https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HEnr8pVigxg
This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Yeah like I was saying to you because in Australia the restrictions are very, very harsh and I think at the start of it, it wasn’t that I was happy but I kind of took advantage because I’m like you know what, I’m going to have a lot of time to do my own thing, learn a new skill, spend time with my fiance and all this kind of stuff but I think a year and a half later it’s like okay, I think this is enough. It’s getting to me now, I’m going to admit it. Yeah, I believe it. You know I think we all had the same reaction, the same for me. First when it started it was kind of like okay we’ll have some time together as a family and we’ll also you know I’ll be able to kind of let’s say because I wasn’t traveling anymore so I was able to invest in different venues that I hadn’t, you know different things that I knew that I need to put some time in but I hadn’t and so it was actually pretty fruitful but by now, I mean it’s not as bad here as it is there but right now you know with these passports and the scapegoating and all of these kind of weird political measures that are coming to the fore, it’s becoming yeah it’s becoming more and more frightening let’s say because it’s also at the same time they keep telling us that it doesn’t matter if you’re vaccinated, you still have to wear your mask, you still have to social distance and there’s going to be boosters and there’s new variants and so it’s as if they’re going to have it all. We’ll have quarantines, we’ll have vaccines and social distancing and masks and infinite boosters so it’s very yeah and for a disease that kills like 0.1% of the population, I feels like it’s a little bit of a stretch and to destroy our democracies and to completely change the very mechanisms by which our societies function so it seems to me like there’s something else that’s going on and that it’s not just about a disease that there are other things at play in this. Oh for sure and I like I laugh because it’s like I don’t know what else to do at this point you know what I mean it’s getting so it’s getting so ridiculous and I think now more than ever it’s like so much divisiveness you know what I mean like if you have a certain opinion it’s like you’re a piece of crap how dare you and it’s very black or white communities breaking down this kind of thing so I wanted to ask you what is the symbolism behind all this like especially what’s going on right now is this related to revelations or is that a stretch what’s going on here? I think it depends how you look at it you know I think that it’s not a stretch if you understand the book of revelation as a series of patterns you could say a series of social patterns that kind of manifest themselves and the idea of revelation is that it’s the final version let’s say the most complete version of this pattern but if you understand it more as these kind of symbolic patterns that it just exists in the world then it’s then in revelation you can actually see these types of moves that happen in culture you know the example I like to give is for example in scripture there’s an image of a whore writing a beast and this whore is all about mixture and about trade and about kind of consuming and this whole vision of a you know that that’s what a whore is right it’s just about pleasure and it’s just about consuming it’s just and it’s all about mixture and lack of identity and all these things and so and then it’s sitting on a beast which is interesting and this beast is actually an image of control of civilization because the beast is an amalgamation of all the ancient empires in scripture there’s these beasts that represent different empires so you see like this amalgamation of empire with the whore on it and then in scripture says that the beast kills the whore at some point and there’s this whole sense that the beast sets up an image of itself and that this image rings about a kind of state of control and the idea of marking with an identity and that when you mark the idea of marking with an identity in a way that you can’t escape the idea that there is no remainder there’s nothing outside of the system the system tries to be total it tries to be complete and if the only thing you can do basically is if you refuse to participate in the system then you’re completely excluded right you can’t buy you can’t sell you can’t exist but you don’t have an existence basically and so if you understand it that way then you can kind of see these these movements towards towards identity let’s say the idea identification and then idea of tracking and control and the relationship you know it seems like the vaccine is maybe just a door into these systems of control which are possible because of technology and as we see this kind of coming through then we see exactly what we see similar things to what we see in scripture which is that right now i was just watching a video of some minister in nigeria saying that if you’re not vaccinated and you can’t show proof of vaccination you won’t be able to go to a bank you won’t be able to go to church and so this is the next kind of the next step where they’re like inching towards the idea that you can’t participate in society at all if you haven’t received this this uh this kind of sacrament of participation in at the same time as they’re telling us that the sacrament of participation isn’t as good as you thought and you’re gonna have to keep getting it every three four months for the rest of your life like i mean i don’t know like it’s all very vague but um so it does it does kind of bring about we don’t have to freak out necessarily and think like this is it you know but it does the the so the story in scripture can help you understand these patterns uh and understand this relationship between systems of control how they take over after too much freedom you could say something is too chaotic and too too much goes too much in that direction then after that system of control comes and tries to clamp it down yeah it’s very like like lately it’s been so inverted i feel like these times because at one stage at least in australia it’s completely illegal for you to go to church but you can pay a prostitute to have sex like that’s fine you know what i mean it’s like wait wait wait wait i thought this was all about like social distancing all this kind of stuff but i don’t think that it’s about that no there’s something else definitely something else going on and people often it’s funny because people wonder what is it and people don’t understand that power is its own motivation there is no other secret motivation except for power and you see that it’s like the capacity for and let’s say the capacity for power which comes into a kind of unholy union with people’s desire to feel safe and you know desire to not to not be in danger these two things kind of go together and they they go together surprisingly well because the more safe the safer you are the more afraid you are and the more you feel like you’re unsafe this is really true you know it was interesting because i you know i lived in in congo for four years and uh my my wife and i and my my son and i my son and us we we actually lived in local neighborhoods with congolese people you know in the city of kinshasa you know there were no other westerners around it was just you know so so we were we were kind of in the life and we lived through the rhythms of the life and the west like the kind of westerners north americans and europeans lived in these gated compounds that had guards and had had all this and they were far more afraid than we were because they were so safe and they felt like the safety now all of a sudden every little danger becomes like an like this crazy thing and it’s like no you’re not supposed to ever be in danger you’re not supposed to ever get sick you’re not supposed to ever die basically uh and this is just that that’s not true it’s just a lie it’s just a basic lie about how we exist in the world and how risk is just an integral part of being human and the less risk we take the more we’re afraid of them yeah i think that’s why i really enjoy traveling especially to third world countries and kind of just getting thrown into the unknown you know what i mean i think it’s what i’ve noticed today those who are like the most strict about you know like getting the jab and lockdown all this kind of stuff it’s usually those who haven’t really stepped outside their bubble their whole life you know what i mean and i find that very interesting like like you said like when you feel so safe and comfortable that’s when you kind of get more afraid of getting hurt and taking risks and these kind of things yeah exactly and it’s and it really is a you know it just a kind of it’s kind of a mode of being in which people embark and there’s something about the mother like something about this kind of devouring mother that that says you know it’s like i’m going to protect you from all danger i’m going to make sure that nothing happens to you that you’re not going to die you’re not going to get sick you’re not going to hurt yourself and you’re not also going to be in danger there’ll be no hate speech no one’s going to insult you nobody’s going to hurt you no one’s going to hurt your feelings it reminds me of my mother she’s like a latina spanish mom so very overprotective she’s over protected yeah i rebelled in my teenage years so it kind of had the opposite effect of what she intended but oh yeah you were like okay i need to break free from this yeah 100 but imagine that now at assist at a level of systems where you know and people struggle to understand that there’s a relationship let’s say with the kind of rise in social justice mentality that was there several years ago and this desire for safe spaces this desire to not to not be triggered that they know that that we’re fragile and that we need to be preserved in from all kind of danger and now this this situation with covid is an extension like a physical extension of something which has been a social phenomenon for quite a quite a while now so is this like a start of a new age do you think i just want to say i mean back you know i hope it’s not a start of new age i mean for sure it does feel like something similar happened in weimar really you know because weimar was a wild place like it was a wild crazy place and uh there were all this kind of uh let’s say fluidity in identity and fluidity and in roles and fluidity in terms of taboos and all of this was all kind of mixed up kind of mixed up and at some point when there was a crisis then the only thing to do was to overcompensate and to kind of clamp down and create massive systems of control and i think that this is what we’re kind of seeing is that this little crisis is just becoming an opportunity for systems of control to clamp down but you know i mean it’s hard not to also see that there seems to be something that is transnational about what’s happening there seems to be patterns which are not just about our own government but that seem to be kind of moving across governments ways of speaking even types of words people use you know for example like this phrase that’s now popular the pandemic of the unvaccinated uh you know it’s being used by different governments by different authorities in different countries and you realize that okay this it’s not just you know it’s like if Justin Trudeau says it and then you hear it in England and then you hear it in other countries and you realize okay i’ve also heard them say similar phrases like build back better and all these phrases that we’re using they have this kind of weird vocabulary that is transnational and so that’s also kind of frightening it is frightening to imagine that that there are patterns which are even beyond our politics and that and that are just going to happen there’s nothing we can do about it like here the the covid passport in Quebec where i am i mean it didn’t it didn’t get debated in parliament it again didn’t get debated legally it was just said like this is it it was just mandated completely in a like a directly tyrannical way and there was no possible way to discuss it with anybody there was nothing to say it was just like this is what we’re going to do everybody just says okay he’s like we’re not a democracy anymore it’s like everybody’s just forgotten that we’re supposed to be a democracy protesting is illegal so you can’t even like voice your opinion on this stuff though they shut you down yeah well i hear at least yet right now they don’t shut us down they just don’t cover it and we’re not allowed to leave the country we haven’t since march last year you guys it’s crazy like you’re not allowed to protest at all no we’re not allowed to leave i can’t leave the city i can’t leave five kilometers within my own house i think now they did uh like only one person per household can go for a walk around the block playgrounds shut down like it’s yeah it’s pretty i don’t even know what to say about that because it’s like i think it’s going to end but then it just gets extended again and again and again and it’s like i don’t know man but i guess a positive out of this whole thing is that it led me to read revelations and uh go inwards and kind of explore uh Christianity i’ve discovered your work many years ago and i didn’t even know what orthodoxy really was um and it’s been very mind-blowing and i’ve really been delving deep into symbolism and i’ll love you a pop culture videos breaking down the patterns of movies and why we’re so like obsessed with pop culture and stuff like this uh for those listening at home maybe for those who aren’t very well versed in symbolism what is symbolism and how do you distinguish that from let’s say yong archetypes well it’s a little bit related i’m not a huge follower of young but it’s it’s not completely unrelated uh the way to the best way to understand symbolism i think in a modern world is to understand the the problem of complexity which is that when you look out at the world we see things we see the world kind of let’s say appear to us in a certain way but if we’re attentive and we think about it we realize that every aspect of the world that we see is infinitely complex right from the glass that i’m drinking of you know to the table in front of me to the sound that i hear they they like the glass that i have in my hand is is as complex as you like there’s an infinite amount of complexity in the glass like it’s made of multiple multiple parts and multiple aspects right your chair is made out of multiple parts and so but there’s a way in which we are able to perceive unities in this multiplicity right and so there’s a way in which unity kind of comes out of multiplicity and appear to us as a pattern right and so reality is necessarily patterned for us to be able to even engage with it we have to kind of our consciousness has to engage with it in its patterns and so that would be maybe the first way to understand what symbolism is which is that there’s an inevitability of patterns in the way we encounter things now this is true for objects it’s true for sounds it’s true for everything but it’s ultimately true for the way in which we engage with each other that is we string a bunch of of words together a bunch of facts together to create narratives to create stories and those stories need to have a pattern and that pattern isn’t arbitrary right it’s a it’s a it’s an objective pattern that you can discern and it’s the same for images it’s the same for the way we remember things so for us to remember something we have to condense all this multiplicity into images that we can remember so those images will also be patterned and so the way we represent things ends up being patterned so that’s really the basis of symbolism and the idea is that you can study that and you can understand it and there’s also a process by which you could say it this way that the symbolism is the pattern of attention right it’s the way that we attend to the world and those things would grab our attention the most and for the longest period of time will remain and the things that we that don’t get grab our attention and that we don’t remember will kind of fade away just like if someone tells you what happened during their day and it’s really boring and no and it’s just a bunch of things that don’t relate to each other you’re just going to forget it but if someone tells you this crazy thing that happened to him and he almost fell up a cliff and then something happened and he came up but then you’re going to remember it because it’s going to have something which gathers your attention so in the same way all the stories we’ve been telling each other for the millennia that we’ve been around those have an almost like a like a natural selection process by which those that end up being preserved are the ones that gather our attention the most so that’s why you can look at fairy tales and religious stories and myths as containing more of these condensed patterns than let’s say just the common reality in which we exist but the common reality in which we exist is also pattern it’s just not as distilled as these patterns and so in the same manner the way we interact with each other is also pattern right you speak i speak we kind of have a way to listen to the other person to show them we’re listening and we have to follow that pattern or else communication breaks down but then that also scales up into rituals like handshakes like saying hello you know like smiling and then ultimately that scales up into something like religious rituals where we all gather together we act in communion we act together towards something which transcends us and then that binds us as a community so we can understand everything from fairy tales to let’s say to to to liturgy to christian liturgy or to architecture with these patterns of this kind of symbolic patterning and are these patterns or symbolism is it religious in nature like well it’s not it’s i would say you could say yes and no that is it isn’t religious in nature if you it’s just reality but it’s just the way the reality lays itself out but you could say that at the at a most basic level reality does present itself in a religious manner that is even if you understand what religion the word religion religion means means bringing together means binding together that’s what really connecting things together that’s what religion is and so it ends up being the ultimate types of of patterns move towards religion because they end up being let’s say recognizing how these patterns bind us together and then looking up towards them you could say consciousnesses it’s not just even pattern even consciousness has this pattern and so you have something which binds the community together they recognize it they celebrate it together they sing songs about it you know they they they end up giving things to it you know and so then you have the image of the king or the image of a god and the image of of of these heroes that we venerate from antiquity and so it ends up it does end up looking religious in its kind of ultimate sphere but it scales all the way down to like i said a handshake or uh yeah or just kind of simple social rituals so are these patterns something that we recognize in our own minds or is the pattern a more fundamental reality well this is where it becomes tricky because there’s a there’s a even today like in modern physics right now you know they have this whole observer problem and they have they have this sense a lot of scientists even now are coming to the sense that somehow consciousness is necessary for reality to kind of present itself because or else without that we have something like quantum fields or just just this kind of possibility of existence and so you can’t completely disassociate mind from the manner in which reality becomes pattern because it is kind of an invisible pattern which manifests itself in in in reality so you can’t completely distinguish it the problem we have is that since let’s say since romanticism and since you know kind of modern philosophy we tend to somehow think that mind is subjective in the sense of idiosyncratic and like you know relative to you like relative to your opinion let’s say yes that’s not that’s not true they say there’s there’s something objective about mind and the way in which these patterns present themselves to us uh and in that in that objectivity then we can kind of recognize them we don’t just recognize them we participate in them and that’s really important to see the difference also between a kind of symbolic understanding and a more modern rationalistic abstract way of understanding the modern rationalist tends to abstract themselves from the world and think they’re they don’t exist or they’re just this like floating being that’s looking at the world and then they analyze it whereas in when you understand this patterning you realize that no you’re in the world and you’re kind of recognizing and participating and celebrating these patterns rather than this kind of cold uh cold cynical uh not cynical but like just cold analysis of uh of science let’s say do you think it’s possible to step outside the patterns and the world no that’s what a lot of a lot of gurus claim so yeah so i think so like you could say that yes um but how do you know but it would be something like a spiritual like a spiritual experience i think that you can have a kind of transcendent spiritual experience but that transcendent spiritual experience will then when it comes back down right so let’s say you have a a theophany and you see something you like you not see with your eyes but like you have an intuition it’s pure intuition of something which is beyond uh multiplicity like as soon as you turn back and you even think about it or even represent it in your mind or you even talk about it or you frame it then it comes back into the world of patterns does that make sense like it immediately comes back into the world of patterns and so uh so that’s why you can recognize uh like this i think you can recognize a fake spiritual person from a real spiritual person when the fake spiritual person tends to want to destroy the world and so they go they say they had this kind of spiritual experience and then what they do is they say then they try to relativize everything it’s like i had the spiritual experience it and then everything else is crap like nothing all of this is nothing right whereas i think the real kind of spiritual insight is able to see that this is the source of the patterns this invisible transcendent point is the source of the patterns and so is able to kind of gather them into their experience there’s a there’s a beautiful image in uh in a mystical christian mystical book called the uh the life of moses by saint gregory of nyssa okay haven’t read what saint gregory of nyssa describes moses ascending the mountain in order to encounter god in the in the divine darkness like even beyond light into this kind of ultimate ultimate transcendent space where even let’s say even vision disappears and you you enter in this kind of pure being that they’re pure beyond being so as he goes up the mountain he removes all these layers you know like his sandals and he kind of removes this quantity and becomes purified as he enters into this kind of transcendent space but then when he gets there he’s given the pattern of the tabernacle he’s given the pattern of the space of worship and so and in that pattern he sees all the things he dropped as he was going up right he sees these layers he sees these garments of skin he sees these actions and so that’s the idea is that if you really attain attain these kind of high spiritual states then you you should be able to gather into them the multiplicity and see multiplicity as an expression of these high spiritual states i don’t know if that makes sense to you no no it definitely does i think it’s important to reconcile these worlds because uh i i fell into the kind of new age non-dual try i mean it’s not even real non-duality really because what i found out is that orthodox christianity is a form of non-duality because non-duality just means non not two uh but yeah i did find this kind of this path that a lot of people go down uh in spirituality where they basically try to dissolve the world you know what i mean they call it all illusory it’s all relativistic but what i’ve experienced is absolute truth so it’s like this dialectical tension like you’re saying one thing but then you’re acting in a way that’s not really congruent to what you’re actually speaking so you can’t really live and act in the world that you’re you’re speaking about and what are your thoughts about this like this kind of the the blind leading the blind false prophets new age spirituality why is this so popular and i understand it because i went full force into it as well and got a bit shaken up well let’s say first of all to give you know as we say to give the deluge do or to kind of understand what happened is that yes christianity became extremely superficial oh you know from the time of the enlightenment as it slowly moved let’s say towards the 20th century there was this there was an extremely kind of superficial and almost materialistic uh version of christianity and so what do you what do you mean by that how did it turn materialistic well it became very moralistic first of all it tended to discount mystical experience it tended to be legalistic right into this kind of protestant idea that you’re declared saved and it’s this kind of uh it’s kind of it’s almost like a legal declaration of your salvation and it doesn’t change anything really but it’s like when you die you go to heaven like all this kind of nonsense you know so if you believe in jesus you’re done you don’t have to exactly like that that’s what spirituality is to you it’s like you just believe in jesus and you’re saved but it’d be in bad boom and that’s it that’s it like i don’t know what that is like i i doesn’t mean anything you know so i get it right i understand and then also the this this one this desire to kind of embrace uh scientism let’s say in christianity and then trying to kind of defend scripture in a scientific way and defend genesis as a scientific narrative and defend all these stories in a historical scientific way and debasing them so much that they just people didn’t understand the spiritual significance of these stories anymore they would argue about some stupid statuette that they found the desert in palestine but then they didn’t understand what it even meant for moses to go up the mountain and encounter this divine uh transcendent uh experience and then come down with his face shining in glory like do you understand what that’s referring to or do you just see it as a material phenomena that happened right so this is the problem that that happened and so as the scientism and this kind of materialism took shape and christians tried to keep up and tried to stay materialist at some point just shattered and then all these stories just seemed like a bunch of silly stupid stories like why would it matter that some guy got nailed on a cross two thousand years ago like that saves you like some guy gets nailed on a cross and then you’re going to have it like really yeah that didn’t make sense to me either right is that the story like dude it’s just total nonsense right and so it’s like so i get it i understand why at some point people and you see it like you see it even before the modern world you see these um kind of esoteric uh these esoteric groups and these esoteric uh ideas start to appear even in the 17th century you know you see with the rosy crucian rosy crucians and then moving into kind of blavatsky and the theosophist kind of you have this kind of opening up and crowley and all these occultists in the 19th century so you kind of see this this reaction let’s say to this materialist moralistic uh christianity and then that kind of wins you could say in the 60s especially that side of the of this of this kind of uh conflict wins and then there’s this explosion of kind of wild mysticism and all these explorations of all these other traditions and a mixture and and like being you know going to india to find some guru and then yes being fascinated by anything except your own your own tradition um and also like the individualism of the modern world kind of seeped into there and so it became very idiosyncratic all the everybody has their own thing and everybody has their own mixture of stone of like you know crystals and these different practices and spiritual whatever all these things yeah um and so i get it i get it but i think that it’s important to kind of be able to notice that it’s it’s participating in the breakdown of our societies right so you have all these idiosyncratic spiritualities that don’t coalesce that don’t kind of come together or they do as a cult so it’s either you’re totally idiosyncratic or you kind of give yourself completely to this guru that usually lasts a few years then it collapses and there’s all these scandals that come out and and so it’s a just kind of this it’s a very disturbing situation and one of the things that makes it even more disturbing is really the obsession with the strange that is the idea that my own story is worthless and i can’t see any value in it but i can read some like weird tantric text from from some culture that i have nothing to do with that has a caste system that i don’t participate in that has that has all these realities that i can’t at all understand but i find it super interesting and super fascinating and really kind of i feel like it reveals something to me so my like let’s say my take on that or my approach to that has rather been to say okay let’s go back into our story and let’s try to go back and find find what was there before the breakdown find what was there before things started to fall apart and that’s what we see in in the mystics like you read like i talked about sangriya vinesa there are these amazing texts written in the in the early centuries of christianity which have everything of anything that a new ager would want in terms of this kind of cosmic understanding and this mystical union with something transcendent it’s all there but it doesn’t have to break down into all these kind of individualistic idiosyncrasies that people participate in and leads them leads them into all these strange directions you know yeah i think i can understand the allure i think with new age spirituality especially with the you know the the understanding of the 19th 20th century of christianity that materialistic surface level christianity you’re talking about and i can see why people get so attracted to that eastern mysticism side because you can have that direct mystical experience it’s a lot more i guess entertaining you know a lot more explorations kind of scratches our curiosity button uh and but like you said early christianity like orthodoxy it’s got all of that mysticism stuff it’s just that we didn’t we didn’t know and a lot of people who are very against let’s say christianity like protestantism or catholicism aren’t even very aware of orthodoxy and like no early church fathers were teaching exactly and not only that but there’s been an effort in the past few hundred years to iron over in even in the bible that is even in the bible translations there’s been a concerted effort to iron over anything that smacks of something strange or something that doesn’t that that that modernist can’t deal with you know and so for example like this whole idea of this hierarchy of angels and all of these kind of sons of god that are in the council of the divine and and uh and kind of manifest god’s will in the world you know that’s something that people have just been trying to chase out of christianity for several hundred years and kind of to their detriment because now people are interested everybody’s interested in angiology and everybody’s like encountering all these different angels but they have no way of discerning what they’re encountering that’s completely chaotic and they think that just because they have an encounter with the being that somehow this is meaningful and not and and it’s like so they don’t have a map to kind of function in this world of intermediary spirits but that’s all it’s all there it’s there in scripture it’s there in the tradition it’s there in the iconography of christianity where you do have a kind of map of this intermediary world and there are ways to kind of encounter it health in a healthy way without you know ending up following some some strange being that you encountered on ayahuasca and then you and then it takes you on down a very dark uh rabbit hole and you find yourself in psychic trouble you know after a little while where all of a sudden you start to break down oh yeah i’ve been there man i’ve been there it’s scary scary stuff uh i think the having grounding is really important especially like strong scaffolding i think when you just get catapulted into these realms sometimes it’s hard to close those doors you know once opened and the thing with doors is that it’s a two-way street exactly so it’s just you entering the spiritual realm it’s also a spiritual realm entering your if you believe in that i definitely i find it hard not to believe that there is a spiritual war out there and there are principalities so like what are your thoughts on this like pre-less spiritual war good versus evil how do you reconcile dualism is it two independent forces like how do you how do you go well this is an interesting there’s an interesting way to kind of understand that which is that there is a kind of duality let’s say and the duality is due to the fault like no matter how you kind of understand it if you look at the story of adam and eve that’s what you see you see that they’re in a in a kind of balanced space or in this garden that is kind of a balance between culture and nature that’s a balance between masculine feminine that has this this balanced reality uh it’s not perfect right and there’s a remainder in it which is this kind of serpent and then this remainder tends them into duality tends them into seeing duality as final but duality exists right it exists in the world and so that’s the fall the fall is kind of is this fall into kind of extreme duality and so you can see it in the human in the human world as this kind of good and evil and these kind of dualities but you can also see it in the cosmic sphere as these two sides like you said later the angel and the demons are these two sides of a of a great cosmic story but there’s also a manner in which the these principalities ultimately are resolved in god and so there’s a there’s an interesting uh quote from the from the i think it’s from saint gregory nazianzus who he talks about the angels of the left hand right that there are the angels of the right hand and then there are the angels of the left hand the angels of the left hand of god are basically the demons and the demons think that they’re doing their own thing but they don’t realize that they’re not that they’re actually ultimately doing the will of god in kind of showing us our own let’s say uh weaknesses and manifesting these these weaknesses and this darkness in the world so that that darkness can then be covered by god ultimately in the final okay in the final image you could say it sounds like it relates a little bit to Jungian shadow integration a little bit there’s something of that but the difference i would say with the shadow integration is that we really don’t we don’t see Christianity that’s really important Christianity doesn’t see uh darkness or doesn’t see sin as a positive force it’s a it’s a what it what it is it’s a kind of um it’s something not in its right place or something not looking in the right direction that’s what sin is and so being is always positive like being is always true but then there’s an there’s a way in which it can become out of whack by let’s say attracting too much attention to itself or not being in the right place and so that is the way in which you kind of understand so that’s the kind of the joke about the demons is that they think that they’re dark but ultimately they’ll participate in the greater light you could say without without even understanding what they’re doing you know so it’s not just that it’s not that that god is integrating non-being let’s say or or this kind of lack of being but rather that he’s revealing the way in which things actually do participate in the great in the great picture um i don’t know that that makes sense so it’s kind of like the image of christ like you have this image of uh of christ going when christ dies you know there’s this kind of more mythological version of the story in the in the gospel of uh of nicodemus where you know you have the devil in hades in in hell and they’re like we won right we killed the son of god like this is it you know we finally did it and they’re they’re like excited because here he comes right we’re going to bring him into death but then they don’t realize that if you bring light into darkness right it’s not it’s not light that goes away it’s you do the opposite and so bringing you know god into death was actually kind of revealing the revealing the world and kind of scattering that darkness well it’s even like the a physical example of a candlelight you know no matter how much darkness there is around it it can’t actually overpower and over consume it no exactly that’s the and that’s a good the and the phrase you used is exactly the phrase that saint john uses in the gospel right says the you know the darkness did not know it but it it didn’t it couldn’t overpower it because like you said that’s not how light and dark work and it’s even in pop culture or actually forever we’ve been obsessed with this story of good versus evil and the hero’s journey and all this kind of stuff and i remember listening to an old podcast of yours and you talked about the hero’s journey and how ultimately it’s christ’s story and that before christ there really wasn’t at least the version of the hero’s journey that is out today is that true and can you like get into that i mean i think so i think that because one of the things people talk about is like the dying and rising god that there are all these ancient stories of these right pagan gods that that point towards ultimately this kind of story of death and resurrection but i think they’re i think they’re kind of how can i say this i think they’re looking back from a christian point of view into something which maybe didn’t have the same type of hierarchy that they think it did that there was these scattered these you could say these scattered lights that were in the world but then from the story of christ then we can look back into react into the past and then all of a sudden we see these little sparking light that are pointing towards ultimately what is the story of christ and so the idea of going into the underworld right this descent into the underworld that’s the story that you see uh in the hero’s journey but that you also see just in so many stories or you see it in the illiad you see in in uh in so many myths you know when you see it uh in the anead all of these these stories have this kind of descent into hades and then either you encounter someone you encounter your father and then your father reveals something to you or you go there to get someone right uh you have um you have the story of i think it’s hercules who goes down into hades and is able to save his friend out of out of death and so you have these like these little versions of this kind of going into death and bringing out you know kind of revealing something that you wasn’t that death wasn’t able to to hold on to you could say or finding something precious hitting in death like going into death and then finding some some vision that will give you meaning right and so so it’s there right it is there but as once the story of christ happens then that story is it reaches its limit like there’s no there’s actually no other story you could say after the story of christ because in the fullness of the story of christ you have this idea that christ does that right christ goes into death he doesn’t just go into death right he actually dies he dies he goes into death then when he goes down there he gathers everybody that’s there and takes them out wow and so right we have this this sentence that we hear every easter in the orthodox church which says you know hey the hell is empty like hell has been has been emptied by christ christ went down and brought all i mean it’s mysterious it’s not it’s hard to kind of completely understand it but it is this image that christ defeated death itself and that by going into the underworld when he came back out you know that was it and so there’s no it’s like i said it’s the limit of the story you go down into the underworld you saw the underworld and then you transform it into glory and then that’s it like there’s no there’s no version which can go beyond let’s say that version in terms of categories yeah it’s it’s actually it’s a very obviously a story an archetype that resonates with so many people you know yeah and even something like i didn’t want to talk a little bit actually about lord of the rings because one of my favorite movies and it’s obviously a movie that just exploded in popularity and then i found that years later that you know the author is a devout catholic so it’s got deep christian symbology and i feel like a lot of people don’t even notice but then they they become super religious about lord of the rings even anxious which i find quite ironic uh why do you think lord of the rings connected with so many people and like what are the main kind of powerful some symbolism behind that well i think that i mean what token was able to do is to really reinstate a you could say an ancient vision of reality an ancient uh cosmic image and because maybe because he did it in fiction people didn’t feel threatened by it maybe something like that and so because of that they were able to just be seduced by it you could say and so people you know the most materialistic nerd scientific you know programmer guy will just fall in love with lord of the rings and he don’t doesn’t totally understand why if you ask him about religion he’ll say religion is stupid and superstitious it’s it’s it’s all these things but nonetheless he he is able to be completely kind of engaged and subsumed by this story which has this this entire kind of hierarchy of beings that you know that moves from i mean in the lord of the rings himself doesn’t necessarily talk about the first god but like it kind of moves down at least in in the middle earth through the elves and then the humans and then the dwarves you know and then the orcs and so you have this this kind of movement from from light and kind of immortality into this kind of monstrous uh darkness which is at the bottom of the world and in the movie they capture it so well like they just do it so well because they have the guy like coming out of the earth you know and they’re all like filled with they’re all scummy and dirty and that music as well so exactly it’s very it’s super well done and so because of that people just feel like it’s right even though it’s completely silly for a materialist to think about elves and orcs and dwarves and all of these all of these uh tropes they’re they’re because they’re patterning themselves on just like in a traditional image of angels above and demons below and the men in the middle and the king and you know the uh the these kind of prophet uh priestly figures like gandalf that have more wisdom and they’re able to kind of manifest it to us like you know all of these tropes and also the fall with golem who becomes obsessed and then and then turns into it comes closer to the orcs you could say you know becomes demonized because he’s obsessed with with with something which can which can kind of give him power and so it’s like we totally recognize these tropes but they’re really religious tropes right they’re really they’re really uh they’re it’s really a religious story um but it’s great because it it’s actually for people that are attentive to it they can say well you know like i can i can talk to you about the story that’s in the bible in a similar way because it’s way more than lord of the rings like the story of the bible is is is way more has way more complexity and subtlety and has all these layers in it and and all these patterns playing themselves out in different forms than lord of the rings um because of that it’s actually harder sometimes because it’s so big that it’s hard to it’s hard to kind of fully get what’s going on it’s very overwhelming sometimes i’ll open scripture i’m like oh man this is exactly you just fall into some weird thing especially if you open the one bite at a time yeah so like so like weird law about not mixing you know a donkey and a cow while you’re yeah on your field and what are all these stupid things uh how do you reconcile this man you know that’s why i i got the orthodox study bible so that really helped kind of fill in the gaps a little bit you know not pretending like i understand scripture of course not i’m still an infant but definitely saved me some time uh but it’s funny what you’re saying about lord of the rings you know people get so i would even go as far to say that religious about it you know what i mean like the nerds are like crazy about it and it’s funny how like we even use it in our language now like if you go on an epic adventure it’s like all right we’ll go on in a lord of the rings adventure you know or if you instead of using the word hell like oh man i went down immortal last night yeah devoured by orcs you know it’s just like things like it’s just funny how we use it in our language and it’s like it’s metaphorical but it also kind of reflects this very fundamental pattern of reality you know yeah that we and the movies were really successful i think in terms of visuals they really captured still holds up it still holds up today holds up i watched it just a few months ago too with my kids because they hadn’t seen it yet and uh yeah it just it really does hold up in terms of the this this kind of world that exists and these different characters you know yeah it it does pretty well i was reading a few months ago i was actually reading your your brother’s book on the symbolism of genesis and i kind of wanted to unpack that just a little bit maybe for those especially who aren’t too well versed in these topics but uh before getting into genesis i want to know what is the difference between this literal and symbolic interpretation of scripture like how should we even approach this thing because i get that question a few times like all the time you take it literally or do you take it metaphorically and it’s always we live in a very dialectic culture you know it always has to be this or that is it one or is it zero like what’s your answer for this well my answer is that i just cut through all that crap like i i don’t like those i don’t like that opposition i find that it’s a it’s a dishonest opposition because if you remember the way that i talked about what symbolism is like symbolism is the actual pattern by which you’re able to attend to something so it’s so so it’s actually it’s a it’s the pattern of a story it’s the pattern of an image it’s the pattern because the day you take the story of of christ you know christ i don’t know christ uh at the wedding of khan you know there’s a million things that were happening in that event there were indefinite amount of things happening at the same time in that place and notwithstanding around it right it’s like there was you know there’s crinkled in in in his robe there was you know dirt on his sandals there was there’s a million like billions and millions of things happening and so in order for you to be able to attend to what was happening and to get meaning from it you have to condense those facts into a narrative you have to choose facts and then you have to string them together in a way that i will recognize that this is a union and so even the literal meaning of a text is already symbolic it’s already it’s necessarily symbolic because why did we why are we talking about this rather than that why am i mentioning these facts and why am i putting them together in a narrative that i can recognize and so there is no neutral reality there is no neutral meaningless reality that’s just there and then on top of that i add some metaphorical meaning that’s just total nonsense like this there’s already a reason why that story is there there’s a there’s a reason why the story is constructed the way it is and that those facts have been chosen to be sequenced in that manner and so the meaning is already there at the very first left layer right and so the best way to understand it that what you would think as literal just means that you’re very paying very close attention to what the text is saying right that’s even what literal means literal means literature it means what’s written hmm that’s what literal used to me it means what’s written and so you you pay attention to what’s written you have what’s written there and then what’s written there is structured in a way that is analogically related to other things and then that’s when what you would call the metaphorical meaning will appear to you which is that as you look at the pattern of the story you realize that it’s structured in a way that is similar to your experience that’s similar to a society that’s similar to another story in scripture and then a story from mythology and so then you that’s when you get what maybe what people call the metaphorical meaning which is that i can take a story in scripture which is already symbolic which is already patterned in a cosmic way and then i can say this is similar to your experience and then i’ll apply it to your experience but it’s actually similar to the way tokyo understood storytelling because tokyo hated metaphorical meaning he said he said my my stories i don’t have metaphorical meaning and people don’t understand what he meant and he said he said they’re not metaphorical they’re applicable and so he said you can apply my stories to things but they don’t it’s not like you know the orcs are the communist and and this aspect of the story is some other political thing and then this is means technology and this it it’s like that’s the wrong way of looking at the bible and it’s it’s the wrong way of reading tokyo too it’s a it’s mostly that the pattern of the story of tokyo can be applied to your experience or applied to a situation and then you can use it as a lens to see the world and so that’s the way in which scripture is metaphorical but you won’t find like the idea of literal the way that people think of literal that is a neutral telling of a story that is completely without meaning is absolute nonsense it doesn’t exist yeah well you know like i said before so i think we live in two a polarizing society and it’s very people very dialectic on both the material side of things and even the the kind of spiritual absolutist person who you know like the materialist will deny anything that’s spiritual and ground their reality from everything below and then the spiritualist will deny matter altogether yeah and say everything is one what does that even mean what’s what’s everything is one i don’t think people who say that and other people who talk about non-duality i used to say it too and then i realized looking back i’m like wait that that actually doesn’t make any nobody but nobody nobody dares to believe in non-duality at least the way they think they do they think they believe in non-duality and you’re like you believe in non-duality really do you eat your feces no you don’t eat your feces so don’t tell me you believe in non-duality what are you talking what are you even talking about why does eating your crap relate to non-duality well because you don’t eat your crap because you believe in duality you believe that some things are outside and some things are inside and you don’t mix them together right that’s that’s because you believe in duality you know you live in a house you wear closed, you function in duality constantly and you experience duality and you live with duality and if you believe in absolute non-duality in the way that especially people want, and especially in the way that relativizes everything, then you can find traditions that are cannibals, you can find traditions that break all the taboos, but I’m not sure many people are willing to go there because it’s actually very destructive. These kind of weird tantric traditions are very destructive to reality. Most people don’t want to destroy reality. They’re lying when they say they do because they actually exist. They exist, they have a life, they have all these things. And so the idea is that love is a better expression, like love is a better way to understand it because love has the notion of ultimate non-duality in the sense that we all participate in the life of the infinite God, but it doesn’t mean that everything is relative and everything is illusion. It means that because God loves us, then we all exist at the level that we do. It’s as if God’s infinite love also kind of, let’s say, moves out of himself into this multiplicity as he’s gathering it back into himself. So it’s not just like either everything is an illusion and we’re all just Brahma, like we’re all just drops in this kind of vast infinite consciousness. It’s rather like a balance between unity and multiplicity, an understanding that multiplicity exists, but that ultimately, for it to even exist, it has to participate in the oneness. But when people just say things like, it’s all one or whatever, like John Lennon and that kind of nonsense, it’s like we could all be as one. What are you talking about? It’s just posturing. Imagine there’s no heaven. Yeah. That’s one of my least favorite songs of the world. Does that tick you off? Yeah. He has some good stuff though. I like the beat. Everybody likes it. Who doesn’t like the Beatles? Yeah, exactly. But that song in particular, yeah. But it’s ironic because you’re talking about these people who claim to have this absolute experience and that God is absolute, everything, and literally every single particle in the universe is God, everything in physical reality is just an illusion. But then they’re basing their experience of the absolute from a relativistic, subjective experience. So it’s like this kind of, I don’t know, it’s just this weirdness because you’re claiming absolute reality but through a subjective lens anyway. So you can’t really escape that duality. You know what I mean? There’s so much wrong. If you really had an experience that there’s only the absolute and all its manifestations are complete illusions, you know what you would do? You would shut up. Because why are you speaking? What are you saying? Yep. That’s why you realize that there’s just a nonsense to a lot of this type of posturing that you hear in this kind of modern spiritualist reality. It’s not like you don’t encounter text like that in the traditions. There are texts or there are traditions which do kind of try to point to the manner in which, let’s say, compared to the infinite, that the infinite is something which is beyond duality, that the infinite does kind of empty itself and contain everything at the same time. And there’s a language of aporia which people use to talk about that. And you see that even in religious traditions. But like I said, this also has to coexist with all the more buffered versions of that in which we also do participate, in which we do go to church, we kneel, we sing, we burn incense, we do all of these celebrations. And we don’t just have this one, this kind of esoteric vision of the infinite that destroys reality. Because that’s the problem with a lot of this stuff is that people just say mysterious things. They just say that kind of stuff you know, the universe is in a grain of sand. The grain of sand is the whole universe. And you’re like, really? Is that really you really think that? I don’t think you do. I think you’re just bullshitting me. Get those social media likes. People like to hear that. Yeah, they like that kind of fluffy stuff. Yeah, it’s funny because I started off doing New Age stuff. But I feel like because I’m Australian, I have that kind of inherent down to earth casual sort of relationship with it. So I think it wasn’t as New Age hippie. But I think as I got more grounded over time, people weren’t very happy with me. And it’s weird. Yeah, well, it’s something that I question because I find it weird how in this kind of world, there is no word for pre-less. There is no word for false spiritual experience. And even that is very triggering because like, how dare you say that my experience was false? It felt so overwhelmingly real. And I’ve had many of those. I’m not even saying that it’s false or it’s true. But the fact that there is no discernment between them. How do you know? But we don’t have to question the experience people have. You know, it’s mostly like you said, the discernment of that experience. And so, you know, in the Orthodox tradition, I think they have the really good way of dealing with this, which is basically saying, you should ignore all spiritual experiences. And if you were going to go like, what? Just ignore spiritual experiences? But that’s what they say. And the reason why they say that is because they realize that if you really believe even what a New Ager will say, which is something like, you know, the purpose of reality is to be united with the one, right? To be united with the transcendent reality. Then if that’s your purpose, then that’s what you should be aiming towards. And then these spiritual experiences that you have, that’s not it. Right? Just because you see an angel or you have some feeling or you have some insight, even if the insight is true to a certain extent, that’s not your goal. That’s not where you’re headed. So you have to be careful not to give too much attention to that because you’re going to stay there and you’re going to kind of turn around in these kind of experiences. And so if you just ignore the experiences, then there’s less of a danger of being, you could say, seduced by a demon, you know, or seduced by something which is off key because you’re just kind of, and you will have the spiritual experiences, right? You will, but you just don’t spend your time on them and you don’t wallow in them, you could say. You rather keep your eye on the ultimate goal, which is, you know, which is the union with the divine. Yeah. Yeah. And even test your experience, you know, and see if it holds up over time, if it still makes cohesiveness sense with the rest of your conception of. Yeah. And also the fruits, you know, the price, you’ll know a tree by its fruits. That is that if you have these spiritual experiences, but you’re a total jerk to everybody around you. And it’s like, and you continue to have all of these sins in your life and all these things that are your obsessions and your idiosyncrasies, then that spiritual experience is pretty meaningless. Like it might’ve felt real and it probably was real, but it’s not moving you towards freedom. It’s not moving you towards something which is more than just a kind of like an entertaining experience. You could say. Yeah. That’s why integration is so important. Like the work that you do afterwards, it’s like kind of reading a book and not contemplating, you know what I mean? It kind of just go right through your head, except that it’s a little bit, it can be a bit more dangerous, obviously going into these realms and let’s say reading a book. Yeah. But I think, I think a lot of it has to do with like, naivety, like, you know what I mean? Just overly trusting. I found that the people who are the most trusting, navigating through these spiritual realms without actually taking it seriously are like, usually, yeah, just kind of young, white, hippie, Western people who’ve never really, I don’t know, because I grew up, I’ve had some like kind of rough experiences and I’ve met people during my teenage years, like who are very charismatic and they’re very actually good looking and handsome and very, you know what I mean? Like they know how to talk to you and make you feel good, but then you find out later that they’re actually a snake. But you can see them go out in the rest of the world, like people being like, oh, he’s such a nice person. But then when you actually peek behind the curtain, you’re like, yeah, I know that guy, Johnny’s a dick. Don’t trust it. Kind of big. So there’s a lot of that. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I think, you know, I think there’s also an aspect of materialism, which is part of that, which is that because we’ve been so hounded and we’re hounded in school and we’re told that the world is just a bunch of phenomena that can be calculated and be measured, is that when people have an insight that there’s actually something more, then it’s like whatever that more is, they’re all excited about it and they just want to dive in and they want to experience. So it’s like, like you said, it also, the materialism leads to this lack of discernment as well, because it’s like, oh, wow, there’s this whole world that they lied to me about that actually does exist. And so it’s like, open the doors, open. And it’s like, oh, there’s something, there’s something. It’s like this facet, you know, everybody’s just excited about it. But it’s like, no, wait a minute. No, no, that’s a really bad thing. Like that’s a demon. And that’s actually a projection of your passion. And that’s a, it’s like, and so, but at first, people don’t, they don’t have that capacity because they’re used to be complete materialists. And so that’s probably one of the problems that we have too. You know, it’s, yeah, I relate. I went through that too. And it would even, maybe even some people listen to this right now might be triggered for when people even say, oh, it’s a demon, like, all right, crazy Christian fundamentalist. What do you even mean by that? I mean, if demons are just playing the role of God anyway, why does it matter? Yeah. Well, people recognize, let’s say, let’s say, let’s, let’s give it a simple example. Let’s say you’re addicted to something. I don’t know. I mean, you drink too much or I don’t know, whatever it is you watch porn or like you have this addiction and you know that it’s an addiction because it, it, because you can’t control it, right? Cause you try to, and then you can’t, and then it kind of pulls you. And so that’s a principality. That’s, that’s also a principality. That is it’s, it’s a pattern in reality that is cosmic. It’s cosmic because you’re not the only person with that addiction, dude. There are other people that also have that addiction. I mean, that’s not a need to do a synchro see to you. It’s not just relative to you. It’s an actual real pattern that exists in the world, but in which you are participating and that, that you are not only participating, but that you, by engaging in these bad habits and behaviors, you are feeding it. You’re sacrificing your time and your attention to this pattern and you’re making it stronger in the world because you’re, you’re like a, you’re a branch of it. You’re a body for it. You’re a, you know, your tool for it to appear in the world. Right. So it, you don’t need like a ghost busters way of thinking. Like it doesn’t have to be something like a wu wu science fiction thing. This is just cognitive reality of how things work. So that principality has a cosmic version of it. It has to, because it doesn’t just exist in you. It exists in all these other people. And so that’s a demon and you can encounter it and you can be possessed by it and you can be a tool for it to spread in the world. Like, have you ever met someone who has a bad habit and is obsessed with getting other people to participate in that very bad habit? Oh, why they even know, they even know that it’s bad for them. Like if you, if you pride them a little, you know that it’s destructive, but nonetheless, they want to get that young kid to smoke and they’re, they secretly want to get these teenagers to drink or to do whatever it is that they do. And so they’re, they’re a tool of this demon in the world. It’s a real thing. I’m just getting flashbacks because like, it’s so true. Like when people are so entrenched in their bad habits, let’s say whatever, weed, drugs, and I’ve had these experiences where you’re like, ah, I don’t want anymore. It’s like, just have one, man. Just have one. Just have one. Like they’re like, and they even kind of physically transform into that kind of orc demonic like, just have one. Come on, man. Just have one. And it’s like, dude, no. And then as soon as you try to break away from their lifestyle, then they get like triggered and inflamed and like, what do you mean? What? You think you’re better than me? You know, it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, man. I just didn’t want to do drugs. That’s all. Yeah. No, but you, you’ve got to exactly the, you’ve understood the right pattern. And no, so these, so you can understand that let’s say, let’s say, think about this. So there are principalities in the world that are trying to get your attention, right? There are some that are light and there are some that are dark and you know, like all the good things, all, you know, like loving your neighbor, helping your friends, you know, being good to your spouse, taking care of your children. There are all these light, these light patterns in the world and they are trying to get your attention and you want to give your attention to them. And then you have all these darker ones that are there as well. Now you can understand these patterns as just abstract patterns in the world, but they, we are conscious beings, like we are persons and those patterns end up coagulating into something like persons as well. And so that’s why we, then the same way that I encounter you, a pattern thing in front of me, right? You’re just a pattern, but I encounter your face and your behavior as a pattern being that is the same for these higher principalities, you know? And so, and so you can, yeah, you can, like I said, you can encounter them, they can manifest themselves to you in sometimes in a more immediate way, depending on people’s sensibilities. But even if they don’t, you can still understand that they’re acting on you. And you, you know, and like, let’s say, I don’t know if you’ve ever, you kind of free yourself from a bad habit, let’s say. You have this bad thing that you’re dealing with and you’re able to free yourself from it. And then when you’re kind of free from it, you’re even like, like who is that guy who was doing that? You almost don’t recognize yourself. Like you look at yourself and you’re like, who’s that guy that was doing this? Like, how is it that he was doing this? And you’re almost like you don’t even, there’s something about it that you can barely recognize. Of course, until the day that you’re like in a weak spot and then all of a sudden you don’t, then again, you don’t know what’s going on. And it’s like, you wake up and you’re like back in the pattern and you’re thinking, how did I get back here? I thought I was out of this thing. Like I thought I wasn’t in there anymore. So how did I fall back into this thing? Wake back into Satan’s den. Exactly. I said, I’ll never do this again. And you’re waking up with 10 hookers around you, drugs. And you’re like, what? Like how did I get here? Exactly. And so, but these experiences are real. Like everybody’s had them. And so we can understand them just in terms of psychology, but they’re more than that. And ancient cultures and Christian culture was able to recognize that this is not just idiosyncratic to you. These have objective reality, these patterns, and there are ways to deal with them religiously. And that something even like exorcism can actually have an effect on you in the same way that a coach, why is it that a coach who speaks to you before a game would make you better at playing basketball? You think that’s, you don’t think that’s stupid. Well, why does it bother you that maybe someone with authority could, with spiritual authority could affect you in a way that would free you at least somewhat from that, from these different bad patterns that you have. So there are all these ways to kind of be able to look back and see again, these rituals, these practices that we see in ancient culture and just see how they’re totally coherent. They’re not at all, they’re not strange the way that people told us they were. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And what I really appreciate about the Trinitarian view of God is that, well, three, the number three is actually the number of reconciliation, right? Transcends opposites, and something I’ve been searching for so many years, because no matter what worldview I came to, there was always this dialectical tension as always this or it’s that. Hermeticism actually did a pretty good job of explaining, like transcending duality and dark and lightness and all this kind of stuff. And even in Hermeticism, they completely prove that you can’t be God because of this, this and this. And I found that very interesting because in this world today, we, well, either you don’t believe in God or you believe you are God, which is mathematically the same thing, right? Yeah, exactly. Now that makes a lot of sense. And that’s what you end up seeing. It’s more like, yeah, we think we’re like little gods, you know, and then we kind of act that way. But usually, if you observe someone who thinks that, you realize that they’re just a series of possessed, like they’re just possessed by all these things, you know? And you kind of see them pop up when you’re watching someone, and all of a sudden you’re like, oh, here comes this thing, like here it comes. And you kind of see it coming. It’s easier to see it in other people, which is horrible. But it’s true. You can see it. You’re with someone and all of a sudden you can kind of see something coming out, of them, some obsession or some weird way of interacting with others. For example, you have a friend, a woman friend, let’s say, and then you’re engaging, you’re talking with her, and then you go to a party and all of a sudden you see her fall into flirt mode and you’re like, what? All of a sudden she’s like a whole other creature. And you’re like- The way she moves and speaks. Exactly. Everything about her. And you’re like, what is this? What’s going on? This being is, yeah, it’s not the same being that I was dealing with, you know, an hour ago. Yeah. That’s why I like to constantly remind myself I’m just human. I’m always fallible. I’m always going to fall. And it’s actually quite freeing to think that way versus you are your own God and you can basically bend reality to your will. And I’m sure you can for a little while, but I don’t know, man. I feel like there’s always a price for everything. Yeah. It snaps back. It snaps back because there’s 98% of you that you’re not aware of. So much of who you are, you’re not aware of. Like, you know, in the Orthodox tradition, people wonder why that is, but we’re constantly confessing sins that we don’t realize we’ve done. And we’re constantly saying, you know, wittingly or unwittingly, like confessing the sins that I’ve done on purpose or on accident, because there are aspects of my being that I’m not even aware of. And so people who think that they’re kind of like these little gods, they don’t realize that they have these little imps that are riding them. And so they kind of act and all of a sudden something happens, like, you know, this aspect of themselves that they hadn’t accounted for, you know, kind of springs forth and yeah, and then they get sideswiped, you know. So yeah, that’s why community is so important, you know, having, I say this all the time, but I think it’s very important to have good friends that will call you out on your BS. Oh yeah, definitely. You know, instead of just being in your own lone world, having spiritual experiences and yes, gaining so much knowledge, just inhaling all that wisdom and you just, yes, I’m God. Yeah, exactly. And recreating that reality. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And can’t do normal human to human interactions. Yeah, but I get it too, but I actually really wanted to dive into the, like the book, your brother’s book, but just maybe for those who aren’t aware, what is heaven and earth? Like how do these two? Okay, so yeah, so maybe my brother, I can just name for people, my brother’s name is Mathieu Pajot, so he has a similar name. He wrote a book called The Language of Creation. And my brother and I, we both kind of developed the symbolic thinking together when we were in our twenties. And he, I would say he’s kind of a, he’s a far superior symbolist than I am in terms of his kind of grasp of patterns. And he’s almost kind of mathematical in his, in his, in the way he sees things. And so the way to understand heaven and earth is almost in an Aristotelian way. It’s like there’s actuality and potential and there’s, or you can see it like that there’s invisible spiritual patterns. And then there is the potential for them to manifest themselves in multiplicity. And so that’s what heaven and earth is. It’s light and darkness, right? The good way to understand that. So light is that which reveals and then darkness is that which contains the, the hidden bodies that will, that will kind of sustain the light, you could say. Or it’s also, let’s say this idea of just invisible, these invisible spirit, like spirit is just wind in terms of the words. And so you have this kind of invisible movement and then you have the waters below, let’s say. And so that’s what, that’s what heaven and earth is at least in scripture, but not just in scripture. It’s the same heaven and earth that you find in Ouranos or Gaia or that you find in, in, you know, in the Aboriginal cosmologies and all these different cosmologies. It’s, it’s a pretty universal idea. It’s yin and yang. It’s all that stuff. And how do you, how do you reconcile the kind of physical afterlife place of heaven of what it says in the Bible? Yeah. Well, the Bible doesn’t say that you’re going to have. Oh, there you go. So there’s a difference between paradise and heaven. Okay. Oh man. I can think about those. Yeah. Yeah. I just assumed that. So, so, so paradise is the garden of Eden. Right. And so paradise is the paradise is the place where the balance between heaven and earth exists. It’s the place between where the patterns and the their balance manifestation finds its totality. So Christians don’t believe that we go to heaven. They shouldn’t. Some people do, but we believe that we’ll be resurrected, that, that, that, that humans will be resurrected and that they will become a perfect union between the invisible and the visible, you could say. That’s the way to kind of understand the way that Christians understand spirituality. Now you do see beings that go to heaven in scripture. For example, Elijah ascends into heaven, Christ ascends into heaven. And you see that, you know, St. Paul talks about, you know, it seems like he’s talking about himself saying that he went up to the third heaven. And so heaven is this, the place where identities come from. And so it is possible for a being to, let’s say, move into heaven. So a way to understand it, like, let me give an example of a being going into heaven. So saints, you could say to a certain extent, ascend into heaven. Okay. Because then they become patrons of things. And so let’s say a saint moves up into heaven. And then now we have churches named after the saints. People will ask this particular saint to intercede for them regarding certain things. Let’s say St. Mary of Egypt, for example. So St. Mary of Egypt is the same people prayed to when they’re having sexual temptations. And so she’s become, she is to a certain extent in heaven, because now she’s becoming like an angel in the sense that she’s like an invisible pattern by which we now congregate, that we come together and recognize, and then we also kind of ask for her to help us in this aspect of reality. I don’t know if that maybe helps to understand a little bit the difference. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, because I never even thought about the distinction between paradise and heaven. But then there’s also the, like what your brother talked about in the book about how heaven is abstract principles, basically, the purpose of humans to inform meaning with matter and express matter through meaning, if I remember correctly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that’s exactly it. So it’s like a two-way street. It’s like you have these principalities which are invisible and are patterns, and then they find body in potential, but then it’s also matter, let’s say, kind of expressing those principalities. Like you need both of them to kind of happen together because the abstract principles are useless without expression. Yes. So can a body live, can the soul live without a body? Or for it to exist, it has to have some sort of… It has to have some attachment to body. At least kind of eschatologically, like at least in the totality of things, it has to be attached to a body, except for, of course, God doesn’t. You could say everything is the body. Like God’s body is the entire cosmos. That’s maybe a way to understand it. But even the angels are said to have subtle bodies, for example, that they don’t have material bodies, but they have subtler bodies. You know? So a way to understand that is like a very simple way, very simple, simple way, is that let’s say you have an ideal and you’re like, I don’t know, you’re some guy who’s 250 pounds, you’re watching TV, and you decide that you’re going to become the sprinting champion of the world. And then, and it’s like, okay, and you may, I don’t know, you’re 50 years old. But it’s like that pattern that you’re looking towards can’t be embodied by you. It’s actually not useful to you. That pattern is useless to you. That ideal, that abstract, let’s say, direction that you’re aiming towards, you can’t embody it. And so you would, you have, you always have to find this relationship between, let’s say, the principles or the ideals or the things we’re aiming for and the capacity we have to embody them. You can’t make a car out of grass. It’s not the proper body for that pattern. The body of a car has to be able to express the car. So matter has to express the principle. And then principle and the car, the idea of a car is useless unless you can drive it. I mean, yeah, it’s nice to think about the idea of a car, but unless you can drive it, it doesn’t, it’s not going to have much use to you. So you have to be able to find, reality is about finding the place where these things join together. And how does Christ join together between the material and the spiritual? How does this, how does the kind of trying God reconcile all these paradoxes that we have compared to, let’s say, the idea of an impersonal God or pantheism and things like this? Well, the idea, like if you think about it, like a mountain, you think about it like a hierarchy, and that’s part of the hierarchy. That’s part of the way in which the world kind of lays itself out. When I talk about the pattern of attention, this idea of kind of moving, even the idea of moving towards the one, like as you’re moving towards the one, that’s what you’re doing. You’re moving out of quantity or let’s say condensing quantity so that you move up towards the one which is at the top, right? That’s where one is, if the world is like a mountain. So that point is something like, ultimately, cosmically, it would be the fulcrum, like the place where heaven and earth meets in a kind of absolute way. And then all the other places that heaven and earth meet, like the place where the idea of the car and the actual car meet, that would be somehow a consequence or down the hill from this ultimate place where heaven and earth meet. And so the idea is that that has different expressions in scripture, the mountain of paradise, the mountain of Moses, where he goes up, receives the law, the tabernacle where you go into the holy of holies, and you move from the quantity of the people into the one priest that goes into the holy of holies and then sees the glory of God. So there are different versions of that in scripture and in, not just in scripture, but in every religious tradition, there’s all these different versions of it, ziggurats, all these different images. But then the idea that what Christians are trying to help people see is that ultimately is man, first of all. We are the place where meaning and the invisibles, we are like the laboratory where that happens. It’s kind of through us that meaning appears in the world. And so that’s the one thing that you realize in someone like Christ is that ultimately man is that place where that happens. But then that man, let’s say the man that has that position will also manifest something. And what he’ll manifest is that he’ll actually fill up the whole hierarchy. He won’t just be the top. He will actually contain the whole thing in himself. And so if you want to understand the story of Christ, that’s what it is. That’s why Christ has to die. That’s why Christ is all these things. If you look at the way Christ is represented, he’s all these opposites actually. He’s described as a farmer in the sense of agriculturalist. He’s also a shepherd. He’s the king. He’s a priest. He’s a workman. He’s a slave. He’s a criminal. He’s every aspect of reality that is kind of packed into his story. And then that condensation of his story. And then it also like he fills the world up. That’s why he heals things. He’s always healing disease. He’s always at the top of the mountain and then healing that which is below, going to the stranger. Well, that’s why he goes to prostitutes and publicans and all these marginal figures because he’s going to the edge. He’s moving out and kind of gathering all things into himself. He would drink with sinners. He would drink with sinners. That’s right. He would go to these bars and just go to Satan’s den, hang out with the homies, meet people. And so he was able to do that without, because he contains all of this in himself, he was able to do that without losing himself, you could say. Like let’s say most of us, if I went into a bar with a bunch of prostitutes, then maybe I would lose myself there. Or maybe I wouldn’t be the one to bring the prostitute into the love of God, but I would rather find myself being dragged out into the den of hell. And so that’s the difference between the way that Christ, or when Christ encounters the prostitute, she ends up washing his feet out of compunction for her sins and wants to transform her life. And so you see the same, he goes to a tax collector who are these horrible corrupt officials. And when he encounters them, they’re like, I’m going to give my whole fortune to everybody and I’m going to help the poor. And so it’s like Christ transforms all these aspects of reality as he encounters them. So it’s not just about hanging out with the people on the edge, but it’s actually about transforming everything and bringing it into himself. So there’s a million examples of how he does that, but ultimately the death of Christ and the resurrection ends up being the ultimate image of that, like I said, which is that he goes down to the bottom of reality. He goes all the way down into death where everything is broken apart and everything is fragmented into its constitutive elements. And he then gathers all that up and then rises up, resurrects, and then ascends into heaven. But now by ascending into heaven, he’s actually bringing everything into heaven with him. So it’s an image of gathering all of multiplicity, all of death, all of this, everything into God. And so that’s what the incarnation is about. And it’s something which ultimately happens in all eternity. It happened at a moment in history, but it’s actually happening. It’s something which is a kind of a cosmic truth about how reality works. It’s not just something that happened. It’s actually revealing that reality is already and always reconciled in God and that Christ manifested it at one point in the story, but this is actually how reality works. There’s a lot of old mythical stories of people dying, resurrecting, and all that kind of stuff, but is Christ at least the first claimed person to have fulfilled that story in actual reality? I think so. I don’t think I’ve seen another story where it’s not just that people say he resurrected, but Christians don’t just believe he resurrected. We believe that he gathered all of death into himself and brought it up into the Father. And so it’s like, like I said, there’s no other story after that. It’s like, that’s it. He basically went into death and then gathered all of multiplicity all the way to the constitutive elements and then brought it up into heaven. And so I don’t think that, if anybody has an idea of another story like that besides the story of Christ, I never heard it. Yeah, I’d like to know if there is. Because it’s really, I find that symbolic story very interesting of Christ going down to Hades, defeating death and all that kind of stuff. Because even people all around the world, when they get to really hard situations, and I’ve heard this of one of my best friends who lives in Chile, they have crazy earthquakes, and there was a time where he was a materialist, atheist, socialist, but then when that earthquake came and he thought he was going to die, he went on his knees and prayed for Jesus. And there’s a lot of those kind of situations where people, they could be the most anti-Christian person ever, but man, when you’re in a crazy situation where you think you’re going to die, who else are you going to call? I just find, I always found that part interesting, and I think that’s kind of what made me curious to at least explore Christianity, is that special place that Christ has. Because people are going to call for Buddha if they’re getting attacked by demons, you know? And it’s interesting because people, I actually want to talk to you about UFOs, because I found even that to be the case, where certain people have a UFO experience, they’ll call out to Christ and then disappear. Oh really? Yeah, I’ve never heard that story, but I believe it, I’m not surprised. I haven’t tested it, but I’ve heard. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it seems pretty obvious by now that there’s at least a relationship between UFOs and these dark principalities, and the relationship between UFOs and also psychedelics seems to be coming clear and clear, let’s say. And it seems like it’s also part of the story. Have you ever seen Alistair Crowley’s, his demon, the creature that supposedly dictated several of his books, his demon is called Elioth. It just looks like it. Elioth, so A-L-I-O-T-H. And Elioth looks just like a gray, dude. He looks like a gray. And I think it’s the first image of something like that, that anybody had ever seen. But he had this encounter, and Crowley and the OTO were really, they were trying to break things open. They were trying to just remove the seals, and I think they probably were successful. Breaking the Seals revelations, eh? Yeah, and part of the chaos of what we’re seeing is maybe this opening that they participated in, and now there’s a lot of this stuff flooding through. And so it’s interesting that you say that you’ve read stories of people who pray and then the UFO experience just vanishes. I’m not surprised. Yeah, same with sleep paralysis or bad psychedelic trips, things like this. And again, these are people who you can’t even say it’s just placebo, it’s just bias, because a lot of times it’s coming from people who, if anything, they’re anti-Christian. So it’s like, you know what I mean? It makes no sense for it to have… It’s just funny. Imagine what you said. People stop thinking. It’s like, it’s just placebo. It’s just bias. It’s like, okay, well, then why don’t you call to Spider-Man and see what happens and see if it’s just placebo. It’s like, that’s not how reality works. It’s not true. Maybe there’s something placebo about it, but placebo is not arbitrary, even if that’s part of it. It’s like, you can’t just call to anything and then it’ll work. It’s like, no, it has to be something that you believe in. And that’s something which is powerful enough to kind of be there in your story, even though you deny it consciously. And so the idea of just saying, it’s arbitrary, it’s prejudiced, it’s like, okay, dude, you don’t understand how these things actually work. It’s like, no, they’re not. The reason why they would even work, even using the placebo argument, is not arbitrary. Right? Oh yeah, a hundred percent. Even the word just, like, oh, it’s just… Yeah, I know that word. Every time someone says it’s just that, I’m like, okay. It’s just a projection. I’ve caught you. That’s not possible. Think of the placebo effect. Think of the placebo effect. If you get a placebo from your doctor, probably work. But if a homeless guy walks up to you on the street and gives you a pill and says, it’s going to cure your disease, man, it’s not going to work. All right, mate. Yeah. It’s not going to work. And so it’s like, placebo is not arbitrary. It has a structure and it has a way it manifests itself and we can understand it. And it’s actually part of reality. It’s not something that you can just put to the side and say, this is not part of reality. It is because it works. It actually works. What do you think of these? Have you delved deep into these psychedelic entities that people go into? Like, let’s say, have you heard of the DMT jesters? No, I know a little bit about the machine elves. Or this. Yeah. I know about the machine elves a little more. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that? Like, what is that? I find the machine elf, let’s say, concept or the machine elf experience very, it’s fascinating because, do you know about the traditions of the book of Enoch? I know a little bit about it. I haven’t read it completely, but yeah. So in the traditions of the book of Enoch, the book of Enoch is a book that was probably written in the second temple period. And so it’s like, let’s say a little bit before Christ came, but refers to tradition before the flood. Is it non-canonical or is it canonical? So the story is that, no, I mean, it’s canonical in some, it’s canonical in the Ethiopian church, for example, and it remained kind of part of the, it’s quoted in scripture, St. Paul quotes the book of Enoch several times. So it’s not fully canonical, but it’s kind of part of the lore, let’s say Christian lore. So in the book of Enoch, you have the descendants of Cain. They’re the ones who develop technology, by the way, in scripture, you see that. The descendants of Cain are the line which develop all technology. So music and then the arts and then cities and then metallurgy and weapons, all of this is developed by Cain. But in the book of Enoch, it expands on the idea that it says the sons of God went into the daughters of men and then from that spawned giants. So in the book of Enoch, the idea is that these demons, these spiritual entities, come and they teach technical skills to humans. They teach them how to make metal. They teach them how to make weapons. They also teach the magical skills like necromancy, and they even teach them, interestingly enough, they teach women how to wear makeup, which is very interesting because it has to do with seduction and it also has to do with kind of this using a covering to enhance something, which is what technology is. Technology is basically makeup. You could understand it as it’s like adding something to you in order to give you more power. You can understand it because once you understand what makeup is, it can actually help you kind of get it, what technology does. So these demons appear to the, or it doesn’t say how, but they mix with humans somehow. And then they teach these skills of making technology and weapons and makeup and all these things. And the Chimera is important too. So they teach them how to make hybrids, like different kind of hybrids, human-animal hybrids and different animal hybrids. The excess of that is what leads to the flood. It’s like basically things just break down and then here comes the flood to kind of recapture the world. And so the machine elves are super interesting because it just seems like it’s playing out. It’s playing out the story of Enoch and slaying out a book that was written thousands of years ago where people encounter these beings and these beings teach them or show them technological or technical patterns that some, I guess, some people are able to kind of apply in the world. And so it’s like the idea that our technology comes from aliens is actually, even though like the way that they do it on the history channel is completely stupid and ridiculous, the trope of thinking that our technology comes from aliens is not completely stupid. If we understand aliens as just these kind of beings that are able to kind of manifest patterns to people without discernment, and then we kind of move into these kind of technological… Yeah. So I think that it’s very fascinating because it seems to be playing along with what’s going on. And AI is definitely part of that. The idea of these kind of embodied intelligences, mechanically embodied intelligences, like all of this stuff is moving towards something like what we saw in the pre-flood narratives. It seems like it. And I’ve had experience with these kind of, I don’t know if they’re all machine elves, but basically it was all of evil and darkness composed into one being, but it had all these mechanical paths, like this kind of soulless, mechanistic, just, I don’t know, like no free will determinism, but evil. Yeah, it’s really, it’s really bizarre. But when, because when I’ve gone through these experiences, I noticed then that these principalities, it’s like they’re more fundamental than us, it’s like a layer before creation or something like that. I don’t know, I might be crazy even saying this, but it really does feel so overwhelmingly real that I understand why people kind of get into it. But there’s also, of course, the dark side of it. And I should be grateful that I tapped into the dark side early on and not tagged along until later in life. Yeah, that you kind of saw it and said, okay, well, I need to think about this. Yeah, it’s like basically how scared scared me back into heaven sort of thing. It’s like, oh, okay, I want to go like whatever the opposite direction is to that. I’m going that way and just live normal life, you know, just human, human life day to day. I think that’s very important to be grounded, you know, because I think when you get too lost in these spiritual dimensions without having the grounding, it can be more dangerous, you know, any spiritual practice, I feel, you know, I feel like even Christianity would be dangerous if you don’t have that grounding. And I’ve seen it with people with people who get too inflamed with pride or something like that, and they become self righteous like that typical, you know, I don’t say that’s it. But even the mystical practice of the church, like in the Orthodox Church, we have a mystical practice, which is called Hezikasm or the Jesus Prayer. And it’s a prayer, which is repeated. And then it’s also coupled with a breathing with a kind of with a breathing which rhythms the prayer, you know. Okay, and how do you do this? Is this just a quick thing? Is it like, you breathe in, you say half the prayer, and then you breathe out? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is like, this is really kind of the basic structure of Orthodox mysticism. And everybody does a Jesus Prayer, like everybody prays that. But there’s an idea that some people will pray the Jesus Prayer in a manner that they become, or the prayer enters into their heart. And that they actually kind of, the prayer takes over their being. And that they kind of become just the prayer. And so there’s even this idea that at some point, your heartbeat rhythms with the prayer, and that your heartbeat becomes the prayer. And so the Fathers will say, don’t do that. If you don’t have a guide, like if you don’t have someone to guide you, like do not do this, you will become insane. Like it will lead you to insanity if you go in this direction, if you try to kind of do to pray without ceasing, like to just kind of, because this is the idea that they try to do is they try to, the monks basically try to become constant prayer where their entire being is kind of caught up in this prayer. And it leads to elimination. It leads to theosis to basically be united with God. But they tell you, like don’t do it without a guide, because it’s super dangerous. And it’ll make you, it could drive you crazy. And monks go crazy. You go to these monasteries, let’s say on Monathos, and you’ll just meet crazy monks, monks who lost their mind because they just weren’t, they became prideful or they just weren’t being, they didn’t, they didn’t accept to be guided or they just did their own thing. And then it just, well, it’s funny how that, that attitude is so universal because even in the psychedelic world, let’s say with ayahuasca, a lot of people like, no, don’t you dare do this without a shaman. And then even to go beyond that, it’s like, you’ve got to be very careful which shaman you choose. Because again, even in these new age practices, most reasonable people are aware that you are opening doors, you know what I mean? And you have to be very careful with what slips through. And even if something seems good, it might not be good. It’s hard to know, like, can you explore these realms smartly and safely, or is it one of those best not to mess with that kind of stuff? Or it just depends on who you are as a person. I mean, I’ve never done psychedelics, but it’s like, I can’t speak from experience. I feel like, let’s see from a more traditional perspective, it’s definitely more on the dangerous side in the sense that the idea of a real spiritual practice is to be transformed, right? It’s to actually rise up in the hierarchy of being is like through humility, not through pride, but through humility and practice and spiritual discipline that you actually become more like the angels, become more like God. And so it’s not so much to just have these experiences of this world, but rather to kind of participate and rise up in the hierarchy of being, you would say. You see this image called the Ascent of the Divine Ladder, where you see monks going up a ladder and there’s Christ above. Christ is the goal, right? We’re actually aiming towards Christ to become like him, to be united with him. And then there are angels that are kind of helping along the way. But then there are also demons. You see it in the image, like these demons are like pulling the monks down and they fall into like the mouth of Hades at the bottom of the image. And so their idea is not to either experience the angels or experience the demons, right? Their idea is to aim towards the transcendent, aim towards Christ, aim towards the place where heaven and earth meet. And then you will encounter them along the way, but that’s not the point. And so the problem with, I think, with a lot of the psychedelic stuff is that people can rip open the veil and then move into this world and they have these experiences, but they’re not better people. They’re not freer from their own demons. They’re not freer from their own passions. And so yeah, so they’re more in danger than they would be if they would just kind of stay in the normal world. And I say that, but look, I’d be honest with you. I know several people that did psychedelics and then converted and then just became Christian. Yeah, I’ve heard that. That’s the thing that throws a wrench in my whole thinking about this, because I don’t have necessarily a strong opinion of psychedelics or this or that, because they’re so mysterious and they have so many different outcomes for different people. However, I would say that at the state that humanity is right now, it probably would be more dangerous than it is good. But I don’t know if that’s necessarily the psychedelics themselves, but just where humans are, because we’re very prideful and very naive and can fall into these traps. And also because we’re materialist. And so I can see it. I can totally see it because it’s like for all my love, Jordan Peterson, I love Jordan Peterson, but I think that this is one of the dangers that he’s falling into. It’s because it’s easy to, you can analyze it. It’s a mushroom. It’s like, here’s the chemical formula. Here’s the thing. It’s right there. Just take it. You eat it and there you go. So it’s super easy. So the most materialist, the most scientific person can say, this works. It’s a pill. You take it. You have this experience. You can analyze it. You can calculate it. You can look at the person’s brain and you can see their waves, whatever is going on. And so it seems like a kind of materialist shortcut to the spiritual life. But I think that that’s also why it’s a problem. I think that that’s why it’s a problem because look at even like at the way that, I don’t know if you saw that discussion you had with the guy who wrote this, what is it? I forget what it is. There’s something about how mushrooms are at the source of our religions or whatever. Some book about that. Oh, yes. I actually had them on. Yeah. Yeah. The immortality cave. Is that right? I think that’s, maybe that’s what it is. I don’t know, but look at what they’re doing. It’s like, so think of the mysteries of Elucis, for example. So you have this entire ritual that lasts several days and is extremely engaging and is like sworn to secrecy. You’re not allowed to talk about it. There’s a whole thing around the entire mystery of Elucis. And then maybe at some point in this thing where they come, let’s say to the edge of it, then there’s a substance involved in the experience. But now the materialist wants to just say, smell that ritual stuff. It’s all bullshit. It’s the mushroom. Yeah, it’s the mushroom. It’s a formula that I can analyze and that I can show you and that I can measure. And so it’s just such a materialist way of looking at reality that even if maybe in some cultures psychedelics were part of the process of transformation of the person, the idea that they were the central part of it is complete nonsense. It’s complete nonsense. And it’s super dangerous. And it’s like a materialist way of approaching these ancient myths, these stories, these patterns of transformation. Anyway, so I tend to really be very cynical about this stuff. Well, even Carl Jung was cynical about it. It’s funny because even myself, a lot of psychedelic people quote Carl Jung. He’s our Lord and Savior, but even he’s like, yeah, beware of unheard wisdom. Don’t do psychedelics. He didn’t say those exact words. He did say beware of unheard wisdom, but he was very… But then again, man, he went through a 10-year psychosis. So he’s like, yeah, I don’t need to open any more doors. I’m good. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, he also had, I think, that problem where he didn’t accept to be guided. And there are stories about Jung, like even from a not a Christian perspective, there are stories of him going to India, but then refusing to even to be guided by the supposed masters that he encountered there, and that he wouldn’t even meet with them. He’s a scientist in the end. He ended up… And I think that he didn’t… Yeah, he was never… I don’t think he ever ended up being either a practicing Christian or an initiate of anything. He was just someone from the outside who was trying to explain these things and then got cracked open. Just got cracked open is the only way to see it. Oh, man. Could you imagine that? Going to bed, sleeping with a revolver on your pillow and having these attacks by these entities every day. I’m surprised he didn’t end up killing himself, man. That sounds like hell to me, but I’m glad that he got some knowledge out of it and came out the other side. Thank God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s what it is. Yeah, Jonathan, I would love to just finish this off because I know that you make a lot of videos about symbolism, unpacking movies and stuff. Do you ever do video games? It’s funny because everybody’s asking me to do video games forever. And then I did. I did a video. It was probably because it’s also maybe I didn’t approach it the proper way. I thought, okay, so I should talk about an early video game to show the pattern and how it was there from the beginning. Let’s say even the more complicated games. Yeah. So I did it on Donkey Kong because I was moving towards Super Mario. Like the old, old school Donkey Kong. I did a video on Donkey Kong and it just totally bombed. Nobody watched it. And then it discouraged me because I wanted to do it on Donkey Kong and then do it on Super Mario as a second step to show how it’s all there in Donkey Kong, but then it unfurls into Mario and then Mario becomes the template for basically all the games we have now. But then I just never made the second video because it was a lot of effort to kind of put it together and to write it and to edit it. So you can find it, the Donkey Kong video, if you want. I think it was pretty good. I was happy with it. Maybe I will. I might do it. Maybe. Maybe you can even do something that I would enjoy anyways, seeing you do a reaction video to one of the more popular games like Skyrim or something like that. These epic kind of fantasy worlds that people are completely obsessed with that have really cool stories and symbolism. Yeah. Well, I think that Elder Scrolls, I think they definitely do a good job at kind of containing a world. They present a world that is both very diverse but also coherent enough that it really fits in that, it fits a little bit in that kind of Tokyo. Tokyo is the one who set, by the way, Tokyo is the one who set the map for all of these things, especially for the fantasy video games or the world building video game. It’s really Tokyo who kind of set the standard for that. But for sure, in Elder Scrolls, they do a good job at embodying it. So yeah, I think so. But it’s just hard because let’s say something like Skyrim, it’s so big. It’s hard to talk about. It’s this huge, huge game. Even the story itself is really big. And so I think it would be difficult to do a kind of consent. Or break it down maybe, breaking down literally one mission of a certain story. Yeah, and maybe just choosing one and then showing it. I think it could explode. Skyrim is very popular. You’re very good at unpacking these kind of myths. So you don’t have to do anything. But it’s something that it’s something that it’s been, obviously, people have been asking me to do video games for a while, for a long time. And so who knows, maybe, I don’t know. It’s possible. It’s also, it’s like, there are so many things to do, too. So it’s hard to sometimes decide what I’m going to do. I know you want to do all these things at once. Why do people play something that I’ve been fascinated with? Why do people are obsessed with horror games and stuff like that? Why do people get out of the way to pay money to scare the crap out of themselves? So why do people, why do people like horror? Yeah, just in horror in general. It’s something that’s been very fascinating for me. Okay, well, horror, like horror is, how can I say this? Horror is a reality. There’s a relationship, there’s a little bit of relationship between something like sacred space and horror in the sense that horror is a category, it’s always a category which transcends the rational. Horror is like the irrational, which just kind of smashes against the right. Like that primal adrenaline sort of thing. Yeah, but also it’s like something which is unreasonable. It doesn’t make sense. Even the idea of a mass killer doesn’t make sense. And then the more imagistic versions of that, I don’t know, like Evil Dead or whatever, these kind of come with these really, really irrational forces that are extremely cruel and that are extremely violent and that are basically will just destroy the world. It’s something that can make us peek into the idea that there’s something beyond the rational. It’s kind of like in the wrong direction, you could say, but not totally. Because if you look at Christianity, horror is part of the sacred. The cross is in part, it’s not just horror, but it is horror. Horror is in the cross. There’s other things going on in the cross, but horror is there. And so I think the difficulty with horror is that it’s just in one direction, let’s say. It’s more about kind of encountering the monsters on the edge of the world, you could say. It’s something like that. But it’s not completely, it’s understandable. Because if you read even the idea of there’s a relationship between awe and terror. Okay. They’re just in the experience. So think about, I mean, you can imagine it just in a primordial experience of kind of encountering a giant warrior, right? And this giant warrior steps out in front of you and you’re like, I don’t know, you’re an 11-year-old boy, this like six foot five massive warrior with a helmet just steps out in front of you. It’s like, you’re going to be a lot of things. You’re going to feel a lot of things when that happens. You’re going to feel scared, impressed, overwhelmed, like, let’s say frozen in front of this revelation, let’s say. And so that’s when you can kind of understand this idea of the relationship between, let’s say, the terror of encountering God or encountering an angel. The joke on the internet, right? The biblically accurate angels, there’s something about that. When the angel says, be not afraid, the reason why he’s saying be not afraid is because he’s scary as hell. Get that meme. Yeah, yeah. Don’t be afraid. It’s like, whoa. The angel appearing to you is something like a breaking open of normal space and this like rushing in of this trans-rational space. And so there is an aspect of it which is going to be kind of terrifying. And so it’s normal, I think. So that’s why you hear the angels say that, because they’re also trying to signal to you which side of this encounter that you’re dealing with. Oh, that’s so true, man. Those biblically accurate angels are like, whoa. They’re not really biblically accurate. They’re going on purpose to make them really wild. But in the Orthodox version of angels, you kind of see something of that. You do have the image of the cherub with the four heads and then these wings with eyes on them. So these are iconographic versions of these beings, or the wheels with wings and eyes and stuff. But some of the memes, they just go on purpose to make them look almost like, it’s like there’s a little bit of sensationalism, let’s say, in that. For sure. Yeah. Anyways, Jonathan, I won’t leave you any longer. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. We had some very interesting discussions. It was good to meet you. And I wish you all the best on your journey, for sure. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. It’s definitely been an interesting one. It’s a long, very long journey because it’s not like a sensationalized one where you have an experience. You’re like, oh, yeah, I’m a Christian. Some people do have those experiences. Yeah. But for me, it’s been a very long process of elimination kind of journey, I guess. I get it. Yeah. Well, yeah. So I wish you all the best on that. And also in your kind of crazy world of lockdowns, you know, we can wish for the best. Save us, Jonathan. Please get me out of here. I wish. I want to leave. I really want to leave. Yeah. I feel the same here. So it’s not as bad as you, but I kind of I’d like I have all these friends saying, you know, come to Texas, come to Florida, come to Tennessee or whatever. I wish. Like all these other states. But yeah. Well, all we can do is prepare for the worst and hope for the best, I guess. That’s right. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, anyways, thanks again for coming on the podcast. And yeah, hope to catch up with you sometime in the future. Great. Yeah. And send me the link if you, when you put it up, I’ll share. Oh, for sure. For sure. Awesome. All right, Jonathan. All the best. God bless. Bye.