Hello everyone. So for those who have not seen it, Jordan Peterson had
a pretty amazing discussion with Alex O'Connor, cosmic skeptic, who I've also talked
to on his channel as well. I have to say that of all the
celebrity atheists, this is Alex is really showing himself to be one of the
people that is truly paying attention, not only paying attention, but seems to
understand the arguments that Jordan is presenting more than any of the other kind of
celebrity atheists I've seen him talk to in the past. One of the frustrations
that I've had, and you know that is often in talking to these kind
of atheist types, it's actually that we just talk past each other. It's
not that we disagree. I mean, we do disagree, but ultimately,
at least for me, it's been very frustrating because I often feel like people
don't understand what it is that I'm talking about, don't understand the argument,
and then also have a kind of a kind of arrogance and not understanding the
argument, which makes it even more difficult. Right to not get annoyed at
that kind of conversation, but in this conversation between Jordan and Alex. You
really get the sense that Alex has been working very hard at trying to kind
of understand what it is that Jordan is getting at, not only that,
but also willing to push his own understanding of what religious thought is and has
been thinking trying to think deeply about the stories about you know, what they
mean about you know, what would it mean for them to have happened also
in a in a more kind of physical sense or not all of this stuff.
Anyways, the conversation is very interesting, definitely worth watching, and surprisingly,
Alex is able to get questions out of Jordan Peterson that many people have
not been able to get, which even surprised me. That is, Alex
asked them if someone put a camera in front of the Tomb of Christ,
if it would have captured someone walking out and I think during's sense of like
a suspect, so which really surprised me. And so so yeah, so
great stuff. So I thought I would kind of put peek in and talk
about one of the things that they discussed. Alex had some very interesting insights
about their story in Genesis, about the story of the Fall, about the
question of the serpent of who is the serpent, what is the serpent's relationship
to Christ? There would be so much to talk about. But one of
the things that Alex said is that there's a problem in the text because God
says to Adam and Eve, on the day that you eat the fruit,
you will die. And then when they eat the fruit, he said,
well, they don't die. And so what's going on? Why is it
that when that God says that on the day that you eat, the day
that you eat the fruit, you will die, and they don't die.
And so what I want to do is I want to look at the story.
I want to look at how, in fact they do die when they
eat the fruit. Not only do they die, but that the manner in
which they die is actually just like everything in the Book of Genesis at the
beginning of Genesis is an origin story, but we're noticing what we're seeing in
the moment when they eat the fruit is an origin of death. Not only
an origin of death in the banal sense, but an origin in the sense
that it shows us and helps us understand what death is. It becomes a
lens by which we can look at death. After that, and so I
thought it'd be useful to look at that, you know, just even for
you guys, because it's an interesting subject. This is Jonathan Pejol Welcome to
the Symbolic World. And so before we start, if you enjoy what we're
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we're doing, all right, And so, as you know in the story
of Genesis, God tells Eve not to eat the fruit of the knowledge of
the good and evil. They can eat of all the fruit in the garden
except for that one. And if they do on the day that they eat
of that fruit, they will die. And so then the serpent comes and
says, surely you will not die. If you eat the fruit, you
will become like God knowing good and evil, and so Eve is tempted,
she eats the fruit, and then a bunch of stuff happens. Now,
I've talked before about the idea that in some ways the serpent is telling the
truth, and so I won't go into that right now. You know,
maybe we could talk about it another time, that the serpent is not completely
lying. Just like all lies, there's an asp of it which is true
and which will show itself to be true in the story of Christ. Later
about the idea of eating the fruit and dying. But let's see what it
is that happens after the heats the fruits. So I'm not going to go
through the text, but I did made a list of all the things that
happened to them. Hopefully I get this right. If you feel like I'm
missing something, go ahead in the comments, all right. So, when
Adam and Eve ultimately eat the fruit, the first thing that it says that
happens to them is that they realize that they're naked. And then what they
do is that, knowing that they're naked, they hide themselves from each other.
They put they soafig leaves on their bodies, and then they hide themselves
from God. Then when God finds out, he comes to see them,
and immediately what Adam does is he blames Ev. He says, this woman
that you gave me, she gave me this fruit. And then God turns
to Eve, and then Eve lays the serpent. The next thing that happened
is that God cursed the serpent and tells the serpent that the serpent will eat
dust. He says that there'll be enmity between the woman and the serpent,
the serpent and her offspring, and that the woman's offspring will crush the head
of the serpent, and the serpent will strike at the heel of that offspring.
He tells you that you'll have pain and childbirth, that you'll have desire
for a husband, but he will rule over her. He says that the
ground is cursed, and then he says that to atom, and he says
that now it will be painful to get food. You have to work in
order to find food. The world will pursue, will produce thorns and thistles,
and you'll have to eat the plants of the field. And then finally
he ends his pronunciation by saying that for dust you are, and to dust
you will return. You have come out from the ground. We have to
return to the ground. And so the key for us in understanding all of
these statements is in the last heart, is in the very end of the
statement where God says to Adam, from dust you are and from dust you
will return. If you remember, in the second Creation account, God gathers
the dust of the earth and then blows the spirit into the dust. And
that is how God, that is how man becomes a living spirit becomes a
living being. And so you know, when you look at that, you
might at the outset think okay. And then they leave the garden. It's
like, well, if God said that they would die, why don't they
just drop dead? You know, why don't they just eat the fruit and
drop dead? And I think it's because people do. Death is one of
those things that we think we understand, but that we usually don't have very
good definitions for, and that we don't totally understand what it is that they're
referring to. And also to understand the death is something that doesn't just apply
to a person, but that applies at every level, every ontological level of
reality. That there's analogies to what death is at every antology level. And
this is of course what's going on here is that all the elements are trying
to help us understand what death is. We have a kind of origin story
for death. And like I said, the clue is in the idea of
dust. So the idea is that now you will become dust. Now what
does it mean to become dust? First of all, what is dust?
Dust is basically in a massive things that have no relationship with each other.
That's what dust is the difference. And then God gathers the dust together,
all these disperse elements, and then he puts a spirit in it. He
puts a breath in it. He puts heaven inside, he puts a name
inside, he puts meaning inside, he puts purpose inside. He puts all
the things that are invisible patterns that legislate disperse elements. He puts that in
this gathering of dust. Now the dust is animated. Now the dust is
now is no longer dust, but is one being, even though it's still
made of dust. And so this is the difference between life and death.
The difference between life is and death is the difference between unity, which contains
multiplicity, and multiplicity, which no longer has unity bringing it together. That
is the difference between life and death. And so the difference, if you
like, in the most mundane way, the difference between a live animal and
a dead animal is the difference between all these different elements in an animal that
are moving towards the purpose, purpose of survival, the purposes that animals have,
and then all of a sudden, something happens to the animal. Now
the breath leaves, right, the spirit leads the animal, and the Bible
says, we don't know if it goes up or it goes down. But
let's say the spirit leaves the animal, and now the elements of the animal
no longer cohere completely towards purpose, and that's why they will start to decompose.
The elements will start to break apart from each other. It takes time,
but at the moment of death, that process has already become There's a
mystery by which death is actually part of life, but that would be too
complicated to talk about that right now. But the idea of something that is
dead is something that has lost now its unitary purpose. Now, this is
the best way to understand what death is, and it can be applied at
different levels of reality. So if you understand that, that is what it
means for you to die. So when you die, your body now is
still there, but it starts to decompose because there's nothing holding it together towards
purpose. So you can understand then that all the things that move you away
from your purpose are akin at least to death. That is sickness. For
example, when your body is breaking down and is not capable of properly moving
towards its purpose, then that is a process of death. Old age,
when you get older and your body starts to wither and it no longer easily
moves towards the purpose that you have for the body, then that old age
is also akin to death. Now it's not arbitrary that both death, both
disease and old age do lead to death in the in the absolute sense,
like in the sense that now there really is this complete separation between the reason,
the spirit, the unifying principle, and the and the disparate elements,
and you can see the process all alonge. But that's this is what it
is you're supposed to understand. But now you can also apply to anything that
has commonality, and so you can say that you can say you know,
with a true analogy, you can say, well, the death of my
friendship with this person, and so which is the death my friendship with this
person means? It's not like, you know, we don't cease to exist
like me and Bob. We were still there. So what does it mean
for a friendship to die? It means that the thing that bound us together,
that created a third reality, which is our relationship, which is the
communion of us together, is now gone. And because of that, now
Bob and I are going are separate ways. And it's if you say the
end or the death of an empire, the end of the death of a
nation, that's the same thing. The things that are that made the empire
are still there, right, the remainders of the buildings, the matter,
the people are there. But what happens is now they no longer have a
reason in order to join together and to participate in a common identity. It's
true for the death of a company, for the death of anything that you
can imagine that has a unifying principle holding it together towards purpose, and then
that principle going away. The elements now disperse and become something like food for
something else. They become potential for other beings. So you know, it's
like, if I'm no longer friends with Bob, I can still be friends
with someone else. And so that, you know, like, let's say
friendship is complicated gas multiple Let's say I'm married to someone and then I get
divorced and that's the death of our marriage. But now I become potential for
another relationship that I can engage in. And that's true for nations, it's
true for companies, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, and so this
is what dying means, and this is what begins to happen at the fall,
and so all the elements that are there in the story are there to
show that. And so what's the first thing that happens That the Adam and
Eve noticed that they're naked and that they have to protect themselves. And so
why do you have to protect yourself from something? You have to protect yourself
from something because it's not you, it's not part of you. You know,
you have to protect your something because it is hostile to the identity.
So a company has to protect itself from spies from the other company because those
spies are hostile to the purpose of the company. A being has to protect
themselves from being hurt from a being, from someone, you know, hitting
them with the sword or whatever it is that you have to do. That
is the nature of protection. The nature of having to separate yourself in an
act of protection from someone else is an image of separation. It's an image
now of multiplicity that's losing its unitary function. So before that Adam and Eve
were naked, but they didn't have to protect each other. They didn't have
to protect each other from each other, and they also didn't have to protect
each other from God. There was multiplicity, but that multiplicity was moving towards
communion and unity. And now the multiplicity is moving away from communion and unity
and is becoming hostility, is becoming danger, is becoming shame, is become
I mean secret, All of these things are you know, why do you
have to keep a secret from other people? You have to keep a secret.
You have to keep a secret because the people that don't know the secret
are outside from you, And so you have this separation between inside and outside,
which is now formulated as a form of hostility. Now this is implicit
in the very eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
Matsyr my brother has a great way of helping people understand by saying that if
when you use the word good and evil, it has so much baggage because
it's people applied only to morality. But the best way to look at it
is to say, the tree of good and bad, right, And so
what is bad bad is that which is not related to the identity. And
so a bad chair is a chair that is moving away from the purpose of
the chair. A bad apple is an apple that is falling apart and is
no longer cohesive to the reason why I would care about an apple in the
first place. And so et cetera, et cetera. That is what bad
is bad is the movement away from an identity. Now the thing is about
good and bad. It is a necessary it is a necessary category for the
existence of multiplicity, because you can you can conceive of bad that's simply the
distance between beings. And so you know, it's like, how can I
say this, a car makes a bad lunch and and and you know,
like a bird makes a bad chair. And that's totally fine, because bad
can be understood as the distance between beings. Now, there is a danger
in the knowledge of good and evil, which is that you can you know.
Saint Ephraim the Syrian talks about this problem, which is that he said,
is that Adam and Eve were going to be given the fruit of the
knowledge of good and evil when they were ready, and so that they could
see bad from the position of good. But he said, because they took
it for themselves. Now what happened is now they see good from the position
of bad. Is that they are now trapped in multiplicity without unity, and
the unity seems that is as it appears far away, and that they can't
they no longer have access to it. But if you would see good and
evil from the position of good, you would say, then you would be
able to identify difference in a way that is completely normal, in a way
that is completely healthy, because I understand that, like I said that a
bird makes a bad chair, and that's completely fine. If I know the
good of the chair and I know the good of the bird, there's no
problem there. And so the problem happens when it happens from the other side.
And so when you look at what happens there, the nakedness is the
third part is the first part, and so you have the separation. They
have to separate themselves from each other because they have to protect themselves from God.
That have to protect themselves from each other. And then, of course
immediately what happens after that is that Adam blames Eve. Adam says it's her
fault, and he says it's the serpent's fault. Now that's an increase of
that separation. When we begin to blame each other for things, then we
are moving further and further away from each other. God curses the serpent and
says that he will eat dust. Now, the eating of dust of the
serpent is related obviously to the Adam and Eve becoming dust at the end that
now the serpent, you know, I've told I've said this a few times.
You have to understand the serpent as this coil, as a kin to
the Leviathan that surrounds the world. The serpent is the periphery. The serpent
is that which is around the center. It represents the marginality. It is
the dead skins, right, it is the changing of skins. It's change,
it's variety, it's different, it's a distance, is all of those
things. But now this serpent will eat the dust. That it will be
only connected to fragmentation and that which is broken down and will no longer simply
be an expression of the center. Like it won't be multiplicity as expressing the
middle. It won't be a variety or change or transformation as expressing the good.
Okay, that will change in the story of the Bible, right,
this is the story of the Bronze Serpent, and ultimately the story of Jesus
is there's a restoration of the function of the serpent as this agent of transformation
towards the good. But now in this case, God says to the serpent,
you will just eat the dust, like you will just be connected to
the outside. And then he puts enity between the woman and the serpent,
the serpent and her offspring. And you can see now it's the same problem.
So now because of that, you have two problems. You have chaos
and tyranny. You have two extremes. The world tends to move towards hyper
order in order to control the situation, and then there's also a move towards
you could say hyper chaos in order to you know, these two now kind
of face each other, and so you have the serpent wanting to bite the
heel of the person, and then because of that, now the person has
to crush. And that image of the serpent trying to bite the heel and
the human having to crush the serpent is an image of civilization itself. It's
the beginning of civilization. It's the beginning of all artificial structures that try to
keep chaos out. And that that which is wild, that which is trained,
that which is different, now is seen as threatening to the inside of
the city. And you have to, you know, you basically have to
over it in a manner that is different from the way that Adam ruled over
the world before. Before the fall, Adam named the animals. Adam ruled
over the world in a kind of a capacity to name the beings, you
know, and participate in their identity. But now this is the other side,
which is this idea of crushing and and and God just says that this
is how it's going to be. It's important to understand that this is just
the consequence of the eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil
improperly, and that the curse is just it's just like the simple consequence of
what that means. And it's showing us what death is. Like I said,
of course, the the the next one is pain and childbirth. And
this is maybe a little harder for people to understand why that's necessary, but
it has to do with this. It has to do with the fact that
the production of multiplicity and the production of difference is now painful, right,
It is no longer a natural production of multiplicity. You know, there's this
there's idea in the Church Fathers that that Adam and Eve were supposed to multiply
themselves in a manner that was something like intelligence, you know, going over
all of creation and kind of joining it together in this unity. But now
you know, human nature was broken, as some of their fathers say,
and now we have multiple people, and now those multiple people are born in
pain because the process of multiplication is now a process of suffering, just like
death is this breaking down of people, and suffering is related to that and
the same and so you have this the same thing that happened. So what
says that there's pain and childbirth and that her husband will rule over her is
a repetition at a different level of what we said before, which is that
you know, the serpent will move towards the outside and to dust, and
then we'll try to bite at the heel and there'll be a crushing of the
heel. And so now it's the same thing. The woman will be producing
multiplicity and pain, and then ultimately her husband will rule over will kind of
crush her in that way. So it's not like and once again we have
to always remember that this is just a description of how death functions and what
the process of the extremes of move it falling into duality does the ground being
cursed, of course, obviously, hopefully this is now becoming more and more
and more obvious. The ground being cursed is equivalent to the pain in childbirth
is equivalent to the eating of dust. And now Adam has to impose his
will on the world in order to in order to be able to live,
and the thorns and the thistles will resist him. So you have the same
structure, the dust and the serpent. And then ultimately the idea that the
dust is the serpent is biting at the heel, the man has to crush
it. The woman is might making multiplicity in desire, she kind of desires
her husband. He rules over her. Again, the ground is cursed.
You have and and the thorns and the thistles are attacking, and now you
have to you have to impose your will on it in order to make it
function. So this is a description of what death is. And you can
understand that this is something. Like I said, it's really good for you
to understand that this is how death functions, because this is what happens.
So think about now the process, let's say of a city or of a
company. And so you have a kind of unity in multiplicity. And when
that's going well, there's a balance, right, there's a sense in which
the multiplicity is moving as in a kind of dance, towards the purpose of
the company, and there's a there's a flow of identity from the company,
and there's a flow of participation from the bottom up. Now, some things
can happen in a break where there's a lack of trust, where there is
a sin from above, let's say, where the people, the leaders of
the company, start to take too much for themselves, or they start to
act unfairly or whatever that is. And then that creates a kind of fracture
in the body. And then the body now starts to act against each other.
And now they're not focused on the purpose of the company. They're basically
infighting. They're trying to get their own they're trying to pull the blanket,
they're trying to make things. You know, they're trying to protect themselves from
each other because they see their leaders or they see their co workers as their
enemies, as their competition or whatever. And then and then you have this
sense of breakdown. And so the only one of the ways to deal with
that, and it can work to some extent, is then leadership sometimes has
to impose itself more strongly and say, okay, now we have to put
consequences, we have to make rules, we have to you know, we
have to create ways to discipline, ways to fire people, to get rid
of them so that if they're trying to infect the company. And so,
as the company grows, at the beginning, it'll be pretty organic, you
know, just a little team and everybody's kind of worked together and it's great.
Then it grows, and as the possibility of death starts to manifest itself,
then the systems of control will become can become not necessarily depends on the
company, but can become more and more tyrannical. And then you have this
exchange between a kind of distrust here and break down here and then more tyranny
at the top. I've talked about this many times in many videos about this
image of this relationship and how it culminates in the image of the prostitute and
the beast in revelation. And so of course, like I said, then
this ends with this image that from dust you are and from dust you will
return as the kind of culmination of the process of death. And so by
looking at the story of the Fall, you can actually understand the process of
death and what death is, and you can understand it fractally. Like I
said, you can understand that in some ways death is always somewhat active in
the in your life. It's always there, it's always part and there is
you know, how can I say this? There is also a way to
flip this, and there's a way to flip death into glory, which is
something I've talked about also many times, which is that you can make multiplicity
into a form of glory if you're able to flip the process of multiplication into
a way in which it expresses the fullness of the unity. And so that
is also possible. And this seems to happen through self sacrifice. This is
what I've been talking about with Jordan has been talking about that through self sacrifice
you're able to then you know, if the leader, for example, shows
that he's a self sacrificial character, that he's acting with love towards the people
that are making up the company, that he's not wanting to take everything for
himself, that he cares, that he takes care of the people below him,
and he's also giving himself to the purpose of the company, and isn't
just trying to make money. He has vision and he's willing to kind of
give himself towards that. If he does that, then then the multiplicity can
become a type of glory. It doesn't have to be death. It doesn't
have to be infighting and and and competition and the kind of fragmentation, but
it can align itself and then it can become an image of the can become
a kind of instantiation, very large instantiation of the vision of the company.
Right, And so it could be company could be anything. It could be
you could be, your life could be, your family be all kinds of
things. But this is of course, I think this is good to see
and so this was just a little, a little, you know, a
little rejoinder, just to kind of jump into the conversation. I thought,
like I said that the conversation between Jordan and Alex was really wonderful. There
are many other things that I could say about it, you know, and
maybe in the in the in the UH comment section, if there are some
aspects of that conversation do you'd like me to comment on that you think are
worthy, maybe I'll take that into consideration. And so thank you everybody,
Thank you for your attention. I hope you're having a wonderful time and I'll
talk to you very soon. Bye bye,