https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-MEskshQS0E
Yeah. You have to be careful because you’re going to be shaped into the shape of what you are worshiping. If you worship a stone object, you’ll slowly kind of turn into that stone object. You’ll turn into whatever pattern you adulate that will come to engulf all of you. And that’s easy. You know what heroin looks like, right? Everybody knows what heroin looks like. Everybody knows what an alcoholic looks like. It actually physically transforms you. Everybody knows what a prideful person looks like. That’s why we have these. That’s why we can play it in a movie, right? You can play a prideful person and we’ll recognize that. But some people become that. And it changes their face. They actually physically become the thing that they worship. And so it’s a reality. The thing that you worship, like you said, will mold you into its image. Yeah. But there are still patterns that are greater than us that aren’t God. There are transcendent modes of being, something greater than thought, greater than feeling, that still aren’t God. They’re greater than us. They’re on the way, maybe, but they can get distracting from us. Do you agree with that? I found that myself. How do you know what’s God and not just something that’s greater than you? So the idea is that anything, like any good, is always of limited value. So any good, like any good you can recognize, even the virtues. And that’s tough. That’s tough because, you know, it’s so funny because I was reading this morning, I was reading The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, a great book, by the way. It’s really good. And he was talking about that where he talked about how sometimes, like, lower passions that seem virtuous at the outset, like the love of your child. Like, that’s a good thing. Like, loving your child is a good thing. But because it’s such a, it is an actual good, it’s almost like more dangerous than, let’s say, your lust. Because lust, you give in to lust and you kind of know that it’s not good. Like, you kind of know that it’s bad for you. It exhausts itself pretty quickly, too. Yeah. And so you’re like, you’re in this thing and you kind of know you need to get out. But if you love your child, you can trick yourself into thinking that this love is the absolute good. And all the sacrifices you make for the love of your child is good. But it actually, not necessarily, it can reach a limit, right, where you are going beyond the pale in the love of your child, where you’re actually trying to, like, you know, suck the child into you. You’re trying to, like, devour the child. And so it’s harder to awaken from these kind of offset virtues. It’s more difficult. It’s like you have these images of monks, this image of the holy ladder where you see these monks going up a ladder towards God. And you see, like, even that really high up on the ladder, you see these like demons pulling them down into hell. And you realize that, oh man, like, you can do everything for pride, like every virtue you can do out of pride. And then it’s like the last test, whether or not you’re just doing it out of self glory, you know. Yeah, no, I was just, I was just thinking about that. Because I expose so much myself through recording myself and publishing it on the internet, which is rather exposing. Like at any moment and constantly, I’m always like one step from falling off. And the higher I get, the more eyes I achieve, the greater my fall will be. Let’s just say, the more people will be accusing me of wrongdoing and I will have to bear that guilt or that shame. It magnifies as my path becomes successively greater. And, you know, there’s ways of tricking myself out of that. But there’s a reality to that. And I was thinking, well, how do I keep my balance? How do I keep my balance? And I remembered this dream that I had about 20 years ago. I had this conversation with a close friend about heaven and hell. And we were talking about the reality of that. And so I was thinking about that. And then I had this dream that I was actually in hell and everything was pain and suffering. And below me was this brick path. And the only way that I could stay on the path out was to be completely calm and completely relaxed and not respond to the pain, not magnify that suffering and just very humbly, very quietly follow that trail out. So, you know, no matter how high you get, you know, there’s like an anecdote to pride is, you know, if you say that pride is the ultimate test, you know, like you have to have the anecdote embedded in every one of your every one of your patterns, every one of your movements, even between your patterns and the breaths that you take, you need to be constantly remembering that. Yeah, but it’s tough. Like for us, like I would say, like you said, it’s it’s a difficult situation. You know, I feel it all the time in terms of the fact that we have these public personas. And then sometimes you talk to someone and you realize and you see in their eyes something which is scary, you know, and so and it’s dangerous. It’s like you almost like this is dangerous for me. Like get away, get away. You know, you want it that you almost want to push it away or sometimes you don’t. You want it. You want it, you know, because it feels it gives you. So it’s a it’s a I think that that’s like one of my biggest. So one of our biggest fears, because I’m not a humble person. I could just naturally I’m just not I think anybody who’s watching my videos will see that sometimes it comes out like I’m not a humble person. And so it’s like I anyways, I hope I just hope God will preserve me through this because yeah, sometimes it’s especially like in the past few weeks is that whole length is the worst, like length is the worst. Like you can follow my Twitter feed when you see like when you see me start to say certain types of things, you’re like, OK, Jonathan, it’s not doing well. It’s like it’s usually is this like this kind of arrogance and pride that comes out.