https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NOzjfqO6-K8
I’ve become aware over the last five years or so that maybe longer, that there’s a significant overlap between the concepts that I’m telling you about and Heidegger’s work. I didn’t know that. You know, ideas come from lots of different places. It’s hard to track them down. But when Heidegger was trying to, what Heidegger’s philosophical program essentially consisted of was the rediscovery of being. Now, he believed that prior to the ancient Greeks, who were quite rational and modern in their approach to the world, that people lived in a relationship with being that was much less mediated by interpretive structures, I suppose is one way of thinking about it. And he thought of being as something that was in frame. And the framing, which is also a term that I use, the framing restricts the manner in which being is able to manifest itself. So it’s like a reduction of being to something specific. Now, it’s pretty obvious, and Heidegger obviously knew this, that in order to interact with something, you have to simultaneously not interact with everything. So you have to reduce the phenomena to a pinpoint before you can actually interact with it in any immediately useful manner. But one of Heidegger’s points was that that also restricts our ability to be in direct contact with being, and he thought of that as the ground of meaning. Now, I think there’s different sorts of meaning, and perhaps Heidegger did too. There’s the meaning of the thing that reveals itself to you. And so that would be the meaning of an anomaly in some sense. And then there’s the meaning of the framework that you use to interpret the situation. And then there’s the meaning that you experience when you transform the framework that you use to look at things. And those are all forms of meaning, and they’re all interrelated. But it has striking to me Heideggerian approach to this, because in some sense he was also reacting to Nietzsche’s ideas about the death of God. It was an attempt to help people reorient themselves in the world in the novel historical situation where we had become detached in some ways from our traditional religious beliefs, which were in some sense a form of framing. One of the things Jung said about religion, he said the purpose of a religion was to stop you from having religious experiences. It’s quite an interesting way of thinking about it, because what Jung was claiming was that the purpose of a religious system was to filter the overwhelming power of being down to a point where you could tolerate conceptualizing it. But the price he paid for that was a certain kind of arbitrary limitation. You’re always paying the price for arbitrary limitation, but it would be nice if you could also transcend that from time to time and realize that there’s meaning outside of the frameworks that you generally inhabit, and that you can narrow those frameworks so much that you don’t get any of the revivifying form of meaning. Jung would think of that when he was thinking about it symbolically. He would think about that as the absence of the water of life, for example, which is a very common motif in fairy tales. The king is old and desperate and dying, and the only thing that will save him is the water of life. This great-grandmothers-brother fairy tale is called the water of life. It has exactly that theme. It’s got a perfect mythological structure. Now, I think I showed you guys this last time. Is that correct? Do you recognize that? Okay. So that kind of summed up our discussion about the dragon of chaos. What I was trying to communicate, which I think is a very, very difficult thing, is that there are many different ways of conceptualizing the ground of being, and you can do it from an objective perspective, and that’s a very useful tool, but I think that is a form of framing. It’s not so much a description of the nature of being per se, and the being that we were speaking of, I think, is properly conceptualized, at least for some purposes, in relationship to this diagram, which says, well, being is a field of information from which you derive the common objects and entities that you interact with, but also from which you derive your own structure, your own experience, and your own mechanisms of framing. And so you can think of reality as that which allows for the derivation of those two things. I also made the case to you that I think you can make a strong case that that’s actually how your brain works. Like, your brain acts like that’s the way the world is. And then a secondary case that if that’s how your brain acts, and you’re a Darwinian, you’re faced with quite a problem if you are attempting to make the claim that the objective world is the ultimate reality, because that isn’t how your brain is set up, and at least in principle, it evolved so that you wouldn’t die because of your foolish ideas, embodied or otherwise. Anyways, you can wrestle through that in your own minds. It’s a very difficult thing to conceptualize. Now, one of the things that’s characteristic of this particular diagram is that, and you’ve seen this in the book, this is a bit of an elaboration of the idea of what happens to you when you encounter an anomaly. And what happens is, fundamentally, that your body prepares to do all manners of things. Some of those are negative, like they’re experienced as negative emotions, because they’re fundamentally defensive and protective. So, they can involve pain and frustration and disappointment and shame and guilt and all of those sorts of things, as well as fear. But then the other side of that is, well, there’s riches to be had when you encounter something novel, and so the parts of your mind that are associated with creative exploration and the reconfiguring of ideas should also be put on alert, and that is what seems to happen. Your response to an anomaly is to prepare to do everything. And that can be very exciting. It can be extremely compelling. So, one of the things that I think is really worth thinking about, and this is something we’ll cover a lot as the class comes to a halt, because this is one of the only optimistic ideas I’ve ever been able to derive from psychology that I actually think might be true. And it’s a really optimistic idea. If you accept the idea that it’s reasonable to construe the ground of reality in this manner, and then you take seriously the two things, the fact of your embodied motivational and emotional response, that’s one thing, and then the fact of the hierarchy of anomaly, so that some things are anomalous in a kind of trivial manner, and then some things are anomalous in an absolutely terrifying manner. But, so if you accept that, you can draw a further inference, which is, well, maybe sometimes things are anomalous in an optimal manner. Now, and then I would say, well, what would define that optimality? Well, let’s assume that there is a meaningful ground of reality, and then let’s assume that there’s a framing system that you have to use to deal with that, and that’s partly biological, but it’s also partly a consequence of enculturation. And then let’s assume that that framing system can get outdated. So that’s all associated with the stories that we’ve been talking about so far. So then let’s assume that the fact that it can be outdated is also an existential problem. So it’s a constant problem, so that not only do you need to have a framing system, but you need to have a mechanism that you can engage in to update the framing system optimally. And then we can take that one step further and say, that’s built right into you. It’s part of your nature, it’s part of your biology, it’s part of the structure of your consciousness. And then we can say, well, here’s a hypothesis. What if that’s what’s happening when you get engaged with something? So imagine what your brain is trying to do, roughly speaking, is to situate you in relationship to being so that you can both tolerate it, you can tolerate it, appreciate it, frame it, and stay on top of it. And that your mind has to be able to signal to you when you’re doing that. And I think that’s what happens when you’re captured by something and you get engaged in it. And then the other thing that’s happening is what’s happening is your mind is telling you, your experience is telling you, you’re exactly situated in the right place. You’re stable enough so you’re not going to fall apart, but you’re fluid enough so that you’re not going to fall prey to excess stability. And then the experience of that is an experience of engaged meaning, but there are phenomena that are associated with that too, like it’s easy to pay attention. It’s just straightforward. It’s easy to pay attention to things that you’re engaged by. And I think that that’s because your mind, roughly speaking, your brain, knows that information flow is maximized there. So you’re not going to be terrified and you’re not going to be bored. You’re going to be engaged. You don’t fall apart and you stay updated. And so the way you experience that is that the meaning is optimized under those conditions. You’re deep into the material, so to speak, and it’s meaningful. It’s directly meaningful. Yes? So would this be a framework to explain why, say, novel music or stories or an engrossing video game even would induce that kind of space? Yeah, sure. You know it’s another world so you’re safe, but also it’s an unfolding experience. It’s both of those at the same time. You don’t want to play a video game where there are no rules. And you don’t want to play a video game where the rules transform so rapidly and erratically that there’s no way you can model them. You want to play a video game where you can suspend disbelief. You know, there’s some play with the axioms, so maybe there’s some things about the model of reality that aren’t exactly like real reality. But once that framework is established, once the rule-governed framework is established, there’s play inside of it. And that’s very engrossing. And I think part of the reason it’s engrossing is, one, you actually learn things from playing games because in some sense you’re always playing a game. Because you’re always inside a reality that’s bounded by a certain set of assumptions. And it’s not the total reality. It’s like a game-like representation of the total reality. And hopefully it’s a good enough game-like representation. One of the things I was thinking about in relationship to video games was, you know, I’ve read critiques of video games where people complain about young people generally being engaged in video games to the expense of having a real life. And then I was thinking, I don’t know if you know about Edward, I think his name is Edward Castronova. Now he’s an economist who studied video games. And he did this quite a while ago. I think it’s got to be more than ten years ago now. But he made the claim at that point that one of the big massive online player games, I think it was World of Warcraft, but that might be wrong, was like the 20th largest economy in the world. Really. Not in any fake way. Partly because you could sell artifacts that you were producing on eBay, for example. But also partly because people traded within it. And there was no reason to assume that the additional level of abstraction that that video game represented was necessarily any more abstract than what we were already doing in economies. So then you could ask yourself, for example, think about this. Is it more real to lead a band of adventurers through a complex mythological reality in an online game or to work at McDonald’s? Now you’d say, well, to work at McDonald’s, because that’s real, but let’s think about that for a minute. So exactly why is it real? I mean, first of all, McDonald’s couldn’t exist unless it was nested in a whole bunch of other things, right? So it has to be nested in a functional capitalist economy, and that has to be nested inside a functional political system, and then there’s all sorts of other preconditions in terms of material supply and so forth that have to be in place before you’re able to work there and receive tokens for your labor. Okay. So the same thing applies to the video game. And you might say, well, how do you determine which of those is real? And I would say, well, maybe one of the ways of determining whether a game is real is, to what degree do you practice a wide range of the subsets of skills that would be transferable to other games while you’re playing that game? And I think you can make a case that if you’re playing a very complex video game, that the activities that you’re engaging in, which involve leadership and cooperation and communication and problem solving, are actually a more comprehensive subset of the skills that you would have to develop to work in the world as a complex place than what you would pick up at McDonald’s. Now, you know, obviously you can argue about that, but it’s not self-evident. So back to framing. Well, you know, one of the things the video game and types of media, one of the things that the video game designers really try to do is put you in the zone of proximal development. Now, that’s a term from Vygotsky, who was a Russian developmental psychologist who was probably the most influential developmental psychologist apart from Piaget. Now, what Vygotsky noticed was that when parents talk to their children, they talk to them constantly at a level that slightly exceeded what they could comprehend. And you think, that’s so cool, because on one hand they’re communicating with their children because the children can understand what they’re saying, but on the other hand, they’re teaching them to communicate, to understand more things at the same time. They’re doing that at exactly the same time. And he thought of that as the zone of proximal development because it was sort of dragging the kids past their current state of comprehension and understanding and in framing into the next set. And it’s sort of analogous to the principle that I had mentioned to you earlier about playing a game in a manner that not only helps you win that game, but helps you win all the other games that you’re going to play after you play that game. And that’s playing the game at the zone of proximal development because it involves generalization. And I would say that, you know, one of the real debates in psychology, and it’s an appalling debate as far as I’m concerned, is what is it that you can use to buttress yourself against the undeniable catastrophes of existence? You know, because it’s obvious to everyone that existence is tragic in its fundamental essence, right, because people are limited and flawed and mortal. It’s like, that’s a big problem. Well, now hypothetically that was addressed quite well by traditional religious structures. But then our ability to assume that they were reasonable ways of framing existence is being badly damaged or called into question by the rise of scientific materialistic and objective thinking. So the psychological, like the academic psychological response to that has been in many ways that, well, your in framing only shields yourself, shields you from the tragedy of being, and that’s what it is. It’s a defense mechanism, and that’s the terror management, guys. It’s right, fundamentally your basic problem is that you’re terrified of dying and there’s not a bloody thing that can be done about that, so you have to, you know, put up shields of various sorts so that you’re not constantly assaulted by that problem as you go through your life. And it’s a variant of Freudian theory. So that’s one theory, and then there’s a variant theory which is positive illusions, you know, which is the idea that, it’s closely related, is that you can just delude yourself in an optimal way about the structure of being so that you can pretend that things are going to work out better for you than they probably are, and then you don’t have to be worried about the fact that it’s tragic because you just concentrate on your simplistic, optimistical, you know, illusions. It’s like, those are damn dismal theories because they basically say that if you wake, woke up and opened your eyes, what you see would be so terrible that you would die, you know, or that you would want to die that it would drive you to suicide. You know, that’s a, you’ve got to be careful before you tell people that that sort of thing is true because you’re undermining their capacity to live a genuine existence, and you’re also saying, well, you can’t live a genuine existence because the weight of it would be so heavy that it would destroy you, or it would drive you into a position where you want it to be destroyed. It’s like, well, before we get so damn pessimistic about it, we might start thinking about whether there are other phenomena that aren’t illusory or delusional or defense mechanisms that actually are characterized by meaning. And so, one of the things I suggested to you at the beginning of class, this class, was that you watch what you said to find out if what you said was making you stronger or weaker and that you can actually feel that. That’s kind of a Rogerian idea because Rogers would say that if what you’re saying wasn’t in sync with your embodied being, roughly speaking, because Rogers was really an embodied theorist, that you would feel that as a kind of discordance and that that would weaken you. And so, it’s a much older and deeper idea than that, but Rogers articulated it very well. Well, there’s another experiment that you can run that’s also very much worth attending to, which is watch and see what’s meaningful. Don’t think about it. Just notice, notice, when you’re engaged in something enough so that the fact of you doing it is sufficient for the task. You know, because you could say, so think about it this way, okay, well, you’re a bounded creature, and so you’re beset on all sides by tragedy and limitation. Now, that might be necessary. There may be a reason why that’s the case, but we won’t ponder with that at the moment. We’ll talk about that later. The question then is, are there conditions under which you would regard that as acceptable? And the answer isn’t what I’ll think about. That’s the wrong answer. The right answer is, I’ll pay attention and notice if there are times like that. And I think that’s Horace, that noticing. That’s the eye. It’s not thinking. Because it’s not the framing process. It’s something outside of that. It’s something that’s watching. And I think if you notice, you’ll see if you go through your week, you’ll notice, because you have to sort of stand outside yourself and think, aha, I was really into that. I was pulled right inside it. And then you see phenomena that occur along with that, which Chick said in a highly detailed recently in his work on flow. You don’t notice the passing of time. You’re not self-conscious. And the activity is sustaining. You experience it as sustaining, even though it might be difficult. So it’s not a matter of just taking the easy way out and doing something fun. It’s not that at all. It can be that. It’s often you feel that way when you’re doing something that’s exceptionally challenging and difficult. And usually I think it’s those things that are, they’re real in relationship to your goal hierarchy. So they’re moving you forward in the way that you’ve determined that moving forward is appropriate insofar as you’ve sorted that out. So A implies B, and B implies C, and C implies D, and so forth. And you’ve sorted that all out. So maybe you’re working on an essay in a class that you find meaningful because you want to derive something useful from your education so that you’re a good citizen, so that you can live a proper life. And so the chaining of all those things makes the local activity quite richly meaningful because it’s properly contextualized. But then there’s the other element, which is when you’re pushing yourself beyond that, not only do you experience the meaning of what you’re doing in relationship to your goal hierarchy, you also transcend the goal hierarchy at the same time so that while you’re working towards realizing it, you’re also working towards transforming it and improving it all at the same time. And I think that you’re set up to experience that as the highest form of being. And then there’s a corollary to that, which is maybe if you spent the bulk of your time doing that, so you practiced at it, so you were doing it, maybe you’re doing it, I don’t know, you could figure it out for yourself. But my suspicions are that for many of you, that’s probably 5% of your weekly life. Maybe I’m wrong about that because it’s been a long time since I was your age. I can’t remember what it was like. But I do know when I survey undergraduates and I ask them how much time they waste, they’re telling me, generally speaking, it’s four to six hours a day. And I actually think it’s probably more than that. And so that’s time not spent in this particular state of mind. And it’s wasted time. Well, you even recognize it as wasted time because when someone asks you if it’s wasted time, you say yes. And it’s like, well, wasted. If it’s wasted and you know it, you’re obviously comparing that to some other sort of time that isn’t wasted, right, that you regard as valuable and meaningful and worth engaging in, even though it might be difficult and require discipline and all those sorts of things. So you might ask yourself, you know, if you have times during the week where you’re engaged enough in what you’re doing so that you find that intrinsically meaningful and it removes the burden of tragedy. And I don’t mean because you’re preoccupied. I mean because you’re experiencing what you’re doing as intrinsically worth the price. That’s a different thing. You might think, okay, well, what if you were in that state of mind 80% of the time? Or 85% of the time? Or 90% of the time? You know, and that requires a tremendous amount of discipline and organization and clarity of purpose. And it also requires a tremendous amount of truth. Because the enemy of setting yourself up so that you can do that is untruth. Because what happens is, to the degree that you engage in untruth, you contaminate your frames fundamentally. And then you’re in real trouble. Because you won’t be oriented properly if your frames are contaminated. And they’re contaminated to the degree that you build them out of nonsense and delusion. So, yes? No, I think it’s natural to be a chimpanzee sitting in the jungle spending 8 hours a day eating leaves. Because, you know, you’re not smart enough to do any better than that. You know what I mean? So, natural is a tough conception. Do you think, I guess what I mean, you think is a counterpart of like rest time. I mean, you could argue that that’s part of it. Oh, absolutely. You know, sometimes you have to fall asleep. And sometimes the right thing to do is to have leisure time. But I can tell you, you know, I know this from my own experience, that an hour of actual leisure time beats a month of undeserved holiday. And so I would say, well, what constitutes, you know, actual leisure time? It’s like, you don’t have anything that you should be doing at that moment that’s more important than having a break. And there’s nothing about that that’s self-deceptive. You know, like you’re not trying to escape from your responsibilities by watching a YouTube video about joggers falling on the ice or something like that, which apparently is quite a popular one at the moment. So, you know, and you know perfectly well that when you spend time like that, especially if you’re avoiding doing something that you know you should be doing, using your own standards of judgement, that all it does is make you sick. You know, like there’s a physical revulsion that goes along with that. And I think what that is, is your body telling you that you’re contaminating your being by engaging in such low-quality activity. Especially when there’s something else that you know you should be doing. And that’s not restful. I think that’s extremely stressful because what happens is you basically tear yourself in two, and one is a tyrant saying you’re useless and the other is like a cringing melt soft saying, yeah, but I can’t help it. You know, and it’s a terrible state of being to be in because you’re a tyrant and slave at the same time. And it’s very, very stressful. It’s not restful. I was just going to say, like, you’re describing a student because, like, I definitely need to take a break and watch the show for the whole time. Like, oh my gosh, like, and you’re hearing that essay as you’re constantly, like… Yeah, yeah. It’s a hard thing to balance. But, you know, and I think it takes real practice over years, you know, and part of what you’ve been reading about in the book, hypothetically, is the necessity of adopting an apprenticeship. You know, because you have to focus yourself in on something and really you have to focus in hard and you have to do it for quite a long time before you hammer yourself into a good enough shape so that you can even start telling the difference between reasonable use of leisure time and, you know, pathological time wasting, which are by no means the same thing. And it’s hard to get it right. It’s very hard to get it right. I think you have to attend a lot to internal cues. You know, so if you’re sitting in front of the screen and you’re feeling somewhat uneasy and disgusted by yourself, then you have to think, okay, just exactly what’s going on here. Am I being too hard on myself? I actually need a break? And I won’t allow that because I’m a tyrant? And so I’m sneaking one even though I’m tired and should have a break? That’s hard to get. Because then that would be an attitude rule issue, right? Are you, have you conceptualized the necessity for leisure properly? And then the other possibility is, well, you’re just being useless. And you know it. You know, and then that shouldn’t be happening. Something else should be happening. But it’s by no means a straightforward thing to get those things right. It’s hard. Now, I have a hint about that, you know, because I’ve worked with lots of people who, they’re not wasting time. Like, they’re not wasting five minutes. And it’s sometimes because the demand, like it’s usually because the demand’s on them. They put themselves in a position where the demands on them are so high that if they waste any time, they will fail. And so a typical person like that, a lot of you are going to end up in those situations if you’re lucky. You know, so a typical person like that has a challenging job. So it’s a complex job. They have to manipulate a lot of variables constantly. They have to be attentive, alert, focused, and conscientious. And they have to do that for long periods of time. Like, well, it depends on the level of attainment you’re after. But if you want to attain at the peak of your chosen discipline, it’s 60 to 80 hours a week. And those are concentrated, useful hours. Now, some are more useful than others because you’re going to get tired. But that’s what you’re aiming at. And then, you know, well, you want to have the kids. That’s a big issue, too. And if you want to do both of those, it’s like, ha, you don’t get, you don’t have time to waste. You don’t have any time to waste. You know, and so then you have to get hyper efficient. And then you have to ask yourself, yeah, but how much work should I do? You know, what’s the limit? It’s like, you know, where is the right limit? Well, the answer to that is quite straightforward. You can’t work any harder than you can sustain across weeks, months, and years. You know, so some of the people that I’ve counseled who are hyper efficient, one of the holes they fall into is they work so hard they start getting inefficient. And part of that is they’re not paying attention to their family. They’re guilty about their children. Maybe their relationship is becoming unstable, and that’s going to cost them time, man. Like, once you’re married, if you let that go, and you get into a divorce battle, and it’s a custody battle, you are screwed. So like, you have to really watch that and make sure it doesn’t happen, because it’s like a major illness to have that happen. It’s not good. And you know, you never really recover from it in some sense, because you end up with a fractured, you know, your close intimate relationships are fractured. Very difficult thing to sew up. You’re much more likely to get divorced in your second marriage than you were in your first. So it’s not like you can hop out of one into a solution. You know, and then also people tire themselves out. You know, so often with the more hyper efficient people, and often a lot of these people were women, and I think the reason for that is, you know, once they have kids in particular, they’re really torn between two sets of fundamental obligations, especially for the first three years of the kid’s life. You know, and so it’s really hard for them to get the balance right and to figure out what that balance is. But one rule is, you’ve got to treat yourself well enough so you can iterate your activities. You can’t be playing a degenerating game. And it’s a variant of the Piagetian idea of the equilibrated state, right? An equilibrated state will maintain itself, and that can be within you, or it can be within a group of people, or it can be either in you or within a group of people across a long span of time. And that’s really well equilibrated. So a lot of the people that I dealt with who were working themselves too hard, we figured out ways they could take vacations. They couldn’t usually decrease the number of hours they could work per week. It wasn’t possible. Just the demands of the job, like in a law firm or something like that, you know, you might think, well, can’t they just lighten up? And the answer to that is, you don’t get paid $750 an hour for lightening up. It’s like, you’re on call right now whenever your client wants you. And the answer isn’t, well, you know, I need to take a break. It’s like, then you don’t get the pay, because that’s what they’re paying you for. But one of the things I noticed quite quickly was that if people scheduled their time so they took more vacations, the number of hours they could work productively actually went up, not down. So you can get the balance right, but it’s not a simple thing to do. So it isn’t that you’re only going to find engagement in sheer physical, productive activity. There’s lots of places where you can be engaged. You can be engaged in art, you can be engaged in literature, you can be engaged in relationships, you can be engaged in your children. Like, there’s no shortage of places of meaning. But you have to interact with those places of meaning properly. And you have to organize the multiple places where you derive meaning in a manner that’s sustaining to all of them. And that’s when you’ve got your frame right. But getting your frame right isn’t enough. Because you have to get your frame right in a way that allows you to update your frame as you continue moving forward with it. And I do believe, because I do believe that the world that we’re adapted to as biological organisms is the world where reality is information. I believe that when your nervous system signals to you that all’s well, all’s well, it’s true. You’re in the right place at the right time. You’re bearing exactly the right amount of load. And the right amount of load is enough to keep you taut and ready and improved. And when you slip into that slot, I think all of the existential problems that arise to push people towards nihilism and hopelessness, or sometimes towards totalitarianism and rigidity, that problem just goes away. And it’s because you solved it. It’s not because it’s not a problem. It’s a bloody problem. But that doesn’t mean that, you know, because one of the things that modern people do is they conceptualize themselves as defeated. A priori. You know, that the fact that life is tragic and that you’re not all you could be and that everything will come to an end means that you’re not, by definition, you’re not up to the task. It’s like, that’s by no means obvious, man. People are tough. Like, they’re so tough it’s unbelievable. Well, you know, you see that on YouTube. Because, you know, I look at YouTube now and then and you feel terrible about it. One of the things I do like looking at it are the extreme sports that people engage in. You know, and I mean, people can do unbelievable things. They’re completely off the rocker. They can do things with their bodies that you just can’t possibly imagine. I was looking, for example, at there was a video that went around a while ago about it was a videotape of the woman who won the 1956 Hurdling. You know, we bounce off one of those horses for gymnastics. And so she did her winning routine with videotape. And then the next videotape was of the person who won the gold in the Olympics at the last Olympics. And it was like, the first woman did this really cool roll off the horse. It was quite spectacular. It’s like the second one was like 20 feet in the air with four flips end over end, you know, vertically. It wasn’t like they were like they weren’t even the same creatures. One looked like some kind of kind of like Android kangaroo. And the other looked like a pretty confident gym teacher. So, you know, I mean, God only knows what the limits of human ability are. But we certainly haven’t touched them. You guys, most of you have no idea what you’d be capable of if you like if you really got your acts together, you know, when you were a force. Because another thing you might think about is maybe the existential misery that you experience in your life is directly proportional to the amount of time you waste. Because if the dragon guards a treasure, you know, and your job is to get the damn treasure, and you need it, you need it. It’s not optional. Without the treasure, you don’t have the riches necessary to live. All the time you’re wasting is time that you’re not spent in the treasure room fundamentally. And so, you know, if you’re not spending all your time in the treasure room, you can’t complain about being poor. So it’s a good thing to think about, you know, because it’s, and this is what makes it optimistic. It’s possible that if you utilize what was in front of you, and so that would be the ground of being, let’s say, if you utilize that, that would be enough. Or maybe you could get even really lucky, and if you utilized it properly, it wouldn’t just be enough. It would be more than enough, you know. And so you could go from saying, well, it’s okay to be a limited and mortal being to saying, hey, this is a pretty damn good deal, and if I could, I’d sign on for it again. And that was actually Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return, you know. So when he was trying to figure out what people should do as a consequence of the collapse of the ethical system that constituted classical religious belief, he conjured up the idea of the eternal return. It was roughly this. You should live in such a way so that if you had to repeat what you were doing forever into infinity, you would say yes to that. And that’s an idea like Piaget’s Equal Greater State, except obviously it’s stretched into huge expanses of time. You know, that’s a high-level thing to aim at, but, you know, so here’s another example. Like I’ve seen people who get stuck in very bureaucratic organizations, you know, and they just get bloody well tortured to death by them because it’s mindless tyranny, stupid rules, and on arbitrary decisions, and counterproductive management advice, and jealousy, and punishment for doing well. And, you know, everything you can do to possibly set up a situation where the person who’s got the job is just crushed by it, that people won’t say anything. It’s like, well, what would happen if you said something like, well, why do you want me to do this? It looks stupid. And they might be thinking, oh, I could have thought it was stupid too, you know, but someone else told me to do it. It’s highly probable that they would be thinking that. It’s like, what happens if you just refuse to do stupid, useless, meaningless things? It’s like, that’s a rule. I don’t do stupid, useless, meaningless, well, you know, one of the things that happens in corporations, and I’ve seen this happen many times, is that the corporation gets, it’s like an elephant that gets loaded with intestinal parasites. I mean that as a biological analogy. I really do. Because a corporation is a body, in some sense, that has a tremendous amount of built-in value. And what can happen as the corporation develops is it gets full of people who just pull out the value. They don’t actually do anything. They rape the brand, is what they do. Because the brand has value, you know, like the Disney brand has value, because it’s associated with quality. You know, and if you wanted to destroy that, you take over the company and you put out Snow White 2, and Snow White 3, and Snow White 5, and Snow White 12, until, and everybody would buy it until like Snow White 20 when they wouldn’t trust you anymore, and then you’ve sucked all the value out of the company, and it’s dead. You know, or you get people who come into the corporation and all they want to do is maneuver up to the top. They don’t give a damn about what the thing is supposed to be producing, or about how they’re structuring their relationships with other people, or about anything that has to do with the truth. They use language instrumentally to reach their goals, and you get enough people like that in your company and it’s like, it’s dead. It’s gone. And that happens to companies all the time because they don’t last, right? This is why Marx was wrong. You know, he said power and money accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people. What he didn’t say is it’s always different people. You know, it’s like there’s a 1%, but it’s not the same people. You know, most family fortunes don’t last three generations, and neither do most large companies. So there’s a lot of dynamic turnover. But you know, you guys are going to be working in companies, a lot of you, at least at some point, at pretty damn significant levels, and even at an entry level, you have more power than you think. You know, it is not necessary to do things you know are stupid and meaningless. And if the situation that you’re in is demanding that, then you might ask yourself, hmm, maybe I should be somewhere else. And then you might say, well, I can’t be. And what I would say to that is prepare yourself to be. Like if you’re going to go into a company and you want to live ethically, you need an escape strategy. And you need to have that along with you all the time. So you need an updated resume, and you need to be keeping your damn eye on the job market. So that you can see where the other opportunities lie for you, and so you’re not afraid to pursue them. You know, so you’ve got to hone your interview skills. You’ve got to keep your damn resume polished up. You’ve got to make sure you have a broad social network, and you have to do it consciously. And so that if some dame bat tells you to do something counterproductive, meaningless, and will push it one step farther, clearly unethical, you can say no. And you can mean it, because no means I’m not doing that. And if you push me, we’ll either have a war or I’ll go somewhere else. It’s like that’s what no means. That’s what it means. It means I’m not doing this. And you can’t say no until you have an alternative, right? You have to set yourself up so that no doesn’t kill you, because obviously then you won’t say it. These are important things to consider, because the actions that you take at the level of your individual career are going to have far more impact on the ethics and the productivity of the place that you work than you can imagine. Especially if you’re someone who’s straight and sees what’s right in front of their face, because those are the people that keep the damn companies running. And there’s not necessarily that many of them. The Price’s Law rule is that square root of the number of people who are doing a job do half the work. So you could say that in a company of a thousand people, 30 people are doing half the work. And you could be one of them. And then if you are one of them, you can bloody well say no, because they actually need you. And so your loss can be a catastrophe. And that’s what you want to aim for. It’s like you want to be the person whose loss would be a catastrophe. Because then you’ve got some power. And then you can bargain. And then you don’t have to do stupid, useless, crooked things. And you’ll have a much better life if you don’t have to do those things. So very, very practical advice. So… Isn’t that a good time to ask a question? Sure. Okay. When you were talking about how divorce, and if you have a family and you have a divorce that will have people sometimes never come out of that. And I remember you saying that in a class before too. So what do you think about that? It’s so horrible. And what about people who come out of that? Okay, well let’s think about this for a minute. Okay. And then we’ll go back to the symbolic stuff. How many chances do you think you’ll have in your life for like a serious, high quality, intimate relationship? What do you guys think? How many chances are you going to have for that? Three to four. Okay, that’s good. That’s good. Yeah, I would say you’d probably talk out at about five. Okay. So… Okay, so, you know, that’s not that many chances. Plus, you get old quick. You know, by the time you’re 45, you’re not going to have a family. Well, you can do that sometimes if you’re male. If you’re female, maybe. But it gets pretty rough. And you’re looking probably at that point at a fair bit of in vitro and that sort of interaction. It’s tough. It’s hard on people. So, you know, not only do you not have that many chances, you don’t have that much time. So you’ve got to get it right. So if you get it wrong, it costs you. Like maybe it’ll cost you five years. Five years is a long time. So, and three five-year costs is like… you’ve lost things there that you can’t replace. Okay, so that’s one part of it is you don’t have that many chances and it’s costly to burn up the time. Okay, the second thing is… A divorce is very complicated. Like, it’s not so bad if you get divorced to someone who’s reasonable. But often the reason that you’re getting divorced is that one or the other or both of you aren’t that reasonable. And what that might mean is that you might be negotiating with someone whose basic goal is to make sure that you don’t have another day of success in the next 20 years. And if that’s their goal, they will attain it. So, and there’s lots of ways people do that and they usually do it by holding their children hostage. And people will definitely do that. They do it all the time. So, you want to avoid that. And then, you know, then of course it’s hard on the relationship you have with your children. And like that’s… those are probably the most important relationships you have in your life. You know, it’s like, might be parents, might be siblings, might be your partner, might be your kids. But I think when it comes right down to it, your parents are old. And so are you. Your kids aren’t. And they’re just as close. Plus they need you. And so you start twisting and messing that about, boy. It’s hard on your psyche. It’s hard on the kids too. So, you know… So then I’m just thinking about that and what you said about how that’s a cost. If you mess it up, and that’s like a five year cost, that’s what it costs you, right? Oh, and it might be a 15 year cost if you’re in a custody battle. And it would cost you a quarter of a million dollars. Right. Or let’s say, yeah, but like, is it then, would you say, like being a psychologist, that it’s better for people to like pursue a relationship that’s like not good? That continue to do that and possibly incur a further cost than it is to just cut it off? Because it would divorce you. Okay, it’s a complicated question. What I would say is, don’t make the kind of mistakes that get you into such a stupid relationship to begin with. Okay, because that’s the answer to that question. And the way you do that is by trying not to delude yourself any more than is absolutely necessary. And that means, when you’re in the damn relationship, tell the person the truth. And try to figure out what the truth is for you. And don’t put up with any nonsense and stand up for yourself. And also aim towards the good. You know, if you do all those things, then your relationship is probably going to work. If you’re trying to do all those things, really, and you have a partner that will not do that, then leave. But, it’s a rare person who won’t do that if they’re stepped along the way properly and they learn how to do it. Now, not everyone’s like that. Because you do run into some people who are basically devoted towards mayhem and trouble. But usually, a person is a balance of striving for the good and messing about in the hell. And you’re both like that when you start a relationship, and you try to tilt it towards the good. And then you won’t run into that problem. But you have to do that right from the beginning of the relationship. It doesn’t take that much to corrupt a relationship so that it’s not really salvageable. Enough mistakes, three or four acts of infidelity, you’re done. You’re not going to come back from that. Because the fundamental element of trust has been removed. And then you can’t communicate with the person because you don’t know if they’re telling you the truth. And then you don’t know if you’re dealing with reality. And if you’re not dealing with reality with your partner, it’s like, good luck fixing that. It’s like you’re working on a ghost car while the real one is sitting in the shop with the motor out. It’s not going to get you anywhere. So a lot of the issue is don’t get in the trouble to begin with. If you are in the trouble, well, then you try to straighten yourself out and see if you can fix it. Well, if you can’t, your options aren’t great. And it depends on the particularities of the situation. I have people that I counsel, it’s like, leave that person. And the rule is, they’re lying to you, they aren’t aiming up. And you won’t be able to tolerate being with them for ten years without becoming resentful, alcoholic, and homicidal. So that’s a bad outcome. There’s nothing you can do to avoid it. So you might as well leave. But you know, you have to have that sorted out. It has to be the truth. It’s no fun. It’s no good to leave someone who’s struggling in the lurch. You know, when you think, well, I’m with this person, they’re not going anywhere, maybe they have an alcohol problem, and they’re resentful. It’s like, but I’m all they’ve got. Well, they bloody well better want to fix that because you’re not going to be able to fix it. All that will happen is you’ll end up in the same place. Now, if they really want to fix it, more than anything, and they’re willing to tell the truth about it, and willing to interact with you, then there’s a ghost of a chance you might pull through it. But it’s very hard to fix someone, and it’s really hard to fix someone who does not want to be fixed. And there’s lots of people like that. I’m just going to say like a personal anecdote. My parents divorced when I was like three. So I know that a lot of people say like, you’re harming the kids if you get divorced. And I’ve had to deal with a lot of the tension between choosing your parents and which one you agree with. But when everyone asks, like, do you accept they got divorced, I’m like, I see how much they fight now, and I can’t imagine having that happen like 24 hours after being in that health school. Yeah, well, this is why there isn’t an answer to the question. It depends on the particularities of the situation. And so there’s lots of situations where a general answer doesn’t suffice. But I would say, this is a tough one. I can tell you what’s happened since the divorce laws got liberalized. The first thing that happens is that all of you are going to be divorced at about the same rate as people would have 30 years ago. Because rich people still get married. And they generally don’t get divorced. Poor people do not get married. And that’s like 60% of the population, and it’s ramping up quick. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that that’s anything but catastrophic. So kids who are raised by single parents do not do as well. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some single parents who are doing a stellar job. Obviously there are. And there’s some married parents that do a terrible job. That’s not the issue. The issue is the bulk of the evidence. And the bulk of the evidence strongly suggests that children who are raised with two parents do better. Well, duh. Why? Well, why? It’s impossible to raise children. Jesus, they’re expensive, they’re troublesome, they’re smart, and they’re useless. And you’ve got them for 20 years. It’s like, you’re going to do that by yourself? Sure you are. You’re going to be working at a horrible job 40 hours a week, or more. Like a retail job, for example, where they just cheat you like a slave. And then you’re going to go home to your miserable kids exhausted. It’s like, that’s not fun. And it’s increasingly the norm for huge chunks of our population. Like, elitist liberal types, like all of you, for example, don’t pay much attention to what happens to people who are actually poor. But as far as I can tell, it’s been a bloody catastrophe for them. You know, there’s an old saying, when the upper class gets a cold, the lower class gets pneumonia. And you know the thing about that saying? It’s true. It’s like it’s not a metaphor. It’s literally the case. If an epidemic sweeps through a population, the population dies from the poor people upward. Because they’re so damn stressed. So, you know, I would say, with regards to marriage, I’ve been married a long time. It’s just about 26 years now, you know. And I’ve noticed a bunch of things about marriage. One is, two brains are better than one. And so if you actually communicate with your partner, because they’re not like you, it’s like you have a corpus callosum between you. You know, and they’ll tell you things that you don’t understand. You know, like when you’re being stupid. You know, in a typically feminine way, say, or a typically masculine way, or in whatever stupid way you manage to be stupid. They’ll point that out to you, you know. And that can be really helpful, even though it’s extremely annoying. You know, and they can help you make decisions. And they’re a good place to confess to. You know, and it’s really helpful when you’re trying to figure out how to discipline children. So that you’re not a pathetic milk-sop who lets them run all over you, or some tyrant who likes to beat them with a stick when they sneeze. You know, hopefully you kind of find some pleasant middle ground in there. And it’s a lot easier to do that with two people than with one. And then they can spell you off when you’re exhausted. Particularly useful if you have small children. Because you will be exhausted when you have small children. You know, plus the narrative of your life has continuity. And that’s nice. And if your home is set up properly, it’s actually a pleasure to go to it. It is a buttress against the chaotic and uncaring external world. Because the external world in many ways doesn’t give a damn about you. So if you go home and it’s set up reasonably well, it’s like, hey, you’ve got somewhere to belong. That’s not so bad. Just another related situation that has personal relevance for me and for other people too. In many situations, when something bad happens, you know, okay, yeah, I’ve got to do some kind of reparative thing. So say it’s like a health care, you go, okay, I’ve got to work on my diet. And then it’s a divorce, it’s like, alright, I’ve got to work through why I didn’t think I was headed for a divorce for the last 20 years, but now it just happened. But in some situations, people know they’ve got to repair it, but they don’t want to get something that would actually be repairing. So they go to people who are specialists in other areas of personal, psychological dealing and stuff like that. Anything but divorce. Like attention deficit, work on your attention scopes, or work on these, or like assertiveness training or something like that. But they’re diligently avoiding the heart of the matter. And what would you make of that? And if you were in a family with somebody like that, is there something you can do? Well, you know, some situations are like Humpty Dumpty, right? There’s no putting it back together. Now, but again, in terms of avoidance of those situations, it’s like, you think about that hierarchy again. Well, divorce is a low resolution, high impact solution. Because it just tears a chunk of that hierarchy out and throws it away. It’s a lot, and it’s costly. It’s going to hurt you. Okay, so then you think, well, what might you do instead of that? And the real answer is solve the damn problems as they arise. You know, and that’s hard. And it requires drilling down. It really requires drilling down. So one of the things I want to build, for example, which I haven’t built yet, it’s kind of going to be like this future authoring thing that you guys do, I want to build a problem-solving matrix for couples. Because here’s how not to get divorced from your wife. Figure out how to set the table properly. Now, what does that mean? It’s really, really complicated. It’s like, who’s going to cook? When are they going to cook? Why are they cooking? How should you respond to it? Who buys groceries? What are the groceries going to be? Who’s going to put them away? How do you say thanks when someone does something for you in the domestic environment? And what’s happened, and this is part of the death of God, roughly speaking, is that the roles are gone. Okay, and what that means is you better be awake. Because it turns out that running a kitchen in a house is unbelievably complicated and difficult. And so you have to negotiate how to do it. And you’re a terrible negotiator. You don’t know how to decompose the damn problem to the point where you can solve it. You won’t admit what you want. You won’t admit what you’re like. You won’t pay any attention to what actually irritates you. So you like to think that you’re nice and easy to get along with, but you’re not. You’re basically Hitler. And so until you realize that, you can’t even tell your partner what you want. And so this is where philosophy hits the road, or hits the ground. It’s like trying negotiating out a stable solution to how you’re going to run the kitchen. Because that’s where the battle between the sexes, by the way. There’s two places where it really hits. One, who’s going to take care of the little kids? Two. Two. Who is going to work in the kitchen and under what circumstances? It’s like, you figure those two things out, you can consider yourself a philosopher. It’s very, very difficult. It’s very, very difficult. And the cost for not doing it is low quality food in a hostile environment, bratty children that you hate, resentment, hostility, the accumulation of insults and assaults, and either a divorce or a really unhappy marriage. So… But just to take it back to my question, what do you do when somebody has a, to use a metaphor, has a health scare, and then there was, say they develop cancer, and instead of quitting smoking, they just started taking multivitamins anymore. It’s like, what do you do if you’re watching somebody treat their smoking with a multivitamin rather than actual… Then you go to war. Really? I’m not kidding. Fight them into doing what they want. But a war isn’t just like you fly into a rage and throw dishes at six ladies. That’s not helpful. You know, a war is, okay, you are not going to smoke anymore. And so then you think, okay, well what do you have to do to do that? So maybe it’s your father. Think, I’m going to call you every day and harass you, and if that doesn’t work, then I’m going to come over and harass you and I’m going to burn up all your cigarettes. And then I’m going to get your friends to come over and tell you that you’re a bloody idiot. And I’m going to put pressure on you, and your mom’s going to help too, and if you don’t quit smoking, she’s going to leave. It’s like, it’s life or death. What’s it going to be? Now, you know, you may say you don’t want to go to war. You might also say that it’s not even your right to go to war. But if you’re faced with a situation where someone you love is engaging in a behaviour that’s seriously counterproductive, it’s like you ratchet up the pressure until they stop, or you can’t stand it anymore. And if you can’t stand it anymore, you lose. You know, and lots of things are a war. And you have to be prepared for a war, because that’s also a variant of being able to say no. But you also have to fight it in a way, like to take it back to your gaming thing, is that you have to fight it in a way that you can continue to have these battles so that it doesn’t just become a failed enterprise in the first conversation. Right, you can blow apart the whole relationship. You know, and the person will do that to you, too, though. They’ll often say, well, if you quit, if you don’t start biting me, I’m never going to talk to you again. That’s highly unlikely. So you can’t be afraid of that sort of thing. It’s like you can also tell them, look, that’s an inappropriate move. Because that’s like a nuclear… Well, it is. It’s a nuclear bomb. So don’t bring up the nuclear bombs yet. For instance, they took a shot of saying to a parent, the parent will say, look, I don’t need to get health tips from you. I’m the parent. I’m telling you what’s healthy food to eat or whatever. Well, Jesus, you should be able to respond to that. That’s just an entry-level volley, that. It’s like, you’re the parent. Oh, well, hey, that’s a brilliant observation. And then they would say, well, these issues are rather concerning my personal romantic sexual life that I’m not comfortable sharing things with you. Yeah, well, you could tell them you’re not comfortable living with the consequences of their stupid decisions. And you’re stuck with it too. Because, you know, the person will say, well, this is me. Well, yeah, right. Except you’re connected to… he’s connected to your mother, let’s say. And they’re both connected to you. And they’re all connected to their friends. It’s like, sorry, this isn’t just about you. If you were on an island, well, even then it wouldn’t just be about you, but it would be more about you. So that’s just weak argumentation. And what people will do when you’re having a war with them is they’ll have like 10 or 11 pre-prepared responses. They’re always cliches. You know? And so you can just back them away. They’re just cliches. It’s like, okay, first of all, we’re going to get through the cliches. Well, then what happens? Then they get mad. And then they’ll stomp away. And then they’ll cry. It’s like, if you can get through all that, well, then maybe you can have a discussion. You know? And then, but you’ve got to think it through. You actually care if your person is smoking themselves today. You know, of course, I love this. It’s like, yeah, yeah, sure you do. Maybe. It’s like, why is it important to you? Why does it matter? Why is it worth going to war about? And you need to know that. You need to know it. And you have to be able to tell the person. And if you can tell them that, if you can re-figure it out, and you can re-tell them, then sometimes they’ll listen. Because they don’t want to know that they’re tearing you apart. You know? And they’re going to do everything not to see that. It’s my problem. It’s like, yeah, well, I wish it was your problem, because then I wouldn’t have to worry about it. But unfortunately, you know, or fortunately, we’re tied together at the bottom of a barrel. So, you know, we better figure out how to deal with this. So it’s a very hard thing to do. And it’s way better to address those things before they become catastrophic. Because by the time they’ve got to the point where it’s a 15-year problem, it’s like, Jesus, you’re dealing with a very large thiamat at that point. You know, so one of the things I really like about the Mesopotamian creation myth is that it tells you what happens if you muck around. You know, it says, because remember that Mesopotamian gods, they kill Apsut, right? That’s the structure they all rest on. So it’s just a sort of a hollow, stale shell now. And nothing’s alive and being fixed. No one’s paying attention. What happens? Well, the longer that goes on, the bigger the monster that makes its appearance. You know, and you can easily be in a situation where the monster that people are hiding from is so damn big, you may not have the skills to kill it. So, you know, even remember Horus. When he goes off after sepp, he loses an eye. It’s like, it’s no joke. You know, he’s a god, and he wins, and he still loses an eye. So, you know, with someone who’s smoking, you know, one of the things you may have to confront is their absolute cynicism about life. Seriously thought through. And there’s plenty of reasons to be cynical about life and resentful and full of hate and all of those things, you know. So, the bigger the war, the clearer the head. You know, because you’re going to find the monsters underneath the problem, and they’re usually archetypal. You know, I’ve been in lots of situations with my clients where the only language that could be used to describe what was going on was religious. Because the problems were so deep, like they’re so good against evil, that there isn’t any other language that’s even close to powerful enough. And that’s usually what happens in households where there’s a truly homicidal battle going on. Like a deep, eatable problem, for example. Were you in my personality class? No, I wasn’t. But I watched the question of life. You watched Crumb? No. Oh yeah, that’s in the hands. If you want to see psychological reality of the kind you wouldn’t see normally unless you were a clinician, and like a clinician who was really into the situation, Crumb will tell you. It’s available online? You probably have to rent it. But the pathology in that family is archetypal. And it’s rough. I was so ready to give you a hug. I literally was like, oh my goodness. Oh yeah, yeah, it’s brilliant documentary. Well, the guy that made the documentary knew the family. Oh really? Yes, beforehand. So they let him in. You know, and they were also nurse assistants. Like just the progression? So like he didn’t serve really one time? Yeah. That’s kind of like what a monstrous animal looks like, right? Yeah, he looked a lot like that. He had this very large, like, clingy mother. I don’t know. She was quite the creature. Yeah, she was sort of like this monstrous creature. She wasn’t sort of like it. And so all of his drawings were like these monstrous, like, ugh. Monstrous women. Yeah. With him as a parasitical appendage. Right? That’s the Freudian story, boy. If you don’t think that’s real, you haven’t looked at any pathological families. Because Freud’s claim was that’s the first battle that people fight. If you lose, think about it. Here’s some battles. You’ve got to get away from your mother and get to kindergarten. Right? That’s battle number one. And then you’ve got to make friends. That’s battle number two. And then you’ve got to get away from your family. It’s like in the eatable situation, you don’t win the first battle. You’re screwed. And it’s worse even because the reason you don’t win is because there’s something about one or both parents that is bloody well doing everything it possibly can to make sure that you don’t win. And you think, well, that’s pretty dark. Who would ever believe that? It’s like if you failed in your life in a serious way, you know, and you’re resentful and irritable and miserable about it, what makes you think you’re going to facilitate your child’s success? What makes you think you’re going to be able to stand to see someone thrive where you failed? It’s like, yeah, right. If you were that kind of saint, you wouldn’t have failed to begin with. Not in that particular way. So, you know, families can be just… Freud was a smart man. And, you know, if you watch Crumb, you can see exactly what he was talking about. It’s very, very difficult to get access to that kind of experience unless you happen to be in that situation. Or, you know, you’re helping someone cope with it and you’re really tied in. And that’s a perfect segue to the symbolism of the great mother. Now, so the hypothesis here is that, you know, it’s a complex hypothesis, but the hypothesis fundamentally is that the basic ways that you break down being as such, which I would say is represented symbolically by these serpentile forms that have the capacity to be spiritual or to reveal a treasure, because you’re a social primate and you’re sort of a nuclear family social primate, your primary cognitive categories are male, female. I think it’s male, female, and child. And the child tends to take on the aspect of the son, like the male child, for reasons that we’ll go into. But, and I think it’s because the overwhelming reality of the feminine throughout history has been the feminine in relationship to procreation. It’s the defining characteristic of the feminine. And so, you can define the feminine with femininity, but if you’re going to define the child whose relationship isn’t primarily procreative, not as a child, you don’t use feminine symbolism to do that. So it makes it complicated. It doesn’t matter. So here’s an example of that. So there’s a, you see that’s a herb roast. It’s kind of a chicken, which is interesting. I have one of these up in my office. Would any of you guys come up and see what I found in Mexico? Or actually someone found it and I bought it from them. Maybe. I might have bought it in Mexico, too. But whatever, it’s exactly one of these things. It’s so cool. Except it’s got legs at the bottom and it stands up. Except it’s a chicken with a snake wrapped around its neck. And it’s got these wings off to the side and on each wing is a spider web, which I really love. It’s absolutely perfect. And so, you know, it’s an archetypal image. And the image is something like, you see it in the US too with the snake. The US often used, or the Americans often use the flag. It’s like an eagle with a snake in its talons. That’s another variant of the same sort of symbol. And it’s this combination of matter and spirit, bird and reptile, and it does represent the ground of being, all things considered. And then out of that springs these primary phenomena. And that’s father, mother, child, roughly speaking. And those correspond to nature, roughly speaking, culture, roughly speaking, and the thing that mediates between the two of them. And that’s the hero. Now it’s not just the hero because it’s also the adversary. Because the adversary is the thing that refuses to mediate between those two. And that’s just as much part of the individual as the part that will do it. Those are locked in eternal combat, so to speak. But that’s the first differentiation. And I think the reason for that is that that is how we differentiate the world as we spring into consciousness and existence. First of all, it’s chaos. It’s like formless chaos. That’s where you come from, whatever that means. And then poof, you’ve got a mother, that’s for sure. That’s a primary reality. And you have a father. And even if you don’t have a father there, because you’re a human being, you have a father. Because the father is the patriarchal structure, or the framing. It’s the enculturation. It’s the embodiment of enculturation. And that’s going to be in you as you get enculturated. But it’s distributed everywhere and everyone. Those are the rules by which people live. Not even just the rules, but the behavioural rituals that govern our interactions. And if you don’t incorporate, if you don’t become enculturated by the time you’re four, you’re either an eatable catastrophe or you’re antisocial and criminal. That’s the basic rule. And we know the literature on antisocial behaviour. Basically what happens is there’s about 10%, 5-10% of boys, who are very aggressive and assertive and selfish, roughly speaking, self-oriented when they’re two. And you can find them, you just put them together with other two year olds, and there’s a subset of them, they’re almost always boys, but not always, who bite, kick, hit, hit, and steal. And they just do that. And the reason is they’re like tough little monsters and they’re out there asserting themselves. It’s just the tail end of a continuum. It’s mostly agreeableness. They’re disagreeable kids. They’re tough as boots. And they’ll basically stand up to you. And they’re not that easy to scare, especially if they’re low in neuroticism. And so with them it’s like, why the hell should I listen to you? And my son was like that when he was nine months old. He’d stare me down. It’s like, so impressive. You’re this big and you’re really soft. And it’s like, what makes you think you’re so tough? So anyways, with the kids that are like that, if you don’t socialize them by the time they’re four, then they can’t make friends. Because they don’t know how to play and share and all those things. And then they end up outcasts. And you know, puberty hits and the testosterone rises and poof, they’re in jail. So, you know, whatever. You’ve got to be inculturated. And that’s the incorporation of the great father. And some of that’s the superego from the Freudian perspective. And some of that’s positive because you bloody well better know how to share and play games. And some of it’s negative because one of the things that’s so weird about having little kids is that, you know what you give them hell mostly for? Is having fun. It’s horrible. You know, because you think you’re always punishing kids if you do, for breaking rules and so on. No, that isn’t what you do. It’s like they’re running around screaming at the top of their lungs. They’re completely having a blast, you know, and they’re destroying the house in the process. But they’re really having fun. And you know, you’re like, you guys settle down right now. It’s like, you’re doing that all the time. So not only do you bring the negative emotion, you know, the tears and the pain and the frustration and the anger and the hostility under control, so they stop having temper tantrums and they don’t hit you when they’re mad or themselves. You’ve got to get that all under control. Jesus, you regulate the positive emotion. You just dampen it right down until they can go sit with their 80-year-old grandmother quietly, you know. So it’s a real restricting process. And that’s why half of the great father is a tyrant. There’s no way out of that. You know, like you hope that the whole damn thing isn’t a tyrant. Because obviously by socializing your children, you’re doing them a great favor, right? First of all, they learn how to talk. That’s fairly useful. They learn how to read. They learn how to play with other kids. So at the same time that you’re constraining the hell out of them and making them less than they were in some ways, you’re also opening up vistas to them that they would otherwise not have access to. You know, and one of the things that’s very much worth thinking about is that you basically die into your personality. You know, so what happens, it’s a Darwinian issue fundamentally. When you’re first born, your neurons have more connections than you can shake a stick at. Like more than they’ll ever have in your entire life. And then all the ones you don’t use die. And so what that is, it’s a collapse of potential into actuality. But let’s make no mistake about it. It’s costly. Because you become what you are instead of all the things that you could have been. And people experience that as a cost. That’s the story of Peter Pan. I don’t want to grow up. Because I don’t want to become one thing instead of the many things I could be. Now the problem with that theory is you get old. Right, so old. You don’t sustain your potential without, even if you don’t develop it, it doesn’t just sit around. It goes stale and curdles and gets sour. And so it’s not an acceptable choice, but people make that choice all the time. Especially if they think the Great Father isn’t anything but Captain Hook. A terrible pirate tyrant who’s terrified of death. Crocodile. With the clock in his stomach. It’s already got a piece of him. And that’s the great, that’s the Dragon of Chaos. He’s being chased by the Dragon of Chaos. Like if you’re terrified of the Dragon of Chaos, and you’re in the patriarchal role, you’re going to be a tyrant. And then why the hell would anyone grow up to want to be like you? One of the things I see in my clients very, very often, and this is more characteristic of the males than the females, is that many of them will not allow themselves to experience anger or aggression or to express it because they have tyrannical fathers. You know, and so one of the things they decided when they were like four was, I’m never going to be like that. It’s like, well that doesn’t work out because you know, you need the capacity for anger and hostility and aggression and all that. You have to have that at hand. And you don’t fix it by refusing to manifest it. All that does is cripple you. Because you’re missing half of your emotional dynamism. And a whole chunk of your power. You know, you don’t have that many sources of power. You’ve got enthusiasm, that’s a good one. Curiosity, interest, appreciation for beauty. You know, anger is unbelievably useful. It’s a tremendous reservoir of power. You know, and you don’t want to suppress that. You want to harness it so it’s at hand. So that people don’t mess with you. Because they will, you know. People will push. Especially pushing people. And if you can’t push back, they’re going to walk all over you. They won’t even notice, you know, because you’ll just move. They won’t even notice that they pushed you over. So when you’ll go home, you’ll be all resentful and irritated and brood on it for a month. And it’s like, they didn’t even notice anything happened. So, you know, the men I’ve seen often will refuse themselves access to anger in particular. And then with women, it’s often the case that they have a harder time getting access to it. Because women are more agreeable than men. So it’s harder for women often to be, you know, it’s hard for a woman, even if she’s pretty damn tough, to really contend with a guy who’s really tough. It’s difficult. Because guys who are really disagreeable, especially if they’re physically intimidating and super smart, man, those people are very, very difficult to deal with. You know, because they’ll cut you into pieces verbally and they won’t budge. And so you have to really ratchet up your preparation before you can withstand that. And you know, a lot of women here who are going to be in corporate environments and dealing with people who are tough, you’ve got to get prepared for that. And it’s no joke. There’s some very, very, very rock-hard people out there. And that’s a good thing, because nothing would happen without them. You know, they’re a force to contend with. So anyways, the dragon of chaos, roughly speaking, differentiates itself into these fundamental, you could say, personified elements. But personified is the wrong idea, because, you know, usually when you think of something as being personified, you think of it as being something, and then you act as if it’s taken on personified qualities. You know, so it’s like a projection. Now, I don’t think that’s how it works. I think that we naturally experience the world in the personified categories. And then we have to take them apart to get the world, you know, to get the differentiated world out of them. So for example, when you’re a baby, roughly speaking, the world is your mother. And then as you differentiate the world, it starts to turn into things that aren’t your mother. But it isn’t like you confuse the world with your mother to begin with. It’s the mother is the world to begin with. And it’s a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it. I mean, you’re only this big. Your mother’s really big. And she’s taken three billion years to build. So, you know, that’s a force of nature to contend with. And by thinking, by conceptualizing that entity as the world, you’ve done a pretty good job of initial modeling. Because think about this. You’re actually a reflection of the world. Right? You really are, because you were shaped by the world in your evolutionary development. It’s like, here’s the world. Here’s you. You’re like, you’re a little reflection of the world. Because the world has made you. And so you embody it. The world is the sort of place where something like you can adjust to it. That means you’re a lot like the world. And so if you start out with the assumption that the world is a lot like your mother, it’s like, that’s a pretty good assumption. It is pretty much like your mother. And she is a force of nature. And so it’s not personification. It’s first-pass understanding. And then, you know, the father comes into it in one form or another. You know, in a fractured form, perhaps, or a complete form. You know, you hope that you have a parent. You hope you have an architectural parent, in some sense. Who embodies the entire dynamic range of what it means to have that gender. Because then they’re a really good representative of the world. Also, most of the world that you’re going to interact with isn’t stuff. It’s people. So, insofar as your mother and your father are the world, that’s a really good model. Because everyone you meet is going to be your mother or your father, roughly speaking. So, you know, if they’re very dynamic people, and they embody the full range of human possibility, you know, insofar as one person can do that, then they’re excellent models for what you’re going to be interacting with for the rest of your life. And that is what they should be. Right? Because on average, what you should do for your children is be as much like the world as you can be. Because that will prepare them for the world. So you shouldn’t be too nice, because the world isn’t too nice. And you shouldn’t be too harsh, because then you’ll just crush them. But you shouldn’t be, like, making things easy for them. You know, you should be making things as difficult for them as they can possibly manage. And it takes a real… you really have to have a relationship with the child to be able to do that. Because you’ve got to keep them in the zone of proximal development. And to do that, you have to know what they’re like. You know, and so if they can carry five pounds Monday, you put another ounce on Tuesday. And, you know, that way they… You… it’s the anti-eatable approach. You encourage them to become strong and independent. Very hard on parents to do that, especially if they define their lives by their children. You know, because they won’t want the child to leave. That’s not a good thing. Because you don’t end up with a child, you end up with a crippled monster. And, you know, in the closet. Not good. So… okay, so anyways, you know… And the child, obviously, is there too. There’s the mother, the father, and the child. That’s their actual situation. That’s the world. And so that’s what things break into first. And I think our social, cognitive, primate brain operates that way. And then if it operates that way, and there seems to be plenty of evidence that it does, then the next thing you might think is, well, maybe that is the way things are. Since our brain evolved and mirrors reality, that’s a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about reality. From Egypt, on the right, and from China, on the left. And that’s actually, on the left, that’s actually Osiris and Isis, if I remember correctly. So that’s so cool, you know? They emerge from the primordial serpent. Out of the chaos, the predatory, dangerous, and promising chaos emerges the primary archetypal things. Yeah? Do you know if the first one in the right is holy? No. I don’t. And I can’t give you much more information about that. Although, because a couple of students sent it to me over different spans of time. But I don’t have the story at hand, unfortunately. I love this. Okay, so now we’re going to concentrate on the archetype of the feminine. So this is femininity, right? This isn’t a female woman. It’s a class. It’s a category. It’s an archetypal category. So we’re investigating the nature of the feminine, and the use of the feminine as a mode of representing things. Okay, so this is Fat Freddy’s cat. This is a comic I actually quite like. It’s done by, you know, drug-addled hippies in the 1960s. I think they lived in San Francisco. I actually think they knew Robert Crumb, because he was an underground cartoonist. And in fact, I think Crumb probably established a little organization that gave this guy, whose name is Gilbert Shelton, his start in his career. So he has these characters that are three hippies, and they’re always experimenting with drugs of one form or another. And they have this cat. It’s Fat Freddy’s cat. And they kind of like the cat, and the cat has its own adventures, and this is one of them. So the hippies have just sold a bunch of cocaine, and they bought this little estate house in the country. And so they’re bringing their cat out there, and it’s never been in the country. And it’s pretty interesting. I think it’s a funny cartoon, because I’ve had cats, and they hate it when you move places. You know, because they’re all comfortable where they were, and then you move the cat to the new place, and it’s like the little rat that you just put in the new cage. That cat is not happy. Maybe it’ll just sit there and cry, because they will do that, you know. But then they sort of loosen up, and eventually they sort of master the new territory. It’s very stressful for a cat. So dogs are much better at doing that for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because they’re pack animals. Okay, anyways, the hippie takes the cat out, shows them the country, and the cat’s not that happy about that. And so it goes into this crouch, which animals actually do when they explore new territory. So if you put a rat in a cage and it starts to move around, it hunches down, you know, sort of slinking through the undergrowth, basically, so that nothing can see it. So that’s what a cat will do. And then the cat sniffs away, which is what a cat will do, because they’re mostly olfactory, like most animals. And then poof! It encounters an anomaly. And that’s, it’s already on edge. So like an exploring cat like this would have its fur half puffed up already. Because it’s like, it’s preparing for what’s lurking out there in the unknown. And then if anything just triggers it over the edge, you’ve seen this if you’ve ever gone behind a cat and like went pssst! to it. Especially if it’s on startle, if the blood thing will just explode into fur and jump for it, beat the air, and then it’s very amusing. So and it’ll barrel off in the other direction, you know. And then it’ll take revenge on you later. So anyways, the cat encounters something it doesn’t understand and then runs out of the house. And so the hippie says, where’d the cat disappear to now? And the other hippie says under the house. And then the cat says, you’d hide too if you smelled what I did. And then it shows what it smells. And it’s a great thing. And it’s just like, it’s got duck feet, and it’s got like deer antlers, and it’s got an olf face, and it’s got a scum tail. And it’s like, you might say, well that thing doesn’t exist. But then you might say, wait a minute. If you’re going to derive a first pass approximation of what’s lurking out there in the forest, that’s not a bad representation. It’s like, it’s alive. It’s got the properties of a skunk and a deer and a wolf and all these things amalgamated into one thing. And that actually is what’s waiting out there in the bush. Now, as you explore, you’re going to differentiate that into subcategories. But you can’t start your knowledge at a high level of resolution. You’ve got to start your knowledge at a low level of resolution. You’ve got to come up with a low level resolution model that’s accurate but not detailed. And the reason you have to do that is because you bloody well better do it fast. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be sitting around thinking, well are you a deer, a wolf, or a fox? And the next answer to that is, I’m the thing that ate you. So it’s not a good approach. You want to get quick and dirty. And that’s why kids, I think, that’s why kids imagine monsters all the time in the dark. It’s like, there aren’t monsters. Well, not in that particular darkness. But the kid is not that stupid. It’s wired up. It knows what’s out there in the darkness. And it’s not good. And so it takes a lot of calming to make a choice. Especially because we have kids sleep in their own bedroom. It’s like, that’s not natural for kids. I’m not saying that isn’t what should happen. But as an evolutionary, you know, I think it does encourage independence and all that, at the cost of some trauma. But, you know, you can perfectly well imagine that collective humans 150,000 years ago, stayed in a pretty tight heat when they were sleeping. Because that’s a lot safer. Especially if you’re little and delicious and edible. So, I love the cartoon. Because it’s also a really useful illustration about how fantasy operates automatically. And can generate these generic low resolution categories. Alright, so now, this is Kali. She’s a Hindu goddess. And so, you might say, well, did people invent gods? I think that’s a very weird question. Because the answer is yes, and the answer is also no. Because you could also just as easily say that gods invented people. Depends on how you look at it. Anyways. You know, if you think about it from a Marxist perspective, or a Freudian perspective, or from a scientific perspective. And those are perspectives that tend to be very destructive to religious thinking. You’re basically, you’ve got to think, okay, well, the image is there to protect you against death anxiety. And that it’s a substitute father, that’s the Freudian idea, basically. Or that the religion was constructed to aid and abet those who were in power. To keep all the peasants and lowlifes under control. By, you know, like, promising them happy ever after if they behave. Or that it’s just a primitive scientific theory that should be superseded now that we have more knowledge. Those are the alternative hypotheses. Okay, well let’s look at this image. So this is Kali. She’s a destroyer, a devourer. That doesn’t mean she’s bad, by the way. It means she’s something to contend with. She’s like Tiamat. So I’m going to take her apart so that you can see her. Because you can’t, unless you happen to know what this means because of your culture. And even then you might not be able to see it. So let’s figure it out. Now she has eight legs. Why? What has eight legs? Spider. How do you all feel about spiders? Right. Right. And the reason you feel like that is because you have these little spider detectors on your skin. Those are basically hairs. And when the spider crawls along in the spider detectors, you get this creepy feeling. And that’s you basically shaking your skin to get rid of the damn spider. Of course you can’t do that anymore because you’re not a horse. You know, so you just kind of have a vestigial feeling like that. And spider can give you good chomping, you know. And so sometimes that’s actually poisonous. And that’s not so good. But also a spider is an interesting thing from a conceptual perspective. Because it spins a web. And the web catches things that aren’t paying attention. And then the thing that isn’t paying attention gets wrapped up in the spider’s web and then it gets sucked dry. And so that’s a spider. Okay, so she’s a spider. Now spiders are pretty cool too because they can spin webs, you know. And that’s the web of fate, by the way. That’s the web of fate. So that’s one thing. She’s a spider. And then, well, she’s in this web, but the web is made out of fire, because that’s fire. And then inside the fire, those are skulls. So she’s a spider that sits in a web of fire and skulls. So believe me, if you saw a spider like that, you’d be looking at it. You might scream first and maybe you would run away. But then you’d come back and look at it. It’s like, oh look, I found a spider. It’s in a web of fire and skulls. That’d be very attractive to you. You probably wouldn’t be able to forget about it. And you know, that’s one thing about Kelly. She’s the bunch of things that you bloody well cannot forget about. And so you could actually even say, she’s a model of all those things that you can’t forget about. And then you could say, well, she’s an attempt to model all those things you can’t forget about. And you might say, well, why would you want to model those things? Well, it’s because you bloody well better remember those things or you’re not going to stay alive. And then you might ask, well, should you be dealing with the things that you shouldn’t forget about one by one? One by one? Fire, say? Or skeletons? Should you be dealing with that one on one? Or spiders or snakes? Or should you be dealing with that as a category? Right? That’s the thing about human beings is we like to deal with things as categories. Because that way you can solve a whole bunch of problems at the same time. You know, so you might say, you do this all the time. You don’t. If you go online and you look at people who want advice about relationships, they want advice about relationships. And you think, well, really what they want is to figure out how to deal with this female or this male. But they don’t ask that question. They ask, how can I improve my relationships? Which is that they’re trying to solve the problem of how to relate to all the set of all potential relationships right now. Because maybe that’s better information than exactly what to do about this particular male or female at this particular point in time. Now, often it isn’t, but you can understand why people are pushed for that. It’s like, why not get the general answer? If you can. Then you solve the whole class of problems. Okay, so what’s the class of problems here? The class of problems here is the class of problems. It’s how do you conceptualize the class of problems? It’s a brilliant, that’s such a brilliant question. You know, I mean, maybe you can’t. Maybe there’s no commonality between all those things that constitute a problem. But by the same token, maybe there is. Well, this is an attempt to do that. Okay, so what else about Kelly? She’s got a sword. Her hair’s on fire. She also has a headband of skulls. Now, people don’t like skulls very much, you know. They creep us out. And there’s good reason for that. Because all things considered, you should probably avoid places where there are a lot of skulls. Because it’s easy to infer from that that a lot of people like you died there. And that might be because there’s something around that’s going to kill you, just like it killed all those other things, or there’s some illness, or whatever. It’s like, get the hell out of there. So even chimps don’t like chimp heads. And they don’t like immobile chimp bodies. So, you know, a skull for us, it’s like, well, you can see it’s death itself, you know. And it is that. But it’s an archetypal symbol. And you don’t get accustomed to skulls. Very, very hard. So, she’s got skulls everywhere. Well, sometimes she has the tongue of a tiger. But she doesn’t in this particular representation. But sometimes she does. And that’s the predatory element. And a tiger, that’s a pretty fascinating thing, right? Because it’s like 12 feet long and 5 feet high. And, you know, it’s a major piece of engineering that. And probably it will eat you. So, to put the tiger’s tongue on Callie also indicates that she’s representative of those terrible, awe-inspiring, predatory things that lurk in the forest. Of course, this is an Indian representation. She often has a snake around her waist. And usually it’s a cobra. You know, and cobras are another thing that people find absolutely fascinating, like fire. And then, but not in this situation. What she has wrapped around her instead are intestines. And you see how her belly’s hollow? She just gave birth to that unfortunate character that she happens to be standing on. And it’s his intestines that she’s eating. Right. Now, I fail to see how this symbol can protect you from death anxiety. You know, quite the contrary. It seems to me to be something that would seriously evoke it. You know, and there’s no patriarchal protection here. And I can’t see how anybody could use this to oppress the peasants. You know, maybe they could scare them with it. But that isn’t actually how Kelly is used. So I don’t think that that’s a useful way of thinking about it at all. Now, interestingly enough, Kelly is something you make sacrifices to. Now that’s cool, eh? Because it’s weird. People have had a hard time figuring out the whole idea of sacrifice. So there was this guy who was a journalist in the 1960s. And he wrote a book. His name was Arthur Kessler. And he wrote a book called The Ghost in the Machine, which is a book about consciousness. And one of the things he pointed out was that the motif of sacrifice seemed to be archetypal. It was universal. It was happening everywhere. And one of the side effects of that was human sacrifice. Gods were all upset. You’d sacrifice a couple of slaves or captors or children. Because the Carthaginians used to do that all the time. Their own children. And they’d have them smile before they killed them. So it was brutal, brutal. But the Carthaginians, they would commit suicide at the drop of a hat. Because their basic idea was if you screwed up, well you’re wrong. Time to kill yourself. There’s no hope for you. So it was a very common idea. And the Japanese still practiced that before World War II as well. So anyway, so the whole idea of sacrifice, pretty damn dark. And Kessler regarded it as evidence that the human race was basically insane. Like in a fundamental, biological manner that was not fixable. So it was like the ultimate, in original sin theorizing. You know, and that was written when everybody was all shorted out about the fact that we were going to blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons. And so the idea that humans were basically insane. Which, you know, it’s not a bad theory. You know, you could even say we’ve been driven insane by the nature of being. Anyways. You make sacrifices to kill. They’re often blood sacrifices. Now that’s kind of interesting. Because one of the things that you might notice about what Kelly represents, which you might say is the predatory, like almost diabolical side of nature. You know, the part of nature that’s really working hard at doing you in. Is that it does seem to thrive on blood. And so there’s an idea here, which is if you give the damn thing what it wants, maybe it will leave you alone. But there’s a more sophisticated idea right beneath that. Because what happens if you sacrifice to Kelly is she turns into her opposite. And her opposite is, well, it’s the opposite of this. It’s benevolent nature. It’s the kind of nature that environmentalists believe in. You know, it’s like nature as French impressionist landscape. It’s not mosquitoes and guinea worms and cancer and crocodiles and gangrene. It’s a sunny day in that old growth forest where Disney deer are bouncing around smiling at you. And that’s nature too, because nature is what gives. And if you use the feminine symbolism, I mean, your mother is certainly someone who can be an absolutely horrific force. And that often happens to infants. But by the same token, she’s the bearer of everything that pulls you into life. You know, when her contact with you, her physical contact, her ability to play with you, the fact that she looks at you, the fact that she feeds you directly from her body. It’s like that’s the whole opposite of Kelly the destroyer. And they’re both elements of the feminine. And part of the reason I think that it’s the feminine per se that came to represent the destructive element of nature as well as the positive element is that men experience women in many ways as the destructive element of the feminine. Because men are always being rejected by women. And women are nature. Because nature is what selects you to reproduce. And so the answer from most women to most men is, you’re a nice, snuff guy, but there’s no way your genes should propagate themselves into the future. You know, and that’s as harsh a judgment as could possibly be rendered. If you watch Crumb, for example, which I would highly recommend, because it’s full of Great Mother symbolism, is he describes himself as someone who’s so much of a loser. He’s not even in the dominance hierarchy. You know, he’s not at the bottom. He’s outside. You know, so he describes himself as someone who, especially him and his older brother, it was virtually impossible for them to even conceive of the idea that they might ask a girl in high school out. It wasn’t that they would get refused. It was that it was inconceivable that they could even do it. That’s where they were in the dominance hierarchy. So of course, Crumb, who has a mother to go with it, you know, all his females are like these extremely physically powerful bird-headed goddesses, more or less. And he construes himself as this little work thing that’s sort of cowering at their feet. And it’s deeply embedded in them. And no wonder, given his circumstances, it’s no wonder. He actually did a remarkable job of developing himself in a productive manner, I think, given what he had to go against. But anyways, yeah, he has, you sacrifice to Kelly and you bring forth its opposite. Now, once I thought that I had come to understand the idea of sacrifice, I think I figured this out about 15 years ago. It just blew me over when I figured it out. Because it had always been viewed either as a kind of an apothenomena or as something that’s pathological. But it’s not. It’s the most remarkable, it’s one of the most remarkable conceptual discoveries that human race has ever made. Because what it meant was we started to figure out that if you gave something what it wanted, if you gave something something of value, then you could turn it into something that might be beneficial to you. So it’s the concomitant of delayed gratification. Because delayed gratification is a sacrifice. So you know the marshmallow experiment, right? Okay, so you get these little kids and you torture them. You say, hey, you like marshmallows? He’s like, yeah, I know you do. Okay, so here’s a bunch of them. Now, if you don’t eat those marshmallows, you get to have more marshmallows. And so then you leave, and some of the kids eat the marshmallows, right? And you’ve got to admit, those kids, there’s something about them. They get the damn marshmallows. You know, and so if there was an earthquake, right then, those kids would have won. Okay, so that’s something to think about, because delayed gratification is not always the right answer. The environment has to be stable enough so that the probability that you will get what you’ve delayed for is high. And so if you’re living in sheer chaos, you’re a fool to delay gratification. Eat the damn marshmallow now. So it’s not like delayed gratification is the solution for everything. It’s not. Sometimes it’s the solution. So what do you do? You make a sacrifice now. And the idea is it will pay off in the future. So then you think about that in archetypal forms. It means that you forgo something of value now. It’s a sacrifice. You let go of it. And the deal is, if you let go of it, better things will happen to you in the future. And you know, no other animal has figured that out. Well, squirrels maybe. You know, because they store nuts, but I don’t really believe that they… I think it’s fundamentally an instinct. You know what I mean? I don’t think they generalized from that idea. They do act it out, but I don’t think they generalized from it. They haven’t turned it into a concept. And so the concept here is the world is constituted such that it has a tremendously destructive element. But if you can barter with that properly, then you can flip it over and the part of it that’s positive will reveal itself. It’s like, that’s bloody brilliant. It’s unbelievably brilliant. And there’s even another element to it. Because let’s say that all you’ve been getting from reality for a while is Kelly. It’s all spiders and snakes and fires and skulls. And things that want to eat you. You might think, why is that? And one answer is, well, that’s just what it’s like. But then that’s a problem, because that’s not just what it’s like. You know that the opposite is there. And you might say, well, where the hell is that? Like, why is it hiding its face from me? And one answer is, reality cannot be contended with you. That’s one answer. But that’s like, you’re depressed and hopeless. Let’s do that out. It’s like, you’re done. Here’s another answer. You might be doing something wrong. And then you might think, well, what would it mean to be doing something wrong? And then we might say, maybe you’re hanging on to something you value a little too tightly. Maybe one of your axiomatic presuppositions, like the thing that’s at the top of your damn value structure, is actually sufficiently outdated or pathological, such that if you hold on to it, all you’re going to get is frowns and misery. So maybe you have to let it go. And that’s a sacrifice. And so maybe that’s why the rule is when you’re making sacrifices to Kelly, and to any other god for that matter, is don’t sacrifice the low-quality junk. You sacrifice the stuff that you’re attached to. Because if things aren’t going right, it could be that it’s because you’re attached to the wrong things. Now that’s interesting. That’s starting to get very interesting, because that means that people are starting to think, maybe my attitude has something to do with this. It’s something I can change. Maybe it’s not just the factual nature of the external world. It’s something I can contend with and dance with. And maybe if I readjusted my moral schema, the probability is kind of low that Kelly will be there all the time, and it’ll be pretty high that her positive counterpart shows up. So then the question might be, how do we make the sacrifices that are necessary to organize our schema of interpretation and behavior, such that when we implement it in the world, reality shines its positive face on us and not its negative face? And that’s an incredibly complicated problem. That’s a problem human beings have been trying to figure out, and animals for that matter, forever. It wasn’t until there were human beings that we started to get some conceptual representation of it. But then the other thing too is, you guys are all doing that. You have a big bet going with nature. And the bet is, make some sacrifices right now. Or maybe your parents are making sacrifices on your behalf. And what’s the bet? The bet is, it’ll be worth it. But what does that mean? It means that if you make the proper sacrifices, you discipline yourself, you’re not too dissolute with your resources, you pay attention, and you wait, your life will be better. Well, that’s pretty cool, because it might be true. And if it’s true, then none of this is an illusion or delusion. It’s just low resolution, first pass representation. And that’s smart. And so, you know, from a Piagetian perspective, well, what do you do before you understand something? You act it out. And so the people that are making sacrifices, they’re acting out this idea. Do they know the idea? It depends on what you mean by no. No, they’re acting it out. They’re dramatically representing it. Is that knowledge? Well, it’s a form of knowledge. Is it the kind of abstract knowledge that we’re talking about right now? No. But it’s the immediate precursor to that. You don’t get from the phenomenon to the articulation without running it through some bodily representations and some drama. And this is so damn complicated that, you know, you probably couldn’t get to it until you had civilizations that were pretty damn good. And lots of people thinking about this all the time. You know, and so the person who came up with this, they would have experienced it as a religious revelation. It’s like, what’s the nature of reality? Poof, you get this image. You know, it’s of this multi-armed goddess. And it’s in flames. And it’s in a web. And it’s like terrifying you. It’s terrifying you. You’re gripped by it. And you make a representation. And part of the reason you worship it is because the bloody thing has got you in its grip. And no wonder, because there’s an idea behind that that’s so powerful that you should be gripped by it. You should be unable to forget it. Because it’s an absolute, it’s a stellar stroke of genius. It’s a real revelation. And it sets the whole human race on the path to making the proper sacrifices so that the fire and the bugs and the insects and the snakes and the tigers stay the hell away. And a good thing. It’s a good thing. And then maybe now and then, you know, the world’s configured so that it’s beneficial to us. I’m not sure if this is the greatest moment. But I asked a question before. I’m not sure if you got to it last class. But if you could just directly say what you think of as an archetype when you use the word. Well, that’s a good question. This is an archetype. But your behavioral reactions to that could also be archetypal. So I would say it’s the expression of something that’s at the foundation of knowledge. So it’s like an innate axiom of representation and behavior. And it’s archetypes that make us human rather than lions or ants. We have human archetypes. And those are the things that we can’t dispense with. They’re built into us. Like, well, jealousy would be an archetype, for example. It’s an archetypal pattern. Hunger, thirst. All of these things that are common to everyone. But they’re more conceptual archetypes, too. Like these. You know, it’s a fuzzy word. But it has to do with the element of ideation and action that are not merely culturally constructed, let’s say. Is it something like in the realm of genes, is there something like there has to be a substrate that also has to be triggered or activated by something? Or is it just kind of already created? Well, that’s a good question. That’s a good question. I think I can answer that in some sense by analogy. Children would not be able to learn language unless they had the archetype of language at hand. Right. Does it have to be triggered? Twins sometimes come up with their own language. Identical twins. So they’ll just create a language. And so there’s a pretty powerful language creating capacity. But generally speaking, yes, it’s triggered because you’re thrown into an environment where language is the norm. But you can throw a chimp in there and that’s not going to work. Now, what it is that make people able to generate language, that’s complicated because partly it’s you have the right mouth, you have the right tongue, you have the right throat, you know. And then you have the right brain, whatever the hell that means. We don’t exactly know what any of those things mean. So we use the word archetype to kind of cover our ignorance in some sense. Does the human psychological element of archetypes, in your view, change qualitatively when human beings start having widespread access to archetypal representations at each time? Hopefully. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be any utility in developing the representations. So I think the question you’re asking in some sense is, is representation useful? And the answer is, so far so good. Not necessarily useful, but just that the thing itself, once represented, does that representation now filter back in and then change the thing that started there? Yes, I would say it does that in all sorts of ways. So for example, in some ways the dominance hierarchy is a way that animals organize themselves in an environment. But if they do that long enough, it becomes the environment. Right? Because once the adaptation has been there for a hundred million years, it’s no longer an adaptation. It’s part of the environment. So there’s loops, causal loops happening everywhere. So yeah, the representation changes the archetype. God only knows how and over what period of time. But yes, yes. Is there a relationship between Kelly and Ganesh? She has the… There’s a relationship, but I don’t know enough about Hinduism to tell you what it is. So, you know, I’m not an expert on Hinduism. That’s for sure. It’s a very complicated religious system. But, you know, I do know that these sub-deities, so to speak, are manifestations of the ultimate reality. And there’s many… there’s some utility in that, because it’s monotheistic at one level of analysis and polytheistic at another. And it makes it easier… you know, you can think about these as bridges between the human and the absolute divine. The absolute divine is so damn abstract and distant that it’s hard to have any relationship with it. You need intermediary structures. And the saints are like that in Catholicism. You know, because they’re sort of gods, roughly speaking, but they’re sort of human, so you can kind of understand them. And they’re fractionated out, so they only represent a bit of the deity. You know, so they’re not the whole thing all at once, which is a bit much to contend with. So… So do you think having a diverse vocabulary of our civil representations helps people to move things from their unconscious to more abstract representations of it? I don’t know if it helps it. Say that again. It helps them differentiate it. Now, okay, and articulate it. So now we want to think about what that means. Okay, so I think I’ve told you before, I’ve seen children that haven’t been played up with enough. So maybe they’re five or six, and they’re kind of… they’re like little Frankensteins, you know? They’re kind of unformed and kind of cloudy and clueless, and they bump into things like other kids, you know? And so they’re not articulated well, and so the other kids usually won’t play with them, because they’re sort of at a three-year-old level of development, when they should be at a six-year-old level of development. It just puts the other kids off. You know, they find it creepy. And there’s reasons for that that I won’t go into. But those kids aren’t differentiated, you know? They haven’t got the extremely high-level movements down. And so, as you articulate an archetype, and it diversifies, you become more adapted to multiple places. So that’s what you want to do. You want to take the damn archetype and differentiate it like mad. Because, for example, when you’re looking at a woman, you don’t want to see only the archetype. First of all, you’d be on your knees if that happened. Believe me, there’s lots of men like that. There really are. It’s animal possession. It’s way more common than you think. I see this with male clients all the time. If they’re attracted to a woman, her mere presence is so goddamn overwhelming that it just ties their tongue up and knots. And what’s happening is they’re not seeing the individual. They’re seeing the archetype. And the archetype is like, it’s just too much. Now, what’s interesting is, the archetype does shine through the woman. It’s real. But the individual part is real too. And unless the guy is capable of differentiating the archetype into that actual woman, the woman won’t have anything to do with him. Or maybe she’ll play with him like a spider plays with a fly. And it serves him right too. So you have to have both. And so that’s partly why, remember Sleeping Beauty? The Disney movie? You know how the hero is put into a castle by the evil queen. And then Sleeping Beauty is sleeping. And so then he has to fight his way through this archetypal representation, which actually transforms itself into the dragon of chaos. He has to fight his way all through all of that before he can actually get to the real woman. And that’s exactly what happens with men as they develop, or fail to develop, is the first thing to the degree that they’re immature. All they see is the archetype. And they’re very inferior in relationship to the archetype, because unless they were Christ, so to speak, they’re going to be on their knees. And so to contend with the archetype means, first of all, to elevate the male, because as he contends with it, he develops. And it also means to put the place, the two, at equality. And then the archetype turns into the individual woman. And that’s a big sacrifice, because, you know, hypothetically you’d rather have Sleeping Beauty the pretend princess than some actual woman with all her trouble. But the problem is, there isn’t Sleeping Beauty the pretend princess. There’s just the real woman. And you see that in Peter Pan, too, the story, because he’s got Tinkerbell. And that’s fine, except Tinkerbell’s a fairy, and they don’t exist. So he could have Wendy if he would grow up, but he doesn’t want to grow up, so he’s not going to get Wendy. And he’s going to stay king of the bloody lost boys, and that’ll be the end of that. So it’s differentiation of the archetype. And that’s what you’re doing as you develop across time. Now there’s a book called The Origins and History of Consciousness, which was written by a guy named Eric Neumann. And it’s a book that’s very much like Maps of Meeting, because I believe that Maps of Meeting has been written four times. It’s Symbols of Transformation, Jung wrote that. It’s Origins and History of Consciousness. Eric Neumann, who was a student of Jung, wrote that. And it’s also Becker’s Denial of Death. And it’s because, you know, there’s elements in Heidegger that are very similar. It’s because that’s all working on the same problem. But one of the things that’s lovely about Neumann, he’s very smart about this, is he describes the acquisition of knowledge as the differentiation of the archetypes. And that’s brilliant. It’s right. It’s like the thing itself is a unified whole. That’s sort of the divine ground of reality. Then it fragments into the first three layers. Masculine, feminine, and child. And then that fragments. And hopefully what it does is fragments right down to the level of individuals. So that when you’re interacting with someone, you’re interacting with their individual expression of the archetypal reality. Because then you’re actually interacting with the person. And that will get you a lot farther in any kind of relationship than being blown over by the archetypal. So you can project archetypes, but they can also possess archetypes? I don’t think you project them. It’s not like you have a choice. It’s that’s how you see the world. It’s the default. Because a projection implies that you could be doing something else. It’s like everything you see is an archetype. Although some of them are differentiated. And they can become extremely differentiated insofar as you actually come to know a person. If you’re really lucky, you differentiate the damn thing down to the level of individual recognition. And you’re so skilled at that, that the archetypal reality reestablishes itself. And then you get to have your cake and eat it too. So one of the things you conceptualize marriage. Because marriage is a human universal, by the way. Something to think about. So it looks like it’s built into us pretty hard at a biological level. So there’s variations, obviously. And there are certain attractions in polygamy, especially for men. But all things considered, no matter where you look in the world, there’s generally an attempt by the culture to sacralize a man-woman pair. Now Jung was trying to figure out why the hell that would be. I mean there’s the biological necessity, obviously. You’ve got to raise kids somehow, and there shouldn’t just be one of you. But you don’t want to just reduce everything down to the level of two rats living together, even though that’s an important level. He said that one of the things that’s really useful about a vow is that you can’t run away from the damn thing if it’s an actual vow. So what you’re supposed to do when you marry someone is you say, look, I’m stuck with you. And we’re going to bet on this, because we only get five shots at it anyways. And you’re the least awful person I’ve come across. And so let’s tie ourselves together so we can’t escape and see what happens. And so then you think, if you take that seriously, you think, oh my god, I’m stuck with this damn person for the rest of my life. Also then, if you really can’t escape, you think, well, we better build something out of this, you know, because we’re stuck in it. And so Jung conceptualized the marriage as an alchemical container, and he derived this from his studies on alchemy, where two opposite substances were placed together in a container they could not escape from and then exposed to heat. And the heat’s the relationship, obviously, and all the emotions that the relationship generates. They’re exposed to heat and they can’t get out of the damn container. What happens? Well, there’s a transmutation. And the transmutation is a consequence of the exchange of information. And we know this works at a biological level, right? So part of the reason that there is sex is because if we split your DNA down the middle and match it with something that’s exactly the same, wherever there’s a weakness, the two weaknesses are going to combine and you’re going to end up with offspring. They’re all mucked up. That’s basically a consequence of inbreeding. So what you want to do is you want to take your flawed genetic substance, which is, you know, 99.9% good, and someone else’s flawed genetic substance and snap them together and hope like hell that the errors don’t match up. And they probably won’t. So that’s what you’re doing in a relationship. It’s like, you know, you’re screwing in something you can’t fix and so is the other person. And so you slap those two things together and you hope that out of that you build a totality. Okay, and that starts the information flow moving. So then the question is, what would you do if the information flow was curative? What would happen to you? So let’s say you’re 20% warped, which in case would be pretty good, you know, and your partner is 20% warped too, but luckily your warps don’t match up. What that means is if you listen to each other over a long enough period of time, if you really communicated, then you wouldn’t be warped anymore and neither would the other person, and then you’d have the archetypal situation as well as the individual situation. Right? You see what I mean? Because you both have been elevated up to the point where you’re not full of holes anymore. And you think, well that’s part of the purpose. Insofar as there’s a psychological and spiritual function of marriage, that’s it. And so you can have freedom. You can say, well this is a knot that we can untie. But the problem with that is you don’t have to contend with the person then. You don’t have to take it seriously. You don’t have to take it as if it’s life and death. But the problem is it is life and death. It is. Maybe you can have another shot at it. I don’t see why you think you’ll do better the second time, because all the evidence suggests that you won’t. The divorce rates higher for second marriages. It’s like, you know, the thing about being tied to someone who isn’t you is that they’re not you. They have something to tell you if you listen. And so then you start with the flawed individual, and if you bang yourself against each other enough, what you hope is that you both develop and you shed your excess baggage along the way. And that can happen, you know. It’s a good thing if it happens. You live longer. You have a better life. It’s a better situation for your children. It’s like everybody wins in that situation. Okay, let’s… you’re all getting… restless. So let’s stop and come back in ten minutes.