The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 202. Meaning, Awe and Conceptualization of God - pt. 1

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

In our second weekly compilation, we are investigating the various methods and practices that humans use to conceptualize God. This investigation leads us down the path of exploring meaning and wonder. What does it mean to live as though God exists? Why are we awestruck when viewing a beautiful painting? Why does walking inside a great Cathedral render us speechless? What is the relationship between these experiences and God? Jordan talks about how living as though god exists is some form of evidence that we as a society hold these values in high regard.

Welcome to season 4 episode 57 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. In our second weekly compilation, we're investigating the various methods and practices that humans use to conceptualize God. This investigation leads us down the path of exploring meaning and wonder. What does it mean to live as though God exists? Why are we awestruck when viewing a beautiful painting? Why does walking inside a great cathedral render us speechless? What is the relationship between these experiences and God?

Dad talks about how living as though God exists is some form of evidence that we as a society hold these values in high regard. I hope you guys enjoy this episode and have a wonderful week. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing 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 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 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. 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. And I do believe that. I do believe 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. 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 as you know, I've tried to put that into practice in my life and It's tearing me into pieces. Yeah, I asked you to define love and I'm going to define it on my terms now It's not as the best in me serving the best in you. And I think that's the deepest pleasure. That's the deepest and most lasting pleasure, and it is the most fundamental motivation. It's the inexhaustible source, because if I can do that, whenever I do that,

I feel that I'm being properly. And there's nothing better than that. And you can extend that to the world to situations places. Well, I think that's what you're supposed to do by accepting the proposition that God is love. I mean, it's God is love and God is logo. So those are those are both there. So then the question to some degree is the rank order of the two. And I would say God is truth within love. And that's the animating spirit of mankind. And that's a way different claim than the one the atheists are going after by the way. Yeah. Think about it everyone.

It is truth is truth in the service of love, not the best animating spirit of mankind. When it isn't pursuing an aberration, we can all ask yourself that question. I think that's a good question to ask. Thank you, John. What I mean is I think it re- I think it re-orients us to the lab. We can put that on a t-shirt. Is truth in the service of love a good question. I guess I see them as more interpenetrating. I want to make a stronger relationship between them than just interpenetrating.

I wanna make a stronger relationship between them than just a relationship of service. I mean, this is- How about her, man? Yeah, that this way, I like the term realization that love is a way of affording realization and the deepest knowing you have of reality is in realization. That's what I, if I had to-

Okay, so it seems to me, okay, so I'll make an appendage to my claim. Right. The reality that is most justifiable is brought about by the action of truth in the service of love. Yeah, but I guess what I'm saying is I see truth. I think you're using it, and I've heard you use true

as something beyond a correspondence between the semantic content of a proposition reality. I've heard you talk about it. Yes. Right, right. And we even use that when we use the phrase. Yes, it seems to incorporate some of those other dimensions that you've been talking about. Exactly.

Exactly. Okay, well, man, so fill me in. Well, that's what I'm trying to get at. I'm trying to get at that power is a way of, you know, when when your shot is true, your skill has been effective and you're going to hit the mark, right? But, but, but, but presence is also a way in which things are, are true to form, right? And, and, and then care, but the, but the participatory knowing is when we're like the, the deepest sense of true, which is, you know, related to trust and being betrothed to the world in an important way. So if you

will allow me to expand what you mean by true, to cover all of those dimensions. Be trod to the world in that you extend the same courtesy to the world that you described extending to your partner. Exactly. I think the answer to nihilism isn't some propositional answer, this is what I get from this attempt. Yeah, right. It's to relearn, and I mean, it's deeply, in the Buddhist sense of sati, to remember what it is to fall in love with reality, to fall in love with being. And if that's what you're saying is the thing that you think that what Sam Harris is striving for in his spirituality? Well, it's not a throwaway answer. It's like, what's he up to exactly? I mean, he's on a, he isn't he on a Sophia, I find me a Sophia adventure. I think everybody is, how can I put this? Everybody lives from the non-propositional kinds of knowing

emphasized by Plato. And that's what all of the scholastic research is pointing to now. That Socrates was trying to point people to the non-propositional knowing, the procedural, the prospectible, the participatory. I think we all have to live from that, given a lot of things I've said, and a lot of things we've said. Maybe you could expound on those a bit more for us

and clarify a bit more. And so you said the answer to nihilism. That isn't exactly a comment on my comment that the culture war is about a claim that the drive to power is at the core of Western being. I think that's an equally nihilistic claim. I, that's, that's my point. The claim, the claim is nihilistic or my claim about that is nihilistic.

The claim that power is a fundamental reality is an attempt to assage the wounding of nihilism, but it is fundamentally mistaken in its endeavor. It will, it is, it is, it is, it is fundamentally mistaken in its endeavor. It is constituted the wrong way. It's like framing a problem the wrong way so that you know, you not get the insight needed to get to the solution of the problem. So I think of it as a fundamental misframing. That's what I'm trying to say. And that's why I'm hesitant to say either yes or no to it because I get it. Yeah.

Well, I believe that I believe that it is mis-frame because I don't think it would be taking us in such a pathological direction. The whole argument. Exactly. If it wasn't mis-framed. Thinking psychologically again about Christianity. And I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought, is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought, but that predated.

But it looked to me like, and some of those were derived from Mesopotamia, and some of them were derived from Greece, and some of them were derived from Judaism, and other sources, but they all seemed to me to be part of the conversation that human beings have been having amongst themselves for thousands of years about what the nature of the ideal human being is. And now I see these cathedrals, these works of art in architecture that took a tremendous amount of labor. and you see Christ as logos spread out on the sky as a transcendent force. And you ask yourself, well, what exactly is that signifying? And the answer is at least the proposition of a kind of

ideal that's associated with, let's say, universal love and truth in speech. That's the logo truth in speech. That's the logo, it's summed up in two phrases. And if there's no metaphysical reality there, at all, there's still this imaginative enterprise that characterizes the entire human, what imaginative effort, cultural effort to posit a transcendent ideal that we would live in relationship to. And I just don't see that case being made very strongly. And I can't really understand why, because isn't it rather obvious that at least part of what Christianity has been is the attempt by thousands of people over thousands of years to specify the nature of an ideal?

Certainly, I would say so and I would say that the fact that these principles actually work is proof of their of the proof of there being true accounts of what the nature of the real is. Well let's approach this from a couple of different angles, Jordan. The first is, one of the things that I profoundly believe is that these young people seeking deeper answers, and to, however, much they may be flailing about, it's not their fault that many, perhaps most of the institutions they will encounter will

be tray that which is deepest in them. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll denigrate. We'll tell them, no, none of this thing, none of these things that you're seeking are really real. I mean, I think, you know, I've been talking, thinking a lot over the years about architecture and what is going on in brutalist architecture. And it really does seem to me that in brutalist architecture, to live in relation to brutalist architecture,

it is as if you had a parent that said, you're nothing. You're nothing, you'll never amount to. And of course there are terrible people, terrible to say people actually, there are people in these situations who live with such dysfunctional lack of love and antagonism. This is the way that the home life that they, that some people terribly have.

But I'm using this as an example, because I think what Brutalist architecture does is that declares to the whole world and to you that you are, there is no truth. There is no beauty. You are nothing except it. It's just a concrete annihilating force. And you see this culture of repudiation. I mean, here, not here, you're in Canada. I'm in the States in Savannah now. But the Chateau Lourier, I think I misspoke recently,

called it the frontenac, which is in Quebec. But in Ottawa, the Ch, the shadow of Laurier, there's been a desire to expand this sort of beautiful sort of neo-Gothic building. And it went through six rounds of approval to finally be to make a set of plans that would meet the local architectural or review board, whatever it was. And I thought, well, it can't be that bad. It's gone through that. And I mean, this structure is abhorrent. It looks like a cross between a Verizon server farm and an American penitentiary. I mean, it is just a declaration that there is no higher order.

And I mean, in Edinburgh, they're tearing all those out. There was Edinburgh as an unbelievable, beautifully, beautiful city. The whole central mile of it, square mile essentially, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it's marred by random placements of 1970s brutalist architecture. And they're just horrible. It's complete lack of regard for the architectural context. And they're all being torn out and replaced, thank God. So, well, this architectural idea, so back to the cathedral, you know, what's really interesting about a cathedral

with, let's say Christ as Pantocrator on the ceiling is spread against the ceiling, is that it's not the state that's portrayed up there, right? It's not a map of the country. It's not even a map of the world. It's not a geographical locale or a political institution. It's the transcendent individual. And it's just not obvious to me. It seems obvious to me that that's correct. And that if it isn't the transcendent individual,

then it becomes the state. And as soon as the transcendent becomes the state, then we have a catastrophe. And I don't see any difference between the insistence that our identity is predicated on our group membership. I don't see any real difference between that and the insistence that we're just handmaidens of the state. It's a totalitarian insistence. And I think part of that too is maybe, you know, I learned from Jung that as soon as you pause it an ideal you also specify a judge and the more the higher the ideal the more severe the judgment because of your distance from the ideal. And so part of what we're seeing too might be a rebellion against the awful requirements of that ideal, but that doesn't justify.

That doesn't justify the rebellion. Because if it's really the ideal, then if you don't act it out, you fail to act it out at your peril. And then we need to have a serious conversation about the metaphysical, about the practical implications of the idea of this ideal. I mean, if we've had this conversation about the transcendent individual as the ideal against which we should all be judged and to which we should strive, that we should strive to emulate, is there any relationship between that ideal

and the structure of reality itself? Because that's the $100 question, so to speak. You know, we have a human ideal and you could say merely psychologically, maybe even merely biologically, that that's something we originated that's part of our biological nature that's expressed in this ideal, and it's nothing

more than that. But you could also say, well, perhaps it is something more than that. Perhaps it's reflective of the structure of being itself. It depends on our position in the cosmos. We are self-conscious. We are that which reflects being itself, or perhaps even makes it possible. It's not that obvious what our rule is. It might not be so trivial, despite our mortality. Well, I would say that not only it is, as you say, but we can know it to be, as you say. I mean, this is what the whole history in some sense of literature and philosophy and theology is about, is a, and I want to insist on this. It is a rational grappling with these questions, realities, and indeed truths. I want to come back to something in a minute, but just on this topic, one way into this is to reflect on the fact that reality is not zero sum.

That of course we know this economically, you were talking Jordan a minute ago about the voluntary exchange of regulated, that is to say a contractually governed marketplace that in this exchange, you know, it's not in zero sum, we all end up over time better. You also see this naturally in the evolution of the diversity of species, of languages, of cultures. You've written beautifully about play as orienting the child in relation to a deepening reciprocity

with others. We know this in terms of knowledge. I mean, how can it be that in a conversation, I can be wrong and be shown to be wrong? And that be a net gain for me. I mean, you know, I, I mean, you know, the whole point of free dialogue is that we can learn from, we can learn in our not knowing that the conversation is not zero sum, that even in our, in our, we know this in terms of forgiveness, that even our betrayals of beautiful things can become deepening engagements with what we have betrayed, if we have the humility to see it. And so then, you know, I think, you know, that leads one to, you know, what, geez, you can go back, you can go to the level of subatomic particles and physics. I had a pleasure of talking with Freeman Dyson before he died. And Dyson will say very clearly that against the

determinists, some of the rational optimists, they're pretty religiously determinist in their worldview. And they want a martial modern science as saying that their determinism is what science teaches. But Dyson, who was a subatomic physicist at the highest level, expressly said the opposite. He said that the electron that you, essentially, he says that the electron is free, that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, that at the very most detailed level of subatomic particles, things are not determinist. And the reason I want to go all the way down to that level is because you can go down to the lowest level level resolution, then you can back up to the higher level and see that there is a non-zero sum nature to what is real. And then you have to ask yourself, is it good to live in relation to

to ask yourself, is it good to live in relation to what is true or should I live in a delusion? And we say, well, it's better to live in relation to what's true than to live in relation to a delusion. And then you say, well, what would it mean then for me to live in relation to this positive sum, this essential reciprocity, which I think is really what the Christian view of the Trinity is about. This essential reciprocity, which is the bedrock of all reality, what would it mean to live in relations that, what would it mean to remember that? And you know, one can approach that in any number of different ways, but certainly that is what prayer is, that is what all spiritual exercises are. That's what perhaps walking in nature can be. That's what any kind of meditative

activity, intellectual or physical is a recollecting of the self in the deepest way to what is most real. And I know you've written, for example, about gratitude. And I love your words about gratitude because it's an inversion of the burden. It's not that it all comes down to us, but actually just the opposite, that we place ourselves in the hands of the eternal reciprocity that gathers us up and puts us back together. And I think that this frankly is a deeply rational standpoint that can be shown to be true in economics, in physics, in biology, in sociology,

and certainly in all of the higher order spheres of human knowing. This is the nature of what we are and what the world is. And this is where your image of the Panto Crattor, I think this comes back to this because because what fundamentally is going on there is that, you know, the logos is in us, you know, it's actually in us. That's why when you talk about the divine significance of truth and speech, that, you know, we are made to understand ourselves in relation to the whole.

That is an intrinsic human need and intrinsic human ability. And I think that this is where, you know, my life is about trying to, and whatever small way I can, you know, open, if the nihilist darkened the horizon and close off in the way the brutalist architecture does, close off what we're allowed to become and understand ourselves as. Then I think the work of our time is to open it back up.

And that is really what the humanities are fundamentally about. You can go back to one of the things I despise about the current structure of the academy. Is it acts as though these things are just for the few? But you know, you think about Homer. I mean, Homer was the mode of educating the Greeks for, you know, a thousand years.

The Pantheon was right there on the highest hill where everyone could see it. Same with Gotha Garcatecher. You know, J.S. Bach, perhaps the greatest musician who ever lived was a parish church musician. Anyone I presume could walk in the doors and listen to his, to his, to his contadas. I mean, Dickens, when Dickens wrote,

I've heard recently, people would line the docs to wait to see what was the next installment of Dickens. And so what I think most fundamentally is that the antidote to the spiritual crisis, civilization, cultural crisis we're living in is really fundamentally simple in at least it's what we can state it as and that is to to to open the horizon again to turn the lights back on And what that means is to turn them on so that individuals can better come to understand themselves in relation to these higher-order realities in the image of which they are made and in relation to which their fundamental realization

essentially depends. So we have, so there's critiques of, let's say, thought in relationship to the ideal, that Freudian critique of religious structure, that it's infantile. And perhaps that's a consequence of the hypothesis of the divine afterlife that awaits us all. Freud regarded that as an infantile response to the reality of death. And there's the Marxist criticism that religion only serves power. And it's the opiate of the masses. But there's, it's striking to me how poorly the alternative position has been defended given its unbelievable power I mean look

We all seem to recognize within ourselves that we have moral culpability as far as I can tell because I've never met anyone Who hasn't tortured themselves to a tremendous degree as a consequence of their own perceived inadequacies in relationship to the ideal. I see that people take the deepest pleasure that's possible in life in the facilitation of the development of others. I don't believe that I believe that's wisdom to notice that, to say, well, it isn't the service to my momentary desires for pleasure, or even comfort for that matter, where I'm going to find the deepest significance, life-sustaining significance that keeps me away from nihilistic hell and the desire to destroy and hurt. It's going to be something like service to the greater good. And primarily in the form of, well, other people,

and their longest possible term interests and that we have not only a divine responsibility to do that, but a divine capacity to do that, that if not manifested, or cripples us spiritually and physically for that matter. And I mean, the ultimate significance of that remains unknowable, but I don't see any logical flaws in the proposition. I mean, I looked at the manner in which the Mesopotamians built their savior, Mardek. Mardek has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words. The cosmos comes into being and disappears as a consequence of his utterances. And there's this sense emerging

in Mesopotamia, as the consequence of the aggregation of all these cultures, that the highest order being is extraordinarily attentive, hence the all encircling eyes, and is capable of the deepest and most profound speech. And that's not a realization that's in any means trivial. The Mesopotamians had wars between all of their representations of their gods, and what they elevated to the highest position was this all-seeing, truth-speaking capacity that also went forward and confronted chaos and built the world as a consequence. And the influence of that set of ideas or the derivation from the set, same set of ideas

for the Jewish conception of Yahweh is quite clear. And you see the same thing emerging in Greece with the, with the building of a pantheon of gods and the proposition that something occupies the apex, something Apollinian or something of that nature. And then you see that revolution take place with the dawn of Christianity and the insistence that there's something fundamental about consciousness the spoken truth that is constitutive of reality. And you ask yourself, well, do you believe that? And the answer is, well, you treat people like you believe that because you hold them responsible for the consequences of their utterances and you judge their character on the basis of what they say.

And you end on whether or not they act out what they say. And so we hold each other to these standards with everything that we do. And we be right ourselves when we don't live up to them. And I don't understand how it is that we can be said not to believe it. Now, you know, there's the dogmatic element, the hypothesis, for example, that Christ is literally the son of God. And I mean, my knowledge runs out very, very rapidly when speculating about such things. But I'm certainly, certainly seems to me that Christianity has at least been a very long conversation about what the nature of the good is, and that that spilled out into the humanities and and underlies our culture, and that that that has very little

to do with the expression of power. It's it's the it's not the right lens through which to view things. It's devastating, it's wrong, it's cynical, and I think it appeals to envy and the desire to tear down. Well, I think that the two things I would say just very quickly, Jordan, the first is that Well, two things I would say just very quickly, Jordan. The first is that, you know, we have immense resources in our own past and in the past of every culture. I mean, one of the things I love about your work is how sync-retisted. Yes, you know, here you've moved. In the last five minutes, you know, moved from Marduk to, you know, the Pantocrator to

the Greeks. And good on you for doing it. I mean, that's, I think I want to say that you say people have not been good at making the counter-argument, well, you've been very, very good at making the counter-argument and the millions of people who have had their lives touched and enabled and deepened by taking seriously the things you point towards

are proof of that. You know, I think relative to our spiritual cultural crisis, we should not pretend that we don't have resources. I mean, it's as if the situation is, if you were to give young people the challenge of building something beautiful and if you were to say, well, you're absolutely not allowed to look at or have any knowledge of any previous building. Well, the're absolutely not allowed to look at or have any knowledge of any previous building.

Well, the results are not going to be very good. But as soon as you say, and you can go back to Paladio and Betrubius and look at all these models and discover all of the things that they give you, I mean, the results will be amazing. And so what I want to, I want to drive towards a kind of optimism, not rooted in kind of silly blindness about the depth of our problems, but rather in the nature of what is most real and the whole treasure house of tools.

It's like we have these spotlights from the past to help us understand ourselves and the world around us in philosophy, in religion, in literature, in architecture, in art, in painting, in music. I mean, for God's sake, I mean, we've got, we've got an unspeakable treasure house here. And it may be that as we dig into that, we see that we uncover ourselves more

and understand ourselves more adequately. You know, one example, for example, I think one thing that is, as I live in beautiful, very beautiful city in historic Savannah, and I live on the edge of a just absolutely stunning civic space park called Forsyth Park. I hope you can come and see it someday. There's a beautiful fountain in the middle of it,

and it has these oak trees, these live oaks that were planted by people long dead now, these oaks of, you know, one to two to even 300 years old. And I not infrequently see young couples coming to stand in front of one of the biggest oak inside the park proper to get married. They stand there with the justice of the peace and exchange simple vows. I think we have to ask ourselves what in the hell is going on there? It seems to me very beautiful and in a way, very simple. It's that they wish that their vows, they're aspiring to be to each other in some way as the oak tree, as able to live up to the love that they are called to. and they want to instantiate that by by. Well, that's why we turned to the garden and the tree in the center. Yes. Yes. It's the incarnation of Christ within.

That's what it's acting out. That's the idea. I mean, in some sense, it's the consumption of the saving element, but the saving element is actually a mode of being. And this isn't hit home. It's like, look what the church demands, everything of you, Yeah. Absolutely everything.

And then the reason that people are leaving is because that adventure isn't being put before the mess. Like, look, you can have your cars and your money and all of that. But that's nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on. Yes. I wish you'd preached to our people because I think you're absolutely right about that. The language we'd use is be a saint. That's the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint. A saint means someone who's holy or utterly conformed to Christ. Now, press that to be conformed to Christ means you're willing to go into the dysfunction

of the world, to bear its pain, and to bear to it the ever greater divine mercy and love. Now fill in the blank, Francis of Assisi. Mother Teresa may be an artime, like when we were younger, if someone said, well, who's a living saint? We all would have said Mother Teresa. But what did she do? She went into the worst slum in the world. I've been there. And she bore the suffering of the world, literally picking up the dying and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering. And she took on herself the wounds of Jesus. But then think about the smile of Mother Teresa. She brought to that place the ever greater, more super abundant

mercy of Christ. That's being a saint. And you're dead right. I think we're not sufficiently calling our people to that kind of... I can tell you, you're rolling. I've experienced, and this is really something to see. I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially with a dare to, in between, to large audiences, three to 10,000 all the time, something like that. And I always paid attention to the audience singly because I was always talking to one person at a time, but also on

mass, to see, to hear, because if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source, then there's silence. And sometimes that silence can be dramatic. And that's why people say, well, you could have heard a pin drop. It's no one's moving because their attention is 100% gripped by whatever just happened. And one thing that reliably elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility. And people that, and I thought, I thought part of the reason that

that produced silence was because no one says that now. They say happiness or they say rights or they say privileges or, or they say reward or something like that, they don't say, pick up the heaviest load you can carry and carry for that matter and stumble forward. And I've seen people cut those ideas and put them on t-shirts and play with them. And so it's not that the church is asking too little of its people. I'm recommending that we remember that meaning in life, and this is also something I'm doing empirical work on, right? That meaning in life is mostly bound, right,

at the non-propositional level, and it does feed into things like sacredness. I think reverence is the proper virtue of all. Reference is the virtue that helps us appropriate. Well, friends mean it as it hold, as hold in ritual and as hold as a marker, or as a as a pointer for ritual emulation. I think it's I think rep.

That's embodiment. That's and that's the that's the pulling in of that personality into the self. I think that's right, but I think what awe see, awe is really interesting because ah, because you can measure this, ah is one of the few instances where people sense of self and ego centrist

on is is shrunk and they, but they find it a positive experience and they want it to continue. Right. Well, that's, that's how what we experience in relationship to our current ego when we hypothesize our ideal as well. I think that's right.

And that goes to I mean, those are the same things because all capture all is the ideal. All is our unconscious ideal capturing us. Hmm. Think about it. It's the spirit within. So imagine this. You we need you already admitted, so to speak, that we're, you know, akinotic representations of the central animating spirit of the ages. And that speaks from our unconscious because it's embodied within us.

And then it finds its grip on us in awe, in admiration. Would you say, though, so does the quack like would you say that it's not only the unconscious within us, but the unconscious without us? Because I think what all is doing is disclosing the inside. It's the unconscious in the books behind you. Yes, and also the unconscious in the world. Because I think part of what we're, I think we got too locked

into the notion of the sacred as perfection, completion. This is one of my critiques of Plato, although I'm normally a lover of Plato. And I think you can see in the mystics and in many traditions. This is a claim I can back up, but I'm just going to throw it out there. Even in Jonathan's tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy, it's the sacred, the good becoming better. Well, the sacred is an inexhaustible ness, right? And yes, that's why I'm asking that question. Yes, yes, because when I've had visions of heaven, heaven is a place that's perfect in getting better.

Well, okay, well, okay, let me give you my sense. The place where I don't have visions, but the place where I experience what I'm talking I wouldn't recommend them necessarily. Yeah, well, I mean, we can compare all three states of consciousness in other time perhaps. Yeah, okay. You really like to do that would you? Well, let me just finish the point I was making. So for me, don't be before on to another universe you mean? Yeah.

See, for me, I tell people that Plato is sacred, which does not mean that I can't question him. It does not mean that I can disagree with him. It means the following. Plato transforms me, I go out and live my life for a while. The world then changes me because of the way I've been changed. I come back and I see things in Plato I didn't see before. And then I go back to the world.

The thing is, what I do- The Bible does that for people? Yes, and that's why the Bible is sacred. And what Plato, I think argues, and what Taoism argues, and I think Christianity argues where there's also the book of nature, there's always the two books of Revelation. You can actually experience that with respect to nature, I don't particularly like that term, but you can experience that with where the world is. I think introverts do that in particular. That's a hypothesis of mine. I don't have evidence for it,

but I've noticed my introverted clients need to be renewed by nature. When I've tried to reduce this, I mean, that experience of awe. So we went to a, we went to a whole conference on that. So if you see someone that you really admire, that shades into awe. And you can see that in, in the affected celebrities have on the, on the public. It's a parallel, it can be paralyzing. So the admiration, there's a continuum between admiration and awe.

And then you can easily make the case, I think, that admiration is the felt sense of the instinct to imitate. So you see children, maybe they'll hear a worship someone, and then they'll imitate them. They'll copy them. They find someone who's in that zone of proximal development and they start to copy them or they'll take on the identity of a hero or heroine in a movie might my little

granddaughter who's three for a year now literally a year she has two names scarlet and and and Ellie Elizabeth and we kind of call her one or the other and if you ask her Is she scarlet she'll say yes? Is she Ellie? Yes. Is she Pocahontas? Yes Is she scarlet Ellie or Pocahontas? Pocahontas One year now she watched that Disney movie over and over and she has a Pocahontas. One year. Now she watched that Disney movie over and over and she has a Pocahontas doll.

But she's picked that figure and that's quasi-mythological figure obviously, not a historical figure. She's picked that as her identity. And I see that as we can imitate people. We talked about reality and hyper reality before. Well, you can find someone you admire and they're real, or you can find someone who's a mythological figure and they're hyper real. And the hyper reality is so adaptive that imitating the hyper real is more adaptive than imitating the real. And that's to me, that's the essence of the religious instinct. It's to derive the hyperreal and then to imitate that. And I think that's what worship means essentially all with everything stripped away. And so that's a profound instinct because human beings are unbelievable mimics. I mean,

that's a very underappreciated element of our cognitive architecture, a fundamental element. And that instinct to admire and experience off facilitates that mimicry, and that increases the probability, the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior. Okay, so, and then what does what? That makes of the religious domain something real as far as I'm concerned, even real from the biological sense. But that deepens the mystery of the involvement of the psychedelics in that. Like are they are they parasitizing that? Are they like cocaine hyperstimulates the psychomotor stimulant system. Well, does psychedelics hyperstimulate the imitation awe system? And is that an illusion or is it in fact, the revelation of something deeper?

Yeah, to circle back to the ontological question. So just recently I listened to a lecture that Francis Collins gave. Now, so Francis Collins, you may recognize is director of the National Institutes on Health. And he was also the director of the human genome project. So he's a strongly credentialed scientist as one can have, and yet he's absolutely confirmed Christian. And so he was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of, I think he called it, harmonization of a scientific and religious worldview. But he was laying out his arguments for the existence of God.

And one of them would be his claim, and it's an interesting claim, and you could argue it, but the existence of moral law, that there is an absolute moral law. Look, I looked at Jack Panke's work, and he shows that you see complex morality emerging rats in play, play iterated play, which is a crucial issue, right? What pattern of behavior is sustainably optimal across repeated social interactions? Well, you know, you hear all these postmodern critiques say of hierarchical structure because of its predication on power. I think, no, no, corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power. Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal, on reciprocity, on productive reciprocity. You know, I was talking to this, this Jocke Willink, who was the commander of Fallujah

in the 20 years ago, and he's a real warrior type, you know, like a real intimidating person physically, mentally for that matter. He talked about his Navy SEAL training, and, you know, he said, well, we were taught. It was pounded into us to have the back of the guy next to us. It wasn't like every powerful clambering ape for himself, not at all, in these intensely

competitive hierarchies, which would be, you'd think, as pure manifestation of the power mode of S would be possible, Power is not the guiding ethos. And he said, quite clearly, no, your men won't attend to you unless it's reciprocal. They have to know you have their backs. And so, and he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate in strategizing and also in taking care of your team. And so I don't believe that, so what am I getting at in relationship to your last point? This religious, this emergent ethic, this natural law, okay, so imagine now, hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle if they're to be stable and productive across long spans of time. And a pattern that pattern emerges cross culturally. It's reciprocal productivity, something like that. There's more to it than that.

You're selected for your success in those hierarchies based on your ability to manifest that pattern because that'll push you up the hierarchy. That increases, as far as I can tell, that increases your attractiveness as a potential mate substantially. And so I think you can make a very deep biological case for the, even for the emergent evolution of an ethical sense. And I think that does speak to people in the voice of their conscience. And that is part of ex... Well, then you think, well, if that's part of existence, how deep a part is it? How built-in is it? You know, and I don't... And that I suppose depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to be. Okay, so back to the gentleman that you were discussing.

He was talking about a natural ethic. Yeah. Well, I think as a pointer to God, something absolute about the nature of what more law is, and from that standpoint, if you're willing to go that route, then maybe these experiences are actually pointing to something that is absolute and true and informative. Do you think that's true? I don't know. I'm a scientist. It's fine to be investigating it.

Yeah. No, I want to pin you down. Let's see. I'm trained as a scientist. My default is to be deeply curious and to be deeply skeptical. Right. It's the right attitude towards all of this. my response always is that I believe in the data. And so that remains an open question.

But it's certainly fun to toy with as an alternative framing of what's going on. I mean, we're in the middle of this huge, huge mystery. I understand and appreciate the symbolic significance of the ideal human being. And that finds its embodiment. And I took these ideas in large part from Jung and Eric Noiman 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. And that ideal has us, right? And that's where it's very interesting to consider the role of conscience,

because your conscience will call you out on your behavior. And so it seems to function as something that's somewhat independent, or at least as something that you can't fully voluntarily control, because if you could voluntarily control it, then you just tell the pesky little bastard to go away, or to pat you on the back continually, because there 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 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 Christinity, 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, but the thing is, is the deeper you go into biology,

the more it shades into something that appears to be religious because you start analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself. And, and it becomes something, psyche itself and it becomes something, well, it becomes something with a power that transcends your ability to resist it. So, okay, so you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective and the critic, 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 CS 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 know.

I'm amazed at my own belief and I don't understand it. Like because I've seen 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, that seems to me oddly plausible. Yeah. But I still don't know what to make of it. It's too, it's part because it's too terrifying. A reality to fully believe. I don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it. This critic said that the mere 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

root. 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 relationship between attention, psyche, and the way the world reveals itself to us,

then it scales up after that. It jumps up a level. And 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 where it's a for it's attention that people like the word worship. It's a form of reverence, a form of veneration. You submit yourself to that aim. It's not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it, you actually have to submit yourself to that,

which is to what you're aiming. And so that's what... That's what it's 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, 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 load is, immense though it is, crushing though it is even requires the participation of others. So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people to be along with you. It's a collective enterprise, even though it's an individualistic, even though it requires the perfection, it requires as much perfection as is possible

at the individual level. That's not enough. There has to be that communal elements as well. You need help. We all need help to aim as high, the highest aim requires communal endeavor. Yeah. And it's also because it actually is the way

that everything works, you know. It's like the chair aiming to be a chair is a, is it constitutive of parts which are joined together towards a, a, a, a same goal and therefore hold together as it 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. I agree. Well, 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. But, and this is a matter of definition in some sense. And it's actually not impossible to understand is that you aim at something better, generally speaking. I mean, maybe you're out to cause pain, but forget about that. You 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 CS Lewis' insistence that that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history. And I'm not like, I should believe that. And I tend not to believe things without a why. There's always a why. And there's a hurdle there that I waver on constantly, because while I said that 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. 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 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 Nazis basically wanted a de-sincarnated 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 place where it happened? And that's the place.

But it had to be some 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. you