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the most real things about life are the place you don’t know and the place you know and You could say well that’s explored territory and unexplored territory. That’s real and it’s been around Forever back to the lobsters you know if you put lobsters in a new place the first thing they do is go around their territory Finding places to hide and also making a burrow so the first thing they do is establish what they know Against what they don’t know and that’s real It’s real from the Darwinian perspective and we’re going to say that what’s real from the Darwinian perspective is plenty real enough Because we’re alive and everything and so that sort of thing matters. It’s like well. That’s what this is the Taoist symbol That’s what it says is the what’s what it says. What is experience made of? eternally that’s easy Chaos and order and in every bit of chaos there’s the possibility of order and in every bit of order There’s the possibility of chaos and that’s the way right that’s the path of life That’s life itself and where you’re supposed to be is right on the border between the two of those and why is that? stable enough engaged enough Right so not only are you doing what you should be doing you’re doing in a way that increases the probability that you’ll do it better tomorrow, and you can tell when you’re doing that because You’re engaged you’re in the right time and place and your your neurology tells you that that’s what? Meaning is that’s what transcendent meaning is and that’s so cool because I also think that that is the antidote to Existential suffering the antidote to existential suffering is to be at the right place at the right time And you know you want to get technical about it, okay? Anxiety and pain that that’s the cause that’s the reality of existential suffering, okay? So let’s say you’re in the right place at the right time. What happens to you biochemically? Dopaminergic activation what does that do? Suppresses anxiety and it’s analgesic now it’s more than that because it also produces positive emotion and the desire to move forward and it underlies creativity and And so so not only do you get the positive engagement from a neurochemical perspective you get the analgesia and you get the Anti and you get the reduction of anxiety so it’s not hypothetical And it is the case that the dopaminergic systems those are the exploratory systems unbelievably ancient and archaic are activated when you’re optimally positioned to be to be what? Incorporating new information which is what human beings do because we’re information foragers And so we want to be secure, but building on our security at the same time And then we want to do it for ourselves. We want to do it for other people. We want to do it for our families We want to do it for broader society We want to bring the whole world together in alignment to do that and that’s meaningful and God only knows what we could do about The suffering of the world if we did that you know we have no idea What we could do if we started doing things properly and maybe so many of the things that dismay us about life We could we could stop. I mean we stopped a lot of them in the last hundred years You know things are a lot better than they were a hundred years ago obviously. They’re not perfect, but a hundred years ago 120 years ago man You know the average person in the Western world lived on less than a dollar a day in today’s dollars It’s like you just try that for a week and see how much fun that is so the Taoists Well, what is this well? This is the pre cosmogonic chaos out of which the word of God extracted habitable order at the beginning of time It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing and that chaos We’ll talk a bit more about that later I guess because it’s a very complicated thing to to describe But it’s certainly the thing that when you encounter the chaos is what you encounter when the Twin Towers fall Right you remember what that was like right so It was it was September 10th well that was the world everyone knew what the world was like and then it was September 11th And everyone walked around dazed for three days because the buildings fell But so what you can see a building fall you can understand what it’s what happens when a building falls So then what’s going on with the being dazed well? It’s the chaos that underlies our habitable order manifested itself in those buildings collapsed It was a brilliant act of terrorism and everyone was frozen and curious Because that’s how we react to that sort of thing the the it’s like it’s like the shark you know remember that famous Movie poster for Jaws with the woman swimming on the top of the water in that terrible Leviathan shark underneath coming up to to take her out well That’s life man That’s the world and now and then you see that and when something falls like the Twin Towers fall You remember that the ocean below you the abyss right the primordial abyss that bloody thing is deep and and you’re fragile And that happens when someone betrays you and it’s happened It happens to you when your dreams fall Apart you encounter that chaos again from which the world is extracted, and then you’re called upon to act out Attention and the word in order to bring the world back into order and none of that is none of that is Superstitious none of that is superstitious none of that’s even metaphorical. It’s real It’s it’s more real than anything else, and I think the reason for that in part is that? This has been it’s been this way forever Right as long as there’s been life This has been the rule of life and That’s the cosmos that’s reality That’s what we inhabit and so one of the things you know the the so-called new atheists And I don’t want to go on a tangent about new atheists because I think atheists are often remarkably honest and very consistent in their analysis so But I think that’s the way it is So But I just don’t think they’re taking the problem seriously now like I don’t think they take their evolutionary theorizing nearly with the seriousness that it that it necessitates and I don’t think that I Don’t think that you can dispute the proposition that the longer something has had a selection effect on life the more real it is It’s the fundamental axiom of Darwinian biology And I think the Darwinian world is more real than the physical world that was the argument that I was trying to have with With Sam Harris, and I didn’t do the world’s best job of that although it went not too bad the second time, but it’s It’s not something to be taken lightly. It’s a very serious profound and meaningful Proposition and people act it out and want to act it out whether they know it or not That’s Marduk So the the story of Marduk, I’ll just give it to you very briefly Taimata and Apsu were locked in embrace at the beginning of time goddess of saltwater god of freshwater together chaos and order right they give rise Masculine and feminine they give rise to the world of the elder gods and those are to me their primordial motivational forces there’s something like that and And their rage and their lust and their love and all these things that possess us that are there forever and they’re out in the world acting and they carelessly slay Apsu their father and They’re making a racket and then they kill Apsu and then Taimata Gets wind of that and that’s Taimata right there by the way. She’s kind of a rough-looking creature and She’s the mother of all things and so she’s not very happy about this These her children have destroyed Structure itself plus the noisy and careless and so she thinks all right just like Noah Just like the God that brings the flood to Noah exactly the same idea Taimata comes back and says yeah, okay enough is enough I’m gonna take you out and she makes this Battalion of monsters and puts the worst monster there is at the head of the battalion his name is Kingu He’s like a precursor to the idea of Satan and she lets the gods know hey I’m coming for you, and so they’re not very happy about this because they’re gods, but like yeah She’s chaos itself right she gave birth to everything This is no joke and so they send one God out after another to confront her and they all come back with their tails between Their legs there’s no hope and then one day there’s a new God that emerges And that’s Marduk and the gods know as soon as he pops up they know he’s something new Remember, and this is happening while the Mesopotamians are assembling themselves into one of the world’s first great civilizations So all the gods of all those tribes are coming together to organize themselves into a hierarchy to figure out what? Proposition rules everything and so Marduk is elected by all the gods And he says look I’ll go out there, and I’ll take on time at but here’s the rule from here on you follow me I determine destiny. I’m the top God I’m the thing at the top of the hierarchy and all the other gods say hey look no problem you get rid of chaos We do exactly what you say now Marduk He has eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words those are his primary attributes and so he takes a net and he goes out to Confront time at and and he he he he encloses her in a net which I think is so cool because it’s an encapsulation Right it’s a conceptual encapsulation. He encloses chaos itself in a conceptual structure He puts it in a net and then he cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world and then Then he creates human beings to inhabit that world and to serve the gods and he creates human beings out of the blood of King The worst of the demons and that took me to call in to young was a student of mine helped me figure that out He thought geez that’s pretty damn pessimistic. It’s like you know what exactly it sounds like a fall metaphor It’s like the idea of original sin, but but our joint conclusion With regards to that was that human beings are the only creatures in creation that can truly deceive Right we have the capacity for evil just like it says in the Adam and Eve story We can actually do that and that’s why we’re made out of the blood of King who the king of the demons the We are that thing that can deceive that can twist the structure of reality well, so Marduk now the the Mesopotamians had an emperor right and the Emperor was the Avatar of Marduk that’s what made him Emperor He was only an Emperor if he was going to be Marduk he had to be a good Marduk which meant he had to confront time at chaos and Cut her up and make order out of her pieces and what the Mesopotamians used to do at the New Year’s Celebration they’d go outside their walled city, and that’s explored territory versus unexplored territory They go outside their walled city into chaos and they bring all the statues that represented the gods and they’d act this out Because they’re trying to figure something out right you’re trying to figure out what this means They’re acting it out, and then they take their Emperor and the priest would make him kneel and they take all his king Equally all his king uniform off his Emperor uniform off and make him kneel and humiliate him and nail him with a glove and say okay How were you not a good Marduk this year? Right and then he recount all the ways that he was inadequate in confronting chaos and then they do the celebration and Marduk would win and and the king would go sleep with a royal prostitute and The reason for that was it’s the same idea as st. George pulling the Virgin from the dragon it’s exactly the same idea that if you call if you encounter the Reptilian chaos you can extract something out of it with which if you unite you produce creative order That’s what they were acting out and that was the basis for the Mesopotamian idea of sovereignty. It’s so smart It’s so unbelievably smart and you know the Mesopotamians had a massive influence on the civilizations that then had a massive influence on us It’s one of the stories of how the notion of sovereignty itself came to be it’s the evolution of the idea of God That’s one way of thinking about it But even more importantly it’s the evolution of the idea of the redemptive human being right And that’s taken to its one of its conclusions while in the story of Buddha But also in the story of Christ the idea of the perfect individual and the notion is well That’s the word that speaks truth into chaos at the beginning of time to generate habitable order that is good. That’s the story