February 2020 Q&A (KrweTXMnIKk)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KrweTXMnIKk

All right. Hello everybody. All right. I see already I see Jacob in the chat. Good to see you Jacob. You hear the people as well. Thanks Jacob for being around. That’s always good. Okay. So a few things I want to talk about before we start, I guess. There’s a lot of things going on. The first thing that I need to mention is that there has been a massive drop in my YouTube views. And when I’m listening to other YouTubers, it seems like I’m not the only person to whom this has happened. So it’s probably the YouTube algorithm. Obviously, as you’ve noticed, I’ve been pushing the envelope in terms of my content and in terms of the types of things that I’m mentioning. So it seems like after I made the video, which was called, what was it called? From equality to inversion, that video started on the first day, it spiked like crazy and I couldn’t believe it. I think within two days it had like 30,000 views and then it just suddenly tapered off and just stopped growing. And so I was kind of freaked out. And then since then, I have seen my views go down almost systematically on every single video. So maybe it’s because I’m saying crazy things, it is possible. Maybe it’s because of you guys in the chat saying crazy things. I see a few crazy things there already. Maybe that’s what it is. I don’t know. But anyway, so all I can say is if you like what I’m doing, the best thing you can do is to share the content because I’m not friends with YouTube at this moment. It seems like YouTube doesn’t really like what I’m doing. For a while there, they were sharing my content, but at this moment, that doesn’t seem to be happening. So, all right. There are a few big things on the horizon as well. For those who haven’t heard that yet, I’m going to be turning my website into a multi-user blog. And so on the website, you’re going to find some articles on symbolism coming from different perspectives. I have been working with some of the main people on the Facebook group that have been posting some really good stuff. And I was reading a lot of the posts on there and I thought, man, this stuff is just top level stuff. And so with a few of, with a core group of those writers and then a lot of great people that have volunteered to proofread and to edit, we’re going to start having the, we’re going to start putting out some articles and the blog is going to become, the website is going to become like a blog on different symbolic subjects, exploring all the things that I don’t have time to talk about, hopefully, within the same kind of symbolic frame. Another, a few other things, I’m going to be in Seattle on the first week of May. I’ll be giving a talk at the Shared Inheritance Conference like before, and I’m also going to be giving a workshop, a carving workshop during that week. And so stay tuned to my website for that. Soon there’ll be dates and ways to sign up for those events. I’m also going to be in Hartford, Connecticut in the month of June with the same thing, giving a carving workshop. Like I told you guys before, these carving workshops, obviously they’re carving workshops, but they’re also just spending the whole day together. We start in the morning and we usually end later in the evening. And so it’s just a great, it’s just a great time to get to know each other and to have some great discussions. Okay, so here we go. I’m going to start the questions with the website. And you noted that I’m coughing a lot and I’m super paranoid that I might have the coronavirus or something because when I flew to Boston on February 14th, I found out just a few days ago that it seems like the first case of coronavirus in our area was in the airport on February 14th. And so now I’m freaking out because when I got back from Boston, I got a cold and I’ve been coughing and stuff. So I’m a bit nervous about that stuff. So luckily I can’t transmit the coronavirus through the camera. All right. So as you know, people who are patrons of mine on the different platforms at $10 or more get to ask questions in advance. And then if we have time, I will look into the chat for super chats. And so here we go. So Benjamin RVA asks, you’ve mentioned that Constantinople was designed to be an iconic city, a divine image. Can you elaborate on any elements of that, of sources where we could learn more about the meaning behind the Byzantine built environment or sacred patterns in urbanism in general? I have to be honest that I don’t know a lot about that. I don’t know a lot about, I know a basic idea of how Constantinople was set up. One of the things that’s interesting about Constantinople is that it was the first city that was built without any pagan temples in it. And so you can imagine everybody in Rome is there and there are all these like residues of the temples that are still hanging around. Some temples are still functional. Some are being taken down. All of this is kind of, this kind of brouhaha is happening. And then Constantine picks up, goes to Constantinople, to Byzantium, and then builds a new capital there that has the palace and his church in the center. It’s kind of like a hill kind of. And so it’s surrounded by water. So there’s all that symbolism as well. It’s almost like a microcosm of the world. But if you’re looking to learn a little bit more about that, there’s a man, his name is Timothy Petitza. He teaches at the Hellenic College in the US, near Boston. And I think I might have him on the channel. He just wrote a book recently and contacted me. He said he’d like me to check out his book. So maybe I’ll have him on the channel. I know he has written about the notion of the city as liturgy and city life as a liturgical, comparing it to like liturgical experience. So I think that might be something that could be interesting. So you might see that in the near future. I’m coughing between every question. All right. So Josh the mover asks, Hi, Jonathan. God willing, I’m planning on becoming Orthodox this year. Unless I relocate and find a new job, the only tenable option for me is a Greek Orthodox church, the next town over. Ideally, I wish I could join the Russian church. How important of an issue are these communal ecclesiastical issues for a new Orthodox? Can you expand on these schisms, why they occur and how they are resolved? So the schism between the Greek church and the Russian church is happening at the level of the authorities. And even the authorities both in the Greek and the Russian church is my understanding that they’ve insisted that this is not for the communicants, that is for us as believers in the church. It is not a breaking communion for us. That is we have no problem with Greeks. Greeks have no problems with Russians. In theory, the misunderstanding is not a theological misunderstanding. It is a jurisdictional misunderstanding. It is a fight about territories and about authority and about power. And so because of that, whichever Orthodox church you join that is in communion with a broader Orthodox church is totally fine. The difficulty you’re going to face is that some churches are so, let’s say, ethnic or that are based on ethnic questions that sometimes it makes it a little difficult for an outsider to join in and to really feel like they’re part of the church. So that’s something that you have to see with the priest, with the community. There are some Greek communities that have been here for a few generations and they’re completely fine and they are not hostile to outsiders. It just really depends on your situation, on where you are. So I would say just move one step at a time, meet with the priest, tell the priest your worries, and hopefully he can just engage with you about that. So Adam Shalard asks, how does one go about breaking down the negative principalities, patterns in our life? I mean, I would say prayer. I know that sounds just so easy. It’s easy to say that. And I agree because obviously just like all of you, there are some negative patterns in my life that I struggle to get rid of. But nonetheless, I know that that’s the right way to go about. And engaging in the sacramental life of the church, going to confession, taking that seriously. And every time you go to confession, try to see it as a new beginning and not just something that you do just so that you can take communion, but rather see it as a kind of cleaning the slate and then the new beginning so that hopefully you can anchor yourself and start again when you go to confession. That’s the best I could do. If you can have a good spiritual father, that’s probably useful because they can give you advice and they can have authority over you to kind of ask you to do certain things, but it’s hard to do it on your own. And I say that because I feel like I also struggle because I have a confessor, but I don’t have what I would call a spiritual father in the sense that he’s a great confessor, but I don’t think he feels very involved in my spiritual struggle, let’s say. Hopefully one day I can find a more involved spiritual father. So Kenan Cronin asks, I really struggle to understand what Paul says on us being free from the law of Moses and that God’s law is now written on our heart, seemingly for us to work out for ourselves, but then at the same time, it still seems like we should follow certain Old Testament laws. What’s your understanding of this? So my understanding of this is that, you know, if you read St. Paul, St. Paul is very difficult to understand. He’s very difficult to understand. St. Paul is very difficult to read, you know, but if you read St. Paul, he’ll say things, you know, like we are above the law, you know, we’ve been freed from the law, the law in our hearts, and then he’ll ask, well, does that mean that we should break the law? And he says, by no mean, we shouldn’t break the law, right? We should follow the law. And so what is going on there? The idea is that as you enter into Christ, as you, let’s say, you know, it’s the same as when St. Paul says, you know, in Christ, there is neither Greek nor Jew, there’s neither man nor woman, there’s neither slave nor free, you know, and you think he’s like, okay, I guess, but then Paul turns around and he says, slaves obey your master. You know, he says, you know, women submit to your husbands. He says, submit to one another, to your authority as to God himself. And so it’s like, you know, what’s going on? And so the idea is that think of it as the mountain, you know, it’s like you ascend the mountain, you enter into the heart, all that imagery, and then you reach the point of the divine logos in you, you reach the holy of holies, you go beyond the veils of the heart, however expression that the mystics use. And then when you reach that place, you find this spark that is contains in it everything and therefore is beyond the specifics of the law is beyond the, the, the, the multiplicity of the law. It’s like, it’s as if the law is kind of taken into this one place. And you see Christ tried to do that even when he’s speaking to try to show that space to you when he says things like, you know, all the law and the prophet is in his result is resorbed in, you know, love, love, love, love your God and your neighbor as yourself. And so it’s like, he’s trying to show you how all the law kind of, if you have love, then you have all the law. And so, but the problem is that when you go back down the mountain, it doesn’t mean that the law doesn’t reappear or that certain things don’t reappear. I don’t know if that makes sense. And so, and so a good question, a good way to see it is this, it’s like, if I’m in the heart and I, and let’s say I’m in Christ, then if I, if I’m driving down the street and I see somebody who wants to cross, then I’ll stop and I’ll let them cross in front of me. And it’s like, you know, I’m doing it out of the love of Christ in me. But if, but it still means that there might be a rule which says that if you come to a crosswalk and the person is in front of you, you have to stop to let them pass. So those two things are not contradictory. It’s just that one is like this outer expression of what you should be able to find in your heart in terms of something which is beyond the multiplicity of just legal prescriptions. So that’s how I see it. I hope this might, I hope that makes sense. All right. So David Flores says, in the last Q&A, you said some legends say Merlin was the son of a dragon. And I’ve read some where he was the son of a devil, or the son of a fairy. What pattern is he manifesting? Because it seems that he would ally himself with evil principalities rather than good ones, especially since in some legends he’s involved in the subterfuge of Arthur’s birth and other mischievous acts. And so I think that the character of Merlin is, he represents how the things that are on the edge and the things that were before can be flipped and can be turned to serve the new principal, the new logos. And so for example, the story of Merlin usually goes that he was the son of a devil or the son of a dragon, like you said, but then when he was born, they baptized him and then that flipped him. And so he became a servant of God, though still having, you could say, elements of where he came from. And so you know how a lot of modern, let’s say, a lot of modern experts on Arthur will say things like Merlin is a residue from Celtic mythology, Merlin is the remainder of juridic knowledge or juridic ideas that have somehow found themselves in the Arthurian legend. And they kind of say it almost like it’s this subversive thing. But the actual reality is that, yes, you’re right, that’s exactly what Merlin is. It’s only that he’s taking this pagan thing and then flipping it so that it can now participate in the story. And that’s what Christianity does all the time. I always joke with a lot of the new pagans that, you know, it was Christians who wrote down the Eddas, folks, Christianity does all the time. I always joke with a lot of the new pagans that, you know, it was Christians who wrote down the Eddas, folks, in the Middle Ages had a copy. Some of you are going to find this horrible, but on the altar would have a copy of the Bible and would have a copy of the Iliad on the altar because they saw the Iliad and they saw the Roman Sibyls and they saw, you know, all these early things. Or even Ovid’s metamorphoses, they saw it as ultimately pointing to Christ and being like shadows of Christ. And so all these stories were brought back into Christianity and then kept in the manner that they still have an edginess to them, but they ultimately serve a higher purpose. And so I think that that’s what Merlin is. I think that understanding that aspect and understanding Merlin is what we all need to understand now because we got to do a lot of flipping. We got to start flipping some things over right now. Also, Adam now says disregard, Adam Shalard says disregard the first question. So Adam, because I like you, I’ll let you have a second question. So he says, can you explain the top left of this prodigal son icon with the angels and seraphim and circles and wings? So I don’t think I can show you guys, but when you see an angel that has, it’s like a circle, it’s like a circle and it has eyes on it and wings. If you look at my recent drawing of an angel for this t-shirt that I designed, you’ll see that it’s called a throne. It’s just a kind of angel. It’s a stylization of a throne and it’s meant to represent also in part the idea of the wheels that Ezekiel sees in his vision. He sees the cherubs, he sees these four cherubs that are kind of like these pillars and under the cherubs are these wheels within wheels within wheels and that is what they’re supposed to represent. It’s a kind of angel, but it’s also this idea of the wheels. So Alex Riddle says, hi Jonathan, what is the symbolism of private prisons or more generally of the commodification of justice? If that’s still a bit narrow, could you talk more generally about what it means to buy something to be a commodity and how that might relate to the role of government of the state? Thank you very much. I have to admit that I don’t totally understand the, like to say the purpose of your question. The idea that there would be private prisons in a, let’s say in a traditional world, I don’t think would necessarily be a problem in the sense that if the state decides what’s happening and the prison is just owned by a person, I don’t think that would be such a big deal. So I’m not sure what that means. It’s like the state’s function is to set up, is to set the rules, but then there are always organizations that kind of live those out. You can imagine it somehow, like you see that in the Bible, the idea of the Pharisees, not the Pharisees, the Republicans, where the Romans decided, the Romans were the ones getting the taxes, but then they would hire out people to get the taxes for them and they weren’t necessarily the state. They were kind of like, they would just be given a contract to do that. And so I don’t necessarily see a problem with that with prisons. If the state, if the, let’s say the authorities are involved in making sure that the laws are followed and that things are done properly. All right, so Laura says, your talk in Boston was awesome. With so many evangelicals in the audience, I assume that they have a particular hunger for the Christian symbolic worldview. How many do you think eventually need a church that has a rich history of including the symbolic aspect of a biblical faith? I mean, how many do I think? I think all of them, you know, I, I, you know, ultimately I hope that, I hope that the symbolic thinking can reach as many people as possible in order to help them see the Bible differently and think differently. And I think that that will, that will open up discussions that couldn’t be opened before, you know, it’s very difficult, for example, for the Orthodox to discuss with certain types of kind of evangelical products. It’s very difficult, difficult because it’s like two worlds that just aren’t in the same place and they’re just missing each other, you know. And, you know, if the evangelical will say something like, you think you need to, you need to, you know, you need the participants in the sacrament to be saved. So it’s a kind of being saved by doing this and this by following the law and the Orthodox just doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Like it just, that’s just not what it’s about. And so it just, these two things, they just don’t connect. So hopefully, hopefully we can reach as many people as possible. So White Ear Two says, I’ve been thinking about the atonement and can’t help but read Colossians 2, 13, 14, through the lens of a Protestant penal substitutionary model where God cancels our record of debt and nailing it to the cross. How does the Orthodox tradition view that language? Thanks so much. Here are the verses for reference. And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. I mean, I think this is a, it’s a great verse. It’s an, it’s an amazing verse because there’s this beautiful, all these beautiful things brought together. You know, when, when, when I talk about the patterns in St. Gregory of Mesa, he doesn’t make them up. You know, he, he really takes them from scripture, but he, he, he weaves them beautifully. So it talks about trespasses, death, uncircumcision, right, of the flesh. And so it’s tracing this idea of something which is in the margin, right? So you, you’ve trespassed, you, you’ve stepped aside, you’re, you’re not on the path. You’re not aiming properly. You’ve, you’ve gone off to the side. Then you’re also dead because of that. You’re outside of the garden, you’re dead and you’re uncircumcised in the flesh. You’ve accumulated all this flesh on you. And so all of this, this, this powerful, this powerful thing. And so you, you, let’s say you accumulate, think of, think of it that way. Think of it something like this, this taking on of death is, is, is in a way an accumulation of debt. Think of it that way. Maybe it’s a way to help people understand this stuff. So, you know, you, God said, you are supposed to die. You eat the fruit of the knowledge of the new, where you’re supposed to die. And then what happens is Adam and Eve and the descendants, they, they start to borrow from the outside. They start to take things from the outside, add it to themselves in order to, to preserve themselves and kind of expand themselves so that they don’t die. And so they owe all this stuff that they’re, that they’re taking from the outside, they just owe it. And, and so, and that’s a problem. It’s a problem because it just ends up weighing you down and it ends up keeping you in the world of death. And so Christ, by taking all that on himself, by, by dying, he tramples down death by death. He, he, he, and he, by accepting all of this willingly, he, he, he’s, he’s able to pin that down to the cross so that you can now enter into the garden. It’s like, I don’t know, to me, that’s fine. I don’t think, the idea of the penal substitutionary model is, it’s, or the idea of, of, of a substitutionary model in the sense that Christ took our place, all of this stuff is not totally absent in orthodoxy. It’s just not central. It’s not the central pennant. And it’s kind of like a, you can see it more, instead of seeing it as like the central doctrine, it’s more of an image to try to help you understand something which is more mysterious or more, more, more, more, more, more fuller if you take all the images of the incarnation together and put them, put them together. That’s my take on it anyways. So Jacob, Jacob, so our Jacob, Jacob Russell asked me, how do you handle critique of these hard to grasp ideas from fellow orthodox Christians? That’s a great question. I mean, I’ll take critique. I always, it’s so funny because I, I tell you guys, I’m not a theologian. I try to, I’m really a symbolist and an artist and I, and I see patterns in scripture and I see patterns in the church fathers and I, and I see the relationship between the different ontological levels of reality. But I, you know, and I’ve said it several times that I always feel very uneasy talking about things like the Trinity or the divine energies and all this stuff. And so to be honest, like if someone criticizes me and said that I’ve misspoken or said something, which is not exactly right in terms of those things, that’s totally fine with me. I take it back because that’s not my, my purpose isn’t to teach people about that. I just try to, I’m mostly trying to help people see a, a symbolic structure in order to help them view reality differently. But so don’t take what I say about the Trinity as being, you know, the holy doctrine. Anyways, you know, to be honest, you should never, and the thing about that, that’s hilarious though. The thing about that, it’s hilarious is that you shouldn’t take the opinion of someone like me who is not recognized by the church as speaking with authority. I don’t, you know, I have the blessing of my priest and my bishop to make my carving, to do these YouTube videos, but it’s not like they see me as this authoritative father in the church that has some kind of authority. And so you don’t have to take people who don’t have that, who are not, you know, in some regard, officially recognized by the church in its hierarchy. You don’t have to take those people’s word for anything. You don’t have to take their teaching as being the thing that they teach. And that’s also true for those that question you. Everybody online thinks that they have the authority to go after everybody and to attack them. Why do you think we live in this weird democracy where we think that we have the authority to go around and criticize everybody else’s orthodoxy? You can do it, and I do it. You’ve seen me do it, but it doesn’t mean that it’s an authoritative thing. And if someone comes at you, some rando comes at you and starts to criticize you. You don’t have to accept it. It’s happened to me a few times where people have just really gone at me and writing me DMs and saying that I said this wrong, that I need to take it back publicly, and I need to apologize. And at some point I just tell them, you know what, dude, go to my bishop. You have a problem with what I’m saying? Go to my bishop. Tell my bishop. Convince my bishop that I’m a heretic and then we’ll speak. Because you, I don’t know who you are, some rando on Facebook or something. So yeah, sorry. All right. So here we go. Going to continue on here. I’m going to subscribe star. So Nicola asks, what is the symbolic significance of pilgrimage? What is its purpose and how to do it right? Have you personally been on any pilgrimage that you would like to share with us? I would say that I haven’t been on what I would consider to be officially a pilgrimage. I’ve been on kind of semi pilgrimages, but nothing that I would really, nothing that would look like what I wish it was. Like I’ve never been to Athos. I’ve never been to Jerusalem. I would really love to go to those places. I feel like the times where I’ve been, you know, to Greece or, um, visited places like that, I felt like I was more of a tourist than a pilgrim. But if you want to understand what the symbolic significance of a pilgrimage is, you have to see it as a, as a mini version of a return to paradise. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a microcosm of what it means to go back into paradise, go back up the mountain. And so you can imagine that the mountain of paradise is the ultimate center of the world, the ultimate summit of reality. And then below that, you know, if you look at medieval maps, they would have, um, in the East at the summit of the world, kind of the way it was drawn, it was quite specific to in the East and the summit, you would have the Garden of Eden. That’s kind of the summit of the world. And then down in the middle of the map, you would have Jerusalem. So you can understand this Jerusalem as acting as a, a lower version on the, say, imagine that this ontological hierarchy, a lower version of what the garden is. And so going to Jerusalem, visiting the Holy Sepulcher or visiting, you know, the, the Church of the Nativity is this, this mini return to paradise. And so if you, if you, if you do go on a pilgrimage, you should try to see it as a, as a spiritual journey as well, where you, you know, you should try to fast, go to confession more, try to, to, to examine yourself, uh, try to pray in order to prepare yourself so that the effect of the pilgrimage on you will be more transformative. So that’s, so you can see it, but some people have smaller versions of pilgrimages. Like, for example, you can imagine someone who has some issue, uh, you know, some disease or some personal issue and they, it’s a very specific thing, but now they want to find a solution to that. They’re looking to, to encounter, uh, to be healed or they’re looking to, uh, encounter some, some spiritual father. And so it’s all the same, which is at lower levels. So you can imagine you have this one question, you have a problem. And so you take, you take this problem to a center where meaning comes from. And then that place and, you know, the authority that is there is going to answer your question is going to heal your disease. It’s going to answer your spiritual question is going to give you advice in order for you to organize your chaotic life or chaotic question. Okay. So it’s always the same. It’s always the same pattern. Hopefully that makes sense. All right. So now I jump into Patreon. This is the, the most questions are here. All right. So Drew McMahon asks, is Christian nationalism a viable term? What are your thoughts on this ideology, something to embrace or steer clear of? What are your thoughts on this ideology, something to embrace or steer clear of? I think that, I think that there is a balance and what’s going to happen is that in the church, in the different churches, not just in Orthodoxy, but in Catholicism, even in Protestantism, you will find groups that overemphasize one side or the other. And, but I think there is a balance. I think that the unity of reality does not deny multiplicity. And there’s also this idea you see in St. Maximus where he talks about unity without confusion. That is the purpose of our unity is not to have this huge, massive mush of mixture, but there is room for particular identities to have their own space, to have their own, their own coherence. You know, as long as people don’t take so much pride in that coherence that it, that it actually becomes pride itself, where it actually disconnects you from your communion with others, disconnect you from your communion with God, where you only see your identity as completely opposed to other identities, where you all you want to do is fight them off. There has to be a, so there has to be this balance between unity and multiplicity. And so you’ll find people that hate any form of nationalism. They call it philatism. And philatism is officially considered a heresy in the Orthodox church, but what it usually means is to view your ethnic group or your, your lower identity as the most important thing. That’s, that’s definitely a heresy because any identity is, has its reality only to the extent that it’s connected to that, which is above it. You can’t, you can’t say I’m just a Greek or I’m just a Russian. You always have to see it as a Greek in communion with Russians and communion with others around you. All right. And so, but what we’ll see, and we’re seeing it, everybody is aware, we’ll see as Christianity erodes, we’re going to see the two extremes appear. We’re going to see a push for mixture as if mixture itself had some kind of value in itself. You know, the idea that, you know, that, that, that, that this kind of weird joining of all the different cultures, of all the different stuff, you know, like, like a big bouillabaisse that that somehow has value in itself. Then you’re going to see the other side as well. You’re going to see people who are going to put their foot down. We’re going to, we’re going to really dig their heels in and are going to want to fight off anybody that is different and was going to want to protect their borders at all costs. And so, yeah, it’s hard to find a balance. I agree and all that stuff because you always feel like you need to choose a side. So, Agar’s Mames asks, Jonathan, I’m so sorry that you have to answer too many questions. Don’t worry. Don’t worry, Agar. So, Rod Dreher says, Rod Dreher recently published an article regarding the coronavirus calling the situation the China apocalypse. If you still have the energy, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the symbolism of the coronavirus situation in China. Um, I haven’t read Rod’s article, but it’s a serious, what’s happening now is going to exacerbate a lot of the, uh, the problems that we have because viruses are all about, they’re all about identity and infection. They’re all about borders. They’re all about, um, letting something in from the outside, which can kill you. And so what you’re going to see, and you can see it, look, you saw it right away. When the coronavirus, uh, exploded in, in, in China, what was the first thing our go, like in Canada, the first thing, the first thing our, our government said was don’t be racist against Chinese. And I was like, I mean, I wasn’t surprised because there’s an analogy between the virus and the foreigner. You know, it’s just weird that they right away jumped on that. And they were like, the thing you need to learn about the coronavirus is you shouldn’t be racist against Chinese. And I thought it’s, it’s a dangerous game to play to push that because that once the virus you’ve identified, you’ve made it about that. You’ve, you’ve trained the question yourself, you know, by saying, don’t, don’t be racist against Chinese because of the coronavirus you’ve, you’ve created a frame, but there are two, there are two sides to that frame. And when the coronavirus, if it does become a multi, it does become a pandemic, then the same thing’s going to flip. And now it’s going to become the other side. So it’s some scary stuff. But for sure, what we’re going to see is we’re going to see breakdown. We’re going to see how, how infection breaks down social structure, right? So how chaos from below these little bugs, how they can come up and they can start to eat at the world and the world starts to fall apart. It starts to break the bonds between in your body, it’s killing your body, but it’s also destroying the social fabric as it breaks down, breaks and breaking down the bonds. And, and it does so by now you see this pendulum swing where it’s like, here’s the virus, here’s the virus eating at the bonds of reality. And in order to respond to that, we, we create, we isolate things. And so we shut doors, we put people in quarantine and that, but that also in terms of the analogy between the social level and the personal level, then that will exacerbate the problem. Because as you isolate people, which you have to do, you’re, you’re continuing by, you’re continuing this breakdown of the social fabric by creating these, these closed boxes in, in society. And as it, if it gets worse, then we’re going to see a lot more of that. And it does in fact seem that it does in fact seem like if the moment, the moment we see a totalitarian regime arrive, it could be, it could be something after a, it could be after a pandemic because enough chaos is going to call, people are going to, are going to beg the government to come in and, you know, bring the, bring the sword down. So we might see that in China, we might see the Chinese really cramped down on, on their people, not just in China, we might see it happen in Europe, we might see it happen wherever it is that, that this outbreak spreads. Yeah. Okay. So, so Kay asks, this is going to be a tough one. So Kay asked, I’m having trouble understanding the solution you gave to the cuckolding problem. Can you please briefly go over the solutions to the inevitability of paying tribute? This is a really long, to my understanding, it seems there must be a part of an entity that is solely dedicated to atoning for, or on behalf of the whole. I believe the priesthood as a scapegoat is a good example. The priesthood takes the pattern upon themselves and allows the people to move upward, up the proverbial mountain, that as you speak of. As we righteously ascend, more ground land possibilities present themselves and we get closer to the truest ideal or principle. In other words, instead of women and children being given to one or a few men, it is a few men or one man giving themselves to the Lord. As you continue with this ritual of atoning for the pattern, there is a gradual shift of responsibility from the many that cannot bear it to the few, or the one that can. The chances of the women and children atoning for this reoccurring pattern becomes less and less. Yeah, I’m totally not sure I understand what you’re, I don’t think that’s what. Another way of solving the problem of the outsider foreigner is acknowledging and venerating it to the highest status as possible. Am I misunderstanding the solutions you gave? I think you’re misunderstanding some of the solutions you gave. Maybe I can answer just the second part because I know that that created quite a bit of stir when I talked about this foreign thing in terms of Christianity and the conversion of Rome, how you’re making it the highest thing. What I meant is also making it a crown, making it above the world. By putting it above yourself, there’s a relationship between what is below you and what is above you. There’s a relationship between the first and the last. All these things are related. By changing the last into the first, by taking what is below and putting it above, and you can see it like you see it in all kinds of stories where the lowest thing becomes the king, the lowest peasant becomes the priest, or the king marries the slave or a servant girl. All this idea of taking the lowest thing and bringing it up, what it does is it creates, it then makes it possible for the world inside to exist. The way that it exists is that, like I said, in terms of Christianity, what happened is that all of a sudden Rome could remain Roman. Roman didn’t become Jewish. People who think that Rome became Jewish, they’re really, I mean, it’s very silly to think that. Obviously not. Just look at how Constantinople got set up. Look at how everything happened. They didn’t become Jewish. They took the Semitic religion, put it up, and then participated in it in a manner which made it possible for them to remain who they were. It’s funny because it’s already like that. Kings and kings in all cultures are already like that. It’s hard for people to understand that. Think about it. Think of the story. Think of the fairy tale story. The princess has to marry what? She has to marry a prince. The prince has to marry a princess. Where does he find his princess? Does he find the princess in the people? No. He marries a foreign princess. He marries a foreigner. That happens over and over. At some point, the aristocracy is not the same people as the people below. They’re just not. They’re like a different breed of people. They’re just not the same people. You see that happen all the time. Look, there’s so many examples of it. Another example, in the Slavic people, the Slavic people were fighting for, they were fighting amongst themselves. The Scandinavians came, and at first they chased them away, and then they realized, wait a minute, if we make the Scandinavians our prince, then we’ll stop fighting amongst ourselves because we can’t decide between ourselves who’s going to be the chief of the other one. Take someone from the outside, put them on top, and then you stop the infighting. You see it happening in companies. They take CEOs. They rarely take CEOs from the company. Usually they tend to take a CEO from another company because by taking something from the outside, putting it at top, then the question of who among the people in the company is going to be the chief is resolved because you take it from the outside and you put it at the top. There’s a million examples of that. Hopefully that makes sense. Sorry, guys. As for the other part, I didn’t understand your understanding of it, so sorry. I don’t want to put too much time into it. Simon LaBerge asks, I was born in the 80s and a lot of cartoons I watched as a child had an orphan as the main character and hero. That trope seems to have disappeared in the cartoons I watch now with my nephew and nieces. What is the symbolism of the orphan in stories? What would the presence or absence of that trope in mainstream storytelling mean for our culture? Well, first off, I don’t think it’s disappeared. I think it’s definitely there. I mean, even the movies that I don’t particularly like, for example, like Frozen, the two girls are orphaned. A lot of Disney movies like The Lion King also orphan. It’s actually most movies, all the Disney movies, it’s always an orphan. There’s a lot of ways you can understand it. One of the ways is to kind of understand it as this hero’s journey, as the U-shaped story where if you have an orphan, you already have the downturn. You already have the idea that the identity between the father and the son or the mother and the daughter is broken. And so the child falls into a lack of identity or a question of identity. And then the story becomes of how that person is able to reestablish an identity having lost their connection to where they came from. And so that’s usually what it means. So you’re an orphan, you lose your connection, and then you have to kind of go down and you have to come back up with a more complete, more complete identity or something like that. Hopefully that makes sense. All right, so Isaiah Hale says, What does it mean that the altar of the Holy of Holies are now in the east and the entrance or exit of the church is now in the west? Obviously it is related to what Christ is, but I can’t pinpoint exactly what. I have an insipid idea that the Christian church is something like the reflected image of the Jewish tabernacle. So Jesus brings the ark and the altar together into the east. This is still the westward movement that is in the tabernacle, just so far that it is flipped to the other side of the earth and now it’s the east. And the sunset in the west with the exit has to do with the final moment outward towards Zion, maybe. I don’t understand the second part of what you said, but I think you have a basic, the question is a great question. You have a basic intuition of what’s going on. So the flip that happens in the church in part has to do with the flip, the flip between, you know when I talk about the left and the right hand and I talk about two people standing in front of each other and how my right hand is your left hand and my left hand is your right hand and how there’s a flip when you change perspectives. That’s what’s going on here. It’s a change of perspective. The change of perspective has many forms. I think one of them is the change, the conversion of Rome. The conversion of Rome is super important in understanding the story of Christianity. It’s extremely important because it has to do with this restoration of Cain, you would say, trying to resolve the duality by restoring the, restoring Esau, restoring Cain, restoring this brother, the firstborn, you know. But then that also means there’s a flip and the flip happens in so many strange ways. You see it, you know, in Jewish tradition it seems, for example, that, you know, Saint Michael is kind of seen as this angel of mercy and Gabriel is seen as an angel of rigor, whereas in Christianity we see Michael red with a sword and Gabriel blue with a lily, whereas in the Jewish tradition it seems to be the other way around. So there’s a lot of these terms. But in terms of Christianity, you want to understand how it happened. It’s that in the scriptures it talks about, Ezekiel talks about the final temple and in this notion of the final temple there’s a sealed gate in the east of the third temple and the sealed gate is the gate through which the Messiah will come. Okay, so the idea is that the Messiah comes from the east and so you can imagine it that he’s coming in from the east and he’s moving in towards the west to sit on his throne, you know, or to sit on the mercy seat. You could see it like that. So God is coming in from the east and so this door is sealed until God reveals himself, until the Messiah comes into the world. So the early Christians, according to Saint Augustine now, the early Christians during the liturgy in Rome, for example, or in other churches, the first churches, the churches were facing west, that is the altar, the Holy of Holies was in the west and the people were facing west and the priests were facing east. Now this is one of the problems that you see now in modern Catholicism is this confusion because the priests always faced east, they always faced east. It should be the people that were facing west and the priests were behind the altar and were facing east and then at some moment during the liturgy everybody would turn around and would face east and the facing of the east was to face the coming Messiah, that is to be the bride that receives the bride groom. There’s a sexual symbolism, there’s this whole idea of being us ourselves, being the ark in a way and being the throne, let’s say, that God comes and sits upon. So that was the way that was done and then ultimately what the Christians did is to flip the whole thing around. We’re always facing east and we’re always there to receive the glory coming towards us and so then the whole symbolism of the apse becomes the rising sun and you see the mother of God with her arms out and the Christ child in her womb as the sun that is on the horizon that’s coming up from the east to the west like it says in scripture that that is how the son of man will reveal himself. That is how it happened, this turning, it was kind of playing out the actual the actual logic of Christianity itself and the understanding of scripture and the apocalyptic reading of Ezekiel, it was all kind of that coming together and creating this thing. Now in terms of the holy of holies, one of the things that I contend is that the holy of holies in Christianity is a joining in of everything together inside and so it is both the holy of holies and the holy of holies is both the ark of the covenant and the altar at the same time and so everything comes in. It’s just like and it’s also the place of the crucified, it’s the tomb and those two things like the Christ was crucified outside the city but it’s also the inside of the cave or the you know this total inside and so it’s like joining the inside and the outside completely together in this higher inside you would say or like a transcendent inside something like that, divine darkness something like that. All right so hopefully that makes some sense. I feel like I was rambling a lot on that one but hopefully I can answer your question. So Norm Grandin says, can you please speak to the mystery of the kingdom of God has been granted to you but to those outside everything comes in parables so that they may look and see but not perceive and hear and listen but not understand in order that they may not be converted and be forgiven and he says what does this mean you guys have to watch my videos I talked about that in my recent video on the parable of the sower you have to see this saying by Christ as in balance with the parable of the light under the bushel which comes usually I don’t know if it comes after in every version of the synoptics but usually it comes right after and so you have this parable which says you have to come inside those that are inside will receive those that are outside will be cut off those that are outside will only hear things that don’t make a lot of sense or just forms those that are inside will receive the divine patterns will be able to see the pattern of the story that I’m saying and not just see this random story and I have tried to connect it for you guys with this idea with one of the connections of it is is an experience that a lot of you probably had which is starting to see the symbolic patterns and then all of a sudden realizing that you were blind before that that you you were listening to stories you were watching movies you you enjoyed them but you you couldn’t really pierce them and so now all of a sudden you feel like you’ve been brought inside and you can see the light which is hiding and so that’s the first part but then the second part of the the same in the same text it’s Christ saying that you should not put light under a bushel that you should be the light of the world that you should you know that you shine in the darkness and so you have to see those two together this idea you come in you get the patterns you receive you know you you have this ascetic motion towards the the top of the mountain but then once you get it Moses comes back down with the law and gives the law to the people so once you get the pattern then you can illuminate things and you can point and show people what what things mean you know that’s just one version of it um and so that’s what that means you have to see you have to see the two stories together you can’t isolate one all right okay so Justin Seligman asks have you read any of the catholic nouvelle theologie theologians like Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Jean-Dienme Danielou and so what is your opinion of them and their influence on catholicism it seems to you that they’re were attempting to revive a sacramental ontology not unlike your own work and what you would find and and and that you would find many points of agreement with them yes i agree uh i lubeck and danielou i know for sure danielou was part of my journey i read some of his texts on genesis early on when i was kind of asking these questions and i think you’re right and you know there are people like uh balthazar as well are people that seem to want to to regain a cosmic vision of of christ and how christ you know appears in the world um and so but i don’t know i don’t know what their what their influence is on modern catholicism i’m not i’m not sure what that is and and also sacramental like what what is their relationship to to catholic sacramentality but yeah danielou i i remember i remember really enjoying his work when i read them so richard anderson says first of all thank you for all your work i’d like to know your thoughts on the fulfilling of hedonistic desires and if it holds any place in a sober christian worldview and lifestyle i know you’ve spoken know you spoke on how there are exceptions within certain religions and cultures which i found to be informative but i would like to know your thoughts on how this topic can be understood specifically through the lens of christianity hope this makes sense ha ha ha uh well for sure there in in traditional christianity there’s no place for the fulfilling of hedonistic desires um in the way that we understand that today for sure in the this kind of in the way we understand this you know we have this hedonistic culture now for sure that’s not at all the case um what i pointed to there are two things one is that the desires are not bad the church fathers all the church fathers agree that our desires are not bad um they just have to be pointed in the right direction and they have to have the right place in our human structure let’s say and there is a need sometimes to have a kind of asceticism to rein in the desires to prevent them from becoming wild and taking over but you know there’s there’s nothing wrong with the desires themselves um and so you would say that all the the basic desires are resolved in god it can be resolved at lower levels but they are ultimately resolved in god and so the let’s say the the um the desire to eat which can become excessive and become hedonistic is resolved in communion communion in the sense of of smaller communion where we all will we eat together where we share our food where we show we participate in each other’s lives as we’re eating but then ultimately the sacramental communion which is to actually participate in god through eating and the same thing goes with uh with with sexuality the the desire for for sex which can become hedonistic is resolved in marriage at the lower level in a normal marriage between a man and a woman where the that desire also is a produces community and produces communion as well produces family and uh but then ultimately as brought into are acting as the bride of christ they are are acting as the ones who are joined with god in something which is analogous to sexual union so so that’s how you kind of deal with um hedonistic desires what i talked about when i talk about the carnival is i talk about the idea that uh on the edge at the end of cycles there’s usually a little valve that gets opened and then you see some excess which which is permitted and which participates in society it’s important to understand that those carnivals are always seen as suspicious by the church authority and and and with reason to a certain extent because that’s what they are they’re suspicious their margin their their exceptions they’re upside down they’re all this stuff they won’t go away you can’t make them go away and you and i think that for all the times that the that the church officially pronounces against these these carnivals they never went away until modern times um and so it doesn’t mean that if you participate in those carnivals and you let yourself go doesn’t mean it won’t be detrimental to your soul like you have to be careful in those moments where there’s a you know when you you participate in some kind of feast you have to be careful because yes you can feast but there’s always i mean i who knows where the line is it’s it’s different for for different people but you know you can you usually know when you’ve lost control of yourself and uh and you have to be careful that it doesn’t yeah that it doesn’t affect you in a longer in a longer relationship of loss of control you would say um so Josiah McGarty asks is there a direct connection between the loss of Christian art and the loss of Christian culture i.e. symbolic language worldview yeah for sure i i i agree i think that there definitely is i think that i think that as the modern thinking started to appear and the let’s say the architecture of the church or the or the icons or the sacred chants started to be seen as arbitrary then you know at first people kind of surfed on what christianity had brought in terms of a synthesis of of different cultures and of different ideas of of everything to europe and and at first they kind of surfed on it for a little while but you could just kind of start to degrade and you know in the end you have frank gary and you’re like what’s going on what happened you wake up from your drunk stupor and you’re like okay this is what we have to deal with all right so JD asks what is the symbolism in the story of the tower of babel dude i am not going to answer JD that is an amazing question but i should probably make a video on that if you want me to kind of go into it i mean i’ll give a brief idea of what it what it is and so but it could go into it a lot more you know it’s it’s about the problem of trying to unite everything it’s the problem of pride it’s the problem of believing that you can contain everything that you can have one language that you can have that you can build something which will touch the sky right that you can make something which will be perfect and will not you know will not need anything from the outside and then it’s like you’re pulling the pendulum on this side and you’re like you know we’re going to all contain everything and then what happens pop it breaks and then it scatters and that’s the pattern of a lot of things a lot of things you see that happening so Benjamin Wood asks would you agree that one of the themes of the Old Testament is the independent nation of Israel being tyrannized by empires with universal universalizing ambitions like Egypt, Babylon, etc. Does this tell us something about God’s vision for the scale of Apollite? How does this jive with the Christian Eastern Roman Empire and its scale? I’m still reading about Byzantine, Thamata, and their administration I don’t know much. You know I would say I would say yes I would say for sure not Egypt and Babylon are definitely not the same thing in the Bible but for sure Babylon is this is babble right you can just see it in the word it’s the same word babble babble on you know it’s the in Babylon you see it in the story of Daniel and you see it in how Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian kings how they did it was they tried to get people from all these different cultures and they they brought them to Babylon so Babylon you know when it’s in revelations it talks about the whore of Babylon the Babylon is this whore because it he maybe Ganezer tried to gather all the nations into one place and to have this coherent thing which was just all the nations at the same time you know and so that breaks down right that’s the also the tower of Babylon you try to do that try to bring everybody into one language one world one government whatever and then what’s going to happen it’s going to shatter and it’s going to break down and so I think that for sure Israel is is seen as a resistance to that Egypt is more complicated Egypt Egypt is more complicated maybe I should one day do a a video on Egypt you know what would be great is if my brother Matt here would agree to talk about Egypt on my channel that’s not happening be great if you would though all right okay so so does it tell us about God’s vision for the scale of Apollon I would say I don’t know it’s it’s hard to say because you need to find that balance but like I’ve said a million times guys you know the story ends with a with a with a city that is the size of everything the new Jerusalem is the size of everything you know that the outside of the city of the new Jerusalem is absolute so there’s no narthex in the new Jerusalem all right so Taylor Wilson asks what do you think of dream analysis thanks um to be totally honest I think that I think this is also something I think that is backed up by the church fathers I think that most of the time dreams are just chaos and you have to be careful because that’s what it is most of the time you know and and because it that’s what happens when you dream you dive you go down into the waters you go down into the chaos you go down into these narratives that don’t connect into these things that aren’t logical into this world that is that is kind of like this this this this world without coherence but because of that once in a while it can become like a mirror it can act like a mirror so imagine the waters below you know they’re messy they’re they’re they’re kind of these crazy waves and they’re they’re they’re banging against each other and that’s usually what dreams are then once in a while if the water is very still then the sun can reflect perfectly in that water and so I think that that’s also why uh let’s say aesthetics and prophets and mystics will have will have dreams that are more than just um than just chaos they’ll have dreams that are actually clear like these crystal clear reflection of of the higher principles because the earth doesn’t reflect the higher principle the earth absorbs them and so it’s like you get particulars but whereas the water can act as a as like a perfect mirror once in a while so it can reflect the principle of the really really high principles that’s why that’s why i think you see that happen all right so James Cortides I hope I pronounced that right James your idea of a resurrected Christianity as an answer to the meaning crisis resonates greatly with me what are your thoughts on Jordan Hall and John Ravichy’s concept of the religion that’s not a religion are these two frameworks compatible I haven’t listened I listened to their first talk I haven’t listened to their their subsequent talks I don’t I don’t agree with John uh the two John John and Jordan I think that that’s probably the place where we break that’s probably the place where I really don’t agree with them I I don’t think that I don’t think that you can build uh religion and I also don’t think that saying that it’s a religion that’s not a religion uh is going to solve that problem um um I think that I I understand I have sympathy for people like I have sympathy for people who’ve had bad experiences with Christianity it’s like I understand but at in the end I think a lot of this is a is a is a kind of frustration with uh authority and a refusal to insert yourself in a in a hierarchy it’s kind of a desire there’s something there’s something that is is suspicious of hierarchy in both of their approaches and I understand you need to be suspicious of hierarchy but I find I find their suspicion of hierarchy to be only one-sided you need to find a balance between the kind of eminent say the emergent principle but in the hierarchical principle and I and I and I feel like that’s what they’re that’s what they’re missing and they would need to connect to something which is above them but hopefully I’ll have a chance to talk about that with John at some point you know we’re going to do an event in Ontario this September with Paul VanderKlay as well so it’d be myself John Ravecki Paul VanderKlay and hopefully we can talk about this stuff then because I do appreciate John I think he’s a like he’s he’s very kind and he’s very understanding so so hopefully we can talk about talk it out let’s say so Maisha Ojala sorry I hope I pronounced that right I have noticed with some concern that determinism currently dominates online discussion of free will can explain your basic position on the subject of humanity’s free will or lack thereof or the positions of the church fathers it would be most helpful if you could explain how this will transcend the material world if you believe it does thank you so St. Maximus especially in the church fathers in general I would say they don’t have the same vision of free will that that uh that most people have today which with the idea that free will is somehow the capacity to choose between things like that that isn’t the free will for example like the idea that that in the garden that the that Adam and Eve could exercise their free will by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil that is just not the way that the church fathers understand freedom to be free is to choose God that’s freedom that’s free will to not choose God is to be a slave of something outside of you is to become dependent on your passions on the externals on the outside world and so the only freedom we have is to is when we align ourselves with the will of God and it that’s so I know that that’s so counterintuitive with people for people um and that’s why if you read in St. Paul you can understand St. Paul a little more because the idea that you know you you’re free to sin and you’re a slave to God and that is to be a slave to God is to be free because you get your you’re attached to the do the thing that causes you you’re attached to the thing that causes you and by being attached to the thing that causes you you are free from the things that are uh that are you know around you the thing that aren’t you let’s say or that that are that are pulling on your attention that are that are pulling you in all in all all the idiosyncrasies you’re free from slavery to idiosyncrasies um and so you rise up beyond beyond idiosyncrasies and then you master them so you you then can engage with the world there’s nothing wrong with engaging with the world you can engage with the world in freedom as being kind of above things and engaging with them rather than being under them and being a slave of your desires and your passions and and all these all this other stuff um so hopefully that answers that question in terms of freedom um and so freedom just doesn’t look so so a lot of the questions about free will we read them do you just ring completely empty for me you just read completely empty because freedom actually looks like submitting yourself to something higher and that’s what freedom ends up looking like and so so it doesn’t look like what you think this idea of this absolute freedom where you can you can choose god or not choose god or you can choose between two kinds of toothpaste all that stuff is arbitrary it’s arbitrary and and it’s not it’s not important and it’s not interesting all right frank rowley asks is there a difference between the garments of skin provided by god and the teaching of the watchers in the book of enoch frank man great question tough question the obvious answer is yes but how does one differentiate man that is some that is a really tough question that is a tough question all right let me try to answer it this way okay it has to do with the flip right it has to do with the flip it has to do with turning death against itself and so the idea the idea that you would understand it that the idea that the way that you would understand it would be that man my mind is going blank because this stuff is hard to talk about okay so you turn death against itself so you imagine you have the watchers that come and teach human beings these skills that bring about the degeneracy of the world to bring about the fall that accelerate the fall well the idea would be that in each of those moves at each of those moves there should be a way once the fall has happened to use that skill and flip it towards glory to flip it back up and there’s an intimation in scripture of that which is that noah is a tecton noah is a artisan no way is a you know it’s like no way is build an ark and so you have these ideas that all these skills to modify nature are bringing about the breakdown but then noah somehow he turns it and changes it for the salvation of his family and the salvation of the world right that’s this that’s the turn and so there’s also a hint in that which is the tradition that you find in the book of jubilees i think and in is it in the book of jubilees i’m not sure one of the in one of the extra biblical text it says that noah married nama and nama was the sister of tubal cane so the reason why you would have this idea that noah married nama is that noah who’s a descendant of seth mary’s a descendant of cane he’s actually reproducing the pattern that you see when it says that the sons of god went into the daughters of men you know how christians have those two traditions one is that the angels that went to the the daughters of men the other it’s that the sons of seth went into the daughters men and i’m always telling you guys it doesn’t matter which way you take it the meaning is the same the symbolism refers to the same thing so noah who’s the son of of of seth marys a daughter of cane he’s also a tecton but he flips it and it becomes to the salvation of the world and so that’s the difference now you know i don’t know i don’t know what it is for each thing but that would be the the idea it would be that that every technology has in it the possibility of destruction and and breaking down the world but it also should have the possibility of positive and being of flipping um but maybe it needs a saint you need a saint to do that i don’t know all right so oliver erickson asks do you think that there is a materialistic explanation of the miracles in the bible or do you think like john letticks that god feeds in a new event i would say that that there these are irrelevant questions sorry oliver irrelevant i’m sorry man i just i feel like i’m a jerk answering it that way is that the purpose of telling the story of a miracle in scripture is not so that scripture is not so that you understand the mechanical causalities which brought it about there are obviously mechanical causalities because it’s an event in the world so there are obviously secondary causes for all the miracles described in scripture i don’t know what they are i don’t care those do not oppose the intervention of the divine logos appearing clearly in the world that the will of god appears in the world in a way that is more meaningful that is fuller that it has more impact you know that’s usually what a miracle is a miracle like i i’ve said many times before if a rock falls off a cliff that’s not a miracle if if your if your enemy is attacking you and you’re praying god and as you’re praying god the rock falls off the cliff and crush your hand it crushes your enemy that’s a miracle miracles are the place where meaning and phenomena are so joined together that they shine really really brightly you know um and so i don’t know like what the material causes are of the miracles and and i don’t know like i don’t i don’t know there i don’t i don’t try to find what’s under the description in the story i tend to i tend to see the story as being sufficient in terms of description of what the person encountered um like i said i don’t i don’t think that people that the stories in the bible are made up like i don’t think that people were just sitting there making up stories i think that they are description of events um and those are the description of the events we have there’s no use to try to go under them and try to to figure out you know you get you get that you hear these people who you know you’ve heard this you’ve heard all the explanations of you know like the crossing of the red sea that that maybe there was this wind and this there’s this special wind that comes once every whatever and it could have blown the water so that it would spread the water and you’re like you know what dude this is useless you’re not you’re not helping your soul by by thinking about this stuff all right sorry all right sorry guys if i’m if i’m like this i don’t know why it’s this coughing it’s got driving nuts all right so kevin patterson asked what is the relationship between symbolic liturgy esotericism and the modern notion of cult what is the relationship between modern liturgy esotericism and the modern notion of cult uh i mean those words are so full like the word esoteric now is just so ruined it’s just completely it’s been been ruined you know when someone thinks that esoteric has something to do with crystals or something it’s like it’s so ruined uh let’s say it this way it’s like if you read when you you you meet some orthodox priests who refuse to use the word sacrament for example they only use the word mystery and they talk about the mysteries of the church and you have to be initiated into the mysteries of the church they’re not afraid to use that language which was used by the church fathers uh which is a language uh that kind of pseudo religious uh cults of the modern cults uh will use that language right and so on the other hand you have other people who freak out when they hear christians talk about initiation and talk about the mysteries and you know have this idea that people were prepared and that baptism is a form of initiation like people freak out because they have these modern occult kind of weird occult stuff to refer to and so we just have to be able to to separate the weed from the chaff you know i think you know i i’ve said it before like i i have some sympathy for modern let’s say kind of 19th century style cultists like i have some sympathy for them in the sense that i think that one of the things they wanted was they saw how christianity around them was so stale was so devoid of mystical reality was so devoid of cosmic uh significance that they uh significance that they that they that they kind of created these weird alternatives that were that had these kind of initiative the initiation structures and all this stuff um but i think that the best of that is in the church already it’s in you know it’s in the christian the christian liturgy i think that’s the best i can do with that all right guys it’s almost 10 30 i’m gonna i’m gonna now go into the super chats and see what we got and sorry i don’t feel like i’m being a jerk these a lot of these questions i don’t know what’s going on with me i think it’s a suspicion that i have the coronavirus which is really dragging me all right okay so let’s see this okay all right so i might not be able to get through all these but i will try okay so andre johnson asked the question what makes the christian story the most important why can’t it sit on the next shelf to the greek and north smith on the shelf next to the greek and north smith well i’m gonna give you you know what i’m gonna give you a very practical answer to that i’m not gonna give you a metaphysical one i could give you a symbolic and give you the symbolic reasons why i think that the story of christ resolves all the stories talked about it quite a few in a lot of my videos but i could i could tell you the the basic reason very practical reason is that those stories are are are gone no one no one lives in those stories anymore no one really worships zeus anymore people who think they worship zeus are zeus are pretending there they made it up it’s a it’s a kind of weird syncretic you know uh pseudo religion you know and it’s the same with the north no one really worships odin there it’s all it’s all role play it’s all uh they’re all pretending you know they they’re making stuff up the the link the the connection between those realities have been cut um and and if you don’t if you don’t it’s i understand that people wish that didn’t happen but it did happen and and you know who did it it’s your ancestors that did that it’s not something from the outside not some outer magical weird thing called the church that dropped in and cut those links it’s us it’s our ancestors that did that and so the reason why the christian story is the most important is because it’s the one you can live in you can you can actually be in that story it can be your story that’s it man hope that answers that all right so charles snippy says hello jews and mormons share many of the christian scriptures where and why do they go wrong despite having the key to understanding the patterns um i mean i think jews and mormons are very different you know they’re very very different jews have the the what we call the old testament they have the the tanakh uh uh and so they and the torah and they they have those old books and they have their own traditions and from a christian perspective they did not recognize that christ was the messiah they didn’t recognize that um whereas mormons mormons it’s just it’s weirder mormons they they they kind of build on this rediscovery it seemed like they build on the rediscovery of a lot of the apocryphal texts in the 19th century and and then they kind of mix all that together um and they created like another revelation but i don’t know enough about mormonism it just it just seems to me when i when i see it to be a very modern materialistic religion you know this idea that everything that gods are that gods live on other planets and that kind of stuff like i i if there are mormons out there that that tell me that they don’t believe that or that it’s some kind of symbolic language to speak about something else i’d love to talk to you but uh but that seems to be my understanding that it it’s a very modern religion in the sense that it’s actually very materialistic believes that that everything is material and you know i can’t just can’t jive with that it seems like no one today can believe that anymore you can’t believe that things are only material because the material scatters into into quantum flux or whatever it just falls into potentiality um all right okay so jonathan ought for 20 sorry so charles nippe gave five euros and johnson 10 usd charles ought for 20 says like ethiovens and armenians certain ethnic groups of christianity into their identity what do you think a christian a jewish christianity look like since there are some jews today who believe in christ today even in israel i think um i think that syrian christianity was probably like early syrian christianity was probably if you want to see what jewish christianity would look like it would that’s probably what it looked like when you read uh you know even uh the the syrian saints like saint isaac and uh saint effrem you know they they definitely you can see that they definitely have some insight into jewish tradition that some of the greek fathers don’t have and that’s why one of the reasons why uh saint effrem the syrian i think his his hymns on paradise and his hymns in general are so important because they bring within the christian church the the imagistic thinking that that the jews had at the time um some of it you can still find in the fathers but but a lot of it seems to have kind of eroded whereas saint effrem just it just shines you know all right so brad’s pit it that’s questions before five dollars usd how do you stop watching porn wow i don’t know if that’s a five dollar question brad all right so or how do you gain control of the passions also what’s the symbolism of porn and why is it bad um so i talk about you know i’ve talked about this before that the symbolism christianity that symbolism itself is the gathering in of the particulars of something into its unity and the coexistence of the particulars with the one right that is the symbolic process and so the symbolism of sexuality has several elements and there is a let’s say a pleasurable there’s pleasure there’s communion with your spouse there’s the creation of offspring and the family and there’s how all of this is also becomes an image or a way to manifest the union of of the of humanity with god okay so that’s what sexuality is now every time that you start to split those apart every time you take one element you just pull it and you try to keep it on its own that will lead you towards a downfall it’ll lead you towards an addiction it’ll lead you towards being completely subjugated to your passion and so yeah and it can do and if you do it the other way around like if you pull just the practical part of of uh of sexuality and trying to make it just about having kids it’s going to you know when i talk about this the idea that uh sam maximus talked about the right hand sins you start with the right hand sin where you try to control into be self-sufficient and then pride and then here comes the left hand in the wake of that and so if you do that then you see it in québec you see that in the early 20th century for example the priests here they they had something called the revenge of the the revenge of the crib where they thought that if french canadians could have more children then they would outbreed the english and they couch it in also spiritual terms and they force women to have kids every year and the priest would actually name the women at the front of the church when they weren’t having children every year to to shame them into having children and if you do that what happens you know you get a flip you get a break and then it flips to the other side and it becomes you know sexual revolution or whatever and so you need to keep those things those things together that’s what sexuality is for so how do you gain control of the passions how do you stop watching porn you have to pray and you a good way to do it would be to have someone i talked about i talked to you guys about confession like confession is really great because one of the problems with not with a bad habit is that it becomes like this weird pattern that just repeats itself and and if you notice in your own self when you have a bad habit sometimes if you have a massive change in your life you know then it can be an opportunity to get rid of a bad habit because the massive change disrupts these these kind of insipid patterns enough to create what you could call like a new beginning you know and so you if you’re a protestant you know for for all the the time that i’ve criticized the altar call the altar call can do that can help you going up for an altar call uh can be a moment like a cathartic moment where you you create a new beginning and you know and then you can kind of ground yourself on that to start again you know um in in the orthodox church i think that’s what confession is the best use of confession is that every time you go to confession try to see it as a clean slate for to try to kind of to uh to to uh to start yourself again and the second okay so here’s a more practical thing about that is that the problem that you have when you fall into those kinds of sins is you forget yourself you you forget and there’s a there’s a moment there’s a moment where you switch there’s a there’s a moment where you you you could say you lose consciousness actually you kind of lose consciousness and then the the porn addicted version of you takes over right and it’s so strong that you know once you get once you’re on the other side of your sin you know once you’ve eaten the cake once you drank you know once you drank the six pack once you’ve you know whatever it is that your sin is then it’s almost as if you immediately look back at that person who did that and you don’t recognize them because it’s like a demon it’s like a you have like a demon you have a there’s like a an aspect of you which is completely isolated and is taking over and so the way one of the ways to to not have uh to not fall is to remember yourself is to be attentive and to not forget so be attentive to the times if you’re watching porn be attentive to the times that you do that like when is it that i watch porn what what are the what are the things that lead up to that um you know usually there are a few things that will lead up and you kind of always end up in the same place so what are those things identify those things so that you recognize the first things before you fully forget yourself you see right away it’s like oh i don’t know like i don’t know what it is depends on your story like uh it’s like oh am i going to my computer at 11 at night like why am i doing that you know or am i like whatever it is you’re doing it’s like you you know what the steps are so you have to stop yourself before you have to remember yourself um one of the ways um that i’ve kind of gotten rid of bad habits is for example i’ve given myself something i need to do before i indulge in the bad habit so it’s like okay i’m i before i do this before i i fall i have to do something i don’t know what it is like it could be anything it could be you have to you have to write down your name in a book or you it could be anything the idea is to create steps between the moment you fall and the moment that you’re you know the the moments where you still remember yourself to create some intermediary step that where you can break and you can stop the demon from coming in and taking over you know a good way is also to use the jesus prayer that works for a lot of people too is to repeat to repeat uh the jesus prayer uh lord jesus christ son of god have mercy on me a sinner and to repeat that in your mind in order to not forget yourself and to not to not lose your to not to lose consciousness for that moment it takes for you to become that other person um so those are some tricks you can have there’s a lot there’s so many things you can do you can know if you know the places where you are when you indulge in that kind of stuff then you can uh create reminders of yourself for yourself you know you can have something up on the wall you could have your background of your screen being an image of christ you could you could have like there’s all kinds of things you could do in order to to to help you remember and not forget all right hopefully that is good all right so brachir wow brachir on a roll 199 giving me super stickers 50 dollars wow brachir and 199 usd as well thank you a bunch of people giving me stickers wow you guys thanks a lot murky forgotten brachir again again again thank you um so skylar 999 usd i’m having trouble reconciling satan as the enemy versus merely an accuser is it right to say evil satan has no subsistence beyond man’s limitation imitation because beyond man’s imitation of man instead of god in other words who is satan okay i don’t think i totally understand the second part of your sentence but um so so you you can understand you can understand the idea that satan is so you use a different image we say diabolo’s right the the one who who splits apart we say the accuser we say the enemy and all those things are related to each other so you can understand it as you can understand it as something which is outside of you looks at you and sees how you’re how you’re failing how you’re not what you’re supposed to be right so think of it of how you judge your neighbor you know you look at your your mother and you say you know you’re not the right you’re not a good mother right and so when you do that right and so when you do that you’re being satanic you are you know you’re you are so here here’s a good example right okay so christ says you know he has to die peter says you know it’s like no no no right no you’re not going to die no and so what does christ say he said get behind you say just because because peter was saying that’s not what the messiah should be this is what the messiah should be the messiah should be this and so when you when you judge when you accuse that’s that’s what you’re doing right and so satan is the cosmic version of that um and so he accuses us of not being in the image of god but at the same time he also it’s a weird thing because he’s also the seducer he’s also the one who who kind of pulls us away who kind of pulls us who separates us and he pulls us away by on the one hand telling us you know that we should or could be like god on the other hand telling us that we’re not like god that we’re not living up to what we should be so all of those things kind of are related together so that’s as close as i’m going to get in terms of explaining satan to you so i hope that that was i hope that that was useful kind of running out of voice here guys all right so i’ve got a few more i don’t know if i’m gonna get through all these all right we’re almost it’s 1044 man so andrew nelson says for five dollars when you reference 19th century occultism does that include mormonism can you expand on why you think those cults still exist today um i don’t know enough about mormonism to be honest uh i don’t really know enough about it i’m not not honest i’m not a big fan i think that my perception of them is rather negative but i don’t i don’t know enough to talk about it so when i’m talking about 19th century occultism i mean you guys know who i’m talking about you know i kind of have you know i in fast levy and and uh patu and a lot of the french occultists and then some english occultists it’s like i like i said i i don’t agree with them um and but i understand their frustration let’s say their frustration let’s say with christianity but mormonism is really a weird materialism i don’t know i don’t know someone would need to tell me more about mormonism all right so alan you might not know because baltic countries are very small but worship of pagan gods is just as real as going to the church but i don’t know i’d have to see proof of that that’s a very interesting idea what do you think of hinduism what do i think of hinduism uh yeah i like the i like the vedas i like uh there are some like i think that you read advaita vedanta you get some really fascinating insights i don’t agree with everything i think that i think that a lot of the questions that they were asking were were very good questions very interesting questions um and i think that the word the notion of hinduism is a very strange notion because it’s hinduism is like so big so huge um so i guess that’s as close as i’m going to get to answering that question all right guys i think i think we’re done i think we’re done um um so last maybe this is going to be the last one guys okay shot in the dark five usd says are we are are you familiar with kicker guard’s thought and what is your opinion of it oh man how can you ask that question at 10 45 i can’t i can’t answer that yes i am familiar with kicker guard’s thought and i think that um i think that there are some interesting things in there i think um that there are some things which are just really not interesting um let me get back to that some other time because this is it’s like my mind is just becoming mush now hopefully maybe one day i’ll make a video on kicker guard or something i keep saying maybe one day i’ll make a video on this or that so guys thank you for your time everybody i really appreciate this um and like i said youtube is is really playing a number on me and so if you like what i’m doing please share my videos and thank you to everybody who has been supporting me you know the the financial support is really you know it’s one of the reasons why i feel like i i’ve been able to to now put together this um this new blog where everybody’s gonna where other people are going to start to get involved it’s going to be like a training ground for symbolic thought you know um it’s giving me the possibility to uh to do a lot of stuff so thanks again and i’ll see everybody next month and thanks for our moderator as well i think i saw jacob and christian chad and lisa is there as well all my main people and i will see everybody next month all right so bye bye