The Perfect Mode of Being | Jonathan Pageau | EP 156

[Music] so today i have the great pleasure of speaking with jonathan pagio whom i know primarily as a thinker who's a carver of orthodox icons that are absolutely beautiful i have one in my house of saint michael and the dragon and an increasingly prominent youtuber prominent among intellectual youtubers i would say essentially as particularly those who are interested in religious and philosophical and artistic ideas and jonathan and i have been talking back and forth for i would think about six or seven years now eh we met in 2015. yeah it's my time it's crazy time flies it's crazy that's for sure so i i we haven't spoken for two years maybe yeah we saw each other i think when you booked him out and you came to montreal for a little event and i picked you up at the airport that was the last time we saw each other yeah it's a while a lot of water under the bridge that's right indeed and in your case literally yes exactly jonathan jonathan's house was flooded out that was when it was in 2019 um but we just moved back into our house this christmas and so it was a long kind of a long thing it lasted a very long time so and are you in your house right now yes i am in my my house all fixed up and so we're really enjoying it we're happy to be back i bet it must have been unbelievably dislocating to be flooded like that your whole basement filled with water if i remember correctly yeah exactly it was a dyke broke in the in the city and uh you know i think as thousands of people got evacuated within an hour and so for my kids especially it was my kids and even my wife it was it was a little bit of a trauma because it was water we could see the water coming and there were cops and and you know all these uh firemen and everything and so it was a pretty intense moment yeah and where where were you living when your house was underwater we moved around we lived at my parents then we rented a place then we had to move and so we ended up living in three places during the about a year and a half that we were gone um so but it was a it it was one of those things where you know we say symbolism happens you know a lot of the things that even you talk about or that i talk about just manifested themselves this problem of the dyke and the the idea of uh you know corruption or inattention to the situation and then thinking you're safe when in fact you're not aware of what's what's kind of looming on the margins and and so for me it was a real learning experience i hope that i've come out of it stronger and more more attentive let's say yeah well i hope so too i mean we all hope that we come out of unpleasant experiences stronger than when we went in although that isn't always the case it's the case when things are functioning optimally and when you're fortunate and courageous and i suppose as honest as you can be but fortunate definitely ranks high among all of those necessary um preconditions for successful recovery i would say yeah and i have to say that i am we are i'm so grateful to see you back online you know that i know you've heard this but there have been thousands of people thinking about you praying for you and really rooting for you and you know uh i actually saw tammy last year i when i went to bring your icon and and i just remember just feeling uh helpless and and you know she was like would you go to russia and i was like i'll go to russia i'll go see jordan in russia it didn't seem like it was a reasonable thing to do and and it's probably better it didn't happen but we've definitely been praying for you and routing for you and thinking about you jordan you know i appreciate that a lot and i'm i'm back to some degree i would say i still think i'm running at about five percent so yeah and that's partly why i was concerned about talking to you today and we're generally discuss things that are relatively deep and it's still difficult for me to go deeply into anything that's happening to me because it's so unbelievably awful and it's it's it's been hard on my faith i would say you know and it's my book is coming out in my new book i should show it to you i just got recognized yesterday that's awesome to order it's in it's unbelievable that you wrote that during all of this i can't believe that when you say you're running at five percent i think that your five percent is is pretty close to the hundred percent of most people yeah well i don't know if that's true or not but it's five percent for me and getting the book was actually somewhat of a traumatic experience i would say because it reminded me like it's a it's a it's a it's a concrete reminder of everything that's happened over the last three or four years and it all things that i found very difficult to process both on the social front and on the let's say biological health front um so i was reading oddly enough uh i i got a book sent to me by bishop baron the first draft of a book and it's written by a couple of professors it's called jordan peterson god and christianity the search for a meaningful life by dr christopher caxor and dr matthew pretzek word on fire institute to catholic response to my biblical series and hopefully they won't be too upset about me talking about it today but i won't talk about it that much the book itself it was rather a shock to me they're at loyola marymount university and it was kind of a shock to me to see them talking about my i mean these are religious scholars talking about my biblical series um but i think people are just people don't a lot of people didn't understand and i could see it in my react with the way people were reacting to your biblical studies the biblical uh interpretations people didn't understand how is it that he we can barely get 100 people in our church and jordan has a million people listening to him kind of struggle to to get through these passages and do it in a very improvisational kind of uh existential way um and uh and to me it's funny because i mean i think i i have i have a deep affection for your the way that you approach thing and i and obviously we connect together in the way we think and so to me it was like this is what you guys should have been doing for a while is trying to understand how it is that this stuff is talking about reality and not just a bunch of arbitrary things that you need to believe or that you need to kind of attend to and and because these stories they really are telling us about the structure of being and so i think that that's the way that you approached it and and that's why people are resonating to what you're saying because they're like finally someone can can can help us make sense of these stories that we're somehow strangely attracted to or frustrated by or disgusted by or whatever it is but there's this push and pull with these stories um and so so i think that i've seen a lot of christians listen to your biblical talks and of course sometimes you say things and they're like okay that's way off the rails and then other times you say things and they can't believe the insight that you're able to to pierce and so so i i'm not not all surprised that catholic scholars would would kind of look at what you were doing and we all hope that you're going to do more of that for sure yes well i would like to i'm thinking about trying to attempt a book on exodus and lecture two lectures as well although i wouldn't say that i'm in any shape to do that yet um i'm but it's a dream let's say i mean i'm pretty much completely non-functional for the first three or four hours of the day i get up and i can barely stand up and i go have a sauna for an hour and often sleep during that period of time and then at the same time i cook breakfast uh i use an air cooker and then i go walk for anywhere between seven and ten miles and even though i can by the time i get out of the house i'm dizzy as as can be and it's difficult to stand up but after about a mile or two i get my legs under me to some degree and then by two o'clock i'm kind of functional and although extremely anxious and then um i'm able to do a little bit of work and often to sit down at four o'clock my mind seems sharp enough although my memory isn't good i can't bring things to mind like i used to which is quite distressing and i have very little emotional resilience and i'm worried for that reason about the release of this book i mean i i just did a times interview london times interview that was really yeah we followed that i'd say it's that frustrating it's it's it's i mean it's funny because this you know again it was like the same stories are playing out again this person goes after you and then it just turns against that person and and it's just she's exposed for for the fraud that she was being and during that interview and so you know i think in the it's so strange that it keeps happening over and over i mean i really decided not to do mainstream interviews now for a good while because i've it seems to me that i've gone to the well of public sympathy so to speak enough times and that if this happens to me two or three more times let's say people are going to rightly say you know how many times does it take for peterson to learn and so i don't want that to happen i mean i've been you know i feel an obligation to my publishers obviously to talk about the book although that interview had virtually nothing to do with the book we hoped that i would be able to discuss my health issues with someone who would treat them squarely and then i could ignore them from then on in but um uh that isn't what happened um well it's been it's a sign of the politicized discourse like you you it's a sign of the breakdown that we're going through that we see this capacity to have so entrenched aside that people are can't doesn't doesn't matter what they do it doesn't matter what they say they don't feel like they're responsible because in a way you're the enemy and you know and it's not just you it's other other it's between different groups but if you're the enemy then everything is justified and so well i think a huge part of this is is driven by the desire to have an enemy yeah you know there's it's it's very difficult to feel it's an easy route to self-righteousness to have an enemy exactly and yeah and it's a great place to put all evil yeah and because you attract so much attention you're an easy you're definitely an easy target well that's the theory seems not to turn out that way yeah but it's also was the timing you know the way when you kind of came up in the public uh sphere there was a massive shift happening in culture and i think that's one of the things you could feel and that was happening around us and to some extent you know donald trump had something to do with that as well in the sense that it was this malaise that was there and this kind of this jostling and this this uh and this is what led to all that kind of discourse and so i think that you you were identified you became identified almost mythologically i guess as as a character and and people you know have treat you that way and they act with you that way in many respects yes it becomes very difficult to to understand very difficult for me to understand what character i am you know so much has changed in my life over the last five years i'm i've been on leave from the university so that's very destabilizing i don't have my clinical practice anymore and so i was you know seeing 20 people a week so that's a huge transformation in my life my my house has been completely renovated it was renovated well my wife was ill and so we didn't uh well it the renovation went on in our absence and so i'm a foreigner in my own house which is which is although i'm starting to become accustomed to it and there's some things i like about the new house but i don't feel at home in it i wouldn't say and i've only been here for two months in the last three years because i was on the road and then well all this and so that and everything that's happened has been very disruptive for my family and of course tammy got so unbelievably sick and and with something that was supposed to be fatal and recovered more or less miraculously um and then i've been so unbelievably ill or still am and i i have just i just don't know where to put any of this i i can't think about the past at all because so much of it is incomprehensible especially over the last five years i can't think about the present because i'm in so much pain and i can't think about the future because i don't know what i'm going to do and i have no idea how long this pain is going to last it's been i've been in pain really severe pain for two years now and yeah um and that's it's it's a strange thing because in this book one of the chapters the last chapter is called be grateful in spite of your suffering you know and um i went every through every sentence in that chapter a very large number of times because much of the time while i was rewriting it particularly i was in a lot of pain and um like it's it's it's it's a pain level that's hard to fathom in some sense because i would say every single day i have now is worse than any day i ever had in my life before i got ill so and then i know very well that adding bitterness to your malaise is a very bad idea you know it doesn't help but that that i can certainly see the attraction in that i feel like shaking my fist at the sky and complaining bitterly and but it it doesn't help but but there doesn't seem to be any relief either and so that's it's so it's so perverse it's shaken my faith i suppose i i'm in this perverse position where my work has in principle helped so many people and yet i don't seem to be able to dig myself out of my current circumstances so well or even to make sense of them yeah i think that i think that the role that you've you played is a is a kind of a transition role and that transition manifests itself to you as a as a trying to have your feet on two sides of rifting of an eye two islands that are floating away from each other and you you you're trying to hold on you're trying to kind of help people focus on the middle and help people avoid radicalization and avoid falling into camps in a manner that will lead to god knows what and so i think that i think that that's the role that you played and it's and it's been like i've seen for example people transition through your work transition from worlds moving worlds that's really what i've seen happen it's more than just changing the way changing your opinion or changing your mind about something it really is about changing the world you inhabit and so that's a that's a crazy that's a crazy role to play and especially because like i said you you have your foot it's like you kind of have your one foot or one eye let's say looking towards i would call religion or looking towards christianity or something like that and then you have another eye which is still very much immersed in a kind of secular humanism and you have one leg that is you know you understand people that are more left-leaning you understand people that are more right-leaning you have this capacity to kind of understand everybody but you're yeah it's it's uh that means that you make enemies on on all sides too well you know the overwhelming response that i've got publicly has been i would say traumatically positive yeah and you wouldn't think that that would be possible really but i find it that way i mean partly it's overwhelming to have people constantly tell me in person their responses to what i've been doing it's very emotional and i get caught up in that quite quickly and of course on youtube and the social media platforms youtube particularly the bulk of the comments about me are very very positive it's 99 to 1 often in terms of likes and dislikes it's yeah and and it's too much well i don't know how i don't know how to i don't know how to i don't know what category to put it in i don't know how to conceptualize it i mean part of part of me the practical part of course says well i just happened to adopt a new technology at a time when it started to boom and filled a kind of niche that was empty in that technology at that time but in some sense that that doesn't really cut it you know because it doesn't have anything to do with the content then i think well i have been dealing with these well borderline religious issues well certainly not just borderline there's lots of religious people who seem to think that i'm dealing with religious issues and well and that's really what i wanted to talk to you about tonight so this book i mentioned earlier to talked about disagreements with my conceptualization of christ let's say and which i and i'm not sure what that conceptualization is by the way exactly it's a mystery to me um but but i can say some some concrete things about it i mean i certainly i i understand and appreciate the symbolic significance of the ideal human being and that finds its embodiment and i took these ideas in large part from jung and eric neumann that that christ is a represent christ is at least a representation of the ideal man whatever that is and and we we all interestingly enough we all seem to have an ideal and we and that i or that ideal has us right and that's where it's very interesting to consider the role of conscience because your conscience will call you out on your behavior and so it seems to function as something that's somewhat independent or at least is something that you can't fully voluntarily control because if you could voluntarily control it then you just tell the pesky little bastard to go away or to pat you on the back continually because there must be few things in life more pleasurable than being a fully committed narcissist to really believe that everything that you do is right and that you're a good person and i suppose if you could wave a magic wand and rearrange your mind so that it was constantly telling you that you do it but you don't seem to be able to do that in relationship to your conscience it trips you up and so and so it tells you when you're not living up to your own ideal and that means that you have an ideal and you don't even know what the hell it is but you certainly know when you transgress against it and i know that there's a strong line of christian thinking that's identified the conscience with divinity sometimes with christ inside sometimes with the holy spirit and those are very interesting conceptualizations but you can think of them psychologically and you can even think about them biologically you know to some degree because we're so social if we don't manifest an appropriate moral reciprocity we're going to become alienated from our fellows and we won't survive and we'll suffer and die and we won't we certainly won't find a partner and and have children successfully and so to some degree the conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within and that's a perfectly reasonable biological explanation but but the thing is is the deeper you go into biology the more it shades into something that appears to be religious because you start analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself and and it becomes something well it becomes something with a pow with with a with a with with a power that transcends your ability to resist it so okay so you can think about christ from a psychological perspective and the crit the critic my critic this particular critic that i've been reading said well that that doesn't differentiate christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods and of course people have made that claim in comparative religion joseph campbell did that and jung to a lesser degree i would say but campbell did that but the difference and c.s lewis pointed this out as well the difference between those mythological gods and christ was that there's a there's a representation of there's a historical representation of his of of his existence as well now you can debate whether or not that's genuine you can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there's credible objective evidence for that but it doesn't matter in some sense because this well it does but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter because there's still a historical story and so what you have in the figure of christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth and in some sense christ is the union of those two things the problem is is i probably believe that but i don't know i don't i'm amazed at my own belief and i don't understand it like because i've seen sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch know that's union synchronicity and i've seen that many times in my own life and so in some sense i believe it's undeniable you know we have a narrative sense of the world for me that's been the world of morality that's the world that tells us how to act it's real like we treat it like it's real it's not the objective world but the narrative and the objective world touch and the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be christ but i don't know what to and that seems to me oddly plausible yeah but i still don't know what to make of it it's too hit partly because it's too terrifying a reality to fully believe i don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it if you believed in the story of christ or if you believe that history and and let's say the narrative make meat let's both i think i think you because when you believe that you buy both those stories you believe that the narrative and the objective can actually touch yeah i mean we saw that you and i i mean this is a trivial example but we had a when we were discussing we had a sequence of discussions around frog symbolism four years ago yeah that was very bizarre to say the least you know and that was a trivial example relatively trivial example of the narrative world in the objective world coming together didn't feel that trivial at the time well the way the way that i like to deal with this is that one of the things it it's already there in your thought it's already there in the way that you talk about reality which is that one of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is something like attention right it's something there's a hierarchy of of manifestation because everything that hap that appears to us in the world has a an infinite amount of details right it has an indefinite amount of ways that you could describe it that you could angle that by which you could analyze it and so nonetheless the world appears to us through these hierarchies of meaning right i always kind of use the example of a cup or a chair like a chair is is of just a multitude of things it's a multitude of parts how is it that we can say that it's one thing there's a there's a capacity we have to attend and this capacity we have to attend is something like a co-creation of the world and so the world actually exists a chair is a good example because you know you can try to define it objectively but you end up with bean bags and stumps and exactly and they don't have anything in common well they're both made of matter you know for whatever that's worth it's pretty pretty trivial level of commonality but you can sit on them yeah and that's what you have there's a mode of being which they find well and that's so strange so many of our object perceptions are projected modes of being and so even the objective world is inelectably contaminated with its utility and then or therefore with morality exactly and so i think that that's the key the key is that once you understand that the world manifests itself through attention and that consciousness has a place to play in actually the way in which the world reveals itself and so you can you can try to posit a world outside of that first person perspective but it's it's good it's it's a deluded uh activity well it's also it's very very difficult because you don't you you don't know what to make of something like time because time has an inerratically subjective element and duration which is different than time i mean time is kind of like the average rate at which things change but duration is something like the felt sense of that time and if you take away this objectivity it isn't obvious what to do with time and i think physicists stumble over this all the time so to speak so and this is something that this this intermingling of value and fact was something that i never thought i never thought i made much traction with with harris with sam harris he he didn't seem to me to be willing to admit how saturated the world of fact is inevitably with value and i actually think he's denying the science at that point because for everything i know about perceptual psychology there's a great book called uh um vision as a oh god now i can't remember the name of the books that's memory trouble i'll remember it no worries the idea is that if that is true then there are certain things which come out of that there are certain necessary uh things down the road from that that insight which is that attention plays a part in the way the world lays itself out um and that one of them and one of them is that the stuff that the world is made of is partly something like attention something like consciousness and that has a pattern and that pattern is the same pattern as stories it just it just it doesn't lay itself out exactly the same but things exist with a pattern which is similar to stories they have identities they have centers they have margins they have exceptions and that's how stories lay themselves out like so a story happens in time how an identity let's say uh is broken down and then reconstructed you could say that that's basically the story of every story how something breaks down and is reconstructed and so that is a way for us to perceive uh the identity of things and so if the world is made of this then it's actually it's actually our world our secular world which is a strange aberration on how reality used to exist for every culture and every time from the beginning of time which is to take that for granted to take for granted that something that they didn't call it consciousness but intelligence and attention are part of how the world lays itself out and it lays itself out in modes of being and one of the things that comes out of it is not only that but like you said it's not only that you have ideas but it's that ideas have you or that it's not only that you engage in modes of being it's that modes of being have you and that recognition means that the first level of the first level of attention to that looks something like worship it looks like celebration it looks like uh it it's like uh the the thing which makes the let's say the national hockey league so successful has more to do with celebration than just a bunch of guys on skates on a piece of ice you know throwing a puck around there's a celebration of the purpose of that thing and it manifests itself through a bunch of stuff which one is like a trophy that stands in the middle on the top of a bunch of on a stand and everybody looks at it and kisses it and and and so there's this this veneration yeah and there's mascots the hockey league example is very interesting because it's a it's a it's a social game and you know all the players are they're attempting to aim right right so there's a symbolic element to that sin is misplaced aim and so you hit the you hit the small space in the net blocked though it may be by your enemies and everyone celebrates that and you do that in cooperation with other people and in competition with other people and if you do it properly not only are you a brilliant player from a technical perspective but you're also a great sport and so there's an ethic there and a morality and and this is why people are so upset when hockey players or any other pro athlete does something immoral in their personal life is because it violates the the ethic that that's being celebrated as a consequence of this great game yeah and right so you can see that that the striving for an ideal mode of being the religious striving for an ideal mode of being is central to what it is that makes hockey um addictive that's right yeah necessarily and and so god i saw that pro wrestling there's a great documentary uh bret hart called hitman hearts one of the best documentaries i've ever seen and it portrays pro wrestling as a stark religious battle between the forces of good and evil and bret hart who at one point was the most famous canadian in the world was overwhelmed by his the archetypal force of his representation as the good guy it's a great documentary hitman heart and and it shows you how you know pro wrestling is is it's not the world's most intellectual activity to say the least and people can easily be dismissive of it but one of the things i loved about the documentary was that it attempted to understand from within what was compelling about what was being portrayed and it was a religious drama it just was shocking and brilliant and so so that is that is actually there is a there's an objective part of that that there's an objective way in which these patterns kind of come together and manifest let's say higher and higher versions of this drama uh and so the sports drama has a certain level but it's it's limited to a certain extent because it still happens as a confrontation let's say between two irreducible sides and so what happens in something like the story of christ is that that gets taken into one person and so all the opposites become the king and the the the the criminal the you know the highest even in the image of the cross you have this image sandy as christ is being crucified they're putting a sign above his head saying that he's the king as christ is being beaten they're giving to him a crown and so christ joins together all the opposites and so in his in his story you see if you if you're attentive to these patterns you see the highest form of this pattern being played out and one of the aspects that has to be there for it to be the most revealed or highest form is that it also has to include the world of manifestation i mean it can't just be a story it has to be connected to the world so that's why christians insist on the the the fact that jesus is not just a story that he's an incarnated man that he was incarnated but i don't believe their insistence i don't believe well this is this is because i don't it isn't obvious to me and i think maybe i derived this criticism from nietzsche but i mean people have asked me whether or not i believe in god and i've answered in various ways no but i'm afraid he probably exists that's that's one answer um yeah no but i'm terrified he might exist that that would be truthful answer to some degree or that i act as if god exists which i think is i'd do my best to do that but then there's a real stumbling block there because there's no limit to what would happen if you acted like god existed yeah you know what i mean because i believe that that acting that out fully i mean maybe it's not reasonable to say to believers you aren't sufficiently transformed for me to believe that you believe in god or that you believe the story that you're telling me you're not you're not a sufficient you're not the way you live is a sufficient testament to the truth and people would certainly say that let's say about the catholic church or at least the way that it's been portrayed is that with all the sexual corruption for example it's like really really you believe that the son of god that jesus christ was the son of god and yet you act that way and i'm supposed to buy your belief and and it seems to me that the church is actually quite um guilty on that account because the attempts to clean up the mess have been rather half-hearted in my estimation and so i don't think people people don't manif christians don't manifest this and i'm including myself i suppose in that description perhaps um don't manifest the transformation of attitude that would enable that enables the outside observer to easily conclude that they believe yeah now the way the way to deal with that or the way to to understand that is that it they do but they do in a hierarchy there's a there's a hierarchy of manifestation of the transformation that god offers the world and we kind of live in that hierarchy and those above us hold us together you would say and so in the church there's a testimony of the saints there's there are stories there are hundreds and hundreds of stories of people who live that out in their particular context to the limit of what it's possible to live it and even today there are there are saints living saints who for example like in the orthodox tradition we have this idea of what they call it the gift of tears or the joyful sorrow of of people who live in prayer with weeping constant weeping uh and it's this kind of strange mix of joy and uh and sadness which they which kind of overwhelm them and they live in that joy and sadness non-stop and they pray you know without end and so that exists but then we in this that's one of the reasons why that's kind of one of the reasons why when i talk about this idea of attention like it manifests itself in the in the church as well is that you often say and i understand it when you say something like you know i act as if god exists or you know i'm afraid to say that god exists uh and i think it's because you you think or you tend to think that the moral weight like of that is so strong that you would we would crumble under it that you would just be crushed under it and and i think that and i think that that's i think that i i understand that but the first thing that to act as if god exists let's say it this way to act as as if god exists the first thing that it asks of you is not a moral action the first thing that it asks asks of you is attention that's why to act as if god exists is first of all to worship like that's and i know people are going to hear this well then i have then i have a terrible problem with that too at the moment because i'm in so much pain like one of the things that one of these theologians discussed the idea of and sorry i want you to let you get back to your point but he discussed the idea of the yoke of christ being light and that there is joy in it and um and there's a paradox there obviously because it's it's also a take up your cross and follow me sort of thing but um the fact that i've been living in constant pain makes the idea of joy seem um cruel i would say and so and i have no idea how to reconcile myself to that i mean i've reconciled myself to that by staying alive despite it you know um although by staying alive despite it but there's very little worship and it doesn't mean i'm not appreciative of what i have i'm i'm not only am i appreciative of what i have i do everything i can to remind myself of it all the time and so does my wife i mean she's changed quite a bit as a consequence of her struggle with cancer you know has become much more overtly religious i would say and you know we say grace before our meal in the evening and it's very serious enterprise and it always centers around gratitude you know for well for for the ridiculous volume of blessings that have been showered down upon us at a volume that's really quite incomprehensible but despite that um well let despite that i'm struggling with this because i don't know how to reconcile myself to the to the fact of constant pain yeah and i don't i feel that it's unjust which is halfway to being resentful which is not a good outcome no i i i agree and i can't speak like i can't i don't know how to speak to that because i don't necessarily don't have that experience you know i don't i i don't have that i don't live with constant pain and so i don't know what that would do to me probably probably one of the reasons why it might ruin me you know and so um it's very difficult to answer that i think that the answer like the answer has been the cross like that's been the answer it's an ease maybe it may be easy for me to just say it that way uh but that's always been the answer of of christianity which is that that god went to to the cross and that god went down into death and and plunged down into death and there that there are mysteries hidden and there maybe they're very well hidden but there are mysteries hidden in that than that depth um but uh it's not i don't think it's my job to uh to to moralize to you at this point at this particular moment so we talked about the narrative and the object of touching and so i wanted to touch on that again is that like i i i understand cs lewis's argument and you know i'm even inclined from time to time to think well i've got the choice between believing two impossible things i can either believe that in the world is constituted so that god took on flesh and was crucified and and and died and rose three days later or i can believe that human beings invented this unbelievably preposterous story that stretched into every atom of of culture and it isn't obvious to me that the second hypothesis is any easier to believe than the first because the more you investigate the the manifestations of the story of christ the more insanely complicated and far-reaching it becomes so i read ion for example and for all of those who are listening if you want to read a book that will completely make you insane then you could read jung's eye on and it's a study of christian symbolism in astrology which doesn't sound particularly dangerous but or or or or even particularly necessary to read i suppose but young describes the the juxtaposition of astrological and christian symbolism and it's a brilliant book and it's terrifying because he he he outlines the concordance between the levels of symbolism over several thousand years and it's obvious when you read the book that no one plotted this it's not a conspiracy whatever is going on to make that concordance occur isn't something that we understand and it seems to be best understood as one of these situations where the narrative and the objective touch the saturation of christianity with fish symbolism young associates with astrological movement of of uh into the house of pisces and and so he he describes how a drama so ancient people saw a drama played out in the sky and that was a projection of their imagination and that projection contained symbols that were associated with the emergence of christianity and so you you can see in that the the the alternative explanation is that there's this there's this unfolding of a symbolic landscape over centuries or millennia that's part of human biological and cultural evolution but that that starts to touch on the religious anyways when you when you describe it in those terms like it's it's it's the operation of a of a cognitive of a natural cognitive process let's say natural slash cognitive process that supersedes any one individual or any one culture and so i've never seen a critique of ion you know i think people read that book and they think oh it's like john allegro's uh the sacred the mushroom and the sacred cross do you know of that book i believe that's the title that's another book you read and you think well i have no idea what it's a study of mushroom symbolism in christianity and it's another book that you know it it claims that christianity was heavily influenced by psilocybin use and it was published in the 1960s it's an amazing book but it's another book you read and you think i have no idea what to do with that i have no place to put that book so but ion is really like that and well one of the things that for example you know we talked about just before the idea that um you know the idea of christ being a dying and resurrecting god and you know that's really actually not the case if you actually just look at the story of christ and not just the story in scripture but let's say the whole story as it kind of developed in tradition and kind of melded together in the ancient world you had this idea of gods that went down into the underworld you know either that went down for some reason to visit or went down to save somebody even or you know or or died and then and then rose again but that's actually not the story of christ because if you if you understand the full tradition of the christian story we think that christ died went into hades and then destroyed death and he pulls everybody out of death and then that's it like what other story are you going to tell after that story you have a story of someone who dies goes into death and then take and then destroys death and then that's it like that that's the thing with christ's story that every story every aspect of his story reaches the limit of storytelling and it's it's impossible beyond it right that's right that's right well even from a psychological perspective that's correct and that in itself is a kind of miracle and so you're stuck in some sense constantly having to choose between miracles it's like okay it's a it's a figment of the human imagination fine but it's the limit figment in multiple ways how did that happen and also but as soon as you start to start to think that the world is made of attention the idea of just a figment of somebody's imagination especially just a figment of someone's imagination which is happens like you said over thousands of years within communities of thousands of people it just becomes a ridiculous statement it doesn't it doesn't mean anything it's like yeah it only means something if you assume that and jung pointed this out it only means something it only to say it's a figment of imagination and have that brush it aside means that you think that imagination is nothing and you pointed out constantly that you should not attribute nothing to the psyche it's what you depend upon it's it's the ground of your existence it's it's it's not nothing it's the thing you that you take for granted more than anything else so any anything that you can or recognize as a story will definitely be manifesting patterns that you can recognize and so they can't just be brushed aside from this from the most insane conspiracy theory to the the most you know like childish fairy tale anything that manifests itself as a as a pattern of story that you can recognize is has a certain level of value has a an enough level that if you pay attention to it you actually can gather some some some nuggets of uh of how the world works and how the world lays itself out uh you know and that's why like if i do symbolic interpretations i can do it for scripture but i can also do it for some marvel movie or some video game or whatever it is because that's just the for you to even recognize something as having being it's already part of that world it's already manifesting these patterns this critic said that the mere psychologization of christ was insufficient because and you made the same case in some sense that it doesn't make sense unless the narrative and the objective world truly touch and i think you could debate that because i think that there's some utility there could argue to be be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth you know that the best way to cope with existence is to for to tell the truth and to face what you don't know forthrightly and that will enable you to orient yourself within our finite and bounded existence that ends with our death more properly more accurately more advisedly than any other route i've seen people from orthodox priests to you know the more the most protestant protestant you can imagine recognize in the way that you represent reality something that has value something that has value because you're you are manifesting that that pattern like what you're saying is is true uh but i think that i think that if we if we if we take seriously this the prop the relationship between attention psyche and the way the world reveals itself to us then it scales up it scales up after that it it jumps up a level and uh it also scales up in terms of because one of the things that one of the things that that you talk about like looking up to the star and and looking up to the highest thing you can look at and then aiming towards that you know once again one of the things that that does for is that the first thing you do is actually where it's a form it's a tension that people won't like the word worship it's a form of reverence a form of veneration you submit yourself to that aim so it's not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it you actually have to submit yourself to that which is to what you're aiming and so that sacrifice to it exactly and you have to sacrifice to it so that's why let's say the religious version of this has to move towards the highest possible aim and also one that we can do together because like the lower aims like you could call them something like lower gods let's say or angels or whatever you want to call them like these lower aims they have value but they're all fragmented but for this to stack up we need to be able to look towards the same image we need to look towards the same aim and that will bind us together and so we don't we don't all then we don't also end up being just kind of individuals who have the weight of the world on our shoulders but we're a communion of saints we're communion of people who are submitted to aiming towards worshipping the same point yeah and i believe that that's necessary and and i've i've had some profound experiences which i can't really relate here that of of the necessity for that community is that this whatever our fundamental moral load is immense though it is um crushing though it is even um requires the participation of others so even if you were the perfect you you would need other people to be along with you it's a collective enterprise even though it's an individualistic even though it requires the perfection it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual level that's not enough there has to be that communal element as well you need help we all need help to aim as ha the highest aim requires communal endeavor yeah and it's also because it actually is the way that everything works you know it's like the chair aiming to be a chair is a is a constitutive of parts which are joined together towards a a same goal and therefore hold together as a being and manifest the chairness of the chair and that's the same with you you have all these thoughts right you have all these feelings all these these contradicting things inside you and you need by aiming up towards you know the the i mean i believe that the image of christ let's say by aiming towards the image of christ you constitute your being into that being that's able to attend to sacrifice to love and then that scales up with people i agree well i think you are i mean this is another something else i tried to point out to sam um you are you're aiming you're either aiming at christ or something lesser yeah or if things get really out of hand you're aiming at something opposite and you don't want to be doing that but and this is a matter of definition in some sense and it's actually not impossible to understand is that you aim at something better generally speaking i mean maybe you're out to cause pain but forget about that you you aim at something better you wouldn't do it unless it was better in fact it virtually defines better like the whole idea of better is predicated on the idea that there's an aim that's beyond you and then the highest of those aims is the amalgamate the highest aim is the amalgam a amalgamation of all higher aims and that's a perfect mode of being and and that by definite that's a psychological perspective again that by definition is christ and then but then there seems to be something too convenient about cs lewis's insistence that that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history and i'm not like i i don't understand why i should believe that and i don't i tend not to believe things without a why there's always a why and yeah and i there's there's a hurdle there that i that that well that i waver on constantly because i well i already said that you're when you think these things through at least my experience has been if you think them through sufficiently you end up with the choice between impossible alternatives and so yeah but it has to do one of the ways to see it maybe is is it has to do with the recognizing of the goodness of the world or the goodness of creation that that the world is capable of manifesting these patterns right so if you want to understand for example the big conflict between the early gnostics and the christians that's what it was all about because the gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated christ they were saying you know and they viewed the world as utterly fallen as having no value having to be escaped having to be fled in every way whereas christianity posits that it's a non-dual it's a non-dual proposition it's saying it's it all comes together that's the that's the promise it all comes together and so it has to come down right and so it has to come down at every level and not only does have to come down into the person of christ who's incarnated but that person has to go down down into death to the very bottom of the world you know to the belly of the leviathan and then come back up and so the whole world is declared as once again declared as ha being capable of participating in this good and so and so you could say well maybe maybe it wasn't that one maybe it wasn't you know it's like why would it be that particular particular place where it happened but it had to be that's some place that's the story i mean that's where that there is no other story like that story that we have and and so once you recognize that this is part of the declaration that the world does embody these patterns that it leads to this it leads to the the this this story of of a man who embodied them absolutely and is bringing us in him to also embody them in a way that will transform us you know like the the ultimate goal of of orthodox vision of christianity is is theosis it's to become god to become god through to transformation and participation in god so that's the final goal of everything is to become participant in the divine and how do you how do you distinguish that from catholicism no i i mean in terms of that i think that it's a difference of emphasis i think for sure the orthodox emphasized theosis more than the than the catholics the catholics are kind of iffy about theosis in terms of it's there in some of the thinkers but it i would say it's probably not official catholic doctrine but i think without theosis you're missing the point of the whole thing or you're missing the point of of everything like why why do things exist right like why do things exist and so i think that the idea that they exist to participate fully in their most perfect form like that's what they're called to to to part to to do you know and it ends up being a declaration of the ultimate possibility for goodness in the world i think that that's yeah well it it seems it seemed to me i've observed let's say that it's possible to it isn't obvious to me that anyone wants to leave live a meaningless existence i don't think you can live a meaningless existence without becoming corrupted because the pain of existence will corrupt you without a saving meaning and it also seems to me that you can sell the story that meaning is to be found in responsibility when i've tried to sell that story to myself i seem to buy it and when i've tried to communicate it with other people it renders them silent large crowds of people silent and that's strange because i i'm not sure why that is it's perhaps because the connection between responsibility and meaning had never been made for in in that explicitly somehow because meaning gets contaminated with happiness or something like that but it's to be found in responsibility and then you could say well there isn't any any responsibility that's more compelling than trying to aid things in the manifestation of their divine form that should be an adventure that could be sold and i don't know why the church can't do it i don't understand that and because it seems to me that that's something that i've done at least in part and that accounts for the strange popularity of the biblical lectures in particular yeah and but i've also and i i do believe that i do believe that that the right striving is to attempt with all your heart to encourage things to develop along that towards that divine goal like what else would you possibly do once you think that through it's like you're always aiming at something that's better or you wouldn't be aiming you're always moving towards something that's better or you wouldn't be moving so then why wouldn't you move towards the greatest good yeah well it's because it's terrifying i suppose in part but then as you know i've tried to put that into practice in my life and it's tearing me into pieces yeah i don't know though if if one of the reasons it's because you're also alone and i you know i because you i mean at least to my understanding you're not in a in a in a community um well it's hard to say i mean it's hard to say because fans aren't certainly haven't last well they've been a community i mean yeah one of the things that has held me together certainly is the commitment that i feel to to the people who've been so positive towards me and my family i do feel that as a community i understand what you mean why the hell not go to church you know i know he wasn't gonna come right out and say it jordan yeah i know you're not that blunt about it but it's not just you know it's not just about going to church i one time i i told you something and and i don't know if i could drive if i was able to drive it through there there's something about being in a hierarchy that is that because there's an aspect of being in a hierarchy that you talk about which is this kind of striving to to kind of be the best within that hierarchy but there's an aspect of being in a hierarchy which is that the hierarchy covers you oh definitely there's no doubt about that yeah and so there's something about that's why the lowest member the lowest status members of a chimp group will still fight off interlopers yeah and so there's there's a value in being in a community and a and a hierarchy where you like i go to confession right i go to confession i go to my priest and i confess my sins and and i give that to him he actually takes responsibility for for an aspect of listening to my sins and and kind of participating in my salvation and he and so the weight ends up being distributed across the community it's not so you don't actually just bear it on your on yourself and it's not just even and it's not just a living community it's a it's not just those that are live in the in the hierarchy but those that are that have left their story all the saints are part of this hierarchy that you engage in that you participate in and that you see as consolation as examples as you know as examples of people who have lived through difficult things that you can kind of uh that you can shoulder up against you know and so that's one of the reasons why i i kind of insist with at least for the people that watch my videos is is when i say go to church it's not just because i trying to moralize you into doing something it's because it's a it's actually a participation in how the best vision of reality works i've got no objection to any of that but i've seen you i've seen you objection i'm probably one of the only people in the world that has actually seen you in church and seen you yeah that's worm and squirm in church why see the other thing i was reading again i was reading this book and it's been mostly a jumping off place for me to think it's like there's also something because i'm not inside the church so to speak it's hard to say what the utility of that is the utility of being inside the church of being outside it oh being because i'm an outsider talking about religious matters yeah but i think that i think that i think that it has played a great role like i i've often said something that i've often said that you're something like king cyrus if you know the story of king cyrus in scripture king cyrus was a persian king who told the jews to go back to israel and build their temple so he wasn't jewish like he was he wasn't an israelite he wouldn't believe in the god of the israelites but he was like hey you know that temple of yours looks pretty nice why don't you just go back there and and rebuild your own own thing and so that's definitely an effect that i've seen you have you know the number of people that have become christian because of you is hilarious sorry it's not hilarious but it's just kind of it's just kind of this strange thing because you you you kind of stand outside and you look at you're looking at the door and you're looking at the church and you're saying hey this isn't not so bad you know look at this what is what is going on here like what is this about and and then because of that oh it's also do you think you've got something better you know i was talking to a friend of mine the other day when we were walking because as i said i walk about 10 miles a day right now try to keep myself under control and you know he he was raised a communist in poland and and then an atheist and he was complaining i think i think this is what he told me that he was complaining to his parents at one point about a religious wedding that they were going to despite not believing and he said as he got older he realized he had nothing to replace that with it's like okay throw it out fine okay now where are you well you're just as bad off as you were before but you also don't have that beautiful thing yeah it's like what would happen if we dispensed with christmas well if it's not it's a good thing or we could say we could make it entirely secular but then it would just disappear but you know that's not what's going to happen because religion is inevitable and we're seeing it coming back in very strange ways it's going to be a weird woke uh identitarian religion which is which is going to come back that's why primitive you know it did part of it's part of it's going to be privately doesn't matter can you believe that yeah so it's a it's a scary thing like that's what you could say that that's one of the failures of the new atheists is that they led to the well they partly led to the new woke uh phenomena because they they didn't realize that you can't get rid of religion you can't get rid of rituals you can't get rid of the problems and opportunities of identity all of these things are going to come back if you try to just if you try to brush them aside then they're going to come back in very weird ways and without you realizing what's going on you'll have people kneeling to a shrine of a man who was killed by police and putting a halo on his head and you know and self-mortifying themselves and doing all kinds of insane things or that look to you insane but that you need to understand it's just it's just this religious impulse gone gone off the rails so yes and then the question is what's the right place for it that's right you know i've it i've i've thought in my i suppose it's a form of comedy that catholicism is as sane as people get you know it's baroque right and and god it's gothic not baroque it's gothic it's dark it's it's it's it it has the same aesthetic in some sense as a horror film and i'm not being i'm not being i'm not saying something denigrating by that i mean it's part of its strange mystery and all that strangeness is necessary because people would be much more insane without it than they are with it it's a container for that religious impulse and that impulse is to the to the good yeah and and the image of the of the crucified christ and also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together right it's like if you think of the symbolism of communion you'll notice that it gathers in every extreme from the highest to the most uh transgressive all of it comes together it's worth unpacking that it's ritual cannibalism in the service of god yeah yeah but it's also it's also seen as a as a normal like meal of communion and it's then also seen as a as a sexual union because you there's a relationship there's a notion in which then in the altar and in that moment of communion there's the joining of heaven and earth you know the rays of the chalice and there's this joining which is which is this image of this the sexual union between god and the soul between god and his church and so all of it it just jammed into this into into this ritual as a as a kind of center of reality would call it um and so like you said if you get rid of that then you're going to have all kinds of strange factitious versions of it that are going to pop up and are going to try to replace it and it's leading to the fragmentation of our world and to the breakdown of the west for sure so back to this idea of the the the the mythological level and the historical level conjoining and i thought of that as convenient you know it's that that's a stumbling point for me in relationship to the christian story it's you say it has to be like this if the world is constituted in a good manner and it's the has to be i mean is that so just let me say this one thing because i've been struggling towards it this whole it's an act of faith and so let's say that your faith is that you decide to make the notion that reality is good the the cornerstone of your faith it's something that you that you what that you believe or is it something that you courageously assume and is there a difference between that and belief and if you courageously assume that the world is good that reality is good then the touching of the narrative and the objective in this manner that's demonstrated by christ that becomes necessary is that the idea so i to me it's funny i don't see it as an act of faith in the way that we think of an act of faith like this jump of faith or whatever i i see it as an act of trust faith as trust you would say that's fine that would be a courageous assumption if it's trust and and it's trust in the sense also of so when we talk about the good we always have to be careful not to just limit it to the good to the moral good there there is the moral good but when we talk about the good we're talking about the good in a in a much larger way and the good is the the is the pattern of of the things right and in the sense that the the fact that the world lays itself out as ordered as pattern inevitably that there is no way around it you cannot avoid the order of the world because because the in order of you to even perceive anything it has to have an identity it has to have a hierarchy it has to have a margin has to have all these things it's all there in every reactive perception exactly and so in every act of perception and so it's that every act of perception presumes a value hierarchy exactly you can't avoid it and so it's not so it's not like an act of faith in the sense that i i i you know i at the outset think the world is nihilistic and and and and chaotic it's like no i don't i think that on the contrary i think that you could say it in a religious way that the love of god holds the world together and it's inevitable that things are held together by these by these these patterns of being that are always aiming towards the good even in the very identity of whatever it is that you're you're encountering let me ask you something personal then i mean you you weren't born an orthodox christian this is something you came to how well i think that it has something to do with what you said before it does have something to do with the sense that christianity had fallen away from its original story and its original all-encompassing uh let's say cosmic narrative and so it was really i would say in searching for that and kind of discovering symbolic thinking on other fronts and feeling like i was confronted by this like okay so i can see these patterns i can see the world through these through this coherence and it's like why is it then that that christianity doesn't have this uh and then then after more looking and more searching i realized that it did that not only it did but that some of the earliest more some of the most you know powerful early saints talked about the world exactly this way you know um and and so when i discovered that then i looked around and i saw for example that iconography that the relationship between icons and architecture and liturgy and and all of this was like this amazing giant pattern which was reinforcing manifesting making you participate in the way the world actually existed and so it was like this kind of self you know this this this positive feedback loop i guess you could say it in a good way where it's like you you you you recognize these patterns you engage in them you see them you you sing them it's like this whole thing where you're engaged um and so i realized that it was really in the orthodox church that this was the most that had been the most preserved and the most alive and that i would hear you know contemporary orthodox speakers or thinkers or theologians who talked about the world exactly in that way and so i thought okay so this is the place and also because they kept the idea of theosis as the ultimate goal because i think that that's if you know very very early saint irenaeus which is you know like early third century said the logos became man so that man would become god that's one of the earth some of the earliest saints said that you know and so it's like that's really what christianity is and so that's what that's what ultimately led me to uh to uh well it is the greatest of all possible visions yeah yeah and so i but i think that you know and i think that it's their latent even in in in other forms of christianity and like one of the things that i've been trying to do is how people kind of wake up to that reality and try to see it wherever they are how's that going for you well no i'm really serious i haven't talked to you for a long time i mean you've got this i mean you've had a strange few years as well i've had a strange few years as well it's all your fault by the way yeah it certainly feels that way but it's a it's a good it's a good in that sense i mean i've i've been surprised in the past four years since i met you and you kind of put me on out there in the world you know um right now i have with like 90 000 people following me on youtube and there's a community of i would say symbolic thinkers i'm giving them a place to to uh to write like on my on my website i'm putting up a blog there's communities that kind of get together and talk about about this trying to reinvigorate it in their own communities whether that wherever it is they come from and so i've been just non-stop excited about i mean in a way sad to see that i think the breakdown of christianity is is going to continue like you know i i'm not i i don't have short-term hope for let's say the situation but i do believe that there are that there are seeds which are kind of being planted and there are people who are getting ready and and and will bear fruit so so it's been just it's been amazing i have to say and thanks for that by the way i hope i guess you're welcome to the degree that i had something to do with it yeah um did you want i know one on twitter you you asked about the virgin birth i don't know if you want it if you still have juice if you still have energy to talk about that or if or if or sure why not well the the the one of the things that is important i would say in christianity is understanding that the role that mary has to play let's say in the same in the same in the same way that we talk about how the reality of christ came let's i had to manifest itself in the world for us to understand that the possibility of this thing the possibility of how everything comes together right in the same way so in for example in the old testament you have theophanies you have places where god and humanity meet so on the mountain of moses in the temple uh in the garden of eden as well so you have these they're usually at the top of a mountain or they're at the end of a temple okay so it's still a mountain in that so that's a place where two worlds meet that's the narrative world and the objective world really exactly so the the invisible world and the visible world the world of of of logos the world of pattern and then the world of possibility right they come together and then that's when the the coming together at that point is where you see something so it's like that for everything that's where miracles occur yeah but actually yeah miracles are like super events like they they they show us the pattern of reality in a more in a in a more concise way but everything is like that right so even a chair is a bunch of possibilities right that encounters an idea can encounter the purpose of logos and then then you have a chair you can't have just a bunch of stuff or else you don't have a chair you need that to meet so at the center of every thing of everything that exists there's a little temple a mini temple and there's a little incarnation right a little like a mini one it's not i'm not i wanna don't want it to seem uh heretical or anything but there's this little like mini thing that happens and so that aspect has a has a a lower part which is the the nexus of possibilities the coming together possibilities and then this thing that this logos which comes down so this nexus of possibilities you could call it a mountain a house a temple a body that's mary right that's that's her that's she's the place of manifestation so she's the ark of the covenant she's the temple she's the mountain she's all of that um and so and then in and then we play that role you could say the church the body of christ we play that role we come together in love and then the divine logos descends and manifests to unite the body right together and to reveal himself in that unity of the body so we see christ in the unity of love so christ says they will know you by how you love each other because that's how you know that a body exists is that it's coherent it holds together as a body um and so this body has to be dedicated it has to be dedicated to the thing which it's manifesting so like let's say let's say you have a turkey you know uh a car and uh two bits of grass and you think i'm gonna make a chair out of that well it's not gonna happen right it's not gonna thank you we're gonna go that route but that's this is it this is what it's about it's not gonna happen because that's not dedicated and so in the same way of of a a woman and her husband so a woman has to be dedicated to her husband for the union to be recognized and fruitful so if a woman is is not is not faithful to her husband then there's confusion on the identity of the child right but if a woman is dedicated to her husband which means that she's actually a virgin to all other other identities she's virginal to all other identities and she's dedicated only to the one thing so this idea of virginity is super important because it's about dedication it's about not being mixed or not being uncontaminated uncontamination and so then you can understand that in order for something to manifest the entirety of the whole pattern right so it's like so so for for for someone to be the place of manifestation for the whole thing well that is what a mother does like right it's what a mother does because she dedicates herself great to a greater or lesser degree to bringing someone perfect into being and the more she loves the more she dedicates herself to that in every possible way so now the virgin mary is the extreme cosmic version of that where she has to be perpetual virgin she is a cosmic virgin she is perpetually virginal because she's like you can imagine like in order for the sun to reflect upon the waters you know and all those men who don't believe that sort of thing should take careful stock of the fact that they're frequently terrified out of their skull whenever they encounter someone they're attracted to they project that or see it instantly and it and it it it demolishes them and then if they're rejected they're crushed and you can think of that as a projection but you can also think of it as seeing more deeply what's there and that you only see that when you're actually attracted to someone and then that attraction has a basis because you're seeing what they could be even if you're not seeing what's there and so that's so the that's why the necessity of virgin birth because she she is revealing the highest right she's like the she's like a still ocean which is on which the sun is reflecting and if it was mitigated then it would only reflect a mitigated manner and then everything in between is mitigated like i said it's like a woman who's faithful to her husband obviously he's not a virgin in a technical sense you could say she's she's a virginal to others she's untouched by others but she's dedicated to the one man just like well and you know the degree to which that's entangled with genuine virginity off also isn't the k also isn't so obvious yeah you know it isn't we don't know what the preconditions are for for setting up the ideal relationship and and it's certainly the case that we bring the baggage of our previous relationships into our current relationship and maybe sometimes that's for the better and maybe the virginity can be symbolic but people can certainly be sullied by their past behavior and sometimes in a way that they can't figure out how to how to how to repair yeah well for sure their christian ideal has always been the the union of virgins in the sense that then the dedication ends up being tighter right and so you are dedicated to your husband and your husband is dedicated to you and and then you're unmitigated mentally even right like in terms of memories and in terms of comparing and in terms of all of these things which we do as human beings uh and so it it can prevent slippage in terms of your dedication yeah so i don't know if that makes sense in terms of yes i mean you know these things grasping these things slips out in and out of my capacity and i mean i you you did a lovely job there of of of of making a symbolic account for the virginity of mary i understand that i understand well but no one's going to prove the virginity of mary historically i mean that that's not that's something which is not that obviously is not possible it's a secret there's a secret aspect to virginity which is actually part of its function and it's also part of its how can i say this it's part of its of its mystery right which is something which is which is not public you know it's it's it belongs to the identity it belongs to the you know it's like the the dedication of something belongs to that which is it's dedicated right we can talk about this outside to some degree i mean i imagine that you wanted to form the perfect union with someone let's say it's the perfect sexual union for that matter i think that requires love i whenever i've had in my life a sexual experience that wasn't associated with love i didn't feel right about it my conscience bothered me very much very rapidly and maybe that makes me an outlier although i don't think so i think i think that that is how people react but they refuse to notice now i might be wrong about that maybe i'm a prude it's possible although i don't think so but it's possible but it always struck me that sex was best undertaken within the confines of a committed of an ultimately committed relationship that otherwise it was lesser it was the lesser it was less than it should be it was sullied and i now well i don't have anything more to say about that than that that's been my experience and so and i don't know what the preconditions are for establishing the perfect marriage let's say and the perfect marriage would be one that brought about the best possible children these are not trivial things they're very difficult things to get right certainly you want the least amount of animosity unnecessary animosity possible between the parents you want the union to be tight you want it to be based on love and commitment that seems clear even from the psychological literature yeah so i have another question for you go for it go for it this idea of theosis i think it's lack of i i'm tormented by the possibility that it's lack of courage that stops people from from bringing into being that union with god you think you think that possibility that possibility there sits there in front of all of us and it was actually realized once in history well it i would say that at least in the in the tradition of the church it was perfectly manifested in christ but there are there are other saints that have reached theosis and that that's what we're all called to that we're all called to to become one with god to the extent that that's that that's possible well then i guess we're stuck with the old problem which is if that's the case then wha why does the world seem so unredeemed yeah well because we're we're distracted you know with reason where we we tend to attend to the lower things you know we we we get distracted by our our emotions we get distracted by all these things around us that are trying to get our attention and then we aim towards these smaller things you know we we aim towards whatever it is right we aim towards making money we aim towards uh getting this or having some prestige and these because the problem is that these things all give us us a small sense of satisfaction and so they they're like little idols i guess you could call them um and so we just aim towards these these lower things and and that's one of the reasons why we struggle to see this higher ideal you know and so that's one of the reasons why i guess with one of the reasons for church as well is that you know it kind of forces you even if you're distracted or whatever to come together at least once a week or whatever stand yes together i know i i understand that no you know i remember cynicism that was sort of in the air i suppose when the christianity of my youth started to decompose when people started to not attend church in droves the cynical justification in part was well those are one hour a week christians how hypocritical can you get to claim allegiance to this high ideal and then to go back and live your tawdry life how could anyone participate in anything like that and what we've replaced it with is never doing it even for an hour a week which is actually quite a lot of time compared to none yeah so the replacement has not been an improvement by any stretch of the imagination yeah so and then we we replace it because we need to come together and we need to commune and we need to celebrate and so we end up doing it in in these kind of secondary places like sports or politics and all these other places you know we'll we'll replace that but uh ultimately like i said one of the things that help us to trust let's say or or to find some respite is that we do it's together like we're doing this together and so the exact when you see there's some comfort in knowing that that some people have dedicated their life to god and have lived that way and it serves as a smaller example but also as a as a comfort in those moments because usually in the stories of the saints you'll find times when they're struggling when they're they're completely off the rails when they're not you know when they're struggling with thoughts with passions with desires now you see that in the old testament stories i mean abraham is all of the all the patriarchs i mean they lived full lives complete with catastrophic failure and and malevolence and murder and genocide and war and i mean and and yet we're redeemed and so i think that that's one of the things that helps us to to like you said to to to see it's like you don't you don't have to obviously you don't look at the person who goes to church once a once a year or whatever that person has their own thing to deal with you you you you find and you see these these people that are the opposite that really live and everybody has met i would say probably a few people like that at least i've met a few that are just i've met some priests uh monk priests that are glowing like they're just glowing and and you see it in their eyes that they live at a level of of peace and acceptance that i don't have access to and so it's like that type of encounter is also part of your transformation because it gives you it tells you like oh yeah i see it in your eyes like i can see that that this exists you know it's not just something we talk about i will i want to talk a little bit about heaven and so i talked to matt ridley a while back and and bjorn lomberg and i'm interested in their thinking because they're trying to plot an optimistic course for the future one where at the highest levels of social integration we decide how human society should look at least in so far as we conceptualize how it might look if we addressed some of the major problems that beset us but it's an attempt and it's an attempt to make things better it's an attempt to bring about something increasingly resembling heaven on earth i mean heaven is generally conceptualized you can conceptualize it as a state of being it might be the state of being that those people that you described live in i've had paradisal experiences where everything transformed itself into something that was perfect that appeared perfect and i was unable to stay in those frames of mind the heaven is that something we build is that something i don't understand the relationship be between the heaven that awaits us let's say after we die that's the the idea and what we build here on earth do those touch is that the da is that the doctrine there's so much of this doctrine i don't understand at all i think i think a way to to see it has to do with with attention again and it has to do with a hierarchy of attention if you try to build heaven you're going to fail you're going to fail miserably because you because you're not aiming high enough right you're you're aiming and then you you get stuck in this in these weird world of opposites that you don't even understand the side effects of what you're doing you know um and so for one person heaven will look like if everything could be perfectly ordered then right and then we know what that looks like and another person who look at heaven and think if everything could be free if we could all just be free and then that we know what that looks like and so the idea is to look higher uh you know there's a there's a there's a story that we have to strive for something better but then we end up in which users what you're saying is that we end up with the tower of babel or we end up with the flood or we end up with yeah with the catastrophe continual catastrophe of un intended consequences but as you yourself said we are aiming for something better so so the question is how do you person pursue utopia while avoiding the pitfalls and that's a theological question i would yeah it is and i i think it i know this people are going to hate that i say this but it it has to do with worship it's it has to do with what you worship so if you worship if you worship those things that you're aiming towards the lower things if you worship the the making a safer society if you worship them making a freer society if you worship making a stronger society all of these things are going to go off the rails because they they have unintended consequences that you don't understand because they're they're a fragment of reality you know they need to be encompassed together in order to reach something higher and so that's the danger of ideology it's the part takes the place of the whole so that the the the idea is that if you actually if you worship god then those other things will will kind of lay themselves out slowly and you won't be able to force them they'll kind of lay themselves out slowly and they'll start to manifest uh you know progressively and and as you but you have to attend to the highest or else like i said you know and there's a there's even like a there's an image of antichrist which is related to this problem you know uh in scripture you could one of the first antichrist you could say was judas who betrayed christ well there's a story with judas which is very fascinating because christ doesn't talk to judas very often but one of the places where christ talks to judas is when a woman comes in and wants to anoint and wash christ's feet with a very expensive perfume and then judah says what what are we doing like why are you doing this you need to why don't we give this to the poor right and christ says you know the poor will always be with you but the bridegroom christ the messiah is there for a short time yes that's the other kind of story it's very difficult to understand how anyone could have invented that story like it's not the story of propagandists no it's in fact it's the opposite yeah but that story has to do with attention so christ obviously isn't saying he shouldn't help the poor christ has said to help the poor he said it many times you have to help the poor give to the poor of course but he's saying get your hierarchy in order and you'll help the poor more effectively that way than any other that's that's the case there is that is the thing it's like it starts with worship and the acts that she's doing if you look at what she's doing she's first of all she bought something expensive she's sacrificing it she's she's sacrificing it to to to bow down and to wash the feet to submit to sacrifice to and to worship so those three things like when i talk about the aim how you end up having to submit to that aim and so this is what so christ is saying first comes worship then the world lays itself out below that in an appropriate way and those that's what the sermon on the mount says too yeah and those that are are saying help the poor as their ultimate goal in the in scripture it says that judas didn't even want to help the poor he wanted to take the money for himself really like he was a thief actually and he was taking the money out of the purse and so those that just want to rejoice i suppose the truth of the matter is is that the genuineness of your desire to help the poor is precisely proportional to the degree that you embody christ that's right and i can't be otherwise it cannot be otherwise i i i see that i see that clearly because otherwise things will go astray so that's one of the problems with the modern projects of utopia is that they're they're babelesque in their attempts and you can see like the type of gestures that the world authorities are posing in terms of in terms of safety extreme like you know with covet and everything this desire to create absolute safety this desire to create absolute identification and and tracing and all of these weird these kind of weird gestures that show that they think they can control reality is is uh it's leading us towards a very dangerous place well one of the things i noticed i did some work on a committee at one point that was advising the u.n in relationship to the establishment of its millennial goals and there was hundreds of goals never not rank ordered and so it was a tower of babel because you can't have hundreds of goals that aren't rank ordered and have any goals at all because the goal to have a goal means a hierarchy something has to be more important than something else and there isn't anything more important than getting your act together so to speak you know yeah well i'm going to have to think about all this a lot yeah but they're the question that keeps lurking in in the back of my mind which is does the fact that that's how it should be mean that that's the way that it is and that's trust that's a question of trust yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a question of trust with which ends up manifesting itself in love you know um and i think that like the love that you have for the world which is which is which is clear anyways it shows me that you might be closer to that to that trust than than you might want to admit to yourself maybe well i don't know what to do with it i suppose is the real problem especially in my current circumstances yeah i'm i'm i'm the most confused person i've ever met i would say yeah and i've met some pretty confused people so well thank you that was really something yeah you know it's a it's a really a joy to talk to jordan and you know like i said there are thousands of people who are praying for you and and well they're keeping me alive and your story isn't isn't your story isn't over yet you know so much the pity for me well you know i i i really all i can do is really pray that you've that you yeah that you i don't know how to how to formulate it but i i hope that you that you that you encounter a moment of grace and that you can also find find a a body to join with and i'm always here you know like i i we haven't talked in a few years but uh obviously you're there's only so much i can stand talking to you here you're you're more you're definitely always a part of my life you know even if if it's through weird youtube videos and everything you know and and people remind me that you're a part of my life all the time because a lot of people that watch my videos you know they they come they come from you they're always they always start with well i was watching jordan peterson videos and so so you're uh you're a gateway to to uh you're you're a gateway to what i'm talking about you know so well that's a good gateway thank you for the carving it's beautiful i'm happy to know that it's there that it's in your house and let's say michael is uh is at least holding that dragon at bay a little bit we hope yeah good talking to you yeah it's good talking to jordan anytime [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,801,711

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, religion, god, beliefs, jonathan pageau, podcast, podcasting, rogan, JBP, jordan, peterson, peeterson, catholic

Id: 2rAqVmZwqZM

Length: 104min 19sec (6259 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021