https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=G4pRCXYteSY
I think if you could see God clearly, you wouldn’t need faith. Right? So it’s a precursor in a lot of ways to freedom. If you could see God, it would be so undeniable. Like first you die, but then additionally, everything that he would say would have to be absolute. And that’s a kind of authoritarianism. And so it’s like the faith of the belief is what allows the freedom to keep falling and drinking wine and picnicking and making golden calves. And every time he’s out of sight, there’s a fall and then there’s a movement back again. So you’re suggesting if there wasn’t a veil, there’d be… Everything would be so understandable to us that we could just follow it like automatons. Right. Then you’re back to the pharaoh in a way. I think it’s important also to keep in mind here that the distinction between, even though they’re very closely related, revelation and ritual. And you can have… We all know this in our lives. You can have an epiphany. Oh, you know, I’m going to do this or, oh, I feel I’m called to be, live this kind of life. But that’s just one moment. Right. And the question of mediation, of how the highest ends up in the lowest has to do with ritual. It has to do with the rhythms of life we adopt in relation to or in order to orient ourselves in relation to those high things. To bring in Aristotle, who’s been taking a bit of a hard time in this conversation. Aristotle, in the ethics he feels, he brilliantly says how how the virtues are established by repetition. Right. You become strong by lifting heavy things. Right. You become courageous by facing difficulty. And if you want to live in relation to the highest, you need every day to break that down into the, you might say, the habits of holiness or the habits of orientation. You can’t spend your days as I had been tempted to do, you know, distracted on the internet or scrolling this or being busy from one thing to the next and then think, you know, what happened to the highest? You’ve got to start very intentionally and build habits into your life. Or you’ll always be at the situation of, you know, on again, off again. Oh, there’s a revelation. It’s got to be daily. And again, I think that you see that again, you’re about to see that in the narrative when you talk about the big question, which is you guys just received five minutes ago a revelation on this mountain from Moses and God, and you are about to sin in the most egregious way possible within five minutes of seeing that. And the idea in Judaism has always been that the weakest form of faith is based on seeing miracles. And when you see a miracle, it’s easy to rationalize that away. And it’s easy to think of any memory in your life. And you say, can you recreate the feeling that you had at that moment in your life? And the answer is no. I mean, it’s almost impossible to recreate a moment that happened when you fell in love with your wife for the first time. Can you recreate like right now the feeling that you had just sitting here? And the answer is no, you can’t you can’t do that on command, right? It feels a certain way in the moment. And it doesn’t feel that way. Twenty years later, how it was exactly in that moment, it feels something different. It’s the rituals of everyday life that make you fall in love with your wife every single day and continue that love going. And the same thing is true of God. It’s not the revelation on Sinai that makes you think, OK, well, this is what God is. It’s the living with God every day with him in your midst that allows true romance to actually to actually bloom. One of the things you do with people in psychotherapy as a behaviorist is you you find those things they’re afraid of or disgusted by and are avoiding. And then you help them implement a practice of voluntary confrontation, voluntary incremental confrontation. And the practice transforms them. It makes them into someone who’s no longer intimidated and retreating in the face of either disgust or paralyzed in the face of disgust or fear. And it is that practice. And I think we’ve lost that in our modern culture. Like people say, well, I wish I was more courageous or I wish I was more trusting or I may they don’t say this very often, but maybe they wish they were more humble, less prideful. And it’s as if we think of that as that’s something that’s homogenous, that could just descend on you en masse instead of something that you practice. Like you practice trust with people. If you’re wise, you practice courageous trust and humility is a practice. You have to you have to get better and better at it if you can. It’s not like that’s an easy thing to do, but you don’t get better at it without practicing it in a ritualistic manner. And that’s what prayer is, is fundamentally asking what is highest to help you on that journey. And it involves fundamentally the humility to station yourself in relation to that which you need and asking it for its help day by day, his help, however you want to configure that. Ours is a culture without prayer. I remember as a student, a lecturer who was giving a lecture on the Stoics, and he said, the great difference between you and your ancestors, whether they were pagans or Christians, is they prayed. And and he meant these rituals of prayer, prayers at mealtimes, prayers, punctuating life. I mean, I think that is a very interesting observation about the modern world and the And why it might have lost transcendence. Yes, right. Because it’s not seeking for it. Well, I think it’s lost it because we’ve got a secularized worldview. You know, we live, as Peter Berger says, in a world without windows. So traditionally, the unseen was not unreal. But in the modern world, the unseen is unreal. And the real world is politics, technology and so on. It’s funny, people still believe in a secular manner that still has an implicit transcendence, that there’s something they can communicate with that will guide them because people often in trouble will, let’s say, they’ll hope they do the right thing. But you think about what that means is that it means they know they’re not doing the right thing at the moment, and then they’re opening themselves up to the possibility that there is a right thing and that there’s a source of information that would reveal the right thing. And then they generally it’s easy for them to attribute the discovery of the right thing then to themselves. They thought it up. But they act as if they’re talking with something, speaking with something that’s transcendent, that has the capacity to determine what constitutes what’s right. And so I was thinking to Jonathan here about the Jesus prayer. So maybe if you would just recite that for a second, that there’s something I can say about it. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. OK, so you say, well, why would people repeat that to themselves over and over? And I would say, well, people maybe people won’t know that it’s a prayer that’s repeated mentally. And sometimes monks will actually do it all the time, even in their sleep. And then there’s a breathing which comes with that breathing and a posture and attending to the heartbeat, which would create this kind of rhythm that fills the person’s life with this prayer. OK, so I think people don’t pray in part because they don’t know how or what it means. But this prayer, for example, as far as I can tell, means something like the probability that I’m taking aim properly, optimally, and hitting the target constantly is very, very low. And to sin means to miss the mark. And so knowing that, I want to keep in mind that that’s the case because the degree I keep in mind that that’s the case is going to be precisely proportionate to the degree that I might open myself up to learn. So one thing you want to do, perhaps, is remind yourself constantly that one thing that could get in the way of your continued adaptation would be your unrecognized pride. And so that injunction there, that plea to admit to your sins, I don’t see how that’s any different than opening yourself up to the revelation of something that’s transcendent because you’re only deeming yourself unworthy in relationship to at least an implicit ideal because otherwise, what are you unworthy in relationship to? And if there’s nothing worthy beyond that that could correct you, then there’s no consideration of what constitutes unworthy at all. And then you might also ask, well, if you’re not unworthy, then why the hell are you suffering so stupidly?