https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vSY4XuTKEMo
What does it mean to actually be able to identify? This is almost for me, I’m saying let’s design it. Let’s think about what are the design characteristics of the thing that you’re talking about. Well, to me the thing that I’m talking about, it looks like a medieval village is what it looks like. The structure of it, that’s what it looks like to me, is that there’s something, there’s a transcendent center, there’s a center which is actually not of this world. It’s beyond everything and that’s where we actually meet. It’s not there, there’s signs around it. There’s a church and there’s an altar and there’s a cup and in the cup there’s wine and there’s bread but it’s not there. It’s the seed and the seed and the seed and the seed. It’s hidden, it’s a hidden reality. It’s the pattern hidden in the world. That’s what is transcendent and like you said, that reaches from there all the way down to me in being created in the image of God. It’s like that’s the line and then along that line then we have communions of love that will manifest themselves. Those will be hierarchical in a proper sense, in the sense that there are those that are above us and their responsibility is to care for those that are below and those that are below are there to provide that which comes from below, provide food, provide whatever is needed for the thing that’s above to be able to care for you. Can I say support because it creates a nice symmetry? There you go, support. That’s a better word. To me that’s what it looks like. To me that seems to be the only possible structure for that to happen. You need something, you need the invisible transcendent in the center or else it stops and or else it becomes nationalism, becomes this and that. Even in terms of religion, if we don’t understand that it’s a mystery, we don’t understand that let’s say that God transcends everything, transcends even our religious frame that we have then that’s also a danger because then we have the crusades, we have religious wars or whatever but if we can fully see that beyond even though let’s say the revelation that we have or the church building, the tradition we have is true that beyond that God is always beyond. God is always beyond, beyond, beyond, cannot be contained, cannot be cannot be framed. He’s beyond. To me that’s the only way for it to actually work. I don’t see another way but maybe it’s just because I mean maybe that you can understand by my whole story by why I am who I am, why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s like obviously I’ve drank that Kool-Aid and so now my life lays itself out that way especially the modern Christians they have this weird two-world view of reality. It’s like there’s God in heaven and there’s things here and somehow separate. I’m way more of a Platonist. I’m way more of a Platonist in the sense that the transcendent happens at all levels. If things transcend at all levels, if you’re holding a cup the identity of the cup is not in the cup. You can’t find it. If you try, if you accumulate the parts of the cup you’ll never get to the identity of the cup. The identity cup necessarily transcends the cup and that’s true of a family, it’s true of a country, it’s true of everything and so it’s like if you just keep if you keep doing that at some point it’s like you just keep having things which transcend the accumulation of particulars. It seems like transcendence is just a part of reality. People call it emergence because they don’t like the word transcendence but like I said you can see it bottom up if you want but you can also see it top down. To me those two are the same. It’s just a different just you just stand in different ways and just stand in different places to look at it. Well there’s a great quote by St. Maximus the confessor who’s a mystic. He talks about how he talks about the mystic who perceives the identities of things and their particulars separate so he can see the spiritual essences and you can see the particulars of something. You can see them both and then he realizes that they actually don’t contradict each other at all that they actually are there together that they represent the same reality. That is really the incarnational way of thinking. To me that’s the highest Christian understanding of the world is that it’s platonic in the sense that it believes in the reality of essences but it’s not platonic in the sense that it also believes that those essences have to be incarnated. They have to have bodies and so it’s like it’s the meeting of the two that middle that you talked about that’s where reality happens. It’s in where the where the essences and the particulars meet. That’s the one of the many where it meets. That’s it. That’s the world. That’s life. That’s life. Yeah.