Thanksgiving Pre-Game Open Mic (1rafI1B9aS0)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1rafI1B9aS0

Hello, everyone. And if you’re here, that means you’re here. We’ve got Manuel and William here. How are you guys doing today? I’m doing well. All right. Manuel, you’re just showing us your profile pic today. I don’t know. Okay. All righty. So I believe both of you are stationed in the United States of America, if I know you guys correctly. Getting ready for turkey day, getting, doing your pre-turkey day fast. Fast? Yeah, you got to fast. You got to fast so that you’re hungry, so that by the time all the food shows up, it’s actually enjoyable. It’s a rule. I don’t know if anybody told you that. I’m more than the Americas. Look at the darkness. Oh, I must have got you mistaken for somebody else. But I should have known that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Sure. I’m sorry your country is lame and doesn’t have a national holiday tomorrow. You’re sorry that my country didn’t need to be saved by Indians, Mr. Allen? Ouch. All right. Starting off, starting off. Okay. Does anybody have any burning topics that they want to talk about or were you hoping to listen to me talk? Yeah, I just wanted to poke you a little bit. Okay. Well, I think you’ve already managed that. Interesting church news out there. That’s it. Here we go. Here we go. Pope Francis is threatening on a shared Easter date with the Orthodox. And yeah, this is, if you talk to your friend of mine, Sam Adams, he said that this was the most hotly debated topic in the early church, even more than any of the dogmas. And apparently Pope Francis is feeling pretty open-minded. So I’ll ask you gentlemen, do any of you know how Catholics calculate the date of Easter? No. I think I’ve heard it before. I would say that 98% of Catholics don’t know how we pick the date for Easter, which means that this could totally change overnight and nobody will notice. So perhaps now is the time. How far off is the Orthodox Easter? I think there’s two complicating factors, right? So Catholics calculate the date of Easter by taking the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the spring equinox. That’s how we calculate the date of Easter. And the Orthodox complicate that on two points. One of them is that they won’t observe, this is something I read in this article here, so it’s as good as this article. They won’t observe Easter unless Passover has happened first. And very occasionally Passover won’t happen at that time. But the second is I think the Julian calendar that they’re still using. They haven’t updated to the Gregorian calendar and I think that’s the big deal there. So anyway, we’ll see if anything happens. But they’re doing it in Nicaea. My opinion is that it’s a good movement. I don’t know why I should care about the calculations yet. Right. And it’s probably people that have good reasons to care about the calculations. But I think unification in whatever element is a good example for further cooperation and should be embraced. Yeah. Now they talk about whenever you’re going to change a parish weekend liturgy schedule that everybody has to compromise there. So as long as there’s compromise on both sides, I think I could do it. But if the Catholics just capitulate to the Orthodox, it’d be kind of like, eh, do we really have to do that? Anyway, so speaking of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, here’s Mark. Yeah, I don’t know anything about either of those things. It does occur to me that why is there a relationship between Passover and Easter in the Orthodox Church? Do you know? Because Jesus was crucified during the Passover celebrations. Or before, depending on how you come down on the calendar question. And really, the whole first full moon after the spring equinox business, I think that has to do with dating Passover as well, because the Jews had that solar lunar calendar thing going on. I’d have to look that up, though. I’m not 100 percent certain on it. Gotcha. OK. Yeah, I know. I know you’re the one that read that book. I didn’t read that book. So I don’t know all the… So the Orthodox are trying to preserve this particular idea that Passover and Easter are related in this particular way. Yeah, yeah. Because they have a broken calendar that does not work. And why they maintain it, I do not… It doesn’t work. Like, that’s part of the problem. It actually doesn’t function correctly. The solstice doesn’t occur on the solstice. Exactly. Exactly. And is this all based on New Year? Or like, what is this all based on? So I guess there’s going to be a big Catholic Orthodox gathering in Nicaea in 2025, observing the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. And I guess this is on the docket for something for them to talk about. I’m interested in the… Go ahead. Well, I was just wondering, what is the… What is the year based around? Right? Because if it’s not based on Christ, which might have been a good idea, but whatever. No, we’re basing it on New Year, I think. Right. So, yeah, what’s the relevance of New Year in Christian construction? Everybody knows that New Year’s Day is actually the feast of the circumcision of Christ. For real? On the eighth day after Christmas, yeah. OK. I mean, it used to be the feast of the circumcision of Christ until 1960, when John the 23rd changed it. Not bitter or anything, but that makes way more sense. So… I’m interested in the ecumenism of all of it, but my question really would be the American celebration of Easter, even though, you know, how weird it can be at times. How will that change if the Catholics just throw their way? Because we celebrate with the Catholics the American holiday. Yeah, I guess the funny point for me is that this would not even really be noticed by the majority of Catholics in the pew if we changed how we calculated the date for Easter. Because everybody just, you know, looks on the calendar and says, oh, that’s where Easter is. And then that’s as complicated as it gets. So, yeah, but the Jesuits who came up with the Gregorian calendar, I think they calculated the date of Easter by hand, without decimal points, all the way to the year 4000, you know, just in case. So this would be… I guess they won’t care, but, you know, remember them. So, yeah, I mean, it really… I don’t think a lot of people would even notice. But it was just a little news story that caught my eye. Is that just for the sake of ecumenism or something? Sure, yeah. Well, I… what, Pope Francis, he’s got this line, So let us have the courage to put an end to this division that at times makes us laugh. When does your Christ rise again? The sign we should give is one Christ for all of us. And then he’s got some more Pope Francis lines there. But I thought that was a decent little joke there. He’s a funny guy. That is a decent joke, but I don’t trust him at all. So I’m immediately suspicious. Hermanudence of suspicion confirmed here. Okay. Oh, well, do you have anything else to surprise us with? Oh, yes, I know. Shock of shocks. Oh, ma’am. Are you going back up northeast for Thanksgiving, Mark, or are you just staying in warm South Carolina? I have no plans to go anywhere this winter at all. Everyone’s sort of shocked. I’m like, yeah, you guys aren’t doing anything. So you’re all still in your homes with your masks. And I don’t even want to be exposed. I don’t want to be exposed to the madness at all. And it’s cold and I don’t want to be cold. So anything cold here. It’s been like it was freezing the other night. I’m like, I got under under thirty two the other night. I’m like, what’s going on? This is nutty. This is crazy weather for South Carolina. But we had a mild summer. So I don’t know. Do you have two homes, Mark? No, no, no, no. It just I my family’s up in New England and I’m down in South Carolina. So there was a there was a brief moment where I could have very well had two homes and been. That sounds like a lot of work to me. No, I was going to have a condo in Boston on the water. Great. So I could get to it from the airport easily. I had it all planned out. I almost said I almost pulled it off, too. But no, no, no, I kept getting everything stolen from me. So now I have to live like a like a poor person forever. So is what it is. Well, blessed are the poor. Right. Somebody said that. Yeah, I don’t think they were poor, though. So I mean, suspicious again. Here’s my hermeneutics, the suspicion confirming Mark Lefebvre. Suspicious of Jesus Christ himself confirmed. Yes. Yes. Oh, my. Were you born? Are the Catholics trying to usurp Thanksgiving and turn it into some kind of Jesus fest of some some nature? Is that what’s going on? It was kind of always like that. Listen, Mark, you want to give thanks to somebody. You want to give thanks to somebody. Just just give thanks. Just give thanks. Give it out. Give it out to the universe. You know, give it out. Give it out to the subatomic particles around you. Just let the Thanksgiving out. You know, I have to thank somebody. So I agree with you, Eric. Gratitude thing. Yes. Thank you, Eric, for making me realize that I need to be thankful. But who are you going to be thankful to? I was thankful towards you. I was thankful towards you. I was thankful towards you. What are you complaining about? Oh, OK. I’ll I receive I receive your gratitude. Great to make it awkward, Eric. Sorry, I’m bad at this. I’m new at this. You’re doing fine. You’re doing fine. My best. You’re getting better by the day. I think things got better once I implemented my my rule here. This is a no anime zone. So sorry, William. I don’t know if you’re a big anime person. OK, good. None of you have anime profile pics. So I think. Yeah. Michael says he’s been to the Plymouth plantation many times. Pretty sure it’s a Protestant holiday. Well, here’s the deal. All of the best parts of Protestantism were stolen from Catholicism. There you go. There you have it. Not backing down. Necessarily true. Yeah. Protestants try to take credit for things as if they were first at something. And in fact, they were first at nothing. So it’s a problem for Protestants. You’re hurting my heart. You should say inherited. You shouldn’t make that division more strong. More strong. Like their their little children and their rebellious children. Beliaceus. Tease or whatever their children. I don’t know. I feel like my harsh and divisive language isn’t patronizing, at least. Something. Well, it’s the Father Church. Like leading the fuck. Yeah. You’re called father. Right. Be patronizing. Well, he’s got a point there. Yeah. So personality makes the high church kind of difficult. I don’t know what it is. We went to a Catholic church for about four months, I guess, when I was 12 or so. And I’m definitely I don’t if it’s got smells or bells, I’m not really doing it. So was raised in a kind of went Baptist for a while. And then we went Latter Day Saint for a little while and then kind of my parents stopped attending church. So here I am back at Southern Baptist. But yeah, it’s been quite a adventure. But I just can’t do the Latin or anything like that. So, yeah. Where did you go that had a Latin mass? Well, there was a small Catholic church in Athens, Georgia. I don’t know if it still does it or if it was just one one a one off that confused me, but we didn’t stay very long. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I guess I kind of grew up with all the smells and bells. And so I happen to be a fan of it. I can see it. I just see Protestantism is kind of a even though it started off with all the smells and bells, the Lutherans are kind of nuts for that, in my opinion. But modern evangelicalism, of course, tends to avoid that. So yeah, I don’t I don’t remember any smells in any of the churches I’ve been to that have been Catholic, just the Orthodox who just freaking fumigate the area. And there ain’t no bugs in their buildings. My goodness, all the incense they use. Yeah, yeah, I’d like to use more incense, but gotta run the program that I’ve got here. So I think that’s all important, though. Like, I think that’s really important to change up the container. We were talking a lot about containers today, because we did our our group like Geo-Divina practice. I hope I’m not blaspheming by even talking about this now, because it’s not a it’s one of Reveke’s adapted practices from the from the Catholic tradition. And then we adapted it further because we’re all heathens. And we were talking about that depends on what you’re reading and calling holy. Well, yeah, okay. Well, William Blake, William Blake, come on. Come on, come on. William Blake and Confucius. So there we go. Yeah, I’m inviting you, Eric, next week. Oh, yeah. Oh, I really you might have found a red line there. Yeah, you don’t trust these two guys that are like these two randos on the internet. It’s just it’s a practice. It’s a verve. You got to figure out the verveke practice. Well, plus, we’ve improved on all this stuff, quite honestly. So we fixed the idea of practice as such. Every once in a while, you know, like like verveke, like his work, like listening to him talk every once in a while. He gives me just a little whiff of something. And I’m like, oh, yeah, he’s not Christian, is he? I think practicing Lexio divina with something other than the Bible might be another one of the little whiffs. That’s interesting. The Bible. Yeah, yeah, that’s I mean, that’s like that’s like my bread and butter meditation right there is right. Lexio divina with the Bible because there isn’t another church that or another another text that the church claims is inspired by God. I never attached those connotations. I thought something like the little flowers of St. Francis of Assisi would be appropriate for like the divina. Yeah, I suppose so. I’ve just I’ve never done that. You don’t you don’t think that there’s tons of inspired texts in the world? William Blake. Come on, Blake. We can Blake. Hello, Blake. Come on. He’s he’s as as as what would you call it? I don’t want to use the banal term religious, but he’s as as deeply embedded in in in at least Christianity and Christian thought as you’re going to get like. Yeah, no, no. Now you guys now you guys are really tickling tickling my synapses here because you’re making me think I was not ready for that. Can you do Lexio divina on something other than the Bible? I guess I don’t know enough about William Blake anyway. We don’t do poetry. Oh, you’ve broken my heart. You’ve broken my heart. Everybody should know about William Blake. Come on. So let’s just go with your framework, which I already kind of don’t like. But let’s just say, right, like the Bible is the thing that informs you. And and like it makes you into the right frame. Right. Then why can’t you use that frame to look at other things? Like, like, why would you only look at the frame itself? Yeah. Why is the Bible the only book, Eric? Why are we burning all the books, all the poor books? It’s why are you on the Internet? Go back into the church. I go pray. We have to burn the Internet because Father Eric says there’s only the Bible and you can’t read anything else. Good job. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You are now putting words into my mouth that I never claimed. Let me tell you my side of the story. My side of the story is I go off to seminary as a bright 18 year old lad, head full of hair, clean shaven. See what the Bible does to you. And I go and I learn about the spiritual tradition of the Catholic Church and this primary pillar that developed for me, the way that I spoke to God is through Lexio Divina. God spoke to me. It’s like that’s the primary place where I go. It was always strictly with the Bible. Now, last time the Catholic Church started changing things very, very quickly. Everything blew up. So I am allowed to put the brakes on this and say, hold on, let me think about this for a minute or two before I go join your little cult or whatever. No, no, we don’t. We’re not trying to get you to join anything. We’re just I just got invited. I just got invited to the Church of William Blake and one of your litigations. Wow. Wow. Wow. So just give me a minute to think about this because religious people by definition shouldn’t change very quickly. We are supposed to be the embodiment of the tradition. Someone’s wings got pulled. Holy cow. That was a reference to the poem that we read. Okay, see, Joey, Joey, Joey understands me. Give me three or four hundred years to think about it. That’s right. After three or four hundred years after the Protestant Reformation, Catholics finally started distributing communion under both species instead of just the just the hosts. He gets it. Species. I’m sorry. You’re going to have the bread and the wine, but it’s actually the body and blood of Christ. Right. Oh, you’re saying that they were just doing the the host at first and weren’t you doing the wine too? Right. Right. Not until the 1970s. See, the system works. There was just a lot of whining and then they were like, okay, well, wine too. Protestantism equals exploratory fast boats. And Catholicism is a battleship, slow moving cruise ship. Okay. Sam was already ahead of me. Well, if you like that framing, I guess you like that framing. So I have a new show which is called embodying the logos. But according to you, I need to change my name now. I think it’s probably all right. Okay. Just as long as you remember the OG who embodied the logos and whose pattern you participate. And his name is Jesus. So yeah, reaching a little too high there, Manuel. I need to watch more of your videos, Mark. I’m a little confused on your your relationship with deity or whatever you want to call it. Oh, watching my videos won’t help you with that. But you should watch all of my videos on navigating patterns like immediately. That I can confirm. Very important. I don’t understand a verveky language. I didn’t think to watch your videos. There’s almost no verveky language in there because verveky language is crazy talk. And all I’m trying to do is fix cultural cognitive grammar. So occasionally I’ll throw in a verveky word when it’s appropriate. But I try to explain them. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever you use a word and you can’t ground it in the conversation, you shouldn’t use it. Yeah, I try to avoid that particular mistake. I think I do a pretty good job. And I’m fairly precise with my language most of the time. Although Father Eric can get confused by anything. So he’s always. Because he only read one book. So if I’m reading between the lines here, Manuel, what you’re saying is that if you don’t practice Lectio Divina with the text, you haven’t really read it? I would actually argue yes. Well, according to the way John has the practice set up, that’s actually true. Because the whole point in, you know, look, we’re piggybacking off of his private Lectio, which he’s piggybacking off the Catholic. It has to be a sacred text to you. You have to have read it and extracted all the propositional knowledge out of it. And then you can use it in the practice. That’s the principle behind the practice. The principle we try to follow. We don’t, you know, we’re not like we’re not we’re not testing people. Right. It’s like if you have a poem you’ve never read before. Well, whatever. Right. We don’t really care that much. But yeah. And we use, you know, uses a poem and then and then prose. You know what you could do with the Bible. Right. Because there’s poetic parts of the Bible and then there’s pros parts of the Bible for sure. Right. There’s the more story based stuff. But, you know, yeah. I mean, my two books are Norton Anthology of Poetry, where I almost always read, you know, some William Blake and and and the Wisdom of Confucius, which is a book about Confucius with some Confucian sayings in it. So you guys can’t conceive at all why I would be very, very hesitant to throw something else, you know, some other text as being sacred. Like why that would create a little bit of hesitation in me. I didn’t think the Catholics were that exclusionary, but maybe they are. Yeah, the Catholics adopted like holidays from other cultures and stuff. Right. Yeah, that’s after the process of baptizing them, which was a pretty frankly, probably kind of violent. It’s like, no, you are not going to have it this way. You’re going to have it this way. Yeah, but that’s like the baptism doesn’t change the propositional structure of the things that you adopt. Right. In other words, you’re you once you’re baptized, you’re you’re probably reasonably immune from things like that. You know, yeah, sure. You know, you don’t want to go up and shake hands with the demon. But, you know, I was I was using I was using baptized in a in a more extended sense, like, like, you know, They come into some kind of a winter solstice celebration and then they just say, hey, stop that. This is what you’re doing now, basically. So I don’t know, there might have been a miscommunication there. But like the process of inculturation and the process of bringing things into the church, It’s another one of those things that just needs to be done really slowly. You know, I don’t even I don’t even trust books if they’re not 100 years old yet. Well, that’s what Taleb says. So, yeah, but the stuff I’m reading is 100 years old. So there we go. Like, yeah, I mean, I think that’s a good rule of thumb. I think that the Lindy effect, as Taleb calls it right, is an important way to determine sacred texts. Right. Like how much sacredness can it have if it was written yesterday? Right. And then, yeah, where do you draw that line? And, you know, look, I mean, the Saints wrote stuff. You guys are still using it. I don’t know. You know, like the prayers are not all from Jesus. Like, right, right. Which is why I do think I have to open up the possibility of Lexio Divina with texts that aren’t the Bible. Like, I don’t think I can get around that. OK, so the 19th century. I’m suspicious of the 19th century. I’m suspicious of the 19th century. We’re all suspicious. OK, like like that. That that that is a real thing. But I think I think you shouldn’t do it with any text. Like, I’m I’m totally with you on that. Right. So I have my hermeneutics of suspicion as well. And and well, part of part of the way that we’re doing the practice is actually we’re we’re letting ourselves be inspired. Right. So we don’t let the text speak. We let the spirit speak. And we’re actually literally lifting up from the text. Right. So it’s the text is contextualizing. Are us right who we are in the moment. And then from there, we we get a mirror. Right. We we we get it. We get a way of of sifting out our thoughts into into a frame. And then we we can take that frame and we can step away from the text. And and I think I think you want to do that with the Bible as well. I don’t think you want to get stuck in the Bible. I think you want to you want to lift out. And then the question is, well, where do you get lifted? Right. And if if your suspicion is, well, that can be a bad place, then I’m going to say yes, that can be. But like you can get to the bad place through the Bible as well. Like, I don’t think the Bible immunize you from from going to bad places because that’s you who does that. You’re you’re at the wheel and you can say, oh, I don’t want to go there. Right. Right. Yeah. You got to have the scripture tradition and magisterium all in the appropriate balance. Yeah, I will think about it. Well, that’s got the chain or whatever. If you can engage with practices that aren’t so, I think you’re good and baptized. You’re immune. You’ll be fine. Like you always can go to confession afterwards. That’s I do have that. I’ve got that in my back pocket. You got to get out of jail. Free card. Just like use it. No, it’s not free. It’s get out of jail after much contemplation and repentance. But yeah, it’s no. The hardest part is you actually have to be sorry for what you did. Right. That’s the hardest part right there. I’m sorry I got into jail. Yes. No, not for what happened to you for what you did. That’s the that’s the problem. Well, look, I mean, I know we had I think Pastor Tanner joined us once for a while, but he didn’t stay for the whole thing, which is unfortunate because the end that’s that’s kind of the best. I mean, it’s good to watch somebody go through the process, but then the interactivity at the end is important, too. Yeah. And I would like to see a Christian do the practice like that. Like I would be actually fascinated how that they would say that do it differently or whatever. Like what is this magic thing that they keep saying that they have this magic thing? Sure. I mean, the goal, the goal of Christian meditation is to have communion with God. That’s that’s basically it. That’s what we’re after. That’s what we’re shooting at. Hopefully it works. So you guys have your your very, you know, written our kind of framing around it. Or I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe your guys’s language. So don’t you’re triggering us. We hate written our dumb idea. But you’re not using you’re not using Christian language. You’re not using Christian language. That’s that’s what I’ll say. Yeah, no, that’s fine. No, I mean, you’re right. And the problem with for Vicky stuff in general is that it’s very individualistic, right? It’s all bottom up, individualistic. You know, the guy in charge is always you. Right. And that’s one of the objections that we had to the lecture, Davina practice, which is part of his meditation series, is we were like, what we really need to do is get this into a group practice, because the group practice is where the like private practices are bad for you. They make you solipsistic. No. Right. So we have a group meditation practice. And after we meditate, we are still together. And we discuss our meditation. Right. Hopefully. And that’s really that was always really important. Right. To us was the group aspect and making sure that the that the practices that John talks about are not done solipsistically. And that requires converting them into group practices, because if if if you’re not doing things in a group, you’re you’re not written. That’s not a written. Nice joke. If you’re not doing things in a group, you’re not learning to be in a group. You’re not learning to have intimate connections with other people. You’re not learning how to cooperate in a community. You’re not learning how to build a community. And all of that is bad. Right. Because the problem really boils down to you don’t know how to get along. And getting along requires group group skills, not private skills. Hello, Sam. Hello. And I can’t remember the name behind the user name. Zander. Zander. That’s right. That’s right. How are you gentlemen doing today? Pretty good. How about yourself? Doing all right. Looking forward to eating far too many calories tomorrow. After saying mass, of course. But I understand that Zander’s already had your Thanksgiving like a month ago. Yeah, we did. When we still had food and not snow on the ground. Oh, I guess you have that same situation. You got the snow on the ground, too. Yeah, but we have food. Well, I’m sorry. I mean, I shouldn’t scare people about the state of Canada such that it is there is food. It’s just all been harvested. It’s all been harvested. There’s nothing left in the farmers market except frozen turkeys stored for Christmas. OK. OK. I can understand why you might think otherwise these days. Yeah. Price of eggs. Holy mackerel. It’s bad news. So I just want everybody to know that Michelangelo ruined Western art. Can confirm. No depicting God the Father. No, no. Bad news. Bad news. No depicting God the Father. I think we agree on something. Good. Good. Those Ten Commandments still mean something, right? Well, Catholics use a different list of Ten Commandments. You guys got rid of the graven images part. No, no, no. It’s from a different part of the Bible where we get our Ten Commandments. Oh, really? Is this a punch line or is this? Wait, there’s a different set of Ten Commandments? They’re almost identical, but it’s articulated differently. I’ll get it up. Yeah, please. This is fascinating. This is these are the questions, right? All right. All right. Here we go. Present, share screen, screen to share, add to stream. All of our faces are now really tiny. So I think this is the Protestant list right here. And here you get thou shalt not make any graven images. And this is the Catholic list here. Oh, all right. We use we use Deuteronomy five. Well, it is true that the Ten Commandments do show up differently in two different places. All right. OK, you should have no other gods before. So even in Deuteronomy five, so Deuteronomy five, eight, you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or on Earth beneath or in the water under the earth. That’s still right there in Deuteronomy five. Yeah, but Augustine. So Augustine can scratch things out, I guess. So anyway, that’s an interesting, interesting little point there. Was that like a constant debate in the early church between sort of the the kind of iconoclasts and well, I mean, I’ll put both sides negatively. They the idolaters and the iconoclasts. The iconoclasts and the iconophiles. Yeah, iconophiles. You can do it that way, too. Yes, although I will say that in the pre-Nicene period, it wasn’t a debate. There were virtually, as far as I can tell, no iconophiles. And that seems to be kind of mid to late 400s that we start to get out and out authoritative voices in favor of icon veneration. But there’s I mean, it’s always a question. It’s a spectrum, right? Like you can go into my super iconoclastic church, go into the nursery and find a mural of Noah in his ark with all of his animals. Right. So is that an icon of Noah? Right. We would, of course, say, no, it’s just the children’s nursery. Right. You know, kids like animals. So we have Noah’s ark and the animals in the children’s nursery. Right. So, you know, there’s and then but a Muslim like or at least most types of Muslims would be even against depicting Noah. Right. Even in a mural in the children’s nursery. Right. So and then you can go to like an Episcopal church and there’s tons of, you know, stained glass windows of saints, et cetera, in them. There’s probably no part of their service where they virtually venerate them. But, you know, it’s a that, you know, I’ve been to some Lutheran churches that have some pretty elaborate depictions of Bible scenes and saints and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera all over the church. So there’s it’s more of a spectrum question, I feel like than a binary question. And then there’s like, there’s it doesn’t necessarily need to be physical to like that song. And you could make an argument that even song and ritual is is a form of iconography. Maybe not a graven image because you’re you’re not craving anything. Is that the verb? Well, I think the problem is that you’re fixing it. Right. You’re putting it into a form and saying that is the form. I think that’s that’s making a graven image. So if if if you’re looking through the form, like I don’t I don’t see the issue. I think in the early church, right, like because they were persecuted, at least in the Roman Empire, they didn’t have the time to build a tradition and to build churches and stuff like that. Because like the Romans didn’t really like that. And after they they got all of this stuff together, right after they got capital behind themselves, then you can start making art. Right. So then that question becomes way more relevant than when you’re on the move and hiding. And meeting in people’s houses and stuff like that. Catacombs. Yeah, I I would say I think that there’s I’ll dispel one thing that I think is sort of a Protestant myth that the icons and the icon veneration was something borrowed from paganism. It’s like a little bit true, but it’s kind of mostly not. I think ironically, when Christianity was in competition with paganism, it was more iconoclastic because that was a dividing line. Right. When you have converts coming into Christianity from paganism, be like no idols, none of that stuff, no images, etc. But you really see the increase in the use of icons and I don’t that I won’t say idols. I’ll just say icons after Christianity is not really in competition with paganism. And so it’s interestingly, I think it’s sort of almost the opposite of the case that when the necessary division between Christianity and paganism isn’t as important that there was less pushback on the icon stuff. The winners get to make the rules. So Vatican to recognizes the the rays of Christ in other theological religions. And I’m wondering just about that because it because it was it really like a lot of the things that were done were word was it really done just to appeal to the pagans or that it there’s also there was some truth of Christ in what the pagans were doing. For example, like putting Christmas at the winter solstice and Easter at the venereal equinox. Like is that is it was it just to appeal to to pagans or is it is it because there’s also powerful symbolism there. Christian symbolism of having the the annual cycle. Connect to the biblical stories. I think a little bit of that. But I think there was also an added thing that we don’t totally understand now of of Christian triumphalism. Right. If you can steal the important holiday and make it about you and not about Odin. Right. That’s a form of symbolic victory in the culture of Christianity over paganism. Right. Like the center of the Swedish Church is an oops law. Right. And that was the center of Norse pagan ritual. Right. Oops. Less Sweden was like one of the main meccas of Norse pagan spiritual retreat where they would do all sorts of sacrifices and weird rituals in oops law. And the Christian Church in Sweden specifically made the center of their church there. It’s not because they were like, oh, you know, paganism is all totally cool and fine. Right. And we’re just kind of going to gently smooth this transition from paganism to Christianity. It was actually quite the opposite. It’s like we are so much more powerful than the pagans that we can tear down their stuff and build our church right smack where they used to worship Odin and Thor and whoever else. And Odin Thor can’t do anything about it. And we win. Right. Right. And I actually think a fair amount of the taking over of sort of pagan holidays and making them Christian was in that sort of attitude rather than the I don’t know. Let’s just move this over a little bit. And, you know, no differences here. Just kind of keep doing what you’re doing. Change this word. Change this word. But it was sort of a symbolic Christian triumphalism that was behind a lot of that. One thing I do find very attractive about Catholicism is the way that we have like a there’s a cycle, like a rhythm of through to the Christian year. Right. So we know we have the missiles and we got like a three year cycle, but we also within the annual cycle, there’s a rhythm as well. Like, but Advent Lent, but there’s ordinary time and the feast. So there is and within that cycle, there, there’s sort of the within the rhythm of the year. There’s also like a rhythm of the Bible. And if you go back to to Catholic countries in the old world, it would get really deeply embedded like like the feast of the transfiguration. That’s August 5th. And in Italy, back in the day, that was a harvest festival and or at least one of the one of the crops they were harvesting. They actually had specific, specific dishes they’d make with like the fresh, the fresh food that they had just harvested. That was like your transfiguration this. And then, you know, somebody came up with a way to link it to the actual, you know, events of the Bible. It is just it all it all kind of came together, you know. But really, I don’t know. I don’t know if the church calendar has quite as much pull as it used to. I feel like like if if we were being studied by an alien civilization, they would think that the most important calendar we have is the academic calendar. Because so much of our life is actually governed by the academic calendar, you know. It’s like I know once school gets out that the parish is going to be cleaned out of like a third to a half of our people every weekend because they’re all going to their lake. They all have their personal lake. You know, and and and there am I, you know, just hanging out in the Fargo. It’s really funny. Somebody else is typing in my name. So apparently, Ritz crackers are the secret to a good crust and the academic calendar is more important than the church calendar. And I don’t know how to fix it there. Well, that’s been it’s not the calendar that’s more important, right? It’s the materialism that’s well, you need the fee of finals and the feast day of midterms and the feast day of homecoming. And etc, etc, etc. But you are right, Eric, that that’s it’s interesting that a lot of like especially when you’re either in school or parents of kids in school, how much your life revolves around that. And it’s like sort of descended from older calendars, right? A lot of our school calendars sort of based off of the needs of agriculture in the past, but not anymore. Right. Right. That’s a good point. Yeah, I do find it a little strange how it how it’s, it’s almost the opposite of of fair weather Catholics. It’s it’s when it’s really nice outside. We don’t go to mass. And then immediately after something like 9 11 the churches are packed. Yeah. You don’t tell me did you literally mean the weather. When you said fair weather Catholics. I know that the churches in the late country swell up during the summer to they’ve got to like have these transepts that they’ll they’ll close off during the winter and then they’ll open it up for the summer so. So it’s basically your your your flock is migrating and you’re not migrating with them. I guess. Yeah, that’s actually basically what’s happening. I’m sure the churches in Florida are more full in the winter than they are in the summer. Yeah, no, I know a priest in Florida. He goes down to one Sunday mass during the summer because everybody’s cleared out. They don’t. It doesn’t need to celebrate two masses. Yeah. Is that in Florida. Yeah, in summer. Okay. But but here, too, like we have the snow, the snowbirds in that but it’s the summer because people go or go cottaging, and that I expect. Where we have less attendance in in math. Mark, would you say that hedonism is downstream of materialism. I mean, it’s separate from it. I mean, I think materialism it leads to hedonism right I think materialism leads to a bunch of things because it whacks up against the wall, right, and then, you know, the things it doesn’t do it doesn’t do. And then your default is your ego. And so you. Yeah, hedonism is one result of materialism because you know you get the Sam Harris. Well, it’s all like I don’t want to deal with creation so I’m just going to say well it’s all predetermined and therefore and there’s no free will. And I would say epicurean materialism leads to hedonism, but you can be like a stoic materialist that is pretty different right like I guess stoic materialism is almost like pantheism or panentheism right where God’s in the show. And but you if you have the sort of kind of you know epicurean and molecules bump together there’s no higher purpose right. But the epicurean higher purpose materialism, but the epicureans hated the hated the Dianeseans and because their their aesthetics, so they’re not hedonistic by default they’re like, you know, you should eat just plain beans, and if they were. Maybe, but if you have 10 beans, and your friend comes you’re supposed to share your beans, even though five is not enough for either of you and you’re supposed to be happy about it. So there is that X they’re not that they weren’t he missed that’s, that’s the modern misconception of hedonism. Right, right, but very disciplined about it. Yeah, I was. I’m thinking, I guess what’s on my mind is people who are absolutely, absolutely hustling, you know five days a week so they can live for the weekend. Like that’s the form of hedonism. I don’t know I don’t have a good name for it. But, but I just see a lot of that. Yeah, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re an individual. Right, not a materialist necessarily although probably you’re also a materialist at that point, right, then what’s going to happen is, you’re going to live for your own egoic. You know self right you’re not going to live for right because your aim is off. And so, if you’re just counting everything in the flat material world, and you’re individualistic then your aim is back towards yourself. And so, why wouldn’t you because because there’s nothing in any spiritual tradition that doesn’t talk about the positive affect of engaging with miracles, or with things out of the cycle or out of the normal humdrum mundane sort of path of the like it’s in all the, it’s in all the ancient Greek philosophies too right like there’s a, you’re supposed to seek out that occasional joy, but it’s supposed to be occasional and we’ve turned it into a calendar problem. So I say it’s a form of paganism, though right because it’s going back to revelry. Right that you’re, you’re preparing for the revelry on the weekend, which is in some way it’s a source of joy but it’s a source of destructive joy. So you have to spend the rest of the week preparing for the next sort of cycle of destruction that is your weekend. Like you’re so you’re, you’re sort of feeding your your your your pagan gods, whatever they may be. Right, and that’s what you’re really living for. What is it what is it these people do on the weekends that’s so fun. Okay, I want to reframe this because I think we’re kind of in the wrong frame right so there’s this idea of attachment styles. Right, and attachment styles effectively. Where do you get your comfort, right, like what, what is, what is the way in which you, you find stability in life right so you can you can find stability in your internal world, but you can, you can be in intro. And in your introversion you can make fantasies or whatever. Right, or you can you can you can play computer games right like where where there’s an affirmation of of your direct interaction that that that is fulfilling some sign some kind of need right and that puts you in a state of comfort. Right. Then there is a way where you can do that in the social realm. Right, so if I just appease all the people and my social status is high, then I, I feel like I’m a good person and therefore right and and that’s kind of what what’s going on in society a lot now right like there’s this, this sensor like, oh, like everybody should be let you should let everybody do their thing and you should never have conflict everybody should be like, that’s an attachment style where where where the external worlds is affirming you which, which is better than the solipsism right because in the solipsism you get you get this narcissistic tendencies where where you can’t really relate to other people and account for their view but but even if you’re if you’re just relating to other people as if they are the thing that fulfills your need right you can still have this this narcissistic relationship right even though you’re you’re you’re participating in a social game right and then there’s also the physicality right like so that’s that’s what it is. Right, like they’re like, I, I am grounded in my body in a certain way or I’m oppressed by my body a certain way and and I like I need, I need to do something with a relationship right like tool seekers also have have that aspect I think right where where where their embodiment is is is where they get their attachment from right and I think the thing that meditation did for me right is that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that’s the thing that I think that it’s opened this door for being grounded in in in my body right where I could swap effectively from my introversion into a different way of being and so when we’re talking about materialism and we’re talking about individualism and all of these things their expressions I think in different attachment styles of the same principles somewhat right and and yeah so I was talking to Skyler and Nick and they were talking about the ancient conceptions of what was it? Aziz, Maumann and Mollack right where they’re representative of different aspects right so Maumann is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more feeling in control of what you’re doing right having the right agency and Mollack is more the representative of the different aspects right so Maumann is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more feeling in control of what you’re doing right having the right agency and Maumann is more the representative of the different aspects right so Maumann is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Aziz is more the embodied passion aspect while Az is more true understanding being in control that way right and I bound those things together in this ego right like they’re effectively what the ego is right like there are three aspects of the ego in different dimensions co-manifesting always in some way because I think they’re interdependent. Yeah maybe another way to think about it is the individualism causes you to believe right and this is where the postmodernism comes in that you can frame something and so what ends up happening in that case is that if you believe you can frame something then you know the 9-5 grind becomes a grind right it collapses into what you call the individualism. If you believe you can frame something then you know the 9-5 grind becomes a grind right it collapses into your own point of view it collapses into the solipsism and that’s why the individualism is dangerous because it takes you out of the larger frame of creation and the creator right and what that means in terms of the individualism. And that’s what the individualism means in terms of your role in the world and you know to tie this back into the question here look if when you go outside and you’re interfacing with nature you don’t see the miracle of something like a butterfly being nearby or the lizard that’s running across your house or something. Then you’re you know you’re really missing what miracle is. Miracle is all these things that you have no control over no actual understanding like I don’t understand butterflies. I don’t even understand how they fly. They flap their wings and they say I don’t understand that. I don’t even understand that. Not in any reasonable way. I have propositions that tell me how things fly. Like I get the aerodynamics. I probably get the aerodynamics better than most people. But I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like to be a butterfly. Like this is Nagel’s bat argument right and if you don’t know Nagel’s bat argument you should look it up. But those are miracles to me right and being able to engage in the world where you understand that you’re just this tiny little piece of this gigantic creation right that is so large you just you can’t imagine it. If you think you can imagine drive across the Midwest from the United States you’ll quickly understand like this place is huge and this is only one part of the world. Like the world is so vast it’s insane and even even your neighborhood is so vast because you can always look at a different layer of detail. And it’s that ability to do that that is in sense half of the miracle right because half of the miracle is what we’ll say what’s going on around you and the other half is your ability to see right is your eyes to see and your ears to hear. I like what you’re saying about miracles because you know I’ve thought about it the same thing that there’s there’s miracles occurring all around us and it’s the problem in some sense is that miracles are so commonplace that people ignore their miraculous nature. Right and I want to buy I want to go to bring this back to lecture Divina where we started off right and why we made it a group practice right so what’s miracle miraculous around like to the Vina right like so in like to the Vina you’re you’re trying to grasp at these divine principles right like the way that the world works right and and and your place in it right. And if that is not enough you see someone else do that right and they’re doing things where you’re like how did they how did they do that right like I can’t do that in my mind like I don’t see that trick right like they’re they’re walking through walls for me right and then if you take another step back it’s like how is this even possible like how is it like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding anything right like how am I even understanding like if we’re all having this really fuzzy like touchy relationship to these things that we can’t see with our eyes right like like how is that even possible and that opening up right and and and being in that state of awe right that that is a thing that you need to learn right like that because that for vaguely talks about this the state of awe that can swap to horror right. And so if you’re in, well, if you’re attached to your ideas, right, and you need these ideas to grasp the world, right, you get a sense of security from these ideas and you get confronted with, well, you think you’re grasping but you’re not, right, you’re just grasping air, that is horrible, right? Like that’s horrifying. And being in that state in a positive relationship and having receptivity for divine revelation, that is what you need to learn, right? Like you need to be able to do that. You shouldn’t be burned by the light of God. You should be filled by it. On that, like the idea of grasping and just maybe tying it to this idea of being bored of miracles, I think that there’s something that’s strange about modernity or at least our current age is this idea that everyone has a good conscience or that we all are innately have this infallible sense of good and evil. And it’s not because I think that in Christianity, and I don’t see a lot of Christians emphasizing this, that there is an idea of Christian formation and refining your conscience. Like it’s not taken as a given that you know right from wrong, but that’s something that’s clearly sort of pushed in the culture now that everyone knows right from wrong for themselves. And I’m not buying that. I think I think that we do need to get back to this idea that morality requires refinement that it’s not and training. Well when you’re saying people know right from wrong from themselves, right? It’s implied that there is no right and wrong outside of people. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the individualism, right? And that’s why I think the problem, not modernity per se, right? Although maybe modernity gives you a pretty fertile field to make a bunch of mistakes around objectivism, materialism, and individualism. And the postmodernism just tells you, postmodernism is very sneaky, right? Because it effectively says all interpretations have value. But it implies that all interpretations have equal value. Because it says, why are you privileging your interpretation over mine? And that gets into my felt experience and all this nonsense, right? And so what it does is it destroys framing as a valuable thing. Even though without framing, words don’t have meaning, technically. Meaning is not in words. Meaning happens from the content plus the context. And it’s a transjective is what John would call it. And actually just to connect this to postmodernism, because I’ve been thinking about this while we’ve been talking, but I haven’t really figured out until now why it’s so relevant to the conversation, is that Foucault had this concept of libidinal freedom, right? Which is really freedom to follow the pathos, right? To follow your whims and passions and do so without consequence. And that’s very much like what we call the radical replica. That’s sort of their framing of what freedom is now. That you’ll see this is freedom is, you know, they sometimes mock the idea, but really they want it. They want freedom is freedom following passions. Like, you know, eating as much as you want without having to worry about getting fat. You know, having as much sex as you want without having to worry about the consequences of that. Parting as much as you want. Not working, you know, being as thoughtful as you want without having to worry about any of the consequences. I think that the freedom, like there’s another notion of freedom that I think is more popular among conservatives. I don’t want to necessarily make this a political thing because I don’t think it’s not. I don’t think it is. But there’s this other notion of freedom that we don’t really just make distinguish what is very distinguished. It’s like the freedom that the Puritans wanted when they came over to America was attractive for them. And I would argue it was also the freedom that the truckers were looking for in Canada. It’s the freedom to follow your conscience, right? Which is very different from the freedom to follow your passion, right? Or your path to follow the raw pathos and expect to be free from consequences there. Freedom to follow the conscience, your conscience is more about freedom to engage with God and come what may. And in order for that freedom to exist, you have to first accept that there is something that is called, like that there is a conscience and it is a value. And I think that fundamentally that sort of that postmodernist worldview rejects it, right? And that there’s agnosticism there, I believe, right? Where it’s like, you know, it’s a rejection of sort of seeing that as conscience or morality as a prison that must be broken out of. Well, yeah, principles are a prison, right? They are because they’re everlasting, right? And the Greeks did not see the passions as a good thing. So like, really, like, you know, I mean, I can’t say that the ancient Greeks had it all correct at some level, right? Like their conception of philosophy is correct. Everybody, everybody, everybody after them has the wrong conception of the word. Like it’s just not useful in the universe, right? They had a good conception of the passions, right? They had a good conception of the idea that you were framed, right? Because all the philosophies seem to talk about religion, not very much or what we would call religion. We can call it religion, right? They all have that component because that’s the grounding to justify the philosophy, which is the bucket of ontologies. It’s not an ontology. It’s the place where ontologies exist. All the places where ontologies don’t exist is what we would call religion. They didn’t call it that, but they took that for granted because that was the ground of being for them. So there’s the ground of being, the big O ontology, right? And then there’s the categorization ontologies. That’s philosophy. And each of the philosophy types, so a new philosophy is a new set of ontologies, right, for that thing, whatever it is. I’d have to think about that a bit. It’s a very new idea for me, like this, the whole framing philosophies as buckets of ontologies. But on that, like I agree with you that the Greeks had a lot right with their understanding of the pathos. And I think that you see in the Bible, like there’s that’s partly why the connection to with Christ to the logos is so essential, because it’s, you see it a lot of places in the Bible, but the place that I always think about it is when Pilate puts the question to the Israelites, right? Or the Jews, like the choice between Jesus and Barabbas, right? And I think there it’s really sort of it’s two paths forward, right? And one, Jesus is representing the sovereignty of the logos and Barabbas is representing the supremacy of the pathos, right? Which do you choose? Do you choose the, how do you choose to deal with the Romans? Do you choose the way of Christ, which is the sovereignty of logos? So reason, your passions controlled by reason, right? By logic, by truth. Or do you choose to unleash your passions, the Barabbas, the violent revolutionary? Do you choose that path? And I think that like that choice, you see so much and even that and very much in that sort of postmodernist center, like again, it’s that it’s that two notions of freedom or two notions of the way forward. Do you choose the sovereignty of Christ? You choose the sovereignty of the logos? Or do you choose to put your passions? Do you choose to put pathos first and be governed completely, have the supremacy of the pathos over everything else? I feel this way, right? Is it facts over feelings or feelings over facts to put it in a pithy and sort of capture left. But yeah. Right. But that’s individualism versus versus being a member of a tribe, roughly speaking. Right. You can’t have the revolutionary is always an individual unto themselves. And then the mob just takes over. And that’s why revolutions are always trying to be manipulated. And it always fails. See, I don’t I don’t know. I don’t think the revolution is I don’t connect to individualism because there’s lots of revolutions are generally because it’s the pathos you’re just you’re losing yourself to the mob and you’re losing yourself to the pathos. So I don’t necessarily connect that with individualism per se, because it’s sort of like it’s a complete surrender of of yourself as an individual. But you know, it’s driven by your own selfish desires. So there’s that sort of individual sense to me. Right. Like I see like the French revolutions, you saw that very much as like there was always this person who would speak up and speak for the collective. Right. Whereas like, you know, I am the voice of the people or I am the voice. And you see that today, too, with a lot of these revolutionary forces where someone tries to speak for an identity or a collective. So they’re not in a sense, they’re you know, they’re they’re surrendering their individual to that that mob, that mob mentality. I think you want to reframe it. Right. OK. And what is what is the distinction? Right. Like this. Well, you can have authority in an individual, you can have authority in the collective and you can have authority in God. Right. Like I think that’s the three frames that you can have. Right. And if you have authority in the collective, you have an honor culture. Right. Because now you’re the way that you’re regulating what’s right and wrong is by social status. Right. And so you can’t you can’t transgress against your social status because now you’re cutting off yourself from being literally. Right. Like that’s why people commit suicide when when they’re when their honor gets breached. Right. And what the individualist has is they put the authority in in themselves. Right. Like I and my feelings are the highest source of authority and I should follow them. And then obviously, you can’t avoid putting yourself within certain constraints, right, because you need money to buy drugs. In fact, right. So like you still you still need to participate in a way that you get the money in order to buy the drugs or to buy your electricity bill and your Internet bill. Right. Like like you still you still need to do that that move. And that’s why they’re. They seem to to be able to participate in society because because they have to submit to subsets of society in order to manifest anything in the world, which is a good thing, but maybe also a bad thing because that also allows them not to have to change. And. Or we get too serious here. I well, I want to propose something to Father Eric. So on my general agapic orientation, I had the dialogs happen and the dialogs. I had this insight where I was like technology or better said, psychotechnology in the way that Trevekha uses it. And psychotechnology is effectively a way. A way of participating and intelligizing the world, that’s effectively what what the psychotechnology is. So you could you could go to what Ethan is asking about. What is what is all these buckets of ontologies? Right. These buckets of ontologies are tools to relate to the world. Right. And so if you have a proper psychotechnology, I think you’re you’re getting in contact with with an angel. That’s the way that I would frame. Right. So so there’s a there’s a subset of God that is revealed through a specific type of participation. Right. Which which would be the message from God. Right. So so. If you’re in right relationship to that message to from God, you’re tuned in to an angel. Right. Like you’re receiving one of his messages. Now, I think that’s what happens in polities. Right. Like in polities, you have people that figured out how to read a subset of the intelligibility of the world and to correctly participate in that subset. Right. But now you’re stuck. Right. Because now you’re you’re not triangulating yourself with with with different messages. Right. Like this. Like there’s not only one message. There’s not only one intelligibility and therefore your participation gets corrupt. And so, yeah, I’m still playing with that. So maybe you want to say what you what you think right now, Eric. High heresy here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I actually I don’t think it’s quite that heretical. So let me let me see if I could break it down. So a psychotechnology, if I get this right, is your way of participating with a certain spirit or angel or intelligible pattern. Do I got that right? Well, yeah, like I would say it’s definitely a way of participating with a pattern. Right. Like now the question is whether you want to extend that to angel or not. Sure. Sure. And that if you become too in a if you don’t participate with the different patterns well, that you can become enslaved to them rather than being free to allow one pattern or the other to go. Right. Which is effectively dying to Christ. Right. Like that’s the that’s the alternation between patterns. Yeah. And so, yeah, it just sounds like you’re restating the first commandment there. I’m the Lord your God. You shall have no other God before me that we need to pursue the infinite. And once we get attached to any creature at the expense of the infinite, then we sin. So, Chad, there you go. Don’t sin. Well, I something came up in my mind throughout that whole little spiel that you guys were all doing there. I was thinking of because the passions were mentioned. But, you know, like even like you mentioned this like psychotechnologies. And you said when you participate with the psychotechnologies, but like sometimes I wonder, like the passions sometimes seem to be outside of outside of the scope of my will, as well as sometimes encountering a psychotechnology being struck by something, maybe being struck by all seems to be outside of outside of my will. And in like not 100 percent of the time, but often, I mean, or like I like a good psychotechnology would be like, let’s say when I first watched Forrest Gump, you know, and and and Forrest’s mother passed away and he’s standing at the grave talking to her. That was like there’s a real powerful thing there that I can’t really explain. Science might be able to explain some of that. But there’s a real psychotechnology that I’m struck by. You could say, well, I’m participating in the story and watching the movie. But I’ve also had other instances where I’m just like at work and I’m on my way to a certain portion of a job site and walking through a church, not knowing what I’m I’m not even paying attention to the fact that I’m walking going to be walking through it through this church and I walked through this Catholic church in Milwaukee and it was stunningly beautiful to where it stopped me in my tracks and literally took my breath away. That was powerful. Now, that’s the job of the angel, I would guess. And sometimes the same thing with like these passions. I think the there’s an old Greek word. It’s like I think it’s called Logus me or Logus me, which is like this idea of something like the passions having like this chattering voice, you know, and and they are kind of beyond the will. Now, I can try to think my way out of it, but I just often can’t. I might have to turn to another tool, which might be prayer. So like this is why people like the Jesus prayer or other prayers like this, that they can kind of pull their mind off or pull their attention away from the Logus, Logus me and turn towards Christ. So, yeah, because I don’t like reducing all these different things down to my assertion of the will to either engage or disengage with with either the passions or or psychotechnologies or any of these things. So that’s my big thing that I’m really on lately because it’s it’s fascinating to me. And I think there’s somewhere in there is a miracle, too. Yeah, I mean, I think you’re you’re pretty dead on and you’ve probably had to to fight for your your your knowledge there. And I think the appropriate way to think about the will is actually less like a rudder steering a ship and more like an antenna. And you can tune that antenna in and out of different frequencies. You could decide, you know, I’ve got this this feeling, this passion I’m experiencing. But this passion right now is not appropriate. It’s not going to be towards the good. It’s kind of out of joint. And so I’m just going to to try and tune into something else, which is why, you know, the desert monks, the St. Anthony and such would say with certain of these passions, the only path to victory is fleeing that they, you know, if you sit there and actually like, don’t think about elephants, don’t think about elephants, you know, elephants will come marching right in. And and just especially even just going back to basic vocal prayer, the Jesus prayer or the rosary or something like that is is a disruptive strategy. Yeah, I mean, but it’s but it’s tuning in. It’s tuning into another spirit. Yeah. So like, I haven’t done it in a while, but it would be interesting to do this. So it was suggested to me that when I’m in something like that, this is before I have tripped into you religious people. I was told to go outside, walk, walk, walk around the block. If you see pieces of garbage, pick them up and God for them. And that’s kind of like some sort of like really big prayer rope in some sense. You know, it’s a little more. It’s definitely more solipsistic. It’s not as pointed, but it’s adventurous. And but I am interested in like the discipline, the disciplines of asceticism, these things like a prayer rope. Because, I mean, I’m interested in them because I don’t have those those sorts of disciplines and not as well as I’d like. I have a desire to know them, but I have a complete lack of strength to just throw myself into them. So that’s that’s the strength and the weakness of John labeling things psychotechnology. So in John’s world of prayer is a psychotechnology. Yeah, OK, fair enough. Right. But he’s trying to science it. And, you know, I’m ambivalent about it because you’re exemplifying the more important point, Chad, is that people don’t realize that there are things that they can do as individuals to give them the things that they’re lacking, whether it be in intimacy or in framing outside of themselves or in or in the process of co-creating meaning. Like they have no idea that that is a set of skills that you can cultivate, but it’s not a set of skills that gives you reliable, consistent results, because a lot of it is you’re opening a space for you to have eyes to see and ears to hear. And over time, when you sort of suddenly, you know, the eyes to see hit you for a little while, like for a half a second. And then you notice the butterfly at your feet that just landed while you were on the phone. And then it’s like, ah, there’s this whole miraculous world going on around me right when I’m doing what I’m doing, talking to my best friend. But it’s right there. But you can’t it’s too overwhelming to experience it 24 7, right? You’d never get anything done. Well, that’s another passion. The psychotechnologies are all about like the savoring, for example, which is one thing that Vickie talks about. It’s all about enabling that. Right. Well, and if you experienced it all the time, it really wouldn’t be that powerful. Right. You know, like I do the same thing with with pennies. And I don’t know where this came from, but somewhere along the way, I got into me that and when I find the penny, like it’s it’s God, it’s God saying hello. And at first, I wouldn’t pick him up. I would just be like, oh, cool. You know, and then eventually someone’s like, just pick him up. I’m like, OK. So but yeah, that’s one one thing. Here’s another interesting psychotechnology. So, you know, conversation. Is a type of psychotechnology. And this is kind of the thing, right, that we’re talking about. But the thing is, we can do conversation all the time. And if we’re not paying attention and we’re not aiming with gratitude in our conversation, it would be easy to take it for granted, which we have done. But that’s the weakness of cyber technologies. They’re not going to help you. They’re not going to help you. And they can make you worse. So if you meditate solipsistically by yourself every day, that is not good for you. I don’t care what anybody else tells you. That is not good for you. If you pray to God every day because that’s now you’re in a frame, right? It’s a type of meditation with a frame, with a larger frame towards the eye, with an eye towards creation. That is good for you, even if you do it by yourself. So it’s the same thing, but it’s not the same thing. Right. Because like the way that I’ve come to understand meditation, because I have real difficulty with that word, there’s all sorts of weird stuff wrapped up in that word. And part of it was just lack of experience. But it was shown to me that to meditate while bringing God into the meditation is to observe the potential for the day ahead. You know, and then the whole act is between me and God so that I might be able to be a better service to you. And so that’s really kind of the whole deal there in a nutshell, because I personally am not the kind of person that can just go up on a mountain and meditate and be spiritual. I would just be so terrible for me to do that. Well, maybe the only good I’d be doing in the world at that point is separating myself from the rest of the world. But other than that, it’s it’s not really useful for me and for anybody else. So that’s how I understand these things. Like, so when I say I find it very difficult to go into a room by myself and be spiritual by myself, it’s not meant to be for me. It was never meant for me. It was meant for us. Like the whole idea of our father. So we say our father. It’s not my father. You know what I’m saying? So I think I think part of what you’re touching on there is like several things. Our Lord came and founded a church, right? He didn’t he didn’t just call individuals and say, you come follow me. He called 12 dudes and said, y’all come follow me. And part of the plan was is that would be together, that they would be learning together, they would have these multiple different perspectives. That’s why it’s OK to have four gospels. And then you see this play out in the in the history of Christianity, where it starts off, you know, monasticism starts off with these superhero monks going out into the desert all by themselves. But it doesn’t last very long like that, because all of these other people want to come and learn from the superhero monk. So pretty soon he’s actually gathered a little community around him and he’s teaching them, you know, the few things that he’s learned in the desert. And then they write that all down. And so now we have the writings and the sayings of the desert fathers. So even those things which, you know, maybe the monks went to to go out into the desert to escape the world. Well, the world ended up coming out to them and then bringing something valuable back from their their struggles. And out of all of that was born monasticism, which is, I think, probably the more safe and common path for. Christian holiness is doing it together with a with a group rather than going out and doing it all by yourself. Yeah. Well, that’s why I have such difficulty with. And I don’t mean this with any disrespect. I really don’t. Sometimes I find it really difficult to tolerate people who are so knowing and what they are doing as the only way. And it’s like, oh, man, I think God is far bigger than that. I mean, so like, do I want to be a part of 30,000 different denominations? No, but I want to find a home somewhere. And I think do I think those people in the other 30,000 denominations or even those people outside of a Christian faith are included in in. Whatever the magnitude of God’s love is, do I think that they belong? Are they are they valid in God’s God’s mind? Absolutely. You know, and I don’t know. I don’t that doesn’t I don’t know. So what you’re saying is when you start doing the scaling of what you’re saying there. So Christ, you know, he has these he starts with a couple of friends and then moves up to a bunch of people, the windows back down to 12 or actually 11, and then it goes back up from there. And then you got these fathers. So then it scales and it’s just breathing in and out. And who is to say, right? Because one thing that Christ was saying was like, I didn’t come to you to unite. I came to divide or something like that. And I think about that, I think, well, that’s kind of what we’re doing. But who I don’t know, maybe I got off topic there, but that’s why conversations, because they like when they’re when they’re on point, they’re about they’re about seeing the other and seeing the father and each other. I think that’s a wonderful thing. But yeah, I mean, you’re putting your finger on a really difficult tension. And I think especially for Christians in our age is is that there’s kind of two extremes that people don’t want to go in. The one extreme is that hyper exclusivist extreme where only the people on my boat are heading to port and every other boat’s going to sink. Right. So even if you got a big boat, that’s still every other boat is going to sink. And and that’s just kind of unacceptable because it’s like, well, is God really that incompetent about everything that he can’t draw people in? That he’s only going to, you know, only people who who have this exact secret word and the secret handshake are coming in. So we want to reject that. But on the other hand, you have to be somewhere. And the only way to be somewhere is if you’re not everywhere. Right. And so I have to be in a particular church on a Sunday morning because I can’t be in all, you know, diffuse like a gas across the entirety of Christendom. That’s not how human beings work. Thank God. Yes, that’d be pretty gross. And so I’ll just tell you the way I’ve resolved it, Chad, as a hyper Catholic, as as somebody who belongs to a triumphalistic tradition that says this is the one true church is basically, yeah, this is the one true church and God’s letting all this other stuff happen. And if he’s going to let it happen, then I’ve got to figure he’s got a way through it and that we’ve got all of these different denominations and all these divisions and all these people have never heard of Christ. And if God’s cool with it, then I guess I’m going to be cool with it, too. I’m just going to stick to my little piece of God’s vineyard. And that’s what I’m going to focus on. I absolutely agree. I mean, that’s why it’s like that, along with so many other questions are like what I’m getting at is I get the sense that these types of questions are often so far out of our pay pay scale that it’s like we’re foolish to even glance at them. It’s in some some sense, because like those can be a passion, too. And those can be an idol, too. You know, like that’s what I was saying on the other stream. It’s like sometimes I think when we call other people’s idols or beliefs, idols, sometimes I think the act of calling other people’s idols that in itself can be an idol. You know, at least it’s kind of like the idol of I’m right and you’re wrong. You know, and I fall into that all the time. So in the dialogs that I did, I was talking about skills, right? So you have you have skilled the individual, you have to scale the family, you have to scale the community, you have to scale the city, you have to scale the country. Right. And those skills, they they require different language or different psychotechnologies to to navigate. Because you’re you’re communing with different intelligences at at those levels. And people are not able to see all of those levels. Like they’re not qualified to to talk on those levels necessarily. Some people are. Right. And we need those people. Like you need a king to rule the country. Right. Or a president, which is a placeholder, I’m thinking. But but and and you you should wish that they are able to navigate that intelligibility on that level. Right. And. If if you have idolatry on that level, that that really, really sucks. Right. But but now it’s like, well, are you able to criticize that? Well, not really. Like, did you spend how many years of your life to develop the psychotechnology? Do you have the participatory knowledge of being in the office and running a day to day? Right. Like, no, you don’t. Right. So what is your criticism? What your criticism is always limited. You might be able to identify what’s wrong, but you’re not you’re not going to be able to identify what’s right. And yeah, like like. A big part of the discussion, I was trying to make the point, where like like some conversations, some people or even most people shouldn’t be it because they’re they’re not for them. Like like even this little corner of the Internet, I think. Manuel, Manuel, I’m going to stop you right there. Here we go. Oh, it’s not for me. We go. There we go. Number one rule. Go on. Sorry, I interrupted you. And the rules are rules, Manuel. OK. The conversation is is is not for everybody. It’s it’s it’s not productive. Right. And if we go back to attachment styles, right, like, well, some people get their attachment, their security from the social arena. Right. So they need a spirit that is generated. They need a shepherd that is generating the spirit that they can participate in. Right. And like I think that’s most people, like most people live on that level. They should live on that level. And I think it’s good. Right. Like there’s there’s a level of participation there that’s valuable and definitely necessary. Right. But that that’s when you can start building. Right. And then you have someone who needs to take care of the community. Right. And the communities interface with each other. And that needs to be taken care of as well. Right. And and the Romans have this figure out in some sense. Right. Like it’s like, oh, you need to hold each office in before you you can get to being a console or whatever. Right. And then you have participatory experience of the whole hierarchy. And I think the Catholic Church is based upon that model. Right. Like that they’re having that military structure as well. And and so, yeah, like like when we have these attachment styles as well as like what when when you participate in someone else’s spirit. Right. Like it’s really important that you find a way to participate correctly, but you also find the people to participate with that that have this right spirit. Right. And and so. And all of that is active. Right. Like that that that is in some sense, it’s in the flow. You’re in the river. Right. Like you’re you’re constantly manifest. Right. And then there’s people that that are more reflected. Right. So they’re they’re inherently biased to not go with that spirit because they’re they they want to self impose a spirit out of the name of justice. Right. And now the question is, well, like what what justice? Like what’s the authority that you use for the justice that that you want to impose or at least constrain these other spirits in the world? Right. And so you can see different roles. And and these roles are necessarily in conflict. Right. Because that’s why they’re there. That’s why they’re necessary. And. And obviously, when you’re inhabiting one role and someone is inhabiting the other role, you get frustrated. Right. Because they’re doing the opposite of of of the way that you relate to the world. But but but they’re they’re both necessary. And yeah, you have to you have to realize, well, like why? Where is the person coming from? Right. And should I trust that person or should I submit to that person? Right. Like, are they actually good actors of that role? Or are they like coming from a place where where I can’t trust their their authority or better said, the authority that that is channeled through them. Right. Because like, I don’t think personal authority exists. Hmm. Well, you would be in agreement with Thomas Aquinas. So it’s nice to have independent confirmation. And part of the part of the issue is the idolatry. Right. Like, you know, look, no single person can look at something and say, it’s idolatrous because idolatry is in the relationship between the viewer and the think. And so it’s not like, oh, the president, the president is an idolatrous. Really, it’s not. It’s not. For some people, it’s an icon. And for some people, it’s an idol. And, you know, maybe it’s easy to see when you look at an individual, which of those two situations is true. But you can’t you can’t scale that up and say, and therefore, right. It must be that way because that doesn’t work. But that’s also part of the submission. Right. Like, I don’t know. For example, if Father Eric, although I do trust him implicitly, if he is correctly representing the views of the Catholic Church, when he when he when he’s right. And there’s no way for me to evaluate that. And it’s not appropriate for me to do so. Like, you know, it’s just a hard no. I just have to decide intuitively and put aside the pizza, which was delicious. And say, all right, if he had bought me pizza, he’d still be trusting him. Right. On on this matter. Right. Because that that’s not something you can propositionalize or evaluate as an individual. Well, OK. Yeah. And so and then sometimes it might be appropriate to step out into the wilderness and the darkness in a way that you wouldn’t want to. Right. So like you wouldn’t want to necessarily reject your particular frame that you’re living in. Right. But then you have situations like I was really struck by Corey Tenboom has a book called Hide and Place. And I’ve always bring this up. So if you’ve heard this, I’m sorry. But in that book, so she and her family hid away Jewish people and from the Nazis. And then they were captured and thrown in Ravenbrook. Nazi camp or our concentration camp. And she tells the story of in the basement of that camp every night. There would be a prayer services, church service in there. Very, very discreet. But with people of all different walks of faith. So she’s talking, she said there was Orthodox in there. There was Catholics, there’s all these different, you know, obviously there. Whatever. Even Jewish people, people of not Christian faith, they’re all worshiping together. And it was out of like this this this knowing this very close relationship to desperation. That would that would have them set aside. The rules. And so, I don’t know, like sometimes I think this is why I don’t like being so tightly locked into. I think tradition is very important, but I don’t think that it’s. Always like. The perfect answer. Do you know what it’s not? It’s not meant to be. And tradition doesn’t pretend to be the perfect answer. The question becomes, at what point do you figure out what what you’re going to submit to and what you aren’t? Because there isn’t a condition where there isn’t a submission to something that you don’t like. And you can say, well, you need to go to the. Yeah, absolutely. That’s in the Bible. Like, of course, part of the pattern of what John would call it. You know, for me, you would call it perennial pattern. It’s per perennial problem in this idea that, yes, sometimes we have to wander. But but that’s a submission to because you’re wandering. Like there’s no state of non-submission. The question is, do you understand what you’re submitted to and what you’re not? Sometimes you submit things that are terrible. Right. Because some things are terrible. And we don’t know in some sense how good or bad a trade off that is, because we’re never going to understand that. Right. Sometimes you just you just have to hit a point, a pragmatic point where you say, well, this is going to suck. And I don’t know how much it’s going to suck, but I got to do it anyway. And that’s something like picking a fate like which church are you going to go to? And it’s not to say that you can’t change churches or you can’t not go to church. That’s part of the perennial problem. But but at some point you have to say, am I going to do this crazy orthodox thing for years that I could get in? Get in the club. Right. Am I going to do this Catholic thing for however long that’s going to take? So I can get into the like at some point you have to you have to draw that line and accept that submission. Yeah. Hey, guys. I love you guys. Thank you for the conversation. My phone’s probably going to die. So I really appreciate the conversation. It was really good. And. You know, I’ve been having conversations about going into the wilderness. And much of this, you could ask this question, right? Like, is it OK to voluntarily go into exile? Because because that’s effectively you going into the wilderness, because you go you want to go into the wilderness. And like I’ve I’ve been thinking and talking about this a little bit. And like. I don’t I don’t see why that ever would be a good thing. Right. Like you. Drinking the wine, right, which which is. A psycho technology of losing control, right, which which is. I think different than going into exile, right? Although if you get smashed drunk, that that might be analogous to putting yourself in exile. But I think that’s also highlighting the distinction, right? Like there is a relationship to alcohol, which which is good, right? Like which is inviting the loosening up in order for them. It’s an aid to charity and a fraternity. Right. But but but it’s it’s also allowing to recognize the miracle. Right. Like there’s a there’s there’s a way that we need to open ourselves up. Right. And that’s that’s the Sabbath. Right. Like like there’s there’s this point where we need to open ourselves up. We need to change our orientation from from creating to creation or something. Right. Like from from having mode into being or even becoming mode. Right. Like where? Where we are being informed by the logos to say, well, like, are we still on the right track? And there’s different levels, right? Like there’s looking in your in your back mirror when you’re driving in the car. Right. Like am I still on the right track? Like so. So we’re constantly in in that pattern. And we well, when we’re talking about these different levels of participation in the world, like I think you also have these different levels of participation in yourself. Right. Like so when I am Mark sort of talking about this container, right, like this is I’m now in this conversation with you guys. And like I might check my phone for a message or whatever. Right. There’s certain ways that I’m not in the conversation, even though they’re not happening right now. Right. Like there’s there’s part of me that’s committed to not in the conversation. And but most of me is committed to in the conversation. So now I have I have an identity and has a specific set of rules. Now the question is whether I can actually fulfill that identity correctly. Right. Like am I attuned to the angel or whatever? Right. Like but but I need to change this. Right. Like after this, I’m going to brush my teeth. Right. Like that’s a different activity that requires me to be in a completely different way. Right. Like I’m I’m now doing a bunch of things that I I don’t even have in my mind anymore. When I’m brushing my teeth. Right. Like I’m completely a different person. And it’s only by me stepping out into a different room and starting a different activity. Right. And so that shift, that the changing of identities is but it’s still on the same layer. Right. Like it’s still on the layer of I’m I’m participating in this way because I got to define tell us. But then there’s when you get the temporal extension. Right. Like oh well like I need to travel. Right. So now I need to prepare for the travel. And then like that that is a different level of participation. Right. And like now I get married. Right. Like now I need to understand what being married is and what that requires. Right. Like that is also a different layer of participation, a different layer of relating to the self. And these these are interconnected. Right. Because like maybe if I’m a husband, the way that I’m sitting in this conversation right now is is going to be different. Right. So that that higher layer or maybe if I get baptized and I’m a Christian, the way that I’m sitting in this conversation and the way that I am a husband are going to be different. Right. So yeah. Like and again. Right. Like it’s it’s not obvious that we can look at other people and and judge the way that they participate. Although I think things like materialism actually allow some sort of judgments on that. That’s why you say amen. Amen. Amen. Yeah, I got to have that flexibility that that finesse to deal with the world in all the different ways that you have to deal with it. Yeah, that flexibility or finesse, you know, is facilitated by the intimate quality connections that you have around you, which is why it’s important to have those important to have that scaffolding in that structure. It’s it’s but it’s elastic. Right. It gives you the grace to be these other things and do these other things. Right. Yeah. The intimacy facilitates the flexibility. Right. And but you’re bound to it at the same time. And, you know, you need that. And that’s why I was a day the priest was not sent out on my own immediately. I was sent out on my own immediately. And when I get to a situation that I don’t really know how to handle, I say, Father Dale, Father Phil, I don’t know what I’m doing. Give me a hand here. And it’s usually been pretty helpful. And it gives me a place where I can make mistakes or not really know what I’m doing, but that’s OK. Yeah. And you can’t make them to learn. You can’t. You can’t make mistakes. You can’t make mistakes. You can’t make mistakes. You can’t make mistakes. You can’t make mistakes. Yeah. But you can’t make them to learn. You can’t you can’t really do that with a bureaucracy or a method or a procedure. Right. The procedure can’t show mercy. That’s a that’s a quality of human beings. Yeah. Quality. Right. And qualities. And this is the problem of science. Science can’t deal with quality. There are no tools in science, in ontology, to deal with quality. Ontology destroys quality. Explicitly. Explicitly. It’s not that’s the purpose. It’s supposed to do that. But that’s a good thing in so far as it goes. But it only goes so far. And that’s where the problem is. Science wants to go everywhere. Yeah. Well, I don’t even know if the science, the science want to do that or do people get high on science? Yeah. No, I mean, it’s it’s not. Yeah. I mean, science isn’t an agent in the world, but the people practicing science, many of them being individuals, right, being individualistic, being materialistic, want to do crazy things like extend rationality. And yeah, that’s a shot at John Brevicki directly, right. Want to extend rationality because they want scientific certainty. Right. And science is just intersubjective, intersubjective validation. Right. With with a certain level of accuracy and precision. That’s what they want. They want accurate and precise, intersubjective validation for things that are of quality and not they don’t they can’t be measured. They’re not quantitative. They don’t have a quantity. And you’re not going to get that. You can’t quantitatively measure the best burger in New York City. Right. You can have some quantitative guides. Nobody eats at this place. Lots of people go here. So, you know, that might that might give you some evidence. But yeah, well, my problem with data, it doesn’t. Right. Because, well, it doesn’t it doesn’t work 100 percent. Like it does give you some evidence. Right. And that evidence is mostly. But again, this gets back to the quality argument because the that every everybody knows the best quality burgers in any city are not the most attended restaurants in that city. Everybody knows this. This is not a secret to anyone. Right. Because everyone’s got their little secret, you know, best burger burger space. And and for some people that they’re they’re absolutely correct. Yeah. But the problem is, is that if you don’t like the burger, right, like doesn’t doesn’t touch grandma’s burger and maybe you don’t like the garlic butter that somebody puts on their bun. Whereas other people think that the salty garlic butter is the best. Right. Just just what and like which of them is wrong. Yeah, which of them is right. Say, are you guys reading Plotinus or Dionysius the Areopagite right now? Right now. You can read those. Yeah, this is the only book I’m reading. I did my chapter today. OK, that’s it. So, so when you were talking about like gods and spirits and all that kind of stuff, I’m like, I hope he’s not just making that up again because like people have already been there and done that and figured it out. You wouldn’t have to hack it all out by yourself. But if you were to do Plotinus or Dionysius the Areopagite, I would do Lexio Divina on those texts. Oh, wow. A concession. Well, I yeah, Plotinus might be worth checking out at some point just so that I can slay the beast of neoplatonism once and for all with with facts and logic, because I’m getting tired of people making this garbage up. Because it’s it’s clearly I’m asking very easy questions and nobody has any answers. I’m taking your your your your critiques of of use of the word modernity. It’s like, yeah, that’s a temporal category. It’s a temporal category, you know, has some use, but maybe not the best word for it. And then neoplatonism is just the new Platonism. And that’s another temporal category. Right, right, right. It’s not referring to it to a group that’s cohesive. Right. It’s an identification. It’s not an identification against, but it’s also not an identification of. Right. It’s just this kind of arbitrary line in the sand, Plotinus plus some other stuff, maybe. Right. Well, if if if it would be sequential, right, like Platonism and then that which follows. Right. I would say that that would be correct. Right. Because you can say neo in the sense of of that which follows. Right. And that’s not necessarily a temporal category. But the problem is, right. Then this should this should be only one identity. Right. Like this should be only one essence. And and the Platonism or the way which at least for Vegas using the Platonism is is that is a well, it’s a psycho technology. And it’s like, well, yeah, but like if you want to have a psycho technology that integrates with with other psycho technologies, right, then whenever you do that, like you’re no longer the same thing. Right. Like now you’ve combined two things into into maybe something that’s really useful. But but now they’re no longer the same thing. And then you can say, well, like you can translate it back. But when you translate it back to Platonism or whatever, right. Or the essence of Platonism, then what are you doing? You’re flattening it. Right. You’re making a scientific production of and and and it’s like, well, yeah, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s assuming that there’s anything in Neoplatonism that they’re referring to that isn’t in Platonism. And so far there hasn’t been. Right. It’s just all like, no, no, no, this this came after middle Platonism. And so it’s Neoplatonism. And I’m like, well, it’s the line between middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. There really isn’t one. It’s all temporal. None of it is a group of people, an essence of practices. It’s none of that. It’s just not identifiable from the landscape and it’s not identifiable from the source. And so it’s like, well, if it’s not in conflict with Plato and it’s just maybe because it’s always maybe because we don’t have we don’t have all of all that stuff. Maybe an add on to Plato that’s different. You know, really, you know, but we don’t know that we’re just pretending like we do. And that’s why when I ask people the easy questions, they don’t have answers. It’s like, well, then maybe the thing you’re pointing at is not a thing to be pointed at. Maybe it’s not a strong enough category to be a category. Lots of things are like that. And it’s OK. Like most things are like that. It’s the postmoderns that think all categories are arbitrary. Not me. I don’t think they’re arbitrary at all. Right. And so the problem I have with with reading things, this is one of the issues I have with reading the Bible. It’s like I don’t I can’t relate. Right. Like I can read the Bible and I can recognize the propositions for what they are. But like, that’s not why I read the Bible. I don’t read the Bible for the proposition. So if I read Plotinus or whatever, right, like I want to know why it’s relevant. Right. And what a lot of these philosophical problems like people come in and they’re stating just like, well, let’s talk about the Trinity. And I’m like, I don’t know why. Like, like, why is this a thing? Like, why do I have to be concerned about this? And so with the angel thing, right, like if I could reduce or confine the definition of angel to to something, it’s like, oh, right. Like we have a channel of communing, right. And that channel of communing can inform us. Right. And that’s a message of God. If we listen in the right way, because we can listen in the wrong way. Right. So it’s not only that you have to channel, you also have to listen correctly to the channel. It’s like, oh, that’s a really useful framework in relation to sense making in the world. But it’s also a useful framework in connecting to Christians and talking to Christians. Right. Because I don’t I think most Christians don’t have a good conception of the angel of an angel. And what the use is and how that informs their way of being in the world. I absolutely didn’t before about two years ago. I just want you to know. Did you exit seminary two years ago already? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you had a whole education, Christian education. I had a whole education. I didn’t know what to do with angels. I believed in them because Holy Mother Church taught it with her authority. But I was just like, I don’t know what to do with these angels. And I guess they show up and do things for God. Yeah. So that was just I didn’t really understand the tradition behind it, because as as so the things that I did know, the little propositions that have gotten lodged in there as I’ve listened to Peugeot and Vanderclay talk about these things more. So everything I actually did learn propositionally about angels is like, oh, now that makes sense. Now there’s now there’s actually a container for for that information that I was given. And then like. Yeah, yeah. So it’s all it’s all being unfolded now. But in terms of like actually useful knowledge, right, wasn’t really anything all that useful for it. Right. If you if you have objects, right, and you don’t have a framework to put them in, then they can’t contain any meaning. Right. There’s no they don’t contain meaning. Right. The meaning pops out from that relationship of the context or the framing plus the content. So if you all you have is content, you don’t have anything. And so that’s the postmodernism sneaking in and destroying the church because the church should be giving you all this framing. And that’s part of the problem. Like that framing is what we’re missing. And the reason why I don’t like post platonic is because the whole problem is that we keep trying to get past something we cannot get past, because it is correct. Plato was right. He just was. Everybody who’s tried to get past him has noticed themselves. You know, maybe and maybe Nietzsche didn’t admit it, but he certainly noticed that Plato was already there everywhere he went. Right. And Heidegger knew full well that Plato was already there. Right. And we keep wanting to go past that point. That is not a point which you can pass. And you don’t need to. Bad news. You can’t pass it. Good news. You don’t need to. Like it’s not a necessary thing in the world. And this is where people get wrapped up. It’s like, oh, well, you know, I have to find the perfect church. No, you don’t. Because it doesn’t exist anyway. Like bad news. The perfect church doesn’t exist. Good news. Perfect enough church exists and you can submit to it and it will be OK. And it’ll be better if you do than if you don’t. If you keep looking for the perfect, it’ll be the enemy of the good. And we’re living in that in that era or error, as I would call it. Right. And it’s the postmodernism, this destruction of frames as value, because once once all frames have equal weight, they’re not valuable anymore. They can’t. Value comes from inequality. There’s no value in equality. Definitionally, it destroys value. So you can’t make frames equal. You can’t make people equal. You can’t. You can’t do that. You can’t make religions equal. You can’t make churches equal. You can’t do any of that. You know, but you shouldn’t. And you don’t have to. And it doesn’t it because we’re lesser fallen creatures and we’re limited. Having something closer to our level is better. Right. Having an imperfect church is better because the imperfect church is closer to us than the perfect church would be. You’d be allowed to be a member of the perfect church. Speak for yourself. Oh, man. So it’s I want to respond to it. But the chat is saying, right, like, why are we concerned about how long a day is in Genesis? Right. And I think it what what is that question? Well, it’s framing the framing. Right. Like, OK, they’re talking about a day. How do we how do we understand the day? Like, because it’s not obvious. And I think I think it’s a it’s a proper concern. Right. I think people express and go about the concern the wrong way. But to be concerned about that, like, do I need to take day literal? Like, like asking yourself that question, like what is literal and what is not literal? Right. Like and and and playing with that, I think is a really, really good impulse because when we’re talking about hermeneutics of suspicion, right, like hermeneutics of suspicion is effectively rejecting that flexibility and saying, well, no, there’s there’s only one way of thinking about it. There’s only one way of interpreting what a day is and therefore. But when you when you realize that that you don’t have to have to have only one way of interpreting what a day is, then you can you can become more open. Right. Like, it’s not that you. I would like go off suspicion, but there’s now a potential that you can you can participate in without having to lock down in this defensive modality where I’m going to reject what you’re saying because there’s no frame that can hold what you say. Like there there there is a frame that can hold what the other person’s saying often. Right. That doesn’t mean that they’re right. But there is a frame and I can find a frame and I can participate. All righty. I think it’s been good. Glad you guys are hung with this. I think my my participation jar is now empty and another jar is full and I’d have to go attend to that. So just remember, this is a no anime zone and also nobody wants to hear about it. Is it the smart jar? I am I am happy that you did this, Father Eric. And I’m thankful for your participation and the ability for me to participate. And I’m looking forward to tomorrow being more thankful with with but now with food. So that’d be lovely. But now with food. All right. And I’m thankful about recognizing the ability to be thankful. It’s good. It’s good. It’s all good. God is good. Amen. Good night. All the time. Good night.