Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - How Symbols Shape Our World | Jonathan Pageau

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Starting point is 00:01:13 I think we only met up in person twice. Is that correct? Once I went to my house once before my house was flooded. And so it's crazy because I saw the video I'm like wow that's before my house now I live in the same house completely different Because we had to rebuild it, but then we saw each other at Ark last year well speaking about arcs and floods, huh, okay? Yeah Let's get to your channel's names called the symbolic world. I want to know

Starting point is 00:01:40 You have surely toyed with other titles in your mind. What was a contender and why did this one win out? Well, there were two reasons. Really it's this understanding the title in both ways that you can understand it. One is, you know, we're going to talk about symbolism, you know, and so it's trying to help people see differently, see through the eyes of symbolism. But also because when I talk about symbolism, I'm not talking about metaphor in the way that a lot of people tend to think about it or just maybe psychic projections, even the way that Jung talked about it, but

Starting point is 00:02:14 I'm talking about structural questions. So symbolic world also means that I'm implying that the world lays itself out through meaning and without meaning you can't avoid it. So it's kind of in those both. I thought that the title had a good way of exploring both of those aspects, right? So symbolism but also the fact that the world is symbolic. Now do you say the world is symbolic or reality is symbolic? What would be the difference between those two?

Starting point is 00:02:39 You could say I like the world in the sense of cosmos. The idea of cosmos, the ancient idea of cosmos is something like the ordered world, the idea that the world lays itself out as a balanced order that has harmonies in it. And that's the way that I understand it, that the world that we live in has these harmonies as part of it. And so you could say it either way. In this way, I like it because it's more embodied to say world.

Starting point is 00:03:09 How do you see the world differently than most people? Well, I don't know. It depends on which most people. Like for sure, in terms of the more scientists, not scientists, but let's say people who view the world through scientism maybe would be the difference is- Or at least they believe they view the world through that. Or believe they do, yeah, exactly. Or they think they see it that way. I think that the fact of attention, and this is something, I'm not the only one talking about this obviously, I come at it more through a philosophical and religious background, but the idea is that because of the necessity of the structure of attention, we cannot avoid hierarchies

Starting point is 00:03:52 of meaning in the world. We cannot step outside of our own perception mechanism and perceive the world outside of the world of care, the world that we care about. But I don't see that as a kind of illusion. I'm not saying, well, therefore we can't see the world, therefore we're perceived the world through illusion. I think, no, the reason why also the world formed us in that way, the reason why we're formed this way

Starting point is 00:04:18 to engage into the world means that it is the most appropriate manner to deal with the world anyways. And you can't get out of it. So you can argue yourself around that, but it's like, why not then plunge into the world of the structures that we perceive through attention and care and see them as the best mechanism to understand reality? Therefore it creates a kind of vertical causality which reductionist types struggle with, that there is a kind of causality of meaning that is part of the world and not just mechanical

Starting point is 00:04:53 causes and things bumping into each other and chemicals mixing or that type of causality. So that's what interests me the most and I try to join that vision. I think a lot of modern physicists and let's say contemporary scientists probably do see that. But I really try to join that with things like ritual, with notions like storytelling, images and try to kind of join the world of complexity, let's say, and the more literary and more human world together. Now, I'd like this interview to help people understand how it is that you see the world and get into what I call your Weltanschaung, which means it's the non-physicist theory of everything.

Starting point is 00:05:39 On this channel, we interview different mathematicians and physicists about quantum gravity or how do you harmonize general relativity with the standard model and that's called a theory of everything. But then there's a cognitive theory of everything, a framework through which you interpret the world and so I'd like to get into the nitty-gritty. You use the word vertical causation there and I'd like you to help me understand and the viewers understand what that means and then distinguish it from horizontal causation there. And I'd like you to help me understand and the viewers understand what that means and then distinguish it from horizontal causation and if there's even a third sort of causation.

Starting point is 00:06:09 Yeah, well, the vertical causation is, I guess, what Aristotle called the formal cause. In some ways, it's the cause of identity. It's the cause of purpose. And so, you know, the issue that we often have is that we cannot get to identity from the parts. It's like if you just calculate the parts, the identity is presupposed in the fact that you care about those parts in the first place. Do you understand that it's a problem? It's a chicken and the egg problem, right? So if I'm studying the parts of a car because I want to get to the identity of the car, well, the identity of the car is already presupposed in the fact that I'm studying the parts of that car.

Starting point is 00:06:46 And so that's what I mean when I talk about vertical causality, is that the identity of something and that identity is actually united to its. It's harder to see on the scientific scale, but let's say in the everyday scale, it's related to its purpose. There's a purpose that makes us see something as having an identity. And that is then when we measure the parts. And so that's what I mean by vertical causality. And I think that there's a relationship between that vertical causality, which is

Starting point is 00:07:23 something from the identity to the parts and how we have that relationship, and the more human aspect of vertical causality, which is something like, with my will, I can make things happen. I can make things happen with meaning. It's a good way of understanding it. So, for example, if I ask you to get a glass of water for me, you will not be able to find in all the actions that you pose the impetus for the actions that you're taking. And that's an aspect of vertical causality too, that has to be taken into account, which is the capacity of humans to change, or living beings to change the world in which they live through something like will or autopoiesis, or whatever, I don't want to use a word that's too technical.

Starting point is 00:08:13 The idea that we actually transform the world in our image, or we affect the world in a way that is not just things bumping into each other, that is purpose driven. Is there a relation here between naming something and identifying something? Yeah. So the idea would be that the danger we have is if we fall in the objective-subjective trap where we think, well, if I name something, then it's just arbitrary, right? It's like according to my whim. If you really believe in this kind of vision, then if you do that, if you just name something

Starting point is 00:08:53 arbitrarily according to your whim, then at some point it'll pull back, it'll break, it won't hold, the name won't hold. There has to be a union between the identity and the phenomena that you're kind of both noticing and naming at the same time. So the idea, for example, in Genesis, you have this idea that Adam names the animals, but he's naming them according to the nature. He's not just making it up. It's not like I'm just going to name them, I'm going to notice their reality, but that's part of their ontological grounding is a good way of thinking about it. It sounds really, really fancy, but it's not that fancy.

Starting point is 00:09:37 We still do it today. When do we decide that there's a new species of dog? It's like we have all these different dogs, and all of a sudden we're like, oh, I see characteristics that clump. And those characteristics clump sufficiently that other people seem to be able to see them as well. And so I'm going to say, well, this is the species of dog and I'm going to name it. So I'm not just arbitrarily imposing my will on the world, but I am dividing the world in a way that wasn't divided before. I am kind of noticing phenomena clumping together and giving it attention and therefore making it, participating in its existence in the world. Because before that it was like, oh, they were just, I don't know, like, I

Starting point is 00:10:17 don't know how, it's obviously a process that goes over decades. Like, you know, there are all these dogs and now all of a sudden we're saying, well, when these dogs mix together and if they keep mixing together for a while, we're like, oh, and they create characteristics that we notice that they clump together and then we name a species of a dog. That happens all the time. Like, people say, oh, they discovered a new species of, I don't know, of this particular flower. And like, well, maybe before it was just, you just divided a species into two, because

Starting point is 00:10:49 you saw that characteristic clumped sufficiently according to what you want to be able to notice the difference. You have weird, I mean, you probably, I don't want to get into the details, but you have weird behaviors like saying there's a species of a plant and then there's hybrids. It's like, why is the hybrid not a species? And these are very, very human ways of clumping, let's say, phenomena together by saying, well, this is a hybrid and this is a species. It's like, they're all plants.

Starting point is 00:11:20 Okay. So you're not speaking about the specific name, you're speaking about the act of naming. So what I mean is that you could have called dog FABARU. No, I'm not talking about the word that's used. I mean, naming in the sense of pointing, maybe pointing is a better way of thinking about it. It's like that, there's something, like I'm pointing my attention to something and I see the unity of the phenomena and I give it a name in order for it to exist.

Starting point is 00:11:49 The naming is part of it. There is a sense like you see in mythology these ideas, for example, that even in theology you have these ideas that, you know, ancient man or God, when he names something, it's completely its nature that's being revealed. Whereas we now, our languages are somewhat arbitrary to some extent, not completely. I think they're showing that there are words that have certain meaning, kind of universal meanings because of their sonority, that we identify soft things with soft words, that we identify hard things with hard words. Like there is some more connection, but it's true that our language in terms of just the relationship between the signifier and the signified, it doesn't stick always as much as it could. But it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter in terms of the notion of what I'm saying,

Starting point is 00:12:39 which is like you identify- You notice something is distinct. Yeah, something is shining, right? Something is kind of glowing out of the background. It's being foregrounded against the background. And therefore, and that's for a reason. Even if you don't know what the reason is, it doesn't matter. And then you identify it. Because it's entering into your field of care

Starting point is 00:13:01 in a way that is bright, like it's bright, it kind of shines. Okay, help me understand how identifying something or noticing it as different than, or at least distinct enough for me to notice it, is something intentional, how that's related to care, am I using the word care when I should be using attention? I'm not entirely sure. And then to give an example, because all of this could be quite abstract and that's entirely fine, you can give a symbolic example from the Bible and or an actual practical concrete example in people's lives. As you know, on theories of everything, we delve into some of the most reality spiraling concepts from theoretical physics and consciousness to AI and emerging technologies, to stay informed in an ever-evolving landscape, I see The Economist as a wellspring of insightful analysis and in-depth reporting

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Starting point is 00:14:52 of the mysteries of the universe. An actual practical concrete example in people's lives. Yeah, so I would say that I think using attention and care together is useful just to help people kind of understand what we're talking about. Because the reason why we attend, attention is something like the capacity to identify things in the world and focus on them. So I see that something exists.

Starting point is 00:15:25 I can foreground it against the background. And care would be the bigger question, which is that is not arbitrary. Humans don't care about things arbitrarily. We have a hierarchy of care, which is related to living and dying and reproduction and all these things that make us what we are and that things enter into that hierarchy of care. A good example to help people understand, let's say what I'm talking about is, let's say you have a nation, and then that nation has an identity, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:16:00 Let's say British, so you have British people and the British people are actually made out of a bunch of people. It's like multiplicity is sufficiently joined together so that I can recognize an identity as holding them together. But it doesn't mean that multiply ceases to exist, because a dog is made out of a bunch of stuff, but I have a category that unites all these multiplicities together so that I can grasp it, I can grip it into one. And so you have a British identity, you have people that are British. And then all of a sudden, and then you have a nice category, very important category,

Starting point is 00:16:34 which is called stranger. And that category just means things that don't fit with the British. And so you function together and then once in a while there's someone who's around and you don't know where he's from. You don't know, he's not connected to you and you have a term for it. You call it stranger. And then at some point, what happens is that those strangers, I don't know, they start to accumulate and accumulate. And then suddenly you're like, oh, we're being invaded by the Normans.

Starting point is 00:17:03 Oh, now they're Normans. They're not strangers anymore. Right? Now they're Normans because of the relevance of care. Right? To my, to my, this is obviously a relative example, but this could, you, you could apply this type of, let's say, identification mechanism to anything. So if I walk outside and I'm walking outside of my house,

Starting point is 00:17:27 I walk on grass. But like grass is not one thing. A grass is a whole bunch of different biological species that I joined together for very, very useful purposes into one category called grass. It's a completely legitimate category. It's completely useful. It's very good and everything. But if, for example, part of that grass is poison

Starting point is 00:17:51 ivy, then all of a sudden I'm going to start to care about that and I'm going to start to identify it. And when I walk outside in the grass, for some reason, now I'm going to start to notice that, wait a minute, it's not just all grass. There's grass and then there's poison ivy. That poison ivy is actually not part of the grass. I have to remove it. I have to take it out. There could be something else that is in the grass that's either dangerous or maybe tasty.

Starting point is 00:18:18 There'd be a reason why I would, let's say, specifically identify it and then I would care for it in a different way. And so you can understand, like the whole world is made of multiplicity. It's like there's just millions and millions and millions of details in every single thing that you perceive and that you engage with. But we have reasons to join that multiplicity into one. So like even on you, for example, like you have, we have bacteria on you that we consider to be part of you and there's bacteria on you that we

Starting point is 00:18:51 consider to be parasites. And it's like, why isn't that bacteria part of you like the other bacteria that we just say, well that's just your gut bacteria. It's part of you. It doesn't share your DNA. It doesn't have your DNA, but we consider it an important part of you, Kurt, as being a human. But if there's something that's, I don't know, making you sick, then all of a sudden we have

Starting point is 00:19:13 a different way of dealing with that. Okay. Does that kind of help you see what I'm talking about? I'm unclear as to what about this is Christian. So for people who are- What do you mean, what is Christian? Why do you think that this would be specifically Christian? Okay, well for people who are either just tuning in or unfamiliar with you, you're an

Starting point is 00:19:35 Eastern Orthodox Christian. Your worldview is heavily informed by the Eastern Orthodox tradition and your interpretation of it as well. So I want to know, is this something that comes from the Bible other than saying that God allowed Adam to be named and also God names people and that's also from the Old Testament? So perhaps is there something Christian here from the New Testament? So I mean, I think the best way to understand it is it's actually not, the basis of it is not Christian per se.

Starting point is 00:20:06 It's just actually every single probably ancient tradition had very similar ways of understanding reality. In some ways, this notion or this idea of vertical causality was attacked, removed. It's hard to say exactly when, at some point during their enlightenment it's starting to become, like some people say that Occam removed formal causes. I don't know if that clears that, but let's say we start with Occam with the idea that we don't need formal causes in order to explain phenomena. And so there is this movement away from the importance of formal causes into basically

Starting point is 00:20:48 the idea that we could just do with mechanical causes. And so in some ways the modern West is an aberration in that sense on every other culture in the history of the world maybe. And so there is a use to what happened in the sense that the world, maybe. There is a use to what happened in the sense that it created very powerful modes of thinking about mechanical causes, and it created very powerful modes of creating machines and creating things that were very reliant on those types of causes. But at the same time, I think it was insufficient.

Starting point is 00:21:24 What you see, I think, happening now with some people called the re-enchantment of the world or all kinds of ways of talking about it is a correction on that. Now, what I think Christianity offers in terms of perceiving the world in that way is the notion of uniting the idea of logos, for example, in ancient Greek thinking with purpose and reason, but then also the idea of integrated with the personal, you know, I think is very important. with the personal, I think is very important. And then the vision of love as being the ultimate image of that, the idea of love as this capacity for unity and multiplicity to coexist perfectly, let's say in the Trinity, for example, becomes a model for the world, which is that the world is constantly this navigation between the one and the many.

Starting point is 00:22:29 And love shows us that in fact they not only can coexist, but that is the mode by which they coexist. You could think of the love, sometimes I like to define love simply as that. It's just the coexistence of unity and multiplicity. Okay. I'd love to hear more about this. Perhaps this is going to be the theme of our conversation. Unity and multiplicity existing simultaneously in Christianity, or perhaps uniquely in Christianity,

Starting point is 00:22:54 I'm not entirely sure, but not in the East, or at least our Western conception of the East. So I'll give you some backdrop to this. For me, it's easier to comprehend both experientially and intellectually non-dualism, like Eastern non-dualism, not Eastern Orthodox non-dualism, but Buddhist non-dualism or Vedic non-dualism, as I've had experiences of it. And then Ian had me realize, have glimpses of even experientially, that the right brain is the sort that is the one that recognizes multiplicity. In fact, for you to love

Starting point is 00:23:25 something, it has to be distinct from you, otherwise it's self-love. And we think here in the West that the East must be the source of all that's creative and insightful. A part of it is self-loathing our own culture and we think the East must be completely right-brained. We don't like to be left-brained. That's diminutive. We want to be right-brained. We don't like to be left-brained. That's diminutive. We want to be right-brained. But even that patting ourselves on the back as to how originative and not bound to dogma we are, it turns out that those self-designating plaudits aren't right-brain ruling, but instead they're just right-brain rhetoric originating from the left brain. So all of this

Starting point is 00:24:03 is just the backdrop to the question of explaining unity with multiplicity existing in Christianity. How the heck can that be specific to Christianity? So I would say that Christianity, I believe Christianity in some ways is a more radical form of non-dualism. Because one of the issues of non-dualism is it doesn't always happen, but many times, if you look at, in India, for example, you often see this idea of you have the one and then processions from the one are understood as diminishing of the quality of Oneness. And therefore, even illusory.

Starting point is 00:24:49 You have a caste system that creates a caste system because the further you are from the One, then the less being you have. And therefore, if you're a poor person that lives in the dirt, it's because you're just further away from the one. You have strayed so far from the one that there's almost like a moral equivalent to being in pain or being far away from the, or being handicapped or being broken in any way, that there's some kind of moral deficiency that is based on that. So you see that in Western Gnosticism,

Starting point is 00:25:31 you have different systems that also imply that. As a creator, I understand the importance of having the right tools to support your business growth. Prior to using Shopify, it was far more complicated and convoluted. There were different platforms, different systems, none of them meshed well together. However, once we made that switch to Shopify,

Starting point is 00:25:55 everything changed. What I like best about Shopify is how seamless the entire process is from managing products to tracking sales. It's so much easier now, and it's streamlined our operations considerably. If you're serious about upgrading your business, get the same checkout we use with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories. All lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash theories to upgrade your selling today.

Starting point is 00:26:27 That's Shopify.com slash theories. With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead. Family vacay? Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights. To all the planners, now you can reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. See Uber app for details. One of the things that Christian non-dualism, at least I think, does is that it actually is both radically one and radically many simultaneously.

Starting point is 00:26:58 And so, say Maximus, for example, says that God is being and nonbeing. And that there's this idea of this. And I think that even in Eastern forms, some Eastern forms, you'll find this idea of, like in Zen, for example, you have a little bit of that where it's like it's nonbeing and being. It's not just nonbeing or it's not just being the one and then the many is bad. It's actually the one hidden or contained in the multiple. Sam Maximus talks about the logi, this idea that all things that have identity have a

Starting point is 00:27:36 logos and that they're indefinite. It's like everything that you can identify as having purpose has a logo, it's like a little shining bright thing. And that ultimately all of those logies are the divine logos. That all of the purposes behind hidden, behind all the purposes of all things is something like the spark of God himself that is hidden in all things. And so that is one of the reasons why Christianity looks the way it does, which is this idea of when Christ says, you know, if you help the littlest of these, that's

Starting point is 00:28:15 me. Like you are helping me if you help the person that's in the in. Because I am hidden everywhere in the world. There is no, there is no... The, the... Can I say this? That the fact that the world is eminent, you know, is created by God, means that God is present in all of it, you know, all through. So I think, I mean, I think that you could probably find, you know, you could probably find in some forms of Vedic non-dualism versions of that. Some people point to Shankara, for example, but definitely in Christianity, I think there's a height of that, which, surprisingly enough, creates our value system today, which is our value system, this idea of like helping the poor and helping the weak and giving your strength to those who don't have strength.

Starting point is 00:29:08 All of this vision of self-sacrifice is quite Christian, at least in the way we experience it. There are Buddhist versions of it too as well, but for sure in Christianity, I think there's a very particular way that it manifests itself. So with Jesus being extremely high on the hierarchy and still washing the feet of his disciples prior to him being executed and him knowing that he was going to be executed, the way that I'm hearing you is it sounds like there's a triangle of hierarchy, there's the multiple, and then we have goals and purposes, and that brings you closer and closer to what's at the top, and what's at the top is called God. And then at the same time, there's an involution, and that's epitomized in my reading of Jesus

Starting point is 00:29:57 washing the feet of his disciples prior to being killed. The top is also supposed to serve what's below. So is that the way that you see it? Yeah, that's it. I think that's absolutely right. The story of Jesus washing His disciples' feet is one of the best stories to understand the Christian vision of hierarchy that you can find because Jesus is the master, right?

Starting point is 00:30:17 He's the head and the disciples are something like the body and they serve the head normally, right? Jesus is the master, He tells them what to do, they do it, you know, they follow Him. That's a normal way you would understand hierarchy, like military hierarchy, right? The commander says what to do and you do it. Now, Jesus does this weird thing, which he says, okay, now I'm going to wash your feet. I'm going to lower myself below you and I'm going to wash your feet. And then, you can imagine Peter could have said something like, well, it's about time, right?

Starting point is 00:30:47 It's about time that you lower yourself to our level, you know, and become equal to one of us. But Peter doesn't react that way. He says, no. Like, no, how could you? Like, how could you do that? And then Jesus really shows you what Christian hierarchy is. It's something like, actually, Peter, I'm the boss.

Starting point is 00:31:04 I decide. Now let me wash your feet. It's a beautiful vision of hierarchy, which is that we don't Christian. I think Christianity, although there's some radical versions of Christianity that try to make everything equal, I think traditional Christianity has hierarchy, but understands that the top has to give itself to that which it serves. And you can understand it, by the way, it's just that it's not just. It is in some ways a theory of identity.

Starting point is 00:31:32 It's not just a social interaction, which is that you notice, for example, that all things that have identities are embedded in a hierarchy of identities. All things that can be something are also a part of something else. It's actually almost necessary. It's like if I recognize a fork, there's no reason for a fork besides that it's used for eating and that it participates in a meal and that meal participates in a society. All things that we recognize as having identity embed themselves in higher forms, even if

Starting point is 00:32:10 it's just even like how a molecule embeds itself in a bigger being or like an atom embeds itself in a bigger cluster. So it's like these scaling identities. And I think the mystery that is being shown in this vision of love is that identity is kinetic, like identity is self-emptying. It's not the idea that identity is something that you can hold onto and that makes you powerful and strong. It's that in order for identity to be what it is, it has to empty itself.

Starting point is 00:32:42 And it has to empty itself in two ways. It has to give itself up to its higher participations. And you can understand that as a form of sacrifice, it kind of gives itself up. And then it also has to give itself down to the things that constitute it. It has to serve the things that constitute it. It has to serve the things that constitute it. You know, or else, you know, or else if an identity doesn't serve the things that constitute, then it can't hold. So the self emptying is something you have to do because you said that we can also identify something. So are you saying that in order for this bookcase in front of me to be identified, this bookcase needs to also

Starting point is 00:33:25 self empty or I need to self empty to it? It has to self empty because in order for me to care about it, it has to insert itself within a hierarchy of care. So everything needs to self empty? I think that that's actually how identity functions. That identity is self emptying and that's why we have all these images of, for example, like in scripture, that's why we have these images of idolatry, for example, the idea of idolatry, or the idea of something which tries, that tries to be what it's not in the sense that it tries to hold on to identity on its own, tries to just be itself without giving up or giving down. And that ends up being something like a form of tyranny. or giving down and that ends up being something like a form of tyranny. We experience that, like addiction is that. Addiction is a cluster of behaviors that are very salient and that we participate in, but

Starting point is 00:34:18 that it's kind of this self-devouring thing. It tries to suck everything into it. It tries to suck all of your other behaviors into it, and then ultimately it's self-destructive. Ultimately it leads to destruction. And so the idea would be that your behaviors have to always be scaled in this self-giving manner. They always have to participate. They're not fetishized.

Starting point is 00:34:41 And when something becomes fetishized, then it actually leads to its own destruction, it shatters, right? Because it doesn't, it's not breathing is a good way of thinking about it, let's say. Now in the story of Jesus with his disciples on the last night and him washing their feet, I was suggesting that that was, and you were also suggesting that this was the top serving the bottom. But then if we also think of ourselves as comprising cells or comprising organs, which comprise cells and the cells are actually lower, then would it technically be the case that for Jesus to have served what was the lowest,

Starting point is 00:35:14 he should have scrubbed gut bacteria or something even smaller? You understand what I'm saying? No, but I mean, this is where symbolism is very, very important, you know, because washing the feet is very, very important because that's what washing the feet is. It's exactly what you said. It's something like, it's something like I am washing the place where you touch shit. Like if you want to, where you touch crap, where you touch the decomposing, where you touch the things that are accidental.

Starting point is 00:35:49 That's also important. It's like usually with our hands, we touch things purposefully, but with our feet, we are constantly touching things in an accidental way, especially if you're not wearing like shoes like they did in those days. And so it has to do with accidental, it has to do with things that don't belong. This is actually a symbolism that gets taken up in all kinds of places, but that's what

Starting point is 00:36:17 one of the answers of why he washes their feet. The foot is something like, it's a contact with death, if you want to think about it that way, because it's constantly in contact with things that are accidental and not you, that you don't totally control, let's say. Okay. If we're a human intelligence and we're in this hierarchy and there's intelligences above us, say nations, or I'm sure at some point we'll reference angels, and then beneath us are different, a leg maybe is beneath you, and then the toenail is beneath you, and then the bacteria and so on, and maybe the atom.

Starting point is 00:36:55 Then what is it about human intelligence that makes it fundamentally unique? Well, at least traditionally the idea would be in fact that it is a mediator, that it is capable of mediating between the different levels. One of the things that humans can do is exactly what we said at the outset, which that humans name. Dogs don't name, or if they do, it's probably very, very light name. They do recognize things, but they don't have this meta capacity to, let's say, stand out of the phenomenon, to name it in a way that they can also communicate to others. That type of activity is a form of dominion over the world.

Starting point is 00:37:44 I know it's a way of speaking that people hate, that everybody hates the idea, let's say that humans have dominion over the world, but it's almost impossible to get around that. And postmoderns actually totally know that, because postmoderns will say things like naming is colonizing, like the idea that identifying things is a form of colonizing and that they kind of they see it just as a type of violence.

Starting point is 00:38:10 I think that if it's done properly, it's actually an act of love, because if it's done in a coherence with the thing that is being recognized and named, let's say, then it is a loving act. So I would say humans have that capacity. In the ancient cosmologies, most ancient cosmologies, they're represented as something like at the top of the mountain, right? Between heaven and earth. They're like the mediator between heaven and earth.

Starting point is 00:38:37 They mediate between abstract, invisible things, names, purposes, all of these things that cannot be measured and that which can be quantified and measured and gathered together. Is this capacity to name, is it just we're different as people, we're of a different kind or is it of a different degree? It's definitely of a different degree, I think, than let's say the other animals. Yeah, okay. So I agree. It's of a different degree, I think, than, let's say, the other animals. Yeah, okay. So I agree, it's of a different degree. So then would you say that there are extremely bright birds and apes or what have you that

Starting point is 00:39:14 can do some naming to some small amounts and they do so? Yeah, maybe a little bit. It seems like we can train apes to name things, but I don't know if that carries. I don't know the studies, but I wonder if, let's say, they've done it for a few generations, if that has some kind of... If you put the apes back in nature, would they continue to be able to sign and name and do these things that they're doing now, I don't know. It might just be a corollary of our intelligence.

Starting point is 00:39:49 It might be a form of application of human intelligence to animals that humanizes them in a way that is dependent on human intelligence. It's as if they become an extension of our body, just very similar to the way that we use artificial intelligence, for example. It's an extension of our naming and meaning mechanism. They don't have it independently. Is there a way to understand forms, like Plato's forms, as being above and then potential is somehow below? I think that that, I think, with the form problem is, I think it gets solved with the

Starting point is 00:40:31 notion of purpose. When I talk about how the idea that names are purposes, that helps the problem of forms because it's like a direction, right? It's not just like there's just these indefinite identities that are up there in the mental space, but rather they are means by which multiplicity is gathered, right? It actually works. It's like if you understand the purpose of something, then you gather these things. You know it more when you're doing it, right?

Starting point is 00:41:07 It's like, I have a reason why I'm drinking water. I gather these things together in a purpose, and those are gathered up higher and higher purposes. At least, Sam Maximus, who's my go-to guy, he seems to join- OG. OG, yeah, he's my OG. He seems to join the idea of Plato's forms with the notion of purposes. So in some ways he's similar. It's like he joins Aristotle and Plato together,

Starting point is 00:41:33 because Aristotle was like, well, the forms don't exist. Like, what do they exist? What do you mean by they don't exist in the same way the material things exist? Like, there's no way that that's possible. They have another type of existence. Is there something in particular about how man sinned that led to the fall, rather than say birds that failed to build a good nest or the liver of some animal failing to function properly, which itself can be seen as a sin if you think of sin as failure from a purpose? No, I agree that that's the right way to see it. The difference between humans is they're aware.

Starting point is 00:42:14 They have a type of awareness which is far more dangerous in terms of the notion of sin because we can specifically direct our attention away from that which we should do or that we know is good. And therefore, humans in some ways are far more self-destructive than animals can be. Like, self-destructive in so many ways, which is often actually so weird. We believe in Darwinian evolution, but we see these behaviors in humans of people just destroying their own lives because of sin, in the sense that they can get caught up in behaviors. Because they have this meta capacity to notice what they're doing, meta capacity to notice what they're doing. They can embark on these paths that lead us into complete corruption.

Starting point is 00:43:11 They say that, some people say only humans torture. I don't think it's totally true. I think cats torture to some extent. Or I think hyenas torture, by the way. Their cackling makes me think they're aware of what they're doing. Yeah, but the question is, humans are possibly the only beings that torture ourselves. We torture our own kind. It'd be interesting to find if there are animals that torture their own kind in the way that we do, and that there's this whole practice. But there are many things that humans do that are sinful in that other way, you know, that lead to death in many.

Starting point is 00:43:52 Yeah, I think in that sense it's different. I don't know if that makes sense. Well, while we're on the topic of naming, a question that occurs to me is, when Jesus says, ask for something in my name, in my name, what does that mean? Is that the same use of name? Yeah, it is very much the same use of name. In the sense of, so a good way of understanding the notion of Jesus or the Messiah is the idea of anointed, right? And anointing is related to what we're talking about. Anointing is something like foregrounding. It's like that, you know, this. And so you pour down

Starting point is 00:44:32 an influence on something like you come like a finger from heaven and you say, cup, chair, right? That's a form of anointing. You know, you make something special and it pops out. Now there are levels of anointing. And we do that, for example, amongst ourselves too. Humans will name leaders, will anoint them, will make them stand up and stand above, you could say, others so that they gather things into them, gather other people into them. So we have chiefs, leaders, coaches, all these kinds of things. And so the idea of Christ is that that's the ultimate anointing. He has the ultimate anointing. He is the place where all of heaven and all of earth join together.

Starting point is 00:45:21 And therefore, when he says, ask for something in my name, it has meaning. It doesn't mean ask for whatever you want. It means ask for something in that anointing. Know what it is for something to be anointing and also something to be canonic in its anointing, to be self-giving. So if you ask for something in that name,

Starting point is 00:45:44 then it will be given to you. But that doesn't mean ask for a Ferrari. Like if you ask for something in that name, then it will be given to you. But that doesn't mean ask for a Ferrari. If you ask for a Ferrari, I'm not sure how that would be asking in his name, you know? Does that make sense a little? What I mean is when you ask in his name, so you're saying that what you ask for needs to be somehow good. Okay, so it can't just be for more women in your life or men or what have you. Or whatever you want.

Starting point is 00:46:10 Or the latest iPhone or you want access to whatever open AI has working in their back end. Something I pray for. It's a joke. Okay, so it can't be that. But often I see people say in my name, they think that means amen at the end. That when you say amen, then that's praying in Jesus' name. But it sounds like what you're speaking about is what you're requesting, like in a petitionary

Starting point is 00:46:33 prayer needs to be in line with what Jesus would approve of. Yeah, so there's that, but there's also thinking that you're praying in the mode in which you are the body of that anointed one. You are a part of the body of Christ and therefore you are under his anointing and then you pray in that anointing. Now that now it sounds like mythology. People will be like, okay now he's gone into woo-land, but you can, you can think about it like, think about it like a team captain for a sport is a good way of thinking about it.

Starting point is 00:47:08 I want to make it clear that the Theories of Everything audience is quite an open audience and they're not going to think, oh boy, look at this guy. We're all, including myself, trying to understand your point of view and trying to see where it comports, what does it relate to. So you don't need to worry, you don't need to preface. This is a safe space. I am very much a Christian, but sometimes I avoid using the Christian language because it's been ruined, you know, by a lot of abuse. And so sometimes I'm worried, like when I... But it is the right way of saying it, right? Is to say that we are in the body of the Anointed One and we pray in

Starting point is 00:47:46 His name, you know, and that if we do that, then reality will unfold itself in love and will... Yes, and I think the most elementary way to get around this worry of yours is anytime you give some biblical symbolism, or maybe it's not symbolism to you, but regardless what can be interpreted as symbolism, that you then give a practical example. You'd say, so for instance, so and so and so. Yeah, well a good example of this, of like praying in the name of someone, is the example of a, I like using sports team, it's a good example of a sports team, and so you have this captain of the team, let's say,

Starting point is 00:48:24 right, and the captain of the team, if he's well so you have the captain of the team, let's say, right? And the captain of the team, if he's well chosen, then the captain of the team will be someone who is exemplary, someone who manifests the best spirit in terms of the sport, but often will also be a very good player, will be the best player in the team for all these reasons. And therefore that person will lift the team into him and it can happen through their example, through them like blazing ahead and being a torch that other people can align on,

Starting point is 00:48:59 they can lift the team into his name. You could think about it that way. Or her, yeah. And if the people in the team pray in his name in this context, obviously not for, like in the context of the team, then the kingdom right of that team will be fruitful. The kingdom that is that which is under the authority of that be fruitful. The kingdom that is that which is under the authority of that hierarchy will be full, it will be given, it will be plentiful. And so it's actually a way of understanding the way that unity and multiplicity come together. So think about like when that doesn't happen, right? And so you have a... I don't know, you have a hammer, right? And then the hammer, the handle is so used that there's slivers of wood

Starting point is 00:49:56 that are kind of poking out. Now you have a problem. Because now you have parts of the hammer that aren't acting in the name of the hammer. problem is because now you have parts of the hammer that aren't acting in the name of the hammer. They are all of a sudden, they're starting to act on their own and they don't serve the purpose of the hammer. They're not properly aligned and not properly, I could even say they're not properly worshipping like the purpose of the hammer. And therefore they will cause the panel to break,

Starting point is 00:50:27 they'll cause you to get a sliver, they'll cause things that are not the fruit of the kingdom of the hammer. They're like wild thorns. Is that evil or is that different than evil? That's just sinning. Or is that not even sinning? It's sinning, you're right,

Starting point is 00:50:43 it's a technical form of sinning. It's exactly what it is, but it's just that when we talk about evil, we're talking about exactly what I'm saying, but in the world of human interaction, like interrelated action. Because when it happens in the hammer, it doesn't make it, let's say the fruit, think about it this way, like what happens with the hammer, when the hammer breaks, you get a new hammer and that's it, or you fix the handle and that's it. But if you do it amongst human people,

Starting point is 00:51:12 what happens is you create patterns of being that reverberate and you can create generational chaos if you sin. Like if you sin and you abuse your children, then those effects are going to last maybe two, three, four generations. And so the type of sinning that we do as humans, when we traumatize others through our lying, through our stealing, through our adultery, all of these things, the results of them are

Starting point is 00:51:40 far greater than those that happen only in the mechanical world because of this capacity humans have to be self-conscious and also to, how can I say this, are the importance of transmission in the way in which we exist. We actually transmit modes of being across generations and across people. We influence each other. There's the mimetic aspect to human behavior, which makes sinning in the human sphere very different in terms of the consequences than it does if you have a bad hammer.

Starting point is 00:52:18 Talk about this generational sinning that gets passed down, because I've had experiences, intimations, where I felt like my job is to forgive any of the trauma that came prior to me. And I'm not someone who's traumatized. So I'm not saying this like I've dealt with issues, but I mean, there are sins that are passed down in a familial line, maybe in a societal line as well. If I don't forgive them, and I don't exactly know what forgiveness means, but this is my intimation, that it will then go through me and move on. And so the buck has to stop with me. And I say me somewhat selfishly because that's the only part that I have control over. Yeah, that's right. So tell me about what I just said. Yeah, I think that your intuition is absolutely right.

Starting point is 00:53:10 And in some ways we know that that's actually how humanity continues to exist is that even implicitly that has to happen. These types of transformations have to happen or else, I think it was Jordan Peterson who talked about this. It's like, you know, if sin only played out completely in its own, with its own, let's say drive, then every human would be killing each other at this point, right? We'd all just be murdering each other. But there seems to also be a capacity in humans for repentance, forgiveness, exactly the kinds of things that you're talking about, which is a transformative experience.

Starting point is 00:53:53 It has to transform very deeply. Repentance is a very, very powerful transformative thing. When you're really sorry for something and it's legitimate, right? And you feel it existentially, it creates a kind of a possibility of a new beginning that then also reverberates. And the surprise, I think, like, I don't know, but the surprise that seems to be is that if you're able to do that, that you're able to forgive the traumas that you receive and also repent of the behaviors that you have in your life that are leading you towards death, then that transforms into something greater than what was before.

Starting point is 00:54:34 It actually makes you in some ways more full and more wise than you were before the forgiveness or before even that you engage in sin. Because think about the people that you admire, like people that have gone through great adversity, people that have overcome addiction, people that have overcome extreme, you know, these people, they're bright for us for some reason. Like they have something very shiny about them that it just like draws our attention. And so there is something about transformation, repentance, forgiveness that leads to something greater, which is good.

Starting point is 00:55:14 It's wonderful to know that. It means that we're not totally screwed either. It's not like we're fried. Because of all these things that we've done or that have happened to us. Matthew 14 So I'm not a perennialist, which is someone who believes that all of the world's religions are correct in some manner and it just needs to be interpreted in the correct way. But I'm also not uniquely Christian outside of it's my Western heritage and it's in my bones, it's in the grammar. But here's something that I see as being different than the East in Christianity.

Starting point is 00:55:45 And this is just an etymological, it could be a coincidence, is that non-dualism as we spoke about, non-dualism in the East, and by the way, anytime I'm referencing non-dualism, I'm referencing my Western conception of non-dualism, which likely is completely different than it actually is in the East. And I'll just briefly define non-dualism. There are a few forms of it. One is non-dual awareness, which is you have subject and object and then that just becomes dissolved. And then you also have that everything that you see, this is

Starting point is 00:56:15 the second form, as different as actually the same, it's the same vellum. And then another is that we have opposites, which are supposed to be the same. And then I believe another one is mysticism. So that's the one that most people think about, which is unity with God as being non-dualism. And then there's some other form that has to do with relative and absolute truth in Buddhism as a technical non-dualism of those being actually the same. But anyhow, non-dualism is usually identified with idealism. I know you've spoken to Bernardo Kastrup, andalism is usually identified with idealism. I know you spoke into Bernardo

Starting point is 00:56:45 Kastrup and idealism is about what's fundamental and perhaps only existing is mind. Yet what's super interesting is the word forgiveness, which is emphasized tremendously in the Christian tradition and not emphasized much in the Eastern traditions, even though they do have, they do reference forgiveness. Forgiveness, the Greek word is metanoia, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, which means beyond mind. And so that's interesting because it means those people who believe all there is is mind, forgiveness is pointing to what's beyond that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:22 I think, I mean, I think that's interesting. I think that you can also interpret metanoia as something like the transformation of mind, the possibility. But also, I think you're right that it is also this idea of moving beyond mind, especially in the sense of the mind that, if you think about the mind, especially as that which calculates and that which accounts, because forgiveness is the opposite of accounting. It's like, I'm going to let this go. I've identified something. I named it. You did this to me. This is a thing.

Starting point is 00:57:59 I named it. I found it. There are a bunch of things you're doing that has an identity and a purpose, and I can see it. I see what you've done. And now I am going to let that go. I'm actually going to drop it. There are a bunch of things you're doing that has an identity and a purpose, and I can see it. I see what you've done. And now I am going to let that go. I'm actually going to drop it. I'm not going to point at it.

Starting point is 00:58:11 I'm going to drop it. And so it is related to everything we've been talking about, and it's something that is particularly human that we can do, because we have that capacity in us to foreground things. And if you don't, then it creates the possibility of a new possibility of unity with that person. Because what you usually identify as an obstacle to unity, you're like, there's this thing, this real thing, this is what you're doing. And now that is like an obstacle between us. and we can't be together because of that.

Starting point is 00:58:48 Now we're fighting. And so if I let that go, then, then all of a sudden, then we can join together in a higher purpose. We can actually join together towards something that is more than us. Do you see forgiveness as being the same as letting go or it just has letting go as a necessary part, but it's not sufficient? That you need something else. Well, what would it be? Like besides letting go. In the sense of the way that I'm saying it is that there is something real that is in your behavior. I don't know, you lied to me. It's like I see it. It's there. It's like this thing. And I can account for that. I can make a ledger

Starting point is 00:59:30 and I can say, here are the things that you've done. I'll put it on a piece of paper. And all these things are reasons why we're not together, like that we're not united. And therefore, I need to scrap that Like I'm going to drop it. I'm going to stop attending to it. It doesn't mean that they don't exist. I'm not naive. Like these things happen. I'm not going to, I know what happened, but I'm not going to account for them.

Starting point is 00:59:55 Not going to count them in my relationship with you. And therefore it's possible to renew, right? And to restart, and to start again. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I see those last parts as being what distinguishes letting go from forgiveness. So forgiveness, you still have to say that what you did was wrong, otherwise there's nothing to forgive. It doesn't mean that you hold on to that. So the not holding on to is the letting go part. But there's still an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. And then there's the further moving to heal. So the reason I'm making a

Starting point is 01:00:26 distinction here is because the counters would be, hey Kurt, you said forgiveness wasn't emphasized in the East, but the East heavily emphasizes letting go. And if forgiveness is the same as letting go, then well, Christianity doesn't have that as a distinguishing factor from Buddhism or Vedic text. I mean, I think for sure, I think forgiveness is probably something that's universal. The thing about Christianity too that's important, Kurt, is I believe that Christianity is a description of reality. And so it's funny, sometimes you see the kind of secular atheist types. They're like, you know, Christians, why not original?

Starting point is 01:01:07 Why aren't you original? Why are your ideas look like ideas that existed before? It's like, since when is originality a vector of reality? Like, how is that? Like, where does that come from? I think that Christianity, what it does is it joins also things that people have had intuitions about forever and that have that glimmers of and that are found in other religions or other traditions.

Starting point is 01:01:32 But it does so in a way that has, at least in my estimation, has a shining to it, has an extreme power to it that wasn't there before. And that's why people see it. The reason why people convert to Christianity, despite what a lot of the objectors of Christianity think, there are a few moments in history where that was done through violence. It is possible. But most of the time it wasn't. Most of the time it was just people saying, oh, oh, okay, oh yeah, this actually makes

Starting point is 01:02:10 sense of what I already think is true. It's like a remembering of something that they have. It's a revelation, a revelation of something that is more real. So I think that that's the best way to kind of approach Christianity is to see it as that. Wolfgang Smith is someone that we've both spoken to and Wolfgang is someone who's actually lived in the East for at least a decade, it could be two decades, and traveled. And he was saying that there is a distinction between Christianity and other religions. He's also not a perennialist.

Starting point is 01:02:45 And for him, the fall isn't present, at least not in the same degree in the East. In fact, something I think about when you start reading Eastern texts, it's somewhat, it's quite philosophical and different. I wondered, is it the case that if we were Christianity in the Old Testament, it looks somewhat plain, like more straightforward. And I wondered, do the people from the East, if you were to read them passages from the Old Testament or the New Testament, if their mind would be blown in the same way that when you're a Western thinker and you start to encounter Eastern ideas, you're like, holy

Starting point is 01:03:20 moly. And Wolfgang was indicating yes, actually actually they don't have some of the concepts that the West has. And now it's different because of colonialization and so they're more familiar with it. Yeah, it's been different now for sure. Well, for sure the image of the cross is like, you know, people forget just how scandalous that is. Like you go, and I've seen it in pre-represented movies in an interesting way where it's like, you know, these people get off the boat and they have this like cross with a guy that's nailed to it, and they're walking to meet

Starting point is 01:03:50 people from another culture, and everybody's like, oh my, they have a guy nailed to a cross? What is this? This is crazy! And so I think that you're right in that sense, like there is something extremely radical about that which Christianity proposes, you know, and that, you know, that I do believe is the highest form of reality. But there is something that, at least at the outset, because it is a form of non-dualism, like a form of non-dualism that many people haven't encountered or many people maybe hadn't encountered before, that it has this kind of extreme aspect to it. Okay, so what is theosis? My understanding is that theosis is either union with God or likeness to God.

Starting point is 01:04:36 And I wasn't quite sure what the difference between those would be. Yeah, theosis is really union with God. And that the idea, I think, at least in Eastern Orthodoxy, to me, that was one of the reasons why I became Orthodox is because it makes sense of things. Because the existence of the world is not that obvious. Why does the world exist? And if either you see it as emanation or you see it as creation, it doesn't matter. You still have the problem.

Starting point is 01:05:07 It's like, OK. Briefly explain the differences between emanation and creation. OK, so emanation is something like it is simply the way in which things emanate out of the One. Like there's no analogy to will. It's just basically that's how it is. There's the one and there's the procession and that procession is multiplicity. And so there's just a type of emanation. Whereas in Christianity and in the monotheism-

Starting point is 01:05:38 Like a pyramid, sorry, like a triangle. Something like that, yeah. Whereas in the Western tradition, and not just, there are other analogous versions of it, in most of the tradition we call monotheistic, there is a sense in which we use the analogy of will. We use the analogy of person in order to talk about the origin of all things.

Starting point is 01:06:02 And therefore, there's a sense in which we could say, we say God wanted, you know, God created the world out of love, you know, as an act of love, you know. And so that's the difference between creation and emanation. And so some people don't like creation because they think it's like, why would you create such a broken thing? Like, why would you create a world that's full of death and suffering and pain and all the things that we see in the world? And therefore, it's not as painful to think of it as a kind of emanation moving away from the One, which causes pain as an illusion or something, and then you have to just embrace the one.

Starting point is 01:06:47 And if you embrace the one, then you escape the problem of the illusion of multiplicity and you kind of move in. Whereas in the monotheistic faith, we really have this image of creation. But I think that the idea that the purpose of creation is theosis, right? That the reason why God created the world is to be united with his creation. I think it's something that, I don't know, as a human person, it is far more, it's closer to, it's closer to me. Maybe that's a good way of understanding it. Closer to my everyday, even to my everyday experience, which is I know what that means

Starting point is 01:07:34 with my children, with my wife, with my friends, you know. Sounds like unity without multiplicity. Like imagine the ocean is God and that you're some separate drop of water. Yeah, that's more of a Hindu vision of this idea of going back into the One, of basically dissolving into the One, but that is absolutely not Christianity. That's why the Trinity is so important in Christianity. It is rather, it's almost, it's a radical vision of how the world already exists,

Starting point is 01:08:11 which is that the unity with the one is not the destruction of the multiple. It makes the multiple shine. Right, when something is joined to its purpose, right? When something's doing it right. like when the wheels of my car are doing what they need to do and moving towards the purpose of the car, it doesn't, moving into the unity of the car, it doesn't annul the multiplicity. It makes it real. It makes it even more real because it's like, it's showing the reason why the multiplicity exists. And so that's the vision of theosis in Christianity, is that being united with God is simultaneously

Starting point is 01:08:51 becoming more yourself. Yeah, so that is quite radical. So that's what I mean, that many of the people who watch this channel, they're familiar with at least the Western interpretation of the East. I have to keep putting an asterisk on that and not the East. So when you actually start to speak to people who are from the East, they'll say, no, that you don't actually become one with God and the same as you're the same as God or what have you.

Starting point is 01:09:15 But that's the Western interpretation of what's going on in the East. And when we hear, well, in Christianity, at least in this interpretation of Christianity in the Eastern Orthodox view, that you have a union with God, which is thought of as unions, that's one, you become one with God, but then you're saying, and simultaneously your multiplicity multiplies or you become more distinct in your multiplicity. It's a paradox, it sounds contradictory. And so it's unfamiliar and I'd like you to explain that. Like give us a visual. There's something about the blades of grass

Starting point is 01:09:51 being so sharp in heaven, they're too sharp for us. But so give us an understanding, like what does it mean? So like I said, it really is a version of how the world already exists. It's just a fuller version. So I gave an example of the wheel in the car. I could give you an example of anything, which is that anything which can be recognized as a part of something.

Starting point is 01:10:15 Okay, so think about a team again, a basketball team again. So you have all the multiple players. And the purpose of the multiple players is to be united with the purpose of the team. They want to become one because that's how they'll win the game. The more they're one, the more they'll win the game, the more they will enter into the purpose of what they're doing and they'll become one. But the unity that they come into, the dance that they participate in, the kind of, the rhythms that they're able to enter into to become one, does not annul their multiplicity.

Starting point is 01:10:52 It makes it real. It makes it more real. It gives the reason for the multiplicity. It's like, now I know why I have this position in the basketball team. I know why I stand in this position, I play this role, is so that I can become one with all of you and join in the purpose of the team. And therefore, without the unity, there's no reason for the multiplicity. And so it's moving in two directions at the same time. It's moving up and it's moving down.

Starting point is 01:11:22 It's making things that are down more imminently real, like that God is more imminent in the world, but it also is a simultaneously a transcendence. That's what the incarnation is. That's what Jesus is. There's an image when Christ dies, where as he dies, the veil of the temple rips. And that means that he is simultaneously going to the very bottom of the world, right? He's going into the ground, right, under the earth, where things fall apart and decompose. But he's simultaneously going into the highest place where the glory of God descends on the

Starting point is 01:12:02 world, where the highest point of the mountain, the place where heaven and earth meet, and he's doing that at the same time, simultaneously. And that's the filling up of the world. That's the relationship between absolute unity and absolute multiplicity. So then, anytime someone dies, they're doing what's both union and multiplicity? Well, think about it like, just in terms of simple theological, like simple, almost like folk mythology idea. Like, when someone dies, what do we say? They're passed on? Yeah, we say they go to heaven. They go up into heaven. And then their body, where does it go?

Starting point is 01:12:46 Into the ground. It goes down, right, and it decomposes. But then Christ resurrects. Christ says, no, no, no. Those two, they can be joined together, like the extremes of going up and going down. That's actually the perfection of the world is in how they are joined together. So just a moment, are you saying that they can be the same or that they are the same? How can I say this?

Starting point is 01:13:15 Like they can be the same. Yeah, it's a good idea to say they can be the same, but they're not necessarily the same because you obviously have sinning usually implies an unbalancing. Usually it's too much of one or too much of the other. That's usually what sinning is. It's either pride or it's dissolution and one leads to the other. It's a disconnection of heaven and earth in that way.

Starting point is 01:13:36 You move too much towards unity in a small way or you move too much towards multiplicity and that's what sinning usually does. So my follow-up questions hinge on this. After corporeal death, bodily death, does subjective experience continue? Christians believe in the resurrection. That's what we believe in. Oh, and just so we're clear, Jonathan, I hope that any of the these, a little worried about these questions in the sense that the image of Christianity is the resurrection. That's the image. It is the idea that in the end, when all things are resolved, then that separation of body and soul or purpose and embodiment will be completely resolved, will be resolved perfectly.

Starting point is 01:14:48 That's the highest vision. The highest vision. Resolved perfectly. So they'll come back together? Yeah, that's the vision. The vision is that the separation of the body and the soul is unnatural. And so the identities of things have to be united with their particularities. And that is the highest state of the Christian is resurrection. It's not going to heaven. And a lot of Christians, by the way, I know a lot of people, they don't like that, but that's it. That's Christianity. Christianity is not going to heaven, your soul going to heaven and your body like decomposing.

Starting point is 01:15:28 The ultimate vision of Christianity is resurrection, which means that that unity is a form of unity that is no longer in competition, a form of unity that is no longer hostile to each other. Like you're not fighting your body. You're not arguing with yourself, but there is this dance, right? This beautiful dance of the one and the many,

Starting point is 01:15:52 just like when you watch a great pass in a sports game, like where everything comes together and it's like, oh, you know, this sense of flow, right? Verveki talks about flow, like this idea of this multiplicity and unity kind of exchanging in a way that is almost seamless and beautiful. And that is the vision of the afterlife, if you want to call it the afterlife.

Starting point is 01:16:16 I don't like that word, but let's say the finality of all things, that is the vision. And so there is a sense in Christianity that the body and the soul are separated after you die, but that it is in many ways a very unnatural state and it is not a state that is meant to continue. Okay. Maybe this is another distinction then, because people see-

Starting point is 01:16:41 But if you want an easy answer to does conscious experience continue after death, the answer is yes. Okay, okay. So, let me see if I've got this correct. The folk understanding is that we have something physical and we have something mental. And I understand some people say that's dualism. I said folk. So this is the folk understanding.

Starting point is 01:17:00 Okay, so you have a soul. Perhaps you want to call the soul the spirited part and then the corporeal, the physical part. And currently as we're speaking, hopefully you're speaking to someone who has both and the spirited part is associated also with consciousness. The people who believe that there is an afterlife, despite our qualms with that word, they believe your consciousness is what continues. And some people who are on the, like we mentioned the East, maybe they believe that as well. Maybe they believe all that exists is actually consciousness, but it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 01:17:33 That's what they believe continues. It sounds like what you're saying though, is that actually in the resurrection, both come back and both come back stronger and more shaking hands more properly. Yeah. That's a way to understand it. Because the problem with thinking that there's a soul is that the soul is the organizing principle of your body. It's not like something that exists independently.

Starting point is 01:17:59 A soul is an organizing principle. A soul is a vector of unity and multiplicity. That is what a soul is a vector of unity in multiplicity. That is what a soul is. It's the capacity for multiplicity to move into unison towards a single experience or a single thing. And so the human soul is what makes you in... Because the thing's here, right? Every cell in your body was replaced at some point, right? It's like you don't have the same cell that you had when you were born.

Starting point is 01:18:32 The materiality of your body is constantly changing. Your hair's growing, your skin's falling off, all of this stuff is happening. But there is, in that change, there is something that unites all of that change over time into one. That's your soul. It's the organizing principle that holds multiplicity together. And so that has to be connected to body. Now the notion of body, you could stretch it. You can stretch it in ways that aren't necessarily the idea of like a brute physical body the way that we have now. There are other types of bodies that can hold a soul, you could say.

Starting point is 01:19:22 I think that people talk about subtle bodies, right? This is what's described as- Subtle. Yeah. So in the Christian tradition, we say that angels, for example, have subtle bodies. They don't have brute bodies. Their bodies are more refined. And so you can think about it like, for example, I like to think of it like a story is a subtle body. Influence is a subtle body. So like if I ask someone again, if I say, if I ask my son, go get a glass of water for me, I'm not physically pushing him up the stairs.

Starting point is 01:19:58 I'm exercising subtle influence on him. That's in, that's a, in the sense of like meaning influence, right? So it's like I, but he is acting in accordance to my, like he's moving, getting things with his body, bringing it back to me. And so he is an extension of my body at that point. Like he's acting as an extension of my body. And when we, every time you work in a team, you can experience that. When you have leaders, when you have leaders, you become extensions of their body to some extent.

Starting point is 01:20:27 Not individually, but in the purpose. So it's like he's telling people what to do, exercising his subtle body. If you have an assistant, your assistant is a benefactor of your subtle body. They are acting as an extension of you in the world through your influence. And so those are also possibilities for bodies in terms of understanding the resurrection. When we talk about patron saints, that's what we're talking about. So a saint is someone who still exercises influence. We name buildings after them. We name streets after them.

Starting point is 01:21:03 We tell their story. We, we gather in places with their name. It's like, they are still, they still have body in the world. I see what you're saying. Is this also related to when Jesus said, when two or more of you gather in my name, then there I am. It's not just one of you. Yeah, because, because in order for the head to appear, we have to be multiple things together moving towards the head. It's kind of like, you know, let's use a sports analogy again.

Starting point is 01:21:34 It's kind of like if you'd say, you know, I don't know, the Montreal Canadiens, like if two or three are on the ice together in my name, then you're the Montreal Canadians. But if you're just playing alone, dude, you're not the Montreal Canadian. I don't know what you are, you're just a guy playing hockey. So that's a form of subtle body. It's a good way of understanding a subtle body. It's a good way of understanding the relationship between the resurrected body and the church and the idea of community as body as becoming a vector for the will of

Starting point is 01:22:06 someone who has ascended into heaven for all intents and purposes. I know you were concerned that you don't want to come across as saying just unsubstantiated ill-founded conjecture and people will just dismiss and so on, but just so you know there's someone who is heavily rationalistic and influential his name is Douglas Hofstadter and he has this idea of what consciousness is, and it has to do with patterns existing. And so he had this argument that even though his wife, former wife, sorry, his wife died, that she still lives on because of her influence over him, and that you can extend this argument

Starting point is 01:22:44 to that, no, technically the consciousness of Jesus does live on to the degree that we implement his will. The point of this is to corroborate what you're saying and put it on the footing of something that has more explicit logical. Yeah, that at least doesn't seem like arbitrary description of something you just have to believe in. That's sometimes the issue is that people would be like, oh yeah, well, whatever, you you just have to believe in. That's sometimes the issue is that people would be like, oh yeah, well, whatever. You believe that, I believe that.

Starting point is 01:23:11 The way you're talking about it is absolutely correct. Now the question, and this is the harder question, is does first experience consciousness, right? Yes. Is it a formal cause in the sense it is a vertical cause on the coherence of the body, right? Or is it just the opposite, right? And so the question would be in the sense that someone is remembered after their death and the sense that their influence is in the world, is that the body of a first-person conscious experience? That's the harder question to answer for a more materialist person. And I think that the answer is yes, because I do not think that the very single fact that

Starting point is 01:24:11 your brain, that your entire body is not the same body you had when you were born, means that I think it's difficult to propose that consciousness is completely dependent on a particular material substrate, but that it's rather the patterning of materiality in a certain direction. And so the idea, for example, that you can exist in the memory of others, Like, to have that there could be an actual conscious experience. I don't think that that's completely crazy. Okay. So, we're going to get into more symbolism. I want to know if this is a correct way of understanding where you're coming from.

Starting point is 01:25:02 Is it your contention that we should think of the Bible as actually describing our world and not what the world could be if there was no fall or was no flood. This is the world we live in. It describes this world. And similar to how a student can be told that one of the laws of physics involves the number 137, they could raise their hands and say, why not 138? The professor can say, look, I'm telling you how this world is described. Not all possible worlds, a subset of all possible worlds. Then you also think, okay, if the Bible is describing this world, it's clearly not doing so in a scientific, factual, quote unquote, literal manner.

Starting point is 01:25:44 For a variety of reasons, the factual and scientific manner of understanding the world came about several hundred years afterward. But then the question is, okay, if the Bible is describing our world as it is, what is the language in which it's doing so? So what you're doing is you're probing that language and trying to understand it and you're using several guides, the Bible itself, your own history as a person, your own culture's history, the other religions as well. Does it comport with, it's not as if you just want complete unity, quote unquote, with other

Starting point is 01:26:15 religions and other cultures and so on, but you're also looking there. Is that a correct way of summarizing what you're doing? Please tell me what I said that misrepresented your Weltanschauung. Yeah, I think the first part of what you said is absolutely right in the sense that the Bible describes a world that has a gap in it, you know, this what we call the fall, you know, and everybody experiences that gap, the gap between what is and what I think it should be, just that, right? That's a fall, right?

Starting point is 01:26:51 I have a sense that things should be differently. And the vision that's described as the fall in scripture, I think it's the most perfect description of that gap. But then it also describes the way in which that which should be nonetheless inscribes itself in the world and also what that looks like and how we have glimmers of it and how we can kind of piece at it, we can touch it, and we can see it come together. And so that is definitely what I'm doing in the sense that I am trying to help people understand that language today, like as much as possible, to understand the idea that there is both a structure that is presented in the Bible, a vision of how the world is moving towards what it should

Starting point is 01:27:46 be, not just is in the basis, but showing us what it should be and how it can be implemented in the world. But I think that one of the things that I'm trying to do, maybe that's a little different from at least a lot of contemporary Christianity, and you seem to catch on to it right away, which is to show that it's actually structural. It's not just an ethical issue. What the Bible is describing is actually a structure of being that we participate in. And it is akin, like you said, again, I totally agree, it is akin to many, many other ancient

Starting point is 01:28:22 traditions, other ancient ways of understanding the world that describes similar types of patterns. Although I do believe it offers a particular key, which is the incarnation as being a kind of fulcrum around which the pattern kind of rotates. So do you feel like I'm answering your question? Yeah. I want to be careful here because many people think of themselves as perennials. So meaning that they think that all of the world's religions are touching on the same elephant just from different points of view. Part of that's just our liberal nature and I understand that, our open nature, our unwillingness

Starting point is 01:29:05 to say that someone's wrong. If they're ancient enough, they have to be correct is something that we have as an unconscious belief. But that's a belief that doesn't manifest in almost any other domain. Like we think that Indian food is different than British food, and it is different than Greek food and so on. And even within Greek food, there's a profusion of different options and different cultures and subcultures and people say there is no such thing as Italian food.

Starting point is 01:29:32 There's only different regions within Italy. So then the question is, well, if that's the case for virtually everything else in nature, why is it that when we think of the religions, they're all the same? I want to know what your issues are with idiosyncrasies. Oh, yeah. Yep. else in nature? Why is it that when we think of the religions, they're all the same? I want to know what your issues are with idiosyncrasies. I don't know how you're defining it, so please define it. Tell me what your issues are with it. With idiosyncrasy? You mean in the context of what you ask or just in general? In general. Okay.

Starting point is 01:30:10 So the world is made of unity and difference. It's made of one and many. And so the many has a characteristic. It's something like chaos at the outset or its potential. It's difference per se, fluidity, all these types of terms, change. And so the unity of the one and the many has two directions. It has a direction that's moving towards the one and a direction that's moving towards the many. And the direction that moves towards the many can lead to what we call idiosyncrasy. First of all, what they are is that in some ways they are unity, they're moving towards multiplicity.

Starting point is 01:30:52 And at the end of that is something like things that are there but don't fit, or things that don't necessarily serve the purpose of the being, that are accidental, like that's how Aristotle talks about it. Like there are things that are kind of accidental, that are just very particular to the thing, to the instantiation. And they're kind of important because they act as a buffer between inside and outside. They act as a kind of transition, you could say buffer between inside and outside. They act as a kind of transition, you could say, between inside and outside. A form of extreme particularization that is, like I said, that's a form of transition.

Starting point is 01:31:39 And so you have, think of it like you have two groups of people, say you have two empires, you have the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, and then what's going to happen in between that are going to be idiosyncrasies, necessarily. There's going to be people that are like idiosyncrasies is, are. And so they're important, you know, because they play a differentiating role. Think about it that way. They act as this buffer between two things. They make it possible for you to see the difference. You know, but they... people now are kind of obsessed with idiosyncrasies. We're in this strange moment when we are in some way worship difference and worship idiosyncrasy in a way that is very dangerous because idiosyncrasy is like spice. Think about it that way. It's

Starting point is 01:32:43 like you're making chicken and it's like, what are you eating? You're eating chicken, you know, but then at the, in the process, you'll add something extra, something different that actually doesn't, it's not chicken. It's actually something that actually isn't completely edible in itself. Like you're not going to eat like spoonfuls of cinnamon or like, or whatever. It's, it's something which adds like kind of kick to the identity, but doesn't necessarily serve the identity. Like an ornament, let's say on a chair or an ornament on a vestment.

Starting point is 01:33:15 It's something which is extra. It's like a kind of extra aspect to it. Yes. And so idiosyncrasy can play two roles. You could say it can appear as the way things move into dust, like down into chaos. And then idiosyncrasy can also play a role going up in the sense of it's a type of glory or a way in which something gives itself up towards higher participations. So for example, like the crown on the head of a king is an idiosyncrasy, but it's not the same as the dirt on the bottom of my feet, which is also an idiosyncrasy. One is kind of, is connecting you to the earth and, you know, let's say is a

Starting point is 01:33:59 transitions point with, which is below. And the other is a transition point with what is above. Which is why monsters appear as guardians of intermediary spaces, right? So you have monsters on bridges, you have a sphinx in front of a holy place, and they kind of represent that transition. So are idiosyncrasies something to be minimized? They're just something that has to be in the proper place. They have a cosmic function.

Starting point is 01:34:33 They have an ontological function, but they just have to be in the proper place. Like for the same reason, like if you have this much chicken and this much cinnamon, then you've got the wrong proportion. It's not going to be good. It's not going to be good. It's not going to follow its purpose. And it's the same with idiosyncrasy. So, like, a good example would be like, there's a native tradition, interesting tradition, in which they have, during religious rituals, they have a character that is there to manifest idiosyncrasy. That's actually the function of the character.

Starting point is 01:35:05 So you have these people doing a ritual, then you'll have some guy that's there that'll like fart during the ritual on purpose or will like do something to like draw tension away from the ritual in order to manifest idiosyncrasy. We have that, for example, in the court jester. The court jester is a good example of the need for idiosyncrasy in a system to avoid the system from crystallizing, to manifest change and to point at imperfections in the system and to do that. But if you had a court full of jesters and there'd be no king, or if you make the jester the king, then the world falls apart. So was Judas just idiosyncratic?

Starting point is 01:35:47 Where is idiosyncrasy? It's an interesting question. No, that's a really interesting question because this is the weird thing about Jesus, is that Jesus really seems to have captured all of reality in his story. And so it's like Jesus, for example, understands that for someone to be a betrayer, exactly, to betray the center, he has to come from the center. He has to have a prior allegiance to the center. Like for the antichrist in some ways, or the Satan, is the opponent from within the system. You can't have the complete

Starting point is 01:36:35 outside. And so that's why not just Judas, but also St. Peter, right? They play these roles where they are like chosen opponents, chosen enemies, or chosen betrayers. It's very fascinating. I don't know if there are other stories like that where someone chooses his own betrayer. Maybe it exists, but if so, I've never encountered it. So this whole putting cinnamon or too much cinnamon on chicken in order for you to say, this is my chicken, this is my version of chicken. This reminds me of people who they wear certain clothing because they feel like this is my

Starting point is 01:37:12 expression, I'm being authentic. Then you wonder what's authentic about your Mickey Mouse tattoo. So firstly, it's shared by multiple people. And then if you say, this is who I am on the inside, you're something that a corporation came up with in the 1900s. That's in your DNA. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's a great example. There's nothing... idiosyncrasy happens. It's actually something that you don't have to pay too much attention to. If you actually don't pay attention to it, it'll happen very naturally and sometimes in a very beautiful way.

Starting point is 01:37:45 When you put too much attention on idiosyncrasy, then you're a punk rocker and you're basically wearing a uniform. There's nothing idiosyncratic about idiosyncrasy that is too deliberate. Because idiosyncrasy is an accident. That's what idiosyncrasy is. If you make it too deliberate, you make it into like a parody of itself. Then you have that problem of the punk rocker that is like, I can recognize a punk rocker from half a mile away. They're wearing uniform of idiosyncrasy. A fight that I have with people off air is about authenticity.

Starting point is 01:38:26 And so most people in our culture, almost everyone says what you need to do is be authentic. I say, no, authenticity doesn't matter. Maybe sincerity matters more. And then I give examples of people who are claiming to be authentic. And often it's that they say, well, I'm just speaking the truth. And it just means they're speaking instinctively and they're too harsh. But then they're masking it by saying, oh, it's you that has the problem. I'm actually just being authentic.

Starting point is 01:38:52 There's many issues I have. Yeah. Well, that's the thing is that people identify authenticity with difference. Uh, and that is, that's absolute, that's bullshit. Like that's a bullshit thing. I, the idea that authenticity comes from difference is just not true. Authenticity actually comes from unity and then difference will be there and it'll be great.

Starting point is 01:39:17 It'll be wonderful. Because if you know why you're together, like this is the thing that people don't understand. Like even in our countries, like even the question of immigration has to do with this. It's like, if you know why you're together, then difference is great. But if you don't know why you're together, then difference is war. And so it's like the idea that we celebrate diversity is the most ridiculous thing. We celebrate unity all the time.

Starting point is 01:39:48 You celebrate unity and then diversity just happens and you're just and it's there and it's great. It's not a problem. You know, it's funny because when you think about like even diversity in clothing, if you look at the way that men dressed before like 19th century crazy industry world, like they had way more diversity. They had crazy mustaches and psycho sideburns and like all of this kind of crazy stuff. But they didn't talk about that.

Starting point is 01:40:15 They didn't spend their time thinking about, like they didn't write treatises on fashion and all these things, they just didn't talk about it. It was just something that happened. As you celebrate unity, diversity will increase in a good way. But if you celebrate diversity, then it's dust, then it's decomposition. Am I to think of diversity here as the same as multiplicity? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:40:40 Okay. So then in other words, multiplicity is inevitable and also incidental, that you aim for the unity and then the multiplicity will come out as a natural effect? Well, multiplicity is necessary for unity, right? You need multiplicity for unity to exist. But I mean is that the aspect in which multiplicity is idiosyncratic, that will just happen. Because multiplicity, as it moves towards unity, that is what is the dance. But in that dance, there'll also be the funkiness. Like there'll be a little bit of funk, right? There'll be a little bit of excess,

Starting point is 01:41:18 a little bit of strange. Like that will just manifest itself because it's just part of, and that that strange and that excess and that little bit of funk will just be like spice in the world. It won't be dangerous. It won't be hostile if we know why we're together, if we if we're moving towards unity. And it but it's when we're not moving towards unity that then difference can become dangerous. then difference can become dangerous. So speaking of dangerous, and you're an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I'm sure you have your own views on Catholicism.

Starting point is 01:41:52 I'm curious where you see Catholics as being incomplete or incorrect and even to the point of being dangerous. Well, I would say this is the way that I see it and I wouldn't phrase it exactly the way you did, but I- It'll be more diplomatic. I would say that something happened in the West, which caused the Reformation, which brought about the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. And there's a kind of hardening of the positions, obviously, in a conflict where you have on the one hand,

Starting point is 01:42:26 a church that moves more and more towards centralization, the Catholic Church, where you have an increasing emphasis on the papacy and the importance of the unity of the Catholic Church. And then what happens on the other side is you have a kind of splintering where there's just constant schisms and constant and like 10,000 Protestant denominations, even more probably innumerable amounts of Protestant denominations. So I think that those two feed on each other. And then the papacy becomes more and more centralized until you have the infallibility

Starting point is 01:43:02 of the pope. And then the Protestantism becomes more and more anarchic and kind of charismatic and based on personal experience and personal emotion and all these things. So I think that what Orthodoxy, one of the things Orthodoxy brings is this breathing in and breathing out between the one and the many. This idea of the kind of dance that exists in communion, that communion is not just unity, but it is this interplay between one and many. It's kind of like, yeah, breathing in and breathing out is the best way of understanding

Starting point is 01:43:39 it. And we have that approach in all the ways that we talk about the faith. And so, for example, in the kind of ridiculous question of saying something like, are you saved by faith or by works? Is it the things you do that save you or is it just God that saves you? And God that kind of Calvinists, God just chooses you and points to you and says names you and like you, you are the one that I've chosen and I'm going to take you into heaven, you know. No matter what you want, you have nothing to say about it. Irresistible grace.

Starting point is 01:44:13 If I choose you and I pick you, that's it. You get taken up in the rapture or whatever, right? Sorry, I'm being caricatural. Sorry for the Protestants watching this. Caricature for a purpose, right? Or the idea that- Is Paul VanderKley is a Calvinist? Yeah, he's a very, he's very smart, very... He wouldn't say the things that I... He wouldn't go as far as...

Starting point is 01:44:32 You're speaking directly to Paul. Yeah, exactly. Directly to you. So think about this idea, like of God kind of choosing you from above, right? Sure. And then the other idea of saying, you know, you've got to do all these good things and you've got to do all these good works or whatever, and these two opposites are obviously impossible. This is not the way it works. It's actually the way that to understand it is to... We have this term called synergy, which is this idea that there's a collaboration between your will and the will of God, that God is kind is calling you into his unity with him, and you are responding with love. There's this kind of dance of moving into God, and that's what theosis looks like.

Starting point is 01:45:17 I think that that's something that Orthodoxy is able to offer the world right now is we have been able to avoid these radical positions that move you too much towards unity or too much towards multiplicity. I think that that's helpful. You can see how it speaks across all the things we've talked about already in the podcast. I think that that's something that can be good. You can think of it like as a top down and bottom up causality to get, right? That there is emergence and there's emanation from above and that there's a vertical causality, but there's also a way in which things come together into their purpose.

Starting point is 01:45:56 Okay. Let's speak about this top down bottom up distinction. For what's above us or what's seemingly above us, virtues like forbearance and leniency and regard and charity, when we name those, like what I just did is I identified them and I picked them out. I didn't give them the name charity, for instance, but is that of the same sort of identifying or naming as what we do to the creatures or what was biblically done to the creatures, because it seems like those are above us.

Starting point is 01:46:28 Yeah, that's why we have this image, this term we called Revelation. Revelation is something like, it's like light that comes down from heaven. And that is different, like you said, than the action of humans to identify that which is below. And so it can be represented in many ways. It can be like a prophetic vision or it can be an angel, right? This idea that the virtues are actually angels, you know, the angel of charity, the angel of justice, the angel, and that they are looking down on us and they're revealing themselves to us. Uh, whereas in terms of naming the animals. Ah, I see what you're saying.

Starting point is 01:47:10 Okay. Yeah. Well, sorry, let me see if I see what you're saying. Okay. So they have either named themselves or are given names. I probably given, and then we're identifying them because they have revealed themselves, not because we have picked them out. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:24 I see. That's, I mean, that's the. That's the traditional way of understanding it. It's pretty universal, I would say, that that's why we have the concept or the notion of revelation. That's why you see in scripture, people have visions, or people receive the visit of an angel or someone from above,

Starting point is 01:47:42 and the angel will often name you. And so the angel comes and says to Abraham's wife, like, you're no longer Sarah, you're Sarah. And he says to Abraham, you're no longer Abraham, you're Abraham. So this revelation from above transforms you, which is why Jesus names Peter and Jesus renames people, because it's that kind of top-down. And so, for example, a good example would be when you enter into religious traditions, this happens in many traditions and it happens also in Christianity, you are named.

Starting point is 01:48:21 And so when you are baptized, you are named from above. You receive your name after baptism, and that is kind of a revelation to you. Like, you don't pick your own name. You are named by someone that is above you, your parents, your priest, your bishop, and that comes down as light from heaven. And so, it's iterative, I can say it's fractal, right? It's that which comes above. And so it doesn't necessarily have to be like an angel. It could just be your parents that are above you and are kind of, that are top down causing you in that way. But it can also be the idea of understanding the virtues and the patterns that oversee larger groups or larger clumps of behavior towards a purpose that they are angels, that they're wills, heavenly wills. So the one that comes from above, we recognize.

Starting point is 01:49:20 The one that comes from below, we create? We don't create, you know, it's like it's a co-creation. That's a term people like to use because it's obviously in order for it to be real, it has to come from above even within you. Like it has to be, it could be like, you could think of it like as a mix of revelation and creation in the sense that it has to be true with the purpose of what that thing is. If you try to twist that towards your own idiosyncratic will, let's say, then you're

Starting point is 01:49:53 going to have a problem. Things are going to bounce back at you. If you try to say that your dog's feces is chocolate, you could try as much as you want, it's going to hit you in the face. You can't just arbitrarily impose your will on or name things arbitrarily. Okay, this speaks to relations and I have a question about that. Someone who likes to speak about cult creation, Ian McGilchrist, also likes to say relations are prior to Rolada.

Starting point is 01:50:23 And I'm curious if you believe that, because that sounds on the surface to be in conflict with the doctrine of incarnation in Christianity. Why is it, why do you say that? Why is it in conflict? Well, the incarnation seems to be of Rulata, which is related. That depends how you understand it. So you could say that there's an image in Christianity that says that the Lamb of God was sacrificed at the foundation of the world. We have images, for example, of Jesus in creating Adam in the Garden of Eden. We have images of Jesus creating the world. And so although the incarnation happened in the first century, it is not something that merely happened in the first century.

Starting point is 01:51:20 It is an already. It is an already. The incarnation, although it happens in time at a certain moment, it is... So we say crazy things. We say things like, when Jesus was on the cross, He was creating the world. This is St. Maximus the Confessor. It is trying to break that duality, that simple duality of saying, Jesus is a guy in the first century. It's like there's a priority of the incarnation. Does that make sense?

Starting point is 01:51:52 No, not yet. I need you to explain it in another manner. I mean, it's very difficult to understand. It's like, sometimes people will say that the crucifixion happened in eternity in the sense that it is an eternal event. It is an event that is causing the world and it's not just a... It's not just a... That it takes its nature in the relationship between the Father and the Son. Okay, if what you're saying is that Christ was on the cross for eternity since the beginning of time.

Starting point is 01:52:32 Eternity in the sense of not... Like atemporal. Chronal, yeah, atemporality. In a sense, the combination of time. And not... It's not an infinite temporal length. No, exactly. That's very deep. Then what was special about the first century? Well, because it's...

Starting point is 01:52:51 So, you know, you could think about it like... If you watch a movie and there's a twist ending in the movie. And so even though the twist ending, even though the shock ending happens at the end, once you see it, you realize that it's actually the reason for the whole movie. It's actually, it was there before. It had to be there before or else, you know, when you watch The Sixth Sense is a good example of that. Where during the whole movie, there's an uneasiness about the movie and you don't know what it is and you're like, what is going on?

Starting point is 01:53:26 Why? There's things that even don't make sense. There are things that are kind of chaotic, but you still watch. There's something compelling you to kind of get to the thing. And then once it hits you, then all of a sudden it becomes the cause of the movie. It gathers everything into itself. And so that's the idea of why in some ways the incarnation that happened in the first century is nonetheless the anchor, you could say, for all the story, for the whole story that came before it.

Starting point is 01:53:56 And that it's the cause. It's an atemporal cause. Does that make sense? Okay. Let me see. Let me state it back. In the same way that a twist allows for what came prior to make sense, Jesus' embodiment and then crucifixion allowed for something to make sense.

Starting point is 01:54:15 The pattern of existence, our lives, ourselves being saved, I'm not entirely sure. And then another issue is that the twist usually occurs at the end. That's my understanding that Revelation is the end. So is Revelation the actual twist or was Jesus to give a minor twist in the middle? Help me disembroy all this confusion. Yeah, that's why at the crucifixion he says all is accomplished, you know, because the whole thing is gathered in the crucifixion. The last judgment is in the crucifixion. The Last Judgment is in the crucifixion.

Starting point is 01:54:45 It's all gathered in that story. We could look at the details if you're interested, but in the crucifixion, there's the whole story of the world in the story of the crucifixion. But it's more radical than that. It's actually that it anchors all of the cosmos. That's what we believe. I hope that I'm not asking uninformed amateur questions. No, no, these are very difficult.

Starting point is 01:55:12 Like this is impossible to think this way. It's like, I understand. And it's like, I see it like in glimmers. It's also because it's people I trust. Like, I, you know, at some point, St. Maxx was the confessor has revealed so much reality to you that you trust him. And so when he says something like that, you're like, well, I should take it seriously.

Starting point is 01:55:31 I don't totally get it. I can see glimmers of it. I can kind of see through analogy, the idea, like I said, like using the analogy of the Twisted Movie or using the analogy of how the end of something can make sense of its beginning, can reveal the reason for the beginning, you could say, that I can get that.

Starting point is 01:55:56 And there's a kind of a temporality to the end because it's also the purpose. The purpose of something is already drawing things into itself, or the identity of something is already drawing things into itself, or the identity of something is already drawing it into themselves. Like when you when you're building a house, the end of the house is the origin of the house. Even though it's not there yet, it has to be the origin of the house or else you wouldn't be doing anything. That's interesting.

Starting point is 01:56:20 So all of reality is moving towards this point that is the purpose of creation. And that's the mystery that Christians say is happening in the incarnation, especially in the crucifixion. The transformation of death into glory, the kind of non-dual images that are presented in the story of the crucifixion, that they reveal reality to us. They reveal the purpose of reality. So another word that you just used was trust. St. Maximus has revealed so much to you, so much insight, etc., that you trust what he has to say. Now, another aspect of me is that I'm a contrarian.

Starting point is 01:57:04 I'm so contrarian that I go against contrarian. I'm so contrarian that I go against what people who think of themselves as contrarian, what they believe. So double contrarian. Yes, exactly. To the point where I'm too iconoclastic. Like it's often said in our culture, dogma is the worst. Okay. Even E. McGilchrist this, like, dogma is the only thing that's incorrect. And I'm like, that's dogmatic, even for you to say that. Anyhow. So I'm curious what the upsides of dogma are.

Starting point is 01:57:35 I gave this example to Ian McGilchrist. And I'll tell you, my example was, imagine someone was praying to God and God is, they conceptualize God because that's how they pray and there's something about them pointing toward God. So they're praying, then watching theories of everything this channel and then they watch an interview of someone who believes there's the many worlds, many worlds interpretation, multiverse and then they think, okay, maybe that's true. And then they think, shoot, have I been praying to a single God of our universe, but the true God is the God of the multiverse? Have I been praying to a lesser God? Like, what kind of, what have I been doing? I've been praying to a pagan. Like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. Exactly, exactly. And then they think, okay, well, sometimes there's this phrase that I just say throughout

Starting point is 01:58:30 my day, which is, to the glory of the Most High. And I just say that, and I don't know what I mean when I say that, but it's something that Bach said and that Wittgenstein also used to echo himself, he used to just say this, to the glory of the Most High God. Okay, now imagine you say that, which is akin to dogma. You're saying something you don't understand, you're trusting it in a sense, you don't know it explicitly nor implicitly. But let's imagine you said that and let's imagine you prayed and you ended your prayers

Starting point is 01:58:58 with that and akin to how some people end their prayers with amen. That would have hedged you in that case. Even though you were praying to a lesser God, you also said to the glory of the Most High God. So even though you didn't have an implicit nor explicit understanding, you somehow allowed for your orientation to still be correct. Yeah. Okay. So I was saying this to Ian, and he was finding it intriguing. And then saying, okay, well, that's more an example of ritual and not dogma. And I was quibbling over it while that's a somewhat arbitrary distinction.

Starting point is 01:59:31 But anyhow, that was my setup to what's the upside of dogma. So dogma is useful. I think that it's the best way to understand it. In the Orthodox tradition, we have a sense that we have this apophatic idea of God, which is that God is non-being, that all characteristics of God have to be couched in the negative. They're never absolutely positive descriptions of God. They're always in some ways, mostly safeguards, you know? And the dogmatic tradition in Christianity, and this is something people forget, is always developed in reaction to

Starting point is 02:00:18 heresy. It's always developed in reaction to error, and it is never proposed positively at the outset. So this is also one of the problems with Bart Ehrman and his kind of thinking, which is that he thinks that people normally tell the world what they believe explicitly, but that is not the case. At least I don't think that's the case in Christianity. Christianity tends to expose its positive statements as just a bulwark towards error. And so that's how you have to understand dogma, is as bulwark towards error and not as statements that encapsulate the fullness of the truth. And if you see it that way, then it's helpful. So for example, if you look at a lot of the dogmatic pronunciations of the councils in the church,

Starting point is 02:01:12 they are there usually to do one thing. They're there at the one hand to preserve the divinity of Christ, the fact that Christ is fully God, and on the other hand, they're there to preserve the humanity of Christ, to make sure that Christ is fully human. And then thirdly, to preserve the unity of those two aspects. Now, people will squabble and fight, but when people push too hard and want to make Christ into a divine figure that was just a floating ghost that didn't totally have a body, then the Christians will say, no, that's an error.

Starting point is 02:01:51 That's an error. And if someone tries to say, well, Christ wasn't really divine, he was created, he didn't have a fully uncreated nature, then Christians will say, no, that's wrong. didn't have a fully uncreated nature, then Christians say, no, that's wrong. And it's usually to avoid the mistake, which is that the reality of the incarnation for Christians is the anchor that holds reality together. It's the thing that holds heaven and earth together. It is the perfect union of the invisible and the visible world. It's the perfect union of the uncreated and the created,

Starting point is 02:02:25 of the unoriginate and the originated. And therefore it has to be preserved at all costs. And that's the best way to understand dogma is as kind of fences to prevent people from saying something wrong. Because if you go in the wrong direction, there are consequences to going in the wrong direction. If you over emphasize,

Starting point is 02:02:46 let's say, the humanity of the incarnation, then you move towards idiosyncrasy. You move down into phenomena in a way that can lose itself and scatter. If you emphasize the divinity of Christ, of the incarnation too much, then you have a tendency of pulling things out of the world, pulling them into unity to do that kind of thing where the idea for example that, and you hear people do that in everyday life, it's like the idea that you have to escape the world, right? You have to escape this reality. This is all, all this is evil and broken and falling and the purpose of humanity is to like, is to get out of here.

Starting point is 02:03:27 Like just, you're right. And that's not Christianity. Christianity is incarnational. And so that's what dogma, that's the purpose of dogma. It's very important. So the same with like the Trinitarian dogma. Trinitarian dogma is always... So dogma is an armor. Yeah, it's just to prevent you from making a mistake. Okay, and is this one of the reasons why? Because I conceptualize dogma as what's inviolable. Like this cannot be violated. This is a sanctum. So this is a principle that I'm not willing to compromise on. But... Dogma is the opposite of sanctum, like actually, even in terms of what the word means.

Starting point is 02:04:09 Let's say the dogma are the things that, the way that we use the word dogma today, they are the official external pronunciations of the Church. The Church pronounces itself on a specific issue explicitly and says, this is the judgment of the Church on that issue. The sanctum or the sacred is the hidden secret, unspeakable aspect of revelation. And the dogma is there to protect the sanctum, but it's not the sanctum. It's not the highest thing. It's to avoid you mistaking the highest thing so that you don't think that... Like Trinitarian theology is a good example. It's like, if you push too much towards the unity of God, then you have a kind of monism that has consequences in the world. And if you push too much towards the multiplicity of God, then you've got paganism and

Starting point is 02:05:11 then you've got the gods fighting amongst each other. And the trinity is, you know, and trinitarian doctrine is there to express a paradox, yes, but a paradox that is grounds the world ontologically as the perfect balance of unity and multiplicity. How do you know there's the highest good? And not multiple? How do you know there's the highest good? You mean like love?

Starting point is 02:05:36 Well, the, meaning one. Because that's what it is. Love is that dance between the one and the many. I think there can't be a higher low a higher good than that Okay, so I'll give you an example in the house example that you gave most of the time when people are trying to get someone else to Understand that there's a highest value. They'll say something like look There's the house and you're trying to build a house for what for your family?

Starting point is 02:06:04 You're trying to raise a great society trying and and, and then so on and so on. And then you get higher and higher values. And then I was thinking, okay, well, let's just imagine you're playing a key on a piano and you're practicing that. So why are you doing that? Okay. Because you want to play songs. Why do you want to play songs?

Starting point is 02:06:21 Because you want to make money. Why do you want to make money? Because you want to provide for your family or gain some status. And then firstly, these aren't reasons that you know. Yeah, you don't think them out. Yes. But then you can also say that, okay, I'm playing the piano, not just for a single reason that brings me upward to the highest good, but it can branch off in other directions.

Starting point is 02:06:44 So I'm playing the piano, practicing this key, why? Because it's what my teacher said. Why? Why am I following that? Well, because I want to please my teacher. Why? Because my teacher reminds me of my father and I never pleased my father. You can actually go in multiple directions and then sure at some points they can converge, but they can also then diverge again. So what is the argument that these will necessarily converge and not say diverge again, or at some point become on parallel tracks where they just continue off to infinity, but never meet. They just continue off forever.

Starting point is 02:07:17 Yeah, like train tracks. Yeah. Uh, so I think that one of the things you'll notice if you start to do that and you start to play that is that you'll notice that there are some patterns that organize the world that just have more, that they have more reality to them. And that when you get to the transcendentals, for example, like the Neoplatonic transcendentals, you say, beauty, goodness, and truth, they have a reality to them which binds other realities together. And it's the same with virtues.

Starting point is 02:07:56 So for example, you talk about the specifics of wanting to do this and this and that, but if you get to something like happiness, then it's like this idea of being well integrated into the world in a way that is balanced between myself and the people around me. There are some things where it's just going to join together, I think. If you stay in the very specifics, could you find, for example, an example of a goods that go all the way, that keep going up in parallel tracks? I'm not sure. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:08:45 I tried to figure out. So let's say, could you do that without truth, for example? Could you have parallel tracks that go up without them being submitted to truth? I don't know. Seems like no, that would be my intuition. And I would say the same with goodness, you know. I'd probably say no. I mean, because at some point, if something isn't good, then you're not going to pursue

Starting point is 02:09:22 it or it's going to cause chaos in the world that will swallow you at some point. Because if you're not acting for the good of yourself and others, then at some point, it's going to catch up with you. That's my intuition. I tend to think that there really are a hierarchy of goods and that they're kind of universal. A good example would be this idea of a kinetic identity. I think that that's really a universal good. And I think that if you betray that law, like that law, not a law in the sense of just an

Starting point is 02:10:05 arbitrary rule, but if you betray that path of kinetic identity, then there's death on that road. This is a word that's been said several times now. Can you spell it and define it? Kinotic? Yeah, K-E-N-O-T-I-C, so the idea of self-emptying. I see. This idea that identity is self-emptying and that it doesn't hold onto itself.

Starting point is 02:10:33 It kind of yields and gives itself. I think that that is something that is, when you experience it in everyday life, you realize that it's something that's just real. So for example, you could say that even if you can't identify all the goods that you participated in, like playing the piano, let's say playing the keys and everything, if you don't have the kinetic self-emptying, then you're going to end up with something like obsession, because it's going to start to pull things into its own sphere in an unhealthy way. What would be an example of something that seems like it's self emptying, but it's not?

Starting point is 02:11:18 I mean, obviously any times you have every, any times you have power, you're in danger. That's why pride is so dangerous. Anytime you have power, it's very easy to confuse the self-emptying aspect of authority and the self-aggrandizing aspect of authority. That's really hard. That's why we say power corrupts, because you actually do have to exercise authority. If you're the team leader, if you have some kind of official position, you actually have to do exercise authority and it becomes very tricky.

Starting point is 02:11:57 It's like, think about when you're a parent, you see that. It's like, you actually do have to discipline your children. You have to help them become better persons and therefore you need to impose rules and impose a certain structure that has to happen. But then it's sometimes difficult to tell the difference between what is good for the child and what is good for the family and what is what I want. And that's hard. So I'd say every time you're in a position of authority, you're always in danger of confusing your own desires

Starting point is 02:12:29 with the higher good. That's why things like prayer, things like meditation, things like confession are really helpful because they avoid you from becoming self-deluded in your own actions. So let's imagine God looks, I don't know if this is the correct way of framing it. So let's imagine we have a set of pencils here. There's a whole set on the desk and they're different parts of creation.

Starting point is 02:12:57 And then you're God and you're looking down at these pencils and you name that sheep box house. Okay. So then you get to one you're like, person. And then the question is, one of them was made in the image of God, and I assume uniquely made in the image of God, that the other ones weren't. What is it about us as people that was made in the image of God? Is it that God chose one of those pencils and said, I'm going to make myself in the image of you?

Starting point is 02:13:26 Or did one of those pencils somehow make themselves more worthy and then God chose them because of that? Like, help me understand that. I also understand my framing is vastly incorrect to begin with. No, no, it's fine. I won't stick on the framing so much. So the way that the creation of the human is described in Genesis 2 is a good way of understanding what the human is, like in the Christian understanding and the biblical understanding. And it's that God gathers dust together, dirt, multiplicity, idiosyncrasy, gathers it together, and then he blows heaven into that idiosyncrasy.

Starting point is 02:14:14 So you think of the world as heaven and earth, so heaven has these invisible motivations, names, all that. Then down below is idiosyncrasy and chaos and potential dust, basically. And then God takes that and then puts heaven inside. And that's what the human is. That's what makes the human different from the other beings, is that the human has that connection, like in his heart, you could say. In your heart, you have a little heaven and a little earth.

Starting point is 02:14:55 You have the capacity to engage both with the invisibles and the purposes and with the multiplicity and the potential. And so the question of how it is that humans are in the image of God, that's the answer. It's there in the text. It's creation brought together and not just heaven ruling over, right? Let's say names ruling over, but being inserted inside, the breath of life is in, the breath of God is in man. And so, you could say that from, because it does, is the form of the human worthy of the image of God?

Starting point is 02:15:45 And the answer would be yes, because that's the one, in the sense that it's the best vessel for that image. And that includes having a bigger brain, standing upright, all the things that we do that make us in the image of God, the verticality of the stance of the human, and even the way that we're physically constituted is also an image of God, but more specifically an image of how God is in the world. That's what image means. It's like the manner in which the invisible things are integrated with the physical are

Starting point is 02:16:28 exemplified especially in the human person. And so that's actually, I think like, I've actually had this argument with, what is it, Peter Boghossian, where he was like asking me, what if there was another universe, I don't know, where aliens had tentacles and they were like intelligent like we are, but they'd be made in a completely different way. It's like, what if there was, I don't know, imagine whatever, like a scarab or like insects and that. And my answer was actually no, like that's, we are like the, even the way that we're made,

Starting point is 02:17:04 there aren't indefinite constraints over reality that could make a being the way that we're made, there aren't indefinite constraints over reality that could make a being the way that we are. There are finite constraints, and that is what we have. And we look the way we do because we embody that. Like, even the idea of a face, like the idea of recognizing a face, that is crazy. That's an insane thing. Like when you look at someone's face, you are seeing their soul. Like you are seeing them.

Starting point is 02:17:35 That is nuts. Like you are seeing their, we are able to distinguish. We can see emotions. We can see motivations. We can see emotions, we can see motivations, we can see deception, we can see all kinds of things. And I can see you. I see Kurt. I don't see like however many hairs you have or how many whatever. I see Kurt when I look in someone's face. It's like that is, that's astounding.

Starting point is 02:18:06 You know, that's the idea of seeing the image, right? Seeing the image of God in people. Okay, so earlier we were talking about the physical and then the non-homoporeal, the numinous or the spirit. And then we were saying, I believe you were suggesting that while the way that the physical is constructed, that is the spirit. Okay. I don't know if I'm if I'm misrepresenting you. And then if I wanted to be more verbose, I would say like for Vicky, the structural functional organization is the spirit.

Starting point is 02:18:36 I don't know if that's actually true. There you go. Okay, there we go. I could channel more of it. That's good. John's got some great terminology. I love it. Okay. I could channel more of it. That's good! John's got some great terminology. I love it.

Starting point is 02:18:45 Okay. When people hear man is made in the image of God and they're already religious, they tend to think that means that God put the spark of divinity in us and that divinity has something to do with consciousness or the more spirited realm. Is there something about the physical realm, the physical side that makes us an image of God as well? Yeah. I mean, I think that those are related. physical realm, the physical side that makes us an image of God as well. Yeah, I mean, I think that those are related. They're related. And this is weird. It's like, this is where I'm more like of a... How can I say this? I'm more of a science version than

Starting point is 02:19:17 sometimes I hear people talk. It's like, the way that you're made enables consciousness. We are made in a way that enables consciousness. The way our brain's made, the way we... Everything about us enables the type of consciousness that humans have. And so, the way the human is made, the way that they're physically embodied, is also in the image of God. So God did not put consciousness into a cup and then made this in the image of himself. And this is what can name that which is below and that which is above.

Starting point is 02:19:48 And by the way, an idiosyncrasy that I, I notice, and I don't always bothers me. Is this that witch? I don't know why people say that witch because it could be whatever could be said with that witch could be said with removing it. So for instance, you could say you should move towards that which is beautiful. Or you could say, you should move towards what's beautiful. And it's the same. And it sounds like a verbal flourish.

Starting point is 02:20:14 There's just this idiosyncratic, meaningless remark. And I always notice it. Wonder why it's there. It's like an idol. I don't know if that's the correct usage. It's emphasis. It's an emphasis on that which is beautiful. it's there. It's like an idol. I don't know if that's the correct usage. It's emphasis. It's an emphasis on that which is beautiful. It's okay.

Starting point is 02:20:29 Don't worry about it. All right. Anyhow, so God could not have placed, now I don't want to say God could not. Oh, but you're right. It's not that God could not. It's that the world is the expression of God's will and its structure, and therefore God willed a being in his image, and that being is in his image. And so it's not a question of whether God could have or would have or whatever. It's like that just is. It's just what is. I don't like... I've actually had an argument with like a Catholic monk, like just a few weeks ago about that. Where he was... I mean, I like him. He was a great guy, but he kept saying like God could have created a world where he would have saved us in another way.

Starting point is 02:21:20 And I'm like, I don't even know what that question really means. It's a weird thing. It's like the world is what it is and its symbolism, right, the human person is symbolically structured in a way that is an image of the relationship between heaven and earth, between the invisibles and the visible. And that's the best way to see it. So my line of thinking is that anytime that we say, I don't know what that means, it means that, at least for me, that I have work to do. And it's something that I see many intellectuals say, is there something smaller than a plank length? Someone would say, I don't even know what that means, because if you were a probate,

Starting point is 02:22:01 it creates a black hole. I'm like, if you don't know what they mean, then you need to get yourself into a framework where you understand their point of view because they're a person as well. Another one is, I don't know how to say this, but there's some personal conflict, not with me, but with some people close to me. One person was saying, I can't understand how she did so-and-so. And then I'm like, no, you need to figure it out. You, you saying, I don't know what it means to do so-and-so. I can't understand that point of view. You need to

Starting point is 02:22:29 understand that point of view. You're suggesting that I need to make an effort to understand how consciousness could be bounded to your glass of water. Like how there could be a universe in which a glass of water could have the consciousness of, equivalent consciousness, let's say, of a human being. I mean, maybe. I'm saying that's your homework after this. What are the current debates in Eastern Orthodox tradition? What are the current debates? I'm sure in Catholicism, there's some debates that are at the forefront of Catholicism,

Starting point is 02:23:05 or in philosophy of mind, they're current debates. In physics, they're current debates. Certain questions that people don't have an answer to, but there seems to be different sides to it. So I'm curious, what are one or two debates in the Eastern Orthodox tradition? And where do you lie? Where do you stand on it? Yeah, man, that's an interesting question.

Starting point is 02:23:31 So I would say that some of the biggest debates that are in Orthodoxy right now, at least in the world that I am, is the question of ecumenism, the question of whether or not we should all, I'm caricaturing it, but whether or not we at some point should just kind of join together the different groups that are separated. So the Catholics, the Orthodox, the Protestant, whether we should make efforts in order to reconcile what those efforts are, what they would need to be in order to be a legitimate reconciliation. Those are really big, those are things that are very hot in orthodoxy since the beginning of the 20th century, maybe a bit before. And there are even discussions about the Greeks

Starting point is 02:24:20 and the Catholics, like you have these ideas that will have the same Easter, like we're kind of moving towards unity. And, you know, if that's one of the big debates, if you want to know what I think about that is I think that in order for there to be reconciliation, there has to be true communion and that true communion has characteristics. We can't pretend, but we have to really be together and we can't fudge it. And so I tend to be wary of ecumenism that is trying to be too quick and just saying, you know, we're all the same, let's just all kind of move together.

Starting point is 02:24:56 Rather, I'd say, no, like we have differences, we need to be able to recognize them. There are things that happen between us that separate us. And so we have to be able to look at them, recognize them and deal with them, forgive some, let some go or fix some of them or whatever, in order for true communion to happen. And so I would say that's a big one. The other big one is universalism that is kind of, especially in American orthodoxy, it's kind of there.

Starting point is 02:25:24 It's more, it's kind of there. It's similar to perennialism in the sense that this idea that all men will be saved, it's there in Christianity quite a bit right now. You've heard even Pope Francis say, what did he say? Something like that other religions have their own path towards God, that kind of thing. And so that's another big question in the, I would say Christianity in general. The idea that, yeah, sometimes they'll say like hell is empty or the idea that all beings need to be reconciled in the love of God, that is actually just a metaphysical necessity, like in the sense that the finite cannot compete with the infinite, that ultimately there'll be a kind of joining of the one and the many

Starting point is 02:26:19 together, the infinite and the finite together. Yeah, so those are the big questions. I would say those are the two big questions that are happening in Orchid Axi. Now as we end, I want to understand how Santa can be real. And I want to use that as a segue to talk about your book on fairy tales, which has recently come out. And perhaps we can talk about the literal versus metaphorical distinction or non-distinction. Just that, just those three things as we end.

Starting point is 02:26:49 Well, I think they're all related to one another. That's what I mean, they've used the example of Santa to kind of help people understand what we call, what modern coxsia type people talk about transpersonal agency, the idea that there are some types of agencies which are not individual and that act on us and that we become in some ways the body for and that we kind of make real in the world. And so Santa is a great example because Santa Claus acts through us and we kind of know that. A good way of understanding is the tooth fairy. I had this little thing with the tooth fairy.

Starting point is 02:27:33 I've been very playful about it with my kids. I'm being very careful also to do it as a story, like the idea that stories affect us and that they kind of, they have agency over us, right? They manage our behavior. And so one day I made the mistake when my child was young and she had lost a tooth, I made the mistake of saying that I forgot to put the money under the pillow and she heard me. And I thought she kind of knew that it was a game, that it was this playful thing that

Starting point is 02:28:06 we were doing. And she was kind of scandalized and she said, what are you saying? The Tooth Fairy doesn't exist. And so I said, okay, like let's play this out with her. And she was quite young. And I asked her, so who puts the money under your bed, under your pillow? And she said, you do. And I said, well, why do I put the money under your pillow?

Starting point is 02:28:29 And she said, well, because I lost a tooth. And it's like, why would anybody put money under your pillow because you lost a tooth? How is that possible? Like, why would I do that? And she was young, I don't know, like seven, eight, I don't know. When did the kids lose teeth, like nine, ten? And then she said, oh, because of the tooth fairy. And I said, yeah, that's right, exactly right.

Starting point is 02:28:53 And so I put money under your pillow because of the tooth fairy. And so the tooth fairy is making me put money under your pillow. And she totally understood it. She like totally got it. And it was really interesting because then she said, she remembered that my wife at one time mentioned that she, because she came from Slovakia and they didn't have the tooth fairy,

Starting point is 02:29:20 that she never had money under her pillow when she lost her teeth. And so she's like, oh, so I could put Mundy under mom's pillow and do it for the tooth fairy. And I was like, yeah, that's exactly right. And that's the way that vertical causality functions. That's the same way that when you ask someone to do something for you, it's just that when you follow a law, that's what you're doing. You're doing exactly that.

Starting point is 02:29:49 There is something, there is a will beyond your will that is acting on you and you are making it real in the world. And Santa's a great example of it. It's fun because it's playful. It's a playful example of it. But the idea of a law of the land that is acting on you and that you're embodying in the world, that's a more, let's say, has more consequences.

Starting point is 02:30:13 If you don't follow the will, the transpersonal will that is imposing that on you, then you end up in jail and it's real. Like you can argue against it all day long and you can say, there's no such thing as transpersonal will, and it's like, yeah, well, yeah, try to rob someone. See what happens. You can't predict which police officer is going to come and get you. It doesn't matter which police officer is going to come and get you. They're interchangeable.

Starting point is 02:30:42 Any police officer could come and get you. It's the imposition of that top-down causality that is going to catch up with you. So one of the reasons why you put a dollar or a few dollars under your child's pillow is because of the story of the Easter Bunny. But that would be one of the reasons. Just like the piano example, there are multiple causes. So one of them could be you want to participate in a cultural norm, regardless of what that norm is. Another one is you just want to make your daughter smile.

Starting point is 02:31:14 There are multiple reasons. And so what you're saying is one of those reasons. For sure, in terms of putting Monday on your child's pillow if they lose a tooth, the formal cause is clearly the tooth fairy. Like, there's no way around it because there's very little connection between someone losing their tooth and you putting money under their pillow. You're going to struggle to find some kind of mechanical explanation for that one. It really is a top-down thing.

Starting point is 02:31:43 And you can explain the top-down thing, why it's salient, why it holds, because you could say, well, losing a tooth is painful, right? And therefore, we have a way to palliate that with children, to give them confidence, to help them know that it's not such a big deal, and that if they go through it with bravery, then they get some kind of recompense, like they get something in return. And it's like, yeah, you can explain all of that and that makes sense, but it's the tooth fairy, you know, it's the tooth fairy making it happen.

Starting point is 02:32:18 What's the difference between something being real and pretending something's real? So everything is real to some extent. It just depends on how real it is. Even pretend things are real. They're just real at a certain level. You just have to make sure you don't confuse the level of real. That's the only thing you need to do. It's like, what is there in the world that's pretend,

Starting point is 02:32:42 that isn't real, that you could imagine? Everything has a level of reality. A game is real. It's just real at the right level. Don't base your national economy on monopoly, but monopoly is real. Okay. It sounds like what you're saying is like Frodo is real. Frodo Baggins. Yeah, but he's less real than the... Frodo is definitely less real than the Tooth Fairy. That's for sure. But he's real.

Starting point is 02:33:14 He has a form of reality necessarily or else you couldn't even hold him in your mind. But he's less real than the Tooth Fairy because Frodo doesn't make you do anything. There are a few people that maybe... So what would we call the level of real? You just mentioned Frodo is less real than the Tooth Fairy. And I imagine you'd say that the Tooth Fairy is less real than the camera in front of you and maybe your wife. I don't know if the Tooth Fairy is less real than the camera.

Starting point is 02:33:40 Like the camera doesn't really make me do anything. The Tooth Fairy makes me do more than the camera in terms of formal cause. Like in terms of top down constraint. My wife is definitely more real than the Tooth Fairy. That I would say, well, we could ask that question. In the sense that my wife doesn't like, doesn't, how can I say it? My wife doesn't, isn't able to constrain an entire society to do something. I don't think she'd be happy with this podcast.

Starting point is 02:34:10 Yeah, I know. She'd be like, wait a minute. You know, it's like, well, it depends also, like if you mean, when we're talking about real, we're talking about, I'm talking at this point really about top down formal causes, you know, about wills that act out in the world. And that's what, that's what's most important. Okay, what I mean to say is, what is a word that you would describe your wife as being? There's a certain type of realness to your wife. There's a certain type of realness to the table in front of you that is of a different sort of realness than a unicorn, despite that you can hold both in your head and that they

Starting point is 02:34:41 have some sway over you. So what like, what is it? Would you call one literal? You don't like that word. Well, yeah, I'm not a big fan of the literal, but I would say that for sure, for sure that the table has extension. Like it has weight. It has, you know, it has, it has a, uh, and especially a particular table.

Starting point is 02:35:03 You know, it has a kind of extension. And so let's take like the... I'm going to push this too hard, but there are things in the way that they're embodied that they have a kind of immediacy and a purpose. That a unicorn, for example, it has some kind of purpose to manifest the impossible and to kind of manifest exception and the limit of what you can encounter in the world. That is useful, just like a stranger is real, but it's a useful way of framing it. But it's usually towards purpose.

Starting point is 02:35:45 It's like the table is real towards its purpose, which is, if it's not real towards its purpose, then it's not real. It's real because you can put stuff on it and you can eat and you can... Let's talk about literal. What is the definition of literal? And then why don't you like it? No, well, actually the actual definition of literal, it means that which is close to the text. That's what literal means. That's why the word literal is in relationship to the word literature.

Starting point is 02:36:13 Right. Because literal means close to the text. It means the text itself, you could say. But what people usually mean by literal is something like a factuality without meaning. And that doesn't exist. There's no such thing. I don't think so. There's no such thing as facts without any type of meaning. I wouldn't say that the way that people use the word literal, literal means devoid of

Starting point is 02:36:39 meaning or uninterpreted or something like that. I think it stands in contrast with metaphor. So what people usually mean by literal is something that has, that can be measured, right? And that has a certain weight and density, something like that? Yeah, so what's useful for me would be to come up with two statements, one that's literal and one that's metaphorical. So if I was to say, water freezes at zero degrees Celsius under standard atmospheric pressure.

Starting point is 02:37:12 Okay, that's a literal statement. Her attitude froze me over. That's metaphoric. Uh-huh. It's interesting. It's like, it's so interesting. It's so interesting. Because the idea that naming the temperature of something, especially that, which is like an arbitrary scale of measurement of changes in temperature. I would say that that has a function, but that function is very rare. You very rarely encounter that function.

Starting point is 02:37:58 Usually most people would be like, it freezes when it's cold. That's pretty functional. But it freezes at it's cold, that's pretty functional. But like it freezes at this very specific, specific like temperature. It's usual, it's useful in the laboratory. It's useful if you're like, I don't know if you're like, if you're trying to freeze a certain element in order to do a certain experiment, but that's almost never the case. Like almost no one deals with that level of reality. Am I wrong? Like that almost no one one deals with that level of reality. Am I wrong?

Starting point is 02:38:25 Like that almost no one ever deals with that level of reality. Okay. The point is that I'm trying to put out onto the table statements that one can classify as literal and then metaphoric and sure we can say that there's some gradation, that there's some degree. There's some degree. No, I would say that there are some purposes which are more related to that which can be measured, that which is related to weight and density and embodiment in the sense of

Starting point is 02:38:57 like physical things that you bump your toe against, you know, and things that you, I mean, these things are more, how can I say that they're more... Concrete? Grounded. They're lower on the scale of being, maybe you could understand. Right, okay, look, how about this? He typed in a password onto his computer versus he unlocked her heart with kindness. So the former is literal.

Starting point is 02:39:25 He typed in a password into his computer versus I unlocked her heart with kindness. Which is that it's hilarious that you think that that one's literal. It's like, let's say, let's say, let's say, I mean, I don't know, we're going to get caught up in a bunch of stuff. So it's like, if you would have said, right, he inserted the key in the padlock and unlocked that, that would have been way closer to typing a password on your computer. The idea that we think that that is unlocking is at the same level of metaphor, or whatever you want to call it, as unlocking someone's heart. Because you are not unlocking anything when you type a tab password in your computer. Not at the sense if you want to bring it down

Starting point is 02:40:10 to the most measurable embodied ground on which we base our language. You're not going to find it there. I get it. Let me try again. And even the freezing one. Think about it in two ways. Let me try again. And even the freezing one, like, think about it, like, think about it in two ways. Don't listen. Go on. You have to, like, it

Starting point is 02:40:30 sounds like, are you not able to see the difference? But if there is no difference... I do see the difference. I do see the difference. Obviously, I see the difference. But I would say, I would say to be, first of all, to be cautious that you think that you've grasped things like in a way that is absolutely...how can I say this? The idea that you can completely avoid what you call metaphorical language, even in the most literal thing that you can imagine, is completely impossible. There's absolutely no way. I mean, John Vervecki does a great job at breaking this down, where metaphor is embedded in every single level of engagement that we have.

Starting point is 02:41:16 Like what you call metaphor, which is this capacity to see analogies between different levels of being is there everywhere. You can't get around it. And so I would say, once again, it's to purpose. The best way to understand it is to purpose. So if I use the word unlock, and I'm unlocking a door, it's a perfectly useful term to manifest the unlocking of the door.

Starting point is 02:41:45 If I use the word unlock to unlock my computer, which is absolutely different, which has nothing to do with opening a door that has like, I don't know, gold behind it, that I have to make sure that nobody can like, push their way into. The idea that I want to stop people from getting into my computer, it's a perfect analogy.

Starting point is 02:42:04 And then saying that I want to unlock someone's heart is a perfect analogy. But the idea that one of them is more real, I don't think that's... I'm not even making a statement about realness. I say one of them is more embodied. The one where I'm trying to stop someone from breaking down my door and stealing my stuff. And then the next one, which is I'm trying to stop someone from entering into my system and getting my information, that's already way, that's at the same level

Starting point is 02:42:35 as unlocking someone's heart, really, in terms of levels of disembodiment, you could say, something like that, I don't know. I think this is gonna be fun because we're both at the limits of our energy currently. So let's just have some fun. We're just going to start to get slapped. Okay.

Starting point is 02:42:53 So one of the symptoms of being autistic is that you mistake what's metaphorical for what's literal. So there's that joke, like is your fridge running? Yes. Well, you better run after it. Haha. So the the autistic person wouldn't get that or if you were to say that the well, anyhow, and the autistic person is

Starting point is 02:43:15 grounded in the most measurable, let's say immediate Tendency they can't see analogies Is that is that what you're suggesting or they struggle to see analogies. Is that what you're suggesting? Or they struggle to see analogies? Yeah, I'm suggesting that the presence of not understanding metaphor or analogies in the same way that we do, just taking them all as quote unquote literal, the fact that that's a symptom of autism or a particular type of autism and it's one of many symptoms,

Starting point is 02:43:42 et cetera, et cetera, whatever. The fact that that's there implies there is a distinction between what's literal and metaphorical. I'm just trying to understand if you see the distinction between literal and metaphorical. If there was no distinction, that wouldn't even be a criteria for autism. And we wouldn't have to make unambiguous language and legal contracts like... Yeah, I see what you mean. No, I understand what you mean. No, I understand what you mean. I think that there are definitely people who have more capacity to understand the structural reason for the analogies that we use, and that is definitely the case.

Starting point is 02:44:19 Some people have very great capacity to see the structural reason for analogies. Now it is normal that as we talk about things that are less embodied, that are more purely spiritual in the sense that they are patterns that inform other patterns, that we will be using more and more of, we'll be using analogies more and more. That is in some ways kind of, that is a necessity. And so I understand what you mean. And I think, you know, obviously I'm playing with you to some extent. I think that there's a sense in which the idea that the language that we use, almost all of it connects with the bodily experience, takes that as a ground, and then builds analogies up into the world of meaning. I think that that's what language is, right?

Starting point is 02:45:15 Because that's what language does. That's because, and also even the fact that we have language is already that. It's the noticing of, you know, of a phenomenon naming, and then those names, they're patterned in this, the scaffolding of analogies. And so, but the problem is that you can't really get totally to the bottom of that. Like you can't not get to a place where with language, you are only pointing to purely physical measurable phenomena.

Starting point is 02:45:49 You cannot, because that's not what language is. The best thing you could do would be point at it maybe, or like hold it in your hand in front of someone. I agree. I see what you're saying. And say... Actually, Noam Chomsky also agreed. So if you were to say something like, the car moved at 100 kilometers

Starting point is 02:46:06 an hour down the highway, that's an extremely specific statement. He would say that that's a scientific statement. But Noam said that most of language, the majority, the vast majority of language isn't scientific. So there you go. So already using different language. Scientific is not literal in the way that people think. Scientific is a very specific type of language, which is there to be able to capture reproducible patterns of phenomena. That's what scientific language is there for. It's there to be able to notice, to measure, and to communicate patterns of phenomena that can be measured and can be shown to, if I understand the measure, I can reapply the measure in a way that will show that it

Starting point is 02:46:52 reproduces based on what I've observed. But that is very different from like, people mistake scientific language, which has a very specific purpose, with what they say literal, which is something like that which is most fundamentally true at the lower level. But that which is most fundamentally true at the lower level is more like a phenomenal experience. It's more like the experience of the sun on your face, like the experience of the wind in your hair,

Starting point is 02:47:25 like that is the more grounded than scientific language. Right? Yes, I understand. The sense of distance, like the idea of above and below, right? The pain that you feel when you knock yourself against something. That is the ground more than scientific language. Scientific language is way abstracted. It is like super abstracted towards very, very tight and specific purposes, which is

Starting point is 02:47:51 the capacity to predict reproducible phenomena. Okay, let me see if I got you correct. So for instance, we think of light as being a part of the visible electromagnetic spectrum, but that phrase alone, that came about hundreds and hundreds of years or thousands of years after we coined the word light or had whatever is the etymological root of the word light. Yeah. And light initially is just some impression that you feel on your, in your eyes or the difference between that and darkness.

Starting point is 02:48:16 Yeah, it's more than that. It's like, it's what makes you, what makes you see. Sure. That's what light is. Okay. Okay. And then later on, do we abstract away and get something scientific? And same with, you can use the word mother. Mother would just initially mean your depth specific person.

Starting point is 02:48:30 It's not something that gives birth to something else. You don't even have that concept when you're two years old or three years old. Yeah, and then you kind of abstract into the idea of light as being the way you described is perfect. Because it doesn't mean that either of them is false. Like obviously the scientific description is absolutely accurate. I'm not questioning science at all, but it's not the ground. Okay, so let's take a look at Michelangelo's painting.

Starting point is 02:48:54 And there are two fingers that are pointing to one another. Okay, so one of the- You keep provoking me. Wait, give me a second. You're like provoking me in the worst ways. Like my least favorite painting is what you're going to go at. One of the reasons, maybe it's not your reason, but one of the reasons is that its attempt to portray God is more like an old man or Zeus-like figure.

Starting point is 02:49:15 And that's not in alignment with the scriptural accounts of creation. But moreover, it's what some would consider an attempt to be a more literal interpretation. And so you're debasing God in the same way that the majority of Muslims, I imagine, would not like if you made a specific face of God or Muhammad. Yet you can portray God in more metaphoric manners, beams of light, it was mentioned earlier in this podcast. So the fact that we see a difference between Zeus or the Santa Claus like figure and beams of light to me implies that we have an instinctual

Starting point is 02:49:54 understanding of literal versus a metaphoric. So let me know what you think of that. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. Like for sure, when we talk about the infinite cause of everything, we have to... There are two ways to do it in Christianity, right? There's obviously to use an analogical images, like you said, which is something like heaven, or yeah, light is a good example. Or halo even. Spirit, wind, right? Spirit means wind. Yeah. So to represent it that way, it makes sense because what we're trying to do is to show that it's something that causes other things, but we also use the image

Starting point is 02:50:40 of father because the father is someone who causes others, right? It's like it's something above which causes, it's a formal cause in that sense, like it causes others. And so all of that is definitely real, but for sure Christians also, they say, at least traditional Christians, we say that the way to represent God is by representing Christ. That that's the way to do it. Because we're not representing God directly. Obviously, we can't represent God. You can't represent something that's invisible. You have to do it through analogy. But in the incarnation, we do it in a way that is, say, representing God, the image of God in man, something like that. But I understand

Starting point is 02:51:27 what you're saying. But the thing is that for sure God is a little different because it's... Actually, no, your insight is interesting because the thing is that in order to represent anything that is invisible, you have to use strong analogies. There's no way around it. So once you see that, you can understand pretty much all the language in scripture, especially the more mysterious aspects, which is that you'll use images of things that are invisible that cause other things.

Starting point is 02:52:04 But it's relative, because you can't actually represent something invisible that causes something else because it's invisible. Like you can't represent a name. Like you can't represent a purpose. Like how do you represent a purpose? There's no way. So what you do is you represent light because light is something invisible that makes other things visible, right? And when something invisible that makes other things move, right? And when something invisible that makes other things move. So yeah, so we definitely have to use that type of, then in that case, you really do have an analogy or a metaphor, really.

Starting point is 02:52:35 Do you remember on The Simpsons when Milhouse's father and mother, they were playing charades, and Milhouse's father, it's like a circle with some lines. And then she's trying to guess it. She's like, meatloaf, potato. And then timer runs out. He's like, it's dignity. I'm showing you dignity. It's like, yeah. How do you represent dignity? Yeah. You have to represent. Yeah. There's not the... So yeah, I would say that in that case, I understand what it is you're trying to, let's say, understand is that if you're trying to represent invisible aspects, you have to use, you definitely have

Starting point is 02:53:12 to use analogy. There's no other way. Okay, Jonathan, this has been so much fun. And I'm grateful and honored that you spent three hours, over three hours. We'll see how much this gets down to. Yeah, look at that. Wow. It just flew by.

Starting point is 02:53:28 Flew by. That's a metaphor, by the way. I know you may not agree, but at some point, John, I'll get you to admit that there is a difference between literal and metaphorical. Try using metaphorical language in your YouTube contracts and see if they still pay you. Okay. So you have your book, the fairy tale book. Please tell me exactly what it's called. Oh I know, one of the things, just so people can see,

Starting point is 02:53:49 so one of the things we're doing, this is a little unrelated to what we talk about, is that we're actually publishing fairy tales. Like one of the things that I want to do is obviously not just talk about these things, but you know embody them also myself. And so we're publishing these beautiful kids books that are kind of treasure level books, heirloom objects that are cloth bound and gold foil that's just beautifully illustrated versions of the fairy tales that people can find on my website. And tell us a bit about your YouTube channel. And I'll actually preface it because it's one that I watch and it's called the symbolic world.

Starting point is 02:54:25 If you've liked this conversation then Jonathan Pejol's symbolic world is a treasure trove and I particularly like these 20 minute analyses that you have on different subjects. Well thanks Kurt. I mean it's mostly trying to bridge the modern world with the ancient world. That's you could say is what I'm trying to do, trying to help people understand that the things that the ancients talked about, they weren't arbitrary, they were really describing reality, and we've kind of lost our capacity to understand that. And so trying to help people recapture this through what we've been talking about,

Starting point is 02:54:57 which is a kind of idea of vertical causality and patterns that embed themselves at different levels. So trying to show that in the Bible, in popular culture, in politics, or whatever it is that we can't, you know, to reconnect people with these ancient ways of seeing. Great. The way that we think isn't the same as the way people 100 years ago thought, and you can scale that back even further. And so clearly if someone's writing from the 1500s or the year 900 and they're using the

Starting point is 02:55:28 same words, it doesn't have the same meaning. It may have some surface level meaning that's the same. But then the question is, well, what did they mean? Even though it's the same language, maybe it's English or old English or what have you. What is the meaning that comes along with that in order for us to actually understand what they mean, what they intended? And that's what Jonathan provides. We hope so. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:55:51 Because if you read someone from, let's say, the middle ages, and when you read it, you think this is just gobbledygook, you know, and it's just complete nonsense. It's like, you're probably wrong. People took the time to write things. And so it's better to try to understand what people are saying before declaring it to be just kind of woo woo nonsense. Right. And it could be gibberish from a scientific standpoint because you're trying to interpret

Starting point is 02:56:19 it scientifically. But that's not the frame that they were conveying the knowledge from. Yeah, exactly. It's a different frame that they were conveying the knowledge from. Yeah, exactly. It's a different frame. So you're right. If you try to understand Genesis 1 from a purely scientific frame, like as a kind of description of physical causes and biology, you're going to run into a lot of problems. And that's your issue with fundamentalists or creationists.

Starting point is 02:56:41 Oh yeah. Oh yeah, like the creationists, I think they're demeaning the scriptures by doing that. They're taking a modern frame. Yeah, it's not the right frame. The Bible, especially Genesis 1, if it has something in it, it actually describes what we call the scientific process. It doesn't describe it scientifically.

Starting point is 02:57:02 It's actually, once removed, it's actually describing the way that we identify, evaluate, and judge phenomena. And that's what the scientists use, but we see that in the description of creation. But it doesn't describe the word scientifically. That's ridiculous because, I mean, creating, like just in terms of science, creating grass before you create the stars is pretty wild. Like it's a pretty wild thing, you know, and it doesn't make sense in terms of that type of causality.

Starting point is 02:57:28 But it makes sense in terms of symbolic structure for sure, which we could talk about some other time. Yes, yes. So like lastly, if you were to take this conversation, you download it, it's an MP4. If you rename it as a text file and you open it, it's gibberish. If someone just handed you that as a text file, you would think, okay, this, I'm going to throw this away. But then you put it as an DIVX, which used to be a codec before it still wouldn't open. And you think, well, I broadly have it correct. It's a movie. Correct? No? Well, you need the correct decompiler or the correct decoder. Jonathan is giving you the.mp4 extension so that you can actually view the beauty and the majesticness of what came prior.

Starting point is 02:58:08 Thank you. That was great talking to you. This was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I appreciate it, man. I appreciate it tremendously. It's awesome because it's also, man, you don't shy. Like, you go into the hard stuff.

Starting point is 02:58:17 It's like really tough. Don't go anywhere just yet. Now I have a recap of today's episode brought to you by The Economist. Just as The Economist brings clarity to complex concepts, we're doing the same with our new AI-powered episode recap. Here's a concise summary of the key insights from today's podcast. All right. Strap in, everyone.

Starting point is 02:58:37 Today we're diving deep into the mind of Jonathan Pagot. Yeah, Pagot. You've probably seen his stuff floating around online. I mean, he's been on Kurt Jaimungal's Theories of Everything podcast quite a bit. And that show really gets into the weeds, like deep, technical conversations about some pretty intense topics, you know.

Starting point is 02:58:56 Consciousness, physics, AI, free will, even God. Kurt Jaimungal, he's not exactly a softball interviewer. He really digs in, spends weeks, sometimes months, getting ready for each episode. And he's not afraid to push back, especially on guests with a strong background in, say, mathematical physics. But Pidgeot, he can definitely handle the heat.

Starting point is 02:59:18 He brings this really unique perspective to the table. It's something you don't typically hear in these fields. It's kind of wild, actually. Pidgeot offers what he calls a cognitive theory of everything, this lens for interpreting reality that kind of shakes things up, really challenges conventional thinking. OK, so let's break this down, this cognitive theory

Starting point is 02:59:35 of everything. One of the first things that pops out is how Pagou looks at symbolism. And he's not just talking about, like, metaphors or poetry. He's arguing that there's this inherent structure to meaning, a whole symbolic world that we can't escape. It's a huge departure from a purely scientific or materialist view, right? Those views often see meaning as something we like project onto the world

Starting point is 02:59:57 rather than something that's baked in. He has this awesome example that I think really illustrates this point. Imagine a group of scientists discovering a new species of dog. But Jue would say they're not just randomly picking a name for it, they're recognizing patterns, seeing something essential about that dog species that kind of like shines through, revealing a deeper connection between the name and, well, the dog itself. Exactly. And that leads us to Pigot's concept of vertical causality. He contrasts it with what he calls horizontal causality, which is more like the cause and effect we see in the material world, like billiard balls bouncing around. But vertical causality, that's the causality of identity and purpose.

Starting point is 03:00:36 So horizontal causality, that's the physics of the universe, right? The laws of motion, all that stuff. But vertical causality, it's operating on a whole other level. Exactly. Think about it. You ask someone for a glass of water. The reason you ask, the whole impetus for that action, it's not just about the physical movements involved. It comes from a place of meaning and purpose, your thirst, your desire to drink. So it's like there's this invisible layer of meaning driving everything we do. Spot on. And this ties into another concept Padu borrows from Aristotle, the idea of the formal cause. It's like a

Starting point is 03:01:09 blueprint that tells us what something is meant to be, its inherent potential, not just how it behaves in the world. And for Padu, this formal cause is deeply connected to vertical causality. Okay now we're getting into some seriously mind-bending territory. We're starting to see how Padu's framework challenges traditional ways of thinking. But hold on tight because this next part is where things get really wild. So Pajow is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and he uses his faith to explore the concept of non-dualism, which is often associated with Eastern religions. And this is where his perspective really starts to diverge from the norm.

Starting point is 03:01:45 Soterios Johnson Wait a minute. Is he saying that Christianity and Eastern religions are basically the same thing? Emma Cieslik Not exactly. He argues that Christianity presents a very particular type of non-dualism, one where unity and multiplicity coexist, not as opposites, but as complementary aspects of reality. Think of it like a coin. You can't have heads without tails, right? They're two sides of the same coin. That's how Pajoe sees unity and multiplicity. So some interpretations of non-dualism might view the material world as like an illusion that we need to transcend to achieve unity. Pajoe's saying something different.

Starting point is 03:02:20 Yes. He sees both unity and multiplicity as essential and intertwined aspects of reality. To illustrate this, he uses the image of Jesus washing his disciples' feet. Okay, I'm intrigued. How does that tie into non-dualism? Think about the typical power dynamic we associate with hierarchy. It's often about dominance, control, right? But Jesus, who's at the top of the hierarchy, he humbles himself to serve those below him. It flips our usual understanding of power structures on its head. So he's suggesting that true hierarchy, it's not about wielding power over others, but

Starting point is 03:02:53 about service, about self-emptying, even from the highest position. Exactly. And this gets at the heart of Pujo's non-dualism. It's not about transcending the material world, but about finding unity within it, seeing the divine reflected in every aspect of creation. Wow. My mind is officially blown. And we haven't even gotten to his ideas about sin and forgiveness yet. Well, buckle up, because Pujo defines sin as a failure of purpose.

Starting point is 03:03:17 Hold on. Does that mean a broken hammer is sinning? That seems a bit harsh, doesn't it? He's definitely using the word sin in a much broader sense than we're used to. It's not about moral judgment in the traditional sense. He's pointing to a much deeper principle. Everything in the universe has a purpose, a formal cause, remember. When something deviates from that purpose, it creates a kind of disharmony, a disruption in the intended order of things.

Starting point is 03:03:42 So for Peugeot, sin isn't just about breaking rules, it's about anything that fails to live up to its full potential. Right. And while this applies to everything from malfunctioning machines to societies going astray, Pajoe emphasizes that human sin, because of our self-awareness, has much deeper, more lasting consequences. He talks a lot about generational trauma, right? How the effects of sin can echo down through families and communities.

Starting point is 03:04:06 Exactly. And that's where forgiveness comes in. Peugeot stresses its transformative power, connecting it to the Greek word metanoia, which means beyond mind. So it's not just about letting go of anger or resentment. It's about a fundamental shift in our way of being. Precisely. And this raises a fascinating question. Could forgiveness, which is so central to

Starting point is 03:04:29 Christianity, point to something beyond a purely mental or idealistic framework? Could it be a force that operates on a deeper, more fundamental level of reality? You know, we've only scratched the surface of Paju's ideas, and I'm already seeing the world in a whole new light. It's like he's given us a new set of lenses to interpret reality. And the journey's only just begun. Welcome back. Last time, things got pretty intense.

Starting point is 03:04:54 Sin, forgiveness, the fabric of reality. We were wrestling with some big ideas, to say the least. Oh, we're just getting started. Remember how we were talking about forgiveness operating beyond mind? Paju really likes to turn familiar ideas upside down. Yeah, that one really stuck with me. It connects to something else. He talks about this idea that we're not just limited to our physical bodies.

Starting point is 03:05:12 He says we have subtle bodies that work through meaning and influence out there in the world. Think about a powerful story. Like a truly captivating story, it can reach millions of people, inspire movements, maybe even change history. It's almost like it has a life of its own, going way beyond just words on a page. So are we talking about like a spirit or a soul? Paju is tapping into ancient wisdom here, traditions that recognize different layers of reality.

Starting point is 03:05:40 He's not necessarily saying these subtle bodies are conscious entities and what we usually think of souls, but he is saying they have real existence and they can pack a punch influencing the world in a big way. This is where Pigou's view gets really radical. He's pushing us to expand what we consider real. It's not just about what we can see and touch. There are all these invisible forces, patterns of meaning, constantly shaping our reality. And this brings us back to his definition of sin, a failure of purpose. Anything that veers away from its intended purpose, its formal cause, that's a form of sin for Pajew.

Starting point is 03:06:14 Remember that formal pause is like a blueprint for a thing. Right. So a hammer that breaks because it's poorly made is sinning. I'm still wrapping my head around that. Think of it this way. Pajew isn't saying the hammer is morally bad. He's getting at a much deeper principle. Everything has a purpose, a reason for existing. When something strays from that purpose, it throws things off balance, creates disharmony in the order of things. Okay, I get how that applies to humans. When we're selfish, greedy, hateful, those actions go against what it means to be human. We're not living up to our full potential. Precisely. And Pajot highlights

Starting point is 03:06:48 how our actions have these ripple effects, consequences that go way beyond just us. He brings up generational trauma, how sin can impact families, even whole communities for generations. Like throwing a pebble in a pond. The ripples keep spreading outward long after the pebbles gone. Exactly. He's saying we can't just focus on ourselves. We're all interconnected. Our choices affect everyone and everything around us. And that's where forgiveness becomes even more crucial. It's not just about letting go of anger or resentment

Starting point is 03:07:16 personally. It's about healing those ripples in the pond, bringing things back into harmony. Paducey's forgiveness as this incredible force for change, a way to break free from cycles of sin and disharmony. He links it to the Greek word metanoia, meaning beyond mind. So it's not just a thought process or an emotion. It works on a much deeper level, maybe even like a cosmic level.

Starting point is 03:07:40 That's exactly the point he's making, and it ties into his interpretation of Christianity as this radical form of non-dualism, unity and multiplicity existing together. Hold on. How can something be one and many at the same time? My brain is starting to hurt. Peugeot points to the Trinity, the Christian concept of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It's one God but three distinct persons. It's the ultimate example of unity and multiplicity coexisting. So it's not about choosing one over the other. It's about recognizing that everything's interconnected. Absolutely. And he sees this reflected in the structure of the universe itself.

Starting point is 03:08:16 Every entity, from the tiniest atom to a human being, is both a whole in itself and a part of something bigger. This reminds me of what we were talking about with hierarchy. He doesn't see it as this rigid top-down system. It's a natural order where each level supports the others. Like the human body. Each organ has a job, but they all work together to keep the body alive. Pajoe sees hierarchy as a way to manage complexity, allowing different parts to work together in harmony. And that powerful image of Jesus washing his disciples' feet really drives that point home,

Starting point is 03:08:48 even though he's the leader, at the top of the hierarchy, he chooses to serve. It totally flips the script on how we usually think about power and authority. But Joe is saying true leadership isn't about controlling others, it's about serving the greater good. He really wants us to rethink how we view power. It's not about who's in charge wants us to rethink how we view power. It's not about who's in charge. It's about how we use whatever power we have to help others. And that goes back to his core message.

Starting point is 03:09:12 We're not just individuals doing our own thing. We're all part of this bigger picture woven together by meaning and purpose. Our actions matter not just for ourselves but for the whole. He's calling us to a higher level of responsibility, not just for our own lives but for the well-being of everyone and everything. And he reminds us that we don't have to do it alone. There are transpersonal agencies, these forces of meaning and purpose at work in the world guiding us toward our true potential. Whether you call it God, the pow, or just the inherent goodness of the universe, these forces are always there inviting us to play our part in this incredible unfolding mystery of

Starting point is 03:09:49 existence. You know what's amazing is how Pajow takes these complex abstract ideas and makes them feel so relatable, so relevant to our everyday lives. He's a master at using simple examples and analogies to illuminate these profound truths and he's never afraid to challenge our assumptions to make us think outside the box. I'm already looking at the world differently after diving into his work. It's like he's handed me a brand new pair of glasses. That's the power of a cognitive theory of everything. It's not about having all the answers.

Starting point is 03:10:19 It's about developing a framework to understand the world, something to help us navigate the complexities of life. And realizing that there's always more to learn, always deeper layers of meaning to uncover. Paju is inviting us to come along on this journey of discovery with him. He's like a modern day mystic, blending ancient wisdom with modern insights to reveal a world that's both enchanting and deeply meaningful. Welcome back to our final exploration of Jonathan Paju's world. You know, spending time with his ideas has been, well, transformative. It's like I'm seeing everything with fresh eyes.

Starting point is 03:10:52 Yeah, he's got this knack for weaving together all these different threads. Theology, philosophy, psychology, even physics. It all comes together in his cognitive theory of everything. And he tackles the big stuff head on. Sin, forgiveness. What is reality really? He even talks about Santa Claus. Speakowich, you mentioned earlier that Pajow uses Santa as an example of a transpersonal agency. Could you break that down a bit more for our listeners? Sure. See, for Pajow, it's not about Santa literally sliding down chimneys. It's about recognizing the power of this idea,

Starting point is 03:11:25 this cultural force that's influenced millions for what, centuries now. It works through parents, through the economy, even our collective imagination. So even if there's no jolly old elf in the flesh, Santa still has real world impact because of the meaning we give him. Exactly. And Paju argues that we're bumping into these transpersonal agencies all the time. The spirit of a sports team, the legacy of a historical figure, even the laws of a society. They all shape our thoughts, feelings, actions, even without a physical body in the usual sense.

Starting point is 03:11:57 This goes back to what we were talking about before, how we're not limited to just our physical bodies. Paju says we have these subtle bodies working through meaning and influence. Think of a story, like a really good story. It can captivate people, spark movements, maybe even shift the course of history. In a way, it's got this subtle body that stretches far beyond the words themselves. So it's not just physical things making an impact. Pagou's saying ideas, stories, even institutions, they have real existence and can be powerful forces

Starting point is 03:12:25 in the world. Exactly. He wants us to widen our definition of real. It's not just what we can see and touch. There are invisible forces, these patterns of meaning that are constantly shaping our reality. This is where Paju gets really trippy. He's asking us to think about a layer of reality that goes beyond the material stuff. And it's not just abstract theory. This stuff has real implications for how we live.

Starting point is 03:12:50 Okay, I'm hooked. How does this cognitive theory of everything actually play out in our daily lives? Well, it changes how we view our actions. Remember Paju's definition of sin, failure of purpose. He's not talking about breaking rules, but anything that swerves off its intended path, its potential, its formal cause. Right. That formal cause is like the blueprint for a thing. So if a hammer breaks, it's sinning because it's not fulfilling its hammery destiny. You got it. But it's not about blaming the hammer. Pago's highlighting this deeper idea.

Starting point is 03:13:22 Everything in the universe has a purpose, a reason for being, and when something deviates from that, it creates a kind of imbalance, a disharmony. So how does this work for us humans? Think about the choices you make every day. Are you living in sync with your true purpose? Are you hitting your full potential? Or are you falling short, maybe creating disharmony in yourself and the world around you? That's a big question. Makes you realize that even small choices can have ripple effects. We can either add to the harmony of the world or, you know, mess it up a bit.

Starting point is 03:13:52 Exactly. And Pigou would say this is where forgiveness is so vital. It's not just letting go of anger personally, but about restoring balance, getting ourselves back on track with our purpose, and helping to heal the world around us. Wow, this is deep stuff. Pagul is really pushing us to step up and own our role in this whole cosmic dance. And he reminds us we're not alone. We're part of this grand web of meeting and purpose

Starting point is 03:14:16 connected to these transpersonal agencies that are, in a way, guiding us towards our potential. Whether you call it God, the Tao, or just the inherent goodness of things, these forces are at play inviting us to join in this unfolding mystery. You know what strikes me is Pajos optimism. He sees the world as inherently meaningful, packed with potential for growth, for change. Even with all the suffering, all the brokenness, he still sees beauty. He still sees hope. That's the magic of his cognitive theory of everything.

Starting point is 03:14:47 It's more than an intellectual model. It's a spiritual path, a way to see the world that lets us find meaning, find purpose, even amidst all the chaos and confusion. And he does it with such joy, such genuine wonder. He's like a kid exploring some vast, uncharted territory, and we get to go along for the ride. That's a great way to put it.

Starting point is 03:15:04 Pajoo reminds us that life itself is this grand adventure full of mystery and beauty, and it's up to us to embrace it with open hearts and curious minds. So to everyone listening, if you're ready to explore the symbolic world, to question everything you think you know, to find deeper meaning in your life, check out Jonathan Paju's work. You'll find him on YouTube. He's got books. He's all over podcasts and interviews. And until next time, keep diving deep, keep those minds curious, and remember, there's always more to discover.

Starting point is 03:15:35 New update. Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts, as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical

Starting point is 03:15:58 physics, philosophy, and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this sub stack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - How Symbols Shape Our World | Jonathan Pageau

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