https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=W_7AsQqr4Fo
When I was very young, I realized that God or nature had given me what I have called a goodness detector. And I knew, I always knew when I was in the presence of a good person, because that’s all I really care about. I think brains are wildly overrated, wildly. That’s why I think you’re not bright if you join Mensa. Why you would want to announce to the world your IQ is so bizarre to me that I, I’m sure there are nice people there, but I don’t understand it. But I always picked up that, and I’ve always been right. I’m batting a thousand, essentially. And when I heard you read your book, the passion comes from, I just want to help people lead a better life. And it’s really, it’s quite overwhelming. You didn’t just read that book. You, I won’t say you sang it, but I like that you use music. I’m very much into music, too. So this is the man that I’m honored to have this dialogue with, because you’re, everybody knows you’re bright, but I know you’re good. So I wanted to state that at the outset. I have something to say about that. Good. That’s good. See, I don’t think it’s true. I mean, this is why I got motivated to do what I’ve been doing, and I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for, I would say since about 1979, in one form or another, because things take a long time to generate. And one of the things I learned in the early 80s was that people have a great capacity for evil. And I didn’t really understand that of myself until the early 80s, something like that, after meditating on it for a long time. And so I would say, it’s not that I would never claim to be good. I think it’s dangerous. But I did become terrified of how terrible I could be. I mean, I became terrified about how terrible human beings could be, and that’s one thing. But that’s easy, it’s easy to confuse that with other human beings. It’s a different thing to understand that it’s true of yourself. I often recommend to my students that they read history as a perpetrator and not as a victim or a hero. And people very seldom do that, and it’s no wonder. But I would say, perhaps, that I became terrified enough from learning what I learned that I tried to avoid the pathways that lead people to the dark places that they go. And there’s something in that that might approximate good. Yeah, it does approximate good. I would agree with that. The parallels between us are so eerie to me that in my book on happiness, which came out in 99, I actually have a chapter on the necessity of having a tragic view of life. And then I hear you speak of, like just now, this tragic view of life. And ironically, if you don’t have that, you can’t be happy. So it’s just another example of this, that you’re getting this message out. If you want to comment on that, please, if not, I’ll go on. I watch you and you’re such an intense listener, I don’t know when you’re going to react. No. Well, there’s this old idea. You all know this idea. It’s an idea that’s expressed, for example, in the classic Disney movie, which I really like, called Pinocchio. And you know, when Pinocchio is attempting to free himself from the forces that manipulate him as a puppet and to become an autonomous being, he is required to go to the darkest place to find the worst monster and face that voluntarily. And in doing so, he rescues his father. That’s a very old idea. I don’t know how old it is. It’s one of the oldest ideas we have in written form, and there’s no doubt that in its pre-written form it would be tens of thousands of years older than that. And it’s a very strange idea that you have to journey to the darkest abyss to free the spirit of your father. But there’s a reason for it, and it has to do with the tragic view of life, which is that you can’t discover what you’re capable of being or withstanding. And those are the same things. If you hide away from any of the things about life that are terrible but true. And the reason you can’t discover who you are without doing that is that only necessity will force that out of you. I mean that from the perspective of learning. If you go work in a palliative care ward, you’ll learn to deal with death. You’ll learn the psychological strategies necessary, the steps. You’ll become more informed. But it’s deeper than that even. We know now from a biological perspective that if you put yourself in new situations, in new and challenging situations, that new genes turn on in your nervous system and code for new proteins that produce new neurological structures. And so you can’t even be what you are fully biologically unless you expose yourself to everything that you can expose yourself to as you journey through life. The old idea of a pilgrimage was predicated on that idea as is walking the in Chartre Cathedral, the labyrinth. The idea that you walk the labyrinth in Chartre and you come to the centre is that you traverse every corner of the world quarter by quarter and then you come to the centre. And the centre is the centre of the church and it’s the centre of the crucifixion. It’s the centre of suffering. And you can’t get to what that centre signifies without having journeyed everywhere. And so the tragic view of life is necessary because it puts you on the journey that reveals to yourself who you could be if you were courageous, as courageous as you could be and as truthful as you could be. And that’s equivalent to discovering, to revivifying your dead father because you are an ancient creature in some sense and perhaps one with a spark of divinity inherent in it. But you will never release that unless you’re willing to go everywhere that you have to go because only necessity will call that out of you. And so you can’t be happy. You can’t be complete without you can’t know what you could withstand. You can’t have any proper sense of self respect unless you know what you can tolerate. And if you avoid everything that you have reason to avoid but should nonetheless not avoid you won’t know who you are and then you can’t live properly.