https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TnT8FoX4H3I
There’s this idea in Jungian psychology called the circumambulation. And Jung had this idea that you had a potential future self, which would be in potential, everything that you could be. And that it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things. And the things that you’re interested in are the things that would guide you along the path that would lead you to maximal development. Now, it sounds like a metaphysical idea, or a mystical idea even, but it’s not. It’s not. It’s a really profoundly biological idea. The idea is something like, well, you’re set up so that you’re automatically interested in those things that would fully expand you as a well-adapted creature. Well, like, there’s nothing radical about that idea. How else? What else could possibly be the case? Unless there’s something fundamentally flawed about you, that is what the situation would be. It’s kind of interesting to think about how that would be manifest moment to moment, but the idea is something like, well, your interest is captured by those things that lead you down the path of development. Well, that better be the case. Okay, so that’s fine. And so there’s some utility in pursuing those things that you’re interested in. That’s the call to adventure, let’s say. And the call to adventure takes you all sorts of places. Now, the problem with the call to adventure is, like, what the hell do you know? You might be interested in things that are kind of warped and bent. And often it’s the case that when new parts of people manifest themselves and grip their interests, say, they do it very badly and shoddily. And so you stumble around like an idiot when you try to do something new. That’s why the fool is the precursor to the saviour, from the symbolic perspective. You have to be a fool before you can be a master. And if you’re not willing to be a fool, then you can’t be a master. So you’re going to… it’s an error ridden process. And that’s also laid out in the Old Testament stories, because the first thing that happens to all these patriarchal figures when God kicks them out of their father’s house when they’re like 84, is that they run into all sorts of trouble. And some of it’s social and some of it’s natural and some of it’s a consequence of their own moral inadequacy. So they’re fools. But the thing that’s so interesting is that despite the fact that they’re fools, they’re still supposed to go on the adventure. And that they’re capable of learning enough as a consequence of moving forward on the adventure, so that they straighten themselves out across time. And so it’s something like this. This circumambulation that Jung talked about was this continual… we’ll return to this. This continual circling, in some sense, of who you could be. You might notice, for example, that there are themes in your life. You know, when you go back across your experiences, you see you kind of have your typical experience that sort of repeats itself. And there might be variation on it, like a musical theme, but it’s like you’re circling yourself and getting closer to yourself as you move across time. That’s the circumambulation. Now, you remember that for a sec, because we’ll go back to it. Okay, so imagine that something glimmers before you. It’s an interest that’s dawning. And you decide, well, first of all, you’re paralyzed. You think, well, how do I know if I should pursue that? It’s probably a stupid idea. And the proper response to that is, you’re right, it probably is a stupid idea. Because almost all ideas are stupid. And so the probability that as you move forward on your adventure, that you’re going to get it right the first time is zero. It’s just not going to happen. And so then you might think, well, maybe I’ll just wait around until I get the right idea. And which people do, right? So they’re like 40 year old, 13 year olds, which is not a good idea. And so they wait around until it’s waiting for good-o, until they finally got it right. But the problem is, you’re too stupid to know when you’ve got it right. So waiting around isn’t going to help. Because even if the perfect opportunity manifested itself to you in your incomplete form, the probability that you would recognize it as the perfect opportunity is zero. You might even think it’s the worst possible idea that you’ve ever heard of anywhere. Highly likely. Highly likely. So, so you have, there’s, Nietzsche called that a will to stupidity, which I really liked. So, because he thought of stupidity as being it, you know, it’s, it’s, you have to take it into account fundamentally. And work with it. And so, and so you can take these tentative steps on your pathway to destiny. And you can assume that you’re going to do it badly. And that’s really useful, because you don’t have to beat yourself up. It’s pretty easy to do it badly. But the thing is, it’s way better to do it badly than not to do it at all. And that’s the continual message that echoes through these historical stories in Genesis. It’s like, these are flawed people. They, they should have got the hell out of their house way before they did. And they go out and they stumble around in tyranny and famine and self-betrayal and, and violence. But it’s a hell of a lot better than just rotting away at home. And that’s the, that’s great. So that’s good. And so why is that? Well, okay, so you, you start your path and you think that you’re heading, you know, towards your star. And so you go in that direction. And then, because you’re here, the world looks a particular way. But then when you move here, the world looks different. And you’re different as a consequence of having made that voyage. And so what that means is that now that thing that glimmers in front of you is going to have shifted its location. Because you weren’t very good at specifying it to begin with. And now that you’re a little sharper and more focused than you were, it’s, it’s going to reveal itself with more accuracy to you. And so then you have to take a, you know, it’s almost like 180 degree reversal. But it isn’t because, you know, you’ve… I mean, you’ve gone this far and that’s a long ways to get that far. But that’s a lot farther than you would be if you just stayed where you were waiting. And so it doesn’t matter that you overshoot continually. Because as you overshoot, even if you don’t learn what you should have done, you’re going to continually learn what you shouldn’t keep doing. And if you learn enough about what you shouldn’t keep doing, then that’s tantamount at some point to learning at the same time what you should be doing. So it’s okay. So it’s like this. Now what’s cool about it though, I think, is that as you progress, the degree of overshooting starts to decline, right? And that we know that there’s nothing hypothetical about that. As you learn a new skill, like even to play a game, you know, you’re going to learn a new skill. You play a song on the piano, for example. You overshoot madly. You’re making all sorts of mistakes to begin with, and then the mistakes… They disappear. There’s a great TED talk, I think it was, about this guy set up a really advanced computational recording system in his home. And recorded every single utterance his young child made while learning to speak. And then he put together the child’s attempts to say certain phonemes. And put them in a list, and you can hear the child deviating madly to begin with. And then after hundreds and hundreds of repetitions, just zeroing right in on the exact phoneme. So, you know, you might not know this, but when kids babble, because they start babbling when they’re quite young, they babble every human phoneme. Including all sorts of phonemes that adults can’t say. And then they die into their language. So that after they learn, say, English, then there’s all sorts of phonemes they can no longer hear or pronounce. But to begin with, it’s all there. Which is really quite interesting. So as they learn a particular language, they zero in on the proper way to pronounce that. And their errors minimize. And every time you learn something, that’s how it is. And that’s really useful to know, too. It’s okay to wander around stupidly before you fix your destination. Now you see that echoed in Exodus, right? Because what happens is that the Egyptians, or the Hebrews, escape a tyranny. Which is kind of whatever you do personally and psychologically when you escape from your previous set of stupidly held and ignorant and stubborn axioms. It’s like, away from that tyranny. It’s like, great, I freed myself from that. Well then what? You think, well now I’m on the way. No you’re not. Now you’re in the desert. Where you wander around stupidly, you know, and worship the wrong things. Until you finally organize yourself morally again and head in the proper direction. So that’s worth knowing, too. Because you think, well I got rid of a lot of things, baggage, excess baggage that I didn’t need in my life. And now everything’s okay. It’s like, no it’s not. You’ve got rid of a whole set of scaffolds that were keeping you in place. Even though they were pathological. Now you have nothing. And nothing actually turns out to be better than something pathological. But you’re still stuck with the problem of nothing. And that’s, well that’s exactly why Exodus is structured the way that it is. It’s that you escape from a tyranny. It’s hooray, we’re no longer slaves. Yeah, well now you’re nihilistic and lost. It’s not necessarily an improvement. But it is, but it is the pre-, see, it’s also useful to know that. Because you can also be deluded into the idea that imagine that you’re trying to become enlightened. Which might mean to turn all those parts of you on that could be turned on. You think, well that’s just a linear pathway uphill. You know, it’s just from one success to another. No it’s not. It’s like, here you are and you’re not doing too badly. And the first step is a complete bloody catastrophe. It’s worse. And then maybe you can pull yourself together. And you hit a new plateau. And then that crumbles and shakes and bang, it’s worse again. And so, because part of the reason that people don’t become enlightened is because they’re not. And the second reason that people don’t become enlightened is because it’s punctuated by intermittent deserts. Essentially by intermittent catastrophes. And if you don’t know that, well then you’re basically screwed. Because you go ahead on your movement forward and you collapse. And you think, well that didn’t work. I collapsed. It’s like, no, that’s par for the course. It’s not an indication that you failed. It’s just an indication that it’s really hard. And that when you learn something, you also unlearn something. And the thing you unlearned is probably useful. And unlearning is probably useful. And unlearning is probably useful. And unlearning is probably useful. And unlearning is actually painful. You know, let’s say if you have to get out of a bad relationship. It’s like not every, not any, there isn’t any relationship that’s 100% bad. And so when you jump out of it, well maybe you’re in better shape. But you’re still lonesome and disoriented. And you don’t know what your past was. And you don’t know what your present is. And you don’t know what your future is. That’s not, that’s why people stay with the devil they know. Instead of, you know, looking for the devil they don’t know. So anyways, the fact that you’re full of faults doesn’t mean you have to stop. And thank God for that. That’s a really useful thing. And the fact that you’re full of faults doesn’t mean that you can’t learn. And so you can posit an ideal and you’re going to be wrong about it. But it doesn’t matter because what you’re right about is positing the ideal, moving towards it. If the actual ideal isn’t because you’re going to be wrong about it. But it doesn’t matter because what you’re right about is conceptualize perfectly well first surprise, surprise because like what are you going to do that’s perfect? So it doesn’t matter that it’s imperfect. It just matters that you do it and that you move forward. So that’s really, that’s really positive news as far as I’m concerned. Because you can actually do that, right? You can do it badly. Anyone can do that. So that’s, that’s useful. Okay, so like if you were an efficient person you would have just done that. But you’re not. You know, you still end up in the same place. And maybe the trip is even more interesting. Who knows? Probably too interesting.