https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=11oBFCNeTAs
I Don’t know if any other personality course in North America talks about binswanger and boss anymore. Maybe not but I Think their ideas are extremely interesting and so I’m going to talk about them They were influenced very much by Martin Heidegger who was one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers, I would say probably This school of this is part of the phenomenological school was more influenced directly by a philosopher than any other school and just to reiterate because you might keep wondering why I Discussed so many philosophers in this course. It’s because Clinical psychology in particular is Not strictly a scientific enterprise. It’s because it’s oriented towards Values as far as I can tell and I don’t I don’t see that there’s any way of getting around that and that Because what you’re trying to do as a clinical psychologist and perhaps what you’re trying to do with your own life is to figure out How to live properly now you can construe that as the absence of illness Which is that’s about as close as you get to a scientific enterprise Well as you get to a scientific model of Living wells you don’t have any illnesses, but even the idea of illness is an idea. That’s not precisely scientific It’s it’s an it’s an amalgam of scientific concepts and ethical concepts, so There’s no escaping it and if you’re in the domain of ethics or values Then you’re in what is more or less a philosophical domain, but also if you’re a scientist if you’re a Scientist who’s interested in personality It’s also something you have to grapple with conceptually because people live Within an ethic and the ethic structures their perceptions and so even to study human beings as objects You still have to take into account they ensconce themselves within a value system, and you have to understand what that means So for me it’s easier and and more straightforward just to get right to the root of the matter to begin with and these people Also had insanely interesting ideas They’re really useful to know and so this I would say maybe these the philosophy that underpins this might be the most complex of all the philosophies that we’re going to That we’re going to discuss and that’s really saying something because there’s no shortage of complexity say in Jung So and it’s it’s very difficult to to portray what these people were up to I started by telling you when we discussed Rogers a little bit that The the the phenomenologists were interested in the fact that people live within a self-defined perceptual world that’s that might be one way of thinking about it and so Part of the part of the way to to start to conceptualize what that means is to consider for a moment just consider for a moment how many things there are in this room that you might look at and The answer to that is there’s an infinite number of them Depending on how you’re going to scale your perceptions you could spend if you were a painter you could spend a month Painting that tile painting a representation of that tile because it’s it’s infinitely complex to get the colors right to get the patterns right There’s no end to it really because to make a representation that was accurate It would have to be as detailed as the thing itself And that’s it’s crazily detailed and but you don’t concentrate on that sort of thing So you think you’re surrounded by an infinite number of potential things to apprehend? But that isn’t the world you live in the world you live in is a very very constrained subset of those things and part of the question is then what’s the nature of that constrained subset? That’s what you inhabit. That’s what makes up your experience and also how is it related to the to the? infinitely complex objects that are around you and that’s really what these people were trying to figure out so you’re in this Perceptual frame that’s one way of thinking about it. That’s the design by the way That’s the that’s the existential frame or the phenomenological frame because you can’t think about it merely as perception because it contains also all of the things that you experience subjectively the emotions and the Enough and the qualia that you know what qualia is a as an element of being that Say philosophers or scientists of consciousness have a particularly difficult time with and it’s like it’s the quality of pain Which doesn’t seem reducible to a set of objective facts or the quality of color or the quality of beauty or the quality of love? Or the quality of sorrow those things seem irreducible to some degree in and of themselves like what is what is pain made of it? Doesn’t even seem like a reasonable question. I mean you can say how do you decompose the neurological? Circuits that that are involved in the experience of pain fine But to ask what pain consists of or compose is composed of or what beauty is composed of her love Seems to be there’s something wrong with that with the formulation of that question because those things sort of manifest themselves as raw facts of existence and so they’re constituent elements of this of your field of experience your phenomenal Phenomenological frame or this das sign which is the way that that Heidegger Conceptualized it that’s being there with you at the center of the center of your What realm of experience? so Now here’s some Characteristics of the dazai the thing that you the thing that makes up you The past and the present are implicit in it. What does that mean well? Say you have a particular emotional response to something Maybe it’s a negative emotional response, and you see this very frequently with arguments with people you’re having an argument with someone You love like a family member. That’s a good example So let’s say it’s the same damn fight you’ve had with your mother 50 times Okay, well that’s interesting because what it means is that all of those 50 times that you fought with your mother are implicit in this fight So although it’s taking place right here And now the past has shaped it and if you wanted to investigate the fight Completely you’d have to get to the bottom of that entire train of interactions you’ve had with your mother So it’s implicit in your current in your current In your current experience, that’s one way of thinking about it, but the future is implicit in it too because What you’re doing right now? it’s as if the future is folded up in what you’re experiencing right now and it unfolds as you interact with it and so the end the reason that it’s conditional to some degree on you and your past is because It’s your past and you that are determining the actions that you undertake right now that determine how the future is going to unfold around you Not completely obviously because you don’t have complete control over how things unfold but you seem to have some ability to determine how things unfold So one of the ways I’ve sort of conceptualized the phenomenological viewpoint This is this is one way of thinking about it I believe is that instead of thinking and it does mean you have to reconceptualize your idea of Objects like an object seems like a unidimensional thing in some sense It’s an object but most of the things that people interact with aren’t like that at all. So like here’s an example Let’s say you have Yeah, let’s say you get a you’re writing the MCAT. You want to go to medical school? You’ve written the MCAT you get the envelope in the mail. It tells you what your score is. You hold the envelope What are you holding? Well, if you think about it from an objective perspective, it’s an envelope who cares. It’s just a little piece of paper, right? It’s a little it’s a rectangle of paper, but that isn’t what you’re holding at all That’s not what that thing is. That’s how you see it, but it’s not what it is at all It’s not even and you know that your body knows that because you’re shaking. It’s like well, what are you scared of the envelope? well the the fact that you see it as an envelope is only an indication of just how narrow your perceptions actually are Because it’s a portal Right, it’s a portal through which you’re going to walk into one of two worlds one in which you’re in medical school and the other in Which you’re not and it also actually contains the past which is really strange because you think well You already know what the past is. It’s no you don’t Whatever that score is in there determines what your past was And you know that too you go watch a movie and a bunch of things happen in the movie and then something twisted happens at the end and all of a sudden everything that you thought about the movie was wrong and A whole new past for the movie pops into being well Are you a pre-med student a valid pre-med student well the score will determine whether or not you were Very strange very strange because you think of the past is fixed You know when you think of the things that you’re interacting with as the things that you see and they’re not and Your body is smarter than that way smarter than that because it responds to you could say This is sort of a Rogerian perspective your body is more likely to respond to what the thing actually is Than how it is that you see it so okay, so the past is implicit in the current being and the future is implicit in the current being and so The past and the future sort of folded up inside it, and you can unfold them and take a look at them Now Here’s the next thing so in From a classic scientific perspective. There’s the world of independently existing objects, and there’s the world of subjects and the subject is Really in a secondary relationship to the object because the object of world is what’s real but one of the things that the Phenomenologists were were concerned about that is that well you run into this problem again of exactly how it is that you define the object because Just as the envelope with the scores in it can’t be reduced to the paper So the object that you’re interacting with only reveals what it is as a consequence of the way that you interact with it So for example if you take a complex object like another person It’s like well What is it that you are well a huge part of that is going to depend on exactly how I interact with you? Because you could be a raging beast if I interacted with you one way, and you could be a perfectly you know Cooperative entity that was very pleasant if I interacted with you the other way and another way and so partly What’s happening you could think of what you’re interacting with is something that’s really multifaceted Truly multifaceted and You say well you’re trying to determine what it is But the problem is is that what it is manifests itself only in accordance with how you behave towards it And it’s actually the case with even even objects that you reduce right down to their constituent elements So you might say like let’s talk about subatomic particles Hypothetically the most objective thing there is well it turns out that Whether they’re a wave or a particle depends on the way you set up the experiment now I don’t want to make quantum analogies But what I’m saying is that the object is a very very complicated thing and so even defining what it is means that you Have to adopt a frame of reference with regards to it, and you undertake only some procedures and not others So when you’re defining an object even scientifically you actually don’t find define the object what you say is Here’s a multi-dimensional entity if you approach it in this manner That’s the procedure right the methods if you approach it in this manner It will manifest that set of traits But the problem is is that there’s all sorts of other traits that it could manifest Just as well if you treat it at a different way and so the object itself is not something that It’s it’s not something easily reducible to a single set of properties. I Was talking to one of my students yesterday had a pretty smart thing to say about images. We were we’re talking about Deep images you know the sorts that you might see in a really high quality museum, so maybe they’re thought it off 15th century or 16th century Renaissance masterpieces they’re inexhaustible to some degree which is why there are museums and people go look at them You know decade after decade, and it’s partly because Every time you look at them you’re different you go in one week you look at it You see something you go in the next week you look at it. You see something else. Well. It’s partly because You’re bringing something entirely different to the situation and The image is complicated enough to allow it to reflect something new to you depending on the stance you take in relationship to it And lots of things are like that lots of things are like that a book you read when you were 16 is going to be an Entirely different book when you read it when you’re 35 say well the books the same It’s like it depends on how you define the book Because it isn’t even obvious where the book is exactly well It’s on my shelf in the library. It’s like no that’s a chunk of paper That’s on your shelf in the library where exactly the book is that’s a much more difficult question to to consider So it depends on how you define the book So without a subject nothing at all would exist to confront objects and to imagine them as such true This implies that every object everything objective in barely merely in being merely objectifies by the subject is the most subjective thing Possible well you also know this again when you’re in an argument with someone it’s you know. It’s you know. It’s you It’s like you don’t know are you being biased are you are you looking at the situation incorrectly? The person you’re arguing with is going to convince you that it’s trying to convince you that it’s your problem You think no you made me angry. It’s like Hmm an interesting statement. You know as if you could do that, but it does seem that way you were being provocative Well, you’re just too sensitive Hmm how are we going to settle that? Well, it’s a continual argument and that that again has to do with the crazy Entangled dynamic between subjective perception and objective perception I’ve showed you this before and I actually think this is a pretty good schematic Representation of what’s meant by DAS side, and this is a complicated little diagram although it the diagram itself is quite simple but it it it makes it it’s predicated on the following assumptions is that you need to narrow down your world and What you’re doing is narrowing it down from let’s say an infinite set of possibilities to a finite set of manageable Possibilities and you do that a bunch of ways partly merely you can’t your senses aren’t acute enough to detect everything So pure stupidity in some sense stops you from being absolutely overwhelmed You don’t have eyes in the back of your head for example, so you don’t have to worry about all those things You’re not looking at behind you, but then it’s far more than that. You just can’t handle that full complexity So there’s a continual narrowing process, and then you exist inside that narrowed reality like if I look at you like that There’s not a hell of a lot of difference between that and looking at you like that Okay, I can’t really see these people I can tell their people. That’s all I can see your face I’ve got just about all of it right there, so That’s a very narrow and you know you’re moving your eyes around and Inhabiting this constant narrow space well what what’s that space? What does that space you inhabit consist of well? That’s Dasein that space that you inhabit and so we could say it’s something like this You have implicit in that perception a sense of where you are and what you’re doing right now It’s in the perception and then in the perception as well is what you’re aiming at Because you’re not just sitting here passively or you’d be asleep, or you’d be unconscious You’re sitting here doing nothing you know physically But you have an aim in mind and the aim is what you’re pointing your eyes at the aim is what’s structuring your perceptions the aim is What’s revealing that part of the world that is being revealed to you to you? That’s the revelation of the world it also structures your emotions it also primes your behaviors So it’s not a drive. It’s not a goal. It’s not a it’s not a motivation It’s it’s it’s it’s more than that it’s all of that at once that’s sort of what your personality is But you see the phenomenologists don’t really think about personality they think about the manifestation of your reality It’s not exactly your personality It’s that you’re the center of a reality and you you constitute that reality But all your elements of experience constitute that reality and so it’s something like it’s simple The inner limits element is something like where you are where you’re going and the Embodied actions you undertake to relate those two things which would include your eye movements because of course Perception is an active phenomena you are shaking your eyes back and forth Unbelievably rapidly otherwise if you can if you can make your eyes stand still which you can do with great concentration Everything will black out Because you have to move your eyes back and forth so that the light hits different cells because the cells get Exhausted and then they stop reporting so you’re just whipping your eyes back and forth In in the micro micro way constantly and as well as moving them around Voluntarily and involuntarily so even perception is perception is a lot more like feeling things out with your fingers Even when you’re using your ears or your eyes very active. There’s no passive perception It’s a motor act to perceive and so that motor act is determined by your hierarchy of values That’s one way of looking at it so another way of thinking about it That’s also how the past and the future are implicit in it your very active perception is determined by your entire value structure, so It’s implicit inside of it. It’s folded up inside of it You can tell that too because if something violates it again Maybe an argument with someone People are it’s good to think about people as the thing you interact with the most as as the canonical object because they’re so damn Complicated and they get in the way all the time and when someone gets in the way of what you’re doing You know it isn’t obvious what they’re interfering with it might be the little micro routine that you’re undertaking right now You know maybe you go home, and you make a nice dinner and the person you’re making it for is all rude about it Okay, so what exactly are they getting in the way of? well They’re certainly getting the way in the way of your expectations of having a nice emotional time for the next hour But you have no idea how indicative that is of some serious flaw in you or them or the relationship or the situation or the way You’ve conducted your whole life or the way they’ve conducted their whole life and all of that’s packed in there It’s sort of like the unconscious of the psychoanalysts, but it’s more. It’s more. It’s not the same conceptualization It’s another way of looking at the same phenomena, so alright, so the two people we’re going to talk about most are made our boss and He was influenced by Martin Heidegger who was a great philosopher taken to task often because he turned out to be Tangled up with the Nazis more than he should have been and Husserl that’s Edmund Husserl who was actually if I remember correctly Martin Heidegger’s teacher That’s Ludwig Binswanger, and they were both of these two people were influenced both by Freud and Jung Okay, so here’s one of Binswanger’s claims. I love this claim. It’s such a cool idea And I think there’s neurological support for it neuropsychological support what we perceive are first and foremost Not impressions of taste, tone, smell or touch not even things or objects, but meanings Well, that’s an interesting idea because you’re clear They you know it’s been said that every person is an unconscious exponent of some great philosophers presuppositions well Mostly the way you think about the way you perceive is that there are objects in the world you see the objects You think about the objects you evaluate the objects you decide how to act on the objects, and then you act right it’s from Object sense perception emotion cognition action that’s wrong That isn’t how it works. It’s partly not the way it works because You’re actually the way that you interact with the world exists at multiple levels so for example you have reflexes so if I if I Would if I poke you hard you’ll react like that you’ll jerk back and that you do that without thinking that’s Part of a neurological circuit. That’s very deeply embedded, and that’s virtually automatic. It’s reflexive It doesn’t require conscious perception at all It’s too slow for starters And so you have multiple let there’s multiple levels of you interacting with the world and at one level you’re seeing objects You’re thinking about them You’re planning what to do But you’re doing all sorts of other things that are way faster than that and other things that are way slower at the same time now what what been to swagger claims is that what you see in the world are meanings and That so it’s the meaning detection first and the object recognition second now That’s a hell of a claim that is but but there’s definitely levels of your nervous system that operate in that manner So for example here’s a good example people have blindsight Their dad their core visual cortex is damaged. They can’t see objects, so they think they’re blind But if you show them an angry face, they’ll manifest a change in their skin conductance They’ll orient and it means that the eyes are still mapping the face onto the amygdala and the amygdala is mapping the pattern Onto the body no object perception pattern pattern pattern No object perception and so the meaning is what’s what’s the meaning is what’s being perceived first and foremost and You have to perceive meanings first because you actually want to stay alive That’s the trick so the world is full of these things that have meanings to you that are relevant to your survival And what you’re what you’re perceiving first is the relevance of the pattern to your survival and the idea that you can Conceptualize that as a set of objects well first of all that’s a pretty new idea technically speaking right because Technically speaking we didn’t really start to conceive the world as subject in an objective world until we really formalized science Now science was implicit long before it became explicit, but it didn’t become explicit until about 500 years ago So you react to meanings so here’s an example babies If you if you have two surfaces, and you put a piece of glass between them You know they’re elevated and you put a eight month old baby on the one surface or so they can crawl the baby can crawl It won’t crawl across the space and you might say well It sees a hole and won’t walk won’t crawl across it, but that isn’t what it sees it sees a place to fall off Direct that’s direct perception so when I see this for example my eyes See that as a pattern that patterns on my retina It’s propagated through my optic nerve. It’s propagated into my brain It’s propagated onto my motor cortex and the propagation is this that Right so I can pick it up and as soon as when I look at that this is implicit That’s implicit in the perception you think well. Why do you see that at the size and resolution you see it at that’s why? So the fact that you see it that way has this implicit in it It isn’t that you see the object and match your hand to it It’s that matching your hand to it is part of the perception of the object. It’s what gives the object meaning And so you see actually you perceive the meaning of the object It’s part of the perception and you can’t not see the meaning of the object well you can if you’re a scientist You can sort of separate the out the object from its meaning that’s actually what science does It tears the object away from its meaning and then of course There’s nothing meaningful left and so science ends up value-free, but that’s because the meaning has been torn out of it Now there’s technical reasons for doing that but Ben Swanger’s point is don’t kid yourself. You see the meaning first. Here’s an example You watch the trade tower towers fall What did you see? Well you could say well you saw the towers fall. It’s like why are you in shock for two days afterwards then? Well because the towers aren’t what are the towers exactly? As long as they’re standing and operating their towers as soon as they fall God only knows what they are Maybe they’re the beginning of the next war you know Who knows what they are and so everyone was in shock for three days because what they saw was the indeterminate Meaning of that event and it opened all sorts of gateways. It’s like well the towers fell There’s gateways open everywhere. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know what’s going to happen next We don’t know where we are and that’s direct perception mapped onto your body bang You’re in shock you see the meaning first and well you constrain it down to well. Why are you so upset? Well the towers fell it’s like that’s the best you can do for a verbal utterance It’s it’s what your perceptual systems reported to you, but God only knows what happened We still don’t really know what it meant that they fell now most things have put themselves back together, but And then you think well, what does it mean? What does it mean that what you see first is the meaning and that’s a really tricky question because you might say well That’s when you get back to the problem of what constitutes real So I could say well you’ve evolved to see the meaning Well, then we might ask well if you’ve evolved to see the meaning and that’s kept you alive Is there anything more real than the meaning? Because somebody who’s a materialist would say well no the object is more real than the object Because somebody who’s a materialist would say well no the object is more real It’s like no it depends on how you define real It might be that the most real thing about the visual cliff is that that’s a falling off place And that it’s secondary description as a you know an object a hole or something like that that’s just that’s something you paint over top of the primary reality and so Well here’s and here’s a practical application of it or at least one of the things that I think is practical you know you can Have experiences that did differ in their let’s call it high quality meaning you know so you get engaged in engrossed in something And you’re happy about that. It’s not that you’re happy So you’re engaged in engrossed in it you would do it again even though it might take take effort You can tell that where you are is meaningful. Well. I think what happens in that situation is that? You’re in a piagetian place where many of the games that you’re playing are stacked sort of Isomorphically on top of one another and the experience of meaning is the fact that you’re playing the small game properly Nested inside a larger game you’re playing it properly nested inside a larger game. You’re playing it properly, too Etc all the way out past is balanced future is balanced everything is stacked up And there’s a report coming from your being telling you that that’s why you’re engaged might say well Maybe that’s real. Maybe it’s more real than anything else It’s a strange thing because if you think that meaning is separate and secondary from the real objective world Then the reality is the object, but it isn’t obvious that the reality is the object It’s certainly it’s certainly not how we act. It’s not how we perceive and so Did we evolve to perceive reality it depends on what you mean by perceive? Perceive might mean did we evolve mechanisms that allowed us to survive in the face of that reality? Yes, is that what’s real what enables you to survive in the face of reality? It’s a definition It’s a perfectly reasonable definition unless you can come up with a better one meanings are primary Now that brings up and that brings up a strange issue, so what determines the meaning of what it is that you’re perceiving Well, this is where binswanger and boss disagree binswanger says It’s it’s the a priori ontological structure the world design or matrix of meaning okay, so what does that mean? Well you have a particular history biological and cultural and individual and You’re viewing the world through the lens of that of that set of particularities So it’s almost as if you’re behind a curtain and the curtain has certain holes in it And you can see through the holes in the curtain and but the curtain is your construction so the curtain With the holes determines what you see well boss would say no. It’s the opposite in a very strange thing it’s that the meaning of the world manifests itself to you more or less of its own accord and That’s it’s a tougher one to explain Disclosure of meaning boss the revelation of the object the emergent emergence of the phenomenon the numinous The very word phenomena is derived from feyness thigh to shine forth to appear to unveil itself To come out of concealment or darkness, okay? Here’s an example you see someone beautiful your perception or Is it your perception or does the beauty exist? That’s the difference between binswanger and boss because binswanger would say Well the reason that that thing appears to you is beautiful is because of the way you’re filtering it and boss would say no The beauty is in here is in the object itself and manifests itself it shines forth And so I really like this concept this this cannot concept of phenomena That’s why they’re phenomenologists feyness thigh means to shine forth from from the phenomenological perspective you pursue those things that shine forth Now you remember Now you remember this is kind of a Parallel idea I suppose it’s a parallel of Jungian ideas you remember in Harry Potter that when they’re playing quidditch He’s always chasing the snitch and you remember how if I’ve got this correctly Quidditch is basically two games at the same time right there’s the standard game, and then there’s the game that the seekers play yes I’ve got that right what happens if the seeker gets the snitch Games over right they win very interesting. It’s brilliant. She has a brilliant imagination that that woman Rowling so the idea is that in every game there’s two games going on at the same time There’s the ordinary game and there’s the game that the seekers play and the seekers chase the thing that shines at them And that’s what that little thing is the snitch. It’s a round circle with wings. It’s a very very old old old symbol It’s a symbol of what it’s a symbol of reality before it’s Fractionated into its parts. I don’t know how to say it any more clearly than that It’s a symbol of it’s a symbol of what imagine that there are things that move forward to make you curious And you were trying to figure out what was common among all the things that made you curious That thing that Harry Potter is chasing. That’s a symbol of that It’s golden like the Sun it flits around and attracts your attention, and it’s always moving and if you’re seeking you chase it So that’s the phenomenological idea that’s the disclosure of meaning you say well When you’re curious about something why are you curious about that? Is it is it calling to you or is it something that you’re interpreting? Well? I would say it’s both I think that’s the way to resolve this puzzle. It’s that there isn’t a perceiving entity without a structure and Your structure has been evolving itself for three and a half billion years There’s no perceiving entity without a structure, but by the same token the thing that’s being perceived Also shines forth with its own potential manifestation, and you need to think of it both ways at the same time But the curiosity issues are really it’s a fascinating one because the curiosity pulls you forward It’s not random. That’s the thing that’s so cool. You can’t really control it But it’s not random if your curiosity is random your schizophrenic And I mean that technically because one of the things that happens to schizophrenics is that the mechanisms that establish relevance Become pathologized and they see meaning everywhere randomly and that’s partly why they generate delusions because they the incoherent Manifestation of meaning calls out for a representation they develop a paranoid delusion if they’re intelligent enough to put everything together But so you’re curious and something pulls you forward Well you can’t you can interact with the curiosity and you can follow it But you can’t really direct it the question is where is it taking you so that little ball? That was a manifestation of what the Greeks referred to Greeks. Is that right Mercurius? Is Roman and Greek God Mercurius the spirit Mercurius is this thing? It’s the messenger of the gods the winged messenger of the gods it flits around You say well the curiosity pulls you forward to where well to every wherever it wants to take you That’s a Jungian idea as well is that your curiosity is like the manifestation of yourself to the ego Right it’s it’s it’s the thing that you could be in the future calling you forward something like that very strange ideas Very interesting see when you start to understand That you’re not in control of what makes you interested in things The whole world shifts around on you because the question is if you’re not in control of that what the hell is directing it What’s going on? It’s not you. It’s not under your control. It’s not random. It’s alive It’s dynamic it has an orientation towards something that’s the Jungian self or that’s the manifestation of meaning yes very strange I Told you this already see there’s a there’s an old representation a very old representation of the snitch right there Now this is old symbol a you’ve got this dragon of chaos here It’s kind of like an octopus as well that twist in its tail refers to infinity dragons almost always have an infinite tail Like that it’s got the claws of a bird maybe a bird of prey the body of an animal and the head of a snake and Then down here you see it’s got the Sun up there So it’s sort of aiming at upward towards the Sun this thing and then down here is this thing called the round chaos It’s an old alchemical system And if you look the dragon is fertilizing this and that has potential and it’s like an egg. It’s full of potential and So it’s matter and spirit at the same time It’s sort of like it’s it’s a it’s a representation of that which you’re exploring because you could say well the thing that you’re Exploring sort of a constructivist idea you explore something new. What do you generate from the exploration you? Because as you explore it you learn things that changes you so you generate psyche out of the exploration That’s spirit, and you also generate the world out of it But the thing to begin with is psyche and world at the same time, and that’s what this thing represents And that’s what Harry Potter is chasing That’s what makes him a seeker Very strange ideas now I’m going to tell you a dream and there was a dream I had when I was working on these ideas And I’m going to tell you the dream for two reasons one is because it bears directly on these ideas and two because Well, we just covered psychoanalytic thought and I want to show you how a dream can work because it’s not easy to find a dream That you can interpret in a way that’s public that makes sense because they’re usually so tightly defined Contextually you can define them in the therapeutic contest context because you know so much about the person It’s very hard to pull that out and make it meaningful outside of that context, but this dream works, okay, so I was dreaming I Was dreaming that there was a small object It was a circle a sphere about this big and it was floating on top of the Atlantic Ocean And I was I had a kind of a bird’s-eye view of it And I was following it along like maybe you know like a drone would follow behind an object It was floating and it was it was really zipping along man. It was really really fast and Then the scene shifted to a bunch of scientists They were sitting inside a room full of television monitors And they were watching this thing move across the ocean and so it was here And then there was it had four hurricanes beside it one here one here one here and one here So it was in the center of four hurricanes, so whatever it was was like some bloody potent thing It was zipping across the it was zipping across the ocean then The scientists got a hold of it I guess and the scene shifted and I was in a museum like an old Victorian Museum and This thing this ball was now inside a wood So imagine a wood stand with a glass case on top of it It was inside the glass case, and it was floating it was sort of pulsing a little bit and so inside the room there was Stephen Hawking and The American president, I don’t remember who it was he was sort of faceless, but Stephen I thought Stephen Hawking what the hell disembodied intellect That’s Stephen Hawking, so that’s what that meant and the the president well He’s just the symbol of order and so this thing whatever it was that was surrounded by these winds Had been placed into a category system right it was in a museum It was boxed in it had been conceptualized and categorized partly by disembodied intellect That was Stephen Hawking and partly by social order And so there’s a Binswanger boss thing going on there the thing pulses and is alive, so it’s got its own power But it’s also Encapsulated in a category system, so I’m a third person observer in there. I’m not in the room I’m just seeing this so that was fine, so the next thing that happened Oh, yes, one of them described the features of the room its walls were seven feet thick They didn’t want this thing going anywhere, and it was made out of titanium dioxide. I thought what the hell’s that well It’s a paint. It’s a paint substance But it’s also what the hull of the Starship Enterprise is made out of time so so my dream was saying well What’s the hardest substance there is as well? It’s titanium dioxide. It’s not getting out of that box The walls were designed to permanently constrain the object okay now the next thing that happened was this object was it was you could tell It was kind of alive, and it kept shifting around and at one point it turned into a chrysalis You know a cocoon and I thought what the hell does that mean and then so it turned into A cocoon and I don’t know if you’ve seen a chrysalis when it’s just about to hatch, but it’s it twitches around It’s alive that thing so they’re very strange things and then at the end it turned itself into a pipe like a mere Shaw pipe and I thought Then it reformed itself into a sphere and just shot right out of the room like like the walls weren’t even there It was just it decided it was gone bang It was gone, and I woke up, and I thought what the hell what the hell does that mean it took me forever to figure this out So then about two years after experiencing this dream I was reading Dante’s Inferno in the ninth canto a messenger from God Appears so Dante goes down into hell right and it was Dante’s attempt to describe It’s brilliant. It’s so imagine that you go to a bad place Psychologically right so your life is collapsed that’s terrible But then you’re trying to figure out what you did wrong and how you’re to blame for it And so what you do is a descent a descent into your own foolishness and stupidity Level by level by level and that’s what Dante was trying to explain. That’s what that hell was levels of Catastrophe and there’s something right at the bottom and he found that it was betrayal that was at the bottom So in any case I was reading that and there’s a line in there that made me remember the stream because I tried to figure out the stream for years say In the ninth canto a messenger from God appears in hell to open the gate of dis which is barring the divinely ordained way of Virgil and Dante the approach of this messenger an Angel is preceded by a great storm described in the following manner Suddenly there broke on the dirty swell of the dark marsh a squall of terrible sound that sent a tremor through both shores of hell A sound as if two continents of air one frigid and one scorching Clashed head-on in a war of winds that stripped the forest bear ripped off whole bows and blew them helter-skelter Along the range of dust it raised before it making the beasts and shepherds run for shelter So that was like a herald of the arrival of this messenger It’s a very powerful scene and I thought about this dream with this thing with the four storms. So The pipe thing that really that really that took me forever to figure out and I finally remembered this painting by Magritte This is not a pipe right, so what does that mean? Well, what it means is the representation Is not the thing it’s a very famous painting right the representation is not the thing Well, even the perception is not the thing and that’s what the dream was trying to get at it’s like this thing This thing that was so powerful and so capable of transforming could be Encapsulated temporarily within a conceptual system, but whenever it decided to leave it was just going to leave and so What it was referring to was the potential that there is inside objects So for example, and it’s such a complicated thing to explain nobody knew what cell phones were going to do You make the cell phone you think you know what it is. You don’t know what it is No one knew what the birth control pill was going to do you make it you think you know what it is You have no idea what it is and it’s going to do some of the things you think it will do and it’s going to do a bunch of things you have no idea about and that’s because the things are more complex than they look they’re multi-dimensional and they have I wouldn’t say a life exactly but they have an intrinsic complexity That tends to unfold across time and it’s only somewhat predictable and so you have things under your control and in your grasp to some limited degree But at any point it’s like the switch in the yin-yang symbol at any time chaos can collapse into order or order can collapse into chaos and that’s what that dream meant Another painting by Magritte trying to express the same thing right all men in suits all uniform all thinking the same way same haircuts completely socialized blinded by their own perceptions That’s us because you think while your perceptions illuminate and and bring you information. It’s yes And no they also constrain to equal degree I dreamed much later about a year later. This was a very cool image, too You know that image that I think it’s is it da Vinci or Michelangelo of the man inscribed in the square inside the circle It’s a very famous image. Well. It was like that except It was a cube, but not a square and so there was a kind of a faceless person almost like a mannequin inside this cube And he was suspended about two feet off the ground and on the front wall It was like wallpaper designs There was these little squares about this big and they were mandalas square with a circle inside them and then inside the circle There was a little snake tail that was out and the whole wall was covered with these snake tails and the person When the person walked forward the wall would move forward and when he walked backwards the wall would move backwards It was always this far away and he could reach out and pull any of those snakes into being and So that was another dream of the same sort of idea. What do you have in front of you a world of objects? No You have a world of potential in front of you and you can interact with any aspect of that potential and while you’re doing So you realize it you you pull something into being that wouldn’t have been there before and what you see in front of you Is a wall of potential the potential is not infinite because you’re constrained But it’s still it’s for all intents and purposes. It’ll do you just fine It’s more potential than you could ever need and so the dream see dreams Dreams are at the forefront of thinking they get there before you the creative imagination is at the forefront of thinking If you think that you’re moving out into the unknown to gather new information what gets there first is the imagination Obviously, that’s what PSA said about children as well you imagine it first Then maybe you can represent it in speech and the dream is part of that imaginative process That’s what artists are doing. They’re take going out into the unknown and Representing it imaginatively. So what does that painting mean? Well, if the artist knew that he just write it down Right the art is beyond what’s what’s articulable. Otherwise, it’s not art. It’s just propaganda So the artist and the dream they’re out on the frontier, right? That’s the open imagination And so when you’re conceptualizing new things the dream and the imagination can bring you places that you don’t even know that you can go And it’s a mystery too. It’s like I don’t know how I figured this out It didn’t it was as if the figuring out manifested itself inside me because that’s the experience in a dream, right? You don’t feel I dreamed this up you feel I had a dream where did that come from? Springs out of the unknown and offer something to you Man’s option to respond to this claim or to choose not to do seems to be the very core of human freedom Here’s pathology as conceptualized by the phenomenologists It’s a very interesting way of thinking about it Existential guilt and fear as debt to possibility. Well, so there’s this idea. It’s it’s like an existential idea that you have some problems That you have some problems in your life Well, the part of the Dasein is the sense of responsibility that you have to address those problems It’s part and parcel of the way that human beings manifest themselves in the world so part of your pathology would be failure to bear the Responsibility for your being and the sense that you have a debt to existence and according to the phenomenologists That’s built right into the sense of your being failure to shoulder existential burden results in neurotic guilt and fear It’s a remarkable conceptualization Unpaid debt to existence clean up your room, right? Well, that’s a good place to start stop. Okay good We’ll see you in a week and a half You