https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_3dplLPAq8g
So I guess the main thing with the city is you’ve said before that a city is something we can pray to, that we can communicate with in a way that’s analogous to a person. So I can ask my friend the question and that friend can choose to respond to that question or not. But that’s a kind of prayer there, or entreaty to my friend, like, oh, what do you think of this? And in a similar way, I can do that in a city or something that’s not as obviously a person as my friend, in the sense that they don’t have a physical fleshy body, a city doesn’t necessarily have that. So the first thing maybe to the first thing to understand is that a city definitely has a body. It does have a fleshy physical body. It’s just that it’s not a body that we can perceive at a glance the way that we perceive a person at a glance. So you encounter a person, there he is, he’s contained in space, I can go around them. And the city is also like that, but just bigger. It’s just bigger and the space between the parts, let’s say, are bigger than the space between your parts. But you also have space between your parts too, right? There’s massive amounts of space between your molecules and between your different parts. It’s just that at the human level, we don’t necessarily interact with them. That’s the first thing that’s important. Now, the second thing that’s important to really understand is that all the things you encounter of the city are always parts of the city. And so they don’t contain the intelligence of the city. They only manifest it at their level. That’s really important because when I say that- Which is all we can ever encounter. So we can, is that as me in Bristol, for example, I can only encounter the expressions of the identity of Bristol in its particular ways in which that participates in that most story, is that what you’re saying? Exactly. But not only that, but it’s actually similar to even the way you encounter a person. Because when you encounter a person, you’re encountering their body and you’re encountering the sounds that they make or you have all these experiences. And then behind that, you can perceive the intelligence, but the intelligence is not limited to the fleshy stuff and the stuff I hear. And so that’s why sometimes when I say something like, it’s a city has being, the city has intelligence, then people, for some reason, they have to exist within this weird material world where the intelligence behind it. So you can even imagine yourself, not only even your physical parts, but let’s say even your mental parts. Your mental parts are multiple for different situations, but they all embody something like your spirit, which is completely invisible and beyond the parts. So if I ask you to show me how to cook, or if I ask you to, I don’t know, like I ask you a deeply personal question, it’s not the same part of you that will engage me. There’ll be different parts of you that will engage me. Depending on your prayer. Not exactly, depending on your prayer. And so you could imagine that, like let’s say your spirit will send emissaries, and those emissaries will manifest different aspects of you depending on what is needed. So if I come at you with a knife, then you’re not going to answer me with the same emissary as if I come to you with flowers. You’re going to send a different part of you. And so you can understand that the city is the same, where you write, like if you need something, let’s say there’s a pothole in your street, right? And so now you want to get rid of the pothole. So you obviously won’t write to the people that take care of the parks, let’s say. You’ll write to the people that take care of this street. So you’ll write to the person at the city garage or whatever, whatever, however it’s structured in your city, and then you’ll write them and you’ll ask them to come fix your pothole. And so those people, they’re bound by the rules of the city. But they’re not acting just as Joe and Jane, because they’re supposed to act according to the budget, according to the general projects, according to the way in which these these roads are built. So they’re supposed to embody the will of the city.