https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=—kRXilDhfI
You know, in the beginning of my experience of suffering, really, although I think that, you know, from the time I was a little kid, I had a stomach ache, I’ve always kind of been suffering physically with discomfort. And so I think I’ve always been on this road to spiritual understanding. But when I was diagnosed with that terminal cancer and went to and decided that I would die, and then went to see my son to tell him whatever happened in that moment, you know, that parent child love that that was that became really obvious to me at that moment. Completely. It was like there was some sort of neurochemical change in my system, you know, that I went from thinking one way to to realizing that that wasn’t the way to think anymore. And from now on, I was going to think this way. And, and maybe, maybe, yeah, we call it metanoia. It’s a it’s a it’s a change in intelligence like there’s a term that exists like a shift in intelligence or a shift in in it’s more than intelligence in the sense of just your thoughts, but it’s actually like the very mode of being the changes, and you all of a sudden experience and see reality through a whole new lens, maybe. Yes. And so how do you describe that from the stories of the Bible that kind of change? You mean, which stories talk? There are many, obviously many. The whole idea of the whole idea of repentance has to do with this, of course, you know, the notion repentance, of course, has to do with humility, maybe in a different way than what you experience, but it has to do with recognizing your own faults and kind of owning your own faults. And then when you when that happens, and you, you own your own faults and realize that you all in a way don’t have the power to change that. But sometimes when that happens, all of a sudden, the power does come to you. And you actually can change, you know, and someone who has had, let’s say, a really bad habit for a long time and suddenly experiences that and has that transformation and suddenly becomes is freed from that bad habit. You know, you, you all of a sudden, you’re just free from it. You and you don’t you don’t even know doesn’t mean you’re not in danger to go back at some point. But even that moment that you can experience where you’re suddenly free of that bad habit and you’re looking around you like what? Like how is you don’t even recognize yourself anymore. You’re like, who’s that person before who was a slave of this? You don’t even so there’s these these transformational shifts that usually come with, like you said, a form of of humility. But it can be a form of repentance, it can be a form of accepting your circumstances. It can be all these different things which suddenly free you from a burden and you can shift. And sometimes it’s it’s more radical than that you find this the story of the conversion of St. Paul, for example, is, I mean, it’s so radical, he basically was killing Christians. And and then he’s on the road to go kill a bunch of Christians, and suddenly, it just switches on him, it just flips, where he realizes that he’s, he’s basically going the wrong way and something, something like a light comes from heaven, he falls off his horse, it’s this really radical moment of transformation, and he becomes even blind for a few days where he can’t see anything. It’s like his whole world is shifting. Oh, I think that’s true. Yeah, that makes sense. And suddenly you can see, so that’s that’s something that happens to people for all in in all kinds of reasons. These are real. These are real experiences, you can have them at small levels, but then sometimes you can have very large ones where, you know, you really are. And then you there’s no other way to describe it besides a theophany this besides something like I saw God or I saw light, I saw an angel, there’s something something happened to me and then I can’t even describe. And it’s weird because sometimes it’s like, sometimes it seems to be the related to a process someone has been on like some kind of work that they’ve done, whether it’s a it’s a kind of repentance or attention to their own to their own circumstances. And sometimes it just seems to drop out of nowhere. People just have these experiences and then they they don’t know I have a friend of mine who who was like, he was like a kind of, he would he was a day trader and he lived alone with his dog and he didn’t want to go to the<|nn|>. And he didn’t want a steady girlfriend. He was just like this guy who was just making a lot of money. And one day he was driving on the road and all of a sudden something hit him like a flash of transformation hit him. He almost had an accident and stopped on the side of the road and his life has changed ever since. Like he’s just he’s like, I’m a Christian. I don’t know what that means. Like what is what is going on? I think I’m a Christian. Then he’s like going to ask priests and pastors like, can you explain what happened to me? Can you help me understand what’s happened? And so I think that that’s possible as well. It’s hard to explain why. Yeah, well, I think that’s what happened to me. Yeah, yeah, something like that. Something sudden. But now, because I am asking for God’s will in the morning and seeing and then being grateful for how the day is unfolding and noticing how things if I that that blindness that you talk about, I pause. Right. So if I come up to a time that’s uncomfortable, instead of reacting, I pause. That’s like the blind part of it, right? Where I’m pausing and I’m not doing anything. And I’m waiting, because I don’t know what to do. It’s out of my hands. So I’m waiting to see what there is for me next. And I can I can kind of see that that is, I think that that’s what is being talked about when he when St. Paul is blinded for a period of time, because when you have a misunderstanding, I think that it’s unusual to be told right away what to do. Yeah, I mean, you can’t hear it sometimes also. Like when. Right. Right. And maybe maybe you’re told right away and you didn’t see it. So then you got to wait even longer. And so maybe that’s why you have to wait is because you didn’t see it. Probably. Hey, that’s probably what it is. And I mean, I think that that’s the so there’s even sometimes I think with what Jordan is doing or even what I’m doing or like you said, with my brother’s book, what it’s trying to do is there’s there’s a realization that sometimes there’s some propositional change that can’t happen. It’s not about propositional things. It’s not about I’m going to give you the right information. And now with that information, you’re going to be able to change. It’s not enough. It’s actually the change happens so deep. It’s in the very frame of reference. It’s in the very stance that you hold in the world. And so it’s it’s so hard. You can’t it’s almost you. Oh, you you have to you do it in weird ways. You have to set traps for people almost you have to you have to kind of open up spaces that they fall into suddenly and they don’t realize. And all of a sudden they they have these shocks of you know, the the the the Zen Buddhist have this idea of the colon where you say you try to bring someone in a space that’s so contradictory that they can’t reason out of it. And then they it shocks them into this transformation. So there are these different but I think that for sure this idea of meditating on your on your sins like the idea of repentance is a is an easy way to do it where you you you see yourself. You try to see all the places where you don’t hit the mark where you’re not in line and realize that realize that you can’t sometimes you can’t do anything about it. And then sometimes you get that that that experience. You