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Wolfgang Smith: Christianity vs. Vedicism [Part 2]
April 25, 2023
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region.
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How can there be a religion if no man has seen God and the purpose of religion is to see God? Isn't that a contradiction?
There are basically two ways of seeing God. There is a direct way and a way in which our humanity is not burned up.
Today, we discuss your questions for Wolfgang Smith, which includes remarks around the various Vedantic realms of existence, in particular something called the Av Eternal, and how does consciousness fit in, as well as not fit in, as well as the Western worldview, or as Wolfgang and myself like to call it a Weltanschaung. This is part two of my discussion with Wolfgang, where we discussed his life, his corpus of rich philosophical insight, and his unexampled perspective on religion and interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Wolfgang Smith is a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher of science who draws heavily from pre-modern ontology. He obtained his bachelor's in physics, mathematics, and philosophy simultaneously at Columbia University by the time he was just 18. Again, I've said that before in part one, I'll say it again here, it's unheard of.
He was a mathematics professor at UCLA. He then worked at the Bell Aircraft Corporation as an aerodynamicist focused on providing a solution to the atmospheric re-entry problem. Wolfgang and I, I'm extremely lucky and blessed that we were able to spend several days together in February. It was a humbling and endearing experience. Thank you to Brilliant for help subsidizing the cost, the traveling costs.
You may not know this, but I pay out of my own personal pocket for every expense such as flight fees, taxi fees, food fees, even subscriptions such as software tools, Adobe for instance, the editor editing this right now, different capital like increased RAM and computers and so on. So help from yourself via Patreon. Patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal helps a tremendous, tremendous amount.
and secondly sponsors help a tremendous amount because of all of your support we're able to bring toe to you at zero cost brilliance is a place where there are bite-sized interactive learning experiences for science engineering and mathematics artificial intelligence in its current form uses machine learning which uses neural nets often at least
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Like I mentioned, there's part one on the channel as well, and you can see how much Wolfgang and I bond. He holds a special place in my heart. In that part one, we go four hours toe-to-toe, so to speak.
My name is Kurt Jaimungal. My background is in mathematical physics, and this channel is called Theories of Everything. It's dedicated to explicating the variegated landscape of theories of everything, of toes, primarily from a mathematical perspective, from a physics perspective. But we also explore the constitutive role consciousness may have in engendering the laws as we see them. Enjoy the next few hours with Wolfgang Smith, part two. Editors note, as we rewatch this, we realize this is the inmost conversation with Wolfgang we've conducted, that we've heard.
So Professor, how have you been? What's it been like since last we spoke? What's new? Well, I've had a very busy but very productive time. I've been interviewed on many programs and lots of opportunity to talk to people and to
Explain my ideas so I'm very satisfied with how things have been going. And you just published a new article about consciousness. Yes, well I haven't published it yet but I just wrote it and to be honest with you I think it is one of the best things I've written. I've had a very productive time in the recent weeks.
And I feel it's now coming to an end. What do you mean? Well, I just had my 93rd birthday and which I never expected. No one in my family has ever lived that long and all things come to an end. Well, hopefully not terribly soon. I'd love to see you again in person. Well, I leave it all in God's hands.
What is the Omega Point? Well, I think the expression goes back to Théa de Chardin, who was a very, very interesting character. In fact, the second book I ever wrote was about Théa de Chardin. He was a French Jesuit and a paleontologist and
He wrote many, many books which had an enormous and incredible influence upon the Catholic world and for a while his books were on the index. Eventually that only, I think, made them more interesting to the people and in the sixties
His books became widely circulated and he exerted an enormous influence, I would say, on especially the younger generation of Catholic intellectuals, you might say. So much so that his influence upon the so-called Second Vatican Council was just incredible and
What really happened is that the Catholic world was split into two pieces. There were the traditional Catholics who were very happy with the theology in existence, and then there was the younger generation, kind of revolutionary in their make-up, and they were powerfully under the influence of Teilhard de Chardin,
And so, as everyone who has kept up with the story knows, the Second Vatican Council was a complete revolution. The traditional theology was essentially thrown out and replaced by Theod's theology, which I in my book characterized as
is science fiction theory, science fiction theology. Well, Theotokos was a fake, and I say that in all candor and I mean it, because he had revolutionary ideas
You must grant him one thing at least. He didn't copy anyone else. He was totally himself. He saw everything in a new way. It was, in my opinion, absolutely upside down. It being the omega point?
his science fiction theology. I mean the Omega Point was just one component of a completely new way of approaching theology and I think many people saw it as a sort of integration of theology with science but in truth it wasn't neither of the two. It was
A chimerical theology somehow integrated with a chimerical science. Theodosia is one of the greatest illusionists in the history of human thought, I believe.
Can you talk about the Omega Point? What is it? Well, Théâtre Chardin had this idea that the physical universe itself is converging. He saw everything under the banner of evolution. That was his God, really, and in fact,
In a later part of his life, somewhere he wrote the following words which have stuck in my memory because they really, in a sense, sum up his thinking. He said, in the final count, the one, the only thing that I believe in is evolution.
So he believed, first of all, that the physical universe is itself evolving, everything is evolving, and this evolution takes the form of a convergence of everything to what he called point omega. And this point omega, he talked about it on the one hand,
in sort of physical terms. In other words, as if this is something that the physicist and astrophysicist should eventually discover because he said this is what is happening. Everything converges and from a physical point of view he happened to be about as wrong as wrong can be because we know that
The opposite is true. There's an expansion. The universe is its diameter, so to speak, is expanding at the speed of light, 300,000 kilometers per second. So he was about as wrong as wrong could be from a physical point of view. There's no such convergence to a point omega. But he also, at the same time, saw this
Convergence to point omega as a spiritual thing. He gave it a theological meaning. When they use that word, they got it there. And what he was actually saying is that God himself is evolving.
and has not yet quite reached his ultimate perfection, which will be attained when everything converges to point omega. So, in my book, I devote many pages to, first of all, explaining what Teilhard was talking about.
And secondly, showing the reader how absolutely absurd it is. It is absurd from the standpoint of science. There is no such conversion as I just said. The very opposite seems to be the fact. And secondly, from a theological point of view, it is worse than nonsense. And actually the bottom line is this, it is diabolical.
And one of the things that I have written about in the book, in the last chapter, I look at Teilhard, the man, I go into biographical topics, and in particular, I came upon a very unknown article that Teilhard wrote
when he was very very young it might have been his first publication it was written about nineteen twenty five and in that obscure article he relates an incident that happened to him when he was very young i mean he wrote it when he was about thirty years old or so and the event i think he was in his twenties when that happened
Well, he describes how he's walking one day in a lonely place somewhere in the countryside, and he said, and then the thing swooped upon me. So he speaks in this very strange way, and I asked the thing, who are you? And the thing replied, quote, and this is now a verbatim quote,
I am the quintessence of all good and all evil, and I am now settled upon you in life and in death. And I'm not an exorcist, although I've known a great exorcist, but it is clear to me that this is evidence of possession.
Many people nowadays don't know what this means and don't understand it is a very real thing. What in theology is called Satan or the devil in common language is not an illusion. It's not just
an old fable. It happens to be a truth, a very important truth because I think one of the reasons Satan is so successful, especially nowadays, is because he has succeeded in convincing the modern world that he doesn't exist. And that makes him very, very powerful. So what I'm saying, and this is
What I said in the last chapter of my book on Tehrad-i-Shaddaq, what I'm saying is that Tehrad was possessed and that his doctrine, Point Omega and all the rest of it, is basically written under satanic influence. This is Marshawn Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks whether
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Is Satan capable of telling the truth, or can he only lie?
I would guess that he is capable of saying the truth when he serves his purpose. So even if he says the truth, it is for the purpose of spreading lies. But make no mistake about it, people nowadays tend not to understand that.
The devil is not a fable, it's not a theological fantasy. It's as real and solid a reality as Mount Everest. And it is one of the greatest forces operating in the world, because it is really in a sense a counter force to God. We all agree, no doubt, that
God is all-powerful and the prime power more powerful than anything else. Granted, but the negative of God, the negation of God, which we call Satan, comes in second place. And compared to our human power, the intelligence and the sheer power of Satan is boundless.
This is one of the deficiencies, I believe, of contemporary, quote-unquote, religion. I'm talking mainly to the Judeo-Christian branch of religion, that the idea of Satan has been pretty much lost. In earlier times, I think Christians were more keenly aware of
the satanic side of the cosmos and who were therefore more on guard. I think the so-called demythologizing movement that Theod himself was in a sense representing because he was destroying
Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox belief, and replacing it by that science fiction theology of his, which as I say was demonic.
Let's make an analogy. We are like a finite number, just a finite cardinality. And then there's Satan, which is the countably infinite. And then there's God, which is not only uncountably infinite, but perhaps the highest of all the infinities like Kantor studied them. So even if Satan, compared to us, is infinite, is extremely powerful, compared to God, Satan is nothing. Is that the case? Well, I don't think that from a theological point of view,
One can really think of it that way, because if you look at the matter from a still higher perspective, it turns out A, that Satan is necessary, and B, that unwittingly Satan is contributing to the work of God.
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The German poet Grütter has put it beautifully and I think he's hit the point. I won't quote it in its original German,
The idea is that Satan is necessary to try to mislead human beings, is necessary as a counter force to Christianity, a counter force to God.
because it is by giving opposition to Satan that human beings grow. If there were no challenge, if religion were just like receiving chocolate and eating it, that's a human fantasy. This would never be Christianity.
A negative force is needed to accomplish the will of God. So when you pray, do you ever give thanks for Satan? No, but it would make sense. It would not be in any way amiss, because Satan is there as a necessary ingredient
You see, you might naively and at the same time wisely ask the question, well, if God wants to give us this infinite gift which we call salvation, eternal life, why doesn't he just give it to us? Instead of letting us struggle in a world that is full of
Pain and misery, and also, worse even than that, carries within it the danger of damnation. Why has God so arranged it? Why doesn't He just give us whatever He has as a present, which ultimately it is, it is a present? Well, I think the answer to that is that
God can do all things just by his own will. He can create the world and he has created the world by his own will. But there is one thing that God cannot do simply by his will. And that is, he cannot give us the highest gift, salvation, because salvation
is somewhat akin to God himself. And this is something that simply cannot be given, even God cannot do this. If God could give us salvation just by his word, I think it stands to reason that he would certainly do so.
Why make us suffer and why make us run the risk of damnation? And that risk is there. Every Christian teacher has corroborated that. And the answer is, I believe, that salvation is, in a sense, a participation in the divinity.
And this is something that cannot be just given. You have to earn it. I wish I could do a better job getting that point across. It's something that I feel very deeply, but I hope that these few words are sufficient to indicate
What I'm trying to express. There's some views of God that God can do anything, including contradictions. So you don't believe this. There are some things God cannot do. Yeah. Yeah. He cannot give salvation to an unrepentant murderer. So the
Ascent to God, the invitation from God to man, come into my sphere, be one of us, enter the kingdom of God, that invitation cannot be given, so to speak, gratis. It is something that you have to, in some way, in some sense, earn.
These things, of course, are hard to explain. We're dealing with supernatural things and so it's very, very difficult to express it and very difficult to understand what I'm trying to say, but I think the Christian listener will sense what I'm saying.
And I think he is likely to recognize that this is true. Do you fear death? As a natural man, certainly, yes, certainly. Absolutely, because we have not yet reached the stage of sainthood. We've all read the lives of many, many saints. We have some idea of what they're like.
And it is, in my belief, only in a high level of sainthood that the fear of death is transcended. It's not a simple thing. And ordinary Christian faith is wonderful, and it's a sine qua non. We need it, otherwise we have nothing.
But it doesn't instantly elevate us to great spiritual heights. It's something that you have to work on a lifetime. And there are millions and millions of Christians of all denominations and grades, but only a handful in every generation reaches a level of true sainthood.
And this is something, it's not a matter of degree, it's a matter of kind. It isn't that we have a numerical scale and then we say above this number it's sainthood. No, because sainthood is something generically different from the ordinary condition of man.
Anyone who, and incidentally, sainthood is rare, and in my life I have met only one person who is bona fide a saint. And he is as much different from any other person I've ever met in the world. It's almost as if he were a different species. So many Christians, I think, have
somewhat inadequate ideas of what makes a saint. A saint isn't simply somebody who is very, very good and lives a very, very good life. He is that, but that's not what makes him a saint. What makes him a sainthood is categorically different from our ordinary state. And saints come in all shapes and guises and
Many different kinds of life they've lived. The saint that I had the privilege to see, I visited him. He has since been canonized, and his name is Saint Padre Pio of Pietelcina. Anyhow, he was a Capuchin monk. He spent his life
in a monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy and the most remarkable thing about him was that when he was a young priest on a certain Friday he said Mass and while he was saying Mass he experienced great pain and at the end of Mass he noticed
that he had a so-called stigmata that is the wounds of Christ, five wounds, two in the hands, two in the feet, and one. So these five wounds of Christ were manifest in his body. This is called a stigmata. So he was the first priest in history who received a stigmata.
And he received it at an early age, I think he was in his twenties. And these stigmata remained on him for fifty years. They came on a Friday and they left on a Friday. And two days after the stigmata disappeared from his body, he died. So it was evidently his mission, so to speak, to suffer.
and he suffered terribly that was his mission so it is so difficult for a non-christian to understand all this because it is so contrary to a normal human way of looking at things and what we desire and what we shun so i'm saying all these things just to make the point that sainthood is a very real thing it's a very
Wonderful thing, it is almost always associated with great pain and suffering preceding the miracle of sainthood and oftentimes also after that miracle has occurred. So a saint is someone who as it were in some minuscule way repeats
the life of Christ in his own body and the all-grades and so the example of Padre Pio which I mentioned is a very extreme example but that's why it is helpful in our attempt to understand what sanctity is. It's a very real thing and it's a discontinuity. In other words,
In our ordinary state, we're far, far from sainthood. We can't even imagine it, much less live as saints live. But we can understand, we can appreciate what sanctity is. It is becoming somewhat, in some miniscule way, like Christ.
It is always associated with suffering. You do not attain any higher spiritual grade just in fun. No, it's very serious business. And pain and suffering, as I say, is somehow a sine qua non in this man's journey to God.
Many people, and I think there are also many people who call themselves Christian and think they are Christian, who do not really accept this fact because it goes so much against our human desire. We don't want to suffer. For example, if you practice certain abstinence,
During Lent, we as human beings, we do it sort of reluctantly. It goes against our brain. And that is exactly why it is spiritually efficacious, because a religion is to go against that natural brain.
Something I've been thinking about is we say, well, what is a saint or what is a theory of everything? What is a so-and-so? And then I wonder, well, what is is? What does is mean? You've got me there, Kurt. I've never thought about that. I realized that it is a very, very deep question, one of the deepest questions.
As I understand it, it's the same as asking what is being. That's right. Part of the definition has to do with being, has to do with the Bodhisattva, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, which is an Eastern concept. And so the word is that we use scientifically and secularly actually has the deepest religious roots. Absolutely. In fact, it reminds me of a passage
in the Old Testament, Exodus 314. And let me remind you what that is. It pertains to the episode of Moses and the burning bush. Moses, I forget the outer details,
He sees a burning bush and he asks the question. He realizes this must be the presence of God here. It was something miraculous. And so Moses asked God his name. He said, what is your name? And the answer that came was, to put it in Latin, ego sum qui sum.
which literally means I am that is, I am so here you have your answer to your question about is this is basically what Moses asked God the episode of the burning bush and God's answer to that question was ego sum qui sum so
There is no being, strictly speaking, other than God. And the creation is sort of, I would say, a half-being, a semi-being. You cannot say of anything in creation, for example, of ourselves, that it is. God alone can say that, strictly speaking. I cannot say I am.
because from a rigorous metaphysical point of view this isn't really true. We have a certain being, but it is not sufficient to say I am, because in truth only God can say that. And this is of course the
The whole purpose of our religious quest, if you want to put it in very, very metaphysical terms, we are seeking to be. We are sort of in a halfway state now. Incidentally, the Vedic tradition has understood this very well. This is why they speak of Maya, because
Every Brahmin boy in India used to understand that we do not fully exist. And this is, of course, the message that you got from Buddha, is perhaps the first historical figure that gives us this message. And then it was the message of the Vedic sages,
for thousands of years. And it is absolutely in keeping with Exodus 3.14. As a matter of fact, when I think back of the India that I witnessed 50 years ago, I think the people that I knew there would understand better Exodus 3.14 than our theologians in the West.
Because they're more rooted in these fundamental teachings. When someone says, I am John, I am Mary, I am Carlos, what do you mean that they can't say I am? Well, in ordinary parlance, of course, I am has a very simple meaning that we all understand once we are no longer an infant.
This theological or metaphysical idea of being is something else. And in fact, you know, there is a hard and fast distinction between two levels of understanding religion. And that applies to Christianity or
any other religion that may exist. There's an ordinary, simple way of understanding that every child can understand, and there is a deeper understanding, an understanding in which many people belonging to that religion never attain.
I will give you an example of that. One of my absolutely favorite theologians is St. Augustine. St. Augustine wrote a sort of an autobiography which he called The Confessions. One of the chapters of The Confessions
begins with these words. I like it so much that I even know them by heart. He's speaking to God and he says, I see these others beneath thee, an existence they have because they are from thee, yet no existence
because they are not what thou art. I love that saying. It is pure esotericism because many people simply won't understand what he's talking about. And it can be misinterpreted? It can certainly be misinterpreted. But when you do even vaguely sense what St. Augustine
It is profound. It is absolutely esoteric, and incidentally, what St. Augustine was saying in this particular statement is something that the people in India, the people who are rooted in the old Indian tradition, assuming there are still such people left,
They would understand it far better than most of us here in Christianity, because the Vedic tradition has been harping on that theme for thousands of years. This is the idea of Maya. The things of the world, including ourselves as in our phenomenal existence, both are and are not
In a sense we are, because we are from God, otherwise in no wise would we exist. And yet we are not, because ego sum qui sum, God alone really is. So we are sort of in between
being and non-being interesting because when last we spoke someone asked I read the question of is God both being and non-being and you said yes so at the same time we're both being and non-being excuse me could let me try to understand what I said last week because it doesn't really sound like me to say that that God
is both being and non-being. Yeah, well, I can re-read the question for you. Please do, because at the moment I don't quite understand what I meant to say.
This question comes from Matthew Wyden. He said, Western religions talk about reality as being ultimately the supreme being, an inexhaustible intelligence sentience, whereas Saint Maximus joined these and said, God is both being and non-being. So what do you think about these different ways of describing reality? And then you said, Saint Maximus was right, that God is both being and non-being. Or maybe in the context of the question, you meant something else, or there was more there.
Well, I understand now what I was trying at least to say, and it is this, that God is beyond our conception of being.
one might say this is all you know on earth and all you need to know but it does not exhaust God because God is inexhaustible and so I was a moment ago distinguishing between esotericism and the ordinary way of understanding religion
I should add that there are different levels of esotericism. I mean, in a sense, esotericism has no boundaries. However high you have gone in your conception of God, there's always more.
And you never can reach the point where you said, well now I know who God is, that is impossible. And in fact anyone who says this gives proof of the fact that he has a long way to go. I think there have been great spiritual masters who would simply say,
God is inexpressible. If you ask me, I cannot tell you. There's a wonderful story in one of the Upanishads. A man has two sons.
And when they come of age, he sends them, as used to be the custom, to a guru. So these two sons spend the next few years away from the father and mother in the house of the guru. And so then they come back after a few years to the father, and the father says to them, well, tell me son, what have you learned about God? And so the older son,
gets up and explains to the father what he has learned and gives a very beautiful learned lecture of Vedanta about Saguna Brahman and Nirguna Brahman and so on. And the father listens and says nothing. And then
He turns to the younger son and says, young son, tell me what have you learned? And this young man speaks another word and just lowers his head in silence. And the father is pleased. He says, ah, you have had a glimpse of Brahman. I love this story because I think it tells something that is very, very important.
In the most perfect way of war, not trying to express it directly but by implication, it makes it all that more powerful.
This reminds me of another story from early Christendom. I forget which one of the church fathers said this. There was three disciples or three sons and they were being asked, okay, explain what does St. Paul mean in this verse? And then the first son says, oh, he means going up to the mountain is like ascending toward God and you should praise the kingdom of heaven and so on.
And then he's like, good, good, okay, interesting. What about you? And then the other one says, well, actually it's about moving away from temptation and we should be careful in our everyday life and not stray on a path. He says, interesting. He goes to the next one and says, well, what do you think? That person says, I don't know. And then he said, that's right. That is beautiful. Yeah. Well, you're right, Kurt. This is really quite
equivalent to the story that I've just told you from one of the Upanishads. There is much much in common between Christianity and the Vedic tradition. Vedic tradition is the oldest in the world and so old that you can't, I think it's really difficult to date it, but it was centuries before Abraham was born.
So this is the oldest wisdom in the world and it is a tremendous wisdom but what amazed me in my later life when I began to think about Christianity and the Vedic tradition is that actually what Christ brought into the world is brand new
and not a trace of it is to be found in the Vedas and I was very surprised because earlier in life I felt this was a complete revelation if you want to find anything in the domain of wisdom well you'll find it there not true I mean for example the story of Adam and the fall of Adam
which is of course basic to Christianity. Christ is the second Adam, if you will. You find not a trace of this in any of the Vedas. I didn't recognize this until very very late in life and I was amazed. And incidentally
It was last year that I finally wrote a book trying to put the Vedic and the Christian religion in perspective and to, as it were, indicate what they have in common and what is brand new in Christianity. And so I published this book
under the title Vedanta in light of Christian wisdom, and I say almost the opposite of what is nowadays, so to speak, trendy, because, yes, Shuon had this notion of the transcendent unity of religions, and the idea
that different religions are different paths up to the same mountain peak. This is absolutely wrong. I'm convinced of it, and this is the main thesis that I present in this book. And in fact, I show that the eschaton, the Vedic eschaton, what I call the Nirvanic option,
is in a way the diametric opposite of the Christian eschaton. And the point is really very easy to understand from a formal point of view, and that is that both the Vedic religion and the Christian religion are ways to God.
A skaton is always a union with God, if you will, a seeing of God. But there are two kinds, and they are completely different. The Vedic seeing, excuse me, let me back up. I want to first of all quote St. John, no man has ever seen God.
So this is basic and this is the first thing one needs to understand. So then how can for example, how can there be a religion if no man has seen God and the purpose of religion is to see God? Isn't that a contradiction? And the point is
that the idea of religion is very subtle. There are basically, as it turns out, two ways of seeing God. Only two ways. There is the direct way, which is a way of self-annihilation.
Always to see God you must do a sacrifice. You must offer something to the flame. That's different than suicide. Different, yes. Please explain the difference just to get it clear to people before you move forward. Well, if a man commits suicide, it is not in order to see God. The motive of suicide is
Things are so bad I can't cope with them anymore, or just craziness. No, religion is a matter of man offering sacrifice for the purpose of seeing God. And there are basically two ways. I mean, you can see on logical grounds that there can only be two ways.
Now the Vedic is the direct path. And so the only way you can attain the vision of Brahman is to sacrifice your humanity. And this is why the sadhus in India wear a garua robe. India is a land that
Once it's dead, and so the Gero color, the color is the color of flame. So what the Gero robe of the Sadhu means is that he has really offered his life, offered himself to the flames as a sacrifice for the vision of God.
And having lived with these sadhus, I spent seven months living with them. This was decisive in my life because it just gave me a little glimpse of the higher truth. And so this is the Vedic eschaton. I call it the Nirvanic option. Now Nirvana is a Buddhist word. It means blowing out like a candle flame.
And I use it because to me it is the most descriptive way, the most perhaps perfect way of explaining the eschaton of the Vedic tradition. It is a blowing out and therefore we cannot conceive of it. If you ask any wise man, what is the end state?
How does the perfect yogi who has reached the end of the Vedic path successfully, what happens to him? It is a question that absolutely cannot be answered, simply because there are no words for it. I mean, if Sri Ramakrishna would put it this way, he would say,
If you've never tasted a mango, you never will know what it means to taste a mango. There are no words that can describe it. So this is the Vedic eschaton. It's a Nirvanic, and incidentally, I've seen in India people very, very close to that state, and all I can say is
Even looking at these people experiencing their ambience, you realize what a tremendous thing it is. And I think one of the reasons that I benefited from these associations is because instinctively I approached them with folded hands. And this is why I received, because all I could give them is my admiration,
reverence and it was enough no real sadhu in the vedic tradition will not generously give to anyone who approaches him like that so it's a wonderful thing if we had time together unfortunately we don't
Could tell you some very interesting things. Well, next time, next time. God willing, yes. So this was the Vedic eschaton. Now the Christian eschaton is the diametric opposite and the fact is this. When Christ was born with a long, long time after the Vedic religion was already well established, he brought into the world
Ideas and realities, which were entirely new, had never been conceived of before. And so, the first thing he brought into the world is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Three persons in one, a Godhead. And there is no trace of that in India.
The Vedas, the Upanishads have nothing to say about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. So this Trinitarian conception of God, which of course all of Christianity rests upon that, is nowhere to be found in the Vedas, number one. Secondly, God, Christ revealed
the mystery of the incarnation. So the Trinitarian conception of God tells mankind that there is a son of God and it is based upon this principle that our Lord was able to reveal the second principle, that this son of God
could become man. And so you have the virgin birth and the mystery of the incarnation, God become man. And then you have of course the mystery of the mission of Christ, the suffering
the crucifixion, the three days in the tomb, and the resurrection. And now, it is at this point that a new religion was brought into the world because, and here is the idea of the Christian eschaton, which as I say is the diametric opposite of the Vedic, the point is
we can attain a union with the Incarnate God, because the Incarnate God is human, he is a man, and so there is a possibility of entering into the mystical body of Christ. And this is what it means to be a Christian, and you enter through baptism and through faith. And then
Because you are a member of the mystical body of Christ, there is a possibility of seeing God through Christ. And there's a passage in the what we call the high priestly prayer, where our Lord explains this very idea
Very precisely, he is speaking to God the Father and he says, quote, this is life eternal to know thee the one true God and Jesus Christ who was sent. Here you have a perfect, accurate and complete
Description of the Christian eschaton. It is a seeing of God, but antipodal to the Vedic. We do not need to burn our human identity. No! As a human being, we can see God the Father
through Jesus Christ. And so Christ brought into the world a new eschaton, a new way of seeing God, a way in which our humanity is not burned up. So it took me half a lifetime to gain whatever clarity I have on this subject, and
I was tremendously relieved when it occurred to me, when I finally discovered that the Christian is not the Vedic. Schuon was absolutely wrong. I don't want to talk about any other religions. There are two religions that deeply interest me, the Vedic and the Christian. And I realized that I have no doubt about
These are antipodal eskata. The only life eternal that is possible is a, quote, seeing of God. There's no other eternity that is remotely possible. But the point is, there are two ways of, quote, seeing God. The direct way, which is the Vedic, and it's a bona fide way. I mean, the
Perfection of the Vedic path is rare, but I think in India there has hardly been a generation without such events occurring. So it's a real thing and it's still going on even today, I'm sure. But with the birth of Christ,
or more accurately, if you will, with his resurrection, a new religion came into the world, and this is Christianity. It offers us a life eternal as human beings. Our humanity becomes, in a certain sense, deified through union with Christ, as that means with his mystical body.
So, this is all I know about religion. As I said, I wrote this last book about this subject. The main purpose was to combat this perennialist philosophy, which I think it's correct to say that as things stand now,
The most intellectual people all over the world are perennialists. If you talk to people of high intellectual achievement, and supposing that they have been interested in the subject of religion, you will find in all likelihood that they are perennialists,
that they believe in the so-called transcendent unity of religions, which is a completely heretical notion. Why do you call the AvEternal AvEternal instead of Eternal? Well, because the idea of the tripartite cosmos in which
The highest level is beyond space and time. This is the crux of the matter. Well, this is a kind of eternity, but it needs to be distinguished from the eternity of religion, the eternity of, for example, the eternity which the Christian speaks of when he says that
God is eternal, heaven is eternal. So eternity in that sense is more than the if eternity, because actually one of the crucial ways in which Christianity differs from
the Vedic teaching is that the Vedic teaching regards the cosmos as cyclic. It goes on and on like a sine curve that has no beginning and no end. And the Christian cosmology is radically different
because it is integral to the Christian tradition that at the second coming of Christ, which no man knows the day and the hour, the cosmos in its entirety will be destroyed. So the difference between the Vedic outlook and the Christian is that in the Vedic outlook
The cosmos has no end in both senses, in the sense of a purpose and end in the sense of a termination. So in the Vedic way of looking at the cosmos there is neither a purpose, because the only answer the Vedic
a guru could give to the question what is the purpose of the cosmos based on. The Vedic spiritual practice tries essentially to get out of this cosmos because the Vedic wisdom says this is not God, this is not reality and
The purpose of life is to gain union with God. So you see, in this Vedic philosophy, the cosmos plays no role. The cosmos has no purpose. And also ipsa facta, if you will, it has no ending either. In the Vedic
tradition the cosmos is without beginning and without end and finally the Vedic masters will tell you that in fact it's unreal. When you see a snake in the rope
How can you, why should you ask, where does this snake come from? Why is it there? And so forth. Save yourself the trouble and realize that there is no snake. This is the Vedic approach. It's quite different from the Christian. The Christian says A, yes, the cosmos has its reality.
It was put there by God, and it was put there for a purpose. It's like a school. A school is there to teach the students, and once that is done, the school has no more purpose. If there were only one student in the world and one school, as soon as this student graduates,
You don't need the school anymore. So, therefore, in the Christian religion, the cosmos itself will come to an end. It will end when it has fulfilled its purpose. And all of this, you see, is radically different from the Vedic way of looking at things. I have a question now from Matt Segal, who you spoke to on his channel called Footnotes to Plato.
Oh yes, he is the process theology, the white-head scholar. Right, right, so this question is in line with that thinking. If God does not evolve or change in any relation to actual history or the world, then how are we to understand said history, including our own lives, as anything other than an illusory falling away from and forgetting of what is real? Well, I think
The premise of what Matt Siegel is saying here is something that is more in line with the Vedic than with the Christian way of thinking. So I think, in essence, I have answered this very question precisely by what I said just now.
In explaining the difference between the Vedic way of looking at the cosmos and the Christian, I think that does answer the question. From the Vedic point of view, the question is absolutely justified. The Christian point of view is different.
Some atheists will say, hey, this is real, so we see this, but regardless we have a world that exists, a world that is real. And then they ask, well, is God real? And it sounds like from what you were saying earlier, we have it backward. God is way more real. Absolutely, that is the whole point. God is more than real as we understand and are capable of understanding reality. This is why
Religion, true religion, is simply above what we nowadays call philosophy or what we nowadays call science. If we cannot go beyond that level, we don't really know what religion is all about.
And whatever we think it is and whatever we call it in our conversation, it is all like smoke. It isn't there. Goethe, Schall und Rauch. Sound and smoke. This is why most, so to speak, discussion or arguments about religion are completely pointless and lead nowhere.
because even to talk about religion sensibly, one needs to, in a sense, avail oneself of the tradition. If there were no Vedas and there were no Gospels or the New Testament, there would be no religion. The word would mean nothing and whatever people talk would be just talk.
In a sense one might say that you need to believe in order to believe. It sounds paradoxical and incidentally Christ himself has said as much when he said he who has to him shall be given and he who has not from him shall be taken away I think the little that he has but he who has to him shall be given
In other words, on the level of the ordinary atheists, such as you find wherever you look almost in our civilization, these people can neither affirm religion or deny it. The point is, the idea of religion is something that is not in them. So it doesn't matter whether they say, I believe this or I don't believe this, because it's just talk.
It's just talk. He who has, to him shall be given. Which means that in a certain sense, there must be a religious spark in us. If there is not, we cannot enter there. So of course this raises a problem, obviously. Where does this religious spark come from?
Do some people have it, other people not? If they don't have it, they're not responsible for not being religious and so on. You can go and speak about this and think about it from now to eternity. It's just sound. He who has to him shall be given. And this is a mystery we cannot understand. Why does it
happened that some have and some obviously do not. I don't know. This is God knows. This is not anything that I based upon the worldly understanding that I may have. I have a PhD in this and that. Okay, but that's beyond all that. This is why the Christian needs to follow the words of Christ
Almost blindly, we can't understand it, we can't justify it. But our situation is this, we are like somebody swimming in the middle of an ocean, sharks all around. We don't know when one of them is going to come and swallow us up. And someone comes and throws you a rope and says, come aboard.
You will be healed and warmed and fed and taken to your home. And you say, well, that sounds very well, but where do you come from? Where's the boat? Where are you going to take us? Well, chances are good the sharks are going to eat you up before you ever get half through this. This sounds like the parable of the poison arrow of Buddha.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I had forgotten about that. Yeah. So this is really our situation. And it's a mystery. I mean, look at all the people, millions and millions of people. And actually, in today's Western world, only a minority, A, believe in God, B, want to follow God,
And three, do follow God to a certain degree. Only a handful. It's so strange. So this is another question. I don't know the answer to that. And I only know one thing. That's not my business. My business is to follow Christ as well as I am able
based upon his teaching and with the help of his authentic church. That's all I need to do. That's all I can understand. Will God always catch us when we fall? That's a very difficult question because if you answer yes,
It sounds like nihilism, because it doesn't matter what you do, you'll be safe, so... Yeah, you can't, as a Christian, you cannot say yes, because we know that damnation is a real thing. In other words, religion, true religion, is not without risk. Have you heard this phrase, hell is a door locked from the inside?
It means that at any point you have the opportunity to get out. I cannot affirm that. I can neither affirm nor deny it. I don't see anywhere in scripture that Christ has given us an instruction based upon which this can be affirmed. And if you take seriously what the saints have had to say,
I think you can find instances where testimony has been given contrary to this position. It would be very nice, but you know, the path to God is not without danger. We're talking about realities here, not pipe dreams.
And so it's like climbing a mountain. Yes, you may reach the summit, but even within a few feet of the summit, you can lose your footing and fall to your death. There is risk.
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Do you believe in free will? Oh, definitely. If there were no free will, there could be no religion. In other words, to attain union with God, to attain salvation, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, there is not only a cost, there is a risk.
God has the power to give us all things, but there is one thing that he cannot simply give us. I need not tell you what that is. He cannot give us salvation just, here it is, my child, no. This is the one and only thing that God cannot do.
And incidentally, I forget who it was, some great Christian saint made this point, I didn't invent that. Oh, I remember where I read this, there's a wonderful book written by an Eastern Orthodox priest, Losky, the last name of his was Losky, and his books are beautiful, I've read them with great, great
benefit and someway explains that there is one thing and one thing only that God cannot do. It takes one will, this is what he says and I thought it was beautiful, he says it takes one will to create but it takes two wills to give salvation. This is the whole thing.
The one thing God cannot do, he cannot simply give one of his creatures salvation, because salvation is so great that you have to will it to.
How does free will comport with knowing that there's a timeless realm so that you can see all of what occurs through time but then if we exist as a moment in time and we're trying to plan something for the future and we have free will, how do we have free will when from another perspective all our choices have been made or all of it can be seen? Well, I think there's only one answer to that question and that is that free will pertains to our present state
which is a state of half-knowing. Once we attain enlightenment, there's no question of free will. Sorry, enlightenment is the same as salvation or is that different? Well, I think nothing short of salvation would put you into that state where there's no more free will. There's no more free will because there's no more will in our sense of the term.
Love is what makes things real. What do you make of that quote? Well, I think it is based upon one of the deepest teachings of Christ. Saint John the Evangelist in his, I forget what it is called, his letters
not the gospel but his letters he says deus caritas est God is love so love in the authentic sense that we're using the term now is itself divine it is God it's not something that God makes something that God creates well
There is love in that sense too, but love in its highest purest sense is inseparable from God. What's your disagreement with the Gnostics? Well, I take it that you use the term Gnostic in its true historical sense. So Gnosticism
was so to speak in antiquity the counter religion to christ so there were nasty gurus all over the ancient world they saw themselves as christian though correct or no well i don't know their psychology and i don't even want to delve into it
There are certain characteristics of Gnosticism that one needs to bear in mind. First of all, they were antagonists to the death of Christianity. They despised Christianity, whether they manifested that or didn't. That was integral.
In other words, if you will, they belonged to Satan. They were Satan's men. And secondly, they had an idea of a flight into higher worlds. There were all kinds of teachings and all kinds of methods of attaining that higher flight. And so,
The idea was that the summum bonum of life is to get out of this world. They rejected it as utterly evil and in every way disgusting, revolting, and the thing to do is to leave it, get out of here.
Actually, the way they conceived their higher world, their summum bonum, is really secondary. The important thing about the Gnostics is that everything pertaining to this world and all the good things, they regarded as the very opposite they had discussed for it. For example,
The agnostic is a natural, what is the word, he likes to dishonor everything that the followers of God regard as sacred. So he would love to take, say, a holy Bible and throw it into the sewers.
He wants to destroy and to him everything here in this world is evil and he has a sort of a dream castle in the sky which is his goal, his heaven, his eschaton. That's in a few words the main characteristic
of the ancient Gnostics. They came in all different colors and guises, and what I have said is, so to speak, the common denominator. They differed very, in fact one of the early Christians said, every day every one of them invents something new. So
You can't define Gnosticism by giving it, so to speak, a credo, because they had all different beliefs and theories. The common denominator, which is the only way of defining them, was this idea that everything here, everything that we normally hold as sacred or beautiful or holy, is somehow trash.
Did they follow other books of the Bible that we don't consider canon? I don't know that much about it. For example, I've read the so-called unauthoritative
Gospels, the Gospel. Thomas, Mary. Yes, I've read some of these. What do you make of them? You don't like them? Well, there are good things in it, but there's quite a bit that you can learn from it. But the mere fact that the Church Fathers have not included this in the official teachings of our Lord,
makes me instinctively keep away from it. Why read something that does not have the imprimatur of Christianity when we have these wonderful books that does carry the imprimatur? So firstly we have scripture, holy scripture, the Old and New Testament, and secondly we have the writings of
of the saintly teachers of the faith. We have St. Augustine, we have St. Maximus the Confessor. They have boundless literature of high rank. Of course, scripture is one thing, everything else is another. This division is absolute.
But the point I'm trying to make, we have such wonderful scripture, why read something that is in any way questionable, like the Gospel of Thomas? Because, who knows, there may be innuendos there that are not really orthodox. And there's no need also to go beyond scripture and
improved writing of the saints and the recognized teachers of the church. I'm sorry, we were talking about the Gnostics, right? So what I want to say now is this. It turns out that
with the end of antiquity, the middle ages and then the beginning of the modern age. A very interesting thing happened. Gnosticism morphed, it changed its outer form and turned into what I call neo-gnosticism. And the difference between
The ancient Gnosticism and the neo-Gnosticism is this. I said that an integral part of Gnosticism is the idea of this journey into higher worlds. The problem that the Gnostics face with the dawn of the modern age is that we no longer accept
any higher worlds. So the problem was very, very drastic. How can you fly into higher worlds when there are no more higher worlds to fly into? This was the problem. And by golly, they solved it. And do you know how they solved it?
It's really interesting and ingenious. This all comes from Satan and Satan is very ingenious. No question about that. So the neo-gnostic way of solving this problem that there are no more higher worlds to fly into is very simple. They said the higher world is futuristic.
In other words, this world itself is being turned into the higher world. So the higher world became futuristic. Like worshipping technology or thinking that... Yes, exactly. And as a matter of fact, who is the neo-Gnostic prophet of modern times? Theodosia. There's no question about it.
Teer Desharda is, so to speak, the great Gnostic guru of the present age. This is also why he had tremendous power, because the devil has power. Let no one be in doubt about that. He has great power. In fact, the power of Satan is so great
that unless we, we humans, avail ourselves of the sacred means given to us by God, we have no chance of withstanding that power. This is a quote from David Bohm. In the ontological theory, wholeness manifests from a notion of non-locality, a notion that is seemingly denied by relativity. Why were David Bohm's observations profound?
Well, he was certainly right that there is a wholeness in the cosmos which manifests as non-locality. And in fact,
The last Nobel Prize of physics, the 2022 Nobel Prize of physics, as you know, was awarded to three physicists who conducted crucial experiments, I think in the 80s, to determine which of the two physical theories is right, quantum theory or relativity.
The recognition, which has been made long ago, but people are very reluctant to own up to it, the recognition is that relativity theory and quantum theory cannot both be true. And it was an experiment to determine which of the two
is true was in fact conceived by Einstein himself and it hinges upon what is nowadays called Bell's inequality and in the eighties I think it was three experimenters did the experiment
and the results clearly and definitively stand on the side of quantum theory. And to me it is a rather interesting phenomenon, I would say it's a sociological phenomenon, that logically speaking these experiments based upon an idea
Going back to Einstein himself, of course Einstein proposed that experiment because he thought it would vindicate relativity versus quantum theory. Einstein was very critical of quantum theory. He spoke ironically what he called Spukhafte Fernwirkung, spooky action at a distance,
which he never accepted, because actually it contradicts relativity theory. And lo and behold, these experiments, the chief name involved in these experiments is the Frenchman Alain... Alain? Alain, yeah. Anyhow, the experiments clearly, unequivocally
came out on the side of quantum theory versus relativity. And to me this is so interesting. There is a kind of mystery about Einstein and the sign in physics. He's almost like a god and we continue to believe in his theory even after it's been disproved and after Nobel Prize has endorsed this disproof.
It's a very strange phenomenon. We could talk about this another day. A very interesting story there. I regard it as a kind of a mystery, something that I don't understand. If I were young, I would love to spend a few years digging into this. There is something there that would be very interesting to know. Anyhow, relativity theory has been disproved.
It is not a valid theory, but somehow nobody wants to say these words. It is something like an elephant in the room. Nobody wants to admit it. So I don't know the answer to this, but it's an interesting question. And let me say in this connection, because it is certainly very
Very prevalent, very pertinent I mean. I've always been interested in Platonism and I've thought about it a lot in my life and in recent times I have demonstrated that Platonism entails a tripartite division of the cosmos
The highest is beyond space and time, this is the aveternal realm, that's what I call avetern. Before we continue to be clear, aveternal is a subset of eternal or distinct from? It's distinct from, because the point is this, aveternity and eternity are not the same thing, and the distinction goes back to Saint Thomas Aquinas. I don't know of anyone else who's made that distinction,
But the distinction is this, that Ave Eternity pertains to the cosmos. It is the highest of three ontological strata, characterized by the fact that it is subject neither to space nor to time. And what is the difference between Ave Eternity and Eternity?
Well, let me point out that according to Christianity, the cosmos itself will cease at the second coming of Christ. It is there for a purpose, and when that purpose in God's time is achieved, the cosmos will be no more. This is what Christianity calls the Parousia, the second coming of Christ.
And if eternity and aviternity were the same, then when the cosmos disappears, God and all else would disappear too, which of course is absurd. And this is why aviternity and eternity are not the same thing.
I still don't understand. So eternity means timelessness or infinite temporal duration? Which one? Is it eternity means you exist forever or it means you're distinct from time? Eternity, the adjective eternal can apply to any reality which is not subject to time.
But eternity, I hope I didn't misspeak, what I wanted to say is that eternity applies to any state not subject to time nor space. But yes, no space either. And the reason that eternity is not the same as eternity is because according to Christianity
The universe, the world, the creation itself will cease at the second coming of Christ. This is a mystery of what Christianity calls the parousia. And incidentally, as you can imagine, this is a tough nut for the contemporary theologian influenced by our contemporary science.
because science cannot conceive of such a thing and implicitly denies the Perusia. But the teaching of the Perusa is integral to the teaching of Christianity. Our Lord speaks of it very explicitly and he says that this Perusia will come, but he says that
The day and the time is known only to my father. So it's a mystery. We have no idea when this Parousia will come, but we have it on the authority of Christ himself and the church that it will come.
So this is the fundamental difference of outlook between the Vedic cosmology and the Christian. The Vedic cosmology regards the cosmos as perfectly. So the Vedic is eternal? No, it is not. In fact the Vedic has no concept of eternity because it does not distinguish between
The eternity of its cycles, its manifestation and non-manifestation, they alternate, but they alternate going back to infinity and forward into an infinite future. So the Vedic cosmology is
totally cyclic. You can think of it as a sine curve which goes to negative infinity and to positive infinity. So there is an eternal recurrence of manifestation and non-manifestation. Non-manifestation I think they call pralaya. So this is a Vedic
the Vedic cosmology and the Christian cosmology differs radically because the essential point of the Christian cosmology is that time itself will cease. The cosmos will cease. The cosmos is there only for a certain stretch of time. It came into being and it will cease to exist.
when christ will fully manifest himself at the second coming and you know it makes tremendous amount of sense if you think about it long enough you realize that from a christian point of vantage it cannot be otherwise because when christ manifests himself in the fullness of his divinity it's like turning on an infinite light
The darkness will cease. The polarity of day and night and all these things will cease. When Christ manifests himself in his full divinity, it's like an atom bomb. All these little things that we know now will disappear. And incidentally, in the modern Catholic world,
top theologians parted company with orthodoxy over this issue because they are very scientistic in their outlook. They have more faith in our scientists evidently than in God himself and so the idea of the parousia is something they could not accept. There's a famous
Catholic theologian, I forget his name, is just as well because he was a heretic. He did not accept the idea of the Parousia and he had the incredible, I don't know, call it chutzpah, to regard that Christ himself was mistaken in certain of his teachings, namely the teachings
which deny the eternity of the world, the Perusio. So I think the popes at the time were absolutely culpable for not excommunic... Hans Kuhn was the name of the theologian, German theologian who
had the audacity to teach that even Christ was not fully, in his human form at least, was not fully enlightened because of this teaching of the parousia which Hans Küng denied on the grounds of quote-unquote science and I regard it as terrible on the part of the popes whoever was
in power at that time, not to excommunicate Hans Küng, because Hans Küng's denial of the Perusia is heresy. Our Lord himself declared this in unequivocal terms, and you're not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination if you do not fully accept
The words of Christ as they have come down in scripture. Once you start playing loose and like that with theologies all over, this is why the Catholic Church today is in deep, deep problem.
Because it should have excommunicated people like Hans Küng, who were clear heretics, and it didn't. In fact, he retained all his priestly powers and he was a member of the new external church. That's a catastrophe. When Christ comes for the second time, will the Ave eternal be gone as well and the intermediary?
Yes, the second coming of Christ will terminate the cosmos as we know it. So that's the distinction between the eternal and the avi-eternal. The avi-eternal is one that can be blown out. Yeah. Saint Thomas Aquinas defined avi-eternity as
the absence of time with the proviso that time can be added onto it. This was really his way of teaching the tripartite nature of the cosmos. You have the avid eternal realm, but time can be added onto it, which means that below the avid eternal
You have the intermediary, where there is time only, and the corporeal. And incidentally, let me point out this to you, which I find really fascinating, namely, as soon as I gained what I consider clarity,
regarding the tripartite cosmos, so the existence of an intermediary level subject to time but not to space, I realized that this fact, which is nothing more than Platonist cosmology and also Vedic cosmology, they're one and the same.
Platonist cosmology and the Vedic cosmology are one and the same. And integral to this cosmology is the existence of the intermediary realm, which is a realm of time alone. And the mere existence of such a time only
stratum disproves all of Einsteinian physics at one stroke. It's gone. So, in a Vedic or Platonist cosmology, there can be no relativistic physics. Does the will exist only in the intermediary realm? Well, I would rephrase the question
Or rather, the question is not well posed, because these three realms are not three separate realms. I mean, the cosmos is tripartite, which doesn't mean that there are three... When I speak of three levels, this is just a way of
communicating something that cannot be communicated in any other way. The point is that the three levels of the cosmos constitute one irreducible wholeness in its threefold nature. And this is really easy to understand because man
You and I and every human being is also tripartite in exactly the same sense. We too are made of three levels. In the traditional terminology this is corpus, anima, spiritus. And clearly spiritus is the same as the
If eternal realms, spiritus is beyond time, the psychic realm is subject to time but not to space, and our corporeal realm is obviously corporeal, so it's subject clearly to time and space.
We mustn't think, and obviously we are one thing, we are one organism. There are not three, and I don't have three parts. You won't find an avid eternal Wolfgang Smith and a corporeal Wolfgang Smith. Wolfgang Smith as a person is composed of these three levels, but these three levels are one organism.
Incidentally, this is, so to speak, the fundamental fact about the Platonist cosmology, and this fundamental fact throws a new light on everything. And it has tremendous scientific implications, so much so that you cannot have any kind of deeper science
that doesn't recognize this tripartite nature. So obviously the physicist knows nothing about it, cannot know anything about it, because the very conceptions needed to define the tripartite cosmos or the tripartite anthropos entail ontological ideas which cannot, which are incomprehensible to the physicist,
Because the physicist deals only with quantitative realities, something that can therefore be described say in a differential equation. You can't write a differential equation for spiritus, you can't write a differential equation for
the psychic realm, and actually you can't write the differential equation for the corporeal world either, because strictly speaking the physicist, qua-physicist knows nothing about the corporeal world, nada, nothing, because you cannot have a corporeal world consisting only of quantity,
Doesn't matter how you want, what kind of quantity, whether you want to talk about a differentiable manifold, doesn't matter. Mathematics is one thing and the corporeal world is not a mathematical entity. So as soon as you have even a little glimmering of the Platonist cosmology, you see how utterly blind
our modern intellectuals are. Whether they are actually scientists capable of working with differential equations is secondary. The point is that practically every intellectual in our day has been metaphysically formed on the basis of mathematical physics. And that means that he is incapable of understanding even the first thing about reality.
Once you see it, you see the tragedy of it. It's a terrible, terrible tragedy. We think that we know more than people ever knew, when in fact, strictly speaking, we know nothing. I would really call it nothing.
because these physical models, and it doesn't matter what kind of models, it can be a model with infinite dimensional spaces, it doesn't matter. The point is you're doing mathematics, you're doing differential equations, and the discoveries that you make are the kind that can then in principle be tested by a physical experiment.
Wonderful. It's very interesting. I myself was very fascinated by this. But the point is, it tells you nothing about the real world in its integrality. And worse than that, it makes you believe
That there is nothing other. Right, so on that note, there's a physicist named Brian Green. He was speaking a few years ago or so. And he was saying, free will doesn't exist. Why? Well, show me where it is. Because the physics gives rise to chemistry, which gives rise to the cellular, which gives rise to your brain, and so on. So show me. If you're going to say something exists, point to it. Where is physics failing? Well, this sheer nonsense. I mean, it is sad.
that a human being, presumable with good intentions, good intelligence, a lot of education, is capable of speaking such utter nonsense. Because, look at this table. No physicist has ever understood or will ever understand, A, that this table is brown, and B, that you and I and every other normal human being can see it.
And in a sense you can say that our physicists are the most ignorant people in the whole world, because every child knows that this table is a table, every child knows that this is hard and brown and so on. And incidentally in this connection I want to say something very, very important.
For centuries, ever since the 17th century when our civilization went off the rails, it has been assumed that visual perception is a matter of light hitting the retina, setting up currents going into the cortex of the brain, etc., etc. There are 20 or 21
visual centers in the brain and whole libraries have been filled with papers and books describing the results of this experimental work, which is very interesting. The trouble is that it tells you nothing about how we actually perceive. And Sir Francis Crick, you know,
One of the discoverers of DNA, he then became very fascinated in this theory of visual perception, and at the end of his studies he writes, we see how the brain takes a picture apart, we do not yet see how the brain puts the picture together. And the first
Half of what he said is obviously true. We do know a lot about what happens in these neuronal currents emanating from the retina when it is stimulated. But the whole point is that the brain does not put the picture together again. That is sheer rubbish, sheer nonsense.
Anybody who is not deformed in his thinking would never be stupid enough to say such a thing. The brain takes a picture apart, but it does not put the picture back together again. It cannot. And the fact of the matter is that what we see is not inside our head. It's outside. As every five-year-old child
has known ever since the world began. This table is not in my brain. If it were, you'd have to ask, in which of the 21 centers? The answer is it's not. And so modern cognitive psychology refers to this as a binding problem.
So it studies visual perception, incredible. I mean, in its own field it's amazing how they can do it. It's very remarkable and very impressive. The only problem is that it has told us nothing about how we perceive and it has not rectified the fact that known to every child that isn't brain dead, namely that
Normally we perceive external things and so my work in cosmology has been tremendously enriched when I discovered somewhere along the line it came rather late after I had written the quantum enigma which was the first essential step I took
There was an American cognitive psychologist named James Gibson and he discovered early in his career, he had a PhD from Princeton and he was a professor at Cornell University and in 1941 he discovered that the retinal image theory of visual perception cannot be true.
If we had infinite time we could talk about that, but let's not. He gave a rigorous proof of the fact that the visual image theory is fundamentally false. And so then he spent about 13 years as an empiricist. He was not a philosopher, he was not a mathematician, he was an empirical
a cognitive psychologist and on sound empirical basis research that lasted close to thirty years he discovered a theory of visual perception which he calls the ecological theory of visual perception because it turns out
that what we visually perceive is not inside the head, it's outside, as every child would have told you. And when I discovered Gibson, I was so happy because what I have to say really hinges upon the fact
that we do perceive the external world. And as soon as you recognize that, and as I say, every five-year-old child knows more than the people at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies, because a normal human being knows that we see the world. And so the ontological implications of that are incredible. Because at one stroke,
This tells us that what our wisest people speak is utter nonsense. As soon as you realize that the table is brown, you realize that physics is incapable of even conceiving the corporeal world in which we live.
What they are dealing with is an abstraction, which in fact it takes a lot of college study and research etc. and intelligence to understand even that abstraction. But this abstraction is what I call the physical universe and it is not the same as the corporeal world
which means that in a sense it doesn't exist. One could lecture, but let me just say in reality it doesn't exist. But the interesting thing is that from a Platonist point of view, in terms of this tripartite cosmos, you can understand physics in an entirely new key.
which is in a sense a very opposite way of seeing physics from what our present-day gurus have to offer. So there is a Vedic, Platonist way of understanding physics and this is what I presented in my last book.
And the amazing thing is that I really believe that in the first 38 pages of the book, I have answered the big questions about physics. What is the physical world? And the main
The problem of physics today is to understand quantum mechanics and what differentiates quantum mechanics from classical physics. And how can we understand ontologically that physics breaks into these two different parts? In one part you have
Description A, in the other part we have description B. How do these things fit together? Are there two worlds and so forth? Well, I think Feynman said really a very important thing when he said no one understands quantum theory. I think this is true. No one does and no one can understand quantum theory.
without reference to the true ontology, which call it Vedic, call it Platonist, is one of the same. And that is a true ontology. It's very simple. In a sense, every child can understand it. And once you grasp the Platonist ontology, you can understand quantum mechanics. It comes out naturally.
On ontological grounds you can see that physics breaks into these two parts, because actually the reason is that there are two ways of doing physics. There is the classical way, which is subcorporeal. I will assume that we know that, and so from an ontological
perspective there are two kinds of physics because you can do classical physics which is sub corporeal and you can do quantum theory which is trans corporeal and it follows from the platonist ontology that in sub corporeal physics we're dealing with objects that possess being and in trans corporeal physics
We deal with objects that do not possess being, and the point is that being comes from the ever eternal plane. It doesn't come from below, from some quirky realm of quantum particles, this is all nonsense. Our being comes from the ever eternal realm, and that's why it is being, because it is an irreducible wholeness
and physics cannot deal with irreducible holes, because it can only deal with holes which are sums of parts. For an irreducible hole you cannot write a differential equation, because if it were described by a differential equation, it would ipso facto be irreducible to its parts.
The reason you can write differential equations that mean something is because you're dealing with things that I composite. Do you think this is related to Richard Feynman's sum over paths? That is, reductionism and sum over parts, if it's related to sum over paths. And then further, if the irreducible wholeness and the issues with thinking of reality as the parts that can be summed over is related to how it's infamously difficult to make rigorous the Feynman path integral.
Okay, that's a wonderful question which I would like to answer in the following way. There's no question that Feynman was a genius, but his impact upon physics has been on the whole disastrous because
The great physicists from the old European culture were all in varying degrees schooled in philosophy and going back to, they were somehow touched by traditions going right back to at least Aristotle.
Feynman comes from the New World and he was unquestionably a pragmatist. And his main contribution to physics was QED, quantum electrodynamics. And quantum electrodynamics is something that doesn't quite add up. It took a genius to think of it, there's no question about that.
But it isn't all there. You have this problem of infinities cropping up and I think it's called renormalization is the way you cope with that. In other words, what it really amounts to is that sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don't succeed.
And when you don't succeed, you renormalize and then you succeed. Now, nobody has ever given a mathematical justification for this renormalization. It's a bit of hocus pocus. And Richard Feynman was a master at making it work. But this was pragmatism and not science.
And there is a contemporary German physicist who's written very good books about that. And he's pointed out that Richard Feynman has had... Is it Anziger, by the way? Yes, Alexander Anziger. He's a very bright physicist. He's going to come onto the Theories of Everything channel.
You should note that there was a physics and consciousness explication contest for Toe. Links to all those videos are in the description. Anziker was a winner. If you ever want to speak with him, too, you're more than welcome to come on. We have been in contact and I like to be in contact. He's brilliant. But even though we agree, for example, what he has to say about Richard Feynman, I'm in perfect agreement with that.
I am indebted to Alexander Wunziger for helping to clarify this for me. You disagree on Einstein? We disagree completely on Einstein. He has a reverence for Einstein. Oh yes, he has a special reverence for Einstein and he believes not only that Einstein in physics is true but he somehow feels that Einstein is
You were saying that Feynman brought pragmatism to physics and this was... Yeah, and some of the great
Physicists from earlier times have remarked upon this and Unsinger, for example, in his latest book, in fact, just published beginning of this year, he quotes some of these early names in physics in their criticism of QED. QED
It seems not really to be a solid branch of physics. It is true you can, with a little hocus-pocus, and Feynman was a master at that, with a little hocus-pocus you can get the right answer to some very interesting problems. But physics is more than getting numbers to agree with experiment. It is a question of
There's a bit of philosophy in it. There's a bit of ontology in it. At least there was always the game. I mean, there was always the objective of physics to understand nature. And the early physicists all thought in these terms, they wanted to know what really makes nature work.
And it was in that quest that they produced, the physics that they produced, to Feynman, it was all a question of playing games and getting things to work. But getting things to work is one thing and physics is another. And Unziger would say that
Feynman helped to corrupt physics, because actually, when you look at something like our Chern, the particle physics center, Unsiger wrote a book about Chern, where he shows how absolutely absurd physics a la Chern has become. Physics a la Chern is no longer physics, it's no longer science.
and it's a very expensive game they're playing but it is physics allotron has actually uh... rendered uh... particle physics an absurdity it is a reductio at absurdum of particle physics and uh... i very much recommend
Unziger's, I think, first book, which is devoted to this panorama of Tchern, Particle Felix, a la Tchern, is absurd. Yeah. Is Tchern like C-E-R-N? C-E-R, yeah. It's an acronym for the French name.
research is it's a nuclear physics center which it took a hundred countries to finance etc etc it's one of the world's marvels but at the same time it is a reductio ad absurdum of particle physics.
This question comes from Matthew Wyden again, a fan of yours, and has watched plenty of your work, and he asks, Bernardo Kastrup interprets the fall in the Garden of Eden as a fall into meta-consciousness, i.e., becoming aware of our own awareness rather than simply being aware of present reality. Is this relatable to a fall in the corporeal realm?
I must tell you in all frankness that I have very little interest in this kind of speculation. I feel that if you want to approach these great truths, the truth of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition, you cannot do it
by starting from the contemporary Weltanschauung. You cannot do it, strictly speaking, as a man of the 21st century. You have to do it, you have to go back to the basics, our scriptures and our early Christian commentaries and so on, and feel your way into this world.
To try to understand it basically, and I think this applies not only to Castro, it's sort of a typical thing. We have a lot of intellectuals today who are basically respectful of
the great traditions which is in itself wonderful because the typical thing is just the opposite the typical thing in our if you go to our universities and you get out of them still believing in God you are one of the chosen few because the thrust of it all is I call it satanic because I think it basically it is they are on the opposite side
But the people that you are referring to now, the whole group of them, it is very much to their credit that they are respectful of the Christianity and the other great traditions, and they want to understand, they think that there is truth there and they want to understand it. But they want to understand it, so to speak, starting out,
more or less from the contemporary Weltanschauung. And I think this is absolutely the wrong place to start because if we were in any way schooled or versed in the true metaphysics and the true Christianity, let us say,
We would realize that the contemporary Weltanschauung is nonsense. It's a disease. It's a little bit like poison. I mean, it poisons you. And so the idea of interpreting Christianity in terms that connect with our contemporary physicists or our contemporary psychologists or whatever you
find in the contemporary culture is in a sense to lose before you even started. You cannot understand Christianity from the direction of physics,
or any other contemporary strand of thought, whether it's psychology or what have you, we are in a completely different culture, and the only way to gain access to Christianity is to start from the beginning, that means on a scriptural basis. There's the Old and the New Testament,
And there are the commentaries of the great Christian teachers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. That's how you can learn. And once you have a certain insight into Christianity, you can of course engage in a dialogue, if you will, with contemporary thinkers. You can
Listen to what they have to say and explain what is right and what is not right and help your fellow man find their way into the traditional teaching. But you can't get into the traditional teaching from the direction of
Is it more accurate to say that the corporeal realm is a reduction of the avaturnal or an expression of the avaturnal? Well, the actually correct answer I think to this question is that
Whatever has any kind of being in the corporeal world, for example this table, originates in the avid tunnel. So if you ask, what is this table? What is it? The contemporary person will start talking about atoms and this and that, which has nothing to do with metaphysics. This is something else entirely.
Metaphysically, if you want to understand what this table actually is, what the being is that manifests as this table, you are led unquestionably back to the Ave Eternal realm, because
What is not illusory, what is not perishable, what is actually real in this table, and there must be something like that, otherwise even the illusion of the table couldn't arise. So what is real, what this actual being is located or originates in the avid tunnel plane.
In the same way that we say a baby originates from a mother, we don't say a baby is a reduction of the mother or a baby is an expression of the mother. Is it similar like that or different? I would say it's a little different because the connection that I was trying to verbalize or somehow express is purely vertical. It's ontological.
And, of course, the only way we can understand it in a human way is to add the fiction to spatialize. You say, all right, let this plane be corporeal and up here you have another plane is avid tunnel. So we sort of make a mental picture of it, which is not really
What do you think of the patristic formulation that love is the coexistence of unity and multiplicity?
Well, I would have to really think about this a little bit. On the whole, I shy away from trying to intellectually understand the deep metaphysical theological truths.
For example, the teachings of Christ as you read them in the Gospels, I don't really try to understand this, this type of statement. The way one might want to understand the differential equation or mathematical theorem by analyzing it and so on, I think that
It is preferable to approach these things, figuratively speaking, from the heart rather than the intellect, because you're trying to understand the greater in terms of the lesser. It doesn't really make that much sense.
So I think there is a great deal of this kind of thinking going on. It is somehow an attempt to reach the higher planes without leaving the lower. I tend to be skeptical
to many of the so-called commentaries about deep metaphysical or Christian ideas given by learned men of our day because these metaphysical truths have been known and communicated for thousands of years and
I like to approach them using the language, if you will, of the great sages of prior times. In the case of Christianity, we have this arena of brilliant and at the same time holy and sagacious men and women.
And I am perfectly happy to approach these mysteries in the very terms given to us in the traditional form. Suppose somebody writes an essay about some Christian topic with its love or
life eternal or whatever it be using analogies from modern science something about quantum particles or god knows what I don't feel drawn to that because these ideas have been transmitted from master to disciple
for more than two thousand years now, and so we have a wonderful language that we can use by way of approaching or entering into these highest spheres of thought. To be honest with you, that language that I was now referring to was given to us
by the great saints and mystics of the church, a Thomas Aquinas, a Meister Eckhart, a Saint Augustine. And we have that available. Then why should I listen to Professor So-and-so, who somehow approaches Christian themes, Christian mysteries, one can say,
using ideas or terminology from quantum theory or cognitive psychology and so forth, I feel no need for that. And I'm skeptical about it too. In other words, not only are the truths of Christianity sacred, but in a sense the words, the language and the conceptions which have
which go back to the patristic era, have a sacredness of their own. And so I tend to be skeptical about modern-day gurus who will use a completely different language. I feel no need for that. And as I say, I tend to be skeptical that it's really going to work.
Because not only is the sacred truth sacred, the means of expression are also sacred. The very words that have formed from the lips, say, of the apostles are sacred. And why should I listen to Professor so-and-so? I'd much rather listen to Saint Paul.
or St. Augustine, St. Maximus. I mean, they are the people who understood these things. They are the people who attained them also in varying degrees in their own life. Why should I listen to somebody, a professor from University of Chicago? What does he know? And why do I need him? Professor, thank you for spending so much time with me.
What's next for you? What's next for me, my friend, is to prepare myself to enter into the life beyond this one, to enter into the next phase of life. Christianity and every true religion has always taught that
One should prepare oneself for the end. One of the great insights from the Vedic tradition is the Vedic tradition declares that the natural life of man divides into four stages.
Brahmacharya. This is where a young man prepares himself to enter life through study. He's expected to live a celibate life. It's a sort of an ascetic life. And next comes Grihasthya, the life of married life. So the man marries, he founds a family and he
has an employment and he supports his family. This is the second stage of life according to the Vedic tradition. The third stage is, I think they call it Vana Prastha, I think it means a forest life. The idea is that the children are grown up and they've married themselves, so the man and his wife
and a new stage of life which is a life of they call it forest life because it's a very simple life it involves little outward activity it's a matter of preparing for the life to come and then the fourth stage of life is called sannyas and this is something very
Vedic is foreign to our Western way of thinking but according to the Vedic tradition this is when both the man and the woman leave all attachments to the world and totally fix their spirit upon God. So the extreme way of living that life of Sannyas
And this is actually, I saw people living like that, it was still going on. You retire completely from the world and you give your whole day to prayer and contemplation. Very few people in the western world can even conceive of such a thing. When I was traveling in India half a century ago,
It was still visible. It was rare, yes. And you had to go far away from New Delhi and Calcutta and any place where the western world has so much as touched. Because the western world is poison in that regard. So this is the ancient Vedic culture. We can't duplicate it here.
But I'm just mentioning that the principle applies to us too. The principle is that at the end of our life there should be a transitional phase
where we turn our attention away from the world and the cares of the world and we live a life as much as possible in prayer, solitude, contemplation. I think the principle is therefore everyone will do so to the extent that he or she can.
And actually, from a higher point of view, all the earlier phases of our life should really, in truth, be a preparation for that fourth stage, which is itself a preparation for the true life, which is life eternal. But I think only someone who can really be called a saint is able to
in a very real way live up to these ideals. But I think even though we should know these ideals and try to live up to it as we can, I think God in His mercy will accept this. Thank you so much Wolfgang, thank you. Well, I think you could
I regard it as a great privilege to meet you, to spend a few days getting to know each other, and I wish you all that is good. I think you're apostolate, and that's the right word, it is an apostolate that you have. Your apostolate is a very noble, very important apostolate, because
What the world needs today, almost more than anything else, is the kind of thing that you are attempting to bring about. For example, the understanding of our great traditions, the understanding of why we are really in deep trouble today. It takes a certain spiritual eye to see that.
Not everybody does. And in fact, the more you are associated with universities and other contemporary institutions, the more you are drawn into the very opposite. So, your apostolate is so important.
in the service of God, in the service of religion, and there's nothing greater than that. Nothing. Thank you. I hope we can live up to ten percent of that. Thank you. Well, wonderful. I'm very happy about today's, the questions that you raised. They were excellent questions and
That's a big part in getting a good answer. A big part in getting a good answer is to ask a good question. And that's not an easy thing.
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toes. Links to both are in the description.
Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time.
You get early access to ad free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you.
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"text": " Today, we discuss your questions for Wolfgang Smith, which includes remarks around the various Vedantic realms of existence, in particular something called the Av Eternal, and how does consciousness fit in, as well as not fit in, as well as the Western worldview, or as Wolfgang and myself like to call it a Weltanschaung. This is part two of my discussion with Wolfgang, where we discussed his life, his corpus of rich philosophical insight, and his unexampled perspective on religion and interpretations of quantum mechanics."
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"text": " Wolfgang Smith is a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher of science who draws heavily from pre-modern ontology. He obtained his bachelor's in physics, mathematics, and philosophy simultaneously at Columbia University by the time he was just 18. Again, I've said that before in part one, I'll say it again here, it's unheard of."
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"text": " He was a mathematics professor at UCLA. He then worked at the Bell Aircraft Corporation as an aerodynamicist focused on providing a solution to the atmospheric re-entry problem. Wolfgang and I, I'm extremely lucky and blessed that we were able to spend several days together in February. It was a humbling and endearing experience. Thank you to Brilliant for help subsidizing the cost, the traveling costs."
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"text": " You may not know this, but I pay out of my own personal pocket for every expense such as flight fees, taxi fees, food fees, even subscriptions such as software tools, Adobe for instance, the editor editing this right now, different capital like increased RAM and computers and so on. So help from yourself via Patreon. Patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal helps a tremendous, tremendous amount."
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"text": " and secondly sponsors help a tremendous amount because of all of your support we're able to bring toe to you at zero cost brilliance is a place where there are bite-sized interactive learning experiences for science engineering and mathematics artificial intelligence in its current form uses machine learning which uses neural nets often at least"
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"text": " Like I mentioned, there's part one on the channel as well, and you can see how much Wolfgang and I bond. He holds a special place in my heart. In that part one, we go four hours toe-to-toe, so to speak."
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"text": " My name is Kurt Jaimungal. My background is in mathematical physics, and this channel is called Theories of Everything. It's dedicated to explicating the variegated landscape of theories of everything, of toes, primarily from a mathematical perspective, from a physics perspective. But we also explore the constitutive role consciousness may have in engendering the laws as we see them. Enjoy the next few hours with Wolfgang Smith, part two. Editors note, as we rewatch this, we realize this is the inmost conversation with Wolfgang we've conducted, that we've heard."
},
{
"end_time": 347.073,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 321.305,
"text": " So Professor, how have you been? What's it been like since last we spoke? What's new? Well, I've had a very busy but very productive time. I've been interviewed on many programs and lots of opportunity to talk to people and to"
},
{
"end_time": 377.381,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 349.036,
"text": " Explain my ideas so I'm very satisfied with how things have been going. And you just published a new article about consciousness. Yes, well I haven't published it yet but I just wrote it and to be honest with you I think it is one of the best things I've written. I've had a very productive time in the recent weeks."
},
{
"end_time": 407.517,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 378.933,
"text": " And I feel it's now coming to an end. What do you mean? Well, I just had my 93rd birthday and which I never expected. No one in my family has ever lived that long and all things come to an end. Well, hopefully not terribly soon. I'd love to see you again in person. Well, I leave it all in God's hands."
},
{
"end_time": 435.776,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 408.422,
"text": " What is the Omega Point? Well, I think the expression goes back to Théa de Chardin, who was a very, very interesting character. In fact, the second book I ever wrote was about Théa de Chardin. He was a French Jesuit and a paleontologist and"
},
{
"end_time": 465.401,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 436.869,
"text": " He wrote many, many books which had an enormous and incredible influence upon the Catholic world and for a while his books were on the index. Eventually that only, I think, made them more interesting to the people and in the sixties"
},
{
"end_time": 495.111,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 465.725,
"text": " His books became widely circulated and he exerted an enormous influence, I would say, on especially the younger generation of Catholic intellectuals, you might say. So much so that his influence upon the so-called Second Vatican Council was just incredible and"
},
{
"end_time": 525.623,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 495.691,
"text": " What really happened is that the Catholic world was split into two pieces. There were the traditional Catholics who were very happy with the theology in existence, and then there was the younger generation, kind of revolutionary in their make-up, and they were powerfully under the influence of Teilhard de Chardin,"
},
{
"end_time": 554.616,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 525.913,
"text": " And so, as everyone who has kept up with the story knows, the Second Vatican Council was a complete revolution. The traditional theology was essentially thrown out and replaced by Theod's theology, which I in my book characterized as"
},
{
"end_time": 582.568,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 554.957,
"text": " is science fiction theory, science fiction theology. Well, Theotokos was a fake, and I say that in all candor and I mean it, because he had revolutionary ideas"
},
{
"end_time": 612.807,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 583.797,
"text": " You must grant him one thing at least. He didn't copy anyone else. He was totally himself. He saw everything in a new way. It was, in my opinion, absolutely upside down. It being the omega point?"
},
{
"end_time": 642.739,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 613.695,
"text": " his science fiction theology. I mean the Omega Point was just one component of a completely new way of approaching theology and I think many people saw it as a sort of integration of theology with science but in truth it wasn't neither of the two. It was"
},
{
"end_time": 670.589,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 642.961,
"text": " A chimerical theology somehow integrated with a chimerical science. Theodosia is one of the greatest illusionists in the history of human thought, I believe."
},
{
"end_time": 698.575,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 671.408,
"text": " Can you talk about the Omega Point? What is it? Well, Théâtre Chardin had this idea that the physical universe itself is converging. He saw everything under the banner of evolution. That was his God, really, and in fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 725.572,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 699.889,
"text": " In a later part of his life, somewhere he wrote the following words which have stuck in my memory because they really, in a sense, sum up his thinking. He said, in the final count, the one, the only thing that I believe in is evolution."
},
{
"end_time": 755.401,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 726.664,
"text": " So he believed, first of all, that the physical universe is itself evolving, everything is evolving, and this evolution takes the form of a convergence of everything to what he called point omega. And this point omega, he talked about it on the one hand,"
},
{
"end_time": 784.428,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 755.964,
"text": " in sort of physical terms. In other words, as if this is something that the physicist and astrophysicist should eventually discover because he said this is what is happening. Everything converges and from a physical point of view he happened to be about as wrong as wrong can be because we know that"
},
{
"end_time": 814.121,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 784.838,
"text": " The opposite is true. There's an expansion. The universe is its diameter, so to speak, is expanding at the speed of light, 300,000 kilometers per second. So he was about as wrong as wrong could be from a physical point of view. There's no such convergence to a point omega. But he also, at the same time, saw this"
},
{
"end_time": 841.34,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 816.613,
"text": " Convergence to point omega as a spiritual thing. He gave it a theological meaning. When they use that word, they got it there. And what he was actually saying is that God himself is evolving."
},
{
"end_time": 868.592,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 842.159,
"text": " and has not yet quite reached his ultimate perfection, which will be attained when everything converges to point omega. So, in my book, I devote many pages to, first of all, explaining what Teilhard was talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 899.053,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 869.121,
"text": " And secondly, showing the reader how absolutely absurd it is. It is absurd from the standpoint of science. There is no such conversion as I just said. The very opposite seems to be the fact. And secondly, from a theological point of view, it is worse than nonsense. And actually the bottom line is this, it is diabolical."
},
{
"end_time": 929.94,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 901.459,
"text": " And one of the things that I have written about in the book, in the last chapter, I look at Teilhard, the man, I go into biographical topics, and in particular, I came upon a very unknown article that Teilhard wrote"
},
{
"end_time": 960.162,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 930.367,
"text": " when he was very very young it might have been his first publication it was written about nineteen twenty five and in that obscure article he relates an incident that happened to him when he was very young i mean he wrote it when he was about thirty years old or so and the event i think he was in his twenties when that happened"
},
{
"end_time": 991.323,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 962.21,
"text": " Well, he describes how he's walking one day in a lonely place somewhere in the countryside, and he said, and then the thing swooped upon me. So he speaks in this very strange way, and I asked the thing, who are you? And the thing replied, quote, and this is now a verbatim quote,"
},
{
"end_time": 1021.408,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 991.886,
"text": " I am the quintessence of all good and all evil, and I am now settled upon you in life and in death. And I'm not an exorcist, although I've known a great exorcist, but it is clear to me that this is evidence of possession."
},
{
"end_time": 1041.903,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1024.548,
"text": " Many people nowadays don't know what this means and don't understand it is a very real thing. What in theology is called Satan or the devil in common language is not an illusion. It's not just"
},
{
"end_time": 1070.708,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1042.654,
"text": " an old fable. It happens to be a truth, a very important truth because I think one of the reasons Satan is so successful, especially nowadays, is because he has succeeded in convincing the modern world that he doesn't exist. And that makes him very, very powerful. So what I'm saying, and this is"
},
{
"end_time": 1097.551,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1071.084,
"text": " What I said in the last chapter of my book on Tehrad-i-Shaddaq, what I'm saying is that Tehrad was possessed and that his doctrine, Point Omega and all the rest of it, is basically written under satanic influence. This is Marshawn Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks whether"
},
{
"end_time": 1114.65,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1097.944,
"text": " Football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections."
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{
"end_time": 1130.026,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1114.65,
"text": " anything from touchdown to threes and if you write you can win big mix and match players from any sport on proge picks america's number one daily fantasy sports app proge picks is available in 40 plus states including california texas"
},
{
"end_time": 1159.104,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1130.282,
"text": " Is Satan capable of telling the truth, or can he only lie?"
},
{
"end_time": 1185.333,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1159.684,
"text": " I would guess that he is capable of saying the truth when he serves his purpose. So even if he says the truth, it is for the purpose of spreading lies. But make no mistake about it, people nowadays tend not to understand that."
},
{
"end_time": 1216.067,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1187.483,
"text": " The devil is not a fable, it's not a theological fantasy. It's as real and solid a reality as Mount Everest. And it is one of the greatest forces operating in the world, because it is really in a sense a counter force to God. We all agree, no doubt, that"
},
{
"end_time": 1243.387,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1216.34,
"text": " God is all-powerful and the prime power more powerful than anything else. Granted, but the negative of God, the negation of God, which we call Satan, comes in second place. And compared to our human power, the intelligence and the sheer power of Satan is boundless."
},
{
"end_time": 1274.889,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1245.64,
"text": " This is one of the deficiencies, I believe, of contemporary, quote-unquote, religion. I'm talking mainly to the Judeo-Christian branch of religion, that the idea of Satan has been pretty much lost. In earlier times, I think Christians were more keenly aware of"
},
{
"end_time": 1299.65,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1275.265,
"text": " the satanic side of the cosmos and who were therefore more on guard. I think the so-called demythologizing movement that Theod himself was in a sense representing because he was destroying"
},
{
"end_time": 1312.705,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1299.991,
"text": " Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox belief, and replacing it by that science fiction theology of his, which as I say was demonic."
},
{
"end_time": 1342.773,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1314.036,
"text": " Let's make an analogy. We are like a finite number, just a finite cardinality. And then there's Satan, which is the countably infinite. And then there's God, which is not only uncountably infinite, but perhaps the highest of all the infinities like Kantor studied them. So even if Satan, compared to us, is infinite, is extremely powerful, compared to God, Satan is nothing. Is that the case? Well, I don't think that from a theological point of view,"
},
{
"end_time": 1372.875,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1343.404,
"text": " One can really think of it that way, because if you look at the matter from a still higher perspective, it turns out A, that Satan is necessary, and B, that unwittingly Satan is contributing to the work of God."
},
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"end_time": 1403.524,
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"text": " Henson Shaving is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover. And now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. So here's a personal story. I gave the razor to Sam, who's working behind the scenes here at the Toe podcast. I didn't tell him who it was from. I just said, do you need a razor? He said, sure. Then I asked him, hey, how was that razor? The next couple of days later, he's like, Kurt, that is the best razor I have ever used."
},
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"end_time": 1431.544,
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"text": " And then I said, by the way, that's a sponsor, Henson. And he said, that is fantastic. And he looked it up and they're an aerospace engineering company. So that's an aside story. That's a true story. It's packaged extremely carefully. The handle looks beautiful. The assembly takes 10 seconds and the blade is as precise as I've ever seen in a commercial razor. By using aerospace grade CNC machines, Henson makes metal razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair."
},
{
"end_time": 1442.466,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1431.544,
"text": " That means it's a secure and stable blade with no vibrations. So the razor has built-in channels and it evacuates hair and cream which makes clogging virtually impossible. You blow it out and it's cleared."
},
{
"end_time": 1471.442,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1443.012,
"text": " That's what she said. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business. So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence. And it's extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free."
},
{
"end_time": 1483.012,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1471.578,
"text": " Just make sure to add them to your cart. That's 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g dot com slash everything."
},
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"end_time": 1504.906,
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"text": " Today I also want to introduce our new sponsor Yesol Fitness. Many of you are athletes or want to get in shape but you don't have the time to go to the gym or buy expensive equipment for a home workout. Yesol Fitness solves this problem with their professional stationary bikes offering the same features as Peloton but for half the price."
},
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"end_time": 1530.845,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1504.906,
"text": " This spin bike is solidly built, easy to assemble, quiet and provides an excellent workout starting at just $499. It's cost effective with a flexible and completely optional subscription at just $10 a month, which gives you the ability to cast YouTube or even Peloton when you don't want to use their app. It comes with a 360 degree rotating 32 inch screen for a more immersive experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1559.531,
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"text": " The German poet Grütter has put it beautifully and I think he's hit the point. I won't quote it in its original German,"
},
{
"end_time": 1588.234,
"index": 60,
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"text": " The idea is that Satan is necessary to try to mislead human beings, is necessary as a counter force to Christianity, a counter force to God."
},
{
"end_time": 1616.101,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1589.258,
"text": " because it is by giving opposition to Satan that human beings grow. If there were no challenge, if religion were just like receiving chocolate and eating it, that's a human fantasy. This would never be Christianity."
},
{
"end_time": 1644.787,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1616.527,
"text": " A negative force is needed to accomplish the will of God. So when you pray, do you ever give thanks for Satan? No, but it would make sense. It would not be in any way amiss, because Satan is there as a necessary ingredient"
},
{
"end_time": 1674.206,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1645.401,
"text": " You see, you might naively and at the same time wisely ask the question, well, if God wants to give us this infinite gift which we call salvation, eternal life, why doesn't he just give it to us? Instead of letting us struggle in a world that is full of"
},
{
"end_time": 1704.36,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1674.497,
"text": " Pain and misery, and also, worse even than that, carries within it the danger of damnation. Why has God so arranged it? Why doesn't He just give us whatever He has as a present, which ultimately it is, it is a present? Well, I think the answer to that is that"
},
{
"end_time": 1733.592,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1705.486,
"text": " God can do all things just by his own will. He can create the world and he has created the world by his own will. But there is one thing that God cannot do simply by his will. And that is, he cannot give us the highest gift, salvation, because salvation"
},
{
"end_time": 1759.138,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1734.974,
"text": " is somewhat akin to God himself. And this is something that simply cannot be given, even God cannot do this. If God could give us salvation just by his word, I think it stands to reason that he would certainly do so."
},
{
"end_time": 1787.995,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1759.633,
"text": " Why make us suffer and why make us run the risk of damnation? And that risk is there. Every Christian teacher has corroborated that. And the answer is, I believe, that salvation is, in a sense, a participation in the divinity."
},
{
"end_time": 1811.544,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1789.462,
"text": " And this is something that cannot be just given. You have to earn it. I wish I could do a better job getting that point across. It's something that I feel very deeply, but I hope that these few words are sufficient to indicate"
},
{
"end_time": 1840.23,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1812.073,
"text": " What I'm trying to express. There's some views of God that God can do anything, including contradictions. So you don't believe this. There are some things God cannot do. Yeah. Yeah. He cannot give salvation to an unrepentant murderer. So the"
},
{
"end_time": 1868.916,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1840.998,
"text": " Ascent to God, the invitation from God to man, come into my sphere, be one of us, enter the kingdom of God, that invitation cannot be given, so to speak, gratis. It is something that you have to, in some way, in some sense, earn."
},
{
"end_time": 1897.056,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1870.742,
"text": " These things, of course, are hard to explain. We're dealing with supernatural things and so it's very, very difficult to express it and very difficult to understand what I'm trying to say, but I think the Christian listener will sense what I'm saying."
},
{
"end_time": 1926.92,
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"start_time": 1897.381,
"text": " And I think he is likely to recognize that this is true. Do you fear death? As a natural man, certainly, yes, certainly. Absolutely, because we have not yet reached the stage of sainthood. We've all read the lives of many, many saints. We have some idea of what they're like."
},
{
"end_time": 1950.435,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1927.739,
"text": " And it is, in my belief, only in a high level of sainthood that the fear of death is transcended. It's not a simple thing. And ordinary Christian faith is wonderful, and it's a sine qua non. We need it, otherwise we have nothing."
},
{
"end_time": 1976.34,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1951.015,
"text": " But it doesn't instantly elevate us to great spiritual heights. It's something that you have to work on a lifetime. And there are millions and millions of Christians of all denominations and grades, but only a handful in every generation reaches a level of true sainthood."
},
{
"end_time": 2005.299,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1977.125,
"text": " And this is something, it's not a matter of degree, it's a matter of kind. It isn't that we have a numerical scale and then we say above this number it's sainthood. No, because sainthood is something generically different from the ordinary condition of man."
},
{
"end_time": 2035.418,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2005.759,
"text": " Anyone who, and incidentally, sainthood is rare, and in my life I have met only one person who is bona fide a saint. And he is as much different from any other person I've ever met in the world. It's almost as if he were a different species. So many Christians, I think, have"
},
{
"end_time": 2064.855,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2035.794,
"text": " somewhat inadequate ideas of what makes a saint. A saint isn't simply somebody who is very, very good and lives a very, very good life. He is that, but that's not what makes him a saint. What makes him a sainthood is categorically different from our ordinary state. And saints come in all shapes and guises and"
},
{
"end_time": 2095.333,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2065.452,
"text": " Many different kinds of life they've lived. The saint that I had the privilege to see, I visited him. He has since been canonized, and his name is Saint Padre Pio of Pietelcina. Anyhow, he was a Capuchin monk. He spent his life"
},
{
"end_time": 2124.855,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2095.862,
"text": " in a monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy and the most remarkable thing about him was that when he was a young priest on a certain Friday he said Mass and while he was saying Mass he experienced great pain and at the end of Mass he noticed"
},
{
"end_time": 2151.578,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2125.401,
"text": " that he had a so-called stigmata that is the wounds of Christ, five wounds, two in the hands, two in the feet, and one. So these five wounds of Christ were manifest in his body. This is called a stigmata. So he was the first priest in history who received a stigmata."
},
{
"end_time": 2180.794,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2152.739,
"text": " And he received it at an early age, I think he was in his twenties. And these stigmata remained on him for fifty years. They came on a Friday and they left on a Friday. And two days after the stigmata disappeared from his body, he died. So it was evidently his mission, so to speak, to suffer."
},
{
"end_time": 2210.862,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2181.971,
"text": " and he suffered terribly that was his mission so it is so difficult for a non-christian to understand all this because it is so contrary to a normal human way of looking at things and what we desire and what we shun so i'm saying all these things just to make the point that sainthood is a very real thing it's a very"
},
{
"end_time": 2240.094,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2212.278,
"text": " Wonderful thing, it is almost always associated with great pain and suffering preceding the miracle of sainthood and oftentimes also after that miracle has occurred. So a saint is someone who as it were in some minuscule way repeats"
},
{
"end_time": 2267.585,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2240.418,
"text": " the life of Christ in his own body and the all-grades and so the example of Padre Pio which I mentioned is a very extreme example but that's why it is helpful in our attempt to understand what sanctity is. It's a very real thing and it's a discontinuity. In other words,"
},
{
"end_time": 2295.947,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2268.268,
"text": " In our ordinary state, we're far, far from sainthood. We can't even imagine it, much less live as saints live. But we can understand, we can appreciate what sanctity is. It is becoming somewhat, in some miniscule way, like Christ."
},
{
"end_time": 2326.135,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2296.732,
"text": " It is always associated with suffering. You do not attain any higher spiritual grade just in fun. No, it's very serious business. And pain and suffering, as I say, is somehow a sine qua non in this man's journey to God."
},
{
"end_time": 2357.193,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2327.466,
"text": " Many people, and I think there are also many people who call themselves Christian and think they are Christian, who do not really accept this fact because it goes so much against our human desire. We don't want to suffer. For example, if you practice certain abstinence,"
},
{
"end_time": 2379.053,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2357.534,
"text": " During Lent, we as human beings, we do it sort of reluctantly. It goes against our brain. And that is exactly why it is spiritually efficacious, because a religion is to go against that natural brain."
},
{
"end_time": 2406.715,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2379.804,
"text": " Something I've been thinking about is we say, well, what is a saint or what is a theory of everything? What is a so-and-so? And then I wonder, well, what is is? What does is mean? You've got me there, Kurt. I've never thought about that. I realized that it is a very, very deep question, one of the deepest questions."
},
{
"end_time": 2435.043,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2407.654,
"text": " As I understand it, it's the same as asking what is being. That's right. Part of the definition has to do with being, has to do with the Bodhisattva, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, which is an Eastern concept. And so the word is that we use scientifically and secularly actually has the deepest religious roots. Absolutely. In fact, it reminds me of a passage"
},
{
"end_time": 2465.128,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2435.486,
"text": " in the Old Testament, Exodus 314. And let me remind you what that is. It pertains to the episode of Moses and the burning bush. Moses, I forget the outer details,"
},
{
"end_time": 2493.541,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2465.606,
"text": " He sees a burning bush and he asks the question. He realizes this must be the presence of God here. It was something miraculous. And so Moses asked God his name. He said, what is your name? And the answer that came was, to put it in Latin, ego sum qui sum."
},
{
"end_time": 2525.111,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2495.367,
"text": " which literally means I am that is, I am so here you have your answer to your question about is this is basically what Moses asked God the episode of the burning bush and God's answer to that question was ego sum qui sum so"
},
{
"end_time": 2557.022,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2527.022,
"text": " There is no being, strictly speaking, other than God. And the creation is sort of, I would say, a half-being, a semi-being. You cannot say of anything in creation, for example, of ourselves, that it is. God alone can say that, strictly speaking. I cannot say I am."
},
{
"end_time": 2585.452,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2557.978,
"text": " because from a rigorous metaphysical point of view this isn't really true. We have a certain being, but it is not sufficient to say I am, because in truth only God can say that. And this is of course the"
},
{
"end_time": 2608.899,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2586.032,
"text": " The whole purpose of our religious quest, if you want to put it in very, very metaphysical terms, we are seeking to be. We are sort of in a halfway state now. Incidentally, the Vedic tradition has understood this very well. This is why they speak of Maya, because"
},
{
"end_time": 2639.053,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2609.189,
"text": " Every Brahmin boy in India used to understand that we do not fully exist. And this is, of course, the message that you got from Buddha, is perhaps the first historical figure that gives us this message. And then it was the message of the Vedic sages,"
},
{
"end_time": 2667.619,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2639.309,
"text": " for thousands of years. And it is absolutely in keeping with Exodus 3.14. As a matter of fact, when I think back of the India that I witnessed 50 years ago, I think the people that I knew there would understand better Exodus 3.14 than our theologians in the West."
},
{
"end_time": 2699.531,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2670.06,
"text": " Because they're more rooted in these fundamental teachings. When someone says, I am John, I am Mary, I am Carlos, what do you mean that they can't say I am? Well, in ordinary parlance, of course, I am has a very simple meaning that we all understand once we are no longer an infant."
},
{
"end_time": 2726.852,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2700.043,
"text": " This theological or metaphysical idea of being is something else. And in fact, you know, there is a hard and fast distinction between two levels of understanding religion. And that applies to Christianity or"
},
{
"end_time": 2754.718,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2727.995,
"text": " any other religion that may exist. There's an ordinary, simple way of understanding that every child can understand, and there is a deeper understanding, an understanding in which many people belonging to that religion never attain."
},
{
"end_time": 2783.422,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2754.889,
"text": " I will give you an example of that. One of my absolutely favorite theologians is St. Augustine. St. Augustine wrote a sort of an autobiography which he called The Confessions. One of the chapters of The Confessions"
},
{
"end_time": 2812.005,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2784.889,
"text": " begins with these words. I like it so much that I even know them by heart. He's speaking to God and he says, I see these others beneath thee, an existence they have because they are from thee, yet no existence"
},
{
"end_time": 2841.988,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2812.227,
"text": " because they are not what thou art. I love that saying. It is pure esotericism because many people simply won't understand what he's talking about. And it can be misinterpreted? It can certainly be misinterpreted. But when you do even vaguely sense what St. Augustine"
},
{
"end_time": 2868.507,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2844.497,
"text": " It is profound. It is absolutely esoteric, and incidentally, what St. Augustine was saying in this particular statement is something that the people in India, the people who are rooted in the old Indian tradition, assuming there are still such people left,"
},
{
"end_time": 2897.5,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2869.172,
"text": " They would understand it far better than most of us here in Christianity, because the Vedic tradition has been harping on that theme for thousands of years. This is the idea of Maya. The things of the world, including ourselves as in our phenomenal existence, both are and are not"
},
{
"end_time": 2917.875,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2897.892,
"text": " In a sense we are, because we are from God, otherwise in no wise would we exist. And yet we are not, because ego sum qui sum, God alone really is. So we are sort of in between"
},
{
"end_time": 2947.602,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2918.677,
"text": " being and non-being interesting because when last we spoke someone asked I read the question of is God both being and non-being and you said yes so at the same time we're both being and non-being excuse me could let me try to understand what I said last week because it doesn't really sound like me to say that that God"
},
{
"end_time": 2961.493,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2948.336,
"text": " is both being and non-being. Yeah, well, I can re-read the question for you. Please do, because at the moment I don't quite understand what I meant to say."
},
{
"end_time": 2988.524,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2962.159,
"text": " This question comes from Matthew Wyden. He said, Western religions talk about reality as being ultimately the supreme being, an inexhaustible intelligence sentience, whereas Saint Maximus joined these and said, God is both being and non-being. So what do you think about these different ways of describing reality? And then you said, Saint Maximus was right, that God is both being and non-being. Or maybe in the context of the question, you meant something else, or there was more there."
},
{
"end_time": 3016.169,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2992.295,
"text": " Well, I understand now what I was trying at least to say, and it is this, that God is beyond our conception of being."
},
{
"end_time": 3041.186,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 3017.381,
"text": " one might say this is all you know on earth and all you need to know but it does not exhaust God because God is inexhaustible and so I was a moment ago distinguishing between esotericism and the ordinary way of understanding religion"
},
{
"end_time": 3069.053,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3041.561,
"text": " I should add that there are different levels of esotericism. I mean, in a sense, esotericism has no boundaries. However high you have gone in your conception of God, there's always more."
},
{
"end_time": 3098.712,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3070.503,
"text": " And you never can reach the point where you said, well now I know who God is, that is impossible. And in fact anyone who says this gives proof of the fact that he has a long way to go. I think there have been great spiritual masters who would simply say,"
},
{
"end_time": 3116.391,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3099.309,
"text": " God is inexpressible. If you ask me, I cannot tell you. There's a wonderful story in one of the Upanishads. A man has two sons."
},
{
"end_time": 3146.493,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3116.869,
"text": " And when they come of age, he sends them, as used to be the custom, to a guru. So these two sons spend the next few years away from the father and mother in the house of the guru. And so then they come back after a few years to the father, and the father says to them, well, tell me son, what have you learned about God? And so the older son,"
},
{
"end_time": 3167.637,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3147.125,
"text": " gets up and explains to the father what he has learned and gives a very beautiful learned lecture of Vedanta about Saguna Brahman and Nirguna Brahman and so on. And the father listens and says nothing. And then"
},
{
"end_time": 3196.988,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3168.063,
"text": " He turns to the younger son and says, young son, tell me what have you learned? And this young man speaks another word and just lowers his head in silence. And the father is pleased. He says, ah, you have had a glimpse of Brahman. I love this story because I think it tells something that is very, very important."
},
{
"end_time": 3208.234,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3197.381,
"text": " In the most perfect way of war, not trying to express it directly but by implication, it makes it all that more powerful."
},
{
"end_time": 3229.241,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3208.712,
"text": " This reminds me of another story from early Christendom. I forget which one of the church fathers said this. There was three disciples or three sons and they were being asked, okay, explain what does St. Paul mean in this verse? And then the first son says, oh, he means going up to the mountain is like ascending toward God and you should praise the kingdom of heaven and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 3258.865,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3229.241,
"text": " And then he's like, good, good, okay, interesting. What about you? And then the other one says, well, actually it's about moving away from temptation and we should be careful in our everyday life and not stray on a path. He says, interesting. He goes to the next one and says, well, what do you think? That person says, I don't know. And then he said, that's right. That is beautiful. Yeah. Well, you're right, Kurt. This is really quite"
},
{
"end_time": 3286.886,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3259.206,
"text": " equivalent to the story that I've just told you from one of the Upanishads. There is much much in common between Christianity and the Vedic tradition. Vedic tradition is the oldest in the world and so old that you can't, I think it's really difficult to date it, but it was centuries before Abraham was born."
},
{
"end_time": 3315.367,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3287.466,
"text": " So this is the oldest wisdom in the world and it is a tremendous wisdom but what amazed me in my later life when I began to think about Christianity and the Vedic tradition is that actually what Christ brought into the world is brand new"
},
{
"end_time": 3342.892,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3315.981,
"text": " and not a trace of it is to be found in the Vedas and I was very surprised because earlier in life I felt this was a complete revelation if you want to find anything in the domain of wisdom well you'll find it there not true I mean for example the story of Adam and the fall of Adam"
},
{
"end_time": 3370.418,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3343.985,
"text": " which is of course basic to Christianity. Christ is the second Adam, if you will. You find not a trace of this in any of the Vedas. I didn't recognize this until very very late in life and I was amazed. And incidentally"
},
{
"end_time": 3397.108,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3371.357,
"text": " It was last year that I finally wrote a book trying to put the Vedic and the Christian religion in perspective and to, as it were, indicate what they have in common and what is brand new in Christianity. And so I published this book"
},
{
"end_time": 3422.978,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3397.688,
"text": " under the title Vedanta in light of Christian wisdom, and I say almost the opposite of what is nowadays, so to speak, trendy, because, yes, Shuon had this notion of the transcendent unity of religions, and the idea"
},
{
"end_time": 3451.561,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3423.336,
"text": " that different religions are different paths up to the same mountain peak. This is absolutely wrong. I'm convinced of it, and this is the main thesis that I present in this book. And in fact, I show that the eschaton, the Vedic eschaton, what I call the Nirvanic option,"
},
{
"end_time": 3479.838,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3452.022,
"text": " is in a way the diametric opposite of the Christian eschaton. And the point is really very easy to understand from a formal point of view, and that is that both the Vedic religion and the Christian religion are ways to God."
},
{
"end_time": 3508.2,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3480.708,
"text": " A skaton is always a union with God, if you will, a seeing of God. But there are two kinds, and they are completely different. The Vedic seeing, excuse me, let me back up. I want to first of all quote St. John, no man has ever seen God."
},
{
"end_time": 3537.363,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3511.118,
"text": " So this is basic and this is the first thing one needs to understand. So then how can for example, how can there be a religion if no man has seen God and the purpose of religion is to see God? Isn't that a contradiction? And the point is"
},
{
"end_time": 3565.077,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3538.114,
"text": " that the idea of religion is very subtle. There are basically, as it turns out, two ways of seeing God. Only two ways. There is the direct way, which is a way of self-annihilation."
},
{
"end_time": 3592.142,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3568.183,
"text": " Always to see God you must do a sacrifice. You must offer something to the flame. That's different than suicide. Different, yes. Please explain the difference just to get it clear to people before you move forward. Well, if a man commits suicide, it is not in order to see God. The motive of suicide is"
},
{
"end_time": 3621.237,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3593.029,
"text": " Things are so bad I can't cope with them anymore, or just craziness. No, religion is a matter of man offering sacrifice for the purpose of seeing God. And there are basically two ways. I mean, you can see on logical grounds that there can only be two ways."
},
{
"end_time": 3650.691,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3622.193,
"text": " Now the Vedic is the direct path. And so the only way you can attain the vision of Brahman is to sacrifice your humanity. And this is why the sadhus in India wear a garua robe. India is a land that"
},
{
"end_time": 3672.363,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3651.135,
"text": " Once it's dead, and so the Gero color, the color is the color of flame. So what the Gero robe of the Sadhu means is that he has really offered his life, offered himself to the flames as a sacrifice for the vision of God."
},
{
"end_time": 3702.79,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3673.729,
"text": " And having lived with these sadhus, I spent seven months living with them. This was decisive in my life because it just gave me a little glimpse of the higher truth. And so this is the Vedic eschaton. I call it the Nirvanic option. Now Nirvana is a Buddhist word. It means blowing out like a candle flame."
},
{
"end_time": 3732.09,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3703.285,
"text": " And I use it because to me it is the most descriptive way, the most perhaps perfect way of explaining the eschaton of the Vedic tradition. It is a blowing out and therefore we cannot conceive of it. If you ask any wise man, what is the end state?"
},
{
"end_time": 3760.145,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3732.602,
"text": " How does the perfect yogi who has reached the end of the Vedic path successfully, what happens to him? It is a question that absolutely cannot be answered, simply because there are no words for it. I mean, if Sri Ramakrishna would put it this way, he would say,"
},
{
"end_time": 3783.951,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3760.623,
"text": " If you've never tasted a mango, you never will know what it means to taste a mango. There are no words that can describe it. So this is the Vedic eschaton. It's a Nirvanic, and incidentally, I've seen in India people very, very close to that state, and all I can say is"
},
{
"end_time": 3813.951,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3784.684,
"text": " Even looking at these people experiencing their ambience, you realize what a tremendous thing it is. And I think one of the reasons that I benefited from these associations is because instinctively I approached them with folded hands. And this is why I received, because all I could give them is my admiration,"
},
{
"end_time": 3838.131,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3815.811,
"text": " reverence and it was enough no real sadhu in the vedic tradition will not generously give to anyone who approaches him like that so it's a wonderful thing if we had time together unfortunately we don't"
},
{
"end_time": 3869.701,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3839.718,
"text": " Could tell you some very interesting things. Well, next time, next time. God willing, yes. So this was the Vedic eschaton. Now the Christian eschaton is the diametric opposite and the fact is this. When Christ was born with a long, long time after the Vedic religion was already well established, he brought into the world"
},
{
"end_time": 3896.766,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3871.817,
"text": " Ideas and realities, which were entirely new, had never been conceived of before. And so, the first thing he brought into the world is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Three persons in one, a Godhead. And there is no trace of that in India."
},
{
"end_time": 3927.381,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3897.705,
"text": " The Vedas, the Upanishads have nothing to say about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. So this Trinitarian conception of God, which of course all of Christianity rests upon that, is nowhere to be found in the Vedas, number one. Secondly, God, Christ revealed"
},
{
"end_time": 3956.015,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3927.773,
"text": " the mystery of the incarnation. So the Trinitarian conception of God tells mankind that there is a son of God and it is based upon this principle that our Lord was able to reveal the second principle, that this son of God"
},
{
"end_time": 3983.712,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3956.578,
"text": " could become man. And so you have the virgin birth and the mystery of the incarnation, God become man. And then you have of course the mystery of the mission of Christ, the suffering"
},
{
"end_time": 4010.418,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3984.258,
"text": " the crucifixion, the three days in the tomb, and the resurrection. And now, it is at this point that a new religion was brought into the world because, and here is the idea of the Christian eschaton, which as I say is the diametric opposite of the Vedic, the point is"
},
{
"end_time": 4039.326,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 4011.067,
"text": " we can attain a union with the Incarnate God, because the Incarnate God is human, he is a man, and so there is a possibility of entering into the mystical body of Christ. And this is what it means to be a Christian, and you enter through baptism and through faith. And then"
},
{
"end_time": 4067.995,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4040.486,
"text": " Because you are a member of the mystical body of Christ, there is a possibility of seeing God through Christ. And there's a passage in the what we call the high priestly prayer, where our Lord explains this very idea"
},
{
"end_time": 4094.838,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4068.422,
"text": " Very precisely, he is speaking to God the Father and he says, quote, this is life eternal to know thee the one true God and Jesus Christ who was sent. Here you have a perfect, accurate and complete"
},
{
"end_time": 4122.722,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4095.503,
"text": " Description of the Christian eschaton. It is a seeing of God, but antipodal to the Vedic. We do not need to burn our human identity. No! As a human being, we can see God the Father"
},
{
"end_time": 4154.019,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4124.138,
"text": " through Jesus Christ. And so Christ brought into the world a new eschaton, a new way of seeing God, a way in which our humanity is not burned up. So it took me half a lifetime to gain whatever clarity I have on this subject, and"
},
{
"end_time": 4183.114,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4154.923,
"text": " I was tremendously relieved when it occurred to me, when I finally discovered that the Christian is not the Vedic. Schuon was absolutely wrong. I don't want to talk about any other religions. There are two religions that deeply interest me, the Vedic and the Christian. And I realized that I have no doubt about"
},
{
"end_time": 4213.695,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4184.07,
"text": " These are antipodal eskata. The only life eternal that is possible is a, quote, seeing of God. There's no other eternity that is remotely possible. But the point is, there are two ways of, quote, seeing God. The direct way, which is the Vedic, and it's a bona fide way. I mean, the"
},
{
"end_time": 4241.493,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4214.531,
"text": " Perfection of the Vedic path is rare, but I think in India there has hardly been a generation without such events occurring. So it's a real thing and it's still going on even today, I'm sure. But with the birth of Christ,"
},
{
"end_time": 4270.384,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4242.09,
"text": " or more accurately, if you will, with his resurrection, a new religion came into the world, and this is Christianity. It offers us a life eternal as human beings. Our humanity becomes, in a certain sense, deified through union with Christ, as that means with his mystical body."
},
{
"end_time": 4300.981,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4272.21,
"text": " So, this is all I know about religion. As I said, I wrote this last book about this subject. The main purpose was to combat this perennialist philosophy, which I think it's correct to say that as things stand now,"
},
{
"end_time": 4330.367,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4301.783,
"text": " The most intellectual people all over the world are perennialists. If you talk to people of high intellectual achievement, and supposing that they have been interested in the subject of religion, you will find in all likelihood that they are perennialists,"
},
{
"end_time": 4354.514,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4330.896,
"text": " that they believe in the so-called transcendent unity of religions, which is a completely heretical notion. Why do you call the AvEternal AvEternal instead of Eternal? Well, because the idea of the tripartite cosmos in which"
},
{
"end_time": 4383.626,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4355.282,
"text": " The highest level is beyond space and time. This is the crux of the matter. Well, this is a kind of eternity, but it needs to be distinguished from the eternity of religion, the eternity of, for example, the eternity which the Christian speaks of when he says that"
},
{
"end_time": 4408.814,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4384.224,
"text": " God is eternal, heaven is eternal. So eternity in that sense is more than the if eternity, because actually one of the crucial ways in which Christianity differs from"
},
{
"end_time": 4438.268,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4409.565,
"text": " the Vedic teaching is that the Vedic teaching regards the cosmos as cyclic. It goes on and on like a sine curve that has no beginning and no end. And the Christian cosmology is radically different"
},
{
"end_time": 4466.681,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4438.882,
"text": " because it is integral to the Christian tradition that at the second coming of Christ, which no man knows the day and the hour, the cosmos in its entirety will be destroyed. So the difference between the Vedic outlook and the Christian is that in the Vedic outlook"
},
{
"end_time": 4495.623,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4467.159,
"text": " The cosmos has no end in both senses, in the sense of a purpose and end in the sense of a termination. So in the Vedic way of looking at the cosmos there is neither a purpose, because the only answer the Vedic"
},
{
"end_time": 4522.688,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4496.749,
"text": " a guru could give to the question what is the purpose of the cosmos based on. The Vedic spiritual practice tries essentially to get out of this cosmos because the Vedic wisdom says this is not God, this is not reality and"
},
{
"end_time": 4550.964,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4523.234,
"text": " The purpose of life is to gain union with God. So you see, in this Vedic philosophy, the cosmos plays no role. The cosmos has no purpose. And also ipsa facta, if you will, it has no ending either. In the Vedic"
},
{
"end_time": 4572.312,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4551.254,
"text": " tradition the cosmos is without beginning and without end and finally the Vedic masters will tell you that in fact it's unreal. When you see a snake in the rope"
},
{
"end_time": 4599.531,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4573.114,
"text": " How can you, why should you ask, where does this snake come from? Why is it there? And so forth. Save yourself the trouble and realize that there is no snake. This is the Vedic approach. It's quite different from the Christian. The Christian says A, yes, the cosmos has its reality."
},
{
"end_time": 4626.51,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4600.111,
"text": " It was put there by God, and it was put there for a purpose. It's like a school. A school is there to teach the students, and once that is done, the school has no more purpose. If there were only one student in the world and one school, as soon as this student graduates,"
},
{
"end_time": 4655.196,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4626.971,
"text": " You don't need the school anymore. So, therefore, in the Christian religion, the cosmos itself will come to an end. It will end when it has fulfilled its purpose. And all of this, you see, is radically different from the Vedic way of looking at things. I have a question now from Matt Segal, who you spoke to on his channel called Footnotes to Plato."
},
{
"end_time": 4686.084,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4656.305,
"text": " Oh yes, he is the process theology, the white-head scholar. Right, right, so this question is in line with that thinking. If God does not evolve or change in any relation to actual history or the world, then how are we to understand said history, including our own lives, as anything other than an illusory falling away from and forgetting of what is real? Well, I think"
},
{
"end_time": 4714.804,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4686.357,
"text": " The premise of what Matt Siegel is saying here is something that is more in line with the Vedic than with the Christian way of thinking. So I think, in essence, I have answered this very question precisely by what I said just now."
},
{
"end_time": 4737.09,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4715.93,
"text": " In explaining the difference between the Vedic way of looking at the cosmos and the Christian, I think that does answer the question. From the Vedic point of view, the question is absolutely justified. The Christian point of view is different."
},
{
"end_time": 4767.022,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4737.381,
"text": " Some atheists will say, hey, this is real, so we see this, but regardless we have a world that exists, a world that is real. And then they ask, well, is God real? And it sounds like from what you were saying earlier, we have it backward. God is way more real. Absolutely, that is the whole point. God is more than real as we understand and are capable of understanding reality. This is why"
},
{
"end_time": 4793.695,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4767.483,
"text": " Religion, true religion, is simply above what we nowadays call philosophy or what we nowadays call science. If we cannot go beyond that level, we don't really know what religion is all about."
},
{
"end_time": 4821.869,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4794.07,
"text": " And whatever we think it is and whatever we call it in our conversation, it is all like smoke. It isn't there. Goethe, Schall und Rauch. Sound and smoke. This is why most, so to speak, discussion or arguments about religion are completely pointless and lead nowhere."
},
{
"end_time": 4851.783,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4822.227,
"text": " because even to talk about religion sensibly, one needs to, in a sense, avail oneself of the tradition. If there were no Vedas and there were no Gospels or the New Testament, there would be no religion. The word would mean nothing and whatever people talk would be just talk."
},
{
"end_time": 4881.391,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4852.261,
"text": " In a sense one might say that you need to believe in order to believe. It sounds paradoxical and incidentally Christ himself has said as much when he said he who has to him shall be given and he who has not from him shall be taken away I think the little that he has but he who has to him shall be given"
},
{
"end_time": 4911.715,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4881.937,
"text": " In other words, on the level of the ordinary atheists, such as you find wherever you look almost in our civilization, these people can neither affirm religion or deny it. The point is, the idea of religion is something that is not in them. So it doesn't matter whether they say, I believe this or I don't believe this, because it's just talk."
},
{
"end_time": 4941.374,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4912.244,
"text": " It's just talk. He who has, to him shall be given. Which means that in a certain sense, there must be a religious spark in us. If there is not, we cannot enter there. So of course this raises a problem, obviously. Where does this religious spark come from?"
},
{
"end_time": 4969.241,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4941.834,
"text": " Do some people have it, other people not? If they don't have it, they're not responsible for not being religious and so on. You can go and speak about this and think about it from now to eternity. It's just sound. He who has to him shall be given. And this is a mystery we cannot understand. Why does it"
},
{
"end_time": 4998.131,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4969.445,
"text": " happened that some have and some obviously do not. I don't know. This is God knows. This is not anything that I based upon the worldly understanding that I may have. I have a PhD in this and that. Okay, but that's beyond all that. This is why the Christian needs to follow the words of Christ"
},
{
"end_time": 5023.848,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4999.428,
"text": " Almost blindly, we can't understand it, we can't justify it. But our situation is this, we are like somebody swimming in the middle of an ocean, sharks all around. We don't know when one of them is going to come and swallow us up. And someone comes and throws you a rope and says, come aboard."
},
{
"end_time": 5052.773,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 5024.411,
"text": " You will be healed and warmed and fed and taken to your home. And you say, well, that sounds very well, but where do you come from? Where's the boat? Where are you going to take us? Well, chances are good the sharks are going to eat you up before you ever get half through this. This sounds like the parable of the poison arrow of Buddha."
},
{
"end_time": 5082.073,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 5053.302,
"text": " Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I had forgotten about that. Yeah. So this is really our situation. And it's a mystery. I mean, look at all the people, millions and millions of people. And actually, in today's Western world, only a minority, A, believe in God, B, want to follow God,"
},
{
"end_time": 5110.213,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5082.483,
"text": " And three, do follow God to a certain degree. Only a handful. It's so strange. So this is another question. I don't know the answer to that. And I only know one thing. That's not my business. My business is to follow Christ as well as I am able"
},
{
"end_time": 5133.217,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5110.742,
"text": " based upon his teaching and with the help of his authentic church. That's all I need to do. That's all I can understand. Will God always catch us when we fall? That's a very difficult question because if you answer yes,"
},
{
"end_time": 5163.797,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5134.309,
"text": " It sounds like nihilism, because it doesn't matter what you do, you'll be safe, so... Yeah, you can't, as a Christian, you cannot say yes, because we know that damnation is a real thing. In other words, religion, true religion, is not without risk. Have you heard this phrase, hell is a door locked from the inside?"
},
{
"end_time": 5194.462,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5164.991,
"text": " It means that at any point you have the opportunity to get out. I cannot affirm that. I can neither affirm nor deny it. I don't see anywhere in scripture that Christ has given us an instruction based upon which this can be affirmed. And if you take seriously what the saints have had to say,"
},
{
"end_time": 5221.903,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5195.52,
"text": " I think you can find instances where testimony has been given contrary to this position. It would be very nice, but you know, the path to God is not without danger. We're talking about realities here, not pipe dreams."
},
{
"end_time": 5240.725,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5222.619,
"text": " And so it's like climbing a mountain. Yes, you may reach the summit, but even within a few feet of the summit, you can lose your footing and fall to your death. There is risk."
},
{
"end_time": 5269.497,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5241.647,
"text": " It's real. A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's 499 Chicken Pot Pie. Warm, flaky, with savory sauce and vegetables. It's a tender chicken-filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls. Whatever that means. The Colonel lived so we could chicken. KFC's Chicken Pot Pie. The best 499 you'll spend this season."
},
{
"end_time": 5297.193,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5269.497,
"text": " Do you believe in free will? Oh, definitely. If there were no free will, there could be no religion. In other words, to attain union with God, to attain salvation, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, there is not only a cost, there is a risk."
},
{
"end_time": 5326.459,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5299.684,
"text": " God has the power to give us all things, but there is one thing that he cannot simply give us. I need not tell you what that is. He cannot give us salvation just, here it is, my child, no. This is the one and only thing that God cannot do."
},
{
"end_time": 5357.056,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5327.21,
"text": " And incidentally, I forget who it was, some great Christian saint made this point, I didn't invent that. Oh, I remember where I read this, there's a wonderful book written by an Eastern Orthodox priest, Losky, the last name of his was Losky, and his books are beautiful, I've read them with great, great"
},
{
"end_time": 5386.578,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5357.449,
"text": " benefit and someway explains that there is one thing and one thing only that God cannot do. It takes one will, this is what he says and I thought it was beautiful, he says it takes one will to create but it takes two wills to give salvation. This is the whole thing."
},
{
"end_time": 5403.882,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5386.869,
"text": " The one thing God cannot do, he cannot simply give one of his creatures salvation, because salvation is so great that you have to will it to."
},
{
"end_time": 5434.497,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5404.616,
"text": " How does free will comport with knowing that there's a timeless realm so that you can see all of what occurs through time but then if we exist as a moment in time and we're trying to plan something for the future and we have free will, how do we have free will when from another perspective all our choices have been made or all of it can be seen? Well, I think there's only one answer to that question and that is that free will pertains to our present state"
},
{
"end_time": 5464.855,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5435.247,
"text": " which is a state of half-knowing. Once we attain enlightenment, there's no question of free will. Sorry, enlightenment is the same as salvation or is that different? Well, I think nothing short of salvation would put you into that state where there's no more free will. There's no more free will because there's no more will in our sense of the term."
},
{
"end_time": 5495.589,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5466.288,
"text": " Love is what makes things real. What do you make of that quote? Well, I think it is based upon one of the deepest teachings of Christ. Saint John the Evangelist in his, I forget what it is called, his letters"
},
{
"end_time": 5525.93,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5496.425,
"text": " not the gospel but his letters he says deus caritas est God is love so love in the authentic sense that we're using the term now is itself divine it is God it's not something that God makes something that God creates well"
},
{
"end_time": 5553.558,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5526.271,
"text": " There is love in that sense too, but love in its highest purest sense is inseparable from God. What's your disagreement with the Gnostics? Well, I take it that you use the term Gnostic in its true historical sense. So Gnosticism"
},
{
"end_time": 5578.814,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5554.326,
"text": " was so to speak in antiquity the counter religion to christ so there were nasty gurus all over the ancient world they saw themselves as christian though correct or no well i don't know their psychology and i don't even want to delve into it"
},
{
"end_time": 5605.862,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5580.043,
"text": " There are certain characteristics of Gnosticism that one needs to bear in mind. First of all, they were antagonists to the death of Christianity. They despised Christianity, whether they manifested that or didn't. That was integral."
},
{
"end_time": 5635.367,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5606.288,
"text": " In other words, if you will, they belonged to Satan. They were Satan's men. And secondly, they had an idea of a flight into higher worlds. There were all kinds of teachings and all kinds of methods of attaining that higher flight. And so,"
},
{
"end_time": 5665.606,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5635.93,
"text": " The idea was that the summum bonum of life is to get out of this world. They rejected it as utterly evil and in every way disgusting, revolting, and the thing to do is to leave it, get out of here."
},
{
"end_time": 5696.459,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5666.903,
"text": " Actually, the way they conceived their higher world, their summum bonum, is really secondary. The important thing about the Gnostics is that everything pertaining to this world and all the good things, they regarded as the very opposite they had discussed for it. For example,"
},
{
"end_time": 5725.452,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5697.551,
"text": " The agnostic is a natural, what is the word, he likes to dishonor everything that the followers of God regard as sacred. So he would love to take, say, a holy Bible and throw it into the sewers."
},
{
"end_time": 5752.125,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5726.596,
"text": " He wants to destroy and to him everything here in this world is evil and he has a sort of a dream castle in the sky which is his goal, his heaven, his eschaton. That's in a few words the main characteristic"
},
{
"end_time": 5780.776,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5752.534,
"text": " of the ancient Gnostics. They came in all different colors and guises, and what I have said is, so to speak, the common denominator. They differed very, in fact one of the early Christians said, every day every one of them invents something new. So"
},
{
"end_time": 5808.882,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5781.305,
"text": " You can't define Gnosticism by giving it, so to speak, a credo, because they had all different beliefs and theories. The common denominator, which is the only way of defining them, was this idea that everything here, everything that we normally hold as sacred or beautiful or holy, is somehow trash."
},
{
"end_time": 5834.855,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5810.111,
"text": " Did they follow other books of the Bible that we don't consider canon? I don't know that much about it. For example, I've read the so-called unauthoritative"
},
{
"end_time": 5864.735,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5835.469,
"text": " Gospels, the Gospel. Thomas, Mary. Yes, I've read some of these. What do you make of them? You don't like them? Well, there are good things in it, but there's quite a bit that you can learn from it. But the mere fact that the Church Fathers have not included this in the official teachings of our Lord,"
},
{
"end_time": 5893.08,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5867.551,
"text": " makes me instinctively keep away from it. Why read something that does not have the imprimatur of Christianity when we have these wonderful books that does carry the imprimatur? So firstly we have scripture, holy scripture, the Old and New Testament, and secondly we have the writings of"
},
{
"end_time": 5917.244,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5893.37,
"text": " of the saintly teachers of the faith. We have St. Augustine, we have St. Maximus the Confessor. They have boundless literature of high rank. Of course, scripture is one thing, everything else is another. This division is absolute."
},
{
"end_time": 5947.21,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5917.602,
"text": " But the point I'm trying to make, we have such wonderful scripture, why read something that is in any way questionable, like the Gospel of Thomas? Because, who knows, there may be innuendos there that are not really orthodox. And there's no need also to go beyond scripture and"
},
{
"end_time": 5970.265,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5947.568,
"text": " improved writing of the saints and the recognized teachers of the church. I'm sorry, we were talking about the Gnostics, right? So what I want to say now is this. It turns out that"
},
{
"end_time": 5999.718,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5971.067,
"text": " with the end of antiquity, the middle ages and then the beginning of the modern age. A very interesting thing happened. Gnosticism morphed, it changed its outer form and turned into what I call neo-gnosticism. And the difference between"
},
{
"end_time": 6026.954,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 6000.299,
"text": " The ancient Gnosticism and the neo-Gnosticism is this. I said that an integral part of Gnosticism is the idea of this journey into higher worlds. The problem that the Gnostics face with the dawn of the modern age is that we no longer accept"
},
{
"end_time": 6052.21,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 6027.602,
"text": " any higher worlds. So the problem was very, very drastic. How can you fly into higher worlds when there are no more higher worlds to fly into? This was the problem. And by golly, they solved it. And do you know how they solved it?"
},
{
"end_time": 6081.596,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 6052.517,
"text": " It's really interesting and ingenious. This all comes from Satan and Satan is very ingenious. No question about that. So the neo-gnostic way of solving this problem that there are no more higher worlds to fly into is very simple. They said the higher world is futuristic."
},
{
"end_time": 6109.735,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 6082.398,
"text": " In other words, this world itself is being turned into the higher world. So the higher world became futuristic. Like worshipping technology or thinking that... Yes, exactly. And as a matter of fact, who is the neo-Gnostic prophet of modern times? Theodosia. There's no question about it."
},
{
"end_time": 6134.889,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 6110.879,
"text": " Teer Desharda is, so to speak, the great Gnostic guru of the present age. This is also why he had tremendous power, because the devil has power. Let no one be in doubt about that. He has great power. In fact, the power of Satan is so great"
},
{
"end_time": 6165.128,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6135.384,
"text": " that unless we, we humans, avail ourselves of the sacred means given to us by God, we have no chance of withstanding that power. This is a quote from David Bohm. In the ontological theory, wholeness manifests from a notion of non-locality, a notion that is seemingly denied by relativity. Why were David Bohm's observations profound?"
},
{
"end_time": 6196.186,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6167.261,
"text": " Well, he was certainly right that there is a wholeness in the cosmos which manifests as non-locality. And in fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 6226.544,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6196.732,
"text": " The last Nobel Prize of physics, the 2022 Nobel Prize of physics, as you know, was awarded to three physicists who conducted crucial experiments, I think in the 80s, to determine which of the two physical theories is right, quantum theory or relativity."
},
{
"end_time": 6256.254,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6227.858,
"text": " The recognition, which has been made long ago, but people are very reluctant to own up to it, the recognition is that relativity theory and quantum theory cannot both be true. And it was an experiment to determine which of the two"
},
{
"end_time": 6279.343,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6257.193,
"text": " is true was in fact conceived by Einstein himself and it hinges upon what is nowadays called Bell's inequality and in the eighties I think it was three experimenters did the experiment"
},
{
"end_time": 6304.957,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6279.77,
"text": " and the results clearly and definitively stand on the side of quantum theory. And to me it is a rather interesting phenomenon, I would say it's a sociological phenomenon, that logically speaking these experiments based upon an idea"
},
{
"end_time": 6334.36,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6305.145,
"text": " Going back to Einstein himself, of course Einstein proposed that experiment because he thought it would vindicate relativity versus quantum theory. Einstein was very critical of quantum theory. He spoke ironically what he called Spukhafte Fernwirkung, spooky action at a distance,"
},
{
"end_time": 6363.933,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6334.94,
"text": " which he never accepted, because actually it contradicts relativity theory. And lo and behold, these experiments, the chief name involved in these experiments is the Frenchman Alain... Alain? Alain, yeah. Anyhow, the experiments clearly, unequivocally"
},
{
"end_time": 6391.152,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6364.48,
"text": " came out on the side of quantum theory versus relativity. And to me this is so interesting. There is a kind of mystery about Einstein and the sign in physics. He's almost like a god and we continue to believe in his theory even after it's been disproved and after Nobel Prize has endorsed this disproof."
},
{
"end_time": 6419.428,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6391.766,
"text": " It's a very strange phenomenon. We could talk about this another day. A very interesting story there. I regard it as a kind of a mystery, something that I don't understand. If I were young, I would love to spend a few years digging into this. There is something there that would be very interesting to know. Anyhow, relativity theory has been disproved."
},
{
"end_time": 6448.148,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6419.821,
"text": " It is not a valid theory, but somehow nobody wants to say these words. It is something like an elephant in the room. Nobody wants to admit it. So I don't know the answer to this, but it's an interesting question. And let me say in this connection, because it is certainly very"
},
{
"end_time": 6476.817,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6449.087,
"text": " Very prevalent, very pertinent I mean. I've always been interested in Platonism and I've thought about it a lot in my life and in recent times I have demonstrated that Platonism entails a tripartite division of the cosmos"
},
{
"end_time": 6507.244,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6477.739,
"text": " The highest is beyond space and time, this is the aveternal realm, that's what I call avetern. Before we continue to be clear, aveternal is a subset of eternal or distinct from? It's distinct from, because the point is this, aveternity and eternity are not the same thing, and the distinction goes back to Saint Thomas Aquinas. I don't know of anyone else who's made that distinction,"
},
{
"end_time": 6535.862,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6507.483,
"text": " But the distinction is this, that Ave Eternity pertains to the cosmos. It is the highest of three ontological strata, characterized by the fact that it is subject neither to space nor to time. And what is the difference between Ave Eternity and Eternity?"
},
{
"end_time": 6561.561,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6536.954,
"text": " Well, let me point out that according to Christianity, the cosmos itself will cease at the second coming of Christ. It is there for a purpose, and when that purpose in God's time is achieved, the cosmos will be no more. This is what Christianity calls the Parousia, the second coming of Christ."
},
{
"end_time": 6584.07,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6562.79,
"text": " And if eternity and aviternity were the same, then when the cosmos disappears, God and all else would disappear too, which of course is absurd. And this is why aviternity and eternity are not the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 6610.828,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6584.889,
"text": " I still don't understand. So eternity means timelessness or infinite temporal duration? Which one? Is it eternity means you exist forever or it means you're distinct from time? Eternity, the adjective eternal can apply to any reality which is not subject to time."
},
{
"end_time": 6640.981,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6612.381,
"text": " But eternity, I hope I didn't misspeak, what I wanted to say is that eternity applies to any state not subject to time nor space. But yes, no space either. And the reason that eternity is not the same as eternity is because according to Christianity"
},
{
"end_time": 6671.971,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6642.21,
"text": " The universe, the world, the creation itself will cease at the second coming of Christ. This is a mystery of what Christianity calls the parousia. And incidentally, as you can imagine, this is a tough nut for the contemporary theologian influenced by our contemporary science."
},
{
"end_time": 6702.654,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6673.012,
"text": " because science cannot conceive of such a thing and implicitly denies the Perusia. But the teaching of the Perusa is integral to the teaching of Christianity. Our Lord speaks of it very explicitly and he says that this Perusia will come, but he says that"
},
{
"end_time": 6722.551,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6703.951,
"text": " The day and the time is known only to my father. So it's a mystery. We have no idea when this Parousia will come, but we have it on the authority of Christ himself and the church that it will come."
},
{
"end_time": 6751.954,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6723.387,
"text": " So this is the fundamental difference of outlook between the Vedic cosmology and the Christian. The Vedic cosmology regards the cosmos as perfectly. So the Vedic is eternal? No, it is not. In fact the Vedic has no concept of eternity because it does not distinguish between"
},
{
"end_time": 6782.705,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6754.258,
"text": " The eternity of its cycles, its manifestation and non-manifestation, they alternate, but they alternate going back to infinity and forward into an infinite future. So the Vedic cosmology is"
},
{
"end_time": 6811.374,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6783.251,
"text": " totally cyclic. You can think of it as a sine curve which goes to negative infinity and to positive infinity. So there is an eternal recurrence of manifestation and non-manifestation. Non-manifestation I think they call pralaya. So this is a Vedic"
},
{
"end_time": 6839.94,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6811.8,
"text": " the Vedic cosmology and the Christian cosmology differs radically because the essential point of the Christian cosmology is that time itself will cease. The cosmos will cease. The cosmos is there only for a certain stretch of time. It came into being and it will cease to exist."
},
{
"end_time": 6870.35,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6840.691,
"text": " when christ will fully manifest himself at the second coming and you know it makes tremendous amount of sense if you think about it long enough you realize that from a christian point of vantage it cannot be otherwise because when christ manifests himself in the fullness of his divinity it's like turning on an infinite light"
},
{
"end_time": 6900.623,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6871.493,
"text": " The darkness will cease. The polarity of day and night and all these things will cease. When Christ manifests himself in his full divinity, it's like an atom bomb. All these little things that we know now will disappear. And incidentally, in the modern Catholic world,"
},
{
"end_time": 6927.688,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6901.118,
"text": " top theologians parted company with orthodoxy over this issue because they are very scientistic in their outlook. They have more faith in our scientists evidently than in God himself and so the idea of the parousia is something they could not accept. There's a famous"
},
{
"end_time": 6957.278,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6928.234,
"text": " Catholic theologian, I forget his name, is just as well because he was a heretic. He did not accept the idea of the Parousia and he had the incredible, I don't know, call it chutzpah, to regard that Christ himself was mistaken in certain of his teachings, namely the teachings"
},
{
"end_time": 6982.739,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6957.654,
"text": " which deny the eternity of the world, the Perusio. So I think the popes at the time were absolutely culpable for not excommunic... Hans Kuhn was the name of the theologian, German theologian who"
},
{
"end_time": 7010.93,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6983.183,
"text": " had the audacity to teach that even Christ was not fully, in his human form at least, was not fully enlightened because of this teaching of the parousia which Hans Küng denied on the grounds of quote-unquote science and I regard it as terrible on the part of the popes whoever was"
},
{
"end_time": 7037.329,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 7011.22,
"text": " in power at that time, not to excommunicate Hans Küng, because Hans Küng's denial of the Perusia is heresy. Our Lord himself declared this in unequivocal terms, and you're not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination if you do not fully accept"
},
{
"end_time": 7056.527,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 7037.944,
"text": " The words of Christ as they have come down in scripture. Once you start playing loose and like that with theologies all over, this is why the Catholic Church today is in deep, deep problem."
},
{
"end_time": 7086.937,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 7057.346,
"text": " Because it should have excommunicated people like Hans Küng, who were clear heretics, and it didn't. In fact, he retained all his priestly powers and he was a member of the new external church. That's a catastrophe. When Christ comes for the second time, will the Ave eternal be gone as well and the intermediary?"
},
{
"end_time": 7117.261,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 7088.882,
"text": " Yes, the second coming of Christ will terminate the cosmos as we know it. So that's the distinction between the eternal and the avi-eternal. The avi-eternal is one that can be blown out. Yeah. Saint Thomas Aquinas defined avi-eternity as"
},
{
"end_time": 7147.927,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 7118.729,
"text": " the absence of time with the proviso that time can be added onto it. This was really his way of teaching the tripartite nature of the cosmos. You have the avid eternal realm, but time can be added onto it, which means that below the avid eternal"
},
{
"end_time": 7172.79,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 7148.319,
"text": " You have the intermediary, where there is time only, and the corporeal. And incidentally, let me point out this to you, which I find really fascinating, namely, as soon as I gained what I consider clarity,"
},
{
"end_time": 7195.111,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 7173.524,
"text": " regarding the tripartite cosmos, so the existence of an intermediary level subject to time but not to space, I realized that this fact, which is nothing more than Platonist cosmology and also Vedic cosmology, they're one and the same."
},
{
"end_time": 7218.507,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 7195.265,
"text": " Platonist cosmology and the Vedic cosmology are one and the same. And integral to this cosmology is the existence of the intermediary realm, which is a realm of time alone. And the mere existence of such a time only"
},
{
"end_time": 7248.456,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 7219.104,
"text": " stratum disproves all of Einsteinian physics at one stroke. It's gone. So, in a Vedic or Platonist cosmology, there can be no relativistic physics. Does the will exist only in the intermediary realm? Well, I would rephrase the question"
},
{
"end_time": 7277.363,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7248.865,
"text": " Or rather, the question is not well posed, because these three realms are not three separate realms. I mean, the cosmos is tripartite, which doesn't mean that there are three... When I speak of three levels, this is just a way of"
},
{
"end_time": 7304.36,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7277.773,
"text": " communicating something that cannot be communicated in any other way. The point is that the three levels of the cosmos constitute one irreducible wholeness in its threefold nature. And this is really easy to understand because man"
},
{
"end_time": 7331.578,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7306.049,
"text": " You and I and every human being is also tripartite in exactly the same sense. We too are made of three levels. In the traditional terminology this is corpus, anima, spiritus. And clearly spiritus is the same as the"
},
{
"end_time": 7355.998,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7332.125,
"text": " If eternal realms, spiritus is beyond time, the psychic realm is subject to time but not to space, and our corporeal realm is obviously corporeal, so it's subject clearly to time and space."
},
{
"end_time": 7386.8,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7357.534,
"text": " We mustn't think, and obviously we are one thing, we are one organism. There are not three, and I don't have three parts. You won't find an avid eternal Wolfgang Smith and a corporeal Wolfgang Smith. Wolfgang Smith as a person is composed of these three levels, but these three levels are one organism."
},
{
"end_time": 7416.937,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7389.411,
"text": " Incidentally, this is, so to speak, the fundamental fact about the Platonist cosmology, and this fundamental fact throws a new light on everything. And it has tremendous scientific implications, so much so that you cannot have any kind of deeper science"
},
{
"end_time": 7446.732,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7418.046,
"text": " that doesn't recognize this tripartite nature. So obviously the physicist knows nothing about it, cannot know anything about it, because the very conceptions needed to define the tripartite cosmos or the tripartite anthropos entail ontological ideas which cannot, which are incomprehensible to the physicist,"
},
{
"end_time": 7467.892,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7447.278,
"text": " Because the physicist deals only with quantitative realities, something that can therefore be described say in a differential equation. You can't write a differential equation for spiritus, you can't write a differential equation for"
},
{
"end_time": 7492.602,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7468.251,
"text": " the psychic realm, and actually you can't write the differential equation for the corporeal world either, because strictly speaking the physicist, qua-physicist knows nothing about the corporeal world, nada, nothing, because you cannot have a corporeal world consisting only of quantity,"
},
{
"end_time": 7520.145,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7495.162,
"text": " Doesn't matter how you want, what kind of quantity, whether you want to talk about a differentiable manifold, doesn't matter. Mathematics is one thing and the corporeal world is not a mathematical entity. So as soon as you have even a little glimmering of the Platonist cosmology, you see how utterly blind"
},
{
"end_time": 7549.718,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7520.538,
"text": " our modern intellectuals are. Whether they are actually scientists capable of working with differential equations is secondary. The point is that practically every intellectual in our day has been metaphysically formed on the basis of mathematical physics. And that means that he is incapable of understanding even the first thing about reality."
},
{
"end_time": 7567.363,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7550.435,
"text": " Once you see it, you see the tragedy of it. It's a terrible, terrible tragedy. We think that we know more than people ever knew, when in fact, strictly speaking, we know nothing. I would really call it nothing."
},
{
"end_time": 7596.084,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7567.995,
"text": " because these physical models, and it doesn't matter what kind of models, it can be a model with infinite dimensional spaces, it doesn't matter. The point is you're doing mathematics, you're doing differential equations, and the discoveries that you make are the kind that can then in principle be tested by a physical experiment."
},
{
"end_time": 7613.712,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7596.51,
"text": " Wonderful. It's very interesting. I myself was very fascinated by this. But the point is, it tells you nothing about the real world in its integrality. And worse than that, it makes you believe"
},
{
"end_time": 7644.172,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7614.224,
"text": " That there is nothing other. Right, so on that note, there's a physicist named Brian Green. He was speaking a few years ago or so. And he was saying, free will doesn't exist. Why? Well, show me where it is. Because the physics gives rise to chemistry, which gives rise to the cellular, which gives rise to your brain, and so on. So show me. If you're going to say something exists, point to it. Where is physics failing? Well, this sheer nonsense. I mean, it is sad."
},
{
"end_time": 7674.309,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7644.855,
"text": " that a human being, presumable with good intentions, good intelligence, a lot of education, is capable of speaking such utter nonsense. Because, look at this table. No physicist has ever understood or will ever understand, A, that this table is brown, and B, that you and I and every other normal human being can see it."
},
{
"end_time": 7699.599,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7676.766,
"text": " And in a sense you can say that our physicists are the most ignorant people in the whole world, because every child knows that this table is a table, every child knows that this is hard and brown and so on. And incidentally in this connection I want to say something very, very important."
},
{
"end_time": 7729.855,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7701.732,
"text": " For centuries, ever since the 17th century when our civilization went off the rails, it has been assumed that visual perception is a matter of light hitting the retina, setting up currents going into the cortex of the brain, etc., etc. There are 20 or 21"
},
{
"end_time": 7756.869,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7731.032,
"text": " visual centers in the brain and whole libraries have been filled with papers and books describing the results of this experimental work, which is very interesting. The trouble is that it tells you nothing about how we actually perceive. And Sir Francis Crick, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7787.619,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7757.637,
"text": " One of the discoverers of DNA, he then became very fascinated in this theory of visual perception, and at the end of his studies he writes, we see how the brain takes a picture apart, we do not yet see how the brain puts the picture together. And the first"
},
{
"end_time": 7813.66,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7787.841,
"text": " Half of what he said is obviously true. We do know a lot about what happens in these neuronal currents emanating from the retina when it is stimulated. But the whole point is that the brain does not put the picture together again. That is sheer rubbish, sheer nonsense."
},
{
"end_time": 7841.8,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7814.548,
"text": " Anybody who is not deformed in his thinking would never be stupid enough to say such a thing. The brain takes a picture apart, but it does not put the picture back together again. It cannot. And the fact of the matter is that what we see is not inside our head. It's outside. As every five-year-old child"
},
{
"end_time": 7866.271,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7842.637,
"text": " has known ever since the world began. This table is not in my brain. If it were, you'd have to ask, in which of the 21 centers? The answer is it's not. And so modern cognitive psychology refers to this as a binding problem."
},
{
"end_time": 7893.439,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7867.329,
"text": " So it studies visual perception, incredible. I mean, in its own field it's amazing how they can do it. It's very remarkable and very impressive. The only problem is that it has told us nothing about how we perceive and it has not rectified the fact that known to every child that isn't brain dead, namely that"
},
{
"end_time": 7919.667,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7894.616,
"text": " Normally we perceive external things and so my work in cosmology has been tremendously enriched when I discovered somewhere along the line it came rather late after I had written the quantum enigma which was the first essential step I took"
},
{
"end_time": 7949.616,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7920.947,
"text": " There was an American cognitive psychologist named James Gibson and he discovered early in his career, he had a PhD from Princeton and he was a professor at Cornell University and in 1941 he discovered that the retinal image theory of visual perception cannot be true."
},
{
"end_time": 7978.131,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7951.254,
"text": " If we had infinite time we could talk about that, but let's not. He gave a rigorous proof of the fact that the visual image theory is fundamentally false. And so then he spent about 13 years as an empiricist. He was not a philosopher, he was not a mathematician, he was an empirical"
},
{
"end_time": 8006.783,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7979.497,
"text": " a cognitive psychologist and on sound empirical basis research that lasted close to thirty years he discovered a theory of visual perception which he calls the ecological theory of visual perception because it turns out"
},
{
"end_time": 8036.578,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 8007.278,
"text": " that what we visually perceive is not inside the head, it's outside, as every child would have told you. And when I discovered Gibson, I was so happy because what I have to say really hinges upon the fact"
},
{
"end_time": 8066.186,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 8036.954,
"text": " that we do perceive the external world. And as soon as you recognize that, and as I say, every five-year-old child knows more than the people at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies, because a normal human being knows that we see the world. And so the ontological implications of that are incredible. Because at one stroke,"
},
{
"end_time": 8087.056,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 8066.664,
"text": " This tells us that what our wisest people speak is utter nonsense. As soon as you realize that the table is brown, you realize that physics is incapable of even conceiving the corporeal world in which we live."
},
{
"end_time": 8116.664,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 8088.848,
"text": " What they are dealing with is an abstraction, which in fact it takes a lot of college study and research etc. and intelligence to understand even that abstraction. But this abstraction is what I call the physical universe and it is not the same as the corporeal world"
},
{
"end_time": 8146.391,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 8117.039,
"text": " which means that in a sense it doesn't exist. One could lecture, but let me just say in reality it doesn't exist. But the interesting thing is that from a Platonist point of view, in terms of this tripartite cosmos, you can understand physics in an entirely new key."
},
{
"end_time": 8169.241,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 8147.91,
"text": " which is in a sense a very opposite way of seeing physics from what our present-day gurus have to offer. So there is a Vedic, Platonist way of understanding physics and this is what I presented in my last book."
},
{
"end_time": 8194.599,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 8170.026,
"text": " And the amazing thing is that I really believe that in the first 38 pages of the book, I have answered the big questions about physics. What is the physical world? And the main"
},
{
"end_time": 8220.469,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 8195.128,
"text": " The problem of physics today is to understand quantum mechanics and what differentiates quantum mechanics from classical physics. And how can we understand ontologically that physics breaks into these two different parts? In one part you have"
},
{
"end_time": 8246.903,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 8221.271,
"text": " Description A, in the other part we have description B. How do these things fit together? Are there two worlds and so forth? Well, I think Feynman said really a very important thing when he said no one understands quantum theory. I think this is true. No one does and no one can understand quantum theory."
},
{
"end_time": 8275.555,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 8247.927,
"text": " without reference to the true ontology, which call it Vedic, call it Platonist, is one of the same. And that is a true ontology. It's very simple. In a sense, every child can understand it. And once you grasp the Platonist ontology, you can understand quantum mechanics. It comes out naturally."
},
{
"end_time": 8305.23,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 8276.357,
"text": " On ontological grounds you can see that physics breaks into these two parts, because actually the reason is that there are two ways of doing physics. There is the classical way, which is subcorporeal. I will assume that we know that, and so from an ontological"
},
{
"end_time": 8336.357,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 8306.613,
"text": " perspective there are two kinds of physics because you can do classical physics which is sub corporeal and you can do quantum theory which is trans corporeal and it follows from the platonist ontology that in sub corporeal physics we're dealing with objects that possess being and in trans corporeal physics"
},
{
"end_time": 8366.254,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8336.749,
"text": " We deal with objects that do not possess being, and the point is that being comes from the ever eternal plane. It doesn't come from below, from some quirky realm of quantum particles, this is all nonsense. Our being comes from the ever eternal realm, and that's why it is being, because it is an irreducible wholeness"
},
{
"end_time": 8390.759,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8366.544,
"text": " and physics cannot deal with irreducible holes, because it can only deal with holes which are sums of parts. For an irreducible hole you cannot write a differential equation, because if it were described by a differential equation, it would ipso facto be irreducible to its parts."
},
{
"end_time": 8419.957,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8391.237,
"text": " The reason you can write differential equations that mean something is because you're dealing with things that I composite. Do you think this is related to Richard Feynman's sum over paths? That is, reductionism and sum over parts, if it's related to sum over paths. And then further, if the irreducible wholeness and the issues with thinking of reality as the parts that can be summed over is related to how it's infamously difficult to make rigorous the Feynman path integral."
},
{
"end_time": 8450.009,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8421.288,
"text": " Okay, that's a wonderful question which I would like to answer in the following way. There's no question that Feynman was a genius, but his impact upon physics has been on the whole disastrous because"
},
{
"end_time": 8478.148,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8452.261,
"text": " The great physicists from the old European culture were all in varying degrees schooled in philosophy and going back to, they were somehow touched by traditions going right back to at least Aristotle."
},
{
"end_time": 8509.428,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8480.657,
"text": " Feynman comes from the New World and he was unquestionably a pragmatist. And his main contribution to physics was QED, quantum electrodynamics. And quantum electrodynamics is something that doesn't quite add up. It took a genius to think of it, there's no question about that."
},
{
"end_time": 8537.619,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8510.299,
"text": " But it isn't all there. You have this problem of infinities cropping up and I think it's called renormalization is the way you cope with that. In other words, what it really amounts to is that sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don't succeed."
},
{
"end_time": 8566.357,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8537.927,
"text": " And when you don't succeed, you renormalize and then you succeed. Now, nobody has ever given a mathematical justification for this renormalization. It's a bit of hocus pocus. And Richard Feynman was a master at making it work. But this was pragmatism and not science."
},
{
"end_time": 8594.599,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8567.773,
"text": " And there is a contemporary German physicist who's written very good books about that. And he's pointed out that Richard Feynman has had... Is it Anziger, by the way? Yes, Alexander Anziger. He's a very bright physicist. He's going to come onto the Theories of Everything channel."
},
{
"end_time": 8620.947,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8595.265,
"text": " You should note that there was a physics and consciousness explication contest for Toe. Links to all those videos are in the description. Anziker was a winner. If you ever want to speak with him, too, you're more than welcome to come on. We have been in contact and I like to be in contact. He's brilliant. But even though we agree, for example, what he has to say about Richard Feynman, I'm in perfect agreement with that."
},
{
"end_time": 8650.742,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8621.374,
"text": " I am indebted to Alexander Wunziger for helping to clarify this for me. You disagree on Einstein? We disagree completely on Einstein. He has a reverence for Einstein. Oh yes, he has a special reverence for Einstein and he believes not only that Einstein in physics is true but he somehow feels that Einstein is"
},
{
"end_time": 8670.845,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8651.084,
"text": " You were saying that Feynman brought pragmatism to physics and this was... Yeah, and some of the great"
},
{
"end_time": 8699.241,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8671.647,
"text": " Physicists from earlier times have remarked upon this and Unsinger, for example, in his latest book, in fact, just published beginning of this year, he quotes some of these early names in physics in their criticism of QED. QED"
},
{
"end_time": 8729.002,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8700.282,
"text": " It seems not really to be a solid branch of physics. It is true you can, with a little hocus-pocus, and Feynman was a master at that, with a little hocus-pocus you can get the right answer to some very interesting problems. But physics is more than getting numbers to agree with experiment. It is a question of"
},
{
"end_time": 8752.671,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8729.428,
"text": " There's a bit of philosophy in it. There's a bit of ontology in it. At least there was always the game. I mean, there was always the objective of physics to understand nature. And the early physicists all thought in these terms, they wanted to know what really makes nature work."
},
{
"end_time": 8781.476,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8753.131,
"text": " And it was in that quest that they produced, the physics that they produced, to Feynman, it was all a question of playing games and getting things to work. But getting things to work is one thing and physics is another. And Unziger would say that"
},
{
"end_time": 8811.357,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8782.415,
"text": " Feynman helped to corrupt physics, because actually, when you look at something like our Chern, the particle physics center, Unsiger wrote a book about Chern, where he shows how absolutely absurd physics a la Chern has become. Physics a la Chern is no longer physics, it's no longer science."
},
{
"end_time": 8841.169,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8811.937,
"text": " and it's a very expensive game they're playing but it is physics allotron has actually uh... rendered uh... particle physics an absurdity it is a reductio at absurdum of particle physics and uh... i very much recommend"
},
{
"end_time": 8867.227,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8841.527,
"text": " Unziger's, I think, first book, which is devoted to this panorama of Tchern, Particle Felix, a la Tchern, is absurd. Yeah. Is Tchern like C-E-R-N? C-E-R, yeah. It's an acronym for the French name."
},
{
"end_time": 8894.189,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8869.394,
"text": " research is it's a nuclear physics center which it took a hundred countries to finance etc etc it's one of the world's marvels but at the same time it is a reductio ad absurdum of particle physics."
},
{
"end_time": 8921.886,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8895.367,
"text": " This question comes from Matthew Wyden again, a fan of yours, and has watched plenty of your work, and he asks, Bernardo Kastrup interprets the fall in the Garden of Eden as a fall into meta-consciousness, i.e., becoming aware of our own awareness rather than simply being aware of present reality. Is this relatable to a fall in the corporeal realm?"
},
{
"end_time": 8951.937,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8924.258,
"text": " I must tell you in all frankness that I have very little interest in this kind of speculation. I feel that if you want to approach these great truths, the truth of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition, you cannot do it"
},
{
"end_time": 8978.865,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8952.381,
"text": " by starting from the contemporary Weltanschauung. You cannot do it, strictly speaking, as a man of the 21st century. You have to do it, you have to go back to the basics, our scriptures and our early Christian commentaries and so on, and feel your way into this world."
},
{
"end_time": 8996.51,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8979.462,
"text": " To try to understand it basically, and I think this applies not only to Castro, it's sort of a typical thing. We have a lot of intellectuals today who are basically respectful of"
},
{
"end_time": 9026.425,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8996.92,
"text": " the great traditions which is in itself wonderful because the typical thing is just the opposite the typical thing in our if you go to our universities and you get out of them still believing in God you are one of the chosen few because the thrust of it all is I call it satanic because I think it basically it is they are on the opposite side"
},
{
"end_time": 9055.913,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 9027.056,
"text": " But the people that you are referring to now, the whole group of them, it is very much to their credit that they are respectful of the Christianity and the other great traditions, and they want to understand, they think that there is truth there and they want to understand it. But they want to understand it, so to speak, starting out,"
},
{
"end_time": 9079.889,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 9056.732,
"text": " more or less from the contemporary Weltanschauung. And I think this is absolutely the wrong place to start because if we were in any way schooled or versed in the true metaphysics and the true Christianity, let us say,"
},
{
"end_time": 9111.544,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 9081.886,
"text": " We would realize that the contemporary Weltanschauung is nonsense. It's a disease. It's a little bit like poison. I mean, it poisons you. And so the idea of interpreting Christianity in terms that connect with our contemporary physicists or our contemporary psychologists or whatever you"
},
{
"end_time": 9127.466,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 9112.21,
"text": " find in the contemporary culture is in a sense to lose before you even started. You cannot understand Christianity from the direction of physics,"
},
{
"end_time": 9157.244,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 9128.166,
"text": " or any other contemporary strand of thought, whether it's psychology or what have you, we are in a completely different culture, and the only way to gain access to Christianity is to start from the beginning, that means on a scriptural basis. There's the Old and the New Testament,"
},
{
"end_time": 9187.005,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 9157.602,
"text": " And there are the commentaries of the great Christian teachers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. That's how you can learn. And once you have a certain insight into Christianity, you can of course engage in a dialogue, if you will, with contemporary thinkers. You can"
},
{
"end_time": 9215.35,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 9187.807,
"text": " Listen to what they have to say and explain what is right and what is not right and help your fellow man find their way into the traditional teaching. But you can't get into the traditional teaching from the direction of"
},
{
"end_time": 9238.985,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 9215.657,
"text": " Is it more accurate to say that the corporeal realm is a reduction of the avaturnal or an expression of the avaturnal? Well, the actually correct answer I think to this question is that"
},
{
"end_time": 9269.36,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 9239.684,
"text": " Whatever has any kind of being in the corporeal world, for example this table, originates in the avid tunnel. So if you ask, what is this table? What is it? The contemporary person will start talking about atoms and this and that, which has nothing to do with metaphysics. This is something else entirely."
},
{
"end_time": 9294.787,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 9269.957,
"text": " Metaphysically, if you want to understand what this table actually is, what the being is that manifests as this table, you are led unquestionably back to the Ave Eternal realm, because"
},
{
"end_time": 9322.602,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 9296.169,
"text": " What is not illusory, what is not perishable, what is actually real in this table, and there must be something like that, otherwise even the illusion of the table couldn't arise. So what is real, what this actual being is located or originates in the avid tunnel plane."
},
{
"end_time": 9348.473,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 9323.166,
"text": " In the same way that we say a baby originates from a mother, we don't say a baby is a reduction of the mother or a baby is an expression of the mother. Is it similar like that or different? I would say it's a little different because the connection that I was trying to verbalize or somehow express is purely vertical. It's ontological."
},
{
"end_time": 9375.128,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 9348.78,
"text": " And, of course, the only way we can understand it in a human way is to add the fiction to spatialize. You say, all right, let this plane be corporeal and up here you have another plane is avid tunnel. So we sort of make a mental picture of it, which is not really"
},
{
"end_time": 9401.732,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 9375.452,
"text": " What do you think of the patristic formulation that love is the coexistence of unity and multiplicity?"
},
{
"end_time": 9433.524,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9405.776,
"text": " Well, I would have to really think about this a little bit. On the whole, I shy away from trying to intellectually understand the deep metaphysical theological truths."
},
{
"end_time": 9462.159,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9434.07,
"text": " For example, the teachings of Christ as you read them in the Gospels, I don't really try to understand this, this type of statement. The way one might want to understand the differential equation or mathematical theorem by analyzing it and so on, I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 9492.483,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9462.671,
"text": " It is preferable to approach these things, figuratively speaking, from the heart rather than the intellect, because you're trying to understand the greater in terms of the lesser. It doesn't really make that much sense."
},
{
"end_time": 9522.705,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9494.821,
"text": " So I think there is a great deal of this kind of thinking going on. It is somehow an attempt to reach the higher planes without leaving the lower. I tend to be skeptical"
},
{
"end_time": 9553.2,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9523.387,
"text": " to many of the so-called commentaries about deep metaphysical or Christian ideas given by learned men of our day because these metaphysical truths have been known and communicated for thousands of years and"
},
{
"end_time": 9582.637,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9553.456,
"text": " I like to approach them using the language, if you will, of the great sages of prior times. In the case of Christianity, we have this arena of brilliant and at the same time holy and sagacious men and women."
},
{
"end_time": 9611.459,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9583.78,
"text": " And I am perfectly happy to approach these mysteries in the very terms given to us in the traditional form. Suppose somebody writes an essay about some Christian topic with its love or"
},
{
"end_time": 9639.241,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9612.108,
"text": " life eternal or whatever it be using analogies from modern science something about quantum particles or god knows what I don't feel drawn to that because these ideas have been transmitted from master to disciple"
},
{
"end_time": 9667.142,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9639.65,
"text": " for more than two thousand years now, and so we have a wonderful language that we can use by way of approaching or entering into these highest spheres of thought. To be honest with you, that language that I was now referring to was given to us"
},
{
"end_time": 9693.507,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9667.517,
"text": " by the great saints and mystics of the church, a Thomas Aquinas, a Meister Eckhart, a Saint Augustine. And we have that available. Then why should I listen to Professor So-and-so, who somehow approaches Christian themes, Christian mysteries, one can say,"
},
{
"end_time": 9721.459,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9693.882,
"text": " using ideas or terminology from quantum theory or cognitive psychology and so forth, I feel no need for that. And I'm skeptical about it too. In other words, not only are the truths of Christianity sacred, but in a sense the words, the language and the conceptions which have"
},
{
"end_time": 9751.459,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9722.773,
"text": " which go back to the patristic era, have a sacredness of their own. And so I tend to be skeptical about modern-day gurus who will use a completely different language. I feel no need for that. And as I say, I tend to be skeptical that it's really going to work."
},
{
"end_time": 9782.329,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9752.5,
"text": " Because not only is the sacred truth sacred, the means of expression are also sacred. The very words that have formed from the lips, say, of the apostles are sacred. And why should I listen to Professor so-and-so? I'd much rather listen to Saint Paul."
},
{
"end_time": 9812.073,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9783.268,
"text": " or St. Augustine, St. Maximus. I mean, they are the people who understood these things. They are the people who attained them also in varying degrees in their own life. Why should I listen to somebody, a professor from University of Chicago? What does he know? And why do I need him? Professor, thank you for spending so much time with me."
},
{
"end_time": 9841.22,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9812.944,
"text": " What's next for you? What's next for me, my friend, is to prepare myself to enter into the life beyond this one, to enter into the next phase of life. Christianity and every true religion has always taught that"
},
{
"end_time": 9866.442,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9841.834,
"text": " One should prepare oneself for the end. One of the great insights from the Vedic tradition is the Vedic tradition declares that the natural life of man divides into four stages."
},
{
"end_time": 9892.637,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9867.073,
"text": " Brahmacharya. This is where a young man prepares himself to enter life through study. He's expected to live a celibate life. It's a sort of an ascetic life. And next comes Grihasthya, the life of married life. So the man marries, he founds a family and he"
},
{
"end_time": 9921.715,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9894.002,
"text": " has an employment and he supports his family. This is the second stage of life according to the Vedic tradition. The third stage is, I think they call it Vana Prastha, I think it means a forest life. The idea is that the children are grown up and they've married themselves, so the man and his wife"
},
{
"end_time": 9947.79,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9922.671,
"text": " and a new stage of life which is a life of they call it forest life because it's a very simple life it involves little outward activity it's a matter of preparing for the life to come and then the fourth stage of life is called sannyas and this is something very"
},
{
"end_time": 9977.363,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9948.524,
"text": " Vedic is foreign to our Western way of thinking but according to the Vedic tradition this is when both the man and the woman leave all attachments to the world and totally fix their spirit upon God. So the extreme way of living that life of Sannyas"
},
{
"end_time": 10005.879,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9978.2,
"text": " And this is actually, I saw people living like that, it was still going on. You retire completely from the world and you give your whole day to prayer and contemplation. Very few people in the western world can even conceive of such a thing. When I was traveling in India half a century ago,"
},
{
"end_time": 10030.282,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 10006.408,
"text": " It was still visible. It was rare, yes. And you had to go far away from New Delhi and Calcutta and any place where the western world has so much as touched. Because the western world is poison in that regard. So this is the ancient Vedic culture. We can't duplicate it here."
},
{
"end_time": 10045.247,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 10030.691,
"text": " But I'm just mentioning that the principle applies to us too. The principle is that at the end of our life there should be a transitional phase"
},
{
"end_time": 10072.841,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 10045.879,
"text": " where we turn our attention away from the world and the cares of the world and we live a life as much as possible in prayer, solitude, contemplation. I think the principle is therefore everyone will do so to the extent that he or she can."
},
{
"end_time": 10103.763,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 10074.804,
"text": " And actually, from a higher point of view, all the earlier phases of our life should really, in truth, be a preparation for that fourth stage, which is itself a preparation for the true life, which is life eternal. But I think only someone who can really be called a saint is able to"
},
{
"end_time": 10135.572,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 10106.015,
"text": " in a very real way live up to these ideals. But I think even though we should know these ideals and try to live up to it as we can, I think God in His mercy will accept this. Thank you so much Wolfgang, thank you. Well, I think you could"
},
{
"end_time": 10163.848,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 10136.578,
"text": " I regard it as a great privilege to meet you, to spend a few days getting to know each other, and I wish you all that is good. I think you're apostolate, and that's the right word, it is an apostolate that you have. Your apostolate is a very noble, very important apostolate, because"
},
{
"end_time": 10193.763,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 10164.462,
"text": " What the world needs today, almost more than anything else, is the kind of thing that you are attempting to bring about. For example, the understanding of our great traditions, the understanding of why we are really in deep trouble today. It takes a certain spiritual eye to see that."
},
{
"end_time": 10221.459,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 10194.326,
"text": " Not everybody does. And in fact, the more you are associated with universities and other contemporary institutions, the more you are drawn into the very opposite. So, your apostolate is so important."
},
{
"end_time": 10251.323,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 10222.329,
"text": " in the service of God, in the service of religion, and there's nothing greater than that. Nothing. Thank you. I hope we can live up to ten percent of that. Thank you. Well, wonderful. I'm very happy about today's, the questions that you raised. They were excellent questions and"
},
{
"end_time": 10263.746,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 10252.278,
"text": " That's a big part in getting a good answer. A big part in getting a good answer is to ask a good question. And that's not an easy thing."
},
{
"end_time": 10289.77,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 10264.497,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toes. Links to both are in the description."
},
{
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"text": " Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time."
},
{
"end_time": 10325.742,
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"text": " You get early access to ad free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.