https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=G9oi9U5ANvA
Good. How are you? I’m doing well. You said you wanted to record. Did you want me to enable recording on your site too or shall I just send you the file or are you just gonna? Just sending me the file is fine. Okay, okay. Well, what’s life for you been in this strange thing? Are you doing online classes? What does that look like? Yep, so there was the huge transition to doing everything online. I was helped by the fact that I already had a lot of material recorded online, stuff like that. So a lot of stuff ready to go and a lot more experience than some of my colleagues with using these media. So yeah, that’s been pretty sort of hectic, but it’s stabilizing now. And we’ll see what’s gonna emerge out of it. The university is kind of optimistic, I think naively so, that we’ll be holding in-person classes in September. And I doubt that. I think we’ll be doing virtual classrooms until 2021. So we’ll see how that falls out. I understand why the university is being optimistic because they depend on international students and their funding. But on the other hand, if they drag a lot of people here and those people get really sick, they’re gonna get sued to the ground. So they’re just like, and I don’t envy being in the position of the administrators trying to weigh these decisions out. This is where I’m glad to be a minion in doing my work. So, I mean, other things. The weather here has exacerbated the condition because it’s what, it’s May 12th. And normally by that time, Canada is in the midst of a lovely spring. And we had snow and ice yesterday kind of thing. And so that’s adding to the grimness. The instability of the weather is also really affecting the manures in my ear. So that has been particularly difficult for me. In fact, I might warn you that at one point you’ll see me freeze, because it means I’m re-stabilizing my vision. Just take that into account. But I’ve had to decide that I have to keep doing what I do. I mean, I pace things and I do the exercises and the interventions, but I can’t stop doing things because I might have an attack. I just can’t live, I’ve decided I can’t live that way. I gotta keep going forward. So, before I was being very private about it. So the alternative is I have to just basically tell everybody about it. And it means I’m not having an epileptic seizure. I’m not taking drugs, I’m not drunk. I’m not having some weird affective response to what you said. Just give me a moment or two, and then we’ll get back to it. So that’s been that. Then the other thing, which is, I don’t know what the correct attitude is for this to representing it in a way that I find morally appropriate, but I’ll just say it. And I’ll depend on your good charity. The COVID crisis has increased the relevancy of my work considerably. And so more and more people are interested in it and contacting me and inviting me to projects and to conferences, virtual ones, of course. You know, and doing more stuff about the intersection between the COVID crisis and the meaning crisis. We can perhaps talk about this, the way it exacerbates a lot of the conditions of the meaning crisis. So, I mean, what should be my response there? I shouldn’t be happy that my work is more relevant because the proximate cause of that is, well, a worldwide disaster, but I’m appreciative of the fact that that’s the case. And I’m also encouraged by the fact that a lot of people have found my work helpful during this time. And I mean, I’ve been supplementing that awakening from the meaning crisis with the Voices with Verveki series, and also with the, I’ve been live streaming my meditation course for free. And that’s also been having like a very terrific response. So I guess what I would say is the relevancy of my work and the sense that it’s mattering and helping is giving me sort of strengthened meaning in life during what’s in some ways a really, really challenging time. I mean, don’t get me wrong, compared to many people, first of all, I’m in Canada and Toronto, which is great. Right? And I have a privileged position, my income is secure because I can do it virtually, right? And I have permanent status and all that sort of thing. So I’m not saying woe is me, right? Many people are much worse off than I am. That’s why I’m really hesitant about trying to express this in a morally appropriate way. But I am grateful, I guess, for the fact that my work matters and is helping, and that helps me. That helps me. I can very much understand that. I can very much understand that. What are the things that going, so as a pastor of a small church, of course you always want your church, almost every pastor I know wants their church to be a little bit bigger, a little bit more successful and all of that. And then you go online and then you have a YouTube channel and then you gain more attention and then you get more invitations and requests for interviews and things like that. And then suddenly you have the opposite problem of filtering, okay, who do I say yes to, who do I say no to? And in many ways, I would imagine your situation is quite parallel to mine because you do have your day job that you are in a university, but at the same time now you have these things and they do sort of go together but they’re not exactly the same. Yeah, that’s true. It’s a difficult and tricky balance in some ways. Yeah, because I think, and I think I should think, I have responsibilities beyond now, just my responsibilities to my students. I’m talking about my professional responsibilities, not my personal ones. But now I think I have equally a professional responsibility to other people who study my work, even if they are not officially my students. And trying to balance that out and trying to figure out, you know, who to talk to, it’s like you said, you can’t talk to everybody. But the problem is, because of what I mentioned about the relevancy sort of increasing, I’m getting both more requests and higher quality requests too, right? So it’s truly, well, you know, it’s the Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times, right? And so that’s how it’s going for me. How’s it going for you? It’s strange. You know, one of the things I’ve actually, again, through this pandemic thought a lot about your work and different points that you made in awakening from the meaning crisis have come to relevance for me through this process, which has been very interesting. One of which was immediately I saw this pandemic as a disruption in everybody’s sort of a shamanic episode that everybody’s patterns were disrupted, which suddenly affords all sorts of new opportunities and challenges for people. And as you know, for churches, this was very much the case because suddenly, well, the first week of the crisis, it was shall we open or shall we close? And then very quickly County of Sacramento came and said, you’re all closed. And then churches, which as we’re now contemplating, okay, when we have the green light to open, how can we do so safely? We begin to appreciate that even just common aspects of worship and I mean, most of my work is face to face, large groups that involve worship, which is singing, which is expelling all sorts of droplets all over the room that we never thought of, small groups. And so all of this is tremendously disrupted. And so in my congregation, I have as many congregations, a high percentage of individuals who would be at high risk from this. Right, right, right. And the same group of people, especially in my church, has near zero capacity for managing all of the tools like Zoom that could mediate this. Yeah, yeah. And so the one thing that everyone in the church knows how to use, which is the telephone, that suddenly becomes plan A. And so we immediately created with my church council, my governing board, a system so that everyone in the church would be contacted every week by somebody in leadership of the church so we can keep tabs on each other. And we’re very grateful for the fact that no one in the church has come down with the virus. And Sacramento has in many ways done very well in this pandemic, our rates are very low. But very quickly you begin to recognize how dependent, especially many of our seniors, many of our widows, have been emotionally on their weekly rhythms of life within the church. Right. As a pastor, women’s Bible studies are, a daughter church of ours bought a building from a church that was closing, and the church gave them a tremendous price on it, which afforded that new church to be able to occupy the building and purchase it. But one of their requests was, can our women’s Bible study keep meeting? In other words, the church had closed, but the level of community that many of these women’s Bible studies have is really, that they are tremendously dependent upon their wellbeing in these Bible studies. And so a lot of this has been, okay, how can we continue to support and encourage, I have a number of people in my congregation who struggle with various degrees of mental illness. Right, right. And some of them don’t understand what’s going on. And then, now it’s been months and it might be months still before we can even have any getting together, much less any sense of normalcy. And even when that happens, we recognize that many of the people will just, you know, social distancing masks, they’re not gonna wanna do any of this. And so we’re dealing with all of that. But at the same time, I think there, as with all of these things, there are almost always upsides and opportunities that develop. And just as sort of this shamanic disruption breaks up and troubles people in terms of their normal patterns of wellbeing, it also affords new opportunities for new discoveries and new patterns of wellbeing. And I think it will be very interesting to see how this changes people for the longterm. And we don’t know, but will people have discovered new things? For me personally, you know, a lot of the work that I did, I did by myself in my little office in my chair, and I go on. So a lot of my colleagues kind of laughed at me because they’re like, well, you were making videos before, you just keep doing it now. So it’s good and bad. I have two, so I have two, I have five children. One lives in an apartment in another area of town, another lives on the East Coast, but three of those adult children are now living at home and they started their academic careers homeschooling and now they’re going to college at home. And so, you know, my daughter who just today finished her last exam for her college work, and I really feel for her because, you know, no graduation. And so that’s not the way I would have liked to have seen her and her four years of college, but that’s where things are. Well, I’d like to pick up on what you just said there because I think it’s really relevant to some of the things I’ve been thinking about because I’ve been thinking about how the COVID crisis, let’s talk about what you call the downside first. I acknowledge it’s an upside, we’ll return to it. I want to focus on the downside right now. There’s a sense in which, and Chris and I, Chris and I for Master Pietro and I’ve been doing a lot of work on this, how the COVID crisis is causing a kind of domicide. You’re describing it there, people are losing home. And if you remember in the series and in the book, we talked about an important aspect of the meaning crisis being a sense of domicide, at least cosmological domicide and certain degrees of cultural domicide. People feel sort of cultural shock within their own worldview. And of course, people are quite literally losing the places where they feel safe and at home, even in the routine patterns of their life. And there’s, like, there’s, apology, there’s a deep reciprocal narrowing going on. The options in the world and the options for who they can be are narrowing. And as you said, relationships, connectedness is being severed, the religio is being undermined, the shamanic disruption, as you said. And this is exacerbating existing mental health difficulties. In fact, I think we should be talking now and preparing for a sort of mental health tsunami once we’re out of being fixated, not inappropriately so, but we’re fixated on the biological and economic aspects of this. But the mental health aspects are going to be titanic. Yeah. Like, you take a look at people that went through, you know, periods of the Great Depression or things like that, you can see them psychologically altered for the rest of their life by this kind of phenomena. So I think a lot of the mechanisms that we talked about in the, you know, in the meeting crisis are being accelerated. And then the people, you know, the background meeting crisis means that for many people, there isn’t a bigger thing that they can relate to, to offer as a counterbalance, a counter attraction to this narrowing. There isn’t something greater that they matter to and participate in that acts as a counterbalance to this shrinking. And so, you know, you’ve probably heard the stats are going up about suicide and domestic violence and substance abuse and all kinds of things. And this is, I think, also, you know, indicative. And I talked with Johannes Niederhäuser about this, about how we got into this Cartesian framework where, you know, everything was centered upon our subjectivity and everything was relative to our subjectivity. Now, the thing is, when people are actually thrown back on to their subjectivity, like they are now, they often find that it is not very deep. It doesn’t have very powerful resources available to them. And the idea that we are self-sufficient, self-defining beings is being seriously called into question. So I think that is, that’s part of why it’s exacerbating the meeting crisis. I also find another symptom that’s really interesting. And I think you might be interested in, I’m interested in how spontaneously, because, you know, mythological thinking is emerging around this. But, you know, I talked to Zach Stein and he talked, you know, he used mythological language to talk about this. He talked about the war on heaven in his famous essay on medium. And it was really, really interesting when you hear people talk, people that are otherwise self-declared secular will say things like, I feel like we’re under judgment. And it’s of course interesting that the word crisis originally means judgment. And then, and I think about sort of the barely implicit narrative that people have. I mean, it’s kind of like being in the Old Testament, right, because there’s this almost demonic, invisible, ubiquitous presence out there that can strike you undeservedly, independent of the moral quality of your life, strike you down, and it’s demanding purity codes from us, really harsh and drastic purity codes. So you’re sort of in this, like, you’re sort of in this, like, you know, like, I don’t mean any insult to the Old Testament, but you know what I’m trying to invoke? You’re in that world, right? Yeah, right? And so, you know, archetypal mythopoetic stuff is coming up. Well, and of course, those two factors are interacting with each other. Because if you’re starving for meaning and mythopoetic stuff is coming up, well, you’re gonna latch onto that. I mean, I think that’s one of the points that Jordan Peterson, his rise to fame, just demonstrates over and over again. When people are starving for meaning and you offer them some mythopoetic stuff, man, they’ll come running, right? So those two factors in my mind are really feeding on each other. And then, and I did a thing with David Fuller in Rebel Wisdom, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this. And then you get sort of attendant upon that weird mythopoetic space, you’re getting the generation of all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories. As people are desperately trying to find the narrative order behind all the chaos. And then that exacerbates all the other things, right? Because if you’re into conspiracy theories, that tends to be a nice place for mythopoetic imagery, but that, you know, conspiracy theories also feed on a hunger for meaning. And all of these things are really spinning around each other in a really powerful and accelerating way. And so that’s my sort of, I mean, I have more, but that’s sort of my, you know, gist analysis of why this crisis is really, you know, really amping up the meaning crisis for people in powerful and dramatic ways. Sorry, that was a bit of a speech, but there was a lot. Oh, that was good. And I saw, I really appreciated, you know, what you said with, on Rebel Wisdom about this. Especially about the conspiracy theories. And in fact, I included a slide of you in my Sunday sermon on this, because part of what, I think, I mean, I agree with everything that you’ve just said, and I see this happening. And I, you know, almost think you could rephrase, you could rephrase the Psalmist who says, you know, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. Well, the fool says in his heart, there is no COVID. And so you have two groups of people running around out there. Some for whom, I mean, you have to, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this, you have to, in a sense, engage our mythopoetic capacities to manage a virus that, you know, we’re not even sure if viruses are alive. They’re these weird, you know. Yeah, categorical things. Yes, and so, for example, and I watch people with this, where some individuals, because again, I try to keep in contact with all of these regular people, completely outside of my internet, people who would never watch any of my videos, and some of whom, you know, ah, they don’t have any patience for this. They’re just gonna go out there, and they’re gonna do whatever they want, and they’re annoyed by the government shutdowns and all of this stuff. And then you’ve got other people who are, you know, they’re everything, I mean, like you said, the purity rights, everything has to be cleaned, everything has to be washed, and then you try to engage people, say, well, you know, you’re gonna have to somehow balance these two things because you can’t live on one side or the other. But you watch as people sort of naturally default to, you know, their personalities, their upbringings, all of this, but again, it requires a, it requires this, really, this mythopoetic capacity that we have to imagine the virus on everything, and then that, of course, factors into all sorts of very natural triggers that people have for safety and security. Yes, and also for scapegoating, right? Yeah. And all kinds of things. Well, that sort of brings me to a point that I mentioned in our preparatory email. I mean, so a bunch of us, people I’m talking to, you know, like Jordan Hall and Zachary Stein and Andrew Sweeney and Christopher Matapietro, there’s a bunch of these conversations swirling around each other, also the ones I’ve had with Guy Sendstock and Johannes Niederhäuser. You know, but Zach Stein is, like, he’s been really articulate about this. He and I had a really good conversation about this, about, you know, part of what we’re discovering is, I’m gonna use these terms very carefully, and I would hesitate to use them normally, but I trust that I can use them around you. It’s our religious illiteracy that is really exacerbating this. He argues that we have so lost, and we have so lost, and I think he means this both inside and outside the church, and I think that’s a fair thing to say. We have so lost the capacity for a literate and wise response to the mythopoetic machinery. I mean, Jordan Hall makes a good point. This machinery is gonna come up when we’re in really novel circumstances. That’s the shamanic disruption that you pointed out, because we’re grasping on the deepest kinds of information processing that have survived the widest possible number of contacts, and we’re tapping into that. We’re trying to exact it and bring it out, and see if that, because, you know, these things have survived the longest, so there you go, right? And so you’re gonna fall back on those. Now, there’s all kinds of problems with that, though. There’s all kinds of problems, and we’ve been talking about it. And so, because people, and this was part of Jung’s critique, right? Because people have not been educated. They have not gotten a sapiential education in this imaginal machinery. We are largely suffering it rather than making use of it. That’s sort of the core of his argument. And he says what this should be, he argues, I think, quite eloquently, this should be a clarion call to us that we need to reconsider what it is that our education is in the service of. That, you know, and this is where I agree with Thomas Bjorkman, you know, our culture sort of collapsed to the de facto normativity being the market. And, you know, and he’s a financial banker. He’s not some crypto Marxist or anything, right? And the problem is what we’re seeing is the market doesn’t have what we need right now. It’s not the right machine. In fact, the market has been behaving very poorly in all of this, right? And so he says we need to understand that we should be educating for normativities other than the normativity of the market. Not excluding those, of course. People have to be prepared for making a living, et cetera, et cetera. But we used to have, I mean, I grew up, as you know, I went to Sunday school, which was a school other than the state school. And what was supposed to happen there, whether or not it did happen for me is something we can talk about another time. What was supposed to happen there was I was supposed to be given education, right, in how to deal with this kind of mythopoetic processing so that I could use it wisely and not, and then, you know, and you know, it was very clear about this. People talk about architects as if they’re wonderful things like, you know, jewels that they can put on their shelves. And it’s like, no, no, architects are really, really dangerous things, right? They’re really, really dangerous. Anything that’s really powerful and has capacity for tremendous transformation, both of your agency and of your arena, is a very dangerous thing. And if it comes up and you are not educated in how it can slam you, you’re gonna get slammed, right? You’re gonna get slammed. And I think this is really, really important. Now that was an all a very long preamble like something out of Hegel for this point, which is I’ve noticed, like I said, that the emergence, the spontaneous emergence of a lot of mythopoetic and religious terminology, and I’ve noticed that that’s weirdly convergent. And there’s probably, this is probably not completely like unconfounded, but I was already independently before the crisis hit as I was working on the dialectic, theologos project. And I mentioned this to you before. I was noticing, you know, how much the language that people were bringing to this, both in their experience of it and their theorizing about it was trying to bring back, is that the right word? I don’t know what the right verb is, but it was, they were using, but also trying to renew the use or change the, but they were using a lot of religious terms, right? And I noticed that I was starting to think about this too. And you know, just as the crisis was hitting, Jordan, Paul and I have gotten into this discussion that has unfolded across several discussions and conversations about, you know, how faith is needed and what does faith mean in this kind of context. And then, you know, these discussions about, if we need to get, they could did something with this notion of subjectivity that I think has a deep religious import that hasn’t been explored enough, it needs to be unpacked. And it goes towards that point I made earlier about people are in their subjectivity, they’re finding it’s shallow, it’s not deep, right? So Descartes basically reduces the soul to mind, he equates them, your soul is just your mind and just your conscious mind, because that’s all Descartes understood. And then what it really is, is that moment of where consciousness touches itself, that sort of center of your subjectivity. And so you see these identifications take place, and then, you know, the sense of soul as, what it is in Plato and perhaps, I don’t know if it’s in the Christian tradition, but maybe it is because of it’s, you know, the soul is something as intermediary between, well, I’ll use the old language and then I’ll use the new language and then I’ll shut up so that you can talk. The old language was the soul is an intermediary, it’s the faculty that mediates between the mysteries of transcendence and the mysteries of imminence. It’s that capacity in you that puts those two together and it’s something therefore other than just your mind or even your spirit, if your spirit means your capacity for aspirational self-transcendence or something like that. And that’s why, you know, the notion of soul was bound up with worship, because I take worship was a set of practices that tried to relate the mysteries of transcendence and the mysteries of imminence. Now, what’s the new language that I found myself using and I’m seeing other people using? And so it’s not idiosyncratic to me, I think that’s a fair thing to say. And you’ll notice that some of this language precedes the crisis. One is the sense that people are talking about how there’s moreness, that there’s an inexhaustibleness. And man, I started using that term and now everywhere I’m reading it, I’m seeing this term, the inexhaustible, how reality has an inexhaustible. Literally that term, that adjective, inexhaustible moreness, and not just quantitative, qualitative moreness, right? And then this is a little bit more in Eastern philosophy in the Kyoto School, but I’m also seeing it in some continental philosophy, the idea of suchness, that there is something about you, there is something about you that resists, and this goes to the being mode, there’s something about you that is not captured by any of your categorical identities. And I hate using this word because it’s so part of narcissism, but there’s a uniqueness to you. There’s a here, now, nis, suchness, that’s irreplaceable, that nothing else, no, everything has that, but human beings have that in a considerable depth. And so if you’ll allow me to look in terms to give you a bridge back why I see this so religiously, I think the moreness is a way of talking about the mystery that we participate in, and the mysteries of participation, to use a platonic idea, and the suchness is the mystery of individuation, and Tillich sees those always in a constant tension, and the soul is sort of the capacity that you can’t resolve the tension, the soul is the capacity that constantly mediates between them. Now, I’m attracted to that because this is a non-Cartesian, and I would say non-supernaturalistic way of understanding soul, and I’m seeing it emerging in how people are trying to talk about these new forms of dialogue and discourse, and how they’re doing this not just to give information or change people’s minds, they’re trying to get into right relationship, and think about faith and right relationship, they’re trying to get into right relationship with themselves, with each other, and reality, and this kind of thinking and this way of talking is coming to the fore. Sorry, there was a lot to say, but I had to say a lot because I wanted to put it out there. I think that was really very helpful, I took a lot of notes, and of course it’s recorded so I can watch it again. I’ve been, so my last couple of videos, I’d been reading Robert Putnam, he wrote Bowling Alone, and then in 2010, he put out American Grace, which, so he’s a political scientist, and he was working on trying to figure out politics and religion and some of that, and he landed on the term religiosity as trying to get it- I watched part of that video. Oh, okay, it’s a very long video. As trying to get a handle on what happened, because we have the strangeness, we have the strangeness of when John F.K. ran for President of the United States, his Catholicism was a very big deal. And then when you had another senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry running, his Catholicism was no deal at all. The religiosity was a question, and now in fact, in the next election, we’ll likely have a German Friesian who, whatever church background he might claim comes from the Reformed Church of America, Norman Vincent Peale running against a Roman Catholic, but the Calvinist Reformed, all the way through Norman Vincent Peale, Christianity versus Roman Catholicism has nothing to do with any of their identities in terms of how they relate to each other in public. So I was digging into this book, and the point that I’ve made many times on my videos that church attendance in North America reaches its peak during the Cold War. Right, of course, of course. And Putnam made the observation in the book that women had already had high degrees of religiosity, almost always, constantly higher than men. People of color, almost always higher degrees of relig, well, African-Americans and Hispanics, Asians, less so, but what really caused the huge surge in religiosity that held the culture from the Cold War up until the counterculture where it started to wane in the 60s were basically the men coming back from World War II. That experience of, and I really recommend Ken Burns’ documentary, The Pacific, which in many ways captured the, what does war do to even those who survive it? We’re experiencing a dislocation, we’re experiencing a disruption, but war just rips people open inside. And they came back from that. I don’t know if you’ve read, I think it’s Unbroken. I’ve seen the movie. Yeah, don’t watch the movie, the book is, because the movie is, the movie is a trashing of the book. Oh, that’s too bad. The book, so here you have this guy who was, he was Italian, so wasn’t, churches are kind of over there, survives this incredible thing of being adrift at sea only to be rescued by the Japanese, to be just horrendously abused in Japanese prison camps and survives all of this, comes back to North America, marries the woman of his dreams only to become an alcoholic, and just trashes his life. And then he goes to a Billy Graham crusade, goes down the aisle, and again, I got, I have to be careful here because a lot of, in the church there’s often a lot of problems, people think, well, if I become a Christian, you know, I’ll get rid of my alcohol issues, no. So the story is exceptional, but basically becomes a Christian, goes, you know, at a Billy Graham crusade, finds, you know, no longer has a problem with alcohol and lives a remarkably different life. That’s his story. And you look at how religiosity, this, which I think is something I was just working on for my next video, you know, okay, what are we talking about when we’re talking about religiosity? You know, you and I spoke about religio, and that comes up in, it has to do in many ways with, I think you’re exactly right, where the moreness and the suchness, you negotiate those two realms. And you do so communally, because obviously we’re deeply woven into each other. And part of the disruption of this pandemic is that so many people in North America, people live in smaller and smaller units than just about anybody, any place else in the world, unlike, you know, not extended families, like in many other places in the world. So people are now divorced from each other. A lot of our contact is mediated through these screens, which are false, frankly. And now the studies about why Zoom calls are so exhausting are coming to the fore that, you know, there’s all this bullshitting that the screens are doing to us. And so I, you know, we’ll see, at this point, I think one thing we should be able to say is that we really have no idea how deeply this pandemic will disrupt what we have taken to be normal for a good number of years. But I think, oh, go ahead. And that both helpful religiosity and bullshit religiosity will, and that’s manifest. I mean, the conspiracy theories are just sort of the narrative cusp of that. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So I agree with everything you said. I guess what I was trying to say is that I think one of the things that’s gonna come out of this, and I think it’s consistent with what you just said, because what I see people searching for is they’re searching for, in their search for meaning and a kind of meaning in this homelessness, you’ll allow me some metaphors, they’re searching for lost faculties. They’re searching for machinery that has been largely backgrounded, sometimes even suppressed or marginalized. They’re searching for lost faculties of meaning cultivation and wisdom cultivation. That’s what I’m trying to understand with this notion of soul and its capacity for faith. Let me just be quickly that I understand faith as an extension of what I was talking about in awakening from the meaning crisis, not as the assertion of propositions, but I try to put it this way. It’s the wedding of the emergence of mind to the emergence of a world that affords right relationship to oneself, to others and to being. It’s more of this continuity of contact, this ongoing enhancement, preservation, celebration and enhancement of religio. And people are trying to figure out, and I think very fairly, not as explicitly as what we’re talking about here, because this is an analysis, of course, but I think they’re trying to figure out what is the faculty that does that? It’s, you know, what is it? And I was impressed by you making use again of the distinction between the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse, but I wanted to add one thing to it that I don’t know. You might wanna push back on it a little, but that should be fun, which is that, I mean, at least in how I read Pascal, the spirit of finesse is that aspect, it would be the three non-propositional kinds of knowing that I talked about. Finesse is obviously a procedural term, right? It’s doing things with finesse, right timing, right placement, but it also requires respectable situational awareness, and it requires that you have that sort of co-fittedness of the agent and the arena, right? That’s, you know, the famous thing, the heart has reasons that reason knows not of, right? And so I wanted to say that I agree with you that, trying to find, if you’ll put it, if you’ll allow me to play with the Fs, the faculty of, and these are all interpenetrating, the faculty of faith and finesse, because you were already putting them together, and I see them as putting together, but the thing I wanted to say was, you seem to be making an argument, and I participated in you crafting that argument before, and you know I think it’s a good argument, so, and this is not some silly village idiot atheist, reputation of your argument or something like that. Because I’m trying to build on the machinery that you’re tapping into, but you seem to be arguing that that requires that the finesse aligns us with treating God, conceiving, I don’t know what the right word is, Paul, relating to God as a person. That seemed to be the gist of your argument, and while I acknowledged, I think that has clearly clear evidence in many people’s lives. I was thinking, but if the finesse is ultimately non-propositional, aren’t there deep ways of finesse that aren’t bound into the propositional structure of narrative, and the example that comes to mind, of course, is for me, being a Tai Chi player. Taoism, I mean, if Taoism is anything, it’s a religion of finesse and flow, that’s how it works, and it gives me very deep finesse and flow, and it puts me into, I think, the right relationships that I’m talking about, yet it doesn’t seem to have a narrative structure to it, and doesn’t seem to involve me in personhood. Now, I’m gonna give you some ammunition to throw back at me, or we’re playing catch, not war. I’ll throw the ball to you, and you throw it back to me. That’s a better metaphor. Because one of the things you might say is, you could be sort of a Jungian, a la Jordan Peterson, and you could say, well, yes, I acknowledge that that’s even possible and profound, but notice that what you said earlier, is that you’re not a Jung, that you have a lot of mythopoetic stuff coming up, and this tends to be expressed in a dream-like aspect of the mind, and that seems to be inherently narrative. And so don’t we need something in the mythos that deals with that personalized aspects of things? So that’s something you can use. So, sorry, you can tell I’ve been talking to you in my head, right? You can tell that, right? So- Finally you get the chance. So there, I’m putting it out for you. So there’s one part where I think the faith as finesse is really important, but that seems deeply a very viable and real option in a non-narrative framework. I know it, personally, right? But nevertheless, I do take seriously the concern that the intermediary through which the mythopoetic expresses itself is kind of like a dream-like aspect of the mind, which is very narratively woven. I get that. So there, I sort of set you a problem. Well, I think, and I very much take seriously, I mean, when we’ve talked about this before, the fact, I mean, when I talked about, let’s say the narrative sort of being the machine code, and you rightly noted that, narratives are learned, are things that we learn, and then later with the wonderful video that Sevilla made about one of my videos, she really focused in on the sort of religion being the JPEG of being, which is this lossy compression scheme by which we take all of this. And I think it’s important. I mean, my dog has, my dog is, at least to my knowledge, incapable of the kinds of narrative capacities that we are, yet my dog has being and is relatable and is an agent in this arena and all of those things. And so I think narrative is the kind of thing that will likely be, especially given certain cultural parameters like my own, inescapable. I almost can’t think without it. Just like I almost can’t think without the English language. And so just as we touched on in our previous conversation when I presented the argument to you, and I think you rightly countered me, it’s not really an argument about ontology. And I think that’s correct. But at this point, even when I look at say COVID, we relate to COVID personally. And if you just, it’s so natural to us that we personify this virus all over the place. And that’s just such a handy tool. And we always have to catch ourselves BSing it because I’ll remind sometimes when we’re cleaning off our groceries, I remind my wife, this thing doesn’t jump. It isn’t seeking us out, but we act as if it is. And so we use these narratives. And I think that is part of the gift of narrative and the gift of approaching the universe as if it is personalized and personified. But again, I don’t think that answers the question, but this gets to the point of whether we can answer the question and whether we need to answer the question. And- Right, and I’m happy about that. So yeah, that’s an excellent response. And I’m happy with, if you’ll allow me, you’re shifting it into being pragmatic in the philosophical sense, not in the everyday sense. But then, and then like I said, so that’s why I shifted it, I thought, but I don’t think it was clear enough. I’ve shifted it to a pragmatic arena. I’m a Tai Chi player, and this puts me in right relationship. It enhances my religio, makes me more insightful, makes me more compassionate, allows me to shift perspective. It makes me wiser, not wise, but wiser, right? And that’s taking place non-narratively. And it’s making use of other powerful mechanisms like our innate capacity for getting into the flow state, which is also powerful and universal, et cetera, et cetera. So what I’m saying is, the pragmatism seems to, if you’re being consistent with it as your criteria, it seems to commit you to a kind of pluralism, I think, that there are many ways, I know, I know- Keep going, keep going, I love it. I love it. I know, I know, but I am your friend. And if you wanna back out, you know- I’m from New Jersey, I love a good fight. This is what I do. I hope we’ll continue to discuss. It seems to- You have no idea the lengths you would have to go to to offend me and to have me back out of this relationship. You have no idea. Well, I know, and I wanna come back to that, because I think there’s a connection between finesse and faithfulness, which isn’t the same thing as faith. Like, when I’m faithful to my partner and I want to be faithful to her, because she’s just an amazing person, that doesn’t mean that I have a fixed knowledge or set of beliefs about her at all, right? My beliefs about her will change. And some of the ones that I held as most dear will even be abandoned, they are, because she’s not fixed, right? Faithfulness is, that’s what I mean, it’s not closure, it’s not completeness, it’s continuity of contact. It’s maintaining right relationship that’s both right for me and right for her. And I don’t mean morally right. I mean, in the sense of right-handed, dexterous, facilitatory, adaptive, things like that. Not excluding moral rightness, but I’m not reducing it to moral right. So I appreciate the fact that you’re faithful to the conversation, but I don’t want this to generate into the debate, because I’m not presenting this to you as here’s my position and now you must defend yourself and say, it seems to me, because I’ve seen, I saw Jordan making the same kind of move, right? And I know you’re influenced by him. That’s not a criticism, that’s just an observation, right? And then when you go into the guts of pragmatism, which I have, especially James, James comes out of this like a died in the world pluralist. He says, if your standard is how well people’s lives are being lived and how much finesse and faithfulness they can bring to bear, you have to conclude that you’re a kind of pluralism. I mean, that’s what I see in the saint of pragmatism, James, right? And so that’s what I’m saying to you. Well, I think that’s very fair. And of course, all of the Christian traditions have Christianity in common, but they all accentuate different things. And so what’s interesting to me about is that when you are raised in a tradition, in the religiosity of it, you are formed into certain aspects of it that you are never conscious of until far later, there’s opportunity to become conscious of it. And so for example, my particular brand of Calvinism comes through the Dutch Calvinists and through secessionists of the Dutch Calvinists of the likes of Herman Bobink and Abram Kuyper. And Kuyper was, I don’t know how much you know about Abram Kuyper. I don’t know anything at all, completely ignorant. Okay, he was a very interesting guy. Bobink and Kuyper were in the latter half of the 19th century. And they were very much in a time when the modernism, theological liberalism, political liberalism, the Netherlands was no longer at its peak as an empire anymore, but still a thriving trading culture. And both Kuyper and Bobink tried to maintain their religiosity in the face of modernity. And so in some ways, what that yielded for them in my reading of it is kind of a proto neo orthodoxy. You know, they came to, they had to deal with some of the same things that Barth had to deal with, but a generation earlier. And Kuyper, so Bobink stayed, he was probably the better of the two theologians. But Kuyper was an enormously productive man. He eventually became prime minister of the Netherlands, founded the Free University of the Netherlands. And then developed this sort of pluralism for the Netherlands that eventually, of course, the Netherlands became quite a pluralistic country. So my roots, my Christian roots have a degree of respecting pluralism within it. And I think that comes out of this certain element of Calvinism that I don’t think you’ll find alien that talks about the absolute strangeness of God. Yeah, yeah, yes, yeah. And so given that kind of base assertion that affords a degree of freedom in terms of understanding the non-essentiality of narrative, because narrative is something that we need. And Calvin and many others spoke a lot about, if there’s anything you understand about Calvin, it’s about God’s accommodating our needs. And so, and one of the things, so it’s really fun having listened to your whole course when you’re presenting it, and now having a little bit of distance from it, because I find my thinking is very slow. And I’m always curious about what bubbles up. And some of those latter lectures you talked about, you talked about some of these issues of, nothing appears real to us if it’s too, how could I say it? If it’s too perfect, if it’s too complete, there always needs to be that frontier between, for lack of a better word, the infinite and the finite. And I think your language of both the, both the moreness and the suchness gets at that. Yes, yeah. And so for me, and this gets born out in the most, what has been the most enduringly controversial aspect of Calvinism, which are God’s decrees. And I remember when you were treating Luther, I thought, I think you got some Calvin in your Luther there. It’s probably true, given my religious upbringing, yes. I acknowledge that. But there’s this sense of, in that, as is so often the case in some of these dogmas and doctrines that there are, beneath them there are observations of reality that are trying to get expressed by that dogma and that doctrine. And almost always, because these are our dogmas and our doctrines and our institutions, these are all human inventions and therefore all limited and imperfect. And that’s another piece of the Calvinism. Of course. And so all of these things are our attempts to try to understand a world that is too big for us and a world that is too complex for us. And so where that leaves us is finally, a Calvinist has to make his peace with the pluralisms of the world by virtue of the fact that the Calvinist confesses that he doesn’t know it all, he can’t see it all, and any system he develops is going to be too limited and will finally fall short of the reality that God has created. So in that way, I’m not uncomfortable with, it’s interesting to me that the pragmatists arose at the same time as Kuyper and Bobink were working because even though some of the pragmatists are often in America and the Dutchmen are over in the Netherlands, Netherlands has long been a very porous place, it’s too small a place to really have enough for itself and so they reach into all other places to figure things out. So I don’t know if any of that makes any sense or is helpful at all. No, it was helpful. And no, that was very helpful. And I mean, I take it that part of why Calvin is the source of this is because of Calvin’s deep antithopy towards idolatry, right? And towards, I mean, the human imagination is a permanent factory for the production of idols and that sort of thing. But, you know, and so I appreciate that and I appreciate you saying that, but notice part of the problem again and where I’m trying to sort of, let’s agree that you sort of agreed it’s not metaphysically necessary, that seems to be the case. And I’ve acknowledged it and I talked about it. I think it’s indispensable and that does, so we’re not self, we’re not, you know, we’re not Camus heroes, we’re not completely self-interpreting, self-defining beings, clearly. Okay, that’s all good. Now I said, if the function was, you know, finesse and faithfulness, I can see, like I said, you know, there’s other things that have that and that don’t use a personalistic mythos. But I’m also thinking, well, but maybe they’re, you know, I’m gonna use this word and I’m gonna use it in the ancient Greek sense. You know, the demonic aspects of our existence, that we have these archetypal patterns and things and they’re emergent now. And I take Zach’s point to be that, you know, we’re deeply illiterate in that, and this is where, you know, talking to Thomas Cheatham and reading Corbett has been so helpful. You know, we’ve lost how to relate to the imaginal. We’ve reduced it again to this purely subjective imaginary. And so I’ve been thinking about this because, right, this is really relevant to dialectic because here’s one way in which I think personhood, I’m talking, someone just knocked on my door and I have to see who it is, but keep talking, I’m listening. Okay, so I’m gonna use the word personhood, not personality. And there might be something really important about personhood that is coming out. So when you’re involved in these dialogical practices, and I take, I’m trying to work out what dialectic is as a psychotechnology that transforms dialogue to dialogos, right? And so something happens, which is really interesting. You’ve got, of course, you’ve got the interpersonal relationship happening within the person, and then there’s the interpersonal relationship. And then as I’ve mentioned to you before, you get this collective flow state and you get what, what Chris and I are calling the third factor or the geist, trying to pick up on the German sense of it, because it hangs between mind and spirit and, right? And you get this, you get this phenomena. And then what I’m trying to do with Chris and with Guy and these other people’s, in these circling practices, and Guy is very responsive to this criticism, these circling practices, they’re designed to just maintain the interpersonal intimacy. You’re trying to just maintain the intimacy with yourself and each other. And that in itself is a wonderful thing. I love it. I mean, I’m not disparaging it. But when I said to Guy, but there’s no philosophia in it. Right? And so what happens sometimes, right? In some of the conversations I have, when I’m trying to reconstruct dialectic and dialogos, is the intimacy goes from being intrapersonal or interpersonal to being transpersonal. You start to feel an intimate connection to the logos, to the very process of emerging intelligibility. And the sense that it’s coming from some, you know, from an inexhaustible aspect, both of our own cognition and of our mind. It puts you into a soulful relationship. The suchness and the moreness are just there, and they’re being mediated by the logos. And it’s like there’s a special power of interpersonal and interpersonal contexts that I’m trying to acknowledge it, right? I’m trying to acknowledge and say, yes, there’s something there that needs to be given respect. I’m not backing away from my nontheism or anything like that. I’m not saying that. There’s something there, and maybe you’ll say, well, you know, this is what Paul was on, Paul the apostle, not you, with the body of Christ or something like that. And that’s fine, you can talk about that. I’m eager to hear. But if you see what I’m trying to say, there’s a special privileged relationship between the logos of speech and the logos of being. And I can only speak to other people. I’m not speaking to myself. I’m speaking as if I’m speaking to another person. Speech presupposes personhood. And if the spoken logos is one of the most appropriate participatory symbols of the ontological logos, then the interpersonal relationship, right? The relating of personhood to personhood has a special kind of privilege. Did that make sense as an argument? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense. I think that’s right. What are we, I mean, what are we, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot in, so, you know, I looked at, you know, some of the Ryan Holiday stoicism and Peter Bogosian, who, of course, has made a name for himself of, you know, talking religious people out of their religiosity. He posted a, you know, he posted a video, 10, you know, from some other guy, 10 Keys to Success. And again, this gets at, you know, Sevilla’s project of, you know, what are we looking for, really? And I’ve thought about this a lot with, you know, the religion that isn’t a religion. And, you know, Eric Weinstein’s, you know, idea of, well, we kind of, you know, we kind of tried to wring all the Jesus smuggling out of everything so we could get at the pure, you know, the pure stuff, but then we realized, you know, since we took the one eye out and we have to bring the subjective and the objective back in. And again, I like your moreness and your suchness. You know, C.S. Lewis makes a comment in, there’s this, I don’t know if you’ve ever read Sheldon Van Auken’s book, A Severe Mercy. Sheldon Van Auken was a student of C.S. Lewis. He was a Brit, and he, the book starts, he starts writing about this. He falls in love with this woman, and they become married. And I warn people not to read this book if they’re having trouble with their relationship, especially women, because, you know, this book is, the first part of this book is this story about, and again, my work of getting down into sacraments. In some ways, you know, the intimacy of a relationship of a couple is a sacrament of, you know, what you’re talking about in terms of the, all of this stuff coming together. Yeah, yeah. And so, Van Auken, you know, Van Auken begins this, just amazing relationship with this amazing woman. And, you know, the way he writes, you would almost imagine that there was, there never has been in the history of the world a relationship, a love better than between these two individuals. Now, once you get to that kind of peak, you know, there’s gonna be a crash. And of course, you know, it does come apart. And it’s a tragic story. And so, part of why this book has been popular is because this person was a friend of C.S. Lewis, and they wrote letters back and forth. Lewis was a great letter writer. Lewis talks about the fact that, you know, there’s, it’s a weird thing that, you know, in a platonic sense that the form of apple is, you know, is the ultimate apple. And then of course, Aristotle will come back and say, that form of apple is somehow less than a real apple. So you have the moreness and the suchness. Very much, very much. And so, what are we trying to get at with a dream? Addressing the meaning crisis. We have at the, we have at the, we have at our center a longing for everything. And when we relate to individual human beings, we have a sense that I am, if we’re paying attention at all, and we have any humility whatsoever, we have a sense that we are sitting across the table from a being that makes everything else in my life clearly of lesser value than the value of that other being. Even if they’re, even if they’re the alcoholic that’s sleeping outside my door. How, and so we’re almost tantalized by, you know, and so then when you get involved, I haven’t visited Guy and his circling. He’s been very deeply connected with one of our daughter meetups over in Alameda. But I, you know, having in Christian terms been part of, you know, various retreats, communal settings, worship practices, all these kinds of things. You get into these moments where everything seems to come together. The personal, the impersonal. And there’s all this religious language that we have to try to, you know, to try to point to these things. Because we always have the sense that that we can never get there. The book of Ecclesiastes, you know, which is just an amazing book in the Bible, which I think in many ways so speaks to our world because, you know, we, chapter three begins with this, you know, this song that was, that was the birds that, you know, there’s a season for everything. And then a little bit later, you know, he says, you know, God has placed eternity in our hearts. And I think that gets into this, we, unlike my dog, can see and hunger for exactly what you’re talking about. About where all of this comes together. And Lewis talked about this as, as sense such, which is this, which is a kind of a joyful longing that it’s the joy and the sorrow mixed together because we taste it enough to, to long for it. Then yet we know we can’t grasp it enough so that it’s tainted by sorrow. And, you know, part of, you know, part of where I weaved some of your thought into my sermon last week is because the book of First Peter keeps bringing up a very common New Testament concept of epithumia, which is this, you know, thumia, which is desire, epi is an over desire. And these over desires create this reciprocal narrowing that I think you talked so well about. But there’s one use of epithumia that, that Peter uses when he’s, and he addresses it to the angels. And he talks about the gospel as this thing that the angels have epithumia for because they can’t taste it like we can. And it’s that, it’s that, it’s that place that we sit where, you know, it might be through all of these practices that suddenly we, we get this, we get this, we see it, we get a glimpse of it and our hearts instantly long for it. And we want more of it. And we get a sense that nothing short of everything will actually satisfy it. And I think, you know, that sort of puts us in Augustine’s lap. Or in the lap of Siddhartha, right? You know, the idea that we long to consume the whole world. Yeah. So- Maybe I missed what you were saying. I hope not, but I, you know- No, no, no, there’s two things. I was making an argument that there’s, I’m not pointing to a doctrine. I’m pointing to a special functional place or personhood in putting us into that mediating role. And by the way, it’s all through Plato. The symposium is dripping with that, that, you know, finite transcendence. We’re always, we long for what the gods have, but we’ll never have it. That’s why it’s always philea Sophia. We never have Sophia. But I was trying to pick up on that, you know, that there’s this phenomena, right? Which we’re calling the logos, right? You know, the emergence of the, the transjective emergence, cause it’s between us and the world of new intelligibility. And it seems to point to a kind of, you know, moreness and inexhaustibleness in both the world and me. And there’s all that’s happening. But that, well, I’ll even use this language. Semantic meaning, the meaning of speech is, we even use it. We use this as the metaphor for meaning in life, for actually this non-semantic connectedness and the connectedness that affords the moreness and the suchness. And so human speech is, and the Greeks do this, they were lucky the word logo sort of equivocates between the two of them, not nicely, right? So, but human speech is an affining symbol. It participates, but it’s not identical to the logo, the ontological logos. And if that’s true, then speech, speech is dependent on personhood. And that means that personhood has a special place in, it’s a special locus for which we cultivate our ability to come into faithful, right relationship with ourselves. And what I mean by relationship is, the relationships that reduce self-deception and increase connectedness, meaning in life, that’s my pragmatic criteria. Those are my pragmatic criteria, right? And so I think that’s really, really important. And then, and so you acknowledge that. So I’m just pointing the points. And then you moved over to the point of that, what I’m sort of trying to reformulate the notion of the soul around as that tone-offs, that mediating tension, right? And you were talking about the logo. So every gathering all the logos means to gather together so they belong together. And you’re pointing to these chaotic moments in which all of this gathers together until it belongs together and we get a sense of, right, right, but we can’t live there, right? Right, we can’t stay there. And you know, and you mentioned Augustine, right? And you know, he has the platonic mystical experience. But what he takes away from it isn’t the wonder of the experience, but his sense of depravity in that he can’t live there. Everything about him is telling him that’s his home, but he can’t live there, but he can’t live there. Did I get that correctly? Yes, yes, yes. And Lewis goes exactly to the same place. And so, you know, I get a lot of this from Lewis because Lewis makes this point, and he’s, you know, back to the pluralism point. You know, you don’t have to be a Christian. You don’t have to be a Christian to both get these glimpses of, in Christian language, we call it the consummation. You know, that word too just goes to all these different things. You don’t have to be a Christian to both get the glimpses of this and feel the longing and the angst of it that, you know, and even, and this isn’t, I mean, we don’t have to use highfalutin philosophical terms. You know, you got, you know, if I could put time in a bottle, I mean, that song, I mean, just right there. I actually think that is very good philosophy. I think that time, I think that what he’s doing in time in a bottle is actually very good philosophy. I mean, and this goes to what, I mean, what we’re talking about, because, you know, part of what Zach and I got into was there, like if we’re talking about philosophia, not the academic discipline of philosophy, but if we’re talking about the right kind of education that deals with the imaginal and tries to cultivate wisdom within the imaginal and within the special role that personal relationships play for us, right? Then poesis, in the broader sense, not just written poetry, but enacted poetry like Tai Chi Chuan is also gonna be central and important. So, yeah, that’s very, very cool, the way you brought those together. I really like that. So- And so, then this actually- This, I just, I just, one question. This is an aside. I remember reading it, but I can’t find it. So maybe it’s my error or reconstructed memory. You know more of Lewis. But I read a story where a young girl comes to Lewis and she’s really guilty. And she says that she loves Aslan more than Jesus. And then he says to her, that’s okay. Is that apocryphal or is that- No, that’s true. That’s true. That’s true. And I think that gets into this, this sacri, you know, this sac, what I see, I never imagined I’d get here because, you know, Jordan Peterson put a whole bunch of people on a journey. But, you know, where I’ve sort of come down and been, you know, the doors I’ve been knocking on lately, Hans Borsma, some of the work he’s been doing, Jamie Smith, some of the work he’s been doing, really gets, so basically what C.S. Lewis is saying is that in some ways for this girl, Aslan is a sacramental portal to Jesus. To Jesus. Yep. Because maybe the Jesus that she saw in Sunday school was, and Lewis could be very frank about the poverty of the church. Because he thought, you know, he thought a lot of the worship service were just horrible. It was horrible poetry put to terrible music. And it was only his attempt, his desire to be faithful that so often helped him abide the church. But, you know, so it’s this idea that what the creator has done is, and again, I’m self-consciously using Christian language and people can translate as they will, has strewn throughout this creation glory. These, you know, basically Eric Weinstein would call them portals. These, you know, you might call them sacraments. Ways in which we see through the thing to the real thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And which is an atomic notion through and through. Yes, yeah, it is, it is. And of course, there’s so much there. But then Lewis basically at the beginning of, at the beginning of mere Christianity, Lewis lays out his argument from desire, which I think in some ways is deeply tied to the ontological argument. And the ontological argument is just an interesting thing because it seems to convince no one, but it seems to still haunt conversations. Because his argument is basically, it would be such a shame if the glimpses we have now and the longing we feel to put time in a bottle would actually arise in consummation. Hmm. And that’s in many ways, you know, a lot some of the arguments I put together in my video, that’s really just a refabrication of Lewis’s argument, which I think is sort of a refabrication of the ontological argument. That gosh, what a, and I think it actually comes from the apostle Paul. What a cruel joke to play on humanity to have this eternity in our hearts, not actually one day yield and point us to the consummation of our longings. It’s amazing that you say that. I think that leads into a meaning crisis. Well, I think that’s, well, I’d like to reserve meaning crisis as a term for a particular historical development. That to me is, I think that’s a perennial problem of human existence, right? Yeah. So what came to mind was a place where that very longing and the sense of eternity is actually in the heart of Spinoza. Spinoza makes an argument, right, that there is something eternal about the human mind. And he doesn’t mean everlasting. He’s clear that he doesn’t mean immortality. In fact, he says that the wise man thinks of nothing less than death, right? So, but he’s still, and for me, this is the kind of argument, so this is very nascent, but this is what I see going through a lot of work. There’s this fundamental trust. I mean, you know this part of the argument many people make. We have to believe at some point that absolute skepticism is not true, right? And there’s no way of getting behind that. And by the way, absolute skepticism doesn’t ground itself and undermines itself. So they’re both equally bad positions where a Jamesian decision comes in. There is no rational way to decide between them because the way the problems are set up, they are deeper than any of our rational faculties. Yep. Okay, and then, so the part of it is, okay, well, what would it mean to say that, well, this is Plato’s question and Plotinus. What would it mean to say that we get knowledge? Maybe imperfect, but it’s not that which is referred to when we have absolute skepticism. And then what it came down to me for, what it came down to me for me was this notion that is so central to, you know, Plato and even Aristotle and clearly for Plotinus and then Pseudoprochus and Pseudodionesis and then on and on, right? Was this notion of participatory knowing that if there is nothing about us, if we do not instantiate within us that which is in some way indicative of some of the principles of being, then we are forever cut off. There must be that, well, the thing that makes up, the thing, if we take, if we say I reject absolute skepticism, right? Then what we, I believe what we’re committed to is that participatory knowing is the ground of that, that there’s aspects of reality I know not by representing them, but by instantiating them in the very guts and fabric of my being, participatory knowing. And so I take that to be sort of part of what we’re talking about here, right? That in the end, right, that connectedness, I keep coming back to it, you know, that religio is something that is, well, I think it’s constitutively necessary of being a cognitive agent, not just for all the reasons I give about relevance realization, and I’m not putting that aside, good grief, but for this deeper reason that, I mean, I’m making, I’m trying to do a secular version of the ontological argument, right? Or the argument from desire. If there was not something of eternity in us, something that, right, some of the important properties that are constitutive of, you know, the presencing of the world, right? The intelligibility and presencing of the world, then we would be alienated from it in our being, and then absolute skepticism would be the position. So if we reject absolute skepticism, we then get an argument, a reverse modus tollens, that says participatory knowing must be there. And I take that to be, so if you’ll allow me, I’m not trying to be in any way insulting, but I take that to be sort of a secular version of that argument, right? That there are principles and patterns in me that are not represented by me, they constitute me, and those patterns are also constitutive in important ways of the world. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think the patterns in our speech and our cognition and logos, thereby we have a reason for thinking that they might participate in the logos of being. Well, and I think that gets, when I listen to you, when I listen to you lay that out, you know, I think of, you know, the Imago Dei. Yes, yes, yes. This strange, you know, and this is where I think, that this is where I think certain, scientific narratives projected, overly projected fail is that, what a strange thing that, you know, this crazy book of the Bible would begin with this story where you have this creator, God, because that’s the best word we have for it, where you can’t even say it, I mean, this is because language betrays us. We have this creator that, you know, one of the biggest rules he gives this crazy little group of people is, don’t represent me with anything that you can see in my creation. That’s a weird rule. And then the same book, it says that, well, the man and the woman are made in his image. Yeah, and it’s like, aren’t you breaking your own rule? I guess divinity has its prerogatives. But no, and, you know, I think in some ways, you know, the impasse that some have come to in philosophy of the objective and the subjective winds up exactly what I think you’ve just articulated, that it has to, it cannot cohere, where else may it cohere for us? It can’t. And this, yeah. No. Well, that implication of that, right, what you just said, and then our previous thing about idolatry, right, and what just happened to you. You know, the spoken language is, has a special, the enacted, it’s not just spoken, but the enacted logos, right, right, has special privilege for affining us and reminding us, deep remembering, reminding us, like in Plato or in Sati, remembering, deep reminding us of our participation, right, the conformity, the affining, the participatory knowing. But notice how speech also failed you, right? That’s right. It also failed you. And so I’m also reminded about this other strand. Sorry, Paul, I’m using you to help me weave things. Oh, good. Right, because that’s what, I mean, one of my defining features of the logos, as opposed to debate or whatever passes for discourse on a lot of these channels, is that two people can get to places that they couldn’t get to on their own. Two or more people, right? That’s for me a defining feature. That’s for me the evidence of the presence of the logos, right? So I’m throwing out another thing. So I’ve acknowledged, you know, I’ve acknowledged the special placeness. It’s not metaphysical necessity. It’s sort of hyper pragmatism, right, of spoken language and therefore the necessity of personhood and distinct minds, right, et cetera. But then I’m reminded that there’s even problems around the notion of person. And let’s play a little bit in historical theology. Because, you know, person is a really bad translation of hypostasis, right, which it’s a really bad translation of hypostasis. It’s like, you know, parts of the, you know, when you get machine learning and you have, you know, the spirit is welling but the flesh is weak and the machine learning translates it as, you know, the, you know, the alcohol is potent but the meat is kind of rotten, right? It’s that kind of bad in some way. Because why am I saying that? I’m not just saying that, you know, I’m not disrespectful. I’m not trying to be mean. I’m saying that because I spent a lot of time in neoplatonism. I read a lot of platinus. I read a lot of propus. I read a lot. I know how this word is used. I know they’re the originators of this term. Doesn’t mean what we mean by person at all. It doesn’t. Yeah. It doesn’t. Yeah. You know, the craziest thing happened, you know, in the craziest thing happened, the conversation with Tyler about Discord servers and, you know, you put out a video about Jordan Peterson and people start to want to talk to you. And, you know, I’ve talked about Sam before. He’s our resident non-trinitarian. Right. And of course, you know, when he steps into the community, it was very interesting to watch because suddenly all these people who were bending over backwards being kind to atheists, suddenly pounce on him. And it’s like, well, that’s interesting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The stuff, you know, how, okay, so what is a person? Well, so here’s me thinking I’m just little old me and doing hundreds of hours of yakking at a computer, I discover that I’ve got elements of not only Plato and Aristotle, but Herman Boving and Abram Kuyper built into me and Athanasius and all of this stuff bred into me so that when a non-trinitarian comes in our midst, all the Trinitarians want to pounce on him. And it’s like, we haven’t fought this fight for 1500 years. So what exactly am I? Because I wasn’t around 1500 years ago. Right, right. And so, and of course, you know, Sam, of course leads us into all of these conversations about persons. And when I was talking to, you know, I had a conversation with Nathan Jacobs, who has a, you know, a very interesting story. And, you know, he, and so I finally asked him, what is persons? And he’s spent a lot of his time working on this word. And well, it shouldn’t be such a surprise to us that we don’t know what persons are because we don’t know what we are. And that’s the word that we use to describe ourselves. And it’s the word that we use to privilege these other beings that we’re in contact and relationship with and sometimes war. So, yeah, we don’t, you know, we’re so, the stuff that we are using is so deeply, you know, it’s amazing anything works at all, frankly. That reminds me like when I was dating, the times in my life when I’m dating and I would come to the, it’s amazing that the human species has survived and reproduces because this does not work. This just does not work. That’s exactly right. And then of course, the next of women that I’m now deeply in love with, right? Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, it’s, that’s the thrownness of, Yeah. Of our existence that, and the fact that, you know, that even people who, you know, wouldn’t begin to have interest or understanding and anything that we’re talking about, and, you know, work productively, both with glory and depravity in doing, in producing both glory and depravity in this strange existence that we have. So, yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, I mean, so, I mean, hypostasis, I mean, it literally translates as that which stands under. Right. That became substance, that which stands under. Yep. But then, and that’s the Aristotelian, but the Aristotelian sense of substance is not our sense of substance. Right. It’s that which stands under. It’s the core principle that all the predicates attach to, sort of in Aristotelian logical terms. But so, my worry is that there’s alongside, remember I said, you know, the Cartesian collapse of the soul, right, to the center of subjectivity. We’ve also got, you know, hypostasis as the, the point of hypostasis under, you know, that which stands under, or the substance, and it’s related to, I play a little bit with this word, because it’s changed the meaning, but it’s related to understanding. Right. That which stands under. It’s that which affords intelligibility. Right. And I think, you know, that’s what they were trying, they were trying to get at the under, you know, the underlying reality that is affording intelligibility and affording intelligibility, right, in different ways, et cetera. But, you know, this history of hypostasis into substance, right, and then substance into substance as stuff, right, has had, we, I’m afraid that the notion of person has gone through a similar loss, right? It’s been disconnected, right? One of the things I see Haydn are trying to do with his notion of Dasein is to re-situate personhood into the project of what it, that we are in relationship to that which grounds and founds intelligibility. That’s what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to get us out of both the Cartesian inner true self and all that stuff that I’m so critical of. And he’s also trying to get us out of the notion that we’re some kind of special stuff. And the reason I bring- Who’s we in that sentence? We’re some kind of special stuff. Well, he, the idea that, okay, so be fair to you, that’s always a legitimate move you make. I’m claiming, I’ll take responsibility, I’m claiming on behalf of Heidegger that these two degenerations come to the notion that your soul is secret special stuff inside you. And see, I wouldn’t go there either. Well, would you acknowledge that’s a very pervasive and popular view? Oh yes, oh yes. Well, well then, so look at, you know, look at this. Oh, yeah. No, actually, again, years before I heard about Jordan Peterson, I was thinking a lot about this stuff because, you know, okay, so what is, because I, you know, just, I was thinking about Christianity because I always have to try and explain it to people. And then what that means that I always have to try and figure out what on earth I’m trying to talk about. Right, right. You know, it reminds me, you know, again, to me this brings back to this, you know, what we were talking about before in terms of, you don’t find the apple neither in the moreness or the suchness. No, but in the relation between them. And then you’d have to ask, well, well then, so, you know, what I was wrestling with is, so, you know, long before I got into any of this stuff, well, what is, what am I? What is we, what am I? And because obviously not just simply this body because this body has been transforming dramatically, you know, so a representation popularly of, you know, you’d see it in cartoons when you’re a kid, you know, somebody dies and this little ghostly thing just kind of comes up. And even in the movie Ghost, when, you know, because we try to, and all these things in all fairness are of course representations and we can’t, but we can’t, but use representations because we want to communicate with one another and whether we’re doing that with words, whether doing that with film, you know, with art, whatever. Yeah, we don’t know that which we are. And I think about this, I think about this in the context of the Christian narrative that people happily embrace this idea that, okay, when they die, they go to heaven. I think, okay, a little Gnostic and throw in some empty, right? No, it’s actually a resurrection, okay. And then I think long and hard about, all right, well, let’s take this, let’s take this imagery from the book of Revelation and say, well, what does the consummation of this inner longing that’s at the core of me? Right, right, right. What does that really look like? Where does that really go? And, you know, the apostle Paul says, eye is not seen and ear is not heard, okay, well. But he does promise that we’ll know as we’ve been knowing as well. Yes, he does. And so, you know, these are just all very hard questions. And I mean, I don’t have any shame in admitting that. The kind of pastors I hate, they’re the ones who think they know everything. I don’t really hate them, but that’s a bad pastoral habit, I’ll say that. So, it’s hard. What do you think? You put the question well. But I’m trying to, I mean, so, there’s, you know, I’ve been trying, I’ve been thinking about, you know, because of the criticisms that you and Jonathan made of my work about, you know, the distributed nature of this, not just the individualistic, right? I took that, you know, the scalability. I’ve taken these criticisms deeply to heart. And so, I’ve been thinking, you know, but there’s ways in which we can culturally bullshit ourselves if we get attached, I’ll almost use it in a Buddhist sense, fixated on certain salient images that have come through this kind of process and have then, instead of being portals, they’re barriers. Yes, yes. The soul as the interior special stuff at the core of my subjectivity or whatever, I don’t even know what that means, by the way, but that’s clearly how Descartes taught too, right? That disconnects me from all of this stuff we’ve been talking about and trying to unpack. And that’s a kind of cultural bullshitting because it’s making, right? And it verges on ideology because it’s making the wrong aspects salient, right? And we’re looking at rather than looking through. Yeah. And, you know, this comes up in weird ways because, you know, I’ll be in a conversation, I’m willing to talk to religious people, as you know. And I’m happy to do so. And you know, the thing is, you know a lot of theology. I mean, you know Augustine and Plotinus and so you’re a wonderful conversation partner because you know this and you don’t have to do a whole lot of explaining if you’re a pastor, so keep going. Thank you. I really appreciate that. But, right, so I’m gonna, I was at a meeting with a minister, a reverend. And you know, he found out that I do cognitive science. And then he said to me, oh yes, you know, and you know, what do you think of all these experiments where they’ve measured how much the soul weighs? They measure the body, yes, you measure the body right before it’s dead and right after it’s dead. This sounds apocryphal to me. But even if it’s happening, I’m thinking, I don’t know how to respond to that. That is just, that is a series of, that is a series of equivocations and category mistakes that, and yet, so I was dumbfounded and I thought, well, either we argue for four hours or I’m polite. So I did the Canadian thing. I just said, oh no, I’m sorry, I have not heard of these things and then sort of left it at that. But see, in my business, I come across that kind of stuff perhaps more than you do where people have these really, really wonky notions, right? And I’m not just pointing out. You’ve met people in churches? Yeah, people in churches. At least they don’t have, they don’t have as many, the pastor should know better, but this is what you find in a church because this is exactly what churches collect. I can only imagine. Like, you know, and you get not only that and you get new age wonkiness that, and it’s all kinds of stuff that swirls around. And this brings us back to the point. You know, Zach, science point, we have become so illiterate that we’ve lost discernment and we’ve become, and I don’t mean philosophy in the elitist academic way. I mean, in what we’re doing here, the human proclivity and need to make sense, to wonder and to connect deeply, right? But most people’s attempt to deal with this stuff is so philosophically inept, right? I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be harsh, but you know, our educational project, both culturally, our state institutions and our religious institutions have not properly prepared people. We’ve allowed all of this to degenerate into bullshit imagery in a lot of ways, in my opinion, that is really, really exacerbating the craziness that is occurring to people right now. Yes, yes. And so if you want to have an understanding of, because for a lot of people, people think pastors are people who give sermons, yeah, we do that. People who give comfort, yeah, we do that. But navigating the kind of conversation you just articulated is most of what we do, because people come into church with a grab bag full of stuff from other churches, stuff from Hollywood, sometimes stuff from our own tradition, and then they just wander around with these things in their heart until a crisis comes like this, and then suddenly, now what is required of them is, well, what have you been, you know, it’s like, what have you been training for in your life? And what they have is this grab bag full of half-chewed ideas from Hollywood movies and some self-help book they bought, and all over the place, and then they come to you as pastor in an existential crisis saying, stop the crisis for me. And so what you do as a pastor is, you know, you could settle them down a little bit, because when they’re in panic mode, they’re not gonna be, and you begin to try to, but you’re not going to, they already believe that, you know, they have these experiments, and so you’re not gonna take that on frontally, so then you begin, and so to me, it gets into, you know, and I think, I’ve used your language a lot, because I think it’s the right language, and I hope you don’t hear it when I, hear it dismissively when I use it. A religion is not a religion, and then the question is, well, well, what exactly is it that we wish to give to people and why? Well, I think, okay, so we have this pandemic right now. Well, what would we like for them to have, and again, not having mode, but what capacities would we like them to possess to confront this moment in the best way possible? And this moment challenges people at so many different levels. I was having a, so every meeting, we have a council meeting, and we’re talking about, okay, at some point, we’re gonna reopen this thing, and one of my deacons, who is by no means philosophical, he’s a probation officer and used to be a professional baseball player, made it to the major leagues, and he says, I quite quite insightfully, you know, people, other office bearers start talking about, you know, pragmatics, he says, the real question is who do we trust? Right, right. For information, and I thought that’s exactly the real question. And then I thought of a lot of your project, which is, okay, so we have all of this information coming at us, and, you know, and I get in trouble on my channel because I have religious people, and I say bullshit, at least Americans, Canadians, you can say bullshit in church in Canada, you can’t in America, but, Yeah, yeah, right, okay. But, you know, we’re, okay, so we have all this information coming at us, and who do we believe, what do we believe about any of this, and so then we very quickly reflect upon the fact that all of the information, which again, in our imaginary, we kind of imagine as this impersonal, we think of information kind of as what, you know? Stuff, yeah, this substance out there, information, and no, but it’s all coming at us through people, and so everything is just so, so now we have to suddenly make our way through this, and chances are even the best put together people are going to get things wrong, not only take, not only trust people who are, who are saying things that aren’t true, but propagate those beliefs, and we’re swimming in an environment full of this all the time, and so what we want from our religions are, again, you know, we want the four Ps all operating, yes, because we need all four, Yep, and not only within, but also between us. That’s right, that’s right, and so, and then when I get to these points, I always get pushed to the end of it, okay, for what, to what end, well, we want them, you know, and then suddenly again, we just kind of land in the religious language, for me at least, because I can draw, I can have little mental pictures about what we want someone who is, who is not going to be depressed, and they’re not going to hoard food, and they’re not going to have a panic attack, and so GK Chesterton in his book Heretics had a really lovely chapter about the fact that, you made the observation that, you know, in this world, we can sort of get at the good by all saying what it’s not, and so this, so we say that the person who is functioning, functioning optimally in, during the COVID-19 pandemic, well, they’re not paralyzed by anxiety, they’re not hoarding food, they’re not propagating misinformation, they’re not, they’re not, they’re not, they’re not, but what exactly is it that they are? And to me as a Christian, I, well, they’re Jesus, talk about a low resolution Sunday school answer, but, and that’s, you know, sort of where Christianity all comes together and you ask yourself again, in a very, one of the things that religions do is that they are, they do provide JPEGs, and all of these JPEGs are contextualized of limited utility, but they also have certain properties that are tremendously powerful, and even just the such, the cliched, what would Jesus do? If you take that in the right way and you say, what would Jesus do in a pandemic? Well, and you know, you could play that with Socrates too, I mean, because. That’s how you get Stoicism. Yeah. Or what, you know, what would the Buddha do for Buddhism? Yeah. I talk about this in the work that I published with Leo Ferraro about wisdom, that above and beyond all the skills and virtues, you have to internalize the sage. You have to internalize the sage. And that again comes back to a concession I’m wanting to make. It’s really difficult to internalize something into your personhood that isn’t represented personally to you. Yes. Yes, no, I agree with that. And I agree that that’s a concession. I just don’t know if human beings can do any other thing. Well, I mean, they can, I mean, all of, we’ve admitted that all of this is episodic, right? That nobody does it continuously. And I go back to, there’s many aspects of my existence that I regard as sacred, like when I’m doing Tai Chi Chuan, in which that is the case. And I’m internalizing something. And you know, I think that’s a better understanding of what qi is. Qi isn’t some secret stuff energy inside you. Qi is that you have internalized the Tao in some fashion. And so it is now an operative principle. You’ve got participatory knowing, and you’ve internalized it through that participatory knowing. And you’ve identified with it. So it’s now operative in you. That’s what I take it to be. And then when you can fight that way, you’re a dangerous person. So, I mean, it has real, real practical consequences. So it’s a concession, and thank you for being charitable about that. But like I say, like you, I see, yeah, I internalize the Tao in this experience of qi, which I don’t give any magical properties to. But I also need, I know that trying to internalize what Plato is teaching me is really seems to me to be dependent on the figure of Socrates. Because just what you’re saying, in the end, it’s gotta be not, well, like I always say, don’t tell me what you believe, tell me what you practice. You know, a lot of people are making this case that what you see in Socrates is you don’t just see a comparative. Socrates is not just comparing arguments and getting us to try and steer between merely formal pretence of certainty or the obviousness of common sense. That’s why he’s refuting both of those because he’s trying to keep this space open in which we’re both moving. But there, you know, and he’s a tip-offs. He’s classically, he belongs to no category. But he’s not just presenting arguments. He is embodying a way of life and he’s making it beautiful for us. The point of the logos in his speech is not just to get some propositions established. That often doesn’t even happen. The point is to open this space and show you that when human beings live in it, they become more beautiful and they see beauty in the world than they otherwise wouldn’t see. And so that is how Socrates ultimately seduces people. I’m doing this because it’s no sexual seductionism at all. But he’s, right? And it’s hard for me to see how you, how would you beautify a way of life without beautifying a person? That is, that’s another concession on my part. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. There’s a, I’ve told this story in my videos too. It’s, one thing that seems embedded in Christianity is this idea that the, that so often the, and I use the, I use glory for this term of, it has beauty in it as joy. Moreness. Yeah, moreness. There’s this great story of Eric Little, they made the movie Charits of Fire about, who was this world-class sprinter. And the movie kind of has this idea of him, it showed it in one scene where he used to run straight up with his head back. And people would say, why do you run so weird? You ran fast, so they didn’t mind. But he said, you know, cause when I, God made me fast and when I run, I feel his pleasure. He became a missionary in China. And the Japanese, of course, we pay attention to the kind of the watery side of the Japanese war in the 30s and 40s. Well, he was in China. And so he was taken by the Japanese and put in an internment camp. So brutal. Yeah, and so he’s in this internment camp and there’s a bunch of other missionaries there. And there’s a business people and expats of various courts. The Japanese just pull them all together and put them in the camp. And so there’s this one guy, he’s not a Christian. He wrote, he wrote reflections from that camp. And he talked about the fact that a lot of these missionaries, you know, they were just as crappy as everybody else. But there’s this one guy in the camp and this was Eric Little, the sprinter, who when everybody was, when everyone was hoarding, you know, he would give. And when everybody was anxious, he was relaxed. And he died in the camp. He got sick and died as many do. But this individual comes out of that camp, you know, never forgetting him. And, you know, when I talk about, because I’m in the business of religion, formally how we use the word commonly, and I think about scalability, I think about that it’s always instantiated in a person because again, in a human being because that’s what we get. And I mean, in terms of that’s what we understand. I was, you know, in another video, I was talking about, I forget what rationalist was talking about, you know, Sam Harris said, we wanna make everything, I mean, talk about proposition. We wanna make everything propositional so we can rationally work it out. And I was thinking about the fact that when I became a parent, I came into parenting with a first draft of what a parent is that I didn’t know. And of course, that first draft I received from my parents, but I received it without knowing I was receiving it. And it just got built into me. So again, in that sense, it doesn’t surprise me that the best representations we have of glory are people and the stories we have of those people, at least when we’re divorced from them in history, the stories are what remain. So I don’t know how we will, I don’t know how glory is seen or transmitted in any better way. And so when I think about, okay, well, how, what can I do for people in the midst of this pandemic, which again, for you and I, and many listening to this is, it’s a crisis, but it’s not the second world war. It’s not a Japanese internment camp. It’s not growing up with a physically abusive father. It’s not growing up with a different kind of abusive mother. And part of what I love of my opportunity to be a pastor is that you’re always on the front line of such a broad spectrum of this. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so then the challenge, and it’s an impossible challenge often, just like, pastor comes to you and has this question and it’s like, well, I got, and most of the time I do like you do, you’re polite because you know, I have 10 minutes to talk to this guy. What can I accomplish in 10 minutes? And so that’s in a sense what pastor you get accustomed to. Okay, I got 10 minutes. What little thing, what seed, and again, I can’t help, but always use this biblical language. What seed can I plant potentially in this individual? And I think you’re exactly right in that every now and then, I think in most of the pastoral communication I’ve done, there’ve been two or three points in which a direct confrontation was the right approach. But that’s, in the very few times that I’ve used that, only once or twice has it actually worked even. And it’s almost always much more the case of two people having a conversation in which two people get to a place that they couldn’t get on their own. And I think, again, the way you say that, I think it’s exactly right. And to me, that’s what ministry does. And it’s gonna entail pluralism in there because lately I’ve also been thinking about Tom Holland’s observation that Christianity, tried to get into India, didn’t get very far, but other things kind of got in underneath. And some of those things are helpful and some of those things aren’t helpful. We’re always planting seeds that we never quite know where they’ll go. And you know that as a college professor, for goodness sakes. Yeah, very much, very much. And you see that represented well in the Platonic dialogues because Plato is very clear to present all of Socrates’ failures as a teacher. Yeah, yeah. The failure of all sobieties famously, right? Yeah. But I do think, I think about that point that, in a lot of the dialogues, Plato will fail, sorry, Socrates will fail to convince the person because you get to the aporia and they don’t wanna give up and they’re angry. But then in two separate dialogues, they’ll say, but I want my sons to come and spend a lot of time with you. And I think of Marcus Aurelius when he’s indicating the people that are true philosophers for him. He goes through all these people and he’s clear to say, they didn’t write anything down or say very much, but they lived their lives with wisdom. And that is for him, I think that’s what we’re kind of talking about here. That for him is the true mark of a philosophical life. It’s not being able to weave long, complex arguments. It’s the ability, well, it’s the ability to be that person in the kairos that you were talking about earlier and be that in a way that attracts or seduces other people who think, maybe I’ll take up this way of life or at least maybe my sons should consider this way of life. That for me, that, well, that circles us all the way back around to this notion of faithfulness that I was talking about, right? Beautifying things so that people feel that it is naturally right to follow them, to be drawn into them, a way of life. One of my favorite passages in the Bible is at the beginning of the book of Acts. Jesus has crucified, resurrected, is about to ascend. The disciples come to him and say, now will you restore the kingdom to Israel? And when you read that line, you have to say, you haven’t gotten anything yet, have you? You’re still playing the games of the old covenant and Jesus who can seriously at times lose his patience with his disciples and it’s right there in the text. He very calmly says, it’s not for you to know the times or the places, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses. In Jerusalem, in Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth. And that just kind of takes that idea that Jesus in a sense is saying to them, you really haven’t learned anything I’ve told you. And I’m trusting that at least some of what I say you will remember and at least convey with some fidelity out there. But, and then even thinking, and so part of me, what’s been so enjoyable about doing this, having to have the discipline of talking to people like you in terms of a secular frame rather than let’s say a church frame. Because in church frame, you can use all these shorthands, but all of those have liabilities too, which are crippling the church quite frankly. But that even if you don’t believe in anything supernatural or wooey or whatever, that somehow something of Jesus by watching him live got into these hapless disciples. And again, the New Testament is very frank about their failures, they mess up a lot. But they, that somehow this gets into their disciples and through, and this is again gets into the question of what is a person? Because lots of different cultures have thought lots of different ways about in terms of, in what way am I my father and my grandfather and all the way back through there. Well, somehow being with Jesus changed these people which kind of like a pebble in a pond rippled all the way out through people, through centuries to the place where certainly plenty of, you can blame Christianity for plenty of evil in this world. I won’t shortchange that, but somehow Jesus impacted the world for good through all of these people. And they call it spirit, which that’s probably the right word in terms of their conceptualization, but anyway. I don’t know. And so in that sense, people often ask people, pastor, because they’re anxious about their children, what do I need to do to be a good parent? I just always tell them, I say, it sounds cliche, but be the kind of person you want your child to grow up into because you’ll talk to your children and you’ll mess up and all this stuff. Anyway. The modeling that gets internalized is way more important in the raising of children. Well, Paul, I’m sorry. We’ve had this for over two hours and I’ve got to go to another appointment. Well, I hope this has been worthwhile for you. It’s been deeply worthwhile for me. I hope it was worthwhile for you. Oh yeah, well, obviously. It was genuine dialogos. I get it. I get it. It was genuine dialogos. I got to places in my thinking about this stuff that I have not got to before and I think are valuable places to have gotten to. So thank you. Well, I feel the same way. You always bless me and I deeply appreciate it. Okay. Well, let’s talk again, my friend. Okay, we will. Take care, John. Okay, take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.