The Sermon on the Mount | Lecture One (Official) | Peterson Academy
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Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst, he said, modern people don't see God because they don't look low enough.
That's worth thinking about for the rest of your life.
The Sermon on the Mount is the longest continuous discourse attributed to Christ in the Gospels, and it's widely regarded as containing the central doctrines of Christian faith.
Thy kingdom come.
Well, that would be good.
He might say, well, what is the shared goal that should unite a whole society or a person?
And that's partly what the Sermon on the Mount is about.
It's like, what should you be aiming at?
Something like the city on the hill.
What's being outlined here is the best approach.
It's the best approach in all possible ways.
There's this tremendous emphasis in Christianity on embodiment.
That's why Christ is a carpenter, not a thinker, not a priest even.
It's a pattern of behavior to emulate, to act out, to embody.
All of what we're laying out is a landscape of faith, right?
Should you aim up or down?
That's not a question you can answer by sifting the evidence.
And that's where the element of faith comes in, is that regardless of the catastrophe of existence, I will do good.
What you want to do is welcome the unknown with open arms because it can teach you and change you into what you could be.
The Sermon on the Mount is the longest continuous discourse attributed to Christ in the Gospels, and it's widely regarded as containing the central doctrines of Christian faith in, I suppose, the most condensed narrative sense.
And a sermon is just a talk or a discussion, a dialogue in some sense, I suppose, as well.
And the first question might be, well, why would it be on a mountain?
And talking about that allows us to understand, to some degree, right initially, how complicated these things are.
Words and phrases and poetic titles make sense to us because they appeal to us at emotional, motivational, and embodied level.
And so you think, well, do you become enlightened in a valley, in a pit, or on a mountain?
And the answer is, well, you become enlightened on a mountain, not in a valley.
And why would that be?
Well, you can't see in a valley, right?
You're hemmed in.
And so your vision is blocked by the surroundings.
And it's dark in a valley compared to on a mountain, especially on a mountaintop, because, and you're closer to heaven on a mountaintop as well, in the symbolic sense, although you're also, in some sense, in the sky.
And the sky is up, and up is the place you aim.
And up is where the heavenly bodies are, the sun and the moon and the stars.
And we orient ourselves by the heavenly bodies, right?
Because human beings are navigators and we've learned to use the sky to literally to orient ourselves when we move from one place to another.
And so part of the reason that a sermon that's enlightening is delivered on a mountain is because that makes sense to creatures like us.
And there's these old comic tropes of people climbing a mountain to see a guru who's perched on top, often in a lotus position, delivering wisdom.
And that's also associated with the old Egyptian idea and the Mesopotamian idea of the eye of attention.
And so you see in Egypt, there was a god, Horus, who was symbolized by the eye and also by the falcon.
Falcons, by the way, are birds of prey, like eagles, raptors in general.
And they're the only animals that have better vision than us.
And so they've been used for a long time as a symbol of the capacity to see long distances from above and extraordinarily clearly.
And the falcon, of course, can fly above everything as well as having great vision.
And if you remember the Lion King, the movie The Lion King, there was a little bird in there named Zazu.
And Zazu was the eye of the king because he could fly above everything else and see.
And so, and that's an extremely interesting issue, too, because, and in the Mesopotamian creation myth, the God Marduk, who was their monotheistic God and the precursor of Christ in some sense in that manner, he had eyes all the way around his head and he could speak magic words.
So there's an idea there in Mesopotamia of the doctrine of the word and the magic word that can bring things into reality, which is what we do with our words for better or worse, and what we actually and truly do with them.
Because what you say changes your destiny and it changes the destiny of people around you.
And that's really worth thinking about because you just have no idea how deep that truth goes and how much role you play in shaping the way the future transforms itself into the present and the past as a consequence of what you say.
It's a core element of Christian doctrine that the word is the fundamental creative process that brings order into being out of chaos and potential.
And you participate in that.
That's partly why in Genesis, in the first chapter, God uses the word that is true and oriented by love to bring about the habitable order that is good and then makes the rather radical proposition that men and women are made in that image.
And so you can think about that in your own life.
So the idea of love is that despite its suffering and malevolence, the world is worth supporting and working to improve.
And that's a real tough commitment, right?
Because to the degree that your life is tragic and that it's contaminated by your malevolence and the malevolence of other people, it can make you bitter and resentful and destructive.
And it can interfere with your desire to improve what's torturing and tormenting you, which also might be you.
And so part of the reason there's an emphasis in many religious traditions and certainly in Christianity on faith is because the evidence about the goodness of being is in some sense ambivalent, right?
I mean, you can tell that, not least, because of the culture war that's tearing us apart right now, because the accusers, so to speak, say that the world's so corrupt, human beings are so corrupt that we're best understood as nothing but the drive to malevolent power in some sense.
And it's a pretty powerful critique because it's not like history isn't a complete catastrophe in many ways.
And it's not as if we lack the capacity to make other people's lives miserable and our own, and also, I suppose, to some degree, pose a threat if we're not careful to the ecological integrity of the planet.
And so there's reasons to be unhappy about the conditions of existence.
And part of the faith that is imposed on you, let's say within the confines of the religious doctrines of Judaism and Christianity, not to say it isn't the case in other religious traditions, is that you should move forward as if you're benevolently predisposed to existence itself, to being itself, and that would be life, your life, other people's lives, life in general, but being as such,
despite the fact that you're cursed with the burden of your mortal vulnerability.
And that's no joke, right?
That's as heavy a burden, a moral burden that can possibly be placed on people.
And you have to accept it as a presupposition of faith, because, as I said, at best, the evidence is ambivalent.
You know, women will think, I shouldn't bring a child into a world such as this.
And historians will look at events like Auschwitz and the Gulag archipelagos and all the catastrophes of the 20th century and say, well, if history is such a bloody nightmare, is it really something that we should propagate forward in time?
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These are very profound questions.
In Goethe's great play, Faust, there's a demonic character, the devil himself, Mephistopheles.
And Mephistopheles is the great adversary of being.
And his credo is that life is so rife with suffering and malevolence that it would be better if consciousness didn't exist at all.
So we're called upon, I would say, ethically and practically and philosophically and spiritually to lift our eyes up to the heavens or to the hills.
And there's another reason for that too, which is that our primary problem in orienting ourselves in life is actually a navigation problem.
It's not a perceptual or a conceptual problem.
It's how you get from point A to point B, because we're mobile creatures and we're always concerned with what we're going to do next and what we encounter along the way.
And that means that we have to be aiming at something to move forward, because why move forward if you're not aiming at something?
And why would you move forward towards something you're aiming at if you weren't aiming up?
Because the place you're going to, if it's not better than the place you're at, why would you work to move there?
And so that idea of up is built into our conception, not only of progress forward, but it's also built into us psychophysiologically and neuropharmacologically, because most of the positive emotion you experience, and this is worth knowing, man, is experienced in relationship to a goal.
And so you might think you're happy because you attain things, but that's actually not why you're happy.
You might be satisfied if you attain something, but it's fleeting because you attain it and then the question is, well, now what, right?
So when you graduate from high school, well, you've attained that graduation status, but the next day you wake up and you're no longer king of the high school.
You're entry-level junior clerk at the local drugstore.
Not that that's such a catastrophe, but you get my point.
Being at the pinnacle isn't exactly the goal.
Now, what happens if you want to experience the positive emotion that can help sustain you through life and can also, what would you say?
Well, fill you with enthusiasm, which means to be filled with God, by the way, entheos is to be filled with the Spirit of God, is you have to be aiming at something worth aiming at.
And then, and this is literally the case, the more vital the thing is that you're aiming for, the more positive emotion you experience when you notice that you're moving towards a goal.
And so one of the things this means is that if you don't have an aim and even an ethical aim, because you're aiming up, right, you're aiming at something better, if you don't have an aim and an ethical aim, you literally cannot experience any positive emotion.
And more than that, the higher your aim, now that assumes that you're not making things impossibly difficult for yourself, but the higher your aim, the higher the more intense the positive emotion associated with evidence of progress.
And so then what you might derive from that, if you were thinking about setting your life up properly, is that you should aim at the highest possible thing.
And of course, then that begs the question, what is the highest possible thing?
And that's partly what the Sermon on the Mount is about.
The highest possible good is a multifaceted phenomenon.
It's not just one thing.
It might be beauty, for example, but it also might be truth and it might be love and it might be courage and it might be integrity, right?
You can see all these positive moral virtues aggregated into a single thing.
It might be the call to adventure.
It might be the call to wisdom.
It might be the fear of God.
There's all sorts of elements that make up what's best.
And so you can't reduce it in some sense.
You certainly can't reduce it, for example, to something simple like compassion.
It's not a one-dimensional virtue.
It's something very difficult to attain, a balance of many virtues or a sum of many virtues.
And so God was often defined classically as the summum bonum, the sum of all good things.
And this is a definition, not a statement of belief.
It's a definition, and that's worth knowing too.
So imagine that you do know, we all know that there are good things.
And so that's an interesting category because there are many different things that are good, but they share the common feature of being good.
And so then the question is, well, what is the essence of the common feature of good?
And the classical, one classical answer to that would be, well, that's a good enough definition of God.
And then you can ask yourself too, well, if you're pursuing things that are good, and hopefully you are, not that you necessarily are, because people can pursue evil and harmful things too.
But if you're going to pursue something that's good, well, why wouldn't you pursue the sum of all that's good?
Why?
And especially, there's another way of thinking about it too, especially because you're betting your life on your actions.
You know, I was out on jet skis this morning and I thought, you know, I could die on this.
I could crash into a boat and I'd just be dead.
And then I thought, well, yeah, it's worth it to zip around out here to take that risk.
But the fundamental truth of the matter is, because of the mortal conditions of your limited existence, you're betting your life on what you do all the time, in maybe a rather small way, but often not so small, because people do die in the pursuit of what they're pursuing.
And so you might ask, well, what's worth betting your life on, betting your sanity on, betting your family on, betting your future on?
And why should it be less than the sum of all that is good?
Why would you do that?
Now, one answer is because it's a heavy responsibility to pursue the highest possible goal.
And you might think, well, I'm afraid of that responsibility, and fair enough.
But if you think I don't want that responsibility, you might want to think again because it isn't obvious what you have on your side to justify your miserable life to yourself.
You know, we all are very aware of our own flaws, and we're also very prone to torture ourselves with our own consciences.
And we probably do that more to ourselves than we do it to other people.
Most of the people I know who aren't narcissistic are much harder judges of themselves than they are of other people.
They're often less likely to do good things for themselves than they are to do good things for other people.
And that's because they're acutely aware of their multitude of flaws.
And then you might say, well, how is it that you contend, can contend in a realistic way with your multitude of flaws?
And you might say, well, you could develop the self-respect that would emerge as a consequence of bearing a heavy responsibility.
And I actually don't think there, I don't think there is any other solution than that.
And I know, like I've seen people in very dire circumstances, you know, who've been brought low by all sorts of things, including their own foolishness and malevolence.
And one of the things they do have to rely on in such situations is the fact that they've been of some service, well, to themselves, but mostly to other people, genuine service, right?
And I also think that if you're mature and you have some experience, one of the things you also notice is that there are few pleasures in life as deep as recognizing that something that you've done, escaping from your bitterness, and as a precondition for this, that something that you've done has genuinely been of service to someone else, especially in service to their continued development.
And so, you know, there are a lot of cynics about people who run businesses, for example, that you're just exploiting your workers.
The bloody Marxists think that all the time.
But if you run a prosperous and reasonable and productive and generous business, one of the true pleasures, it's the same if you're an academic or anyone in a position to mentor, one of the genuine pleasures of life, and it's a deep pleasure, is the opportunity to take young people who have real promise and to open doors for them and help their development.
And that's a much deeper pleasure and also a much more useful solve for your conscience than any trivial profit you might derive from exploiting them, which is also not a very effective or efficient way of dealing with anyone around you.
It's like, if I can cooperate with you and we can align our interests and I can help you move forward and you can do that, vice versa, even if you're in a junior relationship to me, we're going to do way better together than we are if I'm just telling you what to do and you're resentfully dragging your miserable carcass along because you have to.
That's no way to conduct your affairs.
And no one wants to be around anyone who does that.
And so the responsibility is, it might be worth the effort and the attempt, you know.
And you just, there's other reasons to think that too.
So imagine that you go different places and you do different things.
And one of the things that happens as a consequence of facing that challenge is you start to develop because you get more informed, right?
You meet more people, you have a wider social network, you learn more skills, you gather more descriptive information, you flesh out your knowledge of geography and philosophy and history and beauty and all of that.
That's all information.
But that isn't all that happens to you when you challenge yourself, especially if you take the challenge on voluntarily.
So one of the other things that happens is if you stress yourself, challenge yourself physiologically.
So you put yourself in situations that you hadn't been in before that demand something new of you.
New genes turn on and start to code for new proteins and they build new parts of you.
And so it's as if there's a reservoir inside of you of biological possibility that's a consequence of your inheritance in the deepest sense.
But it will not be transformed into actuality unless there's a demand.
And then you could imagine further that maybe you're facing a challenge and you don't want it, right?
And you reject it.
And so you're afraid and you're running.
Then the genes that turn on inside you are going to turn you into a prey animal and something that's hiding.
But if you face that voluntarily, then that puts you in an entirely different psychophysiological state.
The data on this are quite clear.
And that's going to craft you into the sort of person who's more and more able to confront, to voluntarily confront larger and larger challenges.
And given that the basic challenge of your life in some real sense is to not allow the weight of your mortal vulnerability to embitter you and drag you into hell.
I think that's even a more pertinent threat than death.
You better be set up for the challenge because, and everyone faces this in the most fundamental sense, right?
Betrayal and death and old age and all the things that are classic elements of the catastrophe of existence.
They are definitely coming your way.
And hopefully you can prepare yourself for that.
And there's every reason to assume that you can.
And so that's a very positive message in the face of something that's extraordinarily negative.
And so that's all background just for why this is a sermon on the mountain.
And so that gives you some indication of the depth of these kinds of stories.
Very little in them, if anything, is accidental.
And almost every word and phrase is connected to a multitude of other words and phrases, say, within the biblical text, often within the chapter itself.
But then also it has its branches out into the broader culture, into poetry and art.
You'll see that with the images that I've selected, for example, that accompany the statements in this sermon.
And so aim up.
That's the first rule.
And seeing the multitudes.
So he's being Christ in this situation.
This is early in his ministry, by the way.
And seeing the multitudes following him, he went up into a mountain.
And when he was set, his disciples came unto him.
And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
That's a very confusing line.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
So are we talking about the economically poor?
Or do we mean poor in spirit?
What does that mean?
Does that mean those who are bereft of spirit, so of energy and enthusiasm?
And that isn't what it means.
It means blessed are the blessed are those who are the antithesis of narcissistic.
That's what it means.
So to be poor in spirit means to be humble.
And it isn't humble in a self-effacing way, in a cringing, milksaw sort of retreating, I'm unworthy way, especially not if it's accompanied by such pronouncements.
That's not what it is.
What it is instead is that there's an immense emphasis on humility as a virtue in Christian practice.
And again, I'm speaking of Christianity specifically here because this is a Christian text.
And I'm not implying that this isn't an attribute of other religious traditions.
But what is this humility and why is it a virtue?
And a long time ago, when I was teaching this course that I developed over a few decades called Maps of Meaning, I put forward the proposition that your experience is made, you can subdivide your experience into two components at the broadest level.
It's yin and yang to some degree.
But another way of thinking about it, a more concrete way, is known and unknown.
There are things you know and there are things you don't know.
Now, here's the definition of know.
It isn't that you have a description of it.
You know a place when what you want to happen happens there when you act.
That's how your brain reacts to a known situation.
So when you're somewhere familiar, the reason it feels familiar is because everything you do works.
And that's one of the nice things about being home.
You know where everything is.
Everything's simple, assuming your house isn't an absolutely chaotic hellhole, which it might be.
But if you set it up well, it's familiar and comforting because everything you do there works.
And so you feel secure there, like you should, because everything you do there works.
But then you can go out beyond the domain of what's kind and familiar, and you can go to places where you don't know how to match your behavior with the demands of the situation, and that's in the unknown.
And you might say, well, why bother going to the unknown at all?
And there's a variety of answers to that is, well, do you want to just stay in your house?
And the answer to that is probably no.
And second, the unknown has an uncanny ability to come into your house, even if you don't invite it, which is the motif, by the way, of the serpent in the garden, right?
No matter how carefully you set up the walled garden, you're not going to keep out all the snakes.
And so you better be prepared to deal with snakes, even if you're on familiar ground.
And the way you learn to deal with snakes is by going out and interacting with snakes.
And so then your safety isn't dependent on security, right?
Which is an impossibility in any case.
Your stability starts to become dependent on your competence.
And that's a way better deal.
In order to move out into the world and to become competent, you have to make friends with what you don't know.
And so, and this is the opposite of being a totalitarian.
So, if you're relying on security to regulate your emotions, you're going to insist that what you know is right.
Because if it's not right, then you get anxious and upset.
And if you're anxious and upset, you have no tools.
But if your security isn't dependent on what you know, but is dependent on your ability to handle snakes, let's say, your ability to deal with the unknown, then you can welcome the unknown.
And so, why should you do that?
Well, first of all, you're not going to escape from it because it's going to come visit you at home, no matter how secure you are.
You know, even if you just stayed at home, at some point you're going to get ill.
And then, well, in come the snakes.
And if you're not prepared for that, well, all hell's going to break loose.
And so, there's no final security in being a human being in security, which is why tyranny and authoritarianism, mindless rule following is insufficient, even though careless rule breaking is also not helpful.
So, what you want to do is welcome the unknown with open arms because it can teach you and change you and it can teach you the things you don't know and it can change you into what you could be.
And so, then you think, well, maybe what I don't know is my friend.
Now, you might ask yourself, well, is what I don't know my friend?
And here's the answer to that question.
To what degree are you living in paradise?
If your life is not everything it could be, and I mean everything it could be, then hopefully, the reason for that is that you're wrong.
And that'd be great if that was the reason, right?
Because if the world's wrong and that's why you're miserable, you're done because that's the world and there's just you.
And if it's the world making you miserable, you're pretty much doomed.
But if it's your own stupidity and your own ignorance, your own blindness, your own malevolence, then at least in principle, even though this wouldn't be easy, at least in principle, you could do something about that.
And so, what you do in some sense, and this is why Christ says, blessed are those who are poor in spirit, is because they've opened themselves up to the possibility of revelation.
Knock and the door will open.
Ask and you will receive.
Seek and you will find, which seems wildly optimistic, but which has a real point, which is that the manner in which the world manifests itself to you is dependent to an indeterminate degree on what you aim for and how much you're willing to sacrifice to attain that.
And I mean that technically as well, because when you look at the world, you look at the world through an ethical hierarchy, because you have to prioritize your perceptions.
You have to decide what's most important, because that's what you look at.
Because what else would you look at?
What's least important?
And so, with every act of your movement of your eyes and with every attempt to focus your attention, say on a conversation in a restaurant when there's all sorts of other conversations going on, you're making decisions about what's most important.
And so, if what's most important is opening yourself up to revelation, then you're going to put yourself in a position where that's a possibility.
So, one of the things I recommended to people who are trying to develop a vision for life, and this is a meditative exercise or even a prayer, is, and we could put it in biblical terms for the purposes of this lecture.
So, imagine that you can have what you want and you need, but you have to know what it is.
And you have to be willing to do, to let go of whatever's necessary to let go of to move in that direction.
And the more you're willing to let go, and that's a sacrificial motif, the more you're willing to give up to move in that direction, the higher the probability you'll move in that direction, and the more clear your vision is with regards to what you want, the higher the probability.
Well, that makes perfect sense, right?
How are you going to orient yourself towards something if you don't know what it is?
And how are you going to attain something difficult if you don't put in the requisite effort?
No one with any sense would ever presume that either of those things were possible without doing both of those things.
And so the exercise asks you to spend 15 minutes, first of all, imagining, okay, here's the deal.
You get to have what you want and you need in five years from now within the bounds of reasonable rationality, right?
But who knows what that is?
Because God only knows how far you could go in five years if you were all in.
You can go a long ways.
But let's be reasonable about it.
You can make another plan in five years if you're radically successful.
If you could have what you wanted, what would it be?
And it's a bit of a vague question.
So we ask people to answer it more specifically.
What would you want in an intimate relationship?
What would you want in friendship?
What would you want in your job or your career?
How might you educate yourself?
How would you take care of yourself mentally and physically?
What would you do with your time outside of work?
Remember, you get to have anything you want here within the bounds of your limits, let's say, and even the limits of your imagination.
Just what would that look like?
Well, that's an opening up to revelation.
You think, well, you're asking yourself this question.
Well, that's an interesting thing, right?
It's like, why do you have to ask yourself a question if you could hypothetically generate the answer?
Why isn't the answer just there?
And the answer is, we don't know why.
But it's clearly the case that you can ask yourself a question and then you can get an answer.
That's what happens when you think.
That's the revelatory element of thinking.
And we think, we think up those answers.
But the religious presumption is something more like, well, no, the thoughts enter the theater of your imagination because you've opened yourself up to the revelation.
And that isn't you in any real voluntary sense.
And in some sense, it's almost as if it's something external to you because you didn't have the answer and you posed the question and now you have the answer.
And you know how that works too, because you can get an answer that manifests itself internally and sometimes it clicks, right?
It's intuitively appropriate.
It matches you in some fundamental way.
And you think, oh, yes, of course.
And well, that's a revelation.
And then that's part of thought.
First part, ask yourself a question.
The second part, receive an answer.
The third part, dissect and analyze the answer and maybe compare answers and maybe do that in dialogue with other people.
And that's thought.
But all of that's predicated on the initial openness to the receipt of the revelation.
And so this is such a cool idea that the more of your own ignorance and insufficiency you're willing to admit, and that's a painful thing, right?
If you go right down to the core of why you're much more useless than you might be, you go right to the core of that.
The deeper you go down, and that's in some real sense an admission of your sins and inadequacies, the more likely it is that you'll receive an answer that will rectify that.
And I think, well, that's the first line.
I think that's literally true.
I think that's almost all you do in psychotherapy, for example.
It's like, what's wrong with my life?
Now, some of that might be, you know, you've been terribly hurt by other people, but maybe you need to fortify yourself so that won't happen anymore.
And you may have all sorts of physical and psychological problems that are intrinsic to you, but it's still the same issue.
You still have to contend with those weaknesses.
And you've probably multiplied them stupidly in all sorts of ways.
And so you got to put yourself down, not in a demeaning sense, but you have to strip yourself of all your presumptions and your pretensions, especially when you're dealing with the worst problems that you face, because the worst problems you face are in some sense directly proportionate to the most blind that you are, right?
Or God, wouldn't it be lovely if that was the case, that that was the reason you had serious problems, is because that's where you're most blind.
It makes sense, hey, because you'd be most afraid there and also most unwilling to take remedial action.
And so you really have to humble yourself.
And it's supposed to be a private act too.
This isn't something you do and sort of expose your vulnerability to other people, although there might be circumstances under which that's appropriate.
You're really doing that for yourself.
Like, what the hell's wrong with me exactly?
And that's a terrifying thing, too, because that means you have to admit to yourself that you are unhappy.
And that's the first thing a tyrant does, by the way, is forbid you to be unhappy.
And so you might be a tyrant to yourself in that regard.
You have to admit to yourself the depths of your misery and your longing and the bitterness that might go along with that.
And then you have to associate that with all your insufficiencies and your errors.
And that might involve a real detailed analysis of your past.
That's something like a confession of sins.
And the more you do that, and this is literally the case, the more open you are to a corrective revelation.
And so Jung, Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst, he said, modern people don't see God because they don't look low enough.
And that's worth thinking about for the rest of your life.
So that's a great opening.
These are the Beatitudes, by the way.
That's what this section of the Sermon on the Mount is known technically, the blessings.
And it's very strange conceptually, this part of the document, and this is true of the Bible in general, is that it brings polar opposites together, right?
So it lays out some of the elements of the catastrophe of life, and then it says it's in this twist.
There's a twist here that makes the acceptance of those catastrophes something that can be transformed into a blessing.
And you see this example, most particularly in the meta-narrative of Christ's life, because Christ, of course, dies a torturous and unjust death at the hands of malevolent people, which is the worst sort of death you can die in many ways.
But the story itself is contained in a broader narrative that the acceptance of that destiny, which by the way is a destiny that to some degree we're all prone to in some real sense, the more radically you can accept that, the higher the probability that you can fundamentally transcend it.
And I would say that's an open question too, man, because we do know that the more you're able to contend with your own insufficiency, the stronger you'll get.
And so then that is an open question.
It's like, well, how far down can you chase that insufficiency, right?
Is it all the way down to the fear of death, the fear of social rejection, the fear of insanity?
Because maybe those are the three cardinal fears.
Can you chase it all the way down to that?
And then can you rectify that?
And I would say, this is a Kierkegaardian idea.
You find that out in the course of your life.
No one can tell you that how that's going to go.
That's your adventure, and no one can have that for you.
And so, and you don't have to find it out.
You don't have to dig all the way into the depths, but they will come looking for you.
And there's no doubt about that.
So my sense is it's a hell of a lot better to be prepared.
And you're a lot less harmful and toxic to other people under those circumstances too.
And that's really worth considering as well if you have people in your life that you love, because maybe you don't want to hurt them while hurting yourself.
That's often a way out of self-inflicted pain for people.
Is like, well, you know, maybe you don't care that much about yourself and maybe you have your reasons, but there are people who love you and they are not going to be happy if you are not doing well for yourself.
That's generally particularly true of parents in relationship to children.
So, so blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
That's a hell of a thing to say and something to believe.
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
I would say again, there's an emphasis on the full experience of these emotions in some sense.
I'll give you an example.
So, it's a rough one.
When my wife's mother died of a degenerative neurological disease, Delzheimer's variant, and it was very nasty.
It basically took her apart over 15 years, you know, and it's a terrible thing to watch someone decay in a piecemeal fashion, right, towards an inevitable death.
And of course, everybody in her family was very sad about that.
But there were some events around her demise that served as their counterpart.
The first was her husband, his name is Del Roberts.
He's my father-in-law.
I've always liked him.
He's a really charismatic guy.
He's a real 1950s Dean Martin, man-about-town-town kind of guy, extremely extroverted, pretty disagreeable, really funny.
Everybody in the little town we grew up in knew him.
He just had that brilliant personality.
And he was out all the time working as a businessman, and he was an athlete as well.
And he had a big booming voice, and he was always the center of the center of the party in a good way.
I really liked Dal and luckily he liked me.
But when his wife got sick, no one really knew how he would respond.
Because I wouldn't say that he, his cardinal, his cardinal virtues were not those of compassion.
And this is not an insult.
Compassion can be a devouring virtue for the person who experiences that and for the target of the compassion.
And so I'm not saying this in any manner that was critical at all, but he didn't seem to be the stay-at-home, take-care-of-someone sort of guy.
And that's exactly what he turned into.
And it was stunning.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was unbelievable because he took such care of his wife.
And it was so amazing to see that part of his character flower like that, you know, and to see him sacrifice his more extroverted and outward-oriented mode of being to take care of this woman that he loved.
And he really did love her, and she really loved him.
And really, right up to the end, when she couldn't speak, she would light up when he came into the room.
And so that was something because he was mourning her loss.
He wasn't shielding himself from the grief.
And because of that, it affected him different deeply enough to transform him.
And so what was the benefit of that?
Well, the benefit was she had a lot less miserable time of it than she might have.
So it was still hell, but it wasn't the lowest depths of hell, and it could have been.
And then he manifested a widening of character and wisdom.
And one of the things that did was there was some friction within the family, like there always is, and some ambivalence in the relationship between the children, say, and the father.
But all of his children came to respect and admire him much more.
And so when she died and he got old, they were much more around to take care of him, which is an extremely interesting thing.
And also, the family who was not afraid of death in a very fundamental sense.
My sister-in-law was a palliative careless, and my wife is very brave in that regard.
And another sister was a pharmacist.
They were in the medical establishment and accustomed to confronting reality head on in some real sense.
And so when their mother died, they marshaled together and they didn't squabble and fight with each other.
And they did what they could to make her deterioration as bearable as possible.
And because they saw in each other the effects of the loss that they shared, they got closer.
And by the time Tammy's mother died, the family had tightened up to a much greater degree than had been the case before the onset of her illness.
And so one of the things they benefited from, because they actually experienced in some real sense the depths of their grief, was a compensatory tightening of the relationships.
And so something was taken out of the family, a major catastrophe, the loss of a mother, but something non-trivial was gained.
And I'm not trying to say, well, that made up for it, because nothing makes up for the loss of someone that you love, not in any real sense, but you can do it badly or you can do it well.
And there is a big difference between doing it badly and doing it well.
And so I think this beatitude reflects that notion is that, yeah, well, the other thing too is that mourning in the real sense is proportionate to love, right?
The more you love someone, the more you're going to mourn.
And then to mourn someone's loss is also in a paradoxical sense a celebration of life.
Because if you allow yourself to be affected by the disappearance of someone that you loved, even if you had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with them, which is often the case with family members, for example, you also signify to yourself that in the depths of your soul, you regarded their existence as worthwhile in the most fundamental sense and their loss, a true loss, despite their inadequacies and their flaws and yours as well.
And maybe in some sense, even because of their inadequacies and their flaws, you know, as my parents have got older, because people get in some sense more like they are as they get older and their horizons get somewhat restricted, you know.
And you see your parents as they start to become more fragile and you see as well that you care for them not despite their idiosyncrasies, but also because of them, because the idiosyncrasies make up part of what they are.
There's a Nietzschean quote, which I really love.
He said, great men are seldom credited with their stupidities.
And his notion, and Nietzsche knew this very well, is that you don't want to be thinking so certainly that there's a virtue without a corresponding vice, right?
And that something that you love about someone might come along with an attendant weakness that's a necessary precondition or an accompaniment for that strength.
And I would say that's the same about you.
And maybe you can work on those weaknesses because you have the strength and broaden out your personality.
And I think you can and I think you should.
But it's still the case that when you love someone, you kind of take them, you kind of take them as a package.
And maybe that's in some way, I don't mean an all-encompassing and all-forgiving, judgmentless compassion, you know, because you want to hold people to standards as well, because that's part of love.
But there is still that element of liking them because of who they are in all their peculiarity, right, as well as their possibility.
And so, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
That's a re-representation of the poor in spirit idea there is that to be meek again isn't I've read multiple translations of that word and meek can mean What would you say?
It means not arrogant and narcissistic.
That's the best way of thinking about it.
And there's another way of attacking that.
That's a very deep idea, too.
So the notion of Lucifer, there's very little discussion of the nature of the satanic spirit in the biblical corpus.
Really, a few lines, almost nothing.
Almost the whole idea that there's an adversarial entity, a satanic entity or Luciferian entity, is sort of in the cloud of dreamlike imagery and story that surrounds the biblical corpus.
So it's material, literary material in a real sense, outside of the biblical writings.
It's a figment of the imagination, so to speak, which doesn't mean it isn't real, by the way.
The Luciferian spirit, this is Milton.
Milton developed this idea more than anyone else.
He believed that it was the untrammeled, arrogant intellect that insists that its rational presumptions are 100% correct.
And so you could think of the Luciferian.
So Milton portrayed Lucifer as the highest angel in God's heavenly hierarchy, gone most catastrophically wrong.
Lucifer means lightbringer, and Lucifer was represented as the spirit of the intellect.
And that's in some sense, that's rationality itself.
But it's not just rationality, it's the rationality that falls in love with its own pretensions and then elevates them to the status of God.
And that's the story of the Tower of Babel, for example.
So when the people who build the Tower of Babel build it, they build a structure that attempts to replace God.
And the consequence of that is that no one can communicate with one another anymore because fundamental categories become questionable, which is, by the way, exactly what's happening right now.
And Babel referred to Babylon, which was an empire, but the word Babel is also derived from the Babel of unintelligible speech is also derived from the same root as the Tower of Babel.
And so it's authoritarian presumption that reduces utterances to meaninglessness.
And certainly totalitarian presumptions do that because in a totalitarian state, every word everyone says is a lie.
And that's what makes it a totalitarian state.
And that's true of everyone, right?
Parents lie to their children, children lie to their parents, wives lie to their husbands, husbands lie to their wives.
Everyone lies about everything all the time.
And that's why it's a totalitarian state.
And so no one ever says anything that's real or true, and no one can communicate.
And the Luciferian spirit is behind that.
And that's the spirit that wants to not open itself up to continued revelation from the transcendent, let's say, but to insist that what is already known is all that needs to be known and more importantly, all that is morally allowed to be known.
And you see that again playing out in the culture war where what we see now is that if you think certain things that aren't canonically correct, not only are you wrong, but you're basically immoral and worse, right?
You're predatory or and worse.
You're positively demonic.
And that's a complete inversion of the actuality of the situation because you should be holding your knowledge lightly because what the hell do you know unless your life is perfect and you're a shining light on the hill.
And so you should always be looking for corrective from what's transcendent.
And so one of the things I realized recently, it's quite a frightening realization.
This is mostly when I was talking to Richard Dawkins because Dawkins is an atheist, as most of you know, so he doesn't believe in a transcendent deity.
But Dawkins believes in a transcendent object.
And this is very interesting.
So he believes in the transcendent.
So what would a transcendent object be?
Well, imagine you're a scientist, right?
And you have a theory about the way the world is.
And you can think about that as a Tower of Babel.
It's a set of presumptions about reality itself.
But if you're a real scientist, you don't believe in your theory.
You believe that there's an object, transcendent object, that you do not understand, which is outside the confines of your theoretical presuppositions.
And if you match the theory against the transcendent reality, which you cannot detect, by the way, right?
Because it's outside of your conceptual framework.
So it only exists in possibility.
If you match that theory against the transcendent object, it will correct you.
And I think that's the same idea as a transcendent deity.
It at least shares the notion that there's something, well, that there's an objective reality, but it's not objective.
It's transcendent because it's outside of your epistemological frame, right?
Epistemological frame would be your philosophical and conceptual frame.
And so I think, I don't know if this is true, but it could be true.
It's possible that the reason that science developed in the West was because we developed the notion of a transcendent reality and instantiated that very deeply in our culture.
And once that had been instantiated, that you could exist in a relationship, say, of truth in relationship to the transcendent, we could also use that on the material world.
And it also turned out to work there.
And there's an interesting corollary of that too, which is that the Nietzschean death of God, which is the death of the transcendent deity, might also be the death of the transcendent object.
And you certainly see that playing out with the postmodernists because they basically make the claim that there's no territory.
There's just different maps.
There's no transcendent reality even on the objective front, which is why you see things like the decolonization of science and the insistence that the scientific enterprise is nothing but a variant of the oppressive maneuvering of the power structure or something like that.
It's not any real attempt to contact something genuine on the ontological front.
So that's the study of reality itself, because there is nothing genuine there.
And if you think there is, that's just an index of the depth of your willingness to use your own delusions to oppress other people.
That's a hell of an accusation, you know, both on the theological and the scientific front.
And so it could be that if we lose our humility in the face of the transcendent, we'll also lose the transcendent object in science itself.
And no one, no one saw that coming.
But I think not only is it a possibility, I think that's exactly what's playing out right now.
And so science, there's no reason to assume that's not a fragile enterprise.
It's only 500 years old in the formal sense.
I mean, you could trace it back to the Greeks if you really want to push it, but fundamentally, it's 500 years old.
That's not very old.
That's like, that's not even yesterday.
That's like two minutes ago.
And it only emerged in our scientific culture.
It never emerged anywhere else.
And we don't know the preconditions for its emergence or its maintenance, but belief in the transcendent object certainly seems to be one of them.
You know, one of the things I liked about Dawkins, and I like about the scientific atheists in general, is that most of them are actually scientists.
Dawkins is a real scientist.
And that means also that he believes that the truth will set you free.
Because he wouldn't be so assiduous in his pursuit of the truth if he hadn't accepted that as a metaphysical axiom.
I tried to torture him a bit about that.
And we've got a little ways On it, but he believes, like most of the atheist types believe, that you can have a hunger for truth outside the framework of a Judeo-Christian morality.
And I'm not so sure that's true, but he thinks it is, and he might be right, but he isn't.
As he's finding out, as the scientific enterprise collapses around him, and all the atheist humanists who were supposed to be rationalists degenerate into postmodern woke ideologues.
And he's suffered a fair bit on that front already.
And so, you know, because his dream was, well, we'll shed the shackles of superstition and we'll all be enlightened Renaissance rationalists.
Like, no, we'll just be way crazier than anything you've ever seen.
And that seems, first of all, it's the most likely outcome because it's really hard to be a trained scientist.
Like, it takes you 10 years of practice to really think like a scientist.
And then, if you take all those scientists that have practiced for 10 years, only a real tiny subset of them can really think like scientists.
It's really, really hard to learn that.
And so, the probability that what's interfering with that primarily is just the hangovers of our superstitious past.
It's like, you know, that's part of it, I suppose, but it's not very much of it.
It's a way worse problem than that.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.
Well, that's a lovely idea.
It's another variant of the knock and the door will open notion: well, if you want righteousness, whatever that means, well, what would that be to walk the proper path?
And so, you might say, well, do I want to walk the proper path?
That's the first thing you have to figure out.
And you've got to think, well, why wouldn't I?
And the answer would be because you're bitter and resentful and you'd rather aim down and you don't want the responsibility.
And maybe not only that, you want to pretend that you're good so that you get all the benefits of being good without having to do any of the work.
So those would be the fundamental impediments.
And if you don't think they're in you, you have not looked because they're definitely in you.
And so you've got to shed that and you've got to think through: do you really want to carry that along with you?
And then you want to walk the righteous path.
Well, you better discover what it is.
And that's going to be hard because it's probably not the path you're on.
And you can feel that out to some degree.
You know, one of the things I learned and that I've tried to teach people is that if you pay attention to what you say, and I really mean attention, not think about it, I mean attend.
Attend is an opening to watch and to be receptive.
That's why the Eye of Horace was a redemptive figure for the Egyptians and not the rational spirit, the Luciferian rational spirit.
It's attention.
If you pay attention to what you say, you can feel whether you're making yourself weak or strong with every word.
And then you can decide to stop saying things that make you weak.
And then you can practice that.
And that works.
And so that's one way of sort of feeling out the righteous path.
It's like, well, is this the right pathway forward?
You know, you do that when you meet someone and you're trying to feel out how to have a relationship with them, right?
You're dancing with them and you're seeing, does this work?
And not instrumentally, but if you're doing it genuinely, learning how to play with them, you test it out and you see.
You do that with a dog in a park to see what the pathway is.
And you do that in an embodied sense, not just a rational sense.
And so to tread the path of righteousness is to, first of all, orient yourself so you want that.
And one way of doing that is to think of the alternative, you know, because paths that aren't righteous lead to hell.
And that's, if you don't know, that's worse than death.
There's lots of things you still don't know.
And so you really want to ask yourself if that's the path you want to be on.
Path that's associated with deceit, that's definitely the pathway to hell because that's the totalitarian path.
And if the pathway isn't informed by love, then it's neutral, or it's informed by hate.
And it's hard to see how that's, unless you want hate, and you can have your reasons for that.
But you just, it's very difficult to think, to believe in any fundamental sense that that's going to do you any good or anyone else.
You might have dispensed with the desire to do good.
That happens, but that's not my point.
My point is, if you do want to do good, almost no one thinks you get there with lying and hate.
So, and so this beatitude basically claims if you want it, then you can have it.
But there's a cost because the question is, what do you mean want?
And that's why the sacrificial motif that runs through the biblical corpus is so important because to want something means to work for it.
And to work for it literally means to make sacrifices because work is a sacrificial enterprise.
And you say, well, what do you mean by that?
It's like, well, work sacrifices the present for the future.
If that isn't what you're doing, you're not working.
You might be playing, maybe even have a job that's play, you know, but it's not real work.
You're just so fortunate that you found something you can play at that actually provides you with economic sustenance.
But very often, you have to work in order to make ends meet, right?
And you do that by sacrificing the short-term hedonic pleasure of the present to the medium and long-term stability of the future.
And that can be very effortful and responsibility-laden.
But it works.
And then the question, I suppose, and this is a question that's posed, it starts to be posed right in the early opening stories in the biblical corpus.
What should you make sacrifices to?
And the lurking idea here is righteousness.
And so imagine you're trying to decide what's worth giving up your selfish short-term pleasures in service of.
And then we're back into the same problem we started with.
Well, what's worth making sacrifices to?
Or more importantly, even, what spirit should you be making sacrifices to?
And that's the question of God.
And you might think, well, I don't believe in God.
And I would say, that's completely irrelevant in some fundamental sense, because if you're not making sacrifices, you're at best useless.
At worst, you're harmful.
And you're chaotic and anxiety-ridden seeker after trivial pleasures.
That's you.
And then you're making sacrifices anyways, because now you're sacrificing the future to the present instead of the reverse.
So there's no way out of the sacrificial paradox.
There's only a matter of getting it right.
And then the question is: well, what's worth the ultimate sacrifice?
Because you're going to have to make that.
Everything you have, everything you hold, you're going to lose.
And then the question, really, the question comes up: what could possibly justify that?
And the answer might be nothing, right?
That would be the fundamentally pessimistic answer.
But you could always pose it as a question to yourself, right?
You could take it seriously.
I'm going to lose everything.
All right.
So given that that's the case, how might I live?
And it seems hopeless.
I'm going to lose everything.
Why would I live at all?
But it's possible if you actually asked yourself the question, you could find an answer to it.
And I do believe you can.
You know, when people, when someone my age, because I'm getting older, I look back on my life, I think that was worth it.
You know, and it's often something that took a fair bit of struggle to manage.
But I think in retrospect, yeah, but it was worth it.
And that's a hint in the right direction, isn't it?
If it's difficult and demanding and you do it in the face of your mortality and your insufficiency, and your judgment on that in retrospect is, yeah, but that was worth it, then you actually found a solution to the problem.
One of the things I really liked about the biblical corpus, especially the story of Abraham, but you see it in the story of Moses as well, is there's this idea that it isn't happiness that redeems you, it's proper sacrifice, but there's more to it than that.
What redeems your life is the adventure of your life.
It's not happiness, it's not ease or security, it's not freedom from anxiety or even privation, none of that.
In fact, those experiencing those in the proper proportions might be a precondition to a full life, right?
To putting yourself in a position where you actually have something to lose and both risk and experience loss because nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
And so, but I do think that, I do think that it strikes a deep chord in people when you say you could have the adventure of your life.
And that would be so magnificent.
It could be so magnificent that it would justify the catastrophe of your life.
Or you could even put it forward as a challenge.
It's like, could you conjure up an adventure for your life that's so magnificent that it would justify the catastrophe of your life?
And the answer is, well, we'll see what you do with your life because you literally answer that question.
You literally answer that question with your life.
And here's something else to think about that, I think, that's so interesting.
So in the force that God uses at the beginning of time to conjure habitable order, the habitable order that is good out of potential.
That's the word.
And the word is directed towards love in the sense that we've already described, but it's also the truthful word.
And so truth is subordinate to love in that sense.
So then you might say, well, how to think about truth?
And so imagine that, oh, I don't know, maybe you're out on a date and you're trying to manipulate the person that you're with into bed with you for some short-term hedonic gratification.
And so you're trying to craft yourself so you're maximally attractive to attain that short-term end.
And so it's not you that's talking, right?
It's this little fragment of yourself that's possessed by this desire.
And now you're twisting and bending your words to attain that desire.
You might say, well, I'm lonesome and I'd like to be with someone.
And so that's perfectly justifiable.
But the problem with that, here's the problem.
I thought about this in relationship to these guys in colleges now.
There's a small percentage of people, men in female-dominated colleges who basically have their selection of sexual partners because there's a shortage of men.
And there's a tiny fraction of that shortage of men who are popular.
And so they can engage in repeated short-term hedonic sexual interactions.
And so why not?
What a deal.
Except, well, what are you learning?
Exactly.
Like, are you learning a variant of psychopathic instrumental manipulation?
Because you just treat the other person as if they're a target for one interaction that's not repeated.
And that's a recipe for psych for learning how to be a psychopath, that's for sure.
And so you get what you want, but what the hell do you know about what you want?
That's the big issue here.
It's like, unless you're 100% reliable and you're not, your conception of what might constitute the optimal future is likely to be warped.
And so that doesn't mean you shouldn't make plans.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't have a vision and lift your eyes up, but you have to do that given your sense of your own inadequacy.
And so then you might say, well, why don't you just give all that up and just say what you believe to be true?
And then what you find is that's an adventure.
Because if I tell you only what I think you want to hear, I might be able to manipulate you to do what I want, right?
And that could be true in business and it could be true in my family.
Then I maybe I even have a slightly higher chance of getting what I want, although I think that's debatable because people see through that pretty quickly if they have any wisdom.
But if I just tell you what I think, then I have no idea what's going to happen.
None.
It might be good, might be bad.
It might be bad and then good.
That's happened to me a lot.
It was like really bad and then it was good.
And so I kind of learned to live through the desert part of that and to get to the positive part.
And, you know, it shook my faith in the truth to some degree because it got me in a lot of trouble to say what I actually thought.
But I found that if I didn't, if I was careful to begin with, and if I didn't backtrack, things would turn eventually.
It was not so fun while they were turning, you know, and it wasn't necessarily the case that they were going to.
But there's something deeper in that.
Imagine that you want to have the adventure of your life.
Okay, now imagine you lose it using lies to manipulate yourself and other people.
Well, those lies aren't you by definition, right?
They're not the real you.
That's what makes them lies.
And so if your lies work, the thing that's succeeding is not you.
And then you might ask yourself, well, who or what is the prince of all lies?
And what makes you think that that's not what's succeeding when you get your short-term way?
And if you think about that deeply enough for a while, then that's one of the things that can scare you straight.
You think, well, if I say what I believe to be true, or at least don't lie, because you can at least start with that, then at least it's you, right?
And maybe you're not very good at it to begin with.
And so you get hammered pretty hard, but then it's you getting hammered too, you know.
And if you hammer metal carefully enough, you can make something beautiful out of it.
And so if you tell the truth, this could literally be the case, is that the way you have the adventure that justifies your life is by telling the truth.
And then you might think, well, would you, how could it be any other way?
It's one of those things that once you lay it out, you think, well, that has to be the case because if you're not telling the truth, it's not you.
If it's not you, then you're definitely not having the adventure of your life.
And you know perfectly well that telling the truth is an adventure because the reason most of the time you don't tell the truth is either because you want to manipulate people or you don't want to have the consequence of telling the truth.
So you just sugarcoat it or you put it away or whatever.
So you're actually denying yourself the adventure.
And I can understand that, right?
Because how much bloody adventure do you need?
But that is an open question.
You know, like, what are we?
Are we rabbits?
Are we adventurers on the high seas?
You know, maybe we're adventurers on the high seas.
And maybe that's where life is really to be had.
And so when you shirk away from that adventure, you could easily be shirking away from the destiny that stops you from being bitter in the face of your own mortality.