https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XHRW0DPHdNg
What’s the relationship between the unconscious and the imagination? It’s a very good question. That was a good question. The… Boy, the dream is how the… implicit structure of your perception and values and value hierarchy reveals itself to you. Now, I’ll have to unpack that, but… So, the dream, the implicit structure that guides your attentional focus and constitutes the structure of your value hierarchy reveals itself to you in the dream. So, let’s unpack that. It took me really like 40 years to figure this out, so it’s hard to unpack. It’s very hard to unpack. What the hell are you up to? And the answer is, you don’t know. Why? Because you’re really, really complicated. And yet, you can see the world, which is a very difficult thing to do because there are a lot of ways to see the world. There’s an infinite number of ways to see the world. And the fact that you can see it one particular way is nothing short of a miracle, and you certainly don’t know how you do it. As far as you’re concerned, you just look at the world and there it is. And there’s a lot going on to make that happen. I mean, half your brain is devoted specifically to visual processing, and the other half is integrally involved. So, for example, when you do something like look at a bottle, you know, you think, you think, you think, you see bottle, you think bottle, you evaluate bottle, you pick up bottle. You know, that’s the order of perception to action. Sensation, perception, emotion, action, or sensation, perception, emotion, thought, action. That’s how we think we think. That’s just not true at all. When you see a bottle, the motor grip you would use to pick it up is automatically primed by the perception. So even your motor cortex that governs your actions participates in the shaping of your perception. Almost everything you see in the world is a usable object or a pathway or an obstacle. You don’t see things because there’s an infinite number of things. You don’t see things and then overlay a value structure on that. The value structure is implicit in the perceptions. The value structure is implicit in the perceptions. And then the people who’ve made much of implicit bias sort of know that, although they’re not smart enough to think through what they accidentally discovered. And so that’s a big problem in our society at the moment because you can be accused, for example, of unconsciously viewing the world through an oppressive racist hierarchy of presumptions. You know, and there’s a bit of truth to that because you’re probably a little more racist and sexist and I don’t know. How many flaws don’t you have? Like zero. You’ve got all the flaws to some degree. And so, you know, we’re kind of where all of us are ethnocentric. All of us prefer our kin, even though we might not like even them. You know, you’ve had Christmas with your family. You know who’s most likely to murder you? In case you want to know. A drunk relative. Particularly if you’re drunk. So remember that next Christmas. So, you know, we see the world through a priori structure of value and we don’t know what that is. And we dream it. We dream about it. And then we aggregate those dreams into stories. You know, that’s what a novelist does. Novelist uses imagination. Let’s say no novelist worth his salt knows what the hell is going to happen when he starts writing the book. How dull would that be? The writers keep writing because they want to know what happens next. You know, and if they really want to know, so will you when you read it. And so and they’re using their imagination or it’s using them. That’s a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it. That’s that’s what would you call it? Divine inspiration guided by the by the by the by the soul of divine inspiration. That’s a real thing. It’s the most real thing, in fact. There’s not a lot of difference between imagination and dreaming. And that’s useful to know. Dreaming or imagination is is a bit more systematized. It’s generally directed more towards a goal. But Carl Jung thought we were dreaming all the time. We see the literally see the world through a dream, but that the sensations of the outside world blind us to the dream. That’s occurring while we’re while we’re awake. I think there’s every reason to assume that that’s correct. One of his questions. This is a great question. What dream are you living out? Or here’s another way of looking at it. What dream is possessing you or what story is possessing you or what spirit is possessing you? Those are all the same questions. And you might say, well, it’s me. Nothing’s possessing me. All that means is all that means is you just don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s what it means. Even if you’re a hedonist, you know, an impulsive hedonist, the dream that’s possessing you is the dream of pain and cost free instantaneous gratification. And if that’s not a dream, man, that’s a delusion. That’s how dream like that is. It’s no one with any sense at all who thinks for more than a second. And so you don’t if you’re an impulsive hedonist, no one who thinks for a second ever thinks that’s going to work. You know, you might think you can get away with it. You might dream you can get away with it. Something’s operating in your imagination. You can use your imagination like you would use a dream. That’s extremely useful. That’s what you do. If you meditate or if you pray and those are the same thing. So I can give you an example of this. It’s very useful to learn. So I have this program online called Future Authoring and it helps people develop a vision for the future. And you need a vision because the people perish without a vision. Vision gives you it identifies the tools and the obstacles and it gives you a pathway forward. It stops your anxiety and gives you hope. No vision. You’re hopeless, fragmented, disunited and anxious. You have to have a vision. It has to be a guiding vision. It has to be a uniting guiding vision. And you and you might say, well, how do I develop a vision like that? And here’s how. Try this. If students do this for 90 minutes, it takes a lot of time. If students do this for 90 minutes, it decreases the chance they’ll drop out of university by 50%. So that’s how well this works. That’s quite something. Okay, so here’s the game. So it’s not an easy game, but you can do it badly and it’ll still work. So that’s a good game. So the first part of the game is give yourself the benefit of the doubt for the purposes of the game. I think that the universe would not grind cataclysmically to a halt if something as horrible and wretched as you had an okay time. So it’s hard for people to grasp that because, you know, you might think of people as selfish and self-centered and out for themselves, all of that. Most people aren’t like that. There’s about 4% of people who are like that. Like, look the hell out for them. And they’re online trolls, by and large. And the clinical evidence for that’s very clear, by the way. And it’s pretty much them and not you if you’re in interaction with them. It’s all about them. But most people are the opposite of that. Most people are better to other people than they are to themselves. You know, most people are harder on themselves than they are on anyone else. You know, there’s something admirable about that because it means to some degree that you’re looking out for other people. But there’s something that’s not admirable about it because it means that you’re not treating yourself with the respect that someone with your intrinsic worth must have to flourish. And so, and the problem is, of course, you know more than anyone else how, what the full range of inadequacies, what your full range of inadequacies most precisely is. You also know all the stupid things you’ve ever done. And that’s a heavy burden. And it’s hard to look at yourself knowing what you know about yourself and then think that you deserve anything other than suffering for your sins. It’s really hard for people to treat themselves like they would. This is something else I learned from Carl Jung. You know, there’s this biblical injunction to treat, to love your neighbor as if he were yourself. But that sort of presumes you love yourself. Most people are better at loving their neighbors. But there’s a, it’s actually an equation that rule. It’s like, so the first part of the equation is you should act out the proposition that it’s incumbent upon you to strive to put your life together so the best possible thing could happen to you. You should strive to take care of yourself as if you’re taking care of someone you love. That’s hard because you know you’re trouble. So that’s the first part of the game is you have to play. It’s like, OK, let’s admit for a second that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I wasn’t being roasted over slow fire all the time for my iniquities. I’ll give myself a break. OK, now, so that’s the first. That’s hard. You got to you got to think that through. You know, you got to open yourself up to the possibility that the earth wouldn’t crack open and swallow you up. If you dared to imagine that things maybe could go OK for you if you did the right thing. And then the next thing you do is you got to ask yourself a question. Ask yourself whatever that means. It’s like, how can you ask yourself and get the answer if you don’t know the answer? And why do you have to ask the question? If you could come up with the answer, you’re really asking yourself whatever that means. I don’t even know what that means. I thought it up. Well, how? Well, you know, how do you think things up? You don’t know. Thoughts just appear in the theater of your imagination. They just spring out of the void. And there they are. You might think, well, I thought that up. It’s like, OK, have it your way. But it’s not an explanation. It’s a theory. It’s a dream that it’s you. So imagine you ask yourself a question. Now, the first thing you’re doing is admitting that there’s something you don’t know. So that’s humility. There’s something I don’t know that I need to know that I could learn if I was willing to learn. So what don’t you know? Here’s the question. Five years from now, you could have what you need and want, but you have to specify what it is. Now, you don’t have to specify it perfectly because as you move towards it, you can improve. You’re going to learn along the way. But you’ve got to be aiming in the right direction vaguely. And then you have to move in that direction to learn what you need to learn as you move in that direction. So then you think, and you have to ask yourself this, and then you have to imagine. It’s like, OK, I get to have what I want and need. What would that look like? And maybe you’re just stumped then because it’s such a big question. And you’ve never really asked yourself that. And no one else has ever really asked you that either. And so you don’t even know where to begin because you’re that lost in the desert. That’s a good way of thinking about it. So in this online program, this future authoring program, we break it down into seven questions for people. My clients used to come to me, my students, to say, well, I don’t really know what to do. What should I do? And my answer was, I don’t know what the hell you should do. It’s like, you’re you. I’m not here to affirm your identity or to deny it. I’m here to help you figure out the pathway forward. But if you don’t know what to do, well, here’s some guidelines. Don’t just do nothing because you can’t. If you do nothing, you’ll just get old. And that’s something. So there’s no doing nothing. So you should do something. What? Well, why don’t you do what other people do? If you don’t know what to do, you start with that. So what other people do? Where do people find meaning in their lives? Well, here’s a bunch of different domains. Most people want an intimate relationship. And if you don’t, well, you got to ask yourself, what the hell is going on? You know, are you bitter, resentful, cynical, terrified, betrayed, hurt, traumatized? Or you might be a misanthrope and you’re one of those people who are just trying to be a misanthrope and you’re one of those people who’s extremely introverted. Maybe you’re extremely introverted and creative and you just want to go the hell out in the woods and not see anyone and do your creative thing. And it’s like, OK, you’re one in a million. You get a pass. But for most people, that’s just complete bloody rubbish. And so people want to have an intimate relationship. OK, so you admit that and then you think, well, if I could have that relationship and it was the one I wanted, what would it look like? You know, and that can get very detailed. How would your family conduct itself if you were sitting around the dinner table? You know, it’s like a Norman Rockwell painting, you know, that famous painting of Thanksgiving. It’s like if you could have or maybe you’re just having an intimate candlelight dinner with your wife or your husband and you get to have it and it works. What does it look like? Who are you? How are you dressed? How are you conducting yourself? What are you talking about? Who could you be? If you could have what you wanted. Well, you can imagine and you can and your imagination will provide you with an answer. And then you can write that down and think, well, that looks like that’d be a good deal. That’d be worth making a sacrifice for. And then you say, well, what else do people need? Well, family. Well, that might mean children. It might mean repairing the relationship with the children you already have. It might mean your parents, if you’re fortunate enough to still have them or unlucky enough, depending on the parents. And maybe you should fix that relationship, you know, and how do you fix it? Well, you try to find out what you can be grateful about that your parents delivered to you. And then everything left over. You see if you can work it out with them. And then you think, well, if I had a relationship with my father that I would want to have, what would that look like? And then there you go. You got some you got some work to do right there. You know, Tammy did that. I don’t know. Ten years ago, ten, fifteen years ago. Also, what do you do with your family? What was your vision? I wanted to improve my relationship with my father. How’d that go? As soon as I laid it down and wrote it out, it was right there in front of me. And it just happened. Is your dad like you? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Even though he’s he’s old and he’s he’s not there all the time now. No, he’s old and he faced time me the other day. My sister faced time me and I answered, she said, Dad wants to know when you’re coming to visit. I said, well, I’m coming to visit on his birthday. So my sister said, Do you want anything else, Dad? No. That’s good. Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. He’s thrilled to see you. Yeah. He trusts you. Mm hmm. That wasn’t always the case. Well, it was more I didn’t trust him. That too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And your sisters? They’re good. I don’t say anything to them. I just listen. It works really well. Yeah. Right. Because you used to fight when you talked. Well, I’d say what I thought. That never went very well. Right. So you just shut up. Yeah. Then they start talking to you. Then they start. One of them told me that I’d never done anything myself, that my parents had given me everything, that I’d been spoiled and didn’t go out on my own. And I just let her talk. And I thought, I don’t know who she’s talking to, but let her talk. And at the end of that, she said, You know, Tam, you’re a really good mom. I said, Thanks, Bart. And then she got along with you for about like two years. Yeah. And then she did it again once. Once. But less so. Yeah. And you know, she laid out this whole story about who Tammy was that was so preposterous that it wasn’t even insulting because it had like nothing to do with Tammy, as far as we could tell. And it was so interesting watching her do that because you could see that as she said it, she conjured up this story when she was like 14 and this is like 30 years later, never really revisited it. And when she told the story, it was even obvious to her that, Yeah, no. And the next time, too, you know, she came out with this litany of criticisms of you. And then you just shut up and you didn’t say anything or get irritated. And at the end, she complimented you. The same way. Same way. You’re a good mother. Yeah, I know. It was so amazing. Yeah. That was a good thing, too, because after that, Tammy’s sister got very ill and, and you know, she’s mostly gone now. And yeah, if she hadn’t got that put together when she did, it would have never happened. And that’s one thing you don’t want to have be the case with the people you love. She came on tour with us, even she did for a little while. Yeah. So we had some good time with her. So, you know, you can put your family relationships together. And of course, the more cataclysmic they are, the harder that’s going to be. But boy, if you can put together a really fractured familial relationship, you’ve really got your act together. So it’s a big challenge. But once you solve that problem, a lot of other problems look much easier than they did before. So, and then probably you want to have some friends, you know, and hopefully ones that like you. And then so you kind of got to think through what that means. What friends do you want to have? No, people never ask themselves that question. They sort of take random friends. And I’m not saying that you should be arrogant and picky, but you should have something like a philosophy of friendship. And here’s a good start. Pick people that you can tell good news to. Okay. And pick people that you can tell bad news to. You know, and if you can tell them good news, then something good happened to you and they’re celebrating the fact that something good happened to you. And maybe you’ll be able to return the favour and that’s part of what friendship is. And so that’s a good thing because they’re not going to be jealous and bitter and spiteful and resentful and try to drag you into the cooking pot with them just because you’ve managed to clamber out, you know. And then on the bad news front, well, you tell someone bad news and it’s time for them to shut the hell up and not tell you about how something happened to them five years ago that was even worse. And they offer you a certain amount of comfort or at least, at least they listen, at least they listen, which isn’t nothing, that’s for sure. And then you can return that favour at some point in the future as well. And it’s not a good deal, you know. And so you want to have some friends, you want to figure out how often you want to see them and how you want to treat them and what maybe needs to be straightened out on the friendship front, you know. And then, well, you’re going to have a job or a career and you might want to figure out how you’d like that to go, you know. I’ve had lots of people come up to me. This is something I love doing with my clients. I meet people after the shows and people say, I had a pretty wretched job three years ago. Of course, I was drinking and doing all sorts of stupid things at the same time and I was pretty bitter, but I decided I was going to, you know, give it a shot for a while and now I make three times the money and, you know, I have a job. I don’t have a job, I have a career and the horizon is kind of unlimited. And then we have a little joke which is, well, that seems to be better, you know. Is that better? It’s like, yeah, that’s better. It’s like, hey, man, there’s a huge industrial organisation, literature, that shows that if you write down your goals for your life, so that’s the vision of your life, there’s nothing you can do that will make you more productive than doing that. Well, why? Well, you’re working. Do you have a reason? And if the answer is no, well, you’re not going to work very hard, are you? Because why would you toil away for no reward? And then you think, well, what’s your reward? Well, what’s the reward you want? How about you get to have the life you want? There’s a good reward. Well, what is that? Well, I don’t know. It’s like, well, I’m not hiring you. You know, you’re all over the place and any obstacle will stop you and you have no hope because you actually experience hope in relationship to a goal. That’s what hope is for. It’s to show you that you’re progressing towards a goal. No goal, no hope. The highest goal? Hey, the most hope? That’d be a good deal. You know, like you shouldn’t aim so high that you’ve got no chance of hitting it because that’s just arrogance. But like you do with a child, you say, well, here you are. You could easily hit that. It’d take a little work to hit that. Why don’t you try hitting that? You know, maybe you’ve got a 70% chance at it, 100%. That’s too much. You already did that. Zero? No, that’s just futile. 70% or 55%, you know, depending on how tough a game you want to play. Well, that’s optimally challenging too. And it’s optimally challenging because it moves you towards the goal and it transforms you while you move. So that’s a good deal. So intimate relationship, family, friends, job, education plan. You’re probably interested in something. Find out what it is. Get good at it. You know, maybe it’s you want to figure out how to wire your house. That’s a good one. You want to know how to repair the plumbing. You don’t want to know how to fix, what do you call that? Re-grout bricks. It’s not brick, grout, mortar. What do they call that when you re-fix the brick? Tuck pointing. What? Tuck pointing. She’s done a lot of renovations, by the way. So, or maybe you could be a better carpenter. You have abstract interests you want to read or you’ve got artistic interests or, you know, get better at something. Get good at something. Get really good at something. Then you learn how to get good at something. Then you can get good at some other things. That’s a good deal. Consider the space of temptation in front of you. You know, what are you doing stupid on the alcohol, drug and promiscuity front that’s screwing you up? You know, and maybe that’s quite a good time and you don’t want to give it up, but if you had something better to do, maybe do that instead. That’s the best way out of alcoholism, for example. Hardly anybody gets out of alcoholism without something approximating a religious transformation. That’s been known even by extremely secular researchers for like 60 years. There’s almost no alcohol treatment programs work. In fact, I don’t think there’s evidence that any of them work. They can get you through withdrawal, but almost everybody relapses. But what works? Well, lots of people quit on their own, but if you investigate that, it’s because they have something like a spiritual transformation. And if you investigate that, you find out that they found something better to do. And so, and in that, you know, it’s a crucial point because especially if alcohol, for example, is a good drug for you, it relieves anxiety, it improves positive emotion, it makes people more social, and it decreases self-consciousness so you can do impulsive, hedonic, foolish things and enjoy them in the moment. That’s a pretty damn good deal, except that there’s tomorrow. And so, why give that up? Especially if you have nothing. And the answer is, well, you won’t give it up if you have nothing, but if you have something better to do, you might think, I’d rather do that. You know? I mean, I like to drink. I drank a lot when I was a kid. I started drinking when I was like 13. I used to sit with my delinquent friends behind the fence in Fairview, Alberta, 800 miles north of the American border, 20 bloody below when it was warm in the winter. And you could still go outside at minus 20. It was minus 40, things got chilly. And we’d drink, you know, vodka we’d put in the freezer and have a perfectly fine old time, and there was plenty of drinking up north, that’s for sure. And I really liked it. I was very frequently the last person at the party. And why did I quit? Well, I got married, and that was better. And I was writing this extremely difficult book, my first book, Maps of Meaning, and I just couldn’t write that and do the research I was doing as a graduate student. I couldn’t do that and be hungover. It was one or the other. You know, and it was interfering with my relationship with Tammy, too. Not tremendously, but I could see that it could easily be a problem. And there was no damn way I was going to be drunk with kids. Like, no. So I just stopped. Just. And, you know, that was a really good idea. But I wouldn’t have stopped if I didn’t have anything better to do. Like, why would I stop? It was a blast. I had a riot. You know? So Dionysius, man, see, if you don’t have another god, he’s plenty of fun around the campfire, you know, at three in the morning. So, well, here’s another thing you could consider. You know, what responsibility have you adopted on the civic front? You know, do you belong to a community of any sort? If you don’t, you’re probably lonesome. You know, a sports club, a businessman’s club, a chess club, a reading group. Those are pretty local. A neighbourhood association. Political party. You know, you wonder, how can those politicians be so… You can list the adjectives, you know, after that. And the answer is, because the people who aren’t like that aren’t doing that. And maybe you’re one of them, you know, if you’re so smart. Why the hell aren’t you shouldering your civic burden? You know, and you think, well, I’m cynical. Politics, you know, I haven’t got time for that. Fair enough, but you’re going to take what you can get then, aren’t you? And then also you have zero, in this country, you have zero grounds for being cynical. And why do I say that? Well, first of all, there isn’t a better country, as far as I can tell. And, you know, and that’s damning with faint praise because I’m comparing you to other actual countries instead of who you could be. But as far as when you stack your countries up, you’re at the top of a dismal pile. And so… And so this is about as good as it gets. And so this is about as good as it gets. And then you have these political parties and, you know, the less said about them, the better, you could say. But I know perfectly well, this is 100% true, that every single, every, both political parties at every single level are dying for competent people. It’s certainly the case that the Biden administration did not have enough competent people to fill the roles it had to fill. I’m not just, that’s not just a casual criticism. I know this. I’ve talked to people who tried to staff the positions. They know perfectly well that many of the people who are filling the positions aren’t the people for the positions. So why are they there? It’s like, well, they took what they had. So, and I’ll tell you something else about being involved in the political party. And I know this to be true as well. If you join one and you work, if you’re reliable and careful and, you know, willing to do that, you know, willing to start at the entry place, you’ll move so quick that it will traumatize you. Because you’ll think, oh my God, you’re kidding. I can move that far up that quickly, knowing how little I know. It’s like, yeah. So, so you might want to think about that. You know, here’s a rule. I didn’t write this in my book. All abdicated responsibility is vacuumed up by tyrants and used against you. Right. So if you’re not involved politically, then you’re at the whim of those who are. And that’s that.