https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xTRe3GSK2ZI

Good evening and happy Sunday to all of you who are listening. I do want to make an announcement before we get into the bit about the witches. And that is I will not be streaming on Christmas Eve. Two weeks from now, I guess it’ll be Christmas Eve and that will not be a good time for me to be streaming. So we are going to I’m going to stream on Friday the 22nd at 1pm. Friday to 22nd at 1pm will be the time that I’m streaming. So if you show up here on Sunday night the 24th, you will be here by yourself. Perhaps lonely and sad. I can’t do anything about that because I’m going to be going to be hanging out with my family. And actually, Emma, I’m not actually that busy on Christmas Eve. All I have is a midnight mass with the bishop. So the guys who are in a parish actually will have more work that I do. All right. So what is this business about the witches? I’m going to do a little bit of historical interpretation here and we’ll see if it lands. I’m going out a little bit on a limb this one here. So here we go. What we have to remember is that things, especially long movements of history, start before everybody says that they start. And I want to look specifically at the scientific industrial revolution. That I think that that started long before what? Bacon, before Kepler, before Galileo. I think we can brace that back to strains of thought during the Middle Ages and specifically the strain of thought of nominalism. So what does nominalism say? You’ve probably heard that word before. I know Dr. Vervecki spoke about that in his awakening from the meeting crisis thing. Basically, the idea of nominalism is that there isn’t anything inside of a thing that makes it to be what it is, that what our names for things are, are just what we call something. That was not very clear. Basically, there’s nothing intrinsic to the tree that makes it a tree. The only thing that makes it a tree is the fact that we call all of these things, which appear similar to us, to be a tree. They just have these similar appearances. But what draws them together isn’t anything intrinsic in each and every single different instance of a tree that we can encounter. What draws them together is just the pattern recognition happening between our ears. Now, there was all sorts of fringe views, all sorts of crazy ideas floating around the Middle Ages, as there are in every civilization. But nominalism was not one of these. And despite its condemnation by the church, it flourished in the universities. And so I think by the time you actually get to nominalism manifesting itself as a philosophical system, there’s already been this tendency in the culture to view things as the parts first and the whole second. And the whole second, right? That when we look at a tree, when we look at a dog, we see all of the individual parts first and seeing the whole second. That right there, that right there is the foundation of how science works. It takes things apart. It takes materials apart. It takes phenomena apart and looks at it according to all of these very discreet categories so it can reduce it to variables that we can manipulate so that we can get data out of it. I think this was a habit of mind that developed long before the first scientists began actually explicitly doing this kind of experimentation. So that’s the first idea. First idea is that in the period of the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, this idea of nominalism and what we could call the spirit of scientism had already spread far across Europe. So now we get to the business of witches. Now, the business of witches, that really started getting flaming hot in the 16th century. It was during the 16th century that the big witch trials, the witch hunts, all of that really began to exist at a feverish pace. And there’s a very interesting phenomena about these witch panics. There was always one complaint about these supposed witches, whether they were really witches or whether or not, one thing in particular is that they prevented birth one way or another. Either people weren’t getting pregnant or they were casting curses to cause stillbirths, premature births, miscarriages, all sorts of things, birth defects. There was always this idea in the heads of these people that these witches were anti-baby. And I don’t think the conjunction between this materialist, nominalist view of the universe that would progress into scientism and this anxiety about there being some spiritual force that’s anti-baby coming into the world are unrelated. I think they might be related. We move on through history. And if you’re going to look at an invention in the 20th century that’s had a profound cultural, psychological, social impact on all of us, it’s the invention of hormonal birth control in the 20th century. That was absolutely necessitated. The invention of hormonal birth control in the 20th century needed to have a scientific frame of mind to invent that. That there was something about. Yeah, there was something, I think, in an intuition in the 16th century that this way of looking at this world, this scientific, dissecting, vivisecting way of looking at the universe was eventually going to turn itself on the human person itself. That for a while it would be dropping weights off a tower in Italy and measuring how long it would take to go down. For a while it would be separating the various elements of the world and laying the foundations of modern chemistry. But eventually, eventually this would turn itself back in on us. That we would find ourselves making ourselves the subject of scientific experimentation. And so even at the very beginning of the scientific revolution, we had this anxiety about what this way of looking at the world, what kind of effects that was going to have on us. And I think this goes back to the fact that you never see witches with their own children. I think of any story you’ve ever seen, it’s always the witches stealing somebody else’s children, doesn’t have any of their own. And even I think, you know, if you go to the Barnes and Noble witchcraft section here, I think you’ll find that same pattern continues itself. So. That’s a wild idea I had this week. Absolutely, I wouldn’t die for that idea, but I think there might be a connection between these things. And if I’m wrong, then Mark will come here and tell me that I’m wrong. So I have to worry about that. Let’s take a look at here. Josh says, Hi, I say hi. Motivation to finish packing ahead of time so I can hang it online before we leave. Happy to be a cause of motivation. Hey, Neil’s here. Good to see you. Yeah, you know, the link between nominalism and materialism is absolutely what I was looking at. Sure, sure. Yeah, the evil eye. That is apparently something that witches do. I don’t know. I don’t study it. Okay, here we’ve got the definitive, definitive interpretation from Mark controlling hormones as an attempt to control the unseen within to master the parts of the body which are otherwise controlled versus allowing yourself to live in harmony with nature. Gosh, that makes me sound like a hippie saying that but the hippies can be right every once in a while. The materials explanation is that people were mad at with wives for either failing at their jobs or helping women who didn’t want babies avoid them. Cool. Whatever. Pinocchio pleasure island desk. Yes, I mean, that’s more of the masculine version. But yeah, 100% we see that all over the place. Looks like Mark thought my remark is funny. That’s good. And hey, Charlie’s here. I think we need to talk about Plato even more. I don’t think we have enough Plato. Yeah. So anyway, witches are stealing your babies. Be on the lookout for that. Yeah, I have it on good authority that the Almighty himself, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is very pro baby. So it gives you an idea of what’s going on there. All right, the link is up in the chat. Somebody come here and talk to me. Otherwise, I’ll be lonely. The Latin mass today. Oh, good. Good marks here to prevent me from being lonely. How you doing, Mark? I’ve I’ve had better weeks, but I’m here. So, okay. Still six feet above ground. So, right. Right. Actually, I had a wonderful dinner and an ice cream for dessert. So all in all, today’s a good day. So let’s focus on the goodness of the day. Yeah. Yeah, shepherds pie heaven and shepherd pie and eat. And yesterday, my friend Kira lives down the street, invited us over and she made the best nachos. Like I was like, wow, these are nachos. These are the best. I think the ceiling on nachos is really high because it’s like. What are you going to tell you that you can’t put tomatoes on on your on your nachos? You know, you put whatever you want on your nachos. Josh, it’s good to see you, sir. Oh. He’s not going to say hi to us, though. Oh, there it is. Yeah, sir. I’m sorry. I can hear you now. Hi. All righty. Good to have you on, Josh. Hey, I was sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt you, Mark. No, no, I think we’ve concluded our discussion on nachos. Oh, okay. Well, hey, nachos. There’s some depth and layers to nachos. I thought it was interesting you’re talking about witchcraft and babies. Something came to mind is Jonathan one time talked about, as you talked about, if anybody from olden times had heard about and or somebody had described to them like in vitro fertilization. They’ve been like, yeah, that’s witchcraft. Like that, you know, that I don’t know. Sometimes I refer to scientists and doctors these days is like wizard and witches, because, like, I don’t understand how they do or what they do, but they do. And like, I mean, they can describe to me the medical procedures and things like that. But I, you know, as a just a layman, I don’t, you know, you’d have to be versed in their science or witchcraft. I’m betting a lot of them don’t understand everything that they do. Like how many people could write, let’s say, a program to do something on a computer who don’t understand all of the arcane stuff from the 1980s? Mark Bright could. Well, Mark understands the arcane stuff from the 1980s. I’m not, I’m not accusing him here. That’s why I said I’m software engineer, not Mark. Right. Yeah, that’s the problem. They don’t necessarily like actually, technically, nobody knows how a light bulb works. I mean, LED or incandescent. Like we have a general theory that, well, the filament in an incandescent light bulb glows because of heat. Right. Okay. Almost nothing does that. Like all the stuff they tried, and they tried a lot of stuff like Edison in particular, but other people too. They tried a lot of stuff. So it’s kind of like anything will heat will give off heat when it’s when electricity is put through it. So why does the light bulb work and work for so long and nothing else? That’s probably what they can’t explain very well. Right. And they’ll probably go one layer deeper and say, well, you see, and the tungsten infused carbon filament. Okay. But, you know, you’re really not not getting there. And that’s the problem is they can always go, you know, deeper. But ultimately it fails. And William Branch has it correct this plank length garbage, which which has changed recently, by the way. So not for the first time. They keep changing the plank length. Right. Like, oh, we got better measuring tools. Now we can change the plank length. That’s actually what’s happening there. It’s not like a unknown quantity. Right. It’s just a plank length is just a placeholder, maybe an icon for the smallest thing we can measure. But then as you get better measurement tools, that thing changes. So what are you doing? I don’t know. Shrinking scientific measurement of the gaps. Yes, I like that. Oh, you should write a book like that. So you could have somebody making a light bulb, manufacturing a light bulb, distributing a light bulb to the public and have no real working knowledge of, you know, the technology. Yeah. Well, there’s a famous article about this, Josh, where somebody pointed out no single person knows how to make a modern computer mouse. Which, look, I mean, I can actually describe three different types of computer mice work. I can tell you all the parts, but you couldn’t build one. Like, you know, personally, the first computer mouse ever made, though, was made by one person, but it was made out of wood. So that’s the first key. Like, you can’t build one because you don’t have the ability to make plastic. But maybe you have the ability to make plastic. You don’t have the ability to make the, you know, the the the diode or the laser or whatever, you know, whatever you’re using. Right. Or maybe you could make that, but you don’t also have the ability to make that the plastic and the rubber that you need for the wheels to do that. Right. And even if you could do that, you don’t have the ability to make the the. What is it? The electronics that do all the all the A to D conversion. Right. And even if you have that, you don’t have you still have to make a USB writer PS2, but which is actually easier. But a USB thingy so that it can hook up to the computer. Like, like, there’s all these things you, you know, maybe you have one of them, but nobody can do all of it. Like, no single person. So and almost nobody knows how any of those parts work. There’s very few people that can describe and there’s different types of mice. There’s the pure optical mice, which I have in my shed on older machines. And then there’s there’s the type that work through. Well, my track ball here works through dots. Actually, there’s dots on that ball and it measures the dots. And then there’s other ones that that measure the change in distances or ones that have a ball and they measure the movement of the ball inside through mechanical means. So there’s two different styles of optical mice. I remember that it was surprisingly heavy that ball and it had rollers on the side that it would bump into and then kind of roll those. Yes. Yes. The complexity of being. And as I think I think Father Eric alluded to this earlier, basically, God is probe probe 80s. Probe being for some reason. So I think I think you’re OK on that side, Paul. I think God’s God’s good with you for the he’s blessed. He’s blessed Pastor Paul abundantly. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, it’s even worse, Josh, than you first said, because the doctors who are working this magic and you don’t even know what they’re doing. They’re just following a manual and a tradition. Right. So what do we think about that? That something OK. So like, I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot of doctors and nurses and that that have been involved with these procedures that if you were to describe them to that are like nurses and doctors that are probably Catholic or religious or, you know, things like that, that would do in vitro fertilization or be involved with other procedures. That if you describe them to somebody, even a priest or a monk or anything like that from about 500 years ago, they would be like, yeah, that’s witchcraft. Stay away from that. But does it become innocent because of our lack of understanding of its origins? Does it lose some of does it? Yeah, does the practice in some ways become not witchcraft? If you’re. Yeah, like, how does that look like? What’s your thoughts on that? Well, the Catholic Church has said that in vitro fertilization is not permissible. OK, that it’s not treating children according to the dignity that they deserve. So we would immediately run into a problem with a Catholic doctor doing that. I was aware that I’m Catholic and I wasn’t. I just became Catholic on Easter. But yeah, I’m aware of that actually. Very interesting. We don’t. And it’s a matter of. If you’re doing that, you’re fundamentally treating the child more like a commodity than a gift. Yeah, yeah, I would agree. So so that that’d be kind of the first thing that and you know, this this comes up. Every six months or so in the Peterson’s fear here that there’s an intrinsic connection between technology and the world. There’s an intrinsic connection between technology and magic. All of them are designed to give man dominion over the earth and our power. This link between power and, you know, to a certain extent, we always like until our Lord comes again, you know, come Lord Jesus. We’re always going to need a little bit of power over the elements because otherwise we’re going to die. So it’s not like we can get rid of all technology and live in simplicity in nature, except perhaps maybe if you live in California or something where the weather is always perfect. But speak of California, that’d be nice, wouldn’t it? So, yeah, it’s one of those we’ll call it a perennial pattern. Other people might call it a perennial problem where we’re always going to be trying to integrate our technology in such a way that it doesn’t corrupt us. But is that so back to my original way of my kind of original wondering, does the technology become innocent after a while when people no longer like nobody doing it today would be thinking or I would get a nurse or a doctor that’s involved in the procedure of in virtual fertilization. Wouldn’t be thinking of it as witchcraft, wouldn’t be thinking of it as. So, yeah, it’s not witchcraft right now. It is technique. Yeah. So, but it’s a technique and witchcraft, obviously, overall, I would guess they would kind of overlap. One’s more organic than the other. But I would I would say that they kind of, you know, overlap in that it it. I mean, it’s artificial. It’s it’s using it’s using understanding of the of the way the nature and the way things are built to manipulate it. Yeah. So when I preach a really good sermon, like when I’m really vibing, when I’m connecting with the people, I got the eye contact. I’m getting quiet and then I’m raising up and I’m doing the hand gestures, everything. Right. Like, is that witchcraft right there? I’m kind of doing magic with the speech there. I might be unlocking people’s hearts. And so what ultimately makes the difference is, is that is this aligned with my vocation as a priest? You know, what exactly am I preaching? And let’s say I’m preaching from the heart and I’m preaching the pure gospel of Jesus Christ. And it’s and it’s lifted people up. Well, then this magic words that I’m saying, they’re fine. That’s exactly what God willed. You know, but if I was doing it for my own ego or if I was preaching some foreign doctrine, then I think that would be a sign that something has gone astray. And I’m misusing the gift of speech that I’ve been given the same way with this technology. You know, there’s a fair amount of the fertility assessment and treatment that we could do, which is not, let’s say, treating children in an undignified manner. Right. So, you know, there are ways to, we’ll say, collect the semen sample in order to test to see whether or not there’s something wrong with the man’s reproductive systems. And there’s ways of doing that that are in accord with Catholic doctrine and all of that. And you would do that just to see, oh, is this something that we can treat or is this something that is is kind of untreatable? And you guys are going to have to start looking at adoption or fostering or something like that. So it all kind of depends on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it to see if it actually crosses over the line. So it’s not the magic that’s the problem. It’s like because if somebody was to spontaneously get pregnant when they weren’t necessarily like a person who had very low sperm count or somebody who was barren, you know, that they were suddenly to get pregnant without help. That would be God’s, you know, a miracle, which I guess you could swap out the word magic in our understanding of God’s magic. And, you know, so if we’re talking about God’s magic, magic, we don’t understand it and therefore it’s permissible. So when we dissect it, deconstruct it, and then in turn use it for manipulation, then we’re getting into witchcraft. Would you say would you say that’s kind of a somewhat of it’s sort of like it’s sort of like we’re usurping power that we haven’t been given. We’re trying to take that’s what we’re trying to pull it into our grasp so that we can so that we can get along without God like we can do our own magic. Well, and and I think I think more to the point, it’s what it’s right relationship is the key. And so I would say that in so far as you can complain about really any wisdom text, the one that gets picked on the most of the Bible, of course, and say it’s full of contradictions. I would say it’s full of material contradictions. That’s correct. And the reason why it’s full of material contradictions is to show you that material is not primary doesn’t have primacy in the world. But it also shows you the difference in relationship, right, because that it’s the relationship, right, that makes the material good or bad, not the material. There’s no goodness or badness inherent material, and therefore it’s the relationship. And, you know, people unconsciously know this. So Arthur C. Clark, right, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. He’s sort of he’s sort of tipping his hand, right? Like, well, if you don’t understand it, it’s magic. Okay. But he but he you know, he links it to technology. Well, technology by definition is something that’s under our control. Human controlled element. But as I think you nicely pointed out, Josh, the the understanding, right, the idea of magic is that it’s not just a human controlled element. It’s the relationship that matters more than the understanding. And if it’s a relationship between you and God and there’s a miracle and nobody else intervenes, then that’s right relationship. Right. Whereas if somebody’s intervening, I’m not saying for sure. Right. There’s a question, right. There’s a question that has to come into play. And that’s the relationship that matters more than the understanding. And that question is what is your involvement and how much of your involvement is trying to usurp will say, I mean, for a Christian, it would be the will of God, roughly speaking. Right. Or usurp the ability for the potential to manifest in a way that you do not understand. In other words, the ability for magic to appear in the world. Yeah, because I mean, if we’re usurping it, then we’re gonna we’re gonna miss the magic. We’re gonna miss. We’re not gonna. It’s not bad. Then what’s that? It’s not magic. If you force it to happen, then you know your prediction is correct. Magic necessarily because it’s not it’s a lack of understanding magic necessarily. It’s so interesting that, yeah, because if you understand how the miracle that if you understand if you can manipulate if you could manifest the miracle, and it’s almost going back to like how Moses was a member of the snakes and the magicians that the Pharaoh had and things like that. And God kind of pulls his own reverse. And so that’s the question. And I think that’s the answer. And I think that’s the answer. I mean, it’s so interesting that like we were not supposed to seek power, but yet God demonstrates his his dominant power so many times in the scriptures. And things like that. And God kind of pulls his own reverse card and like swallows them all up with and and I think he was showing that for a reason. I mean, it’s so interesting that like we were not supposed to seek power, but yet God demonstrates his his dominant power so many times in the scriptures, like doing things like that, you know, showing you know, my snake will swallow all your snakes. I mean, that’s a pretty dominant part of the story. I would say that that that really lends a lot of power to God, you know, that that these magicians, they they can do something like me, but they’re not fully they can understand it. They can manipulate it maybe a little bit, but they’re not fully in control of it like I am. It’s interesting. I don’t know. It’s just interesting to me that the that the things that we don’t understand. It matters that we don’t understand them like it like if I see a miracle out in the world, it map. It’s a miracle because I can’t understand it. I can’t fathom it. It doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense to me. And it. Because otherwise it’d be boring, right? Like tying my shoes is a miracle. Yeah. Yeah, no. I mean, there’s so many things around us all the time that are I work with trees and I mean, sometimes I’m genuinely impressed with nature. Like I’ve just blown away with the engineer. Yeah. I mean, you could call it engineering, but I mean, the bioengineering, whatever you want to say that of a tree that it’s the I mean, it’s a filter. It’s an in a house that’s over 100 years old. And I’m sure there’s still beams here that are over 100 years old, which means over 100 years after this tree has died. It’s wood is still really strong and also flexible. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, and like I tell people sometimes that like trees are pumped, like, and they’ll look at me like, what? I’ll be like, no, it’s a pump. I was like, it pumps it literally. I mean, they even swell the trunks even swelling contract almost like a heartbeat and not not trying to anthropomorphize trees and relate them too much to humans or anything like that. But it just is impressive. The the and what you were saying in the beginning about trees, like what a tree is and how we overlay meaning onto things and things like that. But it it sometimes takes away from the I guess the majesticness of it when you when you do understand the site. When you. Yeah, you’re completely right. It’s about relationship because I have a relationship to trees that both scientific and philosophical. And honestly, my love for them is is based more on their philosophical kind of relationship to me and to our environment and to our communities and things like that. More so than like, oh, yeah, this is a stack of hollow tubes that conducts water up from the ground. You know, transpire, you know, yeah, you can have an understanding of the parts of the tree as long as you keep the whole tree in the same place. As long as you keep the whole in view, it’s where we get in trouble with scientists. It is all we can see is the parts. Yeah, that’s where you get serious trouble. It’s disassembled. You’re viewing it not in its unity. You’re viewing it like a car that’s just laid out across the garage and its various parts. You’re not. That’s not a car. That’s just a bunch of parts. I think of Eustace from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. And this is spoiler alert for Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Yeah, go back or read this one or listen to it. He at the beginning of the story, this is like page one, so I’m not spoiling anything too bad. Talks about Eustace Clarence Banks and he deserved that name. He almost deserved it. And it says that he loved insects as long as they were pinned to a board with a nail. Yes, I remember that. Yeah, and it’s like, oh, you know, because little boys, you know, like, have you met little boys? They find a bug. It’s the coolest thing in the world. But they want to, you know, hold on to it while it’s squirming around and trying to get away from it. Right. Oh, there’s something up with this kid because he only likes them when they’re in. Yeah, our need to control, categorize and domesticate is very interesting. It’s like a hidden, grand cult. That’s worth bringing up too because that’s the thing that’s still good to do, right? Because we’re, you know, if you’re a Christian, you believe you’re called to have dominion and to domesticate and to categorize and to name. But there is a way that that can usurp the authority. Like what you were talking about before, I think really is the key part of I actually never have thought of magic as being defined in that way of kind of there being a necessary mysterious part to it. Because it is precisely that thing when you break something down into its component parts to understand it and to use just a small piece of it, then you’re tricked by your left brain in, you know, the McGillchrist frame of reference into thinking that you understand it. But you’ve destroyed your posture towards the greater mystery of the universe. And in that sense, you are usurping authority. Like you’re, you think that you understand this thing, that you are, you know, you have a, as a wielder of it, you have same relationship with it somehow as its creator, which is very much not the case. I’m trying to work out how to relate this to the way Pajot talks about, you know, how this is the same pattern as reaching for the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It’s all the same pattern up and down. But there’s a way in which technology, even technology that could be born out of a bad thing, could still be redeemed once it’s put back in its proper place. And that’s a hard thing to figure out. You know, yeah, we could redeem nuclear power with nuclear power plants or we could blow ourselves up, you know. Right. There were the knowledge, the knowledge of how the atom works is the way to say it. Right. And I think that’s the that’s the problem. I mean, there’s a couple of things come to mind like understanding means you’re dealing with the whole. If you break things into parts, it’s under you. In fact, it’s under its oneness. Right. When you dissect something propositionally or physically, it doesn’t matter. It’s still dissection. When you say, oh, well, see, a tree has these tubules that, you know, that work together to transmit the water up through evaporation because they’re all connected. Right. It goes all the way to the leaves and the type of tubules change when it hits the leaf as opposed to the branch. Right. So there’s all these things going on. Right. When you do that, it’s no longer a oneness. Right. You’re just talking about one piece. So you’ve placed it under you. So you can’t have understanding by dissection. That’s not possible. When you break something into pieces, you don’t have understanding because you’re not standing under it anymore. And in fact, it’s not standing on over its parts. Right. So its parts aren’t under it anymore either. They’re under you. It’s like, well, that’s no good. Right. And it is the difference. You know, I try to use this example because for some reason I think it resonates. It doesn’t seem to. You can you can know like a colony of frogs or whatever. Right. Like a group of frogs at your pond. You can know them in a way. Right. Fairly well. Or you can know one frog really well by capturing it, dissecting it. But it loses all the potential and you’ll never know it in that way going forward in time. Like that knowledge. You’ve erased that knowledge from the universe. Never mind knowledge, just like the goodness of its being generally. Right. Like you can. If you think about it in terms of authority, it’s really helpful because you see this if you’ve ever been put in a position of authority over other people. You figure out real quick the difference between a micromanaging type of leader and the type of leader that enables their subordinates to come into being, so to speak. Right. By giving them their own agency. Like there’s a way in which if you’re put an authority over something, then in a way you’re saying that you are responsible to enable that thing to come into its fullest form of being. And you don’t do that by micromanaging and restricting what they’re able to do and making it just what, you know, the super controlling, minimal sort of approach. You give them constraints, but then you allow them to grow naturally by allowing them to take some of the agency that involves risk a lot of times taken upon yourself. But that’s the understanding of bolstering up, of allowing to grow. And by keeping the same posture towards the openness of mystery of life itself, rather than trying to make it the thing that that you’re mechanistically, you know, trying to manipulate. You give the thing its life and you help right orient it so that it can grow in a healthy thing and it becomes itself. Rather than destroying it, which is like what you’re talking about. The micromanaging model of leadership that you’re describing is actually just trying to wield people as if they were instruments of yours. Exactly. Or things, or things. And it’s the it’s the asymmetry that people miss. Like we keep everybody lately and it’s gotten way worse. I measure these things. It’s gotten way worse with people. They seem to think everything’s symmetrical. And I’m like, holy macaroni. The whole universe is asymmetrical. It has to be by definition. Otherwise, all the scientific theories about how the universe came to be don’t work in a symmetrical system. Period. And that’s what we’re worried about. The science, huh? Well, science is not the first thing I’m worried about. He measured it. He measured it. No, no, it’s it’s it’s that’s the ironic part. You can. They just don’t. No one measures anything anymore. They just say they do. They just know stuff in their head. But when you dissect something, even propositionally, just like I described the tree, right? I mean, it’s part of it. We could describe a punch between the two of us, Josh. Right. We might get most of it. We might understand this stuff pretty well. Understand the individual pieces. Right. But ultimately, you can’t put that back together. Like, you can’t take a knowledge of the parts of a tree and make any predictions about how a tree is going to grow, how it’s going to work, how long it’s going to live, how it’s going to bend in the wind, how much water it’s going to suck up from my damn pond. Most importantly, which way it’s going to fall when you cut it, which way it’s going to fall when you cut it, how how how big it’s going to be, like what the girth is going to be, what the height is going to be, how big a canopy it’s going to have, whether or not it’s going to get a blight, whether or not it’s going to help another tree to withstand a blight, because it turns out trees communicate. Right. We can’t go any of those things at all from dissecting it into parts. And it just turns out that the more parts you try to dissect something like a tree into, the worse it gets, because ultimately it turns out there’s all these chemicals that get transferred between trees. And so it changes the tree. The tree can fight bugs based on another tree getting infected. And then there’s some mysterious, because it is mysterious, and magic, because it’s definitely magic, communication device that happens through fungi in the forest. Micro-energy. The ground that causes the trees to communicate and trees trees will keep tree stumps alive. Living trees give energy, actual energy to tree stumps to keep the tree stumps intact, even though they’ll never flourish into a tree again. It’s the weirdest thing ever, man. We can’t understand that. We’re not going to understand that. And certainly dissection doesn’t teach us that, because it turns out the tree-ness isn’t contained within the tree. It just so happens that everything that has a oneness is connected with everything else, or at least some number of things that we do not know about. So what is our attitude towards? What is the, in keeping our right relationship towards things that need to, that we would like to rectify, like cancer. We would like to rectify that. We’ve all, I’m sure we all know somebody that’s passed or has been infected with cancer, things like that. It would be amazing if there was a miracle treatment that came out tomorrow. I mean, we could, the amount of suffering that that could possibly alleviate would be, I mean, you wouldn’t even be able to put it into words or quantify it. But is that, is that, I mean, in getting in finding that cure, we would have to, we would, we would have, somebody would have a very deep understanding of how to treat that. How and why cancer works and, you know, understand the mechanisms of it. Or maybe just find something that can, you know, fight it or manipulate it. But, and I have much understanding at all. But you didn’t know how chemo worked. Yeah. They came up with a bi-act. If you start looking into the history of medicine, it’s almost all accidental. It’s a lot of that. Most of science is that way. Yeah. Most of, well, all of science is accidental discovery that was then explained. It’s not science allows us to predict such that we can make, and I’m not saying that never happens, but it literally almost never happens. Like the model for the atom that we use from Rutherford, he made an accidental discovery while doing an experiment about something completely different. And then said, hey, this means that probably atoms work like orbits. And it was totally accidental. And then, sure, once you have that, you can derive other models. But at the end of the day, and I was talking about this in my live stream, when I worked at Polaroid, the manager there told me they’re rewriting physics all the time. Polaroid was very connected to MIT, like very, very connected. And they would do stuff with the chemistry in the lab. And then the physicists would be like, no, no, no, that’s not in the models. And like, yeah, but we did it. So like, you got to update your models and the physicists go back and update their models. That’s actually proper science, by the way. Proper science is not science just makes prediction. Prediction comes true. That’s not how it works at all. So it’s like science kind of a record keeping of all the accidents. I mean, yeah, I mean, and then reverse engineering the accidents, which makes you wonder if the word accident is appropriate for what we’re actually, you know. I mean, maybe intuition might be a better way to describe it or something that’s given to you is maybe another way to describe it. It’s something that comes from inside of us. Yeah, John has kind of talked about that. Like, just because you have an idea doesn’t mean it came from you. But you got to give science credit like the scientific method is extremely powerful. Just again, people have it backwards. What does the scientific method do? The scientific method allows you to reliably know when something is false. That’s it. And it does it in a way that allows other people to reproduce it so that you know that that your test is valid. Now, a side effect of that is that if you come up with a test that sounds reasonable, because all tests sound reasonable in your head, everything works in your head. Everything. The idea you have works perfectly. But it’s when you translate it outside. Right. And you’re making a prediction and usually an inference at the same time that if this test passes, then my hypothesis is valid, fair. And so that hypothesis could be correct. Right. Because other people can now test it and they can agree that, yes, this test produces that result. It doesn’t speak to the inference at all, though, by the way. Right. You might speak to the agreement of the inference because a lot of scientific stuff, what ends up happening is people go, oh, I disagree with your conclusion of your paper. That happens all the time in science. And so, sure, your tests came out exactly the way you said they did. Very powerful scientific method. But we think there’s other explanations for your conclusion. And so that’s where people get confused is that they think science has something to say about truth when I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what to tell you. But all the things I learned about science and science tells you what’s wrong, not what’s right. And you infer the correctness from the fact that the thesis put forth has not been disproven. That’s a very different statement from saying we know this is the truth. It’s not the opposite. But, boy, it’s not it’s not a statement of truth or even true confidence. Welcome, Neil. Good to see you. Hey, good to be here. I just started reading on the plane ride in a hotel room right now, but I just started reading the book that Sevilla King built her channel on, which is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And it gets it gets precisely to this question. I’m still processing some things. So by all means, keep going. Well, you know, it’s interesting that the stuff that you’re talking about, Mark, is also directly related to what Jonathan Haidt talks about. And what terms of what’s just the way that we think, the way that we process our consciousness or whatever you like with the rider and the elephant is the metaphor that he uses. We tend to think in the modern world that we discover analytically and that truth is an analytical thing at its heart. But analysis, you know, by nature of its name, breaking down into subcomponents is exactly what you’re talking about. And that it’s a narrowing. It’s precisely a negative negating in order to understand in a way. And so it is powerful and it’s good, useful, but it narrows to the point where you don’t actually if you over focus on that, it excludes everything that it can’t already see, which is mystery. Right. And there’s a lot of people like to talk about in my community, Kahneman’s system one and system two thinking if you know what that is. I think that’s a good point to add to. So he’s an economist, right? I don’t know about that, Corey. You’re going to have to explain it. Yeah. So Daniel Kahneman, I think is his name. He wrote a best selling book. And Chabursky. Yeah. Yeah. So economists wrote this book called Thinking Fast and Slow. I think he won a Nobel Prize for if I’m not mistaken about how people use two different modes of thinking or decision making. You see, you know, he’s an economist, so he’s concerned with utility and how people make decisions. You know, and his idea that he called it system one thinking and system two thinking are the two ways that we engage in system one is kind of like the sub rational, subconscious, like intuitive, really fast way of thinking. And system two is what he called like your analytical, conscious effort. Like you’re aware that your thinking sort of process is much slower. But you can the thing is you can be more certain that in your mind, at least that system to thinking is correct because you can show your work and you can use it to communicate stuff like because it’s conscious. Right. And his. I think a lot of people take it a little bit too far, and I don’t know if he would have said this himself, but the way that a lot of people interpret that, at least in my community, is that we ought to always slow down and engage our system to thinking so that you don’t rely on your system one thinking because you know that to your pilots. Yeah, yeah. So because, you know, prejudice comes from pre rational thought and so clearly prejudice is bad, and clearly it can make mistakes because we use heuristics that are, you know that lead us to false information. But I think what he kind of failed to recognize and what people fail to talk about when they’re talking about his work is that you can’t actually choose to engage system to thinking it is dependent on your system one thinking that is pre ever thinking. Pre everything like our subconscious or pre rational, our intuitive our spiritual sense of engaging with the world is actually that which comes into touch with reality and always comes from outside of us is a way of thinking about it and it requires this recognition and relationship with what is the serious, but we have tricked ourselves into thinking that we can engage rationally and that is the proper and in fact only correct way of thinking and engaging with the world. But it’s exactly backwards. And so you can you can relate that again very closely with the way that the go Chris talks about things. Yeah, I have a weird simple as we think. I have a weird premise or a weird idea of thinking about this. So I haven’t I haven’t heard PVK talk about this in a while, but he used to talk about his consciousness Congress. And I used to think about that the rider and the elephant. It’s not it’s not an elephant because the problem is an elephant assumes one blob mass with a single will. It’s a shepherd and the sheep. Ah, oh, that’s way better. That’s better. And the sheep. It goes all the way up. So I’m just gonna plant that bomb and think about that for a year. Well, you’re right. Because the sub rational, the pre rational is you don’t that’s the part of you that doesn’t exist as an individual and he gets height gets at that too because he says we’re like a rider and elephant, but we’re also like a bee. He says that humans are 10% bee and that we have this hive mind thing going on and he can’t quite make out why that is. But it’s because we exist relationally, like not just between each other and up and down. But within ourselves even like we’re made up of multiplicity. Exactly. You have to rank order and prioritize and it changes based on time. Like right now, maybe I’m hungry, tired, sleepy. I mean, those are the basics. But you’ve got you’ve got everything from do I do I value this friendship above that friendship? Do I value this arena over that arena? It goes all the way up and and life or I would say wisdom is the proper order of that hierarchy. And that’s what life’s all about. Like that’s why we’re alive. I don’t know. But but it’s the proper order of that hierarchy both within oneself and outside of oneself. And to the extent that well, I believe to the extent that the one is properly aligned within oneself, that’s going to be projected outside oneself. Well, I think I think to kind of move also a psychologist, Corey, so a lot of a lot of his experiments were in psychology as well. That’s that’s kind of important. It’s interesting, right? Because they’re all talking about the same thing. So I’m going to steal that and not credit you. I’ll just tell you up front. Please do. Yeah, well, it occurred to me while you were talking that yeah, I mean, it’s quite possible that well, first of all, the reason why you need the system one, the fast thinking and the slow thinking, the fast thinking is the thing that actually keeps you alive. Yeah, it’s desire. It’s a will. You don’t have. Well, you’re not going to have the will to do that. You’re not going to have the will to do that. You’re not going to have the will to do that. You’re not going to have the will to do that. You don’t have. Well, you’re not. But but it’s also the thing that says thing moving in jungle run instead of rationalizing whether or not it’s a tiger. And where Vicky talks about a lot of people talk about that, right? So they all know it. But they and they’re all like, yeah, these people should all read each other’s books because they realize that we’re talking about exactly the same thing. But the thing that really occurred to me is maybe if you’re spending all your time with the slow system, trying to be rational, that slow system has to be not only rational, but it also has to run your imaginal, your imagination. So maybe that’s why people lack imagination, therefore lack poetics. You’ll have to see my my model video on on intelligence for the four P’s to understand more. But yeah, basically, that’s probably what it is. So you’re not able to imagine because your imagination is one of the things your imagination does is it tells you when you’re wrong. Peterson talks about this, right? Like we put our ideas in our imagination so that they die so that we don’t have to. Okay, that’s clearly a rational function, even if it’s not a function of rationality per se. Right. And you can argue either way. Right. But also, if rationality crowds out imagination, then all you’re going to do is think, well, if this rational system were in place, my prediction would be 100 percent correct. Therefore, there’s something wrong with the world. And how dare you, you bigot Corey. Yeah, you can kind of see the thinking. That’s right. And this is how we can get to Peterson saying crazy things. Sorry, Neil. This is how we can get to Peterson saying crazy things. And I think he’s exactly right. This completely changed my frame of thinking. Reality, like creation actually consists of value hierarchies. Yep. Like that’s actually in the sense that that’s that’s what our consciousness does and our consciousness. So we say if it’s, you know, even if you’re using evolutionary terms, is the thing that maps itself onto reality so that we can interact with it, then ergo creation or reality is something that is like unto our consciousness. It is a value hierarchy. That’s how we can say crazy things like something doesn’t actually exist unless you perceive it. And something doesn’t actually exist except in its relation to you and to other things and in fact to everything. Sorry, Neil, what were you going to say? I like to think of God as the Alpha and the Omega and rationality is everything in between, meaning the imaginal wherever that comes from. I’m sure there’s demonic imaginal as well. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But even that everything has its root cause in God. I mean, as a Christian, everything has its root cause in God one way or another. And then it’s it’s up to let’s call it the shepherd or whatever you want to call consciousness to sort out the wheat from the chaff. That makes sense. Well, and also, you know, if you’re squeezing out your imagination or diminishing your ability to imagine and therefore to be wrong in your head or whatever, right, to kind of practice being wrong in your head. So when you’re wrong in the real world, you’ve got some expectation. Right. I think at the same time, that’s going to destroy, you know, your poetic way of informing the world. Right. Because that’s what the skill is. Right. And that poetics has to be done in your imaginal in the imaginal space in your imagination. And so that’s part of because we talked a lot about the sick and vivium. Right. That’s part of what’s going on. I think when people go, well, I really don’t resonate with poetry. I don’t like poetry. I stopped reading poetry. Right. That’s always a tell for me that they’re a materialist trapped on the edge of nihilism. I really think like you’ve got to catch people there because they go any further. There may be no way to help them. Like that’s that’s a really dangerous place. When you got there through the crisis of faith, you got there from the meaning crisis, which again, I think are two different things. It doesn’t really matter. Once you’re there, you’re on the nice edge. And we need to kind of pull you out of that. And we need to kind of pull you out of that. I’m hesitant to put poetry into the category of all art, because some people are not verbal people. You know, some people are visual or some people are more musical or some people are. I think all art has a poetic. Poetic in a very broad sense. Not as much as a lot of us. So that that might just be a trick of our language here that we’re not just talking about sitting down and reading Wordsworth here. But it’s like it’s like when you have a really good conversation with somebody, you’re kind of doing poetics when you’re driving really well up in Boston. That’s kind of like a piece of poetry right there. Is that possible? It is. Yes, it is. I can show you Corey. Come on up. I love Boston. But I also think it’s difficult to like you talk about the space of poetics. I don’t know if I I still like to think of poetry as being the intermediary. That’s the thing that connects us relationally to the stuff that we’re experiencing. So like the propositions are the thing that you arrive at. And there’s a propositional space and there’s a participatory space. And I think like the relation, the inner, the dynamic interrelating between them is kind of like what I think of as the poetics. You can engage in that with poetry or with art or with just ruminating like Matthew Peugeot likes to talk about engaging with life. That’s actually how it’s set up in our model, Corey. Right. So we’ve got propositional, which are roughly speaking, thingnesses or ways to label things. And then you’ve got procedures. And if you navigate the world using propositions or procedures and that’s all you use, you’re autistic. That’s what it looks like. That’s what it looks like. And then on the other side, you’ve got participation and then you’ve got the poetic way of informing the world, which is the connections of the participations, which are things roughly speaking, right. Playing fast, losing language. Right. And so it’s thingness and navigation on the left side and thingness and navigation on the right side. And so you’ve got a thingness of propositions and the navigation of procedures. Of course, you can you can navigate propositions with poetics. Right. And then you’ve got a thingness in participation and a navigation with poetics. Right. Of course, you can replace procedures with poetics. Right. Or vice versa. Right. But having those four things, those four ways of informing the world, which is how we use it, creates the two types of knowledge. One is concrete knowledge and the other is intuitive knowledge. And those are very different ways of knowing things. Where does the flow state fit into that? So are there? Well, can you can you be in a flow state without doing poetics? I guess that’s my question. Of course. Well, one of the things one of the things because we thought we think about the flow state all the time because it’s such a part of her work. And that’s sort of where we came out of as a group. So we we deal with this a lot. There’s recently been an article about the negative effects of flow state. But one of the things that occurred to me is that the flow state, you are so in the moment that you think that your engagement is perfect. That’s actually what you like. You feel like you aren’t making mistakes, but actually you are. And you’re never able to reflect on those mistakes because you’re in the flow state. There’s no future. Exactly. There’s no future at all. Everything’s immediate. But also your memory is screwed. And the reason why the thing that made me realize this is John Vervicki’s excellent example of flow state is rock climbing. Right. And then I remember watching people climb rocks and going, oh, he made an error there that I can see perfectly from the ground that there’s no maybe he can’t see that error from climbing the rock wall or climbing actual rocks. Doesn’t matter. Right. Maybe you can’t see that error from from or that can’t anticipate that error from climbing up. And so you climb down and back up. Now, in a flow state, that feels perfect because you figured out there was a problem. You solve the problem and you got around it. You’re wonderful. You’re not probably a feature, not a bug. Right. That’s got to be a feature. Right. Right. It’s still a feature. But this is a really important topic, too, because the flow state is kind of just a neutral function. It’s just a thing that happens, but it’s attached to and oriented towards something. And so this is the same like the studies that have come out relatively recently about the negative impacts of meditation, which is very much related to the flow state. Right. Because if you are getting yourself into a state of mind that is very much at peace and very much in tune with something to where you feel very comfortable and it’s very relaxing. And it’s a great way to dispel negative emotion. What they’re finding in studies of meditation is that some people who practice meditation actually find that they become worse people because it eliminates negative emotions that ought to be attached to negative things like, you know, maybe feeling guilty for something bad that you did. And it’s very similar with the flow state. Like you can get yourself into the flow state playing an addictive video game. You know, that happens to me. It’s maybe the difference between. Yeah, it’s maybe the difference is that the locus of whatever’s being done is outside of you. Sorry, it’s within you in the flow state and it’s outside of you when you’re in poesis or I forget the technical term. And it also still depends on what the thing is because there are things outside of you that are, you know, that will cause reciprocal narrowing to use the scientific language or that are demonic using spiritual language. And same thing. Yeah, yeah, I’ll stop there. No, that’s a good catch. Reciprocal narrowing and demonic are pretty much the same thing. 100%. It comes back to how are we using these things, right? Right. So I’m doing a basketball game, pick up basketball game. I get in the flow state because I’m just running around and having a good time. That’s fine. So I spend, you know, an hour and a half doing that. That’s a good use of my time right there. Good exercise, good fraternity, all of that. But when you start when you start chasing the flow state for the mere fact that you want to live in the moment all the time, you want to live in the moment all the time. You never want to take any thought for the morrow. Like, it’s okay to have long term plans. Right. Well, then video games put you in the flow state. Right. I think he says that everybody says that. Right. And and and and Vervecki rails against the mindfulness revolution. Right. Is this critiques of it reasonable critiques. But actually the flow state is the same thing. It’s the presence. Right. The presence. Oh, you’re thinking about the here and the now. But actually, I think I think I think the comments. Correct. Right. The flow state is suppressing your rationality to some extent. See, I’m sorry. You go ahead. I would agree with that because you’ll do things inside the flow state that you won’t do. Normally, like you can get in such a state of flow that you’ll. So I climb trees and I’ve gotten into zones and states where I felt safe going off off my line, you know, and just scrambling around up in the tree up to my neck. Time point basically free climbing. And so but I I don’t know why, but I was in such a state that I felt safe with that. Now, two days later, same tree, same situation may not have done that because I don’t know. I draw bro. Like I just I wouldn’t have been in that same state to to allow that to happen. You know, but yeah, you’re you’re definitely I think you’re right there. Yeah. But you’ll you’ll do things inside that state that you wouldn’t. So here’s the thought experiment then. What would it be? What would be the ideal or is it I’ll put it this way. Is there an ideal state in which it is appropriate to be in the flow state 100 percent of the time? Like, is there a thing you could be oriented to have as its locus to which because the flow state is also like I think it can exist in different levels as well. Like there’s a very narrow side of the state and there’s a very wide area. I think it’s a fortunate side effect when it when you’re doing the right thing and you can’t pursue it in and of itself. It’s like happiness or joy or whatever you want to call it. And if it comes to you, great. But you can’t get kind of like alcohol to good time. Like, I mean, at a wedding, like, I mean, alcohol can be a great additive to a wedding or something like that or to a good time. But if it becomes the main the main thing, if it I mean, flow state’s kind of like a drug, like, I mean, if it can become it, it’s a it’s a welcome added benefit to to something. But if it becomes like the thing, I think that’s what rock climbers honestly chasing like rock climber. You brought up rock climbers and bring that up. But like or parish, you know, parachute guys or whatever those adrenaline junkies. Heavy state of adrenaline. Like what Mark was saying, you feel like you could do no wrong. You feel like you’re not making mistakes. You feel like you’re like, like, I mean, it’s almost like tantric or something like that. Like, you know, you’re just in this like you’re under the influence of some sort of brain chemistry drug, obviously. But and I think under the right circumstances, yes, it’s a very, very added benefit. But if it becomes the main thing, then you’re just a drug addict. I mean, you’re just a flow state addict. Yeah. So let me let me let me defend my question a little bit and give an example of how I think that there could be a way in which it is a positive good. And this actually is related strangely to what you were talking about, Father Eric, about the different modes of music that I’ve been trying to noodle through. I think that if your aim and your mode of being is aimed at or attached to. The thing that’s outside of yourself that is worthy of all of your attention. That it is possible to get into a kind of flow state. And I’m thinking of like saints and mystics, you know, to where you can live your entire life with your attention on the highest to the point where you experience that sense of joy. Of course, what what Josh just said, I’m bumpy left, is absolutely right. If the sense if the feeling becomes at any point the primary thing or the thing that you’re going after, then of course, you’ve lost it. But, you know, in the C.S. Lewis sense of meditation on a tool shed, if you’re seeing by way of the light through the light and your your attention is on Jesus, you know, speaking as a Christian, then that is the thing that. Becomes the way that you perceive all of the world. And if you are existing in perfect will with God in that sense, then you’re you’re going to experience something like a flow state. And of course, as an imperfect human being, like you can’t experience it all the time. But the Saints, I think, experienced suffering as joy. And you kind of see that in the accounts of the martyrs. So I don’t know. This is going to blow your mind. It’s a doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that while he was on earth the entire time, Jesus Christ was experiencing the beatific vision. He was on earth now during his passion that was limited to the highest faculties of his soul, so it wouldn’t overflow through his whole being and negate everything else that he was experiencing. So there might be something to that. I’m not sure if flow states the right word for it, though. I think flow state is maybe a narrow conception of reaching out this thing that we’re thinking of. Right. Right. And there is something to that. Where where there’s this immediacy between what your goal is and what you’re doing. What I don’t like about making that permanent is how it compresses your experience of time entirely to the now. Yeah, that that I think is an error. I think I can show that that’s an error. For a first, I want to say it’s not suffering. It’s struggle. I still don’t use suffering in the same way that you and Rebecca do. And I’m trying to maybe maybe we’ll figure it out. But I think I think there are three components. And yeah, you definitely helped me work this out. You you have to have reflection, contemplation and rumination. And I like mature. I like mature. I like mature. I like mature. I like mature. I like mature. I like mature. I like mature. I like mature. I like mature. I like mature. Ruman nation. And I like mature. Pigeon recently, finally been waiting for like two months, shed light on his meaning of rumination. Ruman nation is where you question your actions. And I was like, oh, that’s that’s yes. That’s correct. It was not recently, but I gave up Twitter recently for for Advent. So I can’t see what he’s saying. He put that on Twitter like a few days ago and I just went, yes, that is that. I knew he had one. Like I knew he had a good definition. I just didn’t know what it was and I couldn’t work it out for myself. And that’s perfect too because rumination is like being fully present with like your reality in your immediate space, which is an open posture towards being corrected in your little concepts in your head. So that’s perfect. So say it again, rumination is questioning your axioms. Rumination is questioning your axioms, right? Testing and questioning your axioms. So reflection is looking back. Contemplation is looking forward. And rumination is looking at the place you’re standing now. Basically, you could map it that way. And I was like, yes, but you need that. And therefore flow is incorrect, right? Because flow is only the here. Now the other thing that occurred to me about flow, when you’re in the flow state and you’re flooding out, and I think that’s what it is, it’s a flood, haha, right? You’re flooding out your rationality and your imagination at the same time, right? The reason why that happens is because you feel like you’ve executed something perfectly. And I would say this goes back to that type two fun thing you guys are talking about at convivium, which I love that I’m just using that all over the place. Type two this and type two that. Yeah, where upon reflection, it was awesome. When you’re in it, you weren’t very happy at all. Sounds really miserable. Whether you’re doing a pilgrimage or whatever, right? Getting lost in the woods. Getting lost in the woods, which turned out to be a lot of fun, even though at the time it was like, wait, how did this happen? This is not good. I’ll say the last time I know I was in the flow state, immediately after I was embarrassed because I realized I wasn’t thinking about my actions. I was just going and I wasn’t ruminating, right? So but forgive me, but if there I think it is at least theoretically possible if in the flow state it is entirely immediate. If there were a way for that immediacy to encompass the eternity of time, then it would not be wrong, right? But yeah, I don’t think it’d be the flow state anymore, though. It’s outside of itself, if that’s happening. It’s not you. Well, but it could also be you. Like the flow state maybe is the part that’s happening inside you. But if it’s participating in the ultimate, yeah, sure. There’s a way to properly orient it or something, right? Yeah, sure. So if I go play pickup basketball for an hour and a half, twice a week, that’s a pretty reasonable amount of basketball. The exercise is good. The fraternity is good. So within the whole, it’s fine. Like we’re not we’re not sitting here saying that this psychological phenomenon is evil in itself. But it’s not big enough to be the whole, I don’t think. I think it’s fundamentally selfish. Flow is fundamentally selfish because you’re crowding out everything around you. You’re living in your own level of perfection. And I do want to push back. I don’t think rumination is analytical at all. I think I’m not a fan of analytical anyway. I mean, analytical is good. You can use it. But I think rumination is more about that intuition that you get that something might be wrong and that you just need to inspect your your actions. Ultimately, you can’t analyze axioms. People say that. But technically, that can’t be true. And like I can’t I think that’s where people get stuck with being as good versus emergence is good. Right. Like being as good can’t be analyzed. You can’t analyze your way into that. There’s no analytical justification for being as good. Right. It should be obvious and intuitively obvious to you that being has to be good. Otherwise, you should kill yourself, technically speaking. Right. But don’t do that. That’s that’s what do that. Don’t do that. We’re all going to say don’t do that. Don’t do that. Right. But emergence is good is equally plausible. Right. I think it’s disprovable by my experience, but I can’t just prove it for you or anyone else. And I can’t come up with an analytical proof for it. I can just say ultimately, no, you can’t you can’t analysis your way into emergence is good. And in fact, all the emergence is good. People analyze their way into why something was good. And I’m like, I don’t think good is an analysis. I think good is an engagement, an intuitive engagement with something. You know, what makes a good piece of music or a good song or a good poem? Go ahead and analyze that for me. OK. And when you’re done, I will either destroy your analysis because it’s very easy to do or point out where it’s lacking because that’s very easy to do. Or probably just walk away because I got better things to do than to talk to people who who can’t see the obvious that you can’t analyze your way into the goodness of a song. That’s so silly. Now, analysis is always secondary. I think I think most of our axioms, let’s say, are ruminating in biblical terms. That’s the heart. And then I forget who initially said this, but it’s definitely not me. But it’s like the head pretends it’s in control. So the heart’s actually in control. The heart’s actually determining what you love and what’s the good and all that. And then your head tries to justify it. Well, no, no, no. Then your head justifies a post hoc in your head pretends that, oh, I figured out the good. Or the the what? You know, and I think going back to the shepherd and the sheep, if God wants our hearts, let’s say he wants the essence of us, which is our heart. And it’s up to this to slowly govern and transform the sheep, slowly transform them in perfect unity, let’s say, or the proper hierarchy of value, you could say, whatever you want to call that. So in this model, maybe the poetics is the chest. Like in the men without chests sense, if we’re expanding the heart and head. Because that was because that was Plato that did the heart and the head thing right. Except I think he had it backwards. He said that rationality is the ruler. And I can’t remember where Jonathan Hite pulled the monster. It’s the man and the monster and the lion. Man, was it was it was it was it you? Was it him who said that the that the emotions are what actually rule you? Yes, so Hume Hume would say that the reason is the slave of the passions, no matter what it thinks. But I don’t think that’s quite correct. Thomas Aquinas’s view would be, I think, more close to a log the lines of Jonathan Hite’s, where it’s the reason can have a slow influence on the passions and on the will to correct them. Because before the fall, in theory, it would have had perfect dominion over them, such that you could just be like, now is not a good time to be hungry and you wouldn’t be hungry anymore. You your entire being would be perfectly rational. And maybe maybe we’ll get back there someday. But until then, we’ve got to just fast and say no to the brownies until until we’re better. Wait a minute. No, I’m not agreeing to no to brownies, Father Eric. I will give you I’m not giving you no to brownies. That’s not happening. Oh, man, it looks like you’ll you’ll remain a gargoyle. Brotesque, not a gargoyles funnel water grotesque, sir. It’s a technical term. Emma, how was the ND? It was good. We we fought some rocks and then some poison plant guys. And delivered a letter. It was a good time. Nice. We might go on a long term break soon because half the D&D party because it’s it’s two married couples and then one other person. And one of the married couples, not us, is having a baby in January. So we might go on a little bit of a break. Do they have no priority whatsoever? Do they have no priority whatsoever? It’s emergent. Well, you know, I’ll tell you something that forces you into rumination and prevents pretty solidly the flow state is babies. I’ll tell you that right now. Babies are anti flow. Which is why Eric Pearl talks about, you know, that was the conversation with Ken Lowry and for Vicky or DC Schindler, maybe both of them about how changing diapers is like one of the most philosophically profound things that you can actually do. And I think that’s exactly right. That’ll challenge your axioms right there. Yeah, it’s challenging my axiom because Thomas Aquinas, I’m sure, never touched a diaper in his life. Not in. Men shouldn’t be changing diapers. Come on. Well, we’ve got plenty of saints in the church that went through far worse. So I’ll put it that way. Just. Hey, I mean, you know, monks and parents are supposed to engage with different facets of God, right? My gosh, no, Corey, it’s all supposed to be symmetrical. I’ve got it wrong again. Mark, tell me why I’m wrong. Because symmetry. I came here, by the way, to bully Mark for talking like a YouTuber at the beginning or an influencer at the beginning of his stream. He is a YouTuber. I don’t I don’t know if he’s an influencer. No, he talks like an influencer. He has to go through and describe all the different drinks he has on hand and tell you what they are and where he got them from and how you can get your own and get your own mug at mark of wisdom dot com. He sounds like an influencer. Is Mark of wisdom even like supporting you? Are they contributing any money to this effort, Mark? No, no. Who runs that anyway? Mark of wisdom is not it’s struggling struggling organization for sure. Oh, goodness. We’re working on it. I like your culture war stream. Now, I just that bit went on for longer than normal and I was like, Mark sounds like an influencer. That wasn’t longer than normal. I always talk about two drinks at least and one snack if I if I have always. This is good. Culture war is good. It was an important topic. I like all my streams though. I’m biased. Well, I would hope so because some of my videos are better than others in my videos like my fourth estate videos are really really good. That was make a playlist called the good ones. Maybe I might the model video to the knowledge engine video very good. It explains all the stuff we were already talking about except you you guys have contributed. I do. I do. Honestly, Mark, if you need a video just to hook people in, you should go with what is a church? Because that one’s really simple. You just get there in 12 minutes. And it’s it’s just a nice easy. Oh, I can get this guy. Yeah church. Yeah, that’s a community designed to protect the highest value that they share in common. They are right. But that’s the first time I’ve heard that feedback. I appreciate that people. I’m going to try that. I just thought that right now. I just thought that right now. So I know that’s great. You any sooner whenever whenever I I I realized that. But yeah, no, that’s that’s good. That’s good. It is a short one. Yeah. Yeah, and it is it is accessible because that concept is dead simple. No one sees it, but dead simple. No, it’s a good. You’re right. That’s a good intro videos. What is a church? Yeah. All right. I would try and tie in something from way back at the beginning of my stream, which I meant to tie in my opening rant. So. When they were dealing with the transcendental property of unity, Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure both dealt with it in different ways. Thomas Aquinas imagined that the unity of, let’s say, the human soul was one. And that everything that looks like it might be a part underneath it. Is just a faculty as a part of that unity, but the unity has a priority. Whereas Bonaventure looked at the forms kind of coming up from underneath. So it’s like you had the form of a single cell, then you had the form of those single cells coming into tissues in the form of those tissues forming its organs. Form of those organs forming its organ systems. And then something you got to realize about the Middle Ages was they always had their schools of thought that you would be trained in. So if you were Dominican, you studied Aquinas. If you were a Franciscan, you studied Bonaventure. Now, Mark, because I know you haven’t read any of this, guess who invented nominalism? Was it the Franciscans or the Dominicans? Oh, it was the Franciscans. Obviously it was the Franciscans, right? Because that’s what they were learning. They learned to look at the parts first rather than the whole first. So anyway, that’s why, you know, Franciscans are great, but they shouldn’t be allowed to do theology. How about the same thing? I think that’s a good point. You know, Franciscans are great, but they shouldn’t be allowed to do theology. How about the Salesians, Father? Salesians? They’re in trouble right now. Okay, we’ll leave it at that. Did you go to a Salesian school? No, my church is a Salesian. Really? I thought they only did seminaries. Yeah, in schools. Who is this? I don’t know this name. St. John Bosco. Yeah, it was founded by St. John Bosco, but they named themselves after St. Francis de Sales, which is where you get Salesians from. But he had lived like 200 years before St. John Bosco. But they focus on the youth and the poor. They focus on the youth and the poor, but I just heard that they are now the largest order, larger than the Jesuits worldwide. Not in the U.S., but worldwide. Wow. But they’ve only existed 160 years, 170 years, so that’s why they’re not that well known. Is St. John of Savio linked with St. John Bosco? Yes, he was a disciple of his. Okay. Who, yeah? It took me an embarrassingly long time to recognize that St. Dominic, founder of the Dominicans, and St. Dominic Savio were two different St. Dominics. That took me a really long time. One died as a child, right? St. Dominic Savio died as a child. Yeah, so you can imagine how confused I was. This is what happens when you learn about just a ton of saints when you’re like eight. And then you just spend the rest of your life just separating them out. You know what, one of the reasons, one of the things that’s just so obvious to me in retrospect, but it’s like, you want all the paths that are possible that point to Jesus. And obviously, like it’s better to have a tapestry of people who point to Christ than, you know, like, yeah, anyway. So it just happens. No, we’re all equal. There should only be one path, and it’s symmetrical. So yeah, we just want one answer, Neil. Occasionally, occasionally, occasionally, I know when you’re being facetious, Mark. Let me guess, liturgy and repeated prayer are also bad. The word did not come up in my Presbyterian upbringing. Liturgy. Prayer did. Prayer did come up. Liturgy did not come up. I bet people get really upset about that word, too. Yeah, they do. They don’t like that word at all. Liturgy? Yeah. There was a stream that Digital Gnosis did. And boy, he’s a messed up kid. But Cassidy was on it, and she used the word liturgy and he just about flipped out. Why are you using that word? That’s a religious word. And she’s like, no, it just means that you do this over and over again. I don’t know if Cassidy is the one who can reach Digital Gnosis. No one can. I just saw a seven second clip of Trent Horn debating destiny. And I thought, man, if I somehow, by some machinations of the evil one, had to debate destiny, I don’t think I wouldn’t respect him at all. But that wasn’t a debate. See, that’s the problem, like even just calling it a debate. Because you need to have at least a few common axioms in order to debate something. Well, and you need to start with a starting axiom. And that whole talk started with destiny saying, well, I would imagine that the best argument against my position, and he never stated his position, would be X. And it’s like, you just projected the other side’s argument and argued against that. If that’s not straw manning, then there’s no such thing as straw manning. What is wrong with you? And that’s really the problem. I was like, well, then it’s not a debate. He didn’t state a position. If you don’t state a position, it definitely can’t be a debate. Forget about all the rules and all the other stuff that you should have in place, at least normally to have a debate. It wasn’t a debate. And it’s shameful that anybody calls it a debate. And it’s shameful that the guy running it didn’t immediately catch that and put an end to it immediately. State your positive position in a positive way, or you lose. Because that’s how debates work. You’re supposed to state your position. And he never did that. He never did that. It was shocking to me. Because then he would have to say that abortion is good. You have to justify that without saying it. So you at least have to imply it. But you can’t. That’s absurd and nonsensical. It’s denying being as value. Like any value. Because you can just stuff it out whenever you feel like it. And it obviously doesn’t have any value. And it’s like you can’t deny that being has value. Like I said, if that’s the position you hold, then why are you here? Why are you here? Why are you allowing yourself to continue? It’s easy, relatively speaking. If being didn’t have some intrinsic goodness to it or some intrinsic value to it, to preserve, it would be easy for you to stop existing. And yet, it’s not. Just fast for a while. Have you guys talked about C.S. Lewis’s conception as hell? Maybe I’m getting this wrong. But I’ve thought about this a lot. And I like the idea a lot. That hell is a place where it’s just yourself to the end of time. It’s just you. And nothing else. It’s the difference between creation outside of yourself. It’s like the complete opening to that creation that is outside of yourself. Versus nothing but you. But that you is all you get forever. I’m not sure that that was the basis. So I’m assuming you’re talking about the great divorce, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, they’re in this like rainy city where they’ve got their big homes and they’re all alone by themselves. Right. So I see two things going on. One is in that vision of hell, you don’t have the capacity to really change. So you’re kind of on the verge of a hellish death. So you’re kind of locked in the way that you are. And that you can’t get anything of real substance and gravity anymore. So there’s this little throwaway line. But it’s like you can have whatever you want but it won’t be of good quality. And it seems like the result of that was people moving away from each other rather than coming together. I don’t know if the being alone with yourself was what comes first. Or if it’s the… Yeah. So I think he played with that idea. It’s also interesting to compare that to how he portrayed the Un-Man in Paralandra. So I’ve been thinking about the Ransom Trilogy a lot and talking with people about it. And it seems like he was trying to push the limit of exploring what evil was. He did that a lot in different ways. He wrote the Screwtape Letters and he wrote The Great Divorce. And I think that’s really… There’s something that’s very true about it. It’s reminiscent also of reciprocal narrowing, which narrows you down and down and down and down to a point. To where the point is all that you can perceive. But he also played with the idea of… And actually I think I might have even disagreed with him a little bit. He played with the Un-Man in the sense that it was a tendency towards annihilation. Like maybe you can conceive of evil, like the ultimate evil maybe, as being reciprocal narrowing unto annihilation. If you’ve reciprocal narrowed all the way down to there’s a point, but there’s still a point, then you still have some existence. You still have some hope from redemption. You still have a little bit of being left over. But really it doesn’t get to… If being is kind of like the equivalent to what is good, somebody correct my terminology there, then non-being… Nope, they’re 100% the same thing. Yeah, so non-being then, annihilation, is kind of like the opposite of that. But that’s also difficult to go to the limit of. You can see it in terms of atrocities, like school shootings, people who go all the way down, fall down the well of nihilism to where they basically enter the berserker state, which is like it itself is not annihilation because you’re still an acting force with will, but it’s right on the edge, like approaching the asymptote, the limit of evil, which is where you just… But you want to destroy yourself and everything around you is kind of like the ultimate end of that. But that’s really, really difficult to portray in fiction or to even think about what that means. And that’s like, I’m not saying necessarily that I believe… I know there’s a whole section of people that believe hell is just like complete annihilation from existence. Yeah, Sam Adams believes that. The reason I bring this up is I see technology moving us in that direction, in that the fundamental path is I use technology to get whatever I want forever for the rest of my life and let’s say I can extend my life infinitely. But what that lacks is other people completely. Whereas if I have to interact with other people, I have to sacrifice some aspects of who I am fundamentally to interact with those people. There’s no other way to interact with people as you have to sacrifice part of who you are for the higher conversation, or the higher activity of changing diapers, which is a higher activity, by the way. That’s right. And so it’s like further and further and further and further, all alone in your technologically created hell. Electric hell. On Earth versus… anyway. So just something I’ve been… I am thinking of Dante because we can’t have a Sunday night live stream even without Ted here, without bringing up Dante. We’ll bring up the spirit of Ted, which is Dante. At the very bottom of hell, you’ve got like a frozen lake and the treacherous are frozen in there. They can’t move, they can’t communicate with each other, they’re just stuck in that isolation because on account of their treachery, they cut themselves off from their fellow man. So there is something to that, I think, of that isolation. But the thing is, is that maintaining a relationship takes a lot of work, too. You need to put your tea into it, your time, energy, and attention in order to keep these relationships healthy and strong. And worthwhile. So yeah, the more you lose your capacities to do things, right? To do useful, virtuous things. The more you’ll be cut off from other people, the more cut off you are from people, the more you’ll lose your capacity to relate to people, you get into that vicious cycle where you’re just kind of degrading and degrading and degrading until you’re at the bottom. So yeah, there’s something to it there. Hey, I got to run tonight. Good talking to you guys. Hey, Josh, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. Good to see you. Been too long since I’ve seen Josh. Sounds like he’s doing okay, though, so that’s good. Yeah. It’s a very Catholic stream tonight, Mark. I know. I know. I guess that’s good. Let’s blame Neil. Why not? You’re the only priest in the corner, Father. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s how it often goes with these Sunday night streams. It’s like the Catholics plus Mark. Sorry, Neil. You got to go through your indoctrination. We don’t use that. We don’t use that terminology here. It’s not even the Peterson sphere with the rest of us, Neil. We really appreciate that you’re here in the sphere. Father, you need to come up with a penance associated with each one of those booboos. No, I think we just flashing that across the screen. I think that’s enough of a penance. It’s pretty obnoxious when I do it. Is there a… What am I asking? What is the reason for the desire to not self-reference? It’s not the self-reference necessarily. The first thing that I noticed is that every time people started using this term, this little corner of the internet, and started talking about it a lot, I got really bored. I was just like, oh, this is just… Why are you doing this, right? It’s like you guys… YouTube and Discord are not able to contain a robust body. It’s always going to be a weak network at best. So I’m like, I just don’t want to talk about it while I’m on here. That’s why I made that. And then I thought, you know, they’re trying to talk about this flotilla, this sphere of influence, as if it was one cohesive, solid, real thing. And it’s not. Right? It’s like we don’t have something that rises to the level of thingness here. So don’t talk about it like it’s a thing. There’s no leader. So Brindis uses flotilla. Okay, so we’ve got an aggregate that sometimes comes together. We can buy that, right? We can talk about a sphere, right? Where we have a personality in the middle of it. That’s Jordan Peterson, right? It’s like, okay, the only thing that draws all of us together here is that personality. So you put that at the center of it. It’s not really a thing. So it all works better. So anyway, that’s why on this live stream, but at this house, young man, we don’t say this little corner of the internet. We say the Peterson sphere. Baby, being, whoops, being is good. No, no, no attention. No, go away. Okay. We just had to share the babyness and the beingness. Well, I think the other thing is too, corners are places where you get trapped. And I don’t feel trapped. Also, you’re stuck. And when certain people talk about the corner, they talk about the corner of corners, thus destroying the unity of the idea. All at once, like always. Right. And so it’s constant rebellion. We can change the subject. It’s fine. No, I didn’t change the subject. She’s right. We haven’t really articulated much of this publicly. So like, it’s okay to get it on the record. I mean, to what’s the word? Mea culpa, mea culpa. I have not watched a sufficient number of these streams, clearly. It’s okay. Getting the TLC flash is just a part of… It’s like when you go on QI. You have to set up the Clack Center, else you didn’t actually go on QI. Exactly. It’s a ritual. It’s a right of nothing. I had the good fortune of joining the college fraternity that had zero pledge process whatsoever. I just hung out with these guys and after a couple times they said, By the way, we’re a fraternity. Would you like to join? Were you in a fraternity then? No ritual entry? I was in ZBT, which is a historically Jewish fraternity. Zion Bemish Pat Tepede. Okay, so they didn’t need any initiation. They had plenty of rituals already. It was all there. Do you think the ritual back in the day would be doing the Sabbath dinners altogether? That makes sense. We went to a bodhouse on Friday night and we had a good time. I at no point felt pressured to convert. The Jews don’t pressure you to convert. They don’t do that at all. They don’t really want you to. Why would you want to do that? Because they end up getting Walter Chizik to be the one to convert. Emma, do you get that reference? Oh, it’s better that you don’t. Watch that one in seminary. It’s the big Lebowski. Corey, your baby’s crying. Hey Andrew, how’s it going? It works. How’s the homework going? It’s good. My stair is almost done. Is it final week for you next week? Yep. Yep. I have a building due and a portfolio due. That’s what I’m doing now. I think I’m going to check out for the night. It’s good to see you guys. Good to see you Corey. Check Discord if you want. Okay, I will do that. Thank you. Good night. Good night. I’ve got a final due this week. My professor for this course is about as checked out as we all are. Is this the history one? History of canon law, yeah. Our final is to write a bullet point summary of a 45 minute presentation we would give at an evangelical college about the history of canon law. Wow, that’s interesting. Evangelical college to Protestants? Yeah, how would you explain the history of canon law to Protestants who are educated and want to know? That’s really interesting. Crazy Protestants. This is my second time in grad school and this is what we’re getting for our final. Are you going top down or bottom up? I’m going to go chronological. Church’s sacred customs are the foundation of all her law. But are those customs top down? Well, they’re customs that became law. Customs that last were informed top down. Customs that don’t were not. Problem solved. At a certain point the bishop looks at that and says, that’s right, we’re going to keep doing that. So anyway, that’s what I have for my finals week. It’s much less work than you have, Andrew. Yeah, I suppose. Oh man. That’s the way it is. How’s your Greek coming, Emma? It’s coming, actually. Good news is I have a little bit longer to work on it. We’ve decided to push back to the April exam slot instead of the January. Because it would just be a little too tight in January. So that’s a lot of pressure. And I’m confident about my ability to pass it in April. I was much less confident about passing it in January. This week I’ve kind of paused Greek to focus on final papers. But we’ll get back to it. Good to hear. Good to hear. Sounds like everybody’s doing pretty well in their education. Yeah. Those who are edumacating anyway. Yeah. You stopped talking about flow state for one second. Everybody just pauses. Yeah, I guess so. I had a big discussion on education today where somebody was arguing that memorization and education were the same thing. And I’m like, no, literally memorization is the opposite. Not that it’s not useful for education, but if you memorize something you actually didn’t learn it at all. Mark, I would be really interested in hearing your fully laid out thoughts on education. Well, I have a video on that, Emma. Okay. I haven’t gone through all the backlogs of your videos, Mark. It’s not complete on education. But I might do one piece on the conversation I had today with a teacher. He’s in Denmark. Which I questioned if that was even a real place. Denmark? I have fun doing things like that. Yeah, he was upset because I was saying, yeah, literally memorization is not the way to go. He was actually complaining that his students couldn’t memorize what a sum was. It’s because you got to show them how to derive it. And that’s what facilitates memory is connection anyway. And what you want to do is not memorize things, but you want to understand how to derive things. Because your memory is faulty anyway, and if you can’t derive it over again and you get it wrong, you’ll never know that. Because you have no way to contrast. But you can use your memory and your derivation together and play them all over again. So how does that apply to memorizing things like poetry? Well, look, I mean, I would say you can’t memorize poetry. Because poetry gives you a feeling. You can memorize the lines. But do you have to? I mean, could you just experience it? I think it’s a different experience to have it memorized than it is to just read it. There’s no doubt about that. I totally agree. But let me put it this way. If you feel the way you feel about a poem, you want to convey that to somebody else, and you write your own poem that conveys that feeling, isn’t that better than giving them the memorized version? Well, sure. I think having children memorize poetry for their own good or for their own experience or practice. I’m not against memorization. That’s not the argument I’m making. I’m saying memorization is you’re not educating. It’s not to say that memorization can’t be used in education. That’s a different statement. This is where I get the symmetry gets confused, right? But I do think that that is the issue. You have to understand that when you’re memorizing something, you’re not necessarily able to derive it. And therefore, you didn’t learn it. You are not educated in it. Because you just have it in hand. It comes from your memory. And yet, look, you need to remember things in order to do stuff. That’s my market. Well, from what I’ve seen, that’s my pet peeve on Catholic childhood education. It’s a lot of memorization. But can you put that into your own words? I don’t know if it’s taught as well. Yeah. Well, yeah, there’s a whole article out there somewhere, and I cannot find it for the life of me. I’m fairly sure it was a medium article from like 10 years ago. But the woman makes the case. I’m glad I’m finding that. Yeah, the way when you put kids in preschool, pre-K, and in kindergarten, and you put them in front of a desk, you destroy a whole way of learning. And those kids, according to her, have worse outcomes. But when you let kids play longer, and they actually go to kindergarten later, because when they were born or whatever, they actually do better in life overall. Because that style of learning is different and complements the later style of learning in front of a desk. I believe it. It might be the case that if kids are not sufficiently disciplined in the home, that they learn how to play in the home, that memorization is the only way to discipline kids in the classroom. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The indication here that I was getting from the discussion today was they did not possess the skill of memorization. There was no amount of discipline that he was able to apply to get them to memorize what a sum was. And I was like, okay, but why do you want them to memorize it? Why don’t you want them to derive the definition of a sum so that they can describe it, albeit slower? Because you have to derive it every time, maybe. But now you don’t have to memorize it. And also you figure out how to derive things, which for me is a better plan. Definition of a sum is an interesting one to have to memorize. But I think there’s value in learning the skill of memorization. And the subject matter is maybe secondary. Yeah, I think you need to know how to memorize. Imagine if nobody in the home made you memorize and nobody in the early school made you memorize and then you ended up with a problem. Yeah, that’s a problem. Yeah, memorization is a valuable skill to have. I just think it’s somewhat blocking to education if you use it in place of education. But it is required for education because you have to remember something. But maybe the best way to memorize is not through memorization. Or maybe the best way to exercise your memory is not actually through memorization but through something else. I remember things by sight and so memorization just doesn’t work for me at all. Smell. Smell is the best way. Yeah. Well, and the rise of the memory palace is something I was pointing out earlier today in the Discord. It’s weird that this memory palace idea, which has been around for a long time, but it’s strictly materialistic too, is such a big deal. In terms of a way to utilize memory and to advance memory. And I don’t know why that is or what that means. But it’s strange because in the past people had better memories. They were better able to recite things like poetry and stories. And they didn’t have the systems of memorization. They didn’t have memory palace the way we do now. So it’s more convenient to use something we lost. Well, memory palace is a little bit sister-row in some form. Right. Well, the idea that you need multiple connections to have a good memory is super important, I think. Neil, I’d be interested in what you said about Catholic education, stuff like that. So my wife teaches, oh, I should know the official term, but she teaches little kids the terms. And she tries to relate to them in ideas and story, basically. And the problem is they play around too much. They don’t know how to focus on the material. And whereas our daughter does not have that problem. And I think it’s because it’s not just us, like having grandparents around and an extended family around, hugely helpful. But I just don’t see, let’s say, the parents having the expectation of their children that when you’re in that classroom, you have full attention and respect on whatever’s going on. And you’re going to be held account by the parents if that’s not the case. And that’s a rare… Maybe it’s just that particular experience. But I suspect that, especially since COVID, it’s gotten a lot tougher for school teachers. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think this was starting even before COVID. But I’ve heard of teachers being told that they just have to make their lessons more interesting and more engaging. And it’s all on them. And discipline starts first. Yeah. No, discipline is traumatic. You can’t discipline a child. And then the parents will destroy their self-esteem for life. So can I tell a quick story? Absolutely. You’ve got four minutes. Four minutes. I can do this in four minutes. It’s one of my prouder experiences as a father. And this is my… I’m trying to think of the year. I think it was 2018. I think my daughter was about one and three quarters two. And I had JP flowing through me. And I waited. I was a crafty. I waited for my wife to be out of the house. Because my daughter was reaching the age where I knew that she knew what I was asking her to do. And she wouldn’t do it. She would… So I was getting close to her nap time. And she wanted a toy. And I said, well, help me clean up these toys and then we’ll get that toy. And she helped me. So I asked her to help me, but she just ran out of the room. And I brought her back. And I’m like, no, no, no. Come on, help me. We’re going to do it together. And she just ran out of the room. And then I was like… So then I put my plan into effect. My plan was I found the most boring corner of our house. Not using the word in that capacity, father. I found the most boring. And I said, OK, I put her in my lap firmly, but gently. And I said, we’re going to sit here until you’re ready to help me clean up. And she just sat there. She’s puzzled. She doesn’t know what’s going on. And then after two minutes, I’m like, OK, ready to help me clean up? She’s yes. And I let her go and she runs out of the room. And then she’s like, back in the corner, and now she gets it. And it’s on. And you know, so five minutes, she’s, you know, I could be really, but, you know, she’s she’s hollering and I’m just very gently. And then, daddy’s in charge. Yeah. Well, after after five minutes, she she, I say, OK, ready to help me clean up? Like, she settles down. I say, are you ready? Help me clean up. She says, yes. And I let her go and she runs out of the room. And we go back and forth. We do this for over an hour. It was like an hour and a half and I said, there is no way I’m losing this battle. There’s no way. If I lose this battle now, I’m gonna be fighting this battle the rest of my life. And okay, so we get to the point and my daughter to her credit, she had a stubborn will and I was impressed with her by the end of it. So we get to about an hour and a half and she’s falling asleep in my lap and she’s going, like she’s on that verge of like falling asleep. And then the door, she hears the door open and mommy’s home and she just perks up in my lap. She goes, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, screaming atop my top for like, my wife comes comes running up and she comes up to the edge of the room and she looks inside and at first she thinks daughter’s hurt and to my wife’s credit, she lets me explain the situation. And then she asked my daughter, she says, oh, are you ready to help daddy clean up? And my daughter’s like, yes. And then my daughter goes and actually, my wife, it was like perfect good cop, bad cop. It was so perfect. And helped my daughter just clean up and we probably only had to sit her in the corner maybe half a dozen to maybe eight times since then. And she’s seven and a half now. So yeah, anyway, sorry father if I went over time. No, no, no, no, you didn’t go over time at all. That was perfect. And that is exactly what we need to hear because yeah, yeah, that’s just that kind of disciplines. You know, it’s not fun, but it’s necessary. And I think you’ll be reaping the benefits of that for years to come. So two thumbs up on that. And we’re gonna put two thumbs up at the end of this live stream here because I’m going to be disciplined. I’m going to go to bed at a reasonable time. So good night and God bless you all. Good night. God bless.