https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qDzBp8SStnQ
So I’m going to start with a hypothesis. I spend a lot of time thinking about religious symbolism and archetypes. But there’s a problem with that. And the problem is it lacks concretization. To think about the ultimate ideal as only something that’s symbolic. It moves away from the real world. It’s partly for this reason that there’s an insistence in Christianity that the Logos is two things at once. It took me a long time to figure this out. I was guided in my attempts to understand it by Carl Jung, who was a truly remarkable person. And probably orthodox in his fundamental convictions, I would say. He talked about the Logos as the thing that existed at the beginning of time. This is a very particular way of looking at things. So the idea is essentially that, as Jonathan pointed out, that there’s something about consciousness that calls forth being from chaotic potential. And you all understand what this means, because when you look at the future, or if you look at yourselves, you know that what you confront is a field of potential. And everyone tells you that. They tell you, you’re not living up to your potential. And potential is a very strange thing, because it doesn’t yet exist. And so by the canons of, say, modern science, it’s not something that has any reality whatsoever. But everyone knows precisely what it means. And everything around you is full of potential, because you can interact with it and bring forth new things. And you know that. And you can be called for your failure to do it. And you call out yourself for your failure to do it, because you wake up at three in the morning and you torture yourself with your inability to bring forth the potential that’s within you. And it haunts your soul. And it’s hellish. And the reason it’s hellish is because it is hellish. And if you don’t call forth the potential that’s within you and outside of you, then the world does transform into hell, because that’s its tendency anyways. And we’ve had no shortage of evidence of that in the last 100 years. It’s part of the Christian doctrine that at the beginning of time, the logos of Yahuwah operated on potential and brought forth the habitable world, order. And it was perfect in some strange sense. It was the paradise in which Adam and Eve were placed. And the paradise was a walled garden, a well-watered place. And the walled garden is a place of order and chaos, culture and nature. And that’s because people inhabit a garden of culture and nature. That’s our environment. And if those two properties are properly balanced, then inside that garden, everyone can flourish. And human beings are in principle made in the image of that logos. And that’s why we can speak things into being. And we do. And when you speak truth, then you speak paradise into being. And when you speak falsely, you speak hell into being. And that’s the truth. And what that means is that with every decision that you make, you decide for yourself and for everyone else whether you’re going to tilt the world a little bit more towards hell or a little bit more towards heaven. And that’s the burden you bear for your existence and the choices that you make as you pass through life. And it’s the fleeing from that that’s at the bottom of the nihilism of postmodernism and the escape into the totalitarian certainties of idol worship. And none of this is fictional because we’ve seen the consequences. Jonathan said, quoting, I don’t remember the source that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. But that’s wrong. But the poetry has to be about Auschwitz. The lesson from Auschwitz was never again. Fair enough, but you can’t decide not to repeat something terrible unless you understand it. And the way to understand it is that the small sins of each individual culminate in the great sins of the state. And so when you ask why terrible things happen in the world, the answer is quite simple. The answer is it’s because you’re not good enough. And it’s because you don’t tell the truth. And you know it. Jonathan said something I thought was very interesting. It’s something I thought about, but I haven’t talked to him about it at all. What happens as you move towards the truth? And the answer is everything comes together. That really is the answer, is everything comes together. There’s even a sexual element to that because of course the highest element of sexual ecstasy is to come together. And around someone who’s telling the truth, everything comes together and that’s the potential destiny of the world. It’s something that you can partake in. It’s the call to the greatest adventure that there is. You can bring forth something akin to paradise by speaking the truth and you can start in your own life and you can start in the life of your own families. And these are people in principle that you love. And so why would you do anything but speak the truth to them? To protect them from reality? There’s no protecting anyone from reality. Reality just is. You interact with it on its terms and you do that by facing it forthrightly. And you do that by not shying away from the challenge. I spend a lot of time trying to understand the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a very strange document. I’m going to tell you what I think it means. It means conceptualize the highest good that you can. And so you might think that would be the highest good for you and it would be the highest good for the family around you that you love and it would be the highest good for that family in the state and it would be the highest good for the state in the world. And that would be the highest possible good. Aim at that even though you don’t know how. Aim at that. Make that what you want. And then tell the truth. And it’s an adventure because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have no idea because if you treat things instrumentally, if you treat people instrumentally, you use them as tools for your own desire. And the problem with that is what do you know about what you desire? Many things that you chase will turn out to be empty. But what happens if you just tell the truth? Well the world will unfold around you in very strange and mysterious ways and there isn’t anything that’s more exciting than that and it’s perhaps something exciting enough so that the suffering that’s attendant on being would redeem itself by that adventure. And that’s the call, that’s the Western call to the individual. The suffering of being can redeem itself through truth. And it’s not a rule. It’s not a proposition that you need to adhere to like a good citizen. It’s the proper way of wending your way through the terrible world without making it worse than it already is. But the possibility perhaps of making it better, there’s no more exciting possibility than that and no higher moral demand. And the thing is, is everyone knows it. You know when you lie according to your own conception of the truth that there’s something shameful and demeaning about that and you know that it hurts people and you think, well why do you do it? Despite all that and partly you do it because it’s easy. And partly you do it because there’s a crooked, horrible, hellish part of your soul that’s more than happy if part of what you do is make everything worse to pay for the sin of its existence. And I would say we should stop doing that and see what we can do if we got ourselves together because human beings are remarkable creatures. We put together an amazing civilization working at it half time. You know it’s like 55% of humanity on a good day is working to make things better and 45% is working to make it worse. And you wonder what would happen if we all just decided that we were going to make things better. As simple as that. Start where you are. We would make things around you better. Where would we be? What would the world turn into around a civilization of people who were genuinely trying to make things better? I can tell you we better find out soon because if we don’t try collectively to make things better given the current state of affairs they are going to get a lot worse. I’ve thought for a long time I wondered why people find themselves adrift in meaninglessness and there’s a lot of answers to that. There’s the classical criticisms of traditional faith that have been put forth by brilliant people like Friedrich Nietzsche. There’s the idea that there were fairy tales that people lived by prior to the modern age and we’ve outgrown those and that’s left us in a cosmos that’s bereft of meaning. And so it’s a consequence of the inevitable unfolding of a kind of cutting rationality and some of that’s true but there’s a lot of it that isn’t true, you know. Because I’ve also come to understand that the reason that so many of us proclaim that life is meaningless is because we actually would rather have it be meaningless than to take responsibility for it. Because you can imagine this, you can imagine this scenario, imagine you were offered a choice and this is because you are offered this choice, you could say well absolutely nothing you do matters and who the hell is going to know anyways in a million years. And so you can do whatever you want moment to moment, right? That’s the payoff for that perspective is you can do whatever you want moment to moment and you’ll not be held responsible by anyone including yourself for pursuing your petty, impulsive, immoral, foolish, destructive, genocidal tendencies. Or the alternative is that you can assume that everything you do is meaningful and everything you do has an impact on the way the world unfolds. And take responsibility for that and it’ll, it’s something that you’ll have your meaning all right that’s for sure because you have an infinite amount of responsibility for every mistake that you make under those circumstances. And perhaps as a medicament for that, the knowledge that when you’re on the path properly that you’re helping the world unfold in the best direction that it possibly could. Well there isn’t anything better than that. If you want something to set against the inevitable suffering of life, that’s what you set against it, the endless adventure of trying to make things better in every possible way. And God only knows where we could get if we did that. Around the perfect man everything comes together. And I don’t believe that that’s where the infinite logos that express, that stretches across time and space comes together in a single individual. That’s the Christian story. And the reason for that is that every single person is embedded in a specific time and place. That’s you as an individual but at the same point you’re also the embodiment of this thing that has acted across forever to call chaos into habitable being. You’re both this divine eternal transcendent essence and the finite shell that you inhabit. It’s like the genie, right? A genie is genius and the genie is something that can grant three magical wishes but has to inhabit this tiny little space. It’s the same idea. Well, you can act that out in your life and you can transcend it. And as you do that, things come together around you and everything becomes musical. That’s the right way to think about it. And everything becomes alive. And you shy away from that because you’re resentful about the fundamental structure of being and you don’t want the responsibility. And it’s no bloody wonder because the responsibility is the responsibility for everything. You know, that’s why it’s part of the Christian story that Christ took the sins of the world upon himself because that’s what you have to do in order to put yourself together. It’s your fault. Everything that isn’t going right is because you’re not good enough. Well, who wants that, right? Welcome the postmodernists because they’ll lighten the burden. The consequence is that nothing has any meaning. But that’s a small price to pay to get rid of that particular burden. Well maybe not. Maybe the meaning of life is to be found in your voluntary willingness to take on that burden and carry it, right? Well that’s the notion that’s embedded in the idea of the cross, right? To pick up a full conscious knowledge of your own vulnerability, your subjugation to betrayal, your slavery at the hands of the state, your insanity and your mortality and to say, I’ll bear that voluntarily. It’s okay. I can handle it. It seems to me that we’re at a kind of crossroads. I don’t know exactly why. You always meet the devil at the crossroads, by the way. And the reason for that is because every crossroads is a choice, right? And it’s always a choice between good and evil. We’re at a crossroads and I don’t know why. I guess it’s because the terrible 20th century has spent its energy and now we have something new in the aftermath of that. It’s time for everyone to pick up the chaotic pieces and to carry them voluntarily and to make their way through the world and to try to speak their truth and to see what happens. It will heal yourself. It will heal your body. It will heal your soul. It will heal your family. It will heal the nation. That’s what truth does. And how could it be any other way? The reality is the truth. And how are you going to adapt to it without using the truth? Well the problem is reality is the terrible truth, but it’s certainly possible that the terrible truth is its own medicine. With regards to my connections, orthodoxy, I have kind of a funny story to tell about that. About 15 years ago, a student of mine who I’ve maintained a relationship with since I taught at Harvard, I’d helped him through a difficult period. His family had been at the center of a real storm of publicity like this. A front page story for a number of months. Recently he returned the favor with me. But he proposed at one point that I fly down to Los Angeles and act as the officiant at his marriage. And I thought, well that’s pretty interesting. I never expected that to happen. And so I thought, well if I’m going to do that I better get ordained because that’s obviously the logical thing to do. How do you get ordained on short notice? And obviously the answer to that is you go online. And so I went online and I signed up. I could name my church. So I did. I have this church. I’m the only member. It’s called the Church of the Spirit of St. Joachim of Flores, which isn’t necessarily the name that you would expect. I like St. Joachim from what I knew of him because he had this idea that there were three epochs, there would be three epochs in Western civilization, and one would be the epoch of the Father. And that’s roughly the Old Testament epoch, the Old Testament morality that has to do with following rules. And then there was the epoch of the Son. And that was of course the epoch, the Christian epoch of the last 2,000 years. And he believed that what would come after that would be the epoch of the Holy Ghost. And the Holy Ghost is this weird spirit thing that hypothetically Christ left behind that could inhabit people and guide them on their path. And it seems to me that that’s very much in keeping with the Orthodox idea that the proper moral pathway for each individual to take is to attempt to bear the burden of the perfect individual, right, to become Christ, so to speak, in an attempt to transcend mortality and finitude and to unite with God. And I thought, well, that was kind of a cool idea. So I thought, well, I might as well have that as a church. And then I thought, who should I be in this church? And I thought, well, Pope was probably a little bit on the narcissistic side, let’s say. So I thought, I’ll be Metropolitan. Because I thought that was kind of archaic enough and sort of out of the way enough so that it was a good joke. So I’m my own Metropolitan, my own church. It only has one rule, and so you can join it if you want. The rule is that if you’re a member of my church, you can’t follow stupid rules. Yeah, so that’s a good rule because it’s actually, it’s an anti-rule rule, which is really funny as far as I’m concerned. Anyways, I went down to L.A. and I did marry these two and they’re still married and so that’s good. And yeah, yeah, so I know that’s a bit rambly, but it’s been a long day. I talked to Sam Harris today again, for those of you who, it went great. Ha ha ha. Yeah, it went great. Anyway, so look, the idea is pretty straightforward, you know, as far as I can tell. There’s this tremendous idea that’s at the bottom of Western culture that’s taken the human race millennia and perhaps an endless amount of time before then, an eternal amount of time before then to formulate. And the idea is that our consciousness, and that’s the center of us, the soul, whatever that happens to be, partakes in the process by which creation comes into being. And we do that through the logos, which is our capacity to think and to utter words and to engage in dialogue, but more importantly to do that truthfully. And to the degree that we’re able to do that truthfully, we bring paradise into being rather than hell. And it seems to me that that’s as close to objective reality, although it’s not precisely objective, it’s more than objective reality. It’s a kind of meta-reality. It’s the most profound truth that you’ll ever encounter. And the thing that’s cool about it is you can put it to the test if you want, you know. You start deciding that you’re not going to lie because how the hell are you going to tell the truth? I don’t know what the truth is, but you certainly know when you’re lying and you know how to stop doing that. So I would say, well, just try, stop lying and see what happens. Try it for like a year. You don’t get to lie about anything anymore. And that also means you can’t do things that you would be afraid to talk about because, you know, if you’re going to tell the truth, you have to tell the truth about what you did. And if you do reprehensible things, then you can’t just run around telling everybody about them. So it also means that you have to not act in a way that you wouldn’t speak truthfully about. And try it. You have to find out, first of all, that you’re so full of lies and deceit that you just bloody well can’t believe it. When I started doing this 30 years ago, it really just about drove me crazy because I divided into two people in some sense. And one person, one person was talking and the other person was watching the person that was talking. And the talking person was a puppet and the watching person was the right person. And every time the talking person said something, the watching person would go, you don’t believe that. That isn’t true. That’s not your idea. And I thought, wow, that’s really not good because it looks like 95% of what I’m saying isn’t mine or I’m saying it for show or I’m saying it to be dominant, primate or I’m saying it so that I can be, you know, so that I can use my language instrumentally and get what I want or, you know, I swiped it from a book and I really don’t deserve it but I’m saying it. And it was horrible. It was 95%, seriously. And so then I learned, at least in part, to only say things that made me feel like I was weak. And that’s part of that coming together. You can feel that physically. You know, if you say something deceitful, you shrink and you cower from it. It makes you embarrassed and it makes you weak. You can feel the weakness. It’s like, well, stop saying things that make you weak. If you don’t want to be weak, then if you want to be strong, stop saying things that make you feel weak. Try it. Try it. See what happens. You can test this out. In a year, things will be way different for you. In five years, you won’t even be the same person. God only knows what will happen in a decade. So it’s really worth it. Besides, you don’t have anything better to do anyways. Because here you are, you know, suffering stupidly away. You might as well do something useful with your time while you’re waiting to die. So… And there isn’t anything more interesting to do than that. It’s so cool because, and I mean, it’s part of what I decided to do last September when I made these, you know, crazy videos which really have more of an effect than I certainly thought they would. I thought, well, I’ve got some things to say and why don’t I say them and see what happens? So that’s sort of… That’s an excellent way to live. Why don’t I say the things that I think and see what happens? Well, this is one of the things that’s happened, so that’s kind of cool. I mean, how unlikely is this? It’s completely absurd and ridiculous that here I’m with Jonathan, this crazy French-Canadian arbor, and these two guys in dresses here. I mean… That’s exactly what you’d expect given what I’ve been talking about recently. This is very unlikely and all of this has been very unlikely. And life is very unlikely and, you know, maybe it could be absolutely magnificent and wonderful. We could make everything into a holy temple in which we could live forever, peacefully, only searching for more remarkable and spectacular things to do next. And that’s what people do in paradise. They sit around dreaming about how the paradise they already had could give rise to a paradise that’s yet greater than the one that’s there. And with the collective imagination that we pursue, that could be a never-ending thing. And we could bring it into being, and that’s what we should do, because the alternative is to let everything degenerate into chaos and hell. And how about we don’t do that? Well, that’s good enough.