The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast XX
[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, Season 4, Episode 59.
[1] I'm Michaela Peterson.
[2] This is part two of meaning, awe, and conceptualization of God, where we'll continue to investigate the religious realm.
[3] Part one was released last week.
[4] Check it out if you haven't already.
[5] This episode is comprised of multiple season four episodes from the podcast, specifically Jonathan Pajot, Randall Wallace, Ian McGilchrist, Bishop Barron, Stephen Fry, and John Verveke.
[6] this is a good one.
[7] We've paired this compilation with some exciting upcoming episodes in the form of next Monday's podcast, which is a conversation between Jordan, Jonathan, Pajot, Bishop Baron, and John Verbeki, where they discuss many of the same concepts you'll hear about today, as well as the role of psychedelics in religious tradition.
[8] This Saturday, tomorrow, we're also releasing a talk given by Jonathan Pajot to the Montreal Young Society.
[9] Jordan and Tammy, my parents were both so impressed by this talk that Jordan decided to add this conversation to the official canon of his biblical series.
[10] Stay tuned for part three of meaning awe and the conceptualization of God next Thursday.
[11] That'll be the final part of this series.
[12] Quick Peterson update.
[13] We're in Cambridge and London in the UK.
[14] It is so wonderful to be with family and not have to worry about health.
[15] Thank God for that.
[16] I can't believe that nightmare.
[17] is over.
[18] I hope you enjoy this episode and have a wonderful weekend.
[19] Where does your insistence that values are part of the structure of being, like, where does that find its limit?
[20] Because the classic limit of that is something like, is, in fact, the day definition of the utmost place of value in some sense is almost indistinguishable from the claim that there is a god.
[21] A god is not the same as an engineering god.
[22] And I take enormous pains in the book.
[23] It costs me more than anything I've ever written to write the chapter called the sense of the sacred in which I try to help people to a place where they can understand why people use this extraordinarily difficult word God.
[24] You know, it's not a satisfactory term, but it's the term we have to have to name an aspect of our experience that if we don't name it, disappears from our lives.
[25] And that's not to say that there isn't something there that merits whatever we mean when we say divine.
[26] I mean, we haven't defined, we haven't defined what we mean by divine.
[27] And we're back in the nets of language.
[28] We're trapped in the nets of language, as Schelling said.
[29] But what I'm suggesting is that as Whitehead suggested, and come on, Whitehead was also the co -author with Russell of the Principia Mathematica.
[30] He wasn't a fantasist.
[31] He had this, I think, incredibly deep idea that whatever one likes to call the divinity, God, whatever, is the thing that the cosmos has relation with.
[32] Relation is at the core of being.
[33] I even argue that relation is prior to the relata, prior to the things that are related.
[34] That sounds nonsense.
[35] How can you have a relation if there isn't anything yet to relate?
[36] But there's a wonderful image in Indian mythology called Indra's Net, which covers the universe.
[37] And in it, the idea is that the filaments of the net exist before the net, before the crossing points, which are the things we see.
[38] And on those crossing points, there are little gems which reflect every other gem in the net.
[39] That would take a very long time to unpack, but perhaps it can set things going in people's minds.
[40] But the idea I have...
[41] A gesture to the right hemisphere.
[42] Is that relation is prior to anything at all, really.
[43] And therefore, whatever we mean by God and whatever we mean by the cosmos are in some sort of dynamic relation, which is an evolving one, in which the outcome is excitingly not known.
[44] If it were known, it would all be some horrible, possibly sadistic play by an almighty, all -knowing God.
[45] I mean, look, I'm going to be talking to Rowan Williams shortly, but I don't want to go into all that I mean by that.
[46] I don't think God is omniscient and omnipotent, but I don't think he's not either.
[47] Just in the same way, I don't think he's green, and I don't think he's not green.
[48] I think the terms are wrong.
[49] But, you know, we can go there if we want them later or another day.
[50] But the thing, what I'm really saying is that these, that God is discovering, becoming unfulfilling whatever God is, through the relationship, which classically in most religions is described as love, which is, after all, just like a form of gravity in the world of life and emotion rather than just in the world of the so -called inanimate.
[51] So, therefore, we are coming into being, God is coming into being, and we're necessary to one another's coming into being.
[52] It's not that God does a bit to us and then we do a bit back to God.
[53] It's like, I've read a very good book.
[54] I keep mentioning it by a young microbiologist in America called Critishama, called Interdependence.
[55] And she argues very importantly that it's not just that, certainly it's not just that an animal or an organism molds its environment, nor is it just good enough to recognize that while an animal effects and shapes its environment, the environment shapes the animal or the organism.
[56] But that this is not a, you know, turn by turn process.
[57] It's not that the animal shapes the environment which then, in its turn, shapes the animal.
[58] It's an entirely simultaneous process of coming into being, of co -creation, if you like.
[59] this idea of simultaneous coming into being is an ancient one, but I think it's a very deep one philosophically and a very important one.
[60] So that accounts for your objection to the idea of the omniscient determining God.
[61] Absolutely, absolutely, because the God has, God would have no creation.
[62] Creation is not really just the unfolding of something that's already there.
[63] The idea of negative theology is you fundamentally, I wonder if this is like Young Circumambulation, you fundamentally understand God by saying what God is not, but not, of course, randomly, right?
[64] What you're trying to do is...
[65] Oh, that's sort of like the God of the gaps.
[66] Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, oh, sorry.
[67] No, no, that's, don't apologize.
[68] We're friends talking.
[69] Well, I don't, I don't want to derail the, the, you know, conversation so there's been it's been like this and it's been wonderful it feels to me like doing touchy um no it's more that it's more of a recognition of not of the god of the gaps but of a recognition how our categorical scheme is always inadequate so for example is god an object well no that's wrong is god a subject like the way we are no that's wrong too that's right so god is well god escapes our categorical right god is by definition in some sense, what escapes are categorized.
[70] Because God is supposed to be the grounding of the intelligibility that makes the categorical scheme possible.
[71] At least that's the...
[72] Right, but God's also presence within the category scheme if it's set up properly.
[73] Right.
[74] So the point about negative...
[75] That's why it's not just the God of the gaps.
[76] The point is to see within the category, that it's present within the categories, but it's not captureable within the categories.
[77] That's what you're trying to do with.
[78] Yeah, yes, the reality supersedes the categories.
[79] Which is why you're not supposed to make idle.
[80] why you're not supposed to make representations of God.
[81] But you can make icons to summon Jonathan back into the conversation one more time.
[82] You can make icons, right?
[83] And you've got John Luke Marion's distinction between the idol and the icon.
[84] What's the distinction?
[85] The distinction.
[86] The icon does not capture God.
[87] Right.
[88] That's exactly it.
[89] That's an artwork.
[90] So an artwork is an icon.
[91] Exactly.
[92] And propaganda is an idol.
[93] Yes.
[94] I would agree with both of those statements.
[95] Well, isn't that something?
[96] Because they're really in some sense far astray, aren't they?
[97] but they do map.
[98] And so how cool is that?
[99] So art is the icon.
[100] How cool.
[101] And propaganda is the idol.
[102] Exactly, man. You know, and I had these paintings in my house and they were melds of the icon and the idol.
[103] Right?
[104] Because it's all this socialist realism.
[105] I have 200 pieces of socialist realism, watching the icon and the idol fight with each other.
[106] And the problem is they are, and I want to get the enomology of this word, at a superficial level of similarity, they can easily be confused.
[107] They can be confused.
[108] Well, I would say they will inevitably confused in the absence of God.
[109] Well, and I...
[110] Because propaganda, like, this is something I've been working out too, John, is that, you know, that we make religious the next thing on the hierarchy if we don't give to what is religious, it's proper place.
[111] And I think the new atheists are beginning to realize this.
[112] The amount of the world's evil that's a common.
[113] consequence of our voluntary moral insufficiencies is indeterminate.
[114] You know, so you might say, hypothetically speaking, that as part of God's creation, we actually have important work to do.
[115] And if we shirk it, the consequences are real.
[116] And you might say, well, that's just an apology for God.
[117] And perhaps that's the case.
[118] And perhaps there's no God at all.
[119] And so what the hell are we talking about?
[120] But I do think it's an important issue.
[121] I mean, your life is characterized by a stellar level of constant productive creativity.
[122] That's you, and you're offering that to the world, and that seems necessary.
[123] And maybe it's because the problems are real and important.
[124] And the role we have to play ethically is of paramount importance, truly.
[125] Why else would we torture ourselves with conscience?
[126] And I would say that's the flowering of the religious instinct within you.
[127] Well, you could describe it as that, but then, you know, there are phrase, I mean, you used a phrase earlier than I wanted to say, whoa, hang on, I'm not sure I know what that means, a higher mode of existence.
[128] I don't see, I remember having this argument with John Cleese, of all people, some years ago.
[129] He was a great lover of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Gilbran and people like that.
[130] And I've always found them slightly hard to take.
[131] and he talked about a, I think the phrase he used was a higher level of consciousness.
[132] And I said, I don't, and again, this is my empiricist thing.
[133] It sounds cynical and skeptical.
[134] It's not meant to be, but what level?
[135] Describe a level.
[136] What is a higher mode?
[137] Why higher?
[138] What's higher than another?
[139] Are you saying it in terms of animals?
[140] It's a view, it's an old -fashioned, Huxleyan view of evolution that most modern, Richard Dawkins, for example, most modern evolutionary science.
[141] and so on, the ethologists would deprecate to say that there is a higher level of being, a higher mode of consciousness?
[142] Is it just like saying, well, you're better educated, you've read more, you know more, is it you've somehow been enlightened, a fair clown's effect, as the Germans would say, which is not necessarily intellectual, but is somehow spiritual.
[143] If so, show me an example of it.
[144] show me someone who has a higher mode of existence than I do, or the...
[145] I can answer that, I think, to some degree, three ways, three ways.
[146] One, that higher mode of existence is what your conscience tortures you for not attaining.
[147] Right, okay.
[148] Okay.
[149] I think what my conscience tortures me for not attaining is that I was rude to someone yesterday and I shouldn't have been.
[150] Right, but it's the shouldn't part of it.
[151] Yes, the obligation.
[152] It's the T...
[153] David Hume, the problem of ought.
[154] Well, and then you think about how it manifests itself.
[155] You don't, this is why Nietzsche was wrong.
[156] You cannot create your own values.
[157] Right.
[158] The values impose themselves on you independent of your will.
[159] Now, maybe there you part, well, that's what your conscience does and good luck trying to control it.
[160] This is very anti -Necher, isn't it?
[161] Well, I'm a great admirer.
[162] I know you are.
[163] That's why I made the point.
[164] Very opposite to his philosophy.
[165] Well, so Jung embarked on a lengthy critique of Nietzsche, and it's part of his work that isn't well known, I would say.
[166] But we'll leave that be, except to say that the psychoanalysts, starting with Freud, well, not really, but popularized by Freud and systematized, showed that we weren't masters in our own psychological house.
[167] There were autonomous entities, and those would be the Greek gods to some degree that operated within us, and we were...
[168] Which is Julian Jaynes' point.
[169] Exactly.
[170] Yes.
[171] Yes.
[172] I have my problems with James, but as an overarching idea, there's interest in it.
[173] Okay, so there are things happening with us and to us in the moral domain that we cannot control.
[174] And that's a, that stunned me when I first learned it as a proposition.
[175] It's, oh, yes, look at that.
[176] Here's one.
[177] What are you interested in?
[178] Well, that grips you.
[179] Okay.
[180] Number two, what does your conscience bother you?
[181] about.
[182] Okay, that's you're inadequate by your own standards.
[183] Now, what adequate would mean that's a different question, but it's defined negatively by conscience.
[184] Yes.
[185] And then better.
[186] There's one that I said I would lay out three.
[187] You can look at Jean -Pierge's work on developmental psychology.
[188] On the development of the subject, yes.
[189] He was a genetic epistemologist.
[190] He wanted to do was, this is what he wanted to do.
[191] He wanted to unite science and religion.
[192] That was his goal.
[193] And he wanted to look at the empirical development of values.
[194] And what he concluded, at least in part, was that a moral stance that's better than a previous moral stance does all the things that the previous moral stance does plus something else.
[195] Yes, yes.
[196] And you can say the same thing as a scientific theory.
[197] I remember I had a great, I loved Piaget.
[198] And his observations were so empirical, of course.
[199] Yes, absolutely.
[200] of the development of the child and the, not quite the theory of mind, that wasn't his thing, but similar developments and signposts where people become aware of self.
[201] So now, Piaget looked specifically at the development of morality, and he was one of the first people to emphasize the importance of games.
[202] And what he showed was that at two years old, let's say, a child can only play a game with him or herself.
[203] But at three, both children can identify an aim and then share it in a fictional world.
[204] So that's partly pretend play and the beginnings of drama and then cooperate and compete within that domain.
[205] And then what happens, and the game theorists have shown this is that games, out of games, morality emerges.
[206] So I'll give you an example, and this is a crucial example.
[207] So if you pair juvenile rats together, the males.
[208] They have to play.
[209] They have to rough and tumble play because their prefrontal cortices don't develop properly if they don't.
[210] Anyways, they have to play.
[211] You pair a big rat and a little rat, teenage rats together, and the big rat will stomp the little rat.
[212] First, first encounter.
[213] So then you say power determines hierarchy.
[214] Yeah.
[215] Okay, but then you pair the rats multiple times, like 50.
[216] Yeah.
[217] Then if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30 % of the time, the little rat will stop inviting him to play.
[218] Until you get an emergent reciprocity, even at the level of the rat.
[219] Yeah.
[220] One of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is something like attention.
[221] It's something, there's a hierarchy of manifestation because everything that appears to us in the world has an infinite amount of details, right?
[222] It has an indefinite amount of ways that you could describe it, that you could angles by which you could analyze it.
[223] And so, nonetheless, the world appears to us through these hierarchies of meaning, right?
[224] I always kind of use the example of a cup or a chair.
[225] Like a chair is of just a multitude of things.
[226] It's a multitude of parts.
[227] How is it that we can say that it's one thing?
[228] There's a capacity we have to attend, and this capacity we have to attend is something like a co -creation of the world.
[229] And so the world actually exists.
[230] It shares a good example because, you know, you can try to define it objectively, but you end up with beanbags and stumps.
[231] And they don't have anything in common.
[232] Well, they're both made of matter, you know, for whatever that's worth.
[233] It's pretty trivial level of commonality.
[234] But you can sit on them.
[235] Yeah.
[236] And that's what they have.
[237] There's a mode of being which defines them.
[238] Well, and that's so strange.
[239] So many of our object perceptions are projected modes of being.
[240] And so even the objective world is.
[241] ineluctably contaminated with its utility.
[242] And therefore, with morality.
[243] Exactly.
[244] And so I think that that's the key.
[245] The key is that once you understand that the world manifests itself through attention and that consciousness has a place to play and actually the way in which the world reveals itself.
[246] And so you can you can try to posit a world outside of that first person perspective, but it's good luck.
[247] It's a deluded activity.
[248] It's also very, very difficult because you You don't know what to make of something like time, because time has an eradicably subjective element and duration, which is different than time.
[249] 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.
[250] And if you take away this objectivity, it isn't obvious what to do with time.
[251] And I think physicists stumble over this all the time, so to speak.
[252] So, and this is something that this intermingling of value in fact was something that I never thought, I never thought I made much traction with Harris, with Sam Harris.
[253] He didn't seem to me to be willing to admit how saturated the world of fact is inevitably with value.
[254] 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, vision as a, oh God, now I can't remember the name of the books.
[255] That's memory trouble.
[256] I'll remember it.
[257] No worries.
[258] The idea is that if that is true, then there are certain things which come out of that.
[259] There are certain necessary things down the road from that insight, which is that attention plays a part in the way the world lays itself out.
[260] And that one of them is that the stuff.
[261] stuff that the world is made of is partly something like attention, something like consciousness.
[262] And that has a pattern.
[263] And that pattern is the same pattern as stories.
[264] It just, it doesn't lay itself out exactly the same.
[265] But things exist with a pattern, which is similar to stories.
[266] They have identities.
[267] They have centers.
[268] They have margins.
[269] They have exceptions.
[270] And that's how stories lay themselves out.
[271] So a story happens in time, how an identity, let's say, is, broken down and then reconstructed.
[272] You could say that that's basically the story of every story, how something breaks down and is reconstructed.
[273] And so that is a way for us to perceive the identity of things.
[274] And so if the world is made of this, then 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.
[275] And it lays itself out in modes of being.
[276] 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, being is that modes of being have you.
[277] And that recognition means that the first level of the first level of attention to that looks something like worship.
[278] It looks like celebration.
[279] It looks like it's like the thing which makes the, let's say the National Hockey League so successful has more to do with celebration.
[280] than just a bunch of guys on skates on a piece of ice, you know, throwing a puck around.
[281] There's a celebration of the purpose of that thing.
[282] 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.
[283] And everybody looks at it and kisses it.
[284] And so there's this veneration, you know, and there's mascots.
[285] The hockey league example is very interesting because it's a, it's a social game.
[286] and no all the players 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.
[287] And so there's an ethic there in a morality.
[288] 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 ethic that's being celebrated as a consequence of this great game.
[289] Right.
[290] So you can see 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.
[291] addictive.
[292] That's right.
[293] Yeah, necessarily.
[294] And so, God, I saw that pro wrestling.
[295] There's a great documentary, Brett Hart called Hitman Hart.
[296] It's one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.
[297] And it portrays pro wrestling as a stark religious battle between the forces of good and evil.
[298] And Brett 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.
[299] It's a great documentary.
[300] Hit Man Heart.
[301] And it shows you how, you know, pro wrestling is, it's not the world's most intellectual activity to say the least.
[302] And people can easily be dismissive of it.
[303] 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.
[304] And it was a religious drama.
[305] It just was shocking.
[306] It was and brilliant.
[307] And 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.
[308] 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.
[309] And so what happens in something like the story of Christ is that that gets taken into one person.
[310] And so all the opposites become the king and the criminal, the highest, even in the image of the cross, you have this image.
[311] As Christ is being crucified, they're putting a sign above his head saying that he's the king.
[312] As Christ is being beaten, they're giving to him a crown.
[313] And so Christ joins together all the opposites.
[314] And so in his story, you see, if you're attentive to these patterns, you see the highest form of this pattern being played out.
[315] 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.
[316] I mean, it can't just be a story.
[317] It has to be connected to the world.
[318] So that's why Christians insist on the fact that Jesus is not just a story, that he's an incarnated man, that he was incarnated.
[319] But I don't believe their insistence.
[320] I don't believe, well, this is, because I don't, it isn't obvious to me. And I think maybe I derived this criticism from Nietzsche.
[321] But, you know, people have asked me whether or not I believe in God.
[322] And I've answered in various ways.
[323] No, but I'm afraid he probably exists.
[324] That's one answer.
[325] Yeah, no, but I'm terrified.
[326] He might exist.
[327] 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.
[328] But then there's a real stumbling block there because there's no limit to what would happen if you acted like God existed.
[329] Yeah.
[330] You know what I mean?
[331] Because I believe that acting that out fully.
[332] 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 a sufficient, you're not, the way you live isn't sufficient testament to the truth.
[333] 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 second.
[334] corruption, for example.
[335] 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.
[336] And it seems to me that the church is actually quite guilty on that account, because the attempts to clean up the mess have been rather half -hearted in my estimation.
[337] And so I don't think people, People don't manifest, Christians don't manifest this, and I'm including myself, I suppose, in that description, perhaps don't manifest the transformation of attitude that would enable, that enables the outside observer to easily conclude that they believe.
[338] Yeah.
[339] Now, the way to deal with that, or the way to understand that is that it, they do, but they do in a hierarchy.
[340] There's a hierarchy of manifestation of the transformation that God offers the world.
[341] And we kind of live in that hierarchy.
[342] And those above us hold us together, you would say.
[343] And so in the church, there's a testimony of the saints.
[344] There are stories.
[345] 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.
[346] And even today, there are saints, living saints, who, for example, in the Orthodox tradition, we have this idea of what they call it the gift of tears or the joyful sorrow of people who live in prayer with weeping, constant weeping.
[347] And it's this kind of strange mix of joy and sadness, which they, which kind of overwhelm them.
[348] And they live in that joy and sadness nonstop.
[349] And they pray, you know, without end.
[350] 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 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.
[351] And I think it's because 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.
[352] And I believe that.
[353] And I think that that's, I think that I understand that.
[354] But the first thing that to act as if God exists, let's say it this way, to act as if God exists, the first thing that it asked of you is not.
[355] a moral action.
[356] The first thing that it asks of you is attention.
[357] That's why to act as if God exists is first of all to worship.
[358] And I know people are going to hear this.
[359] Then I have a terrible problem with that too at the moment because I'm in so much pain.
[360] Like one of the things that one of these theologians discussed the idea of and sorry, I won't let you get back to your point, but he discussed the idea of the yoke of Christ being light and that there was joy in it.
[361] And there's a paradox there, obviously, because it's also a take up your cross and follow me sort of thing.
[362] But the fact that I've been living in constant pain makes the idea of joy seem cruel, I would say.
[363] And so, and I have no idea how to reconcile myself to that.
[364] I mean, I've reconciled myself to that.
[365] I mean, I've reconciled myself to that by staying alive despite it, you know, although by staying alive despite it, but there's very little worship.
[366] And it doesn't mean I'm not appreciative of what I have.
[367] I'm not only am I appreciative what I have.
[368] I do everything I can to remind myself of it all the time.
[369] And so does my wife.
[370] 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.
[371] And, you know, we say grace before our meal in the evening.
[372] And it's a very serious enterprise.
[373] And it always centers around gratitude, you know, for, well, for the ridiculous volume of blessings that have been showered down upon us at a volume that's really quite incomprehensible.
[374] But despite that.
[375] 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 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 have that.
[376] I don't live with constant pain.
[377] And so I don't know what that would do to me. It's probably one of the reasons why it might ruin me, you know.
[378] And so it's very difficult to answer that.
[379] I think that the answer, like the answer has been the cross.
[380] Like that's been the answer.
[381] It's maybe easy for me to just say it that way.
[382] But that's always been the answer of Christianity, which is that.
[383] that God went to the cross and that God went down into death and plunged down into death.
[384] And that there are mysteries hidden and maybe they're very well hidden, but there are mysteries hidden in that, then that depth.
[385] But it's not, I don't think it's my job to moralize to you at this particular moment.
[386] So we talked about the narrative and the objective touching.
[387] And so I wanted to touch on that again is that.
[388] Like, I understand C .S. Lewis's argument.
[389] And, you know, I'm even inclined from time to time to think, well, I've got the choice between believing two impossible things.
[390] I can either believe that the world is constituted so that God took on flesh and was crucified and died and rose three days later.
[391] Or I can believe that human beings invented this unbelievably preposterous story that stretched into every atom of, culture.
[392] 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 manifestations of the story of Christ, the more insanely complicated and far -reaching it becomes.
[393] So I read Iion, 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.
[394] And it's a study of Christian symbolism in astrology, which doesn't sound particularly dangerous, or even particularly necessary to read, I suppose.
[395] But Jung describes the juxtaposition of astrological and Christian symbolism.
[396] And it's a brilliant book.
[397] And it's terrifying because he outlines the concordance between the levels of symbolism over several thousand years.
[398] And it's obvious when you read the book that no one plotted this.
[399] It's not a conspiracy.
[400] Whatever's going on to make that concordance occur isn't something that we understand.
[401] 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, Jung associates with astrological movement of 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 can see in that the the alternative explanation is that there's this there's this there's this this unfolding of a symbolic landscape over centuries or millennia that's part of human biological and cultural evolution.
[402] But that starts to touch on the religious anyways when you describe it in those terms.
[403] It's the operation of a natural cognitive process, let's say natural slash cognitive process that supersedes any one individual or any one culture.
[404] And so I've never seen a critique of eye on.
[405] I think people read that book and they think, oh, it's like John Allegro's the sacred, the mushroom and the sacred cross.
[406] Do you know of that book?
[407] I believe that's the title.
[408] It's another book you read and you think, well, I have no idea what, it's a study of mushroom symbolism in Christianity.
[409] And it's another book that, you know, it claims that Christianity was heavily influenced by psilocybin use and it was published in the 1960s.
[410] It's an amazing book, but it's another book you read and you think, I have no idea what to do with that.
[411] I have no place to put that book.
[412] But Ion is really like that.
[413] Well, one of the things that, for example, you know, you talked about just before, the idea that, you know, the idea of Christ being a dying and resurrecting God and, you know, that's really actually not the case.
[414] 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.
[415] in tradition and kind of meld it together.
[416] In the ancient world, you had this idea of gods that went down into the underworld.
[417] You know, either that went down for some reason to visit or went down to save somebody even or, you know, or died and then rose again.
[418] But that's actually not the story of Christ because if you understand the full tradition of the Christian story, we think that Christ died, went into Hades and then destroyed death.
[419] 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 destroys death and then that's it that's the thing with Christ's story that every story every aspect of his story reaches the limit of storytelling and it's impossible to go beyond it right that's right that's right well even from a psychological perspective, that's correct.
[420] And that in itself is a kind of miracle.
[421] And so you're stuck in some sense constantly having to choose between miracles.
[422] It's like, okay, it's a figment of the human imagination.
[423] Fine, but it's the limit figment in multiple ways.
[424] How did that happen?
[425] 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 happens like you said over thousands of years within communities of thousands of people, it just becomes a ridiculous statement.
[426] It doesn't mean anything.
[427] It's like, yeah, it only means something if you assume that, and Jung pointed this out.
[428] It only means something.
[429] It only, to say it's a figment of imagination and have that brush it aside means that you think that imagination is nothing.
[430] And Jung pointed out constantly that you should not attribute nothing to the psyche it's what you depend upon it's the ground of your existence it's it's it's not nothing it's the thing that you take for granted more than anything else so any anything that you can recognize as a story will definitely be manifesting patterns that you can recognize and so they can't just be brushed aside 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 it has a certain level of value has this enough level that if you pay attention to it you actually can gather some some some nuggets of how the world works and how the world lays itself out uh you know and that's why like if 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 for you to even recognize something as having being, it's already part of that world.
[431] It's already manifesting these patterns.
[432] No, and that is one of the things that the narrative does is that it enables us to play out ideas that we're not yet intelligent enough to understand.
[433] And sometimes the gap between the narrative representation and the explicit understanding can be thousands and thousands of years because we're still unwrapping well we're certainly still unwrapping the bible we're we're unwrapping we're still unwrapping shakespeare there's more depth there than we can than we can understand explicitly and so anything that uses character has that tremendous advantage and then it also there's also this strange ability that some people have in spades to create fictional worlds that are of unbelievable profundity and power and i mean the greatest example of that in the last 30 years, in terms of sheer imaginative power, has got to be J .K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series, which, you know, gripped the imagination of the entire planet for a decade and produced untold wealth and spread literacy everywhere as well.
[434] She had an remarkably creative imagination and something quite mysterious.
[435] And so you're fortunate enough to work at the marriage of ideas and, and drama.
[436] Yes, and, you know, it's really interesting when you've spoken about Dostoevsky and others in some of your lectures, I'm fascinated by him and all the Russians.
[437] I studied Russian for four years in college and read some of these in the original.
[438] My Russian wasn't fluent enough for me to really, I mean, I had to grind through them, but Tolstoy, Chekhov, who was.
[439] a doctor, a medical doctor, as well as a writer, so that that congruence of a commitment, not just in terms of literature, but that he used his profession as a doctor to also inform him as a writer.
[440] He famously said, medicine is my wife, and literature is my miss. and when I tire of one, I spend time with the other.
[441] And Pushkin, who would write stories that were full of thought, but the story itself was bigger than any thought he could put around it.
[442] It was more resonant.
[443] It carried more.
[444] By the way, when I listened to your biblical series, it caused me to decide to read through the whole Bible and just start to finish.
[445] And I grew up Southern Baptist.
[446] So ever since I could read, I've read the Bible virtually every day of my life.
[447] But I'd never read the Bible start to finish.
[448] And there were some books that even when I was a religion major at university, I would get to some of the books and go, I can't stay awake for this book.
[449] just got to move on.
[450] But when you really go through it and you see the Old Testament as this incredible saga of a people trying to find the rules that kept them together as a people.
[451] And it felt if you disobey these rules, then it's going to end badly for us all.
[452] And the greatest the greatest violation is to erect altars to other guys.
[453] Worship, false idols, yeah.
[454] That's the worst.
[455] And then along comes Jesus, who is completely steeped in all that Old Testament.
[456] I mean, he is profound in his knowledge of it.
[457] And he lives and does and says these things.
[458] But it's not like it's a philosophy.
[459] It's a narrative, a narrative which I've studied a great deal.
[460] believe is largely historical, or I should say significantly historical.
[461] I believe these things did happen.
[462] And then you have St. Paul who's trying to make sense of what happened.
[463] And it's mind -blowing to me. It's mind -blowing to read it as a whole and put it into perspective in that, having spent my life.
[464] Well, what's mind -blowing about it?
[465] in part.
[466] I mean, and I try to speak of the Bible, not from the perspective of a committed believer, and I have my reasons for that.
[467] I guess it's partly because I want to concentrate on what everyone can come to see as true, I suppose.
[468] Perhaps that's it.
[469] But it is remarkable that the Bible does, in fact, make a coherent narrative.
[470] Because we don't understand that.
[471] It was written by a very diverse range of people over a span of time that we can perhaps not even imagine.
[472] It's very difficult to tell how old the oldest stories in Genesis particular are, the story of the fall of Adam and Eve and Kane and Abel.
[473] They bear all the hallmarks of a previous oral tradition that would have existed in relatively unchanged form for tens of thousands of years.
[474] and perhaps even longer than that.
[475] And so they're unbelievably ancient, and then parts of it obviously are newer, and the written parts are obviously newer than any tentative oral tradition.
[476] But you have a, you have at the bare minimum, an unbelievably deep psychological document that weaves itself over centuries into a coherent story.
[477] And Northrop Fry, I would say, he's a Canadian literary critic, has did more for me than any other particular thinker to help me understand the nature of the narrative.
[478] Because Fry, and I suppose he did the same thing, or I'm doing the same thing that he did, because he preceded me also at the University of Toronto.
[479] He assessed the Bible as a work of literature, as a narrative.
[480] And that to me was never any denigration, because narrative, a powerful narrative, and you talk about this when you talk about Braveheart, for example, because there isn't that much known about William Wallace historically, but you crafted a narrative that was true enough, let's say, to be unbelievably attractive to people and to motivate them very deeply because it's an affecting movie.
[481] Well, and if it wasn't, it wouldn't have been so popular.
[482] And so there's a truth in narrative that I think is even deeper than historical truth.
[483] A true, like a truly profound narrative truth is like the average of a whole variety of historical truths.
[484] And so it's the essence of historical truth.
[485] So it's even more true than what we would consider, say, eyewitness history, because eyewitness history is just, it's one battle, you know?
[486] And there's maybe an epic theme in that battle, but then imagine that you could look at a thousand battles and you could and you could extract out from that what was canonical about heroic victory across all 1 ,000 battles.
[487] You see something like that happening in the Old Testament.
[488] And the narrative thread is really quite deep.
[489] The societies emerge, formulate, fall off the path, worship false idols, collapse.
[490] And then the same thing happens again, and the collapse happens.
[491] And the collapse happens because people become too prideful, the kings in particular.
[492] They don't listen to.
[493] the voice of conscience.
[494] And a prophetic voice arises and says, you're wandering off the tried and true path, and you're going to be punished terribly for that.
[495] And generally speaking, the kings ignore that and catastrophe breaks free.
[496] And you see, and in the Old Testament in particular, there's the promise of the ultimate state in some sense.
[497] There's utopian promises that run through it, the search for the promised land.
[498] And then so strangely, you see that transformed into something that's not really political in the New Testament.
[499] You see that the promised land becomes the nature of experience as a consequence of a particular form of moral being.
[500] And then perhaps that has political implications because people who acted like that would produce a particular state.
[501] But it's no longer the dream of establishing the state that will solve all.
[502] problems.
[503] It's psychologized and it's it's unbelievably profound and it's and that's I think you can derive all of that from from the biblical writings without even starting to move on to classically religious territory and and it's and then that does beg the question of course is what does all that wisdom point to in the final analysis and that's when the question start to become religious.
[504] Yes.
[505] And well, Jordan, that's that's the part to me that it takes it into a whole whole different realm as you as you say.
[506] There's a quote from Mary Oliver that a friend shared with me recently.
[507] It's keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
[508] And I find that in a great story or any great piece of art, that surprise is the central currency of its power.
[509] There's an element of, if you will, of revelation, if you will.
[510] And I think it was Paul Tillick, I'm not sure, who said that religion is man's way to God and there's always erroneous, but revelation is God's way to man. Maybe it was Carl Bart, it's God's way to man and it's always perfect.
[511] Well, there's a revelatory aspect to any great story.
[512] when you're telling someone a story and they didn't see coming what just happened that's what makes them awake that's what stabs them broad awake do you know what my the most powerful takeaway for me was from my biblical series which which is what the meaning of the word israel wrestling with god we who wrestle with god yeah who struggle with god yeah it's like well maybe that's the real Christian spirit is, and that's what that phrase implies, and that's the real Jewish spirit.
[513] It's the wrestling, John.
[514] Why does, you know, why is, why is there that strange scene of the wrestling with the angel?
[515] Like, why would you possibly fight with God?
[516] And then you think, well, God, isn't that what I'm doing all the time?
[517] And he partially wins.
[518] Isn't that what everybody's doing all the time?
[519] He partially wins, though.
[520] That's what's even more mysterious.
[521] And hurts you doing so.
[522] Yeah.
[523] I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's the story.
[524] But isn't that the story?
[525] But isn't that the story?
[526] I mean, it isn't belief.
[527] It's the wrestling with belief.
[528] And it's wrestling in the way that you're wrestling.
[529] Well, I mean, I do sparring.
[530] And I often use sparring as a metaphor for the kind of...
[531] Oh, so that's the other metaphor for dialogue.
[532] Yeah, exactly.
[533] It's not just the tracking.
[534] It's the sparring.
[535] Yeah.
[536] And we have to remember that, you know...
[537] And that kind of sums up men's relationships.
[538] Well, Plato means...
[539] With each other tracking and sparring.
[540] Plato means big shoulders.
[541] He was a wrestler.
[542] That's his nickname.
[543] His nickname is Plato because he's a wrestler.
[544] And we have to remember that the Greeks are in the gymnasium even more than there are in the academy.
[545] I was watching this suits episode last night.
[546] And the man are always sparring with each other verbally, you know.
[547] And they're tracking something.
[548] They're tracking victory in this series.
[549] They're phylaya.
[550] And they wrestle.
[551] They wrestle when they fight.
[552] They have to go into a clinch and a flinch in a fight.
[553] fight to settle their disputes, like a physical fight?
[554] But you can shift off of that.
[555] This happened, Bernardo and I when we were doing this.
[556] We both said this.
[557] You can shift off of it.
[558] And this happens when you're actually martial arts sparring because you get into the shared flow state.
[559] You can shift off of victory to the aesthetics of the dance.
[560] There's a beauty in that that is an independent, that's independent of victory that you can come to appreciate for its own sake.
[561] Plato talks about this.
[562] He talks about the beauty, the eros, that draws you.
[563] into the, that's why he, I mean, it's a dance.
[564] Yeah, a dance, but it's a dance that draws you beyond yourself, Edu's education, right, to draw forth from you.
[565] So is that the, is that the battle with the adversary?
[566] Is that related to the, this is another very serious question, obviously.
[567] It's a question related to the book of Job.
[568] I don't know because I see parallels, you know, in Nietzsche's quote, you know, I hate Socrates.
[569] He's so close to me. I'm always fighting him, right?
[570] You can see, you can see both Nietzsche and Kirkagard wrestling with Socrates.
[571] Kirkagard said, I follow Jesus, but Socrates is my teacher.
[572] And he wrestles with Socrates all the way through.
[573] Everybody's wrestling with Socrates.
[574] I follow Jesus, but Socrates is my teacher?
[575] So is that the statement of the West?
[576] I think that.
[577] I mean, that was your objection at the beginning of this talk, right?
[578] At least to some degree, because you said how influenced you were with Greece, you insisted on how influenced you were by you.
[579] Greece.
[580] I think the West is the attempt to, if I had to try and summarize the West, what an audacious thing to try and do.
[581] See, Ruck, Ruck said that, because I asked him why Dionysius transformed into Christ, because we were answering simple questions too, and he said, well, Greece met Judaism.
[582] Yeah, but Judaism also met Greece.
[583] I mean, final starts theology because of the interaction with platonic philosophy.
[584] I think Christianity is trying to integrate Agape and Logos together.
[585] That's how I try to understand its project.
[586] Please clarify that claim.
[587] Sure.
[588] So I think, I mean, we've talked a lot about the Greek heritage of Logos, and Logos is also central within.
[589] Especially in the book of John.
[590] Yeah, especially in the book of John.
[591] And saying that metaphorically with regard to you is well.
[592] But also in the epistle of John is where John also said God is agape, right?
[593] And then that's the epistle of John.
[594] He makes that famous statement.
[595] And the idea is there's something, there's something about the way the Logos gathers things together.
[596] So they belong together.
[597] That's the original.
[598] So that everything comes together.
[599] Everything comes together.
[600] And then there's the idea in Plato of the ascent from the cave, the anagogy.
[601] You and Jonathan talked about this.
[602] the world discloses itself to me that transforms me and then I can see more deeply into the world than that transforms me and I do this reciprocal opening and the thing is that's very much if you know you know and agape that's do you define that that's love yeah accelerating mutual disclosure is how it's even disclosed well it seemed to me well it seemed to me that the relationship between truth and love is that love is the is something like the goal and truth is its servant it seems to me to be same because I think so this is how I've worked it in my in my mind is sure sure well I think the truth is the best servant of reality truth is the servant of reality and reality I think best manifests itself as love well one of the slogans I have in my that's why this power claim is so abhorrent to me the claim that power is the central motivating factor for the western endeavor is tantamount, I believe, to saying that it's the basic endeavor of the human species, and I think that's opposite of the truth.
[603] I think this agape is and Logos is more accurate, and so it's not just a counterclaim, it's an antithesis.
[604] Well, I'm trying to pick up on what I'm saying here.
[605] You know, I'm trying to touch on the culture wars obviously.
[606] Well, that's, yeah, and I mean, I think, I mean, for me, you're saying something very, analogous to a critique that I've built in, Awakening for the Meaning Crisis.
[607] Let's hear it, man. Fucking shut up.
[608] No, it's okay.
[609] I mean, like I was going to say, one of my signatures is, you know, it's in Latin, but it translates as love is its own way of knowing.
[610] And the kind of knowing there is, like, noticing, like news and insight.
[611] That's the Egyptian eye.
[612] Well, yes.
[613] It's noticing.
[614] It's not thinking.
[615] It's attention.
[616] And maybe you're tying that with that revelation of the form.
[617] You're tying that to that.
[618] revelation of the form and that conforming.
[619] Yeah, and that's exactly it.
[620] That's exactly it.
[621] It's, it's, it's, and this is very similar to the Buddhist idea of that the, the, what you're trying to do is shape attention and mindfulness so that you get that reciprocal opening so that your, your self -knowledge and the knowledge of the, of the world become indistinguishable, become interpenetrating, like what you have when you really love somebody in a committed long -term relationship, you're knowing of yourself and you're knowing of them become bound up because you indwell them and you internalize them and they endwell you and internalize you, right?
[622] And how much how much death of the old you has this involved for you?
[623] I know that's a strange question.
[624] No, it's a good question.
[625] It's a damn good question.
[626] Why?
[627] It's a good question because it brings up the idea of the fact that there's a level of knowing that deals with the process of identification itself, in both senses of the word identifying, designating something and assuming an identity.
[628] In both those senses of identification, the kind of knowing that I most care about, this participatory knowing, involves in identification.
[629] And therefore, if we're talking about the transformation at that level, we're talking about, that's what I mean, about, when I talk about knowing, knowing yourself, I don't mean representing yourself.
[630] I mean the knowing that constitutes you.
[631] you as a self.
[632] And that's what's undergoing the transformation when you're engaged in participatory knowing.
[633] When I really love my partner, right, I'm not just forming.
[634] What does it mean that you love them?
[635] Do you think if you had to express that?
[636] How would you express that?
[637] Well, I mean, it means a lot.
[638] It means that reciprocal opening I was talking about, but it means that I, I mean, it's like what Eckhart says.
[639] And again, I don't mean to be pretentious.
[640] Like, you know, he said, you have to make a space.
[641] I don't think you're going to be able to help it in this conversation.
[642] issue.
[643] Yeah, that's true.
[644] That's fair enough.
[645] He says, you know, you have to...
[646] God forgive us.
[647] The goal of Rhineland mysticism was to, this kind of receptivity, you have to make a space so that the son of God can be born within you.
[648] And again, no, not being disreligious, you know, irreligious, but for me to love my partner is to cultivate that kind of receptivity, a space in which she can be within me. And I don't mean in any purely romantic metaphorical sense.
[649] What I mean is she finds a purchase within me whereby she can realize herself in both senses of the word realize and she can come to trust that that space, that place of realization will always be available for her and she can come to rely on it a place through which she can transcend herself when she needs to.
[650] I mean, and being committed to that and finding that inseparably bound up with my own project of trying to realize who I am, that's for me the core of what it is to love somebody that's great i wish you luck with it well that's all we can ever wish anybody i mean if you're if you're the grace of god or yeah or or that there is a life to this relationship that will eventually grow strong enough that we can come to trust in it as much as we trust in each other and that's what i believe is happening for me. And I think there's kind of three loves involved, and they're all bound up together.
[651] There's, you know, Socratic self -love, not narcissistic self -love.
[652] There's the love of the other, and then there's the love of the relationship.
[653] But that, for me, is like a Trinity, talking about if those are separate is the mistake.
[654] You have to talk about it analytically as if they're separate, but they interpenetrate and inter -affort each other in a profound way.
[655] They become in an important, sense indistinguishable from each other.
[656] Think about this admiration is the instinct to emulate.
[657] Okay, so then we look for the most emulatable.
[658] That's the ultimate spirit.
[659] And I think Gerard is right, that that always carries with it the dark side of memetic envy and covetousness, and that those two are always playing off against each other.
[660] Because we think we can possess it by ill God means.
[661] That's the story of Cain.
[662] Yes, yes.
[663] And of course that's carried with us because the story of human history is the battle between Abel and Cain, which is also why I asked you about this fundamental cultural crisis that's tearing us apart.
[664] And you said, well, that's a manifestation of deeper things.
[665] And that's, well, that's what I ask too.
[666] Yeah, and I hope that what we've been doing is actually my answer to that.
[667] I can say more about because I've been involved and am involved in some actual experiments on awe and the effects on cognition and some of the work.
[668] I don't know if what we've been doing is the answer to that or the antidote to that.
[669] To which, sorry.
[670] Well, if the question is posed wrong, we can't really answer it, can we?
[671] We have to provide an alternative formulation.
[672] But that's what I think we're doing here.
[673] Yeah, so it's an antidote rather than an answer.
[674] And that's fine.
[675] I know, I know.
[676] I'm just clarifying it.
[677] I think looking for the answer is in some sense a fundamental way of mis -framing it.
[678] That is to give in to the problem.
[679] Well, how do we address it, then?
[680] How do we address it, John?
[681] Do we just bicep it and just offer the alternative?
[682] No, no. That's a genuine question, because perhaps we do just sidestep it and offer the alternative.
[683] Yes, that's what I'm saying.
[684] I don't know.