https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=685eYZBc6A8
All right, everybody, here we are. Here we go. All right, everybody needs to congratulate Jacob, who is one of the moderators and the moderator of the Facebook group and who just had two baby girls adding to his growing clan. And so he said he’s going to be in and out of the chat. And so thanks for coming, Jacob, despite I imagine that you’re drowning in diapers and also in a lack of sleep. So I’m happy to see you in the chat room. Happy to see Christian Chad back in the chat room again as our moderator. He was gone. He wasn’t there last month, so it’s good to see him. Lisa is also there. She’s running the Clips channel. You know, guys, I wanted to really call attention to that. Lisa and Lhasa, I’m not sure I’m pronouncing his name right. Lhasa, they’re running this Clips channel for me. And it’s just been really amazing. They’ve been putting stuff out, you know, every day. I think they’re going to slow down a little bit because they’re just putting out video after video after video, short clips, kind of picking stuff out of the question and answers, picking stuff out of old videos that maybe most people haven’t seen, trying to trying to feature that stuff. So, you know, go and subscribe to that channel because it’s, it’s, they’re really doing a great job. And Lisa is also really hilarious. She put together a few really funny videos that I hope that we’ll see more and more. So, so yeah, so that’s going on. I have a few announcements, another, another few other announcements. Okay, I am going to be in Boston on the 15th of February at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral. I’ll be giving a full day of talks, two talks, plus also we’re going to do a tour of the church and looking at the iconography and everything. There’s a lunch that’s provided. It’s super cheap. I forget how much it is. I think it’s like 10 a month on Patreon. They get to ask questions in advance, but now it’s like there are just too many questions. I can’t, I’m not going to get through all those questions. So here’s the rule. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go through the questions. My first mechanism to sort out the questions is going to be, I’m going to, if you, if people have written two questions, I’m going to pick only one question per person. Then I’m also going to skip the questions that have super long text, you know, elaborating the person’s opinion. Sometimes it can be interesting, but just because for time and everything, I’m going to I’m going to I’m going to avoid those. So Auntie Saint asks me, where’s the bow tie? And the bow tie is, you know, man, there’s something, you know, when you’re somewhere, when in Rome, you can act like the Romans. But when you’re not in Rome, then it’s weird to act. If I were a bow tie around here, it’d be very odd. But but I might wear it again. You know, I got it. I got a lot of positive comments about the bow tie. All right. Because if we don’t start, we’ll never we’ll never end. I’m thinking I’ll probably I’ll probably go for like an hour and a half. Maybe we’ll see how it goes. We’ll see how much energy I can muster. All right. So I’m going to start with the website as usual. All right. So Kenan Cronin asks, I struggle with how much of a difference there is between the level of wealth and comfort we have in our world and Christ’s command to give away our possessions to help the poor and the way the early church seems to behave in acts. How do you handle this? What are your views on charity in relation to Christ’s example? So I think the way to understand it, there are two ways to understand it. One is in understanding it in terms of hierarchy. You know, there still is this idea of giving everything to follow Christ. That’s what a monk does. So monks, you know, they have no possessions. In theory, even the things that they use are not theirs. Their bishop, you know, their their abbot has full control over what objects they can or can’t use. And so they they are dispossessed and they live the life of a poor person. And so that is still there in the Christian church. You still have it. It’s just that the way that it set itself up in order to give place for the world to exist is in a hierarchy. And so if you’re interested in the question, there is a really nice little text from the early church by St. Clement of Rome called Who is the rich person who will be saved? And the basic idea in his text, and I think it’s become the basic trope of Christianity, we see in St. Paul, he talks about that as well. He said St. Paul talks about how he can be rich or poor, like he can live in different circumstances. That is, the idea is not that you have to be poor. You know, the idea of poverty is to divest yourself of your possessions in order to be fully dependent on God, to to be not dependent on these garments of skin that we have around us. But it is possible, maybe harder, but it is also possible for someone who is wealthy to use his wealth generously and to care for those around him and to care for the poor. And that also is part of how everything kind of lays itself out. And so the best way, like I said, to see it is through a hierarchy. And so if you’re not willing to give up everything and live as a, you know, become a monk, then you can at least use what you have to help those around you. All right. So David Flores asks, I just finished listening to La Morte d’Arthur. What is the connection between Lancelot’s skill at arms and his devotion to Guinevere? I’d assumed it was something like purity of spirit manifesting purity of combat prowess. However, his love for her has adulterous undertones. Also video on Gawain and the Green Knight. I think you’ve asked that before there, David. The way that I see the problem of Lancelot, there are a few ways. One is to understand that in fact, his love for Guinevere is his flaw in a way, you know, it is his motivation and there’s something about it, you know, which if it had remained pure there would be something about it which could be good, but because it ends up becoming adultery, then it ends up being his flaw and it also ends up being his demise and participates in the demise of the round table. And is also, you know, the reason why he’s not able to find the grail is because of his adulterous relationship. So it ends up being his thorn to a certain in a certain manner. But there’s also something else going on in that story. The whole the whole question of Lancelot. We also have to understand that Lancelot is French and, you know, there’s also a relationship between Lancelot as this foreign knight who comes from France and then the fact that the king is cuckold. I’m going to make a video on that pretty soon on the idea of, because I’ve seen people ask that in the chat. I see a lot of the, or a lot of the, let’s say, hard right wing people who talk about how Christianity is a cuckold religion and how Joseph is a cuckold and, you know, you see in the popular culture people talking about that quite a bit. And so I think that I’m probably going to make a video about that very soon. Something like is Christianity a cuckold religion? And then we can talk a little bit about that. Maybe I can even use the example of Lancelot in that video to try to show different patterns of cuckolding and what that can mean. All right. So Jesse Blaine, he says, what’s the significance of early Christians using the sign of a fish to identify themselves? So the way that, so he gives his own theory, but I won’t read it. The way that you need to understand fish is you see it in the gospel. If you look at how the fish are described in the gospel, I’ve mentioned this a little bit in a recent talk, I think, or in a recent Q&A. The idea is that you have like potentiality. You know, you have this sea out of which the world comes. So you can imagine it, you know, in the Old Testament, God calls for the, you know, pulls the earth out of the sea. And then basically it’s like creation is being pulled out of the sea. So you see some logos pulling from potentiality so that the world manifests itself. And so that is what the fisherman is ultimately doing. So the fisherman is putting his net into the sea and he’s pulling out the nuggets, the hidden things that can participate in reality. He’s pulling them out, those that are, that can become food for the world, let’s say. And so you can imagine in terms of Christianity that when, let’s say when Christ tells St. Peter that he’s going to become a fisher of men, is that he’s basically taking fish out of the ocean so that it becomes food for God. Or that another way to say it, saying it becomes food for God is odd, but saying that it becomes the body of God. And so that is what we are called to be. We are called to be this food for God in the sense that we are there, we are the potential, we are the possibilities in which God manifests himself. And so if you can imagine it as the sea, as this, let’s say, place of kind of dark potentiality, and then hidden inside are these little shiny things. And these little shiny things are like the spark of the divine that are able to kind be pulled out of the chaos in order to participate in reality. So I hope that makes sense. So the idea of the fish is basically the idea of life and death, right? Of life that is hidden in death, kind of like seeds, you know? And so in the ground there are these seeds that are hidden and that will bring up the tree. And so in the ocean, in this dead thing, in this thing which represents kind of death and chaos, there is food that you can get and bring up and make participate in the world. And so you, as a fish, you know, people who get tattoos of fish or how the early Christians represented themselves as fish, it has to do with that. It has to do with the idea of this life hidden in death. And so it has to do with the resurrection. You know, it ultimately also refers to something like Jonah, who was hidden in the fish, you know, just like St. Peter goes into the ocean and goes into the sea and then he finds a gold piece inside the fish. So this idea of value hidden in potentiality, the fish hidden in the ocean, you know, Jonah hidden in the whale, you know, if you want to refer to another video that I’ve done, let’s say about Christmas, the idea of the hidden gift, you know, the orange hidden in the sock during Christmas season, you know, the hidden gift. So that’s what the fish has to do with. All right. So Lisa asks, Hi Jonathan, can you explain why John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, couldn’t speak until his son’s birth? It is said that it was because he was skeptical of the pregnancy. But what does that have to do with an inability to speak? You could see it really just directly in the sense that, you know, God revealed himself to Zechariah and Zechariah did not believe the vision and so he could not speak, you know, and so you can understand it in terms of just the normal hierarchy to understand that let’s say there’s the logos of God and then we are the little Christians, we are the little, the sons of God and so we manifest the logos in the world. But if we don’t connect, if we’re not connected to the divine logos, then we can’t speak or, you know, we say nonsense or we don’t, you know, we’re not, we’re not, we’re no longer the vehicles for the divine logos to manifest in the world. So I think that the fact that he doubted the logos, he doubted this revelation that he received from God and so therefore it prevented him to speak because that is from where we speak. We ultimately, we speak, our logos, our capacity of mind and of speech and of language is a lower version, is analogous to the divine logos. All right. So SLS 94 asked a few questions. I will just take the first one. What is the symbolism of Joseph going to Egypt, becoming the advisor of the Pharaoh, his family returning to him to live in Egypt and his sons being blessed by Israel as his own? If this mirrors Christ’s death and resurrection, then why is Jesus born to the tribe of Benjamin? Jesus isn’t born to the tribe of Benjamin. Jesus is born to the tribe of Judah. I’m not sure. Sorry, man. I think you might have, you might have, you might not have phrased your question properly. So I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure, I’m not sure how to answer that. Okay. So White Ear 2 asks, when God is refining Gideon’s army, he has Gideon send away the men that cup water in their hands to drink rather than kneeling to drink. Is there a significant symbolic difference between bringing water to your mouth to drink it out of your hands as opposed to kneeling to drink it directly from the source? Okay. So this is, this is what I think. This is really my speculation. And I’ve thought about this quite a bit in terms of understanding why that’s, why it’s because it is a strange detail in the story. I think that it has to do with the idea of, the idea of, of, because in Genesis they separate the waters. There’s the waters above and the water below. And I’ve kind of talked about this, this problem of the, you know, you have the waters above, you have the water below. The water that come from above are like blessing and the water that are below are like potentiality, you could say. And so the idea, so for example, you see that in the symbolism of baptism, you see that there is the, there are these two traditions. The one tradition, which is that baptism is going down into the waters below and that you see that closer in the symbolism of the, the Orthodox baptism and the Protestant baptism. And then you have this idea that baptism is actually being sprinkled from the waters above. And then you see that in Catholic baptism. If you look at early images, it seemed like it was both at the same time. If you look at, if you look at early images, you can see Christ pouring water, John the Baptist pouring water over Christ’s head, but then Christ also being in the water at the same time. And the early baptistries seem to have had, often had the baptistry and then there was like a fountain that would come up. And so if you were in the baptist, the baptistry, you would have a fountain over your head and then you would also be in the waters. And so what’s important is understand that these two different types of waters, one which like a blessing, one which is below like potentiality. So I think that that’s what it has to do with. It has to do with the fact that, that those who lift the water up to their mouth, they are of heaven, you could say, or they, they, you know, they manifest their, their connection to heaven. Whereas those that kneel down and put their face in the water, then they connect their, they are manifesting their relationship to earth. You would say something like that. That’s as good as it gets going to get because it is indeed a strange, a strange, a strange part of the text. All right. So I am done with the website questions. I will move on to subscribe star. Okay. So Nicola asks, you talk a lot about the masculine and feminine. So does Jordan Peterson. What would be your definition of masculine and feminine? How do those terms relate to male and female and how are they different? And so, I mean, in terms of masculine and feminine, male and female, you know, masculine is a broader category because there are things that are masculine and are not, you know, there are things that are masculine, but that are not necessarily male in terms of cosmic, like the cosmic structure, you could say. And there are things that are feminine and are not necessarily female. So I mean, one, a simple example is in language, you know, we have these gender terms, not in English, but in French and many other languages where some things are masculine, some things are feminine. I mean, obviously they’re not male and female. They’re not biological beings, you know, but they are masculine and feminine. You know, so I thought a lot about, and I think I’ve been asked in the question period whether or not there is some meaning in this masculine and feminine words. I think that maybe long, long ago there was, I’m not sure if there still is. It seems like that’s a, if there’s symbolism in there, it seems to have evolved quite a bit, but the potential of the idea that in the identity of certain things, there would, some things are more masculine and some things are more feminine. Now as to what is the relationship between the two, we have to go back again in the story of Genesis and understand this separation of heaven and earth as this existence or this first reality of heaven and earth as the primal duality, as the yin and the yang, as the active and passive, as the, you know, the, you could call it the question and the answer in terms of the feminine being questioned, the male being answered. You could have logos, tropos. So you really do have to understand it as the primordial opposite. Now the problem is that I’m not going to be able to give you a full definition of what masculine and feminine is because it is the very pattern of reality. It underlies all our opposites. So you could say it that way, that the primordial opposite underlies all our opposites. And so you can’t define it. You can just point to it and give analogies of it so that you can understand it. And so you can, so a good way to understand it would be to understand, look at traditional culture, the gender roles that would exist in a traditional culture will show you what masculine and feminine is and what the patterns of these behaviors are, how they are complementary, how they are opposite. And then ultimately that can help you understand the primordial opposition, the primordial opposite, let’s say the first opposite, which is beyond all, it’s actually beyond all description. So I hope this helps. It’s hard because it’s hard to define these things. We always end up talking around them. But some of the examples that I gave I think are good enough to get you started on that question. Alright, so XRD. Hi Jonathan, what’s the significance behind the Bible’s prohibition against divination? Is it seen as an intrusion on God’s realm or is there more to it? The relationship in the Bible between, the relationship in the Bible to divination is actually more ambiguous than you would think. It is actually not at all a straightforward thing. I mentioned this in a recent video. The ephod, the ephod, I don’t know how you pronounce it, was this cloth that the priests wore but then also seems to have existed in other circumstances where there were 12 stones on the cloth and it seems like those 12 stones might have been used in a way, maybe they were thrown, maybe they were, who knows how they were used, and then they were objects of divination. So you could read the will of God in the stones. For example, in the Bible when it says something like, and God said this, God said that, God said this, it’s most probably a best way to understand it is through some form of divination. That is that the priests cast lots using these stones and they had a sacred language of reading the stones and they could understand what the will of God was. But why is divination frowned upon and why is it dangerous? I think that the problem of divination is that it is usually motivated by something like what you said. It’s usually motivated by our desire to control the future, by our desire to control events, have an insight which is related to the world. That is, it’s almost like you want God’s insight for the world rather than getting, let’s say, entering into the life of God himself. It’s like you want to get some of that higher insight in order just to understand the patterns. But it’s not, I’ll be totally honest with you, divination is not completely frowned upon even in the New Testament. There’s the story of the apostles and when Stephen dies, then they want to, sorry, not when Stephen dies, sorry, when they want to replace Judas, they need to find the 12 apostles and they end up whittling it down and finally they cast lots in order to decide. That casting lots is a form of divination. In the Orthodox Church, even until today, I was told that this is the similar process can happen, that let’s say a synod of bishops will get together and try to choose a metropolitan or someone who is above the bishops, who would be like the head bishop for those who don’t know that language. The way they do it would be to try to find it, to try to discern the will of God and to pray to be able to find who is the right one. But if they can’t agree, then ultimately they will also cast lots and that casting of lots is a form of divination. So obviously the idea of going to fortune teller, all that stuff is definitely frowned because it is this desire, it’s a desire which is turned towards the material world, trying to master the future, master the material world and it can be very dangerous for you, very dangerous for your soul to want to do that and to use spiritual insight just in order to gain power over the world. So I think that’s probably the best reason why divination, that I think why divination is bad. So Julie Payne asks, Jonathan, I’ve been thinking about the particular phrase in the Lord’s Prayer that mentions earth and heaven. In light of the vastness of the symbolism of heaven and earth, I’m wondering what are your thoughts on that part of the prayer? Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. I think that this is really like the key to reality. I mean it really is the key to understanding the purpose of creation, the purpose of the incarnation, that that’s what it’s about. The purpose of everything is so that we become reflections, we become vessels for the divine to shine in the world, that we become let’s say translucent vessels of light. So that’s what it is. So when we talk about the idea, so you can imagine kingdom as, so you have a king at the top and then you have the kingdom. And the kingdom, it’s like you imagine like a pyramid or like a mountain, the king above and then you have the kingdom below. So what you want is you want for the will of the king to reach all the way down into the kingdom so that the kingdom is the kingdom, right? The kingdom is the reign of the king, it’s nothing else. It is the extent to which the king reigns. And so you can understand that the notion of kingdom in terms of anything, right? In terms of any organization, in terms of any identity that there is an identity, there’s a principle and then there’s the, let’s say the rule of that principle on reality. And so the idea of Christianity and the idea as opposed to something like let’s say the decadent aspects of Platonism or even of Gnosticism is that we don’t believe that there’s an opposition ultimately. Like we don’t believe that it’s only that which is above, which is good. It’s only the ideas, it’s only the divine principles, it’s only the higher things which and the lower things are dirty and bad and they’re a kind of degradation of reality. Rather, we believe that it’s above, on earth as it is in heaven, that the divine logos fills the world completely and that even the lowest aspects of reality can be saved. And that’s why Christ goes down into death. He goes all the way down into the bottom of death to gather everything up to God and that is this kingdom which reaches to the ends of the earth, which reaches to the end of reality, which fills up the world. And so it’s really important to understand that because there still is in popular thinking this idea that somehow Christianity is anti-manifestation, that Christianity hates the world, hates the body, all of these things and this is of course not at all true. It don’t things only have to be in the right order and the body has in order for the body to be good it has to become a kingdom. All right. So Christian Chad, our moderator says, Hi Jonathan, what do you think Christianity has to say about erotic love? I feel like Christianity does not have a coherent narrative to encompass it. So I will admit this might just be a Catholic stereotype. So one of the things, one of the difficulties in this whole problem of erotic love is that you know, Christianity has been run by monks, which is very good. This is what it’s supposed to be. And so what happens in patristic literature is that we see that the erotic imagery that the Old Testament, for example, Song of Songs, for example, even in the Christian story of God, of the bridegroom and the bride, that all this imagery becomes this image, becomes symbolic for the relationship of God to the soul. And so the lover is God and the lovee, the woman is the human person, is the human soul or is the church. And so we have this relationship of this erotic relationship between God and the person. And if you read in the Church Fathers, it really is, and in the mystics, there is often a use of sexual imagery, the rapture, this kind of rapturous entry into God is described as in sexual categories and erotic categories. Now, what you’ll find in the Church Fathers sometimes is like a warning, which is that the Song of Songs is this relationship of God to the soul and to be careful not to apply it too much to actual erotic love. But you can’t avoid it. You just can’t, you can’t avoid it because if you don’t have that reference, if you don’t have the reference of erotic love, then you can’t sublimate it into the relationship between God and the soul. You have to maintain the reference because then what are you talking about? It doesn’t mean anything anymore. So I think the way that I see it is that I think that that reality of understanding, let’s say the Song of Songs as this poem of the relationship between God and the human soul as this erotic relationship and this kind of this passionate giving up into the other. I think that then that can actually come back down and also participate in a normal marriage relationship. You know, of course, it cannot be coming exclusively, but it’s like having been filled with this spiritual reality, I think that it can then come back down and participate in the life of a couple. Understanding like I’ve talked a bit about before in terms of sexuality, understanding that all the logi have to come together and so that there is no place in Christianity, at least not in traditional Christianity, there is no place for a kind of eroticism which does not include fruitfulness. You cannot remove the reproductive purpose of sexuality because then you’re missing an important aspect of reality. So all of these things kind of have to come together. And I think that, you know, in the let’s say in the early modern times there has been, especially in Catholic circles, I don’t know in Orthodox circles because I grew up in a Catholic history, let’s say that there was an excess in trying to reduce sexuality to reproduction, you know, and so the Catholic Church kind of hounded people and tried to reduce sexuality to reproduction and I think that that is probably honestly one of the reasons why it flipped the other way, this excess because there is an erotic aspect to sexuality. If you try to deny it, it’s going to build up and it’s going to explode into the kind of crazy world we are now. And so I think balance as usual is the best way to go about it. That’s my… All right, so Christian Chad, because he’s Christian Chad, he gets two questions. Nobody else. All right, so Christian Chad also asks, Hi Jonathan, you’ve mentioned postmodernism many times on this channel. What is it Christians and traditionalists can take from postmodernism without destroying hierarchies and categories? And I know, I think that postmodernism is very useful. I think it’s useful in destroying the certainty of modernism. It’s useful in destroying the totalizing tendency of the enlightenment and of reason. It accurately points to the limits of the modern system and this kind of modern desire to encompass everything in discourse. And so it points to the cracks in discourse. It points to the place where discourse falls apart. And so the only problem with it is that it does it in a manner which is subversive and doesn’t embrace hierarchy. And I think that if you take… Jacques Derrida would roll in his grave, but it’s like Jacques Derrida with hierarchy ends up with something not bad. Although he would think I’m crazy to say that. But I think it’s always the proper understanding of hierarchy is that we always understand hierarchy from top down, but we can also understand hierarchy from the bottom up. And that’s what I’ve been trying to show people is that the coming together, the communion of the saints also produces a hierarchy. And that hierarchy can be seen as the head and the body from above down, but it can also see as the body gathering manifesting the head above. So to me, hierarchy is the solution to how to use postmodernism in a way that is not as destructive. All right. So Michael… I think we already had a question by… No, Michael Erickson asks, I’m currently reading through Exodus, and I’m wondering about the symbolism of the staff that Aaron uses in Exodus 7, 10. Can you see it as an example of how God flips things around so that the bad becomes a symbol for good, et cetera? And is it connected to the snake in the garden? Or am I reading too much in it? No, it’s definitely… I mean, if you read that story and you don’t see that the staff turning into a snake is not related to the snake in the garden, I mean, that would be crazy. It is obviously related to the snake in the garden. And so you have to understand this idea. So imagine it like this. I’ve talked about the right hand, the left hand. I’m not going to go into it too much, but if you haven’t seen my recent video on… What is it called? Iconography as the pattern of reality where I talk about the left and the right hand. Also, this recent patron only video, I talked about this as well. So there’s the idea of solidity and, let’s say, falling apart or breaking down. So solidity, you hold on to something. So let’s say you grab something and you make it real, grabbing onto something or pointing at something. You gather it together. You can even think about it in terms of just ideas. It’s like I grasp that idea. I grasp it. When you grasp something, it comes together. It solidifies. It becomes something solid. It acts vertically. And then when you let go of something, then it fragments and it breaks down. When you abandon, when you give up, when you… All of this other type of imagery, that’s what gives the snake. That’s what gives the lack of solidity, the shifting, the shifting left and right. Moving from one side to the other without any direct path. And so imagine you have a straight path, a crooked path, you have all this imagery. And so that’s what it’s referring to. In the garden, that’s what happens. Adam and Eve at the top of the garden, they give in to opposites. And as they give in to the opposites, then they break down with the snake down into the thorns. But that’s just the pattern of reality. It’s not good or bad. It can also be used for good. Sometimes you let go and then the snake can be used as a monster to come and eat your enemy. So it just depends. It just depends. In that story, it shows the two possibilities of grasping and solidifying, letting go and having things become, let’s say, chaotic potential, something like that. So hopefully that wasn’t too abstract. But I think for those of you that have watched several of my videos, you will understand that. All right, guys. So I am going to… So there are more questions from other people. Like I said, I’m just going to focus. I’m going to try to have one question for everybody because I’ve got a lot more questions to go. So here goes for Patreon. All right, so in Patreon, I will start with Josiah McGarvey asks, is it common among Orthodox, Christian, and Catholics to share the symbolic understanding and worldview that people like you and your brother have? I know the symbolic worldview is totally foreign to evangelicals. It’s not totally foreign to evangelicals. There are some exceptions. I think there are some exceptions of people who… I’ve seen some writings of people who seem to just have this intuitive grasp of the symbolism. I think that sadly what happens is that it never ends up being grounded, never finds ground in reality. It ends up being more like these visions that they have. And the visions are actually extremely well-patterned and have very powerful structure. It’s just that it doesn’t land in terms of… So that person could maybe have extremely powerful intuition and have this whole structure of the garden and everything in their vision. But then they go back to church and then there’s none of that in the church. Right. So I think that this is the way that I could see it. I think that the modernism has done a serious job on Christianity, all types of Christianity, the Orthodox and the Catholics as well. My experience is that in the Orthodox Church, I have found the most people, contemporary people, contemporary authors who agree with what I’m saying and understand that Christianity is talking about this stuff. You see people like Father Schmemann, you see people like Vladimir Lossky, you see theologians like Nellis, all these contemporary Orthodox theologians, they have this symbolic worldview. Now, I don’t think that they felt the need to dissect it and explain it the way that Matsu and I are doing. The reason why we feel the need to do that is because we see that the disease is so deep that there needs to be a radical cure. And so explaining it is a dangerous thing. We’re not unaware of the danger of explaining the symbolism because you can mistake explaining symbolism with living it. But at this point, I think a lot of things are so far gone that we have to explain it. But a good way to understand it is that I have found nothing but acceptance in the hierarchy of my church for the things I’m saying. And I’m being invited to speak at different events. And this summer will be the second time that I’m actually invited to speak at the general assemblies of the church with the priest and the bishop and everything. So I think that you’re going to find it at different levels depending on your circumstance. All right. So Agars Mames asks, hey, Jonathan, could you elaborate on the symbolic idea of business? There seems to be a great difference between being a master and being a master. Is there a difference between being a master of a particular trade and running a business that is trying to oversee all the processes? Are there any dangers in the idea of business? Yes, for sure. There are dangers in the idea of business. If you understand, you have to understand that, for example, in the middle ages, the businessman and the artisan were not seen in the same class. In traditional societies, business is always frowned upon. I’m sorry to say that. It’s not frowned upon, but it is seen as something which is a little dangerous for your soul in the sense of a craftsman is perfecting a craft and is kind of living this thing. Whereas a businessman is often seen in the kind of traditional way of seeing things as this kind of middleman who buys and sells and is actually just dealing in money, really. So it does have a different connotation. But I think that the businessman or the merchant also has a function in the grand scheme of things. I think that they also have a role to play and that they also have a cosmic role, let’s say. It has to do with the capacity to gather possibilities, the capacity to see opportunities, the capacity to also a little bit of the trickster is in the idea of the merchant somewhat. There’s a little bit of the idea of the trickster in there, being crafty in that sense, in that sense, making a deal, getting the best of what’s there. That can be negative or positive. It can also be positive. I think that all these aspects of the business person is really quite important. You can see it in scripture. You can see people who have that capacity. You have this story of Jacob, obviously, who works for his brother-in-law, Laban, and is able to get a pretty good deal by doing certain maneuvers. He’s able to then get rich, let’s say. In the Bible, also, the idea of becoming rich, it also has to do with living in the foreign land. You get your riches from Egypt. You get your riches from dealing with the outside. That can also be something that is tricky. AJ Daltorio asks, hey, Jonathan, do you think the Orthodox Church lets in enough of the new? I think that it’s a discussion that is constantly happening. I think one of the problems that we have right now is that the world is accelerating at such a pace that it might seem that, let’s say, something like Orthodoxy is just completely static. But that is not the case. Orthodoxy, all traditional worlds are dynamic. Not that they change to change. That is stupid. The idea that you should let in something new because it’s new is stupid. It’s complete nonsense. It is the delusion of the modern world to think that because something is new, then it has some value. It doesn’t. Things have value or they don’t. If something new appears, that novelty will be measured against the tradition. If it can be integrated and if it can add something, then it will be integrated. You can see the Orthodox tradition as this accumulative process because it’s not like all the hymns of the church were written in the 4th century. That’s absurd. All the hagiography was not written right away. All the iconography programs, all the small fee traditions slowly accumulated in the church and were added and were pruned and were removed. But it’s not about the new in the sense of the new having any value. More something appears which is recognized by the tradition as having value and then will slowly be integrated into the tradition. It ends up being a slow organic process. One of the things that I like about the Orthodox church is that hopefully, although there are signs that they might cave at some point, hopefully they’re not going to be bullied by the modern world and changing for change. Of letting in things that are new just because they’re new. Think about it. Think about that idea. Think about the idea that just because something is new that it has value. It is patently absurd. It is completely crazy. It makes no sense. Sorry. Sorry AJ. They kind of get on you like that there. Okay, here we go. So Norm Grande asked, hey Jonathan, in your conversation with Benjamin Boyce you said, your frame by which you interpret the world is lacking. You need something which is more connective and connects the different layers of reality together. What are the different layers of reality and do they connect through a unity multiplicity dichotomy? Yes. Well, they connect through, they connect through, yes, exactly. You can understand the layers of reality as let’s say the lower parts become one and they manifest the higher part of reality. But then that higher part of reality can also become one with another aspect which is higher. A simple way to understand it is of course in terms of a society. You have you, let’s say you have your passions inside you that are all multiple and then they come into one and then you manifest the person and then that person is in a family and that family comes into one, manifest the family. Those families are one and then multiple and all those families come into one and they manifest a higher level which could be the city. That city comes up, manifests something higher which could be the state and keep going until you get to humanity itself, to man with a capital M. That is what I mean by levels of reality. That’s not the only hierarchy that exists. There are multiple hierarchies that have multiple and indefinite levels actually. But that’s a way to kind of understand it. A way to know if something is true or if something is real is that you can, if you see a pattern, then you can try to find examples that are on a reality above you and a reality above your interpretation or your intuition or reality that is below or find a pattern in which the same, let’s say a structure in which the same pattern is appearing at different levels. That’s one of the ways to know if something is true or if it’s just your illusion. All right. So Kevin Patterson says, how can we navigate the ideas of eschatology from both within the church and time prophecies, second advent and from the secular world, environmental collapse, without falling prey to alarmist fear mongers, nihilistic defeatism or all encompassing systems? This is where I think that really the idea of your life, of your own passions, of your own, your own thing, this is where it comes into play. This is where I do agree with Jordan Peterson completely that change yourself, work on yourself first, and that will prevent you from falling into alarmism because it doesn’t matter. If the world is going to end next week, the Christ would not have said, the Christ said, spoke as if the world was going to end next week. Right? When Christ was talking about the end times, he was saying like, it’s next week, guys. It’s going to, it’s next week. And a good way to say it, it’s still say it that way. It’s like, it’s happening right now. It’s next week, guys. It’s the end, the end. So live your life as if it’s the end. Right? Live your life as if you’re going to die tomorrow. That’s where, that’s where that’s the purpose of eschatology. The purpose of eschatology is so that you participate in reality, you participate in your life, that you love your neighbor, that you worship God, that you take this seriously. And so yes, it is useful. It can be useful to recognize the sign of the times, mostly so that we’re not seduced by the whore of Babylon or that we’re not seduced by the beast. You know, when those things manifest themselves around us. But in the end, it’s all about you. It’s all about you becoming a better person. That’s always the, that’s always the answer. So when you see people who, who, when you see, and you see it a lot, you see people who are completely taken up by eschatology, you know, it’s like the people who, and I made a few videos about this, like people who want to, who are obsessed with like secret societies and obsessed with the Illuminati and with all these, these things and are like, are spending hours and hours, you know, finding this Luciferian message in this or that media or this or that thing. It’s like, dude, seriously, I mean, it’s good to understand the basic pattern of it. And it’s good to point to it. But at some point, like your obsession to do that, it’s, it’s disturbing because that’s not what we should be focusing on ultimately. Right. So that’s how I feel about that kind of stuff. I feel like people who focus too much on eschatology are, are probably doing it as a way to make, to put the demon outside, right. To make the bad guys something out there that I have to fight and that I don’t have to look back inside and find those demons that are affecting me. All right. So JM asks, Hi, Jonathan, can you explain the symbolism of the snake in Orthodox art, especially in regards to the Bishop’s Crozier and to the icons that depict Christ crucified as having snake-like qualities? I know that healing by snake has precedent precedent in the story of Moses, but this imagery still makes me quite uncomfortable. Well, look, I’m not going to answer that right now, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to point you to an article that I wrote, which is quite long. It’s called the Serpents of Orthodoxy. You can look it up. It’s on the Orthodox arts journal. And there I go quite deep into the symbolism of the serpent. Why Christ looks like a serpent on the cross? Why there’s a snake on the top of the Crozier? How it relates to the bronze serpent, how it relates to the snake in the garden and the snake that appears in the icon of the last judgment. All of that, I deal with all of it. So check it out. All right. Jeremy Morgan asks, all right, he gives me a suggestion for a future video. Sorry, I should read this a little bit. Ryan Pinkham asks, Can you explain the symbolism of tongues? I’m Catholic and there’s a charismatic movement in my parish that troubles me, but I don’t know enough about it to decide if it’s completely heretical. I watched a doc about a monk on Monathos that could speak to people that didn’t speak the same language. That seems correct to me. Gibberish, not so much. Thanks. Yes. Yes, I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you, obviously. You know, you can see there are two kind of versions of the symbolism of tongues. You see it in Acts where this is the one that you saw in Monathos, which seems to be actually the one that reveals the mystery of the incarnation much more, which is the idea of people who have the gift of speaking in languages that they don’t know, or they have the gift of speaking and other people understand them despite the fact that it’s not their language. That seems to be what Christianity is about. It seems to be that Christianity is the thing which can, not a universalism in the sense of swallowing all the particulars into itself, kind of sucking them up and just becoming one thing, but rather that it can reach into other languages and that it has the capacity to be translated into all the different cultures and have its own, you know, have each culture become a member of the body in that sense, so without negating multiplicity. So that seems to be far more in tune with what we see in Acts, but there is also in Scripture the idea of speaking the tongues of angels, and you see that in St. Paul, the description of when he talks about how the people who speak tongues should have someone to interpret or else, you know, they’re doing it in vain or whatever, and this is really interesting because this is where you see, and I’ve talked about this, the problem of the extremes. You know, when I talk about the idea of the fool or the clown and I talk about how, you know, the idea of, let’s say, the crown of thorns with thorns as the fall, this notion that the periphery is like a circle which goes lower and higher than what’s in the middle, right? It’s kind of like this, it’s like the crown above is also the horns of the animal, this death, right? And so it’s the same word, it’s the same thing. So this is, I think, seems to be an example of where there really is this confusion where the language of angels, which should be the highest language, ends up being flipping, not flipping, but ends up becoming, appearing as this confused gibberish, this tower of babble gibberish, and the idea that people could get into this gibberish, this kind of tower of babble gibberish, and somehow think that this is like this divine revelation is absolute nonsense, right? It’s absolute nonsense. It contradicts everything about how the world is made. It’s completely insane to think that this would somehow, you know, that now you also have to be careful, you also have to be careful. The problem is that if, it would not be completely unfathomable to imagine that someone could appear to be saying things that are gibberish, but then ultimately they would be manifesting the highest pattern. But I think that this is kind of like when I talk about the holy fool. Now the problem is that because our world is so level, we don’t understand hierarchies, then we confuse the regular fool with the holy fool. We think that the fool is always a holy fool. The fool is not always a holy fool. And most of the time, 99% of the time, gibberish is gibberish. And in those churches, I am pretty sure that gibberish is gibberish because these charismatic churches that split every other two years and that, you know, that they’re constantly breaking up and they have these contradictory prophecies and all this stuff is just, so the tongues are just another sign of this absolute fragmentation of these non-denominational churches that are all over the place and that are all, you know, saying different things and having all these different visions and all this stuff. So it’s like the tongues are just an example of that. But like I said, if you saw someone speaking the highest patterns of reality and you didn’t have access to them, they might look like gibberish. And I’ll give you an example and again, I don’t want to bring it back on me. This is not, I’m not saying I speak in tongues, but there are some videos that have gotten more views, let’s say. And those videos, when they kind of reach into the algorithm of YouTube, and especially if it’s a video where I’m talking to you guys, where I’m talking to the people who follow my videos, who have developed this symbolic structure, this symbolic language, they hear me talk about symbolism and you can see in the comments are like blah, blah, blah, gibberish, gibberish, gibberish. They think that I’m spouting absolute gibberish. Because they don’t see the pattern, then when I speak the pattern and I talk about these analogies, they just see nonsense. And so we have to be careful too because the highest pattern for those who don’t understand them might look like gibberish. Not that they are, they’re not. They’re the very opposite of gibberish. Hope that makes sense. I feel like I’ve confused you guys with that answer. Well, we’ll see. Okay. Okay, so some people say that we need to act as if God exists, that we need to take the wisdom of religion, but that we can lose the belief in God. I find this presumptuous, much like how science tries to account for the margins as God is first and foremost a mystery. What do you think about the idea that the belief in God is itself an allowing for the margins? I’m not sure that this has to do with the margins, but I can answer that idea that even Jordan, my friend, he says that. He says that he acts as if God exists. This is how I’ve been thinking about this actually quite a bit. And I think that my answer to that is that I would say, yeah, I would say you should act as if God exists. Even if you struggle to believe in God, you should start by acting as if God exists. But the problem is that acting as if God exists does not first and foremost imply morality. It doesn’t first and foremost imply a code of behavior. It first and foremost implies worship. And so I would say that if you struggle, like if you’re struggling with faith and you can’t get yourself to believe in God, I would say, yeah, act as if God exists. Worship. And you’re going to see what’s going to happen. You’re going to see what’s going to happen. And you see that in the Church Fathers. They actually talk about that. They talk about the monk who is dried up and his faith is dry and he can’t get himself to engage existentially with God. And they tell those monks to sing the Psalms, sing the Psalms out loud. And that’s what the Psalms are. The Psalms are just worship. It’s this recognizing of that which is higher, the celebration of that which is above you. And I think that if people actually did that, instead of just jumping to morality, I think that we’d have surprises in terms of what would happen to them. And they might find faith in a surprising moment. So Neil deGrade asks, I always have too many questions to narrow down to what I want to ask. How about this instead? What new thoughts are you having or what theory or concept have you been wrestling with of late? Well, I told you a little bit. I’ve been thinking about, I always want to try to take on the hardest reality. I always want to take on the thing that I feel like atheists or secularists have kind of brandished and are using to make fun of Christianity or using to end that a lot of Christians will kind of tiptoe around or shy around and like, no, I want to take that on. So the idea of talking about what it means to be a cuckold and what that type of symbolism could suggest, that’s actually what I’ve been thinking about just in the past week or so as I’m getting ready to make that video. So I mean, you probably understand, like when I make a video, I just don’t turn on the camera. Even though now I improvise, I don’t just turn on the camera and start talking. I usually have been thinking about it for months, sometimes years, at the least weeks that I’ve been thinking about it, mulling it over, trying to structure my ideas so that when I do sit in front of the camera and speak, then it comes out in a way that is as clear as possible. Let’s just see where we are here. All right, we’re not so bad. We’re not so bad. We’re not so bad. All right, okay. So Will Dickey asks, can you elaborate on the role of freethinking and imagination in Christianity? As someone raised secular, it took a bit of rebelling against the material world view to find mysticism of Christianity. Now that I’ve found a center in the church, I am practicing letting my freethinking mind die in order to acquire the mind of Christ. But the use of my radical intellect seemed necessary for the escape from the modern material Egypt, and it’s not something that is easy to let go of. I have found that my imagination is much better at seeing the patterns of the world, and I think I’m much better at seeing the patterns of Christianity inside the symbols and rituals of the modern world. This seems like a healthy synthesis of obedience and imaginations. Thanks for all you do. Yeah, I think that we need to understand freethinking differently. We need to understand freedom differently in general. Freedom is really misunderstood in the world. The idea is that if you submit, if you find the mind of Christ, you will become the freest thinker. Free in the sense of not bound by the things around you, not bound by the things below, not bound by your own passions, by your own, or just by the rules of reality. It’s like when you acquire the mind of Christ, and all of a sudden you end up, in a way, standing above the rules, and then you see the reason for the rules, and so you end up following the rules. You do it in freedom because you actually see the reasons for the rules. The rules aren’t something outside of you that are imposing themselves on you and making you suffer because you feel like it’s this outer thing that is imposing itself on you. It’s rather become something that comes from within you because as you ascend and you acquire the mind of Christ, you notice how these things make sense. You are free in your submission to them because you’re not actually submitted to them. You’re actually just manifesting them. You’re engaging in them. You’re entering into them. I hope that makes sense. The idea that you would apply the things, the insights that you’ve had of Christ to the modern world is great. I think everybody needs to keep doing that because the fact that people haven’t been able to do that is one of the reasons why Christianity has been thrown out because people at some point thought it just wasn’t talking about anything. It’s just like, what is this referring to? Justin Seligman asked, hi Jonathan, in your November Q&A you mentioned William of Ockham in the 14th century as a reason for the disintegration of the sacramental Christian worldview. Do you trace his radical nominalism onto the reformers, especially Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer? And if so, do any of the Protestant traditions have the capacity of recovering that sacramental view of reality today? Thank you for all your work. Yes, I do. Of course, Luther was a nominalist. Luther was an Ockhamist. It’s something that we cannot deny. And it is clear that the way that he understood God as this arbitrary being came straight from Ockham. There are many things about Luther, which obviously he took from Ockham in that tradition. And so I do think that it’s there in Protestantism. But it’s like anything. It’s always a hierarchy. There’s always a hierarchy. So I think that everybody can participate to a certain extent in the real sacramentality of reality. What did I just say? The real sacramentality of reality. Just participate in the sacramentality of reality. But it’s just on a hierarchy. I will not lie. I’ve said it several times before. I do believe that the Orthodox tradition is the Christian tradition that has stayed closest to the patterns that has stayed closest to the mind of the fathers, to the mind of Christ. But I am not one of those that thinks that there’s nothing below. Because that doesn’t seem like that’s the Orthodox way anyway. It all participates in God to a certain extent. And so it’s just a hierarchy. And so I think that even in Protestantism, there’s a hierarchy. There are different levels. There are some churches which are further from truly participating in the fullness of the patterns. And there are some which are on the margins and juggling and playing circus. And so it just all depends. All right. So here Kay asks three questions. Let me just choose one of the three. All right. Here’s a good one. All right. So Kay says, I find it hard to interpret the biblical text without providing reasons for events from other narratives within the text. I do this with a lot when thinking of Cain and Abel because of the little information given. Did Abel in some way steal Cain’s birthright? Like Jacob with Esau. Abel’s blood crying out from the ground. Joseph calling out to his father from Egypt. Is this thought process wrong? No. Kay, this thought process is not wrong. You are right on track. This is the way to do it. You have to understand the other stories. Let’s say you have the story of Genesis as kind of everything gathered into the seed. Even right there in the first days of creation, you have the whole thing kind of packed into a very, very spiritual way of saying it. And then it unfolds in all the other stories. And so what happens is in the later stories, you find examples which manifest the patterns more explicitly that have more meat to it. And then that can then give you insight in understanding the earlier patterns if you didn’t have the capacity to perceive all the implications of the early patterns. And so you can understand it that way. It’s like in the early stories, everything is all the implicit associations are gathered in. And then those implicit associations become explicit as all the other stories appear. And so it can help you understand the implicit in the first stories. And so your example is a great example. You are right to see that there’s a relationship between Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau. Jacob tries to kill Esau. Sorry, Esau tries to kill Jacob just like Cain killed Abel. And now the idea that did, so you have to understand that it’s the same, but it’s not the same. And so you can understand that Cain and Abel have this, Cain and Abel show the pattern and then Jacob and Esau show it in a specific angle, which is this idea that the reason why, let’s say Jacob supplanted Esau was by stealing his birthright. And so in a way there’s something negative about that. But whereas in the story at the beginning, the reason why Abel is chosen is because his sacrifice was accepted by God. And so what it helps you to see is that, like I always tell you guys, the patterns aren’t moral. And so you find the same pattern sometimes in which the terms, one of the terms is seen as more negative and the same pattern can appear where one of the same term is seen as more positive. And so it just depends on the story. And so when you, seeing that in a way they’re related, but they’re not exactly the same, can help you to kind of click and see the pattern, which is above it, to see the pattern by which all those stories are kind of showing themselves. So I hope this, but I would say you’re on a good track because both of those examples in terms of Joseph calling from Egypt and Abel’s blood calling from the ground is perfect because that’s exactly, Egypt represents the ground. Egypt also represents the ground. All right. So Simon Laberge says in Romans 13, Paul says that we should submit to our rulers and pay our taxes because all authority comes from God. One of my friend interprets that passage as being against democracy and pro-monarchy. Democratically elected leaders are being put in position of power by the plebs, contrary to monarchs that derive their right to rule from God. That interpretation, democracy could be seen as an ongoing revolt against God’s will. Symbolically could be said that the body refuses to submit to the head. Would you agree with that reading? If not, why? I agree to it to a certain extent. I’m not a big fan of the democratic idea. There often is a kind of democracy. It just often doesn’t go all the way down. Let’s say that the king often will end up being kind of chosen by the aristocracy, you know, or recognized by the aristocracy. So you can understand that the election as a recognizing of something which is already true, right? You could understand it that way. So you have the aristocrats recognize who is going to be the king because of some prowess, because that person was able to lead the people in battle or whatever reason that a king ends up getting chosen. And so you could see it that way. You could see it that way even for an election. I think that even though the democratic process, this idea of cycling through leaders every four years and the idea that the people have the power, I think is indeed what you said. It is a revolt thinking. It is revolutionary thinking. But nonetheless, I still believe that even though that’s what it is, this recognition, this legitimizing principle, even though I think it’s lacking in terms of its ontological strength, let’s say, is nonetheless the one we have. And so I think we still have to submit to our leaders. I think that in a democracy, you still have to submit to your leaders, even though the democratic process of these elections and this idea that people have the power and all these things is somewhat misleading. That’s the legitimizing process by which our society chooses their leaders for now. And so pay your taxes and submit to your leaders because they’re still chosen by God. Sorry to tell you, even though they’re elected, they’re still chosen by God. You can’t avoid it. It doesn’t mean that they won’t cause scandal. It doesn’t mean that they won’t bring the world to their ruin. But God knows that the world is going to its ruin. And that’s part of the pattern. All right. Oliver Erickson asks, why do the cherubim have so many wings and faces? And why is one guarding the Garden of Eden? I mean, I’m going to make a video about that for sure. The cherub is really like a sphinx. The cherub is really something like a hybrid. It’s something like a monster. It has different heads of different animals. Sometimes it has different body parts of different animals. It’s described differently in different parts of scripture. And it’s guarding the Garden of Eden because it’s on the edge. It’s like a gargoyle. It’s on the outside and it’s guarding the inside. So you can understand that at every transition, there’s a monster. The transition of the different even… So you have the transition from the outside to the inside, but there are different insides. And so you can have a cherub at the Gate of Eden. Then you can have a cherub on the veil of the Holy of Holies because all of these are transitions from insides to outsides. All of these are these buffer zones between two distinct levels of the hierarchy. And in those buffer zones, that’s where the monsters are hiding. And so I often tell you that the monsters are hiding on the edge of the world. And they are, but they also are hiding at every level where there’s a distinction in the hierarchy. So they’re at the edge of every world, not just the whole world, but every smaller world also has monsters on its edge. And so that’s why in the image of the garden, you have a cherub on the edge of the garden because that’s the edge. That’s what the edge is. The edge is this hybrid creature that guards the transition. And so you can understand the garden, you can understand the cherub and the sword, the flaming sword as two opposites on the edge of the world. So on the edge of the world, you have two things. On the edge of the world, you have mixture and you have a cutoff. You have the place where it gets cut off. So in between identities, there’s a buffer, there’s a place where identities have a kind of mixing, but then there’s also a place where it gets chopped off. And it’s like, that’s it, that’s the end, no more. And so you can understand, so you can see in modernity, you have the two extremes that are manifesting themselves. You have the cherub, which is mixture, crazy mixture and confusion. And then you also have the flaming sword, which is absolute identity, absolute purity. Those two are modern and those two are like an image of the end, as this type of manifestation, as the cherub and the flaming sword become more and more pronounced, you would say. We can see we’re going towards a bigger end or a bigger edge of the world. So I hope that makes sense. So you can imagine, like if you can imagine the cherub with a flaming sword, like a cherub holding a flaming sword, that’s like the ultimate edge. It’s like, you know, the two contradictions brought into one, the ultimate end is a cherub with a flaming sword, both absolute mixture, absolute separation, which seems like an impossible thing. But that’s the image of the end of the world. I’m running out of running out of time here, guys. All right, I’m going to skip some of these. Some of these are a little long. So the Limburg brothers depict the snake in the garden as feminine. I’ve seen this in other Western artists as well. What does this symbolic presentation reveal? And is it symbolically small or orthodox? Yeah, usually when the snake is represented as feminine, usually is an image of Lilith. And so Lilith is this, it’s kind of this, it’s in, it’s, I think it comes mostly from Judaism and these later traditions that Adam had a wife before Eve and that this wife before Eve, because she didn’t, you know, she didn’t submit to Adam, then she ended up spawning all these monsters, like self spawning all these monsters and demons and all this stuff. And you can understand it, as I’ve talked about this before in several of my talks, where there’s a, there’s a, there’s a notion that that which is before your origin is akin to that which is on the edge. Both of them have the appearance of, of chaos and of monsters because they’re not part of the system. So it’s like that which was before you is not connected to your story. And so it appears chaotic and, and, and, and fragmented in all this stuff. And that which is after your story or beyond your story also doesn’t fit in the story. And so it also has this chaotic fringe. And so I think that that’s what, that’s what Lilith is. And the serpent is that as well. Serpent is, you know, the Ouroboros around the tree, the, around the world, the snake around the tree, all of these images are representing the same thing. And this idea of like a wife that, that Adam would have had before, before, before Eve is this pre-origin thing, where all the monsters come from, right? Where, you know, the idea of the gods before the Olympians, where the Titans, you know, that became Titans and are these monsters on the edge of the world that are these elemental forces and these elemental monsters. So it’s just trying to have the same structure in the scripture. Now, is it small or, or, or orthodox? I would say, I would say don’t, don’t teach your children that. Like it’s very, very, very small orthodox. I think you can get some insight from that. But, but I, it’s not definitely not something that the, the church fathers have accepted. All right. All right. We’re almost done. All right. So can you break down the symbolism of gold, frankincense and myrrh? Drew McMahon asked that. Well, hmm, I should probably do a video on that next Christmas. It has to do, I need to think about it a lot more because I, you know, the church fathers give this description of it, which is that, you know, the gold represents Christ’s, uh, royalty. Uh, the incense represents his priesthood and the myrrh represents kind of both in a way represents his embalming or his death, but also in, also represents kind of like even his divinity or represents the highest aspect of him. This is something that you see in the tradition. Um, and so it’s, it’s that type of, of symbol symbolism is not my favorite type of symbolism because I feel like it lacks, it lacks a connection to, to, to the pattern, but I, it might just be my incapacity to see it. And so I have to think about it and, uh, and I’ll get back to you. Uh, maybe I’m sorry to say it might be next Christmas, but that’d make a good video for next Christmas. And I’ll have thought about it quite a bit, um, by that time. All right, guys. So, so there are a few more questions from people that already asked questions. I’m going to skip those and I am going to go and see if just a few, to see if there are a few super chats and, uh, get through those and we’ll see. All right. Let’s see this. Okay. Here we go. So, okay. So, all right. So anonymous 50 DKK Corona. I don’t know what that means in my, my, uh, my, um, currency, but thank you. Hey, Jonathan, I love your stuff. Would you say that you are worried or hopeful regarding the future of our societies around the world? Um, I would say that I’m both worried and hopeful at the same time. I think that things are not looking great and I think that things are looking like they’re going to get darker, but I also do believe that it’s just part of the, part of the story and that out of it is going to come a resurrection, you know, and I, and I already see, I feel like I see glimmers of it already and I see in some aspects, I see people re, you know, you already see, you see like these intellectuals all of a sudden realizing the inevitability of, of God and the inevitability of religion and they’re struggling, still struggling with it. You know, you see all these kinds of secularists who, who, who can see that they can’t avoid it, but they’re angry and they don’t want to fully accept it. But I think that this is just the first step and so I think we’re going to see more of that and a deepening of that. But at the same time, the world is crazy and we’re going to see a lot more of that too. Hopefully there’ll be enough of a, of a remainder to get, you know, to get the spark going again. So Christian Sacra asks, many Christians don’t think there is an issue if they do yoga. This is hard to square for me. I wonder if yoga could be made Christian. Any thoughts? Yeah, I don’t know, man. I, I, I, I’ve, I talked about yoga before. I think I find it shady. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do yoga. Having said that, I don’t think that if you do yoga, you’re going to hell or that if you do yoga, you’ll be automatically possessed by a demon. But I think that there’s something fragmentary about the way that moderns and kind of California Buddhist types do yoga. They’re not Buddhist, but whatever California spiritual types do yoga. And, and I think that they misunderstand the original purpose of yoga. And so because they use something which seemed to be, have more spiritual connotation to just get fit, there’s something about it. It’s just, it just, I’ve, I find it just manifests that kind of confusion, spiritual confusion that we see around us, you know, and people confuse, there’s so much confusion, like people confused, confused, let’s say spiritual practice and spiritual and mysticism with the idea of feeling better and being relaxed and all this stuff. It’s like, that’s not what it’s about. So I’m not a big fan, but you know, whatever it’s, if I meet a Christian who does yoga, usually I’m not going to, I’m not going to say anything. I mean, there are worse things in the world for sure than that. So Brad Pitt, Brad’s Pitt for 7.77, $7.77 Canadian. All right, Bruce, thanks. Without a question. Let me just check if one last one popped in and if not, all right. Hey, I didn’t think I was going to make it. And we did it in an hour and a half, not bad, I would say. So I want to thank all the moderators. I know it always gets pretty crazy in there in the chat. It’s like, I don’t know how you guys do it. How do you guys listen to what I’m saying? And at the same time, right? All this stuff, I don’t know how that works. I don’t think I could do that, which is why I struggled to even like glance at the chat while all of this is going on. Oh, man, Jacob and Lisa say we don’t listen. Sorry, guys. And so you guys, this is like pure self-sacrifice on your part. I really appreciate it. So hopefully, so hopefully, so now I know why Lisa wants to make the clip channel because she doesn’t get to listen during the Q&A if she’s a moderator. She has to listen to them again and then make those clips. All right, guys. So I appreciate everything. I thank everybody who is supporting me. It’s been a crazy, crazy year. There’s one last thing that’s going on. I think I mentioned before, but I’m going to mention it again. One of the big projects this year is going to be to create a kind of platform for symbolic thinking on my website where we’re going to be publishing articles and publishing short things, long things, articles that are just simple interpretations of movies or of things going on. And all of it is going to, most of it’s going to come from the people who are involved in the Facebook group. There are a few people that are really actively involved in have just developed a really powerful intuition. And so that’s how it’s going to start. And then once we kind of get started, then anybody will be able to, you can submit articles and if they’re good, then we might consider them. But that’s going to be a little further down in the future. So guys, thank you for your attention and I’ll see everybody next month again. Bye-bye.