https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=A4s3YDFU-OI
I’m going to start with a story. It’s March 2015 and I’m driving. I’m going to pick up my children at some friend’s house on a Friday night. And it’s about a half an hour drive so I’m settling in and I’m listening to the CBC like I usually do. But that particular evening the content is not usually what you get on the CBC. So on the air is this University of Toronto professor. And what he’s saying rings a bit off from what I usually hear on that show. At first he’s talking about religion and religious symbolism. And he’s doing it in a way, let’s say he’s doing it without the usual smugness that we tend to hear when people talk about religion, especially about Christianity. So here he is talking about Christianity. But I can tell he’s not a priest, he’s not a preacher, he’s a psychologist, he’s a scientist. And so as the talk unfolds, let’s say my attention heightens. And after a few minutes, just a few minutes, I just can’t believe what I’m hearing. As this prof is going through stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel jumping through Shakespeare and Milton and Goethe, and then to Darwin and Nietzsche and Jung, and immediately I see what he’s doing. He isn’t just trying to communicate information. He’s dancing across this wide variety of references because what he wants to do is he wants to bring out, he wants to trace this underlying pattern. And by doing so, he’s trying to awaken something in his listeners. He’s not just trying to get them to understand, which is what we usually hear when we listen to talks. No, he’s trying to provoke, trying to shake people into experiencing how the world is built with meaning. So he talks about logos, which is truth, meaning, expressed in word, this search for purpose. And logos transforms chaos and potentiality into being. And in opposition to this lies deceit, resentment, gradually dismantle the world and plunge it into ever-growing chaos. I mean, of course, he’s taking this from the Bible, the book of Genesis, from the Gospel of St. John, sprinkled with some phenomenology. But he’s very clearly describing this process at all levels of reality. At the individual, the interpersonal, the social, political levels. And this interaction between logos and chaos is the main manner, we could say, by which the world is constantly sustained. So by this point, I’m literally cheering in the car. I’m hitting my steering wheel. And all I can think is, who is this? Who is this person talking? And why have I not heard of him before? Like, why is he not famous? I guess you don’t ask that question anymore, right? And especially, I’m like, how does he know this? You see, like, so the attempt to help people see, experience patterns of meaning and religious symbolism, how it connects to all levels of reality, that’s what I’ve been trying to do for years. That’s been my goal in life, I would say, in my carvings, in my articles, in my talks. And I would say there’s only a handful of people that I know that I can relate to at that level. And it’s not that people don’t talk about religious symbolism, actually a lot of people do, but usually when you hear people talk about religious symbolism, at some point you can kind of picture them in like a tinfoil hat. And then, you know, soon extraterrestrials become part of the discussion. But not this guy. He’s just as clear as can be. So when I get home, I reach out to him and I send him just a little message, you know, just thanking him and expressing my surprise and linking him to a few articles I’d written, a few talks I’d given. You know, that was it. I didn’t expect, I didn’t really expect an answer. But then the next morning I get a message thanking me for my message and pointing me to a few lectures that he had given more specifically on religion. I thought, that’s pretty cool. Like, that’s nice, you know. This random Quebecer sending messages to him. But then about an hour and a half later I get this call. And I can’t do the Kermit voice. So anyways, my memories of that moment are kind of vague. But I think I probably acted like a 14-year-old meeting Kanye West or something. And now his tone is one of surprise, maybe a bit of confusion. And his basic question, and he’s been asking me this question ever since, is, how do you know this? Because he’d listened to my talk and he saw the relationship between what I was saying and what he was saying. And the talk, I had been talking about how Logos organizes potential into experienced being. And so why am I telling you this? I mean, first of all I’m telling you this as an excuse because despite what Father Tedd said, here’s this carver who’s standing amongst theologians and professors. So the reason why I’m here is because since then, Professor Peterson and I have developed this relationship. Some of you might have seen the interviews that we did together. But mostly I’m telling you this because I know that it nears the story of so many people that are probably here in this room. And a lot of the people that might hear this on YouTube or in the podcast. I know that it nears, I know because dozens of people have told me of that experience. You know, I have this image, I don’t know if people have seen it, of Joe Rogan hearing Dr. Peterson talk for the first time and his jaw dropping. You know, at all of a sudden he sees religion in a completely different way. And I’ve even received dozens of messages from, I would call them, in-process atheists who say, you know, my questions and my thinking have been tilted slightly in unexpected ways. And that experience, I think, has been strongest for orthodox Christians like myself. In fact, I stopped counting the number of messages I received from priests asking me, so is Dr. Peterson orthodox or what? And to which I usually answer, no, he just likes Dostoevsky a lot. And there is even one clergyman who answered to that, said, oh, yeah, he’s orthodox, he just doesn’t know it yet. But this correlation has been persistent. So what is this connection? What made the connection between a traditional Christian like myself and Dr. Peterson so obvious, so immediate? And all of this, I believe, resolves around the notion of logos. The language of logos is the underlying language of Christianity.