https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9ATLZSw4SkI
So Andre B says, it’s difficult to understand the views on angels. Really? The way you describe the angel of a city in scientific terms is reasonable, but could you use similar terms to talk about Gabriel, who told Mary she is going to give birth to Jesus? I mean, I don’t know what to answer that. It’s like… Do you think that, let’s say, your being is reasonable in terms of science? Like you, you existing and being able to communicate and being able to act in the world is reasonable? And I hope you would say yes. And so when I use the image of a city and the idea of an angel that has a city as a body, you could say, it’s just to help you understand how you can perceive that. But there are other methods of causality by which higher beings can manifest themselves. And some of them are possibly more subtle than a city, you know. So think of it like the virtues, like the body of the virtues or the kingdom of the virtues. If you have the angel of a virtue, then those angels have far more subtle bodies. The way in which they interact with the world is not the same as the city. A city is easier to understand. But in terms of these other types of beings that exist, the way in which they manifest themselves is more subtle. So the idea that there are, let’s say, angels, archangels, and especially the notion of Gabriel and Michael as these kind of two sides of the man which God manifests himself in the world, like the blue angel and the red angel, or the angel of the right hand and the angel of the left hand that you kind of see in Gabriel and Michael, I mean, I don’t know why that’s, to me that’s not bothersome at all. Now whether or not I can know the mechanical causation by which Gabriel manifested himself to Mary, I don’t know, I’m not there, like I didn’t have that experience. In a way it doesn’t totally matter to understand what are the mechanical causations by which that happened. The mechanical causes by which Mary understood that she had been contacted by an angel, I don’t know what that experience is. I mean, she might have had a vision and that maybe no one else could have seen the vision that she saw. But the vision was nonetheless real and the vision was nonetheless true. And so, you know, Gabriel is using her mechanisms of perception through which to manifest himself to her. You have an example of that, you know, in the story of Balam and the ass, where Balam is going down the road with his donkey and he can’t see the angel. The donkey can see the angel, but he can’t see the angel. So it’s a funny story. And then the donkey is trying to save Balam moving off the road. And then all of a sudden Michael decides that he’s going to manifest himself to Balam. The angel decides he’s going to manifest himself to Balam. And so then Balam sees the angel. So what is the mechanical causation of that? Like what is, I don’t know, like I mean, I don’t know. It’s like, it’s not, that’s not the traditional stories and these types of things don’t, they don’t describe that because they don’t really care. But I mean, the reason why I use city all the time is just because it’s a lot easier to understand with the city how some, how phenomena can gather under a principality and then manifest, you know, a higher will into the world. But there are a lot of other ways that that can happen.