https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iEZVWWk6qHg
Okay, so we’re going to continue today with our initial exploration of different ways to see the world. And so the last time I talked to you a little bit about perceptions of what you might describe as action orientation. So the case I made for you was something like this, that there’s two significant patterns of facts in the sense that you need to know about the world, and one has to do with the objective reality of things, and the other has to do with how you configure your behaviour in the face of that objective reality. And those two overlap to some degree, but a lot of what scientists would normally consider subjective experiences are part of the domain that is applicable to how you comport yourself or how you act. That’s the moral domain. Because psychology, especially in its clinical manifestations, is concerned with how people should act, which is in part mental health and how they should perceive, and even experimental psychology to some degree is concerned with psychopathology. It’s necessary to account for the subjective and also for values as you move forward in your investigation of psychology, personality psychology or clinical psychology. So I want to, we started last week talking a little bit about mythological representations, which I think of as the precursor to a lot of the clinical theories that we’re going to cover. Today, I want to go into that in a little bit more detail and with a little bit more specificity because I want to talk to you about shamanic initiations and other rites of initiation because it’s appeared to me for a long time, and this is something that has also been observed by psychoanalytic thinkers, that there are relevant and important points of similarity between these archaic rituals and the sorts of things that people undergo in psychotherapy. So I can give you a brief example and then we’ll consider this in more detail. People learn almost everything they learn that’s important in the face of fear, and although that’s slightly more pessimistic viewpoint than it might be because you can optimize the rate at which you expose yourself to things that would otherwise cause you to be afraid, then they tend just to captivate you and make you intensely interested. But as you’re progressing through life, what you’re doing continually is either interacting with things that you understand well, which means that you know how to behave in the face of, or you’re interacting with things that you don’t understand at all. And your body and your mind are prepared to respond to things that you don’t understand at all, and they basically respond by putting you on alert. And being on alert is assigned from the deep unconscious recesses of your mind and your body for that matter, that you don’t know what you’re doing in this particular space, and as a consequence you have more things to learn. And so the way you learn when you encounter something that you don’t understand is by progressing voluntarily into the space and time that’s unknown. And so you’re always learning as a consequence of facing the unknown, and the unknown is something that can be frightening, although it can also be interesting if you calibrate your exposure properly. Now this is just as true for psychotherapy as it is for any other form of learning, and that’s because psychotherapy really is a form of guided and structured learning. And one of the things that you continually do with people who are seeking psychotherapeutic help is to determine what it is that they’re afraid of or what it is that they don’t understand, and then to break it down into what you might describe as manageable doses, and then get people to expose themselves to that situation or set of situations voluntarily. And the consequence of that is that people become less afraid and more able. And the original hypothesis was that was because you were doing some form of counter conditioning that people had learned to be afraid in a particular circumstance and you were teaching them to not be afraid. That’s wrong, that viewpoint. What you’re really doing with people when you expose them to situations that they’re afraid of or that they don’t understand is expanding their range of competence, and you either do that by literally teaching them how to behave in those circumstances, which is what you would do with children or maybe with friends, or by helping them observe their own reactions when they’re placed in a situation like that, because lots of people who are afraid of things think that when they confront something they’re afraid of voluntarily, that they’ll be absolutely terrified and unable to cope, but they often find that if they do place themselves in the situation carefully and voluntarily, that they’re nowhere near as paralyzed by the encounter as they might have thought. And so, partly what you’re teaching them then is that there’s more to them than they thought. Generally when you’re teaching people about the world, given that the world is a frightening place if you’re a psychotherapist, there isn’t a lot of utility in trying to convince people that the world isn’t as dangerous as they think, because the world is just as dangerous as you think it is. It’s actually quite a remarkable fact that we’re all not paralyzed with anxiety all the time, but we’re not. But part of what you have in your armament against the terrors of the world is the possibility that you hold within you, and people are unbelievably tough and resourceful creatures, and even if you think that you’re not up to the challenge, you can be sure that encoded in your bodily structure somewhere are abilities that you don’t really understand that would come to the forefront if you put yourself in the situation where they were necessary. And that’s a lot of psychotherapy is precisely that. It’s helping the person learn that there’s more to them than they think. Not so much that the world is less frightening. To be exposed to something you’re afraid of often means to reconfigure your own preconceptions, because if you’re afraid of something, it usually means that you’ve coded it or understand it in a certain way. And so that when you encounter it, not only do you have to learn something new, but you also have to let go of your old presuppositions. Maybe that’s what you do, for example, if you overcome some kind of prejudice that you might have to people or things or places, because you don’t approach the object that you’re afraid of in a conceptual vacuum. You have presuppositions. What that also applies is that when you’re learning, even when you’re learning incrementally, there’s a process of letting go and a process of building. So when you learn something new, you have to let go of an old presupposition of some sort. And those presuppositions are alive because they’re part of you. And part of what that means is that every element of learning in the face of something also an undoing of previous learning. And that’s partly why the motif of death and rebirth is such a powerful one throughout human history. It’s a primary motive of human, what would you call it, of the human story. It’s certainly of human mythology. And the experiences that people have in psychotherapy are often similar to death and rebirth experiences in part because they come in damaged and fragmented and hurt and often have to encounter even more of the material that caused them trouble to begin with. But the consequence of that is that they can shake the structures that are inhibiting their further development, even though that might cause some pain, and then hopefully they can come back alive. And you know that when you encounter something that’s truly unknown, you go through a process that’s similar to that too. If you’ve ever been in a situation, for example, where you deeply desired something but you failed to get it for one reason or another, there’s a tremendous amount of pain associated with that. That could be a person or a goal or a dream or something like that. It’s extraordinarily painful not to be able to attain a valued goal. And the failure literally produces pain. It’s cognitive pain, but many of the same pathways are involved. When you have to give up something that you value, you’re giving up a part of yourself, the part of yourself that’s predicated on that vision. And not only is that painful, but it can really throw you for a loop. The phenomena that we’re going to talk about today are representations of that process as well as attempts to experiment with it, because people have known for a very, very long time that there was something about partial death and rebirth that was also akin to the revivification of the human spirit. And that’s knowledge that human beings have had for, we really don’t know how long. It’s certainly tens of thousands of years, and it might be longer than that. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Now I’m going to back up a little bit and clarify some of the things that we talked about in the last class. So I want to give you some sense of why people see the world the way they do. Because as materialistic people, and by that I mean people who are embedded in a conceptual world whose primary presupposition is that the fundamental mental level of reality is material, we have some misconceptions about our own perceptions. So for example, for creatures like us who are alive and who are primates, the objective world isn’t the primary target of our perception. The social world is the primary target of our perception. Now that’s not so surprising even if you examine your own behaviour. So you might think, how much time do you spend during the day interacting with people in one form or another? If you include texting and emailing and phoning and face-to-face conversation. Or if you’re not interacting with them directly, you’re thinking about them, or you’re watching them or listening to them. So maybe you’re watching them in a movie or you’re watching them on TV or you’re listening to them sing or you’re watching them perform. The point is that most of the world that confronts us is the world of other human beings. And the world of other human beings has been around us evolutionarily ever since there have been human beings. And it’s very difficult to pinpoint the precise moment in time when human beings came into existence but there were certainly vaguely human-like things two million years ago. We seem to have split from the common ancestors of chimpanzees seven million years ago. So it’s somewhere between two and seven million years that we’ve been in an environment that’s primarily made up of other people. And then there’s a great prehistory before that of tens of millions of years where the animals that surrounded us weren’t precisely human but they were certainly social and they were primates. So even stretching back past, far past when we were human, we lived in an environment that was fundamentally characterized by social interactions. And what that means is that our brain is essentially set up to perceive the world through a social lens. So here’s a quote from a paper on primate social cognition. Now this is a group of researchers who are trying to understand the proto-linguistic representations I think with this paper of baboons. Because the idea would be before our human ancestors had language, they had the perceptual structures and the conceptual structures that were linguistic-like that language emerged out of. And the understanding that we eventually transferred to language was there in its prototypical form prior to our ability to utter. I can give you an example of that. That’s kind of a funny example. You know, how many of you know what Tourette’s syndrome is? Yeah, how many don’t? Okay, well Tourette’s syndrome is a syndrome, it’s a neurological syndrome that’s characterized oddly enough by the propensity to curse. And so it’s very strange because you’d wonder how in the world a neurological condition can make you curse. It also, people with it also move. They have motor tics and so they’ll move in stereotyped fashions and they really can’t control that. If they’re concentrating on something they can control their motor output, but if their concentration wanes then they’re often possessed by fairly complicated motor processes that sort of run independently of their will, as well as these vocalizations. Now you might think, how in the world could you have a neurological disorder that would make you curse, that would make you swear? It just doesn’t make sense in some sense that your brain would be so fractionated in its specialization that a neurological condition could emerge that was that specific. But here seems to be the answer. Most curse words are very, very short and kind of guttural. And they’re usually four letters, as in the famous four letter word, and they’re also usually expressed during conditions of high emotion. Now it turns out that certain kinds of primates have distress calls. So for example, perhaps there’s a monkey troop and one of its primary enemies are predatory birds that swoop down from the sky. And so the monkeys have evolved a cry that basically means, look out, there’s an eagle in the sky that’s going to eat you, and then once that cry is emitted by any of the group members, all of them immediately scatter and take defensive action. They hide. It’s another troop and maybe they’re preyed on by leopards or something like that, and they also have an alarm cry for the leopards, and that means hit the trees or do whatever you have to do to get away from the leopard. Well it turns out that the linguistic centers that are in those monkeys that produce the alarm cries to predators are the same circuits that you use to curse. And if you have Tourette’s syndrome, what happens is it’s those old protolinguistic circuits that you share with lower order primates that are disinhibited. And so you can see a good example there of a prototypic language structure, because monkeys are complicated enough to be able to say something like, holy shit, there’s a jaguar, right? And it’s usually the most nervous monkey in the pack who’s always jittering around on hyper alert who manages to curse out a warning. So anyways, you have this protolinguistic, this underlying protolinguistic capability that’s at least part perceptual and conceptual. So we know, for example, that primates, and this is true for animals that are way less sophisticated than primates, are very good at social cognition. So they know to the individual exactly what strata the other members of their group occupy. You imagine they’re in a dominance hierarchy, right? There’s the top primates and the bottom primates, and then there’s strata of primates all the way up, just like there is in most animals. And primates are unbelievably good at knowing who’s who. And they need to be, because if you mess with a high order primate, you know, one that’s high up in the dominance hierarchy and you’re sort of lowly, you’re going to get hurt. And it’s better to be lowly and know your place, or at least this is how animals manage it, than it is to get hurt. Young males who are sort of climbing up the hierarchy will often take an awful lot of abuse trying to get to the peak. But most animals in a social troop are pretty much resigned to their locale, because it’s safer to be there. Often the cast, so to speak, in the primate hierarchy are actually hereditary. So generation to generation, the same families, so to speak, occupy the same rungs. So one of the things we know about social cognition is that, and human cognition, is that it involves social processing and that it’s also very much focused on status. There’s some very funny studies of this sort of thing. I think one was done with macaques, if I remember correctly, where they show macaques photographs of other macaques from their troop, and those photographs were either of low status macaques or of high status sort of celebrity macaques, and the macaques would spend much longer time gazing at the high status celebrity macaques than like the low people, creatures, whatever have you, that they had nothing but contempt for. So you can think a lot of our pre-existing perceptual and conceptual categories are social, so we’re always processing other creatures, humans for sure, but other living creatures as well, and we’re also very concerned with who’s doing what to who and when and who’s got the power, because it turns out that dominance hierarchy status, for example, is unbelievably important in determining, well, reproductive opportunities in particular, but also general health and access to, you know, prime access to resources, unbelievably important. The internal representations of language meaning evolved partly from our pre-linguistic ancestors’ knowledge of social relations. Remember, when we tell stories or listen to stories, they’re always about social relations all the time. Like modern monkeys and apes, our ancestors lived in groups with intricate networks of relationships that were simultaneously competitive and cooperative. The demands of social life created selective pressures for just the kind of complex, abstract, conceptual, and computational abilities that are likely to have preceded the earliest forms of linguistic communication. Although baboons have concepts and acquire propositional information from other animals’ vocalizations, they cannot articulate this information. They understand dominance relations and matrilineal kinship, but have no words for them. This suggests that the internal representation of many concepts, relations, and action sequences does not require language, and that language did not evolve because it was uniquely suited to representing thought. Well, you know, as I mentioned to you in the last class or maybe the previous class, not only do monkeys, baboons say, which are very complex, but not only are they able to track dominance hierarchy structures without language, like lobsters are able to do it. So you can be very, very sure that the underlying basis for the linguistic representation of social interactions is deep beyond belief, since we share it with crustaceans. So it’s very useful to know this because it also helps understand why certain things have intrinsic meaning. You know, like the dominance hierarchy and the position in the dominance hierarchy and the relative status of creatures is an intrinsically meaningful piece of information to us because it’s an important determinant of our survival and reproductive opportunities. So the meaning is there. You don’t have to learn it. You just have to figure out what to map it onto. And that means that that kind of meaning, status-related meaning, is archetypal. It’s built into you as the ground of understanding. So and I’ll show you something. Hopefully this will work. The American work. There we go. Okay, so this, watch this. So we’ll watch it one more time. Okay so anybody willing to hazard a guess about what was happening there? It was an attack. That’s one hypothesis. Yes. Anyone else? Let’s look at the players once again. So the poor little pink circle is trapped and then it’s trying to get out. And when it does get out, the big gray triangle shepherds it away. But that irritates the blue triangle which shepherds it back into the box and the gray triangle isn’t able to enter. Something like that. You can tell a story about it. Does that, I don’t know, I’m not saying that’s the canonical interpretation of the triangle’s behavior or any of that, but you would agree, I presume, that that’s a reasonably plausible interpretation of what those triangles and circles were up to. Yes? Okay, well no, right, because they’re triangles and circles. But the point is, the point is that our ability to perceive social interactions is so deep that we can take entities that are only living insofar as they’re moving in certain ways and we immediately attribute motivation to them. We can tell a little story about them and we can also agree on the story. Now you could say, well it was sort of built in by the people who made the little animated demonstration but that doesn’t matter because the point is they were able to build it in with virtually no representation whatsoever and communicate it because they knew that we understand that sort of information. So. All right, so let’s push our luck and see if this works. Okay. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Well you get the basic idea so there’s a couple of things that are interesting about that clip. One is everything’s animated, everything has a life, and that’s actually okay. You can watch that and you understand it which is quite strange because of course generally trees don’t dance around and so forth. But this module that we have so to speak is a bad way of describing it because it’s more like an entire mode, it’s the entire mode of human perception that’s being called the hyperactive agency detector by people who are somewhat skeptical about its operation. But because we’re evolved to exist within living environments, it’s very living dynamic animal-oriented environments, it’s very easy for us to see everything in that way. Everything is alive, a priori. That’s why when you’re reading stories to your kids, it’s like Thomas the Tank Engine has a personality and motivations, and so does the little engine that could, and all these things that are used to represent to children ways of interacting in the world. So, alright, so the point of all this, basically, is that we’ve evolved to categorize the world into social categories, and the social categories that we use, or that use us, that’s a more accurate way of looking at it, because these aren’t tools that we voluntarily use, these are ways that we perceive the world, they’re underneath our understanding, they’re preconditions for our understanding. So we tend to parse up the world into personified categories, and I didn’t even say that properly, exactly, because that implies that you’re projecting something onto the world, it’s personification, it’s deeper than that, it’s that the world appears to you naturally in a living and animated manner. And the reason for that is because most of what you process, and this was certainly the case to a great degree before human beings became technologically proficient, because we weren’t that good at manipulating the objective world at all. Everything that we thought about, everything we did, essentially was dependent on other creatures. And so what that also means is that whatever advances we’ve made in understanding the objective material world, we’ve made it by, with a tremendous amount of effort, removing that tendency to see things in an animated way from our collective perception, and working diligently to come to terms with the fact that there are ways of treating certain phenomena that aren’t animated that work better. It’s very, very difficult for us, and that’s why, for example, we really didn’t come up with a science-based technology until about 500 years ago. We really had to work against our own instincts, and we’ve still done them tremendous damage, because to the degree that we now perceive the world as objective and material and sort of dead in a sense, it’s also being deprived of meaning, and people really suffer for that, because modern people can certainly say, given our understanding about the nature of reality, is it reasonable to propose that anything truly has meaning? Well, that’s a very difficult question. I would say don’t give up on it too quickly. So here’s some natural categories of apprehension. So there’s the dominance hierarchy, that’s for sure, and that’s the social group. That’s actually what Jung called the animus, leaping ahead a little bit to the Jung-Jung portion of these lectures. The dominance hierarchy is basically what modern social constructionists call patriarchy, and it’s often symbolized by an adult male, and that can have two aspects, positive and negative, because you’re the beneficiary of your culture and you’re also its victim, so to speak. It preys on you and pushes on you and shapes you and molds you and takes taxes from you and fines you and doesn’t let you do things, but on the other hand, here you are in this university and you’re not starving to death and you can all communicate and it’s pretty peaceful. So there’s the great father, so to speak, bifurcated into two elements, positive and negative. And I told you the other day that that was Osiris, and that’s who he represented for Egyptian mythology. He’s sort of standing on a pillar and in representation to the right, which is kind of an odd Christian representation, you have God the Father in the middle. He’s sort of encapsulated inside Mary and he’s holding the figure of Christ and everyone in the thing opens, everyone on the doors is sort of looking at Christ. So there’s the Father in the middle there and the Father in the middle there, and then On this side you have what’s essentially the son, S-O-N, and S-U-N at the same time. That’s Horace there and it’s Christ there. There’s equivalent figures in other religious and cosmological systems. And then on the right you have Isis, and Isis is related to Mary, especially in this image because Mary is basically portrayed there as the mother nature that incorporates culture that’s holding the individual. It’s a brilliant representation, most of them are. And then on the right is a spectacular representation because it sums up the existential situation of human beings in one sculpture. And that is that, well, all around us is nature and nature gives and takes away and nature gives rise to culture and culture supports us and while it supports us we suffer and hopefully we suffer and can manage it and that’s why everyone is gazing at the figure in the middle who’s basically accepted the inevitability and necessity of his own death as a precondition for life. So it’s an amazing representation and a brilliant, brilliant work of art. A lot of that was elaboration of these earlier Egyptian ideas. There’s an awful lot of similarities between the mythological representations of Horace, for example, and of Christ. There are parallels there are many. That makes people often cynical about, say, the claims of Christianity, but that’s foolish as far as I’m concerned because what both of these representational systems point to is something deeper, way deeper, way underneath both of them manifests itself in many forms. So this is the personified representation. So mother nature, father culture, and the individual. Okay, so now imagine that that’s sort of your primary, as a primate who’s striving towards linguistic representation. That’s kind of what you’ve got to work with. As far as you’re concerned, that’s the primal structure of the cosmos. So there’s you, that’s the individual, there’s your mother and nature, there’s your father and culture, and wherever you are, that’s what there is and that’s what you’ve got to work with to begin with. Okay now, you know evolution is a conservative process, and so what that means is that it’s not a radical renovator. Usually what evolution does is cobble something new onto something old while the old is conserved. So for example, you have mechanisms way down in your neurological systems that enable you to do things like detect snakes with incredible rapidity and jump out of the way. Those are reflexes, same reflexes, similar reflexes that are operative, say, when you put your hand in a hot stove and jerk it away before you even know it’s hot. So the reason you can do that is because your body has conserved incredibly primitive neurological loops, say when you jerk your hand away from a stove, that only run from your hand to your spinal cord and back. So they’re super fast, but you know, they can’t do much. They can jerk your hand away, which is enough if it’s burning. It’s a good thing to have conserved. So human beings as they evolve cognitively started out with this social cognitive architecture that they interpreted the world through, and you can see why this would be, partly because Well, we do live in an intensely social environment. There’s always been mothers, there’s always been fathers, and then you add to that the human fact that we have this unbelievably long developmental period where we’re incapable, fundamentally incapable of taking care of ourselves, right? So you know, when something like a moose calf is born, it’s like three minutes later it’s wandering around, and if a wolf shows up, it can run beside its mother. It’s like a human baby just lays there for like a year. And part of that is because you may not know this, but for a mammal of our size we should have a gestation period of two years. So when those of you who are women have children in the future, and you know, at nine months you’re pretty damn sick of this, you might well thank the structure of the cosmos that you don’t have, you know, fifteen more months to go, because that’s how long the baby should remain in utero. The reason it doesn’t is because its head grows too fast, because we have this big brain, and so there’s this weird evolutionary arms race between the mother’s body and the pelvic girdle and the head size of the infant, and the way that’s all sorted itself out is women’s hips are still narrow enough so they can run, because if they were any wider they’d have a hard time running, and the baby is born at nine months instead of twenty-four with the compressible head, because baby’s skull bones aren’t put together, and so when they pass through the birth canal their head can be crushed quite a lot, so that, you know, hopefully they live. So anyways, we have this incredible period of dependency after that, it’s abject dependency for the first while, but then you’re really not, I don’t know how long it takes people to really get up and going, it’s like, well, eighteen we’ll say, but of course that’s complete rubbish, it’s more like thirty, so there’s a very long dependency period, and so that’s all the more reason why we would tend to view the world as, you know, mother, father, and then expand that out into our conception of the cosmos. Here seems to be how people did it, so it’s a complicated association to manage, but I think the best way of managing it is to think of the figure of Mother Nature, and that would be Mary here, and that would be Isis there. Now nature is a funny thing, because I don’t want you to think about nature the way that modern people think about nature. I want you to think about nature as that which lurks outside of culture, so imagine in the typical tribal scene, or let’s say in the typical rather primeval village or gathering, there’s a domain that people inhabit that they’re sort of comfortable with, that’s where all the people are, that’s where the dominance hierarchy is, and then that’s sort of surrounded by God only knows what, like the outside world, the barbarians, the darkness that eats the sun when it goes down at night, all the things that are foreign and uncomfortable are outside of that circle, and that’s nature. What’s outside of culture is nature, and so nature is the unknown, and then what’s inside is culture, that’s the known. And that actually turns out to be, weirdly enough, even though it’s a worldview that’s predicated on this underlying social cognitive structure, it turns out to be a worldview that’s unbelievably useful, because it happens to map onto the structure of subjective experience extremely well, in that wherever you go, you’re viewing the world through a cultural lens and you’re usually encapsulated in a culture as well. It’s virtually impossible now to go anywhere where culture isn’t with you and around you, I mean you can do it from time to time, but even if you manage that, it’s still inside you, it’s coded in the way that you behave, and it’s structured the way you perceive things and think about them. So even if the outside world is devoid of cultural artifacts, it doesn’t matter because you’re a cultural artifact right to your core. Despite that, and it’s the incorporation of the culture that allows you to maneuver and live and act and do that somewhat successfully, despite that, despite that you’re enculturated and embedded in culture, nature can pop up and disturb you pretty much at any moment, happens when whatever it is that you’re doing doesn’t work. And so the way that humanity naturally perceives the world and symbolizes the world is as a place that’s basically composed of culture, and culture is where you are when things are going according to how you want them to go. That’s sort of the definition of knowing. It’s not knowing a set of facts, it’s knowing how to behave so that the ends that you’re pursuing get acquired. And that’s more important in many ways than knowing facts. Facts may help you do that, but they may not too. So there’s the place you are when you know what you’re doing and you get what you want, and then there’s that other place that pops up all the time where you haven’t got a clue about what to do. And that’s the place that, it’s like a transcendent place, and that’s nature. And the transcendent place is where all the mysteries of life come from, the things that you cannot handle, the diseases, the illnesses, death, disappointments, frustrations, all the things that knock you for a loop and make you tumble underground. And that’s nature, nature like a predator. And it’s a strange place, nature, because on the one hand it gives because nature is the source of all things, given that it’s the source of all new things, but on the other hand it takes away because it surrounds you and because it transcends your knowledge, it’s eventually what kills you. So people have a very ambivalent relationship with nature because of its bifurcated and paradoxical existence. Culture is the same way. I mean, in formal logic a thing can’t be one thing and it’s opposite at the same time. In these mythological categories that are derivatives of social cognition, things are what they are and they’re opposites at the same time, just as you’re a beneficiary and a victim of culture and a beneficiary and a victim of nature. Now part of the reason I’m telling you this is because it’s very complicated to grasp, but what’s happened with you neurologically in part is that the part of your brain that evolved to deal with things like predators and dangers, you know, things that are emanating from nature that would directly threaten you. Once those things became abstracted so that they could handle, became sophisticated enough so that they could handle abstractions, instead of dealing with things like predator A or predator B or predator C or danger situation A, they got sophisticated enough to deal with the class of those things. And so human beings, instead of perceiving a dangerous animal or a dangerous place, started to be able to perceive danger as such and to conceptualize danger as a class of events. But the same circuits that originated to do things like take care of, you know, to make sure that you knew where the snakes were coming from, are also the circuits that now enable you to conceptualize danger in the abstract and to, you know, to deal with it one way or another. Potential future danger, danger now, the fact of danger as an existential reality, all of that. Only human beings can conceptualize the class of all dangerous things and part of that is associated with nature. So there’s the domain of nature outside the domain of culture. It’s like an ocean surrounding an island and then there’s you standing on the island. The island’s nice and secure. It’s a very standard mythological representation of the cosmos, by the way. And there’s culture and there’s nature and there’s you. And that’s the archetypal situation of the human being. And that’s essentially our reality. And it’s a reality that’s not merely objective because it’s so tied up with life and with other people and with our own essential being. Here are some. Now, we can move from the sort of underlying domains of nature, the unknown, culture, the known and the individual and then we can start to put some symbolic flesh on those bones. And this will help us when we get into discussions of psychoanalytic theory because the analytical psychologists like Jung and the psychoanalysts like Freud were very, very interested in the images that were produced by what they regarded as the unconscious mind. Now your most direct contact with those sorts of images would come from two sources. One would be your dreams and the other would be the stories that you’re exposed to, both ancient and new, because those stories are full of mythological motifs. I mean, it’s very weird, you know. In recent years, the most expensive artifacts that human beings produce, virtually, maybe with the exception of plants that fabricate chips, are movies, visual representations of mythological themes. So for example, the Marvel movies, Iron Man and those sorts of movies and The Avenger, those are among the most expensive things that people have ever created. And you know, you say, well, there’s obviously a profit motive underlying that. Well, yeah, it’s not a very intelligent analysis. The point is that people are still devoting a staggering amount of effort to representations like that and everybody goes and watches them. So just for an example, you know, in The Avengers movie, there’s all, I can name half a dozen mythological motifs that are embedded in that. So for example, Iron Man is an alchemical symbol because he’s turning into gold and iron turns into gold. As far as the ancient alchemists are concerned, that’s part of its moral progression towards perfection. And his suit represents that because it’s gold, even though he’s the Iron Man. He’s also Icarus, right? Remember Icarus flies too close to the sun and then plummets to earth. So of course, Iron Man does that when he’s encountering the thermonuclear explosion that eventually wipes out the, you know, the demonic aliens that are pouring through the portal in time. So in the Thor movies, that’s a hostile brothers motif. So there’s Thor and Loki. That’s like Cain and Abel or Christ and Satan. It’s the same motif and it’s representative of the sort of eternal battle between good and even evil that’s going on in the background of human consciousness. Like it’s on and on and on. These movies portray these symbolic realities for us and we’re so hungry for them that we’ll line up and pay to watch them. It’s very strange if you think about it, you know. There’s not many forms of activity that you will do that for, you know. And they’re very informative, those movies, but you know, you don’t generally line up and pay for lectures. Movies man, you’ll go to those for fun. It’s like, it’s very strange behaviour, especially when you look at what the things are representing. Everything that medieval Christians, for example, you know, got exposed to in the Catholic Church and in the mythology that went along with that, we go to movies and see. The movies set up the same way a church is, right? There’s rows and rows of seats and all the mythological actions at the front. And it’s bright and there’s music and it’s exactly the same thing. So here’s some symbolic equivalence. And the reason, you might think of a symbol as something that represents something else, but that’s not exactly the right way to think about it. The symbols in this sense are elements of this domain. So the domain encompasses a tremendous number of phenomena. And these are some of the phenomena. So there’s nature. Nature is the unconscious. Why? Well, it’s beyond you. Your unconscious mind, that’s not you. That’s nature inside you. It does what it wants. It’ll do all sorts of things you don’t want it to do. And there isn’t much you can do about it. And all you have to do is notice all the stupid things you’ve done in the last six months to understand to what degree you’re in the grip of the unconscious. You know, maybe you fall in love with someone and you don’t even like them. I mean, what the hell’s up with that? And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll act like a moron, just like everybody, every human being who’s ever lived acted like a moron when that happened to them. So you’re gripped by it. The darkness, that’s nature too. That’s what lurks outside the campfire. It’s like the terrible things that prey on the unwary. And of course, that’s true. That’s why it’s not just symbolic. These things aren’t just symbolic. There are monsters. You know, parents will tell their children when they have a dream, well there’s no such thing as a monster. It’s like, and then, you know, then they’ll tell them not to ever approach a stranger on the street because God only knows what will happen. It’s like, those two things do not go together. They’re either monsters or they aren’t. People are so damn afraid of them still that, you know, they torture their children to death with threats, with the idea of threats that don’t even exist, like the probability that a given child is going to be abducted by a stranger is so close to zero that, you know, you might as well not even bother thinking about it. It’s almost always a divorced parent that comes along and grabs them and runs off with them. So, you know, well it’s a custody dispute issue most of the time. Hardly anybody gets abducted by strangers. Why would they want your child? So, that’s sort of nature as the unconscious and the devouring. And then there’s the great mother, the queen, the matrix, the matriarch, the container, the cornucopia. You know what a cornucopia is? It’s one of those things that you see at Thanksgiving. Weird thing, it’s got this point at one end and it opens up into a kind of a big circle. It looks like a horn. It’s made out of wicker and things pour out of it. It’s like, what is that thing? Well, it’s a cornucopia and it’s a representation of the portal in a sense that everything flows out of. So you can think about it in some ways. Have you ever watched those time lapse photographs of a flower opening? Of course you have. You know how it sort of comes out of nowhere and manifests itself? That’s what the cornucopia is, a representation of the place from which all new forms constantly emerge. And that’s what you’re supposed to be thankful for at Thanksgiving. And you should be thankful for it. It would be a pretty gizmo world if that stopped happening. And then there’s this, the object to be fertilized, the source of all things, the fecund and the pregnant. That kind of helps explain why it’s the representation of the feminine that was used to represent the unknown because the unknown is the place that all new forms emerge from. And that makes it fundamentally feminine. So that’s one domain of unconscious symbolism. Things get assimilated to this too. So for example, the strange is part of the unknown. Strange idea can be part of the unknown. The emotional, and that’s because emotion overtakes you. You know, you’re at a movie and all of a sudden poof, you dissolve in tears. It’s like it wells up from where? From the unknown interior and possesses you. At the same time it does with everyone else in the movie, or everyone else who’s tuned in and who has some feelings. So other representations of the same domain. The foreigner. That’s a person who comes from foreign lands because they’re contaminated with things you don’t understand. And sometimes that can be terrible because the thing they’re contaminated with, especially in the dark recesses of human history, the illnesses. We not only know where the great plague comes from, but we know that it came on ships. And so people left Italy because that’s where the plague seemed to first manifest itself. They left, they went somewhere, picked up some new rats, came home and like poof, a third of Europe was dead. It was even worse when the Europeans went to the New World, right? Because as soon as the New World natives shook hands with the Europeans it was like bang, 95% of them died in the next 50 years. So the idea that the foreigner is contaminated with the unknown, that’s a non-trivial idea. And if it isn’t the pathogens they carry then it’s their damn ideas that come sneaking into your culture and just blow it into bits over a fair number of decades. It’s something to be terrified of. By the same token, there’s incalculable wealth that’s been generated culturally and materially as a consequence of the intermingling of human beings from all over the world. So it’s another one of those situations where it gives with one hand and it takes with the other. Hell, death and the grave. The moon, ruler of the night and the mysterious star. Matter, matter, matrix, mother, same root words. And the earth, mother earth. So all those images are related to the same underlying well of meaning. That’s a representation of that which is always beyond you from which all new things come and to which all things return. That’s the unknown. Artists are very good at representing this sort of thing. This is quite nasty so these are your basic hell-like monsters devouring other monsters which maybe might actually be a good thing. So that’s a representation in some sense of the war of everything against everything. You know the old idea about nature being red in tooth and claw and everything devouring everything else to keep existing. And a representation too of the sort of pain and strife that goes along with a life that’s even quite peaceful. Nature’s a vicious place and you have to contend with it and you don’t know what it’s up to and it’s virtually impossible to keep up with it. In Alice in Wonderland, Mother Nature’s there and that’s the Red Queen. The Red Queen. And she’s the one who’s always yelling off with their heads when they’re trying to play croquet. It’s like really? You know that just doesn’t seem civilized. And it’s the Red Queen who says to Alice, in my kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. That’s a good definition of life because nature is always transforming. This is Callie, the devourer. It’s a Hindu representation. And well, she’s quite the character as you can see. I can tell you a little bit about the image in the middle so that you kind of have some sense of what this, like religious images are often trying to represent these fundamental realities that I’ve been describing. These underlying structures of perception and cognition. So Callie here is kind of a, she’s a representation of all the things that you should run away from screaming. Which is a good category. It’s like the category of monsters and horror. And so let’s investigate her. So first of all, she’s a spider. That’s why she has eight legs. You know, people don’t like spiders much because they’re kind of poisonous. And they spin webs and capture the unwary and then devour them. So she’s in this web of fire. That’s the kind of column or arch around her. And the fire is full of skulls. You can see the skulls inside the fire. So it’s like a web of flaming skulls, you know. It doesn’t get more awful than that really. And then her hair’s on fire and she wears a headdress of skulls and then she’s got a few weapons in case you’re not already terrified enough. And then she often has the tongue of a tiger, although I don’t know if she does in that image. And then often there’s a snake wrapped around her waist. But in this case it’s not a snake. You see those sort of coily things around her belly. Her belly is sunken. That’s because she just gave birth to the guy that she’s standing on and she’s devouring him by the intestines. So that’s Kelly. And it’s a representation of everything you really don’t want to mess with. And you should be very, very careful about. And if you make the proper sacrifices to Kelly, well, then maybe she’ll show you her benevolent side and that would be a really good thing. And you know, people have been making sacrifices to gods forever and goddesses to try to get them to stop, you know. And you know, it’s very easy for modern people to think about that as a superstition. But it’s not a superstition. It’s one of the most fundamental discoveries of mankind. And the discovery was, if you let go of something that you value now, maybe you’ll get something better in the future. It’s like that is, that’s the discovery of time. It’s a phenomenal achievement. Human beings are the only people who’ve discovered it consciously. Like bees make honey and they store it up for the winter, but probably they don’t know what they’re up to. But human beings can understand that a terrible fate might confront you. But if you make the right sacrifices now, you’ll propitiate fate and you’ll survive and thrive into the future. And that’s why you’re all here at university instead of, well, I presume you do no shortage of partying, but at least you’re not doing it right now. You know, you’re making sacrifices to be here. And the idea is that if you sacrifice your valuable time, the time of your youth now, that the fates will smile on you in the future. And then, you know, if you didn’t believe that, you wouldn’t be here. So you believe it. And you act it out. You understand it psychologically and conceptually, and archaic people understood it practically and dramatically, but it was the same thing. You better make sacrifices and hope that you can turn this into its benevolent counterpart. Well, then there’s culture. This is another domain of symbols. It’s a very attractive domain of symbols. To the degree that you’re an aficionado of a sports team, you’re tangled up by your symbolic longing for a place within a culture. And it’s so tied up with your psychological being that you will act like the team is you. In fact, one of the weird things about human beings is that they’ll often celebrate the victories of their heroes or their teams more intensely than they would ever celebrate anything that ever happened to them. I mean, how often do you see people at work, you know, throw their hands up in the air and then run out in the hallways and dance around because something good has happened? It’s like it never happens. But if it’s a football game or a hockey game, people will paint up their faces and when which is a symbolic act too, right? Because, you know, human beings like to hit the target. There’s a sexual element to that, but there’s also an element of hunting and there’s an element of specifying your target and achieving it, you know, and doing that cooperatively with all the other people on your team and competitively in relationship to the other team. It’s a real little microcosm. But the point is, is the symbolic element of that will grab you, just like you’re a primitive tribesman and you won’t even notice. People think, oh, I’m just having a party because my team won. It’s like, yes, you are some peculiar creature. So, you know, all the teams, they have their tribal logos essentially, you know, and all the iconography that goes with it and they’re treated almost as if they’re sacred objects by people who are the fans. You know, they’ll go look at the silver cup and they’re happy if it comes to their town. It’s like, don’t be thinking you’re not superstitious. You know, it’s just that our modern superstitions are invisible to us and we don’t notice they’re there. It’s like, you’re superstitious right to the core and human beings have always been. Culture, superego, Freud’s categories, id, ego, superego, map quite nicely onto nature, individual culture. So that’s kind of interesting. The king, the patriarch, the plow, the phallus, order and authority and tradition, the wise old man and the tyrant, dogma, the day sky, because it’s illuminated, it’s illuminated. The day sky is masculine and it’s symbolic nature. Your countrymen, your brother, the island, the heights, the ancestral spirits and the activity of the dead. To the degree that you’re patriotic, no, you’re possessed by the symbolism of culture and the symbolism of the known. You would regard that as a virtue, right? What’s more important to you? Your own being or your family or your own being or your family or your culture? Which is more you? Well, it’s not obvious and depending on the situation people make different decisions. As soon as it’s wartime, everybody says, oh my culture is more important than me and off they march. You know, even if it’s World War I, all they’re marching to is, you know, continual death. There’s no, you’re gripped by these things in ways that you just cannot understand. Captain Hook, he’s a great representation of the negative element of culture. So Hook, why does he have a hook? Why does Captain Hook have a hook? A crocodile bit it off, right? And what does a crocodile have in its stomach? And what does that mean? Time. So what’s bit old Captain Hook’s hand off? Time. It’s chasing him around. It’s going to take him under. It’s already got a taste of him. And so he’s terrified of that. So he’s an adult male, right? He’s terrified of that. He’s a tyrant. He’s already lost a hand to time. Now that damn crocodile, that’s that horrible serpentine thing that lives underneath the depths. First chance it gets, it’s going to take the rest of it. He’s terrified about that. It makes him into a tyrant. Peter Pan looks at him. He’s the only adult male around. Fundamentally he thinks, there’s no damn way I’m going to be a tyrant who’s chased by the crocodile of time. I’m going to stay a little boy forever. That doesn’t work so well, right? Because all he gets is Tinkerbell, who doesn’t even exist, and he has to let Wendy go off and be real. You know, it’s an eternal story of not growing up in the face of tyranny. And it’s a story that won’t go away either. And it’s a story that people act out like you wouldn’t believe. And then there’s the old man in the top right. That’s Stalin, by the way, that he’s kissing. I mean, really, think about that. Stalin probably killed somewhere between 30 and 60 million people. That’s a lot of people. But, nonetheless, this old man is so gripped by what he represents in his sort of gold wisdom that this is after the wall fell down, that he can’t stop himself from worshipping this thing that was so barbaric that it defies description. The good old days. Yeah, well, they weren’t so good. That’s a good representation of Stalin. That’s for sure. A terrible element of culture. And that’s patriotism gone wrong. Stalin, yes. Everybody’s family favourite. I really like the one on the right. He’s like the devil standing in the flames of hell. It’s really quite lovely, you know, because it’s very, very accurate. And then there’s Hitler, you know, the 20th century’s other manifestation of the horrible face of culture. A person who was able to produce mass hysteria of his followers, you know, and who represented for them everything that was noble about so-called Aryan culture. All of that was the consequence. It’s like nature can do you in, but so can culture. And that’s why, you know, your proclivity to identify with things, to identify with groups and to identify with states, to identify with cultures, it’s like the greatest gift you have because it makes you civilized and cooperative, but it’s also like one of the most horrible things about you because if it’s activated properly, it’s nothing more dangerous than you. I told you about this, but we’ll go over it just briefly again because it’s very important. So this is the Taoist symbol. That symbol is Dao. Dao essentially means meaning, but it also means the way. It means a bunch of things. And Dao, for the Daoist, is what things are made of. It’s the underlying reality of things. And for the Daoists, that’s more like meaning than it is like material. Or another way you can think about it is more like information than it is like material. And so the Daoists think that experience, you can’t say reality because it’s not the same conception, that experience is meaningful and that the meaning is the primary reality. And the meaning differentiates itself as it emerges and it differentiates itself first into masculine and feminine, essentially into the structure that you use to perceive reality, that’s culture. And what it is that you’re perceiving, and that’s nature. And it’s a lovely conception. It’s different than the way people look at the world in the modern world, but it’s parallel and I think it’s, if not more useful, it’s certainly equally useful because it helps you understand and articulate elements of your own experience that can’t be understood from a framework that has a different underlying structure. So you know that sometimes you’re comfortable and that things are going well for you. And you know that sometimes all hell’s broken loose and you’ve fallen through the ice and you’re dazed and confused and maybe you won’t get up again. And you know that those are two different places and that you’d rather be in the former than the latter. And you also know that there are certain ways that you should act to make sure that you stay where it’s comfortable and interesting rather than wandering off to where it’s like terrible beyond belief. Now you could call that in some sense your innate sense of morality. It’s a kind of intelligence, but it’s deeper than that. And as I said in the other class, the other thing that’s lovely about the Taoist interpretation is that it’s the interplay between these two things that constantly brings reality forth and that if you balance them properly, which is the aim of a properly religious life from the Taoist perspective, then you have all the benefits of what you understand and what you’re familiar with, order, and then you have the excitement of having one foot in the unknown. And that’s a perfect place for human beings to be because not only do we want to stay with what we are and conserve it if it’s good, but we want to continually transform it so that it gets better and better and better. So I can give you an example of this. I’ll give you two quick examples and you’ll understand what I mean. So imagine you’re watching a gymnastics performance, two of them, and the first performer comes out, it’s like the Olympics. The first performer comes out and man, this person is like perfect. You can tell they’ve spent $10,000 because that’s what you need to master something. Like working on these routines and like every single movement they make is impeccable. And the routine goes on for a few minutes and then it ends and the person’s, you know, they’re triumphant about it and everybody claps and the judges are all like 9.9 out of 10. And people are pretty happy about that. And so we’re all hooked into that because we’ve seen someone demonstrate mastery. And so we’re thrilled about that because it shows that that’s what a human being can do and we’re human beings too and so, you know, yay for us. And so then the next candidate comes out and they’ve got a real problem because of course what they have to face and overcome is perfection itself. And you might think, well how in the world could you possibly do that? And so they get out there and this performance is different. It’s got everybody on the edge of their seats because they watched that person go through their absolutely perfect routine but they had one twist to it. They push it so hard that you can tell by watching them that at every single second of their performance they’re like this close to disaster. So they’ve taken their perfection and they’ve pushed it to the point where while they’re competing they’re improving themselves. They’re taking that risk. And that’s the sort of phenomena that makes everybody in the audience go absolutely dead quiet because everyone’s on their edge of their seat thinking, oh my god, is this going to work? Is this going to work? Are they going to pull it off? And so people are holding their breath and they’re tied right into it. And then that person ends and you know they do their little triumphant landing and everybody’s on their feet roaring. And that’s because they just saw someone do this perfect mastery plus they pushed themselves beyond that. And so that’s the proper way to play a game. You’re not just playing it but while you’re playing it you’re improving your ability to play it. Here’s a representation of that. A medieval representation. Here’s the gnome and here’s the explorer pushing his head out past the dome of the gnome. For a long time that’s what people thought reality was, right? It was this disk that everyone lived in with this dome over top of it. That’s where the stars were. That’s because if you go out in the field at night, well that’s kind of what it looks like. It looks like you’re on a big disk with a dome over top of it. He’s gone beyond that. He’s trying to understand what’s outside the realm of his comprehension. And that’s what human beings are like. We’re always poking our nose out past our limitations and trying to master the things that we haven’t yet mastered. And there’s real meaning in that. Maybe that’s the deepest meaning that you can experience in life is the capacity to master something and then to continually extend your mastery at the rate that you see fit, at the rate that’s optimal for you. And then there’s the opposite of that. So just as the great father has its enemy, the tyrant and the great mother has its enemy, the devourer, then the individual has its enemy. This is a very interesting representation from ancient Egypt. This is Horus, and this is Seth. Seth is the Egyptian precursor to the later Christian idea of Satan. In this representation, it’s good and evil that are, this is like the tree of life here, and what they’re doing is sort of spinning it back and forth. The idea here is that human existence is a dynamic interaction between these two forces, one aiming at enlightenment and good and the other aiming at darkness. And that’s what that represents too, except in this representation, it’s the overcoming of the darkness, where that also happens in the Egyptian stories, but not in that particular representation. So you have the known or the unknown and its two elements, negative and positive, and you have the known and its two elements, negative and positive, and then you have the individual and its two elements, negative and positive. And the interaction between those categories makes up stories fundamentally. And all the stories that you ever hear about, how it is that you should live or shouldn’t live, are different juxtapositions of those characters and their interactions. And the more archetypal the story, the more clearly the case that structure is. So for example, in the Thor movies, Loki and Thor are sons of Zeus, right? So Zeus is the great father, and he produces hostile brothers. And that’s the same, that’s echoed in Christian stories by God and Christ and Satan, it’s the same idea. And Cain and Abel, and you see these hostile brother patterns everywhere. And that’s because people have to contend with what opposes them, not only outside in the world when they’re contending against their opponents, some of whom are corrupt and deceitful, but also within themselves when they’re trying to set themselves straight and to keep at bay all those elements of their own character that seem to work at cross purposes to themselves. It’s a very strange thing about people, you know. We can’t just tell ourselves what to do. We’re inhabited by all these strange sub-personalities that have a certain amount of autonomy, and they’re off doing whatever they want to at any given time, and they’re very difficult to bring under control. It’s very hard to be the master of your own house. So I subdivided up reality for you in one way. And so for the time being, we’re done with that. Now I want to subdivide reality up in another way, because you can’t understand what’s going on in the heroic and shamanic initiations and in the worldview that’s encapsulated there, and the implication of that worldview for the understanding of phenomena like the unconscious and unconscious symbolism without looking at the world from one other perspective. So here’s a decomposition of your computer, let’s say. So first of all, we’ll imagine your computer’s working. So then you might think, well, what is your computer when it’s working? And then that’s a hard question to ask, because it’s, well, your keyboard, because you’re clicking on the keyboard in all likelihood, and then there’s the screen, or there’s what’s on the screen, because you’re not actually looking at the screen, right? You’re looking at what’s on the screen. It isn’t even clear where that is. But the computer, while you’re using it, sort of collapses itself down into what you’re watching on the screen and what you’re interacting with. That’s the computer. And then all of a sudden, poof, it stops working. So you have an emotional response to that, right? Like the monkey who’s just seen a jaguar. It upsets you. And the reason it upsets you is because you actually don’t have a clue about your computer, and it either works, well, some of you more than others. It either works and then it’s a computer, or it doesn’t work, in which case God only knows what it is or what you’re going to do about it. So this is a good example of how what you understand can collapse into what you don’t understand, because a computer turns out to be an unbelievably complicated thing. And it can fail for innumerable reasons. And if you want to fix it, then you have to take into account its insane complexity and start to piece it back together so that it starts to behave like the computer you want it to be, instead of like a oblong rock. So what do you have to do? Well, I represented the computer as that little black rectangle in the middle, and I expanded it down one level. So your computer is obviously full of subcomponents, right, of all sorts. The boards and chips and all the little things inside of the electronic things that all of which when they work you can ignore, but when they don’t work, instantly constitute a whole nest of snakes. And so any of those subcomponents could have gone wrong. And then the subcomponents are made up of even smaller parts, of course, and any of those could go wrong, and then underneath that there’s the elemental properties that the micro parts have to contend with in order to function. And sometimes, well, sometimes weird things happen down there. So I don’t know if you know this or not, but computer chips have now got so small that there’s only some probability that the electrons that are flowing along a given wire will actually be in that wire. Because the uncertainty principle specifies that electron is probably here, but it might also be somewhere else, and at small enough levels of resolution or high enough levels of resolution, that actually starts to become a problem. So the electrons can just get outside the wires, and that causes shorts. So probably your computer isn’t failing because of some pathology at the quantum level of reality, but you never know. A subcomponent might not be working properly. A subcomponent might not be working properly. Ah, but there’s other ways of considering the problem, too. You might say, this is the last time I ever buy a compact computer. And then what you’re doing is you’re attributing the cause of its failure to act like a computer to the brand. And then you might say, well, I bought a computer from an economic system that’s still somewhat pathological. So you might say, well, it’s a Chinese part, for example. And as a consequence, the brand isn’t reliable. And the reason the brand isn’t reliable is because the economic system isn’t reliable, and that’s because the political system isn’t reliable. So maybe the reason your computer doesn’t function is because the political system that surrounds the manufacturer doesn’t function well. So you end up with a cheap part, and it doesn’t work. And so all of those, as soon as your computer stops being what it is to you, which is the keyboard and the screen, or what’s behind the screen, say, then all of a sudden it turns into all these other things that it could be. And in order to get it working like a computer again, or even to replace it, you have to contend with all of these other multiple levels of reality. So there’s two lessons from that. One is, well, that’s why you get stressed when something stops working. It’s because when it’s working, it’s doing what you want it to do. And that’s what it is. The fact that it’s doing what you want it to do defines what it is. But as soon as it stops working, God only knows what it is. You know, cars are like that, except they’re even worse, because with a computer you can usually just throw it away and replace it, and you know, maybe that’s a couple hundred dollars. But maybe something went wrong with your car. Well, that’s a complete bloody catastrophe, because not only does it not function as a car, now it’s just a hunk of metal, but you have to take it to someone who you don’t know to fix it, and who knows what they’re going to do with it. Like they might fix it, but they might not, or they might fix something that actually isn’t wrong, or they might overcharge you. I mean, there’s a whole rat’s nest that’s associated with having your car break down, and that tangles you right up. It’s funny, because as soon as the car breaks down, then you have to contend with the whole culture that surrounds the car and any of the, all of the pathology that might be embedded in that culture. Okay, so one way of thinking about this. Computers like that, it manifests itself on multiple levels simultaneously, but so do people, and so do all other phenomena, but we’ll stick with people for now. You know, there’s a level at which you’re phenomenologically apparent, and that’s the level at which we all see each other. I can see your front, but not the back of you, or the sides of you, and I can see your outside, but not your inside, and I can see you, but I can’t see your family that surrounds you, although if I was a chimpanzee, and we were looking at each other, and I knew you were a high status chimpanzee, my body would detect your family, because I would know that if I messed with you, they’d come after me. And so I would perceive your nesting in the social group, even though, you know, you’d sort of manifest yourself to me as just a body, but my physiology would be smarter than that. So another way of thinking about the world is like this, and this is a very old symbol as well, so this is like the Tree of Life. So this is the Scandinavian Tree of Life, which is called Yggdrasil, and then interestingly enough, there’s a Peruvian Tree of Life from the Amazonian jungle, so that’s quite cool, I would say, because those look remarkably similar. So, right down to the fact that, see at the bottom here, this is rooted in chaos, so down here, maybe you can see it, there are snakes, and the snakes are eating the roots, and they’re always doing that, but there’s water down there, and at the same rate that the snakes eat the roots, the water makes the roots grow, and so there’s an idea that this whole multi-level manifestation of reality is grounded in a chaos that constantly renews itself, and it’s serpentine, and then in the one next to it, you can see there’s the mountain there, like there is in this representation, but you see that big snake that’s around the mountain? It’s biting its tail there, that’s called a Herobros, so that’s another indication of the idea that order, that’s culture, is surrounded by chaos, chaos is represented by that big snake, and I think in this one there’s a snake down here too, yeah, so there’s a snake in the Scandinavian World Tree, just like there is in the tree, by the way, in Genesis, right, so, and then there’s this tree which is being drawn by a woman named Angelica Gebhard-Seyer, who went to the Peruvian jungle and asked the shaman there about the visions of the world, and then drew this picture as a consequence of what they told her, and what you notice is, well, there’s a tree, and there’s this big snake that surrounds it, and so that’s an archetypal idea, and so archetypal that, you know, the ancient Scandinavians and the Peruvian shaman in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest can have the same vision, and the vision of reality is associated with that multi-level idea that I just told you about, you know, how can the world be like a tree? Well, the world’s like a tree that sprouts up from the tiniest places up into the grandest areas, it has multiple levels of resolution, and that’s what this represents, and it’s a really lovely way of thinking about things, it’s not a way that we think about them, normally, but it’s relevant, right, because what you are isn’t just what you present phenomenologically, which is what everyone else experiences, it’s all the microsystems that you’re made up of that are invisible, and that can go wrong, and that have to be diagnosed and fixed, and then just like that you’re embedded in your families and your larger cultures and so on, and if there’s pathology there, there’s pathology in you as well. And so you are structured in this tree-like matrix of interconnections right from the subatomic level all the way up to the cosmic level, it’s all affecting you all simultaneously, and this is a very nice way of representing that. I’ll show you one more picture, and then we’ll stop. My son drew this when he was eight, and he had a very well-ordered psyche, which I was quite happy about, but let me show you, I thought it was amazing when he came to church, so I had it laminated, it’s in my office, so first of all, you have this, that’s order, those are all mushroom houses for reasons I really don’t understand, and all of his friends live in those mushroom houses and they all have his friend’s name on them, they’ve got little fires, kids always draw that, eh, there’s always a chimney with a fire, who knows why. So that’s order, and then there’s the line down the middle like the yin and yang line, and then on the other side, here’s nature and chaos, right, and then the tree of life grows right in the middle, so that’s the sort of Jack and the Beanstalk tree of life, right, and what’s happening, you may see, see there’s a ladybug here, and then there’s another ladybug on the vine, and I guess that’s him, and he climbs up the tree of life into heaven, because that’s heaven up there, and then climbs back down, and with information, and so what he’s doing, well he’s balancing order and chaos, he’s climbing up and down the eternal tree of life to the realm of his ancestors, and then coming back, so amazing. If you listen to kids’ dreams and if you watch what they draw, you see them produce these sorts of archetypal things all the time, and it’s, you know, it’s not exactly instinctual, right, it’s like there’s a matrix that has a form that can be filled in by cultural content, I mean he’d heard Jack and the Beanstalk, and you know, he’d watched Disney movies and read all sorts of books, and so he could pick up the patterns from those things, and manifest themselves, but it’s still, it’s remarkable, it’s very difficult to account for. Oh well, we’ll account for it a bit more on Thursday.