https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=h7RhY0HWPJ0
Almost all of the concepts that we use today are not the same as the ancient concepts. So it’s always difficult to talk about symbolism. I’m still going to try, but it’s always difficult because we always assume that we know the meaning of words. And we do, but it just happens to be not the same as the ancient meaning. The idea is we have to be careful not to interpret ancient, ancient stories with modern categories. I keep repeating that because that’s what 90% of the people who misread traditional stories and biblical stories do. So it solves about 90% of the problems that people have when they read a text. So when you at least try to find a proper meaning for the categories, already the problem of the distinction between a symbolic interpretation and a literal interpretation usually vanishes. It usually vanishes right there. If you try to find the proper meaning of words, that dichotomy is usually enough to make it completely disappear. So one of the examples I use in my mind for that, to show that, is you say, for example, in the Bible, the snake in the garden. If I say that’s a symbol of time, the snake in the garden is a symbol of time, let’s say. So if you have a modern scientific definition of time, that makes no sense. It looks like I’m just arbitrarily assigning a meaning to that element of the story. It looks like I’m just making it up, basically. But if you have a proper definition of time which fits with an ancient understanding, then it does work. It’s not arbitrary anymore. Because if you say, for example, that time used to be understood in a way where it meant the cause of transformation or an influence of transformation, something like that, that’s what time is. Change. That’s not change. It’s the cause of change. It’s the influence of change. It’s change itself, something like that. It’s not what scientists call time today. What physicists call time has nothing to do with what we just said. It’s become just an empty quantity used to describe a mechanistic world in terms of events in time and space. It’s not the cause of change. It’s not an influence of change. I mean, in the modern way, time, it’s not seen as a cause of change. But it certainly was seen as that in the ancient world. Time was a cyclical transformation, like a powerful influence that transformed things, changing them into their opposites, actually, changing light into darkness, darkness into light, life into death. That was time. So that definition of time, if you use that, then you can say the snake in the story of the garden is a symbol of time. There’s no metaphor. There’s no metaphor. It is the cause of transformation in that story. Where’s the metaphor? It’s vanished. Just because I use the right definition of the concept of time and I stop using the scientific mechanistic one, all of a sudden, when I say symbol, it doesn’t mean metaphor anymore. It doesn’t mean an allegory. It means nothing of the sort. The snake is a cause of transformation in the story. It is a symbol of time. Yeah, so the idea of nakedness and dressed, it has a cosmic meaning and it has an individual meaning. So the idea is that things are either in a natural state or they’re artificially fixed to make them work, to make your theories match the facts. So this happens at the individual level. I mean, you have an idea of a plan, but maybe your body, your passions or whatever, don’t cooperate. So you want to do something, but let’s say you’re lazy. That’s your body telling you, no, sorry, I don’t agree with your plans. I’m not going to follow along. So you have to artificially force yourself to do certain things. So that’s what it means to be dressed in the Bible. And clothing itself is an example of that. So again, it’s not about having metaphors. The idea of clothing, that’s what clothing is for ultimately. It’s to correct your passions. It’s to give your head, your mind, your things that have a purpose to give them dominance over your body. Food is matter. We eat it, it becomes our body. What does that mean? Become our body. It means now you will follow the laws of this being, the laws. So my hand used to be a sandwich. It’s not a metaphor. I mean, I ate a sandwich, it became my flesh. Now this flesh follows the instructions of my head. It follows the laws. It follows my identity. It doesn’t follow only its natural state anymore. Again, there is no metaphor in there at all. So at a bigger scale, individuals are eaten by a society. It means they’re integrated into that body on the condition that they follow the laws of that society. They follow the rules. So that’s like the sandwich becoming my flesh and following the laws of my head. It’s just at a slightly bigger scale. So what does it mean to dress the body at the individual level? It means put clothing on, but it also means to force my body to some degree to do certain things that it naturally wouldn’t. Because like I said, you could either be lazy or you could have too much energy or something like that and you have to restrain yourself. So in a society, same thing. There are certain rules that are there just to artificially make the body coherent. Yeah, it’s often a question of redefining the terms again. That’s why it’s so difficult to talk about symbolism today. Things that used to be absolutely obvious in the past have become extremely difficult to understand today because we don’t have the same perspective at all. Yeah. Luckily, we still have our everyday experience which we can use as a base for understanding symbolism. So hopefully we can get people to get back into the more primordial experience of their body and their everyday life, which is a good way to start at least.