The Priority of Mind ｜ with Bernardo Kastrup (More Christ) (LglZNsmol58)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LglZNsmol58

That microcosm, what played in the microcosm of Nietzsche is what is playing the macrocosm of humanity 150 years later. I just hope we don’t go mad when we realize that we are failing to pull transcendence downwards and try to make it palpable. It’s not in the nature of the thing to be that it is us who have to transcend ourselves. It doesn’t make sense to pull transcendence into us. It’s like pulling the world into the prison. No, it’s not going to happen. You cannot pull the world into your prison cell. All you can do is break out. It’s not going to work the other way around. It didn’t work for Nietzsche. It’s not going to work for us. This is Jonathan Pageot. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hi, welcome to More Christ. Today I’m joined once again by two gentlemen I most like and admire, Jonathan Pageot and Dr. Bernardo Castro. Jonathan is a French-Canadian icon carver, a public speaker and a YouTuber exploring the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world, how these patterns emerge and come together, manifest in religion, art and popular culture. He’s also the editor of the Orthodox Arts Journal and host of the Symbolic World blog and podcast. Bernardo then is the executive director of the Asensio Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially metal. He has a PhD in philosophy and another PhD in computer engineering. So then just to begin, gentlemen, do you have any preliminary questions or statements about each other’s work that you’d like to ask or to share then? Well, I haven’t read Bernardo’s books, but I have had a chance to listen to many of his lectures and listen to many of his discussions because when I’m carving, that’s the perfect medium for me. And so I think that I first of all, I really appreciate this, let’s say not just what Bernardo is doing, but just this this moment. I would say this return to understanding the importance of mind and the importance of consciousness in the way we experience the world and the way that the world kind of lays itself out. I think that there’s a lot of points of contact with what I’m doing. I think that I definitely come to it from a specifically religious point of view. And so it’s on that particular point that I would have questions for Bernardo. I heard him talk about, let’s say, the manner in which the primary mind or the divine mind, he probably doesn’t use the word divine mind, like the primary mind of how it develops into multiple minds as a form of dissociation. And so I would have some questions on that, how he sees that in relation, for example, to the Christian notion that there’s rather a giving that this kind of giving and then there’s a notion of love which binds the minds together and binds them towards the primary mind. And so that’s actually my biggest question is related to that. But I’m sure we could have many, many things to talk about. Yeah, I think the importance of symbolism and iconography is vastly underestimated in our society today. So from that perspective, I love Jonathan’s work. I have a room in my house. It’s not the one I’m in right now, but I have a room in my house filled with Orthodox Christian iconography. I’m not an Orthodox Christian. I don’t consider myself a person aligned with any particular religious tradition, maybe because of my education, my origins and my father was very scientifically oriented, secular. But in the course of my life, I’ve grown to appreciate the depth and the subtlety and nuance of symbolism and religious iconography. And today I deliberately make it a part of my life, a discrete small part of my life, but an important one nonetheless. So from that perspective, I appreciate very much what Jonathan has been doing all these years. And there’s so many different things that I’m interested in talking about with you guys and points of convergence, but I don’t want to lead the conversation too much. So I actually have less notes, well, less concentrated notes than I usually do, although more probably overall. So I’m just wondering, is there any particular direction that you would like to go in? Jonathan, I suppose, since you mentioned you had a few points that you wanted to clarify, I suppose, with. Well, I think that the question that I mentioned is really my big question for Bernardo. I think what I tend to notice in his system is that the divisions of mind is something like a, I wouldn’t say an accident or maybe that there seems to be something that is not particularly positive about the division of mind. Maybe that’s the best way to phrase it. And so that’s what I would like for him to talk about a little because I mean, an example I can give is that if a human experiences dissociation, we would want to heal that dissociation. It seems like we would want to to resort these opposing personalities or opposing aspects into at least a centralized, centralized consciousness that can encompass both of them. And so if that is the main image that he uses for the manifestations of multiple minds, is it does, does that mean that existence itself, the way we experience it is something of a scandal like the Gnostics tended to tended to to display it? Or is there something is there something more that’s possible in that model? So that’s my biggest question. I don’t think it’s a scandal. I don’t think it’s a mistake. I mean, in Eastern traditions, you hear a lot the notion of Maya or illusion being associated with some kind of error. Something went wrong at some point. And the best we can do is to just, you know, bear this illusion, illusionary life for as long as it lasts. But the better yet is to get away from this while in life and to sort of transcend this world because it’s a mistake. I don’t relate to that very well. I don’t. I may relate more to the Gnostic notion, but only in so far as the demiurge is itself part of God. And we just use different words for different aspects of one and the same thing. I don’t use the religious language normally for two reasons, Jonathan. One is it’s honestly the way I approach it, more secular language. It’s closer to my background, to how I was educated both at home and at university and my work life and so on and so forth. And the other reason is religious language is symbolic. And that means two things. One, it’s much more. It’s much farther reaching. It reaches much, much further than secular language. That’s the importance of it. That’s the indispensable aspect of it. That’s what it does that nothing else can do. But it’s also very amenable to misinterpretation. So if I start talking about God or the divine mind, I don’t know what people what people will interpret my words to mean. Probably there are seven and a half billion definitions of God out there. So that’s the other reason. So that’s the other reason. But in this company, I feel very comfortable talking about the divine mind instead of a spatially unbound field of subjectivity. I’m pretty OK with that because I do identify these two things. I think the world’s religious traditions are not a reflection of mental illness or wish-fulfilling. I think they reflect profound and ultimately true intuitions that the human mind has always had. And what I call the universal mind is bound to be what many people throughout history have referred to as the divine mind. Now, dissociation as the mechanism through which the divine mind becomes our individual minds, the kenosis of the divine mind, if we can start talking more religious language, I reserve publicly. I reserve judgments about why that happened. If I’m pressed against the wall, I would say, well, it happened because it’s one of the things that are inherent in the potentiates of nature. And given enough time, it’s bound to happen for the same reason that the volcano is bound to erupt, that the tornado is bound to happen. You know, that I don’t know, that the star goes supernova. These are the things that can happen in nature because nature is what it is. And therefore, they are bound to happen at some point. And dissociation or life, which is extrinsic appearance, is just one of those things. But if you ask me more deeply and more personal personally in this smaller group where we are now, I don’t think it’s an accident. I don’t think it’s meaningless. I don’t think it’s pathological either. I use dissociation more as a metaphor than as a literal attribution of a pathological condition to the divine mind. For us, it’s pathological in the sense that it may be maladaptive. We have non pathological levels of dissociation all the time. Every time you forget something, you’re dissociated. When you dream, you’re dissociated. Those are not pathological. They are adaptive. So I don’t attribute to the pathological aspect of it to the divine mind. And I even suspect that dissociation has to do with a felt telos, a felt purpose. That is experienced by the divine mind and expresses itself in the form of life dissociation. How do you see that? I think it’s great that we’re talking because I’ve heard you mostly talk in terms of use the more technical language. And so I was wondering what it implied to you. I mean, the way that I see it, I really have what you could call a Christian non-dualist perspective. That might be the best way to explain the way that I think. I think that the way that it’s expressed is that unity and multiplicity have a manner of coexisting. And so in the same manner that there are multiple aspects of my attention, possible attention or possible aspects of my consciousness, and those can be, if I am in the proper, properly oriented, those can be gathered into me. It doesn’t mean that I’m explicitly conscious of all those aspects, but they can be gathered into me even though I’m not, let’s say, explicitly conscious of all the possibilities. And I think that in that same manner, that is how we fit into what we would call transpersonal beings, whether it be families or countries, but then also how aspects of us function in transpersonal beings as well, like virtues. And I have no problem with the notion of hierarchies of beings, hierarchies of angels, hierarchies of gods, but that all of that ultimately is never outside of the divine mind. And that it exists in love within the divine mind. And that it becomes pathological to the extent that when a mind dissociates itself completely from its higher participations, that’s when it becomes something like pathology. And I think that that’s what we see in the image of the story of the fall of Adam and Eve and in other traditions. And I think the important thing for me is unlike what you mentioned before, the notion of Eastern traditions or Gnostic traditions that see multiplicity as something of a scandal in itself or something of a deep illusion or sinful in the very fact of its multiplicity. It seems to me that the Christian or the highest Christian answer that has been given, which is interesting, is that it seems to resolve that with the notion of kenosis in love, this idea of the self-offering. And but then there’s also this return, which happens at the same time inside God. And so you can see it eschatologically in scripture, right, from the beginning to the end, you can kind of see that full movement from procession to return. But it never implies that it ennols multiplicity, like the return into God. This is something you see in the Church Fathers all the time, that they’ll say things like, you know, they’ll say things like, you know, in heaven, St. Paul is St. Paul, St. Peter is St. Peter. There is no loss of personhood, but there is rather the fullness of participation in God to the extent that that’s possible for a person to do so. So multiplicity always continues to exist within the unity of the divine mind. I don’t know if that makes sense. I never know if we have the same language. It’s dangerous to talk too long sometimes. No, I agree largely with you, perhaps completely with some nuances. Dissociation is a very subtle mental process. It’s very difficult to introspect into it and really pin down its mechanisms. And that’s why my colleagues in analytic philosophy have a hard time really embracing dissociation as the solution to the so-called decomposition problem, how one mind can seem to be many, because they are looking for something unambiguous and explicit, some conceptually clear mechanism that would explain how dissociation happens, how the appearance of multiplicity can happen within a unified, otherwise unifying mind. And we don’t have a language for that or sufficiently developed conceptual arsenals for that, because everything is so subtle. The only thing one can appeal to is one’s direct experience. And I have had the experience of resolving certain dissociative states that I have had for years. And in retrospect, and this will sound funny, maybe even sound contradictory. In retrospect, I know that I was both sides of that dissociation. For the longest time, if you would have asked me in the past, are you feeling this and that? I would have said, no, I don’t feel that at all. That’s not how I feel at all. That’s not me. It’s not part of my world. Today I look back and I realized, no, I was feeling that way. I was always feeling that way. I just didn’t recognize it to myself. Now, how do you make sense of this to somebody who has not had that experience? It’s almost impossible. Our vocabulary and conceptual arsenal, they are still evolving to pin that down. But I agree with you that multiplicity and unity are not a dichotomy. It may sound like a dichotomy, but it’s a false dichotomy because our cognitive apparatus is not yet equipped or maybe sufficiently evolved to grasp what is meant there. Only somebody who has had dissociative identity disorder and has been, quote, cured will know that subtlety, will know how that can happen, how multiplicity can happen. Another thing you said that I think is important is you talked about it as a Christian inheritance, and it definitely is that. I would go even further and I would say it’s one of the key characteristics of the Western mind, one of our contributions to the world, which is we are in the middle of the world. There are some streams, even in the Christian tradition, that tell us, you know, this world is just some kind of penance. Life should be about what comes after. But by and large, the Western mind is engaged. We don’t dismiss life. On the contrary, we don’t dismiss life. We don’t dismiss life. We don’t dismiss life. We don’t dismiss life. We don’t dismiss life. We don’t dismiss life. We don’t dismiss life. On the contrary, we seek meaning in the world. And I think, as I’m sure you do, that the world is not only pregnant with meaning, it is the very expression of meaning. Everything around us is not just the thing in itself. It’s merely that. There is no such a thing. Everything around us has an extra hidden dimension of depth and meaning that far transcends surface appearances. And I think the Western mind is very interested in engaging with that. As Jung put it, we don’t try to get rid of the images. We try to relate to the images. We don’t just say, oh, it’s Maya. It doesn’t matter. Forget about it. Wait for the next life. No, no, no. We engage with it. We try to find out what the meaning of this whole thing is. And I think that’s a very important contribution of the Western mind. But even the West has lost touch with that fundamental stream of itself, of its own inheritance. No, I totally agree. I think that it’s almost like there’s a perversion of that inheritance, which has become something like the scientism that we deal with. The strange materialism that we face, it’s almost like an anti-strange. The only way to say it is it’s a strange perversion of something which at the outset was positive. And that’s one of the reasons also why I really love iconography and I love the Orthodox tradition is because it has maintained this notion of the transfiguration and the resurrection as two of the most central images. That is the possibility of fullness and the possibility of seeing light in phenomena and not completely, not exactly like you said, like I’m going to die, get rid of this world and fly off to heaven. But rather the image, the final eschatological image is one of resurrection, which is that all aspects of reality are full of God ultimately, not that they’re just resorbed into the one. So no, thanks for that. That’s really helpful for me to understand your thought. Definitely. And the other thing that I think is part of our inheritance, but we ourselves have rejected it because of, I don’t know, some dialectic reaction to our own inherent archetypes. I don’t know, but it’s this notion that life is a matter of service. And therein lies our freedom. Another seeming paradox and contradiction. But this notion that it’s the notion we perverted when we turned prayer into a ritual for telling God what to do. That’s the thing that is perverted by this modern phenomenon. We turn to God when we need something and then we go follow a ritual to tell God, OK, this is what you should do to help me out. And we completely forgot that it goes the other way, too. That there is a service to be rendered to a divinity through this condition of being alive in this world. And perhaps iconography and symbolism is what we need to sort of revitalize that part of our inheritance, that archetypal part of our inheritance. Who wrote recently about this was Peter Kingsley. He writes in a sort of very particular way. And he just said, yeah, we sort of forgot and we don’t care anymore about what the divinity wants of us. It’s like, yeah, the divinity takes care of itself. And we just ask for stuff. You know, we tell God what to do. Do you think a symbolic life can help us recover that part of our inheritance? Definitely. And one of the things that I’ve been emphasizing with people is the notion of participation in general. One of the things that the modern world has brought to us is this idea of the distance, you know, this entertainment mode or this this kind of observer mode in reality. And I think that religious participation, let’s say the liturgy, for example, I think that one of its functions and obviously this is not the only function for those people who are listening or watching this. But one of its functions seems to be exactly what we talked about in terms of resolving dissociation. That is the manner in which we if you if you look at the progression of the liturgy, it moves. It’s a moving in right and moving into this holy place and a a at some point it says we represent the angels and there’s this notion that the angels come down. And so there’s a movement towards a recognition that we’re all dancing. Let’s say we’re all dancing together around that which unifies us. And one of the things we need to do is engage in this dance, celebrate that which unifies us and then receive from it the seed or the you know the point that we that all the philosophers talk about this point that joined hold the circle together. That’s what we receive. And then we move out and we let’s say bring that into the world so that the world holds together. So in that sense, that’s why you’ll see that often you’ll find theologians saying things like the liturgy holds the world together. You know, and I think that that might seem like just a little bit of hyperbole. But I think it really it really is just in the same way that in engaging in a family dinner properly and doing that with your family, you know, engaging in that that that procession and that circumambulation hold your family together. And so I think that something like the liturgical liturgical service is is a cosmic dance which which binds the world together. And so I think that, and it’s constantly expressing this relationship between unity and multiplicity, the relationship also to attention. If you listen to an orthodox energy you’ll hear attend all the time you know stand stand and attend. And this idea of a sacrifice of worship all these things. I think that participating, there’s a sense in which at least in the Christian vision that participating that in participating in that is a way to actually experience. The resolving of dissociation, and then be able to then internalize it so that we can see, even if not consciously or not thought out, we can then will be applied to your own life, where just as you love your brother, and you notice you know in this movement, how you you notice how all these other people are images of God and we’re all images of each other we’re bound to each other we do what we do doing all these things, and it’s bringing us together. Then we can notice in our own lives these dissociative aspects. I completely agree with you, it’s, it’s, the liturgy is a symbolic playing out of a dance that is happening all the time, even, even if we don’t know, and the vast majority of people don’t know. I do think that the orthodox tradition has preserved that a lot better than the usual Protestant or Catholic Church that some people still go to on Sunday. Because some orthodox rituals for instance, the priests have their backs to the public. They face the divinity, they face the altar. And these subtle little things are important because if they face the altar the messages. The priest is one of us. They are representing us. And, and we are trying to relate to the divinity, as opposed to the Catholic priest who stand on the place where he stands. Facing us with his back to the altar and preaching moral codes. That hasn’t worked for 2000 years. And then, after Luther, we completely got rid of symbolism, all together. I mean, I’m not here to to chastise Luther because he saw several things that that were true and needed a reaction he saw that the church was becoming a temporal power, as opposed to a spiritual power. He saw that clergy was hypocritical focused on money and sinning. He understood that the people had to have more direct participation in the relationship with divinity, so they should be able to read the Bible, and not only have the priests as full controlling intermediaries for a relationship with God so I understand all that. But it went so far that some Protestant rituals are now sort of a mock up of a trial. There is no symbolism is just telling you what not to do all the time. They even dress like judges. So, there is a tremendous loss that may be even religious institutions are guilty of promoting. Yeah, but I think, I think that with even your work or the work that I’m seeing people like John for Vicki that that you’ve talked to as well. It seems like we’re in a, even with Jordan Peterson has been doing seems like there’s an interesting moment right now. And there’s a moment in which even secular people are capable of suddenly noticing, for example, the ritualization of their daily behavior that the idea of the informal as being the place of authenticity. This has been the disease of the, you know, the West from from, I would say, possibly from the Reformation for sure after that this idea that that which is authentic is when we are, we are informal and this is And this is, this is absurd because you as soon as you realize how even your bad habits are ritualized, like everything that you engage with anything that’s teleological has to be ritualized that then all of a sudden you can think okay so that’s why we have to have anything in common, it has to be ritualized. Or else you can’t do it in common and so as it seems like an interesting moment and hopefully this will grow I think even in the Protestant churches in the United States, those that are leading the edge you could say are returning to a somewhat of a ritualized sense of time where they celebrate the different And, you know, they have more liturgy a little more form formalism. So I think that it’s, we can’t go any further than the rock and roll concert rock and roll concert and conference church. There’s nowhere there’s nothing lower we can go to and so hopefully it’s all up here from here for many of the churches. I hope you are right. I do think that there is a psychological reason why we’ve embraced banality so so thoroughly you call it informal informality. I rather call it banality we’ve made everything banal everything is superficial and banal and meaningless and nihilistic. And if I just put it like that and everybody who is listening or watching this will think well but of course that’s not what we wanted. We don’t want to banality. We want depth we want meaning. I think this is a superficial judgment. I think we do want banality, because it, it spares us the confrontation with some great terrors within a banality absolves from responsibility. It absolves absolves from the feeling of having to achieve something of having to render some form of service achieve some kind of goal. No, there’s nothing. There’s nothing to achieve. Nothing. It’s the unbearable lightness of being of Milan from there. It’s so light it floats with the breeze. We are anchored in nothing. Nothing has any meaning. Nothing has any depth. I mean, there is a huge psychological payoff for this, an enormous price our gargantuan price that’s depression. And anyway, it’s all that stuff that we have an epidemic of today addiction, you know this kazillion different patterns of addictive living that we have today when I say addiction I don’t mean only substance addiction I mean addiction to distraction to television to buying shoes to sex and porn to everything, eating meat and sugar. These are all addictions. And because we, we’ve lost depth and roots and meaning. We feel no responsibility. We no longer fear the experiential state after death, death, because there is no such a thing. But we lost our meaning and we compensate with that with myriad patterns of addictive behavior. And since we’ve secured the payoff, and we found a bandaid to compensate for the price we pay. Yeah, that’s distraction, consumerism, television, pornography, eating, all this stuff. It is difficult to dislodge a civilization from this local minimum. It didn’t happen without major trauma, it didn’t happen after two world wars. So that gives you an idea. Yeah, no, you’re right. I don’t think that we’ve dealt with anything that happened in those first world wars we’re just, we just were shocked for two generations when you know two generations and seems like all the patterns are returning that’s for sure. And what I like to do is to help people notice, for example, that the patterns of addiction actually are religious in nature, they’re just distorted religious patterns. And that so once you see that once you understand that you know like, whatever bad habit you have is is basically a form of liturgy. It’s one that that is, let’s say that that spirals fast and that runs out fast to it runs out of, of what it can offer you it’s a in that higher attention is better is better than these low, these, these little, these little circles of attention. Absolutely. I mean, it’s not for nothing that we call alcohol spirit. Yes, there is a deep root to this, why alcohol is a spirit, because it puts you in an inebriated state that the Greeks would would explain by saying well a spirit the possession of me. So alcohol is the spirit. It’s impossible for human beings it’s impossible for living beings to get rid of the religious intuition, because it’s at the root of the tree, the intellect is the canopy. It came much later it’s it’s looking at the sun. And that’s the dark and moist environment where we arise from that womb, where we arrive arise from and that’s the religious intuition, we can’t get rid of it, all we can do is misplace it. We misplace it all over the place. We misplace it by falling in love with that one person we can’t have and then that person receives a projection of a numenon, an expression of the divinity, an unachievable numenon, and it attains an aura of impossible value. And that’s the religious intuition in us being projected outwards. What we see is what is in us, not on the person, the person is just receiving that projection, or in transhumanism. I don’t know whether you know anything about transhumanism. It’s a religious movement. It’s outwardly religious. It’s the idea that there will be a God, we will build it, we will construct a computer that will be capable of producing a better version of the God. And that one, an even better version of itself, and so on and so forth until God. And God is made of silicon. And it will find a way to help us live forever through drugs and surgery and finding new laws of physics. And we will bring back the dead by uploading all information about the dead person into some kind of artificial neural network. Ray Kurzweil, he wants to have his dad back. His dad, he’s a kid who lost his dad, young. So was I. I was 12, lost my dad. He never found a way to integrate that experience and operate the alchemical work on it and transmute it into something else. He’s still trying to bring back his dad. This is religion through and through. Yeah, but it’s a very strange materialistic and distorted religion, that’s for sure. I wonder if you’ve one of the things that interests me is the notion of this hierarchy of beings. I don’t know if you have dealt with that at all. I’ve been thinking about Dante quite a bit in terms of, let’s say, what you’re saying. The way that the Comedia seems to be structured in part is through the capacity for smaller loves to exist in larger loves. And that this is really an image of reality. So Dante starts with, let’s say, poetry. And poetry is what awakens the possibility of love, you know, moving to Beatrice, then moving up to Bernardo Clairvaux, and then ultimately to the Virgin, ultimately to Christ, and then up into the transcendent unity of all things. And so I guess my question is, have you thought about that as well? Like the manner in which certain intelligences act as principalities for other intelligences? The idea of gods or patron saints, like how we can draw others into being? Do you see that as a hidden hierarchy behind the world in some sense? I see it, I mean, I really do see it just as the way that things work. That is, the way that we, there’s the personal aspect, which is that the little loves, those even like having a good drink, having a smoke or something which could actually become addictive or sex, all of these things can be goods if they are embedded in higher goods. And they’re ultimately embedded in something like virtue, something like worship, something which leads you up. It really is a way to preserve the notion that all existence has the possibility of being good. But then that also works in terms of, let’s say, beings themselves. So in myself, I experienced that hierarchy of goods. And in the world, there’s a hierarchy of goods, and there’s a hierarchy of beings which hold other beings together. A simple way to think about it is, of course, how a country works, how you have a president and you have different beings that hold that together. But that this could go much further than just a physical, just the way we see it in the world, something we can see, but that can work all the way up to something like patron saints or gods or angels or virtues that actually exist and hold aspects of reality together. You mean more by this than just supervenience, like we can speak about the mind of China, but it merely supervenes on the minds of China’s citizens. In other words, there isn’t really a mind that corresponds to China in an ontological sense. It’s just a way of speaking about the collective dynamics of the interactions between Chinese citizens. But you mean more than this. You mean something that has an ontological reality. Well, the reason why I mean more than that is that, let’s say, the phrase that you just used to talk about China, I could use to talk about myself or about you. That is that, you know, Jonathan doesn’t really exist. He’s just an image that we have to account for the interactive aspects of my psyche. And so that are not. And then you could keep going lower and lower. And you could say that about every constitutive aspect of reality. So once I noticed that fractally, I can apply that type of argumentation to myself or to human beings. Then I see less of a problem to then apply it up towards the ontological reality of higher beings. If in under, sorry, in other circumstances, sometimes another language creeps into my mind. In other circumstances, I would normally be cautious about this because normally I speak from reason and objective evidence. So if there is some structure in nature, I would look for its physical correlates. In other words, how that structure manifests itself to my empirical observation. And if I cannot find that empirical manifestation of it, then I would say we would need to have very good conceptual reasons to infer that that thing exists in the absence of any direct empirical way to verify that it’s there. So I would normally be very cautious. I would say dissociation in humans show us that our own otherwise unified mind can’t fragment itself. And it’s fragmenting itself all the time. When you dream, you identify with your dream avatar, not with the rest of the dream. But guess what? The rest of the dream is you as well. You’re just dissociated from a part of yourself until you wake up. Or when you forget things or when you compartmentalize things in order to remain functional, which is a deliberate form of dissociation. So we can speak of that, but it’s more difficult to go the other way and say there is a bigger mind that we could call the hierarchies of heaven. The angels and archangels and the saints and so forth, because we do not have, well, at least we think right now we do not have a direct physical correlate of that. Of course, there are people who would deny that. You talk about Dante. Dante would deny that because he talked about the love that moves the sun and the other stars. In other words, maybe the stars are the empirical physical expressions of some higher level form of mentation that also is circumscribed by some form of dissociative boundary and has an individual identity, perhaps. Perhaps, but in the early 21st century, it’s very difficult to go down these avenues of speculation because how do you differentiate that from the aliens from the Pleiades sending us heart vibrations? I mean, it’s no. Well, I think it’s not. It’s not that hard to differentiate in the sense that. So I’m a big fan of Sam Axman’s The Confessor, and in his, it’s in his vision, the human being is in a way the laboratory of meaning. It’s that in the human that even the higher principalities are gathered in a certain manner. It’s difficult to fully. It’s difficult. It’s not super precise the way that he talks about it, but he has a sense in which in a certain manner, man is above the angels. And so you can understand that you see Christ represented as a man when he’s creating the world. And so there’s an idea, Adam Kanmon, which is there in File of Alexandria, but appears rather in the idea of in iconography. We see it very clearly the notion that man is at the outset, that the universal man is at the beginning of all things. And so these intelligences. So a good example would be right. Young did something similar where he said, so the star, it’s not that the stars are legislating our experience is that we project meaning into this into this infinite tapestry of possibility. And now that pattern has a certain form of reality because it corresponds to our our psyche into our psychic projection. And so we it’s like you could say that there are no patterns in the stars because there’s there’s millions and millions of them. And the patterns we trace are just projections of our psyche. But there might be a way in which. If the pattern of our psyche is the laboratory of how reality comes together, and it’s hard to avoid that because we are the people looking at the world, then those patterns can also have causal effect. I will be more. It’s not the big ball of gas. That’s when we say so. It’s not the big ball of gas, but it’s the pattern of the heavens, which is causally affecting the world through. If you want to see it as through the projection of the human psyche into that objective patterns that that have developed from millennia millennia doesn’t matter, but it can still have a causal effect. I don’t reject this at all. Recent studies are showing again and again that the universe at its largest scales, which we can simulate and we can’t image it because we are within it, but we can compute it. And the structure of the universe, the network structure and topology of the universe at its largest scales is mind bogglingly similar to the structure of organic nervous systems. And there is no known reason why this should be the case to call it a cosmic coincidence would be the understatement of history of all history, because the correspondence is rather precise. So it suggests the fractality of minds and its manifestations. So the universe as a whole looks like a nervous system because it too is the body of the divine mind. In other words, it’s the extrinsic appearance of the divine mind. And the whole thing operates through hierarchies of self-similarity or fractal hierarchies. Religious iconography suggests that and I take religious iconography seriously. There is an icon from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with the church fathers gathered in a conference underneath two large mountains. So you see that, you know, those individuals are within the earth, which suggests that what we call the physical world is actually the outer appearance of a hierarchy of being. I do take that seriously and I do take introspection seriously. And I’ll be very open with you. At this point in my life, I’m 47. I will be 48 this year. It’s trivial for me. It has become trivial for me to notice the movements of the impersonal within me. I know what is my own shit and I know it’s not. If you know what I mean. When I was 32, it would have been impossible to make that distinction because you just don’t have the subtlety of inner perception to make these differentiations. So you were all the time deceiving yourself. Your ego is all the time pretending to be something higher and noble and driving your actions. Well, in fact, it’s all of your bullshit, all of your wishful film and your search for meaning. It’s all that superficial stuff. It’s all you. But if you get beaten up by life enough over the decades and you are paying attention, which most people don’t, I happen to be put together in a way that I cannot help but pay attention. And I have paid attention for the best part of 40 years. And now I think maybe I’m deluding myself still, but I don’t think so. I think I can notice the impersonal in me. But that impersonal is not oceanic consciousness either. That impersonal has an agenda. It’s not mine, but it’s not the whole of the universe either. It’s an individual agenda of some form. I personalize it and I call it the diamond because it gives me some… The guardian angel is good enough. Well, I… It’s okay. I’m just pushing you. No, I will tell you why I don’t use that. Yeah. My diamond is morally neutral. And if I’m not careful with… I mean, my diamond doesn’t give a damn whether I will have a roof over my head tomorrow, food on the plate. It doesn’t give a… Sorry. It doesn’t give a damn about it at all. Because it’s impersonal. Its agenda is not my individual survival as a tool of nature, as an expression of a part of nature. It’s not operating at the level of comfort and survival. It’s a force of nature. It’s like the tornado that comes, destroys your house and kills your family. Did it have a bad intention to do that? Of course not. The tornado is not living in this framework of survival and comfort. So the diamond is a force of nature. And as a force of nature, I perceive it as very morally ambiguous or neutral. It knows where it wants to go. And it will beat me up to help it go in that direction. But it doesn’t have my individual well-being in mind, if you know what I mean. My well-being is something that I negotiate with it. Literally, I negotiate with it every day. So I don’t call it the guardian angel. So what would its telos be? Or can you recognize that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you think you recognized it right and then you go down the path suggested by that misapprehension, it gives you very quick feedback that you’re pursuing the wrong path. That was not it already. It turns my mental inner life into sheer hell. All kinds of things will plague me. Unexplainable anxieties, obsessions, physical symptoms. It… I don’t want to use certain words that informally I would, but it’s a show. It’s a very bad show that happens within. So it gets to a point where it’s inevitable to learn to recognize what its agenda is. So I do. I do recognize it. And that’s why I do what I’m doing now. Two years ago, Jonathan, I abandoned a 25-year long career in the high-tech corporate world. If I had stayed, I probably would be close to what you would call rich. And it’s not only the money, it’s my social network, my sense of identity, my sense of value and differentiation. I left it kicking and screaming because my diamond was very clear about what I had to do. And what I had to do, part of it is talking to you today and leading a sensual foundation. I negotiated enough with it that I delayed the process until I could secure myself more or less. But it does have an agenda. Yeah. Very impersonal. So that suggests to me there is indeed a hierarchy of dissociation in the divine mind. Because my diamond comes across to me as something that’s not human, but it’s not the whole of the divine mind either. It is an aspect of it. Yeah. St. Gregory of Nyssa talks about in The Life of Moses, he uses Moses and Aaron as an analogy to talk about this. He calls it the helper. He has the notion that there’s Moses and then there’s his helper. And he differentiates two sides of the helper. And what he comes to is actually the little cartoon image of the angel on the right shoulder and the devil on the left shoulder. And St. Gregory of Nyssa actually describes exactly that. And so he separates Aaron, the helper, into two. It’s a good way to understand it. It’s like a transpersonal pull towards something. And so it’s something which is beyond you, which is pulling you in a direction. But he sees it as either going up or going down. So it’s like you have a certain transpersonal aspect of you, which is pulling you down towards these little circles of attention and this kind of chaotic levels of attention. And you have an aspect of this helper, which is whispering to you and kind of pulling you up towards higher levels of attention. I use, of course, St. Gregory doesn’t use the word attention. I’m using that here because it makes sense to what we’re talking about. And so you can see it in iconography. You’ve probably seen these images if you know Orthodox iconography a little bit. The angel pulling up the toll houses and then the devil kind of pulling someone down towards hell. This is this kind of image of how we are embedded in this transpersonal mind, you could say. The push and pull exists, it’s introspectively very clear to me. It’s a datum of existence. It’s not something that is open to theoretical speculation. If you know what I mean, it’s there. I don’t divide the diamond into one good and one bad. I tend to identify with the bad. Like the bad one is me, it’s Bernardo. It’s probably the best way to do it actually, in terms of transformation, it’s probably the best way to do it. It’s not really a choice. It’s how I feel it. Bernardo is the guy who is looking to secure his own comfort and safety and the comfort and safety of the other little beings that Bernardo cares about, like Bernardo’s girlfriend and Bernardo’s cats and Bernardo’s friends. He wants to have a little bit of power, a little bit of money and get some recognition. That’s me. That’s the ego. The other pull, that’s from the impersonal. That’s not me. But it’s neither good or bad. It’s neither an angel or a devil. It’s morally ambiguous. Again, it’s a force of nature. That’s how I experience it. But talking to other philosophers and reading history, that’s part of the reason why I sort of granted that there are reasons to think of a hierarchy of being. Other people, other philosophers seem to have other diamonds. Like Socrates’ diamond would only tell him what not to do. Would never tell him where to go. Only tell him when Socrates was doing something wrong. Then the diamond would say, no, my diamond is not like that. My diamond just kicked me in the butt in a certain direction. You go there, you bastard here. Boom, go. And I go kicking and screaming. That’s not Socrates’ diamond. It’s another diamond. And some people have a seductive diamond, a diamond that seduces from the front instead of a diamond that kicks you from the back. That’s not my diamond. And I envy other people’s diamonds. I think in the cosmic lottery, no, no, no, I’m not going to say what I was going to say because my diamond has brought tremendous meaning to my life despite all the suffering and all this stuff. So I’m not going to spit on it. I’m not going to spit on it. But there is nothing romantic about the diamond. If you know what I mean. Yeah, there is something romantic about, oh, we have a guardian angel. Oh, you go out mushy and it’s so romantic. There is nothing romantic about my diamond. Nothing. Yeah, I don’t see anything romantic in the guardian angel myself. They’re often represented as warriors anyway. It’s not particularly… That’s more like it. So let’s say the way that I… How can I phrase this? And so the way that I like to think about it. So your diamond, one of the things it’s asking for you is, let’s say, direction and attention. That is, you have to look in its direction and attend to, and that is how it kind of pulls you or pushes you or kicks you, whatever, in the direction that you’re going. And so the way that I like to think of transpersonal beings is similar. That is, when we talked about, for example, the existence of the angel of China would be a good way to think about it. It’s that what the angel of China is asking of the Chinese is to attend to it. That’s the first thing it’s asking. And so by the multiple attending to the one, that is how it finds body in the world. And so that is how it manages the body. And so you can apply that fractually at all levels, and you can understand that there’s something about that which is right. You can even think about your own cells without using the same level of attention, but that the cells that attend to the telos of my body, they’re the ones which will make my body exist and go forward. And the cells that don’t will be fought by those other cells that are in line with the attention of my body. And so I think that when you notice that a country also works that way or that hire a basketball team or anything in which multiple individuals attend towards the. But do you see these these hierarchies as supervening on us? In other words, as just emergent phenomena from us? Or do you see them as pre-existing like there is a pre-existing angel of China? Well, you could say something like the way that I would say it would be that that all all exists pre-exist in eternally in the divine mind. That is, to the extent that mind does not is not unfolded in time, then all the aspects of mind exist in it from, you know, and then they unfold through what we call time and what we call space. And so the being, you know, the angel of China eternally exists in the mind of God and then unfolds in its time and in its space the way that any being unfolds in their time and their space. So you could you could you if you wanted to say that it like it doesn’t exist before before China, then I would say that’s fine. It doesn’t bother me that much. But I think there’s a way to I would say I the way I always do it is I ask myself that of myself is that do I exist or am I just an emergent phenomena of particles and thoughts? And you could say, well, yeah, I’m that. But I also think that I have a me or I have a consciousness with supervenes on the multiplicity of my of my being. It’s not 100 percent. It’s not something which is completely sealed shut and totally. Let’s say that that’s completely authoritarian, but it nonetheless exists. And so in that sense, I also think that China exists and that families exist and that there’s there’s myriads of angels, the way that you know that the Thomas would have said. But if China tomorrow, I mean, we know historically that given enough time, all nations will cease to exist, at least in their former form. If China tomorrow ceases to exist or if you decades from now cease to exist, does that level of the hierarchy continue to exist? Does the angel of China survive China? Does the angel of Jonathan survive Jonathan? You will. A good way to say it would be something like it exists in the eschaton, but it exists in the totality of all things within the divine mind. It doesn’t it can continue to linger, to have a lingering existence without without without a localized body. So, for example, I think that if we say that Greece doesn’t exist anymore, I would say that that’s that’s malarkey. The Greece still exists today. And, you know, we carry Babylon, we carry all these things. So there is there is a certain manner in which these bodies continue to, although weakened, continue to to exist and be assimilated into into other beings. And so that’s the way that I see it. And it’s also these beings are they fit into each other. It’s not like how can I say that? I don’t think any being has a discrete existence. It always exists in a fractal relationship with other beings within higher beings. And so so the notion that that certain. So in the same way, so a good example would be that these beings being held by higher beings. And so if the day the the angel of all nations, right, or Christ himself holds authority over all the angels and and that is how it works. In the same way that if my cells come and go in my body, you know, you could say, well, does that cell still exist? Well, no. But, you know, it’s it’s held together in potential, you know, in the actuality of the higher being. So that’s the way that I tend to think about it. I don’t know if it makes sense. This is becoming a little more esoteric here. Analytically, it’s very difficult to unambiguously conceptualize what you’re saying. Yeah. Without internal contradiction. And psychists try to do exactly that. And it’s very, very difficult. Some would say impossible. But I do feel the smell of what you’re trying to say. Your dream avatar, there is a sense in which your dream avatar dies the moment you wake up. But there is a sense in which your dream avatar also survives in your memory. So in that sense, everything that has ever existed survives as an eternal memory in the divine mind. Yeah. And but then you you solve the problem in one way going forward, but you didn’t solve the problem the other way, going backwards. Like the danger of China pre-exist China and it provided a template for the formation of China. Did it exist as an archetype in the sense that, like Jung said, that the the matrix structure of a diamond pre-exists the diamond because it’s encoded in the laws of nature. So that would be a sense in which things could pre-exist without pre-existing as particular manifestations of the thing that pre-exists. But it gets into very difficult territory analytically. This is something that is better grasped intuitively, I think. Maybe that’s maybe I just grasp it intuitively. So I don’t I don’t feel I have to analytically. But let’s explore that. I mean, I think that that it’s a good idea to to explore it. And so if we understand China as a as a as a species of something like human communities. Right. And so you could ask that question that you’re asking about any level of speciation of different beings. And so you have so the question is, like, do Rottweilers how do Rottweilers exist within the speciation of dogs? Like, how do identities exist within higher identities? And I think that if if we are able to resolve that problem at the level of the dog, where we understand that these that multiplicity is held in unity and multiplicity is to a certain extent indefinite. But the multiplicity that’s held in the unity is indefinite. So you could say that the identities that the identities that dog can give are indefinite. There’s an indefinite amount of dogs, possible speciations of dogs. Right. But they still nonetheless are held together by the dog speciation. And so I think that if we think about it that way, then the problem of the angels of countries is less complicated because we have we have the divine logos, which manifests the bond of love of all of all possible things in in in the highest aspect. And then that speciation lower down is and then lower from from countries or lower lower from countries. You have families, you have groups, you have associations, you have all kinds of things which are just possible speciations that are held together up into higher identity. Like I’m really I get you can see I’m more of a Platonist like at this point. But but I don’t know if that if that does that. And analytically, does that make sense or like the way that you see it? I see it in a way that makes sense. Analytically, it’s very difficult. And the reason it’s difficult analytically when I say analytically, I mean to make it fully explicit and unambiguous is very difficult. And the reason is it entails determining where boundaries lie. Where are the boundaries of identity hierarchical or otherwise? Where do they lie? So if we talk about the identity of China, is there the identity of Hong Kong? Yeah, I think so. Is there the identity of Shanghai versus Beijing? If the table has an identity and I pull a leg off the table, does the leg now have its own identity? And if I nail it back to the table, did it lose its own identity? Does the mountain have an identity? And if so, when a boulder digs loose from the mountain and comes bouncing down the slope, does it now have its own identity when it’s flying and does it reconnect to the mountain every time it touches the mountain as it rolls down? It becomes arbitrary because there are infinite possible boundaries. And if one doesn’t have some kind of explicit and unambiguous criteria for determining boundaries like here, then it’s a free for all because you can put boundaries anywhere and then it’s an explosion of identities. So I don’t mind the explosion of identities. That is, I think that there is an indefinite amount of possible identity. So that doesn’t bother me. And I think that if we understand it as a hierarchy, then the boulder can exist in the mountain. And it doesn’t prevent the mountain from existing. We can recognize lower level identities within. So like the table is a good example. So does the leg of the table have an identity? The answer is yes, it does. Well, actually it had an identity while it was still nailed to the table. And if you remove it from the table, I can still recognize it as a leg of a table. But we were talking about the identity of meditation in the sense that there is something it is like to be the leg of the table as opposed to the table as a whole. Of course, we can define boundaries on the screen of perception, but that’s not what we were talking about. We were talking about individual individual minds. So if the mountain has one individuated mind, like I have an individuated mind, when the boulder rolls down the slope and becomes separated from the mountain, does the boulder now acquire its own private mind as distinct from the private mind of the mountain? And there is a philosophical sense in which if you say that there are infinite mental identities in this sense, entities with private inner minds, if you say there are infinite ones of those, it’s exactly the same thing as to say that there are none. Yeah, no, I don’t. The way that I see it is I see it really in the manner that I talked about St. Maxx was before, is that I see them gathered into my mind. And so to the extent in which they have their own individual, like discrete existence in a certain extent is an extension of man. When I say man, I mean the incarnate man as the image of mind, let’s say, or the highest image or the most gathered image of mind that we have, because it’s also that through our conscious experience that we have it. And so that’s the way that I tend to see it. I don’t know if that resolves the conflict that you’re seeing. It does. It does. Because what you’re saying is that within our private minds, which we know exist, even if they are illusions, they still exist as illusions. Something is making this illusion happen. Maybe there could have been no illusion, but there is one. So there is some kind of mechanism within the context of our private minds which are there. We experience fractal reflections of all the identities in nature. That I agree with that completely, because I think the subjectivity means the same as the subjectivity new and it’s the same as the subjectivity of the universal mind or the divine mind. Who said it? That the eyes with which God sees me are the same eyes with which I see God? Was it? No, it was not. Is it a Christian? It sounds like a Sufi to me. No, it’s Christianistic. Was it Eckhart? I think it was. Yeah, that could be Eckhart. Yeah, that could definitely be. And if you grasp this, and it’s very difficult to put it in sort of unambiguous analytical terms, we don’t have the conceptual armor to do this, but if you grasp this, that the eyes through which you look for God are the eyes of God looking for itself. If you feel it in your being, not only conceptually as a thought, but as an experience you’re directly acquainted with, then it becomes very obvious that all seeming identities exist within you as experiences, as a reflection of the macrocosm in the microcosm. It’s yeah, I mean, I can’t defend it analytically. I can’t write a paper for the Journal of Consciousness Studies defending this, but if you ask me, do I believe this? I know this. It’s a living experience for me. So you have a dime on that, Jonathan. I don’t want to change the subjects if you want to pursue this a little further, but I had this question. I mean, go for it. I know, Mark, if you want to turn, Jack, because we kind of we kind of we’re just going at it here. So I don’t know if you had things you wanted to talk about and deal with you. So I had thought about going in the direction actually of a recent essay by Paul Kingsnorth and talking about all the different myths of progress and using that as a kind of contrast to serve for clarity with what you guys are speaking about. But if you want to go with the diamond, that’s fine with me. Very quickly. I just I just wondered if Jonathan has a diamond. I don’t I don’t experience it in the same way that that that you experience it. I think that I I tend to experience it more in the way that St. Gregory talks about it. That is that I I sense that there’s a transpersonal aspect of me. Like I sense on the one hand, something like what St. Paul says, right, I do the things that I do not want to do. I experience that all the time. Right. Where I’m doing I find myself lying and there’s another voice in my head going, why are you doing this? Like, why are you lying? Or like, why are you why are you acting this way? Why are you taking the credit or whatever it is that I’m doing? And so I I experience this this this kind of force that’s pulling me down. And then I also on this in the same way have a sense that something like a good Christian way of saying it would be like I know I feel a calling is a good Christian way of saying it. I feel like I have this calling and that I’m being like you said, I’m being kind of pulled forward towards certain things, both in my own life in terms of of transformation, but also even like you said professionally in terms of the types of things I’m supposed to pay attention to the types of things I’m supposed to put my energy into. And if I don’t listen to that voice and I suffer greatly and if I if I listen to that voice, I suffer. But the suffering is worth it. Like it’s worth it for what it gives. And so that’s the way that I tend to experience it. It’s exactly the same for me. You don’t personalize it as I do, probably because you have always done the diamonds bidding. So you you you don’t have a background to contrast it with. You have. But I also see it. But I think I think that I see that let’s say something like my guardian angel. I tend to see through the guardian angel into Christ, into the incarnate God. And so it’s not that I it’s like it that’s that maybe even be just my Protestant background because I used to be Protestant, where it’s like I even even if I when I feel pulled, I tend to want to see through that towards something else. Like so you’ll hear people. I think that the experience you have, you’ll hear Christians say something like that all the time. I would say like God showed me this for God. And it’s not God directly. It’s it is this intermediary being. But I understand, too, why, because it’s pulling you up and it’s pulling you into more being. Then it’s easy. You want to see through it and see, see the higher aspect kind of pulling you forward. So that’s that’s how I tend to. But I have other beings pulling at me all the time. Like my patrons. I have certain saints which have imposed themselves on me. Some like St. Maximus, who I’ve chosen, but other saints like St. Christopher, for example, who really has imposed himself on me and is there to and is kind of pulling me pulling me in certain directions. And I yeah, and I I can’t deny it. Yeah, you always describe it as pulling Everest pushing. Yeah. I think it’s somebody who feels pushed like I do it like I won the lottery the other way around. But what you described, I recognize and there is the diamond, which unlike you, I don’t see it as a as the sumo bonum. I don’t see it as a morally positive force. I see it as a very morally ambiguous force who doesn’t care much about my comfort and safety. But I also feel the push of the ancestors instead of the saints. Like I feel the push to sort of clear the record of the ancestors. Clear the record of Jung. Clear the record of Schopenhauer. And the one that’s really pushing me now want his record clear. I mean, it could all be fantasies of my mind, of course, somewhat impersonal. But it’s useful for me to attach names to these things, because it enables a relationship with them. I feel the push of Nikolaus von Kuz. Nikolaus de Cusa. I don’t know whether you know about him. Hardly known philosopher who was also a bishop of the church in the 15th century. And I feel the push of that image now like clear his record, you know, vindicate him because he left a treasure buried in the field and nobody has a map and we need to find that and open it up. So that I feel too. It’s less personalized than the diamond. The diamond is just overwhelming with me. Totally overwhelming. And it’s a very present reality for me because I used to not listen to it. So I know what it is like to ignore the presence of the diamond and therefore its presence now has great contrast against that previous background in which I thought it’s just me. I’m the master of my own house. And I remember that and it provides a background that really highlights the diamond. Now, there is that thing there that I used to ignore and not listen to and pretend that it didn’t exist. But it was always there and it’s very distinct. So, Mark, go ahead with your talk that you wanted us. I didn’t read Paul King North’s last essay. But maybe you can. I usually do read all his essays. I just haven’t gotten to that one yet. No, that’s a grand day. So I’ve taken a lot of notes about it so I can try and phrase it in a way that I hope sort of lands with you guys and see if we can use that as a springboard. So I wanted to phrase it within the context of the kind of meaning crisis, which I know you’ve spoken about, Jonathan, which I think in line with what you guys have said is two things in particular behind that, even if I might phrase it that way. A crisis of authority and which authority or authorities are we going to trust, I suppose, and direction with the kind of myth of progress that he describes having no direction. There’s no destination to the clear mind, whereas from the Christian context, suppose you have the kingdom of God, however hard that might be to define. So I think that’s kind of general crisis of modernity. So Paul’s recent work, I think might help us find some convergence in clarifying some key trends and problems. I think he picks up in some ways where Alan Watts left off, which I know Bernardo likes. And in terms of the Christian perspective, I think even Nikolai Berdyaev serving this kind of prophetic role. So I wanted to speak about this notion of progress that he critiques in his article. He suggests a number of things that progress wants the end of history, it wants the end of transcendence and so on. And he mentions how modernity actually makes a major break by fully sort of developing the anthropological theme. And he says that transcendence is pictured as beyond is replaced by this kind of transcendence within the world. And he says that transcendence within the world can be translated as progress with no ultimate truth or higher story. There’s nothing to stop us kind of bending the universe to our desires indeed to do so as our duty. And this in Augusto de Luches’ Talanin is what explained actually 20th century history, having replaced religion with this kind of perverse philosophy. We then tried putting philosophy into practice on a kind of grand scale with terrible results. So then he goes on, what progress wants is the death of God. So suppose really considering all that, how do you hope in humility then to help address this crisis with your work? And I’ve been thinking about that from both your perspectives then. Can we go first there, Bernardo? 2000 years of preaching have not solved the problem. So we know at least a few things that don’t work. Pure philosophy has not solved the problem. Otherwise, you know, all the philosophers that occupy the path, the long path before us, would have made a significant difference in the way these things have evolved. I tend to think that the collective mind of humanity, and we can think of it as the angel of humanity in Jonathan’s language, it, as people in religious circles say, the spirit will move the way it moves. The angel of humanity will stir and move the way it does. I think the only thing we can do is to put some beacons here and there. So if and when that great angel of humanity looks around for some bearings, that it will find the beacons. We cannot make it look, we cannot convince it to look, we cannot make it go in the direction of the beacons. All we can do is place the beacon there, light it up. If it does happen to look and find and does happen to want to come in that direction, then we’ve done our part. But it’s not a process that can be forced. It’s too big of a giant to be corralled in a certain direction by mere human minds and human actions, or by preaching, or even tremendously compelling philosophical reasoning. It will not make it happen. All it can do is plant the beacons around and hope for the best and cross our fingers. And to me, there is freedom in the recognition of this small part that I’m supposed to play. Because it doesn’t make me feel a sense of responsibility for the final outcome. Because if you do feel a sense of responsibility for the final outcome, you are lost in a very dark space and you may react to it through inflation. Like Hitler taking responsibility for the final outcome of the destiny of the German peoples. That’s what you get. You get this kind of tremendously dysfunctional pathological inflation that can lead to disaster. And if you don’t get that inflation, then you feel like you’re nothing. You feel powerless before a tremendously powerful universe that doesn’t even know you exist and might as well step on you by just not noticing that you are there, like we step on an ant. Which is also not a good place to be. I think freedom resides in service, which is something that we in the West knew but have forgotten. And it’s a seeming paradox. Because when you serve, it’s like there is a kenosis involved. You’re losing yourself because you’re serving something that isn’t you. Your life is no longer about you. You are just a tool, a small tool. So there is this sense in which you sort of extinguish yourself in service. So how can you be free? Well, you can be free from the claustrophobia of purely personal meaning. Because you see, even if you achieve everything you want, ultimately it’s all for nothing. You’re just a person. You will be forgotten 100 years from now. If you’re extremely famous, a thousand years from now, 10,000 years from now, you’ll be forgotten. It will all be for nothing if you think that it’s about you. It’s extremely claustrophobic. And it’s a prison. It’s the prison of the insignificance of the personal self. That’s what happens if you think your life’s about you. But when you extinguish yourself in service, wow, it’s like opening the windows. It’s like looking at the horizon. Everything becomes huge the moment you disappear. The moment, how do we explain this? I’ve been trying to explain this the past year or so and to fail every single time. To me, setting up that little beacon without any control of the process is my freedom. It’s the insignificance of setting up the beacon that is my freedom. I lose myself in it. Yeah, I don’t know whether I can say this any better. Maybe Jonathan, as an artist, would know better than I do. I think that you’re really coming right up to this mystery about how multiplicity and unity exist. It’s really, in a manner, the surprise of what Christianity, in my vision, the surprise of what Christianity offers. But I think you see that in other traditions as well. But you definitely see it in Christianity, which is like, okay, so why is the cross, this cross thing? What do we do with this? What is this cross thing at the top of the mountain? Why is that the thing we’re asked to pay attention to? And it’s the realization that it is in giving yourself to a higher being that you lose yourself and then you’re full. You find yourself filled. And so I think that that’s what you’re experiencing. And I think that that’s actually how things work. That’s actually how the world works is that fractally things give themselves, sacrifice themselves for their higher participation. And I think that even the ritual sacrifices were ritualized versions of that. Like we take something precious, we give it up, and then we receive fullness from above. And I think now in terms of Christianity, now we talk about this, the sacrifice of worship, the sacrifice of attention. So as you attend to the higher and you give yourself, then you’re filled by that higher participation. That can, of course, can become pathological. And we’ve seen many examples in which it has, but it’s nonetheless the way that things work. And I tend to agree with Bernardo in the sense that I see that there are certain patterns which are playing themselves out, which we’re not going to stop at this point. We’re not going to stop this pattern. And there are stories from the past which tell us about these moments. And there are versions of, I made a video on the book of Enoch recently where the description of the instrumentalization of intermediary beings towards power and towards desire and towards kind of like taking these patterns from above and then, you know, incarnating them in these giants that then devour the world. I think that that’s where we are. Like we’re really, you know, when St. Peter says, like in the time of Noah, I think that that’s pretty much where we are. And so the only thing we can do is build an ark, you know, and I think that when Bernardo talks about beacons, I think that that’s something like that. And the other thing we can do is understand that the world exists ultimately in a certain way. And I think that it exists through these types of principalities. And so when, you know, when we hear this idea, you know, acquire the spirit of peace, and you will and millions around, thousands around you will be saved. I think that that’s also something which we can do, which is that to become more. And in becoming more, you somehow pull others into the ark. It’s the only way to say, I don’t know how else to say it, is that in becoming more, in working out your own craft, in kind of consolidating what’s immediately around you, your life, your family, your friendships, your relationship to the people around you, and encountering that in a manner which is true through the spirit of service that Bernardo talked about. I think that that actually has more, that has more effects than we think that it does. And it actually acts as little beacons, little arcs of possibility that will rise up after the fire. But I think that in terms of the big pattern, I don’t see, it seems like things are accelerating in ways that are, you know, we could barely have predicted, we could have intuited, but now we’re seeing it, things are really accelerating. And this idea of progress, you know, right now we have people in Davos, you know, planning the future, talking about how we’re going to have, we’re going to have all these, you know, we’re going to use all these different technologies to make us more, whatever that means. And that’s exactly the problem that Paul is, Paul Kingsnorth is talking about where. It’s a, it’s a, it’s not a recent thing, right? I mean, Nietzsche was the first one to identify exactly this and to go through the consequences of this in the microcosm of his own life, because there was someone with a profound religious disposition, Nietzsche. A profound religious disposition who thought his way out of religion by interpreting religion literally and building a straw man for religion and setting it alight, burning it up. So where would that man put his religious intuition, the founding head of meaning that that was active within him? Where was he going to put that? He put that in the Superman, in the Ubermensch, which was his way to sort of pull transcendence downwards and squeeze it into a physical entity of some form that he called the secular Ubermensch, the man that transcends himself. And what is peculiar is that if you read Nietzsche’s work, he never says what the Superman is. Yeah, there is one passage in which he characterizes it indirectly. Like he talks about man being the intermediary step between the ape and the Superman, but he never says, here’s what the Superman is. He doesn’t define the bloody thing. It is the central pillar of his late work and he doesn’t define it. And he goes mad. That’s how he ends his days, 11 years of madness, mental illness. And I think that microcosm, what played in the microcosm of Nietzsche is what is playing the macrocosm of humanity 150 years later. And I just hope we don’t go mad when we realize that we are failing to pull transcendence downwards and try to make it palpable. It’s not in the nature of the thing to be that. It is us who have to transcend ourselves. It doesn’t make sense to pull transcendence into us. It’s like pulling the world into the prison. No, it’s not going to happen. You cannot pull the world into your prison cell. All you can do is break out. It’s not going to work the other way around. It didn’t work for Nietzsche. It’s not going to work for us. Yeah, I think that if Nietzsche knew that the that the Ubermensch would be furries in the metaverse, I think he might have changed his mind. OK, in agreement with what you described there, Bernardo, Dr. Wayne Gostrado, an Australian philosopher, he describes Nietzsche as an ideaist, where he takes maybe butchered what he says, but takes his little idea, makes it the reality, and he goes on replacing the reality for the map and falls into the same trap that the people that he’s critiquing. And he sees him in line with in some ways with Plato and a whole host of philosophy. He’s got an interest in history of philosophy, but just thrown in my mind whenever he said that. And I also thought about the way Dr. Ian McGilchrist has kind of framed modernity, right, and how the left hemisphere’s kind of thinking has come to dominate so much. And he mentioned that idea that reason in its properties is fine, but as the emissary’s fine, was terrible as a master. And I think Rabbi Jonathan Sacks sort of mentions then in his work, similarly, in some ways that science, properly understood, takes things apart to see how they work. But the religion, so-called, brings things together to see what they mean, which I think both of your works demonstrate in a more profound sense than the kind of social construct of religion is the privatized little myth that we have going on the West, predominantly, I suppose. And South Park says you’re going to have a bad time. So I’d love to know what are some of the ways you think this is manifesting itself at societal levels and in line with what Jonathan described as kind of secular liturgies. So I think even down to how we design our cities for accrued notions of things like functionality and ever-growing car parks for our major corporations, not that it’s all bad, but I wonder about some of the problems when that’s our maybe major or only emphasis. And there’s no center like in the traditional kind of European cities, I suppose, around the church or temples and things like that elsewhere in the world. Would you like to describe that, I suppose, then going beyond our individual selves to cities, towns, how that abuses our relationship with the creation then? And so, I mean, I think, Mark, what you’re saying, what’s interesting, you can kind of see when we talk about this kind of breakdown and this idea of progress, but how it’s actually manifesting itself in a breakdown. I think you pointed to the image of the city is a great example of how this works. And so there used to be the way that cities were understood was almost mythological. I talk about this in one of my podcasts, we have this Universal History podcast where we talk about how the founding of cities was, even when Constantine founded Constantinople, there was this sense in which there was an angel walking in front of him and he was walking with this standard that he planted at some point, which would mark the limit of the city. And they asked him and he said, well, I walked until the angel stopped. And then he basically planted the city. So all these cities have these mythological foundings, and then they end up being created in a fractal way. So the city itself usually has higher points of attention. And so medieval village is a great example. So the church would be in the center or in something which represented the center, then there would be the steeple would be the highest building in the church. And in the church, you weren’t allowed actually to build higher buildings. And so he would act as a kind of access of attention for all the people in the city, an access of attention and also a place that binds you literally in the sense that you go there together, and you would go to things, your baptisms, marriages, all the things that bind societies at different levels were celebrated there. And then even during the day, right, the bells would ring and then you would do the Angeles or something similar where all people in the village would turn towards the center and then would pray to participate in the existence of the city. So the city itself was built like a being, like was built in a way that you’re a microcosm of the same thing, right? These centers of attention and the highest thing which binds all the other aspects of you together. And so right now, the way that we build cities is so completely utilitarian that we the barely the cities barely exist except for random distribution of houses on in space, you know, separated by highways and functional, you know, malls and functional places for entertainment. And this is leading to massive breakdown in terms of people not knowing their neighbors, people becoming isolated, and ultimately falling into despair and not even realizing that the very space in which they live is participating in their despair with, you know, it’s not the only thing, but it’s definitely fueling the despair that they’re feeling is living in this, this, like a morphous grid of houses, you know, on the landscape. Absolutely. I feel it every time I go to the US. I don’t have it here because, you know, the Netherlands is a very small country. All the villages are old in a sense, and there are there are no, I mean, there are new constructions, but they grow in rings around the old towns. And sometimes the old towns merge together to form a city, but every little neighborhood has that center and that center has a church, a baker, a pharmacist, the doctor, and the bar. Yeah. And the grocery, the grocery store. So this five or six things are in every little neighborhood. And when I go to the US, I feel very ungrounded because you hardly touch the ground unless you are indoors because otherwise you are in a car. Yeah, from car to indoors. Yeah. That’s how it works. Yeah, you hardly have pedestrian pathways that you can walk from one place to the other and people hop into a car to go 100 meters. For us here it’s unthinkable. 100 meters. You don’t get into a car to go 100 meters. And, and I feel like I’m, I don’t know, floating in the air. There is no center. I have this very, I have a very strange feeling in the US. This is one of the big reasons. The other big reason is television commercials. I find them very alienating in the US. I can’t relate to them at all. So I can tell you that from an outside perspective, mine, what you are saying is not theory. It’s not conjecture. It’s a very, very real palpable lived reality. Yeah, and but it’s interesting because I think that the scandal of America and in Canada, we have the same problem is leading to a type of consciousness of this problem. You know, and so, like I have a good friend of mine, Andrew Gould, who’s an architect, and he is now realizing this and the architects around him are realizing this and so they’re, they’re forced to consciously, let’s say, re-engage with this pattern. So something which, let’s say in the Middle Ages, when this wasn’t thought out, it was just, that’s how the world works. You just do it. And so now we have to, I think that this is true about all the questions right now of participation is that we somehow have, like we bit the apple, right? We took, we took the apple and now we can reintegrate the garden. But it’s the cross, right? It’s the cross which will make us reintegrate the garden. It’ll be difficult. It’s going to be painful and ultimately will end with something which is fuller in the end. And this is maybe like in terms of the hope of this whole problem is that the story seems to be always something like that. Like that seems to be the story of all the stories. And so there’s a sense in which possibly the crisis we’re going through, although it is horrible and frustrating, that there is a hope that ultimately the reintegration which comes after will be fuller than the one that was before. And that’s the, that’s kind of like the only hope that I can, I can bring when you read in the book of Enoch, it’s really, it’s very powerful because it’s talking about the flood in the book of Enoch. And it talks about how all this calamity is coming because of these, because of these demons, these giants that are there and that are eating the world and that are devouring everything and that are engaged in all these kind of perverted destruction of the world. But then it says that, okay, destruction is coming and then after that God will fill all things. We think interesting, like that this is something describing the flood, but there’s a manner in which that seems to be the pattern and even the pattern of ourselves. Bernardo, you talked about how someone who experiences dissociation and then is able to heal that dissociation is maybe more than the person that was there before. Yeah. Yeah, you get a level higher of insight. It’s like you are in a spiral. So it feels like you’ve gone back to the same place where you were before, but it’s a level higher. As you go through this spiral, you’re always going a level higher, always going back to the beginning, but always with an understanding of new ones, subtlety and perspective that wasn’t there before, even though you’re again looking from that same perspective. Yeah, that’s, and so the image, the image of the entire story of the Bible, that’s the way that I see it. And so we all we often forget that the last image in scripture, the image of the New Jerusalem of the heavenly Jerusalem is the Garden of Eden. It’s the tree of life and the water of life, but then around the tree of life and the water of life is now this glorious city. And so from from the moment of innocence in the garden, and then a fall and the fall bringing about all these human activities, all this, all this kind of human technology, which is constantly leading us into little levels of distraction and and thinking that power is going to solve our problem. So all these problems happen and then ultimately in the end, there’s a way in which it gets resolved in this kind of glorious city where the tree is in the center, the water is in the center, the lamb, right, the self sacrificial lamb is in the center, but then it makes the rest meaningful. It fills the rest with with meaning. So it’s at least a little bit of hope. As we talk about this. Can I run an idea by you? It’s something I’ve been thinking about. It’s not worked out in my mind, but I wonder what what you would how you would react to it. We were talking about banality and ritual earlier on when we began this conversation, and I’m totally with you that we have to re ritualize life in order to come back in contact with its extra dimension of that meaning and significance. At the same time, and I don’t know whether this is a dichotomy or a paradox, I don’t know, but I also sense that the word spirituality is the worst thing that has ever happened to spirituality because it made it distinct from reality. Yeah. And sometimes I think that if we use too romantic language to talk about real stuff, you know, the bedrock of existence, if we talk about it in too romantic terms, we create a distance between ourselves and it because we are moist living beings. We go to the loo every day, even Kings, and it doesn’t smell good when that happens. And we have to eat stuff and kill stuff to eat. Even if you’re a vegetarian, you’re killing plants to eat. And you know, the business of life is messy. There is it’s very bloody. There is a lot of suffering. And it’s moist. It’s warm. You know, it’s not slick marble statue. If you know what I mean. Yeah, no, I know exactly what you mean. And sometimes I think the romanticized language creates this impassable cars between lived reality and the treasure buried at the end of the rainbow. If you know what I mean. And we do that in language. So is there something to say about trying to get a little bit read of some of the romanticizing talking about these things in more visceral terms? Yeah. You know, if we talk about enlightenment, I always go like, what the heck does that even mean? You know, this business of enlightenment, what does that even mean? But there is something I know, which is suddenly I became a lot more empathic. It’s a shit show because I suffer over the Ukrainians. I suffer with the mothers and fathers in Texas. I suffer with everybody. And it’s a horror show. Is that what you call enlightenment? Maybe maybe that’s what it is. You see what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. But I call it a shit show. Yeah. Not enlightenment. And I think there is something to be said about, you know, bringing the language down to our level a little bit so we can relate to this stuff as reality and not a romanticized something that is unachievable. I don’t know. Yeah. No, I totally agree. And I, people who watch my videos will hear me often say something like, go to church. And what I mean by go to church is, yeah, that’s why I don’t talk that. That’s why go to church is the most boring. It sounds like the most boring thing you could say to someone. But I’m saying go to church. You go to church, but it could be other types of participation. You go to church, then it’s messy. It’s messy because let’s say something like church, there are people there that you would choose to be with and there are people there that you would not choose to be with. And so all your buttons will be pressed. Everything about you will be challenged. But nonetheless, so there’s something dirty and moist and smelly about it. But it’s all this dirty, moist, smelly stuff, which is trying to aim higher and transform these aspects of reality into something more. And so you kind of get in my estimation through participation in the things that are immediate to us. And so I think that engagement is probably better. And so, for example, finding a confessor in the Orthodox Church, I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good idea. That’s at least the way that I try to… And I say that, but it’s hard for me as much as anybody, because we have all this comfort. It’s hard for me as much as anybody to do it, but at least that’s the way that I’m trying to deal with that stuff. And so I’m trying to really pin down what I’m attempting to say and not really succeeding yet. That’s why symbols are so important. But when I talk about romanticizing, there is a mushy quality to it, a kind of perfection to the goal, like the sumo bonum, like the saint is purely good, and it’s all about love and playing the harp in the clouds. I don’t think this is a helpful image, if you know what I mean. Yeah, but do you think that that’s really… If you look at the Christian version of that, you end up with martyrs, and Saint Francis of Assisi, who is poor, people who live in the desert. And so it’s like Saint Mary of Egypt. These are the images of our saints. They’re not angels on clouds, like, you know, strumming hearts. You miss the big one. The big one is Jesus’ life. Yeah, of course, the life of Christ himself. That’s the reality of the thing. That’s the reality of service and a sort of giving up words of yourself. But if you tell people, just go to church, what they think is Ruben’s caribis with plump bottoms playing the harp on clouds. And it creates this notion. You see what I mean? No, I know what you mean, exactly. I totally understand what you mean. How do we help people understand that this stuff is real and it’s so real, it’s not under their noses, it’s behind their noses. It’s as close as anything can possibly be. It’s so close nobody sees it. And there’s nothing romantic about it. It’s tough stuff. Yeah. You see what I’m trying to get at? No, I totally agree. But I think the image of the cross is, in that case, that’s the best image and helping people remember what that is. But we romanticized even that. Yeah. Yeah, there’s work to do, that’s for sure. When Jesus was in the Gethsemane and he asked God to take that chalice away from him, how do you think most Christians understand that today? Oh, it was a moment of weakness. It was just the human Jesus that suddenly was there but then went away. No, no, it was not a moment. It’s an ever-present reality. Drinking from that chalice is tough stuff. It’s tough to be a real Christian, if you know what I mean. No, I totally… It’s not that romantic thing. It’s unbearable, actually. It’s unbearable. Just reading the words of Christ is unbearable. It’s very difficult. That’s why we read them, but it’s hard to really read what Christ asks of us because it’s really unbearable. I agree. So the challenge is, how do we recover the ritual, the sacralization of this world, the ensoulment of this world through ritual without this trap of romanticizing and lyricizing it to a point where it becomes unattainable and becomes different from reality. It becomes spirituality. You see what I’m struggling with. I can’t even describe the problem, let alone find a solution. That’s the issue right now for me. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that in a proper kind of balanced Christian life, there’s an aspect of the Christian life which is celebratory, and that’s important, but there’s also an aspect of the Christian life which is penance and repentance, constant repentance. So if you take the prayers that you do every day seriously, it’s like you’re constantly seeing how you’re missing the mark, even unwillingly, and you’re constantly kind of in that moment of missing. And so those two extremes held in balance, I think, are what make it bearable, because if you just had one, then you have the romantic part. If you just have the other, then you would just collapse. You just collapse under the weight of what it means, right? And so I think that having those two in tension is probably the best. But at the same time, occasionally I do go to church, and it has partly to do with my self-nurture and partly to do with some kind of anthropological project, to see what’s happening in the culture. And there is a way in which transcendence has become cartoonified. It has been turned into a cartoon. And one of the mechanisms, I suspect, are partly responsible for this, is turning religion into a moral recipe alone. So a moral code is no longer a consequence of religious insight. It now is religion. And that’s a way to cartoonify the whole thing. If you do the right thing, my son, you will have eternal life. That’s a cartoonification of the whole thing. And to some extent, it’s been done by the church, this cartoonification. You see what I’m trying to… No, I totally agree. I’m not waving my way here, but… No, no, I totally agree. But sadly, I have to… I’m watching the time go by. I need to go because someone is waiting in two minutes. But I would love to continue this conversation with you, Bernardo. And Mark, thanks for organizing this. It’s always wonderful to talk to you as well. I’m afraid I have to leave you. It was a pleasure talking to you, Jonathan. All right. It was great to me to talk to both of you. And, Bernardo, let’s do this again. Let’s do this again. Maybe it can be more coherent next time. No, no, no. It’s great. I know exactly what you’re pointing to. And so we can explore that. I’ll also meditate on it in my own life, let’s say. All right. Bye, everybody. Thanks, Jonathan. Take care. Actually, Bernardo… Thanks for doing this. Thank you, Bernardo. Did you ever see Terence Malick’s A Hidden Life about Franz Jagerstetter? No. Oh, you must watch it. You know, just what you outlined there. It’s about a Franz Jagerstetter in Austria during the Second World War when he refused to play as an oath of allegiance to Hitler and the consequences. And it shows that kind of pristine pseudo Christianity versus his embodied living out the Christian way in this messy but very real and visceral form. So I think you’d love it. Yeah, it’s a brilliant movie. Recent one, 2019. Yeah, I think you would enjoy it. More than just enjoy it. It actually is… Terence Malick’s movies, I think, are quite challenging and change your mindset. I watch it tonight. It’s with Bruno Gans, one of my favorite actors. Oh, brilliant. So I think that would actually help a little bit with your queries there about this kind of neat Christianity versus the authentic thing. Yeah. I watch it tonight. I’m supposed to go down and have dinner now, and I probably put it on. If I can access it, I’m sure there will be a way for me to access this. You can get it on Amazon Prime if you have Amazon. Oh, I have it. Oh, good. I’ll get it there. Thanks for the tip. I will watch it. Yeah, please let me know what you think. I hope you find it as moving as I did. But I would love to say to whether you want to do a separate conversation with Jonathan or whether you want to come back on to my channel. I’d love to set that up because… Let’s do this again. Like part two. There is no need to change the recipe when it works, right? Yeah, wonderful. God bless you, Leonardo. Have a lovely evening. You too. Thanks for this, Marc. Take care. As you know, the symbolic world is not just a bunch of videos on YouTube. We are also a podcast, which you can find on your usual podcast platform. But we also have a website with a blog and several very interesting articles by very intelligent people that have been thinking about symbolism on all kinds of subjects. We also have a clips channel, a Facebook group. You know, there’s a whole lot of ways that you can get more involved in the exploration and the discussion of symbolism. Don’t forget that my brother, Mathieu, wrote a book called The Language of Creation, which is a very powerful synthesis of a lot of the ideas that explore. And so please go ahead and explore this world. You can also participate by, you know, buying things that I’ve designed, t-shirts with different designs on them. And you can also support this podcast and these videos through PayPal or through Patreon. Everybody who supports me has access to an extra video a month. And there are also all kinds of other goodies and tiers that you can get involved with. So everybody, thank you again and thank you for your support.