https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RqzPRajuCNA
Right, so when I first started watching you, there was a sense in which I was familiar with the language that you spoke. I was familiar with what you were talking about because I had obsessively read Jung when I was in high school. And so I was very familiar with the way he talked about symbolism in the Jungian way that he did. But there was something different about the way you were talking about it than he was. I, on the other hand, don’t read Jung. Believe me, but it’s just true. I don’t know what to say. I don’t think you’d like him, no. I think if you read Jung, I’m imagining, if you read Jung, it’d be interesting, but I don’t think it would really be compelling because he has some implicit horizons that I think are, well, what makes your work your work to me and not Jung’s is actually when it came to this. And I think this starts to speak to also these moments of ecstasy, these moments of releasement. And I want to talk about what’s good about that. When you said, no, it’s like, I think it’s when you talked about the symbol. I think you in some video where you were talking about the symbol of something and you said, look, the symbol is actually, the symbol is one of the ways or that picture is one of the ways that the pattern substantiates itself. The picture isn’t the symbol. The picture, it just happened. I got this sense that you didn’t say this, but I got the sense it’s like it’s a condensed, it brought all the pieces enough in this like a small enough space time picture such that you could see the whole pattern in front of you. But it itself is just an substantiation in the pattern that happens in reality over longer timeframes that if you could understand it, you could see those patterns. Yeah, that’s a good way to understand it. That is that the symbols that appear to us most clearly are those that are the most condensed, you could say, like you said, that the word symbol actually means two things that are thrown together. And so there’s this idea that symbolism itself is bringing together of elements and so that you see them as one, you see the pattern or the ordering of it. And so the symbols, the more proper symbols, let’s say like an icon or a church building or something which we tend to think as symbolic rather than your everyday life, which is also symbolic. But let’s say the liturgical space or the sacred spaces, they condense it in a manner which is more accessible or makes it accessible to us so we can kind of get it. And once you see the pattern, then it actually then, if you’re sensitive, then it’ll start to, let’s say, bleed out into other aspects of your reality. And then you realize that, hey, my body is also made that way and a relationship with others also has similar patterns. And our societies and our stories, all of it is actually manifesting these sacred patterns to a certain extent. Yeah. And so the symbol is one instant of the pattern. Like a little incarnation of an essence. And so then I think that’s when I really got, it’s like, oh, you’re talking about, you’re actually talking about reality. Oh yeah. That might be the difference between me and you. It’s not just psychological. And so it really is, the psychological is part of it. For sure, your psyche also has that shape. And it’s really important because we are human beings, our logos, that say we have reason and we have consciousness. Therefore, we are the place where symbolism actually kind of happens, but it nonetheless is also happening in the world because we’re like the funnel through which the world has meaning. And this is something which I’m not making up. This is something that I take from the Church Fathers, especially St. Maximus the Confessor, this idea that the man is the ultimate microcosm and that the entire cosmos condenses into the human person. And we can understand it in a, you can use cognate, cog scythe to now to understand it or you can use theory of the meaning and the problem of emanation and complexity to now see that yes, conscious beings are like the funnel through which this potentiality that’s out there, this kind of indefinite potentiality comes in and then becomes meaning, becomes a world. Right. Okay, so I want to slow down there a little bit. So you just said a bunch right there. Yeah, sorry. The infinite potential, the endless potential comes in. And what you’re saying is that the psyche, you could say is the place that the psyche is the place where that potential gathers into a world. I mean, it’s not just the psyche, it’s the person. It’s more embodied than just the psyche, but it is the person, like the human person both in terms of mind, but also in terms of acting out in the world. That’s why it’s a perspective. And Jordan talks about this all the time where the categories of being are actually categories of action. They’re not static categories, even the way that Plato tended to think of forms. There’s something off about that. Say Maximus, the confessor, talks about how the idea of things or the form and the essence, the way that the Platonists talked about are actually also the end of things, those two things together. So he kind of takes a lot of Aristotelian categories in Platonic, jams them into this thing, which is logos, which is it’s also the reason, the purpose, and that brings it back into the human person because those purposes come out of us or join in us. And so the reason why we have a category called rock is a human reason, but it’s also totally objective. It’s not a subjective reason. It’s objective, but it’s a human reason. It joins into us. I don’t know if that makes sense. That makes sense. It makes a lot of sense.