Episode 133 - I'll Be Happy If...

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[Music] our world is built with stories [Music] sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other the liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart today's story i'll be happy if all right so we've got pete rollins back on the podcast one of my favorites and one of our crowd favorites welcome back pete oh thank you you're one of my favorites just in general thank you i'm excited about hearing your music by the way some yeah or can i say yeah yeah yeah is that's right yeah thank you i'm very excited to hear up i can't wait to play for you you yeah i'm just saying that publicly so you have to let me hear it because i i've set up to you now you're out there yeah your audience and i've agreed so yes okay so last time we talked about scapegoating and how that mechanism of other people being the problem and there's like another side of the coin which is you know that that that i will be happy if so a lot of times we have this externalized problems but we also attach on the other side of things attach our joy our happiness to some external thing as well as though if we only could have this accomplish this have this relationship get that promotion whatever the thing is then all my internal problems will be solved yes so what can we where where do you want to start off with that i know you've done a lot of work yeah with that idea and um how do you see how do you see that i mean we could start from where we were last time with how is that related to the scapegoat mechanism absolutely because the scapegoat mechanism is all about the idea that there is a sense of a lack and you get someone else to carry it so sin traditionally just means lack and uh so whenever the scapegoat is the one who carries the sin of the community which means they carry the lack of the community um and this idea of lack is is is key i mean this is why i actually really like the language as a from a philosophical perspective of original sin because if you strip away the religious the confessional religious dimension of it um what it means is original lack and in the kind of philosophy that i'm interested in the philosophy of of hegel and the khan there is this notion that that there is a sense of lack that is part of being human it's not just that we have a lack it's original it's it's part of who we are the to be a self is to know that you're not something else so there's an inside world there's an outside world there's a me there's a you so there's something about subjectivity that involves a kind of lack and we're always trying to get rid of it and there's lots of people who are promising that they can get rid of it but perhaps the challenge is to learn how to live with it and enjoy it right so often when we're uh in life we're looking for that thing money fame looks uh whatever it is something that will fill the lack that will take it away that will make us whole and complete and um i think that's the religious promise per excellence is the promise that if you do the right yoga moves if you take the right drugs if you have the right tantric sex if you worship the right god if you do if you have a child if you don't have a child whatever it is the thing that that is promised that will make you make you whole that is the uh that's kind of the religious uh uh movement and a lot of my work is about exploring what can be called religionless religion which is a salvation from the need to find that salvation uh so we could jump into that i mean that's a lot let's jump in let's jump yeah um so i mean we could talk a little bit about where this lack comes from yeah you know because there's nothing mystical about it for for someone like lacan um it's simply that there's a certain point around the age of three months uh three to 18 months where the infant begins to realize that they are a self you begin to gain a selfhood and with that notion of selfhood there is the notion that you're not your mother you're not your brother or your sister right so in your environment you're yeah you're kind of starting to differentiate and that differentiation by the way it doesn't always occur in psychosis a person that differentiation is always very fragile or very fragmented in schizophrenia or whatever but for the typical neurotic they they feel differentiated from the world and then they feel that they've lost something you feel oh my goodness i lost this oceanic oneness i lost this this oceanic experience of being one with everything but the weird thing is you didn't lose it because you are the result of not having it so the eye is in a sense the the uh is the eruption of lack into the world it's the eruption of kind of you being apart from things but then you're that means you're marked with this for the rest of your life you're marked with this feeling of loss i lost something and that is something that we can always kind of want to get back and there's basically two types of religion uh that answer this there's religions of hedonism and religions of nihilism so religions of hedonism say you can fill the slack right so whether it's through money sex drugs religion and religions of nihilism are the only way to escape it is to get rid of your desire to have no desire to kind of embrace the lack the negative and i think these are both false solutions to the problem um there's a third type of religion and it's the religion of the absurd and uh this is where uh you embrace you basically embrace your dissatisfaction and you kind of like it's i i use an example of my own work right so i i do a thing called para theology now what is para theology well it's nothing it doesn't exist it's just a word that was uh thought up by a friend of mine um when we were doing these events in belfast but i constantly try to define what it is so i do lots of courses i write books and every time i do a book or do a course i miss it i go like i didn't really define it i feel to get it but those repeated failures actually start to create it so as has i repeatedly feel to define what this amorphous thing is it starts to take shape and then what i do is i start to enjoy my failure i enjoy the constant failure to define what it is and there is where i find a certain joy within life so that's that's the challenge is we think we'd be happy if we get the thing that will make us whole incomplete but we're not when we get it we realize it doesn't work or we think we'd be happy if we can just you know give up and have no desire but that's just depression what we have to learn is how do we enjoy what we don't have well how do we enjoy how do we revolve our lives around some sort of project that we always feel to get but that in that failure generates something positive hmm i love all that that was i mean that that's so much of my non-dual understanding is the wrong word yeah approach tell me a bit about the obviously in religion that so in nondual thought you are the wholeness of the all which is contradiction which is yin and yang that and there is this existential wound of self that is self and trying to make that heal only can be done by itself no it's just reinforcing its own wound yeah yeah by trying to heal it you're still you're still at odds with what is yeah the uh the irony and like the the paradox at the heart of it and i think what at the heart of what jesus was saying of like you have to die to live is just surrendering to that the way that it is surrendering to the wound being part of the all [Music] it does take away the sting yeah it's interesting you're saying that because so um yeah most full of philosophy here we're talking philosophy now this is my my joy um is is exploring you know i in a way a non-dualist type of thought so in in so much philosophy there is a question of you know what how do you reconcile thought and uh being or mind and matter or materialism and idealism so there's these are realities there's thought and there's being how do they interact with each other um do they interact with each other etc etc and interestingly hegel who i think was one of the greatest philosophers uh he he had a reading of christianity that was fascinating um he basically he had a philosophy that ultimately is very complicated philosophy but he basically showed that he said life is a series of contradictions what happens is even in general life we encounter a problem we encounter a contradiction or a deadlock some some problem in mathematics or some problem in our life and we try to resolve it and what hegel basically shows is that as we resolve problems we find deeper problems and we find deeper and deeper problems and for him the evolution of human society but also the evolution of the entire universe is this deepening of contradiction so the movement from nothing into being from being into life from life into consciousness from consciousness into self-consciousness right which are these massive moments in the the movement of the universe hegel shows that they are a deepening of contradiction playing out in deeper and deeper ways and then what hegel basically tries to show is that eventually we get to the point where we realize that contradiction is in the heart of reality itself now just to make it concrete for a second because i think that what we've seen in the last three or four hundred years has been the development of this idea so within mathematics for example you have a girdle who is a great mathematician and he showed that uh it's fascinating he basically showed that if mathematics attempts to be all-encompassing it falls into contradiction right now in physics uh niles bohr showed that at a quantum level we enter into wave particle duality and superpositioning there's other examples oh yeah well darwin showed that life biological life is a conflict of adaptation and and reproduction and all of these moments and they're there you can see them in various disciplines there's just three as an example um contradiction becomes part of reality itself so for example before girdle the notion is that the mathematics any contradictions you find in mathematics are contingent they're not they're not inherently part of mathematics you can get rid of them but with girdle you enter into this possibility and i don't think even he realized is that no at the steepest level mathematics has contradiction built into its heart with physics again before quantum mechanics the even einstein didn't go this far he opened the door but didn't walk through it um before einstein it was like the contradictions of the physical world were contingent and once we knew enough we could get rid of them then with quantum mechanics the contradiction becomes hardbacked into reality itself so in the same way what hegel is saying is we eventually get to the point where we realize that there is a contradiction in reality itself and when we encounter that he calls this absolute knowledge and his reading of christianity this is fascinating the reason why he liked christianity was he said that um in in religions generally god is lacks the lack god god is whole and complete but in christianity on the cross you expect christ cries out my god my god why have you forsaken me in other words you realize that god has a lack god experiences a lack of god right um and this for for hegel is a way in which individuals can experience that at the heart of reality the heart of the absolute is a type of lack and he calls this the reconciliation of unity indifference so in one sense it's a hole but it's a whole with a hole yet you willy it's a it's a so it's yeah so i you know i i find it interesting when you talk about that you your your non-dualistic thinking has a place for a type of deadlock um i like that because i was worried for you for a while so i like i like that i hear that because i think that's the ultimate insight is that that we realize that there's a deadlock in reality itself but when we encounter that and by the way can i just talk what but i'm sorry fully enjoying us all right so if you look at development of a kid right there's there's two things that happen you can call them alienation and separation and alienation is the point when you realize that you're separate from your parents we already talked about that and that's where you experience the lack right you experience this lack and you're no longer one with your parents and what kids try and do is they try to get back to the oneness they want to be everything to their parent that's the oedipus complex right kill the father be back with the womb of the mother and um you know we see children always trying to um well undermine the the paternal figure which you know whenever kids always ask these questions why is the sky blue and why is that and people think they're very inquisitive but often it's because what they want to do is they want to get their parents to eventually say i don't know expose their impotence because we have to expose the impotence of our parents right so um but the child is also wanting to you know be be everything for the other and that's the perverse structure actually as a perverse structure is as an adult you want to be everything to the other but anyway so separation that's sorry that's alienation you're alienated from the people around you but then something else happens for the cam and it can be described as redoubled alienation and what that means is it's where you realize that you can't fulfill your parents you can't be one with them because they can't be one with themselves you can't fulfill the desire of your mother or father because they don't even know what they desire because their desire is in flux because they are not at one with themselves and at this point you then become free and this is called separation and so this is similar to what hegel's saying about christ is at first you feel yourself separate from the absolute or god or whatever you want to call it and you want to get that oneness and you'll do anything and you sing all the songs and you say all the prayers or whatever it is but then once you realize that you can't be one with the absolute because the absolute is not at one with itself then you become comfortable with your own not at oneness you become comfortable with your own divided self and that is salvation that's the moment that's that's called the epoch of the holy ghost when you are able to live in community without some sort of big other you're trying to satisfy and maintain you know the absolute is now in the community of people living responsibly with one another hmm there's a lot in that sorry no yeah that's beautiful so where it comes back for me to like the spiritual like when i hear jesus talk or the buddha that it's not a dissolution of the self completely as far as like that there is no no sense of self anymore but it is the sense of self does get engulfed into a bigger is-ness um where the wound is no longer identified with and so it no longer has power and that in my experience that happened in 2016 for me this like awakening moment of seeing the self constriction of seeing the self wound asking myself who's seeing this who is the seer other than just the universe other than all the all that is seeing within itself these little constrictions and these contradictions and so the all has the contradictions in it has the wounds in it um but maybe i just went crazy yeah from the talker fight yeah that's it yeah i mean yeah but that's what i hear when i hear and jesus talk about those things i hear from that from that place of i am-ness yeah well see it's interesting like because yeah i like that you're taking you're going from a more spiritual perspective i like that because what i'm doing then is uh i want to kind of then grind it in a very material way as well just in mathematics and in physics and then and in biology it's all just words yeah but also the the the unconscious is the name in in psychoanalysis for for this um for this kind of contradiction in reality because all the basically i mean jung uh he's not psychologist so young goes a different direction but um the the freudian insight is that the unconscious is simply the name really for a type of imbalance within us um a type of not at oneness of ourselves and uh so you know you can experience this in a in a spiritual way and also make sense of it in a in in terms of politics and in terms of so uh for example in political sense um there's a book i really like called by a guy called todd mcgowan the title is a terribly boring title called emancipation after hegel but um it's a very good book in which he argues that the left and this is where this is why where progressivism went wrong is that the left um took heegel's work but they they left his religious stuff behind so with foyer back and in three marks and then today they they they they ditched hegel's work on religion and on the state but actually that hegel's work on religion far from being kind of some sort of weird like why is he into christianity like he's one of the smartest people in the world like um it's going oh there's actually something really interesting that he's seen in it and it's this idea that if we don't embrace the idea that there is contradiction in life we will end up uh thinking that we can be whole and complete then we will end up having a purity culture then we will end up scapegoating then we will end up creating enemies and then we will basically become the evil that we are trying to fight and so it's all interconnected you know so um this this notion of this uh deadlock in the one this wound that is within the one um is not just it is a spiritual thing but it's actually also got real political and mathematical and scientific import yeah for sure how does that bring us back to the oh i will be happy if ah yeah yeah because we've kind of taken a big long rabbit trail around but it is there is this sort of existential wound yeah um that is the self it's funny i do these little sessions sometimes with people um where we look at like the nature of the self and and one of the exercises we do in it is go through the body and and like can you find yourself in your body yeah and in that exercise people will often go to places that are wounded they'll be like right here my ribs i had a broken rib and it hurts and that feels more like me than the rest of their body they like feel that wound as themselves more which is like the self is a wound that's very interesting because hegel has the phrase the spirit is a bone and what he means by that is a uh is basically that when he says spirit is a boom it's it's almost like saying that or i i let's put it in a freudian by the way you set up which is perfect is very very good is that we might feel like a broken rib or we feel we've got hives or we've gotten an itchy skin or we've got like a certain kind of like skin problems and that's like a boom that's like out there objective it's on your skin it's not subjective but actually it's it's where we inhabit that is saying something about us more than we know and actually part of what we're trying to do is subjectively um interpolate ourselves into our objective symptoms to find ourselves in our wounds and to find ourselves in our symptoms and that process is a is a very powerful process so i think that's that's what what they do in psychoanalysis is what you're doing in your retreat when you're asking people to find themselves and they're identifying themselves in physical dimensions of their body um that's a you know that's a very powerful experience because those parts of our body tell us who we are they speak truth they speak something yeah and so we feel these wounds we feel this our sense of self being some of the walls of who we are being our wounds themselves and and then we look outside of ourselves for healing yeah salvation for the thing that will make me happy the thing that will save me um and what why is that what are we missing when we do that yeah and this thing by the way it's there's a there's a name for it lacan gave it a name he called it object puttia a small object a but they don't translate it they usually say objective and i'll call it object a object a is the name for the thing that you think will heal you it's the name for the object whatever object it is whatever relationship it is whatever it is it's object a and the can't kind of like give a a really good explanation for where this comes into existence why do we believe in object a one way of thinking about it is um using a freudian language where he talks about uh we have a desire for pleasure the pleasure principle i want to be able to climb trees i want to eat chocolate i want to play games and win games and then the reality principle is what gets in the way i can't eat everything i want because my mom won't let me i can't climb all the trees i want because my body won't let me and i can't win all the games that i want because my friends won't let me and when we encounter this conflict between the reality principle and the pleasure principle we fantasize that if only we got rid of the reality principle we could be happy right get rid of reality principle we get everything we want it would be fantastic but of course the problem is it's the reality principle that makes things pleasurable if you just simply got everything you wanted without any struggle or any opposition you wouldn't enjoy it if you could just climb mount everest because with a thought it wouldn't be fun to do right part of the fun is training buying the equipment and the danger um and i've seen this i know some mega rich people who um who have grown up mega rich and melancholy sets in because there is to a certain extent they can have whatever they want when they want to the result is not happiness it's melancholy um without the sadness of getting what you want so um object a is what is basically think of it like almost like a black hole or this void in us that certain objects fill and then we think if we could get them we'd be happy and shizek has a beautiful analogy of what object a is he says it's similar to what young earth creationists think of uh in terms of fossils because during the time of darwin uh supposedly one of his friends who was a young earth creationist uh you know liked everything darwin was saying and darwin was like listen what do you what do you think of all these fossils that i find and he goes yeah no i admit you find these fossils and they look old but he says god created the world to look old right so he put those fossils in there right and shizek says this is the perfect analogy for object a is these are fossils whenever i get the million dollars that i think will make me happy i'm left with a fossil of object a but it's a fossil of something that never existed because object a doesn't exist object a all you get are the fossils of something that never even existed and we need to somehow kind of it needs to be revealed to us and it's difficult to do that that object a doesn't exist and and that we will destroy ourselves in the pursuit of it but even more weird is we'll also whenever we would prefer not to get object a and for it still to exist than to realize it doesn't exist so rennie gerrard a philosopher anthropologist said once he said imagine this guy in a field it's a rocky field and he's told that under one of the rocks there's a treasure um eventually if he lifts enough rocks and doesn't find any treasure gerard says he will find a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it in other words he wants to find a rock so heavy he can't lift it so he can still maintain the fantasy that if he could lift it underneath there would be some treasure right what's more traumatic than not getting object a is is realizing it doesn't exist and yet realizing it doesn't exist is what frees us because the goth is the ultimate melancholy like the goth is the ultimate person who you think goths are realistic right because they're depressed and they see through the silliness of life but know their romantics they so believe that there is something in someone you know some i don't know dracula or whatever who will he's a romantic hero that they don't have which makes the melancholy if you're not depressed enough right because you still believe the object a is out there you have to redouble the depression you have to you have to get to the point where you go it's not just that i don't have object a object a isn't there and then you can be free to experience joy yeah yeah because joy means the pleasure of not getting what you want basically i love it i love hearing it in this different language because this is that i'm i used i'm used to more spiritual language with this kind of stuff oh yeah but to me this is taoism this is buddhism this is non-duality it's that beauty of the cross it's the beauty of life in death yeah of letting go of your life and what you think you need to be happy letting go of salvation and finding that you are salvation because you are as you are yeah yeah you just are in a weird way like you are the thing that you've been looking for yeah i'd be very interested because i wonder whether like i'll have to look into more about what you're doing because you know there might be some kind of interesting resonances yeah between what we're doing yeah because um this idea of joy for example is very nonchalant like joy c.s lewis had a great definition of joy where he said that basically it was an aruma of heaven right he talked about these moments of joy when he experienced this aroma of this kind of utopia but what's interesting about that is he was experiencing pleasure of not having because he didn't have the the utopia he didn't have the heaven right um he kept fantasizing about it but the joy was this experience of pleasure and not having and if you think about a kid at christmas there's pleasure which is when he gets the christmas presents right opens the christmas presents and there's enjoyment which is when she's like excited about christmas coming right the problem is sometimes we can't enjoy your enjoyment so the little kid is wetting themselves they're they're having temper tantrums they're so excited about christmas coming um but eventually then they open the present there's a momentary pleasure but actually all the fun is in the enjoyment which is the the not having the present the waiting for the present the expectation of the present and in in a similar way life has moments of pleasure absolutely but actually what can be sustained is joy and and i mentioned it earlier with my own project my own work is that's joy because with moments of pleasure moments of pleasure is maybe when i publish a book and i go oh yeah i think i i kneel something there right and that's momentary that lasts for virtually no amount of time like actually i get i get very little pleasure from publishing or anything but there's probably a moment where you get the book through the post and you go oh that's nice but the enjoyment is the frustration of writing it um and the on and pursuing it and then going to i'm going to have to write it again i'm going to rewrite that because it was rubbish you know and write in a second a third a fourth or fifth book um and that is a weird form of pleasure and not in not getting it's it's a bringing together of two seemingly opposite things yeah you know let's let's say i've got my finger hurts i i've hurt my finger i can experience that as suffering if i don't want it to be like that and i i have this idea of well i should be feeling i've had healthy fingers before that aren't hurting oh my god i wish i had fingers like that but you could also theoretically just imagine use your imagination to be somebody who's never had feeling in their hands and all of a sudden they have a feeling and even if it's painful that might be an absolute delight oh my god i can feel with my finger yeah yeah and it's a joy to experience pain yes well that's that's funny like hegel talks about this and it's it sounds crazy at first exactly what you're saying in a philosophical way is that that pain is um is the contradiction of life because basically life is between being and nothingness being is pure stuff and nothingness is pure lack of stuff right and uh becoming is the contradiction becoming is kind of like we're we are moving towards death but we're also you know we can become healthier and and and so pain um is is basically the expression of that contradiction yeah so there's even growing pains when you think i remember when i was growing and the the difficulties in my legs and the pains and my bones and and the it's not because someone might hear this and go this is a glorification of p integra no no it but it's something deeper it's actually saying that life cannot exist without some level of pain that that either too much pain and joy can't exist without some level of pain yeah and like like too much pain is and you know you die and too little pain and there would be no subjectivity no self so there is this interesting place of that that life has a certain amount of pain yeah within it um so yeah yeah it's just it brings it back to my ex how i'm experiencing the world how i'm experiencing my life doesn't happen objectively it doesn't happen out there it happens here and now and it happens through this body it happens through this subjectivity through these wounds through the stories that i'm telling and so and when i'm tempted to either go they're the problem or this is the solution i can be invited closer into into the actual thing that's going on which is uh happening in me and and how am i perceiving and reacting to and how what are how are my desires interacting with what's happening um and that i i think the closer that that you always bring it back there where you bring it back to yourself you can avoid some of the traps and illusions that of the rainbow or the you know the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that doesn't exist you just forever be chasing your own tail or on the other side of things the trying to solve a problem out there that's not going to help you anyway yeah um and at that and at the highest level of all this when you get to you know level 132 or whatever it's we realize we are the wind of the universe you know like we it's not so much that that even though we have contradictions we are the contradiction and um on a very deep level uh you know there are the traumas that happen to us in life and we can do stuff about them and what we want to do is we want to minimize the traumas that happen to people in life but there is the trauma that is life and we that we all share in that trauma that there are the wounds that that we sustain and there is the wound that we are and the wounds that we sustain we can we can create a better life for people where we sustain less wounds but we ultimately if we do enough work we will come to see the realization that we are the wound of the universe which means we are the the kind of the lack the the we are the eruption psa we are the universe seeing itself and hearing itself and speaking itself and and so in order for that to happen there needs to be these cuts like swiss cheese yes these cuts and we are the cuts and uh it's a you know and it's very difficult to get your head around at first but um and but it's funny because in various areas like so in in in politics i think it's called democracy in uh in psychoanalysis it's called the cure in philosophy it's called absolute knowing and in christianity things called salvation they're all kind of similar which is the moment in which you realize that you're able to embrace the contradiction and the lack that you are you're able to make peace with that lack and in doing so you stop scapegoating you stop pursuing lost objects and you're able to be what else could notice the wound but just being yep and being itself is not doesn't have anything to change about itself yeah it just is right yeah and so being recognizes the wound within itself and being is perfectly fine all of the time um or yeah we'll see where this is where i'm more pessimistic this is why we're we're going to talk is it's like i almost want to say like this is why being is is is not well all the time but that's why it is like that there's this weird the reason why anything exists at all is because of this oscillation in being so being is kind of like reality everything we see as i say being out of nothingness life out of being consciousness out of life self-consciousness out of consciousness these are all the eruptions of deadlocks and contradictions resolving themselves and going deeper and deeper and deeper um and so yeah yeah what do you think about the i've got this kind of notion that i don't know if it's true it seems true to me i'm curious what you think that anything as soon as you start getting close to something saying saying something that is like pretty good pretty true you can say the opposite and it's also true oh yeah this is this is oh you're so right this is why i'm against wisdom and this is why he hit instagram actually um i was like so here's an example she's like does this well too different i don't know what he does i'll do a different one but if i say to you um you know don't don't get caught up in the everydayness of life you know meditate on the infinity of space and time and they will lift you out of the mundane concerns of the world oh wow then if i say to you you know the true joy of life is in the little momentary material things the smile of a stranger the kiss of a lover the the the embrace of a friend don't get caught up in the eternal and the infinite you find joy and and then i can add another one and i can go you know the pursuit of a meaningful life is itself the problem the pursuit of meaning is what makes us so unhappy and unfulfilled just give up the pursuit of either the eternal or the infinite little tiny moments forget both of them and simply be or i can say it is the pursuit of meaning that makes our life meaningful whether it's in the pursuit of the eternal or in the pursuit of the the momentary and so there's four all different and you say them in this kind of like they're all equally true yeah at all so this is why i mean i'm i'm very i humpty wisdom but i i see this as funny on instagram i did think of setting up an uh twitter account once that had wisdom sayings where each saying just the next one contradicted up the next one contradicted that but wouldn't what you said like i like wisdom for that like they all are valuable from certain vantage points at certain well yeah the only thing being here's my here's my devil's advocate on this because i can say you know you know they all could be useful but um one is they tell you just more about yourself so you know like whichever one you like like i said when someone gives you advice they're telling you about themselves it's hilarious nine times out of ten they're saying what they would like to do so oh you should break up with them okay what are you saying to yourself um but um the other things i think i like about philosophy is in one way it's like it it tries to actually say something that that does work universally at all like it tries to get to an insight that that's just that's right and so i do kind of like that also i do see figures like jesus as anti-wisdom and anti-ethical uh because this is the one thing that progressives say by cheese they go like regardless of anything else the one thing we can say about him is he's ethical and he was wise but soren kier gore would be stirring in his grave he says no no no the whole point is jesus like there was it's not wisdom tradition you take abraham and isaac for example that's nuts if anybody ever says to you i wouldn't kill my kid it's like you know but the whole abrahamic faith is based on this and jesus is always overturning wisdom and also acting unethically so um and then and then kiragor does a whole like builds a whole existential philosophy on that very insight anyway go ahead yeah but i think that it's built into it like there's i've heard it somewhere um and i don't know if this is true to the jewish understanding of these books but that there's sort of a progression like proverbs would be more like a for a young person than ecclesiastes uh as you kind of deconstruct the constructs of proverbs and then ultimately song of songs yeah being sort of union so you have like this construct deconstruct union progressive progression to wisdom thoughts whatever but baked in to the wisdom to these these sayings that can be helpful at one point or another in your life and you see then you see the opposite is also true yeah well this is one of the reasons why i like the bible it's funny because there's people who believe in you know you'll know a thing called inerrancy and it's but actually one of the beautiful things about the text is that it's full of contradictions you know god hears everything but god is deaf god is a peacemaker but god is a warrior um proverbs where one proverb completely contradicts another where four gospels were literally that you know jesus clears the temple as the first thing in one gospel and it's the last thing in another gospel and the point being not that these contradictions were actually often embraced by the writers themselves which is of course part of the idea of of truth if truth is contradiction that that's actually part of one of the things i like about the text is you say like proverbs you can't read proverbs without seeing it's fundamentally in that's actually what the writers are doing they're actually bringing you into a deep insight there um yeah so and even the fact there's four gospels that don't fit like there was uh what was the name of the for early church father ter tashian you know uh that's a that's a big company but similar to that but he tried to make one gospel put them all into one and he was condemned as a heretic and i'm always surprised that evangelicals don't try to do that but i think deep down they know that actually the truth is in the contradiction like is in the fact that it's four different conflictual testimonies makes something interesting that's actually one of the interesting things about it anyway yeah yeah love it okay so as far as the story the myth uh i will be happy if are we are we stamping that not true oh yes i would be happy with yes the the trick the trick is to enjoy your lack of enjoyment for neither neither go for the religions of nihilism or the religions of hedonism it's the re the religion of the absurd kierkegaard's religion of the absurd which is you the highest and the lowest form the having and not having or there i mean this is what the cross is like god dying is actually an absurd claim it's an absurdist claim we didn't we should do one on the absurd something but um so this idea of of actually not getting what you want and that's what you want somehow enjoying the unending pursuit of uh of life being a way of finding some sort of pleasure so there you go that's the trick yeah it's not what else what else could you ever find joy in other than what is now right like you're always seeking this other thing but even that is happening now is that seeking of the this is where i think you and i have a we make a good kind of yin and yang yeah and that's your language not mine i'm not a young and young guy but what is that uh a year ago like the pleasure of the noi and i'm saying with the pleasure of the not now but you know that's exactly it yeah we are the perfect expression we must be saying wise things cause the realistic stuff yeah because they're offices i love it i love it i think somehow i connected yeah yeah i agree nice one thank you very much uh do you have anything any places you want to direct people no just if they're interested in finding out more fire on them a website and you'll find lots of material there okay thank you [Music] thanks to peter rollins for being on this episode of the liturgist podcast my name is michael gunger i've been your host thanks so much to the patrons for making this show possible if you'd like to join the liturgist community we'd love to have you part of us we do these sunday gatherings and there's meditations and there's all sorts of stuff that we've got going on behind the scenes just go to the liturgists.com we'd love to see you around thanks everybody