https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RXGdaJFIB8M
So one of the comments that I’m getting quite a bit is that people have noticed that I recommend San-Def from the Syrian and his poems, the hymns of paradise, to read that in order to understand the story in Genesis and also the symbolic structure. And many people have written me to say that they’re struggling to get out of San-Def from what I suggest they can get. And so last month I was invited by Father Jason Foster to Shreveport, Louisiana to speak at a clergy retreat for the Orthodox Church, the OCA, Orthodox Church of America, but also to give two public speaking events at his parish. And so what you’re going to see is the first part of that. I’ll post the second part in a few weeks. But the first part was really diving into the poem of San-Def from also connecting that poem with St. Gregory of Nyssa and his vision of the ascent of the mountain. And so what we’re really getting is this image of the mountain of paradise as this cosmic structure. And so hopefully this will help people get through San-Def from and get the gold nuggets that are found in his poem. I would especially recommend that people, a lot of the good stuff came out in the question period because it was the first time I was presenting, trying to present these things systematically. A lot of the stuff ended up coming out in the question period. So please, if you can, take the time to get through that as well. The questions are difficult to understand, but when they are, I put up the question as text over the image. And so if you are listening to it audio, maybe take a glance at the screen to see the question if you want to follow that as well. So please enjoy my first dive into San-Def from the Syrian and I hope you enjoy that. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So tonight what I want to talk about is, I want to talk to you a little bit about that experience that I had or try to take you along that experience that I had of seeing how everything is connected together, to see how the Bible and our tradition of the fathers, the icons, all of this is really a powerful series of embedded patterns, you could call it. The way I sometimes try to describe it is that reality has a fractal structure. We already know what a fractal is. So fractal is like a tree. If you look at a tree, you have the basic tree, then each branch of the tree has the same shape as the tree. So you have a tree and then the branch and on, if you follow the branch, if you could cut the branch off and hold it, it would look just like a tree. If you cut a smaller branch off, it would also look like a tree. The pattern is the basic pattern, but then at every level of the tree, it’s the same pattern which reappears. And that’s what, when you start to look at the way that the fathers were interpreting scripture and the way that then they use that and they use that to form our liturgy, to form our icons, to form the way that they talked about scripture, that that’s what they’re diving into. They’re diving into that pattern. And so when a father will add some, will go through some of the details, when a father will add some little detail in the text, it looks like he’s making up some detail in the biblical text, some tradition, but he’s not. He’s able to say that because he’s noticed that there’s all these patterns come together and the elements are there in each one. So this is very abstract for now. I’m going to take you on the trip, so hopefully you will see what I’m talking about. So first of all, we have this idea, this embedded idea of patterns. You could call it, the fathers, St. Maximus the confessor especially, talks about it as macrocosm and microcosm. So there’s a cosmic structure and then there’s a personal structure. The human being is microcosm and then you have this massive universe which has the same shape as the human person. So St. Maximus goes very far in this. He says, the entire cosmos consisting of the visible and invisible things is man. And man consisting of body and soul is cosmos. For the intelligible things participate to the substance of the soul as the soul has the same reason as the intelligible ones. That’s a little more complicated. Keep the first quote part, but I’m still going to go through it. And the sensible things bear the image of the body as the body is the image of the sensible things. So we have in the created world, there are invisible things, there are principalities, there are angels, there are things that hold, let’s say hold the world together. Then we have sensible things. And in the person, we also have an invisible aspect to us. We have the soul, we have the noose, we have, we have even have our desires which are invisible. And then there’s the body, there’s the physical part. And those two are, they’re the same structure. So because they’re the same structure, St. Maximus sees creation as being built for man. Because man ends up being the thing that holds the whole thing together. Like this, like an anchor that has, just like the universe, has a physical aspect, an invisible spiritual aspect, and then kind of brings it all together. So St. Maximus talks about how the man is a, he talks about him as being a laboratory in which because the human being pulls all those elements together, right, we have our thoughts, we have our bodies, we have all these elements to us, and we pull them together into one being. And then the human being does that also for creation itself. And so it’s interesting, it’s interesting to think about that, it’s interesting to think about that today. Because we’re reaching, we’ve gone through this time in history where we’ve had this kind of scientific materialism. And we’ve, and Christians have been slapped around by a lot of that thinking, where we have this idea that there’s the world, the world has these rules, and we just have to look at them and we can measure it, we can calculate, and then we can just say, you know, here’s how it works, we figured it out. But we’re coming to the end of that, and even a lot of scientists, a lot of physicists are coming to the end of that, where they realize once we’ve reduced everything to the material world, once we’ve done that, we have a problem. Because then you have to explain the spiritual stuff. Because before that they could kind of ignore it, you know, this is stupid, this is just stupid stuff, let’s not talk about that, we’re just going to talk about this material stuff. And then you reach the end of it, you’re like, okay, we can encompass everything in this material stuff, we’ve encompassed everything. And then at some point you’re like, okay, well then, let’s take that stuff, that spiritual stuff, like consciousness, like human experience, like identities, like qualities of things, how do you now fit that into your material world? And they’re struggling to do it. So they come up with words like emergence, right? How is it, why is it that we know that something has parts, but it’s also one thing at the same time? You ever thought about that? Right, you look at a chair, a chair has parts, right, it has different parts, different elements, different, you know. Why do we think that that’s one thing? Why do we say it’s a chair? Why don’t we just see the parts? Why don’t we just see the parts all the way down? Because those parts go all the way down in the scientific world, all the way down to the quantum whatever, quantum fields of particles that are just floating around. So then they stack up, they stack up towards these different stages of unity. And then in the human experience, we see it even more, like why do we think that this here, people coming here, why do we think that that’s one thing? Why do we think that the United States of America is one thing? How do we get to that? And so in the vision of St. Maximus, St. Maximus gives us a key. St. Maximus gives us a key that the human person, a modern way of saying that would be something like consciousness, right? Fathers don’t use that word. But it’s a good word to use because people understand what it means today. People know a lot of the other words like soul, you say use the word soul today, you’re people just have all these ideas of what it means. Like try to find words that actually have meaning for people today. So you say through, we need consciousness or consciousness plays a part in bringing things together, in making things one. You need a conscious agent to be able to say that terror is a bunch of stuff. It’s also one thing that jump into into unity. That’s how St. Maximus talks about us. That’s what we do. That’s what we are. That’s what makes us special in creation. That’s what makes us not only special, that’s what makes us in the image of God. All right, so that’s this idea of this macrocosm, microcosm, right? And how relevant it is to understand today. One of the words that the physicists are using today, they have a fancy theory, they call it the anthropic principle. Because they’re realizing that anthropic means the shape, like the shape of of man. They’re realizing that it’s so complicated, everything is so complicated, that you almost need the world to be made in a way to give consciousness, to bring consciousness about. Because consciousness is, they’re not able to explain it. They can’t explain consciousness. Like they can’t explain the thing by which they’re looking at the world with. It comes very, very, and then that’s when people like St. Maximus can help us get a key to something more. All right, so a lot of you like me come from kind of Bible believing churches, the kind of Protestant evangelical world. So what I discovered in reading The Church Fathers, and today I’m going to take you mostly through a church father whose name is St. Ephraim the Syrian. St. Ephraim the Syrian is a Semite. He’s an Aramaic saint who probably spoke Aramaic. He probably actually did, I don’t know, he wasn’t Aramaic, he spoke the early Syriac language I would think. I think his texts are written in Syriac. And so he does this powerful interpretation of the Garden of Eden and of Genesis. He has a text called The Hymns on Paradise, and it’s a poem. It’s a poem that talks about paradise. The way that he talks about paradise is so powerful because it does exactly what I’m talking to you about. It shows us this pattern that is there. It basically lays the Garden of Eden out as the pattern of everything, all the way until we understand that it’s also the pattern of the heart of the human person. Alright, so first off I want to show you how big St. Ephraim makes the paradise. He says, he had a vision, for him he had this vision of paradise. And he says, with the eye of my mind I gaze upon paradise. The summit of every mountain is lower than its summit. So it’s the highest mountain. And then he talks about how the crest of the flood of Noah reached to the foothills of paradise. But it didn’t enter into paradise. So paradise ended up being above the flood. Now you also have to remember that paradise is a mountain. That’s actually in the Bible. People forget that it’s in the Bible. It’s not in Genesis, it’s in Ezekiel. Ezekiel gives this description of paradise and he says, he talks about paradise as this holy mountain, as this mountain. So you have to imagine this mountain. I’m already going to give you the image. And so he has this idea of this paradise as a mountain. At the summit of the mountain is the Tree of Life. And let’s say above the Tree of Life or coming down upon the Tree of Life is the glory of God. Just like the glory of God descended onto the Ark of the Covenant, he talks about how the glory of God descended to encounter Moses on the Mount Sinai, so too the glory of God is at the summit of the mountain and we have the Tree of Life. So he talks about how the limits of the garden, so imagine that the summit of the garden is higher than all the mountains and the limit of the garden is beyond all the ocean. So imagine the way that the ancient people saw the world. Basically this giant island surrounded by ocean, by the infinite ocean, which is still true today. There still is this ocean that kind of surrounds everything, you know, that’s all connected together that kind of flows around everything. And so he saw the limits of paradise being beyond the ocean. Here’s a description that he talks about. He says, Moses made a crown for that whose splendid altar with the wreath entirely of gold that he crowned the altar in its beauty. So around the altar in the tabernacle there was this golden grave or this golden crown which went around the altar. So he says, thus gloriously intertwined is the wreath of paradise that encircles the whole of creation. So the crown of paradise, the wreath of paradise encircles all of creation. So its summit is beyond the highest mountain and its limit is beyond all of creation. So already we’re starting to see that the place that he’s talking about is maybe not the same kind of place that we’re used to thinking about in our kind of very materialistic world. That he is talking about a place, but this place is, let’s say it’s the place of places you could call it, right? It’s that which makes place possible, something like that. Maybe a way to describe it. And so this mountain is also a hierarchy. It’s a hierarchy of beings, a hierarchy of being itself. So here’s some descriptions that he gives. He says, when he made this intricate design, he varied its beauties so that some levels were far more glorious than others. To the degree that one level is higher than another, so too is its glory the more sublime. In this way he allots the foothills and the most lowly, the slopes to those in between and the heights to the exalted. So that which is exalted, that which is high, that which is glorious is higher up on this And that which is confused or in between or is lower is lower on the mountain. All right, so hopefully things are starting to take shape in understanding what he’s talking about. So then St. Edward talks about the four rivers of paradise. So we know that in the garden there were four rivers of paradise. Now if you think of the paradise as a mountain, all of a sudden the image of the four rivers will change as well. Because it’s hard, you can’t really see it otherwise as these four rivers that are coming down the mountain. So you can kind of imagine, I mean you don’t have to think about it too much, but like a source, there’s a source, some kind of source that is pushing the water and then it’s coming down, coming down the mountain. So he talks about how its fountains delight with their fragrance, but when they issue forth towards us, they become impoverished in our country, since they put on the savors of our land as we drink them. So he has this idea that the waters of the rivers of paradise water all of creation. They’re the source of all the waters. We always have to remember when we look at in the Bible, when it talks about water, flowing water always comes from above. It has to. It has to come from above. There’s no other way for it to be flowing. And so when we talk about flowing waters, we’re already in this notion of this hierarchy. The water is coming from above. It’s coming from heaven. The water is coming from heaven. So here are these four rivers that come down, water the world, and as they get lower and lower on this mountain, they lose their quality. They become mixed with the local places and then they become less pure, you could say. And then he talks about the beings. He talks about the children of light. He talks about from their abodes, the children of light descend. They rejoice in the midst of the world where they had been persecuted. They dance on the surface of the sea and they do not sink. Because St. Ephraim understands that paradise is always there. It’s always, it’s not something which was only there in the past. It’s always there. And then if we want to participate in paradise, there are ways in which you participate in paradise. And he gives us the ways. He tells us. First of all, he tells us in the Old Testament what those were. He says this structure with this mountain and he divides it into three. So he has the tree of life at the top and that is the same as the Holy of Holies of the temple, of the tabernacle. And then he has the tree of knowledge of good and evil and that’s the same as the Holy place in the tabernacle or the temple. And then he has the lower part, the gate or the fig tree, which would be the outer court of the tabernacle. So he divides it into these three parts. Why is the fig tree, why is the fig tree the third part? Do you know the story of why there’s the fig tree in that story? Why is there a fig tree in the story of paradise? Who remembers? Sorry? They cover themselves. Exactly. So that becomes the first covering. So then everything else is going to flow from there, this notion of the covering. So imagine this, these levels as three coverings, three veils, the three veils of the temple. You have the veil to the Holy of Holies, you have the veil to the Holy place, and then outside you have this rougher covering. You have the covering of skin, the garments of skin. St. Ephraim doesn’t talk about the garments of skin, but St. Gregor of Nyssa definitely talks about the garments of skin. And he explains how the covering of the tabernacle, which was hairy, it was made of animal skins, is the same as the garments of skin that Adam and Eve put on themselves. So as we get lower and lower on the hierarchy of beings, there is this need to cover ourselves more. Right? And it’s not that hard to understand that. It’s not that hard to understand it. I always talk in my talks about the garments of skin, trying to understand what that is. What does it mean that Adam and Eve have to cover themselves with garments? And it really does have to do with this moving out towards death. So in the garden, they were self-sufficient to the extent that they were only dependent on God. And as they move away from the garden, then they start to become dependent on God. They start to have to deal with the outside world more and more. The reason why God gave Adam and Eve garments of skin was to encounter the thorns. God said, because of your fall, the trees will start to produce thorns. And so the world will be hostile to you. And you have to cover yourself in order to face that hostility. So you add a layer of clothing to be able to face the cold. Then if you want more colds, you go further out into a place where human beings, it’s more difficult, the world is more hostile to you. You add a house. And if you want to go further out into a world that’s hostile to you, you add a wall to your city. You add this and that and you add technologies in order to supplement your existence out in the world of the hostile world. In the story of the fall, you see it happening. There’s the fall. Adam and Eve have garments of skin. And then there’s another fall where Cain killed his brother. And then what does Cain do? Found the city. So you have this garment around Adam and Eve. And then Cain puts a garment around, around, let’s say, the group. And then his descendants, they end up creating weapons of war and steel, you know, metal weapons, metallurgy in order to add that. And then the final result of that is the flood where it all breaks apart. You can’t at some point that garments, you keep adding garments around yourself at some point, you know, it cracks. And then I went through that recently. For those who know that I’ve been on a, through a flood that the, the, the, our city, they built a dike at the end of our city because they used to get flooded. And then they started to trust that dike completely. And everybody forgot that the dike even basically existed. It was like, this is just normal world as the waters rose and rose and rose. And at some point, the dike gave in and the water came in. So these garments of skin, which are, which are immediately described by the fathers as our physical bodies that are, that are fleshly bodies are the first garments of skin that we all know that those, they give us, they give us protection for a while, but they’re going to break apart. You better do what you need to do while you’ve got them, you know, because at some point they’re going to go away. All right. So, so the notion is that this thing, this mountain, it goes all the way out until, so Asseh-Defrim had different ways of describing it. He talks about when Adam and Eve fell, then God chased them out of the garden and then they were lower down on the slopes of the garden. And then when Cain killed Abel, then Cain was chased out of the garden. Cain was chased lower down still. And then Seth was higher up on the mountain. So it is, it’s a hierarchy of beings. It’s an ontological hierarchy. The more you’re closer to God, the higher you up on the mountain, the further you are from God, the lower you are on this, this mountain. For all these, those who are Orthodox, it’s the ladder of divine ascent. The same thing. The ladder of divine ascent is exactly what he’s talking about here. You know, several centuries before that text was written, it’s the same structure. Okay. St. Ephraim talks about how this is the same structure as the ark, the Noah’s ark, because the human beings were on top and then the birds were there after, lower than the humans. And then the animals were at the bottom of the ark. Like I said, the same as the tabernacle. The tabernacle had the glory of God in the Holy of Holies. And on the outside, there was the outer court where they had these, and around the tabernacle, they also had these animal skins that were around it. So it’s, all of it is the same structure. And so then, when it says in the Bible that the children of God mix with the daughters of men, right, in this, he actually gives such a beauty, he’s able to avoid the problem of the whole angel thing, because he has it on a mountain. And so you have the children of Seth, the sons of Seth, that go down the mountain, and then they mix with the daughters of King. And so they’re going down the ontological hierarchy, and they’re perpetuating this fall, like going further and further down. And then finally, like I said, you have this fig tree that was an image of the Covenant. And Sedefrim does a beautiful thing. He tells us why Christ cursed the fig tree. Right? That text, which is one of the strangest texts in the Gospel, right? Christ comes up to the fig tree, and he curses it because it hasn’t produced fruit. Well, Sedefrim says it, in the Sedefrim, it just makes total sense, because that’s how the fall started. Adam and Eve fell, and they tried to cover themselves. And Christ is saying, I’m removing those coverings. I’m going to remove them. And in the process, it’s also in the story of his entry into Jerusalem, he’s going towards crucifixion. He removes the fig garments, and then he ends up by ripping the last veil in the temple and entering into the Holy of Holies. And so Christ is going back up, he’s doing it in reverse. He’s going back up the mountain in that story. Part of it is cursing the fig tree. All right. So does that make sense to some of you? Like, do you kind of see how this pattern is repeated in Scripture in different places? And the structure of a church, the actual architectural structure of the church, follows the same structure, right? Our church architecture has three sections, basic sections. We have the altar, the Holy of Holies, and we have the nave, which the communions gather. And then we have the narthex, where is the buffer space between the outside, right? We chase, we don’t, nobody does it anymore, really. But in theory, we chase the catechumens out at a certain moment in the liturgy in order to create that actual ontological hierarchy. We’re actually doing that. So we have the priest in the altar. We have the faithful in the nave. And we have those that are in between, right? Remember St. Ephraim said that which is in between is lower on, so we have this in between in the narthex, and then we have the flood or the chaos on the outside, right? Okay. Hopefully, I made my case for that at least, because I’m not done yet. And so, because this structure exists at all the different levels, when the incarnation happens, then it gets in, like it falls into the personal level. Christ is a person. Christ is also the glory of God, which descends down on the holy mountain. That’s what Christ is. He is the ultimate accomplishment of that promise, of that image of the glory of God descending and coming down onto the Ark of the Covenant, coming down onto the holy mountain, all of this. So, inevitably, the Church Fathers are going to associate who with the Garden. If you look at the icon right behind you, if you look at the icon of the Last Judgment, there’s an image of paradise, and there are two images, two basic images of paradise in paradise. One is the bosom of Abraham, right? So, think about this ontological hierarchy that I’m talking to you about. You have a source, Abraham, then he has children, they have children, they have children, they have children, and it widens out, right? It becomes a pyramid. Abraham has more and more children, has more and more children, and then when they die, if they’re righteous, where do they go? They go back. They go back into their place of origin. They go back to paradise. They go back to their source. They go back to the bosom of Abraham. You could do that, we could keep going until Adam if you wanted to. We go to Abraham, but we could all say we’re all in the bosom of Adam, right? But then the other image is the mother of God, right? Because she is the place where Christ came down and manifested himself through. And so, we see, for example, in this image, I always tell people, the reason why we put the mother of God in paradise isn’t just because she’s in paradise, it’s because she is paradise, right? The reason why we show the bosom of Abraham in paradise isn’t because Abraham is in paradise, it’s because it is paradise. That is an image of paradise, okay? And so, the fathers will bring us on that line. St. Proclus says, The Holy Mother of God and Virgin Mary has gathered us here. She is the pure treasure of virginity, the intended paradise of the second Adam. So, in that quote, there’s a lot of things going on. First of all, she’s the one who has gathered us here. What does that mean? It means that the church is also paradise. I already told you, right? It’s the same. This structure, this thing, this is paradise. I mean, you could say it’s not the… You could say that there’s an eschatological glorification of that reality where at some point, all of creation is going to kind of come into this ultimate revelation of return to paradise, but also the Holy City, like, of course. But we can participate in paradise already, to the extent that we are gathered by the Holy Virgin into the church. And then she is the intended paradise for the second Adam. The second Adam is, of course, Christ. So, what is one of the names? You… Do some of you know one of the names for Mount Athos? Mount Athos is called the Garden of the Mother of God. Isn’t that a great name? What do you think they’re referring to when they say the Garden of the Mother of God? They’re, again, the monks, the holy monks in their divine intuition, they’re referring to paradise. They’re telling you, Athos is an image, is a participation, is a participation in paradise. And this image is one of my favorite, the image of the Mother of God, of the Holy Fount, where you… If you look at her, she’s basically a mountain, she’s this mountain, and then you can see that the water is flowing down from her, like the water is flowing from the mountain of paradise. There’s another image as well, too. You have it in your narthex, which is the Mother of God as the burning bush. If you look at that icon, not all the time, but often they’ll make the burning bush in a way that it fills up the entire mountain. And so it looks like the Mother of God is like a mountain inside the mountain. So you have this amazing image of Mount Sinai as being the Mother of God herself. All right. So, so the return to paradise in the fathers, especially in St. Gregory of Nyssa, who is one of my favorite fathers, he talks about it as the removal of the garments of skin. So he says, in order then to go back into this space, we have to remove the coverings, remove the coverings. And the coverings have to do with our passions, they have to do with our sins. And you have to think about it because it’s not arbitrary. Why do we sin? We often sin because we think that that’s where life is, right? We think that we have a desire to eat and those desires are not wrong. None of our desires are wrong. We have a desire for sexual pleasure. None of our desires are wrong. We have a desire for sexual desire. We have all these different desires. But the problem is when we enter into that, and we think that that is going to be our protection, that if I eat, then I’m fine. If I give in to the desire, then I will find life there, that I will be safe. But that’s why we have ascetic practices, because that’s not where true safety is, that’s not where true life is. So St. Gregory needs to talk about this removal of the garments of skin. But he talks about it in the sense, for example, he talks about how Moses, when Moses went up into the mountain to see the burning bush, it says that he removed his sandals in order to enter into the holy place. And St. Gregory will say, we need to remove the garments from the feet of our soul in order to come into the presence of God. You think about St. Paul when he talks about the circumcision of the heart. So he uses the image of the Old Testament of removing this layer of skin, removing this layer of skin in order to go back to something which is rectified, to remove the layer of skin, and he says, no, no, he said, yeah, fine, that’s good, it’s fine, the circumcision was fine, it’s an image of something which is way more deep, way more profound, which is that you need to remove the veils around your heart. You need to remove the garments which you use to protect your heart, or you use to cover your heart. And so the entering into the temple, the entering into paradise, all of those now come into the person, where the structure of the person ends up being the same structure as paradise, same structure as the temple, the same structure as the church. And so the church fathers talk about this hierarchy of being. We have a capacity, which they talk about the noose, the spiritual intellectual, the capacity to grasp God, to come into contact directly with God, that would be up there at the top of the mountain, it would be up there, you know, where the tree of life is. And then we have the soul part, you could say that the thoughts, the feelings, the desires, all of that is in the middle part, and then at the lower part, you would have the body, or you could also understand the passions as being in the lower part too. You could just see it as a hierarchy, you have the noose, or the spiritual capacity, the thoughts, the passions, and you could imagine the body as even being kind of outside. St. Ephraim, he has this great image, he says that there are no animals in paradise. That’s weird, right? Because in the Bible, it doesn’t say that. There are no animals in paradise. He says that, even in here, I drew it different from what St. Ephraim described here. He says the serpent was not in paradise. He said the serpent came up to the gate of paradise, and Adam and Eve had to come down the mountain in order to encounter the serpent at the gate. And so this idea that the Church Fathers always attach our bodies to the animal part, like the animality, I mean, it’s not stupid, it’s obviously true, that is what we have in common with the animals. The Church Fathers knew that our bodies we have in common with the animals, it’s not a surprise that we have the same structure as the animals. But this idea that they have to descend the mountain in order to encounter the animals. So it actually gives a very interesting possible solution to the problem of death, this whole problem of people talking about, you know, was there death before? How is it that there could be death before? But if you see the paradise as an ontological hierarchy, instead of just seeing it as a story, then you understand that the animals, that the mortality was already there, you could say, down at the bottom of this hierarchy already. There was already possibility down below this cosmic structure. I’m just suggesting that, I’m not saying that that’s a solution, but it’s definitely something to think about. All right, so I had this great, one of my favorite prose from Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. He says, you must therefore keep in mind that as the center of a wagon wheel has a certain number of spokes going out to the circumference of the circle and returning to the center where they meet, so also is the heart of man like a center where all the senses, all the powers of the body and all the activities of the soul are united. And so you can see that structure again. He describes it as a flat wheel, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing as a mountain. You have a spoke, a center, then you have all these things that come out, which emanate from the center, but as they get further and further away, imagine a wheel. The spokes on the wheel, as they get further away from the center, what happens? They’re further from each other. They’re further from the center. If you turn the wheel, what happens? The further you get out, the wheel actually goes faster. If you turn the wheel, the further you are on the wheel, the faster it spins. The closer you are toward the center, the slower it spins. And if you come into the very center of the wheel, it doesn’t spin at all. It actually stops. The axis of the wheel doesn’t move. It’s this invisible point in a spinning circle that doesn’t move actually. And so this image, this is it. This is the image. This is the image. When the fathers talk about go into the heart, go into the heart, you have to enter into your heart. It’s because it’s all the senses, they come into this central invisible point, this place in the human person where, I guess, movement stops. I’m not a saint, so I don’t, it’s like I don’t. But then it also, but it doesn’t mean that everything on the outside, none of it is bad, right? All creation is good. And Sanephrim emphasizes that too. The problem isn’t that, you know, like what’s down on the mountain is not bad. But it becomes bad to the extent that it forgets the top, right? That’s, the Church Fathers always talk about memory. That’s the whole idea of memory. So as you, in your, you have these desires on the edge of you, you have these things pulling you in different directions. If you forget the memory of God, if you forget God, then that’s when those things are going to destroy you. That’s when they’re going to devour you. But if you remember God, then like Sanephrim talks about the children of light that come down from the mountain and participate in all of creation, they walk on water. This beautiful image of how the saint can engage with all of creation without it being a danger to him. He’s able to come down the entire hierarchy and the flood for him is basically a floor that he can walk on, like Christ walked on the waters. So this beautiful image of how everything participates. But if you forget, right, what happens? I know I have the story of St. Peter. No, what happens if you’re walking on water and then you start to focus on what’s going on instead of focusing on the face of your divine Lord that’s in front of you, you sink. And in that image you get, right, you get what is what does St. Peter say when he’s sinking? Lord Jesus, I’m going to say the prayer. It’s like Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me. It doesn’t say it in that exact words, but that’s the basic thing he’s saying. He’s saying have mercy on me. And that’s our prayer, right? That’s the whole of the mystical tradition of the church is this capacity to even when you’re falling, even when you’re lower to remember the glory of God that descended onto paradise. It’s all the same, it’s all the same structure. All right. So I, this is, everybody’s very silent. Okay. This is the first time that I talk about this to the extent that I’m talking about it now. Okay. And so I, I know it’s possible that I have stretched some people maybe beyond the breaking point. And so is it okay if I take questions? Is that okay? I would, so what I would like to, I’d like to take questions from all of you because I know that a lot of this stuff is, you know, I’m reading this shavuah that I’m getting all excited and I’m, and I’m, and I’m, and I’m seeing it in the icons and I’m seeing this, but I, but sometimes, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s hard to think that way. We’re so used to this idea of this kind of materialist way of understanding the world that it’s very hard to think of these embedded realities in each other. So I’d like to open up questions for you if you have any. Thinking about the moral of the garments in the National Met now, do you think it’s so much the garment or is it the fact that if someone receives a garment by God, like the garment is going to protect, but they stay in connection and receiving the gift versus taking the garment, they forget, like the prodigal son takes the inheritance and goes out, but when it’s lost, he’s returned back because the garment allows him not to have to remember God or home, he felt independent. Right. But when everything is taken from him, he comes back to center to what is, because now he’s defending again. Do you think the garment or is it the reception or the… So I’ll just repeat the basic question just for the recording. So the question was about the garments of skin, whether or not the garments of skin themselves are a problem, you could say, or whether it’s because they, they received them in pride or they received them, they took them and they didn’t receive them, let’s say, in the proper manner. Right. So here’s the, here’s, this is actually a really powerful thing for me, at least, to have seen this in the fathers and seen this in the story, is that St. Ephraim talks about how the garments of skin, the garment that before the fall, human beings were not naked, that they were covered in glory. And we hear that, right, we hear that in the liturgy, we hear that in our, in the kind of the orthodox culture, that Adam and Eve were covered in glory. And then when they fell, God gave them garments of skin. Now what’s fascinating about that tradition is that when you find out where it comes from, it’s a pre-Christian tradition. It comes from the early rabbinical era before, like just before Christ. And the text they use to talk about how we, Adam and Eve had garments of glory, is a different reading of the word garments of skin. So when it says, God gave Adam and Eve garments of skin in the original Hebrew or Aramaic, there’s a way to read the word garments of skin. There’s a way to read the word garments of skin as garments of glory. And so there’s this idea that one can become the other. So St. Ephraim actually talks about this. He talks about how that which is, the blessing which is, like you said, the blessing which is taken in pride becomes a curse. Then you can see it the other way around. That’s when the image of Christ just appears to you. You know, when you think that you can take the curse in humility and turn it into a blessing. You could take the garments of skin, you could take the consequence of Adam’s curse, which is death, and that could be transformed into garments of glory. And then all of a sudden a lot of Christian practice just makes so much sense. A lot of this notion of dying to yourself, a lot of the ideas about why we do the things we do, if you can see that, all of a sudden everything makes so much sense. And then the image I always like to use the most is, to me, the crown of thorns is one of the most powerful images in the entire Bible. It’s one of the most powerful images because here is exactly that happening. God said, you have sinned because of you, because of the fall, the world will produce thorns, the world will produce these spiky dead things that will be hostile. And then Christ takes that exact consequence of the fall and he receives it as a crown. And he flips it all around. And this whole story of the crucifixion, that’s what it is all the time. He’s flipping it all around. He’s humiliated. He’s beaten. They mock him. They treat him mockingly as a king, but in fact he’s actually manifesting his kingship. They put him on the cross. They put a sign above him saying to mock him that he’s the king of Jews, to shame him. But it’s flipping back and he actually is the king of Jews and the king of glory. And so the image of Christ, if you understand that idea of the garments of skin and you see how Christ transforms them into these garments of glory, it’s a, yeah, to me it’s one of the things that I’ve seen in the fathers and in the story of Christ that has knocked me over completely, you know, because all of a sudden a lot of it starts to make sense that Christ really is solving the puzzle all the time. He’s solving this puzzle right here. This puzzle that was set up right in the beginning of Genesis. Christ is solving that puzzle. Yes, because it, and also the whole idea of lots in terms of this idea of, there’s a lot of things in the story of Christianity which have to do with this, like the fact also that the foreigners converted. That’s also really part of this, right, because in St. Grigor of Nica he constantly described the garments of skin as the Egyptians in Exodus. He talks about, you know, he talks about how Moses killed the Egyptian and killing the Egyptian is related to circumcision. Circumcision is related to baptism and then all of that, it’s like killing this idea of getting rid of that which is foreign, removing the garments of skin, right, and so although we do need to do that, removing the garments of skin, you see Christ, he actually takes the foreigner, right, and he makes him into his glory, right. He takes Rome, he takes the horror of Babylon, he takes the, those that destroyed Jerusalem, those that killed him, and then flips that completely upside down. It’s crazy, yeah, it’s mind-blowing. I don’t think that’s a good idea. You talk about memory, so it seems like if you’re moving on to skin, you’re evolving. Yeah. Well, yeah, so it’s a form of hiding. The garments of skin are, they do end up being a form of hiding. I mean, come on, we all know that that’s what it is. That’s why I wear clothes to hide myself, but then a lot of the actions I have out in the world, this false thing that I present to you guys, and my pretensions, all of these things that I present to you, they’re a way to hide something, obviously. We all have that. We all kind of engage in that transaction, I would say. Maybe it’s just me. And so, what’s amazing in the story, in St. Gregory of Nica especially, is amazing, is that St. Gregory talks about removing the garments of skin, right? So he has this image of Moses drowning the Egyptians in the Red Sea, right? So that’s baptism, going down, leaving the garments of skin at the bottom of the water. Then, as he ascends, removing his sandals, and then shedding, not just that, but in, and St. Ephraim talks about this also, is that on Sinai, there’s this hierarchy that sets itself up, because the people are at the bottom, worshiping the golden calf, right? Then you have the priests, which are higher up, then you have Aaron, who’s higher up, and only Moses goes to the summit. So as Moses is ascending, he sheds this quantity, he sheds this quantity. He leaves the people down below, and they end up worshiping the animal, right? And then he leaves the others, and he even leaves his own brother, and then he ascends into the holy place. So he sheds all these garments as he’s going into the presence of God. But then, when he enters into the presence of God, he’s given the plans for the tabernacle, which is amazing, right? Because in the tabernacle, there are garments of skin. And so St. Gregory of Nica actually, he deals with it, he says, don’t be offended by the fact that here he is, he ascends this whole thing, he sheds all these garments, then when he attains the highest point, he encounters the garments of skin, and he says that it is an image of their crucifixion, right? Where Christ fully embodied the whole question of the garments of skin. But even more than that, it’s saying that as you shed the garments, you get them back, right? Because there’s nothing wrong with them, like I said, they become these garments of glory. There’s nothing wrong with our body, nothing wrong with our passions, there’s nothing, all of it is good, God created it good. The problem is that they’re not in their proper place, like they’re always, they try to pull on the blanket and be everything, right? Our passions, they try to convince us that that’s all we are. And if you, I mean, I’m telling you this, like I said, I’m not a saint, I did not get, I’ve never entered into the divine darkness, so just know that. But if you trust the fathers, they talk about this process, so. We can get glimpses of it, though. We get these little glimpses, because we, when we do, when we are able to shed some passion, then we can see that our dependency on that passion was so silly. It’s like, how is it that I was so taken up by that? How is it that I thought that this was all that I was, that was all my life? So, I think you already wrote it earlier in the beginning of the talk, with humanity as the mandatory census, the communication of the dead, which would imply that you may be the higher person on the planet. And, let me just draw the line, or maybe you can stand in the back of this, that has motion. Talking about the children of life, wanting to be on the planet, supposing the humans that are in the match, sorry, in the bottom of the mountain. Do you see that the dead’s motion of the children of life is a linear image of my order to be a passing person or a soon-to-be-sand? Right. Well, there’s definitely that, there’s definitely a relationship between the two. I mean, we see it in the story of Christ. Christ comes down, then he ascends, and he promises that he’s going to return. And when he returns, he’s going to bring judgment. He’s going to settle it all. Everything’s going to be set when he comes back. And so, I think that, for sure, this notion of, there is this idea of ascent and descent, and I think that you get that in the fathers as well. I mean, the whole idea of an ascetic who reaches theosis, but then out of love and out of mercy and out of grace will then give us his teachings, will give us, and we can participate in a little bit of what he has encountered by our capacity to interact with them. Even the saints, it’s the same, right? The saints, they help us to participate in something that they’ve reached that we haven’t yet reached. They kind of bring us up with them. We hope that they bring us up with them. Yes, Father? I was going to say the same higher previously about the trans-media ratio, I don’t know if that was something to talk about. One thing fundamentally what we’re talking about is questions that human beings have been asking in multiple cultures, specifically on the thinking of Aristotle’s hierarchy. It falls on the same pattern. So what we’re engaging isn’t just abstract theology, it’s our pursuit of humanity and what it means to be a human being. This has been studied in various cultures, various ages. That’s why, while all of them go to Greece, you may see Plato, Aristotle, and the Marthads. They don’t have the divine light in them, but they’re moving in a direction. And while often they’re talking about the same, the same discussion that’s taking place, but the human being, as you were saying, maybe three parts, a mind, soul, and body. And for us to be human is, and to fulfill our purpose, is for those three to function according to the will of the will being combined with the mind, the soul, the body, and us coming to that state. How do we do that practically and through the sacrament to the church? How does this resource give us the opportunity to climb the mountain to the sin? So how does the sacrament tie in with what you’re saying? Right. Okay. Well, I don’t know if I’m going to give you the, I’ll give you the answer that I understand. That’s all I can give you. So in order for, in order for this to happen, let’s say on an individual level, it also has to be happening at all levels. It has to stack up, right? It can’t just happen. That’s the, that’s the mistake that a lot of modern religious, you know, attitudes take. Is that just me and God? That’s not just you and God. Right? Because all of these things stack up. The pattern of you is the pattern of what, of a community. And then it’s also the pattern of the world, you know? And so Christ gives us a way for it to all stack up and, and the sacrament and communion, that’s, that’s it. He takes the things that he takes a lot of. Communion is, is hard to talk about. Let’s talk a little bit. He takes the most basic, the basic images of what uniting together is. So there’s the eating together, right? There’s also a certain sexual imagery of the bride and the groom joining. And so all of this, he kind of gives us as this point that we all come to and we all surround. But he adds the scandal in it too. He goes all the way to, Christ always goes all the way to the edge, goes all the way to the edge. And he says something as crazy as eat flesh and blood. Like that is just crazy to say that. But you have to understand, like I said, what Christ is doing. Christ is saying all of this, I’m going to bring all of this up together. I’m going to give it, I’m going to bring it up, all of it. None of it’s going to be left over. And so he takes the most scandalous image, right? Of offering us his own body and blood, something which is completely forbidden. And even in terms of sacrificial language, the priest would eat the bread of the sacrifice. They never would ever drink the blood of the sacrifice, ever, ever, ever. Blood had to go down into the ground. But Christ says, no, all of it, all of it. I’m bringing all of this together. And so, and so to participate in communion is really to come together as a community. Then also, as we do that, we also have to go to confession, we have to come right in ourselves. But then we also are communing with the entire cosmos, the whole thing, all the way to the edge. And we talk about also how we are uniting with the angels as well during the moment of communion. All of this is coming together. And this image of communion, especially, I mean, it is this eschatological moment. It is a moment that is beyond all moments, you know. Return to paradise, but also the holy city, all of that, the beginning and the end, smash together, everything smashed together in communion. It’s hard to think about communion. Probably best not to, actually. That’s why the Church Fathers really do tell us to shut up about communion. I’m going to shut up now. The tigris everybody says politicians … shade … paradise … tigris … shade … multi … Hmm. Well, for sure in St. Ephraim, he really does talk about, he warns us in some, I think I have some of the quotes, but he warns us to be careful when we’re talking about paradise. He says that these things that he describes in paradise are names. Like he said, be careful of the names that we use to describe paradise, because paradise is, he flirts with the idea that it is like a purely spiritual description that he’s doing. But in other places, he seems to really talk about it as a place. And I think that, I think that if we understand, it is a place. It has to be a place, right? But it’s a place, I think that it’s a place which brings all places together. I don’t know how else to say it. And the way that St. Ephraim describes it, it’s definitely not a place you could find on the map. That for sure. I think that it’s really impossible to imagine that the way that he describes how, you know, it’s like the summit is beyond everything and the base is beyond the ocean. It’s really tough to think that it’s the whole map, you know, it’s everything coming together. And so I don’t know in terms of the actual rivers that we use those names for today, like how he would have understood their relationship to that. Sadly, I don’t know. Does that kind of answer your question? It’s tough. It’s tough stuff to think about and it’s tough to talk about this stuff too. What does it actually mean? The theory point of the last image in Revelation, the breathing back, and the leaves, the tree, and the evening, and the things. And so the image, the image of the last image in Revelation is so amazing because it recapitulates the fall in Genesis. I told you, we often forget, we read the genealogies. People, we need to read the genealogies in the Bible. They’re amazing. The genealogies have great stuff in them. So when they describe the genealogy of the fall up to the flood, it talks about how Cain built the city. Cain builds the city, not Seth. The fallen one builds the city. And that movement towards the city leads to the flood and war and all that. And in the Old Testament, there’s a weird stuff about that too. Like Solomon has to get a foreign king to build the temple. There’s weird stuff. It has to be a foreign king which sends the Jews back to Israel to build their walls around Jerusalem. There’s this weird relationship between the city, the construction, the stable construction, and this interaction with the stranger, the foreigner, or something like that. But then, and Cain represents the ultimate, let’s say, foreigner or stranger or whatever. But then when you get to the end of Revelation, then it all is taken in together. The city, the fall, you have the tree in the middle and the city on the edge. Well here you have the same image. You have the tree in the middle and you have the city around it. But now it’s glorious. Now it’s this glorious city which participates, which fully remembers, let’s say, the name of God and so participates in this totality. So, you know, the New Testament is always an answer to this problem in the Old Testament. And I keep telling people that puzzle, the first chapters of Genesis are like a massive puzzle and then we’re given the key in the New Testament. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. In the Bible there are several very powerful images of that exactly. And sometimes it’s presented both ways. Sometimes it’s presented as God remembering someone or someone remembering God. And so in the story of the flood, for example, they go out into the flood and then when it’s been all this time it says God remembered Noah. That’s it. That’s the connection. And then Jonah, when Jonah goes down into the fish, goes to the bottom of the ocean, then after three days it says Jonah remembered God. So it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter where you are. It just depends which direction you’re facing. You get that sense too if you look at this notion of the divine ladder. Right. So you, you, no matter where you are on that ladder, if you’re looking up and you’re moving up, then you’re good. But if you turn, even if you’re at the top, you’re going to fall. Like it doesn’t matter where you are. And so this idea of memory is really this possibility of connecting to something when it’s far away. That’s what memory is. If I remember my parents, that’s I’m connected to my parents even though they’re far away from me. I forget my parents then and then they start to fragment and I start to, I’m not connected to them anymore. So communion could be the perfect memory you could call it. It’s perfect memory in the sense that it is obviously we’re not physically sitting in the high, you’re not physically sitting in that room when Christ is giving out the bread and the wine, but it is we’re perfectly participating in that event through perfect memory. So although we are 2000 years later, although we are hundreds, no, thousands of miles away, we have the capacity to fully remember that moment and therefore participate in it fully. So that’s the idea. And when you hear the father, when they talk about the memory of God, they know that if you remember God, then you are connected to God no matter where you are. And you get that also in the story of the prodigal son. The prodigal son goes all the way out and then all of a sudden he remembers his father. He’s like, okay, what am I doing? I should be in my father’s house. And already he’s starting, his salvation started right there. And no matter where you are, and that’s the amazing thing about Christianity too, is that no matter where you are, there’s the possibility if you’re the worst thief, murderer, whatever, whatever, anything that you’ve done doesn’t mean that you’re fine where you are, but if you remember God, you can get on that road back. There’s a road for you to come back if you just remember God. And so does that kind of help a little bit? But everything works that way. So that’s like, I keep talking about how that’s the structure of reality. That’s what it is for everything. So you have any object. I always use the image of a cup. People are going to get annoyed because I always use the same image of a cup. So you have a cup. The cup has an identity. It has a cuppness. Something that makes it a cup. Then it also has parts. It’s made of stuff. It has parts of a handle. It has a height. It has a, it’s made of stuff. I can make that cup forget its cuppness. I can throw it to the ground, smash, boom! It’s forgotten. It’s forgotten its cuppness. It’s lost its unity. It’s fragmented. It’s broken. Its parts have stopped being assembled together. And so when that happens, when the parts stop communing with the whole, that’s forgetting. And then, but if you remember, then that’s how they hold together. And that’s how even objects exist in the world. They exist through memory. They have an identity and they have parts which remember their identity. We participate in that. It’s through us. It’s through us being the laboratory of uniting things together. We make that, not to our personal thing, but as human nature participates in that existence. But that’s how the world exists. Hope that makes sense. Yeah. Right. Yeah. St. Gregory of Nyssa talks about, I don’t know if I have a bunch of these quotes in my head. St. Gregory of Nyssa has an amazing quote where he talks about, okay, here it is. This is a great quote. So St. Gregory of Nyssa says, liability to death, then taken from brute creation. This idea that I was talking about, this ontological hierarchy, but let’s say potentiality or death at the bottom. So liability to death was taken from brute creation, was provisionally made to envelop the nature created for immortality. It enwrapped it externally, but not internally. It grasped the sentient part of man, but laid no hold upon the divine image, which could be called like the heart of hearts, you could say. Right. Christ in you, the logos hidden in your heart. Now he says the sentient part, this outer part, does not disappear, but is dissolved. Disappearance is the passing away to non-existent, but dissolution is the dispersion again into the constituent elements of the world, which of which it was composed. That’s death. Death is center cannot hold, things fall apart. That’s death is when things break apart from what it is that held them together. So that image of the garden, right, that’s it. It’s this mountain. The further you go down the mountain, the farther you are from the top, but also the farther you are from the other things that are coming down the mountain. So it’s that’s what fragmentation does. It not only does it isolate us from our source, but it also isolates us from each other. That’s what that’s when communities break down and that nihilism that that people are feeling today is because not only are we no longer in communion in the sense that we are all turned towards the altar, all turned towards God, all turned towards Christ. But we because we have stopped doing that, we’re also not able to commune with each other. And that is also we’re being further and further away from each other. And that loneliness that people feel is a consequence of the incapacity to not and people are trying to find ways to connect people here at the margin, connect people. But it’s not going to happen. It doesn’t happen unless you all look in the same direction. Unless we’re all moving towards the center, you can do what you want around here, but it’s going to be Tinder. That’s what it’s going to be. It’s not going to be real connection. It’s going to be artificial, superficial, you know, passionate connections, but it’s not going to be the real thing unless we turn towards the middle. Unless we turn towards the tree of life, towards the altar, towards the glory of God, which is in the middle. And we all move in that direction. That’s when we start to get closer to each other. Goes together. So a lot of the efforts people are doing now to say like, oh, we’re going to help these young people know it’s a very provisional. It’s not going to it’s not in the long term. There’s only we need something common to look towards. Sadly, sometimes that sometimes people will find short gap like measures to get that. And that’s where a lot of a lot of the weird stuff we’re seeing here today, like coming up today, like the kind of identitarianism that we’re seeing. That’s that’s what it is. It’s a short gap. It’s like saying, OK, we’re breaking apart. We need to find these things to bring us together. And so we attach ourselves on these little identities that we have. Whether it’s on the right or the left, you know, we say, oh, we’re all this. Let’s let’s use this as our common thing so we can come together. But that can be dangerous. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And ultimately that wheel, if it remembers its center, could be it’s a cause it could slide as big as the cosmos. Everything is connected in the end, the middle. Yes, go ahead. Yes. Yeah. Well, they’re the four directions. They’re everything in the sense that they’re there. You can imagine us going in the four directions. So if you look at if you look at. Look like purging gardens, you get a sense of this, right? There’s a there’s a fountain in the middle and then there are these four rivers that go out in the four directions. I mean, it’s a cross. It just it’s a cross is a cross is is is kind of everything reduced to the smallest that the east. The east, the most condensed way to represent everything is a cross. Because it’s an extension in one direction and extension in the other. Keep going. It fills up everything. And so it’s it’s it’s the four directions are probably the best way to understand that. Like it’s an extension out into the world. The basic extension to fill up everything would be four. Right. Does that make sense? A little bit. Yeah. But. Wait, let me just finish that. That’s why there are also four gospels. Right. That’s why there are four beasts on the on the the chair. Right. So it’s like these four things that are on all the directions. Right. When you were talking about the technology of the climate center. So if you have an example of paradise in the town, would the Tower of Babel be the inverse of that? Yeah. Well, the Tower of Babel is the same story as as as the garden. It’s the same story. Right. So so this is something I didn’t go into in the in this explanation. But San Efraim is he reads San Efraim. Seriously, it’s amazing. San Efraim, he presents Adam as in being in the middle of the garden. So he presents Adam and Eve as being at the tree of good and evil. That’s where they are. So God puts Adam and Eve in the middle of the garden between the Holy of Holies and the let you know, the outer court. OK. And so so so what so what San Efraim says, which is amazing, this is an amazing solution to so many problems. Next time you meet a Gnostic, this is the solution to this problem. OK. So so so Efraim says that God put Adam there and told him not to eat the fruit. But he didn’t tell him not to eat the fruit because he didn’t want him to eat the fruit. He told him not to eat the fruit because he wanted Adam to to obey. He wanted Adam to be humble regarding that which was above him. Had to have he had to be in his place in this ontological hierarchy. Right. And San Efraim literally says that if Adam had obeyed and not taken the fruit, God would have given him the fruit. God would have given him the fruit so that he could ascend and commune with the tree of life and commune with the glory of God. Right. And so because he took it out of pride. So when he ate the tree of good, he says when you eat the tree of good and evil, both your eyes open, you could say your right eye and your left eye. The right eye sees the glory of God and then the left eye sees the bottom of the mountain. Right. And so what God wanted was for Adam to in obedience, receive the fruit so that when he ascended, he ascended the mountain, he would he would see both sides as well. Right. He would see the lower side and the top side, but he would see it as someone who is healthy, understands what sickness is. Whereas now, because he took it out of pride and out of self sufficiency, the opposite happened. He got afraid of this thing up there. He actually was afraid of it. That’s why he had to cover himself. Couldn’t deal with it. So he had to cover himself. Then he falls. And now, said Ephraim says, now he has to learn about wellness from sickness. And it’s going to be a long road, my friend. It’s going to be a long road. And so the Tower of Babel is the same thing. The Tower of Babel is saying, we’re going to reach heaven. We’re going to we’re going to build the mountain. We’re going to build a mountain. He got to chase us from that mountain. We’re going to build a mountain. We’re going to go up and we’re going to get what’s up there. What’s the result? Fragmentation, forgetting, incapacity to commune. All of that. It’s the same story. It’s actually a good way to understand what the garden is talking about, because you actually do get this idea of a breaking of communion as they literally go in different directions from this this thing. And they they can’t communicate with each other because they try to take it out of self-sufficiency, out of pride. And that’s the thing. That’s why pride is so bad, because pride is not understanding where you are on this hierarchy. Thinking that you have life in yourself. St. Gregory, he says this amazing quote, he says, he talks about how sin is sin is the capacity for nonbeing to think that it’s being basically capacity for something which doesn’t have being in itself to somehow think that they’re self-sufficient. And then by doing that, they they will break apart. You’ve lost the ultimate thing that joins you together. You’ve forgotten it. Forgotten that all of this is connected together. This pyramids, all this this hierarchy up all the way up to the eternal, you know, transcendent God. If you cut that, then things start to break apart because you forget that all of this all this ontological hierarchy leads up, you know, to our unity in the logos. So that’s it’s it’s this like I keep telling you, it’s a description of reality. It’s not arbitrary. This is how things work. I do think so. Yeah. Yeah. He said the icon of Sinai, the famous icon with the two different eyes, where one is kind of looking straight and the other one’s kind of looking off, his left eye is looking off and his looks a bit angry and his and his right eye is is looking straight at you and his kind of appease or calm. Yeah, I think that definitely has to do with this right eye left eye thing. But that’s a long story. If you want, I gave it. There’s a talk on my YouTube channel called Sacred Symbols, Sacred Art, where I go into also my description of the of the icon of the Last Judgment, where I talk about the right hand and the left hand and the right. I mean, I don’t use right eye left eye, but it’s like the same right hand left hand. You could say like, if you think of Christ judging the sheep and the goats, he says to those on his right, come right. He said to those on his left, move away. So imagine Christ now is the center of this wheel. It’s the same. So those that are on the left side, they move away and they go into fire and forgetfulness and they stop being remembering their, but then those that are on the right side come into the kingdom. I think it’s enough. I think it’s enough. I’m running out of voice. All right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much. Thank you.