https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7XtEZvLo-Sc
I told you at the beginning of the class that I started working on this material partly because I was interested in why people were so inclined to go to any lengths to protect their belief systems. I wanted to understand, and I knew that those were systems of value, right? That a belief system is something that enables you to ascribe value to things so that you can act in the world towards things and away from things, roughly speaking. And I’ve already made a case to you that belief systems regulate people’s emotions, but not as a consequence of decreasing their death anxiety or anything like that, or even directly their threat sensitivity or uncertainty, but more specifically by helping them orient themselves in the world so that what they do matches what they want in the social environment. And it’s an important set of distinctions because the emotional control that belief systems allow is mediated by success in the social environment. That’s the crucial thing. It’s not directly, it’s not as if you’re holding a belief system and that’s directly inhibiting somehow your emotional responsivity. It’s more that you have a mode of orienting yourself in the world so that other people can understand what you’re up to so that you can cooperate and compete with them without conflict. And the fact that you can do that without conflict and maybe even with cooperation, that’s what regulates your emotion. So it’s not only the fact of the belief system, it’s the fact that it’s shared with everyone else. And so people are willing to defend their belief systems because they’re defending the territorial structure that enables them to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world with everyone else around them. Now then the question arises, what if two different groups of people have different belief systems? What do you do in a situation like that? And one answer is you capitulate. Another answer is that you fight. Another answer might be that you come to some consensus about how the difference between those different belief systems might be mediated so that you can inhabit the same territory without subordination or without conflict. But if you’re going to come together in an agreement, you can’t do that simply by abandoning the belief system because the belief system is what orients you in the world. And so the negotiation is very tricky and because of that it often ends up in subordination or conflict. Another question that might arise out of that rat’s nest of questions is if you have belief system A and you have belief system B and they’re in conflict, is there any principles that you can use or any guidelines you can use to take the belief systems apart to try to understand what might be of central value in either of them or both so that if you do bring them together or even if one supersedes the other that there’s some evidence that they’re predicated on principles that are actually viable. And of course that brings up the question of what constitutes viable principles. And I got interested in that more particular question because when the Cold War was raging, there were two ideological systems set up in the world, roughly speaking. There were of course more but we can simplify it for the sake of argument down to two. And one was predicated on the communitarian principles that were put forward by Marx and the other was a consequence of, I would say, Western individualistic free market capitalist democracies, roughly speaking. And then you might ask yourself, was that only a difference of opinion? Because that’s the central question. If it’s just a difference of opinion, if what’s underneath it is arbitrary, then A, it doesn’t matter which system wins, roughly speaking. B, there’s no right and wrong in the discussion, right? That would be something that would be more akin to a postmodern claim. It’s just Group A puts forward their claims to power and Group B puts forward their claims to power and they’re both equally valid and, well, have adder fundamentally because there’s no way of solving the problem. But it struck me that I didn’t think that we should leap to that conclusion so rapidly. And so I started to investigate, I think, I started to investigate the substructure of Western thought, not so much communist thought because I thought of communism as an interloper on the scene. It was a system that wasn’t devised and formalized until the late 1800s and I didn’t see it as part of what you might describe as organic development. There’s no mythology, so to speak, at the basis of the communist perspective. And one of the things that’s very interesting is that although those ideas were roundly defeated by the end of the 20th century, they’re making a comeback so rapidly that it’s almost unbelievable. You know, I got an email from a medical student yesterday at the University of Toronto and now the courses that they have to take, the mandatory, these are social justice courses, include modules on equity. And equity is equality of outcome. They’re pushing, people are having the equality of outcome notion pushed on them in mandatory training in universities everywhere again. And equity isn’t equality of opportunity, it’s equality of outcome. You know, that was the central dictum of the communist states in the 20th century. It’s like, what the hell? How did we get back to that again already? And the idea being is that if there isn’t absolute equality of outcome within an organization, the thing is corrupt and needs to be restructured from the bottom up. And then the question, of course, is who decides that outcomes are equal by what means and with what groups? Because you can produce an infinite number of groups of people with equally validly in some sense. And you’re never going to get equality of outcome across the infinite number of ways that you can parse up society into groups. It’s not even technically possible unless everyone has nothing. So anyways, these are obviously very powerful ideas. And the mere fact that they killed 100 million people already or more in the 20th century wasn’t enough to put them to rest. Anyway, so back to the main theme. Is there something, this is the main question, is there something, is there a set of ideas that Western civilization is predicated on that are more than just bloody opinion? That’s the question. Because if there isn’t, well then what do you do about that? It’s arbitrary? You’re just holding it for no reason whatsoever? It could be a different system. There’s no reason to stick with it. All of those things. Like it takes the core out of it. Well that was Nietzsche’s claim, right? He said you take the core metaphysical presupposition out from underneath Western civilization or any civilization for that matter. And the whole thing loosens, shakes and crumbles. Well for Nietzsche the metaphysical presupposition was God. And then the question of course, what even does that mean? On one hand it means, I suppose, adherence to a dogmatic set of beliefs. But then you might ask yourself, well is there something else that it means? It means at least the hypothesis of some transcendent value. It means at least that. So you know, Nietzsche announced the death of God. And so one of the consequences of that, Dostoevsky was working on exactly the same set of ideas. In Crime and Punishment in particular, which is a book, like it’s a necessary book, that’s the thing. There’s a number of books that were written in the last 120 years that you really have to read. And Crime and Punishment is one of them. And I think the Gulag Archipelago is another. And probably Beyond Good and Evil is another. But you know, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were writing in parallel. It’s remarkable how much their lives intertwined. And Nietzsche knew more about Dostoevsky than is generally known. There’s been some recent scholarship indicating that. But in Dostoevsky’s book, Crime and Punishment, his main character Raskolnikov decides that he’s going to commit a murder. He has very good justification for the murder. And Dostoevsky is very good at this. He puts his characters into very, very difficult moral situations. And gives them full justification for pursuing the… For pursuing the pathway that they’re pursuing. And so Raskolnikov, he’s broke and starving. He wants to go to law school. His sister’s about to prostitute herself, roughly speaking, by marrying a guy that hates her, that she hates, and he has contempt for her, at least acts in that manner. He’s trying to rescue his mother as well, who’s also in dire financial straits. He goes to a pawnbroker to pawn his meager possession so that he can continue to scrape by. She has this niece, I believe it’s her niece, that’s not very bright, who she basically treats as a slave and is horrible to. And so the pawnbroker has this money. Raskolnikov is in dire need. He thinks, look, I’ll just kill her. Because why the hell not? I’ll take her money. She’s not doing any good with it anyways. I’ll free her niece, who’s just lurking as a slave. She’s got all these other people tangled up in her pawnbroker schemes. All that will happen is the world will be a better place. And the only thing that’s holding me back is conventional moral cowardice. And you know, Dostoevsky has his character in Crime and Punishment go through days, hours, hours and days and weeks of intense imagination about this, rationalization about this, trying to justify himself, placing him outside, placing himself outside the law so that he can perpetrate this act, and telling himself with all the best nihilistic arguments that the only possible thing that could be holding him back is an arbitrary sense of indoctrinated morality. And so Dostoevsky explores that. He does commit the murder. And then of course all hell breaks loose because things don’t necessarily turn out the way that you want. He gets away with it, however. Well, he gets away with it technically because no one knows he did it. But he doesn’t get away with it in relationship to his own conscience. And so the rest of the book explores that. So Dostoevsky, I believe it was in Crime and Punishment, although he makes the same point in many of his books, he makes a very fundamental point. And this is the kind of point that I think that people who haven’t investigated these matters down this particular literary and philosophical pathway never grapple with. Dostoevsky said straightforwardly, if there’s no God, so if there’s no higher value, let’s say, if there’s no transcendent value, then you can do whatever you want. And that’s the question that he’s investigating. And you see, this is why I have such frustration, say, with people like Sam Harris, the sort of radical atheist, because they seem to think that once human beings abandon their grounding in the transcendent, that the plausible way forward is with a kind of purest rationality that automatically attributes to other people equivalent value. It’s like, I just don’t understand that. They believe that that’s the rational pathway. What the hell is irrational about me getting exactly what I want from every one of you whenever I want it at every possible second? Why is that irrational? And how possibly is that more irrational than us cooperating so we can both have a good time of it? I don’t understand that. I mean, it’s as if the psychopathic tendency is irrational. There’s nothing irrational about it. It’s pure, naked self-interest. How is that irrational? I don’t understand that. Where’s the pathway from rationality to an egalitarian virtue? Why the hell not every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost? It’s a perfectly coherent philosophy. And it’s actually one that you can institute in the world with a fair bit of material success if you want to do it. So I don’t see, to me, I think that the universe that people like Dawkins and Harris inhabit is so intensely conditioned by mythological presuppositions that they take for granted the ethic that emerges out of that as if it’s just a given, a rational given. And this, of course, precisely Nietzsche’s observation as well as Dostoevsky’s. That’s Nietzsche’s observation. You don’t get it. The ethic that you think is normative is a consequence of its nesting inside this tremendously lengthy history, much of which was expressed in mythological formulation. You wipe that out. You don’t get to keep all the presuppositions and just assume that they’re rationally axiomatic. To make a rational argument, you have to start with an initial proposition. Well the proposition that underlies Western culture is that there’s a transcendent morality. Now you could say that’s a transcendent morality instantiated in the figure of God. That’s fine. You could even call that a personification of the morality. If you don’t want to move into a metaphysical space, I’m not arguing for the existence of God. I’m arguing that the ethic that drives our culture is predicated on the idea of God. And that you can’t just take that idea away and expect the thing to remain intact mid-air without any foundational support. Now you don’t have to buy that, but if you’re interested in the idea, then you can read Nietzsche, because that’s what he was trying to sort out. And it wasn’t only Nietzsche who came to that conclusion. It was many people who have come to that conclusion. But I think the two who’ve outlined it most spectacularly were Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. And Nietzsche is an unbelievably influential philosopher. I don’t think there was anyone that was more influential during the entire course of the 20th century, excepting a very, very tiny handful of other people. Excepting the scientists. We won’t bother with their discussion. You could put Marx in that category. You could put Freud in that category, partly. But after that, the list starts to get a lot thinner, you know. So maybe there’s 10 people up in that level. And Dostoevsky, of course, I think, I mean, if you ever, if anybody ever prepares a list of the top 10 greatest literary figures in the world, he would be in the top 10 list. You know, I think he’s perhaps second to Shakespeare and maybe above Shakespeare in my estimation. So these aren’t trivial people we’re talking about. And they weren’t dealing with trivial issues. Well, so then the question might be, what’s at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent value? I wanted to approach that. Staying out of the metaphysical domain as much as possible. Because you can claim anything you want from a metaphysical perspective, and that’s a big problem. And so people will say, well, why come up with the hypothesis of God, for example? God could be anything. There’s a satire. The flying spaghetti monster, right, is a classic satirical representation of a deity that the atheist types use to buttress their arguments. Fair enough, you know, as a satirical idea, it’s pretty damn funny. But there’s things about this that aren’t the least bit amusing. And the thing that’s not amusing is, well, what if anything is our culture predicated on? Okay, so what happened? Well, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky put forth this set of propositions. And out of Dostoevsky’s line of thinking, to some degree, grew Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn documented the absolute horrors of equity predicated Soviet society. We don’t teach, we don’t learn about that. This I don’t understand. What happened in the 20th century on the radical left end of the spectrum is not well documented. Students don’t learn about it. Why the hell is that? We learn about World War II, we learn about what happened in the Holocaust, and fair enough, we absolutely should. But nobody knows. It’s a mystery to everyone when I talk about what happened in the Soviet Union, and that’s absolutely appalling. And that’s to say nothing about what happened in China, which was equally horrible. The system didn’t work. It was predicated on the wrong values. Unless you think that that sort of thing means worked. You know, because you have to define that as well. But it collapsed under its own weight after it killed tens of millions of people. And still, it’s not like Russia has recovered. It doesn’t seem to me like that’s a very good definition of worked. Now whatever we’re doing in the West seems to work for all of its flaws. And the question is, are we just deceiving ourselves? Is it just arbitrary power politics and opinion? Or is there something at the bottom of it? So when Solzhenitsyn wrote the Gulag Archipelago, he believed that the Russians would have to return to Orthodox Christianity to find their pathway forward. And that’s of course has made him into a reactionary in the eyes of many of his critics. But that is perhaps what is happening in Russia, although it’s very difficult to tell because Putin also seems to be using his affiliation with the Orthodox Christian Church as a means to consolidate power. So the situation in Russia is unclear. But a religious revival, if that’s happening in Russia, and perhaps it isn’t, but if it is happening, is something that unfolds over decades and even centuries. So it’s not an easy thing to evaluate when it first starts to happen. But Solzhenitsyn drew the same conclusions that Dostoevsky did fundamentally. Not in exactly the same way, but very, very close. He believed, as far as I could tell, that unless people were willing to adhere to some sort of transcendent value, that they had no protection against pathological ideologies and no protection against the murderous impulses that came along with them. And I found his work, unbelievably, I found his writing credible. Powerful and credible. I don’t know how you can read that book and not draw that kind of conclusion. I think people who criticize Solzhenitsyn have never read the damn book, because that book is like going into the ring with Mohammed Ali and being pummeled to death for half an hour. You know, you don’t recover from it that easily. So… Then Jung branched off of Nietzsche. And so Nietzsche’s idea was that people would have to create their own values, roughly speaking. And I think that’s where Nietzsche’s is weakest. Because it isn’t obvious to me that people can create their own values. And I think he fell into… I don’t want to be a casual critic of Nietzsche, because that’s always dangerous, given that he probably had an IQ of 260. You know, I mean, he was way the hell out there in the stratosphere. Just when you think you’ve understood what he was talking about, you can be bloody well sure that you didn’t. But it does seem to me… And he was running out of time. He died young, you know, and he was trying to solve this problem in a rush, I would say. And he hypothesized that people would have to become Superman, over men, roughly speaking, in order to deal with the death of God. And that idea sort of branched off into Nazi propaganda, because that’s in some sense what the Nazis were trying to do with their promotion of the perfect Aryan. You know, now it’s a misappropriation of Nietzsche in my estimation. And it was partly because his sister, who is a perverse creature, what would you say, doctored his work in such a way so that it was more easily appropriated by the Nazis. But there is some danger in what he said, too, because the question is, well, if you’re going to transform yourself into the giver of values, what stops you from inflating yourself into something like a demigod, and just pronouncing what the values are going to be? So that’s a problem. You know, you’re going to replace tradition with yourself. Well, there’s dangers in that, because there’s nothing to keep you humble. That’s the most appropriate objection. There’s nothing to keep you humble. And those things can spiral out of control very rapidly. And they did, say, in the case of Hitler. I mean, it’s easy to blame what happened in Germany on Hitler, but that’s a big mistake, because it was a dialogue between Hitler and the German people. Hitler didn’t create himself. It was co-creation. He said things, people listened and told him back what to say. And then he said them, and they listened, and they told him back what to say. And it looped until he was the mouthpiece of their darkest desires. Now that’s a game he was willing to play. But you can’t think about that as it isn’t like Hitler created Nazi Germany. And the Germans co-created Nazi Germany. Now, when a leader gives articulation to the imagination of the population, that’s what a leader does. And you could say that, well, maybe Hitler filtered what the Germans were telling him through a particular lens, because he had no shortage of resentment and desire for revenge in his own heart. It’s not like his life was a spectacular success before he became a political activist, and he was brutalized very badly in World War I. He didn’t get to pursue his primary dream, which was to be an art student in Vienna. And he had applied three times and got rejected all three times. And so he was bitter about that. He was basically living on the streets after World War I. He wasn’t the world’s happiest person, and I’m sure he carried a fair bit of resentment in his heart when he was in the trenches in World War I. In one experience that he had, all of his friends were killed by a mortar when he had wandered off to go do something else. So it’s hard to even imagine what something like that would do to you. But I can tell you, when you’re the only survivor out of 20 people, that’s also going to give you an enhanced sense of your own specialness, because the alternative is just to think about how goddamn arbitrary the universe really is. So Jung studied Nietzsche in great detail, and he was particularly interested, because Jung had his finger on the central problems all the time, right? Because he was a great psychologist, and he was listening to what people said, and he was a staggering genius as well. And so like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn, he was that kind of prophetic type, I would say. And he understood as well, perhaps, what was wrong with Nietzsche’s formulation, the idea that people could only create their own values, and that’s what would replace the lacking foundation that was now lacking under Western civilization itself. And he came to his conclusion, I would say, through Freud, because Freud started analyzing parts of the human cognitive process and content that people hadn’t attended to before in any great detail, and that was primarily dreams. The idea of dream analysis, I suppose, is one of Freud’s, perhaps Freud’s major contribution to modern Western thought. The idea was there was something to dreams. And I suppose what Freud did is said, hey, look, isn’t it strange? We have this whole other form of thought that we engage in at night, and it speaks in a language that we don’t really understand. And so what the hell is that? And you can say, and many modern people do, dreams are of no significance, or even that they’re random processes, which is an absurd proposition, obviously, because they’re by whatever they are, they’re obviously not random. So Freud’s idea was that there was something in dreams that was informative. So that’s now he had a method for describe for extracting out from the dream what the dream purported to represent. And he outlined that in great detail in the interpretation of dreams. And if you want to read one book by Freud, I would highly recommend that one. It’s a very long book, and it’s very detailed. But Freud does an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of the way that dreams work. Now he made the because because he had brought a theoretical framework to bear. Even on his investigation into dream structure, he concluded that dreams were essentially wish fulfillments. And that’s where Jung and Freud disagreed. He also believed that the primary motivating factor of human beings was sexual. Now that’s a tougher one to toss aside, because even if you’re a Darwinian, rather than a Freudian, you’re going to obviously support the proposition that sexual motivation among any living creature is going to be one of the highest order motivations, because otherwise creatures don’t reproduce and prevail over the long run. So the question is, is that the ultimate source of motivation? And in some sense, the answer to that has to be yes. Well, Freud wanted to make that in some ways the sole source of motivation. And I’m oversimplifying, and I hate to do that in relationship to Freud, because he was not a simple minded character. Jung had a dream once, if I remember correctly, that Freud and Jung were excavating a basement. And so Freud had already discovered the basement, let’s say. So that would be the unconscious structure of the psyche. And Jung broke through into another basement that was a multi-chambered place. So many, many, many rooms. And I suppose what drove Jung and Freud apart was Jung’s proposition that there was a hell of a lot more going on down there than had already met the eye. And they broke on the idea that the sexual impulse was primary, roughly speaking. They broke when Jung wrote a book called Symbols of Transformation, which is actually, there’s three books that I know of that are sort of like maps of meaning. One is Symbols of Transformation. One is a book by Eric Neumann called The Origins and History of Consciousness. And the third one, well, is Maps of Meaning. They’re the same book. They’re just, like, they’re trying to solve the same problem from three different directions. They’re all attempts to address the same problem. And so Symbols of Transformation was a book that Jung wrote about the fantasies of a schizophrenic American woman. And he was trying to relate her fantasies to these old mythological ideas. And Jung’s idea, essentially, and this is an idea that was shared by people like Piaget, so we’re not going to say that Jung or Freud just pulled this idea out of the air, was that the birthplace of mythology and literature, for that matter, was the dream. That they share structural, they share, what, mode of information presentation. It’s a relatively radical hypothesis, but given that they both represent dreams, dreams in mythological representations share an essentially narrative structure. And they use, they’re literary-like, you know, I mean, it’s not so unreasonable to notice that a dream at night is like the movie that you play in your head. And it’s not unreasonable to note as well that the dreams that you have at night bear a relationship to the daydreams that you have during the day. It’s a form of cognition. It seems like an involuntary form of cognition, though, and that’s a very strange thing. So Jung thought about the dream as nature speaking of its own accord, roughly speaking. And so his idea was, well, when you sleep, you dream, but the dream happens to you. It’s not something that you create the way that, and you don’t even think about creating it because I might say, well, what are you thinking about? And you’ll say, I’m thinking about whatever it is. And you’ll take credit in some sense for thinking that because it seems like a voluntary activity. But what happens at night is that you think, but you think involuntarily. And so what Jung would say is that means that something is thinking in you. And that’s a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it. And this is one of the things that’s uncanny about the psychoanalysts is they were willing to take their observations to their logical conclusion. There are things that think in you. What are those things? And what are they thinking? And why are they thinking it? Now, if you do dream analysis, and this is a tricky thing, because who’s to say if your damn analysis is correct, right? It’s very difficult to understand that. If you do dream analysis with someone, you generally have them lay out their dream. And then you ask them when they’re going through their dream a second time, they lay out their dream and you can kind of get a picture of it. And then they lay out their dream a second time. And as they go through it, every time they mention a detail or a character, you ask them what that reminds them of. And the hypothesis is that the dream is presenting an image or an idea that’s associated with a network of ideas. And that if you can expand on the network of ideas as you go through the dream, you can elaborate on the dream. You can expand it upwards and you can start to see what it might be attempting to put forward. Now, Freud’s idea was that the dream knew what it was doing, but that its content was being suppressed and oppressed by an internal sensor. So the dream had to be sneaky about what it was saying because it was going to deliver a message that the person didn’t want to hear. And that was tied up with his idea of repression. But that’s not Jung’s idea. See, Jung’s idea was different. He said, no, no, the dream is trying to tell you what it’s trying to tell you as clear as it can. That’s just the best it can do. And so you could think of the dream, and this is, I believe, the right way to think about it. The dream is the birthplace of thought the same way that artists are the birthplace of culture. It’s exactly the same process. It’s that your mind is groping outward to try to comprehend what it has not yet comprehended. And it does that first by trying to map it onto image. And it’s doing that in the dream. And it’s somewhat incoherent. And well, let’s stick with incoherent because it’s not yet a full-fledged thought. It’s the birthplace of thought. It’s a fantasy about what might be. And then if you can grip the fantasy and share it with other people, then maybe they can elaborate upon it and bring it into being with more clarity than it would be if it merely existed as the precursor of a thought in your imagination. Because Jung’s idea too was, okay, you think. You think in words. Where the hell do those thoughts come from? Well, they just spring into my head. Well, that’s not much of an answer. They just, what, pop out of the void? Is there some sort of precursor to the development of the ideas? Is there a developmental pathway? So here’s an image. This is the Buddha. There’s calm water. There’s a lotus. The roots go all the way down to the bottom of the lake. It’s dark down there. The roots are embedded in the dark substrata at the bottom of the lake. The plant moves upwards towards the light. The water gets lighter and lighter as you move upward with the root. The flower manifests itself on the surface and the Buddha sits in the middle. That’s an image about how ideas develop. They come out from the bottom of reality and they push themselves up towards the light and they blast forward and something emerges as a consequence. That’s what that image means. It’s an image. The gold Buddha that’s sitting in the middle of the lotus is an image of the perfect person. You could think about the gold Buddha who sits in a triangle as exactly the same thing that’s the eye on the top of the pyramid. These are all the same ideas. And what’s the idea that’s trying to burst forward? How to be in the world. Well, what other idea would burst forward? Because it’s the only problem that you really have, right? How should you manifest yourself properly in the world? It’s everyone’s question. It’s the ultimate question. It’s been the ultimate question since the beginning of time. And we’ve been working out that idea forever. First of all, merely by acting it out and then by representing the actions and then by representing the representations and spiraling all that together. So I started looking developmentally. I thought, okay, maybe these ideas have roots. And this was partly predicated on the observation from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and so forth that there did seem to be a necessary pattern in morality. There seemed to be a necessary pattern. It wasn’t arbitrary. It was a representation of the specific mode of human being. And it isn’t something that’s just imposed on you by your cultures. It’s not something that’s just learned. It’s intrinsic in you and it’s manifest in the culture at the same time. And there’s a dialogue between those two things, culture and nature, where the idea is embedded, trying to make the proper articulation of that spring forward in each individual. And that’s only to say these aren’t radical propositions. Your nature strives so that you can manifest yourself properly in the world. Culture strives to aid you in that endeavor. Is there something about that that’s of dubious validity? What else would it be doing? Working for your death? Hardly. Working for your destruction? Well, you could see that maybe when culture becomes pathologized, but to the degree that it’s able to maintain itself across long periods of time, it obviously has to be striving in some way for your individual manifestation so that you can survive and flourish. So there’s a co-creation of the human being going on through nature and through culture. And well, and then perhaps with your own voluntary will participating, whatever the hell that is, something we don’t understand at all and are prone to dismiss because of that. So then I learned about Piaget and Piaget had some very interesting ideas and I think I’ve told you already what Piaget was up to. He wasn’t a developmental psychologist. He didn’t even regard himself as a psychologist. He wanted to reconcile science and religion. That’s what he was doing through his entire bloody life because it drove him crazy when he was an adolescent and he didn’t think that he would be able to survive unless he could bring those two things together. So he’s working on the same problem. And so one of the things that Piaget, who was very prone to observation, he was an ethologist of human beings. That’s a good way of thinking about it. An ethologist is a scientist who studies animals by watching their behavior rather than studying them under laboratory conditions. And he got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in the play of children. And it was so smart, so smart that idea that when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular goal, so in play, that a morality emerges out of that. And that that morality, and I’ve mentioned this before, there’s a morality in game one, there’s a morality in game two, there’s a morality in game three. What’s common across all those moralities is a metamorality. And so the metamorality emerges from the particular moralities that are embedded in particular cooperative situations. We could say cooperative and competitive situations. You can expand that out to the, you can expand that out biologically to some degree to the idea of the dominance hierarchy, right? Every social animal and even many animals who aren’t social are embedded in a dominance hierarchy. The dominance hierarchy has a structure. We couldn’t call it a dominance hierarchy. Dominance hierarchy A, B, C, D, E, thousands of them across thousands of years. You extract out from all of them what’s central to all of them. That’s the pyramid of value. What’s the question do you need answered about the pyramid of value? What’s at the top? Because that’s the ideal. That’s the eye at the top of the pyramid or the golden Buddha in the lotus. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing as the crucifix paradoxically enough. And that has to do, it has to do with something like the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcendence of suffering. It’s something like that. These are not arbitrary ideas. They’re deeply, that’s my case anyways, they’re deeply deeply deeply rooted in biology and culture. They’re as deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology. And we already know the answer to that. The dominance hierarchy has been around for 350 million years. It’s a long time. You don’t get to just brush that off and say, well, morality is some sort of second order cognitive problem. It’s like, no, it’s not. I can tell you something about its instantiation in your nervous system. You have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where you are in terms of your status. And it bloody well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions. So if you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, barely clinging onto the world, everything overwhelms you. And that’s because you’re damn near dead. And so everything should overwhelm you. You’ve got no extra resources. Any more threat, you’re sunk. So you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe also impulsive so that you grab well, the grabbing is good. And if you’re nearer the top in the dominance hierarchy and your counter tells you that, when your serotonin levels go up, you’re less sensitive to negative emotion, you’re less impulsive, you live longer, like everything works in your favor. Your immune system functions better and you’re oriented at least to some degree towards the medium and long term future. And you can afford that because all hell isn’t breaking loose around you all the time. And so then the question is, is there a way of being that increases the probability that you’re going to move up dominance hierarchies? Well, that doesn’t seem to be a particularly provocative proposition, unless you think that it’s completely arbitrary and random and that you can think that if you want. But I don’t think there’s any evidence for that whatsoever. I mean, we certainly have even for sexual selection, we impose criteria. They’re not random and arbitrary. So okay, so back to Jung. So what was Jung trying to do? He was trying to see. See, Jung believed that once we had stopped populating the cosmos with gods, that they went inside. That’s a good way of thinking. Well, think about it this way. You know, an archaic person looks at the sky and uses his imagination to populate the sky. What’s the sky? Well, it’s the constellations. It’s the domain of the gods. Well, why? Because the gods are what are out there beyond your understanding. Well, that’s what you see when you look up at the sky. So you populate the night sky with figures of your imagination. So the gods are the things that you broadcast out of your imagination and see spread over the world. It’s like the contents of your unconscious are manifesting themselves when you encounter the unknown. It’s exactly what it is. That’s exactly how else could it be, right? You’re projecting your fantasy onto what you don’t understand. That’s how you start to cope with what you don’t understand. You populate the unknown with deities. Where did they come from? They came from your imagination. Well, what happens when you take them out of the world? Do they disappear? No. They just go back into your imagination. So that’s where Jung dug down to find them. That’s the same motif as rescuing your dead father from the belly of the whale. It’s the same idea. The corpses of the gods inhabit your imagination. So where do you go if you need to revivify them? You go into your imagination. And that’s exactly what Jung did. This is no secret. If you read Jung, he tells you that’s what he did. He tells you that’s why he did it. It’s not an interpretation on my part. Then the question is, what’s down there? Is it just mess and catastrophe? Or is there something in it that’s patterned? Well, Jung’s proposition was that you rediscover the great archetypes that guide human being by investigating the structure of your imagination. When you thought about the imagination in some sense, at least in part as a manifestation of your biology. Well, yes. What else would it be? You know, when I told you that story about my nephew, I believe, right? running around as a knight and then going off to have a combat with the dwarves and the dragons. It’s like, well, where did that come from? Well, partly it came from his culture, right? Because he was a knight. And so obviously that’s a cultural construct. But the thing is, is that his imagination is it’s this structure that’s looking for things to fill itself with, just like your predisposition to language. You have a predisposition to language. What is that? We don’t know. What does it do? It looks for things in the world to fill itself with, right? And if you’re if you first of all, when you start to learn how to speak, you babble every phoneme. Did you know that there’s there’s lot there’s if I was learning to speak an Asian language, there would be phonemes I couldn’t pronounce and vice versa. An infant, all of them, they babble all the phonemes. And then as they start to learn the language, they lose the ability to say a bunch of them and only retain the ones that are relevant to that language. So a baby babbles all lang all possible languages. That’s a way of thinking about it and then loses the ability. So that’s a man. If that’s you can see there. So you could say, well, you manifest the potential to be possessed by all the set of all possible archetypes. It’s built into your biology. And then as you’re inculturated in your own culture, the set of archetypes that manifest themselves in that culture are the ones that you pull in for your own use. So my my nephew is running around like a knight. Well, you know, if he would have been born in the middle of the Amazon, he would have been running around with a bow and a poisoned arrow and a bow. It’s the same thing. It’s the same idea. It’s just trapped out in different cultural dress. And he his little imagination was trying to solve the problem. How do you deal with the unknown? Well, what’s the unknown? It’s these little devils that keep biting, jumping up on you and biting you. They come out without end. So just killing them. It’s like cutting the head off the hydra. Right. Seven more grow. Well, what the hell good is it to solve one problem when there’s just a bunch more problems that are come going to come after you? And that’s everyone’s question. That’s the ultimate question of nihilism. Right. Why bother solving a problem if all that’s going to happen is that 20 more problems are going to come your way? Why not just give up and die? Well, right. It’s a good question. It’s a good question. Right. Is the suffering so intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end? That’s another fundamental question of existence. And people who’ve become truly malevolent answer that question in the affirmative. They say it’s too much. We should destroy it. Now I wouldn’t say they’re precisely doing it only for humanitarian reasons, but you have to understand and appreciate the logic. It’s not irrational. That’s the other thing. It’s not irrational to work for the destruction of being. It’s not irrational. In fact, it might be the most rational thing you could come up with. It depends on your initial set of presuppositions. So Jung, down into the belly of the beast, so to speak, to see what lurks in the imagination. He sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas. Well, what are archetypal ideas? They’re patterns of… You could think about them as representations of patterns of adaptive behavior. And so then you might ask, well, where did they come from? Well, that’s part of what I’ve been trying to teach you about. They evolved, as far as I can tell. Right. They evolved collectively. Is that our society… And this is the dominance hierarchy idea. Dominance hierarchy set themselves up as a matter of course. They’re the standard way that animals organize themselves in a territory. Well, okay, human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies. Since we became self-aware, thinking, what the hell are we up to? What the hell are we up to? And there’s a question that lurks in there. What constitutes acceptable power? What constitutes acceptable sovereignty? Who should lead? Who should rule? What should be at the top? Well, we talked about that. The Mesopotamians figured that out. Speech and vision. That’s Marduk. Speech, vision, and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown. That’s what should rule. Well, what? Is that an arbitrary idea? Or is that a great idea? How could it be any other way? Well, that’s what human beings are like. And I don’t think that you can read the Mesopotamian story and understand the reference, which isn’t an easy thing to do, and fail to draw that conclusion. Marduk has eyes all the way around his head. He speaks magic words. He goes off to fight Tiamat, the dragon of chaos. Well, what’s that? That’s the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown. Well, is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you would presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective? We’re prey animals. We’re predators. We’d be threatened by reptiles forever. Why wouldn’t we use the predator that lurks in the dark forest or the water as a representative of the unknown? Why wouldn’t we harness that circuitry? We already have it at hand. And even more to the point, how could we do anything else? It makes perfect sense. Well, so then you might say, well, what would you want to be king? You could say king of the world or king of your own soul. What do you want to subordinate yourself to? How about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that with people? There’s no nobler vision than that. And I don’t see that it’s merely arbitrary. And so it’s not merely arbitrary, too, because if you do that, to the degree that you do that, assuming your society isn’t entirely corrupt, you will be successful. It will actually aid you practically. You’ll rise up above men. You’ll be selected by women. You’ll be admirable. You’ll be valued. And you know that because if you look at the people that you admire and value, again, unless you’ve taken a detour into dark places and are possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for destruction, you just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what’s common across them and draw your own conclusions. You can ask yourself, too, when you’re torturing yourself with your conscience, because you’re not doing what you should be and you know it, what is it that you’re torturing yourself in relationship to? You have a vision of your own ideal and you torment yourself if you’re not matching it. What’s the ideal? Well, you don’t know, right? It’s kind of incoherent and poorly articulated. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t trying to manifest itself and make itself known to you. It’s really the purpose of religious education, is to make that ideal articulated. Well we’ve lost that. It’s not a good thing. Okay, so I talked to you about the Mesopotamian story and I talked to you about the Egyptian story and what I thought it meant. It’s a bit of an elaboration on the same theme because it says, well, the hero isn’t only the deity, the transcendent pattern, let’s say, that goes out into the unknown, cuts it into pieces, and makes the world. That’s not good enough because it only deals with the terrible mother. That’s one way of thinking about it. But there’s a terrible father too, once culture gets instantiated in large scale. And the Egyptians had that problem. Two problems. Chaos. Second problem. Pathological order. Well, structures tend towards pathological order. The Egyptians laid out why. That’s Seth, right? Seth is the evil advisor of the king who’s lurking in the background all the time trying to tear the structure down for his own malevolent purposes. So now and then that overcomes the structure and destroys the and what rigidifies and makes malevolent the entire social structure. So it degenerates into, say, fascist totalitarianism, something like that. And that’s been a threat since we’ve had highly organized societies. Then the hero ends up in the underworld and has to come back and do direct combat with that malevolent force at the price of his own consciousness, right? Because Horace gets one of his eyes destroyed. It’s no bloody joke to face the forces that make a culture rigid and malevolent. So there’s an addition to the hero archetype. Two things happen. One, you go out and you conquer chaos and you make order out of it. But the second is you take pathological order, recast it into chaos, and then allow it to reemerge. And you do that not in some arbitrary sense, but in tandem with your rescued father. And that’s, I guess, in part what Nietzsche missed, as far as I can tell, is he didn’t he knew that he knew of the death of God. Perhaps he didn’t know that it had happened many times. Mircea Eliade documented that across many cultures. But what Nietzsche didn’t seem to lay out, at least in his vision of the Superman or the Overman, was that it was a responsibility of the person who wants to revivify the culture to go down and rescue the damn culture, which is what you’re supposed to be doing in university because your father is lying dead in the libraries, right? So you’re supposed to be going in there and taking that spirit out of the books and manifesting it in your own being. That’s what the universities were for. Although I don’t think that’s what they’re for anymore. So we talked about the Mesopotamian story and we talked about the Egyptian story and other people have documented the emergence of hero mythology in cultures far more diverse than the ones that I’m exposing you to. That was done most popularly by Joseph Campbell. But Campbell’s, like, I don’t think Campbell had a single idea that he didn’t derive from Jung. And I’m not saying that in a critical manner because Campbell was good at standing as a mediator between Jung and a more general population. And that’s a non-trivial accomplishment, seriously. But Jung is still the source of those ideas and if you’re serious about them, that’s the person that you have to go to for that kind of knowledge. So now I wanted to tell you some other stories that are in some sense closer to Western culture. They’re the stories upon which Western culture is actually predicated. So I’m going to tell you, well, not only Western story today, I’m going to tell you a couple of stories from Genesis and I’m going to tell you about the story of the Buddha. I’m going to do that at the same time because the story of the Buddha is almost a perfect parallel, structurally speaking, to the story of Adam and Eve. And so I want to show you that and you can decide for yourself if I’m imposing a pattern on it because God only knows, right? Or whether or not, once you have the key to understanding the stories, which I hope I provided you with, with the idea of the dragon of chaos and the great mother and the great individual, it gives you a schema that you can use to understand the characterizations of great stories. And as far as I can tell, it works pretty much universally across stories. So I want to read, I want to walk you through those foundational stories. And I would say one of the things to know about the way the Bible is structured, there’s a couple of things you want to know about it, is that it was authored by multiple people across extraordinarily vast spans of time and then aggregated by other people and sorted into something that seemed to make sense. And so you can really think about it as a, because Bible is a library, it’s a library of books, it’s not a book. The library is organized a certain way that makes a kind of sense. But it’s not exactly as if anyone decided what that sense would be. It’s the collaborative work of hundreds and thousands of people across thousands of years attempting to organize a collective story into something that, something out of which the sense emerges. It’s like human beings acted and then they dream, dreamed about how they acted and then they wrote down what they dreamed about how they acted and then they organized what they wrote about how they dreamed they acted. And that’s how that book came into being. The information that’s within it emerged from the behavioral level upward, right? Rather than being imposed top down. Now there’s a feedback, right? Because if you understand how you act, then that changes how you act. And so you can’t avoid the top down feedback, but a tremendous amount of the information in there, and this is why it’s revelatory information, we don’t know. It’s in there because how we act is informative. And then if you represent how we act, that’s informative. But the information came from how we act, not from the representation of how we act. And then you might think, well, how did we learn how to act? And the answer is, we’ve been trying to figure out how to do that for 3.5 billion years. There’s lots of information encoded in our actions and in our social interactions. Way more than we understand. So we’re acting something out. We don’t understand what it is, but we’re doing our best to pull that information upward, partly by dreaming about it. That’s what you’re doing at night. You’re trying to figure out what the hell you’re up to. Well, you don’t know because you don’t know yourself in totality. How could you possibly know? Best you can do is dream yourself up and then speak yourself into some sort of articulated existence. It’s just an approximation because you, whatever you is, whatever you are, rapidly supersedes whatever you think you are. That’s why people constantly shock themselves. If you were only what you thought of yourself, well, wouldn’t life be simple? You’d know exactly what you were doing all the time and you could even control your own behaviour. Well, good luck with that. You can’t do that for yourself, much less for other people. So let’s go through these stories. So they’re sequenced. People are trying to make sense out of them. They’re aggregating these stories from all sorts of different places, all sorts of different tribes, all sorts of different times, and then trying to make them coherent without losing the content and without doing arbitrary editing. And so part of the reason that the Bible is full of internal contradictions is for the same reason that a dream is full of internal contradictions. If you impose too much coherence on it, you start losing the… Look, imagine you have an… Imagine that you have an impressionist painting. Well, it’s messy and the image emerges and you might say, well, we could replace that with a nice clean line drawing or even a sequence of stick figures and get the basic point across. It’s like, well, you would, but you’d lose the richness. The unarticulable richness would be lost in the premature attempt to bring logical closure to the phenomena. And so in fact, we know already that that’s maybe the difference between dreams and waking thought. So waking thought sacrifices completeness for coherence, right? So whereas dream thought sacrifices coherence for completeness. And that’s not something I’m saying arbitrarily. This is something that has been thought through by people who’ve been thinking this sort of thing through for a long time. Precise thought excludes too much. And imprecise thought is not sufficiently coherent. So we do both. Precise thought, left hemisphere, linguistically mediated, sequential, logical. Incoherent but complete thought, imagistic, emotion based, right hemisphere. The right hemisphere even has a more diffuse structure. It’s like the right hemisphere is trying to get a picture of everything. Now it’s not going to be a very detailed picture because it’s a picture of everything, full of contradictions. But at least it’s a picture of everything. And the left says that’s not good enough for precise action. And it’s not. So we’ll narrow that to precision. But we lose the richness. But you need both. So there’s an interplay. Well, the documents that the Bible is composed of are half dream and half articulated thought. And they have the advantages of articulated thought and the advantages of the dream. But also the disadvantages of both. So to the degree that it’s articulated, it’s in a dogmatic box. To the degree that it’s a dream, it’s still incoherent. But the problem is you have to move through the entire world even though you don’t know it in detail. So you need detailed knowledge where detailed knowledge is necessary. And you need vague but complete knowledge where that’s necessary. It’s a very uncomfortable balance. But we have to face everything even though we don’t understand anything completely. Now Genesis, the first stories in Genesis are, what would you say, unidentifiably ancient. God only knows how old they are. The story of Noah, here’s an interesting thing. I know this guy who’s a Kwakwaka tribal member and an artist who lives on the tip of Vancouver Island. And the culture he comes from is about 14,000 years old, something like that. And maybe it’s been unbroken for 14,000 years, very long period of time. And he’s not literate, this guy. Although he’s very intelligent, has a great memory, and is also a great artist. And he’s told me some of the stories that have come down through the Kwakwaka tradition. And he was educated by his grandparents who were original language speakers. And he’s an original language speaker. So there aren’t many people like that left. I think there’s only 3,000 in his particular tribal group. They have a story that’s the flood story, except it’s canoes. And it isn’t a dove, it’s a crow. But the damn story is exactly the same. It’s like, well, what the hell’s up with that? In fact, at the end, it’s not a canoe. It’s a bunch of canoes that are tied together. And at the end, the canoes all break apart. And that’s why there are people all over the world. It’s like the story of the Tower of Babel, which I’m going to talk to you about today. So the reason I’m telling you that is because the stories at the beginning of Genesis are extraordinarily old. Now, so maybe he tells the same story that we tell, you know, making the presumption that we are the people who are part of this Judeo-Christian tradition. And I know that that’s not the case for everyone. Either he’s telling the same damn story and it emerged from a central point so long ago that it’s 20,000 years or 30,000 years or maybe 50,000 years since we moved out of Africa, something like that. And the story has survived, which is certainly possible because oral, you think, can an oral tradition survive that long? That’s the wrong question. Oral traditions always survive that long. What’s radical is that they disappear. We’re the radicals. The oral tradition is something that stays the same generation after generation. So how much innovation do you think there is in the small tribal group? None. That’s why they don’t have advanced technologies. They stay the same. The stories stay the same. So the idea that they can be transmitted unchanged over thousands and tens of thousands of years is really not a debatable proposition. It’s the norm. So either the stories emerged from a central source and have never been lost so that you can pick them up everywhere. Or there’s something about the stories that automatically regenerates themselves. And I suppose it’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. It’s like my nephew when he perceived himself as a dragon slaying knight. It’s like, well, was that the continuation of an oral tradition or was it something that he spontaneously come up with? And the answer is both. Both. The pattern was there. He just had to see it and he saw it and synthesized it and encapsulated it in his own imagination. Well, that’s not much different than the oral tradition being unbroken. It’s it’s just a variant of the same thing. I mean, if you lose a story but everyone acts it out, you can reconstruct the story. Right. And if everyone doesn’t act it out, then the culture dies because there’s some things about the story that you have to act out if your culture is going to survive. That’s the hypothesis. And then that would be well, that would be where you would search for ultimate values. The stories that enable you as an individual to flourish in such a manner that your culture flourishes in a way to enhance your flourishing. Right. That’s the right way that you want to organize things. You know, that’s what you do inside a family if it’s functioning well. Right. The family function so that every individual benefits from being in the family and that strengthens the family. That’s what Piaget called an equilibrated solution. Technically speaking, when he was looking for the origin of moral ideas, he came up with the idea of equilibrated state. And an equilibrated state is one the three of you are in an equilibrated state if you all want to be in that state. And while you’re in that state, the things that you’re doing together work better and they facilitate each of your development. Right. So it’s the stacking of an ethical of a set of ethical propositions so that the individual benefits at the same time as the group. And you can you can increase that stacking. We could say, well, it’s not only that you want to organize yourself so that all three of you get what you want better than you would if you were alone and so that you’re healthy. And so the stacking also occurs all the way down the physiological chain. You want to be manifesting yourself in the world so that you remain as physiologically healthy as you possibly can. So your stress responses are properly balanced and all of that. And then maybe your equilibrated state is well enough developed so it doesn’t just include the three of you. It extends outward beyond you into the greater community and things stack like that. And that’s if they all get stacked up, every level is stacked on top of each other properly. You have an equilibrated state. And I don’t think that that’s any different than a vision of paradise. I think those are the same thing. So now the question is, well, can that happen? That’s a whole different story. I mean, it happens in your own life at those times where everything comes together for you. You know, it’s chaotic and then everything snaps together and you think that’s exactly right. And it’s unstable. You can’t maintain it. It fragments again. But that’s what you’re that’s what you’re working towards. If you have any sense, you’re working towards that constantly. And I think that’s what music represents. It’s the stacking of harmonious patterns, right, that are playing themselves out and being. And you watch how people respond to music. The orchestra is led by the leader. Every different individual plays his or her part. They’re organized into string sections and horn sections and so on. So you get individual subgroup, group, orchestra, leader. Then maybe you have people dancing. So what does that mean? So maybe it’s men and women dancing in front of that, like a Viennese waltz. So it’s the harmonious stacking of pattern being in the background led by someone who’s making sure that the time is in order and men and women arranging themselves according to the patterns. Right. And everyone has a wonderful time when that’s happening. And it’s acting out the it’s acting out the proposition that all of these levels of being can be stacked up harmoniously at the same time. Everybody has a tremendously fun time while they’re doing it. Maybe that’s how you find a mate at a dance. And for exactly the same reason, it’s an optimal place to do that. You see, if there’s someone that you can be with, with whom you can mutually act out the patterns of being. Well, we’re all acting that out at a dance. We don’t know what we’re doing. We’re having a good time. Well, yeah, that’s a little glimpse of paradise. That’s what that good time is. Now, the Bible stories before what happened, what seems to happen is that you can there’s there’s two cataclysmic events at the first part of at the end of the first part of Genesis. There’s the flood. So the prehistoric world is wiped out by the flood. And so the idea there in some sense, there’s a bunch of ideas, but one of them is there’s a place in history past which we cannot look. And that’s absolutely true. One of the things that’s very strange about human beings is that our written civilizations, the ones we have records of all seem to have popped up somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six thousand years ago. Doesn’t matter where you look. Right. Central America, China, India, Greece, Egypt. It’s all the same. Six thousand years ago. Poof. There we were. Well, what happened before that? Well, the answer is we don’t know. Everything is obscured by the chaos of history before that point. And all that’s emerged out of it, so to speak, are these incredibly ancient stories. And so we’re going to walk through the ancient stories and see what we can pull out of them. We’ve already done that with several. So there are some representations of the Garden of Eden. So this is by Hieronymus Bosch. I don’t know if you know who Hieronymus Bosch is, but he’s definitely worth looking up because he was one strange character. He was like I think he painted in the 15th century, if I remember correctly. He was like this 15th century version of Salvador Dali. His paintings are so uncanny that that they’re still shocking to the modern eye. Which is really something because it’s not easy to shock a modern person with a visual image. But Hieronymus Bosch will definitely do that. And that’s his representation of paradise. There’s some central structure in the middle that’s partly phallic and partly chambered. So and there’s Adam and Eve. United by God. So and there’s one by Peter Paul Rubens. And it’s sort of the primordial lush landscape that you might think about as the what? The ancestral human home. It’s something like that. A treed landscape. Well, why trees? Well, we like fruit. We lived in trees. Why not trees? I mean, even modern people have a very powerful tendency to think about trees as sacred. You wouldn’t get environmentalists tying themselves to great, you know, Douglas firs and protecting them if there wasn’t some deep felt sense within us that they’re sacred. Whatever that means. Well, trees are our home. That’s as close to sacred as you’re going to get. So. OK, so I’m going to read you something from the book of Job. And this is God. Harassing Job. So I don’t know if you know the story of Job, but it’s very interesting story. And basically what happens with Job is that God and the devil have a bet, which seems a little, you know, on the unreasonable side. For God, but he gets to do whatever he wants. So he has a bet with Satan, roughly speaking, and says, he says, well, Job, he tells Satan that Job is a good guy and that he’s faithful to God. And Satan says, yeah, let me let me at him for a while. I bet you we can do something about that. And God says, roughly speaking, no, you can torture him all you want. He’s going to stay faithful. And Satan says, well, we’ll have a bet on that. And so God hands him over. And what happens to Job? It’s like everything terrible that you can imagine then happens to Job, right? His his all his family dies. All his possessions are destroyed. He gets a horrible skin disease. And so then he’s sitting there by the fire, sort of scraping himself with bits of broken pots. And all his friends come around and tell him that the reason all this happened to him was because he deserved it. So it’s perfect, right? It’s it’s it’s like an ultimate suffering story. It’s a precursor to the idea of the crucifix. That’s one way of thinking about it. So and Job has a chat with God and asks him, like Cain did, roughly what’s going on. And God attempts to he’s irritated that Job would even dare to question him. It’s like he’s God. It gets to do whatever he wants. It’s a very strange book. Anyways, this is one of the things that God says to Job. Well, God is trying to justify himself, I would say, to Job. And the reason I’m telling you this, you see, is because. So imagine that you’re trying to analyze a literary work. You might say, well, where’s the meaning in the literary work? And the answer is it’s in the words. Word by word, it’s in the phrases. It’s in the sentences. It’s in the relationship of the sentences to each other. It’s in the relationship of the sentences within paragraphs. It’s in the relationship of the paragraphs within the contexts of the chapters. And it’s in the relationship between the chapters and the whole book and then the book in the whole culture. So you can’t it’s not easy to localize the meaning. It exists at all those levels simultaneously and they all inform one another and what that means. And it’s even worse in a book like the Bible. I want to show you a picture. This is an amazing picture. So let me tell you what this is. So the Bible is the world’s first hyperlinked document. That’s a good way of thinking about it. So what you have here. So what you see at the bottom. There’s a line along the bottom and then there’s small lines coming down from it. Okay. Each of those the line has dots on it. Each dot is a verse. Okay. And then there’s a line associated with the verse that’s a varying length. And the length corresponds to how many times that verse is cross-referenced somewhere else in the document. And then these rainbow colored lines are the cross-references. So now that’s really worth thinking about. So then you think well that book is deep. Well why is it deep? Well it’s because every single thing in it refers to every other thing. It’s connected like your brain is connected. Like it’s not a linear document. And the thing is a book is a very strange thing right? Because when you or even a story because when you lay out the story in some sense you’re like God. You’re outside of the space and time of the story. And so you can adjust the end to make the beginning different. You know how if you watch a movie and it’s got a surprise ending it changes the beginning. You thought the beginning was one thing but it isn’t. It’s something else. Well when you lay out a story you can fiddle with the story anywhere in the story. And you can also make something that happens before dependent on something that happens after. Which is very strange. And that’s what’s happened with the Bible because people have worked on it, worked on it, worked on it, worked on it. Trying to synthesize it and make it coherent and make it make sense. And so they’re continually connecting everything that’s inside of it to everything else. And so you end up with a document map that looks like that. So now so you think about that everything is connected to everything in that document. Not chaotically but meaningfully just like your brain is connected in a meaningful way. It’s not everything isn’t connected to everything. It’s connected in a meaningful way. And then you think well where what do the stories mean? And then the answer is well that’s a hard question because all of them are connected with each other. And then there’s all these different levels of analysis. And so you can pull out meanings at one level of analysis that aren’t self-evident at another level of analysis. Just like if you’re listening to a complex piece of symphonic music you can follow a bass line. Or you can follow the strings or you can follow the horns. And they’re all harmoniously interrelated but they’re also separable. Okay so there’s an image that lurks in the Old Testament. And the image is the same image. It’s roughly the same image as the image of Marduk confronting Tiamat. So for example at the beginning God makes… Here’s how the beginning goes. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said let there be light and there was light. Okay so we got to look at the first few lines here. So this is God justifying himself to Job. He says… More computer trouble. Oh there we go. The folds of its flesh are tightly joined. They are firm and immovable. Its chest is as hard as rock. Hard as a lower millstone. When it rises up the mighty are terrified. They retreat before its thrashing. The sword that reaches it has no effect. Nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin. Iron it treats like straw and bronze like a rotten wood. Arrows do not make it flee. Sling stones are like chaff to it. A club seems to it but a piece of straw. It laughs at the rattling of the lance. Its undersides are jagged potsherds. Leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge. It makes the depths churn like a boiling cauldron. And stees up the sea like a pot of ointment. It leaves a glistening wake behind it. One would think the deep had white hair. Nothing on earth is its equal. A creature without fear. It looks down on all that are haughty. And is king over all that are proud. Well so what’s God doing? He’s describing what he defeated in order to create the world. That’s Marduk and Tiamat. Okay so that’s one reference like that. Alright so now another reference like that. This is from Psalms 74. Yet God is my King of old, Working salvation in the midst of the earth. Thou didst break the sea in pieces by thy strength. Thou didst shatter the heads of the sea monsters in the waters. Thou didst crush the heads of Leviathan. Right that’s the creature that we just heard described. Thou gavest him to be food to the folk inhabiting the wilderness. Now you remember so when Marduk defeats Tiamat, he cuts her into pieces and makes the world out of her pieces. And here what’s happening is that the force that encounters the Leviathan is able to break it into pieces and feed everyone with it. Now the reason I’m telling you that in relationship to this is because and the earth was what without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Let me tell you a little bit about that those lines. Before God’s God begins to create, the world is Tohu Wabohu. That’s from the Hebrew. The word Tohu by itself means emptiness or futility. So there’s a psychological element to that. And that emptiness or futility in some sense is what you confront when you’re trying to extract your life from the world. It is used to describe the desert wilderness as well. Tohu Wabohu chaos is the condition that Barah ordering remedies. Okay so there’s the idea in the first verse is that this initial chaos is being ordered and the order is what makes the world. So the it’s standard cosmology. Order emerges out of chaos and the thing that makes it emerge is the word of God. Now darkness and deep which is Teom in Hebrew are two of the three elements of the chaos represented in Tohu Wabohu. The third is the formless earth. In the Enuma Elish the deep is personified as the goddess Tiamat, the enemy of Marduk. Here it is the formless body of primeval water surrounding the habitable world. Okay so but we know Teom and Tiamat are the same word or at least Teom was derived from Tiamat. So the idea that’s presented at the beginning of Genesis is the same. It’s an abstracted and psychologized representation of the story that the Mesopotamians put forward. So Yahuwah is Marduk roughly speaking going out and conquering the dragon of chaos and making order out of it and then there are these illusions later say in Job and in the Psalms of him doing exactly that. Conquering a primordial monster and making the world out of its pieces. Well so what does that mean exactly? Well it means that the highest ordering principle is the spirit that goes out into the darkness or the deep that encounters the dragon of chaos because obviously Leviathan is a dragon and defeats it and feeds the people as a consequence. Well we are hunting creatures after all and in order to establish our place in the world we had to go out there and conquer the dragons of the wilderness. You might wonder why does a dragon breathe fire? Well there’s a bunch of reasons as far as I can tell. Fire is awe inspiring. So fire and a terrible predator are the same thing because they both inspire awe. Fire is transforming but predi- like what’s a good metaphor for being bitten by a poisonous snake? Well have you ever seen the wounds that a poisonous snake produces if you’re bitten by them? It’s like someone took your arm and incinerated it and so the idea that a snake has fiery breath is well let’s call it close enough from a metaphorical perspective right? Now God is claiming to Job that he’s the spirit that clears the wilderness and then builds order out of chaos and because he’s the embodiment of that spirit in some sense Job has no reason to ever question his moral decisions. It’s something like that in the story of Job but the point that that point we’ll leave aside because it’s a more complicated issue. The point is that the writers of the Bible are trying to dream up a representation of the spirit of civilization. That’s the right way to think about it. You can think of Yahuwah as the spirit of civilization and what is that? Well it’s the thing that encounters the wilderness and makes habitable order but then it’s also the spirit of the order itself and that’s I think why in Christianity there’s a representation of God the Father because he’s a representation of the culture that’s generated after the chaos is ordered. You have the spirit that goes out into chaos and orders and then you have the spirit of the order and then the spirit of the order and the spirit of the ordering principle have to figure out how to coexist. That’s partly what the Egyptians were trying to figure out. There’s a dynamic relationship between the culture and the spirit that generates the culture and then you might also ask should the culture be superordinate or should the spirit that generates the culture be superordinate? And the answer seems to be the emergent answer seems to be that the spirit that generates the culture should be superordinate to the spirit of the culture. It’s something like that and that’s also why I think that one of the brilliant discoveries let’s say of Western individualistic civilization is that the group is there to serve the individual because the individual is the thing that revivifies the group so each depend on the other integrally but if you subordinate the individual to the group then the group stagnates and dies and so that’s a very bad long-term strategy even though the group and belonging to the group is clearly necessary. You need to uphold the values of the group but the values of the group should be subordinated to producing the individual who gives the group vision and the Mesopotamians figured that out. The Egyptians figured that out. We figured it out. We just don’t know that we figured it out and it’s not a mere arbitrary supposition. Alright so I should show you because this is actually interesting I think perhaps. Good. I want to show you what the cosmology what people considered the cause the the the the structure of the initial order because it’s kind of interesting and God said let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters and God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament and it was so and God called the firmament heaven and the evening and the morning were the second day. Well so what are they thinking about? Well that’s the sort of classical view of the world. It’s something like that is that there’s a a disk and that’s the disk we inhabit and there’s land that’s the disk and under the disk there’s water freshwater and then under that there’s the ocean and then on top of that there’s a dome and that’s the sky that’s the firmament that’s heaven and there’s water above that well obviously because it rains so there has to be water up there so that’s the way the cosmos was conceptualized just so you know. Now it’s a phenomenological conceptualization because that’s what it looks like right and you might say well that’s wrong it’s like well yes it’s it’s wrong in a functional sort of way it’s right from a phenomenological perspective but it’s wrong from a well from a scientific perspective was never designed to be a scientific perspective so all right so we won’t bother with this part we’ll we’ll start here so God makes animals and plants and all of that and then at the end of it this is on the which day sixth day God said let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and over the cattle and all of the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth okay well the relevant there’s two relevant issues there one is let us make man in our image after our likeness well what exactly does that mean well we’ve already we’ve already encountered that to some degree we’ve already encountered what the nature of the spirit of God is in this story the nature of the spirit of God that creates order out of chaos is the thing that creates order out of chaos and so the statement here is that there’s something about human beings that partakes in that now when I started unpacking this I thought okay look there’s an idea that’s at the root of our legal system and so our legal system is the articulation of the patterns by which we live and to a fair degree it’s it’s an evolved system it’s a culturally constructed system but it’s an evolved system as well and it’s predicated on the idea that there’s something about the individual that the law has to respect well so the question is well is that just an arbitrary supposition because that’s really the question it’s the same question as is western civilization founded on something that’s a rock or is it just founded on something that’s an opinion well it’s the same question with regards to the law the law assumes that there’s something about you that’s sovereign even if you’re a murderer you have inalienable rights now you think that is a bloody weird thing for any sort of system to have come up with because the idea that if you’re the ultimate in malevolent transgressors that you still have some sort of sovereign value it’s like that is such an unlikely thing for people to think up that you really have to think a long time about how that might have come to be well there’s an idea here that’s the idea is that there’s something about human beings men and women you know because people often complain about the patriarchal structure of the bible it’s based on a misapprehension of anthropology that was popularized by someone named gimbutas at ucla which is for her perspective there’s not a shred of historical evidence although there’s some psychological truth in it in in genesis both men and women are created in the image of god and that’s quite a remarkable thing i think it’s a it’s a remarkable part of the document because it’s not what you’d expect from a patriarchal you know from a from a document that was designed to do nothing but extend the dominion of the patriarch it’s like you left women with the damn cattle that would have made things a lot easier and that isn’t what happened so both men and women have this image and what’s the image well that’s the image of the thing that can order chaos and so it’s necessary to treat you as if you have intrinsic value because the fact that you can partake in the process of mediating between order and chaos means that you’re basically the salvation of society that’s what it means and so society can’t impose on you to too great a degree because you are too valuable for even the law to push arbitrarily past a certain point now then you have to think this and this is this is this is where you really have to think about what you believe do you believe that or not because there’s not much difference really technically speaking there’s not much difference than that between that and believing these stories it depends bloody well what you mean by believe they’re not scientific representations of an evolutionary process obviously the people who came up with them weren’t scientists so whatever they are they’re not that but they’re making a proposition that’s not an accidental proposition and we know that partly because it’s rooted so deeply in these ancient stories we have no idea how old the mesopotamian story is you know it’s the oldest story we have in written form so we know that but god only knows how old it is it’s part of an oral tradition and these oral traditions can be look the same carver gave me a big thing called a sea sudle and it’s a man in the middle of a double-headed sea serpent right so there there that’s 14 000 years old that came from siberia it’s the same bloody idea it’s the same idea so these ideas aren’t arbitrary so the question is well are they true well then the question is what the hell do you mean by true because it comes down to that is it true that habitable order is dependent on the spirit that moves into the unknown and takes the leviathan and chops it into pieces and distributes it and the answer to that is yes that’s true as far as i can tell and do you mean is it literally true well it’s as true as things that’s how we got here we got here because people went into the unknown they conquered what was out there they took what was of utility from that they brought it back and they shared it with the community that’s why we’re here that is the central story of humankind and that’s still what we do you know we’re not exactly necessarily going out to conquer an embodied monster although we do that if we hunt for example but you know most of us don’t do that anymore but to the degree that you’re an explorer in the intellectual realm you’re still going out into the unknown and conquering what’s out there looming like maybe it’s it’s the cure for a disease you’re looking at right in the face you’re trying to decompose it and break it into its parts you’re trying to understand it and then you’re trying to tell everybody what you found well and everybody pats you on the back and says well you’re you’re you’re a brave explorer of the unknown well that is exactly the sort of thing that we should be fostering and it’s the thing that we all admire so okay so that happens on the sixth day and so now we know human beings are made in god’s image well what does that mean exactly i think i think what it means a reasonable way of thinking about it you can think about it like the genie the genie has this tremendous amount of power that’s constrained in a very small space and genie and genius are the same word roughly speaking so the genius is that your genius is the genie that inhabits you right it’s this logo spirit it’s in it’s put in a very small container you see that idea represented in the christian conception of the relationship between christ and god because there’s an idea that god had to empty himself out in order to fit into the body of christ it’s something like that they call that kenosis that’s a technical word and what it seems to be the idea that you’re a low it’s like you’re a low resolution representation of the ultimate spirit that that encounters the unknown it’s something like that it’s a very smart idea and you could say maybe that’s what human beings have in common is that that that reach an embodiment of that spirit for lack of a better word so okay so then god makes the god makes human beings male and female makes them in his own image and is happy about them and says well you’re going to dominate the world which you know people like david suzuki read that to say you should go out and dominate the world because they read that kind of patriarchal oppression into the text but this is more a description of how things are going to be than whether or not they should be that way so anyways that’s the sixth day the seventh day god rests right so that’s the origin of the week roughly speaking so okay that’s one story there’s two creation stories in genesis and they actually don’t match completely in their structure and what happened was someone they call the redactor maybe it was a bunch of people we don’t know took creation story one and creation story two from different places and thought well these are sort of the same and they’re sort of different and people are going to be unhappy if we dispense with this one and they’re going to be unhappy if we dispense this this one but they don’t make sense together so let’s see if we can put them in some kind of order that makes approximate sense and they took the newer one and put it second and took the sorry they took the older one and put it second and put took the newer one and put it first so adam and eve is an older story than the story that i just told you so but it’s a different story it’s written in a different style but it’s been more or less brought into narrative coherence with the first story so and you could say at the level of the sentence there is paradoxes but at the level of the chapter let’s say the stories make sense so okay so what happens up there went from the earth a mist and it watered the whole face of the ground and the lord god formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul there’s an identity in this archaic sort of thought between breath and spirit right respiration spirit inspiration spirit pneumatic tire spirit the breath contains the spirit well why is that because when people die the breath leaves their body and so it’s an easy thing to identify that with the animating spirit right the anima means spirit as well so so that’s the phenomenological reality of the story and lord god planted a garden eastward in eden and there he put the man whom he had formed eden means well watered place well why well where do you want to live these are desert people right who are writing this well what do they want they want an oasis what’s an oasis it’s a garden with water well you’re gonna you’re gonna live somewhere it’s not gonna be out in the middle of the damn desert you want to be in a garden that’s watered and then you could say you also be in a walled garden that’s protected and that’s what paradise means paradisa means walled garden so this initial paradise is a walled garden why walled order it’s culture nature what does it mean well that’s the natural environment of human beings it’s a it’s the optimal balance between culture and nature that’s what a walled garden is with enough water flowing in it to keep it to keep it fertile and that water is also chaos right there has to be it can’t be static and dry and solid and stale there has to be some living element to it so so it’s a walled place that the water can still uh uh fructify and out of the ground made the lord god to grow every tree that is pleasant to the site so it’s also full of trees this is our natural habitat 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 so these are two trees they bring forth fruit that produce something one produces the knowledge of good and evil and the other produces eternal life so why well i’ll get to that in a bit and a river went out of eden to water the garden and from thence it was parted and became into four heads we won’t bother with that so now god is having a little chat with adam and he says look you can eat every tree of the garden except one of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you you don’t eat that because in the day you eat you’ll surely die so you might ask well why is the tree put there to begin with and well the answer to that is who the hell knows that’s how the story portrays it we don’t know and the lord god said it is not good that the man should be alone i will make a help meet for him and out of the ground the lord god formed every beast of the field in every fall of the air and brought them unto adam to see what he would call them and whatsoever adam called every living creature that was the name thereof so that’s an echo of the idea of the power of the word right so even though these stories are from different traditions they’re separate traditions you see at the beginning that god uses his word to bring order out of chaos and then he allows adam in some sense to do the same thing is that there’s this unarticulated plethora of being and the man comes along it says that’s that that’s that that’s that and that brings them into a higher order form of being so it’s a it’s a replication of the creation in a in a shrunken form and adam gave names to all the cattle cattle are just anything that has four legs roughly speaking and to the fowl of the air and to every beast of the field but for adam there was not found a help meet for him and the lord god caused a deep sleep to fall upon adam and he slept and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof and the rib which the lord god had taken from man made he a woman and brought her unto the man and adam said this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man and then there’s an injunction therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and she’ll cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh while there’s also a there’s a moral injunction there and so the idea is that the two beings that have been created are actually not whole until they’re one thing right and once they’re joined together that’s supposed to be one thing and that one thing is actually a more perfect entity than the two things that are apart so and that’s actually part of the sacred basis of the idea of of of monogamous relationships in in western culture and they were both naked the man and his wife and were not ashamed a crucial piece of information so what exactly does that mean well the first question is what does it mean to be naked and so that’s something that i thought about a lot in relation and there’s a relationship there with shame so the first question is what does it mean to be naked and the second question is what does it mean to be not ashamed of that well there’s an there’s a i would say there’s an implication of a kind of unconsciousness so adam and eve exist in this paradisal state but they they don’t they don’t they don’t have the capacity for self-reflection there’s no self-consciousness here well why would i say that because there’s very little difference between self-consciousness and shame in fact if you do psychometric analysis of the state of self-consciousness it loads with neuroticism so it loads with anxiety and emotional pain so to become self-conscious what does it mean to become self-conscious it becomes it means you become aware one way of thinking about it is you become aware of your vulnerability or another is that you become aware of your insufficiency okay so let’s say that you’re standing up in front of a crowd talking and you become self-conscious what happens well first of all you can’t talk anymore the second is you kind of fall inside the third is you feel ashamed and the fourth is that you retreat and you look down so it’s a low status operation and it’s associated with heightened anxiety and so then you might say well why would you become self-conscious before a crowd well the answer is they can see you right and they can judge you and you can make an error in front of them and you can make a fool of yourself so they put you down that you can you can display yourself in a manner that ratchets you down the dominance hierarchy that’s to become self-conscious and so well at least you have the advantage of being covered up in front of the crowd but let’s say all of a sudden you’re stripped of your clothes so what’s the problem with that well all of your insufficiencies let’s say are on painful display you can be evaluated by everyone but even more importantly than that if possible is that clothes actually protect the most vulnerable parts of you human beings are upright animals right we’re very strange animals you take a cat or a dog they’re basically armored the part of them that you see their back is heavily armored heavily protected human beings stretched upright and so the softest part of parts of us are there for display but also we’re displayed as sexual creatures too and so to become to be naked and not ashamed of it is to lack self-consciousness so the idea is that the adam and eve in the original state in the garden lacks self-consciousness now the serpent was more subtle subtle is an interesting word here because it means kind of fog like and and vague and difficult to detect so it’s something that that lurks and is hidden so that’s what the serpent is it’s it’s in the domain of hidden things than any beast of the field which the lord god had made and the serpent said unto the woman hey hasn’t god said you shouldn’t eat of every tree of the garden and the woman said we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden but of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden the central fruit god has said you shall not eat of it neither shall you touch it lest you die and the serpent said unto the woman you shall not surely die for god knows that in the day you eat thereof then your eyes will be opened and you will be as god’s knowing good and evil all right so there’s another implication there we already saw that there’s an implicit there’s the implication that adam and eve are not self-conscious and now there’s the implication that their eyes aren’t open or at least that they’re not they’re not open fully in some sense they’re not open for example to the knowledge of good and evil and that seems to be associated somehow with death in some strange way okay so and it’s the serpent talking to the woman so the serpent is the is the tempter of the woman so the question is why in the world would that be i showed you those representations of mary right holding the infant up in the air with her foot on the snake and so you think well who’s more self-conscious women or men and the answer to that is women are more self-conscious than men and even further you might say that women taught men to be self-conscious and i believe that to be the case maybe babies taught women to be self-conscious but women taught men to be self-conscious and they still teach them that all the time because there’s nothing that makes a man more self-conscious than to be rejected by a woman that he desires so the woman is always offering self-consciousness to men and it isn’t necessarily a gift that they exactly appreciate and that motif of course runs through the adam and eve story centrally because eve is damned forever in some sense for making adam self-conscious well he didn’t want to be self-conscious things were pretty good when his eyes were closed and he was wandering around not worrying about whether he was naked or not well the women became self-conscious why because of snakes well maybe right maybe that’s exactly what happened you know so you imagine we’re being preyed upon for millions of years by predatory reptiles right and we become more and more alert to threat and more and more alert to threat and then one day we get so alert to threat that we can see threat lurking in the future and then all of a sudden we become aware of the future and then we become aware of death and then we’re really self-conscious but it’s pretty good if you want to keep the snakes down which we’ve been doing quite successfully ever since then but it’s a big price to pay we got so damn sensitive to threat that we were finally able to conceive the ultimate threat not proximal threats but the fact of threat itself and the fact of mortality itself and the fact of finitude itself and maybe women learn that because they become painfully aware of the mortal limitations of their infants first right this small thing could die could end and it’ll and certainly as an object of predation and you can imagine god only knows how many infants human beings lost to predators i mean i told you at one point i believe that there was a cat that was found that that had a that had a that had a skull and jaws that were specialized for biting the skulls of proto humans so one long tooth at the back that would drive right through the back of the skull so the cat could put its teeth here and drive the tooth right into the back of the skull so you know that’s a good enough dragon for our for our intents and purposes i would say anyways the snake comes along and opens the woman’s eyes when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that was pleasant to the eye and a treated 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 that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons well there’s a lot happening in those few lines now there’s a fruit thing going on there snake and fruit okay so we know from lin isbell hypothetically that the reason that primates like us developed our intense vision is because we co-evolved with snakes so the snakes opened her eyes what about fruit color vision right why to detect ripe fruit we know that and are women and ripe fruit the same well they’re the same insofar as it was women offering the ripe fruit and that’s undoubtedly something that happened you know the hypothetical idea is the males hunt and bring home protein the women gather what are they gathering well they’re gathering at at minimum ripe fruit and then what are they doing they’re sharing it well you also bring about a moral obligation when you’re sharing food right there’s an invitation to reciprocity there and so the fact that women were sharing let’s say ripe fruit with men also brings them into their what would you call builds up the basis for the potential of a reciprocal moral obligation something like that and the problem again for men with being allied with women and infants is that it also heightens their self-consciousness because you’re a lot tougher and more indomitable say if there’s just you but as soon as you have a wife say and then you also have an infant well all the burden of their self-consciousness and their vulnerability is placed upon you well it’s a hell of a bargain well why did men accept the bargain well it’s partly because women stood in front of them offering them fruit right well part of the price that the men paid for that was to wake the hell up well who the hell wants that it’s a lot more it’s a lot more calming to remain asleep with no knowledge of the sort of burden of mortality that you would bear if you became self-conscious so fine so now they’re done with it they the snake and the fruit woke them up and they can see and the scales drop from their eyes and so we can really see well so what does that mean half our brain is visual is devoted to visual processing so as well as long as as our eyes got better our brain got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger what happens when it gets big enough well not only can you see you can meta see it’s you can start to see into the future well that’s exactly what happened to us not only could we see with our eyes we could see with our imagination and our imagination is our eye you can see with your eyes closed right close your eyes bring up a vision you can imagine the future well what are you seeing you’re seeing a potential future with your eyes closed the circuitry is there once it’s developed you can use it to imagine you can project your project your vision into places that don’t even exist and you can start to conceptualize the future what happens when you conceptualize the future well this is a i’m spoiling the punch line you have to work because you can see the future coming you think oh the future’s coming it isn’t just the present anymore i don’t have to just worry about whether or not i’m hungry right now i’m gonna have to worry about whether i’m hungry tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and for me and for my wife and for my child and for the community it’s like you can forget about your day-to-day existence in paradise at that point there’s no evidence that people in industrialized societies are happier than people in non-industrialized societies in fact quite the contrary we’re less happy why well because we fully and constantly bear the burden of the future well that’s good because we don’t die and we live maybe 30 years longer and we have fewer horrible diseases and all of that but that doesn’t mean it’s any picnic you have to carry that along with you wherever you go that’s the burden of self-consciousness right and that’s exactly what happens when god finds out that adam and eve have become self-conscious the one of the first things he says is jigs up now man you’re going to be working forever toiling forever it’s your destiny there’s no escaping from it well human beings work what does that mean they sacrifice the present for the future and that’s partly as soon as this happens like the next story which is cain and abel you see the motif of sacrifice emerge right that story circulates around the motif of sacrifice sacrifice the present for the future well what’s the price you pay you don’t get the present that’s a big price right because what you do is what you’re doing essentially is you’re taking all the potential suffering of the future and putting it into the present all the time well so what happens well maybe you live longer and you live healthier but you’re not without the burden that that puts on you so the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were naked well so what does that mean well what does naked mean it means you know you’re vulnerable that’s exactly what it means they know they’re vulnerable so they sow fig leaves together and make themselves aprons so what happens is they wake up their eyes open they know they’re vulnerable so they discover the future they discover their vulnerability extended into the future and the first thing they do is build culture right that’s the fig leaves it’s like okay here’s the vulnerability we put a barrier between us and the world it’s like a wall right because this is externalized clothing that’s one way of thinking about it and so to put that clothing on this is clothing is a human universal by the way now sometimes it’s only used for decorative purposes but far more often especially in cold climates it’s used for protection so to clothe yourself is to recognize your vulnerability and to use culture to hold it at bay so fine they make themselves aprons and they 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 among the trees of the garden okay so before adam and eve wake up before they realize they’re vulnerable they don’t hide from god so what does that mean well he’s the spirit that goes into the unknown to to to to conquer it and to make the world okay so let’s say that’s what you’re supposed to do you’re supposed to mediate between chaos and order okay and you’re supposed to do that forthrightly so then the question is what the hell’s stopping you and that answer is easy your knowledge of your vulnerability obviously that’s what’s stopping you it’s like why aren’t you courageous and forthright well because you can be cut off at the knees and terribly hurt and so you’re going to shrink back from that responsibility and it’s no bloody wonder right it’s it’s it’s obviously what’s going to happen so the lord god calls unto adam so he’s trying to what that means to for the for god to call on you is to say for god to say i’m i want to act through you or i want to act with you oh that spirit let’s say well adam says i heard i heard god says to adam where are you and and adam says i heard your voice in the garden right i heard the call but i was afraid because i was naked and i hid myself it’s like yes that’s exactly what human beings are like that’s precisely exactly what we’re like we hear the call but we hide and we have the thing is it’s there’s good reason for it it’s not something trivial and god said who told you you were naked did you eat the tree that i told you shouldn’t eat and the man says the man doesn’t come off very well in this particular phrase as far as i’m concerned and there’s actually quite this is actually quite a comedic story except that it’s also a catastrophic tragedy it’s like god calls adam out like what’s with you now you know you’re hiding from me why and the first thing adam does is says it’s her fault it’s her fault she made me self-conscious well i see that in resentful men all the time they’re very antipathetic towards women and they blame their misery and resentment on the fact that women won’t have anything to do with them while the women are making them self-conscious for not being all they should be because the women think why should i bother with you if you’re not the embodiment of the spirit that will move into the unknown and and face the leviathan which is exactly what she should be saying and you’re thinking well i don’t want to have anything to do with that but i’d like women to like me anyways it’s like well good luck with that so that doesn’t work out and so instead of getting your act together you say those goddamn women that’s exactly what adam says to god he said well don’t don’t be laying this on my feet it’s the woman you made her she made me all self-conscious and cowardly it’s like brilliant great wonderful and god says to the woman what did you do and the woman said well it was it was the serpent that confused me and and i ate well it’s like actually i’m a little more sympathetic to her than to adam all things considered because after all she was trying to deal with the damn snake right and we find out that the snake is not only the thing that preys upon her infants but as the tradition developed it’s identified with satan himself so and that’s the snake in every soul that’s the right way of thinking about that so she had her reasons but doesn’t matter you pay whether you have your reasons or not and so god says to the serpent because you’ve done this you’re cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field upon the belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life so first of all the serpent seems to have legs right and then it’s turned into a snake and that’s actually how it worked by the way because snakes had legs and they lost them now you know i’m not trying to say that this story necessarily represents that but it’s an interesting parallel and he tells the snake i’ll put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed it shall bruise thy head and thou shall bruise his heel well yes well that’s the snake striking right and the fact that when human beings see snakes they want to just like the simpsons whacking day right it’s time to get rid of the snakes and that’s why the many great saints are those who drive the snakes from the land like saint patrick or saint george and the dragon and it’s the same representation of the hero moving out into the wilderness and confronting the predatory the predatory predatory potential is the right way of thinking about it all right unto the woman he said i will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children and thy desire to be shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee well that’s a statement of destiny not a statement of the way it should be so what does it mean i will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception well self-consciousness will do that because of course women are fully aware of exactly how fragile their infants are so that’s a big problem in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children that’s something particular to human women right and here’s why the price we paid for the rapid expansion of our brain which is also something that gave us this self-consciousness and vision meant that there’s an evolutionary arms race between the pelvic width of women and the hole in the center of the pelvis and the infant’s head so what happens is the infant is born far too young for a mammal of our size because if it was any older the head would be too big the pelvis would have to be too wide its structural stability would be compromised and then women couldn’t run so right now women are at the maximum for hip width in terms of their ability to run so what’s happened is that infants have had to be born younger with a compressible head so you know the bones of an infant’s skull aren’t joined together and sometimes after babies are born their head is actually almost cone-shaped because of the tremendous pressure that was exerted on their head during the birthing process and of course that’s killed innumerable women right i mean women’s life expectancy before what the latter half of the 20th century was way below men because they died in childbirth all the time and why well it’s a it’s a very what do you call that it’s a it’s um it’s a very narrow gateway and the price that women pay for it is very high risk of death very high risk of sorrow because of death of children in in childbirth and also extraordinarily extraordinary pain in giving birth so that’s the price women pay for having vision and being self-conscious well that’s and then worse they they desire their husband and he’ll rule over them well whether or not that’s good or bad it doesn’t matter god’s statement is that’s how it’s going to be well partly that’s because as far as i can tell there isn’t really women roughly speaking there’s women with infants and a woman with an infant is compromised in terms of her what is independent individuality to a remarkable degree because the infant is dependent absolutely dependent absolutely dependent for a year and then unbelievably dependent for like eight years after that and then still pretty dependent for another five so once you have an infant it’s no longer you and i’ve talked to lots of women for whom that was a great relief by the way because it actually is somewhat of a relief to now not be the center of everything you know if you go visit your in-laws for example and you have a baby it’s like they pay attention to the baby your parents will do the same thing it’s kind of nice to have that happen but it’s still an absolute catastrophe for you as an independent being and you’re not going to go out in the forest and hunt down dragons when you have an infant so even if you could do it you’re not going to do it and so that’s basically what that statement outlines and then to adam he says because you listen to your wife and eight of that tree which i said you know maybe that’s not such a good idea curse it is the ground for thy sake in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee and thou shall eat the herb of the field in the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread till thou return into the ground that’s the death part for out of it was thou taken for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt thou return and i missed one thing about that when the serpent this took me a long time to figure out i think i’ve mentioned it already but it’s worth reviewing the serpent tells eve that if she eats from the fruit of the tree then her eyes will be open and she’ll be as god’s knowing good and evil well the serpent doesn’t say well you’ll be as as god’s insofar as knowing good and evil but you’ll die so you only get half the gift and so then i thought well there’s this weird minter mingling of occurrences in the story there’s the development of vision there’s the development of self-consciousness there’s the knowledge of nakedness there’s the emergence of work there’s the emergence of pain and suffering in childbirth and there’s knowledge of good and evil i thought for ages i thought what the hell what the hell what’s going on there why is there an emphasis on moral knowledge what does this have to do with moral knowledge and the implication is that in the initial state of unconsciousness there was no moral knowledge and i think of that as an animal-like state right there’s no moral knowledge in animals you don’t think well that evil cat you don’t ever think that even if it’s acting like a predator even if it’s playing with its prey you don’t attribute moral knowledge to the cat because you say well it doesn’t know what it’s doing it doesn’t understand what it’s doing which is to say it acts it out but it can’t represent it or maybe even more it acts it out but it can’t represent it and it certainly can’t analyze its representation it doesn’t have that level of capacity but we do so there’s that’s associated with moral knowledge to some degree why knowledge of good and evil i thought all right here’s what it is let’s think about what you would consider reprehensible universally you could say how’s this torturing an infant i would consider that virtually universally reprehensible wouldn’t you say okay so we’ll accept that as a reasonable definition so then the question is one why would you do it we’ll leave that aside for a moment two how do you know how to do it that’s the issue and that’s easy once i know how i can be hurt because i’m aware of my own vulnerability i know how you can be hurt and i can make it into a game and i can prolong it forever and i can do it the worst possible way and that’s why when you open your eyes and you know your vulnerability and your nakedness that you immediately have the knowledge of good and evil and so then evil becomes something like while there’s tragedy in life fine earthquakes cancer disease all those terrible things that’s different than me deciding that i’m going to make you miserable the one is while you’re a limited creature in an unlimited world you’re going to get hurt because of that and maybe there’s ways that you can be that will enable you to transcend that at least to some degree and still have the benefits of being that’s entirely different than me deciding that things are going to go a lot worse for you than they might and human beings are capable i don’t know if you’ve ever gone to some of the dungeon torture dungeons in europe boy those are fun places to go you think you take the most malevolent person you possibly could and then have a little convention of those people and then get them to think up the worst possible things that they could possibly devise and then you have the instruments of torture that are in a medieval torture dungeon right it’s an art form and you think well why do people why are people willing to inflict that on one another well we’ll talk about that next time when we talk about the story of cain and abel because i think it holds the secret to that and in the meantime i’ll stop with this story but i want to tell you the story of the buddha because it maps onto it very nicely so what do you have you have you have a protected space there’s unconscious beings in a protected space something comes in in the form of the serpent to reveal death to reveal to reveal vulnerability and death right and then the paradise comes to an end the human beings are eliminated from it and they don’t get to come back so god puts angels with flaming swords at the at the at the gateway to paradise so that people cannot come back in it isn’t obvious what that means except that there’s got to be some sort of trial by fire before re-entering paradise but we can leave that alone for a moment so that’s the basic structure of the story unconscious human beings emergence of knowledge realization of death and suffering and the elimination of the paradise right okay so now i’ll read you the story of the buddha the father of prince gotama the buddha savior of the orient determined to protect his son from desperate knowledge and tragic awareness built for him an enclosed pavilion a walled garden of earthly delights okay so the story goes that an angel visited buddha’s father and said that he’s going to have a son and the son is either going to become the greatest ruler that the world has ever seen or a spiritual leader and the father being a practical man thought well there’s no bloody way i want my son to be some like wandering spiritual leader i want him to be the greatest king that the world has ever seen okay and so um the father decides how am i going to get my son to be the greatest ruler the world has ever seen i better get him to fall in love with the world because then he’s not going to go traipsing after some sort of half-witted spiritual knowledge he’s going to stick to practical tasks right that’s something that a father should do to some degree is orient you in the world right and maybe he shouldn’t subvert your your spiritual development to any great degree but there’s a practical element to this and and so anyways that’s how it works and so that’s what happens the the the father builds this city of perfection and he eliminates from it everything that’s a reminder of the suffering that’s associated with life so the only thing that’s allowed the only creatures that are allowed to be in there the only people that are allowed to be in there are healthy young and happy people so the buddha grows up surrounded by nothing but the positive elements of life well you think well what does that mean well it’s akin to the paradise idea obviously walled enclosure of paradise where there’s no death but there’s more to it than that too it’s also in some sense what a good father would do what do you do with your young children well you don’t expose them to death and decay at every step of the way right you you build a protected world for them like a walled enclosure and you only keep what’s healthy and life-giving inside of it and you don’t expose them to things that they can’t tolerate you know maybe you don’t take a three-year-old to a funeral now maybe you do but maybe you don’t there’s things that you don’t expect them to be able to cope with you regulate what they’re allowed to watch you’re not going to show them the texas chainsaw massacre when they’re four years old right so so you’re staving off knowledge of mortality and death and so he’s just being a good father in many ways here all signs of decay and degeneration were thus kept hidden from the prince immersed in the immediate pleasures of the senses in physical love and dance and music and beauty and pleasure gotama grew to maturity protected absolutely from the limitations of mortal being however he grew curious despite his father’s most particular attention and will and resolved to leave his seductive prison well it’s that curiosity element it’s the same thing that lurks in the adam and eve story it’s like god tells adam and eve see that tree over there don’t be bothering with it well you know what’s going to happen with human beings especially if there’s a snake associated with it they’re going to be over there right away checking that place out and that’s exactly what happens with the buddha it’s like he’s raised to be healthy and what is what’s the consequence of that is that the fact that he’s healthy makes him look for what’s beyond the protected confines of the thing that made him healthy it’s like what’s like even in the jepetto story you know where jepetto paints on pinocchio’s mouth and he’s ready to go he puts him outside the next day and pinocchio’s ready to run away with all the kids right so the consequence of raising a child in a healthy way is that the child is going to be curious enough to go out there and look for some trouble and we actually know that because there is follow-up studies of teenagers you imagine that there’s teenagers who never break any rules and then there’s teenagers who break all the rules okay these teenagers don’t do very well introverted depressed anxious depressed sorry i said that twice these ones are anti-social the ones in the middle that’s what you want you want your damn teenager to get out of the paradisal confines of your house and to go cause some trouble and to investigate maybe you don’t want to know about it any more than you have to you don’t want them to be breaking rules all the time and you don’t want them to be so timid and oppressed that they can’t make a move on their own and never make a mistake so the paradoxical thing here and it’s sort of echoed this is why i like these two stories back to back is like if you give people what they want then the first thing they’re going to do is try to get beyond it and dostoevsky says the same thing and notes from underground he says if you gave people everything they wanted pure utopia so he says so that they’re they’re sitting in a pool of bliss with nothing but bubbles of happiness coming up from the surface and all they have to do is eat cake and busy themselves with the continuation of the species dostoevsky’s observation is the first thing that people would do is find something to smash that with just so that something interesting and perverse could happen it’s like well yes we’re we’re creatures that are designed to encounter the unknown we want to keep moving beyond what we have even if we have what we have is what we want and maybe that’s partly because we’re oriented towards the future we think well this is great but it’s not good enough it’s great but it’s not good enough there’s always something more that drives us forward well so that’s what happens with the buddha he gets curious he sees the walls he thinks there’s walls there’s probably something outside of those walls so then he goes to his father and he says i’m i want to go outside what’s outside and his father says no you don’t want to go outside and buddha says yeah well i really do want to go outside and his father knows that unless he lets him go outside he’s going to climb over the walls and so the father decides he’s going to let him go outside because he can fix everything out there first so he goes outside it’s like the chinese preparing for the olympics you know when they sprayed the grass with with with green paint got rid of all the homeless people it’s the same thing so he goes outside the city and he tells everyone all right old people sick people dying people hit the road we don’t want to see you for a while clean all this out we want the attractive people around the sides of the roads like waving palm fronds and all of that and so when my son comes out he’s going to see nothing but what’s good and so he gets that all arranged and he lets his son go outside now his son goes outside in this little chariot thing and he has a someone with him now unbeknownst to his father that person that’s with him is an emissary of the gods and so in a perverse way he plays the same role as the serpent in the story of of adam and eve and the gods have already arranged so that the father’s care is going to be insufficient and it’s the snake in the garden idea it’s like no matter how much care you take to make things perfect some of the some of what what you’re excluding is going to come back in so anyways buddha goes outside and and he’s in his chariot and preparations were made to guild his chosen route to cover the adventurer’s path with flowers and to display for his admiration and preoccupation the fairest women of the kingdom the prince set out with full retinue in the shielded comfort of a chaperone chariot and delighted in the panorama previously prepared for him the gods however decided to disrupt these most carefully laid plans and sent an aged man to hobble in full view alongside the road the prince’s fascinated gaze fell upon the ancient interloper compelled by curiosity he asked his attendant what is that creature stumbling shabby bent and broken beside my retinue and the attendant answered that is a man like other men who was born an infant became a child a youth a husband a father a father of fathers he has become old subject to destruction of his beauty his will and the possibilities of life like other men you say hesitantly inquired the prince that means this will happen to me and the attendant answered inevitably with the passage of time well that’s the end of that party the world collapses in on buddha and bang he high tails at home well what does that mean well that’s what children do roughly speaking is they’re around their mother they’re they’ve got security there they go out into the unknown they encounter something that’s just a little bit too much for them bang they come home they get all padded back into shape and hugged and taken care of hugging children and patting them is actually analgesic it actually reduces pain unsurprisingly that’s what you do with someone who’s grieving right so you hug them because grief is pain so so they you know you pat them they get rid of their pain they get rid of their anxiety you calm them down and what happens well the next day they want to go out again well that’s exactly what happens to the buddha so he’s all shorted out by his encounter with death which is very little different than what happens to adam and eve runs back recovers for six months he has post-traumatic stress disorder he runs home and he recovers for six months right in time his anxiety lessened his curiosity grew and he ventured outside again this time the god sent a sick man into view this creature he asked his attendant shaking and palsied horribly afflicted unbearable to behold a source of pity and contempt what is he and the attendant answered that’s a man like other men who was born whole but who became ill and sick unable to cope a burden to himself and others suffering and incurable like other men you say inquired the prince this could happen to me and the attendant answers no man is exempt from the ravages of disease once again the world collapsed and got tamar returned to his home but the delights of his previous life were ashes in his mouth and he ventured forth a third time the gods in their mercy sent him a dead man in funeral procession this creature he asked his attendant laying so still appearing so fearsome surrounded by grief and by sorrow lost and forlorn what is he and the attendant answered that is a man like other men born of woman beloved and hated who was once you who once was you and now is the earth like other men you say inquired the prince then this could happen to me this is your end said the attendant and the end of all men well that’s the end of childhood right there’s no going back after that it’s like panokia goes back there’s no one home anymore it’s there’s nothing that your father can do to protect you from knowledge of death there’s no returning to the childhood unconsciousness because you’re you now know and there’s no going backwards suicide that’s going backwards that’s how you replace your emergent self-consciousness with the old blissful unconsciousness and that’s exactly what suicidal people wish they’re going to destroy their painful self-consciousness and make it all go away the world collapsed a final time and gotama asked to be returned home but the attendant had orders from the prince’s father and took him instead to a festival of women occurring near occurring nearby in a grove in the woods the prince was met by a beautiful assemblage who offered themselves freely to him without restraint in song dance and play in the spirit of sensual love but gotama could think only of death and the inevitable decomposition of beauty and took no pleasure in the display well so you see the parallels between one story and the other they’re the same they have the same underlying structure initial paradise partly childhood partly unconsciousness the emergence of knowledge of mortality into that and the demolition of the of the paradise this is the same meta story that we’ve been talking about all along ordered state collapse into chaos well the rest of the story is the return like in the bible bible is actually set up that way it’s collapse into history and then a movement upward the question is what’s the movement upward that’s the question here when the collapse is caused by knowledge of mortality and self-con and the emergence of self-consciousness and knowledge of death is there any manner in which redemption can be attained or is that the final like is that finally is that does that finally demolish you well that’s the question and that’s that’s that’s it’s the answer to that question that entire civilizations constantly pursue and the question is well what is the answer and part of the answer is identification with the spirit that generates order out of chaos that’s the answer it’s something like that and so then the question is what does that mean well that’ll be what the last two lectures in the course are about because we’re down to two last lectures so any questions does it make sense more more importantly really is there is there any way in which it doesn’t make sense because these stories are not supposed to make sense right that’s the theory is that they’re archaic superstitions or something like that well it doesn’t seem to me that that’s the case it seems to me that they make insanely perfect sense they’re exactly right they tell you exactly what human beings are like and exactly what the situation that we face is so and so then the question is well the diagnosis is made properly what it has the cure been properly identified well that’s what we’ll discuss for the next two sessions