https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hUUy_PC5jSQ
So, I think that the problem firstly arises because we still hold on to a kind of simplistic materialism, a kind of 19th century modernism, which thinks that the fullness of everything exists completely out there, exactly as we perceive it, a kind of neutral range of measurable phenomena which we can then add meaning to. So in this view, symbolism is opposed, or at least it’s divorced from this truly objective world and if in stories and myths and music or in art we find these patterns of meaning, they’re like an abstract layer that we, let’s say, subjectively add onto an idiosyncratic and random world. The problem is that that’s just not how it works. The problem of believing we’re only, let’s say, enumerating physical facts in a story is problematic because there’s constantly an overwhelming and seemingly unlimited number of facts all the time around us. When we look into the world, there’s this field of potential being and so we have two faculties that help us to deal with that. The first faculty is attention, that is our capacity to focus on something. We focus in and limit the world within our purpose activity at any moment. The second faculty we have to deal with the unlimited number of facts is memory. Most of the things we encounter around us just vanish in their specifics. We don’t remember them. Our memory only remembers the things which are important to us for one reason or another. Our memory will string things together, string events together into coherent hierarchies and narrative structures. These structures or these stories, they’re already patterns. We often don’t perceive the patterns but the structure of why we remember something or how we then order events for others is already symbolic. Symbolic in the sense that they are ordered and patterned around things that have meaning. Symbolism is not opposed to a kind of neutral physical reality. Symbolism is the very manner in which we perceive and organize the unlimited field of information. One of the first things that I remember that struck me when I began to attend an Orthodox church, I went to a talk that was given after a service and one of the parishioners was explaining how the Greek word symbol refers to a place where two things meet, where two rivers become one river, for example. That symbolism does not come about by adding a kind of metaphoric meaning on top of events but is the very bringing together of events. The formation of analogies, the process of synthetic compression of multiple level of events, of patterns, of relationships. It’s the bringing of all those things together which constitute symbolism but also constitutes the very manner in which we engage the world. There is no reality which is not symbolic. The nature of our existence in the world is symbolic. Events coalesce around centers of meaning through our attention and our memory. We all experience this constantly and if one is attentive, what it does, it makes the world a magical place. This type of synchronicity, this type of events coalescing in a manner which is not causal in any scientific way is something that happens to everyone. You cannot escape that. The process of putting together important things is how reality works because our existence in the world is symbolic. Human consciousness orders and gives meaning to an indefinite potential of existence. In terms of remembering events, there is a personal way of remembering events. There’s a communal way of remembering events, a broader social way. I would even contend that there is a cosmic way of remembering events. All these levels of attention and memory will not appear the same. The more we move away from the idiosyncratic how my day went stories, the more we move towards remembering events which have universal significance. The more this memory will appear symbolic, condensed, it has to be so that it can be attended to and remembered by larger and larger groups over larger and larger spans of time. For example, in the Bible you can actually see that in the very unfolding of the large story. The more you go back, let’s say, towards Genesis, the more the stories appear condensed, symbolic, universal. The forms are compressed through images that reveal more and more meaning. Does that mean that what’s in the Bible does not describe events? Of course it describes events. The problem is that we think that all events are the same. We think that Adam, which means man as such, ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, becoming self-conscious of his mortality, having been tempted by a serpent, is on the same level, the same type of event, that when I’m picking my nose or washing the dishes, that’s the problem. The events in Genesis happened. They’re just being remembered at a cosmic level, using narrative structures and images that compress so much into them that people have written thousands of books unfolding the implicit meanings contained in those primordial stories. There will be no one writing thousands of books of how I did the dishes last night. If any event in the entire world has definitely happened, it is the story in Genesis 2 and the Fall. And just because computer brains like Sam Harris cannot perceive hierarchy in being, a hierarchy of events and a hierarchy in the manner in which we describe events, just means that they’re forced to discount those stories to their peril and to our peril, the stories which our ancestors for thousands of years considered to be the most important and foundational structures of our being and the underlying origin of what it means to be human. Then you wonder why everyone is so confused and disillusioned. A modern person thinks that the point of the story is understanding a kind of technical description of what happened, their minds immediately trying to calculate the miracle in terms of something which could be reproduced through scientific method. Why do you think you know what that event is? Why does that event have to fit the level of analysis you want to impose on it? Look at the story itself, even the way it is told. So does a Christian have to believe that the Gospel describes events? Yes. Does a Christian have to believe that those descriptions have the modern journalistic or forensic type of description? No. Does a Christian have to believe in the resurrection of the body? Yes. Do we need to technically describe, like a surveyor would give a detailed analysis of a terrain, what the resurrection is? No. The resurrection imposes itself as the culmination of a giant pattern, a pattern which includes the natural patterns of death and rebirth, the seasons, the rotation of the cosmic bodies, a pattern which includes all the stories of the escape of the underworld, the crossing and all the other tales of life rising out of death found in cosmic stories we remember and attend to until today, even in our movies, in our TV shows, video games, comic books. The story of the resurrection is everywhere, if you can see it. The reason why I chose orthodoxy has to do with all of this. We believe that the world is symbolic. Our services, our prayers, the manner in which we remember through the Bible, through the legends and tales of the saints, is because we know how memory and attention have certain forms, how they lead us to and keep us in the heart, in the memory of the center, let’s say. We’re not bothered by stories which do not fit the rigorous forensic description of a crime scene, because we know that such a description cannot, will not, and should not be remembered. But our stories, as they join the cosmic pattern, as they participate in the eternal pattern, they will have a memory eternal.