https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=i2eeDxkHmsI
We’re much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity, and trying to represent them partly through imitation, but also through drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that, to represent what we’re like so that we can understand what we’re like. And that process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the biblical stories. And it’s halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex. But I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebearers, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human. And that’s a very difficult thing, because we don’t know who we are, what we are, where we came from, or any of those things. And, you know, the light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years. It’s an absolutely unbelievable thing. Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years. It’s absolutely unbelievable. We rose out of the dirt and the muck, and here we are, conscious but not knowing. And we’re trying to figure out who we are. And a story that we’ve been telling, or a set of stories that we’ve been telling for 3,000 years, seems to me to have something to offer. And so when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense, with a beginner’s mind. It’s a mystery, this book, how the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for 2,000 years and to transform the world. Like, what’s going on? How did that happen? It’s by no means obvious. And one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don’t take the phenomena seriously. And it’s a serious phenomena. I mean, not least because people have the capacity for religious experience. And no one knows why that is. And I mean, you can induce it reliably in all sorts of different ways. You can do it with brain stimulation. You can certainly do it with drugs. Especially the psychedelic variety. They produce intimations of the divine extraordinarily regularly. People have been using drugs like that for God only knows how long, 50,000 years, maybe more than that, to produce some sort of intimate union with the divine. We don’t understand any of that when we discovered the psychedelics in the late 60s. It shocked everybody so badly that they were instantly made illegal and abandoned in terms of research for like 50 years. And it’s no wonder, because who the hell expected that? Nobody. Now, Jung was a student of Nietzsche’s, you see. He was also, I would say, a very astute critic of Nietzsche. He was educated by Freud. And Freud, I suppose, in some sense, started to collate the information that we had pertaining to the notion that people lived inside a dream. You know, it was Freud who really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind. And we take this for granted to such a degree today that we don’t understand how revolutionary the idea was. Like what’s happened with Freud is that we’ve taken all the marrow out of his bones, so to speak, and left the husk behind. And now when we think about Freud, we just think about the husk because that’s everything that’s been discarded. But so much of what he discovered is part of our popular conception now, including the idea that your perceptions and your actions and your thoughts are all, what would you say, informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control. And that’s a very, very strange thing. It’s one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories. Because the psychoanalytic theories are something like you’re a loose collection of living sub-personalities, each with its own set of motivations and perceptions and emotions and rationales, all of that. And you have limited control over that. So you’re like a plurality of internal personalities that’s loosely linked into a unity. You know that because you can’t control yourself very well, which is one of Jung’s objections to Nietzsche’s idea that we could create our own values. So Jung didn’t believe that, especially not after interacting with Freud, because he saw that human beings were affected by things that were deeply, deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control. And no one really knows how to conceptualize those things. You know, the cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines. The ancient people, I think, thought of them as gods, although it’s more complex than that. Like, rage would be a god. Mars, the god of rage, that’s the thing that possesses you when you’re angry. You know, it has a viewpoint, and it says what it wants to say, and that might have very little to do with what you want to say when you’re being sensible. And it doesn’t just inhabit you, it inhabits everyone, and it lives forever, and it even inhabits animals. So it’s this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body, politic, like a thought inhabits the brain. That’s one way of thinking about it. It’s a very strange way of thinking, but it certainly has its merits. And so, and those things, well in some sense, those are deities, although it’s not that simple. And so Jung, Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths, because he would see in his clients’ dreams echoes of stories that he knew because it was deeply read in mythology. And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth, and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling. Well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them, and some people remember dreams all the time. Like two or three a night, I’ve had clients like that, and they often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures. I think that’s more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they’re a bit unstable at the time, because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it. So it’s like the dream is the birthplace of thinking. That’s a good way of thinking about it. And so because it’s the birthplace of thinking, it’s not that clear. It’s doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung’s notion, as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors, that were hiding the dream’s true message. That’s not what Jung believed. He believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated, conscious comprehension. Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That’s obvious. Bang! It’s nothing you ever ask about. But what the hell does that mean? A thought appears in your head. What kind of ridiculous explanation is that? You know, it just doesn’t help with anything. Where does it come from? Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head. Okay, well, that’s not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out, you know? And so you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from? Well, they’re often someone else’s thoughts, right? Someone long dead. That might be part of it. Just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who’ve been long dead. And so you’re informed by the spirit of your ancestors. That’s one way of looking at it. And your motivations speak to you, and your emotions speak to you, and your body speaks to you. And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream. And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.