The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - What Happens When Good Men Say Nothing

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

What if the thought that just crossed your mind arrived the same way a prayer is answered? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson opens with a claim that sounds impossible and spends the next ninety minutes making it undeniable: that thinking is a kind of secularized prayer, that every insight you have ever had arrived more like a revelation than like a calculation, and that the direction you aim decides not only what you think but what you are able to see at all. From an ordinary argument with your wife, which Peterson uses to reveal something disturbing about the spirit in which you speak, he moves through a prophet alone in a cave, a man swallowed by the sea for staying silent, and two brothers and a rejected offering, building toward a single answer to the oldest question a person can ask. What faith turns out to be has almost nothing to do with belief in the way you were taught, and everything to do with a decision you are already making, every hour, whether you have noticed it or not. This lecture was filmed on May 16th, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. Unlock the ad-free experience of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast and dive into exclusive bonus content on DailyWire+. Start watching now: http://dwpluspeterson.com/yt ALL LINKS: https://feedlink.io/jordanbpeterson // LINKS // Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com Books - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/books/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Shapiro. Hi, everyone. I spent decades unpacking the biblical stories upon which these lectures are based. I did that because they form the foundation of our culture. You need to know what they are so that you share something in common with everyone else. You need to understand what they mean so that you can find their application in your life. Knowing the meaning of these stories can get you through some very dark times. Welcome to the lecture. Thank you, everyone. Thank you very much for coming tonight. It's very good to see you all here. And so I always sit backstage. I'm preparing for these talks all the time, really. I finished, I think what's the final draft of the book that this tour is based on today, by the way.

Yeah, and I've been working on it. Well, I've been working on it for 40 years. years really, but well, you know, because it's a continuation of ideas that I've been developing really for four decades. But I've been writing it specifically for about three years, I guess. I actually wrote three books at the same time as it turned out. So they'll come out one after the other over the next couple of years. So I'm writing that constantly. And then I'm spending each of these occasions that I have the privilege to engage in thinking on my feet, trying to clarify what I'm writing, trying to clarify my investigations. And I usually focus that, I always focus that,

in preparation for a given lecture, by noting what question is perplexing me. this is really what you do when you think when you think I've thought recently that thought is actually secularized prayer I'll tell you why I believe that I truly believe it's the case there's endless reason to believe that

the religious enterprise per se preceded any attempt to formalize thinking we don't really have any records of formalized thought as such, let's say prior to the Greek philosophers, prior to Socrates in particular, who taught people to think. What were people doing before that at a psychological level? Well, they were engaged in some variant of a religious enterprise. There were no faithless people in the distant past. The manner in which people interacted with the world was a religious.

manner. There was no alternative to that. People might have debated with one another about what the appropriate faith was, but everyone existed within a conception of the world that we would regard today as clearly religious. What do you do when you think? Well, the first thing you do is you admit that you don't know something. Right. So that's a gesture of humility if you want to think about something. We have to have a problem. It has to be a problem you're interested in, let's say, or a problem that bothers you, a problem that plagues your conscience or calls to you.

You have to have a problem. You have to accept that problem as your own, so that's a move of responsibility. And then you have to proclaim your ignorance, not least to yourself, right? Because if you have a problem, you have a problem because you don't have the solution. and if you don't have the solution,

then you're not everything you could be. Not least because you have the problem. And so then what do you do? If you're thinking, you know, people say, well, I thought up this or I thought of this. And it's a strange way of apprehending what happens because when you say, I think, it's not like you know what you're doing, right?

You don't know how you think. You have no notion. whatsoever of the causal sequence that allows you to conjure up something, essentially out of nothing, that addresses something that you didn't know. And it's a complete bloody mystery. It's like, think about it this way. If you didn't know the answer, then how could you think it up? It's the same problem obtains when you dream. It's like, obviously that's not a voluntary activity. where did the dreams come from? Well, they say, well, they happen in my head.

It's like in there in the goo, that's the idea, is it? It's a very weird way of looking at the situation because the disjunction between the dream as a phenomena and the matter of your brain is so great that attempting to casually reduce one to another to the other is, well, it's just a non-starter. It's preposterous in some ways. And we certainly don't understand the relationship between conscious or unconscious experience,

say if dreams are more on the unconscious side. We don't understand that in the material substrate of the brain at all. There's been no decades now of pretty intense work on consciousness from the neuroscience perspective. It isn't obvious that we've really got anywhere at all with it. It's a great mystery. So anyways, you're thinking away, what do you do? Well, as I said, you admit that you have a problem, so that's a gesture of humility. It's also a confession of sorts, right?

Is that you don't know. And you have to admit that to yourself. So this is what scientists do when they're thinking. You have to grapple with the fact that you're bereft. And then what do you do? One of the things I learned when I was a scientist was that scientists lie about science the time. It's built right into the scientific process. When you publish a scientific paper, you write the introduction. The introduction describes how you generated your hypothesis and why,

and all of that's complete nonsense. Because what you do is you tell a story about how you reviewed the literature and how it sequentially influenced you to logically, take the next step forward and come up with the research question in mind. That isn't how it works. Ever or virtually ever. First of all, if your research question is so obvious that you could have just derived it from a review of the literature, it hardly is original or worth pursuing.

So there has to be a leap of originality in there somewhere that isn't accounted for by the mere facts. The truth of the matter is that you have a hypothesis. you have an intuition, you have an insight that something might be the case, and you get that because you admitted in ignorance that you didn't know and you received something that approximates a revelation. That's what an intuition is. That's what an insight is.

That's what it means to move towards illumination. Those are all words with the religious connotation. That's where scientific hypotheses come from, right? And sometimes they strike people even with the force of revelation is that the greatest of scientists in their autobiographical accounts, accounts often insist upon the fact that they're struck by a realization, right? It's a very strange language. It's like, well, where does that realization come from?

It's the same question as where do your thoughts come from? Well, what you have to do to think, at least in the initial stages, you have to admit that you don't know and then you have to what you'll have to want to know well there's no real difference between that and Christ's injunction in the Gospels right the junction from Christ is that you should knock and the door will open and you should ask and you'll receive and you should seek and you'll find and that's all predicated on the idea that you're actually knocking right that it's a gesture that indicates an intent to walk through the door and that you're actually asking because you want and that you're

seeking because you want to find. It has to be the genuine article. And then what is the consequence of that? And the consequences, well, something appears in the theater of your imagination. That's a much more accurate way of describing what happens than that you thought it up. You thought out your dreams, did you? That's why dreams can contain information that you. That's why you can contain information that you don't know. How do you account for that? Well, is it necessary to portray it as a revelation? Well, it's a description. If you want to attribute it to the workings of the unconscious mind, go right ahead. But it's not like you've made any progress in solving the problem. You've just replaced one mystery with another. And so I think that the biological and the divine dove tale,

And if you want to take a bottom-up approach to the problem of revelation, and attribute it to something like an implicit unconscious that emerges out of the material realm but has its own structure, it's like, well, go right ahead. You're treading on religious ground when you do that anyways. Not just treading. You're fully there. Certainly people like Carl Jung realized that by like 1930, you know. And that was part of his beef with Freud.

because Jung realized that the God that Nietzsche had dispensed with in some sense made itself manifest anyways and the unconscious. And he was absolutely right about that. And so what do you do when you ask a question is, well, you open yourself up to revelation. Now, that's not the end of thinking. And the reason for that is that as it's put in the New Testament, you have to test the spirits to see. see if they're of God. And what does that mean? Well, you have to critically evaluate what it is that you've received.

Because perhaps the revelation that's been delivered to you in consequence of your search has been delivered by the wrong spirit. And what would that mean? Well, here's a way of thinking about this is extremely useful to know. Imagine that you're trying to settle an argument with your wife. Now, if you had any sense, when you were trying to settle the argument, you would aim up. Right? I'm dead serious about this.

You would step back and you'd take stock and you'd think, okay, if I could have what I wanted, if I could get what I, if I could have the proper door open, if I could ask and receive in the proper manner, if I could seek and find what I wanted to find, what would it be? And then you'd think, well, I would like to reestablish the harmonious peace and playful spirit that characterizes my relationship with my wife and all those people I love when those relationships are at their best. And I would sacrifice everything to that end. And I would seek for the solution to the problem of our conflict in that spirit. And then if you did that and you were sinless in your aim, if you were precise in your aim, if you were oriented towards the establishment of that microcosm of the Garden of Eden,

then the spirit that would respond to your request would be the spirit of the God of your ancestors that would deliver you the message that would move you one step forward to the... One step closer to the kingdom of heaven. But you'd bloody well better make sure you have your act together before you make a request like that, because the alternative is that you call something unholy up to answer you, and you get a revelation from that spirit instead. And you might say, well, Dr. Peterson, you're degenerating into archaic and superstitious language. It's like, don't be so sure about that, because you might imagine that you harbor an endless number of resentments

and your bitter little soul about your wife and about all the other people that you interact with. And instead of orienting yourself properly towards what's highest and seeking for the insight that would establish peace and harmonious tranquility, you decide that you could toss a little insult in there and maybe obtain a little bit of a victory and, you know, get back at her for the last time that you argued when she defeated. you or maybe the last hundred times that that's happened, who knows, and that you've had enough of taking guff from people and it's time for you to, you know, make your own stance. And if you can throw a little intellectual pride in there, so much the better.

And that's the spirit in which you ask the question. And that's exactly the spirit that responds. Right. And so then you get a revelation that's not exactly from, you might say, the divine source itself because you've called some lesser devil up in the recesses of your imagination and that's what informs you as to your proper what would you say your proper strategy moving forward that's what crafts your cynical and sarcastic and bitter words that's what inspires you to use power when you could use invitation that's what inspires you to proclaim your correctness like the pharaonic tyrant

who continues to double down, that's what you've invited into your life, into your soul. And so you better test the spirits that you call on to see if they're of God, because God only knows how misaligned your aim is. And that misalignment of aim, that is sin. That's what sin means. It means, it's an archery term. It means to miss the target. And so, God, heaven help you when you, what would you say, first practice to deceive,

heaven help you when you aim in the wrong direction and wait for the inspiration to strike you. And that's worth thinking, you know, that's worth thinking about. Because your thoughts, you can speak of this just in the most practical sense, your thoughts are tools, they're age. to your progression forward, right? I mean, you think so that you can maneuver in the world more effectively. And so what is it that determines

what thoughts make themselves manifest to you? And the answer to that is straightforward. Your aim. That's what determines it. That's what determines. That's what determines not just what you think, but what you see.

literally what determines which pathways forward open to you which determines what constitutes obstacles and what constitutes obstacles and what constitutes aids

your aim determines who your friends are and who your enemies are your aim your aim is the structure through which you see the world and your character is your sequence of abes

That's what you see unfolding in front of you when you go see a movie. You see someone characterized as a series of aims. And you derive from that the manner in which they view the world. You identify them with them emotionally. You come to see the obstacles and the pathways forward and the friends and foes that make up their world because you understand their aim. And so it matters for you to get your aim right.

And so when I'm sitting backstage before I come on stage to talk, I try to first knock and ask, like, what's the problem I'm trying to address? It has to be a real problem. It has to be something I'm wrestling with, something I'm grappling with, something that I believe is worth sacrificing for, worth pursuing, worth communicating, worth contemplating.

And it has to be a genuine question. And the question for tonight was, what is it? How is it that we could best conceptualize faith? Right. And so that's the question that I'm hoping to answer. And what's the spirit in which I hope. that answer will be delivered. Well, we set the stage with the music and David Carter's a very good musician and he gives it his all and that orients us upward in the way music does and it focuses

the attention of everyone in the audience. And as my daughter indicated, we're very happy with our audiences, which is why we continue to do the tours and why are we happy with them. It's well, First of all, look it, here you are. And that's a miracle for anyone who has any sense. It's like there's 5,500 of you. It's like, what the hell are you doing here? It's seriously, like, you have to be a complete fool as someone who has the privilege to address a crowd like this to not constantly be struck by the sheer improbability.

of this happening, of all the things that have to come together in this strange way they have come together in order to make something like this possible. And so if you have the least bit of sense, you walk on stage, what would you say? With your jaw dropped, realizing that nothing more improbable in some sense than this is likely. And yet, here it is. And so, and then what else? Well, My sense, these events tend to be very positive. Why? Well, because the people who are attending, by and large, are knocking and asking and seeking, and people differ in their sophistication in that regard. You know, I mean, you meet some people who have clear vision and their ability to detect up, even under trying circumstances, is unparalleled. You see other people who are just starting to stumble out of the pit up the hill, and their vision is still obscured, but they have some sense that up exists, and they're willing to take a risk to pursue it.

And by and large, the audiences that come to these events are upward aiming. And so it's a celebration of Jacob's Ladder, this endless spiral up towards the pinnacle and a mutual attempt to walk that golden ladder. And so when I sit backstage and conjure up a question or allow one to make its appearance to me, I remember that I'm engaged in a serious quest, in the most engaging possible way and that I have the privilege of undertaking that endeavor

in a public manner that allows me to craft my words and see them appear and then to test them simultaneously in real time to see if they land. And that's a good deal. Like that's a seriously good deal. It's hard to imagine

especially for someone constituted like me, it's hard to imagine anything better. I mean, I've always enjoyed being a professor and took it seriously, and now I have the opportunity to speak to a different audience every night about exactly what it is that I'm most compelled to investigate to exactly the audience that's only there because they actually want to be there. It's like, well, that's a fine deal. And so I hope with that contemplation and that effort and gratitude for the unlikely gift of this opportunity

that I can call upon this spirit of revelation to aid me in crafting my words and dig more deeply into the problem at hand. That being, how do we conceptualize faith? Now, I'm going to tell you a way we shouldn't conceptualize it. What's it called? Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy. It's called Peterson Academy.

Peterson Academy. If you want an actual education, with hand-selected professors from top universities around the world. Bringing the best professors together, making sure they're not censored in any way, giving them the audience and the remuneration and appreciation they deserve. And you were true to your word. You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy. I have had it through every course. We figure we can offer people a high quality university level education for under $2,000. Well, congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant. I can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this. Funjo.

There's an insistence in the biblical texts that God is in the final announcement. analysis, ineffable. Okay, so what does that mean? It means beyond categorization. It means outside of space and time. It means that whatever existence God has is of a higher order than the existence of what we regard to be objectively true. the reality of the objective is one form of reality, the reality of the transcendent is a higher form of reality.

And it's not to be reduced to the objective. This is partly why Christ says in the Gospels. Not everyone who says, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those that do the will of my father. what does that reference mean? Faith is not belief in a set of fact. It's the precondition for observing the facts that matter. And that's a much deeper form of truth. It's a much deeper understanding of the structure of reality.

God can't be reduced. to what's simply material. Here's an example. There are multiple examples of this. When God comes to the prophet Elijah. Elijah is the prophet who accompanies Moses on Mount Tabor when Christ is transfigured and the disciples

realize that he's the Savior. So Elijah is a major prophet. prophet. His account in the Old Testament is rather short, but it's crucial. Elijah is the prophet who finally realizes and establishes the proposition that God is not to be found in the world of nature. Elijah is the prophet who defeats the priests of Baal, the God of nature, in a final showdown, and follows that with a flight made necessary by his victory, which displeases Jezabel, who's the foreign queen of the Israelites who brought the worship of Baal to the forefront, the worship of nature, something we're toying with now, more than toying with,

he has to flee into the desert. And when he's in the desert, in a cave, the awe-inspiring majesty of the natural world presents itself to him. He experiences a conflagration, a fire, a terrible fire, forest fire, a raging inferno, which is certainly capable of eliciting the kind of awe that is akin to a religious experience. He experiences a thunderstorm, a great thunderstorm, and with a tremendous wind, right, the motion of the invisible that also has that uncanny element that elicits awe and can be confused with the divine, even in. if it's a pointer, proper pointer to the divine,

and he experiences an earthquake, which brings him to his knees, you might say. And despite that, Elijah has a realization in his pursuit of the God of Israel, and his realization is that God is not in the storm or the fire, or in the majesty of nature. God is not identical to any of that. he's instead best better construed as the still small voice that calls within

that's a radical claim, a radical idea in some ways it's a minimization of God it's certainly what you'd propose if you were one of the said worshippers of nature that now God is something that, well what is subjective, psychological? Well, not exactly because the still small voice within your conscience, that's not exactly subjective, right? I mean, it makes it self-manifest to you, and insofar as that occurs, it's in the realm of subjective experience, but it's not subjective in that you don't control it. In fact, it operates autonomously despite you.

And that's a remarkable thing. And so it also speaks to you or otherwise impels you in a manner that issues force. Because your conscience might plague you and things might bother you and problems might present themselves. to you as yours to take responsibility for, but you're not compelled in the manner of an automaton, a robot, a deterministic robot to act out without choice the dictates of your conscience. It informs, it reveals, but it doesn't compel. And that's a remarkable, that's a remarkable, that's a remark. phenomenal phenomenon. And phenomenon is a word that is derived from the Greek,

than is thy. And it means to shine forth. Right. That's what phenomena do in the world. They shine forth and attract your attention, compel you, or call to you, or warn you, in the case of conscience, to stay on the straight and narrow path that leads uphill. And so that's God. That's God. And what is faith in relationship to God construed in that manner? Faith is the willingness to abide by the dictates of your conscience. You see, it's not a statement about the nature of material reality. That just moves the phenomena back into the realm of the world of nature. It's the faith is the willingness to attend to your conscience. And there's faith either way in that situation, the atheistic types, the materialists, and the determinists.

They make the insistence that faith is tantamount to superstitious, superstition is unnecessary given the availability of evidence. It's like, in relationship to your conscience, you have two choices, both. our faith predicated. You can either listen to it and act in accordance with it or ignore it and take an alternative route. And the evidence is essentially the same in both cases. You don't know if you're called upon to take a problem that's calling to you seriously. You have no evidence a priori what the outcome of your decision to listen will be. And so if you abide by the still small voice that Elijah identified as an element of the one true God, then your faith is your decision to act.

That's why Christ says in the Gospels, as I indicated, that true faith is indicated by the willingness to do the will of the heaven. Heavenly Father. That's the poetic representation. And so that's a God that's ineffable and indescribable, incomprehensible, who invites but does not command, who defines the straight and narrow pathway forward that exists in relationship to you because you have a relationship with your conscience, even if it's an uncomfortable one, which it tends to be if you deny its voice, which also makes you a very dangerous person to yourself and others indeed. That's a characterization of God or a definition.

And faith is the pattern of decision that emerges from that encounter. Conscience is not the only way that God makes himself manifest in the Old Testament and New Testament stories, not by any stretch of the imagination. The stories are in fact a sequence of characterizations of what the ancient Hebrews regarded as an essential unity. They're a set of characterizations of what is to be celebrated or celebrated. put in the highest place or aimed at or related to in the manner that produces integrity in the soul and harmony and productive generosity in the community. How is that character represented or portrayed? In the story of

the opening stories of Genesis, God is portrayed as the victor over Leviathan. Leviathan is the great dragon of the chaotic waters. There's a very primordial set of images underlying that text. The God

who confronts the dragon and wins the treasure that that confrontation allows, bestows the abysmal dragon that lives in the depths is the inhabitant of the original primordial waters

the Tohu Vabohu upon which the spirit of God rests or broods at, not only at the beginning of time, but throughout the entire expanse of time itself and who wrestles with that chaos and

possibility and potential because that's the primordial water and in doing so extracts out the order that is good human beings are conceptualized in that story as made in that image and

what are we to understand of that. Well, what's the world? Is the world a set of facts and phenomena that force us as automatons to

react in a deterministic manner that's pre-programmed and willless? That appears not even possible in principle because the manner in which things unfolded

is in principle in determinant and uncertain, and there's no deterministic causal pathway forward that can properly compute the transforming horizon of the future. And that is what you actually experience despite your delusions. Otherwise, you see the world, you as the Enlightenment, post-enlightenment materialists that we all are, you see the world as a set of objects that what compel you forward. That's not how you experience the world. The fact that you believe that is an indication of the grip of that enlightenment view that is now coming to an end. what is it that you perceive and contend with?

It's the same thing that the spirit that broods on the water that's chaos and potential wrestles with at the beginning of time. What is that? That's the potential that surrounds you. Your consciousness does not deal with what's fixed. It deals with what's fluid. It deals with what is yet to be. You peer into the future like a driver looking down the road.

You've already run over what's all right in front of your car. You look into the future and you craft your strategy and your attention and your actions to make of that future the continuing voyage to your destination. And that sequence of destinations is the endless journey to the promised land, the endless wandering up Jacob's ladder, or the climbing of the Holy Mount, the attempt to reestablish the Garden of Eden, or to bring about the paradise that is lost to us because of our sin. When you awaken in the morning, in anxiety, let's say,

because of the desperate straits that you foolishly found yourself in, or in the hope that an exciting adventure awaits you when you sit up and put your feet on the ground and begin to contend with the day, that anxiety and hope is the apprehension of the potential that is your deepest reality on the, upon the occasion of the emergence of your conscience, your consciousness. You know that you have opportunities and obligations to shape whatever it is that's offering itself to you in the course of that day. And you can do that badly. Or you can do it well and you can do it bitterly and resentfully. Or you can do it gratefully.

You can do it aiming down. You can do it when you call upon the first. foul spirits to reveal their mysteries to you or you can do it aiming up and you're always doing that with every word you utter with every breath you take with every glance you make you're wrestling with possibility and transforming it either into some slice of the hell that you could bring about with your foolishness or some improved representation of the earthly domain that's attempting to transform itself into heaven. And that's your inevitability and your responsibility.

And you know that because your conscience calls you out when you fail to perform that shaping and wrestling, subduing and naming that's Adam's responsibility. When you fail to perform that in the manner that indicates that you've brought your best to the table. And so that's an early characterization of man, of God and man. And Adam and Eve, in that early stage, walk with God, in the eternal garden, the wall garden that's the optimal balance of social structure, hence the walls and natural abundance, hence the garden that is the permanent environment of human beings. And Adam and Eve walk with God in that garden prior to the emergence of pride and sin because they're aiming up. And that's possibility exists for you insofar as you truly aim up

and make the sacrifices necessary to realize that aim. And that sacrificial path of expanding opportunity is the establishment of the covenant between the chosen people and God. And that's the story, that's the biblical story. That's the story of Abraham. That's the story of Canaan Abel.

That's the story of Exodus. That's the story of Jacob and Esau. This story of willingness to shed, sacrifice everything that's immature, prideful, power-hungry, and unwilling in the attempt to grow in character, to develop integrity, to become the father of nations, to become the leader who invites people away from the tyrant and their own slavish habits,

and encourages them to cross the desert of their own lostness in search of their own lostness in search of the promised land. That's the story. And faith is the willingness to embark on that adventure. Faith is the willingness to embark on that adventure. Right? In the presumption that there isn't up, in the aftermath of the decision,

to commit to that, in the story of Jacob and Esau, Jacob is not a good person in this story. He is a spoiled, academically oriented, tent-dwelling mama's boy who conspires with his treacherous mother to deceive and manipulate Esau, who, out of the rights he has, has is the first born.

That's Jacob. And he does that successfully. In a sequence of manipulative actions that span his childhood and his adolescence. He literally comes out of the womb attempting to pull Esau down. Jacob means he who grips the heel. And it means it's a description of the spirit that usurps and destroys. And that's Jacob. Now, many of the heroes that are characterized in the Old Testament are deeply flawed people

when they initiate their transformative adventure. And that is realistic and it's optimistic because you are a deeply false. flawed person when you embark upon the adventure of your life, and if it was hopeless for those who are deeply flawed to transform upward, then you would be lost. But the stories that sit at the base of our culture assure us that if you determined to aim upward, regardless of your state of reprehensible sin, you can establish a covenant with what is highest and progress. In the story of Jonah, Jonah is called upon by God to speak his mind to the citizens of Nineveh who have degenerated into a kind of woke idiocy and who are being threatened by

God with destruction as a consequence and God comes to Jonah as the voice of conscience and says you need to stand up in the city of Nineveh and tell

those faithless and corrupt people that I am not happy with their conduct and that if they don't straighten themselves out, I'm going to destroy them. And Jonah says, I don't think so. There's a hundred and fifty thousand of them. There's one of me. I'm a nobody. Plus, I don't like them. And if you feel like

you want to give them a good smiting, I'm on board with that. And so Jonah, being a sensible individual, makes tracks in the opposite direction, and heads by ship for a port that is literally as far away from Nineveh as it was possible to get at that time. On the ship, he proceeds, promptly falling asleep. And what does that mean? Well, that's what you do. When you reject the call of conscience, you take Take refuge in blind unconsciousness. And that's what Jonah does to reconcile himself to the fact that the divine itself had commanded him to utter the words that could redeem the corrupt state. He falls asleep on board and the ship falls into peril as it always does when people refuse to say what they're called.

upon to say and drift into unconsciousness. The waves rise and the wind blows and the ship is in peril and the sailors have an intuition that someone on board is not right with their God and they gamble to, they draw lots to identify the likely perpetrator and the pointer points to Jonah and they wake them up And they say, sleeping, though you may be, you can now see that the ship that contains you is in great peril. And we have been granted the intuition that someone on board is not right with their God. And Jonah, who's basically the kind of honest person who might receive a message like that from God, says, I'm afraid that's me. And the sailors say, well, who's your God? And they're expecting that he's some

forest pan or some God of the tavern, some local pagan sub-deity that rules over some dismal and tiny expansive space and time. And Jonah says, no, my God is the creator of of heaven and earth themselves. And the sailors say, you probably shouldn't irritate him. And so the ship is in peril and the waves rise. And that is what happens when good people refuse to say what they know to be true.

When they refuse to embody the logos that hovers over the realm of possibility itself and with the force of truth extracts out from that domain the order that is good or very good. That logos is speech, right? And that's truthful speech. And when you are called upon to speak by your conscience and you reject the call of truthful speech, you refuse to bring in to be a the order that is good and consign what you were called to contend with to hell. And that's what happens in totalitarian states

when everyone decides that the sensible thing is to hold their tongues and let someone else take the risks. And so the sailors who are good people in their

own right decide to head for shore with Jonah safely on board the ship, but the storm mounts to the point where that's impossible and the reluctant prophet calls upon them to toss him into the briny blue sea to his death. And that's a rough story indicating as it does that if you're an ordinary person and you receive a message from the divine to redeem even the city of your enemies and you reject that call that you will put the ship of state itself in peril and risk your own descent into the abyss and you might think that's pretty harsh and that just means that you're a naive, optimist, because that isn't the end of the story. The next thing that happens is the worst beast imaginable.

The Leviathan itself, a creature from the lowest pits of hell, rises to the surface and takes Jonah in its jaws and pulls him to the bottom of the world itself. Three days in hell. And that's how it's portrayed in the story. And what does that mean? It means that there are things that silence when you're called upon to speak will bring that make death itself the preferable alternative. And if you don't understand that, you're blind and fortunate indeed.

And you know nothing of history because there are four. of deceit-induced cataclysm that are so extreme that rather than participate in contribute to or experience them, a sensible person would choose death. And if you know anything about the horrors of the Nazi regime or the catastrophes of the Soviet state or of Maoist China or of North Korea, these terrible satanic, luciferian tower of battle states that emerged in the godless 20th century, then you would understand that there are perils of malevolence compared to which death itself is nothing. And that's what you risk having consume you and everything that you love when you refuse the call of conscience to voice.

that which you know to be true and you're you Americans you understand this deep in your bones because your whole culture which is a derivative of the Judeo-Christian tradition is predicated on the we hold this truth as self-evident presumption that you are made in the image of God and that you are in print the voice that continually redeems the corrupt state. And so that state is limited in its right to intrude upon the territory of your consciousness, because if it does so, it destroys the process of vision and speech upon which it depends for its integrity and continuity. And you might say, well, is that something?

you believe is that something that you have faith in it's well do you believe that people have intrinsic value and the free will of sovereign agents and I would say try treating the people around you as if that isn't true and see what they think of you in consequence what's Jonah's faith he repents and he and humbly kneels before the God of his conscience and says, if you see fit to raise me from this pit, I will do what you asked. And the whale spits him on shore and he goes to the city of the corrupt enemy. and he tells them what he has been requested to tell them.

And they repent and they put on sackcloth and ashes and they make the proper sacrifices and they reestablish their relationship with what is properly put in the highest place and the city is saved. And what does that mean? It means the same thing that, Abraham bargained for with God when the angels or God with whom Abraham was traveling informed him of the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham, a man of great character by this point objects wrestling with God,

making the case that it is not fit for the benevolent deity of, the ancestral Israelites to demolish a city in which there may still be some inhabitants who are good. And Abraham asks God in this wrestling whether if he goes to Sodom and finds 40 men who are upright, whether the city can still be salvaged. And God says, yes. And Abraham, who, who has some fortitude and a certain amount of gall pushes God and says 30. And God says, yes. And Abraham says, 20. And God says yes.

And Abraham pushes him. And the number is reduced to a very small, to something very small. And what does that indicate? It indicates the power of proper conduct and the truth, because the truth of the matter is that a city that is still uncorrupted enough so that 10 people have kept their voice can avoid the total destruction that's a consequence of everyone adopting the lie. Right.

And so what's the terrifying implication of those two stories? You're called upon to be one of those few. And anything less than that is an abdication of the responsibility whose adoption stops hell in its tracks. Right. And that's the price you pay for having the temerity to be fabricated in the image of God. And that's your responsibility.

Right. The responsibility of ultimate meaning that characterizes you as the citizen who is neither the vassal of tyrants nor the willing slave. Right. So what's Jonah's faith, his decision to speak? It's not his proclamation. Lord, Lord, his invocation of his prop, of the propriety of his acceptance of a set of claims,

of descriptive claims. It's his willingness to put himself 100% on the line in the service of what's good. That's faith. Cain and Abel make the same, the story of Cain and Abel makes the same point. Cain and Abel are the first two human beings born in the natural way, in the fallen and profane world that characterizes our realm and history itself. The hostile brothers, each exemplifying a pattern of work, a pattern of sacrifice,

each exemplifying the two opposing patterns of work are sacrifice that characterize the human endeavor as such. Why work and sacrifice? Because work and sacrifice are the same thing. And if you understand that, then you have a key to more deeply comprehending the entire corpus of the biblical stories. Why is work a sacrifice?

Because you sacrifice the present for the future when you work. You sacrifice your own whim for the stability of the community when you work. The community and the future are depend for their integrity and their abundance on the sacrifices made by civil. individuals who can forego gratification and who can act in a manner that sacrifices the pleasure of the moment to the assurance of the well-being of their family and community and the stability and productivity of the future. That's work. That's what human beings do. That's what mature human beings do. They stop worshipping their own narrow whims and they aim at the up that provides them with integrity

and that upon which the community itself is necessarily predicated. That's the sacrificial gesture that reconciles man, woman and God. Kane refuses to properly engage in that sacrificial process, whereas Abel is all in. Abel, who's a shepherd, a keeper of flocks, and therefore an archetype of the shepherd who keeps the predators at bay and defends the innocent and vulnerable, who can fend for himself in the desert. That's all the shepherd, takes the best animals in his flock. He takes the best of his way. He takes the best aspect of his riches.

He sacrifices that on the altar, which he uses to communicate with God, and he indicates thereby his willingness to bring his best to the table. It's an archaic mode of representation. It's predicated on the idea that God is up, like the sky, The observation that smoke rises, the notion that the God who inhabits heaven can detect from the essence of the smoke, which contains the spirit of the sacrifice, the intent of the sacrificer, the spirit of the offering, and that if it is of the highest quality, then we'll show that sacrificeer, do respect. Kane, by contrast, keeps what's best in reserve. He has no faith in the necessity to exhaust himself in the pursuit of the proper relationship with the divine. He buries his talents. He hides his light under a bushel.

He falls under the sway of the spirit of... deception and prideful usurpation because if you win you don't bring your best to the table you have to lie to yourself and everyone else to justify that you have to assume that you as the deceiver has the upper hand not only over your own conscience but over the other people that you're deceiving with your false offerings over the world and over God himself. And that's how Kane falls under the sway of the Luciferian temptation. He fails in his endeavors, failing as he does to bring his best to the table. And this engenders a certain bitterness. His countenance falls. He's sad and unhappy and depressive. and bitter and resentful and vengeful. And he is inclined in consequence to call God out for his shortcomings.

Like everyone bitter does, when they make the presumption that the fact that the world is not laying itself out for them as the walk towards paradise they desire, when they lay the responsibility for that at the feet of, the maker of the cosmic order instead of taking responsibility for their own shortcomings themselves. Kane faces God down, which is what we all do when we shake our fist at the sky and bemoan our tragic and undeserved fates. And God says to Kane precisely those words that Kane least wants to hear. He says,

First, you blame your resentment on your failure, but that's not exactly true, because other people who fail decide that there's an error that they're making, and they atone and repent, and they put themselves together, and they start making the proper sacrifices, and they learn in consequence of the rejection of their sacrifices. Instead, what you did was fall prey to the temptation of the sin that crowded. at your door, in your despair, that crouched there like a predatory, sexually aroused animal, which you invited in and allowed and encouraged to have its way with you. And so what does that mean? Well, failure itself is insufficient justification for cataclysmic depression and resentment. You have to brood on it. You have to invite in the spirit of resentment and pride to possess you in your meditations on the unfair nature of the cosmic order itself, which appears to be turned against you, that entices you into this rebellion

against God instead of the acceptance of insufficiency, the consequent repentance, consequent repentance and that proclivity to learn that's part of the upward striving path of Abel. And so God says, you can't blame your misery on the world and on me. If you had done well, you'd be accepted. And Kane is incensed and enraged by this response to his misery. and resentment and he invites his brother to work with him in the field

and when his brother agrees hoping no doubt that Cain has decided to put some real effort into the game he kills him with a rock and he does that to spite God himself and to take revenge over

to take revenge on God's chosen son, which is a foreshadowing of an endless number of events that culminate in the death of Christ on the cross. Kane has faith in his own proclivity for deception. He falls prey to the worship of the spirit that he's invited into his heart.

He kills him. his own ideal in the form of Abel, and he's bereft in consequence, because of course when you kill the successful, when you kill the very idea of success itself, there's nothing left for you but misery and failure. And Cain says to God, my punishment is more than I can bear, and God marks him to stop the cycle of tit for tat revenge and sentences him to wander alone in the land of Nod,

which is once again the place that children go to sleep. It's the domain of unconsciousness. And the wandering is the fact that Kane is the embodiment of the pattern of sacrifice that makes him unfit for the company of other human beings and destined to be the vagabond, the psychopathic vagabond who has no community or place. Kane's descendants degenerate their... more murderous than Cain, they extract a higher degree of vengeance than their father. They worship technology instead of God, and they become increasingly murderous and then

genocidal. And what that means is that when we each refuse to make the offering that's of the highest sort, and we fail in consequence and develop and invite in that spirit of bitterness that justifies our dissatisfaction we participate in the process that not only corrupts our own soul but that leads the state down the pathway to absolutely catastrophic genocidal murderousness the next thing that happens in consequence of the faithlessness of Cain is the flood

right so what do we make of this faith isn't the mouthing of the proper holy incantations faith is

a total commitment a total commitment a priori to the pathway of good. When Jacob leaves his brother, who's inclined to murder him for his perfidy, and he leaves his family and his mother, he goes into the desert and he builds an altar

and he consecrates it to God. And it's a decision point in Jacob's life. He decides that despite his ill-spent youth, he is now going to aim up. That's his manifestation of the faith that establishes the covenant between his soul and the God of his ancestors. And what does that mean? Do you aim up?

Do you determine in the aftermath of your failure and bitter disappointment that the proper path that you should take toward redemption is to stop doing what you know to be wrong and start doing what you know to be right? that decision to aim up, even in the smallest manner in which you might be capable given your blindness. That's what Jacob determines to do. That's what Abraham does when he starts out on his adventure and builds that initial altar. He indicates his willingness to believe that the good exists and to pursue that pathway and to let go of, shed and sacrifice everything that.

stands in his way. And that's faith. And then that's ultimately exemplified in the story of Job, who's tortured by God and Satan, who has everything that any man could value, stripped from him and arbitrarily, and yet decides not to lose faith in himself, despite his suffering,

or in God, despite the apparent injustice, indicating that we're all called upon to maintain our faith in the utility of the upward aim no matter what happens to us. And that's finally realized in its ultimate form in the story of the passion, which is the catastrophe of Job

multiplied and portrayed, and portrayed multidimensionally. The passion of Christ is the story of the least deserving the person who least deserves

betrayal and brutal torture and punishment, receiving exactly that in its worst form, young, well simultaneously being the target of the

unjust mob and the worst of the tyrants facing a catastrophic death in front of the people that he loves. It's the most tragic possible fate portrayable. And the pathway that Christ follows is the faith to continue the up. upward aim that unites man and God despite the utter catastrophe of the tragedies and malevolence of human existence and the world. And that sacrifice that is represented by the crucifix, which is a symbol of the voluntary willingness to bear that fate, is the same. symbol that we put at the center of our communities and have for 2,000 years to signify our

dawning understanding that the future is ensured, death is defeated, evil overcome, and the community established as a consequence of full participation in the pattern of voluntary self-sacrifice. Right. That's faith. that's faith. Thank you very much. All right, so I'm going to invite my daughter Michaela back out, and she's going to take some questions from the audience and weave them together in a manner that enables our inquiry to continue,

and we'll do that for about 20 more minutes, and that will comprise the evening. You nailed it. Thank you, my dear. That's a hell of a metaphor under the circumstances. circumstances. See, that's a Freudian slip, I'm dead serious. That's exactly the sort of thing that Freud in his genius observed is that the implicit structures through which we view the world, the unconscious, will note concordances and patterns that and express them, often as jokes, for example, that indicate a pattern of symbolic understanding that's beyond our comprehension. And that Freud wrote a whole book about such things, right?

And that was part of his investigation into the mysterious workings of the unconscious. Right? I'm never saying that again. Did you guys notice that he lectures with his eyes closed? This was the first time I noticed how long you keep your eyes closed. And you'd never, you've never fallen off the stage. So far. So far.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So far. Yeah, that's happened more and more in this tour in particular. And it started to happen. And it helps me concentrate on what would you say? It helps me screen out everything from my awareness except my apprehension of the next right word. Right, right, right, and that's a calling on as well.

I'm trying to, as I said, address the problem at hand in the most accurate possible manner. That requires detailed and devout concentration and the willingness to let the inquiry take itself wherever it goes. when Christ is baptized after Christ is baptized and the spirit of the Holy Ghost descends on him he goes where the wind blows right

he goes where the spirit calls him and that takes him to the desert that's what happens in that situation where he's tempted by Satan right he gets to the bottom of things that's what happens if you attend to the calling of the spirit that is attempting to make itself manifest in its descent from heaven, right?

It takes you to the place you least want to go, to encounter what you least want to encounter. And that's the pathway to resurrection and salvation. Yeah. That's also partly why people don't tell the true things, that's where it will lead you. Just like it leads the Israelites away from tyranny, of course, into the desert, right?

For 40 years, you can wander around lost, even if you've established your upward aim. You can wander around lost for a long time. So it's a terrifying, it's a terrifying adventure, but it's better than all the alternatives. Okay, we have, I've been told, we have 10 minutes, so we should get through a quarter of a one, one question.

So, start with the important ones. If I acquire enough wisdom, will my hair grow back? Okay. I'm joking. You don't even have to answer that one. No offense to Amir.

Okay. Poor Bald Amir. Oh. How do you believe God reveals people's callings or purpose? By gripping your interest. assuming you're aiming up. That's the thing.

You can rely on your interest. That instinct that signifies the proper pathway forward. You can rely on that if you take the beam from your eye and aim up. Then things will call to you in the world. They'll elicit your interest. They'll fill you with enthusiasm, and insofar as you've established the proper relationship with what's in the highest place, that calling will be reliable. This is what happens to Moses, you see, when he's a shepherd in Midian, he's an ordinary man. He's established himself as an adult, a respectable, responsible adult, a shepherd, not a high status job, but a difficult and necessary one.

he has. He's established his marriages. He's a man. And he's attending his flock near Mount Sinai. Mount Horeb. Same place. That's the place where heaven and earth touch and something beckons to him

that calls him off the beaten path. Right? His beaten path. This happens to all of us. You have a dream. You have a vision. You have something that excites you, and interests you, it's the birthplace of the dream that would, whose realization would constitute the adventure of your life. It's a secret you hold in your heart unwilling as you are to share it with yourself or with anyone else because of your faithless fear of betrayal, let's say. It's

the pearl of great price that you might well keep buried. If your orientation is appropriate, can rely on your intuition and what captures your interest and that's what moses does he goes to investigate the burning bush right and that's the tree of life that's on fire and fire is life right because living things metabolize and that's fire and something intensely alive burns like a like a child burns you know a child you love burns and captures your imagination or someone you love burns and captures your imagination you can see that something that inspires you, glows and warms your heart. You can investigate that.

And that's what Moses does. He takes off his shoes, signifying his willingness to abandon his current identity and his current path. He understands that he's beginning to tread on sacred ground, which is what you do when you investigate what calls to you. And the spirit of being and becoming itself speaks to him. And that's what happens if you take your quest seriously. that's what happens that's how you develop the wisdom that makes you charismatic

that's what happens to Moses he becomes a leader a leader is someone who leads his people from tyranny their own tyranny the tyranny of their marriage the tyranny of their family the tyranny of the community

there's always tyranny right and away from their slavish and immature habits the habits that lead them to the worship of the golden calf they listen to Moses because he's been there and done that and has got to the bottom of things and speaks the words that are compelling

because of their force and that's all real and that's what happens when you meet someone who's pursued their destiny properly and they're charismatic and admirable and their words have force and that's because the voice of the benevolent father speaks through them And that's the eternal story of proper development, and it's true. And that's the answer to that question. Okay, great. Okay, we can squeeze another one in here. I think this one was worth addressing.

I'm a married 32-year-old man, an alcoholic, sober seven years. Should I have kids, even if I fear I can drink again and ruin my family like my father did? So when the Israelites are on the edge of the promised land, Canaan, which needs a lot of work, by the way. Moses and the Israelites send out scouts. And they're sort of like prophets in a way. They're scouts of the future. They go to Canaan, the promised destination, and they check out the territory. And they come back with various accounts.

And some of them come back and say, oh my God, there's nothing but jobs. giants in Canaan, and they're going to stomp us to death. All hell's going to break loose. We were fools to leave the comfort of Egypt. We were fools to walk across the desert, led by this mountebank, Moses. We cannot possibly progress into the future. We have to turn tail and run. We have to look back like Lot's wife.

And then there are other scouts, Joshua and Caleb, among them, who say we can prevail with faith and proper upward aim, maintaining the covenant that we have established with what has been put in the proper, properly in the highest place, we can prevail. And God rewards those faithful scouts and transforms them into the leaders that take the Israelites into the promised land after Moses dies.

Right? like that's Joshua, same name as Yeshua, same name as Christ, signifying that. It's the spirit of total adventure that stabilizes the future. Faithful, total adventure. So you were an alcoholic, a worshipper of Dionysius, while you've had seven years, like Jacob, to straighten yourself out. Have some faith. Right.

All right, everyone. Thank you, Michaela. Thank you, everyone.