https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=d_cPW1HOc9c
Hi Jonathan, could you talk a little about the concept of noose in the Christian tradition, what it is and the role it plays in our understanding God and the world? So the notion of the noose is very simple. I mean, it’s not simple. The notion of the noose is the idea, is spirit. It’s something like, when St. Paul talks of the body, the soul, and the spirit, you could use the word noose for that. That is, it is it is the super rational capacity. And it’s difficult because people in the modern world don’t think that. We don’t believe that it exists. Most people don’t believe that it exists. And it’s the capacity to be in direct contact with reality. You could say it that way or to… It’s the intellect. It’s the intellect in the highest sphere. And so it’s the capacity to intuit reality. Something… It’s hard to give words, but the noose is that which can contemplate God to the extent that that’s possible. And so we have… And so the way that I try to help people kind of get a sense of the noose, because like I said, we don’t have… We struggle to have access to that. But I think that we do sometimes. Sometimes when you have an intuition, an aha moment, an intuition that no rational method has brought you to when you glimpse something. And I think everybody has those. Scientists have those. Artists have those. The hunch, this thing that flips. And it’s can’t explain. You didn’t do this rational process to get to this intuition. And this intuition is like a flash of light. It’s like this flash of light. And I think that that’s the way that the modern person still has access to the noose. And so one of the things that I try to do, and you probably… So if you kind of know what the noose is, that’s something that I’ve been trying to do, which is to say things in a way, to bring patterns next to each other in a little dance. And what I’m hoping to do is that the place where those patterns come together, I don’t explicitly talk about it. But I’m looking at you and I’m thinking, okay, can you make that jump? Can you jump? And then that jump, that intuition where it’s your eyes flash. You see it in people’s eyes when it happens. It’s like this flash, this understanding. That I think is a little contact with the noose. But I think that, of course, the church fathers develop the noose. They purify the noose, you could say. And so reducing distraction, this idea of paying attention to yourself, of attending to your sins, attending to your heart, attending to God, all of these images of attention are there to reduce the chaos on the fringe and move in, move in, move in to this point, this spark, which is the noose, the spark of light. You could call it something like the image of God in you or the Christ in you. All of those things have to do with the noose. But it’s hard to talk about because I don’t live in the noose. I have glimpses of it like most of you do. And I think that that’s just, it’s the disease of the modern world. It’s very difficult for us to purify the noose.