https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=geqt_P7N6OM
way that you know, I see the symbolism has worked in my life. And I started praying about a year ago, and the like praying, you know, in the morning, I got to actually have a Orthodox prayer book for kids that I started with. And I moved up to this prayer book. And then I have my son who’s six, he he absolutely he’ll remind me to pray if we forget at night. And when we’re in the, we’re in the car, we’ll pray on the way to work and which something that seems, you know, so archaic, but the effects that it has are hard to articulate. And it’s not like I get more things or, you know, I get more stuff that I wanted. But it has this effect where it has helped, you know, heal relationships within my family. And then it helps with, you know, focusing on what’s right and it’s helpless helps with real relevance realization. Yeah, you know, that’s the thing if you if you even if you’re not like if you’re not a religious person, and you don’t believe in God or whatever, you know, to understand that in terms of attention, to even understand prayer just as attention, to say, okay, so you start your day out. And then you when you start your day out, you attend to something which is beyond you, you attend to your sins by ask by confessing and asking for forgiveness, you attend to the people you love and care about by interceding for them. It’s like, even if you I mean, I do believe in God, but if you didn’t, you would still see that this is the way the world is set a right that, you know, think about the difference between that. And you know, getting up in the morning and right away, I don’t know, like watching some series on Netflix or something, it’s like, how are you going to then your day, your day is going to be distracted, you’ll be distracted, right. And so prayer is a way to focus attention on the things that matter and also be grateful. Gratitude is, is the is the solution to so many problems, right. Celebration and gratitude is the way for the is one of the ways that the world the world coheres together and holds together. Yeah, no, well said it. And this morning had a weird uncanny feeling of gratitude. So like, every morning, right when I wake up, I have the Jesus prayer, I just start saying it right. And like, I had this come up on me of how grateful and how blessed I am to have this family around me and this unit and how much I love them. And like, you know, I don’t, you know, not think about it, but you know, and express it or, you know, consider it as much and it was such a good like an uncanny feeling, this kind of kind of kind of came out of nowhere. And so I started a new job I work with in pediatric home health. So we take of take care of kids that are straight out of the hospital, we provide 24 seven nursing. So I work in a little office with two or three women in there. And we just were we’re talking in a sense. And long story short, there’s this nurse who comes in, she’s really religious, so they’re cautious about her. But she’s like, James, every time she comes in, she lights up the room, right. And she came in, and it happened and started this conversation. And long story short, I got them an Orthodox prayer book. And these people are, you know, you know, had bad relationships with their churches or have just this disdain or indifference, but they asked for it. And they started doing their prayers. And I’m like, you know, it’s the weirdest thing in a corporate environment for that to happen. I’m telling my wife, she’s like, What the heck? I’m like, I don’t know. But it’s just, I think people respond, or they see the quality of the heart that happens when you engage with with prayer and with, you know, these types of, you know, worship and prayer, right, it does something to this, the heart, which is hard to express. But when you engage with someone, you can see the Holy Spirit in them. I think this woman did that and is doing that, like she just lights up the room, whether you’re talking to her on her phone, in a sense. So I see this happening in a lot of different areas. And it’s, it’s interesting, it’s hard to really kind of understand exactly what that is. Well, it’s that the thing is that we can’t think that we know we are what we care about, you know, and so you can’t think that if you spend your mind your day in dark thoughts, or in dark passions, or in dark interests, then how how that will reverberate on your being, it’ll it’ll show, right? It’ll show in subtle ways, it won’t be explicit. But when when people meet you, they will get the they will get a sense very intuitively of what you are. And so if you spend your days grateful for that which you have, and you spend your days interceding in your heart for those that are struggling and caring for those around you, then that’s going to show and you’re going to you’re going to shine, you know, and and it’s just things are not arbitrary, you know, the the our attention has has value and the things we do and the way we engage with people even in secret, they they have value if you do something in secret, don’t think it’s not going to show it’s going to show it just won’t show explicitly, but it’ll show people will will it’ll show in the way you connect with others and the way that that they connect with you and and so that’s one of the secrets of obviously of religious life. Yeah, no 100% and it’s it’s something that I’ve realized that even small lies, even small manipulations or whatever it may be has this type of effect. And I guess that brings me to the idea of sin. This was a huge insight that’s come upon me the last year of idea of what sin is. So when I started doing the Jesus prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God have mercy on me a sinner, and I’m telling my son about this prayer and he says, What is sinner? What does it mean? I’m a sinner. So I’m like, how do I explain to my six year old that we’re all sinners and this idea is that I told him, well, some throughout the day, we do things that, you know, we missed the mark, we do things that we shouldn’t have done, and all we’re doing is asking for forgiveness of that, you know, and, you know, to sin is to miss the mark. And we think of the 10 commandments, which, you know, seems something so archaic. Oh, yeah, what are these 10 rules? Why would God care if you’re jealous of your neighbor’s things? Why would he care if you’re wanting to sleep with his wife? What a strange God to care about that. But it’s like, No, if you have these thoughts, these intentions, it will, it will have disintegrating effects on the relationships that you have with yourself and with your family and with your work life. But if you focus on, you know, not having, you know, like pornography is a big thing for young men. You see that the the inflame, inflaming of the passions in terms of pornography is just obviously destructive. And for so long, we were like, Oh, you know, porn is great, but now, you know, it’s free online, nobody makes money off it. In a sense, they’re not even sells advertising, why is it free? And the effects that that is having pointing to the relationships in people’s lives. Same thing if you’re jealous of your neighbor’s stuff, he gets a new car, you have to get a new car. So it goes again, like what you care about kind of determines who you are. And that’s why everything else becomes an ideology or idolatry. If you focus on money, on power, on wealth, on reputation, even if you attain those things, you know, you that will destroy you. That’s what I think a midlife crisis is, you know, you get all these things that the society told you and you realize it was a it was a trick. And now you’re just, you know, it destroys your identity, because you’re identified with money, then you get it. That’s not it. Identify with power, you get it. That’s not it. And then when you run out of stuff, you have no identity, you cling to things, you just look for anything, a new Ferrari, a new girlfriend, a divorce, or whatever it is. So I think this idea of going to the highest high, and this is something that I’ve gotten from you and from Jordan Peterson, like if you aim at the highest, right, that will order your way and structure your life in a way where your relationships will work out. I think it all comes back to that. And in my life, the effect that symbolism has is the effects it has on your relationships. Yeah, surprise, surprise. You think why would something like that have an effect on my relationship? But the thing the thing is that this is something that I tried to bring across, and it’s hard to bring across is the inevitability of worship, you know, the idea that you are what you care about, and that the what you care about, and what you’re aiming for, those two things actually will go together, because you can’t aim for something if you don’t care about it. Those two things go together, and then they will, that will order your your reality, you know, and and so you end up so worship ends up being just an inevitable inevitable part of what you are. So it’s best to be deliberate about it, and to worship the highest. And say, if you worship the highest, then like you said, you’ll be surprised to find that things will will lay themselves out, you know, after that down downstream from that, because the things are embedded into each other. So if you, if you if you worship the God that is love, then that will also it’ll inform all the other aspects of your of your reality.