https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4hJx81TclFo
Alright guys, here we go. So I am seriously exhausted. I got back from Chicago last night, went to bed super late. And for those also who have been waiting for the patron only video on goblins and those small monsters imps and all that stuff, it’s coming. I was supposed to make it today, but the whole Kanye West question required my attention. I knew that I wanted to put that out because it was just happening right now. And it’s good that I did because the Kanye West video has been taking off, I think, like 7,000 views in a few hours. So it seems, at least at the beginning, it seems to be doing almost as well as the Joker video. So, so I guess, yeah, I guess commenting on current events sometimes works. So, alright, so the mad truth says he wants to post, he wants to post some, let’s see if it if I have it activated. So the mad truth, are you trying to post a super chat, but it’s not working? Alright, answer that and we’ll see. I’ll start with questions from the different platforms. As people usually know, those who give at the 10 level on each of the platforms that I using, they get to ask question in advance. So I go through those questions. And then when those are done, then if anybody wants to put in some super chats, I will take them. As usual, if if you, you know, the moderators are in Jacob is moderator, he might add another moderator as well because our friend Christian Chad is not there today. And the moderators are in full control if you write silly questions. Alright guys, so as usual, I will start with my website. Oh, maybe one last announcement. Don't forget for those who are around. I am going to be in PA and near Scranton, Pennsylvania at St. Ticons in this weekend. So the conference is mostly for the seminarians. But on Sunday after liturgy, those who want to come, they can come either come to liturgy or arrive towards the end. And I will be giving just a brief talk about, you know, this kind of the strange moment where atheists and agnostics are interested in Christianity again. And I'll also be taking some questions. So alright. Oh, is that what it is? Is it because the video isn't public? Let me check. Let me check. That might be what it is. That might also be why we don't have a lot of people in in the event right now. Let me check if I can change that. Man, sorry, guys. Robert Smith says I'm one of seven and I feel special. Alright, let me check. I don't know how to change it, though. I don't even know if I can change. Oh, that's what it is. So it's not public. Alright, so I'm putting it public now. There you go. So that should hopefully call out call to those who haven't yet. I was like, why? Why is there some people? But you know, you are all of my are you all my better friends? All of you that are there right now. Alright, so we should be live now. So for anybody who is going to appear, let's see if people appear. So anyways, yeah, people are starting to pop in. And so for those who are starting to pop in, my apologies. I had not put the video live. It was only it was in not is like unlisted mode. So I think it was only the patrons who were able to see it. So I gave a few announcements. You can check them out afterwards if you want about Sainti cons and just about being really tired in in general. So the super chat should work as usual. I'm going to start with the I'm going to start with the questions from the website, then subscribe star, then Patreon. And for those who want to put in super chats, I will get to them after that. All right. So here we go, guys. So Keenan Cronin asked, asked, you mentioned in the Halloween video that prayer is the best way to expel the demons within us. What is it that makes prayer so powerful? OK, so what is it that makes prayer so powerful? So if you look at the story in the of the creation story in the Bible, and if you look at how Christians believe this notion that Christ is the incarnation of the divine logos, the idea is that meaning and creation happens through speaking. And so there's a relationship between the actual existence of the world and language that language, which is also related to mind. The expression of mind is the manner in which the world comes together. I've talked to you guys about that in terms of phenomena in general, that we participate in the oneness of phenomena and the capacity to see the relationship between multiplicity and unity within something. And so because language is the way in which the relationship between multiplicity and unity is manifest, then language is also the way to solve that problem. The problem of demons is exactly that problem. The problem of demons is, you know, sometimes I use words like wild principalities. The idea that there are there are principalities, the best way to understand it is to understand it in yourself. That is, you have passions. There are things that draw your attention and they pull your attention in a way that fragments you, that draw you away from your heart, from your center, from that which makes you one. And like I've said before, there are cosmic versions of that. So if you are a slave to the demon of lust, you're not the only one experiencing that. You know, everybody who has that problem is having similar experiences of reality. And that's how you can understand that it's a demon because it has a cosmic aspect. That personality, that coherence of different elements which pulls you away from yourself, so it's a demon. It's a principality, but it's a principality that isn't submitted to the highest thing, that isn't aligned with the logos. And so the way in which you get rid of that is through speech. And so of course the most explicit version we have is the idea of the exorcism where someone who has spiritual authority, a priest or a saint, someone who is holy, will be able to speak and will be able to chase the demon away through their authority. And so you can imagine it, you know, I think I've given this example before. It's like if you as a father have authority and your kids are being naughty and they're kind of losing control and they're fighting amongst themselves and they're being annoying and you say stop. And if you have authority, then the word, the speaking to them will make them stop and they'll realign themselves. And so then that's exorcism. But ultimately you have to understand that when you pray, when you use language to ask of God, if you use language to ask others to intercede for you, you're participating in that whole process by which the logos is ordering the world. And so that is why prayer is the way to solve a lot of your problems. I mean, of course demons is the most extreme thing, but a lot of your problems can be solved by prayer because you have a issue and you're even just by framing it, even just by formulating it in a request towards God, then you are opening up that space for the logos to come and manifest themselves. One of the examples I've given before is in the wedding of Cana where Christ is hidden. No one knows that he's the divine logos and the mother of God, Mary, she comes up to him and she says there's a problem. There's no wine. And then Christ at first is saying, you know, it's not my time yet because she is opening up the space for him to reveal himself. And when he said it's not my time yet is because he's going to reveal himself unto death. This idea that you have to for the logos to manifest himself, manifest himself in the world, there has to be a prayer. There has to be a space, a body. Call it a body. A prayer is a body. Prayer is like, here's a frame. I want meaning to manifest itself in that frame. So I hope that that makes sense. If you pray to God, that is the ultimate example. That is the highest example where you're really submitting yourself to the highest of high. But you can pray to your boss, right? You have a problem. Someone's being annoying in the office or maybe there aren't enough staples in the office. And so you need to solve that problem. Well, how do you solve the problem? You ask your boss because your boss has the authority to give you staples. And so the idea that through prayer, through asking, we solve problems is just something we experience all the time. We just have to be able to see it in the highest sphere and in the cosmic element of it, which is really prayer to the divine. But people, like the idea that we should only pray to God is really silly. Nobody only prays to God. It's just anybody who thinks they only pray to God is really deluding themselves. You pray all the time. You pray when you go to the store. You pray when you pray to your boss. You pray to your politicians. You pray. You ask things of those that are higher up than you in the hierarchy. And that's a form of prayer. The fact that we've made it special for God is... Anyways, most of you know where I think that comes from. So anyways, so all right, enough on that. My goodness. I've been doing this for 15 minutes on that one question. All right. I need to not do that again. All right. Here we go. So, all right. So let me see. Did everything work out in terms of the chat and the payment and stuff? Anyways, we'll see. We'll see you later. All right. If there's a problem, guys, tell me. I might keep my eye on the... for the super chats. Okay. So, DS Brew asks, Hi, Jonathan. Have you by chance read the book, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future by Seraphim, by Father Seraphim Rose? If so, what were your thoughts? If not, could you be able to talk a bit about prelest and spiritual deception? How might a proper symbolic worldview help an honest seeker discern what is true across a huge landscape of spiritual experiences? P.S. We're still waiting for that symbolism of Antichrist 666 video to drop. Well, I've read parts of that book. I haven't read the whole thing. I have to be honest with you. It is one of the books on my list and I very much do want to read it. And if you want me to... I think that what I've read and what I've gathered from the content, that he does in the problem of kind of this weird spiritual but not religious moment, you know, the kind of new age, the strange new age, for sure his intuition that the future would not be secular was right. And we see that not only in Father Seraphim Rose, but you see it also in René Guénon, who had... who had influence on Seraphim Rose in terms of that book. And what I've read of Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future resembles Guénon's The Rain of Quantity and the Science of Time and the Science of the Time. And so I think that we are surrounded by pre-lest and spiritual deception. And I totally agree. And I think it is probably important that I talk about that a little more. I haven't been talking about it very much just because it has been on the subject. But I do think that this might also be a problem for all of you guys that are really into psychedelics. I would say that, you know, I've never taken psychedelics, so I don't want to speak without experience. But what I gather from what I hear is that it does seem to open people up to spiritual experiences. Now, the problem with having spiritual experiences is you need discernment. And one of the ways to have discernment is to be connected, to be connected to a hierarchy, to be connected to a clear path, a clear tradition, and to, you know, to hopefully to have a spiritual father or a confessor that can help you get through those types of experiences. Now, not everybody has access to that. But for sure, I think it's important to understand that in the Christian tradition, the Church Fathers really warn against spiritual experiences. They're not saying that they're inauthentic, but they tend to say that you shouldn't really try to grasp those experiences too much. That is, the purpose of the mystical life or the purpose of the spiritual life is to be united with God, is to be transformed, to be free from your passions, to be illumined with the fullness of the divine to the extent that that's possible. That is very different than a kind of mystical vision that you would have. Mystical visions can be helpful. And, you know, in the Orthodox tradition, there are plenty of mystical visions which are used to interpret some of the tradition with those visions. But like I said, that's not the point. The point is not to have these visions. And as we, and it's important not to simply trust those visions, especially because, you know, if you don't already, if you haven't reached a certain spiritual level and you have these experiences, you don't have the capacity to know what the wheat and what the chaff is. And when I, you know, and to be honest, when I hear a lot of the psychedelics people, especially the really famous ones, I hear a lot of chaos. And I hear, you know, when people talk about, what is it, the clockwork elves and all of that stuff, I don't hear a lot of good stuff. Coming out of that, not in terms of spiritual transformation. All right, okay. So, still waiting for the, I will make a video on 666 at some point. I've been wanting to make it for a while. Just seems like there's so many things to talk about. It's hard to get to all of these. But one day I will. If censorship gets worse even than it is now, you might see me making a video about that because it's related actually to some of the censorship that we've been seeing. All right, David Flores says, Gawain and the Green Knight video, please. Yeah, it is coming. I'll make a video on that subject for sure. Especially, maybe a patron only video. We'll see. I'm definitely interested in that. So, last Q&A, I realized that when you say hierarchy, I'm misunderstanding exactly what you mean. My assumption is that you mean a hierarchy for a given problem, concept, idea. Hierarchy of truth. But I feel like you sometimes mean something like the hierarchy of hierarchies. I'm sure this qualifies more for a video due to the complexity, but could you expound on how you conceptualize and apply hierarchy? So, I mean, I think you're right. I think that when I talk about hierarchy, in a way I'm talking about the meta hierarchy or a meta pattern. And it is important to understand that because there's the hierarchies themselves and then there's the very manner in which hierarchies are made, which is analogical across the different hierarchies. So, if you have a political hierarchy or you have the hierarchy of the person or you have the hierarchy of the temple, they all share certain things in common. They're not exactly the same. They all share certain things in common, which as you can see the analogies between the different hierarchies, then you can start to understand hierarchy per se or the divine hierarchy, which is the highest form of hierarchy. But another important thing about that is also to understand that I mentioned that word a few times. I talked about the meta pattern a few times in the recent videos. And I realized when I was saying it that I'm like, maybe these guys, I'm not telling them what I mean by that word. But when I use the words, when I use a word like meta pattern, what I mean is that it's the hierarchy and the manner in which the hierarchy breaks down. And so there's the pattern and then there's the breakdown of the pattern. But my contention from the beginning has been that the breakdown of a pattern is also part of a bigger pattern in which you can see how that breakdown occurs. And so even the chaos is ultimately part of a meta pattern, you would say, because you can recognize chaos and you can recognize not total chaos. Obviously, you can't see absolute chaos, but you can recognize the effect of chaos or the breakdown of structures. It happens in a way which is coherent and you can see across different types of hierarchies. So I hope that answers that. All right, so I'm moving to Subscribestar. Okay, so XRD asks, your word of warning in your Halloween video about becoming too obsessed with the holiday makes me think about the contemporary obsession with content that appeals to our nostalgia. Sometimes something about it feels wrong, but I can't quite put my finger on it, any thought. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I don't think I don't know if there's directly a relationship between Halloween, but I do think that there is a problem with nostalgia. One of the things that sometimes I say is I believe in tradition without nostalgia, because the problem with nostalgia is that you attach yourself to something in the past. There's this longing for the past, and sometimes it's just sentimental thing. It's not for understanding the past or it's not for actualizing it now, but it's a kind of sadness of a loss for something that's behind us. Now, I do believe that that type of nostalgia can be useful spiritually in terms of, you know, people talk about the nostalgia for paradise. I think that it can be useful if we live in that nostalgia for paradise, but I think that that type of nostalgia can be directed in a wrong way. You see it in, for example, people who like old things. It's hard for people to be able to see the difference between tradition and old things. Traditional cultures didn't care that much for old things unless those old things had a very important meaning. So it can sometimes baffle modern people to understand that when a church got old or was too small, they would knock it down and build a bigger one on top, and it was not for them a big problem. It wasn't like we need to absolutely preserve everything from the past just because it's old, because the living tradition is living. And so if a church is too small, knock it down, make a bigger one. If the church needs to be restored, it's like restore it. You don't have to preserve everything. You paint new frescoes. You do all that if there's a need to. If there's no need, then you don't do it. But it's not about being, you know, tradition is actually diametrically opposed to a kind of archaeological obsession with, you know, this kind of weird preservation of monuments and this kind of strange desire to preserve things just because they're old. But I mean, in the end, I would much rather they do that because modern buildings and a lot of modern stuff is so ugly that I'm sometimes thankful for those preservation societies who want to preserve old buildings. You don't even know exactly what's motivating them except for some kind of sentimentality, but I'd rather have that old building than whatever condo is going to replace it. So yeah, so sometimes thank God for that. Okay, so Nicola asks, can you explain the difference between the soul and the spirit? I was always confused about that ever since I was a kid. So at least in the Orthodox tradition, we have this idea that the word spirit in the way that Paul uses it, I would say, has been come to be called something like the noose or the intellect. And so the spirit would be the highest aspect of you. And that highest aspect is a kind of direct intuition of the patterns of reality, a capacity to have direct intuition with the logos and the logy that are hidden in creation. And so there are things that we do, you know, some types of prayers with the Church Fathers talk about Purifying the noose, that is kind of getting to the core of the spirit. So the problem that we have that most of us don't have access to the spirit very often, in a way we do all the time, but we don't realize it because our noetic capacity, this absolutely spiritual capacity, actually, you know, the hidden identities of things and our capacity to interact with them is actually informing our entire experience of the world. But usually we live in what you would call the soul part, which is your thoughts, your emotions, your personality. All of these things are in the soul part. And you'll read in the Church Fathers, they'll say things like you are not your thoughts, you are not your feelings, you are not, you know, your thoughts are not you. The highest aspect of you is beyond the dialectic of thinking, it's beyond the dialectic of emotions. And it's this direct capacity to encounter reality, kind of catch it. And so we have little glimpses of that. I mean, every time you get this sense, you know, when you have that little spark moment when everything comes together and you get this, it's kind of like a magical moment where you grasp something, like, aha, and you get this little spark, you're kind of flirting with the news, you're coming up to it, you know. But the Church Fathers talk about how it is possible to fully enter into the heart and to hold in the heart and to have a, to be transformed in a manner in which you have, always have access to this noetic capacity. All right, and so Nicola also asks, Well, I mean, these things are difficult to talk about, and sometimes you get into serious trouble talking about them. And so I don't want to get into, the way that I like to explain it and the way that I like to describe it is my own. And so take it for what it is, a theologumenon that is a theological opinion, as I ponder the mysteries of reality. The way that I understand it is you have to see the end. A good way to understand it would be to understand to a certain extent how your end coincides with the end. That is, that as you come to the end of you is the totality of your possibilities which are consummated. That is, everything that was going to be you has gone, has run its course and you've come to the, and you have the totality. I don't know if you see what I mean, but it's like, I can say this is all you, there's no more coming. There's nothing left, there's nothing more coming of you in a kind of manifestation. And that is the end. And so if you can understand it in a way that that end is the same for everything, that is, everything has an end. Every identity has an end. Every person, every city, every country, every everything has an end. And as you come to that end, that end coincides with the eschaton. And some people are going to be angry that I describe it that way, whatever. This is the way that I'm capable of making it make sense in my mind. That is, all these ends, they coincide with what we call the eschaton, which is the return of the logo to judge everything. And you can understand it like this, that while something has body, that is you, while you have body, the logos acts as your guide, acts as, and also has a kind of, it's a call. It's a call to come towards the logos. And so there's a kind of grace, there's a kind of compassion. So Christ appears to you as saying come, wanting you to come towards him to the extent that you can. But then once you're finished, once you've come to the end of something, then that identity, that logos becomes your judge. So you can think about it, you can think about it in any way. You can think about it as a play or a movie. It's like as you're watching the movie, let's say, the whole movie, you leave open your judgment, right? Unless it's really horrible, then you maybe start judging before the end. But usually what you try to do is you try to leave your judgment open because you haven't gotten the whole story. And so a good example of a movie is like a movie like The Sixth Sense, where if you stop in the middle of the movie, and you judged it, you would get it wrong. No, you have to leave yourself open and kind of engage with the movie until it ends. But once it ends, then the logos of the story becomes a judge. Then the logos now judges. And there's a judge, let's say the logos of movies, judges that movie. Because it now acts as a standard that you have or have not reached. While you're climbing the ladder, it's not yet a judge. It's only at the end that it acts as a judge because now everything is done. And the standard appears as that which you haven't reached or can show you the extent to which you've reached that standard. So I hope that makes sense. That's the way that I understand it. I hope this is helpful. If not, sorry. But there are plenty of places where you can find the kind of more traditional description, which is usually described more narratively. And I have no problem with the more narrative description of the life after death and either the toll houses or purgatory or this kind of Playing out in the afterlife of the consequences of your life, moving all the way towards the last judgment, which is the place where everything is evaluated. All right, so I hope that helps. So Nicola asked, Do you have any advice on how to talk about relics to my fiancee who is not religious at all? Her and I have had long talked about Orthodox beliefs and she finds them a bit weird, but otherwise tries to remain as neutral as she can. When she found out about relics though, we have one at our church, she was afraid and couldn't explain why she felt that way. She used to work as a paramedic and she was dumbfounded why she would feel this way. I consulted our priests about the whole thing, but I couldn't get any concrete advice. I was mostly advised to be patient, loving and kind and that God will sort things out. All right. I've talked about relics a few times before and I really understand why relics are such a problem. I would say that it is important not to completely shy away from the horror that relics create in us. I think that that is not, I think that that is part of relics. The idea of a relic is that death can be changed into glory. That's what a relic is. And the very death of the saint becomes his glory. Now you can see it this way, see it like this. His body, let's say a saint's body, dies. And then the very flesh, the very bones, the very nails, the very hairs, the flesh, really the body, in the most physical, natural sense, is taken, parts are taken and are sent out all around. And those relics become the place, the holy, especially in the Orthodox Church, they become the anchor of holiness in a church. And so either under the altar, there has to be a saint's relic for the liturgy to occur. Sometimes it's sewn into the cloth which is put on the altar and that's what it is. It is the transformation of death into glory. It is the very hope of what Christianity is. And we have to be careful not to, like I said, to shy away from what it is in the sense that there is something shocking, just like communion is shocking, relics are also shocking, but they are an image of how the highest and the lowest meet together, of how the very body, dead body of someone can actually participate in anchoring a community and participate in the glory that Christ brings into the world. That's the best way I can explain it. So I hope that helps. I know some people will never totally understand it and I think that to a certain extent it is not necessarily possible to fully understand it. But if we are non-dual, like if we do not believe that duality is at the beginning of reality, if we don't believe that the world is defined ultimately in duality, that although there are dualisms, that they don't end in duality, that they peak into God, then we have to understand that everything participates ultimately and that just as glory was changed into death at the fall, so too death is changed into glory. So that's the best I can do. Alright, so I'm moving now to Patreon. Okay, so Drew McMahon asks, Any thoughts on the Pacamama pagan statue stolen from the Catholic Church and thrown in the Tiber River? Is this breaking a commandment or following one? I feel like the Catholic Church is fractured. My goodness, what a mess this whole Pacamama thing is. Okay, I'm not going to give you a total answer to this, but... Okay, I'm going to first give the be careful answer, because I see a lot of trads going nuts, a lot of trads that are simply declaring their righteousness without thinking about it or without examining themselves. We have to be aware that some of the titles that we use for the Mother of God, that we use for Mary, were titles that were used for ancient pagan goddesses, right? So we have to be careful to be aware of that. And so we have to understand that Christianity... We're not Protestants. We don't believe that Christianity simply exists in this pure fashion, that it somehow has a pure form that is scripture, I guess, I don't know, whatever, that it has a pure form and that anything that is not from that pure form contaminates it. We don't believe that. We believe that Christianity, like baptism, has a transformative effect on whatever culture it encounters, that it takes that culture and it plunges it into the waters of death, and it pulls out from that baptism whatever it is that can be taken forward, can be compatible. And so you can understand, for example, that a good way to see it is that if in the first century the Son of God was Augustus, the Son of God was Caesar Augustus, he was the first one to be called the Son of God. And so medieval Christians saw the Aeneid, which talks about Augustus as the Son of God, they saw it as a prophecy for Christ, because they're saying the notion of the Son of God is not a bad one. You just have the wrong manifestation. The real Son of God has something much more, because he unites the king and the crucified one. He unites everything together. He's not just an emperor. He is the top and the bottom. He's the alpha and the omega. And declaring that that is more than the way that Romans understood the notion of the Son of God. Now, it's the same also for Mary. What happened is that all the aspects of feminine symbolism, which were there before and which were useful and which were close to truth, were taken back, were cleansed, were pruned, were removed of their dangerous elements and were then applied in a proper manner to the Mother of God, who is the temple, who is the ark, who is the space in which the divine manifests himself. And so that's the answer. So we need to be careful. We need to be careful. Now, there is the danger of the opposite of what I just said, which is if Christianity takes that from the culture, which it encounters, baptizes it and brings it into the faith, we have to be careful that we don't do the opposite, that we don't denature ourselves, that we don't denature the core of what Christianity is in order to then give it to these pagan gods, these pagan things. Do you see the difference between the two? And so we're not going to say that Mary is an image of this Mother Goddess, Pachamama or whatever. That is blasphemy. That is not Christian. That is a denaturing of Christianity. Now, would it be possible for those tribal people to understand through Pachamama, to come to understand what the role of the Mother of God is? Because maybe there are some things which align with that that could be possible. Now, is that what's happening now? It seems that it's not. It seems that what's happening is rather this denaturing, which these tribal groups, and I don't know because I'm not there and everything that's been written has been written in terms of polemics, but it seems like what's happening is that the tribal group is using the fact that we have the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary in Christianity to justify their worship of this Mother Goddess, which they just keep as their own. Now, that is the understanding that I have. And I would say that whether or not that's what's happening, I would say that that is the danger. And that is the opportunity on one side and that is the danger on the other side. So, yeah, but what I'm seeing, it seems to be that as Pope Francis does quite a bit and that many modern Catholics seem to do, they seem to actually want to evacuate Christianity for that which comes from the outside. And I would say that that is a form of sacrilege. Alright, and so Benjamin Wood says, I probably share your view that things will get worse before they get better. What are your thoughts on approaches like Dreher's Benedict option and forming intentional communities as a strategy for navigating the potentially destructive years ahead? Sometimes I sometimes think it's wise and sometimes think it's cowardice. I think that, you know, and I've had some discussions with Rod about this, and I kind of, I hadn't read his book. I kind of came in with the basic idea that he was asking people to retreat from society. And in discussion with him, he vehemently said that that is really not what it's about. And that is not what he is suggesting, that rather he doesn't see these communities that are formed as isolating themselves from the modern world, but rather giving themselves a coherence and a strength in order to interact with the modern world in a stronger and more coherent manner. And I think in that sense that it's good if you can do it, if it can happen. It's not available to everybody. It is one of the dangers that I see maybe in that is, for example, I'll give you an example. Like I am constantly tempted to move to South Carolina. Like if I had reason to, I would go to South Carolina. Why? Because in South Carolina there are these amazing Orthodox churches with beautiful communities, beautiful churches, painted icons, people who help each other, people who see themselves as this strong community, way more than anything I can find in the North, and that more than most people are able to find in the North. And so it's like, okay, I'm going to move to Charleston or to Greenville, where I know there are these amazing communities. But the problem, we have to be also careful that we also don't want to leave, if all the Christians leave and go to where those groups are, you're also kind of evacuating, you're kind of abandoning your own nations, your own communities. And so, I don't know, I don't know. I mean, for now I'm still here and I have no intention to go. And I'm also, I've decided now I'm going to try to also have some meetups here of people, curious people, agnostics, atheists, anybody who is interested to discuss, because I feel like maybe I'm more useful actually out here than I would be if I was in a great community with a bunch of extremely engaged Orthodox people. So, yeah, I don't know. All right. So Benjamin Wood also asked, people like yourself and Jordan Peterson and help me, I think there's an error, help me get the value of tradition, hierarchy, etc. I see now the Pandora's box of subjectivity that has gradually been open in the West over the last millennium and the harm it has wrought. That said, I'm still a Southern American in Anglo-Scots-Irish descent who has individual sovereignty and rebellion to what's perceived to be arbitrary central authority encoded in my DNA. I can't help but see some virtue in this skeptical streak as the individual level, but also perceive the chaos that can manifest at the collective level. Do you have any advice on how to order these things within myself, especially as I approach faith and the church? And I think that we do need a kind of balance. And I don't think that, especially for those who aren't monks, let's say for not monastics, there has to be a balance between a capacity to submit to authority and to submit to a tradition and also have a sphere of, a private sphere of private experiences. And so, you know, the modern world doesn't only appear as this Pandora's box of subjectivity, as you mentioned. The modern world appears as both. And we're just lucky right now, to a certain extent, maybe we're unlucky, but we're just lucky that we are now in the swing of the pendulum or the space on the map where the extreme subjectivity is massive. The extreme subjectivity is manifesting itself. But if you were in, you know, if you were in the Eastern Europe just a few decades ago, if you had been in Germany a few decades ago, then you would have seen the other side of this pendulum. And, you know, a lot of people are feeling that the other side of the pendulum is coming and it might be coming faster than we expect. And so I think that value, that balance is the key. And. But it's hard because it's not, there is no, there is no specific rule because it all depends on the circumstance. It all depends on the situation. And here's one place where I think that John Verbecky's idea about optimal grip or this idea of, you know, I forget some of the technical words he uses, but the idea that your attention or your capacity to be ordered will always be in relation to what is there as what's happening in front of you. So sometimes you have to be more, let's say, submitted to your authority. And then other times you may have to be more skeptical to your authority because sometimes the authority is corrupt. We saw that in the Catholic Church and we see it in the Orthodox Church. And that, you know, that and even in terms of a corrupt authority, there are some places where you still would need to submit yourself to the extent that that corrupt authority is is at least speaking in line with tradition. But there are certain ways in which you should definitely not submit to those corrupt authorities. You know, Christ talks about when he talks about the Pharisees, he says, do what they say, but do not what they do. He says, because they sit in the seat of Moses, because even though our authorities, you know, if a policeman gives you a ticket for speeding and you were speeding, you know, and if you find out that that policeman is corrupt and is taking drug money or whatever, you still speed. You were still speeding and you still have to accept that ticket from that cop, you know, but you do have to find the balance. All right. So I hope this makes sense. So Robert Smith says, is there something symbolic in the phrase of scales falling from the eyes? Is there something symbolic in the phrase? I mean, I've heard several people use that phrase. I've heard Jordan Peterson use it. I think he he takes it from Jung, who takes it from Gnostic texts, the idea that that when Adam and Eve fell, that the scales fell from their eyes, you know, you of course the let's say the the way that it's described is meant to talk about the snake. It's you know, it's as if this this skin of the snake has fallen and there's this kind of opening and this renewal. There's a capacity to see the things more directly. And so what the Gnostics have tend to understand is that that is somehow good. That that's where you get you get this idea that the fall of Adam and Eve's eyes fell from the eyes of the snake. That the fall of Adam and Eve somehow is actually good. And it's a very dangerous way to think because. Sanfrancisco really gives the best description of this problem. He says that. We were meant to be given the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. We were meant to know that is the scale that the scales from our eyes were meant to fall. And for us to be able to see that's a duality. But we were meant to see it from the space of unity. That is, we were if we had submitted to the higher principle, we had submitted to the principle, the law of God, the divine logos. If we had submitted to that, then in eating the tree of life, God would have also given Adam and Eve the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So that from a place of unity, they would have seen duality. Now, the problem of the scale from falling from their eyes and being revealed, the mysteries of the of duality without being in a place of unity is that they fell into the duality. They became prisoners of their revelation because they and then when they saw the unity, when they looked up and they saw God, they were they were afraid and they wanted to hide themselves. And so I think it's really important to to and you see it now. You see it. You see this kind of stuff all the time. And I and I think this is also some of the mysteries of that. One of the attractions of things like the occult for people is that some of the mysteries that that's a cult writers have revealed or have helped people reveal to see are real. That is, they they're there. You can encounter a demon if you make the effort and you you do all the proper things you will you will encounter a demon and it will be scales falling from your eyes. But if you're if you're not if you're not in the in a higher place when you encounter a demon, that demon will eat you. And so. I hope that that answers that. I hope that that answers that. All right. Drew McMahon asks another question. So it appears that Kanye will convert more people to Christianity than anyone else in his generation. What is going on? Well, you guys, I mean, I don't really have to answer the question, Drew. I think you probably asked this question before I made the video. You guys check out the video that I I made today on Kanye. And, you know, I've been watching Kanye for a very long time. So you will see what I think about him as a as a foolish as a fool character. But I do agree. I do think that I've been seeing it come for quite a while. And, you know, my desire to connect with Jordan Peterson, my talking about people like Gavin McGuinness and even Milo and all these characters that appeared in the last few years on the horizon. They're all part of bringing us towards this flip. This renewal that I think is going to happen. I don't know how big it's going to be. I don't know if I don't know if it's only going to be the forming of a remnant. I'm not sure. But I think it's inevitable. And if Kanye participates in that, well, I guess glory to God, I guess, you know. All right. OK, so Mark Peters asks Jonathan. In a recent video, you were talking about the body and said something to the effect that the body doesn't really matter. It's neutral. Then you said the soul is the body of the word or the soul is the body of this. I would have I probably I probably didn't say that. Probably said the soul is the body of the noose or the soul is the body of the spirit. OK, then I thought you said in the soul body relationship that the body is masculine. No, no, no. All right. I understood what I understood you to mean that the masculine and feminine dyad is mutable according to the relation in focus. Yes, that you understood the tabernacle is feminine in receiving the Holy of Holies, but masculine in relation to the rest of creation. It struck me that your initial character, characterization of the body as being neutral with diminutive importance smacked of Cartesian dualism. So no, no, there is no there is no Cartesian dualism. You know, and I'm not making this up. You know, Aristotle thought of the body that way, thought of the notion of matter that way. That is, there is everything has an aspect of it, which is matter. And so that matter is matter to that principle. But it can it not it can act as something else for a lower, let's say, reality. So the in terms of us, our physical or physical body, it's. It's neutral in the sense that it receives its direction and it receives from above. And you. You. It only becomes negative if the hierarchy is not right. That is, that if your soul focuses more on your body than focus, then focusing on that which elevates it towards the spiritual or the news or or just literally, you know, brings it up towards God. If if if you if your eyes are always turned towards the body, then that's when the body becomes a problem because it's pulling your attention in the wrong directions. And there's nothing wrong with having some attention to your body, but it had everything. Things have to be aligned in the right direction. If they're misaligned and you your soul focuses on your body, then that's when that's when that's when food becomes a problem. That's when sex becomes a problem. That's when all these things which are not bad in themselves, there's nothing wrong with any of these things. That's that's when they become a problem. So I hope that helps. OK, so Tyson and Jessica Gabe asks, What does a proper interpersonal relationship with principalities, bodyless powers and saints look like from your perspective? With regard to I'm sorry, I'm laughing, guys, because these questions, man, they're great. You guys have the best questions, but some of some of them are tough. All right. With regards to this, could you expound on. Tamata and votive offerings in orthodoxy. What is Tamata? I don't know what that is. It's a votive. I don't think I've never never used the word Tamah Tamata. OK. What is the relation between that and principalities? OK, so how can I explain this? So it's actually very similar to prayer. If I can help you understand prayer, maybe that can help you understand this notion of a voted. So for those who don't know these these Tamah that she talks about these votive offerings, what they are is usually they are something like little images, like little body parts, let's say, of someone who is sick. If their arm hurts, they'll have a little image of an arm. If they if they have certain problems, they'll be little images of the things that they that they have a problem with, which with which they will offer to. They'll offer to a saint. They'll off. They'll they'll they'll put it next to an icon. They'll they'll bring it. They'll they'll bring it to a church. They'll you know, sometimes you see churches where these little votives are put on different places. They're nailed there or they're stuck there or whatever. And so like, can I expound to this? So so this is this is some of the hard stuff, because this is the type of stuff that for modern people looks like superstition. And I can understand why people would view it that way. But I want maybe I can explain it to you in the way that I talked about before when I talked about prayer and when I talked about the idea of understanding prayer as the the opening up of a space for the logos to manifest themselves in. Right. It's like, here's a problem. God, here's a problem. Do something about it. You know, and so it's this it's it's it's it's creating a body for God to manifest himself in. Now, the this idea of a votive is related to that. It's like so your arm hurts. Right. And so you can't put your arm. But you can't put your you can't cut your arm off and say, God, fix my arm. You know, you can't offer up that body in a physical manner. You can do it in prayer. You can do it in word. But, you know, ultimately, what you would want to do is you would want to take whatever problem you have and, like, put it out there and say, God or, you know, Saint X. Like, can you pray for me about this? Can you help me with this? This is where I need help. And so because we can't do that, there's a secondary manner in which people will do that, which is to have a little image of an arm and to a little image of eyes or a little image, a little image of you or a little image of a baby that, you know, a mother who wants to who doesn't want to lose her pregnancy. And it's like you put that out there and you're like this. This is the thing that I want you to help me with. And so it's like you're offering up body. You're offering up space. You're offering up the frame in which you want the light to shine in, in which you want the divine logos to manifest themselves. And so that's what it is. Now, does it have a relationship with principalities? I mean, to a certain extent, or saints in the sense that, you know, just like this is a good idea, like this is a good way to understand it. It's like if you went to the doctor and you had a problem with your arm, then you would say, here's my arm, doctor, fix my arm. Right. And so if you have a bodyless principality, if you want to ask the intercession of a saint, if you want to ask for a saint to pray for you regarding this problem that you have, then like I said, you can't do that. It's like here's this image of an arm that I'm putting on the icon of this saint in order to open up the space for the saint to pray for me so that ultimately it's God who will act through the prayers of the saint on my arm. That's what it is. And it's like, and you guys are really pushing this because I feel like as you, if those who've been following me for a while, it's like I've been trying to explain these things gradually, you know, one step at a time. So that those of you that are more natural naturalists or that are more skeptical or more kind of agnostic will understand where I'm going. So I feel like in this answer, I'm kind of jumping a few steps for you guys and that a lot of you might go, oh my goodness, like this guy's crazy. But, you know, if you keep following me at some point, we'll get there to understand once you understand, guys, once you understand that there is a connection between the way the world exists and mind and language, these things can never be totally disconnected. Then there are these types of practices will start to be less strange to you. Now, I have to admit, I don't engage in those practices because I'm still a very modern person, because I am someone who is very intellectual. And so I am not a I don't have that kind of extremely I'm not as have that as grounded of a. Can I say this grounded religion like people did in the old days or people even sometimes still have in Greece or in Russia or in the old country, you would say. But I don't have a problem with it. I don't think that I think it would be naive to believe that it's just superstition or that it doesn't work. It's no more superstition than prayer. You know, it's the same thing as prayer. It's just done in a matter, which is an offering up of an image or offering up of a part of something so that you open up that space. So all right, guys, that makes sense. And sorry if I'm losing you here, because I didn't necessarily expect to talk about something like that. All right. So I am I am already done with the question. So let's go into the let's go into the super chats. And and see what we got. So I saw the Christian Chad showed up Christian. All right. Happy to see you. I saw a bunch of you guys from the sub sub Brad. Heisman is there and saw some of you guys from the from the Facebook group. I'm really excited to see how the the Facebook group has been has been growing. So if you guys aren't on the Facebook group and you want to have discussions about this stuff, that's that's definitely the place to be right now. I think I saw Lisa is there, too. All right. Here we go. So now I'm. All right. All right. OK, so here we go. I'm going to go down to the first one. Start with the first one. OK, so we've got a few that are that have been deleted. I told you guys we watch out with the watch out for the moderators, you know. If you think that you're if you think that your your super chat shouldn't be deleted, what I would suggest is that sign up for me on one of my platforms for just one month. Ask your question on that platform at ten dollars a month. You just pay ten dollars because you guys are some of you spending more than that. Just ask your question and then I will I will I will be the final judge to decide. But in the meantime, on the super chats, I totally trust Jacob and and Christian Chad. So so that's the reality. OK, here we go. So point curation asks thoughts on Westworld and the problem with future game NPCs being capable of suffering. I don't think we're there, but someday we will be. Oh, man. Seriously, point curation. I got better things to think about than future game NPCs suffering. There are there are there quite a few people suffering in the world right now. How can I answer this? How can I answer this so that I'm giving you something? Because I feel like I need to give you something here. I would say that the whole A.I. question is is definitely extremely important. And and it's something that that we need to think about. And it's something that is going to create. Is going necessarily going to create monsters in the sense that I've talked about monsters. Very close to the sense also of the notion of principalities, which join with lower bodies, bodies that are too low for them. And, you know, the idea of the fall of the angels, I think that when we look at A.I., we're approaching that type of problem. It might happen through us. The very fact that we're asking these types of questions and that, you know, Zizek is asking whether or not sex robots have rights, whether or not, you know, and that what Tim Cook is talking about the God from the machine, it's going to end up saying more about how fallen we are. But we might still manifest a demon just by that type of interaction, just by the fact that we we look at that. So, yeah, anyways, a video will come on that guy. So sorry if I'm being esoteric here. There's nothing esoteric in what I'm saying. All right. So Stan, the one and only for five dollars says, JP, I'm bummed that I missed your recent Chicago appearance. Hope you had a great trip. Keep up the good work. Thank you, Stan. Alyosha, thirty dollars and no message. Thank you, Alyosha. That is very kind of you. Devere, 2777 says, I'm a former Gnostic turned Orthodox Christian, but a theologumenon I've kept from my apocryphal days is a belief that the Holy Spirit is female. Would you say that this is an acceptable belief for an Orthodox Christian to have? I would say no. I would say it isn't. I would say that your desire to find the feminine in God is understandable. I understand it. I don't think it's the Holy Spirit. I think that, my goodness. I think that the manner in which Christianity manifests the feminine in its theology is through deification. That is the way that the feminine appears in Christianity. We have to see the feminine in the big eternal story as the capacity for that which is not God by nature to be unified with God. And I think that that's the way we have to understand the feminine. The only way to totally get it is to get it in the entire cosmic story and to understand that the very purpose of creation is that this potentiality, which this overflowing of God that is in the infinite of God, it's like there even had to be that which is not his nature, but also fully participates in God. And so it is this eternal love story. It's like this giant love story that is being told, this massive love story. And I think that that is the way that we need to see the way that the feminine plays a part in Christianity. Now, the problem, and I've talked about this recently, the problem is that it's difficult to talk about. The feminine should always be difficult to talk about. And should we always be careful not to have clear pronouncement about the feminine? Because that's the very point of the feminine is to elude clear pronouncement. And so we have to be very careful. So if you notice my talks, I point, I elude, I give analogies, I do all that. But I am very careful not to try to point to, let's say, the divine feminine, because every time you do that, you end up in trouble. And yeah, that's about as much as I'm going to say on that subject. So Christian Chad for 10. Good to see you, Christian. Hi, Jonathan. I’m looking into the fasting and diet of orthodoxy. I’m curious why it’s basically vegan. Even outside Easter for most of the year, is this because meat is symbolically unclean thoughts? It’s not mostly vegan. I mean, the fasting, yeah, the fasting of orthodoxy is vegan. The life of orthodoxy is not vegan. You have to understand the, it’s not that meat is symbolically unclean. It’s that there is this idea that in the garden, humans did not eat meat. In fact, humans only started eating meat after Noah. I mean, maybe they did before, but they were only allowed to eat meat after Noah. So meat, the coming of eating of flesh is seen as part of the fall. So it’s like this falling into flesh. So eating flesh is also the falling into flesh. And so the idea that fasting would be an abstaining from meat is to put ourselves back into the move towards the original state, you would say. So that is that. But the meat is not bad. There’s nothing wrong with eating meat. It is completely acceptable and it is completely fine. And that whole problem is finally actually resolved in communion. Communion resolved the problem of Genesis and flesh. And because we eat the flesh of the divine logos in the form of bread. And so we actually go back into the garden, but we bring all the death, all that stuff from the outside. We bring it into the garden. So we join everything together. So I hope that helps you to understand that. So Paul Renee Nichols for fifty dollars US. My goodness. Wow. That’s that’s really kind of you just want to say thank you for leading me to orthodoxy. I keep you in my prayers. Keep up the good work. I thank you Paul because I definitely need your prayers. That’s for sure. And I appreciate them very much. All right. Drew McMahon asks for four ninety nine. So you can focus too much on your body. Can you focus too much on your soul? For sure. For sure. For sure. You can focus too much on your soul. Not only can you focus too much on your soul, but the first sin is a sin of the soul. It’s not a sin of the body. The sins of the body come after. St. Maximus the Confessor. I think I’ve mentioned this quote, one of my favorite quotes from St. Maximus the Confessor, where he says that, you know, there’s the sins of the right hand and the sins of the left hand. And the sins of the right hand consist in pride, self-sufficiency. These are sins of the soul. They are sins of thinking that you what you identify as you, your thoughts, your identity, your personality, all of these things that they’re the top. They’re the top of the hierarchy. There is nothing which gives that, the light doesn’t come from above. The light comes from my own reason, my own thinking, my own self. That’s the first sin. And St. Maximus says that when we give in to the sins of the soul, the sins of pride, then comes in the sins of the body. It starts with pride and you see it in the case of Satan. You see it in the case of Adam. You see it in the case of Cain. Every first, all these first sins are always sins of pride. But then comes the murder of Abel. Then comes not the sin of the body, but let’s say in terms of terms of Adam and Eve, you know, Adam sins. And then then after that comes the conjugal union between Adam and Eve. And so this falling into the body is a consequence of the sin. Now in the case of the conjugal union, it’s actually not seen as a sin in itself, but it’s still seen as a consequence of the fall. All of that, like I said, though, is going to be changed into glory. As much the murder, because we have Christ being murdered on the cross, and as much the conjugal union, because we have the entire imagery of Christ as the groom and the church as the bride and this whole union, which takes that imagery and lifts it up, you could say. So for sure, you can focus too much on your soul. And I would say that focusing too much on your soul is probably one of the bigger dangers right now. Because the problem is this. The problem is that if you’re living in the body, if you are completely taken up by the passions of the flesh, you know, by your desires for sex or for whatever, for food or for, you know, just that you were lying all the time, that you’re stealing, that you’re murdering, all these things that are really like, you know, taking things and killing people and whatever, all of that, then it can actually be helpful to focus on the soul. That is, it can be helpful to move into the soul. And so by finding a purpose, by getting a job, by having friends, by doing all that stuff, you know, the kind of Jordan Peterson stuff that he suggests, then you can solve the problem of the body. But you can’t stop there. If you stop there, then you’re going to fall again. It’s going to be a cycle. Maybe it could be a long cycle, but you’re going to, you’re going to, the chances that you tumble back are quite strong. And so that’s why we need to move up towards the higher aspects. And that’s where the spiritual disciplines come into play. That’s where prayer comes into play. That’s where also submitting yourself to something in a hierarchy to someone who is responsible for you spiritually, because that person, let’s say, acts as something which is beyond your own thought and your own, your own emotions and can mirror for you your noose because he’s above you, you know, like a priest. All that is helpful to kind of help you move up so that you don’t run into the problems of the soul. But problems of the soul, man, those are the, you know, you can do everything through pride. You can, anything that you do, you can do through pride. And so it’s, that’s the last sin in a certain extent. It’s the, it’s the sin that could, that takes you down and it’s the last sin to go because you can love other people. You can be nice. You can help the poor. You can do all, everything that you do, you can do through a sense of self-sufficiency. And it, and it, it’s on, it’s around every corner. But as soon as you give into that self-sufficiency, here comes the snakes again. You can’t avoid that as well. So I hope that answer is that. All right. Let me just see. I just wanted to. Okay. So Jonathan asks, do you and Mathieu differ on certain symbolic interpretations at all? Also, should one consciously seek to embody certain symbolic manifestations, i.e. the fool? I would say Mathieu and I have, have small differences. We definitely, I would say we have way more in common than we do have differences. I would say that one of the differences between Mathieu and I is that he is more, he’s, he’s smarter than I am. And he also, he has a capacity for abstract thinking that I, that I don’t have. And so he sees, I think the patterns more purely than I do. But, but then the negative side of that is that I think that I tend to be more prone to give a lot of examples and to, to. That in some respects, I’m capable of pulling people in because I constantly giving examples and I’m constantly trying to give as many examples as I can. So I kind of maybe speak closer to the way that most people think. But, but ultimately I do think that Mathieu has a clear perception of the patterns and has a clear perceptions of the subtleties of these patterns. So, and by the way, guys, if any of you have not read Mathieu’s book yet, like what are you waiting for? You need to, you need to read it before his other books come out. So it’s called, it’s called. Oh man. All right. Okay. So you guys can follow me to page. You can find his book on, on Amazon. All right. So Gabriel R for $5 asked, could you elaborate a bit more on the centrality and importance of language? You say language is the foundation of thought. I mean, it’s, it’s the, it’s the expression of thought. It’s maybe a better way to explain it. It’s the expression of pattern. It’s the communication of pattern. It’s the way in which the principles exterior exteriorize, like become exterior. And so for me, I think that’s the way that I think about it. So I don’t know if it’s the foundation of thought, but it definitely is the way in which thought manifests itself. So you could, you can imagine it like that. That the, you could say it this way, that the way to explain it would be something like that. The entire creation existed in the thought, the mind, the thought, the thought, the thought. And so I think that that the entire creation existed in the thought, the mind of God in all eternity. And then the actual realization of those thoughts happened in the speaking. And so let there be is the way in which the patterns appear in the world through a let there be, you know, a name. Also pointing, you know, that kind of stuff where all of a sudden things come together. But the divine pattern, the divine thought is, I think, precedes the, I mean, precedes, my goodness. If I say that, people are going to, you could really see it as God the Father, as let’s say the silence in which the infinite is silent. And then the son or the logos as the exteriorization of the divine into the world. That’s the best way I’m going to get to it. All right. So Jeffrey Stewart for five dollars. Oh, man. Jeffrey Stewart asked, What do you think of Mormonism? Specifically, they’re wearing garments and the symbols in their underwear. I don’t know about the underwear and the symbol. I know I have Mormon to watch me. I know that some of you Latter-day Science people watch my videos. I have to be honest with you. I don’t think that Mormonism is a valid tradition. I think Mormonism is a I think Mormonism is a is a strange twisting of of the Christian tradition. So because of it, there are some things in Mormonism which are not false. There are some things which shine brightly. There are some things which are which actually capture some truths about Christianity. But there are also some aspects of Mormonism which I think are not are not Christian and are are something else. Sorry, guys. All right. So let’s see. I keep refreshing these super chat. So TJ Gecko for ten dollars. As someone with 18 years of Catholic education, I’m somewhat upset that you’re the first person to ever explain things in this way. Even they had even they had something like a materialist view. Dude, I look I know I know I know and. And I had sympathy for you. I I feel I understand because I think so many of us have had that experience. But I think it’s important to understand that. Like, I’m not making it up. I’m getting I think that we have neglected some of the church fathers. People have neglected the more profound church fathers in Grigory of Nyssa, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Ephraim the Syrian, the deeper aspects, even in peoples like Athanasius or St. Irene de Lyon. Or I think that it’s all there. But I think that so many of us have forgotten it. And the difficulty that we have when there’s a change of worldview is that we often don’t we don’t perceive it. It’s happening under our feet and very few people are able to perceive it. That’s one of the things that I when I talk about Galileo and I when you look at what happened with Galileo, you realize that there was a change that happened. There was a shift in the very manner in which people saw the world. And by the time they were arguing with Galileo, it was too late. The ancient world was gone and no one knew what they were. They had lost something. And then they were arguing with Galileo on a terrain that wasn’t that wasn’t the right terrain to argue on. And so and so I think that one of the reasons why we’re able to do this, like one of the reasons why now there’s this moment where I can talk about this and you guys can understand and you can talk about this and you can understand to a certain extent. Jordan Peterson was talking about some of these things and and and people are understanding. But then now I’m starting to find other people that have been trying to talk about these things in a way that that people can understand is is really I hate to say this, but it’s because of postmodernism. Postmodernism, what it did is that it shattered the modern. Hold on our perceptions. It kind of shattered that vision and it broke it broke it in a thousand pieces. And what it didn’t realize is that among those thousand of pieces, there are a few of the pieces that had. Of what was left, there were some gems which could be found again that couldn’t be seen before. So we so we we all of a sudden could now in a way that our ancestors even a hundred years ago could we’re looking back at the Christian tradition and there’s some things which were veiled to their eyes because of the very worldview that they were inhabiting. Now that that worldview is broken. There’s all this chaos. There’s all this madness because of it. But it is now possible to look back and see things that were not seen by our immediate ancestors. And I think that that’s the surprise of postmodernism. And and and that’s the that’s the that’s the problem of you know this idea when I talk about this Dublin version where there’s a trick like there’s a trick in in in the Gospels of the trick in the Bible. There’s a trick in the idea of the crucifixion itself, which is that you know the story that you see in the Gospel of of Nicodemus. And we see in the image of the Anastasis of the resurrection of Christ where you know the devil and the Hades are in hell and they’re waiting for Christ to die on the cross. You know, and they’re they’re boasting and they’re bragging and they’re thinking we’ve done it. You know, we finally arrived. We’ve killed the logos, but then bringing the logos down into the chaos, then the logos shines into the chaos. And I think that that’s what happened. Modernism tried to destroy Christianity, but as it actually resolved as it came to the very end where it actually thought that it had succeeded. And the last thing left, I’ve talked about this before, the last thing left was consciousness itself that they tried to swallow. You know, the qualities of things themselves, the Logi themselves, they thought they could swallow them in darkness and pop. Here they come again. So that’s the way I see it, guys. That’s the way I see it. All right. Let’s see. All right. I need to review. I need to refresh this again. Sorry, guys. I’m really not good with these super chat stuff. OK, so shot in the dark asks, my wife and I will be having our first child in the next few weeks. Can you comment on the symbolism of the firstborn or first fruit? Yeah, I mean, sure. I mean, I can comment about it in a way that you might not expect. I like to do that. As you notice that one of the interesting things about Christianity is that it is a restoration of the firstborn. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I’ll probably do a video on it as well. But if you look in the Bible, there’s this idea of the firstborn, right? This idea of the firstborn. But if you look at how the story actually plays out, the firstborn is always the second. It’s the second. It’s Abel. It’s Jacob. Or it’s not even the second. It’s Joseph. It’s not the first. First has been lost in the fall. It’s as if the fall is the losing of the firstborn. And so when you see that Christ is the firstborn of all creation, you have to understand that it actually is clashing with the biblical story. Because in the biblical story, it’s always never the firstborn. Even though there is this idea of the firstborn that you see, the idea that the firstborn will inherit, the idea that the first fruits need to be given up to God, all of this is there. But Christ restores that. And once you understand that Christ restores the firstborn, you’ll understand a lot of things. You can understand why it is Rome which converted to Christianity. Because Rome is Esau. Rome is Cain. Rome is the killing of the brother and the founding of the city, just like Cain. And so in the very story of Christianity, it seems like it was inevitable that it would be Rome or something akin to Rome, which would finally, which would convert in this restoration of the firstborn. So here’s a little mystery for you guys. All right. Okay, so Christian Chad asks… So this Mad Truth guy keeps trying to post, but I don’t see his post for some reason. So sorry, I don’t know why that’s happening. I don’t know if you’re being censored or whatever. So Christian Chad says, the Mad Truth asks you, don’t support revolution and say perfect form of government is monarchical with Christ as King, but King’s Christ are sin and corruptible. And so revolutions are necessary, inevitable, to flip the corrupt system. So this is an interesting idea. It’s an interesting thing to think about and it’s an interesting problem. And I agree that Kings are corruptible and that Kings are… can be subject to sin and that hierarchies are corruptible. Now… the problem is what kind of revolution is acceptable. That’s really the problem. It’s not that revolutions are inevitable. The problem with revolutions is that they rarely give… they really give what they think they give. There are stories of revolutions in tradition. Now, the best story of revolution is the story of King David. That is the Bible trying to work out the problem of revolution. And that ultimately actually gets resolved in Christ, ultimately. But in the story of King David, you already see a desire to resolve the problem of revolution. Because the problem with revolution in general is that it’s a toss-up. It’s like turning the table. And the idea that the next King or the next leader is going to be any better than the one before is really a gamble. There is no guarantee, just because they say they’re going to be better. You know, Robespierre was nowhere better, or Napoleon was in no way better than Louis XIV. And so… And it’s the same with the Russian Revolution. It’s the same with most revolutions, is that they end up with worse than before. So then how do you restore? How do you reboot? How do you… So in the Bible, there are several ways that there’s an attempt to do that. One is the Jubilee. The Jubilee is a desire to avoid the problem you’re talking about. The Sabbath is that as well, the Jubilee especially. Because in the Jubilee, what you have is you have a… Let’s say a 50-year period where things organize in this hierarchy of property and this hierarchy of power. And then at the end of the 50 years, the power is then devolved back into its original distribution, you would say. So what it does is it avoids the pyramid getting too pointy and too hard. And then every 50 years, you break it apart so that it doesn’t get too harsh. Now the Jubilee is a desire to do that. Now in the story of King David, the beauty of the story of King David is that King Saul falls into sin and becomes an evil king, tyrannical king. So the idea is there has to be a change. Now how do we know that the king who’s going to replace Saul in a revolution is going to be the right king? And the answer in the story of King David is very powerful. Because the answer in the story of King David is that it’s the one who refuses to kill the king. It’s like I’m getting shivers just thinking about it. It’s like that is the solution. The one who is to be the king is the one who refuses to kill the king. And that’s the way to know which king is the one to replace the corrupt one. And that’s what happened in the story of King David. King David replaces Saul. But the whole time that he’s ascending, the whole time of his ascent, he refuses to kill Saul, even when he has a chance to do it. And I think that’s ultimately ends up being the answer that Christianity offers, which is if you look at the best stories in the hierarchy of the church, there are horrible stories. But the ones that we hold to be the ideal ones, the ones that we hold to be the highest, are the ones where the bishop, let’s say, or the abbot of a monastery is the one that’s chosen, is the one who refuses to become the bishop. The one who flees, physically flees away when they try to put him in office. And they have to go get him in his cave and bring him back and say, no, you’re the bishop. And then they’re like, no, I don’t want to be the bishop. Like, no, you’re the bishop. Those always end up being the best bishops. That’s the way I see the solution to that, guys. All right. So Christian Chad also says, the mad truth continues. Is democracy not preferred with revolution built in every four years? Is democracy not preferred? Preferred to depend. Preferred to what? Preferred to monarchy? Maybe it’s preferable to absolute monarchy, but I don’t believe in absolute monarchy. I’m not an absolute monarchist. I believe that something like the Byzantine Empire tried to find a balance between the powers of the state, the powers of the church, and the emperor figure was not always a direct succession. There are possibilities of breaks in the succession. The idea that it’s only the descendants of one family forever is a silly idea. There are possibilities of breaks in that succession. So the problem with democracy is that it devolves into chaos, and then it actually brings about tyranny. And that’s what Plato said. And I think that there are many examples. And there are one example in Germany in the 1930s, which is that when democracy breaks down because there are too many factions and there are too many people who are and there’s too strong an opposition within the factions, then that can either devolve into civil war or it will devolve into a tyranny. And just because it hasn’t happened yet, I mean, you know, and thank God for that, although it happened once in the US, although it hasn’t happened since the civil war, there’s nothing to say they won’t happen again, especially if you look at how tense the situation is right now in the US. There is a need, I think, for trans-political characters. Yeah. All right. So the People’s Front of Judea for five dollars for Monty Python. All right. So what is the… he is actually asking about Monty Python. What does the Orthodox Christian do on the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian? The position of Catholic priests is that it’s blasphemous opinion. I don’t know what the official view… I don’t think the Orthodox have any official view on that movie. I would say that movie is half blasphemous and half hilarious. I mean, it’s a pretty funny movie. But I think that for sure, some of it seems to at least court with blasphemy. But it’s really funny, especially the whole Monty Python. My goodness, they had such incisive capacity to understand cultural movements and cultural dynamics. And that movie, that whole idea of these different revolutionary groups that can’t get along with each other and are fighting more amongst each other than they are fighting against the authority is wonderful. Yeah, that whole discussion about the guy who wants to be a woman because he wants to have babies and then they’ll defend his right to be a woman. My goodness. I mean, was that movie really made in the 70s? I guess it could only have been made in the 80s. I don’t know when it was made, early 80s maybe. It would only have been made at that time because today you can never make a movie like that. But it’s hilarious. All right. So Vesuvius asks, what’s the status of God’s dog? So it’s coming along. So the difficulty with God’s dog is that Kord Nielsen, who’s the artist working on it, I mean, and he is being amazing about it. I mean, the images that are coming out of it. When I post the talk I gave in Chicago, I actually give people a sneak peek of some of the pages that he’s putting out. The difficulty is that he has a full-time job and he’s doing it in his spare time. And I’m not in a position right now to finance the, to hire him full-time for him to make the comic. And he also just had a baby like a few months ago. And so that has slowed him down. But we’re still working. We’re still working on the different pages. We’re still moving along. It is going to take a little longer, but we won’t give up on that project because it’s going to happen. Now, my hope is that when it’s ready, we’re going to crowdfund the printing for it. What I’m hoping is that if people really get behind us and are willing to support the project, that we’ll be able to raise enough money to finance the second book, because it’s a really, it’s an epic story. And I think there’s going to be at least four or five books in the series. And so what we hope is that if we can get enough momentum going, that then he could quit his job and we could finance the second book and then we could speed things up. And so, well, you guys will see the images from that soon. It’s really, it’s really, he’s really doing a great job. And he’s really, I feel like he’s really understanding the ideas that we’re bringing in there. And he understands the characters very well. I’m excited. Like I, even though, even though I know it’s taking longer than what any of us would have hoped for, even himself, I’m really excited about it and looking forward to, looking forward to present it to you guys. When we get close to, when we get close to the time when we’re actually going to do a crowdfunding for the printing, I’ll start making videos about it and I’ll start doing more explicit videos about St. Christopher and maybe do a video with Cord as the artist. And I’ll try to kind of integrate that into my content so that you guys get a bit more of a sneak peek of what’s happening. OK, so Elinor asked him, what are the meanings of anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-communism? I don’t know, besides that they’re deluded. I don’t know what to say. They’re completely deluded anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-communists. My goodness, with that is just the most insane delusion. People who, people who come up with those ideas really honestly can only have lived in Western world, in Western countries. I mean, yeah. I’ve seen anarchy. I’ve seen it with my eyes and it doesn’t at all look like what they think anarchy looks like. If there are no, there are no hierarchies, then it’s just a bunch of people fighting amongst themselves. And it can devolve to different levels, but it will always evolve and people will fight. And if people think that it’s just a cultural thing in the sense that other cultures do it that way, but us in the West, we wouldn’t do it that way if we had such a system. You know, not that long ago, our cultures were also fighting amongst themselves and, you know, tribes were fighting each other. And so, yeah, I don’t believe in that stuff. There’s not a lot of solutions, though, politically. I mean, I’m not delusional myself. Like, I’m not saying there are easy political solutions. And when I say that I believe in a form of monarchy, I also see it in that I’m only presenting to you guys my ideal. I’m not sure that there can be such a thing as monarchy in a technological world, because it would be difficult to imagine how it would devolve into a form of tyranny. Because one of the strengths of monarchy in the past was the idea of having a figure that had something like near absolute power and very little reach. And so they had to negotiate with their aristocracy, with the people below them in the hierarchy, because they couldn’t affect the world directly from where they stood. And so that tended to create a kind of balance. But in a world where you have surveillance states and where you have the capacity to spy on everybody and to control everybody, you know, of course, like I said, guys, I don’t know what the political solution is. That’s why I don’t focus on the political solution. Try to focus on on a spiritual solution. And hopefully out of that will come will come political solutions that will be viable. I just feel like this is ending on a depressing, depressing note. What is going on? All right, guys, I think we’re going to end. It’s like almost 11. Anyways, usually I try to go for now and half. But but all right, guys, thank you so much for showing up. I really appreciate the opportunity that you guys give me to talk about this stuff. I’m I’m excited to see how the face how the YouTube channel has been growing. I’m excited to see the Facebook group growing and all the great discussions that are happening, all this stuff that’s going on. I’m excited to see even the discussions that are happening between the different people like even, you know, like John Verveke and Paul VanderKley and the fact that I, you know, even rebel wisdom that I just did this talk with Jordan Greenhall and all these discussions that it seems like we’re not weren’t that possible a few years ago. So I’m just excited about all of this. And I think all of you for giving us the opportunity to talk about that and to to discuss and to duke it out and to try to get to the bottom of all this stuff. So so so I thank you and I’m going to I’m going to sign off. All right, guys, see you in a month.