https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Q_2UYIuvDXI
So the last time that we met, we talked about the idea of logos operating on chaos in order to bring being into being. And that’s predicated on a worldview that’s not precisely materialistic in its fundamental orientation. So it’s predicated on a viewpoint that one way of looking at being is that it’s a place of potential, maybe of unlimited potential, and that what acts on that potential to bring it into being is what modern people would call consciousness, but what the ancients called logos, which I actually think is a better word than consciousness. I think it’s a more encompassing word because it doesn’t only involve the act of being there, so to speak, like the existentialists would say, but it also involves active exploration, both physical and imaginistic, as well as communication about the results of that exploration. And I think that it’s perfectly reasonable to face the world as if what you’re facing is a pool of potential that you are capable of shaping. And then the question is into what do you wish to shape it? And I think that’s actually the ultimate question. People often ask questions like what is the meaning of life? And I actually think to some degree that that’s an ill-posed question. I think that you can observe the many meanings of life. Some of them are negative. No one questions their reality, and some of them are positive, and we’re more likely to question the reality of the positive meanings that manifest themselves because we get overwhelmed with our apprehension of the fact that life is tragic and that we’re finite and mortal. But that doesn’t mean that those meanings aren’t real. I would also say that, as I’ve considered more and more carefully the way that value structures might be hierarchically organized and gone farther and farther out to what I think of as the edge or the ultimate reaches of that hierarchical organization, that your identity as a finite individual being sort of localized in time and space now and here, that encapsulates generally what people think about themselves as real individuals, but that there are metaphysical spaces outside of that that are hyperreal in some sense. And in one of those metaphysical spaces, you’re the embodiment of nature and culture in the most real of senses. And in a metaphysical space that’s just beyond that, you’re the logos that transforms order into chaos and sometimes the reverse, and then outside of that, which I think is in some sense the final metaphysical domain, the question is what exactly is it that you’re up to? And I think that what you should be up to is the attempt to transform being into something resembling classical conceptualizations of paradise. That has nothing to do with the attempt to impose an ideological structure on the world so that you can bring it into alignment with your a priori convictions. That’s not the right answer. The right answer is something different. I mean, one of the things you want to ask yourself is, you know, is it better to work for the abolition of misery or for its extension, which I think in some sense is the fundamental metaphysical question. I think that was posed properly in the 20th century because we learned at that point exactly push voluntary evil without bringing everything to a halt. And I think we pushed it right to the limit. And you know, maybe we’re still not done with that game, it’s hard to say, but things look like they have improved, I would say, overall since 1989, since the Berlin Wall fell down, although you certainly see signs of recidivism frequently, and you see that right now, for example, in Russia. And other Russians are trying to find their own way, and they’re afraid in many ways of Western individuality. They believe that it’s got a fatally nihilistic element, and that one of the consequences of that nihilistic element will be the undoing of everything that culture has produced that’s of any value. And so the main Russian political philosopher at this point, who’s one of Putin’s advisors, he’s a nationalist of sorts. But the reason I’m telling you that is because the ideological conflict that began in the 20th century is by no means over, and it isn’t obvious that liberal individualism constitutes the final solution to the problems of mankind. Now I’m not saying that as a cynic, because as far as systems go, it’s a pretty damn good system. I think that people in the West still suffer from a spiritual sickness that’s a consequence of what Nietzsche outlined and Dostoevsky outlined as the major philosophical moves of the 19th century, and that was the demolition of metaphysical belief by rationalism and empiricism, some of which was fully justified and some of which I think was an overextension of the emergent forms of knowledge. So I’m going to go through the rest of Genesis today and explain to you what I think it means, and then I’m going to tell you why I think that’s relevant. So this is an extension of the stories that we’ve been talking about during the entirety of the course. We talked last time about the fact that in the second Genesis story, God takes Eve out of Adam and what that might mean. And the idea there is that it’s something like the feminine or material world has to be transposed into something that’s symbolically masculine in order for it to become properly oriented. So the idea in some sense is that human beings, not just women, but human beings in general, have to rise above their material substrate and transform themselves at a psychological level or at the level of consciousness, and that that’s actually a real level. And if you accept the presupposition that consciousness is actually an active agent in the extraction of order from chaos or in the extraction of reality from potential, there’s no reason to delegate consciousness to epiphenomenal, to the status of something that’s epiphenomenal, even though it seems to depend on the existence of a material substrate for its manifestation. It requires a different way of thinking. Okay, so we’re going to start with the idea of the garden. And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. Now what appears to me to be happening in this story is the, now this is multiple stories that have been edited together over a very long period of time. And so people had evolved in some sense their own traditions of accounting for the structure of reality, and then when people came together in their tribal groups to make civilizations that were larger, it was necessary for the people who were working at an intellectual level in those cultures or at the level of storytelling to try to determine what to do with these old stories so that the core truths could be retained and the apparent paradox is ironed out. And that happened continually as the Bible was written. It’s an ongoing process. It certainly is not something that’s stopped yet. And so it’s an attempt in some sense to bring the story of mankind together into one place and to make it comprehensible, to turn it into a comprehensible literal narrative. The idea that that’s associated, like if you look at the standard Marxist and psychoanalytic critiques of the religious process, I think that they radically underestimate the fundamental utility and power of the underlying process because you can become cynical about it and talk about it in terms of the imposition of a superstitious belief system and you can talk about it in terms of class struggle and patriarchy and all of those things. And I think that those are valid insofar as everything that human beings do are, all of the things that human beings do are contaminated with those motives. But I think it’s a dreadful mistake to write off the entire metaphysical history of mankind by attributing its existence to some cause and then to make that cause something that’s cynical and destructive. I think it’s extremely dangerous and I think by doing that we risk losing what we actually need to survive because I think that the sorts of things that the metaphysical speculations that are buried in religious systems teach us are absolutely vital. You cannot live properly without them. You’ll become destructive or suffer from some variety of serious existential, metaphysical or mental illness. I mean I’ve certainly observed in my clinical practice that one of the major contributors to mental illness, it’s certainly not the only one, but antiphysical illness is the tendency for people to deceive and betray each other. In fact I don’t think there is any factor that plays itself out in human interactions that has more of a causal connection with what we describe as mental illness that the tendency of people to lie to each other and betray each other. One of the things that’s really shocking and surprising to me as a clinician is that those sorts of things are almost never considered as factors in the etiology of mental illness. So when you talk to someone in psychotherapy and you’re trying to straighten out their lives basically what you’re trying to do is to replace falsehood with truth. Now it isn’t like you do that by telling the person what the truth is and having them accept that as some sort of final ideological statement. What you do instead is engage with the person in a form of dialogue that’s designed to help them understand exactly what it was that happened and why it happened and what was good about it and what wasn’t good about it and how the things that were good could continue to manifest themselves in the future and maybe to manifest themselves more powerfully and more strongly and more comprehensively in the future than they had in the past. And as far as I can tell that’s basically what you’re doing in psychotherapy and I think all the evidence points in that direction. I think you can do it for yourself. I mean one of the things that Jung said about psychoanalytic psychotherapy was that it could be replaced by a sufficient moral effort. So what happens is that once God makes man and woman, so what that means in some sense is that once the logos is embodied in something that’s flesh, a place for that to be has to be established. And so you might say, well, what is the, this is an archetypal story, so the question is well what is the archetypal nature of humanity, the essential nature? And the story says the essential nature of humanity is that we’re logos clothed in flesh. And I think that that’s in accordance with people’s own subjective experience. I believe that’s how we experience the world because we see ourselves and perceive ourselves as conscious beings who are capable of transforming potential into reality and that we’re clothed embodied in something that’s mortal and corruptible. And that’s partly the opportunity of existence and partly it’s peril and burden. And then the question, and this is actually the question that’s posed in the story of Adam and Eve is what then can be done about that? What are the consequences of that and what can be done about it? And I think that the biblical writings taken as a comprehensive unit are an attempt, are or one of the prime attempts of mankind to sort out that question and answer it over a period of thousands and thousands and thousands of years. So, so the first idea is that we’re made in the image of God and that what God is is the thing that extracted order from chaos at the beginning of time. And that we can, that we partake in that and embody that as we move through life. And that we can choose how to turn potential into actuality and that we actually choose what kind of reality the potential will be turned into. I think that part of the reason that many cultures have the idea of heaven and hell as well as the idea of the underworld is that the archetypal potential poles for the transformation of potentiality are heaven and hell. If things went as badly as they possibly could, we could turn the, we could turn being itself to something that as closely enough resembles hell so there’s no reason to figure, there’s no reason to assume that there’s any distinction whatsoever. And I think we’ve had a good taste of that. We had a very good taste of that in the 20th century. And on the opposite pole is whatever we could do if we made things as good as they could possibly be. Now, I think in order to make things as good as they possibly can be you have to abandon your fear and your resentment and there’s lots of reasons why people can’t do that. And some of the primary reasons have to do with the fact of our, the nature of our being which is that we’re conscious co-creators of reality but we’re enveloped in a corruptible envelope and that’s painful and frightening and in some sense of sufficient mystery to undermine our faith in the entire process. And then that happens to people all the time, especially when they get sick or when things really go badly for them. They wonder, you know, what’s the point? Or I was talking to one of my clients the other day about Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov and I don’t know if you’ve read the Brothers Karamazov but you definitely should. It’s an amazing book. In that book there’s a novice, a monastery novice named Alosha and he has an older brother named Ivan. And Alosha isn’t very verbal but he’s a very good person and he’s trying his best to be divine, I suppose, to be devout and to become a monk. But his older brother, who’s extraordinarily intelligent and charismatic, is a rationalist right to the core and he likes to torment Alosha with all the reasons why believing in some kind of divine reality is weak, naive and ill-advised. And basically he continually tells him stories about horrible things that happen in the world and attempts to force Alosha to justify how if being is good those things could possibly occur. And so one of the stories he tells Alosha, which is a story that Dostoevsky got from the newspapers of the time, was that it’s a story about a little girl whose parents locked her in an outhouse overnight when it was freezing outside and she screamed and cried the entire night because she was locked out there and eventually froze to death. And that became quite a scandal in Russia at that time. And Ivan’s basic comment to Alosha was that as far as he was concerned the entire course of being up to this point in time wasn’t worth that girl suffering that night and that there could be justified by man nor beast and fall under the rubric of the assumption that being was good and that whatever created it was also good. And so Ivan is very good at laying out stories like that. And Alosha has a very difficult time dealing with it and I think Dostoevsky had his finger on exactly the problem. If life has some sort of transcendent meaning then why is it pervaded by suffering and evil? That’s basically the question that people have been asking since the beginning of time. My impression of that, my feeling about that is that it’s a work in progress so to speak and that things might be as good as they can be because no one has figured out how to make them any better than they are. I mean that flies in the face of ideas of, you know, the classical ideas of God are that God’s omniscient and omnipresent and I always forget the other one. Yes right so the classic attributes of God is that he has all the power there is and then of course the question is if that’s the case then why are things such a mess? You know and there’s been various attempts to address that in the history of metaphysical and philosophical thought and one is that they vary in degrees of complexity but one is that the world is set up such that human beings have to find their own way that we have a role to play in this in some sense although God could fix it if he wished. The other is that there was a, something went wrong near the beginning of time when people became or at least the beginning of human time when people became self-conscious and that it’s never been rectified. And the other is, and this is how it appears to me, is that it’s something that has to be worked out as time progresses. That the nature of perfection can’t be predetermined. It’s too complex. And so in some sense that the whole, that being itself is an attempt to compute the perfect final solution but that no one knows what that is and that you can’t compute it without running it as a simulation. It’s something like that and that we participate in that and I believe that every time people make a choice that the choice that you make is between tilting the world more, tilting the world in a direction whose final destination would be something resembling hell or tilting the world in a direction whose final destination would be something approximating heaven and that you’re always making that decision and that you actually know that you’re making that decision and that you make it consciously at that point in time. And so I think then part of the moral duty of people is to put their lives together so that they’re sufficiently without arrogance and sufficiently without resentment so that every time they make a choice they choose to push things in the right direction. And part of the reason that I’ve come to this solution is because I’ve read what people who are extremely destructive think. You can find those writings in various places. Some of the most illuminating forms of those writings I saw, for example, in the writings of the kid who shot up the Columbine High School. He tells you exactly what he was thinking. It’s very, very clear and it’s completely metaphysical. He explains it in religious language. He basically says that the world as presently constituted is so evil and so rife with suffering, including all of humanity, that it would be better if it was just wiped out. And that’s what he proceeds to try to do. And his viewpoint is of course contaminated by the fact that he places himself not only above all other people but above God himself and then proceeds to be the judge and executioner. And I don’t see how you can read what he said and not come to that conclusion. That’s just exactly what he says. And the connection between that and the nature of the satanic impulse to rationally dominate and destroy are so close that they could have been formulated by the same thinker. And in some sense I think they were. So now, when God makes man and woman, a couple of things we talked about last time that I think are extremely interesting is that despite the fact that this book is so ancient, one of the propositions that it formulates is that both men and women are formulated in the image of God, which I think is quite remarkable. One of the things you always hear with regards especially to radical feminist thought, which is something that I think is destructive beyond comprehension, is that prior to the emergence of feminist thinking, the entire structure of humanity was basically patriarchal and aimed at oppressing women. And I don’t think you can, and that was certainly the case for religious traditions like the great monotheisms, but I don’t think that you can read Genesis and come to that conclusion because one of the first statements is that both men and women are divine in their fundamental And that is by no means a patriarchal statement. I think it’s actually a miraculous statement in some sense that that idea could have been formulated so early in time. And I think that says more about the true nature of the historical relationship between men and women than any attempt to rewrite history across some ideological, using some ideological, a priori ideological format. So men and women are both created and then they’re created in the image of God, whatever that means. I think it means that they have the capacity to turn possibility into actuality and that that’s built into our being and then they’re placed in a garden. Now the idea of a garden is a very, very complicated idea because the Garden of Eden is a particular type of place. And what it seems to me to be is that the story is not only describing archetypally what men and women are, but it’s also describing archetypally what the environment of men and women has to be. And the environment has to be a garden and a walled garden. And Eden means well watered place and paradise means walled garden. And so the idea that the semantic indicators point to is that the proper place for human beings is a place that’s a combination of culture and nature because the walls are there to protect and to keep in and to keep out. Whereas the garden itself is the flourishing of nature in some independent manner while also under the conscious apprehension and shaping of the inhabitants of that particular place. And I think that that’s part of what human beings are struggling with right now. We’re in the 21st century and a big part of what faces us is well it appears that we have the ability, whether we want it or not, to shape the manner in which the entire planet manifests itself over the next endless span of time. And we’re caught at the moment trying to decide exactly what that should look like. And whether we want the responsibility or not, it seems to be on us. And I would say that since it’s on us, we should wake up and take the responsibility because the thing will deteriorate of its own accord. And that means we have difficult decisions to make. And at the moment we’re mostly fighting about who’s bad and who’s good within that entire struggle and looking for people to blame about why it’s not as perfect as it could be. It’s like there’s a lot of reasons it’s not as perfect as it could be. And I think that one of the most fundamental reasons is that none of your lives are as perfect as you could make them. And so because of that you’re not in any position to make the appropriate decisions that would have to be made in order to set the world on its proper course. Because it’s a very complicated set of decisions and that if you make a mistake because you’re ideologically predisposed or because your life is full of deceit and inadequacy, all of which you could conceivably address, then why would you think that you would be reliable enough to make the kind of decisions that would set things right? It’s very, very complicated. And if we want to put the world in order, we’re going to have to extend our capacity tremendously because we’re just not up to the task at the moment. It’s not only that people won’t do it. It’s not only that people actively fight against making things better. It’s also that we just don’t know what to do. And it’s a massive problem. And I don’t believe that it’s a problem that you can solve unless you put your own house together to begin with because I don’t think that you have the psychological sophistication or the spiritual stability to begin to address such issues before you are standing on firm ground, the firm ground that you’ve placed beneath your own feet. And it’s no simple matter to get your own life together. And then it’s no simple matter to get your own life together while you’re simultaneously getting your family’s life together. And then there’s you and your family and your community. And all those things have to be brought into harmony. One of the things that I’ve been very, very impressed with over the years is Piaget’s idea of an equilibrated state. I think that that’s the appropriate paradisal vision. Now what Piaget basically said was that it was possible to set up complex systems so that they were voluntarily self-sustaining. And so across, so involuntarily self-sustaining would mean self-sustaining now. They would mean self-sustaining for you. It would mean self-sustaining for you and the people around you. It would mean self-sustaining for you and the people around you now, next week, next month, the year after that, and then across multiple spans of time. And there’s a kind of harmonious balance that that implies that I think you have to build from the bottom up because it’s too damn complicated otherwise. You just don’t know what the appropriate next step would be. And the ability to determine what the next step would be requires certain fundamental skills that have to be brought to bear on the problem in order to solve the problem. One of them would be if you and I, for example, want to sit together and determine how to establish an equilibrated space right here and now, one of the things that we have to do is we have to be able to listen to each other. And we may have to be able to listen to each other in such a way that if I happen to be better at articulating myself than you are, then I have to lend you my skills of articulation to help you understand what you want so that we can actually discuss how we could mutually obtain our individual goals simultaneously in the same space. It’s very complicated. And that would also mean that you have to know what you want. And I think that in order for you to know what you want, you have to know who you are. And if you have to know who you are, that means you also have to know who you are all the way down to the bottom of the demonic side, which is no easy thing to do because it’s bottomlessly terrible. But if you don’t take it into account, then what you have is an equilibrated solution that’s unstable and naive. And that’s not going to be helpful because the parts of you that you haven’t called in to the table, so to speak, are going to rebel and cause all sorts of trouble. And so to some degree, that means that you have to make peace with the side of you that’s predatory and destructive in order to bring that element up into the discussion so that it can be incorporated into the solution that’s going to propagate across time. And you might think these are metaphysical considerations and that they’re very abstract, but I can tell you they’re not. When you people set up your intimate relationships with one another, your marriages will say for the time being. Unless you manage to incorporate the elements of your own psyche that are aggressive and sexually demanding, let’s say, you’re not going to set up a marriage that is the least bit satisfying or stable. And it isn’t obvious at all how monstrous and awful both the husband and the wife have to be across time so that they find each other mutually satisfying. But the idea that you can live as, you know, naive persona together happily over any length of time is completely absurd. It just will not happen because the parts of you that are deeply animalistic and powerful are going to go off and have their own adventure. At times when you win for you, it’s going to be the least convenient. So back to the garden. Well, the garden seems to be something like the optimal balance of nature and culture. And so the Genesis story is offering the proposition that the proper environment for human beings is actually partly constructed and partly spontaneous. And that is what a garden is like, right? Because a garden does what it wants to do. And it’s also the product of billions of years of evolution. But when you’re in the garden, you’re tending it and shaping it and protecting it and walling it in so that you get the advantages of the spontaneity that the natural world can produce along with the intelligent and judicious order that heightened consciousness and attention can bring to the situation. And so the story basically says that the human environment is half constructed and half natural. And that seems to me to be approximately correct. I mean, we are cultural creatures. We’re not going back to the jungle. No one wants to. And no wonder, because it’s full of snakes and poisonous spiders and you live 30 years and it’s not pleasant. So that isn’t us. We’re culture and nature at the same time. So then the question is, well, what exactly is the proper garden? So I wrote this. A walled garden is a productive natural place given order by structure. Thus, it is a localized replication of the interplay of chaos and order. The man who’s a kenotic logos. There’s this idea of Christianity. It’s a very strange idea because one of the propositions of Christianity was that God became man. And so there’s this idea that there’s the possibility of direct unity between whatever the divine, whatever the total consciousness of being might be in any individual person. And one of the questions that, of course, that particularly the Catholics tortured themselves with as a consequence of that piece of doctrine was how could God possibly fit himself into the frame of a human being without blowing it into shattered bits. And the basic idea that the Catholics came up with was that God underwent kenosis, which was a kind of emptying. And so he emptied himself to the point where there was only enough left of him that he could fit inside a body without blowing it into pieces. And I think what that means in some sense is that the consciousness that each of us has within us is a reflection of the divine consciousness, but it’s scaled down to the point where it can inhabit the sort of framework that we constitute without overwhelming it, without destroying it. So the idea is that Adam and Eve are these kinds of reduced divine consciousness and that they inhabit a microcosm of chaos and order. So it’s like a localized representation of the entire structure of being. And I think that that’s perfectly reasonable because I do believe that it’s perfectly appropriate for each of you to assume that what you inhabit in your own being is a microcosm of the entirety. What else could it possibly be? Especially if you take seriously the proposition that what being is constructed of is chaos and order. That’s what you have in front of you, is chaos and order. And maybe you have just the right amount of it in front of you so that you could bring it into a harmonious relationship. I mean, you better, or there’s going to be hell to pay. So it’s not like it’s optional. So what’s optional is whether you accept the responsibility of doing it. That’s what I think is optional. I also think that that’s why people won’t wake up. Because there’s been a story throughout the entire history of mankind since we became conscious that people could wake up. They could become enlightened, but they don’t. And you hear people, especially the New Age people, and I think they were sort of motivated by Joseph Campbell and maybe by the human potential people, that if you just follow your bliss that you could wake up. And I think that that’s, I understand why that idea emerged. It’s a classic 1960s idea, which is that you could have heaven with no responsibility whatsoever just by doing what felt good all the time. And I think there’s a kernel of truth in it. But the problem with the whole idea is that there’s no responsibility in it at all. And I think that if you wake up, the problem with waking up is that you have to take responsibility. And then the question might be, well, how much responsibility do you have to take? And the answer to that might be, it depends on how much you want to wake up. Because if you want to wake up completely, maybe then you have to take responsibility for the whole thing. I think that’s what it means. There’s this old idea in Christianity that Christ took the sins of the world on his shoulders. And that’s a very strange idea. What Christianity has done with that idea to some degree has made the proposition that because Christ took the sins of the world on his shoulders and died for us as a consequence, that everything has been redeemed. But the problem with that, and this is the problem that Jung pointed out when he was talking about the development of science from alchemy, is that everything doesn’t seem to have been redeemed. There’s still plenty of problems. Part of the reason that Jung believed that alchemy developed into science in Europe was because the Christian community realized at an unconscious level that the proposition that reality had been redeemed by the death of Christ was an incomplete assumption because it didn’t seem to be working. And so there was a tremendous emphasis on spiritual development in Christianity. And the idea of the death redeeming humanity was a spiritual idea. But it left the material world behind as something that was essentially damned. And Jung’s idea was that the unredeemed material world was crying out. And human beings, especially in Europe, responded to that. And the way they responded to that was by beginning to dream that transformations of the material world could bring about the redeemed state. And that that was the motivating dream that led to the emergence of science. If you don’t have a better theory for why science emerged, that’s a pretty damn good one. I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. And it strikes me as something that’s very much the case. So maybe part of Nietzsche’s commentary was that Christianity lost its moral force because it continually pushed paradise off to a place that was beyond death and alleviated the responsibility of all the individuals who were currently alive. It alleviated their responsibility to bring it about. And maybe that’s why the whole damn thing came crashing down. It’s like it lost its moral footing. I mean Nietzsche is often regarded as perhaps the most influential anti-Christian who ever lived. But I have always read him as a salutary corrective. You know, if something’s rotten, something that goes in there and destroys the rot is actually its friend, not its enemy. And I think that that was the role that Nietzsche played in relationship to Christianity. He thought that as soon as it had disappeared into some other world, then it had lost its moral right to exist because it left everything behind. It’s like the Buddhist doctrine that you can attain nirvana, you know, individually, and that’s what you should be doing. You should detach yourself from existence and attain nirvana. Existence in and of itself can go to hell. It’s like it’s not a very… It’s an irresponsible doctrine. You know, Buddha himself left nirvana to come back to redeem humanity. He decided, you know, one of his most fundamental temptations was that the gods offered him the opportunity to stay in paradise. And he let that go so that he could come back, so to speak, and spread his teachings around to try to bring everything else up to the state of being redeemed. So I don’t think that the idea that you can escape is a reasonable idea. I think it’s a running away from responsibility. So a walled garden is a productive natural place given order by structure. Thus, it’s a localized replication of the interplay of chaos and order. The man, who’s a Kenotic Logos, is placed there to inhabit and keep it. The fact that the garden may be also a well-watered place intimates the same. Water, the primal element, commonly represents fertility and generative chaos. However, the garden itself is tended, structured, and ordered. Thus, a garden is both productive and sheltered, particularly if it is walled and well-watered throughout. The garden is a microcosm of being. It is, in turn, the place of man, female and male, who are microcosms of Logos. So I would say what that story suggests is that the entire destiny of being itself is played out in a microcosmic form in the localized environments that every human being inhabits. And I think that’s a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it, and I can’t see how it could be any other way. Next, the garden and the tree. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now the whole tree idea, it’s insanely complicated. I mean, the first thing that you might think about with regards to trees is that we spent a bloody long time in them during our evolutionary history, tens of millions of years. So the idea that being is a tree, and that there are snakes in the tree and around the bottom of the tree was literally true for us for some tens of millions of years. And I think I talked to you about Lynn Isbell and her hypothesis about snakes and vision. Her basic anthropological hypothesis is that it was the arms race between our tree-dwelling ancestors and predatory snakes that gave human beings the incredible vision that we have. And that’s exactly the story that’s laid out in the Genesis story because it’s the snake that gives Adam and Eve vision. And strangely enough, the snake gives Adam and Eve enough vision so that the scales fall from the horizon so that they wake up and realize that they’re naked. And you know, that seems to me to be a story. Imagine that we became more and more cognitively and attentionally complex as a consequence of being chased by something that was evolving along with us. So that’s an evolutionary arms race. That sort of thing happens in evolution all the time. And then in order to outsmart the snake, we had to grow a brain that was so big that something catastrophic happened. And the catastrophic occurrence was that we became so aware of the nature of being and of our own being that we could start to see its limits. You know, human beings can envision time. It’s something that distinguishes us, I think, completely from other animals because we can see the future. We can see multiple potential futures. And of course, that’s a massive advantage because that means that we can see terrible futures and strive to avoid them. But it also means that we can see inevitably terrible futures. So for example, you know that even if you’re not hungry now, you’re going to be hungry in the future. And even if you’re not ill now, you’re going to be ill in the future. And that even though you’re not old now, you’re going to be old in the future. And that the same is the case for everyone that you know. And that everything decays and goes away. And so that, I think, is what Genesis portrays as the fall. And I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. I think if you read the story, I mean people have been reading this story for a very long period of time, but to me it makes the case about as straightforwardly as any story possibly could. So now more about the tree. the evolutionary tree has the snake in it. And the evolutionary tree also bears fruit. And you know that our color vision evolved to detect ripe fruit. And I think that part of the reason that Eve tempts Adam towards consciousness is because women shared fruit with men. And sharing food is a very, very weird thing. I mean most mammals share food with their offspring, right? So mother mammals will share food with their infants. But human beings are very peculiar in that we’ll share food with each other and we share food with strangers. And it’s built into us. This isn’t some cultural construct. Human beings share food. In fact, if we don’t eat communally, our whole ability to regulate our eating goes astray and we get sick. And we know perfectly well that our vision evolved to detect ripe fruit because one of the things we’re really good at is detecting the difference between red and green. And the relationship between fruit and evolution and women and consciousness is so tight that even many of the attributes that men find beautiful in women are fruit-like attributes. So it’s an old and deep association. And I think part of the reason that women, the way women tempted men towards self-consciousness is imagine that you’re more self-conscious if you’re vulnerable. And so I think that the idea that women became self-conscious first is probably right. Because women, first of all, had to contend with the fact that they were small and easily damaged. But even more particularly, they had to contend with the fact that they had infants who were small and easily damaged. And I think that female nervous systems have actually evolved so that they’re optimized for the female infant dyad and not for the female herself. Because you might ask, well, why are women more sensitive to negative emotion and higher in agreeableness than men? And it makes perfect sense. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons why it might be. But it particularly makes perfect sense if the nervous system that women are using is adapted so that it’s responding to the world as if the woman is a dyad between her and which is exactly how she’s going to have to act if she’s going to get an infant from the age of, well, 0 to 4, certainly. But we could say from 0 to 14. It’s a hell of a burden. It’s the biggest maternal burden that any creature on the planet carries. And in some manner, women were able to entice men into dyadic pair bonds. And there’s a variety of reasons why that might be. Some of the evolutionary biologists think it’s because women are continually sexually available, which makes them unique among most animals and certainly unique among primates so that it made sense from a sexual perspective for a man to bind himself to one woman because men are rather, they have a strong sex drive and they tend towards, they certainly, as a general rule, want to have sexual relationships more often than the typical woman. But women are capable of doing that. And women share food and women are gatherers. And so the idea that women entice men into self-consciousness by sharing food with them strikes me as highly probable. That’s an enticement. And I think that women did make men self-conscious and I think they did it a whole bunch of ways. I think they first did it by making men more and more aware of how vulnerable women and children were and drawing their attention to the fact that in principle that placed a moral responsibility on the man. We think of that as self-evident now, but it’s certainly not self-evident in the animal kingdom. So it’s a particularly human discovery. And then I also think that women made men self-conscious by rejecting them constantly. And so what that also means is that women produced an evolutionary arms race in some sense among men and between men and women. One of the things we have to account for, you remember, is our incredibly rapid cortical growth. And it seems to me that a whole variety of positive feedback loops got going at the same time and that’s what produced a tremendous increase in our cortical capacity up to the point where we became aware of our own vulnerability. And that was the birth of self-consciousness. One of the things that’s very interesting in Genesis is that Genesis portrays the emergence of self-consciousness as something so profound that it produced a cataclysmic rift in the structure of being. Now of course whether or not you believe that depends on what you think of as being. But the idea, when you think about the relationship that human beings have with being, I mean First of all we don’t really see ourselves as part of the natural world. We see ourselves as somehow separate from the natural world. We also see ourselves, it’s so funny because most modern people believe that the doctrine of original sin is an absurd doctrine. But I don’t think I’ve ever met a modern person who isn’t fully convinced of the doctrine of original sin. I mean all you have to do is talk to an environmentalist for 15 seconds and the first thing they’ll tell you is that there’s something intrinsically corrupt about human beings and that we’re running around destroying the planet. I mean how you can fail to see that as a modern transformation of the idea of original sin is beyond me. The idea that there’s something wrong with people is the idea of original sin. So do people not believe that? I mean who in this room feels that they’re everything they could be? Or who in this room feels that they’re not in some sense a fallen being? I mean I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t fit into that category. The closest you ever get is somebody who’s like psychopathic beyond belief. And I mean people are burdened by their inadequacies to different degrees. But virtually no one is secure enough to stand forth as the flawed being they are and say well everything’s the way it should be with me. So how the hell do you account for that? Now I think I don’t exactly know what the situation is but it seems to me. So one of the things that happens, I’ll get back to the tree in a minute, is that the serpent tempts Eve first of all to eat the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, which is quite interesting. So it’s the knowledge of good and evil. So there’s two trees, right? There’s the tree of life and there’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And it’s not good and bad, it’s good and evil. And it’s the serpent that tempts Eve to take the fruit. Okay, so we’ve already talked about the potential role of the serpent in the development of visual apprehension and the fact that human beings’ cognitive structure is primarily visual and that we have the best visual system of any primate on the planet and a better visual system than anything but birds. And that that’s tightly tied with our ability to see and that the fact that we can see and pay attention appears to be tightly tied with our ability to detect our own vulnerability. I mean, it’s a pretty coherent story. Now what happens after Adam and Eve eat the fruit? It’s very, very complicated. It’s very interesting the way the story portrays it because it’s all packed together in almost no words. So what happens? The serpent first tells Eve, if you eat this fruit you won’t die because that’s what God has said. Don’t eat that thing or you’ll die. For God knows that in the day that you eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as God’s knowing good and evil. Now that’s very interesting because the first thing that happens is that there’s an intimation that whatever transformative process occurs as a consequence of this meal will elevate human beings further to a god-like status. Now it’s strange because they’ve already been attributed that to some degree in the story, right, because they’re made in the image of God. But there’s an intimation here that because of what happens as the transformation is that human beings prior to eating the fruit did not see properly and they weren’t aware of the fact that they were naked. Now you can derive that conclusion by noticing that that’s what happens to them when they do eat the fruit. So there’s this intimation that human beings are at a certain plane of being, that that plane of being could be elevated in terms of power, that one of the consequences of that elevation would be all of a sudden that people became moral beings. And so what that also means is that the unconscious paradise prior to the emergence of self-consciousness it’s an amoral existence. And so the way that that’s been dealt with historically is to assume that the conditions in the Garden of Eden were sort of like the conditions of animal unconsciousness. Because animals aren’t beyond good and evil, they’re just not in the domain of good and evil. And then you might ask, well why is that? Is there something particular about the knowledge of good and evil? Now you know modern people don’t really believe in the idea of evil or in the idea of good so they don’t really ask questions like that but I think the story sheds clear light on exactly what this means. Did you have a question? No, okay, okay. So, yes? Well I think it has to do with the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness. Because I think what happens initially is that creatures are conscious. But they’re not self-conscious. Now you might ask, well what does self-conscious mean? Well it’s complicated, right? Because there is some evidence from the animal experimental literature that animals have rudimentary self-consciousness. So I think self-consciousness is a multi-factorial construct. It’s not like something that’s reflexive and automatic. You’re self-conscious in that you know that you exist and that you have some sense of your boundaries and that you have some sense of who and what you are. But you’re not fully self-conscious because you don’t know exactly who or what you are and you don’t know what your possibilities or limitations are and you don’t know what your essential nature is. And part of the reason that you’re self-conscious is because you’re the inheritor of a cultural tradition that’s linguistically predicated, that contains information about what human beings are like, that has been worked on by collective generations of human beings over thousands and thousands of years, right? So partly the reason you’re self-conscious is because you’re educated. And there’s no real limit to that. You come to university to become more self-conscious. So it’s complicated. But there’s an initial self-consciousness that seems to be the precipitating event. And I think it’s reasonable to assume that that’s associated with cortical expansion and the development of enhanced cognitive ability. I mean, I don’t think that that’s a questionable assumption. We just act as if that’s the case. We’re intelligent enough to have discovered time. And the problem with discovering time, which is the fourth dimension, we’re minimally extendable in time. Now we don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that we’re minimally extendable in space, right? Because I mean, here you are and you’re not over there. And there are obviously limitations to that. And we do try to overcome them with telephones and televisions and all of our gadgets that put us everywhere at once. But to discover our finitude in time is to discover time. And it’s not surprising that that’s represented in the story as a cataclysmic disjunction in the structure of being. That’s how we experience it. Something’s wrong. And I don’t believe that that’s how animals experience being. Like they might experience things that need to be done temporarily to put things back into proper balance. But they’re not set up to question the nature of existence itself. So anyways. Now, yep? I think it’s both. No, I think it’s both. I think it’s a description. Archetypal stories are true on multiple levels at the same time. So I think it’s a phylogenetic and an autogenetic story simultaneously. There’s no reason it can’t be. So there is the paradisal element of childhood prior to the emergence of self-consciousness. I can tell when my children learned they were naked. Actually, it didn’t bother my daughter at all. But my son, you know, who’s quite an emotionally stable person, by the time he was two and a half likely, there was no damn way you were going in the bathroom with him. And if he wasn’t clothed, he would not show himself. And as far as I could tell, that was all his own doing because it wasn’t like we were hung up about that. And it didn’t bother my daughter. So it wasn’t the familial environment that was producing that. He was an intensely private creature. And that was his own discovery. And you know, I mean, part of the reason I think that people are self-conscious is that we stand up right in that we’re very, very exposed to the world in a way that most animals aren’t. But I also think there’s more to it than that too, is that because we’re self-conscious, we’re also intensely aware of our own inadequacies and imperfections. And we’re not willing to share them with the world, except under very limited conditions. And I would also say it’s no wonder, you know, because people run around talking about how it would be better if we weren’t ashamed of our bodies. It’s like, it’s not exactly clear to me that it would be better. It’s a pain in the neck, but it makes you take care of them and try to fix them. You know, if you had no sense that there was something wrong, why the hell would you try to fix it? So I don’t think you can have your cake and eat it too. You can’t think, oh, I’m perfect just the way I am, and then also be motivated to make things better. That’s not possible. Now, you might be able to say, the fact that I’m the way I am is acceptable, given my plans to make things better, which I think is perfectly reasonable. You don’t want to be so ashamed that you’re immobilized. That seems counterproductive. But the idea that people have nothing to be ashamed of strikes me as naive beyond belief. So anyways, I do think it’s ontogenetic and phylogenetic simultaneously. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. Now, there’s an awful lot of information packed into those few lines. So the first is that it’s the woman precipitates this. And I believe that that’s the case. I think that women still make men self-conscious, and I think they do that because of their vulnerability, because of their vulnerability with infants, but also because they’re incredibly harsh judges of men. So we know, for example, from the dating site studies that women regard 85% of men as below average in physical appearance. And we also know that the default response to a woman in response to a mating request is are you kidding? And there’s nothing that makes men more self-conscious than that. And you might say, well, what’s the consequence of that? And one is eternal enmity between the sexes. So men hate women because they get rejected all the time, and that manifests itself in all sorts of underground war against women. And in some cultures, the war is virtually total. But it also manifests in men’s attempts to continually make themselves better so that they can attract women. And so there’s no doubt that women with their selective mating, which is partly what makes them different than chimpanzees, have been a major motivating force for the development of culture. Status turns out to be important to men. And I think you can make a very strong case that culture itself has been the product of status competition in large part, the consequence of status competition between men driven by women. So anyway, so they both eat the fruit, and then they’re naked. Now this is an interesting thing, because as I said, the fruit is the fruit of the tree, and the tree is a very, very, very complicated thing. So the tree represents something that’s manifesting itself on multiple levels simultaneously. So there’s the actual trees in which the actual fruits grew, and the actual fruits that ripened and that gave us color vision and that constituted a large part of our diet and that we did forage for and share. And then there’s the metaphysical tree, which is the tree that produced that fruit, that produced that neurological transformation that went along with that over the course of evolution. And then there’s another tree that lurks in there, which is the tree that constitutes the human being itself, because we’re also frequently symbolized as trees. And I think we’re like, it’s the microcosm, macrocosm tree that’s reflected in the Scandinavian figure of the world tree, you know, so that’s Yngdrasil. So you know that some of you have no doubt watched the Avengers, and you see that both Loki and Thor come from Asgard, and Asgard is actually in the branches of the Scandinavian world tree. Now the question is, what is the Scandinavian world tree? Well it’s even represented this way in the movies. The Scandinavian world tree isn’t a tree like a tree in the forest. The Scandinavian world tree is the microcosm to macrocosm tree, so it’s like the subatomic realm and the atomic realm and the molecular realm and the realm above that and then the phenomenological realm and then the cosmic realm emerging as a set of stacked phenomena and the gods inhabit the upper reaches of that tree. And that’s the same tree, the world tree, that shaman climb up and down when they have their shamanic transformation experiences which are usually initiated as a consequence of their interactions with hallucinogenic drugs, often mushrooms. And the shaman report that they die and decompose to skeletons and then climb the world tree and enter heaven. And people like Iliada, who were some of the initial observers of the shamanic phenomena, believe that the use of drugs was a decadent after consequence of a pure original tradition but the modern evidence suggests very strongly that it’s the use of the psychedelic mushrooms in particular that produce the death, rebirth experience and the climbing up and down the microcosm to macrocosm tree. There’s been some very interesting recent anthropological research done on shaman who use ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle and the tree they seem to climb up and down is all the way down to the molecular and all the way up to the cosmic. And there are people who believe, who’ve given credence to the idea that the shaman can go down far enough to see DNA. Now we have no idea what to make of those sorts of reports but I would be very hesitant about dismissing them because the world’s a very weird place and there’s nothing in the world that’s stranger than psychedelic drugs and people have been using those for tens of thousands of years and a tremendous number of our religious traditions are a consequence of use of hallucinogenic, naturally occurring hallucinogenic chemicals and they seem to produce profound transformations of consciousness and profound enough so that we have no idea what to make of them. So the tree is a very, very complicated thing and it seems to me, you know, inside a cathedral, the pillars and the columns, those are tree-like structures, especially in the Gothic cathedrals, they look almost exactly like the canopy of old growth forests and the trees that are in there are the trees that we lived in tens of millions of years ago but they’re also the tree that’s growing up from the tiniest micro realm up to the macro realm and attempting to manifest itself in perfectly harmonious layers at every single level of structure all the way up. And I think that part of what people are doing when they practice things like yoga and they’re trying to get the chakras, so to speak, aligned is that the chakras are like cross-sections of that tree at different levels of emergence and the person who’s practicing yoga is trying to get their body aligned so that the communication from the microcosmic level to the macrocosmic level is completely facilitated and free of blockages. So and I don’t know if you know that when people do yoga, when they really know how to do it, they don’t do it, it does them. So yoga happens to people spontaneously when they wake up and the yogis talk about that as the influence of the Kundalini serpent which is the thing that lives at the base of the spine and when the yogi is sufficiently sophisticated in his practice, the body moves by itself and straightens itself out and aligns itself along this central axis of being and if it’s aligned properly, that’s when divine revelations occur and that’s what you see manifested in religious symbolism when you look at the figure of the Buddha who’s sitting in this triangular position and he’s completely covered in gold is that he’s aligned his body, the levels of the material being so perfectly that the information flow across the levels of structure are without flaw and that puts them simultaneously in contact with the microcosmic realm and the macrocosmic realm. So alright, so the tree is a very very very complicated idea. There’s the tree that you are and there’s the tree that the cosmos itself is and there’s the tree that we lived in and there’s the tree that bears fruit and those are all the same tree from a broader perspective. No, but they had no concept of death. So that’s a very good question. Well I think the absence of death prior to the emergence of self-consciousness, I mean, figuring out what death is is a very tricky thing. I mean one element of death is that you cease to be as a physical form. Well death for humans is a lot more than that. It’s not only that you cease to exist as a material form, it’s that you bloody well know it and that’s where death has its primary sting. You know if there was no apprehension of death it would be a lot less dramatic experience than it actually is. It’s complicated because if you look at elephants, elephants are pretty self-conscious. They seem to understand to some degree what death means. They will return to the place where an elephant that they knew well died and they will move the bones around and so they seem to be able to remember the cessation of being over a very long period of time. But they certainly can’t conceptualize it the way we do because they don’t have any tools of conceptualization. They’re not linguistic. I think that the un-self-conscious pre-death paradise is prior to self-consciousness and it’s the same state that a child exists in before they’re aware that they’re naked. That develops in rushes in some sense. The eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. That’s a massive transformation in that statement. First of all, people figure out that they’re naked. You think, well, what does it mean to figure out that you’re naked? Well, generally that’s read in a sexual sense. I think the sexual sense can’t be ignored because I think part of the way that people are primarily self-conscious is sexually. The most fundamental element of being evaluated by another is evaluation for sexual attractiveness. Men bear the burden of that because they’re constantly compared to other men in terms of their accomplishments and their position in the dominance hierarchy. Women bear the brunt of that because they’re constantly being compared to the ideal feminine form. The ideal feminine form is associated both with sexuality and with reproduction. There’s no doubt that the fact of a sexual ideal makes everyone intensely self-conscious. If you look at, there are all sorts of attempts constantly to write that off to cultural factors, to say that the reason that women are so intensely concerned with their body image is because we’ve constructed false cultural representations of beauty. I don’t think there’s any evidence for that claim at all. There’s plenty of evidence for what is regarded as optimally healthy and attractive with regards to women cross-culturally. There are variations in it. Body size, for example, is one of the variations, but body shape is very seldomly varied, and symmetry is virtually never varied, and skin quality is never varied, and youth is never varied. The reason those things appear to be never varied is because they’re good markers of fertility and health. In cross-culture, women like men who are higher up in the dominance hierarchy, and I think what women have done is outsource the problem of sexual selection to competition among men. So all they do is let men compete and then peel off the top, which is a perfectly reasonable – it’s an absolutely reasonable way of solving the problem. But what that does is make all the men who are in the lower stratas of the socioeconomic hierarchy intensely self-conscious, angry, and resentful. They become homicidal and genocidal if things are pushed too far. I mean, Martin Daly and Margot Wilson have done a perfectly reasonable job of laying out the consequence of very unequal societies on male aggression, and what happens is that as the probability that young men will be able to climb up a dominance hierarchy decreases, the young men at the bottom become increasingly murderous and impulsive, and it’s not surprising. Not only did they delineate that, but they showed that the men who become successfully impulsive and aggressive – and they did this most in their studies of Chicago gang behavior – actually push themselves up the hierarchy fast enough and far enough so they immediately become attractive to women. So the fact that they become impulsively aggressive and even murderous, it works. So it’s not some side effect of some process that’s gone wrong. It’s what you do when the competition pressure has become so high that you can’t climb the hierarchy as a consequence, say, of diligent application of pro-social behavior over the long run. What do you think is the site there? Margot Daly and Wilson? Margot Wilson and – is it Margot Wilson? Yeah, it’s Margot Wilson and Daly. What’s Daly’s name? They’re at McMaster. Look up David Bus. Bus is the best source for this. He wrote a textbook on evolutionary psychology. It’s a great book. I mean, mostly textbooks aren’t great books, but his textbook on evolutionary psychology is a great book. And if you look at the sexual selection chapters, you know, they’re incredibly illuminating. So the correlation between male socioeconomic success and access to sexual partners is like .5. It’s high. It’s the determining factor. It’s no joke. And for women, it’s zero. So, you know, and that – well, that’s how it is. So – Oh yeah, male aggression. They looked at Chicago in particular. What they found, for example, was in the Chicago gangs, generally what happened, because there are very high rates of male-on-male homicide in the Chicago gang scene, and it’s usually interracial, not cross-racial, and it’s usually young men against young men. So you’re much more likely to be killed by murder if you’re a young man than if you’re an older woman, although it’s the older women who are most afraid of this sort of thing. It’s young men who are always getting killed by other young men. And basically what Dalian Wilson showed was that if you were a gang member in Chicago and you were charged with murder, usually the murder was a consequence of some kind of status challenge. So maybe it’s gang member A against you and you’re gang member B. Well, you’re fighting. Maybe you’re both armed. He’s going to kill you or you’re going to kill him. It’s a toss-up. You kill him. Okay, then what happens? Well, no one testifies against you. And you plead. They try to nail you for homicide, say second-degree murder, and you plead self-defense and they plea bargain it down to manslaughter, and they throw you in jail for three years and you’re out in a year and a half on good behavior, and your status goes way up. So it’s a perfectly reasonable, it’s not a, what would you call, equilibrated solution, but the reasons for it are quite clear. And it works. Have you ever seen the evolutionary rap song by the Canadian? You know the one I mean? It’s great. It’s great. Bhabha? Bhabha? What’s his name? Bhabha? I don’t remember. Look it up. Evolutionary rap. It’s brilliant. It takes all of the evolutionary psychology work that’s been done over the last 15 years and casts it as a gangster rap song, and it’s extraordinarily well done. It’s tremendous. I’ve never had a watch from the John C. Bieber book. Jesus, don’t you have anything better to do? I couldn’t resist seeing the headline on my paper with Mark Stewart drop, and she and I are in a conversation. But I think what you’re talking about is basically she had crack. Look you know I think the fundamental female sexual fantasy is beauty and the beast. Now if you don’t believe that you might give some consideration to the phenomenal popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey. Now why is that? It’s because women don’t want a man who isn’t dangerous. They want a man who’s really dangerous, or who can be really dangerous but who is capable of not being. So that’s closely allied with Jung’s idea of the incorporation of the shadow. So if you’re developed as a male you should be too dangerous to mess with, but you should be civilized enough to keep that under control. And that’s not the same as repression of aggression and sexuality. It’s not the same at all. That just means that you’re still a five year old boy. That’s the Oedipal outcome, right? Where the mother is so terrified of the male movement towards dominance and aggression that she squashes it completely and keeps the male at eunuch level for the rest of his life. Turning him into something that’s like a potato that’s grown in the darkness in the basement with white tubers coming up everywhere and resentful and murderous underneath all that. It’s not a positive outcome. It’s associated with the destruction of consciousness. That’s the Oedipal story. And like women are afraid of men because they’re monsters. But the problem is that forbidding a man to become a monster just makes him a monster. It just drives it underground. What has to happen is the men have to be taught how to be civilized monsters. And we’re doing a very bad job of that. And we’re going to pay a big price for it. I think we’re already paying a price for it. One of the prices that seems to be being paid in Japan is that people in Japan don’t have sex anymore. I have a question that might be loaded so I’m going to try and phrase it as well. But there’s a huge question like the race culture movement towards educating men not to rape women instead of educating women how not to rape. And that’s sort of a big dialogue. And I’m wondering how much, what exactly you’re talking about, about keeping men from being civilized monsters. It’s part of that like incorporating sexuality and women that have sexual views in a healthy way so it doesn’t come out sort of underground and that they’re violent. Well, a tremendous amount of the push to, and the push behind the whole idea of rape culture is violently anti-male movement. The idea that there’s a rape culture is completely insane. No men get together and say, well, I think we should go out and rape some women, especially not in like relatively civilized Western and North American cultures. Yes, yes, but I understand that. But that’s more, I would say that that’s more a consequence of stupidity and inability than anything else. I can’t deny that it happens, but I can deny that it’s a culture. Well, let’s look, I don’t want to not talk about that, but let’s go back to it. It’s also one of the things that you absolutely have to understand, that no alcohol means no rape. So it’s as simple as that. I mean, I studied the effects of alcohol and criminal behavior for five years, and the truth of the matter is that almost no men would be aggressive ever if they weren’t drunk. So if the fraternities were alcohol free, almost all of this would immediately disappear. Alcohol makes people, well, partly the reason that alcohol is fun is because it’s completely disinhibiting. Well, what happens with alcohol, I mean, we did some studies looking at how alcohol makes people aggressive, because it does. It’s one of the only drugs that actually makes people aggressive. Even cocaine doesn’t make people aggressive, but alcohol does. So for example, one of the things my supervisor did was he would bring people into the lab and get them pretty intoxicated, you know, like up enough so that they would be at the level that you would hit if you were out for a party, pre-drinking, let’s say. And then they would play a competitive shock game, although one of the protagonists was a computer. And so the drunk people, so you could shock your opponent if they violated some rule, or at any other time if you felt like it. And the drunk people would shock them harder and longer. And so one theory was, well, people who are drunk just don’t know what they’re doing. Okay, so what my advisor did was he had people write down the duration and level of the shocks that they were administering, and when they were drunk, that made them administer longer and harder shocks. So it isn’t at all that people don’t know what they’re doing. What it is is they don’t care what they’re doing. That’s a whole different thing. They don’t lose self-consciousness. What they lose is the worry of the fear of the consequences. That’s gone. And plus, for some people, alcohol is also a psychomotor stimulant. So they get ramped up, especially on the ascending limb of the blood alcohol curve, and then the alcohol knocks out the fear inhibition of their behavior. So it knocks out any affective significance of long-term consequences. I thought someone had a question there. Okay. By not caring, you mean like on an ethical level, because they must care if they want to administer more shocks. Oh, they don’t care about the negative consequences. They care about it in flippant hangings. Oh, sure. That’s, you know, well, anger, aggression is a positive emotional state in part. You know, it’s an approach behavior. So it also, anger activates approach and withdrawal circuits. But if it’s successful anger, there’s a huge kick in it, and that can be boosted upwards by alcohol. So Like I think Milligrams show that you don’t need alcohol to do that sort of thing. So I think that… Right, but that was a very specific condition. And some of that might also apply in places like fraternities. Right. I think alcohol can remove inhibition, for sure. But I think that also this whole society of internet-borne normalizing kind of violence against women has also… Right, right, absolutely. Yeah, well, I would like to continue this discussion, but let me continue to go through this. So, okay, so what happens after they wake up is that they sew fig leaves together and make themselves aprons. Now, I don’t know if you know this, and you probably don’t, but, you know, every single line of this story has bred thousands and thousands of pages and thousands and hours of discussions about what it means. And this line is no exception. And basically what the story says here, or at least one of the interpretations of the story, is that as soon as people wake up and realize they’re naked, they make clothing and put it on. And that’s culture, right? So, as soon as nakedness is on the table, then people put culture between themselves and the vision of their evaluators. And so the apron is the representative of the fact that as soon as animals wake up and realize they’re naked, they use culture as a coping mechanism, or it’s not a coping mechanism, as a way of adapting to that emergent situation. And you know, one of the things that people do pretty much worldwide is wear clothes. Now, it’s not a universal, although it does seem to be a universal insofar as clothes are always used at least for decorative purposes. But in virtually every culture, human beings are clothed, and we have been for a very long period of time. Now partly, that’s because, well, we don’t have any body hair, and so we get cold, especially if we live in northern climates, or we need to protect ourselves from the sun and so forth, but that’s certainly by no means the only reason. Even when we’re, as modern people, we’re in temperature controlled climates, it’s not like we’re wandering around without our clothes on. So it’s a form of boundary between ourselves and the natural world, and we immediately adopt it. And the reason for that, I mean the motivational reasons that’s laid out in the story is because people know that they’re naked. The transformation produces immediate enlightenment. Adam and Eve can finally see their now transcendent vision produced by incorporation of what was forbidden produces within them a vastly heightened self-consciousness. A terrible catastrophe for limited being, but a precondition for genuine individual existence. Adam and Eve instantly realize their individual naked vulnerability, a realization that emerges during cognitive development at a very young age, and a fact that only human beings seem cognizant of in any complex sense. What does knowledge of naked vulnerability mean? It means that human beings are painfully conscious of their limitations. We know that we are flawed in relationship to our ideals. We understand that our being is limited in place and time. We know we are vulnerable to death, disease, and insanity. We know that we can be betrayed by our embodied being and undermined socially by our peers and even by our friends, and all of this makes us ashamed, fearful, and self-conscious. Now next question. So Adam and Eve become, they eat this fruit and they figure out that they are naked and then they put on clothes on, but one of the things that the snake tells them is that as soon as they become awake, they are also going to know the difference between good and evil. Now I took a long, it took me an awful long time to figure out what that could possibly mean, but one of the things that I was trying to figure out is well, the thing is as soon as you know that you are naked, and imagine that you can really comprehend your limitations, you really understand what they are, then that means that you understand your vulnerability, or at least to some degree that you understand your vulnerability, and the thing that is so interesting is that the fact that I can understand my own vulnerability means that I can be empathic, right, because I can also understand your vulnerability and we can mirror that back and forth. So I would say well that is part of what enables us to comprehend good, but there is a terrible downside to that too, which is that as soon as I know that I am vulnerable and I know exactly what that means, I know exactly how I can hurt you, and that is a hurt that goes beyond what animals do when they destroy one another. Like if a wolf is trying to take down a cow, say, it is a pretty hideous process, you know, like the wolves will take pieces of the cow out while it is standing up, so it is not that they go in for the kill and they do it as fast as they possibly can. I mean they do that, but only because they don’t want to get kicked to death by the cow. So it is pretty bloody awful. And you know, if you have ever read about chimpanzees hunting colobus monkeys, for example, that is a pretty brutal situation because the chimps will catch the colobus monkeys, which weigh about 38 pounds, and tear them to pieces and eat them while they are still alive. So they are like screaming madly away. It doesn’t stop the chimps at all. So it is not like predation in the wild is brief and merciful by any sort of natural order. But it is no more horrible than it has to be. Whereas with people, that is a whole different story. You know, so if I, I mean if you, if people have been torturing each other, especially in warfare, for a very very long period of time, you know, and there is certainly in tribal warfare in particular, I mean one of the things that the tribes pride themselves on is the ability to keep a captured soldier alive for the longest period of time possible while torturing him in the most painful way possible. And so that can mean weeks. And you can’t understand exactly how to take someone else apart in every possible way that you can take someone apart until you understand how you could be taken apart. And so I think that as soon as you do recognize your own vulnerability, you have transcended mere good and bad and moved into the domain of good and evil. So because you can treat someone else like you would want to be treated, but you can also, there is no limits to your imagination for cruelty. I mean, and there are truly no limits. I mean, you see in situations like, I don’t know if you have ever read the book The Rape of Nanking. But that’s a truly horrifying book, The Rape of Nanking, and it’s about what happened when Japan occupied China during the Second World War. The estimates are that some three to four hundred thousand people were raped and brutalized and tortured in Nanking. And what seemed to happen was the Japanese soldiers at that time were products of the Prussian military school because the Japanese had adopted that as their model. And they were basically taught that everyone who wasn’t Japanese was subhuman. And it’s pretty easy to teach people that because you can teach people that those people who aren’t them are subhuman at the drop of a hat. I mean, it’s a natural way for us to think. And so when the Japanese went into Nanking, there was no limit on what they were allowed to do to the Chinese. And what basically happened was, you can imagine this, because people can imitate, what basically happened was you could take the most psychopathic single Japanese soldier that you could possibly imagine and then find a group of those and then find the one person who had the most vivid imagination for mayhem and evil. And then you could imagine him setting the tone for the entire occupation. And that’s exactly what happened. It was competitive brutality. And so, and you don’t get at competitive brutality until you understand exactly what you’re doing. And you don’t understand what you’re doing until you know how people can be hurt. And you don’t understand that until you know how you can be hurt. And so that’s also an emergent consequence of self-consciousness. Now, so you might think, well, is there any support in the story for such a hypothesis? Well, I think the thing that comes next supports it. And this is another part of this story that I think is by no means patriarchal. I think it’s exactly the opposite. So one of the things that, well, I’ll read you the story. So now they found out they’re naked and they covered themselves up and so now God comes walking through the garden. And Adam and Eve heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. So they hadn’t been doing that before. So they hadn’t been hiding from God. So now what we have is the idea that as soon as people become vulnerable, they hide from God. And I believe that to be as close to literally true as anything that you can really utter. And I’ll talk about why that is in a moment. And the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid myself. And God said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou should not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with, she gave me of the tree and I did eat. Okay, so that’s an amazing story. So the first thing that happens is there’s an intimation that before the emergence of self-consciousness that human beings walked with God in the garden. And so there was an unbroken line of communication in some sense between the creature and the divine totality. The link was not broken. Now one of the things that’s characteristic of the shamanic tradition, and this seems to be an idea that’s basically spread worldwide, is that there was a time back in time when the connection between heaven and earth was unbroken. And the idea that there’s a fall and that the fall involves a tree and a snake is unbelievably well distributed. It’s ridiculously well distributed. So now that might be because maybe that was a story that we all knew before the diaspora, before the diaspora out of Africa, and that people have just been retelling it forever since then, so many hundreds of thousands of years ago. Or it might be that it’s a story that’s so built into our architecture that when we come across approximations of it in stories that people tell one another that it rings true somehow and we collect it and recollect it and retell it. Nobody really knows. But so what happens is that there’s this idea of unbroken communication between Adam and Eve before the development of self-consciousness. But then self-consciousness emerges and they both realize they’re naked and then they cover themselves up. But then the next thing that happens is that they hide from God. Now you know, it’s pretty primitive. I think this part of the story is actually a comedy because they’re really acting in a very brainless manner. It’s like first of all, what are they going to do? They’re hiding from God behind trees? It strikes me that that’s a very ineffective way of hiding from God since he can probably see through trees. And if they thought about it for two tenths of a second, they’d figure that out. So they might be conscious and self-conscious but they’re not really very bright yet. And then God calls Adam on it and the first thing Adam does is blame the woman, which is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect from a patriarchal story as far as I’m concerned because he comes across as a complete dweeb. You know, I mean you would think that if the writers of this story would have wanted men to look particularly good, that Adam would have stood up and protected Eve, not ratted her out the first possible moment. But I think that men do complain to God that women make them self-conscious. I think they do that all the time. And I think that manifests itself in resentment and especially if they’re not being successful in the game of attracting female attention. So they complain to God all the time about the fact that women are making them self-conscious. And that produces a tremendous amount of resentment. So anyways, the man says, the woman who you gave to me, so he blames God too, which I think is pretty funny, she gave me of the tree and I did eat. So now there’s a deeper meaning here too, which is that the reason that human beings no longer walk with God is because they’re embarrassed about their own vulnerability. And I also believe that to be the case because you know you think it isn’t only the worst of ourselves that we hide from each other, it’s also the best of ourselves. And I think in fact we’re more likely to hide the best of ourselves than the worst. Because like if I manifest the worst of myself socially and it gets rejected, it’s like well who the hell cares about that? You know, it’s like that’s my second great attempt. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of anyways and if you’re not that happy about it, well it’s not the real me and so who cares? But where you’re most vulnerable is if you try to do something that’s as good as you can do and you lay that out for public evaluation. And that’s why Nietzsche said for example that if you really want to punish someone, you punish them for their virtues, not for their faults. And so people are afraid of letting their virtues be seen because that really reveals their vulnerability, like that reveals the true extent of their potential being and that’s something that someone who has the motivation can immediately capitalize on and torture them to death for. And I think that’s basically the plot of every high school coming of age movie that’s ever been made. So well, now they’ve done it. So God says, I read, here let me read this because I thought this was pretty funny. Self conscious knowledge of vulnerability makes the individual too afraid to walk with God. This is avoidance of meaning, responsibility and destiny. Such avoidance has catastrophic consequences. Existence properly undertaken produces a condition of being that makes knowledge of finitude tolerable. That properly undertaken existence means the embodiment of logos in spite of vulnerability. To hide from God as a consequence of revealed nakedness is to destroy the incarnation of logos and to immediately become subject to the privations of merely human existence. Adam’s sin, which is partly his curiosity inspired rebellion, is also more than that and what is more may also be more significant. Adam refuses to continue his relationship with logos because he is awake and afraid and he blames the archetype of femininity Eve for his enlightened cowardice. After all, she made himself conscious. His immediate abandonment of courage and responsibility endears him neither to God nor to woman. Perhaps this is the real sin of Adam. Had he not compromised himself further after eating the apple, God might have relented and allowed him to stay in paradise. That’s not a reading of Genesis that I’ve ever really come across because the sin is always presented as the original eating. But you know, he acts pretty damn reprehensibly. In fact as badly as you possibly could under circumstances like that. And it’s certainly the case that women, men acting towards women in that manner, blaming them for their own self-conscious vulnerability is definitely a major source of avoidable strife throughout the world and has been for all the centuries that we’ve been in self-conscious association with women. Yeah, well I think that’s right. So okay, so what happens? Well what happens is what you’d expect. God just lays out the consequences of this. And he says, unto the woman, he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. Now it’s often read as, that’s often read as again as a patriarchal statement that God punishes women by dooming them to be ruled by men. But I don’t think that that’s what it says at all. What it says basically is okay, well a sequence of events has just occurred. The sequence of events is that event which caused the emergence of self-consciousness. Now we can assume that that was associated with cortical expansion. So one of the things we know that happened during cortical expansion is that the baby’s head became so damn big that it could hardly get out during childbirth. So there’s been a bunch of physiological consequences of that. One is, women’s hips are wider than men. If they were any wider, women couldn’t run. So women hit the limits of hip expansion. And so the hip expansion helped made the pelvic gap through which the baby is born sufficiently large so the head could get through, but barely, like seriously barely. And that’s partly why there’s so many caesarean sections. But one of the other consequences of that, there were a couple of them. One is babies are born way younger than they should be. So for a mammal of our size, women should have a gestation period of two years, not nine months. So babies are born fetal. And the second is that the baby’s head, the bones in the head aren’t grown together. And so one of the things that happens during birth is the baby’s head compresses. And it compresses a lot. Like when a baby comes out, it actually can be, its head can almost be cone shaped because of the tremendous pressure that’s crushing the head during the birth process. And so birth is very, very painful for human beings. And it’s very, very dangerous. And part of the human story is that the hero is always threatened at birth. And the reason for that, the reason that that’s true among human beings, is because human babies are unbelievably vulnerable. You know, and even at birth, they’re highly likely to die. Child mortality has been a terrible burden on humanity. Well really up until the last century, you know, and child mortality rates have been plummeting like mad in developed countries over the last ten years. But you know, prior to the 20th century, children died in, the majority of children died, women died in childbirth all the time. So the idea that women were going to have sorrow in childbirth and in conception doesn’t seem to me to be precisely a divine doctrine. It’s just an observation of exactly what was going to happen. So, and then you know, once the baby’s born, the same damn problem emerges because the baby’s so premature and so helpless that the woman is basically doomed to be non-self-sufficient for a reasonably extensive period of time. And so we could say, well that’s at least until the baby is, I would say, five, absolutely minimum. You know, even chimps carry their babies around for about three years with one hand, you know, so the females are down to one arm. And so human mothers are at a tremendous disadvantage in the immediate aftermath of birth and part of the consequence of that is that they’re doomed to be reliant on men. What the hell else could possibly happen? I mean the women put themselves together in groups and try to support each other during pregnancy and childbirth and that happens in most human societies. But it still boils down to the fact that in order to redress the balance, the woman ends up dependent on a man and one of the consequences of that is that, you know, he’s got more power than she does. And so it’s a statement of destiny rather than a sentence of revenge. And unto Adam, he said, because you have hearkened unto the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree which I commanded thee, saying, thou shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for thy sake. In sorrow shall thou eat of it all thy days of the life, of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shall eat the herb of the field. For the sweat of the face thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground. For out of it wast thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return. Pretty damn dismal. I mean the women get knocked really hard to begin with but it’s not like the men get away scott free. Basically the statement of the consequence of the emergence of self-consciousness is that men are doomed to toil their entire life and then to die. I also think that that’s not something that characterizes any other animal because human beings work. And the reason we work is because we’re conscious of the future and we’re conscious of all the potential catastrophes the future can bring, including the catastrophes for our family. And so the consequence of that is that instead of being directly immersed in the pleasures of the moment, people always have to forego those pleasures to stave off the potential array of future catastrophes that we’re firmly aware of because we’re self-conscious. And so that’s when history starts. You know and the fundamentalists say well the world began when God created the world after seven days. You know and the funny thing is that there’s an element of that that’s true. History does not begin until human beings become self-conscious. Before that it’s mere unconscious animal existence. And so to some degree the emergence of self-consciousness is the beginning of the being that we would consider specifically human being. So and exactly what that means on a cosmic level is no one can be certain of that because we don’t understand the relationship between consciousness and being. So on the one hand you can think of us as occupying some little speck of dust at the corner of some irrelevant galaxy in an infinite universe. But by the same token we’re also, this is the only place that we know of where consciousness exists. And if consciousness is, if being is dependent on consciousness and I think that you can make a very strong case that it is then there’s no reason to assume that this isn’t the center of things despite the, you know, despite our reinterpretation of that over the last 300 years. So the God, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man and placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubims and a flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the Tree of Life. So there’s no going back. You know it’s funny because one of the classic shamanic mythologies is the attempt to go back to get the Tree of Life, to get the fruit of the Tree of Life. And you can see that in Gilgamesh for example which is a story that’s either older than the Enuma Elish. So Gilgamesh goes to the bottom of the ocean. So he goes to the bottom of being itself in one of his heroic ventures to grab the herb of immortality but he loses it on the way up. And there’s an idea in the shamanic traditions that when the shaman are going up and down the Tree of Life that one of the things they’re trying to do is to go into this heavenly realm to bring back that which will confer immortality upon people but there’s no one has been successful at doing that. And that’s a very, very widespread story and there’s also something to it. Something I don’t understand but there’s something about it that’s accurate. Right. Right. Right. Right. Well the fact that the story suggests that there’s a way of obtaining immortality that people have been able to voyage to but not to bring back. So and that’s a failed hero story. It happens all the time. It’s like the person who goes to fight with the dragon to get the gold but can’t bring the gold back or ends up inside the dragon’s belly. It’s a failed hero story. And Gilgamesh for example is a failed hero story. Now the story, one of the things that happens in Christianity is that there’s a twist in the failed hero story because Christ dies and then comes back. And so there’s this idea in Christianity that voluntary death solves the problem of death. So. Do you think that means the death of the ego or literal death? I don’t think that’s an or question. I think it’s an and question. I actually think that it requires both. But I don’t exactly know what that means. So there’s a very old idea that the way to overcome death is to accept it. But it isn’t exactly clear what accept means. Obviously it means to accept it at a metaphysical level which is to say to not deny the validity of being merely because you’re finite. But I don’t think that’s all it means. Because I think most of these stories have a reality that plays itself out at the level of the material reality that we’re familiar with in day to day existence and at the metaphysical plane at the same time. And that somehow those are the same thing. There’s in some way that we don’t understand. So I’ve had strong intimations that death is partly a repair mechanism. So I mean one of the things that seems to happen when you go to sleep at night that that’s something that brings you close to death. Your consciousness certainly disappears. And the deeper you go into sleep, it’s only in the deepest stages of sleep that your body produces human growth hormone and does the repairs that are necessary. So you have to become extraordinarily relaxed and let go of everything in order to enter a physiological condition where you can be optimally restructured. And I don’t know how deep you can go into that. There seems to be a diametric opposition between analysis and mystical realm. So perhaps it’s the death of one that leads to the emergence of the other. Well, that certainly does happen when you go to sleep. I mean you leave the realm of normal day to day individual wakefulness and you descend into a realm of fantasy and immobility. And so there’s a cyclic interconnection between those two states of being. You know, and it’s certainly the case that when people become unhealthy that their sleep-wake cycles become tremendously disrupted. They don’t sleep properly anymore and then they really start to age and disintegrate. So, alright, so that’s that. Now I want to tell you this Cain and Abel story. So, and then, yep? Well, you know, when I place these talks on the internet, people will criticize them and say that I’m stretching. You know, that I’m attempting to use scientific evidence to justify the reality of these stories. So, I don’t think that is what I’m trying to do. I think what I’m trying to do is to figure out what the hell these stories mean. I think the reason that the isomorphism is there is because these stories are true. I just don’t think we know what that means. Well, I can tell you that the story, I’m going to try to get to it. We missed a lecture, unfortunately, but one of the stories I wanted to tell you is the story of Buddha. The story of Buddha is exactly the same story as the story in Genesis plus the story of the reincarnation of or the resurrection of Christ. It’s the same story. And Buddha obtains enlightenment under a tree. You know, Christ obtains enlightenment on a tree, but you know, the tree that Christ obtains resurrection on is the tree of life. And it’s the tree that grows out of the place where Adam died. So, that’s part of the story that is associated with Christian symbolism. If you look at Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox crucifixions, the crucifix has always got Adam’s skull at the bottom. So, Adam dies and what Christ represents is the thing that transcends that death. And this is very important. I mean, one of the ideas that’s nested there, and I think this is the prime idea, is that you can overcome death if you can accept it voluntarily, if you can embrace it, if you can see it as a necessary part of being, if you can detach from it your presupposition that it’s only evil and destructive. And so, now that’s a hypothesis, right? It’s a hypothesis. But, you know, because one of the things you’ve got to ask yourself, for example, you can say that existence is meaningless, you know, that we’re in a clockwork world, in the Newtonian world, which we’re clearly not. But you could accept the Newtonian worldview that we’re in a mechanical universe and that things unfold in a mechanical and deterministic way, that consciousness is epiphenomenal, and then when you’re done, you’re done, and that’s it. And this is all a consequence of randomness, laying itself out across time. Randomness and causality. That’s one way of looking at it. And there’s powerful reasons for looking at it that way. But there are consequences to looking at it that way. First of all, we do not know that that’s true. And we certainly know that the world is not deterministic. And we certainly understand that there are plenty of processes at play that are not random. Sexual selection is not random. So, and sexual selection, the reason we’re the way that we are is because of sexual selection. So we’ve made conscious decisions the entire way about, you know, what elements of human form should propagate themselves into the future. Now, you know, nobody seems to take the metaphysical implications of that seriously. And basically what happened, Darwin was extremely impressed by the power of sexual selection. But because people couldn’t handle the notion that evolution was shaped, say, in large part by female choice, the biologist ignored sexual selection for a hundred years after Darwin published his great work on evolution. It’s only recently that people have been able to take this sort of thing seriously at all. And we also don’t understand epigenetics at all. You know, the epigenetics, it’s obvious that our own experiences can modify our genetic structure. And the other thing that we don’t understand, there’s some animations. I’ll send you guys the link to this, but I saw some amazing animations in the last couple of weeks showing how DNA separates and then reassembles during cell division. And so they’ve modeled this at the molecular level using X-ray crystallography. And so it’s unbelievable what’s going on down at that level. Basically what you see is there’s these little machines that are made out of molecules, like single molecules that have arms and legs that walk around and move things and put things together. Like you look at it down there, you think that’s computational. Those bloody things are, I think they’re quantum supercomputers operating at that level. Because those goddamn things are smart. You know, like there are these little machines, they pull DNA apart, then they loop it around and cut it, and they send the loops off. And at the same time, as the DNA separates and it has to be remade, these things are grabbing molecules as they come by, like literally, mechanically, and sticking them on the DNA chain. And it’s so computational that it’s mind-boggling. I’ll send you the links. It’s like I looked at that. It just blew me away. And we have no idea what kind of computational processes are available at the microscale, though we do know that quantum computation is possible. And you know, that means that computation can be occurring with extreme power at levels of resolution we would have never imagined possible. But I can tell you, look at those bloody videos, and you look at them with a fresh mind, the idea that what’s happening down at the molecular level is the idea that it’s not intelligent, it’s insane. I mean, those bloody things are making decisions. It’s not deterministic. It’s way too complicated to be deterministic. It looks more like a car factory or something like that. It’s incredible. Molecules. Single molecules. Like sometimes five or six atoms. So there’s like the one thing that when they’re making the telomeres that pull the DNA apart, they like whip out these telomeres, which are made out of four molecules, they kind of make a square that extends. There’s little gadgets that are putting those together. And then when they’ve got them all done and they need to signal the fact that they’re finished, these other little molecules that look like little stick men, they grab a molecule and they walk down the telomeres, like one foot after another, carrying this thing that’s going to be the message. It’s, I wish I could show it to you. It’s unbelievable. It’s like just make your jaw drop. And it’s intelligent. There’s no way that that’s merely deterministic. Not a chance. Plus those bloody things can fix mistakes in DNA. So because your cells are repairing mistakes in DNA all the time. It’s like, well, how do they do that? Well, if you model them, it looks like they look at it and look at it, whatever the hell that means. They’re evaluating it to see where there’s a mistake. So it’s like, hmm? Oh, it’s like they’re little robots that are doing diagnostics. Yeah. So it’s… Alright, so now, okay. So what happens after Adam and Eve? So, yeah. Yeah, let’s have a short break, okay? Only let’s do it for five minutes, because I really want to finish this part before we end. So, while you’re gone, I’ll show you this. I’ll find this animation. You guys can come up here and take a look at it, because it’s mind-boggling.