so the the central idea in The Sermon on the Mount is that you should aim up and then you should concentrate on the present then you get to have your cake and eat it too but the first thing is that you aim up so you want to orient yourself so that everything you do is in keeping with an upward aim then you can concentrate on the present and that's that's that's that's the best possible pathway forward so what does it mean to aim up that's you might ask that well in the final analysis is it means to align yourself with the spirit of God but if you want to bring it down to earth it's like well there's undoubtedly some things you're doing that you know aren't optimal and you could aim at improving those well that's an upward aim and you could imagine that the sum total of all those incremental improvements is the upward aim you know and that as you make an improvement you get better at seeing the next step upward the the ultimate upward aim is what would you say the Heavenly City on the hill it's something like that it's it's existence that would be optimal for you and optimal for everyone else but that's a that's a receding goal right that's a kind of impossible heaven but it's the thing that sort of stands behind all your proximal aims want to aim upward and then you can concentrate on the present you know so what I'm trying to do in this discussion and I'm sure you are is what are you trying to do in this discussion you're trying to have an honest discussion okay why why I want to learn from you why I want to improve my life okay and you're bringing other people Along on that trip yes why is it useful to bring other people along because it improves their life okay and and is there something meaningful in that abolutely okay so that's a mystery I talked to Joo willik Joo wanted to be a soldier from the time he was like three and he's a complete bloody monster you know he's 4 feet thick and rampaging and he said he could have easily been a criminal he's a disagreeable militaristic guy he went off to train and he found that it was he really liked mentoring young men that was is way better than being a criminal he found a better pathway you know in these discussions that you're having with the people you bring on here like you said you're trying to learn so you're trying to shed your stupidity and move uphill but at the same time you're doing that you're engaged in a communal Endeavor right because you're helping other people do that too and so then you've got this great alignment between what's good for you and what's also good for everyone else that's a good deal God comes to Abraham as the the voice of Adventure so Abraham is Rich and he's 70 years old when the story starts he spent his whole life in his father's tent just living a hedonistic and secure life and there's no reason for him to do anything else cuz his parents are rich but God comes along and says get the hell out of your zone of security leave your parents leave your tent leave your community go out into the world and Abraham agrees he commits to it and he makes the sacrifices along the way that are necessary in expanding uh well each sacrifice that marks his pathway forward requires a Greater Giving Up it culminates in the offering of his son God tells him to sacrifice his son to God and so that's the culmination of the sacrificial process but God makes Abraham a deal it's such a cool deal this is such a wonderful thing to understand so imagine there's an instinct in your child that causes that child to push himself Beyond his limits and to develop to become mature to become independent imagine that you Foster that as a father right so you you'll you'll challenge your child because you want him to be able to Bear the weight of existence by himself but more than bear it to Bear it in an adventuresome manner God comes to Abraham as this the call of the spirit of Adventure and he makes it Abraham a deal he said if you abide by the spirit of Adventure wholeheartedly and you make the sacrifices that are necessary no matter what they are you'll be a blessing to yourself your name will become renowned so you you'll have a reputation you'll establish something permanent that's good and you'll do it in a way that's good for everyone else and that that's all aligned with that Spirit of Venture now that's a good deal if that's I think it's true like if it's not true it would mean that what calls us to develop is not in alignment with communal Life Society or with what's good for other people it could easily be the case that if you treated yourself properly in in the highest sense that that would align perfectly with the deepest needs of other people and that's that Divine Harmony that is offer on offer on the religious side of things that's associated with what's good and it seems to me it it seems to me true you know I would say for your friend who committed this terrible sin is that his pathway forward is to swear to do what's good and I don't know how deeply he has to swear that it it would be commensurate with his error know and and that could be of great benefit to him to some degree because it's a very rare person who becomes good without you know running into Satan at the crossroads you're not serious enough before then right you don't take yourself seriously enough think well what does it matter what does it matter what I do I'm just one dust Speck among 8 billion you know it's like no if you start to see yourself as well would you say the author of all evil that's a good one you might just start taking yourself with a certain degree of seriousness and then you can do a lot of good let's go back to post-traumatic stress I've done three and a half years of therapy twice a week I've done psychedelics uh treatments therapies I've done I've explored all kinds of different ways to overcome postraumatic stress uh tbii but let's just concentrate on postraumatic stress it always seems to go back to Childhood everybody I've talked to their therapist starts them at childhood I started at childhood then when I got into when I started research in the Psychedelic therapy and I started interviewing people about it a lot of the visual experiences that they relive is not wartime a lot of it is I would say more than not our childhood memories why the psychoanalyst would have called that a complex well imagine that it it's the same as a portal into hell I suppose that's another way of thinking about it all things you haven't dealt with are the same thing and why well all things you haven't dealt with are things you don't understand well how can you classify things that you don't understand because you don't understand them well you classify them with negative emotion that's the class the class of all things that produce negative emotion okay what's set the core of that the deepest hell you've managed to fall into what's associated with that everything you haven't dealt with in your life right so that if you encountered something particularly traumatic it would aggregate everything that was partially traumatic around it it's something like that because it's the same thing it's all those places in your life you did not Traverse properly right and those all have to be mapped because otherwise they're pitfalls and that's how your psyche responds to them there are dragons there look out do you have to sort that all out you do if you don't want to carry it with you you have to sort everything out that you don't want to carry with you that's partly why the Catholics insist on confession it's like what' you do wrong this week well I don't want to think about that it's like fair enough but then you carry it