Episode 75: Jonathan Pageau/Bernardo Kastrup: Orthodoxy, Resurrecting the Western Mind, Body & Soul

praise him praise him praise him in the morning praising me praising praise [Music] hi welcome to more christ today i'm joined once again by two gentlemen and most likely admire jonathan paul and dr bernardo castro jonathan is a french canadian icon carver a public speaker and a youtuber exploring the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world how these patterns emerge and come together manifesting in religion art and popular culture he's also the editor of the orthodox arts journal and host of the symbolic world blog and podcast ronaldo then is the executive director of essentia foundation his work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism the notion that reality is essentially metal he's a phd in philosophy and another phd in computer engineering so then they just to begin gentlemen do you have any i suppose preliminary questions or statements about each other's work that you'd like to ask or to share then i i haven't read bernardo's books but i i i have had a chance to listen to many of his lectures and listen to many of his discussions because it's when i'm carving it's that's the perfect medium for me um and so i think that i first of all i really appreciate this let's say not just what bernardo's doing but just this this moment i would say this return to understanding the importance of mind and the importance of consciousness in the way we experience the world and the way that the world kind of lays itself out i think that there's a lot of points of contact with what i'm doing i think that i definitely come to it from a specifically religious point of view and so it's on that particular point that i would have questions for bernardo i heard him talk about let's say the manner in which the the primary mind or the you know the divine mind he probably doesn't use the word divine mind like the primary mind of how it develops into multiple minds as a form of dissociation and so i would have some questions on that how he sees that in relation for example to the christian notion that there's rather a giving that this kind of giving and then there's a notion of love which binds the minds together and binds them towards the uh the primary mind and so that would that's actually my biggest question is is related to that uh but i'm sure we could have many many things to talk about yeah i think uh the importance of symbolism and iconography is vastly underestimated in our society today so from that perspective i love jonathan's work i have a room in my house it's not the one i'm in right now but i have a room in my house filled with orthodox christian iconography i'm not an orthodox christian i don't consider myself a a person aligned with any particular religious tradition maybe because of my education my origins and my father was very scientifically oriented secular but over the course of my life i've grown to appreciate the depth and the subtlety and nuance of symbolism and religious iconography and today i deliberately make it a part of my life a discreet small part of my life but an important one nonetheless so from that perspective i appreciate very much what jonathan has been doing all these years there's so many different things that i'm interested in talking about with you guys and points of convergence but i don't want to lead the competition too much so i actually have less notes that well less concentrated notes notes than i usually do a little more probably overall so i'm just wondering is there any particular direction that you would like to go in well i think that that the question that i mentioned is really my big question uh for bernardo i think what i tend to notice in in his system is that the divisions of of mind is something like a i wouldn't say an accident or or maybe that there seems to be something that is not particularly positive about the division of mind maybe that's the best way to phrase it uh and so that's what i would like to for him to to talk about a little because i mean an example i can give is that if a human experiences dissociation we would want to heal that dissociation it seemed like we would want to to resorb these opposing personalities or opposing aspects into at least a centralized centralized consciousness that can encompass both of them and so if that is the main image that he uses for the manifestations of multiple minds uh is it does is does that mean that existence itself the way we experience it is something of a scandal like the gnostics tended to uh tended to to uh display it or is there something is there something more that's possible in that model so that's my biggest question i don't think it's a scandal i don't think it's a mistake i mean in eastern traditions you hear a lot um the notion of maya or illusion being associated with some kind of error something went wrong at some point and the best we can do is to just you know bear this illusion illusory life for as long as it lasts but the better yet is to get away from this while in life and to sort of uh uh transcend this world because it's a mistake i i don't relate to that very well i don't i may relate more to the gnostic notion but only in so far as the demiurges itself part of god and we just use different words for different aspects of one and the same thing i don't use the religious language normally for two reasons jonathan one is it's honestly the way i approach it more secular language it's it's it's closer to my background to how i was educated uh both at home and and you know at university and my work life and so on and so forth um and the other reason is religious language is symbolic and that means two things one it's much more it's much farther reaching it reaches much much further than than than secular language that's that's the importance of it that's the the the indispensable aspect of it that's what it does that nothing else can do but it's also very amenable to misinterpretation so if i start talking about god or the divine mind i don't know what people what people will interpret my words to mean probably there are seven and a half billion definitions of god out there so that's the other reason but in this company i feel very comfortable talking about the divine mind instead of a spatially unbound field of subjectivity [Laughter] i'm i'm pretty okay with that because i i do identify these two things i think the world's religious traditions are not a reflection of mental illness or or wish which fulfilling or and you know i think they reflect profound and ultimately true intuitions that the human mind has always had um and what i call the universal mind is bound to be what many people throughout history have referred to as the divine mind now dissociation as the mechanism through which the divine mind becomes our individual minds the kenosis of the divine mind if we can talk start talking more religious language i reserve publicly i reserve judgments about why that happened if i'm pressed against a law i would say well it happened because it's one of the things that are inherent in the potentials of nature and given enough time it's bound to happen for the same reason that the volcano is bound to erupt that a tornado is bound to happen uh you know it that i don't know that the star goes supernova these are the things that can happen in nature because nature is what it is and therefore they are bound to happen at some point in dissociation or life which its extrinsic appearance is just one of those things but if you ask me more deeply and more personal personally in in this smaller group where we are now um i don't think it's an accident i don't think it's meaningless i don't think it's pathological either i use dissociation more as a metaphor then as a literal attribution of of a pathological condition to the divine mind um for us it's pathological in the sense that it may be maladaptive we have non-pathological levels of dissociation all the time every time you forget something you're dissociated when you dream you're dissociated those are not pathological they are adaptive so i don't attribute to the pathological aspect of it to the divine mind and i even suspect that the association has to do with a felt telos a a felt purpose that is experienced by the divine mind and expresses itself in the form of life dissociation how do you see that how do you know i i think i mean i think it's great that we're talking because i've heard you mostly talk in terms of use use the the more technical language and so i was wondering what it implied to you i mean the way that i see it i i have a more i really have it what you could call a christian nondualist perspective that might be the best way to explain the way that i think i think that there's that the way that it is it's expressed is that unity and multiplicity have a manner of coexisting and so in the same manner that there are multiple multiple aspects of my attention possible attention or possible aspects of my consciousness and those can be if i am in the proper properly oriented those can be gathered into me it doesn't mean that i'm explicitly conscious of all those aspects but they they can be gathered into me even though i'm not let's say explicitly conscious of all the possibilities and i think that in that same manner that is how we fit into what we would call transpersonal beings uh whether it be families or or countries but then also how aspects of us function in transpersonal beings as well like virtues you know and and i have no problem with the notion of hierarchies of beings hierarchies of angels hierarchies of gods uh but that all of that ultimately is never outside of the of the divine mind and that it exists in in love within the the divine mind and that it is it becomes pathological to the extent that when when a mind dissociates itself completely from its higher participations that's when it becomes something like pathology and i think that that's what we see in the uh in the image of the story of the fall of adam and eve uh and and in other traditions i think the important thing for me is unlike what you mentioned before the the notion of eastern uh some eastern traditions or gnostic traditions that that see multiplicity as something of a of a scandal in itself or something of a of a deep illusion or sinful in in the very fact of its multiplicity i i i it seems to me that the christian or the highest christian answer that has been given which i find interesting is that it it seems to resolve that with the notion of kenosis and love this this idea of this self-offering um and but then there's also this return which happens at the same time in inside god um and so you can see it eschatologically in scripture right from the beginning to the end you can kind of see that full movement from procession to return but it never implies that it never implies that it annoys multiplicity like the return into god this is something you see in the church fathers all the time that they'll say things like you know they'll say things like you know in heaven saint paul is saint paul saint peter's saint peter there is no loss of of personhood but there is rather the fullness of participation in in god to the extent that that's possible for a person to to do so so multiplicity always continues to exist within within the the unity of the divine mind i don't that makes sense i i never know if we have the same language so it's they it's dangerous to talk too long sometimes now i i agree largely with you perhaps completely with some nuances um dissociation is is a very subtle mental process it's very difficult to introspect into it and really pin down its mechanisms and that's why my colleagues in analytic philosophy have a hard time really embracing the association as the solution to the so-called decomposition problem how one mind can seem to be many because they are looking for something unambiguous and explicit some some conceptually clear mechanism that would explain how dissociation happens how the appearance of multiplicity can happen within a unified otherwise unifying mind and we don't have language for that or or sufficiently developed um arsenals for that because everything is so subtle the only thing one can appeal to is one's direct experience and i have had the experience of resolving certain dissociative states that i have had for years and in retrospect and this will sound funny maybe some maybe even sound contradictory in retrospect i know that i was both sides of that dissociation like for the longest time if you could if you would have asked me in the past are you feeling this and that i would have said no i don't feel that at all that's not how i feel at all it's that's not me it's not part of my world today i look back and i realized no i was feeling that way i was always feeling that way i just didn't recognize it to myself now how do you make sense of this to somebody who has not had that experience it's almost impossible our vocabulary and conceptual arsenal are they are still evolving to pin that down but i agree with you that multiplicity and unity are not a dichotomy it may sound like a dichotomy but it's a false dichotomy because our cognitive apparatus is not yet equipped or maybe sufficiently evolved to grasp what is meant there uh only somebody who has had dissociative identity disorder and has been quote cured will know that subtlety will know how that can happen how multiplicity can exist in a unity that never ended the other thing another thing is that that i i think is is is important is uh you talked about it as a christian inheritance and it definitely is that i would go even further and i would say it's one of the key characteristics of the western mind one of our contributions to the world which is we are engaged with this world there are some streams even in the christian tradition that tell us you know this world is just some kind of penance uh uh life should be about what comes after but by and large the western mind is engaged we don't dismiss life on the contrary we seek meaning in the world and i think as i'm sure you do that the world is not only pregnant with meaning it is the very expression of meaning everything around us is not just the thing in itself you know it's it's merely that and there is no such a thing everything around us has an an extra hidden dimension of depth and meaning that far transcends surface appearances and i think the western mind is very interested in engaging with that as jung put it we don't try to get rid of the images we try to relate to the images we we don't just say oh it's maya it doesn't matter forget about it wait for the next life no no we engage with it we try to find out what the meaning of this whole thing is and i think that's a very important contribution of the western mind but even the west has lost touch with that fundamental stream of itself of its own inheritance i no i totally agree i think that there it's almost like it's a there's a perversion of that inheritance which is which has become something like the scientism that we deal with or this that you know the the strange materialism that we that we face it's almost like a it's like an anti a strange the only way to say it is it's a strange perversion of something which at the outset was positive and that you find and that's one of the reasons also why i i really love iconography and i love the orthodox tradition is because it has maintained this notion of the transfiguration and the resurrection as two of the most central images that is the possibility of fullness and the possibility of of seeing light in phenomena and not not exactly like you said like i'm gonna die get rid of this world and and fly off to heaven but rather the image the final eschatological image is one of resurrection which is that all aspects of reality are full of of god ultimately not that they're just resorbed into the into the one um so no thanks for that that's that's really helpful for me to understand your thoughts definitely and the other thing that i think is part of our inheritance but we ourselves have rejected it because of i don't know some dialectic reaction to our own uh inherent archetypes i don't know but uh it's this notion that um life is a matter of service um and and therein lies our freedom another seeming paradox and contradiction but this notion that uh you know it's the notion we perverted when we turned prayer into a ritual for telling god what to do that that's the thing that is perverted by this modern phenomenon we turn to god when we need something and then we go follow a ritual to tell god okay this is what you should do to help me out and we completely forgot that it goes the other way too that there is a service to be rendered to a divinity through this condition of being alive in this world um and perhaps iconography and symbolism is what we need to sort of revitalize that part of our inheritance that archetypal part of our inheritance who wrote recently about this was peter kingsley [Music] he writes in a sort of very particular way and he just said yeah we we sort of forgot and we don't care anymore about what the divinity wants of us it's like yeah the divinity takes care of itself and and we just ask for stuff you know we tell god what to do do you think a symbolic life can help us recover that that part of our inheritance definitely and one of the things that i been emphasis emphasizing people is the notion of participation in general one of the things that the modern world has brought to us is this idea of the distance you know this entertainment mode or this this kind of observer mode in reality um and i think that religious participation let's say the liturgy for example i think that one of its functions and obviously this is not the only function for those people who are listening or watching this but one of its functions seems to be exactly what we talked about in terms of resolving uh dissociation that is the manner in which we if you if you look at the the progression of the liturgy it move it's a moving in right a moving into this holy place and a a um at some point it says we represent the angels and there's this note that the angels come down and so there's a movement towards a recognition that we're all dancing let's say we're all dancing together around that which unifies us and one of the things we need to do is engage in this dance celebrate that which unifies us and then receive from it the seed or the you know the the point that we that all the philosophers talk about this point that joined hold the circle together that's what we receive and then we move out and we let's say bring that into the world so that the world holds together so in that sense that's why you'll see that often you'll find theologians saying things like the liturgy holds the world together you know and i think that that might seem like just a little bit of hyperbole but i i think it really it really is just in the same way that in engaging in a family dinner properly and and doing that with your family you know engaging in that that that uh procession and that circumambulation holds your family together something like the liturgical uh liturgical service is is a cosmic dance which which binds the world uh together and so i think that and and it it's constantly expressing this relationship between unity and multiplicity the relationship also to attention if you listen to an orthodox energy you'll hear attend all the time you know stand stand and attend um and this idea of a sacrifice of worship all these things i think that participating there's a sense in which at least in the christian vision that participating that in participating in that is a way to actually experience the the resolving of dissociation and then be able to then internalize it so that we can see even if not consciously or not thought out we can then it will be applied to your own life where just as you love your brother and you notice you know in this movement how you you notice how all these other people are images of god and we're all images of each other we're bowing to each other we do what we're doing all these things and it's bringing us together um then we can notice in our own lives these dissociative aspects i completely agree with you it it the liturgy is a symbolic playing out of a dance that is happening all the time even even if we don't know and the vast majority of people don't know i do think that the orthodox tradition has preserved that a lot better than the usual protestant or catholic church that some people still go to on sunday because some orthodox rituals for instance the priests have their backs to the public they face the divinity they face the altar and these subtle little things are important because if they face the altar the message is the priest is one of us they are representing us and and we are trying to relate to the divinity as opposed to the catholic priest who stand on the place where he stands facing us with his back to the altar and preaching moral codes that hasn't worked for 2000 years and then after luther we completely got rid of symbolism altogether i mean i'm not here to to chastise luther because he saw several things that that were true and and needed a reaction he saw that the church was becoming a temporal power as opposed to a spiritual power he saw that clergy was hypocritical focused on money and sinning he understood that the people had to have more direct participation in a relationship with divinity so they should be able to read the bible and not only have the priests there's full con controlling intermediaries for a relationship with god so i understand all that but it went so far that some protestant rituals are now sort of a mock-up of a trial there is no symbolism is just telling you what not to do all the time um they even dress like judges so there is a tremendous loss that maybe even religious institutions are guilty of promoting yeah but i think i think that with even your work or the work that i'm seeing people like john vervicky that uh that you've talked to as well and it seems like we're in uh even what jordan peterson has been doing seems like there's a an interesting moment right now and there's a moment in which even secular people are capable of suddenly noticing for example the the ritualization of their daily behavior that the idea of the informal as being the place of authenticity uh this has been the disease of the of you know the west from from i would say possibly from the reformation for sure after that this idea that that which is authentic is when we are we are informal and this is this is absurd because you as soon as you realize how even your bad habits are ritualized like everything that you engage with anything that's teleological has to be ritualized that then all of a sudden you can think okay so that's why we have to have anything in common it has to be ritualized you know or else you can't do it in common and so as it seems like an interesting moment and hopefully this will grow i think even in the protestant churches in the united states those that are leading the edge you could say are returning to a somewhat of a of a rich ritualized sense of time where they celebrate the different feasts of the church and you know they have more liturgy a little more form formalism so i think that it's we can't go any further than the rock and roll concert uh rock and roll concert and conference church there's nowhere there's no nothing lower we can go to and so hopefully it's all appeal from here for many of the churches i i hope you are right i do think that um there is a psychological reason why we've embraced banality so so thoroughly you call it informa informality i rather call it banality we've made everything banal everything is superficial and banal and meaningless and nihilistic and if i just put it like that and everybody who is listening or watching this will think well but of course that's not what we wanted we don't want banality we want depth we want meaning i think this is a superficial judgment um i think we do want banality because it it spares us the confrontation with some great terrors within um a banality absolves from responsibility it absorbs absorbs from um the feeling of having to achieve something of having to render some form of service achieve some kind of goal no there's nothing there's nothing to achieve nothing it's the unbearable likeness of bean of milan kundera it's so light it floats with the breeze we are anchored in nothing nothing has any meaning nothing has any depth i mean there is a huge psychological payoff for this an enormous price our gargantua price that's depression and uh in nui and it's all that stuff that we have an epidemic after the addiction you know this gazillion different patterns of addictive living that we have today when i say addiction i don't mean only substance addiction i mean addiction to distraction to television to buying shoes to sex and porn to everything eating meat and sugar these are all addictions and because we we've lost depth and roots and meaning we feel no responsibility we do not we no longer fear um the experiential state after death death because there is no such thing but we lost our meaning and we compensate with that with myriad patterns of addictive behavior so in a sense we've secured the payoff and we found a band-aid to compensate for the price we pay yeah that's distraction consumerism television pornography eating all this stuff it is difficult to dislodge a civilization from this local minimum i don't think it happens without major trauma it didn't happen after two world wars so that gives you an idea yeah no you're right i don't think that we've dealt with anything uh that happened in those first world wars we're just we just were shocked for two generations one you know two generations and seems like all the patterns are returning that's for sure uh one of the things that i like to do is to help people notice for example that the patterns of addiction actually are religious in nature they're just distorted religious uh patterns and that so once you see that once you understand that you know like if whatever bad habit you have is is basically a form of liturgy um it's just that it's one that that is let's say that that spirals fast and that runs out fast too it runs out of uh of what it can offer you it's a and that higher attention is better um is better than these low these these little uh these little circles of of attention absolutely i mean it's it's not for nothing that we call alcohol spirit there is there is a deep root to this why alcohol is a spirit because it puts you in an inebriated state that the greeks would would explain by saying well a spirit took possession of me so alcohol is the spirit it is impossible for human beings it's impossible for living beings to get rid of the religious intuition because it's at the root of the tree the intellect is the canopy it came much later it's it's looking at the sun and it doesn't see the dark and moist environment where we arise from that womb where we arrive arise from and that's the religious intuition we can't get rid of it all we can do is misplace it and we misplace it all over the place we misplace it by falling in love with that one person we can't have and then that person receives a projection of uh an anumenon an expression of the divinity then achievable pneumonia and it attains an aura of impossible transcendence of impossible value and that's the religious intuition in us being projected outwards what we see is what is in us not on the person the person is just receiving that projection or in uh transhumanism i don't know whether you know anything about me it's a religious movement for sure true it's outwardly religious it's the idea that there will be a god we will build it we will construct a computer that will be capable of producing a better version of itself and that one an even better version of itself and so on and so forth until god and god is made of silicon and it will i need to find a way to help us live forever through drugs and surgery and and finding new laws of physics and we will bring back the dead by uploading all information about that person into some kind of artificial neural network ray kurzweil he wants to have his dad back his dad he's a kid who lost his dad young so was i i was 12 lost my dad um he never found a way to integrate that experience and operate the alchemical work on it and transmute it into something else he's still trying to bring back his dad yeah this is religion through and through yeah but it's a it's a it's a very strange materialistic and uh distorted religion that's for sure i i wonder if you've one of the one of the the things that interests me is the the notion of this hierarchy of of beings i don't know if you if you have dealt with that at all i've i've been thinking about dante quite a bit in terms of let's say what you're saying the way that the comedian seems to be structured in part is through the capacity for smaller loves to exist in in larger loves and that this is really an image of of reality so dante starts with uh let's say poetry and poetry is what awakens the possibility of love you know moving to beatrice then moving up uh to uh to bernard of clairvaux uh and then ultimately to the virgin ultimate to christ and then up into you know the the transcendent unity of all things um and so i guess my my question is have you thought about that as well like the web the man in which certain intelligences act as principalities for other intelligences uh the idea of gods or patron saints like how we can draw others into into to to being do you see that as a hidden hierarchy behind the world in some sense i see it i mean i really do see it just as the way that things work that is that the way that we there's there's the personal aspect which is that the little loves those even like having a good drink having a smoke or something which could actually become addictive or sex all of these go all of these things can be goods if they are embedded in higher goods and they're ultimately embedded in something like virtue something like worship something which leads you up it really is a way to preserve the notion that all existence has the possibility of being good but then that also works in terms of let's say beings themselves so in myself i experienced that hierarchy of goods and in the world there's a there's a higher cure of goods and there's a hierarchy of beings which hold other beings together a simple way to to think about it is of course you know like how a country works how you have a president and you have you have different beings that hold to hold that together but that this could go much further than just a physical just the way we see it in the world something we can see but that can work all the way all the way up to something like patron saints or gods or angels or virtues that actually exist and hold aspects of reality together you mean more by this than just supervenins like we can speak about the mind of china but it merely supervenes on the minds of china's citizens in other words there isn't really a mind that corresponds to china in an ontological sense it's just a way of speaking about the collective dynamics of the interactions between chinese citizens but you mean more than this you mean something that has an ontological reality well the reason why i mean more than that is that the let's say the phrase that you just used to talk about china i could use to talk about myself or about you that is that you know jonathan doesn't really exist he's just an image that we have to account for the interactive aspects of my psyche uh and so that or not and then you could keep going lower and lower and you could say that about every constitutive aspect of reality so once i notice that fractally i can apply that type of argumentation to myself or to human beings then i i see less of a problem to then apply it up towards the the ontological reality of of higher beings if in in under sorry in other circumstances sometimes another language creeps into my mind in other circumstances i would normally be cautious about this because normally i speak from reason and objective evidence so if there is some structure in nature i would look for its physical correlates in other words how that structure manifests itself to my empirical observation and if i cannot find that empirical manifestation of it then i would say we would need to have very good conceptual reasons to infer that that thing exists in the absence of any direct empirical way to to verify that it's there so i would normally be very cautious i would say dissociation in humans show us that our own otherwise unified mind can't fragment itself and it's fragmenting itself all the time when you dream you identify with your dream avatar not with the rest of the dream but guess what the rest of the dream is you as well you're just dissociate dissociated from a part of yourself until you wake up or when you forget things or when you compartmentalize things in order to remain functional which is a deliberate form of dissociation so we can speak of that but it's more difficult to go the other way and say there is a bigger mind that that we could call the hierarchies of heaven the angels and archangels and the saints and so forth because we do not have well at least we think right now we do not have a direct physical correlate of that of course there are people who would deny that you talk about dante dante would deny that because he talked about the love that moves the sun and the other stars in other words maybe the stars are the empirical physical expressions of some higher level form of mentation that also is circumscribed by some form of dissociative boundary and has an individual identity perhaps but in the early 21st century it's very difficult to go down these avenues of speculation because how do you differentiate that from the aliens from the pleiades sending us heart vibrations you see what i mean no well i i i think it's not it's not that hard to differentiate in the sense that um so i i'm a big fan of sam axmus the confessor and in his it's in his vision the human being is in a way the laboratory of meaning it's it's that in the in the human that even the higher principalities are gathered in a certain manner it's it's difficult to fully uh it's difficult it's it's not super precise the way that he talks about it but he has a sense in which in a certain manner a man is above the angels and so you can understand that you see christ represented as a man when he's creating the world and so there's an idea adam kadman which is there in philo of alexandria but appears rather in the idea of a in iconography we see it very clearly the notion that man is at the outset that the universal man is at the beginning of all things um and so these intelligences so a good example would be right jung jung did something similar where he said so the star it's not that the stars are legislating our experience is that we project meaning into this into this infinite tapestry of possibility and now that pattern has a certain form of reality because it corresponds to our our psyche into our psychic projection and so we the it's like you could say that there are no patterns in the stars because there's a there's millions and millions of them and the patterns we trace are just projections of our psyche but there might be a way in which if the pattern of our psyche is the laboratory of how reality comes together and we it's hard to avoid that because we are the people looking at the world then those patterns can also have causal effect i uh uh i'll be more it's not the big ball of gas that's when we say so it's not the big ball of gas but it's the pattern of the heavens which is causally affecting the world through if you want to see it as through the projection of the human psyche into that of objective patterns that that have developed from millennia or millennia it doesn't matter but it can still have a causal effect i i i don't reject this at all um recent studies are showing again and again that the universe at its largest scales which we can simulate and you know we can't image it because we are within it but we can compute it and the structure of the universe the network structure and topology of the universe at its largest scales is mind-bogglingly similar to the structure of organic nervous systems and there is no known reason why this should be the case to call it a cosmic coincidence would be the understatement of history of all history because the correspondence is rather precise so it suggests the fractality of minds and its manifestations so the universe as a whole looks like a nervous system because it too is the body of the divine mind in other words it's the extrinsic appearance of the divine mind and the whole thing operates through hierarchies of self similarity or or or fractal hierarchies so to say religious iconography suggests that and i take religious iconography seriously there is an icon from the ukrainian orthodox church with the church fathers gathered in a conference underneath two large mountains uh so you see that you know those individuals are within the earth which suggests that what we call the physical world is actually the outer appearance of a hierarchy of being i do take that seriously and i do take introspection seriously and i'll be very open with you at this point in my life i will i'm 47 i will be 48 this year it's trivial for me it has become trivial for me to notice the movements of the impersonal within me i know what is my own and i know it's not if you know what i mean yeah um when i was 30 it would have been impossible to make that distinction because you you just don't have the subtlety of inner perception to make these differentiations so you were all the time deceiving yourself your ego is all the time pretending to be something higher and noble and driving your actions well in fact it's all of your all of your wish fulfillment your search for meaning it's all that superficial stuff it's all you um but if you get beaten up by life enough over the decades and you are paying attention which most people don't i i happen to be put together in a way that i cannot help but pay attention and i have paid attention for the best part of 40 years and now i think maybe i'm deluding myself still but i don't think so i think i can notice the impersonal in me but that impersonal is not oceanic consciousness either that impersonal has an agenda it's not mine but it's not the whole of the universe either it's an individual agenda of some form i i i personalize it and i call it the diamond uh because it gives me some guardian angel is good enough well i i i it's okay i'm just watching you no i'll tell you why i don't use that yeah my diamond is morally neutral um and if i'm not careful with i mean my diamond doesn't give a damn whether i have a roof over my head tomorrow food on the plate it doesn't give a sorry doesn't give a damn about it at all um because it's impersonal its agenda is not my individual survival as a tool of nature as an expression of a part of nature um it's not operating at the level of comfort and survival it's it's it's a force of nature it's like the tornado that comes destroys your house and kills your family did it have a bad intention to do that of course not the tornado is not living in this frame framework of you know survival and comfort so the diamond is a force of nature and as a force of nature i i perceive it as very morally ambiguous or neutral it knows where it wants to go and it will beat me up to to help it go in that direction but it's it doesn't have my individual well-being in mind if you know what i what i mean my well-being is something that i negotiate with it literally i i negotiate with it every day so i don't call it the guardian angel so what would what would its its telos be or can you recognize that oh yeah yeah it's uh if you think you recognized it right and then you go down the path suggested by that misapprehension uh it gives you very quick feedback that you're you're pursuing the wrong path that was not it alrighty all right it uh it turns my mental inner life into sheer hell all kinds of things will plague me um unexplainable anxieties obsessions physical symptoms it it i don't want to use certain words that that informally i would but uh it's a show it's a very bad show that happens within so it gets to a point where it's inevitable to learn to recognize what its agenda is so i do i do recognize it and that's why i do what i'm doing now i've two years ago jonathan i abandoned a 25 year long career in the high-tech corporate world if i had stayed i probably would be close to what you would call rich i and it's not only the money it's uh my social network my sense of identity my sense of value and differentiation uh uh i i i left it kicking and screaming because my diamond was very clear about what i had to do and what i had to do part of it is talking to you today and and leading essentia foundation um i negotiated enough with it that i delayed the process until i could secure myself more or less but it does have an agenda yeah very impersonal so that suggests to me there is indeed a hierarchy of dissociation in the divine mind because my diamond comes across to me as something that's not human but it's not the whole of the divine mind either it is an aspect of it yeah um saint gregory of nisa talks about in the the life of moses he he uses moses and aaron as an analogy to talk about this he he calls it he calls it the helper he has the notion that there's moses and then there's his helper and he he he differentiates two sides of the helper and what he comes to is actually the little cartoon image of the angel on the right shoulder and the devil on the left shoulder you know and and saint gregory nisa actually describes exactly that and so he he separates aaron the helper into two that is it's something like it's a good way to understand it's like a transpersonal uh a transpersonal pull towards something and so it can it can it's something which is beyond you which is pulling you in a direction uh but he sees it as either going up or going down so it's like you have certain a certain transpersonal aspect of you which is pulling you down towards these little these little circles of attention and this this kind of chaotic levels of attention and you have one an aspect of this helper which is pulling which is whispering to you and kind of pulling you up towards higher levels of attention i use of course gregory doesn't use the word attention i'm using that here because it makes sense to what we're talking about uh and so it's so you can see it in iconography you've probably seen these images if you know orthodox iconography a little bit you know the angel pulling up the uh you know the toll houses and then the the devil kind of pulling uh someone down towards hell this is this this kind of image of how we have how we are embedded in this transpersonal mind you could say that the push and pull exists it's um introspectively very clear to me it's a a datum of existence it's it's not something that is open to theoretical speculation if you know what i mean it's there um i don't divide the diamond into one good and one bed i tend to identify with the bed like uh the bad one is me it's bernardo it's the guy that's probably the best way to do it actually if too in terms of uh terms of transformation it's probably the best way to do it but it's not really a choice it it's how i feel it and yeah bernardo is the guy who is looking to secure his own comfort and safety and the comfort and safety of the other little beings that bernardo cares about like bernardo's girlfriend and bernardo's cats and bernard's friends and he wants to have a little bit of power a little bit of money and get some recognition you know and then and that's me that's that's the ego and the other pull [Music] that's from the impersonal that's not me but it's neither good or bad it's neither an angel or a devil it it's morally ambiguous again it's a force of nature that's how i experience it but talking to other philosophers and reading history i and that's part of the reason why i sort of granted that um there are reasons to think of a hierarchy of being other people other philosophers seem to have other diamonds like socrates diamond would only tell him what not to do would never tell him where to go only tell him when socrates was doing something wrong then the diamond would say no my diamond is not like that my diamonds just kick me in the butt in a certain direction you go there you bastard here boom go and i go kiki and screaming that's not socrates diamond it's another diamond um and some people have a seductive diamond a diamond that seduces from the front instead of a diamond that kicks you from the back that's not my diamond and and and i envy other people's diamonds um i think in the cosmic lottery no no i'm not going to say what i was going to say because my diamond has brought tremendous meaning to my life despite all the suffering and all this stuff so i'm not going to spit on it but um there is nothing romantic about the diamond if you know what i mean yeah like there is something romantic but oh we have a guardian angel oh you go out mushy and it's so romantic there is nothing romantic about my diamonds nothing serious yeah i don't see anything romantic in the guardian angel myself but they're also they're often represented as warriors anyways it's not particularly uh that's right but so my so let's say the way that i let's how can i how can i phrase this and so the way that i like to think about it so the the diamond what your diamond one of the things that's asking for you is is let's say direction and attention that is you have to look in its direction and attend to and that is how it kind of pulls you or pushes you or kicks you whatever in the direction that you're going and so the way that i like to think of of transpersonal beings is similar that is when we talked about for example the existence of the angel of china would be a good way to think about it it's that what the angel of china is asking of the chinese is to attend to it that's the first thing it's asking and so by by the multiple attending to the one that is how it finds body in the world and so that is how it kind of it manages the body and so you can apply that fractionally at all levels and you can understand that there's something about that which is which is right you can even think about your own cells without using the same level of attention but that you know the the cells that it tend to the telos of my body they're the ones which will make my body exist and go forward and the cells that don't will be fought by those other cells that that are that are in line with the the the the the attention of my body um and so i think that when you notice that a country also works that way or that higher a basketball team or anything that in which multiple individuals attend towards the sorry let me just close the door because i think there's somebody making noise in my house sorry is this better i think this is better all right okay um but do you see these these hierarchies as supervening on us in other words as just emergent phenomena from us or do you see them as pre-existing like there is a pre-existing angel of china well you could say something like the way that i would say it would be that that all all exists pre-exist in eternally in the divine mind that is in to the extent that mind does not is not unfolded in time then all the aspects of mind exist in it from you know and then they unfold through what we call time in what we call space and so the being you know the angel of china eternally exists in the mind of god and then unfolds in its time and in its space the way that any being unfolds in their time in their space so you could you could you if you wanted to say that it like it doesn't exist before before china then i would say that's fine it doesn't bother me that much but i think there's a way to i would say i would i the way i always do it is i ask myself that of myself is that do i exist or am i just an emergent phenomena of particles and thoughts and you could say well yeah i'm that but i also think that i have a me or i have a a a consciousness with super veins on the multiplicity of my of my being it's not a hundred percent it's not something which is completely sealed shut and totally uh uh let's say that that's completely authoritarian but it's nonetheless exists and so in that sense i also think that china exists and that families exist and that there's an there's myriads of angels the way that you know that the the thomas would have said but if china tomorrow i mean we know historically that given enough time all nations will cease to exist at least in their former form if china tomorrow ceases to exist or a few decades from now cease to exist does that level of the hierarchy continue to exist does the angel of china survive china does the angel of jonathan survive jonathan you will the a good way to say it would be something like it exists in the eschaton but it exists in the totality of all things within the divine mind it doesn't it can continue to linger to have a lingering uh existence without without um without a localized body so for example i think that if we say that greece doesn't exist anymore i would say that that's that's malarkey like the greece still exists today and you know we carry babylon we carry all these things so there is there is a certain manner in which these bodies continue to although we can continue to to exist and be assimilated into into other beings uh and so that's the way that i see it and it's also these beings are they fit into each other it's not like um how can i say that i don't think any being has a discrete existence it always exists in a fractal relationship with other beings within higher beings and so so the the the the notion that that certain so in the same way so a good example would be that these beings are being held by higher beings and so if they say the the angel of all nations right or christ himself holds authority over all the angels and and that is how it works in the same way that if my cells come and go in my body you know you could say well does that cell still exist well no but you know it's it's held together in potential you know in in the actuality of the higher being so that's the way that i tend to think about it i don't know if it makes sense this is becoming a little more esoteric here analytically it's very difficult to unambiguously conceptualize what you're saying yeah without internal contradiction um pen psychists try to do exactly that and it's very very difficult some would say impossible uh but i i do feel the smell of what you're trying to say your dream avatar there is a sense in which your dream avatar dies the moment you wake up but there is a sense in which your dream avatar also survives in your memory so in that sense everything that has ever existed survives as an eternal memory in the divine mind yeah and but then you you solve the problem in one way going forward but you didn't solve the problem the other way going backwards like did the angel of china pre-exist china and it provided a template for the formation of china did it exist as an archetype in the sense that uh like jung said that the matrix structure of a diamond pre-exists the diamond because it's encoded in in the laws of nature so that would be a sense in which things could pre-exist without pre-existing as particular manifestations of the thing that pre-exists but it gets into very difficult territory analytically this is something that is better grasped intuitively i think maybe that's maybe i just grasp it intuitively so i don't i don't feel i have to analytically but but let's explore that i mean i think that that it's a good idea to to explore it and so if we understand china as a as as a species of something like human communities right and so you could ask that question that you're asking about any level of speciation of different beings and so you have uh so the question is like do rottweilers how do rottweilers exist within the speciation of dogs like how do identities exist within higher identities and i think that if if we are able to resolve that problem at the level of the dog where we understand that these that multiplicity is held in unity and multiplicity is to a certain extent indefinite but the multiplicity that's held in the unity is indefinite so you could say that the the the identities that the identities that dog can give are indefinite there's an indefinite amount of dogs possible speciations of dogs right but they still nonetheless are held together by the dog speciation and so i think that if we think about it that way then the problem of the angels of countries is less complicated because we have we have the divine logos which manifests the bond of love of all of all possible things in in in the highest aspect and then that speciation lower down is and then lower from from countries or lower from countries you have families you have groups you have associations you have all kinds of things which are just possible speciations that are held together up in the higher identity like i'm really i get you can see i'm more of a platonist like at this point but but i don't know if that if that does that analytically does that make sense or like the way that you see it i see it in a way that makes sense analytically it's very difficult and the reason it's difficult analytically when i say analytically i mean to make it fully explicit and unambiguous is very difficult and the reason is it entails determining where boundaries lie where are the boundaries of identity hierarchical or otherwise where do they lie so if we talk about the identity of china is there the identity of hong kong yeah is there the identity of shanghai versus beijing if the table has an identity and i pull a leg off the table does the leg now have its own identity and if i nail it back to the table did it lose its own identity does the mounting have an identity and if so when a boulder deglues from the mounting mounting and comes bouncing down the slope uh is it not does it not now have its own identity when it's flying and does it reconnect to the mounting every time it touches the mounting as it rolls down it becomes arbitrary because there are infinite possible boundaries and if one doesn't have a some kind of explicit and unambiguous criteria for determining identity boundaries lie here then it's a free-for-all because you can put boundaries anywhere and then it's an explosion of identities so i don't mind the explosion of identities that is i think that there's an indefinite amount of possible identity so that doesn't bother me and i think that if we understand it as a hierarchy then the the boulder can exist in the mountain and and it doesn't prevent the mountain from existing we can recognize lower level identities within so like the table is a good example so does the tape does the leg of the table have an identity the answer is yes it does well actually it had an identity like while it was still nailed to the table and if you remove it from the the the table i can still recognize it as a leg of a chair of a tape but we were talking about the identity augmentation in the sense that there is something it is like to be the leg of the table as opposed to the table as a whole of course we can define boundaries on the screen of perception but that's not what we were talking about we were talking about individual individuated minds so if the mountain has one individuated mind like i have an individuated mind when the boater rolls down the slope and becomes separated from the mountain does the boater now acquire its own private mind as distinct from the private mind of of of the mountain and there is a philosophical sense in which if you say that there are infinite uh mental identities in this sense uh entities with private uh inner minds if you say there are infinite ones of those it's exactly the same thing as to say that there are none yeah no i don't i the way that the way that i the way that i see it is i see it really the in the manner that i talked about some axis before is that i see them gathered into my mind and so i to the extent in which they have their own individual uh like discrete existence in a certain extent is an extension of of man as when i say man i mean right the incarnate man as the image of of mind let's say or the highest image or the most gathered image of mind that we that we have because it's also that through our conscious experience that we have it and so that's the way that i that i tend to see it uh i don't know if that resolves the conflict it does it does because what you're saying is that within our private minds which we know exists even if they are illusions they still exist as illusions something is making this illusion happen um maybe there could have been no illusion but there is one so there is some kind of mechanism within the context of our private minds which are there we experience fractal reflections of all the identities in nature that i agree with that completely because i think the subjectivity in me is the same as the subjectivity in you and it's the same as the subjectivity of the universal mind or the divine mind like who who said it uh that the eyes with which god sees me are the same eyes with which i see god was it a no it was not um who who one of the christians like is it a christian sound like a sufi to me it's not a christian mystic was it eckhart i think it was actually yeah that could be eckhart yeah that could definitely be possibly and and if you grasp this and it's very difficult to put it in sort of unambiguous analytical terms we we don't have the conceptual armor to do this but if you grasp this that the eyes through which you look for god are the eyes of god looking for itself if you if you feel it in your being not only conceptually as a thought but as as an experience you're directly acquainted with then it becomes very obvious that all singing identities exist within you as experiences as a reflection of the macrocosm in in the microcosm it's yeah i mean i i can't defend it analytically i can't write a paper yeah or the journal of consciousness studies defending this but if you ask me do i believe this i i know this it's a it's a living experience for me so i have a diamond jonathan i i don't want to change the subjects if you want to pursue this a little further but i had this question i mean go for it i don't mark if you want to turn jacks we kind of we kind of uh we're just going at it here so i don't know if you had things you wanted to to talk about and deal with too that's good so i um had thought about going in the direction actually of a recent essay about paul king's north and um talking about all the different myths of progress and using that as a kind of contrast to serve for clarity with what you guys are speaking about but if you want to go with the diamond let's play with me too very quickly i just i just wondered if jonathan has a diamond i don't i don't experience it in the same way that that that you experience it i i think that i i tend to experience it more in the way that saint gregory talks about it that is that i i sense that there's a transpersonal aspect of me like i sense on the one hand something like what saint paul says right i do the things that i do not want to do i experience that all the time right where i'm doing i find myself lying and there's another voice in my head going why why are you doing this like why are you lying or like why are you why are you acting this way why are you taking the credit or whatever it is that i'm doing that's this and so i i experienced this this this kind of force that's pulling me down and then i also on this in the same way have a sense that um something like a good christian way of saying it would be like i know i feel a calling is a good christian way of saying it i feel like i have this calling and that i'm being like you said i'm being kind of pulled forward towards certain things both in my own life in terms of of transformation but also even like you said professionally in terms of the types of things i'm supposed to pay attention to types of things i'm supposed to put my energy into and if i don't listen to that voice and i suffer greatly and if i if i listen to that voice i suffer but the suffering is worth it like it's worth it for what it gives and so that's the way that i tend to experience it it's exactly the same for me you don't personalize it as i do probably because you have always done the diamonds bidding so you you you don't have a background to contrast it with uh you have but i also see it but i think i think that i see that let's say something like my guardian angel i tend to see through the guardian angel into christ into the the incarnate god and so so it's not that i it's like if that's that maybe even be just my protestant background because i used to be protestant where it's like i even even if i when i feel pulled i tend to want to see through that towards something else like so you'll hear people i think that the experience you have you'll hear christians say something like that all the time we'll say like god showed me this for god and it's not god directly it's it is this intermediary being but i understand too why because it's pulling you up and it's pulling you into more being then it's easy you want to see through it and see see the the higher aspect kind of pulling you forward so that's that's how i tend to but i have other beings pulling at me all the time like my patrons i have certain saints which have imposed themselves on me uh some like saint maximus who i've chosen but other saints like saint like saint christopher for example who really has imposed himself on me and uh and is is there to to and he's kind of pulling me uh pulling me in certain directions and i yeah and i i can't deny it yeah you always describe it as pulling never as pushing yeah i think it's somebody who who feels pushed like i do it's like i yeah i won the lottery the other way around um but uh what you described i i recognize and there is the diamond which which unlike you i don't see it as a as the sumo bonum i don't see it as a morally positive force i see it as a very morally ambiguous force who doesn't care much about my comfort or safety but i also feel the push of the ancestors instead of the saints like i feel the push to sort of clear the record of the ancestors here the record of jung cleared the record of schopenhauer and the one that's really pushing me now wants his record clear i mean it could all be fantasies of my mind of course somewhat impersonal but it's useful for me to attach names to these things because it enables a a relationship with them i feel the push of um nicolas von kuz nikolai de kuza kusanus i don't know whether you know about him [Music] hardly known philosopher who was also a bishop of the church in the 15th century [Music] and i feel the push of that image now like clear his record you know vindicate him um because he left the treasure buried in the feud then nobody has a map and we need to find that and open it up um so that i feel too it's less personalized than than the diamond the diamond is just overwhelmed me with me totally overwhelm me and i it's a very present reality for me because i used to not listen to it so i i know what it is like to ignore the presence of the diamond and and therefore its presence now is has great contrast contrast against that previous background in which i thought it's just me i am the master of my own house and i remember that and it provides a background that really highlights the diamond now like oh there is that that thing there that i used to ignore and not listen to and pretend that it didn't exist but it was always there and it's very distinct [Music] so mark go ahead with your what you talked that you wanted us i didn't read paul king norris last essay but maybe you can i usually do read all his essays i just haven't gotten to that one yet no that's grand sorry we've taken a lot of notes about it so i can try and freeze it in a way that i hope sort of lands with you guys and see if we can use that as a spring word so um i wanted to phrase it within the context of the kind of meaning crisis which is no use for the mark jonathan which i think in line with what you guys have said is two things in particular behind that even if it might phrase it that way a crisis of authority and which authority or authorities are we gonna trust i suppose and direction with the kind of myth of progress that he describes having no direction there's no destination clear in mind whereas from the christian context suppose you have the kingdom of god however hard that might be to define and this kind of general crisis of modernity so um paul's recent work i think might help us find some convergence in clarifying some key trends and problems i think he picks up in some ways where alan watts left off which i know bernardo likes and from a christian perspective i think even nikolai berdayev serving this kind of prophetic role so i wanted to speak about a this notion of progress that he critiques in his article it's he suggests a number of things that progress once the end of history it wants the end of transcendence and so on and he mentions how modernity actually makes a major break by follow fully sort of developing the anthropological theme so the transcendence is pictured as beyond is replaced by this kind of transcendence within the world and he says the transcends within the world can be translated as progress with no ultimate truth or higher story there's nothing to stop us can abandon the universe to our desires indeed to do so was our duty and this in august of the nazis is what explained actually 20th century history having replaced religion with this kind of a perverse philosophy we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a kind of grand scale with terrible results so then he goes on or progress once is the death of god so suppose really considering all that how do you hope in humility then to help address this crisis with your work two thousand years of preaching have not solved the problem so we know at least a few things that don't work um pure philosophy has not solved the problem otherwise you know all the philosophers that you know occupy the path the long path before us would have made a significant difference in the way these things have evolved i tend to think that the collective mind of humanity and we can think of it as a you know the angel of humanity in jonathan's language um it as as people in in religious circles say the spirit will move the way it moves the angel of humanity will stir and move the way it does i think the only thing we can do is to put some beacons here and there so if and when that great angel of humanity looks around for for some bearings that it will find the beacons we cannot make it look we cannot convince it to look we cannot make it go in the direction of the beacons all we can do is place the beacon there light it up if it does happen to look and find and does happen to want to come in that direction then we've done our part but it's not a process that that can be forced it's it's too big of a giant to be corralled in a certain direction by mere human minds and human actions or by preaching or even tremendously compelling philosophical reasoning it will not make it happen all it can do is plant the beacons around and hope for the best and cross our fingers um and to me there is freedom in the recognition of this small part that i'm supposed to to play because it doesn't make me feel a sense of responsibility for the final outcome because if you do feel a sense of responsibility for the final outcome you are lost in a very dark space and you may react to it through inflation like hitler taking responsibility for the final outcome of the destiny of the german peoples that's what you get you get this kind of tremendously dysfunctional pathological inflation that can lead to disaster and if you don't get that inflation then you feel like you're nothing you feel powerless before a a tremendously powerful universe that doesn't even know you exist and might as well step on you by just not noticing that you are there like we stepped on an end which is also not a good place to be i think freedom resides in service which is something that we in the west knew but have forgotten um and it's it's a it's a seeming paradox because when you serve it's like there is a canosis involved you're losing yourself because you're serving something that isn't you your life is no longer about you you are just a tool a a small tool um so there is this sense in which you sort of extinguish yourself in service so how can you be free well you can be free from the claus claustrophobia of purely personal meaning because you see even if you achieve everything you want ultimately it's all for nothing you're just a person you will be forgotten 100 years from now if you're extremely famous a thousand years from now 10 000 years from now you'll be forgotten it will all be for nothing if you think that it's about you it's extremely claustrophobic and it's a prison it's the prison of the insignificance of the personal self that's what happens if you think your life's about you but when you extinguish yourself in service wow it's like opening the windows you know it's like looking at the horizon everything becomes huge the moment you disappear the moment and how do we explain this i've been trying to explain this the past year or so and to fail every single time to me setting up that little beacon without any control of the process is my freedom it's the insignificance of setting up the beacon that is my freedom i lose myself in it yeah i don't know whether i can say this any better maybe jonathan as an artist no but i think better than i do i think that you're really you're really coming right up to this mystery about how multiplicity and unity exist it's really in a manner the surprise of what christianity in my vision the surprise of what christianity offers but i think you see that in other traditions as well but you definitely see it in christianity which is like okay so why is the cross like this cross thing like what do we do with this like what is this what is this cross thing at the top of the mountain why is that the thing we're asked to pay attention to and that it's the realization that it is in giving yourself to a higher being that you're you lose yourself and then you're full you you find yourself filled and so i think that that's what you're that's what you're experiencing and i and i think that that's actually how things work like that's actually how the world works is that that fractally things give themselves sacrifice themselves for their higher participation and and i think that even the ritual sacrifices were ritualized versions of that like we take something precious we give it up and then we receive fullness from above and i think now in in terms of christianity now we talk about this the word the sacrifice of worship the sacrifice of attention so as you attend to the higher and you give yourself then you are you're filled you're filled by that higher participation that can of course can become pathological and it and we've seen many examples in which it has but it's nonetheless the way that things work um and i tend to agree with with bernardo in the sense that i i see that there are certain patterns which are playing themselves out which we're not going to we're not going to stop at this point there's we're not going to stop this this pattern and um there are stories from the past which tell us about these moments you know there are versions of of uh i've i made a video on the book of enoch recently where the description of the the instrumentalization of intermediary beings towards power and towards desire and towards kind of like taking these these patterns from above and then you know incarnating them and these giants that then devour the world i think that that's where we are like we're really you know when saint peter says like in the time of noah i think that that's pretty much where we are and so the only thing we can do is build an ark you know and and and i think that when when bernardo talks about beacons i think that that's something like that and we and the other thing we can do is understand that the world exists ultimately in in a certain way and i think that it exists through these these these types of principalities and so when you know when we hear this idea you know acquire the spirit of peace and you will and millions around thousands around you will be saved i think that that's also something which we can do which is that to to become more and in becoming more you you somehow pull others in into the ark is the only way to say i don't know how to say it is that in becoming more in working out your own crap in in in kind of consolidating what's immediately around you your life your family your friendships your relationship to to to the people around you and encountering that in a manner which is true through the the spirit of service that bernardo talks about i think that that actually has more that has more effects than we think that it does and it actually acts as little little beacons little arcs of possibility that will rise up after the after the fire um but i think that in terms of the big pattern i i don't i don't see it seems like things are accelerating in ways that are are you know we could barely have predicted well we could have intuited but now we're seeing it things are really accelerating um and this idea of progress you know right now we have people in davos you know you know planning the future talking about how we're going to have we're going to have all these you know we're going to use all these different technologies to make us more whatever that means and that's exactly the problem that paul is paul king's north is is talking about where it's a it's an it's not a recent thing right i mean nietzsche was the first one to identify exactly this and to go through the consequences of this in the microcosm of his own life because there was someone with a profound religious disposition nietzsche a profound religious disposition who thought his way out of religion by interpreting religion literally and building a straw man for religion then setting it alight burning it up so where would that man put his religious intuition that the fountain had of meaning that that was active within him where was he going to put that he put that in the superman in the uber mage yeah which was his way to sort of pull transcendence downwards and squeeze it into a physical entity of some form that he called the secular ubermensch the the man that transcends himself and and what is peculiar is that if you read nietzsche's work he never says what the superman is yeah there there is one passage in which he characterizes it indirectly like it talks about man being the intermediary step between the ape and the superman but he never says here's what the superman is he doesn't define the bloody thing it is the central pillar of his late work and he doesn't define it and he goes mad that's how he ends his days 11 years of madness mental illness and i think that microcosm that what played in the microcosm of nietzsche is what is playing the macrocosm of humanity a hundred and fifty years later um i just hope you don't go mad when we realize that we are failing to pull transcendence downwards and try to make it palpable it's not in the nature of the thing to be that it is us who have to transcend ourselves it doesn't make sense to put transcendence into us it's like pulling the word the world into the prison no it's not gonna happen you cannot pull the world into your prison cell all you can do is break out it's not going to work the other way around it didn't work for nietzsche it's not going to work for us yeah i think that if nietzsche knew that the that the ubermensch would be furries in the metaverse i i think he might have he might have changed his mind okay in agreement with what you described there bernardo a dr wayne gashado an australian philosopher he describes nature as an idea story texts but maybe butcher what he says but takes the his little idea makes it the the reality is replacing the reality for the map and um falls into the same chapter the people that he's critiquing and he sees him in line with in some ways with plato and a whole host of philosophers he's got an interest in history and philosophy but um just strung into my mind whenever you said that and i also thought about the way dr ian mcgill questions kind of framed the modernity writing about how the left hemisphere is kind of thinking has come to dominate so much and um he mentions that idea that a reason in its proper place is fine but as as the atmosphere is famous terrible as a master and i think rabbi jonathan sex sort of mentions then in his work similarly in some ways that science properly understood takes things apart to see how they work but the religion so-called brings things together to see what they mean and which i think in both of your works a demonstrate in a more preferring sense than the kind of social construct of religion is the privatized little a myth that we have going on the west predominantly i suppose and south park says you're going to have a bad time so i'd love to to know what are some of the ways you think this is manifesting itself at societal levels and in line with what jonathan described as kind of secular liturgies so i think even down to how we design our cities for recruiter notions of things like functionality and add ever-growing kind of car parks for our major corporations not that it's all bad but i wonder about some of the problems when um that's our maybe major only emphasis and there's no center like in the traditional kind of european cities i suppose around the church or temples and things like that elsewhere in the world would you like to describe that i suppose then going beyond our individual um selves to cities towns how that abuses our relationship with the creation then jonathan uh and so i mean i think mark what you're saying what's interesting you can kind of see when we talk about this kind of breakdown and this idea of progress but how it it's actually manifesting itself in a you know in a breakdown i think you pointed to the image of the city is a great example of of how this works and so there used to be the way that cities were understood was almost mythological i talk about this in um i talk about this in one of my my podcast we have this universal history uh podcast where we talk about how the founding of cities was even when constantine founded constantinople there was this scent in which like there was an angel walking in front of him and he would walk he was walking with his standard that he planted at some point which would mark the limit of the city and they asked him and he said well i walked until the angel stopped and then he he basically planted the city so all these cities have these mythological uh founding and then they end up being created in a fractal way so the city itself usually has higher points of attention and so uh medieval village is a great example so the church would be in the center or in something which represented the center then there would be the the the steeple would be the highest building in the church you weren't allowed actually to build higher buildings and so it would act as a as a kind of access of attention for all the people in the city an axis of attention and also a place that binds you literally in the sense that you go there together and you celebrate the things uh your baptisms marriages all the things that bind societies at different levels uh were celebrated there and then even during the day right the bells would ring and then you would do the angelus or something similar where all people in the village would turn towards the center and then would would pray to participate in the existence of the the city and so the city itself was was was built like a being like was built in a way in a in a the way that you're a microcosm of of this the same thing right these centers of attention and the highest thing which binds all the other aspects of you together and so right now the way that we build cities is so completely utilitarian that we the bare the cities barely exist except for random distribution of houses on in space you know separated by highways and functional you know malls and functional places for entertainment and this is leading to massive breakdown in terms of people not knowing their neighbors people becoming isolated and ultimately falling into despair and not even realizing that the very space in which they live is participating in their despair with you know it's not the only thing but it's definitely fueling the the despair that they're feeling is living in this this like amorphous grid of houses you know on on the landscape absolutely i feel it every time i go to the u.s i i don't have it here because you know the netherlands is a very small country all the villages are old in a sense and there are there are no i mean there are new constructions but they growing rings around the old towns and sometimes the old towns merge together to form a city but every little neighborhood has that center and that center has a church a baker a pharmacist the doctor and a bar yeah in the grocery the grocery store so these five or six things are in every little neighborhood and it when i go to the u.s i feel very ungrounded because you you hardly touch the ground unless you are indoors because you know otherwise you are in a car yeah from car to indoors yeah that's how it works yeah you hardly have pedestrian pathways that you can walk from one place to the other and people hop into a car to go 100 meters for us here it's unthinkable 100 meters you you don't get into a car to go 100 meters and and i feel like i'm i don't know floating in the air there is no center the height is very i have a very strange feeling in the u.s this is one of the big reasons the other big reason is television commercials i find them very alienating in the us can't relate to them at all so i can tell you that from an outside perspective mine what you are saying is not theory it's not conjecture it's a very very real palpable lived reality yeah and but it's interesting because i think that the scandal of america and in canada we have the same problem is is leading to a type of of consciousness of of this problem you know and so uh like i i have a good friend of mine andrew gould who's an architect and he is now realizing this and the architects around him are realizing this and so they're they're forced to consciously let's say re-engage with this pattern so something which let's say in the middle ages when this wasn't thought out it was just that's how the world works you just do it and so now we have to i think that this is true about all the questions right now of participation is that we somehow have like we bit the apple right we took we took the apple and now we we can reintegrate the garden but it's the cross right it's the cross which will make us reintegrate the garden it'll be difficult it's going to be painful uh and ultimately will end with something which is fuller in the end and i this is maybe like in terms of the the hope of this whole problem is that the story seems to be always something like that like that seems to be the story of all the stories and so there's a sense in which possibly the crisis we're going through although it is horrible and frustrating that there is a hope that ultimately the reintegration which comes after will be fuller than the one that was before and that's the that's kind of like the only hope that i can i can bring when you read in the book of enoch it's really it's very powerful because it's talking about the flood in the book of enoch and it talks about how all this calamity is coming because of these because of the the these uh these demons these giants that are there and that are eating the world that are devouring everything and that are engaged in all these kind of perverted uh destruction of the world but then it says that okay destruction destruction's coming and then after that god will fill all things we think interesting like that this is something describing the flood but there's a manner in which that seems to be the the pattern and even the pattern of ourselves bernardo you talked about how someone who experiences dissociation and then is able to heal that dissociation is maybe more than the person that was there before yeah yeah you get a a level higher of insight it's like you are in a spiral so it feels like you've gone gone back to the same place where you were before but it's a level higher as you go through this fire you're always going a level higher always coming back to the beginning but always with a an understanding of new ones subtlety and perspective that wasn't there before even though you're again looking from that same perspective yeah that's and so the image the image of the entire story of the bible that's the way that i see it and so we all we often forget that the last image in scripture the image of the new jerusalem of the heavenly jerusalem is the garden of eden it's the tree of life and the water of life but then around the tree of life in the water of life is now this glorious city and so from from the moment of innocence in the garden and then a fall and of the fall bringing about all these human activities all this all this kind of human technology which is constantly leading us into little levels of distraction and and thinking that power is going to solve our problems so all these problems happen and then ultimately in the end there's a way in which it gets resolved in this kind of glorious city where the the tree is in the center the water is in the center the lamb right the self-sacrificial lamb is in the center but then it it makes the rest meaningful it fills the rest with with meaning so it's at least a little bit of hope for you know last week let me talk about this can i run an idea by you it's something i've been thinking about it's not worked out in my mind but i wonder what what you would how you would react to it we were talking about banality in ritual earlier on when we began this conversation and i'm totally with you that we have to re-ritualize life in order to come back in contact with its extra dimension of depth meaning and significance at the same time and i don't know whether this is a dichotomy or a paradox i don't know but it i also sense that um the word spirituality is the worst thing that has ever happened to spirituality because it made it distinct from reality yeah and i sometimes i think that if we use too romantic language to talk about real stuff you know the the bedrock of existence if we talk about it in two romantic terms um we create a distance between ourselves and it because we are you know moist living beings we go to the loo every day even kings and it doesn't no good when that happens and we have to eat stuff and kill stuff to eat even if you're a vegetarian you're killing plants to eat yeah and you know the business of life is messy there is it's very bloody there is a lot of suffering um and it's moist it's warm you know it's not a sleek marble statue if you know what i mean yeah no i know exactly what you mean and and sometimes i think the romanticized language creates this in impassable chasm between lived reality and and and the treasure buried at the end of the rainbow if you know what i mean and and we we we do that in language so is there something to say about trying to get a little bit rid of some of the romanticizing talking about these things in more visceral terms yeah you know um if we talk about enlightenment i always go like what the heck does that even mean you know this business of enlightenment what does that even mean but there is something i know which is suddenly i became a lot more empathic and it's a show because i suffer with the ukrainians i suffer with the mothers and fathers in texas i suffer with everybody and it's a horror show is that what we call enlightenment maybe maybe that's what it is you see what i mean yeah yeah but i call it a show yeah not enlightenment and and i think there is something to be said about you know bringing the language down to our level a little bit so we can relate to this stuff as reality and not a romanticized something that is unachievable either yeah no i totally agree and and i people who watch my videos will hear me often say something like go to church uh and and what i you mean by go to church is yeah that's why i don't talk that's why go to church is the most boring it sounds like the most boring thing you could say to someone but i'm saying go to church you go to church but it could be other types of participation you go to church then it's messy it's messy because let's say something like church there are people there that you would choose to be with and there are people there that you would not choose to be with and so all your buttons will be pressed everything about you will be challenged you know but nonetheless so there's something dirty and moist and and smelly about it but it's all this dirty moist smelly stuff which is trying to aim higher and transform these aspects of reality into something more and so you kind of get in my my estimation through through participation in the things that are immediate to us like for example like your family it's like don't don't talk to me about enlightenment if you're if you alienated your kids and you know you hate your wife and like okay i don't know because you can see it right you see these kind of spiritual type people that their lives are completely in shambles but they're doing yoga and they're having mystical experiences like okay exactly yeah there's something there's something off about that and so i think that engagement is probably better you know and so like so so for example finding a confessor in the orthodox church like having someone you have to you go to you confess to it's sometimes they'll say the worst thing like your confessor sometimes will say the most damaging thing you could ever hear but it's like you have to kind of understand that that's the messiness of this community right that's the messiness of this communion as we kind of move and kind of move awkwardly you know towards deification towards towards transformation um so that's at least the way that i try to and i say that but it's like it's hard for me as much as anybody because we have all this comfort it's hard for me as much as anybody to to to do it but i yeah at least that's the way that i'm trying to to deal with that stuff and so i'm trying to really pin down what uh what i'm attempting to say and not really succeeding yet that's why symbols are so important but uh when i talk about romanticizing there is a mushy quality to it a a kind of perfection to the goal like the sumo bonum like the saint is purely good and it's all about love and playing the harp on the clouds it it's i don't think this is a helpful image if you know what i mean yeah but do you think that that's really so it's like if you look at the christian version of that you end up with like martyrs and saint francis of assisi like who is poor and like people who live in the desert and are you know and so it's like saint mary of egypt that these are the images of our saints they're not they're not built on clouds like you know strumming hearts this is the big one the big one is jesus's life yeah of course the life of christ is the big one yeah that's the reality of the thing that's the reality of service and and and in a sort of giving upwards of yourself um but if you tell people just go to church what they think is reuben's caribbeas with you know plump bottoms playing their harp on clouds and and it it creates this notion you see what i mean what i'm saying i know what you mean exactly i don't really understand what you mean this stuff is real how do we help people understand that this stuff is real and it's so real it's it's not under their noses it's behind their noses it's it's as close as anything can possibly be it's so close nobody sees it and and there's nothing romantic about it it's tough stuff yeah you see what i'm trying to get no i totally agree you know i think they like but i think the image of the cross is in that case that's that's the best image and helping people remember what what that is but we romanticized even that yeah yeah there's work to do that's for sure when when jesus was in the in the gethsemane and um and he asked god to take that chalice away from him how do you think most christians understand that today oh it was a moment of weakness it was just the human jesus that suddenly was there but then went away no no it was not a moment it's an ever-present reality drinking from that chalice it's tough stuff it's tough to be a real christian yeah if you know what i mean no i told yeah it's not that romantic thing it's unbearable actually it's unbearable listening but just reading the words of christ is unbearable it's it's a it's it's it's very difficult that's why we we read them but we it's hard to really read what christ asks of us because it's really unbearable i agree so the challenge is how do we recover the ritual the sacralization of this world the ensoment of this world through ritual without this trap of romanticizing and lyricizing it to a point where it becomes unattainable and becomes different from reality it becomes spirituality you see what i'm struggling with um i can't even describe the problem let alone find a solution and that that's the issue right now for me yeah well i mean i think that in i think that in a proper kind of balanced christian life you there is a there's an aspect of the christian life which is celebratory and that's important but there's also an aspect of the christian life which is which is penance and repentance constant repentance so if you take the prayers that you do every day seriously it's like you're constantly seeing how you're missing the mark and even unwillingly with you know when you're you're constantly kind of in that moment of missing and so those two extremes held in balance i think are what make it bearable because if you just had one then you have the romantic part if you just have the other then you would just you would just collapse you just collapsed under the weight of of of what it means right and so i think that having those two having those two in intention is probably the the best but at the same time you know if occasionally i do go to church and it has partly to do with my self nurturing and partly to do with some kind of anthropological project see what's happening in the culture then there is a way in which that in which transcendence has become cartoonified [Music] it has been turned into a cartoon and one of the mechanisms i suspect are partly responsible for this is turning religion into a moral recipe alone so a moral code is no longer a consequence of religion religious inside it now is religion yeah and that's a way to cartoonify the whole thing if you do the right thing my son you will have eternal life that's a cartoonification of the whole thing and and and to some extent it's been done by the church this cartoonification uh uh you see what i'm trying to oh i totally agree and i don't i'm waving my way here but no no i don't agree but sadly i have to i like i'm watching the time go by i need to go because someone is waiting for two minutes but i would love to continue this conversation with you bernardo and mark thanks for thanks for for organizing this it's always wonderful to to talk to you as well so i'm i'm afraid i have to i have to leave you no problem talking to you jonathan all right it was great it was great to me to talk about you and uh ronaldo let's let's let's do this again let's do this again maybe i can be more coherent next time no no no it's great i know exactly what you're pointing to and so we can explore that i'll i'll also meditate on it from in my own life let's say all right bye everybody thanks take care actually yeah thank you bernardo um did you ever see terence malek's a hidden life about franzia agusta no oh you must watch it you know just what you outlined there i think what's his name again it's a hidden life it's about a frontier starter in austria during the second world war when he refused to play as an oath of allegiance to hitler and the consequences and it shows that kind of pristine pseudo-christianity versus his embodied living out the christian way in this messy but very real and visceral form so i think you'd love it actually yeah it's a brilliant movie recent one 2019. yeah i think you would enjoy it and more than just enjoy it it actually is transmonics movies i think are quite um challenging and change your mindset and i watch it tonight it's with bruno guns one of my favorite uh actors ah brilliant so and i think that would actually help a little bit with your queries are about this kind of a neat christianity versus the authentic thing yeah i watch it tonight um i'm supposed to go down have dinner now and i probably put it on if i can access it i'm sure i'm sure there will be a way for me to access this yeah you can get it on amazon prime if you have amazon oh i have it okay yes you have it i'll get it there and thanks for the tip i will watch it yeah please let me know what you think i hope you found it as game moving as i did but uh i would love to say to whether you want to do a separate conversation with jonathan or whether you want to come back onto my channel i'd love to set that up because say let's do this again like part two there is no no need to change the recipe when when it works right so yeah wonderful god bless you bernardo have a lovely evening you too thanks for this mark take care there [Applause]

Channel: More Christ

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Id: usFMBUTkaLk

Length: 116min 44sec (7004 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 04 2022