Psychology of Redemption in Christianity

[Applause] So, people are possessed by a question, and it's part of our nature to be possessed by this question. You can think about this as an archetypal question, if you like. The question is, what are we doing here? You can ask yourself that in relationship to this conference. You're here to search for meaning and to understand what that might mean. But you also might ask yourself, well, why is it that you have to be here for your search for meaning? Why is that something that drives human beings? It isn't characteristic, for example, of animals; they don't seem to question their existence. There’s something about the very nature of human being that makes us feel as if something needs to be set right.

When that's been discussed historically, it's been associated with the term redemption. People are in need of redemption. In the modern age, we talk about positive psychology and we talk about happiness, which is a much weaker word. But our forefathers had a more profound sense of the problematic state of human existence. They had more profound words, and the idea that we have a need for redemption is a more profound idea. Human beings — and I'm going to talk mostly about human beings in the West because that's the literature that I'm most familiar with — have been meditating on the nature of human being for thousands of years, perhaps ever since we became self-conscious, which is another thing that distinguishes us from animals and another thing that drives our search for meaning.

The consequence of this meditation, or one of the consequences of this meditation, has been the production of a series of books that people know as the Bible. I realized years ago that people saw the world through lenses of belief, and more recently it's been demonstrated that that's actually inevitable because you're a limited cognitive processor. You have to frame your perceptions with beliefs. What I learned is that the belief systems that people use to frame their perceptions have a structure, and that structure is religious. A religious presupposition is one that you might even not notice that you make; it's a predicate or an axiom or an assumption. The study of those axiomatic assumptions is what religion is about.

Now one of your axiomatic assumptions, for example, is that life involves a search for meaning, and that's associated with the idea of redemption. You'll notice that you ask that question because, of course, you're here. But you might not notice how strange it is that all of you asked that question, and the fact that all of you asked that question — that human beings have asked that question for as far back as we can understand — is indicative of something profound about human nature: its lack of completion.

Now I'm going to walk you through the series of stories that make up this library of books known as the Bible because it presents a theory of redemption that, in a sense, is emergent. It's a consequence of this insanely complicated cross-generational meditation on the nature of being. It's not designed by any one person; it's designed by processes that we don't really understand because we don't know anything about how books are written over thousands of years or what forces caused them to be compiled in a certain way or what narrative direction they tend to take.

Now, one of the things that's strange about the Bible, given that it's a collection of books, is that it actually has a narrative structure. It has a story, and that story's been cobbled together. It's like it's emerged out of the depths; it's not a top-down story, it's a bottom-up story. And I suppose that's why many of the world's major religions regard the Bible as a book that was revealed rather than one that was written. It's a perfectly reasonable presupposition that it's revealed, because it’s not the consequence of the work of any one author; it's not written according to a plan — or not a plan that we can understand. But nonetheless, it has a structure. It also has a strange structure in that it's full of stories that no one can forget but that also no one can understand. The combination of incomprehensible and unforgettable is a very strange combination, and of course, that combination is basically mythological.

So, I'm going to start out by telling you what Genesis has to say about why it is that you need to search for meaning. Now, people are pretty familiar as a general rule with the basic stories in Genesis. Genesis starts out with the word of God creating being from chaos. That's a very complicated idea. The idea is that whatever the word is, which is logos, from a Christian perspective, that logos — which is something like consciousness and something like speech — has the power to pull order out of an underlying chaos.

Now we do this all the time; people do this all the time. That's, I suppose, in some sense, why we're hypothetically made in the image of God. We use our consciousness to constantly construct being out of chaos, and according to the initial opening of Genesis, there's something about that that's akin to the construction of the world. So that means that from the perspective of this book, consciousness itself plays a world-constructing role; it’s got a central place. Human beings, in some sense, participate in that — in some minor sense, I suppose — but in a sense that nonetheless makes them akin to what the library of books called the Bible assumes is a deity.

Now, once God — logos — extracts order out of chaos, he builds a little world and he populates it, and then in the little world, he puts a garden, a walled garden. That's paradise, because paradise means wall garden, or Eden, and Eden means well-watered place. You might think: well, why a garden? And the answer to that is, a garden is the optimal combination of nature and culture or chaos and order, because a garden is where nature flourishes. But it's also where nature flourishes in a safe and controlled environment, and so that's like an optimal environment for people. And so there’s a garden, and God puts the people in there, and that’s optimal.

He warns them. He says — this is a strange thing — he says: well, now you're in the garden, that's where you should live; and there's something you shouldn't do. And what you shouldn't do is eat a particular fruit. Now, I'm going to tell you something about vision. Human beings have excellent vision. First of all, we see color; hardly any creatures see color, but we do. And not only do we see color, but our vision is tremendously acute. The only other animals that can see as well as us are birds of prey. For mammals, we can see like you wouldn't believe, and for primates as well; we can see much better than our closest primate relatives. And why that is is a bit of a mystery.

But there's a woman in California who seems perhaps to have solved that. Her name is Lynn Isbell, and she was very interested in how human beings develop vision. She's interested in patterns of predation, predator-prey relationships, and she knew that our tree-dwelling ancestors, millions of years ago, were frequently preyed upon by snakes. In fact, there's some evidence that our tree-dwelling ancestors and snakes co-evolved, and that our visual system is particularly good at picking up the patterns of camouflage that snakes use to hide in trees or in the undergrowth.

What Isbell showed was that if you looked at primate populations around the world, where there were more predatory snakes, the primates could see better; it’s a very high correlation. And so she concluded that the reason that human beings can see so well is because of snakes. Now she thought the association between that and the snake story in Genesis was interestingly coincidental, but it's much more than that.

We don't know how the Adam and Eve story came about; we know it’s very ancient. But there's something about it that sticks in our memory and in our culture, and the reason for that seems to be that in some strange way, it’s an extraordinarily accurate summation: snakes gave us vision. What about fruit? Well, the reason we can see colors is because our visual system evolved to detect ripe fruit. What about women? Well, you have to be pretty awake to out-smart a woman, so there’s this weird interconnection in Genesis between women, fruit, and snakes.

The idea is that the interplay between the three — remember, women are gatherers too, or were gatherers historically speaking — and they shared food with men. And that's a strange thing because human beings share food and hardly any other animals do. And so women did tempt men with fruit, and they did make themselves conscious along with the snake and the fruit, and that was a catastrophe.

What happens in Genesis is that when people become self-conscious, when they eat the fruit, their vision improves; the scales fall from their eyes, and all of a sudden they can see in a way that no other animal has ever seen. One of the things they can see is that they're naked, and that's a big problem. You might ask: well, what does being naked mean? And that's quite straightforward. People often dream, for example, of being naked in front of a crowd. To be naked in front of a crowd is to have all your frailties and vulnerabilities revealed to judgment, and that's a nightmare for people.

To become self-aware is to wake up into a nightmare, and the nightmare involves a profound realization of individual vulnerability. The consequence of that, in Genesis, is that people are banished from paradise and are, from then on, in need of redemption and that they have to work. That's how man comes to be in a fallen state. You don't have a need for redemption or a need for meaning, or a quest after meaning, unless you're in a fallen state. And everyone strangely enough has this intuition that they're in a fallen state, that something is wrong with the world that needs to be put right.

And more than that — or something is wrong with being; it needs to be put right. More than that, that in some weird sense, weird way they have a moral obligation to participate in that process. And that drives us; like, it’s beneath what drives us; it's an axiomatic presupposition.

The next thing that happens in Genesis is that Abel and Cain are born, and they're really the first two human beings. Because Adam and Eve are made by God, whereas Cain and Abel are born. They’re the first people that are born in history. Interestingly enough, what happens between Cain and Abel, which is jealous resentment against God followed by murder, is the first pattern of behavior that human beings manifest once they become self-conscious.

That's an awful story, and it's a prototypical story in a sense because what it says is that there are two patterns of reaction to tragic self-consciousness. One is associated with a murderous state of resentment — resentment towards life — the kind of murderous resentment that drove the killer in Colorado, for example; murderous resentment against life.

The other, typified by Abel, has something to do with the establishment of the antithesis of murderous resentment. You can associate murderous resentment, in a sense, with hell, and you can associate Abel's path, his choices, with heaven. And so what happens is that as soon as people become self-conscious, being divides into a do that has hell on one end and heaven on another.

That's only hinted at in the second story in Genesis. After that, everything dissolves into a flood; that's Noah — into a flood. Nature comes in, tears everything down, and the Tower of Babel is erected, and that’s a meditation on pride. People build a structure that reaches up to where God is; it’s a presumptuous act. There’s reason for that too; one of the consistent warnings that emerges in the biblical writings is warnings against the sin of pride.

The sin of pride is an intellectual sin, and it's associated with the presupposition that you know enough to do without the transcendent. The biblical stories state very, very clearly continually that that is catastrophically dangerous. That you always have to be aware that there's something transcendent that supersedes the domain of your knowledge. And what might you think of people who don’t believe that? Well, they're totalitarians, because they believe that their belief is total.

We know what happens when people become totalitarian. What happens is you get the instant creation of something on Earth that very closely resembles hell, and that was hammered home in the 20th century. If you want to derive one lesson from the 20th century, it's that totalitarian states and totalitarian ideologies are not a good way to entrap or search after meaning. That's a mistake.

After the flood — the flood is before the flood, that’s prehistory; that’s so far back in time we can't even imagine it. After the flood, there’s a new beginning, in a sense, and that's when history really starts from a biblical perspective. The way the Old Testament lays itself out, then, is that it’s kind of a classic hero myth — a hero myth that's associated with the establishment of states.

Generally speaking, when societies mythologize the beginning of their state, they imagine a set of heroes. It's sort of happening with people like George Washington in the United States; it happens automatically that the founders of the state are mythologized as the great heroes of the past. It's the great heroes of the past who are forefathers who established the state. And of course, that's true, and there were millions of them.

But you can't tell a story about millions of people, so all the actions of those millions of people are collapsed and condensed and compressed and turned into a kind of fiction that's more real than truth, that describes the patterns that characterize how the state was founded. The Old Testament runs us through that; the heroes, like Abraham, for example, and Jacob, who are crucially involved in the establishment of the polity of the actual state.

But something always happens as this state is established, and what happens is the state's established, and then people get off course, the leadership gets off course, and then the state collapses into a state of chaos. Then there’s a prophetic revelation warning of that danger, and then there’s a terrible period of chaotic disruption, and then there’s the regeneration of the state.

That story is foreshadowed in the Old Testament by Exodus; Moses' story: Egypt's a tyranny; a leader rises to pull everyone out of tyranny. There’s a terrible chaotic interlude, the wandering in the desert, and then there’s the re-establishment of the state. That’s an archetypal pattern that happens to all of you; it happens to every country.

The pattern is: you're in your system of belief, which is yours and a collective belief, and something arises, like a snake — analogous to a snake — to disrupt it because the state is insufficiently adapted to the environment. It doesn't have all the answers; it ages and becomes corrupt, and then it's prone to collapse. And that collapse is a catastrophe, a chaotic catastrophe that happens to you every time, for example, that your dreams are shattered or that you encounter a great tragedy.

It happens to people when their spouse dies, or when they're diagnosed with a very dangerous illness, or when their children are damaged. That event, analogous, as I said, to a snake; and that's partly because the circuits in your brain that detect snakes, that other animals use to detect snakes, are the same circuits that we use to detect things that go wrong. Things are always going wrong for us, and we're always collapsing into a state where we're wandering through a desert.

A desert is a state that's bereft of meaning and bereft of ideas, and in that state, then we're desperately seeking for, well, for the establishment of another state — a state that we hope will be a better state. It’ll be like the last state, except there will be more to it and everyone will finally be happy. That’s part of our utopian dream, and it's impossible not to be in that story. You're either in a state of order, or you're in a state of chaos. That's why the Dostoevsky, for example, believed that the world is made out of order and chaos, because you're always in one of those two places.

What happens in the Old Testament is that the limitations of the state itself start to become apparent, and they become apparent in that the state is established, but it always collapses. And then it's re-established, but it always collapses; it's never permanent. And there's repetitions of this; continual repetitions of this, and the upshot of the Old Testament, at least the way that it's been constructed in Christianity, is that the state itself is flawed. It cannot provide the final answer to the question, what constitutes genuine redemption.

Well, this is an important issue; it's an important issue psychologically. It's an important issue politically. Is the state the final answer? Well, it's a totalitarian claim. We know that it was claimed by people like Stalin; it was certainly claimed by the Communists. It was claimed by people like Hitler that the state was the final answer. It’s still claimed in many ways, in places like China today, the individual subsumed underneath the state or organization in the state.

Well, under Stalin, the state was already in a state of perfection. If you complained about its imperfection, then you were going to be killed. So the idea that the state is perfect, although it's a tremendously flawed idea, can be pursued so hard by people who are gripping their narrow viewpoints that the state itself becomes murderous. The Old Testament sort of sums itself up in the book of Job, and it’s a problematic summing up because Job is tormented in all sorts of ways. Everything that could possibly be terrible that happens to any person happens to Job. They can't understand why, so Job is in, like, a final state of unredeemed being. The state’s not the answer.

Well, so then, if being is order and being is chaos, and chaos is intolerable, and the state of order is not the answer, what do you have left? That’s the question. The New Testament attempts to solve one of the problems with the Soviet Union, for example, was their inability to correct errors. See, when you start out with an a priori hypothesis about what constitutes the truth, and that structures your life, it’s very difficult to make the kind of micro corrections that a state has to make on a continual basis in order to remain dynamic and fluid.

So in order to stay adapted to reality, not only do you have to have a viewpoint, but you have to engage in a process of modifying that viewpoint. And the way that you engage in the process of modifying that viewpoint — there’s two ways, really. One is continual minor adjustments as a consequence of paying attention. So, for example, if you’re having a conversation with your wife or a friend, or maybe it's a difficult conversation, there are a couple of ways that conversation can go.

One is you can take your viewpoint and you can impose it on that person, and often, when people are talking, that's what they're trying to do. They’re not having a conversation; what they're doing is attempting to impose a viewpoint that they already hold there on the person that’s listening. And if they’re a tyrant or a bully, they’ll do that and pay no attention whatsoever to the person's response, and in fact, they’ll get irritated and even violent if the person doesn't accept their a priori framing.

Is there an alternative? Well, there is an alternative. The alternative is to pay attention and to listen on the off chance that the person that you're talking to might tell you something you don’t know. But in order to listen, you have to be already convinced that the little theory that you're using to orient yourself in the world isn’t good enough. Because if it was good enough, then why would you bother listening? So you have to be deeply aware of your own ignorance, and that’s what humility means.

Humility means to be deeply aware of your own ignorance. It doesn't mean to slink around in an ashamed manner; it means to make the presupposition that you may still have something left to learn, and that this annoying person in front of you might have something to teach you if you would just listen. And so you’re discussing a problem, and a problem is a time when the things you think aren't working. That’s what constitutes a problem.

So you have a little problem, and you're discussing it, let's say with your wife, and she offers you her opinion. You can brush it off, in which case your little state stays intact, it doesn’t move; it's still made out of stone. You're still a tyrant, or you can listen and you can think: oh, I see there's a micro correction that I need to make in one of the peripheral elements of my belief. And that's a little painful, because it means you have to let something go — your presumption — and then you have to be a little chaotic as you adjust to the new information, and then you have to reconstitute yourself.

What that means, interestingly enough, is that you have to make a sacrifice, and God likes sacrifices, especially if they're of the proper kind. The proper kind of sacrifice is the one that you make of your micro belief when you're faced with evidence of error. And if you make those sorts of micro sacrifices, then God stays pleased with you. The reason for that is that your models of the world stay up to date.

Now, one of the things that happens in the Old Testament all the time is that people are making sacrifices to God, and modern people, they just — they have no idea what that is. Like, why does God want burnt lambs smoked? It’s not obvious to modern people. But you know, their ancestors weren't stupid; they were dramatizing something. They were dramatizing this tremendous realization that no other creature has ever managed, which is that there are things you can do to your being that change the nature of reality.

And if you do them properly, you can make reality better. It’s mind-boggling, and they acted that out because they didn't really understand it. They noticed that if things weren't going right, you had to sacrifice something valuable, and that seemed to make God happy. Well, it might have been a firstborn calf or a firstborn son for that matter. For modern people, it’s more like an idea: you have to sacrifice an idea that you hold dear in order to progress because the ideas that you hold dear are exactly what are making you suffer if you're suffering. So you have to sacrifice them, and then you have to let them go.

The consequence of that is that you enter into this little period of chaos, and then maybe you pop out of that, and that’s a good thing. Here’s an interesting observation: that process of being in a state and identifying an error and correcting it — that’s a little death and rebirth. That’s like the Phoenix; the Phoenix dissolves itself into ashes, and then it pops back up as a new bird.

In the New Testament, there’s this weird idea that you have to identify with a person who continually dies and is reborn. Well, what does that mean? It means that the idea that redemption itself is not the consequence of being in a state; it’s the consequence of participating in a process, and the process is the willingness to continually have yourself sacrificed, chaotic, and then reborn. That’s what keeps things alive.

Now, in the Passion story, there are other elements, and the elements are important. So for example, the story of Christ is predicated on the assumption that the person who is making the ultimate sacrifices performs a number of acts or undergoes a number of processes. One is a disciplined apprenticeship. So, for example, in order to have some ideas that you can let go and then reconstitute, you have to have some ideas; you can't just be all chaotic and unformed.

In the New Testament, Christ is a master of tradition; he's a master of the law, and you have to be disciplined. You have to be a master of something before you’re formed at all; you have to be imbued with the spirit of your ancestors, we'll say. You have to take on that burden. You see this reflected in popular culture, for example, in the movie Pinocchio. At the end of the movie, when Pinocchio is about to become a real boy, his last challenge is to rescue his father. He does that.

To rescue the father means to make peace with your culture and to embody it, but then not to assume that that's absolute. It's a necessary process of discipline. The next idea that underlies the Passion ideas in the New Testament is that the ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of yourself to God. Now that’s a very strange idea, and it’s a very, very sophisticated idea.

What happens in the Old Testament is there’s the constant sacrificing of something else. This requires a different order of being. What does it mean to offer yourself up as a sacrifice to God? Well, you can think of God as an ineffable representation of the highest possible value. That's what monotheists presume. They don't really presume God’s namable; even the Israelites presume that God wasn't namable. It's ineffable, but it's the ultimate value. Whatever the ultimate value is, you don't know what it is, but you have some kind of idea.

The idea of offering yourself up as a sacrifice to God is the same thing as determining that your life will be guided by unshakable commitment to the highest good. What that means is that it’s no longer your state that's in charge, or it’s no longer your ego that's in charge; it’s not even you that's in charge. It means that your conversations with people are no longer going to be about convincing them that your viewpoint is right.

It means that what your conversation is going to be about, in your speech, is about attempting to represent what you believe to be true in the most concise and clear possible manner, no matter what. And that’s not how people live. People live, in a sense, by — it’s like a conniving. The conniving is a totalitarian conniving. The conniving is an idea that the world should be the way that I want it to be.

I have a theory about how I want it to be, and I'm going to enforce that theory, and I'm going to be very angry when the world doesn't respond the way I want it to. Maybe I'll even be violent as a consequence of it, and I have some sense of where I’m headed. Maybe I’m headed for wealth, for example, and I'm headed to an advertisement, so I'm with my wife when I'm 50 on a tropical beach, and that's how I'm going to be redeemed.

It's a narrow and totalitarian viewpoint, and then I sacrifice everything to that, and it turns out that that's a very bad idea because things don't turn out the way I want them to turn out. The alternative to that — and this is part of what happens in The Sermon on the Mount, which is a very, very strange document — because it represents a transformation from the idea that morality is constituted by adherence to a set of rules to morality being aimed at something that you might think about as more of a positive good.

It’s not merely not doing what's wrong; it's something else. It's sacrificing yourself in the attempt to make things better, and making things better not by aiming at what's better, but by telling what's true and assuming that if you do that, then what's better will happen, whatever that is. Because the thing is, you don’t know what’s better; you don’t have the capacity to fully realize what would constitute better.

We’ve seen that, as I said, over and over in the 20th century. People aim at a circumscribed definition of what constitutes the utopian state, and all we get out of that is endless hell. We have to pursue what's good, but we don't know what’s — what’s good is, so how do we remove ourselves from that paradox? Well, it isn't a matter of gathering more knowledge; it's a matter of approaching reality in a different manner, and it is an act of faith, as Kierkegaard pointed out.

Because if you decide, for example, that you're going to pursue the highest good — whatever that is, and the highest good — pursuing the highest good means being willing to transform what your conception of the highest good is. You pursue the highest good; that’s your aim. Your aim determines the world you live in; we know that — that’s a fact. That's a psychological fact. What you aim at determines the nature of your world, and to aim wrong — that’s hamartia, by the way, that's a Greek word — hamartia, to aim wrong; that's sin, because hamartia, which is an archery term, means to miss the target — is what sin means.

So if you're not in a state of grace, it means your aim's wrong; you're not aiming at the right thing. Or maybe the world is constituted badly, and it's hell-bent on torturing you — that's the alternative viewpoint. So you've got to get your aim right; you aim at the best. And how do you aim?

Well, The Sermon on the Mount says something very interesting. It says, okay, once you get your aim right and you decide to tell the truth, then all you have to do is concentrate on the day. Now, people read The Sermon on the Mount like it's a hippie document, you know; be like a flower, be like a bird, don’t pay any attention to the future — you know, everything will be taken care of. It’s not that at all; there are presumptions that are nested in there, and the presumption is, first of all, that you’re aiming at perfection. You’re aiming at whatever perfection is, and you’re not trying to get other people to do that; you’re aiming at it.

You’re reconstituting your actions and your speech to aim at that, and then you do that by noticing very carefully and attending to what constitutes the truth, and then you let that take you wherever it will go. And that’s the sacrifice of self to God, because the truth is a representation of whatever constitutes reality — your best attempt at whatever constitutes reality — and to follow that means to follow something that’s transcendent, because whatever reality is, it’s certainly not something that you’re individually responsible for creating, even though you might participate in that process.

To speak the truth is to be guided by being; that’s a completely different mode of being. Now, I said right after Adam and Eve’s catastrophic emergence into self-consciousness, the world split into two attitudes, one associated with Cain and the other associated with Abel, and that those attitudes are associated with heaven and hell. Well, we know that human beings can turn the world into hell. If you're a student of history, you have no doubt about that. And no matter how terrible you think the hell that people have created in the past is, if you read a little more history, you'll find something even more terrible.

People, of course, are afraid of the human capacity to turn things into hell; that's one of the things that underlies our environmentalism. We're afraid that our misbehavior will turn the world into hell. Well, we believe we can do that. Do we believe that human beings can turn the world into heaven? Well, that's a harder thing to believe, because there's a lot more ways that things can go wrong than there are ways that things can go right.

So heaven's a much narrower thing to aim at than hell, which is a chaotic mess. Well, maybe it's improbable, but life is improbable, that's for sure, and our unredeemed state of being is improbable. And the other thing that's improbable is the burden that we're required to carry existentially. We're awake creatures of God. What does that mean? It means that we suffer, and it's real, that suffering, and it's not only that we suffer and that we feel pain, which is bad enough, and frustration, and disappointment, and all the catastrophic things that are associated with life.

But even worse, we can apprehend the possibility of that recurring in the future. So even when none of those terrible things happen to be happening right now, it's pretty easy for us to imagine that they're going to happen tomorrow, and they will. Not only can we imagine that they're going to happen again tomorrow; they are going to happen again tomorrow. So we're in a state of constant unredeemed suffering; it's a big problem, and you know, if you think about it, you can't even imagine a state that would address that. It’s just too big of a problem.

Well, so then there's another inference in the New Testament, and it's the hypothesis of a metastate. The inference is that a life that's predicated on constant death and renewal, at every level of being, a life that's predicated on a search for the truth, and an attempt to act out the truth, and a life that's associated with the sacrifice of self to God, produces a state of being that's so deeply meaningful that it justifies suffering.

It doesn't eliminate suffering; there’s no elimination of suffering. Nietzsche said, "He who has a why can bear anyhow," and what he meant by that was if what you're aiming at is of sufficient profundity, it's worth an awful lot of misery to participate in the process of bringing it about. Life has an unbearable depth of misery, and as a consequence, it needs an absurd positive aim.

The absurd positive aim that's posited in the New Testament is participation in the process that transforms Earth into heaven — the generation of the kingdom of God on Earth. And that actually means something. It means that the state of being that's described by the parameters that I already laid out — the willingness to engage in eternal sacrificial death and renewal and sacrifice of the self to the highest value — produces a state of being subjectively that's associated with habitation in the kingdom of God.

The actions that are conducted in that state are what transform the interpersonal state into the political state that's a manifestation of that kingdom. Now you all know this. You know this the same way that the people who wrote the Bible know it, because of course, people just like you wrote the Bible. And the Bible’s about people.

When you have a deeply meaningful conversation with someone, you change them, and you change yourself; you know that. And the process that you're engaged in, well, you have that deeply meaningful conversation — that’s a mode of being, and that mode of being, to the degree that that mode of being is predicated on the attempt to communicate as truthfully as possible and with the highest possible end in mind, then right then and there, you're in that state.

Now, you can tell when you're in that state, because, number one, you're not self-conscious; time disappears. Number two, what you're engaged in is deeply meaningful. You don't bear the tragic burden of your life at that moment because what's happening with you is so worthwhile that it consumes you completely. And people are in that state to a widely varying degree, but everyone is in it sometimes.

When something like that happens to you, especially once you learn to notice it, you think, well, there's nothing better than that. And if there's nothing better than that, then you might ask yourself, why do anything else? Now I've tried to figure that out; I've tried to figure that out for years. It's like, because to me these look like existential realities; they're not hypothetical states. They’re not shoved off into some transcendent heaven; they're not otherworldly; they're part of being itself.

People can enter states of heaven and hell, and they can learn to stay longer in one state or another. So why don't they stay in the best possible state? Well, one problem is the commitment of faith. I think it's very terrifying to let go of the direction of your life and say, well, I'm going to go wherever the attempt to speak the truth will take me because God only knows where you're going to end up, and it’s certainly not where you think.

In fact, the willingness to abandon going to where you think is a prerequisite for doing this. And so in a sense, you’re a ship that the wind takes wherever it wants to take. The second problem, I think, is that it’s a real responsibility because in order to undertake this process, you have to come to terms with the idea that what you do in your life — your wretched, miserable, tragic-prone life — actually matters. Really, it matters.

You know, when people complain about meaninglessness in their life all the time, but I think that's a kind of face-saving illusion. I think people are more afraid of meaning than they are of meaninglessness, because meaninglessness means, well, I can do whatever I want. I mean, it might be kind of, you know, second-rate, and might be dull; it might be dangerous, it might be destructive, but it doesn't matter. So I can do whatever I want; I have no responsibility because I don’t mean anything, so I'm not responsible to anything or anyone.

But if your life actually has meaning — and it doesn't always have meaning; it has meaning when you’re doing something that’s meaningful — well then, all of a sudden, you are responsible to a high power, so to speak. You’re responsible to your own soul, and you're responsible to the state of being that characterizes the world itself, and that's a massive, massive responsibility.

It's to take responsibility, in a sense, it's to take responsibility for the sins of the world, which is another prerequisite of the motive being that's described in the New Testament. It's a very strange idea: the redeemer takes on the sins of the world. What does that mean? Well, it means, well, human beings are Nazis, and human beings are the maest red guard, and human beings are the slaughterers in Rwanda, and you're all human beings.

To take on the sins of the world means to realize that all those things that characterize the human capacity to turn Earth into hell characterize you, and then, in order to live properly, you have to live in a manner that addresses those elements of your nature. And again, that’s a terrible responsibility. Well, first of all, who wants to admit that? Second of all, who can stand looking at it? And third, who’s going to take on the burden of solving it?

Well, it better be all of us, or we're just going to keep doing it. So redemption, what does it mean? It means we’re not in a state of grace. Why? We're self-conscious; we're aware of the tragedy of our being. We're unwilling to take full responsibility for it, or we're ignorant about how to do that, and that leaves us bereft. How do we solve that?

Well, we can solve it with a state, but the problem is the state is not reliable. It degenerates into tyranny, then it transforms into chaos, then it reconstitutes itself and does the same thing again. It's not a good answer. Is there another answer? Well, maybe. I believe that what is outlined in narrative form in the New Testament is psychologically correct. I believe that the idea that endless micro-death and renewal produces a state of proper adaptation to being, and that the prerequisites for that, that are laid out in the narrative structure that underlies the New Testament are fundamentally correct.

So to be redeemed is to aim at the highest value, to sacrifice what's no longer useful and valid in yourself, and to tell the truth. The consequence of that is existence in a deep state of meaning that justifies the tragedy of being and the possibility of transforming your own life in the most beneficial positive direction while simultaneously doing that for the people around you. And that’s redemption. Thank you very much.

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