https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LrmT1KjgsVc
The question still remains, where does the information in dreams come from? And I think where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone acts out. We’ve watched that forever and we’ve got some representations of those patterns. That’s part of our cultural history. That’s what’s embedded in stories, in fictional accounts of the story between good and evil. And the romance. These are canonical patterns of being for people and they deeply affect us because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world. And then we flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. So it’s like there’s waves of behavioural patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd across time. And the great dramas are played on the crowd across time and the artists watch that and they get intimations of what that is and they write it down and they tell us and then we’re a little clearer about what we’re up to. Like a great dramatist like Shakespeare, let’s say, we know that what he wrote is fiction and then we say, well fiction isn’t true. But then you think, well wait a minute, maybe it’s true like numbers are true. You know, numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think numbers aren’t true. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, right? Because the abstraction is so insanely powerful. Once you have mathematics, you’re just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. And so it’s not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. And you take a work of fiction like Hamlet and you think, well is that, it’s not true because it’s fiction. But then you think, wait a minute, what kind of explanation is that? Maybe it’s more true than nonfiction. Because it takes what the story that needs to be told about you and the story that needs to be told about you and you and you and you and it abstracts that out and says, look, here’s something that’s a key part of the human experience as such. Right? So it’s an abstraction from this underlying noisy substrate. And people are affected by it because they see that the thing that’s represented is part of the pattern of their being. That’s the right way to think about it. And then with these old stories, these ancient stories, it seems to me like that process has been occurring for thousands of years. It’s like we watched ourselves and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other and we represented that in drama and then we distilled the drama and we got a representation of the distillation and then we did it again. And at the end of that process that took God only knows how long, I think some of these stories, they’ve traced fairy tales back 10,000 years, some fairy tales in relatively unchanged form. And it certainly seems to me that the archaeological evidence, for example, suggests that the really old stories that the Bible begins with are at least that old and likely embedded in a prehistory that’s far older than that. You might think, well, how can you be so sure? The answer to that in part is that cultures that don’t change, like the ancient cultures, right? They didn’t change as fast as they stayed the same. That’s the answer. So they keep their information moving generation to generation. That’s how they stay the same. And so we know again in the archaeological record, there are records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years. It was discovered in caves in Japan that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe. So these things can last for very long periods of time. We’re watching each other act in the world. And then the question is, well, how long have we been watching each other? And the answer to that in some sense is, well, as long as there’s been creatures with nervous systems. And that’s a long time. You know, that’s some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that. We’ve been watching each other trying to figure out what we’re up to across that entire span of time. Some of that knowledge is built right into our bodies, which is why we can dance with each other, for example. Right? Because understanding isn’t just something that you that you have as an abstraction. It’s something that you act out. That’s what children are doing when they’re learning to rough and tumble plays. They’re learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way, learning to cooperate and compete. And that’s all instantiated right into their body. It’s not abstract knowledge. They don’t know that they’re doing that. They’re just doing it. And so we can even use our body as a representational platform. So we’ve been studying each other for a long time, abstracting out what is it that we’re up to? And that’s that that’s what is it we’re up to? What should we be up to? That’s even a more fundamental question. If you’re going to live in the world and you’re going to do it properly, what does properly mean? And how is it that you might go about that? Well, it’s the right question, right? It’s what everyone wants to know. How do you live in the world? Not what is the world made of? It’s not the same question. How do you live in the world? It’s the eternal question of human beings. And I guess we’re the only species that has ever really asked that question because all the other animals, they just go and do whatever they do. Not us. It’s a question for us. We’ve had to we have to become aware of it. We have to be able to speak it. God only knows why. But that seems to be the situation. So. We act that acting is shaped by the world, that acting is shaped by society into something that we don’t understand, but that we can model that we can model. We model it in our stories. We model it with our bodies. And that’s where the dream gets its information. The dream is part of the process that’s watching everything and then trying to formulate it and trying to say, well, trying to get the signal out from the noise and to portray it in dramatic form because a dream is little drama. And then you get the chance to talk about what that dream is. And then you have it. You have something like articulated knowledge at that point. And so the Bible, I would say, is is it sort of it exists in that space that’s half into the dream and half into articulated knowledge. It’s something like that. And going into it to find out what the stories are about. It can aid our self understanding. And then the other issue is, is that if Nietzsche was correct and if Dostoevsky or Jung was correct and Dostoevsky as well, without the cornerstone that that understanding provides, we’re lost. And that’s not good because then we’re susceptible to psychic pathology. That’s psychological pathology. Psychological pathology. You know, the people who are adamant anti-religious thinkers seem to believe that if we abandoned our immersement in the underlying dream that we’d all instantly become rationalists like Descartes or Bacon or, you know, intelligent, clear thinking, rational, scientific people. I don’t believe that for a moment because I don’t think there’s any evidence for it. I think we would become so irrational so rapidly that the weirdest mysteries of Catholicism would seem positively rational by contrast. And I think that’s already happening. So. Okay. So this is the idea, essentially, you know, that you have the unknown world. That’s just what you don’t know at all. That’s the outside. That’s the ocean that surrounds the island that you inhabit. Something like that. It’s chaos itself. And then you act in that world and you act in ways you don’t understand. There’s more to your actions than you can understand. One of the things Jung said, I love this, when I first understood it, he said, everybody acts out of myth. But very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy. And maybe you don’t want it to be. And that’s really worth thinking about because you have a pattern of behavior that characterizes you. You know, and God only knows where you got it. Partly it’s biological. Partly it’s from your parents. It’s your unconscious assumptions. It’s the way the philosophy of your society has shaped you. And it’s aimed. It’s aiming you somewhere. Well, is it aiming you somewhere you want to go? That’s a good question. That’s part of self-realization.