https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zH8VdQN76uY
I completely agree with you. The liturgy is a symbolic playing out of a dance that is happening all the time, even if we don’t know, and the vast majority of people don’t know. I do think that the Orthodox tradition has preserved that a lot better than the usual Protestant or Catholic church that some people still go to on Sunday. Because some Orthodox rituals, for instance, the priests have their backs to the public. They face the divinity, they face the altar. And these subtle little things are important because if they face the altar, the message is, the priest is one of us. They are representing us, and we are trying to relate to the divinity, as opposed to the Catholic priest who stands on the place where he stands, facing us with his back to the altar and preaching moral codes. That hasn’t worked for 2000 years. And then after Luther, we completely got rid of symbolism altogether. I mean, I’m not here to chastise Luther because he saw several things that were true and needed a reaction. He saw that the church was becoming a temporal power as opposed to a spiritual power. He saw that clergy was hypocritical, focused on money and sinning. He understood that the people had to have more direct participation in the relationship with divinity, so they should be able to read the Bible and not only have the priests as full controlling intermediaries for a relationship with God. So I understand all that. But it went so far that some Protestant rituals are now sort of a mock-up of a trial. There is no symbolism. It’s just telling you what not to do all the time. They even dress like judges. So there is a tremendous loss that maybe even religious institutions are guilty of promoting. Yeah. But I think that with even your work or the work that I’m seeing, people like John Vervecky that you’ve talked to as well. And it seems like we’re in a even with Jordan Peterson has been doing seems like there’s an interesting moment right now. And there’s a moment in which even secular people are capable of suddenly noticing, for example, the ritualization of their daily behavior, the idea of the informal as being the place of authenticity. This has been the disease of the West from, I would say, possibly from the Reformation for sure. After that, this idea that that which is authentic is when we are informal. And this is absurd because as soon as you realize how even your bad habits are ritualized, like everything that you engage with, anything that’s teleological has to be ritualized. That then all of a sudden you can think, OK, so that’s why we have to have anything in common. It has to be ritualized or else you can’t do it in common. And so as it seems like an interesting moment, and hopefully this will grow, I think even in the Protestant churches in the United States, those that are leading the edge, you could say, are returning to a somewhat of a ritualized sense of time where they celebrate the different feasts of the church. And they have more liturgy, a little more formalism. So I think that we can’t go any further than the rock and roll concert and conference church. There’s nothing lower we can go to. And so hopefully it’s all upheld from here for many of the churches. I hope you are right. I do think that there is a psychological reason why we’ve embraced banality so thoroughly. You call it informality. I rather call it banality. We’ve made everything banal. Everything is superficial and banal and meaningless and nihilistic. And if I just put it like that and everybody who is listening or watching this will think, well, but of course that’s not what we wanted. We don’t want to banality. We want depth. We want meaning. I think this is a superficial judgment. I think we do want banality because it spares us the confrontation with some great terrors within. A banality absorbs from responsibility. It absorbs from the feeling of having to achieve something, of having to render some form of service, achieve some kind of goal. No, there is nothing. There’s nothing to achieve. Nothing. It’s the unbearable lightness of being of Milan Convera. It’s so light. It floats with the breeze. We are anchored in nothing. Nothing has any meaning. Nothing has any depth. I mean, there is a huge psychological payoff for this. An enormous price, a gargantuan price. That’s depression. And it’s all that stuff that we have an epidemic of today, addiction. This gazillion different patterns of addictive living that we have today. When I say addiction, I don’t mean only substance addiction. I mean, addiction to distraction, to television, to buying shoes, to sex and porn, to everything. Eating meat and sugar. These are all addictions. And because we’ve lost depth and roots and meaning, we feel no responsibility. We no longer fear the experiential state after death. Because there is no such thing. But we lost our meaning and we compensate with that, with myriad patterns of addictive behavior. So in a sense, we’ve secured a payoff and we found a bandaid to compensate for the price we pay. That’s distraction, consumerism, television, pornography, eating, all this stuff. It is difficult to dislodge a civilization from this local minimum. I don’t think it happens without major trauma. It didn’t happen after two world wars. So that gives you an idea. Yeah, no, you’re right. I don’t think that we’ve dealt with anything that happened in those first world wars. We’re shocked for two generations. And it seems like all the patterns are returning. That’s for sure. One of the things that I like to do is to help people notice, for example, that the patterns of addiction actually are religious in nature. They’re just distorted religious patterns. So once you see that, once you understand that whatever bad habit you have is basically a form of liturgy, it’s just that it’s one that spirals fast and that runs out fast, too. It runs out of what it can offer you. And that higher attention is better than these little circles of attention. Absolutely. I mean, it’s not for nothing that we call alcohol spirit. There is a deep root to this, why alcohol is so important. To this, why alcohol is a spirit, because it puts you in an inebriated state that the Greeks would would explain by saying, well, a spirit, the possession of me. So alcohol is the spirit. It is impossible for human beings. It’s impossible for living beings to get rid of the religious intuition, because it’s at the root of the tree. The intellect is the canopy. It came much later. It’s looking at the sun and it doesn’t see the dark and moist environment where we arise from that womb where we arise from. And that’s the religious intuition. We can’t get rid of it. All we can do is misplace it. And we misplace it all over the place. We misplace it by falling in love with that one person we can’t have. And then that person receives a projection of a numenon, an expression of the divinity and an achievable numenon. And it attains an aura of impossible transcendence, of impossible value. And that’s the religious intuition in us being projected outwards. What we see is what is in us, not on the person. The person is just receiving that projection. Or in transhumanism. I don’t know whether you know anything about transhumanism. It’s a religious movement. For sure. It’s outwardly religious. It’s the idea that there will be a God. We will build it. We will construct a computer that will be capable of producing a better version of itself and that one, an even better version of itself and so on and so forth until God. And God is made of silicon. And it will find a way to help us live forever through drugs and surgery and finding new laws of physics. And we will bring back the dead by uploading all information about that person into some kind of artificial neural network. Ray Kurzweil, he wants to have his dad back. His dad. He’s a kid who lost his dad, young. So was I. I was 12. Lost my dad. He never found a way to integrate that experience and operate the alchemical work on it and transmute it into something else. He’s still trying to bring back his dad. This is religion through and through. Yeah, but it’s a it’s a it’s a very strange materialistic and distorted religion. That’s for sure. You.