https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0xhkNPGs-w8
I found this part of your discussion particularly illuminating because I had no idea what the cherubs represented. And as far as I can tell, there’s something like the monstrosities that exist on the fringes of cognitive and perceptual categories. And they’re part of the support mechanism for the divine unity that any given category represents. And so I’m going to read this and I’ll read a bit of your commentary and then maybe you can comment on it. As I was, this is Ezekiel, as I was among the captives by the river Chabar, or Chebor, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. A stormy wind came from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing up. From its center came the image of four living beings that looked like the image of a human. Each cherubim had four faces, a human, a lion on the right, a bull on the left, and an eagle Over the heads of the living beings was the image of an expanse and it was on the throne. And on it was the image of a throne. And on the image of the throne was an image that looked like a human. Ezekiel’s vision is the perfect example of a narrative that seems cryptic from the wrong perspective. Conversely, in proper context, cosmic categories like thrones, cherubs, and wheels are just as fundamental as space, energy, and time are to materialism. The tetramorphic cherub described in this vision is an obvious example of the symbolic template that we just described. At the top of the structure, the eagle flying in the air and above everything and capable of great vision, by the way, the eagle represents a spiritual or heavenly principle, which is too abstract to be grasped without tangible expressions. At the lower end, the lion-bull duality represents the corporeal or earthly basis that provides concrete support for that principle. At the center, the human is the knower that unites spiritual and corporeal realities. Even though these living beings might seem random at first glance, they perfectly describe the inner structures of this cosmology. As a prophet, Ezekiel was using this symbolic language to describe the very process of obtaining divine knowledge. There’s a tendency when we want to interpret symbolism to focus on the weird stuff, right? Because when you see something in a story, it seems weird, it seems unusual. We have a tendency to want to interpret it symbolically because we don’t want to imagine some kind of weird chariot with animals in it. We have a tendency to immediately say, okay, this is symbolic of something, right? It’s like a dream. Yeah, it’s like he’s seeing the categories of metaphysics directly. That’s what it’s all about, that vision. He’s describing the process of the visions of a prophet. He’s not even describing his vision. He’s describing the process of how he got to the vision, which is I don’t think there’s any other place in the Bible where we see something like that. Maybe in Elisha, maybe, he describes the process through which he gets the vision a little bit, I think, if I remember correctly. But it’s entirely different to describe a vision and to describe the process that brought you to the vision. And the chariot is describing the very process of a prophet. So we’ve got a special glimpse into his world there, which I think is a very interesting thing. So we get a case there with this vision that the visionary is apprehending the structure of the structure through which structure is viewed. Yes, exactly. That’s a vision of the heavenly structure in some real sense. And so that made me think, tell me what you think about this. When I read this section on cherubs, I remembered that when God chases Adam and Eve out of paradise, He puts cherubim to guard the gates of paradise and they hold flaming swords. And that’s always been a great mystery to me, both the cherubim and the flaming swords. And so then I was thinking about that and I thought, well, a sword is a tool of judgment and carving. You carve up things with a sword and you dispense with your enemies with a sword. And Christ uses a sword in Revelation to separate the wheat from the chaff. And a flaming sword is even more of a sword than just a sword because it’s a red hot sword. And so not only is it going to cut and discriminate and differentiate, but it’s going to do so in a manner that burns like the burning bush. And then I was thinking, well, if you want to reenter paradise, you have to subject yourself to this flaming sword of judgment in the real sense because you have to carve away from yourself everything that isn’t fit to be in paradise. And that would be almost everything. That would be everything that wasn’t perfect enough to be paradisal. And given how imperfect you are, the probability that you would experience whoever was wielding that sword as a monstrous cherubim with a sword of flames strikes me as extremely, the probability that that’s how you’d experience it strikes me as extremely high, especially And that would be in proportion to some degree to the magnitude of your sinful nature. And so, and I think that’s associated with the notion of the passion in the Christian story that Christ has to voluntarily accept not only death, but hell itself in order to reconfigure and also associated with the symbolism in Revelation that an apocalyptic judgment has to precede something like the reestablishment of a paradisal state. And so that all came out for me out of your description of the cherubim, which I thought was extremely helpful, by the way, the notion that these monstrosities on the fringes support the conceptual structure that’s united by the overarching ego vision with the human between the overarching vision and the multiplicity of earthly categories. Yeah, yeah, the cherubim and the flaming sword, I have to admit, it’s also been something that’s I’ve found intriguing for a very long time. And I think I have a good grasp on it now, more than when I wrote my book, actually, because it’s directly related to the story of Adam and Eve again. If you have Adam naming the animals and then there’s a fall, it means he lost his ability to name the animals so that there’s a confusion that enters into it. And the cherub, that’s what the cherub is. It’s a confusion of species. It’s an animal that has a confusion of different species within it. Confusion of identity. Yes. So it represents Adam’s inability now to name all the species correctly and separately. So he fell into confusion. So the cherubim is that confusion. It’s a beast, a hybrid, right? A hybrid of species. So it represents his inability to name the animals correctly. And then, like you said, the sword is the principle that would separate them back again. It’s the logos, it’s logic, it’s light. That would separate the cherub again into separate species. And like you suggested, the bigger your sin, the bigger the sword you need and the bigger the monster you have to face. So the bigger the confusion. Right. Well, and I can’t help but see, you know, when all this confusion about naming of human identity came about in the last 10 years, all this confusion with regard to pronouns and subjectively defined identity, I couldn’t help but think about that as, well, I believed at the time when the government mandated a certain type of pronoun use that that was a form of extreme conceptual, couldn’t be a more extreme form of conceptual confusion that now our very agreement about what constituted the most fundamental categories of reality, because I think you can make a real case that male and female are the most fundamental categories of reality. You know, and I think you can make that case biologically because sex has been around for a very, very, very, very long time, for hundreds of millions of years. And the proper perception of sexual dichotomy is absolutely crucial to survival itself and reproduction, obviously, and mating, but also a precondition for the stability of society as such. And the insistence that to bring in the marginalized, we have to demolish the entire structure of categorization itself seems to me tantamount to this sin that you described that Eve would produce if she insisted too assiduously that everything be integrated at once. Yes, exactly what you’re talking about, the idea that I give you my pronouns. It’s just an example of what I was saying before that Eve mediates with nature and then if Adam names something, it’s possible that there’s a reaction and there’s a complaint. Like, no, you don’t name me, I name myself, basically. That’s what it represents. It represents the same thing as I was describing earlier. So anything that’s named can decide at one point to answer back and say, no, you don’t tell me what I am. You don’t tell me what my name is. I’m the one who decides my name. And by the way, the flaming sword in the text is the flaming sword that turns on itself. That’s also part of it. It’s very interesting. If you translate it literally, that’s what it says. A flaming sword that turns on itself. Right. So that’s interesting, you know, because I would say to some degree, the harshest judgments that we are made subject to do come from within. And that a lot of totalitarian presumption is the attempt to escape the flaming sword of personal conscience by insisting that the current theory of categorization is sufficient and all that there should be. And that dichotomy between fundamentalism and doubt, I think, is an expression of that conflict. So you think that sword that turns on itself, is that part of an interior psychological process? It represents sort of, yes, it’s all part of a psychological process for sure. Everything in the Bible has an inner meaning. But the sword that turns on itself is like what I was saying before, the role of Eve is to show a mirror to Adam, and then he sees himself. But when there’s a conflict between the two, when they’re enemies, this is when everything’s working out, right, and they love each other. But when there’s a conflict, then Eve shows the mirror and it can’t be solved, and then he turns, the sword is the logo’s trying to answer, and he can’t solve the puzzle. So he turns on himself.