https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tldjEKeL7m4
I’ll be very open with you. At this point in my life, I’m 47, I will be 48 this year. It’s trivial for me. It has become trivial for me to notice the movements of the impersonal within me. I know what is my own shit and I know what’s not, if you know what I mean. When I was 30, it would have been impossible to make that distinction because you just don’t have the subtlety of inner perception to make these differentiations. So you were all the time deceiving yourself. Your ego is all the time pretending to be something higher and noble and driving your actions. Well, in fact, it’s all of your bullshit, all of your wishful film and your search for meaning. It’s all that superficial stuff. It’s all you. But if you get beaten up by life enough over the decades and you are paying attention, which most people don’t, I happen to be put together in a way that I cannot help but pay attention. And I have paid attention for the best part of 40 years. And now I think, maybe I’m deluding myself still, but I don’t think so. I think I can notice the impersonal in me. But that impersonal is not oceanic consciousness either. That impersonal has an agenda. It’s not mine, but it’s not the whole of the universe either. It’s an individual agenda of some form. I personalize it and I call it the diamond because it gives me some- The guardian angel is good enough. Well, I- It’s okay. I’m just pushing you. No, I will tell you why I don’t use that. My diamond is morally neutral. And if I’m not careful with, I mean, my diamond doesn’t give a damn whether I will have a roof over my head tomorrow, food on the plate. It doesn’t give a fuck, sorry, it doesn’t give a damn about it at all because it’s impersonal. Its agenda is not my individual survival as a tool of nature, as an expression of a part of nature. It’s not operating at the level of comfort and survival. It’s a force of nature. It’s like the tornado that comes, destroys your house and kills your family. Did it have a bad intention to do that? Of course not. The tornado is not living in this framework of survival and comfort. So the diamond is a force of nature. And as a force of nature, I perceive it as very morally ambiguous or neutral. It knows where it wants to go and it will beat me up to help it go in that direction. But it doesn’t have my individual well-being in mind, if you know what I mean. My well-being is something that I negotiate with it. Literally, I negotiate with it every day. So I don’t call it the guardian angel. What would its telos be? Or can you recognize that? Oh yeah. If you think you recognized it right and then you go down the path suggested by that misapprehension, it gives you very quick feedback that you’re pursuing the wrong path. That was not it already. It turns my mental inner life into sheer hell. All kinds of things will plague me. Unexplainable anxieties, obsessions, physical symptoms. I don’t want to use certain words that informally I would, but it’s a show. It’s a very bad show that happens within. So it gets to a point where it’s inevitable to learn to recognize what its agenda is. So I do recognize it. And that’s why I do what I’m doing now. Two years ago, Jonathan, I abandoned a 25-year long career in the high-tech corporate world. If I had stayed, I probably would be close to what you would call rich. And it’s not only the money, it’s my social network, my sense of identity, my sense of value and differentiation. I left it kicking and screaming because my diamond was very clear about what I had to do. And what I had to do, part of it is talking to you today and leading a central foundation. I negotiated enough with it that I delayed the process until I could secure myself more or less. But it does have an agenda. Very impersonal. So that suggests to me there is indeed a hierarchy of dissociation in the divine mind. Because my diamond comes across to me as something that’s not human, but it’s not the whole of the divine mind either. It is an aspect of it. Yeah. So St. Gregory of Nyssa talks about in the life of Moses, he uses Moses and Aaron as an analogy to talk about this. He calls it the helper. He has the notion that there’s Moses and then there’s his helper. And he differentiates two sides of the helper. And what he comes to is actually the little cartoon image of the angel on the right shoulder and the devil on the left shoulder. And St. Gregory of Nyssa actually describes exactly that. And so he separates Aaron, the helper, into two. It’s a good way to understand it. It’s like a transpersonal pull towards something. And so it’s something which is beyond you, which is pulling you in a direction. But he sees it as either going up or going down. So it’s like you have a certain transpersonal aspect of you, which is pulling you down towards these little circles of attention and this chaotic levels of attention. And you have an aspect of this helper, which is whispering to you and pulling you up towards higher levels of attention. Of course, St. Gregory doesn’t use the word attention. I’m using that here because it makes sense to what we’re talking about. And so you can see it in iconography. You’ve probably seen these images, if you know orthodox iconography a little bit, of the angel pulling up the toll houses and then the devil pulling someone down towards hell. This is this kind of image of how we are embedded in this transpersonal mind, you could say. That the push and pull exists, it’s introspectively very clear to me. It’s a datum of existence. It’s not something that is open to theoretical speculation. If you know what I mean, it’s there. I don’t divide the diamond into one good and one bad. I tend to identify with the bad. Like the bad one is me, it’s Bernardo. That’s probably the best way to do it, actually. In terms of transformation, it’s probably the best way to do it. It’s not really a choice. It’s how I feel it. Bernardo is the guy who is looking to secure his own comfort and safety and the comfort and safety of the other little beings that Bernardo cares about, like Bernardo’s girlfriend and Bernardo’s cats and Bernardo’s friends. He wants to have a little bit of power, a little bit of money and get some recognition. That’s me. That’s the ego. The other pull, that’s from the impersonal. That’s not me. But it’s neither good or bad. It’s neither an angel or a devil. It’s morally ambiguous. It’s a force of nature. That’s how I experience it. But talking to other philosophers and reading history, that’s part of the reason why I sort of granted that there are reasons to think of a hierarchy of being. Other people, other philosophers seem to have other diamonds. Like Socrates’ diamond would only tell him what not to do, would never tell him where to go, only tell him when Socrates was doing something wrong. Then the diamond would say, no, my diamond is not like that. My diamond is just kicking me in the butt in a certain direction. You go there, you bastard here. Boom, go. And I go kicking and screaming. That’s not Socrates’ diamond. It’s another diamond. And some people have a seductive diamond, a diamond that seduces from the front instead of a diamond that kicks you from the back. That’s not my diamond. And I envy other people’s diamonds. I think in the cosmic lottery, no, no, no, I’m not going to say what I was going to say because my diamond has brought tremendous meaning to my life despite all the suffering and all this stuff. So I’m not going to spit on it. But there is nothing romantic about the diamond, if you know what I mean. There is something romantic about, oh, we have a guardian angel. Oh, you go out mushy and it’s so romantic. There is nothing romantic about my diamond, nothing. Yeah, I don’t see anything romantic in the guardian angel myself. They’re often represented as warriors anyway. So it’s not particularly… That’s more like it. Very quickly. I just wondered if Jonathan has a diamond. I don’t experience it in the same way that you experience it. I think that I tend to experience it more in the way that St. Gregory talks about it. That is that I sense that there’s a transpersonal aspect of me. I sense on the one hand something like what St. Paul says, I do the things that I do not want to do. I experience that all the time. I find myself lying and there’s another voice in my head going, why are you doing this? Why are you lying? Or why are you acting this way? Why are you taking the credit or whatever it is that I’m doing? And so I experience this kind of force that’s pulling me down. And then I also in the same way have a sense that something like a good Christian way of saying it would be like, I feel a calling is a good Christian way of saying it. I feel like I have this calling and that I’m being, like you said, I’m being pulled forward towards certain things, both in my own life in terms of transformation, but also even professionally in terms of the types of things I’m supposed to pay attention to, the types of things I’m supposed to put my energy into. And if I don’t listen to that voice, then I suffer greatly. And if I listen to that voice, I suffer, but the suffering is worth it. Like it’s worth it for what it gives. And so that’s the way that I tend to experience it. It’s exactly the same for me. You don’t personalize it as I do, probably because you have always done the diamond’s bidding. So you don’t have a background to contrast it with. I think that I see that, let’s say something like my guardian angel, I tend to see through the guardian angel into Christ, into the incarnate God. And so it’s not that I, it’s like, that maybe even be just my Protestant background, because I used to be Protestant, where it’s like, even if I, when I feel pulled, I tend to want to see through that towards something else. So you’ll hear people, I think that the experience you have, you’ll hear Christians say something like that all the time. They’ll say like, God showed me this for God. And it’s not God directly. It’s, it is this intermediary being, but I understand too why, because it’s pulling you up and it’s pulling you into more being, then it’s easy. You want to see through it and see, see the higher aspect kind of pulling you forward. So that’s, that’s how I tend to, but I have other beings pulling at me all the time. Like my patrons, I have certain saints which have imposed themselves on me. Some like Saint Maximus, who I’ve chosen, but other saints, like Saint Christopher, for example, who really has imposed himself on me and is there to, and is kind of pulling me, pulling me in certain directions. And I, yeah, and I can’t deny it. Yeah. You always describe it as pulling, never as pushing. Yeah. I’ve never found somebody who feels pushed like I do it. Like I won the lottery the other way around. But what you described, I recognize, and there is the diamond, which, which unlike you, I don’t see it as a, as the sumum bonum. I don’t see it as a morally positive force. I see it as a very morally ambiguous force who doesn’t care much about my comfort or safety. But I also feel the push of the ancestors instead of the saints. Like I feel the push to sort of clear the record of the ancestors, clear the record of Jung, clear the record of Schopenhauer. And the one that’s really pushing me now, want his record clear. I mean, it could all be fantasies of my mind, of course, somewhat impersonal, but it’s useful for me to attach names to these things, because it enables a relationship with them. I feel the push of Nikolaus von Kuz, Nikolae de Kuzanus. I don’t know whether you know about him. No. Hardly known philosopher who was also a bishop of the church in the 15th century. And I feel the push of that image now, like clear his record, you know, vindicate him. Because he left a treasure buried in the field and nobody has a map and we need to find that and open it up. So that I feel too, it’s less personalized than the diamond. The diamond is just overwhelming with me, totally overwhelming. And it’s a very present reality for me because I used to not listen to it. So I know what it is like to ignore the presence of the diamond. And therefore, its presence now has great contrast against that previous background, in which I thought it’s just me, I’m the master of my own house. And I remember that. And it provides a background that really highlights the diamond. Now, there is that thing there that I used to ignore and not listen to and pretend that it didn’t exist. But it was always there and it’s very distinct.