https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PjOwRIBPUU8
the thing, the whole evolution narrative is the most, it’s just so hilarious because the evolution narrative has to be, ends up being teleological. They can’t avoid it. Every time they try to make it non-teleological, it fails. So, and so it always ends up having to be teleological. And so then it becomes non-scientific immediately. It just becomes a kind of mythological pattern. It’s like, well, if it’s a mythological story, my mythological story is much better. Like the creation narrative in Genesis accounts way in a better manner for the ontological hierarchy of your experience of the world than the way that evolution talks about reality. And it’s, and you can see, like, I mean, you know, when I talked about wine science, it’s always the same issue. And you see the same with all the evolutionary theories. They’re basically saying, what evolutionary want, evolution really wants you to do is to basically kill and compete and take and just get your seat out there and get your genes to the next generation. But of course, we shouldn’t do that. It’s like, okay, well, where do you get the, we shouldn’t do that from? That’s actually what interests me because that’s a lot closer to what I care about. And then maybe you can find that in the Genesis story, but the other, you can’t find it anywhere else in your little pattern, like in your little worldview. So I have a couple of special guests with me today on Grille Country. I have Michael Martin, who’s kind of a regular and a friend of the channel. Dr. Michael Martin, you can find on his own podcast these days, Regeneration Podcasts, where he has very interesting guests. And a guest who will need no introduction for most of my audience, Jonathan Pajot of the Symbolic World. That’s great. It’s great to finally meet both of you in person. I’ve had contacts with Michael for a long time. Really, at least 10 years. I sent in a piece of art for his magazine ones, and we met through a common friend. And so it’s great to see you in person. Yeah, it is nice. That’s great to learn about that connection. I feel like I’ve known you for a long time. Yeah, that’s what it feels like too, but we’ve never actually spoken. That’s very interesting because when I first started reading Michael’s books, it’s like, that’s immediately, it’s like, oh, I need to have him talk to Pajot at some point. Somehow, that’s got to happen. It’s like, they’ve got to talk. So here we are. So I might do more listening than talking today because I’m excited to hear the two of you talk. So I just kind of dive in. One thing that we can, kind of the thing we’re going to talk about today is kind of Christian esotericism, mysticism, that kind of thing. And we’ve been doing this series on Talbot’s meditation of the Tarot, on the Tarot on Grail country. Michael has taught the book and read it several times, and he’s been a guest on some of our episodes. And you’ve started reading it recently too. So I thought we could just like maybe dive into that and tell us about what your impressions have been of the book so far. I really, I think it’s wonderful. There are obviously a few caveats. I was really surprised about the reincarnation bit. I was like, really? That’s a little surprising. And I know where he gets it. I mean, obviously he’s a Kabbalist, so he gets it from the whole cycle of souls thing. That’s probably where, why he’s, he’s, because a lot of his stuff seems to refer to Kabbalah. So, but besides that, I think his cosmic vision is very much aligned with mine and the way that he understands what he calls vertical causality. He’s also adding some vocabulary for me that I’ll be able to use, I think, in the future, because it’s definitely connected directly to, you know, and I think the richness of the book is also that, I mean, this is what we’ll get into later, probably in our discussion, even with you, Michael, is that I think one of the reasons why I’ve differecated from kind of Christian esotericism and kind of step back from it is that I felt like the way that it was presenting itself to me, especially in the recent, let’s say in the last, I mean, I guess more, like at least a hundred years has been almost as a challenge to Christianity and has been presented almost as something which was subversive to Christianity. And I think that when reading Thumbird’s book, I think that he’s really trying to reconcile, you know, the esoteric traditions in the West with, you know, real Christianity. And so I was really appreciative of that. Yeah, in a lot of ways, it seems like what he’s doing is almost, it’s almost a plea with esotericists to cooperate with the church. It’s kind of the tone of like a lot of the book. Definitely. I mean, I haven’t, I’ve read about maybe a third of the book, so I’m not, I’m not right near from done, but for sure, everything I’m seeing, like I said, except for the weird reincarnation thing, everything else I feel is he’s really, I think that someone would read, if someone read that book and then watch my videos, they would immediately understand what I’m talking about and probably vice versa. Like if people watch my videos and then read that book, they would immediately understand. So that’s great. Yeah. I think what Thumbird’s, what I think he’s doing and it resonates with a lot of people is there’s a kind of traditionalism to him. It’s a kind of, not only appreciation, but devotion to traditional sacramental forms of Christianity. He’s a Russian writing in French about Western esotericism and it’s very different. Maybe I don’t know enough about it, but from what I know, especially the East and especially in Russia, the esoteric traditions, if you want to call them that, there were actually borrowed from the West, from Yakoberma and even the Philadelphia Society and people like that. So start with the Protestants, move to the Russians, came back, at least part of it, came back to the West. But in the West, I mean, part of what I think Thumbird’s doing a lot of what he draws on is not what I would even call like kind of a traditional, I mean, I kind of hesitate to use the word, well, Christian hermeticism, the word he uses. Yeah. Because his Christian hermeticism is grounded more in the 19th century. And when he quotes all these authors like Elifes Lévy and Papou. Yeah, most of his sources seem to be like late 19th and early 20th century. He has Pelladon and… Yeah. Which are all, I mean, they’re all interesting. Pelladon in particular is kind of fascinating to me. But Thumbird, I mean, so my doctorate is in 16th and 17th century English literature, religious literature, where when hermeticism was hermeticism. So it’s a very different, it’s very different, you know, that strain of hermeticism. So when people talk about Rosicrucianism or hermeticism, and they think it’s like being a Freemason and like, well, no, no, that’s not these guys. Well, the thing is what happened is after the 17th century, when there was a kind of a revival of that stuff and it was connected to masonry in the 18th century, 19th century, they kind of just borrowed the vernacular and appropriated it. And it really doesn’t have a lot to do with what this kind of… Because if you look at like traditional figures from the hermetic period in 17th century England, like Robert Flood and Thomas and Henry Vaughan and Jacob Berm, they were, if you would have, we would have talked to them right now, they would have described themselves as kind of traditional Christians. What they were rejecting was the scientific revolution and its base materialism, which if you can do science without the realm of the spirit, they thought that was crazy, right? And so they were kind of traditionalists. They were kind of old school. You’re right. There’s a way in which it seemed like the Freemasons, they seem to have just, they basically just want to aggregate all the esotericism. They seemed at least at some moment, maybe not so much now, but at least in the 19th century, they seem to want to just kind of pull everything into their sphere. And so started using all this imagery from the different esoteric traditions. And so that’s why I think today people also conflate it all together because of also the strangeness of the Luciferian hoax that happened with the Mason, that all got weirdly kind of brought into modern occultism and then taken up by the Satanists, basically using the the textiles host hoax as a template for their Satanism. It’s just so, all of it just so weird that it’s also one of the reasons why I kind of tend to stay away. Yeah, no kidding. I would do, yeah. Because it’s also hard for people to be able to differentiate. And I often feel like I don’t have to, like I don’t need it. I feel like I have in St. Gregory of Nyssa and in St. Maximus and in a good cosmic understanding of the liturgy. It’s like I have everything I need. And if I’m going to pull from other sources, I can do it once in a while, but I tend not to do it too much because if I do, then people get confused. That’s my feeling at least. I understand. Now, you ever read the book Foucault’s Pendulum? Yeah. That’s a hilarious book. Yeah, it’s hilarious. I really enjoyed it. I read the whole thing as a giant like kind of joke on it. It is. It’s set up. It’s like a 400 page set up to a joke. Because what he does, because all the the so-called occultists, they get talked into thinking they’re members of an occult group they didn’t know existed, but they’re sure they’re initiates into it. And he basically invents a necessary society. And then he is basically saying like, because the idea of the secret is what rules a lot of these players, then if we create another secret, it’s almost like creating a body to be, it’s like a little vacuum for people to kind of step into. I mean, you have people today, the L.A.’s people saying they’re Rosicrucians. Like you’ve got these Rosicrucian churches. In Africa, there was a lot of them. Oh, yeah. They’re called Rosicrucian churches. And you have all these people who think they’re Templars. And the same with the Freemasons who think they’re Templars and stuff. A lot of it, I feel is so fantastical that I tend to, yeah, I tend, but I go ahead. Sorry. No, no, you’re right. I mean, they’re just appropriating ideas. Like I don’t think there’s any substance there. Yeah. But see, you know, like René Guénon had, I don’t know how serious it was, but with Papu, they had the idea of creating a kind of Christian esoteric thing using Freemasonry, the Martinism. I think it still exists today. There’s still Martinism today. And Arthur Edward Waite was another one. And there’s some of those people in the occult revival of the late 19th and early 20th century. I mean, some of them, not everybody, but some of them tried to Christianize it or tried to apply it to Christianity. Yeah, Waite was a member of the Golden Dawn at the same time as Charles Williams. Yeah. But they both bailed on it, right? And so, but I think, you know, it’s actually, because I was puzzling over this whole phenomenon in anticipation of our talk and thinking about, you know, now I’m technically an Eastern right Catholic and Jonathan is Orthodox. So it’s pretty much the same thing. But there’s no tradition like that as far as I know in those Romans. I mean, they certainly picked it. The Russians, for instance, would pick up on Freemasonry and all that stuff after the fact, but there’s no homegrown version, right? But I think that the reason why we don’t see a homegrown version is that we don’t see what we could call the, we don’t see the split. Because one of the problems is that there’s a problem with high theory in the world of esotericism, which is that I think that when people start to create explicit systems and try to create things that are very, very, they’re almost like these, that are very explicit systems of causality and higher beings and all this stuff. I think that that’s one of the issues that happens in Western esotericism. There’s almost like a split between popular religion that is, that becomes more sentimental and more morality based. And then you have this thing that splits out and becomes very high minded and intellectual and esoteric. But I can find everything in the icon of the last judgment that you could find in any esoteric system that you could develop. In the, say, the layout of a church and the way that it’s all set up, it’s all there, but it’s not necessarily theorized, is the way that I would say it. I don’t know if that makes sense. No, it does. But the way where I was heading, pardon me, is, so I’m preparing, I have to get this lecture in September on Pavel Florensky, the Russian sociologist, priest and martyr. And so I was reading some of his earlier articles. He was only in his early 20s. And a phrase that comes up at least twice, maybe more in those articles is, the salt has lost its savor. And he was concerned, and I think he was already ordained by this point, he was concerned that the experience of Christianity in Russia at the time, that for a lot of people, the salt had lost its savor. There was no flavor to it. And I think, and looking around now, and I can imagine what drew Tomberg, for instance, community, because he grew up in Russia, or drew people like Arthur Edward Wade or whoever it happens to be, toward that stuff is, I think, Blavatsky, she’s Russian too. Yeah, but my point is, is that, in fact, if you read the notes of Bulgakov and Florensky and Florensky’s book, the Pillar and Ground of Truth, is that they were reading a lot of people like Rudolf Steiner and Ledbeater. I don’t know if they were quote Blavatsky, but they do those other people, and John Portage and Jacob Burma. So they were definitely aware of that stuff. And I think the reason being, and here what you guys think about this, is that like we see right now with a lot of kids who grow up, or people, even adults who grew up in a Christian tradition, and somehow the salt loses its savor for them. And then they, whether they’re drawn to Buddhism or something very exotic, or I see a lot of kids being drawn toward neo-paganism, for instance. And I’m wondering if this is the same kind of thing that Florensky was seeing in 1903, and that maybe was impacting those people in the occult revival of the 19th century. That’s a good theory. I think it’s an interesting theory. And I think it also, you could say something like it connects to my own experience, which is that for me, I never stopped being a Christian. I always really stayed a Christian. But let’s say there was a detour, and then a return where it’s like I was reading more exotic things and stranger things. And then I was able to then look back at traditional Christianity and find in it the fullness that I had been missing. But when I did, though, I also left to the side a lot of the weird stuff that I might have been interested in, because I felt like there was something about it, which was, like I said, there’s something about it that was de-incarnation, that was too high. And so it tended to suck the world towards a kind of a- It’s a head trip. Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s also because a lot of people I met, they would tend to use esoteric ideas to relativize existence constantly, to constantly relativize forms. And so they’re constantly criticizing any form and everything as if it’s all about this high, high- And it’s like Einstopf. It’s like Einstopf will destroy the world. It’s not supposed to be in the world. And so you have to be careful with- Even with non-dualists, you see it all the time. When non-dualists are out of control, they tend to want to- They have this weird pulsion inside them to destroy the world and to kind of relativize everything to the point that it actually- And so I think that that’s why I tend to come back. And I think incarnational thinking, and that’s why, like to a certain extent, hermeticism has something I think possibly to offer. And interestingly enough, according to the information that I have, like whatever remaining hermeticists that seem to still exist, I mean, they just do the Jesus prayer now. I think that maybe they think that that’s all that’s really left of what hermeticism- And so they get together and they do the Jesus prayer and they’re not initiating anybody else. It’s like the doors closed. There’s no one else coming in. They’re just going to die with whatever it is that they have. Let me initiate you. I will be your master. Yeah. Yeah. I had no pay. My trajectory is kind of very similar to yours. And I got to the point I was like, no, how about I just bloom where I was planted? I’ll try that. Which I mean, it’s good. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s not so good. But that’s what I- And this is what drew me towards sociology. Because I saw in sociology very much an ecumenical thing. Because there were Russians who were doing it and attracted to it. Vladimir Slovia, Bulgakov, Lorensky, Brejajev. But there were also Protestants who kind of started it off in modern times. Jacob Burma, the Philadelphia Society, Thomas and Henry Vaughan for sure. And then a little bit later, it hit the West and the Catholic West with Louis Boyer and Thomas Merton and people like this. So to me, it seemed- what the appeal with that was not that it was fit material for some kind of esoteric construct, but that it was just very simple in having the idea that if we’re in a right relationship with God and creation, we’re in a right relationship. That’s what sociology is. That’s enough for me. I don’t need all these elaborate systems and explanations and wheels within wheels to figure it out. I was just going to say, it was interesting that you mentioned the ecumenical piece because Bulgakov was particularly committed to those kind of ecumenical efforts. When he was in England, he tried to bring his Anglican community that he was associated with in communion with the Orthodox Church. So he was deeply committed to that kind of vision. So I think to me, you could say that the hyper ecumenical part, and it comes from- I do see how it is related to sociology. And that’s one of the reasons why maybe I am careful about. So I tend to- if you listen to my talks, you’ll notice I talk about the idea of the secret feminine, for example. I’m afraid of the explicitation of the mystery, let’s say, of the feminine into the Christian story. I’m very scared of that. And I feel like those that have gone too far in that, they tend to fall into a strange relativization again of forms. And so- And they get flaky, right? They’re flaky. I’ll give you a very practical example. My own brother went to a Trappist monastery to search for his own vocation. Spent a month there and met with all these Thomas Merton monks. And he said every single day he would speak to the supervisor there, he would come to talk to him, the spiritual advisor. And all the guy would do was talk about Buddhism. Really? That’s all he would talk about. He said- it’s like my own brother was like, well, what about Jesus? Of course, he’d talk about Jesus for about two minutes and then he’d go right back to Buddhism. And it’s like, there’s something about that. When I notice, like I’ve seen with a lot of the non-dualists and I’m seeing that with someone that I admire David Bentley Hart very much so. But I’m seeing some of that in his, even in sometimes I see him almost have a disdain for Christianity and disdain for orthodoxy sometimes. When he’s speaking, it’s like, it’s trite. Let’s talk about Shankara and let’s talk about all these other non-dual systems. And I’m like, I don’t know how helpful this is, especially in the public discussion. And that’s what actually bothers me about perennialism and those kinds of traditionalisms, which is, well, if everybody’s right, what am I doing this for? Why am I looking? But because I don’t buy it. Because I figured for me, he’s like, well, the incarnation, the crucifixion and the resurrection, that’s what I need right there. And I get it. And I’m sticking with that guy. That’s the God I’m going to stick with. And you know what I mean? No, I of course totally agree with you. Yeah. And I think objectively, the story of Christ is unsurmounted. There’s nothing that beats that story. Well, I would say that even the possibility of perennialism being a view that people hold is only because of Christ. I don’t think that there’s no way in a pre-Christian era, you could have that as a thing that anyone would think. A lot of paganism is actually pretty relativistic in that sense. So the ancient pagans usually, they had in the back of their minds a map, a cosmic map, and then they would map on to the different cultures that they would encounter. And so you can read in ancient Greek and Roman texts, like, oh, they worship this God. It would map on their God to the other gods. Map the Romans’ gods onto the German gods and so on. Yeah. And you see the same, I think Indian systems like Advaita, they tend to be quite relativistic in terms of understanding that this kind of manifests itself everywhere. Like the pattern that they believe in is basically in every culture. Yeah. On the other hand, I think it is, I mean, not for everybody. I mean, it’s not everybody’s thing, but the study of comparative religion and what’s beautiful in other religions is really a worthwhile activity, right? Which is what, I don’t know about you, but that’s basically what I was doing from the age of 18 till about 28 or so. I’m just checking it out. I mean, like you, I never didn’t feel like I was a Christian. Never, ever. Yeah. I tend to really see now, like my approach to comparative religion is really, well, I guess like what Nate was saying, it really is Christ-centered. That is, I tend to see everything through the lens of the incarnation. And then I’m able to look at other traditions without feeling either overwhelmed or threatened or whatever. I just see it as glimmers and manifestations of the incarnational principle. And so in that sense, I never feel like I’m in danger of being overwhelmed by all these other traditions. And I also, so I feel like I would never participate in other religious rituals. I only participate in the Christian tradition, but I can read a Sufi poem and I find it beautiful and insightful and extremely connected to something which I see in the Church Fathers as well. Right. And it’s interesting, in Topberg, two things he says on this topic. He says, you know, meaning all the religions that came before were beggars and thieves. And the other thing is, behold, I make all things new. So how, how those different systems we could say, and this is what I think Topberg’s trying to do in his book are, and this is what actually Hans von Balthasar said about Sloviac is that he, that Sloviac took all these, you know, Gnostic systems and other things, and he ran them through Christ as in a, as through a purifying stream. Right. And I think that’s part of what Topberg’s project is in that book is to clean it up. You know, yeah, which is right. And he did that with Plato, did it with the kindness, you know, and so I think, and he’s giving people of that esoteric bent a way back in. I remember when I read the book, I said, wow, in my father’s house, there are many mansions. Cause what my problem was before that is I thought I had a very limited perception and understanding of what Christianity is. And I read that book. I said, wow, maybe I didn’t give this thing enough credit at the Catholic church. Maybe I didn’t give it enough credit. Maybe I didn’t, I could, I was too busy seeing the version I got in the suburbs of Detroit in a second rate Catholic school and not what’s really there. Yeah. But that’s what actually one of my arguments for Christianity really has been its integrative possibility, because one of the things that I see also in that’s what I called, I don’t know how to call it, like the esoteric split that happened, you know, at the Renaissance or after a bit after the Renaissance is that there, you can see how things, how these, these elaborate and very intellectual systems kind of move up. And then you can notice religion becoming more and more sentimental and moralistic and, and less and less understood, you could say. And so, but I think that what Christianity ultimately offers is a way all it’s, it should be a way all the way through. So it’s like when you stand in a church and you have this painted system of images, right? It’s, it’s connected to a simple person could go in there and be completely touched and impressed. But then, you know, a metaphysician will walk in and see the map of the universe in the church. So I think that that’s one of the reasons why I, that’s one of the reasons why I tend to, to, to stay within, let’s say the more traditional, just talk about the church fathers as much as, as far as saying that make me choose the church fathers, right? It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s always the same San Efraim, San Gregory, San Maximus. So, you know, and they, they seem to have had all those intuitions that, that, that are in the best of the esoteric systems, let’s say. Well, and that, that’s, and that’s what I think, you know, another re we were talking earlier about why people feel sometimes that the salt is lost and savor. And this is my own experience growing up, you know, I was kind of just naturally interested in mysticism as, I mean, I went to Catholic school and, you know, I wanted to know this person talked to Jesus or the Virgin Mary, what’d they say? What was it like? How did that, how does that happen? And, and nobody wanted to tell me, you know, cause and I think, so what I got instead was, you know, the catechism or kind of a dry intellectual delivery. We had the Baltimore Academy because I think that’s turned more people off the Catholic church than the sex scandal. But, but, and, and so it was for me, certainly, I mean, for a lot of people, it was an unincarnated experience of Christianity, which is, which is ironic, right? Because, and how do, how do you return to that? And I actually, most of my life has been trying to find a way back into the, to that incarnated experience of Christianity. Yeah. And I mean, I see all your, just your daily practices of being a farmer and doing that. I can see when I, when I kind of follow you and see what you’re doing, I can notice that you’re really trying to find that, that lived, let’s say, incarnational principle. Yeah. And I don’t want to read about it. You know what I mean? Well, yeah, you know, cause I think what happened after that split, you talked about the Renaissance or the Reformation is at least in the West, not only did religion become more and more sentimental, but the other half of it has became erudite intellectual. Yeah. You know, parts of it. I mean, I have to act harder thing, right? And, and so, and, and it was, in fact, it was reading in a Florence key was he was talking about the Russian tradition, which is what I love about it is it’s both intellectual and anti-rational at the same time. You know, it’s very intuitive or mystical while it’s being intellectual, which is, you know, you see that probably in Slovia of more than an anybody, you know, who’s, who, who is the model for both Ivan and Aloysia and the brothers Karamazov. Oh, really? I didn’t know that. That’s interesting. Yeah. That’s it. Actually it’s, it’s in a book written by his nephew that, that, yeah, because, uh, cause Dostoevsky was good friends with Slovia. Okay. And he based those two brothers on his two sides. That’s hilarious. His totally intellectual side and his, and his deeply intuitive and warm side. Yeah. That’s really fascinating. So what, what do you think about like, let’s say the basic perception that I have, which is, so let me give you, let me give you a very practical example about what I’m talking about. And so, you know, especially this is, this is interesting because the Georgia guide stones were destroyed, right? Just in a few weeks ago or whatever last week. And so, you know, according to the, the, the, the legend, the person who had it built was named Christian RC. And so, so you could say, so like in a way it doesn’t matter, like whether or not this is related to any group that is actually considering themselves Rosicrucian, there is something about the branding. There’s something about the fact that normal Christians wouldn’t refer to the Rosicrucians, but right now, something like weird anti-human, uh, esoteric, like kind of occultist type thinking will attribute themselves to the Rosicrucians. We can say like, it’s too bad or whatever, but there’s something about that, which I think is, is important to understand in terms of this split that I talk about where, and the, and the, let’s say the accumulation of this esoteric tendency into, let’s say, Freemasonry groups or whatever, like trying to capture, and Blavatsky was also, was also kind of trying to pull whatever she could from all that stuff. And so, this is, I think, so it’s like, although I could, I can, for example, in Robert, someone like Robert Flood, I can see, let’s say the power and the good intentions that are there and this desire to keep something magical and, and, and wonderful about Christianity. It’s like, by the time you get to Crowley, it’s like, and all these people are seeing themselves in line with that same, that same type of thinking. I’m like, something’s off, like something really went off. And I need to, I need to not be too associated with whatever that is. No, you’re right. And, and so my doctorate, I did my dissertation. One of the chapters is on, it’s kind of, in fact, the title is The Rosicrucian Mysticism of Thomas and Henry Vaughan, because they were part of that initial 17th century movement. But if you, and the, the original documents of the Rosicrucians were written by a Lutheran pastor. And if you read them, there is straightforward Christianity as you can get, you know, it’s, they were, they were just interested in the rebuilding of society. And some people try to say that they wanted to rebuild society in the scientific way, which is not true at all. Alex, your name, Frances Yates wrote a book, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. I think she totally misunderstood what was going on. It was actually, like I said earlier, a kind of a traditionalist movement that didn’t want to lose that traditional Western Christian understanding of the relationship from the microcosm to the macrocosm about God’s presence in the world, about the presence of not angels and demons in the world, right? As contributing to even weather patterns, right? Which was all thrown out the window with René Descartes. And they were, in fact, they would rip on Descartes in their books. They didn’t like him at all. But how does it get from there? Did Descartes write a public letter trying to be initiated into the Rosicrucians? Yes, he did. Yes, he did. They turned him down. Good choice. Yeah, I would have turned him down, too. I’m not answering that call. But it’s funny because you read that. And so when I think of Rosicrucianism, I automatically think of that stuff. Yeah. Which is, when you read it, you can’t see how anybody could interpret it otherwise. But then you look at the Crowley stuff and the Golden Dawn, and that came much later. And as we said earlier, these appropriations of the term, in fact, even the idea of the Rose Cross there, and I think it’s a good argument that the Rose Cross comes from the coat of arms of Martin Luther, which had a cross and a rose on it. Yeah. So who could be? Some people think the RC means Roman Catholic. There was a lot of discussion in the 17th century about whether this is actually the Jesuits trying to get Protestants to come back into the fold. It’s always the Jesuits, right? I think we’re smarter than everybody. But I mean, yeah, so how does it get from there to what it became in the 19th century? Or even the 18th century? It’s so strange. But I think we really have to understand it as this de-incarnation. We often think of something which becomes decadent as always going too low, but it actually always starts with the going too high. It’s like there’s pride. Pride is the first sin. And so there’s something about trying, and you can see it in the very rituals of the early occultists and the early magicians and the demonologists, there’s something very powerful pride in that, the very idea of, let’s say, weaponizing or capturing these spiritual entities and inquiring from them or using them to manifest their will. That is definitely something which I think represents that pride. Right, it does. Maybe you all do it for the good reasons at the beginning, right? It’s like, we’re going to do this to help the world. We’re going to capture these demons in order to understand them and then exercise them from society. That leads very quickly, in my opinion, to something. I agree. I totally agree. In fact, in my dissertation, the first chapter is on John D, who was doing that precisely and who got played like a game of Yahtzee by the spirits. Yeah, by these personalities. They worked him, man. The thing is, he was a good man, I think. He’s a guy who loved his family, loved his country, was doing all the right stuff. But as you said, his problem was his pride. I am the one who will bring this to the world. He thought that he was going to recover the language of Adam and that would heal all the divisions in Christendom. Wrong. Yeah, exactly. Of course, the spirits talk him and his assistant to swapping their wives, right? Yeah. Which is, you don’t get any more mortal sin than that, right? It doesn’t get better after that. Let’s just do them all. Yeah, let’s just get on with it. 50% it doesn’t get better after that. On the other hand, you look at Henry Vaughan and his brother. Especially in Henry, there’s such a beautiful, practical spirituality in his poetry that’s both connected to nature and to God and to Scripture. I remember when I was doing a dissertation, you have to read everything the person wrote. So I was reading all this guy wrote and I’m like, Don, wait, oh yeah, this is basically what I am. This is what I am. This is my spirituality right here, which is very simple. It’s not complicated and it’s not a cult in the least. But it’s very mystical, I would say, in a practical, mystical way. Hopefully not a prideful one, but what’s important? God, his creation and community, right? The church, we call the community the church. And that I think from, if you focus on what’s important, then you protect yourself, hopefully, from a little bit of evil. Yeah, well, definitely. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, there’s an interesting moment right now. It’s just interesting because it seems like something got broken, I guess, in the past 10 years. I don’t know how to say it. Something broke and all of a sudden, secular atheists and secular people are now able to perceive principalities and they’re able to understand, at least, what it is that we’re even talking about when we use the word angel. So it’s an interesting moment, but it’s also in some ways a very dangerous moment. And that’s something that I sometimes don’t emphasize enough, especially with the psychedelics. A lot of people take psychedelics and they indiscriminately encounter beings and then they’re all excited about whatever it is that they encounter. And so I don’t know if you’ve noticed that it seems like there’s a we’re at a moment where magic seems to be seeping back into the world, but it’s not all positive. Which is weird because that’s seeping in at the same time where everything’s becoming disenchanted through the internet, right? So there’s this weird polarity going on, right? But it seems to be like it’s almost as if a natural movement of moving so far into darkness that all of a sudden these small lights start to be visible and people start to see. Because we’re noticing, I think one of the things that’s doing it is actually the internet because the internet is based on attention. And it’s actually bringing to the function of attention in the way the world lays itself out. And so it’s like, there’s not much more, there’s not like, that’s what magic is. Like magic is about that. And so if you understand that, and now people have that experience where they’re noticing how everything is vying for their attention and that attention is actually creating bodies of interest and is actually kind of transforming reality. So I think that there’s a strange, and because it’s accelerated online, right? Usually these cycles of interest are long and they don’t last like two days or one week or sometimes one day, this idea of something trending. And so I think that there’s something about that which is making people notice something like the vertical causality that Tomberg talks about, that is that there’s a relationship between, yeah, that there’s a relationship between like common attention and then things manifesting themselves, I’d say. Yeah. Agregor. Yeah. Well, yeah, that’s what a lot of us are trying to like, talk about and try to help people differentiate the different, but even as I’m doing that, I’m worried because I meet people that are all excited. They’re like, you talk about these angels, I want to meet them. Like what? No, no, that’s not why we’re doing this. Like we’re doing this so that people can see through, let’s say, at least understand this hierarchy of principality so they can see incarnationally. But it’s not about like having encounters with angels. It’s usually not the good angels. They don’t want to talk to you that way. That’s right. I tell people back in the day, my students would say, I’m going to, Mr. Martin, I’m going to use the Ouija board. No, no, no, no, no. Why? Because it’s like dialing seven numbers and saying, can I talk to Jesus? Yeah. And the demon says, he thinks it’s Jesus. Jesus speaking. You know what I mean? You’re asking for trouble because they’re smarter than you and they’re like with John Deeb. They’ll play you like a game of Yahtzee. They’ll just ridicule you. And it’s one of, as Tom Berg actually talks about that, how they lead people along. Yeah, you’re special. Come on. And we’ll give you all this information, which is all just ends up being gobbledygook. Yeah. And you see it, like if you’ve known, I usually see it a lot in the people that are around me that are interested in kind of new age stuff and get sucked into that. Then they all have their weird guardian angels and their weird guides and stuff. And it’s usually never ends well. It just doesn’t go well. Never, ever. Oh man. So Nate, so what is it that you want us to talk about besides the things we talked about already? You guys seem to have no problem. There’s things that you’re curious about because I also wanted you to say there’s one thing you said early on. It’s interesting the way Tom Berg actually approaches the subject of reincarnation because he just says either you’ve experienced it or you haven’t. And he doesn’t argue. He doesn’t argue for it. In fact, he argues. He can’t argue for it. Right. Exactly. And he doesn’t make any argument for it being a meaningful part of a spiritual system of any kind. It’s just kind of like, and then he drops it after that. So the way he presents it is weird. So I’m wondering what you thought of that. And then in letters, I don’t know if you’ve gotten to letter six yet, but this idea of evolution being like on the horizontal plane under the guise of the serpent, that was very interesting to me because I can remember when I was raised Pentecostal and I can remember when I was going through my catechism when I was converting to Catholicism, I still had some misgivings about evolution. And I made this argument to my priest about how you really can’t, if evolution is absolutely true without any qualification, there’s no resolution to the problem of evil possible because you can’t really, there’s no way of dealing with the physical evil. So I thought the way that Tom Berg talks about evolution as being this groping trial of the serpent offers a way to do that. I tend to, like the way that I presented before and the way I present it now is that I think natural selection is a pattern in the world. It’s a true pattern and it’s a pattern that can help you understand things. But I think the narrative evolution is just useless and not interesting. And it doesn’t help you do anything. It always ends up having to be represented mythologically despite the scientists pretending that it’s not. This is kind of what Tom Berg says too though, because he says it’s a fact, right? So it’s a fact on the horizontal plane, it’s a fact, but it’s a fact only on the horizontal plane. And that it’s guiding and that because it’s on the horizontal plane, its origin is the serpent. But you know, I think part, you know, Tom Berg was a man of his time. And that was the language that was the language of evolution was what was appropriated by Blavatsky. And the early Steiner also picked up on it and they were speaking in these kinds of terms. Now it’s spiritual evolution, right? Now my friend Guido Preparata, he’s a blunt and funny guy and he thinks Darwin’s whole project was just a project to prove British imperialism. You know, it was social dark, you know, what we call social Darwinism now. Yeah, that’s what it is. See, the survival of the fittest, the British are the fittest, end of story, right? So I don’t buy, I mean, personally, I don’t know what to think of the evolution narrative. I mean, I’m sure things do. I’m a farmer, I know how things work, but of course, we have a society that believes in evolution, but doesn’t believe in gender. Because I can’t figure it out. You know? What’s really interesting? It’s also the thing, the whole evolution narrative is just so hilarious because the evolution narrative ends up being teleological. They can’t avoid it. Every time they try to make it non-teleological, it fails. And so it always ends up having to be teleological. And so then it becomes non-scientific immediately. It just becomes a kind of mythological pattern. And it’s like, well, if it’s just mythological story, my mythological story is much better. Like the creation narrative in Genesis accounts way in a better manner for the ontological hierarchy of your experience of the world than the way that evolution talks about reality. And you can see, like, I mean, when I talked about wine science, it’s always the same issue. And you see the same with all the evolutionary theories. They’re basically saying, what evolution really wants you to do is to basically kill and compete and take and just get your seed out there and get your genes to the next generation. But of course, we shouldn’t do that. It’s like, okay, well, where do you get the we shouldn’t do that from? That’s actually what interests me because that’s a lot closer to what I care about. And then maybe you can find that in the Genesis story, but the other, you can’t find it anywhere else in your little pattern, like in your little worldview. Well, you know who believes in the evolution story, the World Economic Forum. And guess who’s at the top of that food chain. But you know, it’s interesting because you think about you mentioned Genesis, Genesis is the opposite of the evolution. It’s the fall. Yeah, right. It goes in the opposite direction. Yeah, I mean, it been and you’re right, but you can you can understand, you can you can understand. It’s so much closer to even to the way that evolutionists think of their teleological project, because there is a hierarchy of being if you read San Ephraim, it’s beautiful. Like San Ephraim says that he says things like the animals did not come into the garden. Right. And so the animals were would come to the foot of the garden, then Adam would come down the mountain, and he would like encounter them. And that’s when he named them and everything. So there’s this sense in which, like the type of ontological hierarchy that they tried to create in their evolutionary system, it’s it’s it’s there in the more traditional narrative. And it’s more, it’s actually account for morality and responsibility. And all this stuff that we actually think even now, even all these weird environmentalists, like super environmentalists, they’re they they believe in what Genesis says, like they believe that we’re the gardeners, and we should take care of creation and that we shouldn’t abuse it. It’s like, if you’re really like just an evolutionist, I don’t know if you could really believe any of those things. I agree. Well, that’s what that’s what happened with. And I think that’s explains Tomberg’s attraction for Tear de Chardin, right? Yeah, because that’s that’s evolution taken into Catholic theology. Yeah, I haven’t gotten there. And so maybe I definitely have my my beef with him when he gets to the other side. I don’t know. Well, not if you read Tear. I mean, he’s a beautiful writer. He really he writes like a poet. Yeah. And it’s beautiful writing. And he has a lot of brilliant insights, I think. The the complete project, I don’t have to believe agree with with people about everything that they’d say. Of course, you’re right. I like them. I’m just I’m just I’m cool with the parts I like, you know, I don’t have to I don’t have to be all in. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. I agree with that. That’s how I approach pretty much everything. I don’t it’s like I don’t have to defend everything that this person that I, you know, slightly associated with says, with. I don’t agree with everything my wife says. You know, so what about some guy I never met, right? You’re going to tag me with everything you ever thought or believed. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Don’t tell her that. I’m sure she knows. I’m sure she knows. She says. Yeah. And so I mean, like, for me, I think that the ultimately for me, the solution that I’ve been trying to propose has really been the taking the traditional forms that are there, taking the liturgical life that is that has all the potential, like I said, like, even if it’s lost, it’s like, if it’s lost its salt, it’s like, it’s there, it just has to be has to be kind of re recaptured and relived. And so to me, that seems like the only really realistic solution. And in it. One of the things that Florensky mentioned in there, which, which kind of added savor to it was those kinds of folk traditions. Yeah. You know, that, you know, are they really Christian? Are they kind of Christian? But yeah, let’s keep those in there. Because those, those, those make Christianity a way of life and not something you do on Sunday. Right. And try to think, you know, I say a couple of prayers during the day, but how do you incorporate that into a lived life? Right. Yeah, definitely. Because we people tend to think modern people tend to think more monastically. It’s like they think that, you know, living a more kind of embodied Christian life would mean to just have, you know, do the hours or whatever, do more, more services. But I think you’re right that there’s a, there’s a more, there’s an even more embodied way, which is, if you think of the middle ages and they had all these associations and clubs and people would, you know, be in the association of the saint and they would have their costumes and they would have all this stuff and they would have, you know, like all these banners and processions and stuff. It’s hard for us to even imagine it, but I know it’s still with my friend, Andrew Gould. I remember said he went to this little village in Spain and, and he said it was just astounding. They had these four hour, five hour processions of their statue of the, of the mother of God, you know, all dressed up and, and everybody had these like particular costumes and they would just kind of walk around and, and, and every, and he said it was so solemn and it lasted forever, but everybody was just completely enthralled by these processions. And so, yeah, it’s just hard because we don’t in North America, it feels, it always feels like we’re immediate, but it’s always feels like we lost like so much of it that to bring it back is almost idiosyncratic. I mean, and I say that for the Orthodox very much, it’s like, it’s like people become Orthodox and they think they’ll immediately become Russian or it’s like, that’s not going to happen. Right. You have to find some kind of discussion about how to embody folk folk traditions. Right. So let’s say on, for us on, on theophany, like we’ll still do like the traditional French epiphany celebration, right. We have a cake and we bake a bean in it and we have like the king of the day and stuff. And so like, this is not Orthodox, but it’s, it’s like, these are the traditions that we have. We need to French Canadian. Yeah. Yeah. It’s definitely French Canadian. That’s for sure. Yeah. We do it. We need to like find ways to connect all this in a way that is that it’s going to be messy and organic, but it was so already in the folk traditions already. Isn’t that kind of already the norm for Orthodoxy though? It’s a kind of like morph itself somewhat to the culture that, that it’s expressed in. It should hopefully. Well, the Greeks have a lot of, you know, everything that like, like the, the bean cake and you know, all that stuff. I also think that’s a way to, to have children. This is a way to raise children in a lived experience of Christianity, you know, cause they, they can, they’re not going to you know, we all remember being in churches as little kids listening to a sermon. I mean, not listening to a sermon and wondering how long is this going to take. Right. But those, those festivals of conviviality make it for, for children and for, for growing people too, a lived experience. And then when people have children, they want, they want that they, people hunger for that. They want an experience of the world that is, that is not only spiritually nourishing, but that’s nourishes their souls and their relationship with other people. Cause you can do it by yourself, right? There’s something different when you do it in a community, which is what a church is supposed to be. And I think, so I think that’s why, I mean, I’ve noticed a lot of these Orthodox churches take it seriously is to realize how that coffee hour in terms of, in terms of a modern church is absolutely essential. Like you actually, you really need to have one or two hours after liturgy or after a service for people to be together, because we’re not in a village anymore. You don’t just walk out and then go back to your house and then it’s your neighbor that was there in church with you. So we have to create these spaces where we, we can have, you know, a more informal communion or else it’s just going to, it’s not going to, it’s not going to, it’s not going to tell. Otherwise it’s like punching a clock. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Going to liturgy, go back home. Okay. Bad coffee is important. But we really noticed, like we’ve noticed that at least in my parish, it’s been a, it’s been a, one of the, cause we are seeing our parish grow quite a bit in the last year. I think a lot of, a lot of parishes are growing because of post COVID people looking for meaning and stuff. And we’ve noticed that that’s been one of the keys has been to have like a place and a time afterwards for people to, to sit down and to connect. And so then it encourages them to call each other during the week and to, to connect in, in, in, in other informal ways. So yeah, so you’re right. So we need these more embodied, more embodied practices because liturgy is wonderful, but it’s, it’s not, it has to kind of seep into all of reality. Can’t just be. Yeah. It’s got to be everywhere. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So, I mean, how does that play into, I know, I know Michael, you’ve expressed some disappointment with the way that the church handled COVID. I have. I mean, it seems to me that what you guys are talking about right now and the way the church is kind of handled COVID, they’re not. I think, I honestly think like seriously think that COVID was a litmus test for a lot of churches. And I think that a lot of the churches that, that didn’t, that weren’t attentive to what was happening and didn’t take into account the primacy of communion. I think there, a lot of them won’t get over this. I really believe that they just won’t survive. And I think the opposite is also true. The churches that, that, that, you know, were, it’s a lot of them were cautious at the outset, like we’re, we know obviously, and then slowly started to realize that, okay, wait a minute, there’s something else going on. And then started to, to emphasize communion over being strict on the rules and everything. I think those will thrive and they have thrived. Well, yeah. And I just was so, for me, it was so profoundly discouraging to see so many, especially in the Catholic church, when the Pope required all employees of the Vatican to have the vaccination, like, okay. And that now they backed up, they never apologize when they back off. It’s like, oh yeah, well, we were, you know, it just, it’s, it becomes, uh, they’re slaves to policy. And, and, and if you probably saw too, there were many churches out across North America and Australia, places who would have signs saying fully vaccinated parishioners may come to confession or to communion, right? I mean, we had that, like we, cause you, I don’t know if you know what happened here in Quebec, like it was crazy because, so we, we had, the church were closed for the longest time, right? And then finally they were open with limited people, whatever, blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff. But then came the moment when they were going to, they were going to impose the COVID vaccine passport on the churches. That was to me, that was, I think with this test and those churches that tried to find solution to that and not, not impose it because you, you would have to have a parishioner standing at the door with their phone, scanning people as they walked into the church. Can you imagine how crazy that is? And so it’s like, I think that the doors, the doors, right? Let us see it. That’s what that was for, right? When they say the doors, the doors, it was to keep the, you know, the spies out, look at the side. So they’ll come in here and kill us after we say the creed. Yeah, exactly. And so, so I think that I’ve seen like the church, some churches did crazy stuff. Like they had, it was minus 30, right? It was like right in the, it was like in December, in January. So some churches just had services outside, you know, people found ways to get around it or whatever. But I think the churches that applied it, that is not a lot of hope for those guys. I’m sorry to say. Maybe they’ll survive, like, but I don’t think, I think it’s going to be a serious, they’re going to have to do it with a lot of like repentance and return and deliberate desire to reenter communion because- Yeah. Well, and I think we’ll also see a kind of church of the catacombs. Yeah, for sure. You know, under kind of a gorilla church or underground church or something, you know? Yeah. And people love to learn to do, like we, we started to learn to do this, the reader services, you know, because it’s like, if we, if we depend on the clergy completely, then we’re, we’re, we’re going to be in trouble. It’s that, that was, I was up. I don’t know how you feel about it. Well, you brought up Soloviev several times, Michael, and I can’t help but think of tale of the Antichrist. It’s not the, it’s the majority of the church goes along. Yeah, with the Antichrist. With the Antichrist in that story. It’s just like the three figures that he has representing the, you know, the Protestant, the Catholic and the Orthodox tradition. They’re the ones with the courage to stand up, but the vast majority of the clergy and all three go along. Yep. They join the Antichrist. Well, it’s not hard to, it’s not hard to see it now. Like, it’s, there’s something wonderful about the moment right now, which is that there’s a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of, let’s say, apocalyptic thinking that I didn’t totally understand, let’s say 20 years ago. And I’m not saying that this is it, like this is the end of the world or whatever, but I think that there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of structure that I can now see. And not only do I understand them, but I can see them burgeoning and kind of see them popping up in the world. And it’s like, okay, I understand what he’s talking about. Well, it’s a revelation. Yeah, definitely. In that sense, it’s, it’s taking, it’s tearing the veil open so you can see what’s going on. And I mean, like the idea of Antichrist itself, like the idea of something, which is a parasite on Christian morality, but manifests itself. So it’s like, right. The idea, for example, that we saw, like the weaponizing of compassion that we saw during the COVID time, it’s like, that was like a weird parasite on Christianity. So you can kind of see, it’s like, okay, I can kind of, I mean, I’m not saying this is Antichrist, but I can kind of see the pattern of Antichrist, how it can manifest itself and how it can also delude people. How it can trick people into believing this is true Christianity. And tricking is the right word, right? Yeah. And you can see like, you can see like with even with like the, you can, who would have thought that, so for example, like it’s like in the abortion debate, I’m sorry to become political here, but like, who would have thought that there would be a common moment when someone would be able to say out loud publicly, a Christian should be pro-abortion. It is the Christian position to have. This is the compassionate Christian position to have to be pro-abortion. And it’s like, and you see now people take that position all the time. It’s like, really? It’s like, who would have thought? But then you can see it. It’s a weaponizing of compassion and a weaponizing of the idea that we’re the image of God. Like all of these Christian ideas are being twisted and contorted to bring about these strange positions. Yeah. That’s all. Yeah. Okay guys. I’m depressed. No, that’s right. Okay. But I think like, I did, like, I, I’m, I’m a 50 50 all the time. Like this is why I think I, how I survived. Got 50 50 all the time. Cause on the one hand I can kind of see, I can, I, like, all of a sudden I see these patterns of that are straight up from the book of revelation, kind of come, come towards me. And at the same time, I’m also seeing the, the, the candle, like being lit. I can see like the next, I don’t know what to say. Like I can get a glimmer of the resurrection. This maybe is another way to say it. I can see it. Like I can actually see it and I can notice, you know, I had this talk with someone like Ian McGill, Chris, that I think I put up today. I had a talk with Don Hoffman, all these like cognitive science type people that are total psychos or even my discussion with John Reveke, like John Reveke and, and, and then we’re using the word angel and demon as if this was a totally normal technical word to use to talk about transpirational beings. And I was like, I can’t believe that we’re, that we’ve reached this point where a scientist would use that word and not flinch or not feel embarrassed at all about using it. So I think, so I think we’re, we’re going to be surprised. Like there’s going to be some wonderful surprises and some dark surprises at the same time. Well, I think so too. And that’s, you know, and I kind of saw it coming and wrote about it, you know, because I think, you know, like you’re saying, we had the rise of the technocracy or the archons, if you want to call them that. But, you know, there is also, you know, the real possibility to, to live the kingdom, you know, that the kingdom and heaven is within you, you know, so there’s, there’s a, there’s a capacity to realize that. And I think, and if you go back to the early Christians, there were, there were those, there were parallel societies there too, parallel polices, right? There was, there was the power structure and there was the kingdom. And I don’t think we’ve, we’ve had enough awareness of the kingdom for the past couple of few generations, and I think part of what I think happened, if you read a world war II or post world war II literature, when all the intellectuals were like, what the heck just happened? You know what I mean? They’re, they’re soul searching. And I think that really destroyed a lot of people as far as, as religion goes, not just Christianity, you know, that the Holocaust could happen and you could have that much evil and God didn’t intervene. Right. And I think we have it at a different, different manifestation of that kind of evil right now. But maybe in a way, this is our opportunity to not despair as happened to those people in the 1940s and 50s, right? They didn’t the 1940s and 50s, right? They despaired and it’s, and it’s really easy to despair. Right. Well, from listening to my wife, I would say that like the Jewish experience in that post Holocaust is almost like the opposite though. Like there was a lot of, like a lot of Jews who weren’t really even religious, like they returned to Judaism, not even out of any real religious commitment, but just out of the idea that there should be more Jews in the world. Cause like both their parents like were basically atheists, but they made sure that their children were raised with the knowledge of their faith and practiced anyway. So, yeah, I mean, I think for sure, like the, the rise of, of the, the, the Hasidim is, is based like in part in like the world war two and, and like the, the, the return of kind of Orthodox Judaism or the strength of Orthodox Judaism does, does seem to be, but I think it’s not like, I think what it’s, it’s, it’s the two extremes you could say, because also, I mean, the, the, the secular Jew is, is, is extremely powerful in the world right now as well. Like you have a lot of that, a lot of that very strong. So I think, I think what we’re probably going to see something similar in the Christian church. We’re going to see a kind of remnant, which will, which will consolidate and become, you know, deliberate and authentic. And at the same time, we’re going to see the world in general become more and more anti, anti Christian and, and, and secular. So I think so. I mean, especially as the churches, like here in Quebec, like the churches are at some point, they’re going to start to demolish the churches. Like they have to, because they’re trying to pass, they’re trying to descend these things out. They’re trying to sell them, but it’s like all these old buildings and no one wants to keep up. And so at some point, we’re going to start to see bulldozers like go into these things. It’s going to, it’s going to be inevitable. We see it in Europe happening now all the time. And so, and so I think that that’ll have, that’ll be important. Like, I think it’s, it’s probably good that that happens because it’s going to help people see what’s going on in ways that might both increase the secularism, but also shock some people into thinking, okay, so what, what is it then? It’s like, is it more shopping malls? Is that what we really need? Or is it a taller cell towers? Is that, is that going to be like our, is that going to be our, our, our holy place? Is it going to be really, really tall cell towers? But. Right. Yeah. Let’s see. Sorry, Michael. I feel like I’m really not. Oh, no, no, no, you’re not bumming me out. No, no, I, I agree. And I’m just, just, you know, I, I mean, in fact, you know, my gosh, my whole project is pretty, it’s a pretty hopeful project, right? But, but knowing you’re up against this, this kind of darkness, which is what surprised me over the last couple of years is how effective the mass formation and propaganda project of the bad guys has been. I mean, you got to tip your hat. It was well orchestrated. Yeah. That you could, but, but, and it’s, but it’s, it’s, it’s amazing. Like here in Canada, it’s amazing. I mean, Justin, Justin, you know, is just obviously like a empty like puppet, but it doesn’t matter. Like, it just doesn’t matter. It all, it all works. Like it all. And it’s the whole world is like that right now, the whole West. It’s amazing how many sophisticated people show for it. I mean, they’re just fall for it though. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s really, it’s mind boggling. I mean, it kind of like, it kind of proves the rules idea that elites are more prone to propaganda. Oh yeah. Well, no propaganda is never aimed at, you know, people with a high school education may always aim propaganda at the middle managers, the teachers, professors, doctors, and people like that who think they’re smart. You’re smart because you believe, yes, I’m smart and I’m doing this to help others. So you’re saying it’s designed specifically for dumb, smart people. Yeah. The midwits, the midwits. They’re the problem. They’re always the problem. Yeah. Oh gosh. Wow. Well, it was really great getting to listen to you guys talk. I’m glad, I’m glad I brought you together. It was great to have this conversation. Yeah. So you got me to be quiet for the most part, which is not an easy task. It was our plan. We talked ahead of time. Yeah. Well, good, excellent collusion then. Okay. Well, thanks for the conversation. Yeah, thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate the gift of your time, both of you. All right. I’ll let you know when I get it posted. All right. Great. Wonderful. Yep. Take care. As you know, the symbolic world is not just a bunch of videos on YouTube. We are also a podcast, which you can find on your usual podcast platform. But we also have a website with a blog and several very interesting articles by very intelligent people that have been thinking about symbolism on all kinds of subjects. We also have a clips channel, a Facebook group. 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