https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ArpLMHYMK9E
Ajafka asks, could you please elaborate on the pattern that culminates with the Eucharist being the real blood and body of the Lord? I understand many aspects of it, but fail to see the cohesive whole and how it relates to my day-to-day experience. So probably not supposed to talk about the Eucharist. I think I probably talked about it way too much in the past. So how does it relate to your everyday life? Well first of all there’s the idea that your daily life functions through memory. And so that everything you do is connected. So let’s say you are doing homework. So when you’re doing homework you are connected by memory to your purpose. Because you’re not in your purpose. You’re connected to your purpose. So memory doesn’t just function backwards, it actually also functions forwards. Because you can forget your purpose. If you’re running towards the store and all of a sudden something happens to you and you forget why you were going there. So you have to remember things. So memory is something like one of the building blocks of experience. And memories scaffold, they scale up. So let’s say I’m remembering why I’m doing this Q&A. But then let’s say I’m remembering why I’m doing this Q&A because I want to be in contact with my patrons, with the people watching me. I want to give them a little more access to my thought and be open to questions. It’s like that, all that. The memory into that is also linked to another memory which is something more like let’s say the vision I have for what I’m doing. The fact, the mission that I have or whatever and that mission should remember and should be connected to an even higher version which would be something like participating in the Kingdom of Heaven, something like that. And so it’s important to understand that in some ways your life functions through the memory of these different levels as you do things. And so the Eucharist is presented to you as something like perfect memory. So it’s the idea that you are… So it’s… The memory is so perfect that it is both identity, fully identity and also non-identity at the same time. And so you could say the Eucharist is actually eating the blood and body of Christ. Like no, there’s no doubt about that. But it is also being in church and eating bread and wine. And those two realities exist completely. And so we say something like… So you can say it this way. You get to something like the bread and wine is the body and blood of Christ. So if you say it that way, you’re both asserting identity and difference at the same time, complete identity and complete difference at the same time. And so that… You could say that that would be the culmination of how memory works. And it would be the source of… So Christians believe that it’s the source of reality, that it’s actually the secret source of things is found in communion. So a lot of… I know now secularists are going to just be like… Jonathan is just talking about magic again. But the memory, that’s how memory works. The idea is that there’s also the relationship between identity and sacrifice, which I’ve talked a lot about. The idea that identity functions through sacrifice, functions by giving itself. So a way to understand your relationship to your purpose is memory. Another way to understand your relationship of what you’re doing towards your purpose is something like sacrifice, which is that you are taking your best and you’re giving it up towards something above you. And at the same time, you’re also, let’s say, casting out the scapegoat at the same time. So you are always… Say you’re writing a book, you’re gathering all these gestures in and you’re giving it towards the higher purpose of writing the book. But you’re also not eating celery, right? You’re not trying not to be distracted and write something else besides your book. You’re trying not to do other things. And so you actually have to cut off things and you have to send out something on the outside in order for you to exist. And so the idea of memory, sacrifice, ritual, all of this is gathered together in the Eucharist. And there’s so much more. I could just talk about this all night. But hopefully that gives you a little idea of ways in which the Eucharist binds your experience. So, yeah. But it’s never going to… I’m never going to be able to exhaust it for you because that’s why it’s not an explanation. That’s why the Eucharist is a participative act. This is also something which is sometimes frustrating when you’re dealing with talking about these difficult subjects, that these subjects are participations and intuitions. And so when we try to explain them, we never really capture what it is we’re trying to explain. That’s obvious, it’s inevitable, but that is just how it is. And so the way that I try to do it is I try to jump around and like, you’d say, run around the thing and then point towards it in the middle, but I can never really just show you the thing unless you do it yourself, unless you participate. So…