https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bSJU0uAakMI
You speak frequently in your lectures about, I guess, the war between good and evil, or the struggle of life really is a struggle between good and evil being at the core of a conscious, lived existence. And I guess on that note, if you were 100% certain that there was no afterlife, would you still be able to preach that there’s a positive meaning in life? If you were 100% certain, some atheists seem to be 100% certain, and yet they still preach that there’s some positive meaning to life, would you be one of those, or would you turn into Cain? You know, so cynical. I think that, well, as far as I’m concerned, one of the things I learned from studying 20th century history is that, like, even if the idea that, even if you take the most cynical of ideas, let’s say, that life is irredeemable suffering, and perhaps isn’t even justified because of that, it still seems to me that you have an ethical duty, let’s say, to live in a manner that reduces that to the degree that that’s possible. And so, and I think that that can be experienced as meaningful, in some sense, independently of the transcendent context. Now I don’t exactly know how to strip off the transcendent context, because one of the things I would say that’s happened to me is because I’ve spent so much time looking at the horrible things that people have done, is that it’s, like Jung said, when this is one of his famous quotes, he said, no tree can reach up to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. And so, as I’ve dug deeper into the depravity of human beings, my sense of the possibility has also grown, what would you say, in proportion. And until I’ve become convinced, actually, that good is a more powerful force than evil, even though evil is an unbelievably powerful force. And so I can’t really strip the transcendent away. Now, what bearing that has on eternity, say, or on an afterlife, I mean, I can’t say anything about that. The only thing I guess I can say is that there are many things about being that we don’t understand in the least, and we don’t understand the nature of consciousness or the nature of time. So I wouldn’t despair about that, but yes, I think that life can still be meaningful without there being a necessity of an afterlife.