Speaker 1: These are the elders I was talking about, right, They're
not just olders. Let's make that distinction. It's not just
because somebody's old. Elder means you have suffered enormously direct
contact with the complexity of life and have metabolized that
into a capacity to be in more relationship, more intimate
relationship with reality. You know, when you look at the fathers,
say well, who are they? Well, they were guys who
were up here and what they said is true. But
until you can connect it to something that you can
actually own in your own experience, you don't have piece these.
You have knowledge, and knowledge isn't going to do you
much good in reality. Piece these will do you great
in reality. And that I think is the real pivot
that we have to make, is to say, look, we
cannot be saved from suffering. That's not how it works.
In fact, as Christians, we kind of recognize that if
we're told to follow me, we know we're following me
leads we cannot be saved from suffering. We're choosing to
enter into that reality. That's the reality we're entering into. Well,
one of the aspects of suffering is that it's not
call it it's not a bug. The problem of suffering
is not the problem. The problem maybe is meaningless suffering.
We're suffering, we don't actually put it to proper use.
Speaker 2: That's a problem.
Speaker 3: This is Jonathan Pegel, Welcome to the symbolic world.
Speaker 4: We were talking in private for a while and we
didn't We haven't done a podcast in a very long time,
so it seems like it's a yeah, it's good to
catch up and to see you know, how things have
been doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. In fact, I think I might be wrong. You know,
these things have been going on forever, but I don't
think that the last time you and I spoke, let's
say publicly, I had come out of the closet.
Speaker 4: That's right. And the last time we talked you hadn't.
At least you had started saying the publicly that you're
a Christian, and then we had some conversations in private
and so so and so. Yeah, so it is the
first official time that we talked since you you came out.
Speaker 5: You say you came out of the clout. That's funny.
Speaker 1: And I think appropriating terms is perfectly legitimate.
Speaker 4: Yes, appropriate, perfectly legitm And so let's say, how how
has it been for you, like in the transition towards
towards Christianity, Like I mean, because it's changed. I mean,
your whole life is probably quite different.
Speaker 1: Now, Okay, well, I'm gonna maybe have to use a
kind of a crazy metaphor. But it's the first step.
The first step of the metaphor is a little bit
life going over a waterfall.
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: The second step of the metaphor is even crazier, which
is you begin to realize that there's no bottom to
the waterfall. And then the third step is you begin
to notice that the whole thing is actually learning how
to swim in a bottomless waterfall. Something like that. I mean,
everything just moves, it's move. Things are just moving continuously,
rapidly and with an increasing level of the right way
of describing it, like secure surprise, something like that. Yeah,
it's been amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And and so let's say, I mean, for the people
that are watching, you know, my question would be because
one of the things that that you are known for
is trying to think of.
Speaker 3: Let's say, solutions or ways of ways of seeing.
Speaker 4: The world that can help us figure out what's going
on and also help us, you know, try to see
what direction we should be aiming, you know, individually, but
also let's say as communities, uh, and even globally. Let's say,
and so my question to you is, you know, since
you've converted to Christianity, has that changed your perception let's say,
when you think strategically, or when you think about, you know,
how how we should act as a society, or how
we should align ourselves.
Speaker 5: Like, what, how has that change for you?
Speaker 1: And that's a very it's a very subtle questions. Let
me see if I can respond with something like clarity.
The framework that I think is maybe the best is
one that a friend of mine gave a while back,
which is this notion of the in music, the movement
from rhythm to tone. So you have a rhythm that
has a certain bpms, you say, start at ten right,
such just a beat, and then as you increase the bpm,
it starts to happen. What happens is you can kind
of graph it this. This is a visual me putting
on an X Y graph as the as the as
the beat starts to accelerate, it has this really interesting
thing where it transitions to a tone. I think it
changes from just a series of beats that have no
tonality to them and kind of magically converts into something
that your ear now actually hears as a quality of tone.
And that ability the fact that reality consists of the
capacity to move from quantity increasing beats to quality. The
presence of tone is on the one hand, by the way,
super fundamental. But in this case it also has to
do with what the supply, say, rationality or strategy or
the application of intelligence across energy. These are all more
or less of the same plane, and as there's a
process of endeavoring or even needing to increase those in
velocity or bandwidth would be the actual, weirdly technical term.
What begins to happen is you notice there's a lift,
of vertical lift that is of a qualitative nature. And
so a way of saying it is something like we
have exited the realm where the concept of strategy is
applicable or viable.
Speaker 5: That's interesting, or.
Speaker 1: Are shortly going there, we're heading there rapidly, and that
could be concrete, for example, the notion of we kind
of move us to a slightly different domain that has
the same pattern. Let's just talk about, say, the tension
between AI and the human mind that thinks that it
is something like AI. And what I mean is, you know,
the the arc of the Enlightenment had this really interesting
thing where it started taking human beings as being more
like machines I call the mediocre machines. And like the
really concrete examples, we literally had people whose job was
to calculate, to do reliably and quickly they were calculators yea,
and the folks realized you could make digital calculators that
were better. Okay, well, that whole function of the human mind.
There are no more calculators, except for maybe for fun
who was replaced by tech calculators. But the broader point
is that's actually sort of commonplace, like effectively all functions.
At the end of kind of modern modernity and the
version of capitalism that is subordinated to modernity are situations
where the human has been converted into something like a
mediocre machine. What do you want accounting?
Speaker 5: Yeah, factory worker is the ultimate example.
Speaker 4: Basically like just doing a repetitive gesture until I get
a machine that can do it for you and.
Speaker 1: Then for you. And then the point is like we say, okay,
what are more advanced things like software engineer or doctor
you're like, wait a minute, that's just a more sophisticated,
mediocre machine. Because as we accelerate towards AI, we begin
to notice that AI can kind of do that and
maybe kind of do it better. Yeah, oh well, now
you have this problem. Do you, as a human say, well,
the thing I have to do is now like race
faster than AI, so I can stay ahead of the
event horizon of than nothing as it consumes all human activity.
And you can for a while, but you won't. It
won't work because it's going faster. Or oh, wait a minute,
there's a vertical dimension that's completely different modally in nature,
which is not just part of what is human, but
is actually more human, vastly more human, and of which
AI has new relationship at all. So that's like one
example of this notion that makes any sense.
Speaker 2: Sorry, Oh, it.
Speaker 4: Makes a lot of sense, And I think it's I
think you're the way you present it is extremely useful,
and it's it's useful for people to understand also what
AI is and why the dream of AI becoming more
than human it's muddled because people don't understand the difference
between like power, let's say, the capacity to just do
a bunch of stuff, and the reason why you do
the things, like the reason why you do the things,
there is a vertical relationship to the capacity to do it.
And AI doesn't have access to the reason in itself,
like it just doesn't.
Speaker 1: By nature, it's just that by what it is.
Speaker 4: And also because everything about it is a derivative of
human and so it will unless I mean, at least
in the current state, it will always be a derivative
of man, right.
Speaker 1: Right, And there's nothing in the current trajectory that will
change that current state. Although who knows, right the world
this is not that's above our pay grade, but it's
critical when we look at something and we say, okay,
AI has produced something that looks like art. What it's
done is it's done bricolage, and it's taken art as
manifested by humans and combined them in a way that
is so sophisticated as a combination that the artistic element
that was in the substrate that was manipulating, Oh, okay, interesting,
that's there. And of course to the human eye, the
human eye looks at it and applies its pattern recognizing
capacity to it, and that connects. But the thing, the
thing that is is the art, the connection to the transcendent,
which is what art is, is just sort of strictly
not available.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it also.
Speaker 4: Even I think one of the problems we have, let's
say that in that domain, is that we've forgotten what
art was for, Like we've forgotten even humans have struggle
to understand what the reason we make art is for.
But even in the AI, we still provide the vertical
like even with the II production of an image, because
we are the ones telling the I.
Speaker 5: What to make. We give it the prompt.
Speaker 4: Like the AI doesn't just start generating images out of
its own will because it doesn't care. We give it
the prompt, and then it manifests the prompt based on
the vertical direction that we give it. Uh, it's dangerous
in the sense that then it means now that I mean,
it means now that we can give power to any
whim that we have, like we can basically give give
massive amounts of power to any type of vertical whim.
Speaker 5: That that can be a.
Speaker 4: Kind of sinful wim you could say, like a because
there's some aspect of verticality which is which is dangerous
if it's not well aligned, because it's it's a there
are mediocre humans too. Let's say it that way, in
the sense that there are things that we can want
that are vertical that are not sufficient, right if we
and that like, for example, that the idea of just.
Speaker 5: Of being a slave to a desire is a good example.
Speaker 4: Like if you just want sex, that's actually a vertical
it's a vertical thing because it acts down on on
on the reality, but it's not sufficient. And so if
you have infinite power that gives you access to that
little vertical thing, then then you're then you're in trouble.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, okay, so this is that's a really good bridge.
Speaker 4: So but in relationship to Christianity, I think, I think,
or to your transformation and to your life. I think
it's interesting to think that when you talk about this
change from the horizontal to the vertical, uh, being aware
of the verse article already, just being aware that this
is something that we need to be engaged with h
is a huge difference because most people are just kind
of blind to it. They just act and they don't
have a sense that, oh, wait a minute, there are
things that I can want that should be ordered properly
towards something which is transcendent. If not, then I have this,
then I have the problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're sort of that case. It's you're playing
out something that has already happened, and then there's this
sort of flattening that will occur over time. What do
you mean there's the verticality? Is there anyway? There's no
way of putting it. But if you're not aware of
it or not connected to it, then this kind of
like a nerve. It's like when you take silly putty
and you kind of form it into a pyramid. You
did it right, that happened, but then when you let go,
it can welcome to the last three hundred years. So yeah,
so what happened? I'm trying to figure out. This feels
like this is an interesting like a confession. So the
way that I was dealing with this problem of the
acceleration of the playing out of the secular dynamics, meta
crisis cascades, like the way that different systems interact with
different systems, what happens and the rate of agency just
continues to feed back on itself and various the technological
expansion explosion things like that intensity, like bigger and bigger
perturbations like This was the thing that I was really
worried about, maybe up until about two or three years ago.
And what happens is that the term is actually what
is invariant under transformation, as the set of context becomes broader.
If you're trying to figure out how do you respond
to a larger set of context, or to a set
of context where you can't quite predict what it is
you're dealing with, you have to look for strategies that
are invariant under more and more possible contexts. You know,
some point would be like, let's make it very concrete,
seek the high ground. It doesn't necessarily matter exactly what
you're situation is. It's a very good strategic rule of thumb.
Like sun Zoo when he writes The Art of War,
what he's basically saying is like, guys, here's a whole
bunch of stuff that's probably going to work. Like I
don't know where you are, what you're doing, but if
you choose the battlefield and the enemy has to fight
you on your choice at battlefield, good rule of thumb.
I see, these are rules that are invariant under lots
of different contexts. Okay, what happens if you continue to
sort of recurs on that what are more invariant, what
are the most invariant, What is the most invariant in principle?
So this is like you're climbing this pyramid of the
things that are the most fundamental, which is to say,
ultimately you're beginning to move from the imminent into the transcendent.
You're looking for things that are now eternal principles that
are not bound to the playing out of time at all,
and then you're noticing that the eternal principles have a
structure that is intrinsic to the eternal principles. This is me,
by the way, moving up and by the way, always
trying to figure out how to move out of the
pure abstraction into okay, what are the actual embodiments of
these eternal principles. So Dalloism, for example, is very high
on the stack of actually perceiving the structure of the
internal principles and then knowing how that embodies itself in life,
and not that hard to get from these points. At
the highest level of the stack, you find yourself. I
found myself going okay, I'm at a certain level. I'm
actually really able to almost like literally physically notice how
these principles interact and operate. But I'm continuing to have
to focus because the magnitude of what we're actually dealing
with in this moment in time is larger than anything's
ever happened in history by a lot, by orders of magnitude,
maybe six, seven, eight, nine, ten orders of magnitude, is incomprehensible.
So if we want to find a way to navigate
it properly, we want to have a kind of a
scope of vision which is symmetric with the magnitude of
the scope of the problem. We have to just keep
going up that st stack. And so what happened was
I got, as you know, as high up the stack
as I could get under my own power, and it
didn't work. It was unable to handle the pressures of
what needed to happen, the kind of the shearing strengths.
So I was gifted then with the possibility of profound humility,
and in the field of profound humility, and with some
help yourself included, I picked up the last you know,
the last book. Huh man, Now, these Christian guys, really,
how could that possibly be? You know, the thing is
at the very top of the stack that seems implausible
for lots of reasons, by the way, like doing a
retcon how we got there to that, to that posture
that relationship for me and for so many other people
in this culture. But because of the experience I had
of actually going to church and being in a state
of very, very deep I don't know exactly how this
stuff works. I'm not in charge of it. I can't
understand it. It's beyond my It's strictly beyond my capacity.
So how do you begin to kind of more respond
to what's happening and seeing what you know, the people
in my church, like literally just those people, they're doing
something which is clearly from a theoretic perspective, that's exactly
what it should look like. And there's something going on
that is actually a mysterious that I can't could never
have produced. On my note, No strategy, no strategy in principle,
could figure this out what's happening in any effort, by
the way to do it, by means the strategy definitely
kills it or produces something even uglier, like a simulacruma
of wholesomeness. Okay, well, I'm gonna have to go from
the inside out, like just I don't listen, like absorb,
read the Bible, talk to Christian side, find out what's
going on here, and assemble it. And then there's a
certain point where I was like, oh wow, that's it,
found it. That's the point, that's the location, which is
the highest of the high and then everything else orders
out underneath that and that's you know, that's that's where
we end up. So in some sense, the answer is
this is the logical logical Yeah, logical logos, right, the
logos conclusion of that work with continuity, every step following
every step, and the piece is coming in and there's
nothing about it. From my point of view looking back,
that is of the sort of like I don't know,
abandonment or nonsense, but rather quite the opposite, like this
is actually the proper way of responding to the circumstances
that we find ourselves in.
Speaker 5: So when you so when you let's say, when you say.
Speaker 4: You you you you go to the church or you
you encounter these groups of Christians and you see the
thing that's at the top of the stack.
Speaker 3: What is it that you are seeing, Like, what is
it that you are perceiving.
Speaker 5: In there?
Speaker 4: Like in the way that they are or the way
they're interacting, or the way that they're they're they're acting
between each other.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, there's two ways of saying that, and you
try the second one first. So it's with the way
I would describe it is being in the presence of God,
the ability to actually notice that there's something that means something.
The presence of God is an experience that is something
that one can notice. There's a difference between that and
being in the presence of God. And for me it
actually happened. Ah, that's how interesting in two very distinct ways,
and they interfaced with each other. One was maybe the
level of I want to say mental but faculties like
the interior faculties, reading, thinking, talking, trying to make sense
of what these concepts meant, and very specifically actually ultimately
focusing on the Trinity, so really what is this and
delving in and reading like the kind of the three
hundred AD and the Desert Fathers and the form of
the guys who are really putting those ideas together, trying
to understand what they were saying from the inside out.
At the same time, going back to church and going
back into house church and going back into community and
going back into communion and being in the experience. That's
the third, being in the actual experience of communion. And
then something happened where I noticed that there was a
quality of capital peak presence, and that there was something
about that quality of capital p presence that was well,
it shifted, right, it's the theoretical shifted to relational. The
relational at the community level shifted into communion. That makes sense.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you must.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So that's that's the best I can do at
this point.
Speaker 4: On August twenty seventh, we are going to start to
ascend the mountain of purgatory. Richard and I was trying
to continue on the second Dante class, so you can
please go and sign up. You know, the first class
was just an absolute blast and everybody really enjoyed it.
So we're hoping that everybody will continue on the track
with us.
Speaker 6: And yes, so we're as as Jonathan said, were starting
August the twenty seventh. Can get the course now at
Symbolic World Courses. There are payment plans and everything there
to make it convenient for you. It's going to be incredible.
Purgatorio is actually my favorite book of the whole comedy
to teach, it's the one that most people when you're
in school you start, you read Inferno when that's all
you read. If you read Dante at all in like
high school or college, you probably only read Inferno. Purgatory
is my favorite one to teach. It's the one that
is kind of, you could say, in a certain sense,
the most relevant to where many of us are in
our Christian life. That is to say, Purgatorio is about
the purification, right, It's about the process of becoming saints
and so whereas you know, in Fronto is like about
sort of rejecting sid and then Paradise is about what
is what even is holiness?
Speaker 1: And Paradise is the hardest.
Speaker 5: One to teach.
Speaker 6: We are going to be doing it later this year.
Paradise is the hardest one to sease though, because it's
very hard to explain to somebody exactly what it means
to be holy. But I think all of us can
understand what it's like to try to become holy. So anyway,
join us for Purgatorio. It's kind of be really awesome.
All the juicy stuff is in Inferno, you know, because
like it's really fun to look at these sinners getting
there you know, what's coming to them or whatever. But
Purgatorio is in many ways it's the most practical because
it's it really hits us right where at right now.
So August to twenty seven of the folks, please please
please come and join us for the class.
Speaker 1: You won't regret it.
Speaker 6: It'll be five amazing weeks of really getting deep into
the question of what does it mean to be purified?
And I think you will enjoy it.
Speaker 5: So all right, we'll see there everybody.
Speaker 4: No, And I think that because I'm what I'm looking for,
and you probably see what I'm looking for, is that,
you know, for people that are listening, people that are watching.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: Sometimes one of the issues we've had in the past
two hundred years is that many much of the theological
language has become debased. And so when we when we
say things like God, or we say things like communion,
and I'm not saying those things don't have a reality.
Speaker 5: That of course they do.
Speaker 4: But one of the difficulties is that it's been cheapened
by you know, just our history and materialism and all
these issues like when we say love or we say spirit,
and we use all these words, And so because I
know you've thought you know you because I admire the
way that you see things and how you think of it,
you know, I you know to me it's it's a
good idea to get your description of that experience like
or they get.
Speaker 5: And I think you you explained it very clearly.
Speaker 4: And talking about a shift, and the shift is you know,
in some ways it's the shift of a it's a
shift of participation, or it's a shift to attention, not
just abstract attention, but attention like you said, the attention
that you give to a child, you know, when you're
caring for it is not the same attention that you
give to a problem when you're thinking about it in
an analyt right. Yeah, and that that's a real qualitative
difference that that that you seem to be trying to
account for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me see if I can I can hit
on that. So, as a part of the process that
the kind of I began to cultivate over the period
of say fifteen years from when the meta crisis first landed,
was the recognition that there's a proper way of learning.
And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to
distinguish between the thing that our education system calls learning, which,
oddly enough, Gary Da more or less perfectly described. It's
this horizontal relationship between signifiers that are all happening disconnected
from experience, disconnected from embodied experience. And so the process
of oh wait, embodiment is actually more fundamental than the
ability to move signs back and forth. FYI, if you
happen to be listening to this right now and you're
still stuck in the mode of thinking you understand things
by a virtue of doing kind of the discursive relationship
between signifiers. I would like to urge you to not
think that's true and actually notice that become like unto
a child, meaning learn from your experience. Reconnect a concept
to something that you've actually experienced phenomenologically like in your
actual life, and then you can own it like it
lands in you, and then you can be in the
process of moving back up. So that's the that's the
practice of embodyment. So so pistis so let's let's let's
call it renovate, resuscitate, revalorize. Right. An actual word from theology,
we have this word pieces, which in English is translated
as faith, which in the contemporary world that Darie daw
thinks is actually how reality works largely means maximally degenerate delusion.
And that's what the word faith sort of largely means
that in sort of the postmodern sensibility, and which is
postmodernism is a version of modernity, by the way, course,
but it doesn't mean that at all. Right, What it
actually means is embodied, the embodied form of relationship, and
it's actually a cultivated thing and you can make it
very trust.
Speaker 4: The word trust helps you understand the word faith. Trust
is not is a it's a relational term. It's not
it's not just like the belief in propositions that I
don't have proof for right, that's not what And so
it's like faith is something like it's like more like
a trust fall.
Speaker 5: Like you you you you.
Speaker 4: Basically give yourself to the other in a manner that
you're like, oh, I'm going to make this. It's a risk, right,
there is a risk to it, but it's but it's
a risk that and it's leading you somewhere, right, It's
not just like you trust someone to lead you somewhere.
Speaker 5: That's not the same as like this idea.
Speaker 4: Of you have faith in someone, right, like, not in
the sense like again, not in sense of just believing
propositions that you can't proof, which is which a lot of.
Speaker 1: People still think that that's what I say, is well,
and we can make it like if you do a
trust fall, well it's evening it make it like a
bigger tableau. But the acrobats right, swinging on the trapiez Right,
there's a process where the guy lets go of the
girl and she flips in the air and then she
puts her arms out and then she gets caught. Yeah,
that's a serious trust fall. That's a trust fall of
significant magnitude. Well, here's the thing. If you just kind
of do that with your friends and you say, like
I trust, that's not the same thing, right, that's just stupid,
That's that's foolishness, that's that's bullshit. But if you go
through a process of continuing to engage in practicing more
and more intense versions of this activity, starting very simply right, literally,
an actual trust fall where that you just lean back
and they catch you and you only fall like a foot,
but you begin to notice with them right in the
category of the relationship, and think about the relationship as
having an identity that it's not just you know, how
do you say ephemeral, But it's actually you're cultivating the relationship.
The relationship is beginning to build a an embodiment, a reality,
a capacity that is stronger and stronger and stronger. And
so of course, the three people, the two guys catching
in the girl being thrown, they practice and they practice,
and they practice lower and lower like small big, and
finally get to the point where the strength of their faith, right,
the reality, the capacity of their relationship can hold this possibility,
and then it happens. And so that's the notion, is okay,
that's what we're called to. That's the thing that is
actually underlying our ability to do these sort of higher
order activities is we have to cultivate a relationship. Now,
you and I can cultivate a relationship, and we'll begin
to build something like faith. Now, what's the highest the
highest is what does it mean to build cultivated relationship
with God? Right with the trying gun. And the beauty
of the trying God is the trying God is relational
and endeavoring continuously with maximum commitment and sophistication to cultivate
a relationship with us, so that otherwise be in deep trouble.
Speaker 4: So what you're saying, I mean, I think that it's
so interesting what you're saying, like, and also it makes
me think out how the difficulty of the atheist position
in the sense that that's like just one of the
things that seems to happen is that if we understand
the infinite right as something else than a relational thing, right,
if we understand the source of reality as something else
than relational, you know, one of the one of the
problems that happens, and this is this is the argument
that people would set against you, is to say, the
relational right it's idiosyncratic, and it's subjective and cannot be
trusted because it is it's not based on uh, it's
not based on truth. It's based on feelings. It's based
on experience, which can be which can be deluded. All
of these the these things are the argument against what
you're saying. So, like, if you engage in if you
talk about this motive, this modal being, like this this
motive being where you're entering into communion with others and
you're building a body basically through trust and all of this,
and you say it's phenomenological. A lot of people will say, well,
that means that it's idiosyncratic, that it's not that it
can't be trusted because it's just subjective, right, all of
these terms. Obviously I don't think that, But how would
you answer someone brings.
Speaker 1: That up, Well, hold on neat. So I think that
we're actually entering into a moment like in our in
this niper conversation, where we're almost like doing microsurgery. We
have to really be careful zooming in on things. I
noticed that I had a long conversation with Jim Rudd
about the trinity, and what I realized is that we
actually hadn't cultivated the capacity to really zoom in at
the right level. I noticed it when I was actually
watching your conversation I think last week with Bishop Baron
talking about fractals and how fractal orders can you can
move zoom in and out at levels of scale. And
the point is there's a point at that level of
scale where you actually get to a well, a level
of subtlety that's very difficult to hold in your mind.
And that's where we are. We have to get to
that level of subtlety. So the first chance would be
something like personal make an argument that the trust is
strictly upstream of truth. And one of the things I'll
do so a second proposition, memory is a spiritual act.
So two plus two equals four. You know, does that
sound true? How do you know that what's actually happening
inside your mind and by the way, inside your neurology
if you'd like, that allows you to have the sensation,
the feeling that that particular construct, for example, isn't just nonsense. Yeah,
it seems sensible. Delays a logic dessons. He actually zooms
in on that zone, like, what's the point where you
have the experience, the phenomenal logical experience that you are
in relationship with something that is of the category of sense,
not nonsense, And it moves from the category of sense
to this version the subset of sense called truth. I
hate to break it to you, guys, all of that
is in the category of trust. You are trusting, for example,
your memory. You're trusting a series of basic feeling faculties
that you have that allows you to orient towards this
domain where you can say truth. And that's the point, Like,
right there, we can get in that little piece and
really they literally just do you can do it meditatively?
What does it feel like that makes you able to
distinguish between an assertion tuplostuquals five tublosuqus four. How do
you get that distinction? You can go you can go
all the way down as light as you want to
get at the level of logic, at the level of
the construct, to notice that there's a quality of feeling
that strictly precedes the ability to have a conviction at
the level of truth. That's just the order of how
things operate. Beauty precedes truth, and not so psychophenomenologically. Like,
if you want to look at it as an atheist,
if you can, if you can do the really hard
work as an atheist of actually being in a first
person experience. And I'm not a kidding at all, by
the way, because the primary thing that happens with an
atheist that you can't help but obligately try to be
in the third person experience. Sure, and that's the problem, Like,
that's actually the that's where the that's the where things
fall apart, is that you have this weird thing that
their default mode is third person, which means that first
person things are have you occluded or mysterious, which which
is how you can get to these absurd constructions that
take consciousness or free will doesn't exist. Well, of course,
if you're if you're a will get third person, then
everything you've already you've already sort of you've reached that
you raw the conclude by your premise or pistemological stance
a third person. The things that are intrinsically first person
aren't part of that, and so you're stuck. But the
point is you can come here, You can be in
the first person. You can notice that you have experiences
and sort of contemplate them deeply from that point of view.
And what you will notice is one hundred percent of
that which you are able to identify as true in
any fashion is by means of a first person set
of faculties that we will categorize as feelings. Now, we
may need to go through a process of valorizing feelings
because we don't mean how do I say this right,
certainly don't mean the willy nilliy emotions at the end,
that's right.
Speaker 4: I think that we need to not confuse it with emotion.
Insight is not an emotion the same the same way
that you get from eating like a good piece of cake. Like,
it's not pleasure, it's not pain.
Speaker 5: Insight is.
Speaker 4: It is related to pleasure to some extent, but it's
a different type of experience.
Speaker 1: Whoof Yeah, the weird thing is it's actually part of
the incarnation of the second person. That's what's happening. How
is it right now that I have some capability of
mapping the notions? Are these things that are ideas into
words in English in in order and selecting a vocabulary
that has this capacity to be transmitted to you so
that you can actually be in the same space mentally
as I am. Like, how's that part of reality at all?
Like that? How does that even? We don't have a
way of describing how that's part of reality unless we
decide to remove the ideas in the first place, in
which case we're back to AI chatbots. Right, So going
back to that point, but we're pretty confidently not AI
chat bots, Like I'm the degree which I'm confident in
that is actually one hundred percent more confident than I
am than the opposite. Okay, well, there's something going on there.
That thing going on there, that set of faculties which
are part of what we are intrinsically, that's the basis.
So that's the argument, that's the place, that's where this
conversation stay with the atheist or anybody else. We have
to get down to the level of being able to
have that level of precision in first person, third person trust, truth,
mind expression that these are very precise things. We have
to notice what we're doing. And I'll give you another
example that it's a little bit esoteric, but it worked
for me. I was having my conversation with Jim and
we were talking about the way that the Trinity, by
its very nature is of the transcendent, in this case eternal,
and that time, specifically chronological time is how do I say, derivative,
Like it's a second order. There's a whole bunch of
stuff that happens, Like how okay, well, how does how
can you move from eternal to chronological? Well, you can't
do it chronologically. That can't be how it works. And
then I listened to another conversation he had with Stuart Kaufman,
who's a lovely individual. Stuart's a Santa Fe Institute like
polymathic genius in the sciences, and they were riffing on
a very scientific way of thinking about the origin of
space time. Yeah, but the problem is when I was
listening to it, and I don't know exactly where they
were off you, off paper. Every time they spoke about
the origin of space time, I'll just focus on the
time piece, the important temporality, the important causation conceptization. Right, Well,
where'd that come from? We have not time yet, right,
So what does it mean to be thinking about the
relationship between the eternal and the temporal? You gotta that's
you got to get in between there if you want
to be able to do it.
Speaker 4: Every time somebody talks about the Big Bang, I can't.
I can't but roll my eyes anymore. I just really
struggle because it's so difficult for people to to understand
that the exactly the notion that you if you use
analogies of space time to talk about the origin of
space time, you have to be very in at least
acknowledging that you're using analogy when you're doing it. But
when you don't, then it becomes this weird thing where
it's like a kind of blind spot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, in fact a conceptual blind spot, because
your mind grabs these concepts intuitively and then uses them
to produce themselves, and then you'll end it for a paradox.
And wait, but it's not a necessary I say it right.
There's a way of actually thinking about this properly, which
of course means that at a certain point you stop
thinking and you begin relating. And that's the deeper substrate.
You know, Piecetis is strictly more fundamental than a piece.
To me, this is Plato brought them out, but he
had them reversed, which is a part of a long air.
And a piece to me is all well and good.
Don't get me wrong. It's great to have, but it
sits on top of the substrate of pieces, which is
much much larger, and conventionally that's very easy. Like if
you talk to somebody who is a master of some
skill and you say, can you explain to me how
you do that? Yeah, they can kind of explain it
to you. But if you think about it, like, the
thing that they can explain is about that why, and
the thing they're actually doing is that why? And the
right answer is kind of no, you just have to
do it.
Speaker 2: We can.
Speaker 1: I can do it with you, maybe walk you through
a set of stages that get you from where you
are and where you want to go. We can put
you on a path to mastery, but I can't explain
it to you because it's much bigger than explanation as
a category. That's the idea. The ontology of faith is
a different order than the epistemology as a category, and
that's where we are. Like, that's that's reality. And if
you can't get that, then you're stuck at that point.
Speaker 3: So how okay, So how do you deal with the
problem of.
Speaker 4: Delusion or the problem of because let's say you have groups,
even in a person or in a group, that will
have faith in the wrong thing.
Speaker 5: Right, you think that way.
Speaker 4: And because of that, then the consequences, you know, will
manifest themselves, like if you if you trust the wrong person,
you buy the wrong car, right, I mean, there's a
there's a really boring are really kind of mundane versions
of it where you know, you you trust someone you
shouldn't be trusting or whatever. But you could scale that
right and understand that you could have something like false religions, right,
or people that gather together in the name of something
which is not the right thing, and they're engaging all
the mechanisms of trust and faith but there's something which
is leading it awry and ends with you know, drinking
the kool aid, you know, something like that. I mean,
that's an excessive one, but there are there are less
destructive versions of that, let's say totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So golly. The way, the way that I've really
thought about this, and I'm sure this is helpful to anybody,
is that the way that shows up categorically, way it
constantly shows up is when we replace faith with a
simulacrum of faith generated by epistemology or in this case,
let's use the simpler term ideology. So what happens is
we we aren't actually able to be in relationship by
virtue of having cultivated our relational competence, and or we've
just been turned upside entirely by an absolutely degenerate culture.
But and we get this notion that the right way
of doing it is to try to model it in
our minds and produce a mental construct that allows us
to imagine that we are now masters of this event.
And then we'll get stuck there. And so let me
see if I can give you some examples of what
that looks like or how oh yeah, this is nice.
So like a very simple one. This is actually, weirdly enough,
this is actually a really good example. If you're dealing
with kids in the ages of like five and six
and they're beginning to ride a bike, you know what
you'll notice is they'll tell a lot of stories about
how they can ride the bike and how they're going
to be riding the bike, but they cannot yet actually
ride a bike, right, And as an adult you're looking
at them going, yeah, telling the story isn't the same
thing as actually doing the thing. But until you actually
get on the bike and try to ride it, it's
really easy to tell yourself a story because it's a
lot easier and you feel a lot more comfortable. The
story is, yeah, I can ride the bike, and I'm
going to do You get on the bike and you
fall right. So the reality of engaging with reality is
a different kind of thing than the thing that happens
when I can tell the story and living in the narrative.
So they mean I'll do some We're gonna split a
couple of different pieces here, a lot of stuff. So
one is the more you live in a culture where
engagement with reality is prior to the social or the
theoretic layer, the less the problem you raise is a
real problem because the checksum of smacking into reality orients
you towards. Oh yeah, that's right, I can't actually ride
a bike. It turns out I need to learn how
to ride a bike. Get what I'm saying. But the
more you live in a culture where your experience with
reality is mediated by social environments, where telling the story
is good enough or even maybe better. So an example
would be, do you know how to fix a leak
in your plummet? Well, if you live out in the
country and there's nobody to call, the answers yes or
no in a very clear fashioned to fix it? You don't.
You try to fix it. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. Right.
If you live in the suburbs, how do you solve
that problem? When you call a plumber? Do you know
how to as a kid watching it, do you know
how to fix a leak? Well, the answer is yeah,
you call a plumber. Do you know how to fix
a leak? No, it turns out not at all. If
you live in the city, you don't even call the plumber, right,
you call the super Right. You're so distant from concrete
reality that you live like in yourself. Somebody asked you, well,
you've got to fix a leak. You may even in
your mind have a sense the answer is yes, because
the agency is I have a problem. I can solve
that problem. Oh well, how do you solve the problem
by virtue of your competence in relationship with the ground reality. No,
at the end of the day, my ability to manipulate
other people by means of narrative. So that's one fork
very important right when we live in the world that
we live in, where particularly people who live in cities
have very little actual relationship with ground reality and their
stock and trade, and the way of navigating success is
by means of being able to manipulate symbols and manipulate
human social relationships. You're going to get into a problem.
More bullshit is very difficult to prove that it is bullshit,
and so therefore it becomes gold. It becomes a fabric
of actually being able to at least be perceived as
being successful. The other side is, let me see if
I get they're so the distinction between certainty and let's
good with confidence isn't quite right, But actually competence is nice.
So what happens is this imagine a group of people.
Let's actually go way back. So let's imagine an indigenous
group of people who are living in a valley, and
they've lived in a valley for as long as anybody
remembers who's alive. I'm actually using a very specific story
from Tyson Juncoporta. So we're actually in Australia and there's
been a drought, and the drought is actually longer than
almost anybody remembers, except for like two or three very
old people, like the oldest of the old. And there's
a point where the oldest of the old go, guys, look,
I know it's super risky for us to leave this valley.
None of you even have had any experience of that.
But I remember when I was a kid, there was
a drought. It was terrible, and the old people told
us then that we needed to leave the valley and
go to this other place. And I remember it enough
that I can lead us there. It's going to be risky,
but it's the right thing to do, all right. So
that's that's a mature relationship with the fact we can't
actually control reality with precision, and the notion of certainty
is actually not a real thing in the context of
complex reality. But we can have the best that we
can get. So what do the old people do? Well,
they get together and they talk and they compare notes,
and they say, okay, hold on, you remember having that?
Okay with this the stars? You remember, oh yeah, the weather,
And they build a gathering. They gather, and in their
gathering they deposit the highest level of wisdom that they
can deposit in their individual and collective capacity, and then
the group makes decisions on that basis. That's the reality
of how we actually do this, how humans do this
kind of thing. Ever, you're not going to escape that.
You're never going to be able to have something like
mathematical precision on complex reality. Okay, fair enough, But what
happens when everybody's an immature adolescent? What happens when your
culture doesn't produce grown ups? What happens the only thing
your culture produces is very bright adolescence. Well, then you're
in real trouble because nobody actually has depth of maturity,
nobody actually has wisdom, nobody actually has experience in complex reality.
And what they do have is they do have, for example,
the ability to formulate pithy phrases with incisive sarcasm, or
to grab pieces of other people's work and assemble it
in ways that showed that are shiny and impressive. I
actually called this simulated thinking in a essay, an essay
I wrote many years ago. Well, now you're now you're
in real trouble because you're still facing issues of risk.
And what you do is you think that you can
actually produce something using this simulated thinking, using the kinds
of stuff that you'll get you an A plus on
a paper, and the kinds of stuff that will get
you uh, we call it elevated to a VP inside
a fortune five hundred company, which, by the way, has
nothing to do with actually effectively managing and stewarding the
responsibilities of that company in the world, and everything to
do with being good at politics. And therefore you get concerned.
You get concerned that, wait, this thing called wisdom, this
thing called making good choices, is actually not even a thing.
And what I need to do is I need to
have some way of being sure that I'm not being
bamboozled by politicians or by my own bullshit. Does that
make sense what I'm saying?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 1: So this is this is this is like the issue
that you're raising, which is a serious tissue. Happens to
do with the fact that we're very very far away
from the reality of what it is like to just
have an embodied experience of wisdom and relationship with complex choices.
Speaker 4: Okay, so let's take you know, let's let's let's take
because we're we taught. We started the conversation talking about
about Christianity becoming christian So we have Christianity. We have
this situation, which is that we're dealing with an event
that happened two thousand years ago, right, and we have
a book, and then we also have traditions, and we
have ways of doing things which to some extent could
be described or expressed as this remove that you're talking about,
which is an issue.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: It's like we have an account of.
Speaker 4: Someone that lived a very long time ago, and then
we have accounts, you know, people who followed their teaching.
But then you know, and those teaching produced root.
Speaker 5: In their life.
Speaker 3: But that's what we have. We have these accounts and
so here we.
Speaker 4: Are now in the modern world, and we have you
know that say, thousands of churches in North America. How
do we Okay, so, how do we navigate that the problem,
the problem of on the one hand, wanting to connect
to that right, to the resurrections of Christ, to the
story of Christ, to the teaching, and then living living
today right in the way that you're talking about, which
is the desire to cultivate wisdom, to live true communion
to do that, Like how do we find the cause?
You'll find Like I'll give you two extremes, right, just
to give an example, like, so you'll have the Bible
tells you so people right or not? Just Bibles fathers
tell you so. Like in the Orthodox rts, it'll be
similar to Bible tells you to like this is what
the fathers say?
Speaker 5: This is it? Like this is the thing. If the
Bible says it, that's true.
Speaker 4: Just just believe it and it doesn't matter if you
And then if you believe it, basically you're saved. Something
like that, right, if you if you trust them, if
you trust these guys and you kind of believe what
they said, then you're saved.
Speaker 5: Uh. You know.
Speaker 4: The other excess excess of that would be something like
you know, what, what's what the Bible says or what
the fathers say? What the traditions are with the theology.
It doesn't matter. As long as you're nice and you
like people, you kind of love people, and you're a
good person. You know, that's enough, right, And so that
I'm giving you caricature obviously, But how do you see
that we can navigate in that?
Speaker 1: Man? Yeah, well, so let me put take both of
those right, and here's what to say that those are
both adolessent. That's the point. Those are both just straight
up ado lesson. That's that's and the answer. There's a
there's a vertatality here called maturity, and those are they're
just completely different categories. So I've been having this conversation
now recently in the context of our church because you
imagine you're you're talking with the teenage boy, you like,
in that fifteen sixteen zone, and he still is thinking
about the choices he's making on the basis of is
he going to get into trouble? The father says, the
book says, the rules say whatever, you could do the
same thing on the other side. The point is that
ain't the right way to think about it, but the
right way to think about it? Is it right? Well,
how do you know that it's right? Well, the book
said no, no, no, no, no, you know what's right
because you've lived with life. You've got these patterns that
are around you to help you make sense of what's happening.
But the first thing is you touched the hot stove
and it was hot, and then second you said, oh hot, right,
not the other way around. If you do it that
the other way around, you don't Actually you don't know anything.
Somebody says, don't touch it it's hot. Don't touch it's hot.
As a rule, you're running these rules in your head
like a computer, and then you have this problem of
constantly and now analyzing reality. Oh is that what is hot?
Speaker 5: Is?
Speaker 1: What is hot? Actually? Kind of I don't know, but
I know if I touch it it's bad like that
kind of stuff. That's rule following.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: No, The point is you have to cultivate wisdom. If
you touch the hot thing, you know what hot is
and you know why hot it's bad, and then you
can map that. Now you can use that, So they did.
You have to actually cultivate and bided experience. You have
to cultivate faith or you have to live life and
you have to suffer like you have to actually make
big mistakes and you have to have integrated those big
mistakes into a deeper relationship with what the fricken thing is,
what life is and how it works. And this is
these These are the elders I was talking about, right,
They're not just olders. Let's make that distinction. It's not
just because somebody's old. Elder means you have suffered enormously
direct contact with the complexity of life and have metabolized
that into a capacity to be in more relationship, more
intimate relationship with reality. And that's the difference between these two.
And so you know, when you look at the you know,
the fathers say, well who are they? Well, they were
guys who were up here, and what they said is true.
But until you can connect it to something that you
can actually own in your own experience, you don't have
piece these. You have knowledge, and knowledge isn't going to
do you much good in reality. Piece these will do
you great in reality. And that, I think is the
real pivot that we have to make, is to say, look,
we cannot be saved from suffering. That's not how it works.
In fact, as Christians, we kind of recognize that if
if we're told to follow me, we know we're following
me leads we cannot be saved from suffering. We're choosing
to enter into that reality. That's the reality we're entering into. Well,
one of the aspects of suffering is that it's not
call it. It's not a bug. It's not that there's
the problem of suffering is not the problem. The problem
maybe is meaningless suffering or suffering we don't actually put
it to proper use. That's a problem. But that's how
you do it, right. The reality is you have to
actually just live life. You have to notice your experience
is rich. Your experiences is across a diversity of things.
And by the way, now, in relationship with other people,
have you noticed that other people have different experiences than you,
and sometimes their experience has a wisdom and an insight
that is deeply gives you a new perspective then yours does.
So that's what it means to be in communion is
to have the ability to have a coherent relationship with
other people's perspective. And I'll sit this in a very
nerdy way, which increases your capacity to have a mature
relationship with reality geometrically. So that's how you do it.
So when somebody comes and cond tries to sell you ideology,
I try to sell you bullshit. If you are operating
from an adolescent point of view, you're in deep trouble.
You're you're an easy mark. If you're operating in a
mature point of view, you're immediately going to be noticing
the difference between bullshit and reality. And if you're in
communion with a group of people who are operating from
a mature point of view, your immune system to bullshit
gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and your ability to
actually navigate complex reality, always risky, get stronger and stronger
and stronger, and that's it's as good as you can get.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think I think what you're saying it
rings a lot of bells to me in the you know,
because one of the things that's important, for example, in
the in the Orthodox tradition, is the idea of the
living saints, right that we kind of live downstream from
people that are alive and have reached the highest pinnacle
of transformation and of uh, you know, and that even
though some people will have direct access to them, you know,
it's like you people are always looking to have at least
secondary access to these to this wisdom. Right, it's like, Okay,
so I haven't talked to the actual elder, but he's
alive now and he said this, So if he's saying
this today, it means that it has there's something about
that's relevant to our world now, because it's not just
something that someone recounted from thousands of years ago, Like
how do I connect to that? So there's that aspect
which I think is is real. And then there's also
the reality, for example, of.
Speaker 5: The reality of confession and union. Right, It's like that
whatever theoretical idea you.
Speaker 4: Have about religion, it's like when you go to confession,
you know that gets smacked out of you because it's like,
you know, it gets down to the dumbest things and
to the dumbest thoughts, to the and to the most
embarrassing moments and to like humiliating.
Speaker 5: Things, and it's there's nothing.
Speaker 4: You can have all the lofty thoughts you want about
the trinity, for example, but you know, but that moment
when you lie just to impress this other person and
there's absolutely no reason, like it actually didn't bring anything
like to your life except for this little moment of
like just being a little yeah. And then you and
you're like, what the hell you go to confession? You
have to say that it's like, at least for me,
you know that that's the kind of SmackDown that has
like hopefully brings you slowly towards wisdom and towards a
real embodied practice of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And by the way, if you wanted to kind of
do the test, get a bunch of people who are
like the highest level right now in developmental psychology, educational theory,
and I mean like real practitioners, people who are really
really good at that, and said, design what an optimal
learning environment looks like? It turns out they're going to
design something looks an awful lot like the best practices
inside the Chrichan Church. H confession is going to be there.
But confession is a very specific kind of thing, right,
It's in a context of communion, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course it has to be. It's very dangerous.
Speaker 1: It's very dangerous. Exactly. So now that the we call
it a safe space, well, yeah, safe space is a
simulacrum of communion, which you're saying is communion, And there's
something so much more profound and deeper in complex reality
and in relationship with the transcendent that's in communion that
this simulacrium that you produce called safe space is demonic.
It's actually perfectly terrible and it creates exactly the wrong results, unless,
by the way, that's your intent.
Speaker 4: So yeah, because confession has a safety to it in
the sense that you know that the priest is bound
to secrecy and all of that. But it's not a
safe space because he's got he's you can gotta smack
you around a little bit and say, you know, and
make and make you understand that it's not it's a
safe space, but it's a space that's geared towards transformation,
not to coddle you and to make you feel like,
you know, although I had confessors once a while that
were too nice where I was like, oh, it's okay,
you know, God loves.
Speaker 5: You, and I'm like, I'm not sure I want to
hear this.
Speaker 4: You know, I need I need to be tightened a
little bit so that I re redirect my you know,
my aim.
Speaker 1: Let's say safe, he's a lion. He's not safe. Good
but not.
Speaker 5: Safe exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: And that's like, so back to good parenting and same
thing in the same category what's what's a good parenting context,
which is of course is learning context. That's the parenting right,
is to cultivate these individuals you happen to have a
very parsticular relationship with as as a steward of mine.
Speaker 4: So here we are, like we're here, you know, like
I'm a Christian YouTuber for all intents and purposes. Hopefully
I'm more than that. But let's you know, that's a reality,
which is that you.
Speaker 1: Know, we make it increasingly by the way in the
pocket square phase of being a Christian YouTuber, the pocket
square phase, right, the high production value, right yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and so and so that's a reality that's there,
right uh.
Speaker 5: And the same with this, like this conversation.
Speaker 4: The same with you know, for example, the education moving online.
How do you how do you see us finding some
a way to let's say, use the technology, because we
if we, I can't deny that this technology.
Speaker 5: Has been useful to some extent, Like definitely.
Speaker 4: Is it is in some ways a little trail that
helps people find their way back, but it's clearly not sufficient.
And it's also very dangerous because you know, you can
have people who just sit in their basement watching YouTube
videos feel like they're that they're that they're up here,
when in fact, you know, not the it's all up
in their mind.
Speaker 5: And so how do we I mean.
Speaker 4: I don't know if you have a solution is but like,
have you thought a little bit about how can we
find ways to bridge those worlds?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean I have. I have thought about it
for sure, tremendously, even to the point, let's put it
this way, in somewhere around I guess twenty eighteen, the
theory was now demanding that the moment of theory was
over and the only available next move was the moment
of embodyment. So practice so, and this is kind of
what you're saying. Hey, if if all you're doing is
consuming youtubees, what I'd like to say is that the
point of every YouTube video consumed that is vaguely pointing
you towards the truth, is telling you to go outside
and do something besides consuming YouTube videos. There's a terminal
point where that's the only signal that's actually in all
of them. And remember there's a discernment vector, so many
of them are actually saying no, no, keep watching YouTube videos.
That's diabolical. So don't do that. And everything that's not diabolical.
What it's telling you to go out and actually engage
in complex life. So in some sense the question is
a little bit simple, and it's just what's it like
live a wholesome life? What are the ingredients of living
a wholesome life? Put like, what's your kind of time management?
Like what's your attention allocation function? And the answer would
be sort of like, okay, first prayer and first are
you actually allocating your time to your relationship with God?
And how much like a decent chunk. It's got to
be a pretty solid chunk and in the right order
when you wake up in the morning. What comes first? Bone, Twitter,
even a even a really nice suite Jonathan Pegio YouTube video.
Or or is it are you actually, you know, having
a relationship with God? Are you reading scripture? Are you praying? Right?
The order matters? So time matters and order matters. And
then okay, how much time are spending in your body
and life? Are you going outside? Are you engaging with
other human beings in your community in physical relationship and
events that matter with stake?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: Is this in some sense it's crazy simple. Do the
thing that ordinary, like an ordinary wise person would just say,
have a wife, raise kids, spend time with your wife
and kids, care about them, care about how their lives go.
You know, which is the thing is. It's crazy simple
and just like dieting and our contemporary culture is super hard. Yeah,
my wife and I have a continuous process of frustration
and surprise at the fact that we know prioritizing our
relationship is important, and yet when we do like a
monthly out out of how much time did we actually
spend together and we're not actually living according to our values.
We've we've clarified our values, we've identified what we think
the hierarchy of values actually is, and then we don't
live that way. And then of course we read Paul
Paul's like, yeah, yeah, I get it. That's how it works.
So that's it. It starts with God, and then the
very second thing after that are your actual lived relationships
in a concentric circle with your you know, your your
wife in this in this case, and your kids, and
then you know the closer friends usually in your church
as very helpful, like you get a synergy value out
of that, Like if your time with your wife and
you and your wife are also in relationship with God,
than that. You now you're not having a double you know,
it's simple viies right, It makes things smoother. Same thing
with your kids, right, same thing with your friends and
your community. And it's the kind of monastery sensibility. And
you engage with complex reality man like fixed things with
your hands, like deal with plumbing and deal with your
change your cars oil. And I don't mean this because
you're saving money. I mean that's a practice, like it's there,
it's it's how you cultivate pieces. And notice that there
is something deeply deeply theological about the fine art of carpentry.
There's deeply deeply theological about actually learning how to fish
and noticing that you can't bullshit yourself into fishing. And
the more you learn the skillfulness of the distinction of
what requires competence and what can be bullshitted, the more
discernment you have about that distinction in general, and more
people you notice than other people who have that distinction,
and you begin to form relationships with people who have
that distinction, you notice that something stronger happened. So just
we have to live our way into that. And the
core discipline is just that ality. Didn't know what is
the right order of values and how terribly am I
not living in accord with my own values?
Speaker 4: M h yeah, it makes sense. It makes makes a
lot of sense, you know. And I'm leaving with a
lesson too. It's like we know it, but we don't,
like you said, we don't always do it in the
right way, because I mean, and in some ways it
is there's an illusion that we have, like the fires
go start burning, and then you start to pay attention
to all these fires and you don't realize, you know,
that the reason why you should care about the emergencies
that are kind of popping off, You know, they're more
important than those emergencies, even though the emergencies are screaming.
You know that there's a kind of emptiness to I mean,
I say that, but I mean the past few months
of my life have been like just this NonStop fires, right, like,
just like all these things that are happening that you
have to take care of, and then you start to
forget the like you said, the core, right, the core
of saying, well, it's like, you know, actually, what what
is it that I actually care about? And I raiship
with my family, like you said, the relationship with God
and so why am I just paying attention to all
these fires?
Speaker 5: But it's a tough one. It's hard to do well.
Speaker 1: So I'm seeing like three different things that come out
of that that it's going to be useful to tease out.
Two of them are very similar, and I see this
a lot, particularly maybe in the world that includes both
of us. So one is I call it the philanthropists deception.
So the philanthropist deception is the devil on your shoulder
who says it's okay to not live according to your
values all the time because there's a way to buy
your way back into them. Basically, right, don't actually have
all of your choices be in alignment with your values.
It's okay to have some of your choices be extractive
and maybe a lie to people or deceive, manipulate so
you can make more money. And then you can take
that money, you can put that into this really really
good thing, like super good, and if you add them together,
good just went up. You actually have a net net
increasing good. Yeah, and this is extremely subtle. I was
actually talking to my pastor about this, and he had
this experience where he had put some money into an
investment and the investment was doing really well. And what happens, right,
the devil on his shoulder who's wearing like an Angels costume, goes, man,
you're gonna be able to really support missions. Now you're
gonna you're gonna you're gonna be like so many good
things you'll be able to do with this and that
that's how it gets you. It has to sneak in
and a little flash of like a Lamborghini here, just
but just a little bit. Oh no, no, not Lamborghin's. You know,
I'm gonna I'm gonna pay for starving orphans. But that's
one right, So that's one trick. Same trick happens over
here at the level of fires. If you've identified how
you say it, doing good work in the context of
you know, I have responsibilities, like these are important things,
so I gotta take care of and maybe I'm unique
in the world being able to actually take care of
these problems. And it could be a small problem, like
it could be really practically, there's an oil fire in
my kid. Well, I'm the one who has to put
it out. That's a real fire. But it could also
be like, oh my gosh, like civilization's falling apart. Fill
in the blank. You know, somebody says something really wrong
on the internet. I gotta deal with that immediately. And
of course that's the same thing, right. The point, yeah,
the problem is who's making that choice. How do you
know whether or not that's actually the your cross or
if it's somebody else has crossed it. You're racism described
yourself too, right, And uh, that's that's that's that's subtle.
That's that's in the level of like where the I
guess that'd be Luciferian. The Luciferian sense of temptation. Right,
temptation is the exact inverse of communion and temptation. If
it if it gets you just right, it's tricky. The
whole point is it is tricky, and you really really
think you're doing the right thing. That's the part, Like
the stupid temptation if I'm gonna eat you know whatever, Uh,
you know, fifty donuts and gets sick, fair enough. But
the point is there's the really subtle those.
Speaker 5: Are the worst ones.
Speaker 4: Like you said, the lucifer In temptations of your point
is great, you know to think like, oh, I have
to take care of this because.
Speaker 5: You know, like that's so special.
Speaker 4: You know and that you know and this this, like
you said, the guy getting aimed to the internet, that's
a that's such a perfect example because like you know,
I mean, I definitely found myself you know, that they're
paying way too much attention, you know, to that type
of stuff and realize hopefully, yeah, some hopefully at some point.
Speaker 5: Realizing that, you know, what does it matter?
Speaker 4: Like it doesn't really and all of the a lot
of especially like the news cycle stuff, a lot of
it is just flashing the pans, stuff that we won't
remember three months from now. And we've spent so much
attention focusing on all these scandals and all of these things,
and this especially during the American election year. It's crazy.
Like going on Twitter is like it'll drag you into
hell really fast.
Speaker 1: Uh and it.
Speaker 4: Just and then it just captures you and you and
you realize that you've spent an hour scrolling down Twitter,
and it's like that hour could have been spent in
far more useful things, you know, including nothing, concluding nothing exactly.
Speaker 1: It's funny. So as a practice, I've actually tried to
cultivate noticing aesthetically the difference between the for you tab
and the following tab mm hmm, right, because you can
tell if you pay attention to the four you tab
is palpably luciferian. Oh yeah, I'm palpably and you're like,
wait a minute, man, the taste. Oh I'm in the
for you tab.
Speaker 5: So they also switch you over.
Speaker 4: I think like without you, it's not let's you switch
you over to the fore you til you don't even
know that why are we seeing all this stuff?
Speaker 1: Like it gets okay, so this thing goes to the
piece that's the top of that pyramid. With regard to
the fires, because then there's there's some fires that you're
actually supposed to deal with. Yeah, right, The point is
you're actually here for a purpose. And okay, so how
do you discern that? How do you notice, for example,
that oftentimes the struggling with the fire is the purpose.
It's not putting the fire out that was the thing.
It's actually your engagement with the choice is this mine
or not? And the cultivation of competence in relation, which
could be very complex competence the grief of recognizing that
you got drawn into something and it separated you from
your kids and now they've got like a ripple in
their experience that is going to be with them forever
or you know, the dealing with that and healing that's
going to be real challenge. Okay, And this is a
complex thing, man, Reality is so far beyond our capacity.
It's really critical to grasp that, like, you cannot master
this thing at all, not even a little bit. And okay,
and this, yeah, we come back to the kind of
the Christian discipline at the center. It is actually at
the center is to recognize the degree to which you
have no idea what's going on, You have no ability
to actually plan properly how to engage with this thing. Well, right,
you can do like you've been given a very specific
amount of agency and it's not much, and you can
do a little bit. Yeah you can. You can probably
make eggs. You can you can maybe drop your kid
to school without getting in a wreck. Right, that's like okay,
beyond like literally that level. I'm being facetious, but beyond
that level. If you think you've got to handle on
things beyond that, you're actually getting yourself further and further
away from reality.
Speaker 5: M hm.
Speaker 1: Oh. But but glory is it turns out that God's
right there and that there's actually an entire thing that's
helping you. And if you just learn how to build faith,
like to learn how to let go of that first
person and flip through the air, there is another person
on this side that's going to grab your hands. Right,
You've got to build that competence of being in relationship
with the actual infinite which is specifically here to help
not help you, to guide you and navigate you for
big capital peak purposes through complex reality. Right. That's the
you know, that's the kind of the was that that's
a version of the Gospel right right in the middle
of that spear in the center.
Speaker 5: That's amazing. That's amazing, It's everything. Jordan, listen.
Speaker 4: I think we think we've I think we've come to
the end of our conversation. I I'm really, I mean really,
I want to just express that I was I've been
finding a lot of joy and seeing your journey and
seeing your path and uh and you know the things
that you're talking about. You know, I remember when I
first encountered your work. You know, you you were trying
often trying to think of how to disrupt, right, how
to disrupt the system, how to disrupt the machine? How
you know, And I was like, I could I kind
of understood what you're saying, but I feel like you
know what you're presenting with us, what you're presenting to
us now is is a far deeper way of understanding
and in the end, and the thing is that it
is the ultimate disruption in a way. You know, it's
not a planned disruption in the sense of like, here's
how we can strategically kind of you know, let's say,
break the machine that's setting itself up.
Speaker 5: It's rather ascend.
Speaker 4: Vertically to become more than the than just this mediocre
machine that that we're that we're living in. Uh and
uh and yeah, it's a it's a beautiful it's beautiful journey.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure you understand this, but you have some
a substantial amount of contribution to that. So I have
a tremendous amount of gratitude.
Speaker 5: Glory to God for any help that I provided.
Speaker 4: And we'll be watching and discussion and hopefully collaborating more
in the future.
Speaker 5: Jordan, it's good to talk to you.
Speaker 1: Wonderful. Yeah.
Speaker 4: 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 and books to purchase, So
go to the Symbolic World dot com and thank you
for your support.