https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=w2H9Eo_2Yac
The notion of eating is extremely important because it has to do with this idea of knowledge. I’ve talked about this notion of knowing as joining ourselves with something. And so there are several images of that in the Bible. One of the images is sexual union, this idea of joining yourself, a man joining himself with his wife, that it is a form of knowledge. Eating is also a form of knowledge. What it is, it is just, you could say it this way, just as a man and his wife are joined together to become one body, so too when you eat you are making body, you are taking the stuff, taking food and you are gathering it into yourself and it becomes your body. Now that becomes an image of knowledge, that is an integration, a manner in which heaven and earth are integrated, is that the human being, man as microcosm, as the central point, gathers the food into himself and it becomes the potential out of which his mind, his thinking, his spirit can then manifest itself in the world. If you watch some of the videos that I did with my brother Mathieu, he talks about that in those videos as well and explains it quite well. Now in terms of understanding the specifics of communion, there are several things to understand. The first is the notion of eating together. Now eating together is a manner in which we participate together in making a body. And so as we sit together and we eat the same thing together, we are, if you will, using the same potential in order to create body. We are becoming one body in that sense. We are in communion in that sense, that is we are participating in the making of body. And so that is a good way to understand also a manner in which the idea of Mathieu, in the video we did, he talks about how the notion of how a city, it eats people. And so by eating people, it integrates all those people into this one identity and it becomes one thing, it becomes one city. In the same manner, if we sit around a table and we are all eating the same food, it’s not exactly the same image, but in a similar manner, we are all joining ourselves together in that body. And so it is, so that’s let’s say the basic idea of why food is such a symbol of knowledge and why it’s related to this notion of eating the fruit of good and evil, which is the fall, because in the notion of eating the fruit of good and evil, we are eating the fruit, the result of the opposition of good and evil. And by doing that, we are joining ourselves with that, and then especially in the way that it happened in the story of the fall, it’s actually a kind of falling into the body, right? Not that the body is evil, not that the body is wrong, but there is a manner in which we can kind of fall into the body, where we lose, we forget the higher aspect, we forget the aim, which was the tree of life, we forget this notion of our higher aspect, that we kind of fall into the body. And that’s why all the images of the fall are related to this adding on of body, the adding on of the garments of skin, it’s kind of this, the world becomes hostile. And then also procreation happens after the fall. So all of those images are images which talk about the same thing, this kind of descent into flesh, let’s say. But like I said, it’s important to understand that people have been so confused in thinking that somehow the body is bad, or that flesh is bad, or that sexuality is bad. None of those things are bad, but they are bad to the extent into which we lose ourselves into them, to the extent that we forget our humanity and we become animalistic, we become subject to our own desires, so we become subject to our body. Now you can see that as much with the belly as with sexual desire, whereas we can lose ourselves in making body, we can become a slave to the making of body. So now that’s, we kind of have to understand this basic symbolism of eating first before we understand how it plays itself out afterwards. So now if you take the notion of eating, so eating is the cause of the fall, eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and then so too, eating in the end is also one of the images of salvation. It’s one of the images of the undoing, or let’s say the transformation of the fall into something higher, into something which actually brings us closer to God. So Aidan Paisley asks, I wonder if the subject could be food? And he talks about, yeah I read this comment before, it’s a good comment. He talks about Matthew’s book and talks about this hierarchy of how there’s a hierarchy where man feeds off the animals and the animals feed off the ground, so there’s this kind of hierarchy, ontological hierarchy, and this is also related to the sacrifice of Abel, which is a sacrifice of meat up to God, but not a sacrifice of cane, and that there’s this idea of these levels of nutrition. And I think that it’s a difficult question because I do see those two structures in the Bible, and I’m not totally sure how to answer it because I do think that the structure that Metsur brings about is a good structure, and it obviously helps you to understand sacrifice and it helps you to understand a lot of things, but I think that there’s also this structure which is this movement from the garden to the vegetable to the animal, and so you see it in terms of this moving out towards animality, and that would have to do in the sense of moving out towards flesh. So you can see it as in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are innocent and are not covered, and then as they fall they first cover themselves with a vegetable with leaves, and then that’s insufficient, and then they’re kind of chased out of the garden and then they’re covered with skins, and so if you see it, like I keep giving you guys this structure, if you see it as this kind of the cosmos as a mountain and moving out towards the flood, towards the ocean, you see that after they’ve crossed the flood, like after the world has kind of finished and started again, at the second cycle you could say, then God permits Noah to eat meat, right, and so you really have this sense of moving further and further out, and that eating meat is in a way a sign of being further out, let’s say, like moving further and further away from this whole system. And you see the same structure in the Tabernacle, so you have the Holy of Holies, then you have a veil of vegetable, you have a linen veil, and then you also have a wool veil, right, which is kind of like it’s an animal veil, but then it still has something fine about it, it’s just the hair, and then finally on the outside you have actual skins that are covering the Tabernacle, and so that structure is also there, it’s kind of moving out into animality, and in the Christian tradition we really see that as this kind of moving out into the passions, for good or for bad, this idea of being tempted by our animal selves, let’s say, and so that’s why in the Orthodox Church we have fasting periods, and in monasteries often they’ll have, you know, some extreme aesthetics will only eat vegetables, and why we also have eating only vegetables, but in the Christian tradition there’s this notion of moving out, moving towards the center, let’s say, right, and then kind of, let’s say, backtracking the fall, and part of that idea of fasting has to do with that, but there’s also this notion of the fullness, and in that fullness there’s also this notion of the feast, right, of this notion of moving out towards the outside, and so an example of that, you can see it in the story of St. Peter, who has a vision and sees the drape fall down from heaven, and the drape is square, you can see it, it’s like a circle, right, being held up by its corners, and it’s like a circle, and then it spreads itself out and becomes a square, right, so it’s like really is this idea of moving out into manifestation, you could say, right, a church has a dome and a square body, so it’s this moving from the circle to the square, and then in that square he has all these meats, all these, this mixture of meats, of kosher and non-kosher meats, and God tells them to eat, right, and this idea of, he tells them to eat has to do with this notion of moving out towards the foreigner, and also how the foreigner can now participate in the life of the church, how the Christian church can integrate things until the edge of the world, and so those two, I think in a way it’s like those two traditions are totally complementary, but I mean it would be interesting to ask Matsir about his vision of those two structures and see how he sees them related to each other. Okay, so, Aedes Nostalgia Guy asks, what is the symbolism of fasting? Is it about purification? Is it about sacrificing our own flesh? Why does God choose to speak to those who fast? Yeah, I think it is about purification, it’s about leaving the things that come from the outside and focusing on that which is inside, you know, and so you remove the garments of skin, you remove the outer, because when you, so like when you eat or when you engage in sex, when you do things like that, then you are, you are kind of giving yourself out, right, you are moving out, so you’re focusing your attention on things which are coming from the outside, pleasures, all of that, and so fasting is a way to kind of shut off those doors and then try to enter into the middle, into the center, so it is about sacrificing our own flesh, but you don’t have to, you don’t see it in a moral way, you don’t have to see it in like you’re bad, you have to sacrifice your flesh, you know, it’s like, it’s not that, it’s really about moving away from the outside and kind of, let’s say, casting off the outer layers and moving in towards the center, so. Usually we schedule, we fast before an important feast, you know, like Pascha or like Christmas, you know, it’s as if, it’s a kind of spiritual discipline, a spiritual preparation in order to fully be able to participate in the, let’s say the glory of the feast or the, you know, when you, when you, when you’re deliberate about your actions and your discipline and you’re focused, once you then, let’s say, once you reach your goal, which is the feast, you know, it’s going to be a lot, it’s way more precious than if it was just handed to you. So Norm Grondin asks, can you speak about fasting during Lent and Advent? Yes, if you want to find the rules in the Orthodox Church, there are specific rules for fasting during Advent and Lent. You can also see it as a hierarchy to a certain extent as well because they’re, you know, it’s very important to understand that fasting is not, the Church Fathers always insist that the real fasting is the interior fasting. That’s the real fasting. You do need to fast exteriorly in terms of certain foods, in terms of certain practices, but you also have to not, you have to do an interior fast, which is to try to cut yourself away from the passion. So that’s very important. But if you look online, just look at Orthodox rules for Lent, you’ll find, you know, you don’t eat meat, you don’t eat fish. At some point you don’t eat dairy products, you only eat vegetables and you can also eat some shellfish. And then on Sundays, you know, some traditions, you can eat fish on Sundays, you can have wine on Sundays, no wine during the week. So there are rules that you can follow. And the rules are good because the rules are not from you. They’re not something that you choose. There’s something that are chosen for you. And because they’re chosen for you, then they are something which manifests your humility. You have to submit to something which is exterior to you. And what it does, it shows you how weak you are because, oh my goodness, it’s so funny because, you know, you could any day decide not to eat certain things and it’s no problem. But when there’s a rule and you have to follow it for a certain amount of weeks, all of a sudden it’s like, oh man, that cheese looks really good. It’s like, oh, you know, it’s not a big deal. It’s not a big deal. You know, all of a sudden, you know, you can discover yourself. You discover just how weak you are and how you have these different personalities in your mind that switch on, you know, and all of a sudden, you know, yeah, it’s definitely something that’s worth the exercise. My community is riddled with a tendency in reaction to the idle machine of self-help culture expressed in organic food movement to instead celebrate being seriously indiscriminate about what we put into the body. Yeah. Zero discrimination is supposedly the evidence of true liberation and faith. Well, that’s odd. I see truth in this tendency and something deeply bothers me. Hmm. I consider the purpose of sustaining the body to host heaven and also the meaning to die purposefully. Maybe the blurring of the lines of the category for what is food is a uniquely modern issue. Is it relevant to my question, which I failed to clarify succinctly that the desert fathers went without but did not do the opposite to put anything in? Yes, exactly. So I would say that there’s a difference between fasting and eating anything like, you know, there’s something, the idea that because it’s not important, because in the sense that because it’s more important to focus on spiritual things and all that, the idea that then you could just eat anything is absolutely stupid. Like it’s stupid because eating is a passion. Like eating is not just a fuel, right? And so it’s like you would have desires to eat things. And so the idea that you could just eat anything is also showing you that you just give in to your desires. Like discipline in eating is actually a kind of pointing to spiritual discipline. Like that’s why there’s fasting in the church. And so the idea of not eating certain things and not eating all the time or not eating certain quantities is actually very important in order to tame your passions and to tame your body. So that you’re able to not be focused on it. So someone who says something like, you know, it’s only God that’s important. It doesn’t matter what you eat. And so he eats anything. You might realize that that person is more of a slave of what it is they’re eating that they would wish to admit to themselves. you