https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Vth4A5sPJ5Q
Jacob’s Ladder? Okay. Do you want to delve into that momentarily? Because that’s a very striking image and one that’s rooted in ancient shamanic tradition as well. The notion of a liana between heaven and earth. That Jacob’s vision is definitely that. So that’s another example of a hierarchy. Yeah, so I think it’s another example also of if you look at these stories, these ancient stories with the wrong perspective, they look completely arbitrary and random and as if they were just pure inventions. But if you use just the basic categories of these cosmologies themselves, then they become pretty self-evident. Why is there a ladder between heaven and earth? If you’re thinking materially, why is there a ladder between heaven and earth? It doesn’t make any sense. But if you think in terms of an ancient cosmology where everything is based on the idea of heaven joining earth, then obviously there’s a ladder between heaven and earth. Well, and a relationship between the abstract and the concrete and a relationship between the infinite and the finite and the relationship between the psychological and the material. And that has to be a structure with some intermediary levels. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so you can always look at things with different lenses and if you look at the stories in the Bible with the lens of the basic patterns of heaven and earth and things like that, then a lot of the questions that seem unsolvable, they become not only unsolvable but self-evident. So like why is there a tree in the Garden of Eden? Self-evident. Why is there a ladder in Jacob’s dream? Self-evident. It’s always just the connectors of heaven and earth. Boom. Problem solved. You know what I mean? It all depends on how you look at it. Sometimes you look at something in one way, it seems very complicated. You look at it in another and it’s like, okay. Right. Well, and you described earlier and I think this is worth revisiting. I mean, we’re going to revisit the Sam Harris or even the postmodern critique. And so, because it’s quite interesting that Sam and the postmodernists do the same thing, which is how do you know you’re not just imposing your arbitrary interpretation on a set of stories? And then how do you know that your arbitrary interpretation just doesn’t serve your need and motive for the expression of power? And those are good questions. But you can’t rush right to the answer that all interpretation is nothing but the self-serving imposition of power and it’s all arbitrary except at the behest of your whim. Jesus, that’s definitely throwing out the baby with the bathwater and it’s a very simplistic interpretation. You could say the same about science too. I mean, anyone who claims to have a theory about reality, you could say, how do you know it’s not just in your head? I mean, you could say that about anything. The answer is the same. How do you know? You can prove it in your experiment and you prove that your ideas and your theories explain the phenomenon. It’s the same thing in a story. You say this is all about a certain pattern, that’s like your theory. Well, I can prove it to you. I’ll read the story and I’ll show you that it’s always an expression of this pattern. So you prove it in exactly the same way as science proves its theories. You can also prove it the same way that Kierkegaard and the existentialists insisted. And I would say this is basically an act of faith, which is you can take the pattern, you can act it out in the world. You can use it to govern your perceptions and to rule your actions. And then you can see what happens in your life. And I think a lot of the injunction in the Bible in relationship to faith isn’t the command to accept a certain description of reality at the propositional level, but to act in accordance with this divine cosmology. And then to see the manifestation of that, that’s the fruits, right, by which the tree is known, to see the manifestation of that decision to act and perceive in that manner in the world. And that is a fundamental test. And I do think that’s something that has to be done at the level of individual, the individual. And that’s definitely something that Kierkegaard stressed immensely and that people like Solzhenitsyn and Jung and Dostoevsky for that matter also insisted upon. Not that there’s not a communal element, right, because we need to strive to do that together to manifest our individual responsibility. But fundamentally, the test is pragmatic and almost like an engineering test, which is take the story, act it out, and stress test it. See if it helps you overcome the insuperable obstacle and see if it protects you from nihilism and despair and see if it orients you properly in relationship to yourself and other people. See what it does with your relationship with women and with children and with your parents. And you can test the story that way. And as far as I can tell, the Bible is the compilation of stories that have been tested in that way. Yes, exactly. Yes. And you can test it within the text to know if your interpretation of the text makes sense within the text. And like you said, that’s even a higher level, I would say. You could test it with reality and then it’s another story. And if you start to, if you know the Bible very well and you understand the stories, you might start to discover that the patterns that are described in the Bible are also happening to you all the time, whether you want it or not, by the way. Yes, well, this is something Jung pointed out. He said, look, whether you know it or not, you’re in the grips of a myth. And he meant a story. And you better figure out what the myth is because it might not have the ending you want. And I read that and I was quite convinced by that because I’d started to understand that was years ago, decades ago. I’d started to understand that the reason that we’re attracted to stories is because a story is a description of the pattern through which we view the world and the pattern that we enact in the world. And we value stories because we want interpretive patterns to make sense out of the complexity of things. And then the question is, well, what story are you acting out? And the premature neo-Marxist rejoinder to that is, well, we’re all acting out a story of power and domination. And I think that’s preposterous. We act out a story of power and domination when the proper story is corrupted and demented. So if your relationship with your wife is governed by power and authority, then you have a pretty appalling marriage. And if all you do is dominate and tyrannize your children, well, good luck with that. And if you bring the same attitude towards your friendships and your business relationships, you’re not going to have any friends. You might have cronies or bully henchmen, and you’re certainly not going to be successful in any voluntary business arrangement. So there’s a different ethic that governs our perception and our actions. And it is oriented towards this higher spiritual realm that, well, that you laid out conceptually and that’s detailed out as a characterization of the spirit that we should mimic in the biblical corpus. I think that’s all become quite clear on the cutting edge of cognitive science, let’s say. Yeah, you can’t… Part of the narratives of the Bible is to move from a state of competition where it’s just raw competition. I think kind of what you were describing here with just imposition of power. So there’s the realm of competition, and that’s symbolized by a cycle. And then it might look like a fun thing to be in the realm of competition, but it’s not because you always end up… Sometimes you’re on top, sometimes you’re at the bottom, and it’s a painful experience, right? So what you want is to have a solution to that competition at one point. So a lot of the stories in the Bible of competing brothers are about exactly that. So Jacob and Esau… Right, it’s zero-sum competition because you do have a competitive relationship in some sense between Adam and Eve because there’s an adversarial relationship there, though, It’s bound in a higher order. It’s not competition over a finite set of limited resources.