A Lecture by Jonathan Pageau: The Symbolic World | EP 206

Hey everybody! I'm going to put up a video from my colleague and friend Jonathan Pajot, a Russian Orthodox icon carver, a great artist, and a very profound thinker in my estimation. About a month ago, so that would be October of 2021, I listened to a lecture he gave to the Montreal Young Society on the conceptual structure of Genesis, and I thought it was brilliant. It was like 20 years of thought packed into an hour of lecture and then also a brilliant Q&A that followed, analyzing some iconic images in the Russian Orthodox tradition. I thought that it would make an excellent adjunct to my biblical series on Genesis, coming at it from the different tact that Jonathan takes, elucidating the ideas that I had developed and certainly the ideas that he has developed.

I always learn a lot from listening to Jonathan, and so I reached out to him and the Young Society of Montreal, which kind of gave us permission to repost the lecture. He agreed to do it, and my production team has been working on it. We’re pleased to bring it to you, and I hope that you enjoy it even more, or at least as much as you enjoyed the Genesis lectures from a few years ago, and hopefully there’s more of this sort of thing to come.

Hi everybody! My name is David Andrea. I'm a college teacher in Montreal. It's my pleasure today to introduce Jonathan Pajot, who I see as one of a small handful of cultural commentators helping us make sense of our strange historical moment. I first came across Pajot in 2017 in the chaos and contestation of that time. The mood of rebellion was especially pervasive on the internet, with the memes of 4chan's edgelords fueling the triumph of Trump and Brexit. We all remember those years, not too long ago.

Jordan Peterson hosted Jonathan Pajot on his YouTube channel to talk about what they called the metaphysics of Pepe. Pepe, of course, was that cartoon frog that seemed to symbolize the worst instincts of the alt-right, or maybe just the timeless urge of the jester to poke at the sanctimony of the powerful. Peterson and Pajot’s discussion seemed to move beyond the tawdry politics of the moment and grasp something deeper going on.

So, like many people at that time, I decided to keep an eye on this interesting new commentator. A little bit later, Pajot organized a documentary screening on Jordan Peterson that was held here in Montreal, so I saw that name pop up again. Oh, I think I’ve heard of that fellow. You may know that Pajot is a carver by profession. He is an editor at the Orthodox Arts Journal. Today, I see him mainly as a YouTube commentator, and in that medium, I see him occupying a role somewhere between an intellectual, a social critic, and can I say an entertainer?

He speaks with a series of interlocutors, among them of course Jordan Peterson, Christian commentators like Paul Vander Klay, secular psychologists like John Vervaeke of the University of Toronto, a very interesting fellow, and novelist Vesper Stamper. These are a few of the guests he’s had on who stick out for me. Some recent topics that Pajot has discussed include universal history, this kind of retro idea of a grand narrative that includes and makes sense of everything, right? With, of course, a Christian foundation, the interpretation of scripture, but also symbolism within pop culture.

He seems to be fascinated by superhero movies and TV shows as well as rap stars like Lil Nas X and Kanye West, and I confess that I share that last fascination. Throughout all of this, as Pajot says, symbolism happens! So today, it is my great pleasure to introduce him, and I’m hoping that he will lay out a roadmap to the symbolism which is happening today and which maybe is gathering for the near future.

Well, hello everybody. Thank you for inviting me. This is a really wonderful opportunity. I'm surprised to see some people that I know in the... I'm kind of looking at the mosaic here of everybody—not everybody, but some people. So I’m surprising some people that I know and then some people that I don't know.

What I want to do with you today is I want to kind of take you on a symbolic trip. I want to present to you, first of all, the, let’s say, the source of the symbolism that I tried to present—the frame you could say of the symbolism. I'm going to present it maybe in a little more of a technical way than I usually do in the more kind of colloquial way that I do on YouTube. So hopefully that'll be okay.

Then what I'll do is I'll take you on an example of this symbolic pattern—a very basic example, which is we’re going to read the first chapter of Genesis together, and we're going to try to look at how it kind of manifests the symbolic pattern and how this becomes a kind of map that you can use to interpret the world, but also map—especially a map that you can use to inhabit your life.

So, we'll see that symbolism is also not only about interpretation. I mean, as Jungians know, it’s a way to be in—a way to kind of inhabit the world. There’s an interesting moment right now, I think, in the zeitgeist, in the culture. Something like the end of materialism or the end of physicalism.

We saw, of course—I think that Jordan Peterson has played a big role in poking at this, you know, kind of poking at the new atheist, this last weird new atheist moment that we had in the early 2000s. So what we're seeing is kind of materialism running to its end, and it is happening in physics with the problem with the observer. It's happening in things like just this notion of complexity or complexity theory, the problem of emergence. All of these things are bringing materialism to its end.

The way that I like to understand it is that for a while, we had this kind of weird duality of mind and body or mind and matter, where we kind of abstracted the mind into this place that we didn’t talk about. Then we look at the world and we interpret reality, and as materialism kind of ran its course, as this kind of scientism ran its course, at some point we could say there is something of a little moment, a surprising moment of pride, where as we're kind of exhausting the things that we study, people realize that, well, there's this one thing that we haven't studied—it's the thing that's looking at everything else.

Like we're studying the world, the world, the world, but all of a sudden we realize that there's a viewer that’s doing that studying. And as soon as the materialist eye, you could say, turned toward the viewer, turned toward the interpreter, turned toward trying to understand consciousness, trying to understand meaning itself, then things become very loopy.

And certainly the simplicity of the dualistic model stops making sense. This happens very much in terms of evolutionary thinking. What evolutionary thinking did in some parts is try to explain the motivations of humans, but when you start to do that, you have a problem because this human who’s talking about evolution is what you're trying to interpret. You're actually interpreting the interpreter.

What has happened is that it's opened the door to all kinds of questions—the problem of emergence, the problem of quality—and one of the big things that’s happened is the problem of attention. This has been manifesting itself in different fields. It’s realizing that the world is too complex—that the world actually is kind of indefinite in its complexity.

You know, everything you look at, everything you encounter has an indefinite amount of complexity. And it’s made up of parts, and those parts also have an indefinite amount of complexity. You can just scale that down, you know, to the quantum field or whatever. Many thinkers realize, how does this work? How do things scale up between different levels of phenomena?

How is it that I can look at a chair and see that the chair is both one thing—it's a chair—but it also is many things and those many things are also many things? But I can perceive at every level of reality that there's unity. So I can notice a leg of a chair, and I can notice the color of the chair, but I can also see that all of this participates within the being of the chair.

This is like a hard problem. It's a difficult problem, because it ends up being—in fact, it’s not an infection, it’s actually a kind of healing, I think. But it kind of seeps back into science and seeps back into the very way in which we understand the world.

And we realize that we have difficulty accounting for the qualities of things using descriptive means. That we have difficulty even accounting for the identity of things using descriptive means. So once we have the identity, we can describe things, but the identity seems to kind of emerge from somewhere else or come from somewhere else. It kind of brings multiplicity into unity.

And so what’s fascinating is that—like I said—it has opened up all of a sudden the possibility for people to kind of understand ancient thinking in a way that until recently was very difficult to understand.

If we understand, for example, we realize that the world has to be patterned—that there has to be patterns in the world. This is more than just a psychological reality; it’s not just about describing the psyche of the human person. It’s actually a cosmological argument.

It’s an argument about how reality works, which is that for things to exist, they have to be patterned, and those patterns seem to stack up at different levels of reality and also seem to exist in smaller patterns, seem to exist in bigger patterns.

Right? You can think about it physically or think about it any way you want, and this actually seems to be something which is inevitable for us to be able to even encounter the world. Now, what that means is that it brings back the idea of intelligence, the idea of consciousness, and it can reconnect us to how the ancients talked about it.

Some people are talking about something like the revenge of Aristotle, right, or the revenge of Plato because suddenly, when we talk—when we re-enter our experience and try to analyze our experience, we realize that, oh, actually when Aristotle talked about potentiality and actuality, I experience that every single day of my life.

I actually encounter the field that presents itself to me as potential, which is brought into patterns, brought into actualities that I need in order to be able to exist, right? And those actualities—those patterns—they're not just mathematical patterns or ideas in the vague Platonic sense that people have, but they're actually teleological; they're purposes, right?

And these purposes can be regained from evolutionary thinking, which is just the strangest thing in the world. Like, who would have thought that Darwin would bring Plato back? But when we re-enter evolutionary thinking, we realize that we need purposes in order to encounter the world.

So it’s like if I—if I perceive this cup, the fact that I recognize it as a cup is because I recognize its purpose; its purpose to me as a human being. That actually scales the hierarchy of purposes, even in terms of science. Right?

People think that science is just a study of phenomena, but we always forget that science is embedded into us, into social systems. For example, the science that will get the most attention will always be the science that is the most fascinating or useful for humans.

The scientists that would get the least attention, which means the least money, the least effort to study, will be the things that are the least useful for humans. So as soon as you re-embed science into its actual social frame, then all of a sudden this hierarchy just reappears again—this ancient hierarchy, which is basically—you could call it something like the religious hierarchy.

So what it does is that these patterns, these teleological patterns, these patterns with purpose, come back into the way in which we actually exist in the world. So you can understand that ritual suddenly makes sense again. Not only does it make sense, but it’s actually inevitable.

You can see everything you do through ritual because everything you do in the world is patterned—teleologically it’s patterned towards purpose. And when it—and sometimes, let’s say there are moments in which that purpose will kind of break down, but that is also part of the—that's a great ritual, which usually involves something like carnival, which involves aspects of chaos on the edges of these patterns.

And so if you—if you realize that, like drinking a cup of water is necessarily ritualized, it has to be teleological, and it has to have a certain form. I have to do certain things in a certain order in order for me to be able to achieve the purpose that I'm reaching with my cup.

Now, bring this into the human sphere. It’s the same when I encounter someone. My encounter necessarily has to be ritualized. And you can realize that it has to be ritualized because if you try to do the opposite of the ritual, you’re going to get some funny reactions, right?

Try to talk to the back of someone's head, for example, for a while, or just lay down in the middle of the ground while you’re speaking to someone, and you’ll realize that human relationships are extremely ritualized.

We speak, and we feel the tension, right? So you feel like a rubber band. You speak, and then you have to stop speaking, and you have to listen. And so there’s this kind of wave, this back-and-forth wave, this—this call and response, you could call it—that happens in a conversation that if you don't follow that pattern, you're gonna break the relationship, and no one's going to want to talk to you anymore.

Everybody knows someone like that, and everybody sometimes has fallen into that excess where they’ve talked too much and they realize it, or they haven’t talked enough; they just listen and didn’t give their opinion, and the other person feels like you weren't there.

So we can see that this is how it works. Now, you can scale this pattern up from simple human interactions, from simple human engagement with objects, into social interactions as well. That is, we realize that in order to have teleology, in order to have purpose, and in order for a group to have purpose, it has to encounter itself ritually.

It has to have things which bind it together, which make it make the group recognize that it is together. Because this is the problem of multiplicity, and the problem of complexity happens especially in terms of human interactions.

What's the difference between a group and a crowd? What's the difference between a team and a crowd? Right? There are a bunch of people that are together, but one of them is not bound teleologically, and the other is, right? A team is bound teleologically. It’s a soccer team. They are bound towards a purpose; they're bound towards a common identity, and that common identity will manifest itself in ritual.

Those rituals include the rules of the game, the rules of engagement. Those rituals also include other things which are more related to identity, and this is something which will bring us straight into religious ritual. That is, those rituals include the capacity to attend to the thing that binds us together.

This is when we're going to start to realize that this pattern is almost first and foremost the pattern of attention or the manner in which we're capable of paying attention. A team will have to attend to those things that bind them together, and what that will look like will be something like celebration.

You know, at the fear of sounding somewhat scandalous to people, it’s going to look something like worship—like a little worship, right? It's going to be a celebration of the thing which binds us together, reverence towards the thing that binds us together. I don’t want to—I use the word worship to scandalize you a little bit, but reverence is fine, right?

So they will have to reverence their team colors; they have to reverence their team name; they have to have a totem, a mascot, which will represent them in a mythological frame as a kind of an animal or some figure that has more social connotation that will bind their identity together.

Then they will also be bound, you could say, on the human level through a person who will represent their ideal—the team captain, the coach, at different levels in this kind of hierarchy of being. So you will see that a sports team, but not a sports team, a knitting group or anything that is bound together will necessarily have to have these elements at different levels of reality.

Now, one of the aspects is that it will also have to judge what is inside and what is outside, and what will be the judge of that inside and outside will be their reason for existing, right? And so you could say the logo—something is a Christian term—the logos of the group will be that which binds together, which joins the body into one, but will also be that which judges those that are inside to bind them but also to exclude them.

So think of a knitting group, for example, right? You have a knitting group, a bunch of people come together, they knit together—that's what they do—and so there’s a ritualized reality to that, which is that when they meet, they're going to knit. Now, as they’re knitting, they'll probably do other things as well—well, they’ll talk, they’ll chat, they’ll talk about their lives; someone might bring something to eat, and this is all going to kind of organically participate in the knitting group.

But let’s say that at some point, someone comes and says, "Well, you know, I like this knitting group. I like to move this knitting group, but I don't want to knit. I want to play music!" And so they're like, "Okay, well, maybe one person playing music while we're knitting is not a big deal."

So, you know, they play music, and then that person invites someone else and says, "I like this knitting group, but this music playing is pretty cool, so what if I brought my instrument?"

Then we start playing music. So imagine now that process going on to a point where, well, okay, are we a knitting group? Are we a band? Like, what's going on? We have to decide—we have to judge; either we exclude these musicians or exclude their practice, or we cease being what we are; we die.

Basically, this knitting group is going to cease to exist; it’s going to be transformed into something else, okay? And so this is how kind of this pattern acts as the attention that we give towards the teleology of the group will also act as the logos of that—it's the reason, the purpose that I'm looking at will look like a binding agent but will also look like a judge.

So, like I said, this is how all kind of reality works or how all of reality lays itself out. What I want to do is I want to kind of show you that this pattern that I'm talking about is really just—a cosmological argument is an argument about how reality works.

What it does is that it argues about how reality works based on the notion that intelligence is necessary for reality to unfold. This is something which is kind of bubbling up, right? It’s not something which is that everybody agrees with in the world, but it’s something that is bubbling up, and we’re seeing it appear in different fields.

Even in science, we’re finding some physicists who are arguing what they call the strong anthropic principle, which is that consciousness or intelligence is necessary for the world to unfold because intelligence is the only thing which is able to discern pattern.

And not just discern but it’s like a—it's not just a discernment; it's a participation in pattern, right? Because the agent, the pattern ends up coagulating in the agent, you could say. And so the conscious being sees these patterns but also engages with these patterns and transforms these patterns.

It’s not just a passive relationship to the world; it’s an active embodied relationship to the world. Now, before I give you—before we go on the example, I want to say that this—once you kind of enter into this way of thinking, it has certain consequences.

One of the consequences is that the intelligent perception, the perception of the embodied intelligence becomes the primary mode of engagement and interpretation in the world. And what I’m saying here, this is extremely important because we tend to abstract and become scientists, and we think that that is the primary way to interpret reality, right?

We do it; we all do it. We analyze; we’re analysts. We look at the pattern from outside, right? We try to stand above and say, “Well, look at that interesting pattern in that culture. Look at that interesting pattern in that culture.” And look at how nice it is that they’re the same, and we’re kind of like these disembodied beings that are just looking at the world supposedly.

But once you realize that once you realize this notion that intelligence is necessary and that this ritualized embodied reality is necessary for the world to appear, then it changes everything because you have to embody—the real way to engage the world is the embodied way.

So it’s not that we're standing above the stories and we're interpreting the stories; it's not that we’re standing above the images and we’re interpreting the images; we are in a story! We participate in a story. We participate in communities. We participate in images, right?

They are our communities; they are our images; they are the things that make us exist, right? As we kind of actively engage with them. So that’s why if you look at the way that, you know, when David at the beginning said that Jonathan is an artist, this is extremely important in my theory about reality—it’s not like I’m presenting it to you in a way—in a theory, but this presentation that I’m giving you, this is secondary to what is really going on.

What is really going on is that to the extent that I'm capable of, I get up—I get up in the morning, and I physically carve sacred images, right? I go to church on Sunday, and I physically participate in the rituals and the liturgy. You know, I sit there with my family around the table and I eat a meal, and I realize that this meal is a smaller version of the ritual that I’m engaging in on Sunday morning with my parish.

And so it's an embodied reality; it’s an embodied engagement with the world. And so, like I said, it’s a pretty radical, it’s very radical, and sometimes people don’t realize how radical the proposition I’m making is.

The proposition I’m making is that if what the things I said are true, that means that the only way for them to be fully true is for us to dive in and embody—while realizing, of course, and while being aware of all the problems that come with this pattern as well. There are many problems which come with this pattern because I said, right, one of the issues of the reality of being engaged in a group that has a teleology, that has a purpose, is that it excludes.

That's the very nature of a group. A group excludes. Groups always exclude; that’s why they’re a group because they’re not the totality of all manifestation in the universe. They necessarily need to exclude. I mean, even if you want to be inclusive in the kind of, let’s say, a politically correct way, you’re still going to exclude animals from your group, or you’re still going to exclude rocks from your group. You necessarily have to exclude because you're not God, right?

You're not the totality of everything. In order to move teleologically in the world, you have to exclude, and so that has a prop—that has difficulty to it. But there are ways to deal with those in a manner which won’t make the group completely self-devouring, and also won’t make you kind of fall into the chaos of thinking that just that nothing has identity and everything is just a mush of potential, let’s say.

Okay, so hopefully if that's clear, what I want to do is I'm going to go into the first chapter of Genesis and show you how the creation narrative is a very, very wide story. It’s a very, very huge narrative. Obviously, I can’t exhaust it, but I want to show you is that the manner in which it shows that the world manifests itself through intelligence, through consciousness, and that this is actually the agent of how reality comes together and how we participate in that as intelligent beings.

Okay, and so hopefully you’re a little aware—I will go through the verses, but I hope everybody's a little bit aware of the creation narrative in Genesis enough that you'll be able to at least follow. All right? So here we go.

Okay, so scripture starts. It says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Now the earth was formless and empty; darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. So what we have are first the setup of one thing which seems to be outside of the system but is related, actually, to the top of the system.

So you have God who is in the beginning—the beginning can be interpreted as the head. The actual word means the head of something; it also means something like the principle, right? The origin—all of these words work into "in the beginning." And so God is in the beginning, and he separates heaven and earth.

The characteristics he gives of heaven and earth is that—because he says that the Spirit was hovering above the water. Now we have to see the Spirit hovering above the waters as the repetition—you'll see it’s all going to be repetition and showing you what the pattern is. And so the Spirit hovering above the water is the same as heaven. Heaven is just wind, right?

We have to be immediate about this. Heaven is that—is the things that you can't see, like wind; you can't see the wind, like your breath; you can't see breath like speech. You can’t see all of these things that you can't see. And then so it separates heaven and earth—two basic principles of reality.

The earth is void; it’s empty; it’s silence; it’s water; and heaven is spirit, wind, breath, and speech. So at first, basically, we just have two categories, right? The implications of these two categories are not going to be clear right away. They're going to start to manifest themselves, but you can already understand it as something like spirit and potential or actuality and potential is actually totally fine to see it that way.

Dante completely joins together the Aristotelian categories of actuality and potential in the creation narrative, the idea of heaven and earth as these two basic principles. And so this is just this, right? I mean, it’s no different. It’s a universal category; it's in every culture that exists. This idea of this basic separation of heaven and earth, and it is completely based on our actual experience in the world.

And if you can’t kind of re-embody yourself and realize that this distinction is a very simple and clear one, you're going to struggle to understand what the meaning of it can be because, as you're standing there—like imagine yourself standing there on the ground right? All light comes from above, right? Wind comes from above.

The things that are above are unreachable. You can't touch the stars; you can't touch the sky; you can't touch the sun and the moon—all of these things which give you light and which are the source of wind, invisible movement. Think about it that way. Think of wind as invisible movement, as invisible patterns of transformation, okay?

Seeing that, think of it that way. So you have all of this above you, and then below, you have a world that you knock your foot against; you have a world that you can touch, that you can count, that you can get dirty with, that can kill you, and that is also dark, right? It hides the sun. If you take something that’s on the ground, you take a rock, and you put it above your head, it's going to hide the light from you.

Right? This is very embody—right? This is very, very—But what it does is it separates two basic categories of reality. And so when God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. There was an evening, and there was a morning—the first day.

So now it starts to become clear. You can easily understand, of course, if you can embody yourself, that light has to do with heaven, has to do with spirit; it’s above, and then darkness has something to do with this void. So you don’t necessarily have to represent it below, but it becomes analogous to below because it’s the moment when the light stops being stuck; it’s the moment where the light stops showing you what the world is like.

So I'm placing it like this for you to understand. You wouldn’t necessarily have to put night at the bottom, but this is a good way to kind of see light, dark, earth as void and empty, and heaven as wind, spirit, breath, and speech. So God—sorry, let me say it—so God is above and he speaks, and light comes down on the world.

So then God says, "Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water." So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it, and so it was. So God called the vault sky, and there was an evening, and there was a morning—the second day.

All right, so already you're starting to see something like a narrowing. You have heaven above, but now you have like a second heaven which is like—okay, what’s going on? You have the water that is below. It's kind of split into the potential, the earth that is below is kind of opened up, and now we have a pattern which is similar which is setting itself up inside the world.

So you’re going to start to see that this pattern of attention is fractal, just like the way in which multiplicity moves into unity in any object in the world or in any community in the world happens at every level of reality. And this is what is going to start to appear to you is that the pattern is just repeating itself at different levels until it comes together in the middle.

Okay? And so we have these waters being separated, and then we have now a secondary heaven. Another heaven which is also above, but it’s something like inside the earth. The earth now is obviously not the earth exactly the way that we understand it, but at the inside, the things that are visible and have are quantifiable.

Now Augustine said this clearly. He said, "Everything you see, and when you look up in the sky, all the things you see— the sun, the cloud, the stars—all of this is the earth." All of this, because it can be quantified, but the second heaven—that's why the things above that actually can be seen and identified; they are like a secondary heaven.

There are pointers towards something which is truly invisible, you could say, or patterns that are truly invisible. So, it's not—I don't want you to think that I'm being all esoteric here, right? It's like the world has a pattern, let’s say day and night; that’s a pattern.

The way the thing that manifests that to you, that you can recognize it as a pattern, is those shining lights up in the sky that move, right? These shining lights up in the sky, they move, and they reveal to you a regular pattern.

The regular patterns of reality are in the sky. The irregular, the more embodied irregular patterns are in the world. They're still there, but they're more irregular. But the ones in these heavens are regular, right? Every day the sun comes up; every day the sun goes down; the moon has its phases; the stars move in the sky.

So it’s completely natural that these heavenly bodies are pointers to pattern—they point us to patterns; they point us to the invisible patterns, you could say, even though they are obviously visible. Okay?

So God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let the dry ground appear." And it was so. So God called the dry ground land and gathered the waters; He called seas, and God saw that it was good.

Now I wanted—I want to point you here to something that I haven’t pointed to yet before. So now think of the problem of intelligence that I’m trying to present to you and its kind of embodied or active participation in the way that reality manifests itself to you teleologically.

So God says—and you can imagine it like God says—it's God shining light, okay? So imagine an eye in the sky, and that—a sun; an eye—the sun is the same thing as an eye, let's say—and it's shining light down on the world, and he’s showing you things.

And that has to do with identifying. So when you encounter something that you've never seen before and you see it, what is it that you want to do? You want to identify it. That’s your job. Your job is to identify. If you don't identify it, you don't know if it can kill you; you don't know if it's dangerous; you have no idea.

There’s a direct relationship between seeing, speaking, in the sense of identifying. Naming, you could say. Okay? So God—so God speaks, identifies, as light comes down from heaven, manifests itself on the thing, and then God speaks it into being. But then he sees its relevance; he recognizes that which is manifesting itself to him, and he says that it’s good. He judges it right away. God judges.

Now think of your experience again. Think of your just basic experience, right? You walk into the room; you see the glass; you identify it; and immediately you ask yourself, consciously or unconsciously, you’re always asking yourself if it’s good.

This is necessary because the reason why you even perceive the glass in the first place is because you use it to drink water. You always have to ask yourself if it’s good or not. Is it a good glass? This is true about everything that you encounter; you don’t even do it consciously; this is true of everything you encounter.

As you’re walking on the grass, you have a system which is constantly judging because it has to be able to recognize if there’s a hole; it has to be able to recognize that there’s an object in your way. So it’s looking at the ground, at the grass that you’re walking on or the path, and it’s always identifying, naming, and recognizing whether it’s good.

So hopefully this makes sense, all right? So now we’re really going to start to see this fractal pattern start to appear more clearly. So you have the basic structure; you have the very invisible patterns of head, principle, origin. Wind, spirit, breath, speech, which is completely above.

Now you have the void, empty, silent question, puzzle, darkness, potential—all of this is below. Now at every level of reality, this is going to start to appear as being the same pattern. And so, like I said, the potential and the actuality of the glass is relative, obviously, but it points to some—to the pattern itself, to the pattern of the identity and potentiality itself.

And so this is why you’re going to see at every level it’s going to repeat. So you have the secondary heavens, which are the sky, and then you have the secondary earth. Now in the secondary earth, the same pattern happens again.

So God creates dry ground and separates it from the waters. So dry ground is above; it’s higher than water, right? This is just basic experience. Dry ground is higher than water; dry ground is the place where you live; dry ground is the place where you find meaning because that’s where you build cities, that’s where you do things, that’s where you eat—all of this, like, is from the dry ground—that’s where you can breathe air; you can encounter spirit from the dry ground, and light—but you can't in the sea, right?

And the sea, if you stay there too long, you die because you run out of spirit; you run out of meaning; you run out of air. All of these analogies play themselves out. So imagine dry ground as a mountain is the best way to understand it; you have this mountain, and then at the bottom of the mountain, around the mountain, you have the sea, which is an image of the original chaos, the original potentiality.

Now at a different level, then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation, seed-bearing plants, and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it according to the various kinds," and it was so. The land produced vegetation, plants bearing seeds according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in accordance to their kinds, and God saw that it was good.

There was an evening, and there was a morning—the third day. Now here, notice again what is going on, right? So God says, "Let the land produce vegetation," but not just produce vegetation. What is he saying? He’s saying "produce seed-bearing plants."

Why seed-bearing plants? What a strange thing to say! He’s saying seed-bearing plants because, once again in this pattern, now the seed is the identity, and the vegetation is the variation, or it is the bottom part of this pattern.

So he’s repeating the pattern; he’s saying you need a way for this identity to recognize the identity of the plant; that’s the seed. The seed is the manner in which you recognize the identity of what you’re encountering.

So you want reality to have stability; this is how we work in the world. We have to be able to recognize the different plants, and in that pattern, what there is is there's both identity and variability. So we're moving towards the kind of multiplication, but this multiplication always has to be a recognition also of the identity of each plant and how these plants are different from each other and how they participate in a major pattern of just plants.

So you can see this fractal process just continuing. Then once again, the same thing. God says the identity is in the—God said it’s in the seed of the plants, and then the plants kind of manifest his variability.

God sees and judges and says that it is good. So now you can see the same thing—the dry ground on the dry ground; you have the same pattern of above and below, right? Identity, spirit—obviously it’s not spirit in this case, but identity and variability.

All right, so we continue. So God said, "Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times and days and years and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so.

God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. There was an evening, and there was a morning—the fourth day.

So now, in the heaven, even in the world of meaning, the same pattern appears. So the pattern appears below in kind of the world of manifestation, you could say, as a fractal pattern, but it also appears above in the pattern itself.

And so we have these signs in the sky; they are signs to mark the days—they are signs for you to identify the pattern of reality. And there’s one of the major ones—one of the major lights which are there to govern the day and one to govern the night, so you have light and dark. Even in the heavens, the pattern is fractal all the way through, right?

Every day is going to be like this—just a spoiler here. God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky." So God created the great creatures of the sea—sea monsters.

It doesn’t say they don’t like to say sea monsters, but great creatures of the sea mean sea serpents and sea monsters. All these demythologizing Biblicists are the worst; it just means sea monsters. God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teams that moved about according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas and let the birds increase on the earth." There’s an evening, and there’s morning—the fifth day.

Now this is where you’re gonna start to see what’s really going on because until now you might have thought that what I'm saying is just a bunch of like just random interpretations, but here it becomes impossible not to see—why on earth would God create birds and fish on the same day? What is happening? It’s the strangest thing in the world; it seems to us—doesn't make any sense, right?

Well, it only makes sense if we understand that he’s constantly establishing the repetition of the heaven and earth pattern, of the above and below pattern, which is started from the beginning. And so he puts—he creates the birds above and the sea monsters below, and the fish.

So even in the sea, he separates fish and sea monsters. The fish are those that you can eat, that you can encounter, and the sea monsters are those that are going to eat you, right? There’s a difference between the two. So you have the fish and the sea monsters, but even in this whole pattern, you have the birds and the fish framing again the same duality which is being framed from the very beginning of the text.

You have to understand that that’s what’s been going on from the beginning because why would God create vegetation before he created the sun and the moon? It doesn’t make any sense in terms of science. How can you create vegetation first and then create the sun? It is completely illogical in terms of a scientist.

But in terms of a pattern of reality, it’s completely understandable. What you’ll notice is that from the beginning of this whole thing, the bottom stuff appears first; the potentiality kind of manifests itself first as a question, as this kind of darkness which is calling to be solved—this potential which is asking to be resolved. Then comes the answer from above, right?

The name, the idea—the light. So think again about your experience, right? You encounter something in the world; you can imagine in a microsecond—in a micro microsecond, the first thing it does is present itself to you as potential or as puzzled. And then, obviously, it happens almost simultaneously. You immediately identify, judge, and make it participate in reality.

But you can obviously have the experience of seeing something you've never seen before. I mean, everybody's had that experience; you see something or you experience something that you’ve never seen before. So at first, it presents itself to you as a puzzle, right? It’s like, “What is this?”

And then the process has to happen—this back-and-forth process of question and identification, of question and judging in order for you to finally be able to kind of identify and participate in its existence. All right? And so now we have God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds—the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so.

God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground, according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And so once again, what is happening? What is happening in this text? Why is it that God separates living creatures between livestock, wild animals, and creatures that move on the ground?

The answer is—it’s very simple; it’s just to continue the very same pattern. This hierarchy that we’re seeing is a hierarchy of meaning, right? It’s a hierarchy of identification, participation in reality. And so when God creates the animals, he does it in the same pattern—that is, you have livestock—livestock are more intelligent animals.

You can call them animals that are closer to us, animals that participate in our intelligence. They are the sheep, the cows—all the animals that kind of, let’s say, are almost—not almost, but are more like extensions of human society. And then you have the wild animals which are out there in the chaos, in the wild, in the world that doesn’t completely make sense to us.

And now, then the creepy-crawlers are the ones that live underground, like the sea monsters live on the ground that dig holes in the ground that come up, you know, and that don’t actually live in the light, you could say. They are actually hiding in darkness, hiding under rocks, and so you have to kind of dig in order to encounter them, just like the sea monsters are.

And the fish are on the ground, just like the very pattern from the beginning—darkness, chaos, you know, at the bottom and light, meaning, at the top. And then, of course, now we come to man. Again, then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image and our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So why is it that man has to rule? This is like the most politically incorrect thing that you could say, right? What are we talking about? But once you realize this pattern, it has to change the way you see reality—which is that intelligence is the place in which reality is encountered, identified, and also judged.

And this is going to be a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow, but at least try to understand it—try to understand it in this pattern. So man has to rule because man is an image of God. Man is an image of God in the sense that man is a locus of intelligence, and all the things that God said, all the things that you saw from the beginning in terms of how God creates the world is something that we participate in, in a lower level, we could say.

We recognize that we participate in that at a lower level because we do that; we cast light; we identify; we judge. And then, we are the place in which meaning is gathered into us, and so now God puts man above all the creatures which are below.

Now remember, those creatures were already organized in this hierarchy of meaning, right? Livestock, wild animals, crawlers, fish, sea monsters—all of this is organized in this kind of hierarchy of meaning, this hierarchy of danger, this hierarchy between that which is in the light, which is identifiable, which participates in intelligence, and that which is below and is in the chaos and is also dangerous to you.

Okay? And so we have the human person meeting in the middle, becoming the place where all of these patterns kind of join together in the center. So then to understand the role of man a little better, we actually have to go into Genesis 2, just for a little bit, to kind of understand because in Genesis 2 there’s another creation narrative which focuses more on the human person.

And then it says God—sorry, let me skip this, actually. Oh yeah, so it says that—I don’t want to run out of time here—but he says, "God bless them and said, ‘Be fruitful, increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it.’" Again, this is going to be difficult, but intelligence fills the earth and subdues it not in a negative sense, but in the sense of identifying, right?

The scientist that is constantly discovering new species and all of this is something like intelligence or man filling the earth and subduing it in the sense of identifying it and making it participate in a pattern of meaning—rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moved in the ground.

Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant," etc., etc., and then he saw that it was good. It’s important that when God created the humans, he creates the male and female, and in scripture, there’s a sense in which at first this is almost like man is actually androgynous, that he creates man, male and female; that is, in man is the duality of heaven and earth itself, right?

So there’s a microcosm of this basic duality of heaven and earth which is being reproduced inside the human person as within them they also contain this actuality and potentiality and how they also participate in the manner in which actuality and potentiality come together in the world.

So it’s not just in them, but it’s actually in—as being intelligent subjects—they are able to now encounter the world as this union of these two. All right? So this is where I wanted to go into the second chapter of Genesis just for a little bit to help you understand how this kind of comes together.

So it says, “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth.” Now you see it’s different here. Here there is a sense in which actually man kind of comes before everything—he’s actually there at the outset before God did all those other things.

Before you can imagine that God was—man or the microcosm or the intelligent agent was there even in the origin of creation itself. "No shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had sprung up for the Lord God had not yet set rain on the earth, and there was no one to work the ground."

But streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

So it’s a similar image as to what we have before, but here man is there right at the outset. So it says that there is no plant, there is nothing on the ground, and that water covered the earth. Water came out from the earth and covered the earth.

So it’s the same age as before. You have heaven above and the earth below—the earth is chaos and water. And then what God does is he gathers all the potentiality, the dust—all this formless chaos—he gathers it into one place, and then he puts heaven into it. He blows air into this gathered dust, and that’s how man becomes a living being.

Now what I want to propose to you is that process of gathering dust and putting air into it—that’s what was being described in the first chapter of Genesis, and that is how you encounter everything in reality all the time, non-stop.

That is the world presents itself to you as indefinite potential, and the manner in which you are able to exist in a living world is that intelligence gathers potential into bodies and then puts purpose—or recognizes purpose, engages with purpose.

Meaning, spirit, breath—and that is how the world actually exists, right? And so the description in Genesis is a description of how the world exists, not in a scientific way but in a way which takes into account that intelligence is necessary, that we are intelligent beings in the world, and that we can avoid that problem.

We can't pretend that we're not in the world and that we’re just analyzing phenomena and that we're not part of that process. So it’s a cosmic vision of reality which includes the viewer, which measures the viewer or includes the viewer in the way in which we understand the world.

All right, until we have this image again. Now, we can represent it this way; we can also represent it this way. This is a way that will help you understand. If you can realize that you can represent it this way, you’re going to understand so much.

And this is where I want to make a shameless plug, which is that my brother and I—we developed a lot of this way of speaking about reality together, which is not something that we invented.

It really is just a reinterpretation of traditional pattern-making, its interpretation of the church fathers, of the rabbis, of the Brahmin. It’s just a way in which we’re trying to represent these traditional stories for the modern world.

He wrote a book called "The Language of Creation," which goes through a lot of the things that I'm talking about, almost in a more kind of mathematical technical way.

So now think of this first image that I showed you as heaven and earth, you could say. So this is the same. So at the top, you have—I’m just laying them out there. There’s more complexity to this, but it’s like father, heaven, spirit, light, essence, pattern, mind, purpose—all of these things which are above.

And then at the bottom, mother, earth, waters, chaos, potential, question, body, puzzle, multiplication—all of these images of that which is below. And then what you have is you have the pattern which descends, right, the ray of light, the speech—the speaking which comes down, right?

The logos which comes down from the Father and connects with—sorry, connects with earth, and that usually in all traditions pretty much appears at the top of a mountain, which is just completely intuitive, right?

The mountain is the place where heaven and earth meet. It’s like the earth kind of coming together into a point where the heaven now touches the earth at its highest point.

Okay? But it's also an image of this difference between quality and quantity, identity, variability. You know, all of this kind of image of the relationship between the identity of your team and the variability of its players, of its idiosyncrasies—all of that will kind of come down below as this image of the mountain or the pyramid.

I won't go into this right now, but there are centering—let’s say there’s a centrifugal force and a centripetal force.

That is, there is a capacity to move into attention, to move into identity, to move into purpose, and then there’s a way in which we are able to have this, let’s say, what you could call a breakdown of attention, or focused attention, but it’s also this kind of general attention.

You could call it where we have this general attention on the borders of our—even of our visual field, where it’s almost like an alarm system, right? Where things—we don’t have a lot of energy there, but if things pop in—this variability kind of pops in on the edge, and it's the question, right?

A puzzle—something’s happening here, and I can’t see it; it’s a puzzle. So what do I do? I then put my attention on it, identify it, judge it, and do all the things that we talked about before.

And so there’s a—there’s a centrifugal force and a centripetal force, and that’s true as much as you're in your attention as it is in a team or a country or any group—anything that has body. There’s something which is making it more towards its identity, and some aspect which is pushing it towards multiplicity, variability, and potentiality.

Okay, I don’t want to go into that too much because that would take us into a whole other world, but just to understand that you probably are—if you’re Jungians, you’re aware of the kind of coagula, solve structure that Jung used in terms of alchemy. This is exactly what I’m talking about, right?

This is exactly the coagula, solve pattern, which is a movement towards solidity and identity and then a dispersion into potentiality. But what I want to help you to understand especially is that this structure, like this basic pattern, can help you understand so many things, right?

It’s the pattern of a temple, right? It’s a pattern of a temple where—in the temple, let’s say, in the Jewish temple, you had the holy of holies where the glory of God would descend in the holy of holies. And then there you would have a priest who was just one person, and then outside of that you would have all these levels of quantification, where outside you would have the priestly cast, then you would have the faithful, and then you would have the strangers.

Right? It’s a pattern of a church which has the same pattern. You have the altar in the highest point of the church where God descends on the altar, and then there’s also a reduced number of people that are there that represent this moving into quality, this moving away from quantity.

Then the sacraments get dispersed out into the nave where the faithful gather, and then there’s a narthex or a vestibule where strangers come, and then on the outside of the church, there are gargoyles and strangers and other aspects of reality.

Okay? So this is the structure of the way that Greeks understood themselves in ancient times, right? They had the umbilical—a navel of the world, and in that place, they received oracles from heaven, which would bind them together, which would manifest their destiny—all of that was manifested at the place where they had the belly button of the world, the center of the world.

And then as you moved away, you would have Greeks and then strangers that you knew and then finally barbarians, and ultimately monsters—things that have confused identities, things that you don’t recognize would be outside on the outer edges of this.

Okay? So like I said, this is basically just the pattern of the way in which we encounter the world, but it’s also the pattern of the way that society is actually bird together. It’s not just—it’s not just a subjective experience, but it scales up in terms of your experience into the social experience, ultimately I think into a cosmic version; it’s an image of the cosmic pattern.

So I just want to show you quickly, without even going into detail, I want to show you how this pattern just appears everywhere. So here’s an icon of the ascension of Christ. Look, you have above, you have the top of the pyramid or the top of the mountain; you have the principle—the logos which is above.

You can imagine that the Father is actually above this, hidden above, and then below you have the mother as the place of potentiality, and then next to her, you have all this multiplicity. So you have the one, you have the mother, you have the twelve.

Okay, this is one example. Here’s an example of the image of baptism. So you have Christ as the one who now joins heaven and earth as this point at the top of the mount and joints have been entered. But now, he's descending all the way down from the top, let’s say, down into the waters—down into the waters of chaos.

And you see the spirits above which is coming down on the top of the mountain. And below you have the sea monsters, which are below in the chaos of the waters, right? Symbol, just many, many.

And so this is a version that I made, which I call the image of everything basically, and it’s just trying to kind of capture the Bible story as an image of this pattern as an image of what—how the top of the pattern relates to the bottom of the pattern—the waters at the bottom, the sin, the fall, you know, the thorns as this multiplicity, etc., etc.

The sea monster—I don’t want to interpret it, but there are different ways in which you can kind of see this. And the last one I wanted to show you is an image of the last judgment, which is really the ultimate image of this. If you want to see an ultimate image of this whole pattern, because obviously the last judgment being the last moment or the eschaton, you could say, or the moment in which all the totality is manifested in one final thing, then you have this image of the world in this version, especially you actually have the father above, right?

At the top—can you—I don’t think you can see my cursor. Oh, can you see my cursor? Oh, here you can see it this way. Okay, so you have the father above here, then you have the logos descending onto the world—can you see that? He’s got the world underneath him, and then you have that which is below, which is both the hell—this kind of monstrous hell, okay?

But it’s also the place of paradise here because it’s the place in which we gather things together. So remember in scripture, the gathering of the dust and the blowing of the spirit? Well, that also happens from the bottom, right? It’s at the—so you have the two sides.

Remember I talked about the centrifugal and the centripetal force? On the left of Christ is the sword, and there’s a descent down into death. On the right of Christ, there is his hand lifting up, right? Lip—sorry, wrong hand. Lifting up, and here you find the gathering of the saints, and they rise up.

See these little saints with the angels with wings, they go up on the right of Christ into glory. So there are very, very mysterious things about this image that I don't want to go into too much detail, but you can understand that this is happening through these angels that are making music—that are making sounds, pattern sounds.

And this is what is calling to the end, bringing about the judgment of all of reality in which all of this is kind of happening—the judging of the good, bringing into the center, and the ultimate exclusion in a cosmic way towards death.

And then here—this is the process. So this is—it’s a complicated thing in orthodox theology, but this is the soul, which is—you can see the soul here; the soul is moving up this serpent/slash ladder.

So it’s both a way to go down and a way to go up, just like shoots and ladders. Guys, this shoots and ladders is one of the oldest games in reality; it's like it's a truly cosmic game, by the way.

It’s almost religious as a game. So you have this coming down and moving up which is— which is captured in one image, and on this are all the sins that you can have; those sins are coupled with virtues.

And so as the soul ascends, this thing they encounter at every level of reality a demon which is pulling it down, but also they also encounter angels which are pulling them up. Here in this one, you don’t see the angels so much.

In other versions, you see—in other versions, you’ll see the angel—like in this one, you see the angel as the one trying to push down the demon. And as you move up, you kind of move towards this judgment, and that’s actually that hierarchy that I showed you at the beginning in the creation—that also obviously has an analogous version of that in your virtues—in your capacity to scatter yourself into chaos, right, by falling into all these thoughts that rip you apart and the capacity to join together into one and to move up the ladder of attention as you worship God of attention as you move towards virtue rather than this dilapidation and distraction by which you lose the worship. You lose the capacity to attend to that which is above you, and you fall into chaos and the multiplicity of the passions that rip you apart, right?

Jordan, I think we’re starting with your questions. Let’s go for it.

Well how about subdue? I think of the word subdue, or to arrange hierarchically—to give everything its due—that is so when man subdues the world, he does exactly what you’re doing, right? Everything is placed, and that’s a reflection of the simultaneous act of perception and judgment and the fact that those things, as you pointed out, are inextricable.

And that’s technically true, right? Yeah, people, psychologists studying perception from the biological ground have drawn that inescapable conclusion. So that was really cool.

Ritual encounters with other people—in Dostoevsky’s "The Devils"—"The Possessed," there’s a great scene where Stavrogin goes into an officer’s club, and he’s coming unglued at this point in his political chaos, utopian political chaos; he’s possessed by these ideas. He puts his fingers in the nostrils of an ancient general and drags him onto the street, and it just causes absolute chaos in the entire society.

So yeah, you realize how fragile—like how easy it is to actually just shatter, you know, this ritual, virtual reality. Yes, Dostoevsky understood that so deeply.

So that’s stunning. The female potential equation—I’ve been criticized a lot for associating femininity with chaos, although it’s not an insult, and it’s not something that I did casually, and it’s not something I did—and the idea of the seminal word is precisely a reflection of that.

And the implication of that is feminine potentiality and the analog between the word and the drawing out of potential new forms. So there’s a sexual element to that, obviously; that's reflected in the idea of the seminal word.

The pyramid notion on top of the—George Washington aluminum, of all things, because aluminum was the most valuable metal at that point. And so that idea that there’s a pure and valuable top to the pyramidal structure—like that’s an icon of the entire structure of the United States, and by extension, the entire, let’s say, Western world, but world as such.

Yeah, the Egyptian pyramids were most probably capped with gold; like the very top of the pyramid would be like a mini pyramid, and then that would have been gilded, right?

So one of the advantages to the interpretive framework, this interpretive framework, is that it explains the intrinsic sacred nature of the pyramidal structure. It’s a great mystery—like what's up with these pyramids, exactly? And like people put a lot of work into those things, so it wasn't trivial.

Yeah, and the ziggurats are pyramids too. People always want to separate them, but you know, all these structures, these kind of structures that are representing mountains are like geometric versions of mountains—that's what they are.

And if you understand—once you understand that, then you realize that every time someone goes up a mountain in scripture, it’s the same as a pyramid. It’s going up to the top of reality.

I think you did a brilliant job of explaining that with your analysis of those images at the end. Are you going to make that image you made into a carving?

Yes, I am, but it just in line somewhere in one of my carvings. Someone is like, "You need a client to purchase that." I have one, but I can also make one for you if you want.

It's quite something, Jonathan. And then this last thing I’ll say, I think, is—in the second creation version where you have man primary, that’s an analog, a repetition of the notion of the word?

Yeah, so it’s the same. So that’s so interesting, seeing that embedded in a really archaic narrative there.

Oh, so I do have one other thing. Why did you use intelligence as the primary descriptor of the interactive consciousness instead of logos?

Well, the reason why—I mean, I tried to kind of move between the two. It’s also because it’s hard to—you to know which word to use because the way that the ancients understood intelligence was very—it’s a little different from the way we understand it.

It was more—it’s called a noose in orthodox thinking, which is—it’s actually—it's beyond rationality. It’s the capacity to directly grasp the pattern.

Exactly, that’s why it's related to attention, yeah, yeah, that. And that supersedes rationality; it’s embedded inside that capacity to pay attention because attention selects the objects that rationality deals with.

And rationality tends not to notice—that, it’s like, well, that’s the easy part. It’s like, no, no, no, that’s the hard part actually. And as we see, like, YouTube virality is a great way to understand what happens when we’re not careful about that because what we have with YouTube virality, or just internet virality, are just these random, you know, stupid things that pop up, gather all the attention, vanish, pop up, gather all the attention, vanish.

And so it’s actually—it ends up being a form of breakdown of attention; it’s a distraction. It prevents us from seeing it. It’s the incapacity to pay attention to the right things, and it leads us into a kind of breakdown. It was great. I really—I always learn a lot listening to you.

It’s really good. Pretty good, thanks! I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks!

Okay, one question—someone is asking: could you elaborate on what you mean about above and below?

Well, the idea of above and below, like I said, it manifests itself fractally, but it’s about something like—I mean, it’s actual and potential, and so it’s identity and potentiality.

And so think about it—let’s bring it down to a real basic level—so let’s think of a sports team again, right? So you have the identity of the sports team; the reason why it exists, which is to win basketball games or to do that.

Then there’s the identity of the team itself, you know, which is kind of embedded in that. And then there’s the potential—the potential of that team are the players; those players have also their own potential.

Like I said, it's fractal. So the players can change, but the identity of the team won’t. So that’s what we mean by potential, right? That’s—you can—it’s variability which comes together and then is able to manifest the purpose in the world.

So that’s what we mean by above and below. And so God says to let the earth bring forth that vegetation that has seed—we always forget that God doesn’t just speak it into existence; he says to the earth, "Bring forth," right?

And so it’s like out of the potential comes this variability, which then receives name from above and joins it together into specific identities. And so, like I said, this idea of above and below can be seen in anything that you encounter.

Another question is you mentioned the pattern of livestock and wild animals that manifest heaven and earth. Are people that try to tame animals, such as tigers and bears—examples of breakdown of the pattern, and that is why usually it ends in disaster?

Definitely! I mean, you can see that that you have to kind of have a respect—a subdue, as Jordan said. I love that! That is you have to be able to see things where they really are and engage with them where they are in this kind of pattern of reality.

And so if you engage with—the if you engage with the pattern of reality in a wrong way, that’s—you die. And it can be—it can be something like taming a tiger, but it can also be something like eating rocks. Like rocks are not potential that you have access to to eat, and that's true for like an indefinite amount of things.

There are certain identities which have certain potentials that can participate in them. And if you don't encounter that properly, then you're going not going to work. If you have a basketball team and you decide to fill the basketball team with gerbils, well, your basketball team is going to lose. It’s not going to exist.

And so this is how this works in terms of this idea of subduing, right? Or judging is a very good thing; it’s a necessary thing because it’s how you judge what potential is able to join with what identity.

Okay, we have a heretical question. How sure are you about the universality of the heaven and earth distinction, as I know it is a symbolic pattern appearing with the axial age cultures—Buddhism, Christianity, Socratic Greece, Islam, animistic culture, for example—do not have a clear distinction between those two categories?

So by extension, what makes you sure that all of this isn’t just a perfect exposition of an axial age mind?

How can I say this? Now I’m gonna go back into what I’m saying—I’m gonna go back into what I’m saying, which is about embodied reality. People who talk about the actual age and animistic as if they don’t exist in the world—they just—I have very little patience for that.

Like, where are you to tell me about the actual age as if it’s something which you’re not in, and talk about the animistic age as if it’s something that somehow you can see from outside? Like this—how can I say this?

It’s like we don’t know much about animistic religions because we’re not animistic religions. We’re always interpreting animistic religions from the place where we are, and so it’s a very—to me, it’s always true—it’s like, do you know the secret traditions of the shamans? But you read the text that some European went out into Tibet and wrote some text based on what they encountered there—were you initiated, right?

Did they bring you into the secret of secrets? Did they tell you what their secret traditions are? No! They didn’t! You don’t know them!

And so I’m not saying that that comment is true or false; I’m saying that you really know less about these traditions than you think you do because the way you know about something is not about—and it’s not by studying it from the outside, but it’s about encountering it and living it from the inside.

And those that are initiated into the higher mysteries, they're not supposed to talk about it anyways, so they’re not going to tell you.

So even if a scholar was at some point maybe initiated into the higher mysteries, they shouldn’t tell you. And if they tell you, it means they probably weren’t initiated and they're bullshitting you, right? This is true—like even of the Eleusinian mysteries, everybody talks about the Eleusinian mysteries as if they know what they are.

It’s like that was a pretty awesome thing because no one ever told anybody what happened there, right?

And so it’s really important to understand that—to understand this. Anyway, I’m sorry. I don’t want to go off on this person, but it’s really just important to understand the implications of these embodied patterns and how it is that every time we pretend that we can stand above them and just analyze them, that we’re deluding ourselves.

So coming back to heaven and earth—how can I say this? Like I think that heaven and earth is a universal pattern. It doesn't mean that there maybe aren't other ways of explaining that same duality or that same relationship.

And also, it’s the same—it’s the same thing. Like it’s the same problem. These animistic cultures that were there before the actual age, you don’t know anything about them. You have no way of encountering them.

And the ones you encounter now—the idea that they’re the same as the ones that were there before the actual ages—also, it’s all kind of weird scientific delusions people give themselves. Sorry, sorry to ever ask that question; I didn’t mean to kind of go off, but these are sometimes—these things I get itchy about them.

Okay, someone is asking what is the meaning of God calling the human very good versus calling the other things only good, and that’s super interesting because there’s even a day where God doesn’t say that it was good, by the way. People always forget that when God separates the waters, he doesn’t say that it was good.

And so, I mean, I think that’s what it is. It’s that in a way the human being participates in the pattern of the good in this way similar to the way God participates in the pattern of the good.

That is, the human being can do good and can recognize good, right? And can participate in the good whereas the other beings less so—not completely absent of it, but less so.

And so I think that all living creatures participate in the good and participating God ultimately, but it’s just a question of hierarchy and embedded patterns, you could say.

There’s a psychological observation in terms of psychological work. How, out of the infinite complexity of interpretations, certain interpretations of experience have been offered to us to stay inside the group we accept defensively versus how we can seek out our intuitive other patterns in our experience and create a new reality for ourselves.

Okay, I would say—okay, let’s see it this way: that the patterns of specific groups, they are always limited. They’re limited by their limitations; they’re