Cognitive Science and the Sacred | with John Vervaeke
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- Опубліковано 13 тра 2018
- John Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist and psychologist who teaches at the University of Toronto. He has won several teaching awards and is seen as a life changing lecturer by his students. We discuss the meaning crisis as the breakdown of the binding web offered by Christianity, as well as relevance realization and its relationship to the sacred.
John's youtube channel: / johnvervaeke
His book on Zombies: www.openbookpublishers.com/pr...
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I'm trying to figure out what watching a video with JBP and Verkaeke would be like. SOOOO MUCHHH ENERGYYYY!
It would have to be 16 hours long, otherwise one of them would never speak. :)
*spoiler alert* Peterson's "pragmatic truth" is troubling to Vervaeke;D
It is a really great talk though!
ua-cam.com/video/-RCtSsxhb2Q/v-deo.html
I guess that should have been predictable. Finding faults in other's theories/frames/ideas is an academic habit -- likely to occur both when we are far apart and perhaps more so when we are close together.
Oh, interesting. Here I'm sitting at a computer and didn't think to just search it. wow. Thanks for dropping the link. I'll watch it.
So many hand gestures.
I spent so much time learning enough vocabulary to understand what Jonathan is saying, now I need a whole ‘nother dictionary to get on Vervaeke’s level.
For real
Vervaeke and Pageau is a collision of worlds for me. Really glad this happened. Cog sci meets orthodox icon carving - never would have thought I would be excited to see a video on this. What a wonderful world.
Right there with you, very cool. Hope to see many more conversations between these two.
This was great. The thing that struck me towards the end when Verkaeke landed the plane on his definition of the sacred was how buffered (Charles Taylor's buffered self) secularization has made the world. Sacred is the supposed helper trying to not allow the ark to fall reaching out their hand and being struck dead. It is the holy, the thing, more than an experience of Isaiah hitting the floor in sheer terror being a man of unclean lips in the midst of an unclean people. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of the wisdom we've lost but that simply feels like foolishness to our academic discussions. We have a healthier sense of the sacredness of a high voltage wire or a blown-out nuclear reactor than we have of the being who launched our universe in the singularity. I think of CS Lewis' comment about children playing burglars only to hear something move. What if what's on the other end of the line isn't just a feeling but the warrior of Psalm 18? I'll close with Annie Dillard's great quote.
Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”
-Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.
To me the holy has a direct connection with Godliness. Sacred has the connotation of what we protect, or what we do not profane. Humans being imperfect may hold the wrong things sacred. But holiness is what comes from above. Maybe similar to the bottom-up top-down thread in this conversation.
Flavius Blisarius. Lightening also comes from above. :)
Paul Vanderklay, one of the problems is the levelling of hierarchy. Even in the Orthodox Church there is this desire to eliminate the separation between the altar and the nave, but it is precisely this separation coupled with the fact that the priest opens the curtain and then comes down from above with the body and blood of Christ which both reminds us of how far from us the mystery is, but also how awesome it is that the mystery is then made available through the incarnation of Christ.
Robert Cubley very good question. Except Peterson, I don’t know of anyone looking at this question deeply. This could be just a reflection of my ignorance.
Jonathan Pageau
Here's the sentance on Eucharist I was hoping to hear in the video! The catechism before being allowed to take of the body makes the gap tangible. Quite an experience.
If Vervaeke and JBP sat too close, their gesticulating extremities would get entangled.
Entirely conceivable: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king
Vervaeke wins 'hands down' :D
It's happened: ua-cam.com/video/-RCtSsxhb2Q/v-deo.html
Here they are discussion the "The Meaning of Life"... It's f***ing crazy. Brace yourself lol
@@lzzrdgrrl7379 gross!
It is absolutely incomprehensible that from listening to Peterson, and doing a lot of thinking on my own, that I have come to wildly abstract conclusions that manage somehow to fit perfectly with what you and he are saying. "Transcendence" as the cure to suffering. I came to that broad scale conclusion basically through a dream, and now I see it fit and represented in every symbolic talk. Peterson's maps of meaning really gave useful tools. That "Point A to Point B" diagram he uses reflects a lot of this too.
I have often thought that one of the ideas embedded within Christianity is that you should act as if the only hierarchy that matters or should be considered, is the hierarchy of moral actors/morality ("doesn't matter if you are a slave in the world of the flesh, if you are moral then you are a king" sort of idea). So if someone beats you, but you played morally, then you didn't lose the game that mattered.
Postmodern normies mistake nuance for the absolute loss of direction that comes along with subscribing to the myriad hierarchies to which they purport doing so. That is, in the ideal scenario that they are conscious enough to realize their subscription-usually it's implicit and thus they are incapable of even wondering if they're in the dark.
"thus they are incapable of even wondering if they`re in the dark."
I spend a lot of time thinking as deeply as I can about these things and there’s something preventing me from coming to such a succinct conclusion that can define a mode of being that’s worth considering. I’ve preemptively decided to reduce the general purpose of being to worship, but I still can’t fully and completely understand _why_ .
Maybe it’s not incomprehensible, maybe you’re just smart.
"The data! IT'S THERE!". Love the passion. Will watch twice again.
I will need to listen to this at least 3x. This is dense, in the best way. Thanks gents.
After I watched your talk about zombies I had the following dream:
I was walking on the street with a man who tore his skin off, revealing rotting flesh underneath. He proceeded to talk about how liberating it felt to become a zombie. It was truly disturbing.
Love this! This dream seems to me (who has no expertise whatsoever) to perfectly categorize a certain type of person that I have dealt with on multiple occasions. Tell me what you think... I ran into a friend a while back that I hadn't seen in years. He was visually in rough shape, but he kept saying how happy he was that he had abandoned his religious community. Now there was no one in his life judging him for his excessive drug use, excess porn indulgence. I was happy that he felt "relief," but I couldn't help but think he had cut off contact with a system that would have appealed to the best parts of him to improve himself. He had "pealed off his living flesh" and insisted he was perfectly happy with the "rotting flesh" underneath...
Sounds like a valid interpretation. Many parts of culture today promote a hedonistic lifestyle that avoids responsibility without considering the fact that avoiding responsibility means avoiding meaning in life.
Holy fuck
Let it all hang out.
Thank you, Jonathan and John, for this enlightening talk. Jonathan, I would particularly like to thank you for leading me toward Orthodox Christianity. CG Jung led me to JBP, who led me to you, who led me to Orthodoxy -- a circuitous route, but all good! I was seeking for a long time, and I will shortly be accepted as a Catechumen. A very happy outcome. Bless you.
Welcome home!
My dream panel would be this + Peterson and Iain McGilchrist. Maybe throw in Jonathan Haidt, for good measure.
I wish Rene Girard were still alive, because I feel like he has something valuable to add to this brew that hasn't been expressed yet. His anthropological, literary, and theological insights could provide powerful amendments to the perspectives being explored....not least when it comes to the true nature of post-modernism.
DEFINITELY throw in Haidt. His intimations about social justice stuff being religious... Oh, and while we're at it let's get John Michael Greer in there too.
This is one of the greatest conversations I've had the privilege of sitting in on.
Please have John back on.
I think we all feel the synchronicity... oh man.
❤️
Wow, I just saw the best talk ever, inbetween Peterson and Vervaeke from 2015 on UA-cam. This was the top of the top, a unique piece, honest, engaged and funny, a lot to laugh about ; )
I am so glad I discovered John, his language can be difficult to digest sometimes but well worth the effort! ( ... and people who talk with their hands, too, are great! )
Thank you Jonathan for bringing this about and delivering on a substantive and energetic discussion. Thanks to you and JBP, I think there's a ready audience for Vervaeke. Personally, I would be thrilled to see his voice get out in the public sphere more broadly, e.g, to have a discussion with Robert Wright.
When he said "knowing by loving" I thought of "Adam knew his wife, Eve, and she gave birth"
I am ready for another conversation between you two, gave me a lot to chew on.
Praise the Lord. Listened to the whole conversation. Thank you.
In Taoism there is no person because the Way had not yet revealed himself in person. You can see the same ideas formulated around the same time by Heraclitus about the Logos but it could not be fully articulated before the coming of Christ.
Some people have minds that are on fire.
JBP and Vervaeke are two of them.
Well John, you are an other giant who does not act like one, like your friend JBP. Must be Toronto air ; ) Saw other Videos of you and yesterday also, you both debating. Was the best debate I've ever seen: deep, funny and at the edge! Thanks for all you do John!
Can't explain how cool it is to have such great minds coming together at a time when I'm in desperate need for this knowledge and wisdom. Keep up the great conversations, Pageau!
Vesaeke is a tough guy to chat to. My favourite insightful comments are from Jonathon. 57:43 : You have to live the story or you'll end up outside on the margins 01:01:30 : [Taoism] is fine, but I don't know how Chinese we are :D
I really enjoyed this talk. I'm looking forward to more discussions with Vervaeke in the future.
So profound! Will have to listen to this about 5 times before I can really comprehend.
Yay Vervaeke!
Excellent. “We don’t belong in the scientific world”. What a deep observation.
Favourite person ever. Love the clean, technical vocab combined with passion, consciousness of metaphor, incredible engagement with the history of philosophy, phenomenonal insight into metacognitive processes, evolutionary exaptation, etc etc. Transdisciplinary connections.
"relevance realisation" is such a fantastic concept.
This is so good, I wish you could make more content. As an ex-art student and painter who has his eyes more fixed on the past than the frayed present, your outlook and insights give me strength. Thanks dude. Can't wait to read all the books recommended. Peace.
Wow, this was just great!
And thanks for getting this Verkaeke on, he got himself another subscriber.
Wow, that was great! Probably the best dialogue i have heard in months! At the beginning of 2017 I came across JBPs Maps of Meaning Lectures (like many other people that somehow arrived at this video), and since then it was like I was taking a detour along the questions that Peterson tried to answer. It was and still is exciting, but I had to leave behind a few threads of my "knowledge-quest". This dialogue actually brought some old and some new things together. That makes me happy and very excited!
What a bloody brilliant speaker. Loved watching and learning from this. Thanks Jonathan
relevance --- 'relieve'-ance (has a comfort component to it / giving / offering relief)
One of my favorite videos wow!
When he talked about consciousness working like two hierarchies I thought of two things: Star of David, and trees (center point at trunk, and two hierarchies at the roots and branches)
Yes, both of those are dead on. The star of David is often seen as a union of Heaven and Earth.
Brilliant conversation!
Fantastic energy
i went through a drugless psychedelic trip at age 18 where i saw people break down into decomposed corpses and reconstitute themselves up and down.
it took me a long time to figure out that it was because i was living in two worlds.. a symbolic and geometric world that i had come to understand from reading psychology and mythology through the lens of higher math, and one that was me going to a state college being catachized in materialism. good luck trying to explain that to a psychiatrist...😮💨😅😑
Jonathan, that Heidegger quote was perfect.
fuck yeah, I got chills while John was explaining Plato's insight and aligning yourself to reduce inner conflict. John should have just as much exposure as Jordan imho.
if it is any consolation, i subscribed and hit the bell after being exposed to you from the campus liberty rip of your panel discussion with jbp. very impressive talk there, looking for more.
great discussion. JP can you please produce content more frequently? I'm eating up everything you're putting down but it's like having a potato chip...I need another as soon as I eat the next one just to keep up with the craving. Thanks for doing this and sharing!
Great talk. Thanks.
There is connotative data and denotive data.- Denotive data has to do with what you can touch, taste, see, and hear. Connotative data has to do with how ideas interrelate. You can point to a chair, you can’t point to human rights. Human rights as an amalgamate of several different ideas, some of which you can point to, others of what you cannot. Artificial intelligence struggles with mapping out connotative data, this is because it’s a very intuitive process. Noam Chomsky in his famous paper “ The poverty of the stimulus” famously wrote about how there was no evolutionary first cause for grammar. Which is significant because it is how our consciousness maps out meaning. There is something intractably mysterious, or Dare I say transcendental about grammar. It’s always fascinated me how in the Torah the cosmos is created by God‘s ‘Ruach’ or speech. Which is interesting because breath and spirit and speech are all synonymous in Hebrew. That your speech and capacity for intentionality is divine in origin. And then again in the gospels in the book of John where Jesus is referred to as the logos- The word- by which all things were made. To understand ontologically the genesis of consciousness, and it’s practical application for AI- we would have to teach computers to understand poetry I think. Elohim meaning ‘one of the many,’ and the University meaning ‘one of the many’ to me it shows how the nature of the divine and the nature of consciousness are intuitively linked. E pluribus unum- The bedrock phrase for democracy- is the most complex and yet obvious and self apparent intuitive axiom we have that pervades everything.
in reference to the dynamic coupling, mystery to mystery idea, Fry in The Great Code offers "Demotic language... seems to confine us to a level of reality that Paul (I Corinthians 13:12) very aptly compares to a riddle in a mirror." Just love all the synchronicity going on right now!
You three are my favourite
Great show ! . .
"the moment of loss of meaning at the end of the cycle"
e.g. drinking alcohol on new years eve or at the end of a cycle makes symbolic sense, but drinking every day is not connected with any broader meaning.
dressing up like a monster at the end of cycle has some meaning, but dressing like a monster everyday ...
I think this relates to the sacred and the profane.
Yo, do another conversation! This is the best!
Tell everyone about red and blue like the thumbnail of this video! Priceless knowledge
I was particularly struck by Jonathan's explanation of why the chaos of our time is unique. When people get worked up and start ranting about the problems of our age, my usual response is, "chill, study some history. This isn't the first time things have gone crazy". I guess I need to study more history. Is there another video that develops the point of the uniqueness of our time compared to others? And thanks for the amazing discussion!
Cerebral boinkfest
Thanks
A good article on the theological implications of self-deception is "Self-Deception and Autobiography: Theological and Ethical Reflections on Speer's 'Inside the Third Reich'." David Burrell & Stanley Hauerwas (1974)
Paul Vander Klay I think a video like that might be here at Jonathan’s UA-cam channel.
I also think you may have posted that video at your blog a while back.
At any rate I’ve seen it and yes you’re right...:) it’s awesome.
At ~13:00 you talk about heaven and earth and the relationship between them. This is Matter and Pattern. Mother and father. The construct is as old as language itself. Ma and Pa
we know there will be a clash between hundreds of millions of people in an army from the far east. we know that some set of armies will be levelled with a single word. while I personally hold this will eventually happen very literally at a moment in time and a location in space, this clash is seen (and I think the two sides are very much trying to change each other with respect) in this very video. great job Jonathan! you stand for the person of Christ the way I hear this.
Also the pdf version in the link for his book is FREE. I am going to read it and was pretty stunned. Enjoy!
24:00 you don't think words, You think WITH words.
I wonder if either of them have read C.S. Lewi's "Meditations in a Toolshed." He talks about the same difference between kinds of knowing. And never being able to be outside completely of your framework.
I think what was missing in this discussion was archetypes. The combinatorial explosion is impossible to resolve in real time, but it is possible to resolve over evolutionary timescales. The archetypes are the solutions to the combinatorial explosion that allow living things to filter perception down to what is necessary for survival in real time. I think that what is unique about humans besides cortical expansion is that we have the right combination of archetypes (or metaphors) to perceive ways to survive in all environments.
I love JV's Charlie Brown glass!
I think the following quote by Hegel would be apropos here: "The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For the work of Reason (which is synonymous with the Idea) when considered in its own actuality, is to simultaneously enter external existence and emerge with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and phases - a multiplicity that envelops its essential rational kernel with a motley outer rind with which our ordinary consciousness is earliest at home. It is this rind that the Concept must penetrate before Reason can find its own inward pulse and feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But this infinite variety of circumstances which is formed in this element of externality by the light of the rational essence shining in it - all this infinite material, with its regulatory laws - is not the object of philosophy....To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason." Hegel, Werke, vii, 17. www.gwfhegel.org/index.html
His retort to the basic atheist argument is absolutely spot on. If you aren't paying attention to these sort of very basic axiomatic discussions then you are not prepared for what's coming and you're essentially a zombie being led by pure salience manipulation (advertisement, political ideology etc.). It takes deep work, be it through the use of psychedelics or meditation or the practice of a religion, to realize that there is something beyond just simple power dynamics. This is why I agree with Jordan Peterson when he said that Matt Dilahunty is not a true atheist, because a true atheist would be a murderer, a dostoevsky character, that had no conception of morality. A belief in morality IS THEISM, atheists are just being intentionally myopic in order to dismiss that fact.
Great conversation. It seems in our time of social, political, economic, and ecological upheaval, Jesus is more relevant than the Buddha. You can see that just by comparing the historical situations of Jesus and the Buddha. Perhaps we need a new synthesis, but I don't see doubling down on private spirituality of Buddhism, for example, will play more a decisive role than on the extraverted spirituality we find in Christianity.
ah yes, almost thought you skipped out on the blessed intro.
Or as Sheldrake would say - the Trinity is: 1. Unity 2. Differentiation and 3. Both together dynamically. This is the yin yang symbol with the encasing circle as the third principle.
❤!
It’s like do you try to understand the tree from the fruit, leaves and branches or from the roots. Top down, bottom up, heaven and earth. Obviously we want to do both but we tend to have one vantage point from which to see the tree. Do we deduce from the fruit down to the roots or do we focus on the seed and how it will become the tree? Either way you start and end with the seed and that scales both ways, forest to atoms.
My goodness, there is so much condensed in this video, so I can hardly perceive it. Every sentence and every move contains so much in it. This talk is like an intellectual dance, or like Chopin's melody, you can listen to it over and over again and find treasures every time.
I think we have still not properly acknowledged (though we are slowly coming to terms with), the end of the meaning crisis which culminated in ww2.
All we have done since, is say "never again", yet here we go again. We need to understand how widespread meaning crisis void was filled with hyper-nationalism, that we are still not immune from that, in fact as eluded to with the zombie crisis, maybe we are more vulnerable?? to hyper-nationalism or a kind of hyper-globalism that attempts to solve the meaning crisis but from a totalitarian perspective rather than through Agape.
I don't know who he's talking about when he says the Romantics but I'm pretty sure Coleridge would agree with what he's saying.
Mr. Pageau, related and personal personal question: how do you regulate your technology use and device habits so you manage information and experience?
Love the intro music to ur videos.
JustPast12 Do you know what it is? I've asked him before but he never responded.
Jonathan Perez, Rimsky-Korsakov - Russian Easter Overture
Jonathan Pageau That's it! Thank you Jonathan.
Jonathan Pageau Now that I have your attention, have you ever watched the Estonian film Tangerines? It's set in the Georgian Abkhazian war and it's full of symbolism and profoundly beautiful. I think you would absolutely love it and I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
19:00 E Pluribus Unum comes to mind.
I find most of your videos fantastically difficult to follow in the best possible way. Could you make a video solely on the topic of "what the physical act of going to church does for you". I know you've made many references to it from different angles, but the points, for me, tend to get washed into the topic/frame of the video at hand, and thus don't reach their end (I'm too busy processing the tidal wave of info about Dasein and cognition to go off and process the connection with physical embodiment in church, even though that point is really important I feel)
Have you seen my talk "Sacred Space in Secular Terms" which was subtitled "Why you should go to church"?
You guys need to connect up with Sheldrake and Vernon who are doing this integrative work (and from a Christian centre)
John Vervaeke has a Charlie Brown (shirt) drinking glass and a Sangean radio. The owl is a representative of wisdom in some cultures (being able to see into the darkness). Also a print of three (trinity) spherical vessels on the wall behind enclosed in a series of rectangles or squares. Just observing the set. Interesting.
and did you see which names where under the vessels?!:))-its like cherry on top of a cake:)))
Yes. Wisdom personified.
Make meaning making meaningful again.
Interesting ... we're losing meaning so we look for salience - just like our pre-axial ancestors. Instead of having traditional weddings, we jump out of airplanes to say our vows. We watch movies about blind folding and we drive our cars with blind folds to get our "kicks". We jump from one "kick" to another ... our ancestors reacted from one threat to the other, a bouncing experiential world of animism. One big cycle. I could listen to these two guys for days on end. This material is so rich. I notice smart people like Peterson and Vervaeke use their hands a lot when they talk. Firing both hemispheres obviously. I'm going to try that with my wife and see if she will start listening to me :) Hey I'm smart look at my hands ... (using a Seinfeld voice).
Psychonomic 😮 why is this the first time I have heard that word?
It was comic and tragic when they had that dissagreament close to the end xd, I also think about sophia the AI, maybe they can help us understand ourselves better, as we try to understand shopia as a robot being. Dont actually creators love his creations? I think some of them have good intentions on sophia. (not V.4)
Great video, Jonathan! I'd suggest checking Matthew Tarnas Segall's videos on Whitehead and Schelling and the 'Re-enchantment' the West could go into, out of this period of chaos after the end of the metaphysical age.
0ThouArtThat0 is the name of his channel.
Cheers :)
Thanks for the reference. I have a talk on re-enchantment which I gave at Eastern University that I should be putting up soon.
"Right?Right?Right?"
16:40 , 19:50, c 1:14:45
“You have to be a relevant actor in the world - and we aren’t. We don’t fit into the arena that science sets for us”.
- Any ideas what John meant by this?
It's at 38.30 approx.
Science uses a grammar that is very alien to us, to the way we experience things. For example, deep and meaningful emotions are described as chemical reactions in the brain. A lot of our humanness suddenly disappears we use science to perceive things. We find ourselves in a world where genes are merely trying to propagate themselves into the future. I think that's roughly what he means.
@@Mearc_Stapa Thanks. Much appreciated!
Tao Te Ching has the figure 'Saint', but not as a particular person.
Daoism is not different to the others. They merely represent the ideal in a different way.
Daoism has a Person if you identify Christ the Way with the Dao the Way.
I don't wish to be rude, but the skipping in the video (as if it was buffering constantly as it's playing), is somewhat distracting. Do we know what the cause for this is, whether recording or uploading?
I loved the content of the video though! I agree that the "institution to find wisdom" is among other things, the role of the Church or at least organized religion. It brings people together, and while they participate in the anthropology in a linear fashion of self and collective improvement, they are also cyclicly bringing us back to the same places and things in the Church calendar, allowing us a form of higher order contemplation by looking at what changed between repeated events in the yearly cycle. "How did I change since last Lent" or "what did I learn last time which can help me spent Lent more effectively" as examples.
I would love a talk about Hesychasm, the Jesus Prayer, and how self realization is expressed and how that is supposed to take place according to the Orthodox narrative. The reason being that I am an Orthodox Christian for a few years now, and while I've done a lot of reading, some of it I don't have a good sense of how they connect. Getting rid of the passions makes sense, but moving from a simple procedural conversation to how that translates to prayer of the heart and the vision of God does not necessarily connect in a meaningful way. It looks to me like a series of fact statements whenever I try to self express it to myself, rather than a relationship or a narrative story. I would like to hear someone address how they connect to one another as one story or idea.
We would need a Saint to do that for us. I need to get a webcam to Athos. 😀
Integration/differentiation... inhalation/exhalation... order/chaos.
Hi Jonathan, just wondering if you have an Instagram account? I would love to see more of your art work! Thank you
instagram.com/jonathan.pageau/ 🙂
I don't think we are going to rationally talk ourselves back into meaning structures, God is dead and cannot be revived with anything materialism uncovers. Faith is required specifically because we have to trust the tools handed down.
where would someone naive start to read Augustine, is there a book that would be appropriate ?
His confessions
*HAND MOVEMENTS*
2:48 you left out Philosophy
Can someone help me? I'm reading Jung and he uses a lot the word "Gnostic". I just know "gnostic" as an ancient christian heresy, but it seems there is more meaning in this word. I dont understand what he means, when he says there are 3 synoptic plus the 1 gnostic gospel of John.
The gospel of John is focused on the more spiritual aspect than the other gospels, it is concerned with theosis, that is becoming, or being united to God.
I've always thought that a good way to separate Christian Mysticism and Theosis from Gnosticism is on two main points. From what we know the Gnostics usually were world-deniers. But John still includes the narrative of the Jesus story along with mystical elements. Second is moral orientation as one understands the mysteries. Many of the Gnostic gospels suggest an inscrutable morality of those select illumined 'above', which seems alien, or even evil, to those below. To be fair to Jung, he was mainly interested in the Gospel of Thomas, which is, appropriate to the doubter Thomas, a reductive collection of the sayings of Jesus, not very different to the sayings in the synoptic gospels, though importantly different in format. Some of the other gospels found at Nag Hammadi have a very dark tone, however. Such as Jesus striking a man dead for no reason, then skipping down the street laughing, and saying what amounts to 'you'll never understand me'. A dark oligarchical view of God and the world....:(.
So gnosis (or theosis) would then be akin to the Individuation process?
All three talk around a similar concept, but have a different take, Ill give it a go, but Jonathon would be better at Theosis. Well Gnosis means knowledge, which is a high resolution intellectual-type concept, where secret knowledge unlocks a higher meaning of religion and being, like finding a key which unlocks a door to a secret divine garden, leaving the ignorant behind in their 'lower' concept of religion. The other two are more gradual and integrated in their process, more low-resolution (not a high-low value judgement btw). Individuation is the process of making the unconscious conscious, and burning off false assumptions, through introspection and self-honesty. Then it becomes a weaving the threads of your nature into being and purpose, and finding the true eternal self (God?) within. Jung describes this state as walking the Golden Path. Theosis is more akin to aligning the pattern of your life with the divine, thereby moving yourself into the center of divinity as laid out by the pattern of Jesus' life.
Thank you very much Flavius, now I have something to work with.
Where's the next talk? :)
you can watch his lecture here: ua-cam.com/video/54l8_ewcOlY/v-deo.html :)
heaven is a big place. nothing wrong with humans reaching to touch Gods already reaching hand. as if humanity can exhaust the potentiality in the divine. welcome to the party we have never seen. there is only one narrative.
I’m posting a link to a song, because it points heavenward in more ways than one.
I first heard the “canonical” recording of this song over forty-five years ago and have listened closely countless times since then.
Another recording of the same song, made within months of the “canonical” recording, features the same personnel; it’s almost identical in structure.
“Old hat for sure”, was my expectation immediately before hearing this particular version today for the first time.
Whatever its story, the telling here is ferocious and unequivocal.
m.ua-cam.com/video/4JJ9lnUBBDU/v-deo.html
You can clearly hear spontaneous full disclosure by each member, within the framework agreed upon by all.
Peterson says of self-authoring “just do it badly at first”.
According to Jonathan Pageau, the ascetic of the old legend similarly counsels Reprobus. “Carry an individual traveler across the river. Then do it again and again, because you can, and because you will.”
One of the guitars heard in the recording is played by Duane Allman, sometimes also affectionately referred to as *Skydog*
He was killed shortly afterwards in a traffic accident, and a real Reprobus he was by all accounts, who coulda shoulda woulda used a crash helmet (or the equivalent) way more than just that once. Oh well.
Something about music “...that makes the wounded whole...”
I’m doing this badly, I know. I’ll look for my dad’s old Saint Christopher medal today.