https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4bqWTNK8FBY
And so Zazu, the eyes of the king, comes to check out the king, and that’s… What’s his name? What’s the king’s name? Mufasa. Mufasa, yeah. And he’s a very regal-looking person, a lion. And he stands up straight and tall, and that means that he’s high in serotonin, because serotonin governs postural flexion, and if so, if you’re dominant and near the top of hierarchies, you tend to expand so that you look bigger than you could if you shrunk down. And so if you’re low-dominant person, you wander around like this, so that you look small and weak, and you don’t pose a threat to anybody, but if you’re at the top, you expand yourself so that you can command the space, and that’s why he has that particular kind of regal posture. And if you look at his facial expression, you see that it’s quite severe. Like he’s capable of kindness, but he’s also harsh and judgmental, and that’s what society is like. That’s what the superego is like. And what that means is that he’s integrated his aggression. And I’ve seen this happen in my clinical clients. When they come in and they’re too agreeable, they look like Simba looks later in the movie when he’s an adolescent, and he’s sort of like a deer in the headlights. Everything is coming in and nothing is coming out, but when the person integrates their shadow and gets the aggressive part of themselves integrated into their personality, their face is hardened. And if you look at people, you can tell, because the people who are too agreeable look childlike and innocent, and the people who, well, hyper aggressive person will look mean and cruel. But I’ve seen people’s face change in the course of therapy. Men and women. And what happens is they start to look more mature, and it’s more like they’re judging the world as well as interacting with it properly. Once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them, it’s very, very necessary. And that’s part of the incorporation of the Jungian shadow or the incorporation of the unconscious from a Freudian perspective. But old Musafa there, he’s already got that covered. So, and he’s capable, like obviously he can smile, and he’s capable of the full range of expressions, but he’s a tough looking character. Now, this baboon here, who’s supposed to be basically just a fool when the story was first written, he turned into what’s essentially a shaman across time. And so he represents the self from the Jungian perspective. Now, the self is everything you could be across time. So imagine that there’s you and there’s the potential inside you, whatever that is, you know. And potential is an interesting idea, because it represents something that isn’t yet real, yet we act like it’s real. Because people will say to you, you should live up to your potential. And that potential is partly what you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain you the most information, right? Because you build yourself out of the information in the Piagetian sense. But it’s deeper than that too, because we know that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment, new genes turn on in your nervous system. They encode for new proteins. And so you’re full of biological potential that won’t be realized unless you move yourself around in the world into different challenging circumstances, and that’ll turn on different circuits. So it’s not merely that you’re incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist sense. It’s that by exposing yourself to different environments, you put different physiological demands on yourself all the way down to the genetic level, and that manifests new elements of you. And so one of the things that happens to people, and this is a very common cultural notion, is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central. And that would be, say, like the rock in the Pride Rock in the Lion King, because you take yourself out of your dopey little village, and that’s just the little bounded you that everyone knows and that isn’t very expanded. And then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the central place, and while you do that, you have adventures and they toughen you and pull more out of you. Like, partly because you’re becoming informed, which means in formation. It means you’re becoming more organized at every level of analysis, but there’s also more of you too. And so that’s a very classic idea. And then in cathedrals in Europe, especially at Chartres, there’s a big maze on the floor, a circular maze, which is a symbolic representation of the pilgrimage for people who couldn’t do it. And so it’s a huge circle divided into quadrants, which is a union mandala. And you enter the maze at one point, and then you have to walk through the entire maze, north, east, west, and south, before you get to the center. And the center is symbolized by a flower that’s carved in stone. It looks like this. It’s big, this maze, eh? It’s large, so that you can walk it. And that’s a symbolic pilgrimage. It takes you to the center. That’s the center of the cross, because it’s in a cathedral, and that’s the point of acceptance of voluntary suffering. That’s what that means. And so you walk through, you can call that a circumambulation. You go to all the quarters of the world to find yourself. And so, well, the self is the baboon in this particular, in this, I think he’s a mandrill, actually, in this particular representation. And he lives in the tree. He lives in the tree of life. It’s a baobab tree in this particular. So he’s the spirit that inhabits the tree of life. And he’s the eternal wise man. That’s a way of thinking. So is the king. But he’s sort of a superordinate king or an outside king in some sense. He’s the repository of ancient wisdom. And the king is the manner in which that wisdom is currently being acted out in the world. And so they’re friends. And that means that the king is a good king, because if they, if the king was a bad king, he would be alienated from himself. And that would make him shallow and one dimensional. And that would make him a bad ruler, no union with the traditions of the past. To be a good ruler, you have to rescue your father from the underworld and integrate that. And of course, that’s a main theme in this entire movie. So the hero is born, and that’s what the rising sun represents. And everybody goes, oh, isn’t that cute? And the reason for that is because you’re biologically wired, especially if you’re agreeable to respond with caretaking activity to cute, to cuteness. And cuteness is button nose, big eyes, small mouth, round head, symmetry, and helpless movements. And you’ll respond to that across the entire class of mammalian, of mammalian creatures, even maybe down to lizards, you know, isn’t that cute? No, it’s a lizard. But you know, so, so, so that’s an archetype as well. That’s the archetype of the vulnerable hero at bore the vulnerable hero, newly born. And that should invoke a desire mostly on the part of males to encourage and mostly on the part of females to nurture, to nurture, but males and females are quite crosswired among human beings. And so there’s encouragement from the women and there’s also nurturing from the men. And of course, those those curves in some sense overlap. So there’s more nurturing males and more encouraging females, but that’s roughly the archetype. And so he looks cute and everybody goes on. That’s because the animators nailed that they caught the essential features of cuteness. And he’s also in the light, right? And so then the the shaman mandrill basically baptizes him. That’s essentially what he’s doing. And he uses something that’s symbolic of the sun, which is this ripe fruit. And fruits are symbolic of the sun, because of course, they need the sun to ripen and they’re round like the sun. And so and people know that they need light. But and and so anyways, the animators make a relationship between the fruit that the shaman is going to break and the sun. And so he’s also being baptized into the sun. And that means that he’s being baptized into the light or that he’s being transformed into a hero. And so then everyone’s happy. And that’s basically, you know, the divine father and the divine mother and the divine son and the self who’s taking care of that. And there’s a union between the baby and the wise old man, because the baby is all the potential that’s realized in the self. And there’s an old idea that the way to full maturity is to find what you lost as a child and regain it. It’s a brilliant idea. And that that that echoes through myths all over the world. And that means you have to regain your capacity. Once you’re disciplined, and you know how to do something, you have to regain your capacity for play and sort of for wide eyed wonder. And that’s maybe the childlike part of your spirit. And the reintegration of that childlike part with the adult grown up part revivifies the adult grown up part and allows the child to manifest itself in a disciplined way in the world. And so that’s all being hinted at there. And then they showed the shaman shows the baby the newborn hero to the crowd. And it’s very cool what happens in the movie, all the animals spontaneously kneel. And I can give you an example of that kind of spontaneous action in a crowd. So imagine you’re watching a gymnastics performance, right? And, and it’s like a high level world class performance, and someone comes out there, and they do this routine that’s just dead letter perfect, you know, and they stop and everybody claps like mad, right? And it’s perfect. And so then the next contestant comes out, and they’re basically in real trouble, because you know, this person just got 9.7 out of 10. And it was perfect. So how do you beat perfect? And so they come out there, and then you watch them and you’re right on the edge of your seat, because what you see them do is something extraordinarily disciplined, just like the last person did, but they push themselves into that zone that’s just beyond their discipline capacity. And you can tell every second you’re watching it that they’re that close to disaster. And so you’re right on the edge of your seat. And you know that they’re doing a high wire act without a net. And so when they finally land triumphantly, you’ll all stand up and clap spontaneously. And it’s because you’ve just witnessed someone who’s a master at playing a game, who’s also a master at improving how to play that game at the same time. And people love that more than anything to see that it’s just absolutely overwhelming, because it’s a testament to the human spirit. And you’ll respond automatically and unconsciously to that. And that’s why that’s an analogy to why the animals all spontaneously bow when now what happens is they he shows the lion king and the sun breaks and shines on the hero at the same time. So there’s this concordance between an earthly event and a so-called heavenly event. And Jung would call that synchronous. That’s his idea of synchronicity, where something important subjectively is also signified by something that appears in narrative keeping with that in the outside world. It’s one of the most controversial elements of his theory, but I’ve experienced a variety of synchronous events, and they often happen in therapy, especially around dreams. But they’re very hard to communicate because they’re so specific to the context in which it occurs, they’re very difficult to explain.