https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=l6rDqMo0WUo
And I’ve been thinking a little bit about the question of independent existence, because I know that’s one of the things that came up in the discussion, which is that do these angels exist without humans, right? Do these transpersonal agencies exist without humans? And I tend, like I always have the same approach. Like my I really believe in a fractal structure of reality. And so if I want to test something up here, I’d test it down here at my level. And I and I I use that as an analogy to help me transpose the problem. And so the question happened, the same question can be asked about me. The question is, do I exist without my body? And the answer is, it’s a ridiculous question. It’s actually not a question. Like, what are you asking? You know, at least in the Christian position, like St. Gregory of Nice says clearly that humans begin to the human begin to exist in their bodies, they don’t pre exist in some temporal way. You can say that they exist in the mind of God from all eternity. If you wanted to say something that are they exist in the totality of all things. Like there are ways to formulate like a kind of pre existence, but it’s not it’s not a pre existence in time. And so the idea of understanding transpersonal agency seems to be the same. So there’s a manner in which we can say it pre exists, just like you could say about you to a certain in certain manner. Just follow me through this argument. I’ll give you space. Right. That you pre exist your body. And the reason why you could say something like you pre exist your body is because the elements of your body are changing. And so like the actual like chemicals in your body and the parts, like they’re not the same that you had when you were born. Right. They they they moved. It’s like it’s a it’s a what is it? The ship of Theseus problem. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Very much. And so you you you pre exist your body in that sense. And so you could also understand that transpersonal agency pre exists the bodies in that sense. That is a basketball team that has a coherent agency acting on it, that acts as a body. The players can change. Right. And even the management can change. There’s a certain amount of variability possible in the body. But the agency can remain the same despite the change of the body. There’s a limit. There’s a limit. At some point, if you shatter the manifestation too much, like if you shatter the body too much and at some point it some point it separates and then then there’s no then there’s no being like there’s no being anymore. But but so I think that if we see it that way, then we we can both understand the reason why we talk about angelic pre existence, but also understand that angels don’t exist without their subtle bodies either. Like they exist in the world through the effects that they have. So that, you know, the angel of charity doesn’t exist without charity. Like there has to be acts of charity in the world for the angel of charity to exist. Like the angelic virtues, which are one of the hierarchy of angels, are the easiest to understand in that sense. It’s like there is no angel of hope without hope. There has to be hope. There has to be a body of hope for the angel of hope to exist. OK, first of all, this is tremendously helpful. Let me let me try and say something similar. But I so we talked about, you know, you know, non reducibility, the you can’t reduce. I can’t reduce you to your chemical structures because you are instantiated in different chemicals and your body isn’t the same even physical body it was when you were 25 and all that sort of ship of theses kind of thing. I mean, same thing with a computer program. I can put this computer program in the computer I can put this computer program in this computer or that computer or that computer. What makes it the same program? Now, can it be free of any computer? That’s weird. But can you reduce it to any one computer? No. And in that sense, it you know, it pre-exists being in that computer because it’s in this computer, etc. And then secondly, like you said, that these things can’t exist independently of their manifestations.