https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WdLXZu9hMTI
So welcome everyone to another Voices with Raveki. I’m joined by my good friend Jordan Hall. And so I proposed a topic. We’re doing this trilogy on the sacred. We did a first one on the sacred per se, and then we did a second one on connections between grief, loss, suffering and the sacred. And now there’s a topic I’m proposing to Jordan, and he’s already accepted to discuss this, which is, I want to propose that the West has not properly grieved the death of God, to put it in a niche in framework with a union twist. And the idea is you can see a lot of the meaning crisis as symptomatic of what people, how people behave when they’re stuck in unprocessed grief. They look for surrogacies. They act out behavior of sort of anger, and they do sort of ineffective search strategies. They get stuck. They can’t move on to a new relationship. They’re, they keep trying to recover. And so, and they, they get well, and this is one of this is how it’s often put people get stuck in on a non process grief, they get traumatized by it. And I myself have experienced that I grew up in a very fundamentalist version of Christianity, and then leaving that I was traumatized within it, I didn’t realize the trauma until afterwards. And then I realized that a lot of my behavior has been, in a sense, grieving that God and trying to grow beyond that grief like we talked about last time and open myself up to a new, new possibilities of relationship. So that’s the topic, I hope it’s it’s it’s it’s sort of said well and now I’d like to hear what what you have to say Jordan in response to that. Yeah, so when you, you know, when you proposed it, we began to riff on it and so to say surrogates, for example, yeah, yeah, here it’s funny I’m actually listening to one of your first few meeting crisis videos on YouTube. Right first actually sort of saw your face and heard your voice. And so I think that’s the framing of ideology. Right as a surrogate, right, you have a God shaped hole in your life. And one of the things that you might do is you might try to suture that hole with an ideology that provides the answers. Or you might go the other direction you might become an atheist, which is you deny that it ever mattered at all. It was never really an important thing and so it’s absence has no value. And you know fill in the blank so I actually think that’s a very beautiful frame to say that the grief, we have not we have not actually processed the grief of the death of God, and that explains a very large fraction. Perhaps all of the very large fraction of the various coping mechanisms. Yep, they’ve been in place. And what’s nice is it also activates that the meaningfulness of grief. What is the meaningfulness of grief, what what is it about, what is it, how is it in service. And the idea is to say that. There’s something about the nature of allowing grief to really allow grief like you might even say that grief is the. Oh, this is nice. Yeah, try this. Huh. Oh wow. So you go up and down in an elevator. Right, right, right. The sensation of going down. There’s a feeling in your stomach, which is in fact physically literally your stomach is not going down as fast as your feet. You’re going up, there’s a feeling in your stomach. Yeah. And it’s something like, without attaching any particular kind of preference to it. Grief is the is the sensation that is associated with healing in a particular way. So when you have a lot of healing to do the the energy of that as you’re going through the process of that. It’s the feeling of that experience. And so if you if you block the grief, it’s literally like, you know, holding back the healing energy. If you grief as it feels uncomfortable. It feels in fact, it’s not even painful you know it’s if it has a feeling of its own but it’s very uncomfortable. And so in this case, we block it. We don’t want to have that feeling go through us. But if the hypothesis is that that’s like, you know, it’s just a it’s just a particular quality of feeling that is associated with a particular aspect of experience, which in this case for the moment of this I’m just going to name healing. Right, right. Maybe more to it maybe healing and growing. Right. Yeah. Right, right. I exercise and I have a sore muscle and there’s something about the feeling of the processing of the soreness of the muscle that’s associated with the healing of the micro tears that happened in the muscle from exercising it and the group of stronger muscles that happen in exercise if you kind of frame it in that way. So how that’s really interesting that there’s the grief is is that, you know, the, the, the quality of feeling associated with the processing of, and thereby healing and growing as a consequence of some kind of, in this case loss or some kind of change. Right, right, right. Something goes away as change occurs and in that change some aspect of reality is no longer. And the aspect of reality that is that is continues is undergoes grief, as it begins the process of growing into the new possibilities and healing the things that have broken as a consequence of the change. Right, right. The concept of God would be a pretty big change. Well, I mean the famous passage with the madman in the marketplace, Nietzsche said, you know, and of course like everything that Nietzsche said, it’s multi vocal and trying to assign it to single interpretation that goes beyond the intent of nature. But he said, you know, we’re not worthy of the event. He makes it stronger he said you know, not only that God has died but we’ve killed him and we’re not worthy of the event yet. And so, and people forget that when Nietzsche pronounces the death of God and says that he’s not talking to the believers. He’s talking to a group of atheists in the marketplace. Part of what I wanted what I wanted to do by bringing that up is to try and separate what you’ve introduced the healing and what we talked about last time about how depth, how grief takes you to the depths, so that you can see into the depths of other people, those, those holes of loss are apertures through which we can see beyond the prison wall of the ego. All of that that we talked about last time, and you’ve said like it’s healing and growing. And I want to separate it from what what the temptation is here, which, which is to make this an issue about the debate about the arguments about the existence of God. Because it’s clear that Nietzsche is mad man. And of course he he’s he’s crazy wisdom mad man. It is not interested in that because he directs what he’s saying to the atheist. He’s saying, even if what you say is true, you, you have not. Well, you’ve not properly grieved the event you, and he says we have to be, we have to grow much larger in order to be worthy of the event. So I don’t. So whether, and again I’m putting aside the metaphysical question, I identify as a non theist, but, and I, because I think that the theism atheism debate misframes the question of the sacred and perhaps we can get back to that in a fundamental way. But what what what I what the criticism I’m making independent of this metaphysical argument, which I think is a missed framing argument miss framed argument anyways, is that the new atheist movement doesn’t give us the tools for grieving the death of God, other than ideological tools of trying to convince us that we’re stupid to believe in a particular proposition. And so, in a very real way because I meet lots of people, as you can imagine through my, through, you know, my channel and stuff, and they they’ve gone through that sort of that the new atheist and then they come and they say, but I get the but it was, I wasn’t satisfied it right like you didn’t. Right. What what negating a proposition. It’s radically insufficient for grieving. And so the critique I’m making the cultural critique is the people, and the people on the other side the theist especially you know more literalist fundamentalist ilk, they’re they’re no, they’re, they’re no better. They’re like the people that when you’ve lost a loved one and they sit down beside you say don’t worry, there’s another one just around the corner that that sort of like relentless optimism that we’ve talked about this, right, which is not being present with someone’s grief it’s actually denying it. And then the the atheist is like the person that sits down behind you it says, just get over it, just accept the reality. Both of those people would be we would consider them cruel, insensitive almost inhumane, or inhuman even individuals at a funeral. And so, I don’t find my, I’m making a cut. I’m pressing a very strong cultural critique here I don’t find anybody taking this event with its appropriate seriousness and care in terms of how people are undergoing it. Maybe, right, maybe they, you know, maybe people will come back after properly grieving to their God, that happens, CS Lewis wrote about it in a grief observed. But he had to go through the grief and he talked about it, he said it felt like there was a great big door in heaven that shut closed. And so, I just want to, that critique is my way of separating off the sort of ideological combative thing that is not helpful and trying to get us to really directly focus on what do we need to do in order to heal in order to grow in order to sound the devil of grief so we can sound the depths of reality. That’s the question I’m asking now. Right. And there’s always that and that’s the thing, remember we talked about when you grieve you lose the world and, you know, when you lose someone you lose their world well even more so with God right and there’s a particularity. Right grief is always particular to the being, perhaps God shouldn’t be thought of as a being but anyways, the being that has been lost. And so, like when you like every time you lose like, in my experience every time I lose a romantic relationship. Yes, it’s grief every time but it’s a different grief every time. And so, I think that’s the thing, right, that’s the thing about grief. And so, like when you like every time you lose like, in my experience every time I lose a romantic relationship. Yes, it’s grief every time but it’s a different grief every time it’s like the same piece of music played on different musical instruments, every time there’s a different tenor. Right, different tempo. Right. And there’s a particularity that has to be addressed or you do not properly grieve. Sorry that was a bit of a speech but I really wanted to make clear what I think we should be focusing on. I’m. What I want to do is maybe just sort of dance with it for a little while. Yeah, please allow things to come up so one thing that came up for me was. It’s funny so with regard in regard to the new atheists. And they kind of hit the scene. When I was an adolescent, more or less, right, right. But I even recall as an adolescent, having a feeling that the new atheism had a very adolescent feeling to it. I felt like an angry teenager. Right, right, right, right, right, still feels like an angry teenager, but. And then and then as you were talking I was really starting Okay, what are other what are ways that this experience like how can I relate to the experience of the death of God in the different ways, right, right, more, maybe more embodied ways. And one had to do with the precise experience of adolescence, which is to say the, the, the child’s relationship with the, with the parent is the death of God. Right, right, right, as you move from child to adolescent the essence of adolescence is precisely. The loss of childhood, the breaking of the, and think about that from like a developmental perspective from a mythopoetic perspective like the notion of living in a mythic world, living in a world that is alive with fairies in a world that’s alive with magical potential which is the child like experience, and the aliveness like the richness that color and tense and the, you know, the horror is all the more horrible and joy is all the more joyful. Right, right. To to to yearn to return to childhood is a perfectly valid yearning because it’s so singular and powerful. And in that context, of course, in childhood, we also have the relationship with the parent with the mother with the father, and, and even, even if you haven’t had a very good childhood, there’s at least some point where there’s an experience of that as being an experience of connectedness. Yep, I said, suppose in some cases that’s never true and that’s horrible to imagine but yeah. That’s the break that’s the that’s the fracture. And then you go through adolescence. And I love the idea right now just playing with the metaphor of, of, you know, the adolescent precisely has not yet integrated the death of childhood has not integrated the, the fracturing of the image of God embodied in the parent embodied in the relationship those relationships, and that the act of maturity, the act of transforming from adolescent into adult is in fact to have gone through the true processing the true grieving experience, which may take months or years or decades depending on how close you are to being in late 20th century adolescent. Right. And then to be an adult is in fact you have come into a place where you are at peace with really truly at peace with the developmental process in its most full sense, like to be an adult is to be able to sit with the reality that childhood is a thing. That’s the childhood comes and goes that you will die that everyone you love will die like that’s to truly sit with an adult is to have like right relationship with the reality of reality, and to be able to say yes to it so now we’re coming back to nature at the Yay saying spirit, the ability to have grieved the death of God is to be able to re enter into a Yay saying relationship with life itself. That’s well said. All right, that’s what came out of that little upwelling. So, I mean that that. There’s a couple there’s a yeah that that’s really good. First of all, I can’t remember. Was it, I’m trying to remember I was just reading it this morning. It was, it was a Graham Harmon was in his book on object oriented ontology he cites somebody can’t remember, and they argued that the predominant age group, like the adolescence is the predominant of our culture right now, our culture, venerates adolescents and looks at everything through an adolescent lens and of course that that is very problematic for lots of reasons. So let’s let’s let’s play on that a little bit. And second, you talked about, you know, losing the image and you mean in the imaginal sense, you mean in the inactive transjective not images in your mind. Right. And I think there of another CS Lewis book the discarded image, one of his last books how we talked about, you know, you know, we had this whole image of reality in which God figured, and that image has been discarded, we have thrown it away. And, and so, again, that I want what does that, I want to, I want to unpack what that means to throw that kind of encompassing image away. And then the other thing that came up for me was the degree to which we’re talking about a virtue. It’s the virtue that is most well, perhaps the most important virtue not singular but one of the most important virtues, with respect to adolescence. And then we have to use it carefully here without sounding condescending or anything like that. But we’re talking about maturity here. I mean, the virtuous development is maturation, that’s a, that’s a thesis I’m going to propose and maturity is a virtue we praise it in people, it is it is an active, you can condemn or criticize somebody by saying that they’re being immature. And of course, our maturation is a multi dimensional thing. There’s cognitive maturation there’s emotional maturity. There’s existential maturity and I think it’s appropriate perhaps to talk about spiritual maturity. And so, what I want to, I’m just throwing now throwing things I’m throwing three balls in the air. I’m throwing three balls in the air that came from what you said, you gave this sort of wonderful metaphor, really rich, we’ve got adolescents, and it’s, I would argue inappropriate prominence as the dominant age group of our culture. We have the difficulty. Now we have in talking about maturity, which might prevent us from properly grieving and moving on. And then we have to deal with. There was a discarded image, and the adolescent discards an image. The West has discarded an image that was CS that’s, you know the discarded image and perfectly apropos. And what does it mean. What does it mean, trying to use your analogy what does the adolescent recover, if they do recover, and how does that connect to the maturation. And how does the adolescent. Come back to their parents. Right, so all of that, all of that, because, like, we need to. I know okay what is it to grieve what is it to go through a loss, I want to keep, what do you have to do. What do you have to do, like, and you often bring me down to that groundedness. Like what do we, like, what do you have to do, because we talked a lot about what grief means in connection to the sacred but I like, what do you have to do like what are the things you do. In respect to the discarded image, the realization that like in adolescence you’re in a liminal state, and that you need some kind of maturation that you don’t yet have. What does that virtue look like so that’s a lot, but I’m trying to, you know, do what you’re doing I’m trying to dance and give you some material back to work with. Yeah, well, what I would say is what keeps coming up is the notion of heartbreak. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. Okay, so let’s see. To be able to so to be mature is to be able to be kind of so funny to be saying these words, but I think we can do a good job of allowing the words to be said and then expanding on them so they’re sure for sure let’s trust each other on that. So, to be mature is to be able to stay in relationship with what is happening with relationships with experience with life, while maintaining an open heart. Right. So I want to do is I want to open the notion of open heart so it’s more meaningful. Right. And of course what that means is that you will have heartbreak. Yeah, yeah, close, if you close your heart one of the reason why you close your heart the reason why you close down your, your, your willingness to experience things is because you want to avoid heartbreak, and avoid the pain of grief. Yes. And hold on me see okay so let me give it an example. I mentioned, how does the adolescent return to his in this case parents. Right. And, you know, having kids is a big part of it. Yep, yep. I have a I have an 18 year old daughter. And she’s just getting ready to graduate so going off into that next stage of life. And I was just I was just remembering that. When I was that age when I went away to college. And my continuity of relationship with my own parents was very poor. Right. There was no internet there was no zoom calls. I drove home. I don’t know, three or four times a year. Right. Right. I called home, probably less almost never call anybody so I never called home. And that continued, I graduated from college I went to went to law school and I got married I moved to another place and so my, you know, the number of little the number of times that I was in relationship with my parents from the moment that I graduated from high school was your fingers and toes. Right, small, small number most frankly most of the time they had to do may take the effort. Right, right. And then I was just sitting there with my daughter, you know who, as a parent I love the way a parent does right the way that, you know, sacrificing yourself on the altar of parenting provides a level of connectedness to the sacredness of another human. Yep, for sure. It’s like, oh my god like she has a lot of me, which is to say, she’s very bad at maintaining contact. Right. If I don’t reach out to her she rarely reaches out to me. And I just had this grief heartbreak of imagining, you know, years and decades going by, and only like seeing her like this little flash. Oh, yeah, and the contact of who she is and who I am and our relationship fading. And that’s heartbreak right but that heartbreak then creates an empathy going the other direction. I’m like empathizing with my own parents experience of my being that and then heartbreak again of being oh my god, what a, what a tragedy of my own failing and not being able to honor the, and the beauty of that relationship and the care and love that they give and want to give and basically even just be able to know these people is most singular people to truly know who they are as an adult, right, because of course the child relationship with the parent is X, whatever it is, and adolescent relationship with the parent is Y, different, not a whole lot better. But the question is like who are they really like as you become capable of being in relationship with anybody can you actually be in relationship with those people who are like you in deep sense like you carry that lineage, like you carry the essence of their soul, and they’re going to die, right, at which point the ability to do that goes away. Like, just to feel the reality of that all the way down and to feel it from both sides like feel your own, you know your own children your own child and the possibility of the separation of that. And then mirror it back up, you know the agony of that is very powerful. Right. And that’s one thing that came up was just that that that feeling. Okay, so what was the next. Oh well let me just throw this out. This is just kind of a, frankly a fun one. But let’s not let us not forget that the long arc of the baby boomers. Right, has been a ruthless grasping onto adolescence. Yes, yes, as a generation probably the, as far as we know historically, the singular most committed to adolescence of any of any of this ever lived in our entire and holding our entire culture in that mode in every way. I would belong to the generation just after them. And it was like following a swarm of locusts. Where, by the time I got there, they had consumed what was available and moved on. You know, so we don’t have new textbooks in the high school anymore. They’re all, they’re all 10 years 20 years old right all that in the high school so it’s kind of Todrian a little bit worn down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the, you know, the beaches have rules that you can’t do the things you used to be able to do like, yeah. And by the way pop culture. Yeah, yeah, you know shifts and degrades and follows their proclivities and their profanities that we got exposed to as young people. So, just to put that out there that there’s a not not just a sort of one directionality and this notion of a prolonged adolescence but there’s there’s a particularity to it, I think it’s real, there’s a maturity specific maturity that’s asked being asked for. And it’s even, by the way, it’s even interesting like their own parents which when this gets to be the GI generation and the way that they ended life, like the invention of the retirement home. Yeah, yeah, moving of death out of, of reality. All of that loss of loss of eldership. Right. Yeah, very much. Yeah, so kind of stepping back and looping all the way back to the to the beginning. The, like the, the true like the deep acknowledgement the deep recognition of the unspeakable tragedy of life. And that’s just the reality that if you’re going to be open to experiencing life fully, you’re going to be setting yourself up for a world of pain. And that’s just life like literally you if you love someone. You’re now going to experience unbelievable grief that’s just what’s going to happen. Yes. And to be entering into a way to again to say yes to that, to be able to really really really say yes to reality. To say yes to life as it is as the nature of reality has these characteristics to it, and to be able to sort of, and that suffer in the in the Buddhists, in the sense that Buddha didn’t like right right right but but in the sense of just simply undergo to just live life, but live life with a with an orientation towards yes toward an orientation towards like yes and like I will I will continue to love. I will not shirk away from love, even though I know experientially with no avoiding it that to love is also to grieve instantaneously, like the act of one is the act of the other. At the minimum, you know, either your beloved or you are going to die. And the experience their acknowledgement of that is the severing of that and the suffering of that is going to be experience of the grief. And so in some really interesting sense we might say that the death of God is actually a beautiful offering, like a gift of an opportunity to be able to grow into the maturity to be able to say yes to the grief that comes from every other form of death that shows up in life. That’s beautiful. Bonhoeffer argued something like that about how Christianity needed to grow up. And he’s writing that from within the Nazi prison and they’re going to kill him. So he has every right to talk about facing reality. So, I, so that idea that you’re getting this affordance to confront confront the depth of loss. So, hold on to that. And then you had this other insight that really struck me which is, and we talked about this last time but you really did something really cool with it that might apply. You said like, when I’m in this grief. What I, what it does is it gives me an empathetic insight into my daughter forward. And it gives me an empathetic insight backwards to my parents. So this bi directional insight empathetic insight. And I was, I was, I was, I was sort of juggling in my mind, while also trying to keep in contact with you as like, well, what would be what would be the analog, like, are we, we, like, as, as, as, as our God is dying, does that give us the capacity to, like, do, like, what’s the what’s what are the what are the, like, there’s, like, do we do we more appropriately appreciate the ancestry that gave us that gift. And then, do, do we, do we try to see what, what in us is going to be is emerging and what are we giving birth to. And how do so because we’re identity, our identity stretch both ways. And it’s like, how does this law, this heartbreak, this heartbreak, how does it connect me. How does it allow me to more compassionately understand my, the, my, my spiritual ancestry and I’m struggling for terms here. And how does it help me to appropriately understand and afford my spiritual descendants. That what I thought is, I thought that was a really great insight. Yeah, I was seeing that that notion of lineage in in both directions and in a very great like over vast time scales. Yeah. And and what what comes into the middle of that, that emerges out of it is something like care. Yeah, yeah. And something like responsibility which I think are very closely related. And it’s something like you know as you to the degree to which this this to properly agree with the death of God, to the degree to which you enter into that grief. Honestly. And you. And then of course you actually feel it. There is a, an opening into this empathic connection. Right. Bi directionally. Which also opens up into the, oh, yeah, wow. I’m pretty sure we’re actually recapitulating some pretty like there’s theology that is kind of kind of before I remember seeing the image of the cross, and what that means, but And so the, you know, the, the opening up into and allowing oneself to be empowered by the death of God. Perhaps is the gateway to a true connection and empathic connection that has the sources and like, like, orients or guides the right relationship the relationships of care the relationships responsibility, both for all that has come. And in response to or in service of all that will come. And again, of course you have another child and the grandchild and go forward. It’s really nice that it’s not just theoretical it’s you’ve got the very practical, you got your actual parent and your actual child, and then you’ve got the, the notion of lineage. Yes, you have that notion of like how do you sit like how do you sit in the middle of where you are the moment that you’re in right now. And now we’re back to the notion of the sacred, to be able to enter into the relationships of care with the right like orientation the right discernment and the notions of responsibility Is is how you are able to be in relationship with with reality with with the world as sacred It sounds to me like you’re saying something else. That that ability through the death of God to come into the stereoscopic awareness of lineage and take up one’s care of it is precisely the virtue of maturity. Yes, that’s precisely it. That’s precisely what the virtue of maturity is. And so, I mean, what what’s being afforded then is I mean, we should be trying as much as we can then to deeply appreciate all of these transitions because every time there’s been a spiritual transition the upper Paleolithic transition the agrarian revolution the actual age, people were going through that death of God, and something else right was emerging. Yeah, there’s a long history of these. And we can more appropriately, like, we could, we could see our ancestry better. And then we can see, we can, maybe it would give us, maybe the aspect of looking forward is a bit of discernment. Can we look forward to our, the forward, the forward, the forward? I’ll call it this spiritual descendants. I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious. Right. But can we discern between what is coming after us that is like us but is going to be beyond us like the way your daughter is like you but beyond you, right, that we have that empathetic connection to. Right. But can we discern between what is coming after us that is like us but is going to be beyond us like the way your daughter is like you but beyond you, right, that we have that empathetic connection to. Right. So can we discern a difference between that and the thing we were talking about earlier, people, people who are stuck. People who, right, cannot enter into that proper reverence, reverential care for the lineage that I think we’re arguing constitutes spiritual maturity. So, Ian, did you and I talked about the the quote well behaved women rarely make history. No, no, that was that was another conversation let’s do it here because I think it’s it lands very nicely. So that is their quote I think it’s Margaret Mead. Right. And I had the insight recently like just in the past two weeks of, oh my gosh, my understanding of that has always been exactly the inverse of what I think is the proper understanding. My initial sort of superficial understanding was, and therefore, women should behave badly so that they can make history. Right, right, right. But if I, if I actually think about it deeply. What I realized is that, oh, bad behavior, the kind of behavior that makes history is in fact fundamentally wrong. Right, and that well behaved women were doing the right thing. And it’s the model of that is the model that we should be seeking towards. Right, though, stuck in this. What does what does the, what does it mean to endeavor to make history. What does it, what does it mean so you know the poem, Ozymandias. Right, Michelle. There’s two things that happen. One is that you strive egoically right this, the part of you that doesn’t want to pass away. Yeah, it wants to last forever. Yes, strives to carve itself deeply into some civilization to be remembered beyond your death, to be storied in history. And that’s only useful to the degree to which the civilization you carve into itself carries that same intent. So it carves itself into humanity forever. Yeah, it tries to you have to have it has to have that as intent. Right. Very much to ensure to guarantee to require that the future exists really only so much as it carries you forward with it. Yes, like the it’s imprisoning the future in a powerful way. Yes, it’s imprisoning the future in a very powerful way in a truly kind of demonic way, really. Well, that’s what comes out in the poem. Yes, exactly. The poem is like I remember reading that poem and going, Whoa, that’s it. I got it. You know, observe all the all of my great works you mighty and despair, like the lone and level sands. Look, what is it the lone and level sands or bare sand stretch far, far away. Yeah, right. Just, oh, I got a similar experience, just interject. I don’t think this is particularly good movie but I was watching the Titanic and there was two scenes that I thought Cameron got that were for me the whole movie. So there’s a scene where they sort of do a cutaway, and you see the back of the Titanic, and it is this. It is a Titanic machine. It is this vast ship and you’re all these levels and man working in these huge machine. Oh, how vast, the Titanic is, and then forward to the scene, which is the night before, like the dust with the two main characters are standing on the bow of the Titanic, and it’s just before it’s going to sink. And he does a helicopter camera shot me pulls away. And the Titanic is minuscule against the ocean and you went on and I remember going, Oh yeah, right. It’s not really big, but it’s nothing compared to the ocean. Yeah, getting that that sense. I got that same sense when I read autism and I asked by Shelley it’s like, yes, you’ve made this a huge statue, that’s going to carve, like you said your name for all of eternity, and it’s being filled up by this desert that just overwhelms it overwhelms it as it always will be. Yes, yes. Yeah. And so they say, Okay, well, what is, what does that mean? Well, what does it mean to have the other kind of almost the inverse intent? Yeah, what does it mean to have an intent where you choose to live your life, deeply, deeply acknowledging that your name will be remembered only by those who you loved and connected with most closely, and will fade very quickly. Like within a couple of generations, your name will return to the dust. Yes. But but your care is an authentic true care for the ongoingness of the thing that is most close like for the thing that is the most sacred. So you, you are just a part of that and to the degree to which the life itself or living this or whatever it is like that thing that vital essence continues to move forward in the world in the way that it needs to the way that each child is truly free to choose to live. And so you choose how they are going to be and who they’re going to grow into, and then enters into the same dynamic of separating from the past, going through a process entering into maturity and then re swearing themselves re orienting themselves to an oath to yay saying back into life, and thus it continues something like that. That’s beautiful. It made me think of when I was raising my stepson, and he was going through very difficult adolescence. And, and he had been very, he, you know, he was the, the, the, the divine child he was the way he was brought up by his mother and he’s, he’s a wonderful person I want to besmirch him in any ways, but I remember, I remember saying to him at one point, and then I’m going to make a point on this. I remember saying to him, I was saying, look, you don’t get this that the point isn’t about you being cool, because cool is adolescent fame. That’s what that’s that’s what cool means cool. There’s no cool is completely indexical what’s cool shifts around. What it refers to is adolescent fame, it’s being famous among the adolescents that’s what coolness is right. And I said, it’s not about being cool. You have to make yourself valuable to other people. If you want to be an adult. Right and and notice what you’re saying. So I’m hearing, I’m hearing what happens is the child child the childhood image that needs to be discarded is, how do things matter to me. How can I make the universe Ozzie Mondaius how can I make the universe continue to point to me and matter to me. And the whole shift you have to make is you have to go, no, no, no. Once I discard childhood is, how can I matter to something beyond me. And then I, like we’ve talked about this be in service to what has preceded me, and what will follow me. And that reminds me then of the core of a gapic love because the core of a gapic love is to realize that you are your ancestry is a gap a, and your future. Right. Your descendants are through your agape. So I’m just, I’m thinking about that in the, in the context of just, you know, being a parent, and particularly if a young child. Yes, yeah, actually, in specific I’m actually thinking about in terms of my wife, so being a mother of a young child, where you’re to be a good parent as we, as I think we know and agree is first and foremost to be and have that open heart. Yes, come always from a basis of love. Yep. And we need we need to be careful to sort of disambiguate that from. What would you call it like nicely, whatever you want to call it like indulgence that’s not the same thing right love is crucible is a hot thing love melts things. You know, as a mother, the necessity for that, to be able to actually commit to that and actually deliver on it is to go through heartbreak continuously. Yeah, your child will will break your heart, moment to moment to moment. Yeah, I mean to be able to be able just like to be with that and actually just kind of be so overfilled with love that your heartbreak itself doesn’t pull you even an iota off of that, so that you can actually just return back and return back it’s that you actually in this case become Christ on the cross. You become the God that sacrifices itself himself herself. In order to continue to be able to return right the sacrifice is to be able to return, you allow your heart to break, so that you can come back from that place of the deeper love to bring it back into service. Right and that taps into again how the heartbreak the grief takes us to the depths of our heart so we can reach into the depths of another person. So I’m starting to see some things drawing together here logos is taking shape between a God pay right the the right the the bi directional empathetic connection. The reverence for that lineage the part, the willingness to matter to it rather than have it matter to you, like all of these things are now sort of in my mind coalescing together, they’re starting to, like, I feel like we’re getting close to what it would be to become unstuck, what it would be to to reorient. Yeah, yeah, I can say that as a recovering adolescent I can, I’m even noticing that as I’m speaking part of me is pulling back. Fuck that man. It’s so funny like I even noticed over the past four or five years, every single time that something has gone, a relationship has moved into place where I feel regret. It has always been an adolescent response to the event has been at the core of it. And yet me. Yep, yep, yep. Yep. I’m going through something like that right now where I’m trying to take responsibility and emphasize an empathetic connection outwards and how I’m mattering to others, rather than the adolescent thing which is the thing about adolescence I mean I, because I’ve raised several I think the thing about adolescence is they, they, they want the privileges of an adult and they want the security of a child right and and they vacillate between it. And I think vacillation that kind of vacillation is precisely what we’re seeing in our culture, right where we speak as if we, we don’t have to go through any growth or transformation, we can just speak the sacred we we want full maturity privileges with respect to the, the adulthood of sacredness, as if we can just pronounce on these things, whereas other people had to go through decades long processes before they felt they were responsible enough to carefully speak about the sacred. So we have people who I can just talk about God and blah blah on that. And then we have other people who want no I just, I just want, I just want to be loved and adored by God I just want the universe to be a place that is constantly caring for me. And I feel I feel our culture vacillating back and forth. And again, similar to that, that place of adolescence and the way the adolescent gets stuck is the Peter Pan syndrome, right, the Peter Pan syndrome is, I want to keep all of this wonderful future open by never committing myself. And that way I don’t actually lose, right, I don’t actually lose all the magic of childhood and of course Peter Pan loses his shadow and we know what that means, even in Jungian terms, right, he can’t, he’s stuck in never never land because he will never grow up right. And so I see our culture, precisely because it vacillates with its with respect. I’m picking up on use there. One of the ways in which the adolescents towards the sacred is expressing itself is in this vacillation that keeps us stuck forever. It never let me throw another brand on the fire. Yeah. So this, this is the newest version of VR rig. Right, right, right. And my, my expert opinion tells me that this is now placing us at the, at the nub of the curve in VR. Right. This is the generation before the generation. So this is something that will achieve enough adoption enough use that the next generation that comes out will begin to become ubiquitous. Okay. Oh, that’s so dangerous. So, adolescent. Yeah. Adolescent wants the power of the adult and the responsibility of the child. Yes, exactly. Well, that is the if there is nothing, one of the things that happened one of the reasons why we killed God was to unlock our capacity to do that. Yes, our adolescent rebellion, and here I mean we was the West and about 500 years ago. And the goal was to pursue it with it with an unseeming recklessness. Power. Yeah, about equal responsibility. I think that’s well said. Yeah. And there’s a there’s a whole story about that, we can talk about what the game theoretic implications are of what happens if you don’t choose that path. There’s an obligation in fact to choose that path if you want to actually be at all in the context of, of what I call game a. But, but the point here is that this, and then I’ve also I’ve made this argument many times but now we’re getting pretty close to the, to the end is just think about the implications of cell phones and social media. The last big wave of power at absent adequate responsibility. Well said, well said may have already killed us. Right, we may actually already be dead, like our addiction, the addictive power of social media and mobile technology in the content in the In the consequence of what is Tristan Harris call it like mind one or something like that, like our own capacity to pass it to maintain our health and fight off the dopamine serotonin attention jacking systems that we that we are in relationship with, with the previous generation of technology is possibly inadequate and therefore it’s already done deal like we were, we’re done, the last human will die, staring intently at their cell phone. But even if that’s not true. Yeah, it will be true of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah true immersive VR environment, particularly with our spookily matrix like neural link Elon Musk work. Right, which is which would be the fully mature version of that. If we do not enter into that degree of power with a symmetric degree of responsibility. The technical term for that is we are fucked. Yeah, yeah, and we are not far from that. Right. So now what I’m doing is that and bring in the energy of this is this notion of grieving the This notion of grieving the death of God, this notion of entering into a level of maturity. This notion of, of using that grief to actually generate the capacity in ourselves and in in our population as a group to achieve a level of care for the sacred which in this case is going to be just for example, our kids and other people’s kids. Right. That’s necessary to engender the capacity to choose to have the responsibility equal to the power that is literally right in front of us. And I assure you that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, which is the company that produces this won’t slow down. No, no. So, that was, that’s a beautiful connection. Thank you for that. I think that what you’re saying is that technology will make stilted stuck adolescents even more addictive for us. And it will also partially get that kind of access to our core self, because of the way it can be a surrogacy for God, and the way it can take the place. Like you said, of a relationship to reality. Virtual reality, it’s literally called that, as opposed to the reality of virtue, which is what I’ve been talking about. Yeah, nice. Yeah, that’s a very good connection. So, greet. I mean, what that does is that lends a degree of urgency to, we need to properly grieve the death of God. I mean, the the the enlightenment deal was precisely a severing right the pursuit, it was the It was the Ozymandias pursuit of power that no longer felt it had it bore any responsibility to the parental world that had given birth to it that the enlightenment saw itself as, you know, you know, burn like Voltaire said you know, committed to the flames right, you know, burning the past in order to make the utopic future, which is also not a proper relationship to the future because the utopic future you and I have talked about it is not that it is to imprison the future. It is to not allow the future to be other than you. It is to try and inscribe yourself into the future perpetually. So I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I think that that that that piece of technology, you held up is kind of is hyper modern to throw another new modernism on to right in the in the way in which it’s taking that The destruction of our care for lineage and just accelerating it and then in to me, I see in a surrogacy that will prevent us from properly grieving So that we can identify with our parents and our kids and disappear into the lineage that we participated. I think that’s what I’m hearing you say. That is what I’m saying. Very much so. And by the way, I’m not saying that there is no goal. No, I put this in this I put this in the category of, you know, psycho technology. Yeah, I put it put it in the category of like, you know, LSD and ayahuasca and cannabis and dancing at the firelight and staring at the stars and things like that. Which is to say that if we are able to enter into a shamanic relationship, you know, or it’s funny when I was talking about this with Zack Stein earlier, I found myself for whatever reason the aesthetic was actually a medieval Islamic aesthetic. Yeah. And the relationship of care for in particular because you know the the the Quran includes stories about the jinn. Yes. Yeah. So for for for Islam, the notion of the sort of supernatural realms where there’s demons and you know, gin and all kinds of things. And there’s stories about how as a as an alchemist, right, which is a, you know, an Arabic word as an alchemist as you are in relationship with those kinds of worlds, right, you got to be careful. Yep. Yep. And what do you do when someone when a when a when a gin asks your true name? How do you navigate the relationship? So you’re in a relationship with the real world. And that’s that that that that aesthetic is the aesthetic that level of carefulness. Yeah, but also skillfulness like deafness is the aesthetic that is appropriate for dealing with this, which is precisely the same kind of thing. Yeah. But then also as a creator, right, if I’m producing these kinds of things, I have a shamanic level of care for all the other people who will be using the virtual world. And so I’m not going to be using the virtual world, but I’m going to be using the virtual world to create a relationship with the virtual world. Right. And I think these things are all very closely tied together, like in some sense, what we’re talking about is in the maybe the macro loop is, you know, the relationship between the virtual world and the virtual world. And so I think that’s the way that we’re going to be dealing with this. And I think these things are all very closely tied together, like in some sense, what we’re talking about is in the maybe the macro loop is it is most needful. Now in this moment, to at long last awaken from the adolescence of our civilization. Yeah, and to choose to step into maturity, which first and foremost means re establish our right relationship with if you can just the notion of the sacred first, you don’t have an intrinsic allergic reaction to it. But actually, okay, so what’s be curious about what’s happening here? And what’s that mean? What does it look like? And then begin to actually step into it, which is going to require and this is I guess the key idea is going to require a true journey of allowing of heartbreak, a true journey of truly reopening yourself from all the other things that you’ve been through. And so I think that’s the key idea is to really re opening yourself from all of the addictions and all of the numbingness and all the distractions that have have separated you from life, which by the way, is itself the most tragic thing. You know, I remember having the realization the true deprecation of the portion of my life that was wasted watching stupid television in the 80s. And I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the TV show, and I remember watching the and then rebuild cutting because getting the Because connecting with the And then rebuild And then rebuild of being actually able to be steer ourselves to the super normal world that we have created for ourselves without constantly distracting ourselves from the hard stuff that our heart wants to avoid so that it doesn’t have to endure a heartbreak but rebuild the capacity to truly grieve and understand the energy the say the fundamentally sacred potency of grief as the orienting basis towards a higher empathy that allows you to enter into true relationships of care. That was beautifully said. I thought that was a great summative statement. I thought that was excellent. Well done. That was really good. That was really good. I’m glad. All right. Now I’m going to go back to playing video games and avoiding life. Okay. Thank you. It was a tough gig. Yeah. This was very good and I like the way I’m happy with the way we took care of the proposal because I thought it weaved the other two part one and part two together very nicely. So thank you very much. Yeah. That was a lot of fun. I look forward to finding out other kinds of games we can play together. Yeah, me too. Okay. I’m in.