https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LltEzZtiLdA
What relationship do you see between psychological reality and the hypothesized objective material reality? Or do you not assume that both of these exist? Okay, so I think the problem is psychological reality and objective material reality. I think that we have to see the psychological as an intermediary aspect, but there is the Church Fathers talk about a higher aspect of the human being, which we call the noetic aspect. You could call the spiritual aspect of the human being. And that noetic aspect is our capacity to grasp reality for what it is. It is our capacity to intuitively see. So when I talk about how we engage the world and how the human being participates in the manner in which the world lays itself out, I’m not talking about psychological reality. I’m not talking about what we think. I’m not saying that we can make the world into whatever we want. I’m not a sorcerer. But what I’m talking about is this noetic capacity, which is before thought, before rationalization. It’s this intuitive capacity. And so we don’t actually often have access to it because we’re blind. We just see the world. But with practice, at some point you can start to, with prayer and with practice, with meditation, you can start to see this interaction. You can see how the logi of the world are gathered into us. St. Maximus talks about how we are the laboratory for all of this world to be joined together in us. And then essentially that is what God created us for, is to join all of this together. And sometimes you can see hints of it in the psychological, which is I do use sometimes arguments that refer to more psychological aspects and how we can get a hint sometimes because we can see people twist reality with psychological arguments. We’re seeing that right now. We see it in the media a lot, is how using psychological tactics, using persuasion tactics, people are trying to magically shape the world so that you only see, the world only exists in a certain frame for certain people. They’re in the matrix, you could say something like that. So once we start to understand this, we can see also how through the psychological it can be misused. But also through the psychological, sometimes you can break through someone and kind of open up their perception, I think, so they can see things connect together and you can create these kinds of surprises. And so, okay, so do I assume that both of these exist? Objective material reality. Are you asking if things exist? Without noose, you would say, without spirit? I don’t think things exist without spirit. I think that the existence of the world is a joining of heaven and earth, it’s a joining of the spirit of God and the potentiality of the lower waters or whatever. And I think that that’s how the world exists and that’s what it’s like in Genesis and that’s what it’s like when God creates Adam and that’s what it’s like when, it’s like that’s just how the world exists. But that doesn’t depend on individual people, you know, that let’s say the noetic aspect or the logos in you or the logos is that it ultimately all of this points to the divine logos. Ultimately, all this whole process points to the divine logos, but without the divine word, without the essence which is spoken by God and then at a lower level through Christ and through us, through Christ, I think that the whole idea of whether it exists, it just becomes irrelevant. I don’t even know what that would mean without that.