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Nov. 26, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
03:07:13
Meaning, Awe, and the Conceptualization of God (Part 1-3) | EP 202
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It's not easy to understand that other people are genuinely different from you and how they might be different.
And maybe even more difficult is to understand that the differences, although frustrating, are also necessary.
It isn't obvious to me that anyone wants to live a meaningless existence.
resistance.
I don't think you can live a meaningless existence without becoming corrupted, because the pain of existence will corrupt you without saving meaning.
And it also seems to me that you can sell the story that meaning is to be found in responsibility.
When I've tried to sell that story to myself, I seem to buy it.
And when I've tried to communicate it with other people, it renders them silent, large crowds of people silent.
And that's strange because I'm not sure why that is.
It's perhaps because the connection between responsibility and meaning had never been made that explicitly somehow.
Because meaning gets Contaminated with happiness or something like that, but it's to be found in responsibility.
And then you could say, well, there isn't any responsibility that's more compelling than trying to aid things in the manifestation of their divine form.
That should be an adventure that could be sold.
And I don't know why the church can't do it.
I don't understand that.
And...
Because it seems to me that that's something that I've done, at least in part, and that accounts for the strange popularity of the biblical lectures in particular.
Yeah.
But I've also, and I do believe that, I do believe that, that the right striving is to attempt with all your heart to Encourage things to develop towards that divine goal.
What else would you possibly do?
Once you think that through, it's like you're always aiming at something that's better or you wouldn't be aiming.
You're always moving towards something that's better or you wouldn't be moving.
So then why wouldn't you move towards the greatest good?
Yeah.
Well, it's because it's terrifying, I suppose, in part.
But then I've tried to put that into practice in my life and It's tearing me into pieces.
Yeah.
I asked you to define love, and I'm going to define it on my terms now, and that is the best in me serving the best in you.
And I think that's the deepest pleasure.
That's the deepest and most lasting pleasure, and it is the most fundamental motivation.
It's the inexhaustible source, because if I can do that, whenever I do that, I feel that I'm being properly.
And there's nothing better than that.
You can extend that to the world, to situations, places.
Well, I think that's what you're supposed to do by accepting the proposition that God is love.
I mean, it's God is love and God is logos.
Those are both there.
So then the question, to some degree, is the rank order of the two, and I would say God is truth within love.
And that's the animating spirit of mankind.
And that's a way different claim than the one the atheists are going after, by the way.
Think about it, everyone.
Is truth in the service of love not the best animating spirit of mankind when it isn't pursuing an aberration?
We can all ask ourselves that question.
I think that's a good question to ask.
Thank you, John.
What I mean is I think it re...
I think it reorients us to the fact...
We can put that on a t-shirt.
Is truth in the service of love a good question?
I guess I see them as more...
I see them as more interpenetrating.
I want to make a stronger relationship between them than just a relationship of service.
How about her, man?
That...
This is why I like the term realization, that love is a way of affording realization.
And the deepest knowing you have of reality is in realization.
That's what I, if I had to...
Okay, so it seems to me, okay, so I'll make an appendage to my claim.
Right.
The reality that is most justifiable is brought about by the action of truth in the service of love.
Yeah, but I guess what I'm saying is I see truth...
I think you're using it, and I've heard you use true as something beyond a correspondence between the semantic content of a proposition reality.
I've heard you talk about...
Yes.
Right, right, and we even use that when we use the phrase true.
Yes, it seems to incorporate some of those other dimensions that you've been talking about.
Exactly, exactly.
Okay, well, great, Matt, so fill me in.
Well, that's what I'm trying to get at.
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?
But presence is also a way in which things are true to form, right?
And then the participatory knowing is when we're, like, the deepest sense of true, which is, you know, related to trust and being betrothed to the world in an important way.
So, if you'll allow me to expand what you mean by true, to cover all of those dimensions.
Betrothed to the world in that you extend the same courtesy to the world that you described extending to your partner.
Exactly.
I think the answer to nihilism isn't some propositional answer.
This is what I get from Nisha Tanya.
Yeah, right.
It's to relearn, and I mean this deeply, in the Buddhist sense of sati, to remember true.
What it is to fall in love with reality, to fall in love with being.
And if that's what you're saying is the...
You think that's what Sam Harris is striving for in his spirituality?
Well, it's not a throwaway answer.
It's like, what's he up to exactly?
I mean, isn't he on a Sophia...
Finally a Sophia adventure?
I think...
Everybody is, how can I put this?
Everybody lives from the non-propositional kinds of knowing emphasized by Plato.
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 perspectival, the participatory.
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.
Maybe you could expound on those a bit more for us and clarify a bit more.
So you said the answer to nihilism.
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.
I think that's an equally nihilistic claim.
That's my point.
The claim...
The claim is nihilistic or my claim about that is nihilistic or both?
The claim that power is a fundamental reality is an attempt to assuage the wounding of nihilism, but it is fundamentally mistaken in its endeavor.
It is constituted the wrong way.
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.
So I think of it as a fundamental misframing.
That's what I'm trying to say here.
And that's why I'm hesitant to say either yes or no to it.
I get it.
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.
I've been thinking psychologically, again, about Christianity.
And I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought that predate it.
But it looked to me like, and some of those were derived from Mesopotamia, and some of them were derived from Greece, and some of them were derived from Judaism and other sources.
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.
And now 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.
And you ask yourself, well, what exactly is that signifying?
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.
That's the Logos, summed up in two phrases.
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.
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 specify the nature of an ideal?
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 there being true accounts of what the nature of the real is.
Let's approach this from a couple of different angles, Jordan.
The first is, one of the things that I profoundly believe is that these young people seeking deeper answers, however much they may be flailing about, it's not their fault.
That many, perhaps most of the institutions they will encounter will betray that which is deepest in them, will denigrate, will tell them, no, none of these things that you're seeking are really real.
I mean, I think, you know, I've been talking, thinking a lot over the years about architecture.
And what is going on in brutalist architecture.
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.
You're nothing.
You'll never amount to any...
I mean, 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.
This is the home life that some people terribly have.
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 there is no truth.
There is no beauty.
You are nothing.
Accept it.
It's just a concrete...
Annihilating force.
And you see this culture of repudiation.
I mean, not here.
You're in Canada.
I'm in the States, in Savannah now.
But, you know, the Chateau Laurier, I think I misspoke recently, called it the Frontenac, which is in Quebec.
But in Ottawa, you know, the Chateau Laurier, there's been a desire to expand this sort of beautiful sort of neo-Gothic building.
And it went through six rounds of approval to finally be to make...
A set of plans that would meet the local architectural review board, whatever it was.
And I thought, well, it can't be that bad.
You know, it's gone through that.
And I mean, this structure is abhorrent.
It looks like a cross between a Verizon server firm and an American penitentiary.
I mean, it is just it is a declaration that there that there is no higher order.
You know, in Edinburgh, they're tearing all those out.
Edinburgh is an unbelievably beautiful city.
The whole central mile of it, square mile essentially, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
And it's marred by random placements of 1970s brutalist architecture.
They're just horrible.
It's complete lack of regard for the architectural context.
And they're all being torn out and replaced, thank God.
So, well, this architectural idea.
So back to the cathedral.
You know, what's really interesting about...
A cathedral with, let's say, Christ as Pantocrator on the ceiling is spread against the ceiling is that it's not the state that's portrayed up there, right?
It's not a map of the country.
It's not even a map of the world.
It's not a geographical locale or a political institution.
It's the transcendent individual.
And, you know, it's just not obvious to me.
It seems obvious to me that that's correct.
And that if it isn't the transcendent individual, then it becomes the state.
And as soon as the transcendent becomes the state, then we have a catastrophe.
And I don't see any difference between the insistence that our identity is predicated on our group membership.
I don't see any real difference between that and the insistence that we're just handmaidens of the state.
It's a totalitarian insistence.
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.
And the higher the ideal, the more severe the judgment, because of your distance from the ideal.
And so, part of what we're seeing, too, might be a rebellion against the awful requirements of that ideal.
But that doesn't justify the rebellion.
Because if it's really the ideal, then if you don't act it out, you fail to act it out at your peril.
And then we need to have a serious conversation about the metaphysical, about the practical implications of this ideal.
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?
Because that's the hundred-dollar question, so to speak.
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.
But you could also say, well, perhaps it is something more than that.
Perhaps it's reflective of the structure of being itself.
I mean, it depends on our position in the cosmos.
You know, we are self-conscious.
We are that which reflects being itself or perhaps even makes it possible.
It's not that obvious what our role is.
It might not be so trivial despite our mortality.
Well, I would say that not only it is as you say, but we can know it to be as you say.
I mean, this is what the whole history, in some sense, of literature and philosophy and theology is about.
And I want to insist on this.
It is a rational...
Grappling with these questions, realities, and indeed truths.
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.
Of course, we know this economically.
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 zero-sum.
We all end up over time better.
But you also see this naturally in the evolution of the diversity of species, of languages, of cultures.
You've written beautifully about play as orienting the child in relation to a deepening reciprocity with others.
We know this in terms of knowledge.
I mean, how can it be that in a conversation I can be wrong And be shown to be wrong.
And that be a net gain for me.
I mean, you know, the whole point of free dialogue is that we can learn in our not knowing.
That the conversation is not zero sum.
That even 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.
And so then I think that leads one to Geez, you can go at the level of subatomic particles in physics.
I had the pleasure of talking with Freeman Dyson before he died.
And Dyson will say very clearly that against the determinists, some of the rational optimists are pretty religiously determinist in their worldview.
And they want to marshal modern science as saying that their determinism is what science teaches.
But Dyson, who was a subatomic physicist at the highest level, You know, expressly said the opposite.
He said that the electron...
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.
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.
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?
And we say, well, it's better to live in relation to what's true than to live in relation to a delusion.
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.
What would it mean to live in relation to that?
What would it mean to remember that?
And, you know, one can approach that in any number of different ways, but certainly that is what what prayer is.
That is what all spiritual exercises are.
That's what perhaps walking in nature can be.
That's what what any kind of meditative activity, intellectual or physical, is a recollecting of the self in the deepest way to what is most real.
And I know you've written, for example, about gratitude.
And I love your words about gratitude because it's an inversion of the burden.
It's not that it all comes down to us, but actually just the opposite.
That we place ourselves in the hands of the eternal...
Reciprocity that gathers us up and puts us back together.
And I think that this, frankly, is 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 order spheres of human knowing.
This is the nature of what we are and what the world is.
And this is where, you know, your image of the pantocrator, you know, I think this comes back to this because what What fundamentally is going on there is that the logos is in us.
It's actually in us.
That's why when you talk about the divine significance of truth and speech, that we are made to understand ourselves in relation to the whole.
That is an intrinsic human need.
And an intrinsic human ability.
And I think that this is where, you know, my life is about trying to, in whatever small way I can, 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.
And that is really what the humanities are fundamentally about.
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.
But, you know, you think about, you know, Homer.
I mean, Homer was the mode of educating the Greeks for, you know, a thousand years.
The Pantheon was right there on the highest hill where everyone could see it.
Same with Gothic architecture.
You know, J.S. Bach, perhaps the greatest musician who ever lived, was a parish church musician.
Anyone, I presume, could walk in the doors and listen to his cantatas.
I mean, Dickens, when Dickens wrote, I've heard recently, people would line the docks.
To wait to see what was the next installment of Dickens.
And so what I think most fundamentally is that the antidote to the spiritual crisis, civilizational, cultural crisis we're living in, is really fundamentally different.
Simple, at least it's what we can state it as.
And that is to open the horizon, again, to turn the lights back on.
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.
So we have, so there's critiques of, let's say, Thought in relationship to the ideal, that Freudian critique of religious structure, that It's infantile.
And perhaps that's a consequence of the hypothesis of the divine afterlife that awaits us all.
Freud regarded that as an infantile response to the reality of death.
And there's the Marxist criticism that religion only serves power, and it's the opiate of the masses.
But it's striking to me how poorly the alternative position has been defended, given its unbelievable power.
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.
I see that people take the deepest pleasure that's possible in life in the facilitation of the development of others.
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.
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, in 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 unknowable, but I don't see any logical flaws in the...
In the proposition.
I mean, I looked at the manner in which the Mesopotamians built their savior, Marduk.
Marduk has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words.
The cosmos comes into being and disappears as a consequence of his utterances.
And 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, hence the all-encircling eyes, and is capable of the deepest and most profound speech.
And that's not a realization that's in any means trivial.
The Mesopotamians had wars between all of their representations of their gods, 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.
And the influence of that set of ideas, or the derivation from the same set of ideas for the Jewish conception of Yahweh is quite clear.
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 Apollonian or something of that nature.
And then you see that revolution take place with the dawn of Christianity and the insistence that there's something fundamental about consciousness and spoken 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 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.
And I don't understand how it is that we can be said not to believe it.
Now, you know, there's the dogmatic element, the hypothesis, for example, that Christ is literally the Son of God.
My knowledge runs out very, very rapidly when speculating about such things, but it 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 underlies our culture, and that That has very little to do with the expression of power.
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 the desire to tear down.
Well, I think that the...
Well, two things I would say just very quickly, Jordan.
The first is that, you know, we have immense resources in our own past and in the past of every culture.
I mean, one of the things I love about your work is how syncretistic it is.
You know, here you've moved in the last five minutes, you know, moved from Marduk to, you know, the Pantocrater to the Greeks and good on you for doing it.
I mean, that's, I think, I want to say that You say people have not been good at making the counterargument.
Well, you've been very, very good at making the counterargument and the millions of people who've had their lives touched and ennobled and deepened by taking seriously the things you point towards are proof of that.
You know, I think relative to our spiritual, cultural crisis, we should not pretend that we don't have resources.
I mean, 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, well, the results are not going to be very good.
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.
And so 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 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, in religion, in literature, in architecture, in art, in painting, in music.
I mean, for God's sakes, we've got an unspeakable treasure house.
And it may be that as we dig into that, we see that we uncover ourselves more and understand ourselves more adequately.
You know, one example, for example, I think one thing that is...
I live in a very beautiful city in historic Savannah, and I live on the edge of a just absolutely stunning civic space park called Forsyth Park.
I hope you can come and see it someday.
There's a beautiful fountain in the middle of it, and it has 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.
I not infrequently see young couples coming to stand in front of one of the biggest oak inside the park proper to get married.
They stand there with the justice of the peace and exchange simple vows.
And I think we have to ask ourselves, what in the hell is going on there?
And it seems to me...
Very beautiful and in a way very simple.
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...
The love that they are called to.
And they want to instantiate that by...
Well, that's why they return to the garden and the tree and the scent.
Yes.
Yes.
And act out Adam and Eve.
Yes.
Reborn.
Yes.
Yes.
The incorporation of the host is the embodiment.
It's the incarnation of Christ within.
That's what it's acting out.
That's the idea.
I mean, in some sense, it's the consumption of the saving element.
But the saving element is actually a mode of being.
And this isn't hit home.
It's like, look what the church demands everything.
Everything of you.
Absolutely everything.
And the reason that people are leaving is because that adventure isn't being put before them.
It's like, look, you can have your cars and your money and all of that, but that's nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on.
Yes, I wish you'd preach to our people, because I think you're absolutely right about that.
The language we'd use is, be a saint.
That's the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint.
A saint means someone who's holy or utterly conformed to Christ.
Now, press that.
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.
Now fill in the blank, Francis of Assisi.
Mother Teresa maybe in our time, like when we were younger, if someone said, well, who's a living saint?
We all would have said Mother Teresa.
But what did she do?
She went into the worst slum in the world.
I've been there.
And she bore the suffering of the world.
Literally picking up the dying and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering.
And she took on herself the wounds of Jesus.
But then think about, you know, the smile of Mother Teresa.
She brought to that place the ever greater, more super abundant mercy of Christ.
That's being a saint.
And you're dead right.
I think we're not sufficiently calling our people to that kind of heroic.
Mom, look, I can tell you one thing I've experienced.
This is really something to see.
I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially, with a day or two in between, and to large audiences, 3,000 to 10,000 all the time, something like that.
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 people.
Because if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source, then there's silence.
And sometimes that silence can be dramatic and that's why people say, well, you could have heard a pin drop.
It's no one's moving because their attention is 100% gripped by whatever just happened.
And one thing that reliably elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility.
And I thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because no one says that now.
They say happiness, or they say rights, or they say privileges, or they say reward, or something like that.
They don't say, pick up the heaviest load you can carry, or care for that matter, and stumble forward.
And I've seen people cut those ideas and put them on t-shirts and play with them.
It's not that the church is asking too little of its people.
I'm recommending that we remember that meaning in life, and this is also something I'm doing empirical work on, that meaning in life is mostly bound at the non-propositional level, and it does feed into things like sacredness.
I think reverence is the proper virtue of awe.
Reverence is the virtue that helps us appropriate awe.
Well, reverence means it is hold in ritual, it is hold as a marker or as a...
A pointer for ritual emulation.
I think it's...
I think...
And that's embodiment.
And that's the pulling in of that personality into the self.
I think that's right, but I think what awe...
See, awe is really interesting, because awe, 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.
Right.
Well, that's what we experience in relationship to our current ego when we hypothesize our ideal as well.
I think that's right, and that goes to...
I mean, those are the same things, because awe is our unconscious ideal capturing us.
Think about it.
It's the spirit within.
So imagine this.
You already admitted, so to speak, that we're...
It can odic representations of the central animating spirit of the ages.
And that speaks from our unconscious because it's it's embodied within us and then it finds its it finds its grip on us in awe and admiration.
Would you say, though?
So, would you say that it's not only the unconscious within us, but the unconscious without us?
Because I think what Oz 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...
I think we got too locked into 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, this is a claim I can back up, but I'm just going to throw it out there.
Even in Jonathan's tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy.
Is the sacred the good becoming better?
Well, the sacred is an inexhaustibleness, right?
Yes, that's why I'm asking that question.
Because when I've had visions of heaven, heaven is a place that's perfect and getting better.
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.
I wouldn't recommend them, necessarily.
Yeah, well, I mean, we can compare altered states of consciousness another time, perhaps.
Yeah, okay.
You'd really like to do that, wouldn't you?
Well, let me just finish the point I was making.
For me, I tell people that Plato is sacred, which does not mean that I can't question him.
It does not mean that I can't disagree with him.
It means the following.
Plato transforms me.
I go out and live my life for a while.
The world then changes me because of the way I've been changed.
I come back and I see things in Plato I didn't see before.
And then I go back to the world.
The thing is...
The Bible does that for people.
Yes, and that's why the Bible is sacred.
And what Plato, I think, argues, and what Taoism argues, and I think Christianity argues, where there's also the book of nature.
There's always the two books of Revelation.
You can actually experience that with respect to nature.
I don't particularly like that term, but you can experience that with...
I think introverts do that in particular...
That's a hypothesis of mine.
I don't have evidence for it, but I've noticed my introverted clients need to be renewed by nature.
When I've tried to reduce this, I mean, that experience of awe.
So we went to a whole conference on that.
So if you see someone that you really admire...
That shades into awe.
And you can see that in the effect that celebrities have on the public.
It can be paralyzing.
So the admiration...
There's a continuum between admiration and awe.
And then you can easily make the case, I think, that admiration is the felt sense of the instinct to imitate.
So you see children, maybe they'll hero-worship someone...
And then they'll imitate them.
They'll copy them.
They find someone who's in that zone of proximal development, and they start to copy them.
Or they'll take on the identity of a hero or heroine in a movie.
My little granddaughter, who's three, for a year now, literally a year, she has two names, Scarlett and Ellie, Elizabeth.
And we kind of call her one or the other.
And if you ask her, is she Scarlett?
She'll say yes.
Is she Ellie?
Yes.
Is she Pocahontas?
Yes.
Is she Scarlet, Ellie, or Pocahontas?
Pocahontas.
One year.
Now, she watched that Disney movie over and over, and she has a Pocahontas doll, but she's picked that figure, and that's quasi-mythological figure, obviously, not a historical figure.
She's picked that as her Identity.
And I see that as we can imitate people.
We talked about reality and hyper-reality before.
Well, you can find someone you admire and they're real, or you can find someone who's a mythological figure and they're hyper-real.
And the hyper-reality is so adaptive that imitating the hyper-real is more adaptive than imitating the real.
And that's, to me, that's the essence of the religious instinct.
It's to derive the hyper-real from And then to imitate that.
And I think that's what worship means, essentially, with everything stripped away.
And so that's a profound instinct, because human beings are unbelievable mimics.
I mean, that's a very underappreciated element of our cognitive architecture, a fundamental element.
And That instinct to admire and experience awe facilitates that mimicry and that increases the probability of the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior.
Okay, so...
And then what does...
That makes of the religious domain something real, as far as I'm concerned, even real from the biological sense.
But that deepens the mystery of the involvement of the psychedelics in that.
Like, are they parasitizing that?
Like, cocaine hyper-stimulates the psychomotor stimulant system.
Well, does psychedelics hyper-stimulate the imitation awe system?
And is that an illusion, or is it, in fact, A revelation of something deeper.
Yeah, to circle back to the ontological question, so just recently I listened to a lecture that Francis Collins gave.
Now, 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.
So he's as strongly credentialed a scientist as one can have, and yet he's an absolutely confirmed Christian.
And so he was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of, I think he called it harmonization, of a scientific and religious worldview.
But he was laying out his arguments for the existence of God.
And one of them is what 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.
Look, you know, I looked at Jack Panksepp's work, you know, and he shows that you see complex morality emerge in rats in play, iterated play, which is a crucial issue, right?
What pattern of behavior Well, you know, you hear all these postmodern critiques, say, of hierarchical structure because of its predication on power.
I think, no, no.
Corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power.
Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal...
On reciprocity, on productive reciprocity.
You know, I was talking to this Jocko Willink, who was the commander of Fallujah 20 years ago, and he's a real warrior type, you know, like a real intimidating person physically and mentally, for that matter.
He talked about his Navy SEAL training, and he said, well, we were taught it was pounded into us to have the back of the guy next to us.
It wasn't like every powerful clambering ape for himself.
Not at all.
In these intensely competitive hierarchies, which you'd think as pure a manifestation of the power motive as would be possible, power is not the guiding ethos.
And he said quite clearly, your men won't attend to you unless it's reciprocal.
They have to know you have their backs.
And he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate in strategizing and also in taking care of your team.
And so I don't believe that So what am I getting at in relationship to your last point?
This religious, this emergent ethic, this natural law.
Okay, so imagine now, hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle, if they're to be stable and productive across long spans of time.
And that pattern emerges cross-culturally.
It's reciprocal productivity, something like that.
There's more to it than that.
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.
That increases, as far as I can tell, that increases your attractiveness as a potential mate substantially.
And so I think you can make a very deep biological case even for the emergent evolution of an ethical sense.
And I think that does speak to people in the voice of their conscience.
And that is part of existence.
But then you think, well, if that's part of existence, how deep a part is it?
How built in is it?
And that, I suppose, depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to being.
Okay, so back to the gentleman that you were discussing.
He was talking about a natural ethic.
Yeah, well, I think as a pointer to God, something absolute about the nature of what moral law is.
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.
Do you think that's true?
I don't know.
I'm a scientist.
Look, it's fine to be investigating it, you know.
Yeah.
No.
I don't want to pin you down.
No.
Let's see.
You know, I'm trained as a scientist.
My default is to be deeply curious and to be deeply skeptical.
Right.
Which is the right attitude towards all of this.
And so my response always is that I believe in the data.
And so that remains an open question.
But it's certainly fun to toy with as an alternative framing of what's going on.
I mean, we're in the middle of this huge, huge mystery.
I understand and appreciate the symbolic significance of the ideal human being.
And that finds its embodiment.
And I took these ideas in large part from Jung and Eric Neumann.
That Christ is at least a representation of the ideal man.
Whatever that is.
And we all, interestingly enough, we all seem to have an ideal.
Or that ideal has us.
Right?
And that's where it's very interesting to consider the role of conscience, because your conscience will call you out on your behavior.
And so it seems to function as something that's somewhat independent, or at least 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.
And I suppose if you could wave a magic wand and rearrange your mind so that it was constantly telling you that, you'd do it.
But you don't seem to be able to do that in relationship to your conscience.
It trips you up.
And so it tells you when you're not living up to your own ideal, and that means that you have an ideal, and you don't even know what the hell it is, but you certainly know when you transgress against it.
And I know that there's a strong line of Christian thinking that's identified the conscience with divinity, sometimes with Christ inside, sometimes with the Holy Spirit inside.
And those are very interesting conceptualizations, but you can think of them psychologically, and you can even think about them biologically, you know, to some degree, because we're so social.
If we don't manifest an appropriate moral reciprocity, we're going to become alienated from our fellows, and we won't survive, and we'll suffer and die, and we certainly won't find a partner and have children successfully.
To some degree, the conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within, and that's a perfectly reasonable biological explanation.
But the thing is, is the deeper you go into biology, the more it shades into something that appears to be religious, because you start analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself, and it becomes something Well, it becomes something with a power that transcends your ability to resist it.
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.
And, of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion.
Joseph Campbell did that, and Jung to a lesser degree, I would say, but Campbell did that.
But the difference, and C.S. Lewis pointed this out as well, the difference between those mythological gods and Christ was that there's a representation of There's a historical representation of his existence as well.
Now, you can debate whether or not that's genuine.
You can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there's credible, objective evidence for that, but it doesn't matter in some sense because this...
well, it does, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter because there's still a historical story.
And so what you have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth And in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things.
The problem is, is I probably believe that, but I don't know.
I'm amazed at my own belief, and I don't understand it.
Because I've seen...
Sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch You know, that's Jungian synchronicity.
And I've seen that many times in my own life.
And so, in some sense, I believe it's undeniable.
You know, we have a narrative sense of the world.
For me, that's been the world of morality.
That's the world that tells us how to act.
It's real.
Like, we treat it like it's real.
It's not the objective world.
But the narrative and the objective world touch.
And the ultimate example of that, in principle, is supposed to be Christ.
But I don't know what to—that seems to me oddly plausible.
Yeah.
But I still don't know what to make of it.
It's too—partly because it's too terrifying a reality to fully believe.
I don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.
This critic said that the mere psychologization of Christ Was insufficient because, and you made the same case in some sense, that it doesn't make sense unless the narrative and the objective world truly touch.
And I think you could debate that because I think that there's some utility, there could arguably be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth, you know, that the best way to cope with existence is to To tell the truth and to face what you don't know forthrightly and that will enable you to orient yourself within our finite and bounded existence that ends with our death more properly,
more accurately, more advisedly than any other route.
I've seen people from Orthodox priests to, you know, the most 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 pattern.
Like, what you're saying is true.
But I think that If we take seriously the relationship between attention, psyche, and the way the world reveals itself to us, then it scales up after that.
It jumps up a level.
And it also scales up in terms of...
Because 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 that does is that the first thing you do is actually, it's attention.
People don't like the word worship.
It's a form of reverence, a form of veneration.
You submit yourself to that aim.
It's not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it.
You actually have to submit yourself to that which is to what you're aiming.
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 values.
We need to look towards the same aim, and that will bind us together.
And so then we don't also end up being just kind of individuals who have the weight of the world on our shoulders, but we're a communion of saints.
We're a communion of people who are submitted to, aiming towards worshipping the same image.
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, It requires the participation of others.
So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people to be along with you.
It's a collective enterprise.
Even though it's an individualistic...
Even though it requires...
The perfection, it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual level.
That's not enough.
There has to be that communal element as well.
You need help.
We all need help.
The highest aim requires communal endeavor.
Yeah.
And it's also because it actually is the way that everything works.
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.
And that's the same with you.
You have all these thoughts, right?
You have all these feelings, all these contradicting things inside you.
And you need, by aiming up towards...
I mean, I believe that the image of Christ, let's say, by aiming towards the image of Christ, you constitute your being into that being that's able to attend, to sacrifice, to love, and then that scales up with people.
I agree.
I think you are aiming, and this is something else I tried to point out to Sam.
You're either aiming at Christ or something lesser.
Yeah.
Or if things get really out of hand, you're aiming at something opposite, and you don't want to be doing that.
And this is a matter of definition in some sense, and it's actually not impossible to understand, is that you aim at something better, generally speaking.
I mean, maybe you're out to cause pain, but forget about that.
You aim at something better.
You wouldn't do it unless it was better.
In fact, it virtually defines better.
The whole idea of better is predicated on the idea that there's an aim that's beyond you.
And then the highest of those aims is the amalgamation of all higher aims.
And that's a perfect mode of being.
And that's a psychological perspective again.
That, by definition, is Christ.
But then, there seems to be something too convenient about C.S. Lewis' insistence that that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history.
And I'm not, like, I don't understand why I should believe that.
And I tend not to believe things without a why.
There's always a why.
And there's a hurdle there that...
Well, that I waver on constantly because, well, I already said that 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.
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, right?
So if you want to understand, for example, the big conflict between the early Gnostics and the Christians, that's what it was all about.
Because the Gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated Christ.
They were saying, you know, and they viewed the world as utterly fallen, as having no value, having to be escaped, having to be fled in every way.
Whereas Christianity posits that it's a non-dual proposition.
It's saying it all comes together.
That's the promise.
It all comes together.
And so it has to come down, right?
And so it has to come down at every level.
And not only does it have to come down into the person of Christ who's incarnated, but that person has to go down, down into death, to the very bottom of the world, you know, to the belly of the Leviathan, and then come back up.
And so the whole world is declared as once again, declared as being capable of participating in this good.
And so you could say, well, maybe it wasn't that one.
Maybe it wasn't, you know, it's like, why would it be that particular place where it happened?
Well, it had to be some place.
That's the story.
I mean, that's where there is no other story like that story that we have.
And so once you recognize that this is part of the declaration that the world does embody these patterns, that it leads to this, it leads to 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.
You know, like the ultimate goal of Orthodox vision of Christianity is theosis.
It's to become God.
To become God through transformation and participation in God.
So that's the final goal of everything, is to become the Participant in the divine.
Where does your insistence that values are part of the structure of being, like, where does that find its limit?
Because the classic limit of that is something like...
In fact, the definition of the utmost place of value, in some sense, is almost indistinguishable from the claim that there is a God.
And so...
A god is not the same as an engineering god.
And I take enormous pains in the book.
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.
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.
And that's not to say that there isn't something there that merits whatever we mean when we say divine.
I mean, we haven't defined what we mean by divine, and we're back in the nets of language.
We're trapped in the nets of language, as Schelling said.
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.
He wasn't a fantasist.
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.
Relation is at the core of being.
I even argue that relation is prior to the relata, prior to the things that are related.
That sounds nonsense.
How can you relate?
How can you have a relation if there isn't anything yet to relate?
But there's a wonderful image in Indian mythology called Indra's Net, which covers the universe.
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.
And on those crossing points, there are little gems which reflect every other gem in the net.
And that would take a very long time to unpack, but perhaps it can set things going in people's minds.
But the idea I have...
Adjust you to the right hemisphere.
Is that relation is prior to anything at all, really.
And that, therefore, whatever you 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.
If it were known, it would all be some horrible, possibly sadistic Play by an almighty, all-knowing God.
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.
I don't think God is omniscient and omnipotent, but I don't think he's not either.
Just in the same way, I don't think he's green and I don't think he's not green.
I think the terms are wrong, but, you know, we can go there if we want later or another day.
But what I'm really saying is 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.
So, therefore, we are coming into being, God is coming into being, and we're necessary to one another's coming into being.
It's not that God does a bit to us and then we do a bit back to God.
It's like, I've read a very good book, I keep mentioning it, by a young microbiologist in America called Kriti Sharma, called Interdependence.
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 affects and shapes its environment, the environment shapes the animal or the organism.
But this is not a, you know, turn-by-turn process.
It's not that the animal shapes the environment, which then, in its turn, shapes the animal.
It's an entirely simultaneous process of coming into being, of co-creation, if you like.
Now, 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.
So that accounts for your objection to the idea of the omniscient determining God.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Because God would have no creation.
Creation is not really just the unfolding of something that's already there.
The idea of negative theology is...
You fundamentally...
I wonder if this is like Jung's circumambulation.
You fundamentally understand God by saying what God is not.
But not, of course, randomly, right?
What you're trying to do is...
That's sort of like the God of the gaps.
Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, that's...
Don't apologize.
We're friends talking.
Yeah.
Well, I don't want to derail the conversation.
It's been like this and it's been wonderful.
It feels to me like doing Tai Chi.
No, 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 inadequate.
Right, so God escapes our categorical...
God is, by definition, in some sense, what escapes our categories.
Because God is supposed to be the grounding of the intelligibility that makes the categorical scheme possible.
But God is also present within the category scheme if it's set up properly.
Right.
So the point about negative theology, that's why it's not just the God of the gaps.
The point is to see...
It's to see within the category, that it's present within the categories, but it's not capturable within the categories.
That's what you're trying to do.
Yeah, yes, the reality supersedes the categories, which is why you're not supposed to make idols.
You're not supposed to make representations of God.
But you can make icons.
To summon Jonathan back into the conversation one more time.
You can make icons, right?
And you've got Jean-Luc Marion's distinction between the idol and the icon.
And what's the distinction?
The distinction.
The icon does not capture God.
Right.
That's exactly it.
That's an artwork.
So an artwork is an icon.
Exactly.
And propaganda is an idol.
Yes.
I would agree with both of those statements.
Well, isn't that something?
Because they're really in some sense far astray, aren't they?
But they do map.
And so how cool is that?
So art is the icon.
How cool.
And propaganda is the idol.
Exactly, man.
You know, and I had these paintings in my house and they were melds of the icon and the idol.
Because there's all this socialist realism.
I have 200 pieces of socialist realism watching the icon and the idol fight with each other.
And the problem is, they are, and I want to get the etymology of this word, they, at a superficial level of similarity, they can easily be confused.
They can easily be confused.
Okay.
Yes.
Well, I would say they will inevitably be confused in the absence of God.
Well, and I... Because propaganda, like this is something I've been working on too, John, is that, you know, we make religious the next thing on the hierarchy if we don't give to what is religious its proper place.
And I think the new atheists are beginning to realize this.
The amount of the world's evil that's a consequence of our voluntary moral insufficiencies is indeterminate.
So you might say, hypothetically speaking, that as part of God's creation, we actually have important work to do.
And if we shirk it, the consequences are real.
And you might say, well, that's just an apology for God, and perhaps that's the case, and perhaps there's no God at all, and so what the hell are we talking about?
But...
But I do think it's an important issue.
I mean, your life is characterized by a stellar level of constant productive creativity.
That's you, and you're offering that to the world, and that seems necessary, and maybe it's because the problems are real and important, and the role we have to play ethically is of paramount importance, truly.
Why else would we torture ourselves with conscience?
And I would say that's the flowering of the religious instinct within you.
Well, you could describe it as that, but then, you know, there are phrases...
I mean, you used a phrase earlier that I wanted to say, whoa, hang on, I'm not sure I know what that means, a higher mode of existence.
I don't see...
I remember having this argument with John Cleese, of all people, some years ago.
He was a great lover of the...
Tibetan Book of the Dead and Gilbran and people like that.
And I've always found them slightly hard to take.
And he talked about, I think the phrase he used was a high level of consciousness.
And I said, I don't, and again, this is my empiricist thing.
It sounds cynical and skeptical.
It's not meant to be, but what level?
Describe a level.
What is a higher mode?
Why higher?
What's higher than another?
Are you saying it in terms of animals?
It's a view, it's an old-fashioned Huxleyan view of evolution that most modern, Richard Dawkins, for example, most modern evolutionary scientists and so on, the ethologists would deprecate to say that there is a higher level of being A higher mode of consciousness?
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 Verklärung's effect, as the Germans would say, which is not necessarily intellectual, but is somehow spiritual?
If so, show me an example of it.
Show me someone who has a higher mode of existence than I do.
I can answer that, I think, to some degree.
Three ways.
Three ways.
One, that higher mode of existence is what your conscience tortures you for not attaining.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
I think what my conscience tortures me for not attaining is that I was rude to someone yesterday and I shouldn't have been.
Right, but it's the shouldn't part of it.
Yes, the obligation.
It's the T. Exactly.
David Hume, the problem of ought.
Yeah.
Well, and then you think about how it manifests itself.
Hmm.
This is why Nietzsche was wrong.
You cannot create your own values.
The values impose themselves on you independent of your will.
Well, that's what your conscience does, and good luck trying to control it.
This is very anti-Nietzsche, isn't it?
Well, I'm a great admirer of Nietzsche.
I know you are.
That's why I made the point.
Very opposite to his philosophy.
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.
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.
There were autonomous entities, and those would be the Greek gods to some degree that operated within us, and we were... - Which is Julian Jaynes's point, exactly, yes.
Yes, I have my problems with Jaynes, but as an overarching idea, there's interest in it.
Okay, so there are things happening with us and to us in the moral domain that we cannot control.
And that stunned me when I first learned it as a proposition.
It's, oh yes, look at that.
Here's one.
What are you interested in?
Well, that grips you.
Okay.
Number two, what does your conscience bother you about?
Okay, that's you're inadequate by your own standards.
Now, what adequate would mean, that's a different question, but it's defined negatively by conscience.
Yes.
And then, better.
There's one that I said I would lay out three.
You can look at Jean Piaget's work on developmental psychology.
On the development of the subject, yes.
He was a genetic epistemologist.
He wanted to do was, this is what he wanted to do.
He wanted to unite science and religion.
That was his goal.
And he wanted to look at the empirical development of values.
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.
Yes, yes.
And you can say the same thing as a scientific theory.
I remember I had a great, I loved Piaget.
And his observation was so empirical, of course.
Yes, absolutely.
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 science.
Okay, so now Piaget looked specifically at the development of morality, and he was one of the first people to emphasize the importance of games.
And what he showed was that at two years old, let's say, a child can only play a game with him or herself.
But at three...
Both children can identify a name and then share it in a fictional world.
So that's partly pretend play and the beginnings of drama and then cooperate and compete within that domain.
And then what happens in the game theorists have shown this is that Games, out of games, morality emerges.
So I'll give you an example, and this is a crucial example.
So if you pair juvenile rats together, the males, they have to play.
They have to rough and tumble play because their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly if they don't.
Anyways, they have to play.
You pair a big rat and a little rat, teenage rats together, and the big rat will stomp the little rat.
First encounter.
So then you say power determines hierarchy.
Okay, but then you pair the rats multiple times, like 50.
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.
So you get an emergent reciprocity, even at the level of the rat.
Yeah.
One of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is something like attention.
Right?
Right.
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?
It has an indefinite amount of ways that you could describe it, angles by which you could analyze it.
And so...
Nonetheless, the world appears to us through these hierarchies of meaning, right?
I always kind of use the example of a cup or a chair.
Like a chair is just a multitude of things.
It's a multitude of parts.
How is it that we can say that it's one thing?
There's a capacity we have to attend, and this capacity we have to attend is something like a co-creation of the world.
And so the world actually exists.
A chair is a good example, because, you know, you can try to define it objectively, but you end up with beanbags and stumps, and they don't have anything in common.
Well, they're both made of matter, you know, for whatever that's worth.
It's a pretty trivial level of commonality, but you can sit on them.
Yeah, there's a mode of being which defines them.
Well, and that's so strange.
So many of our object perceptions are projected modes of being.
And so even the objective world is ineluctably contaminated with its utility and therefore with morality.
Exactly.
And so I think that that's the key.
The key is that once you understand that the world manifests itself through attention and that consciousness has a place to play in actually the way in which the world Reveals itself.
And so you can try to posit a world outside of that first-person perspective, but it's kind of diluted.
It's a diluted activity.
Well, it's also very, very difficult because you don't know what to make of something like time because time hasn't...
an ineradicably subjective element and duration which is different than time i mean time is kind of like the average rate at which things change but duration is something like the felt sense of that time and if you take away this objectivity it isn't obvious what to do with time and i think physicists stumble over this all the time so to speak so and this is something that this this intermingling of value in fact was something that i never thought
i never thought I made much traction with Harris, with Sam Harris.
He didn't seem to me to be willing to admit how saturated the world of fact is inevitably with value.
And I actually think he's denying the science at that point, because for everything I know about perceptual psychology, There's a great book called Vision as a...
Oh God, now I can't remember the name of the book.
That's Memory Trouble.
I'll remember it.
No worries.
The idea is that if that is true, then there are certain things which come out of that.
There are certain necessary things down the road from that insight, which is that attention plays a part in the way the world lays itself out.
And one of them is that the stuff that the world is made of is partly something like attention, something like consciousness, and that has a pattern.
And that pattern is the same pattern as stories.
It doesn't lay itself out exactly the same, but things exist with a pattern which is similar to stories.
They have identities, they have centers, they have margins, they have exceptions.
And that's how stories lay themselves out.
So a story happens in time, how an identity, let's say, is Broken down and then reconstructed.
You could say that that's basically the story of every story, how something breaks down and is reconstructed.
And so that is a way for us to perceive the identity of things.
And so if the world is made of this, then it's actually...
It's actually our world, our secular world, which is a strange aberration on how reality used to exist for every culture and every time from the beginning of time, which is to take that for granted, to take for granted that something that they didn't call it consciousness, but intelligence and attention are part of how the world lays itself out.
And it lays itself out in modes of being.
And one of the things that comes out of it is not only that, but Like you said, it's not only that you have ideas, but it's that ideas have you.
Or that it's not only that you engage in modes of being, it's that modes of being have you.
And that recognition means that the first level of attention to that looks something like worship.
It looks like celebration.
It looks like a...
It's like the thing which makes, let's say, the National Hockey League so successful has more to do with celebration than just a bunch of guys on skates on a piece of ice throwing a puck around.
There's a celebration of the purpose of that thing, and it manifests itself Yeah, well, the hockey league example is very interesting because it's a social game.
And, you know, 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 small space in the net, blocked though it may be by your enemies, and everyone celebrates that.
And you do that in cooperation with other people and in competition with other people.
And if you do it properly, not only are you a brilliant player from a technical perspective, but you're also a great sport.
And so there's an ethic there and a morality.
And 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.
Right, 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 addictive.
That's right.
Yeah, necessarily.
And so...
God, I saw that in pro wrestling.
There's a great documentary, Bret Hart, called Hitman Hart.
It's one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.
And it...
It portrays pro wrestling as a stark religious battle between the forces of good and evil.
And Bret Hart, who at one point was the most famous Canadian in the world, was overwhelmed by the archetypal force of his representation as the good guy.
It's a great documentary, Hitman Hart.
And it shows you how, you know, pro wrestling is not the world's most intellectual activity, to say the least.
And people can easily be dismissive of it.
But one of the things I loved about the documentary was that it attempted to understand from within what was compelling about what was being portrayed.
And it was a religious drama.
It just was shocking and brilliant.
And so...
So 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.
And so the sports drama has a certain level, but it's limited to a certain extent because it still happens as a confrontation, let's say, between two irreducible sides.
And so what happens in something like the story of Christ is that that gets taken into one person.
And so all the opposites become the king and the criminal, the highest, even in the image of the cross, you have this image.
As Christ is being crucified, they're putting a sign above his head saying that he's the king.
As Christ is being beaten, they're giving to him a crown.
And so Christ joins together all the opposites.
And so in his story, you see, if you're attentive to these patterns, you see the highest form of this pattern being played out.
And one of the aspects that has to be there for it to be the most revealed or highest form is that it also has to include the world of manifestation.
I mean, it can't just be a story.
It has to be connected to the world.
So that's why Christians insist on the fact that Jesus is not just a story, that he's an incarnated man, that he was incarnated.
But I don't believe their insistence.
I don't believe...
Well, this is...
Because I don't...
It isn't obvious to me, and I think maybe I derived this criticism from Nietzsche, but...
People have asked me whether or not I believe in God, and I've answered in various ways.
No, but I'm afraid he probably exists.
That's one answer.
Yeah, no, but I'm terrified he might exist.
That would be a truthful answer to some degree.
Or that I act as if God exists, which I think is, I do my best to do that.
But then there's a real stumbling block there, because...
There's no limit to what would happen if you acted like God existed.
You know what I mean?
Because I believe that acting that out fully...
I mean, maybe it's not reasonable to say to believers, you aren't sufficiently transformed for me to believe that you believe in God.
Or that you believe the story that you're telling me.
You're not a sufficient...
The way you live isn't a sufficient testament to the truth.
And people would certainly say that, let's say, about the Catholic Church, or at least the way that it's been portrayed, is that with all the sexual corruption, for example, it's like, really?
Really?
You believe that the Son of God, that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and yet you act that way, and I'm supposed to buy your belief?
And 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.
And so I don't think people...
don't manifest christians don't manifest this and i'm including myself i suppose in that description perhaps um don't manifest the transformation of attitude that would enable that enables the outside observer to easily conclude that they believe yeah now the way the way to deal with that or the way to to understand that is that it they do
but they do in a hierarchy there's there's a hierarchy of manifestation of the transformation that god offers the world and And we kind of live in that hierarchy.
And those above us hold us together, you would say.
And so in the church, there's a testimony of the saints.
There are stories.
There are hundreds and hundreds of stories of people who live that out in their particular context to the limit of what it's possible to live it.
And even today, there are There are saints, living saints, who, for example, in the Orthodox tradition, we have this idea of what they call the gift of tears or the joyful sorrow of people who live in prayer with weeping, constant weeping.
And it's this kind of strange mix of joy and sadness, which kind of overwhelms them, and they live in that joy and sadness nonstop, and they pray, you know, without end.
And so that exists, but then we, in this, that's one of the reasons why, that's kind of one of the reasons why, when I talk about this idea of attention, like it manifests itself in the 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.
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 crumble under it, that you would just be crushed under it.
I believe that.
And I think that I understand that, 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 asks of you is not a moral action.
The first thing that it asks of you is attention.
That's why to act as if God exists is, first of all, to worship.
Like, that's...
And I know people are going to hear this...
Well, then I have a terrible problem with that, too, at the moment, because I'm in so much pain.
Like, one of the things that...
One of these theologians discussed the idea of...
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.
And...
And there's a paradox there, obviously, because it's also a take up your cross and follow me sort of thing.
But the fact that I've been living in constant pain makes the idea of joy seem cruel, I would say.
And I have no idea how to reconcile myself to that.
I mean, I've reconciled myself to that by staying alive, despite it.
Although, by staying alive despite it, but there's very little worship.
And it doesn't mean I'm not appreciative of what I have.
Not only am I appreciative of what I have, I do everything I can to remind myself of it all the time.
And so does my wife.
I mean, she's changed quite a bit as a consequence of her...
Struggle with cancer, you know, has become much more overtly religious, I would say.
And, you know, we say grace before our meal in the evening, and it's a very serious enterprise.
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.
But despite that, I'm struggling with this because I don't know how to reconcile myself to the fact of constant pain.
And I feel that it's unjust, which is halfway to being resentful, which is not a good outcome.
No, I agree.
I don't know how to speak to that because I don't necessarily have that experience.
I don't live with constant pain and so I don't know what that would do to me.
It's probably one of the reasons why it might ruin me.
It's very difficult to answer that.
I think that the answer has been the cross.
That's been the answer.
It may be easy for me to just say it that way.
But that's always been the answer of Christianity, which is that God went to the cross and that God went down into death and plunged down into death.
and that there are mysteries hidden.
And maybe they're very well hidden, but there are mysteries hidden in that depth.
But I don't think it's my job to moralize to you at this particular moment.
So we talked about the narrative and the objective touching, and so I wanted to touch on that again.
I understand C.S. Lewis' argument, and I'm even inclined from time to time to think, well, I've got the choice between believing two impossible things.
I can either believe that the world is constituted so that God took on flesh and was crucified and died and rose three days later.
Or I can believe that human beings invented this unbelievably preposterous story that stretched into every atom of culture.
And it isn't obvious to me that the second hypothesis is any easier to believe than the first, because the more you investigate...
The manifestations of the story of Christ, the more insanely complicated and far-reaching it becomes.
So I read Ion, for example, and for all of those who are listening, if you want to read a book that will completely make you insane, then you could read Jung's Ion.
And it's a study of Christian symbolism in astrology, which doesn't sound particularly dangerous, or even particularly necessary to read, I suppose.
But Jung describes the juxtaposition of astrological and Christian symbolism, and it's a brilliant book, and it's terrifying because he outlines the concordance between the levels of symbolism over several thousand years.
And it's obvious when you read the book that no one plotted this.
It's not a conspiracy.
Whatever's going on To make that concordance occur isn't something that we understand, and it seems to be best understood as one of these situations where the narrative and the objective touch.
The saturation of Christianity with fish symbolism Jung associates with astrological movement into the house of Pisces.
And so 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 alternative explanation is that there's this...
There's this unfolding of a symbolic landscape over centuries or millennia that's part of human biological and cultural evolution.
But that starts to touch on the religious anyways when you describe it in those terms.
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.
And so, I've never seen a critique of Ion.
You know, I think people read that book and they think, oh, it's like John Allegro's The Mushroom and the Sacred Cross.
Do you know of that book?
I believe that's the title.
It's another book you read and you think, well, I have no idea what...
It's a study of...
Mushroom symbolism in Christianity, and it's another book that, you know, it claims that Christianity was heavily influenced by psilocybin use, and it was published in the 1960s.
It's an amazing book, but it's another book you read and you think, I have no idea what to do with that.
I have no place to put that book.
So, but Ion is really like that, and Well, one of the things that, for example, you know, 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.
If you actually just look at the story of Christ, and not just the story in Scripture, but let's say the whole story as it kind of developed in tradition and kind of melded together.
In the ancient world, you had this idea of gods that went down into the underworld, you know, either that went down for some reason to visit or went down to save somebody even or, you know, or died and then rose again.
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.
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.
And that in itself is a kind of miracle.
And so you're stuck in some sense constantly having to choose between miracles.
It's like, okay, it's a figment of the human imagination.
Fine.
But it's the limit figment in multiple ways.
How did that happen?
But as soon as you 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.
It doesn't mean anything.
Yeah, it only means something if you assume that...
And Jung pointed this out.
It only means something.
It only...
To say it's a figment of imagination and have that brush it aside means that you think that imagination is nothing.
And 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 not nothing.
It's the thing that you take for granted more than anything else.
So 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 most childish fairy tale, anything that manifests itself as a pattern of story that you can recognize It has a certain level of value.
It has enough level that if you pay attention to it, you actually can gather some nuggets of how the world works and how the world lays itself out.
And that's why 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.
That's just, for you to even recognize something as having being, it's already part of that world.
It's already manifesting these patterns.
That is one of the things that narrative does, is that it enables us to play out ideas that we're not yet intelligent enough to understand.
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 still unwrapping Shakespeare.
There's more depth there than we can understand explicitly.
And so anything that uses character has that tremendous advantage.
And then there's also this strange ability that some people have in spades to create fictional worlds that are of unbelievable profundity and power.
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 gripped the imagination of the entire planet For a decade and produced untold wealth and spread literacy everywhere as well.
She had a remarkably creative imagination and something quite mysterious.
And so you're fortunate enough to work at the marriage of ideas and drama.
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.
I studied Russian for four years in college and read some of these in the original.
My Russian wasn't.
I mean, I had to grind through them, but Tolstoy, Chekhov, who was a doctor, a medical doctor, as well as a writer, so that congruence of 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.
He famously said, medicine is my wife and literature is my mistress.
And when I tire of one, I spend time with the other.
And 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.
It was more resonant.
It carried more.
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.
And I grew up Southern Baptist, so ever since I could read, I've read the Bible virtually every day of my life, but I'd never read the Bible start to finish.
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.
I just got to move on.
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.
And it felt, if you disobey these rules, then it's going to end badly for us all.
And the greatest violation is to erect altars to other gods.
Right?
Worship false idols.
Yeah.
That's the worst.
And then along comes Jesus, who is completely steeped in all of that Old Testament.
I mean, he is profound in his knowledge of it.
And he lives and does and says these things.
But it's not like it's a philosophy.
It's a narrative.
A narrative which I've studied a great deal and I believe is largely historical.
Or I should say significantly historical.
I believe these things did happen.
And then you have St.
Paul who's trying to make sense of what happened.
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 in church.
Well, what's mind-blowing about it in part?
And I try to speak of the Bible not from the perspective of a committed believer, and I have my reasons for that.
I guess it's partly because I want to concentrate on What everyone can come to see as true, I suppose.
Perhaps that's it.
But it is remarkable that the Bible does, in fact, make a coherent narrative.
Because we don't understand that.
It was written by a very diverse range of people over a span of time that we can perhaps not even imagine.
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 Cain and Abel, they bear all the hallmarks of a previous oral tradition that would have existed before In relatively unchanged form for tens of thousands of years, and perhaps even longer than that.
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.
But you have, at the bare minimum, an unbelievably deep psychological document that weaves itself over centuries into a coherent story.
And Northrop Frye, 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, because Fry, 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.
He assessed the Bible as a work of literature, as a narrative, and that to me was never any denigration, because...
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.
Well, and if it wasn't, it wouldn't have been so popular before.
There's a truth in narrative that I think is even deeper than historical truth.
A truly profound narrative truth is like the average of a whole variety of historical truths.
It's the essence of historical truth.
So it's even more true than what we would consider, say, eyewitness history, because eyewitness history is just one battle, you know?
And there's maybe an epic theme in that battle, but then imagine that you could look at a thousand battles, and you could extract out from that what was canonical about heroic victory across all 1,000 battles.
You see something like that happening in the Old Testament, and the narrative thread is really quite deep.
Societies emerge, formulate, fall off the path, worship false idols, collapse, and then the same thing happens again, and the collapse happens, and the collapse happens because people become too prideful, the kings in particular.
They don't listen to the voice of conscience.
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.
And generally speaking, the kings ignore that, and catastrophe breaks free.
And you see, in the Old Testament in particular, there's the promise of the ultimate state There's utopian promises that run through it, the search for the promised land.
And then, so strangely, you see that transformed into something that's not really political in the New Testament.
You see that the promised land becomes the nature of experience as a consequence of a particular form of moral being.
And then perhaps that has political implications, because people who acted like that would produce a particular state, but it's no longer the dream of establishing the state that will solve all problems.
It's psychologized, and it's unbelievably profound.
And I think you can derive all of that from the biblical writings without even starting to move onto classically religious territory.
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 questions start to become religious.
Yes.
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. - Okay.
There's a quote from Mary Oliver that a friend shared with me recently.
It's, keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
And I find that In a great story, or any great piece of art, that surprise is the central currency of its power.
There's an element of, if you will, of revelation, if you will.
And I think it was Paul Tillich, I'm not sure, who said that religion is Man's way to God and it's always erroneous, but revelation is God's way to man.
Maybe it was Karl Barth, but it's God's way to man and it's always perfect.
Well, there's a revelatory aspect to any great story.
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.
You know what the most powerful takeaway for me was from my biblical series?
Which was what?
The meaning of the word Israel.
Wrestling with God.
We who wrestle with God.
We who struggle with God.
It's like, well, maybe that's the real Christian spirit.
That's what that phrase implies, and that's the real Jewish spirit.
It's the wrestling, John.
Why is there that strange scene of the wrestling with the angel?
Like, why would you possibly fight with God?
And then you think, well, God, isn't that what I'm doing all the time?
Isn't that what everybody's doing all the time?
He partially wins, though.
That's what's even more mysterious.
And hurts you doing so.
Yeah.
I mean, that's...
That's the story.
But isn't that the story?
I mean, it isn't belief.
It's the wrestling with belief.
And it's wrestling in the way that you're wrestling.
Well, I mean, I do sparring, and I often use sparring as a metaphor for the kind of...
Oh, so that's the other metaphor for dialogue.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not just the tracking, it's the sparring.
Yeah, and we have to remember, you know...
And that kind of sums up men's relationships with each other, tracking and sparring.
Plato means big shoulders.
He was a wrestler.
That's his nickname.
His nickname is Plato, because he's a wrestler.
And we have to remember that the Greeks are in the gymnasium even more than they are in the academy, right?
I was watching this Suits episode last night, and the men are always sparring with each other verbally, you know?
And they're tracking something.
They're tracking victory in this series.
You can shift off that.
And they wrestle.
They wrestle when they fight.
They have to go into a clinch in a fight to settle their disputes, like a physical fight.
But you can shift off of that.
This happened, Bernardo and I, when we were doing this, we both said this.
You can shift off of it, and this happens when you're actually martial arts sparring, because you get into the shared flow state.
You can shift off of victory to the aesthetics of the dance.
There's a beauty in that that's independent of victory that you can come to appreciate for its own sake.
Plato talks about this.
He talks about the beauty, the eros that draws you into the...
That's why he...
A dance.
Yeah, a dance.
But it's a dance that draws you beyond yourself.
Edus, education, right?
To draw forth from you.
So is that the battle with the adversary?
Is that related to the...
This is another very serious question, obviously.
It's a question related to the book of Job.
I don't know, because I see parallels, you know, in Nietzsche's quote, you know, I hate Socrates.
He's so close to me, I'm always fighting him.
Right?
You can see both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard wrestling with Socrates.
Kierkegaard said, I follow Jesus, but Socrates is my teacher.
And he wrestles with Socrates all the way through.
Everybody's wrestling with Socrates.
I follow Jesus, but...
Socrates is my teacher.
So is that the statement of the West?
I think that...
I mean, that was your objection at the beginning of this talk, right?
At least to some degree, because you said how influenced you were with Greece.
You insisted upon how influenced you were by Greece.
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.
See, Ruck said that...
Because I asked him why Dionysus transformed into Christ, because we were answering simple questions too, and he said, well, Greece meant Judaism.
Yeah, but Judaism also meant...
I mean, final starts theology because of the interaction with Platonic philosophy.
I think Christianity is trying to integrate agape and logos together.
That's how I try to understand its project.
Please clarify that claim.
Sure.
So I think, I mean, we've talked a lot about the Greek heritage of Logos, and Logos is also central within.
Especially in the book of John.
Yeah, especially in the book of John.
And saying that metaphorically with regard to you as well.
But also in the epistle of John is where John also said God is agape.
And then that's the epistle of John.
He makes that famous statement.
And the idea is there's something about the way the Logos gathers things together so they belong together.
That's the original etymology.
So that everything comes together.
Everything comes together.
And then there's the idea in Plato of the ascent from the cave, the anagoga.
You and Jonathan talked about this.
The world discloses itself to me, that transforms me, and then I can see more deeply into the world, then that transforms me, and I do this reciprocal opening.
And the thing is, that's very much, you know...
And agape, you define that, that's love.
Yeah.
Accelerating mutual disclosure is how it's even disclosed.
Well, it seemed to me that the relationship between truth and love is that love is something like the goal and truth is its servant.
It seems to me to be...
So this is how I've worked it in my mind.
Sure, sure.
Well, I think that 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.
I think this agape is...
and logos is more accurate.
And so it's not just a counterclaim, it's an antithesis.
Well, I'm trying to pick up on what you're saying here.
You know, I'm trying to touch on the culture wars, obviously.
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 from the Meaning Crisis.
Let's hear it, man.
Well, shut up.
No, it's okay.
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.
And the kind of knowing there is like noticing, like news.
Great.
That's the Egyptian eye.
Well, yes.
It's noticing.
It's not thinking.
It's attention.
And maybe you're tying that with that revelation of the form.
You're tying that to that revelation of the form and that conforming.
Yeah, and that's exactly it.
That's exactly it.
And this is very similar to the Buddhist idea of what you're trying to do is shape attention and mindfulness so that you get that reciprocal opening, so that your self-knowledge and the knowledge of the world become indistinguishable, become interpenetrating.
Like what you have when you really love somebody in a committed long-term relationship.
Your knowing of yourself and your knowing of them become bound up because you indwell them and you internalize them and they indwell you and internalize you, right?
And how much death of the old you has this involved for you?
I know that's a strange question.
No, it's a good question.
It's a damn good question.
Why?
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.
In both those senses of identification, the kind of knowing that I most care about, this participatory knowing, involves identification.
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 yourself, I don't mean representing yourself.
I mean the knowing that constitutes you as a self.
And that's what's undergoing the transformation when you're engaged in participatory knowing.
When I really love my partner, right?
I'm not just forming What does it mean that you love them, do you think?
If you had to express that, how would you express that?
Well, I mean, it means a lot.
It means that reciprocal opening I was talking about, but it means that I, I mean, It's like what Eckhart says.
And again, I don't mean to be pretentious.
Like, you know, he says you have to make a space.
I don't think you're going to be able to help it in this conversation.
Yeah, that's true.
That's fair enough.
He says, you know, you have to.
God forgive us.
The goal of Lineland mysticism was to this kind of receptivity.
You have to make a space so that the son of God can be born within you.
And again, no, not being, 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.
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.
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...
The grace of God.
Or, yeah, 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.
There's, you know, Socratic self-love, not narcissistic self-love.
There's the love of the other, and then there's the love of the relationship.
But that, for me, is like a trinity.
Talking about if those are separate is the mistake.
You have to talk about it analytically as if they're separate.
But they interpenetrate and inter-afford each other in a profound way.
They become, in an important sense, indistinguishable from each other.
Think about this.
Admiration is the instinct to emulate.
Okay, so then we look for the most emulatable.
That's the ultimate spirit.
And I think Gerard is right, that that always carries with it the dark side of mimetic envy and covetousness, and that those two are always playing off against each other.
Because we think we can possess it by ill-got means.
That's the story of Cain.
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.
And you said, well, that's a manifestation of deeper things.
And that's, well, that's what I asked, too.
Yeah.
And I hope that what we've been doing is actually my answer to that.
Awe, I can say more about because I've been involved and I'm involved in some actual experiments on awe and the effects on cognition and some of the work.
I don't know if what we've been doing is the answer to that or the antidote to that.
To which, sorry.
Well, if the question is posed wrong, We can't really answer it, can we?
We have to provide an alternative formulation.
But that's what I think we're doing here.
Yeah, so it's an antidote rather than an answer.
And that's fine.
I know, I know.
I'm just clarifying it.
I think looking for the answer is in some sense a fundamental way of misframing it.
That is to give in to the proposition of tyranny.
Well, how do we address it then?
How do we address it, John?
Do we just by-step it and just offer the alternative?
No, no.
Think about this.
That's a genuine question because perhaps we do just sidestep it and offer the alternative.
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Sorry, I want to be more responsible.
That's what I'm recommending.
That's what I'm recommending.
See, one of the things I've thought is that at minimum what Christianity is is a thousands of years long discussion about what constitutes the human ideal.
It's a purely psychological viewpoint.
Now, I understand the metaphysical Implications, you know, and I don't want to dispense with them, but it's best to start with what's simple.
So there's this discussion of what constitutes the ideal.
And we're exploring it and discussing it.
And we explore and discuss it in all sorts of interesting ways, right?
Because it's not merely rational.
Bach writes this soul-inspiring music.
And that makes us feel a particular way, and that's a hint as to the nature of the ideal.
And then there's these great cathedrals that are built all across Europe, and they're awe-inspiring masterpieces of stone and light, right?
So opposites conjoined, and they bring the primeval forest into the city, and they provide color, and the music is set in there.
And then there's the invocation of the ancestors and the dogmatic formulations that Christianity consists of that go back centuries as well.
And all of that.
And that's all part of this exploration.
And to me, it's the exploration of that central animating spirit.
And when we're debating the postmodernists who say everything is power, this is the sort of thing that needs to be pointed out as a rejoinder.
It's like, no, it's not.
We're doing our best to manifest this ideal that we're discussing.
We're flawed and fragmented and ignorant.
So, for example, you asked me earlier, Nigel, What sort of things I had to discuss in order to make people attracted, say, to a discussion of Genesis.
And what it is, is that I try to get the wheat from the text.
And in the chaff, I think a lot of that's my ignorance.
It's not necessarily chaff, but I'll leave it be because I don't have the intellectual wherewithal to make sense of it.
So I just leave it be without despising it.
Because I can't understand, it doesn't mean there isn't something to it.
Now, you know, we're still stuck because we have problems like, well, the idea of the resurrection, you know, which is obviously a very big problem in a very fundamental sense, and I leave that be.
Except to say that I have seen, in my studies of mythology, that there are stories of dying and resurrecting gods throughout history, and the idea of Christ seems to be of that type, although it's not only that, but it's something I can't touch, and that's a problem.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't this investigation that we're all undertaking, including us in this conversation, of what constitutes the ideal and how we could manifest it if we could only understand it.
And I think that's unbelievably compelling to people.
And it's not only compelling, they die without it.
Because we can't live with only knowledge of our limitations.
We have to be moving towards an ideal.
Just a quick thought there.
Certainly within the Christian tradition, the claim is that God's decision to become incarnate is not accidental.
He chose this particular human being, not just because he had to choose some human being in order to become a human being, But he chose a human being and, as it were, exhibited the qualities that he wanted to, as it were, disseminate as a kind of moral exemplar that were profoundly countercultural to the values and the exemplars of the time.
So you think of the weakness of Christ in some contexts, obviously the sense of self-sacrifice, the radical openness to those on the margins, the poor in particular, the ceremonially unclean, and of course to women.
And so it's as if this is completely subverting the kind of the sort of power narrative that dominated first century Palestine, particularly in the form of the sort of the Roman legions and the Roman imperium.
And so I think that's a that's a quick thought.
I've really been struck constantly by some of Jung's descriptions of Christ as a member of the Trinity, because Jung makes much of John's sense of Christ, the logos that's there across time, which I read something as something like the creative consciousness which I read something as something like the creative consciousness that's involved in the bringing to awareness of beings.
something like that.
It's maybe identical to consciousness itself, at least in its higher stages.
It's very abstract.
But then there's Christ, the carpenter, who lived in a particular time and place, which is kind of a mystery, because everyone asks, like in the movie, Jesus Christ Superstar, you know, why that time and that place?
And the answer is, well, it has to be some bounded time and place.
And so, if what Christ is is a representative, in some sense, of what a human being is, is that there's a divine aspect to us, which is this creative consciousness that's very abstract, but it's also localized intensely, You know, in an arbitrary throne, to use the existential phrase, historical context, and then each of us is unique in that manner, but there's something universal about each of us, too, that enables us to reach out to each other.
And also gives each of our individual lives a larger significance that otherwise they just wouldn't have at all.
Well, yes.
You know, one of my students once asked me a brilliant question.
It's like, well, if all stories have the archetypal structure, why not just tell the same archetype over and over?
And I thought, well, isn't that so interesting?
Because what you want is you want old wine and new skin, so to speak, right?
You want the universal story particularized.
And then I thought, well, that's exactly what Jung said about the figure of Christ, is it's the universal story particularized.
And both of those, like both the particularization and the universality, it's the intersection of those two that produces the meaning.
And it also produces, I guess you say, meaning I would say human dignity.
Because on the one hand, there is individuality.
No one quite grasps the truth or speaks the truth in my time and place.
Like me.
So, in a sense, everyone is a unique prophet and has a unique responsibility, but we are commonly subject to a universal order, universal obligations, universal calling, which endows our little lives with a larger significance.
The important things are hard to articulate in words.
They're implicit meanings.
All the deep things like love, religion, poetry, music.
How do you say these in words?
How do you say them in language?
But they have extraordinary meaning and power.
They're the things we live for, not for the things that we can say, put down in a notebook, if you know what I mean.
I try to look at things scientifically insofar as the science allows those things to be viewed.
Okay.
And so to the degree that I can look at religious matters from a biological perspective, I do that because it's simpler.
Okay.
So I believe that the religious instinct manifests itself in a variety of fundamental motivations, but they're abstract motivations to some degree.
So the experience of awe...
Mm-hmm.
That's a major one.
The experience of beauty, that's another one.
The experience of admiration and the desire to imitate, those are crucial.
And so one of the things that I would point out, you can tell me what you think about this, and I've been trying to formalize this idea and I don't know its extent.
So I look at Christianity in particular, although not uniquely Christianity, but Christianity in particular, as a thousands of years investigation into the structure of the abstracted ideal to imitate.
So imagine, we imitate those we admire, okay?
But we're abstract creatures, so we want to know what's the essence of what should be imitated itself.
Now, we investigate that.
It's not all explicit.
We have to represent it in music.
We have to represent it in art.
We have to represent it in architecture.
Because we're hitting at it from multiple different domains.
And that is a reductionistic argument, right?
It says nothing to do about divinity itself.
Sure.
It's purely psychological or biological argument.
You're saying that everything is relevant.
That what these philosophers were talking about, what these artists were painting, what these musicians are doing, what filmmakers are doing, this is all something that's trying to get us that way.
No, that's what a cathedral represents.
You know, it's an expression in stone of this yearning to bring the material world into harmony with the spirit.
It's something like that.
And that's what music does as well.
There's this proclivity within us to strive upward.
And the cathedrals, they're absolutely amazing.
These lattice-like structures of stone.
There's something about the harmonious interplay of shadow and light that's key to it as well.
It's like the opening up of dark matter to the light that pours in.
That's all embodied in the architecture.
And I can't say, and neither can anyone else, what that ultimately represents.
And then to bring music into that space and tradition, it's all pointing upward to something, to the direction that we're supposed to go.
It's so terrible to see these buildings empty out.
I mean, thank God that they're being preserved in some sense by the tourists who come there driven by a sense of awe.
But we can't inhabit them anymore the way that we used to, and that's a terrible thing.
It means there's a kind of ideal that we're no longer pursuing.
Perhaps we're no longer pursuing it.
It seems like a catastrophe to me.
No one really knows how to revitalize it, though, unfortunately.
Well, I think one of the problems to me when I was in Paris working on Man in the Iron Mask, I would want on a Sunday morning to go to a mass.
And it was very difficult to find...
Well, for one thing, in a Baptist, church would start at 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning, and masses aren't like that.
But go into, say, the Cathedral Saint-Germain, and...
There was no one there.
It's a magnificent ancient cathedral and a few tourists.
The place didn't feel dead.
The architecture was alive.
But it was very difficult to have a congregation.
And a congregation is...
What the church, of course, is supposed to be.
It's a collection of people who are united and different.
It's a collection of sinners acknowledging their sins.
And I think that is a fascinating thing to me about how we keep...
Well, it's so surprising.
It's also so surprising that Those hundreds of years ago, when most of those buildings were built, that those cultures would dedicate themselves to such great cost to produce these absolutely spectacular, impossible buildings made out of stone or brick.
They're like a dance in stone.
They're so magnificent.
And then to fill them with...
The greatest of artworks.
And to bring the light in, in the most colourful possible ways, and then to bring the music in, to set the scene, and then to have everyone come in and commit to at least not being as bad as they were, right?
Like it was a joint moral enterprise that everyone was involved in.
You can be as cynical about that as you want and talk about, you know, Sunday Christians and all of that, but an hour a week to contemplate How it is that you should be living your life or to become in tune with your conscience once again, which at least the confession can offer that.
And then to see that so much effort was poured into that.
It's amazing that that over occurred.
And then it's also equally amazing that we've stopped doing it because you might think, well, wouldn't we be interested in Jointly coming together and saying, well, here's how we're inadequate, and here's how we're conceptualizing what would be ideal, and couldn't we move together toward that?
And I was talking to Bishop Barron this week about this issue, about the loss, especially in the Catholic Church, of young people.
It seems that there's a great adventure there that isn't being communicated properly.
And it's a terrible loss for all of us.
What do we have to replace that?
You know, I've talked to the new atheists, especially Sam Harris, and it's not like I don't understand their arguments.
It's not like I don't have sympathy for them, for that matter.
But There's nothing poetic or artistic or magnificent about the alternative.
Yes.
It loses, it loses, it loses.
There's something that just disappears.
It's that artistic ineffability.
There's no room, there's no obvious room for that in the, say, the Enlightenment worldview.
I'm an admirer of Steven Pinker, for example, and he falls into the Enlightenment rationalist camp.
And in his book, The Language Instinct, he talks a little bit at the end about Culture, philosophy, music, art, and all of that.
Religion, even for that matter, to some degree.
But it's like a throwaway chapter at the end.
Whereas by my way of looking, that's the whole book, all of that, that artistic endeavor.
And that shades into the religious endeavor.
And that's not some side effect of human cognitive development.
Quite the contrary.
It's the central feature of I agree.
Jordan, when you were speaking with Julia, the most recent podcast I heard, her description of her life reminded me of an experience I had in Russia.
I was in St.
Petersburg and we were doing a scout for a film I wrote called Love and Honor based on a novel that I wrote.
And we were finished with the scout.
We had seen everything that That we were scheduled to see.
And this young woman who was in her early 30s, a Russian woman, asked if there was anything else we'd like to see because we had some time.
And I said, well, I'd love to see some of your churches.
And she got this quizzical look on her face.
She was surprised that, I don't know, a Hollywood director would ask that.
And she said, well, I'll take you to my church.
And I said, you've got a church?
And she said, oh yes, I'm Christian.
And I said, but you grew up when that was discouraged, even when it was illegal.
Are your parents Christian?
And she said, no.
Mother's a confirmed atheist.
Her father was baptized as a child, but he's also an atheist.
And so I said, well, how did you become Christian?
And she said, there was no beauty.
I was a young girl walking around and nothing was beautiful.
And one day I passed the church and I could see candlelight in it and heard music coming out.
And I went in and I kept going and I kept going and I became a Christian.
And that to me says so much.
And people have no idea.
They have no idea.
That's why I wrote Chapter 8.
They have no idea how much they're starving for beauty.
Yes.
Like, it's a hunger that goes far beyond...
Well, let's not say that.
It doesn't have to go beyond material hunger, but it...
No matter how well-fed you are, without some relationship to beauty, there's too much suffering in the world for it to be viable.
Along with truth, it's the antidote to suffering.
It's not optional.
It's crucial.
And you can tell that by its economic value.
For those who are hard-headed, it's like you can't point to anything with more economic value.
Period.
The end.
And so...
Well, some weeks back, when you were, I felt, really working your way back, that work and engagement in your calling is helping to heal and sustain you.
You said something along the lines of that you wondered why in the Christian community and religious community that people...
We're telling you that your work means so much.
You know, why it's somewhat overwhelming to realize that so many people are drawing from you.
And I think I can tell you...
It is completely.
It is.
Today, I was sitting on a bench with my friend who walks with me.
And this kid came up to me.
And he said...
Apologies for interrupting you, but I was listening to your podcast while I was walking down the street, and I saw you here, he said...
And he started to tear up right away.
He said, five years ago, I was suicidal.
And I've been listening to your lectures on a regular basis.
He said, an hour and a half a day, which seems like an overdose to me.
He said...
He's invented prosthetic limbs and has helped all sorts of disabled people and is on his way to MIT. It's like just a random meeting on the street, you know?
Yes.
Yes.
It is.
It's too much.
Yes, of course it is.
I know you like to understand.
There's something else you said a couple of weeks back about, I want to understand why.
I want to understand why this story makes sense, and I do too.
But the what of it all, to me gets at the why of it all, but the what of it all is that you speak to people like me and like others who know this experience of more, who know what it is to stand in awe, to feel the awe of a moment.
And you combine all the different elements of perspective, of thought, of experience, and you validate or endorse that people who choose faith and who see courage and sacrifice as crucial divine values are not idiots.
It's no accident that crucial and cross are the same thing.
Yes, exactly.
And, you know, we go through this thing of, well, you're just, you're choosing an opiate.
And to me, it's like, well...
The alternative is not attractive, too.
When I started working on the Pope story, I came across a statement that I believe is one of the talk show guys, late night talk show guys had said, Conan O'Brien, I believe it was, that he said that Pope Francis had made a pronouncement that he thought even atheists could go to heaven.
And in gratitude, atheists have said that the Pope, when he dies, is welcome to enter their endless void of nothingness.
Well, the problem with that worldview is, in some sense, that endless void of nothingness confronts us right here and now.
Yes, exactly.
I try to tell people I'm not so much concerned about life after death as life after birth.
Jesus said, come that you can have life and have it more abundantly.
And I'm not trying in a movie to espouse my particular dogma.
I don't believe in my own dogma.
My own dogma is...
Is limited and I'm not trying to think that when I was in school and I'd study systematic theologians, and I remember asking my mentor who was the head of the department, what is really the point?
What are they trying to do?
And he said, well, they're trying to have a system of understanding that holds up From every angle.
I thought, well, how's that working out for them?
Because ultimately, you get into, do you have faith or not?
When I write a story, it's, I've got to jump in and trust.
And I don't know where they'll lead.
But I know that to not jump in is...
Is death.
And so for me, it's like the Old Testament says, you know, I set before you life and death.
Choose life.
And that to me is what I hope my work's about.
And I'm damn sure it's what your work's about.
Let's delve into this faith issue a bit too.
Because the faith is a very complicated term and You know, it's often parodied by the rationalists.
To have faith in God is parodied as a primitive and superstitious belief.
But my psychological investigations convinced me that there's no action without faith.
Because we are always stepping into the unknown, We have to take a leap of faith to exist, to do the simplest of things, literally to move.
And that has to do with what I said earlier, is that We're trying to move from a place of less value to a place of more value.
So we have to make some assumptions about what constitutes value.
And then we have to believe that our actions are going to have the outcome that we desire.
And we do that without evidence.
I mean, that's partly why to be human is to be riven with anxiety.
It's because there's no certainty.
And so...
You can't act without faith.
And so then the question might, if you accept that proposition, you can't act without faith.
And I actually believe, I don't believe that that's a disputable proposition.
Unless you view people as deterministic in the way that clocks are.
You know, so that we're just stimulus response machines.
It seems to me that instead we're moving into the unknown.
And we do that...
In dread, in some sense, dread and hope.
And we do that because we have faith.
And when we lose that faith, our lives fall apart.
And we don't know which way is up or down.
And so then the question is, well, if we have to have faith, what is it that we should have faith in?
And then the answer seems to be something like, well, we should have faith.
If we have to make a decision about that, maybe we try to have faith in the idea that the best should be pursued and will prevail.
As an organizing principle, and then the question is, well, what is the best?
And the answer is, well, that's a really hard question, and so we need cathedrals, and we need Bach's music, and we need the stories in Genesis, and we need the world's great literature, and we need all of that.
Theater and drama and art and aesthetics to help us understand what the best is and to determine how it should prevail.
And I don't see that technically as any different from, I think it is the same thing psychologically as the worship of Christ.
I think it's the same thing.
Because, again, I'm trying to speak psychologically to think about what Christ represents.
I'm not thinking about him as a historical figure.
That's something we can get to later.
That image, which is seen, for example, laid out on these massive cathedral domes, Christ as Logos, as generator of the world, it's...
It's the idea that the proper mode of being is brought into existence by consciousness that's operating according to the highest possible principles.
And, like, why wouldn't...
And that is the kind of faith that's maybe got some courage associated with it, right?
I'm gonna act as if this is the case.
We're all gonna act as if this is the case.
Now, that begs the question, does that make it real?
Well...
Pope Benedict XVI, who's a great intellectual hero of mine, said the Church always does three essential things.
The Church worships God.
It evangelizes, and it cares for the poor.
Poor broadly construed, as I say anyone who's suffering, right?
But that first move, as we said earlier, is indispensable.
The church worships God.
It teaches the world right praise, because without right praise, the whole thing falls apart.
Secondly, it evangelizes.
What's that?
Well, that's a cool thing, too, because euangelion in Greek, good news, they were playing with that because the Romans would have used that in the eastern part of the empire.
To announce an imperial victory.
They would send an evangelist ahead with the good news.
Evangelion, hey, Caesar won a victory.
So these very edgy first Christians who had zero social status, no power, no military behind them, said, oh, no, no, I got the true Evangelion.
It's about Jesus, risen from the dead, who was put to death by Caesar, but whom God raised.
So that's the proclamation of the good news that now we have hope.
Now the sacrifice has been made and God's love is greater than anything that's in the world.
Okay, now I got those two things in place.
Now serve the poor.
Now go where the pain is.
Go where the suffering is.
But if you divorce them from each other, and that has happened, So who cares about worship, and that's fussing around with altars and sacristies, and who cares about evangelization?
Let's just get down and serve the poor.
Then it does devolve simply into social work, right?
But if the three are together, worship God, evangelize the dying and rising of Jesus, and serve the poor, now the church is cooking, you know?
Alright, so let's look at the second one of those.
It seems to me, I can understand this, not that whether I can understand it or not is a hallmark of its validity, but I have to try to understand what I can understand.
I can understand the idea that bearing forward in a moral direction, acting as if being is intrinsically good and that humanity as part of that is also intrinsically good, Bearing all that up as a set of propositions, even in the most extreme cases of suffering, I can see that as a valid moral good.
That's Christ's refusal to be, what would you say, corrupted by the injustice and terror of his fate.
And so that might be something like, you don't have the right to become a tyrant no matter how badly you were tyrannized, let's say.
And I think that's an unshakable moral proposition.
But then there's the resurrection element of it, because I could say, well, the first thing I would say is, well, I kind of understand that psychologically.
Parts of us die, and And they have to die because they're in error.
They have to be cast off.
And we're reborn constantly as a consequence of our movement, our ascent forward.
There's no movement forward without some death of the past.
And so I can see the resurrection idea as a metaphor for the part of us that continues onward despite our failures and constantly reconstitutes our spirit.
It's not something trivial.
But then there's the insistence in the church of the bodily resurrection, which is, well, let's call that a stumbling block to modern belief.
No doubt about that.
That's something more than mere metaphor.
And so you might ask, well, why is it insisted upon?
Why isn't the proposition that you have a transcendent moral obligation to bear, to operate for the good of all things, regardless of your suffering— A hard line, no justification with the defeat of death necessitated.
I'm not trying to make a fundamental critique of the idea of the resurrection, because I know there are things that I don't know.
I know that for sure.
And God only knows how the world is fundamentally structured.
But it seems, and this is a Nietzschean criticism in some sense too, and a Freudian criticism, that seems in some real sense too good to be true.
And so what do you make of the resurrection?
How do you conceptualize it, even as it's related in the Gospels?
Yeah, good.
You're raising a lot of interesting things.
First of all, everything you said about it in terms of psychological archetypes and metaphors, good, fine.
I think those are legitimate.
I think those are our correct perceptions of things.
And it has indeed functioned that way in a lot of the literature of the world, resurrection-type stories.
But I think what's really interesting about the New Testament As Lewis said, you know, C.S. Lewis, when someone said, well, the New Testament is just another iteration of the ancient myth.
And he said, anyone that says that has not read many myths, because there's something so distinctive about the New Testament.
And I would say, Jordan, first this.
I think from the first page of Matthew through Revelation, what you get throughout is this, what I call this grab-you-by-the-shoulders quality.
They knew about literature that is conveying deep psychological and philosophical truth.
Paul certainly knew that literature very well.
It doesn't sound like that though.
It has overtones with it.
It bears some of that.
It has family resemblances with it.
But what you find on every page is this Evangelion is good news.
So everything you said is true.
I think it is true.
But it's not exactly news.
It's part of the philosophy of Perennis.
It's been around for a long time and a lot of the great thinkers of the world.
And again, I agree with it.
I like the philosophy of Perennis.
But the New Testament is people...
Who grabbed everyone they met by the shoulders to say, something happened.
Something's happened here that we were not expecting, that was not part of our thought system.
And it's so shaken us up that we feel obligated to go careering around the world, and indeed to our deaths, announcing it and defending it.
And what it was, was the fact, here in the 10th chapter of Acts of the Apostles, This sort of almost tossed off line.
We who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead.
I don't think people trading in mythic talk use that kind of language.
Mythic language, and again, I say it with high praise.
I love the myths.
But, you know, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, and then a mythic story unfolds.
But read the Acts of the Apostles.
Did you hear about what happened?
First, it was up in Galilee, and then in Judea.
You know those people, remember John the Baptist?
And then there's Jesus, and then in Jerusalem, and then we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead.
And then look at Paul.
Paul who saw him on the road to Damascus.
Now the Pauline letters.
Man, they do not read like myths.
They just don't.
And I love the myths.
I love the philosophy of Prentice, but it doesn't read like that.
It reads like someone who has been so bowled over by something, and he wants you to know about it, and it's changed everything.
And I think what it was was what we said earlier.
It's, okay, now we know.
God's mercy and love is greater than anything we can possibly do.
Why?
Because we killed God.
And that's why Paul will say, I'm going to hold up one thing to you, Christ and Him crucified.
And crucified, I mean, it was the most horrific thing they could imagine in the ancient world.
It was deeply embarrassing even to talk about a crucifixion.
Paul says, no, no, let me put it right in your face.
See, the author of life came and we killed him.
But I got the good news, Evangelion, is God's mercy and love is greater because he brought this Jesus back from the dead.
Well, you do have the following argument, which is that it isn't clear which is harder to believe, whether that happened or whether people made it up.
Because if they made it up, that was really something.
And that does strike me quite frequently reading the New Testament.
There are lines in there that hit so hard you think, hmm, it isn't obvious to me how someone could have just thought that up.
So, and there is that, well, and Jung, Carl Jung, who I greatly admire, you know, he believed, I think, in the same way that C.S. Lewis did that, and he doesn't talk about this that much, but that there is this archetypal mythological pattern of the dying and resurrecting hero that has this psychological reality, which is extraordinarily deep.
But that archetype was realized once in history.
And that's fully realized.
So it came from the mythic realm, let's say, the realm of eternal truth, the realm of pattern, instinctive pattern for that matter, and was fully realized at one point in history.
And you might think, well, if it's going to be fully realized, it has to start somewhere.
You know, it can't start everywhere at the same time or, Right.
Right.
What's an archetype look like when it takes flesh?
Might be a way to get at that.
Well, and the thing is, we do see this, and it does grip us, because movies, like, we see representations of this all the time.
In my new book, I talk a fair bit about Harry Potter.
Right.
And Harry Potter is definitely an archetype taken flesh.
Well, clearly he's in battle with Satan himself, obviously.
I mean, and she has an unbelievably profound mythological imagination.
And the thing that's so fascinating about all of that is that because her mythological imagination is spot on, She captivated the entire globe and produced this immense storehouse of wealth and dominated the entertainment landscape for a decade.
People don't take that seriously, but it's a great mystery to watch that.
Absolutely, they should.
Anything that grips people's attention like that is obviously worth paying attention to.
Yeah.
Lewis called them good dreams, right?
So all the sort of archetypal anticipations of the gospel, the good dreams of the race.
Or use the Jungian.
I love Jung, too.
But what happens if that archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to God, Kant's language, what would happen if that archetype became flesh?
And indeed, that's how they put it.
The word became flesh and dwelt among us.
I think that's also the question we should each be asking ourselves.
In our own lives.
Yeah, quite right.
It's like, well, who could we be?
And you say, well, you don't have to ask yourself that question.
It's like, well, good luck with your conscience then.
You should be another Christ.
That's the objection to the self-created person.
It's like the idea that you can create your own values is, well, good luck.
Right.
Good luck with that project.
Yeah, good luck.
It's not going to work.
You know, Newman referred to the conscience, I always love this, as the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul.
So he took the language descriptive of the Pope, you know, the vicar of Christ, but he said the aboriginal vicar of Christ is the conscience.
John Henry Newman.
Okay, because I was thinking of Eric Neumann.
No, John Henry Newman.
It's a beautiful way of describing it, because we'd say the Christ dwelling within you is the voice of the conscience that's calling you to sanctity, ultimately, to heroic self-sacrifice, to being who Christ is.
It is what people worship, because here's a way of thinking about it technically.
Well, look, when I have a conversation with you, There's something I want from you.
I want everything you can give me.
I want you to be as there as you can possibly be.
That's what I'm demanding all the time.
If my attention...
Assuming a properly constituted subjectivity.
If my attention wanders, that means you're not delivering.
And so if you're wandering around and everyone's attention is wandering away from you, you're not delivering.
And conscience, because we're so social, we're social creatures to the final degree, conscience tells you when you deviate from the ideal.
And that ideal is what people worship.
By attending to that manifestation of the ideal in you, they worship it.
And so that's there.
It's there in the demands that we can't help but make of each other and of ourselves.
There's no escape from that.
And so I do think it's a perfectly good question.
What would happen?
And this is the right question for your life.
What would happen if you took that seriously?
And so, again, what I see is that it doesn't seem to me to be If the church can no longer attract young people, it has to be that they're not taking that with sufficient seriousness.
Yeah, I think there's a lot to that.
I don't want to externalize the blame.
It's like I know the church is a human organization and all of that, but it's still evidence.
But it's not just about going to church.
One time I told you something, and I don't know if I was able to drive it through.
There's something about being in a hierarchy.
Because there's an aspect of being in a hierarchy that you talk about, which is this kind of striving to kind of be the best within that hierarchy.
But there's an aspect of being in a hierarchy, which is that the hierarchy covers you.
Oh, definitely.
There's no doubt about that.
Yeah.
And so there's something about submitting...
That's why the lowest-status members of a chimp group will still fight off interlopers.
Yeah.
And so there's a value in being in a community and a hierarchy where you, like I go to confession, right?
I go to confession, I go to my priest and I confess my sins and I give that to him.
He actually takes responsibility for an aspect of listening to my sins and And kind of participating in my salvation.
And so the weight ends up being distributed across the community.
So you don't actually just bear it on yourself.
And it's not just a living community.
It's not just those that are alive in the hierarchy, but those that have left their story.
All the saints are part of this hierarchy that you That you participate in and that you see as consolation, as examples, as, you know, as examples of people who have lived through difficult things that you can kind of, that you can shoulder up against, you know.
And so that's one of the reasons why I kind of insist with, at least for the people that watch my videos, is When I say go to church, it's not just because I'm trying to moralize you into doing something.
It's because it's actually a participation in how the best vision of reality works.
I've got no objection to any of that.
But I've seen you.
I've seen you.
I'm probably one of the only people in the world that has actually seen you in church and seen you squirm and squirm in church.
Why?
See, the other thing, I was reading, again, I was reading this book and it's mostly a jumping off place for me to think.
It's like, there's also something Because I'm not inside the church, so to speak.
It's hard to say what the utility of that is.
The utility of being inside the church.
Of being outside it.
Because I'm an outsider talking about religious matters.
Yeah, but I think that it has played a great role.
I've often said that you're something like King Cyrus.
If you know the story of King Cyrus, in Scripture, King Cyrus was a Persian king...
Who told the Jews to go back to Israel and build their temple.
So he wasn't Jewish.
He wasn't an Israelite.
He wouldn't believe in the God of the Israelites.
But he was like, hey, that temple of yours looks pretty nice.
Why don't you just go back there and rebuild your own thing?
And so that's definitely an effect that I've seen you have.
The number of people that have...
Become Christian because of you is hilarious.
Sorry, it's not hilarious, but it's just kind of this strange thing because you kind of stand outside and you're looking at the door and you're looking at the church and you're saying, hey, this isn't not so bad.
You know, look at this.
What is going on here?
Like, what is this about?
And then because of that...
No, it's also, do you think you've got something better?
What was it?
Milton.
Didn't Milton write Paradise Lost to justify the way of God?
The ways of God to man?
It's a hell of an ambition.
In some sense, that's what this entire religious endeavor does.
The literary endeavor as well.
What's the point of all this?
What's the meaning of this?
And, you know, when you think about that too propositionally, I also saw this in my therapy practice.
It's like, well, what's the meaning of life?
And I could easily get off on a nihilistic argument with some of my more intelligent clients.
They had a rejoinder for every proposition about why life was valuable.
But then if you said to them, Don't be so sure that that part of you is your friend.
Look what it's doing to you.
It's so destructive and it has all of its self-justifying arguments and they might even be coherent.
But look at the consequences and then contrast that with Your own experience.
When does that sense of nihilistic despair disappear?
You know, for some people, it's when they're with people they love.
They're with friends or family.
Some people find it in creative activity.
Some people find it in charity.
There are various sources of meaning.
And that's not propositional.
You see it in your own life, right?
Literally, in therapy, you have people track that.
It's like, well, you're nihilistically depressed.
Let's watch your life for a week and see how that ebbs and flows with what you're doing.
And then see if we can get you participating more in what makes it ebb than what makes it flow.
And that's empirical in a sense, right?
I'm not asking you to believe something.
I'm asking you to watch the structure of your own reality to see where meaning manifests itself.
And then you could say, In some sense, the sum total of where meaning manifests itself, that's where God resides.
And that relationship with God that you described as, what would you say, as that has to be maintained by our good behavior, I suppose that's that desire to live in that space of meaning.
And then you can propositionalize that.
You can say, well, that's associated with love, and it's associated with courage, it's associated with these classical virtues, and it's not these things that we've learned to deem as evil.
And that's where you...
Is it reasonable to say that that's where you find God if you're searching?
Is that an appropriate way of looking at it?
I think so.
I met a guy one time who told me he went to a lecture, and the lecture was on God's existence, and the guy was lecturing.
And then after the lecture, my friend came up to him and said, you know, everything you say is a bunch of malarkey.
There's no God.
Your lecture is just meaningless.
And the guy said, okay, what I want you to do is for the next week, I want you to treat everyone that you meet as if they were Jesus in disguise.
And the guy left the lecture, and he went home, and he gets home, and mom's there doing the dishes, and he thought to himself, well, if this were Jesus in disguise doing the dishes, I'd probably go up and help my mom do the dishes.
And then Dad came home from work, and rather than ignore him, he said, Hey Dad, how was work?
How's everything going?
You know, because if that were really Jesus in disguise, I would do that.
And then they're eating dinner together with the family, and there's one hamburger left.
And he turns to his brother and says, Hey, why don't you have this?
The guy told me his life was completely transformed by literally one week of acting in this sort of way.
That's not really surprising.
Pope Benedict talked about this in one of his encyclicals, that one way to God is to act in this sort of way, to act as if God exists, to act as if other people are Jesus in disguise.
And, you know, Mother Teresa talked about that too, that for her, the poor and the leper and the destitute were all Jesus in disguise.
And so she served them as if they were Jesus.
And so that is one way, it seems to me, to move towards God.
I don't think it's the only way, though.
And the reason is that I know a philosopher, Alistair MacIntyre, who mentioned to us in class one day that he was an atheist until he carefully studied the arguments for God's existence.
So there are at least some people, at least one person, Alistair MacIntyre, who really did come to God through that way.
But I think the more common way is through lived practice, lived actions.
You brought up the case of severe depression, and it is the case, of course, that You can make profoundly coherent arguments for why your life is meaningless and why there is just a vast nullity to all existence.
But the question isn't, are they coherent?
The question is, are they true?
The question is, are the premises right?
Because anything can be coherent within false premises.
The question is, is it the case that your life is worth nothing?
And the answer has to be no.
That's a false statement.
It's a false apprehension of Well, look what happens if you act that out.
Of course.
But even then, you could say, well, no, I'd be doing a sum.
If within the grips of depression, you'd still be thinking that I am acting according to a good, given the premises that I have about the meaninglessness of my own life and of all life.
So I think the foundation, which keeps going back to the same question, the foundation of truth must be there.
But then the next thing to say is not that you are wrong about your life being meaningless as a false statement, but that you're also loved.
You are loved.
And I think that's the kind of thing, at least my own experience, that can take you out of the darkness.
That your life is not about you and your own thoughts.
It's not about you and the systems that you are building.
Ultimately, you are in response to something much greater than you.
And that thing that's greater than you is looking at you and calling you out and saying, I love you.
So it's not an either or.
It's not, well, what's true propositionally about the nature of existence and is there a soul?
It is that and.
I am calling you, which is a universal call for us as Catholics.
This exercise that you described, Dr.
Kayser, I believe that when we see other people, except under very extraordinary circumstances, we see an illusion that we project upon them.
Mostly.
It's a simplifying illusion.
We don't see the whole person.
Partly, I suppose, because we couldn't tolerate the complete vision.
It would be too much for us, you know?
So, our doors of perception are three quarters closed.
And exactly why that is isn't obvious.
But I do believe that the more accurately you perceive a person, the more you perceive them in the manner that you described it.
You see this eternal, recurring, conscious hero striving against the darkness.
And when you treat people like that, of course they're compelled by that.
It's a compelling way to be interacted with.
Although, I don't know what it is.
It's that maybe...
It's not obvious how much of that you can tolerate, which is a very strange thing, too.
You know, I'm thinking about this.
Most of what we perceive is our memory.
And sometimes that is stripped away and we see what's there.
But seeing what's there is awe-inspiring.
It's gripping and it instills terror.
And I think that's the same as the burning bush.
And in some sense, everything is a burning bush.
But you're blinded to it.
You see what's there, I think, when you really love someone.
A child.
You really see that in a child, if you're a parent.
You don't see a generic baby.
You see...
That actual person.
So that memory that pushes generic baby into your field of vision dissipates and you see what's actually there.
And that love drives that.
I imagine it does that.
Love seems to...
Like I always thought when people fall in love with one another, they see the perfection that could conceivably exist.
It's like the curtains of illusion...
Pull apart momentarily and you see the paradisal state that could be there hypothetically if everything was done properly.
And that drives the love.
And then maybe if you work across time you can achieve that to some degree.
You know, because other people think about themselves as deluded when they're in love.
And that's a very cynical way of looking at it.
It certainly doesn't apply to the love between a parent and a child.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean, I know in my own life, having children has been such an unbelievably enriching experience.
And I think about, you know, especially when kids are little and they're asleep.
You go in there and they're just sleeping and you see their little chest moving up and down.
There's something painfully beautiful about that.
I mean, you just wish it could go on just indefinitely.
And For me, that taught me something about God's love.
If God really is God the Father, well then, that's sort of how He looks at us.
And He sees the good, He sees the effort, and of course there's imperfections too.
But I don't know, for me, having children is a kind of...
I try to sometimes tell my students, most of whom don't have kids, what it's like.
And it's very hard to describe.
So the best way I came up with was, well, remember when you were a little child, you know, like six, and you thought, oh, boys have cooties, girls have cooties, and the idea of romance or kissing someone is just repulsive.
And then, you know, you could imagine trying to explain to a six-year-old, look, at some point, you're going to look at someone else and just find this person unbelievably captivating, and you're going to want to kiss them.
And you can say the words, but a little kid's been like, well, No way.
That's hard to describe.
And I think becoming a parent is similar to that in that, yeah, it seems to me that it is so enriching and has given so much, at least to my life, including calling out something from me that would have never been elicited.
Because there's kind of sacrifices that you'll do for a kid that you'll never do for an adult.
Yeah.
So that's interesting.
That ties in with this idea that you brought forward of treating everybody as if they were a manifestation of Christ.
You see that Meaningful fragility in your children, and it's beautiful.
And maybe if you've been warped and hurt, you get resentful about it and jealous of it, and that can lead to all sorts of terrible things.
But to the degree that you're privileged to see that, that calls you to be a better person.
And you can think of that, you know, biologically.
Well...
You have these fragile creatures that you're responsible for.
Of course that's going to call you to a higher mode of action because otherwise they're not going to live.
So it's very practical.
But what you see there is if you view someone with love, then it's incumbent upon you to treat them as if they're valuable.
And then the more you treat other people as if they're valuable, the better person you are.
That just comes along for the ride in some sense.
So none of that seems questionable to me.
That seems solid.
And so then maybe the more love you view other people with, the higher the moral demand that's placed on you.
And then I would say too, well then, that's another reason why It's so important to be truthful and in some sense to be good because it isn't obvious to me that you can withstand that moral load if you're compromised by too much sin.
It's too much.
And that's another thing that we're not very good at teaching young people about.
You know, you shouldn't do that.
You know, it's like There's a sanctimonious authority that goes along with that that's the wrong tone.
It's more like...
You know, I don't know how you lay it out properly, but you tell people that you love how to avoid the road to hell.
And you don't do that because you're shaking your finger at them or because you're a moral authority.
You do it because you don't want them to burn.
And I think there's too much of the moral authority still in the church and not enough of the, you know, the love that helps people avoid the fire.
I think what you just beautifully described is the unity of the love commandment that you...
You love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and you love your neighbor as yourself.
The love of God identifies the pattern and then the interplay between the love of the neighbor and the love of the self.
They're differentiated but inextricably intertwined.
So to love the neighbor is to see the neighbor as he or she actually is.
And to respond to the actuality, not to your desires, not to what you want this person to be in a utilitarian, instrumental sense, but to the reality of that eternal soul right there.
And in and through that, then you see who you are.
And that's a commentary on the Ten Commandments, right?
That's Christ's summation of the Ten Commandments.
So that's another...
Another illustration of that abstraction.
Proper behavior.
The story on top of that.
The propositions.
That would be the Ten Commandments, let's say.
So then Christ is challenged on the Ten Commandments.
Something like, rank order these if you're so wise.
Right, exactly.
Because you're going to say something heretical.
And Christ does this unbelievable slight of mind.
And extracts out two superordinate principles.
And it's done in such a compelling way that the interlocutor, who's basically a prosecutorial mind, like an inquisitionist in some sense, is reduced to silence.
That's a very powerful story.
It's one of those stories, you read that, you think, it's not obvious how someone could have made that up.
There's a lot of genius.
There's an immense well of moral genius in that story.
And the idea that that's some sort of casual, false construct, you know, produced for the purposes of power.
It's like, well, you try to write a story that short that is that wise.
See how far you get with it.
So...
No, I'm a Catholic.
Heck, ritual is our whole thing, you know.
Yeah, well, there's peace in ritual, right?
That's the thing.
You know what to expect.
It's a place of safety.
And in a world that changes constantly, ritual is the only thing that provides order.
And so we may need that now more than ever because things are changing so unbelievably fast.
Which is also partly why the church should be careful about being too relevant.
Yep, I agree.
I agree, yeah.
Catholicism is as sane as people get.
You know, it's Baroque, right?
And it's Gothic, not Baroque.
It's Gothic.
It's dark.
It has the same aesthetic, in some sense, as a horror film.
And I'm not saying something denigrating by that.
I mean, it's part of its strange mystery.
And all that strangeness is necessary because people would be much more insane without it than they are with it.
It's a container for that religious impulse, and that impulse is to the good.
Yeah, and the image of the crucified Christ...
And also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together, right?
If you think of the symbolism of communion, you'll notice that it gathers in every extreme from the highest to the most transgressive.
All of it comes together.
It's worth unpacking that.
It's ritual cannibalism in the service of God.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's also seen as a normal meal of communion, and it's also seen as a sexual union, because there's a relationship, there's a notion in which then, in the altar and in that moment of communion, there's the joining of heaven and earth, you know, they raise up the chalice And there's this joining, which is this image of this sexual union between God and the soul, between God and his church.
And so all of it, it just jammed into this ritual as a kind of center of reality, we'd call it.
And so, like you said, if you get rid of that, then you're going to have all kinds of strange, factitious versions of it that are going to pop up and are going to try to replace it.
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