https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BIrQeHmoKqc
So, welcome to Voices with Revaki. It’s my great pleasure to have JP Marceau on with me. So, I first met JP via Paul Van der Kley. He was on Paul Van der Kley’s channel talking about how he was proposing a form, a particular philosophy of mine, panpsychism as a response to the meeting crisis. And then JP and I had a couple of really wonderful conversations comparing the deep continuity hypothesis to panpsychism and also some theism and non-theism. And then he and Mary Cohen and I had a couple of excellent conversations around that specific topic. And I’ve always been impressed by his carefulness of thought and his willingness to consider seriously and with respect views that he initially disagrees with. I think he exemplifies the Socratic ideal in a lot of important ways. And so part of what I want to do is get more people aware of JP’s work. One of the things we’ll talk about today is he’s now, are you the editor or what’s your title for that blog? It’s the editor-in-chief. We’re a team of editors and I’m the one in chief. The editor-in-chief of Jonathan Pagio’s Symbolic World blog. So we’ll let JP talk about that. So JP, why don’t you say a little bit more about yourself and then perhaps segue into your role as editor-in-chief and what you see that blog doing, what you’re trying to accomplish with it. Maybe we can get into a particular example like I was suggesting of one of your more recent postings. So take it away, JP. Yeah, sure. Thanks for the invitation and thanks for the kind introduction, John. I have a background in philosophy. There’s a lot more on that whole story on John’s, sorry on Paul’s channel for those who are interested. But basically, my first background is in the art sciences, especially mathematics and computer science. And then just because I was interested by more philosophical topics, philosophical questions, then I ended up doing masters in philosophy. Through this, it was around the time when Jordan Peterson and Jonathan and you and Paul sort of started to pop up. So I got interested by you all, got in touch with Jonathan two, three years ago maybe, especially since we were both in the same province. We were able to meet in person as well. And yeah, as you said, over the last year, we’ve had a few conversations. And around the time of our first conversation, I started to make YouTube videos about my own thought process, what that helped me overcome my personal meaning crisis through especially penpsychism and symbolism with Jonathan and so on. And then I tried to detail that over the last year, especially the, I would say over the last year has been mostly art metaphysical issues. It’s purely theoretical. And around the point of our last discussion, John, I wanted to start doing things that were more practical and less just theoretical. It’s an important issue that I think we’ll talk more about in this whole discussion. And what happened, my first reflex really after our discussions, because to give some context for people who may not be familiar with it, we ended up exploring, I was coming from a penpsychist background in philosophy of mind. And I had matched that up with some, especially some Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics to dive into Christian practices. And then in the course of our discussions, we ended up trying to figure out more precise bridges between naturalism and Christianity. I was using, as I said, penpsychism, some Thomism to get from a sort of physicalism to Thomism and penpsychism. But in the course of our discussions, it became clear that another bridge, which was probably easier to make was using neoplatonism. So we converged on, especially John Scutus’ original. And I felt that this was a stable enough point, metaphysically speaking, that for a while it would be good to try to apply this metaphysics to practice, try to not only know more about what is ultimate reality and how to cultivate virtue and wisdom, but try to actually use these metaphysical insights to become more virtuous and more wise. It was at least worth trying to practice it. And so my first reflex, of course, coming from a Christian background, was to just get more involved into my community and doing the regular Christian practices while keeping this whole neoplatonic metaphysics in mind. So I can work through things and practice and associate the abstract ideas with the things that I’m actually doing with my body, the things I’m actually participating in. And then the pandemic happened. So lots of the traditional practices were disrupted, but it still leaves place for more individual practices, and especially symbolism. So the timing for that came pretty well. I think Jonathan told me about this just a month or two before the lockdown started. And the genesis of the blog really is, as Jonathan was making videos, some people started a Facebook group to discuss those ideas. And eventually, Jonathan started to look at this Facebook group from time to time, and he noticed that the quality of the posts were often very good. And as the community was growing, he wanted to find a way to promote this. And he had the idea of creating a blog for it on his Symbolic World website. So that’s why we talk often. So in one of our conversations, he mentioned it, and he proposed that I could be the editor for it. And I, of course, accepted because it’s a good way, symbolism is a good way to bridge between theory and practice. One way of seeing it is that we use categories that we use to see the world with all the time. For instance, one I like to use is the head-body symbolism. We’re familiar with the fact that our head exists on the one, it’s a member like all of our other members, like our hands, our hearts, and so on. But it also has a special place in that it is somehow linked up with our minds. We don’t have to get into the precise theories, whether you’re a panpsychist or so on. But the fact is that there’s a certain hierarchical relationship between our head and our bodies. And we’re all to some extent familiar with it because we all have heads and bodies. And then we can try to use that, that embodied perception we have of ourselves and try to apply it to some other relationships that are at other scales. So in a Christian context, this symbolism of head and body is often used to describe the church, for instance, where Christ is the head of the church, is the top of all of the members. So symbolism allows us to take something that is embodied, a certain perceptual apparatus we have of, let’s say, ourselves, and we try to use it to seek other things as well. And conversely, this can be useful the other way around. If, for instance, you have the idea that Christ is the head of the church, and there’s an old story in there where Christ is a man like other men in a group, is a member like the other members, you could say. But at the same time, you will gather all of them under one principle, under one divine principle, I would say ultimately. But yeah, and in gathering this, and you will do this in a particular story. And then I try to link this story to our own. So our perceptual apparatus of this story can then be linked up to our perceptual apparatus of our heads and our bodies. So we could go into much more details there, but I just wanted to throw out the basic idea of symbolism allowing us to take some abstract metaphysical ideas, like how it is that the ground of being, like the ground of intelligibility, Christ, could be linked up to people, to us, in the same sort of relationship that our mind is related to our bodies. Do you see a bit where I’m going with this? I do. I think it’s very clear. There’s lots I want to talk to you about that. We can talk a little bit more in a minute about symbolism per se. But could you say a little bit more about explicating and explaining how symbolism specifically helps you to bridge between theory and practice? I see how it’s bridging between abstract concepts and more embodied concepts. That’s not quite the same thing as bridging between theory and practice. So how does symbolism bridge between theory and practice? Okay, interesting question. Maybe it would help if I gave another example. Well, it’s going to slightly change my question. Maybe I’m being unfair on my question. That’s why I interrupted. Sorry. There’s a way in which I might be unfair to you because I might oppose my questions incorrectly. Perhaps it would be better to say how would the practice of symbolism integrate between sort of metaphysical theorizing and everyday existence or everyday life? Okay. I think it would be useful to give another example, which we touched on at some points in our discussions with Mary. Yes. It’s good to take sort of intermediary steps. And something we do in communal practices like could take, yeah, I’ll take the setting of a church because I’m more familiar with it, but I think we could do the same sort of exercises with movies or other sorts of symbolic practices. In the case of a church, for instance, I can take some abstract metaphysical ideas we discussed with neoplatonism. So the idea that somehow the ground of being and the ground of intelligibility interact and will manifest themselves in different ways. So for instance, in the case of Christian metaphysics, we would say that the ground of intelligibility and the goal of being manifested themselves in Christ, in the person of Christ. In other settings, maybe you could say that those are manifesting themselves through Plato. Anyways, the idea is that through, if you think that those different aspects of, if you take the idea of the ground of being and the ground of intelligibility can manifest themselves, especially in the church, then while I go in the church, I can try to see how different symbols in the church allow me to see how the ground of being and the ground of intelligibility are manifesting themselves to me in that setting. So I’m going through things with my body. Maybe I’m standing with a lot of people around me, and we’re all looking at, for instance, maybe I can take an extreme example of taking the, okay, maybe there’s a cross on the back door, the actions at the back door, just the back wall. Then there’s the priest, and then maybe the priest is holding the Eucharist or the wine, for instance. Okay, and on the one end, you could look at this all as, okay, well, there’s wood on the back wall, shaped like a cross. Then there is a person, there’s a priest, and then there’s a piece of flat bread, and then there’s a bunch of people in front of it just staring at it. So if you were to look at it at the physical level, that’s what you would see. But if you look at it, let’s say bump it up a layer to the communal layer, the social layer, and what you see is a group of people, the laity in the assembly, then you also have the priest. So now you see a bunch of people were gathered around something, around bread and wine in this case, and you can start to see something like the head and the body ear, where everyone is gathered in the head, in the Eucharist, through the priest. And also we’re informed by this. We bring a lot of our own thoughts, what happened in our days, in our weeks, and so on, through this experience. But this common experience of also looking at the same thing altogether, especially looking at something very simple, through which we think God is manifesting in himself, will also add impacts on us back in the same way that I gather tons of information from my different members through my head, and then I will also feed that back and my members will act the way I intend to. And then, so we started from the physical layer of just people, wood, bread, and so on. Then we moved up to the social layer, a bunch of people organized together around the altar, around bread and wine. And then we can link it up to an even higher metaphysical level of creation and creator. So we would see that the bread and the wine through the priest is actually a manifestation of the ground of being and the ground of intelligibility itself. So you have the ground of intelligibility manifesting itself through the communal layer, where lots of people are gathered around a certain thing, around the bread and the wine. And then this trickles down to the individual or the physical level, where the different people will be impacted by this. So I took three different metaphysical layers of just objects or people, and then to a community. And then I tried to link it up to the cosmic level of creator and creation. I can do this on the one end, because we had our discussions on metaphysics over the last year, where I can see more how it is that the ground of being could possibly manifest himself through layers. And I’m using symbolism. I’m using the way that my head and my body are related together metaphysically, where I have a mind that exists at the higher level than just my body. This relationship of the higher mind to the lower body is the same thing that allows me to go between the layer of the individual people in an assembly to one assembly to something more abstract. And then you’ve got more abstract taking all of this and linking it up to God. Okay, that was very helpful. So let me see if I can sort of say what I got from that back to you. And what I heard you saying is, the practice of symbolism is actually the practice of ritual, where ritual isn’t just action. Ritual is also shaping how you’re perceiving and conceiving of things. And so you’re both acting, but you’re also sense-making at the same time. And you’re doing this in a way that allows you to make connections of understanding between different levels, ontological levels, within people’s experience and existence. And so that, have I understood you? Yes, yes, that’s good. And this is a practice also in the sense that doing this in the special arena of the church allows us to, once we were able to make these symbolic bridges between the levels of being in the church, it’s a lot of us better do it outside of church as well. Once we’ve practiced doing it in that setting, we can exact this and do it in other things as well. So a direct example would be, this will have shaped your perception of just other people. Once you see other people in the same community with you under God, it changes your perception of people in general. The people you see on the street, they’ll be different. And we can also think about more abstract things. Like I published a funny article this morning about white people would burn cell phone towers. And of course, the story that they will typically give about this is that there are various conspiracy theories that accuse 5G waves of either causing the virus or weakening our immune system, which will then cause the virus to spread. Whatever, they give a physical level explanation. But if you’re familiar with symbolism and the idea to cross between those different layers of being, when I read about this, it just seemed obvious to me because I had practiced symbolism in the setting of the church. It was obvious to me that those people were sensing the way in which cell phone towers have a social level impact on people. And then because we’re not very good nowadays at translating physical level phenomena at other levels, we’re not very good at looking at social level or cosmic level phenomena. We just try to cast it down into the physical layer. So people blame 5G electromagnetic waves because we’re not good in general at looking at the other levels of being or taking them seriously. But I think it’s fairly obvious how the cell phone towers could contribute at the social level in the COVID crisis, for instance. There are several ways in which it does so. It helped just the virus itself spread in the sense that cell phones allow us to travel more easily. Communication between people is easy. Travel is easy. I can go to another country and keep working as I would. I can travel easily if I want to. So people can more easily move around and this can, on the one hand, spread pathogens. That’s true. And at the other levels of the, you can also see this at other levels of the crisis. For instance, the fact that government can use modern technologies to track people on their cell phones, to see are people following the social distancing rules and so on. Also, the government can disseminate information really quickly to people. So people can feel themselves sort of trapped by this. There’s also the fact that lots of people have become pacified because of modern technologies such as cell phone. People have lost, for instance, social interactions with other people. They’re pretty happy just watching Netflix or doing not recommendable things on the internet. And because of this, they don’t mind as much the enforced social distancing. We can also think about all the social media panic, which made people even more happy to just sort of anchor down and stay inside. So there are all kinds of real impacts that cell phone towers have had on the crisis. But you don’t have to look at the physical layer to find it. It’s psychological and social level phenomena. And then it’s not too surprising looking at this, that people would intuit, even if they can’t articulate it symbolically like I just did, that they will intuit that cell phone towers have a role to play in this crisis. And that some of them would even go so far as to just burn down the cell phone towers. And it’s even the same sort of move that you can see, for instance, in the Old Testament, when the Jews would from time to time notice their idolatry and then they would burn down their idols. But nowadays, people sense that there is something wrong. But because they can’t articulate it symbolically well, they also can’t analyze it well. So they don’t see the good social impacts that cell phone towers also have. The fact that technology also helps us against the virus. It can help people work remotely, for instance, so people don’t just lose everything because they have to anchor down. And I think it exemplifies our… We have a common fight here, whether you’re a panpsychist or a neoplatonist or a non-reductive physicalist. Most people today really tend to try to bring things down to the physical layer. And it prevents us from seeing social level phenomena that are real. And then we cast it down in all kinds of wrong ways. For instance, in people trying to burn down cell phone towers. That’s really interesting. This goes towards a discussion I had with one of my Patreon subscribers. He was criticizing me in a constructive way because I was seeing this kind of behavior and you acknowledge this generally factor as being built out of conspiracy theory kind of thinking. And I was trying to indicate how when people are… We’ve got experimental research showing when people’s sense of a grasp on reality or the meaningful structure to break down, they’re prone to conspiracy theories. They’re prone to seeing patterns that aren’t there. And he said while he acknowledged that, and you already did too, that that’s a factor that my account wasn’t taking into account the fact that a lot of these people are doing exactly what you described, JP. They’re burning the towers down symbolically. The towers represent, as you said, sort of an incoherent understanding of nebulous social factors and political factors and economic and technological factors that are somehow part of, right, or associated with the sense of the world now being threatening, being ominous, and that’s being exacerbated by the meeting crisis. And so what people are striking at that, they’re not just acting out of a conspiracy theory, they’re acting out of sort of a symbolic displacement, if you’ll allow me some Freudian language, because that’s what I think you’re invoking an idea that I think was first really made clear by Freud about how people can do symbolic displacement. As you said, they can burn the towers because they have an incoherent, unarticulated sense of them somehow being involved in, again, this nebulous, ambiguous things going wrong. Yeah. So that, before we move on to investigate that, that brings to mind an observation that sounds like your point is similar to Corban’s point about the imaginal, especially because it’s not in your head. These people aren’t doing things in their head, they’re enacting things in the world, right? And Corban’s point was that the imaginal, the enacted symbolism, actually bridges between the sensible world and the intelligible world. Because part of what you articulated there is people are trying to rise, I’ll use the metaphors, they’re trying to rise above the sensible world, they’re trying to grasp more abstract patterns and relations and systems of being, but they are not used to that and they can’t get to a pure intelligibility, they can’t get to sort of the pure abstract thought. And so what they do is they reach for, and this was also a haunt, I would say, they reach for the symbolic. Symbolon is to join, right? And part of what Corban was arguing that symbols don’t just join domains of thought together, they join together levels of being. They make the perceptible ready for the intelligible, and they make the intelligible ready for the perceptible. Does that work for you then? Yeah, yeah, I agree. And part of the reason why this works, I think, is that this happens within ourselves. Like I was talking just about our head. The head is a symbol that does precisely this, that takes things that exist at the physical layers, I have my nerves, my cells, and so on, all kinds of stuff that happens at the physical level. And that somehow brings it up to the mind level. No matter what the exact relationship is between mind and body, it definitely goes through the head, through the symbol of the head. So the head bridges between those layers. And I think so do tons of physical artifacts, like cell phone towers, like churches. And so to spell maybe more precisely what I think is the relationship that causes bad symbolism, like people burning cell towers, is I think they have a good symbolic intuition at the start, that they feel that there is something connecting the physical layer of humans and cell phone towers to the communal level of the COVID crisis. But because they’re not aware that this is happening this way, then they sort of lose their symbolism. It collapses into bad symbolism that try to cast itself back down into just the physical layer. And you end up saying that the cell phone towers are involved physically in the crisis, and then you can’t deal with the problem correctly. You just burn down the towers and you expect things to be better. But of course, they turn out better. When the ancient Israelites, for instance, would burn down the idols, they would replace them by something else. They weren’t aware that this wasn’t just a physical issue, that the idol, the fact that they were gathered around the golden calf, for instance, that this was bringing them together at the communal level in a way that wasn’t good, in a way that wasn’t sufficient. So after they burned down the sacred cow, they would make something else. They would gather around another principle. They would gather around God. And this would indeed solve the issue. But today, because we’re not that good at this sort of symbolic thinking, this kind of navigating the different layers of being, people burn the cell towers and don’t do anything. They expect things to be better. But of course, they’re not. So what you just said and what I said seems to converge on this idea, which I think is a point I’m getting for Corbett, that you’re talking about people lacking a particular, let’s call it a virtue. And what I mean by that is a sensitivity, a set of skills, even a way in which they identify things. So sensitivity, skills, and self are all involved in virtue in some fashion. So people are lacking a particular virtue. And it sounds to me like that what people are lacking is a capacity for metaphysical reflection. So what is it that is preventing them from, because you said that they sort of reach up, but they’re actually not, they can’t be, what I’m saying is this is similar to the argument that Chris and Philip and I made in the zombie book, that the zombie expresses the meeting crisis, but it doesn’t give people any theoretical or reflective understanding. It is expression without understanding. And it sounds to me that that’s like what you’re attributing to the people who are burning down the towers. They’re expressing something, but it’s expression without understanding. And therefore, it’s a kind of bullshit, because it’s again, it’s expression without understanding. So I get that. But then it seems to me that what’s lacking in that model, and I know this is going to sound ruthlessly self-promotional about the two of us. And so we have to be careful about that. But what’s lacking in that model is philosophy, not as an academic enterprise, but philosophia as the project of trying to cultivate virtues of deep understanding. And precisely because people don’t have that kind of philosophical education, again, I’m not talking about academic philosophy per se, right? That that is precisely what prevents them from being capable of what you called good symbolism. Another way of putting it, if symbolism is sort of readying the perceptible for the intelligible and readying the intelligible for the perceptible, you need experience moving into the intelligible and also returning from the intelligible. Obviously, I’m doing a neoplatonic move here. You see what I’m arguing? Yeah, I agree. Okay, so that means that therefore there is a deep interconnection between the practice of symbolism and the practice, I like to call it phileosophia rather than philosophy, because we’re talking more about, right, we’re not talking about an academic enterprise of just doing meta-theoretic reflection. We’re talking about an existential enterprise and trying to cultivate wisdom, deep understanding, not fall into deep self-deception. Is that okay? So it sounds like there’s an emerging argument here between the practice of symbolism and the practice of phileosophia. And then I’m wondering, what does that, this is not meant to be a trick, we’re friends, right? What does that say then about religion? Because what we’ve got is we’ve got symbolism and you acknowledge, you just acknowledge it with your example, that people can partake in symbolism outside of religion and of course you have phileosophia outside of religion. We’ve had many discussions around that and you happily acknowledge that. And then it seems that we’ve at least got an argument that the relationship between symbolism and phileosophia is necessary. So my question is, is it also sufficient? And if it is sufficient, what’s religion for? And if it’s not sufficient, in what way is it not sufficient and does religion supply what is missing? Does my question make sense? Yeah, can you repeat it? So what I said is, this is also me trying to practice a new kind of argumentation where we try to draw things together into convergence rather than just debate it, right? And so the idea here is, given what we’ve said, it looks like there’s an argument emerging between us, a necessary relationship between symbolism or at least good symbolism as a practice and phileosophia. So we’ve got an argument for the necessity of it. This then brings up a question, is that also sufficient? And if it’s not sufficient, what’s still missing? That’s the first part of the question. And is it the case that you see something in religion that’s missing that was missing in the conjunction of phileosophia and symbolism? Is that what’s done? Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the difference is, it probably wouldn’t matter at our scale. I believe the idea is that different systems, different ecosystems of practices, different religions or different thought systems will have different metaphysics and different symbolic systems to reach from one metaphysical layer to the other. And then it will be more of a question to see which one does the best job or which one can reach the highest. And I think that for the most part, plenty of people could do just fine with symbolic systems outside of religion. I do think that for now, it looks to me like the best systems we have to train people this way are from religions, because they’re already established. That’s one way of seeing it. You already have people who have, you have buildings to practice in, you have philosophers who have written books to explain the metaphysics to you, you have people to discuss this with, you have also established also symbolic systems that you have established people who can explain this symbolism. Jonathan does it well today, but you can also find church fathers who did that as well. And I think that the Christian system especially can do that pretty well. But we also we see also tons of places where this isn’t done well in Christianity as well. But I think there are other systems that did this well. I think Neoplatonism also had symbolic religious sizes. Oh, it does. It does, yeah. In addition to the theory, you have theoria, which are contemplative practices, and then you have theurgia, which are ritual practices that are designed to exactly what you talked about, enact the relationship, explicitly to enact the relationship between the various metaphysical levels, between the perceptible and the intelligible via the symbolic. So that’s clearly the case. So I want to make sure that I’m understanding you. So you seem to, I seem to hear you say that the conjoining of the symbolic with phileosophia, with symbolization with phileosophia could be sufficient for people. But in practical terms, it’s not because that sufficiency is also a matter of, to use Paul’s terms, scalability, having established institutions, having established traditions to provide sort of pedagogical guidance and exemplification of how to bridge between those two. Is that fair? Yes, yes, because I don’t see any convincing argument I could give to prevent non-Christian systems to do this. And I think that this Christian symbolic system is is very good. And I have, I would have suspicions that other systems could do better, but I don’t have any sort of hardline argument against it. Right. Well, thank you. I mean, that’s one of the things I like about you. You’re intellectually humble, and you’re honest about what you can assert, and what you just have an opinion for. And I think that’s admirable. Okay, so then, so that means that there’s a real pluralism here. But, and I don’t want to force you, because you have admitted you don’t have any, like, argument to propose on this, but you do have an intuitive sense. And so I’ll take it within that framework. So here’s my question then, right? What, so we’ve seen that, you know, if people get practice, right, in moving, you see what I’m doing here, I’m doing something synoptic integration that you find within cognitive science, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s very much the analog that I’m using here. And so it would be sort of symbolic synoptic integration or something like that. But anyways, the relationship between symbolism and phileasophia, that you do have a sense that there’s something in Christianity that’s really good about that interpenetration, inter-refort of phileasophia and symbolism. And I get that you’re not claiming exclusivity or anything. And I get that you’ve already said that. So I’m not trying to box you in. But now this is meant as a genuine open question. What is it you think that Christianity, other than the things you’ve already mentioned, because other, other, all the other systems also have traditions and guides and exemplars, right? So what is it that you think Christianity is doing particularly well? And you did admit, and I want to acknowledge, that it can go wrong. So I’m trying to pull up from you a piece from you, a more fine-grained analysis of how do we know when it’s going well? And how do we know when it’s going right, such that you have an intuition that by and large, Christianity is doing it well? Is that better for you? It might be? Yeah, that’s very good. I mean, we can try to work through this together. I’m sure you’re gonna have lots of interesting things to say on this. Okay. So there, I think there will be something, okay, very special, obviously, about Christ, about the person of Jesus Christ, the basic idea that he is both the son of man who emerged from the earth, from matter, through Israel, through Mary, through the man Jesus Christ, and also from the top metaphysical layer, from the uncreated itself, down to through heaven, which is like the invisible stuff, the forms, all the patterns, then to the divine nature of Christ, and that those two will meet together. So there is this idea in Christianity that the center of the religion is someone who unites those two extremes, so someone who unites all of the different layers of reality. So the basic idea that we always have to, yeah, I think it will be the basic fact that we always have to wrestle with those two aspects of Christ that obliges us to always deal with those symbolic exercises. And I think, you know, we end up with different levels of proficiency, and I think this is where it can start to go bad, where, of course, not everyone in the queue will know all of those very abstract metaphysical ideas, not everyone has the time to study all of this, not everyone has the desire or maybe the capacities to go through all of these abstractions. So for some people, it will be simply the fact that somehow Jesus is both man and God, and unites the two, I don’t know how, but I can practice it, and I know people around me who are smarter who can explain it, so that’s fine with me. Okay, so I just want to throw, you made a good point, so I never put this quite clearly together explicitly in my mind the way you just did, that a symbolon, right, sorry, just give me a sec, the symbolon, right, the way the symbolon works, the way it affords a bridge, we use the metaphor, between the intelligible and the perceptual, it also allows it to be scalable in the way that Paul, VanderKlaai talks a lot about, right, so the same symbol, right, can be taken up into very abstract theology, but it can also just be taken into everyday cognition and consciousness. Is that a fair point? That’s fair. Okay, and so then one more point that comes from this, and this came out in my recent discussion with Paul, right, that insofar as symbols are aspirational for us, insofar as they’re trying to call us, as you said, to virtue, to being something better than we are, they can function well if they have a, sorry, I don’t mean this to be insulting, if they have a personified, right, if that symbol is personified for us, because what we’re aspiring to is ultimately greater personhood, and so having the symbol personified also makes it aspirationally powerful for us, so the symbol of Christ in that sense makes it scalable to the, both for the abstract theologian, because they ultimately rely on it, but also for the person in the pew, and I don’t mean that to be insulting at all, just using an example, and simultaneously by having it personified, it enhances its aspirational power for us. Is that fair so far? Yeah, I think that’s fair. I haven’t thought about the fact that, yes, it allows us to better aspire. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I think that’s good, because it allows us to get drawn into this symbol, and then we can use it to reach higher or lower. That’s right, so it’s really this, it allows me to get drawn into the symbol and to identify with the symbol, which of course St. Paul famously talked about, but at the same time it’s there as an ongoing potential for me to move up from concrete practice to abstract reflective thought, right? Yeah, yeah, and so what you’re arguing is that the figure of Christ does that well, because it has both of those dimensions well articulated. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah, and sort of the, yeah, I think especially the fact that in the symbol of Christ, you will reach like maximally high and maximally low, like you’ll reach the, even the Eucharist, just a piece of bread that will die in you, so you reach down to the sort of the bare level of just bare potential from which Christ can emerge and to which he will fall, and yeah, to which he will be digested, so you go to the lowest, from the lowest to the highest, and I don’t see this in other religions, because for instance in, I don’t, God is never personified in Judaism, I mean personified, he’s never like incarnate in a man, doesn’t reach very low in Judaism, and in Buddhism that you have the Buddha, but you don’t claim that the Buddha is God, same, you could say the same about Plato. Well, we can talk about Buddhism and Neoplatonism in a sec, yeah, so and now I bring this up, and I bring this up just as Devil’s Advocate Boyle, and you know that there’s no insult intended, because let’s take a look at something, you know, our universally accepted example of where symbolism goes wrong, I’m thinking of Nazism and the figure of the Fuhrer, the Fuhrer, the leader, and the Fuhrer represents both, right, you know, the fatherland, and ultimately the Aryan race, and ultimately the destiny of humanity, but he’s also a concrete specific person giving instruction here and now, and the mass of people can relate to him, because he’s just a regular person, he’s just Adolf Hitler, but he’s also the Fuhrer, and so you can also get abstract reflection about these abstract principles by which being is governed, and he allows people to aspire, you have the Hitler Youth, right, you’ve got all of that, it looks very, very similar, I mean, part of, I would argue that’s not happenstance, I think Nazism got a lot of its power, because it was basically a perversion of a lot of Christianity, you know, and it takes place in Germany within the product Lutheran, all that stuff, and I talk about Nazism, but you see what I’m trying to do here, I’m trying to say the very argument that I could give for Christ, right, as devil’s advocate, I can also give for the Fuhrer, and yet this is considered to be something you, I know you advocate, and I also know you would want to reject the Nazism, as this seems to be, so it looks like the criteria we have brought out don’t distinguish good symbolism from bad symbolism, yeah, it just sort of distinguishes between powerful symbolism and not powerful symbolism, exactly, exactly, now that’s important, that’s relevant, because presumably one unnecessary feature of a good symbol is that it’s a powerful symbol, but it’s not sufficient, we haven’t got to sufficiency yet, and so I said let’s put aside the comparisons to Buddhism or Neoplatonism right now, but let’s just try and work on, okay, we’ve got features that bring out power, but not, and I acknowledge that’s a necessary thing, right, but it’s not, we haven’t achieved anything like sufficiency of what makes good symbolism, is that fair? Yeah, yeah, I think that’s fair, so I guess there are two directions we could go, we could either try to look at how morality fits into it, how virtue is actually developed within those different symbolic systems, or maybe we could try to explore by how, and maybe that may be a roundabout way to get to virtue anyways, but the other way would maybe be to see where, at which point the symbolism can reach, like how high can it go, and then I would argue that, let’s see, Nazism can bring you at the highest through Hitler to like the domination of the world or something like this, but it won’t bring you to the ground of being, like it will stop, it will fall short, so. Okay, so there’s two potential things, and I agree with your intuition that they’re probably related, and I think they’re both on the right track, just as an intuitive sense, that doesn’t mean I’ll turn out to be right or you’re turn out to be right, but it’s a bit, intuition is at least a sense that let’s go here rather than there, okay, so what the second point you made was basically the point of idolatry, it’s sort of a philician point, that a symbol, right, it can be very powerful, but if it actually blocks you from what Tillich would call ultimate concern, coming into right relationship with what is ultimate, then it’s ultimately idolatrous, and then the other thing you made is, and this goes back to the point, and this is why I think there’s something right to it, I can get a little bit more justification for the claim though, the connection to virtue, because we did say that we were talking about a relationship between a philosophia and civilization, that they need each other, and at the core of philosophy of course is the love of wisdom, and then I have the idea that virtue is the beauty of wisdom, I’ve been making that argument elsewhere, each virtue is a specific way in which we’re wise in a specific circumstance, and so that we could ask, and see notice how those two come together, and you’re going to like this perhaps better than I would, but I believe in Socrates, we should follow the argument where it should go, because there’s a place where these come together, the cultivation of virtue, which is, right, I think as, you know, I think it ultimately as wisdom, enhanced brotherhood, this realization, seeing what the right thing is to do, and also seeing yourself as doing the right thing, like you structure yourself, like you fit yourself to what is the relevant thing to do, and you do it at that point, so we’ve got virtue like as enacted wisdom, and then there’s a particular virtue that seems to be the one that prevents us from falling prey to idolatry, which is the virtue that Woodruff talks about, which is the virtue of reverence, so reverence is sort of the virtue that puts you into an appropriate relationship with that which is greater than you, so that whereas awe is an experience, reverence is the virtue of how to appropriately respond to awe, right? So, oh yeah, I think that, yeah, that’s very good, because there is, you know, there are constant reminders against idolatry within constant reminders against idolatry, and then there’s constant reminders about seeking wisdom in connection with reverence, right, the fear of the Lord is the beginning, and then what you could say, this is weird, I’m getting into this, but what you could say, well, you know, worship is the practice of cultivating reverence that prevents idolatry and affords powerful symbols being directed to what is ultimate, yeah, how about that? Yes, I think so, you can take it, and concretely in the case of, you go to mass, there is the priest with the Eucharist in front of you, and you’re practicing seeing God through that piece of bread, knowing full well that you’re not supposed to, that no matter how much you go into it, you still don’t see the whole thing, so this is a symbol that is ultimate in the sense that it does point to the highest, but you shouldn’t, like, idolatry is anything that you come up with to understand it, right, it’s always a lens you look through, not a picture you look at. Yeah. So we’ve strengthened your argument, I don’t know where this leaves me, but we’ll come back to me in a bit, I’m not that important right now, we’ve strengthened your argument in that you said, okay, Christianity not only affords powerful symbols, but Christianity affords, we could call it good worship, because good worship is the training of good, of the virtue of reverence, so that it is always directed towards what is most plausibly regarded as ultimate, which is God or something like that, and no matter what you want to say about Deutschland or the Aryan race, it is not ultimate, is that? Yes, that’s fair. Yeah, that’s very good, yeah. Okay, so that’s interesting, that’s interesting, so, but it could be then that there are other, now I’ll speak as John again, rather than just the voice of the argument, but it could be that in other things like neo-Platonism, because I know this from both Buddhism and Taoism and also neo-Platonism, that there is also the cultivation of reverence always being deliberately directed towards what’s ultimate, right, Shri Yata in Buddhism, the Tao in Taoism, the one in neo-Platonism, and so it seems to me that while our definition does strengthen the case for Christianity and excludes Nazism, it seems like, looks back to your point, it doesn’t in principle exclude neo-Platonism or Buddhism or Taoism. Yeah, what I’d be curious to know is, what are concretely the symbols within Buddhism or neo-Platonism that… afford aspiration? Yeah, and that do it as, yeah, that go from both extremes as well as Christ does, yeah, that go from both extremes as well as Christ does, what plays that role within Buddhism or neo-Platonism? So, I mean, even though the Buddha, and it’s very correct to say the Buddha is not worshiped, the Buddha bridges between those because there are two aspects to the Buddha. There is the historic, and this in some ways parallels some of the things you say about Christ, right? There is the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, of course, and as a human being, he exemplifies the fact that the path of Buddhism is available to all human beings, but he is also somebody who has realized Buddha nature, and the Buddha nature is not something specific to him and his personality, it is, right, something analogous to the one or God in the sense that it’s supposed to represent, it’s a way of ascending towards ultimate reality, and in that way the Buddha conjoins together, you know, historical individual personhood, right, humanity, and Siddhartha, in being both Siddhartha Gautama and somebody who exemplifies Buddha nature, something like that. Yeah, okay, good. I think this pretty much brings us back to our discussions about personalism versus non-personalism in the ground of being, because then it’s, you know, in a framework where the ground of being is a person somehow, then it’s possible for that ground of being to incarnate into a person, like a human, like Christ, but the equivalent in Neoplanism or Buddhism, since in those systems God, the ground of being, is impersonal, then nothing personal like the Buddha can in the same sense be also the person of God, the personhood of God. Sure, but then I would turn it around and say it’s precisely the capacity of the Buddha to transcend personality into what’s transcend personality into what’s transpersonal. Yeah, so both systems, within Christianity, you go through Christ to the ground of being, which is personal, so it works, but then within Buddhism or Neoplanism, you go through the Buddha or some equivalent in Neoplanism to the ground of being, which is not personal, so it works as well, like both ways, you go from the lowest to the highest. Yes, and also you afford the highest coming into expression. Yeah, so that’s interesting. That’s interesting. Yeah, I don’t know if we can make any more progress now at that point, but I think already we’ve unpacked quite a bit about symbolism. Go ahead, go ahead, JP. Maybe a way to see where this goes is in practice, how it is that those symbolic systems can go wrong, because I know I have an idea of what the history is within Christianity, where as I said, at some point in time, the whole thing was well integrated, where the person in the pew who could get the basic idea that somehow Christ is both God and man and that I can participate in him somehow, that was enough for most people, but they knew they had also a sophisticated parish priest or somehow someone could reach higher and lower. They had saints around that they could refer to, to an okay, well this person can reach from the highest to the lowest, and that whole system was well integrated. You can sit in, to reuse the ad-body symbolism in a well functioning or even just an okay functioning parish. The priest is the head of the parish where he lives at a more abstract level, where everyone just sort of brings condensed information to him through confession or through regular conversation, and the priest has to abstract from all of this and gather it in his thoughts and then bring it down into something useful. He has to be able to do the sort of the theory himself and then bring it down symbolically to the people. He’s doing compression and particularization. Yeah, and he also fits within a network of priests and bishops, so he’s integrated in a whole network of religious realization going down from the people in the pew through the pope ultimately through the ground being. So this could be well integrated work. The people in the pew couldn’t go too far off track in their symbolism because the priest would detect it and he would intervene somehow, whether directly speaking or through the prayers he would say, or he would do something to make the whole system work. But then what we can see in, well, you can see for instance when the churches started to fragment in the great schism between the Catholic Church and the the Orthodox Church, and then within the Catholic Church through all of the churches, you can see that you lose more and more your symbolism. I can say I’m a Catholic and I can say that in terms of symbolism, like the East is, yeah, I haven’t seen much better than the East and then of course in you can see in yeah there’s much less symbolism, especially much less enacted symbolism and ritual, much less the sense of deep transformation that’s afforded for example in the Catholic idea of the Eucharist, that’s lost, that symbolic power is some degree lost, the aspirational qualities are not as well brought out symbolically. Yeah, I see that, but I see that also happening, well, I mean I go over this argument at great length in the Waiting for the Meeting Crisis, about many historical factors sort of unplug things. I think it’s important because we didn’t spell it out in that particular argument, but the loss of the theory and the loss of the symbolism go together. Yes, I agree. As some branches of Protestantism become more and more materialistic, they lose their symbolism. It’s the same thing because if you lose your theory, you lose your symbolic ability to reach higher in the levels of theory and if you lose your symbolism then you can’t go higher, so of course you will lose your theory eventually. Yeah, I agree. That’s consonant with what we said earlier about the deep interpenetration of philosophy and symbolism, so I agree with that. I think that is consistent with what we’ve been arguing and I think there are definitely historical, like the way the Protestant reformations shut down the monastery where people are trying to live out the connection between symbolism and philosophy, and then philosophy adrift into the university where it’s slowly becoming philosophy, less and less about a transformational aspiration and more and more about coherence of information, coherence of proposition. I talk about that at length elsewhere, so what I want to do is I want to take that. I want to do a little something more, because all of those things are external, they’re extrinsic, right? There are things that are happening historically and so in a sense it’s not quite right to say that’s where symbolism went wrong. Here’s what I mean by it. Okay. A more precise question would be in the face of these threats, where symbolism went wrong is that it did not properly respond to these threats. Yep. Can you give an example of those threats? Take it to be useful. I just gave you one. This is not meant to be exhaustive, it’s just as an example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are too many factors. The Protestant reformation, blah, blah, blah, historical factors, and the monasteries are shut down. We lose the wisdom institution. We lose the place where people are practicing in community and in tradition, the integration of philosophy and symbolism, because I think that’s a pretty good description of what’s going on in monasteries, by the way. We lose that, right? Now, the thing was, right, that’s not really a fault of the symbolic way of being. It’s that like, why wasn’t this involved? Sorry, I don’t mean to personalize it. Maybe you like it, but I don’t mean, and I’m not saying why couldn’t the Catholic Church defeat the Protestant Church. That’s not what I’m talking about is why wasn’t it possible within, and maybe I’m not the right person for saying this. Maybe we should have Paul here, right, or Jonathan, but why was the, why was, given, let’s take Jonathan’s slogan, symbolism happens, right? It’s always there, right, and we’ve given all these arguments, and you know, symbolism is always a powerful thing, and secular alternatives can spring up, Nazism, and it takes place in Germany for the reasons we’ve just said. Okay, all of that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So my question now is, why don’t we see emerging within Protestantism? Why don’t we see, that’s too specific, I don’t want to be so- But I think we do. Okay, so, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, can we just, maybe we should- Yeah, sure, sure, sure. No, no, no, I don’t want to prevent you from, I just want to say, it might be good if we put into words the question and then you respond to it for the viewers, because I think you and I are getting very in sync, and I’m worried about people who might be able to. So what I’m trying to say is, why don’t we see the process, this philosophy of symbolization reconfiguring and adapting, and preserving itself and promoting itself in the face of this historical threat to its existence? That’s my question. Do you mean why don’t we see it now today, or why didn’t we see it back then? Both. Okay, yeah, cool. Yeah, I think, I think, yeah, I’ll start by appealing to symbolism itself. There is within Christianity the idea that for, I have to choose my words carefully. Take your time, JP, I’m not in a rush. Cool. For, don’t know if I want to say symbol. Okay, no, I can, yeah, I think I can sit this way. For Christianity to expand, it will have to go through deaths and rebirths. It goes to the idea that Jonathan mentions from time to time, that Christianity itself is going through a death and rebirth, and I think, symbolically, I think this makes sense at different layers of reality where for something to, let’s say for the center to expand, the center has to lose itself as it goes outwards. At some points, at some point, it just dies, and then it will reemerge sort of bigger or greater. Yeah, like spirituality in a dynamical system. Yeah, yeah, I think this is what is going on, and if you look at it, it’s exactly the way the church grew. So you have Christ who comes down, who will, you know, he will gather people as he’s there, but then he will die, and then it’s only when he will be reborn, and he is reborn in a very strange way if you read the gospels. Like, he’s not just reborn as a man, he’s reborn in groups, he just appears through people, and it’s very strange what happens, but you have the idea that as Christ himself died, what was reborn was the church. So instead of having Christ in just one person, you have Christ in a group in the church, and then what happens is those different people in the church, they will also die. All of them were martyred. The only one that didn’t die a martyr was John. Apparently, he was boiled, but anyways, he apparently survived, and then just he was exiled, but and even there you have something interesting, because John was also the one that stayed close to the center, and yeah, I made a video recently about this, and it took like 40 minutes, so I can go through the whole thing, but there’s this idea that I can see maybe, just two stories. So during the Last Supper, John is leaning on the breast of Christ, and Christ says something about someone betraying him, so Peter is curious, he wants to know what’s that all about, but instead of just asking Christ directly, instead of Peter, the active, the outer, asking the center Christ directly, he asks John, John asks Christ, and then Christ answers John, and then everyone knows. So this is the idea of the outer, Peter will be the end of the church, will go and evangelize across the nations, is as to appeal to the center, to John, who stays on the breast of Christ, and at the end of the gospel of John, when John, sorry, when Christ tells Peter that you will have to go basically the DMR, they go by John, and then Peter sort of asks Christ, well, what’s this one going to do? And Christ tells him that, what is it to you if this one tarries until I come back? So you have the idea that the center, the one that is closer, will not die, the one that’s closer, so you can see the true symbolism, the one who’s leaning on the breast of Christ, who I can ask him questions and so on, will not die, the center will not die, but then the outside, like the active part, like Peter, this one will die, and what happened in practice is exactly this, and the different apostles died, they founded churches, and even you can look at it at the higher scale, where a lot of those churches also died, like there were tons of martyrs in Rome until it converted the Roman Empire, and then you can track it further in history as well, where as Christianity basically was dying in, was having big, big troubles in Rome, as sort of it was dissolving in Rome, it conquered Europe, and then now Christianity is in bad trouble in Europe, but it’s conquering like South America, Africa, parts of Asia, and to bring it back to especially symbolism, you can see also how Christianity spread in North America, in Protestant countries, where it, Christianity kind of dissolves at its edges into secularism, into, you can see Protestant churches where they have basically the same, they say basically the same things, they have the same values as the secular population, and they even go to the extremes of leaving their metaphysical beliefs aside, they lose some of the theory, and they adopt the theory of the people, but in doing so, the center is still expanding, and I’m not as familiar with this as Paul is, for instance, he talks about this very often on his podcast, but as Christianity itself sort of died across North America and the rest of the world, it also spread secularism, it spread sort of atheism, and with it came like science and other stuff, but what we see today, I think, and I would have to look at the data to be sure, but what seems to be going on is as the different branches of Christianity are having troubles, the Orthodox church is not having so much troubles, and you can see as John as well, the more mystical side of the church, the one that is close to the breast of Christ, the one that carries until he comes back, they’re very high on monasticism and not as much on evangelization as you see in the West, for instance, so I think even within, of course, I don’t expect really this to convince you, but at least I can make sense of it symbolically within Christianity, so that’s something you can see. I didn’t find it convincing in one sense, but I found it a reasonable proposal, let’s put it that way, on what you’re saying, you’re really, well, what you’re doing that’s helpful to me is you’re explicating an argument that Jonathan often makes very, very briefly and somewhat cryptically. This is the idea that what you’re basically saying, it’s a kind of a Hegelian argument, is that symbolism didn’t really die away, what’s happening is actually we’re witnessing a broader pattern in the life of symbolism in which it goes through deaths and rebirths. Yeah, I think that’s fair, and as it does, so it expands, so I think I can make sense of it all within Christianity, so it made sense in the past, for instance, in the Protestant Reformation that as Christianity was expanding, that some parts of it would go further away from the center, that they would lose some of their symbolism, some of their theoria, and in a way, it’s just what happens when the cycle of deaths and rebirths. Yeah, I mean, I would make this argument that, and you nodded at several places when I made this suggestion, you’re saying that symbolism is basically sort of a dynamical process, it’s a self-organizing process that goes through something like self-organizing criticality, and this is kind of what Jonathan’s point about how symbolism has deep analogies to relevance realization, that’s kind of expanding and then impressing and again pressing. That’s a very interesting proposal, I have to give that more thought, but you’ve certainly made more clear to me why what Jonathan is saying, and to give credit to you, and also why it’s something that bears thought, there’s something I need to think about, which I think is a good thing to have done. Thank you. So one last question, and then maybe we’ll bring it to close so this doesn’t get too long, because this has been quite wonderful, I thought. Yeah, this was really fun, thank you, John, and yeah, I reached, as you often say, in a good dialogue, you know, we both reach points we wouldn’t have reached otherwise, and you definitely did that with me, so thank you. And you did that for me, and I try to acknowledge it repeatedly. So how do we put together, let’s say I accept at least the intelligibility, even the plausibility of a couple of proposals that you’ve made. One is that, you know, symbolism has this dynamic, it’s a dynamical system, and it goes through self-organizing criticality, and that’s how it’s an evolving phenomenon, if you’ll allow me, my language, with the criticism of people who are burning down the towers, right, because they aren’t educated symbolically very well. Like, how do we put those two together? Like, do we just excuse them and say, well, they can’t help it. Symbolism is going through its inevitable death and rebirth, right? And you see the position I don’t want to get into, I don’t want to say, well, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with Nazism, right? So we did a lot of work sort of pulling good symbolism apart from bad symbolism, and then how do I make that consistent with this claim that symbolism, part of what symbolism is, is the death and rebirth. I think, yeah, I’m going to answer by quoting Christ, um, they’re asked to be scandal, but woe to those who caused the scandal. So like the symbol, like the art of the symbol Christ, he knew that he had to die for this whole cosmic religious thing to get going, but it’s obviously bad for instance, Judas or Pontius Pilate and all of those two have not understood the symbolism and to have killed him, but it was still required for it to get started. So it’s bad to burn down the cell towers, but you know, it’s part of the story. Even if it’s bad, it’s still part of the story, like Pontius Pilate or like Judas. So first of all, I’m acknowledging the important point that the tradition you belong to acknowledges this tension, but it doesn’t, and maybe it’s like the other existential tensions, like the tension between participation and individuation, right? It’s not resolvable, um, but it’s constant. It has to be constantly negotiated or something like that. Is that which you’re pointing to? Because what you said, what you, so to be coarse, right? If I was coarse, I would just say, well, all you’ve done is just stated the problem. You didn’t give me any resolution to it. You just stated that my tradition acknowledges the problem and here’s the statement of the problem. And it’s like, okay, I get that. I get that. Well, the best, the best we can do really is to try ourselves, I think to be more virtuous and wiser. Like we have, we do what we can at our scale. I can sort of, so for instance, if I take the case, so I do whatever I can at my scale to not be the cause of the scandal, but, uh, to allow and to better foster whatever will be reborn after the scandal. So for instance, some people were burning cell towers. So I, I tried to do my best when people are doing things like this. So first of all, I won’t burn on cell towers myself. Like I won’t engage in this. I will try to understand it. And if I can like plant a seed to tell people why they’re burning cell towers, what’s good about it and what’s terrible about it, then maybe I can help better regrow after afterwards. Like I’ve had good feedback from this article from people are better unable to understand symbolism following this. So you can see from this failed symbolism of burning cell towers, like better symbolism is frothing up. And I think this is the best we can do. We can try to participate in that, that rebirth to the best we can. So you individually act virtuous and try and induce in others as much virtue as possible, but you also accept that there is a larger scale that is going to unfold of its own accord, which sounds exactly like stoicism to me, because that’s exactly stoicism, right? I will act individually virtuous, but my, I can’t control all the consequences of my actions. I may act completely virtuously and yet the consequence of my action can turn out to be vicious or horrible down the road because there’s a pattern of, there’s a logos to the universe that’s unfolding beyond me. And I have to accept that. So I act virtuously and I also accept that there’s a logos beyond me. That’s the part of stoicism. And so you get a stoic answer at the end. Yeah, but that’s the part of stoicism that I’m totally comfortable with in Christianity. St. Paul would like you for that because he he was very familiar with importing stoicism into Christianity. I think we should wrap it there. That sounds like a good place to close. Yeah, this was really wonderful. I, it’s wonderful to have these discussions with you that as you said, we get into genuine deal logos. We both get to places where we couldn’t get to individually on their own. You allow me to follow the argument, even though I might not necessarily totally commit to it as a Socratic practice, and I hope I afford the same to you. Yeah, I don’t strangle you into your position early or anything like that. And so I think this was very valuable. I think the fact that you and sort of behind you, Jonathan, that you’re doing this work is really, really important. And so I’m going to strongly encourage people to check out your blog. And so please send me an email. And I’ll put it in the description for the notes to this video. So thanks again, JP. It’s been great doing this. I’ve missed talking to you. And hopefully we can do this again, not too far, not too far in the future. Yeah, sure. Thanks a lot, John. I’ve learned a lot from our, it’s been the most a year since we first talked, I think. And yeah, if I think about how much I learned in the course of those conversations, we get dialogs and growth, not only within dialogues, but also across dialogues. Yeah, I want to thank you a lot for all of this. Well, thank you very much. And you helped me get a lot of things clear today. So thank you for that very much. Cool. Thanks, John. Okay. Oh, JP, I’ll put this on Voices with Reveki. And you’ll probably be invited to come and speak on my Discord server to the community there. Oh, nice. Yeah, that would be fun. Okay, great. Take good care and stay safe during these troubled times. Yeah, you too.