https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uaJUXTuBtS0
You know one of the things I really didn’t like about going to church when I was a kid I went to a pretty moderate church, it was the United Church which has hardly even become a church now, it’s so moderate so to speak One of the things I didn’t like was the constant harping by the ministry on the sinful nature of human beings Like, it didn’t speak to me properly, partly because I really didn’t understand what it meant and partly because it seemed Well sort of, what would you say? was self-flagellating in an unattractive way, I don’t know if there is an attractive way to be self-flagellating, but it was it was and there was something about it that was also rote and and fake that I didn’t like but you know in later years I thought about that more and I started to understand that there was some real utility in Asking people to keep the evil that they’re doing Clear and conscious in the forefront of their imagination I think I mentioned to you guys last week that this little episode from what we know of Mesopotamian culture surrounding the Emperor the New Year’s Festival they would take the Emperor outside of the walled city and strip him of his garb so that he was reduced to just an ordinary man and then Humiliate him richly and then ask him how it was over the last year that he wasn’t a Spectacular embodiment of Marduk and Marduk was the Mesopotamian deity who made order out of chaos essentially And the Emperor was supposed to sit and think okay. Well, you know, I’m Emperor and everything I should be doing a good job. Maybe I should even be doing a great job and Probably I’m coming up short in a bunch of ways and that actually happens to me I should be very very cognizant of How I’m failing to live up to the ideal and that is what that call that constant clarion call That’s degenerated. I would say an institutional Christianity. That was actually the idea was look There’s a bunch of ways that you’re not being everything you could be and it is not supposed to be a whip To knock you down. Although maybe it’s a whip to knock down your pride the pride that you’re not being Although maybe it’s a whip to knock down your pride the pride that stops you from being aware of your insufficiencies It’s more like a call to the opposite It’s like well You should stop doing those things because you could be so much more than you are and that would be so much better for you And everyone else that it’s just it’s just not good that you continue doing these things continue breaking your own rules. Let’s say Because we could certainly as I said we could start this game by assuming that you should at least play the game that you’re playing straight And so and it is the case that if you watch yourself It’s a terrifying thing to do. But if you watch yourself You’ll see you lie a lot like when I learned this to begin with I was in my 20s And I was I’m a smart person and I was very proud of that Because I was also a small person. I was moved ahead one year in school and I was a small person To begin with and so I was a very small person in my classes and also very mouthy Which might not come as much of a surprise and somewhat provocative and so you know and I got pushed around a fair bit because Everybody gets pushed around and my weapon was to be mouthy and it was a fairly effective weapon although it tended to backfire because you know if you’re really effectively mouthy with large obnoxious people then they tend to Respond in a relatively negative physical way and so that sort of thing was happening to me a fair bit and but I was quite I was quite proud of the fact that I was that I I was I had some intellectual power and That it was then in my 20s when I learned about some of the danger of that because I started to read partly Milton’s Paradise Lost and I started to understand the The danger of the intellect and the danger of the intellect as far as I can tell is that it tends towards Pride and arrogance and it also tends to fall in love with its own productions And so that’s actually Lucifer in Paradise Lost That’s Lucifer. Lucifer is the intellect that falls in love with its own productions and then assumes that there’s nothing outside of what it thinks That’s the totalitarian mentality right? It’s like we have a total system and we know how everything works and we’re gonna implement it and that’ll bring about heaven on earth right, that’s that’s say that that that’s the totalitarian mindset and that’s associated with intellectual arrogance and Another at the same time another thing Was happening to me. So I was noticing that I started to understand what that meant and I also started to understand that there was more to life than the intellect much more because I Smoked too much and I drank too much and I weighed like 130 pounds I wasn’t in good physical shape and like I had a lot of things to do when I went to graduate school to put myself Together and at the same time I was trying to understand why things had gone so crazily wrong with the world Its encapsulation in the Cold War and what role I might be playing in that if any or what role any of us were playing in that At the same time I was Working at a prison only a little bit. I worked with this crazy psychologist He used to put jokes on his multiple-choice tests He was a really eccentric guy, but I really liked his courses he and he taught a course on creativity and he was also a prison psychologist and he was an eccentric guy and he for Some reason liked me and maybe because I was eccentric too And he invited me to go out to the Edmonton maximum security prison with him a couple of times Which I did and that was a very interesting experience because I was trying to figure out What role each individual’s behavior Bore to the pathology of the group was something like that and I went out there and I Met a little guy smaller than me. I was a little bigger by then and he was a pretty innocuous guy and What had happened was I was out in this gymnasium It looks like a high school of prison, which is really quite telling in my estimation And there were all these like monsters in there weightlifting and like they were monsters I remember one guy was tattooed everywhere and he had like a huge scar running down the middle of his chest It looked like somebody to hit him with an axe and you know and and I was in there And I had this weird cape that I used to wear that I bought in Portugal and some boots that went along with it Yeah, it was like an 1890s Sherlock Holmes cape And it was really like it was from the 1880s and I was like, oh my god, I’m gonna go to the gym 1890s Sherlock Holmes cape and it was really like it was from the 1890s because this little village was up on a hill It was a walled city on a hill and they sold these things and I don’t think they’d changed the style since 1890 And so I thought they were really cool. And so I was wearing that which wasn’t perhaps the most Conservative garb To dawn if you’re going to wear if you’re going to go to a maximum security prison So anyways, I was in the gymnasium and the Psychologist left and God only knows I mean that’s what he was like and all these guys came or all these guys came around me You know and they were offering to trade their prison clothes for my cape and was It was like I was being made an offer I couldn’t refuse You know And so I didn’t I didn’t really know what to do and then this little guy said something like that The psychologist sent me to come and take you away or something like that and so I thought well better this Little guy than all these monsters. So we we went outside the gym through some doors like school doors we went outside the gym into the Exercise yard, I guess and we were wandering along and he was talking to me and he seemed like a kind of an innocuous guy And then the psychologist showed up at the door and motioned us back And so which was kind of a relief and so I went into his office and he said you know that guy that you walked Out in the yard with and I said, yeah, he said he He took two cops one night and he had them kneel down and while they were begging for their lives He shot them both in the back of the head And I thought hmm That’s See the thing that was so interesting was that he was so innocuous Right because what you’d hope is that someone like that would be very much unlike you Let’s say and certainly wouldn’t be like someone innocuous that you’d met what you’d want is that the guy would be like You know half werewolf and half vampire so you could just tell right away that he was a cold-blooded killer But no he was this sort of ineffectual little guy who was certainly not ineffectual if you gave him a revolver in the upper hand and so So that made me think that made me think a lot about the relationship between being innocuous and and being dangerous And then another thing happened. I met another guy out there, and then a week or two later I heard that he and a friend of his had held another guy down and pulverized his left leg with a lead pipe like just Pulverized it and the reason for that was that they thought that he was a snitch and maybe he was and That that time I did something different instead of being shocked and horrified by that although. I certainly was I thought How in the world could you do that because I didn’t think I could do that I didn’t think that I thought that there was a qualitative distinction between me and Those people and so I spent about two weeks trying to see if I could figure out Under what conditions I could do that like what kind of psychological? Transformation I would have to undergo to be able to do that and so that was a meditative exercise let’s say and it only took about ten days for me to realize that Not only could I do that that it would be a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be and that’s sort of where that wall between me and what Jung described as the shadow started to fall apart and That also was very useful because I started to wreck I started to treat myself as somewhat different entity because I hadn’t been aware up to that point You know because I thought I was a good guy And there’s no reason for me to think that because you’re not a good guy unless you’ve really made a bloody effort to be a good Guy you’re just not it’s not easy and so you’re probably a moderately bad guy And that’s a long ways from being an absolutely horrible guy But it’s also a long ways from being a good guy and so but I had a little more respect for myself after that because I also understood that There was a monstrous element to the human psyche that That you needed to respect and that was part of you that you should regard yourself in some sense as a loaded weapon