The Perfect Mode of Being | Jonathan Pageau | EP 156

[Music] So today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Pagiot, whom I know primarily as a thinker who's a carver of Orthodox icons that are absolutely beautiful. I have one in my house of Saint Michael and the Dragon and an increasingly prominent YouTuber, prominent among intellectual YouTubers I would say, essentially particularly those who are interested in religious and philosophical and artistic ideas. Jonathan and I have been talking back and forth for I would think about six or seven years now. Eh, we met in 2015.

Yeah, it's my time. It's crazy, time flies.

It's crazy, that's for sure. So I... we haven't spoken for two years, maybe?

Yeah, we saw each other, I think when you booked him out and you came to Montreal for a little event, and I picked you up at the airport. That was the last time we saw each other.

Yeah, it's a while. A lot of water under the bridge.

That's right, indeed, and in your case literally.

Yes, exactly! Jonathan's house was flooded out, that was when?

It was in 2019.

Um, but we just moved back into our house this Christmas. And so it was a long kind of... a long thing, it lasted a very long time. So, and are you in your house right now?

Yes, I am in my house, all fixed up, and so we're really enjoying it. We're happy to be back.

I bet! It must have been unbelievably dislocating to be flooded like that, your whole basement filled with water if I remember correctly.

Yeah, exactly. It was a dyke broke in the city, and you know, I think thousands of people got evacuated within an hour. And so for my kids especially, it was... my kids and even my wife, it was a little bit of a trauma because it was water. We could see the water coming, and there were cops and, you know, all these firemen and everything. And so it was a pretty intense moment.

Yeah, and where were you living when your house was underwater?

We moved around, we lived at my parents, then we rented a place, then we had to move, and so we ended up living in three places during the about a year and a half that we were gone. Um, so but it was... it was one of those things where, you know, we say symbolism happens. You know, a lot of the things that even you talk about or that I talk about just manifested themselves—this problem of the dyke and the idea of, you know, corruption or inattention to the situation and then thinking you're safe when in fact you're not aware of what's kind of looming on the margins. And so for me it was a real learning experience. I hope that I've come out of it stronger and more—more attentive, let's say.

Yeah, well, I hope so too. I mean, we all hope that we come out of unpleasant experiences stronger than when we went in, although that isn't always the case. It's the case when things are functioning optimally and when you're fortunate and courageous and I suppose as honest as you can be. But fortunate definitely ranks high among all of those necessary preconditions for successful recovery, I would say.

Yeah, and I have to say that I am— we are—I’m so grateful to see you back online. You know that. I know you've heard this, but there have been thousands of people thinking about you, praying for you, and really rooting for you. And you know, I actually saw Tammy last year when I went to bring your icon. And I just remember just feeling helpless, and you know, she was like, “Would you go to Russia?” and I was like, “I’ll go to Russia! I’ll go see Jordan in Russia!” It didn’t seem like it was a reasonable thing to do, and it’s probably better it didn’t happen. But we’ve definitely been praying for you and rooting for you and thinking about you, Jordan.

You know, I appreciate that a lot. And I'm back to some degree, I would say. I still think I'm running at about five percent.

So, yeah, and that's partly why I was concerned about talking to you today. And we generally discuss things that are relatively deep, and it's still difficult for me to go deeply into anything that's happening to me because it's so unbelievably awful. And it's been hard on my faith, I would say. You know, and my book is coming out—my new book, I should show it to you. I just got recognized yesterday!

That's awesome!

It's unbelievable that you wrote that during all of this! I can't believe that.

When you say you're running at five percent, I think that your five percent is pretty close to the hundred percent of most people.

Yeah, well, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's five percent for me. And getting the book was actually somewhat of a traumatic experience, I would say, because it reminded me like... it's a concrete reminder of everything that's happened over the last three or four years. And all things that I found very difficult to process, both on the social front and on the, let's say biological health front. Um, so I was reading, oddly enough, I got a book sent to me by Bishop Barron. The first draft of a book, and it's written by a couple of professors. It's called “Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life” by Dr. Christopher Kaczor and Dr. Matthew Pretecek, Word on Fire Institute, a Catholic response to my biblical series. And hopefully they won’t be too upset about me talking about it today, but I won’t talk about it that much. The book itself, it was rather a shock to me. They’re at Loyola Marymount University, and it was kind of a shock to me to see them talking about my—I mean, these are religious scholars talking about my biblical series.

Um, but I think people are just... people don't—a lot of people didn't understand, and I could see it in my react with the way people were reacting to your biblical studies, the biblical interpretations. People didn't understand. How is it that we can barely get 100 people in our church and Jordan has a million people listening to him? Kind of struggle to get through these passages and do it in a very improvisational kind of existential way.

And to me, it's funny because I mean, I think I have a deep affection for the way that you approach things and I—and obviously, we connect together in the way we think. And so to me, it was like, this is what you guys should have been doing for a while—trying to understand how it is that this stuff is talking about reality and not just a bunch of arbitrary things that you need to believe or that you need to kind of attend to. And because these stories, they really are telling us about the structure of being. And so I think that that's the way that you approached it and that's why people are resonating to what you're saying, because they're like, “Finally, someone can help us make sense of these stories that we're somehow strangely attracted to or frustrated by or disgusted by or whatever it is.” But there's this push and pull with these stories.

And so I think that I've seen a lot of Christians listen to your biblical talks, and of course sometimes you say things and they're like, “Okay, that’s way off the rails,” and then other times you say things and they can't believe the insight that you’re able to pierce. And so, I’m not—not all surprised that Catholic scholars would kind of look at what you were doing, and we all hope that you're going to do more of that for sure.

Yes, well, I would like to. I'm thinking about trying to attempt a book on Exodus and lecture two lectures as well, although I wouldn't say that I'm in any shape to do that yet. But it's a dream, let's say. I mean, I'm pretty much completely non-functional for the first three or four hours of the day. I get up and I can barely stand up, and I go have a sauna for an hour and often sleep during that period of time, and then at the same time I cook breakfast. I use an air cooker, and then I go walk for anywhere between seven and ten miles. And even though I can... by the time I get out of the house, I'm dizzy as can be, and it's difficult to stand up. But after about a mile or two, I get my legs under me to some degree, and then by two o'clock I’m kind of functional, although extremely anxious. And then I’m able to do a little bit of work, and often to sit down at four o'clock, my mind seems sharp enough, although my memory isn’t good. I can't bring things to mind like I used to, which is quite distressing, and I have very little emotional resilience. And I'm worried for that reason about the release of this book. I mean, I just did a Times interview, a London Times interview, that was really...

Yeah, we followed that.

I'd say it's that frustrating.

It's... I mean, it's funny because this, you know, again it was like the same stories are playing out again. This person goes after you and then it just turns against that person, and it’s just she’s exposed for the fraud that she was being during that interview. And so, you know, I think in the—it's so strange that it keeps happening over and over. I mean, I really decided not to do mainstream interviews now for a good while because I've—it seems to me that I've gone to the well of public sympathy, so to speak, enough times. And that if this happens to me two or three more times, let's say, people are going to rightly say, “You know, how many times does it take for Peterson to learn?” And so I don’t want that to happen. I mean, I've been, you know, I feel an obligation to my publishers, obviously, to talk about the book. Although that interview had virtually nothing to do with the book, we hoped that I would be able to discuss my health issues with someone who would treat them squarely and then I could ignore them from then on in, but, uh, that isn't what happened.

Well, it's been... it's a sign of the politicized discourse. Like you, it's a sign of the breakdown that we're going through, that we see this capacity to have so entrenched a side that people are—doesn't matter what they do, it doesn't matter what they say, they don't feel like they're responsible because in a way you're the enemy. And you know, and it's not just you. It's other... it's between different groups. But if you’re the enemy, then everything is justified.

And so...

Well, I think a huge part of this is driven by the desire to have an enemy.

Yeah. You know, it's very difficult to feel... it's an easy route to self-righteousness to have an enemy.

Exactly, and yeah, and it's a great place to put all evil.

Yeah!

And because you attract so much attention, you're an easy... you're definitely an easy target.

Well, that's the theory. It seems not to turn out that way.

Yeah, but it's also was the timing, you know the way when you kind of came up in the public sphere? There was a massive shift happening in culture, and I think that's one of the things you could feel, and that was happening around us. And to some extent, you know, Donald Trump had something to do with that as well in the sense that it was this malaise that was there and this kind of jostling, and this is what led to all that kind of discourse. And so, I think that you were identified—you became identified almost mythologically, I guess, as a character, and people, you know, have treated you that way, and they act with you that way in many respects.

Yes, it becomes very difficult to understand. Very difficult for me to understand what character I am. You know so much has changed in my life over the last five years. I've been on leave from the university, so that's very destabilizing. I don't have my clinical practice anymore, and so I was you know seeing 20 people a week, so that's a huge transformation in my life. My house has been completely renovated. It was renovated while my wife was ill, and so we didn't—well, the renovation went on in our absence, and so I'm a foreigner in my own house, which is... which is... although I'm starting to become accustomed to it, and there are some things I like about the new house, but I don't feel at home in it, I wouldn't say. And I've only been here for two months in the last three years because I was on the road and then all this.

And so that and everything that's happened has been very disruptive for my family, and of course, Tammy got so unbelievably sick and with something that was supposed to be fatal and recovered more or less miraculously. And then I've been so unbelievably ill, or still am, and I have just... I just don't know where to put any of this. I can't think about the past at all because so much of it is incomprehensible, especially over the last five years. I can't think about the present because I'm in so much pain, and I can't think about the future because I don't know what I'm going to do, and I have no idea how long this pain is going to last. It's been... I've been in pain—really severe pain—for two years now.

And yeah, um, and that's—it's a strange thing because in this book one of the chapters, the last chapter, is called, "Be Grateful in Spite of Your Suffering," you know? And um, I went through every sentence in that chapter a very large number of times because much of the time while I was rewriting it, particularly, I was in a lot of pain. And um, like it's a pain level that's hard to fathom in some sense because I would say every single day I have now is worse than any day I ever had in my life before I got ill.

So... and then I know very well that adding bitterness to your malaise is a very bad idea, you know? It doesn't help, but that I can certainly see the attraction in that. I feel like shaking my fist at the sky and complaining bitterly, but it doesn't help, but there doesn't seem to be any relief either, and so that's... it's so... it's so perverse. It's shaken my faith, I suppose. I’m in this perverse position where my work has in principle helped so many people, and yet I don't seem to be able to dig myself out of my current circumstances so well, or even to make sense of them.

Yeah, I think that the role that you've played is a kind of a transition role, and that transition manifests itself to you as trying to have your feet on two sides of rifting, of an eye—two islands that are floating away from each other. And you’re trying to hold on; you’re trying to kind of help people focus on the middle and help people avoid radicalization and avoid falling into camps in a manner that will lead to God knows what.

And so I think that’s the role that you've played, and it’s been like... I’ve seen, for example, people transition through your work—transition from worlds, moving worlds! That’s really what I’ve seen happen. It's more than just changing the way—changing your opinion or changing your mind about something. It really is about changing the world you inhabit.

And so, that's a crazy role to play, and especially because, like I said, you have your foot... it’s like you kind of have your one foot or one eye, let’s say, looking towards, I would call it religion or looking towards Christianity or something like that, and then you have another eye which is still very much immersed in a kind of secular humanism. And you have one leg that is, you know, you understand people that are more left-leaning; you understand people that are more right-leaning. You have this capacity to kind of understand everybody, but you're—

Yeah, it's uh... that means that you make enemies on all sides too.

Well, you know, the overwhelming response that I've got publicly has been, I would say, traumatically positive.

Yeah, and you wouldn't think that that would be possible, really, but I find it that way. I mean, partly it's overwhelming to have people constantly tell me in person their responses to what I've been doing. It's very emotional, and I get caught up in that quite quickly. And of course on YouTube and the social media platforms, YouTube particularly, the bulk of the comments about me are very, very positive. It's 99 to 1 often in terms of likes and dislikes.

It's—

Yeah, and it's too much.

Well, I don't know how to... I don't know how to... I don't know what category to put it in. I don't know how to conceptualize it. I mean, part of me, the practical part of course says, well, I just happened to adopt a new technology at a time when it started to boom and filled a kind of niche that was empty in that technology at that time, but in some sense that doesn't really cut it, you know? Because it doesn't have anything to do with the content. Then I think, well, I have been dealing with these borderline religious issues—well, certainly not just borderline. There's lots of religious people who seem to think that I'm dealing with religious issues.

And well, that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about tonight. So this book I mentioned earlier talked about disagreements with my conceptualization of Christ, let’s say, and I’m not sure what that conceptualization is, by the way, exactly. It’s a mystery to me, but I can say some concrete things about it. I mean, 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 and that ideal has us, right?

And that's where it's very interesting to consider the role of conscience because your conscience will call you out on your behavior. And so it seems to function as something that’s somewhat independent or at least is something that you can't fully voluntarily control because if you could voluntarily control it, then you’d just tell the pesky little bastard to go away or to pat you on the back continually. Because there must be few things in life more pleasurable than being a fully committed narcissist—to really believe that everything that you do is right and that you're a good person.

And I suppose if you could wave a magic wand and rearrange your mind so that it was constantly telling you that you do it, but you don't seem to be able to do that in relationship to your conscience. It trips you up and so it tells you when you're not living up to your own ideal. And that means that you have an ideal, and you don't even know what the hell it is, but you certainly know when you transgress against it.

And I know that there’s a strong line of Christian thinking that's identified the conscience with divinity, sometimes with Christ inside, sometimes with the Holy Spirit, and those are very interesting conceptualizations. But you can think of them psychologically and you can even think about them biologically, you know, to some degree because we're so social. If we don't manifest an appropriate moral reciprocity, we're going to become alienated from our fellows, and we won't survive, and we'll suffer and die, and we won't... we certainly won't find a partner and have children successfully.

And so to some degree the conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within, and that's a perfectly reasonable biological explanation. But 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 pow—with a power that transcends your ability to resist it.

So, okay, so you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective, and the critic—my critic, this particular critic that I've been reading, said, well, that doesn’t differentiate Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods. 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 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 don’t—I’m amazed at my own belief, and I don’t understand it. Like, because I’ve seen sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch—that’s union, synchronicity—and I've seen that many times in my own life. And so in some sense I believe it's undeniable. You know, we have a narrative sense of the world. For me, that's been the world of morality—that's the world that tells us how to act. It’s real, like we treat it like it’s real. It’s not the objective world, but the narrative and the objective world touch.

And the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be Christ, but I don’t know what to—and that seems to me oddly plausible.

Yeah.

But I still don’t know what to make of it. It's too—hit partly because it’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it. If you believed in the story of Christ or if you believe that history and, and let’s say the narrative meet...

Let's say, I think you... because when you believe that you buy both those stories, you believe that the narrative and the objective can actually touch.

Yeah, I mean, we saw that, you and I. I mean, this is a trivial example, but we had a... when we were discussing—we had a sequence of discussions around frog symbolism four years ago.

Yeah, that was very bizarre, to say the least.

You know, and that was a trivial example. Relatively trivial example of the narrative world in the objective world coming together.

Didn't feel that trivial at the time.

Well, the way I like to deal with this is that one of the things—it's already there in your thought, it's already there in the way that you talk about reality—which is that one of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is something like attention, right?

It's something—there's a hierarchy of manifestation because everything that hap—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, that you could angle it 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. 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 bean bags and stumps.

Exactly!

And they don’t have anything in common! Well, they're both made of matter, you know, for whatever that's worth, it's a pretty trivial level of commonality. But you can sit on them, and that’s what you have. There’s a mode of being which they find...

Well, and that’s so strange. So many of our object perceptions are projected modes of being.

And so even the objective world is ineluctably contaminated with its utility, and therefore with morality.

Exactly.

And so I think that’s the key. The key is that once you understand that the world manifests itself through attention and that consciousness has a place to play in actually the way in which the world reveals itself, and so you can... you can try to posit a world outside of that first-person perspective, but it’s a deluded activity.

Well, it's also very, very difficult because you don’t know what to make of something like time because time has an inerratically subjective element, and duration which is different than time. I mean, time is kind of like the average rate at which things change. But duration is something like the felt sense of that time.

And if you take away this objectivity, it isn't obvious what to do with time, and I think physicists stumble over this all the time, so to speak.

So, and this is something that—this intermingling of value and fact was something that I never thought—I never thought I made much traction with with Harris, with Sam Harris. He didn’t seem to me to be willing to admit how saturated the world of fact is inevitably with value.

And I actually think he’s denying the science at that point because for everything I know about perceptual psychology, there’s a great book called, uh, um, Vision as a—oh God, now I can't remember the name of the books.

That's memory trouble.

I'll remember it. No worries. The idea is that if that is true, then there are certain things which come out of that—there are certain necessary things down the road from that insight, which is that attention plays a part in the way the world lays itself out.

And that one of them—and one of them is that the stuff that the world is made of is partly something like attention, something like consciousness, and that has a pattern, and that pattern is the same pattern as stories.

It just— it just, it doesn’t lay itself out exactly the same, but things exist with a pattern which is similar to stories. They have identities, they have centers, they have margins, they have exceptions, and that's how stories lay themselves out. Like so a story happens in time, how an identity, let's say, 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 the first level of attention to that looks something like worship. It looks like celebration. It looks like—it's like the thing which makes the, let's say, the National Hockey League so successful has more to do with celebration than just a bunch of guys on skates on a piece of ice, you know, throwing a puck around.

There's a celebration of the purpose of that thing, and it manifests itself through a bunch of stuff which—one is like a trophy that stands in the middle on the top of a bunch of—on a stand, and everybody looks at it and kisses it.

And so there's this veneration.

Yeah, and there’s mascots. The hockey league example is very interesting because it’s a social game, and you know, all the players are—they're attempting to aim, 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 do something immoral in their personal life. It’s because it violates the ethic that’s being celebrated as a consequence of this great game.

Yeah, and 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, um, addictive.

That’s right, yeah, necessarily. And, and so God, I saw that pro wrestling—there’s a great documentary, Bret Hart called Hitman Hart. One of the best documentaries I've ever seen, and it portrays pro wrestling as a stark religious battle between the forces of good and evil. And Bret Hart, who at one point was the most famous Canadian in the world, was overwhelmed by his—the archetypal force of his representation as the good guy.

It's a great documentary, Hitman Hart.

And it shows you how, you know, pro wrestling is—it's not the world's most intellectual activity, to say the least, and people can easily be dismissive of it. But one of the things I loved about the documentary was that it attempted to understand from within what was compelling about what was being portrayed, and it was a religious drama.

It just was shocking and brilliant and so that is—that is actually there is a—there's an objective part of 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, you know, the highest—
even in the image of the cross you have this image. Sandy, as Christ is being crucified, they're putting a sign above his head saying that he's the king. As Christ is being beaten, they're giving to him a crown.

And so Christ joins together all the opposites. And so in his—in his story, you see if you're if you—if you're attentive to these patterns, you see the highest form of this pattern being played out. And one of the aspects that has to be there for it to be the most revealed or highest form is that it also has to include the world of manifestation.

I mean, it can't just be a story. It has to be connected to the world. So that's why Christians insist on the 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 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 I mean, people have asked me whether or not I believe in God, and I've answered in various ways, “No, but I'm afraid he probably exists.”

That's 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.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Because I believe that that acting that out fully—I mean, maybe it’s not reasonable to say to believers, “You aren’t sufficiently transformed for me to believe that you believe in God” or that you believe the story that you’re telling me. You're not—you're not a sufficient... you're not—the way you live is a sufficient testament to the truth.

And people would certainly say that, let's say, about the Catholic Church or at least the way that it’s been portrayed is that with all the sexual corruption, for example, it's like, really, really, you believe that the Son of God—that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and yet you act that way? And I’m supposed to buy your belief?

And 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—people don't manifest—Christians don't manifest this, and I'm including myself, I suppose, in that description, perhaps—don't manifest the transformation of attitude that would enable the outside observer to easily conclude that they believe.

Now, the way to deal with that or the way to understand that is that they do, but they do in a hierarchy. There’s a hierarchy of manifestation of the transformation that God offers the world, and we kind of live in that hierarchy, and those above us hold us together, you would say.

And so in the church, there’s a testimony of the saints—there are stories. There are hundreds and hundreds of stories of people who live that out in their particular context to the limit of what it's possible to live it. And even today, there are there are saints—living saints—who, for example, like in the Orthodox tradition, we have this idea of what they call it the gift of tears or the joyful sorrow of people who live in prayer with weeping, uh, and it’s this kind of strange mix of joy and, um, and sadness, which they— which kind of overwhelm them and they live in that joy and sadness non-stop and they pray, you know, without end.

And so that exists, but then we in this—that's one of the reasons why—that's kind of one of the reasons why when I talk about this idea of attention, like it manifests itself in the 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—we would crumble under it.

That you would just be crushed under it!

And I think that that's—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—and sorry, I want you to let you get back to your point—but he discussed the idea of the yoke of Christ being light and that there is joy in it.

And um, there’s a paradox there obviously because it’s—it’s also a “take up your cross and follow me” sort of thing. But um, the fact that I've been living in constant pain makes the idea of joy seem, um, cruel, I would say.

And so—and I have no idea how to reconcile myself to that.

I mean, I've reconciled myself to that by staying alive despite it. You know, although by staying alive despite it, but there’s very little worship. And it doesn't mean I'm not appreciative of what I have. I’m... 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, um, well, let... despite that, I’m struggling with this because I don't know how to reconcile myself to the fact of constant pain.

Yeah, and I don't—I feel that it's unjust, which is halfway to being resentful, which is not a good outcome.

No, I agree, and I can’t speak... like I can't—I don't know how to speak to that because I don't necessarily, don’t have that experience, you know? I don’t have that—I don’t live with constant pain, and so I don't know what that would do to me, probably... probably one of the reasons why it might ruin me, you know?

And so, um, it's very difficult to answer that.

I think that the answer, like the answer has been—the cross! Like that’s been the answer. It’s maybe 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 there are mysteries hidden—and there maybe they’re very well hidden—but there are mysteries hidden in that depth.

Um, but uh, it’s not—I don’t think it’s my job to, uh, to moralize to you at this point at this particular moment. So we talked about the narrative and the objective touching, and so I wanted to touch on that again. Is that, like I—I understand C.S. Lewis’s argument and, you know, I’m even inclined from time to time to think, “Well, I’ve got the choice between believing two impossible things.”

I can either believe that in the world is constituted so that God took on flesh and was crucified and 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 Jung, 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 is going on to make that concordance occur isn’t something that we understand. And it seems to be best understood as one of these situations where the narrative and the objective touch.

The saturation of Christianity with fish symbolism, Jung associates with the astrological movement of—of, 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 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, like it’s the operation of a cognitive—of a natural cognitive process, let's say, natural slash cognitive process that supersedes any one individual or any one culture.

And so I've never seen a critique of Ion. You know, I think people read that book and they think, “Oh, it’s like John Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Sacred Cross.” Do you know of that book?

I believe that's the title.

That's another book you read, and you think, “Well, I have no idea what—” It’s a study of mushroom symbolism in Christianity, and it's another book that, you know, it 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 one of the things that, for example, you know we 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—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 takes—and then destroys death, and then that’s it! Like that—that's the thing with Christ's story—that every story, every aspect of his story reaches the limit of storytelling.

And it’s—it’s impossible beyond it, right?

That's right, that's right.

Well, even from a psychological perspective, that's correct. And that in itself is a kind of miracle. And so you're stuck, in some sense, constantly having to choose between miracles.

It’s like, okay, it’s a—it’s a figment of the human imagination, fine. But it’s the limit figment in multiple ways. How did that happen?

And also—but as soon as you start to start to think that the world is made of attention, the idea of just a figment of somebody’s imagination, especially just a figment of someone’s imagination, which happens, like you said, over thousands of years within communities of thousands of people, it just becomes a ridiculous statement.

It doesn’t—doesn't mean anything. It’s like—

Yeah!

It only means something if you assume that—and Jung pointed this out— it only means something to say it's a figment of imagination and have that brush it aside means that you think that imagination is nothing.

And you pointed out constantly that you should not attribute nothing to the psyche.

It's what you depend upon!

It’s—it’s the ground of your existence!

It’s—not nothing! It's the thing 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, you know, like childish fairy tale.

Anything that manifests itself as a pattern of story that you can recognize has a certain level of value. It has an 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.

You know, and that's why like if I do symbolic interpretations, I can do it for scripture, but I can also do it for some Marvel movie or some video game or whatever it is because that’s just the... for you to even recognize something as having being, it’s already part of that world.

It’s already manifesting these patterns. This critic said that the mere psychologization of Christ was insufficient because—and you made the same case in some sense—that it doesn't make sense unless the narrative and the objective world truly touch.

And I think you could debate that because I think that there’s some utility, there could argue to be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth, you know, that the best way to cope with existence is to tell the truth and to face what you don't know forthrightly, 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 protestant you can imagine recognize in the way that you represent reality something that has value. Something that has value because you are manifesting that—that pattern.

Like what you’re saying is is true, uh, but I think that if we take seriously the prop—the relationship between attention, psyche, and the way the world reveals itself to us, then it scales up.

It scales up after that.

It also scales up in terms of—because one of the things that—one of the things that you talk about, like looking up to the stars and looking up to the highest thing you can look at and then aiming towards that, you know, once again, one of the things that that does for is that the first thing you do is actually where it’s a form—it’s a tension that people won’t like the word “worship.”

It’s a form of reverence, a form of veneration. You submit yourself to that aim!

So it’s not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it, you actually have to submit yourself to that which is—to what you're aiming!

And so that sacrifice to it!

Exactly! And you have to sacrifice to it! So that’s why, let’s say the religious version of this has to move towards the highest possible aim and also one that we can do together because, like the lower aims, like you could call them something like lower gods, let’s say, or angels, or whatever you want to call them, like these lower aims— they have value, but they’re all fragmented.

But for this to stack up, we need to be able to look towards the same image. We need to look towards the same aim, and that will bind us together. And so we don’t—all then we don’t also end up being just kind of individuals who have the weight of the world on our shoulders, but we’re a communion of saints.

We’re a communion of people who are submitted to aiming towards, worshipping the same point.

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—

Um, crushing though it is—even—

Um, requires the participation of others.

So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people to be along with you. It’s a collective enterprise, even though it’s an individualistic—

Even though it requires the perfection, it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual level. That’s not enough. There has to be that communal element as well. You need help.

We all need help to aim as ha—the highest aim requires communal endeavor.

Yeah, and it's also because it actually is the way that everything works. You know, it's like the chair aiming to be a chair is a is a constitutive of parts which are joined together towards a 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, you know, the—I mean, I believe that the image of Christ, let’s say, by aiming towards the image of Christ, you constitute your being into that being that’s able to attend to sacrifice, to love—and then that scales up with people.

I agree!

Well, I think you are—I mean, this is another something else I tried to point out to Sam—um, you are—you’re aiming—you’re either aiming at Christ or something lesser, or if things get really out of hand, you're aiming at something opposite.

And you don’t want to be doing that!

But—and this is a matter of definition in some sense, and it’s actually not impossible to understand, is that you aim at something better. Generally speaking, I mean, maybe you're out to cause pain, but forget about that. You aim at something better. You wouldn't do it unless it was better; in fact, it virtually defines better!

Like the whole idea of better is predicated on the idea that there’s an aim that’s beyond you, and then the highest of those aims is the amalgam—the highest aim is the amalgamation of all higher aims, and that’s a perfect mode of being.

And that, by definition, that’s a psychological perspective again—that by definition is Christ.

And then— but then, there seems to be something too convenient about C.S. Lewis's insistence that that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history.

And I’m not—like I don’t understand why I should believe that.

And I don’t, I tend not to believe things without a why. There’s always a why, and I—there's—there's a hurdle there that I waver on constantly because I—that’s bad.

Well, that—I already said that you know, when you think these things through—at least my experience has been, if you think them through sufficiently, you end up with the choice between impossible alternatives.

And so—

Yeah, but it has to do—one of the ways to see it maybe is—it has to do with the recognizing of the goodness of the world or the goodness of creation, that the world is capable of manifesting these patterns, right?

So, if you want to understand, for example, the big conflict between the early Gnostics and the Christians, that's what it was all about because the Gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated Christ. They were saying, you know, and they viewed the world as utterly fallen, as having no value, having to be escaped, having to be fled in every way. Whereas Christianity posits that it’s a non-dual—it’s a non-dual proposition. It’s saying— it 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 ha—being capable of participating in this good!

And so—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?”

But it had to be! That’s some place—that's the story! I mean, that's where—that there is no other story like that story that we have.

And so once you recognize that this is part of the declaration that the world does embody these patterns, that it leads to this, it leads to the— 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 is theosis. It’s to become God—to become God through transformation and participation in God. So that's the final goal of everything—to become participant in the divine!

And how do you how do you distinguish that from Catholicism?

No, I mean, in terms of that, I think that it’s a difference of emphasis, I think for sure. The Orthodox emphasized theosis more than the than the Catholics. The Catholics are kind of iffy about theosis in terms of—it's there in some of the thinkers, but I would say it's probably not official Catholic doctrine.

But I think without theosis you're missing the point of the whole thing, or you're missing the point of everything. Like why—why do things exist, right? Like why do things exist? And so I think that the idea that they exist to participate fully in their most perfect form, like that’s what they’re called to—to to do, you know?

And it ends up being a declaration of the ultimate possibility for goodness in the world. I think that that's...

Well, it seems to me—I've observed, let’s say, that it’s possible to—it isn't obvious to me that anyone wants to live a meaningless existence. I don't think you can live a meaningless existence without becoming corrupted because the pain of existence will corrupt you without a saving meaning.

And it also seems to me that you can sell the story that meaning is to be found in responsibility. When I've tried to sell that story to myself, I seem to buy it. And when I've tried to communicate it with other people, it renders them silent. Large crowds of people silent.

And that's strange because I’m not sure why that is. It’s perhaps because the connection between responsibility and meaning had never been made for—in that explicitly somehow. Because meaning gets contaminated with happiness or something like that, 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. And I—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 along that towards that divine goal.

Like what else would you possibly do once you think that through? It's like you’re always aiming at something that’s better, or you wouldn’t be aiming. You’re always moving towards something that’s better or you wouldn’t be moving.

So then why wouldn’t you move towards the greatest good?

Well, it’s because it’s terrifying, I suppose in part.

But then, as you know, I've tried to put that into practice in my life, and it's tearing me into pieces.

Yeah.

I don’t know, though, if one of the reasons is because you're also alone. And I, you know, because you—I mean, at least to my understanding, you’re not in a—in a community.

Well, it’s hard to say. I mean, it's hard to say because fans aren’t... certainly haven't last—well, they’ve been a community.

I mean, one of the things that has held me together certainly is the commitment that I feel to the people who’ve been so positive toward me and my family. I do feel that as a community.

I understand what you mean. Why the hell not go to church?

You know, I know he wasn’t gonna come right out and say it, Jordan.

Yeah, I know you’re not that blunt about it, but it’s not just, you know, it’s not just about going to church.

I once told you something, and I don’t know if I could drive it through there. There’s something about being in a hierarchy that is—that because there’s an aspect of being in a hierarchy that you talk about which is this kind of striving to be the best within that hierarchy.

But there’s an aspect of being in a hierarchy which is that the hierarchy covers you.

Oh definitely, there’s no doubt about that!

Yeah! And so there’s something about—that’s why the lowest member, the lowest status members of a chimp group will still fight off interlopers.

Yeah!

And so there’s—there’s a value in being in a community and a 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 kind of participating in my salvation, and he—and so the weight ends up being distributed across the community.

It’s not so—you don’t actually just bear it on your own yourself. And it’s not just—or even—and it's not just a living community; it’s a—it's not just those that are live in the hierarchy but those that have left—their story.

All the saints are part of this hierarchy that you engage in, that you participate in, and that you see as consolation, as examples, as you know, as examples of people who have lived through difficult things that you can kind of 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 a—it's actually a participation in how the best vision of reality works.

I’ve got no objection to any of that!

But I've seen you—I’ve seen you object.

I'm probably one of the only people in the world that has actually seen you in church and seen you, yeah, squirm in church.

Why?

See, the other thing I was reading again—I was reading this book, and it’s been mostly a jumping-off place for me to think—is that... there’s also something because I’m not inside the church, so to speak. It’s hard to say what the utility is of that.

The utility of being inside the church, of being outside it.

Oh, being—because I’m an outsider talking about religious matters!

Yeah, but I think that—I think that it has played a great role. Like I’ve often said something that I’ve often said is that you’re something like King Cyrus. If you know the story of King Cyrus in scripture, King Cyrus was a Persian king who told the Jews to go back to Israel and build their temple; so he wasn’t Jewish—like he was... he wasn’t an Israelite; he wouldn’t believe in the God of the Israelites, but he was like, “Hey, you know that temple of yours? Looks pretty nice! Why don't you just go back there and rebuild your own own thing?”

And so that’s definitely an effect that I’ve seen you have— you know, the number of people that have become Christian because of you is... it’s hilarious—sorry, it’s not hilarious, but it’s just kind of... It’s just kind of this strange thing because you—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—what is going on here? Like what is this about?

And then because of that, oh, it’s also—do you think you’ve got something better?

You know, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day when we were walking because, as I said, I walk about ten miles a day right now, trying to keep myself under control.

And you know, he was raised a communist in Poland and then an atheist, and he was complaining—I think this is what he told me—that he was complaining to his parents at one point about a religious wedding that they were going to despite not believing.

And he said as he got older, he realized he had nothing to replace that with.

It’s like, okay, throw it out, fine! Okay, now where are you?

Well, you're just as bad off as you were before, but you also don’t have that beautiful thing!

Yeah!

It’s like, what would happen if we dispensed with Christmas?

Well, if it's not... it’s a good thing—or we could say we could make it entirely secular, but then it would just disappear. But you know that’s not what’s going to happen because religion is inevitable.

And we're seeing it coming back in very strange ways. It’s going to be a weird woke, identitarian religion, which is—I mean, it's— it’s going to come back.

And that’s why primitive... you know, part of it is going to be privately... doesn’t matter. Can you believe that?

Yeah!

So it’s a... it’s a scary thing. Like that’s what you could say that’s one of the failures of the New Atheists is that they led to—well, they partly led to the new woke phenomena because they didn’t realize that you can't get rid of religion, you can't get rid of rituals.

You can't get rid of the problems and opportunities of identity! All of these things are going to come back. If you try to just—if you try to brush them aside, then they’re going to come back in very weird ways, and without you realizing what’s going on, you'll have people kneeling to a shrine of a man who was killed by police and putting a halo on his head and self-mortifying themselves and doing all kinds of insane things, or that look to you insane, but that you need to understand, it’s just this religious impulse gone off the rails.

So yes, and then the question is, what's the right place for it?

That's right!

I’ve thought in my... I suppose it’s a form of comedy that Catholicism is as sane as people get.

You know, it's baroque, right?

And—

And, god, it’s gothic. Not baroque; it’s gothic. It’s dark, it’s... it has the same aesthetic in some sense as a horror film, and I’m not being—I’m not saying something denigrating by that.

I mean, it’s part of its strange mystery, and all that strangeness is necessary because people would be much more insane without it than they are with it.

It's a container for that religious impulse, and that impulse is to the—to the good.

Yeah!

And the image of the crucified Christ and also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together, right?

It’s like if you think of the symbolism of communion, you'll notice that it gathers in every extreme from the highest to the most transgressive—all of it comes together.

It’s worth unpacking that. It’s ritual cannibalism in the service of God!

Yeah, yeah! But it’s also—it's also seen as a normal meal of communion, and then it's then 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, the rays of the chalice, and there’s this joining which is this image of this—the sexual union between God and the soul, between God and his church.

And so all of it—it just jammed into this—into 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, and it's leading to the fragmentation of our world and to the breakdown of the West for sure.

So back to this idea of the mythological level and the historical level conjoining, and I thought of that as convenient. You know, it’s—that's a stumbling point for me in relationship to the Christian story.

You say it has to be like this if the world is constituted in a good manner, and it has to be.

I mean, is that so? Just let me say this one thing because I’ve been struggling towards it this whole... it’s an act of faith.

And so let’s say that your faith is that you decide to make the notion that reality is good the cornerstone of your faith. It’s something that you—that you, what? That you believe or is it something that you courageously assume?

And is there a difference between that and belief?

And if you courageously assume that the world is good—that reality is good—then the touching of the narrative and the objective in this manner that’s demonstrated by Christ, that becomes necessary.

Is that...

The idea... so I—to me it's funny, I don’t see it as an act of faith in the way that we think of an act of faith like this jump of faith or whatever. I see it as an act of trust.

Faith as trust, you would say.

That’s fine, that would be a courageous assumption if it's trust! And it’s trust in the sense also of—so when we talk about the good, we always have to be careful not to just limit it to the good, to the moral good. There is the moral good, but when we talk about the good, we're talking about the good in a much larger way, and the good is the pattern of the things, right?

And in the sense that the fact that the world lays itself out as ordered as pattern, inevitably, that there is no way around it. You cannot avoid the order of the world because in order for you to even perceive anything, it has to have an identity, it has to have a hierarchy, it has to have a margin, it has to have all these things.

It’s all there in every reactive perception.

Exactly!

And so it’s that every act of perception presumes a value hierarchy.

Exactly.

You can’t avoid it!

And so it’s not like an act of faith in the sense that I... I at the outset think the world is nihilistic and chaotic! It’s like, no, I don't! I think that on the contrary, I think that you could say it in a religious way that the love of God holds the world together and it’s inevitable that things are held together by these patterns of being that are always aiming towards the good, even in the very identity of whatever it is that you’re encountering.

Let me ask you something personal then. I mean, you—you weren't born an orthodox Christian; this is something you came to.

How well?

I think that it has something to do with what you said before—it does have something to do with the sense that Christianity had fallen away from its original story and its original, all-encompassing, let's say cosmic narrative.

And so it was really, I would say in searching for that and kind of discovering symbolic thinking on other fronts and feeling like I was confronted by this—like, okay, so I can see these patterns, I can see the world through this coherence, and it’s like why is it then that Christianity doesn't have this?

And then after more looking and more searching, I realized that it did! That not only it did, but that some of the early, more powerful early saints talked about the world exactly this way, you know?

And so when I discovered that, then I looked around and I saw, for example, that iconography, that the relationship between icons and architecture and liturgy and—all of this was like this amazing giant pattern which was reinforcing, manifesting, making you participate in the way the world actually existed.

And so it was like this kind of self—you know, this positive feedback loop, I guess you could say in a good way, where it’s like you recognize these patterns, you engage in them, you see them, you sing them.

It’s like this whole thing where you're engaged. And so I realized that it was really in the Orthodox Church that this was the most—that had been the most preserved and the most alive, and that I would hear, you know, contemporary Orthodox speakers or thinkers or theologians who talked about the world exactly in that way.

And so I thought, okay, so this is the place! And also because they kept the idea of theosis as the ultimate goal because I think that that’s, if you know very, very early Saint Irenaeus, which is, you know, like early third century said, “The Logos became man so that man would become God.” That’s one of the—some of the earliest saints said that, you know?

And so it’s like that’s really what Christianity is.

And so that’s what ultimately led me to, uh, to...

Well, it is the greatest of all possible visions!

Yeah!

And so I... but I think that, you know, I think that it’s there latent even in other forms of Christianity.

And like one of the things that I've been trying to do is how... people kind of wake up to that reality and try to see it wherever they are.

How’s that going for you?

Well, you know, I’m really serious. I haven't talked to you for a long time.

I mean, you've got this—I mean, you've had a strange few years as well, I’ve had a strange few years as well.

It’s all your fault, by the way!

Yeah, it certainly feels that way!

So, but it’s a good in that sense. I mean, I’ve been surprised in the past four years since I met you, and you kind of put me on out there in the world, you know?

Right now I have, like, 90,000 people following me on YouTube, and there’s a community of, I would say symbolic thinkers. I'm giving them a place to write—like on my website, I’m putting up a blog; there’s communities that kind of get together and talk about this, trying to reinvigorate it in their own communities, whether that is—wherever it is they come from.

And so I've been just non-stop excited about... I mean, in a way sad to see that I think the breakdown of Christianity is going to continue. Like, you know, I’m not—I don't have short-term hope for, let’s say, the situation.

But I do believe that there are seeds which are kind of being planted, and there are people who are getting ready and will bear fruit. So it’s been just—it’s been amazing, I have to say.

And thanks for that, by the way.

I hope—I guess you’re welcome to the degree that I had something to do with it.

Yeah!

Did you want—I know one on Twitter you asked about the virgin birth. I don't know if you want it—if you still have juice, if you still have energy to talk about that or if...

Sure, why not?

Well, the one of the things that is important, I would say in Christianity, is understanding that the role that Mary has to play, let’s say, in the same—in the same way that we talk about how the reality of Christ came—let’s say, had to manifest itself in the world for us to understand that the possibility of this thing—the possibility of how everything comes together, right?

In the same way, so in, for example, in the Old Testament you have theophanies. You have places where God and humanity meet, so on the mountain of Moses, in the temple, uh, in the garden of Eden as well.

So you have these—they're usually at the top of a mountain or they’re at the end of a temple. Okay, so it’s still a mountain in that—so that’s a place where two worlds meet—that’s the narrative world and the objective world really, exactly!

So the invisible world and the visible world—the world of logos, the world of pattern, and then the world of possibility, right—they come together.

And then that's when the coming together at that point is where you see something.

So it’s like that—for everything, that’s where miracles occur!

Yeah!

But actually... miracles are like super events! Like they show us the pattern of reality in a more concise way.

But everything’s like that, right? So even a chair is a bunch of possibilities, right? That encounters an idea—can encounter the purpose of logos, and then you have a chair. You can't have just a bunch of stuff or else you don’t have a chair.

You need that to meet!

So at the center of every thing of everything that exists there’s a little temple—a mini temple!

And there’s a little incarnation, right?

A little mini one!

It’s not—I’m not... I don’t want it to seem heretical or anything, but there’s this little, like mini thing that happens.

And so that aspect has a lower part, which is the nexus of possibilities—the coming together of possibilities—and then this thing, that this logos which comes down.

So this nexus of possibilities you could call it a mountain, a house, a temple, a body; that’s Mary, right? That’s—that’s her.

She’s the place of manifestation!

So she’s the ark of the covenant, she’s the temple, she’s the mountain, she’s all of that.

Um, and so—and then we play that role. You could say the church, the body of Christ, we play that role.

We come together in love, and then the divine logos descends and manifests to unite the body, right, together and to reveal himself in that unity of the body.

So we see Christ in the unity of love. So Christ says they will know you by how you love each other because that’s how you know that a body exists—is that it’s coherent.

It holds together as a body!

Um, and so this body has to be dedicated, it has to be dedicated to the thing which it's manifesting.

So, like, let’s say you have a turkey, you know, a car and two bits of grass, and you think, “I'm going to make a chair out of that.”

Well, it’s not gonna happen!

Right?

It’s not going to...

Thank you! We're going to go that route!

But this is it! This is what it’s about!

It’s not going to happen! Because that’s not dedicated!

And so in the same way of a woman and her husband, so a woman has to be dedicated to her husband for the union to be recognized and fruitful.

So if a woman is not—is not faithful to her husband, then there’s confusion on the identity of the child.

Right?

But if a woman is dedicated to her husband, which means that she’s actually a virgin to all other identities, she’s virginal to all other identities, and she’s dedicated only to the one thing.

So this idea of virginity is super important because it’s about dedication, it's about not being mixed or not being uncontaminated.

And so then you can understand that in order for something to manifest the entirety of the whole pattern, right?

So it’s like—for someone to be the place of manifestation for the whole thing, well that is what a mother does, like, right?

It's what a mother does because she dedicates herself, to a greater or lesser degree, to bringing someone perfect into being.

And the more she loves, the more she dedicates herself to that in every possible way.

So now the Virgin Mary is the extreme cosmic version of that where she has to be perpetual virgin.

She is a cosmic virgin!

She is perpetually virginal because she’s like—you can imagine like in order for the sun to reflect upon the waters, you know, and all those men who don't believe that sort of thing should take careful stock of the fact that they’re frequently terrified out of their skull whenever they encounter someone they’re attracted to.

They project that or see it instantly, and it demolishes them!

And then if they’re rejected, they’re crushed!

And you can think of that as a projection, but you can also think of it as seeing more deeply what’s there.

And that you only see that when you're actually attracted to someone, and then that attraction has a basis because you’re seeing what they could be even if you’re not seeing what’s there.

And so that's why the necessity of virgin birth—because she is revealing the highest, right?

She’s like a still ocean which is on which the sun is reflecting, and if it was mitigated, then it would only reflect a mitigated manner, and then everything in between is mitigated!

Like I said, it’s like a woman who's faithful to her husband, obviously, he’s not a virgin in a technical sense.

You could say she’s a virginal to others—she’s untouched by others, but she’s dedicated