Gratitude! Live Navigation (rde7r1HJAxc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rde7r1HJAxc

The Young Girl dance to the latest beat has found new ways to move her feet, and the lonely voice of youth cries, what is truth? Young men speaking in the city square, trying to tell somebody that he cares. Can you blame the voice of youth for asking what is true? Yeah, the ones that you’re calling love are gonna be the leaders in a little while When will the lonely voice of youth cry what is true? This old world’s waken to a newborn bear, and our solemn lists swear it’ll be their way You better help that voice of youth find what is true And the lonely voice of youth cries what is true I’m glad to be back in the pirate captain chair Captaining the live navigation ship once again and talking about gratitude I’ve got my Sam Pell large bottle I’ve got my tea from Table Rock Tea, we get some Marathon Tea because it’s always a marathon when we do these things Jesse’s in the chat, I don’t know why he’s not in the stream, I have no idea I sent him the link, he should have it. What are you doing Jesse? Send it to your Discord, I send it to you on Twitter, I don’t know what else to do Yeah, so the topic is going to be gratitude, oh and I got potato chips, he doesn’t like potato chips And they’re sea salt and vinegar potato chips Very important for navigating live patterns Because we’re on the sea, and as Anselman says I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky Indeed, indeed And there’s Jesse And Jesse is here to help us navigate gratitude And Jesse is going to do as much of the monologue as he feels comfortable with And I’m going to jump in wherever he allows me to do so Have we started yet? We are live, we are ready to go I am here waiting for you Uh oh, Anselman had a beer He’s getting his coffee brewed though, so it’s all good How are we Mark? Let me get this Mark a friend Okay, well we can take our time thinking about gratitude We talked about discernment, judgment and action, right? We’ve talked about boundaries, we’ve talked about telos We’ve talked about a bunch of things And gratitude is one I’ve been reticent to conquer So I’m glad you want to steer the ship for this one These are rocky waters indeed We’ll try Can you hear me? I can hear you Great Thank you Mark, thank you for allowing me to come on and speak about gratitude I’m grateful for the experience if you’re passing the pun Okay, which note should I have here? Do you want to have your notes ready? I thought we’d be like I do have my notes ready Tuning all the sounds If you’re a little one, you can never shake it This is the thing, once you’re a little one, you can never shake it You’re always late to things and stuffing around Okay, so you want me just to read what we’ve got? You can do it however you want sir It’s your show to some extent here Go right ahead and give it a try Yeah, you can do it Okay, all right Maybe I’ll do my best mark and impersonation while we do this I’m going to laugh if I do that Okay, so gratitude The issue with gratitude is the opening to the idea of creation Having been created in this world, we are bound to time, to a context, to a community, to the seasons We need to find a way to be grateful When we do this, it affords you a way to feel good in right relationships, in alignment to the divine or to the logos or to you know what Instead of being skeptical and cynical, we need to attend to that which we appreciate, to what we find true and are grateful for Through proper judgement, discernment, action, you gain the outlook to appropriately see the potential that is before you Maybe we should stop there Maybe save that up How about that as a… I like that, you’re born into a particular time and place, right? And so you should stop every once in a while in your progression forward through life, through the universe, through whatever And appreciate the fact that, well, you’re here And you’re still here, even though yesterday you were here, you’re still here, right? And even though there are constraints on you, and maybe the constraints seem onerous or numerous or impossible somehow, you’re still here Well, there’s always reasons to despair, right? There’s always reasons to despair You can get the Velcroed pathlon to the metaphor where it’s far easier to stick to things that are negative than they are positive You can also connect this out with brain chemistry, right? It takes a lot longer to receive than it does negative Stress hormones, there’s always reasons to battle with what you think is reality But gratefulness is a way to kind of mitigate that challenge of stress Because potential is just potential You don’t know what’s going to happen next I could say, cheeseburger sandwich, and you’ll be like, what? It’s because potential is always before you, right? You don’t know I’m going to say that And so you don’t know the challenges that have come before you, but what you can do is, in some ways, stop, look, listen To where you are and sort of orient yourself towards, I like to say it in truth, but Can we go on with the notes? Yeah, go ahead Okay So, potential So, potential There Potential phenomena is always before you, but how you see that, what attitude you are bringing to the patterns of life is important How do you navigate the symbolic season of the life that you are in? It’s not easy to be grateful because life does involve pain and suffering It’s easy to find reasons to be resentful Resentfulness and cynicism are extremely toxic You can make yourself drunk on your inner critic It is easy to be selfish and bitter Gratitude isn’t about being happy, it’s about being content No matter how much you lose, having had something to lose is still a way to be grateful How you interact with others, how you navigate the patterns of your own manifest behaviors is important How you interact with the spirit of gratitude determines your attention towards everything else Waking up and being grateful is important Because it sees your intentional effect for the day It sets your intentional effect for the day Crazy Christians talk about praying in the morning Other types of religions, other types of religious practices have modes of behavior, modes of patterns, modes of interacting with the world It sets up an orientation, a spirit, a logos for the day, the particular seasons of life Or even for holy days, festival days What the Lord has done is strip us away from that context of the seasons of life It’s flattened out the world The basics are Easter, Easter is not about chocolate, it’s not about fasting Christmas is about sacrificing for others, it’s about having a broader perspective, giving out Christmas is about receiving ends, everything is flattened and decontextualized The contrast is being lost, which is the next thing we go to Prayer gives you the contrast The idea of this flattening, this gratitude is really where you’re pointing your attention You can always point your attention at your inner critic and become that part of you To the exclusion of the other parts of you Because it’s all about attention And you become what you attend to, very much It’s a very big danger And I was listening to busy data, I’ve been out all day at meetings, driving all over the state Actually driving to another state and having meetings And I came late to the Paul Van Der Klay livestream, which was unfortunate Because I had asked a question of Paul and I wanted to hear his answer And I’m very grateful that he allowed me to ask a pretty complicated question And I was listening to a good portion of the livestream, I sort of missed the first part of the answer I caught up on it just before the stream actually And at one point I heard this question where somebody was asking, I don’t remember the exact question It was something like, if Mary hadn’t anointed Jesus, would he still have resurrected? And it was like, that is Christian materialism That is the clearest example of Christian materialism And I was grateful that I heard that Because it’s such a clear example of, well, are these steps to follow to get this to happen? It’s like, no, and had these steps not happened with history of unfolded differently, it’s like, no Because when your attention is set on the things or the process or the what actually happened Did this, right, then you’re not pointed higher anymore And so when you’re not pointed higher, it’s hard to be grateful Because it’s your earlier point, I mean, this world is full of suffering And things don’t go your way and you make predictions and they’re wrong And maybe a bunch of predictions are right and the most important ones are wrong And you just can’t, I mean, nothing goes well over time because we all die Like, my dogs are dead, I want my dogs back, but they’re dead But I’m grateful for the time I had with them Because that’s part of re-enchanting the world is not just looking at where you are now Or looking at your suffering or identifying with your inner critic because it’s easy to critique Or it’s hard to build, but it’s really easy to critique, right And we’re tuned to that evolutionarily in the same way we’re tuned to negativity because the negative stuff kills you And so we’re tuned evolutionarily to pay attention to negative signals We want to pay attention to our inner critic It’s just that when we identify with the inner critic, now we have a problem Because we can’t be grateful for all the things that aren’t critiquable It’s a small number of things that are critiquable in any domain You don’t engage in a critique that does not have a true tell-off, right You’re just critiquing for the sake of critique, for the sake of glorification, right What’s the aim there, right? You’re aiming back at yourself And that’s often why the critique space is often diminished itself And that often becomes bitter because the tell-offs of the critique is usually pointed back at themselves Right, if you’ve painted a big target on yourself, of course things are going to look, you know You’re not going to have proper context or contrast because all that attention is focused at you And really the way to be grateful is to focus outward from yourself and appreciate what you have, right I appreciate the saying, go painting, right, I picked up $20 and it’s sat with me ever since I’ve got paintings and pictures and portraits, a whole bunch of things that I’ve kept with me for years And they’re kind of grounding in some ways of, oh, I remember when I caught this from here, I got that from there And that’s not materialism, that’s appreciating the context in the moment I can look back at that and go, ah, that’s a reminder of what that time was And it’s not a hindsight bias, it’s a way of going, well, this is where I’ve come from That’s another thing, grounding is a great way to say this Okay, so I’ll keep going I might say that again, because it’s a little bit, maybe you can work on the wording Gratitude leads to the restoration of the right celebration that is highlighting the ideal Right, the divine, the logos Gratitude increases your participation in the true, the good, the beautiful Even if you’re not a true person, you’re a true person, you’re a true person Gratitude increases your participation in the true, the good, the beautiful Evil, however, is the lack of potential, is the oppression of having no option, having no agency Gratitude affords the contrast, contrast is important, gratitude affords agency Fubarous, pride, malice, depression, despair, disease, arrogance, greediness, wrath Impatience, impotence, envy, self-aggrandizement Apathy, these patterns will manifest before you, arguably in you But it’s gratitude that leads you out of this negative thinking This gets into the intellectual frames of the hermeneutics of suspicion Here’s a note, suspicion is a type of judgment We’ve been talking about this for the last few weeks, what is the justification for your suspicion? You cannot be grateful for the things that you are questioning Yeah, I remember reading over the notes and thinking, yeah, this is a pretty good circumnavigation of this whole issue of gratitude, because you can’t not pay attention to negative things, so you have to reset by paying attention to not just the positive things around you, but the positive things that are spiritually around you, or ethereally around you It’s the gratitude, not for the large champel bottle that I can just go to the store and buy, they sell them all over the place But gratitude for the fact that they sell them all over the place Gratitude for the fact that there’s an infrastructure that enables me to have this stuff from Italy, it’s kind of amazing And I can critique that the store was out the other day, or I had to go to a different store and it’s further away, but by some force, mystical force, we have this amazing trade network that enables me to have this and drink it Trade, like reciprocity, leads towards humility, right? You don’t think you’re afraid, but you realize what you are and what you think of yourself, what surrounds you and the reality that I’m showing you You have to think about that, you have to think You’re mic’s a little crazy Yeah, it changed for me Try again It’s still soft and bassy A little better Nice How about that? Speaking of Gratitude for even having Adolescent of potential Potential does not lie in today Gratitude re-enchant A weak frame of spirit of ungratefulness leads to the corruption of integrity and worship Your moment of resentfulness is a deceit, is a type of blindness, is a type of arrogance You need to acknowledge that you had a yesterday but even having a yesterday, you still have what comes next Miracles do happen, and you acknowledge that What should you be grateful for? Most likely it will be a specific thing What you appreciate can show you what your ideals are What you appreciate can reveal your preferences You prefer to live an easy life, you prefer to be comfortable What are your actual prayers? What are the questions that are like a rock and a shoe? What do you do when you wake up and you’re not in the right spirit? What do you do to realign yourself with the culture, with the community, with your loved ones, with the divine with the telos, with the logos? What frame and patterns do you recognise? We need to be grateful for the things that are weak for us, the things that are being passed to us the traditions that we are living in What are you responsible for? How do you respond to times of challenge? I guess that’s not fair For me that brings up a bigger issue in some sense If you think you know your virtues and values then you must be being grateful for something If you’re not being grateful for something, the odds that you understand your virtues and values are probably zero It’s taking the time to be grateful to express gratitude that gives you the contrast to orient yourself away from the here and the now, the progress, the pressing needs and contrast all of the here and now with what’s come before, what happened today, what’s happening now What could happen in the future That’s a way of re-enchanting your world I know the world is already enchanted I sent him a comment on one of his videos the other day and he used a bunch of that language Some of you are saying I know about re-enchantment The world is already enchanted It’s not re-enchanted for those people Some people are seeing a flat or compressed world and the gratitude gives you the opportunity to re-inflate that world You can’t take the time to express gratitude when your vows are passed or what political party is in power or what I ate for breakfast or the sum total of the atomic states of whatever was compressed when the Big Bang exploded or whatever nonsense you come up with in your head You can’t take the time to express gratitude when your vows are passed or what political party is in power You can’t take the time to express gratitude when your vows are passed or what political party is in power You can’t take the time to express gratitude I think that’s the flip What a ridiculous question The procedures and the processes are important but they’re not everything That’s the flip I think that’s the way to do it You’re not just differentiating that and it is that gratitude that gets you out of that cycle to some extent What did my internet tell me about? You forgot me? I overpriced it Let me know if it’s working out I want to thank Manuel, Sally Jo and Mark for helping me get these notes together I wonder if you can hear in these notes what’s Jesse, what’s Mark, what’s Manuel, what’s Sally Jo What’s even Adam I think that’s the secret assassin It was great Even Adam agreed to stay at the late last Friday night I’m in the new world here I want to say thank you to Adam for agreeing to at least try to stay up I’m going to try to get the screen to work Here we go We need to try to observe I’m going to try to get the screen to work I’m going to try to get the screen to work I’m going to try to get the screen to work I’m going to try to get the screen to work I’m going to try to get the screen to work Ungratefulness has become the norm of modernity Ungratefulness is a lie Pragmatically you are here today in this moment Listening to these words Remember to dare The ultimate expression of gratitude is that relationship That you have matter That you are in relationship to yourself, to others, to nature To the culture, even to the logos And there will be trade-offs This is a question of why relationships through gratitude Deem the world to be so intimately One thing, particularly in England and Australia Is that custom, if you are on a bus Before you get off you thank the bus driver This is an arbitrary thing This is something that slowly slips away It shows that you respect yourself You respect the public But they are participating in the community You respect the time, energy, and attention You respect the bonds of society, of the spirit, of the community You are in a right relationship What are some of the examples of gratitude? Yeah, I like that Because it is a piece of society A piece of community that you should be grateful for Especially if you lie on the bus There are so many things throughout the day to be grateful for I am grateful that I have internet, a microphone I am grateful that I have my computer I was driving today, top down With the convertible And just the ability to listen to Paul VanderKlaai while I am driving to a meeting These are miracles I have heard a lot about Paul VanderKlaai While he was on the live stream While you are driving down the street It is important to recognize how much we benefit From society and all the things going on in society Yeah, I was even last night reflecting, I was waiting for a film, and maybe I’ll say it later, in the context of this monologue called The Star Wars. And I was driving back and I became aware that at any moment I could say to the Spotify AI car engine Siri, or the Apple iPhone, and say, hey, play this, play ShopCart, play Schubert. OK, let’s go here, let’s go this. All the world’s music, you say majority, 90% of the world’s music can be found on the streaming service. And at a clear and clean prompt, bam, I’m playing. I’m now at 16 Lovers Lane, it’s a great album. These are the things, you can be grateful for the participation, right? It’s not just an artwork, it’s an outsourcing of the distributive cognition, the aesthetic, right? It’s not just a church, it’s not just a building, it’s a place to meet, a place to sing, a place to worship, a place to celebrate, a place to commiserate. Things are not just the one thing that you want to materialistically see, they have a sphere, they’re resonant, but they manifest, they have to nominate within them. Right? And so by observing that, you reorientate yourself, and then through that reorientation, you see it once. That participation is an acceptance of the gratefulness that you have within you, and your lack of participation actually shows you what you’re grateful for, what you’re resentful for. Well said. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, yeah, your participation and other people’s participation really signals gratitude and ingratitude pretty effectively, and not just their apparent participation, but how they’re participating. And you can just see that. You don’t need to, you know, you don’t need to propositionalize it or break it down, you can just see it. What’s manifest, right? This is the thing that you know, that smiling phenomenon, you walk down the street, you just smile at people, eventually people smile back at you. Strange phenomenon, guys, it works. Try it. If you don’t around people, drive to your nearest gas station and be nice to the gas station person. Be nice to your petrol station if you’re over here. Here we go. Last little section of notes. In every moment, in every given moment is a gift, something that you haven’t earned. It brought you to that moment. And in a grand of that way, you have no way of reassuring yourself that there’ll be another given moment. But that is an opportunity to be grateful. The opportunity in the present moment affords you the experience of wonder and appreciation. It is the opportunity, not the thing that is given to you. That is a blessing. That is the thing to be grateful for. It is the opportunity, not the thing that is given to you. That is a blessing. That is a thing to appreciate. It is a miracle. We didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy, do something. We wouldn’t be grateful for the gift that is the present moment. The opportunity is the gift. And within every gift is a spirit of gratefulness, a blessing, a thankfulness. Every given moment is a new gift. And if you miss the opportunity, there will be another moment given to you. And another moment and then another level moment. At the personal level, we cannot be grateful for the loss or the bereavement, but we can be grateful for the opportunity, for the discovery, for the development of character. When we are confronted with difficulty, when we’re rushing through life, when we’re stopping to see the true, the good and the beautiful, we can be grateful. Once in a while, something very difficult will be given to us. And I’ve gone through many of these things. I know Mark’s gone through many of these things, but we can be grateful that we got through them. We can be grateful for the lessons that we have learned. We can be grateful for the wisdom that we can impart to others. Right. There’s a way to participate in that challenge, in that difficulty. This given moment is a chance to learn, to suffer, to stand up. We are given something, are given to us in this moment. There are opportunities and they avail themselves of these opportunities. And we are the ones that, people that do this are the ones that we admire. They make something out of life. And those who fail to get another opportunity are the ones that we don’t appreciate. Another opportunity is another opportunity to see the world, the wonderfulness, the richness of life. How often do we stop? How often do we run through when we don’t stop, we don’t listen, and we don’t appreciate the opportunities that are before us. You have to build. We have to stop. We have to see the signs in our lives and be grateful for what we have. I’m going to keep going. We’ll finish this off. When we don’t stop, we don’t get to that quietness. We don’t find our center, our being and realize in that moment that being is good. But because you have life, you have something to be grateful for. You have something to give. You have something to offer. You have a way to celebrate. Gnosticism is to say that the world is broken, right? The way to get yourself out of that Gnostic path is to say the world is not broken. The world is beautiful. There are beautiful things all around you. There are miracles at many different layers, layers that you are participating in. Right? We live in a beautiful world, a world of wonder, a world of ethics, also world of the routine, a world of mountains and of valleys. When people are grateful, we participate with them. We are participating in a joyfulness. And that’s what we need. We need a network of grateful, joyful people. And that will heal the world in some Christian or foundational sense. We’ll heal the world of materialism or heal the world of modernity. You can pick your talents, right? But you can at least participate in these layers of being. You can navigate the path. Very nice. Good ending. I like the ending. The ending was great. Right. It’s going to be messy at the end, but yeah. No, no, the, the ending was good. Yeah. I mean, I think that that, that is the key. I mean, we’re doing stuff and whether it’s going well or not, we can be grateful for the opportunity. And one of those deep things that people don’t understand is that learning is failure. And we don’t like failure, but we like learning, but we don’t like failure. They’re the same thing, guys. It’s not that you can’t learn anything without failure, but what you’re learning is not much, but you learn far better when you fail at something. Because it teaches you that your assumptions are wrong. And that’s actually really important. And it also teaches you what to do when that happens, because it happens to you and then you have to deal with it. All right. And sometimes the answer is, you can choose not to learn. Sometimes the answer is you could choose not to, or you could choose not to deal with it and then you would become resentful and having missed the opportunity. Well, that’s going to, that’s going to be a next week’s theme. I think it’s responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think we’re going to go there. Um, yeah, I think that’s what’s important is again, the gratitude gives you the ability to orient and navigate. Against the stream of materialism, against the stream of your normal life, against the stream of everything that’s going on, right? Like all of these things are, are things that need to be pushed against in some fashion and gratitude is the pushing against sort of the stream of the solipsistic, cynical, skeptical, critical tendency that we have because we live in an imperfect world and it’s really easy to criticize. I mean, I often joke with people about, um, how, you know, I asked them how they’re doing and they say, I can’t complain. And I’m like, Ooh, Ooh, I can show you how to complain. I’m really good at it. Do you need lessons? And they always decline, which is good. Um, but, but yeah, you know, getting them out of that sort of neutral position. And, um, yeah, I think that I, I, I like it. You, the neutral position is a lie. The neutral position is actually a lie in some sense, the neutral position there, right? Like, you know, how are you going? You say fine. Like that’s not, that’s not, that’s not an answer, right? Well, it can be, it can be fake. There’s no way to participate. Yeah. Right. There is a, there is a neutral answer. The neutral, the neutrality is in the manifestation of reality or pro-manifestation of reality. Right. It’s not good or bad yet because you’re in the right. And you can, you can, you can couch that in terms of space or time. It doesn’t matter. They’re transposable. Einstein resolved that for us. Right. So there is a neutral space, but when you have a negative valence to it, right. Or when you’re, you know, there’s no reason to have a, you know, say, can’t complain is different from, from, from saying, you know, oh, well, you know, the day is still here, you know, like that’s a very different valence. Yes. Okay. The contextualization of the answer, the spirit behind the answer, right. Right. You, and I do, I want to jump through these, these, these comments. So Anselman, this trust in ultimate benevolence, be grateful for your existence. That’s a good place to start. A lot of people, a lot of people are not Anselman is good when they smile back, but don’t be hurt when they don’t. Yeah. You know, you smile for the sake of you trying to improve the world, not for the sake of you succeeding. Hey, that’s where people get messed up. It’s like, sometimes the success is in the trying because again, you learn through failure. So Anselman always look forward to looking back on your tribulations. That’s a good point. We didn’t, we didn’t address that. But yeah, it’s good to have tribulations and then you can look back on them. You know, you can, you can always be grateful for your success. Uh, you know, in the future, uh, Nathaniel Gnosticism, like Christianity is very well it’s the same thing. Um, the type you were describing about me, something like Sethian. Yeah. Categorizing Gnosticism is a waste of time. I mean, you can categorize anything to death, right? There’s an infinite amount of detail. One of the videos I’m going to work on. Oh shoot. I was going to release a video for tomorrow. Maybe I’ll set that up after the stream. Um, one of the videos I thought up because I figured out how to do it is on scaling. So I figured out a way to describe scaling to the Muppets. So very happy about this. I’m like, I’ve been, this is so obvious that I can’t explain it to anybody. I don’t know why, but I think I finally, um, I finally figured it out. So I’m going to be working on that video. Um, and maybe we’ll get it out in a week or two. We’ll see how motivated I am. I got, I got another video too that I want to, that I really want to record. Anselman. It’s not Gnostic to say the world is broken. That is a Christian position, but it is good despite the brokenness because God doesn’t work in it. Right. Exactly. Yeah. The Gnosticism really comes in and you know, how material, materialistic you are, right? How focused you are on the here and now, how focused you are on perfection or universality. Those are closely related. They’re not quite the same thing. Same thing. Um, and, and yeah, I mean, not being able to be grateful for the, the, the varied attitude of the people around you, which means there’s varied perspectives, which feeds into the distributed cognition. Like you can be grateful for that. Um, even if it’s negative, like, look, you know, the homeless drug addict has a nice contract to contrast to your comfortable life and you can find gratitude that you’re not in that situation because you could be, and you might be someday. Um, or maybe you were in the past cause you know, there are people like that. And, um, you know, like my uncle used to be an alcoholic and he’s not anymore. So, and, and, uh, you know, he talks about it quite a bit. So, um, yeah, you know, there’s, you can always be there. And your relationship matters. Right. Kind of push back a bit with Antony though, your relationship to the world matters, right? And how you frame your relationship to the world matters. Right. I would say the Christians kind of wars, they, the world has fallen. It was, you know, it’s hard to eat a word out of it. Then broken, broken is just not the sense that, you know, it can never be fixed. Right. So what if broken, it can never really be put back together in the same context. Right. But when it’s fallen, right. It can be restored. I different way of symbolizing the world. And I, that’s, yeah, I tried to watch the wheel of prime series on Amazon, which is that for garbage, but it can go there. But I lost about 10 seconds before I’d do that whole rant for my partner. I was like, what is this? It’s right there, right? If you want a good description of narcissism, just read the opening monologue to Amazon’s real time. That’s it. Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s very true. Yeah. Um, yeah. Also this thing is like, if you don’t have this right relationship towards life, you don’t see that life, but there’s a gift, but the miracle, right? And you can’t have this if miracle blessings or rhetoric inside of the world broken, right? You can’t receive a broken gift when some you can write, you can receive a, but it’s not really a gift at that point. It’s a, it’s an opportunity to fix something or it’s, you know, it’s an opportunity to restore something. It’s, it’s not, it doesn’t sit right. Right. If someone wants to give you a broken clock, you’re like, oh, okay. You’re giving me a challenge. You’re not really giving me a kick. Like, okay, I’m going to do something about it, which is fine. The challenge can challenge something to be grateful for, but you have to recognize the difference between, between the contrast between what’s before you or the relationship. Right. Right. Well, and the gratitude really is about looking at that North star that Jordan Peterson talks about, right. And looking up and taking time to look up and doing that orientation. And you know, he talks about it, right? Oh, the star moves, you move, you try to move closer to the star. Then the star moves in relation to you. And it’s all talking about orientation. You know, it’s, it’s, and, and it is, you know, the magic in some senses in that relationship. It’s in not your position per se, but your position with your valence relative to the position of the riches and values you’re looking at, which is how you get Christian materialists is that they’re. It’s not that their position is wrong, right. Per se, I mean, it might be also, it might also be wrong, but what’s really wrong is their valence and their attitude about the world. Like if you think that the procedure of when you were putting the two matters to the resurrection, I don’t want to tell you like that’s so materialistic. I mean, that’s not a modern or modernity problem at all at that point. Um, if you’re, if you’re, if you imbibe enlightenment values, uh, or so you think, cause the enlightenment doesn’t actually speak about values. If you think it does, you’re, you missed something. Enlightenment just steals its values from Christianity. Um, it doesn’t talk about values. It assumes that you’re Christian period. Um, little, little hint, um, right. Well, no, I mean, everybody back then was, wasn’t. Yeah. Yeah, there wasn’t the alternative didn’t exist in some sense, not to them. I mean, they were not where they were. Um, it, it, it’s that relationship that you have to the thing. And one of the problems is the way the enlightenment is interpreted, because again, you think they’re enlightened values or something, which is crazy talk. Um, is a bad relationship to what they were talking about, which is ironically relationship, uh, cause that is, that’s what philosophy talks about. What’s your relationship to your axiomatic assumptions of the world? Um, yeah, that’s, that’s all philosophy is unlike theology. Theology is the other side of the register. It’s like, no, no, no. How do you come by your virtues and values? Like what informs that that’s theology, right? Yeah. But they’re both, um, introducing interesting, uh, rabbit holes of materialism in their own way, right? Because when you try to, uh, squish that world into, oh, well, it’s all just these relationships and they’re direct and discreet one to one, you know, you fail. And what that would just, that would just, yeah. Right. Reduction. Right. And you hear that a lot. It’s like, oh, you know what it is? It’s just that they want to make money. And that’s why the pharma companies did it. Really? No, that’s, that can’t be true. Uh, very few people do things for just money. And, and by the way, are they going to be buried with the money? No, of course not. They’re going to spend it on something. It’s the thing they’re spending it on at the very least. That’s the reason they’re doing it. Not the month, the money is an interim thing. It doesn’t, it doesn’t contain a stable value over time. The time value of money is, is, is a real thing. So yeah. And having gratitude sort of teaches you that to some extent. Well, the importance is what people are really looking for. Right. When you, when you have limited potential, right. That’s a, the property technically. Right. You know, I have the potential to make like, you know, food for days in my house, right. And that’s what they call weight before. Right. You could hardly call me poor in that sense. Right. So when you have this limited opportunities before you use limited potentials, right. That’s classically suppression as well. Right. And depression is part of the flattening of the world. Right. So the way you get out of that is, you know, realize the bare, the groundedness, the bare basicness of what you have before you. Right. You might be living on the street. You might be poor, but you might still have your family and you can start somewhere. Right. And that’s, that’s the, that’s the opportunities that before you. Um, I think we even talked to Andre, you know, a couple of months back about starting somewhere, starting local, even if you have to pay to meet up with someone that’s a coach who encouraged you to get you to do things, right. At least, I can’t, at least you starting somewhere. Or, you know, having difficulty getting a job was, you know, find something for a couple of days a week. It might be a meaningless routine, mundane job. Listen, you’ve got somewhere, you’re starting somewhere, right. And that can afford you further and further opportunities. And those opportunities are the things that you end up being grateful for. And that will transform how you see the world, how you navigate the time. Right. Right. And that gets back to relationship. The thing that re-enchants relationship is gratitude. Yeah. And I’m grateful for Mark. Like, yeah, these, these streams and him setting up this, this time here has been, yeah, transformed my life. I’m a better person for it. So hopefully that passes on to you guys, the people that come on each week and you know, participate in the streams or at least in the text channels, you know, we’re grateful for that. I’m grateful for that. So I speak for Mark in essence, but yeah. Um, they are given moments and we have to appreciate the moments that we in. And that’s another thing. Yeah. Um, the modern world is probably a bad frame constantly point back to, but that decontextualization, because yeah, you know, what’s his email, Gilgris, Tom Holland, very few people now keep putting towards this relationship aspect of life. And that’s, that’s, you know, COVID was the, the contextualization of relationships, right? Right. For business thing. Right. Right. Well, and, and, and look, we have a comment from Nathaniel, by the way, Mark, the video where you talked about Star Trek and what formed you as we, you watching things that meant a lot to me on age 16. It’s been very illuminating. Well, I’m glad to hear that. I’m doing much the same thing for better and worse. Yeah. It always is. I mean, it’s amazing. The things you sort of see. I mean, I meant to think I’ve mentioned this before and maybe, maybe, uh, maybe Jesse and I will get around to doing this matrix video. We’re thinking of, um, rewatching the matrix after listening to Jonathan Peugeot’s breakdown of the matrix three times, cause it took me three times. Um, you know, as many times as I had already watched it and sort of analyzed it actively and broken it down, I got more out of it again. And I’m just like, wow. Your matrix is about agency. Well, and the interesting thing that people don’t recognize is that you don’t ever break out of the matrix. Like the machine still control everything at the end of the day. Like, it’s really not a good story. It’s like not a happy story. Like it’s, it’s just like, yeah, but the machines, you still negotiate with them and they can still snuff you out at any minute. And the fact that they’re not choosing to do so is really just this negotiation around power and they still maintain the power. So it’s not like it’s a good postmodern power narrative where the, the people rise up and communism everywhere or something like that doesn’t happen. Like nobody ever gets out of the matrix. Even if you’re unplugged from the battery portion of the matrix, you’re still not out of the damn matrix. Wait a minute. Is this good? Cause they still live close to the earth. We’re still warm enough, you know, and they’re, they’re beneath the city, the dead city, the sewers of the dead cities. Like they’re actually beneath the sewers of the dead. It’s like, can you get much lower? And it’s like, well, no, we’re not in hell because we’re not in the core of the earth burning. Okay. I guess that’s a plus, but you know, you can see the Dante there too. Right? Like, Hey, you’re, yeah. Wow. You know, I’m grateful for my dad. This is the time of BCR. And also like keeping things right. You play things on television. You get off and you can still do that by the way. Now. It’s just like, Hey, you can still do that. I find that it’s super nice to try. But you feel good. Um, no, no, no, not today. Um, although we used to, it used to be a widely accepted practice. There’s something called compulsive. And you just go out and take that. Well, what my dad used to do is anytime something was mature age or when you at least edited it out, let it out. But I could at least participate in the story. And one of those transformers, Sasha Troopers. And then I, that was, that’s the, that’s a key cornerstone to me. Cause it completely breaks away from sci-fi and Star Wars. It’s a complete contrast to that. You know, obviously there’s like Trinity and a bunch of healing plug files, which you can edit all out. But when I went back in years later, I was like, there’s a shower. Like, but, um, maybe, maybe it doesn’t need to be in the phone, but, uh, yeah, we can, you can be thankful for that. Which protects you. That’s the point there. Right. It doesn’t all you expose you to the, to the insane levels of the world, but at least you can participate in them. Right. You don’t need to know how insane everything is, but you can always get an understanding of how, um, how much that there is in the world and how complex things are. Right. Well, then you can be, you can be grateful for your submission to others, taking care of things that you now don’t have to worry about, even if they do so badly. You didn’t have to worry about, like, it’s like the one bad thing, right? They do 10 things in the same domain and you pick up on the one mistake. It’s like, yeah, but the other nine times you didn’t have to be anxious about it. It’s like, isn’t that like, you know, like, like a little thing too, like, like dinner, dinner’s just taken care of. And it’s like, well, maybe it’s never what you want to eat ever. Maybe, but you don’t have to worry about cooking it and getting it ready. And like, cause people are always, people have a real thing, right? They, they’re always trying to figure out like what my favorite food is or right. They’re always trying to give me my favorite thing. And it’s like, I really don’t have a favorite thing. I have lots of favorite things that I’m just like content with all kinds of crazy things, you know, like what’s your favorite candy, the kind with sugar in it or not. Because some candies, you know, like, you know, I got to really like, I’m just super easy going about these things. Right. And, you know, people are always trying to anticipate that. And it’s like, no, no, no. You make me a steak as long as it’s decently cooked. If I don’t have to cook it, I’m just so grateful that I didn’t have to figure out what it was, saw it out or, you know, prepare it or buy it at the store. Right. And, and then cook it. And I’m just so happy about that. You know, I mean, even just something stupid, like grilled cheese, grilled cheese is one of the easiest things in the world to cook and it’s so flavorful. Right. It’s like butter and cheese and bread. Like, how can you get any better? Right. I’m going to add some ham. You know, grilled cheese and ham, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. But really, like, it’s so much tissue when someone else makes it. I don’t know why. I’m just glad that it is. Because it’s easy enough to make and, you know, so yeah, just, just being able to, to find the gratitude in that is, you know, I think super important. I did, I did want to go back to go back to the matrix here because Nathaniel Balthazar refers to Mary and the church as the matrix. Yeah. Well, different kind of matrix. I think it seems like we all have to enter a matrix or one will be assigned to us. Yeah. If you believe you do not have to you without your knowledge or consent, as I like to say. Yeah. Well, I like Anselman. Well, matrix is a womb. So Mary giving birth to Christ in the church, which gives birth to the souls. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Not an original thought Anselman. I don’t, I don’t, there aren’t a lot of original thoughts. We can be grateful that we, that we rediscover things that other people already knew. Right. And we have a real problem with that. So one of the things I learned sort of the other day was my good buddy Jefferson, who’s the redneck philosopher king, wonderful human being, one of my favorite peoples. He was telling me about this podcast, about this kind of crazy thing. I was on the Teatrogrammaton podcast, which I guess is Rick Rubin’s podcast. And he had Huberman on and this Dr. Cruz guy, and they’re talking about all this stuff. And they made this comment in the middle. He basically said, you’ve got all these people telling other people that being in the sun is bad for them right now. I bought my convertible while I was in Hawaii, by the way, very cool. I’ve gone to Hawaii twice. On purpose, right. I could have bought a cheaper car for sure. I could have bought a car for half the price. It was very nice. Actually, I loved the Elantra. It was a very nice car. I rented one. I was like, wow, this is actually a really good car. I think for 20 grand, it’s fantastic. It’s a 10 year warranty. It’s great. And then I said, no, I need that convertible because I need the sun. I need to get as much sun as I can because I spend way too much time in these silly blue light computers. And I said, I need that convertible because I need the sun. I spend way too much time in these silly blue light computers. But they’re basically saying that. And I’m going like, yeah, but A, no one’s dumb enough to believe it. And B, they probably don’t believe it themselves. And then I realized while I listened to this podcast, that’s wrong. There are doctors who should damn well know better. It is impossible for the sun to be toxic to us because we couldn’t be here. If that were it’s not like it’s not like we had early sunscreen and we’ve been redeveloping, no, like obviously not. It’s like, it’s the sort of thing that’s so obvious to me that I was discounting that A, anybody would say it and believe it and B, that anybody hearing it would actually take something so ridiculous. So obviously incorrect, seriously. And yet they’re pointing out, no, no, people say this and believe it. And people take them seriously. And it’s like, no, this is bad. And then you see that to your point with the fake news virus scam, scamdemic, where it’s like, you’ve got to stay indoors and you can’t go outside and you know, it’s like, what? And, um, yeah. We’re just doing this to the old people. We’re just doing this to the old people. We’re doing this to the old people. We’re just doing this to the old people. Come on man, come on. Even you, even you have to be quiet. Now your mic went soft again. You got to, you got to fix that. Anselman, vitamin D and E, isn’t it? No, uh, actually Dr. Cruz does not think so. He thinks it’s all light and water. Uh, I have to do more research. He talks a lot about semiconductors and I’m like, some of that I know is wrong. And some of it is correct enough that I’m okay with it. Um, but basically he points out that people in California have vitamin D deficiencies and they’re in California with like land of sunshine, uh, and excellent weather where you can, you know, basically 12 months out of the years. Very, the variability in Monterey, California is like, you know, it’s like, in Monterey, California is like zero. Like in LA is pretty, pretty, you know, yearly variability is like nothing. It’s always between 60 and 70 or something stupid. It’s ridiculously nice weather in California. Um, but the reason why is because, um, of the electromagnetic interference, according to him, electromagnetic interference and some of the things that are affecting the Van Allen belt. I have to look that up. Um, I’ve heard some of it before. And I’ll tell you, when I flew over California, I knew immediately when I was in California. I’m just saying, like there’s weird stuff out there. Um, and he says, send to New York City. And I’ve been to New York City a few times. And yeah, New York City is one of those places when you’re there, you know it. I don’t know how you know it. You can, you can be blindfolded. I’m telling you right now, when I drive, somebody drove me blindfolded around the country and I hit California, New York City, I’d know right away. Immediately. I don’t know why. Um, so I, I have some affinity for this idea. He’s also got some pretty interesting evidence backing it up. Um, and it’s just interesting that people can say sort of, you know, like ridiculous things, you know, like, like without science, where would we be? I don’t know. We got here without science. Like science wasn’t eternal. Science is a relatively recent thing. Um, and I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll, I’ll, I’ll say it again. Um, these, you know, science recently, I don’t know if it was this year or just last year, discovered, discovered. Okay. You ready? You ready? Brace yourself. Here’s what science discovered recently. That if you are in love and you get out of love, you know, rather jarringly, right? It’s, it’s, it’s an exit. Your heart is physically damaged. And I’m like, everyone knew that already for thousands of years. It’s in all the literature. It’s in all the songs. It’s like you’re not telling any, anything new guys. Like, oh, you validated it through some kind of ridiculous experiment that you probably should be doing because you’re all unethical bastards. Fine. Fair enough. But also no, like we already knew this. We didn’t need, we didn’t need it. And a few months later, they, they scientifically proven that if you fall in love, it actually reverses in some cases, heart damage. We already knew this. Everybody already knew this. This is not new information. I hate to break it, but now we have scientific validation. I have a video on what is science, by the way, where I basically point this out. It’s just a form of validation. Yeah, it’s independent validation. It might be superior to like thinking it up on your own, like fair enough. But, you know, it’s also only, you know, intersubjective validation. It’s not anything else. And we get sort of caught up because, you know, we’re not grateful. Like, we’re just not, we don’t, we don’t have the level of gratitude for we’ve got a son. The son appears to be able to shoot UV red radiation light into our entire body all the way in. And it can rain and go through your bones. It literally just started. It literally just started coming out. Right now it’s coming in. Your microphone is still terrible. You got to fix it. What is wrong with you? You’re the worst audio engineer in the world, Jesse. I just hate to tell you that. I just… Very low. Why does it get low? It gets low. What? Couldn’t hear a word. Good job. No, it’s way too soft. Why don’t you get a real mic? But, you know, you can see the scientific scam in this whole interaction with intersubjectively validating that love is real and affects your heart, which everybody, like I said, like the symbol for love is a heart. Like, I don’t, I don’t even know. I can’t fathom the level of stupidity. I just can’t. Be grateful for the past, for the things that are handed down to us. Don’t be cynical of those, those ancients. They didn’t know what they were doing. No one’s gotten past Plato in modern philosophy. No one. They admit it, too. It’s not, I’m not making this up. Like Heidegger knew, right? He knew. He said it. He wrote it. He said, oh, Plato, I think I’m positive. Oh, Nietzsche probably knew, although he wouldn’t admit it because he’s an arrogant bastard. You know, but he always said, Plato, I feel like you’re a bastard. He said, Plato, I feel like he’s looking over my shoulder. Yeah, he is. Because you’re not smarter than Plato. Because you’re overthinking a very simple thing. It’s not, it’s not that hard, right? So, yeah, I mean, it’s only a problem if your relationship to it is ungrateful or cynical or skeptical, right? That’s where the problems begin. I mean, we could be grateful that we have the writings and we can just read them and understand them. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’m doing. Good? Good? It’s a little bit better, but because I can actually hear what you’re saying, but not by much. That’s true. I couldn’t hear any of that. What are you doing wrong with your microphone? Is your gain up to it? You’re really bassy too. You’re bassier than usual. I don’t know what that’s about. Yeah, it’s very muffled. It’s weird. I do want to be grateful for everybody and the fact that they actually watch any of this stuff, including my actual videos, and invite everybody on into the stream. So we’ll put the link up there. Anybody who wants to join should feel free to do so. And of course, again, I can only pin it on navigating patterns, which is my channel, but you should be able to find all the chats. So if you want to join in and you’re willing to come on camera and not be a troll, we’re happy to have you. Talking about gratitude, although we can switch to something else. We’re grateful for your participation and involvement. What do you got, Jesse? You fix it? No, absolutely terrible. Very little change. A little bit better. Thank you. It’s really low. Like you’re just really low again. Muffled, you’re low, you’re bassy. I don’t know what you’re doing wrong. What are you doing wrong? Do you have a different mic? I can always switch my mics. No, that’s a mic problem. I can tell just by listening. It’s a mic pick up issue. Unless there’s a bandwidth constraint on your side or something and it’s getting the audio channel. That can do it. You can see it coming up. It’s coming through very, very loud. I’m actually seeing it when I watch it. Now you’re fine. Well, you’re not fine, but now you’re better. It’s much louder. It could be bandwidth. You should get your Internet fix. Do you ever reboot your Internet router? That always fixes some things. Oh, he’s left. Anselman, I have a hearing problem to be attended to, so I have been leaning into my laptop to hear better. Yes, well, that’s always a problem. I only have a hearing problem with Jesse because he mumbles. No, he doesn’t. It’s funny to hear him on Discord because he’s usually much clearer on Discord, especially if we’re not running cameras. So some of it’s definitely a bandwidth issue. But the fact that we can have such luxurious problems is not being able to hear each other well while we’re across the world from one another literally. Yeah, OK. What else are you going to complain about? They didn’t have the right brand of hot dog in the store, which I was complaining about earlier, by the way. I just wanted to bring it up. Yeah, you know, at some point your complaints and lack of gratitude are just silly. And we all fall into it. Like I said, I wasn’t falling into that today. Yeah, I was like, man, I couldn’t get better hot dogs at the store. Why not? This is terrible. And I’m already going to like three grocery stores just to get my damn food. Not too happy about that. But you know, you got to have the Sam Pell. You got to have the right tea. Like these things are all critical to a good life. Yeah, and some of my, you know, my illness, my immune system illness means that I have a hearing problem. My immune system illness means that sometimes my ears don’t work at all. So sometimes I get loud and people are like, why are you yelling? And I’m like, I’m yelling? I can’t hear me yelling. Oops. And then when the inflammation goes down, I can hear again. Although my hearing is not like when I was younger, boy, my hearing was good. It’s not that good anymore. Every once in a while it gets much better. But yeah, it’s yeah, you got to be grateful for hearing something. Because something is good, you know. And you can be grateful for being able to hear the truth, even if only occasionally. Right? Or experiencing beauty in silence. Because that’s one affordance you can have from hearing loss. I remember I had a, I had an attack of, you know, immune system flare up. Right. So I basically, my body went into immune shock. Right. So I was, I was feeling sick and I get off the subway. I was on my way to meet my mother. So I’m feeling sick and I go into anaphylactic shock basically. I didn’t know it at the time. So I go into this anaphylactic shock state and I’m sitting at this train station. And it’s, it’s the Boylston Street Tea Shop in Boston. Which is, you know, it’s, it’s one of the closest tea stops to another tea shop. It’s right by Park Street. So it’s one end of the Boston Commons, a park. Right. Park here and the other stop is here, still in the park. And what happens when you almost die is you start losing all your senses. So I got television and then my eyes went out, click and they’re wide open. I can’t see a thing and I’m like, and I’m just like, oh, I guess I’m going to die. That kind of sucks. I’m going to die at the Boylston Street Tea Stop. Probably nobody will find me for a while. This is like, wow, that sucks. I was probably 22. And I had no idea what caused the anaphylactic shock to this day. No idea. But the last thing you lose is your hearing. And I was hearing birds and I’m in an underground tea stop and I can hear the birds. And I was just amazed. I was like, wow, you can hear birds like this before you die. It’s pretty cool. And then I don’t know what happened, but everything restarted and my body reset and just. So I’m always very grateful for the fact that that happened because yeah, you know, I mean, there’s some there’s some other sort of near death sort of things. But that one was just totally out of the blue. Just, you know, just get on the train, start feeling a little queasy, start feeling worse, start feeling worse. You know, and I’m not I needed to get to Park Street. That’s where you take the red line. I was taking the red line to the end. And I didn’t make it. I had to get off of Boyle Street, which, you know, like I said, very close to the next piece of your walk from one to the other pretty easily. And I had to get off and I just sit sitting at this barrel. I thought I was going to throw up. I was sitting at this on a bench next to a barrel. And I don’t think I threw up. I don’t quite remember. You never hear my stomach anyway. And yeah, I mean, vision goes, it’s weird losing your vision like that. Like your eyes are wide open and you just can’t see and you just can’t see. And like everything turns gray and then black. It’s like, whoa, that’s freaky. And all you can hear are birds. And I was like, wow, I can hear these birds. And yeah, then everything reset. I was like, whoa. And then everything came back online and then I could see again. And the whole time my eyes were wide open. So it’s very strange. Your vision goes, it’s like, whoa, you get anti tunnel vision. It’s pretty wild. Jesse’s back. All right. How’s this? Is it better? There was a bell. What? Okay, guys, convincing me to. Yeah. I’m going to cancel Vodafone. All right. Clear as a bell. Like best it’s been all all straight for sure. Why did you tell me I could have? Okay. All right. Don’t complain. Don’t complain. There’s a rule. Be grateful. Just move forward. Be grateful. Get to talk to your friends. Yeah, I’m glad you figured it out. Any comments? Anselman says, way to go listening to Birdsong. Yeah. If I had died that day that yeah, I would have at least listened to Birdsong. Glad you came through. Okay. Well, I’m glad that you’re glad. Otherwise, there’d be no streams. That’s for sure. If you die when you’re 22 at the Boylston Street T-stop. Yeah, there are no streams. That is true. YouTube wasn’t a thing. So yeah. Yeah. It was. Is this the same Nathaniel as last that came on a couple of weeks ago? If so, you should come on the video chat and come chat to us. Because talking in person is better than sending messages, if possible. Nathaniel. Well, yeah. I mean, I’m just grateful for any interaction at all or any viewers. Exactly. Nathaniel. Thanks for turning me on to Sugru on postmodernism. Great stuff. I’m glad you like it. Yeah, I love Sugru’s stuff. It’s fantastic. Him and Stalhoff are fantastic. Have you seen the one on Kant’s Moral Philosophy? You know, I think I did. But I have to watch Sugru again. Manuel’s been having a Sugru revival because we get turned on to him early as a result of the meditation series because one of the guys in the meditation series, Rob, who’s wonderful being, I got to meet him at Thunder Bay, he found him or knew of him and he was local to Rob at the time, I think, because he’s in Florida. So he kind of turned us on to that. And it’s quite good. Quite good stuff. It’s kind of amazing that that stuff is there and has been out there that long and nobody engages. It’s this Tetragrammaton podcast with Dr. Jack Cruz and Huberman, Rick Rubin’s podcast there. He’s talking about these papers from the 1920s and the 60s. All this stuff has been known and nobody’s paid attention. Right? And that’s the world we live in. It’s a fallen world. And what does Anselman say? And for that minute the blackbird sang nearby around him, Missed your father and farther all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Aha. I do not know that poem, but I’m glad you shared it. I’m grateful for the interaction. Whoops. Nathaniel. Yeah, that’s me. I need a mic and a camera. I know it’s 2023. How do you get a computer with a mic and a camera? I thought it was impossible. I’ll join when I can. I’ll appreciate the interaction in the meantime. Yes. You don’t need this. Edward Thomas Poet. Okay. Well, is he in my norton anthology of poetry? Then I’ll check him out. Otherwise I won’t. You don’t need this fancy technology. In fact, it’s probably a hindrance because half of the time it breaks down. Yes. Yes. Half the time it does break down. All you need is tea. I have my marathon tea from Tiborak Tea Company right here. You definitely need coffee and wine. No. Wine maybe. I don’t drink alcohol, but. And honey actually. PC does not come with a webcam. Really? That’s shocking. Shocking. I mean, these phones the other day. These phones are pretty good. Yeah. I’ve gone on live streams on phones and Chromebooks and stuff. In fact, early on I was doing all the live streams on the Chromebook. So like Jacob’s early live streams when I’d go on, I’d just use my Chromebook because I wasn’t in the office. I was, you know, living room hanging out. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I’m going to I’m going to take a quick break. I will be right back. Oh, OK. Talk about talk about gratitude while I’m breaking. Oh, gratitude. Let’s get back to my notes here. So how do you observe the situation that you’re in, the life that you have, the potentials, the potential that is before you? You start small. You start with the frames that you have. And you humble yourself. You find a telos that aligns to the truth, good, beautiful. One practice that you can do is you write down as many of the questions that you have in the current moment. Perhaps they’re not genuine questions. Perhaps they’re not helpful questions, but having written them down gives you an orientation. It gives you a focus. It helps you map your thoughts. Perhaps the questions that you have currently are not the right questions, but they can lead you to a better orientation. Conversely, you can make a list or write down or just think up or even just you could even just walk the streets. One of the practices I’ve done is just walk the streets and just say out loud the things that you’re grateful for. You don’t even have to write down your thoughts so much as much as give voice to them, give resonance to them. Perhaps you have more things to be grateful for. Perhaps you have more things to be grateful for than you first realize. I like that. Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of practices you can do around gratitude, right? Like you said, you can just walk the streets and be grateful for the things around you and the fact that you live in this wonderful time, the best time ever to live anywhere in history, almost no matter what country you’re in too. Yeah, that’s true. The amenities available to people right now are greater than the amenities available to people 100 years ago. Right. So even the poorest people has better plumbing than Rockefeller had back when he had what would be the equivalent of a trillion dollars, by the way. Just so you know, I know people lie about that number, but if you watch the Internet and you actually see that it changed, yeah, you know you’re being lied to. So you can be grateful for the fact that you can figure that out. You can be grateful for the fact that you can engage with Segru, who has a wonderful YouTube channel where he’s posting, you know, all these old videos from the lectures look like they’re from the 90s. Something they look quite old. I don’t remember. I think we figured it out at one point, but I don’t remember for sure how old they are. You can be grateful, not just in prayer, not just in like walking around, but you know, the gratitude is the thing that’s giving you that orientation, because again, you’re pointing up and out, hopefully not at something in particular only. You can you can embody that by reminding yourself that you have thoughts. Hmm. This is why mindfulness works. That’s some aspects, and you can’t do mindfulness correctly, in my opinion, without setting yourself a time limit, a boundary, right? Otherwise, you’re just sitting there with your thoughts and that container, that boundary line, that sagging line, that boundary line. That sacred time, that given moment, right? It helps you contextualize your thoughts, helps you contextualize your world. Right. Right. Oh, and here it’s Anselman. I’ve voiced my thanks to my late parents as I look at their photographs, part of my grateful prayers to God. Yeah, well, that’s another that’s definitely a way to do it. Well, here’s a thought, guys. Photographs, don’t just have them on your phone. Print them, have them. I have a photo printer, actually, for that reason, so I can print photos out every once in a while and have them available. I have photographs here on my desk. When people send me photographs, I tend to put them out where I can see them. Yeah, and just the exploration or search for things to be grateful for is valuable in and of itself. And part of the problem is we’re always trying to stay busy or be efficient or whatever. And then we’re not leaving the time and space to be grateful anymore. Right. And what that means is you’re not orienting yourself in the world anymore. Again, this goes back to how do you know your virtues and values if you’re not being grateful? Right. If you’re not. The one real change point for me was when I was doing the Verveki meditation. At one point, you talked about savoring and I was like, ooh, savoring as a practice. Like, oh, you know, figure out what you’re connected to in your office, in nature. And then I started going outside again and walking through and like, wow, look at these flowers and these plants just growing up without any help from me. Plant retarded. Gardening is not my thing. But somebody already set it up. So it was like, oh, OK, we can engage with the garden that’s here. And that was very, you know, very, very good for me was to be able to savoring as a form of gratitude. Right. Because you’re enjoying and appreciating what’s around you. Even in the little things like don’t just scoff your chocolate or your candy down like savor it, savor it there. Right. Same thing with any sort of meal. Right. I was so busy to consume. Right. One of my ideas for YouTube channels actually just to sit on camera and eat chocolate and tell people what I think about it. If it’s garbage or not. Right. Just, you know, they can heal the world just that just the very thing that a lot of people can agree upon is chocolate is the least taste nice. And there’s a lot of garbage chocolate and it might be a bit fun to criticize it and just be like, this tastes like, you know, old biscuits or something, you know. It’s the taste like gravel. But these are your habits. Right. And you can cultivate your habits to be in the to be at least aimed positively. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I want to address Anselm and mindfulness is best done in the countryside. I’m grateful for access locally. Yeah. Well, and for Vicky even pushes back against the mindfulness revolution. I very much agree with. Right. Because it’s too much here and now here and now. Yeah. Now it’s like, okay. Sunshine, breezes, scents and colors. You can focus intensely. Right. Right. Because you have contrast. Like you focus on the flowers and the breeze is still there on the sunshine. Still you focus on the sunshine. The flowers still the breeze is still there. Right. And there’s so many things like that. And then that re-enchants the world for you again. Right. And it it gives you a way to orient because now you’re not just looking at one thing. Right. You’re not just paying attention to one thing. You’re appreciating one thing among many. And that’s where the gratitude comes in. Sure. Absolutely. Savor Pellegrino aqua mineral. Yes. You should do that. I do. It’s also therapy. So there’s a lot of lithium in here. That’s all I’m going to say. That’s what I was told. Really? I looked it up once. Yeah. I looked it up once. I think. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. Well, and it’s the whole thing about water. They were talking about deuterium reduced water. Water with less deuterium in it is supposed to like I couldn’t follow all the stuff and I’m not done. Yeah. The theory is. Yeah. It’s a two part thing. So but it’s interesting. I mean, again, a lot of the stuff he said wasn’t wrong. There were a couple of things that I’m like, no, that’s definitely not right. But there were a bunch of things I was like, I don’t I don’t know about that. I’m going to do some research. But yeah, red light, less blue light and water. And that was this whole thing. And I’m like, wow, that’s me. And he he claims he reversed albino. Yeah. What was the condition that Michael Jackson had? He reversed that condition in a few months with light there. So it’s like, what? That’s amazing if it’s true. I don’t know. Red lights. Have you done a red light sauna? Maybe something like that. Yeah, I have a I have an infrared light that actually quite a bit with my. Yeah. Illness, actually. I want to get one. It’s a decent chunk of money, but I want to convince when we because we’re going to move across states eventually. Yeah. I want to convince my dad to go in and get get a little booth like that. It will split it 50 50. Come on. Then you just come around whenever you want. Just sort of again, you’d be grateful in a sauna. Right. For that small amount of suffering. And also those practices like we used to go to the Roman bath. Yeah. I used to like there were deliberate time and some people still do it. Right. They go to the sauna. And what are you doing while you’re sitting there? Well, that’s your time for gratitude right there. Right. That’s the time to savor your being alive and your health and and and you know, consider all the negative alternatives. And so I one of the reasons I was in here last week was I was driving up to New England because my cousin had a combined graduation and birthday party for Zelda’s daughter. And I wanted to drive up. And usually when I drive up, because I’m a man of my word, I’m a man of my word. I wanted to drive up. And usually when I drive up, because I’m basically spoiled and you know, not working aside from making me very, very poor, you know, means I can leave whenever I want. So what I do is I know what all the traffic is and where it’s going to be. So I time everything so that I don’t have any traffic. I just have me on the top down. And usually I pick a route that I like. I go over the Bay Bridge Tunnel, which is just gorgeous. And I would never normally travel on a Friday because Fridays are wacky traffic days. Like it doesn’t when you’re driving up the East Coast. You know, somebody said this, well, you know, people are leaving the city. I’m like, OK, but I’m driving through the city. So maybe there’s no traffic on my way into the city, but I have to drive past the city. And then they’re trying to say, you’re not getting out of anything. And I wanted to visit Bruce. Bruce Bruce, you know, he’s been he’s been on some of the live streams here and he’s been on Van der Kley’s live stream and stuff. And he does this thing on Thursday nights, which is alcohol and smoking, pipes and theology discussion. But it’s Thursday night and he’s halfway, which is great. Well, yeah, I have a free place to stay. That’s wonderful. So I drove up there on a Thursday night, realizing, oh, then I have to drive on Friday to New England and that’s going to be terrible. And it was really not fun. But it was worth it, right? Because I got to experience the Thursday night thing that normally I wouldn’t have gotten to experience. So that’s the thing. Like it is, you know, being grateful for the opportunity, right? Being grateful for the drive on these long drives. That was I think it was 16 hours up or 15 hours off. Yeah, yeah, it was a long drive. And then I did drive back in one day, actually. I don’t know how I did that. I don’t know how you do that. Look, I used to drive 16 hours down here one way without a problem. I only had a problem when I took the other car. So I used to have a blue C C-wing convertible, which is awesome. And that car just built cruise forever. It’s a comfort vehicle. So it’s just designed to be able to driven for hours on end. But then I came down in the winter and I took the all-wheel drive Subaru and it was an older used car, right? I was driving mostly used cars until recently. You cannot drive that car for 15 hours. You can’t sit in it for 15 hours comfortably. So I drove down and I was so sore and damaged and hurt. And I was just wrecked. I was like, wow. So when I drove back, I stopped in Maryland halfway and took a rest. And then it was OK because you get about eight hours in that car. I never did that again. That once. I was like, I’m never driving this car all the way again. But when you’re doing these long drives, you have time to think about things. I’m grateful. Listen to podcasts. Relax and hear music that normally you might not listen to. Right. A lot of long, especially classical pieces, right. That are best listened to, you know, over an hour, two hours or whatever. Right. And it’s hard to get that kind of time. I don’t know about Anselm and you. Do you have to beat yourself with twigs like the Russians? I would be uncomfortable in a sauna. I’m sure everyone’s uncomfortable in the sauna. That’s the point. Yeah. Well, yeah, I remember one of my moments I’m grateful for when we visited Japan in Osaka. We stayed near a bathhouse. It’s probably one of my most peak cultural shock moments in my life. You know, I can’t speak Japanese or speak Japanese very, very poorly. So I go in a fumble English with this guy. I pay to the access to the bars. It’s all open space. So once you pass the female male divide, it’s just, OK, you you’re in this changing area. And then you can use glass, glass doors, glass windows into the barbs. And then there’s another little room for the sauna. And all he did was give me some soap, a little bar soap, no stool or anything, a bit of a towel. And he’s like, that’s it. Like, that’s up to you, mate. And so I’m there taking off my clothes, you know, wrapping myself with a towel. I don’t know any of the customs. So I go in, I open the door, I get all looked at because he’s this foreigner. He’s the stranger coming into their normal mundane space. I pick up a stool. No, no, don’t pick up the pick up the stool at the point. No, don’t pick up a stool because all the schools are all the way at the other end because you meant to shower yourself first before you get into these baths. So I go there. I go to right to the back. I’m thinking, OK, I’ll go to the back one. It’s already near a shower station. I’ll pick there. To my surprise, I pick someone else’s stool. I don’t know the customs. So 50 year old Japanese guy runs butt naked from the other side of the room going, no, no, no, no, no, no, that’s my don’t take my stool. You could go get another one from over here. And then like I’m grateful for that moment. I’m great. There’s not there’s no way to write that moment in chat. He bet or in a tale. That’s an authentic moment. And they just know it’s a shocking image of that Japanese guy. He’s he’s Jack Jones running across the ground across the sauna to tell you, hey, that’s that’s that’s wrong. This is how you do it. And then to go through and they welcomed me and they see I did the same customer putting the towel on the head. I was cool with some German guys actually came in later that made it a little bit a little bit more. Yeah, a little bit more authentic. And sometimes because they could trade English and all that. But yeah, like these moments that you have in life, you should you should cherish them. You should try and recall them or have a have a note somewhere. Because they remind you of the goodness. Right. And that’s that’s that’s it’s a very thing hard to cultivate. One thing I wanted to see from by you, Mark, is I made a claim. I’m not sure if it’s a right claim, but a weak frame leads to ungratefulness or a spirit of resentfulness. Yeah, among other things. Right. No, I think I think that’s I think that’s correct. And I think also the other factor there is that. The lack of gratitude is the thing that causes and is also caused by idolatry as such. Yeah, because I could be I could in that moment in the bathtub, right, I could see it as a moment of shame, right, as you know, dishonor, or I could be grateful for the chance to learn to appreciate to engage in the culture shock and engage in the in the sacredness of our care. These are your customs. I’m in your land like I’m having, you know, this is a positive experience, not a negative experience. But that’s part of the flattening or the compression of the world, too, right, is that if all you have is your interaction in the moment, whether that’s mindfulness or whatever else, if that’s all you have, you’re screwed. Because you don’t have access to the three transcendentals, you don’t have access to virtues and values, you don’t have access to any of this other stuff. It’s not that access doesn’t exist for you. And so the way you know the truth, the good and the beautiful, the way you know virtues and values is through gratitude, because you’re looking up at some ideal and realizing that it is obtainable partially and also in potential. And that’s part of the orientation. And when you don’t do that enough, you lose those orientation. I mean, a lot of this, a lot of my channel is about orientation and skills of orientation, obviously, right, the fact that dualisms are false, all binaries are false, just not the way the world is. I like to use unhelpful. Well, yes, yes. But also, when you don’t engage with that, the problem is the world becomes flat and disenchanted. And at the same time, you lose the skill of navigation, of orienting yourself properly in the world. So it all goes away, all at once, right. And then you can’t make moral claims. Yeah, that’s that as well. There you go with responsibility, right. Right, because you can only discern the right sense of responsibility through good ethical or good moral frameworks. And when you’ve decontextualized moral frameworks or customs or aesthetics or traditions, right, you don’t know how to respond responsibility to the circumstances of life or the given moment you’re in. Right. Right, you don’t you don’t have a way to be grateful because you lost the skill of practicing gratitude. And you can’t be responsible. You can’t judge, even though you have to take an action. So you’re caught in this. Oh, we have to we have to judge to take action. We have to take action. Otherwise, we’re not alive, technically. Right. What you’re doing is you’re degrading virtues and values. We even properly discerning to write if your discernment does not have a spirit of gratefulness kind of attached to it in some aspects or you can kind of counterbalance. Right. You’re always going to discern things through the inner critic through the the left handed demon. Demon if you want to use Freudian like the angel and demon on your shoulder. Right. Yeah. Yeah, well you you may you only have an angel or demon. And the problem is, which is which. And without that orientation towards something you can be grateful for. In the past and in the future right that the potential and the actual or the manifest. Yeah, then you know again, you know, there’s the manifest stuff in the past is the potential and the way you are now it’s still three points. Now you can orient can orient with two points. All you have is direction directions not good enough. Try sailing a boat with direction. Good luck. Try climbing. Try climbing a mountain without direction. I mean with that with just just direction right you have to navigate. All right. This is not this is no longer the right path to make. I need to make a climbing climbing a mountain face or have improperly scaled where I’m at. I need to readjust. Right. And that’s what reminds you. Right. I’ve been. Oh, can I go down to go back up? Can I go left and then go back right? Can you know the humility to appreciate that you can think? Yeah, you made a mistake, but you got this far. That’s something to be grateful for. Yeah. Well, this yeah lack of humility or embodied humility. Right. Maybe it’s maybe your humility is always external and not doesn’t have you don’t have it’s not an embodied. I want to say internal. I think embodies is a better sense of the internal right. Because you can enter you can internalize something. But if it’s not kind of manifesting in what your behaviors and your actions right. Right. It’s kind of it’s kind of it’s it’s it’s just well it’s just good knowledge. Embodies perfect because you can do things in your head and everything in your head is perfect. But if it doesn’t manifest in your body, nobody else can tell. Yeah. And this is why meditation is dangerous. This is why I made that we’re talking about discernment, judgment and action. And everyone flipped out when I do my action monologue. And I said, if your actions not external to you, it’s not an action. And they were like, no, no, no, no, it’s an action. I’m like, no, it absolutely is not an action. And and the reason why you have to think of it that way, whether I’m right or not, is not even relevant. The reason you have to think of it that way is because you don’t know if you’re doing stuff, if it’s not external to you and somebody else can observe it. Right. This is why we deem science as intersubjective validation. There’s the redemption of science for me is that, yeah, the sanity is defined by other people, not just you. Yeah. And they can’t judge your sanity if you’re just stuck in your head. It’s not possible. It’s technically impossible. Well, Jordan Peterson, that’s like great credit has, which is saying that you outsource your sanity. Right. It’s not it’s not a purely divisive for your own reason. Right. Right. And if you don’t have you’re not humbled by the people around you, you have external inputs. You can lead yourself very easily astray, very, very easily. Right. You know, one one, you know, one of the things that you can do is you can lead yourself to a state of mind. One one acceptance of the inner critic can destroy your life for years and so on. Because you’re basing your actions upon an unvalidated or on improper, improper wisdom would be the right if you want to live or amuse. Right. Yeah. But again, that’s why the embodiment is important, because if you don’t act it out, you don’t know if it works. Everything works in your head. Everything. Anything you can imagine your head talking purple unicorns. Yep. I’ve got one in my head. It’s fantastic. Would you like to meet it? And that’s it can’t embody the purple talking unicorn. I can’t do it. And I and I can’t be grateful for it because in a sense, it’s not manifested. Now, can you participate in a fantasy there? I don’t I don’t think you do. I think what you do is you try to manifest a fantasy that you try to embody it. You can you can embody anything you want. And that’s where people get upset. They want the law to stop them from embodying bad things. Which law are we talking about? We’re talking about natural law. And is that different from the law of God? Are we talking about the law of man, which is fungible as we like? Like social distancing. Yeah. I got I got I was on the Break the Rules podcast live stream. They did a live stream with Catherine Brodsky, one of the best journalists out there for sure. And so I jumped on because I like to support Catherine as much as I can. And I have deep disagreements with some of her some of her stuff. Oh, good night. Good night, Anselman. Great. Good night. I hope so. We’re grateful for your involvement anyway. Thank you, sir. Nice to see you. Yeah. So I was I was on that live stream and it struck me the people I was talking to. I mean, I basically just said, yeah, maybe you can’t afford to live in the city. That doesn’t mean you can’t afford a house. Like, it’s not true in the United States. There’s plenty of cheap housing right here. I can just go down the street and point you cheap housing. I’m 20 miles from a capital city of a state. You know, I’m an hour and a half from an international airport. It’s almost all highway, by the way. It’s not that bad. Right. And it’s so cheap to live here. When I was outside of Boston, I was 25 miles outside of Boston. And it was still an hour from an hour and a half from the airport. Although they fixed that. I got about 45 minutes from the airport. But that’s the problem is that when when you’re not grateful for the things that you have, you pick them for granted and in your head, everybody should solve the problem of I can’t do the job I want the way I want and afford a family and to live in the city and have the house I want. Really genius. I can’t even. This is a universal problem. I don’t know why you should get special treatment to have it solved. But it was them not being grateful. And all I said was you have a choice. You’re not accounting for the trade off. And they were all upset. People were. The other thing, too, is you can’t prioritize happiness. The happiness, right? Happy is happening. It’s in the moment. Right. You can’t prioritize that. You’re you’re you’re you’re embodying actions which you cannot control if you prioritize happiness. Right. Well, your immediate gratification. You can be grateful that you are happy. But true gratitude is really just about content in this. Yes. Well, the thankfulness as well, which we haven’t talked about in embodying gratitude is the thing that makes you content at the same time. Yes. Oh, yes. Typical relationship. Right. People was this. Right. How do they miss this? Yeah. Right. Right. And that’s the thing. It’s like you can’t really be content if you’re in the here and now all the time and trying to do the next big thing and get this done and get that done. And you know, you burn out. Right. You make yourself anxious and then you burn out. Yeah. Yeah. Burn out. Burn out’s a real phenomenon. Well, and that’s lack of gratitude. I mean, you’re going to burn out without gratitude. Gratitude is the thing. You’re taking the time and space to stop being anxious about about potential because you’re trying to live in the potential constantly. You can’t live in the potential. You need to have mountains and valleys. Right. The cyclical if you don’t have this cyclical nature of time or a seasonal approach to life. Right. You are going to lead yourself to burn out. Right. Because not all candles last. Right. But the life last. Right. The phenomena of life last. So you have to start a new season, a new cycle. This is what I’m trying to get towards. I think that gets too stuck on the metaphor. Right. And how are you embodying that cycle? Gratitude. Gratitude is part of that cycle. Right. It’s part of the proper cycle of engagement in your relationship and the quality of your relationship with the world. Quality. How does quality relate to gratefulness? So quality. That’s what you’re doing in gratitude. Yeah. Yeah. You’re in quality. You’re out of the realm of quantity. And you’re into the realm of quality. And you’re sensing that you can’t measure quality. It’s in my argument. You can’t measure. It is definitionally a thing you cannot measure. Right. And the materialists have a real hard time with that. Well, the naturalists. Yeah. The way you interface with quality, the way you understand quality, the way you embody quality is gratitude. Also, yeah, the virtues and values of underneath things are how you appreciate quality. Right. Right. Is that great? I’m not sure if anyone’s seen this, but the great clip of Henry Cavill recently, and he gets mocked by the TV presenter and the women on the panel because he appreciates Warhammer 40K. But instantly the other guy in the other room is like, oh, I do this, I do that. And there’s that quick trade of like, I’m grateful for you bringing this up because I can appreciate something like with you. We can make this relationship, this connection because we find quality in something. And it kind of, you know, it’s one of those like gotcha moments like the Jordan Pisa moments. People put it up as the content was put up as a ha, isn’t this funny on Henry Cavill’s part? I was like, no, this actually signals a completely different set of virtues and values that many people, not just men, actually appreciate, which is, you know, someone that breaks the ground, the taboo of, oh, like, you know, we all we all find quality in something. But who’s going to be the first person to admit this? Right. Well, you see that too in Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad’s been posting about his adventures in painting Warhammer 40K characters and stuff. People went after him on Twitter and he’s like, no, you just don’t understand. Very nicely, nicer than I would have been. Yeah, well, I don’t I don’t suffer fools, right. I’m like, all right, you’re just dumb. I don’t even play 40K. I’ve barely scratched the surface on it, but you can you can point towards it is, OK, it does restore something in a world with that that’s been lost, which is religion, a game sport. Yeah, it’s a reenchantment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, and there is a line. And this is part of the problem. It’s like, well, we need to remove myth from the world. Yeah, that’s not going to happen. We need to remove entertainment from the world. You remove entertainment from the world, you get war. That’s literally like that’s how that works, guys. I hate to break it to you, but that’s how it works. Like you remove gaming, whether it’s, you know, Incan football or soccer where they use, you know, human heads or killed everybody who lost or it’s football, you know, modern American football or European soccer or boxing was a big deal. Boxing. Right. And there’s so many examples and there’s all kinds of games throughout history. Chess. Board games. Yeah. If we don’t have a way to compete up a hierarchy, then our only way to compete up the hierarchy is war. It doesn’t have to be a war that results in death, but it has to be a war that results in defeat. With a loss of appreciation too, right? And maybe this way of engaging in entertainment type games, which maybe they’re not, allows us to be grateful for what we can’t do and others can. And there has to be a space to entertain ideas, entertain thoughts or feelings, emotions, spirits, right? Right, right. But even just a having space to do that. How do you practice that gratitude? Right. And B, what is the way of interfacing ideas? Ideas have quality. You don’t count the number of ideas you have and go, hi, I have 10 ideas. No. Right. Maybe your ideas are stupid. Probably. Most of mine are. I’m grateful that I can usually weed them out before I speak. I’m a muppet, so I just learned to humble myself. I’m like, I said that I misspoke. I’m grateful this week I spoke to Burn Power, so that’s probably coming out sometime this weekend. And I misspoke all the time throughout that. Gosh. Although every five minutes I was like, I was in my head going, I should have said it this way. Damn it. He’s saying this. I should have jumped. But no, I shouldn’t look back on that and reflect on the negative. I should be like, I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk to him. I’ll be grateful for another opportunity to talk to him. Just as much as I appreciate these conversations. Where’s that coming out, Jesse? He said sometimes this weekend he was going to release something else first and then he appreciated my thoughts on my experiences with Christians and music. And so yeah, he’s going to put that out. And is that on the Anadromist channel that he has? That’s going to be on the Anadromist, yeah. Oh great. He’s trying to get me to come. Yeah, thank you. He’s trying to get me to come to Georgia. He spends a decent amount of money to come to East Georgia first. Which I don’t know. Maybe if I get a few more photography gigs. We’ll see. We’ll see. It’s a bunch of money. It’s about five grand for me to come. Once you actually factor everything like the flights and then the actual things and accommodation. And you’re never just there for seven days. He’s like, oh, it’s a seven day thing. It’s 14. Because I’ll do your thing and then I’m going to do my own thing since I’ve left the country. I leave it as a prison planet. So I did this foolish thing of go up to New England for a long weekend. Yeah. I mean, it’s a memorial day. Right. And so, you know, I mean, originally it was going to be two days up and two days back of driving. You know, I have three days there and I’ve never done anything like that before. Usually I go up to New England. It’s two weeks. You know, I’m just I’m up for two weeks because I am not working. And you know, all the work that I am doing is easily done remote. So it’s not really a big deal. Yeah. It was like, what the hell? And I’m like, I got to be back here. I got meetings to do. I got I got, you know, maybe maybe by some miracle, some money soon. One of these one of these small businesses get funded and then I’ll be fine. And I can travel to Georgia myself and Tbilisi, Georgia. I was in Georgia today, which it wasn’t Tbilisi, Georgia, Georgia, Georgia. It was funny, too. The place we went was literally right over the river and the rivers, the dividing line between South Carolina and Georgia. So it was like we were kind of in Georgia, but, you know, not not a lot because, you know, that’d be crazy, Mark. If we both met in that Georgia, that’d be crazy. Now, what would be crazy? When is his best? You know, I think it’s in October. Oh, I think it’s the week of my birthday. It’s around the seventh. So, oh, I think it’s the fourth. Yeah. No, no, no. Well, I technically have the money, but I should put it that way. I have the money by October. I’ll go and we’ll and we’ll meet up. How’s that? Don’t do this to me, Mark. Don’t challenge me. The other day, Sally Jones, Sally Jo was like, have you heard of this book club called The Great Conversation, which happens to be very interesting coincide with Peterson’s great books list. She was like, have you heard about this? You probably read some of the books already. It’s like, Sally, I don’t need this. This is my type of thing. You give me a decent list that’s recommended and you give me a club and an affiliation. I want to be bought in. Because, yeah, what’s the way to participate, right? It’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s not just secret or forbidden knowledge. It’s actually all right. This is this is your carry on a tradition to which tradition sustain people, which they don’t realize they’re not grateful for the traditions we have. Right. Right. I’m looking at. Yeah. I’m looking at you, Sister Act. It’s a big issue. I’m doing the Texas Wisdom Community YouTube channel has has the book clubs that we’re doing on the Plato’s Republic, which I’m grateful for. And of course, I’m way behind. And of course, that’s the next thing I have to do. So basically, when I get off the stream, I am just reading because I can’t rely on reading in the morning because I missed a week. They skipped last week. But the week before, I missed two, right? I was busy. Yeah. Lots of vacations. So, yeah, I’m way behind. No, it’s good. Yeah, I mean, it’s good to engage with. Right. So, man, am I super busy? I got all kinds of stuff to do. I’m working on way too many projects at once. It’s bad timing for me to go drive up to New England. We’re trying to get funding. What’s important? What’s important? That’s that’s the thing. I think I stress that. Yeah. Which is what’s important? Where you at? Well, on the problem, you don’t have that. Well, that’s life is. I, you know, I might be funny, giggly on the streams, but I’m actually quite a serious person off camera. I take things way too seriously. It may be a bit aspergius on my part, but I tend to be quite serious about things because because you only have so much time, right? And you should actually put you should actually maintain a quality control of your life. Right. You shouldn’t entertain that bad things, bad decisions. Right. Well, I have a 15 minute grace. I know you don’t watch a lot of. Yeah. Sometimes just stuff comes up all at once, you know, and you have no choice. And it’s like, oh, well, I’m busier now than I’m used to being. But also it is what it is. It couldn’t couldn’t have unfolded any differently. So. I just cut out. Damn it. You did? Oh, no, just yes. It’s doing that. It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t. We’re here. We have. Look, yeah, part of the Muppet crisis, too, is this hubris, this sense of improper gratitude. So, yeah, it’s been good. It’s been good to dwell on this subject because it connects a few dots for me. Oh, good. You might you might have anyone on the chart. You might find Vanderkla’s stuff interesting, too, from today. When he answered my question, because I asked him the question. I think I did submit. Yeah. What about you know, what’s the Christian answer to the meeting crisis? What’s the answer to the faith crisis of faith? Right. And what’s the difference between men and women in in these crises? And it’s interesting to me that his meaning crisis answer was way more Christian, like far more Christian than his crisis of faith answer. And I’m like, this is exactly the problem. You’re never going to do what Peterson does if you’re using this highly Christian language and framework to help people in the meeting crisis. It’s never going to work. And I found it fascinating that he did that, which I would call a mistake. You know, I mean, I asked the question in the Q&A to figure out where he’s at with these things and to start the conversation to manipulate. And I actually said, I’m manipulating the conversation here. I want I want the answer to these three questions for a reason. And I’m grateful that he did. He bothered to answer it. He could have skipped over it and said, oh, Mark, you silly person. And I wouldn’t blame him at all. Fair enough. You know, I do enough manipulation. Here. Hey, Nick. My friend. Is this Nick? Okay. Yeah, it’s one of the Knicks. There’s two Knicks. This is the low grade Nick. Hey, Nick, what are you grateful for? Huh? What are you grateful for? Yeah. Audience, what do you think? I’ll answer them in that. He kind of answered, though. I mean, he’s he’s living he’s living the life over there. So, yeah, but you’re right. We should have asked everybody to pipe in with what they’re grateful for. What what what things you do. You know, I did. I did. A long week. No, no, he says he’s grateful for Friday night for Friday right now. Oh, because of the long week. Fair enough. Oh. Oh, Takuan Soho. My yakami. Yeah, yeah. Yamaki guitar. Man, brain is not working. Do you know anything about this type of guitar there? I’ve never heard of that. Never heard of that brand. You’re the musician, man. Don’t look at me. I don’t know any of what guitars. I don’t want to speak out. I actually almost got into guitar repairs and things of that nature. Some guy was mentoring me, but it just got way too esoteric. Why? I was like, I am not. I like guitars, but not this much. I don’t want to spend all day fixing them and dealing with guitarist guitarist. Very annoying. Oh, it was his mom’s. Oh, that’s lovely. Well, that’s that’s something to have gratitude. Yeah, that’s nice. Yeah. I’m actually very annoyed. My dad sold the family piano. It’s like, oh, I’ll scolded him for a couple of years on that. It’s like, why did you sell the family piano? He’s like, no one was playing it. It’s like, well, every time I came home, I played it. I was grateful for it being there. Oh, here’s a good one. Nathaniel, I’m grateful for finding this smaller but more engaging channel. I’m glad you feel that way through bigger but somewhat dead end channels. Yeah. Well, the one criticism that I take very seriously and not very good at solving is keeping things a little more pragmatic. Not that I’m not saying more pragmatic than say for Viki or something, but we got we got to dial up the pragmatism a little bit a little bit higher here, too, I think. And yeah, part of it. And I like that we did go into it. Like, how do you practice gratitude? Jesse went through a few ways. I went through a few ways. Right. And just the idea of waking up in the morning and being grateful that, hey, that’s not bad. You know, and then before you go to bed, being grateful for the day that you had and that it’s. Yeah, the whole. Is that is it dropping out? It’s dropping out. Damn it. You know, I’m still thankful for the stream. Kind of what I was going to bring up is the American Thanksgiving. Right. It’s not just one day. That’s just the that’s just the ceremony of it. That’s the Easter. The day before Thanksgiving in America, the busiest travel day in the year. So people get with their families to be grateful. Right. It’s an interesting attitude, ceremony or ritual. Yeah, I don’t I don’t think you’re cutting out, Jesse. I think your lag is like two seconds or three seconds really high. You just can’t catch a break with your Internet. The wallabies are not treating your packets well. I have to upgrade. So annoying. Upgrade away, sir. Upgrade away. Get get get better, better. I see net. We know what I you know what I can tell you about. I read this book on a recommendation from a friend you could say. A friend you could say. Could childhood and childhood and by Arthur C. Clark, a man who if you want to know about subversive sci-fi that is that book. You just look up the premise in Wikipedia. But yeah, that that that book has a high degree of resentfulness baked right into its premise. So what’s it called? Essentially, but the magic Independence Day child childhood and. You actually can see all its ideas and other sci-fi works deconstructed. But imagine if there was no alien battle at the end of Independence Day, but the aliens just stuck around and started started to change society. Oh, and by the way, the aliens actually look like demons once they reveal themselves. And by the way, you will love them. Once you get to know them, you’ll love them. Even though they’re aliens and demons, you’ll love them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of these people, you know, when you start. Oh, a lot of these people, when you start looking at it like the modern philosophers and some of the modern authors, they’re just taking their trauma, projecting it on the world and solving it there. Like, that’s the whole trick. It’s nothing else more. There’s nothing. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Manuel and I have been noticing that’s modern philosophy. All the modern philosophers, like you look at somebody like Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, it’s so funny, PVK does this thing on Kierkegaard and reads the introduction to one of his biographies or something. And basically, he’s the Luther of Lutheranism. That’s his whole trick. You don’t know anything else about him. You know everything about him just from that. Right. Or you look at Nietzsche. Oh, the death of God. It’s like, well, that happened for him. And so he’s rejecting all the other things. And so he’s rejecting it on the world and trying to solve it there. So he can resolve his own internal thing. All these guys, it’s all the same story every time. And it’s Arthur C. Clarke, right? A lot of these things are sort of the same thing. Oh, we got a question. Do both of you have an equivalent space to the church, Sangha, temple, community, etc.? You don’t need to be specific about how much community practice here is to you. But yeah, look, I mean, I have a Discord server. And we used to do the awakening from the meaning crisis, Discord server. And we ran the meditation there for like just over three years, actually, until our moderation skills were taken away from us, consecrated by the desktop. They no longer have people there in numbers. And they lost their John Brevicki Q&A’s as a result. But you know, you make a decision as a Discord owner and that has consequences. So yeah, causing a big desktop was no good. Now I just have my Mark of Wisdom Discord server. And hopefully, at some point, we’ll get the website up properly. That’s my communal space engagement right now. There are other things I’m grateful for, like we do this entrepreneur meeting every Wednesdays in Columbia, South Carolina. That’s nice. Right. So I often just go outside and savor my property because I have 12 beautiful acres. And yeah, I’ve got a dam and a pond and all kinds of wildlife and everything else. I don’t have to do much. It’s kind of wonderful. How about you, Jesse? Although I actually, yeah, I’m actually a little better. Some of that circumstantial, some of that’s relational. Christina works when I’m not here and I work when she’s not here. And that’s due to we’re building a future, right? We’re actually building a house. And so we’re paying right now for a great amount of reward because when we move across states, we’ll be with my family and extended to people from there. Even though I’m not looking forward to living in that state because I actually vowed never to go back. Nevertheless, watch what you vow not to do because sometimes life has other plans. I was like, I never want to go back to that state. Backward city and it’s not that well built and people think they’re more cultured than they actually are. And that are nevertheless, that’s what that’s what that’s when my family is. And that’s where, you know, we have if we are willing to manage to have a child, then we’ll have a good foundation there. Met a bunch of different things. I used to be part of a church, obviously, because I was kind of a little bit Christian ease with my monologue. But that all fell apart for different reasons. Covid, Covid kind of destroyed that. And I still keep up to date with a lot of my former friends or still friends. It’s tough, though, when people, seasons of life change and then participation with them also has to change. Especially once kids gets involved or different career paths for different political beliefs, say sometimes come out or just different aesthetic beliefs come out. It’s you’re going to navigate that. You’re going to navigate that space and try to do it immediately. Or, you know, I think I have just restored the relationship with one of my good friends. But, you know, I had to call them out in a bunch of bullshit right after Peterson gig. And, you know, he went off and he went off and started a full time relationship with this gal for about three months, which is why I didn’t hear from him. And then he came back to me once it all broke up. And even then at Pogtel’s was like, well, she became your idol. She’s not meant to do that. Right. Right. Well, that’s, you know, that’s the modern story right now. Well, I should say recent story is the the interaction with the destruction of sacred spaces where you could be grateful. And for many people at his church, you know, like I said, we had a sign going as a result of a Vickie meditation series. You know, that effectively I built a Vickie would acknowledge that. I think pretty easy. You acknowledge it in the in the streams. You can listen to them. If you can find the damn streams, they’re hard to find. I don’t know if they’re still not on his channel. They were taken off at one point. You can hear him. You can hear him talk about that. So my saying it was sort of taken away. But, yeah, I mean, you shouldn’t practice only practice gratitude alone, certainly. But it’s important practice it even if it’s only alone. And that’s part of the, you know, this problem. Like there’s there’s something there’s something deeply to individualism, but also it’s insufficient. And so, yeah, you have to have these spaces. You can go to get more contrast to be grateful. And, you know, I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll raise it again. Such a good and interesting story. Verbeke did a talk with this guy, Jacob Kishir, and he did the same story on the Awakening from the Indian Crisis Discord YouTube channel. Or basically, he was trapped during COVID in Athens, Greece. And if anybody would like me to be trapped in Athens, Greece, can make that happen. Let me know. I’m all in. Yeah, imagine weird wording. And he had done psychedelics in the past. He was a young kid, too, right? He had done psychedelics in the past. And, you know, whatever, he had his profound experiences, but nothing transformative. And then he goes into a Greek Orthodox Church in Athens, Greece, of all the places. And he sees everything exemplified. And he understands, you know, there are symbols everywhere and they’re bright and shiny. Nothing happens. He leaves the church. And then he sees those patterns in the city, in the world. Then he has the experience. It’s like, whoa. And it is so it’s not it’s not like, oh, you know, you only have your profound experiences in the sacred space. That’s not how that works. The sacred space affords you the ability to have those experiences anywhere because it’s part of the contrast. And that’s why I actually think symbolism is really important and that the lack of symbolism is not good. It’s just not not good. I do. I do also want to address Joey’s. Yeah. Right. Is anti-social. Really? That is true. Really? OK, let’s think about this. OK, if you do it on a Saturday night, technically Saturday night is a holy night to some people. We do it on a Sunday night. Technically, Sunday is a holy day or holy night to some people. So when would you like us to do this? Monday night? Is that practical? Is that possible? It’s the it’s the stream for the for the misfit toys on Misfit Island, for sure. I don’t go out. We’re all Muppets. So, well, yeah, see, and here you go. Joey’s got judgment. Yes, because I’m missing out because I’m going out to be social. Monday night would be great. Well, maybe we’ll do Monday night streams as well. That would be interesting. Yeah, I’d be Tuesday night. It’d be Tuesday night for me. Right. No, it’d be Tuesday morning for you. Oh, yeah, I can’t do that. I have to work. Well, I’ve toyed with doing other streams in different different days or whatever. But people people have not expressed enough interest in that yet for me to consider what other times and days would be good. But I’d be open to doing Monday night stream or something. That would be interesting. But part of my problem now is I’m super busy trying to do five thousand. Everything just came at me at once. And then I had to do two vacations in a row, two weekends in a row. So that was that was no good. Joey, giving you a hard time. Said with love, we’ll catch up with you guys later. Sure, Joe. I understand the spirit and I’m grateful that you engaged at all. Dropped in. So, yeah, and I think that that is part of it is being grateful for the things you have and the constructions. And the constraints, right? Because there are constraints like I can only get Jesse here at this time, time period. Right. And the moment. And I lose Manuel and Adam. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs, tradeoffs. That’s why Manuel and I did a video recently, a live stream recently. And that went pretty well. That one didn’t get as much as many. Nothing ever gets as many views as we want. But it got quite a few views. And, you know, I mean, I thought it was a really good I thought it was a good topic. Right. Because what we were talking about was the domicile. Right. Why why people feel lonely. And Manuel is good to do that with because he knows more about domicile than most people. Unfortunately, talk about embodied poor guy. Yeah, stuff. But we’re going to the we’re in the age of domicile. That’s for sure. That’s and that’s I think what people should appreciate here is that we are building a back catalog of great topics to to review in the past. You know, and Mark’s actually by the way, guys, I say this every now and then Mark’s early videos are really good. Like really, really good. I’ll do the quiet the voice thing to get your ego to the do the enchantment force people to pay attention. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah, I am. I am trying to build something. I think the the point of Chino, for example, search for a spiritual home. Yes. If you want to stop the domicile, you’re not going to do it in a materialist way. Yeah. Right. And not that you can’t use materialism to stop the domicile. That’s not what I’m saying. Yeah. And oh, oh, here we go. Here we go. All right. We’ll cultural lens. We go. Sally Jo is going to be very happy to hear that you think Batman Superman is fantastic. And I’m grateful. I mean, that was another one of those videos that I was listening to Jesse in particular, but some other critiques and trying to craft much better videos and Batman versus Superman was a video where I used some of the framing from my fourth estate video, which Jesse told me was one of my best and tried to, you know, incorporate that into another video. And that was that was the video that I chose. And five videos, top five. Yeah. Yeah. I really liked it. The pages and videos are very excellent to become very passionate. I want to do another one. I’m doing more. Do it. I could I could do one more. Well, and now I’ve got the band of clay on the Q&A today. Oh, my God. I was like, is this me or is this band of clay talking like these are my sentences for sure. Like whole sentences. I’m like, oh, hey, that’s that’s cool. Colonization complete. My work is done here. Great. Well, he actually I comment on one of his videos, right. He commented back and said, excellent. Thanks. And I was like, oh, oh, well, OK. It’s like, all right, now he’s getting it. This is good. It was it was a meeting, come up with a shorter one. Like some of these comments that I do, sometimes I have to do to to get all this stuff because I take notes. I listen to these videos, I take notes and then I’m basically just pasting my notes. Sometimes I go in and smart enough and thoughtful enough to go in and edit them to give a little more context. But usually I’m just no time stamps, no nothing. I’m just brain dumping just to push in this direction or point out that thing. Right. Because some of Andrew Clay’s stuff is so brilliant. It just needs to be shouted to the world. He doesn’t focus on that. He focuses on the distributed cognition where he’s basically using his audience. So, yeah. Oh, here we go. Nathaniel, the content from my youth, I’m rewatching is X-Men. So the comics just works for me. I think P.B.K. should bump that one. Look, write him an email or send him a message in Twitter that are yet and tell him that. Say, look, I really like this video. I think you should do a commentary on it. If he did a commentary on one of my videos, my 500 free subscribers or so that I have right now. I’m down to 502. I lost one today, probably. Maybe I can get over a thousand like Grim Grits. And then that would be huge for the algorithm. I mean, monetization in YouTube is terrible, but the algorithm is not. So I’ll take the algorithm stuff. Yeah. Let him know. That’s all I can say. He did see my story narrative archetype video and he really liked that one. So, oh, there we go. Nathaniel, gratitude practice for the day. I will do that. Excellent. Excellent. Mission accomplished. Excellent. That’s it. Right. What did you think? Yeah, let me just I like that Nathaniel brought up, which we missed, obviously, you know, what your sacred space for gratitude effect. Yeah, that was a good that was a good feeling, Nathaniel. So I’m grateful that you brought that up. We totally missed that one. It was a good catch. I kind of touched on it, but not not to the level that I should in some aspects. But I’m reading off like bullet point notes that I’ve condensed down and some of its manuals, some of its use of it’s me. I can tell all the manual stuff, that’s for sure. Yeah, me too. But I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for his input, particularly about, you know, you can’t be that for which you judge or suspicious of you can’t be grateful for. That was one of his big things. I was like, yeah, I need to have a unique suspicion. Manuel is the master at the understanding of an articulation of identification against. He understands that better than anyone I’ve ever met in Kuwait, including me, for sure. He’s just he has that dialed in for some reason. And there’s not the only thing he has dialed in by any means, but like he has that so dialed in. He can just talk about that at any time. He can recognize it in places that I don’t even see it. It’s fantastic. He’s really, really good with that. And so, yeah, it’s good to be grateful for the opportunity for the distributed cognition amongst the Muppet crew. Right. And and and practicing, you know, in a lot of ways, you got to be very grateful for Paul Van der Kley, because he exemplified the distributed cognition, the consciousness congress that he called it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what a lot of this stuff stems from, especially with the live streams. Yeah. Well, without Van der Kley, I wouldn’t have we wouldn’t have hooked up in that. You know, have this relationship. Yeah. Well, of course. Of course. Yeah. Same thing with me. And him doing his early live streams and me being on is like, I’m on all his. You know, led me to be able to do this because, you know, it’s still a set of skills like, you know, I. Oh, yeah, it’s a practice. Natural, whatever. Now I. You’ve got to practice this. The fluency, too, is the fluency is such a such a hard thing to master. Yeah. Particularly with the cadences and the way you present and the way you read to and how you break all that up. I can’t wait for you to watch this and then see the difference between the end of the monologue that you did and the beginning. So it’s going to be very exciting. I will. OK, I’ll do that. Fine. I’ll do that. You have to do that because that’s how you learn. You watch yourself and you go, oh, there’s a difference between the end of the beginning and the difference is pretty, pretty striking. Actually, it’s it’s it’s funny. There’s a couple of differences, too. Yeah, you’ll see you’ll you’ll you’ll send it right away. Well, I’ve started to make training videos at work, too, so that’ll help. Oh, good. Yeah, it’s going well. It’s going well. So they like one of my documents is up to like 200 pages, which is just ridiculous. That’s insane. Well, it’s all screenshots and how to do things and where to click and all that. They don’t have any of that. And they’re like, oh, don’t write policy. Don’t write procedure. I’m like, yeah, I’m going to do that because it’s not written anywhere. What’s written in different bits of things? And it just needs to be on one place. Well, you lose consistency, right? Without policy and procedure, you lose consistency. And that without consistency, it’s harder to cooperate. And, you know, it’s just harder at every level, too. Well, I should be should be clear. I’m not writing policy. I’m just writing down what we’re collecting together, what different guitar. You’re not determining policy. Yeah, exactly. You’re just writing it down. But without it, you can’t cooperate. So anyway, you have a business or a nonprofit or a charity, you have procedures and policies. Are they written down? Because if they’re not, it’s harder for new people. And it’s sometimes harder for people in the system because they don’t. What are we doing? So yeah, you need to be grateful for that structure. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, like, yeah, we went to Canberra a couple of weeks ago, and that was a strange thing. I’m not sure if you know about Canberra, but it’s a design city. They literally at the end of World War II, they’re like, we need to design a city, essentially. So they just literally picked, OK, between the two big cities, we’re just going to start designing this. And they had a whole Unitopia and sort of socialist, semi-socialist thing behind it. We’re just fine. Like, sure. It led to one of the more beautiful cities we have in this country because so well planned out. There’s so much space between the buildings. Like, they literally there’s a couple of documentaries on it. And they reference Washington and Paris and all those Republican or Republican places where like the glory of the buildings is actually not the building. It’s the space between the buildings. Right. It’s a bit strange, too, because it’s all modernized and they’ve got a lot of materials up on the wall. And the old Parliament House would be far much better if they didn’t have you just go to the buildings and they recreated some of the rooms and things. But a lot of it’s too museum like now. It’s a little bit dissonance. But if you go further to the back of the building where it’s just recreated rooms and things, you’re like, oh, yeah, some things, some decisions were made in this room. This is all what we get to go to the old Senate floor with the Queen like Queen came and that’s like, oh, you’re like, yeah, this was this used to be a place of great importance and prestige. Now it’s a little bit alien to be here. So nevertheless, you can appreciate that which has gone before you to try and pass the way. Right. Yeah. And they’ve also got a great lookout, too. We can look up and it’s all so the one of the best things that they did, which they designed it. So it’s one whole pathway. So you can see the old war museums in different libraries. And then there’s the town that kind of echoes out like this. And there’s a river and a bridge. And then it’s like the four main big building of the Treasury, the Art Gallery, the other building I’m forgetting the name of. And then the first Parliament House. And then they built the new Parliament House right right after that. So you get this whole like teal teal loss kind of pointing into the Parliament House. Quite beautiful. Right. Some aspects. So, yeah, there’s a lot of those. Right. Brazil did the same thing. They designed city, utopic city. Right. And what they do is they look at the good cities. Right. And they try to emulate them and they always destroy everything. It’s like all of these attempts that have ever been and there’s been a lot of them too. You start looking at the history of that sort of thing. Everyone’s tried it and it always fails. It’s like Versailles was an attempt to do that. People don’t realize Versailles, you know, look, I mean, apparently from all the pictures I’ve seen is absolutely gorgeous. I’d love to go someday. But by any measure, it’s a complete failure. You know, in many ways, that’s the French Revolution. Wow. Wow. Yeah. The Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of Versailles destroys the rest of the world. The Treaty of Versailles destroys the rest of the world. Oh, that’s so epic, Mark. It’s so epic. Is Venice a designed city? I don’t know. I don’t know. Well, do they build upon? But not all designed cities are these utopic copies. Yes. Yeah. Right. Like all cities have an element of design. Like New York City is a grid. If you can’t get around New York City, you’re dumb because it’s literally a grid. It’s probably the worst part of it. In fact, the most interesting parts of the city aren’t part of the grid. The bars. Broadway is not part of the grid, guys. That whole area, the interesting squares and stuff are not part of the grid. Time square is not part of the grid. There’s a cutoff in the grid. It’s actually the place where the grid is sliced. It’s the split up of the grid. It gives it significance. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t really realize it’s in those little imperfect spaces where all the magic happens. Right? Right. The miracles manifest. Not in the regularity. Nailed it. It’s so obvious everywhere. I’m like, how do you not know that? Trade-offs. Trade-offs. They want control. And they think they can have it. Well. Designs. And materialism. Naturalism. You know, my favorite thing is naturalism now. I’m bashing naturalism. I like naturalism. I like naturalism. You know, my favorite thing is naturalism now. I’m bashing naturalism. Any chance I can get it? You don’t get to naturalism without the Enlightenment project. Where everything can just kind of be naturalized out. Science and facts. Okay. Okay. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think the naturalism was. I mean, because extreme naturalism is Dionysus. That’s naturalism. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the 80s. Yeah, but you had that way before the 80s. You had that before the 80s. I know. You had the 60s Bohemians. Yeah. And then before that, you had the Beat Poets and all that sort of stuff. And before that, you had Berlin. The Berlin Bohemians. And then before that, you got the French. All paganism. All paganism. Oh, yeah. Well, paganism is the default, right? Isn’t it? Well, its nature is good. Right? And it’s like, oh, that’s no, that’s not its being is good. Nature is good is almost the same as emergence is good. Wow. Okay. How do you how do you pass that up, though? In what respect? I mean, because there is a there is a goodness to nature. There is a wonder in nature. No, no. There is the potential for goodness in nature. Right. That’s different. Okay. But nature has a snake. Yes. Yes. Okay. And therefore, the goodness isn’t automatic because nature is not nature and therefore goodness in the same way as emergence and therefore goodness, right? In the same way that it is being in there for goodness. Yeah, I agree, actually. Right. So there’s a lot of things to figure out with that one. The nature is good as a leads to all sorts of strange places. Well, nature is the manifest emergence, but emergence. Yes. Okay. That’s right. Nature is a manifest of emergence that is following what we call natural law. Right. Yeah. Same as law of God or something. Doesn’t really matter for our purposes, we’ll say. Right. And then and that’s an and therefore, right? That’s just the observable world. Again, we’re grateful that we were created into, created at a time and in a place. And that’s the description of that is called nature. That is the word for that. Right. It’s one of those these words that the big container is too big to use. The big container is too big to use in some sense. Because it can contain all these different ideals. Right. Nature is the container because it contains, it is the constraints. And so constraints are part of the container. Right. And so that’s the big container for the materialists, like material constraints. And this is why for Vicky Goot says I’m not a physicalist reductionist. It’s like, well, fair enough. But you’re still a materialist. And materialism is just thinking that material is primary and not material, which is clearly primary, by the way. Spoiler alert. That we agree. That we agree on. Yeah, there’s a lot. There’s a lot. There’s a lot to think that it’s a lot to contemplate. Because when people say nature, what you have to listen to the context around what they’re saying there. What are they hinting at? Are they saying in the scientific frame? Are they saying in the romantic frame? Are they saying in a pagan frame? Are they saying in a materialist frame? Are they saying in a stoic frame? Perhaps two. Right. Right. Well, and that’s the right. You’re right. That’s the issue is they use nature to mean a lot of different things effectively. Right. And they’re not talking about the same concept. Because they what most materialists want when they’re talking about nature is an objective material reality to orient towards. Yeah. And they don’t know that. Fair enough. But that’s the way they talk. If you listen to Vickie or even Peterson, that’s the way they talk. Peterson’s very much he doesn’t. He doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that. Peterson’s very much he doesn’t in my mind he doesn’t actually talk about constraint correctly. But he’s very much talking about constraint and using nature as a training agent. Yes. Yes. So what do we do with the different conversations around natural law? How do you navigate through that? Well, it’s easy. I always say, look, you know, there has to be a difference between natural law and the law of man. Yeah. Because we get those two confused all the time. We just use the word law. It’s like, well, natural law and law of man. Law of man is very fungible. We create it and destroy it. Law of nature is not quite so fungible. Right. It’s I like this new term unconditional. It’s not conditional upon us. Right. So gravity works whether you’re there to see it or not. Right. Heat of the fire remains constant when you move away from it. Your experience of it changes. But that heat is unconditional. Conditions, constraints, priorities, dissipation. The conditionality is in the agency, in the free will. It’s like, oh, there’s free will and that’s where the condition. Yes. Yes. Now you can modify the conditions within the constraints. Those constraints are nature. And then all of a sudden you have a very simple model, in my opinion, very simple model that basically, you know, I mean, there’s more pieces to my world. The world model will say that explains the world. But if you want to explain nature, materialism and the difference between, say, natural law and the law of man, and you add the law of God, you could say a lot of God, a lot of nature. It doesn’t matter at that point. I think the model accommodates both systems just fine. It doesn’t change anything because you’re adding a component within the same within the same basic framework. Right. Now you have a simple way of understanding nature. It’s like, oh, OK, so nature is that neutral space where good and bad, good and evil, both because they’re different, can exist. Both axes, both the horizontal and the vertical can exist. Yeah. In some ways, you need to preserve in your mind. I’m not sure if I’m going to say this correctly. You need to remember the container of neutral space. Right. Right. Just to correct correct lensing or correct orientation. Right. Has all shades of the contrast when you reduce the contrast down to a few shades. It’s very hard to see things in their proper state or just kind of your yet to a binary. This is what people are doing. They’re like, yeah, well, let’s find the others. The Hegelian dialectic, literal thesis, antithesis synthesis. Right. But there is no synthesis. That’s garbage. Right. He’s just saying there’s a thing and there’s the opposite of the thing, which I’ve already said. No, that’s cannot be true. Not that things don’t have things that oppose them, but they don’t have exact opposites. The world is not symmetrical. Everything does not have like matter doesn’t have corresponding anti matter. How can you say that? Because we’re here. This is actually a big problem in physics that nobody’s been able to. Yeah. Basically, I solved it in two seconds. There’s obviously just more matter than anti matter problem solved. There’s an asymmetry built into the universe automatically. That’s how we’re here. It’s obvious. Right. It’s like the sun is not toxic to us. So if it was, we couldn’t be here. It’s the same sort of banal, almost functionally retarded mistake that people are making. There’s an asymmetry. And that means that opposites is not the world we live in. And so the Hegelian dialectic is bankrupt from the start because there isn’t an antithesis. It doesn’t exist. Right. Which again doesn’t mean things don’t have overlapping opposition. They do, but they’re not opposite. Those are different statements. And adding that nuance is actually really important because it allows you to understand the difference between natural law and the law of man. They’re not in conflict. There is some overlap. If you’re trying to rationalize, right, and pass out, right, if you’re beginning from a need to rationalize, you’re going to have no neutral space or no other framing for the irrational, which is perhaps the thing that you should actually protect is like, no, things sometimes just don’t have an explanation. Some things will never get to the bottom of. That’s the closed world. Yeah. You want to know how people are stuck, how they’re stuck in a meeting crisis? They have a closed world. And in that closed world, it has to be very simple. And one of the arguments I get into on the Break the Rules live stream chat there was these guys are saying, we need to pass a law to do this. And I’m like, guys, you break laws all the time. You don’t even know the laws. You literally don’t know what laws you’re, you live in the US and probably everywhere else, but definitely the US. You don’t even know the laws you’re breaking right now. There’s no idea. How is that helpful? If somebody passes like like there’s these little signs and they have numbers on them and they say something like speed limit. I don’t know. I can’t exactly. Do you think I have a convertible BMW that’s basically a freaking race car? I mean, I didn’t intend to buy a race car, but I did because it was car and driver, man, car and driver said that was the best car for the money in that in that price range. I just bought it. That’s just how I roll sometimes when I when I’m not pork. And I don’t regret any of it. The car is way too fast. Like I should not be driving a car that goes as fast. I’m already irresponsible about I don’t need any help. Right. I don’t pay attention to those signs. They don’t stop me from doing anything. That law about how fast you know, and what’s the penalty, you know, and because I did get a ticket recently and my vote is like, oh, I’m sorry. You go to ticket. You know, you should have driven. And I was like, whatever, dude, this is a tax for having a fancy car. That’s what this is. And it’s like, whatever, I’ll just pay the damn tax. I bought the damn car. It’s not that hard. Right. And so I pay the tax for having the fact that pragmatic. That’s so well, I know what it is. It’s really good. I broke the law. It has a penalty. It’s not a penalty. I care about that much. Although, yeah, even a small ticket is a big deal right now. Right. But it’s like whatever. I mean, it is what it is. Right. And so is that really an effective law? I mean, it is. But you don’t know why. It’s not because of the consequence and the penalty. It’s because of the point. Like, oh, here’s a speed we can agree on. Even if we don’t actually agree, the availability of having a speed limit is really important because it causes and we know this actually. This is funny. We actually know this from experiments. These experiments have actually been done. If you put a sign, even if it’s 100 miles an hour, people will travel in packs at a similar speed and that reduces accidents. Insurance companies can tell you this all day long. The thing that causes accidents is not the speed you’re going or not going. It’s the difference in speed on the same road. That’s what causes accidents. You know what else causes accidents? Nothing. That is the factor for accidents. Right. Because even if people aren’t paying attention, they’re easy to avoid if they’re doing the same speed as you. Because the minute they come out of that speed, you know right away to avoid them. Yeah. Right. How many times have people Jay walk to? I had someone last night or Miss Jay walked in front of my car. I cursed. It’s just what are you doing? Especially when you go maybe 100 meters up the road. There’s a traffic light just across there. What’s the utility of Jay walking here? Just because you can save a little bit of time. It’s like yeah, but you could. Jay walking in Boston in particular is a sport. But yeah, oh yeah, the American Carousel. They do call it Frogger for a reason, don’t they? Imagine living in this world, especially in the US, and thinking that passing a law was going to have some material effect on behavior in the way that you would have. It’s like you’re not paying attention to how things are happening. I told them all go to a court just for the day, maybe half a day, watch what happens. Go ahead. And then you tell me how effective laws are. And the fact of the matter is in the US, it’s all recidivism. Right. Most people are there at court because they’ve been there before. Most criminals are breaking the same laws over and over again. It just is what it is. And so how effective are laws? I would say they’re not effective in the way that you expect at all. But having things like speed limit signs, which are set by laws somehow, is effective. But you don’t understand why. It’s not the law aspect. But imagine not seeing that. What’s the norms? It’s the norms of immediacy. And hypothetically, it’s a protection or a limitation or sentimentality that the community has been to help up. You have to point at something. It’s the same argument with gratitude. The reason why you have gratitude is because you’re pointing up at something. And that gives you contrast to see the rest of the world. And because you’re pointing up and away from the material, you get orientation. And then once you can orient, you gain the skills of orientation. And now you take those back, you exact them, to use Reveki terminology, back into the world, and everything in your life improves. I don’t want to tell you. That’s why you need the gratitude. All right, Jesse, I’m pretty tired. We’ve been doing almost three hours. What do you think? Closing comment or two? Closing comment. Virtue, appreciation, character, contrast, discernment, integrity. These are moments to cultivate the spirit of gratitude. Nice. Have a sacred space, right, where you can practice gratitude. And that will not only stave off some of the materialism, but it will also give you the ability to compare and contrast and therefore orient with respect to virtues and values and the transcendentals. Because if you’re busy all the time, you cannot appreciate virtues and values. You cannot engage with transcendentals. You have to take that time out and dedicate it in worship, in practice, right, to gratitude. And hopefully you do it in the morning and in the evening. Highly recommended. So thank you, everybody. If you have ideas for topics, put them in the comments and we’ll try to get to them. If you’ve got ideas for different streaming times, because Joey has to be a social butterfly at the normal time with the normal people, which I very much disagree with. This normal thing is totally overrated. Let me know. I can’t guarantee anything. But any topics for any navigating patterns videos, obviously. And I’m always grateful that A, anybody watches, and B, for whatever feedback we get. So thank you very much, everybody. Have a good night.