Why Jordan Peterson Lives in the Signifying Present and Sam Harris Lives in the Signified Past

I just watched the first debate of Jordan Peterson with Sam Harris on YouTube. 

I haven't watched debate #2 yet, but I will. From what I saw so far, this debate displayed the following existential conflict: the capacity to order language and ideas across time, which operates and functions at the level of and functions in, though, and as the a priori, distinguishing, demarcating, meaning-creating centers of activity that precede, transcend, update, and unify meanings (displayed by but never explicitly stated by Peterson), vs Harris' capacity to (only) move ideas and meanings around, which relies on acts of distinguishing, demarcating, and meaning-creation which

a) he's unconscious of

b) were done by others in the past,

c) he doesn't understand the nature of,

and d) he will only admit exist with pressure. And he does (they both call them, I think unhelpfully, "intuitions")

Sam's big idea is that meaning is a function of accounts of what is (facts, in other words), but implicit in Peterson's point (as far as I can tell; he struggles to say this explicitly; I sure did too; English is not a language that lends itself to this kind of thinking) is that meaning is a function of activities that

a) ontologically precede accounts of what is, that is, facts (since it's not clear how an account of what is, which is an act that occurs at a given moment, can also give an account of that in what is that transcends said moment and only exists in, through, and as that transcendence, which is, itself, an activity that creates what is in its wake),

b) transcend accounts of what is (for the same reasons),

c) update accounts of what is (since an account of what is can be demonstrated as wrong by certain new accounts of what is, or facts, that become apparent to us, and since this "becoming apparent" is itself an activity that cannot be accounted for as fact, since it exists in, through, and as the act of transcending accounts of what is),

and d) unify accounts of what is (since this level of activity, as what exists in, through, and as the perpetual transcendence of the accounts of what is that occurs across time, is what allows us to posit that two elements of an account of what is can cohere in some meaningful way as the same account).

In other, much shorter words, Harris moves around elements of meaning that have been situated, whereas Peterson operates at the level of what situates meaning, of meaning (the gerund) itself.

This isn't arbitrary

a) because it's not clear how we can have meaning at all, to not succumb to nihilism, without centers of meaning that precede, transcend, update, and unify individual meanings,

b) because in order to allow one word to succeed another over time instead of another, I have to choose it for some generative, meaning-creating reason, to participate in an activity that privileges one value over another and thereby creates one meaning and not another.

c) because people have different such modes of letting words succeed each other in ways we can talk about and discuss.

d) because these centers of generative activity are, put differently, that which privileges one value over another in action (like speech or writing) are, therefore, what exists in and through meaningful action, are, therefore, what exists as the reason I choose that act over another, and are, therefore, the moral intuitions that Peterson and Harris both agree exist and can't be explained away

and e) because these generative centers, as what unifies a chain of signified meanings across time, is by definition *narrative," and we enjoy narrative as a culture.

TL;DR: Harris lives and works in the signified past and Peterson lives and works in the signifying present. Harris sees meaning as a function of facts, of accounts of what is; Peterson sees meaning as a function of the generative centers that precede, transcend, update, and unify accounts of what is, i.e., moral intuitions. Harris operates only using the logic of "meaning" as a noun, where Peterson also operates at the level where he can use "meaning" as a gerund. The former is trapped by what has been signified and can only see what precedes, transcends, updates, and unifies what has been signified as arbitrary nonsense. The latter knows that this preceding, transcending, updating, unifying activity is not nonsense but is a) the condition for any sense, and b) intelligible and something we can discuss.

Btw, I suspect that Peterson hasn't articulated this to himself, but this distinction seems to be at the heart of their disagreement and, more broadly, certain philosophical conflicts in general (like whether or not Heidegger is saying anything but nonsense).

Reuniting Nouns and Verbs: An Insoluble Problem and the Dream that Solved It

This post is a combination of two Facebook posts: one from yesterday, where I articulated a problem that's been plaguing me for a long time, and one from this morning, where I recounted a dream I had last night and explained how it solved that problem for me. This is a milestone for me, and it is not only because it is objectively a milestone, but also because I will *make* it more and more of a milestone by the act of subjectively taking up the belief that it is a milestone.

Post 1:

A huge, pervasive problem I see no one talking about:

As far as I can tell, most people assume that to be right is desirable and to be wrong is undesirable. Moreover, if that's the case, and if someone asserts a point of view that contradicts mine, to retain the desirable state of being right, I have to assert (either privately to myself or to them) that they're wrong. But this is to deny them the desirable state of being right (either in my consideration of them or as a possibility in their consideration of themselves) and is, therefore, something I do to benefit myself at the expense of other people. To declare either privately or publicly that I'm right and you're wrong seems to be selfish, unsocial, and immoral. In short, I can't see how you can have a) the peace and existential security of knowing you're right and b) allow other people who think differently that same peace.

I, for one, have always subliminally chosen b) over a). In arguments with people, I tend to (generally only privately) assume that they must know something I don't if they disagree with me, even if (to be honest) in the vast majority of the cases what *they* don't know vastly outweighs what I don't know. I choose to let them have the existential security of being right and deny it to myself; that, to me, is the only virtuous thing. But it wrecks my psyche. I am torn apart by people whom I respect and trust who disagree with each other. And respect everyone. It has made me mentally unstable at times. I need to find a solution to stay sane or even alive. This has driven my intellectual pursuits for the past few years.

A few potential solutions:

1) I could let you have your opinion and let me have mine. This seems doubtful and inconsistent. To posit a is to posit that not a is false. So even if I merely declare an opinion to myself, I'm asserting to myself that you are wrong and, therefore, in an undesirable state.

2) I could not tell x person that they're wrong and spare then the pain of lacking that desirable state. This is good for them but not good for me; there is a microcosm of them in me that suffers whenever I call them out even privately. This is another way of stating my "morality."

3) Have peace at the expense of virtue. No. I can't and I won't.

4) Change my idea of virtue. I can't. My "morality" is, really, the primeval togetherness of people where you are a part of me and I am a part of you. To be honest, this isn't a conscious choice but part of my tendencies as someone on the spectrum. I could maybe change that, and I'm trying, but it won't be easy. This doesn't mean, however, that I don't think it's *objectively* immoral to posit my opinion over yours. I do.

5) Avoid confrontation. A version of 3. I really want to, but I can't. I have too much to say, to many people to help, to privilege my own we'll being over others. Not only that, but avoiding places where there *might* be confrontation generally leaves me mentally understimulated.

6) Care more about what is the case than who's saying what is the case. A version of 4). This is valid in certain ways: if I don't know what's right, I could lack information that could help me later. That's fair. But this perspective also ignores that truth, as a correct representation of being, does not exist apart from a specific representation of being. The table over there is real, yes. Is it true? That's meaningless. "Objective" truth is as nonsensical an idea as a book that includes everything, including (somehow) itself and the media/conditions for the representation it is. There is no true representation or conception, or one that claims to be true, without someone to posit it. And as such it falls prey to the problems I've delimited here. Of course, there is the problem of information that doesn't fit my model and whether or not I ignore that information, whether it comes from others or from the world. I agree with Jordan Peterson on this point, who says that this act is the origin of evil. However, I wonder if to "posit" itself, as a representation, in a certain sense is to ignore what doesn't fit that representation. People seldom say "x, but x could be wrong," especially since this means to say "x" and then "not x." There's something fishy here.

7) Figure out a way to expose denotative language, logic, and the idea of positing "what is the case" as a fraud. This is my best, desperate bet, methinks. It's what I've been trying to make clear to myself at BYU. I suspect that "positing" is nothing more than a selfish, arrogant, left-hemisphere language game used to justify control, patriarchy, and conflict in rent way I've described here. Language doesn't have to posit; it can gesture.

Just figured out how to say this. Thank God. It's been slumbering subliminally for a while. Tell me what you think.

Post 2:

A (big, in the technical sense) dream I had last night that subliminally represents and solves the problem I articulated with yesterday's post:

I am at the theater, and a woman gives me (as Shrek) the grace of pushing me out of the boundaries of the theater before the theater and everyone in it is sucked into another world and goes beyond reach, beyond what can ever come back again. This is what is depicted in Avengers Infinity War: half goes away. I make it by the skin of my teeth. The worlds created by the split become split off and develop in parallel ways. In the original world, there is great mourning and sadness. This sadness is Terrence Mckenna's death. I am with a group of people who study Christian ideas under Terrence McKenna's model. In a dark passageway that *is* the Internet and the search for knowledge, I encounter him saying that the split in Avengers Infinity War was cosmically foreseen in the Bible; it is the split of Revelation, the "Rapture." In this group, I write (on a yellow sheet of notepad paper) my model for the world, the way I conceive of this tragedy, the way I process it, poetically. I wrote a lot (a lot of it was in an earlier medium and didn't survive, but I summarized it), and the arbiter there, Terrence Mckenna's friend and the head of it not only after he died but before he died as well (this bridges over his death), isn't too much of a fan of the bulk of it, a long rambling poem, but really likes the beginning summary even though I didn't see it at first, and even if I did, I didn't register its significance. The world that left inhabits a previously uninhabited world, one that starts over from the beginning, a green world, a world where a new civilization develops, a world dominated (sadly) by Trump and his cronies. This world itself is divided into two parts: a privileged class and an unprivileged class. The privileged class is constituted by those who inhabited "the head" of the theater during the split; the unprivileged happened to inhabit other, lower parts of its "body." This is arbitrary and totally unjust, but it is law. There is a kind of intelligent metal, one that grows and develops in adaptive, intelligent ways, that produces amazing things for the privileged class. It is barely used for the unprivileged class. The metal is a microcosm of cities, a city-ing, an adaptive, generative, intelligent producer of structure and order. There is the hint of an idea that we will overthrow the order. I pop into this world by free choice. I am met my brother's boss, a Trump, but a good Trump. I am here to overthrow order; I wouldn't have come otherwise. It's not clear I will succeed. at one point (I'm not sure when), the boy king/prince of this world speaks to his mother, who is immortal even if he isn't (she transcends the split between the worlds), and asks her what it's like to be a "Valkyrie." She says that it's like living 80, 180 (something like that ) years (almost to the end of the boy king's life) and still being the same age. There's something unnatural about it. This is related to Trump, the arbitrariness and absurdity of this split, of this world. This second world is brighter, greener, somehow. It is a new beginning, but one with a perverse streak. At one point, the part of me that inhabits the second world tries to go back to the first, an *impossibility*, but I manage it. I go back to the world that had cast us out. And there, Captain Hook, a version of Donald Trump that's only (if anything) "prior," inhabits this world alone to revel in himself. He is totally, perversely evil. This is the house, and it is empty, empty except for Tre, who is nearing the end of his life and is being trained by Hook for his purposes (including watching out for intruders). I go to Mom's bedroom, where Hook had remained, and I find his phone. My sisters are here with me; they came too. We look through his phone, find the state of the world we had left behind. But then he comes back, and I, in rage for the catastrophic split he inflicted for his own selfish, self-indulgent reasons, seize him. I want to dismember him, tear his head off, crush it, tear his limbs off, and I see the malevolence in his face, and I realize that, yes, he is pure, unadulterated evil, but if anything, that makes me realize that to kill him would perpetuate his evil. So I stop, and to prevent him from ever leaving, I condemn him to 600 years (I.e. a long, purgative time) of torture, after which he can be freed. Then I realize that, wait, it wasn't just Hook; the half of the world that remained is still here. I catch up on everything that happened on social media in the hundreds of years since Hook split the worlds. I see the Mutual matches I had missed while they weren't sure if I had been raptured. I see the other half of the Tinder announcement grieving this "Rapture," a parallel of what had developed on the other side. I see Instagram, Facebook, everything that I had missed. I/we are the first to cross back over. We will heal the split. 

This dream depicts a catastrophic cosmic event, an event that occurs in what ontologically precedes history, that is, what occurs perpetually, what repeats, in each of our lives in a way that we are totally helpless to and have forgotten. The dream, aided by my logical articulation yesterday, is an *imaginative* articulation of the same problem.

The "theater" (i.e. my folks' place) is, obviously, a stage, a place of representation, a place where representation is married to the things that represent it, where representation is plastic to the world that transcends representation, where the stage is permeable. The theater's "rapture" is what occurs when representation is severed from what transcends and updates representation. This splits the world into two: the world seen only as representation, as something fixed, something that can be updated, even if we're unsure how something that "updates" representation can exist at all if it's not represented, and the ("empty") world that lives in the act of representation, that is "representative." The world that leaves is the world of represented things; the world that is left is the world of representing things. The world that leaves is the left hemisphere of the brain; the world that is left is the right hemisphere of the brain. The world that leaves is the world seen as a collection of things, of nouns; the world that is left is the world as process, as verb. You can leave from the representative to the represented, go "downstream" (we do it all the time), but it's *so* rare to go from the represented to the representative, to go *upstream.* This is why you can leave one world and go to the other but (apparently) not vice versa.

What causes this split? The dream provides an answer: Captain Hook, i.e., the embittered old man, the act of refusing to update perceptions or, in other words, the fear of death. To consider representations merely as *represented* and not *representative*, then, is to refuse to update what is represented by the *representing* factor that precedes, transcends, updates, and unifies representations. It is an act of, by definition, evil. The dream also suggests that Donald Trump's evil is the *represented* effect of what the *representative* act of ignoring the act of representation (as a gerund) itself. He is the effect of what Captain Hook is the generative cause. Hook is upstream, damming the flow; Trump is downstream.

Other cool things:

Terrence Mckenna (i.e. the guy who teaches these ideas in his own way, the guy who wants to return to the primordial togetherness of nature with culture) dies as the theater raptures away. They are the same event. I.e. the world of Eden, where plants give life and where we are one with nature and what lies within and behind nature, dies when we distinguish the representative from the represented.
The represented world, the left-hemisphere world, the world of *effects*, is completely arbitrary in the sense that the things and people who populate it are grouped only by *already-made* distinctions, only by distinctions that were given by an act of distinguishing that's either unconscious, inherited, or done by someone else. We have forgotten that distinction isn't only something given but, actually and with more ontological priority, also something *done." We have failed to realize that distinguishing is something which precedes what it distinguishes, and so we are at the mercy of unconscious, arbitrary acts of demarcation. This is what is being described with the "classes" in the fallen world, the world that left.

The intelligent metal is interesting. It was entirely benevolent, in the dream, not unlike McKenna's machine elves, and it seemed like something both dangerous and awe-inspiring. It seems to me that this metal is something like the unconscious generative capacities that come about when we create in ways that are uninhibited by material limitations, i.e. the Internet. The nternet is an image of the spiritual world that occurs purely because a) we lack material limitations and can do whatever we want, and b) because the structure of what we want is the structure of mental state, and the structure of mental state *is* the spiritual world.

I'm sure you'll notice parallels to various cultural artifacts. Avengers Infinity War was a huge formative factor in the dream. Thanos' "final solution" is, in essence, the act of severing the world from itself by privileging ideology, intellect, and the effect of intellectual judgment over the *act* of intellectual judgment, of demarcation, of *action* itself. It kills half the world, though (as we all suspect) they're safe in some kind of cosmic hard drive. On that note, this also strongly parallels recent seasons of Doctor Who, which includes an episode (Heaven Sent) that has affected me very deeply as a mythical, affective description of my life. I am trapped in the Underworld (notice that I am cast out of the theater and that, when I return to the empty world, my dog stands guard there like Cerberus), a common theme in *many* of my dreams, and my job is to open a door. This is a theme you also saw in my play, if you know what happens. I (not just as "me" but as the totality of people nowadays who fill the same spiritual, affective role) am meant to open the door to the hidden remnant on Gallifrey, to the souls who have died by Thanos' hand, and rejoin the living with the dead. There are also, of course, lots of parallels with recent events in my daily life.

If you think this is an arbitrary and meaningless reading, it isn't. I wrote this interpretive essay when the continuous, unfolding, representative factor in the dream was still fresh, when it was still able to continue. This "continuation" wrote the essay. Also notice that the symbols in it cohere around a definite, very evident structure: an upstream world is split from a downstream world by malevolence. This essay is just an elaboration of that evident structure. I could have said a lot more, but the point is not what I say but the generative centers of meaning-creation that organize what I say. Not all such generative centers are created equal. To equate meaning with what is *generated* is what the dream equates with evil.

My Explanation of Autism

Jordan Peterson's Bible Lectures and Swedenborg's Biblical Inner Meaning

So I've been studying the works of the 18th century scientist, theologian, psychonaut, and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg for over at least five years. I find his works fascinating because his visions describe phenomena that are bizarrely similar to those of NDEs and people who take drugs like DMT (not to mention things like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and certain strands of Islamic mysticism). But that's neither here nor there.

 

What I find most fascinating is that he wrote a 10,500-paragraph-long exegesis of the inner meaning of Genesis and Exodus, and this spiritual interpretation is shockingly similar to Jordan Peterson's psychological interpretation in many parts. Let me give some examples.

 

For instance, I'm sure you're familiar with Jordan Peterson talking about how the snake in the Garden of Eden story affectively describes the factor in human evolution that gave human beings both self-consciousness and visual acuity. In essence, the snake is the thing in the grass that makes you look carefully, anxiously, and fixedly on the environment for threat - the factor that makes you "open your eyes" into a big stare almost permanently. Compare that with Swedenborg's statement about the snake:

"The earliest people did not compare various human traits to animals and birds but called them such. This was their manner of speaking...Snakes was their word for a person's sensory abilities. This is because sense impressions rise directly out of the body, just as snakes lie directly on the ground."

That is, snakes are a primeval word (an affective and not empirical description of Being, in other words) for the factor in human consciousness that regulates conscious intensity. Swedenborg goes onto describe how Eve eating the fruit is a symbol of human beings reveling fully in sensory consciousness and not participating in a more unconscious "participation mystique" where we paid attention more to the motor significance of perception than its literal content. Peterson's words from Maps of Meaning say the same thing, more or less: "The 'serpent' of the 'external unknown' works in concert, therefore, with the 'serpent' of the internal unknown: apprehension of the mystery which transcends the current realm of adaptation (that is, the permanent mystery of mortal limitation) produces permanent consciousness, at least in principle." I.e. the snake in Eden, for both authors, is the factor that "opens our eyes" to the factors in our environment that are permanently unsafe, what you have to scan for, the literal, sensory aspects of Being where you constantly have to watch out for the patterns of snake scales.

 

But that's not all. More impressive is their mutual treatment of the Cain and Abel story. For Peterson, as you know, Cain is the symbol of the embittered intellect, the intellect resentful of Being, a mind that thinks it knows better than God, a consciousness that has not accepted the price of Being (i.e finitude) and therefore learned how to love. Likewise, Swedenborg says this:

"Cain's offering depicts worship motivated by a detached faith while Abel's offering depicts worship motivated by charity."

For Swedenborg, charity and faith form a union like female and male and like the right hemisphere and left hemisphere of the brain (which, by the way, Swedenborg the lettered anatomist identified, respectively, with the affective and intellectual principles at least a good 150 years before anyone else did). To exercise faith (which he associates with the intellect) without charity (which he associated with the will or "affections") is the origin of evil, a state he says is depicted by this story. Likewise, here's Peterson in Maps of Meaning again: "Reason can serve health only when it plays a secondary role." This quote, by the way, is in a chapter called "The Hostile Brothers," where he interprets the Cain and Abel myth in way even more clearly in alignment with Swedenborg's exegesis.

There are other examples. For instance, in their treatment of Genesis 12 both Swedenborg and Peterson say that the actions of that chapter elucidate pedagogical principles; Peterson does this referencing the Future Authoring program in that lecture more than he does in any other Bible Lecture, and Swedenborg does it by explicitly saying that the affective meaning of Genesis 12 is used by angels in heaven as a kind of instructional manual for children there. But I think I've said enough.

 

The question is: why? I think, at the very least, these stories have a kind of inner feeling-logic, a method to their madness, a motor significance woven through the words, that can be distilled and explicated clearly. If so, geniuses like these two should come up with the same narratives. And they do.

The Book of Mormon, UFOs, and the Learned Man

The Book of Mormon origin story is admittedly hard to swallow. A guy from upstate New York uncovers a set of golden tablets conveniently located in his neighborhood, which he then translates with a weird breastplate-spectacle thing, and which he then conveniently loses. It's actually kind of absurd. But that doesn't stop millions (including myself) from believing in it. Does that make me, x convert from Guatemala, my ancestors from Copenhagen, Philo Farnsworth (the guy who invented the TV), and Mitt Romney idiots? Richard Dawkins has gone on record for saying so. But the situation is deeper than that.

For even if the Book of Mormon's origin story is absurd, that doesn't stop the alternative explanations from also being absurd. For even if we admit that the Book of Mormon has no historical evidence (something I'm not ready to accept), the *fact* of its text, just on its own, is an insurmountable mystery. It is remarkably consistent with itself. There is a coherent timeline, a coherent geography, and consistent voices throughout the text that often reference each other as if they had other texts in front of them while narrating. To create it on his own, #JosephSmith would have had to have charts, maps, and notes, but the witness reports we have to the translation process say he didn't. He just dictated, line after line, indefinitely, and picked up wherever he left off. This is a human impossibility (one, by the way, that has also occurred in other places, as with the book #ACourseInMiracles) And, of course, there are the witnesses to the plates themselves. You can believe that all these witnesses are part of a grand conspiracy, but that seems more like every other conspiracy theory when you think about how all these witnesses kept to their story even after some of them apostatized. This is a realm of study where the “rational explanation” isn't rational at all. There's nothing rational here, on either side.

And that, actually, seems to be the Book of Mormon's point. No one shall have it to get gain, in other words (and to paraphrase 2 Nephi 27), since as soon as anyone tries to grasp it rationally (apologist or skeptic) they leave gaping holes in their argument and lose it again. The Book of Mormon is slippery, something that can't be explained, a gaping hole in any rational account. More, it seems to *want* that. It wants to be unseen by those who wouldn't benefit from it. It wants to carry on its work in a way unchecked by rational skepticism, in a way that actually dismantles skepticism from within
This conceit of the Book of Mormon is, surprisingly not unlike the UFO abduction phenomenon. As the late #TerrenceMcKenna pointed out in his lectures, these accounts seem absurd, yes, they seem comical, clichéd, even inconsistent, but this absurdity is a mask that allows the rational skeptic to dismiss and therefore pass by them. These skeptics don't see, don't feel like they need to see, that abduction stories are common, *shockingly* common, and that even if we don't believe them literally, they need to be taken seriously. But, says McKenna, maybe they don't want to be looked at too closely, at least not by rational investigation. Maybe they want to demonstrate that rational science can't account for everything, to exaggerate the bias of scientism that would otherwise be invisible, to deconstruct its patriarchal, logocentric model at the core. And as McKenna points out, this is like what happened 2000 years ago at Golgotha. The early Christians were simple and naive, not the educated, cosmopolitan, rational cynics in vogue in Rome. Romans were materialists, remember, were skeptics, didn't believe in any higher power. But all of a sudden, their servants started whispering about a man in Judea who rose from the dead. These Roman cynics would have dismissed Christianity out of hand as sheer stupidity. They would not have seen that, within two centuries, it would be their state religion, and that within five, it would have deconstructed their whole empire. Christianity, like The Book of Mormon, like UFOs, hissed forth and did its work unseen, (often literally) underground, changing minds and moving souls in a way that rationality can't understand and therefore can’t confront.

For the book Dawkins rails against isn't the book I read. The book I read is a phenomenon of feeling and will, not of the dried-up, two-dimensional intellect severed from feeling and will. And this will-reality, this quality of feeling, seethes beneath the surface of rational consciousness like a root beneath a sidewalk. And it will break it open. It will dismember the numb intellectual husk we've made the world to be and reveal the gold of will and feeling buried under it.

The Spiritual Reason for Modern Violence

On January 1, 1919, Rudolf Steiner delivered a lecture about the underlying spiritual causes of World War I. He described how a new "revelation" was taking place from the spiritual world, that we had been immersed in a wave of spiritual life since the end of the previous century, and that this wave, when accepted and integrated into consciousness, would deliver human consciousness into a deeper, more mature level of spiritual evolution.

But we rejected it, said Steiner. We fight against it. And this battle against incoming spiritual life shows up as *intellectuality." The intellect, of course, is not real, not living. It *images* reality, yes, but this image is static, captures only one aspect of the dynamic organizing principle that brings reality into being. It doesn't present life, doesn't *perform* life, but instead makes shadows, specters, even corpses of life.

These shadows and specters, thoughts empty of life, thoughts that form a "ghostly web," were super popular then. Bertrand Russell was working on his Principia Mathematica, an attempt to define all mathematics logically (which Godel later proved impossible), and logical positivism was all the rage. "Everything is thinkable, logical, can be put into propositions, into a system, a web of facts," they all said. This system strives to be airtight, rigid, but this rigidity is the rigidity of defense, what occurs when you get a massage but never relax your muscles and end up feeling more tense and more exhausted than you did before.

But likewise, the world in 1919 was seething with rejected life beneath the airtight logical facade. Life is *not* logical - it is a world of difference, of dynamicity, of what facilitates the necessary connection between two things that even *lets* them oppose each other. You get hints of this in the culture and philosophy of the time. Joyce, Picasso, and Kandinsky were experimenting in the field of art, as were Jung, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger in the intellectual sphere. All of these (arguably) constitute an attempt to step beyond mere intellectuality, to embrace the new revelation of spiritual life, to add humility to thought. Heidegger, after all, had to create a new vocabulary to even articulate what he was trying to say, and Wittgenstein had to add a disclaimer at the end of his Tractatus to the effect that "if you understand what I've said here, if you got my point, you won't believe it, you'll throw away the ladder this book is after you've used it to ascend."

For the world yearns to step beyond this ghostly web, this web of thought, of *mere* thought, of thought-corpses. This is still true, more true, and the stakes are increasing. The ghostly web is breaking apart from underneath like a root beneath a sidewalk, and the "reality" of intellectuality is becoming more and more palpably absurd. The *world* is absurd; the world is a godforsaken Onion article. Donald Trump is president, school shootings happen every week, and intellectual debates are intellectual in name only. Soon, one way or another, we'll give up the intellect entirely.

But this can happen in a good way. To do this, we'd have to use a different kind of thinking, a thinking that is (to quote Steiner) "shape-producing; it gives separate pictures, rounded totalities; it gives contours, and through contours, color." This thinking *forms*, whereas the thinking still present, which we still stubbornly hold to, the thinking of the logical positivist ghostly web, is *dismembering*. If the right way integrates, sees things as wholes, knows the integrating and integrated character of the thing, the wrong way only separates parts from parts, only gives definitions. Positivism crucifies, whereas this new, dynamic thinking gives life, re-members.

For the secret, says Steiner, of World War I, and by extension the other wars of the twentieth century, and, moreover, the violence that pervades not only all school shootings but the present whole political climate, is this dismembering factor. When we reject the wave of life that comes with the new revelation and cling to our outdated positivist spider web, we fight that integrative factor with a force just as strong. We reject life; we have to reject life -- it's too powerful, demands too much, fills me more than I can bear. But if we don't accept it, if we turn ourselves away from it, we kill it. And murder like this can't remain implicit. Like everything we do with our minds implicitly, it will become explicit through deeds we all look away from. So, therefore, wars happen that we turn away from until it's too late, and we forget about school shootings within a week of their happening.

Eventually, the cry of this life will be heard, and it will become physically, tangibly real. Whether this life is mass murder or an integration of what the intellect has crucified depends on us. Will we remain within the shadows of the intellect or, facing our discomfort, step into the reality of will?

The Book of Mormon as Conversation

So the Book of Mormon is written entirely in first-person. Never is there the anonymous, omniscient "and God said" of Genesis, Leviticus, and Job -- you always know who the author is, and it advertises that fact on the very first page, in the first words: *I, Nephi* wrote this record.

And this goes deeper than pronouns. Anyone without an ideological agenda can tell you that Mormon sounds different from Nephi, that Nephi sounds different from Jacob. Mormon is the historian, as cut-and-dried as David A. Bednar's bullet-pointed, thoroughly organized General Conference addresses. One can imagine Mormon putting his styluses in obsessive-compulsive rows before he uses them to engrave the plates. Nephi, on the other hand, is more involved. He reads more introspectively, more emotionally, than Mormon's dispassionate spiritual history. Jacob seems almost bitter at times. Alma the Younger is the most intelligent author in the text. Moroni seems more otherworldly somehow.

To me, this first-person character implies that the Book of Mormon is a kind of conversation -- with itself, with Joseph, and with us. The book itself is a gift, a gesture, what occurs when one of numberless concourses of angels gives you a book to read, when your father bestows the sacred records to your keeping, when you dig up ancient golden plates, when a couple of nineteen-year-olds show up on you doorstep. This invitation is an irruption, a rip in the fabric of what makes sense, an opening to heaven. It's a challenge: "Read it! I *dare* you." And we respond to this invitation, participate in this conversation, by accepting that challenge, by reading the Book, by letting the Book change you, change your world.This is a chain, a system of concatenated strata, formed by invitations to read and acts of reading. The Book becomes itself through those levels, through Mormon, through Joseph, through *you*. Always becoming different, always blossoming, always transfiguring. It doesn't lose itself this way. It *is* this blossoming, this perpetual re-visioning in and through the reader. It's what lives through death. It's *resurrection."