The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 292. The Language of Creation | Matthieu Pageau

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

Dr. Peterson's extensive catalog is available now on DailyWire+: https://utm.io/ueSXh Matthieu Pageau and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson discuss the meaning of mythos. They draw parallels to the Bible as they discuss Adam and Eve, how their story relates to psychology, and its parallels to modern human behavior. Matthieu Pageau is a Canadian author living in Quebec. For over a decade he’s taken part in discussions regarding religious philosophy and symbolism with his brother and icon carver Jonathan Pageau. This led him to write his first novel: “The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism: A Commentary” —Links— For Matthieu Pageu (Book) The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism: A Commentaryhttps://www.amazon.com/Language-Creation-Symbolism-Genesis-Commentary/dp/1981549331  —Chapters— (0:00) Coming Up(0:53) Intro(3:44) Logos: a Top Down System(11:41) Heaven, Earth, Order, Chaos(16:20) Union of Meaning and Fact(22:00) Adam and Eve, Opposites by Design(29:00) The Talking Snake(35:00) Newton V. Einstein(40:25) Something Above the Head(47:04) Inedible Fruit, Totalitarian Sin(54:19) The Nature of Sin, Fractal Patterns(1:02:10) Tetramorphic Cherubs(1:12:00) The Flaming Sword That Turns on Itself(1:17:13) The Adversary That Loves You(1:27:25) Pageau’s Process for Writing(1:30:30) The Principle of Recursion(1:40:58) Not All Interpretation is Arbitrary(1:48:14) The Cycle of Competition(1:59:47) Jacob and Wrestling the Angel.(2:02:48) Why Pageau Avoided Academia While Writing(2:04:37) Women Tend to be Hypergamous // SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL //Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.com/youtubesignupDonations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate // COURSES //Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com // BOOKS //Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-lifeMaps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning // LINKS //Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast // SOCIAL //Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson #JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus

Hello, everyone. I'm extremely pleased today to be engaging in a discussion with Mr. Matthew Pazzo, who is the brother of Jonathan Pazzo, whose name may be familiar to many of you who are watching and listening. And if it's not, it probably should be. Matthew Pazzo lives in Quebec, Canada. Matthew has been engaged in discussions about the deepest religious matters

with his aforementioned brother, Jonathan Pazzo, a fine artist, orthodox Christian thinker and frequent guest on my podcast for many decades. On Matthew's side, these discussions and the accompanying thoughts resulted in the production of his 2018 book, The Language of creation, cosmic symbolism in Genesis, a commentary which we are going to walk through today, that book manages the difficult combination of extreme depth and extreme clarity. In some senses, it reads like a programming manual of mythic narrative laying out the foundation of the language of creation employed by the foundation of the language of creation, employed

by the authors of the biblical story that, for better or worse, undergirds the entire culture of the West, and increasingly the rest of the world. I hosted Matthew once previously on my podcast, although as a consequence of my recent illnesses, I don't remember that at all, but I am extremely pleased to welcome him back again today. I read his book in depth in the last weeks and was struck by its utility on many fronts and the remarkable manner in which Matthew manages to render what are often otherwise impossibly complex and mysterious symbolic representations, both lucid and clear in a manner that depends on a tremendous knowledge of the interrelationship between all of the different aspects of the biblical text and the interpenetration of all of its verses.

So I thought it would be extremely useful for me and hopefully for everyone who's listening and perhaps even for Matthew to walk through his book in some detail and then to talk about what his next set of ambitions might be. And so welcome, Matthew. I'm very much looking forward to talking all of this through with you.

Yes, thanks for having me. Thanks you for that great introduction. Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. It was really, it was really something to read your book. It's not like any other book on religious thinking that I've encountered. I'm very familiar with work by Merchè Aliyada, say, and Carl Jung, and they're much more tilted towards the imagistic and technically religious side and become symbolic and narrative in some way that's akin to, say, Nietzsche's thus speaks their ethosstra. They're more on the poetic side of things, but your work is oddly positioned, in the best sense, on the rational and a propositional side, even though simultaneously it manages

to lay out the symbolic grammar of the entire biblical narrative, and really the entire narrative. And so maybe you can start by introducing some of that. Your book has six parts. I'll just go through them and we'll start with part one. Part one is salvaging creation from the scientific worldview. Part two is heaven and earth in biblical cosmology. Part three is heaven and earth on the human scale. Part four, time and space in biblical cosmology. Part five, time and space on the human scale. And then, part six, transcending the scientific worldview. And in part one, you juxtapose the scientific worldview with the biblical worldview and make a strong case,

well, I would say for the utility of both, but you make a strong case for the utility of the ladder, the biblical narrative, and then attempt to outline what it's attempting to accomplish. And so maybe you could give us a bit of an intro to that. Yeah, so basically what I was attempting to do in the first part of the book is move away from a materialistic world view to do in the first part of the book is move away from a materialistic worldview towards an ancient worldview where meaning is at the center of everything. So basically logos is the driving force of everything. Whereas in a materialistic perspective, it's about like I like explained in my book, it's just about understanding how things work basically, how things function. And the other perspective is pretty much the opposite of that. And we've completely lost, I think, the other perspective in many ways.

So it was relegated to the artistic domain, this basically what happened. So it was relegated to the artistic domain, that's basically what happened. So it still is out there, but for people who are more rationally minded, it's not satisfactory. To me, it wasn't, at least. I enjoy a good painting, but my mind is not satisfied with that. I need something more precise and concrete and also usable.

with that, I need something more precise and concrete and also usable. Your work is predicated on the idea that the act of cognition and perception is a consequence and correct me if I'm wrong, of something approximating simultaneous top down and bottom up processing. And so the top down processing is something like the imposition of a structure of order on the multiplicity of the world. And that order is implicate. It's intrinsic to being itself. And it manifests itself to us psychologically and existentially

and phenomenologically, let's say, in the sense of meaning that imbues our perceptions and actions if we're acting in proper accordance with the hierarchy. And so for you, there's a pyramid of perception and action. The top of the pyramid is associated with heaven symbolically and cognitively, and the bottom of the pyramid with the multiplicity of earth. And the heavenly domain is the pinnacle, but also a spirit that saturates the entire hierarchy. And it's a spirit of unity and order and the order that is good. And it's also reflective of the implicate order. And so that would be the logos of the world.

Does that seem approximately correct? Yes, exactly. The idea is kind of like in mathematics, you have some first principles, and then everything comes from the meaning that's implicit in the first principles. So I mean you have some axioms that seem like they don't contain a lot of information, but when you unpack them, you end up explaining a lot of phenomenon. And part of it also is it becomes your lens to view reality. So it's always incomplete in a sense, but it provides reason for things, order for things, purpose.

So it's unlike science, which claims to just be about discovering the laws of nature, it also has a purpose. It imposes a purpose on reality. It doesn't just claim to explain phenomenon. There's a difference. Well, and the thing that I think is so relevant in all of that, the prime issue of relevance is the issue of what John Verveiki,

the cognitive scientist, has been calling relevance realization. We have the problem of what to focus our attention on, and that's actually an unbelievably pervasive problem and a deep problem because there's an infinite multiplicity of phenomena that we could attend to and combinations of phenomena that we could attend to, in such massive numbers that it's very difficult to understand how we don't become overwhelmed. And the way we don't become overwhelmed is that we impose something like a point on things.

And a point is the point of our perceptions and the point of our actions. And the point, in the ultimate sense, is also the ultimate thing towards which we're striving. And that ultimate thing towards which we're striving is, as far as I can tell, elucidated in no small part in the biblical cosmology, because it's an attempt to lay out the characteristics of the spirit that would orient us towards the highest good as we go about our job of perceiving the complex

world and acting in it. And so, I mean, part of the revolutionary element of your thinking is that even our confrontation with the material world per se and our ability to derive the facts upon which a materialist worldview is hypothetically based is dependent on an ethic of perceptual prioritization and action that's described in the biblical cosmology and mythic narratives in general. So it's a priori. It exists prior to the act of perception that even enables us to make contact with the material world.

Yes, yes, exactly. We have some spiritual principles that we're often not aware of. And then the reason we're not aware of them is because they're extremely simple. So sometimes we can't see things because they're too complex, and they appear to us as darkness or clouds

But when things are too simple We also don't see them for a different reason. It's like they're transparent. We don't even see their existence Basically, those seem to me to be the axioms upon which our perceptions are founded and they're implicit, right? So they're part of the structure through which we actually view the world. I'm going to read something from your book, okay, and maybe then you could comment on it. The words heaven and earth as quoted in the verse above, which was in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, can no longer refer to what we now call heaven and earth from our scientific viewpoint, the third planet from the sun

and its atmosphere. Instead, the archaic concept of earth refers to the lower material half of the entire universe, and the archaic concept of heaven refers to the upper spiritual half. In general, a complete redefinition of cosmic categories like heaven, earth, time, and space will be needed. The implications of these concepts will then trickle down to every level of human experience to redefine all things in the context of the Bible.

So I think of your work as a program or as guide to phenomenology in some sense is that the world of experience, which is the reality that we know and the only reality we know, has a material half and it has a psychological half that's conceptual and there has to be a union between the conceptual half, the half that exists in abstraction and the half that exists concretely. And it isn't obvious that the abstract half is any less real or perhaps any more real than the material half, because the abstractions that constitute the spiritual half are abstracted in part from the patterns that are implicated in the material half, and the material half can't be encountered

or made sense of or interacted with or perhaps even brought into being without the imposition of the upper spiritual half. And so the description of the cosmos in Genesis is a Taoist-like description that assumes order and chaos in some fundamental sense and the meaningful interaction between the two. And your claim is that not only is that a more comprehensive description of reality, it's also a necessary description of reality to stave off such phenomena as a kind of corrosive nihilism. Yes, yes, I think that's a good description of it. It's actually difficult to understand the concept of heaven, I would say. I wouldn't even say the word use the word order necessarily, although I understand why

you use that word. It's hard to find an adequate word for it. And similarly, the earth, I also have trouble with the word chaos for different reasons. And I also understand though why you use that word because I don't really have a better expressions to use. There's always a little bit of something missing in any words that's chosen to describe these concepts, but I'd say the best way I describe it in my view is the earth presents itself as a riddle. So in a sense

it's related chaos in the sense of being unordered, but more in the sense of being a meaningless Because you can have an ordered reality that's still meaningless You see the distinction I'm making is something can be extremely ordered But have no meaning to it have no higher purpose to it or no higher meaning to it and purpose to it or no higher meaning to it. And similar, something can be chaotic and you can still see it as a meaningful experience. So, but I understand why you use the words chaos in order. I completely understand that I don't have necessarily better words. Well, I wouldn't identify meaning with chaos or order either, it looks to me that meaning is actually the instinct that emerges to signify in your terminology the proper union of heaven and earth.

And I do think that's how we experience it because when we're engaged in something deeply meaningful, hopefully like this conversation, then we have a sense that everything is in its proper place and in balance, and we lose our self-consciousness, and we lose our sense of time. We lose our self-conscious neurotic preoccupations in the immersion in the moment, and there's something that's deeply paradisal about that. And I do believe that that's a reflection

of the deepest instinct that we have. It's much deeper than mirror cognition, or mirror semantic and propositional content. Yeah, there's, yeah, there's a, what we want basically, I think, is knowledge, what I call knowledge in my book, which is we're looking for a union of meaning, in fact, we're not satisfied with just meaning, we're not satisfied with just things or facts, but then when there's a perfect joining of these realms, that's what we're looking for

as humans. That's what I think. That's what we strive for. We strive to understand abstractly things, and then we strive to concretely express them. Just understanding a concept is not much, and then you have to express it in reality and concreteness. And you even have to experience it. So I think this is something that's a little bit missing in science in general, like modern science, the concept of experiencing knowledge for personally experiencing a principle. So it's always about describing the outer world.

And even when we talk about ourselves, we're describing it as if we're looking at ourselves from a detached perspective. It's interesting because there are people who've objected to that characterization of science quite strenuously. Min Thomas Kuhn, for example, spent a lot of his writing in his work on scientific revolution, insisting that much of science was, in fact, an embodied practice as a practice rather than as a result, right?

Because the result might be a description of the objective world, but the practice itself is something like the seeking of truth in relationship to some orientation to the higher psychological and communal good. And so it's embedded inside something that has to approximate a religious ethic. Otherwise it's pointless. And otherwise the scientists themselves wouldn't be motivated to pursue it because there's an infinite set of dead facts But there's a finite set of living facts and the living facts grip even the scientist and the scientist This is also relevant to something that you talk about in the book

You talk about that will jump ahead a little bit, I guess you talk about the distinction between a stumbling block or a stumbling stone and a foundation stone. And the thing that's, one of the things that's very interesting about scientists is that they assume the existence of a transcendent object outside the domain of their ordered presuppositions. And then what they search for is the stumbling block or the anomaly that will falsify their presuppositions on the assumption that that relationship with the transcendent object will be corrective that it will expand the domain of knowledge

and that it will be something to pursue in the pursuit of the psychological good and the common social good. I thought the stumbling block and foundation stone discussion was particularly brilliant by the way. Yes, yes, I think what you were saying before about the practice of science. I think that's how I view it now. What is similar to ancient cosmology and what we do today is the practice of science, not the result of what we find practicing science, but the practice itself is analogous to a traditional worldview.

Like what you said, you have some principles that you try to see in the world, so that's your scientific theory, right? And then you expect to have some obstacles to your theory. And when you find obstacles, you don't necessarily get discouraged. You see it as a possible way to grow your own theory to make it even more inclusive, to make it even more explanatory. So that process, that is what the Bible is talking about,

that very process. And you refer again to in the beginning, God created the heaven, spiritual reality, and the earth, corporeal reality. And then you quote Genesis 1, 2, the earth was confused and meaningless. Darkness was on the face of the deep, and the breath of God hovered over the face of the waters. God said, let there be light, and the breath of God hovered over the face of the waters. God said, let there be light, and there was light. And that confused and meaningless chaos, that's the Tohu

Vabohu, that's the dragon of chaos in some sense. And so you could imagine, and I believe that your work refers to this, this planetude of multiplicity and potentially meaningful, meaningless, confusing facts, and then the attempt by the scientists to shine a light on those, on that set of facts, and to thereby bring something into illumination and the habitable order that is good. And that pattern is established right at the beginning of Genesis in Genesis 1, 2, and it's most usefully understood in that light. In that chaotic deep that God confronts, that horizon of potential in the biblical language

is a strange amalgam of the psychological, because it's confusing and off-putting and strange and mysterious and potentially awe-inspiring. But it also has this material element which is symbolized by water or the darkness or the deep. And we refer to that automatically when we speak about what scientists are doing, especially great scientists, because we say things like, well, they think deeply

or they've encountered deep phenomena. I mean, we refer back to that symbolic language axiomatically and don't notice the metaphorical structure of our own utterances. Yes, definitely. If we just look at science as a process instead of what science comes up with as a model of the universe, then we see the same patterns as what's described in the Bible. In fact, if anyone today that has a more of a scientific mind wants to understand the story of Adam and Eve, you should read it as a scientist. So, Adam is like a scientist who is trying to understand reality, and try to impose his theory upon reality. So that is Adam names the animals, that means he's trying to impose meaning on

reality. And then this answers kind of the question, why did God create Eve in the narrative of Adam and Eve? Because that's actually a good question. He might have just created this the man without the woman, right? But what if you're a scientist, you can easily understand that because the reason why he creates Eve is to counter what Adam is doing. And it's pretty clear in the language, if you read it in the original Hebrew, there's a lot of hints to that. So what happens when God creates Eve, he puts Adam to sleep. Okay?

What does that mean? It means it's an attempt to renew Adam. He loses consciousness. Sleep is like a little taste of death. It's like a sickle thing where you lose your ability to control and to name and to command things. So that's what happens when we fall asleep. Our mind loses the command of the body, right? So that it's like a counterpoint to what Adam just did. Adam just names the animals. He's naming everything. He's using his authority to say, this is this the name of this phenomenon. This is this is like a scientist who has a theory and he's seeing if it works and it's working, it's working, it's working. And then

it says it's not good that Adam is alone, basically, because why? Because he needs a feedback mechanism for his, what he's doing for his naming. Because he can name phenomenon, but he can't name himself. He can't see himself. Because he has a perspective. He's using his own perspective to view the world, but then he never bothers to or he can't rather look at himself. So what he needs is what's called sometimes a foreign perspective. Okay. So he needs, this is what Eve is represents. So he falls asleep and then it says, God took a side, his side, and built a woman into it. See, the word for side also means stumbling, stumbling stone. See, so the side of that he took also means a stumbling stone.

So that is exactly what it is, but it's a good stumbling stone. And this is very important. Well Ben Shapiro told me that the original Hebrew for what's translated as help meat in the King James Version is actually something like beneficial adversary. It's because it says, God created a help against him. That's literally what it says, a help against him. That's literally what it says, a help against him. But obviously, the

purpose of God creating Eve is not to destroy Adam. You know, this is a pretty obvious thing, but because if we look at the narrative and we give importance to each of the events, it starts with God saying, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or you will die. And then right away it says, it's not good that man is alone. So you see, it's directly related. The creation of Eve is related to the fact that he just told him, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of evil or you will die.

And then, okay, Adam names all the animals, but he doesn't find a help as his opposite. You see? He doesn't find his opposite. He needs his opposite to see himself. That's the idea. He needs like a mirror to look into where he sees an inverse image of himself. So the left and the right are flipped. Women, women really do this. This would be associated with their association with the serpent in the Garden of Eden as well, as women really do provide a critical mirror for men, and that's partly because they're hypergamous. And so women judge men more harshly in many ways than men judge women.

Now, it's ambivalent, but there's some truth in it. So, for example, on dating sites, women rate 80% of men as below average in tractiveness, whereas men rate 50% of women as below average, as in attractiveness in relationship to potential short-term or long-term mating. And it's clearly the case that Eve becomes self-conscious in the story of Adam and Eve, and then makes Adam self-conscious. The scales fall from both her eyes, and now they can see their

own nakedness. And their own nakedness is in some deep sense their own vulnerability. And so Eve provides, as you pointed out, a corrective reflection of Adam. And you're also stating, and this must have something to do with the association between even the serpent, because the serpent is the thing that lurks in the well-ordered place. And there's always something that lurks in the well-ordered place because no matter how much order you establish,

that would be true of a scientific theory. There's always something left over that speaks of the infinite that isn't encapsulated within your theory. And Eve is allied with that force in Genesis and is the root to self-consciousness for men. And that seems to me again from a scientific perspective, pretty damn accurate. And then you might think as well that part of the reason that women make men self-conscious is because they're mediators between men and infants. Because women become pregnant and because they give birth to extremely dependent and fragile infants,

they are more conscious of life's catastrophe and tragedy and more conscious of the necessity of knowledge serving life, and always serve as a reminder to men that their capacity for abstraction and naming, let's say, isn't sufficient to exhaust the proper possibilities of life that all that abstraction still has to serve life? Yeah, it's just exactly. She represents the opposite of Adam, really. That's exactly what it is. It's actually pretty, once you know these things, you can see it very clearly in this story. So like I said, Adam, his job is to name the animals, so what does Eve do?

She listens to the animals. That's one way to see it. So why is she talking to the snake? This is a question nobody asks themself, which is interesting. People sometimes say, wait, why is this snake talking in this story? Because that's obviously an anomaly. I mean, snakes don't talk, right? So why is this snake talking? But the real question they should be asking themselves is,

how can Eve understand the snake? How does Eve know how to understand what the snake is saying? Because that's what Eve has. Adam, it has the ability to name the animals. So this is what you are. This is what you are. And it's a general, it's a way to name the animals. So this is what you are, this is what you are. And it's a general, it's a way to symbolize the general idea of assigning meaning to things or imposing meaning upon things. And what Eve does is she does the opposite. She mediates

with the earth, that means with matter that has no meaning or that has not been giving meaning. And also with things that Adam has has named but that are not satisfied with the meaning that Adam has given so we can actually think that that's what the snake is up to a little bit in the story so It represents basically so we can say Eve is mediating the The perspective of the earth or of nature. So it's actually, this story is really, really deep. I mean, it represents basically the right wing and the left wing.

If you look at it at a bigger scale, at a political scale, Adam is the traditional perspective. He represents, we have tradition, we have the past, we have our insights from the past, and we order things according to that. So that's what Adam is doing. Eve really represents the left wing. If you represent, I'm going to listen to nature, and if I don't, if it doesn't agree with

what Adam is doing, I'm going to try to mediate that. So the ecological movement represents basically what Eve is doing. It represents the feminine aspect as described in the story. So it's about maybe the snakes is not happy with the name that Adam gave the snake. You see what I'm saying? But it's just a general symbol for anything that you can impose meaning upon, can then turn around and say, complain about it. No, I disagree. I mean, every phenomena has a finite aspect that's categorizable and that can be subdued

and brought into a kind of cognitive order, but it has a transcendent element that constantly escapes from that and that has to be taken into account. And the problem with imposing an order that's final on anything is that you lose the connection to the transcendent. And so, and then you can think about that on an even broader scale, which of course you've done, which is that the garden that Adam and Eve inhabit, where everything is named, is a kind of order that's imposed and it's reasonably well-balanced. But there's still

always that possibility that something that hasn't been taken into account yet is going to upset the Apple card. And then there's an even broader possibility that in the highest possible sense that it's good that the Apple card gets upset because it produces an advance towards the next stage. There is a sense in which Christianity makes this, the Christian corpus of thought makes this quite clear. There's an aspect in which the fall from paradise is a cosmic cataclysm and that it propels human beings into the suffering of history. But it's also the precondition for the emergence of the higher order that symbolized by the voluntary sacrifice of Christ

as a culmination of the entire biblical narrative. And there's some implication there that to become innocent once again, like we were in the Garden of Paradise, but to be self-conscious and knowledgeable as adults at the same time is actually better than the kind of unconscious paradisal state that we inhabited before we became self-conscious, let's say in the Garden of Eden. I think it was T.S. Eliot who said something like, we need to return to the beginning and know the place for the first time. And that's a fundamental theme of the, let's say, the Exodus narrative, where there's a fall from

tyranny into the desert and then a movement toward the promised land, but it's the meta-narrative of the entire Bible, and it's something like a description of the structure of cognitive and conceptual revolutions towards a higher form of unification, differentiation, and, and, uh, plenitude. That might be a good way of thinking about it. Yeah, there's definitely, this is the thing. The follow is not, it's not a good thing, but I understand with your, what you're getting at the every piece of the puzzle that you're describing was there in the garden. So if, if Eve wasn't there, then there'd be a problem. She's, but she's there though, she is there to mediate with the garden. So if Eve wasn't there, then there'd be a problem. But she's there, though.

She is there to mediate with the serpent. So the sin of Eve and the sin of Adam is not that they listen to the serpent. Is that that was a good thing, actually. You have to listen to the serpent. But the serpent tricked them. That's the whole thing. And how does it work? I mean, the serpent tricked them. That's the whole thing. And how does it work? I mean, there are certain facts or certain puzzles that we don't have the ability to solve yet. OK?

And then when you try to integrate those facts into your system, but you don't have the ability to solve them yet, then it causes some problems. Because once you have inside of you or inside of your system, something that is against you, but not in a good way, like I was talking about Eve. Eve is like, the, she represents something like the curse that's good for you, the curse that loves you, right? She, she criticizes, but she loves her husband. So it's a loving criticism.

It's a loving complaint. But that's extremely dangerous, in a sense, because you can also encounter the curse that wants to kill you. And this is often something. I mean, you don't want to have your enemy integrate your enemy inside of you if you don't have what it takes to give him an identity that he'll accept. So this basically is, if you want to take it as a scientist, a good example of this process would be the difference between Newton and Einstein. That's actually,

to me, that is an example of the story of Adam and Eve, because Newton is like Adam. He just names everything according to his theory. It all works great stuff. It's still a revolutionary way of thinking that he's obviously a genius. I mean, he figured out simple, simple laws that explain vast amounts of phenomena. So that's pretty amazing. But then Einstein comes along and says he puts the mirror basically in the theory of classical

mechanics and he says where are you in the theory? So that's the mirror the feminine mirror look at yourself in the look at yourself. So And then so what does Einstein do? He says basically it yourself. So, and then, so what does Einstein do? He says, basically, all these categories that we're creating classical mechanics, they all think they operate from a point that's outside of reality. So, but then he says, look, you're also in reality. So, your concept of Simultanati is false because you think you're not part of the things that are moving, but you are actually one of the positions that's also potentially moving. So you have to define things considering yourself as part of the reality that you're explaining, right? So so what happens is all the categories the categories of classical mechanics that are important

such as speed, distance, simultaneously, things like that, they all get warped. They all get warped because now you're in the system. So basically that's what Einstein does to Newtonian physics. He forces the perspective to be in the system that they're looking at. So that's like a like a cyclical view of yourself, right? You're looking at yourself in the mirror now. And then it transforms all the equations in a way. And this is why this is a good thing because he was able to find an equation or a formula that included Newton's physics. It didn't totally dismantle it and say,

this is worthless. Right, it integrated it. I didn't know little something. Yes, it added a little something so that Newtonian physics is a special case of the other physics that he found. Well, that's what John Piaget said happened to children during their cognitive revolutions, is that,

and that's why there's progress in science and conceptualization, contra some of the more simplistic interpretations of people who read Thomas Kuhn, is that each successive theory accounts for everything the previous theory accounted for, plus something additional. And so now you said something that was quite mysterious and sideways that I want to refer to. You said that Adam and Eve were tricked by this snake. It wasn't that they listened to them, that they were tricked, and that you associated that with premature conceptualization. So let me riff on that for a second. So one of the things that's really bothered me about the postmodernists more more than anything else, wasn't the problems they posed. It was the solutions they generated.

And so the postmodernists were among the first thinkers to note that there was a real mystery bedeviling perception, which was how do we make sense of the multiplicity of facts that constitute the world or that constitute even the entire corpus of the potential interpretations of a given text. And they investigated that thought, well, we don't know how to make canonical sense out of even a single text. And so, and we don't know what to do about the fact that we don't know how to do that. How do we rank order the importance of texts or facts? And that was a stroke of genius because that is a key question. But the the the prideful error was the presupposition that was smuggled in under the guise of a kind of neo-Marxism, that the way

that we solve the problem of perception is through the imposition of power and that our perceptions, all of our perceptions serve nothing but compulsion, self-interest, and power. And so the question was formulated properly, but the answer was literally Luciferian, which is the spirit that it orders the world is predicated on nothing but the answer was literally Luciferian, which is the spirit that in order the world is predicated on nothing but the imposition of compulsion and power. And what I see happening with you and Jonathan and John Verveiki, and particular, and my work bears on that, and so does Ian McGill-Krists, and there are others, is that no, the lens through which we see the world is an ethic, and that ethic is described

in stories, and the fundamental foundation piece of the stories through which we view the world is biblical, and the biblical corpus has a language of symbolic representation and grammar that you're outlining in your book. So what do you think about that response to your proposition? Well, I just wanted to say something about what you said, which is really important. You said, because I think we have to understand it, where the difference lies between the good curse, which is what Eve was supposed to bring, or a taste of death, like I said, Adam was put to sleep in or a taste of death. Like I said, he's, Adam was put to sleep

in order to bring forth Eve. That's a taste of death, but it's not death. So what's the difference? Kind of like the example that I gave about Newtonian physics being transformed by Einsteinian physics is, I put you to sleep a little bit. This is when Einstein is like,

look at yourself in the mirror And then it seems like your whole physics is gonna crumble for a little minute there, right? It looks like you're your finish. I'm gonna replace completely, but then oh, it's a little tweak and This this is in a in biblical language is called a woman crowning her husband. That's the name of it. It means There's a little bit of transformation that was done, but it's not a lethal transformation. It's a transformation that puts something above the head. So the head is the first principle that are used

or the perception that was used in the first place. So it creates something above that and that opens up the theory to explaining even more, but it doesn't destroy it completely. I mean, you can look at it politically too. It doesn't have to be just like scientific examples. You can look at it politically. If the left says, for example,

the left, what's basically the purpose is the same as Eiff, is to listen to the marginalized. So what are the marginalized, the people who are, maybe not satisfied with the names or the identity or the function that they were given. So she listens to the marginalized. There's a serpents on the end. Yes, exactly.

So yeah, she listens to the complaints of the marginalized and then she tries to formulate some slight modifications without destroying completely. You don't want to marry your enemy. You don't want to join with your enemy. That's when all the problems start. If you join with your enemy, Eve is not Adam's enemy, but she could. She's went to school by the snake then she becomes. Yeah, she's a feedback loop of knowledge and what happens? How do you know the difference see that's the thing you said it before it was a preemptive Attempt to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and this is actually interesting by the way the the the word that

Sews one when Eve says I was tricked the word means Lending on credit. So see, the meaning is there. A couple of things here. I want to quote something by Alfred North Whitehead. The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying. And so this idea of a salutary minor death is extremely important, because even biologically, as we progress through time, ourselves and our structures are dying optimally to maintain their vitality,

so we don't have to die completely. And it's definitely the case that psychologically, that you can make minor correctives with you hit a stumbling block that help you reformulate your theories without having to become ferronic and tyrannical and then have everything burn in a conflagration that you might not survive. And so there's an optimal level of correction, and I think that's also manifest in the experience of optimized meaning because what I think meaning does signify is information flow that's optimally

corrective without being pathologically destructive. And that's a very deep instinct for adaptation. And so then, let me finish that by trying to clarify something you just said, which I think is of crucial importance. So do you believe that the trick that Adam and Eve fell for that was presented by the serpent was the supposition of a comprehensive knowledge because of the taste of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. The presupposition of a comprehensive knowledge,

a prideful presupposition of a comprehensive knowledge well still in a state of insufficient ignorance. Is it something like the presumption of personal omnipotence? I would say it's, it's something like there's a, it's, like I said before, what you want to avoid is joining with your enemy. It sounds like it doesn't say a lot, but it says everything. Because when you join with your enemy, once you, you're, you're united to your enemy, then you are, you fall into a paradoxical realm of cyclical cannibalism

and things like that. If you read the story, most of the stories in the Bible are about that, actually. If you read the story of Samson, that's what the story of Samson is really about. It's about Samson joins with his enemy. He falls in love with his enemy. Okay, he's always wants a foreign woman, but that's also his enemy.

And he doesn't make the distinction between a foreign woman that loves him, and that's actually not his enemy, and just a foreign woman that hates his guts. And he falls for the ones that hate his guts. That's what it's the story of Simpson is all about. So what happens, then he joins with his enemy. And once you join with your enemy, then you're in big trouble. Because then when you try to attack your enemy,

you're attacking yourself. So you're now in a cyclical pattern of self-destruction. And that is what the story of Samson is all about because at one point he figures it out near the end. He figures out the whole mystery of it is once you join with your enemy, then if you kill your enemy, you kill yourself. Okay, and other stories in the Bible

are about that very problem. But then at the end he figures it out and he figures out and he says, okay, if that's the case, then if I kill myself, I also kill my enemy. And that's the conclusion of the story of Samson. He basically kills himself. He makes the pillars fall and he knows very well, it's going to kill himself. And the conclusion is, but he killed more of his enemies. Okay. The idea is, but he killed more of his enemies. Okay? The idea is, it's about a pattern of

overreaching? Oh yes, it's overreaching. Well, this is what I was saying before. When it says that the snake tricked Eve, the word is used is land on credit. The reason is because when you buy something on credit, It means that you obtain something that you can't cover. Okay. Okay. Okay. So okay, so let me let me let me ask you about that then so so then What that made me think was that well There's the the tree with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil hanging from it and there are

Elements of that that we can ingest safely of good and evil hanging from it. And there are elements of that that we can ingest safely. But the snake is not one of them, even though the snakes in the tree, and what that would mean. So we should be eating in some sense the low hanging fruit that's actually within our grasp. And if we try to consume, let's say, or incorporate the entire snake, then we do that on credit,

and we do that to our own detriment and that's going to knock us out of a paradisal state of being into the catastrophe of history. That's what happens when you bite off more than you can chew or that you decide that there's enough to you to face a serpent that's too big. So I'll add one more thing to that. I've been thinking about this lately. So we have, we're being informed constantly that we're on the brink of an ecological catastrophe. Now it brings in the idea of the

left and the corrective voice of Eve and the marginalized, let's say. And I might say, well, okay, is that true or not? And that's one question. And the second question is, if it's true, who should guide us through that potential catastrophe? And the issue of whether or not it's true is probably resolved by noting that it's always true in some sense that we're on the brink of an apocalyptic disaster and that we have to be very apprehensive and careful about such things as long-term sustainability. And because we're very powerful now and things are moving quickly, that's come to a head. But then you might say, well, who should lead us through that crisis? And here's an idea.

If you're facing a dragon, an apocalyptic dragon, that's so large that it frightens you into paralysis and turns you into a tyrant, then you've bitten off more than you can chew, and that your pride is set you up as someone who can stand as a antithesis to this particular apocalyptic serpent, but you're not the man for the job. And if you insist to acid you as lead that you are, you're only going to make things worse. And it seems to me that that idea is analogous to the idea that you're putting forward about the serpent as an inedible fruit in the Garden of Eden. That seemed even vaguely sensible.

Yes, yes. It's always about, like you said it exactly, biting off more than you could chew. And there's an expression in French, I can translate it, and you can tell me if it's also an expression in English, but it's something and you can tell me if it's also an expression in English, but it's something like your eyes are bigger than you're stomach. Right, right. That expression in English.

Yes, it is. So, or you'll read it. Or you'll reach exceeds your grasp. And that is a sin of pride. So you think it seems to me that you're, and this is a great mystery as far as I'm concerned because it's not obvious exactly what the error is in the, in the, in the garden, but you think at least in part it's an error of overreach and pride.

That makes real sense to me because it's definitely the case. You know, if, if we have to encounter the world in a spirit of gratitude and ignorance in order to learn, then the thing and, and, and thing and to learn optimally, which would put us in that meaningful domain, then the fundamental spirit that opposes that is something like the spirit of totalitarian certainty about the fact that we've incorporated the entire serpent. And that's what totalitarian constantly presume is that we've got it right, and our theory is complete, and there's no

exceptions to be allowed. And if you say anything contrary to that, there's going to be hell to pay. You're heretical and you need to be damned and alienated and removed. And maybe that's an echo of that same sin in some real sense, rather than the humility that would enable you to encounter the proper to ingest the proper size fruit and to contend with the proper size snake. Yeah, yeah, there's two types of sin, let's say, that are really basic and you can see in this story or this whole cosmology.

One of them is the sin of Adam would be something like not listening at all to nature, just I'm going to impose meaning and whatever doesn't fit can go, you know, can go to hell or something like that. It doesn't matter. So that's one kind of sin, but then there's another kind of sin, which I think we're actually seeing a lot of nowadays. It's if the job of Eve is to provide riddles for Adam. I'm giving you some riddles that you need to solve now. And the purpose of these riddles is to refresh a science, if we're talking about science again, refresh a theory. Show that it's not complete, but in a way that usually doesn't totally destroy it. But you can also do something else. The sin of Eve would be something like, I'm going to give Adam a riddle that can't be solved.

And see what he does with that. So a problem that can never be solved. Here you go, Adam solved that. That's how Eve becomes a tyrant. That's how Eve can totally dominate Adam by giving, like, making him go through a labyrinth that doesn't have an exit, you know, and he's stuck in there forever. Maybe that would be reflected biologically in the potential proclivity of women to set

standards for men that are so high that no productive union is actually possible. And to never reward attempts to move towards the good because it deviates insufficiently. It deviates and indicates insufficiency in relationship to this unobtainable ideal. Because Eve has to be judicious and selective, but she has to make allowances for a human frailty that's on the same scale as her frailty. Yes, if Eve loves Adam, or if the left wing, let's say, if we say the left thing is like Eve, wish it is, if it loves its country, the goal is not to destroy the country.

If the left wing starts to talking about completely changing a founding document or the constitution or all the laws, or bringing in anyone that wants to to come in even if it's our enemies, you know You don't go to war with a country and then bring them in That's a recipe for disaster. It's an obvious recipe for disaster and anyone who engages in that I think is It's being tyrannical and is as a purpose that's nefarious and they want to destroy the country or they want to destroy Whatever organization. I mean you create a anything you create is limited, in a sense. And if you think you can bring in all the flood waters, it doesn't make any sense unless you're trying to destroy it.

And this is how you tell the difference between Eve and Eve that's tricked by the serpent. Eve, once she's tricked by the serpent, she thinks she can integrate absolutely everything, but it's a trick. Everything at once, instead of sequentially, and everything at once. Yes, not incrementally. That's always the problem.

Everything eventually can be integrated, but then if you do it too quickly, that's when you join with your enemy and then you're screwed. And then after that, you're in a deep, deep trouble. Okay. Well, so I've been thinking about that on the environmental front, too, because it seems to me that that's exactly what we're trying to do right now is we're trying to solve the problem of sustainable economic development in an emergency crisis, instantly, right now for all time or else. And the consequence of that is we're trying to integrate way too much at once with our totalitarian presumption that we already know what to do. And in doing so, we're going to bring about the very catastrophe that in principle, we're

trying to avoid. Yes, exactly. Absolutely what's going on, I think, today is we want to create, well, when I say we, I'm not talking about myself, because somebody somewhere wants to create a totalitarian government or a world government or whatever you want to call it, it doesn't really matter. Something that includes everything. And they're real anxious to do it, a real fast. And that's the real, that's the end problem.

You wanna do it faster than you can handle it for whatever reason. I don't, I mean, who knows what the reason is? Well, because you just don't know enough. I mean, the thing about integration, so here's another way of thinking about it. You tell me what you think about this. So I've been touring with this notion

is that one of the hallmarks of inappropriate public policy is the use of compulsion. Now, I would say compulsion should be restricted to cases of severe criminality and psychopathy to that tiny minority of people who just cannot play fair by any rules whatsoever. And perhaps if they were told the right story in the right way, they'd play fair too, but we don't know how to do it. But under normative conditions, if you have to use compulsion to impose your vision of paradise, then it's not an adequate vision of paradise. It isn't motivating and it isn't integrated. And so when our politicians are doing things like driving up the cost of energy so that people who are poor will suffer so that their vision of utopia can be

brought in hastily, it seems to me that they're committing this same cardinal error. And it is one of pride and luciferian presumption. And maybe that's also part of the temptation of the snake, right? Because the snake is associated symbolically with the luciferian intellect and pride, and also with the force that wants to overthrow the heavenly hierarchy, that thinks it can replace it in this tower of Babel sense. Yeah, well, the snake often usually what it represents.

You're not wrong, though, but maybe to add to that. The snake usually represents something like a perspective that's close to the earth, something like matter, the perspective of matter. But it's basically the perspective of that, which is furthest from the meaning that was given to things. Right, right. Any, in any system, you have things

that get pushed to the margin. So that's the fringe perspective. Yeah, yeah, and you can view it at different levels. I mean, the ecological movements are that because they represent nature, or they claim to represent, it doesn't matter if they really are, aren't, that's what they embody. They embody a mediation between nature and civilization. So they're basically taking the perspective of nature and saying, okay, don't go too far with your civilization dominance, you know, because there's nothing wrong with civilization, but obviously you can go too far, but you can also go too far in the other direction

You can start saying things like We can't have any human activity anymore. That's bad because it harms nature, you know That's the other sin from the other direction. Yeah, well, and I think the other sin there is that we can't have any more human activity because it harms nature by the ethical preconditions that I've adopted in relationship to my worldview and I'm perfectly willing to impose by force on others rapidly and in an emergency panic.

Yeah, the emergency is a big part of it. Well, I'm looking at what's happening, for example, with the Dutch farmers. And the Dutch farmers are among the most sophisticated farmers in the world, assuming that they're not the most sophisticated, which they might be. And now they're having these edicts from the nature worshippers forced upon them. They're not being consulted with. They're not being brought in. They're not being integrated into the game.

There's an imposition by force of a particular vision and one of the consequences of that, apart from the devastation of their livelihoods and the destabilization of civil society is going to be a radical increase in the cost of food, as well as seeing simultaneously on different fronts a radical rise in the cost of energy. And this is, so you're associating this with this proclivity to undergo a insufficiently

sophisticated critique of the imposition of civilization. So one of the things you do in your book, which I really like that's germane to this, is I'll turn to a diagram that you have on page 31, where you lay out a relationship between abstraction and concrete examples that's akin symbolically to the relationship between heaven and earth. And so, earth you describe here as a set of concrete examples and heaven as an abstract principle. And so you say, for example, there are two concrete examples might be boat and chariot,

so that's indicative of multiplicity, of modes of transportation, but they can be united in a transcendent reality in some sense that constitutes vehicle. And that's really the nature of abstraction, is that you have a multiplicity of phenomena from which you can abstract a common principle. And part of that is the ordering of things

and the sub-doing of things and the putting of everything in its proper place. But it's also a union of that multiplicity into a higher order. And your comments about Eve, and I've noted this, I would say, in my own marriages, that imagine that I have a conflict with my wife that's akin to the kind of conflict that we're just describing. And we want to mediate that conflict.

And one way is for her to submit to me. And another is for her to submit to her. And a third is that we can compromise. But a fourth is that, as a consequence of the dialogue between us, which would be the masculine proclivity to impose order and the feminine proclivity to speak for chaos and multiplicity, we can come up with a third solution that transcends both our problems and that offers a union that's preferable to compromise and certainly

preferable to slavery and submission. But that would involve a full dialogue, right? And a bringing together of all the concerns into a true higher order that did account for all the multiplicity. The pattern you just described, if anyone wants to understand the stories in the Bible, it's always the same pattern being repeated over and over. And you just have to be able to look at different scales of it

and just get used to thinking fractally. This is something I think is completely lost. There's a way to see things in a fractal way where every piece of a story expresses a certain pattern and the whole thing expresses a certain pattern. It's very easy to get lost when you do that but it's basically very simple. Like any story in the Bible, you can use the pattern you just described. Any story in the Bible, you can use that and you understand it basically. So I guess that would require some examples, but...

Well, let's use the examples of the cherubim. So maybe you could elaborate because I found that. Let me just read something from the Tetremorphic Cherems from Ezekiel 1. And I found this part of your discussion, particularly illuminating because I had no idea what the cherubs represented. And as far as I can tell, there's something like the monstrosities that exist on the fringes of cognitive and perceptual categories. And they're part of the support mechanism for the divine unity that any given category represents. And so I'm going to read this, and they're part of the support mechanism for the divine unity that any given category represents.

And so I'm going to read this, and I'll read a bit of your commentary, and then maybe you can comment on it. As I was, this is Ezekiel. As I was among the captives by the river Shabar or Chebar, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. A stormy wind came from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing up. From its center came the image of four living beings

that looked like the image of a human. Each cherubim had four faces, a human, a lion on the right, a bull on the left, and an eagle. Over the heads of the living beings was the image of an expanse, and it was on the throne, and on it was the image of a throne, and on the image of the throne was an image that looked like a human.

Ezekiel's vision is the perfect example of a narrative that seems cryptic from the wrong perspective. Conversely, in proper context, cosmic categories like thrones, cherubs, and wheels are just as fundamental as space, energy, and time are to materialism. The tetramorphic cherub described in this vision is an obvious example of the symbolic template that we just described. At the top of the structure, the eagle flying in the air, and above everything, and capable

of great vision, by the way, the eagle represents a spiritual or heavenly principle, which is too abstract to be grasped without tangible expressions. At the lower end, the lion bull duality represents the corporeal or earthly basis that provides concrete support for that principle. At the center, the human is the nowhere that unite spiritual and corporeal realities. Even though these leaving beings might seem random at first glance, they perfectly describe the inner structures of this cosmology. As a prophet, Ezekiel was using this symbolic language to describe the very process of obtaining divine knowledge. describe the very process of obtaining divine knowledge. There's a tendency when we want to interpret symbolism to focus on the weird stuff, right? Because when you see something in a story, it seems weird, it seems unusual.

We have a tendency to want to interpret it symbolically because we don't want to imagine some kind of weird chariot with Animals and it you know we we have a tendency to immediately say okay, this is symbolic of something. It's like a dream Yeah, it's it's It's like he's seeing the categories of he's seeing the metaphysics directly. That's what it's all about that that that vision he's describing the process of the visions of a prophet he's not even Describing his vision he's describing the process of how he got to the vision which is I don't think there's any other place in the

Bible where we see something like that maybe in Elaysha maybe he describes a process through it, he gets the vision a little bit, I think, if I remember correctly. But it's entirely different to describe a vision and to describe the process that brought you to the vision. And the chariot is describing the very process of a profit. So we got like a special glimpse into his world there, which I think is a very interesting thing. Right, so we get a case there with this vision that the visionary is

apprehending the structure of the structure through which structure is viewed. Yes, exactly. That's a vision of the heavenly structure in some real sense. And so that made me think, you tell me what you think about this, when I read this section on churros, I remembered that when God chases Adam and Eve out of paradise, he puts cherubim to guard the gates of paradise and they hold flaming swords. And that's always been a great mystery to me, both the cherubim and the flaming swords. And so then I was thinking about that, and I thought, well, a sword is a tool of judgment and carving. You carve up things with a sword, and you dispense with your enemies with a sword, and Christ

uses a sword in revelation to separate the wheat from the chaff, and a flaming sword is even more of a sword than just a sword because it's a red hot sword. And so not only is it going to cut and discriminate and differentiate, but it's going to do so in a manner that burns like the burning bush. And then I was thinking, well, if you want to reenter paradise, you have to subject yourself to this flaming sort of judgment in the real sense because you have to carve away from yourself everything that isn't fit to be in paradise. And that would be almost everything, well, that would be everything that wasn't perfect enough to be paradise and given how imperfect you are, the probability that you would experience whoever was wielding that sword as a monstrous charibum with a sort of flames strikes me as extremely, the probability that that's

how you'd experience it strikes me as extremely high, especially, and that would be in proportion to some degree to the magnitude of your sinful nature. And so, and I think that's associated with the notion of the passion in the Christian story that Christ has to voluntarily accept not only death, but hell itself in order to reconfigure and also associated with the symbolism and revelation that an apocalyptic judgment has to precede something like the reestablishment of a paradisol state. And so that all came out for me out of your description of the cherubim, which I thought was extremely helpful, by the way, the notion that these monstrosities on the fringes support the conceptual structure that's united by the overarching eagle vision

with the human between the overarching vision and the multiplicity of earthly categories. Yeah, yeah, the the chairbim and the flaming sword. I have to admit it's also been something that's I've found intriguing for a very long time and I think I have a good grasp on it now more than when I wrote my book actually because it's directly related to the story of Adam and Eve again. If you have Adam naming the animals and then there's a fall It means he lost his ability to name the animal so that there's a confusion that enters into it and the The cherub that's what the cherub is. It's a confusion of species. It's an animal that has a confusion of different species within a- Confucianity represents.

Yes, so it represents Adam's inability now to name all the species correctly and separately. So he fell into confusion. So the cherubim is that confusion. It's a beast, a hybrid, right? A hybrid of species. So it represents his inability to name the animals correctly. And then, like you said, the sword is the principle that would separate them back again.

Like, it's the logos, it's logic, it's light. That would separate the chair again into separate species. And like you suggested, the bigger your sin, the bigger the sword you need, and the bigger the monster you have to face. So the bigger the confusion. Right, well, and I can't help but see, when all this confusion about naming of human identity came about in the last 10 years,

this all this confusion with regard to pronouns and subjectively defined identity, I couldn't help but think about that as, well, I believed at the time when the government mandated a certain type of pronoun use that that was a form of extreme conceptual, I couldn't be a more extreme form of conceptual confusion, that now are very agreement about what constituted the most fundamental categories of reality, because I think you can make a real case that male and female are the most fundamental categories of reality. And I think you can make that case biologically, because sex has been around for a very, very, very, very long time,

for hundreds of millions of years, and the proper perception of sexual dichotomy is absolutely crucial to survival itself and reproduction, obviously, and mating, but also a precondition for the stability of society as such. And the insistence that to bring in the marginalized, we have to demolish the entire structure of categorization itself, seems to me tantamount to this sin that you described that Eve would produce if she insisted to acidiously that everything be integrated at once. Yes, exactly what you're talking about the idea that I give you my pronouns. It's just an example of what I was saying before that Eve mediates with nature.

And then if Adam names something, it's possible that there's a reaction and there's a complaint. No, you don't name me, I name myself, basically. That's what it represents. It represents the same thing as I was describing earlier. So anything that's named can decide at one point to answer back and say, no, you don't tell me what I am,

you don't tell me what my name is, I'm the one who decides my name. And by the way, the flaming sword in the text, is the flaming sword that turns on itself, well that's also part of it, it's very interesting. If you translate it literally, that's what it says. A flaming sword that turns on itself. Right, so that, well, that's interesting, you know, because I would say to some degree, the harshest judgments that we are made subject to do come from

within, and that a lot of totalitarian presumption is the attempt to escape the flaming sword of personal conscience by insisting that the current theory of categorization is sufficient and all that there should be. And that dichotomy between fundamentalism and doubt, I think, is an expression of that conflict. So you think that sword that turns on itself is that part of an interior psychological process? It represents sort of... part of an interior psychological process? It represents sort of, yes, it's all part of a psychological process for sure. Everything in the Bible has an inner meaning, but the sword that turns on itself is like what I was saying before, the role of Eve is to show a mirror to Adam and then he sees himself.

But when there's a conflict between the two when there's when there are enemies This is when everything's working out, right? And they love each other, but when there's there's a conflict then He shows the mirror and it can't be solved and then he turns the sword is the logos trying to answer and he can't solve the puzzle But it's so he turns on himself. Is that the same as the figure of the Medusa, do you think that the snake headed woman that paralyzes the man so completely that he turns to stone? Is that a mythological reflection

of the same imposition of an insolvable problem? I haven't, I've never thought about it, but it seems like it's very similar. Yes, it's like an intractable problem that if you look at it, you're finished. Right, right, it paralyzes you. And the thing is, you know, that fear in the face of a formidable opponent, which would be the inability, let's say, to reach a mediating arrangement with nature and the feminine,

that's the ultimate opponent in some sense when it turns against you. That paralyzes you, and paralysis is that freezing in place that's characteristic of a prey animal, and that's represented symbolically as turning to stone in the face of the snake headed woman. Yeah, I'd have to think, to be honest, I'd have to think about it for a while probably to figure out what that image means. But I think from a, at first glance, it looks like something very similar to what I, it's like a problem that can't be solved.

And then it, like I was saying before, if you get, if you enter a labyrinth that there's no way out in a way you're paralyzed because you're stuck in the labyrinth, you're never going to go out. So it's a, it's a form of paralysis. What you do as a Clinical psychologist especially as a behaviorist is very much relevant to this discussion because you might say well You need to set someone a problem and a task in order to encourage them to develop and so then the question becomes Well, what size tasks should you set them? And there's two extremes to the answer to that question. And one is, a task so easy that the person

can do it without effort. And the other is a task so difficult that no matter how much they try, they'll never manage it. And what you do to avoid both those errors is you establish a personal relationship with the person that you're trying to help transform. And then you experiment with a range of stumbling blocks until you find one that they're willing to take on, that requires some transformation, that they will, in fact, implement, and that carries with it a reasonable probability of success. And then you think, well, that is what you should do in your relationship with your wife and your husband, right? You wanna set them a challenge that moves you both

to a better place, but that's not so burdensome, that it's impossible for them to fulfill. And it's absolutely, and 100% what you do when you're trying to encourage children to develop, because you put them in the zone of proximal development, which is a term derived from Vigotsky, that signifies the existence of the place where the challenge is optimal to produce cognitive transformation without paralysis and tyranny. And that's all dependent on relationship, right? You have to know the person.

That's partly, I think, why hospitality is emphasized so much in the Old Testament, is that in order to set the optimal challenge, you have to set up a social interaction that's based on generosity and love to come to understand the person so that you can set the tasks between you mutually so they're optimal and not not paralyzing and tyrannical. Yes, yes, exactly. Yes. It's all about finding a foreign or an outer perspective that loves you. That's like basically the secret of almost all the stories in the Bible or about that and the culmination of that in the Bible. There's like a thread of narratives, which is All about King David because that's what King David represents in the Bible

He represents the foreign perspective that was brought in slowly and carefully through generations and then and then became the and carefully through generations and then became the power of renewal. So the first king that of Israel is Saul, right, and he makes a lot of mistakes and he basically is unfit. And then so a new, a renewal has to be brought in and that's David. And David is represents exactly something like what you said. He's the adversary that loves you. And David represents exactly something like what you said. He's the adversary that loves you. And David never kills Saul, even though he has many chances to do it. He doesn't kill him because he sees himself as united with Saul.

They're both the king at the same time. So it's like, he understands the mystery that I was describing earlier. You don't want to kill, be joined with your enemy and then kill your enemy because you're killing yourself. So the whole story of David is about all the problems we've been discussing since the beginning. Basically, David is a foreigner that was brought in correctly, slowly through time, and David loves slowly through time. And David loves his people, but he's a foreigner. David comes from a foreign line. And then he becomes king. Well, when the king has become tyrannical, so when your own order has become tyrannical, you have to bring in something foreign that's outside in order to counterbalance

the tyranny. You know, you see the same pattern reflected in Egyptian cosmology because in Egyptian cosmology you have Osiris and Osiris is basically Saul. He's the old state and Osiris is old and anachronistic and willfully blind and he has an evil brother, Seth, whose name becomes Satan through the Copoptics, the Egyptian Coptics, and Seth waits for an opportunity to overthrow Osiris and he becomes the ruler of the state and he chops Osiris into pieces. So he breaks up the order completely and destroys it and now rules as a malevolent power. Now when Osiris falls apart as a malevolent power. Now when Osiris falls apart, ISIS, whose queen of the underworld, comes up again, emerges out of the underworld, and so that would be the material realm in some sense in your cosmology. And she finds Osiris's fellace and she makes herself pregnant with it. And then she gives birth to Horus, and Horus is the eagle and the falcon and the eye of

attention. And he grows up outside the kingdom alienated from it, and then he goes back to retake his kingdom. But he, and he dispenses with Seth in a battle so called a cataclysmic that, and not one of his eyes is torn out. Because that's how damaging that encounter with that malevolent spirit can be. He gets his eye back and he banishes Seth, but then he goes to the, instead of ruling, now as Victor, he goes to the underworld and he finds the ghost of Osiris, who's sort of fragmented in in pieces and three quarters dead, and he gives him the eye. And then they unite, and it's their union that constitutes

the model for the Pharaoh, an Egyptian political theology. So the idea is that you don't overthrow the state, you overthrow the, you separate the chaff from the wheat, and you conserve the state, and you do that by giving the dead state living vision. And the proper ruler is the combination of the living vision and tradition that can keep the archetypal enemy of the state at bay. So that's an echo of the same idea that you just described as characteristic of the relationship between David and Saul. You see this necessity for relying on the stranger quite often in the biblical narrative. So when Jethro tells Moses how to set up the proper alternative to the Pharaoh in the desert, Jethro is an outsider too, and a priest, he's a Midianite priest if I remember correctly.

And he tells Moses to set up a distributed system of power and responsibility as an alternative to top down feronic judgment, which is the trap that Moses is falling into in the desert at that point. So this introduction of the foreign element, the proper leaveening of the tradition by the introduction of the foreign element, or the foreign woman, for example, or the foreign agent who acts morally, despite their foreignness, that's a recurring motif in the Bible and another reason for radical hospitality.

Yeah, it's almost the universal motif of the Bible. If you, almost every story, if you understand this pattern of the need to find a foreign perspective in order to renew yourself, you can understand a whole lot of stories just with that basic understanding. But, I mean, there's always a language that has to be understood because things aren't obviously aren't said in such a direct way. You know, so you have to understand certain patterns that are, for example, the pattern of women drawing water from a well, that's one way to represent the woman's role of mediator with the earth. So she goes and takes water from below the earth and she brings it up.

And the purpose of the water is to refresh and renew a system that needs it. Yeah, a system that's become too desert like an it's sterile presuppositions. Yes, and can't, can't, doesn't have a feedback mechanism for its errors. I mean, if you have something that's too rigid and error inserts itself into it, and you don't have a feat about mechanism or a way to cleanse it, like to wash your feet. This is how it's described in the Bible. If you can't wash your feet,

then you'll end up with gangrene or something. You know what I mean? You'll end up with a serious problem. But so there's the woman that draws water from below the earth and brings it and waters, it's about renewal and refreshment of something. But so I'm just using this as an example, but it's the idea that almost every story in the Bible is describing some very basic patterns, and then you just have to learn the language that that's used to describe it, because it doesn't speak in a mathematical way, you know, it doesn't

speak with categories, it speaks with stories, But their stories are actually a lot more precise than people might imagine. It's not vague. You're also precise and you point this out very well in your work and your brother does this extraordinarily well too. Their precision is amplified and bolstered by this fractal quality that you described is that because people like Sam Harris for example, this is not a criticism of Sam, are prone to say you're just imposing an interpretation on the story and how do you know that your interpretation is correct. There's actually a technical answer to that which in psychology is known as a multi-method, multi-trade construct validation

process, and the idea is that if you want to see if something's actually there, you have to view it from a number of perspectives, as many perspectives as you can manage, and then you have to see if each perspective provides the same view. And so one of the things that you do that's so remarkable in your book, which I think gives it an extreme level of validity and reliability, is that you say, well, here's a pattern I inferred from Genesis 1, and then look, this pattern replicates itself 300 times. how in the world so either you've done a remarkable work of imagination imposing an order that isn't there and you've managed to pull out

300 exemplars showing the existence of that pattern or you've actually found something that's implicate in the text itself. And I was certainly convinced by your book that you had done the latter and not the former. And I would also say that it wasn't merely a consequence of reading your book, because your book doesn't exist in a vacuum, and the symbolic language that you lay out so clearly, and with a tremendous dearth of references, which is quite interesting, is very much akin to the same pattern that emerges out of the writings of people like Merchè Alliata and Eric Neumann and Carl Jung

and the great investigators of myth who have made propositions, put forward propositions that are very similar. And so Camille Pallia told me once, I thought this was extremely interesting. I'm a great admirer of Eric Neumann who wrote a book called The Great Mother and another called The Origins in History of Consciousness.

And he provides a very acute and deep summary of Carl Jung's thought. He was a student of Jung's and Jung wrote an introduction to The Origins in History of Consciousness and said it was the book. He wished he was able to write, which is pretty damn high praise. And Neumann's work is analogous to your work in its symbolic language. And Pallia said that had the postmodernists turned to Eric Neumann instead of Michelle Foucault

and Jacques Derrida and the French continental philosophical Neomarchist crowd that the entire history of intellectual endeavor in the humanities in the last 60 years would have been written very differently. And I think that's absolutely true. I had come to the same conclusion independently of her and worked quite different as thinkers. And so it was quite striking for me to have her, to hear her say that, especially about a work that's

relatively obscure as the origins and history of consciousness, which is a great book. It's a truly great book. And I definitely see your work in the same tradition. Yeah, I think I think one of the maybe main differences with what I'm doing, maybe I come to similar results, but one thing I didn't want to do was to do like a work of comparative religion. I always, I tried to avoid that. Not that I find anything wrong with that, but I tried to write something that only was based on the imagery of the Bible. I didn't want to get into comparative religion.

I just didn't want to do it. There's already work like that exists. Well, you did your comparisons within the biblical stories. So you took a comparative approach, but it was a within text comparative approach, which I thought was very powerful and very compelling. And one of the things I should tell everyone who's watching and listening is that

Matthew's book is very, very straightforward. It's, there's none of the merceness, let's say, that characterizes Carl Jung's work for better or worse. And believe me, I'm not making myself out to be a credible critic of Jung. He was unbelievably brilliant in 50 different ways. But Matthew's book is, I described it to my son who is a computer programmer as a programming manual for the biblical

narrative. And you mentioned before we started talking today that that is in part your background that you do think like a programmer. And so maybe you could explain that a little bit. Well, for sure, my thought processes were definitely influenced by mathematics and computer science. The mathematics may be just for the rigor of it. Not every discipline, academic discipline has the same level of rigor as mathematics.

There's a little bit of slagness sometimes in certain areas, I think, which lead to just things being just opinions, you know, but when you study mathematics, you get used to just the basic habit of not dealing with opinions, you know, I'm dealing with derivations from principles. You can agree with, you can disagree or agree with the first principles in mathematics if you want, but you can hardly disagree with the derivations they come up with. And so that's, I guess, influence a lot of my rigor. And then the other aspect I would say computer science definitely prepared my thinking

for a fractal way of understanding things. Because one of the rare, I would say, disciplines that exist, that study fractal thinking, I would say is computer science. Okay, expand on that because I don't understand that. I understand the fractal issue with regard to the stories, but I don't understand its role in computer programming. Well, I mean, a part of computer programming is to learn how to think with recursion.

So recursion is fractality, basically. It's just you have a pattern that includes itself and defines itself within itself. So it's just a different kind of thinking. You need to get used to that kind of thinking. You can't just pick it up like that. You need practice. Okay. I just released an essay writing app called essay.app with my son. And it's also based in some

sense on the principle of recursion. And so it teaches people to edit their writing while simultaneously apprehending multiple levels of interpretation. And so, and this is relevant to the layered structure of reality that you lay out in your book. And so, well, what are you doing when you're writing? Where's the meaning? Well, you could say, you would say, well, it's in the lines that make up the letters of each word. And then it's in the letters themselves, and then it's in the words,

and then it's in the phrases and the sentences, and the organization of the sentences, and the ordering of the sentences within paragraphs, and then in the ordering of the paragraphs, and all of that has to, everything at each level has to reflect the totality as a whole in order for the piece of writing to be edited properly. And you point out in chapter 11 when you're talking about the spiritual and material dimensions, something akin to that, again, working on this idea of a hierarchy moving

from Earth to heaven, using the old cosmology of light, air, water, and Earth as a representation of that cosmology. And so, imagine that we're moving from dark and heavy to bright and light. And dark and heavy would be Earth, and the multiplicity of forms that are characteristic of the earthly domain, and then above, and that's solid and multiplicitous, and and meaningless in some sense, and then above that is water, which is more like fluid and light and air, and then above that is air, and then above that is light, and that's a pyramidal structure, and light is associated with apprehension and detention, and with the pinnacle of the pyramid, and that's a recursive language that's fractal in nature, that's reflective of the structure of heaven and earth, and those images recur consistently throughout the Bible as well, as

well as in ancient writings that use this earth, water, air, and light cosmology. Yeah, yeah, it's about seeing the always miniature versions of things within themselves. But I think like you said before, there are tests that you can do to know if your interpretation is just your opinion or your fancy or if it's actually something legitimate and that's what exactly what it is. If you can find the patterns that you're describing at multiple levels of this story and also there's other patterns. I mean I think a lot of people who criticize the Bible many times atheists I guess are they're just being dishonest. They don't they don't know the stories. They don't

know what they're talking about. So I mean it's a very unsatisfactory criticism, in my opinion. It's like me criticizing a language that I don't even understand and not even trying to learn the language. It's also like a scientist casually criticizing deep literature. It's like, well, someone like Dostoevsky, let's say, is extraordinarily deep and writes fiction. The notion that that fiction is somehow meaningless is absurd. And the notion that there aren't depths of fiction is equally absurd. And the idea that there are depths means that there's a hierarchy.

And the idea that the deepest parts of the hierarchy of meaning are the divine parts is a matter of definition. It's not a matter of interpretation. It's like, while we experience deepest things at the deepest levels, and to not regard the Bible in some fundamental sense as the deepest of literature is only to reveal your ignorance about the subject. It's as simple as that. As Whatever the Bible is, it's certainly deep and mysterious and not least because it's so intensely cross-referenced, right? And has this immense, amazing fractal structure that you describe. Here's

here's an example. So in the beginning, God created the heaven, you say, immaterial meaning and the earth, meaningless matter. And then you go on to say, in biblical cosmology, the universe was created as a union of heavenly and earthly components. Therefore, everything in it has both a spiritual and material dimension. These dimensions are often symbolized by a series of layers in vertical space with a relationship between each layer's position and its degree of corporate reality. Top layers are light and supple, and bottom layers are heavy and solid, and you analyze Genesis 1-2, the layers of vertical space. Earth.

The Earth was meaningless and confounding. Water above the Earth. Darkness was on the face of the deep. Water above the earth. Darkness was on the face of the deep, air above the water. The wind of God hovered over the face of the waters. Light above air. Light, God said, let there be light, and there was light. This topography of vertical space

is illustrated in the following diagram. You present a pyramid with the earth at the bottom and light at the top, multiplicity of earthly phenomena, let's say, in a singular unity of light at the top. However, there is no need to associate the dots of that illustration with atomic theories of matter. Instead, they simply illustrate the varying densities of tangible stuff for each of these levels. The top levels are more implicit than the bottom levels, and therefore have a less corporeal presence.

In addition to the degree of corporeality, these layers are also defined by the degree of brightness. So earth is dark and heavy and light is obviously bright and light. Together, these two dimensions provide a complete picture of vertical space in ancient cosmology. The material dimension goes from heavy to light, while the spiritual dimension goes from bright to dark or from clear to obscure. There is also an inverse relationship between these characteristics. Highly corporeal things will naturally be low in brightness and vice versa.

To fully understand this inverse relationship, it is important to realize that matter was inherently connected to darkness in ancient cosmologies. In practice, this is the phenomenological aspect. This is due to the fact that matter causes obscurity depending on its degree of opacity. In other words, earthly substances block the light completely while more fluid substances, like water and air, have greater degrees of transparency. Hence, there is an inverse relationship between the degree of corporeality of a substance and its degree of clearness. Substances high in corporeality are obscure due to their complexity, while substances that are low in corporeality are clear due to their simplicity and will close with this.

This pyramidal structure is a fundamental pattern of interpretation in the Bible. It attaches a spiritual quality to objects and events based on their position in vertical space. In this context, something may be depicted as too high when it is too simple to understand and too low when it is too complex. True knowledge is usually depicted as central, in the sense that it is complex enough to be tangible and simple enough to be meaningful. Sprilliant, very short chapter, chapter 11, we read most of it, a marvel of what would you call that centrality of meaningful clarity. And so, hooray for that. You do the same thing in the next chapter in some sense with Nebuchadnezzar's dream.

Yes, yes, yes, exactly. As I was listening to you read that, I was saying to myself, oh, that's why I use diagrams in my book, because when it's just a description like that, it sounds very complicated. And when you just look at the picture, it's like, okay, yeah. So as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? I found an analogy between you use of diagrams in this book and my use of diagrams in my

first book, Maps of Meaning, while I was working out the ideas in that book, which are analogous in many ways to the ideas that you're presenting, where we're definitely what sniffing down the same trail, let's say. I found that in order to understand what I was doing, I had to make the diagrams. And then I decided to include them. There's some 70 diagrams. Yours are, you have many more diagrams. They're more differentiated than my diagrams

by quite a margin. I'm gonna read Nabokit Nezers' dream from Daniel 231 because I think it's a great example of this isomorphism of pattern. And in such a surprising sense, right? Because in the previous chapter, we have the image of the cosmos that God creates laid out in four lines and the relationship between the different levels. And then we see the same thing reflected in a dream using entirely different imagery, but the pattern is the same. So this is from Daniel 231 to 233. This image,

which was large and whose brightness was surpassing, stood before you. Its head was fine gold. So that's the sun and the ethereal and eternal realm, because gold is incorruptible and eternal and shines like the sun. Its head was fine gold. Its chest and arms were silver moving down the hierarchy. Its belly and thighs were brass. Its legs were iron and its feet were iron and clay. So it gets heavier and more material as you get closer and closer to the earth and it gets in some sense more vulnerable to as you move down the...

It's more vulnerable in some sense as you move down the, it's more vulnerable in some sense as you move down the hierarchy. That's why we use the expression feed of clay. Yes, it gets harder and then but more corruptible. Yes, the top of the statue is ahead of gold, which is the brightest and rarest of metals. Conversely, the bottom layer is made out of iron and clay, which is the hardest and most common of metals. So this statue is a microcosm of the elemental hierarchy of light, air, water, and earth that

stretches from heaven to earth and biblical cosmology. Yeah, brilliant, I thought. I thought. So all right, so let's turn to Jacob's ladder. Okay. You want to delve into that momentarily because that's a very striking image. And one that's rooted in ancient, shamanic tradition as well, the notion of a Liana between heaven and earth.

At Jacob's vision is definitely that. So that's another example of a hierarchy. Yeah. So, well, I think it's another example also of if you look at these stories, these ancient stories with a wrong perspective They they look completely arbitrary and random and as if they were just inventions pure inventions But if you use just the basic categories of these cosmologies themselves Then they become pretty self-evident like why is it a ladder between heaven and earth? I mean if you're thinking materially why why is a ladder between heaven and earth?

I mean, if you're thinking materially, why is there a ladder between heaven and earth? It doesn't make any sense. But if you think in terms of an ancient cosmology where everything is based on the idea of heaven and joining earth, then obviously there's a ladder between heaven and earth. And while on a relationship between the abstract

and the concrete and a relationship between the infinite and the finite and the relationship between the psychological and the material. And that has to be a structure with some intermediary levels. Yeah, exactly that. So you can always look at things with different lenses. And if you look at the stories in the Bible with the lens of the basic patterns of heaven and earth and things like that, then a lot of the questions that seem unsolvable, they become not only unsolvable but self-evident.

So like, why is there a tree in the Garden of Eden, self-evident? Why is there a ladder in Jacob's dream, self-evident? It's always just the connectors of heaven and earth, boom, problem-sol. You know what I mean? It's it's all it all depends on how you look at it. Sometimes you look at something in one way it seems very complicated. You look at it in another and it's like, okay. Right. Well, and you described earlier and I think this is worth revisiting. I mean, we're going to revisit the Sam Harris or even the postmodern critique. And so because it's quite interesting that Sam and the postmodernists do the same thing, which is, how do you know you're not just imposing your arbitrary interpretation on a set of stories?

And then how do you know that your arbitrary interpretation just doesn't serve your need and motive for the expression of power? And those are good questions, but you can't rush right to the answer that all interpretation is nothing but the self-serving imposition of power, and it's all arbitrary except at the behest of your whim. Jesus, that's definitely throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and it's a very simplistic interpretation. You could say the same about science, too. I mean, anyone who claims a theory about reality, you could say, how do you know it's not

just in your head? I mean, you could claims to have a theory about reality, you could say, how do you know it's not just in your head? I mean, you could say that about anything. The answer is the same. How do you know you experiment and you prove that your ideas and your theories are explained the phenomenon. It's the same thing in a story. If you say, this is all about a certain pattern, that's like your theory. Well, I can prove it to you.

I'll read the story and I'll show you that it's always an expression of this pattern. So you prove it in exactly the same way as science proves its theories. You can also prove it the same way that Kirchegard and the existentialists insisted. And I would say this is basically an active faith, which is you can take the pattern,

you can act it out in the world, you can use it to govern your perceptions and to rule your actions, and then you can see what happens in your life. And I think a lot of the injunction in the Bible in relationship to faith isn't the command to accept a certain description of reality at the propositional level, but to act in accordance with this divine cosmology and then to see the manifestation of that, that's the fruits, right, by which the tree is known, to see the manifestation of that decision to act and perceive in that manner in the world. And that is a fundamental test. And I do think that's something that has to be done at the level of individual.

The individual, that's definitely something that Kirchegard stressed immensely and that people like Solzhenetsyn and Jung and Dostoevsky for that matter also insisted upon. Not that there's not a communal element, right? Because we need to strive to do that together to manifest our individual responsibility. But fundamentally, the test is pragmatic and almost like an engineering test, which is, take the story, act it out, and stress test it. See if it helps you overcome the insuperable obstacle and see if it protects you from nihilism and despair and see if it orients you properly in relationship to yourself and other people and see what it does with your relationship with women and and with children and with your

parents and you can test the story that way and as far as I can tell the Bible it is the compilation of stories that have been tested in that way. Yes exactly. Yes. You can test it within the text to know if your interpretation of the text makes sense within the text. And like you said, that's even higher level. I would say you could test it with reality. And then it's another story. And if you know the Bible very well and you understand the stories, you might start to

discover that the patterns that are described in the Bible will also are also happening to you all the time, whether you want it or not, by the way. Yes, well, this is something Jung pointed out, you know, he said, look, whether you know it or not, you're in the grips of a myth. And he meant a story. And you better figure out what the myth is because it might not have the ending you want. And I read that and I was quite convinced by that because I'd started to understand. That was years ago, decades ago. I'd started to understand that the reason that we're attracted to stories is because a story is a description of the pattern through which we view the world and the pattern that we enact in the world.

And we value stories because we want interpretive patterns to make sense out of the complexity of things. And then the question is, well, what story are you acting out? And the premature neo-Marxist rejoinder to that is, well, we're all acting out a story of power and domination. And I think that's preposterous. We act out a story of power and domination. And I think that's preposterous. We act out a story of power and domination when

the proper story is corrupted and demanded. So if your relationship with your wife is governed by power and authority, then you have a pretty appalling marriage. And if all you do is dominate, tyrannize your children, well, good luck with that. And if you bring the same attitude towards your friendships and your business relationships, you're not going to have any friends. You might have cronies or bully henchmen, and you're certainly not going to be successful in any voluntary business arrangement. So there's a different ethic that governs our perception and our actions, and it is oriented towards this higher spiritual realm that while that you laid out conceptually

and that's detailed out as a characterization of the spirit that we should mimic in the biblical corpus. I think that's all become quite clear on the cutting edge of cognitive science, let's say. Yeah, and you can't, part of the narratives of the Bible is to move from a state of competition where it's just raw competition. I think kind of what you were describing here with just imposition of power. So there's the realm of competition and that's symbolized by a cycle.

And then it might look like a fun thing to be in the realm of competition, but it's not because you always end up Sometimes you're on top. Sometimes you're at the bottom. It's a painful experience, right? So what you want is to have a solution to that competition at one point So a lot of the stories in the Bible of competing brothers are about exactly that so Jacob and Eson right Right, it's zero sum competition. Because you do have a competitive relationship in some sense between Adam and Eve because there's an

adversarial relationship there, though, that's bound in a higher order. It's not competition over a finite set of limited resources. Yeah, and there's a name for that in the, let's say the Jewish cosmology or Biblical cosmology. The concept, there's a difference between what's called an outer cycle and an inner cycle. An outer cycle is when you're in competition, like a war, that's an outer cycle. And then an inner cycle is a contained competition, usually made for selection, and not always, there's other reasons for it. And the contained competition is usually made for selection, and not always, there's other reasons for it.

And the contained competition is what you want. It's basically what I was talking about the role of Eve. It's something like a contained competition. Like, for example, let's say in medieval, it's like a tournament, a tournament. That's a contained competition for selection processes. And that's like a female, it's the female role that does the tournament. P.S.J., the developmental psychologist identified that as a hallmark of appropriate developmental play. And so that's the idea that you unite your striving towards a common direction, that's what a game is.

And then you compete for the purposes of selection. Well, the selection is the victory in the game, but it's also the tuning and adjusting of yourself as an ever greater player, both at the skill level, which would be dependent on the particular sport, but also as a team player as such, because you also need to facilitate the development of your team, and you have to learn to abide by the rules that constitute the fair structure of the tournament. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a contained...

And so that's not a zero sum? Yeah, no, it's not zero sum because it's not a real war. You're not trying to obliterate your adversary. You're in a war but part of a system. Like I said, the feedback mechanism for a system is called an inner cycle. And when you lose that, then you fall into an outer cycle, which is war. Now you're in a constant state of war and competition. When you lose that, you fall out into an outer cycle. So that means that if you don't conduct yourself in some fundamental sense, according to the rules

of advanced development, fostering play, that the alternative to that is that outer cycle of real conflict in the world where negotiations and unity break down and you're forced into a state of tyranny or slavery or war. That's the alternatives. Yeah, and you don't have an arbiter when you're in that level. When you're in the other level, you have a, is that how you say in English, an arbiter? Yeah, there are a referee, a referee is fine.

A referee. Yeah, okay, you don't have that in the war domain, so it might be a never ending conflict. This is actually one of the, if you are familiar with the story of Jacob and Esau, we have that in that story, it's pretty clear. It starts with the mother, which is Rebecca. She says that inside her womb, they're fighting. she has twins right inside her womb. They're fighting inside her womb So this represents what I was this represents the inner inner war the inner cycle That's mediated by her inside her womb. So she she has like the wisdom to mediate that and so she decides who is

Who is worthy to be the the inheritor of the? Of the father you see what I mean? So there's like an inner conflict inside the womb and she decides it She does some some little tricks there some some some a little bit of deception there But she decides who who ends up on top and the reason she does that is if she didn't decide it correctly that would have been an outer war probably that would have lasted forever between the two between Esau and Jacob but then so basically what she did avoided a never-ending conflict between the two brothers and the reason is uh why I don't necessarily want to get in too much detail but the reason is, well, I don't necessarily want to get in too much detail, but the reason is something like

Esau represents the The first born in general in the Bible represents the idea that you have to solve the problem now That's the first born because that's his job because the first born inherits the problems He inherits the the wealth, but he also inherits the problems and here He inherits the times that he's in so if you're living in a rotten time and you're the first born It's actually not a good thing who might think it's always better to be the first born, right? But no if you're born in a state of Inversion and clown world state, you know like now, if you're born in a state of corruption,

then you don't want to be the first born because you're going to have to deal with that problem right now. And the second born or after the youngest or whatever represents a time span that will happen before it becomes your problem. So in a way, when you're in a corrupt world, it's better to be the second born. And a lot of stories in the Bible relate to that. So, Ken and when you're in a corrupt world, it's better to be the second born. And a lot of stories in the Bible relate to that. So, Ken and Abel is the same thing. So in the story of Ken and Abel, the fall just happened. So everything's the earth is cursed. And Ken is the first born. So he has to work the earth. That's his job. He inherits this world. is the firstborn, so he has to work the earth. That's his job.

He inherits this world. This is a way to describe it, this world. And he, so he is in a corrupt world where the earth is cursed. So it might seem like a great thing that he's the first born and he inherits the land, but it's not, because it's cursed, okay? So he's in a bad position, really.

So what happens is able, what he does, it's basically nothing. He just, he doesn't advance his knowledge. He just preserves the traditional knowledge. So in a way, Cain represents the scientist in a way, and Abel represents the priest or the the traditional. So let's say for example, in Christianity, the able would be something like the continuation of the tradition of Christianity, while Cain would be the one who's got to solve the problems as they are right now. And then when there's a fall, a fall away from understanding what tradition means and how it applies to reality, then Cain is in trouble because he has to still solve the problems of the earth. So like a scientist, he has to solve, still solve the problems of the earth.

So like a scientist, he has to see what's in the earth, see what's the facts that are before him, and he has to solve them. But he doesn't have the higher knowledge to solve it correctly so that it doesn't destroy him. Right. So sometimes, sometimes the first born, who's the cardinal inheritor of the tradition is cursed because the tradition itself is cursed and the second born, who's the cardinal inheritor of the tradition is cursed because the tradition itself is cursed

and the second born and often lesser, so to speak, son is the preferable alternative. And that pattern is repeated very, very quickly. Because he had time. Right. Yes, because the second born has the time to like ruminate on the problems. Doesn't have to solve them now.

He just takes his sweet time. And when he solves it, then he acts. This is what Jacob and Esau represent, too. It's a very interesting story. By the way, Esau, at first he thinks he's angry when he gets his inheritance stolen or whatever. But then later when he encounters Jacob, he's not even angry.

And this is a weird little event that happens in the story. It's like, why isn't he angry? Like Jacob is afraid he's gonna be killed by his brother, but then he meets his brother and he doesn't really care. And the reason is because he gets the land right away and that's what he wants. So it's illustrated by, it says he has 400 men with him. Okay, the 400 men represent the land, let's say, the potential of the land.

He gets them right away. And Jacob, he doesn't get 400 men that follow him. He gets 400 years of exile, okay? So the 400 years of exile is the time needed for the rumination to solve the problem correctly and slowly and patiently instead of rushing into it, instead of, it's a solution to not eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You need to wait for the solution and then you can do something. So in certain cases, it's better to be the second born that you can wait, take your sweet time, you don't

have the responsibility of solving the problems of the land. And the other guy has a hard time. Well, right, and there's, while there's an injunction there to the kind of patients that also enables you to allow the solution to present itself instead of assuming that you're the man to take on that particular dragon right here and now in the way that you think is fit. Yes, and that's the burden of the first born. That's the burden of the first born. He has to do it now.

It's his job. Is it also relevant that Jacob is the person who becomes Israel, that becomes the person who's wrestling with God? I mean, if you're interpretation, if I riff on your interpretation, it's something like the firstborn is the inheritor of the proper tradition. But Jacob is someone who's wrestling actively with God. He's engaged in the process of trying to come to grips with what's meat and right and to put that whole hierarchy in order. And maybe his mother prefers him because he has that spirit of active engagement rather than the imposition of traditional, what would you say, traditional values? No, I don't think so. I think it's the other way around. I think it's the other way around. I think Issa is trying to impose, not necessarily tradition, he's just trying to solve the problems that

present himself to him in the land where he's in, which is Canaan, right? And the problems are huge when he gets there because there's enemies everywhere, right? He's in a strange land. So he's supposed to inherit the land right now, but this is a big job. He's alone against a sea of adversaries, you know, the land is cursed, the land is corrupt.

So what does he do? He hires, it doesn't say he hires them, but he gets 400 men to follow him. But the idea is that these aren't reputable men. You know, they're like mercenaries or something like that. That's the general idea. It's not a well-chosen 400 men to follow him. While Jacob, he has the advantage of being forced, in fact to wait. What is he waiting for? He's waiting for the problems to resolve in an easier way, and then maybe he can intervene at one point later, well, 400 years later, according to that story. But the rest thing thing is a

kind of a difficult to explain. I can explain just a little bit, maybe you might find it interesting. What happens when he wrestles the angel is the angel strikes his leg, curses his leg, it says, or plagues his leg. And then what happens after that? It says, now his limp, he limps, right? Because his leg has been hit by the wrestling. So again, the word for limp here is the same word that it's used to say that Eve was taken from the side of Adam. It's the word side. So he lamps means that one of his side is not functional. It's limping. It represents Eve, okay? Does it also represent this sort of

small death that's an antithesis to a great death. Yes. Okay. Okay. Yes. And what happens because he's plagued in his leg, this looks like a bad thing, right? Looks like a curse. But because he's, he's limping, he can only go slowly now. He only walks slowly. And this is what happened. He meets Esau. And Esau is like, uh, let's do our journey together because Esau thinks he's got it figured saw things he's got to figure it out. He's got 400 men behind him. He thinks he's the best, right? He thinks he's got to figure it out.

He's a tough guy now. But Jacob is like, oh, sorry, I can't follow you. I'm limping, you know, I'm gonna go at the speed of the children in the flock. That's what he says. What does that mean? It means I'm forced now because I wrestled with the angel.

His has forced me to take my time to go slowly because one of my legs has been cursed. But now it's a bad thing that turns into a good thing because he has to go extremely slowly. And he has to take care of everyone while doing so. Yes, and he has to wait for a right time to solve the problem when he's able to solve the problem. And this represents also, it represents the 400 years of exile that he has's able to solve the problem. And this represents also,

it represents the 400 years of exile that he has to go to in a sense. One of his legs is injured. And that represents the time also that he has to go into exile. And see, it says in the story, when he gets his leg injured, it says, to this day, the children of Israel don't eat from the sinew of the, basically, the place where he was hit, where he was cursed. See what that means is it's the equivalent of saying, oh, we're not eating from that part that we can't handle. The part that we can't handle right now, we're not going to eat that. That's like saying, we're not going to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and

evil right away. That means you pick a monster that's the right size for you and you do that judiciously and with great care. And that makes real sense to me an increasing sense. We talked at the beginning before we entered this conversation that we were also going to discuss some of the things that you're working on now. And so what are you working on next?

Well, actually, since we didn't really control the conversation, as I would always happen to any conversation, I guess, I kind of started talking about what I was working on. I guess that's what's in my mind right now, so he comes out. So, yeah, what I'm working on basically is my first book, I wrote it from a really, we can say, male perspective, I guess, like, a logo-centric perspective, because that's totally lost anyway.

It has to be dealt with in a negative way, but we have to understand this because it's been lost. But then since then, I've had time to look, try to look at it from, let's say, Eve's perspective or the female perspective in the Bible, which is something that feminists do actually. And this is one of the... When I was in university, I studied religious science and I had this strange interactions with the Department of Religious Studies because I realized it was,

let's say, taken over by feminists. It was totally taken over by feminists. And that kind of put me off, right, because I wasn't looking to become a feminist or anything like that. So I wanted to learn about the Bible. I didn't looking to become a feminist or anything like that. So I wanted to learn about the Bible. I didn't want to become a feminist. So that, one of the reasons why I sort of quit that academic world and I just decided I was going to do it on my own, which is what I did. And that's basically the, we could say the story of my first book. I kind of steered away from academia and I decided, okay, I'm going to just focus on this myself.

But now since then, since I've written my first book, I've had the chance to try to look at it from another perspective. And I really have been doing that and I've been doing, trying to look at it from each perspective. And I've shared a little bit of what I've discovered in our conversation about, eave listening to the snake and what that means. So, again, it has a lot of implications. And all the story, basically I'm interested in the feminine roles in the stories of the Bible, because I think it's something that's very misunderstood.

How far are you through your next book, then? I'm still in the planning stage, just figuring out what I'm going to talk about. Right, well, I got to say I'm very much looking forward to it. And maybe if you would find it useful to have discussions along that dimension as you're moving forward through the book, I'd be more than happy to do that. I think it'd be very interesting to see how you would approach the problem of the feminine. I mean, my wife and I have been talking about that an awful lot. We're trying to puzzle through as we tour around the world and talk to people. We're trying to puzzle out the role.

Well, the role she plays in relationship to what I'm doing and what we're both doing in our lives and exactly what that role should be and then how to formalize that and conceptualize that and to communicate it. It's a very complicated problem partly because for example, because women are hypergamous, they want males who are of equivalent or higher status than them socially. And the same isn't true in reverse. And so what that seems to indicate is that women and the data bears this out, by the way, women are not happy if they are associated with a relatively low status partner in comparison

to their own status. And what that seems to me, to mean, is that to some degree, it's incumbent on women to support their husbands to the degree that's possible in achieving and maintaining the status that would make them as women satisfied. And I don't exactly know what that means practically in relationship between a man and a woman, but I know there's something that's deep about it and that it's something that our culture has done a very bad job of sorting out conceptually and technically. Yes, I think it's even in tradition, the feminine role or the female role, it's kind of, it represents a little bit the esoteric side of any tradition. Because like I said, the criticism of it, tradition has its own criticism within itself. That's the eve criticizes Adam.

Every tradition has a feminine aspect which criticizes the tradition. But this is done discreetly. It's done lovingly and discreetly. So, yes, you have to read between the lines. Right, well, the criticism should be one of encouragement rather than denigration, right? I mean, if I'm going through someone's essay and criticizing it, and all I do is tell them

how terrible it is and how stupid they are, that's not going to be helpful. But if I say, you know, here's the way this sentence could be reformulated to make it clear. And here's something you wrote that's really quite stellar. And I helped them separate the wheat from the chaff. Then the criticism serves the higher purpose of having them develop. And that's a purpose that's part of love because love isn't just acceptance. It's also encouragement. That's the judicious part of love.

And the antithesis to what would otherwise be, an overwhelming and drowning mercy. Yes, yes, so yeah. Basically, yeah, we've been a little bit discussing these questions, I guess, like I said, because what's going on in my head, that's the subjects that are interesting to me right now. So I can't help but communicate them, I guess.

But yeah, it's so it's because it's discreet because the female role of criticism of a tradition is discreet. It ends up being hidden in a way. And when you can find it, it's hard to find. If you can't understand it, it's hard to find. If you start to understand it and you see it, then you see it a little bit everywhere. And you see the female role is just as important as the male role in the tradition, but it's discreet. Because when it stops being discreet, then it becomes an adversary. So there's a proverb that says, how does it go?

It says, a golden ring in a pig's snout is a woman without discretion. That's the whole symbolism that I'm describing can be summed up in that in that proverb. And the word in that proverb without discretion, the word is actually taste. Literally, it's translated, you could say, without taste. And what that means is taste, the ability to taste is part of the female role. It means eat just a little bit. That's what tasting is. Yes, women actually have a much more just differentiated sense of taste and smell by the way than men too.

By a really speaking yes, I didn't know that. Yes, it's the case. So that's interesting. So the idea is you have to have a sensitive taste where you can taste the poison even if you eat just a little bit. So if you eat just a little bit, it's like the the taste of a king, basically, right? The idea is a taste of a king doesn't die every time he does his job.

That's ridiculous. He has to have a sense of taste that is extremely refined so that if he eats tastes something, he can know, ah, this is poison. Don't eat it. So that's part of the mystery of the female role in the Bible. It's like a woman with taste. The female can identify what's poisonous early so that it doesn't become so poisonous, that it's destructive, and that's part of that discretion and judgment. Yes. And she can bring

that to the attention of her of her mate. Here's a potential place of danger and peril that you're overlooking. That would also make sense in relationship to women's finer tuning on the negative emotion side because women do feel negative emotion more intensely than men, and that means that they're bellweathers for alarms in a real sense. And they need to be that because they also have to be sensitive to the more, what would you call it,

vulnerable needs of children. Yes, that makes sense. Yeah. Well Matthew, it was a great pleasure speaking with you. I appreciate it a lot. I really liked your book. I would say to everyone who's watching that you could do a lot worse than to spend a couple of hours reading through Matthew's extremely clear book, The Language of Creation 2018, Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, a commentary, that's available broadly on, the easiest place to get it is Amazon. It's very well reviewed on Amazon,

especially for a self-published book. And I think it's a travesty in some sense that it had to be self-published, because I do think there's some real possibility that it's a great book. And a great book is a very difficult thing to manage, especially when it's simultaneously deep and clear. And I found it extremely useful. I'm going to read it again. I'm really quite in awe of your capacity to unite the highest and lowest in such a clear and concise and straightforward and rational

manner. So to the degree that you were serving the masculine logos in relationship to that book, man, I think you nailed the target dead on. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com. dailywireplus.com