This is Jonathan Feeshel, Welcome to the symbolic world. If I have a
pattern of behavior, it is always towards a purpose. And then we realize
that that's what patterns are actually for. And so every time that we experience
multiplicity coming into one, every time we experience variability that suddenly appears as it's
moving towards purpose, what's happening is we are experiencing the music of the spheares.
We're experiencing the pattern of the cosmos, and it brings us great joy.
Every time you see a great past in the football game, you're experiencing
the music of the sphears, because you see these several players moving and all
of a sudden something happens. He throws the ball and the other person is
exactly in the right place. For some reason, they're not even looking at
each other, but they know where to be and it lets he catches it,
and we rejoice. Why do we rejoice? If you break it down
to its elements, it's pretty silly, right. Why do we rejoice?
We rejoice because we see multiplicity come into one. We see action move and
pattern towards purpose, and so we experience the We experience the music of the
spheares when when we see a cook make a great meal, because they take
all this stuff, the meat, the vegetables, the spices, they bring
them together, they mix them up, and not just mix them up,
they move them towards purpose. And so when we eat the meal, we
rejoice because we're experiencing the music of the spheres. We're experiencing multiplicity move into
pattern, multiplicity move into purpose. And so this this image, the image
of the the heavenly Man, if we can put it up again, of
the heavenly Man that is at the center of the of the of the spheres,
you know, it can help you understand a lot of the aspects of
that story. You know. That's why, for example, when he's born,
there's a there's a choir of angels. A choir of angels is the
same as the heavenly spheres. It's just exactly the same. There's no difference.
It's just music coming from above, something which is revealing to us the
great pattern, something that's happening in the world, which is hiding in it
a greater purpose and a and a higher pattern. So it's the same when
we see people dance, we also have that that that pleasure. It's like,
why do we enjoy dancing, especially dancing with someone else? Right,
Because then all of a sudden, you do see this multiplicity come together.
You do notice that you're moving in unison with someone else, that all of
a sudden, you know, you act and they react, and there's this
back and forth and that is the music of the spears. And we especially
experience the music of the spears in In a Great conversation, the cognitive psychologist
John Rivaki talks about d logos. He explains this idea that when you enter
into a real conversation and everybody has had that experience or all of a sudden,
you're carried, you know, and you build on each other's discussion.
So maybe you push back a little, but you nonetheless bring the person further,
and they push you back a little, but nonetheless you're brought further.
And all of a sudden you notice that there's almost like a third being the
room, that there's almost a third reality, which is the conversation itself.
And you know that that that third reality could not exist if you were alone
just thinking about whatever you're thinking about in your room, you know. And
the great theologian Bulgakov saw that reality as an image of the Trinity itself.
That this capacity to enter into conversation or into communion with someone else coming into
common purpose, and that common purpose appearing as the frame or as a as
a third reality in our in our communion, that it was an image of
the Trinity. And so this image of the you know, the music of
the Spherees is something that continues on until today. What does this have to
do with fair tales? My contention is that fairy tales are like tuning forks.
Fair tales are mechanisms by which we participate in that music, but also
mechanisms by which we train ourselves in the grammar of that music. And so
it's both a participation but it's also a training. And the way we can
think about it, we can think about the origin of fairy tales. You
know, this is speculative origin in but you'll notice that it's not that far
fetched. And so you can imagine a great way to think of fair tales.
You can imagine a bunch of grandmothers in villages telling stories, you know,
telling stories that are noticing when they tell certain stories with certain aspects that
all of a sudden people's attention perks and they're like, oh, now they're
listening to what I'm saying. And then the person listening to that remembers that
when their grandmother told that story, people were paying attention. And so then
when they tell the story in the same way, maybe they modified a little
and they noticed, oh, when I modified too much this way, Well,
it's not nothing that this is conscious by their way. They noticed that
they when they modified a little bit this way, then people stop paying attention.
If they modified this way, oh, then all of a sudden,
people are paying attention even more. Now. I imagine that happening over forty
thousand years, right, And so salient stories that gather attention, that are
remembered and are transmitted, and nobody has to know why, nobody has to
understand the story. Some people do, but most people don't, And that
actually doesn't matter. All that matters is the attention, the memory, and
the transmission. Because the music of the spheres is the meaning of things,
right, It's the purpose of things. It's the way that the pattern comes
together. And so when you remember something and when you transmitted, you're participating
in that game. You're participating in the game of meaning in the game of
relevance, maybe is the best better word even to use, that the stories
that are relevant will be transmitted and remembered by the very process of storytelling,
and there's almost no way around that. You know, for the same reason
that certain TV series become more popular and are remembered, for the same reason
that certain songs are more popular and remembered, it's because they have something in
them that capture more attention. And you can measure that over You can do
a how can I say this? You can do a shock version and get
attention, very short attention, and then some people will do that, you
know, even in the music sphere, but usually that attention peaks and then
goes away. What happens over time is that the regular pattern of attention gets
remembered, and so the stories will find will kind of move up and down,
will change, but nonetheless we'll keep transmitting that capacity for attention, for
memory and for transmission. And so it's a very it's a very powerful it's
a very powerful vision because what it means is that you can trust the fairy
tales. You can trust those stories that have been transmitted over thousands of years,
hundreds of years, you can trust them even if you don't understand them,
because they must necessarily manifest the pattern of human cognition. They must necessarily
manifest the pattern of human attention, of human memory, and that music of
the spheres, and so we have. Therefore, in these stories we have
very powerful tools, and you know, we change them to our peril.
We're actually dealing with the Chesterton's Fence situation here is that when we come up
to the stories and we try to modify them too much, we're actually we're
actually, you know, especially if you're dealing with children, you're actually in
danger of twisting their attention. Luckily, in the long term, the twisted
versions will go away. They just won't be remembered, you know, the
political ones, the ideological ones, all these twisting of fairy tales that we've
seen in the past decades. They nobody will remember them in the long term.
The damage can be short term, sadly, and so still we have
to be attentive to that. We have to be attentive to the short term
damage that changing them. But what we know is that we can trust these
stories because they do contain this powerful structure in them. And in that way,
I would say that they are undistincts from myth, you know, And
in a similar way, I would say not as much. They are very
close to scripture. They're not exactly scripture, because scripture is elevated, you
know. The fairy tales are not elevated. They're just remembered transmitted, and
therefore they definitely contain the basic structure of reality in them. For some reason,
we have certain texts, we have certain stories that we elevate on purpose,
and we put above us, and we all look to them as shining
beacons. So those stand above but they're very close. Fairy tales are the
closest thing to scripture that you can find the side scripture, because they have
the same code or the same underlying structure of reality and this capacity to perceive
meaning and to transmit it. And so one of the great things about the
fairy tales right now is that, especially for you, all of you that
are teaching, those that are teaching children, is that the Iliad was not
meant to be read ultimately, you know, and you all know that,
right The Iliad was told around the campfire. The Iliad was told to warriors
who came back from battle to help them return to return to their land,
to kind of go through the process of all the horrible things they have done
by participating, by remembering, by engaging with the great heroes of the past
that had to make the same types of sacrifices, made the same types of
errors, and so it was really a participative act. The Iliad was a
ritual text, and we have very few of those left. We're so used
to entertainment culture and we're so used to passive reception that we've forgotten that these
stories, they are meant to participate. And just like the Great Conversation that
I mentioned at the outset, how the Great Conversation participates in the music of
the spheres, Well, that's what telling a story to a fairy tale to
a child does, especially if you do it while you're being attentive, being
attentive to the child, not just telling the story, but watching the child
and watching how the child responds and interacting with the child as you tell the
story, You're you're you're really participating in that that great cosmic music. So
it's a it's an amazing opportunity that we have because it's one of the last
remainders of the ancient world that we have the capacity to sit with children,
you know, in a classroom, in a group around a fire, you
know, as you're tucking them into bed, and tell them a story.
You know, this is one of the last remainders of these great worlds that
we love from the past. So we have to cherish it and we have
to really engage with our children in that vision and understanding that it's not just
about information when you're telling a fairy tale, it really is a tuning fork
for reality and in ways that often we even don't understand, the fair tales
have cosmic structures. Fair tales are not morality tales. I hope if you've
read the grim fairy tales, you probably know that. It's like, try
to find the moral story from Puss and Boots, Like, really try hard
to find a moral story out of Puss in Boots, very difficult. But
nonetheless we tell the story. The children love it, they're remember it.
We don't know why, because fair tales are not moral stories. They have
morality downstream from them. But actually, just like the Bible stories are often
not not moral stories, especially the Old Testament stories, we can actually stop
thinking that that Old Testament stories have to be moral stories. We probably could
appreciate them more because then we go in there and we're shot at every story
because it doesn't fit the way we think things should happen in a nice,
decent, puritan moral story. So the fairy tales don't have that at all.
The fairy tales are they are cosmic images, and like I said,
I think it is the time to enter into it in a way that is
living. And so this is what I've decided to do now for the past
few years, because of what I've seen happen in the world, I've decided
to kind of enter into it. Because it's also dangerous, I think,
especially for people that love classical education, to just see the fairy tales as
texts and say like, oh, we're gonna read them Grim. Well,
the truth is that Grim didn't make up these stories. They didn't come up
with these stories. You know, we're gracious to them because they translated them,
because they they collated them, because they told them in a beautiful,
poetic way. We have to be grateful for them for that. But all
of them, the Peoles, the Grims, all of these people that the
fairy tales together, none of them wrote them, so we have to be
careful not to treat them as we treat a novel. For example. You
know, it's like little women and fairy tales. They don't inhabit exactly the
same world. The fairy tales is like a grammar, right, it is
like music. And that's why they rhyme with each other too, Right,
the fairy tales look like each other. You know. Cool, Wait a
minute, why this woman falls asleep in this fairy tale? And then she
falls asleep in this fairy tale? And then and you see, like there
are these things that repeat each other. And then you think, oh,
she eats an apple and she falls asleep. That looks like another story I've
seen in the Bible somewhere. I don't know what's going on, but you
notice that these stories are different. They have this kind of grammar of repetition,
a pattern, that musical pattern. And so that's the way that we
that I'm encouraging you to engage with them, is that, yes, of
course, read the kids the grim version, but also enter into the grammar
of this stories, right, and see how you can actually play with it
to some extent. And I think that that's something that possible to do with
great reverence and love for the stories. And so I'm going to take you
just quickly through our project that we're embarking on. So I've started now with
eight fairy tales. I'm going to tell eight of the most known fairy tales
that you can imagine. Snow White, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstock,
you know, Rumble, steel Skin, all the very very known ones.
But enter into them with that desire to first of all celebrate them, but
then also a desire to play with the musicality of the story, you know.
And so I've also noticed that when snow White eats the apples, she
falls asleep, and that looks like a story in Genesis. So I can
add a few little details in the story to make that more salient. I'm
not going to change the story, right, I'm not going to twist it
and turn it, but I will bring out or make certain elements shine,
you know, to kind of participate in the great symphony. It's a good
way to think about it, you know, and to add my voice to
the symphony of the stories. And so we have and one of the things
that's interesting that's happening now as well is that there are a lot of There
are a lot of artists that are tired of the way culture is going.
And you'd be surprised how many there are writers and artists and musicians. And
now is a really great time you pay attention. For the next few years,
You're going to see things shake because a lot of the artists are checking
out and they want to now move into a a rekindling and a recapturing of
these ancient stories in a powerful way. And so I was able to get
an artist for this book who was a designer for all the great Friends Chies,
right, all the Disney's and the you know, and the Marvels and
the Harry Potter and all that stuff. And so but nonetheless, her love
of the true fairy tale made her want to move on to a project like
this where if you tell and it's so funny because you know, if you
tell a literary agent I'm gonna write a version of Snow White, and they
ask you, well, what's your take on it? And it's like,
no, there's no take on it. I'm actually gonna tell the story of
snow White, and you know it And it's funny because obviously nobody, I
mean, soon people will understand. But at the outset people wonder what's going
on. But you know, nonetheless, we sold out the first print of
the book. I was actually supposed to have books tonight. I don't have
any because we just sold out all the books. And so the moment is
happening, Like the moment is clear. So what I want to do is
I want to take you through a fairy tale. And this is actually a
fair tale that we're gonna tell, but I wanna kind of take you through
it to help you hopefully see a little bit of how it is a cosmic
story, even though it is couched in rather silly imagery, you know,
and and things that in a story that we've heard since we've been ten and
that the type of story that the the New Atheist will mock Christianity as looking
like. It's like, I'm happy that the Bible looks like Jack and the
bean Stock. It's Jack and the Beanstock's an amazing story. It's an amazing
cosmic story. So we're gonna go through Jack and the Beanstock, and we'll
hopefully you'll be able to start to see how we can play with this and
how this makes sense. Alright, So Jack of the Beanstock is also a
story that I'm fond of right now because a lot of the fairy tales that
have been popular in the past decades have been about have have girls in them,
and a lot of the fair tales that I'm telling also will have female
antagonist. This one is a story that has a male protagonist, and it's
interesting because I think that it has to do with that as well. It
has to do just like snow White or Cinderella to some extent, are the
transition of a young girl to womanhood. I think Jack is also about that
for a young boy. So we kind of look at it and she So
Jack doesn't have a father, that's important in the story. I think he
has two things. He has a mother and he has a cow. Now,
fairy tales are sometimes quite on the nose, and there's a relationship between
the two and the story, you know, because the cow is obviously the
creature that provides the milk for the family, you know. And now his
mother is his guardian. And so he's an eleven year old boy, twelve
year old boy. It's not you're in the story, but he's a boy
that's right on that edge where he's going to start to change. His mind's
going to start to change, his body's going to start to change, and
he's going to start to realize certain things. And so he's missing something in
his life. Doesn't know quite what it is yet, he doesn't understand it.
But he lives in this world with his mother and the cow. But
things are so dire because they're missing that which provides and that which makes his
couldn't make his family continue. They're missing that. They're running out of body.
The good way to understand it. They're just running out of food,
they're running out of wealth. They don't have anything left. And so at
some point his mother becomes desperate tells him go sell the cow. You know,
basically, we'll buy some food, we'll eat and will die, you
know, like it'll be that'll be it for us, you know, similar
to the story of Elijah and the Widow by the way, very similar of
the structure. And so Jack goes out and he sells his cow. So
I'm gonna show you these are son images from our book. I'll tell you
when they're from our book, just so you can see the difference. So
Jack goes out and he sells the cow for beans match beans It's really interesting
because right in the story, of course, it's presented as a trick,
and in some ways it is a trick. But the question is is it
really a trick? What is he trading for? What is he what is
he trading? Right, he's trading the cow for seed, That's what he's
trading for. He's trading it for a seed. And what's a what's a
seed? Right? A seed is a pattern without body. It's the best
way to understand it. Right, that's a maybe that's when Christ talks about
the mustard seed, That's what he's trying to refer to. It's like,
it's a it's a it's a pattern that doesn't yet have body, and that
it has to then find body and it will grow. But it's a meaning,
right, it's a purpose, but it's still small, it doesn't have
body yet. But it's also you know, it's interesting too, like in
the twentieth century, you've had all these people tell you that fairy tales are
all about sex, and the truth is they are about sex. They're not
just about sex. And that's the difference, is that the cosmic dance involves
sex. Guys, like sex is part of the cosmic sphere, the music
of the spheres. Right. It is a pattern of communion. It is
a pattern of dance, of coming together, you know, of the finding
of purpose and of meaning and of life. And so the imagery will always
contain some sexual aspect to it, but it's not just that. And if
we can see the whole picture, then we are not afraid of the aspects
that are to some extent reflect that. Right, And so this is also
reflected in this question. Is that he finds the seed. That's what he's
missing. He's missing his father, right, and he's also missing he's also
entering into a world where this will become relevant to him. Right, He's
discovering this aspect of the world. Okay, so that's that's part of the
that's part of the story. Now, you know, his mother cannot recognize
the seed. She doesn't recognize the value because of her role in the story,
because she is the widow in the story. She's she's the woman who
doesn't have a husband, and because of that, their family's in trouble,
and so she can't recognize it, tosses it out, tosses it out,
of course, and then overnight what happens the bean stock grows and when he
wakes up up, there's a bean stock there in the morning. Now,
there are so many stories that have that similar structure. Right, the bean
stock is is Jacob's ladder, Right, It's the it's igracil, it's you
know, it's the pillar, the axis mundi if you like that type of
language. Right. It is the thing that connects heaven and earth. It
is the hierarchy of being. It is the music of the spheres, right,
it is. That's how the ancients understood these heavenly spheres that went up
as a hierarchy of purposes and of truth, that went all the way up
into those stars that don't move, that are fixed, that are that don't
move, that aren't part of the dance, that are beyond the dance,
right, the prime mobile. Right, that's what Dante goes through. Dante
experiences layers of meaning, layers of purpose, layers of virtue as he is
sends the heavenly spears to reach the highest point. And this is exactly the
same as what's going on in this story. This pillar appears, which connects
heaven and earth, and you know, but it is also it is also
Jack waking up in the morning to the bean stock, right, and so
it has a sexual element to it. But it's not just that, right,
and it's you know, and it's the same even like Jacob Jacob's pillar
is related to all of this symbolism, but it's not the same. It's
not just that. That's what I want to say. I just want to
help you when when the postmodern will tell you that that fairy tales are only
about sex, it's like, yeah, get over it. You know,
they're also about higher meanings and you know, and those are more important.
I don't know what to tell you, right. And so Jack climbs the
bean stock, but climbs the bean stock. It's important that his mother wants
to prevent him from climbing the bean stock, because his mother wants to prevent
him from climbing the bean stock for the same reason that she couldn't recognize the
seed at the outset, right, And that is also the twelve year old
boy that has to now find his own purpose, that has to you know,
has to find his way out of the house slowly and progressively, but
has to find his own purpose. And that is what Jack is doing.
And so he climbs the bean stock and he comes to the giant and so
this one is also from our book future book. Now this music, Okay,
what's important to understand is that this music like a fugue or you know,
it's fractal, which is that the pattern that it shows you will always
repeat itself in the parts of the story. So the parts of the story
are like little mirrors for the whole story. Right, Does that make sense
to you. That's what a fractal is. It's like it's a pattern that
repeats itself at every single level that you can recognize. Okay, So when
Jack enters into the house of the Giant, what happens. The woman wants
to protect him. Obviously, what does she want to protect him from.
She wants to protect him from this giant man that's going to devour him.
Will the giant man devour him? Yes? Does he have to confront that?
Yes? Right, those are all true. All of it is true.
And is the woman kind of right to want to protect him from that?
Of course she is right, of course she does. She wants to
protect him from the evils of hierarchy, the evils of masculinity. All of
that stuff is real, you know, the tyranny of the Father. All
of that stuff exists, but nonetheless Jack has to deal with it, has
to encounter it, has to confront it. So what does he get from
his first encounter? So he goes up three times. I don't want to
make this the longest story in the world. He goes up three times and
he gets three things. The first thing he gets is gold, and he
brings the gold back down. Now what can he do with the gold?
If you can buy food? Problem solved? It's great, Right, we
had a problem, we don't have enough food. I go up into heaven,
I get the solution, I get the reason, I get the purpose.
Then I bring it back down. Then I solve the problem. That's
what we do all the time. When we solve a problem. We go
up into heaven, we find the reason, we find the purpose, we
find the solution, and then we come back down and we implement it into
the world. Okay, but then what happens the money runs out? Hm,
he didn't go high enough or he didn't get enough from heaven. Because
what's better to solve a problem, or to solve a single problem, or
to understand how to solve problems? Right? Understanding how to solve problems is
a much better skill than solving a particular problem. I can know how to
hammer a nail, and I could do that all day. But if I
understand carpentry, then I can figure out all the things that are downstream from
that. So what's the next thing Jack gets? Goes up there and he
gets now the cause of riches. So riches are one thing, they're great,
but how to make money is way better than money. If you know
how to do that, it's much better. And all this time, what's
really important is that Jack is also sacrificing his immediate needs. And that's what
he did. At the outset. He's learning, you know, to delay
pleasure. He's learning to delay his immediate desires because you know, milk is
good and getting food is good. And that's why when he goes up,
he always asks the woman for food. If you notice in the story,
he goes up and he asks her for food, and then she puts him
in the cupboard, tries to protect him, and then he adventures out,
goes out, deals with the dangerous man and then gets the treasure. And
the second thing he gets is the way to make money. That's great.
Now he comes back down he's pretty much solved all his problems. You know,
now he can just generate wealth. He's good. He's a businessman.
He knows how it works. Right. He doesn't just know how to run
a dry cleaner, but he knows how to run several companies. He's good
to go, so he can become rich. It's all good. There's something
missing, it seems, and something itching right, something's itching at him.
Feels like there's something more that he hasn't gotten yet. He needs one more
step, so he goes back up. The same thing happens, but this
time the weirdest thing, right, how do you do you get gold?
Then the chicken that lays eggs makes sense? Why is the third one of
harp? That's weird? Hope we've been paying attention from the beginning, because
now you know why it's a harp. Right now, he's getting the pattern.
He's getting the pattern that cannot be spoken. He's getting the origin of
all the other patterns. Right, He's getting the harp that says, he's
getting the music of his fears. That's what he's getting, and that's the
highest thing. He's getting the pattern of reality. And now he brings it
back down and it's not clear like what advantage in material terms this harp is
going to bring. It doesn't seem like it's going to bring him any But
it's the beauty of the song, right, that attracts it. Something more
than just his belly, something more than just the desire to solve the problems.
He's lifted up into something higher, something that transcends those desires, and
he's capable of perceiving it because all this time he's been sacrificing to some extent,
those little desires for higher purposes. Right, And we all know,
right, that's what education is, right, you know, you can tell
a ten year old boy to sit still. It's like, what are you
doing. You're saying, sacrifice your immediate desire for something more and you'll thank
me later, you know, because if I, if I let you do
whatever you want, and I let you eat all the candy and I let
you do whatever, you know, you'll be miserable. And you know,
And so Jack discovers that. Jack finds that as he ascends the hierarchy.
Now you know the story. You know the story more than you think,
right, This story, the story of Jack is very similar. It's actually
almost the same as this story. It's almost exactly the same as the story
of Moses. What happens What happens to Moses? Right, he's a shepherd,
he's got a good life, he's got a wife, got kids.
It's good to go. Then he sees this glimmering thing. It's not a
seed, oh, it's a burning bush. But you get it right,
sees this shimmering thing, and then ultimately that leads him to sacrifice all to
go through great difficulty in order to ascend the mountain. Now what does he
get at the top of the mountain? He gets a pattern? What do
you think law is? That's what law is. Law is a pattern of
behavior. Right, And in the case of the law that is given to
to to Moses, it's not just a pattern of behavior. It's first of
all, a pattern of attention. Right, you will have one God,
you will worship one God. That's a pattern of attention. And then downstream
from that it's a pattern of behavior. So that's also part of the you
know, the top the first aspect of the law have more to do with
ontology, with the way the world exists. And then the second part,
the moral part, is downstream fairy tales are the same. Like I told
you, if you try to find too much morality in fairy tales, you're
really going to you're gonna you're gonna have to twist them and you're gonna have
to to make them into something else. But if you understand that they're actually
usually on to logic structures, they're showing the structure of being, and then
downstream from that you can get moral meaning. That's a much better way to
approach fairy tales. Then. Also, what does Moses get there at the
top of the mountain. He gets a literal plan for a building, He
gets an actual pattern for a building. God says, you're gonna make a
building. It's gonna be this size. He's like, he gets architectural plans
at the top of that. But that's what you need to understand and why
Also you need to understand that you know the temple, the pattern of the
temple is not is not a moral question. It's not moral in itself.
It's not telling you how to how to you know, how to not steal
or do all that stuff. It is it is a pattern of participation,
right the liturgy or the way that the Israelites came to the temple and sacrificed,
and the whole order of the temple itself was representing the beanstock itself.
The structure of the temple is this moving into the secret place where the secret
glory of God is hidden. And that's the same at least in these kinds
of stories, as as that mustard seed. And the crazy thing about that
is what does Moses find when he comes back down the mountain. He finds
a cow, you know, because the people have worshiped their desires, right,
and then they've worshiped their desires instead of looking up towards higher reality and
the sacrifice, you know, it's the upside down of what the story in
the story in Jack, Jack has to sacrifice the cow. He has to
sacrifice the cow in order to get the meaning. Here you find Moses coming
down and realizing that because the people are now worshiping the cow, the pattern
doesn't it's not gonna fit. The pattern has to be broken. The pattern
cannot connect with that world, and they have to purify themselves so that when
he comes back down again, then the pattern can connect to the people.
And so this is just one fairy tale, you know, and I chose
one which when I was a child, I love Jack and the bean Stock,
but it always bothered me because I was told that fairy tales are supposed
to be moral. Jack and the bee Stock is not moral at all.
There's nothing moral about it. But he goes up there steals from these giants.
If you take it at the first level, it's like, who's the
bad guy in the story? You know, it's probably Jack, right,
just in terms of simple morality, it's not the giants. Like he's up
there mining his own business and someone's in his house. You know. It's
like, but if you see it rather as this structure of being right,
as this structure of participation, then then it lays itself out beautifully and powerfully
before you. And so you know, my call to you is to take
these stories very seriously. And you know, so I spend all this time,
you know, explaining it to you, and I'm not explaining it to
you. This story has way more than what I was able to explain to
you. And it's really important when you think about fairy tales that they're not
they're not metaphors for things. And Tokien got this right, by the way,
because Tokien hated when people said that his work was symbolic, he said,
my work isn't symbolic. My work is applicable. And that's the way
to understand fairy tales is that fairy tales are patterns of being that are applicable.
Now I can show you the analogies, right, and I can say
this is like Moses, this is like this, this is like that,
this applies to this, and it can help you see the pattern that you
didn't perceive before. And it's helpful to do that because it can make you
see how valuable it is. But I'm not explaining it to you, you
know, and that's really important. And what that means is that two things.
Means that one, you can keep telling the fair tales to the kids
and don't worry about it. The story will take care of itself, right.
And two you have the rest of your life, as you tell these
stories to the kids, to realize that they have something to teach you.
You have no idea, like you have no idea what they contained, the
power and the depth that they have in them. That honestly, fair tales
are not just for kids, and they never were. Really, it's weird.
It's a very modern idea that fair tales are just for kids. We
tell them to kids because kids, you know, they haven't forgotten how to
hear the music of this fear so much like fifth Agora said, but they're
for us as well. And so I'm embarking on this, on this adventure
of myself. I encourage you to embark on it on your own, to
look through you know, look, in the next few years, we'll see
these eight fairy tales that are gonna come out that are going to be this
kind of symphony of fairy tales where we're gonna play with the rhyme and with
the the meetings of the fairy tale so that they kind of come together in
this great symphony at the end. So hopefully I was able to make you
love fairy tales even more than when you walked in. Thank you, Thank
you. We're gonna have a Q and A session now, talk about fifteen
minutes or so. We do have a microphone down front, so I'll kick
us off with a question here, But if you could, if you could
line up in front of the microphone so that you're ready to go, and
we would ask that the question be a question, not five minutes and then
Hi, Jamen, what do you think about that? So, in other
words, trying to be concise, we get more questions, So please feel
free to come line up here at the microphone while they're doing that. I
was very taken by this analogy of the football team and when the pass is
thrown, everything's in its place. Now. I grew up a suffering Browns
fan and the receiver was never in his place. Frustrating. I won't ask
you what you make of you know, My question actually is obviously lots of
talk about these stories being in some sense freed from a particular telling, right,
they existed before grim What do you what do you make of the connection
though, between the story and the particular telling is the particular linguistic incarnation importance?
Is it important to read multiple versions of it? What is that connection
between the story itself and that particular telling. Well, it's the same,
it's the same process as what was there before. Is that the reason why
the Grims were able to do that, and that we love the fairy tales
is because they captured something true, you know if and so that is something
that should be remembered and celebrated, and it will be. And so you
know, I think that it's important to read the grim versions because they are
a beautifully crystallized version that has become a marker for the way we understand fairy
tales, and that has there's a reason why that's the case, and so
I think that we definitely need, you know, to do both, to
both remember the great tellers of the of the fairy tale, but then also
engage with them, you know. And it is a good idea to play
with the fair tales little because you know, we all know now that there's
like twenty five versions of snow White, you know, and it's interesting,
you know, when you tell the story to a child, to switch it
up a little bit, to do it in a traditional way, right,
to not make some stupid thing up, but to really you know, sometimes
the dwarves are robbers, you know. Sometimes the dwarves are more like our
miners. Sometimes they're they're not even dwarves, right, Sometimes they're there,
and so it can be an interesting way to help the child know what analogy
is. And totally unconsciously, by the way, one of the things I
did when I was selling the fairy tale to my kids is I would always
pause when there was a rhyming point when I would say, you know,
like snow White falls asleep, and I'd say where did you where have you
seen that before? And then they'd remember other they'd say, oh, yeah,
sleeping beauty also fall asleep. And then you don't even have to explain
it. Just let them see the analogy, you know, especially if they're
young like six seven, Just let them see the analogy. They're learning the
lan without you even having to explain it to them. So let me be
a little bit more pointed with this. Why publish a new version? Oh?
Because I believe that there are things in the fairy tales that are appropriate
for the context. So this is the great thing about stories like this is
that their wealth is so immense that there are certain things that you can make
shine that are relevant to the moment. You know. A simple example in
our version of snow White is there are two versions of this the mirror.
One is mirror on the wall, one is a mirror in my hand.
And you know, in our version, we made it a mirror in my
hand. And if you saw the image of it and she holding the mirror
in her hand like this, it's like, oh, okay, I understand.
One of the aspects of what that can apply to this, this narcissism
and this this this black mirror that you know tells you who's the most beautiful?
You know, it's like and so. So those are little things,
but these are but you don't betray the story at all. You just tell
the story of snow white. But to make certain things salient I think is
important. Derk thanks shake, Jonathan, thank you. I thought that was
great, but more of a point of clarity or question for clarity. So
what I heard you suggesting is that the let's say, let's call them the
important aspects of fairy tales are attention, memory, and transmission. It seemed
that you were at least this is what I heard, that memory was not
or it was something separate. Is that a fair understanding of Was there a
delineation there that Oh sorry, that meaning that I say memory meaning that meaning
was a different. No. When I talked about attention, memory, and
transmission, I was just talking about the mechanism by which we have them,
which is that fairy tales are not just about those three things there, but
the fact that attention, the way that humans pay attention, the way they
remember things, and then the way they retell them is a beautiful way to
understand why the fairy tales have come to us, and also why they contain
a pattern of consciousness in them because of those three aspects. But are those
in your mind? The meaning? The meaning is there, but usually you
don't. Yeah, can I say, an illiterate grandma is not going to
tell a story because it's meaningful, right, Like, not in the way
that we think meaningful, you know, when you think about it, Like
when you're telling a story around the fire with your kids, you know,
you're not thinking about like how meaningful is this? You want them to love
it, You want them to pay attention, you want them to be enthralled,
you want them to follow along, you know, but you might I
mean so, so where do you see the pedagogical implications of that? When
when you're putting the fairy tales forth? What do you see as the highest
end right of that transmission, right of this thousand year old story? Should
the teacher care about the meaning at all? Is or is that not the
important aspect of the telling? Like when you use the word meaning, what
do you mean? Well, I mean in the sense of what you did,
so you took us through the images themselves, not necessarily that the maybe
the kindergarten teacher would do exactly what you did with us, but maybe to
some extent to draw out applicability, right, And I'm just wondering what the
pedagogical import of that. The first thing I would say is that in the
same way that I don't think you would ask what the pedagogical import of learning
to play the piano is. It's the same here that is learning the grammar
of being is not It's not a like that is beyond the specific application.
It's like learning how to learning how to play well with your friends is more
than pedagogy, right, It's learning to be human. It's learning to be
to to to dance in that pattern. And so the fairy tale is like
a tuning fork for a person in terms of meaning. So it's it actually,
in some ways is more than it's more than it's applicability, and participating
in the fairy tales precedes the application. The applications can be great, but
if the applications are always secondary and they can be fun, you can actually
have fun with kids because you can do it as questions instead of doing it
as a teaching. You can ask the child, why did Jack do this?
Why did snow White do this? You know, why did snow White?
Why would snow White? Why is it that she let the queen in?
You know? And you can do it that way and and then the
child will be forced to think about it in their own context, and they
will they will find applications. You can teach the applications too. But I
think anyways, I think that the the music of the Sphere's aspect precedes the
simple pedagogical aspects. Elks, thanks for talking. The most difficult part about
coming up here is not doing what Jake just said. So I'm just gonna
ask the question our fairy tales. Is the purpose of fairy tales different for
adults than for children? And or is there something different adults are supposed to
get out of it than children are? No, I think I think yes.
I think adults can get more out of different things out of fairy tales.
And it has to do in some ways with the play. So you
know, it's the same with music, right, Just like when you start
with the child, you say, you know, just play the play the
piece like you know, do the different exercises, and they learn the exercises,
and then as you get older, at some point then you can listen
to a fugue and you can notice the great things that box is doing,
you know, and taking you out of the pattern and then hinting at it
and teasing you and then bringing you back and this, and you can actually
more consciously see what's going on. And I think that that's what adults can
do, is that now you know, and it's actually fun. Especially the
fair says you know really well as a child, and that you you knew
and as an adult not go back and say I'm gonna take this seriously,
and all of a sudden you can see these beautiful things. They can they
can unfold riches in a more conscious and intellectual way. That is that can
be quite quite fun and more than fun, but that can actually reveal to
you some deep mysteries. Actually, even about scripture. By the way,
there are some things that I've understood in scripture that I understood because I was
reading fairy tales. But all of a sudden I was like, oh,
that's one of the things that's going on. And because it's close, but
it's not, and so it makes you think of the scriptural story differently and
it kind of it reflects back on it and you're like, why is it
different? Why is it the same? And then you get these insights.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense for kids. Is there something because
you mentioned at the end of your talk there's things they see that maybe it's
harder for you to see as an adult, and just any more about that,
and I'm sorry to understand that the students are seeing or the children are
seeing. That's they'll see it implicitly. They'll see it implicitly by their attention.
It's like a child loves something. And if a child a child children
love fairy tales, you don't have to explain the fairy tales to them,
especially now when they you're super young. They just love to hear them.
And so it's like rejoice, like rejoice in that it's wonderful. They love
the stories, you know, and as they get older, then you can
tease out the applications, you know, you could. I mean, it
would be a great idea, for example, for an education program to go
through the fairy tales that say three times in the curriculum, you have them
in kindergarten first grade, you just read them to the kids you play with,
you play with them, you know, you have them, memorize them,
you do them as poems, you do them as plays. You just
get them to do them. And then you know, maybe at around like
I would say, like twelve years old, then you go back into them
and then you see what fruit that those patterns have produced. And then you
know, like senior year of high school, then ask a senior to analyze
a fairy tale and to do it like the structure of it and show how
its literary references, to be able to demonstrate how, you know, how
the variability and how it looks like this myth or it looks like these other
things. You know. I think that would be a great way to do
fairy tales. Thank you, thank you again for your talk. I really
appreciate your caution that we over moralize story, and particularly with fair tales,
take that approach, but instead take a ontological approach to understanding how reality works.
But I'm curious to understand, particularly for those of us who are tasked
with ordering the loves of children, cultivating virtue and children. Can you say
a bit more about why that approach is more effective than an over moralistic approach
that I think is more common in a modern sense. I mean, I
think you've answered your own question. You know, it's like you can't.
The world is made of love. Dante pretty much demonstrated it to us.
It's built out of care, and I think that in some way it's a
way that we can It's something that we can argue quite strongly today with the
new developments and cognitive science, that the world is act actually made of care,
and that the orders of cares are the orders of identities. Like there's
there's almost no there's no difference between the identities of things, their purposes,
and the hierarchy in which we engage with them, right, the fact that
we care about them or not. And so you know, if you can
get you know, and everybody knows that, right, if you can get
a child to love something, then you've done. You don't have to do
any more work. That's it. They'll do it themselves. And that's what
Like I grew up, I did a lot of homeschooling with my kids,
and we were kind of around homeschool people, and that was the case,
you know, in the right context, Like a homeschool kid that loves something,
they'll just like they'll take off and you'll have to stop them, Like
you'll have to say, all right, stop reading now, you know that's
enough, Like put that No, that books too old for you, don't
read it. You know. It's like, you know, it's like I'm
fighting with my sixteen year old about which she's like, I want to read
Dostoevski. I'm like, like, could you read C. S. Lewis
instead, Like, let's wait until you're in your twenty three As people,
you know, it's like that's the kind of thing that the love will produce,
right, is that at some point you have that, Yeah, the
child will just take it on their own. So in just presenting that the
truth of reality, you think that's sufficient to cultivate the virtue and love for
that reality. Well, the stories, the stories are made to be loved.
Yeah, And who doesn't like the story of from the White Who doesn't
like Jack and the bean Stock when you're seven years old? Yeah? And
you don't have to know why. It just it just catches the kids,
especially if they're not ruined with telephones, you know. But but if you
have a kid with a bit of a healthy mind, then those stories will
catch them, no doubt. About it. Yeah, thank you. You
began to touch on this a few questions ago, or your answered to a
few questions ago in talking about how fairy tales have affected the way that you've
read scripture. And so my question is, a fairy tale are often more
enjoyable to read than scripture. So how can we learn to read scripture like
a fairy tale. Yeah, no, I think that's a that's a great
question, and I think that at least it's just this is a lesson that
I learned hard in my life with my kid because I love scripture, you
know, it's like I live in scripture. And so I thought, you
know, tell them these fairy tale stories, we tell them Bible stories and
just all kind of go together. For some reason, the Bible stories were
a harder sell, you know, And I think that and I think that
in some ways you could say that the fairy tales can be a way of
initiating people into the language of scripture. And so they're kind of like the
narthex or like an entrance to the church, right because because they have certain
fantastical elements that are exaggerated, and so you know, obviously you have dragons,
you have you know, giant beat stocks that go up to the sky
and giants and all this stuff. There's some of that in scripture too,
but not as in as much of a salient manner. And so I think
that that then, you know, when your kids are quite young, the
fair tales can kind of help them and then slowly move into to uh to
scripture stories later or no, you can still tell some of the scripture stories
when they're young. But I made the mistake of just starting in Genesis,
like, don't do that, so seriously, don't don't do that, you
know. So that's for a child, but for an adult who maybe doesn't
you know, read scripture in a very like academic right in that sense,
well for sure that I think that I think that the fairy tale is a
better model for how to read scripture then the way that the modern scholar tells
us to read it. You know, the way that the modern tell the
scholars tell us to read the scripture makes you hate Why would I read this?
It's just it's just it's just a historical text about something that is actually
not saying what it's actually saying, but it's hiding all these political things or
whatever nonsense. You know it's better to you know, the Bible itself is
a great like if you pull away from it and you're able to kind of
get out of the way that the modern Bible scholars have told us what the
Bible is. It has this amazing pattern from the beginning to the end.
You know, it starts in the garden, It ends in a city with
a garden inside. It has this great sweeping structure that moves right through you.
But you have to be able to kind of pull out a little bit.
And you know, this is might will be controversial for some of you,
But what can help us is the more fairy tale like stories around scripture.
Sometimes a lot of the legends can help you see that, like a
lot of the extra biblical traditions, if we don't take them at the same
level as scripture, but sometimes they can help us. See there's this amazing
story in the Golden Legend about how Seth goes back into the garden of Eden
and takes a shoot from the tree in the garden and then takes it out
and plants it, and then that tree is used to make the arc of
Noah, and then it's preserved to the ark and then that tree becomes the
staff of Moses, and then that tree et cetera, et cetera becomes the
cross, and you think, like, that's this crazy story, and obviously
that did not happen, but it's really useful for you to help you understand
the meaning of all those things, of all those elements in scripture, you
know. And then at the end of the world and the end the tree
of life that's planted in the heavenly Jerusalem. So that's the great pattern of
that story. And so there are all these interesting like midrash or extra biblical
stories, both in the Christian and Jewish tradition that can really help you see
the fairy tale element that's already there kind of hidden in scripture. So we
thank you. So we have three more people. I think we can get
through the three. We're a bit over time, so we can make it
quicker. I think we can get through these last three. I'll keep it
very short. What do you think is the relationship between fairy tales as the
music of the spheres and learning or teaching mathematics? Yeah, well it should
be related. I'm sadly of those people that was made to hate mathematics in
my life and I was just told that it was just a bunch of like,
so what happened? Okay, it was it was just it was it
was. It was just a bunch of things that I had to learn,
you know, by heart. Uh. And so I never my brother though
it's different from me. I remember he he kind of developed a very mathematical
mind, and he's very close to close to me into my thinking. He
wrote a book on symbolism, and he kept telling he keep even until today,
he'll tell me like, no mathism when you think you know it's it's
something else and so, but there clearly is. When you see how Kepler
approaches this, these patterns, like the cosmic patterns, you know that it's
definitely related. So hopefully all of you make your kids love math and not
hate that for my sake at least, you know. Hi. I picked
up a copy of snow White for my family and for my kids' school,
and people were so impressed by the quality of the storytelling and the art work
that they asked me if I could get like a set of classroom for a
classroom set. So when is that going to available? Yeah, like six
months? Yeah, No, I know, it's it's been a very it's
been a learning curve, is the best way to say that. Uh,
you know, I hope there because you know, we we we sold out
the first edition and the person that was running the publishing company that I own,
you know, it's sad to say she just wasn't the right person and
I had to let her go. Uh And because we literally oversold a thousand
copies and we didn't have the books. So now there might even be people
in this room that are waiting for a book and they've been wayading for like
four months, five months, it's crazy. And so we have ordered books
now they should be there in a month, and so we should reopen the
sales. But this is also a long term project. We don't want to
rush it. So we have two more books that are being illustrated right now,
Jack and Rapunzel, and so we're gonna we're gonna put those out in
the fall probably. So the distribution aspect of it will hopefully we'll find a
solution as these kind of come out. But the quality we want to maintain,
like world class quality, that's our that's our first goal. Well,
there also be extra copies to say God's Dog to purchase and also, yeah,
that's also a problem. We also sold out those books. We sold
out all our books. I don't know what to say, and we just
yeah, it'll think. Yeah, we're also doing we're also doing graphic novels
for those who don't know why. The two graphic novels. One it's called
God's Dog, and it's basically it is in some ways what we're what was
asked before. It is a way of telling of telling a token style epic
but with the biblical world and taking all the fairy tale elements in the Christian
tradition that people want to ignore and just putting them all in one story.
So we have like giants and the Leviathan and Saint George and you know,
like just and dog headed men and all this kind of crazy stuff. So
it's coming, okay, And also, are there other people who are doing
this if we want to provide resources for classrooms that you'd recommend that are doing
the similar things that I'm talking that I'm trying to do. Yeah, I
think that it's coming. I don't know if it's I think that it's going
to happen very fast. I was you know, I knew two years ago.
I had an inside it from Disney. Insider from Disney tell me that
Disney was making snow white for the hundredth anniversary of Disney. And when I
heard that, I thought, they're not they can't do it. They can't
make snow white. They just are not allow and so they they and and
and so, and that's exactly what happened. They just they just basically refuse
to make snow white as they're making snow white. So it's like she's you
know, there's no prints, there's no kiss, there's no dwarves. It's
like, what story are you telling? I don't know. It's not snow
white anymore, you know. And so and so that was one of them.
The one of the impetus for making for starting this series was to re
It was just this wake up call to realize that actually people are dropping these
stories. So let's just take the take the flame, you know. And
I think that we're going to see that happen pretty soon, because that's the
future. I don't know what to say, it really is, you know.
And this is something about, by the way, about Disney snow White
that people forget, is that the idea that Disney snow white is just this
old fashioned story, and this old fashioned movie is hogwash. That is not
what was going on when Disney made that movie. They were it was the
raging It was the rage lend of the raging twenties. It was all jazz
and all crazy and drug use, and the animation studios that were popular were
doing crazy, hallucinatory kind of you know. And so when snow White,
when Disney made his version of snow White, it was a desire to recapture
the traditional story. And he won. He won the attention game. And
I think that that's where we are now. And I think that all you
people here, that's the edge that you have because people have forgotten the Iliad.
Oh my goodness, people don't know that story. It's like, tell
that story. It's an amazing story. There are so many stories now everybody's
forgotten. It's like, tell the story and people will love it because it's
amazing. So the opportunity is immense. Two quick questions. Two quick questions.
I run a k through a I read the snow White. I thought
it was amazing. I noticed two patterns that I wanted to ask you about.
When snow White's going through her purification journey, you have those beautiful words
about the thorns her journey, and then the book ends that way with the
villain enduring her own purification. But I noticed that the literary pattern was repeated.
Could you tell me a little bit more about that, because I want
to pass it on to the students at my school properly. Well, it's
a long it's it's it's going to be a long story. And so so
it's because what happens at the end of the story in our version of snow
White is that the witch it ends up in the Dwarf's cottage. So she
leaves that, she actually leaves the castle, and she's kind of forgiven by
snow White, and she leaves the castle and she ends up living in the
forest, in the in the in the Dwarf's cottage. And so that's a
promise of her story. So it's not the story isn't over, Okay.
I just really enjoyed that. And then the romance that's blostomy, the words
that you use. It spoke to me of song of songs, do not
stir love before its time? Was that? Yeah, that was definitely on
purpose. Okay. So one of the things we wanted to do one of
the things we wanted to do in the in the in the in the fairy
Tales is actually use use scripture to solve some of the narrative problems. That's
what I saw, and that's how I want to teach it to the kids.
But I really wanted to make sure I was on the right track,
or you're definitely on the right track, because I really believe that Actually,
like I said, it's aid scripture is. Scripture is higher than the fairy
tales, and they actually offer some solutions to the fairy tales that because there
are some narrative problems in the story, and some of the postmodern people pointing
it out, you know, we get annoyed with it, but sometimes they
might have a point. It's like, you know, what gives the right
of the prince to kiss the white? Like what is going on there?
It is a little odd, you know. So and so what we did
in our version is that the snow the Prince meets snow White at the outset
in the in the castle and he he he's attracted to her, you know,
and and he's a little too forward with her, and he says,
like, come with me, I'll take you into my kingdom, like basically,
well, you know, it's a well, it's a rapture, like
I'll take you away, and he comes to kiss her, and he she
says, do not awaken love before it's time, which is quoted from the
Song of Songs. And then at the end of the story, then he
basically remembers. We don't even say that he remembers. But she told him
what to do, right, she she's the one who told him what to
do, and that would happen. But it's like, but it's scripture that
is kind of giving you the key. We do that a few times in
the story. There's like especially with the Apple too. We tried to kind
of show how the story of Adam and Eve is actually the key to that,
to the to the story. I thought it was magnificent and I've been
waiting for something like this. So thank you, thank you, I'm happy
for you. Thank you well, Jonathan. What a great way to kick
off symposium. We're talking about conversation start with story makes a lot of sense
to me. We really appreciate your time here and we hope you have a
chance to be with us and stop by some of the breakout sessions, some
of them are quite relevant to this and we'll make sure that we get you
into one of the sessions on mathematics. All right. If you enjoyed these
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