The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 202. Meaning, Awe and Conceptualization of God - pt. 2

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

This episode is comprised of multiple Season 4 episodes from the podcast, specifically, Jonathan Pageau, Randall Wallace, Iain McGilchrist, Bishop Barron, Stephen Fry, and John Vervaeke.We have paired this compilation with some exciting upcoming episodes in the form of next Monday’s podcast which is a conversation between Jordan, Jonathan Pageau, Bishop Barron, and John Vervaeke where they discuss many of the same concepts you will hear about today - as well as the role of the psychedelics in religious tradition. 

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, season 4 episode 59. I'm Michaela Peterson. This is part 2 of Meaning, awe, and conceptualization of God, where I will continue to investigate the religious realm. Part 1 was released last week, check it out if you haven't already. This episode is comprised of multiple season 4 episodes from the podcast, specifically Jonathan Pazzo, Randall Wallis, Ian McGill Christ, Bishop Baron, Stephen Fry, and John Verveki. This is a good one. We've paired this compilation with some exciting upcoming episodes in the form of next Monday's podcast, which is a conversation between Jordan, Jonathan, Pazzo, Bishop Baron,

and John Verveki, where they discuss many of the same concepts you'll hear about today, as well as the role of Psychedelics in Religious Tradition. This Saturday, tomorrow, we're also releasing a talk given by Jonathan Paso to the Montreal Young Society. Jordan and Tammy, my parents, were both so impressed by this talk that Jordan decided to add this conversation to the official canon of his biblical series. Stay tuned for part three of Meaning Aw and the conceptualization of God next Thursday. That will be the final part of this series. Quick Peterson update. We're in Cambridge and the London in the UK.

It is so wonderful to be with family and not have to worry about health. Thank God for that. I can't believe that nightmare is over. I hope you enjoy this episode and have a wonderful weekend. Where does your insistence that values are part of the structure of being, like, where does that find its limit? Because the classic limit of that is something like, in fact, the definition of the utmost place of value in some sense is almost indistinguishable

from the claim that there is a God. And so, a God is not the same as an engineering God. And I was taking enormous pains in the book. It cost me more than anything I've ever written to write the chapter called The Sense of the Sacred, in which I try to help people to a place where they can understand why people use this extraordinarily difficult word God. You know, it's not a satisfactory term, but it's the term we have to have to name an aspect of our experience that if we don't name it disappears from our lives. And that's not to say that there isn't something there that is that merits whatever we

mean when we say divine. I mean we haven't defined, we haven't defined what you mean by divine. And we're back in the nets of language. We're trapped in the nets of language, as Shelling said. But what I'm suggesting is that as whitehead suggested, and come on whitehead, that as whitehead suggested, and come on, whitehead was also the co-author with Russell of the Principia Mathematica. He wasn't a fantasist. He had this, I think, incredibly deep idea that whatever one likes to call the divinity God, whatever, is the thing that the cosmos has relation with. Relation is at the core of being. I even argue that relation is prior to the relator, prior to the things that are related.

That sounds nonsense. How can you relate, how can you have a relation if there isn't anything yet to relate? But there's a wonderful image called, in Indian mythology called Indra's net, which covers the universe. And in it, the idea is that the filaments of the net exist before the net, before the crossing points,

which are the things we see. And on those crossing points, there are little gems which reflect every other gem in the net. And that would take a very long time to unpack, but perhaps it can set things going, people's minds. But the idea idea I have- The gesture to the right hemisphere. Is that relation is prior to anything at all, really.

And that therefore, whatever you mean by God and whatever we mean by the cosmos are in some sort of dynamic relation, which isn't evolving one, in which the outcome is excitingly not known. If it weren't known, it would all be some horrible, possibly sadistic play, an almighty, all-knowing God. I mean, then look, I'm going to be talking to Rowan Williams shortly, but I don't want to go go into all that I mean by that. I don't think God is on Nisent and on Nippleton, but I don't think he's not either. Just in the same way, I don't want to go go into all that I mean by that. I don't think God is on Nissington on Nippleton,

on Opheton, but I don't think he's not either. It's just in the same way I don't think he's green and I don't think he's not green. I think the terms are wrong, but you know, we can go there if we want and later or another day. But the thing what I'm saying is that these that God is discovering, is that God is discovering, becoming unfulfilling whatever God is, through the relationship, which classically, in most religions, is described as love, which is, after all, just like a form of gravity, in the world of life and emotion,

rather than just in the world of the so-called inanimate. And so, therefore, we are coming into being, God is coming into being, and we're necessary to one another's coming into being. It's not that God does a bit to us, and then we do a bit back to God. It's like, I've read a very good book. I keep mentioning it by a young microbiologist in America called Crish Sharma, called interdependence. And she argues very importantly that it's not just that, certainly it's not just that an animal or an organism molds its environment. Nor is it just good enough to recognize that while an animal

affects and shapes its environment, the environment shapes the animal or the organism. But this is not a, you know, turn by turn process, it's not that the animal shapes the environment should then in its turn shapes the animal. It's an entirely simultaneous process of coming into being, of co-creation, if you like. Now this idea of simultaneous coming into being is an ancient one, but I think it's a very deep one philosophically and a very important one. So that accounts for your objection to the idea of the omniscient determining God? Absolutely, absolutely, because the God would have no creation,

creation is not really just the unfolding of something that's already there. The idea of negative theology is, you fundamentally, I wonder if this is like Jung's circumambulation, you fundamentally understand God by saying what God is not, but not, of course, randomly, right? What you're trying to do is.

Oh, that's sort of like the God of the gaps. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, sorry. Oh, no, that's, don't apologize. We're friends talking. That's right. Well, I don't want to derail the conversation, so. It's been like this, and it's been wonderful. It feels to me like doing poetry.

No, it's more of a recognition of not of the God of the gaps, but of a recognition how our categorical scheme is always inadequate. So for example, is God an object? Well, no, that's wrong. Is God a subject? Like the way we are? No, that's wrong, too. That's in the...

Right, so God escapes our categorical... It right. God is by definition in some sense, what escapes our categorized. Because God is supposed to be the grounding of the intelligibility that makes the categorical scheme possible. At least that's the deal. But it's also presence within present within the category scheme, if it's set up properly. Right. So, so the point about negative, that's why it's not just the God of the gaps. The point is, I see, I see, I see, I see why it's not just the God of the Gaps. The point is the C within the categories, but it's not capturable within the categories. That's what you're trying to do. The reality supersedes the categories.

And that's why you're not supposed to make idols. You're not supposed to make representations of the icons to some Jonathan back into the conversation one more time. You can make icons, right? And you've got John Merriens' distinction between the idol and the icon. What's the distinction? The distinction? The icon does not capture God.

Right. That's exactly it. That's artwork. So an artwork is an icon. Exactly. And a propaganda is an idol. Yes. I would agree with both of those statements.

Well, isn't that something? Because they're really in some sense, far astray, aren't they? But they do map. And so how cool is that? So art is art is the icon. How cool and propaganda is the idol? Exactly, man. And you know, and I had these paintings in my house and they were melds of the icon and

the idol, right? Because it's all this socialist realism. I have 200 pieces of socialist realism watching the icon and the idol fought fight with each other. But and the problem is they aren't and I want to get the an apology of this word. They at a superficial level of similarity, they can easily be confused. Yes, they can be confused. Okay. Yes. Well, that they and I would say they will inevitably confused in the absence of God Well, and I because propaganda like this is something I've been working on to John is that yeah You know that we we make religious the next thing on the hierarchy if we don't give to what is religious

It's proper place and I think the new atheists are beginning to realize this The amount of the world's evil that's a consequence of our voluntary moral insufficiencies is indeterminate. You know, so you might say, hypothetically speaking, that as part of God's creation, we actually have important work to do. And if we shirk it, the consequences are real. And you might say, well, that's just an apology for God. And perhaps that's the case. And perhaps there's no God at all. And so what the hell are we talking about? But, but I do think it's an important issue. I mean, your life is characterized by a stellar level of constant productive creativity. That's that that's you

and you're offering that to the world. And that seems necessary. And maybe it's because the problems are real and important. And the role we have to play ethically is of paramount importance, truly. Yeah. Why else would we torture ourselves with conscience? And I would say that's the flowering of the religious instinct within you.

Well, you could describe it as that, but then you know, there are, I mean, you used to phrase earlier than I wanted to say, whoa, hang on, I'm not sure I know what that means, a higher mode of existence. I don't see, I remember having this argument with John Cleese of all people some years, he was a great lover of the Tibetan book of the dead and Gil Brown and people like that and I've always found them slightly hard to take and he talked about a he I think the phrase he used was a higher level of consciousness and I said I don't and again this is my empiricist thing it sounds cynical and skeptical it's not meant to be but what level who's at what a describer level? What is a higher mode? Why higher?

What's higher than another? Are you saying it in terms of animals? It's a view. It's an old fashioned, Huxley in view of evolution that most modern, Richard Dawkins, for example, most modern evolutionary scientists and so on, the etologists would deprecate to say that there is a higher level of being,

a higher mode of consciousness. Is it just like saying, well, you're better educated, you've read more, you know more. Is it you've somehow been enlightened? But effect, clans, effect, as the Germans would say, which is which is not necessarily intellectual, but is somehow spiritual. And if so, spiritual and if so, where show me an example of it, show me someone who has a higher mode of existence than I do or the... I can answer that, I think, to some degree, three ways, one, that higher mode of existence is what your conscience torches you for not attaining. Okay.

I think what my conscience torches me for not attaining is that I was rude to someone yesterday and I shouldn't have been. Right, but it's the shouldn't part of it. Yes, the obligation. It's the tea. Exactly. David Hume, the problem of ought. Yeah. Well, and then you think you think you think about how it manifests itself. You don't. This is why Nietzsche was wrong. You cannot create your own values. Right. The values impose themselves on you independent of your will. Now, maybe you part, well, that's what your conscience does and good luck trying to control it. This is very anti-neature, isn't it?

Well, I'm a great admirer of you. I know you are. That's why I made the point. Well, well, opposite to his philosophy. But it's well, so Jung embarked on a lengthy critique of nature and it's part of his work that isn't well known, I would say, but and we'll leave that be except to say that the psychoanalysts starting with Freud, well, not really, but popularized by Freud and systematized, showed that we weren't masters in our own psychological house. There were autonomous entities, and those would be the Greek gods to some degree that operated within us, and we were... Which is Julian James's point, exactly, yes. We're in... yes, yes. I have my problems with James, but as an overarching idea, there's interest in it. Okay, so there are

things happening with us and to us in the moral domain that we cannot control. Yeah. And that's that's stunned me when I first learned it as a proposition. It's, oh, yes, look at that. Here's one. What are you interested in? Yeah. Well, that grips you. Okay. Number two, what is your conscience bother you about? Okay. That's your inadequate by your own standards. Now, what adequate would mean? That's a different question, but it's defined negatively by conscience.

Yes. And then, better, there's one, I said, I would lay out three. You can look at Jean-Pierre J. is work on developmental psychology. The development of the subject, yes. He was a genetic epistemologist. Yes, we wanted to do, this is what he wanted to do. He wanted to unite science and religion, that was his goal.

And he wanted to look at the empirical development of values. And what he concluded, at least in part, was that a moral stance that's better than a previous moral stance does all the things that the previous moral stance does plus something else. Yes. Yes. And you can say the same thing as a scientific theory. I remember I had a great, I loved Piaget and his observation was so empirical of course. Yes. Absolutely. All the development of the child and the, not quite the theory of mind, that wasn't his thing, but similar developments and signposts where people become aware of self.

Okay, so now Piaget looks specifically at the development of morality. And he was one of the first people to emphasize the importance of games. And what he showed, what he showed was that at two years old, let's say, a child can only play a game with him or herself. But at three, both children can identify an aim and then share it in a fictional world. And so that's partly pretend play and the beginnings of drama and then cooperate and compete within that domain. And then what happens in the game theorists have shown this is that games out of games morality emerges. There's a recid. So I'll give you an example and this is a crucial example. So if you pair juvenile rats together, the males,

they have to play. They have to rough and tumble play because their prefrontal cortices don't develop properly if they don't. Anyways, they have to play. You pair a big rat and a little rat, teenage rats together, and the big rat will stomp the little rat. First, first encounter. So then you say power determines hierarchy. Yeah. Okay, but then you pair the rats multiple times, like 50. Yeah. Then if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time, the little rat will stop inviting him to play. And so you get an emergent reciprocity, even at the level of the rat.

Yeah. One of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is something like a tension. It's something 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 it 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 chairs a good example because you know You can try to define it objectively, but you end up with bean bags and stumps and exactly They don't have anything in common while they're both made of matter, you know for whatever that's worth It's pretty pretty trivial level of commonality, but you can sit on them. Yeah, and that's what happens.

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 objective world is ineluctively contaminated with its utility. And then they're there for 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 kind of good. You're good luck. It's a deluded activity. Well, it's also very, very difficult because you don't know what to make of something like time because time hasn't ineradiably 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. And this is something that this intermingling of value, in fact, was something that I never thought I made much traction 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 books. That's a memory trouble. I'll remember it. Yeah, 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 it's off 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 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 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, you know, and there's mascots. The hockey league example is very interesting because it's a, it's a, it's a social game and, you know, all the players It's a social game and know 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 you hit the small space in the net block though it may be 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 the ethic that that's being celebrated as a consequence of this great game. Yeah. 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, one of the things.

Got to saw them pro wrestling. There's a great documentary, a Bret 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 Brett 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 just 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 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. 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, in his story, you see, if you, 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, 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.

Yeah. limit to what would happen if you acted like God existed. You know what I mean? Because I believe that 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, you're not as sufficient. You're not the way you live as sufficient testament to the truth. And some 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, people don't manifest, 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 that enables the outside observer to easily conclude that they believe. Yeah. Now the way to deal with that, or the way to understand that, is that 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 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, which kind of overwhelm them, and they live in that joy and sadness non-stop, and they pray, you know, without end. And so that exists, but then we, in this, that's one of the reasons why... That's kind of one of the reasons why, when I talk about this idea of attention,

like it manifests itself in the church as well, is that you often say, and I understand it, when you say something like, I act as if God exists or I'm afraid to say that God exists. And I think it's because 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 going to hear this again. Well, then I have a terrible problem with that 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 yolk of Christ being light and that there was joy in it. And, um. 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. 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, and become much more overtly religious, I would say. And 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, at a volume that's really quite incomprehensible. But despite that, well, despite that, I'm struggling with this because I don't know how to reconcile myself to the fact of constant pain. Yeah. And I feel that it's unjust,

which is halfway to being resentful, which is not a good outcome. No, I 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 I don't have that I don't live with the 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 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 easy, maybe easy for me to just say it that way. But that's always been the answer of way, but that's always been the answer of Christianity, which is that that God went to to the cross and that God went down into death and and plunged down into death. And there are that there are mysteries hidden and there may be they're very well hidden, but there are mysteries hidden in that than that depth.

there are mysteries hidden in that depth. But 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 I understand CS.S. 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 in the world is constituted so that God

took on flesh and was crucified and died in rows 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, but, 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 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, 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 unfolding of a symbolic landscape over centuries or millennia that's part of human biological and cultural evolution,

but that starts to touch on the religious anyways when you describe it in those terms. Like 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, oh, it's like John Allegro's the sacred,

the mushroom and the sacred cross. Do you know of that book? I believe that's the title. That's The Mushroom and The Sacred Cross. Do you know of that book? I believe that's the title. Well, it's another book you read and you think, well, I have no idea what, it's a study of mushroom symbolism in Christianity. And it's another book that, it claims that Christianity was heavily influenced

by psilocybin 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. But Ion is really like that. And well, one of the things that, for example, you 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.

So not just the story in scripture, but let's say the whole story has 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, you know, or or or or died and then and then rose again. But that's actually not the story of Christ because if you 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 destroy his 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. 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 this, from the most insane conspiracy theory to the most, you know, like 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. That's why 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. No, and that is one of the things that narrative does is that it enables us to play out ideas that we're not yet intelligent enough to understand. And sometimes the gap between the narrative representation and the explicit understanding can be thousands and thousands of years. Because we're still unwrapping.

Well, we're certainly still unwrapping the Bible. We're unwrapping, we're still unwrapping Shakespeare. There's more depth there than we can, than we can understand explicitly. And so anything that uses character has that tremendous advantage. And then it also, there's also this strange ability that some people have in spades to create fictional worlds that are of unbelievable profundity and power. I mean, the greatest example of that in the last 30 years, in terms of sheer imaginative powers, gotta be JK rolling and the Harry Potter series,

which gripped the imagination of the entire planet for a decade, and produced untold wealth and spread literacy everywhere as well. She had an unremarkably creative imagination and something quite mysterious. And so you're fortunate enough to work at the marriage of ideas and drama. Yes, and you know, it's really interesting when you've spoken about Dostoevsky and others in some of your lectures. I'm fascinated by him and all the Russians. I studied Russian for four years in college and read some of these in the original. My Russian wasn't fluent enough for me to really, I mean, I had to grind

through them, but Tolstoy, check-off, check-off who was a doctor, a medical doctor, as well as a writer, so that, that congruence of, of a commitment, not just in terms of literature, but that he used his profession as a doctor to also inform him as a writer. He famously said, medicine is my wife and literature is my mistress. And when I tire of one, I spend time with the other. And Pushkin, who would write stories that were full of thought, but the story itself was bigger than

any thought he could put around it. It was more resonant. It carried more. By the way, when I listened to your biblical series, it caused me to decide to read through the whole Bible and just start to finish. And I grew up Southern Baptist, so ever since I could read, I've read the Bible virtually every day of my life. But I'd never read the Bible, start to finish. And there were some books that even when I was religion major at university I would get to some of the books and go I can't stay awake for this book. I just got to move on. But when you really go through it and you see the the Old Testament as this this incredible saga of the people trying to find the rules that kept them together as the people. And it felt, if you disobey these rules, then it's going to end badly for us all.

And the greatest violation is to erect altars to other gods. That's the worst. That's false idols other gods. That's for sure. That's for false idols, yeah. That's the worst one. And then along comes Jesus, who is completely steep in all at all testament. I mean, he is profound in his knowledge of it. And he lives and does and says these things.

But it's not like it's a philosophy. It's a narrative, a narrative which I've studied a great deal and I believe is largely historical, or I should say significantly historical. I believe these things did happen. And then you have St. Paul, who's trying to make sense of what happened. And it's mind-blowing to me. It's mind-blowing to read it as a whole and put it into perspective in that having spent my life

in. Well, what's mind-blowing about it in part? And I try to speak of the Bible, not from the perspective of a committed believer, and I have my reasons for that. I guess it's partly because I want to concentrate on what everyone can come to see as true, I suppose, perhaps that's it. But it is remarkable that the Bible does, in fact, make a coherent narrative, because we don't understand that. It was written by a very diverse range of people over a span of time that we can perhaps not even imagine.

It's very difficult to tell how old the older stories in Genesis particular are. The story of the fall of Adam and and and Cain and Abel, they bear all the hallmarks of a previous oral tradition that would have existed in relatively unchanged form for tens of thousands of years and perhaps even longer than that. And so they're unbelievably ancient and then parts of it obviously are newer. And the written parts are obviously newer than any tentative oral tradition. But you have a, you have the bare minimum, an unbelievably deep psychological document that weaves itself over centuries into a coherent story. And Northrop Fry, I would say, he's a Canadian literary critic,

has did more for me than any other particular thinker to help me understand the nature of the narrative, because Fry, and I suppose he did the same thing, or I'm doing the same thing that he did, because he preceded me also at the University of Toronto. He assessed the Bible as a work of literature, as a narrative. And that, to me, was never any denigration, because a powerful narrative, and you talk about this when you talk about Braveheart, for example, because there isn't that much known about William Wallace historically, but you crafted a narrative that's,

that was true enough, let's say, to be unbelievably attractive to people and to motivate them very deeply, because it's an affecting movie. Well, and if it wasn't, it wouldn't have been so popular. And so there's a truth in narrative that I think is even deeper than historical truth. A true, like a truly profound narrative truth, is like the average of a whole variety of historical truths.

And so it's the essence of historical truth. So it's even more true than what we would consider, say, eyewitness history, because eyewitness history is just, it's one battle, you know? And there's maybe an epic theme in that battle, but then imagine that you could look at a thousand battles and you could and you could extract out from that what was canonical about heroic victory across all 1,000 battles. You see something like that happening in the Old Testament and the narrative, the narrative thread is really quite deep. The societies emerge, formulate, fall off the path, worship false idols, collapse. And then the same thing happens again. And the collapse happens.

And the collapse happens because people become too prideful, the kings in particular. They don't listen to the voice of conscience. They, and a prophetic voice arises and says, you're wandering off the tried and true path and you're going to be punished terribly for that. And generally speaking, the kings ignore that and catastrophe breaks free. And you see, and in the Old Testament in particular, there's the promise of the ultimate state in some sense. There's utopian promises that run through it, the search for the promised land, and then so strangely, you see that transformed into something that's not really political in the New Testament. You see that the promised land becomes the

nature of experience as a consequence of a particular form of moral being. And then perhaps that has political implications because people who acted like that would produce a particular state, but it's no longer. It's no longer the dream of establishing the state that will solve all problems. It's psychologized and it's unbelievably profound. And that's, I think, you can derive all of that from the biblical writings without even starting to move on to classically religious territory. And then that does beg the question, of course, is what does all that wisdom point to in the final analysis? And that's when the questions start to become religious.

Yes. And well, Jordan, that's the part to me that it takes it into a whole different realm, as you say. There's a quote from Mary Oliver that a friend shared with me recently. It's, keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. And I find that in, in a great story and any, or any great piece of art, uh, that surprised is the central currency of its power.

There's an element of, if you will, of revelation, if you will. And I think it was Paul Tillich, I'm not sure who said that religion is man's way to God, and there's always erroneous, but revelation is God's way to man. Maybe it was Karl Bart. It's God's way to man, and there's always perfect. Well, there's a revelatory aspect to any great story. When you're telling someone a story and they didn't see coming, what just happened, that's what makes them awake. That's what stabs them, broad awake. You know what, my, the most powerful takeaway for me was from my biblical series. Which is what? The meaning of the word Israel. Wrestling with God.

We who wrestle with God. We who struggle with God. It's like, well, maybe that's the real Christian spirit. And that's what that phrase implies. And that's the real Jewish spirit. It's the wrestling, John. It's the, why does, you know, why does, why is there that strange scene of the wrestling with the angel?

Like, why would you possibly fight with God? And then you think, well, God, isn't that what I'm doing all the time? And he's not really willing to do so. He's all the time. He partially wins, though. That's what's even more mysterious. And hurts you doing so. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's the story. But isn't that the story? Well, it doesn't believe it's the wrestling with belief and and and it's wrestling in the way that you're wrestling Well, I mean, I do sparring and I often use sparring as a metaphor for the kind of oh, so that's the other metaphor for dialogue

Yeah, exactly. It's not just the tracking. It's the sparring Yeah, and and It's not just the tracking. It's the sparring. Yeah. And we have to remember, you know, that kind of sums up men's relationships. Well, play don't, each other tracking and sparring. Play don't means big shoulders. He was a wrestler. That's his nickname. His nickname is play though, because he's a wrestler. And we have to remember that the Greeks are in the gymnasium, even more than they are in the academy, right? I was watching this suit's episode last night and the the men are always sparring with each other verbally, you know, and they're tracking something. They're tracking victory in this series. They're they're filaia and they wrestle. They wrestle when they fight. They they have to go into

a clinch and a fight to settle their disputes, like a physical fight. But you can shift off of that. This happened Bernardo and I, when we were doing this, we both said this. You can shift off of it. And this happens when you're actually martial arts sparring because you get into the shared flow state. You can shift off a victory to the aesthetics of the dance. There's a beauty in that that is an independent victory, that's independent of victory, that you can come to appreciate for its own sake.

Plato talks about this, he talks about this, the beauty, the aeros that draws you into the, that's why he, I mean, it's a dance. A dance. Yeah, a dance, but it's a dance that draws you beyond yourself. He dues education, right, to draw forth from you. And so is that the, is that the battle with the adversary? Is that related to the, this is another very serious question, to draw forth from you. And so is that the battle with the adversary?

Is that related to the, this is another very serious question, obviously. It's a question related to the book of Job. I don't know because I see parallels, you know, in Nietzsche's quote, you know, I hate Socrates, he's so close to me, I'm always fighting him, right? You can see, you can see both Nietzsche and Kerkegard wrestling with Socrates.

Kerkegard said, I follow Jesus, but Socrates is my teacher. And he wrestles with Socrates all the way through. Everybody's wrestling with Socrates. I follow Jesus, but Socrates is my teacher. So is that the statement of the West? I think that... I mean, that was your objection at the beginning of this talk, right? At least to some degree, because you said how influenced you were with Greece,

you insist upon how influenced you were by Greece. I think the West is the attempt to... If I had to try and summarize the West, what an audacious thing to try and do. See, rock, rock said that... Because I asked him why Dionysus transformed into Christ, we were answering simple questions to and he said well Grease met Judaism. Yeah, but Judaism also met Greece. I mean, five know what theology because of the interaction with with platonic philosophy. I think Christianity is trying to integrate agape and logos together. That's how I try to

understand this project. And please clarify that claim. Sure. So I think I mean we've talked a lot about the Greek heritage of logos and logos is also central within especially in the book of John. Yeah, especially in the book of John. And saying that metaphorically with regard to you as well. But also in the epistle of John is where John also said, God is a gope, right? And then that's the epistle of John. He makes that famous statement. And the idea is there's something,

there's something about the way the logos gather things together. So they belong together. That's the original. So that everything comes together. Everything comes together. And then there's the ideas and galato of the Ascent from the Cave, the Anagaga. You and Jonathan talked about this. The world discloses itself to me, that transforms me. And then I can see more deeply into the world than that transforms me.

And I do this reciprocal opening. And the thing is, that's very much, you know, you know, and that's love. And that's love. Yeah. Accelerating mutual disclosure is how it's even discolored. Well, it seemed to me, well, it seemed to me that the relationship

between truth and love is that love is something like the goal and truth is it's servant. It seems to me to be safe because I so this is how I've worked it on my in my mind is that well I think the truth is the best servant of reality truth is the servant of reality and reality I think best manifests itself as love. Well, one of the slogans I have in my mind that's why why this power claim is so important to me. The claim that power is the central motivating factor for the Western endeavor is tantamount.

I believe to saying that it's the basic endeavor of the human species. And I think that's opposite of the truth. I think this agape is, and logos is more accurate. And so it's not just a counter claim. It's an antithesis. Well, I'm trying to pick up on what you're saying here. I mean, you know, I'm trying to touch on the culture wars, obviously. Well, that's, yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, for me, you're

saying something very analogous to a critique that I've built in awakening from the meaning crisis. That's here at man. Well, shut up. No, it's okay. I mean, I was gonna say one of my signatures is, you know, it's in Latin, but it translates as love is its own way of knowing. And the kind of knowing there is like noticing, like news and insight.

Great. That's the Egyptian eye. Well, yes, it's noticing. It's not thinking thinking it's attention. And maybe you're tying that with that revelation of the form. You're tying that to that revelation of the form and that conforming. Yeah, and that's exactly it. That's exactly it. It's it's it's it's and this is very similar to the Buddhist idea of that the what you're trying to do is shape attention and mindfulness so that you get that reciprocal opening so that you're trying to do is shape attention and mindfulness so that you get that reciprocal

opening so that you're your self-knowledge and the knowledge of the of the world have become indistinguishable, become interpenetrating. Like what you have when you really love somebody in a committed long term relationship, you're knowing of yourself and you're knowing of them become bound up because you indwell them and you internalize them and they indwell you and internalize you, right? And how much how much death of the old you has this involved for you? I know that's a strange question. No, it's a good question.

It's a damn good question. Why? It's a good question because it brings up the idea of the fact that there's a level of knowing that deals with the process of identification itself in both senses of the word identifying, designating something and assuming an identity in both so senses of identification, the kind of knowing that I most care about this participatory knowing involves identification. And therefore, if we're talking about the transformation at that level, we're talking about, that's what I mean about, when I talk about knowing yourself, I don't mean representing yourself. I mean, the knowing that constitutes you as a self. And that's what's undergoing the transformation

with your engagement participatory. When I really love my partner, right? I'm not just forming. What does it mean that you love them? Do you think, cool? If you have any express that? How would you express that? Well, I mean, it means a lot.

It means that reciprocal opening I was talking about, but it means that I, I mean, it's like what Eckhart says. And again, I don't mean to be pretentious. Like, you know, he says, you have to make a space. I don't think you're gonna be able to help it in this conversation. Yeah, that's true, that's fair enough. He says, you know, you have to go pretentious. Like, you know, he says, you have to make a space. I don't think you're going to be able to help put in this conversation. Yeah, that's true. That's fair enough. He says, you know, you have to, God forgive us. The goal of Reynel and mysticism was to this kind of receptivity. You have to make a space so that the Son of God can be born within you. And again, no not being

disrelet, you know, irreligious, but for me to love my partner is to cultivate that kind of receptivity, a space in which she can be within me. And I don't mean in any purely romantic metaphorical sense. What I mean is she finds a purchase within me whereby she can realize herself in both senses of the word realize. And she can come to trust that space, that place of realization will always be available for her. And she can come to rely on space, that place of realization will always be available for her. And she can come to rely on it, a place through which she can transcend herself when she needs to,

I mean, and being committed to that. And finding that inceptorably bound up with my own project of trying to realize who I am, that's for me the core of what it is to love somebody. That's great. I wish you luck with it. Well, that's all we can ever wish anybody. I mean, if you're if you're the grace of God or yeah or or that there is a life to this relationship that will eventually grow strong enough that we can come to trust in it as much as we trust in each other. And that's what I believe is happening for me.

And I think there's kind of three loves involved and they're all bound up together. There's, you know, socratic self-love, not narcissistic self-love, there's the love of the other and then there's the love of the relationship. But that's for me as like a Trinity, talking about if they're separate is the mistake, you have to talk about it analytically as if they're separate, but they interpenetrate and interrefour each other in a profound way. They become, they become in an important sense indistinguishable from each other. Think about this admiration is the instinct to emulate. Okay, so then we look for the most emulatable. That's the ultimate spirit.

And I think Gerard is right that that always carries with it the dark side of memetic envy and covetousness and that those two are always playing off against each other. But because because we think we can possess it by, by, by, you'll God means. That's the story of Cain. Yes, yes. And of course that's carried with us because the story of human history is the battle between Abel and Cain, which is also why I asked you about this fundamental cultural crisis that's tearing us apart.

And I was, you said, well, that's a manifestation of deeper things. And that's, well, that's what I ask, too. Yeah. And that's and I hope that what we've been doing is actually my answer to to that. All I can say more about because I've been involved and I'm involved in some actual experiments on awe and the effects on

cognition and some of the work. I don't know what we've been doing is the answer to that or the antidote to that. To which, sorry. Well, if the question is posed wrong, we can't really answer it, can we? We have to provide an alternative formulation.

But that's what I think we're doing here. Yeah, so it's an antidote rather than an answer. And that's fine. And I know, I know, I'm just clarifying it. I think looking for the answer is in some sense a fundamental way of misframing it. That is to that is to give into the problem. Well, how do we address it then? How do we address it, John? Do we just buy step it and just offer the alternative? No, no, no, think about this. No one, I'm, that's a genuine question, because perhaps we do just by side-step and then

offer the alternative. Yes. That's what I'm saying. you