Speaker 1: The whole world is a miracle, and we struggle to
see it because we're so used to it, are kind
of bored by it because we were just we just
live in the world and we're used to it. But
once you start to realize to what extent all things
are held in spirit in God, you realize that the
miracles are just really very bright versions of something that
happens all the time, that is constantly underlying the world.
Speaker 2: So we're going to try to look at that. This
is Jonathan Pesel, Welcome to the symbolic world.
Speaker 3: I know people say things like you know, such and
such as does not an introduction, but I think that's
probably true of all of our speakers today. But I
think many of us have the experience of clicking on
a video and watching Jonathan Pago do his thing. And
one of my favorite things that he does is was
saying where he says, I just don't know what to
tell you, but he does.
Speaker 2: So Jonathan.
Speaker 3: Please everybody welcome Jonathan up for his fall.
Speaker 2: It is just good you. Yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine. Hey, everyone.
Speaker 1: Everybody organizing this conference is really good at making it
feel like we're just all of big family hanging out
and so yeah, all right, all right, so fractals everybody.
Speaker 2: So this is something called the sibirsky. How did you
pronounce it? Serpinski triangle.
Speaker 1: I mean it existed before the mathematician, but I guess
it took his name. And so I thought, if we're
going to talk about fellowship of the Spirit, I thought,
because I'm with a bunch of experts here, the people
who have been kind of following these conversations for a
long time, I thought we would try to push a
little harder on our understanding of what that means, of
why these words that we use are not arbitrary. You know,
we've spent several, maybe the last one hundred years people
try to convince us that a lot of these words
are kind of.
Speaker 2: Just arbitrary words.
Speaker 1: Spirit, angel have been all these things, but they actually
have meanings and they actually.
Speaker 2: Are talking about reality.
Speaker 1: And so we're gonna look a little bit more about
how it is that spirit embodies itself in the world,
and hopefully it will move us a little further. And
I'm pushing myself harder because when I'm with you guys,
feel like.
Speaker 2: I can do that too.
Speaker 1: I can kind of go on the edge of what
I understand, and so if i'm if you've seen me
skating a little, hopefully you can be.
Speaker 2: More forgiving than in other circumstances.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that sometimes makes it
harder for us, how do I know how much time
I have?
Speaker 2: Is there a way to do that?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: I see it's right there, all right, Sorry, I just
want to make sure I don't go over.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that makes it difficult for
us to understand what it is we're talking about when
we talk about spirit or fellowship of the Spirit, or
the way in which Spirit embodies itself in the world,
is really is our difficulty thinking in terms of fractals.
It's the difficulty in understanding how this is constantly happening
all the time in everything thing that we encounter, right, and.
Speaker 2: That all things and all.
Speaker 1: All parts of things are always God sustaining the world
through His spirit.
Speaker 2: The whole world is a miracle, and we struggle to
see it because we're so used to it, are kind.
Speaker 1: Of bored by it because we were just we just
live in the world, and we're used to it. But
once you start to realize to what extent all things
are held in spirit, in God, you realize that the
miracles are just really very bright versions of something that
happens all the time, that is constantly underlying the world.
Speaker 2: So we're going to try to look at that a
little bit.
Speaker 1: So maybe go to the next slide. And so in
the Bible, the Bible starts with these these basic categories Heaven, Earth.
At first, we don't really know what it is because
these categories are kind of and then as the Bible progresses,
you could think that the whole Bible is there to
help us understand what these are talking about. Now, what's
the first thing that's important to understand is that neither
of these categories are in the world, in the world
as we experience it. They're not things. Heaven is not
a thing. Earth is not a thing the way it's
described in the Bible. Earth is chaotic potential, right, it's
tohu bohu.
Speaker 2: It's it's this emptiness and void, right.
Speaker 1: And Heaven is the place out of which God's voice
comes and forms reality.
Speaker 2: And so it's not it's not in the world.
Speaker 1: And that's really important to understand because when we start
to think that they're in the world, then we get
massively confused.
Speaker 2: When we look at it, when we look at.
Speaker 1: Things, because we just can't see at which at what
proper level we we can look at. So it's really
important to understand there are different words that we use. Right,
So when you talk about spirit and matter matter, if
we think about it that way, matter also doesn't exist.
It doesn't have an existence unless it is qualified by Heaven.
Everything that has a name, everything that you can recognize,
is adjoining of Heaven and Earth together, right, And so
a way of thinking about it, I'm giving you a
basic idea is you have order coming from above, coming
from Heaven, and you have potential or chaos that comes
from below, and you need those two categories.
Speaker 2: You need those two things in order for anything to exist.
Speaker 1: And this joining of order and potential is happening in
every being that you recognize as existing. So you could
think of every single being has Heaven and Earth inside.
And there are these images that the church fathers use
that are beautiful.
Speaker 2: They talk about how.
Speaker 1: In your heart there's Heaven and Earth in your heart, right,
and there's a ladder in your heart that connects.
Speaker 2: Heaven and Earth together.
Speaker 1: But that if you continue to push into that idea,
you realize that everything has heaven and earth inside everything
has heaven and earth.
Speaker 2: Relating is like a little temple.
Speaker 1: Right, everything is a little temple at a little revelation
from God. And like I said, it's only because we're
kind of blase and bore that we don't see it.
Speaker 2: So to bring it, to bring language that is a
little more let's.
Speaker 1: Say practical, you could say that heaven offers identity and
earth offers variation.
Speaker 2: So let's go to the next slide.
Speaker 1: So when God creates the world, he says a bunch
of weird things. He does it a few times. He says,
let the land produce vegetation, seed bearing plants and trees
on the land that bear fruit with seed in it,
according to their various kinds. It's such a weird way
of phrasing it. So God doesn't we always think that
God creates things.
Speaker 2: Actually, God in this case doesn't.
Speaker 1: Create everything at least in this he basically gives a
basic category and he says to Earth produce variation on
this category. Right, So produce plants and the earth produces plants.
But he says what's important is that the plant contains seed.
It contains seed because seed is heaven. Right, seed is
an image of heaven inside. Why is seed an image
of heaven? Because seed is a pattern of a plant.
Speaker 2: Right. The seed isn't the plant. It's like a little dot.
Speaker 1: And in that little dot there's the whole pattern of
the plant. And now it has to be put into
the earth, and it has to embody itself using the
potential of the earth. Right, that offers itself to the pattern,
and that is what creates a particular plant.
Speaker 2: Right. That image is true of everything, right, It's true of.
Speaker 1: Everything has a pattern, and the pattern embodies itself and
then manifests itself in variability.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: And so that's why it's very important to note when
you talk about fractals. Right. Already in this text, you
can see that God is setting everything up in a fractal.
He's providing the seed, right, He's providing the pattern. He says,
let the land produce vegetation, and let every version of
that vegetation.
Speaker 2: Reproduce.
Speaker 1: What I'm saying, So, let the earth produce vegetation, and
let every plant then have in it a pattern that
will reproduce itself and will have variation in it.
Speaker 2: Like we'll take the earth.
Speaker 1: And create different versions, because let's say you have a
maple tree. It's very practical. I know it's hard to
think this way, but it's very very practical. Right. So
you have trees, right, and then you have variations on trees,
and then you have a maple, and then you have
variations on maples, and then you have the one maple
tree that is planted in your backyard, and that is
a specific maple tree that is the joining of the
all these patterns, the pattern of tree, the pattern of maple,
of this particular kind of maple that is now a
very very particular hard tree that is totally unique and
is different from all the other trees. So it's both
completely different from all the other trees, but it's all
it's a manifestation of all these patterns that.
Speaker 2: It's participating in.
Speaker 1: Right. And so when God says that the earth produce vegetation,
and then he's saying, now, the things that it's going
to produce are going to repeat what I've just said,
which is every plant, every plant is going to have
an identity and is going to have a variation, and
that is indefinite. There's an indefinite version of this, right,
There's no limit, and.
Speaker 2: That's why it's very difficult if you.
Speaker 1: Don't think fractically, it becomes very difficult to see some
of these patterns because they're always manifesting themselves, like they're
like I call them cascading hierarchies. So there are all
these hierarchies that are manifesting themselves simultaneously, and they're all valid, right,
it's not like anything goes or anything as possible like
these they're valid, they're true, but they're multiple, like at they're.
Speaker 2: All multiple at the same time.
Speaker 1: So every single being that you recognize as being one
has to be this joining of potential.
Speaker 2: So I mean, let's do the battle right.
Speaker 1: And so like you recognize, you recognize the purpose of
this right, you recognize the name of it, you recognize
the reason for it, You recognize that it's there for
you to drink water, and you know that there are
many types of things that you could use to drink
water with. But you have the capacity to both know
that this is the same as like a ceramic cup,
but it's also different and it has its own particularities
to it, but it participates in that pattern, and then
you can you do it completely unconsciously. You can recognize
all of the patterns and you know what it's for,
and you also know that it's not.
Speaker 2: It's my water bottle and it's not his.
Speaker 1: Like that, you could have two on the table and
you could know that they're different, and you could also
know that they're the same, and you're completely fine doing that.
Speaker 2: It's completely normal for you to do that.
Speaker 1: But once you start to think with fractals, you can
start to see how this plays out, and especially how
it plays out in terms of groups of people, because
that's the theme of the conference. The theme of the
conference is fellowship in the spirit.
Speaker 2: So what are.
Speaker 1: We talking about when we talk about a group that
has fellowship? How is it that Heaven acts on us?
Is what type of causality does Heaven provide on groups?
Now you've seen in terms of objects that Heaven provides identity, right, purpose,
All these things are invisible. Right, you can't see the
purpose of the bottle in the bottle. It's not there, right,
it's in the purpose. And that's why this bottle could
be used to This thing here could be used to
do other things besides being a bottle.
Speaker 2: Right, it could become a weapon very fast.
Speaker 1: If someone's running at me I could throw out of
a sudden, it becomes a weapon. That's because the patterns
are real, and they instantiate themselves this way in variation,
and what's real is mostly the patterns, right, The patterns
are the things that are the most real about things.
And that's the first thing we have to flip in
our mind when we're a materialist, is to realize that
the world is anchored in logos. The world is not
anchored from below first, it's first anchored from above. It's
anchored in purposes, it's anchored in names. It's anchored in
reasons why things exist. And then those reasons find their instantiations.
They find their multiple instantiations in the world. And those
are the ones that are actually quite unstable, right, the things,
but down here below, they're actually quite variable. Things shift
and change, right, The solidity is not is not down here.
Speaker 2: Hopefully that'll make sense once we look at groups. All right,
So I'm gonna let's go to groups because.
Speaker 1: I don't want to let's next slide please, all right.
Speaker 4: All right, And so this is how in scripture in
the world, this is how heaven embodies itself.
Speaker 2: Kind of comes down on us.
Speaker 1: And if you know your Bible, you'll see that this
is the different levels of instantiation. And that's the best
way to think about it, just to think about it
as levels of embodiment.
Speaker 2: And they're in de definite amounts of them.
Speaker 1: Right, There are in definite shades of embodiment by which
Heaven are purposes or identities find themselves in their variability,
find themselves in the world. In the Bible, the way
it works is you have a revelation from God, right,
and that's the first part. Whatever exists isn't in it.
It comes from above it. It comes from above. Even
this bottle is a revelation, right, because for me to
recognize it.
Speaker 2: It already has to be.
Speaker 1: It comes from a purpose that isn't in the bottle.
It comes from above the bottle. And it's the same
with everything. And that's why the relationship that humans have
with God in scripture is revelation.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It comes to them, and it comes from above it,
and it is in some ways.
Speaker 2: Can I say this it is mysterious, right, It.
Speaker 1: Is mysterious because it doesn't have all the forms yet.
Speaker 2: So that's why the.
Speaker 1: Glory of God, right, the glory of God in the
Bible is represented often with images like light, like breath,
like wind, sometimes been like darkness, right, because it's not
something yet, it's that which brings you beyond yourself. So
that's how the revelation starts. And then then it comes
down from that. And then you have something like names.
So God speaks and then he gives names to things
in the world. God chooses, God picks, right, all these
things are invisible when I select something. When God selects Abraham,
no one can see that. In Abraham, it's an invisible thing.
God said this person, and nobody can tell yet what
that's going to give.
Speaker 2: It's just one guy, and God is just pointing and.
Speaker 1: Saying this kind of putting his finger and revealing something hidden,
something secret about Abraham that we know now because we're
thousands of years after and we now know what happened
and everything that came through.
Speaker 2: But when the revelation appears, right, it's secret. It's hidden.
Speaker 1: If you think of the shape of the tabernacle, the
shape of the temple, right, that's how it works.
Speaker 2: There's this secret.
Speaker 1: Place, this hidden place that is behind the veils, and
that's where the revelation of God manifests itself. And from
that the world unfurls in its multiplicity, and every level
is a veil, right and an embodiment at the same time.
So in the Bible, one of the things that happens
is that in some ways there's even there's a little
bit of a resistance to embodiment. Even God doesn't want
to completely embody himself in things right away, because the
problem with every embodiment is that it's a veil that
both reveals what's above and then separates you from what's
above at the same time. So what Saint Paul says,
like the law, it's like even Christ, you know that
the law is given to you because of the weakness
of your hearts, Like that's why the law is given
to you. If you had love, you wouldn't need the law, right,
And if you had love, you wouldn't need the law,
and you wouldn't need the tabernacle, and you wouldn't need
you would all of these things would be contained and
held up above. But then God condescends and then gives
us these multiple iterations, And so you can understand that
the law is why is the law manifestation of heaven? Right?
Speaker 2: The law is a manifestation of heaven because.
Speaker 1: It manages purposes, right, it frames purposes, It says, okay, right,
so you can't just.
Speaker 2: Live in love of God and love of your neighbors.
Speaker 1: So what I'm going to do is I'm going to
tell you at a lower level how to embody that.
And then I'm going to say, don't steal from your neighbor,
don't take his wife, don't do these things that go
against the purpose. Right, and with the laws not sufficient,
then the embodiment's going to go down even more.
Speaker 2: And then it's.
Speaker 1: Going to be if you do this, then then I'm
going to punish you because I want you to move
towards the purpose. So if you do this, I'm going
to bring you back towards the towards the real purpose.
Speaker 2: And if that doesn't work, then not only that, but
I'm going.
Speaker 1: To create a police force that is going to enforce
the law on you. Yeah, I wish you didn't need it,
like you wish you were in like a nice community
and everybody loves each other and we don't need a
police force. But the instantiation happens at a more and
more embodied level.
Speaker 2: Right, So the the.
Speaker 1: Revelation of Heaven slowly, you could say, embodies itself in
the world and becomes more and more, becomes harder, comes harsher,
and comes more multiple. Let's go to the next one,
all right, And so the best way of understanding this
is that Heaven provides influence. Influence is a kind of
causality which we're not used to thinking about, but which
is the one that, especially as conscious humans, we are
constantly engaging in.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: It provides an invisible motivation. So if I am, as say,
if I am in a basketball game, right, there's an
invisible reason why we're there.
Speaker 2: That reason doesn't enforce itself with policemen. You don't have to,
you don't.
Speaker 1: Need to, you don't need to physically force people to play.
There's an invisible influence that is bringing people together towards
a purpose, and that is what provides the order.
Speaker 2: And it's the same with any group, any any group
that you're involved in.
Speaker 1: That is the highest form of you could say, of causality,
is a causality of influence.
Speaker 2: Then as that influence comes down, right, it provides order.
Speaker 1: But the lower it gets, you could say, on this hierarchy,
the more it gets connected with Earth, the harder it's
going to get, the more explicit it's going to get,
and then you're going to get more and more multiplicity,
multiple laws, multiple examples of how that influence functions.
Speaker 2: And that's when you get.
Speaker 1: The comp that's when it gets complicated, because then you
have to deal with exceptions, you have to deal with
all of these differences, and you have to ultimately sometimes
enforce the influence. Right in the Middle Ages, they had
this ordered society, which was that there are three tiers
in the world. There are those that pray, there are
those that fight, and there are those that work. That
was the order of society. The idea is that those
that pray, they're at the top. Right, Why are they
at the top, right at the top, because they provide
a type of influence which is invisible.
Speaker 2: They don't have weapons.
Speaker 1: They're providing examples, they're providing guidance, they're providing you with direction,
with motivation.
Speaker 2: But all of these are the influence of heaven.
Speaker 1: They're all invisible, and as you move down, then you
have things embodying themselves in the world. So those that fight,
now they take that influence, they take those purposes.
Speaker 2: And now they embody them in laws. They embody them.
Speaker 1: In regulations, in actual people like magistrates, all the people
that run our societies. And then ultimately, like I said,
at the bottom or at the limit of that is
something like the military, the police force.
Speaker 2: That are enforcing the borders. But you need that full
connection with what is above. Let's go to the next one,
all right.
Speaker 1: So the best way to think about it is to
think about it in terms of a nation.
Speaker 2: I can't even read that slide, can you read it?
Speaker 1: All?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: So a nation has an angel, right, it has a spirit,
that is, it has an invisible reason why people exist together.
It can then be exemplified. But it actually is very mysterious,
you know. And Paul was talking about that this morning.
He was saying, why are we here? I don't totally
can't completely put it into words, right, But that's also
true of all the things actually that we do, is
that there's a mystery behind all things that have identity.
Speaker 2: There's something spiritual in the sense that it is invisible.
Speaker 1: It doesn't yet have anybody, it doesn't yet have any explication,
it doesn't have multiplicity.
Speaker 2: It's it's this invisible influence we tend as humans.
Speaker 1: We tend to want to embody that in a point,
in one person.
Speaker 2: That's why most groups, if they're big enough, will.
Speaker 1: End up having a president, a leader, a chairman, however
you want to phrase it. We have this tendency to
want to see this spirit kind of come down and
manifest itself in a person. And the reason is because
that person can then exercise a more explicit authority. Right,
they can exercise this, they can manifest the spirit of
the group for us. Right, they can become exemplars, they
become examples. Examples is a good way of understanding how
Heaven acts, right, because I's say I am trying to
teach you something. I do it once as an example,
and then you're gonna do it a thousand times.
Speaker 2: Right, But I'm there to provide the example. I'm there.
Speaker 1: But then that happens at all these different levels. So
we tend to want to embody and there's a danger
in that.
Speaker 2: Right. By the way, if you.
Speaker 1: Again, if you know your Bible, when the Israelites wanted
a king, what did the prophet say? The prophet said, ah,
you sure you want to embody that in a one person, right,
because then you have all these problems that can happen,
which is that person can start to exercise too much influence,
too much authority.
Speaker 2: You know, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Think of all the cults, think of all the gurus,
think of all of these problems. When you embody the
purpose of something in the one person, there's a danger,
but it offers a lot. Actually, it also offers a lot.
So there's always this weird thing in the Bible. It's
weird because on the one hand, God says you shouldn't
want a king, but then when they do have a king,
then it's like, the king is great, the king is
the son of God, the king is on these six
It's like, what's going on and it's these two. It's
this tension of this resistance to embodiment, but then also
the advantage of what happens when you're able to embody
and then that becomes true right at every.
Speaker 2: Level of that.
Speaker 1: So any group that you have, usually if you start
some group, and it's probably true of this little corner,
it stouts art. It start, it starts out with an
intuition of something that binds us together. We don't totally
it's like it's it's invisible. We can see it's motivating us,
but we don't yet have a We haven't captured it, right,
It hasn't landed, it hasn't embodied itself yet. So what
do we want to do to embody it? We need something,
need a name to start with that, right, So you
need a Name's.
Speaker 2: Find a name.
Speaker 1: Once you have a name, that name will in some
ways limit already even in the name, like it'll tend
to limit what that how that spirit is embodying himself.
You might find when you find a name for something
that you actually already are excluding some people. Some people
are like, oh no, no, no, that's not what I thought
it was. You're already constraining this spiritual influence into the world. Right,
And so then you want all the kinds of things
that provide influence.
Speaker 2: What do you want? You want a motto something like that?
What's a motto? Auto is more than a name. It's
like a little phrase.
Speaker 1: You want to make it really succinct, and you want
to make it precise enough but open enough so that
it it looks like it's embodying the intuition that we
had of what the group is about.
Speaker 2: Right, and so nations will do that.
Speaker 1: You can have a flag, you can have all kinds
of things that will kind of manifest the fact.
Speaker 2: That this thing exists.
Speaker 1: But then as the group becomes bigger, right, it becomes
more settled, et cetera, then it's going to start to
embody itself in all these different ways.
Speaker 2: You're going to need to.
Speaker 1: Have rules protocols for your meetings, and let's say for
the estuary, right, is the protocol?
Speaker 2: Is that a good thing? Or is it a bad
thing for a conversation to have a protocol? Yes, that's right,
that's the right answer.
Speaker 1: The answer is it does something having a protocol for discussion, right,
It formalizes the relationship. And so what it does is
it offers certain it crystallizes certain possibilities, and it excludes others.
Speaker 2: So sometimes it can be good and sometimes it can
be bad.
Speaker 1: If I'm having coffee with a friend that I haven't
seen for ten years and he says, well, we're going
to have a protocol for our discussion, no thank you, right,
no thank you. But if I go to a board
meeting and everybody is hanging out and sitting and talking
about everything, and like you're there for three hours, You're like,
please give me a protocol for this meeting, because it
is driving me absolutely crazy.
Speaker 2: Right, And so.
Speaker 1: These levels of embodiment, they're not about good or bad.
Speaker 2: They're about what they do right, what they offer.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that's going to happen
as the group persists is that you're going to have
people that are going to exemplify exceptions.
Speaker 2: To what the group is.
Speaker 1: So you have people that are going to kind of
be pushing it what and you're gonna say, well, I'm
not sure that that's what this group is about.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure that this is what the purpose is.
And then you have to have to decide what you
do with those people.
Speaker 1: Do you punish them, do you eject them?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And so in a nation, obviously that becomes quite strict.
It becomes ultimately laws, police forces, prisons, executioners. Right, it
becomes pretty intense. And the question is, again is that
good or bad? It just is right, It's just how
things progress. Do you wish most of the time, Like,
do you wish that you didn't need police and that
we could all just live together in harmony and love
each other. Of course, obviously that's what we kind of
all want to be closer to heaven.
Speaker 2: It's kind of normal we all kind of want that.
Speaker 1: We naturally desire to be closer to the intuition of
the reason of why we're together, Like we naturally wanted
to be completely natural and intuitive to participate in the
groups that we participate in.
Speaker 2: But we also realize, especially.
Speaker 1: If the groups get bigger and if they become more formalized,
that at some point the gadflies can prevent.
Speaker 2: The group from existing. And so you need to have
these different levels of enforcement.
Speaker 1: Okay, and so this is like and all of these
things are happening fractally, right, So every aspect of what
I said also has this pattern.
Speaker 2: So think of a police force as a good example.
So the police force plays a certain role.
Speaker 1: In this based huge pattern, right, in some ways very embodied.
They're really there to like physically physically hold.
Speaker 2: People down or physically eject.
Speaker 1: People so that they don't harm the purpose of the group.
Now that's like very material, right, But it's always based
on influence.
Speaker 2: It's always based on laws. The police people aren't the
one making the laws. They shouldn't be. That's why we
have these separations of powers. They're there to enforce the laws.
The people who make the laws shouldn't be the people
that enforce them. There should be used to be different
levels or else it doesn't work. But even the police.
Speaker 1: Force itself has the same pattern. Right, So the captain
of the police force, however you want to call it, the.
Speaker 2: Captain of the police force, isn't out there.
Speaker 1: Putting handcuffs on people, right, He's not doing the things
he is providing authority, He's providing influence, right, He's providing
reward and punishment for his own people that are in
the in the hierarchy.
Speaker 2: And then they are at different levels, they'll be enforcing
it in different ways. Right.
Speaker 1: So you have a detective that is doing the more
intellectual work that is kind of trying to figure out
what's going on, trying to find the criminal doing this.
But the detective might not be the guy who actually
puts the handcuffs on the criminal.
Speaker 2: Like he's not going to be the.
Speaker 1: Actual physical brute that goes out and stops the people.
So everything has that pattern, right, the pattern that's why
it's fractal, Right, It it reproduces itself in in all
the different the different levels of the groups that we participate.
Speaker 2: In, all right, And so.
Speaker 1: You can so I've in some ways represented it a
little negatively right, this embodiment, and you can understand why
there are a lot of traditions that represent this embodiment
in some ways as being negative.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That is, in someone's the gnostic type of approach, where
this idea that the more you move towards embodiment, the
more you move towards evil, fragmentation, multiple multiplicity, the more you.
Speaker 2: Move towards illusion.
Speaker 1: Right, Why would it be that the lower you go
on this you move towards illusion.
Speaker 2: Because all the examples they're like veils.
Speaker 1: So if you if you just look at one maple
in your yard and you analyze the one maple, it
can prevent you from understanding.
Speaker 2: The category of maple.
Speaker 1: You have to kind of pull back and see all
the examples that are multiple versions of the same pattern.
Speaker 2: So if you're too close to multiplicity, if you're too
close to like.
Speaker 1: The bottom of the pyramid, then you then you don't
know what's going on right in the society. If you're
too close to the bottom of the pyramid, it's not
usually not very good for you, right, because you end
up being the person that's constantly breaking the rules.
Speaker 2: You don't understand.
Speaker 1: What's happening to you, you're constantly being acted upon right
by those that are above you. You're in some way
as a victim. You become a victim of the system,
you become, you know, a marginal person in the system.
Speaker 2: And so there's a there's a reason.
Speaker 1: Right. So if let's say, as Christians, we look at
the Hindu cast system and we think that's abhorrent, right,
but there's there's you have to understand why people come
to that conclusion.
Speaker 2: Why people come to the conclusion that the lower you
are on.
Speaker 1: This massive hierarchy with the priestly casts at the top,
and then the warrior cast, and then the worker cast,
and then people that are just being acted upon at
the bottom, you can kind of understand why they tend
to think up good down bad.
Speaker 2: Pretty simple. Lower you are, the more it means that
you are living.
Speaker 1: The consequences of some sin or some error that you've
that you've done, or that your past life or whatever.
So now you're just being acted upon like you're close
to chaos and everything. So it's kind of understandable.
Speaker 2: But ha, Luckily for us, I hope you think that.
Speaker 1: Lucky for us, we have this crazy guy, that crazy guy,
this this this this crazy moment where someone revealed to
us how this can be transformed into something more, how
in fact, it is possible that all of the whole
pyramid of being, all of the way that God reveals
himself in the world, that those veils you could say
they're luminous, right, their veils of their light.
Speaker 2: That's not they're not veils. Actually you can think of like
they're actually.
Speaker 1: Just light that's moving down and manifesting itself in all
the different parts.
Speaker 2: And one of the mysteries that Christ.
Speaker 1: Revealed to us, you know, and there was inklings of
that before Christ, obviously, but I think Christ did.
Speaker 2: Reveal it to us.
Speaker 1: In the best way is to understand this relationship of
Heaven and Earth as a loving relationship, rights as the
relationship between a lover between two lovers, and this in
some ways understanding that Heaven needs Earth to manifest itself
in because Heaven is nothing without Earth, like it's just
in the air. It's just Actually it's interesting that you
know that the word for Able in the Bible, Able
that was killed.
Speaker 2: By Caine is like breath.
Speaker 1: But it's like the wispy breath that just fades, It
doesn't find body right, that just is an idea that
floats off and doesn't find its roots, but that in fact,
what Christ reveals to us is that these two opposites, right,
they can exist in a loving relationship, and that loving
relationship is a sacrificial relationship.
Speaker 2: And so you realize.
Speaker 1: That in fact, the way that it works is that
when spirit, the spirit of the group manifests itself at
all the different levels, it is also the spirit of
the group giving itself to the group, right, offering itself
and in some ways yielding to multiplicity on purpose.
Speaker 2: Right, there is a kind.
Speaker 1: Of flexibility that happens in groups where the purpose of
the groups also gets adapted to each personal reason why
you're here, and that that is actually not It can
be a relationship of love. It doesn't have to be
a relationship of just this top down authority that.
Speaker 2: Just comes down that doesn't completely go away.
Speaker 1: But there's also another vision of that, which is the
highest vision, which is the.
Speaker 2: One of understanding the world as sacrifice.
Speaker 1: You know, you've heard Joan Peterson talk about it, or
I've talked about it, of understanding the world as this
self sacrificial act, and that as God emptying himself into
the world.
Speaker 2: In order to sustain it, in order to hold it together.
Speaker 1: And once you encounter groups like that, you realize, and
you realize it in practice, right, And I'm sure all
of you have had that experience when you realize when
you find a group where the leader of the group
is giving himself to those that are part of his group,
you realize immediately that those are the strongest, most real
groups that exist, right, and that those groups that only
act top down right in this kind of authoritarian way,
that they tend to be fragile, right, because the parts
that are below right. So a good example is in
a prison, if the prisoners could escape, they would, right.
They're not there on their own will, like, they're not
there because they want to be there.
Speaker 2: They're there because they're forced to be there. But that
also means that it's a very very fragile system.
Speaker 1: But if you have a loving family, the people that
are there at the table eating together, if you have
a loving church, the people that are there are there
because they want to be there. They're there because the
unity that the group provides is more than their individual self.
It is bringing them closer to Heaven, right, it is
giving them a glimpse of heaven, because I can see
the fellowship as an image of the heavenly influence that
comes from above.
Speaker 2: And of course the.
Speaker 1: Church is meant to be that's right. The way that
Saint Paul describes the church is exactly that. But there
are ways in which we can experience that in every
single one of the relationships that.
Speaker 2: We engage in. It doesn't have to just be the church.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: You can do that in a business.
Speaker 1: Right. If you do this in a business, you will
have you won't have to be afraid that your employees
are stealing from you. Right, because if you can create
that loving relationship, that exchange of love, then you will
have a strong body and a strong commitment from the
members into the body. And so I mean, obviously, you guys,
I mean none of you, nobody forced you to come here.
If you're all paying to come here, you're all you've
all come underwill and so, but you also all have
that intuition that there is this something, there's a reason.
Speaker 2: Obviously you wouldn't be here if there wasn't some glimmering.
Speaker 1: Mysterious reason that was binding you together, even if you
can't completely put a finger on it. And even if
this is actually interesting too, because everybody probably has.
Speaker 2: Their own reason for coming here, right.
Speaker 1: And none of those reasons are the ultimate reason why
the group exists, but they're they kind of How can
I say that they're downstreamed from that reason?
Speaker 2: They have to be, or else you wouldn't be here.
Speaker 1: So you can trust that even if you don't totally
get it, Like you know, Paul is like, what is this?
Speaker 2: Like what are we doing? You don't totally get it.
The body is real, you know it's real. You're here.
Speaker 1: You've all come here, and you all have your own reasons.
But when you talk and you experience the fellowship with others,
you realize that those reasons a complimentary and that those
reasons are like members of a body that are working
together right, as Saint Paul says, that are well fit
together and working together towards.
Speaker 2: The unity in love.
Speaker 1: So I hope I didn't stretch you guys to your
complete limit.
Speaker 2: I hope this was helpful. I think we're gonna Can
we take a few questions?
Speaker 1: I think we were supposed to write cale are we
taking some? We're not sorry, no questions. You can ask
all the questions you want I'm gonna now that I've
given my talk, I'm gonna be way more relaxed so you.
Speaker 2: Can all come talk to me. Help me. Happy to
talk to you, all right. Thank there was.
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