https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=t966lVrHEzo
All right. So if there’s anybody, is there anybody here who’s new? So everybody knows where to find the website? Okay. Well, that’s good. No? Someone doesn’t? Is that saying no? Aha! There you are. Just look up my name on Google and you’ll find my website and then you can find the course. Okay, and all the readings and so forth are there. Unfortunately, some of the links were outdated and if you tried to get a hold of a TA, you probably got a hold of last year’s TA, but, because I didn’t update all the links blindly. So anyways, that’s fixed, I hope. And with any luck, the website is fully functional. So all right. So last time, I was trying to give you a brief introduction to a way of looking at symbolic representations. Maybe I should tell you a little bit about symbolic representations first. Because Freud was, in some sense, the first of the quasi-modern psychologists to talk about symbolism. And Freud believed that symbols were often used by the unconscious to represent things that the conscious mind did not want to become conscious of. So in some sense, Freud believed that the things that you repressed were things that you knew and understood, but didn’t want to attend to or believe or understand or integrate or develop or even allow to exist. And so the unconscious was reduced to using subterfuge, in some sense, to get its point across. Now, it’s a powerful argument. It’s one we’re going to return to when we talk about Freud, but I don’t think it’s right. I think Jung’s explanation of symbols is better. I think it’s right. Although there may be times when Freud’s correct, but I think that would be a subset of the times when symbolism is used. Imagine that there are different forms of knowledge first. It’s important to recognize that before you can really think about something like the use of symbolism by the unconscious. First of all, there’s the form of knowledge that everyone knows as knowledge, which is articulated knowledge. And so articulated knowledge is often factual, or it can be procedural because you can tell someone how to do something. And then there’s knowledge about facts of various forms, which may or may not be true, but that’s really irrelevant. And that’s often the sort of knowledge that you learn, say, in a classroom. Procedural knowledge is a different issue because you can learn that by doing or by imitating. Even in science, which is a process and a method as well as a body of knowledge, even in science a lot of the knowledge isn’t explicit and articulated. It’s actually procedural. This is something Thomas Kuhn talked about, for example, in his famous book on scientific revolutions, because partly when you’re a graduate student, for example, or to a lesser degree an undergraduate, it’s more relevant when you actually start practicing science. A lot of the knowledge that you bring to bear on the subject is actually implicit. You can’t really explain it. And so some examples of that might be like learning how to look through a microscope, which turns out to be a very difficult thing. You have to practice for many hours before you get good at looking through a microscope. Or maybe if you’re a radiologist, you have to read x-rays or fMRIs or that sort of thing. You can build up a body of knowledge that makes you a perceptual expert, but you can’t really get that kind of knowledge without practice. It’s sort of like learning how to play the piano, say, or learning how to walk. Or any complex act of perception or action is seldom fully articulatable. And so that’s another kind of knowledge. You might call that embodied knowledge. And there is a memory form that goes along with that, which is procedural memory. And a lot of what you know is procedural memory. And then there’s another kind of knowledge, which is, I suppose, autobiographical. And that’s often referred to as, say, episodic memory. And autobiographical knowledge would be your memory of yourself as an actor in the world. So I suspect for many of you, well, let’s find out for how many this is true. When you remember an episode in the past or when your mind is wandering and episodes of the past come up, how would you describe the form in which they emerge? For how many people are they like little movies? Is there anyone for whom that’s not true? Yeah, OK. So when you think about the past or when the past comes to mind, in what form does it come to mind? Still. Still. OK, but it’s still images. Is there anybody? OK, fine, fine. There’s also knowledge about the past that’s semantic knowledge, articulated knowledge. And that would be factual knowledge about what you did in the past. But that seems to be a more thoroughly processed form of memory. Because in some sense, what you’ve done, if you’re extracting out articulated knowledge from past experiences, is that you have to pull out the gist. You reduce it. It’s sort of like, imagine that you have a conversation with someone in the last two hours and someone says, well, what did you talk about? Well, you don’t repeat the entire conversation verbatim, right? You do some weird job of compressing the information into something like a summary. And you do that more or less automatically. It’s quite a remarkable process, actually, because you get the gist or you get the point, whatever the point is. It’s not like it’s that easy to extract from a conversation. That’s another form of knowledge that you can formulate. And then there’s sort of borderline forms of knowledge. And those are the ones that seem to be expressed, as far as I can tell, in something that’s more like symbolic representation. So we talked last time a little bit about a parent acting the role of a father. So the parent is embodying whatever father means. And the child’s prepared for that, because children generally have a father. Of course, children are prepared to interact with men like they’re prepared to interact with women. They understand men and they understand women. And a lot of that knowledge comes hardwired in. So the child might be observing the father across multiple contexts, trying to understand precisely who this creature is, but then also learning how to embody that insofar as she might be learning how to interact with males or he might be learning how to imitate a male. Of course, there’s some of that that’s going on with both genders. And then a lot of what’s summarized in the acting out, in the pretending, also seems to be like gist. Because when a child imitates his father and is pretending to be a father, for example, he isn’t just duplicating exactly what he’s seen, what he’s doing in some sense you might think of as extracting out the commonalities of behavior across different contexts that the father manifests in order to get a handle on the spirit of the father. And then it’s the spirit of the father in some sense that the child’s trying to embody. And that would be whatever makes a father different from a man. And so you can certainly, I’m sure you know perfectly well when you go home to visit your parents or when you interact with them on a day-to-day basis. When your father is being a father and when he’s just being a man, there’d be voice tone and stance and gaze and all sorts of articulated phrases that you’re familiar with that are part of the role of father. And you can see other people’s fathers acting like fathers too. Now it seems to be that a lot of symbolic representation has to do with the extraction of the gist. It’s like exactly what is, it’s a categorization process. It’s exactly what it is that these various behaviors have in common. And what they have, if they’re embodied behaviors, what they have in common is something like a spirit. So I think it was Hegel who talked about the spirit of the times. And you know how if you look at photographs that are like 20 years old, all of a sudden they’re dated. For a while photographs look like they’re current and then all of a sudden poof they’re dated and you think how in the world did people think they were normal when they were dressed like that? And there are frequently occurrences in culture where there’s an emergence of a style that seems consistent across the entire culture. Like the Art Deco movement was like that. What seems to be the case in those situations is that there are novel ideas being generated but everyone is imitating everyone else as rapidly as they possibly can because they’re communicating in an articulated way and they’re copying each other and out of that you get something like a spirit or ethos of the time. And so a lot of what symbolism is trying to do is to extract out commonalities across contexts and often commonalities that you really don’t understand. Like they’re categories. They’re almost like pre-categories or they’re levels of representation that are trying to represent something that’s actually too complex for you to articulate. So for example many of you will act out being a mother or being a father when you have children but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you could fully articulate the knowledge that you have about what it is to be a mother or a father. And so you have the knowledge because you can act it out and it’s somewhat, you actually have some form of representation of the knowledge too because you can understand it when it happens but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can fully articulate it. So you can say for example that you have an image of what a mother is and the image wouldn’t be just a still, it would be maybe a sequence of stills or something like that but it’s more like a pattern of behavior, your image of the pattern of behavior that characterizes a given role. And so that’s a good way to think about symbols I think and that was sort of the Jungian way of thinking about them. Jung believed that a symbol was nature’s attempt, nature within you say, nature’s attempt to express a relatively unknown idea in the clearest possible manner even though that wasn’t necessarily clear. And well we use symbols all the time for that sort of purpose. You see them all the time when you go to movies for example. Movies are full of symbolism. I was just interpreting the dream of one of my clients the other day and he dreamt that he was following a spirit around in the basement of a house that was like a maze and the spirit kept disappearing and reappearing and he gathered some people around him that was sort of like a, I would say a social network because he’s been working on developing a social network and as that social network got developed he felt more and more confident to search out this spirit and to chase it around the basement. Finally the spirit manifested itself, a ghost, it was a blue ghost, ghostly thing. It came out of a box that was in one of the basement rooms that had a toilet seat on it. So it was like a toilet that was on a box which is just what I said. And then the spirit disappeared down into the toilet and he looked in there along with some other people and there was a huge massive maze-like structure of many many rooms underneath. And I thought well that’s actually quite a common representation in dreams but does that remind anyone of anything? Anything that’s not unbelievably pathological? It’s like the story in the second part of Harry Potter, right? Do you remember that? So you have Moaning Myrtle, she inhabits the bathroom, she’s always diving into toilets and don’t they find the understructure of Hogwarts by going through that bathroom into the subterranean elements? Yeah so that’s a good… that realm of symbolism is something like underneath, this is exactly what the case is with the second Harry Potter story, is that underneath the edifice of culture and that would be Hogwarts in that particular story, there’s a subterranean realm and in that subterranean realm lurk things that can paralyze you if you look at them. That’s the basilisk. Now what do you think happens if a rabbit sees a fox? What does it do? It freezes. Why? Absolutely, right. The rabbit assumes that it’s camouflaged and so as long as it doesn’t move then maybe there’s some chance that the predator won’t see it and so the idea that you turn to stone when you look at something that’s predatory and reptilian, and that’s an old idea, you know, God only knows how old that is, it’s probably about as old as mammals. I suspect it’s something in the neighborhood of 60 million years old, maybe even older than that because it was at that point that our primitive ancestors were living in trees and being preyed upon by snakes mostly because our ancestors back 60 million years ago got eaten by snakes quite a lot. They seem to have co-evolved with us. In fact, there’s some evidence from a woman named Lynn Isbell who’s quite an interesting scholar that the reason that we can see so well is actually because we developed our vision to detect predatory reptiles, most particularly snakes. And the way she found that out was by, because human beings have amazing eyes, we can see like no other animal except for raptors, except for birds of prey. They can see better than us. But as far as primates go, man, we knock it out of the park and mammals too. We’ve got amazing vision. And what Isbell did was look around the world to see what predicted how accurate the eyesight of primates were in different locales and what she found was there’s a powerful relationship with the presence of predatory snakes. That’s an extraordinarily cool thing. It gives you some insight into the level of depth that might be involved in the analysis of the symbolic realm in the Harry Potter. The Harry Potter story, the second story, is almost a precise duplicate of the story of St. George. And if you look up St. George on the net, if you Google St. George, you’ll see that St. George is usually on a horse and what he’s doing is slaying a dragon. It’s not a very big dragon usually, but it’s bigger than his horse, but it’s particularly nasty looking. And it comes out of a cave and he frees a virgin from its grasp. That’s exactly what happens in Harry Potter, right, because it’s Ginny that’s down there. And you remember Harry gets bitten by the basilisk, right, and it’s kind of poisoned, right, and so he’s going to die. And then what happens? Yeah, a phoenix comes and so what’s a phoenix? It’s a… Yeah, it’s a symbol of death and rebirth. Exactly, exactly. And so what the Harry Potter story says is that if you’re fighting a dragon, a snake, something terrible, something that will paralyze you if you look at it, and you’re doing that in order to redeem something from that encounter, because you often learn things when you do something that you’re afraid of. In fact, almost all learning occurs in spite of fear, right, because to learn something you have to explore something new, and that’s usually something that’s frightening. And so what that means is that if you’re willing to face something that’s frightening, you can garner something of value. Now it also may well mean in the context of that story, and you see this in the romance that underlies the first part of Harry Potter, is that the man who’s capable of standing up to predatory reptiles is also the one who is most likely to attract women. And I think that that’s been a truth since God only knows when, too. We have no idea. But human beings are definitely hunters, right, and men are bigger than women, and one of the things that that suggests is that, you know, a lot of the predatory-like activities that are characteristic of human beings were undertaken by males, and some usually males that hunt. But anyways, we can put all that aside. Harry gets bitten by this basilisk, and part of the reason that the story shows that is because it wants to tell you, the story wants to tell you, so to speak, that the danger that you face when you voluntarily confront something you’re afraid of in order to learn is actually a danger. It’s real. You see an example like that, too, in the Avengers. I don’t remember the guy’s name. He’s the black guy with the patch over his eye. Who is that? Yeah, yeah, well, you know, that the representation of the one-eyed hero is also quite common. You see this, for example, in ancient Egyptian mythology. There’s a god named Horus, who I’ll talk to you about. In fact, there’s a picture of Horus, actually. Horus is the god on the left there, on the picture of the left. He’s got a face like a falcon, and that’s because falcons can see, and the reason the Egyptians turned Horus into a falcon is because Horus is the eye. You’ve all seen the famous Egyptian eye. Horus can see. One of the things he sees is evil, and that actually, he has an encounter with evil, and as a consequence, one of his eyes gets torn out. And the idea there is that, you know, you have to face evil just like you have to confront fear. Fear can paralyze you, and the things that make you afraid can kill you, and in a confrontation with evil, the same thing can happen, is that it can be so overpowering and traumatic that it damages your consciousness. And like, these things are real. They’re real. I mean, that happened to, what’s the general’s name? The Canadian general who was there during the Rwandan massacre. He developed post-traumatic stress disorder, and he entitled the book he wrote about the development of his post-traumatic stress disorder was called Shake Hands with the Devil, and that’s really what he meant, because he met one of the guys who led the massacre, you know. And anyways, he never really recovered from that. He has post-traumatic stress disorder, and so these things are extraordinary, real. Now back to the basilisk. Well, if you’re going to confront something that’s dangerous enough and informative enough to like virtually kill you, and you’re going to survive, what does that mean? It means that your capacity for death and renewal is what saves you. And so, you know, you think about this, partly what it means is that, like, there you are, but you learn something. Okay. Once you learn something, you’re not the same as you were before you learned it, right? There’s a transformation. So that means you’re the same as you are, because you’re still there, but you’re also different. And then you might also ask yourself, well, what do you give up when you learn something? And that’s an interesting question, because you very seldom learn something that’s completely without precedent. Now if you do, that’s really shocking, generally, but you generally don’t. What happens is that you already have a framework of evaluation that you’re using to interpret the world. And it’s good enough to get you from place to place, but it’s not 100% accurate. And when you encounter something you didn’t expect, or something that’s frightening, so that you have to transform your knowledge, generally what happens is you have to lose some of what you already presume before you can learn something new. It’s like a prejudice, or an oversimplification, or an element of your ignorance has to be allowed to die before you can incorporate the information and then grow. And so you might say, well, death is the precondition for learning, at least symbolically speaking, and that’s exactly what the phoenix is attempting to represent in the Harry Potter story. Now who owns the phoenix? Dumbledore, right? And he’s sort of God of Hogwarts, so to speak. So the phoenix stands in the same relationship to Dumbledore that Christ stands in relationship to God the Father in Christianity. It’s exactly the same kind of idea. Well, it’s not exactly the same, obviously. But the underlying structure of the idea is very similar. If you remember, maybe, what happens to Harry Potter at the very end of the series? What process does he have to go through? He dies, right? And then he comes back to life, right? And he has to die and come back to life in order to defeat evil. It’s pretty funny, because a lot of people, especially fundamentalists in the US, were all over Harry Potter for its hypothetically anti-Christian occultism. But the fundamental story, I wouldn’t say it’s Christian exactly, because it’s actually older than Christianity itself. But the main themes in Harry Potter are, like, Christian symbolism informs the main themes to a great degree. And it’s funny, because most of the time when you go see this sort of thing, how many of you watched all the Harry Potter movies? Yeah, like, what the hell’s up with that? This woman got people reading 700-page books when they were 10 years old. I suspect a lot of you were those people. So, why were you so interested in that stuff? For God’s sake, it’s about a magic orphan. What’s wrong with you people? Magic orphans? But for some reason, why an orphan? Well, Superman’s an orphan, too. And if you go on Wikipedia, it’s kind of an interesting thing to do. Look up superhero orphans. It’s like 500 of them. And that’s a very comp… It goes along… it also goes along with the idea of having two sets of parents, which is also characteristic both of Superman and of Harry Potter, right? Because Harry has his daily, day-to-day, you know, parents that aren’t his real parents. And then he has his heavenly parents, who are his magic parents. And you know, this representation here that I’ve got up in front of you, and I was telling you a little bit about that in the last lecture, you can say in some sense those are representations of your magic parents. And so you can think about it this way. It’s like you have a mother and a father. And those are your local mothers and fathers. And whether or not you get along with them, or whether or not they were any good for you, or whether you understand them, or anything like that, in some sense is irrelevant, because they’re not your real parents. Your real parents are something more like nature, biology, the unknown, something like that, and culture. We kind of think of that as nature and nurture, you know, which is also a symbolic idea. And so one of the things that Jung thought, Freud thought, you couldn’t be a man until your father died. It’s kind of an interesting idea. And Jung said, yeah, but the death could be symbolic. And partly what he meant by that was that, you know, insofar as you’re still the son of your father, or the daughter of your father, or the son of your mother, or the daughter of your mother, you still haven’t grown up. You haven’t taken the projections, those would be Freudian projections, that make you subordinate to your parents, because you might ask yourself, why the hell do you care what your parents think? Why do you care what any random set of 50, 60 year old people think about you? Why do you care what your parents think? Well, the reason for that, I would say, is because you’re suffering or benefiting as a consequence of a projection. You project something onto your parents. It’s like a quasi-deity status. They’re the people who know what’s going on, and they’re entitled to evaluate you. Maybe you’re working to achieve things to impress them and make them happy. It’s like, well, why them? Why them? You don’t care what your parents’ friends think. I don’t imagine you probably don’t really care what the parents of your friends think. So why do you care what your parents think? Well, understanding that is part of coming to understand the dynamics, Freud would say, of the personal unconscious, because your relationship with your parents is part of your personal unconscious. And Jung’s idea was, well, you have to replace. It’s interesting, because Freud thought that the reason there were patriarchal religions was because people projected the figure of their father onto the cosmos. In some sense, they sort of personified the cosmos. It’s like God is an old man with a beard, which, by the way, isn’t as stupid a theory as it sounds like. But anyways, Freud thought that religion sort of emerged out of the familial dynamic. But Jung thought that that wasn’t exactly right, because the religious symbols, like say the one on the right there where you have God the father, was representing something like a meta-father, the sum total of all fathers, which would be something like the patriarchy. And you need a representation of that, because you are a child of culture. And if you’re not a child of culture, then you’re an incomplete being. And you also don’t want to confuse your parents or your father, let’s say. I mean, there’s masculine and feminine elements in both parents. But for the sake of simplification, I’m going to lay it out the way I am laying it out. You don’t want to confuse your father with culture or history. He’s the embodiment of both those things, but he certainly doesn’t embody it in total. And your primary relationship, in some sense, your personal relationship is to your father. But your primary existential relationship is actually to culture itself. Now I can give you an example of that, too. A quick example. How many of you have seen Pinocchio? Yeah. So anybody not? Well, you should watch it. It’s a great movie. It’s a bit dated, and some of it’s a bit preachy. But fundamentally, they knocked it out of the park. So Pinocchio is this fake thing, right? He’s like this artificial boy. He’s made by Geppetto, who’s a pretty good guy. What’s Pinocchio trying to do? Right, right. Well, hopefully that’s part of what you’re trying to do. And hopefully that’s a process that this class could conceivably further. So what does Pinocchio have to do in relationship to his father in order to become real? He rescues him, right? What does he do? He goes down to the bottom of the ocean. What does he find there? A whale, weirdly enough. And really weirdly enough, you know, I don’t know what a puppet is doing on the bottom of the ocean looking for a whale, but apparently it swallowed his father. Which also, none of that makes any sense at all, you realize. It makes no sense. But of course, you’re in there, like, following it and thinking, yeah, well, I can, you know, I can suspend disbelief. You know, it’s just a puppet, a wooden puppet. And it’s looking for its father at the bottom of the ocean in a whale. That all makes, doesn’t make any sense at all, right? It makes no sense whatsoever. But it’s a mythological motif. And part of that motif, it’s a death and rebirth motif, going down to the bottom of the ocean and being devoured by something and then coming back up. So that’s a death and rebirth motif. But even more importantly, the motif there suggests that you can’t stop being a puppet, a marionette. Somebody else is pulling your strings. Something else is pulling your strings. You’re a marionette till you rescue your father from the bottom of the ocean. And what does that mean? Well, it means that you’re a puppet of forces you do not understand, probably prevailing political attitudes or ideologies or something pathetic like that, until you make the attempt to dive down into the depths and reclaim your identity with history as a phenomena. You know, because you might say, well, why should you study history? It’s like, well, history is you. You know, if you’re not studying history with the understanding that you’re studying yourself, then you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. And you can’t be a complete person because we’re culture, we’re cultural people, we’re cultural creatures. You can’t be a full person until you catalyze your identity with your culture. And it’s like an existential obligation. So, and if you don’t do it, then you’re going to feel all nihilistic and weak, or you’re going to be all totalitarian and self-righteous and oppressive and, you know, maybe genocidal and deadly. So, it’s not something that you can just brush off. You have to do it. It’s part of an initiation motif, by the way, which we’re also going to talk about. So that’s some, it’s hard to talk about symbolism. And you’ll notice, especially in the first part of the lectures, that my lectures are, well, I like to think about them as impressionist. And there’s a reason for this. I started reading Jung about 30 years ago, I would say, and I pretty much read everything he wrote, which is an awful lot. And it’s very difficult to read Jung because there’s not precisely a linear narrative. But the reason for that is that it’s very difficult to construct a linear narrative about information that’s been primarily transmitted in images. And so in order to impart the knowledge, you have to give people, like, sub-pictures of the whole picture. It’s almost like laying them out in space, in a sense. And so that if you get enough of those little sub-pictures, the whole thing will click into focus and you’ll think, aha, I get that. But wandering through it in a linear manner is extraordinarily difficult. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible. I also think that’s why the kind of information that’s embodied in symbols is generally not transmitted as linear articulated knowledge. You can’t transmit it that way. And so it remains in, you know, forms like this. You look at those pictures, you know. So think about those pictures for a minute. Okay, the picture on the left. So that’s ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt lasted for longer than Western, well, if you don’t include Egypt as part of Western civilization, it certainly lasted longer than what we generally consider Western civilization. It lasted for thousands and thousands of years, right? And those images are representations of the fundamental assumptions of Egyptian culture. So those images had foundational power for eons, for thousands and thousands of years. You know, and you can just look at them and nothing happens to you. You know, you look at them like they’re photographs or flat images, but they had the kind of motive power that drove an entire culture for thousands and thousands of years. You know, they had more motive power than communist ideology, for example, which only, you know, managed to motivate people for about 50 years. And you know, it’s certainly possible that they had more motive power than Christian ideas which have only been around for roughly 2,000 years. You know, so when you’re looking at something like that, you’re looking at something with power. And the idea that, you know, that symbolic representations or religious representations are what you call unsophisticated empirical theories, like that’s an idiotic theory, you know. You don’t think that anybody who’s educated should be proposing such a thing after more than 100 years of psychoanalytic and anthropological investigation. It’s just not a tenable theory anymore. So what are people up to? Well, let’s look at the left-hand side. I can tell you a little bit about what the Egyptians were trying to figure out. So on the right-hand side of the first picture, you have Isis. Okay, and now Isis is goddess of the underworld, and she’s also a goddess of chaos. And so she’s the goddess of the place that you go when things fall apart around you. And it’s worthwhile thinking of that as a domain. And you know what that’s like. So okay, so a dream falls apart or a vision falls apart or you get dumped by someone you love or you get betrayed or you fail, or maybe you just have, you know, maybe you have clinical depression or you’re hyper-anxious or you know, you have some negative emotion pathology. Well, that’s a state of being, right? You can think about it as a place. And that place is the underworld. The underworld is where you go when things fall apart. And the representation for the Egyptians of the underworld was primarily Isis. She was the personified figure that represented the domain that was underneath normative knowledge. And the reason she was female, it’s very complicated. And like I said last time, I really don’t have time to explain it in depth, unfortunately. But part of the reason that the underworld is given feminine qualities, there’s a lot of reasons, but one of them is that kind of the defining feature of the feminine is that from which new forms emerge. That’s almost like, there’s other ways of defining female, but that’s our feminine. But that’s a pretty good one. It’s a pretty universal one. And the unknown is feminine because the unknown is the place from which all new forms emerge. Right? So when you interact with the unknown on a voluntary basis, which can be symbolized sexually, which often happened with Freud’s thinking and with his clients, you bring forth something new. And so it’s a terrifying place to descend into. It can be hellish because hell is actually like the worst suburb of the unknown. And I’m sure some of you have been there too. Or maybe you’re there now. Or maybe you know people who are there. So it’s a very, very rough place to visit, especially if you do it accidentally. If you go there especially accidentally, you might never come out. But if you do come out, maybe you’ve learned something. Maybe you’re new in some way. And that’s another reason, in some sense, why the feminine is a symbolic representation of the unknown because there is a death and rebirth motif there. And birth is always associated with the feminine. So can I remember the word? No, I can’t. The baptismal font in Christian ceremonies, so baptism ceremonies, has a Latin word that is basically equivalent to uterus. So you can look that up if you want. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly remember the word. But it’s the same idea. You’re being plunged back into the feminine underpinnings of everything and then pulled back up. And well, that’s what a baptism is supposed to be. You’re supposed to be born into the spirit instead of into matter. And that means that you’ve emerged as a articulated being that isn’t merely a biological product. It’s something like that. So all right, so that’s Isis. And Isis is the wife of Osiris, or Osiris, who’s in the middle standing on a pillar there. He’s the father. And he’s a pillar because culture is like the pillars that hold things up. And so in the Egyptian story, Osiris was an old king. And he was kind of willfully blind. He didn’t really know what was going on anymore. And he didn’t pay sufficient attention. And he had an evil brother, by the way, whose name was Seth. And Seth eventually chops him up, wants to take over the kingdom, and scatters him all over the kingdom. He can’t kill him because he’s a god. And Isis comes up from the underworld and finds Osiris’ phallus and makes herself pregnant. And she gives birth to Horus, who’s the guy on the left. And Horus is sort of like King Arthur or any number of orphans. He grows up, or like that lion in the Lion King. Simba, you know how Simba grows up basically outside of the damaged kingdom, right? It’s taken over by Scar. It’s exactly the same story. It’s really, it’s exactly the same story. And Horus grows up outside the kingdom. And when he grows up, he can really see Horus. That’s why his symbol is the eye. He goes back and he can see evil. He’s not blind like his father, which is the difference between you guys and dead culture, right? So you’re cultural organisms, but you’re not dead. You can see and you can update yourself. So you’re like the living embodiments of history. And the living embodiments of history have to know what history is and incorporate it into themselves, but also be awake enough to alter it where that alteration is necessary, especially when they’re doing that to further their knowledge of the unknown and also to triumph over evil. So anyways, Horus grows up outside, but like he can see he’s different than Osiris, partly because he’s young. And he knows that his uncle is evil and he goes back and has a terrible fight with him. And during the fight, Seth, his uncle tears out one of his eyes because it’s no joke to confront evil. It’s no joke. It can damage your consciousness. Anyways, Horus wins and he gets his eye back and then he banishes Seth to the nether regions of the kingdom because he can’t get rid of him either. He can’t kill him. The potential for corruption in an institution is always there, so there’s no permanently getting rid of it. There’s only controlling it from time to time. Anyways, so he gets his eye back and then instead of putting it back in his head and being king, which you’d expect him to do, he goes back down to the underworld and he finds his father there because his father, chopped up, is also a spirit who inhabits the underworld and he gives his father the eye. And then the two of them go back and rule the kingdom together. I tell you, it’s one of the world’s most brilliant stories. It’s a staggeringly brilliant story because it says that active youth should be the guiding the state because the Horus-Osiris combination was actually what the pharaoh imitated when he was being a good pharaoh. It’s dynamic vision that should be the guiding principle of the state, but it should be allied with tradition. It’s brilliant. It’s one of the things that the radical revolutionaries of the 1960s never figured out. It’s like, well, don’t trust anybody over 30. Well, that’s a really stupid idea, especially since you’re going to spend half, two-thirds of your life over 30. The hell good is that? So the idea is that you’re supposed to embody your tradition and be awake at the same time. And then if you do that, then you’d be a good ruler of yourself, of your little family, and if you have an opportunity beyond that, then of whatever organizations you happen to be involved in. That’s exactly what should be happening to you at university. It’s the whole point of going to university. It’s not a trade school. Not that there’s anything wrong with trade schools. But that’s not what university is for. It’s to turn you into creatures that aren’t marionettes. And to do that, you have to follow a mythological path, or you can be chaotic and random. Those are, or like I said, subject to some idiotic totalitarian ideology, but I wouldn’t recommend either of those paths because they’re not going to get you very far for very long. So that’s the Egyptians. Brilliant. And it’s not like they understood that story. They told it. That’s different. It’s just like, you think, well, how can you tell something you don’t understand? Just like you can watch Harry Potter and not have a clue what’s going on. It’s exactly the same thing. And part of it is that you have levels of understanding that make you up, but that you don’t simultaneously understand. You can’t articulate them. So you’re a multileveled creature. And the part of you that’s conscious and articulate is floating on a massive substructure that’s neither conscious nor articulate. That’s in some sense striving to become conscious and articulate, but that can never be completely either of those things. So it’s part of the pain of being half spirit and half matter. So then on the right, you have another set of symbols which are quite similar, although they come about the story in a completely different way. So I told you a little bit about them before. You have Mary at the top. And she’s represented here as that which encloses everything. And so in that representation, culture is the child of nature. That’s one way of looking at the statue. There are many ways of looking at this statue. That’s the other thing that’s strange about symbolic representations, because in some sense you can’t exhaust them with words. There’s always something more you can say about them. And that’s partly because they’re associated with everything. And so if something is associated with everything, then you can talk about it forever and you never run out of things to say. They’re inexhaustible. And you have God the Father who already talked about it. And then if you notice in that image, I hope you can see that the figure is open and there’s a crowd of people gathered around. And they’re all looking at the central symbol, which is the crucifix. And you might be thinking that billions of people over the last 2,000 years have spent a substantial amount of time doing nothing but gazing at the crucifix. It’s like, why? And one answer is, well, those people are all superstitious. They believe in stupid things like death and resurrection and the virgin birth and all those things that make no empirical sense. It’s like, yeah, well, think again. It’s not a matter of simplistic belief. It’s a matter of belief structures that are so profound that you can’t articulate them. You don’t know what they mean. And so to gaze on the figure of the dying and resurrecting hero is to understand that a huge part of what redeems you in life from evil and from the things that terrify you is your capacity to let go of things that are outmoded and dead and to revitalize them as a consequence of new learning. And it’s the very soul, it’s your very soul. It’s the very, it’s the living part of you. And that’s the part, the thing that’s so interesting about this is according to the wisdom traditions of mankind, that’s the part of your spirit that protects you against fear and pain. Because you might say, well, you know, if you don’t want fear and you don’t want pain, you should build a big wall around yourself and wrap yourself up in styrofoam and sit right in the middle, you know, where nothing bad is ever going to happen to you. But you know, first of all, that’s obviously ridiculous. And second of all, you die of boredom in no time flat. If you did that, you cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you. But if you identify with the part of your being that has the capacity for transformation, then you’re always, then you’re always, you’re always the equal of what it is that’s opposing you or maybe more than the equal of it. So you can either depend on the walls that protect you from things. And so those could be like actual walls or cultural walls or totalitarian beliefs or rigid thought patterns or anything like that. Or you can rely instead on the part of you that’s voluntarily able to confront things that are frightening and painful and triumph. And the deepest story of humankind is that that’s the part of us that’s the most powerful. You know, weak as we are and subject as we are to all sorts of terrible things, what do you need for protection? That’s what you need. You have to be willing to let go and come back and let go and come back. And then you can stay dynamic through the ups and downs of your life. It makes you incredibly strong. And so, you know, one of the things that you could think about in relationship to this and we’ll talk about this more when we talk about Carl Rogers. Rogers talked a lot about the importance of listening. You know, he said most people can’t listen because what they want to do instead is impose their viewpoint on the other person. Because if you listen to people, they’re going to tell you all sorts of weird nonsense about their own lives and about what they think. And, you know, some of it’s going to be… it’ll set you back, you know, to hear that people have gone through that and to actually understand their opinions. If you can listen to them, well then you can open up an exchange of information and that can transform both of you. And Rogers regarded that as an absolute necessity in the therapeutic context and even in the context of profound relationships. But he said, you know, most people won’t do that because they want to cling to what they already have. And so one of the things you can think of, and this is worth thinking about for five years here, here’s something to think about. What’s your friend? The things you know or the things you don’t know? First of all, there’s a lot more things you don’t know. And second, the things you don’t know is the birthplace of all your new knowledge. And so if you make the things you don’t know your friend instead of the things that you know, well then you’re always on a quest in a sense. You’re always looking for new information on the off chance that somebody that doesn’t agree with you will tell you something you couldn’t have figured out on your own. It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. So it’s the antithesis of opinionated. So okay, so here’s some… You can think of these terms. Let me give you an example. So I was just reading this research paper by one of the people in our department and he was looking at, he’s found out that people are better than chance at determining sexual orientation when they look at cropped faces that are gray scaled with no hair for 50 to 100 milliseconds. That’s pretty fast, eh? It’s like you’re not thinking about it at that speed. Takes you half a second to think about something. Maybe a little less, but 50 milliseconds to 100 milliseconds, man. That’s automatic processing. Okay, so he found that if you show people faces then they can predict with better than chance levels of accuracy what the sexual orientation of the person is. Now we don’t know exactly how they do that. The other thing he found is that if you’re exposed, say, to a face that you judge as homosexual, let’s say, and then you’re given a bunch of cognitive tasks where if you use the articulated stereotypes of homosexual people you’ll perform better, that you do perform better. So you see a face that you instantly categorize as homosexual, then you’re given a cognitive test that you can do better at if you rely on cognitive stereotypes and you do do better on it. So what that means is the brief perceptual exposure activates a whole complex of associated ideas. And it’s not exactly obvious why those things are associated. You might say, well, what does it mean to be gay? Or for that matter, what does it mean to be straight? Well it means a whole bunch of things and you probably couldn’t tell me all the things And some of them are things that you perceive rather than think. No matter. When you’re exposed to that particular image, that entire complex of associations, which is like the mapping of a personality, right? Because to be gay is to be a personality of a certain sort. It’s to embody a certain mode of being. And so you have a picture of that personality that’s partly made out of all your cognitive assumptions and that can be activated at 50 milliseconds by exposure to just a black and white picture. Okay, so that’s like a complex, just so you know. You’ll hear about the idea of complex when you read Jung. And a complex is a set of associated ideas that tend to take on embodied form. And you might ask, well, why would ideas tend to take on embodied form? And then the answer to that is, what the hell good is an idea if it doesn’t take on embodied form? They’re embodied. So to say that an idea is useful, and you make that judgment, by the way, when you find an idea interesting, because like why is it interesting? You don’t know, which is also something that’s really worth thinking about, right? Because to be interested in something is to be in the grip of a particular mode of being. And you don’t have any voluntary control over that. Some things you find interesting and some things you don’t. And you know, you might say, well, I’m going to concentrate on this boring thing as hard as I can because I have to master it. Maybe you have to pass an exam or something. It’s like good luck trying to get your unconscious to cooperate because usually it won’t. You know, you’ll be thinking about, oh, God only knows what you’ll be thinking about. Doing the dishes, vacuuming up under the bed, like anything, not to concentrate on that particular boring piece of information. So back to the complex and the idea that ideas are embodied. If an idea can’t be embodied, you have to ask yourself if it has any utility. Because there’s a trillion facts, right? You could go on Google and write down facts until you died. And then you still wouldn’t have got anywhere near the whole number of facts there are. So then you might ask, well, what are good or facts if there’s an infinite number of them? And the answer to that is, they’re actually not much good at all. Unless you have a purpose for them. If you have a purpose for them, then the fact becomes embodied because you either use it to change your perception or you use it to guide your actions. And that’s when it becomes meaningful. And so you might say in part that a complex is the tendency of a group of associated ideas to manifest themselves in something approximating a personality. And then that also gives you a real key to what the psychoanalysts were up to because as far as they’re concerned, you’re just chock full of complexes. And you know, you think about yourself as one thing, which is foolish, because you know, you’re obviously, you’re kind of like a loose collection of microorganisms, something like that. You’re like two of the stupid ideas that possessed you. Or maybe you’re possessed by an attraction to someone you can’t control, or you can’t control your eating behavior, or you’re a pushover when it comes to interpersonal interactions because you’re too agreeable, or you fly off the handle and fight. You know, none of this is really under your control. And so all of those things that manifest themselves, not only in your behaviors, but in your perceptions, your perceptions themselves, you know, they tend to take on embodied form and use you as the vehicle for their activity. So you know, when you’re thinking about something like anger, for example, think about how it works because it’s quite peculiar. What must someone generally do? How must someone generally act if you’re going to be angry at them? They have to be irritating, right? You know, they have to provoke you in some way. Well the mere fact that you perceive what they’re doing as irritating or provoking doesn’t ensure that anyone else would have thought about it as irritating or provoking, or that that’s what they meant, or that that’s what’s happening. And my point is, my point is, it’s very important to think about these complexes of ideas as sub-personalities because otherwise you really don’t get what they’re like. If you’re angry, if you have a proclivity towards anger, especially if it’s unthinking proclivity, anything that someone says might irritate you. And it isn’t like they say something and you think about it and then you get irritated. It’s like you perceive the person as irritating. You know, maybe it’s just the way they hold their mouth or something. It can be very, very subtle. And you might say, well, it’s not me, it’s you. It’s not that I’m irritated by you. It’s that you’re irritating. And that, you know, that’s a very difficult thing to settle because the reality is somewhere between the subjective and the objective, right? A lot of arguments that you’ll have with people throughout your life are about exactly that. Am I, are you irritating or am I over sensitive? It’s like, well, you know, we’re going to hash that out for a good long time before we figure it out. But the point is, is that if you’re possessed by an emotional state or a motivational state or an idea or some kind of complex, you’ll see the world through its eyes. And then the facts reveal themselves to you through the lens of that particular set of ideas. So it’s a very frightening idea because, you know, we like to think of ourselves as masters of our own house, which is completely clueless because it’s obvious if you watch yourself for like a month that you hardly ever do what you tell yourself to do when you’re liable to do all sorts of other things that you don’t even want to do. You know, because you say, well, I’m going to go to the gym three times a week and I’m not going to drink, you know, and maybe there’s this person I’m not going to associate with. And then, you know, you don’t go to the gym and you find that person and you go out and drink with them and you think, what the hell’s going on? You know, but it’s, you’re not the sort of person that will do what you say. And so, like, what sort of person are you? Well that’s a psychoanalytic question. It’s a deep one. Because you’re a peculiar thing. And there’s parts of you that are really, really, really old. And you know, the sort of naive you, the naive young you that you think of yourself as is like a little piece of flotsam in an ocean of complexity. And the ocean of complexity is you. And part of diving down into the depths is to start to understand what it means to be human. And like, whatever that means, it’s the one thing you can say about it for sure is that it’s bloody peculiar. So here are some associations of ideas that go along with these symbolic representations that I was describing. So the feminine is often nature. And here are some associations. They’re not necessary associations. They’re common associations. So if you see these sorts of things, they would make the narrative sense. So for example, if you see an old and somewhat evil woman in an animated movie and she lives in a swamp, that makes sense. Now why does it make sense? Well, I can’t explain that at the moment. Well, it’s partly because the swamp is outside of the standard borders of civilization. It’s also a place of death, decay, and rebirth. So that’s part of it. Anyways, some associations. Nature is the unconscious. Why is the unconscious nature? Well, because you can’t control it. It just manifests itself within you. That’s the Freudian id. It’s like dreams. They happened. You don’t know what they mean. They just happened. And so that’s nature operating inside of you. The terrors of the darkness. Why? Well, remember when you were a little kid, you were three. And you’re afraid of the dark because kids at three are afraid of the dark. What’s in the dark? What are you looking for in your closet? Monsters, right? Where are the monsters? Well, they’re not in your closet, hopefully. But that’s not to say that there couldn’t be a monster in your closet. And it’s also not to say that when you look at your closet when you’re a little kid, that you’re looking at your closet. Maybe you’re looking at the darkness. And then the question of whether or not there are monsters in the darkness gets a lot more complicated. I had a client once who was agoraphobic. And she didn’t like to take elevators, which is quite a common phenomena for people who are agoraphobic. And so I was doing standard exposure, which is voluntary exposure to the unknown, which is a prime curative process in psychotherapy. It’s like, find out what you’re afraid of that’s interfering with your movement forward, break it into small pieces, and expose yourself to it. That works. So we go to the elevator. And I say, well, how close can you get to the elevator without being nervous? So she stands like 10 feet away. I say, OK, well, stand there till you’re bored and then go three steps forward. So she could do that and made her a little nervous. And then I said, well, stand there till you’re bored and make sure you’re looking at the elevator and not avoiding it. And then take another three steps forward. OK, we keep doing that until she’s like at the elevator. So then I say, well, here’s the deal. We’re just going to let the elevator doors open. You don’t have to get on. We’ll let them close. And then that’s it for today. And I always tell people when I’m doing that sort of thing that I’m not going to trick them. There’s no tricks. It’s like you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. And I’m not going to play any games on you. So OK. So the door is open. She goes, that’s a tomb. And then it closes. And you think, well, was that an elevator or a tomb? And you might think, well, obviously it’s an elevator. It’s like things are not so obvious, you know, because there are many ways of perceiving something. And a given entity can be a member of multiple categories at the same time. And you say, OK, well, yeah, the elevator is not a tomb. But it’s an enclosed, dark place that contains the unknown. And when you see an elevator, you just see like a conveyance that moves you up and down. But that isn’t what she saw. And you might say, well, what she saw is wrong. It’s like not exactly. But it’s not functional. Right? It’s not. If you want to take an elevator, then perceiving it as your tomb is probably inappropriate. But the point is, is that it has a lot of associations. Like it’s a place of constriction and privation and isolation and separation. And so it has elements of its being that overlap with other things that are frightening. And so agoraphobics are often afraid, too, of being in a subway, being all crowded in the subway. It’s partly because they can’t get out and make it to a hospital. So enclosed places or crowd places are places where they encounter their mortality because they get afraid they’re going to die and then they can’t get to the hospital. So they come into a room like this and sit in the middle. And you think, hey, crowd of students. They think, ah, place of death. And it’s like, well, you might say, well, no, this is a crowd of students. And I might say, well, how come you’re so damn sure it’s not a place of death? Like generally it isn’t. But any of you could drop dead of a heart attack in the next five minutes. So why aren’t you terrified out of your skulls because of that? And the answer to that is, you don’t know. That’s the answer. Because as far as I’ve been able to tell, most of the things agoraphobics are afraid like that they might die at any moment actually happens to be true. And so the fact that they’re afraid of that, it’s like, yeah, no kidding. You’re afraid of that. How are other people not afraid of it? Well, that’s a good question. So that’s nature. That’s nature. I can tell you another reason, I think, why the feminine is nature. I don’t know what you guys think about this, but I was pretty happy when I thought this up. So if you think about the world in Darwinian terms, it’s a struggle for survival and reproduction, which are basically the same thing. Survival is you, but reproduction is the survival of your genes. So it’s a survival issue over very long spans of time. What do we call the selection mechanism? Right, natural selection. It’s nature who does the selection. Okay, so let me tell you something that makes female humans different than female chimps. I mean, there’s lots of things that do, but. So but here’s an important one. If you look at which male in a female, in a chimp troop, fathers most of the offspring, it’s the dominant male. But the reason for that isn’t because the female chimps sort of flock around the dominant male. Now that happens in other species, but it doesn’t happen with chimps. What happens is the dominant male chases all the subordinate males away and will interfere with any sexual behavior they manifest. It’ll chase them away. The females, though, are perfectly happy to mate with a subordinate male if they’re in heat and they get the opportunity. So they go into heat, which is something that doesn’t happen with female humans, and they really don’t care who they mate with. Okay. Female humans are much different than that. They’re picky. So they’re really, they’re choosy. It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal that they’re choosy. So there’s famous psychology experiments. You’ve probably heard about these where undergraduate male goes out and asks random women if they’ll go home and sleep with him, have sex with him. And what happens? I mean, generally they say, get away from me, creep, or something like that. They certainly indicate no. But then they do the reverse experiment where they have a female undergraduate go, you know, proposition, essentially, males, and well, what happens then? Well, the males say yes, much more often than the females do. Okay, I’m sure that doesn’t come as a surprise to any of you. And you know, part of the reason for that, who knows? But part of the reason is that sex is much more dangerous proposition for women than it is for men. Because they have to bear the consequences, literally, if something, if the logically appropriate thing happens, which is they get pregnant. At least in principle, women recognize that, and they’re a bit more cautious. Although there’s more to it too, because women also seem to evaluate men for their fitness. Now, so, lots of men have no sexual partners and they have no children. That’s not the case with women. Almost all women have one child or more. And it’s a rare woman indeed who cannot find a sexual partner. Now Roy Baumeister indicated, and you’re going to have to think this through because it doesn’t make sense on first encounter, you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. So what that essentially means is that the success rate, the average success rate for propagation for the typical woman is very high. And the average success rate for the typical man is very low. But some men are hyperprocreative. Okay, so, men are subject to selection pressure and many of them fail. Here’s an interesting statistic. I think this came from Dataclysm, which is a book that was recently written about one of those online dating sites. A big one. Can’t remember its name. But he was looking at things like how the typical woman on the dating site rates the typical man. It’s pretty funny, eh? Because men actually rate women on a normal distribution. So the typical woman scores at the 50th percentile and half of them are above average and half of them are below. What do you think the equivalent is for women rating men? And everyone laughs, especially the women. So what do you think it is? It’s 85-15. 85 percent of men are below average. Yeah, it’s annoying. Unless you happen to be one of the 15 percent who isn’t. And those are the 15 percent of the guys who are having all the sexual encounters in a relatively sexually liberated environment, too. Okay, so why am I telling you all this? Women select men. That makes them nature. Because nature is what selects. And so you can say, well, it’s only symbolic that women are nature. It’s like, no, it’s not just symbolic. It’s not just symbolic. You know, and the woman in some sense is the gatekeeper to rep—is, not in some sense—is the gatekeeper to reproductive success. And you can’t get more like nature than that. In fact, it’s the very definition of nature. So as I said, there are lots of reasons why these symbolic representations are set up the way they are. All right, so that’s the great mother, nature. The queen, the matrix. The matrix is something from which all things form. Same root word as matter, mother. All the same root word. The matriarch, the container, the cornucopia, the object to be fertilized, the source of the pregnancy. There are more parts of the association network. The strange, the emotional, the foreigner, the place of return and rest. The deep, the valley, the cleft, the cave, hell, death, and the grave. The moon, ruler of the night, and the mysterious dark. And matter and the earth. So those aren’t necessarily associated with femininity, but they’re typically associated from a symbolic perspective. So generally, like a witch in a movie doesn’t come riding out of the full bright sun at noon, right? That just doesn’t happen because it doesn’t make sense. It’s a dark thing. And so if you saw that occurring in the light in a movie, you’d think, you know, what the hell’s going on here? That doesn’t make sense. And the reason it doesn’t make sense is because it violates the complex, the symbolic complex. So those are sort of female denizens of the underworld and hell. Very pleasant creatures. It’s like Medusa with the head of snakes, you know? And if you ask, why would a woman have a head of snakes in reference to a man? And that’s really simple. I bet there are men here who know the answer to that. Come on, Jesus, think about it. What emotion do you feel when you’re going to approach someone you’re very attracted to and there’s an extremely high probability that she’s going to tell you to disappear? Right. Exactly. Absolutely. Because it’s a real judgment, right? We’re going to see a movie called Crumb where you’ll see this in great detail. But it’s a real judgment. It’s like the best judgment is, well, I don’t mind your physical presence, but your genes should definitely not survive another generation. Right. And that’s sort of generally translated into, I think we should just be friends. Right. And you can blow that off, and people do, and you have to because it’s part of being polite and civilized. But let’s make no mistake about it. There is no more fundamental judgment than that. So paralysis. And there’s no shortage of men who are absolutely terrified of women. I mean, I’ve had many of them in my practice. I had one guy, he was so terrified of women he couldn’t even talk to them on the phone It’s more common than you think. So but it’s generally manifested by men who no one cares about, so it’s generally irrelevant. So well, it’s the case. It really is the case. I’m not kidding. They’re low status men. You know, they’re people that are generally regarded as losers. And there isn’t anybody who really gives a damn about what happens to them one way or another. And there’s a lot more men in that category than there are women. Women are in all sorts of social categories that cause the misery and distress. But that one seems to be predominantly male. One of the things I’m going to do when we talk about Freud is I’m going to show you this movie Crumb, which I just told you about. And it’s actually it’s very rare thing because it shows you the world from the perspective of very intelligent male losers. And that’s just not a perspective you ever see because it’s the winners that tell the stories about their life. It’s like who the hell cares about the life of a loser. This movie is about a loser who became a winner and, you know, almost as an act of revenge. And it’s great. It’s great. Great, great examination of the edible complex. Remarkable. So those are Hindu representations of Kali. I could tell you a little bit about Kali here. Just the middle representation I’ll use. So she has eight legs. Spider. Spider’s been a web. The web is fate. The web of fate traps the unwary. Nature does that. She’s in a web of fire. The little fire arch there, which is a mandorla, you can look that up if you want, is also made out of skulls. That’s what’s on the inside of it. So it’s skulls on fire, roughly speaking. Her hair is on fire and she has a headdress of skulls. And this guy she’s standing on, she just gave birth to him, which is why her belly is hollow, and she’s eating his intestines. So you know, and that’s a deity. You might think, well, why would something like that be a deity? And it’s something like, well, it’s the sum total of all fears. And you know, you might think, well, you don’t believe in that sort of thing. It’s like, yeah, you do. You just don’t know you do. Of course you do. You can’t not believe in it. You know, the manner in which you allow it to be represented and what you do with those representations, that’s a whole different matter. But you know, you’re not watching vampire movies for nothing, right? You say, well, you don’t believe in vampires. It’s like, that’s actually not true. You believe in them enough to go watch them on movies. So like, where are you going to define belief exactly? If someone comes up to you and says, do you believe in vampires? You know, you’re going to say, well, no. And then they’ll ask you, well, would you spend like two hours this month watching them? And the answer would be yes. And so you might think, well, which is the better indicator of what you believe? Like, what do you know about what you’re like? Who cares about your statements about yourself? You know, you think you have privileged access to what you’re like? You don’t. You’ve only been around for 18 years. And you inhabit this body that’s been built up over 400 million years of life, something like that. It might be longer than that. So it is longer. I mean, that’s when crustaceans emerged. Life itself is much older than that. So you know, the people who made this representation of Kelly, assuming they made it, which they really didn’t because it manifested itself in their imagination, which is a completely different thing, they’re trying to come to terms with something pretty awful. Or you might say they’re trying to come to terms with the category of all awful things. Or you could even be more sophisticated than that. You could say they’re trying to come to terms with the category of all awful things that also reveals new life. That’s a terribly paradoxical thing because Kelly can be transformed into something positive. It’s like, you know, logical people think, well, something can either be A. It can’t be A and not A at the same time, right? That’s a fundamental logical proposition. But then, so let’s say you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. You can’t hate them and love them at the same time? I mean, half your life or three quarters of your life will be in that state, you know? Families, it’s like, what is it, 50-50 love and hate? What defines a familial relationship might be intensity rather than, you know, whether it’s love or hate. It’s intense. And so you can certainly have a completely paradoxical relationship to yourself or to another person. And so part of what happens with these symbolic representations is that they’re more accurate than mere logic. Because life is one of those, life is composed of oppositions in conjunction and oppositions in conjunction simultaneously. So there’s very little about it that’s logical at all, but that doesn’t matter because you still have to deal with it. You have to deal with it at a very fundamental level. So you could think of that representation there as… We’ll walk through it again. Let’s think about things you should be afraid of. It’s a funny category. Well, an animal wouldn’t really have a category of things to be afraid of. What an animal would have is specific things they’re afraid of. Okay, and so then the animal would have to learn, what do you do in the face of all those specific things that you’re afraid of? So you know, maybe you, I don’t know, you climb a tree if you’re a monkey and it’s a jaguar, maybe, and you go under the underbrush if you’re a monkey and it’s a predatory hawk, something like that. You’ve got these individual escape mechanisms that are tied to the specific stimulus. But then there’s human beings who are capable of abstraction. And so you might say, well, there’s a class of things to be afraid of. It’s those things that you should be afraid of. Those are the things that go bump in the night, right? You’re always exposed to them when you go to horror movies, especially if they’re not the gore type of horror movie. They’re always hinting at something going on outside of your perceptual sphere and they frighten you because you don’t know what’s out there. And so the Blair Witch Project was a really good example of that because nothing ever happens in that movie, but it’s frightening and not gory. So it’s kind of an interesting horror movie. It plays upon the fact that you do have a category of those things to which you should be, those things about which you should be afraid. So it’s a category, frightening things. And then only something capable of abstraction could come up with the category of frightening things. And so Kelly is like an embodied representation of the category of frightening things. And then you might ask yourself, well, once you come up with the concept of the category of frightening things, maybe you could come up with the concept of what to do in the face of frightening things, which is not the same as what do you do when you encounter a lion or what do you do when you encounter someone angry? It’s a meta question, right? You could say, you may encounter a frightening thing. What’s the thing? What should you do about it? But then you could say, at a philosophical level, you will encounter elements of the category of all those things that can frighten and undermine you during your life. Is there something that you can do as a category that would help you deal with that? Well, the answer is yeah, there are, in fact. And that’s a lot of what religious stories and symbolic stories are trying to propose to you is the solution to that. One is approach it voluntarily. Carefully, but voluntarily. Don’t freeze and run away. Explore instead. You expose yourself to risk, but you gain knowledge. And you wouldn’t have a cortex that is ridiculously disproportionate if, as a species, we hadn’t decided that exploration trumps escape or freezing. It’s like we explore. That can make you the master of the situation. So you can be the master of something like fire instead of just being terrified about So one of the things that’s absolutely phenomenally fascinating, I think, is that one of the things that the Hindus do in relationship to Kelly is offer sacrifices. Say, well, why would you offer sacrifice to what you’re afraid of? Well, it’s because that is what you do. That’s always what you do. You offer up sacrifices to the unknown in the hope that good things will happen to you. So in a sense, you’re faced with something terrible. The uncertain future that faces all of you, right? Something you’re afraid of, no doubt. How many of you are worried about your future? Yeah. Why? You’re all young, you’re smart, you’re relatively good looking. It’s like, what the hell are you worried for? What are you worried about? Yeah, right in this classroom. Right. Well, maybe you’re worried about what you’re going to do or who you’re going to marry or what your job’s going to be or your health or your family. There’s a whole category of things to be worried about. So then you think, well, you’re worried about the future. So what are you doing in university? Well, I would say you’re sacrificing your free time in the present to the cosmos, so to speak, in the hope that if you offer up that sacrifice properly, the future will smile on you. That’s another fundamental discovery of the human race. It’s a big deal, that discovery. Think about it this way. By changing what you cling to in the present, you can alter the future. Wow. I don’t know when we discovered that. Maybe when we first started to store food or something like that. But it’s a mind-boggling discovery. Again, it’s one of the prime discoveries of human beings. So you represent the thing you’re afraid of. Then you think, okay, there’s a class of things that I’m afraid of that are unknown. What can I do about them? Well, that’s a really good question. It’s a sophisticated and complicated question. And we do know the answer to some of it. It’s like approach cautiously, voluntarily, when necessary. Don’t run. Especially if the thing that’s in your way, if the thing that frightens you is opposing your movement towards a valued goal, do not freeze and run away. Because the thing will grow if you do that, and you’ll shrink. So that’s a bad strategy. I’ll just give you a bit of a preview about what I’m going to talk to you about the next time we meet. Oh, yes. There we go. I want to talk to you a little bit about initiation rights. And I touched on them a little bit today when I was talking about things like rescuing the father from the depths. So what Pinocchio does is essentially an initiation right. And there are elements of that that are also embedded in the Harry Potter stories. Because, for example, his descent into the unknown underneath the school and his encounter with the phoenix are all parts of a very complex initiation right. And he basically, his adventures set him on a path that makes him the savior of his kingdom. That’s fundamentally the entire story of Harry Potter. There are ways of catalyzing that identity. Some of them have to do with the fact that you’re a multi-level creature. So this is a tough thing to grasp too. When you look at someone, you think, well, that’s what they look like. But it’s really not the case in very many important ways. Because they have molecular and micro-substructures that you can’t see. You don’t see the back of them. You don’t see their family. You don’t see the political systems they’re embedded in. And you don’t see them across time. So the thing that’s there is way more complicated than the thing you see. And one of the ways of starting to pull your conceptions past your senses is to understand that a human being exists at multiple levels simultaneously. And that part of psychological, the expansion of psychological knowledge, is to become aware of those levels and to, in some sense, move up and down them so that you become conscious of them. And I would say in part, the initiations that we’re going to talk about are embodied dramatizations of the process of moving up and down the multiple levels of being that a human being exists upon. And that the psychoanalytic process is a subset of that process. So the Freudians, the Jungians, the people who are interested in symbolism and the unconscious and depth psychology, were interested in expanding your conception of who you are beyond what you can articulate. And then you have to ask yourself, well, do you believe that there’s more to you than what you can articulate? And if the answer to that is yes, then you might think, well, is that worth exploring? And that’s really what we’re doing for the next five lectures or so. So we’ll see you next Tuesday. No, Thursday.