Identity - Live Navigation (aic4OQYNpKo)

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Acting. Young girl dancing to the latest beat, has found new ways to move her feet. And the lonely voice of youth cries, what is truth? Young man speaking in the city square, trying to tell somebody that he cares. Can you blame the voice of youth for asking, what is truth? Yeah, the ones that you’ll call and love, are gonna be the leaders in a little while. When will the lonely voice of youth cry, what is truth? This old world’s waking to a newborn babe, and I solemnly swear it’ll be their way. You better help that voice of youth find, what is truth? And the lonely voice of youth cries, what is truth? Alright, I gotta fix that video and add a fade. Welcome, welcome to Navigating Patterns. We’re gonna navigate some patterns live, live, live. I’m gonna talk about identity and for a while and then we’re gonna let people in and see what they have to say. Of course, livestream comments, I try to get to them if I don’t get to them in the moment. We’re ready, we get our Sam Pelle, right? Sam Pellegrino, we got it. We got some of the Muppet Cup, right? If you don’t have a Muppet Cup, you should get one in my store. So, good stuff you should consider. We got our Junkless Cinnamon Roll for later. And we have some tea this time, we remembered to get our Table Rock Tea. Wintergreen, picked in the cold. Definitely unique flavor. Never had a tea quite like that, very subtle difference. Hey Josh, good to see you again sir. Great comments last week, thank you so much. Very helpful, a lot of people commented like, wow, Josh is really honest. Yes, he is. You want genius in the corner there or in the Peterson Sphere rather? There you go, Josh is it. Speaking of the Peterson Sphere, working on the petersonsphere.com website. It’s there, you can look at it, it looks pretty slick. We’re still building it. We’ve got a community doc where we’re building what we want to say about it. And yeah, it’s going to be interesting. So, I just got tired while I was on the Sunday stream with Father Eric. So, while I was there I registered a domain, put up a bunch of graphics that Sally Jo had lying around for years that nobody wanted to use for whatever reason. So I said, oh, I have a use for these. And I set up a website like 15 minutes while I was on a stream with Father Eric, which I apologized Father Eric for because split attention. And then we’ve since redone it. I don’t build websites, I haven’t built websites in years. So I have a webmaster, she’s building everything, it’s looking great. So we’ll be rolling out petersonsphere.com soon. I mean you can go now and subscribe and stuff, all that stuff’s working. But we’ll get mission statements and stuff up there soon. And this goes to sort of the identity, right? How are people identifying? I identify as somebody within the Peterson sphere. That’s the key. And look, I have a lot of notes, a lot in the past like 8, 10 hours. Even I think this is last minute adoption of ideas. I’ve been watching a lot of stuff, and maybe I should be doing other things, but you know, such as it is. And pondering a lot of this identity stuff because it comes up all the time. We’ve got identity politics, we’ve got all kinds of identity things. The key question is what is identity, right? Why do we have a problem with identity? It should be obvious, observable, and clear. That’s what identity should be, however it’s not. And this is due to our deep confusion because things look different from the outside than they do from how they are on the inside. And that’s just how the world is. It’s reality, it’s not optional. In other words, the way you look at and think about your identity cannot be the same way you look at and think about identity outside of yourself. It’s not possible. You have an access to yourself internally that other people don’t have by definition. That’s the difference between inside and outside. So, and I talked about this before with discernment, judgment, action, right? So inside you, there’s a discernment, you make a judgment, take an action. When you look at other people, you don’t see their discernment and their judgment. You can’t. It’s not available to you. All you see is their action and you infer that before that, hopefully, there was a judgment, right? And before that, there was a discernment. And then you try to guess what they are and that’s a fool’s errand, but I’m pragmatist so we don’t try that. It’s the same with identity, right? The way we identify things is not the way we can be identified within ourselves. It doesn’t make any sense. And we crave the equality of the inside and outside view, even though they’re definitionally different, right? There’s an inside view, there’s an outside view. They are not the same. And the thing about having the equality of the inside outside view is we can understand ourselves perfectly and we can understand others perfectly. Using one set of tools, the same actual set of tools. And wouldn’t that be nice? One set of tools, we understand ourselves, we understand others, problem solved, right? But this is false and it causes a bunch of problems, right? The expectation of equality, which doesn’t work, it puts us in this opposition, in this binary rebellion. And we only have that when we don’t have real boundaries, right? Real boundaries you wouldn’t rebel against. You’d be like, oh, these are natural boundaries. We’ll just respect them when we can. And you can’t always respect all boundaries at all times. It’s not universal, right? But, you know, respect them most of the time. Like when somebody tells us they know something, we’re not going to automatically say, you don’t know that. Well, how do you know what the other person knows? And look, sometimes there’s ways to know when someone’s saying something that they can’t know the answer to. Sometimes. But that’s rare and it shouldn’t be your assumption. Well, that person said that. Therefore, they’re making it up. They, you know, that’s not usually the case. And the real question is, where do you end and other things begin? Where do you end and other people begin? Where do you end and your community begins? Where does your community end and you begin? Well, that’s a very difficult question. Where do you end and your community begins? Where does your community end and you begin? This is the problem of drawing boundaries or not being able to draw boundaries or drawing improper boundaries. Those are all similar sorts of issues. And this is informed by some work. I probably talked about this before. I think it was a year ago. Maybe it was two years ago. I had I did a talk. I set it up with Pastor Paul VanderKlay and Father Eric and Joey and myself. And it was two atheists talk to two clergy, whatever, forget the exact title. It was a good video. And after we did that talk, somebody put a comment on it, I think since been deleted, where they said. You know, they were in some kind of therapy role. They said, oh, thing that people find most helpful is when I can teach them where they end and other things begin. And that really helps them therapeutically. And that makes sense. And, you know, that’s actually a whopping issue. Like Joey highlighted this to me and said, this is really important. And Joey’s often right about these things. So I try to listen to Joey. I’m so glad, so glad to have met Joey. Very rich. Is a very good, clear thinker and clear communicator, even more importantly, sometimes. And we get confused because part of identity is formation. And formation is something that is done to you. By outside forces, by definition, you do not form yourself. That’s not possible. That’s ridiculous. It’s absurd. If somebody says that they’re a crazy person, don’t listen to them. Right. Just smile, nod, back up slowly. Right. You’re not going to form yourself. Let’s say you’re not involved in your formation. Of course, if you’re not involved in your formation, you’re not going to form yourself. You’re not going to form yourself. Let’s say you’re not involved in your formation. Of course, if you’re a rebel, you won’t form. You’ll become unhinged, effectively. Right. You should, you should try to form and conform to the world around you because you’re in it. It’s not really an optional thing, except you can burn a lot of time, energy, and tension. You can burn a lot of personal power. Power. Rebelling. Like you always have the option to rebel. You have the option to opt out. Right. You have the option to rebel. You always have these options. But I don’t recommend it. Part of formation is figuring out where you fit in, how you fit in, and why you should submit. And what you should submit to fit in. It’s all kinds of problems with this. It’s an imperfect process. Maybe you want to be a baseball player and you can’t catch a baseball. That might be a problem. Maybe you can’t fit in there. Maybe you don’t want to be a baseball player, but your parents want you to be a baseball player. Yeah, that’s a problem. These are all problems. For sure. I’m not here to give you answers. Right. I’m here to show you how this works, to help you, give you the tools to navigate. I’m not here for answers. You’re here for answers. I’m sorry. I’m going to be disappointed. The problem of identification is that it implies limitation and admitting to limitation. You can’t identify without acknowledging limits. And probably a lot of limits. Maybe limits you’re uncomfortable with. And it also involves leaving stuff out in favor of other stuff, like privileging things, value hierarchies, things like that, trade-offs. It involves trade-offs. Identity involves trade-offs. If you’re not willing to make trade-offs, you’re not going to have identity. If you’re not willing to draw boundaries, you’re not going to have identity. If you’re not willing to put limits on things or acknowledge limits, you’re not going to have identity. That’s not just you personally. It’s also objects in the world. If you want to make a cup with no sides, it’s not going to function as a cup. You can call it a cup. You can try to force the identity on it. It’s not going to work. You can use arbitrary words. You know, you can call things topics. You can call people topics. I don’t think people are topics. I think that’s a reduction. Terrible thing to say about somebody, but whatever. People do that. Part of the flattening of the world. Improper identification is a denial of boundaries or it’s rebelling against boundaries, against exclusion, against consequence and constraint. That’s the liberal ethos. When people say, you know, in recent times, they’re liberal, they’re not liberal. They’re not liberal. They’re not liberal. They’re not liberal. What do you mean? What they typically say, if you listen closely to their descriptions, they want freedom from consequence and constraints. Well, I got news. We’re not living in that world. We’re not going to be living in that world. We can’t form the world in the way that that would be a thing. We need to get over it. Proper. Proper. We need to get over it. Proper identification is all about defending that which is within the bounds against that which is outside of those bounds. It doesn’t mean that you can’t bring the outside in. But there is a right or proper way to do this and a wrong way to do this or maybe several wrong ways and only a few right ways or maybe only one right way. And without that, you can’t have identity. You can’t big tent everything and say, well, everybody’s welcome all the time no matter what. It’s not practical. It doesn’t work. And the worst sort of people are going to figure that out, take advantage of it and destroy you. You’re going to have snakes in the garden. In fact, your garden is going to be full of snakes really quickly. And you won’t notice because the snakes are very clever at replacing good people with snakes. Get one snake. They tell their friend snakes. The next thing you know, it’s a pit of vipers. It happens all the time online. It happens all the time online. I’ve seen it time and time again. Extremely common. You have fewer signals online. We’ve talked about signals before. And once they start getting in, they just keep getting in. And it’s hard. They’re hard to discern already. And having an identifiable thing doesn’t mean that everything or everyone can stay forever. It doesn’t mean all the parts are going to last. It doesn’t mean all the parts are going to be the same parts. The parts aren’t going to fundamentally change because that can happen. It’s not a universal in time. And I know we love universals. Those are easy answers. But people change. Communities change. Identities change. There’s a great story. I forget how long ago I heard it or where it was. But it was one of these true crime things. They’re basically talking about it. It’s such an absurd story. Sometimes I’m like, how did this happen? It was a small town. I think it was in the northwest of the United States. It was a relatively small town. You know, like 700 people type sound. I don’t think it had 1,000 people in it. It might have been less. It might have been 200 people. But it was a relatively small town. I had this one drug dealer there who was motorcycles, multiple, quote, girlfriends, wives, whatever, beat them publicly. Right. It’s a problem. But he’s part of the community and he’s hard to get rid of. And he happened to have an attorney who loved cash. And he’s a drug dealer, so he had a lot of cash. A guy on retainer. He was out on two different murders, separate cases. He was out. He was out and about. And I forget what happened. But something triggered the townspeople to shoot him. So he was shot and dead and killed. And the locals kind of came in and said, oh, yeah, he’s dead. All right. Well, let’s wrap this up. Because they knew. Like, well, he’s a drug dealer. He beats people and kills people. He was on trial for two different murders. And he somehow got off. So like, justice is done. Let’s move on here. And went up to the state level. State investigated. Said, oh, yeah, horrible tragedy. Lunch. Right. They figured it out. Nobody was interested in prosecuting, except obviously somebody was pissed off. I don’t know if it was the attorney or who it was. I don’t remember the story that well. That detail wasn’t important. So the FBI comes in. And I’m like, why is the FBI investigating this? This guy’s a murderer. He’s dead now. That’s really too bad. I’m so sad. I’m going to cry. Leave it alone. The FBI comes in. They start interviewing people. And the story that comes out is that every single person they interviewed said, oh, yeah, well, I was in the bar under the pool table when the shots were fired. I heard the shots. I know the shots happened. I was under the pool table. So now it just turns out the FBI is doing some math. And they’re like, there were like 45 people under a pool table. And it’s the same pool table. And they all agree it was that pool table. And they asked every one of them, was anybody else under the pool table with you? And they all said, well, I don’t know, man. I just know I was under the pool table. And they just all stuck to that story. The FBI did all this long, ridiculous investigation. And couldn’t make a case. So they had to drop the case. Sometimes people need to be ejected from your community because they’re bad people. It happens. And your community changes in that case for the better, sometimes for the worse. Yeah, that’s a problem. Sounds like a problem of discernment. I have a live stream on that. Just saying. Navigating patterns. Wonderful live streams. Presumably that’s why you’re here. Your attempt to identify can conflict with reality when you try to control that yourself. Because identity is your relationship to the world. Identity is also recognizing reality. Not just something that applies to you. Something you’re embedded in. Something you’re related to. Something you’re in relationship with. A quality relationship, hopefully. In other words, intimacy. If you’re having a conflict of, say, personal identity or even an identity of, is this a cop? You might just be wrong about reality. I’m not saying you are. I’m saying you should consider that, though. A lot of what’s going on is people never consider, maybe I’m wrong about something. They just don’t, never crosses their mind. And it might be if you are wrong about reality, you cannot properly identify. Or be identified. Or be able to identify things. Synapses. Perhaps you don’t know what thingness is. A lot of people are trying to work out thingness. I’m like, really? That’s a waste of time. If you need to work out thingness, say, propositionally, you’re screwed. You’re completely screwed. It’s over for you, man. You’re in hell, and you’re going to stay there for a long time. You need to just relate to the world. And that question of thingness will resolve itself. All we have are signals. And this is part of the confusion. Do we know a loud signal from a persistent signal? Or from 12 different signals that are basically signaling the same thing? Or are they all just the same to us? Because I think in a lot of cases, that’s part of the problem. It’s a flat world out there, man. We flatten people to topics, to prompts. We flatten people to political parties. We flatten people to what videos they listen to on the internet. We flatten people to who they talk to. It’s like, what? Why? I’d rather relate to people and hear what they say. And be in a relationship with them. And with the world. And with them with the world. That’s how you be with somebody. You don’t be with them by having the same physical location for them for a time. That’s not sufficient. I can be with somebody on the internet without having a physical location in common. That’s part of the flattening. That’s part of the problem. We’re not understanding the signals. If 12 people are signaling exactly the same thing, does that just sound as loud as one really loud person? I don’t know. I suspect so, though. A lot of people were making a lot of hay in the past like five years, six years, things like that, over certain topics. And I’d be like, yeah, that’s four people. You’re listening to four very loud people. The majority of people don’t believe that. And you know, they’d show up in the polls and everybody would just be like, wow, I don’t know about the polls. Why would you ignore the polls? Because they don’t believe in numbers. They just believe in numbers when they agree with them, which is fine. We’re humans. That happens. Sample bias is a thing. We ignore the things that disagree with us and we prefer the things that agree with us. That’s part of the problem that we have as people. We’re very much the creatures that filter out disagreement and try to include agreement. And we do that with signals first and foremost. The world starts with signals. And it’s hard to discern these loud signals from these frequent signals from these 12 people with the same signal from where the majority is. And we’ll throw out those polls and those numbers all day long to fit our beliefs because one person that’s very loud. And maybe we don’t know it’s one person. On the internet, it’s hard to tell. Is your one person with 12 accounts? Because I know people that did that. So could be. I’m not saying it is. I’m saying it could be. You need to consider that. A lot of people make a lot of, hey, see, it’s a conspiracy. This person said it and that person said it and they use the same script. It might be the same person, guy. That’s possible. It’s the internet, man. The real problem is we live in a flood of identity. There’s a ton of things you could identify with or copy or emulate or agree with or try to participate in or try to exemplify. We mix up identities. Is poverty the same as piety? Is being poor something that makes you righteous? Is being a minority something that makes you worthy of assistance? Is being different a reason to give you more attention? And look, the world is too complicated for us, identity in particular. So we oversimplify it. That’s where I’m going to go. We oversimplify it. That’s where identity politics comes from. You’re reducing identity to the binary frame of politics. That’s what identity politics, oh, it seems really simple. Yeah, go map it and see it maps perfectly. Wow. It’s really simple. Yeah, the world is really simple. Everyone’s giving you these complicated blue church, green church, game B, game C, game D, you know, advanced non-Euclidean superphysicist. Garbage frames that you don’t need. Nobody had them in the past and they all survived to give us the world we are in. So I don’t think we need them. Just a guess. But it has to be true too. So there’s always that. And if you try to identify as all things or with all things, like you can’t. So the flood gets you and you end up in nihilism or you go, well, I don’t know what I want to identify as. So I’m going to try everything. No, you’re not. You can’t. You can’t. It’s not an option that’s available. At some point, you have to give up and quit. Otherwise, the nihilism is going to eat you. And it does eat you like nihilism eats people. That’s what it does. Instead of finding problems with different identifications, with different things that you could relate to, instead of identifying against, you should identify for. They aren’t opposites. I can identify as a computer programmer. That doesn’t mean I’m identifying against being a plumber. It’s not symmetrical. Saying I’m not a plumber and saying I am a computer programmer are not the same sort of statement at all. Identifying for doesn’t mean rejecting everything else. It just changes your mode of participation. What is right participation? Well, I’m sure you can have some answers to that. And this sort of brings us to the big question. Where are communities? What are we talking about? Communities are things with identity. I mean, they’re a way of identifying. If I ride the train, am I part of the train commuter club? Well, no. I mean, maybe you have to ride the train at commuting hours. Look, I used to ride the train once in a while. I’ve actually gone without cars for whole months and had to trek two hours to get into the city occasionally. So I take the train into Boston. I’ve done it a few times. Can’t do anymore because I don’t live anywhere near Boston anymore. But there’s a commuter train community. There’s a commuter train culture. You don’t become part of it by commuting at the commuter train time. You also don’t become part of it by going into one of the cars where all of the commuter community people are. That’s not sufficient. It’s a little confusing. Well, what makes that community? Well, regularity. Relationship. Those people have been riding the train in the same train car, probably sitting in many of the same spaces, usually for months, sometimes for years, at least for weeks. They’ve gotten to know each other in various different ways for various different reasons. So they formed a little train commuter community. Very nice community, by the way. If you want into the community and get in temporarily, if you know somebody or perhaps you start to make a friend or two. But you don’t get in by just being there. You’re not in the community because you’re commuting with those people in that train car at that time. That’s not sufficient. It takes work. It takes effort. A lot of people are just freaking lazy. I hate laziness. I hate laziness. Laziness. The only thing worse than laziness is incompetence. You’ve got to work for community. You can’t just declare it. You can’t just be on the train and say, I’m part of the train commuter community. You have to cooperate. You have to show up. That’s what builds. Communities are built. They’re not named. They’re built. First, you build them. You build them. Cooperation is required to be in a community, to be part of a community, to have a community, to build a community, for a community to exist. It’s not just having things in common because we all have lots of things in common. Lots of people listen to Jordan Peterson. That doesn’t mean they’re all in the Peterson sphere. Some people misunderstand Jordan Peterson. They’ll never be in the Peterson sphere. But they’re not in the Peterson sphere. They’re not in the Peterson sphere. They’re not in the Peterson sphere. Because they don’t understand what he’s talking about. Fair enough. I’m fine with that. I’m okay with it. I don’t need everybody to be there. I don’t need the universality, the equality. But you have to have something higher in common, like an understanding of what Jordan Peterson is pointing to and what he’s doing for people and what people are doing with his work. That’s all beyond Jordan Peterson. That puts you in the sphere. We need that thing, that higher thing. Because we need to orient towards the same thing. And we can’t orient towards the same thing at the same level of analysis or layer of reality. We can’t. Mere direction might work in that situation, although it also doesn’t. But it certainly looks like it does. But it certainly looks like it does. And it’s not just about the same thing. It’s about the same thing. It’s about the same thing. And it also doesn’t. But it certainly looks like it does. But only when you only account for yourself and your goal. Not when you account for yourself, the landscape around you and the other people around you and all the snakes and all the demons and all the other things that get in your way and the goal. Now you need something higher to orient towards. Because we all have different perspectives at the same level of reality. That’s the materialism. We cannot use that for orientation and cooperation. It’s not sufficient. That form of commonality will always result in opposition and therefore direct conflict. I’m not a fan. You can have identity or you can be a universalist. You get to pick one. Everyone wants to be special and included, but both are not possible. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. A lot of people have this problem. They’re pretending like something hasn’t happened. They’re pretending like something that hasn’t happened or something that could possibly happen has already manifested in the world. It’s already here. And that helps to cause a deep confusion with identity. That’s the I want to be versus I am. That’s fantasy versus reality. We could all go to the same conference together. Okay, dude. I’m sure in theory we could. In practice, however, we can’t. Now I would hope that someday we, everybody on the stream and perhaps a bunch of other people, could all get together in the same place at the same time. But for me to identify that now and say, well, this is a navigating patterns conference and you’re all part of that community, I’m like stepping across a billion boundaries. So counterexample, please, can’t afford me. It’s inappropriate. You can’t do that. We haven’t established that that can happen yet. We can’t do that. It’s inappropriate. You can’t do that. We haven’t established that that can happen yet. It can happen in theory. Anything can happen in your head. Anything. Your brain can manifest anything in idea space. I have purple talking unicorn. I just don’t understand why purple talking unicorn doesn’t talk to you. No idea. It’s also never going to. And it’s important that I know that. I don’t want that. I already am. We don’t want that. Look at the outfit. Really? Do we want more outrageous outfits? I think not. That’s the confusion. I mean, that’s why people like the LARPing frame, which is just the most garbage frame ever. I get it. But you have to be able to discern fantasy and reality. No, no crazier outfits, Casey, sorry. Not gonna happen. Thank you, hello. Knowing where you end and other things begin or other people begin is a crisis of meaning, a collapse of intimacy, like the quality of your relationship to the world or relationships in the world. And it’s explanatory of our times, the recent stuff we’re going through right now. Not having proper boundaries, or maybe any at all, means you cannot have proper intimate connections with the world. You cannot be in proper relationship with the world. Thank you, Aaron. That’s very generous of you. Let me ask you a question, all of you on my stream. Are we true to ourselves? Or are we acting like we have a profile that is not us? Is that our identity? Is that authenticity? When we signal lies to each other, we live in a world full of lies and deception and betrayal, not only of us, but of knowledge itself and by knowledge itself. If we’re reducing the world to propositional knowledge, and I tell you a cup is not a cup, or that two plus two equals five, or that Elon Musk is a topic, that’s dangerous. That’s unhealthy. That’s profelicity. That’s the fantasy fooling yourself into just naming things randomly and thinking that’s OK. You don’t have the authority to name things. You’re nuts. Maybe even things you create. You know that thing about a nickname? You don’t pick your nickname. People pick your nickname for you. That’s weird. Why? But it’s how it works. There’s nothing wrong with it. We as a culture have reduced knowledge to propositions, and now it betrays us. The age of gnosis is here. Knowledge has the highest value, has betrayed us. We don’t even know what knowledge is for the most part. I do have a video on that by the way, Navigating Patterns. Check it out. Knowledge Engine, wonderful video. Slides. More videos with slides coming. We want to know the identity of others in the age of gnosis because knowledge is the highest value. And having the propositions that tell you what people are and who people are. Ah, he’s a Republican. Ah, he’s a Democrat. Ah, she’s woke. Ah, she’s anti-woke. Even though propositions are flat maps and often merely descriptions, which can be inaccurate, they seem more real. But only in our fantasy where we fill in all the details that propositions cannot convey. We create identities for others from our propositions or from their propositions, and when their actions and activities don’t match that, we think they aren’t being authentic. Often that is true, but sometimes it is false. How frustrating. Our sense of authenticity of others is wrapped up very, very, very heavily. Very heavily. In our expectations, which are informed by our predictions, which are informed by our models of the world. And so you may think that Jordan Peterson, moving to Daily Wire, is some betrayal or that he somehow changed and become different. That didn’t happen. Sorry, it didn’t happen. I’m not saying Jordan Peterson didn’t change, but him going to Daily Wire, the message isn’t changed at all. He’s not saying anything fundamentally different. His views on certain things have shifted for sure. Watched a great video on Aaron McIntyre’s channel with Jonathan Pigeot, and he talked about some of that. Jordan Peterson is no longer, say, a classical liberal. I think that’s fair. He’s not talking like that anymore, for sure. Very subtle, hard to catch. Don’t believe me? Look, I got a bunch of videos on Jordan Peterson, one of them, and I got a conversation with Manuel, actually, right? Why this third wave Peterson, whatever, this Daily Wire thing is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. Maybe you didn’t expect him to go to Daily Wire because you have this ridiculous view of Daily Wire as conservative. Oh, Lord. Get a media conservative if you think they’re conservative. Ben Shapiro gets crap all the time from the Jewish community because they say you can’t be orthodox and do Daily Wire because you don’t talk like an orthodox. And he’s like, yeah, no kidding. I’m a journalist. Fair, very moderate, very moderate, shockingly moderate, disappointingly moderate from my perspective. I’m not going to get into my politics. We’re filling in the details. If somebody says they were conservative or somebody says they watch Daily Wire, we’re going, oh, I know all these things about them. No, you don’t. You have one piece of information. Let’s suppose I watch Daily Wire to yell at Ben Shapiro for not being harsh enough on bad people or calling out evil enough, which occasionally I do, by the way. You may think I’m agreeing with him when in fact I’m pissed. I know other people who watch Daily Wire to go, what are those crazy conservatives up to now? Even though I would call them insane. I know people to do that. They pay the money so they can watch it. So the fact they watch Daily Wire tells you zero about them, zero, actual zero, zero. It does not give you any intimacy with them, but you filled in their identity all by yourself. Pro-felicity, huh? Yeah. I know Pastor Paul talks about pro-felicity. You get from Hans-George Muehle. I like Hans, actually. When he talks about dead philosophers or alleged philosophers, right? We all know there’s no actual philosophers past Plato and Aristotle. Good stuff, like really good summaries. When he talks about Jordan Peterson, I don’t know what drugs he’s on, but I wish he’d share them because like drugs that good. Yeah, I’m in. He’s delusional, hallucinating. It’s crazy things. He clearly doesn’t understand basic concepts. He makes inane statements. When he talks about stuff nowadays, completely off the rails. This happens with philosophers who specialize in older sorts of philosophy, right? It also happens with historians. You can read American Nations. Please do. Colin Woodard, excellent book. Great stuff until he gets to around the Civil War and then his history gets a little wonky. And when he starts talking about like the past 50 years or like the future, sounds like a crazy lizard people believing person. The rest of the book is great. That’s only like 25, 30 pages of the book. I forget. It’s not much of the book. It’s just the very end. The rest of the book’s bang on. It’s amazingly helpful. And look, everyone’s got problems, man. I mean, one of the reasons why I don’t like Carl Jung and refuse to read him is because I know he went off the rails, but I can’t figure out where. And that just scares me. I can point to, yeah, he’s definitely off the rails when he said that. But I don’t know where he went off the rails. It’s a lot easier to see with Nietzsche. It’s a lot easier to see with Kant. It’s a lot easier to see with Heidegger. Oh, yeah, I know where they went off the rails. Easy. When I can’t see where they went off the rails, it’s too easy to fill something in or to give them the benefit of the doubt. Or to say, well, you know, maybe when they said this, they actually meant this. You see a lot of that with people’s fantastical interpretations of Plato. This cave in particular. I got to get that video done. I know. We fill that in. We fill in the poetical parts. And I’ve got a video coming on poetics, by the way, with slides, with slides. Did the slides the other day. Well, I didn’t do the slides. My editor did. I have an awesome team. I really do. What you see. What you see. Most of what you see here is Sally. Sally’s fault. Not mine. I didn’t come up with this. Informed by me, for sure. Locus, head, leader, me, sure. Head Muppet, whatever you want to call me. That’s fine. I love it all. What you’re seeing is not me. I’m being authentic. I have a lot of help. I have a lot of help. I need a lot of help. I need more help. We always need more help. Often we try to identify with what we see in the world. Or in relation to it. Like our relation to that thing. Rather than what we are or what that thing is. Because we want things to be different. Whether it’s us. I don’t want to be a guy. I want to be a girl. Or I want to be non-binary so I can decide later. Whatever that’s about. I don’t know. That way I can be treated the way I want in the world. Because I know how people treat women in the world. And they treat them better than men. Or vice versa. I don’t know. And the difference is that we aren’t Elon Musk. We aren’t what is in the world. We are our relationship within the world. What do we sacrifice to be in this world? Particularly in right relation. Because those are two different things. You can be in this world and not in right relation. And struggling. Or suffering. Worse yet. But some of that you may maybe you do some of that to yourself. What compromises do we make? Where are our trade-offs? What do we give up to relate to the world? To others in the world? To meet them in a way that they can be comfortable even while we are uncomfortable. Sit on Discord servers sometimes. I’ve done this for years now on Discord and online in general. And I put up with the most annoying people. And it really makes me uncomfortable. And sometimes it makes me angry. For sure. But I do it. What do you do? I do it because it’s good for them. Not because it’s good for me. It pisses me off. I’m trying to get work done usually. It’s like, ah. I’ve got to calm myself down. I’ve got to remember why I’m doing this. I’m relating to the world. I’m not relating to my feelings in the moment. That’s hedonism. I’m not generally hedonist. There may be a time for hedonism. Carnival. Maybe. Maybe not all the time. That sucks. That requires discernment. Man, that discernment is annoying. It’s freaking everywhere. Oh, we’ve got to get rid of that stuff. Let’s make everything equal. Ha! Solved it. In short, cooperation requires proper relationship to identity. Your identity. The identity of things in the world. The identity of other people. What values do we hold and uphold? What values do we defend? What values are we willing to die for? That informs us and the world of who we can cooperate with and how to do so. We need to be mindful of virtues and values. But we will always be homeless. We’ll always be in domicile. Because we cannot have a home without an identity. Because a home is a thing that anchors us to the world and you can’t be in your home without a relationship to that place. When you’re in relationship, you’re identified. You have an identity. You deny identity or you try to get squiggly about identity or squishy. You’re homeless. You’re in domicile. It’s all over. This is very close to what John Breveke describes in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which should be called Awakening to the Meaning Crisis. When Alexander conquers the world. I disagree with this history entirely in this particular section. It’s a piece of history I actually know a little bit about. But the point is a good one. Man, when the possible relationships you have in the world flood in. The outside world floods in to your culture. And you have more options, maybe. More job options. More options of who you can and can’t work with. Then maybe that causes domicile because maybe it shatters our identity or maybe we shatter our identity because whatever we have is not good enough. And whatever you have is not good enough. But it may be good enough for you. Or it may be as good as you can have. And we always want more than we can have. When we oppose, we cannot identify. Identify who we are. Identify who we are. Identify who we are. Identify who we are. We cannot identify. Identity itself is lost in rebellion, in refusal. And then we become unhomed. Domicile ensues. This is a second way. It’s not just a flood. It’s a rebellion. It’s a different method. We don’t know who we are. So we cannot have a proper relationship with and in the world. And this is a big problem with the flood of identities. There’s so many identities. I’m overwhelmed. I’m just going to identify against a bunch of things and see what happens. So the flood and the rebellion are related, but they’re completely separate too. One can cause the other, but they can exist alone. Especially when we’re told all identities are possible for us personally, ourselves. Individually, that’s nonsense. I can’t do everything. I can’t play guitar. I’ve tried my whole life. I can’t do it. I wish I could have small little girl fingers. Little girl fingers and guitar, not a good combination. Are there ways around this? Maybe I’d have to be really motivated. Maybe I’m just not motivated enough. Maybe I just can’t do it. Maybe. It’s madness. It’s self-imposed domicide to tell people, oh, you can be whatever you want to be. No, you can’t. That’s insane. You need formation to help you be what you can be or help you be good at what you do. Do you want to be a mediocre singer? Really? Maybe you do. I mean, maybe you’re comfortable with that. Most mediocre singers are part-time, by the way. Maybe formation gives you a sense that, yeah, you can be a singer on the side, but you shouldn’t try to be a singer as your primary identity because we have multiple identities. And they can conflict. And we don’t like conflict. We try to get rid of that. And we say, oh, we can identify as this and then that, or we can identify as it. No, you can’t. It’s just a conflict that you have to resolve, and that sucks. But that’s the world that you’re in. No, Casey, I can’t play piano either. I’ve tried. Perhaps doing things without identity is entertainment because there’s no intimacy. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment. I like entertainment. Entertainment is good and necessary some of the time. How much of the time? I don’t know. Probably varies person to person. Not here to give you answers. If you’re here for answers, sorry. That is not to say that entertainment cannot have an identity, right? But those are different things. The world is asymmetrical. Just because entertainment could have an identity like, oh, tap dancing is a form of identifiable entertainment doesn’t mean that the entertainment itself is an identification. Those are different things. That’s inside versus outside. And worse yet, perhaps doing things in the world actually doesn’t mean that the world is an identity. Doing things in the world, actions, causes identification because this is an expression of a relationship. And the question is, what are you identifying as? Or are you merely identifying against with your actions? That actually should be discernible. Did you tell somebody you can’t know that about that other person? That sounds like an identification against. You might be right because most of the time you’re not right. You don’t know what one person can know about another person because you don’t know the other person. And of course, once you relate to something, you cause this conflict with other relationships. That’s the navigation we need. How do we orient in the world? How do we manage and interact with those relationships, those separate identities? Because there is a conflict. If I don’t stay late at work, my boss is not going to be as happy with me. Maybe I won’t get as good of a raise. But if I don’t go home on time, dinner is going to get cold. My wife is going to get upset. There is a conflict between those two identities. You as the worker and you as the husband coming home from work. The head of house. The head of house should be at your house leading. You can’t do that all the time. Part of leading your house is submitting to work. Getting to work, making sure things get done out in the world so that you can bring back the bounty. Even if you can say, oh, we need to live like cavemen. Same problem. And you’ll leave during the day and go hunting. No free lunch there. You’re not getting around that problem, that conflict between these relationships, between these identities. How do we identify? What do we identify in the world? What do we see? How do we interact with, relate to the world around us? Ultimately, that is what identity is about. The problem with identity is that we might have it all wrong. We might be identifying things that we should not. Trying to force things to be something they cannot be. Including ourselves. Including other people. Including cups. Including art. We may want to be Elon Musk. But that burden might be beyond any human being. We may want to be Elon Musk. But that burden might be beyond anything we can bear. What if you want to be a creator, but you can’t create? That happens all the time. What if you want to sing well, but you have a terrible voice? I know people like this. But you can always, always participate in making something bigger than you can even imagine. You could work for Elon Musk and build a rocket that goes to Mars. You really cannot imagine Mars or a rocket that goes to Mars. But you could participate if you submit to being a cog in the machine. To being part of a machine that can build the thing that goes to Mars. You could do that. But you can’t be Elon Musk. He’s one part of that machine. He may be the leader or the head of that machine. But you can’t be him. And that’s okay. He needs you too. You need him to be the leader. And he needs you to follow. That’s right, relationship. That’s an identity. There’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe it’s not the identity you want. Hey, guess what? Suck it up, buttercup. That’s how it is. Some people can lead. Some people can’t. Some people can follow. Some people can’t. Some people can do nothing but rebel. Ever. Doesn’t mean they can’t have things in the world, but probably miserable for it. I’ve met those people. I’m sure you have too. Maybe you give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you cast a profile on them where their life is rosy. And so you don’t realize they’re suffering. And maybe no one talks about what they’re struggling with in the world. What they’ve suffered with in the past. What they’ve overcome. And so we don’t know that that’s normal. And we think our life of struggle is somehow broken. Somehow incorrect. Maybe. All right. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got on identity. I know, Casey, I did see you’re taking notes. If you want my original notes, you can reach out to me on the Discord, of course, and I will provide them to you. Let me go through the comments here. I hope the spirit moved me there. I edited those notes a few times and added a couple things. Hi, Father Eric. Who are you? Who am I? What is this? Yes, I’m a doctor. Casey can’t say I don’t know what what identity is yet. There you go. Peterson’s fear. All the participation you can handle. I like that. Yeah, I like that. I will put that in the doc. You’ve got access to the doc, Father Eric. It’s on the Discord. Arrrr. Arrrr indeed. William Braynard, Spongebob has poorest boundaries. That’s an interesting observation. I don’t know why we’re telling people about this this way. Eric, when people try to form their own identity, it usually ends up really stupid. Yeah, it really does. Forget usually, always. Fair. Probably would be. Josh, does an individual seek by nature seek to be absorbed into a body? I don’t think individuals exist. I think the thing people are pointing to is individuals are already bodies and bodies are made up of parts. And so this is where you get into trouble. Right. If bodies are made up of parts, then they’re already made up of parts. And so that’s where you get into trouble. Right. If bodies are made up of parts, how do you think there are individuals like in this post that this Neoplatonism is just absolutely killing us. Oh, oh, oh, Father Eric. Welcome, sir. Am I allowed in? You’re still going through the comments. I was going to. You can you can you can help me with the comments. That’s that’s fine. OK, I know I have privileges. You do have extra privileges that as a priest, you have extra privileges. That’s excellent. So no, no. Did you have some quick comments before I continue to go through the comments? No, no, no, no. I’ve got something I do want to get to. OK, all right. Well, cue that up and I’ll go to William Branch. NBA discriminates against midgets. You’re right. I’m right. I’m right. I’m right. I’m right. I’m right. NBA discriminates against midgets. You’re right. Somebody should should form a lawsuit. Contact political political activists today. Well, that’s the thing, right? You’ve got these tiny frames politics and then you try to fit things in. And there’s conflicts everywhere. If you try to put everything into politics or or or legalism or something, you’re just going to have conflict all over the place. And it’s really funny to watch people create these conflicts and they go, there’s problems in the world. And I’m like, well, not if you don’t create those problems and they don’t exist. I may get really confused, which I think is funny. William Branch, Boomer, women, you can have it all. Oh, yeah. It’s a big mantra of people having it all, not just women, but women in particular. Yeah. Big problem. You can’t even have like 10 percent. That’s just how it is. Exactly. Exactly. Like and you can’t even handle much more than 10 percent. So even if you could have it, it wouldn’t do you any good because you’re just a muppet. You know, I’m a muppet. We’re all muppets. Like, I don’t know what to tell you, man. I mean, it’s all about the muppets. I mean, you just have to consider with your mug. You need to consider that you might be a muppet and everything will get easier. William Branch, China Wuhan lab just tested C-19 variant that is 100 percent fatal in mice. Poundries are failing. Why would you do that? Gain of function. Gain of function. What is gain of function? Oh, I know. We’re going to push the boundaries and maybe push past them by accident or on purpose. That’s what gain of function research is. Was that good? I don’t think so. I like the boundaries. Thank you very much. You know, that’s that’s the thing. Oh, oh, Father Eric himself. Identity is not a substance, not a quality, not a quantity, but relation. I’ve been saying this for years. OK, so so here’s why that’s important is that Aristotle had his his the ten categories, right? That you could understand all being and you could use all these categories. Later, philosophers reduced that to four substance and then the three forms of accidents, quantity, quality and relation. You don’t put identity in the right place. You end up saying, well, I’m a straight white male. It’s like, OK, that’s true. That doesn’t actually, you know, tell you anything. You’re just naming qualities of yourself. It’s not proper ground for identity. So. And then you said the exact same thing. And I’m like, we’re we’re we’re tracking, tracking. Excellent. Excellent. I love it. I love it. I love it when I stumble across the ancient wisdom because it’s not that hard to derive. William Branch, FBI founded by grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. History is false narrative. I don’t know about that. History is something. Everything is false under that definition. There’s always detail. DuPont’s, a.k.a. French nobility, our deep state to I don’t know about that. William, sound a little little too lizard people for me. And I like the lizard people. But William Branch, only three TV stations, a great place to be. William Branch, only three TV stations, a great flattening. I don’t know. It was an expansion from radio. If you think about it, it wasn’t a flattening. Having 500 channels. And I did at one point, by the way, that’s a flood. I’d rather have three. I like the better when we had five. Actually, that was great. William Branch, seven faces of these happened before the Internet. Yeah. Well, the Internet’s relatively new. William Branch, which is why I hope you find any face to face community, Marcus. I did last fall. Thanks. I’m working on that. We’ll see. Presence, participation and support, as I was taught in church years ago. Oh, really? That’s an interesting outline. I’ve never heard presence, participation and support. That’s fascinating. Oh, Josh had a question. You want to answer this one? I did with the very next comment. You could take a look at that. But basically, identity is a relation is a real category. Right. And you could think of it this way. Right now, I’m speaking into an electronic device, which is beaming my image and my the sounds that I’m making, or at least a close approximation to all of you. We’re in relation with each other. And it actually changes you. Our relationship, you know, right now it’s mostly going this way. It changes you. And the relationship can also change me back. Sometimes it only goes one way. Oftentimes it goes both ways. And so there’s real, you know, change. There’s real communication of being either building up towards perfection or tearing down. But yeah, that real connection right there. So relation is real. So I don’t want you to think that I’m making identity to be not real in terms of making it relation. And I think there’s probably something about, you know, the flattening effect of materialism there. But I’m not smart enough to think about it right now. Well, materialism, there’s no relations in materialism. I mean, only like the grossest physical causality. Right. It’s gross physical causality. Right. So linear, discrete. I do this. That causes this. That causes this and only this. It’s like, no, that’s not the world. George Elias, you might even add the ground of all other categories. Maybe. Thank you. Hello. Thank you very much. Casey, crazy refs, please. I said no earlier. I’m going to say no again. Just so. What the hell? What is this? Go on. Go full Don Cherry. No, I’m not going full Don Cherry. But just guys, if you’ve never heard of Don Cherry, just Google it. There’s nothing, you know, not safe for work there, but just the craziest suits you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s amazing. Casey, more frills. More frills is possible. Pirates usually have puffy shirts. So I could I could just I have all these nice Hawaiian shirts that I bought in Hawaii except for one of them. And so I like to use them. How about having a navigating patterns dance? OK, Elizabeth, well, we’ll work on it. We got that lovely intro music. I wish I had more of that. We might get no, no, please. No, please stop. Oh, goodness. No, you shouldn’t ask me to design a dance ever. The horrors, the horrors. Make it stop. Make it stop. Aaron, thank you, Aaron. Thank you very much. Booty is much appreciated. I could use a little booty I could get. Oh, I’m lucky these streams are cheap enough for me to do. But other people are paying the bills. That’s the only way that’s possible. William Branch, to your own self be true, but only if you identify with Jesus. Well, I think Father Eric’s going to agree with that. Yeah. Hello. The way people use the Internet proves they want great proflicity. Everything is centralized and you can reach millions with a few keys. I mean, I think everything is decentralized, right? This is the struggle with platforms. You see a lot of people rally against platforms. Platforms are the centralization that give you a place to find things. You can find things without platforms. It’s not possible, technically. We didn’t like in the early days of the Internet, you’d have to like figure out how to get to things through magazines and such. Yeah. I wasn’t around for it, but like, you know, they didn’t have Google, right? That didn’t exist until 98. Right. Right. Yes. Yeah. Google has been on the Internet less time for less time than I have by a significant margin. I only mentioned that because every once in a while Google will bounce an email. I’m like, I’ve had an email server on the Internet longer than you’ve been around Google. How dare you bounce my emails? Oh, yeah. I used to get quite pissed off. I think I wrote to them once and said, cut it out. They were like, you’re not following all these new Internet email rules. I don’t care. I am the Internet. You came later. You’ve really adopted the Internet. I was born here. Exactly. I was born in the Matrix. If you’re 14 and you try to pick a name for yourself and you end up with something stupid like Big Mac 2112, that’s a really stupid name. I bet no one has a name that stupid. Casey says many notes tonight. Yeah, Casey, I have the original notes here. I’d be curious to know what stood out to you too. So if you get a chance, we should chat about that. It’s always interesting. I know Pastor Paul talks about this all the time. He loves hearing feedback on his sermons because he’s like, that’s what you got out of it? I’m the same way. Oh, that’s real. That’s 100% real. That’s what you heard. Did I even say that? When did I say that? Yeah. It’s good to know what people find helpful. It’s amazing to know what people find helpful. Yeah. It’s good to know what people find helpful. It’s amazing communication happens ever. Yeah. Yeah. William Branch, knowledge is information depends on the living semantics of the writer and the reader. Yeah, knowledge isn’t information. It’s made from information. People get that confused. See my Knowledge Engine video on navigating patterns. Thank you very much. Wonderful video. Slides, slides. Hello. People don’t behave more authentic because of the pseudo-animity. Yep. Opposite happened. Right. The option of being anonymous. Right. A lot of identity. Because who are you when you’re anonymous? You have an infinite number of potential identities. And yet you have none at the same time. Very confusing. It’s not better for you. It’s actually a lot worse. William Ottis, live in an introverted world. Yeah. Well, they’re stuck in an introverted world. Let’s see. What else we got? William Branch, Mark, you won’t get the Quaternary Alchemy of the Red Book of Carl Jung. No, no, I’m not. I’m not even gonna read such crazy things. Not gonna try. No corners. I agree with no corners. Jung intentionally went insane in the attempt to study his findings. Yes. Can you do that? That’s a good hint. Oh, yeah. I suppose you could do things that you know will make you insane. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. I’ll absolutely do that. Yeah, I don’t recommend it. It seems kind of self-defeating. But yeah, I like there’s no corners. Like nobody puts baby in a corner. Right. So. Churchy, you have a good team who engaged in active participation. That is true. A lot of good active participation, particularly for this stream. Some of it wasn’t voluntary. We’ll say that. People put things out on the internet, though. You’re kind of volunteering. You’re volunteering for me to integrate it. Elizabeth, we always need more help. I know, huh? That was inspired. Thank you, Holy Spirit. Definitely. Hello. Essence is greater than form. Yeah, well, form is still a bad word. I like Eidos. John Vervecki does that well. Eidos is better. I already answered that. All right, Father. Christ is the ultimate identity. Whatever doesn’t fit with Christ must be excluded. That’s great. How do we know, though? If only there was a community of believers who had followed the teachings of Christ and his apostles for thousands of years at this point. Oh, we’re going to dox Christ. Look at that. Get his identity out there. Yeah, maybe that should be the church’s mission to dox Christ. That would be a great marketing campaign for the Catholic Church right there. I love it. Josh, is Elon as him even him or is Elon actually a them? No, it’s a him. SpaceX is a them. It’s one layer up. That’s where people get confused. Well, really, we could look at it this way. You could look at it that way, but you’re not helping yourself when you look at things wrong. In case he has almost four pages of notes. That’s great. That’s fantastic. Sally Jo, I wish comments could be pictures. Yeah, I saw that you sent me a picture. Yes. Is that the one she sent? Oh, thank you. Yeah. What does that say? I can’t even read that. And then this pirate guy says purple talk show unicorns don’t even exist. I love it. OK, fair. Excellent. Thank you, Sally. That’s awesome. That’s great. I appreciate that. See, it’s a group effort. Casey, something needs a name to be realized. Yeah, I might say manifest. Realized works, too, right? Things can be real without a name, but they can’t be realized without a name. That’s fair. That’s a fair way to say it. That’s wonderful. Yes, it’s canonical authority. Your canonical authority is correct. Canonical authority happens. Casey, Father Eric, we’ve got to get you to the barbershop and get that beard lined up. Is it not lined up? It’s not. It looks fine to me. I’m not going to worry about it. William Branch, Muppets Came Later. I followed Captain Kangaroo. OK. I’m going to go with that. Casey, Ontoes and Osea is what I remember from physics. Aristotle’s physics. Yeah, Aristotle’s physics. I recognized it right away. Capital P. I was like, oh, he’s talking about the book. The lecture notes. I’m going to go with that. I’m going to go with that. I’m going to go with that. I’m going to go with that. I’m going to go with that. I’m going to go with that. Capital P. I was like, oh, he’s talking about the book. The lecture notes. Yeah. William Branch, Plato, Trolled by Diogenes. Well, yes. Elizabeth, can we talk about dreams? I guess we can try. I mean, dreams are good and positive and you need them, but also you can over identify and you can over identify your dreams. And the reality is that which objects to your subjective experience. And that’s a partial definition, but I think it’s useful. And I have a whole stream on fantasy and dreams and that sort of thing. So you might want to check that out, Elizabeth. And dreams are tough, right? Because now you get into the imaginal realm, which you need, right? And imagination, where you gin up ideas so that they can die so that you don’t have to. And you can use that they can live in environments that you can’t. Dun, dun, dun. Right? And how much imaginal you’re using for modeling matters. Right? So if you’re in full dream mode, you’re modeling a world that doesn’t exist. So in the dream world, you can fly. And in the real world, you can’t. And if you get confused, suppose you drop some acid. You’ll get confused. And this happens a bunch. Right? People drop acid. They think they can fly. They try. They find out that was a dream. Although they really don’t find it out. They just sort of die, which is unfortunate. I tried at the age of five. At a playground. That’s healthier. Yeah. It looks like five. Yeah. You know, you saw Toy Story. You saw Buzz Lightyear had wings. Obviously, this translates to me. Right? Yeah. You jumped in. You identified with him. The thing in the world without kind of recognizing I’m not that thing that I saw. I’ll tell you what. I only learned that one once. Like that. I got it in there. You know. That’s good. Well, but if you have a hallucination and you can. Right. That’s a problem because now you’re over identifying with your imaginal with your dreams. And then that can wipe you out. Right. So, yeah. I have a hard time imagining any category that precedes relationality. It seems to be the ground of every possible category. I don’t know that I’d go that far with it. I think that relationality doesn’t make any sense unless there are other things in categories at the same time. I think a lot of times, especially with ontology, which can’t explain the world, by the way. A little hint. We get into trouble because ontologies have well-defined hierarchies and the ethereal realm does not have as well-defined a hierarchy. And that confuses us. And fair enough. Is it the fact that it’s not well-defined or that we don’t know it and we can’t test it? I don’t know that those are separable. Sure. That’s where people get into trouble. Right. Because we could imagine from the perspective of God, everything is ordered sweetly and he’s arranged everything according to number, measure and place. So we can say, yeah, that’s based on first principles. That’s true. But it doesn’t do us any good because we don’t have access to that point of view. Right. And that’s where we get confused. Yeah. Okay. Casey’s good observation. Don made some tailor very rich. He did. He did. Somebody had to make those outrageous suits for him. And yeah, that’s important. Casey, were all the rectories built in the 60s or does it just feel like it? Now, I think he’s throwing inappropriate shade at my little sitting room here. Right. This is a Victorian mansion, basically. And this is this isn’t like, you know, plastic that looks like wood. It’s real wood panel. Like, you know, so I feel like I’m living rich here. Yeah, this house is over 100 years old. I like it. Mills. Talking to many different people who are not connected and then them all connecting up forces you to get clear with yourself and others about your identity. Yeah, it does. Well, you know, again, you can’t have one identity. Right. So I was like, oh, which one do I adopt under which circumstance? Right. Like, am I am I the worker? Am I the head of house? Am I the good friend? Right. I don’t know. Right. Am I am I the priest? Do I get to tell you what to do? Do I get to just barge in on your live stream unannounced? Yeah. You didn’t have to let me in. You let me in. That’s not going to stop me from mischaracterizing the situation. William Brandt and girdle went nuts studying infinities. I didn’t know about Boltzmann. Yeah, girdle shouldn’t have gone nuts. He had the whole thing. Right. It’s it. You know, everybody says this turtles all the way down. It’s not. It’s girdle. It’s not. It’s girdle all the way down. Girdle’s in completeness here. I’m looking up. It’s girdle’s all the way down. Yeah. That’s a good line right there. You hold onto that. Pastor Paul nearly fell out of his chair when I told him that line. Yeah. It wasn’t a live stream, but we were on camera on Discord. Yeah. On the Bridges of Meaning Discord. He used to go to the Bridges of Meaning Discord back when there was a community there, which is subsequently gone. There’s a few people in voice chat tonight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there’s there’s people over there now. Well, they’re trying real hard to resurrect over there. Maybe they can pull it off. I don’t know. Keep an eye on my Catholic folks there and I get all my news from Prophet Zechariah. So. Excellent. Aaron Black, my equip for identity is good ideas from culture for the future. Excellent. Aaron Black, my equip for identity is good ideas from culture form identity versus bad ideas. Identity forming culture, forming bad ideas. Yeah. Well. I don’t think it’s that simple. There’s a lot going on. No corners. Is the imaginal realm related to the etheric realm? I don’t think so. I think it’s our interface between, right? So you have the imaginal realm. This is a video I got to do with slides. I don’t have those slides done. I’ve slides done for poetic. Got poetic. I made a big breakthrough in the middle of doing slides for poetic. Actually going to be great. You’re going to love it. There’s an imaginal realm. Right. And then that is what links you to the ethereal realm. In other words, the realm of your senses doesn’t interface with the ethereal realm very well. Not at all, maybe, but not very well. The imaginal realm interfaces the ethereal realm very well and decouples from the material realm. Right. And so those are your two interfaces. And neither are perfect interfaces is this philosophical question from the dawn of time. Right. Like, do we actually sense reality correctly or not? Well, good question. That’s a hard one to answer. I think the answer is of course not. But that’s okay. Right. And the key is to understand reality is so much bigger than us that we couldn’t interface it accurately and precisely. And that’s okay. That’s why we have other people. That’s why we need other people. That’s why we’re persons and not individuals. Persons are connected to other persons. So, yeah. I mean, Jonathan Michaud talks about that all the time. He claims it’s some Christian doctrine. I have no idea. Sally Jo, the imaginary is a potential doorway to all realms. You are not the authority of it. Yes, that’s correct. Yeah. The imaginal realm or your imagination is the potential doorway to. Right. It is the in-between space. Right. It is the in-between space. Churchian, get that wooden walls. Swagger, living the rich life. There you go. Look at that. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. No corner. Sally Jo, it sounds like the astral realm. No, the astral realm doesn’t exist. There’s an ethereal realm and there’s an imaginal realm. If by astral realm you just mean outer space where the stars are, then sure. Yeah, I don’t know. Sorry, I know too many classical languages. The stars are just above us. I don’t know. They’re kind of material. They’re the same. The imaginary isn’t taken seriously enough. Well, I don’t know. Some people take it too seriously. Then they imagine they can just name things and that those things pop into existence through magic. Imagination like creation. I might use manifestation there. Nature and life can eat your face. Use responsibly. Yes, I like that, Sally. They can, in fact, eat your face. Mills, does faith connect us to the real? Father Eric, you’ll have to answer that question. Yes. The faith is the act of the intellect, assenting to divinely revealed truths by the impulse of grace under the command of the will. When we talk about divinely revealed truths, what actually are we talking about? Are we talking about a bunch of things that are written down in books? Well, sure, maybe some of these are written down in books, but that’s not the most important thing, right? If God is going to, in his great mercy, reveal himself to us, is going to reveal his nature, his identity, his mission, his intentions, all of these sorts of things, what he’s really doing is he’s giving us his own self-understanding. So when we look at things that are revealed in scripture, through the church, and all of it, through creation even, we get God’s self-understanding. And so just as I can tell you something about myself, let’s say I share some intimate story or some intimate piece of information, and you now participate in my own self-understanding, so when we, empowered by the Holy Spirit, have an act of faith, we are participating in God’s self-understanding, which is why Thomas Aquinas would say that faith is the first contact of the soul directly with God. Mark, Mark, I was just finishing up, you can’t pale right there. Yeah, and because it’s not something that we see immediately, the act of the will is what closes the ascent. I like it. I like it. Good answer. Good answer. I like that answer. All right, what do we got? No corner. Father Eric, is theology the science of the church or the science of faith? Is it worth looking into for a non-theologian? Oh, boy. You can totally take that. A science, so theology is that study of God and his creatures in relation to them. It takes as its starting principles revelation. So I think because something like natural theology is possible, whereby just from the created order, you can make true statements about God, that you should say that it’s the science of faith rather than the science of the church. The judge of theology is the degree to which it actually helps you to love God and love neighbor. So if by studying theology, you love God and love neighbor well, then it’s good and you should do it. But if you find it makes you puffed up and arrogant, just makes you into a clashing gong or a clanging symbol, then theology isn’t doing you any good. And you would be better off, you know, helping some old lady shovel her sidewalk. I like that. I like to conceive of theology as the philosophy for religion. It’s the same nature of study. And not everybody should study philosophy. And most people shouldn’t study theology for the same reason, right? They probably can’t. And if they do, it will make them sad. And they won’t be out helping their neighbors shovel their sidewalk. And that would be bad, right? Because you’re too busy with your head in some stupid book. Instead of relating to the world with your wonderful identity. Mills, thank you, Father Eric. Are the faithful the ones who by degrees got out of the cave? Faithful are the ones who have been freed from slavery to the powers and principalities of this world. That’s a much better, I think, and have been integrated into the body of Christ. And I think that the people of Christ have been allied with him and are now participating in the divine nature by faith. I hope you’re not referring to Plato’s cave because yeah, we’ve got opinions about Plato’s cave here. Are we going to drop the links, Mark? Yeah, we should. Let me. I’ll let you do that. I’m having a thought about identity and how people can get confused. I’m not 100% sure about it, though. So I’m I’m I’m I want to I want to kind of hack it out. Oh, great. So Thomas Aquinas has a very sophisticated doctrine of analogy where there’s different kinds of analogies and you have to use them properly. The most common kind of analogy is analogy of attribution. These things have something in common and we can relate them to each other via that common quality. The example he gives is health. So you look at a doctor or doctor is in theory, let’s say he’s a good doctor, the cause of health. Listen is also a cause of health. We could look at, let’s say, the the sleek coat of a dog and its tail wagging back very forth and the energy with which it’s running around. Those are signs of health. And all of those things are related to this idea of health, but they don’t they don’t participate in the same way. Some things participated as a cause of health. Some of the things are the effects of health. Other things could just be like a symbol of health. You look at the American Red Cross, the big Red Cross as a symbol of health. None of those are intrinsically participating in the same pattern. That’s an analogy of attribution. They all have some relation to this shared quality. And then he’s got and this is the more powerful form of analogy, the analogy of proper proportion. Where basically the thing has the same pattern inside of it. It’s where we’re getting into things like the fractals, but it’s the self similar fractals. Right. Right. When you get to a self-symbol of fractal, that’s like an identity right there where you’ve got the same thing happening on every level between the different things. And so we could use that analogy of proper proportion to talk about God basically, because all effects are similar to their causes. Therefore, by looking at goodness in God’s creation, we can know something about him. Although Aquinas is very careful to say that both our ideas about, let’s say, wisdom and the way that we predicate these things of God are not equal to him because of that insurmountable gap between the infinite and the finite. Right. But still, it’s still I think that. So we get into what I just vaguely suspect is the instigating cause for this live stream is this talk about supposed corner of the Internet. There’s an analogy of attribution right there, right, that these things have some quality by which we can relate, but they relate in different ways. So they’re not doing the same thing. Whereas the thing that has a proper identity is going to have this analogy of proper proportion where the same pattern is working on each of the levels with each of the members. Right. That’s the biggest compliment you could give me, Mark. You just said right. That’s that’s correct. That’s I, I find no flaws. That is that is correct. Yeah, I, yeah, I like the way you the way you put that. Yeah. And the fact that there is a relationship of a certain type does not mean that there’s a thing there. Right. Because the relationship isn’t the identity. The identity is determined by the relationships and there isn’t a single relationship. You can’t say, well, I watch lots of Jordan Peterson videos. You watch lots of Jordan Peterson videos and therefore we’re both in the Peterson sphere. You can’t. Right. That’s not a sufficient number of relationships together to form an identity. Relationships can have quality though, right. You can have like a quality of relationship. You have to all relationships have quality, hopefully. Right. Then this is this gets into poetics. If you lack poetics, relationships don’t have quality. The whopping thing, the thing that just blew me away that I was like, damn, I wish I said that first was that convivium where Ted said, so there’s all these AI engineers and they go, aha, AI can write poetry and it’s indistinguishable from the poetry that people write. And Ted goes, I read it and I can tell the difference. He said, but I can see why software engineers working on AI can’t. And that is that is a whopping indictment. Right. And it’s really to the point. That’s what my video, my new video with slides right after I do the Plato one is about because I have the slides. All right, Casey, you left us, but you’re back. Welcome. What you got for us. And then I’m going to jump into Elizabeth’s statement. My camera was freaking out. I’m getting all sorts of notes. They’re mainly for me to help me understand. But that’s fine. Anything that you need clarification on that? I don’t know. Go that and we’ll come back. All right. Well, let me see. Elizabeth, no gap, I hope. The imaginal is direct authority. Direct authority. I don’t think so. And the body knows it by recognition of beauty. What? I don’t know, Elizabeth. I don’t know. I don’t think the imaginal is an authority. I think it’s just up. It’s an interface, much like your senses. Like I have a sense of smell, right. I have eyes. I can see. Right. Those are interfaces, just like your imaginal. Your imaginal realm is set of interfaces. So your imagination is the place that your brain goes to test out worldviews. Whether it’s in your dream state or as Peterson says, that’s where your ideas go to die so you don’t have to. Oh, yeah. If I do this and I try to fly, I’ll jump off a building and probably not succeed. So I think that’s more to the point. Oh, she didn’t close the right tab yet. We’ll get mission statements and stuff up there soon. Yeah, I did. Sorry. Am I good? You’re good now. Welcome. Yeah, I like what Sally Jo said about the authority of the imaginal, if I interpreted her correctly. Sorry, I just missed your comments. I don’t really know what you said. That one. I like not having to do all the work myself. Yes. OK. Imagination. Oh, wait. Oh, yeah, there it is. The imaginary is a potential doorway to all realms and you are not the authority of it. Yeah, I agree with her. Right. You’re not the authority of it. Right. Because it’s a doorway, right. It’s an interface or a set of interfaces, maybe. What do you mean by interface, Mark? The same way your eyes are an interface or your skin or your nose. Does it imply clarity? So, I mean, an interface is where identities kind of come to each other, right? Right. Where they…there’s necessarily like a mixing point. We’re not ever going to be able to discern these things with like perfect, rigid, 100 percent accuracy. It’s a matter of, you know, allowing there because like you think of like the senses, you know, at a certain point, the light photons activate the nerves and it’s like, OK, where does the light that’s not me and the impulse that is me begin? Why do you care so much? It’s not that important. It’s a bit of a fuzzy boundary and it’s not going to do this. And so this imaginary and this is a cool idea. It’s like your imagination is another place where your identity and the rest of the world have their interface between each other. And yeah, and you’re not the authority of it. Right. And it’s not the authority of you. It’s just that it’s a source of informing. Right. It’s an information point. And it’s the way you relate is the interface. Like the interface is the affordances that you have to relate with. Right. So my eyes have an affordance to relate with light in a certain way. Right. So they don’t really need to be considered in a sense because that’s not what we’re talking about. Right. But I think it’s incredibly important what she said, because we were talking about this on on on whatever Twitter’s called now. Mark Dante was talking about precisely this and he makes it clear as crystal in that in that quote. I don’t have it with me right now, but he makes clear crystal in his estimation that that there that the the under the body itself. So we kind of get into the embodiment. The body itself experiences the the imaginal in a way that that that snaps it into beauty, you might say. And that’s the point he’s making. And he’s and he’s it’s complicated to read. I should get it. But I think it’s I think it’s an important piece because because yeah, I understand that that we don’t want to like make it. Look like there’s some cookie cutter image coming at us that has some rigidity to it. It has to have that. That’s that beautiful creative creative coming into being or whatever you want to call it. But but there has to be in my estimation, if you don’t have if you’re if you’re imaginal is not is not authority. And I profoundly meant you’re in trouble. You’re in nihilism. Well, again, I don’t like the authority claim. Sally, Joe, there was more in your head than than what is yours, right? Because we are Muppets. She’s right about that. What does she mean? I don’t know what she means. There’s more in your head. Like, that’s the thing. Like your head can do you have an unconscious, basically. That’s what you’re saying. Right. And your unconscious moves you. It pulls you. It pushes you. It’s not 100 percent in charge. And you’re not 100 percent in charge. It’s not talking about the unconscious at all. I’m talking about about imaginal. I’m talking about the. Well, but that’s that’s affected by your unconscious. That’s part of the problem. They’re inseparable in some sense, because you’re unconscious. Oh, no. How did you jump over there? No way. Anyway, yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, things things move you. Your desires, for example, you have a mad imagination about your desires. Like that’s in your imaginal. Say that again, Mark. You have imaginations that’s about your desires, right? That’s in your imaginal realm. Yeah. But that’s the distinction I was making that the Old Testament makes all the time. Vain imaginations. There’s a difference between the imaginal and vain imagination. And it’s really critically important. Vain imagination happens in the imaginal realm. What’s critically important is the discernment. Right. Because again, we can imagine a world where it’s in the song. Imagine right where everyone just gets along. Right. But that’s not the world we’re in. And it’s not going to be. And that’s really important that you know that. Right. So you can talk about the neoplatonic problem of the one in the many. And you can imagine that this is a quote out of out of a video that that that strange theology did. Right. You can imagine that civilization or society or history is, you know, human beings or humans as such searching for the unity and diversity. I mean, that’s it’s just wrong. Like it’s just wrong. Humans don’t search for for unity and diversity. It’s more like humans seek out a unity and they’ll get rid of diversity to do it. Right. I mean, that’s that’s that that’s more like how people act. Right. I mean, that’s where that’s where racism comes from. Right. Is that is that we have that tendency and that tendency is required. And I did I wanted to address this. I don’t want to be too far down the rabbit hole mills. So we can or can’t self-author. You can’t self-author. That’s crazy. That’s complete crazy talk. Even if you could self-offer, how would you know? Because the world has constraints and you probably don’t know the constraints of the world. You might know some of them and then confuse that with knowing all of them because we reduce the world that way. But no, and I do. I want to address no corners here, too. Lucid dreaming can offer awareness of day and night consciousness. Boy, can it ever. I don’t recommend lucid dreaming, even though I’ve done it. It can be interesting. Some people should do it for sure. Like, it’s an interesting thing. But, uh, man, man, you know, Father, I got to disagree with you. We’re not creators. We’re manifestors. Creation happened once. That’s an easier way to understand everything. There’s one creator. There’s one creation. Everything else is a manifestation using that creation. Right. We’re beholden to it and restricted by it. I think that’s an easier way for people to understand the world. I think Casey’s right. Identity is given. And don’t apologize for that, Casey. Don’t apologize for it. I meant sorry as in like, sorry bud. You know. You’ve got to put the bud in there and let me know that they’re not interested in you. The royal Canadian sorry. Sorry. Sorry, eh? Mills agrees that we’re Muppets. That’s good. Sally Jo, you don’t know the depths of you. I’m talking unconscious and imaginal. Right. Because they’re linked. I mean, where is your unconscious? It’s not like in your head exactly. Right. And how do you communicate with it? It’s all in the imaginal. That’s the interface. Again, it goes back to this idea of interface. And William Branch as a semi-human with multiple parent trees and added artificial parts. Maybe not. It seems seems dynamic too. Right. Right. It is dynamic. Sally Jo, honestly, not navigating the realms is better language than the unconscious. Maybe. I mean, yeah, it’s like you don’t. It’s funny, right. Because the idea of the unconscious is really recent. This is Freud and Jung. They come up with different names for the exact same thing. Some conscious versus unconscious ones. Freud, Jung. Right. And then you don’t need those if you just talk about passions or desires. You’re really like, ah, passions and desires and imaginal are the same as the unconscious in some sense. That’s not to say that the imaginal is only the unconscious with passions and desires added. Not saying that again. World is deeply asymmetrical. But yeah, Sally Jo, we all traverse the realms. Yes, we do. Hopefully put some gospel in your soul so you don’t get waylaid there. And maybe that’s the function of religion. Right. Is not getting waylaid in your imaginal space. Right. It’s keeping grounded to something higher than you so that you can keep grounded to something lower than you beneath you. Right. And then have right relationship to both what is above you and beneath you. That might sound something like the knitting together of heaven and earth. I might have heard that somewhere. I don’t know. I’ll go pick the bishop up from the airport. All right. Good luck, sir. Thank you so much for joining, Father, and answering questions. That was great. My pleasure. Take care. God bless you. God bless you. Mills. Utopian idealism is a dead end and leads to its opposite. Yeah, it’s a dead end because in our imagination, it works and we don’t understand the disconnection between our imagination and the real world. William Branch, the hand drawing itself is Escher. Yelp Sally Jo. Yelp. William Branch Monsters of the Id. Yeah, there’s a great I think it’s a 50s movie called Forbidden Planet. It’s fantastic. Oh, that’s great. That’s a really fun movie. Yeah, it’s a classic science fiction film. That’s the one that like they have like little living creatures that they keep as pets. Is that the same one? I don’t know. The whole the whole thing is that they’re a genius and his daughter basically crash land on this planet or something. And they’re there and these other explorers find them. Right. I think they were looking for them. And then it turns out that there’s a monster that’s invisible that gets through the force field and then they’re there. And then they’re in the force field and it’s all about his daughter’s attraction to the to the space captain that comes to save them. And and and the monster is actually out of this guy’s id, the scientist id, because he doesn’t want to lose his daughter. It’s a wild movie. It’s a wild, especially how early it is. I just remember it was very, very visually stunning. It’s weird. I mean, the the special effects are interesting just because it’s the 1950s or whatever. But yeah, it’s weird. I think Elizabeth, the easiest way to understand this, like I don’t like the psychological framing, even though it’s quite useful sometimes. It’s unconscious is is really just what you’re talking about when you’re talking about desires that are well, say, being driven from something so powerful outside of yourself that you don’t have full control over them. And therefore, you can just talk about desires or passions as such driving you. And that is at least a partial explanation for what they call unconscious in psychology. But those things are outside of you. So there’s things outside of you in in material world and there’s things outside of you in the ethereal world. Right. And your interface for material world is basically your senses. The interface for the ethereal world is mostly your imaginal realm, whatever, whatever that is. That’s why actually why I like imaginal realm and not imagination. Imagination within the imaginal realm, the imaginal realm is not merely the imagination. Right. Because the imagination is something you have some control over. Right. You you have some some control over it. But all the things in the imaginal realm, like your desires, man, I don’t know sometimes where my desires come from. You know, sometimes I just get scared and I want to like click off my stream. And I have no idea where that comes from. I like my stream. I like my I like what I’m doing. But sometimes, you know, and sometimes I like when I’m doing videos, sometimes I just quit the video. Then I have to rerecord it. It’s a mess. I don’t know where that comes from. I know it’s controlling me and I’m not controlling it. I know that. Ah, now that’s interesting. So are you saying are you saying imaginal realm? Is that what you’re saying? I never even thought of that. That’s that’s for Vickie’s framing. Imaginal realm. Ah, ah, right. OK. So this is why we like Vickie, because some of his work. Where where where did he get that from? Yeah, no, that’s all his stuff. I mean, we had that idea of a magical realm. Like so it’s again, you I’m going to do the video on this. We have two I have two more sets of slides. I’ve had them for years at this point. In addition to knowledge engine that go along with it, there’s there’s the realm of transformative coupling. Where it’s that in between space where you’re not who you can be yet, but you’re moving towards it. And that realm is all thanks to Andre here, actually. Right. All of this. Right. Yeah. It was right there when when when all this developed, like he was he was his tarot cards that that helped with, you know, build this whole model. Well, when you’re starting out grounded in what you are today and you transformed, right, you’re moving through something. Right. That’s the realm of transformative coupling. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to work. Right. Like you could fall back down. And if you think of means, that’s what means do. They kind of go up into the realm of transformative coupling, but they don’t cause a lasting effect because they’re they’re fleeting. And yeah, they don’t work in the same way for everybody because different people have different relationships. You show me a meme from the from the American version of The Office. I’ve never seen most of those episodes. It doesn’t actually convey the same thing to me. It can’t because I don’t have the contextual reference. I didn’t particularly like the American version. I didn’t find it funny. I found it kind of base and banal and and crass. And, you know, it’s not refined. I like British humor. British humor. I find to be more refined in general. And that’s the problem is that we don’t recognize there’s a realm of transformative coupling. That doesn’t mean you’ll transform. That doesn’t mean your transformation will be good. Like it’s not solving a problem. It’s just helping you map a set of potential problems and understand the role of orientation and navigation in the world. Orientation and navigation are wrapped up in discernment. Right. The hard part about everything is discernment. Everything flows from discernment. Bad discernment, bad results. Not all the time, though, like you can get lucky with bad discernment. There’s a Nazi and Taleb read all the books. One of the things he talks about is a trader because he was a trader for a while. He was an options trader. There was a trader who was famous and he made tons of money and he traded green lumber. Now, this trader never knew what green lumber was. And so somebody asked him, like, what’s green lumber? And he said, oh, I think that’s lumber that’s painted green. He never knew what it was. He knew how to trade green lumber and he made a fortune in it. Green lumber is lumber that hasn’t been cured yet. Like, you know, it has to be dried. Usually you leave lumber out for, you know, out and open after it’s cut for like a year. Then it’s not green anymore. But the way that you trade that lumber, which is, you know, which is seasoned versus the way you trade green lumber on the market is totally different. Right. Because obviously you’ve got to store it. You can buy it, but you’ve got to store it. So the valuation is different. And then all the patterns around how you trade that asset are different. He saw those patterns and picked up on them without understanding the material difference between green lumber and seasoned lumber. Sure. Right. And so like that’s really important. Like you don’t you don’t necessarily need to know the thing to do the thing. And that’s very confusing for people in the age of gnosis because they want to know things, they want to understand things. They don’t want to engage in things until they understand them. And that’s crazy. You need that’s why Peterson and Verbeke talk about play. That’s what play is. Play is learning. It’s engaging in something despite your ignorance. Right. And having faith in some sense, right. Or at least having a level of trust that it’s going to be OK. Right. Or maybe that you’re going to be able to learn the thing you need to learn. Right. And transform into what you need to transform into. Super important concept, Nade. Super important play. Right. Right. Because we’ve lost it. Well, we were talking about that last week. It goes back to the authenticity versus the other. Yeah. You have to play. You’re right in yourself. You’re right in your soul. There’s nothing else going on there. Because that’s what you can’t. Well, that’s a good question. Can you can you play in authentically? Well, no, you can’t actually because then you’re not playing. You’re doing something else. What the heck are you doing? You’re performing. Yeah, that’s nice. Nice. Nice. OK. So, so wait. So is transformative coupling is sounds to me like play? The realm of transformative coupling is the realm of play. Yeah, because you play is is fundamentally an attempt at transformation. And so you must be doing it in the realm of transformative coupling. So why does it have to be? Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I’ll have to make sure I put that on the slide. Thank you. It’s helpful. Super helpful. I’ll put that on the slide when I do that when I do that video. Why does it have to have that special name for? Because I came up with that. That’s the only reason. Oh, I don’t know about that. But yeah, I mean, I think it’s the right name. I mean, I think that yeah, it’s the right name is just that when we made it, it was just sort of like grabbing ideas from the imaginable of like what I was trying to map. And it’s like it feels like this. But like the actual material or conceptual parts that made it up was chopping up the ideas from the tarot cards, seeing like little symbols and then the fact you have like the past, present, future spread. And then I think it was the Talos was how do we get to an archetype? Right. Somehow that develops like this realm of transforming the coupling where the transfer could happen. It was an accident. It was an accident. Actually, what happened was we were working on the archetypes and then he was like, I want to take a break. All right. That’s fine. Right. He’s like, let me show you my brand new tarot deck. OK, let’s do that for a while. Well, because tarot is wrapped up in archetypal symbols anyway. So I was like, all right, but we’re taking a break. We’re just checking out. And then it’s like, I wonder how this works. And then it all came. Right. Because I actually know how to read tarot cards. So right. But it all came and it was like and we developed this like, well, what are you actually doing when you do a tarot reading? And how does this work? And actually, we ditched the whole reason why we ended up with this, because the original thesis, this is before the knowledge engine. Right. This is actually part of what developed this knowledge engine idea. And the whole point that we were on was we transform or try to transform into archetypes. And I actually think I got that totally wrong. Totally wrong. This is early days. Right. This is, you know, three and a half years ago or something. Right. Maybe four. I don’t know. And yeah. Oh, all right. So that was the original path. But then we’re like working on these tarot cards and going like, well, what does that mean? Well, there must be a space where you’re taking the symbols on the tarot cards and you’re taking your situation and you’re taking a past situation and a future situation, a present situation. And there’s some set of relationships that you’re testing. You have to test them. Where is that? Oh, that’s the realm of trade. It’s part of the imaginal. Sure. Absolutely. Love the imaginal. But it’s the transformative coupling part, which is also to your point, I think, again, I have to remember from my slides, which is where the realm of play. Right. And all imaginal is not the realm of play. All imaginal is not the realm of transformative coupling because sometimes you’re just trying to predict. Right. It’s Peterson’s point. Like you’re just trying to get your ideas to die so that you don’t have to. And that’s part of the difference. It’s a really good term, actually. I like it. I know, but I’m thinking I’m thinking there’s something else you know, you all know that I don’t that I don’t know, because it’s actually I think there’s a richness to it. That there’s a whole video in there with there’s a whole set of things about now I have to add a bunch of stuff. I got to find my notes and all that because I have notes. I just don’t know where those particular notes are because we make so many notes. I have a lot of notes. Thank you. Thank you. No, that’s good. Josh, welcome. It’s good to see you, sir. What you got for us? Hi, Josh. Nevin, I’ve just been listening. Yeah, you guys have kind of gone over a lot so far. Identity is a big topic. It’s a big problem problematic topic. Right. It’s just full of issues and confusions and identity is not easy. So what you got for questions? So I had to hop in and out. I was running some errands at the same time as I was listening to you. But I when I so me and father in the comments, we I said, does the does the individual seek to be absorbed into a whole body? The reason I ask that is I for some reason, while you were talking about the individual, I started thinking about the 3D conglomerate, which is the human being on a cellular level. Like it. So you take something like a virus. A virus can affect you unless they can find a place to fit like on it. Unlike on a blood cell, you know. And so if they can find a place that it can actually, you know, can join and then it can grow and then it can do these things. And I was thinking that the individual is a lot like. I mean, it’s kind of like, I mean, it’s kind of like a virus or something like that. It kind of floats around out there until it finds somewhere to fit. And then it can affect and then it can, you know, and can draw. Now, those are those are negative words. I get that. But I was I was kind of thinking that like, yeah, that’s kind of that’s kind of what we’re all seeking to do is connect. And in fact, like I’m trying to. Yeah, I like I like that idea, Josh. Let me let me let me refine it a bit and see if you object. That’s fine. But no, no. Instead of individual, I’d rather say you’re a person and then in the nature of your identity or identities, because again, you can’t have one is what changes as you try to fit into various different things. So the thing that floats and nobody wants to hear this is identity. Right. Everybody wants an identity, one identity, they want to flatten the world to identity politics, one identity explains everything about me or explains enough about me. Right. That’s ridiculous and impossible. Right. But you’ll tweak it until it can actually latch on to something else. Well, hopefully you will. Like unless you’re in rebellion. And this is this is the problem. If you’re in rebellion, you won’t you’ll do crazy things like make self contradictory statements. Right. Yeah. Like, yeah. Or you’ll or you’ll constantly be like, well, you know what? Everyone’s in this corner. But really, there’s corner of corners. Then you’re all in the corner, guy. You got to pick one. I’m sorry. So in the world. So is our evolutionary like kind of I mean, our evolutionary path kind of like one of a like I use the term of virus before, but it’s kind of like that’s kind of that’s kind of what you’re doing. I mean, you’re kind of going around trying to see where you fit. And I mean, I mean, yeah. Yeah. So I mean, like a flu virus is just trying to survive. I mean, you can’t really blame it for trying to do it. It’s biologically imperative is, you know, and so I mean, as individual seeds cast out into the wilderness, we’re going to float around until we find a place that’s habitable for our, you know, for us to sprout. I don’t think that’s our nature, though. I don’t think we’re individual. You don’t think you were cast into it. No, I think we were born into an order and we’re given a way to be in order with the universe. And we can reject that. Right. And I mean, you can get crazy. You could dig down and say, well, Protestantism has that feature, whatever. But we can reject that. We can say, no, we, you know, but I think there’s a danger in saying things like we can’t blame the virus. I mean, this is why the materialist frame is dangerous. Right. Because get into the circumstance where your agency is removed and agency in the world as such gets removed. Well, you can’t blame the virus. It’s programmed by evolution to infect you and change your identity. Because when you’re a sick person, you’re totally different. Dude, you should see me in the hospital when I’m sick. You would not recognize me. It’s amazing. My brain just automatically goes into make friends with everybody mode. Because if you don’t make friends with those people, your life’s in their hands, man. You got to make friends. I joke with everybody. I’m sitting there on my head going, you stupid bleepity bleep. I mean, I swear a lot when I’m in pain. So am I. I keep it all in my head when I’m in the hospital. I’ll be like, you stupid bleepity bleep. And then I’m trying to find, you know, when I’m talking to them, I’m trying to find something in common with them so that they’ll relate to me so that they’ll pay better attention to me. Wow, wow. Right now. My brain just does it. Put that in your book. What to do when you go to the hospital. Seriously. You got to have a little page and Sally joke and have a picture of you. Well, well, like that begs the question now, is relationship an evolutionary response to the fact that we’re screwed without the rest of us? Like, you know what I mean? Like you’re you’re screwed without a doctor when you’re sick. Yeah, I don’t I don’t think that’s I mean, it’s it’s the same thing. I mean, I mean, I don’t think that’s true. Like, you know, I think it’s true. I mean, it’s not true. I mean, I’m not saying that. I mean, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that. Yeah, I don’t I don’t think that’s I mean, the danger there is that’s a little materialistic. Right. Well, the only way I see that is through what Father said. And he said that the individual basically, at least as far as I understood it, he was kind of saying that the individual doesn’t actually exist except in its relationship to the whole. And so or to the to the conglomerate, you know, and so you wouldn’t there would be no individual without the bigger picture, you know, without the without the math. No, no, no, no, there is no individual at all. Yeah, not there would be just individual never happened. It’s a bad word. You’re a person in relation to other persons. I think that I think that is the best way to to think of it. And I think it is the right way to think of it. However, there is a mirage that exists when the whole exists, when the math exists, that, oh, I can separate and I can, you know, I can I can pick and choose where I want to be on the on the whole. And that may as soon as you stick your head above the rest, you know, kind of pop your head out and actually express individualism, unless you’re inside of a group, you’re going to find out how lonely that is real quick. It’s going to get real cold and it’s going to get real lonely and it’s going to be real nihilistic very quickly. Yeah, no, it’s not. It’s not. Yeah, I can’t, you know, it’s when you try to do solo to be solo. It’s just you. Right. And something else when you try to reduce or flatten the world to you in a relationship to something. Right. That’s when you run into trouble. Like you actually run into trouble. And it’s the trouble that you described, I think, accurately. I think that’s I think that’s correct. And that’s the problem is that when you try to conceive of the world as you and then things, you know, outside of you, that that’s already wrong. You’ve already fallen materialism and you’re kind of like in trouble. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re instantly going to crumble or that you can’t be a good person or any of that. What it means is you’re the odds that you’ll run into trouble, especially when pushed. A lot of people are like, I’ve had this worldview my whole life has worked fine, but it’s never been pushed. Right. And then like, like, look, how many people are out there? And again, Republican, right, conservative Republican churchgoers who actually cannot tell you why drag queen story hour is bad. They can’t even make the statement that it’s bad. I’m like, what is wrong with you? First of all, you can’t possibly be conservative or even a Republican voter. And you certainly can’t be going to church if you can’t instantly know. But the thing is their worldview has never been pressed. And so they don’t realize that the tools to discern why that’s bad don’t actually exist within them. Yeah, well, you’re three degrees away from the problem at that point. Like you said, you got I forget what you listed first, but then you got conservative and you got a churchgoer. By the time you get to churchgoer, you’re a bit in an echo chamber, fast island, and you’re so far removed from the problem that when it when it when it shows up, it’s alien. Some of them, not not all of them. Like some people. Right. But but I don’t know if it’s a majority. I just know there are people like that and that terrifies me. How can your worldview not understand instantly that this is wrong, fundamentally wrong? And and I did I wanted to take some time out, get some comments because we’re getting thank you. Hi, Josh. Nice to see you. Can’t wait to have my hair as long as yours. I got a haircut recently. I shaved off the sides, but I kept the length. So I got I got a decent amount. There we go. There we go. More importantly, Elizabeth Sally Joe. Elizabeth, we should do a vid chat coffee or something sometime. Oh, all right. Oh, yeah. I’m totally, totally into that. I don’t know how to do all that. How do we do? Let me know if you need help with that. We’ve got zoom accounts and all that available to us. So hello says colonize. Yeah, I don’t know about the colonize thing. I mean, I don’t I don’t like that talk. That’s a progressive thing. Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, so that they will have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over the earth and over every single one of the earth. And over every creeping thing that creeps on earth. That sounds really clever. Hello. Did you copy that from someone? I feel like it’s a joke. Yeah, no, that’s good. All right. Mill, the logos is warm. We feel a little fire emoji. I love it. Heraclitus saw it. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. And I think I think that’s what’s wrapped up in all this, especially with identity. Like, if your identity hasn’t been tested, you don’t know who you are. You know what I mean? Like, like, you know, I mean, I’ll harken back to it just because it’s my personal experience. If you haven’t lived in a car in the winter in New England, you don’t know who you are. And that changed you, no matter who you were before. Yeah. You after that’s for sure. Yeah. Good. Good point. Yeah. At least throw you into the realm of like gaining resiliency. Yeah, most definitely going to be a new person and resilient person if you have to live in a car. Yeah, yeah. Nothing like nature, right? You’re basically thrusting yourself out into Mother Nature or which nature or whatever. Freezing cold for sure. And you realize real quick that you rely on others. And to what extent? It becomes very clear when you’re actually on your own without shelter and without a method of obtaining food. Right. It gets real clear real quick. Yeah. How long were you in in that situation? I have no idea Elizabeth. That’s that’s so like my life is divided into sections and one of the sections I called the before time. I was in the middle of the winter. I was in the middle of the winter. I don’t this is why I don’t know what I’ve read. Like there’s some books like like I read Walden. I know I read Walden. The only reason I know I read Walden though is because you know, I forget even timeframe on that. This is after my homeless stand whenever that was. Somebody quoted Walden and obscure quote Walden. It wasn’t a well known one. It wasn’t one that anybody had ever quoted anywhere. And I said, oh, I know that quote. That sounds familiar. And they’re like, what? And I’m like, yeah, that quote sounds really familiar. And they said, oh, that’s in the middle of Walden and nobody ever quotes that. Like you must have read the book. And I went, what? And then and then when they said that the because I sometimes every once in a while my memory works. Perfectly. I saw the cover of the book and then I went back and looked and realized I had it. And then I went back and figured out where I got it and when. And I was like, oh, I got this when I started junior high school. And then I said, oh, that’s right. I read all of my school books the two weeks before we started school. So when I was in classes, I was goofing around all the time and I got great, great, great. Because I’d already read everything. And then I got really pissed off because like the ancient like ancient civilization was like one of my favorite things that history and science. It’s my two favorite subjects. The the the teacher said, well, we’re only going to cover half this book this year. And I went, what? I read the whole thing. What do you mean? You’re only going to go half of it. It’s not even that long. Like, what’s wrong with you? Because I learned real quick. So I was pissed. Man, was I angry. I was really mad. Like, no, no, no. I want to cover the whole book this year. Like, in fact, I want to cover this book and the next one this year. Thank you very much. You know, I was like, let’s get this done. I love this stuff. So, yeah, I was just inspired you to do that. That is such a brilliant strategy to read all the books ahead of your year, because then you’re basically going in. Talk about being prepared. I have to be prepared. I had the teacher. The teacher pulled me aside and said, you have to stop talking to Stephen. And I was like, what? Why? And he’s like, because Stephen’s getting bad grades and you’re not. And he’s like, you just have to stop distracting him in class. I’m like, well, that’s no fun. I mean, I’ve already read the damn book. Like, you guys are boring the hell out of me now. Like, yeah. And I did. I stopped talking to Stephen’s grades went up. That’s my bad. I was a junior high. What the hell did I know about the world? You know, like, you know nothing. You know nothing about the world. Junior high. Nothing. No, no. Well, you knew to read the books ahead of time. That was pretty freaking smart, in my opinion. That’s formation, though, right? Like, you get formed. You don’t know you shouldn’t talk to your friend who didn’t do what you did and maybe maybe didn’t have the capacity to get the grades I was getting. I don’t know. Right. But you don’t know. And you’re like, you don’t know any of that, junior high. Right. If you think you did, you’re deluding yourself. You’re a delusional creature. Like, you just are. Sorry. And it’s fine. Like, we all delude ourselves. But like, you’re delusional about that. And you didn’t know those things. And you learned them. They formed you. And somebody gave that formation to you. And you didn’t have a choice. And some of the formation people gave you was wrong. That’s all true. Also, not negotiable. It’s not optional. It wasn’t your decision. It has to happen. And yeah, like, your parents are going to parent you. And they’ve never parented you before, even if they had other kids, because you’re not like their other kids, because everyone’s a little bit different. Right. Sometimes they’re a lot different. And so you have to forgive them for not knowing how to do the right thing for you. And also be grateful that they formed you the way that they did, because, look, you survived. Like, a little bit of gratitude is not untoward. And maybe they traumatized you. I would say everybody got traumatized when they were young. Get over it. Like, you know, fuck up. Inevitably. Inevitably. For sure. Hey, Mark, do you think that either one of the political, I guess, frames work better for the individual for acceptance? Not acceptance, that’s a bad word. For an on-ramp from the individual to being involved in a body as far as conservative versus liberal. Do you think that? No, because it’s all flattening and reduction. Okay. Individual is a reduction and politics is a reduction. So let’s look at this just mathematically. Let’s just look at it mathematically. Politics is a binary. Right. You’re left or right. You’re Democrat, Republican. That’s it. Now, that doesn’t work. So people come up with libertarian and then people point out, well, libertarians aren’t one thing. They’re really not. Libertarianism is an identification against the other two. Right. Because you can’t squeeze out three. Everybody tries to get things down to two, but you can’t. So what’s an individual? An individual is one. So how can you fit something in a binary frame? Well, you have to reduce it to one. Otherwise, it doesn’t fit in the binary frame. It competes with it. Right. And so that’s just too low resolution, as Peterson would say, I hope. Right. You mentioned that on a comment that binaries are bad. Like, I remember you responded to a comment because I said, is Christianity paganism inverted? And you said, no, binaries are bad. Avoid or I think you might have said, like, avoid them or something like that. Like, so break that down for me. Like, why would me saying like, yeah, binaries are bad. The world isn’t all the things and they’re opposite because actually I can’t prove this, but I suspect things don’t have opposites. Like that whole concept is insane. Positive, negative and magnetism. Like, I mean, right. But the thing is, things can be opposed without being opposite. Right. Like, like my hand and my face can’t occupy the same space at the same time. So they’re opposed. But the opposite of my face is not my hand. OK, I got you. OK. That’s not opposite. Those are different words. Right. And same thing. Fair. Also different words. And maybe one of them is just wrong. Like, maybe one of those names is just a bad name. Like, it doesn’t fit the world. And so we get confused because you do the Sam Harris moral math. You go and Peterson doesn’t push back on this. Yeah, no, I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I’ll tell the Peterson critique for you. Right. Yeah. You can’t say we know bad and we can just move away from that and get to good. That’s absurd. That’s impossible. I can prove mathematically that it’s impossible. So I have no idea why anybody would say that. I’m like, you must not have thought about this at all. You must have skipped the thinking part of making that statement because it obviously cannot work that way. Yeah, because you you try to go towards something like utopia, which ends up bad. Like, it’s not what you’re trying to go towards. You’re thinking that there’s only two states, good and bad. But actually, most of the things we do are neither good nor bad, but they have the potential to be either. OK, OK. So we exist in the acting space. Right. Well, that’s when we talk about the imaginal. I’m saying the imaginal isn’t what’s real because you haven’t done it outside of your head yet. Right. So it’s not an action. Right. But it’s also not purely impossible in its entirety. Is that where the individual exists, though, in the imaginal? No, the individual doesn’t exist anywhere at all. Because I’ve heard that that well. And what do you think about the self not existing? The concept of the self is also garbage. OK, so the self and the individual don’t exist. We could probably put them into the same garbage bin, throw those out. And what we’re left with is a thing that needs to be absorbed into a larger thing. No, no, no. You’re a person. And the way you know you’re a person is that persons are in relation to other persons. And so when Paul Van der Kley says we outsource our sanity, that’s what he’s talking about, whether he realizes it or not. It’s irrelevant to me. That’s what he’s talking about. You are not a person without other persons to give you your personhood. It doesn’t make any sense to talk about yourself alone on a desert island. Well, it’d be solipsistic, wouldn’t it? Right. It’s all solipsism, right. And sophistry. And this is the worst thing ever to Socrates and Plato is sophistry and solipsism. That’s the worst thing ever. Those are the false philosophers. True philosophers. The Stoics. Often they’re famous sophists. Well, yeah, I mean, Stoicism has a lot to recommend. The problem is people nowadays don’t understand Stoicism at all. What is your summation of Stoicism? Stoicism is a bunch of hows without a why because they didn’t need it. Like everybody assumes like, oh, philosophy is a self-contained thing. Right. And so what that means is they will talk about a book like this book here. Okay. And they will neglect to mention that within this text, right, within the Republic, it relies on it. The text itself doesn’t function as a as an understandable piece of work without religion. They mentioned the gods all over that book, all over it. It starts with a religious ritual and ends with a religious resurrection story, by the way, which everybody seems to have failed to mention to me my whole life. I haven’t gotten to that point. I’ve been listening to it, but like I got about a quarter of the way through it and I was like, okay, I need to stop. You shouldn’t engage the Republic by yourself. The thing I feel the smartest and most genius about in my life right now is not having tried to read the Republic by myself. I’m like, you know what, Mark? You’re a genius for making that decision that way because I read it one piece at a time at the pace of the book club that we did, which is online, by the way, Texas Wisdom Community YouTube channel. So you can see me going through the Republic in real time. I read it minutes before the book club minutes. I did not read ahead at all. Well, it’s really important, right? Because then you get all the perspective at the same time. So you’re doing all the processing roughly at the same time. And that’s really important. So the problem is when we look back at the ancient Greeks, we go, oh, Plato and those guys, they didn’t have any religion and philosophy. And that’s how they operated. And it just turns out that’s a lie. That’s a way big lie. Now, I realize people don’t realize they’re lying or they’re being up. Whatever. I don’t care. I’m a pragmatist. You lie. You lie. A lie is a lie. I don’t care how it got there. I don’t care if it’s a blameless lie. I don’t care if it’s a lie. I don’t care the type of lie. I don’t care. I just don’t care. It’s not information I have access to. And so it’s not information I’m interested in. And I’m never going to care. Right. So they’re lying about that, probably to themselves, which is unfortunate. But like religions all through that, it’s the same with all of these many philosophies like Epicureanism and Stoicism, et cetera. They were embedded in a religious context. So even that you have a why, given that you have a religion, given that you’re worshiping a god or gods or whatever you’re doing, you’ve got all those rituals and all that other stuff in place that we’ve thrown out in recent times and assumed the ancients didn’t have or some of them didn’t have, which is garbage. Just garbage ideas. No, there’s no place in the historical record, the archaeological record and in the text where people weren’t embedded in religion all over the place. Yeah, is atheism like a…when do you think that atheism became a worldview? When did that take place? Like when does that come on the scene? The 1600s. Yeah, I’d agree. I think it’s Cudworth. Right. I don’t know about that guy, but yeah, I would say it’s somewhere around there. But Paul Van de Klaay did a video about this. This is Guy Cudworth. No one’s ever heard of him. He has no writings. Okay. He came up with vocabulary words for what we would call modern philosophy all over the place. No one’s ever heard of the guy. And one of the words he came up with was theism. Rough definition of theism is bearded man in the sky who controls things. Yeah, that got me into a big amount of trouble growing up, the bearded guy in the sky. Because I have mentioned to you before the Chick comics that are all over Christianity and things like that. Okay. I mean, I cannot tell you the amount of bad damage that did to my worldview to have that image in the back of a Christian comic where there was a big glowing figure on a big stone throne that’s about, I would say, 100 to 1000 times somewhere in there the size of a normal human. And it was like it literally capped your imagination at a certain point because it’s like what you’re thinking of as the highest thing is material. You can imagine it. So therefore it’s inside of your realm. And so you can imagine it. And so you can imagine it. And so you can imagine it. And so you can imagine it. And so you can imagine it. And so you can imagine it. And so you can imagine it. And so you can imagine it. So therefore it’s inside of your realm. And you can approach it. And you can see it. And you can touch it. And things like that. But that’s why you’re not supposed to do an image of God. That’s why that whole treaty exists. You’re never supposed to represent the highest in any form ever. And the bottom line is, Josh, this theism idea, when the atheists are talking, they’re speaking exactly correctly. The problem is they have a straw man of theists. And as near as I can tell, there are very few Christian atheists. Because Sam Harris, if he talks to me, what he believes is I believe in a giant glowing figure on a stone throne up in the ethereal. And I’m like, bro, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not how you talk. That’s the nuance. That’s why John Verbeke, right? This is only like two or three years ago. He starts reading the Church Fathers and he goes, there were non-theists, these Church Fathers. That wasn’t a possibility in his head. But of course they’re not theists. I could have told you that, John, and I don’t even study them. I knew that already because Christians are not theists for the most part. There are a few that are, sure, whatever, there’s four, whatever. It’s fine, right? It’s not zero, but it’s not the majority. But it’s hard to tease out because when you talk about things with propositions, instead of acting them out in the world, this is the recession of the church. It’s not acting things out in the world, church. But when you talk about things in propositions, you come down to the level of propositions, already a flattening of the world, you run into these problems. Because when you talk about whatever’s moving the world, spirits, we would just say spirits. We won’t go all the way up the ladder. We’ll just say spirits. Oh, the spirit stirred my passions and I sinned. Okay, fair, right? Or I did something wrong or whatever it is, right? Fair. How do you talk about that without making it material? Because propositions fundamentally materialize things, at least in some sense. And that’s part of the problem. I want to buzz through this. Casey, atheism, late-state Protestantism. Where could I have gotten that from? Mills. Josh just nailed it. Yeah. So Mills had the same sort of experience. I hear you, Mills. Christ breaks that rule, right, of representing God. Well, a little more complicated than that, but I don’t disagree. Mills, a few, not the majority. What is the basis for this statement? When you talk to Christians, not when you ask them what your conception of God is, you actually talk to them. If you were to ask them, well, is he a guy in the sky? They’d go, of course not. What are you talking about? They’d be like, no. But then if you just listen to how they describe it, the failing of the Christians, and this is my deep critique of most Christians, except Father Eric, he’s awesome. They do not properly represent their views because they make a bunch of assumptions about what the people they’re talking to know and believe. When they do that, they straw man their own position reliably. And that’s why Sam Harris has the attitude that he has because they reliably straw man their own position. You just listen to Bishop Barron, and I love Bishop Barron, but my goodness, dude, like you really needed a language upgrade. You need to stop assuming that these people have the same assumptions in mind. They don’t have the, it’s not that they don’t have the words or the language, but it’s the concepts. You can hand them the language all day long and they will not get the concept. You listen to Sam Harris closely enough, and you will understand Sam Harris’s worldview is the following. The universe popped into existence when I became conscious. Yeah, that’s how we talk. That’s how almost all new atheists talk. If you listen closely, everything is relative to my individual state. Everything because he’s not absorbed into a larger body. He’s not. He’s still outside. He’s still looking at things, but up to his defense. He’s trying to be that way, right? But then none of his systems work. Right? By his own admission, if you hear his last conversation with Peterson, he’s sitting there saying, well, there’s a moral landscape. And there’s peaks that maybe aliens that are higher than the peak we’re on that maybe aliens have access to that we don’t. It’s like, really, dude? And then and then he starts talking about, well, maybe in order to find a higher peak, we have to go down the peak we’re on. Okay. You’ve just recreated all of the problems that were already addressed, maybe not solved or maybe not solves your satisfaction already addressed by religion, except you’ve created new problems because now there’s peaks that only aliens have access to. Yeah. And what are we going to do? Go down and try to ascend a peak we can’t even see. Like, how is this solving a problem? It seems to be creating problems that don’t need to exist. We already have a better system than the moral landscape for resolving this sort of thing. Well, and is this okay? So the West has always been identified as an individualistic and got a bit of an individualistic endeavor that the individual can exist as long as it’s observant to a larger body. But there was an earlier system that was in place. The Eastern and the Eastern mindset, the Eastern worldview is that embedded in a body like is that like is Sam Harris simply suffering from the fact that he was not born in the East? No, no, no, because the East is embedded in a body. It’s just that Sam Harris is a Western Buddhist and he doesn’t understand the East at all. I’m getting at is that the Western Buddhist is like an oxymoron. It doesn’t actually work because the entire Eastern brain was that it’s a phenomena that exists that’s identifiable. But you’re right. It’s oxymoronic in that you can’t implement what they’re talking about because it can’t it can’t make any sense. Yeah. Is it Alan Watts? Probably. Thank you for bringing him up. I thought I was like the only one that listened to what? No, no, he’s not bad. He totally misunderstands Eastern thought. And a lot of it is he was listening to like it’s little details that aren’t so little. He was listening to exiled Buddhists, people who were thrown out of their home country because they were heretics. So he’s listening to heretics and and and formulating the Eastern thought from the from his engagement with Eastern heretics. OK, fair. But do you think he represented it correctly if he was talking to the Eastern heretics? Because, like, I don’t know who these people like, you know, no offense to John Verbeke, but I don’t know who the hell he talks to. When I talk to people who were born in Asia or whose parents were born in Asia and I start talking to them about, hey, you know, in Buddhism, doesn’t it say this? They’re like, look at me like I have two or perhaps three heads and go, no. And I’m like, does nobody talk to people from Asia when they’re real? Well, if you’re born from if you’re born with no legs, as far as I understand, you deserve that. Like, you know what I mean? Like, as far as I understand. No, no, right. That’s all Western. They don’t. That’s not how they get it all right. Yeah, no. And that’s what I’m saying is, is like if we’re because it’s dang near impossible for me, born in the West, because I got into it. So, I mean, Robbie Zacharias was I mean, I understand that his life did not end well. He was accused of multiple sex scandals and things like that. But he he wrote a book called Seeing Jesus from the West or seeing Christianity or seeing Jesus from the East or something like that. It was very close to that title. And that was the first one that kind of brought me around like because he kept on he kept on mentioning in a lot of his lectures and that Eastern thinking Eastern thinking. And then when he wrote that book, I was like, oh, this is what he’s talking about because he started talking. He started getting into a shame versus guilt culture or maybe. Yeah, it was shame versus guilt culture. And like basically the way that you deal with that, like the way that we deal with it, like like how is how is what you do bad represented in your culture and that and that and then and then through that kind of segued into a worldview. And it was like, oh, we’re not talking about the same thing. Right. But it seems it seems like the East is individualistic because they talk about your personal shame. Right. As a thing that you own entirely and as the driver for you not to do bad things. And so that’s right. And in a Western context, but like none of this happened. Like the story of the West has absolutely nothing to do with individualism whatsoever. Like the individualism is this whole whole whole cloth made up, pasted on concept. You know, and this is like the misunderstanding the Enlightenment thinkers, you know, or the misunderstanding of the founding the United States. The founders were unbelievably clear. You can read the papers. This experiment they thought the government they were building was an experiment does not work without God. Everybody, everybody in the experiment has to believe in God. Well, that’s a weird thing to say if they’re individualists, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s because they’re not individualists. That’s because the Enlightenment thinkers were not individualists. I know you read them that way. And in the same way that everybody misreads Plato’s cave, you misread them. Their stuff works fine if it’s a religious framework. The minute that framework goes away, none of their stuff works anymore. And that’s actually what we’re discovering now. Right. With the secularity frame and all of this. But I do I do want to get to some comments real quick, Josh. OK. Yes, you do think. A few, not the majority. What is the basis for the statement? Just talk to people, dude. Just talk to Christians. When you ask them questions, when you engage with them, you will find out they do not believe in a bearded man in the sky that makes lightning come down. They don’t believe that. The way they talk, if you listen closely and you do have to listen closely, it’s not easy, especially if you don’t have the language and the concepts. You will understand that they believe that there is a creator and that there is movement in the world that has nothing to do with human activity. That’s about it. They don’t really go into how that all operates. They might go into, well, there’s angels and spirits and whatever. Right. But like, that’s really not an explanation. They’re just kind of adding more pieces to the board at some point. It’s like, you’re really not explaining how this works. I agree. They’re not explaining how it works. But they’re also comfortable with mystery. And when you’re a materialist or a scientism guy or whatever, science person, you’re not comfortable with mystery. I get that. You think certainty is available. And so you cast your limited frame on their rich frame. You bring that down. And then you think, well, clearly they just said there’s a bearded man in the sky. And it’s like, well, that’s not what they said at all. Well, in the same way that no one mentions that Plato’s Republic is full, full, chocked full of appeals to the gods and that it opens with a religious ceremony and it closes with a myth of resurrection. Why does nobody mention that? Because it doesn’t fit in their worldview. It’s just as convenient for them to talk about Plato’s cave as justification for enslaving people and bringing them away from the goodness because there’s classes or castes in society and they need to get along in a certain way. Nobody tells you that. That’s the honest truth of what’s actually in the text. Why does nobody tell you that? I don’t know. Why do people think that Christians seem to think that there’s a bearded man in the sky that casts lightning down? Same answer, dude. Like, I don’t know what the hell is going on with this with these people. Something. But that’s the problem. That’s the problem. And yeah, the actual functional beliefs that informs actions. Who acts in this world as though they are subject to a bearded man in the sky? I’ve never seen it. I mean, I’m sure some people do. Right. But it doesn’t work out for them. It’s not like lightning comes down and kills the people they don’t like. Right. Yeah. Aaron, what does Christ teach us about identity? I have no idea, Aaron. Father, it’s gone. So you should ask him. Way out of my depth, dude. Like, way out. Tough question. The belief is not the implicit belief. Asking gives you the explicit. No, asking doesn’t give you the explicit. And that’s the thing. If there’s an implicit, if there’s an implicit set of assumptions, asking cannot give you that ever. And that’s the difference. Like implicit things must be inferred by things like actions. If people were acting as if there was a bearded man in the sky that could rain lightning down on you. And I’m not saying no one does that. But like the vast majority of Christians don’t seem to act that way at all, especially with respect to their sin. Right. They just don’t. Like if you thought you were going to be struck by lightning if you cheated on your wife, I don’t know. I think you behave a lot differently. And that’s part of the problem is that we are unable to see these things. John Vervecky didn’t understand that there were church fathers who were non-theists because it had never occurred to him that there was a configuration that wasn’t belief in God versus not believing in God. That’s how we think of atheists. Right. There’s theists and atheists. That’s not true. And the ironic part here is that Cudworth knew this and Cudworth coined the term theism. And theism was not the same as proper religious belief. Cudworth, he actually understood theism is this subtype of belief. Most people aren’t theists. Most believers aren’t atheists or theists. They’re non-theists. Right. And so, oh, well, now it all makes sense. We’re back to three, not two. We keep casting things into binaries and flattening the world and no resolution picture. And then we don’t understand. And then we think, well, if the options are bearded man in the sky or no super thing, right, then it’s got to be one of the, that’s not the world. That’s absolutely not the world. I want to address this and then I’ll get back to you, Josh. Hello. India has a caste system to this day. That’s true. But they consider Christians less than human. Some of them might. That’s true. Not in Kerala. Kerala has a lot of Indian Christians. They drag them out and beat them sometimes. So Plato probably didn’t pump the pluralism schizophrenia. That’s yes. No. Plato is not to blame for this. A lot of people are like I said, Plato’s Republic ends with a story about resurrection that should tell you a bunch about Plato and his beliefs and how close he was to Christianity already. Since he made up a myth at the end of the book, trying to supplant or improve upon Homer. And that myth is explicitly a myth of resurrection. That should tell you something. These people are holding Plato and Greek philosophy up as some like solved to the evil religion. And I’m like, no, dude, it points right at the Christian story, like directly at it rather explicitly. Why don’t you mention that? Anyway, go ahead, Josh. I’m off my soapbox. Oh, no, no, you’re good. I was actually going to ask like as you were talking about Plato. I so a while back I heard I heard that the the scripture that’s in the Bible, it says that all scripture is valid for reproof for correction and for instruction. Do you think that Plato’s Republic may have been in thought or in do you think that Plato’s Republic would have been in scripture? Basically, in that in that context, we’re going to do it. Yeah, yeah. No, I got you. I’ll say this. I’ll say this. Well, I talked to Karen Wong about this on her channel, The Meaning Code, a while back. Great channel about the Vincent The Meaning Code. I’m on there a few times. Okay. Karen Wong. I you know, we were talking about Plato and I said, you like I think I asked her like, how do you conceive these things? And she said, oh, well, Plato is just a Christian before Christ. And that’s how we see it. I’m like, oh, fair enough. Okay. You know, you just included him in the past. That’s fine. Well, because they have a flat view of time in terms of eschatology. Right. And so all things were known. Right. Blah, whatever. And so what that means is that things unfolded in that order. But actually, you know, the fact never changed. Right. Like the fact of Christendom and creation obviously never change our understanding of it or our readiness to understand it. It changed over time. And this is like this is exactly the trick John Breveke plays. He says, oh, we just need to go back to Neoplatonism, which is odd because he keeps saying we can’t go back and then points to Neoplatonism all the time. Right. And then birth a new religion, a religion that’s not a religion that isn’t Christianity. Oh, but it has all the roots, the same roots as Christianity. But it’s not going to be Christianity. And it’s like, really, John? That’s your proposal effectively. I mean, you wouldn’t frame it that way. But that’s effectively a proposal. I don’t agree with any of that. I think all of that is a little cray cray. Gotcha. John Breveke is still thinking he’s not undercover Christian in a way. Like from the time we spent on that discord, like he says he was traumatized by religion and he wants to make the religion that isn’t a religion, but it has all the roots of Christianity. And he’s constantly referencing and sort of taking ideas from Christianity. Right. I think he has an issue with identifying as being a Christian. Well, he has a general identity issue, right? Because neo-Platonism is an identification against Plato. It’s new Platonism. Yes. But at the end of the day, my argument is and always was, and I’ve had this argument over years with many, many people, not just way before I met John Breveke’s work. When you say neo-Platonism, what do they all have in common? Because that’s how you know how to identify something. And the answer is Plato. And I’m like, all right, then you’re talking about Platonism, not neo-Platonism, because you can’t identify the new thing because there isn’t one new thing. It’s just a bunch of ideas that came after Plato in time. Right. And so you start reading some of these guys. I think it’s Platonist. I think I dealt with Platonist briefly. Well, it might not be there. There was a couple of others, but one of them specifically denies the forms. I’m like, well, then he’s not even a Platonist. So he’s anti-Platonist. Right. Well, and then you can’t point to him as a new Platonist. Like, what are you talking about? Plato’s foundational breakthrough that all those other breakthroughs rely on is forms or eidos. And so if somebody’s denying that in whole or in part, then the Platonic system then breaks down. You can say, well, they made a new system. Fine. But now it’s not Platonism. So it’s not new Platonism. That’s a ridiculous name all of a sudden. Right. This is why you can’t name things. So Neo-Platonism is an identification against Plato, which is oddly what Heidegger is guilty of. If you listen to Peterson and Brevecky in the talk, what, two or three talks ago when they talked about that. Like, okay, fair. But also what are you doing? Because now you’re naming something that doesn’t have an identity by your own admission at that point. I think Neo-Platonism is basically a rediscovery of Platonism, right? Like, that’s all they’re really describing is that they dug up. Yeah, it’s an identification against Plato. Basically, what you’re doing is you’re saying, well, Christianity and Platonism are very close. But really, there’s another branch. Yeah. A hidden branch. Well, you’ve got to call it Neo-Platonism. And it’s like, what? What makes you think you can do that? Like, why are you trying? Why are you trying to do that? What makes you think you can get away with that move? Yeah. Because I’ve asked people, what’s Neo-Platonism? And you don’t get any set of consistent answers. I’ve looked it up on YouTube. And, yeah, it’s very, it’s very, I mean, it’s very, it’s very, it’s very, it’s a very, very, very, very, very complicated. it’s very obscure. Like it doesn’t… I took philosophers at Harvard and Boston University and other schools in Boston about this. Like no two of them could give me anything that resembled a similar answer. Beyond Plato, which means it’s an identification against, which means it’s not an identification, it’s just a rebellion. And look, maybe sometimes you need rebellion, but like it’s just a rebellion. It’s a rebellion against what Platonism became. I talked to Dr. Lanton-Jack about this at 1.2, speaking of silly names you chose when you were young. I’ve talked to him about that. That is what happened. Much like with Father Big Mac there. These things happen. I said, John Brevigy talks about Neoplatonism. He says, well, that’s silly because Christianity basically took it over. Why are you talking about it? I’m like, yeah, that’s a good point. I didn’t even think of it. There’s a simpler case than the one I made. Like Christianity crushed it and it’s crushed it so thoroughly we don’t know anything about it. Fair. Okay, now what? Why are you talking about a failure? And then you claim evolution. All right, well, that evolutionary branch died off, kid. Move on, buddy. You’re the one that believes in evolution, not me. I’m not in that camp. I mean, I believe evolution is true, right? And it’s a real observation of the world, but like I’m not hanging my hat on that garbage. That which survives is good and that which doesn’t isn’t. Yeah, that’s an observational standpoint and it’s taken at a snapshot. Like we’re going to look at this set of evidence, take a snapshot and make an assertion out of that snapshot and say that this is how it works. And no, no, you can’t do that. I mean, there’s a whole lot of other things that need to be factored into that. Right. You’re going to, I mean, you’re going to explain a bunch of things and it does. Yeah. Great. But it doesn’t explain the most important questions. And that’s the problem, right? That’s where we sort of get caught up. Sally Jo, seasonal nature of how your identity should be changing over time. Yeah, well, your identity changes over time. That’s a good point. We don’t talk about seasons enough. I know Sally Jo would, if she could. Yeah, seasons are important because it helps us relate to change as such. Right. Not just changing. Do you mean like in scripture when it says, when I was a child, I thought as a child and now I’m a man, I think as a man and I put childish things away. You’re quoting scripture to me. I don’t know any of that stuff. Oh, come on. You gotta read some Bible. No, no, seasonality in general, the idea that the way you are in the spring and the way you are in the fall and the way you are in the summer, the way you are in the winter is different. Even if you don’t have seasons as such, like there’s a contrast and a change of identity there that helps you set the boundaries of yourself. Like, oh, maybe I know how much cold I can survive for how long, right? Or how much I’m comfortable with and the same with hot because I interface with the seasons. Oh, that’s good to know that those constraints that are outside of yourself help you to find your boundaries, which helps you to identify yourself. And then maybe that pattern, because the universe seems to be self-similar fractal patterns, right? Maybe that pattern helps you understand the pattern that you were quoting from scripture, right? Which helps you understand the pattern of something like evolution, which is scaled up, right? You just keep scaling up. When you scale up, it’s not the same. There’s small changes. Self-similar fractal. It’s not the same fractal. It’s not the same at every layer, right? And Jordan Peterson talks about this. Oh, I should put that in my doc. Somebody remind me. I’ll put this in my doc later. Jordan Peterson talks about this, right? You can’t treat your family the way you treat your company. You can’t treat those things, right? Like you can’t treat your spouse the way you treat your family, right? And that’s where communism works at the family scale or seems to. Maybe that makes sense, but it doesn’t work when you scale it up to community or to state or to nation. Ah, right? It’s self-similar. It’s not the same. You can’t apply the exact same rules in the exact same way at a different scale, even though the similarities are there. It rhymes. It doesn’t repeat necessarily, but it rhymes. It’s same concept, right? It’s the same concept. Sally Jo, you are a child. You are an adolescent. You are a parent, if you dare. I like that, Sally. I like that. That’s good. You are a juvenile. Then you take on responsibility when others depend on you. You grow as others grow, right? Right. And they encourage you to grow. And if they don’t do that, if they say, you know what? This child’s a budding individual. I’m just going to leave them on their own. Well, that’s the Rousseauian, pure nature, leave the baby in the woods. And you can say, wow, they don’t leave the baby in the woods. Oh, that’s a nice small improvement over Rousseau’s idiocy. Thanks a lot. They abandon the teenagers and never challenge them and stress them. And then when they get in the real world, somebody says a mean word to them, and they go into the streets and scream at the sky. Oh, great. That’s a super improvement. All because you thought they were an individual. And basically, that’s laziness. I don’t want to bring my kid up and make hard decisions and make them uncomfortable and conflict with them all the time. So I’m just going to let them flourish as they will and provide for them as I can. And then they don’t grow because you don’t form them. You need formation. Right? That’s what makes identity. And then it’s like, well, am I a boy or am I a girl? I don’t know. I don’t have identity because I didn’t get formed. I didn’t have formation. And so I don’t know what boundaries are or how to apply them. And then other people are applying boundaries to me. And I don’t know what the hell is going on. And why should they do that? I haven’t had boundaries applied to me before. It all makes sense to me. It’s horrific, but it makes sense. Yeah. No. And I mean, if you make a tomato plant and a weed before they bear fruit are somewhat indistinguishable, meaning they’re about the same height. They’re both green. They both have leaves. They look very, very, very like a thistle and a tomato plant. Like they both have even the little like fuzzy hairs. They look very, very, very similar. And so like to try to differentiate yourself from that. Yeah, I see exactly what you’re saying. That like there’s no boundary. There’s no there’s no this is them. This is me. Right. But you know them by their fruits, right? So yeah. Oh, it’s the outcome. It’s the manifestation. But the outcome, the fruit is only realized after the fact. You know what I mean? And so that’s the rub. That’s right. And what’s the problem? The problem is we’re trying to identify people before we have a relationship with them. Damn. That’s a rough one. Because I mean, you’re I mean, how do you vote? Did you vote for Trump? Are you a MAGA person? Or did you vote for Biden? Right. Well, now I know everything I need to know about you. Now I can talk to you. What? I mean, that’s what people are doing. You’re doing it all over the place. Oh, you listen to Daily Wire. Oh, Peterson moved to Daily Wire. I know what’s going through his head now. Don’t I? Oh, yeah, I absolutely do. Are you high? What are you on? Stop smoking that stuff, man. That’s bad for you. Where did you get that idea that you knew what was going through his head for Daily Wire? You don’t even know what his deal with Daily Wire is. You don’t even know what he agreed to or what they agreed to. You know, like, maybe he didn’t take any money from them at all. And he just wanted better video production. I mean, that’s not the case. But maybe like, I don’t know. I didn’t read the freaking contract. Did you? I have no idea what was going through his head. Maybe he just wanted better video production. He didn’t want the hassle of doing his own video work, man. Sign me up, Daily Wire, if you’ll do the camera and the lighting and the damn sound, because lighting and sound are like impossible. Sign me up. Like, I don’t need any money to shine me up for not having to set this stupid stuff up and manage it all. Because it’s a pain. It’s a lot of work. I put a lot of work into this. I improve it every once in a while when I can. I put a lot of work into this. It’s a lot of work. I could see somebody cutting a deal, like, don’t pay me any money. Maybe he already has money. He doesn’t care, right? It’s possible. And so he doesn’t need any more. He’s like, just fix my sound and my lighting for me and take all my videos and edit them so I don’t have to deal with it. Okay, good deal, man. I don’t know. But pretending like you do, right? And then there’s all kinds of people. This happens to me all the time. I’ll say, oh yeah, that person, they’ve they’ve got a problem. Like, they’re not mentally, you know, with it. And people be like, you don’t know that about them. And I’m like, I don’t know. They talked to them and they told me that. So your assumption that I don’t know is wrong. And the reason why you don’t know is because, hey, you didn’t talk to them and you don’t know them. And you didn’t talk to me to find out if I knew them. Maybe I know something you don’t. That’s always possible. Right? And people do that to me all the time. Or they’ll say something like, you know, well, you can’t know that about a person. You’d have to observe this. And I’m like, oh, but I did observe that. You didn’t because you’re lazy and you didn’t do the work. Right? You didn’t watch their videos or you didn’t engage with them. You didn’t have a conversation with them. You didn’t ask the right questions. Right? You just assumed they were good and that any negative thing about them was me being bad. That’s ridiculous. You don’t, you don’t know. You don’t have those relationships with those people. Right? Oh, whatever you’re up to is bad. How do you know you’ve never engaged with it? And people do that all the time. And they assume they know because they, and they make a lot of assumptions, they assume they know because they know how you vote or they know you listen to Daily Wire or they know you’re bad and therefore they know you’re MAGA or whatever nonsense they come up with. It’s a shortcut. So you don’t actually have to relate to the person because the more you relate to the person, the harder it is. That’s true. What do you think, Josh? I think it’s three hours, I think I’m going to shut things down. So closing statements, Josh, what do you got for me? Well, where I started out with, I mean, was with the individual and like, I think, I still got that image in my head of the virus, you know, wanting to connect, wanting to land upon, wanting to connect, you know, to infect, you know, and, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know about that. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. So let me just recapitulate this so that I understand. So you’re saying when you try to become an individual, you actually become a virus. Okay, yeah, I can get on board with that. Your attempt to become an individual makes you parasite because you’re not relating correctly to the world, you’re not relating to the world, you’re not relating to the world, you’re not relating to the world, you’re not relating to the world. So I think you’re trying to be a person connected to other people. You’re trying to be a person connected to other people. And that is cheapening and flattening the world. And that makes you purely viral or parasitic upon the world. And so you can’t help but destroy everything you you you kind of touch. And you can’t help but touch something unless you’re living in a cave in the woods or something. So you’re muted, Josh. You’re muted, you’re muted, you’re muted, you’re muted. Yeah, you’re gonna find somewhere to fit. You’re gonna find somewhere to you’re gonna I mean you’re gonna find somewhere to latch on. And if you’re not in the right mode, you’re gonna infect. You’re you’re not gonna be any help. You’re you’re gonna be a detriment. That clarifies it for me. I like I like this frame actually. I mean, it wasn’t I mean, it was something that like I it was just an image that was coming to my head when you said the individual and then you were talking about the whole you know the whole yeah it just it was like okay well what’s he talking about he’s talking about like this outlier this this separate thing and then but that separate thing has a place the individual it can find a place it can find it it can find a place to latch on but it won’t be healthy it won’t yeah it has to find a place yeah no that’s that’s great i really like that that’s that’s super helpful framing yeah i’m definitely going to steal that and pretend it’s mine for sure excellent thank you john thank you how does the individual change the mode to get the healthy place yeah well you you recognize that you can’t be an individual and you’re a person it’s connected well yes sorry that that’s my excellence like has um does one start like acting in their own personhood instead well you you just have to i well i don’t think you can because you don’t know how that’s why you need to embrace play and and the fact that you don’t know everything right and the fact that you don’t have to like you can do things without knowing right and so that means you can take an action before you’re ready right because you have to to learn like you have to stumble and and make mistakes you know and have errors in in order to learn right you you you have to but you also have to be in play mode which means oh i know i’m doing this badly and i’m going to listen and watch for feedback maybe it’s not direct right maybe it’s just people people a lot of times people will manipulate other people with silence right that’s a yeah that’s a big that’s a big observation like a lot of people don’t know this but one of the most powerful uh weapons in your in your in your arsenal when negotiating negotiating is silence you do not like when you’re negotiating for something you have no no you don’t you don’t need to respond you’re like like that’s a conversational tactic we’re not in conversational mode we’re in negotiating mode i want something out of you you want something out of me so therefore like we’re not in conversational mode anymore we’re in negotiating mode and so like if i stay quiet that’s going to make you nervous and it’s going to make you want to offer something and it may result in me getting a better price on the truck or something like that you know what i mean and and that’s okay but like what you’re what we’re talking about as far as needing to be absorbed onto a larger bot like for me coming into Catholicism i dropped everything i dropped all of my Protestantism i did not argue in rca i accepted everything and then like i i found uh like Scott Hahn who was a who is a YouTube you know YouTube personality also a very learned man and he came out of Protestantism and that’s who i took my like okay well what do i do with Mary i was never taught about Mary i was always told she was just a woman in the in the story she doesn’t really she’s just a woman she is not to be prayed to or anything like that and then i listened to Scott Hahn’s YouTube uh you know uh lecture i guess you could say on on Mary and i was like oh she represents the Ark of the Covenant now if i had brought that up in rca it most likely would have like deterred the conversation it would have it would have not landed necessarily as well but like in my i dropped back into student mode and you know so my mode there i guess you could say you’re a cell or you’re a you’re a you’re a molecule and your your attitude the your points of attachment are dictated by your attitude and so if you’re not in the right attitude you will not adhere to the right part of the body like and so like you need to be ready to be in student mode if you know come in with humbleness come in with with you know you know generosity be ready to do work because you’re the newcomer you know what i mean like just like any newcomer into a tribe you need to be ready to earn your not not saying that that’s actually how it works but you need to be ready to earn your spot so to speak and and and so yeah your attitude your frame of mind your everything about you that’s the spirit of what’s that again that you know peterson talks about rough and tumble play right for making talks about serious play which is crazy it’s just play that’s what that is right you have any humility to make mistakes and know you’re going to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes that’s what play really is so yeah that was that was well said josh thanks thanks yeah what else we got for closing statements there uh andre before we shut everything down um yeah no josh made very good points like recently i found myself in a frame of humility um a bit a willingness to make mistakes and accept that i made them um and i can’t erase them but i can process through them and move on from them um and that as it says to change your mode um you have to be ready to learn um i was a bit unsure and like the silence being manipulation uh statement um but uh that that how is that relating to um that you need to be more engaging josh um or no it just means that like it is a state of it’s an option it’s an option like meaning depending on what you’re doing like we don’t there’s certain there’s certain modes of of engagement that we can be in that we don’t necessarily there are certain you might feel a pressure to speak but that pressure is is solely internal like that’s not something that’s actually on the actual situation such as like i said if i come up to you and you’re offering a truck for say 1500 and i say would you take 1200 and then i just keep my face like that and you’re gonna feel a certain level of need to advance the conversation and so you’re gonna you’re gonna possibly now depending on your personality you may try to assuage me and offer well i can’t do 12 but i could do 13 i gained a 200 advantage you know and so you see what i’m saying and like and that’s not me manipulating you that was simply me stating something and withholding my expression i’m not gonna i’m not gonna try to assuage you by saying well would you would you would you please would you would you just take the you know and that yeah that’s it that’s that third state right because you can you can go in and try to agree you can go in and try to oppose or you can or you can you can disengage this is all your third option and it’s that disengagement through silence right silence is a powerful manipulative conversation because it gives you that third option where you know now there’s a space for people to change the topic now there’s a space for for people to consider right you thinking mode i mean you know peterson makes a lot of hay out of talking his thinking and that’s true but you shouldn’t be thinking all the time you need time for reflection contemplation rumination maybe i’ll do a stream on that leave leave a comment i’ll do a stream on contemplation reflection rumination if need be new concepts for me by the way right but but that’s what silence gives you right silence is yeah and it’s not wrong it’s in my opinion that’s not a wrong thing to meaning that in between humans like i there’s a way that i can communicate without speaking and it’s not it it is not wrong for me to uh in certain situations to try to pull i guess you could say to to turn conversation by silence you know what i mean like to and i’m not i’m not giving you a disapproval look i’m not saying well i can’t really do that you know you know i mean i’m not really trying to you know manipulate you i’m simply stating where i’m at and i’m asking you where you’re at and i may come to you or you may come to me you know what i mean and that and i’m using negotiation because that’s one of the more tenuous uh exchanges that humans find themselves in and where you might find that you got yourself bit or you got yourself you know like oh man i made a good deal or i got i got oh man i got screwed you know and and that but um but yeah no i think that the way that humans engage with each other because you i mean somebody might you know go over a deal with me and say man that guy robbed me and it’s like no i didn’t you know we we spoke in clear terms i you know it’s it’s simply that you were not ready for the conversation and you may have felt a need to uh you know try to please me and so you didn’t want me to be quiet and so you try to you know sweeten the deal or felt an urgency to sweeten the deal and those are not my fault those are those are not there’s nothing in there that’s that’s uh my i don’t have to be concerned or i don’t have to feel guilt or anything over that and these are things that are weird because i mean on the other side of it somebody could feel shafted doesn’t doesn’t mean that you’re valid in filling that you know what i mean it just what i would say is that the reason i’ve been quiet this time is i’ve been trying to pay attention and learn and i’ve also been trying to find points at which i can uh give some insight or commentary and there has been relatively little so um i’ve defaulted in a sense into the quiet mode um rather than not being ready to engage um i have just sort of been paying more of my attention on getting the message across that’s been sent to me and um um finding any space where i can uh make a comment or a reply uh mark’s just so good at talking that like i couldn’t find many and yeah well but you don’t have to i mean that’s that’s part of the right yeah like again there’s a there’s a there’s a piece in not having to comment that allows you space to grow and and that’s more important than trying to engage and think like there’s a lot of talk about oh start your own youtube channel that may be overwhelming and it may not be helpful and it may it may make everything worse like just because somebody got better doing it doesn’t mean you’ll get better doing it and and that’s part of the problem is that we manipulated ourselves when we’re not comfortable with silence and when we’re not comfortable with our place and maybe our place isn’t jumping into every youtube stream we can see or talking when no one else is right or trying to learn something when maybe it’s just fun time like it’s sometimes if you’re just talking about fun things and it’s not time for learning right maybe it’s it’s vacation time like maybe you need to sit on the beach and just enjoy like there’s and that’s the problem we don’t we don’t have that nuance we’re we’re trying to over identify things in the world and and that’s a big problem and i think on that note i’m going to shut the stream down thank you guys really appreciate the engagement it’s been fun and i’ll see everybody next week i hope we’ll figure out a topic and uh comments you know whatever like subscribe threaten your friends whatever it takes and uh have a lovely week