The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast XX
[0] Welcome to Season 4, Episode 57 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
[1] In our second weekly compilation, we're investigating the various methods and practices that humans use to conceptualize God.
[2] This investigation leads us down the path of exploring meaning and wonder.
[3] What does it mean to live as though God exists?
[4] Why are we awestruck when viewing a beautiful painting?
[5] Why does walking inside a great cathedral render us speechless?
[6] What does the relationship between these examples?
[7] experiences and God.
[8] Dad talks about how living as though God exists is some form of evidence that we as a society hold these values in high regard.
[9] I hope you guys enjoy this episode and have a wonderful week.
[10] It isn't obvious to me that anyone wants to live a meaningless existence.
[11] I don't live a meaningless existence without becoming corrupted, because the pain of existence will corrupt you without a saving meaning.
[12] And it also seems to me that you can sell the story that meaning is to be found in responsibility.
[13] 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.
[14] And that's strange because I'm not sure why that is.
[15] It's perhaps because the connection between responsibility and meaning had never been made for in that explicitly somehow because meaning gets contaminated with happiness or something like that.
[16] But it's to be found in responsibility.
[17] 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.
[18] That should be an adventure that could be sold.
[19] And I don't know why the church can't do it.
[20] I don't understand that.
[21] 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.
[22] 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.
[23] So then why wouldn't you move towards the greatest good?
[24] Yeah.
[25] Well, because it's terrifying, I suppose, in part.
[26] But then I've tried to put that into practice in my life.
[27] And it's tearing me into pieces.
[28] Yeah.
[29] I asked you to define love.
[30] And I'm going to define it on my terms now, and that is the best in me serving the best in you.
[31] And I think that's the deepest pleasure.
[32] That's the deepest and most lasting pleasure.
[33] and it is the most fundamental motivation.
[34] It's the inexhaustible source.
[35] Because if I can do that, whenever I do that, I feel that I'm being properly.
[36] And there's nothing better than that.
[37] And you can extend that to the world, to situations, places.
[38] Well, I think that's what you're supposed to do by accepting the proposition that God is love.
[39] I mean, it's God is love and God is logos.
[40] Those are both there.
[41] So then the question, to some degree, is the rank order of the two, and I would say God is truth within love.
[42] And that's the animating spirit of mankind.
[43] And that's a way different claim than the one the atheists are going after, by the way.
[44] Yeah.
[45] Think about it, everyone.
[46] Is truth in the service of love, not the best animating spirit of mankind when it isn't pursuing an aberration?
[47] We can all ask yourself that question.
[48] I think that's a good question to ask.
[49] Thank you, John.
[50] What I mean is I think it it re, I think it reorientes us to the fact.
[51] We can put that on a t -shirt.
[52] Is truth in the service of love a good question?
[53] I guess I see them as more, I see them as more interpenetrating.
[54] I want to make a stronger relationship between them than just a relationship of service.
[55] I mean, this is why I like the term realization, that love is a way of affording realization.
[56] and the deepest knowing you have of reality is in realization.
[57] That's what I, if I had to put it into a word.
[58] So it seems to me, okay, so I'll make an appendage to my claim.
[59] Right.
[60] The reality that is most justifiable is brought about by the action of truth in the service of love.
[61] Yeah, but I guess what I'm saying is I see truth.
[62] I think you're using it.
[63] And I've heard you use true as something beyond a correspondence between the semantic content of a proposition reality.
[64] I've heard you talk about, right, right?
[65] And we even use that when we, when we use the phrase true love.
[66] Yes, it seems to incorporate some of those other dimensions that you're talking about.
[67] Exactly, exactly.
[68] Okay, well, great, Matt.
[69] So fill me in.
[70] Well, that's what I'm trying to get at.
[71] I'm trying to get at that power is a way of, you know, when your shot is true, your skill has been effective and you're going to hit the mark, right?
[72] But presence is also a way in which things are true to form, right?
[73] And then the participatory knowing is when we're like the deepest sense of true, which is, you know, related to trust and and being betrothed to the world in an important way.
[74] So if you will allow me to expand what you mean by true to cover all of those dimensions.
[75] Betrothed to the world in that you extend the same courtesy to the world that you described extending to your partner.
[76] Exactly.
[77] I think the answer to nihilism isn't some propositional answer.
[78] This is what I get from Nishten.
[79] It's to relearn, and I mean this deeply, in the Buddhist sense of Sati, to remember what it is to fall in love with reality, to fall in love with being.
[80] And if that's what you're saying is the animating thing.
[81] Do you think that's what Sam Harris is striving for in his spirituality?
[82] Well, it's not a throwaway answer.
[83] It's like, what's he up to exactly?
[84] I mean, he's, he's, he's, he on a Sophia, um, finally a Sophia adventure.
[85] sure?
[86] I think everybody is, how can I put this?
[87] Everybody lives from the non -propositional kinds of knowing emphasized by Plato.
[88] And that's what all of the scholastic research is pointing to now, that Socrates was trying to point people to the non -propositional knowing, the procedural, the prospectival, the participatory.
[89] I think we all have to live from that, given a lot of things I've said and a lot of things we've said.
[90] Well, you should, maybe you could, you could expound on a bit more for us and clarify a bit more.
[91] And so you said the answer to nihilism, that isn't, that isn't exactly a comment on my comment that the culture war is about a claim that the drive to power is at the core of Western being.
[92] I think that's an equally nihilistic claim.
[93] That's my point.
[94] The claim is nihilistic or my claim about that is nihilistic or both?
[95] that power is a fundamental reality is an attempt to assuage the wounding of nihilism, but it is fundamentally mistaken in its endeavor.
[96] It is constituted the wrong way.
[97] It's like framing a problem the wrong way so that you do not get the insight needed to get to the solution of the problem.
[98] So I think of it as a fundamental misframing.
[99] That's what I'm trying to say.
[100] And that's why I'm not, that's why I'm hesitant to say either yes or no to it because I get it.
[101] Well, I believe that it is mis -framed because I don't think it would be taking us in such a pathological direction, the whole argument if it wasn't mis -framed.
[102] Thinking psychologically, again, about Christianity.
[103] And I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought, but that predated.
[104] But it looked to me like, and some of those were derived from Mesopotamian, some of them were derived from Greece, and some of them were derived from Judaism and other sources.
[105] But they all seem to me to be part of the conversation that human beings have been having amongst themselves for thousands of years about what the nature of the ideal human being is.
[106] I see these cathedrals, these works of art in architecture that took a tremendous amount of labor, produce a dome -like structure that represents the sky, and you see Christ as logos spread out on the sky as a transcendent force.
[107] And you ask yourself, well, what exactly is that signifying?
[108] And the answer is at least the proposition of a kind of ideal that's associated with, let's say, universal love and truth in speech.
[109] That's the logos, summed up in two phrases.
[110] And if there's no metaphysical reality there at all, there's still this imaginative enterprise that characterizes the entire human, what, imaginative effort, cultural effort to posit a transcendent ideal that we would live in relationship to.
[111] And I just don't see that case being made very strongly, and I can't really understand why, because isn't it rather obvious that at least part of what Christianity has been is the attempt by thousands of people over thousands of years to spend?
[112] the nature of an ideal?
[113] Certainly, I would say so, and I would say that the fact that these principles actually work is proof of their, of the proof of their being true accounts of what the nature of the real is.
[114] Well, let's approach this from a couple of different angles, Jordan.
[115] You know, the first is, I mean, one of the things that I profoundly believe is that that, you know, these young people seeking, you know, deeper answers and, you know, to, however much they may be flailing about, you know, it's not their fault that many, perhaps most of the institutions they will encounter will betray that which is deepest in them.
[116] We'll, will denigrate, we'll tell them, no, none of this thing, none of these things that you're seeking are really real.
[117] I mean, I think, you know, I've been talking, uh, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, thinking a lot over the years about architecture and what is going on in brutalist architecture.
[118] And it really does seem to me that in brutalist architecture, to live in relation to brutalist architecture, it is as if you had a parent that said, you know, you're nothing.
[119] You're nothing.
[120] You'll never amount to any.
[121] Of course, there are terrible people, terrible to say people actually, there are people in these situations who live with such dysfunctional lack of love and antagonism.
[122] This is the way that the, the, the home life that they, that some people terribly have.
[123] But I'm using this as an example because I think what brutalist architecture does is it declares to the whole world and to you that you are, there is no truth.
[124] There is no beauty.
[125] You are nothing except it.
[126] It's just a concrete, uh, uh, uh, annihilating force.
[127] And, and, and, and, and, and you see this culture of repudiation.
[128] I mean, here in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in Savannah now.
[129] But, you know, the Chateau Lurier, I think I misspoke recently, called it the Frontenac, which is in Quebec.
[130] But in Ottawa, you know, the Chateau Loret, there's been a desire to expand this sort of beautiful sort of neo -Gothic building.
[131] And it went through six rounds of approval to finally be, to make a set of plans that would meet the local architectural or review board, whatever it was.
[132] And I thought, well, it can't be that bad.
[133] You know, it's gone through that.
[134] And I mean, this structure is abhorrent.
[135] It looks like a cross between a Verizon server farm and an American penitentiary.
[136] I mean, it is just a, it is a declaration that there is no higher order at all.
[137] In Edinburgh, they're tearing all those out, eh?
[138] There is, Edinburgh is an unbelievable, beautiful city.
[139] The whole central mile of it, square mile essentially, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
[140] And it's marred by random placements of 1970s, brutalist architecture.
[141] And they're just horrible.
[142] It's complete lack of regard for the architectural context.
[143] And they're all being torn out and replaced, thank God.
[144] So, well, this architectural idea.
[145] So back to the cathedral, you know, what's really interesting about a cathedral with, let's say, Christ as pantacrator on the ceiling is spread against the ceiling, is that it's not the state that's portrayed.
[146] up there.
[147] It's not a map of the country.
[148] It's not even a map of the world.
[149] It's not a geographical locale or a political institution.
[150] It's the transcendent individual.
[151] And, you know, it's just not obvious to me. It seems obvious to me that that's correct.
[152] And that if it isn't the transcendent individual, then it becomes the state.
[153] And as soon as the transcendent becomes the state, then we have a catastrophe.
[154] And I don't see any difference between the insistence that our identity is predicated on our group membership.
[155] I don't see any real difference between that and the insistence that we're just handmaidens of the state.
[156] It's a totalitarian insistence.
[157] And I think part of that too is maybe, you know, I learned from Jung that as soon as you posit an ideal, you also specify a judge.
[158] And the more, the higher the ideal, the more severe the judgment because of your distance from the ideal.
[159] And so part of what we're seeing too might be a rebellion against the awful requirements of that ideal.
[160] But that doesn't justify.
[161] That doesn't justify the rebellion.
[162] Because if it's really the ideal, then if you don't act it out it, you fail to act it out at your peril.
[163] And then we need to have a serious conversation about the metaphysical, about the practical implications of the idea of this ideal.
[164] I mean, if we've had this conversation about the transcendent individual as the ideal against which we should all be judged and to which we should strive to emulate, is there any relationship between that ideal and the structure of reality itself?
[165] Because that's the $100 question, so to speak.
[166] You know, we have a human ideal, and you could say merely psychologically, maybe even merely biologically, that that's something we originated that's part of our biological nature that's expressed in this ideal, and it's nothing more than that.
[167] But you could also say, well, perhaps it is something more than that.
[168] Perhaps it's reflective of the structure of being itself.
[169] I mean, it depends on our position in the cosmos.
[170] You know, we are self -conscious.
[171] We are that which reflects being itself, or perhaps even makes it possible.
[172] It's not that obvious what our role is.
[173] It might not be so trivial, despite our mortality.
[174] Well, I would say that not only it is as you say, but we can know it to be, as you say.
[175] I mean, this is what the whole history in some sense of literature and philosophy and theology is about, is a, and I want to insist on this.
[176] It is a rational grappling with these questions, realities, and indeed truths.
[177] I want to come back to something in a minute, but just on this topic, one way into this is to reflect on the fact that reality is not zero sum.
[178] Of course, we know this economically.
[179] You were talking Jordan a minute ago about the voluntary exchange of regulated, that is to say, a contractually governed marketplace, that in this exchange, you know, it's not, is it zero sum.
[180] We all end up over time better.
[181] But you also see this naturally in the evolution of the diversity of species, of languages, of cultures.
[182] You've written beautifully about play as orienting the child in relation to a deepening reciprocity with others.
[183] We know this in terms of knowledge.
[184] I mean, how can it be that in a conversation I can be wrong and be shown to be wrong?
[185] And that be a net gain for me?
[186] I mean, you know, I, the whole, the whole point of free dialogue is that we can learn from, we can learn in our not knowing, that the conversation is not zero sum, that even in our, in our, we know this in terms of forgiveness, that even our betrayals of beautiful things can become deepening engagements with what we have betrayed, if we have the humility to see it.
[187] And so then, you know, I think, you know, that leads one to, you know, geez, you can go back, you can go at the level of subatomic particles in physics.
[188] I had a pleasure of talking with Freeman Dyson before he died.
[189] And, you know, Dyson will say very clearly that against the determinists, you know, some of the rational optimists, they're pretty religiously determinist in their, in their worldview.
[190] You know, and they want to marshal modern science as, as, as, you know, as saying that their determinism is what science teaches.
[191] But that, you know, Dyson, who was a subatomic physicist at the highest level, you know, expressly said the opposite.
[192] He said that the electron, that, you know, you, the, essentially he says that the electron is free, that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, that at the very most detailed level of subatomic particles, things are not determinist.
[193] And the reason I want to go all the way down to that level, is because you can go down to the lowest level of resolution, then you can back up to the higher level and see that there is a non -zero -sum nature to what is real.
[194] And then you have to ask yourself, is it good to live in relation to what is true, or should I live in a delusion?
[195] And we say, well, it's better to live in relation to what's true than to live in relation to a delusion.
[196] And then you say, well, what would it mean then for me to live in relation to this positive sum, this essential reciprocity, which I think is really what the Christian view of the Trinity is about, this essential reciprocity, which is the bedrock of all reality?
[197] What would it mean to live in relation to that?
[198] What would it mean to remember that?
[199] And, you know, one can approach that in any number of different ways, but certainly that is what prayer is.
[200] That is what all spiritual exercises are.
[201] That's what perhaps walking in nature can be.
[202] That's what any kind of meditative activity, intellectual or physical, is a recollecting of the self in the deepest way to what is most real.
[203] And I know you've written, for example, about gratitude.
[204] And I love your words about gratitude because it's an inversion of the burden.
[205] It's not that it all comes down to us, but actually just the opposite, that we place.
[206] ourselves in the hands of the eternal reciprocity that gathers us up and puts us back together.
[207] And I think that this, frankly, is a deeply rational standpoint that can be shown to be, despite my not making it very articulately here today, shown to be true in economics, in physics, in biology, in sociology, and certainly in all of the higher orders.
[208] spheres of human knowing.
[209] This is the nature of what we are and what the world is.
[210] And this is where, you know, your image of the pantocrator, you know, I think this comes back to this because what fundamentally is going on there is that, you know, the logos is in us.
[211] You know, it's actually in us.
[212] That's why, when you talk about the divine significance of truth and speech, that, you know, we are made to understand ourselves in relation to the whole.
[213] That is an intrinsic human need and an intrinsic human ability.
[214] And I think that this is where, you know, my life is about trying to, in whatever small way I can, you know, open, if the nihilists darken the horizon and close off in the way the brutalist architecture does, close off what we're allowed to become and understand ourselves as, then I think the work of our time is to open it back up.
[215] And that is really what the humanities are fundamentally about.
[216] You can go back to, you know, one of the things I despise about the current structure of the academy is it acts as though, you know, these things are just for the few.
[217] But, you know, you think about, you know, Homer.
[218] I mean, Homer was the mode of educating the Greeks for, you know, a thousand years.
[219] The Pantheon was right there on the highest hill where everyone could see it.
[220] Same with Gothic architecture.
[221] You know, J .S. Bach, perhaps the greatest musician, who ever lived was a parish church musician.
[222] Anyone, I presume, could walk in the doors and listen to his, to his, to his, to his, to his, to his, to his, to his, I mean, Dickens, when Dickens wrote, I've heard recently, people would line the docks to wait to see what was the next, you know, what was the next installment of Dickens.
[223] And so what, what, what I think, you know, most fundamentally is that the, the antidote to the spiritual crisis, civilizational, cultural crisis we're living in is, is, is, is, is really fundamentally.
[224] simple in it, at least it's what we can state it as.
[225] And that is to open the horizon, again, to turn the lights back on.
[226] And what that means is to turn them on so that individuals can better come to understand themselves in relation to these higher order realities in the image of which they are made and in relation to which their fundamental realization essentially depends.
[227] So we have, so there's critiques of, let's say, thought in relation to which, to the ideal, that Freudian critique of religious structure, that it's infantile.
[228] And perhaps that's a consequence of the hypothesis of the divine afterlife that awaits us all.
[229] Freud regarded that as an infatile response to the reality of death.
[230] And there's the Marxist criticism that religion only serves power, and it's the opiate of the masses.
[231] But there's, it's striking to me how poorly the alternative position has been defended given its unbelievable power.
[232] I mean, look, we all seem to recognize within ourselves that we have moral culpability, as far as I can tell, because I've never met anyone who hasn't tortured themselves to a tremendous degree as a consequence of their own perceived inadequacies in relationship to the ideal.
[233] I see that people take the deepest pleasure that's possible in life in the facilitation of the development of others.
[234] I don't believe that I believe that's wisdom to notice that to say, well, it isn't the service to my momentary desires for pleasure or even comfort for that matter where I'm going to find the deepest significance, life sustaining significance that keeps me away from nihilistic hell and the desire to destroy and hurt.
[235] it's going to be something like service to the greater good and primarily in the form of well other people in their longest possible term interests and that we have not only a divine responsibility to do that but a divine capacity to do that that if not manifested cripples us spiritually and physically for that matter and I mean the ultimate significance of that remains unknown knowable, but I don't see any logical flaws in the proposition.
[236] I mean, I looked at the manner in which the Mesopotamians built their savior, Marduk.
[237] Marduk has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words.
[238] The cosmos comes into being and disappears as a consequence of his utterances.
[239] And like there's this sense emerging in Mesopotamia as the consequence of the aggregation of all these cultures that the highest order being is extraordinarily attentive.
[240] hence the all -encercling eyes and is capable of the deepest and most profound speech.
[241] And that's not a realization that's in any means trivial, that the Mesopotamians had wars between all of their representations of their gods.
[242] And what they elevated to the highest position was this all -seeing, truth -speaking capacity that also went forward and confronted chaos and built the world as a consequence.
[243] And the influence of that set of ideas, or the derivation from the same set of ideas for the Jewish conception of Yawa is quite clear.
[244] And you see the same thing emerging in Greece with the building of a pantheon of gods and the proposition that something occupies the apex, something Apollinian or something of that nature.
[245] And then you see that revolution take place with the dawn of Christianity and the insistence that there's something fundamental about consciousness.
[246] spoken and what's and and and the spoken truth that is constitutive of reality and you ask yourself well do you believe that and the answer is well you treat people like you believe that because you hold them responsible for the consequences of their utterances and you judge their character on the basis of what they say and you and on whether or not they act out what they say and so we hold each other to these standards with everything that we do and we berate ourselves when we don't live up to them.
[247] And I don't understand how it is that we can be said not to believe it.
[248] Now, you know, there's the dogmatic element, the hypothesis, for example, that Christ is literally the son of God.
[249] And I mean, my knowledge runs out very, very rapidly when speculating about such things.
[250] But I'm certainly, certainly seems to me that Christianity has at least been a very long conversation about what the nature of the good is and that that's spilled out into the humanities and and underlies our culture and that that that has very little to do with the expression of power it's it's the it's not the right lens through which to view things it's devastating it's wrong it's cynical and i think it appeals to envy and and the desire to tear down well well i i i i think that the well two things i would say just going quickly, Jordan.
[251] The first is that, you know, we have immense resources in the, in our own past and in the past of every culture.
[252] I mean, one of the things I love about your work is how syncretistic is, you know, here you've moved in the last five minutes, you know, move from Marduk to, you know, and the Pantocrater to the Greeks, and good on you for doing it.
[253] I mean, that's, that's, I think, I want to say that you say people have not been good at making the counter argument, well, you've been very, very good at making the counter argument and the millions of people who have their lives touched and ennobled and deepened by taking seriously the things you point towards are proof of that.
[254] I, you know, I think relative to our spiritual, cultural crisis, we should not.
[255] pretend that we don't have resources.
[256] I mean, it's as if, it's as if, you know, the situation is, if you were to give young people the challenge of building something beautiful, and if you were to, if you were to say, well, you're absolutely not allowed to look at or have any knowledge of any previous building.
[257] Well, the results are not going to be very good.
[258] But as soon as you say, and you can go back to Palladio and Vitruvius and look at all these models and discover all of the things that they give you, I mean, the results will be amazing.
[259] And so what I want to, I want to drive towards a kind of optimism not rooted in kind of silly blindness about the depth of our problems, but rather in the nature of what is most real and the whole treasure house of tools, It's like we have these spotlights from the past to help us understand ourselves and the world around us in philosophy and religion and literature, in art, in painting, and music.
[260] I mean, for God's sakes, I mean, we've got an unspeakable treasure house here.
[261] And it may be that as we dig into that, we see that we uncover ourselves.
[262] more and understand ourselves more adequately.
[263] You know, I want to, one example, for example, I think one thing that is a, I live in a beautiful, in a very beautiful city in historic Savannah, and I live on the edge of a just absolutely a stunning civic space park called Forsyth Park.
[264] I hope you can come and see it someday.
[265] There's a beautiful fountain in the middle of it, and it has these, these oak trees, these live oaks that were planted by people long dead now, these oaks of, you know, one to two to even 300 years old.
[266] And I not infrequently see young couples coming to stand in front of one of the biggest, the biggest oak inside the park proper to get married.
[267] They stand there with the justice of the peace and exchange simple vows.
[268] And I think we have to ask ourselves, what in the hell is going on there?
[269] And it seems to me, you know, very beautiful and in a way very simple.
[270] It's that they wish that their vows, they're aspiring to be to each other in some way as the oak tree, as able to live up to the love that they are called to.
[271] and they want to instantiate that by, by associating.
[272] Well, that's why they turn to the garden and the tree in the center.
[273] Yes.
[274] Yes.
[275] And act out Adam and Eve.
[276] Yes.
[277] The incorporation of the host is the embodiment.
[278] It's the incarnation of Christ within.
[279] That's what it's acting out.
[280] That's the idea.
[281] I mean, in some sense, it's the consumption of the saving.
[282] element, but the saving element is actually a mode of being.
[283] And this isn't hit home.
[284] It's like, look, what the church, the church demands everything of you.
[285] Yeah.
[286] Absolutely everything.
[287] And then the reason that, that people are leaving is because that adventure isn't being put before them.
[288] It's like, look, you can have your cars and your money and all of that.
[289] But that's nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on.
[290] Yes.
[291] I wish you'd preach to our people.
[292] because I think you're absolutely right about that.
[293] The language we'd use is be a saint.
[294] That's the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint.
[295] A saint means someone who's holy or utterly conformed to Christ.
[296] Now, press that.
[297] To be conformed to Christ means you're willing to go into the dysfunction of the world, to bear its pain, and to bear to it the ever greater divine mercy and love.
[298] Now fill in the blank, Francis of this easy.
[299] Teresa maybe in our time.
[300] Like when we were younger, if someone said, well, who's a living saint?
[301] We all would have said Mother Teresa.
[302] But what did she do?
[303] She went into the worst slum in the world.
[304] I'd been there.
[305] And she bore the suffering of the world, literally picking up the dying and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering.
[306] And she took on herself the wounds of Jesus.
[307] But then think of like, you know, the smile of Mother Teresa.
[308] She brought to that place the ever greater, more superabundant mercy of Christ, that's being a saint.
[309] And you're dead right.
[310] I think we're not sufficiently calling our people to that kind of heroic.
[311] I can tell you one thing I've experienced.
[312] This is really something to see.
[313] I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially with a day or two in between.
[314] And to large audiences, three to 10 ,000 all the time, something like that.
[315] And I always paid attention to the audience singly because I was always talking to one person at a time, but also en masse, you know, to see, to hear.
[316] Because if, if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source, then there's silence.
[317] And sometimes that silence can be dramatic.
[318] And that's why people say, well, you could have heard a pin drop.
[319] It's no one's moving because their attention is 100 % gripped by whatever just happened.
[320] And one thing that reliably elicited that was the proper.
[321] that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility.
[322] And people that, and I thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because no one says that now.
[323] They say happiness or they say rights or they say privileges or or they say reward or something like that.
[324] They don't say pick up the heaviest load you can care and carry and care for that.
[325] matter, and stumble forward.
[326] And I've seen people cut those ideas and put them on t -shirts and play with them.
[327] And so it's not that the church is asking too little of its people.
[328] I'm recommending that we remember that meaning in life, and this is also something I'm doing empirical work on, right?
[329] That meaning in life is mostly bound, right, at the non -propositional level.
[330] And it does feed into things like sacredness.
[331] I think reverence is the proper virtue of awe.
[332] Reverence is the virtue that helps us appropriate.
[333] Well, reverence means it is hold in ritual as hold as a marker or as a as a pointer for ritual emulation.
[334] I think it's, I think, that's embodiment.
[335] That's and that's the, that's the pulling in of that personality into the self.
[336] I think that's right, but I think what awe, see, awe is really interesting because you can measure this, awe is one of the few instances where people's sense of self and egocentrism is shrunk, but they find it a positive experience and they want it to continue.
[337] Right.
[338] Well, that's how what we experience in relationship to our current ego when we hypothesize our ideal as well.
[339] I think that's right.
[340] And that goes to.
[341] I mean, those are the same things because awe is the ideal, awe is our unconscious ideal capturing us.
[342] Hmm.
[343] Think about it.
[344] it's the spirit within.
[345] So imagine this.
[346] You already admitted, so to speak, that we're, you know, kinetic representations of the central animating spirit of the ages.
[347] And that speaks from our unconscious because it's embodied within us.
[348] And then it finds its, it finds its grip on us in awe, in admiration.
[349] Would you say, though, so there's a question, like, would you say that it's not only the unconscious within us but the unconscious without us because I think what all is doing is disclosing it's the unconscious in the books behind you yes and also the unconscious in the world because I think part of what what we're I think I think we got too locked into the notion the notion of the sacred as perfection completion this is one of my critiques of Plato although I'm normally a lover of Plato and I think you can see in the mystics and in many traditions.
[350] This is a claim I can back up, but I'm just going to throw it out there, right?
[351] Even in Jonathan's tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy, which is the sacred, the good becoming better?
[352] Well, the sacred is an inexhaustableness, right?
[353] Yes, that's why I'm asking that question.
[354] Yes, yes.
[355] Because when I've had visions of heaven, heaven is a place that's perfect in getting better.
[356] Well, okay, well, okay, let me give you my sense, the place where I don't have visions, but the place where I experience what I'm talking about.
[357] I wouldn't recommend them necessarily.
[358] Yeah.
[359] Well, I mean, we can compare altered states of consciousness another time, perhaps.
[360] Yeah, okay.
[361] You really like to do that, would you?
[362] Let me just finish the point I was making.
[363] So for me...
[364] Before on to another universe, you mean?
[365] Yeah.
[366] See, for me, I tell people that Plato is sacred, which does not mean I cannot, that I can't question him.
[367] It does not mean that I can't disagree with him.
[368] It needs the following.
[369] Plato transforms me. I go out and live my life for a while.
[370] The world then changes me because of the way I've been changed.
[371] I come back and I see things in Plato I didn't see before.
[372] And then I go back to the world.
[373] The thing is I, what the Bible does that for people.
[374] Yes.
[375] And that's why the Bible is sacred.
[376] And what Plato, I think, argues and what Taoism argues.
[377] And I think Christianity argues where the, There's also the book of nature.
[378] There's always the two books of Revelation.
[379] You can actually experience that with respect to nature.
[380] I don't particularly like that term, but you can experience that with, right, where the world is sacred.
[381] I think introverts do that in particular.
[382] That's a hypothesis of mine.
[383] I don't have evidence for it.
[384] But I've noticed my introverted clients need to be renewed by nature.
[385] When I've tried to reduce this, I mean, that experience of awe.
[386] So we went to a whole conference on that.
[387] So if you see someone that you really admire, that shape.
[388] fades into awe.
[389] And you can see that in the effect that celebrities have on the on the public.
[390] It's a parallel.
[391] It can be paralyzing.
[392] So the admiration, there's a continuum between admiration and awe.
[393] And then you can easily make the case, I think, that admiration is the felt sense of the instinct to imitate.
[394] So you see children, maybe they'll hero worship someone.
[395] And then they'll imitate them.
[396] They'll They find someone who's in that zone of proximal development, and they start to copy them.
[397] Or they'll take on the identity of a hero or heroine in a movie.
[398] My little granddaughter, who's three, for a year now, literally a year.
[399] She has two names, Scarlet and Ellie, Elizabeth.
[400] And we kind of call her one or the other.
[401] And if you ask her, is she Scarlet?
[402] She'll say yes.
[403] Is she, Ellie, yes.
[404] Is she Pocahontas?
[405] Yes.
[406] Is she Scarlet, Ellie, or Pocahontas?
[407] Pocahontas.
[408] One year.
[409] Now, she watched that Disney movie over and over, and she has a Pocahontas doll.
[410] But she's picked that figure, and that's quasi -mythological figure, obviously, not a historical figure.
[411] She's picked that as her identity.
[412] And I see that as we can imitate people.
[413] We talked about reality and hyper -reality.
[414] before.
[415] Well, you can find someone you admire and they're real, or you can find someone who's a mythological figure and they're hyperreal.
[416] And the hyper reality is so adaptive that imitating the hyperreal is more adaptive than imitating the real.
[417] And that's to me, that's the essence of the religious instinct.
[418] It's to derive the hyper real and then to imitate that.
[419] And I think that's what worship means, essentially, all with everything stripped away.
[420] And so that's a profound instinct, because human beings are unbelievable mimics.
[421] I mean, that's a very underappreciated element of our cognitive architecture, a fundamental element.
[422] And that instinct to admire and experience awe facilitates that mimicry and that increases the probability of the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior.
[423] Okay, so, and then what does, what, that makes of the religious domain something real, as far as I'm concerned, even real from the biological sense.
[424] But that deepens the mystery of the involvement of the psychedelics in that.
[425] Like, are they parasitizing that?
[426] Or are they, like cocaine hyperstimulates the psychomotor stimulant system?
[427] Well, does psychedelics hyperstimulate the imitation awe system?
[428] And is that an illusion or is it, in fact, the revelation of something deeper.
[429] Yeah, to circle back to the ontological question.
[430] So just recently I listened to a lecture that Francis Collins gave.
[431] So Francis Collins, you may recognize, is director of the National Institutes on Health, and he was also the director of the human genome project.
[432] So he's as strongly credentialed a scientist as one can have, and yet he's an absolutely confirmed Christian.
[433] And so he was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of, I think he called it harmonization, of a scientific and religious worldview.
[434] But he was laying out his arguments for the existence of God.
[435] And one of them would be his claim, and it's an interesting claim, and you could argue it, but the existence of moral law, that there is an absolute moral law.
[436] Look, you know, I looked at Jack Panksepp's work, and he shows that you see complex morality emerging rats in play, iterated play, which is a crucial issue, right?
[437] What pattern of behavior is sustainably optimal across repeated social interactions?
[438] Well, you know, you hear all these postmodern critiques say of hierarchical structure because of its predication on power.
[439] I think, no, no, corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power.
[440] Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal, on reciprocity, on productive reciprocity.
[441] You know, I was talking to this, this Jocka Willink, who was the commander of Fallujah in, in, in the 20 years ago, and he's a real warrior type, you know, like a real intimidating person physically and mentally for that matter.
[442] He talked about his Navy SEAL training, and, you know, he said, well, we were taught, it was pounded into us to have the back of the guy next to us.
[443] It wasn't like every powerful clambering ape for himself, not at all.
[444] In these intensely competitive hierarchies, which would be, you'd think as pure a manifestation of the power motive as would be possible, power is not the guiding ethos.
[445] And he said quite clearly, no, your men won't attend to you unless it's reciprocal.
[446] They have to know you have their backs.
[447] And he, so, and he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence.
[448] and the ability to communicate in strategizing and also in taking care of your team.
[449] And so I don't believe that, so what am I getting at in relationship to your last point?
[450] This religious, this emergent ethic, this natural law.
[451] Okay, so imagine now, hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle if they're to be stable and productive across long spans of time.
[452] and a pattern, that pattern emerges cross -culturally.
[453] It's reciprocal productivity, something like that.
[454] There's more to it than that.
[455] Okay, now, you're selected for your success in those hierarchies based on your ability to manifest that pattern, because that'll push you up the hierarchy.
[456] That increases, as far as I can tell, that increases your attractiveness as a potential mate substantially.
[457] And so I think you can make a very deep biological case for the, even for the emergent evolution of an ethical sense.
[458] And I think that does speak to people in the voice of their conscience.
[459] And that is part of existence, but then you think, well, if that's part of existence, how deep a part is it?
[460] How built in is it?
[461] You know, and I don't, and that, I suppose, depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to being.
[462] Okay, so back to the gentleman that you were discussing.
[463] He was talking about a natural ethic.
[464] Yeah.
[465] Well, I think as a pointer to God, something absolute about the nature of what moral law is.
[466] And from that standpoint, if you're willing to go that route, then maybe these experiences are actually pointing to something that is absolute and true and informative.
[467] Do you think that's true?
[468] I don't know.
[469] I'm a scientist.
[470] It's fine to be investigating it.
[471] Yeah.
[472] I don't want to pin you down.
[473] No. Let's see.
[474] You know, I'm trained as a scientist.
[475] My default is to be deeply curious and to be deeply skeptical.
[476] Right, which is the right attitude towards all of this.
[477] And so my response always is that I believe in the data.
[478] And so that remains an open question.
[479] But it's certainly fun to toy with as an alternative framing of what's going on.
[480] I mean, we're in the middle of this huge, huge mystery.
[481] I understand and appreciate the symbolic significance.
[482] of the ideal human being.
[483] And that finds its embodiment.
[484] And I took these ideas in large part from Jung and Eric Neumann, that Christ is at least a representation of the ideal man, whatever that is.
[485] And we all, interestingly enough, we all seem to have an ideal.
[486] And we, or that ideal has us, right?
[487] And that's where it's very interesting to consider the role of conscience.
[488] because your conscience will call you out on your behavior.
[489] And so it seems to function as something that's somewhat independent, or at least as 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.
[490] 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.
[491] But you don't seem to be able to do that in relationship to your conscience.
[492] It trips you up.
[493] And so it tells you when you're not living up to your own ideal.
[494] 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.
[495] 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.
[496] And those are very interesting conceptualizations.
[497] 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 certainly won't find a partner and have children successfully.
[498] 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.
[499] 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.
[500] And it becomes something, well, it becomes something with a power that transcends your ability to resist it.
[501] So, okay, so you can think about, Christ from a psychological perspective, and the critic, my critic, this particular critic that I've been reading, said, well, that doesn't differentiate Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods.
[502] And of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion.
[503] Joseph Campbell did that, and Jung to a lesser degree, I would say, but Campbell did that.
[504] 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 existence as well.
[505] Now you can debate whether or not that's genuine.
[506] You can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there's credible objective evidence for that.
[507] But it doesn't matter in some sense because this, well, it does.
[508] 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.
[509] The problem is I probably believe that, but I don't know.
[510] I don't, I'm amazed at my own belief and I don't understand it.
[511] Like, because I've seen sometimes the objective world.
[512] And the narrative world touch.
[513] You know, that's Jungian synchronicity.
[514] And I've seen that many times in my own life.
[515] And so in some sense, I believe it's undeniable.
[516] You know, we have a narrative sense of the world.
[517] For me, that's been the world of morality.
[518] That's the world that tells us how to act.
[519] It's real.
[520] Like, we treat it like it's real.
[521] It's not the objective world.
[522] But the narrative and the objective world touch.
[523] And the ultimate example of that, in principle.
[524] is supposed to be Christ, but I don't know what to...
[525] That seems to me oddly plausible, but I still don't know what to make of it.
[526] It's too, partly because it's too terrifying a reality to fully believe.
[527] I don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.
[528] This critic said that the mere psychologization of Christ was insufficient because, and you made the same case.
[529] in some sense that it doesn't make sense unless the narrative and the objective world truly touch.
[530] And I think you could debate that because I think that there's some utility, there could argue to be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth, you know, that the best way to cope with existence is to tell the truth and to face what you don't know forthrightly.
[531] 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.
[532] I've seen people from Orthodox priests to, you know, 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 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 if we take seriously this the problem 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 it also scales up in terms of because one of the things that one of the things that you talk about, like looking up to the star 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 does is that the first thing you do is actually where it's a form, it's attention that people like the word worship.
[533] It's a form of reverence, a form of veneration.
[534] You submit yourself to that aim.
[535] It's not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it.
[536] You actually have to submit yourself to that which is to what you're aiming and so that's what sacrifice to it exactly and you have to sacrifice to it and 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.
[537] We need to look towards the same aim, and that will bind us together.
[538] 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.
[539] We're a communion of people who are submitted to aiming towards worshiping the same point.
[540] Yeah, and I believe that that's necessary, and I've had some profound experiences, which I can't really relate here, that of the necessity for that community is that this, whatever our fundamental moral load is, immense though it is, crushing though it is, even, requires the participation of others.
[541] So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people.
[542] to be along with you.
[543] It's a collective enterprise, even though it's an individualistic, even though it requires the perfection, it requires as much perfection as possible at the individual level.
[544] That's not enough.
[545] There has to be that communal elements as well.
[546] You need help.
[547] We all need help to aim as high.
[548] The highest aim requires communal endeavor.
[549] Yeah.
[550] And it's also because it actually is the way that everything works.
[551] It's like the chair aiming to be a chair, is a constitutive of parts which are joined together towards a same goal and therefore hold together as a being and manifest the chairness of the chair.
[552] And that's the same with you.
[553] You have all these thoughts, right?
[554] You have all these feelings, all these contradicting things inside you.
[555] And you need by aiming up towards, you know, 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.
[556] I agree.
[557] Well, and I think you are aiming, this is another, something else I tried to point out to Sam.
[558] You are, you're aiming, you're either aiming at Christ or something lesser.
[559] Yeah?
[560] Or if things get really out of hand, you're aiming at something opposite, and you don't want to be doing that.
[561] But, and this is a matter of definition in some sense.
[562] And it's actually not impossible to understand is that you aim at something better, generally speaking.
[563] I mean, maybe you're out to cause pain, but forget about that.
[564] You aim at something better.
[565] You wouldn't do it unless it was better.
[566] In fact, it virtually defines better.
[567] Like the whole idea of better is predicated on the idea that there's an aim that's beyond you.
[568] And then the highest of those aims is the amalgamate, the highest aim is the amalgamation of all higher aims and that's a perfect mode of being and and that by definition that's a psychological perspective again that by definition is Christ and then but then there seems to be something too convenient about C .S. 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 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 it has to do with the recognizing of the goodness of the world or the goodness of creation, that the world is capable of manifesting these patterns.
[569] Right.
[570] 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.
[571] Because the Gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated Christ.
[572] They were saying, you know, and they have viewed the world as utterly fallen as.
[573] having no value, having to be escaped, having to be fled in every way.
[574] Whereas Christianity posits that it's a non -dual, it's a non -dual proposition.
[575] It's saying it all comes together.
[576] That's the promise.
[577] It all comes together.
[578] And so it has to come down.
[579] Right.
[580] And so it has to come down at every level.
[581] And not only that it has had 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.
[582] And so the whole world is declared as once again, declared as being capable of participating in this good.
[583] And so, and so you could say, well, maybe it wasn't that one.
[584] Maybe it wasn't, you know, it's like, why would it be that particular, particular place where it happened?
[585] Well, it had to be some place.
[586] That's the story.
[587] I mean, that's where there is no other story like that story that we have.
[588] And so once you recognize that this is part of the declaration that the world does embody these patterns, that it leads to this.
[589] It leads to this story of a man who embodied them absolutely and is bringing us in him to also embody them in a way that will transform us.
[590] You know, like the ultimate goal of orthodox vision of Christianity is theosis.
[591] It's to become God.
[592] To become God through transformation and participation in God.
[593] So that's the final goal of everything, is to become participant in the divine.