Speaker 1: I don't know if I should, says I love catechizing
former occultists because they get it. I've had more than
one person say to me, Yeah, I was getting way
too deep into this. I was being haunted by these demons.
I couldn't deal, like.
Speaker 2: Figure it out.
Speaker 1: I heard about orthodoxy, I didn't know what it was.
I put icons up in my house and the demon
stopped attacking me. So I'm all in. And Mike, right,
I mean, so you know, it's it's we laugh and
it's funny, but it's so real for these people, and
and and so that I bring this up as an
example because that's the kind of person with whom you
don't have to have any iconoclasm discussion, right that all
that kind of well, But the Old Testament says, blah
blah blah. You can't make a graven image like that's
so academic. You know, when somebody's being haunted by a
demon and they put icons up and the demons go away,
it works. There's exactly no And it's not academic. It's
deeply practical.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Peshel. Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello everyone,
I'm here with doctor Zach Porku. And so doctor Zach
has written a wonderful book. It's called Journey to Reality.
Many of you might recognize the book. I have been
noticing even in my own parish that this is being
recommended by young people, by priests as a kind of
introduction to Orthodoxy. And I think that what's interesting about
this book is that it's a it's a kind of
introduction to Orthodoxy, and that for the times, you could say,
because it tries to introduce Orthodoxy first of all, as
a as a kind of cause make vision as a worldview,
and doesn't go into not as much about theology, but
really about a way of engaging with reality. And so
it seemed to me like it's perfect part time. So
doctor Zach, thanks for talking to me, Thanks for having
me on. It's a pleasure. And so what motivated the
writing of this book for students?
Speaker 1: Actually, so when I was doing my doctoral program, I
was a teaching fellow, and so they make all the
teaching fellows teach the standard Introduction to Theology course that
all incoming freshmen have to take, and they wanted me
to teach. I said, well, what I have to teach
in this course? They said, well, you know, just the
Old Testament, the New Testament, Church Fathers, doctrine, and church
history in one semester.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: And so I was completely strapped for short things to
assign the students. And what I found was that it's
hard to find short, concise things written at a high
school reading level that do this. But also even when
I could, you can't just tell nineteen year olds the
what in this day and age? You can say the
what God is? Three persons in one essence, crisis to
nature is YadA, YadA, And then just they just stare
at you and they are they so what?
Speaker 2: You know? That was the look on all their faces
And what does it mean? Yeah? So what?
Speaker 1: Why do I care? Why should I care about any
of this? And what I realized that I had to
do in order to make this course in any way
coherent to them was I had to totally reframe all
of their categories for how to think about the world
in order to get at the so what. And that's
why I kind of spend the whole first part of
the book taking apart basic basic definitions. What is religion?
What do we mean by God? Where did all this start?
Speaker 2: You know? M? And so you wrote it for like
nineteen year olds for Yeah, well you said, are like
really like kind of college freshmen.
Speaker 1: Freshmen, Yeah, college freshmen, and they did not. I mean,
so I had to be high school reading level because
they're incoming freshmen.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I had to write basically a book about metaphysics
and epistemology without using any of those words. And it's
so funny because.
Speaker 2: That it would become a kind of introduction book for
people that are just dropping off up the street. Yeah, wild,
that's right.
Speaker 1: It was so funny is that I wrote it alongside
because I was writing it for teaching while I was dissertating,
and so I wrote it alongside my dissertation and I
worked on both every day, And the dissertation was way
way easier to write because if you use all these
big words and convoluted incomprehensible sentences, they like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, trying to actually say the thing very simply and
especially in a way that, like you said, I think
most people it's okay. You know, when we go to
church for a very long time, this happened in all
the different you know, Christian churches. You end up having
a kind of lingo and it's very comforting, right, The
lingo's very comforting because it can signal inside, it can
signal that we're on the same team. And so it does.
It plays a function. But like you said, sometimes people
actually don't really know what those words mean, or they
have a very kind of fragmentary understanding of what that is.
So if you can't explain these concepts, you know, Christ
didn't use complicated theological terms, and so if you can't
explain these these theological terms in ways that can reach
a normal person that's never heard about theology, then what
are you talking about? Like what do you say? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And it was, you know, at seven am, a require
course for every one of every major. So it's a
very hard sell and really really, I mean it's it's
a it's a tough class. And so I really had
to I had to sell this as why is this
relevant at all for you to think about?
Speaker 2: And just when?
Speaker 1: So I would do these reading summaries. That was how
I taught, And when all the reading summaries came back incoherent,
I rewrote the chapter. So I just rewrote this book
over and over and over again. I response to student feedback.
So in a lot of ways, I mean they wrote
the book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they told you what they could they could
grass and when they congress. You know, the problem with
history is that you are in it.
Speaker 3: Plotark teaches us how to read power symbolically, asking whom
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Speaker 2: Not that man. Does the world look mad to you?
Speaker 3: This feeling of madness is something which we all share,
especially the one who spent more time than maybe we
should following the modern news cycle. Well, one wise Englishman
once said, there is a system. It is madness, And
one wise Greek two thousand years ago explained, what is
the system behind the madness? Is of great men? Journal
to ride clutter symbolica.
Speaker 2: What did you or what have you noticed? Is the
biggest obstacle to understanding why this is relevant for people.
Speaker 1: The the whole framework of the modern world, the sort
of secularism or humanism or whatever you want to call
it that assumes materialism or dualism at best, means that
people just have this almost impenetrable conceptual barrier for things
like sacraments, because because they can't imagine a world where
the spiritual and the physical are fundamentally interrelated, and they
don't have the vocabulary for it. But they're you know,
they're functionally materialists, or they're functionally dualists, or like, they
believe in the spiritual, but it's somewhere else, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, there's a weird idea that in some ways
spirituality is related to more like psychology something like that,
and therefore, you know, anything spiritual has to go through
the psychological. And so if you have a kind of
ritual or a practice that you that you that you
have in church, then people struggle to understand how that
can be a vehicle for spiritual transformation and so sort
of redeeming.
Speaker 1: I mean, everyone's talking about re enchantment, you know, since
and I encountered this when I was reading Charles Taylor
and grad school. And it's now everyone's saying re enchantment
and talking about it, and I think that's I think
that's fine. I think that's probably the best way to
talk about it, because you have to reframe the idea
that matter itself has spiritual content, rather than thinking that
matter is just neutral, it's just a tree, it's just
a chemical reaction, and that that way of thinking is
so deeply embedded even in people who identify it very
piously and sincerely as Christians.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's really the thing that I've that
I've been fighting against in some ways since I started,
is to help people realize that there is no unpatterned reality, right,
and there's no such thing as a material world that
doesn't exist in patterns. And if that's true, then it
means everything that is patterned reality, you know, has a
claim to a form of reality, even though some people
struggle if you can't hold it in your hands and
you can't measure it, they struggle to understand. But the
you know that a city or you know, a team,
or all these things, they are patterned materiality in the
same way that you know a car is or you
know our rock or something like that. And that's that's
a big struggle for modern people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's hard too because when you start springing in
the kind of language that some of the twentieth century
German herminuticists used to kind of take apart the Enlightenment
they said, well, all, like, I don't know if you're familiar.
Michael Pollanni said, you know, all knowledge is personal knowledge
participation through in dwelling. And when you say something like that,
I use this participatory language in the book, people immediately
jump to, okay, so everything's subjective. Yeah, everything's internal, and
so you have to So I had to. I was
faced constantly with when I said knowledge is personal. Even
the way you see physical reality is conditioned by your
cultural vision, which is really a lot of what's in
Spangler actually, like uh, he says that individual cultures see
the world a certain way. That's what our culture means.
And when I say that that, people think like, oh,
I can see the world however I want to. There
is no pattern, the patterns inside me.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly. Yeah, that's that is the biggest obstacle, the subjective,
objective world. And it's funny because it's so odd to
face people that that at least espouse a kind of
atheism or kind of materialism. If you ask them, you know,
if they were they would say, yeah, we're scientific, you know,
everything is, but they still believe in this arbitrary internal world.
It seems like if you were truly a physicalist, then
you would understand that your that your internal world is
has to be conditioned by the same types of constraints
and pressures that that made the external world. And so
how can you how can it be possible to be
both a kind of reductionist or a you know, a
physical list and at the same time believe in this duality.
It's weird, It's wear it because I don't. I just don't.
Speaker 1: I think we talked about this a little bit when
you were in Riverside. I just don't understand how you
can even believe in minds on physicalism, in minds at all.
Why should there be a self?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I mean it's a kind of epiphenomenon of
material cause it. But you know that even people that
would say that, you just wait, wait ten seconds, and
then you catch them falling into Dickcard dualism, they just do.
As soon as they forget the subject they're talking about,
as soon as they forget that they're actually discussing the
fact that minds don't exist, You just wait ten seconds
in and you catch them. It's watching the New Athians
do that is the funniest. Like watching Sam Harris or
Dawkins do that, you know, on the one hand, to
have this kind of you know, it's just this, it's
just that it's reductionist language. And then you wait and
then they become pro clutching moralists like you know, five
seconds later it's hilarious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the same. Yeah with the moralism where it's like, well,
there's no you know, absolute moral standards don't exist, and
then two seconds later, well Christian Church does these horrible
moral atrocities, and you're just like, we're but you know,
something going back to the to the seeing thing, something
that helped me, maybe you could use this on people,
something that helped me articulate this is do you know
the the guy in the gorilla suit experiment. Yeah, it's
as sounding, it's incredible. So I don't know those of
you who we.
Speaker 2: Can describe it, you do, just then't use that as examples.
So many people have said you maybe you can describe
it for people. It's quite as sounding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so it's they have they do this test
and they show a video to the subject and the
subject is watching the video and it's a video of
these basketball players passing the basketball. And it's been done
many times in many versions, and the tester tells the subject,
you need to count how many times the basketball has
passed or how many times has passed to this team
or whatever, And so the subject sits there and watches it,
and then at the end of the video, the tester says, okay,
how many times and the subject says, oh, seventeen. Did
I get it right? And the tester says, yes, you did.
But did you see the guy in the gorilla suit
wave at you? And they're like, what do you know?
I would have seen that, and the tester says it, yeah,
a guy in a gorilla suit walked up, stood in
the center of the frame, waved at the audience, and
walked off stage. And the test goes, no, I would have,
or the subject goes, no, I would I would have
noticed that. Then they play it back and there it is,
and it's This was used, I think at the time,
to disprove the effectiveness of eyewitness testimony in courtrooms, because
they say, well, you know, eyewitness evidence is so unreliable.
But the takeaway was that you only see what you're
looking for, yeah, and you don't see what you're not
looking for. And I thought that this study I thought
this study proved way too much because what it what
it proves to me is that even the material world
cannot be seen like seeing material things itself gets problematized
by what your beliefs are. Yeah, of course if a
spirit you know, people say, well where is where are spirits?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: I thought they where a gohes? Where are spirits? All
these other cultures believed in it in the past that
we don't now. I guess they were stupid. And it's
the Gorillas suit experiment shows me, at least, I'm pretty
convinced that your your perception of physical reality itself is problematic.
Speaker 2: It's based on your beliefs. Yeah, you can. I mean
people experiment this. We experiment this in movies all the time,
you know where in some ways there the movie will
set it up so that like a good example, the
sixth Sense was one of the best ones, right where
you don't notice, or maybe you notice, but you kind
of push them to the side. There are all these
narrative incoherences in the movie and you just kind of
you kind of toss them out, you don't really string
them together, and then when you get to the punchline,
all of a sudden, all the incoherences that you barely notice,
all of a sudden gets strung together and then you
see something from the beginning of the movie. You actually
re see the movie in your head from the beginning,
and then all this stuff becomes coherent, and like you said,
you realize that there are pattern realities that it is
possible not to notice if you're not looking for them.
And so, like you said, let's say the signs of
things like ghosts or things like spirits, or the effect
of let's say, transpersonal agency. If you're not trained to
see it, you know, you wouldn't see it. My friend
JP Marsoi, he pushes it really hard. He talks about
this idea of people that can see auras. He uses
like kind of new new age kind of thing. But
he said, you imagine when you're a child and you
look at your mother. You know, you just see a face,
like you see this face, and at first you don't
even see a face, you just see a bunch of stuff,
and then slowly this stuff, it's all discombobulated. Then it
becomes a face, and then it becomes your mother, and
then it becomes all these things. And then when you
become older, you can become trained to notice emotions. Like
you can look at someone and you can see their emotion,
and it's like, well, what what the hell are you
talking about, Like, how can you see an emotion? Well, exactly,
you're you're trained to see subtle differences in material causes
that makes you see the emotion. And people that are
artistic or that have some impairment, you know, they're not
capable of seeing those subtle changes. And he was saying
something like how high does this go? How how much
is it possible to see in in the in subtle
by being subtly trained to look at someone's face or
to look at someone, you know, could you see into
their soul? Like if you imagine a monk that has
some kind of uh you know, uh visionary capacity will
look at you. Yeah, you'll see he sees through you
in the same way that I can look at you
and see if you're angry or you're mad, or you're sad.
But he can see way more because he has that
capacity to notice very very subtle patterning in human behavior.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it doesn't when you let when you
kind of let the cat out of the bag with
that idea, it's it kind of doesn't end. And so
what I was telling Catkummens was, you know, if you
could see reality, because that's why the book's call Journey
to Reality. You know, it's this idea that we're not
real yet, we don't see the world as it is.
And I told the Catechimmens, if you could see reality,
you would see the Holy Spirit descend on the gifts
in the liturgy. You would see and people have seen it,
you know, according to various reports, oftentimes little children, I heard.
I've heard many stories about this. They see the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 2: And so what you know is the failure.
Speaker 1: Let me put it this way, but that idea that
our perceptions are somehow inadequate, and that those perceptions get
more adequate when we increase in something like virtue. It's
just not even in the imaginative framework of a society
like ours, which is so informed by enlightenment, thinking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and you see it. And there's also I mean,
this is my experience, like this is not of my
own virtue. But I you know, when I went to
mont Athos last time and I met one of the
abbots of the monastery that where I was staying I
mean he was glowing. I don't know how I was
to say it. He was like there and everybody in
the room saw it, and everybody and then I kept
thinking like he then he said some things if we
had just transcribed what he had said, like you know,
he just said what Jesus says, like he just said,
you know, just basic Christian things. They didn't say anything
particularly different from what you would read in the Gospel
or what you would you know, but there was a
kind of present that was And I don't know how
what words used, because obviously there was no light like
physical and it's not like there's no other way to
describe what I was seeing besides something like he was glowing.
But I mean, it's not like if I turned the
light out, he would be glowing in the dark like
it wasn't It wasn't the same kind of physical. But
there's only the only analogy I can use is to
say that is just to use that term. And so,
like you said, I can imagine the same with someone
who is so attuned that they see the Holy Spirit
descend on the host, just like I see my wife's emotion,
which is invisible and is an internal state. Uh, you know,
and you say, like, what does sadness look like? And
I can't, really, I can't tell you what sadness looks like.
I mean, it's like I can tell when my wife
is sad. But it's a it's a it's a particular
experience of something that is invisible. In the same way,
like you said that that reality holds so much. I'm
we're you know, we're just finishing Dante right now, we're
just finishing the last conto. Like I'm actually this morning,
I was reading Kanto thirty two and you get these
this exactly what you're saying. Whereas like Dantia, Dantia sends
the heavens and he looks at Beatrice, and the higher
he is in the heavens, the more resplendent she is, right,
and the more she is just like this overwhelming presence
and this overwhelming white it's always the same gesture. She
looks at him and she smiles. She looks at him
and she smiles. But in that same gesture, at every
level of heaven, he sees more and more of God,
more and more of God, until you know, in some
ways he's trained to look directly at at God because
he saw through her this this this reality, and so
you know it's when you read it, If you read
it without a certain sensitivity, it can look like kind
of science fiction type, you know, like there's light and
he sees light and everything. But if you've had that
that little experience of seeing something behind you know, behind
the mask when you look at someone, then you know that,
like you said, there's way more behind that, like there's
there are levels behind that that are for And this
is this is hard, I think for modern people to
realize because you know, it actually is a physic it
is something that you experience. It's not like a mental thing.
It's not just like when I see the sadness of
my wife. It's not a mental thing. It's an actual experience. Uh.
And so it's hard because a lot of materialists will
then misinterpret that as a kind of materialist transformation, like
I don't know how to say it, like a kind
of kind of Marvel comics kind of you know, you
don't when need Marvel comics will show like the light
coming out and like electricity that's like exuding, you know, or.
Speaker 1: It's it's attributable to forces that science simply hasn't mapped.
Speaker 2: Out yet or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's so weird that the accusation of the God of
the gaps thing, when really there's the science of the gaps,
you know, like we haven't mapped that out yet. Yeah,
but it's like, I don't know, you get the you
sort of get the opposite picture in some of C. S.
Lewis's imagery too, like the dwarves in Narnia or the
people in the Great Divorce where they literally can't see
the physical thing going on because of this sort of
moral deficiency that's happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's also, Oh, that's that's also so true,
Like that's something that that you see all the time.
I really do have this intuition that in some ways,
when Christ is saying, you know, to not judge your brother,
it's like it's actually a training mechanism. It's actually it's
like it's actually training yourself to see the right patterns,
you know, so that when you encounter someone, you're always
encountering Christ in them, and you're actually calling that person,
you're actually calling that person into becoming that by encountering that.
Like if I encounter you, and I see in you
the best aspect of you, and I see, you know,
the highest aspect of you, and you can see that
in my face. So that's what I'm encountering. It's like
I'm actually calling you to become that. But you know,
everybody has had moments like that, or everybody's met people
that doesn't matter what's in front of them. They just
see the faults.
Speaker 1: And these ideas are in the culture. I mean, people
believe in manifesting, and people believe in karma, and people
believe at a sort of a pop level, and the
idea that the physical and the spiritual are interpenetrated. And
so I'm wondering something I've been talking a lot about
on my podcast recently, is the way in which we're
kind of coming back to a sort of naive paganism.
It's not like the Greco Roman paganism, but we're coming
back to a sort of weird re enchantment. And in
there are the kind of categories that would allow somebody
to understand the sacraments. And I was, I was, I
was in class and I said, okay, who you know.
I would always challenge the students and I say, you
know what, you guys, you know, I give them some
standard materialist thing and they would agree to it basically.
And then I said, okay, but who, where's your hand
if you believe in karma? And all the girls raised
their hand and I said of course.
Speaker 2: And I said, I.
Speaker 1: Said, oh, so you're really worried about how you're going
to get reborn in the next life. That's really what
you're concerned with, right, And they're like no. And I said, well,
that's what karma is about, friends, that it's about you
don't want to be reborn as our cockroach. You want
to be reborn as a princess. That's really what keeps
you up at night. And they're like no, because they're Americans,
they don't have a Hindu sense of karma. And so
I said, well, what do you mean by that? And
they said, well, you know, if you do good things,
then good things happened to you. I said, why do.
Speaker 2: You think that? What does that even mean?
Speaker 1: I mean, good things? Explain all of that to me.
And then when they realized, oh, I guess I don't
believe in materialism. I guess I do believe that there's
this moral thing out there. And I don't remember if
it was William L. Craig or it was some one
of these other one of the other kind of Protestant
philosopher types. From about ten years ago. He said, we
know that the moral law exists the same way that
we know the physical world exists, because when you try
to move around in it, you run into it. You know,
if you try to move around in the physical world,
you run into a physical object, and the same way
you run into the moral reality when you try to
do things. And we all just we all just know
that it's kind of it's the same thing that you're
talking about. You know, you run into people's emotions.
Speaker 2: Even though you can't see them. Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely
I mean, I think that at this point, hopefully for
most people, that it's kind of all the kind of undeniable,
you know, this idea that I do still hear people
say ridiculous things like you know, there's no there's no
moral order to the world, and I even sometimes I
want to just completely deracinated from moralism the way that
the way that you think about it. I'm like, okay,
let's forget the moral aspect at the outset, and let's
just say actions have consequences, Like if you do certain things,
certain things will happen. To you, and that is you
can't avoid that, or it's like you can avoid it
for a little while sometimes, but then at some point
it just crashes back. And that's it. Like I could say, okay, well,
if you want everybody to hate you and to be
alienated from your society, then here's how you act, Like,
just lie and cheat and steal, do these things. And
you could say, you know it's is it a moral good? Well,
you know, do it for a while, you know, see
what it does for you, and you'll notice that it's
dragging you down, like you'll notice that it's actually making
a slave, It makes a slave of others. Someone's going
to put you in prison at some point, you know,
someone's going to threaten you. Your going to become you're
basically going to become imprisoned by your behavior. But there's
these other behaviors that you can engage with and if
you do those certain things will happen to you as well.
You know, and you can experiment with it and you
can see, you can see what happens. Uh, And so yeah,
I think that that's a that's now how when I
face a moral relative. That's kind of my approach now
is to just say, well, they're actually if you don't
believe in absolute moral good, there is actually there's at
least an applied moral good because there are things that happen,
and there's a hierarchy of them too. You know, you
could you probably most people would probably agree that there
are certain societies that ran on certain patterns, but that also,
you know, ran themselves into the ground, and you probably
don't you know, probably don't want that, right, Yeah, and
you see it now like a good example. Now, like
the sexual revolution is such a great example. Like you
could say, hey, well you you want the sexual revolution.
Everything is relative, everything is like, well, if you do that,
then you're not gonna have people anymore. You're gonna run
out of people, you know, uh, And you know that's
kind of that's a reality. So if you want to
run out of people, then do these things and then
you're gonna and you're gonna you're gonna stop to exist.
But if you think that it's probably good you know
that people exist, or that you know that that people
should continue to exist, and you actually can't engage in
all these behaviors because they lead to a certain result.
And we have now we have the numbers you know
those results. Yeah, it's it's quite grim. Actually, yeah, that is.
Speaker 1: I'm I would wonder if that would that kind of
argumentation would make people think too consequentially about morality, meaning
like use it too much as a means to an ends.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. The thing that I've been.
Speaker 1: Using a lot too is is saying because something that
where that's very indicative of the sort of Western post
Christian reform it temperament about politics and society and morality
is outrage. You know, people are so outraged because they
have and moral indignation. You know, because we're kind of
utopianists in the West. We think that with the right
combination of laws and people that then we can make
the perfect society. And so there's a lot of outrage
because of course we're not at the perfect society. And
so what I try to poke at people's outrage, and
I say, well, why are you so upset?
Speaker 2: You know, what's the big deal? You know? Why if it?
Speaker 1: And then and then you quickly uncover that they believe
that there's such a thing as the moral law. And so,
like you said, I think it's very hard. I think
materialism is dead. This whole that kind of naive atheism
just doesn't.
Speaker 2: It didn't.
Speaker 1: It wasn't able to sustain itself for that long because
everybody has to believe.
Speaker 2: In in morality.
Speaker 1: And so I'm wondering, you know what the best way
is to start with that belief that the moral law
is real and it's outside of us and independent of us,
and it's something that we ought.
Speaker 2: To conform to.
Speaker 1: And then how do we start putting that together? Because now,
when when you start with that, now you're on the
same page as every other great civilization in human history.
And then you can have a conversation about religion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and did you see you know, because you've been
talking to all these nineteen year olds for how long
did you are you still teaching? No?
Speaker 1: So I taught that course for five years at Catholic
University in d C. Then we moved to California and
I taught at the University of Saint Catherine until it
closed a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2: And so I'm just podcasting now, Okay, all right, all right,
I mean I'm.
Speaker 1: But I'm catechising. So I teach the catechym as at church,
at this Church of Saint Andrew.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. My question is did you in the time
that you were teaching that class, if you stop, if
you like a few years ago, did you see a
change happening in the young people, either better or worse like,
in terms of their capacity to assimilate these these ideas,
these questions en mass.
Speaker 1: I mean, because there's mostly Generation ZE and so in general,
over the time that I was teaching about seven years,
I didn't see a very great change in mass in
the generation. But at an individual level, it was so
rewarding because so many people would individually come up to
me at the end of the semester, or email me,
or take me aside privately and say, hey, I just
want to thank you for this course. I mean, no
one has ever talked to me about religion in this
way at all ever. And these were some people who
had been in Catholic school from K through twelve. They
had been processed their whole lives. Some of them were Orthodox.
It's just nobody had ever sat there and reframed the
categories underneath all of these things in a way that
allowed them to make sense for these kids. And it
wasn't that the kids were you know, I wonder if
young people get too much of a bad raper. You know,
they're not interested, they don't care, they're blah blah blah.
But no one had ever made it made them care before.
And once I offered those that conceptual reframing, it was
just incredible. It was really breathtaking to see them go, oh, yeah,
this is what I've always believed, but no one told
me that this is what I believed. So going to God,
I mean, it was really a deeply rewarding kind of ministry.
Speaker 2: Really, And what are you seeing now, because now you're
teaching gottakisus in an actual church, what do you see
coming downstream? Because there's been a lot you know, obviously
there have been a lot of catechy and a lot
of young people coming in, And so what's your perception
of that, of that whole motion. It's very mixed.
Speaker 1: And I'm in southern California, so that's a very different.
Speaker 2: Kind of milieu than other milieus.
Speaker 1: I mean, Southern California is a lot of where the
home of a lot of megachurches, a lot of Protestant megachurches,
a lot of I mean, there's a lot of inter
religious et cetera. And also there's a lot of occultism
in an alternative religion in southern California, and so I
get a lot of ex Protestants in our church who
need to be disabused of their Protestant categories, specifically in
the sense that those Protestant categories nine times out of
ten are just Enlightenment categories, which is what's so awkward
about the conversation, as you say, well, this thing that
you think is quote unquote biblical is actually secular humanism,
as it turns out, and so that and I think
that's kind of an all ongoing problem. But increasingly we
get so many people who have an occult background, and
I actually I don't know if I should says, I
love catechising former occultists because they get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't need that's what they were looking for.
When they win a lot of people looking going towards
the occult, they're realizing there has to be a nontological structure,
there has to be metaphysics with undergirds these religious things.
And so when they read the like the nineteenth CenTra occultists,
that's what it seems to me, that's what they're at
least when I was young, that's what was that going on.
It was like people looking to say to say, well,
what's the what's the meaning structure underneath? What's this? What's
the will? What's you know, what's the relationship between my
consciousness and you know, manifestation. And so it's like, like
you said, it makes sense that that ocultist would discover
that that that orthodoxy actually offers a much more complete
ontological structure than the occultis is one or or a solution.
Speaker 1: So you know, I've had more than one person say
to me, Yeah, I was getting way too deep into this.
I was being haunted by these demons. I couldn't deal,
like figure it out. I heard about orthodoxy, I didn't
know what it was. I put eye coons upon my
house and the demons stopped attacking me.
Speaker 2: So I'm all in.
Speaker 1: And Mike, right, I mean, so you know it's it's
we laugh and it's funny, but it's so real for
these people, and and and so that I bring this
up as an exam because that's the kind of person
with whom you don't have to have any iconoclasm discussion,
right that all that kind of well, but the Old
Testament says, blah blah blah, you can't make a graven image,
Like that's so academic, you know, when somebody's being haunted
by a demon and they put icons up and the
demons go away.
Speaker 2: It works.
Speaker 1: There's exactly no, and it's not academic. It's deeply practically
you know. And so in a real way, those kinds
of experiences strike me as being much more laid antique
Christianity experience, much more like the early Church dealing with
these kinds of real problems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that, I mean that makes sense because when
you hear even sometimes when you hear stories of missionaries
that encounter different cultures and stuff and kind of present Christianity,
I think that's often the missing link is that people
don't realize that these weren't just theoretical questions you know
for people and they had like you said, they they
they sometimes lived with very very old things that had
a lot of power, uh, that they had to propitiate constantly,
and they were having to deal with all these all
these things you see it. I mean the sort of
Saint George is like is a kind of you know,
like a reduction of something like that, where it's like, well,
if you have to sacrifice human create, have human sacrifices
every year and someone comes and presents you, you know,
something that's effective to stop that. You know, most people
be like, hey, all right, let's let's let's stop. Let's
stop all these all this nonsense or all this like
destructive stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And something on that note, something that a lot of
people don't know is that the Romans had exorcisms too.
I mean, all these old cultures who knew and dealt
with the reality of spirits had exorcisms, and a lot
of Romans were won over on the basis of how
much more effective the Christian exorcism was.
Speaker 2: It was just practical. There are crazy stories I was
being interviewed by h a Coptic priest, and you know,
and then off the off camera he started telling me
these crazy stories about I mean, this is wild, like
that they're the monastery with Saint Moses, the Ethiopian is right,
Saint Modes the Blackest and his sarcophagus is there and
it's like seven feet you know, it's like a huge sarcophagus,
you know, and it's closed. And at least when he
told me the story, he said that there's a monk
who has a very deep a grey close relationship to
Saint Moses. And so he sits next to the sarcophagus
and they talk to each other, and he like whispers
to Saint Moses. Uh. And then there's a long line
of people that come to get to receive healing from
Saint Moses. And it's like, it's like me, it's it's Muslims,
is Christians, it's like whatever, just any kind of person.
People just come, you know. And then and then supposedly
the monk he like whispers to Saint Moses, and then
like it starts, the room starts to shake and people
get healed. This is the story I heard, Folks like,
I didn't witness it myself, but this is the story
I heard of a man who saw it himself.
Speaker 1: But I mean, there are so many stories like this everywhere,
and you can just say, well, I mean back to
the kind of original point. It's like, I think those
sorts of stories are hard for us as Westerners, whereas
an ancient person would have just been like, yeah, sure,
why not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm cynical, Like you saw how I told the story.
The whole time, I'm like making excuses, you know, I
you know, I have to say I'm such a modern person.
People tell me about the mare streaming icons and I'm like, yeah,
you know, I'll see it when I believe it. I'll
believe it when I see it, you know. And and
you know you will see it when you believe it too. Yeah, exactly. Well,
I like I saw I did see the mirror streaming
icon from of Hawaii when I was in a church
in Louisville. I think it would just showed up and uh,
and you know, it's like I'm still such a modern person.
I was looking at it and I'm thinking, you know,
it's a pretty big box. It was like being so cynical.
But I talked to a nun once who saw the
mur screaming icon of Montreal, and you know, and I
trusted her. She said she said she spent the night
with the icon because she was she was helping the
guardian because obviously the guardian can't be with the icon
all the time. And she said, you know, she said,
it's just a piece of paper and she like put
her face like right up to it and she was
just waiting and she could just see like the beads
pop out and she said, there's no like it was
just it's just a photocopy, you know, and anyway, so
but yeah, so you can see that I'm such a
modern person because I'm very cynical about all that stuff.
I believe in it, like theoretically, but as soon as
someone gives me a story, I'm like, yeah, yeah, you know, maybe.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe yeah, no, it's it's in the water, you know.
Speaker 2: So actually, this is a question I wanted to ask you.
Speaker 1: So people people really like the Journey to Reality Glory
to God, and they've been appreciating kind of me getting
more into these sorts of topics in my podcast. But
something that people keep asking me over and over again.
And the students started with the students, they say, we
love the book, it's great, we get it.
Speaker 2: What do we.
Speaker 1: Do how do we actually put this into practice? And
the answer is not just go to liturgy and be
a Christian because I get all these neophytes in our church.
We've actually just turned into a neophight church because we
have so many catechumens and the ratio of neophytes is
very high and they're going to church and doing it.
But same kind of thing you're talking about. The categories
are all still Protestant, secular, modern, whatever, and you know
me too, everybody, everybody in this culture. So what people
I've been asking me for is we need some kind
of set of practical things to do. So what I'm
working on right now is basically a masterclass that I'm
calling d secular rightation, and it's it's it's it's like
a masterclass style. So there's you know, short lectures that
go along with each lesson and whatever. But then I'm
giving all of these exercises and challenges. Do this journal
about this? Ask yourself this question. A lot of it's
related to putting your phone away, you know, all this.
Speaker 2: Kind of practical stuff.
Speaker 1: But so my question that I'm asking everybody because people
keep asking me for this course and it's going to
it's coming out soon. But what do you think, because
obviously you could go all over the place with a
course like that, what do you see that's something that
would be very helpful and healing for people? Like a topic?
You know, what sorts of things do you think should
be focused on in an introductory course like that? Given
the kinds of things that you see people struggling with
in your perish and when you're going around giving talks
and the kinds of questions people ask you, you know,
what sort of thing would be valuable to people? And
of course like that do you.
Speaker 2: Think I mean, I would say, I mean, my my
advice on that front is always to stay close to
what is accessible to you, because I mean, it's hard,
especially for like people who become Orthodox. It's it's like
you're also moving into like a foreign world. You're you're
learning a new language. Everything about it is is new.
But you know, the the kind of enlightened experiences are
they're closer to us than we than we think they're
They're in our own celebrations, like the birthday celebrations or
name day celebrations, in holidays and meals. And so I
tend to to tell to encourage people to stay close
and to say, okay, well, can you make the most
of your dining room, like when you're with your wife
and your kids, Like can you create dedicated experiences that
that that will that will shine. And if you start
when you're when the kids are young, that's definitely something
you can do. Like what are these what are these
moments that we can have and end the everyday life.
You know, That's why we wrote the Fairy Tales was
because that's something that's immediate, right, sitting with a child
in a book. Reading a book to a child is
like an immediate entering into a world of uh that's
almost liturgical, you know. And so that's the that's really
the the the advice that I give is that a
lot of people, you know, they go straight to Oh,
you know, I could say that Jesus pay a thousand
times a day, and you know, I can do these
these like massive spiritual practices. I'm not against those obviously,
but I think there's something to say about saying kind
of close to close to the things that are that
are already around you and that you can make more bright,
you know, like our our daily lived reality. Yeah exactly,
you know, and just like a kind of day discipline.
And also, like I said, I think that I focus
on meals a lot, especially if you have kids. There
are a lot of things that you can do to
to to feel connected and to kind of leave the
mind in a box world that we tend to live in. Yeah,
thank you, I'm writing I'm writing this down. Does that well?
Speaker 1: I'm asking everybody, I mean everyone, I talk to, every priest,
every catechist, everyone, because you know, there's this there's this
real need I think that for practical things, because there's
lots of good books and good podcasts and good content
coming out all of the time.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's this huge explosion of good Internet orthodoxy,
let's say, and re enchantment is on everybody's minds and
all this stuff. But you know, my concern always, well
a lot of the time is that they become too intellectualized,
because if you just turn it into studying more and
more and more, a that preclude it's a certain type
of person who's not that interested in doing that, and
then b it kind of puts you back into your
inside this internal headspace where you're just thinking through problems.
Very scholastic. Maybe you could say, yeah, yeah, but our
life is lived that.
Speaker 2: There's also a simple one, which is obviously the one
that the Fathers often say. It's like remember, you know,
just remember remember God, remember your sins. You know, just attention,
practicing attention is pretty you know, I think it's it's
it's also like a universal thing. It's not a particularly
Christian thing. It's something you see in the Fathers that
you see some Buddhist monk tailure or whatever. But I
think it's because it's so real that if you that
were so distracted and we're so swirling in our thoughts,
that if you're able to practice just basic attention and
basic memory, like like remembering yourself and remembering God, that
does a lot. I think too.
Speaker 1: And actually I've often quoted your definition for worship, but
let me make sure I'm doing it justice, which was
imitative attention is yeah, how you talk about it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so.
Speaker 1: Do you find because I often want to recommend people,
I'm sort of on the cusp of including something that
looks like meditation in this course, just in the sense
of there's a lot of meanings to that word, obviously,
but just in the sense of being totally present and
having no thoughts. Yeah, in a state of giving total
attention to something, just to existing. But I wonder how
much that kind of word is a turn off for
people who are worried about the influence of New Age
thought on Christianity, which is real, that's a that's a
real kind of syncretism problem that you see in the
twentieth century.
Speaker 2: But I think that if you use the term practicing attention,
I don't think that that's that that's particularly a problem,
you know, you know, the idea of the idea of
of focusing attention and then also avoiding distraction and having
that attention be a physical attention too, right, to just
be still and to attend, and to also you know
the practice of being aware of the the logismoi, you know,
like of the of the thoughts and to kind of
let them go. Like all of those things are totally fine.
Just because some Buddhist meditation does the same thing doesn't
mean that it's wrong. You see it in the Philocalia
and in the in the Hesiochastic Fathers all the time.
So I think that it's completely fine, you know. And
I know there's been you know, in the early twentieth
century and part of the parts of the twentieth century,
there's been a lot of going against the breathing aspect
of the Jesus prayer. But I think that yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
but I think that there's that there's been a I
think that now we're in a better position to help
people kind of understand that aspect and how in fact,
if we do believe in a fully sacramental reality, you know,
if you don't object to the fact that the that
the you know that the cup that the hold the
host has to be made of a precious metal. Like
if if you believe that, then why would it bother
you that in prayer there would also be a kind
of breathing and a type of attention to the body
that would that would help to avoid distraction, you know.
And so I think that I think that it's possible
to recover those aspects of the Jesus prayer in a
way that isn't new age or whatever, but it is
actually a more more sacramental and kind of incarnational practice
of the of the prayer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I understand why people have that reaction where
we just started the next series on my podcast on
American religion, and in reading up on this, I was
just kind of validated and also still surprised at how
much a cult and esoteric influence.
Speaker 2: Was weird. You're doing that. We're doing that right now too.
We just brow Yeah. Yeah, we just put out as
episode uh called I think it's called Universal History of
American I forget American Religion. We talk about the bird,
the birdover district. Yes, that's next week. Oh, that's wild
that you're doing at the same you're doing it Oh
my goodness. Okay, there you go. Yeah, so there you go.
It's it's in the air to help understand the relationship
between Kabbalah and and the you know, and the Puritans,
Like they're these weird connections that people like, you know,
the idea that that the Salem witch trials, like we're
just completely in a vacuum that nobody was practicing these
kinds of magical practices, you know, Okay, whatever they were.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's breath taking. Well, you know, I mean,
you guys are in the middle of it right now too.
I was just breath taking to me. The extent to
which occultism and spirit mediums and says, I mean Lincoln
held a seance in the White House. I mean, it's
it's just wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So it was, so I understand, yeah it was
those times. But but yeah, but I think, yeah, go
ahead and say what you were going to say about
the well, the connection is, like, so I understand. Why.
Speaker 1: So by the time we get to the twentieth century
and there's there are overtly explicit movements called Satanism and
Luciferianism and Hindu syncretism and the Bahai religion it's like
I understand why there's a pushback from the evangelicals, even
if they are not on solid enough ground to make
an adequate pushback, and why that might come into, you know,
a suspicion of Buddhism or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I actually in the in the Orthodox, in some
of the twentieth century aesthetics, they really went after the
breathing part and especially like the heartbeat part of the
and said it was dangerous, it was danger for help
and all this stuff. And I think they're also afraid
that it was turning the Jesus prayer into a kind
of an automatic thing, you know, like it it wasn't
it wasn't related to contrition and to I see, and
it was just like it was more like a Montreal
like this automatic thing that you do. But I think
that we can recover the more that's say embodied aspect
of the prayer without falling into that mistake. It's especially
now with like so much so much of Cogshai and
so much of like the recent psycho you know, psychological
development show us that the body is completely related. You
can't separate the body from from from spiritual practices, you know.
Speaker 1: And I even knew a woman on the East Coast
who went to her priest and said, I want to
do the Jesus prayer, and he sent her, He literally
sent her to a nearby Buddhist center to take a
class in breathing meditation. You should go there, learn to breathe,
and then come back and I'll teach you that Jesus prayer.
And she said, you know, why are you sending me
to this Buddhist center? He said, because the human body
is the same everywhere, and this is a good resource
to learn how to breathe. So you need to breathe
to pray. Go do that, you come back.
Speaker 2: So that's why I've never heard anything like that. That's
where that's it. That's that's interesting, very interesting.
Speaker 1: And I wonder too, how much of because obviously ecommenced syncretism,
where we kind of say all religions are the same
or whatever. Obviously that's you know, we can't have that.
But I guess I would want a different word for
the kind of cus lewisy and syncretism that produces books
like Christ the Eternal Doo, for example.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean where.
Speaker 1: We say, well, all of this belongs to the faith,
no matter where where it is all all truth is Christ.
So when you encounter truth, you're encountering some part of
some part of Christ.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think that this is It's been there
from the beginning. You know. It's like you have Tertillian
versus Justin Martyr, Like right at the outset, you kind
of have these two almost necessary aspects of the tradition,
one which is trying to protect the inside and to
prevent corruption and kind of infection, and the other which
is saying, well, if you know, if the world is
creative by God, then it means that God must be present.
And therefore all those that you know, all truth is
our truth. You know, the ancient philosophers, all the things
they said were true, is Christ's truth, you know, saying,
I mean Justin Martyr even said they were Christians before Christ.
And so I think that, you know, and it's and
it's funny because both of those are kind of captured
in monasticism, and you know, you go to mon Athos,
you see the Greek the philosophers and the Greek thinkers
in the nartheks of the churches with their like prophecies.
But at the same time, you know, often the monastics
are the ones that are the most radical in terms
of purity and like protecting the inside and everything. So
I think that there'll always be at tension between those two.
And if we're sensitive, we can realize that the people
that play the like, if we have a certain tendency,
that the people that have the opposite tendency, they they
are also necessary. They're probably good check on you, no
matter what you which side you're on, They're probably a
good check on you to prevent prevent accesses in believing
that the world is arbitrary and that you know, the
world isn't actually created by God, and God's grace isn't
present in the world, and where everything is falling and
corrupted in a kind of Calvinist way, you know that's
not the Orthodox way. Then at the same time, like
you said, we can't have this kind of just like
whatever syncretism that doesn't work either.
Speaker 1: Which, weirdly, going back to the American religion things, that's
a weird theme I'm noticing in American religion. You know,
it starts with Freemasonry and then it leads into Theioseelphism.
There's all of these movements to sort of make this
kind of meta religious movement that tries to include all
these other things. And so that's I don't know, that's
probably a result of the trying to solve the chaos
of the Reformation, now that I think about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, one of the things that I've been my
insight too about this has been that there seems to
be that because the tendency of the Reformation, not right away,
but the tendency of the Reformation is to move towards
the kind of flattening. Obviously, like you know, Anabaptists are
the radicals, but even if you don't just take directly Anabaptists,
there's a movement towards the kind of flattening. But because
reality is actually not flat, it's just it is, isn't
it actually doesn't work that way. What happens is secret societies,
you know, because there's a kind of secret about the
higher cure of the world that has to re formulate itself,
and so you have these people that that so you
can see like the secret societies and even freemasony, like
if it really existed before the like seventeenth century, I mean,
who knows, I mean maybe did, but it's appealas it
appears around the around that time, it starts to it
starts to bubble up. And so there's a connection between
the Enlightenment and the secret societies, right uh. The wrote
these letters to the to the Rosicrucians trying to like
get into their secret, secret thing, and so, you know,
so it's interesting because in North and so in some
ways you have, like I heard traces. This is a
little difficult to talk about, but you know, I've heard
traces of of of hermetic organizations inside the Catholic Church,
like actually Catholic priests that are kind of secretly hermeticists
and practice these kind of mixed mystical practice, but it's
not officially part of their practice. It's like something apart
or on top or whatever. But as in Orthodoxy, we
don't we don't have that, we don't need that because
because the Jesus Prayer, which leads to theosis, is just
part of our it's just part of our tradition, and
you access it to whatever level you can access it.
There's no need for a secret doctrine. There's no need
for like a secret hierarchy. It's like it's right there.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that starts to emerge by the time
Scholasticism is hitting its full kind of rationalist force, and
that kind of causes a esoteric reaction the way the
Enlightenment leans very non rationalism, and then you get the
romantic kind of pushback against it. I feel like you
see those two tendencies and in the West since the
Middle Ages, you know, the hyperrational and then the move
away to the sort of secret, emotional, occult, esoteric thing
kind of a as a reaction.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's possible. For sure, there's a there's a
there's an influx from Spain, you know, that came from
from the kind of capitalist movement. And then there's already
a kind of Christian Cobbola during the Renaissance that starts
to develop itself. And so it is it is like
you said, before the Reformation, before the Enlightenment, but it's
already in those movements that are leading, that are leading
to it. And so you know, in the in kind
of Renaissance magic, you have these types of influences.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean maybe that that starts earlier in
like the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, where you know at
and the divide between the rational and the sort of esoteric.
Speaker 2: It possibly, Yeah, I mean that's where the that's where
the templars, like, so that's where the legends of the
templars are are are probably at least the legends around
them are probably relevant in the sense that it's the
templars that are the source of all the the esotericism
in the West, Like they all no matter which one
you look at, whether it's the Freemasons or the Resecutions
or whatever, if you look at their mythology, it goes
back to the to the templars into this to the
suppression of the templars. So yeah, you probably onto something
we studied U before I was in Patristics in my
PhD program. They I was.
Speaker 1: I just sort of woke up one day in the
medieval department and we were doing all this translation of
medieval manuscripts, and it was really just eye opening the
way that we know very little about the medieval world.
Speaker 2: It certain says, I don't know if you know this.
Speaker 1: There was a ton of text produced in the in
the Middle Ages, and ninety percent of it has never
been translated by ament.
Speaker 2: I totally believe it. I completely believe it, and because
I mean, but in some ways it is. I think
it's it has to be with the Enlightenment and the
Dark Ages and all this stuff. There's a desire for
the same reason the Enlightenment people said, said the Byzantine Empire,
you know, quote for that same reason it was also
didn't want you to see anything of the medieval actual
medieval text. Yeah. Yeah, anyways, we're kind of way off
our original subject, but it is definitely very interesting. And
so doctor zach Talus, where people you said, you're podcasting,
that's so tell us where people can find you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the podcast is on ANCI it's an ancient faith
hosted podcast, so it's on Ancient Faith Radio. There's a
YouTube channel for it called the Roots of Everything. It's
also on the regular kind of ancient faith channels. But
all of that content, with all these bonus episodes are
on substack. So it's just just zach Ricporku dot substack
dot com. And that's kind of where I'm putting everything
right now and putting notes actually for the upcoming course
and for I'm trying to do a sequel to this book. Actually,
there's a because the thing my students asked me a
lot about was I said, well, what do you want next?
And they said sexuality, sexual ethics, because a huge defeat
for Generation Z and a lot of other generations is
as soon as they hear that your church might be
somehow phobic, it's a non.
Speaker 2: Starter for them. You know, it's just lay off the table.
Speaker 1: And so I realized that we needed a whole sequel
book about morality and to address sexual ethics.
Speaker 2: So so putting some notes out step on that landmine
for us, Doctor Zach.
Speaker 1: That's what everybody said. Everybody said, you go to that,
but but no. I asked Father Josiah, trying for a
blessing to write this book, and he said, I'm not
giving you a blessing to write this book. And then
he paused, and I stared at him, and he goes,
I'm demanding it. Did you write this book that's hilarious?
So you know, well we'll see how that goes.
Speaker 2: All right, And everybody, don't forget to jick out journey
to reality.
Speaker 1: It's good to talk to you, doctor Zach. Yeah, it
was great to talk to you. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: I said I would never do it again. But here
we are. We are announcing the Symbolic Girl Summit in
May twenty twenty six. I have so many great people
around me that I'm just excited to do it, even
though I thought it would be crazy to do it again.
Speaker 4: Our summit's going to be from May fourteenth through sixteenth
in Broadview Heights, Ohio. You can buy tickets at Symbolic
World Summit dot com. We have early bird pricing going
right now, fifty dollars off of general admission and VIP tickets.
Keynote speakers this year our father Josiah Trenham and doctor
Mary Harrington, which is a combination nobody knew that they wanted,
but I think it's going to be absolutely incredible. And
of course Jonathan and I will be speaking, as well
as several people from around the Symbolic World community.
Speaker 2: A lot of people that you like that you've seen
are going to be there, are going to come, We're
gonna have book signings. It'll be a lot of time
for people to meet and to greet. We're also doing
Supra as well, and so come and join us. We
can't wait for this and we're excited to meet you
in person. If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please
go to the Symbolic World dot com website and see
how you can support what we're doing. There are multiple
subscriber tiers with perks. There are apparel in books to purchase,
So go to the Symbolic World dot com and thank
you for your support.