https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RupeqP3GS6k
Symbolism and religious language is not just about the subjective and social. And symbolism is indeed a language describing what happens in the universe. Symbolism and religious language in general are an attempt to understand the universe, yes, but also while simultaneously understanding the process by which we understand the universe. Okay, so let me repeat that in another way. It’s both a description of the world and a description of how it is I can describe the world. So in relation to modern science, religious language would be something like a something of a meta process or a meta language because it tries to express the thing it is focusing on. Let’s say a mountain, okay, while also expressing the process by which that focus is even possible. So if modern science can describe a mountain, height, width, terrain, its foliage, its mineral constitution, religious language is expressing why I have a category like mountain in the first place, why that category is relevant to humans, basically what does a mountain mean? So the religious language is above the scientific language and contains the scientific process within it, makes it possible. And I know it’s hard to understand and it will seem aggravating beyond belief to many atheists at the outset. So I’m going to try to give an example that will unpack this as much as possible. I think we can keep going with the mountain. I’ve talked about mountains before in other talks, but it’s such a basic image that it can help us understand many things. So the experience of a mountain is that as you ascend the mountain, the width of the base is refined. It necessarily gets narrower and narrower as you go higher and higher. The experience of particularity is contained more and more because as you go up the mountain, you can see more and more, you can see further. So when you’re at the bottom of the mountain, you can only see the very particular, the rocks in front of you, the trees around you. But as you ascend, your gaze widens and you get more and more of an encompassing experience. This refinement of experience happens as the mountain itself becomes narrower and narrower, moves from the particular and the many to the one and the universal. So reaching the summit, then your view opens up completely in a kind of a jump. Because suddenly as you reach the summit, in that very moment, the entire world seems to appear beneath you and you can see the mountain itself on all its sides and the horizon all around you. So that experience of the mountain, the one I’ve just described, is the same as any hierarchy. What happens is this. Symbolism. Religious symbolism is exactly that ladder. It’s exactly that mountain. It offers images at the base of the mountain, the most particular images possible. Images act as a kind of support for the higher levels of meaning. So symbolism is always very concrete, very immediate, a tree, a rock, the earth, the heavens. But the structural patterns then move you up towards more universal and encompassing realities. Now most of all we need to understand that this mountain, this ascent, is also an ascent of consciousness. Because we human beings are organized in the same way. We have these desires and multiplicities on our edges. These competing personalities which pull us here and there tend to pull us apart, pull us into multiplicity. But as we ascend our own consciousness, we find a center, the head or the mind. The Church Fathers speak of Venus. And that center of consciousness is capable of transcending and unifying the multiplicity into oneness. Now the symbolism of hierarchy I’ve just described, the mountain, the ladder, is also the root of why we identify the highest things with spirit, air, wind, or with intelligence. Why we identify the highest of high with heaven. That which is so high above us that it is unreachable. The Father, light, spoken word, which comes both from intelligence, but most immediately from the head of the body. So it’s not that God is physically in heaven, no reasonable Christian believes that. Rather the analogy of our experience of heaven, of ascension, is the root, the support, so to speak, for that which is beyond and cannot be described directly.