Meaning, Awe, and the Conceptualization of God (Part 1-3) | EP 202

It's not easy to understand that other people are genuinely different from you and how they might be different. Maybe even more difficult is to understand that the differences, although frustrating, are also necessary. It isn't obvious to me that anyone wants to live a meaningless existence. I don't think you can live a meaningless existence without becoming corrupted, because the pain of existence will corrupt you without a saving meaning.

It also seems to me that you can sell the story that meaning is to be found in responsibility. When I've tried to sell that story to myself, I seem to buy it. When I've tried to communicate it with other people, it renders them silent, large crowds of people silent, and that's strange because I'm not sure why that is. It's perhaps because the connection between responsibility and meaning had never been made for them in that explicitly, somehow. Meaning gets contaminated with happiness or something like that, but it's to be found in responsibility.

You could say well there isn't any responsibility that's more compelling than trying to aid things in the manifestation of their divine form. That should be an adventure that could be sold, and I don't know why the church can't do it. I don't understand that because it seems to me that that's something that I've done, at least in part, and that accounts for the strange popularity of the biblical lectures in particular.

Yeah, but I've also... and I do believe that the right striving is to attempt with all your heart to encourage things to develop toward that divine goal. Like, what else would you possibly do? Once you think that through, it's like you're always aiming at something that's better or you wouldn't be aiming. You're always moving toward something that's better or you wouldn't be moving. So then why wouldn't you move toward the greatest good?

Yeah, well it's because it's terrifying, I suppose in part. But then, as you know, I've tried to put that into practice in my life, and it's tearing me into pieces. Yeah, I asked you to define love, and I'm going to define it on my terms now, and that is the best in me serving the best in you. I think that's the deepest, and most lasting pleasure, and it is the most fundamental motivation. It's the inexhaustible source, because if I can do that, whenever I do that, I feel that I'm being properly, and there's nothing better than that.

You can extend that to the world, to situations, places. Well, I think that's what you're supposed to do by accepting the proposition that God is love. I mean, it's God is love and God is logos. Those are both there. So then the question, to some degree, is the rank order of the two. I would say God is truth within love, and that's the animating spirit of mankind. That's a way different claim than the one the atheists are going after, by the way.

Yeah, think about it. Everyone is truth in the service of love, not the best animating spirit of mankind when it isn't pursuing an aberration. We can all ask ourselves that question; I think that's a good question to ask. Thank you, Joe. What I mean, I think it reorients us. Today we can put that on a T-shirt. Is truth in the service of love a good question?

I guess I see them as more interpenetrating. I want to make a stronger relationship between them than just a relationship of service. I mean, this is a matter of man. That is why I like the term realization, that love is a way of affording realization, and the deepest knowing you have of reality is in realization. That's what I—if I had to... okay, so well, so it seems to me... okay, so I'll make an appendage to my claim, right? The reality that is most justifiable is brought about by the action of truth in the service of love.

Yeah, but I guess what I'm saying is I see truth. I think you're using it—and I've heard you use true as something beyond a correspondence between the semantic content of a proposition. Reality, I've heard you talk about... Yes, right, right. And we even use that when we use the phrase—yes, it seems to incorporate some of those other dimensions that you're exactly talking about.

Exactly. Okay, great man, so fill me in. Well, that's what I'm trying to get at. I'm trying to get at that power is a way of, you know, when your shot is true, your skill has been effective, and you're going to hit the mark, right?

But presence is also a way in which things are true to form, right? And then care—so the participatory knowing is when we're like—the deepest sense of true, which is, you know, related to trust and being betrothed to the world in an important way. So if you will allow me to expand what you mean by true to cover all of those dimensions, betrothed to the world in that you extend the same courtesy to the world that you described extending to your partner.

Exactly. I think the answer to nihilism isn't some propositional answer, or this is what I get from Nietzsche. Yeah, right. It's to re-learn—and I mean this deeply in the Buddhist sense of sati—to remember what it is to fall in love with reality, to fall in love with being.

And if that's what you're saying is the enemy, do you think that's what Sam Harris is striving for in his spirituality? Well, and it's not a throwaway answer. It's like, what's he up to exactly? I mean, isn't he on a Sophian adventure? I think everybody is.

How can I put this? Everyone lives from the non-propositional kinds of knowing emphasized by Plato, and that's what all of the scholastic research is pointing to now; that Socrates was trying to point people to the non-propositional knowing—the procedural, the perspective of the participatory. I think we all have to live from that. Given a lot of things I've said, a lot of things we've said—well, you should maybe expound on those a bit more for us and clarify a bit more—and so you said the answer to nihilism—that isn't exactly a comment on my comment that the culture war is about the claim that the drive to power is at the core of western being. I think that's an equally nihilistic claim.

That's my point. The claim is nihilistic—or my claim about that is nihilistic—on both that power is a fundamental reality is an attempt to assuage the wounding of nihilism. But it is fundamentally mistaken in its endeavor. It will—it is constituted the wrong way; it's like framing a problem the wrong way so that, you know, do not get the insight needed to get to the solution of the problem.

So I think of it as a fundamental misframing. That's what I'm trying to say. Okay, that's why I'm not—that's why I'm hesitant to say either yes or no to it, because I get it.

Well, I believe that it is misframed because I don't think it would be taking us in such a pathological direction, the whole argument, exactly, if it wasn't misframed.

I've been thinking psychologically again about Christianity. I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought that predate it, but it looked to me like—and some of those were derived from Mesopotamia, and some of them were derived from Greece, and some of them were derived from Judaism and other sources—but they all seem to me to be part of the conversation that human beings have been having amongst themselves for thousands of years about what the nature of the ideal human being is.

And now I see these cathedrals, these works of art and architecture, that took a tremendous amount of labor and produce a dome-like structure that represents the sky, and you see Christ as logos spread out on the sky as a transcendent force. You ask yourself, well, what exactly is that signifying? And the answer is at least the proposition of a kind of ideal that's associated with, let's say, universal love and truth in speech—that's the logos summed up in two phrases.

And if there's no metaphysical reality there at all, there's still this imaginative enterprise that characterizes the entire human, what, imaginative effort, cultural effort to posit a transcendent ideal that we would live in relationship to. And I just don't see that case being made very strongly, and I can't really understand why.

Because isn't it rather obvious that at least part of what Christianity has been is the attempt by thousands of people over thousands of years to specify the nature of an ideal? Certainly, I would say so. And I would say that the fact that these principles actually work is proof of their—the proof of there being true accounts of what the nature of the real is.

Well, let's approach this from a couple of different angles, Jordan. You know, the first is one of the things that I profoundly believe is that, you know, these young people seeking, you know, deeper answers and, you know, to however much they may be flailing about, you know, it’s not their fault that many, perhaps most of the institutions they will encounter will betray that which is deepest in them.

We'll denigrate, we'll tell them none of these things that you're seeking are really real. I mean, I think, you know, I've been talking, thinking a lot over the years about architecture and what is going on in brutalist architecture. It really does seem to me that in brutalist architecture, to live in relation to brutalist architecture, it is as if you had a parent that said, you know, you're nothing, you're nothing, you'll never amount to. And, of course, there are terrible people, terrible to say.

There are people in these situations who live with such dysfunctional lack of love and antagonism. This is the way that this is the home life that some people terribly have. But I'm using this as an example because I think what brutalist architecture does is it declares to the whole world and to you that you are—there is no truth, there is no beauty, you are nothing, accept it. It's just a concrete annihilating force.

And you see this culture of repudiation. I mean, here in, not here, you're in Canada, I'm in the States in Savannah now, but you know the Château Laurier—I think I misspoke recently, called it the Frontenac, which is in Quebec. But in Ottawa, you know the Château Laurier, there's been a desire to expand this sort of beautiful sort of neo-Gothic building, and it went through six rounds of approval to finally make a set of plans that would meet the local architectural review board, whatever it was.

And I thought, well, it can't be that bad, you know, it's gone through that. And, I mean, this structure is abhorrent. It looks like a cross between a Verizon server firm and an American penitentiary. I mean, it is just a—it is a declaration that there is no higher order.

You know, in Edinburgh, they're tearing all those out, eh? There is Edinburgh is an unbelievably beautiful city. The whole central mile of it, square mile essentially, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it's marred by random placements of 1970s brutalist architecture, and they're just horrible. It's complete lack of regard for the architectural context, and they're all being torn out and replaced. Thank God.

So, well, this architectural idea—so back to the cathedral, you know what's really interesting about a cathedral with, let's say, Christ as Pantocrator on the ceiling, sprayed against the ceiling, is that it's not the state that's portrayed up there, right? It's not a map of the country, it's not even a map of the world, it's not a geographical locale or a political institution, it's the transcendent individual.

And, you know, it's just not obvious to me that that's correct and that if it isn't the transcendent individual, then it becomes the state. And as soon as the transcendent becomes the state, then we have a catastrophe. And I don't see any difference between the insistence that our identity is predicated on our group membership.

I don't see any real difference between that and the insistence that we're just handmaidens of the state. It's a totalitarian insistence. And I think part of that too is maybe, you know, I learned from Jung that as soon as you posit an ideal, you also specify a judge. And the more the higher the idea, the more severe the judgment because of your distance from the ideal.

And so part of what we're seeing too might be a rebellion against the awful requirements of that ideal. But that doesn’t justify—it doesn’t justify the rebellion because if it’s really the ideal, then if you don’t act it out, you fail to act it out at your peril. And then we need to have a serious conversation about the metaphysical, about the practical implications of the idea of this ideal.

I mean, if we’ve had this conversation about the transcendent individual as the ideal against which we should all be judged and to which we should strive to emulate, is there any relationship between that ideal and the structure of reality itself? Because that’s the hundred percent question, so to speak. You know, we have a human ideal and you could say merely psychologically, maybe even merely biologically, that that’s something we originated—that's part of our biological nature that's expressed in this ideal and it’s nothing more than that.

But you could also say, well, perhaps it is something more than that. Perhaps it’s reflective of the structure of being itself. I mean, it depends on our position in the cosmos. You know, we are self-conscious; we are that which reflects being itself, or perhaps even makes it possible. It’s not that obvious what our role is. It might not be so trivial despite our mortality.

Well, I would say that not only it is as you say, but we can know it to be as you say. I mean, this is what the whole history, in some sense, of literature and philosophy and theology is about. It is a—I want to insist on this—it is a rational grappling with these questions, realities, and indeed truths.

I want to come back to something in a minute, but just on this topic, you know, one way into this is to reflect on the fact that reality is not zero-sum. That, of course, we know this economically. You were talking, Jordan, a minute ago about, you know, free—the voluntary exchange of regulated, that is to say, a contractually governed marketplace, that in this exchange, you know, it’s not zero-sum; we all end up over time better.

But you also see this naturally in the evolution of the diversity of species, of languages, of cultures. You’ve written beautifully about play as orienting the child in relation to a deepening reciprocity with others. We know this in terms of knowledge. I mean, you know, how can it be that in a conversation I can be wrong and be shown to be wrong, and that be a net gain for me?

I mean, you know, the whole point of free dialogue is that we can learn from— we can learn in our not knowing, that the conversation is not zero-sum; that even in our speech. We know this in terms of forgiveness—that even our betrayals of beautiful things can become deepening engagements with what we have betrayed if we have the humility to see it.

And so then, you know, I think, you know, that leads one to—you can go back, you can go at the level of subatomic particles in physics. I had the pleasure of talking with Freeman Dyson before he died, and you know, Dyson will say very clearly that against the determinists, you know, some of the rational optimists are pretty religiously determinist in their worldview. You know, they want to marshal modern science as saying that their determinism is what science teaches.

But that Joe Dyson, who was a subatomic physicist at the highest level, expressly said the opposite. He said that the electron—that, you know, essentially he says that the electron is free, that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, that at the very most detailed level of subatomic particles, things are not determinist. And the reason I want to go all the way down to that level is because you can go down to the lowest level of resolution, then you can back up to the higher level and see that there is a non-zero-sum nature to what is real.

And then you have to ask yourself, is it good to live in relation to what is true or should I live in a delusion? And we say, well, it’s better to live in relation to what’s true than to live in relation to a delusion. And then you say, well, what would it mean then for me to live in relation to this positive sum, this essential reciprocity, which I think is really what the Christian view of the Trinity is about? This essential reciprocity, which is the bedrock of all reality.

What would it mean to live in relation to that? What would it mean to remember that? And, you know, one can approach that in any number of different ways, but certainly that is what prayer is. That is what all spiritual exercises are. That’s what perhaps walking in nature can be. That’s what any kind of meditative activity, intellectual or physical, is—a recollecting of the self in the deepest way to what is most real.

And I know you’ve written, for example, about gratitude, and I love your words about gratitude. Because it’s an inversion of the burden. It’s not that it all comes down to us but actually just the opposite—that we place ourselves in the hands of the eternal reciprocity that gathers us up and puts us back together. And I think that this, frankly, is a deeply rational standpoint that can be shown to be, despite my not making it very articulately here today, shown to be true in economics, in physics, in biology, in sociology, and certainly in all of the higher order spheres of human knowing.

This is the nature of what we are and what the world is. And this is where, you know, your image of the Pantocrator, you know, I think this comes back to this because what fundamentally is going on there is that, you know, the logos is in us. You know, it’s actually in us. That’s why when you talk about the divine significance of truth and speech, that, you know, we are made to understand ourselves in relation to the whole that is an intrinsic human need and an intrinsic human ability.

And I think that, you know, this is where, you know, my life is about trying to in whatever small way I can, you open if the nihilists darken the horizon and close off in the way that brutalist architecture does close off what we’re allowed to become and understand ourselves as, then I think the work of our time is to open it back up. And that is really what the humanities are fundamentally about.

You can go back to, you know, one of the things I despise about the current structure of the academy is it acts as though, you know, these things are just for the few. But, you know, you’ll think about, you know, Homer. I mean, Homer was the mode of educating the Greeks for you know a thousand years. The Pantheon was right there on the highest hill where everyone could see it. Same with Gothic architecture; you know, J.S. Bach, perhaps the greatest musician who ever lived was a parish church musician. Anyone, I presume, could walk in the doors and listen to his cantatas.

I mean Dickens, when Dickens wrote, I’ve heard recently people would line the docks to wait to see what was the next, you know, what was the next installment of Dickens. And so what I think, you know, most fundamentally is that the antidote to the spiritual crisis, civilizational cultural crisis we’re living in is really fundamentally simple in at least—it’s what we can state it as—and that is to open the horizon again, to turn the lights back on. And what that means is to turn them on so that individuals can better come to understand themselves in relation to these higher order realities in the image of which they are made and in relation to which their fundamental realization essentially depends.

So we have critiques of, let’s say, thought in relationship to the ideal— the Freudian critique of religious structure—that it’s infantile and perhaps that’s a consequence of the hypothesis of the divine afterlife that awaits us all. Freud regarded that as an infantile response to the reality of death. And then there’s the Marxist criticism that religion only serves power and it’s the opiate of the masses. But it’s striking to me how poorly the alternative position has been defended given its unbelievable power.

I mean look, we all seem to recognize within ourselves that we have moral culpability as far as I can tell because I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t tortured themselves to a tremendous degree as a consequence of their own perceived inadequacies in relationship to the ideal. I see that people take the deepest pleasure that’s possible in life in the facilitation of the development of others. I don’t believe that. I believe that’s wisdom to notice that—to say, well it isn’t the service to my momentary desires for pleasure or even comfort for that matter where I’m going to find the deepest significance, life-sustaining significance that keeps me away from nihilistic hell and the desire to destroy and hurt.

It’s going to be something like service to the greater good and primarily in the form of, well, other people in their longest possible term interests and that we have not only a divine responsibility to do that but a divine capacity to do that—that, if not manifested, cripples us spiritually and physically for that matter. And I mean the ultimate significance of that remains unknowable, but I don’t see any logical flaws in that, in the proposition.

I mean I looked at the manner in which the Mesopotamians built their savior, Marduk. Marduk has eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words. The cosmos comes into being and disappears as a consequence of his utterances. And like, there’s this sense emerging in Mesopotamia as the consequence of the aggregation of all these cultures that the highest order being is extraordinarily attentive—hence the all encircling eyes—and is capable of the deepest and most profound speech, and that’s not a realization that’s in any means trivial.

The Mesopotamians had wars between all of their representations of their gods and what they elevated to the highest position was this all-seeing truth-speaking capacity that also went forward and confronted chaos and built the world as a consequence. And the influence of that set of ideas—or the derivation from the set of same set of ideas—for the Jewish conception of Yahweh is quite clear.

And you see the same thing emerging in Greece with the building of a pantheon of gods and the proposition that something occupies the apex, something Apollonian or something of that nature. And then you see that revolution take place with the dawn of Christianity and the insistence that there’s something fundamental about consciousness and spoken truth that is constitutive of reality.

And you ask yourself, well, do you believe that? And the answer is, well you treat people like you believe that because you hold them responsible for the consequences of their utterances. And you judge their character on the basis of what they say and whether or not they act out what they say. And so we hold each other to these standards with everything that we do and we berate ourselves when we don’t live up to them.

And I don’t understand how it is that we can be said not to believe it now. You know there’s the dogmatic element—the hypothesis, for example, that Christ is literally the son of God. I mean my knowledge runs out very, very rapidly when speculating about such things but I’m certainly—it certainly seems to me that Christianity has at least been a very long conversation about what the nature of the good is and that that’s spilled out into the humanities and underlies our culture and that that has very little to do with the expression of power. It’s not the right lens through which to view things. It’s devastating, it’s wrong, it’s cynical and I think it appeals to envy and the desire to tear down.

Well, I think that the—well, two things I would say just very quickly, Jordan. The first is that we have immense resources in our own past and in the past of every culture. I mean, one of the things I love about your work is how syncretist it is. You know, here you’ve moved—in the last five minutes you’ve moved from Marduk to, you know, and the Pantocrator to the Greeks and good on you for doing it!

I mean that’s—I think—I want to say that you say people have not been good at making the counter argument. Well, you’ve been very, very good at making the counter argument. And the millions of people who’ve had their lives touched and ennobled and deepened by taking seriously the things you point towards are proof of that.

I think relative to our spiritual cultural crisis we should not pretend that we don’t have resources. I mean it’s as if, you know, the situation is as if you were to give young people the challenge of building something beautiful. And if you were to say, well, you’re absolutely not allowed to look at or have any knowledge of any previous building, well, the results are not going to be very good.

But as soon as you say, and you can go back to Palladio and Vitruvius and look at all of these models and discover all of the things that they give you, I mean, the results will be amazing. And so what I want to drive towards is a kind of optimism not rooted in this kind of, you know, silly blindness about the depth of our problems but rather in the nature of what is most real and the whole treasure house of tools.

It’s like we have these spotlights from the past to help us understand ourselves and the world around us in philosophy and religion and literature, in architecture and our—in art and painting and music, for God’s sakes. I mean, we’ve got an unspeakable treasure house here.

And it may be that as we dig into that we see that we uncover ourselves more and understand ourselves more adequately. You know, I want to do one example. You know, for example, I think one thing that is a—I live in a beautiful city—a very beautiful city—in historic Savannah. And I live on the edge of a just absolutely stunning civic space, a park called Forsyth Park.

I hope you can come and see it someday. There’s a beautiful fountain in the middle of it, and it has these oak trees, these live oaks that were planted by people long dead now—these oaks of, you know, one to two to even 300 years old. And I not infrequently see young couples coming to stand in front of one of the biggest— the biggest oak inside the park proper—to get married.

You know, they stand there with the justice of the peace and exchange simple vows and I think we have to ask ourselves what in the hell is going on there. And it seems to me, you know, very beautiful and in a way very simple. It’s that they wish that their vows they are aspiring to be to each other in some way as the oak tree, as able to live up to the love that they are called to.

And they want to instantiate that by—that’s where you turn to the garden and the tree in the center. Yes. Yes, the incorporation of the host is the embodiment; it’s the incarnation of Christ within. That’s what it’s acting out, that’s the idea. I mean, in some sense, it’s the consumption of the saving element, but the saving element is actually a mode of being.

And this isn’t hit home. It’s like, look, what the church demands everything of you. Yeah, absolutely everything. And then the reason that that people are leaving is because that adventure isn’t being put before them. It’s like, look you can have your cars and your money and all of that, but that’s nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on.

Yes, I wish you’d preach to our people because I think you’re absolutely right about that. The language we’d use is be a saint. That’s what—that’s the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint. A saint means someone who’s holy or utterly conformed to Christ. Now press that to be conformed to Christ means you’re willing to go into the dysfunction of the world, to bear its pain, and to bear to it the ever greater divine mercy and love.

Now fill in the blank—Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, maybe in our time like when we were younger, if someone said, well, who’s a living saint, we all would have said Mother Teresa. Well, what did she do? She went into the worst slum in the world. I’d been there and she bore the suffering of the world, literally picking up the dying and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering.

She took on herself the wounds of Jesus. But then think about, you know, the smile of Mother Teresa. She brought to that place the ever greater, more superabundant mercy of Christ. That’s being a saint, and you’re dead right. I think we’re not sufficiently calling our people to do that.

I can tell you one thing I’ve experienced—and this is really something to see. I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially with a day or two in between, and to large audiences, three to ten thousand all the time, something like that. And I always paid attention to the audience singly, because I was always talking to one person at a time but also on mass.

You know, to see, to hear, because if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source, then there’s silence. And sometimes that silence can be dramatic. That’s why people say, well, you could have heard a pin drop. It’s no one’s moving because their attention is 100 percent gripped by whatever just happened. And one thing that reliably elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility. And people—when I thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because no one says that now. They say happiness or they say rights or they say privileges or they say reward or something like that. They don’t say, pick up the heaviest load you can carry and care for that matter and stumble forward.

And I’ve seen people cut those ideas and put them on T-shirts and play with them. So it’s not that the church is asking too little of its people; I’m recommending that we remember that meaning in life—and this is also something I’m doing empirical work on, right? That meaning in life is mostly bound right at the non-propositional level and it does feed into things like sacredness. I think reverence is the proper virtue of awe. Reverence is the virtue that helps us appropriately... well, reverence means it does hold as hold in ritual and is hold as a marker, as a pointer for ritual emulation.

I think that's embodiment, and that's the pulling in of that personality into the self. I think that’s right. But I think what ah, see ah is really interesting because ah—okay, so you can measure this. Ah is one of the few instances where people’s sense of self and egocentrism is shrunk and they find it a positive experience and they want it to continue. Right?

Well, that’s how what we experience in our current ego when we hypothesize our ideal as well. I think that’s right, and that goes to—I mean those are the same things because there are capture or is the ideal. Ah is our unconscious ideal capturing us. Think about it—it’s the spirit within.

So imagine this. You already admitted, so to speak, that we’re canonic representations of the central animating spirit of the ages, and that speaks from our unconscious because it’s embodied within us, and then it finds its grip on us in awe, in admiration. Would you say though—so there’s a question like would you say that it’s not only the end, the unconscious within us, but the unconscious without us? Because I think it’s—

Yes—it’s the unconscious in the books behind you. Yes, and also the unconscious in the world, because I think part of what we’re trying to do—I think we got too locked into the gnosis, the notion of the sacred as perfection, completion. This is one of my critiques of Plato, although I’m normally a lover of Plato, and I think you can see in the mystics and in many traditions, this is a claim I can back up, but I’m just going to throw it out there.

Right? Even in even in Jonathan’s tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy, is the sacred the good becoming better? Well the sacred is an inexhaustibleness, right? And yes, that’s why I’m asking that question. Yes, because when I’ve had visions of heaven, heaven is a place that’s perfect and getting better.

Well, okay, well, okay, let me give you my sense. The place where I—I don’t have visions, but the place where I experience what I’m talking about—I wouldn’t recommend them necessarily.

Yeah, well, I mean we can compare altered states of consciousness another time perhaps. Oh, yeah, okay, if you’d really like to do that, would you?

Well, let me just finish the point I was making. So, for me, don’t be before-on to another universe you mean? See, for me, I tell people that Plato is sacred, which does not mean that I can’t that I can’t question him. It does not mean that I can’t disagree with him.

It means the following: Plato transforms me. I go out and live my life for a while, the world then changes me. Because of the way I’ve been changed, I come back and I see things in Plato I didn’t see before. And then I go back to the world. The thing is, when the Bible does that for people.

Yes, and that’s why the Bible is sacred. And what Plato, I think, argues and what Taoism argues and I think Christianity argues, where there’s also the book of nature—there’s always the two books of revelation. You can actually experience that with respect to nature.

I don’t particularly like that term, but you can experience that with—right where the world—I think introverts do that in particular—that’s a hypothesis of mine. I don’t have evidence for it, but I’ve noticed my introverted clients need to be renewed by nature.

When I’ve tried to reduce this, I mean that experience of awe. So we went to a co—we went to a whole conference on that.

So if you see someone that you really admire, that shades into awe. And you can see that in the effect that celebrities have on the public. It’s peril—it can be paralyzing.

So the admiration—there’s a continuum between admiration and awe. And then you can easily make the case, I think, that admiration is the felt sense of the instinct to imitate. So you see children, maybe they’ll hear a worship someone and then they’ll imitate them, they’ll copy them. They find someone who’s in that zone of proximal development, and they start to copy them, or they’ll take on the identity of a hero or heroine in a movie. My little granddaughter, who’s three, for a year now literally— a year—she has two names, Scarlett and Elizabeth, and we kind of call her one or the other.

And if you ask her is she Scarlett, she’ll say yes. Is she Ellie? Yes. Is she Pocahontas? Yes. Is she Scarlett, Ellie, or Pocahontas? Pocahontas. One year now, she watched that Disney movie over and over and she has a Pocahontas doll.

But and she’s picked that figure and that’s a quasi-mythological figure obviously not a historical figure. She’s picked that as her identity and I see that as—we can imitate people. We talked about reality and hyperreality before. Well, you can find someone you admire, and they’re real; or you can find someone who’s a mythological figure and they’re hyperreal.

And the hyperreality is so adaptive that imitating the hyperreal is more adaptive than imitating the real. And that, to me, that’s the essence of the religious instinct. It’s to derive the hyperreal and then to imitate that. And I think that’s what worship means, essentially—all with everything stripped away.

And so that’s a profound instinct because human beings are unbelievable mimics. I mean, that’s a very underappreciated element of our cognitive architecture, a fundamental element. And that instinct to admire and experience awe facilitates that mimicry, and that increases the probability of the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior.

Okay, so and then what does that make of the religious domain something real as far as I’m concerned, even real from the biological sense? But that deepens the mystery of the involvement of the psychedelics in that. Like are they parasitizing that? Are they like cocaine hyper-stimulating the psychomotor stimulant system?

Well, does psychedelics hyper-stimulate the imitation-awe system? And is that an illusion, or is it, in fact, a revelation of something deeper yet?

Yeah, just circle back to the ontological question.

So just recently I listened to a lecture that Francis Collins gave. Now, so Francis Collins, you may recognize, is director of the National Institutes on Health. He was also the director of the Human Genome Project. You know, so he’s as strongly credentialed a scientist as one can have and yet he’s an absolutely confirmed Christian.

So he was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of, I think he called it, harmonization of a scientific and religious worldview. But he was he was laying out his arguments for the existence of God and one of them is what would be his claim—an interesting claim. You could argue it. But the existence of moral law—that there is an absolute moral law. Look, you know, I looked at Jack Panksepp’s work; you know, and he shows that you see complex morality emerging, rats, in play.

Play—iterated play—which is a crucial issue, right? What pattern of behavior is sustainably optimal across repeated social interactions? Well, you hear all these postmodern critiques, say, of hierarchical structure because of its predication on power. I think no, no corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power. Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal productivity.

You know, I was talking to this joker, willing, who was the commander of Fallujah 20 years ago. He’s a real warrior type, you know, like a real intimidating person, physically and mentally for that matter. He talked about his Navy SEAL training. And you know, he said, well, we were taught, it was pounded into us to have the back of the guy next to us.

It wasn’t like every powerful clamoring ape for himself. Not at all. In these intensely competitive hierarchies, which would be—you’d think as pure a manifestation of the power motive as would be possible, power is not the guiding ethos. And he said quite clearly, no, your men won’t attend to you unless it’s reciprocal. They have to know you have their backs. And he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate in strategizing and also in taking care of your team.

And so I don’t believe that—so what am I getting at in relationship to your last point—this religious, this emergent ethic, this natural law? Okay, so imagine now hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle if they’re to be stable and productive across long spans of time. And that pattern emerges across culturally.

It’s something like that. There’s more to it than that. Okay, now you’re selected for your success in those hierarchies based on your ability to manifest that pattern because that will push you up the hierarchy. That increases, as far as I can tell, that increases your attractiveness as a potential mate substantially.

And so I think you can make a very deep biological case for the—even for the emergent evolution of an ethical sense. And I think that does speak to people in the voice of their conscience. And that that is part of—but then you think, well, if that’s part of existence, how deep a part is it? How built-in is it? You know, and I—I don’t, and that, I suppose depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to being.

Okay, so back to back to the gentleman that you were discussing—he was talking about a natural ethic?

Yeah, well I think as a pointer to God, something absolute about the nature of what moral law is. And from that standpoint, if you’re willing to go that route, then maybe these experiences are actually pointing to something that is absolute and true and informative.

Do you think that’s true? I don’t know. I’m a scientist; it’s fine to be investigating it. You know what? Yeah, no, I’m going to pin you down. No, let’s see. You know, my—I'm trained as a scientist; my default is to be deeply curious and to be deeply skeptical, right?

Which is the right attitude towards... yeah. And so my response always is that I believe in the data. And so that remains an open question but it’s certainly fun to toy with as a... as an alternative framing of what’s going on.

I mean we’re in the middle of this huge, huge mystery. I understand and appreciate the symbolic significance of the ideal human being and that finds its embodiment and I took these ideas in large part from Jung and Eric Neumann—the Christ is a represent—Christ is at least a representation of the ideal man, whatever that is. And we all, interestingly enough, we all seem to have an ideal and that ideal has us, right?

And that’s where it’s very interesting to consider the role of conscience because your conscience will call you out on your behavior. And that means that you have an ideal and you don’t even know what the hell it is, but you certainly know when you transgress against it.

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

And so to some degree, the conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within. And that’s a perfectly reasonable biological explanation, but the thing is, is the deeper you go into biology, the more it shades into something that appears to be religious because you start analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself and it becomes something... well, it becomes something with a power that transcends your ability to resist it.

So, okay, so you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective. And the critic, my critic, this particular critic that I’ve been reading said, well that that doesn’t differentiate Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods. And, of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion. Joseph Campbell did that, and Jung to a lesser degree I would say.

But Campbell did that. But the difference—and C.S. Lewis pointed this out as well—the difference between those mythological gods and Christ was that there’s a representation of—there’s a historical representation of his existence as well.

Now you can debate whether or not that’s genuine; you can debate about whether or not there’s credible objective evidence for that. But it doesn’t matter, in some sense, because this—well, it does—but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter because there’s still a historical story.

And so what you have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth. And in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things. The problem is, is I probably believe that but I don’t know—I don’t—I don’t—I’m amazed at my own belief and I don’t understand it, like because I’ve seen sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch, you know, that’s union, synchronicity.

And I’ve seen that many times in my own life and so in some sense, I believe it’s undeniable. You know, we have a narrative sense of the world; for me, that’s been the world of morality. That’s the world that tells us how to act. It’s real, like we treat it like it’s real.

It’s not the objective world but the narrative and the objective world touch, and the ultimate example of that, in principle, is supposed to be Christ. But I don’t know what to—and that seems to me oddly plausible, yeah, but I still don’t know what to make of it. It’s too... it’s partly because it’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe.

I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it. This critic said that the mere psychologization of Christ was insufficient because—and you made the same case in some sense—that it doesn’t make sense unless the narrative and the objective world truly touch. And I think you could debate that because I think that there’s some utility there; you could argue to be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth, you know, that the best way to cope with existence is to tell the truth and to face what you don’t know forthrightly.

And that will enable you to orient yourself within our finite and bounded existence that ends with our death more properly, more accurately, more advisedly than any other route. I’ve seen people from orthodox priests to, you know, the most Protestant Protestant you can imagine recognize in the way that you represent reality something that has value, something that has value because you are manifesting that—that pattern.

Like what you’re saying is true, but I think that—I think that if we take seriously the problem, the relationship between attention, psyche, and the way the world reveals itself to us, then it scales up. It scales up after that. It jumps up a level. And it also scales up in terms of... because one of the things that you talk about, like looking up to the star and looking up to the highest thing you can look at and then aiming towards that, you know, once again one of the things...

That does for us is actually—it’s a form. It’s attention that people don’t like—the word worship. It’s a form of reverence, a form of veneration. You submit yourself to that aim, so it’s not just that you see the aim and that you aim for it; you actually have to submit yourself to that which is to what you’re aiming.

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

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

Yeah, and I believe that that’s necessary. And I’ve had some profound experiences, which I can’t really relate here, that of the necessity for that community is that this—whatever our fundamental moral load is immense though it is, crushing though it is even—requires the participation of others.

So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people to be along with you. It’s a collective enterprise even though it's an individualistic—even though it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual level, that’s not enough. There has to be that communal element as well. You need help. We all need help to aim as high. The highest aim requires communal endeavor, yeah, and it's also because it actually is the way that everything works, you know.

It’s like the chair aiming to be a chair is a constitutive of parts which are joined together toward a same goal and therefore hold together as a being and manifest the chairness of the chair, and that’s the same with you. You have all these thoughts, right? You have all these feelings, all these contradicting things inside you, and you need, by aiming up towards, you know, the—I mean, I believe that the image of Christ, let’s say, by aiming towards the image of Christ, you constitute your being into that being that’s able to attend to sacrifice, to love, and then that scales up with people.

I agree. Well, I think you are. I mean this is another—something else I tried to point out to Sam. You are aiming—you’re either aiming at Christ or something lesser.

Yeah. Or if things get really out of hand, you’re aiming at something opposite and you don’t want to be doing that. But this is a matter of definition in some sense, and it’s actually not impossible to understand that is that you aim at something better. Generally speaking, I mean, maybe you’re out to cause pain, but forget about that. You aim at something better; you wouldn’t do it unless it was better.

In fact, it virtually defines better, like the whole idea of better is predicated on the idea that there’s an aim that’s beyond you, and then the highest of those aims is the amalgamation of all higher aims, and that’s a perfect mode of being. And that by definition—that’s a psychological perspective again—that by definition is Christ.

And then, but then there seems to be something too convenient about C.S. Lewis’s insistence that that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history. And I don’t like—I don’t understand why I should believe that, and I don’t—I tend not to believe things without a why. There’s always a why. And yeah, that—there’s a hurdle there that I waver on constantly because I—I already said that you’re—when you think these things through, at least my experience has been if you think them through sufficiently, you end up with the choice between impossible alternatives.

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

So if you want to understand, for example, the big conflict between the early Gnostics and the Christians, that’s what it was all about. Because the Gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated Christ. They were saying, you know—and they viewed the world as utterly fallen, as having no value, having to be escaped, having to be fled in every way, whereas Christianity posits that it’s a non-dual proposition. It’s saying it all comes together. That’s the promise; it all comes together.

And so it has to come down, right? And so it has to come down at every level and not only does it have to come down into the person of Christ, who’s incarnated, but that person has to go down, down into death to the very bottom of the world, you know, to the belly of Leviathan and then come back up. And so the whole world is declared as once again declared as being capable of participating in this good.

And so you could say, well maybe it wasn’t that one, maybe it wasn’t, you know, it’s like why would it be that particular place where it happened? But it had to be—that’s the place—that’s the story. I mean, that’s where—there is no other story like that story that we have. And so once you recognize that this is part of the declaration that the world does embody these patterns, that it leads to this story of a man who embodied them absolutely and is bringing us in him to also embody them in a way that will transform us.

You know, like the ultimate goal of the Orthodox vision of Christianity is theosis. It’s to become God—to become God through transformation and participation in God. So that’s the final goal of everything is to become participant in the divine. Where does your insistence that values are part of the structure of being? Like where does that find its limit?

Because the classic limit of that is something like the definition of the utmost place of value. In some sense it’s almost indistinguishable from the claim that there is a God. And so a God is not the same as an engineering God, and I take enormous pains in the book—it costs me more than anything I’ve ever written to write the chapter called The Sense of the Sacred, in which I try to help people to a place where they can understand why people use this extraordinarily difficult word God.

You know, it’s not a satisfactory term, but it’s the term we have to name an aspect of our experience that if we don’t name it, disappears from our lives. And that’s not to say that there isn’t something there that merits whatever we mean when we say divine. I mean we haven’t defined what we mean by divine. And we’re back in the nets of language; we’re trapped in the nets of language as Schelling said.

But what I’m suggesting is that as Whitehead suggested—and Komarow Whitehead was also the co-author with Russell of the Principia Mathematica; he wasn’t a fantasist—he had this I think incredibly deep idea that whatever one likes to call the divinity, God, whatever is the thing that the cosmos has relation with, relation is at the core of being.

I even argued that relation is prior to the relata, prior to the things that are related. That sounds nonsense; how can you relate, how can you have a relation if there isn’t anything yet to relate?

But there’s a wonderful image called Indra’s Net, which covers the universe. And in it, the idea is that the filaments of the net exist before the net, before the crossing points, which are the things we see. And on those crossing points, there are little gems which reflect every other gem in the net. And that would take a very long time to unpack, but perhaps it can set things going in people’s minds.

But the idea I gesture to the right hemisphere is that relation is prior to anything at all really and that therefore, the whatever you mean by God and whatever we mean by the cosmos are in some sort of dynamic relation which is an evolving one in which the outcome is excitingly not known. If it were known, it would all be some horrible, possibly sadistic play by an almighty, all-knowing God.

I mean, then look, I’m going to be talking to Rowan Williams shortly, but I don’t want to go to get into all that. I mean, by that I don’t think God is omniscient and omnipotent, but I don’t think he’s not either; just in the same way I don’t think he’s green and I don’t think he’s not green. I think the terms are wrong.

But we can go there if we want them later or another day, but the thing what I’m saying is that these—God is discovering, becoming unfulfilling. Whatever God is, through the relationship—which classically in most religions is described as love, which is after all just a form of gravity in the world of life and emotion, rather than just in the world of the so-called inanimate.

So therefore, we are coming into being, God is coming into being, and we’re necessary to one another’s coming into being. It’s not that God does a bit to us and then we do a bit back to God; it’s like I’ve read a very good book. I keep mentioning it by a young microbiologist in America called Kriti Shama called Interdependence.

She argues very importantly that it’s not just that certainly it’s not just that an animal or organism molds its environment, nor is it just good enough to recognize that while an animal affects and shapes its environment, the environment shapes the animal or organism. But this is not a turn-by-turn process; it’s not that the animal shapes the environment should then in its turn shapes the animal.

It’s an entirely simultaneous process of coming into being, of co-creation if you like. Now this idea of simultaneous coming into being is an ancient one but I think it’s a very deep one philosophically and a very important one.

So that accounts for your objection to the idea of the omniscient determining God? Absolutely, absolutely. Because God would have—God would have no creation. Creation is not really just the unfolding of something that’s already there. The idea of negative theology is you fundamentally...

I wonder if this is like Jung's circumambulation—you fundamentally understand God by saying what God is not, but not of course randomly, right? What you’re trying to do—oh, that’s sort of like the God of the gaps.

Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, sorry. Oh, no, that's—don't apologize. We’re friends talking.

Well, I don’t—I don’t want to derail the conversation, so it’s been—it’s been like this, and it’s been wonderful. It feels to me like doing Tai Chi.

No, it’s more that it’s more of a recognition of—not of the God of the gaps, but of a recognition of how our categorical scheme is always inadequate. So, for example, is God an object? Well, no, that’s wrong. Is God a subject, like the way we are? No, that’s wrong too.

That’s it, right? So God escapes our categorization. Right. God is by definition, in some sense, the—what escapes our categorization, because God is supposed to be the grounding of the intelligibility that makes the categorical scheme possible, at least that’s right.

But there’s also presence within present within the category scheme if it’s set up properly. So right, so the point about negative theology—that’s why it’s not just the God of the gaps. The point is to see within the category, that it’s present within the categories, but it’s not capturable within the categories. That’s what you’re trying to do.

Yes, the reality supersedes the categories, which is why you’re not supposed to make idols. You’re why you’re not supposed to make representations of—you can make icons. Just to summon Jonathan back into the conversation one more time, you can make icons, right?

And you’ve got John Luke Marion's distinction between the idol and what’s the distinction? The distinction—the icon does not capture God.

Right, that’s exactly it. It’s an artwork. So an artwork is an icon exactly, and propaganda is an idol. Yes, I would agree with both of those statements.

Well, isn’t that something? Because they’re really, in some sense, far astray, aren’t they? But they do map—and so how cool is that? So art is the icon. How cool!

And propaganda is the idol. Exactly, man. You know, and I had these paintings in my house and they were melds of the icon and the idol because there’s all this socialist realism. I have 200 pieces of socialist realism watching the icon in the idol fight with each other.

Well, and the problem is they are—and I want to get the entomology of this word—they at a superficial level of similarity, they can easily be confused. They can be confused.

Okay, yes. Well, that’s—they will inevitably be confused in the absence of God. Well and I, because we make religious the next thing on the hierarchy if we don’t give to what is religious its proper place. And I think the new atheists are beginning to realize this.

The amount of the world’s evil that’s a consequence of our voluntary moral insufficiencies is indeterminate. You might say hypothetically speaking that as part of God’s creation we actually have important work to do, and if we shirk it, the consequences are real.

And you might say, well that’s just an apology for God and perhaps that’s the case, and perhaps there’s no God at all. And so what the hell are we talking about? But I do think it’s an important issue.

I mean your life is characterized by a stellar level of constant productive creativity—that’s you and you’re offering that to the world. And that seems necessary. And maybe it’s because the problems are real and important, and the role we have to play ethically is of paramount importance, truly.

Yeah, why else would we torture ourselves with conscience? And I would say that’s the flowering of the religious instinct within you.

Well, you could describe it as that, but then, you know, there are phrases. I mean you used a phrase earlier that I wanted to say, whoa, hang on, I’m not sure I know what that means—a higher mode of existence.

I remember having this argument with John Cleese, of all people, some years ago. He was a great lover of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Gibran and people like that, and I’ve always found them slightly hard to take. And he talked about a—I think the phrase he used was a higher level of consciousness. And I said, I don’t—and again, this is my empiricist thing. It sounds cynical and skeptical; it’s not meant to be.

But what level? Who’s a what describer level? What is a higher mode? Why higher? What’s higher than another? Are you saying it in terms of animals? It’s an old-fashioned Huxleyan view of evolution that most modern, Richard Dawkins for example, most modern evolutionary scientists and so on, the ethologists would deprecate.

To say that there is a higher level of being, a higher mode of consciousness, is it just like saying, well you’re better educated, you’ve read more, you know more? Is it you’ve somehow been enlightened, a fair Klans effect, as the Germans would say, which is not necessarily intellectual but is somehow spiritual?

And if so, show me an example of it. Show me someone who has a higher mode of existence than I do. Or the—I can answer that, I think to some degree, three ways. Three ways. One, that higher mode of existence is what your conscience tortures you for not attaining. Right?

Okay, okay. I don’t think my conscience tortures me for not attaining. It’s that I was rude to someone yesterday and I shouldn’t have been— right, but it’s the shouldn’t part of it. Yes, the obligation. It’s the T—exactly, David Hume, the problem of ought.

Yeah, well then you think about how it manifests itself—you know this is why Nietzsche was wrong. You cannot create your own values. The values impose themselves on you independent of your will. Now maybe there you partic—well that’s what your conscience does.

And good luck trying to control it! This is very anti-nature, isn’t it? It’s—well, I’m a great admirer—

I know you are! That’s why I was—that’s why I made the point. Well, opposite to his philosophy.

But it’s—well, so Jung embarked on a lengthy critique of Nietzsche, and it’s part of his work that isn’t well known, I would say. But—and we’ll leave that be except to say that the psychoanalysts starting with Freud, well, not really, but popularized by Freud and systematized, showed that we weren’t masters in our own psychological house.

Nice, there were autonomous entities, yes—and those would be the Greek gods to some degree that operated within us, and we were—which is Julian Jaynes’ point exactly, yes. Yes, yes.

I have my problems with Jaynes, but as an overarching idea, there’s interest in it. Okay, so there are things happening with us and to us in the moral domain that we cannot control. Yeah. And that stunned me when I first learned it as a proposition—it’s oh yes, look at that!

Here’s one, what are you interested in? What grips you? Okay. Number two, what does your conscience bother you about? Okay, that’s—you’re inadequate by your own standards. Now, what adequate would mean—that’s a different question, but it’s defined negatively by conscience, yes.

And then better—there’s one out of that, I said I would lay out three—you can look at Jean Piaget’s work on developmental psychology, the development of the subject. Yes, he was a genetic epistemologist. He wanted to do this is what he wanted to do. He wanted to unite science and religion; that was his goal. And he wanted to look at the empirical development of values.

And what he concluded, at least in part, was that a moral stance that’s better than a previous moral stance does all the things that the previous moral stance does plus something else. Yes, yes. And you can say the same thing—no, as a scientific theory.

I remember I had a great—I loved Piaget, and his observation was so empirical, of course, yes, absolutely, the development of the child and the—not quite the theory of mind that wasn’t his thing, but similar developments and signposts where people become aware of self.

Okay, so now Piaget looked specifically at the development of morality, and he was one of the first people to emphasize the importance of games. And what he showed at two years old, let’s say, a child can only play a game with him or herself, but at three, both children can identify an aim and then share it in a fictional world.

And so that’s partly pretend play and the beginnings of drama, and then cooperate and compete within that domain. And then what happens—and the game theorists have shown this—is that games out of games morality emerges.

Yeah, there’s a result. So I’ll give you an example; this is a crucial example. So if you pair juvenile rats together, the males, they have to play—they have to rough and tumble play because their prefrontal cortexes don’t develop properly if they don’t.

Anyways, they have to play. You pair a big rat and a little rat—teenage rats together—and the big rat will stomp the little rat. So first encounter, you say power determines hierarchy. Yeah, okay.

But then you pair the rats multiple times, like 50, then if the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win 30 of the time, the little rat will stop inviting him to play. And so you get an emergent reciprocity even at the level of the rat.

One of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is something like attention, right? There’s a hierarchy of manifestation because everything that happens— that appears to us in the world has an infinite amount of details, right? It has an indefinite amount of ways that you could describe it; that you could angle it by which you could analyze it and so nonetheless the world appears to us through these hierarchies of meaning.

I always kind of use the example of a cup or a chair. Like a chair is of just a multitude of things; it’s a multitude of parts. How is it that we can say that it’s one thing? There’s a capacity we have to attend. And this capacity we have to attend is something like a co-creation of the world.

And so the world actually exists. A chair is a good example because, you know, you can try to define it objectively, but you end up with bean bags and stumps, and they don’t have anything in common. Well, they’re both made of matter, you know, for whatever that’s worth. It’s a pretty trivial level of commonality.

But you can sit on them. Yeah, and that’s what you have. There’s a mode of being which they find well, and that’s so strange.

So many of our object perceptions are projected modes of being, and so even the objective world is intellectually contaminated with its utility and then therefore with morality. Exactly.

And so I think that that’s the key. The key is that once you understand that the world manifests itself through attention and that consciousness has a place to play in actually the way in which the world reveals itself and so you can—you can try to posit a world outside of that first-person perspective, but it’s good—it’s very, very difficult because you don’t know what to make of something like time. Because time has an inerratically subjective element and duration which is different than time.

I mean time is kind of like the average rate at which things change, but duration is something like the felt sense of that time. And if you take away this objectivity, it isn’t obvious what to do with time. And I think physicists stumble over this all the time, so to speak; so—and this is something that this intermingling of value and fact was something that I never thought—I never thought I made much traction with Harris—with Sam Harris.

He didn’t seem to me to be willing to admit how saturated the world of fact is inevitably with value. And I actually think he’s denying the science at that point because for everything I know about perceptual psychology there’s a great book called Vision as a—oh God, now I can’t remember the name of the book. That’s memory trouble! I’ll remember it. No worries.

The idea is that if that is true, then there are certain things which come out of that, there are certain necessary things down the road from that that insight, which is that attention plays a part in the way the world lays itself out. And that one of them—and one of them is that the stuff that the world is made of is partly something like attention, something like consciousness, and that has a pattern.

And that pattern is the same pattern as stories, it just doesn’t lay itself out exactly the same. But things exist with a pattern which is similar to stories. They have identities; they have centers; they have margins; they have exceptions. And that’s how stories lay themselves out.

Like so a story happens in time how an identity, let’s say, is broken down and then reconstructed. You could say that that’s basically the story of every story, how something breaks down and is reconstructed. And so that is a way for us to perceive the identity of things.

And so if the world is made of this, then it’s actually our world, our secular world, which is a strange aberration on how reality used to exist for every culture and every time from the beginning of time, which is to take that for granted—to take for granted that something that they didn’t call it consciousness, but intelligence and attention are part of how the world lays itself out.

And it lays itself out in modes of being. And one of the things that comes out of it is not only that, but like you said, it’s not only that you have ideas, but it’s that ideas have you. Or that it’s not only that you engage in modes of being; it’s that modes of being have you.

And that recognition means that the first level of the first level of attention to that looks something like worship. It looks like celebration. It looks like the thing which makes the, let’s say, the National Hockey League so successful has more to do with celebration than just a bunch of guys on skates on a piece of ice, you know, throwing a puck around.

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

Yeah, and there’s the hockey league example is very interesting because it’s a social game, and you know, all the players are—they’re attempting to aim, right? So there’s a symbolic element to that sin is misplaced aim.

And so you hit the—you hit the small space in the net, blocked though it may be by your enemies, and everyone celebrates that. And you do that in cooperation with other people and in competition with other people, and if you do it properly, not only are you a brilliant player from a technical perspective, but you’re also a great sport.

And so there’s an ethic there, and this is why people are so upset when hockey players or any other pro athlete does something immoral in their personal life is because it violates the ethic that’s being celebrated as a consequence of this great game.

Yeah, and so you can see that the striving for an ideal mode of being, the religious striving for an ideal mode of being, is central to what it is that makes hockey addictive.

That’s right. Yeah, it necessarily—and so God, I saw that pro wrestling—there’s a great documentary, Bret Hart, called Hitman Hart. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen and it portrays pro wrestling as a stark religious battle between the forces of good and evil.

And Bret Hart, who at one point was the most famous Canadian in the world, was overwhelmed by the archetypal force of his representation as the good guy. It’s a great documentary, Hitman Hart. And it shows you how pro wrestling is—it's not the world’s most intellectual activity to say the least and people can easily be dismissive of it, but one of the things I loved about the documentary was that it attempted to understand from within what was compelling about what was being portrayed.

And it was a religious drama. It just was shocking and brilliant. And so that is—that is actually, there is an objective part of that—that there’s an objective way in which these patterns kind of come together and manifest, let’s say, higher and higher versions of this drama.

And so the sports drama has a certain level, but it’s limited to a certain extent because it still happens as a confrontation, let’s say, between two irreducible sides. And so what happens in something like the story of Christ is that that gets taken into one person.

And so all the opposites become the king and the criminal. The highest—even in the image of the cross, you have this image, Sandy, as Christ is being crucified. They are putting a sign above his head saying that he’s the king, as Christ is being beaten, they’re giving to him a crown.

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

I mean, it can’t just be a story; it has to be connected to the world. So that’s why Christians insist on the— the bodily resurrection, because there’s a distinction to that that implies you believe there is a connection between this story on the surface and something much bigger than you thought.

If that, in fact, is the event—the hinge point of history—that physically took place, I can’t deny that it creates a challenge, I think, to every human being who’s ever lived, in terms of grappling with the question of what it means.

And therefore, that leads me back to the anthropocentric approach, which I think is—that we can’t simply dismiss the idea of the resurrection as a comprehensive moral narrative. Because every time you engage in something that reflects a good action or a positive direction—every time that you engage in an active bond of love, the perception you create is a reflection on what the resurrection means.

It is this assurance that transcends the limits of time and space and human experience itself while acknowledging human limitations—all that together. And so therein lies the true moral center of it all, the unshakable notion of love that bears testament in our lives.

So what is exciting and transformative is to see how that love narrative, if we can envision it carefully together, rewrites the script of our lives—not allowing our existential challenges to blind us to the brightness that intimacy with God can bring.

This—a beautiful image painted through our actions—achieves balance, much like the religious harmonics you’ve mentioned, and becomes the fulcrum around which the individual expands into broader awareness—not only of oneself