https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=A7QVrqJkJx4
And so this is the world that you’re in. You’re somewhere, because you have to be somewhere. Now you might not know where that is, which means that the somewhere that you are is chaotic. In which case you need to go over your past in great detail and figure out where you are. It’s like you’re lost, right? You’re lost and the problem with being lost is when you’re lost you don’t know where to go and the problem with not knowing where to go is there’s a million places that you could go and a million places is too many places for you to go without dying. So being lost is not good. So you need to know where you are. One of the things that we built online my partners and I is this program called Past Authoring that helps people lay out the narrative of their past to identify to break their life down into six stages, epochs we call them, and then to identify the emotionally significant moments in each epoch and to write them out. What happened negatively, what happened positively, what the consequences were, what you derived from it, perhaps what you could have done differently, perhaps what you learned from it, all of that. So that you can narrow in, zero in on determining precisely where it is that you are right now. And people are often loathe to do that because they actually don’t want to know. Because they’d rather be spread out in a sort of half blind manner in the fog hoping that the place that they’re at is better than it really is and deluding themselves by remaining vague than to figure out I’m right here right now with these specific problems. But it’s actually better to do that because if you have a set of specific problems and you’ve really narrowed them down and really specified them, then you can probably start fixing them. And you can start fixing them in micro ways, bit by bit. But there’s no way you can do that without knowing where you are. It’s impossible. And you can kind of tell if you don’t know where you are. It’s quite straightforward. If you are haunted by reveries of the past, for events that are older than approximately 18 months, if they continue to come up in your mind over and over, in your dreams over and over, you haven’t extracted the world out from your past experiences. The potential is still trapped in the past. And to confront the potential means to confront the dragon of the past. And of course that’s terrifying. And it can seriously be terrifying. So for example, maybe you’re vague and ill-formed and ill-defined because you were abused very badly when you were a child, four years old, something like that. And maybe you were abused by a family member because that’s generally who does the abusing. And so that just makes it worse. And then what that means is that you’ve got a implicit, you’ve had an implicit encounter with malevolent evil. You’ve had a direct encounter with malevolent evil but you have an implicit hypothesis of malevolent evil that’s plaguing you. It’s still there. It’s trapped in the memories, right? It’s trapped in the representational structure. And as an adult, you’re now faced with the necessity of articulating that fully before you have any chance whatsoever of freeing yourself from it. And so that’s no joke. Lots of times people have to go into the past, that’s what the psychoanalysts do, and say, look, here’s something came along and just bloody well knocked me over. And it isn’t even that I repressed it, which I think was well, we won’t talk about Freud’s errors because Freud was a genius so we’ll just leave him alone. But sometimes it’s not repression, it’s just the terrible things happen to people at such a young age that there isn’t a bloody chance in hell that they can figure out why they happened or what to do with them or what they mean. And then you can carry that with you and you carry it with you. It’s like, your body encounters the world in stages, and it happens very rapidly. Well, it can extend over years, but the initial stages happen very rapidly. So for example, if you’re walking down the road and you hear a large noise a loud noise behind you, it will go like this. That’s a predator defense response, by the way. You crouch down and that’s to stop something from jumping on your back and getting at your neck too easily. That’s like a few hundred milliseconds. It’s really fast, or even faster than that. And it better be because something like a snake, we’ll say, can nail you just right now, so you better be fast. But it’s low resolution. It’s like danger snake, something like that, or danger predatory cat. It’s that fast. And then you can unravel that and categorize it, but that takes time. You do that with emotion and then you do it with cognition, and you can do that with long term thinking, you know, because maybe you’ve encountered someone specifically malevolent and predatory at work. That happens to people a lot who’s operating as a destructive bully and who seems to have no positive function whatsoever. And is only living that out. And then you don’t know what to do about it. So you’re in prey mode. I don’t mean this kind of mode, although that would help too. But, I mean, you’re acting like a prey animal and then you have this terribly complex thing to decompose, which is, what the hell’s up with this person? Why are they making my life miserable? What is it about me that allows them to make my life miserable? That’s a nasty little road to walk down. And you’re stuck with having to decompose it. Maybe you can’t. Maybe formulating an explicit philosophy of good and evil to deal with something malevolent in your environment actually just happens to be beyond you. And that could easily be. It’s certainly the case for people who are young. And it’s the case for plenty of adults as well.