https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XQhvu1y8aAg
To bring it back just a little bit, you mentioned worship. So I want, this is a really difficult concept for us to conceptualize. And all of your language, both of your languages, it’s always pointing outside of language. You guys are always pointing out, you’re even literally pointing out of the screen. Like, it’s like something, like, how do we conceptualize this right now? Or how would you facilitate the conceptualization of that for people who don’t have the structure of a religious background to draw upon? Like, how do you go about, like, understand? Well, it’s pretty simple. It’s like you need, you always celebrate. If you don’t like, let’s use the word celebrate. It’s an easier word to understand than worship because people, obviously worship, worship is more than just celebration. But because worship is maybe difficult for people to understand, let’s say celebrate. So we always celebrate the thing that binds us. We just will. It just will happen. And then what happens is you have competing things to celebrate. And so right now, we are asked, we are being asked, let’s say in the past few years, that the one thing that you really, really have to celebrate is, for example, pride. And everybody celebrates pride. Like, all the corporations, they’ll change their logo. They’ll change. And so there is a worship happening. We create objects. We create events where we sing songs, where we gather together in the name of something. All of that is the notion of celebrating or worshiping in a small W, let’s say, venerating. Let’s use the word venerate. And so we venerate those who are markers of what binds us. So we have the right to venerate certain figures. Let’s say, for example, someone who pretty much everybody can still venerate right now is Martin Luther King. Everybody can venerate Martin Luther King. There’s some argument on that. He has nakedness too. Everybody has nakedness. He has a darkness in his hidden darkness as well. But let’s say there are some figures that, and then there’s people that are fighting for us to venerate certain figures that manifest that thing. So let’s say, Harvey Milk. I’ve seen icons of Harvey Milk being made or different characters. And so that’s, so everybody understands that because we all do it. Now, the problem is that if you stop your celebration at a small G god, then that’s when you have the fight. That’s when you have the massive fights because the different principalities, the different gods are fighting amongst each other. So who are you going, what is going to be, who are going to be the leading values, the leading things, the leading concepts that are going to unite us. So then you end up, that’s what you end up happening. So the idea is that the religious people, the Christians, the Jews, and yes, the Muslims or the Zoroastrians or even the Neoplatonists, the revelation that slowly came down was that if we, the higher we make it, if we’re able to actually bring it up into the highest, that we celebrate the highest thing which transcends everything, then what it’s going to do is it’s going to moderate all the principalities below. It’s going to make them less prone to fighting amongst each other. And so let’s say in Christianity, we say it’s love, it’s love. Love is, God is love. God is the manner in which things exist together and apart at the same time. That’s, he is the principle by which things exist together and apart at the same time. So he’s the principle of unity and multiplicity. And so we have the Trinity, we have all these images, the duality of the nature of Christ, all these images that help us participate in that one and many, infinite one and many. Okay. And so that’s what worship is. Worship is celebrating the highest. And so in terms of religious worship, then it has specific ways we do it. We sing, we recite, we pray, we, most of the time it has to do with vocalizing, by saying things or singing things, you know, through logos to participate. But there’s also bowing, kneeling, making yourself low. There’s, and then there’s also loving others. Like by loving others, you are also worshiping because you are embodying the love that is supposed to be that you’re manifesting the love of God. So when I say that, that you’re manifesting the love of God, it just sounds like something that doesn’t mean anything, but it really is a pattern of reality. It’s not just a sentimental statement. That makes sense to a secular, like a secular person. I want to make one quick footnote that people can visualize what you’re talking about, because the pride flag was a rainbow that meant diversity. But now there’s these new iterations of the pride flag that are being compacted by all these other identities. And it’s just becoming this really ugly war zone. Like this flag is just becoming this, is being torn apart on an aesthetic level because that unity has been now lost by all these minor principalities or identities. That’s because the way to understand the rainbow is to understand it as a circumsensitve art. Like if you look at the sun and there’s a rainbow around the sun, that’s the symbolism of the rainbow. The rainbow is a periphery and the sun is in the middle. If you don’t have the sun, you don’t have a rainbow. If you don’t have white light, you don’t have a rainbow. You need the center for the periphery to even have any sense, to make any sense. So you want one and many. You need both. Benjamin, you said conceptualization. I think it’s not that people need to conceptualize. People need to practice it. And in a healthy liturgical diet, you have all of the elements of the manifestations. And it’s not so much, I mean, this is part of the Protestantism, is that, well, if I can conceptualize it, then I can master it and I can wield it. No, it’s always service. Worship is in a sense service. And what happens, what you do in church, in the liturgy, is that you go through all of the movements of this. Somebody pointed out to me yesterday that the one element of Protestant liturgy that has been eliminated over the last 50, 70 years has been confession. If you go to a Protestant church with acrobats and smoke machines, the one element you won’t have that has been taken out is confession. Is that the similar testimony, like the testimonial? No, confession is the part of the liturgy where we say it’s not the colonizers, it’s not the racists, it’s not the killers of Christ who are responsible for the sin of the world, it’s me. And so that has come out of Christian liturgy in the Protestant church. Now we see it manifest in the street enormously, and it’s like the elements of liturgy will not be denied. And so if you fail to practice them within the confines, now I sound terribly orthodox here, if you fail to practice them within the confines of the properly structured universe, which is what an orthodox church is in terms of the architecture and everything, if you fail to practice them inside, they will leak out and you will, in a sense, you will have to fulfill the prophecy, but in a far more destructive way. And in that sense, the church is a containment unit.