https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=t-DZOqpyr5o
This critic said that the mere psychologization of Christ was insufficient because, and you made the same case in some sense, that it doesn’t make sense unless the narrative and the objective world truly touch. And I think you could debate that because I think that there’s some utility, there could argue to be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth, you know, that the best way to cope with existence is to tell the truth and to face what you don’t know forthrightly and that will enable you to orient yourself within our finite and bounded existence that ends with our death more properly, more accurately, more advisedly than any other root. I’ve seen people from Orthodox priests to, you know, the most Protestant, Protestant you can imagine, recognize in the way that you represent reality something that has value, something that has value because you are manifesting that pattern, like what you’re saying is true. But I think that if we take seriously the relationship between attention, psyche, and the way the world reveals itself to us, then it scales up, it scales up after that, it jumps up a level and it also scales up in terms of, because one of the things that you talk about, like looking up to the star and looking up to the highest thing you can look at and then aiming towards that, you know, once again, one of the things that that does is that the first thing you do is actually, it’s attention, that people like the word worship, it’s a form of reverence, a form of veneration, you submit yourself to that aim. It’s not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it, you actually have to submit yourself to that which is, to what you’re aiming. And so that’s what… Sacrifice to it. Exactly, and you have to sacrifice to it. So that’s why, let’s say, the religious version of this has to move towards the highest possible aim and also one that we can do together. Because like the lower aims, like you could call them something like lower gods, let’s say, or angels or whatever you want to call them. Like these lower aims, they have value, but they’re all fragmented. But for this to stack up, we need to be able to look towards the same image. We need to look towards the same aim and that will bind us together. And so we don’t, we don’t, then we don’t also end up being just kind of individuals who have the weight of the world on our shoulders, but we’re a communion of saints, we’re communion of people who are submitted to aiming towards worshiping the same point. Yeah, and I believe that that’s necessary. And I’ve had some profound experiences, which I can’t really relate here, that of the necessity for that community is that this, whatever our fundamental moral load is, immense though it is, crushing though it is even, requires the participation of others. So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people to be along with you. It’s a collective enterprise, even though it’s an individualistic, even though it requires the perfection, it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual level. That’s not enough. There has to be that communal element as well. You need help. We all need help to aim as high. The highest aim requires communal endeavour. Yeah, and it’s also because it actually is the way that everything works, you know. It’s like the chair aiming to be a chair is a constitutive of parts which are joined together towards a same goal and therefore hold together as a being and manifest the chairedness of the chair. And that’s the same with you. You have all these thoughts, right? You have all these feelings, all these contradicting things inside you, and you need by aiming up towards, you know, the I mean, I believe that the image of Christ, let’s say by aiming towards the image of Christ, you constitute your being into that being that’s able to attend, to sacrifice, to love, and then that scales up with people. I agree. Well, I think you are aiming, and this is another something else I tried to point out to Sam, you are, you’re aiming, you’re either aiming at Christ or something lesser. Yeah. Or if things get really out of hand, you’re aiming at something opposite, and you don’t want to be doing that. But, and this is a matter of definition in some sense, and it’s actually not impossible to understand is that you aim at something better, generally speaking. I mean, maybe you’re out to cause pain, but forget about that. You aim at something better. You wouldn’t do it unless it was better. In fact, it virtually defines better. Like, the whole idea of better is predicated on the idea that there’s an aim that’s beyond you, and then the highest of those aims is the amalgamate, the highest aim is the amalgamate, amalgamation of all higher aims, and that’s a perfect mode of being. And that by definite, that’s a psychological perspective again, that by definition is Christ. And then, but then there seems to be something too convenient about C.S. Lewis’s insistence that that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history. And I’m not like, I, I, I don’t understand why I should believe that. And I don’t, I tend not to believe things without a why. There’s always a why. And, and I, there’s, there’s a hurdle there that I, that, that, well, that I waver on constantly because while I already said that when you think these things through, at least my experience has been, if you think them through sufficiently, you end up with the choice between impossible alternatives. And so, yeah, but it has to do, one of the ways to see it maybe is, is it has to do with the recognizing of the goodness of the world or the goodness of creation, that, that the world is capable of manifesting these patterns. Right? So if you want to understand, for example, the big conflict between the early Gnostics and the Christians, that’s what it was all about. Because the Gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated Christ. They were saying, you know, and they have viewed the world as utterly fallen, as having no value, having to be escaped, having to be fled in every way. Whereas Christianity posits that it’s a non-dual, it’s a non-dual proposition. It’s saying it’s, it all comes together. That’s the, that’s the promise. It all comes together. And so it has to come down. Right? And so it has to come down at every level. And not only that it has to come down into the person of Christ who’s incarnated, but that person has to go down, down into death to the very bottom of the world, you know, to the belly of the Leviathan, and then come back up. And so the whole world is declared as once again, declared as being capable of participating in this good. And so, and so you could say, well, maybe it wasn’t that one, maybe it wasn’t, you know, it’s like, why would it be that particular, particular place where it happened? And that’s the story. But it had to be some place. That’s the story. I mean, that’s where that’s the, there is no other story like that story that we have.