The Meaning Crisis, and Shadow work, Jordan Peterson on Jung ft. John Vervaeke and Anderson Todd (0J8TLRUOgJo)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0J8TLRUOgJo

Welcome. This is an addendum to the series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Recently I released an episode on Jung as a prophet of the Meaning Crisis. I decided it would be a good idea to have my good friend and colleague Anderson Todd. He’s a former student of mine and now he’s a colleague of mine. We work together. He’s the associate director of the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Lab. He has a degree in cognitive science. He’s also studied Jung extensively. He’s a practicing psychotherapist. I thought it would be a very good idea to bring Anderson in and bring this into more of a dialogue format and talk about Jung, the Meaning Crisis and how that intersects with other thinkers like Corbin and current thinkers like Jordan Peterson. Anderson, welcome. Well, thanks, John. I’m happy to be here. So, I came to Jung quite early. I think as many people do, I came to Jung sort of obliquely through sort of cultural products. He’s hidden on the cover of Sergeant Peppers in the background. So, I kept encountering him, the music of the police, but I didn’t have a very clear sense of it. And then I began to read Jung when I was 12 or 13. And like things that I was reading around the time, I was reading Freud as well. And there’s a big difference. Freud is a very lucid writer, right? And so, although I disagree with a great deal of what Freud wrote and sort of the theory doesn’t always hold up for me, although he’s a giant, the theory doesn’t always hold up for me. Nevertheless, it has that lucid quality, right? So, reading it page by page, it’s very compelling. And reading Jung was not like that. It was very difficult. So, I would sort of wade through it and it would be like slogging through mud and I would hit these long passages that were written in Greek. But nevertheless, every page or two, I would hit sort of a jewel and stumble on something like this that just sort of stopped me in my tracks, you know, a single sentence or a single paragraph that seemed to connect really, really deeply to my felt experience of things. And so, Jung came to have sort of an increasingly central role in the way that I was structuring thinking around psychology in my kind of teenage years. And then I dropped it and came back to it as one does with these things and sort of went back and forth periodically making like a deeper and deeper slog into the collected works. And I worked as a full-time writer for quite a few years as a novelist and nonfiction. And it’s sort of hard to avoid the archetypal, especially if you read people like Northrop Frye, right, if you’re interested in critical theory, although Northrop Frye actually never credits Jung. He did have highly annotated copies of Jung in his library. No, I didn’t know that. He never credits him. Never. No. In fact, he deliberately kind of rejects and slags on him. I mean, Jung was sort of persona non grata in the academy and to some extent still is, right? So, you know, I was encountering these ideas more deeply and giving thought to them. And when I eventually came to university, I had it in mind to eventually work towards being a psychotherapist, which is what I now do, and had something of a depth psychological framework in mind. So that kind of psychodynamic approach to thinking about people’s problems and the way that personality forms and development and so on and so forth was very central for me. But even then, I felt that there were pretty deep problems with it. So some of those are reasonably well known. You know, Jung died in the 60s. And so, you know, lots of his ideas, which may at one time have had some currency, you know, really are in pretty bad need of updating. And you know, in other areas, like every other thinker, he’s at least 50% wrong. And that became sort of increasingly obvious to me. Where he gets things right, he’s striking, it’s shocking. And he’s a very talented phenomenologist. And I think he was a remarkably talented clinician in some ways. But also, you know, there are big gaps in his theory, there are pieces where he struggles to articulate things, and doesn’t really have the scientific language at hand to do so. He does sort of the best he can with, you know, quantum mechanics in places, and it doesn’t quite work. But then also, you know, the blind spots that just come about with the fact that, you know, he’s contrary to what the Jungian community often, I think, treats it, he’s not a saint. You know, he’s a man, and he’s a human being, and one with, you know, his own fairly deep character flaws. So the desire to sort of supplement his work started to take on more and more importance to me. And then when I got to university, when I got to university, as it turns out, I already knew you weirdly. So I had audited your classes like back in the 90s, because friends of mine who are enrolled at the school were doing cognitive science degree. And because I didn’t realize yet that I wanted to be part of the academy, I just spent all of my time with students and in the library. I ended up auditing a bunch of your classes. And I don’t think you remember this, we had an argument about leprechauns. Where I was being, I think a bit of a I think I was being a bit of a like, intellectual saboteur, you were explaining something, I said, you know, something, we could explain that with leprechauns. And I remember you giving me like a really I don’t are you serious look, I actually feel like that sets a really good note for things anyway. So, so yeah, so we had met then and had a few encounters. And so when I first took your course on I think, cognitive science and Buddhism, I think was the first course I took with you, that pretty rapidly got me to swing my major. I had been doing an English major out of a simple desire to do something straightforward. And I pretty rapidly dropped that and did cogsci. And it was not long thereafter, I think that you and I started to collaborate. So collaborating on the work around consciousness. And then I think soon thereafter was when we started talking about the lab. Yeah, and a few other projects. And of course, you you were a speaker right from the outset, as were a few other people, Tony Toneado, Dan Dolderman, Jordan Peterson, were all speakers at the conference series that I started. Yeah, the Mind Matters, which ran for six, six years. Yeah. So yeah, so in that time, you know, we you and I had sort of an increasing number of collaborations. But also, I had spent the better part of that period trying to sort of wrestle these different interests I had in the mind into some kind of working synthesis. And I sensed that it was possible to do so. And that’s still sort of an ongoing project. And it’s a tricky one. Because, you know, the the sort of driving ethos of cognitive science, you know, you would make the argument generally and certainly here at the University of Toronto, is this commitment to the naturalistic imperative. Yes. But I was once asked by somebody really early on why why you’re Tony Toneado, actually, I sat and I was in his office. And I said, Why Freud, Tony? Why Freud? Why Freud? I was quite puzzled. And he turned it around very ably on me and said, Well, why Jung? And I was not prepared for that question. And so I sort of struggled through it. And what I came up with was more than any of the other of the depth psychologists and psychological theorists of the period, and the psychodynamic sort of people, Jung takes seriously the realities of the soul. And by that, I don’t mean nor did Jung, you know, kind of like a discarnate, you know, it’s not a ghost living in your body. That’s not what we’re talking about. But rather that Jung takes seriously and directly, you know, takes sort of reverentially, the notion that spiritual reality and a sort of dimension of meaning, right, that is abstract and not easily grounded in physical things is not just relevant, but central to sort of our human purpose and flourishing. And so because Jung took that so seriously, but also because I had, you know, the sort of the naturalistic comparative at work, you know, I had a lot of work ahead of me in terms of trying to square those things off together, right? Yeah, and figuring out like what, you know, what what it means to to have both of those commitments. And like I said, that’s far from I think, a fully solved problem. But as the, you know, the time went on, it’s been almost a decade. And I had theory from from before. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that actually these things play together far better than I think people might believe at first glance. Yeah. But would you? Well, there’s two things I wanted to give you a chance. You were giving a very balanced overview of Jung, but you recently told me that Jung’s reputation has gone through a bit of redemption. Maybe you could share that with people. Yeah, sometimes I feel like I was the last person to know this. So, you know, I teach Jung here at the university, I have the great pleasure to teach the interdisciplinary courses in Jungian Theory Suite at New College. And, you know, as a Jungian enthusiast, right, I’m often called upon to defend Jung. And the main thing that of course comes up routinely is wasn’t he a Nazi? Which, you know, that’s a pretty serious charge. And, you know, there is a kind of an obvious split, right in German intellectuals, right? That this is the Tillich Heidegger split. Heidegger signs up to the party, Tillich says no, and leaves and Jung traditionally has fallen, I think, in public perception of this funny middle ground. And I know some people that really, really believe he was like a deep anti-Semite and so on and so forth. Now, that had never really washed with me, it just didn’t make sense. It was clear that a lot of the Freudians had accused him of anti-Semitism. But they didn’t like him for a lot of reasons. And there was some fairly vicious exchanges in the psychodynamic community after the Jung-Freud breakup. But then I found out, like a little under a year ago, so Jung, part of the problem was that Jung had stayed on in a kind of official capacity, somewhat answering. So when the Nazis took over, Jung decided to remain in charge of the, you know, like of the Psychoanalysis Society. And obviously, Freud being Jewish, that was that was a no go. But Jung stayed on. And the idea was that, like, maybe he sort of profited from that, etc, etc. And there’s some questions that he might have been, you know, a sympathizer, at the very least, like not sufficiently resistant. But in fact, I found out recently, that it’s on record that Jung, in fact, worked for the OSS. So the OSS was the World War Two precursor to the CIA. So it was sort of the intelligence, you know, the spy arm, basically, of the Allied forces. And Jung had an official an official designation as Agent 488. He reported through Alan Dulles as secretary to Alan Dulles, who became the first director of the CIA, and was a quite significant World War Two agent. And as it turns out, this stuff is all still classified, which itself is pretty weird. But he did psychological profiles of high ranking Nazi Party members, like he interacted with people and then I guess archetypally profiled their like mythic landscape or whatever. And Alan Dulles is on record as having said that, you know, people will never really know how much of a contribution Professor Jung made to the winning of the war, which is that’s neat. So yeah, he wasn’t he wasn’t a Nazi. He was a spy. That’s cool. Or something. He was a secret agent. Yeah, secret agent. It’s neat. So it’s good to finally have an answer in that respect. But yeah. So the reason I wanted to talk to you in more depth is, well, as you know, I’ve done you know, my work, we do a lot of work together. And I’ve done this series, awakening from the meeting crisis. And I see Jung as a pivotal figure. I group him with a bunch of other people I call the prophets of the meeting crisis. I’m using prophet in the Old Testament sense, not a fortune teller, but somebody who’s speaking truths that have like have a that are like revelation, they need to they’re not being noticed, something needs to be seen, something needs to be understood. And for me, you know, books like Modern Man and Sorts of a Soul, and you mentioned the idea of a soul seem to me to be clear documents portending and trying to craft a response to the meeting crisis. And so I thought maybe we could talk a bit about that. And then in connection with that, I’m sure that another person you encountered at U of T, especially with your interest in Jung was Jordan Peterson, and you’re teaching courses on Jung. So imagine that comes up. And I think one of the reasons that Jordan’s work has, well, there’s a couple of reasons. So one of the reasons why Jordan’s work is so has so much resonance is so popular, I guess that’s the right word, especially amongst one group of people, the people that I’m in dialogue with people like Jonathan Paget, Paul Van der Kley, is that Jordan seemed to have crafted an interpretation of Jung, similar in some ways to Joseph Campbell. But and then he seemed to have used that as a way of putting his finger on the pulse of the meeting crisis. So I thought maybe we could talk about sort of those two topics, we could talk about your take on Jung and the meeting crisis, perhaps your take on my take on Jung and the meeting crisis. And then how does Jordan Peterson’s work fit into this? And what do you think about that in general? Because I’m sure you have to have thoughts about this because you are teaching these courses about Jung at U of T. Yeah. So yeah, you know, looking at sort of profits of the meeting crisis, generally speaking, I thought you, it was interesting as I was sort of watching you build the diagram. Moving through, I was like, oh, wow, that’s where this is going. And it was very, it was very interesting sort of account, like you drew some lines that were somewhat unexpected. And I might have in fact drawn some extra lines in there, maybe I will. In terms of Jung’s role in that, you know, I think you do identify some really important threads, right? The influences that sort of go into Jung that naturally form a part of the kind of meeting crisis account, right? So Kant is the ultra obvious choice, right? You didn’t mention Hegel, but like a lot of the approach to the Jungian synthesis of the opposites is essentially pulls from the, you know, Hegelian dialectic and the practice of dialectic. Plato is a very obvious, very blatantly obvious influence on Jung. Jung allegedly did not like Kierkegaard, which, yeah, which might be interesting to touch on. But yeah, the big thrust, I think you’re right, quite right, aside from his contemporaries is Kant. And in fact, so much so that Jung referred to Kant as his philosopher. He was known in his medical residency to sort of bitch that he now only had time to read Kant on Sunday. So, you know, there’s no question that, you know, concepts, you know, the notion that we have sort of categories, right, that structure our experience innately is very closely related to the Jungian notion of the archetype. Yeah, you can get that sort of by taking the Jung’s notion of the categories and Plato’s notion of the forms and sort of- That’s right, mashing them. Together. Mashing them. Yeah, I mean, Jung’s concept of the archetype, and this is one of the problems when it comes to studying Jung, you know, I often field questions that are like, when Jung uses this term, what does he mean? Yeah, it’s problematic. It’s deeply problematic because his work is occurring over a 50-year span and what he means changes. Now, for one thing, I think Jung as a thinker was less concerned with consistency than completeness to, you know, bore the Goodellian idea. So because of that, you know, there is a grab bag quality to his work. You know, you’ll be going along and you’ll be like, yeah, yeah, sure. Okay, grail myth, good, you know, parental issues, whatever, UFO is fine, right? That kind of thing happens fairly routinely where his desire to be inclusive in the way that his phenomenology functions means that sometimes the pieces are a little loose. But above and beyond that, his specific ideas about what terms mean shifts pretty considerably over the period. So just to take archetype as an example. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Sure. Okay, so what, like, I mean, I was impressed by Storr’s idea that Jung has an organic model as opposed to Freud’s hydraulic model. And so I thought it was appropriate, I want to hear your feedback on this, to see Jung, I get that it’s anachronistic, but nevertheless, maybe it’s a way of properly appropriating his work to see Jung in terms of like dynamical systems idea, a self organizing system, and then you have attractor states within that self organizing system, things like that. And I was sort of pitching the architects along that line. So the model I had in mind is like archetypes are like settings of a parameter on a state space as a dynamical, and the dynamical system moves through the state space and it has attractors. And those attractors are sort of the image of the content of the archetype, but they’re not the archetype itself, the archetype, right? Is that, is that, what would you think about that? Well, okay, so the very nature of the archetype brought off the bat, and, you know, call back to Kant is that, you know, the thing in itself, you can’t get at. So the, you know, trying to describe the archetypes in any final sense is sort of doomed to failure. And Jung offers a variety of explanations for that. Some of it is just like, it’s inaccessible because it is before the subjective and objective world, right? So, you know, the archetype exists sort of outside of the objective and subjective. It’s part of the unis mundis, and therefore you can’t get at it. That’s one possibility. But another possibility that he gives sometimes is like, well, it’s just too big. It’s too big for your ego to grapple. It’s like you can’t pull it in because there’s too much of it. And it’s kind of a shape shifter. Like I said, he moves around in this stuff. I think the attractor state space and the idea of using dynamical systems theory to talk about it as an interesting lens, like it’s an interesting and one that I share. It maybe sanitizes a particular aspect, though, of Jung’s focus on the psyche as a living system. So obviously, right, like if you treat organic living systems as dynamical systems, this is like- Autopsy systems. Right. Yeah, it’s less of a problem. But there’s something about talking about it in terms of state space and attractors that maybe doesn’t quite capture. So the analogy that I use sometimes, okay, is like in Freud’s hydraulic system, you just have forces, right, pushing each other around. So if something is in your unconscious, if you have a repressed content, for instance, it’s kind of like when you lose your keys in the couch, you go to check your pocket, and they aren’t there. And right, and where are your keys? And the thing is, if you pull all the couch cushions out, eventually you will find the keys, right? There they are. They’re not going anywhere. Or you might like your phone, maybe, or your phone might go off and you’ll be like, oh, it’s in the couch. And nevertheless, it’s static. It’s sort of there. And in Jung, complexes and things don’t have that form because they have that living reality. It’s more like trying to catch a mouse behind your couch. So if you hear a mouse behind your couch, and you pull the couch out, the mouse is gone. This is one of the sort of justifications for why you should do analysis in tandem with somebody, because they can wait at the other end of the couch to catch it when you pull the couch out, so to speak, right? So that idea, right, that it’s a dynamical system, you know, if you can sort of extend that notion to really include the idea of the living system that’s adjusting and has its own goals, you certainly can. But I think state space sometimes throws people off from that dimension of it. So like if the system is self-organizing and it has the ability to sort of adapt to changing circumstances, kind of like what I talk about when I talk about parasitic processing, things like that. So I would even go a little further. I would say that it’s sort of maybe even explicit in Jung, but implicit in this particular take on Jung. It’s not just that it’s adaptive, and it’s not just that it’s flexible, and it’s not even just that it’s self-constituting. It is intentional. It has its own ideas about things and its own goals. And so that’s sort of central in some sense to the psychodynamic model, right? The psychodynamic model at its heart, right, which precedes Freud and Jung considerably, right? Like really, the Perz space model goes back to the ancient Greeks at some level. But when we consider it in terms of the unconscious in the modern sense, the psychodynamic model is a rejection of the unitive bias. We all have this unitive bias that we are singular, unitive beings. But in fact, we know from a raft of scientific evidence and from loads of anecdotal experience that people can share that in fact what we are is a bunch of different forces or beings in a dynamic relationship to each other that all happen to mostly answer to the same name and live at the same address. So that really then, I mean, there’s a sense then that Freud’s notion of the soul then is going to be sort of deeply heretical, right? Because then it’s not going to be the metaphysical locus of one’s personal identity. The way you’re describing it, you’ve got sort of micro-agencies at work. So what does the soul then become in that model? So one way, one deep and ancient way of understanding the soul, certainly a long-standing Christian tradition is when I say John, what I’m deeply and most directly and ultimately pointing to is my soul. Your Atman. Yeah, or my soul in the Christian sense, I think. It’s all about me that I identify with that is going to, that is seeking salvation and some kind of integrated individual, non-divisible, individual, non-dividable, right? Whereas that, if what you’re saying is the case, then Jung does not have that model at all. No, I don’t think he does. And I think that a lot of this, the term individuation really screws with people. Ah, so share that please. So individuation is like, I don’t know, some people tend to tag this as sort of the Jungian enlightenment, and I’m not sure that that’s quite accurate, but individuation is sort of the, it’s hard to say when Jung uses it, whether he means it to be descriptive or proscriptive, is it a goal that one has or it’s simply a description of what the mind does. But it’s this like movement towards being who you are. Okay, that’s kind of the idea, that you are becoming more fully who you are over time. A lot of people take the term individuation to indicate that they are eventually going to become, indivisible, right? That they’ll become unitive and locked. But I don’t think that’s actually indicated at all. And sort of in looking at how that works and thinking about it sort of in those terms, it gets closer to what you mean. So, okay, so in the Jungian system, right, you have sort of, you know, multiple sort of loci of agency, right? So you have your complexes, right, which are various forms. And then there are a few things like the, you know, the well-known ego, the shadow, the self, right, the persona. When you’re looking at the relationship between ego and self, particularly, the ego is the center of your conscious experience, and it’s the center of your self-identification. And one way to look at sort of the process of individuation is that, you know, everything else that happens is just facilitating a particular change in the relationship between the ego and the self. Yeah, the dialogue. Yeah. One of the ways that I think, so one of the ways that I think is useful to think about this, or the metaphor that I teach often, is the shift from the geocentric to heliocentric thinking, okay? So imagine for a second that the ego is the earth, okay? So of course, the earth thinks that it’s the center of the universe, right? That’s the geocentric model. And it looks into the sky, and we see the bodies in the heavens moving around, right? The sun rises and falls with a certain degree of regularity. The moon goes through its phases, whatever. And we see the planets moving in this frankly kind of erratic way. And as we try to model that, right, we build orreries and systems of rotation. And in order to make the mathematics of this model of the system, we have to add increasing like epicycles, right? And elaborate this. And what’s the big Copernican shift? The big Copernican shift, and this was not a new idea to Copernicus, right? It goes back to the Pythagoreans and the church knew about it. Yeah, Aristarchus. Right. You know, the big move is that, you know, we treat the sun as the center. And of course, Copernicus himself is very guarded about that in a way that Galileo isn’t. Yeah. So we treat the sun as the center. And why do we do that? Because it makes the math easier. Similarly, right, if you are standing on ego, and you look up and you think ego is the center of the system, then the movements of the other bodies in the system are highly erratic and difficult to predict. It makes no sense. Trying to relate everything back to ego means that things are confusing and weird, right? If instead you realize that the center of the system, right, is that thing up there, right, the self, and the self and the sun, you know, co-appear in the literature all the time, right? It’s like, of course, God is the sun. What else would it be? So, you know, when you suddenly treat the self as the center of the system and realize that everything, including your ego, is actually existing in a systematic relationship to that, suddenly the motions of your psyche become sort of more explicable, more predictable. When you realize that not everything that’s going on in your psyche is serving you, the ego. Right. So what does that, what would that, a couple questions. First of all, the first question is, what does that look like phenomenologically? Is it, you know, it sounds similar to me, and I think people have pointed this out to aspects of Vedanta, the relationship between the ego and the Atman, right? But what does that look like? Maybe that’s part of the confusion with enlightenment, because in Vedanta that’s clearly an aspect of enlightenment. And then secondly, the more I see what you’re saying, and the more we’re drawing out these connections, the more tortured the relationship between Jung and Christianity now seems to me. Very much. I mean, Jung is not a Christian. Jung’s a Gnostic. I mean, you know, Christian Gnostics, right? And likewise, you know, there were forms of Christianity that dipped into that, right? Like the Nestorians, right? Had that kind of the divine double built into it. We can get to that in a sec. So what’s the relationship? Well, I mean, the thing is that- Well, first of all, what does it look like phenomenologically? Phenomenologically. And then we’ll explore the more- So that tells you about the relationship. I mean, you know, the thing that’s said is, and there are sort of intermediary stages, right? Generally speaking within sort of Jungian individuation, you’re not aiming to have a direct encounter with the self right away, right? So typically speaking, you’re talking about doing shadow work first. That’s called the apprentice piece, typically in the literature. Then you’re doing work with the anima animus, your contrasexual soul image. Okay. And then eventually that segues through into the wider, woolly menagerie of archetypal forces and beyond that, the self. So what- Is the self also reaching, as you’re reaching towards the self, is it reaching towards you? Because you describe these things as if they have at least kind of a para-intentionality or something like that. Yeah. So the self often gets described as the center and totality of the system. And that throws people, the center and totality. But I think that if you maintain the kind of solar system model, that makes more sense, right? Well, that’s what I was trying to use the attractor state idea. Right. Yeah. Same kind of thing. So if you think of the sun, it’s like, yes, it’s the center and it’s discrete, but also it’s sine qua non. You take the sun out, there is no system. Everything flies off in a space, right? So, and it is sort of, you know, out of an accretion disc or however much you want to push on this cosmological metaphor, you know, everything is sort of around that. What that looks like phenomenology, phenomenologically. So this is the thing, and this is where I think Jung ends up with a really interesting and distinct approach to much of the spiritual material, is that the encounter with the self, the central organizing, meaning producing, right? The thing that is organizing all the other forces in the psyche, as often as not shows up in terms of mystical and religious experience. That’s the phenomenology of it. So sometimes I talk about depth psychology and I sort of tongue in cheek like to call it the theory and practice of things you’ll have to deal with anyway. Right? Because many of the aspects of Jungian depth psychology specifically are about having to take into account aspects of your own psyche, right? That you kind of can’t get around and denying them does you no good. So Jung has that position about, you know, the divine, basically speaking too, right? He says, at the end of the day, epistemologically, like, what possible evidence could we get in one direction or another that would prove or disprove the existence of God? So this lines up with Hicks’ argument about the spiritual ambiguity of the empirical evidence. That’s right. Yeah, very much. So I think, you know, in that sense, Jung is sort of an early important non-theist. I’ve tried to argue that. Yeah. That I think he’s best understood as a non-theist. Yeah, I think so too. Although his work gets cageier towards the end. I like, you know, he moves, like I said, the archetypes start being sort of the psychic equivalent of like a reflex, right? Like getting your knee tapped and… Yeah. Right? So they start like that. And I think that there’s some good material to think about them in those terms, which we can touch on. But eventually they become sort of cosmic principles. Like as he moves to explain them, they become more and more like Kantian categories, right? But like even more so, more maybe like the Platonic. What I was going to say, it sounds like towards the end, what you’re saying, I guess, I mean, you’ve read way more of Jung than I have, but I know there are several passages where he explicitly eschews metaphysics and that’s a Kantian thing. But from what you’ve been telling me and what we’ve talked about this in the past, towards the end, he starts talking metaphysically again. And so it sounds like he maybe is reversing the Kantianism back towards a more Platonic model. Is that a fair thing to say? So actually, I think that what’s happening is that in those late stage passages, he is attempting to reconcile the transjective. Ah, so. So, okay, but I’ll finish the other thing first and come back. So his take on God is basically right. It’s that there is an absolute epistemological limit you cannot get, the existence or non-existence of God, finally. But it’s indisputable that people have these forces and encounters in their mind. And his basic point is, it’s like it doesn’t matter at some level whether or not there’s actually a God, because you do have to have an encounter with the part of yourself that is the meaning-forming and the locus of the sacred. It’s sort of the inexhaustible wellspring of your being. You have to have some encounter with that. If you don’t, you end up often kind of deeply stunted in terms of your own potentials and what your life is and how you fit into it, right? And the thing is that he points out as he’s like, and this thing has certain ways of communicating, and the ways that it wants to communicate are in symbolism and ritual. So even though it may not be an actual divine principle in some ultimate metaphysical sense, you have to deal with it like it is. So that would be an instance of where I talk about things being psychologically indispensable but not metaphysically necessary. That’s right. That’s right. Okay, so that’s fair. I can understand that. Now, so one criticism, and I’ve heard it from many people, I think Durley makes a criticism at one point. I think Buber is making a criticism along these lines of Jung, is this is all intra-psychic and therefore it’s missing huge aspects, existential mode aspects that are central to the understanding of God. Now, I’m prompting you to return back to the thing you wanted to make about the transjectivity. So I mean, I understand that critique. I just don’t think it’s the case. Yeah, so please. So the reason I don’t think it’s the case is sort of a fewfold. One is, we’re used to talking about the imaginal, right? And the deep dialogue between Corbin and Jung at the Aaronos lectures. Can I just interrupt? Would you say it’s important then? I was trying to make a case that it’s important to the understanding of Jung that the connection to Corbin be made more explicit and more developed scholastically. Yeah, I mean, as much as I gripe about people deriving ideas from Jung and not crediting him, Jung himself was not always particularly good about crediting sources of ideas. He was a little bit self-mythologizing, I think, and consciously or unconsciously, hard to say. But famously, he essentially speaking, he and Freud stole work from Sabina Spielrein. She was the one who had come up with the concept of the fanatomic death drive. And she had a lot of important contributions to early work, but no credit, right? So yeah, I mean, I see Corbin nodding towards Jung. But I don’t so much see Jung referencing. So yeah, I agree. I think that was an important relationship. The Aaronos lectures, generally speaking, as a set of sort of intellectual encounters between people that were doing that work in the period are remarkable. Did I ever lend you my copy of? No, you didn’t. You should. It’s really good. Anyway. Yeah. So bringing it back, you’re going to go back into the imaginal and this critique of Jung as being merely intra-psychic. Right. So okay. So when we talk about the imaginal and we talk about it in terms like active imagination, right? It’s relatively, I think, easy for people to pull into the idea that what you’re talking about is just a play of imagination. Yeah. But where that’s less clear is in the discussion of dreams. Dreams as a form of the imaginal, right? Because they’re not sort of deliberate and occurring in an overlay on the conscious mind are spontaneously produced, right? Spontaneously produced imaginal material. And so they sort of more directly speak to this interface point between the experiencing self, right? And the sort of the self which makes. And when you look at that material and the way that they talk about dream interpretation in particular, right? Like Marie-Louise von Franz, who was one of Jung’s foremost disciples and to some extent popularizer, right? She wrote very lucidly. And she often said about dreams that when you’re dealing with a dream symbol, somebody appears in your dream, your father appears in your dream. It’s always pointing outwards and inwards. Always, always. And the thing in fact, when you do dream interpretation, I noticed it when I was in analysis and I noticed it with my own clients is that more often than not, people have the tendency to see dream material as pointing outwards, but not to pick up that it’s pointing inwards. And von Franz actually, I mean, I don’t know how much of this emphasis was Jung’s himself, but von Franz actually sort of said like, really, you should count that as 20% outwards and 80% inwards. I’m not so sure about that. I actually think that a lot of Jung’s later work around the psycho aid, right? Which was this term that he had for something, right? That the archetype simultaneously reached into the material and the psychic worlds. And he was basically, I think, you know, he’s trying to solve the mind body problem at some level, right? But he was doing it in this funny roundabout way, because he was in dialogue with Wolfgang Pauli. And they thought maybe if they threw quantum mechanics at it, they could crack it, right? I think they just didn’t have the tools. But the transjective is very much a preoccupation for him. And when you do specifically dream an analysis, dream interpretation, that quality of pointing outwards and pointing inwards is central. Holding both of those things in mind simultaneously is central to understanding what it is that’s happening in a dream. So could dream symbols and perhaps archetypes in general, therefore, afford something like sensibility transcendence, where you’re getting an insight that’s both directed outward and inward at the same time, like John Wright talks about? Yes. But I think it’s hard for people to do. Of course. So yeah, I mean, absolutely. You know, most people when they have that dream symbol, I mean, you know, lots of people have had and we sort of smirk, right? It’s like you’re somebody you know, you know, your partner or something has a dream and they’re like, Oh, just had a dream and you just did something terrible. And they’re kind of mad at you. And you’re like, what am I supposed to do about that? Right. Okay. But so, you know, that outward facing aspect of dreams, and then people will tend to sort of hand wave it. But people don’t naturally speaking tend to gravitate towards what dreams are saying about themselves, right? The dreams are less messages than they are sort of an immersion in the process of your psyche. A participatory knowing. A participatory knowing, right? I mean, you know, it’s hard to grasp. I do this stuff pretty much full time and have done for a long time. But when I really sit with the idea, it’s like, so I have a dream. And in that dream, I’m talking to, you know, my friend, you know, and, but who am I interacting with? I’m not interacting with him. So who am I interacting with? I’m interacting with myself, like some portion of my mind, and yet I’m not consciously doing this, but some part of me is. And of course, we are now used to in neuroscience and cognitive science, the idea that we are sort of conjuring the hallucination of the world around a set of scant data, right? But it’s very clear in a dream, especially like a lucid dream, where those interactions can be quite rich, and they can be quite have a lot of phenomenological detail and depth. Yeah, I had one not last night, but the night before. Really? Yeah. It’s been a while. I had one like a month ago. I keep meaning to get back into it. But that’s I have to do that in January. So so I want to slow down here a little bit, because I’m finding this really interesting. So I discuss like the Boober critique was, you know, you’re not picking up on the existential modes. And, you know, and Boober has something, you know, the I thou I yet, which is, I argue is very analogous to Fromm’s, having mode and being mode. And these are existential modes, and they’re inherently transjective. Yeah, they’re they they’re both processes by which you’re assuming identities, participatory knowing, and assigning identities. And there’s a conformity relationship between them. They’re they’re co determining, co defining. Yeah. And so I get the sense and I and I see just to bring back well, really, we will false. I see alchemy, as we described it as inherently transjective, because you’re you’re doing this transformation of the psyche. And you’re trying to get it to conform with the material world. And you’re trying to get the two to get some sort of mutually afforded disclosure happening. Is that a fair interpretation? Yeah, partly. But partly, it’s also about using projection, right, as an innate capacity to externalize the contents of your psyche to a place where you can work on them without it being so personal. Right. So it’s it’s doing it’s doing it’s doing two things. Right. So what I’m trying to get at is the philosopher’s stone is both an overcoming of deep patterns of self deception, right with the projection. Yeah. But it isn’t it also given me some access, I don’t mean scientifically, but write some access to, you know, patterns in reality that will help me make more better sense of the world. Yes. So so to bring this back around to the geocentric heliocentric right, right. Okay, good. When you have that sort of mystical divine encounter, such as it is with the self, right. One of the things you can point out is that that experience the encounter with the self is always deeply humiliating. He’s quite kind of keen on this. It is always humiliating. Now, does he mean that because I’ve made a distinction in the series, there’s two ways there’s our modern meaning where humiliation is a is a pejorative thing. It’s a bad thing. Right. And then there’s humiliation in the original sense, which is the engendering the creation of humility of humility. I think it’s both. It’s both. I think it’s both. So I think when he means it, what he means is that it’s a soul shattering experience. I mean, realizing that you are not the center of your own universe. Yeah, that it’s not all about you. Right. I mean, that’s fundamentally that is the heart of the encounter between the ego and the self. It’s not all about you. You have a role to play. The ego has a role to play the conscious mind has a role to play. But you are not the only game in town and you’re not calling the shots. What I’m trying to get at. Yeah, is but it produces that humility also. Right. No, no. And I get that. And I can see why that would be if you’ll allow me epistemically and existentially valuable. Yeah, what I’m trying to get this the question is getting clear in my mind. What’s the relationship between gaining that humility towards the self? You’re not the whole psychic show and gaining that humility towards reality. So what’s the relationship? Because there’s a clear relationship in Vedanta between the Ottoman is Brahman. Right. Right. There’s becoming more I don’t want to use the word. I’ll use Ottoman because self centered sounds ridiculously wrong. So what’s the relationship become between becoming Ottoman centered rather than egocentric and becoming onto centric rather than egocentric? Because in Vedanta, they’re clearly allied as being mutually reinforcing interpenetrating. Is that a fair thing to also see in young or am I imposing on young? No, I think that’s fair. So but but so there isn’t a logical identity. No, it’s a non logical. It’s a non logical identity. Right. It’s it’s kind of Yeah, but but it’s maybe Yeah, non duality is closer because it’s not it’s not the case that sort of self and ego are the same. Right. But nor is it the case that in some ways they they in some ways they are I mean, right, because ego is part of self, and yet distinct from right. So there there is in the work of individuation, a kind of simultaneous differentiation and integration and complexification, complexification. And this is the thing generally when we’re talking about individuation, you’re talking about having an encounter that puts you into a state of metaphysical and epistemological humility relative to your own psyche and the forces inside of it. And the idea is that you want to develop different relationships with these parts of yourself, you want to get things moving in a system so that you can understand who and what you are without having to center everything on your ego need, right. But that means developing both a sense of identity with the system, but not direct identity. If you develop direct identity with the self in the union system, that’s bad. No, it’s inflation. So I get that. So sorry, I’m not trying to trivialize. I know you just said is important. So I get that you want the non dual, right identity. That’s why I think the term participation is a good term between the ego and the self. What I’m trying to get at is in, so again, back to the the boober critique, the existential mode, right, there’s also a relationship, what’s the relationship between the self and reality? And this is where the Kantian aspect always sort of trips me up when I try to get to Jung. And that’s what I was saying, where there’s a similar, in Vedanta, it’s like, yes, the ego must realize its non dual at one minute with Atman, but then once it does that, that affords it in a participatory knowing the realization that Atman is Brahman, which is the ground of the psyche and the ground of the and the ground of being, right have a deeper and this this was boobers concern, because boobers concern, he saw God is the ground of being, and he thought that young was reducing God to the ground of the psyche. So it sort of depends where you want to make your chalk mark on the 50 year line. Ah, please. So the further along you go, it seems to me, I think you’ll always had sympathies towards this idea, but he somewhat to manage the perception of him as a kooky mystic, and somewhat because he himself wanted to rein in his tendencies towards inflation, right, he starts out with a relatively grounded, sort of biologically metaphorically driven idea of what all this stuff is. So, you know, when we’re giving this opening idea that like, you know, your psychological encounters effectively structure your reality. And so you have to deal with it anyway. Sure. Right. And, and it’s as close as it comes in some ways, right, even if you take it completely grounded, this is all just happening in your mind, it’s still happening in your mind, and completely changing your mind and what’s salient to you and what stands out to you and your experience of wondering it. I mean, That’s important. It’s huge, right? But it could all be contained within your head, right in the early part of Jung. As that goes on, he’s trying to square it more and more. And some of this, I mean, gets into some of the, you know, for some people, zanier aspects of his work, we’re talking about something like synchronicity, we are breaking straight out of relatively, right. So, so synchronicity, I mean, lots of people are familiar with this term, but synchronicity is the idea of meaningful coincidence. And Jung had a long standing interest in sort of parapsychological material, right, but also in these seemingly meaningful coincidences that he felt were not adequately explained by standard rational sort of, you know, letting the air out. His version of the miraculous. Yeah, very much. And as he, you know, went deeper and deeper on attempting to understand synchronicity, which he felt was a real thing that needed to be grappled with, and he has some predecessors, he was somewhat familiar with the work of a camera, who had like the law of seriality, other people have been interested in sort of coincidences as a thing that may actually be not coincidental. Right. So, as he goes deeper down the rabbit hole in terms of synchronicity, in terms of seemingly external manifestations of psycho-aid events, so he gets interested in UFOs, and he starts to look at like UFO sightings and stuff as being, but also, you know, the appearances of the Virgin Mary in the sky, this kind of thing as being, well, what is that? Right? What’s happening? Because that doesn’t seem to be strictly subjective. It seems that at the very least, it’s intersubjective or something when a whole group of people see that. And then he’s increasingly interested in the idea that if indeed it is the case that his notion of this stuff sort of bridges the mind-body gap, that it may stand outside of that altogether. And at that point, what we’re dealing with is supernatural entities. And so that’s the difference. You start to get towards the end of Jung, and he’s sort of, I think he’s just caved in, particularly after his heart attack. You know, he has a heart attack, near fatal heart attack, and after that, I think he’s a full-on mystic. He believes that the things that he’s talking about are part of the fundamental structure of the universe. That, to me, you know, I’m an aggressive militant agnostic about most things. You know, so I believe in taking on a really strong degree of epistemological humility. I think that it’s important to hold metaphysics lightly because we don’t know. Like, we can have some degrees of plausibility and whatever, but like both our cultural and personal emphasis on certainty, this is something I might come back to if we’re talking about this, it’s sort of out of control. And as a tendency, like we have a tendency to shut off lines of possibilities. So I keep a pretty broad, you know, state of mind. But a lot of the time, that stuff is pretty gonzo even for me. Like, my tendency is to be like, is it really the case that the jester is a fundamental structure of reality? Like, maybe. Maybe that’s the case. But it seems to me that probably there might be sort of easier to get to explanations that are a little bit more naturalistically grounded, but don’t rob any of that of any of its like wonder or impact. Okay, well, that’s a great segue. I mean, first of all, you know that I’m trying to develop, especially with Leo, work on plausibility as playing a central role and that that’s actually much more important than the rather quixotic pursuit, as you said, of certainty. And it also tends to link knowledge more clearly to wisdom, whereas the pursuit of certainty keeps knowledge and wisdom separate from each other, because wisdom is often defined as how you behave in situations of significant uncertainty and things like that. Right. So I’m in broad agreement with that. But the segue that came to mind, well, there’s some threads I want to keep, so I’ll just announce them. I want to come back because now, the Jung’s non-theism and the relationship to Christianity is now getting even more tortured in my mind around this. And that eventually, I think, has to bring us back to talking about Jordan’s work. But perhaps before I give you a chance to address that, I’d like to know what you think about, you know, well, the attempts I make, for example, when you talk about aspects of the psyche that are deeper than the ego, you know, I talk about the pre-egoic nature of relevance realization and how it’s this recursive and, you know, massively self-organizing thing and how it can beset us with something that looked like dynamic versions of Jungian complexes, parasitic processing. So like, what do you see there? Because I take it that that’s been part of your project, right? And so obviously, for egocentric reasons, I’m interested in it. Also for scientific reasons, I’m interested in it. What do you see about the relationship between Jung and relevance realization, to put it broadly? Okay, so I can maybe sort of work backwards. So, you know, you were talking about Jung to some extent and the relationship between Jung and Corbin and the divine double, and the idea of having sort of a transjective symbol of the angel, right? That’s all in episode 48, 49? Yeah. Sort of in there? Yeah, because it’s a, I’m influenced by Stang’s idea that it’s, I hesitate, I don’t want to use the word archetypal, but it’s a transjective, imaginal thing that keeps showing up. And that’s the whole point of the book. And then I said, it’s clear, it’s clear in Corbin’s, it’s undeniable in Corbin. And I think it’s very clear until it with the relationship as he puts it between the existential and the essential self. It’s all through narcissism. Stang makes a very clear case, it’s present in early forms of Christianity, narcissism, it’s rife. And then because of narcissism, that led me to say, well, maybe plausibly it’s also in Jung. Right. I think it is. I mean, you know, the notion of divine doubling and a certain amount of like, the assumption of the archetype, moving into the archetype is sort of relatively central to the on the ground practice of depth psychology and individualism. What do you mean by that, moving into the archetype? So there is a kind of like, okay, I’ll give you an example. So in Jung, we, you know, the idea of the persona, right? You have the ego, the ego is your conscious mind in some sense, and it’s it’s everything you seem to yourself. Separate from that is the interface that you have with the social world, right? And so the persona derived from the theatrical mask, right? And it’s an interface insofar as it really is bi-directional. You both put things through it, in a sense, right? It reveals and it conceals. But it also filters. But it also filters. So it contains your social role, right? You have to put on certain kinds of mass to do certain kinds of things. And we take this as a given, generally speaking, right? Like, if you’re a lawyer and you go to court, you have to have certain kinds of personality, television, law, notwithstanding, you have to have certain kinds of persona in order to do it. Same thing goes for the academy. Yeah, being a professor. Totally. Or being a student. By the time students get into undergrad, none of them are standing on their desk and screaming. Or if they are, it’s a highly anomalous event, right? So, you know, the ability to conform to the expectations and social roles and stuff is part of fitting in, it’s both, right? But also, we push our individuality out. So it’s a bit like, you know, Sartor Rosartus, Carlyle’s book. So it’s a book. Oh, I know Carlyle. Yeah, about the philosophy of clothes, right? It’s a very funny, wry book. But one of the things that you get into this with persona is, you know, clothing reveals and it conceals, right? It has that dual Heideggerian kind of quality to it. It reveals and conceals. We say things about ourselves, but we also hide ourselves. Okay. So if we’re sort of looking at that, right? We can, I’m wondering if that’s actually the best example now that I’ve started to get into it. Are you moving into the archetype? Yeah. I’m wondering if I should be moving into the archetype or not. Want to take a break here? No, I’m just thinking about it for a second. Because if I start moving into persona, specifically, no, I’m going to run into having to unpack all of that stuff. I think maybe in fact, I should move back to talking about the divine double and self instead. Okay. Okay. So that’s what I will do instead. Okay. So there’s a specific thing that you sort of unpack around that, right? Which is this idea that the divine double is standing in aspirationally. Yeah. I was trying to get, I was trying to link Jung’s idea to Callard’s idea of aspiration, because it does a lot of work. Because Callard has a very powerful argument that this aspiration has to be part of what we mean by rationality. Yet she indicates, but does not develop a psychology around it, that it has to have this symbolic thing. Mentioning the persona was actually helpful, even though you’re not going to go in it. Because when you’re aspiring, you need something that’s Janus-faced like that. It has to draw you within the frame that you’re in and the person that you are. But it also has to be beyond you and normatively challenging you to become the person you’re aspiring to be. Okay. So we’ll leave it all my stumbly processing. That’s the process of uncertainty. That’s good. Okay. So that’s exactly what I was getting at, is that when we move into persona, we start out by faking it until we make it. We don’t it, but persona can become too tight. It starts out typically being aspirational. So this is like the classic thing, right? Early undergrad philosophy papers used to get slammed for using jargon and awkward, right? They’re awkward. But the idea is they’re trying on the form. And of course, it’s awkward because they’re imperfectly emulating it. If they could perfectly emulate it, they’d already be doing it. They’d already know what they were doing, right? First, we do it clumsily, then we do it. It’s a serious play that I’ve been talking about. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So the persona is sort of an interface point for that, but it can come to fit too tightly. There is correspondingly a kind of inner, right? So the corresponding point to the persona, which interfaces us with the world, the social world specifically, the anima or animus, right? Oh, so it’s the internal interface. That’s right. Okay. Yeah. Which is why, so, you know, he spent- I never knew that about the anima. I didn’t quite understand it that way. That’s very helpful. Yeah. So it’s hard to understand, but that’s why it’s the soul. And it’s distinct from the self. This is one of the things that I wanted to point out with your design double thing. Oh, I see. So it has a psychopompic function. When you start interfacing with it- So the anima is the soul. It’s the interface between the ego and the self. That’s right. And it is the psychopomp. Yes. A psychopomp is something that leads you into- Right. Into the afterlife or the underworld or between worlds or what have you. Yeah. So the Contrasexual soul image, which I just foresort into soul, right? Is that is to the inner world what the persona is to the outer world. So that means they must have a strange relationship too. Well, they have a compensatory relationship. And so where the ego and the shadow, for instance, are compensatory to some extent, right? It’s an either or proposition, what’s in each. To some extent, that turns up in persona and soul. And that’s one of the ways that I, and I think a fair number of other sort of neo-Yungians try to look at this so that we don’t get into so much gender essentialism around the inner woman and the inner man. And that stuff gets confusing given more modern thinking on this, right? Sure. But if instead it’s the case that all of your externally focused masculine traits, your ideas about what it is to be, like I’m a man and this is how I present myself or whatever, the corresponding traits drift inwards and they become part of your inner relatedness. And because there tends to be sort of a statistical cultural clustering around this stuff, right? Whether or not it’s sort of gender essential in the genetic sense, it is in a cultural sense. And so you’ll tend to get those traits accumulating. Okay. That figure, that sort of soul figure, I think is closer to what you mean by the divine double. And I mean, there are a few doubles. There are doubles and doubles and twins. So this yong is full of that kind of stuff. So the shadow has that quality too. So what you’re saying is I agree with you now. I think your critique is excellent because in fact, what you’ve just done maps better onto the original use. So the divine double isn’t ultimately the God beyond all possible gods. The divine double is the psychopompic figure. But you do have a non-logical identity with this. So Stang’s point is that you’re a divigial, not an individual. You’re a divigial. And that the relationship with the divine double actually draws you beyond. Now the thing is, so I think you’re right. And I think I see- And there are other versions of this, right? Mercurius. Yong talks at great length about Mercurius. And Mercurius is a kind of version of this divine double that’s even closer to the center of being. It partakes in all of the paradoxical, sort of mystical hermaphroditic- And you see that in the Gnostics too, as you move, I want to say higher, but there’s all metaphors through the divine double. So that’s important because that to me then does strike me as perhaps maybe I got to go back and see how Dually is playing with these two. That seems like there’s, although I think they’re both invoking the divine double, Yong’s divine double is more closely Gnostic than Tillich’s is. I mean, Tillich clearly has Gnosticism in him. He talks about the God beyond the God of theism and all of that. But the divine double is- So I feel like Tillich draws on the Gnostics in order to, I mean, the mid-20th century is like the high watermark for theology as the locus where we were going to perform some kind of cultural redemption. And I don’t think we’re there anymore. I mean, now countless Catholics, including some friends of mine, will disagree with me. But it seems to me like that’s not really where this is going to happen. We’re not going to get a modern theologian doing this. So, but Tillich clearly falls into that arc. And it seems to me that he draws on the Gnostics. He’s pulling things from them in order to run his project. But Yong was just a Gnostic. He’s just a Gnostic. Yong got, you know, to an important extent, hammered with an experience which he then attempted to sort out. So, let’s remember, I want you to eventually get back to how does this bridge between Yong and relevance realization. But also, I just want to put another pin. Given what you just said, and I mean, I was a little bit bold, but now you made me feel more confident in the boldness. I said the formula for Yong is Kant plus Gnostics equals Yong. With a sprinkling of Schopenhauer. With a sprinkling of Schopenhauer, yeah. Sprinkling of Schopenhauer. Fair enough. But given what you just said, and then given, of course, the very tortured relationship between narcissism and Christianity, this again makes a relationship between Yong and Christianity even more fraught. Sure. I mean, look, at its most basic, right, Yong has a lot of interest and respect in Christian symbolism, right? But as part of a broader subset, he doesn’t identify Christian symbolism as being sort of unique unto itself, right? He sees it as part of a broader set of rebirth and resurrection. This is your point about him ultimately being a non-theist. Yeah, that’s right. But also that he sees it as part of a tradition. So it’s sort of the flowering within our age of that tradition, right, the fish and so on and so forth, but really has lots of parallels and precedents, right? So this overlaps, sort of, because Durley, who, I mean, he uses Yong as a basis for making a critique of Christianity. Right. Well, so Yong does clearly have, okay, I can give you one example. Yong rejects out of hand the concept of privatio boni, throws it right out. So, right, privatio- This is the Augustinian idea. Please go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. So it’s Augustine’s idea that the way to understand evil is not as having any metaphysical substance in and of itself, but rather it is merely the absence of good, right, privatio boni. And so the idea is there’s just God, and then there are places that God, I don’t know, is not shining as brightly, I guess, is the idea. And Yong throws that out. He is right off the bat, like a dualist in this sense. He says, no, no, like you have to treat these things as having their own solidity and force and motion and purpose. The devil needs his due. Right. You made this point at the very beginning. Right. So, I mean, that’s very central to Yongian thinking and something we’ll actually come back to if we talk about sort of the shadow and the way that the shadow works in this sense. So, you know, yeah, Yong immediately- and he has some other fairly deep critiques. If you read his- it’s a thin little book, and it’s a strange book. It’s interesting, but it’s strange, right? The Answer to Job. Yeah, of course. Right? The Answer to Job is, in many ways, Yong’s attempt to synthesize together the meaning of Christianity together with sort of our current age and what that means. I mean, one of the things that you get in the Deep Yong is the idea that the archetypes sort of aren’t exactly totally outside of time and space because they evolve culturally. And so, where we might talk about the axial age or something, Yong tags this stuff with sort of these 2000 year procession of the, whatever this is called, the cosmic seasons, no, cosmic months, something like that, whatever, it’s astrology. So, he identifies these 2000 year long cycles. And one of the things that he says in The Answer to Job- so, right, Story of Job, you know, did you do Job in the series? No, I didn’t. Okay. So, Story of Job, right, it’s a late Old Testament story. And what you have is God and the devil are sitting around on a mountainside. This is before they were like- God and Satan. What did I say? The devil. Oh, yeah, okay, Satan, you’re right, it was still a job description. So, God and the adversary, the angel that does the adversarial stuff, are sitting on the side of a mountain. And basically, they get into an argument about whether or not if sufficiently bad things happen to Job, God’s faithful servant, Job will denounce him. And they take bets, you know. Satan’s like, I bet you I can make his day sufficiently terrible, right? This is just like the bet in The Dark Knight, right? One bad day. We’re all one bad day. So, they make this bet, and God’s like, you’re on. And then, with sort of God’s go-ahead, he destroys Job’s life, gives him disease, kills his children, ruins his fortune. And, you know, the original text uses this as an opportunity to really plumb some of our deepest sort of questions and concerns and anxieties around why do bad things happen to good people. Yeah, it’s the problem of suffering and evil. Totally, problem of suffering and evil. And then there’s this final scene towards the end where? There’s no answer, but God appears out of the whirlwind. Yeah, God so… So, Job is sitting around and talking to his buddies, and he’s starting to get a little bit, you know, like, right? And then God suddenly appears from the whirlwind. And God delivers this speech, which is very interesting. It’s like he basically questions Job’s knowledge. He says, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You know, can’t thou draw Leviathan up with a hook? He brags about creating these giant monsters. And being able to defeat them. And being able to defeat them. Didst thou lay the foundations of the earth? Basically, God is like, you, fuck you. You, oh, I don’t know if I could say that. You know, like, you just have no idea what you’re talking about, you ignorant worm. I’m the creator of the universe. But, okay, I don’t want to take too much steam out of… I mean, some people have interpreted that is that what God’s doing is inducing a numinous experience. And part of the response to the problem of evil is not any kind of philosophical proposition or argument, but it’s like, look, here’s the numinous. And you go, it’s like that scene in Joe versus the volcano. You know, oh, God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life, because he sees the numinous. And it doesn’t answer the fact that he believes he has some kind of brain cancer. It doesn’t resolve any of his problems. But he becomes grateful for his life because of the encounter with the numinous. And that’s the answer. Right. Beautiful and terrible like the sea. All who look on me shall love me in despair. So for sure, I think that’s one aspect. But the thing that Jung tags on specifically is this particular exchange, because what Jung reads into this is this kind of encounter where it’s like Job basically did nothing to deserve this. And after the encounter where Job does kind of knock a lunder, God feels remorse. We have a kind of an Old Testament figure, because, you know, Old Testament God is a funny capricious figure, right? You read Genesis. The Gnostics made a big deal out of this. Exactly. And so this is a very Gnostic interpretation. We have sort of Old Nobodaddy, right, who’s throwing his weight around in the Bible like, you think I’m just a hill God? Snakes for you. Right? We have this Old Testament God that’s hard to deal with, hard to reconcile, right? Hard to chew through. And this is part of the Gnostic problem. And in the book of Job, Jung sees a moment where that God feels remorse. And that for him is the moment where it’s necessary to then incarnate in the flesh so that you can suffer. He sees that as the transmission book into Christianity. Right. That’s just heresy. Yeah, totally. Right? That is not a conventional Orthodox Christian idea in any way. So the idea that- It’s deeply Gnostic, though. Very deeply Gnostic. So yeah, no, I think Jung is, you know, whether or not he would have had the courage all along to say that he was a Gnostic, because he was already sort of plastered with a lot of labels as a weirdo. Whether or not he would have had the courage, I mean, one of his earliest works around the period of the Red Book is the Seven Sermons. Yeah, I tried to read some of that. It’s very hard. Well, you know, it reads like a Gnostic text. And trying to read the Gnostic Gospels- Is it very tough? Except for the Gospel of Truth, or the Gospel of Thomas. Gospel, okay, the Gospel of Thomas is pretty good because it just puts like a clarifying spin on the synoptic Gospels. It’s like nice little aphorisms, that’s good. But like, you know, perfect thunder mind. There’s a thunder perfect mind. Thunder perfect mind. Yeah. Or, you know, a bunch of those other ones where it’s like constantly unfolding Pleromas and multi-crowned monster dragons. Yeah, it gets- It’s visionary, right? And of course, there are, I think, important imaginal things happening there. Yeah, like the Connick’s idea that you’re getting a different interpretation of the sacred, not as something that should be fixed, but as something that should be constantly transgressed. That’s right. Which gets us back to the symbols. Yes. Right. Yeah, well, so the inexhaustibility and the transactiveness and yeah, when I read Seven Sermons of the Dead, that young book I own, and I’ve read it a bunch, what I see there is not something that’s easy for me to directly connect to, but I can empathize with because I’ve had comparable experiences of poetry. I’ve had automatic writing poetry, things that came through me, or that was the felt sense, right? Of course, at some level, I’m sure that biologically I produced it, but that was not the felt sense. The felt sense was that it was a thing that happened to and through me and that contained sort of massive archetypal structure to it. Yeah, there is a distinction that Tanabe talks about, about self-power and other power that’s crucial to certain aspects of Buddhism, and right effort is about getting the balance between self-power and other power. So, I mean, you invoked transactivity, you invoked inexhaustibility, you invoked salience, so try to bring it back to again. Right. Like you keep invoking the connections. Yeah, I’m teasing you. I’ll give you the simple. So this is how I think about it. I wouldn’t want to put words in Jung’s mouth necessarily, but this is how I think about it. I think about, so you talked, I think, in episode 32, your series about Montague and mutual modeling, and I often think about it in those terms and in type, what we’re talking about when we talk about typology, but in the simplest sense, I think about it in this way. There are a series of encounters that I can have within my own mind with figures that compose my psyche but are not identical with the person I would call Anderson, but they’re important parts of my functioning. Those include things like the internal mutual models I developed for my parents who, and this is a point that I sometimes make, it’s like, well, that’s an area where Freud was right. Theory of mind, we know that we have theory of mind for other people before we have it for ourselves, and under mutual modeling, we know that evolutionarily speaking, it’s absolutely crucial that you be able to internalize your parents. Often, in fact, your enormous frustration as a young adult. You get a lot of your metacognitive abilities through Vygotsky. And you put those two things together, and what that means is your parents have been living in your head longer than you have. Yes. Oh, that’s a good way of putting it. That’s very provocative. And in that sense, like Freud is right. And the effect, attachment, a romantic thing, so that’s Jeff McDonald’s work and other people’s work. Totally. So you get that. You get general kind of concepts of type, and to talk about type, people get very worked up about it. But really, type is just category. And category is essential to doing any kind of abstract thinking, manipulating things in classes. That’s type. The fact that I’m not interacting with every cat as a radical individual, but I have some basic idea of where a cat wants to be scratched and not be scratched, I might sometimes get surprised. But for the most part, I form type. Likewise, we interact with type on a day-to-day basis all the time and recognize in other people, even when we don’t know ourselves, when we say somebody has a romantic type. And that’s recently been put on empirical footing. People really do have a romantic type. And to say that romantic type is intertwined with people’s pathologies of attachment and romance would be understating it even. Can I interject? You just sparked an insight into it. Okay. So if we have sort of categorical relationships, is part of Jung getting us to not make a modal confusion and shift from an I it with our inner life to an I thou? Yes. Ah. Ah. Yes. That’s why it’s about developing relationships. Ah. Right? So you come to a relationship. And this is why often I think people, you know, the archetypes aren’t things we have exactly. No, no, no. Right? They’re and sort of they’re somewhat fundamental structures. But the, but the, the, the fundamental structure is that they will form, not the specific contents. And we have to encounter those specific contents in order to know ourselves. And those specific contents are best encountered as people, sort of. Yeah, not quite, but sort of. Yeah, that was, but not necessarily. Right. Now, I don’t know. I’m, I’m on the fence personally about whether these aspects of our mind possess that possessed our own subjectivity intrinsically, or whether it’s the case that through the practices that we engage in, we allow them to draw on the machinery of subjectivity, whether we person them. Right. We sort of allow them to exact that machinery so we can enter into a more direct therapeutic relationship. Right. Exactly. Right. Like, so I’m on the fence. I sort of suspect just because of, well, ideas we’ve talked about around consciousness and the structure of the brain and how those things are related. I don’t see any reason why the brain not only shouldn’t be able to, but almost certainly undeadedly is supporting multiple consciousnesses at once. Yeah, there’s evidence from lucid dreaming. Yeah, there’s evidence from lucid dreaming. I mean, it goes right back to split brain. We’ve sort of known this for a long time, but we don’t want to support them more than once. Yeah. And, you know, unless you think that there’s some magic number of brain cells that kicks off consciousness, it’s like, I don’t see any reason why certain kinds of structures and functional patterns can’t have separate operating consciousnesses. And when you look at structural dissociation as a field, it just becomes increasingly obvious like this is happening. Right. And RASLAB stuff, right. Hypnosis, dissociation, we can get into that. But the point is, I don’t know per se whether or not there are already multiple people running around your head or there are multiple dynamics and forces and the best way for you to deal with them is to interact with them and turn them into people. Like a spirit of finesse. Yeah, spirit of finesse, but also like the kind of projective love that you use with children. And the projective love God uses to turn us into people. Agape. That’s great. I like that connection. I’m sort of seeing. I’m just trying to bring you one more time around to the connection. I keep interrupting you too. The connection between Jung and the way you are connecting Jung and relevance realization. You just did it again. Yeah. Well, you know, we’re circumambulating. To borrow the term. From Plato, by the way. It comes originally from Plato. Right. So, you know, there’s this variety of encounters. But like I said, I think that, you know, when we’re talking about the divine double, for instance, okay, that is an aspect of encounter that you would have with yourself with the shadow with Mercurius with whatever. But then I think that there is a level below or beyond that, which is a kind of direct, um, transjective, analogical identity relationship with the machinery of your own cognition. Right. So the pre egoic, pre conceptual, right? Relevance realization. Relevance. Right. And maybe something beyond that too. I don’t know. Yeah. Like, I’m not totally sure how deep that can go, but at the very least relevance realization. And I think that’s actually probably the best take that I have on what it is to encounter the self. The self isn’t any of these individual features. It’s the thing that allows these individual features to come into existence and supports them to begin with. Right. Right. I see that. That’s, that’s very clearly put. And God wears many masks. You know, so to directly encounter it is nearly impossible. You encounter it through its manifestations. It’s a shape changer. The closer you get to it, the more obvious that becomes. And that’s why Mercurius is intrinsically sort of paradoxical and shape changing and a trickster and is the son of God and the devil, as they say, and has all these other things, right? It sort of approaches non-duality, teases something that is beyond duality. Right. And it sort of hovers on the very threshold of entering into that Unus Mundus state, which is the, you know, the, the, the Urgrund, the thing that makes it all. Right. And the center of our own being as, as the beings that we are attempting to figure out in the Heideggerian sense. Right. That I think is probably the best. That’s my best shot anyway. No, that’s, that’s very helpful. That’s very clear. So as you know, I’ve tried to use the relevance realization machinery and I guess at times a complicated way, but at least a complex way of trying to get a grip on the meaning crisis. It’s funny, actually, I was thinking about this in the way end and I was thinking about the meaning crisis relative to Jung and the way that spiritual crisis in Jung is the entry point. And I thought, oh, if I can borrow the meaning crisis and borrow something from the Simpsons in a Jungian sense, we’re actually facing the meaning crisis attunity. Right. It’s the meaning crisis attunity. Yes. Everything is falling apart and terrible and on fire. And this is, that’s the door. Right. That’s interesting. So the reason I brought that up is because I think Jung is a prophet of the meaning crisis. And we talked about, you know, part of how high I see him a prophet is precisely his critique of the established religion. It’s not doing a good enough job. And that’s, I think, a fair, that’s a pervasive theme through Jung. I think. And that then lines up with, like I said, his relationship to religion and Christianity in particular is a much more distanced relationship. So why I’m bringing that up is that that brings us up to the topic of the meaning crisis, Jung, and then of course, Jordan Peterson and his take on that and the reading of the Bible that he’s done. And like, so it’s clear to me that Jordan has said many insightful things. I don’t want to detract from that, but it’s clear to me that one of the things he’s doing, and in this sense, he echoes Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell sort of was a big star for a while when I was growing up. And he has the influence over the original Star Wars. We watched them with Bill Moyers on, it’s on Netflix. The Power of Myth. And the huge influence on the original three movies, Star Wars. And because exactly that, he brings up Jung as a way of giving people access to symbolism and self-transcendence and self-transformation in response to the meaning crisis. And I see part of why Jordan skyrocketed. Part of it, of course, was a whole political thing that I don’t want to get into. But part of it is he does something similar to Campbell, but he does it much more charismatically, I think. And he also has a much more powerful medium at his disposal, which is social media, YouTube, etc. And so, and this is not, I’m not going to engage in any left-handed criticisms of Jordan, does not be dismissive. But I think that’s part of the power of his, why he was taken up by so many people, is precisely the power that is in Jung as a response to the meaning crisis. Yeah. Jordan has his hand in contact with a current of mythic material that people hunger for. And, you know, yeah, that’s powerful stuff. I mean, can I talk about that by way of Star Wars? Because I think actually, that’s a really interesting example. You know, as far as the meaning crisis goes, yeah, Jung wrote a really interesting essay during the rise of Nazism, immediately before, called Wotan, which I think is not as widely read as it should be, where he’s talking about sort of this rise of a particular figure within the Germanic psyche and what this is going to mean. But at the same time, he spends lots of time talking about how modernity is breaking down these old structures. He’s a student of nature. He’s not, like, unaware that God is dead and we have killed him, and how can we get the blood off our hands, and what do we need to become to justify our crime? He knows all that. And in fact, in Ion, which is perhaps his most profoundly weird book, and I say that, you know, like, pointedly, you know, Ion is the second part of Collected Works, Volume 9. The first part is relatively straightforward and has to do with sort of different archetypal structures and complexes. But the second part, Ion, is this really interesting, wide-ranging book, and it’s hard. And one of the things that he says in Ion, he gets into this, like, you know, cycles of history thing, and he says, you know, the faintest rudiments, we’re on a 2,000-year cycle, so the faintest, or thereabouts, the faintest rudiments of the future society are actually visible now. He said, and I think that we’ll transition to that society in about 500 or 600 years. I remember reading that and thinking, oh, right? Like, this isn’t Age of Aquarius around the corner. This isn’t I Live to See It, probably. This is like, right, we’re in the middle of a broad cultural movement in change and understanding and our relationship to the world, and really the scale that we need to look at is centuries, technological acceleration notwithstanding. I found that a really striking passage, and that’s sort of Jung’s take, that we’re going to go through this age of fire and despair, and we’re going to lose touch with lots of the formative myths, but that isn’t necessarily bad either, right? So breaking away from certain kinds of myths, right, myths have a currency at a particular time, right? The thing that was sort of best fitted to human behavior in the pre-axial period is not the same thing that’s fitted to human behavior later. And to some extent, right, we still see the rudiments of that. Like, when we talk about Joseph Campbell and we talk about the hero’s journey, I have to admit I’m deeply ambivalent about the hero’s journey, and so was Jung. Please, please. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, so Joseph Campbell, I think, does, you know, he has the problem that lots of structuralists have, right, that he’s not really paying attention to the cultural specificity, like, he tends to oversynthesize. But that’s not what’s interesting about it to me. And this, you’ll see, I think, where this connects to the way that Jordan, I think, connects to some of this stuff, too. So Joseph Campbell does this thing. He creates the monomyth, right, the one guiding, you know, myth that you can, you know, use as the skeleton key to understand all of this stuff. Okay, fine. So George Lucas goes and reads the monomyth, and he expressly takes it and is like, I’m going to make a movie that’s this combined with Flash Gordon. I mean, that’s what he does, right? So, you know, before that, George Lucas, you’re going to get a bit of rant here. Before that, George Lucas had made, like, you know, THX 1138 and American Graffiti, right? And American Graffiti made enough money that the studio said, George, we’re going to give you 50 million bucks. Go make what you want. And he was like, terrific, I’m going to make this movie about skinny robots and hairy giants and space wizards. And everybody looked at it and said, whatever, right? And the cast thought it was garbage. And everybody thought it was ridiculous. But he explicitly took the kind of like incoherent massive notes that he had and structured it, according to Campbell. And what do we get coming out of the far side? We get the blockbuster. And the blockbuster is like, that’s a very modern phenomenon in a certain kind of way, right? The idea that people would go to a movie theater and see something 12 times, that they would merchandise at that level and scale the bed sheets, the lunch boxes. And I’m old enough that I remember the first wave of Star Wars coming through, right? Since then, Disney has learned to operate the pump full time. But that first time through, like, it was a phenomenon. And to say that it’s a structuring myth for people in my generation, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration. More people on the British census identify themselves as Jedi than Jewish. Pete Slauson Yeah, Chris and Philip and I talk about that in the zombie movie. Chris Yeah, right? Okay. So, he’s doing something really specific when he taps into the hero’s journey. And it’s enormously resonant for people. You know, there’s a sense that the older myths are kind of played out, right? People don’t get the same kind of connection from them. But you take the same stuff and reclothe it. However, since then, Hollywood has done what Western culture does, right? The hero’s journey as applied to Hollywood blockbusters is the same thing that we’ve done with fast food and cocaine. We take something that in its sort of like, occasional and non-concentrated state is good for us and useful, and instead turned it into something that’s delightful to the degree of being poisonous. We mainline this same myth over and over and over and over again. And the problem with the hero’s journey, in my opinion, okay, is that it’s just one myth. It isn’t the monomyth. It isn’t the sole myth that human beings tell or that’s important to structuring your life. The sole thing isn’t about a dissent and a struggle against the great dragon. That isn’t the only thing that’s going on. And we know that even from Jung, because Jung, in a pivotal time after his break with Freud, has this dream where he kills Siegfried, right? Siegfried, the solar hero, he kills him, and he feels tremendous shame. But what he interprets that dream for himself, right, is like, oh, right, that part of my life, the solar hero part where I am questing to fight dragons, has to come to an end if I am going to develop wisdom. Wisdom is not a high energy state where you slay dragons. Right, right, right, right, right, right, excellent. Right? And so we’ve sort of selectively chosen to pull some of this stuff, right? That’s a commodification and a trivialization in an important way. Yeah, and also like a concentration. We’ve made these- Not in a good sense of the word. Not in a good sense, no. Like a concentration, like I’m using cocaine advisedly. You chew a few leaves of cocaine. It helps you with your altitude sickness and it lets you march a little longer, and it’s generally pleasant. You take that and concentrate it to 50 or 100 times, and it becomes addictive, compulsive, numbing, like all these things that maybe are not so good. So this is actually, this is a very maladaptive appropriation of Jung then in some ways. In some ways, I think. And I don’t think, I mean, and I don’t want to get too much into corporate criticism here, but I don’t think it’s coincidental. Disney knows what they’re doing. This is the having mode again. Oh, sure. And look, Disney has been buying up my childhood wholesale. They own it all, and they know what they’re doing. Disney knows what they’re doing. They understand this stuff. They’ve understood it for a long time, right? They understand how to make a myth tick in this way. But of course, it’s not in the service to, at the end of the day, maybe we can look back fondly on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and say, wow, what a wonderful cultural document that really showed us da-da-da-da-da. But does anybody ultimately really believe that about Frozen 2? Is Frozen 2 being put out to help us appropriate our own self-development? So you’ve got a nice base here. So how does this now come back to, that’s an excellent critique of Campbell. Campbell in some ways, like he… He’s great in some ways. He’s great in some ways, but nobody’s denying that. You’re making, I think, a very strong but I think well-argued criticism that he’s moushaping Young in a really important way. Are you saying the same thing about Jordan? To some extent, yes. I mean, so I have known and worked with Jordan nearly as long as I’ve known and worked with you. Early contributor from Mind Matters, he and I had looked at doing some projects. We’ve eaten meals together. We’re on a first name basis. I’ve seen a lot of his talks. I know Jordan pretty well. But his particular take on certain aspects of Young is puzzling to me. It’s just I’m not totally sure how to square it. So there are some aspects of Jordan’s interpretation of Young that I think are terrific and straightforward. So his emphasis on the importance and to some extent the reality, if not the actuality of the mythic level of reality is really central and crucial. In that sense, Jordan nails it. He gets it. It’s like if you aren’t paying attention to this level of analysis, you’re missing something really, really important. And the fact that you kind of that people want to point at it when they’re being sort of brass tax realists and saying like, but what are we really talking about here? It’s like, no, that doesn’t matter. Like you have to interact with this. You have to interact with it for the same reason that an emotion can start a war. But what are emotions really real? It’s like, yes, yes, they are. They’re real. And these patterns are real. I mean, to give you just a quick example before I go on this, it’s like at some level is the archetype of the mother as part of the collective unconscious. Is that a fundamental feature of reality? Well, I don’t know. But it’s a fundamental feature of every human psyche because absolutely every human being had a mother. And we all have some kind of relationship to them, even if it’s a relationship of rejection or absence or right. And we’ve talked about with like ducks, goslings, right? When they do imprinting with goslings, gosling hatches out of the egg. And whatever is there at that moment, pretty much the gosling will imprint on and be disposed towards as though it was a mother. So if it’s a mother goose, I said ducks. If it’s a mother goose and the gosling hatches, that’s what nature expects in most conditions. But you could have a hand puppet or in some cases, a ping pong ball. And the gosling will imprint on the ping pong ball in precisely the same way. The goslings got a mother shaped hole or a goose shaped hole, right? In its mind, ready to be filled by whatever appears in the moment of imprinting. And then it will, you know, you roll the ball and the goslings will waddle afterwards. Similarly, we all have that structure, right? Okay. So we have to deal with these mythic realities, right? That I think Jordan does really ably. But there are other aspects of Jung where his interpretation strikes me as puzzling. So for instance, when he talks about the shadow, right? You know, Jordan talks about the shadow quite a bit. And more often than not, he talks about the shadow sort of in its deep collective sense. And he references a kind of note that Jung made, which is like, to really encounter the depths of the collective shadow is a soul blasting experience. Right? So when we talk about the shadow, the shadow is sort of everything that the ego rejects. It has all the potentials within oneself that we reject, that we throw away, they become othered. So technically, the shadow could be filled with lots of virtues if you’re a particularly vicious person. Yes. And in fact, it’s typically filled with virtues regardless. Right. So Jung often talks about the golden shadow, the idea that when you were doing shadow work, which I mentioned is the apprentice piece, right? A lot of what you’re doing is, yeah, partly that’s about gaining a recognition of the ways in which you have been a bad person, bad things that you’ve done that you are, you know, people that you’ve hurt, bad things that you’ve done and you’ve kind of known it. But a lot of it is about just, you know, going back and accessing the things that you left behind. Right? You made decisions. You made decisions about who you were going to be. And sometimes you made those decisions because like, you know, your parents told you to do one thing rather than the other. Sometimes you did it to differentiate yourself from a sibling or a friend, right? I’m this kind of person, not that kind of person. It might just be, it might just be underdeveloped aspects of yourself then. That’s exactly what it is. So when we talk about shadow work, the golden shadow is pulling up these things that you left behind that are actually good. Because when you hit a certain stage in life, right, you might stagnate on the formulation that you have. And so where do you get that material? Well, you get it by reaching back, by reaching into the things you’ve thrown away. Oh, and there’s difficulty because you’ve set up a structure of rejecting those things. Right. Right. And not just that, but like, typically speaking, you know, if you don’t have some kind of conscious relationship with this part of yourself, and most people don’t off the bat, we reject it. You tend to take that material and project it outside of yourself. So, you know, we’re all familiar with the term like love at first sight, right? But hate at first sight is a thing too. The thing that makes love at first sight operate is like we have an outsized reaction, a disproportionate degree of, oh my God, I feel like I’ve known them forever. We wandered around. It’s like we’re soulmates. That’s all love at first sight, right? This feeling that there is some depth there that can’t be there because we don’t know them as people. But hate at first sight operates too. And it’s deeply projected in the same way, right? We encounter somebody and we just, they just drive us crazy, right? We just hate their guts, even though we don’t know them. That’s projective shadow material. Shadow material can also show up as like incredible fear, fear of the other, right? So we reject and push away these things. It’s sort of unthinkable. It’s so far from us that it’s unthinkable, right? And there’s a rigidity to that, you know, that if you have that othering, I mean, you get kind of two problems that turn up in the, in sort of the clinical aspect of this. One is you don’t have access to that wealth of possibilities, right? So you can’t reach back and pull aspects of yourself. You know, you used to draw as a kid. I don’t know. I just lost track of that. It’s very possible that to access sort of the green shoots in your psyche for your own development, it’s necessary to go and pull those things back. But why did you throw it away to begin with? You might have thrown it away because you got chastised. You need to grow up, you know, grew up and stop drawing. Like you need to focus on accounting or whatever. Right. Right. Right. So that’s part of the problem. The other part of the problem is the further away you push it, right? The more you dissociate yourself from that material, the more autonomous it becomes. And so the tendency is then for it to operate sort of on its own, it doesn’t go away. It just does things and you don’t notice. And you see this really clearly in people that are dissociative, right? Where they’ve rejected some aspect of themselves. And so as an example, I knew a good friend of mine was married to a fellow who was the first instance that I ever encountered of what I came to call Spock Buddhists. So this was a guy who took up Buddhism and his explicit desire was to banish all emotions from himself to become a perfectly right. And this is one of these forms of spiritual bypassing, pretty common. So as a Spock Buddhist, this person believed that he had no more emotions. He believed this, right? So you can guess exactly what this did. What it meant was that he had these incredible outbursts of sadness and rage, but he could never own them. It was never him and always you. This is a rational response to what you’re doing. This isn’t me experiencing an emotion. This is the rational fitted response to what you’re doing. This is the problem with distancing yourself from your shadow. Okay. So doing shadow work is the apprentice piece because despite all the difficulty of really looking, taking a hard look in the mirror and acknowledging with sort of a deep humility and commitment to truth, the ways in which you are maybe not great, which is part of the work, it’s also right there. It’s easy to get at compared to some of this deep psychic stuff. So the ways in which you’ve been sort of an asshole are more easily accessible than the golden shadow. Am I understanding you correctly? To some extent. I mean, the thing is that the ways in which you’ve been an asshole generally jump you into in the morning anyway. The trick is just not to shrink away. Right. Right. We often, most people, will experience some moments where we’re like, oh, I feel profoundly bad about myself. And there are a few things that we can do. Sometimes what we do is we sort of slurp the Kool-Aid of self-esteem and say, no, I’m perfect just as I am. And that’s not good. Another thing that we do is we externalize that outside of ourselves. These are the people that become proponents of the one true way. And they’re like, I’m never wrong. It’s always the world. Everybody’s an idiot. These people who are always right about everything. And that’s a horrible, inflexible place to be. So what you’re doing is making an argument that the shadow is a very complex thing. And our relationship to it is also very complex. Absolutely. And then you crafted this argument. And I think it’s a really good argument in response to my question about a criticism of Jordan. Jordan. So one aspect, though, of shadow work, I’ve talked about shadow work, and I’m talking about it in very personal terms. Right. But there is an aspect that Jung talks about where you’re dealing with the shadow in the collective sense. And this is like encountering some of the fundamental, as it were, darkness that’s part of the human experience. For all that we are spiritual beings concerned with the aesthetic and love, we are also a genocidal species capable of producing tremendous suffering, cruelty. This is an aspect of human experience, too. And one that really does need to be confronted with. It seems to me that a lot of the time when Jordan talks about the shadow, he talks about it with a very strong emphasis on that collective sense that you too could be a Nazi. Right. And that’s important. It’s important to recognize that you could be a Nazi. But you don’t want to stay there all the time. You want to pull your focus back to your personal shadow because that’s where the work is. Right. So that’s one thing. But for instance, okay, I saw a piece where somebody had asked Jordan how one develops their shadow. Right. And leaving aside that really properly in Jungian terms, one doesn’t develop their shadow, it develops all on its own just fine. You integrate it. You have a series of encounters with it where you try to render it conscious and develop a relationship with it that specifically isn’t rejectful. And so he lays through a set of practices which are like here is practically how you would go about doing shadow work. I was very interested in this. And so he says something basically like you want to pay attention to the moments where you are experiencing resentment. And I was like, okay, fair. Right. Negative emotion is a good place to track. And then he moved from that too. And that may tell you when something is wrong in the world and you want to stand up because there’s an act of courage to oppose those things. Okay. And then he sort of rounded this out by referencing a young quote that to engage in sort of an act of radical honesty can be as effective in a certain sense, right, as doing psychoanalysis. And so the idea is that you track your own resentment, that tells you what’s wrong with the world, and then you stand up, you speak truth against that thing. And that is a fine recipe, I think, for an encounter with your heroic self. Be courageous, oppose things you think are evil. But that’s not shadow work. Oh, I see. Right. The very nature of that, I mean, it can’t be shadow work to identify something that you find by activating an irksome in the world and then denounce it. That’s the opposite. Right, right, right. It’s the opposite. In fact, what you want to do is track your resentment, figure out what it is in the world that’s causing that, right, that’s triggering you, the hooks that are triggering you, and then use that to look within and to figure out like, how am I involved in this? Why is it triggering for me? So I can give you an example. This is an example that it’s interesting. I teach with, and so it bounces off. When I took my first young course at U of T, I was in the class and there was this fellow in the class. And every time he spoke, I experienced this really strong like antipathy. He drove me really crazy. Okay. He would talk about things and I would find myself just simmering at the other side of the room thinking to myself, oh, this guy, like such a know-it-all, like big deal. Like, you know about this, you know, I know about all those things. Like, you really made me mad. So much so that I used to come home from that class and gripe to my housemates. I’d be like, that guy was talking again. And like, it really made me nuts. But I was in a class on Jungian psychology. So I was also like, hmm, it seems like this might be a shadow projection, right? You know, it seems like this might be a shadow projection. So instead, what I did was I approached him at the end, sort of at the end of class and I said, hi, you know, I’m Anderson. Do you want to go get a beer? This person was one of my best friends now. And one of the reasons was all of the things that I was reacting to in him are things I don’t like about myself. Right? It’s like, I, you know, I have no illusions that I both can come off and self-identify as kind of a know-it-all in a motor mouth. Right? And so to the extent that that’s a shadowy trait for me, projecting it outside and then having this like irrational, right? Feeling that tells you more about shadow work. The same goes for the aspects of yourself. Just because it appears monstrous doesn’t mean that it is monstrous. If you approach it with sort of you know, a stance of charity, you know, you can think about this with like the therapeutic work that people use with nightmares and lucid dreams, right? Kid is having a nightmare where they’re being, you know, chased by a troll or something. The idea is for them to become sufficiently lucid that they turn around and approach and turning around and making the approach often within the stuff, right? The monster will cease to be monstrous. It will transform and then you can actually talk to it. What do you want? Oh, I was just trying to get your attention. I’ve had that experience. Right. I mean, this is a standard trope that you see in dreams. If aspects of your mind can’t get your attention, they turn the dial up. And the main dial that they have access to is horror. Right. Right. So they keep turning it up until you start having nightmares and you pay attention. Right. But if you in fact make the approach yourself, right, and we know generally within psychotherapy, making the approach to an object of fear is different than the object of the fear coming to you. Yeah, of course. You get pounced on from the bushes. That’s one thing. You walk into the cave. It’s something else. Yeah. So the idea is to make the approach towards the object of your fear and hatred and to try to charitably reframe to see how you can form some relationship with it and make it not so bad. Right. There’s an aspect shift involved. So that’s sort of one example where the sort of recipe that Jordan gave on doing shadow work is an interesting recipe from the perspective of accessing one’s heroic mythological nature in some sense. You’ve also emphasized we can overemphasize that too. Right. And I think that that too is something that’s maybe a bit problematic. It’s not that I don’t think that having a warrior ethos can’t be a valuable part of self-development, but it’s not the only game in town. And so similarly, sometimes Jordan, for instance, will talk about order and chaos of the Tao. But then he has a relatively sort of strident, proactive, and externally focused approach to this that doesn’t strike me as particularly Taoist at all. Right. Have courage, act, do stuff. Yeah. There’s a lot of yang, but not very much yin. Right. Exactly. So to me, both of those things are sort of indicative of a somewhat selective or, you know, his interpretation, right? It could be just as good as mine. And it’s possible that he has good supports for it, but it’s hard to square in some sense how he deploys that term. I don’t think Jordan would want to, nor should his work be set up as something that’s beyond criticism. If it’s taken that way, then for me, if people are reacting to it that way, then for me, it loses any and all intellectual respectability. If people are simply putting it beyond the pale of criticism, then that for me has exactly the opposite effect. It’s like, oh, well then I’m not going to take it seriously. Why should I? Right. This brings me to… And actually, sorry, I just want to say on that respect. I mean, you know, I’ve, as I said, I’ve talked to Jordan a lot. And one of the things is, I mean, of course, he produces so many lectures, so much material, so many classes, right? He does tend to orbit themes, but also the sheer amount of stuff that he says means that necessarily maybe there are certain things that don’t. Yeah. Right. That’s true. But on the other hand, that’s also something worthy of criticism because if you’re going to overwhelm people with a large mass, you have to do a lot of work to render it systematically coherent so that people do have critical access to your work. Right. So I wanted to segue into something, so that criticism you made, because as you’ve noticed, I sort of have a criticism, whereas Jordan seems, again, there’s the mass of the work and I have to be careful, but I’ve seen a lot too, like you. And many people are taking it this way that Jordan seems to ally Jung with theism and particularly with Christian theism in a way that for many reasons that we covered in our discussion seems to be deeply mistaken. I think you can make a much stronger case that Jung is a non-theist, and I think you can make a much stronger case that he’s a Gnostic and he’s not a Christian, and he’s in fact deeply critical at a fundamental level of what many people would call Christianity. Yeah. So I mean, I’ve tried to sort of square that off too, and partly as part of an effort to figure out in what sense Jordan’s a Christian. That’s a tortured question. It is a tortured question, but I think that maybe there’s something useful in there. Okay. Like to the extent that he is drawing on Jung as being like a central source, it’s like, okay, so what are we saying here? We’re saying that the myths of incarnation and sacrifice and resurrection are still relevant, right? And I think that’s true. I think that those things are all true, right? And I think that, yes, it’s also true that you don’t want to just throw out the whole mythical apparatus of your culture, right? There’s just too much there. And in the West, we have done that somewhat. A critique that I had many years ago when we were talking about Buddhism was I think far too many people in the West have sort of sought the exoticism of Eastern systems rather than bother going back to sort of try to recapture some of that stuff. And I understand why, but right. So I think if we take that level and just say, yeah, yeah, Christianity still has some useful to borrow our language, right? Some useful psychotechnologies. Yes. Right. So, you know, in that sense, yeah, I agree with you. But Jung’s not a Christian, not in that sense, not in any kind of traditional conservative sense. He had extremely like unorthodox bordering on heretical and Gnostic views. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that that material can’t be used to create a kind of regenerate approach, right? And I think, you know, Tillich, right? There’s a reason Tillich gets accused to some extent of the same thing. There are lots of people- Yes. He’s often called a heretic. Right. Right. Because it’s like in some sense, well, what he’s talking about, this doesn’t seem to be our traditional Sunday school material. That’s why I think it’s important to read Tillich the way Durley does with Jung, because Tillich shows you somebody who more explicitly tries to get this interacting with Christianity and what a tough, tough job it is. Yes. And how much your Christianity, he bends Christianity explicitly to non-theism. Right. Right. And so that’s, yeah, that was an argument I wanted to make. Was there any other point you wanted to bring up? I mean, there’s also stuff I’ve heard you mention about sort of the treatment of symbols that seems to be implied by what you’ve been saying here. Yeah. I mean, you know, so there are a couple of angles here. So, yeah, one is that periodically, I find, and I think maybe that Jordan himself doesn’t think this. Like, I think it’s an outgrowth of rhetoric or something. But periodically, there is a way that he approaches symbolic interpretation where his language isn’t tentative enough. Yeah. So you see this sometimes in the biblical series where he says, this is the interpretation. This is the interpretation of XYZ. I mean, you know, there are versions of this. I mean, I think at this point, anybody that’s watched his material has seen, you know, his unpacking of say, the Garden of Eden, which sort of mingles together some speculative evolutionary ideas about the development of color vision, snake patterning, fruit, and a few other things right into sort of a general. This is sort of a routine. I mean, he’s been teaching that routine. It’s part of it. And I’m an instructor too. I understand what it’s like to have certain kinds of routines. You need them. You need them. So it’s a routine that he’s been running since Harvard. You can go back and watch him deliver some version of that talk in the 90s. And the problem with it is that because it’s insufficiently tentative, people that don’t have maybe the same depth of experience in treating symbols as being multi-aspectual and inexhaustible have a tendency to treat that as a settled interpretation. Yes. And central to the notion of the symbol. I mean, that’s what distinguishes a symbol from a sign. Yes, exactly. A sign means a thing and a symbol means a lot of things. Like, and sort of is endlessly disclosing. That is the whole point of it. That is why it’s sacred. That’s why it’s useful. Yes. Right. And maybe even more than that, like, you know, the fact that the symbol can endlessly disclose in this way is part of what structures a bunch of other things in depth psychology. Like, there’s a reason that you can’t have a book that’s called 10,000 Dreams Interpreted that’s serious. Because people always want that. They’re like, I saw a raven in my dream. What does it mean? And the answer is like, well, that depends. It’s like you take into account cultural levels. You take into account your personal history. You take into account your other dreams. Dreams are never interpreted in isolation. They’re always interpreted as part of because there is a language that develops. And, you know, in keeping with this, like, you know, it’s possible that you are allowing these parts of your psyche to plug into certain kinds of machinery. You develop a relationship when you’re doing this kind of work, right? Where, yeah, you get better and better at accessing deep layers of yourself. But also those layers start to express things in certain ways. I’ve been keeping a dream journal for years. And I went through Jungian therapy and did lots of coursework and seminars and stuff. And I noticed that too, you get that there’s a dialogic feel that comes out of it. Yeah, absolutely. There’s an exchange back and forth. And in some cases, like, you know, really, it’s funny because when I was thinking about the divine double and the aspirational self, it’s like a known quantity with sort of analysts and therapists that soon after you enter analysis, you will often have your first analyst dream where you write and that is often a really important dream to pay attention to because it’s pointing towards some future state of self. It’s like this is the this is the kernel of what you’re developing. Anyway, so sometimes I think that the the sort of not taking a sufficiently tentative line on some of the stuff means that the rhetoric of absolute interpretation enters in. Yeah, I agree with that. And I see that’s to me where I don’t know. Well, if you take the symbol as continually disclosing, that’s much more Gnostic, right? Whereas if you say this is how the symbol is interpreted, that’s ultimately just is just a two stage literalism. Yes. Right. Which is which is, I think, deeply and antithetical to Jung’s approach to the symbol. Right. And so I actually think that that is to some extent symptomatic of the other trend that I sometimes see in Jordan’s work, or at least in the sort of popular approach to it, which is the fetishization of certainty. Yes. Right. So, you know, there is a kind of line that that runs through. I think I first encountered this when Jordan delivered a talk called The Necessity of Virtue, which I saw a number of years ago. And it’s interesting, I had the opportunity to sort of have coffee and talk to him at length after that talk, where he had referenced fairly heavily Dostoevsky. And I ended up having a conversation with him where I was like, okay, yes, all this stuff about virtue, and good and evil, and the knowledge of good and evil. But Dostoevsky also said, beauty will save the world. Yes. And what does that mean? Like, how do you plug that into what you’re saying about truth and good? Because that’s the third one of the triad, and maybe the one that rescues us because it’s so much less fraught. It’s less of a battleground. Right. And actually, he had, to be honest, in person, a far more accommodating, right, than I’ve noticed that with Jordan too. Yeah, his presentation at the time. That was, I think, maybe the first conversation I ever had with him. So, but there is this approach to certainty. And it goes something like this, right? It goes, you know what to do. At some level, you know what to do. And you can tell when you know what to do, when you do what you know, no. You do what you knew that you had to do, right? Because you feel a kind of alignment. And that’s an interesting idea and a seductive one. I don’t like that idea, as you know. I just don’t think it’s true. Well, that’s why I don’t like it. I think it’s a decadent, I attribute that to a kind of decadent romanticism. So that’s part of the problem. I mean, I sort of run this idea through and I think to myself, well, I don’t know what to do all of the time. And Socrates sometimes didn’t know what to do. And it seems to me that a great number of people, certainly in my practice, either don’t know what to do or experiencing intense ambivalence about what to do. It can be almost as horrible to choose between two goods as two evils. Right? And so, you know, I think about this, and I assume somewhere in your series, you talked about like the way of the wanton and hydrophobic disc camping. Okay. So I think about this sometimes in that term, I think, okay, what is the most clarifying life event that people often tag onto? And one of the ones that you see come up in clinical practice is a brush with death. People will pray for a brush with death when they feel confused, because it will clarify their priorities. Right? If I can just get- Really? Yep. People are just like, I just want to get hit by a bus and be put in a body cast for six weeks so that I will know what’s really important. That’s the thing people say. So, okay, interesting. So I think about that. I’m like, okay, a brush with death. We take that culturally as being one of the most clarifying things that we can have happen, right? But there are two responses that you can have to a brush with death, and they’re equally credible. One is, you can say, geez, like, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Life is short. I need to stop focusing on endless deferral. I need to focus on the now, you know, yolo. Like, I need to live my life and start focusing on, right? That’s one response, and we look at that and we say, yep, that sounds very plausible to me. And then the other response is, crap, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I really got to buckle down. I got to start thinking about the long term. I got to stop frittering away my time in this day-to-day way and really start considering legacy. And we think, uh-huh. And so what is it that resolves that within the brush with death? Where does certainty arrive? I don’t know. The brush with death is supposed to provide it, allegedly, but I don’t believe that it does. But this is one of the central points in Tillich, right? The existential tonus. Most of our life is we are facing things that are in irresolvable tension with each other. Of course, I like that because it maps onto the development realization machine. But independent of my particular thing, I think that’s a profound point that Tillich makes. That, you know, there is no, you know, I need to be myself. No, no, I need to belong to a group. No, no, I need to be myself. No, I need, and there is no, there is no, there’s no final answer. And that means literally there is no certainty about it. That’s right. That’s right. So, so, you know, and like you, probably because of you, at least in part, you know, I share that. Like lots of things are like evolution. There isn’t a final form. Being a shark does not solve every problem. Sharks in the desert buy it. They’re the ultimate predator in the trench, but out in the desert, they’re toast. Tigers do well in the jungle. They do less well in the ice caps. There is no final answer. Everything is about functional fit. And it’s the same with the kinds of like, ontological strategies and existential choices we make. Right. So if that’s the case, right, then you know what to do. It’s like, no, I don’t think I do. And I don’t think other people do either. And I think the sooner we, we move away from the idea that we have a certainty that somehow we’re morally failing to access, the sooner we can deal with the idea that we are fallible, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. No, no, no. In fact, demands that we interact with. No, what I see you criticizing is, and I say this in other contexts, don’t deify any faculty. Don’t demonize any faculty. That’s right. Yes. And I think that, you could use that as the Jungian statement par excellence, right? Very much. There are no demons. Well, that seems like a really good place, I think, to try and draw it to a close. I think this was extremely helpful to me. And you corrected me on some of the sloppiness in my own thinking. I thank you for that. And I think this will be of tremendous value of people who are interested in the meeting crisis, Jung, Jordan Peterson. So thank you very much. Thank you. That was fun.