https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=e-e6_426Uzs
Welcome everyone to what I consider a very important discussion, which I fervently hope will become a full-flowing living dialogos with somebody who I have frequently been in deep dialogos with. I’m looking forward to this. Somebody who means a lot to me and is important to me. And so this conversation, which I again I say I hope becomes dialogos is very important. I’m of course talking about my good friend Jordan Hall. And Jordan has recently professed both ritually and publicly that he’s now a Christian. And Jordan and I talked on a private conversation and I wanted it to be private about what we do in this conversation. And we both agreed I don’t want to debate doctrine with Jordan. That’s not what’s on my heart. That’s not to the point for me. And instead, I’ve already proposed this to Jordan. What I want to do is the following. And Jordan is going to give me a bit of time to do this. I’ll let him say hi first and then we’ll get into it. But I’m going to try and lay out my heart and my mind, articulate where I’m at philosophically, spiritually, psychologically, existentially, all these adjectives slightly missed the mark, slightly hit the mark. And what I’m feeling called to, what my vocation and my vision are. And then welcome Jordan as a friend and a frequent partner in dialogos to how he wishes to respond, resonate, push back possibly. However, I’m open to it. I want to flow with him about this. I want to understand. And I want to give him a venue to move beyond, like I say, a kind of simple doctrinal debate. I’ve had enough of that in my life. I don’t need to do that with Christianity, particularly at all. And I have enough respect and deep affection for Jordan that I really want to understand. And so I am going to do the best thing I know for understanding, which is open myself up as clearly and as carefully as I can and open myself up to him responding. And so this is going to be a little bit unusual. I’m going to talk for a little bit longer than normal. And Jordan is going to be forbearing, for which I’m appreciative. But first, I’m just going to allow Jordan to say hi and whatever initial things he wants to say. I was just laughing at the symmetry. You’ll talk for a little bit longer than normal, but that means I’ll be listening for a little bit longer than normal. Yeah, that’s good. Well, yeah, hi. I would just say, um, this is going to be really interesting. I hope so. And I hope it’s inter-essay that we actually take up with living within it. So so I’m going to start with things or points that we held in common and perhaps we still do. I’m making no presumption. I’m just trying to find a place from which we can, I want to start my presentation. So I want to start with the Christian virtues, because that’s what I’m interested in talking with you about. And so first, I want to start with faith. And as you know, I’ve made a distinction between credo, the assertion of propositions, although credo goes back as does belief to beleiben, to give your heart, which is a different thing. And the distinction, therefore, is between credo, which is that kind of propositional assertion, and religio, which is this non propositional coupling to reality. And I point out that the Bible frequently relies on that metaphor, sexual metaphors, intercourse metaphors for faith. And you and I have talked about this as something more like a continuity of contact that is conducive to creativity, much like the faithfulness between two people in a spousal relationship. And again, that metaphor is also used throughout the Bible. So I don’t think I’m imposing anything strange. I think it’s at least something that we can talk about. Now, I want to try and integrate that with some work I’ve been recently doing on the imaginal. And just to make sure that I’m not, again, imposing, I want to note that the New Testament, in a couple places, one I know for sure is in Hebrews, talks about Jesus as the image of the invisible God, where image there is not idol but icon. And that icon is something you don’t look at. It’s something you look through, as any good Eastern Orthodox Christian will tell you. And so, I mean, that is the sense of the imaginal. I make use of Corban, but it goes back to Ibn Arabi, a Sufi Muslim philosopher, who I will be talking about on the Philosophical Silk Road. And the idea is the imaginary is when you look at an image, and it’s very adjectival, you sort of describe what you’re seeing. And the imaginal is when you look through it, you are sensitized by it, your perception is augmented. You and I have talked about this before, and this notion of imaginal faithfulness. And let me try and give you, everybody, a sense of this. So let’s think about that space in which you do the imaginary, you imagine the sailboat, you’ve got this space inside your head. Well, the thing is, you know what you don’t have literally inside your head? That space, right? And of course, other cultures thought it was in other places, Aristotle thought it was here, the Egyptians thought it was here. Now, we might be tempted to say, well, then it’s just fictional, but that’s not right either. Because this space, this image you look through actually puts you into continuity of contact with your otherwise invisible cognitive processes. It allows you to tell me, what are you thinking about right now? And you just did it? Or what happens? What are you doing when you multiply 22 by 33 in your head? Right? All of that. So I want you to first understand that that space inside of you, it’s neither literal, nor fictional, it’s properly imaginal. And it gives you that continuity of contact without necessarily giving you a cognitively closing representation, but it gives you the continuity of contact. So you can have an ongoing relationship of faithfulness to your own mind. And I’m invoking that now. Here’s what’s a little bit more challenging. And I have arguments to back this up. I won’t give these arguments, but the space outside of you is largely imaginal as well. You are mostly, right, projecting a predictive image that you through which you are sensitizing the very specific and highly relevant detections you need in order to maintain continuity of contact with the world so that you can interact with the world in a faithfully coupled manner. Right? And so imaginal within, imaginal without, and then of course, as you know, and this is part of Corban’s point, right? We can, these two can resonate with each other. And this is the platonic idea. I can see more deeply into reality and see more deeply into myself. And when I’m talking about that, anagogic in and out of the imaginal augmentation of our, sorry for this, ontological depth perception, our ability to come into deeper contact, that anagogic imaginal play, that’s what I mean by imaginal faithfulness. And it connects the deep within me to the deep without in this fashion. It’s not literal, but it’s not fictional. And why does that matter to me? Because I think that literal, not fictional maps pretty carefully onto relevance realization that sits between the algorithmic, which would correspond to the literal, and the arbitrary, which would correspond to the purely fictional. RR is in between and the imaginal is in between. So I think the imaginal is the best way of trying to enhance our relevance realization. I have more significant arguments about that, and I’m not going to go into those right now. So I’ve got this idea of this imaginal faithfulness of this anagogic enhancement of our religio. And that is what I’m understanding faith. And one of the arguments I would have for that is that reciprocal opening is aspirational. And that automatically links faith to the second virtue hope. If we understand hope as not just wishful thinking, but as you and I have discussed it in the past, the commitment to aspiration, the intention to place oneself within an aspirational commitment. And that’s what hope is here. You’re doing this and it’s giving you hope that there is going to be something other hope for real transformation. And then of course, both of those put us into the third Christian virtue, because reciprocal opening is love. And that gives us faith, hope and love in a way that I’m trying to say where my thinking more than my thinking where I’m at more vaguely, but more accurately, where I’m at about the Christian virtues. Now, I think of course, what comes out of this is the greatest of these is love. In some sense, love captures faith and hope. And I think what we’re now talking about when we’re talking about sacredness is love of ultimacy. You can have a conception of the ultimate, like some sort of fundamental law of the universe. And that’s not it’s not sacred to you unless you’re in a loving relationship to it. And you know, this is even Spinoza. And you and I’ve talked about that and where love is this transformative participatory knowing. And then you and I have also talked about, and we both appreciated the work of filler that the neoplatonic proposal that this ultimacy is a kind of pure relationality that you can only ultimately participate in. You can’t fully grasp it because it is the ground of intelligibility. And that the Trinity is a fantastic participatory symbol for the ultimate as both inherently relational and as lovable, if I could put it that way. If that’s I have no doubt that there’s more than the Trinity, but that’s where I am so far. And then when you take a look at this pure relationality, where relevance, realization, and intelligibility, and being all sit together in some way, you come to the realization that it’s in some sense beneath us. It’s beneath our cognition. It’s the ground from which. But it’s also between us, between my mind and my body, between you and me, between me and the world. So it’s beneath, it’s between, and it’s beyond. And it’s all three of these. And of course, the beneath makes me think of the spirit. He is in the Bible. He is within us as we try to pray. And there’s that bubbling up metaphor. And this is kind of like the eros, the desire to be one. And then of course, between this phylea, where two or three are gathered into my name, there I am also. The body of Jesus, the body of Christ, this of course is the Son, the logos gathering together so things belong together. And of course, the beyond is about birth and creativity. And this is the Father. And this is the agapec love, the love that is ultimately one with creativity, the creation of, for us, personhood, and presumably more on behalf of God the Father. I do not want to speak beyond that. What I’m saying is, I think there’s in this framework a deep connection between the virtues and the sacred as the love of ultimacy, and pure relationality and something like the Trinity as trying to capture the beneath, the between, and the beyond of ultimacy in a way that is internalizable, a way that we can love, a way that we can participate in in a transformative fashion. So this leads of course to some of the fundamental Christian proposals. God is love, God is logos, God is light, God is life. And these of course are all inherently relational. It’s filler, and you and I have talked about that. And so I then also get the idea, get is not the right word. I resonate with the idea that these realities can only be realized in a birth and a death, a birth. You must be born. I tell you this, you must be born again, a death. I am crucified with Christ, Paul, right? In other way, these are participatory symbols that these truths are only realized through transformation, that there are truths that are only disclosable in profound transformation. And Christianity is saying that that profound transformation discloses these truths, but these truths in some sense present themselves as paradoxical to us, because we can’t grasp this inherent relationality and subject predicate logic. And there’s just a time around this, on the neoplatonic and the Christian tradition and the Zen tradition. So I’m going to think this has enough going for it. And we get to this course, sort of learned ignorance, which is a proper inhabiting of the fact that we are simultaneously finite and transcendent. We are finite beings capable of transcendence. And that state of participating in a learned ignorance that realizes our finite transcendence, I put to you as profound reverence. And then we have love and reverence also bound importantly. Now I will stop talking about this third personally. I realize that this Christian neoplatonism or neoplatonic Christianity, both are right and both are wrong, is true. And I also realize it’s worth being true too. I say that now. I say that fully. But, and this is where I’m going to continue, I also realize that Zen, which has Daoism in it, and Daoism has how flow, which is not really talked about that much in the Christian tradition, discloses ultimacy as the Dao and the mother likeness of the flow, which is not heavily of the Dao, I should say, not heavily emphasized in Christianity. And the Dao, Daoism emphasizes embodiment in the body in a way that both neoplatonism and Christianity have had some struggle with in their history. And of course, the other part of Zen is Buddhism, mindfulness disclosing Shunyata, the impermanent interconnectedness. And this, of course, is very resonant with science and our understanding of the ecology of the environment and even of our own cognition. So there’s a lot to be learned there. I’ve made a whole series after Socrates about the Stoic, sorry, the Socratic-Stoic-Neoplatonic way and how it discloses the virtues of wisdom, courage, softness, and injustice. And those virtues are also important. Think of Tillich’s masterpiece around courage, the courage to be, and he understands that Christianity owes a debt to the Greek heritage around this. And Sufism, I mentioned Ibn Arabi, from whom I got the imaginal, right? Vedanta, this notion of the deep participatory identity between the ground of oneself and the ground of being Judaism. I mean, I’m just diving into the work of Ibn Karbal and Spinoza and the profound influence they’ve had on me. So I feel loyal to all of these as well. I have a super loyalty to all of them. And that’s also part of faith, is loyalty. And I’m not talking about perennialism here. What I’m talking about, to use my language that I’ve worked carefully on, is a through line, a through line of these profound living traditions, living aspectualizations of ultimacy. And there should be no limit to these aspectualizations, I would argue, because ultimacy is inexhaustible. In fact, I think that is one of the determining features of reality, being an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility. My calling is the Silk Road. The Silk Road is the enacted participation, the pilgrimage presentation of this through line that I have just talked about. And the point of the Silk Road is to offer those who need to seek a way of seeking for another home. Nobody lives on the Silk Road, but there are definitely seekers. But it is also a way for people to recover a home in Tolkien’s sense, in the anthropologist’s sense. You travel to somewhere else, you put on a different set of glasses, and then you come back and you see it again for the first time. That is why I’m no longer talking about a religion that’s not a religion. I am not trying to found a religion. And instead, I have now moved towards talking about the philosophical Silk Road. And this is what I feel most profoundly called to, to pilgrimage the through line and make it possible for other people. Why? I sense, and sense is too weak of a word, there’s an advent of the sacred happening now beneath each one of these, between each one of these homes and beyond all of them, that is adventing a response to the global kairos around the meta crisis and the meaning crisis, and offering us a metanoia at the level of this global collective intelligence, of a global distributed cognition that is needed, I believe, in order to potentially save us from catastrophe. And that, my dear friend, is where I’m at, and how I see things, how I’m called, my vision, my vocation, and how I’m oriented right now. Thank you. I was, a few things that came to me as you were speaking, is one is maybe I should just keep listening. The second was, if my, my conversion in my public conversation about that played even a small part in prompting you to put the energy and effort into producing what you just said, then I consider that to be well worth it. On that end, that was really, well, we’re recording this, so it’s that lost posterity. Okay. Yeah, I think a small piece to begin, very small, and then we can step into the larger piece. The small piece is something like, I am a Christian, which means that I have found in myself a profound faith, in the sense of a deeply felt truth, in both the singularness of the Trinity and the necessity of the incarnation of the Divine. And that’s that. We don’t even need to spend any time on that. We can just say, okay, that’s the thing. Well, I would resonate with that on one point when I said the sort of presentation of paradox, I take the incarnation to be a prime example of exactly that. The incarnation is in one way in which when we come to that place of learned ignorance, and right, the incarnation is, I mean, this is Kierkegaard’s proposal. It is sort of the paradox of all paradoxes, and that is not meant to be taken pejoratively, of course. Right, right. It’s to say it in a slightly different way if you take the symbol of the cross as being the thing that is at the end of all possible roads, something like that. Like it is actually paradox of paradoxes. So that said, it’s funny, I actually find that we’re on the same, we’re actually on the same quest, we can’t help it because we’re in the same moment. We’re perceiving that moment. It’s funny because you came at it from the point of view initially of the meaning crisis, and I came at it from the point of view initially of the meta crisis. And now I’m finding that my way of pursuing it is starting at the micro level, meaning myself and my family and my church and my community, and then out from there. And your way of pursuing it now is coming from the macro level, the silk road, that it’s the through line that can bring together the great lineages. And the lineages themselves become then the ligature that holds together the bodies, the churches, the human families that are connected to those lineages. And I think these are, there’s a harmony here, and it’s a necessary harmony too. That if I just take like a very practical sensibility that within the context of saying my church, we have one of the things that has been profound is that we have found a way of being in a lived harmony with each other that is not disrupted by the fact that there is a diversity of denominations present in the church. And in fact, it’s enhanced by that. That’s the thing we’re looking for. And we’re contemplating now and consciously talking about how we might do that more fully and more deeply. Like on behalf of, let’s say, just for the moment, like first step, one step up, on behalf of the intrinsically fractionalized Reformation. What is the liturgy that can bring that into communion? It’s just yourself. But then of course, the immediate next step, the next breath. Okay, well, how does that Christian-dom, which explicitly points to the body of Christ as the proper place for all believers, and yet has been fractured for a thousand years, and consistently suffers from problems along those lines. But right now, it’s still deeply fractured. Even really beautifully good faith people find themselves dragged down into squabbles all the time. Okay, so what is the liturgy that actually enables a proper communion of the whole of Christian-dom? This is a necessity for me. I’m not really in any meaningful way any particular denominations too early in the day for me to even be able to say anything. And so I drink deeply of all the different variations, and I can feel tremendous beauty and potency in a variety, and notice some particular things that seem off for air. Now, that’s way above my pay grade to say anything more than that’s what it feels like to me. But the journey can’t help but be that. Just to myself, just to be able to maintain integrity, which is the first commitment I made on this journey, was personal, like deep integrity itself. I’m not going to be bullshitting myself. I’m going to be as self-honest and as outwardly honest as possible in the image of that inner and outer imaginal. And then of course, in the context of the Meta Crisis, we now find ourselves with these diversity of lineages that, let’s call them religions for the moment, but indigenous lineages are certainly part of that weave. And there’s going to be a weave, right? It’s going to have similar sensibility to it. The same thing that could bring orthodoxy and Catholicism and Protestantism into a greater, higher communion, the same thing that can bring the denominations of Protestantism, or the same thing that can bring the people in my church into communion. There’s something about that that is of necessity. This is the point of necessity. I’m drawn forth into it because I am certain at the same level of faith that I have in Christianity at this point, that this is where we are as a human family. This is the moment we’re in. And we can kind of slice that from the secular perspective. You remember the conversations we had in the context of the extended transcendent naturalism? Yes. Practical eschatology. Yes. Yes. The slack we’ve had as humans in being able to, and I’ll just have to say it because it’s part of the common vernacular, to fuck around and find out. We don’t have that slack anymore. We’re running out of it rapidly. So we have to actually find some way of stepping into a level of deeply profound wisdom as an entire human community, which is well beyond anything we’ve seen so far in the past. Now I can feel in the back of my mind, deeply committed advocates of each of the distinct lineages saying, well, yeah, as you sit and perceive earnestly, clearly, and truthfully with body, mind, spirit, and soul, you will end up here with us because we are there. We’re at that place. And of course, I can also weirdly enough sit with the secular critics and say, well, it seems like probabilistically unlikely or difficult to pick. But I can also say, well, from the outside. And history has not played out thus far. So we’ve been playing this game for a while. So it’s the same basic journey. What is the through line that if we take the virtues qua virtue and just live those virtues and participate with complete commitment and as much of a commitment to integrity and honesty and humility as we can make and supporting each other in that right now and increasingly embodied a the Deologos kicking out to communion with that reciprocal opening where you’re sharing in your commitment to life and the things that you’ve delved into the time you spent on it, the way that you sharpened your own instrument presses against me in a way that brings things into sharper focus and or slices things away that I couldn’t have gotten to myself. So we sort of mutually begin to go in something like a, again, a reciprocally holding dance or the dance that in the dance actually builds the capacity to dance even more. And in this conversation, because we now live in a milieu, which for all of its weaknesses has the virtue of enabling effectively anybody who wants to listen and participate in some meaningful way to participate in that dance as well. Yeah, it’s funny if I go back and kind of think about the the liturgy of my own life, I felt the calling of that mission at least as early as when I was 17. And I remember trying to figure out how to participate in it, at least as early as 17. I remember talking about it a lot myself walking around in the woods. And the notion of participating, for example, in the construction of the internet at the material level as a form of communications mechanism that would be able to be used in material level as a form of communications mechanism that would simultaneously be global in nature, transcend linguistic and geopolitical boundaries, and also enable a new form or new topology of communications different than the broadcast one. And that was clear to me as an appropriate and necessary step when I was, yeah, probably 18, 19. And I’ve said that only as a way of articulating the fact that this feels like the reason for doing that was part of this quest. How do we embody something that has these capabilities, not from the point of view of philosophy or theology, but from the point of view of materiality? She feels a little bit nice because it helps me understand why my wayward youth was entirely wayward. Nice to have a redemptive narrative. A little slice of redemption there. And so then we’re there. And so when we had our conversation, there was a conversation in some very simple sense, like, are we still going to be able to be friends? And it’s just something about for us to be friends. I mean, it is simply the case. Both of us are on quests. And those quests are so big in both heaviness and scope that if our quests are divergent, that our friendship is going to have some trouble because we just won’t be proper for us to be in relational time. We certainly don’t live next to each other in Toronto or Black Mountain, although you’re welcome to visit any time. But I’m bound to this quest in a very deep way. And I’m sitting in an interesting spot as a collaborator because I’m living it in my little family and in my little church. And I think there’s something about that that’s necessary, like that microcosmic, macrocosmic and holding them together in the middle so that everything is maintains that continuity of contact. And funny, I almost felt a desire to spill forth with Galaxy Brainwool, which is about fractal self-similarity upon multiple levels of nested scale. Yeah, yeah. Those days are behind me now. So do you think that that macro micro pole from the hermetic tradition, do you think that is also a way of talking about what I’ve been talking about this, the platonic proposal of keeping true to our humanity, the transcendence, infinitude at the same time? I’m thinking of Plato, but I’m also thinking of Conrad, the heart of darkness, right? That Marlow is on the quest to encounter something transcendent, but he resolves that he will not give up his humanity, he will not give up his recognition and inhabitation of his finitude, unlike Kurtz, who steps over into hubris and experienced horror. And I take that to be a profound lesson. So does that track for you that this micro pole is also a way in which we can be, I think this is a way to, I like this, a way in which we can be true to this stereoscopic commitment to finite transcendence? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And what I was just feeling is that almost a desire to assert the inversion, which is to say that these cannot be in opposition, that the transcendent serves fundamentally its thing, its role, is to serve as the structure, the binding agent, the, and the liturgy keeps coming up from these words, but when I say that, what I mean is, is that which constrains and enables that which orients and supports the humanity, the lived, so that it can grow. And so in a sense, it’s the skeletal structure, although that’s a crude metaphor, but it makes it a little bit more simple. That it is improper. And I would say both of us could, you better than me, could point to scripture to point out where it’s very clearly specified that we are here for a reason. Like it is not our responsibility or proper direction as humans to endeavor to not be human, to endeavor to be done with our humanity, but rather to allow the transcendent to guide us in a deepening and an enrichment of what that is. So we’d become more and more human by virtue of journeying more and more deeply in intimacy with the transcendent. The transcendent calls us forth into an opening of this possibility that has been birthed into reality. So that’s helpful. There’s an intuitive thing and I don’t quite know what the connection is, so I’m going to leap to it and maybe we’ll backfill it. Right. I’m sensing a connection with this idea of recovery. Like I don’t want, I’m not saying the Christian should become a Taoist. I’m not preventing people from making that change either, but I’m saying, but the Christian could, they could listen very deeply and learn about the embodiment and flow from the Taoist and find out, but how can I find that or recover that or give birth to that, another Christian metaphor within Christianity? And of course, vice versa is possible. How can Taoism bring in, you know, give birth within itself to what is properly, I think, at the center of Christianity, agape and logos, right? And of course, Buddhism and Taoism, the Dharma and logos can talk, we’ve talked about that too, they can talk to each other. I mean, this is the proper definition of dia logos, this mutual transformation and each one is deepened rather than the idea that they come to the same conclusion. And this is what I mean by the Silk Road is the extended version of the courtyard of dia logos replacing the courtroom of debate. That’s why I didn’t want to debate doctrine with you. That’s just not, that felt profoundly wrong to me. And so, do you see what I’m getting at? There’s some, I’ve got some intuition about the vertical of the microcosmic and macrocosmic, the finite and the transcendent and that maybe that’s like a virtual engine, you said it’s enabling, but it’s also constraining, right? And then there’s this mutual transformation. And you know, and I’m, this isn’t novel to me. I’ve got this whole library for the Silk Road on Zen Christianity, Zen Catholicism, mutually transformative dialogue between Christianity and Zen between, right, the Kyoto, like, this is an already growing living thing in a lot of ways. So the question again is, we’ve got this vertical that you just articulated, and then I’ve got this sense of the horizontal people moving along the road and doing this mutual transforming, deeply listening and learning from each other what it is to live and love within a home. And my friend, our friend, Paul VanderKlay said, you know, CS Lewis had a similar thing in mere Christianity, the hallway Christianity that connects all the rooms of all the denominations. And that sounds like your community’s really exploring the hallways in a lot of ways. So I’m putting it out to you, I have an intuitive sense that that vertical that you just articulated and the horizontal that I just articulated belong together in some way. Does that land for you? Yes, so the way it was coming to me, it’s funny, maybe this is just going to be a theme, and I don’t want to be a theme forced because I thought of it as a theme, it just keeps coming up. I was thinking about it from just the historical unfolding of Christianity in relationship with a variety of other lineages in this moment, you know, the classic Athens and Jerusalem, even at that very beginning moment, we had this vision of the horizontal dialogue. And you know, much of the formulation of the trinche was discovered in the process of actually imbibing, maybe most, the Neo-Platonic, which was not present in the early Chyuturhdeic tradition, which is strictly monotheistic, right? Or at least so they thought. And then I was thinking about things like the Arthurian cycle, the chivalry. Yes, yes. Right, which is a later addition, right? It’s not present in either Athens or Jerusalem. That’s a completely different lineage that found itself coming into harmonic relationship with something. And I think actually, as perceived by the participants at the time, one that was a vivification and enrichment. And so the aspects of this lineage, when they came into contact, the aspects of the Latin Roman Anglo-Saxon amalgam that was going on in England, found themselves pulled up in elements enriched, right? So you can give birth to this notion of the knight, which is not a Roman conception. And you can’t have that notion of the chivalric knight in Rome. It requires that you combine something like the Celtic Anglo-Saxon Roman archetypes with the Christian virtues, and you bring them into a harmony that allows a clarification. So again, this verticality that allows these horizontal elements to come into a mix, which produces something which is in fact latent in each, but is not available within their own context, and even just by conjoining them. I was talking to Rafe Kelly, who is also on his journey towards Christianity, part towards your joke about me being a gateway drug to Christianity. And he actually talked about chivalry, and he said, you know, martial men’s associations typically are misogynistic. And chivalry was a very important exception to it. And it was reorient, and they’re sort of aggressive and belligerent. But chivalry did this thing that broke the sort of traditional pattern or the normal pattern and created a viable alternative. And that, of course, has cultural consequences beyond whether or not chivalry still exists. It holds out possibilities that were not sort of conceivable until it actually happened. And that’s what I’m sort of sensing here. You know, Margaret Bowden talks about personal and historical creativity. Personal creativity, nine dot problem is when you suddenly become capable of thinking something you couldn’t think before. And then she says, but that also happens for, well, I’ll use my language now, for the, you know, for the collective intelligence of distributed cognition is when there’s something becomes possible for it, something it could think that it couldn’t think before. And chivalry does that, I think, in a profound way. I was, and the thing about what you just said about the confrontation with neoplatonism, I was reading an article on Ibn Gabir al-Burah by the amazing scholar Bernard McGinn, one of the great scholars of mysticism, especially Christian mysticism. That anthology on Christian mysticism is edited by McGinn, the famous anthology. And the essay began with a line that sort of warmed my heart. He said, philosophy is the first ecumenism because it makes people talk to each other and respect each other in ways they normally wouldn’t do. And that’s why I’m still calling this the philosophical Silk Road. And there’s something there about, there’s something there about, there’s a project. I don’t like that word. It’s not the right word. That’s why I’m trying to get this like this pilgrimage. One of the things that people have, I mean, many people have said they was that I provided a conceptual vocabulary, a theoretical grammar. Of course, some people criticize me for that, the fancy vervekey words and all that sort of stuff. But that is, that’s part of the enabling you’re talking about. It makes possible possibilities that weren’t possible before. And I don’t know if this is in conflict with your Christianity. I’m sorry, I’ll ask it. I think the possibilities of the sacred are inexhaustible. And I think there’s more to come. And I properly think that so I’m not claiming what it has to look like. I mean, this is the influence of Schellingberg on me and his evolutionary religion and his deep time perspective. His argument, which I’ll go over in great detail elsewhere, but along the lines, the gist of it is ultimate reality. You know, we may be have had religion for 40,000 years. And we’ve only had what you could call organized religion for maybe 5000 years. And is it that we’ve got ultimate reality locked down? Probably not, he says. And therefore, we shouldn’t be so we should be much more careful about our beliefs. But and towards my earlier argument, we should be much more expansive about the imaginal. Because that will allow us to properly explore within and without in order to, I suppose, make ourselves vehicles for these news disclosures. Yeah, yeah, make us those vehicles, vehicles and instruments, both. And something that’s capable both of holding and expressing. I am I am the life and the light. And I am the way, not the destination, not the end of the journey, but the way. That’s an interesting thing you just did there. Very Daoist. That’s very cool. Keep going. I mean, in some something of a simple sense, if we’re talking about the relationship between the finite and the infinite, the point of view of the finite is an unlimited by definition. There’s there’s no, there can’t be the definition of the infinite is that which is unlimited. And so we are in fact talking about something like a journey in nature, the essence of it is a journey. We are ending anywhere. And we are becoming a journey becoming becoming one who’s more capable of participating in the journey. So I’m the way I’m not just a model, a model to be emulated that allows us to learn how to discipline ourselves and becoming instruments to becoming vessels to be filled with the spirit. But we have both dimensions now. We have both that that which pulls us forth towards the infinite. We have that which allows us to walks with us on the journey and allows us to learn more and more deeply how to become more and more the one that can go on the way. And then we have the spirit that fills us and guides us and helps us have the movement towards. So I’m not sure it could be otherwise. I mean, there’s there’s a there’s an artificial closure. And you talked about like a silicon and caribidus between the fictional and was it the literal at the top? Yes. Yes. Yes. Which is like, like the arbit, the skill and cribdis of the arbitrary and the algorithmic. Yes, the skill and still in terms of arbitrary algorithmic. And the notion of the literal, if we really think about it, etymology is that which is written down. So the ability to point to what is in the literature as being the final word in this closed, it’s done. It’s not alive anymore, though. It’s not a living thing. And if you find the light, which is to the light is not the end, the light is that which illuminates, illuminates that to be perceived. And if I’m the life, the life is not about death, right? The life life overcomes death, death is defeated. And so the calling, I think, to be properly Christian, one must in fact, step into that calling. And the only only thing that would be something like, well, not everything is is light, not everything is true. Obviously, there’s a directionality, there’s there’s boundary conditions. And not every way is that way, which is fair. Aristotle built logic to help us communicate with each other more clearly and to avoid the consequences of sophistry. Great, useful, help us, it’s helped us refine a direction of truth. Yeah, it’s I’m noticing it in maybe an intuitive and aesthetic level, almost feeling what your invitation. And it has a almost breathing, it’s weird. Breathing in mountain air, there’s a feeling of okay, there’s the invitation, it’s the invitation that we’re already on if we’re doing it right. It’s an invitation to open, it’s not just openness, but a continual opening. And it’s a beautiful invitation at the individual level, the micro level, because it implies and requires a deepening and an enriching of you. If you are closed, if you are closed, then your journey is over. And in your relationships, relationships have to be reciprocally open. So you are opening the people you’re with, you’re helping them to grow, and to develop more and more capability and capacity to more fully participate. And so that that generativity, that is what the feeling of the aliveness of the infinite, inserting itself with continuity of contact into the finite is. Yeah, yeah. So if you think about it, I ran over my own words, but we can you can kind of clip that because that was that was that was a like a thing that was a single like tone. I was feeling the presence so okay, you know, if we think about like the phrase in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. But if we actually look at the language, it’s more like it’s more like a continuous process. It’s not like a one and done. It’s not like creation happened. And that’s it. Creation’s not happening anymore. It’s more like there’s a point of creation, creation, exits or pours forth. That’s right. Exit and creation pours forth in overflowing love from the infinite into the unfolding of the finite. And when the finite is alive, meaning is connected, it is enriched. It has the life poured into it, it then grows and unfolds and it grows and unfolds in a particular way. And so we’re trying to figure out what that way is. And when we come into relationship, this is exactly what they want pure relationality relationship, it’s just make it simple. It’s not even worried about like big picture things like that was it was just talking about like, like you and me, let’s say rave over there, Jonathan pageau. Or, you know, for me, like just the guy who lives on the corner over here. My experience of life is that if I enter into honest relationship with another human being, what it discovers that they have wisdom. They may not be 100% wisdom. In fact, that is almost never the case. That is never the case. But if they’re also not 0% wisdom, I don’t know about you, but I have this experience when I interact with even the very small child, they have wisdom. And I have something to learn from them. And hopefully I have something to share with them. And so if that’s true, at every level of every human, if in the quality of relationship, if the quality of your relationship is one of being shut down, and not wanting to change, and having a felt sense of no, I’ve got our own sort of done, any new thing that comes in a deeper wisdom is almost like a violation. I’d say that’s actually not the way. But if the quality of relationship is deepening of relationship, and listening for that wisdom, and trusting that even if you’re going to get it wrong, there’s something that’s holding you and supporting you to learn how to come into that relationship to pull forth that wisdom, remember all truth is God’s truth, then of course it has to build as you build up. Groups of people who are in their own proper community, I should say, by the way. And so lineage is not the same thing as just a group of people. It’s not just a mass, and not necessarily an ideology. Ideologies may be empty. They may just be sort of control structures. The lineages are different than ideologies. I agree with that. And sorry, just a bunch of things just bounced around. Biblical stuff. The New Testament, I think it’s Paul described Jesus as the pioneer of the faith in some ways. He uses a term that’s translated by that. I don’t know if that’s… Yeah, I just saw Dan McClellan, who’s sort of my favorite YouTube biblical scholar, say the Hebrew is something more like when God began creating the heavens and earth, something like that. Not in the beginning, right? It’s actually not a good translation of the grammar of the Hebrew. I don’t know. I trust him. He went to school. I didn’t learn Hebrew. So things like that. You said something. And sorry, I normally do a much more linear thing, but I’m being very sort of open and just letting things come out. You said that… I don’t know if this is quite the white word, so I’m not claiming it’s verbatim, but you said something along the lines of, I was lucky that I landed in this form of Christianity because there’s many others I would have simply bounced from. Right? And it seems to me that has something to do with what we’re talking about now. That there is this… If this doesn’t strike you as insulting or psychoreligious, I think there’s a spirit in you. You were on this quest since you were 17, and I sense there’s some kind of continuity with your quest now that you’re within Christianity. And I take it that there were forms of Christianity that would not have allowed this continuity and would have bounced you away. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think so. I bounced lightly in the past. I’ve never really found myself in a place of really reaching and going deep. Let’s say, there’s maybe three… It’s funny. If you think about it, it’s like the spirit from which. So if I were to encounter a church or person where the spirit of fear is very much at the bottom of where they’re coming from, and their Christianity is a way of protecting themselves, or a spirit of anger in their form of Christianity is a way of ultimately again also protecting themselves. And then the last one, I’m not quite sure where that spirit comes from, but it’s almost… It’s the version that is superficial. It’s a thin layer. It’s almost like the… Shemayman talks about it where the vector of Christianity effectively has become a version of the secular. It’s pure label. It’s pure semantic actually. It’s in the doctor. I’d say that in the way Han talks about beauty being reduced to the smooth, I think that’s the spirit of comfort. Ah, there you go. Right. And so it sounds to me like you’re saying that lineages, communities, collective intelligences, spirits, you can also listen to them for wisdom. And some of them might not have much on offer because of the spirit from which they are, I don’t know, unfolding. And others, there’s a lot of wisdom you sense because the spirit they’re coming from. Did I get you right? Yeah, I think it’s both directions, both below and above. Okay. So say a little bit more about that first before I ask my next question then. From the point of view of emergence, the spirit that is motivating or spirit that is coming from the individual, from the multiplicity and bringing them together. And then from the point of view of emanation, the spirit that is pulling them into communion. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Granted. And I think that has to do with the way these distributed cognitions are not just synchronic and historical. They’re also ontological, things like that. For example, a simple concrete example. If we think about like the spirit of Mammon, the spirit of Mammon participates in a particular communion, which gathers together a multiplicity driven by greed and pulls them into a communion, which is ultimately dominated by the characteristics of Mammon. And I wouldn’t want to learn from that. I would want to learn the details, but I want to learn the details from a distance. Right. And it top downs, if I can turn that into a verb, insofar as it incentivizes a certain worldview that constrains people and constrains their agency in powerful ways. Okay. So good. Where I think I’m understanding you well. And I think this is all coming back around. So what was the spirit from that you sensed in the church from which you did not bounce? Well, I had an aesthetic first person experience, which was that spirit of wholesomeness, the spirit of aliveness together with people in the ordinary characteristics of human life. Thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the Verveki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Okay. So now a distinction is here. I mean, it’s alive for me right now. There’s a distinction between wholesomeness and completeness, where we were both a few minutes ago rejecting the completeness way of understanding the sacred. And but it is surely possible Plato is although I love him, I think this is a clear historical example of trying to understand the wholesome as the complete. And so I think you’re nodding. So you agree with the distinction. So what would you say to that? Like, what is the nature? Put some flesh on those conceptual bones. What’s the nature of the distinction between that sense of the spirit of wholesomeness and that sense of the drive, the spirit of completeness? Neat. So we just throw some things out. Please. One, two that fit very nicely with each other are the post tragic and the presence of grief. Right. Which is to say, and that’s the end the side of wholesomeness, which is interesting. I want to put that out there. It’s interesting, not obvious, but I think if you, you said right, and I think if you, if you kind of allow it to settle for a bit, if there’s a, yeah, of course. And then the tragic frankly is very connected to the complete. If there’s a sensibility that complete has something to do with like, I don’t like escape or protect or certainly close, right? To complete is to finish. And when I, when I find myself in relationship, it’s funny to shift it from kind of like the third person to the first person, please in relationship with a wholesomeness. I mean, you see the arc of life, you really feel the presence of the fact that life has an arc to it. And then the presence of birth and the presence of death, they’re both part of it. There’s something necessary to grow something honorable and beautiful, actually in growing up. There’s something honorable and beautiful about the helplessness of the infant. And there’s a, ah, like the, the, that unfolding surface area, that notion of plenitude, that notion of generativity, where you, I notice like an invitation in myself, simultaneously, all the qualities of relationality that are present, all the different possible ways that I can actually say participate in a healthy way. Like wholesomeness, it offers forth, how funny, it’s like rich soil with multiple different kinds of like rhizomes and bacteria that are richly interwoven with each other. And it has that, that notion of many, many, many ways, modalities, not just particular, but then different aspects of self, we can participate in this, participate in that, play different roles and get different kinds of support and do different kinds of things. And it’s complex in the lonely sense of complexity. Oh, whereas completeness, it’s complicated in the algorithmic sense of complicatedness. Yeah. Yeah. So wait, that something, before you go on, something is resonating. It sounds to me like the spirit of wholesomeness is the soil for a living ecology of practices, the way you just described it. Massively. And the soil and also in some sense, the, how would you say, right, the guide, if your practices are not meaningful in the context of what is actually present, then there’s something off. Your practices should be like nursing, like latching. You know, that’s something that’s living like very much in the center of wholesomeness. Well, yeah, those are orienting reflexes. And this you’re talking about it being an orientation, right? Of course, and that lines up with the metanoia, the turning, the reorienting in some fashion, which I think is really important. So, oh, sorry, there’s another one. Can I add another one? Of course, this is an open flowing thing. The other one that I just noticed was that the presence, the presence of the transcendent, palpable presence, it’s not the transcendent out there. It’s that it is actually that presence of the present in between and within. And so glowing from the interior and then also a, almost like a technicolor in between and interacting with it feels, there’s a feeling of aliveness, a feeling of energetics inside. And it’s not the stimulant energetics. It actually is the energetics of a life. The feeling of life is more present. Now, wholesomeness has that as you described it beautifully with that inside and in between. Yeah, beneath, between and beyond. And it’s the abundant life idea. So you get a sense of there’s, yeah, there’s the soil, but it’s also like a field. And that it orients the growth of the ecology of practices so that people, like we try to do in diologos, they come into right relationship with the transcendent, right reverential relationship with it, with the virtues. So what did, I mean, what did people do that conveyed that to you? I mean, that’s an interesting, I mean, I’ve, sorry, it sounds like I’m playing a weird card here. And I’m not, I’ve met a lot of Christians. I’ve met a lot of Christians in a lot of different places and situations. And I mean, I’ve met, I’ve encountered what I think you’re talking about. I think it, I mean, and what I was talking about when I was in Aetna, visiting Bishop Maximus at the Eastern Orthodox Monastery and Seminary, I found, I kept saying these are good people living a good life in a good place. And I even told Bishop Maximus, if I were to be a Christian, I would be a Christian, an Eastern Orthodox Christian because of that kind of thing. And is that right? Is that landing with you? I had that profound sense. These are good people living good lives in a good place. And I don’t just mean a place that they’ve cultivated. It’s not just a found place. You know what I mean? That’s what I was trying to get across. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. This was a sense of connectedness to place, a sense of being in the right place, by the way, and a sense of loving the place. That’s important. A sense of actual love for the place. A sense of, it’s funny, of the sacred ordinariness. Maybe that’s a good way of putting it. Just the absolute simplicity of a baby crawling across the floor. And let’s say a 13-year-old girl who’s not related to the baby, picking up the baby, and the baby being very happy with that, and the 13-year-old girl being very happy with that, and all the relevant parents noticing in the background just feeling like a very ordinary thing to have happen. But a presence of the sacred, that notion of relationality happening in an easy way, happening in a proper context. And then again, the scope of light, it’s not narrow, it’s broad. Presencing all the aspects from deep, deep grief, although we have to tremendous joy. And then that last, which you say they’re oriented to the beyond. Okay, there’s a consciousness of, okay, we’re doing this in a context in relationship with the beyond. So it’s not merely a gathering in the park of families to eat together, but it’s actually, there’s a through line on the vertical that holds it all in place. It’s kind of sitting there guiding and holding things in a way that allows that sacredness to be poured into those ordinary moments. I mean, I got this word from Christianity, so I suppose it’s not inappropriate to bring it back. This is what I’ve been trying to articulate with the notion of fellowship as something distinct from romantic relationship and friendship. And that when we’re doing like dialectic into dialogos practices with people, they will regularly say things like, I just discovered a kind of intimacy I didn’t know existed that I’ve always been looking for. And it’s this fellowship. It’s exactly what you like. It’s the transcendent in the finite. It’s the finite yearning for the transcendent ish legal would put it right. And it’s that sense of everybody having a shared orientation that’s not being imposed on them, but that they are sort of naturally co realizing together like the way people turn a corner, and suddenly are caught up together in a sublime view of a mountain or something like that. Yeah. And so. Yeah, can I just add like two more things? Yeah. Yeah, there’s this feeling of invitation into collaboration is another aspect of loveholsting this as I experienced it. And so there was a in the Zek Stein’s concept of teacherly authority or even just a simple concept, proper parenting. Yeah, we’re coming into relationship. In this relationship, there’s a commitment to the space in between us. There was a commitment that there’s a deeper, richer, lived embodied truth is what we’re actually committing to. And that will show up if we participate with each other in a certain way. And, you know, we’re both recognizing that it’s participatory, which means that some part of what we currently are will go away, and we’ll grow into a new quality of being as a result. Which of course is can’t happen if all that’s happening is a conveying of information, right? That’s not the thing. No, no, no, no. It’s a mutual cultivation of life, mutual cultivation of character and capacity to participate in life and in relationship with that which enables and constrains that whole process. So, first of all, I think this is doing what I want it to do. I hope it’s doing it for you, too. I feel like it’s taking on a life of its own, which, to be honest, one of my concerns was we would have lost that capacity, and I’m happy that that’s not the case. So, within that context of fellowship, D.O. Logos, what would you say to my claim that I experience all of this profoundly throughout my life in many ways? Would you say that you found that a problematic claim? I think my Socratic way of life does this for me profoundly. Yeah, what I’d say is that I suspect that you’re living a deeply Christian life. This is what Sara says to me. She said, she actually said, you’re the most Christian person I’ve ever met, and I don’t know how to, I don’t know, I don’t know how to, I don’t know. So, that’s your cross to bear, John, is to be the most Christian person we’ll ever meet, but to be specifically saying, no, no, not me. Yeah, the point of it is what? What’s with those two commandments? Love God with all your heart and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Well, it’s a pretty good start as nearby, and I think that’s the first 15 minutes of this conversation was a tremendous example of somebody who’s been pursuing, how does one go about really loving God with all your heart and strength, and not sloppily, and not sort of in a distracted way, but okay, what does that even mean? And helping other people do it, right? So, what does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? One of the things that I’m going to do is I’m going to endeavor to put tremendous time, life, effort, and faith into cultivating a capacity to help other people come into this quality of love of God with, and in yourself, what happens is you have a very profound orientation towards, I think it may even be very much close to the root of towards being, towards reason in the sense that you define it, that part of you that carves away bullshit, and the risk of self-bullshitting is always present, and it has that notion of completeness, that notion of closure, and so, you know, if you feel it is proper and necessary to wear a particular disposition, a particular posture, to keep doctrine from settling, to keep self-bullshit from hardening, in furtherance of your capacity to love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself, then hallelujah, and I will say to the glory of God in that, and it feels in that in me, like I said, you’re a great gateway drug, so, you know, and I don’t think that your association with known apostates like Taoists and Buddhists is going to be a problem either, because I have many people who I know who are deep in those lineages, and are, you know, beautiful souls themselves, and from whom I have learned great deep stuff, and for whom I have deep care and love, and the hope is to say, look, there’s just, there’s still more, there’s more, it’s not a matter of, no, as so much as it is, yes, yes, yes, let’s keep going, we need to keep doing this process of carving away the bullshit, heightening the truth, increasing the aliveness, clarifying the light, and just going on the way, more and more and more. I now see something in you that has been all the way along, and this is opposite to a Christianity I was brought up with. The Christianity I was brought up with was a zero-sum game mentality, and you have always been trying to escape from the zero-sum game dilemma, and you just expressed a non-zero-sum game form of Christianity that I have not heard very often, at least not, I’ve seen it demonstrated, I mean, I’ve talked, I mean, I think very much the people that I’m getting to talk to and get into profound dialogos with, I see that, but it’s not something that was, it’s not something that was present in the Christianity of my childhood, and it’s not, to be fair to me, something that’s present in sort of the widely broadcast popular Christianity that, you know, sort of, the, for lack, I don’t like these terms, but for lack of a better term, the religious right puts out. I’m, like, for example, I’m seriously worried about, sorry, I’m worried and it’s a serious worry, it’s not in my top 10 worries, but I think the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States will do, I think it’ll do a disservice to both Christianity and nationalism in some very important ways. I think it is the wrong way of trying to say that there needs to be a proper relationship between governance and the sacred, I think it’s the wrong way. I think it has perhaps a dim perception through a glass darkly of the right goal, but I don’t think it has formulated the problem well, because I think it’s within that mindset and you have always, if you’ll allow me as a friend, you have always been trying to escape from the zero-sum rivalrous mindset, and you’re articulating it now, if you’ll allow me to give that back to you, and I’m seeing that as something quite wonderful. Full of wonder, yeah, full of wonder. Just think about how the beauty of being in that, it’s so funny the old language, the anti-rivalrous, I remember actually sitting at some point, I don’t know where it was, maybe in the past six months, and saying, oh, this is the anti-rivalrous, we’re now here, we’re in it, this is the most anti-rivalrous. I’ve for a long time been thinking, what is more anti-rivalrous, because you kind of climb up and get to notice that certain things are more of that kind, and we’re in now this in that conversation, like the qualities of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, that’s a beautiful, I think that’s the journey, that’s the journey that we’ve been called to, that is the calling, and we’ve been given revelation, we’ve been given the scripture to support us on that journey, but the point is that we’ve been given it to support us on the journey, to live, to enter into discipleship, where Christ says, follow me, right, he doesn’t say, you know, read this and be done, that’s not the invitation, and by the way, pick up your cross and bear it, pick up your cross and follow me, which is a decidedly non-trivial invitation, and oh my goodness, yeah, I mean, all you have to do for me, our backgrounds in this are very different, obviously, I wasn’t raised in a church at all, really, I wasn’t raised in any church at all, and the kinds of things that were like churches were purely secular, so for me, like entering into like, okay, what’s going on here with this dude who’s like crucified, the guy who’s crucified, and the story is somehow that’s like paying for my sins, and first of all, like, if his dad wrote the laws that I broke, and his dad created me in such a way that I’m, what’s going on here, like, this is all craziness, doesn’t make any sense, like the i’s don’t dot, the t’s don’t cross, no pun on the t part, but when you actually delve into the heart of it, and say, okay, just first, first, just settle onto a symbolic thing, here I mean symbolically, Eastern Orthodox sense, not in the Western, not in the sense that takes symbol and makes it like fiction, I mean, symbol in the sense of, as you said, imaginal, it’s imaginal, yeah, alivening, right, something that actually pulls you into more and more rich orientation towards the truth. The word that’s often translated in the New Testament for inspired, God breathed, doesn’t mean like origin made it like dictated by God, it means life-giving, like when God breathed life into Adam, it’s that sense, it’s not the sort of dictation sense, it’s the sense of it’s life-giving, it breathes life into you. Yeah, so just imagine, Benjamin, it was being the imaginal space that holds the moment of the crucifixion as the most anti-rivalrous moment possible. Oh, I see what you’re doing. So for you, and this is proper, there is, I was going to say automatic, it’s not the right word, there’s a natural, and I mean this also in the good sense, there’s a natural ritual that comes up with the icon that you’re already called into, like you’re doing this thing, you’re not just considering it, that’s what I’m trying to say, you’re entering into an active ritual relationship with it and through it. Yes, okay. Yeah, yeah. To continue, you’re doing that and what happens, I interrupted you because I just saw something and I wanted to articulate it. So we enter into that, the symbolon of the crucifixion and we take that as being the most anti-rivalrous moment possible. It’s a lot of very particular words and if you open it, for me, the way I feel it is I have a face-to-face with the event, not the simulation of the event, not even the symbol hanging in a shirt, like John, for example, being present at the event and feeling the pouring forth of love, bound to the cross, but the pouring forth of love and that recognition that there’s something about the how do we overcome the win-lose game, like how do we overcome the win-lose game, how do we overcome the omnipresent possibility that if we don’t play the win-lose game to win, then we will lose, we will be crucified, we will be killed, we will die, we will be extinguished from the game forever. That is the nature of that game, that’s the thing, the whip at our back that keeps us driven to constantly play on Moloch’s playground. Well, the quest shows us the way and the way is to settle into the crucifixion from a heart of such deep love that perceives the presence of the kingdom of heaven is at hand, that there is actually already a win-win game, it’s weird to juxtapose these languages, but there already is a win-win game that is deeper, is actually more fundamental, it’s the substrate, it’s the ground upon which the win-lose game is a is a perturbation and a little bit of a perversion. Right, well, I made the same argument to Daniel Schmacktenberger when Daniel and Ian McGochrist and I were talking about that there’s a way out, the symbolic, the way you described it is the way out of the prisoner dilemma kind of machinery and I think that is, I think that’s very, very well said. So it’s this most anti-rivalrous moment. So this is sort of convergent, it’s not identical, but it’s convergent with Girard’s notion of Christ going into the mimetic rivalry and the scapegoating and that whole vicious cycle and then sort of adopting the role and then exploding it from the inside or or Sally McFag’s notion of Christ as the parable, the living parable that goes into the narrative structures, the narrative scripts and then blows them apart from the inside kind of thing. Yes, if you start taking that, you start running that across a variety of different dimensions, it starts to sing or even actually hum is the right sensibility, like the humming of when you have multiple different tuning forks, when you hit one and they begin to hum with each other, that resonant, that explosive presence, the invitation to take up your cross and bear it, to step through the crucifixion of the human nature must in fact be voluntarily self-crucified and human will must surrender itself into a sort of a divine couplet. That’s the stepping through of the win-lose into the win-win. So I mean you do have a parabolic in the sense of parable or even a quonic way of participating in the symbol on right for you. It’s not something you get cognitive content out of, it’s something that explodes grammars that we are automatically trying to project onto everything and that’s really cool. I think that’s really really interesting and profound. Yeah, this is that you know the the metanoia notion and the notion of upside down kingdom, like these are all that exploding the grammars, it’s very much a part of it right. And it’s the kind of thing that transforms or it’s not even transforms it just rectifies, reconciliation, it’s a reconciliation because the win-win is the more fundamental substrate. So it’s actually saying hey how do we bring ourselves back, back into contact, how we reconnect. I guess it’s the you know I think C.S. Lewis talked about it that modernity is a cut flower but I would actually point it all the way back. The win-lose is a cut flower and that is only by a religature, that notion of liturgy, a reconnection, a religio. And that religio is done right, it’s a finished work. Christ did the religio, it’s complete and we are now reconnecting, we are reconciled with the infinite and now we have to simply learn how to live it properly, which is no joke because we’re still very much living in the aftermath. This is a Sorry, let me slow down. One of the things that I came to actually seven or eight years ago, I called it the 10,000 year catastrophe. And the visual image I have is the image of like a meteor breaking apart and then all the different pieces of the meteor like rocks hitting the oceans and just ripples, ripples, ripples, ripples. And it may be a thousand years before the last ripple finally settles back into equilibrium. In our case, 10,000 years. We’ve been hit by an event, maybe 40,000, maybe 50,000, meaning crisis. You have propelolithic meteorite. And there’s so many pieces of that. We have the lineage karma or intergenerational trauma, these kinds of concepts are in fact real. Obviously they’ve passed down. And then in contexts, like contexts that cultivate and produce different events. So the fact that it’s taking us a very long time to metabolize this finished work of religio and to integrate it and to be re to throw away bad habits, which are maybe six, five, 16 generations deep and to hone our cultures to actually take these, this is called this counter cultural elements. So yeah, guess what? You guys have this culture that has, you know, crucifying people and feeding them to the lions and coliseums. That’s part of your cultural inheritance. No, that’s not a good idea. Like how do we hone that away? Or you talked about with the chivalry, like how do we enter into a relationship with a given culture and hone the parts that are actually orienting towards aliveness and towards the light and towards truth. And actually Michelangelo style, like just carve away the parts that are an accumulation of this 10,000 year catastrophe, which then of course enables them to come into relationship with each other because that is actually the nature of this thing. It does actually pure relationality is pure relationality, right? It’s that rich, loamy wholesomeness where the possibility of relationship is available without, without crisp lines. There’s obviously boundaries, but it’s available in all the different pieces. Yeah. Well, Michelangelo got the metaphor from Plotinus by the way. Just nice. And I understand the Plotinus actually got the metaphor from Bob at the bar. Bob of Alexandria. Yeah. Well, I mean, let’s just pause here and maybe take a minute or two what we might, first of all, thank you for this. This has been, I think, very, very good, very helpful for me, very nourishing. I, what we might want to talk about next time. I feel like we’re onto something here about this, right? The non-rivalrous, the connection between the non-rivalrous, the restoration of religio, the deep remembrance, platonic anamnesis, the Sufi, Dikir, there’s all these remembrance. Islam is remembering God, right? And that and sort of this pure relationality that we’ve been talking about, there’s some deep connections there. You’ve also talked, not with me, but you’ve talked about how you think in some ways religion is the, sorry, Christianity is the religion that’s not a religion. And that’s somebody else said, and I said, that might be true. Ah, okay. So it’s being clipped. So you don’t have to stand behind that if you don’t want to. But I want to know more than about how you see it playing a role. I mean, we’ve done a lot about the micro and I totally appreciate your emphasis on it. But how do you think being a Christian in the way that you’ve described the non-rivalrous Christian that is oriented towards a religio to pure relationality that is expressed in love and light and logos and life, if I could be so bold, how do you see that addressing the meta crisis? Okay. Right. Let me throw one else, let me throw something else into it. Sure. And maybe I’ll almost cross like a diagonal. You mentioned fellowship. And interestingly, I found myself having an experience over the past two weeks that I’ve been calling the fellowship of the spirit. And I mean this in terms of actual specific individuals. Huh, I’m beginning to notice that perhaps you’re a member of this thing and I’m calling it the fellowship spirit. And it’s obviously as a component of the fellowship of the spirit is relationality at the level of the logos. But another piece, another tone is recalling each other home. Yes, I think that’s right. That’s well said. And I’ll put a piece out there that comes like a little bit more of the Chevelle record, No Man Left Behind. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a deep, deep commitment because some people are committed to not coming home. But our love is great enough that we will find a way to reach out and we will bring them home. That’s excellent. Well, let’s talk about the two then because I think they belong together. I think they belong together. Yeah. Well, if you take those last two pieces, the last thing you said and the last thing I said. Yeah. Okay. This has been great. This is a good pause point. That’s all it is. First of all, as always, I’m going to give you my friend the last word. But before I do that, just thank you. I sort of spilled my guts in front of you and you took it up in good faith and with graciousness and you responded in kind, which I appreciate. So thank you for that. And I look forward to our next conversation and I’ll give you the, like I say, the last word. Well, I’ll take the last word, but the last word I’ll take is just express to you my tremendous gratitude. And the shape of that gratitude at this moment is just the diligence and the care that you put into what you do. It’s, well, in some sense, it shames me, but it’s a good shame. It’s the motivating shame to step up. And it’s a, yeah, let’s just put it there. Just your tremendous gratitude. So thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you.