I'd like to welcome you to episode 21 of the Symbolic World podcast. On this episode, I'm going to

play for you a video that I put up last year, which tries to follow a symbolic thread. One of

the questions that people have asked me is how exactly do we come to symbolic interpretations,

which are not just, you know, an expression of our own fancy,

of our own idiosyncrasies.

And one of the manners we can do that is by looking at a large scale through many stories

and seeing how the same patterns repeat themselves over and over at different levels of reality.

And so I will try to give up an example of that in interpreting the notion of heaven and

earth from the very beginning of Genesis all the way through the Bible and into the

Christian tradition.

Music This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.

One of the problems with symbolism is that when you hear people making symbolic interpretations for the first time, those people can often feel like they're jumping all over the place.

And sometimes some people, that's what happens.

But for those that really understand the patterns that underlie things,

what can sometimes seem like strange jumps are in fact a very tight

and coherent web of meanings and analogies.

And these analogies are built out of the extremely dense origin of something, and then they

take on a more and more explicit form as the grand story, if you will, unfold.

So in terms of Christianity, the pattern begins in Genesis, and then unfolds, finding

its highest and most complete internalized version in the person of Christ.

And in the end, these patterns are really the underlying patterns of reality.

And they find their, let's say they find form in particular instances, in particular forms.

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