https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=VKsEZUt5ekQ
In order to change your frame of thought, a piece of you has to die? Yeah, well not, it’s worse than that, a piece of you has to die, and it might be a lot of you But also, when that piece dies, it’s not like it’s replaced immediately by a new functional piece You lose the… Just chaos That’s right, that’s the desert We just released this Exodus seminar, right, and one of the things that happens to the Israelites Once they leave the tyranny of Egypt, they end up lost in the desert Of course, that’s part of the mystery of the story, it’s not a very big desert where they’re lost It wouldn’t take 40 years to walk across it, it’s three generations But what happens is that in the aftermath of the collapse of a tyrannical belief system Well, the tyranny disappears, but then you’re lost And it’s not obvious at all that being lost is preferable to being in the tyranny And that’s why people will develop nostalgia for the tyranny It’s also why people won’t let go of their beliefs, it’s like Imagine you stubbornly stick to a counterproductive pattern of behaviour And you even know it’s counterproductive, but you won’t let it go You think, well, why would you be so damn daft not to let go of something that you know is hurting you? And the answer is, well, better the devil you know than the desert you don’t Right, it’s a really big problem, and in the Exodus story, there’s an emphasis It’s like, it might… the desert period, it might extend past your lifetime Right, right, well, you know, if a whole tyrannical society collapses There’s no reason to assume that the society is going to regenerate within the span of your life You know, you might just be the cohort that’s cast into the desert That happened in Russia, in the Soviet Union after it collapsed So if you were like 45 or older in 1989, or 50 let’s say, you’re just screwed, right? Because everything that you knew collapsed, and you’re 50, you know, you’re near retirement You’re going to start again? Well, you’re three-fifths done, or four-fifths done There’s no… lots of people can’t start again, or won’t, even if they’re 30 From my experience of belief systems falling, and I think my first belief system that fell was like full-blown trust in the medical system because of what happened to me And when that fell, I’ve talked about this a bit, it impacted almost every part of my life Where I was like, I believed that, you know, I believed that that was how I was going to get better It didn’t make me better, something else outside of that got me better, which is the diet that we’re on Which was ridiculous Yeah, or your own exploratory capacity Yes, for sure, but I think that was the first belief system that fell, and then I lost trust in everything, like if that was wrong, is the government wrong? What else is wrong? This is something that Nietzsche pointed out with regards to the psychological consequences of European colonialism on Europe, so he said, okay, imagine Europe is Christendom, all things considered, when the European expansion started, okay, now the Europeans go out into the world And there’s some arguments within Christendom about which branch of Christianity should rule, you know, and there’s doubters, but basically, as far as the Europeans were concerned, the cosmos was structured according to Judeo-Christian precepts, it was just that assumption network, okay, so now the Europeans go out in the world, and they find out that there’s a lot of different belief systems, equally well developed, or arguably equally well developed, apparently predicated on different axiomatic systems, okay, so now that brings up doubt So the doubt is, well, you know, the Japanese, Chinese, they seem to be doing pretty well, and they’re not, or better even, in some regards, I think you could argue that when the Europeans hit Japan, that the Japanese had attained a higher level of sophisticated civilization in many ways, they were certainly well advanced in the hygienic front, for example, and so that’s the first doubt, the first doubt is, oh, there’s a bunch of belief systems, but then Nietzsche pointed out, but then there’s a secondary doubt, which is, once you realize that a belief system per se, especially a relatively core one, can collapse, that raises not only the specter of which belief system is correct, but another specter, which is, well, what makes you think any belief system is justifiable? Yeah, yeah. Right, and that’s the nihilist trap, it’s like, well, everything is meaningless, right, and, you know, and that’s a hard trap to get out of, and we’re certainly still, Nietzsche knew that after the death of God, which was something he regarded as really the ultimate catastrophe, the ultimate murder, that two things were most likely to happen, one would be a descent into a kind of counterproductive nihilism, the loss of all values, that’s how he construed it, and all the psychological disorientation that goes along with that, and the other would be a radical turn towards a replacement totalitarian certainty, which he believed and said would likely come from the radical left in the form of something approximating communism, he nailed that like 1850, stunning, and Dostoevsky knew exactly the same thing, they both got it exactly right, and so, and that is exactly what happened, so, yeah, so, and then there’s another way of thinking about it too, is that you look at the world through a hierarchy of presuppositions, of axioms, so like if you’re married, one of the axioms is, and this would be the definition of marriage, one of the axioms of marriage is likely trust on the interpersonal communication front, like you have to assume that your partner is revealing to you what they are, and then sexual fidelity would be the other, and those are obviously integrally associated, but those are the two, you could argue are the two fundamental pillars, okay, so, everything else in the marriage, and that would be your self-conception, your conception of your future, the past, your partner, other people, all of them depend on the integrity of those axioms, and so if any, either of those axioms are challenged, so your partner lies to you in some fundamental way, or betrays you on the sexual front, the whole edifice tumbles down, and so what happens technically there is, that edifice gives you security, because things are defined, and so they’re not all the, look, if you can’t trust someone, you don’t know who the hell they are, and when you’re facing someone and you don’t know who they are, they could be anyone, they could be Mother Teresa or Ted Bundy, that’s a big rage, so someone you can’t trust is a nightmare of entropy, and the reason they’re a nightmare of entropy is because you don’t know which direction to take, like they’re a multitude of, they’re an infinite multitude of potential directions, okay, the systems within you that signal anxiety, signal the emergence of that multitude of pathways, it’s like, you know, you, I’ve seen this in interviews I’ve had, it’s like, you know, I thought they were good faith interviews, and then I discovered that I was talking to a snake, yeah, no kidding, it’s like, oh, I see, you’re not who you claim to be, and whatever’s happening here isn’t what I thought, what’s going on, and the answer is, God only knows, right, so anxiety signals that, anxiety comes up and says, you thought you were here, in the walled garden, but it turns out that you’re in chaos, and then because you don’t know how difficult it will get be to get out of the chaos and reestablish order, your brain says, warning, warning, multiple pathways ahead, multiple indeterminate pathways ahead, that equates to incalculable expense of energy and time probable, right, and so you get anxious, that’s, and that’s what freezes you, you don’t know which direction to go, you turn to stone, so when the mythological hero faces the terrible chaotic feminine, let’s say, with the head of snakes, it’s a predator, he freezes, and the reason for that is, well, if you don’t know what direction to go, how about you don’t move, right, that’s anxiety, it’s a signal of emergent entropy, and entropy can tear you apart, right, it’s complete disorder, so. Yeah, okay, so I have like four or five questions from that whole thing that just happened, but I think the first one, what do people do if something they fundamentally believe changes and they’re left in this state of what’s even stable in my life, like where do you start when you’re frozen? Okay, so back to the book of Exodus, this is so cool, Jonathan Pagio explained this to all of us, and like I don’t think any of us ever recovered after he explained it, because it’s so bloody brilliant, so the Israelites are out in the desert, right, they’re lost, and they have the habits of slaves, so they don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re all bitchy, and they’re whining about having the tyranny back, and they’re bitching about Moses, and they’re worshiping like golden calves, and they’re fighting with each other, it’s just like chaos, so they don’t know where to go, and so God appears to them, and God appears as a pillar of light at night, so it’s a fire, and a pillar of darkness during the day, and so Pagio said that’s the same thing as the Daoist yin and yang, it’s the same idea, so what does it mean? Well, in the Daoist worldview, reality itself, so that’s experiential reality, is made out of the balance between chaos and order, okay, now order is where you are when things are going the way you want them to go, that’s order, and chaos is where you don’t know what the hell is going on, so chaos is also possibility, right, the future is chaos, and novelty is chaos, now in the Daoist worldview, the little serpent, because it’s a serpent, that’s the white serpent, their head to head, has a black dot in it, it’s because order can turn into chaos at the drop of a hat, and the black serpent has a white dot in it, because chaos can reveal a new order, and that’s the interplay of reality, the interplay between the unknown and the known, now when you’re guided by that which grips your interest optimally, right, so you’re attentive, because you’re interested in something, you’re focused on it, what it means is that chaos and order are balanced for you in a way that doesn’t flood you too much, so you’re not too terrified, but that isn’t so predictable that nothing, no transformation is taking place in front of, now you might think, well what I want to be is stable, and that’s wrong, you don’t want to be stable, you want to be stable and improving, right, okay, so something will beckon to you as compelling and interesting if it’s exactly on the frontier between chaos and order that will move your development forward, right, and when that happens you’re engaged, that’s the instinctive meaning, that’s how God manifests himself to the Israelites in the desert.