A Lecture by Jonathan Pageau: The Symbolic World | EP 206
What this covers
Our friend @JonathanPageau gave a lecture on the conceptual structure of Genesis for an event that was orchestrated by the Montreal Jung Society. Jordan felt that this lecture would serve as a wonderful adjunct to his biblical series, also on Genesis, featured on this channel.
Thank you to the Montreal Jung Society and Jonathan for letting us release this video on our channel. We hope that you find it useful. Visit sites.google.com/site/cgjungmontreal for more info on the Montreal Jung Society.
Event Title: The Symbolic World - a lecture by Jonathan Pageau
Event Description: “Meaning is showing itself to no longer be an overlay to an arbitrary world of phenomena, but rather the very pattern of reality. Through the questions of emergence, attention and consciousness which have been permeating so many fields in the recent past, the reality of pattern, ritual and image have also come to the fore. Meaning is showing itself, in a burgeoning post-secular age, as no longer only a subjective overlay to an arbitrary world of phenomena, but rather the very pattern of reality itself. In this frame we come to realize that the archetypal truths are not mostly biological and mental constructs in humans; they are firstly the inescapable patterning of the indefinite potential of the world as it encounters intelligence.”
// SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL // Newsletter: https://linktr.ee/DrJordanBPeterson Donations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate
// COURSES // Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personality Self Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.com Understand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com
// BOOKS // Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning
// LINKS // Website: https://jordanbpeterson.com Events: https://jordanbpeterson.com/events Blog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blog Podcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast
// SOCIAL // Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson Instagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.peterson Facebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpeterson
// SPONSORS // Interested in sponsoring my audio podcast? Reach out to my advertising team at sponsorships@jordanbpeterson.com For Advertising Inquiries, visit https://www.advertisecast.com/TheJordanBPetersonPodcast
Source description (no synthesized summary yet).
Pageau argues that intelligence and consciousness are not incidental to reality but constitutive of it—meaning emerges through patterned attention rather than preceding it—and this cosmological principle, which underlies Genesis and ancient symbolism, should replace materialist abstractions as our primary interpretive framework.
- Materialism and physicalism have exhausted themselves; the observer problem forces us to recognize that consciousness is necessary for reality to unfold, not merely to describe it
- Genesis describes not literal history but the actual mechanism by which reality manifests—potential (waters/chaos) is gathered into identity (form/pattern) through intelligence (logos/speech), a fractal pattern that repeats at every level
- Understanding this requires embodied participation in rituals and communities, not detached analysis; we cannot stand outside the patterns we study
This asset isn't compiled yet
You're seeing its claims, ranked. Compile it to build the argument threads, weight them, and check each claim against your library — the full view.
The pattern of temples, churches, and sacred spaces physically embodies this hierarchy: the center (Holy of Holies, altar) is where God descends, surrounded by progressively wider circles of diminishing intensity (priests, faithful, strangers, outsiders), each level participating in the sacred but at different degrees of proximity and purity.
“in the Jewish temple, you had the Holy of Holies where the the where the the glory of God would descend in the Holy of Holies. And then there you would have a priest who is just one person. And then outside of that you would have all these levels of quantification where outside you would have the priestly cast, then you would have the faithful, then you would have the strangers.”
Icons of the Ascension, Baptism, and the Last Judgment all embody the same pattern: Christ at the apex unites heaven and earth; the divine descends from above as spirit/light while the chaotic waters/demons rise from below; the final judgment involves gathering the elect to the right (ascent, order, light) and casting the damned to the left (descent, chaos, darkness).
“you have above, you have the the top of the pyramid or the top of the mountain. You have the principle, the logos, which is above... And then below you have the mother as the place of potentiality. And then next to her you have all this multiplicity.”
Humans can become patterns for other humans through emulation and modeling; saints become gods in the sense that they become models for others; naming churches, cities, and things after people shows that these beings have ascended into the cosmic order as patrons and co-rulers with Christ.
“human beings can become patterns for other human beings. Right? We become models... We name a church after someone... We name a city after someone... because those beings are like gods. They become patterns for the rest of us.”
The human soul is the pattern (logos) that constitutes the person; at its core is a spark of the divine; when humans commune with each other in love, their individual logoi join with the divine logos, forming the body of Christ; this is how individual and cosmic order are integrated.
“your soul is your invisible part of you. It's the It's the pattern the patterning of your of your being, right? That's what your soul is... there's a there's a more there's a hierarchy of patterns in you, and at the core of that hierarchy of pattern is God.”
Heaven and earth are not locations but fundamental categories of reality: heaven is spirit, wind, breath, speech—things invisible but giving form; earth is void, empty, silent, water—undifferentiated potential; this distinction is grounded in embodied experience (light comes from above, ground is beneath our feet) and manifests in every culture and scale.
“Heaven is just wind, right? If we have to be immediate about this. Heaven is that is are the things that you can't see. Like wind, you can't see. Like your breath, you can't see... And then, so it separates heaven and earth, two basic principles of reality. The earth is void, it's empty, it's silence, it's water.”
The soul ascending the ladder in Orthodox spirituality encounters both demons pulling downward and angels pulling upward at each level—these represent the two forces (centrifugal and centripetal) that operate within every spiritual struggle, with demons representing scattering into passion and distraction, and angels representing gathering toward divine attention and virtue.
“on this are all the sins that you can have. Those sins are coupled with virtues. And so as the soul ascends this thing, they encounter at every level of reality a demon which is pulling it down, but also they also encounter angels which are pulling them up. Here in this one you don't see the angel so much. Um in other versions you see the angel as the one trying to push down the demon.”
Darwin brought Plato back into philosophy: by introducing natural selection, Darwin necessarily reintroduced purpose and teleology—selection is not random but purpose-oriented toward the perpetuation of species identity; this contradicts the mechanistic reading of Darwinian theory that tries to eliminate all purpose.
“Because by coming back into the world of biology, he inevitably brought back purpose-driven action, or selection is the best way to to understand it, right? He brought back the idea of selection, and selection is not chaos, right? Selection is not random. Selection is is purpose-oriented, and it's purpose-oriented towards the perpetuation of the seed, the perpetuation of the identity.”
Attempting to tame wild predators like tigers or bears is an example of breaking the pattern of reality by trying to force a dangerous identity into a relationship it is not suited for, and this breakdown of pattern typically ends in disaster because you are not respecting what things are and how they actually work.
“I mean, you can see that that you have to kind of have a respect subdue as Jordan said. I love that. I actually love that. That is you have to be able to see things where they really are and engage with them where they are in this kind of pattern of reality. And so, if you engage with If you engage with the pattern of reality in a wrong way, that's you die.”
Materialism and physicalism are reaching their end as evidenced by the problem of the observer in physics, complexity theory, emergence problems, and the fundamental difficulty of explaining consciousness and meaning using purely descriptive or materialist frameworks.
“what we're seeing is kind of materialism running to its end. And it it's happening in physics with the problem of the observer. It's happening in things like like just this notion of complexity or complexity theory, the problem of emergence.”
Woke culture has understood the problem of identity and exclusion but proposes an impossible and dangerous solution: they want everything to fit into a single comprehensive system, but it is impossible to have a system that is both logically coherent and completely inclusive—attempting this leads to either chaos (breakdown of all order) or tyranny (absolute enforcement of the inclusivity principle).
“woke culture has understood the problem of identity... they understand the problem the of exclusion. But the answer they give is that they want to account for everything... that doesn't work... it's impossible and it's even a dangerous thing.”
The assault on categorization and discrimination (in the sense of making distinctions) is an assault on the principle of order itself, which is equivalent to an assault on the word/logos; if we cannot discriminate between higher and lower, we lose the very capacity that manifests the imago Dei.
“it's part of terminologically part of an assault on the idea of the patriarchy and that means it it's assault on the idea of pyramidal categorization itself... the assault on that under the guise of destructuring the patriarchy is an assault on that that principle itself”
The ancient idea of the omphalos (navel of the world) in Greek culture—where the center is the place where heaven meets earth and oracles descend—demonstrates that this heaven-earth pattern with a central axis was explicitly understood in the ancient world and treated as cosmologically foundational.
“This is the structure of of the way that Greeks understood themselves in ancient times. Right? They had the omphalos, they had the they had the navel of the world. And in that place they received oracles from heaven which would which would bind them together, which would manifest their destiny.”
The Axial Age religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam) cannot be properly understood from outside; attempts to study them comparatively as cultural phenomena fail because we study them from within the categories they created, making claims about 'animistic religion' fundamentally unreliable.
“People who talk about the actual age and animistic as if they don't exist in the world, they just I have no I have very little patience for that... We don't know much about animistic religions because we're not animistic religions. We're always interpreting animistic religions from the place where we are.”
Discrimination (making distinctions) is a normal and necessary aspect of reality; you are constantly discriminating about what paper to write on, what keyboard to use, which field to plant—making the word 'discrimination' into an absolute evil represents a descent into ideological madness.
“the idea that for example like the idea that the word discrimination has become an absolute evil is insane. It's an insane moment because you discriminate all the time. You're you're constantly discriminating... Discriminating is like a normal aspect of reality, which is that you're constantly judging.”
In your basic experience of encountering something new, you unconsciously perform the same operations God performs: you encounter something as potential/puzzle, you identify it, you judge whether it's good or dangerous, and you integrate it into your understanding—this is how all perception and consciousness works.
“You walk in to the room, you see the glass, you identify it. And immediately you ask yourself, consciously or unconsciously, you're always asking yourself if it's good... this is true about everything that you encounter.”
The true origin of reality is not the Big Bang but the intelligence/consciousness that is able to perceive the Big Bang as a pattern; consciousness is prior to phenomena—the big bang and all physical processes exist in consciousness, not the reverse.
“the real origin is not the Big Bang. I can This is going to be the weirdest thing you're going to understand. The real origin is the intelligence, which is able to even perceive the Big Bang... It's like perce- perceiving change, transformation, identity, participating it. Like that's the origin of reality.”
Traditional cultures maintained embedded identities at multiple scales—family within neighborhood within community within nation within church—allowing people to participate in multiple hierarchies simultaneously, whereas modern culture has fragmented this into competing absolute identities.
“in a normal kind of traditional world you can be uh a family in a neighborhood in a community, right? In a nation, in a church. And it's like it's all embedded. And you can also participate in all these different identities. You can be in a club or you can be in this and that. And so it all kind of works together.”
The knitting group example demonstrates that groups cannot remain coherent if their defining purpose is abandoned for something contradictory: if the knitting group accepts musicians who refuse to knit, it must either exclude them, transform into something else, or cease to exist—there is no way to be both a knitting group and a music band simultaneously while maintaining identity.
“either we exclude these musicians or exclude their practice, or we cease being what we are. We die, basically. This knitting group is going to cease to exist. It's going to be transformed into something else”
The potential consequence of inclusivity absolutism is the creation of absolute scapegoats—those who refuse to participate in the principle of inclusivity become the only permissible sin, the only unforgivable sin, and are absolutely excluded.
“what's important is that that that gesture is going to create something like absolute scapegoats. Absolute scapegoats which is that those that will refuse to participate in this highest this weird principle of inclusivity will be absolutely excluded. It's the only sin um and it's an unforgivable sin.”
God does not say 'it was good' after creating the vault that separates the waters on day two—this omission is significant and suggests that the separation of waters may not represent a completed state of goodness but an incomplete or ambiguous state that awaits further articulation.
“there's even a day where God doesn't say that it was good, by the way. People always forget that. Um when God separates the waters, he doesn't say that it was good.”
The world is too complex for consciousness to handle without pattern-recognition; everything encountered has indefinite complexity scaling infinitely down and up, yet we perceive unity at every level, which requires that reality itself be fundamentally patterned and patterns scale hierarchically across all levels of phenomena.
“the world is too complex. That the world actually is kind of indefinite in its complexity. You know, everything you look at, everything you encounter has an indefinite amount of complexity... And you can just scale that down, you know, to the quantum field or whatever.”
Intelligence is necessary for reality to unfold because intelligence is the only thing capable of discerning pattern; moreover, it is not a passive discernment but an active, embodied participation where the agent and the pattern co-constitute each other—the conscious being sees patterns, engages with them, and transforms them.
“consciousness or intelligence is necessary for the for the world to unfold because intelligence is the only thing which is able to discern pattern. And not just discern, but it's like a It's not just a discernment, it's a participation in pattern. Right? Because the agent the the pattern ends up coagulating in the agent, you could say.”
Rock cannot be eaten even though other potential foods can be—things have specific identities that determine what potentials can participate in them, and 'subduing' the world means recognizing these real identities rather than imposing arbitrary will onto them.
“Rocks are not potential that you have access to to eat. And and and that that's true for like an indefinite amount of things that there are certain identities which have certain potentials that are that can participate in them. And if you don't encounter that properly, then you're going not going to work.”
Ritual is inevitable and necessary, not contingent or culturally arbitrary: everything you do in the world is patterned teleologically toward a purpose, and human relationships are essentially ritualized—if you violate the ritual patterns of conversation (speaking/listening in turn), the relationship breaks.
“ritual suddenly makes sense again. Not only does it make sense, but it's actually inevitable... everything you do in the world is patterned teleologically. It's patterned towards purpose.”
Jordan Peterson's intervention into New Atheism played a key role in poking at materialism and creating space for discussion of meaning, purpose, and non-materialist frameworks, contributing to the cultural shift away from scientific materialism.
“Jordan Peterson has played a a big role in poking at this, you know, kind of poking at the new atheists... And so, what we're seeing is kind of materialism running to its end.”
Seed-bearing plants in Genesis 3 represent the way identity persists through variation: the seed is the identity (how you recognize what kind of plant it is), and the vegetation is the multiplicity/variation—God commands not just plants but seed-bearing plants to show that stability requires both identity and the capacity to reproduce that identity through variation.
“not just produce vegetation. What is he saying? He's saying produce seed-bearing plants. Why seed-bearing plants? What a strange thing to say... Because once again, in this pattern now, the seed is the identity. And the vegetation is the variation”
The evolutionary process of maintaining species identity is a reflection of a deeper cosmic pattern of how the world actually unfolds, not a bottom-up generation of that pattern; the reason evolutionary processes work the way they do is because they function within and manifest a larger system of how reality works.
“you can see it completely top-down. Like you can see it as like like I was trying to explain to you as these the evolutionary process of maintaining your identity is is a reflection of a deeper pattern which is a cosmic pattern of how the world actually unfolds. So it's not that it's not necessarily that evolutionary process brought about this. It's that the reason why evolutionary processes work the way they do and do what they do is because they're they're functioning within a larger system.”
Mountains are the prototype for pyramids; pyramid structures (ziggurats, Egyptian pyramids) are geometric versions of mountains; whenever someone ascends a mountain in scripture, they are ascending to encounter the top of reality, the place where heaven and earth meet.
“the ziggurats are pyramids, too. People always want to separate them, but you know, all these structures, these kind of these structures that are representing mountains of are like geometric versions of the mountains... Once you understand that, then you realize that every time someone goes up a mountain in scripture, it's it's the same as a pyramid.”
The hierarchy is self-healing through kenosis (self-emptying): at the apex is identity, but above identity is sacrifice; the highest realization is martyrdom, not dominance; this prevents tyranny because the leader is called to sacrifice for the purpose above and for the members below, not to aggrandize himself.
“at the very very top of the hierarchy is something like identity. And then right above that identity is something like sacrifice. That is there's a the pyramid is kenotic. It's self-emptying. And so the highest thing the highest thing is the king and then the very highest thing is the martyr.”
Groups necessarily exclude by their very nature: because a group is not the totality of all manifestation in the universe, it must make distinctions and exclude—even an 'inclusive' group necessarily excludes animals, rocks, and other entities from its membership.
“A group excludes. Groups always exclude. That's why they're a group because they're not the totality of all manifestation in the universe. They necessarily need to exclude. You know, I mean even if you want to be inclusive in the kind of uh the kind of let's say uh politically correct way, you're still going to exclude animals from your group or you're still going to exclude rocks from your group.”
The ziggurat hierarchy allows for people to be included at higher levels of unity while being excluded at lower levels—this is the solution to the problem of inclusion and exclusion: not to eliminate exclusion but to understand that categories can nest, and people can belong at different levels simultaneously.
“the ziggurat answers that question too because people can be included at a higher level of unity and excluded at a lower. And so part of this is conceptual confusion. It's like the problem of category is the problem of inclusion and exclusion.”
A group is distinguished from a crowd by the presence of teleology: a group is bound together toward a shared purpose and common identity, while a crowd is merely people gathered in proximity without internal binding; this teleological binding manifests through ritual, celebration, reverence for shared symbols (colors, names, mascots), hierarchical figures (captain, coach), and a logos (reason for being) that judges inside from outside.
“What's the difference between a group and a crowd? There are a bunch of people that are together, but one of them is not bound teleologically and the other is. Right? A team is bound teleologically.”
Genesis 1 is not merely a myth or metaphor but a description of how reality actually manifests itself through the action of intelligence: chaos (potential, waters, formlessness) is gathered into ordered forms through the speech/naming/identification of a conscious agent, and this same process repeats fractally at every level of reality.
“the manner in which it shows that the world manifested itself through intelligence, through consciousness. And that this is actually the agent of how reality comes together and how we participate in that as intelligent beings”
When attempting to understand hidden or esoteric traditions, scholars who study them from outside without actual initiation cannot know what those traditions really are—initiated members are instructed not to reveal higher mysteries, so if someone claims to reveal them, they likely were never actually initiated.
“the way you know about something is not about it's not by studying it from the outside. But it's about it's about encountering it and living it from the inside. Um and those that are initiated into the higher mysteries, they're not supposed to talk about it anyways. So they're not going to tell you. So even if a scholar was at some point maybe initiated into the higher mysteries, they shouldn't tell you. And if they tell you, it means they probably weren't initiated and they're bullshitting you.”
The embodied engagement with sacred images, rituals, and communities—carving icons, participating in liturgy, sharing meals with family—is not secondary illustration of abstract theology but the primary reality to which abstract theology is secondary.
“this presentation that I'm giving you, this is secondary to what is really going on. What is really going on is that to the mo- to the extent that I'm capable of, I get up I get up in the morning and I physically carve sacred images. Right? I go to church on Sunday and I physically participate in the rituals and the liturgy. You know, I sit there with my family around the table and I eat a meal”
The creation of humans as male and female in Genesis 1 shows that man (humanity) contains the duality of heaven and earth within himself: male and female represent actuality and potentiality, form and formlessness, order and chaos—humans are microcosms of the heaven-earth distinction and thus can encounter the world as the union of these principles.
“it's important that when God created the humans, he creates them male and female... in man is the duality of heaven and earth itself... they also contain this actuality and potentiality and how they also participate in the manner in which actuality and potentiality come together”
Ancient thinking—Aristotelian potentiality and actuality, Platonic forms—is now being revalidated because we are being forced to re-enter our experience and analyze it directly, rather than trying to abstract away from it, and when we do so we discover that we actually encounter potentiality and actuality every day of our lives.
“when we we have to re-enter our experience and try to analyze our experience, we realize that oh, actually, when Aristotle talked about potentiality and actuality, I experience that every single day of my life. Right? I actually encounter the field that presents itself to me as potential, which is brought into patterns, brought into actualities”
We recognize objects by their purpose: I recognize a cup as a cup because of its purpose to me as a human being, and this recognition of purpose scales hierarchically through science—the science that gets attention and funding is always the science most useful to humans, not the science most objective.
“if I this cup, the fact that I recognize it as a cup is because I recognize its purpose. Its purpose to me as a human being... And that actually scales the hierarchy of of purposes even in terms of science”
The reason God creates fish and birds on the same day (Genesis 5), and vegetation before the sun and moon (scientifically backwards), is to establish the repetition of the heaven-earth pattern at every level: birds are above like heaven, fish below like earth; sun/moon mark time and reveal pattern only after the potential for life (vegetation) has been established.
“Why on earth would God create birds and fish on the same day? What is happening? It's the strangest thing in the world it seems to us... Well, it only makes sense if we understand that he's constantly establishing the repetition of the heaven and earth pattern”
The propositions Pageau is making are radical: if the arguments about pattern, intelligence, and embodied reality are true, then the only way for them to be fully true is to embody them—to live them out—while being aware of the legitimate problems that come with being embedded in a teleological group (exclusion, potential self-devouring).
“The proposition I'm making is is that if what the things I said are true that means that the the only way for them to be fully true is for us to dive in and embody. Uh while realizing of course and while being aware of all of the problems that come with this pattern as well.”
The hierarchical ordering of creatures in Genesis (livestock, wild animals, crawling things) represents a hierarchy of meaning, identification, and participation in intelligence: livestock are close to human intelligence and society; wild animals are chaotic and unknown; crawling things live underground in darkness—this hierarchy expresses degrees of proximity to intelligible pattern.
“Why is it that God separates living creatures between livestock, wild animals, and creatures that move on the ground?... Livestock is more intelligent animals... Animals that participate in our intelligence... and then you have the wild animals, which are out there in the chaos... And now then the creepy crawlers are the ones that live underground”
In Genesis 2, the second creation narrative, man appears at the outset before other things, suggesting that the intelligent agent (or the capacity for consciousness) was present even in the origin of creation itself—this implies that intelligence is not an afterthought or emergent property but was part of the primordial structure.
“here there's a sense in which actually man kind of comes before everything. He's actually there at the outset before God did all those other things... You can imagine that God was man or the microcosm or the intelligent agent was there even in the origin of creation itself.”
Dreams in Orthodox understanding are mostly chaos (lower waters), requiring caution not to pay too much attention; but they can become pure mirrors revealing truth if the soul achieves stillness through spiritual practice (askesis), transforming potential chaos into reflective clarity.
“the orthodox view or the the say the the way that the fathers talk about dreams is that they are mostly chaos... you have to be careful not to pay too much attention to them... this lower waters, this kind of these moving waters”
Genesis is not describing the world in a scientific way but in a way that takes into account that intelligence is necessary, that humans are intelligent beings in the world, and that we cannot pretend to analyze phenomena from outside the process—it is a cosmic vision of reality that includes the viewer as part of what is viewed.
“The description in Genesis is a description of how the world exists. Not in a scientific way, but in a way which takes into account that intelligence is necessary, that we are intelligent beings in the world, and that we can't avoid that problem.”
Purpose (teleology) cannot be adequately explained by evolutionary theory because evolutionary thinking tries to explain human motivations while simultaneously studying the human who is doing the explaining, creating a self-referential loop that forces us to recognize purpose and meaning are intrinsic to how organisms function.
“What evolutionary thinking is did in some parts is try to explain the motivations of humans. But when you start to do that, you have a problem because this human who's talking about evolution is the what you're trying to interpret... And so you're actually interpreting the interpreter.”
The fragility of ritual reality is demonstrated in Dostoevsky's *The Possessed*: Stavrogin, possessed by utopian political ideas and unmoored from traditional ritual reality, disrupts social order by putting his fingers in an officer's nostrils and dragging him into the street—a violation of basic ritual norms that shatters the entire society, showing how delicate ritual structures are.
“In Dostoevsky's The Devils, The Possessed, there's a great scene where Stavrogin goes into a an officer's club and he's coming unglued at this point in his political chaos, utopian political chaos... He puts his fingers in the nostrils of an aging general and drags him onto the street and it just causes absolute chaos in the entire society.”
Ancient traditions (Jewish law, fringe on garments, leaving field corners untilled) understood that you cannot have a system that is both logically complete and coherent at the same time—you must leave room for the stranger, the unknown, the unincluded, which paradoxically keeps the system healthy rather than self-devouring.
“for example, like you have the idea in Jewish law that you have to leave a fringe on your vestment. Or you have to leave the corners of the field untilled for the strangers. Uh all of these patterns are there to manifest the fact that you can't have a system which is both coherent and complete at the same time.”
The centripetal and centrifugal forces operating in attention, in teams, in countries, and in any organized entity mirror the fundamental pattern—centripetal force moves toward unified identity and purpose, centrifugal force disperses into multiplicity and potential, and reality requires both in balance.
“there's a centrifugal force and a centripetal force, and that's true of as much as you're in your attention as it is in a team or a country or any group, anything that has body. There's something which is making it more towards its identity, and some aspect which is pushing it towards multiplicity, variability, uh and potentiality”
The quarterback of a sports team is only at the top if he sacrifices himself upward to the team's purpose and downward to help other team members participate in the team—if he fails to do this, he becomes a tyrant unable to get the team to cohere.
“The highest thing of the team is the quarterback that everybody loves and everybody worships. And it's like, yeah, that is the top of the team. But it's only the top of the team when the quarterback sacrifices himself above to the purpose of the team and sacrifices himself below to make their other team members participate in the team. If he doesn't do that, then he's not going to be at the top. Uh he's going to be a tyrant.”
Man is created to rule over creatures not as tyrant but as intelligent being who must identify, name, and judge—giving things their due by recognizing their nature and purpose—and this ruling is itself a manifestation of the same divine creative principle that structures all reality through pattern-recognition.
“Man has to rule because man is an image of God. Man is an image of God in the sense that man is a locus of intelligence. And all the things that God said, all the things that you saw from the beginning in terms of how God creates the world, is something that we participate in to a lower a lower level, we could say. We recognize that we participate in that at a lower level because we do that. We cast light, we identify, we we judge, uh and then and then we we are the we are the place in which meaning is gathered into into us.”
The Great Seal of the United States (pyramid capped with aluminum) is an icon of the entire structure of Western civilization: the pure and valuable apex (intelligence, meaning, logos) descending through levels of hierarchy to the base—aluminum was chosen because it was the most valuable metal at the time, making the icon materially accurate to the moment's understanding of value.
“The pyramid notion on top of the that George Washington tower, the obelisk, is a pyramid capped in aluminum of all things because aluminum was the most valuable metal at that point. And so, that idea that there's a an a pure and valuable top to the pyramidal structure, that like that's an icon of the entire structure of the United States and by by extension the entire, let's say, Western world”
Creatures making choices and living or dying by them are performing the spiritual process of subduing in miniature; if they subdue reality properly they survive, and if they do it improperly they perish—this is the mechanism by which spiritual principle and natural selection are the same process at different levels.
“discussion of subdue starts to become so relevant because as creatures make their choices and live or die by them, what they are in fact doing is the spiritual process of subduing. And if they do it improperly, then they perish.”
The practice of 'subduing' involves giving everything its due by recognizing its nature and place in the hierarchy—this is what discrimination really means, not hatred or exclusion, but the capacity to perceive what things are and arrange them appropriately.
“how about subdue? Think of the word sub to or to arrange hierarchically, due to give everything its due. That is So, when man subdues the world, he does exactly what you're doing. Right? Everything has its place, and that's a reflection of the simultaneous act of perception and judgment and the fact that those things, as you pointed out, are inextricable.”
In Genesis, God does not merely command the world into existence but calls upon the world to manifest its potential—'Let the earth bring forth' is different from 'Let there be,' indicating that creation is a collaboration between the commanding principle and the responding potential.
“God says, um to let the earth bring forth veg- vegetation that has seed. We always forget that God doesn't just speak it into existence. He says to the earth, bring forth. Right? And so, it's like out of the potential comes this variability, which then receives name from above and joins it together into specific identities.”
Egyptian pyramids were capped with small gold pyramids that were gilded, creating a visual representation of the scaling of the pattern: at every level of the pyramid, the pattern of apex-to-base is repeated, all the way down to the smallest gilded point.
“The Egyptian pyramids were were most probably capped with gold. Like the top very top of the pyramid would be like a mini pyramid and then that would have been gilded.”
Matthew Pageau and Jonathan Pageau developed much of their framework of cosmological pattern interpretation together, not as original invention but as reinterpretation of traditional Christian, rabbinic, Hindu, and other ancient wisdom traditions applied to modern contexts.
“my brother uh Matthew Pageau and I, we developed a lot of this way of speaking about reality together, which I which is not something that we invented. It really is just a reinterpretation of traditional pattern making. It's an interpretation of the church fathers, of the rabbis, of the of the Brahmin”
Basketball teams filled with gerbils instead of humans will lose because certain potentialities (qualities) can only participate in certain identities—this is how judgment works: determining what potential fits with what identity.
“If you have a basketball team and you decide to to fill the basketball team with gerbils, well, your basketball team is going to is going to lose. It's not going to exist... there this is how it works like in terms of this idea of subduing, right?”