https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=txcBXtaJBh8
Most of what you think and most of what you say are the opinions of other people. They’re things you’ve read or things people have told you. You know, that’s a benefit in some ways because you get all those thoughts that other people have spent a long time formulating. But it’s a disadvantage in that it’s not exactly you. Okay, so you detach yourself from that. You’re no longer your thoughts or the things that you say. Or maybe you’re no longer all of them. So now what you’re going to try to find out is which of your thoughts and things that you say are you. And maybe so you cannot utilize the rest or maybe so that you can correct the rest because they’re not representative of yourself as an integrated being. They don’t take everything into account. My sense is being that you can tell when you’re saying something that’s not authentic by feeling out whether or not it makes you weak or strong. Now you know sometimes when you’re conversing with people you can say something that embarrasses yourself. Now Nietzsche said, for example, everyone has perjured themselves at least once in the attempt to maintain their good name. Something like that. It’s not an exact quote but I’ve got the gist of it right. So maybe you’re saying things to impress someone or you’re saying things to remain part of your political group or your social group or whatever. Or maybe you have attributes, personal attributes that might be positive that you’re ashamed of and so you’re not going to speak about them. So there’s a falseness about your self-representation. Watch for two weeks and see. Make a rule that if you start to say something and it makes you feel weak, it’s hard to describe exactly what that means. To me what it means is that I can feel things coming apart sort of in my midsection so I think it’s an autonomic phenomena. And the subjective sense is of falsehood. It’s like I’ve just stepped off the solid ground and onto something that doesn’t support me well and it feels like a self-betrayal. So that’s existential inauthenticity. You can feel it right away. And then the rule is shut up if that happens. Stop talking. And then feel around and see if you can find some words that you can say in that situation that don’t produce that sensation. And it’s like you see this played out in different forms of drama. So there’s a scene in The Lord of the Rings for example where I believe it’s Gollum and Bilbo? It’s The Lord of the Rings. Yeah it’s Bilbo. It’s The Lord of the Rings not The Hobbit because The Hobbit’s Frodo right? So it’s Bilbo. Have I got it wrong? It’s the other way around? Okay. Gollum and Frodo? Yes. Are going across this swamp. And the swamp is essentially full of dead souls and they have to step very carefully in order to not fall off the track and the stones are sort of hidden underneath the surface. And the implication there is that in order to follow a trail properly you have to pick your ground very carefully and you have to test it to see if it’s solid or you’ll slip off into this well essentially what it is is chaos. You’ll slip off into chaos. And that’s a dramatic representation of what I’m suggesting to you. It’s like all you have to do is notice. And you have to pay attention. So to some degree what you’re doing in fact is you’re making your capacity to pay attention superordinate to your capacity to think and to speak. Because you know you might ask yourself well exactly what are you? Well I said you can identify yourself with your intellect and that’s very very common. It’s sort of like the worst sin of intelligent people. But that isn’t all you are. And there are lots of reasons for making the assumption that attention is a higher order function than intellect. Because attention is what teaches intellect. So if you pay very very careful attention to what you say without having the automatic, without bringing the automatic assumption that what you say is you to bear on the conversation and then also to feel like you have to defend it once you say it. You’ll find very rapidly that very much of what you think and say has absolutely nothing to do with you. It’s just, it’s the dead souls that are in that little scene that I described to you sort of manifesting themselves in your head. They’re dead ideas that other people have created. And some of them might be applicable to you. You might have the right to them so to speak. But lots of them won’t. When you’re using the words as camouflage or self-defense or as an attempt to attain status in a status hierarchy or to make yourself look smarter than you are or there’s all sorts of reasons. Or to hide what you think from other people. I see this in undergraduate essays all the time. So because the essays are full of cliches. And you know, it’s not all that obvious why a cliché is a bad thing. But a cliché is a bad thing in the same way that being possessed by the dead is a bad thing. It’s like a cliché isn’t you. It’s something else. It’s like the crowd. It’s like the other. It’s not living. It has nothing to do with you. And part of the reason that students use clichés is because it’s easier than using your own genuine creative formulation. So you can just default to cliché use. But there’s something more insidious than that is that if you write an essay that’s nothing but a string of clichés and you get criticized, then you’re not being criticized. What’s being criticized is the clichés. And you can hide behind that. And the part of you that’s wise but treacherous thinks, well, the criticism doesn’t really apply to me because, you know, I didn’t really say what I thought. And then there’s this kind of sense you get that you’ve gotten away with something, which is a terrible thing. So when I read undergraduate essays, what I see very frequently is, especially the first essay, it’s just nothing but clichés. It’s awful. It’s dull. You can hardly stand reading it because there’s nothing in it that’s gripping or alive. And then maybe the second essay, you can see there’s a layer of clichés. And then now and then the person will be brave enough to poke up a thought of their own. It’ll just sort of poke up somewhere maybe three pages in. It’s like this little green shoot that’s barely alive. And the person is brave enough to pop it up in the hope that, you know, maybe it won’t get walloped down with a sledgehammer. And so one of the things I try to do is to point that out. It’s like, look, you know, this is something, there’s a real thought here. It’s a real original thought. It’s something that you have the right to because it’s derived from your own experience and your own knowledge. And you’ve formulated it in an original and compelling way. But the problem with that is that if you get criticized for that, you’re just going to pull right back into your shell, right, because that hurts because it’s actually part of you that you’ve exposed. And that’s a terrifying thing to expose yourself like that. But it’s an absolute prerequisite to genuine communication and thought. So the ancient Mesopotamians, I haven’t got time to tell you this story. If you want to hear it, you can come to my Maps of Meaning class in your fourth year. But the ancient Mesopotamians had figured out 5,000 years ago or so that the highest God in the hierarchy of God, so sort of like the highest value or the thing that should be imitated most carefully, was a God whose head had eyes all the way around it and who spoke magic words. And so the words he spoke could make the sun rise and make the sun set. Very, very powerful speaker. And the reason the Mesopotamians had figured this out to the degree they had was because they realized that the capacity to pay attention, which is the eyes, of course, because we really pay attention with our eyes, and then the capacity to speak properly is in fact the highest virtue. And so then you can check yourself, you can see, all you have to do is listen, like you would listen to someone else. And you have to feel, you think, do I actually believe that? Is that actually my thought? And really, I’ll tell you, what you’ll find is 95% of what you say has nothing to do with you. So it’s quite shocking to do this because you’ll start to say something and you’ll Oh, that doesn’t feel quite right. It doesn’t make me feel solid when I say it. There’s something about that that I’m subordinating myself to something or hiding in some way. It’s very difficult to figure out exactly what you’re doing. But you’ll find out that almost everything that’s abstractly represented, it has to be that way because you guys are all so young. So in some sense, you know way more than you can actually know, right? You’ve been taught all these things, but you don’t know them. They’re just in your head. In fact, they have you rather than the other way around. It’s like Carl Jung said, people don’t have ideas. Ideas have people. And that’s something to really think about because then you want to watch and see what ideas there are floating around in your head and start to figure out where they came from because it’s highly probable that they’re controlling you just like a marionette is controlled by the puppeteer. It’s very, very similar. And there’s an inauthenticity about that. And so that brings us into existentialism. So now I want to talk to you a little bit about existentialists because existentialists are very concerned with authenticity. And so you could say that above all else, existentialists are concerned with truth. Now of course we know that it’s not very easy to define exactly what constitutes truth. And I would also say there are various definitions of truth that can be used for different purposes. Because your definitions of truth can also have a tool-like function. And finally, that we can’t come up with an ultimate definition of truth because we’re not infinitely informed. So ignorance is going to underlie our claims all the time. But that doesn’t eradicate the validity of the concept of truth. I think one of the ways you can deal with that existentially is that you may not be able to determine what’s true at any given moment. But it’s quite a different matter to determine what’s false. That’s a lot easier. So one of the things I have to tell my clients, for example, is here’s a way to clean up your life. Stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing. So it’s a fairly limited attempt. First of all, we’re not going to say that you know what the good is or what the truth is in any ultimate sense. But we will presume that there are things that you’re doing that for one reason or another you know are not in your best interests. There’s something about them that you just know you should stop. They’re kind of self-evident to you. Other things you’re going to be doubtful about. You’re not going to know which way is up and which way is down. But there are things that you’re doing that you know you shouldn’t do. Now some of those you won’t stop doing for whatever reason. You don’t have the discipline or maybe there’s a secondary payoff or you don’t believe it’s necessary or it’s too much of a sacrifice or you’re angry or resentful or afraid. Who knows? So forget about those for now. But there’s another subset that you could stop doing. It might be a little thing. Well, that’s fine. Stop doing it and see what happens.