https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KMfPso66yGA
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 true? Yeah, the ones that you’re calling love Are gonna be the leaders in a little while When will the lonely voice of youth cry what is true? This all-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 true And the lonely voice of youth cries what is true Young man speaking in the city square Alright, welcome back. Welcome for the first time if you’re a first-timer here. We’ve got a fun-packed show as always. Our live navigation of patterns. We’ve got our San Pellegrino ready to go. We’ve got some Joy Domens because somebody let me go to the grocery store by myself. Got my junkless cinnamon roll here. I got some Walker shortbread cookies because they’re excellent. And of course I have some tea from the Table Rock Tea Company. Just good tea. And we’re talking about value again. Again. It’s almost like nobody understands value and we need to do it over. Almost. But yeah, it’s been a rollercoaster of a week. So we’re searching for value. We’re trying to find where is value. But it’s been a journey because we did this value before. The what is value. And we’re still playing with these monologues to some extent. Serious play. Some might call it. I just call it play because it’s no such thing as serious play. Doesn’t make any sense. This idea of value is difficult to get your head around. So that’s what we’re going to cover. We’re going to try to navigate the patterns into it. And sort of as an experiment, welcome to navigating patterns. Where we go beyond the realm of the lobster king. Aiming for the mark of wisdom. And look, there was a great live stream that my good friend. Other Eric Sites puts on. And this one in particular was just wonderful from last Sunday. He does these Sunday live streams and they’re just some of them are really fantastic. So if you haven’t seen it, it’s I think it’s over on Randall’s United and on his channel. You should check it out. So I’ll post the link here. That one in particular was really good. I had a really good time there. But I thought the opening was the opening really, really, really good. The opening talk on that one and some of the subsequent conversations just amazing. And the thing is, I found that interaction valuable. So notice what I said there. I found that valuable. So where is the value? And other people, of course, because I said, hey, did you see the open mic from Sunday? Because it was fantastic. You really got to listen to what Father Eric said at the beginning. It was great. They also said that the opening was really good. And interestingly, I had a pretty miserable day yesterday in the middle of the day. And at the end of the day, there was somebody on the Discord server. Somebody knew I hadn’t seen before. I was like, oh, this new person on my Discord server hanging out with Manuel. It’s like, wow, OK, well, that’s good. I got done with that. I was like, oh, I’m going to go to the Discord server. I was like, wow, OK, well, that’s good. So I got done with my meeting and jumped in there. And he said, hey, Mark, I’ve been watching your stuff, and I really like it. And we talked for quite a while. It was a wonderful conversation. And he said, I find your stuff valuable. I was like, what? Find value? OK, interesting. And interestingly, we come up after we pick the topic of the live stream, which seems to happen an awful lot, strangely. So having said all that, that’s how we talk about these things. But value is not something that you find. Sort of lying around. Hanging out. Waiting for you. Hey, man, when are you going to find me? It’s not a thing in the world. The value is not material. It doesn’t materialize. It may have a material representation. You might call that a symbolic representation. Material itself might be imbued with value by virtue of any number of things. And value does not care about you, but it allows you to care. Isn’t that interesting? And what you care about conveys value. And as you care more in that moment, more value is there. And look, I mean, we have talked about caring in a past live stream. So it’s worth posting that link here. And you want to think about things like success. And we define success and reward using value. We expect to some extent to be able to use value. And we expect to be able to use value. We expect to some extent to be able to use these things called values to help us navigate the world around us. Notice that value, values, and what is valuable are all different frames. They’re different perspectives, different approaches with different purposes. In other words, each has a different telos. And that’s important to realize. So we’re using the same or similar words, and it’s not some language game that we put a suffix on it or a prefix or slightly mangle the spelling. And the different telos of value, values, what’s valuable, right, these different frames. Or with respect to us, right, the perspective is dependent upon us. You don’t rid yourself of the perspective by taking a new one. You just switch one perspective for another. And that affects value. It affects where the value is because asking where something is depends upon where something else is. Which is not to say there isn’t an absolute frame, but it’s not to say that there isn’t an absolute frame. Where something else is. Which is not to say there isn’t an absolute frame, but even in an absolute frame, the reference of one thing to another matters. And so that’s why it’s important that you understand that success and reward, that value and what’s valuable and what values are, is all frame dependent. And that’s why we need orientation and navigation in the world. Having values allows us to orient. Valuing things is importance and it is what importance is. Importance is wrapped up in value. And values change in the moment, in context, over time. This is not some straightforward sort of, oh, there’s a value. I caught one on my fishing line. And look, I’m not answering your question. I know that. Right? And so far, this has all seemed like a good idea. Right? And so far, this has all seemed like a way of avoiding addressing the title of this livestream. So I appreciate you hanging in there. And we’ll try to get there together in cooperation. Remember, I’m not here to give you answers. Nice, satisfying, comfortable, scientific, precise, accurate answers. I’m here to give you ways to relate, to sense quality, to participate. To find right participation or maybe good participation for you in and with the world. Or maybe the three frames, you with yourself, you with nature, you with others. That’s what navigation is all about. And maybe your right participation is providing art. Maybe it’s commenting on the video or commenting in the livestream. Maybe it’s questions that you ask in the livestream or in comments on some of the videos. Or maybe it’s just being a viewer. All of this is valuable. And it’s all required for the success of this livestream, of the channel, and of my wider project in general. And so you can look at two different modes of participation and say one’s more valuable than the other. And that may be true. It may even be, we’ll say, unconditionally true. But that doesn’t mean there’s no value in being a viewer. It doesn’t mean that value isn’t there in your engagement. Because ultimately it’s about the power that you do have, the proper, in my opinion, definition of power. Of course, I have a video on that. Which is your time, energy, and attention. And that’s what’s valuable. How you allocate or spend or distribute your time, energy, and attention shows the value. When you pay attention to the TV rather than your child, whether you like it or not, no matter how valuable you tell your child they are, they know the TV is more valuable. At least in that moment. And when we confuse value over time, and we always do, it’s unavoidable. We often get into these conundrums, these little mix-ups. That certainly happens. And so we need to be careful. Are we talking about value over time or value in the next 10 minutes or value for the first half of our life? There’s lots of ways to slice that. And it’s mixed up in what is success? What is reward? What is rewarding? What is rewarding to you? If you do something that someone calls success and you don’t feel you’ve gotten a reward, were you successful? Was it valuable? These are just questions, things to think about. How satisfied are you with the value that you received? Maybe you feel you’re being underpaid. You can think about that in terms of feeling valued. And again, caring and value are wrapped up because caring is, at least in action, which is the only way I think you should think about it, all about time, energy, and attention. And you can say, look, the doctor’s more valuable than the nurse for some things. That might be true. But maybe just having somebody sitting with you while you’re sick is more valuable than the doctor or the nurse. And that’s the tricky thing about value. Value in relation to what? And look, the re-enchantment of the world. And yes, I know the world is already enchanted and nothing has changed. Right? But the re-enchantment of the world for people, for us, for humans, is all about reintroducing quality into the material world. And it’s the quality part that’s tricky. We have to prevent ourselves from falling into the bad habit of trying to merely quantify or explain through quantity the entire world. Because science has shown us amazing success at things that nobody thought were possible. Nobody suspected could be done because they violated some natural law or some words that were written down or some understanding that everybody’s always had. Some teaching that you participated in and believed in. So we tend towards this quantification, this dividing up, this discretization. Let’s get everything into discrete parts. We can understand those parts, maybe. But you’ve carved up the world. I’m not saying there isn’t value in dissecting a frog. You get a lot of knowledge out of dissecting the frog and looking at the different parts and determining where parts begin and end and all of this nice, quote, Neoplatonic hint, there’s no such thing, stuff. But you can argue that now you know that frog, that frog, the one you dissected really well, you participated with that frog in a way that is amazing and unheard of. But you can’t participate in the future of the frog. The frog’s dead. You can’t know other frogs in that way. And you can’t know what that frog would have done had it not been dissected. You lose the quality of the frog. Re-enchantment is saying, hey, no one ever used to dissect frogs. If we wanted to know about frogs, we’d watch the frogs while they were frogging or whatever it is frogs do. I’m sure it’s called frogging, though. Definitely a good science word. And that’s the key to re-enchantment, to understanding that you can only quantify so much about the world and at a certain point you’re making it worse, not better. Not here to tell you what that point is. But it’s worth knowing it exists and taking that seriously and participating in the world as if that exists. Because that’s where value is. You know where value isn’t? In the material. It’s not there. It’s not in gold. It’s not in diamonds. It’s not in dollar bills. It’s not in oil. Do you know how many other things have to exist before oil is of any use to anybody at all ever? No, you never think about that. No one ever does. And finding value, interfacing with value, embodying values, knowing what’s valuable, all of that demands that we pay attention to quality. And yes, one child is more valuable than another in some aspects. And no, you cannot choose one child over the other in any meaningful fashion. The captain of a ship is more valuable than the guy who climbs the rigging. There are fewer people who can be a good captain and there are more people that can climb rigging. Still, not everyone can climb rigging. Not everyone that climbs rigging is good at doing it. And that matters. It also means that climbing the rigging is still valuable. The value doesn’t go away because there’s a greater value somewhere else. It doesn’t have that quality. It’s not a material thing. You can’t go, oh, I’m going to take some value from here and put it over here and then it’ll have moved. No. But it does have a relativistic aspect. But it also depends on TELOS. Like, well, according to Aristotle, everything does. Final Cause. But what you do in the world has value. And we can find value in participation, in action, in experience, which is past participation. And that’s because you don’t walk away from a participation with nothing. That’s what experience is. It can be negative. Put your hand on the hot stove, burn your hand. Negative experience. But it’s an experience. And hopefully you learned from it. And maybe you didn’t. But you probably did. Maybe you didn’t learn the right thing from it. Maybe. And the value is still relevant in the experience. Because the engagement is not nothing. Having done something by definition is not nothing. And look, maybe your past participation is not relevant. Maybe it was a thing that didn’t last. But we find the value in action, even if it’s a past action. But past action is always less valuable than current action. And it’s a conundrum indeed. This is a problem to some extent. Because now we have to work out that past action versus this current action, is it more valuable and why and what’s going on? This is wrapped up, this problem of value and experience versus value now is wrapped up in the quality issue. The past has a quality that is different from the present and the future. You cannot assign a quality to the past or present or the future that makes any sense in the long term. Sure, things can look valuable and seem to exhibit a way to become valuable. But is that thing actually valuable? Are things which don’t reflect some eternal aspect valuable? I think not. This doesn’t impact value changing over time. This is where we bleed over. Exactibility, learning, abstraction, these all play a role. Because once we do something, once we participate, once we take an action that has an effect, that effect is not zero. And in that participation, there is a bleed through, a learning, an exaptation, a way that you relate differently in the future from how you did in the past. It moves you because you moved. Were you seeking value when you participated? And what value were you seeking? Because that will determine how you moved. And then what did you learn from it? This stuff is not easy. You need to look up. And that’s the problem, is that value is in the looking up. And you can’t just look up because then you can’t act. It’s a dance. And value is an abstraction of the material world. It impacts your attention and then it impacts your action. And also in that action, in that attention, you also create value. It’s one of these nice reciprocal relationships. They feed each other, enhance each other, directed by your free will. And this value determines how much energy goes where and how much time you’ll put in or maybe should put into something, like an action. And it’s not the only factor. The complexity that we see in the world around us comes from competing, overlapping, cooperating qualities, which we call values. And these qualities move, they flow, they are not stable. But they are eternal. They are value. So where are we looking for value? Where do we think we’re finding value? What are the things we think are valuable? How are we valuing our relationships, the people around us, the things that we have? This is the highest value. Jordan Ammons were great. At least for candy. And it is value where you’re looking that create the world. If you’re looking for value in your victimhood, you’re not going to have a great world. If you’re looking for value strictly from other people, that might be a problem. If you have one value and it just never gets challenged by any other values, probably an issue. And that’s part of the problem with value. Where is the value? Where are you interacting with value? Where are you finding value? What are you doing to make things valuable? And if you’re not doing anything, are you increasing the value in the world or decreasing the value in the world? What are you trading your time, energy, and attention for? Video games? I can pay you money and you’ll let me play video games. What a great deal. I’m not saying don’t ever play video games. Although, man, I haven’t been playing any video games lately. Oh, except Hoplite. I did get addicted to Hoplite. It’s quite a good game. When you can’t sleep and you need to calm down. Yeah, these things are tricky. Value is tricky. And values are tricky because they compete. They conflict. They change over time. You can tell what someone’s highest value is by how they talk. I have a talk called Highest Value about Sam Harris. Excellent video. It’s one of my most watched. Quite a good video. And you can see his highest value is knowledge. And you can see somebody else with the highest value of politics. And you can see the conflict there, too. And that’s important to know. That’s important to realize. And your values change over time. How much video gaming should you do when you’re a kid versus when you’re an adult? Because I think those answers are different. How much time should be put into learning versus doing? Because that changes, too. And it’s the thing about values. They’re slippery little puppies. So what is it that you find valuable? And how do you enhance its value? Or do you? It’s worth figuring that out for yourself. It’s worth knowing. Like, oh, the values that you have are those the values you’re acting out in the world? Or better yet, what are you acting out in the world? Now tell me what you value. Because that’s what I see. I don’t see your fantasy in your head about your values. I don’t see that. I don’t have access to that. I’m a pragmatist. It’s part of the reason for the where’s value. Bringing things down. Look at what you’re participating in. Look what you’re doing. Look what you’re not participating in. Things you don’t participate in, you don’t find value in. Oh, I really care about the Earth. So I fly around in a private chat. Really? I don’t believe you. You can see what people value. You don’t have to listen to them. You can just look at them. And here in the age of gnosis, substat coming soon, here in the age of gnosis, we listen to people. We put weight on their words. We believe the values they tell us they have. Because it’s the age of gnosis. But I don’t think so. You believe what you act out, as Jordan Peterson says. Or just look at what people act out. They’ll know what they believe. If they scream at the sky, it tells you something. You don’t want to judge. They don’t want to be judged. That’s too bad. You have to act in the world. You’re doing it based on values. Whether you like it or not, you best know what those are. All right. Anybody wants to jump in? I will post the link. Feel free to come on in and discuss whatever you’d like. Although I prefer to stick to values, at least for a little bit. That’s sort of the key. Oh, some day YouTube makes me angry. There. On navigating patterns, I was able to pin the link. I can’t pin the link anywhere. What is all these beer drinkers? Come on. Sam Pell. Valuable. Beer is not valuable. I checked. I looked it up. I researched the stream exclusively and extensively. There was no beer listed as valuable. Beer is just has no value. Sam Pell? That’s value. That’s value. A junkless cinnamon roll bar? Value. Jordan Ammons? Value. I can prove this. Jordan Ammons? Action. More. Action. More action. Value confirmed. No problem. Neutrino. I haven’t parsed the details. The details of what? I don’t know what went over this. Beer not valuable. Sam Pell, very valuable. William Branch. Drinking Pellegrino cherry and pomegranate. There you go. That’s some good stuff. Mills. Is money a store of value? Well, I have videos on that, of course. I have a video on the economy and two on money. Actually, the money ones are short. The problem with economics in general is that people reduce it to money and income. And actually, the only things you need to worry about are wealth and cash flow. It turns out that money and income are irrelevant. So people will point out rightly that the value of a currency, for example, money in this case, goes down with time because there is a time value of money. A lot of people don’t know this. That’s why cash flow and wealth are the two measures you want. You want to ignore things like income and cash as such, like cash on hand, maybe. But it’s weird that we think of it in those terms. Money represents future potential based on past performance. Roughly speaking, that’s how money works. Keeping cash on hand is no good because cash devalues over time. So, yeah, money is not a good store of value. Keeping money moving. Wealthy people keep their money moving. Just saying. Father Eric, welcome, sir. Uh-oh, he’s got some heathen non-San Pellegrino drink, but we’ll allow it. You know, it’s Friday, so it should be a little bit penitential. So getting rid of some of the Michelob Ultra that somebody else put in my beer fridge. Fair. We’re talking about money and value. Well, the money is inevitably going to come up in the comments, so I’m well prepared. But yeah, I mean money doesn’t store value. Right, money is only valuable when it’s transferred, actually. There was the great trick. So if you want a great trick, all you have to do is go back in history and look at the 1990s. The great trick that was played on the economy in the 1990s was the following. If you increase the flow of money, and they didn’t do this, or at least they didn’t do exactly this, but they did close enough to this. You look at, you don’t print any more dollars or mint any more coins. So you keep the same number of dollars and coins in circulation. That doesn’t mean you don’t mint them, but it means for every one you mint, you destroy an old one, right? You then increase the speed of transfer of money in the system, and the economy will magically grow. Even people don’t that happened in the 90s. Like this is the Bill Clinton trick to some extent. Right, so he expands the economy without increasing the goods and services being delivered in the economy. Not that they didn’t increase, but they increased due to other factors like, you know, the population increases, right? If it doesn’t increase more than the population increases, it didn’t increase, right? Because it’s all ratios. People don’t understand that. And it’s mathematically known. In the system, you just increase the speed and suddenly a bunch of things change because the scale changes. Scale changes with speed, scale changes with size, scale changes with total potential, right? I think it changes with other things too, but those are the three that come to mind. And if you don’t understand that, when you build a closed system, you just increase the speed of something and then you’re going to have to do the same thing. You increase the speed of something and bang, a bunch of stuff changes inside the system. And it looks dynamic when it’s probably not. So one of the things they did was they sped up the transfer time between banks. That automatically grew the economy at a ridiculous rate. Because of computers? Because of computers, well, they made some legal changes too. So electronic signatures, that’s the 1990s. Oh, OK. And they did other weird things. So there used to be a rule in place that effectively said if there was fraud on your credit card, the credit card companies had to pay for that. And they were required to keep so much cash on hand for every credit card they issued. And that cash had to remain as cash on hand. So there was a big pool of cash that was on hand. That all got released by changing the fraud laws. No, no, no, the fraud’s on the consumer. It’s like, wait a minute. Right. Well, and then what happens is now all of a sudden the consumer is required to fix the problem. Before the liability was with the credit card company. Oh, you let somebody use my credit card and didn’t check that it was me. Well, that’s on you, dude. That’s not on me. Makes total sense. So they flipped that around. So now all of a sudden you got life lock where you get a million dollars of insurance. Somebody you know what I mean? And then they put all these other laws in place to fix all the problems that were created by by changing who’s you know who’s responsible for the fraud. And so that’s the issue is all of these things have changed because to increase the flow of money because before the money was trapped, money transfer times were low. Now all of a sudden they’re much quicker. Right. And they’re going to transfer money to you right now within like a minute and a half for real. Like, you know, things like Zelle and Venmo and those things. They’re amazing. And interestingly, Europe had the person to person transfer thing down decades before the US ever got it. And the economy works differently and always did and probably always will. Fewer bankers involved in credit card companies. I noticed that when I was in Rome, and they get the guys I went with who had been to Rome before told me, yeah, like, make sure you always have cash when you’re at a restaurant. They might do your credit card, but they might just not. And so is that is that one of the differences between Europe and the United States is the relationship to banks. Yeah, well and banking is older there. But also there’s weird stuff in Europe like, and I knew this about Europe before I ever went but let’s say you go to Croatia, because I went to Croatia. Easy, easy example. You go to your credit card. Because it’s, you know, 20. Where did I go? 2020? Yeah, right in the middle of fake news virus scam. So you go there. I was like, okay, here’s my credit card. Guy grabs a credit card machine because he doesn’t have it with him. Runge your card, it doesn’t work. He says one moment goes back gets the second credit card machine. It doesn’t work. It’s the third credit card machine that works. Have you ever, I mean, I’ve seen it happen a handful of times in my life in the US. That was every, every restaurant except two. Same in England too, by the way, same in, same in, well in Scotland, to be precise, same in Scotland. They didn’t have one credit card machine. They had like three. Some of them had four. And the different networks support different credit cards and, you know, whatever, if you have a foreign credit card, right. Yeah, very different, very different economic, and also, you know, they got grocery stores at a walking distance of every house in the city. And in the city, even in Boston, you don’t have that. I was very fortunate when I lived in Boston. It was a small mom and pop grocery store down the street. But it was an actual grocery store. It wasn’t very big, but it was, it was an actual grocery store. So yeah, we could walk the grocery store. It wasn’t a big deal. But that’s unusual in cities in the US. You got to, you got to work to get that close. When I was in Marlboro, I was right, grocery stores half a mile away, right down the street. Not a problem. I went twice. I went multiple months with no card. And I was fine. I really, you know, I was even able to get into Boston because you can take public transit. Everybody talks about public transport is terrible. No, it’s not. It’s there. I had no problems at all in Marlboro, Massachusetts, 25 miles out of the capital city, getting around without a car on public transport. It’s not great, but it’s there. Yeah. If your bus is a half hour late, it can really mess things up. So it’s like the whole thing might be maybe a little more fragile than you hopping in your car and just going. Anyway, right. Well, and hopping in your car means also you can make appointments better. You can be more efficient about them. There’s an efficiency to cars that doesn’t exist without cars. Right, right. Or doing everything within walking distance of where you live. Right. That’s not practical for most of us. I want to talk about something that I value. Please. And that is my goofy phone. This little light phone here. It’s not even a phone. My goofy little light phone here. And what I really value is also the people who are making it. So I had to buy a new case because I had worn the case off of my light phone here. And they actually sent me some sticker decals. I’m not sure if this is going to come through, but let’s give it a shot anyway. Not quite. Somewhat. Your time equals their money. Nice. Because that’s one of the things that they will never do on the light phone is they’re never going to put any kind of a free app. Because if it’s a free app, you’re the product. And so it’s got this strong kind of anti-advertisement thing. And so this doesn’t feed the machine any data about me. Right. Well, and that’s the lie of freedom. You don’t get things for free. That didn’t happen. Somebody somewhere put time, energy, and attention into it. And what are they getting out of it? Now look, it could be a gift. It could be charity. That’s wonderful. That’s your department, Father Eric. But was it? Or is it something else? And that’s what you have to kind of pay attention to. And the thing about money and storing value is that you can’t talk about value from the perspective of a single person. In the same way that Plato talks about in the Republic, you can’t talk about justice from the perspective of a single person. You can’t even talk about value or justice or values as such from the perspective of multiple people. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t make any sense. You’re still stuck on a horizontal plane. Right. You’re stuck in, now you’re actually stuck in binary land, which, you know, single land is fantasy land. Right. The horizontal is binary land. And we don’t live in either of those two places, thank goodness. We can lower ourselves to them, but we probably shouldn’t. Right. And so, you know, you can look up, see the landscape of values, right, figure out where the values are relative to us, because maybe we’re not imbuing the values that we should. Right. And how do you know you look up? Because that’s where they are. Yeah. At least that’s where they’d better be. Because you get in trouble when you’re valuing something that’s beneath you. Exactly. Yeah. When you’re putting your love towards something that’s unworthy of it. There’s an interesting, interesting thing I noticed studying my man Thomas Aquinas. He talked about the virtue of temperance, the virtue of temperance, whereby you regulate your pursuit of bodily goods, basically, in an orderly manner. And he talks about, even before getting into the nitty gritty of the different things you have to regulate, talks about the integral parts of temperance. And it’s twofold. The first integral part is, and this is where people get confused, it’s honesty. Honesty. What does that have to do with anything? You go back and look at the word that Thomas Aquinas used, onestia. That doesn’t actually have anything to do with telling the truth. That has to do with honor. Right. It’s etymologically related to the word honor. And so basically, if you’re going to be a temperate person, you have to have an honorable aim towards your behavior, right? Not an animalistic aim towards your behavior. So I have one of these to celebrate with Anselman, the valuable thing of the Friday night navigation. Excellent. That’s fine, you know, but if I go have 10, well, that’s too much. And then the second principle part was shame-facedness. So you’ve got like a positive principle drawing you up, and you’ve got a negative principle where if somebody saw me behave in this animalistic manner, I would be ashamed of it. Yeah. And so there’s this sense that it’s actually impossible to be a temperate human being alone. Right. Right. Well, it’s so funny. So there’s a clip on my Discord channel. I forget which channel it was posted. It wasn’t posted in the clips channel. I don’t remember where it was posted now. But basically, the clip is off of this Paul VanderKlay guys channel. You may have heard of him. And this morning. Oh, lovely. Oh, yeah. It’s in what I learned today, actually. And my good friend, Michelle, posted it. And he’s having a chat with some somebody who basically I don’t know. I didn’t watch the full conversation. It’s just a clip. It’s a minute or so. And basically what he said was, well, the way I pulled up was I imagined my future children and what they would think seeing me do this. So every time I was doing something, I would imagine them there. And so when I was taking a hit or whatever, whatever he was describing, some drug habit he had, just horrible, is that I would imagine what would they think of me or something like that doing this? It’s like, yeah, you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You need at least your imaginary future children to help you out. And he kind of broke down at the end, which is interesting, too. But I did want to address this from my good friend, Josh. Is the value in the relationship? No, relationships are valuable. Am I worth what someone else is willing to pay? No. There is a kind of negotiation that happens. Well, yes. But the ability to have a relationship implies close enough values between you and the thing you’re relating to. In other words, all the things you don’t care about, you can’t actually have a relationship with. Does it mean you don’t affect them? Right. And that’s where people get confused. They’re like, well, I have a relationship with this because when I do X, it moves Y. Fair enough. Sure, you have a relationship with every person on the planet because you pollute their air. Yeah, that’s true. That’s useless. And universal, so the fact that you do it and everybody else does it. Now what? Because it’s not like you’re taking from them. You’re all doing it. It doesn’t make any sense. And people get caught up with that. In the same way, relationship happens due to shared value. You don’t have relationship without shared value. It doesn’t exist. Which comes first, though, the value or the person that you agree on with the value with? That didn’t come out very clearly, but maybe you can… The problem is that are you talking about relationship between people or relationship between you and say your lawn or your yard? Because I don’t have a lawn. I’ve never had any grass. Well, not never. I do not put grass near my house on purpose. It’s wild grass grows. That’s different. Because I actually believe that the earth is important and Mother Nature is… Mother Nature needs my help, but largely does not want me to rip up whatever she’s doing and put whatever grass I feel like in the area. That’s not cool. So you can have a relationship with your yard. You can have a relationship with your house. You can have a relationship with your spouse. You can have a relationship with your boss. What is the value? Well, the value is the thing that gives you the relationship, not the other way around. So the value has to come first, right? Yeah. Well, the value is there with or without you. If you want something, quote, objective, which I object to the use of, that would be it. Right. It’s the platonic realm of form stuff, the ethereal. So, yeah. And then between people, to address Josh a little bit more specifically, well, everything between people is a negotiation. But that already happened. So it can’t be last. I share a bunch of values with people that I do not identify with. Right. I can say that explicitly. I don’t identify as Christian at all on purpose, deliberately. Whether you think I’m Christian like or not is not relevant. And yet a whole bunch of Christians really like what I have to say for various reasons. So, wow, there’s something there. It’s not Christian-ness per se, because I’m going to flat out deny it anyway. And I can back it up. Like, I still haven’t read that silly book. What does that mean? Well, it means there’s values and virtues out there somewhere. And that if Father Eric looks up and I look up, we’re looking roughly in the same direction, at the same family. And that’s where I’m going to be. So, if Father Eric looks up and I look up, we’re looking roughly in the same direction, at the same thing. Right. It’s like, oh, that’s interesting. And that’s what gives us a relationship where he can come and spend a week at my house. Right. That relationship is formed from that shared value, not the other way around. So, I’m thinking about my temperance example, right? Yes. And part of the important part of training your temperance, right, of getting to the point where you can behave or like a human being and not like an animal, is basically receiving these values from others, right? Like being educated into that. Because if you just put candy in front of a child, they’ll just eat the candy. Heck, plenty of adults. Educated, yes, but education doesn’t only come from people. If it ever comes from people. And I might even disagree with that idea. Oh. Yeah. So, where does it come from, if not people? Consequence. And so the people are just providing consequences? Well, yeah, explicitly in school. That’s what school is all about. What do you think grading is? Right. It’s a way to measure consequence. Right? So, I don’t see how if human beings are establishing, we’ll say, a very high percentage of the useful consequences in education, you don’t say that the human beings are at least partially responsible for education. I think the way to look at it and the problem that everybody has is that people do not understand the extent to which the enhancement of the world around us, the thing we were born into, crazy religious people might say, use the word creation, is dependent upon us and our interactions. And so obviously, because we didn’t come before us, the world educates us in some way, right? Nature, at the very least, educates us in some way. Absolutely. A lot of it very valuable education. So I’m not going to say that it’s like 90% humans and 10% nature, because my parents did me the favor of not letting me sit around and play video games for the entirety of my childhood and kicked me outside. That was good for me. Yeah. Well, the, we enhance the consequences. And one of the ways we enhance the consequences so you can imagine your imagination is one way you test type, Eric Peterson talks about this. This is why this is the Peterson sphere. Peterson talks about this. We imagine things to make predictions. And then there’s the real world. And so you get two things, right? But when you have society or culture or any of that stuff, you now have a buffer between those two things. And you now have a way to bridge time for real. Right? Because the old man can come up with a story that represents a pattern that a young man can’t have experienced yet. And that young man can learn from that pattern. It’s not strictly his imagination because it came from outside of him, right? Not that your imagination is formed from the outside. It is, but it’s preformed. And now he can play with it in his imagination. And so, again, we don’t appreciate the extent to which we as humans refine creation. Right? Through manifestation, consequence, and learning. And you can say the idea of education, as much as we would like to own it, is ridiculous. The idea of education is more wrapped up in our ability to adjust to consequence through participation. Which means experience matters. And the reason why experience matters is because if you don’t have experience, the, quote, knowledge you have of something is limited. It’s flat. Either it’s purely propositional or it’s purely imaginal. Right? And that’s it. Those are your, pretty much your options. So you would say that, well, say that a good parent or teachers in a school or even the high school bully that keeps things from getting too weak, they’re only educating as instrumental causes of something else? Well, no. I mean, I think, again, it’s just a refinement. So we mimic things as humans. We don’t just mimic each other, though. So one of the things I did when I was a kid, we had a screen house that was just built out of, these little aluminum rods that were tied together with a double hinge. So each one was hinged independently. And we tore it down. But I kept some of those things. And I took karate back when I was young. So I made up something called Kitty Ninja. And that was my style of karate. All the kids had their own style of karate. It was great. Right. Everybody was kung fu fighting. They really were. It’s not just a song, folks. That idea, and you see this in Eastern thought, in particular in the martial arts, there’s all kinds of martial arts names around the form of the tiger. And those are real things. And they mimic nature. So we mimic aspects of nature and bring that together in a higher form to some extent. And incorporate it into something like a martial art that has the form of the swan and the form of the tiger and the form of the eagle and the dragon claw and all of these mimicking. And they do mimic nature rather nicely, actually. Tai Chi does a lot of mimicking of trees, for example, swaying trees in the wind sort of thing. One layer up, we’re doing that to find patterns in the world. And we’re trying to educate people. We’re trying to find patterns in the world. And we’re trying to educate one another to save each other time. And you don’t… There are people who have never put their hand on a hot stove. Not too many of them, by the way, because kids are stupid. And accidents happen. But those people exist. And the not having had that experience isn’t a negative for them. Not that they aren’t missing out on something, for sure. But it’s not necessarily a detriment. Which is good because we can’t experience everything we even need to experience in the world. So having things like language and an education system or at least a method of passing knowledge on from person to person is very useful. Now when you have a method of passing knowledge on and that method is dependent upon context or one might call that framing and you then come in with a civilization destroying mind virus like postmodernism that says my framing and your framing are of equal value, you destroy the world. Yeah, I mean, what do you even mean when you’re saying that they’re of equal value? Right. Because it’s like, you know, golly, so you and I could both go to… We’ll say Richard’s Church, right? His Western right Orthodox Church. They’re going to be celebrating the divine liturgy of St. Gregory the Great up there. We’ll be looking at the exact same thing, but I’m going to see more than you just because I have more knowledge and experience and participation with it. That’ll be your first ever Latin Mass as far as I can tell. Right. But that doesn’t make you a bad guy. And you’re going to look at a page of C++ and understand it when it’s just characters to me. Right. Well, and the worst part is it’s hard to tell which experience is more valuable. Yours is a knowledgeable insider with, you know, first year canon law and all this priesty stuff that you do. Or me as a first time, you know, experiencer of the event. One of the great things that Peterson actually did was he re-enchants the idea of engaging in this way. Saying, hey, you haven’t experienced it. I mean, he doesn’t do this directly, but effectively he says, hey, you haven’t experienced this. But these other people have and they found it valuable. Hmm. That’s weird. Right. So just because you haven’t experienced it and therefore cannot know its value doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. And this is the this is a tip I’m having with Kale Zeldin on Twitter. He keeps using this word K-fabe. And I’m like, you know what? I’m done with this. It doesn’t exist. You can say wrestling is K-fabe all day long. But the people who go to wrestling, who’ve been to wrestling, who’ve been involved in the wrestling community, A, they know all the same things you think you know about wrestling, but they know a bunch more about wrestling that you definitely do not understand even a little bit. And that came out in that Vanderklei Conversations a couple of months ago with the wrestler from professional wrestler from Israel. It’s a fantastic conversation. Right. Because one of the things that it exemplifies is actually about value, which is the wrestler picks a persona and then kind of picks a side. Good guy. That guy. Right. It’s very black and white on purpose. They know they’re doing this, guys. They understand. As they play out that character, the audience may switch their side for them, not them. They’re not doing that. There’s a participation to Josh’s earlier point, a negotiation going on there. And it’s like, oh, the audience is in on it. Of course they are. They’re in on it. Oh, for maybe the children, but no, no, no, no. The children drive the bus, my friend. I mean, the kids might think that these guys are actually intending to hurt each other. Here’s the problem. When you sort of think of it that way, you kind of miss the point of what’s happening with the kids. When you’re a child, the lines between fantasy and not fantasy are blurred. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Right. And because of that, you tend to play more because you’re trying to find this thing in my head. I mean, I think that if I jump off of this branch of the tree that I just climbed, what’s going to happen? Because in my dreams I fly. But actually, that’s not quite what happens. Right. And it was a playground for me. It wasn’t a tree, but I literally said to infinity and beyond before I jumped to. I jumped out of the tree to show the cat how to get down out of the tree. I’m very helpful, I guess, when I was three or something. We were living in Kansas back then. So, yeah, I was probably three. Maybe four. So, yeah, I mean, you know, but I imagine the cat would figure out. You can jump into the laundry basket that I jumped into. The cat did not figure this out. Cat probably already knew, to be fair to the cat, but it didn’t have the result I thought. And yeah, and that’s part of the problem with this postmodern ethos is that we don’t sort of appreciate the change in us from as we grow older. We don’t appreciate the lack of change in Foucault and Derrida, who actually just never matured. I hate to break it to you. It’s kind of obvious at this point. No, no, break it to me. Break them before me. Yeah, yeah. Have those men who will not have Christ as a king taken before me and slay them in my presence. I actually asked Dr. Stephen Hicks, who I rather like Dr. Stephen Hicks. He’s a Canadian, although I guess he lives in the US now. He’s a modern philosopher. I said, hey, man, where’s the good in postmodernism? He said, yeah, you’re right. There isn’t any. I’m like, okay, thank you. That’s all I wanted to know. I’m still there. But I did want to address, speaking of the good, I did want to address Josh. Maybe a different way to phrase my earlier question is, is the value in participation? Okay, Josh, completely backwards, you crazy materialist. The reason you participate is shared value. Now, when, and I went over this, right? When you participate and negotiate, more value is created or less value is created, right? And there is a reciprocation. So when Father Eric and I agree to do something, anything, right? We both do that based on a value. And in doing that, we increase the value that it has reciprocally. And so that value is greater than, we’ll say, the time, energy, and attention that I put in, plus the time, energy, and attention that he puts in. That will not give you the formula for the value or if you could, which you can’t, measure my T, my time, energy, and attention, right? Plus how much greater or lesser it is in relation to his, right? Plus my caring and figure out how much value it, you can’t do any of those things. Those are all ridiculous. Every piece of what I said can’t be done, right? They’re all ridiculous. But even if you could do all the ridiculous things, there’s something mysterious about value that is going to escape your grasp. Because it’s not in the participation. It precedes the participation. I like this comment wrong. They are not, quote, really hitting each other, but they are, quote, really storytelling. Well, I wouldn’t even say storytelling, right? Because again, we tend to black and white the world into knowledge and unknowledge. This is the problem of the age of gnosis. Substack coming soon. I’ve already actually started the opening. I got to say the opening for the first article that I came up with is just really good. I was like, oh, I don’t think I even wrote that. How much are you going to pay yourself for it? I know, huh? I’m going to have to. In the age of gnosis, we get stuck in this idea that there’s just these knowledge and unknowledge, right? But actually, there’s exploration where we’re trying to find value. We’re actually looking for the where on the value. That’s a mode that we inhabit. And there’s a safety mode and an exploration. And actually, oddly, again, Peterson talks about this, the child, and he runs back to his mother, that whole thing, right? Explores. He doesn’t frame it that way. And I think that would have been helpful had he done that. I’d love to talk to him about it someday. Give me a call. Jordan, call me. We’ll chat. But that’s part of it is that people are getting it backwards. They’re thinking that the thing that they see has something to do with how it started. The fact of the matter is everything started before you existed. Hence, there’s a limit to what you can understand. But certainly, value comes before participation. All right. I’m responding to Anselman here. Mr. Incredible just uproots the tree and shakes the cat out. Yes. And this is the Prince William says this is multiverse. The Internet strikes again. Are you trying to answer this thing? Anselman is a boy. I thought wrestling was silly men looking in unganely in shorts and fake fighting. Yeah. Well, that’s what everybody thought. Yeah, I know. So when I was in seminary, we took a hall trip, right? So they have everybody on the hall to a like maybe semi-pro wrestling tournament in a Knights of Columbus hall in Bloomington, Minnesota. And, you know, it’s not like I was dreading this. I’m pretty extroverted. So doing anything seems like a good idea to me. But I thought it’s just going to be kind of dumb. I don’t think I’m going to enjoy it. But boy, was I wrong. Within about 30 seconds, I was screaming for blood. And it was a great time. And, you know, this wasn’t like the biggest stars, you know, and all of the best stuff. This was like whatever schlubs they had in the Twin Cities area, plus some chick they flew in from Denver. And the chick fight was just awful. Just. Yeah, I can’t. It’s just. Females doing masculine things always just bothers me. Yeah. Any masculine thing. Yeah, it just doesn’t work. And like you could just you could just feel like the energy gets sucked out of the room. It’s like they open the airlock and bam out it all went. Yeah, nobody wants to see that style of competition. Between women like. Yeah, we’re just not tuned to it at all. Yeah. But and it’s amazing how. If they had been fencing, that would have been cool. Right. But it’s amazing how people don’t understand. It’s amazing how advertisers and the people running these things don’t figure that out. I mean, maybe they do and they just accept it as a business loss to keep the Rainbow Brigade from, you know, killing their firstborn son or whatever. No, the other problem with the age of gnosis is the assumption that everybody knows what you know, has has available to them at least the perspective that you have and understands things and interprets them all in the same way. And I get news for you. It’s not how it works at all. I retract my former statement and replace it with this. If I was rubbing WWE, there would be no more chick fights. Yes. Yeah, most people don’t don’t know that there’s Jesse. Welcome, my friend. How it is very valuable to me that you have shown up. Welcome. Thank you. Let’s see father. Good to see you too. You’re awful quiet right now. Am I? Yeah. Well, he’s Australian. They tend to be quiet. But yeah, your mic’s a little lower than normal. OK, I will fix that. I like the calm demeanor in his voice though. That sounds much better than the he just woke up, right? Something like that. I got out of the shower. Yeah. OK. It’s also one weekend here. So, oh, so you had the day off yesterday or Monday off in two days. Yeah. OK. Well, even the knowledge of that makes you happy. Yes. It gives you like less time, less time at work, more time for me. Some sort of value system like that. I like Ethan. Ethan just, Ethan’s frustrating because he’s always on the discord from his car, his truck rather doing deliveries and he cuts out. But Ethan, the world consists entirely of knowable and otherwise knowable. Yeah. That’s the problem of gnosis. That’s not the world. But yeah, that’s the problem of the age of gnosis. That’s really good. Is that Albert Einstein in the background of your? That is Saint Pius of Pio Trecina, more commonly known as Padre Pio. Ah, yes. So the text says pray, hope and don’t worry, which isn’t anything Albert Einstein would ever say. I don’t know about that. He didn’t think God played dice with the universe. William, with Google, we have gnosis now. Google is gnosis now. Yes. And here’s the ironic part. I need to do a video on this someday. Everybody said like, oh, all we just need is, you know, knowledge at our fingertips. And we have it. No one ever uses it. It’s amazing how few people actually use it. It’s just is one of my tricks because I can tell right away if somebody’s looked something up or not. They are. You never even look this up. I’m going to just I’m going to take you to the woodshed. It’s going to be glorious for me anyway. I don’t give a glorious for them. That’s what my dad likes about having his Amazon spy bot in the houses. We’ll just be arguing about something and he’ll be like, hey, spy bot. What is the day really? Twelve hours on the equinox everywhere on the planet. The answer is yes. You didn’t believe me. That was correct. Nice. That’s handy, Josh. But the value was noted after participation. When you notice things is backwards from when they happen. Yes. Observation comes last. That that’s where everyone gets confused. Right. Because we think the world begins and ends with us in the age of gnosis. But actually, we did not come for hands. We didn’t come first. But you know, you were born into something. I promise the end, the end of our actions, though, that’s different than the value that like what we’re aiming at and what the common value is. The problem is people don’t think in threes. It’s literally the only problem. Everybody reduces everything to a binary. Just stop doing that. You’re never going to understand anything at all about the world. The problem is when when you don’t engage in something at all, there’s no value and there’s no exploration. When you engage, you’re I’m an extrovert. My value is in hanging out with other people. These people want to go to wrestling. OK. OK. You’ve already noticed the value. You the reason why you went was the value. Well, it was also required. So they have mandatory fund in the seminary. But required. Oh, I submit. And therefore, right. And nobody realizes you guys think you’re not submitting. Oh, boy, are you submitting? I think if you don’t know what you’re submitting to, that’s why your life is out of control. Right. But you’re submitted. But again, we’ll just go with the simple case. Well, I’m an extrovert. These guys want to go. So I’ll just go along. And this happens to me all the time, because like the odds that I want to actually do anything is pretty much zero. Like I got my own agenda. I don’t know. Whatever. So you like you want to do X. And I’m like, do I pretend to be social and say yes and just go along with whatever they’re doing? Or do I go back home or I’m safe and can work on my software? Right. So so when you decide to engage now in the engagement, you find more value or different values than you were expecting. But the participation already was preceded by a shared value. And one shared value can lead to another. Well, once you’re in the realm of values, now you can look around. It’s not that hard. Like if you don’t go into my living room, you can’t look around my living room. I’m sorry. It’s just a limitation of time and space or something. However you want to frame it. You know, you can’t you can’t know the potential of my property unless you come and visit my property. Like you just can’t. I’m sorry. You can think about it. You can ponder it. You can imagine it. You can have a fantasy about it. Absolutely. And those fantasies may be more rich and correct than my physical engagement. That’s theoretically possible and certainly does happen. But it’s not the same as being here and walking the property. Right, Father Eric? Yeah, no, I didn’t really believe you when you said you had a pond until I saw it. I’m like, oh, well, that’s a proper pond. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, no, it’s not a puddle pond. It’s a acre or so of water. It’s just an acre of water of navigable water. Yeah, it’s it’s a good size pond. Nathaniel, gnosis is not knowledge. Well, they need to read Greek, at least not to Wolfgang Smith. Wolfgang Smith is an interesting character and all the mystics. The mystics are all crazy people. You should ignore them. Gnosis is a contemplative state of personal certainty. No, because it’s all wrapped up and like literally the Gnostics believe in a thing called forbidden knowledge, which would be things that other people don’t have access to that they do. Right. They’re elitists by definition. I do agree that Gnosticism is a huge problem. Yeah. I mean, I think you have to look at how people are using Gnosticism. James Lindsay, do you think Gnosticism is a big problem? I think it’s a big problem. I think it’s a big problem. I think it’s a big problem. I think it’s a big problem. I think it’s a big problem. I think it’s a big problem. I think you have to look at how people are using Gnosticism. James Lindsay, despite what Jacob may say, does an excellent job of outlining the actual history of Gnosticism and how Gnostics frame things and think about themselves. The problem, in my opinion, that he falls into, which most people fall into, is that they draw a causal thread because they’re in the age of Gnosis. They think that there’s a causal thread. When in fact, it’s very clear to me that if you are of above average intelligence and you don’t have better framing, like you try to build your own framing in certain areas, and I’m not going to classify that. I don’t think anybody could, but you will fall into Gnosticism all by yourself. And then you will discover a Gnostic and you’ll go, well, I must be right because he wrote about it 50 years or 100 years or 300 years before me. That’s what’s happening. And if you actually pay attention, that’s actually what’s happening. People are rediscovering the same easy frame over and over again. And they fall into a pattern that we label Gnosticism. And that’s the better way to think about it. And James Lindsay gets that wrong, but he identifies the pattern correctly. Probably. I mean, Gnosticism basically independently re-emerged with the albigensian heresy in like the 12th century, 12th and 13th century. And it had a different flavor, right? Because part of it was now, this was now a Gnosticism in a thoroughly Christian context. And so part of what was drawing people to it was, you know, the bishops and the priests were all corrupt. Big news, more at 10. And money grubbing and not temperant at all of that. And the albigensians, they were pure. They were white. They were dressed in white and they would do nothing but fast and pray and then tell you that procreation is evil. But I have it on very good authority that God is pro-baby, so heretics. Taken out by the edge of the sword, because we could do that in those days. Nice. I did figure out Benjamin Franklin. It always pains me. Even if you are submitting, you are still valuing. You have to value to submit. You’re not going to submit something you don’t value. Why? Take your conception, flip it. You’ll get closer. I promise you guys. Wow. Don’t get this. Flipping things. Mills, growing up there was a kid who killed another kid doing wrestling moves. Look, man. Yeah, someday I will tell the story of the death of Hercules. I don’t know how I’m ever going to do that. There’s risk involved though. If it’s not wrestling, it’s riding your bike. If it’s not riding your bike, it’s playing chicken with the kids. Have you ever pulled a muscle scratch at your back? Yeah, I know. People die doing all kinds of things. Well, you don’t have to do much. I put on a sock once and threw my back out for a day. I knew a priest who was taken out for a solid week because he sneezed while sleeping in an easy chair. He had back spasms. Yep. The body is very delicate. Christian mysticism is knowing God infinitely and personally. If you take the Christian out, what is Christian? Christian is a specific, maybe not specific enough for some people, religious frame. If you say mystics are all about, you’re automatically wrong. You’re automatically wrong. This is what I mean by mystics. Using that word by itself makes no sense. It really has to be framed correctly. And that’s it. Nathaniel. The at may be more what I’m getting at, but there is a Christian gnosis which is non-Hertical to the church. Father Eric, he’s looking for his lifeline there. Yeah, no. What you just said is literally the correct… Knowledge is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Right. Whereby you judge the things of this world in light of eternity. And if you want to call that Christian gnosis. Yeah, right. So basically, a lot of these things are bad until you put them in their proper place, you submit them to the Most High God and to Holy Mother Church, and then all of a sudden they’re fine. Yeah, Nathaniel, you want to be very careful with what you define because you’re going to get yourself into a category error. There is a specific reason to say divine insight than there is to say, you know, Christian gnosis. Christian gnosis is a confusing… Yeah, it’s going to carry less water than the previous. And so the point about signaling or communicating to someone or messaging to someone is you want to give them the exact intent of where you’re pointing to. So if you’re saying Christian gnosis, what are you pointing to exactly? What’s the pattern that you’re pointing to? Are you trying to redeem gnosis from a category error? Yeah, that’s why I’d usually prefer to just use traditional theological terminology and not reinvent things myself because it’s like, that’s what these words mean. Right. Well, and that’s and that is the sin of the age of gnosis. It’s just reinventing over and over again, you know, the good conversation John Brevege had with the Lantern Jack on Lantern Jack’s YouTube channel there. And if you listen carefully, and maybe you can’t, like it’s not the easiest conversation to follow. I mean, I thought it was quite nice and Jack’s very easy to follow in general. But you’ll notice that every time like Jack asked John several times, tell me the uniqueness of this neoplatonism of which you speak. And every time John answered, Jack went, yeah, that’s just Platonism. I mean, not like that because I’m a rude son of a bitch. But he was very good about, yeah, but Plato said that this is not after Plato. This is all Plato, all of it. And Platonism in particular, and I forget where it was, but I read something that Platonist wrote. I was like, this is the denial of forms. He’s not a Platonist at all. So I don’t be pulling the Platonist garbage on me anymore. I’m wise to that trick. Well, he made Augustine not a Manichean and into a Christian, so he can’t be all bad. He demolished a good man’s Gnosticism. That’s the Titanic example. Maybe you’re the mistake that serves as the example that so other people don’t follow. It happens. OK. You would see that those are the demotivator posters if you’ve never seen them. They’re awesome. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen them. It’s possible you all know this Titanic was meant to sink anyway, right? With hubris like that, Nathaniel, perhaps all things that work for crazy Christians. Right. Perhaps all things work for crazy Christians. Perhaps. I don’t know. It’s in that book you refuse to read. It’s actually right there in Romans chapter eight. That’s why people are thinking of Rome all the time. Unclean spirits are brought into proper orientation. Well, they can be. They aren’t. You Christians and your this happens and that happens. I think I think your participation has a lot to do with what does and doesn’t happen. I kind of said that earlier. Yeah. Go back to that again. What was the? What? Nathaniel’s stuff? Unclean spirits are brought into proper orientation for us. Yeah, not for you. You have the ability to bring them. You’re given the tools to do that, but you still have to do something. It’s not like God’s not doing all the work. He’s not your your your hand servants. He’s doing all of the hard bits, though, all the bits that would be impossible for us. He takes care of. Right. Right. All the inaccessible bits. With prayer with that’s the thing. Like you’re the there are different energy, spirits, messages, energies. Pick your pick your interaction with things outside of your own house. You’re like you need to sermon there. You’re assuming discernment. And that’s that’s the I think that’s where you’re going to get trapped into. You know, that’s right. You assume that you can discern at all times what you’re encountering, then you’re going to get you’re going to get into. Yeah, I’ve a pattern of self-deception. And that’s what you want to try and avoid. Well, that’s the age of no noses. Anselman, St. Clement of Alexandria spoke of Christianity as true noses. Well, and again, I mean, noses. Yeah. Well, they mean there is the true self. They were right. Well, and I don’t know. Right. The problem is that people are misusing the word noses. If you take noses out of context, it’s a Greek word. The meanings of Greek words are heavily context dependent. Like you could not have a Greek dictionary where it’s got like one through four definitions. No freaking way. That wouldn’t work at all. You could you have overlapping definitions in words based on context in Greek to a ridiculous extent. And that’s a real problem for people because it makes it really tricky to interpret Greek text. So, for example, in my particular copy of The Republic by Plato. It’s not the cave. And it’s not that he doesn’t mention the cave. But in the parable that people refer to as the cave, it’s actually translated as den. And again, it’s not that he’s mistranslating the same word that’s used later. The word that’s used later is translated as cave. That’s very interesting. So why is everybody saying cave, cave, cave everywhere? Because the other three translations we looked at didn’t differentiate between those two particular sections in Book 7 that I’m thinking of. Yeah, Greek is hard. Oh, I did a semester. It was awful. Those verbs, those verbs. Don’t talk to me about the verbs. I’m assuming only that the Bible is known as our sacred text. I assume that sounds like solar scriptura to me. When was that ever true? I’ll just put that on the table. Here we go. What were people doing before we could write things down? There we go. They were saying mess. Well, and here’s the problem. If it’s the Bible, are the people before the Bible not saved? You screw yourself immediately. You just fall right in that hole. I had a chat with Karen Wong some time ago. I forget which one because I’ve done a few on her channel. The Meaning Code. Excellent channel. You want to see Wolfgang Smith? He’s there. McGillchrist and DC Schindler are there too. Great talk. That was a great talk that she did. I was talking to her and she’s like, well, for us, the Platonists are all just Christians. Just before Christ. I was like, oh, fair enough. That sounds good to me. Problem solved. Mills. Is there a point where humility is no longer needed? No. Or can be relaxed? No. Because you got it right? No. And you just got to stay in the groove? No. Nope. Got to stay hungry. Right. I mean, the thing that people don’t realize, it’s probably too simple for our age of Gnostic brains. Movement is life. Non-movement is death. Look, it’s no resting and relaxing. There’s a way in which your movement is easier and a way in which your movement is harder. Up to and including that movement will take your ass out. And you want the movement to be easier. And sometimes that just means letting go of your past hatred or your past grudges or your memories of past interactions. And again, Peterson tells a wonderful story, right? One of his, I think it was his family member even, for years he’s having a feud with one of the other family members. And nobody in the family could figure out what the hell the feud was about until one day it kind of boiled over to a head and this one guy just started going, you knew this and knew that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everybody’s there. And they’re all like, who on earth are you even talking about? And then the person who was upset and doing all this realized that what he was saying didn’t resemble the person he was talking about even a little bit. And then everybody started getting along again. The feud was gone. It vanished in thin air. Just to go back on this original point, there’s a particular kind of unawareness that people have about stillness. Stillness, I would put forward is a presence of mind. It’s an awareness, a heightened awareness, the participation. You could even say it’s something you pray for. It’s not something you can assume instantly. You can’t just go, oh, I’m just going to be still now. And then the counter opposite to that in some ways to draw out the point here is that too much stillness will cause you to be a zombie. You will become stuck in a pattern, in a rut. So you want to pay very particular attention to the mode in which you engage and are interacting in the world because you need to filter out certain things. You need to slow down to filter out and see beauty. But also too much depth and not enough height will cause you to break your neck or cause you to only want to eat flesh rather than to drink of the water of life. We could continue on many different examples there symbolically. But yeah, if you value stillness as just a mode of anti-anxiety rather than a life-affirming presence of mind, you will not embrace the fullness of life. So yeah, inside of that value that you may have of stillness may actually sit other values that you’re unaware of that will cause you to limit your participation in the world. There’s a bit of a spiel that I’m half-mind mapping outside. Nathaniel, contemplation and meditation are these valency practices. Contemplation and meditation will send you into a mystic stupor and you’ll look like a zombie. You need to be very careful. You need participation with others. And participation in a living tradition. You can’t rely on the tradition of the past. Because tradition is a living thing. Because even if you write the words down accurately, and look, this is a Platonic and Aristotelian argument that Plato and Aristotle had between each other. Over time, language drifts. Because it’s part of a living tradition. You can write things down accurately and they cannot stay that way. Cannot. Not optional. Cannot stay that way. That’s why you need a living tradition. You can count on two things. The tradition of the past was useful. It got you here. And it was flawed. And it was flawed. Because perfection doesn’t exist. The fact that it’s changed is both good and bad. Some of the laws were fixed. New ones were introduced. Welcome to reality. That sucks. But also, too bad. Anselman, action and passive reception both needed in approach to God. Well, in approach to anything, really. William, I deserve no respect. I copy Anselman. Yeah, I think maybe this will help for a point of discussion. I think many people assume that they’re in a comedy. That things are just going to work out well. Rather than they’re in a drama that’s unfolding. Or they will create drama around them. And this gets into my whole critique of there is no such thing as a rom-com. You can’t have two things that are completely different views of life. Or views of a story happening at the same time. One is about a challenge. And one is about the removal of all challenge and obstacles. In favor of gratification. That would be the committee on that. Well, yeah. A romance is a budding. A transformation and a change. And a comedy is a contrast between two things that exist at the same time and space. But get swapped in framing, usually. Yeah, comedy is also the kind of… The axiom of comedy is things coming back into alignment. Or things returning home, in some sense. Romance is typically personified as a continuation of things that are dramatic. You know, if Dizius returns home, then he still has to leave again. To go on… The call of Avento is still living within him. Rather than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where everything is very mystical. It’s resolved by the end of the tale. It leaves no stone unturned. Yeah. Well, I think one of the problems when you flatten the world is that when the world is flat, you’re way more important. Because it’s not that much above you. The hierarchy is flattened out, so you tend to cast yourself as a heretic when you’re not teaching. If you’re not promulgating your ideas to others and trying really hard to convince them of something, you cannot be a heretic. Heretical beliefs are not beliefs that are different from someone else’s. Those are called disagreements. We have a word for that. Or misunderstandings is another aspect of that. Things like excommunication are very specific terms. Things like heretic, very specific terms. You’re not one. Don’t worry. You’re not that special. You’re just a person, like all the other persons. A Muppet, Mark. Well, I was getting there, and ultimately, you’re a Muppet. I’m a Muppet. We’re a Muppets. And that’s the thing. We’re always trying to elevate our status. For what a reason, in the age of gnosis, status elevation is a big deal. It’s always been a big deal. But it’s a big deal now because you cannot determine status. When you’ve got people in government dressed in sloppy clothes, when you’ve got some pretentious garbage human wearing sweater vests who has 1 rewards. Higher order participation was $5. That’s fascinating. I think that’s the thing. When you’re looking for value, when you’re looking at value, when you’re dealing with You have to understand that the thing that you’re doing is not the value. The value comes from your participation with the thing. It comes as the result of your attraction. So the value attracts you. You participate. You increase the value or decrease the value depending upon your mode of participation. Because there’s not one value, you can end up playing video games all day or you could end up writing a sub stack or you could end up doing a live stream on Friday nights. These values are not equal. You have to discipline yourself to some extent, not only to find value, where is the value, but to manifest that value in a generative fashion. That’s the key. Again, I put it in the live chat, the live stream on generative because it’s important. It’s important to understand that the things that you’re generating are linked in with value. First, by your attraction to them and second, by your participation in them. Think about that. Think about that very carefully because there’s lots of things you can do. You just have to jiggle around the values because they do compete and conflict. On that note, hopefully I’ll see everybody next week. I plan on doing this next week unless something comes up. I should be here. We’ll figure out a topic. Thank you very much for your participation. I do value it. The value that you give to me encourages me to learn to draw better. I got this diamond. It’s not bad. I’m not unhappy with it. We’ll do it all again next week and hopefully we’ll get even more value out. Have a good week everybody. It’s lovely to see you.