https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=v0s5klPtQXk
It’s not easy to understand that other people are genuinely different from you and how they might be different and maybe even more Difficult is to understand that the differences although frustrating are also necessary It isn’t obvious to me that anyone wants to leave it live a meaningless existence I Don’t think you can live a meaningless existence without becoming corrupted because the pain of existence will corrupt you without a saving meaning and It also seems to me that you can sell the story that meaning is to be found in responsibility When I’ve tried to sell that story to myself I seem to buy it and When I’ve tried to communicate it with other people it renders them silent large crowds of people silent and that’s strange because I’m not sure why that is It’s perhaps because the connection between responsibility and meaning had never been made for in in that explicitly somehow Because meaning gets Contaminated with happiness or something like that, but it’s to be found in responsibility And then you could say well there isn’t any any responsibility That’s more compelling than trying to aid things in the manifestation of their divine form That should be an adventure that could be sold and I don’t know why the church can’t do it. I don’t understand that and Because it seems to me that that’s something that I’ve done at least in part and that accounts for The strange popularity of the biblical lectures in particular. Yeah, and But I’ve also and I do believe that I do believe that that The right striving is to attempt with all your heart to Encourage things to develop along that towards that divine goal Like what else would you possibly do once you think that through it’s like You’re always aiming at something that’s better or you wouldn’t be aiming You’re always moving towards something that’s better or you wouldn’t be moving. So then why wouldn’t you move towards the greatest good? Yeah, well, it’s because it’s terrifying I suppose in part but then as you know, I’ve tried to put that into practice in my life and It’s tearing me into pieces Yeah, I asked you to define love and I’m going to define it on my terms now And that is the best in me serving the best in you and I think that’s the deepest pleasure That’s the deepest and most lasting pleasure and it is the most fundamental Fundamental motivation. It’s the inexhaustible source because if I can do that whenever I do that I feel that I’m being properly Well, there’s nothing better than that and you can extend that to you can extend that to to to to the world to Situations places. Well, I think that’s what you’re supposed to do by accepting the proposition that God is love I mean it’s God is love and God is logos. Those are those are both there so then the question to some degree is the rank order of the two and I would say God is truth within love and That’s the animating spirit of mankind and that’s a way different claim than the one the atheists are going after by the way Yeah, think about it everyone Truth is truth in the service of love not the best animating spirit of mankind When it isn’t pursuing an aberration we can all ask yourself that question. I think that’s a good question to ask Thank you. I mean I think it it re I Think it reorients us to the we can put that on a t-shirt is is truth in the service of love a good question I guess I I see them as more I See them as more Interpenetrating I want to make a stronger relationship between them. They’re just a relationship of service. I mean this is how about her man Yeah that that This way I like the term realization that love is a way of Affording realization and it and the deepest knowing yes of reality is in realization That’s what I if I had to okay, so well, so it seems to me Okay, so I’ll make I’ll make an appendage to my claim, right? The reality that is most justifiable is brought about by the action of truth in the service of love Yeah, but I guess what I’m saying is I see truth. I Think you’re using it and I’ve heard you use true as something beyond a Correspondence between the semantic content of a proposition reality. I’ve heard you talk about yes, right, right And we even use that when we when we use the phrase yes It seems to incorporate some of those other dimensions that exactly talking about okay. Well great man So fill me in well, that’s what I’m trying to get at I’m trying to get at that power is a way of you know, when when your shot is true Your skill has been effective and you’re gonna hit the mark, right? But but but presence is also a way in which things are are true to form, right? And then care of it but the participatory knowing is when we’re like the deepest sense of true Which is you know related to trust and and being betrothed to the world in an important way So if you will allow me to expand what you mean by true to cover all of those dimensions Betrothed to the world in that you extend the same courtesy to the world that you described extending to your partner exactly I think the answer to nihilism isn’t some Propositional answer this is what I get from this attention Yeah, right. It’s to relearn and I mean this deeply in the Buddhist sense of Sati to remember What it is to fall in love with reality to fall in love with being and if that’s what you’re saying is the thing You think that what Sam Harris is striving for in his spirituality? Well, it’s not it’s not a throwaway answer it’s like what’s he up to exactly? I mean, I was on a he’s he’s he isn’t he on a Sophia Finally a Sophia adventure I think Everybody is how can I put this everybody lives from the the non propositional kinds of knowing emphasized by Plato and that’s what all of the scholastic research is pointing to now that Socrates was trying to point people to the non propositional knowing the procedural the Perspectival the participatory I think we all have to live from that given a lot of things I’ve said a lot of things we’ve said well you should maybe you could you could expound on those a bit more for us and clarify a bit more and and So you said the answer to nihilism That isn’t that isn’t exactly a comment on my comment that the culture war is about a claim That the drive to power is at the core of Western being I think that’s an equally nihilistic claim That’s that’s my point the claim Claim is nihilistic or my claim about that is nihilistic That power is a fundamental reality is an attempt to assuage the wounding of nihilism But it is fundamentally Mistaken in its endeavor. It will it is it is it is constituted the wrong way It’s like framing a problem the wrong way So that yeah, you know You not get the insight needed to get to the solution of the problem I so I think of it as a fundamental miss framing. That’s what I’m trying to say Okay, that’s why I’m not I’m that’s why I’m hesitant to say either yes or no to it because I get it Yeah Well, I believe that I believe that it is miss frame because I don’t think it would be taking us in such a pathological Direction the whole argument if it wasn’t miss frame. I’ve been thinking psychologically again about Christianity and I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought But that predated But it looked to me like and some of those were derived from Mesopotamia and some of them were derived from Greece and some Of them were derived from Judaism and other sources But they all seem to me to be Part of the conversation that human beings have been having amongst themselves for thousands of years about what the nature of the ideal human being is and No, I see these cathedrals these works of art in architecture that took a tremendous amount of labor Produce a dome like structure that represents the sky and you see Christ as logos spread out on the sky as a transcendent force and you ask yourself for what exactly is that a Signifying and the answer is at least the proposition of a kind of ideal that’s associated with let’s say Universal love and truth in speech. That’s the logos is summed up in two phrases and If there’s no Metaphysical reality there at all. There’s still this Imaginative enterprise that characterizes the entire human What imaginative effort cultural effort to posit a transcendent ideal that we would live in relationship to and I just don’t see that case being made very strongly and I can’t really understand why because isn’t it rather obvious that at least Part of what Christianity has been is the attempt by thousands of people over thousands of years to specify the nature of an ideal Certainly I would say so and I would say that the fact that these principles actually work is proof of their Of The Proof of there being true accounts of what the nature of the real is Well, let’s let’s let’s approach this from a couple of different angles Jordan You know, the first is what are the things that I profoundly believe is that you know, these young people seeking deeper answers and you know to However that much they may be flailing about you know, it’s not their fault That many perhaps most of the institutions they will encounter Will betray that which is deepest in them will will will will denigrate will tell them No, none of this thing that none of these things that you’re seeking are really real. I mean, I think you know, I’ve been talking Thinking a lot over the years about architecture and what is going on in brutalist architecture And and it really does seem to me that in brutalist architect mean to live in relation to brutalist architecture It is as if you had a parent that said, you know, you’re nothing You’re nothing you’ll never amount to any of course There are terrible people terrible to say people actually there are people in these situations who live with with such dysfunctional Lack of love and antagonism. This is the way that the home life that they that some people Terribly have but I’m using this as an example Because I think what brutalist architecture does is it declares to the whole world and to you that you are there is no truth There is no beauty. You are nothing except it. It’s just a concrete Annihilating force and and and and and you see this culture of repudiation. I mean here in Not here. You’re in Canada. I’m in the States in Savannah now, but you know the Chateau Laurier I think I misspoke recently called it the the Frontenac which is in Quebec but in Ottawa, you know the Chateau Laurier There’s been a desire to expand this sort of beautiful sort of neo-gothic building And it went through six rounds of approval to finally be to make a set of plans that would meet the local architectural Or review board whatever it was and I thought well it can’t be that bad, you know It’s gone through that and I mean this structure is abhorrent it looks like a cross between a Verizon server farm and an American penitentiary I mean it is just it is a declaration that there that there is no higher order You know in Edinburgh, they’re tearing all those out a there is Edinburgh is an unbelievable beautifully beautiful city that the whole central Mile of it square mile essentially is a Unesco World Heritage Site and it’s marred by random placements of 1970s brutalist architecture and that they’re just horrible It’s complete lack of regard for the architectural context and they’re all being torn out and replaced. Thank God So well this architectural idea so back to the Cathedral, you know, what’s really interesting about a Cathedral with let’s say Christ as Pentecrator on the ceiling is spread spread against the ceiling is that it’s not the state That’s portrayed up there, right? It’s not a it’s not a map of the country. It’s not even a map of the world It’s not a geographical locale or a political institution. It’s the transcendent individual and You know, it’s just not obvious to me It’s it seems obvious to me that that’s correct That and that if it isn’t the transcendent individual then it becomes the state and as soon as it the transcendent becomes the state then we have a catastrophe and I don’t see any difference between the insistence that our identity is predicated on our group membership I don’t see any real difference between that and the insistence that we’re just handmaidens of the state It’s a totalitarian insistence and I think part of that too is maybe you know I learned from Jung that as soon as you posit an ideal you also specify a judge and The more the higher the ideal the more severe the judgment Because of your distance from the ideal and so part of what we’re seeing too might be a rebellion against the awful requirements of that ideal But that doesn’t justify that doesn’t justify the rebellion Because if it’s a really the ideal then if you don’t act it out it you you fail to act it out at your peril and then we need to have a serious conversation about the metaphysical about the About the practical implications of the idea of this ideal I mean if if we’ve had this conversation about the transcendent individual as the ideal against which we should all be judged and and to Which we should struck that we should strive to emulate Is there is there any relationship between that ideal and the structure of reality itself because that’s the that’s the Hundred dollar question so to speak You know we have a human ideal and you could say merely Psychologically maybe even merely biologically that that’s something we originated That’s that’s part of our biological nature that’s expressed in this ideal and it’s nothing more than that But you could also say well perhaps it is something more than that perhaps it’s reflective of the structure of being itself I mean it depends on our position in the cosmos. You know we are self-conscious We are that which reflects being itself or perhaps even makes it possible It’s not that obvious what our role is it might not be so trivial despite our mortality Well, I would Say that not only it is as you say but we can know it to be as you say I mean, this is what the whole history in some sense of Literature and philosophy and theology is about is a is a and I want to insist on this. It is a rational Grappling with these questions realities and indeed truths I Want to come back to something in a minute, but just on this topic You know one way into this is to reflect on the the fact that that reality is not zero sum That of course, we know this economically you were talking Jordan a minute ago about you know free You know the the voluntary exchange of Regulated that is to say a contractually governed marketplace Place That that in this exchange, you know, it’s not in is zero sum. We all end up over time better But you also see this naturally in the the evolution of the diversity of species of languages of cultures you’ve written beautifully about play as orienting the child in relation to a Deepening reciprocity with others. We know this in terms of knowledge I mean, you know, how can it be that in a conversation? I can be wrong and be shown to be wrong and that be a net gain for me. I mean, you know, I the whole The whole point of free dialogue is that we can learn from we can learn in our not knowing That the conversation is not zero sum that even in the in our in our beach We know this in terms of forgiveness that even our betrayals of beautiful things can become deepening engagements with what we have betrayed if we have the humility to see it and So then you know, I think you know that leads one to You know what? Geez, you can go back and go at the level of subatomic particles in physics I had a pleasure of talking with Freeman Dyson before he died and you know Dyson will say very clearly that against the Determinus, you know some of the rational optimists are pretty religiously determinist in their in their worldview you know and they want to marshal modern science as as as Saying that their determinism is what science teaches but that you know Dyson who was a subatomic physicist at the highest level you know Expressly said the opposite. He said that the electron That you you the essentially he says that the electron is free that consciousness is not an Hypophenomenon that at the very most detailed level of subatomic particles things are not Determinist and the reason I want to go all the way down to that level is because you can go down to the lowest level level resolution then you can back up to that to the higher level and see that There is a non Zero-sum nature to what is real and then you have to ask yourself is it good to live in relation to To What is true or should I live in a delusion? And we say well, it’s better to live in relation to what’s true than to live in relation to a delusion and and and And then you say well, what would it mean then for me? to Live in relation to this this positive sum this essential reciprocity Which I think is really what the Christian view of the Trinity is about this essential Reciprocity, which is the bedrock of all reality What would it mean to live in relations that what would it mean to remember that and you know One can approach that in any number of different ways, but certainly that is what what prayer is That is what all spiritual exercises are. That’s what perhaps walking in nature can be. That’s what what any kind of meditative Activity intellectual or physical is a recollecting of the self In the deepest way to what is most real and I know you’ve written a book About gratitude and I love your words about gratitude Because it’s an inversion of the burden It’s not that it all comes down to us, but actually just the opposite that we We place ourselves in the hands of the eternal Reciprocity That gathers us up and puts us back together and together and I think that this frankly is is a Deeply rational standpoint that can be shown to be despite my not making it very articulately here today Shown to be true in economics in physics in biology In sociology and certainly in all of the higher order spheres of human knowing. This is the nature of what? of what we are and and what The world is and this is where you know, you’re right your your image of the pantocrator you know, I think this comes back to this because because what Fundamentally is going on there is that you know, the logos is in us, you know, it’s actually in us That’s why when you talk about the divine significance of truth and speech Uh that you know, we are made to understand ourselves in relation to the whole that is an intrinsic human Need and an intrinsic human ability and and I think that this is where you know You know my life is about trying to in whatever small way I can You open if the if the nihilist darken the horizon and close off in the way the brutalist architecture does close off What we’re allowed to become and understand ourselves out as then I think the work of our time is to open it back up And and and and that is really what the humanities are fundamentally about you can go back to you know One of the things I despise about the current structure of the academy is it acts as though, you know, these things are just for the few But you know, you think about you know homer I mean homer was the mode of educating the greeks for you know, a thousand years The pantheon was right there on the highest hill where everyone could see it same with gothic architecture You know j.s. Bach perhaps the greatest musician who ever lived was a parish church musician Anyone I presume could walk in the doors and listen to his to his to his to his cantatas I mean dickens when dickens wrote I i’ve heard recently people would line the docks To wait to see what what was the next you know, what was the next installment of dickens? And so what what I think, you know most fundamentally is that the the antidote to the spiritual crisis Civilizational cultural crisis we’re living in is is is is is really fundamentally Simple in at least it’s what we can state it as and that is to to to open the horizon again to turn The lights back on and what that means is to turn them on so that individuals can better come to understand themselves In relation to these higher order realities in the image of which they are made and in relation to which their fundamental realization essentially depends So we have so there’s critiques of let’s say Thought in relationship to the ideal that freudian critique of religious structure that It’s infantile And and perhaps that’s a consequence of the hypothesis of the divine afterlife that awaits us all Freud regarded that as an infantile response to the reality of death and and there’s the marxist criticism that Religion only serves power and it’s the opiate of the masses but there’s I it’s striking to me how poorly the alternative position has been defended given its unbelievable power. I mean look We all seem to recognize within ourselves that we have moral culpability As far as I can tell because i’ve never met anyone who hasn’t tortured themselves To a tremendous degree as a consequence of their own perceived inadequacies in relationship to the ideal I see that people take the deepest pleasure that’s possible in life in the facilitation of the development of others. I don’t believe that I believe that’s wisdom to notice that to say well, it isn’t the the service to my momentary desires for pleasure or even comfort for that matter where i’m going to find the deepest significance life sustaining significance that keeps me away from Nihilistic hell and and the desire to destroy and hurt it’s it’s going to be something like service to the greater good and primarily in the form of Well other people and their longest possible term interests in that we have Not only a divine responsibility to do that but a divine capacity to do that that if not manifested Our cripples us spiritually and and physically for that matter and I mean the ultimate significance of that remains unknowable, but I don’t see any logical flaws in that in that In the proposition. I mean I looked at the manner in which the mesopotamians built their savior marduk Marduk has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words The the cosmos comes into being it disappears as a consequence of his utterances and like there’s this Sense emerging in mesopotamia as the consequence of the aggregation of all these cultures that the highest order being is extraordinarily attentive hence the all-encircling eyes and is capable of the Deepest and most profound speech and that’s not a realization that’s in any means trivial that the mesopotamians had wars Between all of their representations of their gods and what they elevated to the highest position was this all-seeing truth-speaking capacity that also went forward and confronted chaos and built the world as a consequence and the influence of that set of ideas or the derivation from the set same set of ideas for the Jewish conception of yawa is quite clear and you see the same thing emerging in greece with the with the Building of a pantheon of gods and the proposition that something occupies the apex something apollonian or something of that nature and then You see that revolution take place with the dawn of christianity and the insistence that There’s something fundamental about consciousness and Spoken And and what’s and and the spoken truth that is constitutive of reality and you ask yourself Well, do you believe that and the answer is well you treat people like you believe that because you hold them responsible for the consequences of their utterances and you judge their character on the basis of what they say and you And on whether or not they act out what they say and so we hold each other to these standards With everything that we do and we berate ourselves when we don’t live up to them And I don’t understand how it is that we can be said not to believe it Now, you know there’s the dogmatic element the hypothesis for example that christ is literally the son of god and I mean my knowledge runs out very very rapidly when speculating about such things, but i’m certainly Certainly seems to me that christianity has at least been a very long conversation about what the nature of the good is and that that’s spilled out into the humanities and and underlies our culture and that That that that has very little to do with the expression of power It’s it’s the it’s not the right lens through which to view things. It’s devastating. It’s wrong. It’s cynical And I think it appeals to envy and and the desire to tear down Well, well I I I I think think that the Well, two things I would say just very quickly jordan the first is that you know, we have immense resources in the In our own past and in the past of every culture. I mean one of the things I love about your work is how syncretistic Is you know here you’ve moved me in the last five minutes you to move from marduk to you know, the panto crater to to The greeks and and good on you for doing it. I mean, that’s that’s I think I want to say that You say people have not been good at making the counter argument well You’ve been very very good at making the counter argument and The millions of people who’ve had their lives touched and ennobled and deepened by by Taking seriously the things you point towards our proof of that. I You know, I think relative to our spiritual cultural crisis You know, I think relative to our spiritual cultural Crisis, we should not pretend that we don’t have resources. I mean it’s as if it’s as if You know the situation is is if you were to give young people, uh, uh the challenge of building something beautiful and if you were to If you were to say well, you’re absolutely not allowed to look at or have any knowledge of any previous building Well, you know that the results are not going to be very good But as soon as you say and you can go back to palatio and betrubius and look at all these models And discover all of the things that they give you. I mean the results Will be amazing. And so I what I want to I want to drive towards a kind of uh Optimism not rooted in in kind of uh, you know silly blindness about the depth of our problems but rather uh in in the The the nature of what is most real and the whole treasure house of Of tools. It’s like we have these spotlights from the from the past to help us understand ourselves and the the the The the world around us in philosophy and religion and literature in architecture and in art and painting and music I mean for god’s sakes. I mean, we’ve got we’ve got an unspeakable treasure house Here and and the It may be that as we dig into that we see that we uncover ourselves more And understand ourselves more, uh adequately, you know, I want to do one example, you know, for example I think one thing that is is a uh I live in the in beautiful in a very beautiful city in historic savannah and i’m live on the edge of a Just absolutely a stunning civic space park called for scythe park. I hope you can come and see it someday There’s a beautiful fountain in the middle of it and it has these these these oak trees these live oaks that were Planted by people long dead now these oaks of you know, one to two to even 300 years, uh old and I not infrequently see Uh young couples coming to stand in front of one of the biggest the biggest oak inside the park proper to uh to get married, you know, they stand there with the justice of the peace and uh Exchange simple vows and I think we have to ask ourselves What in the hell is going on there? And it seems to me You know very beautiful and in a way very simple. It’s that they wish that their vows They’re aspiring to be to each other in some way as the oak tree as able to live up to the um The love that they are called to and they want to instantiate that uh by uh By that’s why they turn to the garden and the tree in the center. Yes Yes, and act out adam and eve Yes reborn Yes. Yes the the incorporation of the host is the Is the embodiment it’s the incarnation of christ within that’s what it’s acting out. That’s the idea I mean in some sense, it’s it’s the consumption of the saving element But the saving element is actually a mode of being and this isn’t hit home. It’s like look what the Church the church demands Everything of you. Yeah, absolutely everything and and the reason that that people are leaving is because That adventure isn’t being put before them. It’s like look you can have your cars and your money and all of that But that’s nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on Yes, I I wish you’d preach to our people because I think you’re absolutely right about that uh The language we’d use is um be a saint That’s what that’s the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint A saint means someone who’s holy or utterly conformed to christ now press that to be conformed to christ means You’re willing to go Into the dysfunction of the world to bear its pain and to bear to it the ever greater divine mercy and love Now fill in the blank frances of ecisi mother therese may be in our time like when we were Younger if someone said well, who’s a living saint? We all would have said mother therese But what did she do? She went into the worst slum in the world. I’ve been there And she bore the suffering of of the world literally picking up the dying and and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering and And she she took on herself the wounds of jesus But then think about you know, the smile of mother therese she brought to that place The ever greater more super abundant mercy of christ. That’s being a saint and you’re dead, right? I think we’re not sufficiently calling our people to that kind of heroic thing. I’ve experienced This is this is really something to see I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially with a day or two in between and it took two large audiences three to ten thousand all the time something like that and I always paid attention to the audience Singly because I was always talking to one person at a time, but also on mass, you know to see to hear Because if if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source Then there’s silence And sometimes that silence can be dramatic and that’s why people say well, you could have heard a pin drop It’s no one’s moving because their attention is 100 gripped by whatever just happened and one thing that reliably Elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility And people that and and I thought I thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because No one says that now They say happiness or they say rights or they say privileges or or or they say reward or something like that. They don’t say Pick up the heaviest load you can care and carry and care for that matter and stumble forward And i’ve seen people cut those ideas and put them on t-shirts and and play with them and and so It’s not that the church is asking too little of its people I’m recommending that we remember The that meaning in life and this is also something i’m doing empirical work on right that meaning in life is mostly bound Right at the non-propositional level and it does feed into things like sacredness I think reverence is the proper virtue of awe Reverence is the virtue that helps us Appropriate well reverence means it it is hold is hold in ritual and is hold as a marker or as a As a pointer for ritual emulation. I think it’s I think That’s embodiment. That’s and that’s the that’s the pulling in of that personality into the self I think that’s right but I think what awe see awe is really interesting because Because you can measure this awe is one of the few instances where people’s sense of self and Ego-centrism is is shrunk and they but they find it a positive experience and they want it to continue right, well that’s that’s how what we experience in relationship to our Current ego when we hypothesize our ideal as well I think that’s right and that goes to I mean those are the same things because our capture Is the ideal is our unconscious ideal capturing us Hmm Think about it. It’s the spirit within so imagine this you already admitted so to speak that we’re you know Econotic representations of the central animating spirit of the ages and that speaks from our unconscious because it’s It’s embodied within us and then it finds its it finds its grip on us in in awe In an admiration would you say though? So there’s a question like would you say that it’s not only the in the unconscious within us But the unconscious without us because I think yes what all is this? It’s the unconscious in the books behind you. Yes, and also the unconscious in the world because I think part of what What we’re I think I think we got too locked into The notions the notion of the sacred as perfection Completion this is one of my critiques of play-doh, although I’m normally a lover of play-doh And I think you can see in the mystics and in many traditions. This is a claim I can back up But i’m just going to throw it out there Right, even in even in jonathan’s tradition eastern orthodoxy. It’s the sacred the good becoming better Well, the sacred is an inexhaustible miss right and yes, that’s why i’m asking that question Yes, because when i’ve had visions of heaven heaven is a place that’s perfect and getting better Well, okay. Well, okay. Let me give you my sense the place where I don’t have visions But the place where I experience what i’m talking I wouldn’t recommend them necessarily. Yeah. Well, I mean, um We can compare altered states of consciousness another time perhaps Okay, you’d really like to do that would you Um Well, let me just finish the point I was making For me don’t be drawn to another universe you mean Yeah See for me, I tell people that play-doh is sacred which does not mean I cannot that I can’t question him It does not mean that I can’t disagree with him. It means the following Play-doh transforms me I go out and live my life for a while The world then changes me because of the way i’ve been changed I come back and I see things in play-doh I didn’t see before And then I go back to the world the thing is I what the bible does that for people Yes, and and that’s why the bible is sacred and and and and and what play-doh I think argues and and what daoism argues And I think christianity argues where there’s also the book of nature. There’s always the two books of revelation You can actually experience that with respect to nature I don’t particularly like that term but you can experience that with right where the world I think introverts do that in particular I I that’s a hypothesis of mine. I don’t have evidence for it But i’ve noticed my introverted clients need to be renewed by nature when i’ve tried to reduce this I mean that experience of awe so we went to a we went to a whole conference on that so If you see someone that you really admire That shades into awe And you can see that in in the effect that celebrities have on the on the public. It’s a peril it can be paralyzing so The admiration there’s a continuum between admiration and awe and then you can easily Make the case, I think that admiration is the felt sense of the instinct to imitate So you see children maybe they’ll hero worship someone and then they They’ll imitate them. They’ll copy them. They find someone who’s in that zone of proximal development and they start to copy them or they’ll take on the Identity of a hero or heroine in a movie my my little granddaughter who’s three For a year now Literally a year She has two names scarlet and and and ellie elizabeth and we kind of call her one or the other and if you ask her Is she scarlet? She’ll say yes Is she ellie? Yes, is she pocahontas? Yes Is she scarlet ellie or pocahontas? pocahontas One year now she watched that disney movie over and over and she has a pocahontas doll But and but she’s picked that figure and that’s quasi mythological figure obviously not a historical figure She’s picked that as her Identity and I see that as We can we can imitate people we talked about reality and hyper reality before Well, you can find someone you admire and they’re real or you can find someone who’s a mythological figure and they’re hyper real And the hyper reality is so adaptive that imitating the hyper real is more adaptive than imitating the real And that’s to me the that’s the essence of the religious instinct. It’s to derive the hyper real And then to imitate that and I think that’s what worship means essentially all with everything stripped away And so that’s a profound instinct because human beings are unbelievable mimics, I mean that that’s a very underappreciated element of our cognitive architecture a fundamental element and That that instinct to admire and experience awe facilitates that mimicry and that Increases the probability of the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior Okay, so and then what does what That makes of the religious domain something real as far as i’m concerned even real from the biological sense But that deepens the mystery of the involvement of the psychedelics in that like are they are they Parasitizing that are they like cocaine hyper stimulates the psychomotor stimulant system? Well, does psychedelics hyper stimulate the imitation awe system? And and is that an illusion or is it in fact the revelation of something deeper Yeah Yeah to circle back to the ontological question. So just recently I listened to a lecture that francis collins gave now, so francis collins you may recognize is director of the national institutes on health and he was also the Uh director of the human Genome project, you know, so so he’s as strongly credentialed a scientist as one can have and yet, he’s Absolutely confirmed christian and so he was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of I think he called it harmonization of a scientific and religious worldview Uh, but he was he was laying out his arguments for the existence of of god and one of them is What it would be his claim and it’s an interesting claim and you could argue it but the existence of moral law That there is an absolute moral law. Look, you know you I looked at jack pancsepp’s work, you know And he shows that you see complex morality emerge in rats in play play iterated play which is a crucial issue, right? What pattern of behavior? Is sustainably optimal across repeated social interactions? well, you know you hear all these postmodern critiques say of more of of hierarchical structure because of its its predication on Power I think no no corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal Uh on reciprocity on productive reciprocity You know, I was talking to this this jocko willink who was the commander of fallujah in in in in the 20 years ago and he’s a real warrior type, you know, like a real intimidating person physically and mentally for that matter um He talked about his navy seal training and you know, he said well we were taught It was pounded into us to have the back of the guy next to us It wasn’t like every powerful clambering ape for himself Not at all in these intensely competitive Hierarchies which would be you’d think as pure a manifestation of the power motive as would be possible Power is not the guiding ethos and he said quite clearly no your men won’t attend to you unless it’s reciprocal You they have to know you have their backs And he so and he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate in strategizing and also in taking care of your team and so I don’t believe that So what am I getting at in relationship to your to your last point This this religious this emergent ethic this natural law, okay, so imagine now Hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle if they’re to be stable and productive across long spans of time And a pattern that pattern emerges cross-culturally. It’s reciprocal productivity is something like that. It’s more there’s more to it than that Okay now You’re selected for your success in those hierarchies based on your ability to manifest that pattern Because that’ll push you up the hierarchy that increases as far as I can tell that increases your attractiveness as a potential mate substantially and so I think you can make a very deep biological case for the even for the emergent evolution of an ethical sense And and I think that does speak to people in the voice of their conscience And that is part of exist, but then you think well if that’s part of existence, how deep a part is it? How built-in is it? You know and I don’t I and that I suppose depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to being Okay So back to back to the gentleman that you were discussing. He was talking about a natural ethic Yeah, uh, well I think uh As as a pointer to god something absolute about the nature of What moral law is? and from that standpoint uh, if if you’re willing to go that route then Maybe these experiences are actually pointing to something that is absolute and true And informative do you think that’s true? I’m a scientist. I’m I’m it’s fine to be investigating it. You know, yeah, no, I don’t want to pin you down. No, let’s see You know my i’m trained as a scientist my default is uh to be deeply Curious and to be deeply skeptical. So right which is the right right attitude towards all of this And so my my response always is that I believe in the data and so And so that remains an open question, but it’s certainly fun to toy with as uh, uh As an As an alternative framing of what’s going on. I mean we’re in the middle of this huge huge mystery I I understand and appreciate the symbolic significance of the ideal human being And that finds its embodiment and I took these ideas in large part from jung and eric neumann That that christ is a represent christ is at least a representation of the ideal Man, whatever that is and we we all interestingly enough. We all seem to have an ideal And we and that I or that ideal has us Right, and that’s where it’s very interesting to consider the role of conscience because Your conscience will call you out on your behavior And so it seems to function as something that’s somewhat independent Or at least as something that you can’t fully voluntarily control because if you could voluntarily control it Then you just tell the pesky little bastard to go away or to pat you on the back continually Because There there must be few things in life more pleasurable than than being a fully committed narcissist To really believe that everything that you do is right and that you’re a good person And I suppose if you could wave a magic wand and rearrange your mind so that it was constantly telling you that You do it, but you don’t seem to be able to do that in relationship to your conscience It trips you up and so and so it tells you when you’re not living up to Your own ideal and that means that you have an ideal and you don’t even know what the hell it is But you certainly know when you transgress against it and I know that there’s a strong line of christian thinking that’s identified the conscience with divinity sometimes with christ inside sometimes with the holy spirit and Those are very interesting conceptualizations, but you can think of them psychologically and you can even think about them biologically You know to some degree because we’re so social If we don’t manifest an appropriate moral reciprocity We’re going to become alienated from our fellows and we won’t survive and we’ll suffer and die and we won’t we certainly won’t find a partner and and have children successfully and so to some degree the conscience can be viewed as the voice of Reciprocal society within and that’s a perfectly reasonable biological explanation, but But the thing is is the deeper you go into biology the more it shades into something that appears to be religious because you start analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself and And it becomes something Well It becomes something with a power with a with a with a with a power that transcends your ability to resist it So, okay, so you can think about christ from a psychological perspective and the critic the critic My critic this particular critic that i’ve been reading Said well that that doesn’t differentiate christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting Mythological gods and of course people have made that claim in comparative religion Joseph Campbell did that and young to a lesser degree I would say but Campbell did that But the Difference and cs lewis pointed this out as well the difference between those mythological gods and christ was that There’s a there’s a representation of There’s a historical representation of his of of his existence as well now you can debate whether or not that’s genuine You can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there’s credible objective evidence for that But it doesn’t matter in some sense because this well it does but There’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter because there’s still a historical story And so what you have in the figure of christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth And in some sense christ is the union of those two things The problem is is I probably believe that but I don’t know I don’t i’m amazed at my own belief and I don’t understand it like Because i’ve seen Sometimes The objective world And the narrative world touch You know, that’s union synchronicity And i’ve seen that many times in my own life And so in some sense i’ve seen that many times in my own life And so in some sense, I believe it’s undeniable, you know, we have a narrative sense of the world For me, that’s been the world of morality. That’s the world that tells us how to act It’s real like we treat it like it’s real. It’s not the objective world But the narrative and the objective world touch and the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be christ But I don’t know what to that seems to me oddly plausible Yeah, but I still don’t know what to make of it it’s too it partly because it’s too terrifying a reality to Fully believe I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it This critic Said that the mere psychologization of christ was insufficient because And you made the same case in some sense that it doesn’t make sense unless the narrative and the Objective world truly touch and I think you could debate that because I think that there’s some Utility there could argue to be be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth you know that the best way to cope with existence is to For to tell the truth and to face what you don’t know forthrightly and that will enable you to orient yourself Within our finite and bounded existence that ends with our death more Properly more accurately more advisedly than any other route i’ve seen People from orthodox priests to you know, the more the most uh protestant protestant you can imagine Recognize in the way that you represent Reality something that has value something that has value because You’re you are manifesting that That pattern like what you’re saying is is true uh, but I think that I think that If we if we if we take seriously this the problem the relationship between Attention psyche and the way the world reveals itself to us Then it scales up it scales up after that it it jumps up a level and It also scales up in terms of because one of the things that One of the things that that you talk about like looking up to the star and looking up to the highest thing you can look at And then aiming towards that, you know once again, one of the things that that does for is that The first thing you do is actually where it’s a form. It’s attention that people like the word worship It’s a form of reverence a form of veneration. You submit yourself to that aim It’s not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it You actually have to submit yourself to that which is to what you’re aiming and so that’s what I face to it Exactly, and you have to sacrifice to it So that’s why Let’s say the religious version of this has to move towards the highest possible aim and also one that we can do together Because like the lower aims like you could call them something like lower gods Let’s say or angels or whatever you want to call them like these lower aims. They have value, but they’re all fragmented But for this to stack up we need to be able to look towards the same Image we need to look towards the same aim and that will bind us together And so we don’t we don’t also then we don’t also end up being just kind of individuals who have the weight of the world On our shoulders, but we’re a communion of saints. We’re a communion of people who are Submitted to aiming towards worshiping the same Point yeah, and I believe that that’s necessary and and i’ve had some Profound experiences which I can’t really relate here that of of the necessity for that community is that this whatever our fundamental moral load is Immense though it is crushing though it is even Requires The participation of others. So even if you were the perfect you You would need other people To be along with you. It’s a collective enterprise even though it’s an individualistic even though it requires The perfection it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual level That’s not enough. There has to be that communal element as well. You need help We all need help to aim as the highest aim requires communal endeavor Yeah, and it’s also because it actually Is the way that everything works, you know It’s like the chair aiming to be a chair is is it constitutive of parts which are joined together towards a a same goal and therefore hold together as a being And manifest the chairness of the chair and that’s the same with you You have all these thoughts right you have all these feelings all these these contradicting things inside you And you need by aiming up towards You know the the I mean, I believe that the image of christ let’s say by aiming towards the image of christ You constitute your being into that Being that’s able to attend to sacrifice to love and then that scales up with people. I agree Well, I think you are aiming and this is another something else. I tried to point out to sam um You are you’re aiming you’re either aiming at christ or something lesser Yeah, or if things get really out of hand you’re aiming at something opposite and you don’t want to be doing that But and this is a matter of definition in some sense and it’s actually not impossible to understand is that You aim at something better Generally speaking. I mean maybe you’re out to cause pain but forget about that You you aim at something better You wouldn’t do it unless it was better. In fact, it it virtually defines better Like the the whole idea of better is predicated on the idea that there’s an aim that’s beyond you And then the highest of those aims is the amalgamate the highest aim is the amalgamate Amalgamation of all higher aims and that’s a perfect mode of being And and that by definite that’s a psychological perspective again that by definition is christ And then but then there seems to be something too convenient about cs. Louis’s insistence that that also had to manifest itself Concretely in reality at one point in history and i’m not like I I don’t understand why I should believe that And I don’t I tend not to believe things without a why? There’s always a why and yeah, and I there’s there’s a hurdle there that I that that That well that I waver on constantly because well, I already said that You’re when you think these things through At least my experience has been if you think them through sufficiently you end up with the choice between impossible alternatives. And so yeah But it it has to do one of the ways to see it maybe is is It has to do with the recognizing of the goodness of the world or the goodness of creation That that the world is capable of manifesting these patterns Right. So if you want to understand, for example the big conflict between the early gnostics and the christians, that’s what it was all about Because the gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated christ They were saying, you know, and they have viewed the world as utterly fallen as having no value Having to be escaped having to be fled in every way whereas Christianity posits that It’s a non-dual. It’s a non-dual proposition. It’s saying it’s it all comes together That’s the that’s the promise it all comes together. And so It has to come down Right, and so it has to come down at every level And not only that is have to come down into the person of christ who’s incarnated But that person has to go down down into death to the very bottom of the world You know to the belly of the leviathan and then come back up And so the whole world is declared as once again declared as being capable of participating in this good And so and so you could say well, maybe maybe it wasn’t that one. Maybe it wasn’t you know, it’s like why would it be that particular? particular Place where it happened and it had to be that some place. That’s the story I mean, that’s where that’s the there is no other story like that story that we have and and so Once you recognize that this is part of the declaration that the world does embody these patterns That it leads to this it leads to The the this the story of a man who embodied them absolutely And is bringing us in him to also embody them in a way that will transform us You know like the the ultimate goal of of orthodox vision of christianity is is theosis It’s to be come god To become god through through transformation and participation in god So that’s the final goal of everything is to become Participant in the divine where does your insistence that values are part of the structure of being? Like where does that find its limit because the the classic limit of that is something like is In fact the definition of the utmost place of value in some sense is almost indistinguishable from the claim that there is a god and so A god is not the same as an engineering god and I I take enormous pains in the book It costs me more than anything i’ve ever written to write the chapter called the sense of the sacred in which I try to Help people to a place where they can understand why people use this extraordinarily difficult word god You know, it’s not a satisfactory term But it’s the term we have to have to name An aspect of our experience that if we don’t name it Disappears from our lives and that’s not to say that there isn’t something there that is That merits whatever we mean when we say divine I mean we we haven’t defined we haven’t defined what we mean by divine and we’re back in the nets of language We’re trapped in the nets of language as shelling said But what i’m suggesting is that As whitehead suggested and come on whitehead Was also the co-author with russell of the principia matematica. He wasn’t um a fantasist He had this I think incredibly deep idea That whatever one likes to call the divinity god, whatever is the thing that The cosmos has relation with relation is at the core of being I even argue that relation is prior to the relata prior to the things that are related that sounds nonsense How can you relate? How can you have a relation if there isn’t anything yet to relate? But there’s a wonderful image called In indian mythology called indra’s net which covers the universe And in it the idea is that the filaments of the net exists before The net before the crossing points which are the things we see and on those crossing points There are little gems which reflect every other gem in the net And that’s a that would take a very long time to unpack but perhaps it can set things going people’s minds But the idea I have to the right hemisphere Is that relation Is prior to anything at all really and that therefore the the whatever you mean by god and whatever we mean by the cosmos Are in some sort of dynamic relation which is an evolving one in which the outcome is excitingly not known If it were known it would all be some horrible possibly sadistic um play uh by an almighty all-knowing god, I mean then Look, i’m going to be talking to roan williams shortly But I don’t want to go go into all that I mean by that. I don’t think god is omniscient and omnipotent But I don’t think he’s not either just in the same way I don’t think he’s green and I don’t think he’s not green. I think the terms are wrong But you know, we can go there if we want and later or another day But the thing what i’m what i’m really saying Is that these that god is discovering? Becoming unfulfilling whatever god is Through the relationship which classically in most religions is described as love which is after all just a Like a form of gravity in the world of of life and emotion rather than just in the world of of of the so-called inanimate and so Therefore we are coming into being God is coming into being and we’re necessary to one another’s coming into being It’s not that god does a bit to us and then we do a bit back to god It’s like i’ve read a very good book. I keep mentioning it by a young Young microbiologist in america called kriti shama called interdependence and she argues very importantly that it’s not just that um Certainly, it’s not just that an animal or an organism Molds its environment nor is it just good enough to recognize that while an animal Affects and shapes its environment the environment shapes the the animal or the organism but that this is not a you know Turn by turn process. It’s not that the animal shapes the environment should then uh in its turn shapes the the animal it’s an entirely Simultaneous process of coming into being of co-creation if you like now this idea of simultaneous coming into being is an ancient one But I think it’s a very deep one philosophically and a very important one So that accounts for your objection to the idea of the omniscient determining god Absolutely absolutely because the the god has the God would have no creation creation is not really just the unfolding of something that’s already there the idea of negative theology is You fundamentally I wonder if this is like Uh young circumambulation you fundamentally understand god by saying what god is not But not of course randomly, right? Um, what you’re trying to do is that’s sort of like the god of the gaps Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, sorry. No, no, that’s don’t apologize. We’re friends talking Well, I don’t I don’t want to derail the Conversation so there’s been it’s been like this and it’s been wonderful. It feels to me like doing tai chi. Um No, it’s more that it’s more of a recognition Of not of the god of the gaps But of a recognition how our categorical scheme is always inadequate so for example is god an object Well, no, that’s wrong. Is god a subject like the way we are? No, that’s wrong, too. That’s right So god is well god escapes our categorical Right god is by definition in some sense the what escapes are categorized because god is supposed to be the grounding of the intelligibility That makes the categorical scheme possible at least But there’s also presence within present within the category scheme if it’s set up properly so right so So the point about negative field that’s why it’s not just the god of the gaps The point is I see is to see within the category that it’s present within the categories But it’s not capturable within the categories. That’s what you’re trying to do. Yeah. Yes The reality supersedes the categories which is why you’re not supposed to make idols Why you’re not supposed to make representations of you can make icons to to summon jonathan back into the conversation one more time You can make icons right and you got jon luc marian’s distinction between the idol and what’s the what’s the distinction? The distinction the icon does not capture god, right? That’s exactly it. That’s a artwork. So an artwork is an icon Exactly and propaganda is an idol. Yes, I would agree with both of those statements Well, isn’t that something because they’re they’re really in some sense far astray, aren’t they? But they do map and so how how cool is that? So art is art is the icon How cool and and propaganda is the idol exactly man, you know And I had these paintings in my house and they were melds of the icon and the idol Well, right because it’s all this socialist realism I have 200 pieces of socialist realism watching the icon and the idol fall fight with each other But and the problem is they are and I want to get the etymology of this word They at a superficial level of similarity. They can easily be confused. They can yes be confused Okay. Yes. Well that they and I would say they will inevitably confused in the absence of god Well, and I because propaganda like this is something i’ve been working out too john is that yeah, you know that we we make religious The next thing on the hierarchy if we don’t give to what is religious its proper place And I think the new atheists are beginning to realize this The amount of the world’s evil that’s a consequence of our voluntary moral insufficiencies is indeterminate You know, so you might say hypothetically speaking that as part of god’s creation We actually have important work to do and if we shirk it the consequences are real And you might say well, that’s just an apology for god and perhaps that’s the case and perhaps there’s no god at all and so what the hell are we talking about, but But I do think it’s an important issue, I mean your life is characterized by a stellar level of constant productive creativity That’s that that’s you and you’re offering that to the world and that seems necessary And maybe it’s because the problems are real and important and and the role we have to play ethically Is of paramount importance Truly, yeah, why else would we torture ourselves with conscience and and I would say that’s the flowering of the religious instinct within you Well, you could describe it as that but then you know, there are I mean you used a phrase earlier than I I wanted to say whoa, hang on. I’m not sure I know what that means a higher mode of existence Um, I I don’t see I remember having this argument with john cleese of all people some years ago. He’s a great lover of the tibetan book of the dead and gilbran and people like that and and i’ve always found them Slightly hard to take and he talked about a he I think the phrase he used was a high level of consciousness And I said I don’t and again, this is my empiricist thing. It sounds cynical and skeptical It’s not meant to be but what level who’s what describe a level? What is a higher mode? Why higher what’s higher than another? Are you saying it in terms of animals? Um, it’s a view. It’s an old-fashioned huxley in view of evolution that most modern Richard dorkin for example most modern evolutionary scientists and and so on the ethologists would would deprecate to say that there is a higher level of being A higher mode of consciousness. Is it just like saying well, you’re better educated. You’ve read more you know more Is it you’ve somehow been enlightened a fair clowns effect as the germans would say which is um, Which is not necessarily intellectual but is somehow spiritual and if so We’re show show me an example of it. Show me someone who has a higher mode of existence than I do Uh, or the I can I can answer that I think to some degree three ways three ways one That higher mode of existence is what your conscience torches you for not attaining Okay, okay I think what my conscience torches me for not attaining is that I was rude to someone yesterday and I shouldn’t have been Right, but it’s the shouldn’t part of it. Yes the obligation. It’s the t David hugh the problem of ought yeah. Well, and then you think you think you think about how it manifests itself You don’t this is why nicha was wrong You cannot create your own values Right the values impose themselves on you independent of your will Now maybe there you part it well, that’s what your conscience does and good luck trying to control it This is very anti nicha, isn’t it? It’s well I’m a graded myron. I know you are that’s why I was that’s why I made the point It’s very well opposite to his philosophy Well, so jung embarked on a lengthy critique of nicha and it’s part of his work that isn’t well known I would say but and We’ll leave that be except to say that the psychoanalysts starting with freud Well, not really but popularized by freud and systematized showed that we weren’t masters in our own psychological house Nice there were there were autonomous entities Yes, and those would be the greek gods to some degree that operated within us and we were which is julian janes’s point Exactly. Yes, we’re in yes. Yes. I have my problems with james, but as a overarching idea, there’s interest in it Okay, so there are things happening with us and to us in the moral domain that we cannot control And that’s a that that stunned me when I first learned it as a proposition. It’s oh, yes. Look at that. Here’s one What are you interested in? Yeah, well that grips you Okay. Number two, what does your conscience bother you about? Okay, that’s your inadequate by your own standards now what adequate would mean That’s a different question, but it’s defined negatively by conscience. Yes, and then Better there’s one up that I said I would lay out three You can look at jean piaget’s work on developmental psychology on the development of the subject. Yes He was a genetic epistemologist with he wanted to do was this is what he wanted to do He wanted to unite science and religion that was his goal And he wanted to look at the empirical development of values and what he concluded at least in part was that A moral stance that’s better than a previous moral stance does all the things that the previous moral stance does plus something else Yes. Yes, and you can say the same thing. No, I was a scientific theory. I remember I had a great I loved piaget and I his observation was so empirical, of course, yes, absolutely the development of the child and the Not quite the theory of mind that wasn’t his thing but but but Similar developments and signposts where people become aware of Self-face. So so now piaget looked specifically at the development of morality And he was one of the first people to emphasize the importance of games Yeah And what he showed what he showed was that at two years old, let’s say a child can only play a game with him or herself Yeah, but at three Both children can identify a name and then share it in a fictional world So that’s partly pretend play and the beginnings of drama and then cooperate and compete within that domain Yeah and then what happens and the game theorists have shown this is that Games out of games morality emerges. Yeah, there’s a reset. So i’ll give you an example and this is a crucial example So if you pair juvenile rats together the males They have to play they have to rough and tumble play because their prefrontal cortexes don’t develop properly if they don’t Anyways, they have to play You pair a big rat and a little rat teenage rats together and the big rat will stomp the little rat. Yeah first first Encounter so then you say power determines hierarchy Yeah, okay, but then you pair the rats multiple times like 50, you know Then if the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win 30 percent of the time the little rat will stop inviting him to play Until you get an emergent reciprocity even at the level of the rat. Yeah one of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is Something like attention Right. It’s something there’s a hierarchy of of manifestation because everything that happened that appears to us in the world Has a an infinite amount of details, right? It has an indefinite amount of ways that you could describe it that you could angles it by which you could analyze it and so Nonetheless, the world appears to us through these hierarchies of meaning, right? I always kind of use the example of a cup or a chair like a chair is is of just a multitude of things It’s a multitude of parts. How is it that we can say that it’s one thing? There’s a there’s a capacity we have to attend and this capacity we have to attend Is something like a co-creation of the world and so the world actually exists No, it shares a good example because you know, you can try to define it objectively But you end up with beanbags and stumps and exactly they don’t have anything in common Well, they’re both made of matter, you know for whatever that’s worth. It’s pretty pretty trivial level of commonality, but you can sit on them Yeah, and that’s what you have it’s a mode of being which defines them well and that’s so strange so many of our object perceptions are projected modes of being and so even the objective world is Ineluctably contaminated with its utility and it would enter therefore with morality Exactly. And so I think that that’s the key The key is that once you understand that the world manifests itself through attention and that consciousness has a place to play in Actually the way in which the world Reveals itself and so you can you can try to posit a world outside of that first-person perspective, but it’s good Lock it. It’s it’s a deluded. Uh activity. Well, it’s also it’s very very difficult because you don’t You don’t know what to make of something like time because time hasn’t Ineradicably subjective element and duration which is different than time I mean time is kind of like the average rate at which things change But duration is something like the felt sense of that time And if you take away this objectivity, it isn’t obvious what to do with time And I think physicists stumble over this all the time so to speak So and this is something that this this intermingling of value in fact was something that I never thought I never thought I made much traction with with harris with sam harris He he didn’t seem to me to be willing to admit How saturated the world of fact is? Inevitably with value and I actually think he’s denying the science at that point because for everything I know about perceptual psychology There’s a great book called uh vision as a Oh god now, I can’t remember the name of the books. That’s memory trouble. I’ll remember it. No worries The idea is that If that is true Then there are certain things which come out of that there are certain necessary, uh Things down the road from that that insight which is that attention plays a part in the way the world lays itself out And that one of them and one of them is that the stuff that the world is made of is partly Something like attention something like consciousness and that has a pattern and that pattern is the same pattern as stories It just it’s just it doesn’t lay itself out exactly the same but things exist with a pattern which is similar to stories They have identities. They have centers. They have margins. They have exceptions And that’s how stories lay themselves out like so a story happens in time how an identity let’s say, uh is Broken down and then reconstructed you could say that that’s basically the story of every story How something breaks down and is reconstructed and so that is a way for us to perceive, uh, the identity of things and so if the world is made of this then it’s actually It’s actually our world our secular world, which is a strange aberration on how Reality used to exist for every culture in every time from the beginning of time Which is to take that for granted to take for granted that something that they didn’t call it consciousness, but intelligence and attention Are part of how the world lays itself out and it lays itself out in modes of being and one of the things that comes out of it is not only that but like you said It’s not only that you have ideas, but it’s that ideas have you or that it’s not only that you Engage in modes of being is that modes of being Have you and that recognition means that the first level of the first level of Attention to that looks something like worship It looks like celebration It looks like uh, it It’s like uh the the thing which makes the let’s say the national hockey league so successful Has more to do with celebration than just a bunch of guys on skates on a piece of ice, you know throwing a puck around There’s a celebration of the purpose of that thing and it manifests itself Through a bunch of stuff which one is like a trophy that stands in the middle on the top of a bunch of on a stand And everybody looks at it and kisses it and and and so there’s this this veneration Yeah, well, and there’s mascots the hockey league example is very interesting because it’s a It’s a it’s a social game And you know all the players They’re attempting to aim right, right So there’s a symbolic element to that sin is misplaced aim And so you hit the you hit the small space in the net Block though. It may be by your enemies And everyone celebrates that and you do that in cooperation with other people and in competition with other people And if you do it properly, not only are you a brilliant player from a technical perspective, but you’re also a great sport And so there’s an ethic there and a morality and and this is why people are so upset when hockey players or any other Pro-athlete does something immoral in their personal life is because it violates the The ethic that that’s being celebrated as a consequence of this great game Yeah, right So you can see that that the striving for an ideal mode of being the religious striving for an ideal mode of being Is central to what it is that makes hockey? addictive That’s right Yeah, it necessarily and and so god I saw that pro wrestling. There’s a great documentary Brett hart called hitman hearts one of the best documentaries i’ve ever seen and it Portrays pro wrestling as a stark religious Battle between the forces of good and evil and bret hart who at one point was the most famous canadian in the world was overwhelmed by his the archetypal force of his Representation as the good guy. It’s a great documentary hitman hart And and it shows you how how you know pro wrestling is is it’s not the world’s most intellectual activity To say the least and people can easily be dismissive of it but one of the things I loved about the documentary was that it attempted to Understand from within what was compelling about what was being portrayed and it was a religious drama It just yeah, it was shocking and brilliant and so So that is that is actually there is a there’s an objective part of that that there’s an objective way in which These patterns kind of come together and manifest that the higher and higher versions of this drama And so the sports drama has a certain level but it’s it’s limited to a certain extent because it still Happens as a confrontation. Let’s say between two irreducible sides and so what happens in something like the story of christ is that That gets taken into one person and so all the opposites become The king and the the the the criminal the you know The highest even in the image of the cross you have this image and as christ is being crucified They’re putting a sign above his head saying that he’s the king as christ is being beaten. They’re giving to him a crown and so christ Joins together all the opposites and so in his in his Story you see if you if you’re attentive to these patterns you see the highest form Of this pattern being played out and one of the aspects that has to be there for it to be The most revealed or highest form is that it also has to include the world of manifestation I mean, it can’t just be a story. It has to be connected to the world. So that’s why christians insist on The the the fact that jesus is not just a story that he’s an incarnated man that he was incarnated But I don’t believe their insistence I don’t believe well, this is this is because I don’t it isn’t obvious to me and I think Maybe I derived this criticism from nicha, but You know people have asked me whether or not I believe in god and I’ve answered in various ways No, but i’m afraid he probably exists. That’s that’s one answer Um, yeah, no, but i’m terrified he might exist that that would be truthful answer to some degree or that I act as if god exists which I think is I’d do my best to do that. But then there’s a real stumbling block there because There’s no limit to what would happen if you acted like god existed Yeah, you know what I mean? Because I believe that that acting that Out fully I mean Maybe it’s not reasonable to say to believers. You aren’t sufficiently transformed for me to believe that you believe in god Or that you believe the story that you’re telling me you’re not you’re not a sufficient You’re not the way you live is a sufficient testament to the truth and people would certainly say that let’s say about the catholic church Or at least the way that it’s been portrayed is that with all the sexual corruption, for example, it’s like really Really you believe that the son of god that that jesus christ was the son of god and yet you act That way and i’m supposed to buy your belief And and it seems to me that the church is actually quite Guilty on that account because The attempts to clean up the mess have been rather half-hearted in my estimation And so I don’t think people people don’t manifest Christians don’t manifest this And i’m including myself, I suppose in that description perhaps um Don’t manifest the Transformation of attitude that would enable that enables the outside observer to easily Conclude that they believe yeah Now the way the way to deal with that or the way to to understand that is that it They do but they do in a hierarchy There’s there’s a hierarchy of manifestation of the transformation that god offers the world and we kind of live in that hierarchy and those above us Hold us together you would say and so in the church there’s a testimony of the saints There’s there are stories there are hundreds and hundreds of stories of people who live that out in their particular context To the limit of what it’s possible to live it and even today there are There are saints living saints who for example like in the orthodox tradition We have this idea of what they call it the gift of tears or the joyful sorrow of of People who live in prayer with weeping constant weeping uh, and it’s this kind of strange mix of joy and uh and sadness which they which kind of overwhelmed them and they live in that Joy and sadness non-stop and they pray You know without end and so that exists but then we in this that’s one of the reasons why That’s kind of one of the reasons why when I talk about this idea of attention like it manifests itself in the in the church as well is that You often say and I understand it when you say something like, you know I act as if god exists or you know, i’m afraid to say that god exists Uh, and I think it’s because you you think or you tend to think that the moral weight Like of that is so strong that you would we would crumble under it that you would just be crushed under it and and I believe that and I think that that’s I think that I I I understand that but The first thing that to act as if god exists Let’s say it this way to act as if god exists the first thing that it asks of you is not a moral action The first thing that it asks asks asks of you is attention That’s why to act as if god exists is first of all to worship Like that’s and it I know people are going to hear this Well, then I have then I have a terrible problem with that too at the moment because i’m in so much pain Like one of the things that one of these theologians discussed the idea of and sorry I want you let you get back to your point but he discussed the idea of the yoke of christ being light and that there was joy in it and And there’s a paradox there obviously because it’s it’s also a take up your cross and follow me sort of thing but Um The fact that i’ve been living in constant pain makes the idea of joy seem Cruel I would say And so and I have no idea how to reconcile myself to that I mean i’ve reconciled myself to that by staying alive despite it you know, um Although By staying alive despite it, but there’s very little worship and it doesn’t mean i’m not Appreciative of what I have. I’m i’m not only am I appreciative of what I have I do everything I can to remind myself of it all the time and so does my wife I mean she’s changed quite a bit as a consequence of her struggle with cancer, you know has become much more overtly religious I would say and you know, we Say grace before our meal in the evening and it’s very serious enterprise and it always centers around gratitude, you know for well for For the ridiculous Volume of blessings that have been showered down upon us At a volume that’s really quite incomprehensible but despite that, um, well let Despite that i’m struggling with this because I don’t know how to reconcile myself to the To the fact of constant pain Yeah And I don’t I feel that it’s unjust Which is halfway to being resentful, which is not a good outcome No, I I I agree and I can’t speak like I can’t I don’t know how to speak to that because I don’t necessarily don’t have that experience You know, I don’t I I don’t have that. I don’t live with constant pain And so I don’t know what that would do to me Probably probably one of the reasons why it might ruin me, you know, and so um It’s very difficult to answer that I think that the answer like the answer has been the cross like that’s been the answer It’s an ease maybe maybe easy for me to just say it that way uh, but that’s always been the answer of of christianity, which is that That god went to to the cross and that god went down into death and and plunged down into death and there That there are mysteries hidden and there maybe they’re very well hidden, but there are mysteries hidden in that than that depth But uh, it’s not I don’t think it’s my job to uh to to moralize to you at this at this particular moment So we talked about the narrative and the objective touching and so I wanted to touch on that again is that like I I I understand c.s. Lewis’s argument and you know, i’m even inclined From time to time to think well, i’ve got the choice between believing two impossible things I can either believe that In the world is constituted so that god took on flesh and was crucified and and and died and rose three days later or I can believe that human beings invented this unbelievably preposterous story that stretched into every atom of of culture and It isn’t obvious to me that the second hypothesis is any easier to believe than the first because the more you investigate The the manifestations of the story of christ the more insanely complicated and far-reaching it becomes so I read ion for example And for all of those who are listening if you want to read a book that will completely Make you insane Then you could read jung’s ion and it’s a study of christian symbolism in astrology which doesn’t sound particularly dangerous, but or or or or even particularly necessary to read I suppose but Jung describes the the juxtaposition of astrological and christian symbolism and it’s a brilliant book and it’s terrifying because he He outlines the concordance between the levels of symbolism over several thousand years and it’s obvious when you read the book That no one plotted this. It’s not a conspiracy whatever’s going on To make that concordance occur isn’t something that’s not Concordance occur isn’t something that we understand and it seems to be best Understood as one of these situations where the narrative and the objective touch the saturation of christianity with fish symbolism Jung associates with astrological movement of Into the house of pices And and so he he describes how A drama so ancient people saw a drama played out in the sky and that was a projection of their imagination And that projection contained symbols that were associated with the emergence of christianity and so you you can see in that the the the alternative explanation is that there’s this There’s this unfolding of a symbolic landscape over centuries or millennia That’s part of human biological and cultural evolution But that that starts to touch on the religious anyways when you when you describe it in those terms Like it’s it’s it’s the operation of a of a cognitive of a natural cognitive process Let’s say natural slash cognitive process that supersedes any one individual or any one culture And so i’ve never seen a critique of ion, you know, I think people read that book and they think oh It’s like john allegro’s uh, the sacred the mushroom and the sacred cross do you know of that book I believe that’s the title that’s another book you read and you think well, I have no idea what it’s a study of mushroom symbolism in christianity and it’s another book that You know it it claims that Christianity was heavily influenced by psilocybin use and it was published in the 1960s. It’s an amazing book But it’s another book you read and you think I have no idea what to do with that. I have no place to put that book so but ion is really like that and Well, one of the things that for example, you know, you talked about just before the idea that You know The idea of christ being a dying and resurrecting god and you know That’s really actually not the case if you actually just look at the story of christ and not just the story in scripture But let’s say the whole story as it kind of developed in tradition and kind of melded together In the ancient world you had this idea of gods that went down into the underworld you know either that went down for some reason to visit or went down to save somebody even or You know or or or died and then and then rose again but that’s actually not the story of christ because If you if you understand the full tradition of the christian story, we think that christ died Went into hades And then destroyed death He pulls everybody out of death and then that’s it like what other story are you going to tell after that story? you have a story of someone who dies goes into death and then Take and then destroys death and then that’s it like that That’s the thing with christ’s story that every story every aspect of his story reaches the limit of storytelling And it’s it’s impossible to go beyond it, right? That’s right. That’s right Well, even from a psychological perspective, that’s correct And that in itself is a kind of miracle and so you’re stuck in some sense constantly having to choose between miracles. It’s like, okay It’s a it’s a figment of the human imagination fine, but it’s the limit figment in multiple ways. How did that happen? And also but as soon as you start to start to think that the world is made of attention the idea of just a figment of somebody’s imagination, especially Just a figment of someone’s imagination, which is happens Like you said over thousands of years within communities of thousands of people. It just becomes a ridiculous statement It doesn’t it doesn’t mean anything. It’s like yeah, it only means something if you assume that and you pointed this out It only means something it only To say it’s a figment of imagination And have that brush it aside means that you think that imagination is nothing And you pointed out constantly that you should not attribute nothing to the psyche It’s what you depend upon it’s the ground of your existence. It’s it’s it’s It’s not nothing. It’s the thing you that you take for granted more than anything else So any anything that you can recognize as a story will definitely be manifesting patterns that you can recognize And so they can’t just be brushed aside from this from the most insane conspiracy theory to the the most You know like childish fairy tale anything that manifests itself as a as a pattern of story that you can recognize It has a certain level of value Has a enough level that if you pay attention to it you actually can Gather some some some nuggets of uh of how the world works and how the world lays itself out Uh, you know, and that’s why like if I do symbolic interpretations I can do it for scripture But I can also do it for some marvel movie or some video game or whatever it is because That’s just the for you to even recognize something as having being it’s already part of that world. It’s already manifesting these patterns no, and that is one of the things that the narrative does is that it enables us to Play out ideas that we’re not yet intelligent enough to understand and sometimes The gap between the narrative representation and the explicit understanding can be thousands and thousands of years because we’re still unwrapping Well, we’re certainly still unwrapping the bible. We’re unwrapping. We’re still unwrapping shakespeare There’s more depth there than we can than we can understand explicitly And so anything that uses character has that tremendous advantage and then also there’s also this strange ability that some people have in spades to Create fictional worlds that are of unbelievable profundity and power and I mean the greatest example of that in the last 30 years in terms of sheer imaginative power has got to be jk rolling and the harry potter series which You know gripped the imagination of the entire planet For for a decade and produced untold wealth and spread literacy everywhere as well she had an a remarkably creative imagination and And something quite mysterious And so you’re you’re fortunate enough to work at the marriage of ideas and and and drama Yes, and and you know, it’s it’s really interesting when when you’ve spoken about dostoevsky and and others In some of your lectures. I i’m fascinated by him and all the russians I studied russian for four years in college and um and read some of these in the original my russian wasn’t Fluent enough for me to really I mean I had to grind through them but tolstoy Chekhov chekhov who was a doctor a medical doctor as well as a writer so that that congruence of Of a commitment not just in terms of literature, but that he used his profession as a doctor to also inform him Um as a writer he famously said Medicine is my is my wife and literature is my mistress and when I tire of one I spend time with the other um and I and pushkin, um who would Who would write stories that that were full of thought But the story itself Was bigger than any thought he could put around it it was it was more resonant it it carried more um By the way, um when I listened to your your biblical series It caused me to decide to read through the whole bible And Just start to finish and I I grew up southern baptist. So ever since I could read I’ve read the bible Virtually every day of my life, but I’d never read the bible start to finish and there were some books that even When I was religion major at university I would get to some of the books and go I I can’t stay awake for this book I just got to move on but when you really go through it and you see the the old testament as this This incredible saga of a people trying to find the rules That that kept them together as a people and it felt If you disobey these rules Then it’s going to end badly for us all and The greatest the greatest violation is to erect altars to other gods, right? Worship false idols. Yeah, that’s the worst And then along comes jesus who is completely steeped In all that old testament. I mean he is he is profound in his knowledge of it And he lives and does And says these things but it’s not like it’s a philosophy. It’s a narrative a narrative which I’ve studied a great deal and I believe is Is largely historical or I should say significantly historical I believe these things did happen and then you have saint paul Who’s trying to make sense? of what happened and and And it’s mind-blowing to me. It’s mind-blowing to to read it as a whole and put it into perspective in that having Having spent my life and what’s mind-blowing about it in in part I mean and I try to speak of the bible Not from the perspective of a committed believer and I have my reasons for that um, I guess it’s partly because I want to concentrate on What everyone can come to see as true I suppose perhaps that’s it But It is remarkable that the bible does in fact make a coherent narrative Because we don’t understand that It was see it was written by a very diverse range of people over a span of time that we can perhaps not even imagine It’s very difficult to tell how old the oldest stories in genesis particular are the the the the story of the fall And of adam and eve and and cain and abel They bear all the hallmarks of a previous oral tradition That would have existed In relatively unchanged form for tens of thousands of years and perhaps even longer than that and so they’re unbelievably ancient and then parts of it obviously are newer and the written parts are obviously newer than any tentative oral tradition, but you have a You have at the bare minimum an unbelievably deep psychological development document that weaves itself Over centuries into a coherent story and north rub fry I would say he’s a canadian literary critic has did more for me than any other particular thinker To help me understand the nature of the narrative because fry fry and I suppose he did the same thing Or i’m doing the same thing that he did because he preceded me also at the university of toronto Um, he assessed the bible as a work of literature as a narrative and that to me was never any denigration because narrative a powerful narrative and you talk about this when you talk about braveheart, for example, because There isn’t that much known about william wallace historically, but you craft you crafted a narrative. That’s that was true enough Let’s say to be unbelievably attractive to people and to motivate them very deeply because it’s an affecting movie Well, and if it wasn’t it wouldn’t have been so popular Um And so there’s a there’s a truth in narrative that I think is even deeper than historical truth a true like a truly profound narrative truth is like the average of a whole variety of historical truths And so it’s the essence of historical truth So it’s even more true than his than than what we would consider say eyewitness history because eyewitness history is just It’s one battle, you know And and there’s maybe an epic theme in that battle But then imagine that you could look at a thousand battles and you could and you could extract out from that What was canonical about heroic victory across all? 1,000 battles you see something like that happening in the old testament and the narrative the narrative thread is really quite deep the societies emerge formulate fall off the path Worship false idols collapse And then the same thing happens again and the collapse happens and the collapse happens because people Become too prideful the kings in particular. They don’t listen to the voice of conscience. They and a prophetic voice arises and says you’re wandering off the tried and true path and you’re going to be punished terribly for that and generally speaking the kings ignore that and Catastrophe breaks free and you see and in the old testament in particular, there’s the promise of The ultimate state in some sense There’s utopian promises that run through it to search for the promised land and then so strangely you see that transformed into something That’s not really political in the new testament. You see that the promised land becomes the nature of experience as a consequence of a particular form of moral being And and then perhaps that has political implications because people who acted like that would produce a particular state, but it’s no longer It’s it’s no longer the dream of establishing the state that will solve all problems It’s psychologized and it’s it’s unbelievably profound And it it’s and that’s I think you can derive all of that from from the biblical writings without Even starting to move on to classically religious territory and And it’s and then that does beg the question of course is what does all that wisdom point to in the final analysis? And that’s when the questions start to become religious Yes And well jordan that’s that’s the part to me that um, it takes it into a whole whole different realm as you as you say Um, there’s a quote from mary oliver that a friend shared with me recently it’s uh, Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable and I find that In in a great story in any or any great piece of art Uh that surprise is the central currency of its power There’s an element of if you will of revelation if you will and I I think it was paul tillich. I’m not sure who said that religion is Man’s way to god and it’s always erroneous, but revelation is god’s way to man Maybe it was carl bart it’s god’s way to man and it’s always perfect Well, there’s there’s a revelatory aspect to any great story when you’re telling someone a story And they didn’t see coming what just happened That’s what makes them Awake that’s what stabs them broad awake You know what my the most powerful takeaway for me was from my biblical series Which is what? The meaning of the word israel Wrestling with god we who wrestle with god. Yeah, we who struggle with god. Yeah. Yeah, it’s like Well, maybe that’s the real christian spirit is And that’s what that phrase implies and that’s the real jewish spirit Yeah wrestling john it’s the why does what you know? Why does why is there that strange scene of the wrestling with the angel like why would you possibly fight with god? And then you think well god isn’t that what i’m doing all the time and he’s not what everybody’s doing all the time He partially wins though. That’s what’s even more mysterious and hurts you doing so. Yeah, I mean that’s that’s that’s the story But isn’t that the story? I mean, it isn’t belief. It’s the wrestling with belief and and and And it’s wrestling in the way that you’re wrestling Uh, well, I mean I do sparring and I often use sparring as um a metaphor Uh for the kind of oh, so that’s the other metaphor for dialogue. Yeah, exactly. It’s not just the tracking It’s the sparring. Yeah, and and and you we have to remember You know that kind of sums up men’s relationships. Well, well play with each other tracking and sparring. Plato means big shoulders. He was a wrestler That’s what that’s his nickname his nickname is playdo because he’s a wrestler And we have to remember that the greeks are in the gymnasium even more than they are in the academy right, I was watching this suits episode last night and The the men are always sparring with each other verbally, you know, and they’re tracking something they’re tracking victory in this series They’re they’re filiah And they wrestle they wrestle when they fight they they have to go into a clench in a fight to settle their disputes like a physical fight But there’s you can shift off of that this happened Bernardo and I when we were doing this We both said this you can shift off of it and this happens when you’re actually martial arts sparring because you get into the shared flow State you can shift off of victory to the aesthetics of the dance There’s a beauty in that that is an independent That’s independent of victory that you can come to appreciate for its own sake Plato talks about this he talks about this the beauty the eros that draws you into the that’s why he a dance Yeah a dance but it but it’s a dance that draws you beyond yourself edu’s education right to draw forth from you And so is that the is that the battle with the adversary? Is that related to the this is another very serious question, obviously It’s a question related to the book of job I don’t know because I I see parallels, you know in niches quote, you know, I hate socrates. He’s so close to me I’m always fighting him right you can see you can see Both nichi and kirkagard wrestling with socrates kirkagard said I follow jesus, but socrates is my teacher and he wrestles with socrates all the way through everybody’s wrestling with socrates I follow jesus, but socrates is my teacher. So is that the statement of the west? Um, I think that I mean that was your objection at the beginning of this talk, right? At least to some degree because you said how influenced you were with greece you insisted upon how influenced you were by greece I think the west is the Attempt to if I had to try and summarize the west what an audacious thing to try and do see ruck ruck said that Because I asked him why dianesis transformed into christ because we were answering simple questions, too. And he said well greece meant judaism Yeah, but judaism also meant greece. I mean final starts theology because of the interaction Uh with with platonic philosophy, I think Christianity is trying to integrate agape and logos together. That’s how I try to understand this project And whether or not please please clarify, please clarify that claim sure So I think I mean we’ve talked a lot about the greek heritage of logos and logos is also central uh within Especially in the book of john. Yeah, especially in the book of john And saying that metaphorically with regard to you as well But also in the epistle of john is where john also said god is agape Right, and then that’s the epistle of john. He makes that famous statement and and the idea is there’s something There’s something about the way the logos gathers things together. So they belong together. That’s the original So that everything comes together everything comes together and then there’s the idea It’s a play dough of the ascent from the cave the anagoga you and jonathan talked about this The world discloses itself to me that transforms me and then I can see more deeply into the world Then that transforms me and I do this reciprocal opening and the thing is that’s very much if you you know You know agape that’s you define that that’s love. Yeah Accelerating mutual disclosure is how it’s even disclosed Well, it seemed to me Well, it seemed to me that that the relationship between truth and love is that love is the is the something like the goal and truth Is its servant it seems to me to be same because I think so this is how i’ve worked it on my in my mind is that Well, I think that truth is the best servant of reality truth is the servant of reality and reality I think Best manifests itself as love Well, what are the slogans I have in my that’s why this power of claim is so abhorrent to me The claim that power is the central motivating factor for the western endeavor Is tantamount I believe to saying that it’s the basic endeavor of the human species and I think that’s opposite of the truth I think this agape is And logos is more accurate and so it’s not just a counterclaim. It’s an antithesis Well, i’m trying to pick up on what you’re saying here I I mean, I you know, i’m trying to touch on the culture wars, obviously Well, that’s for yeah, I I I mean I think I mean For me, you’re saying something very analogous to a critique that i’ve built in awakening for the meaning crisis Oh, let’s hear it man. Well, if I can shut up No, it’s okay Oh is that I mean like I was going to say one of my signatures is you know the it’s in latin But it translates as love is its own way of knowing and the kind of knowing there is is like noticing like news Insight that’s the egyptian eye Well, yes, it’s noticing it’s not thinking it’s attention And maybe you’re tying that with that revelation of the form you’re tying that to that revelation of the form and that conforming Yeah, and that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. It’s it’s it’s and this is very similar to the buddhist idea of that the What you’re trying to do is shape attention and mindfulness so that you get that reciprocal opening so that your Your self-knowledge and the knowledge of the of the world have become Indistinguishable become Interpenetrating like what you have when you really love somebody in a committed long-term relationship You’re knowing of yourself and you’re knowing of them become bound up because you indwell them and you internalize them And they indwell you and internalize you right and and How much how much death of the old you has this involved for you? I know that’s a strange question. No, it’s a good question. It’s a damn good question Why it’s a good question because It brings up the idea of the fact that there’s a level of knowing that deals with the process of identification itself in both senses of the word identifying Designating something and assuming an identity in both So senses of identification the kind of knowing that I most care about this participatory knowing involves in identification And therefore if we’re talking about the transformation at that level we’re talking about That’s what I mean about when I talk about knowing knowing yourself. I don’t mean representing yourself I mean the knowing that constitutes you as a self and that’s what’s undergoing the transformation When you’re engaged in participatory knowing when I really love my partner, right? I’m not just forming What does it mean that you love them? Do you think if you Well, I mean it means a lot it means that reciprocal opening I was talking about but it means that I I mean It’s like what Eckhart says and again, I don’t mean to be pretentious like you, you know He said you have to make a space. I don’t think you’re gonna be able to help it in this conversation Yeah, that’s true. That’s fair enough. He says, you know, you have to go and forgive us the goal of Rhineland mysticism was to this kind of receptivity You have to make a space so that the Son of God can be born within you and and again no not being just relit you know irreligious, but for me to to love my partner is to Cultivate that kind of receptivity a space in which she can be within me and I don’t mean in any room purely romantic metaphorical sense What I mean is she finds a purchase within me whereby she can realize herself in both senses of the word realize And and she can come to trust that that space that place of realization will always be available For her and she can come to rely on it a place through which she can transcend herself when she needs to I mean And being and being committed to that and finding that Inseparably bound up with my own project of trying to realize who I am That’s for me the core of what it is to love somebody That’s great I wish you luck with it Well, that’s all we can ever wish anybody. I mean if you’re if you’re the grace of God Yeah Or that there is a life to this relationship That will eventually grow strong enough that we can come to trust in it as much as we trust in each other And that’s what I believe is happening for me And I Think There’s kind of three loves involved and they’re all bound up together. There’s you know, Socratic self-love not narcissistic self-love There’s the the love of the other and then there’s the love of the relationship That’s for me is like a Trinity talking about if those who are separate is the mistake you have to talk about it Analytically as if they’re separate but they interpenetrate and inter afford each other in a profound way They become they become in an important sense indistinguishable from each other. Well think about this admiration is the instinct to emulate Okay, so then we look for the most emulatable That’s the ultimate spirit and and I think Gerard is right that that always carries with it the dark side of Mimetic envy and covetousness and that those two are always playing off against each other Because because we think we can possess it by by by ill-got means. Yes That’s the story of Kane. Yes Yes And of course that’s carried with us because the story of human history is the battle between Abel and Kane which is also why asked you about this fundamental cultural crisis that’s Tearing us apart You said well that’s a manifestation of deeper things and that’s well, that’s what I asked too Yeah, and that’s and I and I hope that what we’ve been doing is actually my answer to to that Ah, I can say more about because I’ve been I’ve been involved and I’m involved in some actual Experiments on awe and the effects on cognition and some of the work I don’t know if what we’ve been doing is the answer to that or the antidote to that to which sorry Well, if the question is posed wrong We can’t really answer it can we we have to provide an alternative Formulation, but that’s what I think we’re doing here. Yeah, so it’s an antidote rather than an answer And that’s fine. I know I know I just clarifying it I’m I think I think looking for the answer is in some sense a fundamental way of Misframing it that is to that is to give into the problem. How do you address it then? How do we address it John? Do we just by step it and just offer the alternative? No, no, think about this. No, I’m I’m that’s a genuine question because perhaps we do just by Side-step it and offer the alternative. Yes, that’s what I’m saying. That’s what I that’s sorry. I want to be more responsible That’s what I’m recommending. That’s what I’m recommending see one of the things I’ve thought is that at minimum what Christianity is is a Thousands of years long discussion about what constitutes the human ideal. It says purely psychological viewpoint now I understand the metaphysical Implications, you know that and I don’t want to dispense with them, but it’s best to start with what’s simple so there’s this discussion of of of what constitutes the ideal and we’re we’re Exploring it and discussing it and we explore and discuss it in all sorts of interesting ways, right? Because it’s not merely rational we Bach writes this Soul inspiring music and that makes us feel a particular way and that’s a hint as to the nature of the ideal And then there’s these great cathedrals that are built all across Europe and they’re awe inspiring masterpieces of stone and light right so opposites conjoined and they bring the primeval forest into the city and they provide color and the music is set in there and then there’s the invocation of the ancestors and and the and the and the dogmatic formulations that that Christianity consists of that go back centuries as well and And all of that and that’s all part of this exploration and to me It’s the exploration of that central animating spirit and when we’re debating the postmodernists who say everything is power This is the sort of thing that needs to be pointed out as a rejoinder. It’s like no, it’s not We’re doing our best to manifest this ideal that we’re discussing We’re flawed and fragmented and ignorant and we don’t know so for example, you asked me earlier Nigel What sort of things I had to discuss in order to make people attracted say to a discussion of Genesis and what it is is that I I try to get the wheat from the text and and In the chaff. I think a lot of that’s my ignorance It’s not necessarily chaff but I’ll leave it be because I can’t I don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to make sense of it So I just leave it be without despising it because I can’t understand it doesn’t mean there isn’t something to it now You know, we’re still stuck because we have problems like well the idea of the resurrection, you know, which is obviously a Very big problem in in a very fundamental sense and I leave that be Except to say that I I have seen You know in my studies of mythology that there are stories of dying and resurrecting gods throughout history And the idea of Christ seems to be of that type Although it’s not only that but it’s something I can’t touch and that’s a problem but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t this investigation that we’re all undertaking including us in this conversation of what constitutes the ideal and how we could manifest it if we could only understand it and I think that’s unbelievably compelling to people and it’s it’s it’s not only compelling they die without it is Because we can’t live with only knowledge of our limitations. We have to be moving towards an ideal Yeah Well, I mean I just just a quick quick thought there I mean certainly within the Christian tradition the claim is that God’s decision to become incarnate is not Accidental he chose this particular human being not just because he had to choose some human being in order to become a human being But he chose a human being and as it were exhibited the qualities that he wanted to as it were Disseminate as a kind of moral exemplar that were profoundly cultured countercultural to the values and the exemplars of the time um, so you you think of the kind of The weakness of christ in some contexts the sort of the obviously the sense of self-sacrifice the radical openness to those on the margins the poor in particular Uh the the uh, ceremonially unclean and of course to to to women And so it’s as if that this is completely subverting the kind of the sort of power narrative that dominated uh first century palestine particularly in the form of the um, the sort of the the roman legions and the roman uh imperium and so so I I think that’s a that’s a quick thought i’ve really been struck constantly by some of jung’s descriptions of christ as a member of the trinity because jung makes much of john’s sense of christ the logos that’s there across time which I read something As something like create the creative consciousness that’s involved in the bringing to awareness of being something like that So it’s maybe identical to consciousness itself at least in its higher Stages it’s very abstract But then there’s christ the carpenter who lived in a particular time and place which is kind of a mystery because everyone asks Like in the movie jesus christ superstar, you know, uh Why that time in that place and the answer is well, it has to be some bounded time and place and so If we’re if if what christ is is a representative in some sense of what a human being is is that there’s a divine Aspect to us, which is this creative consciousness that’s very abstract, but it’s also localized intensely You know in a historic in an arbitrary throne to use the existential phrase historical context and then Each of us is unique in that manner, but there’s something universal about each of us too that enables us to reach out to each other and And also gives each of our individual lives A larger significance that otherwise they just wouldn’t have at all Well, yes and the significant, you know one of my students once asked me a brilliant question is like well if the if all stories have the archetypal structure, why not just tell the same archetype over and over And I thought you know, wasn’t that so interesting because what you want is you want Old wine and new skin so to speak right you want you want the universal story Particularized and then I thought well, that’s exactly what you said about the figure of christ is it’s the universal story Particularized and and both of those like both the particularization and the universality It’s the intersection of those two that produces the meaning It also produces I guess you say meaning I would say human dignity Because on the one hand there is individuality No one Quite grasped the truth or speaks the truth in my time and place like me So in a sense everyone is a unique prophet and has a unique responsibility but we are commonly subject to a universal order universal obligations universal calling which which Endows our little lives with the largest significance The important things are hard to articulate in words They’re implicit meanings all the deep things like love religion Poetry music, how do you say these in words? How do you say them in language? But they have Extraordinary meaning and power. They’re the things we live for not for the things that we can say Put down in the notebook. You know what I mean. I Try to look at things Scientifically in so far as the science allows those things to be viewed Okay And so to the degree that I can look at religious matters from a biological perspective I do that because it’s simpler Okay, so I believe that the religious instinct manifests itself in a variety of fundamental Motivations, but they’re they’re they’re abstract motivations to some degree. So the experience of awe Mm-hmm. That’s a major one the the experience of beauty. Mm-hmm. That’s another one the the experience of admiration and the desire to imitate those are those are crucial and So so one of the things that I would point out you can tell me what you think about this and I’ve been trying To formalize this idea and I don’t know its extent so I look at Christianity in particular, although not uniquely Christianity, but Christianity in particular as a thousands of years Investigation into the structure of the abstracted ideal to imitate So imagine We imitate those we admire. Okay, but we’re abstract creatures So we want to know what’s the essence of what should be imitated itself now we investigate that It’s not all explicit. We have to represent it in music. We have to represent it in art We have to represent it in architecture Because we’re we’re we’re hitting at it from multiple different domains and that is a reductionistic argument, right? It says nothing to do about divinity itself. Sure. It’s purely it’s purely psychological biological argument. You’re saying it Everything is relevant that what these philosophers were talking about what these artists were painting What these musicians are doing what filmmakers are doing? This is all something This is trying to get us that way. No, that’s what a cathedral represents You know, it’s it’s it’s it’s an expression in stone of this yearning to to bring the material world into harmony with the spirit It’s something like that and that’s what music does as well and there’s this this proclivity within us to strive upward and The cathedral I mean the cathedrals there are absolutely amazing these lattice like Structures of stone. There’s something about the harmonious interplay of shadow and light that’s key to it as well It’s it’s like the opening up of dark matter to the light that pours in that’s all embodied in the architecture and and and I I can’t say and neither can anyone else what that ultimately represents and then to bring music into that space and And tradition it’s all pointing upward to something to the direction that we’re supposed to go It’s it’s so terrible to see these buildings empty out I mean Thank God that they’re being preserved in some sense by the tourists who come there driven by a sense of awe But we we can’t inhabit them anymore the way that we used to and that’s a that’s a terrible thing It means there’s a kind of ideal that we that we’re no longer We’re no longer pursuing Perhaps we’re no longer pursuing it. It seems like a catastrophe to me. No one really knows how to revitalize it though, unfortunately so Well, I think one of the problems to me when when I was in Paris working on man in the iron mask I would want on a Sunday morning to to go to a mass and it was very difficult to find Well for one thing in a Baptist we would church would start at 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning and masses aren’t like that but go into say the Cathedral Saint-Germain and There was no one there it was a it’s magnificent ancient Cathedral and and You know a few tourists and the place the place didn’t feel dead. The architecture was alive But but it it was very difficult to have a congregation and a congregation is What the church of course is supposed to be? it’s it’s a collection of people who are united and and Different it’s you know, it’s a collection of sinners Acknowledging their sins and I think that that is a fascinating thing to me about How we keep? Well, it’s so surprising it’s also so surprising that Those hundreds of years ago when those buildings most of those buildings were built that those cultures would dedicate themselves To such great cost to produce these absolutely spectacular Impossible buildings made out of stone or brick these these these They’re like a dance in stone they’re so magnificent and then to fill them with with the greatest of artworks and and to to to bring the light in in the most colorful possible ways and then To bring the music in to set the scene and then to have everyone come in and commit to At least not being as bad as they were right like it was a joint moral enterprise that everyone was involved in You can be as cynical about that as you want and and talk about you know Sunday Christians and all of that But an hour a week to contemplate how it is that you should be living your life or to become In tune with your conscience once again, which at least the confession can offer that and And then to see that so much effort was poured into that It’s amazing that that over occurred and and then it’s also equally amazing that we’ve stopped doing it because you might think well Wouldn’t wouldn’t we be interested in? jointly coming together and saying well, here’s how we’re inadequate and Here’s how we’re conceptualizing what would be ideal and couldn’t we move together toward that and I Was talking to Bishop Barron this week and about this issue about the the loss especially in the Catholic Church of young people and It seems that there’s a great adventure there that isn’t being Communicated properly and and that and It’s a terrible loss for all of us What do we have to replace that? You know, I’ve talked to the new atheists, especially Sam Harris And it’s not like I don’t understand their arguments. It’s not like I don’t have sympathy for them for that matter, but There’s nothing poetic or artistic or magnificent about The alternative Yes, right it loses it loses it loses there’s something that just disappears. It’s the it’s that artistic ineffability There’s no room. There’s no obvious room for that in the say the Enlightenment worldview. I’m an admirer of Steven Pinker, for example And he falls into the Enlightenment rationalist camp And in his book the language instinct he talks a little bit at the end about Culture philosophy music art and all of that religion even for that matter to some degree But it’s like a throwaway chapter at the end Whereas by my way of looking that’s the whole book all of that that artistic endeavor and that shades into the religious endeavor and That that’s the scent that’s not some side effect of human cognitive development quite the contrary. It’s the central feature And I agree But Jordan a when when you’re speaking with Julia the most recent podcast I heard the Reminded me her her description of her life reminded me of an experience I had in Russia Was in st. Petersburg and we were doing a scout for a film I wrote called love and honor based on a novel that I wrote and in We were Finished with the scout. We had seen everything that that we were scheduled to see and Young woman who was in her early 30s a Russian woman Asked if there was anything else we’d like to see because we had some time and I said well I’d love to see some of your churches And she got Squisical look on her face. She was surprised that I don’t know a Hollywood director would ask that And she said well, I’ll take you to my church and I said you’ve got a church and she said, oh, yes I’m Christian and I said but you grew up when that was discouraged him and I’m Illegal or your parents Christian and she said no mothers Confirmed atheist her her father was baptized as a child But he’s also an atheist and so I said well, I’m not sure if I’m a Christian And so I said well, how did you become Christian and she said there was no beauty? I was a young girl walking around and nothing was beautiful And one day I passed the church and I could see candlelight in it and heard music coming out And I went in and I kept going and I kept going and I became a Christian and in And that to me says so much And people have no idea they have no idea that’s why I wrote chapter 8 They have no idea how much they’re starving for beauty. Yes, like it’s it’s a hunger that goes far beyond Well, let’s not say that it doesn’t have to go beyond material hunger, but it it No matter how well-fed you are without some relationship to beauty There’s too much suffering in the world for it to be viable Along with truth, it’s the antidote to to suffering It’s Jordan not opt it’s not Optional right. It’s crucial and you can tell that by its economic value for those who are hard-headed It’s like you can’t point to anything with more economic value period the end and so Well some weeks back when you were you were I felt Really working your way back that that that work and engagement and in your calling is Helping to heal and sustain you You said something along the lines of that that you wondered why in the Christian community and religious community the people were telling you that Your work means so much, you know why Why it’s it’s it’s somewhat overwhelming to realize that so many people are drawing from you and And I think I can tell you completely it is I today I was sitting on a bench with my friend who walks with me and this kid came up to me and he said And this kid came up to me and he said apologies for Interrupting you but I was listening to your podcast while I was walking down the street and I saw you here. He said And he started to tear up right away he said five years ago I was suicidal And I was I’ve been listening to your lectures on a regular basis. He said an hour and a half a day which Seems like an overdose to me He said He’s invented prosthetic limbs and has helped all sorts of disabled people and is on his way to MIT It’s like it’s to random Meeting on the street, you know, yes Yes And thank you for that too much Yes, of course it is but I take and like I know you like to understand, you know, that’s the the There’s something else you said a couple of weeks back about I Want to I want to understand why I want to understand why this story makes sense and and I do too But the what of it all? That to me gets at the why of it all but the what of it all is that you Speak to people like me and like others who? Who know this this experience of more who know who know what it is to stand in awe To to feel the awe of a moment and you combine all the different elements of perspective of thought of experience and you you Validate or endorse that people who choose faith and who see courage and sacrifice as Crucial divine values are not idiots It’s I think that that’s you know accident that crucial and cross are the same thing Yes Exactly. And and and you know, we we go through this thing of well You’re just you’re you’re choosing an opiate and and to me it’s like well The alternative is not attractive to I when I started working on the Pope story I came across a statement that I believe is one of the talk show Guys late night talk show guys had said Conan O’Brien. I believe it was but he said that Pope Francis had made a pronouncement that he thought even atheists could go to heaven and in gratitude atheists have said That the Pope when he dies is welcome to enter their endless void of nothingness Well that you know the problem with that worldview is in some sense that endless void of nothingness confronts us right here and now Yes, exactly that I I try to tell people I’m I’m not so much concerned about life after death is life after birth Jesus said come that you can have life and have it more abundantly and in I’m not trying in a movie to to Espouse my particular dog. I don’t believe in my own dogma my you know, my own dogmas is Is limited and and I’m not I’m not trying to think that when I was in school and I’d study systematic theologians And I remember asking My mentor who was the head of the department? What is really the point what what are they trying to do and he said well, they’re they’re trying to Have a system of understanding that that holds up From every angle I thought that well, how is that working out for them because ultimately you get into Do you have faith or not when I write a story? It’s it’s I’ve got to jump in and trust and I don’t know where they’ll lead but I know that to not jump in is is death and So for me it’s like The Old Testament says, you know, I set before you life and death choose life and And that to me is What I I hope my works about and I’m damn sure it’s what your works about Let’s delve into this faith issue a bit, too Because the faith is a very complicated term and you know, it’s often Parodied But by the rationalists, you know to have faith in God is parodied as a like a primitive and superstitious belief but My psychological investigations convinced me that there’s no action without faith Because we are always stepping into the unknown We have to take a leap of faith to exist to do the simplest of things to literally to move and that has to do with what I said earlier is that We’re trying to move from a place of less value to a place of more value So we have to make some assumptions about what constitutes value And then we have to believe that our actions are going to have the outcome that we desire And we do that without evidence And we do that without evidence, I mean that’s partly why to be human is to be riven with anxiety it’s because there’s no certainty and so You can’t act without faith. And so then the question might if you accept that proposition You can’t act without faith and I actually believe I don’t believe that that’s a disputable proposition unless you view people as Deterministic in the way that clocks are You know so that we’re just stimulus response machines it seems to me that instead we’re moving into the unknown and We do that in Dread in some sense dread and hope and we do that because we have faith and when we lose that faith our lives fall apart and And we don’t know which way is up or down. And so then the question is well if we have to have faith What is it that we should have faith in and then the answer seems to be something like well, we should have If we have to make a decision about that Maybe we try to have faith in what in in the idea that the best should be pursued and will prevail As an organizing principle and then the question is well, what is the best and the answer is well, that’s really hard question And so we need cathedrals and we need box music and we need the stories in Genesis and we need the world’s great literature And we need all of that Theater and drama and art and aesthetics To help us understand what the best is and to determine how it should prevail and I don’t see that Technically as any different from I think it is the same thing Psychologically as the worship of Christ. I think it’s the same thing because Again, I’m trying to speak psychologically to think about what Christ represents. I’m not thinking about him as a historical figure That’s something we can get to later That image which is seen for example Laid out on these massive cathedral domes Christ as logos as as generator of the world it’s it’s the idea that the proper mode of being is brought into existence by consciousness that’s operating according to the highest possible principles and like why wouldn’t And that is the kind of faith that’s maybe got some courage associated with it, right? I’m gonna act as if this is the case. We’re all gonna act as if this is the case Now that begs the question. Does that make it real? Well Pope Benedict the 16th who’s a great intellectual hero of mine said the church always does three essential things The church worships God it evangelizes and it cares for the poor Poor broadly construed as I say anyone who’s suffering right but that first move as we said earlier is indispensable The church worships God it teaches the world right praise because without right praise the whole thing falls apart Secondly it evangelizes. What’s that? Well, that’s a cool thing too. It is oon Gellion in Greek good news they were playing with that because the the Romans would have used that in the eastern part of the Empire to announce an imperial victory They would send an evangelist ahead with the good news who on Gellion a Caesar won a victory So these very edgy first Christians who had zero social status no power no military behind them said oh no No, I got the true oon Gellion It’s about Jesus risen from the dead who was put to death by Caesar but whom God raised So that’s the proclamation of the good news that now we have hope now The sacrifice has been made and God’s love is greater than anything that’s in the world Okay. Now I got those two things in place now serve the poor now go where the pain is go where the suffering is But if you divorce them from each other and that that has happened So who cares about worship and that’s fussing around with altars and sacristies and who cares about evangelization Let’s just get down and serve the poor then it does devolve simply into social work, right? But if the three are together worship God Evangelize the dying and rising of Jesus and serve the poor now the church is is cooking, you know All right. So let’s let’s look at the second one of those So, you know, it seems to me I can understand this not that whether I can understand it or not is a hallmark of its Validity, but I have to try to understand what I can understand. I can understand the idea that bearing forward in a moral direction acting as if Being is intrinsically good and that human that humanity as part of that is also intrinsically good Bearing up under Bearing all that up as a set of propositions even in the most extreme cases of suffering I can see that as a valid moral good That’s that’s Christ’s refusal to be What would you say corrupted by the injustice of his and and terror of his fate and So that might be something like you don’t have the right to become a tyrant no matter how badly you were tyrannized Let’s say yeah, and I think that’s an unshakable moral proposition But then there’s the resurrection element of it because I could say well the first thing I would say is well I kind of understand that psychologically parts of us die and And they have to die because they’re in error They have to be cast off and we’re reborn constantly as a consequence of our movement our ascent forward there’s no movement forward without some death of the past and so I can see the resurrection idea as a metaphor for the part of us that continues onward despite our failures and constantly reconstitutes our spirit. It’s not something trivial But then there’s the insistence on in the Church of the bodily resurrection which is well Let’s call that a stumbling block to modern belief. No, no doubt about that. That’s something more than mere metaphor And so you might ask well, why is it insisted upon? Why isn’t the proposition that? You have a transcendent moral obligation to bear To to to operate for the good of all things regardless of your suffering a hard line no justification with the defeat of death necessitated I’m not trying to make a fundamental critique of the idea of the resurrection because I know there are things that I don’t know I know that for sure and God only knows how the world is fundamentally structured, but But it seems and this is a Nietzschean criticism in some sense to an a Freudian criticism That seems in in some real sense too good to be true Yeah, so and and so what do you make of the what do you make of the resurrection? How do you conceptualize it even as it’s related in the Gospels? Yeah, good. You’re raising a lot of interesting things. First of all, everything you said about it in terms of psychological Archetypes and metaphors good fine. I think those are legitimate I think those are our correct perceptions of things and it has indeed functioned that way in a lot of the literature of the world resurrection type stories, but I think what’s really interesting about the New Testament as As Lewis said, you know CS Lewis when someone said well The New Testament is just another iteration of the ancient myth and he said Anyone that says that has not read many myths because there’s something so distinctive about the New Testament And what I I would say Jordan first this I I think from the first page of Matthew through Revelation What you get throughout is this what I call this grab you by the shoulders quality They knew about literature that is conveying deep psychological and and philosophical truth, you know Paul certainly knew that literature very well Doesn’t sound like that though. It has overtones with it. It bears some of that it has family resemblances with it But what what you find on every page is this One Gellion this good news. So everything you said is true. I think it is true But it’s not exactly news. It’s part of the philosophy of Parenas It’s been around for a long time and a lot of the great thinkers of the world. And again, I agree with it I like the philosophy apprentice but the New Testament is people Who grabbed everyone they met by the shoulders to say? Something happened something’s happened here that we were not expecting That was not part of our of our thought system and it’s so shaken us up That we feel obligated to go careering around the world and indeed to our deaths Announcing it and defending it and what it was was the fact Here in the 10th chapter of Acts the Apostles This sort of almost tossed offline we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead I Don’t think people trading in mythic talk Use that kind of language mythic language and again, I say it with high praise. I love the myths But you know once upon a time and in a galaxy far far away and then a mythic story unfolds But you read the acts the Apostles do you hear about what happened? It was first is up in Galilee and then in Judea You know those people that John the bad member John the Baptist well and then this Jesus and then in Jerusalem and then We who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead It’s that’s what and then look at Paul Paul who saw him on the road to Damascus now the Pauline letters And they do not read like myths. They just don’t and I love the myths I love the philosophy apprentice, but it doesn’t read like that It reads like someone who is has been so bowled over by something and he wants you to know about it And it’s changed everything and I think what it was was what we said earlier, it’s Okay. Now now we know God’s mercy and love is greater than anything we could possibly do why because we killed God and that’s why you Paul will say I’m gonna hold up one thing to you Christ and crucified and Crucified a man was the most horrific thing they could imagine in the ancient world It was deeply embarrassing even to talk about a crucifixion Paul says no. No, let me put it right in your face. See The author of life came and we killed him but I got the good news who won Gilliam is God’s mercy and love is is greater because he brought this Jesus back from the dead There’s what you do have a you do have the following argument Which is that it isn’t clear which is harder to believe whether that happened or whether people made it up Because if they made it up that was really something and that that does strike me quite frequently reading the New Testament There are there are lines in there that hit so hard you think Hmm, it isn’t obvious to me how someone could have just thought that up So and there is that well and Jung Carl Jung who I greatly admire You know He believed I think in the same way that CS Lewis did that and he doesn’t talk about this that much But that there is this archetypal mythological pattern of the dying and resurrecting hero that has this psychological reality, which is extraordinarily deep Yeah, but that that archetype was realized once in history and that’s the could fully realized So it it came from the the mythic realm. Let’s say the realm of eternal truth the realm of pattern instinctive pattern for that matter and was fully realized at one point in history and you might think well if it’s going to be fully realized it Has to start somewhere, you know, it can’t start everywhere at the same time or right, right What’s an archetype look like when it takes flesh might be way to get at well well, and the thing is we we do see this and it does grip us because Movies like we see representations of this all the time in in my new book I talk a fair bit about Harry Potter and No, Harry Potter is definitely an archetype taking Christ figure taking flesh. Well, clearly he’s in battle with Satan himself Obviously, I mean and and she has an unbelievably profound mythological imagination and the thing that’s so fascinating about all of that is that because her Mythological imagination is spot-on. She captivated the entire globe and and produced You know this immense storehouse of wealth and dominated the entertainment landscape for a decade and you know people don’t take that seriously But it’s a it’s a great mystery to watch that Absolutely, they should it’s yeah, it’s a for not, you know Anything that grips people’s attention like that is obviously worth paying attention to by down So, you know, I’m right Lewis call them good dreams, right? So all the sort of archetypal anticipations of the gospel the good dreams of the race Or do you see Jungian? I love Jung too. But what happens if that archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to God, you know Kant’s language What would happen if that archetype became flesh and indeed that’s how they put it the word became flesh and dwelt among I think that’s also the question. We should each be asking ourselves in our own lives Yeah, it’s like well, who could we be and you say well, you don’t have to ask yourself that question It’s like well good luck with your conscience then you should be another Christ. That’s the objection to the self-created person. It’s like yeah The the idea that you can create your own values is well good luck right try luck with that project Yeah, good luck. It’s not it’s not going to work. You know Newman referred to the conscience I always loved this as the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul So we took the language descriptive of the Pope, you know the vicar of Christ But he said the aboriginal vicar of Christ which you know conscience John Henry Newman Okay, cuz oh I was thinking of Eric Norman No, John Henry Newman and I it’s it’s a beautiful way of describing it because we’d say the Christ dwelling within you is the voice of the conscience that’s calling you to sanctity ultimately to heroic self-sacrifice to being who Christ is it also is it is what people worship because Here’s a way of thinking about it. Technically. Well Look when I have a conversation with you There’s something I want from you I want I want everything you can give me I want you to be as as as There as you can possibly be that’s what I’ve been demanding all the time if my attention assuming a properly constituted Subjectivity if my attention wanders that means you’re not delivering and so if you’re wandering around and everyone’s attention is wandering away from you you’re not delivering and Conscience Because we’re so social work social creatures to the final degree Conscience tells you when you deviate from the ideal and that ideal is what people worship they by attending to that Manifestation of the ideal in you they worship it and so that’s there It’s there in the in the demands that we can’t help but make of each other and of ourselves There’s no escape from that and so I know I do think it’s a perfectly good question What would happen and this is the right question for your life What would happen if you took that seriously and so again what I see is that it doesn’t seem to me to be If the church can no longer attract young people it has to be that they’re not taking that with sufficient seriousness now yeah, I think there’s a lot to that I don’t want to externalize the blame it’s like I know the church is a human organization and all of that and But but it’s still evidence, but it’s not just that you know It’s it’s not just about going to church I one time I told you something and and I don’t know if I could drive if I was able to drive it through there. There’s something about being in a hierarchy That is that because there’s an aspect of being in a hierarchy that you talk about which is this kind of striving To to kind of be the best within that hierarchy, but there’s an aspect of being in a hierarchy Which is that the hierarchy covers you well definitely there’s no doubt about that Yeah, and so there’s something about that’s why the lowest lemm The lowest status members of a chimp group will still fight off interlopers Yeah and so there’s there’s a value in being in a community and and a hierarchy where you Like I go to confession, right? I go to confession I go to my priest and I confess my sins and and I give that to him He actually takes responsibility For for an aspect of listening to my sins and And kind of participating in my salvation and he and so the weight ends up being distributed across the community It’s not so you don’t actually just bear it on your on yourself And it’s not just even that and it’s not just a living community It’s a it’s not just those that are alive in the in the hierarchy But those that are that have left their story all the Saints are part of this hierarchy that you Engage in that you participate in and that you see as consolation as examples as you know as examples of people who have lived through difficult things that you can kind of That you can shoulder up against you know and so that’s one of the reasons why I I kind of insist with at least for the people that watch my videos is is When I say go to church, it’s not just because I tried to moralize you into doing something It’s because it’s a it’s actually a participation in how the best vision of reality works I’ve got no objection to any of that But I’ve seen you I’ve seen you I probably one of the only people in the world that has actually seen you in church and seen you Yeah, how does that worm? in church Why? See the other thing I was reading again. I was reading this book and it’s mostly a jumping-off place for me to think it’s like There’s also something Because I’m not inside the church so to speak. It’s hard to say what the utility of that is The utility of being inside the church Now being outside it all beings because I’m an outsider talking about religious matters Yeah, but I think that I think that I think that it has played a great role like I’ve often said something that I’ve often said That you’re something like King Cyrus If you know the story of King Cyrus in Scripture King Cyrus was a Persian king Who told the Jews to go back to Israel and build their temple? So he wasn’t Jewish like he wasn’t he wasn’t an Israelite He wasn’t believe in the God of the Israelites, but he was like, hey, you know that temple of yours looks pretty nice Why don’t you just go back there and and rebuild your own own thing? And so that’s definitely an effect that I’ve seen you have, you know The number of people that have become Christian because of you is hilarious. Sorry, it’s not hilarious but it’s just kind of it’s just kind of this strange thing because you you you kind of stand outside and you look at you’re Looking at the door and you’re looking at the church and you’re saying hey, this isn’t not so bad You know, look at this. What is what is going on here? Like what is this about and and then because of that Do you think you’ve got something better What was it Milton wasn’t didn’t Milton write paradise laws to justify the way of God the ways of God to man It’s a hell of an ambition in some sense. That’s what this entire religious endeavor does the literary endeavor as well What’s the point of all this? What’s the meaning of this and you know when you think about that into? to propositionally This I also saw this in my therapy practice It’s like well, what’s the meaning of life and I could easily get off on a nihilistic argument with some of my more intelligent clients They had a rejoinder for every proposition about why life was valuable But then if you said to them Don’t be so sure that that part of you is your friend look what it’s doing to you It’s so destructive and it has all of its self-justifying arguments and they might even be coherent But look at the consequences and then contrast that with Your own experience when does that sense of nihilistic despair disappear, you know for some people It’s when they’re with people they love they’re with friends or family. Some people find it in creative activity. Some people find it in charity There are various sources of meaning and that’s not propositional You see it in your own life right you can literally in therapy you have people track that it’s like well you’re nihilistically depressed let’s let’s watch your life for a week and see how that ebbs and flows with what you’re doing and Then see if we can get you participating more in what makes it ebb than what makes it flow and That’s empirical in a sense, right? I’m not asking you to believe something I’m asking you to watch the structure of your own reality to see where meaning manifests itself and then you could say In some sense the sum total of where meaning manifests itself that’s where God resides and that relationship with God that you described as as the what would you say as That that has to be maintained by our good behavior I Suppose that’s that desire to live in that space of meaning and Then you can propositionalize that you can say well that’s associated with love and it’s associated with courage it’s associated with these classical virtues, and it’s not these things that we’ve learned to deem as evil and That’s that’s where you is that is it reasonable to say that that’s where you find God if you’re searching is that the is that? Appropriate way of looking at it. I think so I met a guy one time who? Told me he went to a lecture and the lecture was on God’s existence and the guy was lecturing and then after the lecture My friend came up to him and said You know everything you say is a bunch of malarkey. There’s no God It’s just your lecture is just meaningless and the guy said okay What I want you to do is for the next week I want you to treat everyone that you meet as if they were Jesus in disguise For the guy left the lecture and he went home And you know he gets home and you know moms they’re doing the dishes and he thought to himself Well if this were Jesus in disguise during the dishes I’d probably go up and like help my mom do the dishes and then dad came home from work and rather than ignore me said hey Dad, how was how was work? How’s everything going and you know because if that were really Jesus in disguise I would do that and then they’re eating dinner together with the family and there’s one hamburger left and he turns to his brother says Hey, what once you have this and? The guy told me his life was completely transformed by literally one week of Acting in this sort of way and that’s not really surprising that Pope Benedict talked about this in one of his encyclicals that one way to God is To act in this sort of way to act as if God exists right right to act as if other people Are Jesus in disguise and you know mother Teresa talked about that too that in for her the poor and the leper and the destitute Were all Jesus In disguise and so she served them as if they were Jesus and so that is one way It seems to me to move towards God I don’t think it’s the only way though and the reason is that I know a philosopher Alastair McIntyre who mentioned to us in class one day that he was an atheist until he carefully studied the Arguments for God’s existence so there are at least some people at least one person Alastair McIntyre who really did come to God through That way, but I think the more common way is through lived practice lived action you brought up the the case of severe depression and You know it is the case of course that you can make profoundly coherent arguments of for why your life is meaningless and why Meaning there is just a vast nullity to all existence But the question isn’t are they coherent the question is are they true the question is are the premises right because anything can be coherent Within false premises the questions are is it the case that your life is worth nothing and the answer has to be no That’s a false statement. It’s a false apprehension of Look what happens if you act that out of Of course but even then you could say well no I’d be doing a sum if within within the grips of depression You’d still be thinking that I am acting according to a good given the premises that I have about the meaninglessness of my own life And of all life so I think the foundation which keeps going back to the same question the foundation of truth must be there But then the next thing to say is not that you are wrong about your life being meaningless as a false statement But that you’re also loved You are loved And it’s I think that’s the kind of thing at least my own experience That can take you out of the darkness that your life is not about you and your own thoughts It’s not about you and the systems that you are building Ultimately you are in response to something much greater than you and that thing that’s greater than you is looking at you and calling You out and saying I love you. So it’s not it’s not an either-or. It’s not well What’s true propositionally about the nature of existence and is there a soul? It’s it is that and I am calling you which is a universal call for us as Catholics This exercise that you described Dr. Kaser I believe that When we see other people Except under very extraordinary circumstances we see An illusion that we project upon them Mostly it’s a simplifying illusion. We don’t see the whole person party. I suppose because we couldn’t tolerate the the complete vision It would be too much for us, you know, so our doors of perception are three-quarters closed and exactly why that is isn’t obvious, but I Do believe that the more accurately you perceive a person The more you perceive them in the manner that you described you see this eternal Recurring conscious hero Striving against the darkness It’s and when you treat people like that of course, they’re What compelled by that? It’s a compelling way to be interacted with Although I don’t know what it is is that maybe It’s not obvious how much of that you can tolerate which is a very strange thing too, you know I’m thinking about this most of what we perceive is our memory and Sometimes that is stripped away and we see what’s there but seeing what’s there is awes awe-inspiring It’s it’s gripping and and it instills terror and I think that’s the same as the burning bush And in some sense, everything is a burning bush but You’re blinded to it The You see what’s there I think when you really love someone A child you really see that in a child if you if you’re a parent Right. You see you don’t see a generic baby. You see that actual person so that memory that Pushes generic baby into your field of vision dissipates and you see what’s actually there and that love drives that I Imagine it does that It love seems to I always thought when people fall in love with one another they see the perfection that could conceivably exist It’s like the curtains of of illusion pull apart momentarily and you see the Paradisal state that could be there hypothetically if everything was done properly And that drives the love and then maybe if you work across time, you can achieve that to some degree You know because other people think about themselves as being You know because other people think about themselves as deluded when they’re in love and that’s a very cynical way of looking at it It certainly doesn’t apply To the love between a parent and a child Yeah, I think I think you’re right I mean I know in my own life Having children has been such a unbelievably enriching experience and I think about You know, especially when kids are little and they’re asleep you go in there and they’re just sleeping and you see their little chest moving up And down there’s something painfully beautiful about that. I mean you just wish it could go on just indefinitely and For me that is something that taught me something about about God’s love right if God really is God the father Well, then you know we that’s sort of how he looks at us and he sees the good He sees the effort and of course there’s imperfections too, but I don’t know it for me Having children is a kind of I Try to sometimes tell my students Most of whom don’t have kids what it’s like and it’s very hard to describe So the best way I came up with was well, remember when you were a little child, you know, like six and you thought Oh Boys have cooties girls have cooties and the idea of romance or kissing someone is just repulsive And then you know You could imagine trying to explain to a six-year-old look at some point You’re gonna look at someone else and just find this person Unbelievably captivating and you’re gonna want to kiss them and you can say the words but a little kids like no way that that’s hard to describe and and I think becoming a parent is similar to that in that Yeah, it seems to me that it is so enriching that And is given so much at least to my life and including calling out something for me that would have never been elicited Is there’s kind of sacrifices that you’ll do for a kid that you’ll never do for you know an adult So that that’s interesting That ties in with this this idea that you brought forward of treating everybody as if they were manifestation of Christ You see that Meaningful fragility in your children and it’s beautiful and maybe if you’re if you’ve been warped and hurt you get resentful about it and and Jealous of it and that can lead to all sorts of terrible things But to the degree that you can that you’re privileged to see that That calls you to be a better person and you can think of that, you know biologically well You have these fragile creatures That you’re responsible for Of course, that’s going to call you to a higher mode of action because otherwise they’re not going to live, you know so it’s it’s very practical but So then but what you see there is if that if you view someone with love Then it’s incumbent upon you to treat them as if they’re valuable And then the more you treat other people as if they’re valuable The better person you are that just comes along for the ride in some sense. So none of that seems Questionable to me that that seems solid and so then maybe the more the more love you view other people with The higher the moral demand that’s placed on you and then I would say too. Well, then That’s another reason why? It’s so important to be truthful and and in some sense to be good because It isn’t obvious to me that you can withstand that moral load if you’re Compromised by too much sin It’s too much and Then that’s another thing that that we’re not very good at teaching young people about you know, you shouldn’t do that, you know, it’s like There’s a sanctimonious authority that goes along with that that’s the wrong tone it’s more like You know, I don’t know how you lay it out properly but you tell people that you love How to avoid the road to hell And you don’t do that because you’re shaking your finger at them or because you’re A moral authority you do it because you don’t want them to burn And I Think there’s too much of the moral authority still in the church and not enough of the You know the love that helps people avoid the fire I Think that you just beautifully described is the the unity of the love commandment that you You love your you love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and you love your neighbor as yourself Mm-hmm. The love the love of God Identifies the pattern and then they interplay between the love of the neighbor and the love of the self there in extricate They’re differentiated but inextricably intertwined So to love the neighbor is to love the neighbor is to love the neighbor You see the neighbor as he or she actually is and to respond to the actuality not to your desires Not to what you want this person to be in a utilitarian instrumental sense But to the reality of that eternal soul right there and in it through that then you see who you are That’s a commentary on the Ten Commandments, right? That’s Christ summation of the Ten Commandments. So that’s another Another illustration of that abstraction Proper behavior the story on top of that the propositions that would be the Ten Commandments let’s say so then Christ is challenged on the Ten Commandments something like Rank-order these if you’re so wise Right exactly because you’re going to say something heretical and Christ does this unbelievable slight of mind and and extracts out two superordinate principles And it’s done in such a compelling way that the interlocutor who’s basically a prosecutorial mind I Got an inquisitionist in some sense is reduced to silence That’s that’s a very powerful story it’s one of those stories you read that you think It’s not obvious how someone could have made that up There’s a lot of genius there’s an immense well of moral genius in that story and The idea that that’s some sort of casual false construct You know produced For the purposes of power. It’s like well you try to write a story that short that that’s that is that wise See how far you get with it so No, I’m a Catholic heck rituals our whole thing, you know Yeah, well, there’s peace in ritual, right? That’s the thing. You know what to expect That’s right place of safety and and and in a world that changes constantly Ritual is the only thing that provides order and so we may need that now more than ever because things are changing so unbelievably fast Which is also partly why the church should be careful about being too relevant. It’s like yep. I agree. I agree Catholicism is as sane as people get You know, it’s baroque right and and go it’s gothic not baroque it’s gothic it’s dark it’s it’s it’s it has the same Aesthetic in some sense as a horror film and I’m not being I’m not being I’m not saying something Denigrating by that. I mean it’s part of its strange mystery and all that strangeness is necessary because people would be much more Insane without it than they are with it It’s a container for that religious impulse and that impulse is to the to the good Yeah, and and and the image of the of the crucified Christ And also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together, right? It’s if you think of the symbolism of communion, you’ll notice that it gathers in every extreme from the highest to the most Transgressive all of it comes together. It’s worth understanding Transgressive all of it comes together. It’s worth unpacking that it’s ritual cannibalism in the service of God. Yeah yeah, but it’s also it’s also seen as a as a normal like meal of communion and it’s an also seen as a Sexual union because you there’s a relationship There’s a notion in which then in the altar and in that moment of communion, there’s this joining of heaven and earth You know the rays of the chalice and there’s this joining which is which is this image of this the sexual union between God and the Soul between God and his church and so all of it It just jammed into this into into this ritual as a kind of center of reality would call it And so like you said if you get rid of that then you’re going to have all kinds of strange Factitious versions of it that are going to pop up and they’re going to try to replace it and it’s leading to the fragmentation Of our world and to the breakdown of the West for sure