https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0VIRA6T33o4
So, hello everybody. I’d like to introduce you to my brother, Matthew. And some of you might have seen Matthew. We did a conversation with Jordan Peterson, all three of us, discussing the story of Abraham. And so, Matthew and I, we’re used to speaking, we’re used to talking about symbolism together. We’ve been talking about it for, I mean, since we were teenagers. And so, we decided that we’re going to try to have this conversation online to talk about what symbolism is, what are the categories, and what are the criteria for a proper symbolic interpretation of a story. But hopefully we’ll be able to do it because we have our own shortcuts and our own way of talking about things. So, we’re going to make a big effort to be comprehensible to everybody. So, here we go. So, now I even have to use your name in English. I’m used to speaking to you in French. That’s not going to be easy. All right, so I’ll call you Matthew because I can’t say Matthew. That’s not possible. All right, so Matthew, one of the things that, one of the things I want to start with is I’ve been getting, a lot of the comments that I’m getting about symbolism, and these comments keep coming back. And I tried to address a little bit in my video about symbolic versus literal interpretation. But people seem to really want to oppose those two things. They really want to oppose this idea of like a factual literal world and then a world of meaning. But for both of us, in our discussions, it seems like that it’s just not how it works. So, maybe you can start by giving us your vision of that and we can start the discussion that way. Yeah, well, I think that’s one of the major problems with people in symbolism today is that we understand the world in a completely different way as it used to be understood. And it’s such a fundamental difference that trying to understand the world in a truly symbolic way requires such a transformation of your mind, of your presuppositions. It’s a really hard pill to swallow to be able to understand symbolism in a way that won’t force you to make a distinction between meaning and fact. So, if you’re used to thinking in a materialistic way, which we all are, everyone’s a materialist today in my opinion because science has completely dominated everything. So, it’s helped us to understand a lot of things but it’s also hindered us to understand other things in a completely different field of things. So, basically, if we want to recapture what symbolism really is, we have to go way back and think of the universe in completely different terms as we do today. So, basically, the way we understand things today is we interpret everything in terms of matter and energy, basically, and structure. So, that’s how everything’s understood. The only causality left today is a sort of mechanical causality where there’s a transfer of energy or transfer of matter. So it’s a mechanistic way of understanding reality. So, if you understand reality like that, you can’t really understand symbolism the way it was understood in the past and the way it’s described in the Bible. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the ways that I’ve been trying to help people to see symbolism again is to try to get people to dive back in their experience, to kind of go back to the lived experience, let’s say. So, the way that you encounter a tree is not the same – you don’t encounter a tree in the same category that a scientist would analyze a tree or the way you encounter the heavens or the way you encounter earth. They’re not the same categories. So, trying to get people to go back to categories – and the craziest thing is that the symbolic categories are really there at the base of our existence and they’re still there even if we pretend that they’re not. Categories like high and low, even things like hot and cold. Hot and cold are not scientific categories. They’re categories of experience. So, these basic categories of experience – There are still hierarchies and they still have exactly the same meaning as they used to. It’s all still there, but we don’t interpret it in the right way to make it significant enough to pay attention to it. One of the ways that you’ve talked about to me before and that you’ve even written about in some of your texts is this idea of at least for a moment, at least for the experience to try to get a sense of how things come together and have meaning is to – for a specific moment to shut down – to try to shut down the quantitative, the quantitative, the quantitative scientific way of approaching the world. The craziest thing is it’s not that hard to do. I remember – No, because we still think in the other way in a lot of ways. I remember hearing recently a podcast with Sam Harrison and he was talking about – he said something like, when you drink water, it doesn’t matter what you think, you’re always drinking H2O. I’m like, that’s not true. No one drinks H2O. We drink wet, we drink cold, we drink warm, we drink flavor. Refreshing. That has nothing to do with – I mean, it has not completely nothing to do, but the category of two hydrogen and it’s like – that’s not the same as the categories of experience. The only problem with that I guess is that people will think that it makes it arbitrary, which it doesn’t because there’s still universal experiences that all humans have. It doesn’t mean it – because it’s interpreted through the lens of our consciousness, it doesn’t mean that it’s arbitrary in the sense that anybody could say whatever they want can interpret it however they want. That’s the only problem with the idea of bringing it back to your experience. I agree with that’s what people have to do, but they have to keep in mind that the human experience is a universal experience. Some things are universal in the human experience. We all eat, we all sleep, we all work, we all rest, etc. The human experience is not random or arbitrary. It’s universal. In a way it’s funny because to get to true symbolism, you almost have to go – you almost have to destroy what people usually think what it is to give meaning to something. It’s like you have to go beyond the emotional or personal version of what happens and then go back to the really basic, basic ground level kind of almost primordial experience or something. The experience of the grass isn’t like that nice Saturday that you spent with your family and now the grass for you reminds you of that nice moment that you spent. The reality of grass has more to do with the fact that it’s below your feet, that it’s down there, that it’s all these chaotic mix of different things that are just there on the surface of the earth. Maybe that participates in the reason why laying in the grass on the nice Saturday was a pleasant experience. It does actually, but you have to go beyond that psychological literary type of interpretation to get to the baser reality. Just because it’s interpreted through human consciousness doesn’t mean that it’s like a personal individual interpretation. It can be, but that’s not how symbolism works because I don’t care about some person’s individual interpretation of something when that interpretation is based on nothing but their little ideas. Symbolism becomes important when the interpretation is universal. That’s one of the criteria by which we can distinguish real symbolism from the kind of symbolism you can find in a movie or in a story that’s just been made up by someone on the street. Even then, most of the time when people tell a story or write a movie, they will use universal symbols because otherwise nobody would care. Even when it is interpreted through individuals, if they want people to care about their interpretation of reality, they’ll make it universal. Otherwise, nobody cares. In a way, the idea would be to say that symbolism is really the way that our consciousness is written in a way. It’s what makes it possible for us to even perceive and engage the world is these basic structures that we’re made out of, that our experience is made out of. That’s symbolism. It’s really what makes it possible for us to engage with the world. That’s the same structure as the religious hierarchy, like the religious symbolism. In fact, the basic structures of symbolism are so universal that even people who would like to deny them are into those structures. They can’t escape it. Like a scientist, let’s say even an atheist, he’s working on a scientific discovery or something like that. He’s trying to perform an experiment. He can’t escape the basic structures of symbolism. What is this person doing? He’s trying to unite a theory that he has, an abstract theory, a metaphysical idea. He’s trying to join that with the facts that he observed. This scientist is a human between heaven and earth trying to mediate between heaven and earth. He’s trying to mediate his abstract theory with a concrete fact. The scientist, whether he likes it or not, is participating in the symbolic worldview. He’s a mediator between heaven and earth, whether he likes it or not. I talked about this when I talked to Jordan Peterson. When I say heaven, I mean meaning. Theoretical meaning. When I say earth, I mean the factual reality, concrete reality. That’s what it means in the Bible and that’s what it means in pretty much all traditions. It’s funny because recently I made that video about how science is nested in religion. I tried to talk a little bit about that as well. It was funny because just a week later I heard Sam Harris speaking about the phenomenon of emergence. He was talking about how we see these different patterns appear at different scales of reality and how the same patterns appear at a biological level as a city. He was really struggling to make those qualitative jumps between quarks and atoms to a person, to a city. He kept using the world higher order phenomena. He kept using this hierarchical language about these higher orders of manifestations. Wow, man, you’re a religious thinker. You don’t even know it. I listened to that also. I think the answer was also interesting because what the person said is you don’t want to explain higher levels of phenomenon with the lower levels because it’s extremely complex. That’s not what Sam Harris wanted though. Sam Harris didn’t like that answer. I don’t know. The other scientist didn’t like that. Go ahead. Keep going. It’s so extremely complex that giving an explanation at that order would probably be impossible. Even if it is, it would be coherent to us as humans. Right there. It’s important. You can’t get away from it. You can’t get away from the fact that we are humans. We are observing phenomenon. We can’t abstract ourselves from the equation of knowledge. The scientist, the materialist tries to step away from the universe and look at it as if he’s not in it, which is fine to a certain degree. It’s fine to understand certain things like mechanical causality. The perfect way to do that is to abstract yourself from reality. You still can’t escape the other reality, which is the ancient way of thinking, where it’s centered on the human. It’s centered on consciousness. Basically, the scientist can try to create a worldview in which he’s not there and in which his theories don’t exist in that model of the universe. It’s problematic for certain things. It’s problematic. It’s also probably problematic to include it. There’s a reason why science has discovered, materialistic science has discovered a whole bunch of things that the traditional worldview hasn’t discovered because it’s useful to get out of the system. Ideally, I think… It reaches a limit, though. At some point, it reaches its limit. I think it has reached that limit. I think quantum physics is one of the signs that this limit has been reached because they reached a point where the observer can’t get out of the equation. You have to admit as an observer that when you look at the phenomenon, you are impacting the phenomenon. There’s no way out. Now, there’s no way out. They have reached that limit. It’s going to come to them soon. They’re going to have to deal with that limit. I don’t think they’re dealing with it. I think they’re going to have to deal with it, though. What does it mean? It seems like there was a whole bunch of things that happened at the mid, maybe post-war period because it wasn’t just that observation, but it was also Goodell’s theorem. Incompleteness theorem, yeah. Same problem. Then Heidegger, I think Heidegger was part of that. Heidegger presenting this idea that the way that being presents itself to us, like I was saying at the beginning, the way that we encounter the world as consciousness is not the same as the technical, let’s say, kind of scientific way of viewing the world. You can’t discount the other completely. You just can’t because then you don’t know how to act in the world. It seems like maybe it’s taking a while for people to kind of come to the finale of what that’s going to give. I mean, hopefully this is it. This is happening right now that people are going to start. I think that one of the things that Jordan Peterson seems to be doing is tapping into that uneasiness that people have about seeing the limits of science, but then coming at it from a scientific point of view and trying to help people see it without completely, without becoming insane. Yeah, without becoming. No, seriously, because if you delve too much into this kind of universe of self-referential contradiction, you can go insane. You can lose everything. The idea is not to, I mean, my interest in traditional cosmology doesn’t come at the cost of scientific knowledge, in my opinion, not at all. They’re not opposed. They are, but they shouldn’t be. They should team up if possible. One of the things that people who are materialists have to understand if that is going to eventually happen is that traditional cosmology should not be interpreted in terms of materialism because when you do that, it’s ridiculous. They’re right in a way. When they laugh at religion, when they laugh at the religious worldview and the traditional worldview, they find it ridiculous. They’re right because the reason is they’re trying to look at it with their own lens, their own materialism. They’re trying to look at something that’s fundamentally not materialistic. So yeah, it doesn’t work. It’s ridiculous. The worst part of that is that it’s not just the atheists that are doing that. They’re reacting to religious people doing that. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Then interpreting the religious, the traditional cosmologies with their materialist point of view and then saying absolutely ridiculous things in doing so. So the atheist has every reason to mock them. Exactly. That’s why I have zero animosity towards atheists. I have zero animosity towards skeptics because they’re not responding to religion really. They’re responding, they’re answering to the problem of people who are essentially materialists and don’t know it and interpret the Bible for example with materialism and even though it doesn’t work, they still stick to it. So I think you get an example in one of your videos. I’m not sure which one, but an example. You ask somebody, what does it mean when it says he went up into heaven? So let’s say for example Elijah goes up into heaven. What does that mean? Does it mean that he goes up into the atmosphere and then into outer space or something like that? It becomes ridiculous immediately. So there has to be a stage where people who are scientifically minded stop interpreting it like that. Don’t worry about what certain religious people say. If they interpret it like that, that’s not what has to be critiqued. That’s simply wrong. What has to happen is we have to re-understand what it means to go up into heaven. That’s just an example. Pretty much everything has to be in a way reinterpreted according to a cosmology that allows it. That cosmology is the one I was describing with Jordan Peterson. Man is a mediator between heaven and earth. That’s how things have to be interpreted in the Bible. So when it says go up into heaven, you have to interpret it like that. Heaven has that meaning. It doesn’t mean the atmosphere. It doesn’t mean that. It doesn’t mean the atmosphere at the same level that when Sam Harris says higher level phenomena, it means that one phenomena is stacked on top of the other. You can’t use the language of hierarchy to describe these higher levels of manifestation and then mock the idea of, oh, you’re a silly sky god in heaven. It’s like you’re using the same word. They’re using exactly the same language. They’re using the same structure. You’re mocking mine. Yes, but that’s the thing. They’re not mocking your structure. They’re mocking the people who still insist on interpreting it in a materialistic way as in the way you were just laughing at. It means going up into the atmosphere. So they are not mocking that. They’re mocking the people who still interpret it in a way that doesn’t make sense. If we can make people understand what it means, then I don’t think there’s going to be as much discrepancy between science and traditional cosmology. In fact, I think there’s none because they’re not talking about the same things, hardly ever. What’s interesting and what I found in my own research is one of the difficulties that people have is that when you read medieval writings and when you read, let’s say, the medieval writers, it’s difficult for people to understand because those medieval writers were not comparing themselves to something that didn’t exist yet. They weren’t comparing their discourse to a scientific discourse because the scientific discourse just wasn’t part of their world. So they just speak forthrightly. Now when we look at it with our own lens, we see it just seems to be absolute gibberish. It doesn’t make any sense. But what’s interesting is that in the transition between the traditional worldview and the modern worldview, you can catch glimpses of people saying, oh, wait a minute. No, no, no, no. Don’t think this is the same way that you’re hitting a hammer on a piece of wood. In Dante, for example, there’s places where he actually says, he talks about ascending into heaven and encountering higher spirits in the different heavenly spheres. Then he says, no, the spirits don’t actually inhabit the heavenly spheres. It’s a condescension of the heavenly language for us to be able to understand the higher truth that we speak about it in those terms. He was right at the transition before the scientific revolution. He was already seeing that people were changing the way they’re thinking. He was trying to prevent them from having a science fiction version of, like a Marvel Comics version of spirituality, like the gods live on another planet. Yes, because that’s what happens. That’s actually a good point because that’s exactly what happens if you don’t make the proper language shift. Because the words shift. If you’re naive, you don’t realize that the meaning of words shifts constantly. Like what you were saying before, water is H2O. It might be that today, but it’s extremely naive to think that in the time of the Bible, for example, when the book of Genesis was written, that that’s what water meant. It didn’t. It meant something else. It had nothing to do with any chemical composition or anything like that. We always have to be aware that words shift. For example, there’s a natural way that words shift. Words shift when your knowledge of the universe increases. If you say, for example, Earth means matter. That’s what it used to mean. There’s a reason why it meant that. Because all matter came from the land, from the Earth. When your knowledge of the universe expands, then you realize that there’s matter that’s not in the soil, in the Earth. Then you have to expand your category. Now you use the word matter instead of Earth, let’s say. Now you’ve separated those two categories, but they weren’t separate before. When all things came from the Earth, then there was a coincidence between the metaphysical category called matter and the concrete reality that we call the soil, the Earth. When your knowledge expands, then the word shifts. If you don’t keep up with that shift of language, then you start to say things that don’t make sense. Things look ridiculous. It’s funny because it’s like people who criticize the religious worldview or criticize the ancient vision of the world. It’s like either you really have to think that everybody was on drugs or something. That’s what you would have to think because it’s so disconnected to the materialist way of interpreting the world that it’s like either they were completely delusional and lived in a delusional world or maybe they were as smart as you were, they just were talking about things in a different way. I prefer the second because it’s more generous and when you explore that direction, that’s where you find amazing things. That’s where you can discover the pearls that are hidden in the ancient text or else you read stories and it just seems like it’s just a bunch of nonsense. That’s how atheists interpret it and so they’re right to laugh at it. They’re right to mock it. There has to be an effort to understand what the ancient language was at some point. You can’t just assume that you know automatically what words refer to. The example I always use when I talk about these things is the example of the fish. I always use that example because I think it’s an easy one to understand. I remember when I was a kid, there was this Sunday school teacher who said something like he was talking about this story of Jonah and I don’t remember who that person was but that person said, well we know that Jonah wasn’t swallowed by a whale because the text says it’s a fish and whales aren’t fish. I was pretty young at that time. I don’t remember exactly maybe eight years old or something. Even then I knew there was something wrong with that. I knew that didn’t make any sense to think that you can use a modern definition of a fish and apply it to a story that’s thousands of years old. Obviously when people talk about a fish, it didn’t mean the same as what it means today. Today a prerequisite to be called a fish, I think you have to have gills. I think the animal has to have gills but obviously that’s not what it used to mean. Fish were things that lived in the water and that’s about it probably. That was the definition of a fish. It wasn’t a wrong definition. It wasn’t an incomplete definition. It was just a different definition of fish. The word shifted and now the word fish means something else. We have to be careful not to use modern interpretation of words to interpret ancient stories. It’s very naive. It was a definition. We still have definitions like that. I used the word grass before. That’s a perfect definition which is similar to the definition of fish who just under water. If you took the time to analyze all the different types of botanical species that are on the ground that you call grass, you’d think you’re an idiot to say that they’re all the same. Of course they’re completely different in terms of their species and their different origins. That category, grass, is a perfectly fine category of human engagement. I mow the grass. I won’t enumerate for you all the different types of plants that I’m mowing when I’m mowing the grass. It’s the grass. It’s fine. It’s a word that refers to the human experience. That’s a good example. We don’t care about the scientific definition of what grass is. We don’t care what it’s composed of, really. We care about the fact that it’s in our backyard and makes it look nice or something like that. Anyway, the idea is we have to be careful not to interpret ancient stories with modern categories. I keep repeating that because that’s what 90% of the people who misread traditional stories and biblical stories do. It solves about 90% of the problems that people have when they read a text. When you at least try to find a proper meaning for the categories, already the problem of the distinction between a symbolic interpretation and a literal interpretation usually vanishes. It usually vanishes right there. If you try to find the proper meaning of words, that dichotomy is usually enough to make it completely disappear. One of the examples I use in my mind for that, to show that, is you say, for example, in the Bible, the snake in the garden. If I say that’s a symbol of time, the snake in the garden is a symbol of time, let’s say. If you have a modern scientific definition of time, that makes no sense. It looks like I’m just arbitrarily assigning a meaning to that element of the story. It looks like I’m just making it up, basically. If you have a proper definition of time which fits with an ancient understanding, then it does work. It’s not arbitrary anymore. If you say, for example, that time used to be understood in a way where it meant the cause of transformation or an influence of transformation, something like that, that’s what time is. That’s not change. It’s the cause of change. It’s the influence of change. It’s not what scientists call time today. What physicists call time has nothing to do with what we just said. It’s become just an empty quantity used to describe a mechanistic world in terms of events in time and space. It’s not the cause of change. It’s not an influence of change. In the modern way, time, it’s not seen as a cause of change, but it certainly was seen as that in the ancient world. Time was a cyclical transformation, like a powerful influence that transformed things, changing them into their opposites. Changing light into darkness, darkness into light, life into death. That was time. That definition of time, if you use that, then you can say the snake in the story of the garden is a symbol of time. There’s no metaphor. It is the cause of transformation in that story. Where’s the metaphor? It’s vanished. Just because I used the right definition of the concept of time and I stopped using the scientific mechanistic one, all of a sudden when I say symbol, it doesn’t mean metaphor anymore. It doesn’t mean an allegory. It means nothing of the sort. The snake is a cause of transformation in the story. It is a symbol of time. Yeah. For example, I like, this usually is not my usual way of going about understanding symbolism, but for people who are coming at it from the outside, the way that Jordan Peterson traces that idea that the snake is a symbol of time, let’s say, is a good way for people to understand it in the sense that if you’re a community, let’s say, and there’s a predator that arrives, a predator that comes into your camp, that’s exactly a perfect example of that. That’s the most archetypal image of change is that there’s a threat that comes from the outside. It’s both a threat, but it can also be a seduction. It could be either way. It could be either a threat or a fascination or something that appears from the corner of your eye. That thing is going to tumble. It’s going to make things tumble. It’s going to make things move. Yeah. It can potentially change, transform things. If it bites you, it will definitely transform your life into death. In that sense, symbols are not metaphors. They’re certainly not arbitrary metaphors. They’re certainly not conventional agreements on meaning. Yeah. I think that’s really if we can get something out of this conversation today. I think that’s really one of the biggest things that is an obstacle for people to understand symbolism, is that people constantly think that symbolism is something which is added onto literal facts. For example, we both grew up in the Protestant world. Not everybody, but for a lot of people who we grew up with, it was almost as if the idea that something had a symbolic meaning was almost like a threat to the integrity of the thing itself. The fact. Like it was going to swallow up the factuality of the thing, whereas that’s not how it works. The very reason why that’s part of the story means that it’s symbolic. It has to be, or else why would you care about it? Why would it be set up in this patterned story? Actually, unfortunately, it’s kind of a vicious cycle because when all you have left in a story, like the Bible, in stories, biblical stories, is the fact, then you want to defend that if you’re a Christian, let’s say. When there’s no more meaning, that’s what I mean. It’s a vicious cycle because when you have the meaning, you’re more interested in the meaning than the fact, really, because that’s what informs you. That’s what tells you how things work. That’s what shows you how reality works and it gives you guidance as to what I do in this situation. If the text has meaning, it helps you understand the nature of reality. That’s actually what it’s really supposed to help you with. But if you don’t have that anymore and you only think that the text is a description of an event without meaning, then if you want to remain a Christian, you’re going to guard that with your life. That’s what they’re doing. It’s the last remnant of your identity is it happened. You’ve got to prove that it happened. You’ve got to show that it happened. And you don’t care. I don’t care about the meaning. I just care that it happened. Well, that’s a mistake because the real way to understand the Bible is through a traditional cosmology. The events that are described in the Bible are embodiments of metaphysical truth. They’re embodiments of cosmic truth. They’re embodiments of social truth. They’re embodiments of individual truth. So at different scales of reality, of our experience, there are constant truths. So these are the truths that the Bible are trying to communicate. And it’s unfortunate that it’s been lost to a great degree, but there’s work to be done. There’s work to be done. We have to do that work of reclaiming the meaning of these things. Just doggedly defending the factuality of a story is pointless. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t help because the fact contains the meaning, but the treasure is in the meaning. It’s not in the fact. So the whole point of the fact is to support and express and help us understand higher meaning, spiritual meaning. Just like a scientist who performs an experiment, it’s not the experiment that has value in itself. It’s the general truth that the experiment reveals. So I mean, it’s interesting. I always find fascinating the story of Galileo that drops two cannonballs from the Tower of Pisa. I like that story because it’s a perfect example of this dichotomy of meaning and fact. So in that story, why do we keep retelling that story? Do we really care if it happened or not? I mean, it would be interesting to think that it happened, but the reason why we keep restating that story is because that specific event expresses, proves, manifests a cosmic truth, which is gravity, which is the nature of gravity. So why do we care about that event, the dropping of those two cannonballs at the same time from the tower is because it proves a cosmic truth about gravity. So the same can be said about what’s in the Bible. The event of the dropping the two cannonballs, I mean, some people say that it actually happened. I’ve seen other people say that it doesn’t happen. And what I say in my mind is I don’t care. I don’t care that as much. If it happened, I care a lot more that it revealed the nature of gravity. Right. And also, I think that even when we use the word fact, when we talk about a story, especially if we talk about ancient stories, the notion of what a fact would be in a story that was told 3,000 years ago, it doesn’t mean a scientific fact. One of the things that I’ve been trying to get people to see is that to remember something and to attend to something for thousands of years means that whatever it is that happened, whatever event that happened has to be compressed. It has to be brought into something that has meaning for everyone. So I kept thinking about the idea, let’s say that I tell the story of a modern story to an ancient person, and in that story the person has a gun in it, and that other person doesn’t understand what a gun is. But I can still tell the story. I just reduce it and I use the word weapon, let’s say. And then I find a word, and then maybe the word weapon in his language means a lance. And then finally, it ends up being a lance, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing. You’re still telling the story. I’m just compressing the categories in a manner which makes them universal. It doesn’t have to be forensically the same thing for it to be a fact, because categories can be enlarged and detailed and can be compressed into more and more compressed categories. And that’s important to understand, because one of the reasons why the texts are written the way they are is because they focus on the meaning. So we don’t have the events. Let’s say we’re talking about the story of Abraham. We don’t have the events anymore. We only have a story about the events. So the story was recounted in a certain way, and the way it was recounted, the purpose of it, was so that we understand what it means. The meaning. Yeah, exactly. And you see that, I was thinking about that the other day. I was thinking about trying to find examples of that for people to understand. One of the things I kept coming back to was the idea of crossing a body of water. In the Bible, we have the flood, then we have the crossing of the Red Sea, but then I was like, okay, let’s keep going. And then it’s like, oh, that’s funny, because we have Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Then we have Constantine winning his, becoming emperor by fighting a battle on a bridge. Then we have all these examples. Then you come up to Washington crossing the Delaware. It’s like, why is it that all these stories of a change of power happen at the crossing of a body of water? And then some cynic 200 years from now would say, oh, well, Washington crossed the Delaware. Because of course you didn’t. It’s mythological. I can see that it’s the same structure as Moses and all these other mythological structures. No, man, that’s how reality works. We remember that event because that event in those series of events is the most conducive to bringing about the universal meaning that’s in that story. It’s like, that’s how we remembered it. Yeah. It doesn’t mean, it’s not because something has a cosmic meaning that it didn’t happen. It’s ridiculous to think that. Well, that doesn’t take away from the possibility that some traditional stories are fictional. That’s what people have to understand as well. I mean, it doesn’t mean that every story is factual either. But what’s problematic is this dichotomy, this impossibility of accepting the coexistence of a fact and a higher meaning, a general universal meaning. That’s what’s problematic. So what’s happening in a lot of cases is a lot of the Christians are defending a materialistic worldview when they do that. I don’t think they realize. But when they get annoyed by a symbolic interpretation of the Bible, they’re essentially defending their enemy. They’re basically, they’re defending a scientific mechanistic worldview because that’s how they think. They might not be aware of it. So a lot of people, a lot of religious people, not just Christians, a lot of religious people are essentially materialists. But they believe in God. They happen to believe in God, but they’re still materialists in every other way, in every other way. And materialism has two sides, and it’s interesting in terms of meaning because what happens is you meet conservative type Christians and they’re literal. They’re real materialists in the sense that they read the Bible and they see it as what’s written there. That’s what happened in the same way that I ate my muffin this morning and I cut my mustache. It’s the same level. Then you meet liberal Christians who are like, oh, what happened to the Bible? None of that happened. It’s all these stories. Yeah, it’s the other side of the coin. And then those liberal types, then they feel like it’s there now that they can interpret it in whatever way they want because it doesn’t really matter anyway. So then they come up with crazy interpretations. Then the conservative Christians, they go crazy because they’re like, yeah, well, they’re right. If we agree that there’s meaning in these, if there’s symbolism in these stories, look at them. We don’t want to be like them. We don’t want to be these crazy,falutin people. And the other people on the top, on the liberal side, they’re looking at the conservatives and they’re thinking, what a bunch of morons. They really think that there was a snake on an apple and then two naked people. What a bunch of idiots. So it’s like there’s this crazy- It’s two sides of the same coin. They’re just two sides of the same coin. It’s a detachment. That’s the idea. Symbolism is the union of fact and meaning. So it’s both. If you lose that union, if you use the possibility of a union like that, then yeah, you either fly up into heaven, you lose your mind, you interpret it however the heck you want and it doesn’t matter. There’s no reason or rhyme to it. It’s just anything goes. Or you just refuse completely to have any kind of meaning and you just stick to the fact. So one of them keeps the fact and the other one keeps the meaning, but it goes a little bit crazy because when you get detached from facts, your ideas, your theories about what things mean can go fly off in any direction, but if you remain attached to a fact, it limits what you can say about it. It limits the meaning that you can give it. One of the theories that I’ve had for the modern age is that it’s been like a de-incarnation. It’s been like taking the idea of the human and divine nature of Christ and ripping them apart and creating these two wild opposites. We often see modernism in terms of materialism and everything, but there’s a whole other occultism and new age and all these kind of spiritist type movements that are the counterweight of the more scientific materialism that’s there. Those two things develop at the same time. René Descartes was developing his mechanical scientific things and then he spent the most of his life searching for the rosy cross, looking for some esoteric, invisible society. Something that’s detached from reality. Basically, that’s not concrete. That’s what’s ironic about all this stuff is the people who are preserving the true spirit of traditional thought are scientists because they care about the union of meaning and fact. They care about the fact as much as they care about the theory. They don’t just want theories. They don’t just want facts. They want true knowledge as joining meaning and fact together. Theory and fact. A universal theory with particular facts. That’s their job. They’re still doing that. They’re preserving that spirit. It’s completely ironic. The scientists are the ones who are the most good at preserving the union that we’re supposed to be preserving as religious people. It’s a little bit ironic. At the same time, it’s kind of their fault that we lost it. At the same time, because they’re materialists. They don’t view the theory as something real. They view it as completely artificial. It could be argued that that’s their problem. Their main problem is they view the facts, the matter, as real, but they don’t view the theory that they’re using to interpret the fact as real. Why is it not real? It’s not material, perhaps. Why is it not real? There you go. Because they’re materialists. If something is not material, they assume that it has no reality whatsoever. It’s a strange way of thinking. They use math. It’s real. It’s a kind of a real. It’s not material. Mathematical structures, patterns, are real. They’re not real in the sense that they’re physical. That’s stupid. They’re real in the sense that they are universal. They’re actually more real than individual facts. A mathematical pattern has more reality, has more universality, has more applications, implications than any fact I could find. Why is it not real? It’s real. It’s more real than real. The hierarchy of value is the same thing. They can’t avoid it. Even though when they’re doing their hardcore science, they try to avoid it, when they’re even justifying why you would study something rather than study something else, they have to put it in a hierarchy of values. There’s no way of avoiding it. You can’t get around it. It’s one of those structures like mathematics. It’s one of those structures that are so real that there’s no way out of it. You can’t get out of it. Even by denying it, you’re probably going to enter into that framework of meaning. One of the things that I think is a big deal is that I’ve had people who have written me who are interested in symbolism. What happens, the problem that happens when people start to discover symbolism is that not always, but often they go a bit insane. They go crazy. When they start seeing connections between things, it’s as if some strange valve has opened up in their mind and it’s like they drink a gallon of wine and it’s like, wow! Everything’s connected. I’ve gotten these long emails of people who just connect things together and it’s just completely crazy. This is one of the reasons why rational people don’t want to have anything to do with symbolism because a lot of people end up making all kinds of weird connections and it’s clearly irrational. It’s based largely on personal experience and that’s what they want to avoid, which I understand. The idea is like, let’s talk about this. What could we say are some of the criteria by which we know that something has meaning, by which we know something is worth attending to and is actually connected to something else? The criteria, let’s say you give an interpretation of a narrative in the Bible, let’s say, or an element in the Bible, in a story. What criteria can we use to determine if this interpretation is just some crazy association or if it’s something that’s valid, if it’s a valid meaning that’s given to this event in the Bible or this part of the story? The way I see it is it’s exactly the same as what scientists use to determine if a scientific knowledge is valid. First of all, you have to look at consistency. If somebody says, I’m going to use the example of the snake again like I did before, if somebody says the snake is a symbol of, I don’t know, what do people usually say when they don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s a symbol of good fortune and fertility, something like that. That’s what people usually say when they don’t understand symbolism. Yeah, well usually when people don’t really understand symbolism, everything is a symbol of fertility for some reason. How do you know if an interpretation like that is valid? You have to look at consistency. If you read the rest of the Bible and then there’s other examples of a snake, and then your interpretation of the snake fits nowhere except that particular first example that you were looking at, then you don’t have it, you’re wrong. Think again. It’s like the same thing as science. If you have a theory about reality and it only applies to a very specific phenomenon, then keep working. You don’t have anything. You’re just describing it. You just made up a theory to describe just that fact. You’re trying to have a universal theory that explains a specific fact. It has to apply to different examples, different phenomena, not just the one. It’s the same thing if you’re interpreting a symbol. You don’t want it to work on just that story. It’s ridiculous. It has to work all the time. If you say the snake is a symbol of fertility, then look at all the other examples of the snakes in the Bible. Does it make sense? The answer is no. It’s not that. That’s one criteria. Another one, which goes with the first one really, is it has to be comprehensive. It has to include a lot of the stories. If you have a specific pattern that you use to interpret a story, that pattern you should be able to use it to interpret a lot of other stories. If you say, for example, one of the most fundamental patterns in ancient cosmology is the tree. The snake, those are usually seen as opposites. If that’s true, then you should find the tree, that pattern. You should be able to find it in a whole lot of other stories. If you think that pattern is fundamental, then fundamental means it explains a whole lot of things. Just like scientific theory, like let’s say the theories in relation to gravity, you should be able to explain a lot of phenomenon with that single theory. If you don’t, you’re missing some point. You’re missing a simpler truth, a more universal truth. That’s the other thing. The other criteria is does it provide insight? If you have an interpretation of a symbol, it provides you with zero insight into the nature of the story, into the facts that follow, and the facts that precede it. It’s worthless. What’s the point? I think you were talking about that at the beginning. You were saying about interpreting things horizontally. Were you talking about that before? We talked about that before our conversation. I can mention that. One of the things that we see with symbolism, one of the problems we see with symbolism is the kind of, I’m going to probably do a video about this, but it’s like the conspiracy version of symbolism, where symbolism is interpreted on the same level. An image doesn’t refer to a higher reality or to a more, let’s say, universal truth. It’s only a code that hides a secret meaning of something someone’s trying to hide from you, like the fact that maybe they’re aliens or there’s this secret society that wants to, for some reason, they want to hide their communication, but then make it available for others. That type of symbolism, who cares about that stuff? It doesn’t help you live your life. The funny thing is that type of symbolism does exist, but it’s absolutely secondary. If you want to understand the Bible, forget about that. It’s not going to help you to understand anything. I’ve seen an example of that. I don’t remember exactly where, but it was somebody who was trying to interpret the story of Elijah, and he was talking about the raven that feeds Elijah. Then the interpretation of the person was, well, the raven actually refers to a secret society that went and fed Elijah. That was the interpretation. I don’t remember where I got that from. That’s a lateral interpretation. In my mind, when I saw that, I was thinking to myself, that gives no understanding of the story whatsoever. It doesn’t give any more understanding of the story than to say that it’s a raven. Not at all. That’s an example of a faulty interpretation. It provides you with no higher understanding of a specific story. The idea, just like a scientific theory, you find a scientific theory. Why is it valuable? Because it allows you to understand the story a whole bunch of things. It’s the same thing with a symbolic interpretation. You have certain patterns that are universal, and if you use these patterns to interpret the story, it will reveal the nature of the story to you. It will make it obvious. It will make it clear, just like a theory reveals the nature of reality when it works, when it’s right. Of course, it has to be correct. If you have a wrong theory, then it doesn’t help you at all. Same thing with an interpretation. If you have a wrong interpretation, it will mislead you. If you’re honest about it, you’ll see that it doesn’t work. If you’re dishonest, you can always fool yourself. Of course, anybody can do that. This is one of the reasons why certain people are against the idea of a symbolic interpretation. They’re worried about this possibility of interpreting things however you want. That problem is an everyday problem. It’s not just a problem of interpreting the Bible. The problem of having a faulty interpretation of reality is a problem that everyone’s faced with. It doesn’t go away when all of a sudden you refuse to do it with a biblical narrative. It’s something we do every single day in everyday life. We interpret reality with a theory. If we’re wrong, we’re screwed. It hurts us. So that problem doesn’t disappear. It’s always there. It’s there when you interpret the Bible too. It’s there when you interpret something that somebody tells you outside or at your job. It’s always there. There’s no way out of that problem. One of the craziest ones that someone wrote me recently about this type of lateral interpretation of symbolism. Every symbol that he could come up with was basically a symbol for mushrooms. Drugs. It was all drugs. How does that help you? Why would you read a story that hides references to drugs in it? The funny part of that is if that person has the right understanding of what intoxication is, then that person would be able to find places in the Bible that actually are about intoxication and understand the deep meaning of intoxication. If that person had the right honest mind frame about understanding a story, then his fetish about intoxication would be answered in the Bible. That’s the funny part. So that’s why intoxication would be answered in the Bible because intoxication is part of the Bible. There’s a story of Noah who drinks wine. It’s not absurd to say, for example, that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a form of intoxication. If he interprets it like that… That’s not what they’re doing. You can say, yes, you’re right. They’re saying it’s a hidden meaning which is to show that ancient people took mushrooms to have spiritual experiences. That’s what the story means. I don’t even know. I’m not even denying that maybe ancient people took mushrooms to have spiritual experiences. Does that really think that that story, that’s the point of that story? Yeah. When it is, it is. I think the Western civilization is just about someone taking mushrooms. Hallucination. My goodness. I don’t think you’re very good at building a civilization when you’re always high on mushrooms. I doubt it. But the funny thing is that symbolism is important in the Bible. It is important. That’s the thing. When you have an honest approach, you will find those places in the Bible. But not just honest, but also a desire to go to more unitive forms of meaning. It’s not all about being intoxicated. Not just about being intoxicated, but about this idea of a veiled illusion to some social practice that they’re not talking about. It doesn’t even show you the meaning of intoxication. It’s just to show you that people used to take mushrooms and now they’re hiding it from you. The church is hiding from you that people used to take mushrooms because they’re evil and they don’t want you to know that that’s a way to control spirituality. They’re hiding the fact that people used to take mushrooms, but it’s still there, lingering in the stories. It’s all about people used to take mushrooms. It’s a good example. It doesn’t even tell you anything about the nature of taking mushrooms. It’s a good example of what you were saying of a horizontal interpretation. You just replace something with something else. Symbolism is just a replacement of one thing by another that means something else. That’s not what symbolism is. It’s the opposite of what symbolism is. The idea of true symbolism is to reveal things, not to hide them. It’s to reveal things that we usually wouldn’t understand easily because they’re too abstract. It’s exactly the same thing as a scientific experiment. You’re performing an experiment. It makes the abstract concrete real. Then you can recognize it. The example I was doing before of dropping the two cannonballs from the tower of Galileo, it’s an event which has cosmic meaning, cosmic implications because it reveals the nature of gravity. The whole point of that is not to hide the nature of gravity. It’s to reveal it in an event. The idea that symbolism is something else, like a cryptolanguage or something like that, a cryptic way of talking with opposites because that’s what it ends up being, is completely false. I think that comes from what I was talking about before, that something happened in the late Middle Ages or during the Renaissance where there was this split of the more literal things and then the higherfalutin type of spiritualism, let’s say occultism and all that stuff. It seemed like that’s part of it. The whole tradition of secret societies in the West, they did have that idea of somehow hiding. Freemasons have that idea of hiding the meaning. I think when they have that idea it’s because they’ve lost the meaning. That’s what I think. I’ve recently read some people talking about the meaning of Freemason stuff and it was supposedly written by a Freemason. I was amazed at how dumb it was, what it was saying. When I looked at their symbolism I thought it made sense. It was expressing universal truth. When I looked at the explanation that the person who wrote the book was giving, who was supposedly a Freemason, in my mind I was saying you lost your symbolism. You lost your own symbolism and now you’re trying to explain it as a cryptic thing. The only reason you’re doing that is because you’ve lost it. You don’t know what it is. You don’t have what it takes to get to understand it. You’re trying to give it some other meaning that has nothing to do with what it is. That’s why I would say it anyway. I had the same experience. I spoke with it two years ago with a 33rd degree Mason and I’ve never met a high ranking Mason before. I was asking a lot of questions and they were telling me about some of the symbolism that they have and I was like, oh, that’s actually pretty interesting. They have this uncut stone and uncut wall and I was like, wow, that’s actually really left in my head. It’s traditional symbolism. I was trying to get him to talk about it and there was nothing beyond it. There was no scent anyways. I think that now that we’ve entered talking about Freemasonry, I think that means it’s time to finish our conversation. I want to just for the people watching, Matthew and I, we tried to say things, to speak in a way that’s understandable as much as possible but we’re so used to discussing symbolism together that it’s possible that maybe sometimes we’re off. I’m asking all of you guys in the comment section to go ahead and ask questions or to tell us if our aim is right, if the level that we’re aiming at in the way we’re describing things, if it’s at the right level. Hopefully Matthew will agree to do this again with me. That would be great. I hope he does. Like I said, we announced this during the interview with Jordan. Matthew is finishing a book now. It’s not totally finished but he’s almost finished a book about symbolism which really explores the structures in a very concise and very powerful way. We haven’t figured out how we’re going to get that out to people if we’re going to have it published by someone, if he’s going to self-publish. Just so you know that that’s on the horizon and that we’re going to keep announcing the steps of that coming towards you. I hope you all enjoyed this video.