn’t me. What? Here it is. Give me a second. We thought pretending not we thought pretending to not judge between good and evil would redeem us because that’s how we were supposed to live in the garden before we ate from the tree. Unfortunately, we did eat from the tree and we ain’t in the garden. And I was like, that’s massively insightful for the whole equality doctrine and not seeing good and evil, which is just a pattern that I’m that I’m seeing over and over again. It’s just, you know, the big ask from people is, well, no one can believe, you know, of course, of course Hamas wouldn’t like a bomb Israel or try to attack Israel. And they come up with a thousand materialist excuses why that would never happen. Right. And really, the reason why they come up with the material excuses is because they can’t be evil because no one’s evil. There’s no evil in the world. And you see that all the way down to people like, well, of course, this person didn’t, you know, of course, no one would let someone take your house like in the courts, of course, because a lawyer wouldn’t be that evil and the bank wouldn’t be that evil and the judge wouldn’t ignore that evil as it was unfolding in front of the judge. And the appellate court wouldn’t also go along with it for reasons which were never made clear to me. Of course not. Except that’s exactly what’s happening. And it is because there must be something else going. It can’t be that these people are actually knowingly that evil, but they are. And it’s like we’re just kind of ignoring it. It’s like they’ve never read the Psalms before. Well, that’s probably true. With a song just like, why am I suffering from all of these evil men? No, no, no, no. Why aren’t you doing anything about it? You’re supposed to skip over all those parts that like are harsh and like judgmental because those are, you know, we don’t know how to interpret those. So we read the happy fun parts. Right. No judgment. No judgment. Right. Well, and then and then that’s what destroys your discernment. And now you’re surprised when evil rears its ugly head and usually just ignore it. But eventually, eventually people behead babies or throw them in basements or whatever the heck. Yeah. So I guess the wall. Yeah. So I love the conversation that John Breveke had now finally on his own channel with Ken Lowery and D.C. Schindler. It was so good. And I love that D.C. Schindler heard the word domicide for the first time in that little conversation. I don’t know if you guys listen to this, but I highly recommend. But that’s kind of what we’re setting ourselves up for. We’re setting ourselves up to be a whole society that gets PTSD at the same time, because when we when we encounter evil and it becomes it’s not just on the Internet somewhere and it actually happens to you. You don’t have the capacity to deal with it if you don’t have a worldview that includes evil as a real thing that can actually happen to you in real life. That happens to an entire society at the same time. Like that’s that’s kind of what happened in 9 11. If you think about it, like the whole society got PTSD worldview collapse is what that means at the same time. And the whole world like nobody knew what to do. We’re walking around like zombies for like a week. And then we all really started doing stuff. Say what? Oh, everybody went to church Sunday after 9 11. Yeah, no, that’s really insightful. Cory, I like that. Well, it’s funny you bring up zombies. Did you watch my live stream on Friday? That’s what it was about. That’s exactly the part of the theme was the zombification. I didn’t bring up the domicile. I didn’t really. There was so much to talk about. And I think the problem with domicile and I didn’t realize that Ken Lowry and I’m not a fan and DC Schindler. And I’ve got my about DC Schindler. I love most of this stuff. I didn’t realize they talked off to check that one out. Thanks for the thanks for the tip. But I think the thing with domicile is effectively the way John Verbecky talks about domicile is as a materialistic problem. He completely gets the history wrong on Alexander for whatever weird reason. That’s not the only history he gets wrong. But I think the only form of domicile is spiritual. And that’s really what’s happening is that if you don’t have a spiritual home, all the material home in the world that you grew up with that is stable is not going to it’s not kind of like you’ll still get domicile. Like there’s no there’s no material solution to domicile at all. Like it’s just non existent. Right. And it does not say that the material side can’t help you can’t anchor you whatever. But if you don’t have a spiritual home, your domicile and that’s the end of that until you fix the spiritual problem. That that would be my thesis on it. And I don’t. Well, the psychology aspect is it’s this is the thing that I’ve been working on. This is kind of like my pet project is that you can describe this stuff using materialist scientific language. And it’s not wrong. It’s just narrower than what the full like it is fundamentally spiritual. But you can use spiritual language to describe scientific things and vice versa. It’s just if you think it’s all material, then your your space of activity is only going to be here when really it’s so much more that’s going on. But it’s still helpful to map because then you can start to draw people into the you know, hey, there’s a lot more going on here. It can be helpful to map. But that’s when people talk about the confusing the map for the territory. That’s exactly what it is. Just that even Peterson himself, the great Peterson, who made our wonderful Peterson sphere for us, he does as a materialist, he does not understand this. And even though he is channeling the spirit of opening up that for people, because the problem is that is always a reduction. And that I hope this came out in the live stream on Friday. That is what causes the zombification of everything is the fact that you’re mapping it all, reducing it to material. In fact, I think it was DC Schindler that I was talking about. I got into a tip on Twitter shocker. Me getting into a tip at all anywhere and Twitter. Like, what was it with me? I think I commented on one of your things on Twitter and no, actually, I think it was with the guy who did the wonderful quote that I actually thanked him for. So that’s really good framing. You know, DC Schindler, I think it was saying that, oh, well, the way to understand spirit is this I we relationship. And I’m like, oh, my goodness. Now, that’s a total reduction. That’s actually a really poor way to understand spirit because you can’t understand school spirit. It’s like, oh, school spirits absorbed in the eye. And I’m like, not if I didn’t go to the school. So you’re saying school spirit doesn’t exist if the school I didn’t attend or know anything about. That’s ridiculous, right? You have to understand spirit is an emanation from above. So when you’re when you’re personifying it and only personifying it, you’ve reduced the spirit to the personification when, in fact, the spirit exists beyond that. Like the spirit in New York City is not some total people in it. That doesn’t make any. It’s not an I we thing. No, that that’s not what it is. There is some spirit of the city that would remain even with the people not there. That is the imprint of the people who made the city, who built the city, who lived in the city. This is where we get ghosts from. Right. Like there’s an arinic aspect to spirit that because spirit emanates from above. Like and you also couldn’t explain something like the spirit that emerges in the mob that becomes angry. Like where does the angry spirit come from? Is that an I we relationship? I don’t think so. I think that’s something that’s coming from outside of the I we and possessing everybody. But, you know, and I suspect I don’t know. I haven’t talked to DC Schindler. I’d love to someday. I suspect he’s not accounting for all that. Right. I think I think he’s a little too materialistic. I’m not sure if like and actually I thought is DC Schindler Catholic? I’m not sure. I thought he was. He’s a Thomas. Yeah, he’s a Thomas. But like he’s on the edges of, you know, kind of pushing the boundaries a little bit, it seems like. So but they were talking a lot about Hegel and I am not at all spun up on what it was. But I think what you’re describing, Mark, was they were engaging with what Hegel was talking about. Yes. At one point in there, DC Schindler actually said exactly what you just said. He’s like, now we get into the critique of Schindler of like, you know, a lot of what he said was was true and pointing at real things. But ultimately, it fails because of what you just said. It doesn’t take into account the vertical as being its own separate thing. Like it works for the horizontal, the I we thing. But you have to link it into something that’s absolute and foundational to draw in the vertical aspect, the I we. So it’s not just this thing that’s free floating. So so see, but see, this is exactly my critique of using somebody like Hegel. First of all, and somebody else made this mistake. They’re like, I think it was Stephen Hicks. I like Stephen Hicks. I’ve talked to him a couple of times. Wonderful, wonderful guy. I really like most of his work is fantastic. Hegel is not a philosopher. Hegel did not self identify as a philosopher. He did zero. I’m sorry. He was a theologian. And the problem with Hegel from everything I can glean from talking to people, he was a bad theologian, bad at it. He’s just terrible. And I think that so my problem is being DC Schindler. And this is like this is a ridiculous critique in some sense. But also, like I’ve seen a lot of people do this. Don’t talk about Hegel. He’s an idiot. Like, why are you why are you bringing this guy up? He’s a bad theologian. He’s not even a philosopher. You shouldn’t bring him up in either. Right. Because he’s not a philosopher. So don’t bring him up in a philosophy discussion. And he’s not a good theologian. Use good theologians instead and reference them. Unless you’re going to use him in the negative case and say the problem with Hegel. And the clip that was on Twitter was just that first clip. So, of course, you’ve watched the video and I haven’t. So I believe you that DC Schindler wouldn’t have made that mistake because he’s a pretty smart guy. And I’ve listened to him a few times and he’s really good. But my problem is, you know, even referencing Hegel for me is a mistake. I think referencing Kant is a mistake. Unless you’re going to say the idiot, Immanuel Kant, or the moron, you know, Hegel. Right. Because really, like, you have to preface it with because otherwise people take the clip out of context and say, see, this smart guy Hegel agrees with me. Spirit is nothing more than the Iwi relationship. That was the argument I had. I was like, dude, you can’t reduce it to the Iwi. And I got pushback. And I’m like, how are you reducing school spirit to Iwi? And how are you reducing like the spirit of New York City to an Iwi relationship? And the response was, oh, it’s actually included in the I. And I was like, holy crap. Like, if you were going to make a rationalist argument, you wouldn’t say that. You’d say it was like you also kind of have to you have to engage, though, because they’re part of the historical thought process that got us to this point. Right. So if we’re going to try to make things better, we at least have to critique the stuff that’s already out. You engage by saying the mistake that one of the many mistakes that Hegel, the worst theologian of all time, ever made. And then you proceed from there so that people don’t go on Twitter and quote this as though Hegel made some. I mean, they were defending the Hegelian statement. And I’m like, you can’t defend Hegelian dialectic like Hegel’s dialectic is a wrong and be stupid and see obviously broken. Like, I don’t don’t even bring it up except to say Hegel had a broken idea of dialectic, but only included two things and it doesn’t work for the following reasons. I agree. If that’s how you’re going to engage with it. Yes. But when you’re engaging it in a way that somebody can take it and defend it, which is exactly what happened on Twitter. Now I have a problem because you enabled that to. And that’s what pisses me off. Like, do not lift these guys up. I’ve gotten in so many arguments with people about, you know, we have to take Emmanuel Kant seriously. Absolutely. I do not. I can laugh at him all the way until I die. And I will still be right because he’s he’s laughable. Kant is laughable. Hegel’s laugh. These guys are laughable. They made obvious three year old error. Like, then this is the problem. I really think these people have never talked to enough three year olds because and I’m not joking. If you talk to enough three year olds, they will quote Hegel. They will quote Emmanuel. I’m not. I’m dead serious. And the thing is, I know because they’re three, they never read them. So these big deal. And the thing that you could say, well, Mark, maybe those quotes aren’t the important ones. I never read Hegel. If I know a quote from Hegel, it’s because somebody else thought it was important. If somebody else thought it was important and I heard it from a three year old, I don’t know what to tell you about how the world works. But likely it’s not a big like thing that you know, only Hegel could have come up with or something. Right. Because the three year olds are rediscovering it independently, just knowing the minimum amount of language. It’s kind of suspicious. Right. That’s that’s kind of suspicious. So I agree with you. You have to deal with them. But but as with all bad things, you have to deal with them by saying these people were obviously wrong. And here’s why. Right. And then give the correction so you don’t get people quoting them as though they’re smart. Hegel’s not there’s nothing good in Hegel. I’m sorry. I’ve asked people that this is the other thing you ask people. OK, you like Hegel. What was good that Hegel said it? They’ve never had an answer. That at this point, literally because I was in people, nobody actually read Phenomenology of the Spirit. That’s that’s just a book that gets printed and then put up on people’s shelves. That would be an exercise in like self torture. Yeah. If you’ve actually made it, you know what? Shout out anybody in the comments if you’ve actually made it through Phenomenology of the Spirit. I’ll DM you later. We’ll get you some spiritual direction. A little bit of counseling, you know. Hot take Mark’s spirit animal is Archibald asparagus. Is that a vegetarian reference? Oh, that is. Is that the name of the asparagus? I disagree. I think Mark’s spirit animal is Vizzini from The Princess Bride. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, morons. Yes. Yes. The best part of the movie right there. Yes. You know, Mark, you just you just put into words the entirety of my experience of modern philosophy. I had to take a class in it, right? And you know, and and the way my modern philosophy professor would teach philosophy was he would just embody whatever philosopher we were talking about. He’s a really sharp dude, so he could just do it. You and him. If you got in a fight, it’d be fun to watch. And and just the nonsense. We were just also mad about modern philosophy because it’s like, how do you know there isn’t an evil demon that’s deceiving you into thinking that you’re having a sensory experience outside your head, huh? And that’s all we had. Right. So this is Dr. Evil. Is that what this is? Descartes, Dr. Evil confirmed. Yeah, yeah. Well, and this is this is like I listen to I don’t know how. I think actually I think I deserve a medal and possibly millions of dollars. I listened to half of Donald Hoffman and Peterson and I was like, what is wrong? What is wrong with these people? Like they’re both nuts. Like, why are they? Why are they? Why are they talking like that? It’s crazy talk. It’s complete and utter crazy talk. And look, this is not like my personal opinion. I’ve actually talked to people like I used to live in Boston. I used to go walk into the best colleges and universities in the world in some cases and talk to people. This is all the time. Hang out in Harvard Square and just talk to, you know, major philosophers in some cases and, you know, visiting people visited. Right. And Lantern Jack, Dr. Lantern Jack on YouTube, he also runs the Ancient Greece Declassified. Excellent. Excellent podcast, by the way. Excellent. He runs that. He and I ran a clubhouse room where we basically defended because this is his position, too. It’s not just my position. I’m not the only person who’s noticed this by far. His position is modern philosophy is all garbage. No one’s gotten past Plato and Hegel didn’t get past Plato. Right. Heidegger knew he didn’t get past Plato. Nietzsche at least suspected he couldn’t get past Plato. I don’t think he admitted to it. Heidegger did. Heidegger flat out admitted it. Like none of these guys, as quote modern as they are, have gotten past Plato. That’s kind of significant. But Jack and I defended the idea that modern philosophy is all garbage. None of them got past Plato. We had a bunch of amateur. Some of them had PhDs in philosophy, but Jack has a PhD in philosophy. He doesn’t. Jack doesn’t like being, you know, it being said that he has a PhD in philosophy. That’s how much he hates modern philosophy. It’s his degree. It’s his PhD. And he’s like, it’s more like ancient philology. I like to be called an ancient philologist. I don’t want to be associated with these people because he, unlike almost everybody else, actually went to a bunch of these schools. He’s been around the world at the best schools in the world, talking to the heads of the philosophy department. And the thing he told me was, and not just me, he’s told a lot of people this. So the thing he said was he would ask these guys, you know, what do you think? He would ask these guys, what do you think about the quest for truth? And almost all of them, like 80% of them, and some of these guys are famous, well-known, currently practicing philosophers, a couple of them are dead actually, would say, oh no, we’re not, we’re not on the quest for truth. And he’d explain to them, you realize the people paying your bill for your school think that’s what your department does, right? And they’d be like, yeah, we don’t care. Well, you’d appreciate this, Mark, right? Like, there’s a reason for that. Like, show me a modern philosopher who had like kind of a life that forced them to deal with real things in like a real life-threatening or like existential kind of way before they went off to write all this crazy abstract stuff. Like, I’m curious to know, I’m thinking, like, you know, sure, Mark was really poor. Did Nietzsche get kicked in the face a few times? No, Mark, no, no, no. Mark was not poor. See, that’s the thing. This is the thing that bothers me. Well, no, you’re right, you’re right, because he was kind of living off of everybody else’s. From a wealthy family, he had a freaking job, and he had a job that allowed him enough time to write that ridiculous tome. So what did Nietzsche do? He got rejected by a chick. That hurts, man. No, no, he wasn’t like a… Look, I felt that in the sixth grade dance, you know. I know what he went through. Okay, so at least Nietzsche has the experience of a teenager. That’s progress. That’s not bad. That’s not bad. I’ll give him that. Yeah, yeah, but Mark came from a wealthy family. Like, that’s what everybody… And he went to school in a time when nobody went to college, like nobody, right? But it’s not like embodied, right? The whole point of modern philosophy isn’t really to like discover truth in the sense of truth as something applicable, that’s something based on your experience and your being able to actually make people in their day-to-day lives do things that are better and make that like the inseparable core of what it is that you’re trying to accomplish, right? Instead of building up something that might be called truth, but it’s totally abstract and unconnected from most people’s daily experience. Right, but again, this is the sort of question that a pragmatist… I don’t know if Jack would like that, but a pragmatist like Jack would ask, which is, you do realize that the people paying the bill that pays your salary believe that this is the thing you’re doing and that’s not the thing you’re doing. And their response, which is exactly what you’d expect from a sophist, yes, and I mean that in the platonic sense because they thought the sophists were the worst humans on the planet, basically, and I agree. That’s exactly the sophist response is, eh, who cares? This is what we’re doing. Right, it’s a total disconnection to your point from reality. There’s no embodiment. Right, well, there’s no embodiment, there’s no participation, right? Right, we can take it away from embodiment, there isn’t even any participation whatsoever. But I did want to address that, no, in fact, you cannot pack your car and have it yet. You can pack your car and have it yet. You can’t pack your car and have it yet because there’s no packing and have it yet. Everybody knows that. It took me a second to figure out what on earth you were saying. That’s, well, that’s how it works in New England. I mean, you get a role with the New England accent. Well, you know, I just think I’m going to stay out here in North Dakota then, don’t you know? There you go. There you go. You’re most welcome, ma’am. You’re most welcome. I have a question that’s going to take us down a different path. Good. This is mostly a Father Eric question. Thank you. He’s like, good, thank God. So I’m curious to know, what does it take or are, no, that’s not the right question. Is there interest in, interest in manpower in like starting new monasteries in the United States? Because I learned about this Clear Creek Abbey place and how cool it is and it has a cool story. But how much is that happening? Is that happening much anywhere else? And like, you know, I’m interested in the tradition of monasticism and I would like to, you know, visit more monasteries and see more of them appear in the United States. I think they’re generally a very good thing. Yeah, we need a lot more. There’s a few cool places out there, mostly in the South for some reason. I can’t figure that out. It’s probably just because land is cheap. I don’t know. We used to have lots of big monasteries with all sorts of monks running around doing monkish stuff. And I think especially of St. John’s Monastery and University in Minnesota. And this was like, you know, all of these German immigrants came. They built this big Benedictine monastery. They had like top of the line university and humanities department. And then one day they all just went crazy. And, you know, they don’t really have a whole lot of young monks coming in. Nobody really wants to do what they’re saying. And they’ve basically handed off control of their university to lay people. And it’s just going to dilute the whole thing. And they’re just going to go to lay people, and it’s just going to die. But what do you think, Father Eric, about this idea that I was mentioning earlier from Twitter that I thought was brilliant? Like, yeah, if we just get rid of the distinction between good and evil, we’ll be back living in the garden. Because I think that seems deeply insightful to me in terms of equality doctrine and the flattening of the world and the way we’re mapping things materially. Because that’s ultimately a materialistic map, right? Well, if you didn’t eat the fruit, then you didn’t leave the garden. And therefore, if you undo eating the fruit, which just gave you this knowledge, this gnosis, so you undo the gnosis and now you’re back in the garden. Even under, you know, materialist, say logical rationalist thought, it’s still stupid. It’s still stupid. I think I’m going to finish Corey’s question a little bit just by saying there’s not enough monasticism right now. So, but you, I caught the intro to the last, was it last week or two weeks ago? And you talked about the little unknown history of Catholicism and how there’s kind of a, it seems like there might be a bit of a turnaround happening. Like, has it not caught up yet to the said interest? Yeah, yeah. So, so there’s a lot of novitiates, by the way, at Clear Creek. It was really cool to see. There was way more novitiates than there were older gents. Yeah. So there’s a lot more diocesan priests than anything else. Right. So we’re the general infantry of the Catholic Church, at least like, I guess I’m actually an officer. I’m a captain. I’m a captain. I’m a captain. But, you know, we’re the captain of the biggest battalions of armies there. So, and it’s, you know, I think like religious life is really delicate. Right. You’ve got all these people, you have no marriage, right. And they all have to live by this rule. And if they hold on to the rule, you know, they show up for their prayers. They basically practice the wisdom that’s been handed on to them for generations. Then this can actually work. But when you don’t actually do that. Right. So like one of the things a lot of these monasteries did is like, well, we were spending too much time praying, you know. And so we’re just we’re not going to spend as much time praying because Vatican II, we have work to do. Right. My dude, if you’re not praying like four to six to eight hours a day, what are you going to be doing? Like that’s your job. That’s the most valuable thing you do for the world. The hierarchy of attention. Right. Well, that’s the big thing at the bottom of the attention pyramid. Right. But I think that’s part of the problem. Right. Like there’s all these memes about, you know, people coming up. Like I saw one today, actually, I forget which which one it was because there’s so many of them. Right. They basically said, oh, yeah, you just reinvented X. Right. And I think a lot of what you hear is the reinvention of monasteries. We should all get together and community and grow food together. It’s like, dude, you just described a monastery. Yeah. Yeah. But people don’t know. Like, why would you reinvent it? Well, it’s because people don’t know. And that’s that’s when I talk about the recession of the church. That’s part of it. Is it people don’t know what the church used to do? They don’t know about monasteries. They don’t understand that that was an option. And it’s the inverse of what Father Eric’s talked about before with like the nuns are finally given an option called feminism. Right. And they can leave. And then it just turns out and I feel it’s it’s lovely when I get to feel like complete moron. And I did about a week ago within the past week or so. Adam and I found out that the word career means to run a course at full speed. That’s what the word career means. It’s kind of like that’s right. Is that what you want? That’s good. Right. It’s like, is that what you want? You want a career or do you want a life of of what would you call it? Obedience to something higher. How’s that? You know, yeah, because career like there’s a connotation with career as being career. That’s cool. So Emma just made the point. I want to live in a monastery village. She said that’s actually a spoiler. Exactly the reason why I asked the question, because that’s precisely what we want to figure out how to do. My family is going to be at the point where we don’t know what we’re doing anymore. But that seems like that might be a good pattern to figure out how to bring back. So even if well in the pattern doesn’t have a modern pattern as opposed to the to the modern pattern. As opposed to the to the correct pattern, the pattern we had that worked for thousands of years, basically at least fifteen hundred years. Right. The modern pattern is that monasteries are someplace you drive to in the country. It’s like, no, that’s totally freaking wrong. The monastery is the is the thing in medieval times that held the wealth of the community and the community was built around because and the thing was you didn’t have big government. Basically. Right. So the job of big government was being done by the church like charity. The thing that we call welfare welfare, by the way, was invented in South Carolina. I’ve been to the place. It’s up the street. I’ve been there twice, actually. So, yeah, the whole idea that like that whole use of that word and the way they use it right up the street about an hour about an hour’s drive from here. That that’s charity that the government version of charity is called welfare. When you say welfare, that’s actually the correct version of that. We’ll call it the material version of charity is called welfare. The spiritual version of charity is charity. And that was handled by the church because when it’s ethereal, when you put the spiritual first, right, you prevent your domicide. But you have the spiritual center, which is the spiritual pinnacle. The spiritual pinnacle of Christianity is not the church. It’s the monastery. It’s the monastery, like because they’re the guys that do the most prayer. The church doesn’t do the prayer. The church. I think you want to use the word parish there. What I think parish. I think parish is getting more at what you mean. Well, parish would include the monastery. But what I mean is the most pious, the spiritual exemplar of life is the monk. It’s not the priest. No offense, Father. You’re not a prophet. I felt that for a while, actually. Right. But I mean, that’s the thing. Right. And then there’s a, you know, because their hierarchy of attention, if you want to put it that way, Corey, since that’s your framing, their hierarchy of attention is to pray eight to 10 to whatever. Exactly. No, exactly. And I think that’s exactly. And I think that’s exactly. So let me. This is exactly the line of study that I’ve been going down for the past couple of years now as I’m trying to synthesize Jordan Peterson stuff and John Breveke stuff and Pajos stuff. Like the hierarchy. So this, I got the hierarchy of attention thing by blending. Peterson talks about how you actually think about all of reality can be construed as a hierarchy of priorities. Right. Literally a hierarchy of value judgments. Right. And you can start modeling that in like, imagistically, like with a graph, a graphic from Matthew Pajos book. And you can, once you start modeling things like reality and consciousness using that, you can start to draw all sorts of insights from it. And it’s a pyramid, right? It’s a pyramid. That’s why it’s actually, and it’s a good way to explain what eminence and emergence is and how they relate to each other and how it works in reality. And why attention is so critical because it’s this dynamic reciprocal cycle of creating your environment and your environment shaping what you’re able to do in it. And, you know, reciprocal in their ring and reciprocal opening all this stuff. And it’s actually totally true that as misinformation becomes more and more of a thing and as reality itself becomes harder and harder to perceive and understand and know what’s real with AI. But you don’t even need AI. But you don’t even need AI just the way that we’re going in our culture. You need to pick something that you know is true to anchor your attention on. And that shapes the way you see everything else and makes it like that. That is the way to get through the misinformation. You know, impossible. And so guess what the thing is? It’s Christ. It’s prayer. It’s like literally if you spend more time praying and reading the Bible than doing anything else, it really shapes the way. It doesn’t mean you have to ignore the real stuff that’s going on and all the hard stuff and the awful stuff and the Twitter stuff. But maybe spend five minutes doing that so you can be informed generally and let your interpretation come from the thing that you’re spending a few other hours in. You know, and maybe maybe there’s a hierarchy of other stuff you should give your attention to before Twitter, you know, etc. But what are you describing, Corey? And it’s interesting. I didn’t realize this. And I’m not saying this claim was made, but the claim was indicated out by John Vervecki. What you’re describing is what John Vervecki would call relevance realization. And relevance realization he got from the idea of what to pay attention to in the hierarchy or level of analysis. So that’s the name of the problem. And that actually came from before. It came from like the 60s when they were trying to design AI essentially. And they ran into the, what’s the technical word for it? They discovered that at some point if you’re trying to create a robot that solves a problem, you come up with the combinatorial explosive problem of the robot literally doesn’t know what to look at and pay attention to in order to find the problem to solve. Exactly. But also what you’re talking about at the same time, because what relevance realization, the problem of relevance realization is an emergent problem. Notice my use of words. I’m pretty careful and precise. It’s an emergent problem when you don’t start in the right place. So why do you have an emergent problem? You only have an emergent problem when you don’t have an emanation constraining the emergence. And so relevance realization is a problem that’s created, that doesn’t exist without an improper appreciation. Or in other words, when the postmoderns come around and say you can decide your own interpretation of a text, which is absolutely what they do. And you can say they don’t do that directly. It’s absolutely A1. Another way of saying that. So there’s a couple of it’s good to disambiguate because another way of saying that and what they’re what they’re implying is that there is not really an eminent thing that holds everything together. But at the same time, it exactly illustrates the problem that you literally cannot have emergence without an implicit eminent point. You just aren’t able to perceive what it is. But it’s slightly worse than that, Cory, because what Vervecki is trying to do and what Peterson’s trying to do is to use emergence to get up to emanation. Literally, they’re building the Tower of Babel. Like, I mean, like, that’s why Peterson’s doing politics now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope and I pray that there I think they’re open to the idea that there could be an eminent point that they need to discover and pay more attention to. And I think they’re like I get the impression that they’re genuinely open to that. It’s just, you know, it’s a problem of faith in any other thing. Like in order to accept it, it requires a decision to accept it. And that’s that’s a hard leap for people who have problems with Christianity or what have you. It’s the problem of the word I try to avoid using on my channel. I can use it here though. This isn’t my channel. Right. Which is it. And it’s the problem. And this is the problem with all the Christians understanding the problem. It’s the problem of submission. Like the idea of submission never occurs to these people. And I mean that for Peterson, too. Like I love Peterson, but also, right. Why do you avoid using that word? That’s a really important word, I think. Yeah. Well, they don’t they don’t have enough humility to submit to the fact that, you know, I mean, but Fandre Clay suffers from this to a large degree. Like it’s just submission. Like at some point there are hard lines that have to be drawn. And you have to start in the right place to draw those lines. Otherwise, you can’t you can’t discern. Well, why why if if if we’re OK with people being married and gay, then why can’t they also go to church? Well, maybe that’s OK. But then if they can go to church, why can’t they also serve in church? And then if they can serve in church, why can’t they also run the church? Well, they can run the church. Why can’t they also dictate church policy? Well, yeah, that’s because it’s a slippery slope. But it’s only a slippery slope if you don’t start in the right place, which is sodomy is a sin. And therefore, it’s not that hard. Right. I mean, Manuel asked me about that. He said, well, well, I don’t understand this problem because he was listening to the to Van Du Cleis synod there. And their church is blowing up over this issue, as every other church that’s touched it is as you know, has has done. Right. They all blow up. And hopefully the Catholics will pull up from that, too. Sounds like they’re going the same way. Right. But the thing is, I was like because he asked me, why don’t the Catholics have this problem? And I go, because the Catholics effectively take the dumb route and they say sodomy sin, sin bad and therefore. And then it’s never a question. The question never appears. It’s not open to debate or discussion because we already have the answer. The answer is no. Like, it’s not no, you can’t receive communion or anything like that necessarily. I mean, that’s a that’s a decision made by a bishop. Right. But but the answer is, well, no, you certainly can’t move past the hierarchy past this point because it’s a sin. And if you’re embracing a sin, any sin, there’s a bunch of sins, then you can’t be there. And it’s not that if you’ve sinned, you can’t be there because those are two different things. Embracing the sin is different from fighting the sin and failing. Right. Fighting and failing is not the same as accepting. I don’t know why people don’t. And that’s part of the submission. Right. Because there’s a double submission. There’s a submission to the fact that it’s a sin. And then there’s a submission to the fact that despite your laziness and your ineptitude and your utter incompetence, you’re still going to fight. Like you have to fight. Like you can’t say, oh, the world’s world’s full of evil. So you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go take the Benedictine option, which is a ridiculous term and has nothing to do with what people say it does. Right. And hide. I’m going to go in the woods and hide. No. Christians are for lions. Get in front of the lion. And you know what? And this is the thing that people don’t realize because people used to play this game with me all the time. They go, Mark, if somebody had a gun to your head and they say, give me all your money, you give them all your money right away. And I go, absolutely, I would not. And they’re like, no, you definitely would because you don’t want to die. And I’m like, dude, I hate to break it to you. But and I am hopeful. But as near as I can tell, I am going to die. And so the question is not would you do or not do something based on your death because your death is inevitable. The question is, how do you live? Right. And now you never ask somebody in that scenario if you understand what I just said, you would never ask somebody how they would behave if their life were on the line. Because the answer is irrelevant. If you understand that you are going to die and the only thing that matters is how you live, the fact that somebody threatens your life or that you have to stand in front of a tank or that you have to walk in front of a war zone to try and save a baby, the fact that you may die doing that is not interesting or important or relevant. There is some relevance realization. Your death is not relevant because it’s already going to happen. No matter what you do or don’t do, no matter how many lions you avoid, that lion is going to eat you. The lion is going to eat you. The question is not whether or not the lion is going to eat you, but when when and under what circumstances and what did you do? Did you get in front of the lion to save the baby behind you? Or did you go take the Benedictine option and live in the woods? That’s the freaking question. That’s why when people are like, you wouldn’t do that, you’d get canceled. I’m like, if you do something because you’re going to lose your quote job or your career is on the line, then you’re weak, incompetent and useless. And I have no need for you. And I don’t want you around anyway. So I prefer that you get canceled if you’re worried about that. It’s just my take. Sorry. Go ahead. No, no, no, that’s about it right there. That’s all I really wanted to say. A friend of mine made that for me. I love it. It’s great. So but I’m going to and I love everything you just said. I kind of want to clip it and just like play it to myself to motivate myself in the morning. But at the same time, you also have to admit that there’s a difference between like being able to say that and understand that propositionally versus making it a participatory like you’ve lived this and you’ve actually risked your life before. And you know what that’s like and you go back and do it again sort of way because those are two different. That’s but that’s where the hard part is. But you see that this is this is the real problem. And there’s some absurdity in Plato’s Republic. Fantastically absurd book. Everything about it is awesome where they they measure the distance of certain types of groups of people from one another geometrically. They’re nine times worse. What? It’s so funny too because I mean it’s not wrong either. Right. It’s like oh OK. Yeah. I guess if you were making that reduction we’re so far away from what you just said that we’re not even asking those questions because if you want to talk about what to pay attention to. So and I did this on Twitter today. In fact right. I explained to somebody. Look actually two different tweets to two different threads. I explained look I don’t care what group you are in or claim to be in or somebody else claims you’re in. Right. Let’s just suppose it’s Hamas. OK. I don’t judge people that way. I judge people by good and evil. Then you can argue with my definition of good and evil all day long. I really don’t care. I am happy to have those discussions. Whatever. I have them all the time. But I don’t judge people by Hamas because then you get into Sam Harris moral map. Well how many babies did Israel kill. How many babies did Hamas kill. How many babies did the Afghanis kill. How many babies. I don’t care because one’s already too many. And so like the math doesn’t like math breaks down when greater than zero equals too many. Right. Greater than zero and infinity are the same number in morality. Like morality it doesn’t care if you killed 40 babies or 39 babies. It doesn’t make any difference. Right. The evil is still manifest in the one. So the greater than one doesn’t doesn’t make it worse. Which is why one mortal sin is enough to condemn you. There you go. Right. And so it’s right there. Mark frickin does this all the time. He just starts talking and then he reinvents some principle of Catholic doctrine. It’d be a lot easier if you just accepted it Mark. No no. I recapitulate Catholic. I’m well familiar with Catholic doctrine in that way. I recapitulate it in a way people can hear it. Like this is the Peterson trick. Right. He’s to be fair he’s probably rediscovering it unfortunately for the poor guy. But that’s the thing. Like people don’t understand these basic problems. They’re worried about the problem of who do I support Hamas or Israel. And I’m like that’s not even a problem. Why would you worry about that. The problem you need to worry about is who are the good people. I don’t care if they’re Israeli or they’re Hamas or they’re a mixture of both because they’re probably a mixture of both. Just my guess. Just randomly throw that out there and guess that that’s the case. Right. And so I’d rather worry about that than whether or not to support Israel or Hamas. Right. And then everyone goes tribalism and tribalism is bad and I’m not a tribalist. And I’m like if you’re talking about two groups you are a tribalist because even if you don’t identify with those groups you’re identifying against those two groups. Creating a third group and now you’re in that tribe. And I’m not in any tribes. I’m like evil bad good good. That’s it. That’s my tribe. My tribe is the evil good tribe. Right. Like it doesn’t exist because it transcends all the boundaries because those boundaries are always materialistic in nature. So so question segue question. So in order to be able to discern what good and evil is because you said you I think you even said you’re good and evil. Right. So like you got it. What determines that is largely what your hierarchy of attention is shaped like. Right. So Emma makes a very good point that is very very difficult to get your hierarchy of attention in order. So to shift the conversation a little bit. How do you do that? Practice. I every day you just get your butt into the chapel. I have a chapel right and pray or the prayer corner or the front porch or the rosary walk or you just have to show up like a living room in South Carolina. Whatever whatever however it works whenever it works whatever you do that works. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’ll give you ideas. I’m not going to tell you how to do it. But Lord knows I’ve had days where I’m like I am literally sitting here attempting to pray because it’s my duty and that’s all I have right now. And I hope that’s enough. Thank you. I can confirm this personally. I have seen I have witnessed and participated in this to the best of my ability. The Catholics have a lot of work to do. I have a lot of work to do, Corey, on being able to explain to you how to participate in their silly rituals because they do not know how to write instruction manuals on when to talk and what to do and what’s going on. They’re just terrible at it. Because you don’t write instruction manuals. It’s supposed to be like an instructor’s student. We handed him an instruction manual. We handed him one. We handed him one. It was a Latin novus ordo mass. You got handed one when you walked in. You know, because not everybody just knows. They don’t? They just don’t know that. You know, it’s sad but true. And that’s the thing. Even when Father Eric hands me one personally so I can participate in his mass in my living room, it’s not correct. Contained errors. And that throws me off because I need some kind of scaffolding here. Throw me a lifeline. No lifeline. No lifeline. Okay. So I got really, really excited this week. I’m going to share a personal story here a little bit. It’s maybe not that exciting. But to me it was really exciting. I shared a boring story at the beginning of the stream. So it’s fine. Okay. There you go. Here’s my boring story that hopefully won’t be too boring. I’ve been studying Lebrie a little bit as like part of this, you know, how do you create a community where you can do like estuary like stuff. And the Shaffers had it going on to where clearly God was working in it because they were just praying all the time and they were living out like you see it in the way they describe it. Their entire priority everywhere that they went was being obedient to God and loving people. Like literally that was it. And yes, they were very Protestant. It was all about like, you know, do the sermon, do the thing. But by the way that they describe it and demonstrate it, you can see that it was less about that. Although that was obviously still very high priority. It was about doing the thing. It was about praying, getting the priorities in order and loving the people that showed up. And I had this thought that’s like, you know, this is that’s like their that’s their liturgy. Right. Like that’s the that is the liturgy of the word in a sense. And I was kind of thinking I’ve been struggling with this because a lot of people throw out the word liturgy recently in this very generalized sense without referring specifically to the mass or the divine liturgy. And I’ve been struggling with, you know, are we are we misusing that word by taking it out of its ecclesial context? And I decided to so hold on. I was like, maybe. And then I had a thought. It’s one of my favorite chapters in the Bible since I was younger and forced to memorize some stuff. Romans 12 was a chapter that I had memorized very early on. And it’s always been one of my favorites. It says, Therefore, by the mercy of God, offer your body is a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is depending on the translation that you have. This is your spiritual act of worship, or this is your right and proper worship or something along those lines. And I was like, it’s interesting that what I’m thinking about sounds exactly like that. So I just on a whim, you know, this is kind of where I was at with this stuff. I looked up what what is it originally in Creek? Like, what are those words so I can have a better understanding? Guess what it says. This is your right and proper liturgos liturgy. This is your right and proper liturgy. And I was like, I got so excited in that part of the book. And I was like, I got so excited in that moment. I confess to you, I started weeping on the airplane. Nice. I immediately shut off my phone because I was already taking off and I didn’t have an airplane mode. But I got so excited. This is not a misappropriation of the word liturgy. Liturgy is the way by which you live your life such that it is a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. So what you got to remember is that Christians didn’t invent the term liturgy. Liturgy was something they picked up from the Greeks. This was a liturgy was like a festival celebrating Athens. We’re going to commission a poet to write a song about Athens. We’re going to have a play. We’re going to have a festival. We’re going to have some sort of things. And there would be a nobleman sponsoring this. Right. It was one of the duties of the nobleman to sponsor these. And they were called late tour ghosts. Right. They were the ones who provided for the liturgy. Right. And I if if my brain is not failing me and sometimes it does. But literally in the letter to the Hebrews, Christ is described as a liturgy. He’s one who puts it on for the benefit of the people. And so as long as you have this understanding that you are participating in the eternal worship of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, then whatever you’re calling worship probably is, although it’s going to be less intense than what we do on Sunday morning. Yeah, not to not at all to detract from it doesn’t detract by the way it actually adds to it. That’s the beauty of it. It adds to it because it expands what is happening in the mass to what you’re doing in your family and what you’re doing in your communities. And it assumes, by the way, it assumes the locus. It assumes that emanation point. It assumes that Christ is the unifying principle of all the stuff you’re doing throughout the hierarchy, which is why it makes so much sense to have a village run by a monastery. Yes. Well, it doesn’t need to be run by the monastery. But to tie it together, Corey, because this hierarchy of attention thing, you’re absolutely dead on. I mean, I’m glad you got there, right? To tie it together, you’ve got to think of it this way. So you live around something that has a church that can enact the liturgy for you that you can participate in the liturgy with. And that helps you to train that. And what are you training towards? You’re training towards the thing that the monks are actually embodying the best. Like, they’re the highest. So because you’re in this, we could call it a three act play or a three act structure or something, although it’s bigger than that. But whatever. We’ll just assume it’s only three. Right. We’ll just leave the government out of it. We’ll leave Caesar out of it. Now you get to participate in the hierarchy of attention because a there’s a hierarchy, right? You’re impacted by it because you’re living next to the monastery and the church is the center of the village. And to see I don’t know if you’ve been to Europe and seen churches at the center of a freaking village. It’s an unbelievable difference. It’s just like, bang. I mean, I was on I was on an island in Croatia, basically outside of Split. It’s mine. I mean, we rented a car, a convertible, and went and we had beautiful weather somehow. And we went to these villages and drove into the center of the village where the church was. It was just like, wow, because you can just I mean, I mean, I’m not participating. Church wasn’t wasn’t in session or anything. Right. There’s no liturgy going on. But you can just feel the difference by having the church at the center. And then, right, if you have the monastery there to take care of the sick, feed the poor, right, to do the welfare or the charity is still the better word. Then all of a sudden, there’s a hierarchy to interact with what we don’t have in our world. Everything is flat. Like I got my car. I got the roads. I’ve got I’ve got Google Maps. We’ve got grids for some of some cities have grids, no grids down here, thankfully. But some cities have grids. And then but but those cities that you visit in Europe that are designed around a church building or a monastery, they tend to look really, really beautiful. Even though they rise up organically and you can you can even see in the way that people design, build their buildings. And it’s not something that somebody top down says, no, this is what you shall do to make it pretty. Just by the way people exist, they make things beautiful because they’re oriented towards this thing. They have to live there. Instead of having somebody else build your house, who doesn’t live there? But but but but but look, this is where everything goes off the rails, because this is the argument that the Vervekis and the Petersons of the world will make. See, people live together and beauty emerges from the village. And it’s like, no, no, that only happens. And we know this now. We have the evidence that beauty only emerges when they are living with the monastery, with the church at the center, because they’re all their hierarchy of attention is correct. When your hierarchy of attention is correct, the beauty emerges. The beauty doesn’t emerge if your hierarchy is not to say that beautiful things can’t emerge outside of a proper hierarchy of attention. Of course they can. Lots of random things emerge. And if it’s beautiful, we’ll hold on to it. Well, emergence happens. Emergence is random. Most of it doesn’t last worth a damn. The things that last and the things that are beautiful and last tend to emerge as the result of a proper hierarchy of attention, where the starting point was this highest ethereal thing. Here it would be the highest spiritual thing. God, right? When your attention is towards God and you live that way, all of the things that emerge, because this is an island in Croatia. They’re poor olive farmers. No, I was there. Really. And I’m like, there’s some poverty there by Western standards. By their standards, they’re perfectly happy and they don’t care. They live a contented, happy life. Right? But they don’t have anything there. Like no one has a car. Like we were driving around and the European roads and there’s some places where if someone’s coming the other way, there’s going to be an accident because, but nobody has any car. So it’s not a big deal. It’s like, whoa, that’s kind of weird. You know, it was freaky for me because I’m used to crowded roads and big highways and not skinny roads with one lane and tiny, tiny things they think of as cars that I would call large bicycles. You know, whatever. But they’re contented and their place was gorgeous. Like all the time in the middle of the Adriatic Sea, it was lovely. But that beauty doesn’t just emerge randomly because you put two frog legs in a jar or something like Michael Levin. Like no, the thing that makes life emerge from cells is this higher calling from the spirit, the emanation downward. Like that’s what fixes evolution. You can’t fix evolution without that. And that should be obvious to even Peterson. And it’s not. And again, this is where their lack of submission comes in. So I agree with you that they’re open minded enough, but they’re not humble enough. Right. And it’s one of the things that I forget where the original quote comes from. But VanderKlaai was the last one to say it. Or maybe, maybe Verveke said it too. But we don’t find God because we don’t look low enough. It’s like, yeah, yeah. Right. You’ve got to duck down. One of the things I was saying before I actually read the Republican found out Plato’s cave is a lie is that the proper conception Plato’s cave is that you have to duck to get out. You can stand up. But if you want to get out of the cave, you actually have to duck. And to get all the way out of the cave, you have to be on your hands and knees to emerge into the sun, which would be the proper. That’s good. I like that. That’s good. And that would be the proper individualistic misinterpretation, complete lie of Plato’s cave. Plato didn’t say any of that. But that would be a better graphic to to express it. Yeah. Already we fixed evolution too. We fixed evolution. But the hierarchy of attention fixes everything. I mean, that’s why I’m happy that Corey’s on to it, because it’s like, yes, because that is the solution to everything for real. That I mean, in vervecky wouldn’t disagree. He just can’t get to the submission part, to the humble part where that’s required to understand the emanation top down from above the place Hagel never got to. I mean, one of the one of the advantages of submission is that you could just run somebody else’s program and it’s basically going to work. So I’ve thought I’ve thought about my job, my profession and how how much of it is just handed to me on a silver platter. Like I’m I’m working on the the best like like it’s just it’s not all plug and play. There’s some decision making an agency in that. But but most of the hard work’s already done. And so you don’t have to be, you know, 135 IQ. You could you could just be kind of average and get it done. So anyway, makes me happy, makes me happy. Well, that was that was Peterson’s critique of Sam Harris’s system at the end of debate number four, which was Sam, this is all well and good for you. You’ve got an IQ of what 130 135. What are the people at lower IQs do? And my whole point is if your system, whatever it is of morality or ethics or however you want to frame it, does not account for those people. It’s not a moral or ethical system. Period. End of statement. Now, granted, in order to get everybody in, you need things like dogma because that’s the door in anyway. I like the Catholic conception dogma. It’s lights along the path. Great conception. Right. But some people are only going to be able to go so far. Period. Because they have cognitive limitations. And the biggest problem we have today in the age of gnosis. See my Twitter feed for more substack coming soon. The age of gnosis is that we expect that you, a, have to know these things and that, b, people are able to know these things. And that’s the problem. Like, we’re not like I don’t know what’s going on with Hamas and Israel right now, Jude. But I don’t think anybody else does either unless they’re there. Like, I know I do know a few people in Israel. I could ask them. Right. But even they’re not going to know the whole story. Why would I expect that? That’s the problem. Why would I expect that? That’s silly. That’s crazy talk. Why would I expect a reporter in New York City to know? Why would I expect somebody who flew over there for a month and then flew back to know? Why? There’s no way to know. Like, nobody can know that. Right. So the thing I need to focus on is not is Israel better or Hamas better or worse? Is it terrorism? Is it not terrorism? Is the terrorism the result of whatever? I don’t need to worry about that. I don’t need to worry about that. I don’t need to know that in any sense. Right. I just need to focus on the hierarchy of attention. That is a critical thing that I think that the church is able to get really, really right. Is that naturally and you make the presupposition even in the way that you say it. And I know you don’t mean it this way, but get farther right in the sense of being able to cognitively understand something. It turns out and I really think this is really, really true. Obedience comes before understanding submission. It has to. Requires the hierarchy and understanding comes second, if at all. Understanding does not have to come. So like if you’re completely obedient, you are way like a person who is mentally retarded with an IQ of 70 is capable of being a saint. Like generally, probably much more probable, I would expect, than somebody with 135 IQ, because a person with 135 IQ has all these other things telling him that his 135 IQ is going to be able to save him in the end, which is, you know, they’re more exposed to the lie. I feel like. Right. Right. No. Well said. Well said. No. And I do. I do mean it that way, too. Right. Right. Which is always, even when I wasn’t that old, when I was like 9 or 10 years old, I heard that and I’m like, oh, that’s me. Like, you know, grew up in a nice family, have a lot of opportunities, that sort of thing. Yeah. I think that’s a good realization. Like for most of us here who are listening here on the Internet right now, like we’re probably in that category. And if it doesn’t scare you, you should probably go look at it again. Don’t get scared. Yeah. Well, and that’s, and we, and we, we prefer comfort in the age of gnosis. That’s right. Right. We prefer comfort. And it’s like, no, you shouldn’t be preferring comfort, buddy. You should be preferring struggle because if you’re not struggling, you’re not actually living. You’re missing components of life when you’re not in the struggle. That’s why I don’t like the suffering word quite so much. Suffering is inevitable. Sure. But struggle is the mode of life. Like, that’s how you know you’re alive. You’re struggling. And, and, and not happiness, right. Happiness is a gift, right. Just like joy. And you can take the struggle and you can turn it into joy. You can turn it into suffering. And so some suffering is optional. Some suffering is not optional. Right. I think that’s sort of like what the book of Job teaches you. Like, I think that that message is right throughout the book of Job. Like you’re going to struggle. There’s going to be some suffering for sure. That’s not optional, but you could always make more suffering. Right. You could always choose Cain over Abel. I’m going to make more. I would always curse God and die as Job’s wife suggested he do. Exactly. That’s right. And I still, this is the other thing that I think we need to talk about more that I would like to try to figure out some more suffering. I like to use the word suffering because I think it’s important. It is just part of life, but it’s like, it’s, it’s the same sort of substance as what beauty is made of. They’re both things that you’re supposed to experience that push you or pull you depending on what you’re talking about towards God and towards having like a right view of things. Right. Like how does a naturally I’m curious to know Father Eric, what would you say to this? How does a saint perceive suffering? I will think of the life of St. Teresa of Calcutta, commonly known as Mother Teresa. And the shocking, shocking revelation of her diaries, her spiritual diaries, which she asked to be burned, but her spiritual director, director published them anyway. And I think frankly, he was correct because Mother Teresa is not here anymore and can’t be embarrassed by them. Where she felt this profound darkness and alienation from God in her prayer, like, and she was showing up, right? It’s not like she was staying away from it. Like she was showing up. She was kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament, you know, with her daughters in the Sisters of Charity. And I think what made that story so shocking to people is that they would have met her in these periods of supposed profound darkness. And what did they experience in five minutes and watching her receive communion and just simply talking or they experienced profound love and peace and joy radiating out of her. And so that’s why she was able to say, if you love until it hurts and then keep on loving, you’ll find that there’s only more love and not as much hurt and no more hurt. Right. So that’s a saint’s experience of suffering right there. I also think of St. John Vianney, you know, sitting 12 to 16 hours a day in the confessional. Right. I go two hours. I feel like I’m about done. I’m tapping out, you know, and, you know, it’s like at a certain point, he’s just kind of maxed out on the suffering. He’s still got all this time. He’s still got all this energy. He’s still got all this attention. And so people keep on coming to him and he’s able to profoundly comfort them in the old sense of the word where he’s making them stronger and give them direction to life. You know, skeptics would come out to ours. You know, this is France in the 19th century. So, you know, plenty of highly rational skeptics to go around. Just imagine that in a French accent. And they come and, you know, this hardened atheist comes and just watches him celebrate mass and all of a sudden, bang, he’s in the confessional. And this is a funny thing, you know, St. John Vianney gets done divesting for mass. He’s about to go into the confessional. He just points at the atheist as you’re first in line. Boom, takes him out right there. So the saints experience of suffering is that of suffering with Christ in that they know that there’s the resurrection on the other end of it. They are actually able to participate in a more intense and real way in the suffering of Christ and bear enormous fruit through it. And so they find the secret of the cross is the joy that lays on the other side, which we don’t see when we’re just looking at the nails and the thorns and the splinters. Wow. I love it when you do that, Father Eric. You’re always impressive. But the reason why I focus on struggles so much is because we tend to fall into these binaries and people are like suffering, no suffering or suffering, happiness. Those are binaries. And that’s how we got here. We got here with the flattening of everything. And the bottom line is to live is to struggle. Right. And that’s actually really important. And so you can be content in your struggle. You can find joy from your struggle or you can turn it into more suffering. But the suffering is still not off. Some suffering is not optional. Right. Still lions. And some people are going to get eaten by them. And maybe maybe even if you’re running away or hiding from them, they’re still going to get you right. Like that richness, that third option. I think about the third way with Vanderclay, that that particular video, then the clay, by the way, really good. It’s one of one of my better ones. It’s really important to know that it’s important not just compress the world to. Suffering and not suffering. Right. It’s important not to see Joe. The book of Job is some kind of puzzle to figure out why he suffer. It’s not it’s not that hard. There’s a bet. I hate to say it, but God makes a bet. And that’s it. That’s why he suffers. He doesn’t suffer any other reason. Right. But if you can’t transform that like job does into saying, well, this isn’t suffering. Or most of this isn’t suffering. This is just my struggle. And in my struggle, I’m going to struggle to keep my faith no matter what happens to me. All right. Then you don’t see the book of Job correct. The reason Job suffers is because suffering is inevitable, like for everybody. But the right way to think about suffering is to change your posture towards it so that what you said, and I think what Father Eric said, too, is that suffering properly understood if it’s seen through the eyes of God or through the eyes of a saint, which is, you know, through the eyes of God. Suffering is transfigured and it becomes something that’s actually beautiful. Right. Even in your experiencing of it, when people look at you in your suffering, which you’re not experiencing in quite the same way, you see the things that Father Eric said radiate from Mother Teresa. Right. And that’s more about your allowing suffering to change the way you perceive. So you have an open posture towards it, not like you’re seeking self-flagellation for its own sake. Right. Because that’s a mistake. But that’s transforming you to see what real truth is. But that’s the danger. Right. When you start from suffering, and this is hierarchy of attention, right, when you start from suffering, you’re either going to go nihilism or self-flagellation. You just have to include suffering. You can’t exclude it. You can’t run away from it. You can’t ignore it. Right. But you see what I’m saying? Like, that’s why you need a third thing. You need a thing that isn’t optional, and then you need a thing that is an optional state. The optional state, the state where you have free will, is called life. Life is struggle. That’s the optional state. The non-optional state is the suffering, which isn’t to say you can’t create more of it. Right. So when you reduce it to suffering, and you say, well, there’s a lot of suffering in life, it’s either nihilism or self-flagellation all the time. Or self-flagellation all the way down. Like, just on average, it’s not that a few people aren’t going to be saved. Doug can do what he wants. It’s going to happen. Right. Because things emerge, and saving emerges, too. Right. But if you want a reliable, enchanted way of viewing the world, life is some form of struggle. You can reduce that struggle down to Cheetos and video games and your programming job, where you’re making a lot of money, and so you can hire Uber Eats, and you don’t even have to cook. You can reduce it down to that, but you’re still struggling in that, even if you’ve, quote, eliminated the suffering. If you don’t know that, then the only option for the struggle that is life, as long as you’re breathing, you’re struggling. Breath is a struggle. Maybe an easy struggle, but it’s still a struggle. Right. When you don’t do that, the nihilism is inevitable, because all you have is suffering. And if you don’t have the sophisticated spiritual understanding and cognition put towards that understanding, because it’s two components, right, you’ve got to have the framework, too, then you’re screwed. The nihilism is going to eat you. I mean, this is part of the meaning crisis. I think Mark is actually correct. And what I’m going to say is that Jesus says, take up your cross and follow after me, not sit there and suffer. Exactly. Thank you. Right. He’s got, and I think, you know, I think a lot of times when I’m preaching, what’ll pop out of my lips is bearing your cross. And I think that gets at what Mark is going at. It’s like, yeah, you’re going to bear it, you know, and it’s going to be there one way or the other. And you just let it sit there. And, you know, you ever put off something simple and then you get it done in 15 minutes. It’s like, why did I wait six months to do that? Right. It’s like a lot easier just to pick it up and bear it, you know, and then and then that’s just some, you know, some preacher tricks there to connect with the people, you know, because I’m just so relatable. When you don’t have that, that’s that understanding that your life is a struck. That’s what the definition of life is. When that’s not your starting point, you end up with with Sam Harris going, well, you were just kind of popped into this world. And so it’s all predetermined all the way down. And free will doesn’t exist. And the free will doesn’t exist thing is expanding. Like I saw another idiot with the free will doesn’t exist. And I’m like, do you understand the logical, rational and reasonable paradox in making that statement? The idea of free will could not occur to you if it did not exist. It is literally that simple. Why are we having a discussion? You people are stupid. Like anybody who can just sit there and calmly say that has to be a moron. Because that was, you know, like I’ve spoken to this channel before about my materialist fever. Right. On high school, I conceived everything materialistically and I didn’t really start getting cured of that until until I was in seminary. You know, because I think a materialist can easily say that they believe in God. Right. But it’s like the Sam Harris articulation of it and like the full implications of of my intuitive understanding of the universe. Like I looked at that implications, right, because it was conflicting with my faith and I didn’t know how to put the two together. Just horrified me. And I’m like, whatever the right answer is, it’s not that. And that answer is unacceptable. And so like anybody who’s just like, yes, obviously, free will is an illusion because of our chemical reactions in our brains and determined the analysis of free will. Our brains and determine the entirety of our consciousness. And no, I haven’t proven that scientifically. That’s just a result of, you know, what I’ve assumed to be true. And now proclaiming is dogma. But I’m not dogmatic like a Christian. You know, that would be absurd. Yeah. Can we expect more impressions like this at the upcoming conference? Oh, you haven’t even heard the Eric Biblical scholar yet. He’s the most fun, I think, you know, convinced that everything is actually a third century forgery. But I have to be in the right mood to get that one out. So I love it. I love it. Yes. All right. Come in. If you can make I’m going to get going and that’s been participated in your family life. Yes. Yes. Before we all go to bed. It’s lovely to see you both. Thanks for talking. Oh, thank you, Corey. This is very helpful to me. I really appreciate the discussion. It’s very useful. Yeah, for me as well. Are you still trying to go, by the way? Any news on that front? I’m gonna I’m gonna this week I’ll work it all out because I get a fit in Thanksgiving and figure out what’s going on. So I’m going to work it all out this week. Well, I pray that I will see you there. Thank you. I hope to see you too. All right. Have a good night. See you, Corey. Keep your stick on the ice. As they say in Canada, I guess. North Dakota. North Dakota. Canada. North Dakota is almost Canada. Same thing. Close enough. Close enough. Good night. Oh, ma’am. Oh, we got 10 minutes, Mark. What should we talk about? I don’t want to talk about anything else. I thought that was the richest, fullest, most useful discussion that we’ve had. And we’ve had some good ones. Ted wasn’t even here. Ted wasn’t even here. Corey’s a freaking superstar, obviously. And for him to come up with hierarchy of attention and to sort of bleed into that, I thought that, like, I’m very hopeful. Like, finally, these people are starting to get it. So, oh, there we go. Here we go. Fresh, fresh meat in the conversation. Hello, Andrew. You’re beaut, Andrew. He doesn’t love us. He doesn’t. He doesn’t want to talk. Everyone should be speechless after that wonderful conversation with Corey. Hello. There you are. Speaking of suffering, how’s architecture school? It’s great. Our review is tomorrow. So the project we’ve been working on for six weeks is going to be presented. So I’m doing all the work that I can. Something, something, the work you could have done in 15 minutes for six months. You’re doing right now. It’s OK. Everybody’s done that, except for those really happy, really busy people. They’ve never done that and they can’t relate, but they don’t sleep well. So, well, the problem with this is it’s not like I can just do all the work really early. It’s just a constant design process. So then at the end, it’s like, OK, now I have several days to just present what I’ve come up with. So, yeah, it’s you don’t really get to do like a bunch of questions 10 weeks in advance and just be done for a whole month. Yeah. What are you designing right now? Train station. Train station. Is it actually going to get built? Not that I know of. Maybe we’ll see. But did they give you like an actual setting for the train station? Oh, yeah, of course. It’s nearby. It’s a town nearby. There’s an old, really old train station that used to run. Now it doesn’t. And the tracks are going to be built. So the train station that used to run, now it doesn’t. And the track runs through this town, which is actually the center of the county. And it goes on and on and on. And eventually the railroad just deteriorates. So it doesn’t actually go anywhere. But the whole program is they’re building a new one there and you’re going to design it. And there’s going to be an office building in it. And a couple other things. So, yeah, it’s really cool. And due tomorrow. And due tomorrow. So you’re going to be presenting this to your class, to your professors, to the whole school? To the class. Each person gets up individually. They put up their presentation boards. And if they have a physical model of the building, which they should, then they’ll present that as well. And they’ll get up there and they’ll explain all their decisions and the form that they made and why they made it. And then they’ll have to stand up there and justify all their decisions. You know, if we’re paying for this, you’re going to have to explain to us why. So that’s what we’re doing. Sometimes. Yeah, it’s really cool. But sometimes we do present to, quote unquote, everyone will do it in the school gallery and anybody in the public is welcome to come see it. So, yeah, it’s pretty cool. A lot of people get nervous. Yeah, yeah, we just tried not being nervous. Oh, yeah. Okay. But a lot of people, it can be tough. Yeah, it’s nice having a baritone voice when you’re talking. People just take you more seriously for some reason. Yeah, I guess so. So, yeah, that’s what we’re doing. All righty. And then, what, this is your second year of architecture school? Yes. Yeah. And you’re still cooking along, huh? So far, so good. We’ll see what happens. All righty. Well, you know, it is actually a tradition in my family that the priests get to build churches because I had two great uncles who were priests in Minnesota. Both of them built churches from the ground up. With their bare hands? With their bare hands, yes. Yes. Everybody has a set of bare hands in their cupboards. And they use those to build churches. That’s how we do things in the States border in Canada. So basically, I’m going to need an architect to build my churches. And it’s going to be you, Andrew, because I know you’re just a good old kid, good Catholic kid. You’re not going to, you’re not going to build a freaking spaceship and put an alien St. John outside of it, which I was having sushi with another priest on Friday. And he showed me pictures of his church, which looks like a spaceship. And they have alien St. John standing outside of it. And, wow. And he’s just he’s just hoping somebody will come and vandalize it. Or is he hoping for aliens to come and feel more at home at this church? You know what? Knowing this guy, he would be the first priest on earth to baptize a bunch of aliens. It is 100 percent something that would happen to him. Oh, man. Father, are you sure you don’t want to worship in Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim? I’m quite certain. 100 percent, actually. And, you know, despite me talking about my materialist past, I always had a preference for churches that actually looked like churches. You know, these these two forces were fighting inside me. And Christ won. Praise the Lord. Oh, nice. I will say my train station does look a bit like a spaceship. That’s fine for train stations. Have fun with train stations. You know, well, it’s you get away away with a little a little more experimentation out in the world. Actually, well, I say it looks like a space spaceship. One person in the class, it actually looks exactly like a spaceship you’d see like in a sci-fi movie. And I’m like, flying saucer. Well, not a flying saucer, but like a shuttle. It just looks like a shuttle. And I’m like, what happened? It’s a spaceship now, like literally a spaceship. And he’s I’m thinking, well, I guess it’s technically a center for transport. So I guess spaceships can kind of represent that. I don’t know. I guess I’ll see what it looks like tomorrow. But yeah. But yeah, mine is also in interesting shape. My professor actually came by one of them and he looked at it and said, you know, what happened to you? You came in and you said you wanted to build churches. And what is this? It’s like, I think we broke you. So we’ll put you back together. Don’t worry. I got a spiritual superglue for you. Well, make it. It’s going to tell you that. No, no, Mark. You like two months ago, you told me that the church should have a monopoly on beauty. So his train station should look like a space station. No, no, no, no, no. You should make it look like Penn Station before they tore it down. Because when they tore the original Penn Station down, there are a few pictures of it. People like flipped out. There were riots. There were actual they were like, no, you’re not tearing this down. It’s too beautiful. And even Grand Central Station, I got there. They had just redone it. It was absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, you know, it’s it’s it’s it’s interesting that these temples to transportation were so pretty. I think, yeah, to some extent, the church should have they should have a monopoly on beauty that points to the highest for sure. But the train stations were still beautiful, but they were square and flat and didn’t point up. But but people really love them. The original ones. That’s interesting. You say that because one of my good friends in the studio was actually going to build something pretty much like Penn Station where it was torn down. And we were looking at each other’s projects and concept drawings and all that. And it’s funny because we like switched. It’s like I came in saying I wanted to build all this traditional old stuff. And he came in saying, you know, I’ll build all this crazy stuff that looks like a playground. And he’s also like he’s a guy who’s a transgender who dyes his hair. And it’s just it’s crazy because we think so alike. So we basically swapped everything we’re doing in a department. So he’s like, yeah, I’ll build this really old Penn Station looking thing and I’ll build this spaceship. You know, architecture school is a place to play around with that. True. You play around with some designs, just paper, just ideas. You’re not hurting anything. It’s a sandbox. It’s a sandbox. You know, you just go ahead and you tinker there, you know. So that’s why we had we had preaching classes and seminary, you know, and, you know, I and it was really hard to write a funeral homily for somebody who didn’t exist. That was I found it really difficult. But that experience gave me my key for funeral homilies. Right. This is this is this free preaching advice to every priest, every Protestant minister, to every Orthodox, somebody or another. If you ever need to give a funeral homily, always start off talking about Jesus. It just everything just fits so much better because I go to funeral homilies, you know, like somebody dies. I’m not preaching. It’s a shame. And and they start talking off about the person. Right. Like, oh, my mom, you know, and oh, so and so they were just great. And it’s like. Start start high. You got to have the right you got to have the right hierarchy of attention, as Corey would say. Right hierarchy of attention. I’ve got other things invading of my hierarchy of attention right now. It is the possibility of sleep and recreation. So, Andrew, it was good to have you. And Mark, as always, thanks for dominating my stream. God bless you all. Good night. Have a good day.