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Welcome to the Astria Radio Show. The Astria Radio Show is brought to you by www.astriamagazine.com. Professor Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist licensed in Massachusetts and Ontario. He’s also a professor at the University of Toronto and has been so since 1998. Professor Peterson is currently interested in the formal assessment and theoretical nature of self-deception, construing it as a voluntary failure of exploration rather than as repression. He’s also doing experimental work on creativity, achievement, personality, narrative and motivation. Your host for the next hour will be Guy Lee. Welcome to this edition of Astria Magazine and Web Radio. We’re delighted to have here with us clinical psychologist Professor Jordan Peterson. He’s going to be telling us about his amazing book Maps of Meaning. Now, first of all, Professor Peterson, welcome. How are you? Good, nice to be here. Great. Could you please tell us a bit first of all about your background? Well, I’m a clinical psychologist trained at McGill University. I’ve been working as a professor since 1992. I taught at Harvard University in the psychology department for six years. And then I moved to Toronto and I’ve been here since 1998. I also do consulting work for a variety of different companies. Now, that’s what you’re currently working on. Now, probably the most widely read book on psychology for the novice reader was Jung’s masterpiece Man and His Symbols. Are you approaching a general audience with this book or your book Maps of Meaning? Or is this more suited to the student of psychology? Well, I think it’s suited for people who would like a book like Man and His Symbols. And Jung’s books, even the ones that were written for a general audience, were not particularly simple because they’re so different in conception. But I would say Maps of Meaning is aimed at the same audience that those books were aimed at. There’s a similar to the books by Eric Neumann, who was a very astute student of Jung’s and who took Jung’s thought farther in some directions than Jung himself had. So I guess I see my work in part as an extension of Jung’s work and Neumann’s work, partly into the domain of neuropsychology. And of course, you could say that you’ve led on from the work of luminaries such as Ludwig Wittgenstein with his book Philosophical Investigations in 1953, for instance, where again he attempted to lay out the apparent structure of the mind and the conditioning with cultural and historical variables. Would that be true to say you’ve moved on from that and expanded it even more? One of Wittgenstein’s contributions was the idea that a word was more like a piece in a chess game than it was like a label for an object. And from Wittgenstein’s perspective, words were always to do things with rather than to label things with. And that’s a conception that I share because most of our concepts, scientists like to think that our concepts are very much like theories about objects. But in reality, our concepts are much more action oriented than that. I mean, we know, for example, that when you look at even a simple object like a cup, the brain areas that are involved in motor action are activated at the level of perception. So, for example, when you look at a cup, the gripping action that your hand would make if you lifted up the cup is partially activated merely when your eyes settle on the cup itself. So and Wittgenstein was the first philosopher, although Nietzsche knew this to some degree, too. Wittgenstein was the first philosopher to really point out the functional quality of our object categories. And my work overlaps with his ideas to some degree, because one of my preconceptions is that mythological ideas and concepts are functional. They’re to do things with, they’re to act about, they’re not to label, they’re not descriptive like a scientific concept is. That’s why religious mythology has to do with morality, because morality is about action. In psychology, what role does the study of myth and symbols play? And what is the relationship to human consciousness in, say, the treatment of mental illness, for instance, or what we class or classify in the Western concept as mental illness? Well, let’s let’s start with the first question about dreams. I mean, there’s a lot of debate in the scientific literature about the meaning of dreams, and perhaps there’s even debate about whether it’s possible for dreams to have meaning. I think partly the debate exists because to do dream analysis properly, as Jung in particular pointed out, you need a vast body of knowledge in the dream interpreter about comparative mythology and ritual and symbol and art history and so forth, because dreams, of course, use images as their primary means of conceptualization. Now, in order to understand what dreams mean and how they can be useful in therapy, apart from appreciating the fact that the interpreter needs a broad body of knowledge that scientists generally don’t develop, it’s also important to know what it is that scientists have discovered about dreams. So, for example, we know that dreams occur during rapid eye movement sleep. You cycle into rapid eye movement sleep about every 90 minutes when you’re asleep. When you’re in rapid eye movement sleep, your motor centers, so your action centers, are very much activated in your brain, but your body is paralyzed so that you can’t move around. Your eyes are moving because, of course, it doesn’t really matter if your eyes move while you’re asleep because they won’t take you anywhere. But if your legs were moving while you were asleep, you’d run into walls while you were dreaming, and scientists have actually managed to damage the motor inhibition systems in cats so that they do move around when they’re dreaming. Anyways, if you wake up, when someone’s dreaming, their brain is about as active as it is when they’re awake. So there’s a tremendous amount of neural processing going on in the dream state. If you wake someone up when they’re dreaming, there’s about an 80% chance that they’ll report the emotion of anxiety. Dreams tend to focus on threat processing. Now, a threat is anything that might hurt you, but it’s more than that, too. A threat is anything that doesn’t fit into your current conceptual scheme. Imagine that you have a theory about the way the world is, and then you act on that theory, and sometimes things work out the way you’d like them to work out, but often they don’t. And every time things work out in a way that isn’t how you would like or how you predicted, that indicates that there’s some more about the world that you have to learn about, and that fact first manifests itself in anxiety. Now, the dream focuses on anxiety, and then it loosens up. It’s the normal conceptual constraints that characterize waking thinking, and it starts to play, in a sense, or hypothesize about how your current categorical structure could be shifted around so that that threat could be accounted for. Okay, now, that means the dream is dealing with things that you need to understand, but you don’t yet understand. So when you wake up and you remember the dream, the dream doesn’t really make sense, because it’s about something you don’t understand. Now, it’s your brain’s best guess at configuring or understanding the unknowable, but it’s like the first layer of a multi-layered process, which eventually would culminate in fully developed thought, maybe over months or maybe over years, or maybe you would never manage it at all. The unknown thing or the threat is just too great to really come to any terms with it whatsoever. Okay, now imagine that you’re dreaming about something, and it produces enough emotion, the threat produces enough emotion not only to produce a very vivid dream, but to wake you up. When you wake up, you remember the dream, and then you go tell someone about it. Well, the dream is about something you don’t yet understand that’s upsetting, and if you tell a bunch of people about it, they’re going to give you all sorts of opinions on the dream, and that’s a way that you can gather more information about the threat. Are we talking about an extreme case, which is known as a nightmare, or perhaps simply a dream which is faintly troubling or puzzling because it’s so abstract? Could you differentiate between the two? Well, I think it’s clearer in the case of nightmares, and often too, because nightmares tend to have archetypal themes. You know, people, for example, are often threatened by monsters in nightmares, and a monster is a chimera that’s made up of the different parts of frightening things. A dragon is a chimera, for example, because it’s made out of reptilian parts, and it also includes the idea of fire and transformation. So a nightmare is a dream that tends to use archetypal imagery to conceptualize a fairly powerful threat, and if you recount a nightmare to a person with no specific training, they’re going to have some opinion about it, and their opinion might be useful in terms of information gathering. But if you recount a dream to someone who’s psychologically trained and who’s also symbolically trained and who has great depth of knowledge with regards to the structure of religious thinking and comparative literature, the light that they’re going to shed on your dream is much brighter and more profound. And sometimes a dream interpretation can offer the person who’s had the dream a leap forward in knowledge that might have taken them five or six years to conceptualize by themselves. An insight, you might say, that they wouldn’t ordinarily have had, because the person who’s the expert who’s had the dream recounted to them knows and says, ah, yes, I know of that place that they say they’ve been to, that experience they’ve had, that symbol and its meaning, and above all, what it feels like, because surely it is… Some people say that, me included, that one way to interpret a dream when you wake up is to just, like you would taste a sip of wine, just hold the flavor and hold the feeling. What does it feel like? What feels the same in your real life? And that’s what the dream’s trying to tell you with a collage of symbols and memories as well that it’s drawn on in recent conscious experience to try and put it together. Hence the dream can be very abstract. Would you say that’s the case sometimes? Well, I think there’s two things about your comments that are really worth highlighting. The first is the categories that a dream uses are generally based on emotional similarity rather than logical similarity. So a dream, for example, might represent fear or the fear of something unknown by using a juxtaposition of a variety of images of frightening things. So imagine that in the dream world the basic rule is all things that produce the same emotion are the same thing. And so your description of a dream interpretation process that relies on identifying similarities in emotional state gets right to the core of how dream thought works. Now, secondarily, I also believe that if you are able to help someone construct a dream interpretation that fits, they’re also able to feel that it fits. It clicks or it makes sense or it’s like the punchline of a joke in some way. They can tell that the interpretation has put some missing pieces of the puzzle into place. And I think it’s important to rely on that as an indicator of whether the interpretation is actually derived from the dream or sort of just a theoretical imposition on its structure. Now, we can go underneath that too. And I mentioned already that basic categories are more action-oriented than object-oriented. So basic categories, the basic categories of the human mind are categories to do things with. Well, by the same token, they’re also motivational and emotional categories. So the primordial mind, like the animal mind, thinks sort of axiomatically that all things that produce the same emotion are the same thing. So there’s things that make you happy or there’s things that make you sad or there’s things that make you anxious. And the fact that all those things share the capacity to evoke that emotion speaks of some essential identity between them. Now, the identity is in relationship to the experiencer and not necessarily with regards to similarity between the objects. But it’s still how we naturally think. And it’s certainly how mythology thinks and it’s how drama thinks and how religion thinks. We’ve lost sight of that in part because we’ve become scientifically trained to some degree. And we tend to believe that the real categories of the world are objective. And that just strikes me as it’s wrong. There’s something about it that’s wrong. And it’s wrong because we have to act. Sure. There’s something missing there. Maybe we’ve lost it along the way. Going back to emotional reactions, people call them knee-jerk response, for instance. If you take the base emotions, surely one could go way, way back to the dawn of our beginnings when we came down from the trees and moved through the forest out onto the plains, hunter-gatherers. And animals do share this with us because the everyday dog and cat does have emotions. Are emotions born out of originally just pure instinct? Is this where emotions came from, do you think? Because instinct causes reaction. You have the old adage of fight or flight, for instance, depending on what you make a decision to do. Okay. So let’s make a conceptual definition here so that we agree on the terminology. Let’s say that motivations are states of being that indicate a goal, that are indicative of a goal. So, for example, if you get hungry, I would say that’s a motivational state rather than an emotional state. And it’s a motivational state that sets the acquisition and ingestion of food as the goal. And so there’s a variety of motivational states. Hunger, thirst, sexual desire, aggression, especially defensive aggression, predatory aggression, and the desire to eliminate, essentially, the desire to play. Those are all motivational states. And then there’s emotional states, and the primary emotional states are positive and negative. And positive emotional states are experienced when you’re moving towards a desired goal. And negative emotional states occur when the goal becomes uncertain or the pursuit is somehow frustrated or interfered with. Okay. Now you asked about instincts. Well, I would say both motivations and emotions are instincts. They’re very, very archaic. If you think about the positive and negative emotions as being approach versus withdrawal, animals going all the way back to single-celled organisms have approach versus withdrawal systems. So they’re unbelievably archaic. They go way back before we split evolutionarily from our chimpanzee-like ancestors. So they are instincts, and they’re very deep. And the fact that those instincts exist has all sorts of strange, and that they’re evolutionary-based, has all sorts of strange implications. So, for example, you can understand a dog and communicate with a dog because the dog shares motivational and emotional structure with you to a great degree. It’s a pack animal. It knows about dominance. It knows about dominant striving. It feels anxiety and pain, and it knows how to play, and it likes to play. There’s a lot about a human being and a dog that are the same, which is why we can live together. But you can go way down the evolutionary chain. So, say, if you go all the way down to lobsters, well, lobsters know about dominance hierarchies, and they have approach and withdrawal systems. And the lobster nervous system, which is very primitive compared to the human nervous system, is so similar to ours that you can give lobsters antidepressants, and it stops them from feeling hurt after they’ve been defeated in a physical dominance dispute. Is that right? Yeah, it’s absolutely amazing. So, typically, if two lobsters are in a dominance dispute and one loses, it will withdraw, and then it’ll… it kind of folds its body up. It goes into a depressed-like crouch, whereas the winner will expand his body and look bigger. Okay, and when the lobster is defeated, it won’t fight with any other lobster for at least 20 minutes, even one that it had defeated before. But if you give it antidepressants in the aftermath of its defeat, it doesn’t contract, plus it’ll fight right away. It just… well, it just shows you… the idea of evolutionarily determined instincts, in my opinion, is not a theory at all. It’s an absolutely self-evident fact. And it manifests itself in all sorts of strange ways. So, for example, we know with chimpanzees, chimpanzees basically go to war. They’re wired up to regard chimpanzee conspecifics, who aren’t in their tribe, as something to react against with fear and hostility. And if a wandering group of chimpanzees, say numbering three or four, at the periphery of their territory, comes across an isolated individual or two from another group, they’ll tear them into shreds. And that primordial response to the stranger sheds substantial light on how it is that human beings demonize and then persecute their so-called enemies. So we’ve still retained this ability to objectify a target for our resentment, our hatred, and our fear as well. And that can be demonization, as you say. Is that correct? Well, part of it… you can break it up into two aspects, I think. And this is something I go into great detail about in Maps of Meaning. In some sense, this is what the book is about, because I was interested in territoriality and cruelty. And now, animals are territorial. And if another animal of the same species trespasses onto a complex animal’s territory, there’ll be a fight. And I think that’s really understandable, because animals need territory. And human beings are clearly territorial. We’re territorial about our actual physical space, and we’re also territorial about our ideological or cultural space. And it’s because we need to inhabit a physical territory, and we need to inhabit an ideological territory. And we react to challenges to the integrity of our territory with fear and with defensive aggression. And I think that can be understood quite appropriately using analogues from animal behavior and animal neurophysiology. But you talked about resentment and hatred. Well, those emotions, I think, are much more specifically human. There’s lots of examples from 20th century history of the persecution of enemies going far beyond what was merely needed to ensure territorial integrity. Examples, of course, of that sort of behavior abound in the Holocaust literature, where the Nazis went out of their way not only to eradicate the Jews and the Gypsies and so forth, but to torment them and torture them and crush them in ways that weren’t even in the best interests of the persecutor. And that’s a lot more difficult to understand. Sure. I mean, he had the ability to be able to conceptually dehumanize them, to treat them as no better than animals, or Unzimenshin, as they called them. But not forgetting that there were earlier examples before. I mean, the Holocaust in terms of numbers, sure, and its scale and its cold bloodedness. But if we go back to times of, say, one of the earlier ones, tyrants that I thought were horrific was Vlad the Impaler, who used to enjoy sitting, eating his breakfast and having his victims impaled before him. Now that’s psychopathic, really. Is there a difference between that and, say, the crimes of the Nazis? Well, I don’t think there’s a particular difference between that and the crimes of the Nazis. And I also think that kind of behavior is far more normative than anybody ever likes to think. I mean, in modern times the Holocaust has sort of become archetypal of totalitarian evil, more than just brutality. But my sense, after having researched this for a lengthy period of time, is that the behavior that characterized people who were involved in the Holocaust was essentially normative. And even in 20th century history, the numbers involved in the Holocaust per se aren’t of any order of magnitude. They’re not special. They’re not immense by any stretch of the imagination. Solzhenitsyn estimated that Stalin’s brutality killed something in the neighborhood of 60 million people. And there’s estimates from Mao that he killed 100 million people. And in Cambodia, we know that at least 4 million people died. With the Khmer Rouge, yes. So, I mean, the Holocaust is the prime exemplar of that kind of behavior. But it typified the 20th century. And as you already pointed out, it’s not like it arose in the 20th century. It’s part of our nature. But what about the difference between someone who would be a concentration camp guard who would put these poor victims into the gas chamber, or the guy who pressed the release button on the first atomic bomb from that aircraft that he knew would slaughter thousands or hundreds of thousands of people? Because both those two people believed in something. Is this where it really boils down to the difference between good and evil? I think people use their claim that they believe in something to… Look, people will protect what they believe using the same mechanisms that they’ll protect territory. So, for example, if you own your house and someone walks into it at night under English common law, you have the right to say, leave. And then you have the right to say, leave, I have a gun. And then you have the right to say, leave, I have a gun, and fire a warning shot. And then if they don’t leave, you have the right to shoot them, and you can’t be prosecuted for that. And everyone would say, well, you were within your rights because you were protecting your territory. So I think people have a right to protect their territory, and they have a right to protect their ideological territory. And there’s rules of engagement that could govern disputes of that nature. But there’s other sorts of acts and many of those characterized behavior in the concentration camps in the Nazi era that can’t be explained by mere territoriality. And that’s when it’s necessary, as far as I’m concerned, to bring in conceptions derived from mythology like the difference between good and evil. And I think that you can define evil. And evil is an act that is designed to produce a negative outcome for everyone who’s involved. That includes the victim and the perpetrator. Sure, but where does evil come from in your concept of this, Professor Peterson? Well, this is another reason why it’s very useful to look at mythology. Because if you look at the first few chapters in Genesis, there’s a very clear story. So let me tell you one of the stories. It’s really worth knowing. Okay, so as far as I’m concerned, when Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their eyes open. And the first thing that happens is that they notice that they’re naked. Okay, so what does that mean? It means they’re illuminated with regards to their own vulnerable nature. Because to be naked and to be naked is a very clear story. It means they’re illuminated with regards to their own vulnerable nature. Because to be naked and to know you’re naked is to be exposed and vulnerable and to know it. And often people, for example, will dream that they’ve been stripped naked in front of a crowd. It means their material vulnerability is exposed for everyone to see. Okay, the first thing Adam and Eve do once they discover that they’re naked is to close themselves. They cover themselves up. And human beings are the only creatures that wear clothes. And clothes separate our vulnerability from the natural and social worlds. They’re protective in reality and they’re protective symbolically. Alright, the next thing that happens is that God comes walking through the garden in the morning. And he looks for Adam. And Adam is hiding behind a bush. And God says, Adam, where are you? I’m used to walking with you. And Adam says, I’m too afraid to come out because I found out that I’m naked. And God says, who told you that you were naked? And Adam blames the woman. Okay, so then you think, well why would Adam hide from God? Alright, so imagine God symbolizes, that’s a good question. He symbolizes transcendent totality. And this story indicates that at some point in human history, there was an unbroken relationship between the transcendent totality and the individual. But when the individual became self-conscious, that totality was threatened. So why does Adam hide? Well, he knows he’s naked and vulnerable. So he hides from the demands of destiny. He hides from what’s best in himself. Because he looks at himself and thinks, I’m nothing. I’m weak. I can be easily hurt. And therefore, when God calls, I have to hide. Well, the next thing that happens is that Adam and Eve are thrown out of paradise. And God says, well, life is going to be difficult now. Okay, so that sets the issue up. The next chapter starts with the birth of Cain and Abel. Now, Cain and Abel are the first two humans born in history. Because everything that happens in the Garden of Eden is pre-historical. Human history starts with the fall of man, the rise of self-consciousness. And Cain and Abel are the first two humans. And they’re symbolic of two attitudes towards the revelation of vulnerability. Now, Abel is a shepherd. And Cain raises vegetables. And they’re both required to make sacrifices to God. Okay. Now, why would you make a sacrifice? Well, it’s an archaic idea. You burn something, smoke rises up to heaven, God’s in heaven, and he can judge the quality of your sacrifice by evaluating the smoke. Well, that’s a very archaic idea. And what could a modern person do with that? Well, a modern person could give these archaic people some credit first. So let’s say, why is God in heaven? Well, it’s because when you look at the sky at night, it fills you with awe. You see an unlimited expanse of being. And that’s the closest you get to directly experiencing the unnameable totality. Okay. Why should you make sacrifices to God? Why would he be pleased with sacrifices? Well, I would say, you already know that. Because if I asked you, well, what sacrifices have you made to make things better in your life, no doubt you could immediately tell me. Now, archaic people had to act that out because they didn’t really have the philosophical conceptions in verbalizable form. But they still had an intuition that it was necessary to make the right sacrifice in order to maintain an appropriate relationship with the totality of being. Okay. So Abel makes some sacrifices and Cain makes some sacrifices. Now, Abel takes the best things he has and offers them to God. So they’re the firstborn of his flock and the choices, cuts of meat. When Abel’s called on to make a sacrifice, he doesn’t hold anything back. He puts himself on the line and he sacrifices courageously and clearly. And Cain, by contrast, he brings in some ratty little, you know, wrinkly old vegetables and sacrifices those. So God smiles on Abel’s sacrifices and frowns on Cain’s. So what does that mean? Well, Abel’s making the right sacrifices. So everyone likes him. His enterprises flourish. He has good intimate relationships. He produces a thriving family because he makes the right decisions. And Cain, on the other hand, everything goes wrong for him. So this makes him mad, it says in the Old Testament. So this makes him mad, it says in the Old Testament, his countenance falls. What does that mean? He gets bitter and resentful and angry and depressed. He’s mad about how things are turning out. So he goes and he has a little chat with God and he says, look, you know, I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m working myself to the bone. I’m making sacrifices left, right and center. And everything is not turning out for me. Like what gifts? And God says, pay attention here. It’s your problem that things aren’t going well. The monster of sin crouches at your door and you welcome it in. You could reject it. You could do things right. You know exactly what the right thing to do is. Yet you refuse to do it. So all the trouble you’re having is your fault. Don’t come along and blame me. Just get yourself put together properly. Just get yourself put together properly and do things right. And so that’s the end of the conversation. Well, that isn’t what Cain wants to hear. He wants to hear that the world is a miserable place and that the reason that he’s failing is because of the structure of reality. He doesn’t want to hear that it’s his problem. So this just makes him absolutely boiling Matt. And the first thing he does is go and kill Abel. Well, that’s the difference between territoriality and evil. And he wants what Abel has. He even wants to be Abel. But instead he destroys him out of spite and resentment and revenge against the nature of reality. Well, then God gets wind of it and marks Cain. He says, no one kill him. And you might think, well, why? Because it’s God who says an eye for an eye. Well, the next little bit of the story, which is barely there anymore. It’s so edited out explains exactly why Cain wanders away and he gets married and he has a family. But if you mess around with any of Cain’s family, if you annoy them or bother them or make them resentful or angry, they don’t just kill one person. They kill seven. And then those children have children. And if you annoy them, they kill 70. And at the end of that acceleration of revenge oriented killing, God comes along and floods everything. That’s when the story of No on the Ark kicks in. And the story is very clear. It says this. If you act improperly and if you do the things that you know to be wrong, if you don’t make the right sacrifices, your life will not turn out well. You’ll be punished all the time for your foolishness and your weakness, and that will make you resentful, twisted, bitter and murderous. When you act on those motivations because of spite and resentment, you’ll initiate a cataclysm of revenge oriented killings. And if no stop is put to them, that will spread through the entire society and invite the apocalypse. And that’s the second, third major story in Genesis. And it’s exactly right. There’s some very, very strong, would you call it moral teaching there or is it more than that? I mean, whoever wrote that had the insight, didn’t they? It’s moral for sure. But it’s moral in a weird way. It’s more like a description of moral reality than a story that says, well, you should act like this because that would be good. Imagine this story of Cain and Abel. This is a really old story. It’s been around for, we have no idea how long. In written form, it’s been around for several thousand years. It’s undoubtedly part of a larger oral tradition. It was edited by many, many people and told and retold. And all that’s left of that story is what’s intensely memorable because otherwise it wouldn’t have been forgotten. And it just says something blatantly. It says that you can accept your, you can accept the need to make sacrifices in order to keep your life on the right track. Or you can fight against that and act improperly. If you fight against that and act improperly, then you’re going to compromise your relationship with the totality of being. And as soon as you do that, you might as well, essentially you’re living in a hell. If you subject yourself chronically to a hellish existence, that will make you turn your thoughts towards, really towards revenge against existence itself. Well, you know, Stalin was setting himself up to blow up the entire planet. And there’s good evidence from the KGB archives in the late 1950s that he was gearing up with his multiple pre-apocalyptic genocidal practices. He was gearing up enough courage to turn the whole world into a conflagration. Well, this is no trivial matter. And the only stories that I know that have enough profundity to lay out the real seriousness of the issue are these archaic stories. Nothing in modern culture has the requisite profundity. Now we’re just pausing for some exciting news about astriamagazine.com. Stay with us. By the way, don’t forget to grab your own copy of our fascinating 40-page Astria Magazine. Just visit our magazine webpage at www.astriamagazine.com and download it for hours of fascinating enjoyment. And do visit us again soon because astriamagazine.com is full of fresh news, information articles, free audio interviews, your very own copy of the latest issue of Astria Magazine, and also we have a message board if you want to leave your own news or discuss some of the articles with other people from across the internet, www.astriamagazine.com. Well, this is no trivial matter. And the only stories that I know that have enough profundity to lay out the real seriousness of the issue are these archaic stories. Nothing in modern culture has the requisite profundity. Sure. We do have sayings such as, you get out of life what you put into it, and another one that comes to mind is, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. In the East they have their concept and tradition of karma. Yeah, well, karma is a really good example. Because the idea behind karma, it’s very interesting, I think, from a neuropsychological perspective. Because karma is predicated on the idea that it is fundamentally impossible for you to get away with anything. And there’s an idea in Christianity that’s like that too. It’s a little more archaic and more dramatic than the idea of karma. And the idea in Christianity is that all of your actions and motivations are in some manner recorded, and that you’ll be brought to task for them. And modern people look at that, especially when it’s represented metaphorically as, say, a wise old man writing in a book, and they just discount it entirely. But I’ve certainly come to believe, as a consequence of studying what I’ve studied, that it is absolutely impossible for you to get away with anything. Whenever you make a mistake and you know it’s a mistake, you will eventually pay for it. You might not notice that that’s what you’re paying for. Because often the punishment and the crime are so distant in time from one another that the causal connection is virtually impossible to identify. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Now, one of the things I attempted to lay out in Maps of Meaning in some detail was Solzhenitsyn’s insights into the processes that led to the establishment of the Gulag Archipelago prison camps in the Soviet Union, where so many tens of millions of people were killed. It was Solzhenitsyn’s belief, and this is a belief that Jung shared, and as well Eric Neumann, that it was the cumulative sins of the individuals that made up a population that culminated in these absolute totalitarian catastrophes. So just as Cain’s unwillingness to make the appropriate sacrifices in his individual day-to-day life culminated in the degeneration of his entire society and the bringing forth of an apocalypse, so in everyday life, each individual’s moral errors accumulate and manifest themselves at a social level and play themselves out in this immense forum. Now, we don’t like to think that way because no individual likes to feel that their localized foolishness and weakness, conscious foolishness and weakness, reverberates through the entire social structure. But everything that I’ve ever read that was serious with regards to this kind of subject indicated precisely that. I mean even Hannah Arendt, she wrote The Banality of Evil. Well, you know, I think it’s the evil of banality personally, but the architect of the Final Solution was a meek, negligible, resentful non-entity. And what that shows you is just how horrifying it is morally to be a weak, resentful, judgmental non-entity. It’s so catastrophically wrong that under the appropriate conditions, it can endanger the structure of being. Going on to another thesis of yours in Maps of Meaning, you talk about the fact that we’re comfortable with the known, what is known, around which we build all our cultural traditions and from which our myths are propagated. And then this exploration of the new, if you like, and how we can act on that. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Because you’re insinuating, I believe, in your work that in your book that to do so can make one some kind of a it’s some kind of heroic action. You’ve mapped out something whereby we can reach out for what is unknown to explore our potential and our creativity. Is that correct? I think that’s a good summary. I mean, imagine that in life you have some one obvious thing to rely on. An obvious thing you have to rely on is the traditional knowledge and wealth of your culture. It contains most of the knowledge that you have and allows you to make your life as comfortable as it has been made within it. But there are other sources of strength, too, and they’re more subtle. So your culture provides you with what’s known and what’s knowable. But culture has never mapped everything out perfectly. There’s many things that remain to be to be known and many of the things that remain to be known are valuable. And what that means is that if you search after what is yet unknown, you can also derive strength from that. Because that’s the domain in which new discoveries are made. And so if I face you with evidence that you’re wrong about something, which means there’s something that you don’t know that you’re not taking into account, that can frighten you because it shows you that the knowledge structures that you rely on are dangerously incomplete. And that can make you very angry and that can make you very resentful. Or you can say, oh, isn’t that so fascinating? The fact that something isn’t known here means that I could go and discover that. I could voluntarily encounter that and I could derive something new and valuable and I could use that. And the hero in mythology is the person who voluntarily encounters the unknown. And this is an unbelievably old concept. It’s the oldest concept we know that human beings have created. It stems all the way back to the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian creation myth, which is the oldest written document we have. And the Enuma Elish is the story on which the first story in Genesis is based. Now, here’s a way of thinking about things. And this is a mythological way and it’s extremely useful. So forget for a minute the idea that the world is made out of matter and forget that it’s made out of objects. We’ll look at it from a different perspective. We’ll say the world of experience, which is the world you inhabit, is made out of three things. It’s made out of the fact that no matter how much you know, there are going to be phenomena and occurrences that exceed your capacity for comprehension. And that’s always going to be the case. And so we’re going to call that a category. That’s the category of the unknown. And then there are always going to be things that you know and understand and that’s part of your tradition. We’re going to call that the known. So wherever you go, wherever you are, there’s a balance between the known and the unknown. And then the third thing is the fact of you. There’s a conscious observer there. And the conscious observer is the place where the known and the unknown interact. That’s the mythological actors. The known, that’s the great father. The unknown, that’s the great mother. And the individual. And the Taoists represent that as yin and yang, or chaos versus order. People think about that as masculine versus feminine, and that gives us a bad interpretation or an insufficient interpretation of Taoist thought. The Taoists say, experience is made of chaos and order, and the proper place to stand is right between them. And you can tell when you’re standing right between chaos and order, because that’s when you feel that things are meaningful. And that means that meaning is the instinct that tells you that you’re standing in the right place. Now, people are vulnerable and they’re afraid because of that, and they can be challenged and hurt, and they can be made angry and murderous. But I would say, well, if you stand between chaos and order properly, your life can become so meaningful that the meaning gives you confidence and power and the ability to overcome your sense of shameful vulnerability. And I would also say, that’s what religious stories are telling you to do. Now, we go back to Genesis. In the beginning, God makes order out of chaos, and that story is based on an older architecture derived from the Enuma Elish. In the Enuma Elish, a god named Marduk cuts up the dragon of chaos and makes the world out of her pieces. Well, the dragon of chaos recurs as a mythological motif frequently. Generally, in the guise of Leviathan, say. And Yahuwah is envisioned as the deity that derives order, habitable order, from chaos. And immediately after Yahuwah derives habitable order from chaos, he announces, he makes human beings, and then he announces that they are made in his image, male and female, made in his image. Well, we think that means that God is like a human being. But what it really means is that the human being is like God in that the human being has the capacity to make order out of chaos. And when we say that there’s something divine about a person that gives them intrinsic rights, what we mean is, the fact that each human being can make order out of chaos, means that every single person is deserving of a certain kind of respect, even if they’re murderous, even if they’re criminals, even if they’re prostitutes or tax collectors, they’re still embodied with the kind of dignity that only identity with God can provide. And that identity is the capacity to make order out of chaos. And it’s not just a metaphor. What about the people who are of the extreme criminals of whom it said they have no conscience, or their conscience is dead? What’s happened with those sort of individuals? Is it so just very suppressed? Or has it really died? Something in them died, a spark gone out? Well, you know, that’s such a difficult question, you know, because we know, for example, that certain kinds of extreme brain damage can cause a kind of criminal behavior. So, for example, if your prefrontal cortex is damaged, then that can make you impulsive and criminal. And so, from a scientific perspective, I would say, it’s very difficult to judge the culpability of certain people, because they’ve been damaged in some way we don’t really understand. And so the limits on their capacity to choose are compromised. And it’s a situation that has to be judged carefully in each individual case. But then mythologically, I would say what Solzhenitsyn said, and what he said was that in every person, no matter how good, there is a little corner of corruption and evil that still hasn’t been overcome. And then in everyone, no matter how evil and corrupt, there’s a little bit of a little corner of good that’s still a possibility that might be made to manifest itself. And I don’t exactly know how to reconcile those two different viewpoints. You know, and I think I think each of them are right, even though their juxtaposition makes them makes a paradox. Now, so looking at paradoxes like I read about Ted Bundy. You know about Ted Bundy? Go on, tell us. He was a law student in the US, very good looking young man. And he raped and murdered a number of young women. And one of his tricks was to put on a fake cast and to elicit a sympathetic to stop someone, someone young and beautiful who was driving a vehicle to use their sympathy as a means of getting them compromised. He was a terrible person. But I read about his journey downhill, you know, and he said he first started to get involved in violent pornography and that as far as he was concerned, that was what opened the door. And I think that’s a good metaphor. I think that’s a good metaphor. I mean, one of the things you talked about continually when he was attempting to explain what had happened in Nazi Germany was the fact that a person moving, moving downhill to some horrific endpoint, like a concentration camp guards say, makes a little mistake. No, it’s a mistake. Makes a little mistake, a little compromise. And then that puts him in a position where another compromise is more likely. And then that puts him in a position where another compromise is more likely. And 300 compromises later, he’s there’s a great book called Ordinary Men. It’s a study of a police battalion in Poland. And these men started out as normal middle aged policemen, most of them adults before Hitler even came to power. So not victims of Hitlerian propaganda in their maturing phase. They went from perfectly ordinary policemen to men who were taking naked pregnant women out into fields and shooting them behind the head. And the book details their descent into this hellish place step by step. Well, I think that’s how people dissent, you know, it’s step by step. And I believe under most circumstances that every step is conscious, even though the memory of making this step might fade into unconsciousness and the full cataclysmic consequences of each moral error aren’t necessarily evident. So what happens in the case of looking at the individual as opposed to the group consciousness very quickly when someone has what’s known as a nervous breakdown? Is that when they just can’t make order out of anything? They just can’t cope? They just withdraw? Sure. I mean, we could look at that neuropsychologically or we could look at it descriptively. So here’s what happens neuropsychologically. There’s a little brain organ called the hippocampus and the hippocampus helps you know where you are and what you’re doing. And it inhibits a whole array of more primordial emotional structures, particularly the amygdala and the hypothalamus. Now the amygdala is responsible for anxiety and fear and the hypothalamus is responsible for all different kinds of motivation. Now, as long as you know where you are and what you’re doing, which means that when you act, the outcome you desire occurs, because that sort of defines knowing where you are and what you’re doing, then the amygdala and the hypothalamus remain inhibited. Now as soon as things aren’t turning out the way you expect them to, then the amygdala is disinhibited and so is the hypothalamus. And then you get afraid and paralyzed and the hypothalamus starts to produce a stress hormone called cortisol. Now cortisol is in some ways a stimulant. It’ll stimulate exploratory behavior. And in small doses, it’s pretty good for you. But in large doses, it hyper activates your physiology, shuts off your immune system. It compromises your long-term cognitive ability and it’s toxic. It starts to destroy the hippocampus. And as it destroys the hippocampus, the ability of the hippocampus to inhibit your negative emotional responses is increasingly compromised. And that turns into a cycle. And if the cycle gets instantiated with enough intensity, then the entire negative emotional system can get disinhibited. And the knowledge structures start to become demolished. And when people talk about a nervous breakdown, which is usually a post-traumatic stress disorder or chronic repeating depression, that’s basically what they’re talking about. Which is why if you have a conversation with someone who goes through regular bouts of depression, their perception of reality is distorted. They just see everything negative about anything you can think about. Yeah. Well, and what happens is you may imagine, imagine if you’re doing some small task. Oh, let’s say you’re cutting up broccoli for dinner and you, you cut your finger. And I say to you, what is, what is the fact that you cut your finger mean? Here’s some possibilities. It means you should be more careful when you’re cutting broccoli. It means that you’re actually not very careful. The fact that you’re not very careful about cutting broccoli indicates you’re probably not as careful as you should be about most things you do. The fact that you’re not as careful about most things you do, as you should be, is an explanation for why all the things that have gone wrong in your life up to this point have actually gone wrong. People like you, who have had lots of good, of things go wrong and who aren’t sufficiently careful, tend to go downhill over time. Plus they’re very, not very good people. Maybe they shouldn’t even be around. Okay. That’s how a depressed person thinks. Sure. That’s quite a wide scale there, isn’t it? Well, what happens is that their ability to inhibit the spread of the meaning of the negative event is completely compromised. Because their nervous system has, there’s supposed to be a threshold for the transmission of negative information across different levels of abstraction. You’re supposed to be somewhat resistant to that spread. It could easily be true that the fact that you cut yourself is an indication that you’re not living your life properly. But it isn’t necessarily the first conclusion that you should leap to. But for a depressed person, that’s often inevitable. They can’t help it. Yes, they’re on a sort of downward slope, a slippery slope. And they’re overwhelmed by chaos. That’s the mythological explanation. Yes. Now, you were just at a major conference on consciousness in Arizona, I gather. Now, what new ideas did you see presented in this field that you found interesting at that conference? Well, it’s funny, you know, this conference, I’ve been to that conference several times. And I really think the last time I went, I had I learned things that were more directly relevant. So let me give you let me give you an example of that instead. The researcher named Volin Weider, who has been investigating the mechanisms of action of hallucinogenic drugs, hallucinogenic drugs have been used, as you know, throughout history to produce mystical experiences of one form or another. And Volin Weider actually provided an explanation of why that might be. And that was very interesting to me. So your your senses are each somewhat independent systems. But the the content of your sensory experience is unified in a brain area called the thalamus. Now, so imagine your your sight and your vision and your touch and your sense of your body and space are all integrated in the thalamus. But there’s a lot of information coming in from all of your senses. OK, now imagine that your prefrontal cortex, which is a relatively new part of the brain, it sets up a plan what you’re going to do next. And it tells the hypothalamus only let information relevant to the plan through into consciousness. So, for example, if you walk into the kitchen and you’re going to make yourself something to eat, you’re not going to notice the floor and you’re not going to notice the paint on the ceiling. You’re going to notice the refrigerator and the stove and the few implements that you need to undertake the task related to eating. So the prefrontal cortex gates the thalamus. Now, there’s a million things you could pay attention to in the kitchen, because the kitchen is a very complex visual environment. If you take a hallucinogenic drug, it inhibits the prefrontal cortex’s capacity to gate the thalamus. And all sorts of sensory information flows through. Now, most of the time, when you look at the world, you hardly see any of it. You filter it out. Yes, exactly. Your brain is exactly as Elders Huxley proposed. Your brain is actually a sequence of extremely complex filtering mechanisms. And most of what’s out there is eliminated. Well, following on Vollenweider, I would say that the ground of mystical experience is the partial apprehension of the richness of potential experience beyond what’s expected. So when you look at the world, what you see is mostly relevant to your current plan and shaped to a tremendous degree by your memory. And if those systems are inhibited or shut down in some way and you have the opportunity to apprehend what’s actually there, the sensation it produces, which is the disinhibition of certain kinds of emotion, is very much associated with what people describe as awe. Now, I would say, too, here’s something interesting in that regard. You know, people say, people ask themselves, for example, do you believe in God? I would say that’s actually a nonsensical question. I would say whether or not you believe in God, you’re more or less stuck with him. He’s there whether you believe it or not. And it has nothing to do with belief. And I’ll tell you why. It’s actually straightforward. OK, so let’s go back to the ancient Israelis, Israelites. Now, they had some rules. They believed that there was a unity behind everything and that unity was unnameable. So it was against the rules to speak the name of God. Why? Well, because as soon as you speak the name of something, you categorize it. And as soon as it’s categorizable and understandable, then it’s not the totality. It’s something you’ve parceled off and made into a concept. The totality of being is beyond all conceptualization. OK, so then you might ask yourself, well, is there a totality of being? Well, the answer to that is, well, obviously, because everything there is sums up to one totality. Well, what’s the nature of that totality? Well, it’s unutterable. You can’t say it’s too complex. It’s too rich. It’s not within human ability to grasp. Is it there? Well, it’s there just like a room contains the objects in the room. It’s there for sure. OK, so there is a totality that’s unnameable. The next question would be, well, do you have a relationship with it? Well, the answer to that is, of course you have a relationship with it because every part has a relationship to the whole. Because you’re alive, basically. Well, and you’re inside the totality. Now, then you might ask, well, what’s the nature of your relationship with that totality? And I would say, well, you tell me. It’s easy to know. Is your life rich and meaningful and worthy of sustaining from your own perspective? Do you believe that life is worthwhile? Do you live it in a manner that makes it worthwhile? And if the answer to that is yes, then I would say, well, you have the proper relationship with the totality. And if the answer is no, you doubt the value of life, you’re hostile and resentful, you’re bored, you’re afraid, you’re hurt, well, then there’s something wrong with your relationship with the totality. Well, what’s so complicated about that? It’s self-evident and it’s stunning to me that it’s the subject of so much constant dispute. Now, you might object, well, you have a relationship with the totality, but it’s not a personal relationship, which is what the ancient Israelites claimed and, of course, what the modern Protestants claim even more dramatically. And I would say, well, you could be right, but let’s consider it an experiment. Here’s the experiment. Try to establish a personal relationship with this totality. And here’s the criteria. I will say that whenever you’re doing something that’s intensely meaningful, then you’ve established a personal relationship with this totality. And if all you ever did were things that were intensely personally meaningful, well, you’d live an ideal life, and you wouldn’t be afraid of death, and you wouldn’t become bitter and resentful. And it’s also doable, I think, with every choice you make. You decide whether you’re going to do that or not. It’s difficult to do meaningful things. Everybody doesn’t always agree with them. They’re kind of idiosyncratic. There’s no necessary reason that you’ll be rewarded by the culture with material success if you do meaningful things. So it’s a shot in the dark. It’s a leap of faith. But it’s right within your grasp. You can do it just by deciding to. Well, what I learned from writing Maps of Meaning was that the fate of the world literally depends on the choice that each individual makes with regards to their relationship to the totality of being. And that’s that. And that’s the central message of profound religious systems. It says there’s more to you than you think, a lot more. There’s more for evil, way more than you think. And there’s way more for good. And whether you know it or not, you’re always choosing between those two. And whether you know it or not, the fate of being itself rests on your choice. Well, who the hell wants to believe that? Exactly. It’s too weighty. Well, I don’t care if it’s weighty or not. When you’re trying to investigate the reasons behind something like the Holocaust, things get weighty very rapidly. What about 9-11, the shock of people seeing that unfold on their TV screens or people who were there? Now, that was a group experience. It wasn’t an individual, just purely individual experience. How do you think we handled that? Well, I think you can think of two recent events in an illuminating way. 9-11 would be one and the flooding of New Orleans would be another. So with regards to 9-11, the most interesting thing to note about people’s responses to that catastrophe was their unconscious need for repetition. I mean, everyone I know watched the trade towers fall 50 times or 100 times in shock, unable not to watch. And I think the reason that that’s so illuminating is because it shows you how complicated it is to see what you don’t understand. So mythologically speaking, the fall of the towers was equivalent both to the death of the king and to the reemergence of chaos. And when the king dies and chaos reemerges, it’s very difficult to see what’s there. And I’m not speaking metaphorically precisely. People wouldn’t have had to watch the towers fall over and over if they could see them fall. And on a trivial level, a building collapsed. But what the events that characterized 9-11 were far more than merely a building falling. When the event happened, no one knew what fell. No one knew if the financial system fell. No one knew if the economic system fell. No one knew if the world order had collapsed. And everyone watching those buildings fall was trying to perceive all those other levels of reality at the same time. Well, that’s really, really complicated. Well, and then Bush offered people an easy out and a prepared way out. He said, well, the people who did this were evil. And perhaps they were. The people who did this were evil. We’re good. There should be a war. Now, as far as I’m concerned, well, that’s a mythological explanation. And it’s very easy for people to instantly put forth a mythological explanation when chaos makes itself manifest. Well, of course, the problem with our response to 9-11 was that almost every bit of it was a lie. We know that the American government utilized the events of 9-11 to justify an invasion on Iraq that had been planned at least 10 years before. The historical documentation of that is available from the people who did the planning. They’re still part of Bush’s government. So you asked about our response. Well, you can’t. I mean, I think when Bush first went into Iraq, people had a legitimate debate about what should be done about tyrants like Saddam Hussein. Because he was obviously a horrible person and his sons were even worse. But the idea that a catastrophe consisting of the reemergence of chaos could be met by dissimulation and conscious lies and that that would work out successfully. Well, that’s I would say that’s willfully blind, corrupt and naive all at the same time. And that’s what characterized our response. Right. Wasn’t that response planned by a group who were disciples or followers of a philosopher called Strauss? Is that correct? Yes, that’s right. That’s right. And they had put a manifesto together that back in the mid 1990s. I mean, the whole had written Clinton, you know, expressing their their need to invade Iraq, which which I don’t really think is the issue. Like I said, because Saddam Hussein was a terrible person. And it isn’t clear that the international community exactly knows what to do with barbaric dictators. The problem wasn’t necessarily the idea that going after Saddam Hussein was justified. The problem was that an event that had absolutely nothing to do with him was utilized in an absolutely deceitful manner by people who had a pre-existent agenda to deceive their entire populace and to justify and to use that as justification for doing something that they had other reasons for doing. Then they can win the if it seems they can win the justification for judging. It seems that you have to be a victor in order to be able to judge, as in Nuremberg, the victors judged. They judged Hussein. You know, they put him on trial. But otherwise, as you said, the world community, you don’t seem to know what to do otherwise with it seems. Well, it’s a complicated problem, right? I mean, it’s part of the problem we’re talking about is what’s the appropriate response to the manifestation of evil? Well, I would say, generally speaking, evil is something best corralled in your own life. And once you’ve more or less corralled it in your own life, if you have in fact managed that, because that is a very, very difficult thing to do, well, then maybe you have something to say about it on a social level. But we people put the cart before the horse, and many, many individuals who are unable to make peace in their own house are perfectly willing to go out and try to make peace in the world. Well, there’s more brisk and ideology in that than there is intelligence and and and caution. Unless there’s something else you want to add about either maps of meaning, Jordan, or whether you want to talk more about new ideas you’re working on? Well, there’s just just one thing I wanted to have I mentioned 9 11 and New Orleans. Yes. Well, New Orleans is another example of the death of the king and the reemergence of chaos being the same thing. The chaos in Genesis is watery, and it’s watery chaos that causes floods. And the flood that God caused with regards to Noah was the reemergence of chaos because of a corrupt social order. The same thing happened in New Orleans. On the one hand, it was a storm. So the storm caused the flooding. But on the other hand, had the levees been four feet higher, there wouldn’t have been a catastrophe. So the fact that there was a flood in New Orleans is as much evidence that order was insufficient to hold chaos back as it is evidence that the chaotic hand of God is perfectly capable of causing natural disasters. There was too much disorder there on the side of order. Exactly. There was too much. And it was not just disorder, but corruption. Right. So it’s archaic cultural systems, the levees, they were too old and starting to deteriorate. So there’s a deteriorate of their own accord. Plus, the deterioration is sped along by the fact that the people who are putatively in charge of them aren’t taking the responsibilities seriously. On a similar basis, it’s not about flooding, but that reminds me in Australia on the certain beaches, there have been shark attacks where they have shark fences out in the sea which have not been repaired. And there are holes in the fences. So sharks are getting through and attacking surfers. It’s exactly the same concept. Right. And in fact, I would say the reason that example popped into your mind is because of the mythological equivalence. You see, because the underwater creature, the terrible human devouring underwater creature, is a prime mythological representation of chaos. So for example, Tiamat in the Enuma Elish, who’s basically the model for the Leviathan, is an underwater dragon, an underwater devouring dragon, and she’s the prime symbol of chaos. And so I would say your example was brought to mind by the mythological equivalent between the two, between the two occurrences. Well, Professor Peterson, it’s been a great pleasure hearing you discuss your ideas and your work, Maps of Meaning. Could you please tell us where this book is available? Well, I would say the simplest place to find it is at Amazon. If you go to my website, which is mapsofmeaning.com, there are lectures on the book, televised by Canadian Public Television, and links to places the book can be purchased. So that’s probably the simplest thing to do. Okay. And what’s your next project? What are you working on? Are you writing some more or are you concentrating on your lecturing or are you touring or what’s happening now? Well, I’ve written recently a few papers on the nature of self-deception, which is a very paradoxical concept. Self-deception implies that, at least in its classical formulations, that a person knows something and doesn’t know something at the same time, which is problematic conceptually for a variety of reasons. I’ve been trying to crack that problem. I’ve also been attempting to recast our models of neuropsychological functioning, starting from the presupposition that what the mind encounters is much more properly conceptualized as an information-rich matrix of relationships than it is conceptualized as a place of material objects. And that’s following, to some degree, the ideas of the physicist Wheeler, who was a student of Niels Bohr, I believe, who has hypothesized that the fundamental elements of matter are more like bits, more like computer bits of information than they are like something classically material. Could this explain how they conducted experiments with quarks, as it is in quantum physics, where the observer actually causes the event to happen? Well, it does seem related to that in some manner, and I believe that that idea is linked to the notion I described earlier about the capacity of human consciousness to make order out of chaos. Like, I personally believe, and this is partly because of what I’ve learned from reading religious mythology, that human consciousness realizes the world in some non-metaphorical sense. Like, I’m not a materialist, and I truly believe that if human consciousness did not exist, the idea that there would be existence is in some manner wrong. I think existence is dependent on consciousness, and I’ve been trying to work out the implications of that idea in a scientifically rigorous manner, and that constitutes partly what I’ve been writing about recently. That sounds very, very interesting, and of course we’ll take for granted if you or I can sit here and talk about, let’s talk about, for instance, think of the First World War, okay? And we think that this happened, that happened, etc. You can think about the Great Depression. Neither you nor I were alive at the time, yeah? Right. But we take it for granted that it happened. Yeah. Now, if you go from now, today, and you go forward a hundred years, neither you nor I will be alive then. But that shouldn’t worry us, should it? Well, I would say that the fact of our being would still be embedded in the matrix of reality. Right. Because things fold up in a way. The past folds up and is still present in the present. And the future is not yet unfolded. It’s implicit in the present. And I would say just as none of your deeds, just as you cannot escape from the consequences of any of your deeds, the record of your being and the nature of that being is embedded in the fabric of reality permanently. Because possibly what we conceive of as a timeline is a man-made abstraction. Maybe there is no such thing as time. Well, there is for us. But what that means in some ultimate sense is obviously not conceptually accessible to us. Indeed. I think that’s part of the reason why it’s possible to realize that the implications of your behavior and your conceptions reverberate far past you. Things are not necessarily precisely what they seem. Like ripples on a pond. Right. Professor Jordan Peterson, it has been marvelous discussing these subjects with you and listening to your views. I’m sure our listeners will find this most interesting. And on behalf of all the staff here at AstriaMagazine.com and Astria Web Radio, I’d like to extend our thanks. And we hope that you’d be able to submit an article for us at some stage if you wish for our magazine in the due course of time. And maybe you’d like to come back for another discussion at some point in the future. But on behalf of everyone here, thank you very much for this most fascinating discussion. Thanks very much for the opportunity. Thank you, Professor Jordan Peterson, author of Maps of Meaning. Well, that brings us to the end of this show. Thanks for listening. 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