https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zFu9nNPMiUk
[“Pomp and Circumstance”] There’s this piece from Search for the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is a myth that was constructed in England, and the myth goes something like this. There’s a cup, the grail, used to hold Christ’s blood, and that cup has a, has redemptive significance, and it’s been lost. And the knights, King Arthur’s knights, who go off to look for the Holy Grail are after this cup. So it’s a redemption story, right? It means the world’s damned, unredeemed. There’s some object that can serve as, as the source of redemption, the source of nourishment, say, thinking about it from a symbolic perspective, and it’s worthwhile to go on a quest of that sort. And the King Arthur story is set up in an interesting way, because there’s a king, Arthur, but he has all these knights, these nobles, and they all sit at a round table. And they’re at a round table because they’re equals. So although it’s a hierarchical story, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a hierarchical story. There’s a motif in it that transcends the hierarchy. It says, well, yeah, under normal circumstances, everyone’s arranged in a hierarchy, but when you’re out to seek whatever you need, then everyone’s an equal. And so, fine. So they sit at the round table, and then they go off to search for the Holy Grail. And the story opens with a very interesting motif, which is the knights look at the forest, and then they try to find the part that looks the darkest to them. And then they go that way. That’s the marker for their mission, right, to go to the darkest place. And of course, each knight goes off in a different direction, because the world looks slightly different to each knight. So objectively speaking, they’re going to a different place, but psychologically speaking, they’re going to the same place, right? And that place, I suppose, has been represented in mythology and literature as the heart of darkness. And if you’re ever curious about why people aren’t enlightened, since it seems to be a possibility, you can always think about the story of King Arthur and the knights of the Holy Grail, and think, well, do you really want to enter the forest at the darkest place? And the answer to that is, of course, no, because the darkest place means precisely that place you least want to go. And it’s the same for everyone. So then I have this little nephew, although he’s almost 15 now. He had this dream when he was four years old. And the background to the dream is this. He was waking up in the middle of the night for months, screaming. He had night terrors. And this went on for like six months. And what was happening in his life was twofold. There was some instability in his family, because his parents got divorced about a year after that. And also, he had the transition point from staying at home to going to kindergarten. So not only was he making a big move out there into the terrible world, but the stable point from which he might like to have moved was shaky. So he wasn’t having that great a time. So anyways, he’s screaming away at night. And this is pretty unsettling, right? Because night terrors are no joke. And so he’s upset about it. His mom’s upset about it. So I’m watching him. And he’s running around the house. He’s only about this high, very verbal kid. And he’s got this night hat on and this sword and this shield. And he’s running around the house being a knight. And at night, he takes his night hat and his shield and his sword to bed. I think, oh, that’s pretty cool. And you can see how that makes sense, right? You can see how it’s an enacted reality, because children enact or act out their reality before they can explicitly understand it, just like we do. And so I’m staying there. One night, he wakes up and has one of these fits. And then the next morning, he comes to breakfast. And I said, hey, did you have any dreams last night? And he goes, yeah, I had a dream. I said, well, tell us the dream. And there’s six adults sitting around the table. And then he says, okay, I was out in this field and I was surrounded by beaked dwarves. And they came up to my knees. And so these dwarves, they had no arms. They just had shoulders and powerful legs. And they’re all covered with hair. And they had a cross shaved on the top of their head. And they’re all covered with grease. And everywhere I went, these dwarves would jump up with their beaks and bite me. And we’re looking at them like, that accounts for the night terrors, right? And so then he says, yeah, and there’s more to it, too. If you looked in the background, behind all the dwarves, there was a dragon way in the background. And it was puffing out fire and fire. And it was a dragon. And it was puffing out fire and smoke. And every time it puffed out fire and smoke, a whole bunch more of these dwarves would get made. And you think, that’s pretty cool. That’s a Hydra story, right? Remember the story of the Hydra? Cut off one head, two more grows. It’s one of Hercules’ trials. And that’s an observation about the world, which is you solve one problem and like two more problems pop up. And then you solve those. And anyways, he says, okay, well, I’ve got this dragon back there. And so this is his problem, right? He’s being eaten by beat dwarves. And that’s not good. And there’s not much sense fighting them off because there’s just more of them made every time this thing lurking in the background breathes. So I said, what could you do about that? It’s like his brain was working all these ideas around. And he’d heard lots of Disney stories and had lots of books read to him and had abstracted out a lot of information. But he hadn’t quite got it right. And it was all seething around in his head. And I just said, well, what could you do? Tap. And he went, oh, I know what I could do. I could take my sword and I’d get my dad, which is a good notion, right? Because he’s small. And then I’d jump up on the dragon and I’d pop out both of its eyes with the sword so it couldn’t see me. And then I’d go down its throat to the box where the fire came out. And then I’d carve a piece out of the box and I’d use that as a shield. And I thought, great, you really got the story. And the story is something like this, right? If you’re being plagued by midget dwarfs and you wipe them out and they keep multiplying, well, you’re obviously aiming at the wrong target, right? You should be going to their source. So he went after the dragon. But not only after the dragon, he went right down the throat of the dragon, which is, you know, a fairly brave thing to do. And then right to the place where the fire, the transforming element was being produced. And he took a piece of the device that made the transforming element and he used it as a shield. Okay. Well, that’s really cool. And the story is better than that, I think. And it’s true even. So it’s not one of those fake, he was dreaming and then woke up sort of stories. This actually happened. He didn’t have any more nightmares. So when I checked with his mother repeatedly after that because I thought, well, this is too good to be true, right? It’s got this terrible night terror thing. He does one little mythological dream thing and bang, he’s better. But that’s the case. He didn’t have any more nightmares after that. And I think that’s because he’d almost already got it, right? He’s running around like a knight. He knew almost. Just had to be made a little more explicit. And not even that explicit because it was still a story. He didn’t know you should go to the source of your anxieties, right? To the thing that plagues you the most and you should explore that in detail until you find the information that it contains that will protect you against it. He couldn’t say that, but he could tell the story. And he could act it out and that looked like it was good enough. So that’s pretty cool. So he basically, you know, he managed this. Essentially, he fought the dragon of chaos and popped back up. As what? As he who can obtain victory over the dragon of chaos. And that’s a pretty good story because it says, well, if your frame of reference gets blown away by something you don’t understand, some new challenge, and you face the challenge, at least courageously and humbly, which means, you know, you’re not going to run away and you still have something to learn, then you can extract something out of the battle that will enable you to withstand it. And you think, well, why should I believe that, right? And the answer to that would be, well, don’t knock it till you try it. And the second answer would be, that’s exactly what we do in clinical psychotherapy all the time. And there’s endless amounts, I think, of empirical evidence saying that you bring someone in, they’ve got an anxiety disorder, maybe they’re even depressed, whatever, they’re running away. You say, you actually don’t have to run away. Here’s what you have to do. You have to break the problem down into little pieces, digestible pieces, and then you have to hit it one by one. And what you’ll discover is not that you habituate to the anxiety, because that’s a silly theory. Instead, what you discover is that you thought you were the person who had to run away, but it turns out you’re not the person who has to run away, you’re the person that can stand there while you’re anxious and learn something. And what you most particularly learn is that you’re the person who can stand there when they’re anxious and learn. And if you’ve learned that, you don’t have to be anxious anymore. Or even more importantly, if you’re anxious, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean your life’s over, it just means that there you are on the threshold, right, between what you know and what you don’t know, and you have something to learn. And you can learn it. And I think that’s what the empirical evidence suggests too, because you’ve got Edna Foa’s work with post-traumatic stress disorder victims, primarily women who were violently raped, and Foa says, well, I know you don’t like to think about the event, and it’s no bloody wonder. Look what it did to you and how terrible it was, but if you relive it over and over and over again in your imagination, in as much detail as possible, including all the motivational and emotional details, which she measures psychophysiologically, you will get better faster and you’ll stay better longer, and her work’s well documented, and then there’s endless cases of exposure in psychotherapy. You can certainly eliminate simple phobias within an hour, and even complex phobias like agoraphobia, which is more like fear of everything, is not an intractable disorder. Imagine that throughout your whole life you never turned away from a mistake, not even once, never, so that whenever you made a mistake that you could rectify, you did rectify it, then the question would be, well, what exactly would you be like? Would you be suffering from all your existential trouble? Would you be vulnerable to anxiety? What would you be like? And then I think, well, I only know a couple of stories like that, and the one that I’ve told you is the story of Solzhenitsyn, because Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist, was sitting in the concentration camps in the Gulag Archipelago thinking, starving, this isn’t so good. How in the world did I get here? And the simple story is, well, Stalin put you there and he was bad, right? End of story. It’s not your problem, Stalin’s problem. But Solzhenitsyn said, well, that doesn’t really leave me anything to do, right, to construe myself as a simple victim of fate, and I do have a lot of time on my hands, since I’m not really doing anything that requires a tremendous amount of intellectual effort, let’s try a game, let’s do this, let’s pretend that the reason that things happen to me that I don’t like, even terrible things, say, or that I can’t tolerate, is not because I’m a victim of fate, evil, cruel fate, but because there’s something I didn’t do. And so Solzhenitsyn said, well, I’m going to go back over my whole life, right, step by step, detail by detail, and I’m going to try to remember every time I let something go, or I didn’t do something I was supposed to, not because of some adherence to some, you know, arbitrary moral code, because we don’t believe in those anyways, right, but just because I noted that, I can tell when I owe a debt to existence. So then you look at Solzhenitsyn and he says, okay, well, so I spent 15 years trying to untie all the knots that I tied up in my brain, and the consequence of that was first, I started to notice there are some people out there I really admired, man, they were so tough it was unbelievable. You put them in the worst circumstances and they didn’t bend an inch. They were tough. And even the nastiest prison guards and administrators, well, they could kill them, that’s for sure, but they couldn’t bend them and they couldn’t break them. And I really learned something from that, right, and it’s a good story because he’s in the worst possible circumstance, so there’s kind of no bottom past that. You don’t get much worse than the Gulag prison camp, right, that’s, it’s cold, you don’t get anything to eat, and you’re being worked to death, right, for something pointless and to serve Stalin. That’s the bottom. And he said, even under those circumstances, there are still people who could thrive, who could manifest admirable qualities. He said, once I figured out I was wrong, I could actually find them and learn from them. Then he wrote this book, which you know about, the Gulag Archipelago, which was released in the West and then circulated all through the Soviet Union and was undoubtedly one of the factors that contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union. And so then you think, well, that’s pretty interesting, isn’t it? You got this one wacko Zek, right, Russian prisoner, starving to death, tattooed. He says, maybe I had something to do with this, but he didn’t mean it in some casual sort of maybe I had something to do with this way. He meant, geez, this is really awful. It doesn’t get much worse, maybe it’s my fault. You know, I don’t know how it could be, but after all, I’m the one that’s suffering, so maybe it was me. Maybe I could fix it. What would happen if I did? And so his conclusion was, at the end, and it’s not a conclusion that he reached alone, was one person who stops lying can bring down a tyranny. And you think that’s a metaphorical statement, right, because you’re the victim of your own tyrannies, just as you are the victim of someone else’s tyrannies. And maybe if you stop lying, construed in this manner of sin of omission, right, don’t avoid anomalies anymore, but confront the head on. Maybe if you quit lying, well, then you wouldn’t be victim of tyranny, and maybe no one else would be either. The GRE say, the bad exam, that’s a bad thing, but it’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is the sort of thing that knocks existentialists for a loop, right? The worst thing is more like Ivan Karamazov’s suffering of innocent children, right, the fact that children are tortured, or the worst thing is the fact that perfectly good people get sick and die, and sometimes painfully, or the worst thing is there are tyrants all over the world and they torture people for no cause, or maybe even just because they like torturing people. And that’s an anomaly of a different order, right? It’s not just that you’re going from point A to B and something you don’t like happens. It’s more like there are some aspects of existence that look so terrible in and of themselves associated with our vulnerability that just apprehending them might be enough to knock the bottom out of your faith in any frame of reference, and that’s a kind of Nietzschean theme. Nietzsche says, look, when you’re going from point A to B and something bad happens, something you don’t expect, you don’t get to where you want it to go. That’s bad. But what’s even worse is you can’t have any faith in the frame of reference that you were using, because it’s been invalidated. But what’s even worse is you plow your way through two or three frames of reference, and then you start to develop some skepticism about frames of reference in general, right? So I was a socialist, say, and then I was a Catholic, and then I developed some New Age philosophy, and none of those really worked. And what that made me think was, well, you can’t trust socialism, you can’t trust Christianity, and those New Age people are certainly out to lunch. Maybe you can’t trust any frames of reference. And that’s a really devastating discovery, and Nietzsche associated that with the death of God, right? It’s like, no frames of reference work. And then you have the problem that, well, without a frame of reference, life is chaos, and chaos is intolerable, and therefore, logically, life is intolerable. And I tried to make a case for you then, as kind of a side case, which was people protect their ideologies because they don’t want to lose their frames of reference. They don’t want to fall into chaos. But then there’s this additional problem, which is that you can develop a kind of deep cynicism about life in a secondary manner, which is like constant loss of faith. Maybe what you conclude under those conditions, like the aggressive child concludes, is that fundamentally, I’m not to be trusted. You’re not to be trusted. Society’s not to be trusted, and maybe the structure of the world as a whole isn’t to be trusted, and therefore, logically, you’re more or less obligated to work against it. And so then you have a nice sub story for the propagation of evil, which is, well, we like to have our ideological frames of reference retained, and that gives us ample reason to squash anyone that’s different. But then there’s this additional reason, which is when you get right down to it, things are pretty bloody awful, and maybe the sensible thing to do is to just work for the annihilation of things. And I think we’ve had endless examples of people who did precisely that in the 20th century and almost got away with it, in case you’re tempted not to take this sufficiently seriously. We know that Stalin, in all likelihood, who I think you could make a case for being, if not the most evil man that ever lived, certainly the most evil man that lived this century, and that’s really a high honour, because he was up against some really top contenders. We know, as a consequence of recently released KGB documents, that he was probably gearing up to start the Third World War, not one of these little half-rate, little local Third World Wars. We’re talking about the whole H-bomb exchange thing designed to eradicate the US for sure, but also the Soviet Union. And, well, mere territoriality isn’t enough to account for that. But then maybe you can see Stalin’s point, like Tolstoy can see it. If life is really so awful at bottom, which there are perspectives from which that certainly seems to be the case, then why bother having it around at all? Well, you know, that’s a pretty dismal perspective. So, that’s a real anomaly, right? That’s not one of these little second-rate, you’ll get over it in a month or two, anomalies. This is the sort of anomaly that’s laid out in Genesis, where Adam and Eve discover that they’re mortal, vulnerable, they’re going to die. That really takes the shine off existence out of paradise they go. They wander around the planet for the rest of history, you know, working themselves to death and being miserable and killing each other. And that’s basically the story that’s laid out in the Old Testament. And viewed from that perspective, well, it’s not precisely an empirical description of the Big Bang, say, but it’s not a bad description of the nature of human existence. And that’s a pretty dismal, there’s an essential symbolic relationship between the ingestion of food and its transformative capacities and the ingestion of ideas and their transformative capacity. And what happens when Adam and Eve eat this fruit, which they’re not supposed to eat, is that they learn that they’re going to die. And that screws up paradise. And in case you just think about it, you know, Adam and Eve are going to die, and they’re going to die. And that screws up paradise. And in case you just think I’m making this up, which would be, you know, kind of annoying, then you want to look at this picture, which is from the 14th century. And it’s really a remarkable picture. So what you’ve got in the middle here is the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And you’ve got Eve over here. And you’ve got the church here. Now what you see happening, you’ve got to look really carefully at this tree. And what you see is it’s got the snake wrapped around it, this agent of transformation, right, who’s associated with Satan. And then up in the branches you have apples, and you have skulls. And then if you look at Eve here, she’s got grapes here, and a skull in her hand. And what this artist is trying to indicate is that there’s this tight relationship between Eve tempting Adam towards higher knowledge and delivering him death. So that’s a pretty dismal story. And all the people over here on the left side, all these unhappy people, are the people who are living in chaos and misery as a consequence of having their vulnerability revealed to them. And that’s the negative side of the story. But then there’s the positive side of the story over here, and it’s just as complicated. And that’s partly why it’s expressed in imagistic form. So you’ve got the church here, symbolized at least in part as Mary, and she’s handing out something too. And if you look at those, they’re little round circles with crosses on them, and what those are are hosts. They’re the symbols of transformation, particularly in Catholicism. Now that’s a very complicated idea, and this is the idea. At Christ’s Last Supper, before he was crucified, he told his disciples that they were going to have to ingest him. So he gave them wine and bread, and the wine was blood and the bread was flesh. And what’s the idea? What does it mean to incorporate someone? It means to embody them. That’s what it means. And this imagistic ritualistic process is the notion that in order to attain redemption, it’s necessary to embody the hero. And that’s kind of what this picture is trying to portray. It says, okay, well you’ve got this death apple over on the left-hand side, and that’s not so good, and you need an antidote to it, and the antidote is whatever this represents. Whatever this represents. And you see up in the tree here, there’s all these hosts hanging. Now the hosts are representative of Christ, and for complicated reasons. They’re made out of wheat, say. And partly the reason they’re made out of wheat is because if you look at hero gods prior to Christianity, you see that wheat was often conceptualized as a dying and redeemed god, right? Because it would die in the winter and then be reborn in the spring, just like all plants are. And the notion of the dying and resurrecting hero was kind of layered on top of that older agrarian idea, and all mixed together and sort of popped out in this idea of the host. And so the idea here is that whatever ails human beings, which is their knowledge of vulnerability and death, can be rectified by their incorporation of whatever this symbol represents. And so then you might ask, what exactly does that symbol represent? And of course there’s standard Christian answers to that, and the extended Christian answers are, well it represents your faith in Christ, say. But that’s not a very useful answer, all things considered. So let’s look at it in a little bit more complicated way. It’s not a useful answer, I think, because it’s too sectarian, right? It excludes many, many people, this notion. There’s a whole formalism that you have to buy into to even get access to what that story means. And it’s an unfortunate formalism, because first of all I think it’s more appropriate to an earlier time and place, and second of all because I think we’re actually sophisticated enough now, intellectually, psychologically, to actually start to understand what some of these stories mean. And since we have reasonably well-developed brains and we might as well use them, it would be better if they were on our side, so to speak, than constantly conspiring to undermine our faith. Let’s look at what a person is like. And a person is sort of just as complicated as an object, which is not that surprising because there’s an aspect of us that is object-like, right? Our objective being. And we know people are unbelievably complicated. They have nervous systems that have more connections in them than there are subatomic particles in the universe, just for starters. And so that means that when you’re looking at another person, you’re looking at something that’s more complicated than anything else that exists anywhere, including the sum total of everything that exists everywhere, except other people. More complex than everything. And then you have to understand too that just because you don’t think of yourself that way doesn’t mean you’re not that way. It just means that your conscious mind, your rational mind, say, isn’t sophisticated enough to actually completely model who or what you are. And that’s obvious because that’s why we study ourselves. We don’t know who we are. We’re trying to figure it out. We’ve been trying to figure it out ever since we woke up. Some thousands of years ago, we don’t know when. And you think, well, if you look at people, well, you know, there’s the kind of obvious level you see people at, the self level, which is the privileged level of analysis for the West, but you’re a member of a family. And if I said, well, are you more yourself or your family? You might say, well, most of the time I think I’m more myself, but I might be willing to sacrifice my life for my child’s. In which case I would say, well, then you’re just as much your child as you are you. Or maybe you’re even more your child. And what about your family? Well, that’s a tough question, too. And then what about your cultural group? Well, you say, no, it’s me, not my cultural group. But then I’d say, well, what if there’s a war? Is it you or your cultural group? And then you’ll say, what’s my cultural group? And then you see as well, well, at this level of analysis, are you your biological group? Is that what you identify with? The biosphere say? Say, well, no, not generally, but there’s a lot of environmentalists out there. And they say, well, what we should primarily be concerned with is the global health of the planet, because our survival depends on that. We’re as much that as we are the self. And you might not agree with that. And I suspect that most of the time there’s screwy reasons for proposing such a thing. But on the other hand, a case can be made. I mean, we know that you can undermine your ecosystems. It happened in Spain. They let, 400 years ago, they let sheep eat everything. And so Spain turned into a desert. Doesn’t seem like a particularly wise move. And then you think, well, below the phenomenological level, there’s all these sub elements of you, your physiological structure, your cellular structure, your atomic structure. It’s amenable to infinite investigation, absolutely complex. You’ll never exhaust it if you investigate it. And it’s perfectly reasonable to presuppose that you’re all these things. How does it change the world if you stop thinking about it as made of objects? But instead made of your own experience? And how does it change the world if you think you have an ethical relationship to that experience that’s a primary fact, not some secondary derivative? So primary a fact that you can’t even look at the world except through an ethical lens. Primary fact. How does that change the way you conceptualize yourself in relationship to the world? I don’t know. I don’t know. .