https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rHEIWVBq4bA
And I think that, for example, Christ reveals something about the pattern of reality and the way that we participate in reality, which is, which cannot be, let’s say, cannot be overstated. Like what he reveals about reality cannot, there’s just no competition. There’s nothing that competes with his story. His story, the story of Christ is so shattering, especially when you start to understand kind of symbolic categories, especially when you understand them in other cultures and in other myths, the categories that Christ presents and the category that he smashes together. It’s just so shattering. It’s like, it’s even, it’s hard to look at it. You, you, you, you know, every time I tried to think of the crucifixion, I just, I’m, I’m, I’m always reduced to, to like, I have insights and then they just know they’re not enough. Like there’s just, Christ just smashes all the stories together. And I hate to just say that without giving examples. People can find a thousand examples on my channel where I show that like Jesus is not like another myth story. It just isn’t. I don’t know what to tell you. He’s like all the gods and none of the gods at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am one of the lectures that you gave that I was able to watch. You made some comment about, although you didn’t elaborate it, you said in a way it was deeper than you were able to go and I could very much appreciate the idea. You know, this sort of a theme of an ascent, but you get to the top and suddenly what’s at the top is even is, is, you know, the, it’s the crucifixion at the top of the hill, but the highest is actually much is, is, is radically lower than goes, goes further down below the whole order. Yeah. There’s a kind of dramatic reversal that you have that seems to me a really crucial point and also it’s, I guess it’s, it’s, it’s just more abstract way of saying what you’ve been talking about, the shattering. So it’s not just yet another example of the pattern. It’s a dramatic reversal of the pattern that intensifies the pattern too in all sorts of other ways. No, I think you’re right. It’s not, and it’s interesting because it’s not just a reversal. It’s what Christ is doing is so subtle. Like if you think of, like you think of the washing of the feet, you know, you think about that story. And then a lot of people like to think of it as if, okay, well Christ is, is destroying hierarchy, you know, by washing the feet. I’m like, no, that’s clearly not what I want. Not what’s happening. He’s washing their feet and the, and the disciples are astounded that he’s washing their feet. That’s what’s happening. Yeah. So it’s like it’s, it’s recognizing the highest and then noticing that the highest is willing to give itself all the way to the lowest. Christianity seems to be something like that. And so it actually, it actually transforms hierarchy, maintains hierarchy because you can’t avoid hierarchy. It maintains it, but it transform it as a union of love and a union of sacrifice. And it’s like, that’s, it’s like, that’s it. Like that’s the key. You think like that’s the key that the Neoplatonists were looking for. That’s the key that all that they weren’t looking for, but that they were kind of grasping around. Intuiting it. Yeah. That’s right. You know, and not just that, but like the idea of offering sacrifice, the problem of sacrifice, all these problems that, that, you know, people for millennia have been trying to figure out in an embodied way. All of a sudden you have this story where, you know, where, where on the one hand, you have the highest, the son of man, you know, the, the, the one who sits at the right hand of the father, who then descends into death. Yeah. And then he takes us all and he brings us back. Right. Is there, you know, when people say that the story of Christ is a kind of boss’s story, that it’s just like Ulysses going into Hades or all these different characters going to Hades. I’m like, no, it’s not. It’s not because Christ goes there. And then when he comes back, there’s no one left. So what, what, what’s the, you know, can you get another story after that? Like what other story are you going to tell after that story? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s wonderful. Yeah. I mean, even though I mean, as you say that, I mean, the extraordinary thing is that as soon as you see the absolute uniqueness of that story, then suddenly you see intimations of it in other places. I mean, I think that that that, you know, that’s my reading of Plato, Plato’s Republic, you know, the philosopher who, who returns to the cave and precisely in order to, to liberate to bring, bring them back up. I mean, there’s a, an extraordinary dramatic reenactment of this, this kind of reversal that is a, is a, is a, you know, reestablishment of and realization in fact of the, of the hierarchy. Yeah. And so you can see like, that’s the way that I, that’s the way I see it too. It’s like in some ways you end up necessarily seeing the story of Socrates as an intimation of Christ, not that Jesus is copying Socrates, because what Christ is doing is, is a hundred times more than what’s, I love Socrates, but what he’s doing is a hundred times more than what Socrates is doing. And he’s completing all these narrative throats that have been kind of open, you know, not just the ones in the Bible for sure. You know, the problem of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he deals with that. There are all these problems of the hierarchy of the sacred, he deals with all these problems in the, in his story, but then also even the stories of the ancients too, it seems, at least that’s the way that I tend to perceive it. It’s a, yeah. Yeah.