https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rvT13XyuAfE
The story of Adam and Eve is a meta story and it’s a meta story for two reasons one is, it’s about how stories transform because Adam and Eve are in this unconscious paradise and then it collapses and that happens to every potential story, right? that’s Nietzsche’s realization, he said, look imagine that you live within a belief system and then something arises to challenge the belief system not only does the belief system collapse, but something worse happens your belief in belief systems collapses and that’s the road to not, now it doesn’t have to because you can jump from one belief system to another but sometimes that doesn’t work, is that you do a meta critique and you say oh, I was living in this protective structure and it turned out to be flawed okay, one alternative is, jump to another protective structure fine, another alternative is, protective structures themselves are not to be trusted bang, you’re in chaos, how the hell are you going to get out of that? that’s the pathway to nihilism well, you can work your way through that, that’s difficult or you can do what Jung would regard as a soul damaging move and you can sacrifice your new knowledge and re-identify with something rigid and restricted which is what I would say is happening to some degree with the people in Europe who are turning to a regressive nationalism as an alternative to the current state of chaos it’s like, I know that people need to identify with local groups, I understand that but they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate god and that’s order, but that’s not a good replacement for chaos, it’s just another kind of catastrophe, right? too much order, too much chaos both catastrophes you want to stand in the middle somehow and mediate between the two, and that’s where you have your real strength because then it isn’t that you’ve discovered a safe place because even the bloody right-wingers are after a safe place, right? they just want it to be the state yeah, exactly well, there’s no safe places and the next issue is, do you really want a safe place? is that what you want? you want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat what the hell kind of life is that? you’re a paralyzed rabbit in a hole that’s no life for a human being you should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence and the reason for that too is this is the weird paradox, this is… and I believe this is the paradox, first of all, that was discovered in part by Buddha but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity which is that the solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them now, who the hell would ever guess that? it’s completely paradoxical it’s a completely paradoxical suggestion is that, well, why does it work? well, because the more you confront the two of them, the more you grow and maybe you can grow so that you’re actually larger than the chaos and malevolence itself and you think, well, what’s the evidence for that? and that’s easy that’s what people do that is how we learn every time you expose your child to something new a playground what are they exposed to? chaos and malevolence now, there’s more to it than that, obviously, because kids play and they promote each other and they form friendships and all of that but in the playground itself there is the complexity of the social structure and the malevolence of the bully it’s right there and you throw your kid in there and you say, adapt and they do okay, so they can do it at a small scale it’s not trivial the playground is a complicated place the kid can adapt well, how much can you scale that up? can you scale that up to from the chaos and order and malevolence of the playground to chaos and order and malevolence itself? well, that’s the question well, I don’t think there’s any reason to answer that in the negative because we don’t know the full extent of a human being and it is the problem that’s worked out in the Buddha story, for example, what happens after so Buddha’s world collapses in the same way that Adam and Eve’s world collapses it’s a consequence of repetitive exposure to mortality and death what happens to Buddha is he realizes that the little protected city that his father made for him, the walled garden it’s exactly the same motif that’s in this Adam and Eve story is… it’s… what? it’s… it’s fatally flawed that kind of protection cannot exist and he discovers that in pieces, right? which is exactly what happens to children is that they go out, they discover a limit, they run back and the parents can help them with the limit they run out, they discover a limit, they run back but at some point they run out, they discover a limit, they run back and the parents have nothing to say to them because they’ve hit the same limit that the parents hit which is like, well, what are you going to do with your life? how are you going to operate in this archetypal universe? well, your parents can only say well, they can say you identify with the proper archetypal figures they do that, they at least act that out for you but at some point it’s a problem that they cannot solve for you without making you weaker that’s the thing, you know so it’s an interesting thing that I’ve learned in therapy because one of the things you have to learn as a therapist is how do you not take your client’s problems home with you? it’s a very common existential problem that beginning therapists face because they’re afraid it’s like, well, you’re dealing with people all the time who have serious problems sometimes it’s mental illness although less frequently than you’d think and sometimes it’s just that they’re having a good catastrophe, right? their parents have cancer or something like that or their father has Alzheimer’s and they’re unemployed they have a drug problem or they have a schizophrenic son these aren’t mental illness problems, right? those are just catastrophes and so people are discussing those with you all the time how do you avoid being crushed by that or avoid taking it home? and the answer to that is, you don’t steal the problem that’s the answer it’s like, you have some problems if you come and talk to me, I’ll help you figure out how to solve them I will not tell you how to solve them I won’t steal your problems because what we’re trying to do in therapy is number one, solve your problem number two, turn you into a great solver of problems and the second one is way more important than the first one and so you never solve someone’s problem by removing from them the opportunity to solve their problem that’s theft, that’s the Oedipal situation that’s the Oedipal situation that’s the overprotective mother now, father can play that role too we’re talking about archetypal representations it’s like, I’ll protect you at the cost of your ability to protect yourself no, wrong that’s a sin, that’s a good way of thinking about it that is not what you do with people not with your children, not with your partner not with yourself you don’t do that that destroys people’s adaptive competence and it disarms them in the face of chaos and malevolence and that’s a terrible thing you’re gonna send someone out unarmed in a world like that? it’s a terrible thing to do and if people aren’t strong enough to manage it then they get resentful and then, you know, you get the downhill spiral that goes along with that okay, so the meta story is partly you have a map, but it’s insufficient and things will come up to disrupt it and sometimes the disruption is catastrophic everything falls apart that’s what happens to the Buddha and that’s what happens to Adam and Eve and the rest of the biblical stories are actually an attempt to put that back together now, that’s been assembled, as I said it’s been assembled over centuries, right? okay, we’ve got the problem the problem is the apocalyptic the ever-present reality of the apocalyptic fall that’s the problem and so you could say, well, what is that? it’s the insufficiency of all potential conceptual schemes right your conceptual schemes are insufficient to deal with the complexity of the world it’s a permanent problem so what do you do? you stop relying on your conceptual schemes that’s part of the answer you start relying on your instead, on your ability to actively generate conceptual schemes in the face of chaos and malevolence and so that makes you someone that identifies with your creative capacity your creative, courageous capacity for articulation and action in the face of the unknown rather than some formulaic approach to the territory the idea is that that elevates your character to the point where you can withstand tragedy and malevolence without becoming corrupt and that provides a permanent solution to the problem well then you might say, cynically what’s your evidence that that’s a permanent solution? and the answer to that is well, the evidence isn’t all in yet first of all, because people only live that way partially and so we haven’t put the hypothesis to the full test and second, we don’t know what our limitations are we have no idea what our limitations are and they’re both greater and lesser than we imagine because you have to ask yourself like, if people stopped adding voluntarily to the misery of the world and devoted themselves to setting things straight setting themselves straight and setting the things around them straight what would happen? and the answer to that is well, there’d be a hell of a lot less unnecessary misery in the world so that might not be a bad place to start but apart from that, there’s very little that we can say could we overcome the catastrophe of mortality? why not? you think that’s beyond our capacity? could we make the world a place where no one was suffering any more than necessary and still allow the world to exist? well, possibly, because we don’t know the limitations of our capacity we’re only running at 40% if that, I would say we don’t make full use of all the people that are in the world we don’t have our situation set up so that the gifts that they could offer to everyone are fully realized we haven’t set the systems up for that yet so we waste people like mad and then we waste ourselves like mad