https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GjBfkYvABn8
talked about disagreements with my conceptualization of Christ, let’s say, and which I’m not sure what that conceptualization is, by the way, exactly. It’s a mystery to me. But I can say some concrete things about it. I mean, I certainly, I understand and appreciate the symbolic significance of the ideal human being. And that finds its embodiment. And I took these ideas in large part from Jung and Eric Neumann that Christ is at least a representation of the ideal man, whatever that is. And we all, interestingly enough, we all seem to have an ideal. And that ideal has us, right? And that’s where it’s very interesting to consider the role of conscience, because your conscience will call you out on your behavior. And so it seems to function as something that’s somewhat independent, or at least as something that you can’t fully voluntarily control. Because if you could voluntarily control it, then you just tell the pesky little bastard to go away, or to pat you on the back continually. Because there must be few things in life more pleasurable than being a fully committed narcissist, to really believe that everything that you do is right, and that you’re a good person. And I suppose if you could wave a magic wand and rearrange your mind so that it was constantly telling you that, you do it, but you don’t seem to be able to do that in relationship to your conscience. It trips you up. And so it tells you when you’re not living up to your own ideal. And that means that you have an ideal and you don’t even know what the hell it is. But you certainly know when you transgress against it. And I know that there’s a strong line of Christian thinking that’s identified the conscience with divinity, sometimes with Christ inside, sometimes with the Holy Spirit. And those are very interesting conceptualizations. But you can think of them psychologically, and you can even think about them biologically, you know, to some degree, because we’re so social. If we don’t manifest an appropriate moral reciprocity, we’re going to become alienated from our fellows, and we won’t survive, and we’ll suffer and die, and we won’t, we certainly won’t find a partner and have children successfully. And so to some degree, the conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within. And that’s a perfectly reasonable biological explanation. But the thing is, is the deeper you go into biology, the more it shades into something that appears to be religious, because you start analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself. And it becomes something, well, it becomes something with a power that transcends your ability to resist it. So, okay, so you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective, and the critic, my critic, this particular critic that I’ve been reading, said, well, that doesn’t differentiate Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods. And of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion, Joseph Campbell did that, and Jung to a lesser degree, I would say, but Campbell did that. But the difference, and C.S. Lewis pointed this out as well, the difference between those mythological gods and Christ was that there’s a there’s a representation of there’s a historical representation of his of his existence as well. Now you can debate whether or not that’s genuine. You can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there’s credible objective evidence for that. But it doesn’t matter in some sense, because this, well, it does. But there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter, because there’s still a historical story. And so what you have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth. And in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things. The problem is, is I probably believe that. But I don’t know, I don’t, I’m amazed at my own belief, and I don’t understand it. Like, because I’ve seen sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch, you know, that’s union synchronicity. And I’ve seen that many times in my own life. And so in some sense, I believe it’s undeniable, you know, we have a narrative sense of the world. For me, that’s been the world of morality. That’s the world that tells us how to act. It’s real, like we treat it like it’s real. It’s not the objective world. But the narrative and the objective world touch. And the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be Christ. But I don’t know what to, that seems to me oddly plausible. Yeah. Well, I still don’t know what to make of it. It’s too, partly because it’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it. If you believed in the story of Christ, or if you believe that history and, and let’s say the narrative, make meat, let’s say. Both, I think, I think you, because when you believe that you buy both those stories, you believe that the narrative and the objective can actually touch. Yeah. I mean, we all believe that we saw that you and I, I mean, this is a trivial example, but we had a, when we were discussing, we had a sequence of discussions around frog symbolism. Four years ago. Yeah. That was very bizarre, to say the least. You know, and that was a trivial example, relatively trivial example of the narrative world and the objective world coming together. Didn’t feel that trivial at the time. Well, the way, the way that I like to deal with this is that one of the things it, it’s already there in your thought. It’s already there in the way that you talk about reality, which is that one of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is something like attention, right? It’s something, there’s a hierarchy of, of manifestation, because everything that appears to us in the world has an infinite amount of details, right? It has an indefinite amount of ways that you could describe it, that you could angles it by which you could analyze it. And so nonetheless, the world appears to us through these hierarchies of meaning, right? I always kind of use the example of a cup or a chair. Like a chair is, is of just a multitude of things. It’s a multitude of parts. How is it that we can say that it’s one thing? There’s a, there’s a capacity we have to attend and this capacity we have to attend is something like a co-creation of the world. And so the world actually exists. Well, a chair is a good example because you know, you can try to define it objectively, but you end up with beanbags and stumps and they don’t have anything in common. Well, they’re both made of matter, you know, for whatever that’s worth. It’s pretty, pretty trivial level of commonality, but you can sit on them. Yeah, that’s what it’s a mode of being which defines them. Well, and that’s so strange. So many of our object perceptions are projected modes of being. And so even the objective world is ineluctably contaminated with its utility and therefore with morality. Exactly. And so I think that that’s the key. The key is that once you understand that the world manifests itself through attention and that consciousness has a place to play in actually the way in which the world reveals itself. And so you can try to posit a world outside of that first person perspective, but it’s kind of deluded. It’s a deluded activity. Well, it’s also very, very difficult because you don’t know what to make of something like time, because time has an ineradicably subjective element and duration, which is different than time. I mean, time is kind of like the average rate at which things change, but duration is something like the felt sense of that time. And if you take away this objectivity, it isn’t obvious what to do with time. And I think physicists stumble over this all the time, so to speak. So, and this is something that this, this intermingling of value in fact, was something that I never thought, I never thought I made much traction with, with Harris, with Sam Harris. He, he didn’t seem to me to be willing to admit how saturated the world of fact is inevitably with value. And I actually think he’s denying the science at that point, because for everything I know about perceptual psychology, there’s a great book called Vision as a, oh God, now I can’t remember the name of the books. That’s memory trouble. I’ll remember it. No worries. The idea is that if that is true, then there are certain things which come out of that. There are certain necessary things down the road from that, that insight, which is that attention plays a part in the way the world lays itself out. And that one of them, and one of them is that the stuff that the world is made of is partly something like attention, something like consciousness, and that has a pattern. And that pattern is the same pattern as stories. It just, it just, it doesn’t lay itself out exactly the same, but things exist with a pattern, which is similar to stories. They have identities, they have centers, they have margins, they have exceptions. And that’s how stories lay themselves out. Like, so a story happens in time, how an identity, let’s say, is broken down and then reconstructed. You could say that that’s basically the story of every story, how something breaks down and is reconstructed. And so that is a way for us to perceive the identity of things. And so if the world is made of this, then it’s actually, it’s actually our world, our secular world, which is a strange aberration on how reality used to exist for every culture and every time from the beginning of time, which is to take that for granted, to take for granted that something that they didn’t call it consciousness, but intelligence and attention are part of how the world lays itself out. And it lays itself out in modes of being. And one of the things that comes out of it is not only that, but like you said, it’s not only that you have ideas, but it’s that ideas have you, or that it’s not only that you engage in modes of being, it’s that modes of being have you. And that recognition means that the first level of the first level of attention to that looks something like worship. It looks like celebration. It looks like it’s like the thing which makes the, let’s say the National Hockey League so successful has more to do with celebration than just a bunch of guys on skates on a piece of ice, throwing a puck around. There’s a celebration of the purpose of that thing. And it manifests itself through a bunch of stuff, which one is like a trophy that stands in the middle on the top of a bunch of on a stand and everybody looks at it and kisses it. And so there’s this veneration. Yeah. Well, and there’s mascots. The Hockey League example is very interesting because it’s a social game and all the players, they’re attempting to aim right. So there’s a symbolic element to that. Sin is misplaced aim. And so you hit the small space in the net block, though it may be by your enemies and everyone celebrates that. And you do that in cooperation with other people and in competition with other people. And if you do it properly, not only are you a brilliant player from a technical perspective, but you’re also a great sport. And so there’s an ethic there and a morality. And this is why people are so upset when hockey players or any other pro athlete does something immoral in their personal life is because it violates the ethic that’s being celebrated as a consequence of this great game. And then right, so you can see that the striving for an ideal mode of being, the religious striving for an ideal mode of being is central to what it is that makes hockey addictive. That’s right. Yeah, necessarily. And so God, I saw that in pro wrestling. There’s a great documentary, Brett Hart called Hitman Heart. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. And it portrays pro wrestling as a stark religious battle between the forces of good and evil. And Brett Hart, who at one point was the most famous Canadian in the world, was overwhelmed by the archetypal force of his representation as the good guy. It’s a great documentary, Hitman Heart. And it shows you how pro wrestling is not the world’s most intellectual activity, to say the least. And people can easily be dismissive of it. But one of the things I loved about the documentary was that it attempted to understand from within what was compelling about what was being portrayed. And it was a religious drama. It just was shocking and brilliant. And so that is actually, there is an objective part of that, that there’s an objective way in which these patterns kind of come together and manifest, let’s say, higher and higher versions of this drama. And so the sports drama has a certain level, but it’s limited to a certain extent because it still happens as a confrontation, let’s say, between two irreducible sides. And so what happens in something like the story of Christ is that that gets taken into one person. And so all the opposites become the king and the criminal, the highest. Even in the image of the cross, you have this image. And as Christ is being crucified, they’re putting a sign above his head saying that he’s the king. As Christ is being beaten, they’re giving to him a crown. And so Christ joins together all the opposites. And so in his story, you see, if you’re attentive to these patterns, you see the highest form of this pattern being played out. And one of the aspects that has to be there for it to be the most revealed or highest form is that it also has to include the world of manifestation. I mean, it can’t just be a story. It has to be connected to the world. So that’s why Christians insist on the fact that Jesus is not just a story, that he’s an incarnated man, that he was incarnated. But I don’t believe their insistence.