The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 156. The Perfect Mode of Being | Jonathan Pageau

Episode Date: February 28, 2021

This episode was recorded on Feb 14th, 2021Jonathan Pageau and I discuss, among other topics, the issue of conscience, narrative with objective reality, perfect mode of being, the responsibility to move things towards the divine, the inevitability of religion, significance of the virgin birth, Theosis, the idea of heaven, and more.Headspace - for a free one-month trial, visit: headspace.com/jbpThe Great Courses (Plus) - for a free month of unlimited access, visit: thegreatcoursesplus.com/petersonTo pre-order Dr. Peterson's new book Beyond Order: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/beyond-order-12-more-rules-for-life/​New episodes of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast will release in audio-form every Sunday and its corresponding video every Monday on YouTube and thinkspot. Please email [e-mail] for any business inquiries.Please email sales@advertisecast for any podcast advertising inquires.

Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson podcast. My name is Michaela. This episode featured Jonathan Pazzo and Jordan Peterson discussing the issue of conscience, narrative with objective reality, the perfect mode of being, the responsibility to move things towards the divine, the inevitability of religion, the significance of the virgin birth, the idea of heaven, and much, much more. It was recorded on February 14, 2021. Jonathan Pazzo is a symbolic thinker, YouTuber, and class carver of Orthodox icons. He makes the most amazing icon carvings. Big news. Dad's book is coming out Tuesday.

March 2, beyond order, available at his website at jordanbe Peterson.com, Amazon, wherever you buy books and he has posters for sale with Absolutely incredible illustrations on it from the book. I like them better than the last book Check them out, but mainly the book available Tuesday or for pre-order now at jordanbe Peterson dot com enjoy this episode Also, if you want to know about Tammy Peterson my mother and my dad's wife I released a podcast with her on my podcast the the videos on YouTube at Michaela Peterson videos if you want to meet my mom. This episode is brought to you by Headspace.

Wouldn't it be great if there are a pocket-sized guy that helps you sleep, focus, act, be better? There is. And if you have 10 minutes, headspace can change your life. This is what they suggest I read. Perhaps these ads work on some people, but they certainly wouldn't work on me. Although I do believe that meditation can drastically improve your life. That's what headspace helps with. You most definitely have 10 minutes in your day.

You can put a side to meditate and it really does help. It's been scientifically shown to reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. It seems silly, kind of, but focusing on your breathing, doing some visualization, helped by an attractive Australian voice if you so choose headspace records different voices. It can really improve your day. I do it first thing in the morning. You deserve to feel happier and headspace's meditation made simple. Go to headspace.com slash JBP. That's headspace.com slash JBP for a free one month trial with access to headspace's full library of meditations for every situation. This is the best deal offer right now. Head

to headspace.com slash JBP today. This episode is also made possible and brought to you by the Great Courses Plus. The Great Courses Plus, you have unlimited access to thousands of video and audio lectures on hundreds of fascinating topics. Learn a new language, learn about the great philosophers like Nietzsche, or something that most certainly isn't a waste of time. Try critical business skills for success. I realize that makes it sound like I think Nietzsche is a waste of time and I don't, by the way.

These courses are taught by the best professors and top experts in their fields. The material is all extensively vetted and researched. And with the Great Courses Plus app, you're free to watch, listen, and learn on any device at any time. Get started with a free month of unlimited access. Just visit our special URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Peterson. It's a whole month to learn anything you want for free. So sign up now, the greatcoursesplus.com slash Peterson. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to rate and subscribe. So today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Pazzo, whom I know primarily

as a thinker, who's a carver of orthodox icons that are absolutely beautiful. I have one in my house of St. Michael and the Dragon, and an increasingly prominent YouTuber, prominent among intellectual YouTubers, I would say, essentially, as particularly those who are interested in religious and philosophical and artistic ideas. Jonathan and I have been talking back and forth for, I would think, about six or seven years now, eh? I know.

We met in 2015, yeah. It's time. It's crazy. Time flies. It's crazy. That's for sure. So, I, we haven't spoken for two years, maybe. Yeah.

We saw each other. I think when you book came out and you came to Montreal for a little event and I picked you up at the airport, that was the last time we saw each other. Yeah, it's a while. A lot of water under the bridge. That's right, indeed. And in your case, literally.

Yes, exactly. Jonathan's house was flooded out. That was when? It was in 2019. but we just moved back into our house this Christmas, and so it was a long kind of a long thing. It lasted a very long time, so. And are you in your house right now?

Yes, I am in my house all fixed up, and so we're really enjoying it. We're happy to be back. I bet it must have been unbelievably dislocating to be flooded like that. Your whole basement filled with water, if I remember correctly. Yeah, exactly.

It was a dike broke in the city, and I think as thousands of people got evacuated within an hour. And so for my kids, especially, it was my kids, and even my wife, it was a little bit of a trauma because it was water, we could see the water coming,

and there were cops and all these firemen and everything. And so it was a pretty intense moment. Yeah, and where were you living? When your house was underwater? We moved around, we lived in my parents, then we rented a place, then we had to move. And so we ended up living in three places during about a year and a half that we were gone.

But it was one of those things where we say symbolism happens. A lot of the things that even you talk about or that I talk about just manifested themselves this problem of the dyke and the idea of corruption or inattention to the situation and then thinking you're safe when, in fact, you're not aware of what's kind of looming on the margins. So for me, it was a real learning experience. I hope that I've come out of it stronger and more attentive, let's say. Yeah, well, I hope so too. I mean, we all hope that we come out of unpleasant experiences stronger than when we went in, although that isn't always the case. It's the case when things

are functioning optimally and when you're fortunate and courageous and I suppose as honest as you can be, but fortunate definitely ranks high among all of those necessary preconditions for successful recovery, I would say. Yeah, and I have to say that I am, we are, I'm so grateful to see you back online, you know, that I know you've heard this, but there have been thousands of people thinking about you praying for you and really rooting for you. And, you know, I actually saw Tammy last year,

I went, I went to bring your icon and I just remember just feeling helpless. And, you know, she was like, would you go to go to Russia and I was like I'll go to Russia I'll go see Jordan and Russia. It didn't seem like it was a reasonable thing to do and it's probably better it didn't happen but we've definitely been praying for you and routing for you and thinking about you Jordan. I appreciate that a lot and I'm back to some degree I would say I still think I'm running at about 5% so yeah and that's partly why I was concerned about talking to you today, and we're generally discuss things that are relatively deep, and

it's still difficult for me to go deeply into anything that's happening to me because it's so unbelievably awful. And it's been hard on my faith, I would say. You know, my book is coming out. My new book, I should show it to you. I just got a promise of it yesterday. That's awesome. The author. The author. The author. The author.

The author. It's unbelievable that you wrote that during all of this. I can't believe that when you say you're running at 5%, I think that your 5% is pretty close to the 100% of most people. Yeah, well, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's 5% for me. And getting the book was actually somewhat of a traumatic experience, I would say, because it reminded me, like it's a concrete reminder of everything that's happened over the last three or four years. And a concrete reminder of everything that's happened over the last three or four years. And all things that I found very difficult to process, both on the social front and on let's say biological, health front.

So I was reading oddly enough, I got a book sent to me by Bishop Baron, the first draft of a book, and it's written by a couple of professors. It's called Jordan Peterson, God in Christianity, the search for a meaningful life. By Dr. Christopher Caxor and Dr. Matthew Preciusick, Word on Fire Institute. It's a Catholic response to my Biblical series. And hopefully they won't be too upset about me talking about it today, but I won't talk a lot of that much. The book itself, it was rather a shock to me.

There at Loyola Marymount University, and it was kind of a shock to me to see them talking about my, I mean, these are religious scholars talking about my biblical series. But I think people are just, people don't, a lot of people didn't understand. And I could see it in my reaction with the way people were reacting to your biblical studies, the biblical interpretation. People didn't understand how is it that we can barely get 100 people in our church. And Jordan has a million people listening to him kind of struggle to get through these passages and do it in a very improvisational kind of existential way.

And to me, it's funny because I mean, I think I have a deep affection for you're the way that you approach thing. And obviously we connect together and the way we think. And so to me, it was like, this is what you guys should have been doing for a while is trying to understand how it is that, this is what you guys should have been doing for a while, is trying

to understand how it is that this stuff is talking about reality. And not just a bunch of arbitrary things that you need to believe or that you need to kind of attend to. And because these stories, they really are telling us about the structure of being. And so I think that that's the way that you approached it. And that's why people are resonating to what you're saying, because they're like finally someone can help us make sense of these stories that we're somehow

strangely attracted to or frustrated by or disgusted by or whatever it is, but there's this push and pull with these stories. And so I think that I've seen a lot of Christians listen to your biblical talks. And of course sometimes you say things and they're like, okay, that's way off the rails. And then other times you say things and they can't believe the insight that you're able to pierce.

And so I'm not all surprised that Catholic scholars would kind of look at what you were doing. And we all hope that you're going to do more of that for sure. Yes, well, I would like to, I'm thinking about trying to attempt a book on Exodus and lecture lectures as well, although I wouldn't say that I'm in any shape to do that yet. But it's a dream, let's say. I mean, I'm pretty much completely non-functional for the first three or four hours of the day. I get up and I can barely stand up and I go have a sauna for an hour and often sleep during that period of time. And then at the same time, I cook breakfast, I use an air cooker and then I go walk for anywhere between seven and ten miles. And even though I

can, by the time I get out of the house, I'm dizzy as can be and it's difficult to stand up, but after about a mile or two, I get my legs under me to some degree. And then by two o'clock, I'm kind of functional, although extremely anxious. And then I'm able to do a little bit of work and often to sit down at four o'clock. My mind seems sharp enough, although my memory isn't good, I can't bring things to mind like I used to, which is quite distressing. And I have very little emotional resilience. And I'm worried for that reason about the release of this book. I mean, I just did a Times interview, London Times interview that was really. Yeah, we followed that. That's saying. It's that frustrating. It's, it's, it's, I mean,

it's funny because this, you know, again, it was like the same stories are playing out again. This person goes after you and then it just turns against that person and it's just, she's exposed for the fraud that she was being and during that interview. And so, you know, I think in the end, I- It's so strange that it keeps happening over and over. I mean, I already decided not to do mainstream interviews now for a good while because I mean, I already decided not to do mainstream interviews now for a good

while because I've, it seems to me that I've gone to the well of public sympathy, so to speak, enough times, and that if this happens to me two or three more times, let's say people are going to rightly say, you know, how many times does it take for Peterson to learn? And so, I don't want that to happen. I mean, I've been, you know, I feel an obligation to my publishers, obviously, to talk about the book. Although that interview had virtually nothing to do with the book, we hope that I would be able to discuss my health issues with someone who would treat them squarely. And then I could ignore them from then on in. but that isn't what happened. Well, it's a sign of the politicized discourse.

Like, it's a sign of the breakdown that we're going through, that we see this capacity to have so entrenched aside that people can't, it doesn't matter what they do, it doesn't matter what they say. it doesn't matter what they say, they don't feel like they're responsible because in a way you're the enemy. And, you know, and it's not just you,

it's other, it's between different groups, but if you're the enemy, then everything is justified. And so, this is something. Well, I think a huge part of this is driven by the desire to have an enemy. Yeah. You know, it's very difficult to feel. It's an easy route to self-righteousness to have an enemy. Exactly. And it's a great place to put all evil.

Yeah. And because you attract so much attention, you're an easy, you're definitely an easy target. Well, that's the theory. It seems not to turn out that way. Yeah, but it's also was the timing, you know, the way when you kind of came up in the public sphere, there was a massive shift happening in culture, and I think that's one of the things you could feel and that was happening around us. And just some extent, you know, Donald Trump had something to do with that as well, in the sense that it was this malaise that was there and this jostling and this is what led to all that kind of discourse. And so I think that you were identified.

You became identified almost mythologically, I guess, as a character. And people have treated you that way. And they act with you that way in many respects. Yes, and it comes very difficult to to to understand, it's become very difficult for me to understand what character I am. You know, so much has changed in my life over the last five years, I've been on leave from the university, so that's very destabilizing. I don't have my clinical practice anymore, and so I was, you know, seeing 20 people a week. So that's a huge transformation in my life. My house has been completely renovated.

It was renovated. Well, my wife was ill, and so we didn't, well, the renovation went on in our absence, and so I'm a foreigner in my own house, which is, although I'm starting to become accustomed to it. And there's some things I like about the new house, but I don't feel at home in it, I wouldn't say. And I've only been here for two months in the last three years, because I was on the road. And then, well, all this, and so that,

and everything that's happened has been very disruptive for my family. And of course and everything that's happened has been very disruptive for my family. And of course, Tammy got so unbelievably sick and with something that was supposed to be fatal and recovered more or less miraculously. And then I've been so unbelievably ill or still am. And I have just I just don't know where to put any of this. I can't think about the past at all because so much of it is incomprehensible, especially over the last five years. I can't think about the present

because I'm in so much pain and I can't think about the future because I don't know what I'm going to do and I have no idea how long this pain is going to last. It's been, I've been in pain, really severe pain for two years now. And that's, it's a strange thing because in this book, one of the chapters, the last chapter is called Be Grateful In spite of Your Suffering. And I went through every sentence in that chapter a very large number of times because much of the time while I was rewriting it particularly I was in a lot of pain.

And like it's crypt it's a pain level that's hard to fathom in some sense because I would say every single day I have now is worse than any day I ever had in my life before I got ill. So and then I know very well that adding bitterness to your malaise is a very bad idea. You know, it doesn't help, but that that I can certainly see the attraction in that I feel like shaking my fist at the sky and complaining bitterly, but it doesn't help, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere to eat either. And so it's so perverse, it's shaken my faith, I suppose. I suppose I'm in this perverse position where my work as in principle helped so many people. Yet I don't seem to be able to dig myself out of my current circumstances. So well, or even to make sense of them. Yeah.

I think that the role that you've played is a transition role. And that transition manifests itself to you as a... as a... trying to have your feet on two sides of rifting of an eye to islands that are floating away from each other. And you're trying to hold on. You're trying to kind of help people focus on the middle and help people avoid radicalization and avoid falling into camps in a manner that will lead to God knows what. And so I think that, I think that that's the role that you've played.

And it's been, like I've seen, for example, people transition through your work, transition from worlds, moving worlds, that's really what I've seen happen. It's more than just changing the way, changing your opinion or changing your mind about something. It really is about changing the world you inhabit. And so that's a crazy, that's a crazy role to play.

And especially because like I said, you have your foot, it's like you kind of have your one foot or one eye, let's say looking towards, I would call religion or looking towards Christianity or something like that. And then you have another eye, which is still very much immersed in a kind of secular humanism. And you have one leg that you understand, people that are more left leaning,

you understand people that are more right leaning, you have this capacity to kind of understand everybody, but you're... Yeah, that means that you make enemies on all sides, too. Well, you know, the overwhelming response that I've got publicly has been, I would say, traumatically positive. Yeah. And you wouldn't think that that would be possible possible really, but I find it that way. I mean partly it's overwhelming to have people constantly tell me in person their responses to

what I've been doing. It's very emotional and I get caught up in that quite quickly. And of course, on YouTube and the social media platforms, YouTube, particularly the bulk of the comments about me are very, very positive. It's 99 to 1 often in terms of likes and dislikes. And it's too much. Well, I don't know how to, I don't know how to, I don't know what category to put it in. I don't know how to conceptualize it. I mean, part of me, the practical part, of course, says, well, I just happened to adopt

a new technology at a time when it started to boom and fill the kind of niche that was empty in that technology at that time. But in some sense, that doesn't really cut it, you know, because it doesn't have anything to do with the content. And then I think while I have been dealing with these, well, borderline religious issues, well, certainly not just borderline, there's lots of religious people who seem to think that I'm dealing with religious issues. And well, and that's really what I wanted to talk to you about tonight. So this book I mentioned earlier, to talk about disagreements with my conceptualization of Christ, let's say, and I'm not sure what that conceptualization is, by the way,

exactly. It's a mystery to me, but I can say some concrete things about it. I mean, I certainly, understand and appreciate the symbolic significance of the ideal human being. And that finds its embodiment. And I took these ideas in large part from Jung and Eric Neumann that Christ is at least a representation of the ideal man, whatever that is. And we all, interestingly enough, we all seem to have an ideal. Or that ideal has us, right? And that's where it's very interesting to consider the role of conscience,

because your conscience will call you out on your behavior. And so it seems to function as something that's somewhat independent, or at least as something that you can't fully voluntarily control, because if you could voluntarily control it, then you just tell the pesky little bastard to go away, or to pat you on the back continually, tell the pesky little bastard to go away or to pat you on the back continually because there must be few things in life more pleasurable than being a fully committed narcissist to really believe that everything that you do is right and that you're a good person. And I suppose if you could wave a magic wand and rearrange your mind so that it was constantly telling you that you do it, but you don't seem to be able to do that in relationship to your conscience. It trips you up. And so it tells you when you're not living up to

your own ideal, and that means that you have an ideal, and you don't even know what the hell it is, but you certainly know when you transgress against it. And I know that there's a strong line of Christian thinking that's identified the conscience with divinity, sometimes with Christ inside, sometimes with the Holy Spirit. And those are very interesting conceptualizations. But you can think of them psychologically, and you can even think about them biologically, you know, to some degree, because we're so social, if we don't manifest an appropriate moral reciprocity, we're going to become alienated from our fellows. And we won't survive, and we'll suffer and die, and we certainly won't find a partner

and have children successfully. And so, to some degree, the conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within. And that's a perfectly reasonable biological explanation. But the thing is, is the deeper you go into biology, the more it shades into something that appears to be religious, because you start analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself, and it becomes something with a power that transcends your ability to resist it. So you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective and the critic,

my critic, this particular critic that I've been reading, said, well, that doesn't differentiate Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods. And of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion. Joseph Campbell did that and Jung to a lesser degree, I would say, but Campbell did that. But the difference, and C.S. Lewis pointed this out as well, the difference between those mythological gods and Christ was that there's a representation of, there's a historical representation of his existence as well. Now you can debate whether or not that's genuine.

You can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there's credible objective evidence for that. But it doesn't matter in some sense because this, well, it does. But there's a sense in which it doesn't matter because there's still a historical story. And so what you have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth. And in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things. The problem is, is I probably believe that, but I don't, I'm amazed at my own belief,

and I don't understand it. Like, because I've seen, Like, because I've seen... sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch. You know, that's the union's synchronicity. And I've seen that many times in my own life. And so in some sense, I believe it's undeniable. You know, we have a narrative sense of the world. For me, that's been the world of morality. That's the world that tells us how to act. It's real. Like we treat it like it's real. It's not the objective world, but the narrative and the objective world

touch. And the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be Christ. But I don't know what to, and that seems to me oddly plausible. Yeah. Well, I still don't know what to make of it. It's too, it's too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it. If you believed in the story of Christ or if you believed that history and and let's say

the narrative, make me let's both. I think I think you because when you believe that you buy both those stories, you believe that the narrative and the objective can actually touch. I mean, we saw that you and I, I mean, this is a trivial example, but we had a, when we were discussing, we had a sequence of discussions around frog symbolism. Four years ago, that was very bizarre to say the least. You know, that was a trivial example,

relatively trivial example of the narrative world and the objective world coming together. Didn't feel that trivial at the time. Well, the way that I like to deal with this is that one of the things, it's already there in your thought. It's already there in the way that you talk about reality, which is that one of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is something like attention. Right? There's a hierarchy of manifestation because everything that appears to us in the world

has an infinite amount of details. It has an indefinite amount of ways that you could describe it, that you could angle by which you could analyze it. And so nonetheless, the world appears to us through these hierarchies of meaning, right? I always kind of use the example of a cup or a chair. Like a chair is just a multitude of things. It's a multitude of parts. How is it that we can say that it's one thing?

There's a capacity we have to attend. And this capacity we have to attend is something like a co-creation of the world. And so the world actually exists. Not Cher is a good example, because you can try to define it objectively, but you end up with bean bags and stumps. Exactly. And they don't have anything in common.

Well, they're both made of matter, for whatever that's worth. It's pretty trivial level of commonality, but you can sit on them. Yeah, and that's what you have. And there's a mode of being, which defines them. Well, and that's so strange. So many of our object perceptions are projected modes of being. And so even the object of world is ineluctively contaminated with its utility, and therefore with morality. Exactly.

And so I think that that's the key. The key is that once you understand that the world manifests itself through attention and that consciousness has a place to play and actually the way in which the world reveals itself. And so you can try to posit a world outside of that first person perspective, but it's a deluded activity. Yeah, good luck. It's a deluded activity. No, it's also very, very difficult

because you don't know what to make of something like time because time hasn't ineradically subjective element and duration, which is different than time. I mean, time is kind of like the average rate at which things change, but duration is something like the felt sense of that time. And if you take away this objectivity, it isn't obvious what to do with time. And I think physicists stumble over this all the time, so to speak.

So and this is something that this intermingling of value, in fact, was something that I never thought I made much traction with with Harris, with Sam Harris. He didn't seem to me to be willing to admit how saturated the world of fact is inevitably with value. And I actually think he's denying the science at that point because for everything I know about perceptual psychology. There's a great book called Vision as a oh god now I can't remember the name of the book. That's a memory trouble. I'll remember it. The idea is that if that is true, then there are certain things which come out of that. There are certain necessary things down the road

from that insight, which is that attention plays a part in the way the world lays itself out. And that one of them, and one of them is that the stuff that the world is made of is partly something like attention, something like consciousness. And that has a pattern. And that pattern is the same pattern as stories. It just, it doesn't lay itself out exactly the same,

but things exist with a pattern, which is similar to stories. They have identities, they have centers, they have margins, they have exceptions. And that's how stories lay themselves out. Like so a story happens in time. How an identity, let's say, is broken down and then reconstructed. You could say that that's basically the story of every story, how something breaks down and is reconstructed.

And so that is a way for us to perceive the identity of things. And so if the world is made of this, then it's actually our world, our secular world, which is a strange aberration on how reality used to exist for every culture and every time from the beginning of time, which is to take that for granted, to take for granted that something that they didn't call it consciousness, but intelligence and attention are part of how the world lays itself out. And it lays itself out in modes of being. And one of the things that comes out of it is not only that, but like you said, it's

not only that you have ideas, but it's that ideas have you or that it's not only that you engage in modes of being, it's that modes of being have you and that recognition means that the first level of the first level of attention to that looks something like worship. It looks like celebration. It looks like celebration. It looks like a, it's like the thing which makes the, let's say the National Hockey League so successful has more to do with celebration than just a bunch of guys on skates on a piece of ice, you know, throwing a puck around. There's a celebration of the purpose of that thing and it manifests itself through a bunch of stuff, which one is like a trophy that stands in the middle on the top of a bunch

of, on a stand and everybody looks at it and kisses it. And so there's this, this veneration. Yeah, well, then there's mascots. The hockey league example is very interesting because it's because it's a social game. And all the players, they're attempting to aim right, right? So there's a symbolic element to that. Sin is misplaced aim. And so you hit the small space in the net, block the wood, maybe, by your enemies,

and everyone celebrates that. And you do that in cooperation with other people and in competition with other people. And if you do it properly, not only are you a brilliant player from a technical perspective, but you're also a great sport. And so there's an ethic there in a morality. And this is why people are so upset when hockey players

or any other pro athlete does something immoral in their personal life is because it violates the ethic that's being celebrated as a consequence of this great game. In and right, so you can see that that's the striving for an ideal mode of being, the religious striving for an ideal mode of being is central to what it is that makes hockey addictive. That's right. Yeah, and necessarily. And so, and so

God, I saw that pro wrestling. There's a great documentary, Brett Hart, called Hitman Hearts, one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. And it portrays pro wrestling as a stark, religious battle between the forces of good and evil. And Bret Hart, who at one point was the most famous Canadian in the world, was overwhelmed by the archetypal force of his representation as the good guy. It's a great documentary, Hitman Hart. And it shows you how pro wrestling is, it's not the world's most intellectual activity

to say the least. And people can easily be dismissive of it. But one of the things I loved about the documentary was that it attempted to understand from within what was compelling about what was being portrayed. And it was a religious drama. It was shocking and brilliant. And so that is actually there is an objective part of that that there's an objective way in which these patterns

kind of come together and manifest that's a higher and higher versions of this drama. And so the sports drama has a certain level, but it's limited to a certain extent because it still happens as a confrontation, let's say, between two irreducible sides. And so what happens in something like the story of Christ is that that gets taken into one person.

And so all the opposites become the king and the criminal, the highest, even in the image of the cross, you have this image. And as Christ is being crucified, they're putting a sign above his head saying that he's the king. As Christ is being beaten, they're giving to him a crown. And so Christ joins together all the opposites. And so in his story, you see, if you're attentive to these patterns,

you see the highest form of this pattern being played out. And one of the aspects that has to be there for it to be the most revealed or highest form is that it also has to include the world of manifestation. I mean, it can't just be a story, it has to be connected to the world. So that's why Christians insist on the fact that Jesus is not just a story

that he's an incarnated man, that he was incarnated. But I don't believe their insistence. I don't believe it. Well, this is, this is because I don't, it isn't obvious to me, and I think maybe I derived this criticism from Nietzsche. But people have asked me whether or not I believe in God, and I've answered in various ways. No, but I'm afraid he probably exists.

That's one answer. Yeah, no, but I'm terrified he might exist. That would be truthful answer to some degree or that I act as if God exists, which I think is I do my best to do that. But then there's a real stumbling block there because there's no limit to what would happen if you acted like God existed. There's no limit to what would happen if you acted like God existed. You know what I mean? Because I believe that acting that out fully. I mean, maybe it's not reasonable to say to believers, you aren't sufficiently transformed

for me to believe that you believe in God, or that you believe the story that you're telling me. You're not as sufficient. The way you live isn't sufficient testament to the truth. And people would certainly say that, let's say about the Catholic Church, or at least the way that it's been portrayed, is that with all the sexual corruption, for example, it's like, really, really, you believe that the son of God, that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and yet you act that way, and I'm supposed to buy your belief. And it seems to me that the church is actually quite guilty on that account,

because the attempts to clean up the mess have been rather half-hearted in my estimation. And so I don't think people don't Christians don't manifest this, and I'm including myself, I suppose, in that description. Perhaps don't manifest the transformation of attitude that would enable, that enables the outside observer to easily conclude that they believe. Yeah. Now, the way, the way to deal with that, or the way to, to understand that is that it, they do, but they do in a hierarchy. There's a hierarchy of manifestation of the transformation that God offers the world. And we kind of live in that hierarchy. And those above us hold us together, you would say. And so in the church, there's a testimony of the saints.

There's there are stories. There are hundreds and hundreds of stories of people who live that out in their particular context to the limit of what it's possible to live it. And even today, there are saints, living saints, who, for example, in the Orthodox tradition, we have this idea of what they call it, the gift of tears, or the joyful sorrow of people

who live in prayer with weeping, constant weeping. And it's this kind of strange mix of joy and sadness, which they overwhelm them and they live in that joy and sadness non-stop, and they pray without end. And so that exists, but then we, that's one of the reasons why that's one of the reasons reasons why when I talk about this idea of attention like it manifested self in the in the church as well is that You often say and I understand it when you say something like you know I act as if God exists or you know, I'm afraid to say that God exists And I think it's because you you think or you tend to think that the moral weight you think or you tend to think that the moral weight of that is so strong that you would crumble under it, that you would just be crushed under it. And I believe that. And I think that that's,

I think that I understand that. But the first thing that to act as if God exists, let's say this way, to act as if God exists, the first thing that it asks of you is not a moral action. The first thing that it asks of you is attention. That's why to act as if God exists is first of all to worship. Like that's, and I know people are gonna hear this.

Well, then I have a terrible problem without too at the moment, because I'm in so much pain. Like one of the things that one of these theologians discussed the idea of, and sorry, I want you to let you get back to your point, but he discussed the idea of the yoke of Christ being light and that there was joy in it. And there's a paradox there, obviously, because it's also a take up your cross and follow me sort of thing. But the fact that I've been living in constant pain makes the idea of joy seem cruel, I would say. And so, and I have no idea

how to reconcile myself to that. I mean, I've reconciled myself to that by staying alive despite it, you know, although by staying alive despite it, but there's very little worship. And it doesn't mean I'm not appreciative of what I have. I'm not only am I appreciative of what I have, I do everything I can to remind myself of it all the time. And so does my wife. I mean, she's changed quite a bit as a consequence of her struggle with cancer, you know, has become much more overtly religious, I would say.

And, you know, we say grace before our meal in the evening, and it's very serious, enterprise, and it always centers around gratitude, you know, for, well, for the ridiculous volume of blessings that have been showered down upon us at a volume that's really quite incomprehensible. But despite that, well, let, despite that, I'm struggling with this because I don't know how to reconcile myself to the, to the fact of constant pain. Yeah. And I don't, I feel that it's unjust, which is halfway to being resentful, which is not a good outcome. No, I agree. And I can't speak like I can't I don't know how to speak to that because I don't

necessarily don't have that experience. You know, I don't I don't have that I don't live with constant pain. And so I don't know what that would do to me. You'd probably probably one of the reasons why it might ruin me, you know, and so um It's very difficult to answer that. I think that the answer like the answer has been the cross like that's been the answer It's an ease. Maybe it may be easy for me to just say it that way but that's always been the answer of Christianity, which is that God went to the cross and that God went down into death and plunged down into death. And there are mysteries hidden and there may be they're very well hidden, but there are mysteries hidden in that depth.

But it's not, I don't think it's my job to moralize to you at this particular moment. So we talked about the narrative and the objective touching. And so I wanted to touch on that again, is that like IS. Lewis's argument. And you know, I'm even inclined from time to time to think, well, I've got the choice between believing two impossible things. I can either believe that the world is constituted so that God took on flesh and was crucified and died and rose three days later.

Or I can believe that human beings invented this unbelievably preposterous story that stretched into every atom of culture. And it isn't obvious to me that the second hypothesis is any easier to believe than the first, because the more you investigate, the manifestations of the story of Christ, the more insanely complicated and far-reaching it becomes. So I read Ion, for example, and for all of those who are listening. If you want to read a book that will completely make you insane, then you could read Jung's Ion.

And it's a study of Christian symbolism in astrology, which doesn't sound particularly dangerous, or even particularly necessary to read, I suppose. But Jung describes the juxtaposition of astrological and Christian symbolism. And it's a brilliant book, and it's terrifying because he outlines the concordance between the levels of symbolism over several thousand years. And it's obvious when you read the book

that no one plotted this. It's not a conspiracy, whatever's going on to make that concordance occur isn't something that we understand, and it seems to be best understood as one of these situations where the narrative and the objective touch, the saturation of Christianity with fish symbolism, Jung associates with astrological movement of, of, of, into the house of Pisces. And so he describes how a drama, so ancient people saw a drama played out in the sky,

and that was a projection of their imagination. And that projection contained symbols that were associated with the emergence of Christianity. And so you can see in that, the alternative explanation is that there's this There's this unfolding of a symbolic landscape over centuries or millennia That's part of human biological and cultural evolution But that that starts to touch on the religious anyways when you when you describe it in those terms

Like it's it's it's the operation of a cognitive, of a natural cognitive process, let's say natural slash cognitive process that supersedes any one individual or any one culture. And so I've never seen a critique of Ion. I think people read that book and they think, it's like John Allegro's The Mushroom and The Sacred Cross. Do you know of that book? I believe that's the title. That's another book you read and you think, well, I have no idea what it's a study of mushroom symbolism and Christianity. And it's another book that, you know, it claims that Christianity was heavily influenced by Silicide and Use, and it was published in the 1960s. It's an amazing book, but it's another book you read,

and you think, I have no idea what to do with that. I have no place to put that book. So, but Ion is really like that. And well, one of the things that, for example, you know, we talked about just before, the idea that the idea of Christ being a dying and resurrecting God, and that's really actually not the case. If you actually just look at the story of Christ, not just the story in Scripture, but let's say the whole story as it kind of developed in tradition and kind of melded together. In the ancient world, you had this idea of God's that went down into the underworld. Either that went down for some reason to visit or went down to save somebody even or died and then rose again.

But that's actually not the story of Christ because if you understand the full tradition of the Christian story, we think that Christ died, went into Hades, and then destroyed death. And he pulls everybody out of death. And then that's it. Like, what other story are you going to tell after that story? You have a story of someone who dies, goes into death, and then, and then destroys death. And then that's it. Like, that's the thing with Christ's story, that every aspect of his story reaches the limit of storytelling. And it's impossible to be haunted. Right, that's right.

That's right. Well, even from a psychological perspective, that's correct. And that in itself is a kind of miracle. And so you're stuck in some sense, constantly having to choose between miracles. It's like, okay, it's a figment of the human imagination. Fine, but it's the limit figment in multiple ways. How did that happen? And also, but as soon as you start to think

that the world is made of attention, the idea of just a figment of somebody's imagination, especially just a figment of someone's imagination, which is, happens like you said over thousands of years within communities of thousands of people, it just becomes a ridiculous statement. It doesn't, it doesn't mean anything. It's like, yeah, it only means something. If you assume that, and Jung pointed this out, it only means something.

It only, to say it's a figment of imagination and have that brush of the side means that you think that imagination is nothing and you pointed out constantly that you should not attribute nothing to the psyche. It's what you depend upon. It's the ground of your existence. It's not nothing. It's the thing that you take for granted more than anything else. So anything that you can recognize as a story will definitely be manifesting patterns

that you can recognize. And so they can't just be brushed aside from the most insane conspiracy theory to the most childish fairy tale, anything that manifests itself as a pattern of story that you can recognize, has a certain level of value. Has a enough level that if you pay attention to it, you actually can gather some nuggets of how the world works and how the world lays itself out.

And that's why, like, if I do symbolic interpretations, I can do it for scripture, but I can also do it for some Marvel movie or some video game or whatever it is, because that's just the, for you to even recognize something as having being, it's already part of that world. It's already manifesting these patterns. This critic said that the mere psychologicalization of Christ was insufficient because and you made the same case in some sense that it doesn't make sense unless the narrative and the Objective world truly touched and I think you could debate that because I think that there's some

utility. There could argue to be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth, you know, that the best way to cope with existence is to for to tell the truth and to face what you don't know forthrightly. And that will enable you to orient yourself within our finite and bounded existence that ends with our death more properly, more accurately, more advisedly than any other route. I've seen people from Orthodox priests to, you know, the most Protestant Protestant you can imagine recognize in the way that you represent reality,

something that has value, something that has value because you are manifesting that pattern. Like what you're saying is true. But I think that if we take seriously the prop, the relationship between attention, psyche, and the way the world reveals itself to us, then it scales up after that. It jumps up a level. It also scales up in terms of, because one of the things that you talk about, like looking up to the star and looking up to the highest thing you can look at and then aiming towards that. You know, once again, one of the things that that does

is that the first thing you do is actually, it's a form, it's attention, that people don't like the word worship. It's a form of reverence, a form of veneration. You submit yourself to that aim. It's not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it. You actually have you submit yourself to that aim. It's not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it, you actually have to submit yourself to that, which is to what you're aiming. And so that's what applies to it.

Exactly, and you have to sacrifice to it. And so, that's why, let's say, the religious version of this has to move towards the highest possible aim and also one that we can do together. Because like the lower aims, like you could call them something like lower gods, let's say, or angels or whatever you want to call them. Like these lower aims, they have value, but they're all fragmented. But for this to stack up, we need to be able to look towards the same image. We need to look towards the same aim,

and that will bind us together. And so we don't, we don't, all's then we don't also end up being just kind of individuals who have the weight of the world on our shoulders, but we're a communion of saints, we're a communion of people who are submitted to aiming towards worshiping the same point.

Yeah, and I believe that that's necessary. And I've had some profound experiences, which I can't really relate here, that of the necessity for that community is that this, whatever our fundamental moral it is, crushing though it is even requires the participation of others. So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people to be along with you. It's a collective enterprise, even though it's an individualistic, even though it requires the perfection, it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual level. That's not enough. There has to be that communal element as well. You need help. We all need help to aim as high, the highest aim requires communal endeavor. And it's also because it actually is the way that everything works. You know, it's like the chair aiming to be a chair is a constitutive of parts which are joined together towards a, a, a, a same goal.

And therefore hold together as a being and manifest the chairness of the chair. And that's the same with you. You have all these thoughts, right? You have all these feelings, all these, these contradicting things inside you. And you need by aiming up towards, you know, the, I mean, I believe that the image of Christ, let's say, by aiming towards the image of Christ, you constitute your being into that being that's able to attend, to sacrifice, to love,

and then that scales up with people. You're agreeable together. I think you are aiming. This is another something else I tried to point out to Sam. You are aiming, you're either aiming at Christ or something lesser, yeah? Or if things get really out of hand, you're aiming at something opposite and you don't want to be doing that. This is a matter of definition in some sense. And it's actually not impossible to understand

is that you aim at something better, generally speaking. I mean, maybe you're out to cause pain, but forget about that. You aim at something better. You wouldn't do it unless it was better. In fact, it virtually defines better. Like the whole idea of better is predicated on the idea that there's an aim that's beyond you.

And then the highest of those aims is the amalgamation, the highest aim is the amalgamation of all higher aims. And that's a perfect mode of being. And that, by definition, that's a psychological perspective. Again, that by definition is Christ. And then, but then there seems to be something too convenient about C.S. Lewis' insistence that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history. Yeah. I don't understand why I should believe that.

And I don't, I tend not to believe things without a why. There's always a why. And, and I, there's, there's a hurdle there that I, that, that, well, that I waver on constantly, because I, well, I already said that you're, when you think these things through, at least my experience has been, if you think them through sufficiently, you end up with the choice between impossible alternatives. And so, yeah. But it has to do one of the ways to see it maybe is it has to do with the recognizing of the goodness of the world or the goodness of creation that the world is capable of manifesting these patterns.

Right? So if you want to understand, for example, the big conflict between the early Gnostics and the Christians, that's what it was all about. Because the Gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated Christ. They were saying, you know, and they viewed the world as utterly fallen, as having no value, having to be escaped, having to be fled in every way. Whereas Christianity posits that it's a non-dual proposition. It's saying it all comes together. That's the promise.

It all comes together. And so it has to come down. And so it has to come down at every level. And not only that it has to come down into the person of Christ who's incarnated, but that person has to go down into death to the very bottom of the world, to the belly of the Leviathan, and then come back up. And so the whole world is declared as once again, declared as being capable of participating in this good. And so you could say, well, maybe it wasn't that one. Maybe it wasn't. It's like, why would it be that particular, particular

place where it happened? And that's the place. That's the story. I mean, that's where there is no other story like that story that we have. And so once you recognize that this is part of the declaration that the world does embody these patterns, that it leads to this, it leads to this story of a man who embodied them absolutely, and is bringing us in him to also embody them in a way that will transform us. You know, like the ultimate goal of Orthodox vision of Christianity is theosis. It's to become God, to become God through transformation and participation in God. So that's the final goal of everything,

is to become participant in the divine. And how do you distinguish that from Catholicism? Not, I mean, in terms of that, I think that it's a difference of emphasis. I think, for sure, Orthodox emphasized theosis more than the Catholics. The Catholics are kind of iffy about theosis in terms of, it's there in some of the thinkers, but it, I would say, is probably not official Catholic doctrine. But I think without theosis, you're missing the point of the whole thing.

You're missing the point of everything. Like, why do things exist? Like, why do things exist? And so I think that the idea that they exist to participate fully in their most perfect form. Like, that's what they're called to do. And it ends up being a declaration of the ultimate possibility for goodness in the world.

I think that that's, yeah. Well, it seems to me, I've observed, let's say, that it's possible to... It isn't obvious to me that anyone wants to live a meaningless existence. I don't think you can live a meaningless existence without becoming corrupted, because the pain of existence will corrupt you without a saving meaning. And it also seems to me that you can sell the story that meaning is to be found in responsibility. When I've tried to sell that story to myself, I seem to buy it. And when I've tried to communicate it with other people, it renders them silent,

large crowds of people silent. And that's strange because I'm not sure why that is. It's perhaps because the connection between responsibility and meaning had never been made for in that explicitly somehow. Because meaning gets contaminated with happiness or something like that, but it's to be found in responsibility. And then you could say, well, there isn't any responsibility that's more compelling than trying to aid things in the manifestation of their divine form. That should be an adventure that could be sold.

And I don't know why the church can't do it. I don't understand that and because it seems to me that that's something that I've done at least in part and that accounts for the strange popularity of the biblical lectures in particular. Yeah. And but I've also and I do believe that, I do believe that, that the right striving is to attempt with all your heart to encourage things to develop along that towards that divine goal. Like, what else would you possibly do once you think that through, it's like, you're always aiming at something that's better or you wouldn't be aiming. You're always moving

towards something that's better or you wouldn't be moving. So then why wouldn't you move towards the greatest good? Yeah. Well, it's because it's terrifying, I suppose, in part. But then I, you know, I've tried to put that into practice in my life. And it's tearing me into pieces. Yeah. I don't know though, if one of the reasons is because you're also alone. And I, you know, because you're, I mean, at least to my understanding, you're not in a community.

Well, it's hard to say. I mean, it's hard to say, because fans are the community. Certainly having lost, well, they've been a community. I mean, one of the things that has held me together certainly is the commitment that I feel to the people who've been so positive towards me and my family.

I do feel that as a community. I understand what you mean. Why the hell not go to church? I know you're going to come right out and say it, Jordan. I know you're not that blunt about it. But it's not just about going to church. One time I told you something and I don't know if I was able to drive it through. There's something about being in a hierarchy because there's an aspect of being in a hierarchy that you talk about, which is just kind of striving to kind of be the best within that hierarchy. But there's an aspect of being in a hierarchy, which is that the hierarchy

covers you. Well, definitely, there's no doubt about that. And so there's something about something. That's why the lowest, the lowest status members of a chimp group will still fight off interlopers. Yeah. And so there's there's a value in being in a community and a hierarchy where you like I go to confession, right? I go to confession. I go to my priest and I confess my sins and and I give that to him. He actually takes responsibility for for an aspect of listening to my sins for an aspect of listening to my sins and kind of participating in my salvation. And so the weight ends up being distributed across the community.

It's not, so you don't actually just bear it on yourself. And it's not just the living community. It's not just those that are alive in the hierarchy, but those that have left their story, all the saints are part of this hierarchy that you engage in, that you alive in the hierarchy, but those that have left their story, all the saints are part of this hierarchy that you engage in, that you participate in, and that you see as consolation, as examples, as, you know, as example of the people who have lived through difficult things that you can kind of, that you can shoulder up against, you know. And so that's one of the

reasons why I kind of insist with, at least for the people that watch my videos is when I say go to church, it's not just because I try to moralize you into doing something. It's because it's actually a participation in how the best vision of reality works. I've got no objection to any of that. But I've seen you, I've seen you objection. I probably one of the only people in the world that has actually seen you in church and

seen you in the school. And how that's a worm. Yeah. And squirming church. Why? See, the other thing, I was reading, again, I was reading this book and it's mostly a jumping off place for me to think. It's like, there's also something because I'm not inside the church, so to speak.

It's hard to say what the utility of that is. The utility of being inside the church. Now, being outside it. Of being outside. Because I'm an outsider talking about religious matters. Yeah. But I think that it has played a great role. Like I've often said something that, I've often said that you're something like King

Cyrus. If you know the story of King Cyrus, in scripture King Cyrus was a Persian king who told the Jews to go back to Israel and build their temple. So he wasn't Jewish, he wasn't in Israelite, he wasn't believing the God of the Israelites, but he was like, hey, that temple of yours looks pretty nice. Why don't you just go back there and rebuild your own thing. And so that's definitely an effect that I've seen you have. The know, the number of people that have become Christian because of you is hilarious. Sorry, it's not hilarious, but it's just kind of this strange thing

because you kind of stand outside and you're looking at the door and you're looking at the church and you're saying, hey, this isn't not so bad. You know, look at this. What is going on here? Like, what is this about? And then because of that... No, it's also, do you think you've got something better?

You know, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day when we were walking, because as I said, I walk about 10 miles a day right now, trying to keep myself under control. And, you know, he was raised a communist in Poland and then an atheist. And he was complaining, I think, I think this is what he told me, that he was complaining to his parents at one point about a religious

wedding that they were going to, despite not believing. And he said, as he got older, he realized he had nothing to replace that with. It's like, okay, throw it out. Fine. Okay, now where are you? Well, you're just as bad off as you were before, but you also don't have that beautiful thing. It's like, what would happen if we dispensed with Christmas? Well, if it's not a job, it's a good thing. That's a good thing.

You would find a way to keep a shop in this. You would find a way to keep a shop in this. You would find a way to keep a shop in this. You would find a way to keep a shop in this. It's like, let's get rid of Christmas. Or we could say, we could make it entirely secular, but then it would just disappear. But you know that's not what's gonna happen because religion is inevitable

and we're seeing it coming back in very strained ways. It's gonna be a weird, woke, identitarian religion, which is going to come back. That's why, then, the premise, you know, it's part of it's going to be a tribalist. It doesn't matter. Oh yeah.

Can you believe that? Yeah, so it's going to be a tribalist. It doesn't matter. Can you believe that? Yeah, so it's a scary thing. You could say that that's one of the failures of the New Atheists is that they led to the, they partly led to the new woke phenomena because they didn't realize that you can't get rid of religion. You can't get rid of rituals, you can't get rid of the problems and opportunities of identity. All of these things are going to come back. If you try to brush them aside, then they're going to come back in very weird ways.

Without you realizing what's going on, you'll have people kneeling to a shrine of a man who was killed by police and putting a halo on his head and self-mortifying themselves and doing all kinds of insane things or that look to you insane, but that you need to understand it's just this religious impulse gone off the rails. So yeah, and then the question is, what's the right place for it? That's right. You know, I've thought in my, I suppose it's a form of comedy that Catholicism is as sane as people get.

You know, it's Baroque, right? And it's Gothic, it's not Baroque, it's Gothic, it's dark, it has the same aesthetic in some sense as a horror film. And I'm not being, I'm not saying something denigrating by that. I mean, it's part of its strange mystery. And all that strangeness is necessary because people would be much more insane without it

than they are with it. And it's a container for that religious impulse. And that impulse is to the good. for that religious impulse, and that impulse is to the good. Yeah, and the image of the crucified Christ and also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together, right? It's like, if you think of the symbolism of communion, you'll notice that it gathers in every extreme

from the highest to the most transgressive. All of it comes together. That's worth unpacking that. It's ritual cannibalism in the service of God. Yeah. Yeah, and it's also seen as a normal meal of communion, and it's also seen as a sexual union, because there's a relationship, there's a notion in which then in the altar,

and in that moment of communion, there's this joining of heaven and earth, you know, the rays of the chalice, and there's this joining, which is this image of this, the sexual of union between God and the soul, between God and his church. And so all of it, it just jammed into this into this ritual as a kind of center of reality would call it. And so like you said, if you get rid of that, then you're going to have all kinds of strange, fictitious versions of it that are going to pop up and are going to try to replace it. And it's leading to the fragmentation of our world and to the breakdown of the West for sure. So back to this idea of the mythological level and the historical level, conjoining. And I thought of that as convenient. It's that's a stumbling point for me in relationship to the Christian story. You say it has to be like this if the world is

constituted in a good manner. And it's the has to be, I mean, is that so? How about it? Let me say this one thing because I've been struggling towards this whole. It's an act of faith. And so let's say that your faith is that you decide to make the notion that reality is good, the cornerstone of your faith. It's something that you what? That you believe or is it something that you courageously assume? And is there a difference between that and belief? And if you courageously assume that the world is good, that reality is good, then the touching of the narrative and the objective in this manner that's demonstrated by Christ that becomes necessary is that the idea. So to me, it's funny. I don't see it as an act of faith in the way that we think of an act of faith,

like this jump of faith or whatever. I see it as an act of trust, faith as trust, you would say. That's fine. That would be a courageous assumption if it's trust. And it's trust in the sense also of, so when we talk about the good, we always have to be careful not to just limit it to the good, to the moral good. There is the moral good. But when we talk about the good, we're talking about the good in a much larger way. And the good is the pattern of the things, right? And the sense that the fact that the world lays itself out as ordered, as pattern, inevitably, that there

is no way around it. You cannot avoid the order of the world because, because the, in order for you to even perceive anything, it has to have an identity. It has to have a hierarchy, has to have a margin, has to have all these things. It's all there in every active perception. Exactly. So in every active perception. And so it's that. Every active perception presumes a value perception. Exactly. So in every active perception. And so it's that.

Every active perception presumes a value hierarchy. Exactly. You can't avoid it. And so it's not, so it's not like an active faith in the sense that I, I, I, you know,

I, at the outset think the world is nihilistic and chaotic. It's like, no, I don't. I think that on the contrary, I think that you could say it in a religious way that the love of God holds the world together and it's inevitable that things are held together by these patterns of being that are always aiming towards the good,

even in the very identity of whatever it is that you're encountering. Let me ask you something personal then. I mean, you weren't born in orthodox Christian. This is something you came to. How? Well, I think that it has something to do with what you said before. It does have something to do with the sense that Christianity had fallen away from its original story and its original all-encompassing, let's say, cosmic narrative. So it was really, I would say, in searching for that and kind of discovering symbolic thinking on other fronts and feeling like I was confronted by this. Like, okay, so I can see these patterns, I can see the world through these coherence,

and it's like, why is it then that Christianity doesn't have this? And then after more looking and more searching, I realized that it did, that not only it did, but that some of the earliest, some of the most powerful early saints talked about the world exactly this way.

And so when I discovered that, then I looked around and I saw, for example, that iconography, that the relationship between icons and architecture and liturgy, and all of this was like this amazing, giant pattern which was reinforcing, manifesting, making you participate in the way the world actually existed.

And so it was like this kind of self, you know, this positive feedback loop, I guess you could say it in a good way, where it's like you, you recognize these patterns, you engage in them, you see them, you sing them, it's like this whole thing where you're engaged. And so I realized that it was really in the Orthodox Church that this was the most that had been the most preserved and the most alive, and that I would hear, you know, contemporary Orthodox speakers or thinkers or philogens who talked about the world exactly in that way. And so I thought, okay, so this is the place. And also because they kept the idea of theosis as the ultimate goal. Because I

think that that's, you know, very, very early, Saint Euroneus, which is, you know, like early third century, said the logos became man, so that man would become God. That's one of the earth, some of the earliest saints said that, you know. And so it's like, that's really what Christianity is. And so that's what that's what ultimately led me to... Well, it is the greatest of all possible visions. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that it's there latent,

even in other forms of Christianity. And one of the things that I've been trying to do is help people kind of wake up to that reality and try to see it wherever they are. And how's that going for you? Well, no, I'm really serious. I haven't talked to you for a long time. I mean, you've got to,

I mean, you've had a strange, few years as well. I've had a strange few years as well. It's all your fault, by the way, it's just like, yeah, it certainly feels that way. But it's a good, it's a good in that sense. I mean, I've been surprised in the past four years since I met you and you kind of put me out there in the world.

You know, now I have with like 90,000 people following me on YouTube and there's a community of, I would say symbolic thinkers. I'm giving them a place to write, like on my website, I'm putting up a blog. There's communities that kind of get together and talk about this, trying to reinvigorate it in their own communities, whether wherever it is they come from.

And so I've been just non-stop excited about, I mean, in a way, sad to see that I think the breakdown of Christianity is going to continue. I don't have short-term hope for, let's say, the situation, but I do believe that there are seeds which are kind of being planted, and there are people who are getting ready and will bear fruit. So it's been just amazing, I have to say. And thanks for that, by the way. I hope I guess you're welcome to the degree that I had something to do with it. Yeah.

Did you want, I know one on Twitter, you asked about the Virgin birth. I didn't know if you wanted, if you still have Twitter, you asked about the Virgin birth. I don't know if you want to, if you still have juicy, yourself energy to talk about that or if or if or if or sure why not. Well, one of the things that is important, I would say in Christianity is understanding that the role that Mary has to play, let's say, in the same, in the same way that we talk about how the reality of Christ came, let's, I had to manifest itself in the world for us to understand that the possibility of this thing, the possibility of how everything comes together, right? In the same way, so in, for example, in the Old Testament, you have the offenies.

You have places where God and humanity meet. So on the mountain of Moses, in the temple, in the garden of Eden as well. So you have these, they're usually at the top of a mountain, or they're at the end of a temple, okay? So it's still a mountain and that's a place where two worlds meet. That's the narrative world and the objective world really. Exactly. So the invisible world and the visible world, the world of logos, the world of pattern, and then the world of possibility, right?

They come together and then that's when the coming together, that point, is where you see something. So it's like that for everything. That's where miracles occur. Yeah, miracles are like super events. Like they show us the pattern of reality in a more concise way, but everything is like that. So even a chair is a bunch of possibilities that encounters an idea, can encounter the purpose,

the logos, and then you have a chair. You can't have just a bunch of stuff where else you don't have a chair. You need that to meet. So at the center of everything that exists, there's a little temple, a mini temple, and there's a little incarnation, right? A little like a mini one. It's not. I don't want to seem heretical or anything, but there's this little like mini thing that happens.

And so that aspect has a lower part, which is the nexus of possibilities, the coming together possibilities, and then this thing that this logo is which comes down. So this nexus of possibilities, you could call it a mountain, a house, a temple, a body, that's Mary, right? That's her. That's she's the place of manifestation. So she's the ark of the covenant, she's the temple, she's the mountain, she's all of that. And so, and then

and then we play that role, you could say the church, the body of Christ, we play that role, you could say, the church, the body of Christ. We play that role. We come together in love. And then the divine logos descend and manifest to unite the body together and to reveal himself in that unity of the body. So we see Christ in the unity of love. So Christ says they will know you by how you love each other because that's how you know that a body exists is that it's coherent, it holds together as a body. And so this body has to be dedicated, it has to be dedicated to the thing which is manifesting. So like, let's say you have a turkey, you know, a car and two bits of grass,

and you think, I'm gonna make a chair out of that. Well, it's not gonna happen, right? It's not gonna happen. I'm gonna think you were gonna go that route. But this is it, this is what it's about. It's not gonna happen because that's not dedicated. And so, in the same way of a woman and her husband, so a woman has to be dedicated to her husband for the union to be

recognized and fruitful. So if a woman is not faithful to her husband, then there's confusion on the identity of the child. But if a woman is dedicated to her husband, which means that she's actually a virgin to all other identities. She's virginal to all other identities, and she's dedicated only to the one thing. So this idea of virginity is super important, because it's about dedication. It's about not being mixed or not being uncontamination. Uncontamination. And so then you can understand that in order for Uncontamination. Uncontamination. And so then you can understand that in order for something

to manifest the entirety of the whole pattern, right? So it's like, so for someone to be the place of manifestation for the whole thing. Well, that is what a mother does. Like, right? It's what a mother does because she dedicates herself to a greater or lesser degree to bringing someone perfect into being.

And the more she loves, the more she dedicates herself to that in every possible way. So now the Virgin Mary is the extreme cosmic version of that where she has to be perpetual virgin. She is a cosmic virgin. She is perpetually virgin, because she's like, you can imagine, like, in order for the sun to reflect upon the waters, it has to do with the sun. You know, and all those men who don't believe that sort of thing should take careful stock of the fact that they're frequently terrified out of their skull whenever they encounter

someone they're attracted to. They project that or see it instantly and it demolishes them. And then if they're rejected, they're crushed. And you can think of that as a projection, but you can also think of it as seeing more deeply what's there and that you only see that when you're actually attracted to someone. And then that attraction has a basis because you're seeing what they could be, even if you're not seeing what's there. And so that's why the necessity of Virgin birth, because she is revealing the highest, right?

She's like a still ocean on which the sun is reflecting. And if it was mitigated, then it would only reflect a mitigated manner. And then everything in between is mitigated, like I said, it's like a woman who's faithful to her husband, obviously, is not a virgin in a technical sense. You could say she's a virginal to others. She's untouched by others, but she's dedicated to the one man, just like,

well, and you know, the degree to which that's entangled with genuine virginity also isn't the case, also isn't so obvious. Yeah. You know, we don't know what the preconditions are for setting up the ideal relationship. And it's certainly the case that we bring the baggage of our previous relationships into our current relationship. And maybe sometimes that's further better, and maybe the virginity can be symbolic.

But people can certainly be solid by their past behavior, and sometimes in a way that they can't figure out how to repair. Yeah. Well, for sure, that Christian ideal has always been the union of virgins in the sense that then the dedication ends up being tighter, right? And so you are dedicated to your husband and your husband is dedicated to you and then you're unmedicated, mentally even, right? Like in terms of memories, and in terms of comparing,

and in terms of all of these things which we do as human beings. And so it can prevent slippage in terms of your dedication. Yeah. So I don't know if that makes sense in terms of understanding. Yes, well, I mean, these things, grasping these things slips out in and out of my capacity. And I mean, you did a lovely job there of making a symbolic account for the virginity of

Mary. I understand that. I understand. Well, but no one's going to prove the virginity of Mary historically. I mean, that's not not that's something which is not that obviously is not possible. It's a secret. There's a secret aspect to virginity, which is actually part of its function. And it's also part of its how can I say this? It's part of its of its mystery right, which is something which is which is not public, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it belongs to the identity. It belongs to the, you know, it's like the dedication of something belongs to that,

which is it's dedicated. We can talk about this to some degree. I mean, I, imagine that you wanted to form the perfect union with someone. Hmm. Well, let's say it's a perfect sexual union for that matter. I think that requires love. Whenever I've had it in my life, a sexual experience that wasn't associated with love, I didn't feel right about it. My conscience bothered me very much, very rapidly. and the conscience bothered me very much, very rapidly. And maybe that makes me an outlier, although I don't think so. I think that that is how people react,

but they refuse to notice. Now I might be wrong about that, maybe I'm approved, it's possible, although I don't think so. But it's possible, but it always struck me that sex was best undertaken within the confines of a committed, of an ultimately committed relationship. That otherwise it was lesser, it was the lesser, it was less than it should be.

It was solid. And now, well, I don't have anything more to say about that than that that's been my experience. And so, and I don't know what the preconditions are for establishing the perfect marriage, let's say, and the perfect marriage would be one that brought about the best possible children. These are not trivial things. They're very difficult things to get right.

Certainly, you want the least amount of animosity, unnecessary animosity possible between the parents, you want the union to be tight, you want it to be based on love and commitment. That seems clear even from the psychological literature. Yeah. So I have another question for you. Yeah, go for it. Go for it. This idea of theosis, I think it's lack of, I tormented by the possibility that it's lack of courage that stops people from, from bringing into being that union with God. You think that possibility, that possibility

there sits there in front of all of us and it was actually realized once in history. And it was actually realized once in history. Well, I would say that at least in the tradition of the Church, it was perfectly manifested in Christ, but there are other saints that have reached theosis. And that's what we're all called to. That we're all called to become one with God to the extent that that's that that's possible. Well, then I guess we're stuck with the old problem, which is if that's the case, then why does the world seem so unredeemed? Yeah. Well, because we're distracted, you know, with reason, where we tend to attend to the lower things. You know, we get distracted by our emotions,

we get distracted by all these things around us that are trying to get our attention. And then we aim towards these smaller things. You know, we aim towards whatever it is, right? We aim towards making money, we aim towards getting this or having some prestige. And these, because the problem is that these things all give us a small sense of satisfaction. And so they are like little idols, I guess you could call them. And so we just aim toward these lower things.

And that's one of the reasons why we struggle to see this higher ideal. And so that's one of the reasons why I guess what's one of the reasons for church as well is that it's kind of forces you even if you're distracted or whatever to come together at least once a week or whatever. Yes. Together. And see us together. Well, and to consent, I know I understand that. Yeah. No, I remember cynicism that was sort of in the air, I suppose, when the Christianity of my youth started to decompose when people started to not attend church in droves. The cynical justification in part was, well, those are one hour a week. Christians, how critical can you get to claim allegiance to this high

ideal and then to go back and live your taudry life? How could anyone participate in anything like that? And what we've replaced it with is never doing it even for an hour a week, to go back and live your tautary life, how could anyone participate in anything like that? And what we've replaced it with is never doing it even for an hour a week, which is actually quite a lot of time compared to none. Yeah. So the replacement has not been an improvement by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah.

And so and then we replace it because we need to come together and we need to commune and we need to celebrate. And so we end up doing it in in these kind of secondary places, like sports or We replace it because we need to come together and we need to commune and we need to celebrate. And so we end up doing it in these kind of secondary places like sports or politics and all these other places, you know, we'll replace that. But ultimately, like I said, one of the things that help us to trust, let's say, or to find some respite is that we do, it's together. Like we're doing this together.

And so when you see, there's some comfort in knowing that some people have dedicated their life to God and have lived that way. And it serves as a smaller example, but also as a comfort in those moments. Because usually in the stories of the saints, you'll find times when they are struggling, when they're completely off the rails, when they're not, you know, when they're struggling with thoughts, with passions, with desires. Now, you see that in Old Testament stories. I mean, Abraham is all of the patriarchs.

I mean, they lived full lives complete with catastrophic failure and malevolence and murder and genocide and war and I mean, and yet we're redeemed. And so I think that that's one of the things that helps us to to like you said to to to see it's like you don't you don't have to obviously you don't look at the person who goes to church once a year whatever that person has their own thing to deal with. If you, you, you find, and you see these, these people that are the opposite that really live. And everybody has met, I would say, probably a few people like that, at least I've met a few that are just, I've met some priests, monk priests that are glowing, like they're

just glowing. And they, and you see it in their eyes that they live at a level of, of peace and acceptance that I don't have access to. And so it's like that type of encounter is also part of your transformation because it gives you, it tells you like, oh, yeah, I see it in your eyes. Like I can see that that this exists. You know, it's not just something we talk about. I want to talk a little bit about heaven. So I talked to Matt Ridley a while back and

and Björn Longberg and I'm interested in their thinking because they're trying to plot an optimistic course for the future. One where at the highest levels of social integration, we decide how human society should look. At least in so far as we conceptualize how it might look if we address some of the major problems that be set us. But it's an attempt to make things better. It's an attempt to bring about something increasingly resembling heaven on earth. I mean, heaven is generally conceptualized. You can conceptualize it as a state of being. It might be the state of being that those people that you described live in, that paradise experiences where everything transformed itself into something

that was perfect, that appeared perfect. And I was unable to stay in those frames of mind. The heaven is that something we build? Is that something? I don't understand the relationship between the heaven that awaits us, let's say, after we die. That's the idea. And what we build here on earth, do those touches that the door, is that the doctrine?

There's so much of this doctrine I don't understand at all. I think a way to see it has to do with attention again, and it has to do with a hierarchy of attention. If you try to build heaven, you're going to fail miserably because you're not aiming high enough. You're aiming and then you get stuck in these weird world of opposites that you don't even understand the side effects of what you're doing. And so for one person, heaven will look like if everything could be perfectly ordered then, right? And then we know what that looks like. And another person who look at heaven and think, if everything could be free, we could all just be free. And then that we know what that looks like. And so the idea is to look higher.

You know, there's a story that I've been having to strive for something better. But then we end up in, which is what you're saying, is that we end up with the Tower of Babel or we end up with the Flood or we end up with the catastrophe, continual catastrophe of unintended consequences. But as you yourself said, we are aiming for something better. So the question is, how do you pursue utopia while avoiding the pitfalls?

And that's a theological question I would add. Yeah, it is. And I think it, I know this, people are gonna hate that I say this, but it has to do with worship. It has to do with what you worship. So if you worship, if you worship those things that you're aiming towards, the lower things, if you worship the making

a safer society, if you worship the making a freer society, if you worship making a stronger society, all of these things are going to go off the rails because they have unintended consequences that you don't understand because they're a fragment of reality. They need to be encompassed together in order to reach something higher. And so that's the danger of ideology. It's the part takes the place of the whole. So yeah, the idea is that if you actually, if you worship God,

then those other things will kind of lay themselves out slowly and you won't be able to force them. They'll kind of lay themselves out slowly and they'll start to manifest progressively and as you, but you have to attend to the highest or else, like I said, there's even like a, there's an image anti-Christ, which is related to this problem, you know in Scripture

You could one of the first anti-Christ you could say was Judas who betrayed Christ Well, there's a story with Judas which is very fascinating because Christ doesn't talk to Judas very often But one of the places where Christ talks to Judas is when a woman comes in and wants to anoint and wash Christ's feet with a very expensive perfume. And then Judas says, what are you doing? Like, why are you doing this? Why don't we give this to the poor?

And Christ says, you know, the poor will always be with you. But the bridegroom Christ, the Messiah is there for a short time. And so that's the other kind of story. It's very difficult to understand how anyone could have invented that story. Like, it's not the story of propagandists. No, it's in fact, it's the opposite. Yeah.

But that story has to do with attention. So Christ obviously isn't saying, you shouldn't help the poor or Christ has said to help the poor. He said it many times. You have to help the poor, give to the poor, of course. But he's saying get your hierarchy in order. And you'll help the poor more effectively. That's right. That's the case.

There is that is the case. It starts with worship and the acts that she's doing, if you look at what she's doing. She's, first of all, she bought something expensive. She's sacrificing it. She's sacrificing it. She's sacrificing it to bow down and to wash the feet, to submit, to sacrifice to and to worship.

So those three things, like when I talk about the aim, how you end up having to submit to that aim. And so this is what Christ is saying, first comes worship, then the world lays itself out below that in an appropriate way. And those that are... That's what the Sermon on Mount says, too. And those that are saying, help the poor as their ultimate goal in the...

In scripture, it says that Judas didn't even want to help the poor. He wanted to take the money for himself, really. Like, he was a thief, actually, and he was taking the money out of the purse. And so those that just want to replace— Well, I suppose the truth of the matter is, is that the genuineness of your desire to help the poor is precisely proportional to the degree that you embody Christ. That's right. And it can't be otherwise.

It cannot be otherwise. I see that clearly, because otherwise things will go astray. So that's one of the problems with the modern projects of utopia. Is that they're, they're babblesk in their attempts. And you can see like the type of gestures that the world authorities are posing in terms of safety, extreme, with COVID and everything, this desire to create absolute safety,

this desire to create absolute identification and tracing and all of these weird gestures that show that they think they can control reality is leading us towards a very dangerous place. Well, one of the things I noticed, I did some work on a committee at one point that was advising the UN in relationship to the establishment of its millennial goals, and there was hundreds of goals never not rank ordered. And so it was a tower of babble because you can't have hundreds of goals that aren't rank ordered. And so it was a tower of Babel because you can't have hundreds of goals that aren't rank ordered and have any goals at all. Because the goal, to have a goal means a hierarchy.

Something has to be more important than something else. And there isn't anything more important than getting your arc together. So to speak, you know, well, I'm going to have to think about all this a lot. Yeah, but there's the question that keeps lurking in the back of my mind, which is does the fact that that's how it should be mean that that's the way that it is? And that's trust. That's a question of trust. Yeah. Yeah, it's it. It's a question of trust with which ends up manifesting itself in love, you know, and I think that

love and love, you know. And I think that the love that you have for the world, which is clear, anyways, it shows me that you might be closer to that trust than you might want to admit to yourself, maybe. Well, I don't know what to do with it. I suppose is the real problem, especially in my current circumstances. Yeah. I'm the most confused person I've ever met. I would say, yeah. And I've met some pretty confused people, so. Well, thank you.

That was really something. Yeah, you know, it's a, it's a really joy to talk to Jordan. And you know, like I said, there are thousands of people who are praying for you and, and, well, they're keeping me alive. And your story isn't, isn't, your

story isn't over yet, you know. So much to pity for me. Hmm. Well, you know, I really, all I can do is really pray that you, that you, yeah, that you, I don't know how to, how to formulate it, but I, I hope that you, that you, that you encounter a moment of grace and that you can also find a body to join with. And I'm always here, you know, like I haven't talked in a few years, but obviously, you're more of a part of my life. So much I can stand talking to you. Yeah. But you're more, you're definitely always a part of my life, you know, even if it's through weird YouTube videos and everything.

No, and the people remind me that you're a part of my life all the time because a lot of people that watch my videos, you know, they come, they come from you. They're always, they always start with, well, I was watching Jordan Peterson videos. And so, you're a gateway to what I'm talking about. Well, that's a good gateway. Thank you for the carving. It's beautiful. I'm happy to know that it's in your house. And that same Michael least holding that dragon at bay a little bit. We hope. Yeah. Good talking to you.

Yeah, it's good talking to Jordan. Anytime. you