https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4uYVVPs-ALQ
Faith is a presupposition for living in the truth. And then you might ask yourself another question, which is, well, why bother living in the truth? Well, one answer would be so that reality doesn’t rise up and smite you repeatedly, which it will if you’re deceptive. So that’s one answer. But here’s another answer, and this is a better answer. People ask themselves all the time, what’s the purpose of life? And there’s a variety of answers to that. There’s no purpose. We’re just atoms on a dust moat at the edge of a rather reprehensible corner of the cosmos. And we exist for a moment and we’re out. And that’s that. Or we’re so lost in a plethora of subordinate meanings that we’re confused and aimless. Or we want to be hedonistically happy. And I would say that’s really the offer that’s on the table in our culture most of the time. It’s like, well, I just want to be happy. And people will say that to you. It’s a slogan. It’s the most common slogan of our time, I would say. And it’s such a preposterous slogan. It’s like, what do you mean, just? You just want to be happy. That’s all. That’s all you want. That absolute impossibility. You want bliss unending no matter what you do. And that’s all you want. It’s not exactly a small ask, let’s say. Because it’s the same thing as asking to dwell permanently in paradise. It’s something like that. So it’s not that likely. And then it also isn’t true. That isn’t what you want. If you do careful analysis of what people mean when they say they just want to be happy, what they mean is they don’t want to suffer stupidly. They’re much more concerned, we’re much more concerned with not experiencing an excess of negative emotion than we are with experiencing a surfeit of positive pleasure. So first of all, we don’t mean we just want to be happy. We mean, please don’t make us too miserable. And fair enough, that’s reasonable. But then even on the happiness front, even on the absence of misery front, that’s not true. One of the things Dostoevsky pointed out in Notes from Underground, which is so bloody brilliant, he was criticizing the idea of materialist utopia. He said something like, well, imagine we made our materialist utopian dreams come true and everybody had enough to eat all the cakes they wanted and enough to drink and nothing to do, he said, but busy themselves with the continuation of the species. And we were so pleased that we emitted nothing but bubbles of bliss. He said human beings were so damn ungrateful that the first thing we do is take a stick and smash up all that comfortable prosperity just so that something unexpected and provocative could happen. And that’s very smart. That’s hearkening in some sense back to the story of the Garden of Eden and the proclivity of human beings to eat the forbidden fruit. It’s like it isn’t obvious at all that we want happiness. It isn’t even obvious that we want absence of misery. What’s really obvious is that we want an adventure. We want an adventure that’s so compelling that it makes the misery of life not just justifiable, but worthwhile. You want to look back on your life, you know. You want to look back in your life and you know this to be true. You want to be able to say to yourself, even considering a month or a week or a series of days, you want to be able to say that was really difficult, but you know what? It was worth it. And I think that’s what you want from your life. It’s something like, you know what? That was difficult, but it was worth it. And that meant that the adventure was so great that it justified the difficulties. And so then the question is, and here’s the question, where do you find the great adventure of your life? Well, how about in truth? Well, why? Because you don’t know what’s going to happen if you tell the truth. It’s a mystery. It’s going to lay itself out for you. And so that’s an adventure because you don’t, you literally do not know what’s going to happen. You have to let go of knowing what’s going to happen. And so then you have that adventure. And then what is also the case is that it’s you that’s having the adventure, because if what you’re doing is living in truth, that’s you. That truth is you. And so that means that whatever happens when you tell the truth is your adventure. And then you think, well, I’m using deception. It’s like, well, maybe you are, but maybe deception is using you. And then maybe it’s the spirit of deception that’s having the adventure of your life. And then you might ask yourself, well, why are you so miserable and unhappy? And the answer would be, well, the spirit of deception is having the adventure of your life. You’re not even there because if you’re not living in truth, you’re not there. Obviously, what’s there is the spirit of deception. And you might think that’s your deception. But I would be very careful about thinking that because there have been centuries of meditation on the nature of the spirit of deception. And the answer isn’t that the spirit of deception is you. The answer is that the spirit of deception is something that possesses you and convinces it convinces you that it’s you. And that’s not something you want to fall into the clutches of. So. So now you have tell me the question again. I’m certain you answered it. This was about. Teenagers. Oh, yes, yes. Well. Oh, yes, yes. Well. Back to the teenagers. Do you not want to go to college or are you just lying about being lazy? So that’s a question and we can ask ourselves that question. And as I said, on the teenage front. Craft a vision, you know, craft a compelling vision. That’s really what we are as human beings is we’re we’re visionaries. That’s how we confront the horizon of the future. We meet the horizon of the future by crafting a compelling vision. And your vision might not involve college education, but. It should be a vision that makes you think if I could make that come true. It would justify the trouble that it would take to manage it. And I think that’s the right attitude to take towards your life. And, you know, we’re all going to have our crosses to bear in the most fundamental manner. We all have to deal with the catastrophe of mortality. And I think we all have to deal with the reality of hell. And you can think about that religiously or not. You can. Political hell will do for hell as far as I’m concerned. We certainly saw no shortage of evidence for that in the 20th century. And we all have to contend with that, right? The reality of mortality and the reality of hell. And then we all have to contend with the fact that we have to. We have to develop a vision for our life that is so compelling that it justifies those bitter realities. And that’s really the nature of the religious enterprise. And that’s something you can embark on and should embark on young. If you’re trying to figure out who you are, it’s. Figure out who you need to be in order to justify the catastrophe of your life. And then you think, well, that was difficult, man, that’s for sure. But it was worth it. So. Thank you very much. It was very good of all you to come tonight. Appreciate your time and attention. Thank you, Tim. You’re welcome. Lovely to be here. Thank you. Thank you all. Yeah. Good night.