https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pDdotg5lxvA
And so, Garad Widener says, Hi, John, forgive me for being so dim on this. I’m still trying to understand the pattern of the ascent, ascending a mountain as with Moses at Sinai. I can see the pattern itself, but I’m still cloudy on what it means or its applicability. I noticed recently when Jesus prays in Gethsemane in Matthew 26, 36, first he leaves all the disciples, but Peter, James, and John, then he leaves even then, then comes back to them and finds them sleeping. Yeah. So, if I apply it to human life, all I can see is that those who struggle for virtue and succeed find that most other people fall away. That doesn’t seem deep or interesting enough for such a central pattern. You can understand it this way. There’s an exchange that happens between that which is below and that which is above. So when you go up the mountain, you kind of have to be able to abstract the multiplicity. If you want to… I’m trying to apply it to everyday life for you. So this obviously has a deeper… It does have a personal meaning and a spiritual meaning the way that it’s described, but you can understand it that if you want to… If you want to… Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of things and you want to figure out how they connect together. So you have to be able to move your… Get your eyes away from the particulars. You kind of have to remove your eyes from the particulars. Let’s say you’re in a team and everybody’s doing all a bunch of crazy stuff and everybody’s doing all these things and you’re like, what is happening? We need to figure out what our team is doing, what our purpose is and how that organizes everything else. And so you have to stop focusing on all the details because you get lost in the details. You get lost in all the multiplicity. So you kind of have to bring that down and there’s a hierarchy of that. So there’s all the detailed details and then there’s maybe higher aspects of what you’re doing in the team, but you also have to kind of remove that in order to find, let’s say, the one thing, the one reason why everybody’s doing what they’re doing. And so you can understand that when people forget that purpose, they do something like fall asleep or they worship idols. So think about a team that’s building something and then people get caught up in the little thing they’re doing. Then they start fighting with the other members of the team because it’s like, here’s trying to stop us from doing the thing we’re doing. And then it’s like, no, it’s your fault. And everybody’s fighting because because everybody’s so focused on their little task, they don’t see the big picture. Right. And so that’s idolatry. Or it’s there’s also like a sense of they just falling asleep. Like, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this thing? It’s pointless. I’m just going to sit in my office and I’m going to go on Facebook because who cares? I don’t even know what the purpose of what I’m doing is. And so all these people in the team, they can just become kind of just drop and stop even really acting together because they don’t understand what they’re doing. And so the person, the leader goes up, finds the purpose of the meaning, finds the purpose of what they’re doing. And then that person comes back down the mountain and says, wake up, remember the purpose, remember the attention. So Christ says, I’m going up to pray, going up to the highest thing, going up to worship God. And I want you to participate in this. I want you to remember the highest thing. Don’t forget it. And so they forget and they fall asleep. They forget and they worship idols like in the story of Moses. So Christ has to come back down and has to wake them up. And that implies, you know, this idea of saying to wake up or it also implies a judgment, you could say, where you when Moses comes back down and he finds the people worshiping the golden calf, there is some judgment that’s going to happen. That is that some people are going to get cut off and some activities are going to get cut off. So you can see the same with the team. It’s like you have this team doing a bunch of stuff, you don’t know what’s going on. And so the leader goes up or someone goes up, finds the purpose of what this team is for, then comes back down. First of all, says, wake up. This is what we’re doing. And then looks at what everybody’s doing and then decides, well, you know what? This is useless out. This is not pointing to the higher thing. This needs to go. This person doesn’t have the skills needed to be part of this team. They need to go. And then maybe you’re actually going to gather in more things that are more aligned with what you’re with what you’re doing. So that’s how it applies to everyday life, because it’s basically the pattern of of of of of attention itself and the pattern of what we do in the world. So.