How Do You Start Over After Wasting Years?

Hi everyone. I spent decades unpacking the biblical stories upon which these lectures are based. I did that because they form the foundation of our culture. You need to know what they are so that you share something in common with everyone else. You need to understand what they mean so that you can find their application in your life. Knowing the meaning of these stories can get you through some very dark times. Welcome to the lecture. Thank you everyone. Thank you very much for coming tonight. It's very good to see you all here and uh so I always sit backstage. I'm preparing for these talks all the time really. Um, I finished I think what's the final draft of the book that this tour is based on today by the way? Yeah. And I've been working on it well I've been working on it for 40 years really but well you know because it's a continuation of ideas that I've been developing really for four four decades and but I've been writing it specifically for about three years I guess I actually wrote three books at the same time um as it turned out. Um so they'll come out one after the other over the next couple of years. Um, so I'm writing that constantly and then I'm spending each of these occasions that I have the privilege to engage in thinking on my feet, trying to clarify what I'm writing, trying to clarify my investigations. And I usually focus that I always focus that in preparation for a given lecture by noting what question is perplexing me. This is really what you do when you think. When you think I've thought recently that thought is actually secularized prayer. Um I'll tell you why I believe that. But I I I truly believe it's the case. There's endless reason to believe that the religious enterprise per se preceded any attempt to formalize thinking. We don't really have any records of formalized thought as such. Let's say prior to the Greek philosophers, prior to Socrates in particular, who taught people to think, what were people doing before that at a psychological level? Well, they were they were engaged in some variant of a religious enterprise. There was no there were no faithless people in the distant past. The manner in which people interacted with the world was a religious manner. There was no alternative to that. People might have debated with one another about what the appropriate faith was, but everyone existed within a conception of the world that we would regard today as clearly religious. What do you do when you think? Well, the first thing you do is you admit that you don't know something, right? So that's a gesture of humility. If you want to think about something, we have to have a problem. It has to be a problem you're interested in, let's say, or problem that bothers you. Problem that plagues your conscience or calls to you. You have to have a problem. You have to accept that problem as your own. So that's a move of responsibility. And then you have to proclaim your ignorance, not least to yourself, right? Because if you have a problem, you have a problem cuz you don't have the solution. And if you don't have the solution, then you're not everything you could be. You not least because you have the problem. And so then what do you do if you're thinking? You know, people say, "Well, I thought up this or I thought of this." And it's a strange way of apprehending what happens because when you say I think it's not like you know what you're doing, right? You don't know how you think. You have no notion whatsoever of the causal sequence that allows you to conjure up something essentially out of nothing that addresses something that you didn't know. And it's a complete bloody mystery. It's like, think about it this way. If you didn't know the answer, then how could you think it up, right? It's the same problem obtains when you dream. It's like obviously that's not a voluntary activity. Where do the dreams come from? Well, they say, "Well, they happen in my head." It's like in there in the goo. That's the idea, is it? It's it's a very weird way of looking at the situation because the disjunction between the dream as a phenomena and the matter of your brain is so great that attempting to casually reduced one to another to the other is well it's just a non-starter. It's preposterous in some ways and we certainly don't understand the relationship between conscious or unconscious experience. say if dreams are more on the unconscious side. We don't understand that. And the material substrate of the brain at all, you know, and there's been decades now of pretty intense work on consciousness from the neuroscience perspective. It isn't obvious that we've really got anywhere at all with it. It's a great mystery. Um, so anyways, you're thinking away and what do you do? Well, as I said, you admit that you have a problem. So that's a gesture of humility. It's also a confession of sorts, right? Is that you don't know and you have to admit that to yourself. So this is what scientists do when they're thinking. You have to grapple with the fact that you're bereft. And then what do you do? One of the things I learned when I was a scientist that was that scientists lie about science all the time. It's built it's built right into the scientific process. So when you publish a scientific paper, you write the introduction. The introduction describes how you generated your hypothesis and why. And all of that's complete nonsense because what you do is you tell a story about how you reviewed the literature and how it sequentially influenced you to logically take the next step forward and come up with the research question in mind. That isn't how it works ever or virtually ever. First of all, if your research question is so obvious that you could have just derived it from a review of the literature, it hardly is original or worth pursuing. So there has to be a leap of originality in there somewhere that isn't accounted for by the mere facts. The truth of the matter is is that you have a hypothesis, you have an intuition, you have an insight that something might be the case. And you get that because you admitted in ignorance that you didn't know and you received something that approximates a revelation. That's what an intuition is. That's what an insight is. That's what it means to move towards illumination. Those are all words with the religious connotation. That's where scientific hypotheses come from. Right? And sometimes they they strike people even with the force of revelation is that the greatest of scientists in their autobiographical accounts accounts often insist upon the fact that they're struck by a realization, right? It's very strange language. It's like, well, where does that realization come from? It's the same question as where do your thoughts come from? Well, what you have to do to think at least in the initial stages, you have to admit that you don't know and then you have to well, what you have to want to know. Well, there's no real difference between that and Christ's injunction in the gospels, right? The injunction from Christ is that you should knock and the door will open and you should ask and you'll receive and you should seek and you'll find. And that's all predicated on the idea that you're actually knocking, right? That it's a gesture that indicates an intent to walk through the door and that you're actually asking because you want and that you're seeking because you want to find. It has to be the genuine article. And then what is the consequence of that? And the consequence is well something appears in the theater of your imagination. That's a much more accurate way of describing what happens than that. You thought it up. You thought out your dreams, did you? That's why dreams can contain information that you don't know. How do you account for that? Well, is it necessarily necessary to portray it as a revelation? Well, it's a description. You if you want to attribute it to the workings of the unconscious mind, go right ahead. But it's not like you've made any progress in solving the problem. You've just replaced one mystery with another. And so I think that the biological and the divine dovetail. And if you want to take a bottomup approach to the problem of revelation and attribute it to something like an implicit unconscious that emerges out of the material realm but has its own structure. It's like, well, go right ahead. You're you're treading on religious ground when you do that anyways. Not just treading, you're fully there. And certainly people like Carl Jung realized that by like 1930, you know, and that was part of his beef with Freud because Jung realized that the god that Nze had dispensed with in some sense made itself manifest anyways in the unconscious. And he was absolutely right about that. And so what do you do when you ask a question is well you open yourself up to revelation. Now that's not the end of thinking. And the reason for that is that as it's put in the New Testament, you have to test the spirits to see if they're of God. And what does that mean? Well, you have to critically evaluate what it is that you've received because perhaps the revelation that's been delivered to you in consequence of your search has been delivered by the wrong spirit. And what would that mean? Well, here's a way of thinking about this is extremely useful to know. Imagine that you're trying to settle an argument with your wife. Now, if you had any sense, when you were trying to settle the argument, you would aim up, right? I'm I'm dead serious about this. You would step back and you'd take stock and you'd think, "Okay, if I could have what I wanted, if I could get what I if I could have the proper door open, if I could ask and receive in the proper manner, if I could seek and find what I wanted to find, what would it be?" And then you'd think, well, I would like to reestablish the harmonious peace and playful spirit that characterizes my relationship with my wife and all those people I love when those relationships are at their best. And I would sacrifice everything to that end. and I would seek for the solution to the problem of our conflict in that spirit. And then if you did that and you were sinless in your aim, if you were precise in your aim, if you were oriented towards the establishment of that microcosm of the Garden of Eden, then the spirit that would respond to your request would be the spirit of the God of your ancestors that would deliver you the message that would move you one step forward to the one step closer to the kingdom of heaven. But you'd bloody well better make sure you have your act together before you make a request like that because the alternative is that you call something unholy up to answer you and you get a revelation from that spirit instead. And you might say, "Well, Dr. Peterson, you're degenerating into archaic and superstitious language." It's like, don't be so sure about that cuz you might imagine that you harbor an endless number of resentments in your bitter little soul about your wife and about all the other people that you interact with. And instead of orienting yourself properly towards what's highest and seeking for the insight that would establish peace and harmonious tranquility, you decide that you could toss a little insult in there and maybe obtain a little bit of a victory and, you know, get back at her for the last time that you argued when she defeated you or maybe the last hundred times that that's happened. who knows and that you've had enough of taking guff from people and it's time for you to, you know, make your own stance. And if you can throw a little intellectual pride in there, so much the better. And that's the spirit in which you ask the question. And that's exactly the spirit that responds, right? And so then you get a revelation that's not exactly from, you might say, the divine source itself because you've called some lesser devil up in the recesses of your imagination. And that's what informs you as to your proper, what would you say? Your proper strategy moving forward. That's what crafts your cynical and sarcastic and bitter words. That's what inspires you to use power when you could use invitation. That's what inspires you to proclaim your correctness like the feronic tyrant who continues to double down. That's what you've invited into your life, into your soul. And so, you better test the spirits that you call on to see if they're of God because God only knows how misaligned your aim is. And that misalignment of aim, that is sin. That's what sin means. It means it's an archery term. It means to miss the target. And so God, heaven help you when you what would you say? First practice to deceive. Heaven help you when you aim in the wrong direction and wait for the inspiration to strike you. And that's worth thinking, you know, that's worth thinking about because your thoughts, you can speak, you can speak of this just in the most practical sense. Your thoughts are tools. They're aids to your progression forward, right? I mean, you think so that you can maneuver in the world more effectively. And so, what is it that determines what thoughts make themselves manifest to you? And the answer to that is straightforward. Your aim. That's what determines it. That's what determines. That's what determines not just what you think, but what you see literally. What determines which pathways forward open to you, which determines what constitutes obstacles and what constitutes aids. Your aim determines who your friends are and who your enemies are. Your aim, your aim is the structure through which you see the world. And your character is your sequence of aims. That's what you see unfolding in front of you when you go see a movie. You see someone characterized as a series of aims and you derive from that the manner in which they view the world. You identify them with with them emotionally. You come to see the obstacles and the pathways forward and the friends and foes that make up their world because you understand their aim. And so it matters for you to get your aim right. And so when I'm sitting backstage before I come on stage to talk I try to first knock and ask like what's the problem I'm trying to address? It has to be a real problem. It has to be something I'm wrestling with, something I'm grappling with, something that I believe is worth sacrificing for, worth pursuing, worth communicating, worth contemplating, and it has to be a genuine question. And the question for tonight was, what is it? How is it that we could best conceptualize faith? Right? And so that's the question that I'm hoping to answer. And what's the spirit in which I hope that answer will be delivered? Well, we set the stage with the music and David Carter is a very good musician and he gives it his all and that orients us upward in the way music does and it focuses the attention of everyone in the audience. And as my daughter indicated, we're very happy with our audiences, which is why we continue to do the tours. And why are we happy with them? It's well, first of all, look at here you are. And that's a miracle of for anyone who has any sense. It's like there's 5,500 of you. It's like what the hell are you doing here? It's seriously like you have to be a complete fool as someone who has the privilege to address a crowd like this to not constantly be struck by the sheer improbability of this happening of all the things that have to come together in this strange way. they have come together in order to make something like this possible. And so if you have the least bit of sense, you walk on stage, what would you say with your jaw dropped realizing that nothing more improbable in some sense than this is likely and yet here it is. And so and then what else? Well, my sense these events tend to be very positive. Why? Well, because the people who are attending by and large are knocking and asking and seeking and people differ in their sophistication in that regard. You know, I mean, you meet some people who have clear vision and their ability to detect up even under trying circumstances is unparalleled. And you see other people who are just starting to stumble out of the pit up the hill and their vision is still obscured, but they have some sense that up exists and they're willing to take a risk to pursue it. And by and large, the audiences that come to these events are upward aiming. And so it's a celebration of Jacob's ladder, this endless spiral up towards the pinnacle and a mutual attempt to walk that golden ladder. And so when I sit backstage and conjure up a question or allow one to make its appearance to me, I remember that I'm engaged in a serious quest um in the most engaging possible way and that I have the privilege of undertaking that endeavor in a public manner. that allows me to craft my words and see them appear and then to test them simultaneously in real time to see if they land. And that's a good deal. Like that's a seriously good deal. It's hard to imagine, especially for someone constituted like me, it's hard to imagine anything better. I mean, I've always enjoyed being a professor and took it seriously, and now I have the opportunity to speak to a different audience every night about exactly what it is that I'm most compelled to investigate to exactly the audience that's only there because they actually want to be there. It's like, well, that's a fine deal. And so I hope I hope with that contemplation and that effort and gratitude for the unlikely gift of this opportunity that I can call upon the spirit of revelation to aid me in crafting my words and dig more deeply into the problem at hand. That being how do we conceptualize faith? Now, I'm going to tell you a way we shouldn't conceptualize it. >> What's it called? >> Peterson Academy. >> It's called Peterson [music] Academy. >> Peterson Academy. if you want an actual education >> with hand selected professors from top universities around the world. >> Bringing the best professors together, making sure they're not censored in any way, giving them the audience and the remuneration and appreciation they deserve. >> And you were true to your word. You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy. I have had it through every course. [music] We figure we can offer people a highquality university level education for under $2,000. >> Well, congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant. Can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this. Find your insistence in the biblical texts that God is in the final analysis ineffable. Okay. So what does that mean? It means beyond categorization, right? It means outside of space and time. It means that whatever existence God has is of a higher order than the existence of what we regard to be objectively true. The the reality of the objective is one form of reality. The reality of the transcendent is a higher form of reality. And it's not to be reduced to the objective. This is partly why Christ says in the gospels, not everyone who says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those that do the will of my father. What does that reference mean? Faith is not belief in a set of facts. It's it's the precondition for observing the facts that matter. And that's a much deeper form of truth. It's a much deeper understanding of the structure of reality. God can't be reduced to what's simply material. Here's an example. There are multiple examples of this. When God comes to the prophet Elijah, Elijah is Elijah is the prophet who accompanies Moses on Mount Tabor when Christ is transfigured and the disciples realize that he's the savior. So Elijah is a major prophet. His account in the Old Testament is rather short, but it's crucial. Elijah is the prophet who finally realizes and establishes the proposition that God is not to be found in the world of nature. Elijah is the prophet who defeats the priests of Bal, the god of nature in a final showdown and follows that with a flight made necessary by his victory which displeases Jezebel who's the foreign queen of the Israelites who brought the worship of Bal to the forefront, the worship of nature, something we're toying with now, more than toying with, he has to flee into the desert. And when he's in the desert in a cave, the awe inspiring majesty of the natural world presents itself to him. He experiences a conflration, a a fire, a terrible fire, forest fire, a raging inferno, which is certainly capable of eliciting the kind of awe that is akin to a religious experience. He experiences a thunderstorm, a great thunderstorm, and with a tremendous wind, right? The motion of the invisible that also has that uncanny element that elicits awe and can be confused with the divine even if it's a pointer proper pointer to the divine. And he experiences an earthquake and which brings him to his knees you might say. And despite that, Elijah has a realization in his pursuit of the God of Israel. And his realization is that God is not in the storm or the fire or in the majesty of nature. God is not identical to any of that. He's instead best construed as the still small voice that calls within. That's a radical claim, a radical idea. In some ways, it's a minimization of of God. It's certainly what you'd propose if you were one of the said worshippers of nature that now God is something that well, what is subjective, psychological? Well, not exactly because the still small voice within your conscience that's not exactly subjective, right? I mean, it makes it ma selfmanifest to you. And in so far as that occurs, it's in the realm of subjective experience, but it's not subjective in that you don't control it. In fact, it operates autonomously despite you. And that's a remarkable thing. And so it also speaks to you or otherwise impels you in a manner that issues force because your conscience might plague you and things might bother you and problems might present themselves to you as yours to take responsibility for. But you're not compelled in the manner of a automaton, a robot, a deterministic robot to act out without choice the dictates of your conscience. It informs, it reveals, but it doesn't compel. And that's a remarkable that's a remarkable phenomenon. And phenomenon is a word that is derived from the Greek fain is thigh and it means to shine forth right that's what phenomena do in the world they shine forth and attract your attention compel you or call to you or warn you in the case of conscience to stay on the straight and narrow path that leads uphill and so that's God. That's God. And what is faith in relationship to God construed in that manner? Faith is the willingness to abide by the dictates of your conscience. You see, it's not a statement about the nature of material reality that just moves the phenomena back into the realm of the world of nature. It's the faith is the willingness to attend to your conscience. And there's faith either way in that situation. The atheistic types, the materialists and the determinists, they make the insistence that faith is tantamount to superstitious. Superstition and unnecessary given the availability of evidence. It's like in relationship to your conscience, you have two choices. Both are faith predicated. You can either listen to it and act in accordance with it or ignore it and take an alternative route. And the evidence is essentially the same in both cases. You don't know if you're called upon to take a problem that's calling to you seriously. You have no evidence a priority what the outcome of your decision to listen will be. And so if you abide by the still small voice that Elijah identified as an element of the one true God, then your faith is your decision to act. That's why Christ says in the gospels, as I indicated, that true faith is indicated by the willingness to do the will of the heavenly father. That's the poetic representation. And so that's a God that's ineffable and in indescribable, incomprehensible, who invites but does not command, who defines the straight and narrow pathway forward that exists in relationship to you. because you have a relationship with your conscience even if it's an uncomfortable one which it tends to be if you deny its voice which also makes you a very dangerous person to yourself and others indeed that's a characterization of God and or a definition and faith is the pattern of decision that emerges from that encounter. Conscience is not the only way that God makes himself manifest in the Old Testament and New Testament stories. Not by any stretch of the imagination. The stories are in fact a sequence of characterizations of what the ancient Hebrews regarded as an essential unity. They're a set of characterizations of what is to be celebrated or put in the highest place or aimed at or related to in the manner that produces integrity in the soul and harmony and productive generosity in the community. How is that character represented or portrayed? In the story of the opening stories of Genesis, God is portrayed as the victor over Leviathan. Leviathan is the great dragon of the chaotic waters. There's a very primordial set of images underlying that text. The God who confronts the dragon and wins the treasure that that confrontation allows bestows. The abysmal dragon that lives in the depths is the inhabitant of the original primordial waters. The toou vabohu upon which the spirit of God rests or broods at not only at the beginning of time but throughout the entire expanse of time itself. and who wrestles with that chaos and possibility and potential because that's the primordial water and in doing so extracts out the order that is good. Human beings are conceptualized in that story as made in that image. And what are we to understand of that? Well, what's the world? Is the world a set of facts and phenomena that force us as automatons to react in a deterministic manner that's pre-programmed and willless? That appears not even possible in principle because the manner in which things unfolds is in principle indeterminant and uncertain. And there's no deterministic causal pathway forward that can properly compute the transforming horizon of the future. And that is what you actually experience despite your delusions otherwise. You see the world you as the enlightenment post enlightenment materialists that we all are. You see the world as a set of objects that what? Compel you forward. That's not how you experience the world. The fact that you believe that is an indication of the grip of that enlightenment view that is now coming to an end. What is it that you perceive and contend with? It's the same thing that the spirit that broods on the water that's chaos and potential wrestles with at the beginning of time. What is that? That's the potential that surrounds you. Your consciousness does not deal with what's fixed. It deals with what's fluid, right? It deals with what is yet to be. You peer into the future like a driver looking down the road. You've already run over what's all right in front of your car. You look into the future and you craft your strategy and your attention and your actions to make of that future the continuing voyage to your destination. And that sequence of destinations is the endless journey to the promised land, the endless wandering up Jacob's ladder, or the climbing of the holy mount, the attempt to reestablish the garden of Eden or to bring about the paradise that is lost to us because of our sin. When you awaken in the morning in anxiety, let's say, because of the desperate straits that you foolishly found yourself in, or in the hope that an exciting adventure awaits you when you sit up and put your feet on the ground and begin to contend with the day, that anxiety and hope is the apprehension of the potential that is your deepest reality. On the upon the occasion of the emergence of your conscious, your consciousness, you know that you have opportunities and obligations to shape whatever it is that's offering itself to you in the course of that day. And you can do that badly or you can do it well and you can do it bitterly and resentfully or you can do it gratefully. You can do it aiming down. You can do it when you call upon the foul spirits to reveal their mysteries to you. Or you can do it aiming up. And you're always doing that with every word you utter, with every breath you take, with every glance you make. You're wrestling with possibility and transforming it either into some slice of the hell that you could bring about with your foolishness or some improved representation of the earthly domain that's attempting to transform itself into heaven. And that's your inevitability and your responsibility. And you know that because your conscience calls you out when you fail to perform that shaping and wrestling, subduing and naming, that's Adam's responsibility. when you fail to perform that in the manner that indicates that you've brought your best to the table. And so that's an early characterization of man of God and man. And Adam and Eve in that early stage walk with God in the eternal garden, the walled garden that's the optimal balance of social structure, hence the walls and natural abundance, hence the garden that is the permanent environment of human beings. And Adam and Eve walk with God in that garden prior to the emergence of pride and sin because they're aiming up. And that's possibility exists for you in so far as you truly aim up and make the sacrifices necessary to realize that aim. And that sacrificial path of expanding opportunity is the establishment of the covenant between the chosen people and God. And that's the story. That's the biblical story. That's the story of Abraham. That's the story of Cain and Abel. That's the story of Exodus. That's the story of Jacob and Esau. This story of willingness to shed, sacrifice everything that's immature, prideful, power- hungry, and unwilling in the attempt to grow in character, to develop integrity, to become the father of nations, to become the leader who invites people away from the tyrant and their own slavish habits and encourages them to cross the desert of their own lostness in search of the promised land. That's the story. And faith is the willingness to embark on that adventure. Faith is the willingness to embark on that adventure. Right? In the presumption that there isn't up in the aftermath of the decision to commit to that. In the story of Jacob and Esau, Jacob is not a good person in this story. He is a spoiled academically oriented tent dwelling mama's boy who who conspires with his treacherous mother to deceive and manipulate Esau who out of the rights he has the firstborn. That's Jacob. And he does that successfully in a sequence of manipulative actions that span his childhood and his adolescence. He literally comes out of the womb attempting to pull Esau down. Jacob means he who grips the heel. And it means it's it's a description of the spirit that usurps and destroys. And that's Jacob. Now, many of the heroes that that are characterized in the Old Testament are deeply flawed people when they initiate their transformative adventure. And that is realistic and it's optimistic because you are a deeply flawed person when you embark upon the adventure of your life. And if it was hopeless for those who are deeply flawed to transform upward, then you would be lost. But the stories that sit at the base of our culture assure us that if you determine to aim upward, regardless of your state of reprehensible sin, you can establish a covenant with what is highest and progress. In the story of Jonah, Jonah is called upon by God to speak his mind to the citizens of Nineveh who have degenerated into a kind of woke idiocy and who are being threatened by God with destruction as a consequence. And God comes to Jonah as the voice of conscience and says, "You need to stand up in the city of Nineveh and tell those faithless and corrupt people that I am not happy with their conduct and that if they don't straighten themselves out, I'm going to destroy them." And Jonah says, "I don't think so. There's 150,000 of them. There's one of me. I'm a nobody. Plus, I don't like them. And if you feel like you want to give them a good smiting, I'm on board with that." And so Jonah being a sensible individual makes tracks in the opposite direction and heads by ship for a port that is literally as far away from Nineveh as it was possible to get at that time. On the ship he proceeds promptly falling asleep. And what does that mean? Well, that's what you do when you reject the call of conscience. You take refuge in blind unconsciousness. And that's what Jonah does to reconcile himself to the fact that the divine itself had commanded him to utter the words that could redeem the corrupt state. He falls asleep on board and the ship falls into peril as it always does when people refuse to say what they're called upon to say and drift into unconsciousness. The waves rise and the wind blows and the ship is in peril. And the sailors have an intuition that someone on board is not right with their god. And they gamble to they draw lots to identify the likely perpetrator. And the pointer points to Jonah. And they wake him up and they say, "Sleeping though you may be, you can now see that the ship that contains you is in great peril. And we have been granted the intuition that someone on board is not right with their God." And Jonah, who's basically the kind of honest person who might receive a message like that from God, says, "I'm afraid that's me." And the sailors say, "Well, who's your God?" And they're expecting that he's some forest pan or some god of the tavern, some local pagan subde that rules over some dismal and tiny expanse of space and time. And Jonah says, "No, my God is the creator of heaven and earth themselves." And the sailors say, "You probably shouldn't irritate him. And so the ship is in peril and the waves rise. And that is what happens when good people refuse to say what they know to be true. when they refuse to embody the logos that hovers over the realm of possibility itself and with the force of truth extracts out from that domain the order that is good or very good that logos is speech right and that's truthful speech and when you are called upon to speak by your conscience and you reject ect the call of truthful speech. You refuse to bring into being the order that is good and consign what you were called to contend with to hell. And that's what happens in totalitarian states when everyone decides that the sensible thing is to hold their tongues and let someone else take the risks. And so the sailors, who are good people in their own right, decide to head for shore with Jonah safely on board the ship. But the storm mounts to the point where that's impossible. And the reluctant prophet calls upon them to toss him into the briny blue sea to his death. And that's a rough story indicating as it does that if you're an ordinary person and you receive a message from the divine to redeem even the city of your enemies and you reject that call that you will put the ship of state itself in peril and risk your own descent into the abyss. And you might think that's pretty harsh and that just means that you're a naive optimist because that isn't the end of the story. The next thing that happens is the worst beast imaginable. The Leviathan itself, a creature from the lowest pits of hell, rises to the surface and takes Jonah in its jaws and pulls him to the bottom of the world itself. Three days in hell. And that's how it's portrayed in the story. And what does that mean? It means that there are things that silence when you're called upon to speak will bring that make death itself the preferable alternative. And if you don't understand that, you're blind and fortunate indeed, and you know nothing of history because there are forms of deceit induced cataclysm that are so extreme that rather than participate in, contribute to, or experience them, a sensible person would choose death. And if you know anything about the horrors of the Nazi regime or the catastrophes of the Soviet state or of Mauist China or of North Korea, these terrible satanic luciferian tower of babel states that emerged in the godless 20th century, then you would understand that there are perils of malevolence compared to which death itself is nothing. And that's what you risk having consume you and everything that you love when you refuse the call of conscience to voice that which you know to be true. And you're you Americans, you understand this deep in your bones because your whole culture which is a derivative of the Judeo-Christian tradition is predicated on the we hold this truth as self-evident presumption that you are made in the image of God and that you are in principle the voice that continually redeems the corrupt state. And so that state is limited in its right to intrude upon the territory of your consciousness because if it does so it destroys the process of vision and speech upon which it depends for its integrity and continuity. And you might say well is that something you believe? Is that something that you have faith in? It's well, do you believe that people have intrinsic value and the free will of sovereign agents? And I would say try treating the people around you as if that isn't true and see what they think of you in consequence. What's Jonah's faith? He repents in hell and humbly kneels before the God who of his conscience and says, "If you see fit to raise me from this pit, I will do what you asked." And the whale spits him on shore. And he goes to the city [snorts] of the corrupt enemy. And he tells them what he has been requested to tell them. and they repent and they put on sackcloth and ashes and they make the proper sacrifices and they reestablish their relationship with what is properly put in the highest place and the city is saved. And what does that mean? It means the same thing that Abraham bargained for with God. When the angels or God with whom Abraham was traveling informed him of the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham, a man of great character, by this point, objects wrestling with God, making the case that it is not fit for the benevolent deity of the ancestral Israelites to demolish a city in which there may still be some inhabitants who are good. And Abraham asks God in this wrestling whether if he goes to Sodom and finds 40 men who are upright, whether the city can still be salvaged. And God says yes. And Abraham who has some fortitude and a certain amount of gall pushes God and says 30 and God says yes. And Abraham says 20. And God says yes. And Abraham pushes him. And the number is reduced to a very small to something very small. And what does that indicate? It indicates the power of proper conduct and the truth. Because the truth of the matter is that a city that is still uncorrupted enough so that 10 people have kept their voice can avoid the total destruction. That's a consequence of everyone adopting the lie. Right? And so what's the terrifying implication of those two stories? You're called upon to be one of those few. And anything less than that is an abdication of the responsibility whose adoption stops hell in its tracks. Right? And that's the price you pay for having the tmerity to be fabricated in the image of God. And that's your responsibility, right? The responsibility of ultimate meaning that characterizes you as the citizen who is neither the vassel of tyrants nor the willing slave. Right? So watch Jonah's faith, his decision to speak. It's not his proclamation. Lord, Lord, his invocation of his prop of the propriety of his acceptance of a set of claims of descriptive claims. It's his willingness to put himself 100% on the line in the service of what's good. That's faith. Cain and Abel make the same the story of Cain and Abel makes the same point. Cain and Abel are the first two human beings born in the natural way in the fallen and profane world that characterizes our realm and history itself. The hostile brothers, each exemplifying a pattern of work, a pattern of sacrifice, each exemplifying the two opposing patterns of work or sacrifice that characterize the human endeavor as such. Why work and sacrifice? Because work and sacrifice are the same thing. And if you understand that, then you have a key to more deeply comprehending the entire corpus of the biblical stories. Why is work a sacrifice? Because you sacrifice the present for the future. When you work, you sacrifice your own whim for the stability of the community. When you work the community and the future are depend for their integrity and their abundance on the sacrifices made by civilized individuals who can forgo gratification and who can act in a manner that sacrifices the pleasure of the moment to the assurance of the well-being of their family and community and the stability and productivity of the future. That's work. That's what human beings do. That's what mature human beings do. They stop worshiping their own narrow whims and they aim at the up that provides them with integrity and that upon which the community itself is necessarily predicated. That's the sacrificial gesture that reconciles man, woman, and God. Cain refuses to properly engage in that sacrificial process. Whereas Abel is allin. Abel who's a shepherd, a keeper of flocks and therefore an archetype of the shepherd who keeps the predators at bay and defends the innocent and vulnerable who can fend for himself in the desert. That's all. The shepherd takes the best animals in his flock. He takes the best of his wealth. He takes the best aspect of his riches. He [snorts] sacrifices that on the altar which he uses to communicate with God. And he indicates thereby his willingness to bring his best to the table. It's an archaic mode of representation. It's predicated on the idea that God is up like the sky. The observation that smoke rises. The notion that the God who inhabits heaven can detect from the essence of the smoke which contains the spirit of the sacrifice the intent of the sacrificer, the spirit of the offering. And that if it is of the highest quality then will show that sacrificer due respect. Cain by contrast keeps what's best in reserve. He has no faith in the necessity to exhaust himself in the pursuit of the proper relationship with the divine. He buries his talents. He hides his light under a bushel. He falls under the sway of the spirit of deception and prideful usurppation. Because if you when you don't bring your best to the table, you have to lie to yourself and everyone else to justify that. You have to assume that you as the deceiver has the upper hand not only over your own conscience but over the other people that you're deceiving with your false offerings over the world and over God himself. And that's how Cain falls under the sway of the Luciferian temptation. He fails in his endeavors, failing as he does to bring his best to the table. And this engenders a certain bitterness. His countenance falls. He's sad and unhappy and depressed and bitter and resentful and vengeful. And he is inclined in consequence to call God out for his shortcomings. like everyone bitter does when they make the presumption that the fact that the world is not laying itself out for them as the walk towards paradise they desire when they lay the responsibility for that at the feet of the maker of the cosmic order instead of taking responsibility for their own shortcomings themselves. Cain faces God down, which is what we all do when we shake the our fist at the sky and bemoan our tragic and undeserved fates. And God says to Cain precisely those words that Cain least wants to hear. He says, "First, you blame your resentment on your failure." But that's not exactly true because other people who fail decide that there's an error that they're making and they atone and repent and they put themselves together and they start making the proper sacrifices and they learn in consequence of the rejection of their sacrifices. Instead, what you did was fall prey to the temptation of the sin that crouched at your door. in your despair that crouched there like a predatory sexually aroused animal which you invited in and allowed and encouraged to have its way with you. And so what does that mean? Well, failure itself is insufficient justification for cataclysmic depression and resentment. You have to brood on it. You have to invite in the spirit of resentment and pride to possess you in your meditations on the unfair nature of the cosmic order itself which appears to be turned against you that entices you into this rebellion against God instead of the acceptance of insufficiency, the consequence consequent repentance and that proclivity to learn that's part of the upward striving path of Abel. And so God says, "You can't blame your misery on the world and on me. If you had done well, you'd be accepted." And Cain is insensed and enraged by this response to his misery and resentment. And he invites his brother to work with him in the field. And when his brother agrees, hoping no doubt that Cain has decided to put some real effort into the game, he kills him with a rock. And he does that to spite God himself and to take revenge over to take revenge on God's chosen son which is a foreshadowing of an endless number of events that culminate in the death of Christ on the cross. Right? Cain has faith in his own proclivity for deception. He falls prey to the worship of the spirit that he's invited into his heart. He kills his own ideal in the form of Abel and he's bereft in consequence because of course when you kill the successful when you kill the very idea of success itself there's nothing left for you but misery and failure. And Cain says to God, "My punishment is more than I can bear." And God marks him to stop the cycle of tit fortat revenge. And sentences him to wander alone in the land of nod, which is once again the place that children go to sleep. It's the domain of unconsciousness. And the wandering is the fact that Cain is the embodiment of the pattern of sacrifice that makes him unfit for the company of other human beings and destined to be the vagabond, the psychopathic vagabond who has no community or place. Cain's descendants degenerate. They're more murderous than Cain. They extract a higher degree of vengeance than their father. They worship technology instead of God. And they become increasingly murderous and then genocidal. And what that means is that when we each refuse to make the offering that's of the highest sort and we fail in consequence and develop and invite in that spirit of bitterness that justifies our dissatisfaction. We participate in the process that not only corrupts our own soul but that leads the state down the pathway to absolutely catastrophic genocidal murderousness. The next thing that happens in consequence of the faithlessness of Cain is the flood. Right? So what do we make of this? Faith isn't the mouththing of the proper holy incantations. Faith is a total commitment, a total commitment, a priority to the pathway of good. When Jacob leaves his brother who's inclined to murder him for his perod and he leaves his family and his mother, he goes into the desert and he builds an altar and he consecrates it to God. And it's a decision point in Jacob's life. He decides that despite his illspent youth, he is now going to aim up. Right? That's his manifestation of the faith that establishes the covenant between his soul and the God of his ancestors. And what does that mean? Do you aim up? Do you determine in the aftermath of your failure and bitter disappointment that the proper path that you should take toward redemption is to stop doing what you know to be wrong and start doing what you know to be right. That decision to aim up even in the smallest manner in which you might be capable given your blindness. That's what Jacob determines to do. That's what Abraham does when he starts out on his adventure and builds that initial altar. He indicates his willingness to believe that the good exists and to pursue that pathway and to let go of shed and sacrifice everything that stands in his way. And that's faith. And then that's ultimately exemplified in the story of Job who's tortured by God and Satan who has everything that any man could value stripped from him and arbitrarily and yet decides not to lose faith in himself despite his suffering or in God despite the apparent injustice indicating that we're all called upon to maintain our faith in the utility of the upward aim no matter what happens to us. And that's finally realized in its ultimate form in the story of the passion which is the catastrophe of Job multiplied and portrayed multi-dimensionally. The passion of Christ is the story of the least deserving. The person who least deserves betrayal and brutal torture and punishment receiving exactly that in its worst form. young, while simultaneously being the target of the unjust mob and the worst of the tyrants, facing a catastrophic death in front of the people that he loves. It's the most tragic possible fate portrayable and the pathway that Christ follows is the faith to continue the upward aim that unites man and God despite the utter catastrophe of the tragedies and malevolence of human existence and the world. And that sacrifice that is represented by the crucifix which is a symbol of the voluntary willingness to bear that fate is the symbol that we put at the center of our communities and have for 2,000 years to signify our dawning understanding that the future is insured. Death is defeated, evil overcome, and the community established as a consequence of full participation in the pattern of voluntary self-sacrifice. Right? That's that's faith. Thank you very much. All right. So, I'm going to invite my daughter Michaela back out and she's going to take some questions from the audience and weave them together in a manner that enables our inquiry to continue. And we'll do that for about 20 more minutes. And that will comprise the evening. >> You nailed it. >> Thank you, my dear. That's a hell of a metaphor under the circumstances. Uh, see that's a Freudian slip. E, I'm dead serious. That's exactly the sort of thing that Freud in his genius observed is that the implicit structures through which we view the world, the unconscious will note concordances and patterns that and express them often as jokes. for example, that indicate a pattern of symbolic understanding that's beyond our comprehension and that Fred wrote a whole book about such things, right? And that was part of his investigation into the mysterious workings of the of the unconscious. Right. >> Well, I'm never saying that again. [laughter] Did you guys notice that he lectures with his eyes closed? This was the first time I noticed how long you keep your eyes closed. And you'd never you've never fallen off the stage as [laughter] soon as you >> So far. So far. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So far. Yeah. That's happened more and more in this tour in particular. And it started to happen. And I it helps me concentrate on what would you say? It helps me screen out everything from my awareness except my apprehension of the next right word. Right. Right. Right. And that's a calling on as well. I'm trying to, as I said, address the problem at hand in the most accurate possible manner. And that requires detailed and devout concentration and the willingness to let the inquiry take itself wherever it goes. When Christ is baptized, after Christ is baptized and the spirit of the Holy Ghost descends on him, he goes where the wind blows, right? He goes where the spirit calls him and that takes him to the desert. That's what happens in that situation where he's tempted by Satan, right? He gets to the bottom of things. That's what happens if you attend to the calling of the spirit that is attempting to make itself manifest in its descent from heaven. Right? It takes you to the place you least want to go to encounter what you least want to encounter and that's the pathway to resurrection and salvation. Yep. That's also partly why people don't tell the truth. Hey, that you'll that's where it will lead you just like it leads the Israelites away from tyranny of course but into the desert right for 40 years. You can wander around lost. Even if you've established your upward aim, you can wander around lost for a long time. So, it's a terrifying it's terrifying adventure, but it's better than all the alternatives. Okay, we have I've been told we have 10 minutes, so we should get through a quarter of one question. So, uh, start with the important ones. Um, if I acquire enough wisdom, will my hair grow back? Okay, I'm joking. You don't even have to answer that one. No offense to Amir. Okay. >> Poor bald Amir. >> [laughter] >> Oh, how do you believe God reveals people's callings or purpose? >> By gripping your interest, assuming you're aiming up. That's the thing. You can rely on your interest that instinct that signifies the proper pathway forward. You can rely on that. If you take the beam from your eye and and aim up, then things will call to you in the world. They'll elicit your interest. They'll fill you with enthusiasm. And in so far as you've established the proper relationship with what's in the highest place, that calling will be reliable. This is what happens to Moses, you see, when when he's a shepherd in Midian. He's an ordinary man. He's established himself as an adult, a respectable, responsible adult, a shepherd, not a high status job, but a difficult and necessary one. He has he's established his marriages. He's a man and he's attending his flock near Mount Si, Mount Horeb. Same place. That's the place where heaven and earth touch. and something beckons to him that calls him off the beaten path. Right? His beaten path. This happens to all of us. You have a dream, you have a vision, you have something that excites you and interests you. It's the birthplace of the dream that would whose realization would constitute the adventure of your life. It's a secret you hold in your heart, unwilling as you are to share it with yourself or with anyone else because of your faithless fear of betrayal. Let's say it's the pearl of great price that you might well keep buried. If your orientation is appropriate, you can rely on your intuition and what captures your interest. And that's what Moses does. He goes to investigate the burning bush, right? And that's the tree of life that's on fire. And fire is life, right? Because living things metabolize and that's fire. And something intensely alive burns like a like a a child burns. You know, a child you love burns and captures your imagination or someone you love burns and captures your imagination. You can see that something that inspires you glows and warms your heart. You can investigate that. And that's what Moses does. He takes off his shoes, signifying his willingness to abandon his current identity and his current path. He understands that he's beginning to tread on sacred ground, which is what you do when you investigate what calls to you. And the spirit of being and becoming itself speaks to him. And that's what happens if you take your quest seriously. That's what happens. That's how you develop the wisdom that makes you charismatic. That's what happens to Moses. He becomes a leader. A leader is someone who leads his people from tyranny, their own tyranny, the tyranny of their marriage, the tyranny of their family, the tyranny of the community. There's always tyranny, right? And away from their slavish and immature habits, the habits that lead them to the worship of the golden calf. They listen to Moses because he's been there and done that and has got to the bottom of things and speaks the words that are compelling because of their force. And that's all real. And that's what happens when you meet someone who's pursued their destiny properly and they're are charismatic and admirable and their words have force. And that's because the voice of the benevolent father speaks through them. And that's that's the eternal story of proper development. And it's true. And and that's the answer to that question. Okay, great. Okay, we can squeeze another one in here. I think this one was worth addressing. Uh, I'm a married 32-year-old man, an alcoholic, sober 7 years. Should I have kids even if I fear I can drink again and ruin my family like my father did? So when the Israelites are on the edge of the promised land, Canaan, which needs a lot of work, by the way, uh Moses and the Israelites send out scouts and they're sort of like prophets in a way. They're scouts of the future. They go to Canaan, the the promised destination, and they check out the territory, and they come back with various accounts. And some of them come back and say, "Oh my God, there's nothing but giants in Canaan, and they're going to stomp us to death. All hell's going to break loose. We were fools to leave the comfort of Egypt. We were fools to walk across the desert led by this mountain bank, Moses. We cannot possibly progress into the future. We have to turn tail and run. We have to look back like Lot's wife." And then there are other scouts Joshua and Caleb among them who say we can prevail with faith and proper upward aim maintaining the covenant that we have established with what has been put in the proper properly in the highest place. we can prevail. And God rewards those faithful scouts and transforms them into the leaders that take the Israelites into the promised land after Moses dies. Right? That's Joshua. Same name as Yeshua. Same name as Christ. Signifying that it's the spirit of total adventure that stabilizes the future. Faithful total adventure. So, you were an alcoholic, a worshipper of Dianisius. Well, you've had seven years like Jacob to straighten yourself out. Have some faith. Right. All right, everyone. Thank you, Michaela. Thank you, everyone.