So one of the comments that I'm getting quite a bit is that people have noticed that I recommend

San Deferm the Syrian and his poems, the Hymns of Paradise, to read that in order to understand the story in Genesis and also the symbolic structure.

And many people have written me to say that they're not, they're struggling to get out of San

Ephraim what I suggest they can get. And so last month I was invited by Father

Jason Foster to Shreveport, Louisiana to speak at a clergy retreat for the

Orthodox Church, the OCA, Orthodox Church of America, but also to give two

public speaking events at

his parish.

And so what you're going to see is the first part of that.

I'll post the second part in a few weeks, but the first part was really diving into the

poem of St. Ephraim, also connecting that poem with St. Gregory of Nisa and his vision

of the ascent of the mountain.

And so what we're really getting is this image of the mountain in paradise as this cosmic

structure. And so hopefully this will help people get through St. Ephraim and get the

golden nuggets that are found in his poem. Please enjoy my first dive into Sandh

from the Syrian, and I hope you enjoy that.

This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.

Tonight what I want to talk about is I want to talk to you a little bit about that experience that I had or try to take you along that experience that I had of seeing how everything is connected together.

To see how the Bible and our tradition of the fathers, the icons, all of this is really a powerful series of embedded patterns, you could

call it. The way I sometimes try to describe it is that reality has a fractal structure.

We really know what a fractal is. So fractal is like a tree. If you look at a tree, you have the basic tree, but then each branch of the tree has the same shape as the tree.

Right? So you have a tree and then the branch, and on, if you follow the branch, if you could cut the branch off and hold it, it would look just like a tree.

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