https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MpkPof8z7q4
I’m going to show on the screen what caused me to want to have this talk. Jordan Peterson wrote a very cryptic tweet that said, God is the mode of being you value the most as demonstrated or manifested in your presumption, perception and action, which I don’t even know what he’s talking about. But you said that you are basically talking about quote unquote gods in the pagan sense, best angels or principalities. There’s infinitely more beyond that basic hierarchy of being. Is there a mode of being which unites all possible modes of being? The difficulty that I see in what Jordan has been saying, especially when he talks about how basically saying like God is your axiom, right? It’s the mode of being which is behind all your actions. It’s kind of the invisible thing which motivates you to act, right? Yeah. Now, the problem with that is that if you only see it that way, then it is the gods in the small g sense, right? In the sense that you could have anything could be your God, right? Anything could be the thing that motivates you. Your desires, your passions, it could be money, it can be sex, it could be a virtue, right? It could be mercy, it could be compassion, it could be different, it could even be virtues. But even if it is virtues, it’s still a lowercase g. That’s why I said at best it’s an angel, it’s a principality, right? So you have the virtues, you have the angels which are the intermediaries that say between you and the infinite good, right? But the idea is God in the Christian sense or God in a monotheistic sense is not just a God, right? It’s the principality of principalities. It’s that which all things come together in, right? It is even beyond being in terms of especially orthodoxy, it’s beyond being. So all modes of being, let’s say all modes of positive being, cohere into God, right? And in terms of virtue we would say that that is love, right? Love is the highest, it’s the one which is the life of God itself because it is unity and multiplicity which are in harmony, okay? And so it’s not arbitrary. There is a reason why we talk about God the way we do because in a way it unites all those things together. But it’s important to make those distinctions because one of the new ATS argument has always been, well, which God do you believe in? And then it’s like, do you believe in Thor, do you believe in this? And it’s like, whatever. Fine, whatever. It’s like, I believe in Thor, I mean, I don’t mind Thor, he’s a principality. He represents something, right? He’s the God of war, he’s the God of thunder. His characteristics coalesce into something which is something in the world. Like it’s a real, you know, but that’s not when we talk about the absolute. That’s not what we’re talking about. And it’s not just Christians. The Neoplatonists were talking about that and Jews are talking about that. Muslims are talking about that. Zoroastrians are talking about that. And Hindus even are talking about that. You know, when you talk about Brahma, it’s like Brahma is not just another God. It’s not just some God with an elephant head or, you know, how they make fun of the Hindu God. It’s like, you don’t, you can’t, you can’t confuse those two things. Yes. It’s just, it’s a long road, especially to talk about this stuff with scientists. Yeah, with scientists. But it seems like one way of interpreting what you’re trying to get at with Jordan is saying, reserve a space for mystery. If you call something God, always recognize that it’s not anything that you can actually think of and sensibly touch is a mode of being. Right. But, but, and so it’s important or the sacred life is to, is to have like a space reserved for that, which is infinite, even if you can never attain that. It’s still, the hand is always open for it. Yeah. I mean, and so, I mean, in the, in the Orthodoxy, we always say that you can be united with God. They even say things like you can become God, but not in essence. Like you can’t, you cannot, you cannot fully be united with the essence of God. So there’s always something which is beyond. There’s always a mystery which is beyond any level of attainment that any saint can, can. And so it’s actually an eternal dynamism. Right. Okay. So there’s this eternal movement towards kind of towards the infinite. Like there’s no, there’s no stopping. It’s not a stasis. Like sainthood in Orthodoxy is not stasis. It’s not like, all right, you reach, you reach, you know, the beatific vision. Yeah. You’re there, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re sitting on a cloud. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine it. But I think, I think that that’s, yeah, to me that, but with a great thing though, the great thing about what Jordan is doing, and hopefully I’m hoping that some people are starting to understand it. And if they do, it’s going to be a, it’s going to be a huge deal is when he says that those principalities are personalities. That’s a big deal. That’s a big deal for people to understand what we’re talking about. Yeah. We talk about angels, what we’re talking about when we talk about this hierarchy of principalities. Yeah. When the notion that consciousness becomes a, that consciousness is a, is a constitutive element of the universe. And it’s actually the constitutive element into which we can engage with the universe. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Right. And so those elements of, those elements of consciousness actually kind of can scale up. And that’s, that’s a really interesting place that we are that even I, even, even someone like Sam Harris, he tweeted out one time a podcast of a mathematician who was talking about consciousness as different, at different levels that he’s kind of, he thinks that he’s mathematically is able to show consciousness at different levels of reality. And so even like a city, let’s say would have a form of consciousness and then you could keep going up into that, into that, into a hierarchy of consciousness. And I was like, you know, when God, when in the Bible, it talks about the angel of Philadelphia or the angel of these different cities. Exactly. Like cities have our beings, right? Cities have our networks and their beings. And so it’s not, it’s, I think it’s, it’s going to become, hopefully, I’m hoping that it’s going to become more palatable for people to understand it that way. Yes. And so, and then, then it’s, it’s very, then it becomes very close to, to kind of a traditional understanding of how the world lays itself out. Yeah. I think that’s one of the things that Jordan’s doing, especially when he dukes it out with Sam and, and Brett Weinstein’s involved in that discussion and trying to figure out some sort of translator from the scientific mindset. To the religious mindset and show how they are actually, they’re good for each other.