https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GSc9wKKklKg
I take your reading of Christianity to be, for example, compatible with Star Wars in the sense that Luke Skywalker is a very quirky, odd guy, you know, in the middle of this random planet. Of course. I mean, just as weird and odd as a carpenter in Galloway, right, you know, and yet he is the embodiment of this kind of eternal spiritual thing, you know, and that’s where you get that kind of melding together. Right. In Star Wars, we should just look at it historically. Star Wars. George Lucas, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, because all of Campbell’s thinking was Jungian thinking, all of it. And The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a great book, especially as an introduction to that kind of literature. But yes, Star Wars is Christianity for atheist nerds. Yes. Yes. And you can’t get rid of that. There’s no getting rid of that, right? If you throw it out in one direction, it comes back in another. And that’s something we should talk about too. Well, it’s a very powerful story. Yeah, no, absolutely. The one thing I would want to say, though, is that we are most happy when we do not perceive ourselves as inheriting an archetypal story from somebody else. If I were to say to you, you know, here’s the archetypal story, you’re going to end up back there. You know, that would be disinteresting to us emotionally. You know, we want to tell our own stories. We want to be particular in ourselves. I would also say that even though human psychology has remained relatively constant for at least 300,000 years and parts of it for over a million, our world is changing and has changed. And there are real differences between the way the world works now, the kinds of actions and behaviors that are going to function now than there was even 500 years ago. And so there is this need for flexibility in narrative. So even as what you’re talking about, I think, Jordan, is this fundamental spiritual component of narrative for way in which narrative can connect us with the eternal, a sense of things bigger than ourselves. And that transcendent sense of purpose is what lifts us. But narrative also has this flexibility outside the spiritual in the material world to say, OK, how do I navigate this challenge? I’m not going to navigate this challenge as Luke Skywalker or Christ because Luke Skywalker and Christ didn’t encounter it. OK, I don’t I don’t think it’s OK. I don’t think it’s abstracted outside of the spiritual. I think this relates to the issue of the relationship between the conscious propositions and the unconscious understructure. So I think that we think in stories, we frame the world in stories we see in stories. And this is partly why, for example, our eyes are adapted with the whites of our eyes so that other people can see our eyes. It’s really important for us to see other people’s eyes because we can see where they’re pointing their eyes. And if we can see where they’re pointing their eyes, we can see what they’re interested in. We can see what they value and we can instantly infer their motivation. And that makes them predictable. And so so and it’s so important that every all of our ancestors whose eyes weren’t that visible either didn’t mate or got killed. It’s really important. OK, so so we have now this shared narrative. So imagine this is part this perhaps relates to the particular the absolute as you specify the narrative for small scale actions and those would be particularized. The connection with the absolute, the larger absolute in some sense falls away, but it’s nested. So you could say if you’re an integrated person, it’s nested. It’s so like right now you’re talking to you’re listening to me and sometimes you’re talking to me. OK, so and the story there is what we want to have an engaging conversation and and why? Well, there’s a bigger story outside of that because we want to further our knowledge about narrative and we want to share that with other people. And then there’s a story outside of that, which is well, why? Well, because we’re both we’re both educators and public communicators. Well, why bother with that? Well, because we think education, rationality and narrative are important for the proper functioning of human beings. Well, why is that relevant? Because we care about the emotional experience of people and we want to further their growth because we want things to be better. And what’s outside of that? Well, the idea that well, it’s something like the idea that truthful and engaged exploration is of is a high value. And then outside of that, well, at some point you get to the ultimate abstraction, right, which is the ultimate good. And if you’re an integrated person, the particular of your action is associated with that broad scale abstraction. But you don’t have to refer to it in the moment. And thank God for that. Because it would be overwhelming. It would be overwhelming. Here’s something I’ll throw just sort of sideways. I think what happens when people take psychedelic substances that blow apart their latent inhibition is that they start to become cognizant of those underlying nested structures like they start to invade the current reality. And that’s what makes it saturated with meaning and pregnant with meaning. And also sometimes produces that catastrophically terrible experience, because if that nesting is fragmented, so maybe there’s part of you that’s motivated by bitterness and despair and jealousy. There’s a war at the broader narrative levels and you’re a disintegrated character. And that’s extraordinarily stressful physiologically, partly because you can’t act out the contradictions, you know, without running into trouble. So, see, part of what you’re doing in psychotherapy all the time, and this is like an integration of cognitive behavioral and analytic psychology is you’re trying to hammer the person’s narrative into a single non contradictory functional unit at all levels of apprehension simultaneously. The stories can help with that. So, yeah, no, absolutely. So there’s actually a chapter in the book where I talk about how literature can give you the positives of psychedelics without the negatives. And there’s a lot of evidence that literature, particularly certain types of poetry can deeply stimulate the visual cortex and create these feelings of awe and pop that sort of allow you to open your mind and start to put together some of the different narratives different stories you have. And yeah, so is that more effective? Is that more effective when the lyrics are set to music? Yes. So is it is that being demonstrated neurologically? Do you know? Well, I don’t know. I don’t know about I don’t know a specific test that has set the the the poems that I’ve talked about to music. But yes, absolutely. Music has the same can have the same convergent function. Absolutely. Yeah. And as far as the therapeutics go, I mean, I mean, a lot of the work that I do, I mean, I do a lot of work with veterans, a lot of work with trauma survivors. There’s no question. I mean, the origins of Greek tragedy are therapeutic. It was written largely, I mean, initially by veterans performed largely for veterans in ancient Athens. And when you take out the story components of Oedipus and you use them in modern military settings, they continue to have these cathartic effects because they continue to allow soldiers to access these deep and dangerous parts of themselves and of the world. I mean, the thing that happens in war is you get tragic knowledge, tragic knowledge of the world and of yourself. Sometimes malevolent knowledge, which is even worse, like the people I’ve seen who were traumatized, were not so much traumatized by tragedy as they were traumatized by malevolence, because that’s the voluntary imposition of tragedy. And there’s something about and so one of the things you see with soldiers is that often when they get traumatized, it’s not because something terrible happened to them. It’s because they watched themselves do something so terrible, they can’t imagine being human and having done that. And so so one of the things you you pointed out, for example, when he was dealing with people who were extraordinarily traumatized was that helping people understand the battle between good and evil, let’s say. So that’s that’s a narrative at the highest level of abstraction is to understand that. Because imagine what would happen if you had in some sense had to take personal responsibility for your own malevolence. And you got a glimpse of that right. A glimpse of that murderous malevolence that you’re capable of. And you have nothing, no place to put it. Well, if you can put it in a universal narrative, you can say, well, these powerful forces of good and evil are always operating beneath the surface. And that’s been the case for the entire corpus of human history. And God only knows what it means in the final analysis. But it’s possible for an individual to be caught up in that. And that’s not an excuse. Right. But you man, if you’ve done something terrible, you and you need to recover, you need a story to put that in, because otherwise it just hangs. It’s like the sword of Damocles over your head all the time. Who the hell am I? Who I’m capable of that sort of thing. Who the hell am I? And you can’t live without an answer to that question. No, and I think also I will say to move the conversation off just veterans, I think all of us do things in our lives that we’re ashamed of. And we wonder where that comes from. And then we have to square with our own experience. Yes, definitely. I mean, one thing I’ll say is at the bottom of my worldview is Darwin, not Jung. So I myself don’t subscribe. I’m an agnostic. I don’t subscribe to strict good and evil. I mean, I subscribe to pain and and joy or something like that. And so a lot of what I that’s at the propositional level, but you still admire Star Wars.