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Music Applause Okay, well I thought this time that I would actually cover some of the biblical stories Laughter So and hopefully a number of them As I said last time I’m going to go through this Well as fast as I am able to I want to do it as completed job as possible and of course the probability That I’ll get through the entire Bible is very low But we’ll get through a lot of the major stories in the beginning of it, and that’s a good start and then you know Assuming that this all goes well, then maybe I’ll try to do the same thing again either in the fall or next year so Assuming I’m that everything is still working out properly next year. It’s a long ways away all right, so I Guess we’ll start So last week I talked to you about a line in the New Testament That was from John and it was a line that was designed to parallel the opening of Genesis And it’s it’s a really important line, and I thought I would re-emphasize it because The Bible is a book that’s been written Forward and backwards in time in some sense like most books because if you write a book of course when you get to the end If you’re the writer you can adjust the beginning and so on so it has this odd It has this appearance of linearity, but it really it isn’t linear. It’s like your God in some sense standing outside of time that’s your book and you can play with time anywhere along it and The people who put the book together or the books together Took full advantage of that and and and that makes the story It gives the story odd parallels in in many many places in a very large number of places And this is one of the major parallels at least from the perspective of the Christian interpretation of the Bible Which of course includes the New Testament, and so there’s this strange idea that Christ was the same Factor or force that God used at the beginning of time to speak Habitable order into being and that’s a very very strange idea You know it’s not it’s not something that can be just easily dismissed as superstition Partly because it’s so strange. It doesn’t it doesn’t even fit the definition of like a superstitious belief It’s it’s a dreamlike belief in some sense and what I what I see many of the ideas in in the Bible as Is is these dreamlike ideas that that under not lie our normative cognition and that? constitute the ground from which are more articulate articulated and and Explicit ideas have emerged and this one’s so complicated this idea is so complicated that it’s still mostly embedded in dreamlike form But it seems to have something to do with the primacy of consciousness, and this is one of the biggest issues Regarding the structure of reality as far as I can tell because everyone from physicists to neurobiologists debates this there’s there’s The the the stumbling block for a purely objective view of the world seems to me to be consciousness and Consciousness has all sorts of strange properties for example It isn’t obvious what constitutes time or at least duration in the absence of consciousness And it isn’t also easy to understand what constitutes being in the absence of consciousness Because it seems to be the case well if a movie is running, and there’s no one to watch it I know it sounds like the tree in the forest idea But it’s it’s it’s not that idea at all if a movie is watching is running and no one’s watching it in what sense is Can you say that there’s even a movie running because the movie seems to be the experience of the movie Not the objective elements of the movie, and there’s something about the world At least insofar as we’re in it as human beings That is dependent on conscious experience of the world now of course you can take consciousness out of the world and say well if None of us were here if there was no such thing as consciousness Then the cosmos would continue running the way it is running But of course it depends on what exactly you mean by the cosmos when you make a statement like that because there’s something about the subjective experience of reality that gives it reality or at least that’s one way of looking at it and since we’re all pretty Enamored of our own consciousnesses although they’re painful because they define our being it’s not unreasonable to give Consciousness a kind of metaphysical primacy now, and it’s deeper than that you know it’s deeper idea than that because there are physicists And they’re not trivial physicists like like John Wheeler who believes that in some sense consciousness plays a constitutive role in Transforming the chaotic potential of being into the actuality of being he actually has a very strong sense of being Actuality of being he actually thinks about it He’s not alive anymore, but he actually thought about it as as playing a constitutive role you know and then from the Neurobiological perspective or from the scientific perspective it’s like consciousness is not something we understand I don’t think we understand it at all with something. We can’t get a handle on with our Fundamental materialist philosophy, and I don’t know why that is it’s quite frustrating if you’re a scientist But it isn’t clear to me that we’ve made any progress whatsoever in understanding consciousness Even though what we’ve been trying to understand it for hundreds of years and even though Psychologists and neurobiologists and so forth have really like put a lot of effort into understanding consciousness from a scientific perspective in the last 50 years so Anyways, what what it seems to me is the idea that that God used the word to? To extract order out of habitable order out of chaos at the beginning of time Which is roughly the right way of thinking about it seems to me deeply allied with the idea that What it is that we do as human beings is is encounter something like a formless and potential chaos I mean, we’re not omniscient obviously and we can’t just do whatever we want But we encounter a formless and chaotic potential that’s always what we’re grappling with and Somehow we use our consciousness to give that form and this is how people act like if you look at how they regard themselves It’s how they act because you say things to people like well you should live up to your potential When and you make a case that there’s something about a person That’s more than what is that yet could be if only they participated in the process properly and everyone knows what that means And no one acts like a mystery Has been uttered when you say that and you know you can see a situation in your own life That’s full of potential you’re often extremely excited when you encounter something That’s full of potential because what you see is something that could be you see a future beckoning for you That could be if only you interacted with it properly and it activates your nervous system right in a very basic way and we even understand how that happens to the degree that we understand how the nervous system works because The systems that mediate positive emotion which are governed roughly by dopamine by the Neurochemical dopamine and which have their roots way down in the ancient hypothalamus a very very archaic and and fundamental part of the brain it that responds to potential which is the Possibility of accruing something new and valuable it responds to potential with active movement forward and engagement And so we’re engaged in the world as potential and looks like consciousness does that and so there’s this idea that And this is the main idea that I think is being put forth in Genesis 1 It’s something like and you see this in mythology like from from what I’ve been able to gather There’s always three causal elements that make up being at the bottom of world mythology And one is the formless potential that makes up being once it’s interacted with and that’s generally given a feminine nature And and I think that’s because it’s like the source from which all things emerge and rise It’s something like that. It’s more complicated than that But it’s something like that And then there’s some kind of interpretive structure that has to grapple with that formless potential And that’s I think that’s the sort of thing that was alluded to by Emmanuel Kant when when he was Criticizing the notion that all of our information comes from sense data Which would be the pure empirical perspective right because when you encounter the world you encounter it with a cognitive structure That already has shape and so it’s it’s already in you this structure and without that a priori structure You wouldn’t be able to take the formless potential and give it structure And I think that’s something it’s akin in some way to the idea of God the father and I’ll try to develop that idea More it’s it’s the it’s the notion that there’s something in all of us that transcends all of us That’s deeply structural that’s part of this ancient. Well. I would say evolutionary and cultural process that Enables us to grapple with the formless potential and bring forth reality Roughly speaking and then there’s the final element and that element seems to be something like Consciousness itself the consciousness that actually in here’s in the individual so it’s not only that you have a structure It’s that the structure has the capacity for action in the world and it’s like It’s you’re this you’re the spirit that gives the dead structure life It’s something like that and as far as I can tell the trinitarian notion that Characterizes Christianity is something like well formless potential Which has never given a the status of a deity in Christianity and then the notion that there’s an a priori Interpretive structure that’s a consequence of of our ancient existence as as beings it goes back as as far in time as you can go the notion of a structure and then the idea of a Consciousness that that is the is the tool of that structure and that interacts with the world and gives it and gives it Reality and that’s the word as far as I can tell and so the notion is is that there’s a father and that’s the structure And there’s a son that’s transcendent that Characterizes consciousness itself, and that it’s the son the speaking of the son That is the active principle that turns chaos into order and how that’s such a sophisticated Ideas as far as I’m concerned because well there’s something about it That’s at least phenomenologically accurate because you do have an interpretive structure And you couldn’t understand anything without it your very body is an interpretive structure, right? It’s been crafted over. Let’s say three billion years of evolution Without that you wouldn’t be able to perceive anything and it’s taken a lot of death and struggle and tragedy to produce You the thing that’s capable of Encountering this immense chaos that surrounds us and to transform it into habitable order And then there’s the idea too of course that’s deeply embedded in the first chapters of Genesis Which is a staggering idea you know and and certainly not one that’s likely that Human beings were made in the image of God both male and female Were made in the image of God and that’s of course a very difficult thing to understand partly because the God that’s referred to In in those chapters has a kind of polytheistic element Although it’s an element that’s moving rapidly towards a unified monotheism But it’s not also obvious to me why people would come up with that concept because I don’t really think that when we think about each Other we immediately think God like you know the notion that every single human being Regardless of their peculiarities and strangenesses and sins and crimes and all of that has something divine in them that needs to be Regarded with respect and that plays an integral role at least an analogy an analogous role in the creation of habitable order out of chaos that’s a magnificent remarkable crazy idea and yet We developed it and I do firmly believe that it sits at the base of our legal system I think it is the cornerstone of our legal system That’s the the notion that everyone is equal before God which is of course a completely that’s such a strange idea It’s very difficult to understand how anybody could have ever come up with that idea because the manifold differences between people are so so obvious and so evident that you could say the Natural way of viewing someone is or human beings is in this extremely hierarchical manner where some people are contemptible and and and easily brushed off as as pointless and pathological and and without value whatsoever and all the power accrues to a certain tiny you know aristocratic minority at the top But if you look at the way that the idea of the in individual sovereignty developed It’s clear that it unfolded over thousands and perhaps ten thousands of years before it became something firmly fixed in the imagination That each individual had something of transcendent value about them and man I tell you we dispense with that idea at our serious peril And so and if you’re going to take that idea seriously then which you do because you act it out because otherwise you wouldn’t be Law-abiding citizens right you act that idea out. It’s it’s it’s it’s firmly shared by By everyone who acts in a civilized manner the question is why in the world do you? Believe it assuming that you believe what you act out which I think is a really good way of fundamentally defining belief so all right, so So that’s the sort of ideas that there’s this this god of tradition and structure That’s that’s God the father who uses the son which is more of an active force And and primarily something that’s verbal which I also think is extremely interesting because it’s associated not with thought precisely but with speech, and I think the reason for that is is that There’s something to speech that’s more than mere thought and I think part of the reason for that is that speech is a public utterance And at least in in principle speech is something that’s shaped by the existence of of everywhere of everyone else At least across time because when you speak you your speeches is put forward in the world as a causal element, and it’s also subject to criticism and and and cooperation and and mutual shaping and so There’s an idea here to that speech is that that the cognitive processes that bring? Habitable reality out of out of uninhabitable chaos have this collective and public element Which which is part of the reason by the way that I’m an advocate of free speech Let’s say above all because I I don’t think although it is the case for example in the Canadian Bill of Rights That every single right has equal value. That’s the theory It’s an idiotic theory because it’s absolutely impossible for a large set of rights to have absolutely equal standards stances that cannot happen There’s no way that that can ever work, but that is the legal judgment, but I think it’s a huge mistake because Free speech has this well this divine quality. Let’s say that you can’t escape from because it’s the thing that Manufactures everything else you know it’s and so and I do think that The the dream that you could think of as encapsulated in the stories in Genesis is is the dream By which human beings dreamed up the idea that we would now consider Consciousness because you know it took us a long time to figure out the word consciousness It’s not like it’s bloody obvious it who knows how many thousands of years or or? Who knows what struggles we had to undertake to abstract out something like consciousness, and how we had to represent that dramatically say or In a dreamlike fashion before we could actually formulate the term and and localize that to some degree in people it’s very sophisticated so so John Makes the case that well there’s there’s an emanation of God or an element of God The transcendent consciousness, it’s something like that that acts directly and in a sort of living way with the with the underlying Potential of the world and I think that that’s phenomenologically accurate And I do think that that’s the way we regard our lives because you know When you think about it, too We tend to think that what you encounter when you’re looking at the world is the material world But that isn’t how you act you do act as if you’re in a place of potential And also in a place of potential that you can actually transform which is also something extraordinarily strange You know because we do treat each other as if we’re capable of bringing new forms into the world in some permanent manner Right and we treat each other as if we have free choice and free will and perhaps we don’t but it’s certainly the case that societies that are predicated on the idea that we don’t don’t do very well and Societies that are predicated on the idea that we do seem to do a lot better Plus people tend to get very annoyed at you if you treat them like they’re Automatons that lack free will there’s something that people find very I would say constraining Slave like about that even you know that the demand that you don’t have actual Autonomy and even worse that you’re not responsible for your choices It’s an insult to someone to suggest to them that they’re not responsible for their choices You know you usually to do that to someone from a legal perspective you have to argue something like diminished capacity, right? Well, you’re mentally ill or you don’t have the intellectual capacity or or you were or you were addled by some substance Or you had a brain injury or something and that’s why you’re not responsible for your actions otherwise part of the respect that you give to another human being is the assumption that they’re Responsible for their actions and some of that can be well if you do something bad, then you’re responsible for it But part of that too is that if you do something good You’re also responsible for that and that also seems necessary because I mean do you really I? Mean it’s got to be more annoying than than anything else you can imagine to strive Virtuously let’s say to produce something of extreme value and then to be treated as if that was a mere Deterministic outcome and that your your actual choices had nothing to do with that. I mean people find that sort of thing extraordinarily punishing and so I’m willing to You know I mean I know that there are debates about all these things and debates about free will and debates about the nature Of consciousness, but I’m trying to take a clear view look at how people act and how they want to be treated And then to trace it back to these old ideas to see if there’s some if there’s some metaphysical Let’s say metaphysical connection, so All right, so here’s how the here’s how the book opens in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth the earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters now. This is a hard This is a hard What would you call narrative? Section to get a handle on because in order to understand it properly you have to actually look behind it So there are a lot of Pieces of old stories in the Old Testament that Flesh out the meaning of these lines and I can I can give you a quick Overview of it what one of the ideas that lurks underneath these lines Although you can’t tell me because it’s in English you have to look at the original languages and of course I don’t speak the original languages, so I’ve had to use secondary sources too bad for me, but the the the Without form and void and the deep idea you see that’s associated with this notion of endless deep Potential so for example the words that are used to represent without form and void are something like Well one is toe. I’m going to get this partly wrong Tohu wa bohu and another one is tail and it’s important to know this because those words are associated with an early mess earlier Mesopotamian word which is time out and time out was a dragon like creature who represented the salt water and And time out had a husband named Apsu and time out at Apsu were sort of locked together and kind of a sexual embrace And it was that locking together of time out and Apsu and I would say that’s potential and order Something like that or chaos and order they were locked together And it was that union of chaos and order that gave rise in the old Mesopotamian myth which is the enuma elish to the to the to being to the old gods first and then eventually as Creation progressed to human beings themselves, and so there’s this idea lurking underneath this these initial lines that God is akin to that which confronts the unknown and Carves it into pieces and makes the world out of its pieces and the thing that it confronts is something like a Well, it’s something like a predatory reptile or it’s something like a dragon or it’s something like a serpent And I think part of the reason for that and this this is this is a very deep and ancient idea is that This is where it gets so complicated to do the translation is partly That is how human beings created our world like we went out beyond the confines of our safe Spaces let’s say our space our safe spaces defined by by the tree or defined by the fire And we actively voyaged outward to the places that we were afraid of and didn’t understand and and Conquered and encountered things out there like like at like literally animals like mammoths and snakes and predators of all sorts And it was a as a consequence of that active brave engagement with the domain of what we did not understand the terrifying domain of what we did not understand that the world in fact was Generated and that idea lurks deeply inside the the opening lines of of Genesis And it’s a it’s a profound idea in my estimation And I think see I think also that the way our brains are structured And this is something that I’m going to try to develop more today Is that the ancient circuits that our ancestors used to deal with? The space beyond which they had already explored so that would be home territory that so that’s that unknown territory That’s characterized by promise because there are new things out there But also by intense danger right because we’re prey animals especially millions of years ago when we were very young We had to go out there and encounter things that were terribly dangerous And there was a kind of let’s say paternal courage that went along with that And it was that the spirit of paternal courage that enabled the conquering of the unknown And there’s no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the creation of habitable habitable order And the thing is is that as our cognitive faculties have developed to the point where we’re Capable of very high levels of abstraction the underlying biological architecture has remained the same and so I I don’t think that it’s too much to say at all that the the circuits that you That engage you for example when you’re having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you love and so you’re trying to structure the world around you Jointly to create a habitable space that you can both exist within you’re using the same circuits The abstracted version you’re using the same circuits that our archaic ancestors would have used when they went out into the unknown itself to encounter beasts and and and predators and and and Geographical unknowns it’s the same circuit. It’s just that we do it abstractly now instead of concretely But of course it has to be the same circuit because evolutionary Evolutionaries is a very conservative force and what else would it be and this is also why I think it’s so easy for us to demonize those people who are our enemies because Our enemies confront us with what we don’t want to with what we don’t want to see and they and because of that our first response is to use snake circuitry snake detection circuitry on them and that accounts for our capacity almost immediate capacity to demonize and And and there’s a reason for that. It’s not a trivial thing first of all It’s a very fast response and second of all it’s a response that has worked for a very very very long time and so you know one of the variants of the hero and I would consider a variant of the hero Like a fragment of the picture of God is is the heroic warrior who slays the enemy right and of course That’s not precisely a politically correct Representation of the hero in modern times and well in no wonder But it’s still something that you go watch in movies all the time and admire right it’s it’s like this one of the most How many plots are there romance and adventure? That’s about it and most of the adventure? Genre is well. There’s some enemy. That’s lurking in some form It could be human it could be alien and someone rises up to go and confront it and maintain order You know it’s like there’s no getting away from that story And and if you don’t have that in your own life Then you play a video game where that’s happening or you watch a movie where that’s happening or you read a book where that’s happening And it captures you even if you’re atheistic and your only religion is Star Wars You know and and it’s still well really really right it really it still captures your imagination And you act like someone who’s possessed by religious fervor when you line up for three days to be the first one into the theater You know and all the while claiming that you’re atheistic to the core. It’s like Okay, so this this Without form and void is this chaotic? And it’s a hard thing to it’s a hard thing to get a grip on you know what exactly this means But I can give you it another kind of example of how you would experience the formless chaos of Potential in your own lives and and even how the order that you currently inhabit can dissolve into that and you know in Dante’s Inferno when he outlined the levels of hell So Dante was trying to get to the bottom of what constituted evil really in this representation So it’s a work of psychology, and he was thinking well there there are various ways to behave Reprehensibly, but there’s a hierarchy of reprehensible behavior, and there’s something absolutely the worst at the bottom and and And Dante believed that it was betrayal, and and I think that’s right because you know one of the things that enables Long-term cooperation peaceful cooperation between people is trust and I would also say that trust is the fundamental natural resource There’s been some very good books written on the economic utility of trust for example and societies where the default economic Presupposition between trading partners is trust tend to be rich even if they don’t have any natural resources And you can see that for example with what happened with eBay which I think was a kind of miracle because what should have happened With eBay was that you sent me junk, and I sent you a check that bounced right and that was the end of eBay but Right right exactly, but that isn’t what happened like the default the default Transaction on eBay was so honest that the brokers You could hire brokers to begin with I can’t remember what they were called exactly But you could pay someone a fee so that they would guarantee the transaction So you know you wouldn’t send me junk, and I’d actually send you a payment And we’d pay 10% for someone to guarantee that the default trade was so honest that those Things vanished right away, and so that meant that all this frozen capital roughly speaking Which were all the junk that people had lying around that someone else might want? Instantly became money and the only reason that worked was because people trusted one another And so trust is is unbelievably powerful economic force maybe the most powerful economic force anyways If you have a relationship with someone it’s predicated on trust and part of the reason for that is that Trust is what enables us to look at each other without running away screaming And what I mean by that is that if I trust you then I don’t have to take into account How complicated you are because you’re horribly complicated you know I think chimpanzee full of snakes That’s what a human being is and and as long as you’ll do what you say you’ll do then I can take you at your word and your word simplifies you and You can take me at my word and my word simplifies you and then we can act like we understand each other even though We don’t but then if that trust is betrayed then all the snakes come forth very very rapidly and so All of you I suspect have been betrayed one way or another and so what happens if you’re in a relationship with someone And you trust them then you make certain assumptions about the past and you make certain assumptions about the present and you make certain assumptions about the future And everything’s stable and so you’re standing on solid ground and and the chaos It’s like you’re standing on thin ice the chaos is hidden the shark beneath the waves isn’t there You’re safe you’re in the lifeboat But then if the person betrays you like if you’re in an intimate relationship And the person has an affair and you find out about it then then you think one moment you’re one place right? We’re where everything is secure Because you’ve predicated your perception of the world on the axiom of trust and the next second really the next second You’re in a completely different place, and not only is that place different right now The place you were years ago is different and the place you’re going to be in the future years hence is different And so all of that certainty that strange certainty that you inhabit can collapse into Incredible complexity and you say well if someone betrays you you think well, okay, who were you? Because you weren’t who I thought you were and I thought I knew you but I didn’t know you at all And I never knew you and so all the things we did together those weren’t the things that I thought were happening Something else was happening and you’re you were someone else and that means I’m someone else because I thought I knew what was going on And clearly I don’t I’m some sort of blind sucker or the or the victim of a psychopath or someone who’s so naive that they can Barely live and I don’t understand anything about human beings And I don’t understand anything about myself, and I have no idea where I am now. I thought it was at home But I’m not I’m in a house, and it’s full of strangers And I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow or next week or next year It’s like all of that certainty that habitable certainty Collapses right back into the potential from which it emerged, and that’s a terrifying thing That’s a journey to the underworld from a mythological perspective And that is really something worth knowing because you know journeys to the underworld are extraordinarily common in Mythological stories and you know like the hobbit going out to find the smog the Dragon and and get the gold is a journey into the underworld Journeys to the underworld happen all the time and modern people don’t understand what the underworld is except that we’ve all been there And we go there all the time, and we go there every time the Solidity and stability of the world that we’ve erected at least partly through our speech is shattered Because well some sort of snake appears That’s another way of thinking about it And it’s a really good way of thinking about it because you know no matter how carefully you construct a little habitable area That’s around you there’s always something you didn’t take into account And there’s always something that can pop up its head and do you in and make you aware of your mortality and and age you For that matter or even kill you and that’s the permanent That’s the permanent situation of life which is part of the reason why I think the story of Adam and Eve for example is archetypal It’s because we do inhabit walled gardens right because a walled garden is half Structure society and half nature. That’s what a walled garden is and walled garden is a place of Paradise and warmth and and and and and and love and and and sustenance But it’s also the place where something can pop up at any moment and knock you out of it And I think part of the reason that that story exists at the beginning of this collection of books is because it Explains the eternal situation of human beings we’re always in that situation We’re in a walled garden, or we bloody well hope we are But there’s always a snake and then it’s even worse because if there is a snake We’re exactly the sort of creatures who are going to do nothing Go and interact with that state the second that we can manage it You know it’s it’s definitely the case that if you want a human being to muck around with something the best thing to do Is to tell them not ever to do it have anything to do with it Which is of course something you know if you have teenagers Or even children or or if you know anything about yourself or your partner So these stories are trying to Express what you might describe as an unchanging Transcendent reality you know it’s it’s something like what’s common across all human experience across all time And that’s what Jung essentially meant by an archetype And you could say well you know we tend to think that what we see with our senses is real And of course that’s true But what we see with our senses is what’s real that works at the time frame that we exist in right? And so we see things that we can touch and pick up we see tools Essentially that are useful for our moment-to-moment activities We don’t see the structures of eternity especially not the abstract structures of eternity we have to imagine those with our imagination Well, and that’s partly what these stories are doing. They’re saying well. There’s there’s forms of stability that transcend our capacity to observe Which is hardly surprising we know that if we’re scientists right because we’re always Abstracting out things that we can’t immediately observe, but there are Metaphysical or moral realities or phenomenological realities that have the same nature that you can’t see them in your life By by observing them with your senses But you can imagine them with your imagination and though sometimes the things that you imagine with your imagination Are more real than the things that you see Numbers are like that for example. I mean there’s endless examples of that and I would say well This is also a good way of thinking about fiction because a good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was Derived otherwise it has no staying power right it’s distilled reality even though in some sense it never happened It’s like well it depends on what you mean by happened You know it’s it’s a it’s a pattern that repeats in many many places with variation you extract out the central pattern It’s it’s the pattern purely never existed in any specific form But the fact that you’ve pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that you’ve extracted something real and I think the reason that the the Story of Adam and Eve which we’ll talk about in quite a bit of detail today has Has been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true I can give you another brief example. You know like people have a lot of guilt You know there’s a line of social psychology that claims that most people feel that they’re better than others People and like I just don’t buy that that isn’t what I’ve seen in my life And maybe it’s I’m bit biased because I’m a clinical psychologist And I see more people who are overtly suffering maybe than people do in general although I’m not so sure about that you know because you don’t have to scratch very far beneath the surface of most people’s lives Before you find something truly tragic, and I don’t mean the sort of tragedy that you whine about I mean You know your mother has Alzheimer’s or your best friend committed suicide You have a close relative with cancer you have a sick child or you know there’s something wrong with you because almost everyone has at least One really terrible thing wrong with them, and if you don’t hey you will so you know So you know that that so so that that tragic sense of being is there with people all the time and and it’s also The case that my in my experience like I rarely meet someone who says hey you know I’m doing everything I possibly can I’m a hell of a guy, and I can’t see how I could possibly improve You know you meet you meet someone like that you think they’re narcissistic right and you’re right and But but most people don’t feel that way they feel like they could do a hell of a lot better than they are and they’re quite Acutely aware of their faults And they don’t feel that they’re what they should be and you see What happens in the story of Adam and Eve as well as that when people become self-conscious? At least that’s how it looks to me they get thrown out of paradise And then they’re in history and history is a place where there’s pain in childbirth And where you’re dominated by your mate and where you have to toil like mad like no other animal because you’re aware of the future You have to work and sacrifice the joys of the present for the future Constantly and you know you’re going to die and you have all that weight on you and to me again That’s just how can anything be more true than that? That’s just as far as I can tell that’s just how it is for unless you’re naive beyond Comprehension there’s something about your life that that that is echoed in in that representation And why it is that I mean? We’re such strange creatures because we don’t seem to really fit into being in some sense And that’s also what’s expressed in the notion of the fall we the Existentialist said well people feel like they have a debt that they have to pay off to existence for the for the crime of their For the crime of their being something like that And maybe it’s because we are acutely aware that we have to offer something of value to the people around us so that they Can tolerate us you know well? We’re going about our business, but it seems deeper than that is that human beings seem to exist in a post Cataclysmic world and that’s exactly also what’s represented in Genesis It’s very interesting because you know there’s in the Adam and Eve story. There’s two There’s two catastrophes essentially There’s the catastrophe that occurs when Adam and Eve wake up which we’ll talk about in detail and become Self-conscious and know that they’re naked that and their eyes are open right so that’s the terminology That’s used and to have your eyes open means to have it an increment in consciousness Essentially because eyes are associated with consciousness for human beings because we’re intensely visual animals And so the metaphor of having your eyes opened Means is the same as the metaphor of coming to consciousness and as soon as Adam and Eve come to consciousness They realize they’re naked and you know the classic Interpretation of that is that it has something to do with sexual sin, and I don’t I don’t believe that I Don’t believe that that’s what it means although there are elements about that that are relevant It’s more that to realize that you’re naked It’s like you’re you know if you dream that you’re naked and on a stage in front of people That’s not a sexual dream man unless you’re some kind of strange exhibitionist right It’s it’s you want to cover yourself up and get the hell off that stage as fast as possible And so to be naked in front of a crowd is to have everyone it’s to have the judgment of the social world focused on your Self-evident inadequacies, and that makes people self-conscious, and that that’s a real human state It’s associated with neuroticism in the big five trait model But people don’t like that at all they don’t like having their fragility and vulnerability exposed to the group It’s one of the two major fears of people because one is social Humiliation and the other is something like mortality and death and like your your typical agoraphobic For example gets to have both those fears at the same time because she it’s usually a she tends to believe she’s going to have a very Spectacular and exhibitionistic heart attack in a public place and make a terrible fool of herself while she’s dying so And then that’s a good example of the two archetypal fears that characterize characterized human beings So so to me And I said that I tried to approach these stories as if I didn’t know what they were about because that seemed right to me Because there are mysteries there Everything about them is mysterious and why we have them is mysterious and what the hell you’re all doing here is mysterious you know listening to this lecture and so and reading Jung because Jung Carl Jung was very very helpful in this because he He faced these stories with the beginners mind and presumed there was something to him that he didn’t understand given that they were at the very Bloody bottom of our civilization you know which is historically Perfectly clear and that they came out of the midst of time and he wasn’t satisfied with the idea Freudian idea that God was just the father or the Marxist idea that religion was the opiate of the masses It’s like if religion was the opiate of the masses then Communism was the methamphetamine of the masses I can tell you that so So So you know you’ve been betrayed by someone and so you fall into that underworld of Doubt about everything and it’s a serious place to be in that underworld day because not only do you not know Where you came from or who you are where you’re going that’s bad enough So that’s the underworld itself But there’s a subdivision of the underworld like the worst suburb Which is I think what hell is essentially from a metaphysical perspective because you know If someone really cuts you off at the knees especially if they do it in a malevolent way And and if you’re going to be betrayed and you really want to be betrayed properly you want to be betrayed by someone who’s really? Out to hurt you you know they just weren’t being stupid They were like after you for whatever reason and then that’s also you plunged into that underworld space And that’s also when you start to nurse feelings of resentment and aggrievement and murder and homicide and even worse You know because if people are betrayed enough they start they start to Obsess about the utility of being itself and perhaps go to places that no one would ever want to go if they were in the Right mind and to and to develop and nurse Fantasies of the ultimate revenge and that’s a horrible place to be and that’s hell as far as I can tell and that’s why hell Has always been a suburb of the underworld because if if you get plunged into a situation that you don’t understand and things are not good For you anymore. It’s one step from being completely confused it’s only one step from being completely confused to being completely outraged and resentful and then it’s only one step from there to really looking for revenge and that can take you places that Well that that merely to imagine properly can be traumatic And I’ve seen that happen with people many times, and I think that anybody who uses their imagination on themselves Can see how that happens because I don’t imagine there’s a single person In the room that hasn’t nursed fairly intense fantasies of revenge at least at one point in their life and usually you know for What appear to be good reasons? It’s no picnic to get betrayed That’s for sure and it can shake your faith in being but if it shakes it so badly that you turn against being itself That’s certainly no solution. That’s for sure all it does is make everything that’s bad even worse, so Okay now so and God said let there be light and there was light and God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness and so that’s that’s another that’s another fundamental separation right light and darkness Those are those are in some sense the two fundamental two of the fundamental elements of our conscious being because of course When it’s light we’re awake and conscious because we’re diurnal animals and when it’s night well, then we’re asleep and so our Our existence is bounded by light and darkness We’re up and alert when it’s light and that’s partly because we’re highly visual animals right unlike most animals because most animals use smell We we use vision we’re very strange that way and vision is associated with enlightenment and illumination And with the breaking of the dawn and with the coming of the new day and and all of that so and so For light to be created is is is associated in some sense with the emergence of conscious being and so that’s another echo of that notion and there the the particular phrasing of the of the Story also is important because it’s again that God said right so that’s the use of that word And that’s the active element of the structure that gives rise to that gives order to chaos It’s something like that, so it’s the it’s like the spirit of the structure Manifests itself and and produces the fundamental divisions of experience. That’s what’s being presented here and God separated the light from the darkness He called the light day and the darkness he called night and again again the fact that things are named is also very important So you see this later with Adam because God gives Adam the job of naming all the animals and it’s sort of like the animals don’t actually exist in some sense till they’re named and That’s that’s another indication of the authors of the Bible’s Attempt to come to terms with the fact that our cognitive faculties and our ability to speak have something to do with the way That we cast chaotic potential into actuality right because we can’t we can’t really get a grip on something before we have a name for it which is why for example you all have names and Everything that you encounter has to have a name because before it has a name It’s just kind of part of the blurry background in something like that And you could say it exists before it has a name, but and that’s true But it’s also true that it doesn’t exist before it has a name because as soon as you give something a name It’s nature changes, and you’ve transformed it into something that’s not so much mere potential anymore But it’s at least on its way to being actuality It’s on its way to being a tool and so the the act of naming is Repeated continually in the first chapters of the Bible and the reason for that is this continued emphasis on the importance of consciousness and conscious articulation and speech You know and speech is really something that does separate us in an important way from animals. You know like We haven’t got very far teaching animals how to speak the best we’ve managed so far is some parrots right there’s gray African parrot there was one of them that got up to about a four-year-old level and that’s mind-boggling because like how big is the Brain of a parrot it’s like that big and that bloody thing could talk and so that shows you how much we know about brains But I know they’re small and all that but and we tried teaching chimpanzees to talk and they could kind of get somewhere with Sign language especially if you started when they were young But they don’t have the capacity for language like we do and they were never able to Really pass it on to the to the next generation which is obviously a critical element of really having that ability so human beings We’ve used our linguistic capacity to parse up the world in a new way and to conceptualize it in a new way And you know you can say That we’re just like ants on this little trivial planet out on the edge of One of a hundred million galaxies and that what’s happening here has no cosmic significance But that’s an arbitrary that’s an arbitrary Proposition you know I mean we’re very complicated things and and whatever’s going on on this planet has to do with conscious reality and the Transformations of consciousness for all we know might be the most important things that happen everywhere There’s no reason to consider consciousness a trivial phenomena I mean it’s taken three and a half billion years for you to develop the brain that you’ve developed and you and human beings are Amazing creatures I mean just a casual walk through YouTube and all those crazy kids that climb cranes and do that What’s that that yeah parkour man that stuff’s unbelievable? You know I mean human beings are crazy crazy animals There’s almost nothing we can’t do and I’m very loath to assume that the Transformations of consciousness that are described in the early in the early stories in in the biblical accounts are Somehow cosmically trivial it doesn’t strike me that way and it’s certainly not self-evident and even if they are cosmically trivial Whatever that means the rocks don’t care what you think well who cares what the rocks think first They don’t think so I don’t see why that’s exactly relevant But even if even if it’s all the same to the cosmos which is something that I doubt It’s certainly not just all the same to you You know because your consciousness has a quality and it matters the Heidegger for example who’s a philosopher who who’s writing sort of influenced me post-hoc because I recreated some of the things that he had talked about in the 30s before I knew much about him But one of the things that Heidegger said was that the fundamental element of human Being of human phenomenology was care. He said that that’s the basic essence of your being is that you care about things You know and that that’s that you either negatively or positively right you to not care about something or to hate it It’s still to be involved in care and so even if the cosmos itself is is Neutral with regards to our existence We’re not and we’re the only things that we know of that are conscious and so well we might as well go with that And there’s no reason see I can’t help but think That the constant attempts by people to trivialize the nature of their own consciousness has a has a dark side I’m a psychoanalyst and so I always think that way it’s like well first of all if you’re if you as a being don’t matter Then you don’t have to do anything It’s a great justification for total lack of responsibility and that that really twigs something for me because you know people who are Bent let’s say or vengeful or angry are always looking for a reason why they don’t have to be responsible for anything Plus it’s a lot easier and so the notion that consciousness is trivial immediately allows you to wander down that path And so I’m skeptical of those claims And I also think that there’s a deep hatred of humanity that underlies those claims as well And I read my YouTube comments sometimes you know and I’ve always been I’ve always been annoyed that you know because I’ve heard like sort of radical clueless environmentalists say things like the planet would be better off without people on it Which is something that like you just cannot say that that if you say that and listen to yourself You should like go to a monastery for like three years and never say a word and have a shower every ten minutes until you’ve learned Your lesson properly you know you can’t utter a more genocidal phrase than that you know and of course you always do it in In a display of your care for the world. It’s like well if we just didn’t have any people It’s like well. We’ll just line them all up and shoot them with machine guns No, it’s really sickening. It’s appalling it’s and there’s a hatred for humanity That’s at the bottom of it And I mean you can kind of understand why because we’re messy and you know we don’t clean up after ourselves And you know we’re like raping the rainforests and that sort of thing But I do have some sympathy for people because you know we’re we’re hell on Mother Nature But she certainly returns the favor so And that’s a good thing to remember you know a lot of what we’re doing is just bloody well trying to exist with a relative Minimum of pain and we’re doing our best to get you know to get as good at doing that as fast as we can And that’s not an easy thing there are lots of us and like life is bloody complicated And the other thing that happens too is again if you scratch just beneath the surface of people and this is something That’s always you know to me has been a kind of miracle is if you talk to someone they’re out doing their job And maybe they’re doing a good job at it like some emergency room nurse You know it’s God there’s a job for you, or maybe they work in palliative care You know and you talk to them and you find out they’ve got like four as I said before serious problems in their family And maybe they’re diabetic to boot and yet they haul themselves out of bed in the morning and go take care of dying people It’s like good God people deserve a bit of respect for struggling forward and and not always trying to make the planet a worse place when they’re beset on all sides Constantly by you know an unending series of tragedy You think we could have a little bit of sympathy for ourselves as a consequence of that It’s like we’re not all like rapacious greedy monsters who are bent on just devouring everything in our path You know it’s a little bit more complicated than that so All right anyway, so so Well, so let’s go to the next part of this here. Mm-hmm All right So and God said let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse And it was so and God called the expanse heaven and there was evening and there was morning the second day well to understand that Because what how did that doesn’t make any sense at all really so I think I told you a little bit about this before so The the the world that’s being created in this particular account is a phenomenological world There’s a disk of land because if you go out in a field and look around you’re on a disk of land That’s pretty obvious, and then there’s a dome on top of it It’s more or less held up by the mountains and rain comes down So there’s water above the dome because where else would the rain come from and and underneath the ground there’s fresh water You can drill down and find that and then around that there’s salt water And so that’s the the world and it’s kind of an empirical world because if you’re a child And you just go out in a field and you look at the world that’s sort of what it would be like And so that’s the world that’s being created and so one of the things that is worth thinking about This is something Carl Jung was very interested in Is that these old descriptions are half Geographical and half empirical so sort of based on observation and half psychological so one of the things Jung was interested in for example was astrology, but mostly for a psychological reason because You know there obviously there are stars up on the dome And then when you look at the stars you can imagine The shapes of the stars and that helps you orient yourself because as soon as you can see shapes in the stars Then you can recognize the constellations, and you can orient yourself at night But then the constellations become gods say and the gods turn into a drama and so and the drama comes from within It’s the projection of imagination and so when Jung was analyzing Astrology he was a man analyzing psychology because he saw the astrological Narrative as the projection of the human imagination onto the cosmos and so when he was analyzing astrology He was analyzing psychology and the same thing is the case with these stories is that the world they they describe is only It’s not the natural world like a scientist would describe it because these people weren’t scientists They didn’t have the technology and the tools it was it was the way they For them it was the world for us It’s the way they saw the world and so we’re looking at the way They saw the world and a lot of that psychology we share that psychology to a large degree with those people so in this is psychology, but it’s interesting to know what the Geographical substrate is so that you can kind of understand the stories And I like this picture because that’s it’s great from a psychological perspective It’s a very famous picture You know so basically what you have here is the world as we know it and there’s the dome with the sun and the moon On it and the stars and then if you look outside what you know well, then you’re out into this cosmic space, right? And that’s those are like the wheels of the planets and the music of the spheres and that’s the ever-present Explorer who’s gone? Beyond the domain that he can understand and is peering out into the unknown as such and it’s a psychological picture It’s like because you do know some things and then outside of that there are things you don’t know and when you’re feeling brave You put a foot or two out where you don’t understand like because there’s frontier everywhere, right? And if you’re if you’re feeling heroic And you want to do something for the world and you want to expand what you understand you poke your head through what you know When you take a look at the at the at whatever structure is out there You know he’s pretty smart because most of them is still where it’s safe And I would say that’s a good that’s a good thing because if you jump right out there Well, then maybe you fall off the edge of the earth and I wouldn’t precisely recommend that especially if you do it accidentally and to me this is a recreation of the of the Taoist yin-yang symbol, you know with with The white paisley here and that’s what you know in the dark paisley serpents really there And the right place to be is right on the line between them because you’re sort of you got one foot where you understand That gives you security and then you know But it’s kind of dull because hey, you know everything that’s going on there, and that isn’t what people are like They don’t want just security Dostoevsky said that in notes from the underground a great great book And you know he said I love this it was his an early critic criticism of the notion of a political utopia He said look if you gave people everything they wanted they had nothing to eat but cake and Nothing to do but sit in warm pools and busy themselves with the continuation of the species That was his his lines that the first thing they would do well Maybe after the first week was like go kind of half insane and smash everything up Just so that something that they didn’t expect would happen so that they’d have something interesting to do and it’s so right because You know the the utopian notion that if you just had all the material stuff you wanted that you’d you’d be Well, what would you be what would you do? What you just sit in the couch and watch TV? I mean you’d you’d be I don’t know what you’d be cutting yourself just for entertainment in no time flat You know and that’s the sort of thing that people do so we’re not adapted for Security and utopia we’re adapted for a certain amount of security because you know we are vulnerable But mostly we want to have one foot out where we don’t know what the hell is going on Because that’s where you’re alert and alive and tense and with it And and you know I think I believe this and I believe it actually has something to do with the hemispheric structure of your Of your of the physiology of your brain is it because the right hemisphere looks roughly Adapted to what you don’t know and the left hemisphere This is a very this is an oversimplification But a useful one is adapted to the world that you do know and the right place for you to be is halfway between them because then you can tell that That’s what’s so cool and this tells you that this is actually reality that’s manifesting itself to you You know that sense of active engagement you have in the world when things are working well for you You know where you’re where you should be at the right time You’re alert and on top of things and engaged and you don’t have much of a sense of time and the sense of the tragedy Of life sort of recedes And that’s when you’re that’s when you’ve got one foot when it’s where it’s secure and one foot out in the unknown and your brain Signals to you that you’re in the right place by making what you’re doing meaningful and that sense of meaning is actually a neurophysiological Signal that you’ve got the forces of the cosmos property balanced in your being at that moment And that’s why it feels so good and now well what else could it possibly be I mean You know our brain is capable of looking beyond our vision That’s what it’s for and that sense of engagement There’s no reason to assume that that’s anything but a real signal and you can reduce it you could say well The problem with being where you know only is that you don’t know everything and that’s going to be a problem in the future And the problem with being where you know nothing is that’s just too much man like you know you go into panic mode And because anything can happen there, and you can’t handle it So you’ve got to mediate between those two things you want to be secure enough so that your physiology isn’t Reving out of control and you want to be out there in the unknown enough so that you keep updating yourself constantly constantly constantly And that’s that’s the place where information flow is maximized And you know that because that’s where you are when you’re having a really interesting conversation with someone or you’re gripped by a book or you’re really into a movie or maybe something that you do as a You know apart from your work or maybe even in your work You’re into it and that’s because you are in the right place at the right time and your whole nervous system is signaling that to you And I would say that’s the sort of place that you should be all the time of course you can’t be because no one’s perfect But it’s that’s that’s the recreation of paradise on earth It’s something like it because you are in the right place at the right time when that is happening subject to certain What would you say restrictions that we can talk about later? Well, that’s what this guy’s doing and and that’s I would say akin to the action that God is taking when he’s Transforming the chaos of potential into habitable being and it’s the sort of thing that human beings are supposed to act out And God said let the waters under heaven be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear and it was so God called the dry land earth and the waters that were gathered together He called seas and God saw that it was good Well, that’s an interesting thing too because you know there’s this there’s this play written by a German named good I can never say that properly. It’s Johan van G. Oh E. T. H. E. And I can’t say it but He wrote this play called Faust He wrote one part of it when he was quite young and then Faust too when he was quite old and he has a character in There Mephistopheles and Mephistopheles is the devil and he actually has the devil explain himself twice Basically using the same words which which I really like it was very profound and basically girth is Mephistopheles says You know he’s the adversary of the word. That’s a good way of putting it Because that’s how it works out mythologically He’s the figure behind the snake in the Garden of Eden which is something we’ll talk about more But he has a he has a sophisticated philosophy. He’s not just some random Troublemaker he’s got a he’s got a deep philosophy and his philosophy is quite straightforward, and it’s compelling It’s compelling and and people are gripped by it quite often far more often than they think His philosophy is well look around at the world. It’s like Ivan Karamazov in the Brothers Karamazov When he’s trying to disabuse his younger brother of being a Christian monk Mephistopheles says well look at the world. I mean all you look around the world. It’s nothing but a bloodbath It’s just suffering everywhere everything eats everything and people die terribly and and they’re cruel to one another and the whole mess is nothing but a constant haul of terrible carnage and and ruin and and and and and and wreck He says it should be better if it was never Existed at all and that’s a very interesting That’s a very very interesting idea And I do believe and I’ve seen this in people many times that in the depths of despair Especially when you’ve been betrayed for example, and you wander into the wrong subdivision of the underworld That’s something that comes to mind if you know you have a very sick child for example Or maybe your whole family is suffering as whole families do sometimes an idea is going to come to you It’s like good God who put this mess together, and is it really worth it is it really worth the suffering? Suicidal people you know they say no they say no enough of this You know and you have to be pushed a long way generally speaking before you’ll actually commit suicide you have to be in very very desperate straits, but your answer under those conditions is that being is such that it would be better if it had never been and That’s a very it’s I think I think it’s a very it’s a terrible philosophy I believe because I think what happens if you act it out is that you make the very things that led you to despair Far worse, and I can’t see that if it’s reasonable to draw a logical conclusion that suffering should Justifies your desire to make being end that the answer to that can’t be to produce more suffering That just doesn’t make sense and my observation has been that people who act out the metha staphelian philosophy inevitably make suffering far worse and so and then that raises the other specter of well Do they want being just to cease or they just out for bloody revenge at every at any cost and my conclusion has always been That is that the mask is well being shouldn’t exist because it’s too terrible But the true motivation is I’m going to make everyone suffer as much as I possibly can before I say goodbye to this place If you read the writings of people like the kids who shot up the columbine high school They’ll tell you exactly that that’s precisely and exactly what they concluded and then acted out So anyways, but in this God says that it was good And I thought about that a lot is like because the question is something like well is is something better than nothing? Because that’s a really good question. You know and I thought about two things in relationship to that and one is One is well. Maybe it depends on how it is that you are right because it could be that there are ways of being in the world that justify the world and There are ways of being in the world that make the world unbearable And I believe that the narrative that runs through the biblical stories is precisely a dialogue between those two types of being and the optimistic part of the story is that Being requires limitation and suffering there’s no escape from that, but there are modes of being that allow that to be Perhaps even more than tolerable perhaps there are modes of being that allow that to be good, and it’s a straight and narrow road It’s a very difficult road to tread so so I think well that that’s possible you know I’m not an optimist by nature and but that’s that’s one of the things that I’ve Conceptualized and read about that I actually find plausible because it’s certainly the case everyone knows this that there are ways that you can act and Make things worse Everyone knows that and so if that’s the case there has to be the opposite right there has to be ways that you could act that make things better and Obviously you can act in ways that make things really way worse And so the question is well are there ways that you can act and make things really much better And I think that’s the question is can we have our cake and eat it too? Can we have the being that requires limitation and suffering and also simultaneously? transcend that by our mode of being and I believe that the biblical stories and Perhaps not only the biblical stories, but the biblical stories are the human imagined one of the human imagination Best attempts to address and answer that question. That’s what the entire story is about So the first of it is the catastrophe of the collapse of self-consciousness and the entrance of humanity into history And the rest of it is okay now. We’re in history now. We know that we’re going to die We know about our mortality We’re conscious of our own being is there a mode of acting in the world that allows that to be Justifiable or maybe even more that allows that to be triumphant And then I would also say maybe it’s worth finding out you know That’s the other thing that’s so interesting because you’ve got this short time on earth And there’s lots of things that are very very difficult to contend with and and you have the problem of Tolerating yourself even in all your insufficiency and one of the things that seems to me to be the case is that if you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of being if you attempt to do that then the mere act of Lifting up that weight is enough to justify the fact that you’re insufficient and mortal and and and bound by tragedy And I believe that and I believe people believe that because if you watch how people act they look for people they admire And they do admire people right it’s it’s a natural It’s a natural phenomena you see it starting with children the children admire And then they imitate and we look to people who seem to be able to bear the burden of being in a heroic manner And there’s something inside of us that calls to that and that makes us want to To mimic that and to follow it and I think that that’s a I think that that’s the deepest and most profound of instincts And I think it’s right and even if you’re not so convinced on the positive end You know because it’s more difficult to be convinced of the positive You can certainly be convinced on the negative end because there are ways of being that are so brutal and so Reprehensible that merely to read about them is enough to traumatize you and I think that if you’re a person who hasn’t lost their soul Completely you can’t help but encounter stories like that and shudder away from them and you know Alexander Solzhenitsyn who who was the person who did most to unmask the absolute horrors of communist totalitarianism Said that he believed that the Nuremberg judgments were the most important event of the 20th century And that was the judgment at the end of World War two that there were certain actions that no one was to undertake No matter what their cultural background was because they were let’s say crimes against humanity that there was such a thing as universal evil And you can debate that you know I mean And people certainly have but the problem is is if you debate that then you have to say that There are conditions under which the sorts of things that happen say in the concentration camps Which would be the gassing of children after their torture and and their their Forcible removal from their parents and all the terrible things that went along with that that that’s just okay It’s just an opinion. It’s just something that happened and there are circumstances under which that’s justifiable If you if there’s no transcendent good and evil underneath that argument It’s only a matter of practicality and and and it seems to me that that’s that’s not the right conclusion to draw That’s how it seems to me, and that’s what can soldier nitson concluded when he looked at the Nuremberg trials, so the notion that The notion that it was good Well even if you don’t believe that and you know because maybe it’s not as good as it could be I would say it’s incumbent on you as someone who participates in the process of a Furthering creation to act as if it could be good at least and to further that with with all of your efforts Partly because what the hell else do you have to do that could possibly be better than that that could possibly justify your existence more than that And you know perfectly well if you if you if you have any sense at all if you think clearly about it at all Is that that’s what you want to see in everyone else? You know it’s you’re you’re desperate and maybe you’re cynical and now and then Someone appears that acts at least momentarily like a light in the darkness and that Lifts your spirit up and gives you a little bit of hope and maybe helps you continue on it’s well That’s obviously a call to being it’s a it’s a statement from your own soul that says well There’s something about that. That’s how you should be and maybe then well we get a chance to To participate in what is good. I’ve thought to you know Well we’ll leave that for a little later And God said let the earth sprout vegetation And the earth brought forth vegetation plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed each according to its kind on the earth And it was so and the earth brought forth vegetation plants Yielding seed according to their own kind and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed each according to its kind and God saw that it was good There was evening and there was morning the third day I like that that’s You see it’s interesting these old pictures say because if you look here you got you got this halo around God’s head and You’ve got the split again between night and darkness and God’s right on the on the border between the two and that’s the Sun right? That’s what that’s what a halo is a halo is the Sun or the moon sometimes It’s like a coin you know you have the Queen’s head on the coin And that’s the Queen on the moon and it’s silver And it’s a symbol of value because of course the Queen is sovereign and the moon is the sovereign of the night sky and and gold Of course is the Sun and gold is pure because it doesn’t mix with other metals And it shines like the Sun so it partakes of the Sun and God partakes of the Sun because there’s something about Whatever he represents that’s associated with consciousness and illumination and enlightenment And it’s that force of illumination and light that’s it’s right on the border between these two sets of phenomena That’s kind of what that picture is trying to present and so you know it’s a metaphor That’s one way of thinking about it, but it does again allude to the underlying idea that there’s something about consciousness That’s integral to to being itself And God said let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years I mean that’s a that’s a remarkable bit of a bit of Writing there too because you just think about how bloody long it took our cavemen ancestors to look at the night sky and Start to figure out that there were repeating patterns across years that enabled them to mark the seasons I mean, I just can’t imagine how they figured that out It’s that the degree of careful observation that it took and I mean we know people figured that out a long time ago because You know those great megalithic Monuments like Stonehenge seem to be astronomical Observatories essentially and you see the same thing with the pyramids I mean people were looking at the damn sky trying to figure out looking at God You know because that’s kind of what you’re doing when you’re looking at the night sky Trying to figure out the regularity to order in the universe and that’s all compacted into this little line You know and let them be for signs and for seasons to be oriented by the stars Amazing and that let them be lights in the expanse of heavens to give light upon the earth And it was so and God made the two great lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light To rule the night and the stars and God set them in the expanse of heavens to give light on the earth To rule over the day and over the night and so there’s an idea of sovereignty there, too Right that that that there’s an analogy between the ruler and the and the heavenly bodies that that light up the that light up the darkness Essentially and that’s a really interesting idea too because it took us a long time to come to terms with as I mentioned last week To come to terms with the idea of sovereignty itself and to decide what? Constituted valid power, it’s not power. It’s not power. It’s authority and competence and not power It’s not dominance either It’s more sophisticated than that because the people that you want to rule aren’t people who have power Because power just means I can hurt you and you can’t hurt me back That’s that’s not that that’s not what you need from a ruler even though it devolves into that from time to time What you want is the kind of wisdom that illuminates the darkness and to associate the sovereign with the with the heavenly kings of the light Is a perfectly reasonable thing to do from a metaphoric perspective, and that’s an ancient ancient idea You know and another example of how we’re grounded in a dream And God set them in the expanse of heavens to give light on the earth to rule over the day and the night and to separate The light from the darkness and God saw that it was good another Emphasis on the fact that it was better that there was something than nothing and you know Maybe you could maybe you could consider that the declaration of the cosmos is something like well It’s better that there’s something than nothing and well How do you know that and I guess the answer to that is that there’s something instead of nothing and I know that that’s not Proof but but it’s still a remarkable fact that it happens to be the case and no one does know why that is so Maybe we should go along with it and see what we can do with it You know and see how we could make it better because we certainly could if we were if we were really committed to it And we shook our resentment and our our anger and our hatred And I know there’s reason for all of that because people do suffer terribly But you know God only knows what being could be like if we all contributed it Contributed to it to the best of our ability God only knows what we could conquer and what sort of Magnificent cities we could produce and what things we could we could eradicate from from from the suffering of the world And there was you know there’s this guy read about this is this is amazing And I don’t remember his name But he he found out about this worm that was called the Guinea worm and Guinea worm is a really horrible thing And you can look it up if you want But I’ll tell you a little bit about it even though it’s very distasteful so A guinea worm is a parasite that lives in Africa and it burrows under your skin, and it’s quite long It’s about that long And it’s you know about that wide and so it’ll burrow underneath your leg And then it’s in there you know and maybe it pokes its little head out a hole which is one of its delightful Tenancies and then if you want to pull it out it breaks Right because obviously because otherwise you just pull it out It would be dead and so it doesn’t like that so it just breaks off and many many people had this horrible disease You know and it it well you can’t imagine what that would be like because you’re part of the 1% And you live in North America and thank God for that But you know just a little imagine you don’t even want to think about it let alone have it And he went to Africa and wiped the damn thing out. It’s like well great You know it seems to me the planet’s a lot better off without any guinea worms on it even though That’s like guinea worm genocide talk. I’m still you know pretty happy about it And so that was that was one guy who thought well, we don’t need these things and yeah well fair enough you know and Yeah, well so good for him like you know I mean he can die thinking that the world’s a better place than it was when he first popped out and so So good for that then that’s I think that’s a good. That’s a good aim You know I think is to think that when you’re on your deathbed And you can look back and think well There’s a little less suffering in the world from here on out than there would be if I had never existed And that’s a lot better than the opposite because it’s certainly possible Say if you’re Stalin to ensure that there’s a hell of a lot more suffering in the world than there would have been if you Hadn’t lived and we perfectly well know that people can manage that and that many many people try to do nothing But imagine but manage precisely that so and it’s hard for me not to think about that as some sort of Metaphysical evil and I think it’s the right way to look at it, and there was evening and there was morning the fourth day So yeah, you have the Sun here, and then the moon here as far as I can tell Yeah Actually, I think this is the moon over here, but So yeah, and that’s part of the Sistine Chapel, which is you know an absolutely remarkable No, no part of the reason too and the part of the reason I’m teaching about these biblical stories is because You know I’m thinking because the humanities have been decimated so badly and and again I think that has mostly to do with resentment and hatred more than anything else But I don’t really think that you can get a grip on the humanities and what they have to offer without knowing the biblical Stories because they’re the they’re the dream out of which the humanities emerge And so unless you have that background knowledge that dream Then there’s all sorts of things that are utterly profound that don’t open themselves up to you and don’t Is inferno would be one of those and Milton’s Paradise Lost which is an absolutely amazing piece of work I mean Milton wrote it because he wanted to justify the ways of God to man You know what an ambition that is and I mean he was serious about that he took the problem seriously It’s like it’s the mephistophelian problem is that well? This is a rough business that we’re involved in and you know maybe maybe we should just give it up And I think the world the whole world I think was deciding that in the 1980s when we were deciding what to do Engage in the ultimate nuclear catastrophe you know and we were very very close to that a number of times And I think it was a collective decision in some sense on the part of humanity that we might as well keep the whole awful game Going rather than just demolish it but um But you know Milton he wrote Paradise Lost to its dream again It’s a dream and trying to explain the nature of being and the nature of evil and you can’t crack the damn thing without Knowing the underlying stories and that’s really too bad because it’s utterly profound and the reason you need profound things as far as I can tell You need profound knowledge is because life is actually a profound problem for everyone I mean you can shelter back and live a very conservative existence and look like more power to you I understand why you would do that, but it doesn’t stop you from having to face the ultimate questions of life Right there right there in everyone’s face and at least at some point you’re going to have to face the ultimate questions of life And it would be better if you could I think if you could confront them full on and to deal with them properly and to be a beacon of strength as a consequence of that And I think that wisdom that’s what the humanities are supposed to teach is wisdom and wisdom is what enables you to deal honorably with the tragedy of life And I think you I can’t see how you could think that that was a bad idea because there are going to be times when you’re in an emergency room And you know prone to panic and to cry and to break down and to collapse and to be of no use to anyone around you And that’s not the right way to be, it’s the right way to be in a situation like that is to be strong and reliable And I don’t think you can do that without being wise and you can’t be wise without putting yourself together Without knowing something about where you came from and what you’re like and that’s history and the humanities And so this isn’t optional, it’s more necessary, man does not live by bread alone and that’s exactly the issue here So you see these magnificent works, you know, I mean there’s a, it’s not like Michelangelo thought of this literally, you know He was a genius for God’s sake and he’s trying to get at something and he’s trying to get at the profundity of human culture I suppose that’s why you have this patriarchal figure here and the cosmic role that consciousness and tradition plays in being itself And it’s ennobling and you know you think people, religious or not, people, hundreds of millions of people come from all over the world to Rome And go through this little tiny chapel to look at this, there’s something in it that everyone needs to see You know it’s not just beauty, it’s more than beauty, it’s that which feeds the soul And everyone feels that, even if they can’t explain it And God said, let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves with which the waters swarm According to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind And God saw that it was good and God blessed them saying be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas And let birds multiply on the earth And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day And God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds Livestock and creeping beasts, creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds And it was so And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds And everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind Kind, right, that’s kin, right, and to be kind is to treat others as if they’re your kin And so according to its kind And God saw that it was good, that’s continually, continually Represented over and over God said, that’s the thing that calls being into existence And God said it was good and that’s the fundamental judgment about the nature of reality And you know, one of the things that happens in the translation, in the movement, let’s say From the Old Testament to the New Testament is God is obviously blessing creation in the beginning of this story And then you have Old Testament God and like, don’t mess around with him, right Because he’ll give you good smiting if you get out of line There’s no doubt about that and he’s kind of an arbitrary character And you know, lots of modern people think, well, how could you believe in a God like that And it’s like, when I read that, I think, well, the Old Testament people, that isn’t how they thought They thought, you better look the hell out because life is really difficult And if you step out of line, you’re gonna get flattened And God doesn’t care in some sense whether you approve of him It’s like, what the hell does that have to do with anything? Obviously you don’t approve It’s like you better pay attention though, because otherwise you’re gonna be in real trouble And there’s real wisdom in that Nietzsche thought that, Nietzsche really admired the Old Testament as a work of literature Because he thought that the representation of the divine, let’s say As a representation of the essential nature of being was extraordinarily accurate In its arbitrary and often cruel nature You know, it wasn’t following a morality that human beings could really understand as moral He thought that was very realistic, and I like that interpretation But what happens in the New Testament is quite interesting Because there’s an insistence all of a sudden in the New Testament That you’re supposed to act towards God as if he’s nothing but good And that’s such a strange thing, because you look at the world and you think, yeah, really? Just good, eh? Well, the cancer and the earthquakes is kind of hard to fit into that picture And the terrible things that happen to children and all of that is very difficult to square with the notion of a good God, obviously But then the underlying idea is that If you act in that manner, it makes it more likely to be true It’s something like that, and so I would consider that in some sense an act of both courage and faith It’s like you’re going to make the case, like God makes at the beginning of the Bible That being is in fact good Now, you can’t see it because you get to see all the things about it that aren’t so good That’s not the point. It’s a metaphysical presupposition, something like that It’s a decision to act that way I’m going to act as if being is good and to further that And then the implicit idea is, well, there isn’t anything better There isn’t any way that you can make things work out better than to do that And so there’s a courageous element to it, which I think is also expressed to some degree In the idea of Christ’s voluntary sacrifice of his own life His presupposition was something like, I’m going to act as if God is good and I’m going to play that out right to the end And now that becomes something like a divine pattern And I believe there’s wisdom in that because, again, most of the time that I’ve been wrestling with this sort of thing I’ve always been looking at the opposite I haven’t been studying good, I’ve been studying evil Because evil is easier to believe, especially after the 20th century It’s like, I think you have to be blind not to think about the things that happened in the 20th century as evil And some of the things that happened were so brutal, it’s just absolutely unimaginable And, well, unless you imagine it And it’s right there, it’s part of the historical record And then I think, well, if there’s something that’s that terrible It indicates, as clearly as anything can, that there’s also something that’s its opposite And that’s whatever it is that’s the farthest away possible from that outcome Now, that doesn’t mean we can exactly say what it is Because it’s easier to grip, in some sense, what it means to torture and break and hurt And not to be able to conceptualize so clearly how you would have to act if you were acting in the exact opposite manner But at least it implies that it exists And I see that pattern being laid out in this dreamlike manner in the New Testament And it has something to do with, well, it has something to do, and this is for sure With the voluntary acceptance of mortality Because, of course, that’s the poisoned apple, right? The fact that everybody looks forward into the future to know that you’re finite And so is everything that you love And it’s very difficult for that not to poison your existence And, well, there’s no getting out of it, as far as we can tell But there might be something like switching your attitude to it And you could say, well, that’s the price you pay for being And the heroic thing to do is to accept that, and not even to accept it grudgingly To say, all right, I’m going to go along with that, I’m going to accept that And I’m going to act, nonetheless, as if being is good And then I’m going to see how things turn out It’s something like that And God saw that it was good And so it’s an act of courage There’s an act of courage that’s associated with that transformation of attitude And even with regards to the notion that the world is good It’s a courageous attitude Especially given that there’s so much evidence that makes that conclusion difficult to continually draw But the alternative seems to me to be far worse So there’s God again with the sun behind him Because he’s associated with the solar consciousness He’s creating all these strange, wonderful creatures And people say, well, you know, the idea of God as an old man in the sky Let’s say that’s primitive It’s much more better to think about it as a much more better Jesus Anyways, it’s more sophisticated to think of the divine essence as a disembodied spirit Or something like that But you know, that’s not so obvious either Because as I already pointed out There isn’t anything that’s more complicated than a human being And so the idea that the divine is something that’s at least as complicated as a human being Strikes me as something that’s actually quite reasonable And I know it’s a metaphor Although I don’t know to what degree it is a metaphor And it’s also something that’s embodied And that’s also a very interesting notion Because it’s become increasingly obvious as we’ve tried to do such things As produce artificial intelligence That it’s very difficult to produce an intelligence or perhaps a consciousness That isn’t embodied in some manner It can’t be just a spirit, a spirit without form And I think that’s part of the reason too why Christianity puts so much emphasis At the end of time on the resurrection of the body Because there’s a drive in there to ennoble the idea of the body Not just the spirit, the consciousness that floats abstractly above the body But to say that no, you can’t do that You can’t just shed that part of you that’s heavy and material so to speak And leave it behind as if it’s of no value You have to ennoble that as well And that idea is also linked to the representation of God as a human being And as a wise human being and as something that’s embodied And so at least from the metaphorical perspective I don’t think it’s reasonable just to brush your hands across it and say Well that’s primitive Because I don’t think it is I don’t think it’s primitive at all And then God said let us make man in our image After our likeness And it’s our because, well this is part of the priestly story There’s as I said a number of sources for the Old Testament And in the priestly version, if I remember correctly It’s Elohim, that may be wrong Doesn’t matter but precisely it doesn’t matter Because the notion is that the God who’s in the background of this story Has a kind of plurality of being And it looks like the idea of monotheism arose with great difficulty across time Because there are lots of powers And the idea that there’s a power of powers was something that wasn’t easy for people to figure out Because what’s constant across sources of power? Well some kind of meta power But it’s hard to figure out what that is And that’s what’s being represented by the movement as far as I can tell from polytheism to monotheism It’s the first the observation that there are powers that determine the destiny of people At least in part that you’re subject to And then the idea that there’s something common across all those powers That you can represent partly say with the idea of the sun rising in the morning And fighting its way out of the darkness at night And that that’s associated with consciousness and sovereignty It’s very very… See, one of the things that bothers me about simple minded atheism And I would say the simple minded atheism is of the sort That regards these stories as nothing but simple superstitions Is that it’s very very poorly informed Because whatever these stories are, they are not merely simple superstitions They weren’t conjured up by some cabal of priests to bamboozle the masses Even though they were used for that purposes from time to time It’s much much more complicated than that They have a very ancient lineage and they’re tied together with all sorts of other stories And there’s an emergent wisdom in them And I think the right way to view them is as the birthplace of sophisticated philosophical ideas And so you have to wrestle with these stories You can’t just… And I said already that I’m going to be as rational as I possibly can in my discussion of these stories And not refer to anything metaphysical except when that’s absolutely necessary Even though I don’t want to eliminate the possibility of a metaphysical reality Because I think that’s premature But you have to take the story seriously if you’re going to… If you’re going to approach the problem properly, you can’t just casually dismiss them It’s not appropriate And so let us make man in our image That’s a very interesting idea And like I said, it’s not easy to understand how it was that human beings came up with the idea That us lowly creatures were… So with the Mesopotamians for example And the Greeks were like this too Human beings weren’t godlike They were the playthings of the gods Right? They were just… The gods just tortured us for their amusement You know, love and hatred and anger and all those powerful forces We were just playthings to the gods There wasn’t anything particularly divine about us The notion that in some sense we partake of the divines That’s a staggering idea And you don’t want to underestimate the difficulty that there was in abstracting that Or the utility of that idea for our current mode of being Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens And over the livestock and all the earth And over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth So God created man in his own image In the image of God he created him Male and female he created them That’s interesting because there is more than one creation story in Genesis And in this story males and females are basically created at the same time Later Eve is extracted out of Adam And we’ll talk about that But not here It’s the two sexes are generated simultaneously And they both carry within them the divine stamp Which is very egalitarian and very appropriate And I think unbelievably advanced That’s what it looks like to me And God blessed them Well that’s a good thing And God said to them Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it And have dominion over the fish of the sea And over the birds of the heavens And over every living thing that moves on the earth And there’s God creating Adam and Eve And they’re looking pretty happy about the whole thing And that’s Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel representation And there’s some cool things about this I mean you’ve got to wonder This is a side And I don’t know if it’s a credible side But it’s an interesting aside So that’s a form of credible What the hell is God doing in this thing? You know, I mean what is this exactly? And so there’s been some interesting answers to that And this is one of them So there was a group of scientists about 20 years ago That were remarked on the precise Analogy between this structure and the brain bisected down the middle And of course Michelangelo was one of the first people Who did detailed dissections And so they felt that Michelangelo had put God inside the brain For some reason And that seems to me to be associated with the notion that there’s There’s an analogy or a metaphorical identity Between the notion of whatever God is And the structures that give rise to consciousness I think we really underestimate the degree to which consciousness is Both, say, miraculous and not understood I mean, you know, you have what appears to be an entirely material substrate Yet here you are, aware and self-aware And able to generate the world merely in some sense by looking at it It really is remarkable And that consciousness is dependent on something that wells up from deep within that material substrate That we don’t understand at all It’s a crazily remarkable thing You hear a lot about scientific reductionism But I’ll tell you something that’s kind of interesting And it’s a tangent, too You know, the guy that discovered DNA I think it was Watson and Crick But I don’t remember who wrote this book But one of them I don’t remember which one He believed that DNA was so complicated that it had to come from space He didn’t believe it could have possibly evolved on earth And so, like, a lot of these people who are used as exemplars of scientific reductionism Aren’t like that at all when you actually read what they had to say, right? They were very aware of the limits of their own knowledge And, I mean, DNA is something really quite spectacularly remarkable It’s an eternal substance It’s been around for a very long time And the idea that we understand it is a very stupid idea And I would say that the same thing applies to the brain Like, we’re scratching away at the surface of something we don’t understand at all And so it’s quite interesting, I think And maybe Michelangelo had enough gall to do that It’s certainly possible I mean, he had enough gall to do dissections when the cost of that was death You know, he had to rob corpses, essentially, to go and do it So he was, I would say, not particularly politically correct So that’s kind of interesting And there’s another representation of the same thing And that’s a funny one I had to throw that in I don’t know how many of you know this But there’s this joke in the atheist community I think it might have been started by Richard Dawkins But that might be wrong That it was just as reasonable to believe in the flying spaghetti monster As it was to believe in Gott And that’s the flying spaghetti monster, by the way And so that’s called touched by his noodly appendage And anyways, it’s not very sophisticated, but it is funny And God blessed them and God said to them Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it And have dominion over the fish of the sea And over the birds of the heaven And over every living thing that moves on the earth And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed That is on the face of all the earth And every tree with seed in its fruit You shall have them for food And every beast of the earth and every bird of the heavens And to everything that creeps on the earth Everything that has the breath of life I have given every green plant for food And it was so And God saw everything he had made And behold, it was very good And there was evening and there was morning The sixth day Thus, the heavens and the earths were finished And all the host of them And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done And he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy Because on it, God rested from all his work that he had done in creation I like that too, you know One of the I did a lot of counselling work with people who were Coaching work, I guess, with people who were Fairly spectacularly successful And they were usually workaholics You know, they’re the sort of people that were Like, they’d work 80 hours a week Just non-stop That’s just what they were like And one of the things we were always trying to figure out was Well, how much should you work? Because one answer is you just work till you die, right? I mean, you just exhaust yourself And, well, that’s not That’s not a good idea And then you have to figure out why that isn’t a good idea It’s got to be something like this, is that You don’t want to do so much work that the amount of work you do Interfers with the amount of work that you could still do Right? Because if you work like mad for two weeks And then you have to lie in a hospital bed for a month That obviously isn’t very productive So you have to figure out how much you can work diligently And then how much you have to recuperate So that you can get back up and work again And, you know, that’s People have basically settled on something like this And given it the divine imprimatur That’s one way of thinking about it Which is, well, you can toil away for six days And no wonder, because you have to work But you should rest at least one day out of seven Because otherwise, well, you don’t appreciate life That might be part of it And plus, I think it’s more a matter of iterability You know, because one of the things that defines morality is The capacity to repeat something Right? So if something is properly structured in a moral manner Then you can do it over and over and over again Without any degeneration And so that’s kind of like a relationship If your relationship is negotiated You can continue to negotiate it And then you can have a relationship that lasts for a long time You can do it today and next week and next month and next year You can maintain it across time And this, I would say, is the wisdom that’s been garnered over God only knows what period of time To say, well, look, I mean, even God needed to take a break And appreciate what was going on And it’s not such a bad thing for people to follow that pattern And that’s a good thing for modern people to know Because we seem to be, even though, you know, we’re very wealthy By historical standards, our capacity to relax isn’t exactly what it could be And I think that’s really hard on people Okay, so I’m going to go over again the idea of the attributes of God I talked about that a little bit last week But I want to return to it Because I think it’s worth dwelling on a little bit Because we’re trying to figure out what it is that people were trying to formulate When they were formulating these representations And we’ve sort of come to the conclusion that There is an attempt to abstract out the nature of power From specific aspects of power And there’s some attempt to associate that with consciousness As that which gives rise to being itself And there’s some attempt to associate that consciousness With something that has a cosmic quality Whatever that might mean And it’s a statement that it has a cosmic quality rather than a discovery It’s a mere statement that there’s something about consciousness That has world-generating significance And also the implication that it’s associated with human beings as well It’s a very interesting set of propositions And I don’t believe that they’re simply refutable Like, it’s a perfectly coherent argument Even though it’s primarily made metaphorically And so then, once again, I want to build up the framework of associations around the idea of God One of the things that Freud did when he was interpreting dreams And it’s quite useful, you know So if someone comes to me with a dream Then I have them tell me the whole dream And then I get them to repeat it line by line And then whenever they say a line And there’s an object in it or a person or something like that I ask them what that makes them remember Or what that thing means to them Or what comes to mind And that’s the associational technique And it’s predicated on the idea that your memory works by association And you know that if you’re daydreaming You know, you go from one thing to another like a conversation does And that you can take an idea that’s at the center of a web of associations And by tracking the associations You can kind of zero in on what the idea might mean And then Jung expanded that by trying to He called it to amplify the dream By thinking about narrative or literary or mythological similarities That might be associated with the narrative structure of the dream And I think often that can be unbelievably useful You know, it’s like the dream is an idea that’s trying to come to birth It’s partly formulated And then if you discuss it and amplify it It’s like you can speed along its transformation into a more articulated idea And the dream is also something that Because your brain, your mind is trying to With one foot in the unknown It’s trying to formulate what’s out there in the unknown And to make it concrete But it doesn’t do that in one fell swoop It doesn’t just take potential and turn it into articulated ideas It has to dream up what’s out there first Projects its imagination out there To get a handle on what it might be And then that’s presented in the dream And if you analyze the dream you can make it more articulate And so that’s what we’re going to do with the attributes of God To build up the representational structure a little bit So the hypothesis is that God is an abstracted ideal Formulated in large part to dissociate the ideal from any particular incarnation Or man or ruler And the underlying idea there too is that When the ruler becomes the ideal the state turns into the biblical Egypt And the biblical Egypt is a tyranny And so there’s a very, very solid idea in the Old Testament That I think took people, God only knows how long to figure out That if you transformed If you confused the notion of sovereignty with the current sovereign Then your culture immediately degenerated into totalitarian state And turned to stone And that was deadly Then you were slaves And then the thing was going to collapse as well Like no matter how big and grandiose As soon as the ruler became the concrete incarnation of the ideal There was no distinction between the man and the divine notion of the ideal Then the society was doomed And I think that that’s a less I think that’s Well, I think that’s true It’s as simple as that And I think we saw more than enough evidence of that in the 20th century And we’re certainly seeing the same thing repeating itself Now when the ruler becomes the ideal the state turns into the biblical Egypt And the biblical Egypt is the archetypal tyranny So what is God like? Well, from the Christian perspective There’s three elements One is, seems to have something to do with tradition And so that’s God the Father And that’s partly the embodiment, I would say Of the human being And that’s an ancient, ancient thing And it’s also partly the embodiment of the tradition of human beings Which is also a very ancient thing And that’s the structure, as I said It’s the structure that consciousness emerges from That enables us to grapple with the unknown as such And then there’s the intermediary between that and Christ Say that’s the Holy Spirit, that’s that bird And that’s the spirit in a more abstracted sense And I would say that’s probably as close as Christianity ever got To the notion of consciousness as such You know, disembodied consciousness, something like that And then there’s the notion of the suffering individual And that’s a very complicated idea And it’s something like In order for… So there’s this idea, an old idea And I believe this was originally a Jewish idea That something with the attributes of God Omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence Lacks something So it’s like a zen cone It’s a really interesting idea Because what in the world can something like that lack? And the idea is limitation So something that’s everything lacks limitation And that idea, like when I first encountered that Just blew me away I thought it was such a brilliant, brilliant realization That there are advantages to not being able to do things Partly because it gives you something to do I suppose that’s a big part of it, right? If you had everything you wanted at every moment At your fingertips Well, there’s nothing… There’s no story It’s funny, you know, because that happened to Superman You know, the cartoon character By the 1980s, he could juggle planets And you could bounce like hydrogen bombs off him And be fine And it’s like everyone got bored Because, well, what were you going to do to Superman? It’s like you lob a hydrogen bomb at him And he just brushes it off and like combs his hair And that’s the end of that And the whole cartoon series basically died Because he didn’t have any flaws There’s no story without the limitation And I think that’s an absolutely remarkable idea And so part of the notion of Christ And this is something that I’ve puzzled over for a long time And I learned a lot of this from Jung Is that there’s idea in Christianity that There’s consciousness as such Which in some sense is eternal It stretches from the beginning of the time To the end of time But it’s this abstracted notion But it lacks a certain kind of reality Because it’s not instantiated somewhere It’s not instantiated in a specific time and place in history And so the idea of the sun The third part of the trinity Or one of the three parts of the trinity Is the notion that tradition and consciousness as such Also has to be embedded in history In a particular time and place And so there’s the archetypal embeddedness And that would be the incarnation And that’s the perfect man, right? Who accepts his mortality and acts in a virtuous manner But it’s the archetypal story of every individual as well And you know, there’s a very strong strain in Christianity I would say this is more pronounced in orthodox Christianity That the purpose of That the proper path of life Is to take the tradition, let’s say And the spirit that’s associated with consciousness as such And to act it out in your life In your own personal life In a manner that’s analogous to the manner in which Christ acted it out in his life And what that means in part is The acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence And so that’s partly betrayal, right? Betrayal by friends and by family and by the state And it’s partly punishment for sins that you did not commit As well as the ones you did commit And sometimes that’s just a relief But you know, the arbitrary nature of justice And also the fact of finitude And the notion is that your duty, let’s say And the way to set things right in the cosmos Is to accept that as a necessary precondition for being And to act virtuously despite that And that’s a very, very powerful idea as far as I’m concerned And I’m also, you know, the world’s a weird place And I’ve seen some very strange things in my life And one of the things that I’ve seen is that You know, I’ve dealt with some people who are very, let’s say That they weren’t on a good path, let’s put it that way And one of the things that was really interesting About being around people like that It was almost like they were surrounded by a gravitational field of sorts I’m speaking metaphorically, obviously And their world view was so warped and twisted That if you came within contact of them You all of a sudden started to play a part in their drama And it was almost inevitable They would maneuver and manipulate and interpret In a way that made you into the villain in their story No matter what it was that you wanted to do And unless you’ve encountered something like that And many of you probably have You don’t know how powerful a pole that is And so it’s certainly possible that someone can act in a Like a gravitational object and bend things around them To fit their narrative Their unhappy and tragic narrative But I’ve seen the opposite too, you know Where people who were aiming upward with the best of their ability And because of that they had a positive effect on the people around them And that ordered things around them in profound ways And I think it’s an open question The degree to which the cosmos would order itself around you properly If you got yourself together as much as you could get yourself together We know that things can go very, very badly wrong If you do things very badly wrong There’s no doubt about that But the converse is also true If you start to sort yourself out properly And then you have a beneficial effect on your family First of all, that’s going to echo down the generations But it also spreads out into the community And we are networked together You know, we’re not associated linearly We all affect each other And so it’s an open question The degree to which acting out the notion of Of the notion that being is good And the notion that you can accept its limitations And that you should still strive for virtue It’s an open question how profound effect that would have on the structure of reality If you really chose to act it out And I’ve seen things, as I said in my life That indicate that I do believe there’s a metaphysical element to life As well as the rational, practical element And I think there are times when those two things come together And I’ve seen that happen And so I don’t think we know the limits of virtue I don’t think we know what true virtue could bring about If we aimed at it carefully and practically And so the notion that there’s something divine about the individual Who accepts the conditions of existence and still strives for the good I think that that’s an idea that’s very much worth paying attention to And I think the fact that people have considered that idea For at least 2,000 years quite seriously Is also an indication that there’s at least something to be thought about In relationship to that So that’s kind of the Trinitarian idea Same idea there And you see, this is interesting too Because you have here, you have God the Father essentially Who’s coming out of this strange You see, this isn’t the sky exactly And you see this very often in these old pictures It’s not exactly the sky, whatever the heaven was that people believed in It’s something that’s… It’s like the sky opens and there’s a dimension beyond the sky It’s something like that And I wanted to show you this too Just to show you that this isn’t only a Western conception You know, and it has something to do with mystical experience Because there is a Bodhisattva It kind of looks like he has a hat But that’s not a hat That’s a whole bunch of Bodhisattvas Going back to eternity Right, and this hole in the sky here Is like a hole into time And these things are recurring across time It’s the eternal recurrence of this redemptive archetype And the sky opens up And you can see that thing recurring and recurring and recurring Same idea as basically That’s the blue Buddha who’s a healing entity Sitting in a Mandela Which is like a representation of paradise And it’s the same idea It’s like reality opens up and reveals this image of perfection And so it’s a… Well, it’s a universal conception And… Well, I think it’s a representation of the possibility of the metaphysical and the physical coming together In some sort of communication It’s something like that anyways And I mean, you have to remember that there’s absolutely no doubt that people have metaphysical and religious experiences That’s an absolute fact You can induce them chemically You can induce them electrochemically Lots of people who have epilepsy have epileptic prodromas that are associated with divine enlightenment So Dostoevsky, for example He had epilepsy And that was really, I think, one of the things that made him a great author Because Dostoevsky would have this feeling that he was going to have an epileptic seizure And he said that the feeling for him was that the world was opening up And he was becoming more and more and more enlightened And he was just on the verge of grasping the essence of existence And then he’d have an epileptic seizure And for the subjective feeling was that that much knowledge was just too much for him to bear Well, you know, you can say, well, that was a neurological abnormality And fine, you know, but God, he was Dostoevsky, you know And so you can’t just brush that off So… Yeah, so that’s the Trinitarian idea, fundamentally And this notion here is the notion that… Well, the cross is a funny thing Because the cross marks the center, you know And it’s an X, and the X is the center of the world Like the X that a cathedral is And the center of the world is where you are Because as a consciousness, you’re the center of the world And that center of the world is a place of betrayal and suffering and limitation That’s exactly what it is And the question is, well, given that, and given the fact that you know it What the hell are you supposed to do about it? And what that representation… I believe that’s Goya What that representation implies is that you’re supposed to voluntarily accept that And then move forward Well, in good faith and with courage, that’s the notion And that you’re supported You’re supported by your tradition And that’s why you need your tradition, too That’s why you need to be embedded in your tradition Because without that… Without the support, let’s say, of your father And I mean that both practically and metaphysically Without that behind you Without the knowledge of you as both a biological and a cultural creature Without that depth of knowledge You don’t have the courage to do it Because you don’t know what you are or what you could be And so without that… because you’re a historical creature You know what? Students ask me sometimes, why study history? It’s like, well, because history is about you That’s why It’s like history tells you who you are You can’t tell who you are because you only live a little while How the hell can you figure out who you are? So you need all this collected wisdom and all this dream-like information And all this mythology and all this narrative to inform you About what you are beyond what you see of yourself And you know, you’re pummeled down and people picked on you And there’s 50 things about you that are horrible And you know, you’ve got a self-esteem problem You’re sort of hunched over And you’ve got all these problems, you know And so it’s not easy to see, let’s say, the divinity that lurks behind that Unless you’re aware of the heroic stories of the past And the metaphysics of consciousness, let’s say I don’t think that you can have the courage to regard yourself as the sort of creature That can stand up underneath that intense existential burden And move forward in courage and grace And of course, that’s part of the reason that I’m talking about these biblical stories And it’s 9.30, so we’re going to have to stop Okay, so we’re going to stop exactly at 10 tonight Because that’s the deal with the theatre people And so, and besides, I’ll be out of anything intelligent to say By that point, certainly So well, at least we got through one story, so that was good So, yeah So, I’m going to stop at 10 tonight Okay, let’s give everyone like two, you know, just a few seconds to settle down And everyone who wants to leave can leave So thank you all for coming, by the way I’m constantly amazed that, you know, everybody comes and listens to this Because, you know, it’s just Well, it’s strange, let’s put it that way So far it’s been fun, though, so that’s good Hi, oh, that works, hi Dr. Peterson I was raised Catholic and anytime there was a bit of an inherent contradiction Let’s call it in the documents of the Bible It would be referred to as a mystery And there’s one mystery I’ve always kind of wondered about And it’s very important to Genesis How do you deal with a perfect God, or the conception of a perfect God, And how do you deal with the concept of a perfect God And how do you deal with the concept of a perfect God How do you deal with a perfect God, or the conception of a perfect God Who by nature is incapable of an imperfect design Sorry, incapable of a perfect design So what I mean by that is many religions present, for example, good and evil as separate deities That preexisted simultaneously What’s interesting about Christianity is that Lucifer, the embodiment of evil in the Christian religion Is an outgrowth of God And is sometimes, Milton, for example, presents him as a rebel against his interpretation of God’s tyranny Another example, we didn’t touch on Eden today But in Paradise, a supposedly perfect garden, a perfect design Is infiltrated again by that evil outgrowth of a so-called perfect God So from a psychological perspective, do you think there’s a significance to this presentation of perfection Yet the contradictory flaws that are sort of naturally part of that perfection, quote unquote Oh, so good, that’s a good simple question We’re starting good See, Carl Jung, he was kind of Manichean in his approach He tended towards thinking that evil, in some sense, was a separate entity You know, and I thought about that for a long time because there’s a potency about evil that just can’t be brushed away And I mean this most practically, as I’ve said, for people in my clinical practice I’ve dealt with many people who are touched by malevolence and there’s no other way of stating it properly And this happens a lot to people who have post-traumatic stress disorder Like, they encountered someone that wanted to hurt them for the sake of hurting them You know, it wasn’t some misunderstanding, you can forget about that It wasn’t that at all And so to deny the reality of evil in some sense, I think, is the ultimate in naivety Even though it’s a word that you won’t hear used, for example, very often in universities anymore But I just can’t understand that at all But I thought about that a lot And so I’m going to kind of answer that question by hitting it scattershot The first thing is that there’s an idea, and this happens in Milton, that comes across in Milton That distance from God is hell That hell doesn’t actually have any… I mean, no, it’s ambivalent in Milton But the fundamental claim seems to be that the farther you get from God, the more it’s hell And then there’s another idea that Milton’s Satan, who’s Lucifer, the bringer of light He’s God’s highest angel, God most wrong And I kind of think about him as the spirit of rationality, of intelligence It’s not because I’m not an admirer of intelligence, because hooray for intelligence But one of the things that Milton seemed to have caught on to before the rise of modern totalitarian states Was that intellect has the capacity to fall in love with its own creations And to elevate them to the highest place, which is basically a totalitarian claim It’s like, what I know is everything that needs to be known And if it was only manifest in the world, the world would become a utopia And I also think that’s… we’ll talk about this next week I also think that that’s the core idea behind the Tower of Babel Remember, the Tower of Babel is raised by human beings so that the pinnacle will hit heaven And so it’s the idea that we can build a structure that makes the transcendent unnecessary And so, okay, so there’s those two things And then there’s an idea of free will that’s associated with it, too And it seems to me that in order for there to be good, there has to be evil And so, I think the answer is something like this Is that in order for there to be being, there has to be limitation In order for there to be good, there has to be the possibility of evil I think the right path is to exist such that the possibility of evil remains open But that you choose the good And I don’t think that evil, per se, is built into the structure of the world I do think that that’s human I think that evil is human And I think it’s understandable I did a lecture that’s online about the distinction between evil and tragedy And tragedy seems to be built into the structure of the world And perhaps you can blame God for that I mean, it doesn’t seem to me that it’s your fault that there are earthquakes, for example But it is not obvious to me either that it’s tragedy that takes the spirit out of people I think that human beings are actually equipped to deal with tragedy And they’re equipped to deal with malevolence That destroys people And so I think that I think that Metaphysically speaking, the world is structured so that people have a choice Between good and evil And that, so then the next question is why do we have a choice? And that’s where my knowledge runs out I don’t, I don’t Like the alchemists, for example, speculated that And the orthodox Christians also follow this line of reasoning Is that human beings in some sense are furthering creation by our actions and by our choices And I think there’s something to that It’s like creation is unfinished in some sense And that we’re participating in moving it in whatever direction it is that we want to move it And part of that is that we have free will And part of that is that we have the choice between good and evil And that’s also all associated with the significance Maybe the cosmic significance of our lives And I, that strikes me as plausible And I think the weight of responsibility that people feel existentially is an indication of that So that’s about the best I could do with that And it seems the way you’re describing it, it’s built into at least the text that you presented Because one of the other things I noticed was God consistently describes creation as good, right? He creates light, it’s good, he creates dark, it’s good After he creates things, he announces that he creates man and woman And announces that they have dominion over those things and can use them And it might be something lost to translation, but that is described as very good As soon as that dominion is brought into existence It might speak to that notion of furthering creation Here’s something interesting too, and we’ll develop this a lot You see, when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, the snake gives them the fruit The first thing that happens is their eyes are opened To me that means that, well, they’ve woken up There’s been an increment in their consciousness And the next thing that happens is that they recognize that they’re naked And to recognize that you’re naked is to recognize that you’re vulnerable And human beings are strange creatures, because most animals are like this And they’re protected, but not us, like our most vulnerable parts are displayed for harm and for everyone to observe So we’ve got that sort of bipedal self-consciousness built into us But what’s really interesting is that when Adam and Eve realize that they’re naked It’s the same moment that they know the difference between good and evil And that, God, I just ground away on that for years What the hell is going on here? What’s the relationship between consciousness, knowledge of nakedness, and the knowledge of good and evil? And then I think I figured it out I think it was that, you see, when you know that you’re vulnerable And they also develop knowledge of death, right? So there’s deep knowledge of vulnerability And they get embarrassed about that, they cover themselves up, right? So that’s culture So it’s a very profound shock for them to recognize that they’re naked It even makes Adam hide from God And then they develop the knowledge of good and evil Well, I think it’s because, you see, human beings have this peculiar capacity that no other creature has Which is, I know how I can be hurt Because I’m aware of my own limitations Painfully aware And now, because I know how I can be hurt I know how you can be hurt And I can take advantage of that And that’s, I think, how evil enters the world That’s what it looks like to me It’s like, I’ve got this expansion of knowledge It says in Genesis that that gives people another attribute of divinity Knowing the difference between good and evil It has nothing to do with animals And it has nothing to do with Adam and Eve Prior to having their eyes opened But the cosmos switches when that self-consciousness manifests itself And that’s when the possibility of evil enters the world It’s something like that And that’s also echoed by the intimate relationship between the snake in the Garden of Eden And Satan, which we’ll go into Because that’s a very strange association It’s like this snake also becomes the adversary of being And I think that’s, I’ll jump very quickly into that But I think that’s because, you know, there’s the snake that bites you in the jungle And then there’s the snake that lives in your enemy And then there’s the snake that lives in your family If you’ve banished the enemy to the Netherlands And then there’s the snake that lives in you If you remove yourself from your family And that snake that’s in you, right? That’s a psychological phenomena That’s equivalent to transcendent evil itself The thing that inhabits every single person That’s why there’s that association between the snake and Satan And that’s why I think that people have this It’s associated with our knowledge of vulnerability That gives us this constant capacity for evil I mean, imagine if you’re a medieval torturer You know, I mean, people don’t generally imagine that sort of thing But people were medieval torturers And they were very good at what they did And the only way that you can be a torturer is to know what would hurt you Right? And so you exploit your own vulnerability You exploit the knowledge of your own vulnerability To bring pain into the world And I don’t think that you can lay that precisely at God’s feet Now, people have been arguing about that for a very long time But my question, the question for me that arose from that is Alright, fine, like, tragedy, you can lay that at God’s feet Well, if we didn’t bring additional evil into the world Could we tolerate the tragedy of being without becoming corrupt? I think generally the answer to that is yes Because I’ve seen people react quite heroically to the arbitrary burdens of their life But malevolence, man, that lays them low It lays them low, and it seems to be nothing but a destructive force And I do believe as well, and I think you see this in the Cain and Abel story That the root of malevolence is the desire for revenge against God for creation itself And I mean, I’ve read terrible things written by terrible people Trying to get to the bottom of things And I mentioned the Columbine killers, for example And it’s clear, all you have to do is go read what they wrote What they were doing was taking revenge against God They knew that It wasn’t unconscious That they’d been dwelling on this for months, plotting their revenge And it was revenge against being itself for the crime of being So… Thank you Applause Hi, doctor You’d said that when God saw that it was good You read that as potentially, well, I might be better than nothing And the story in Genesis, it’s bracketed by days Which aren’t necessarily literal days, yom, the original word But it’s also bracketed by, and he saw it was good at the end of the day So my question is, is there something more profoundly happening there Between this profundity of speaking into existence The way the start is to this observation, this seeing that it’s good And is God modeling consciousness? Is there a little more there for us to grapple with? Okay, so more for us to grapple with in what way? In the sense that we have this amazing insight of speaking things forth But you’d also commented on consciousness as until something’s observed Or until it’s seen So when God sees that that creation was good Is there kind of this bracketing between the bringing forth through the word, through Jesus Okay, okay, that’s good, I see what you mean Okay, well I think what that is is that I think… Okay, so it’s perfectly reasonable from an archetypal and psychological perspective To consider the idea of the word equivalent to the spoken truth I mean, Christ makes that claim in the New Testament, that he’s the truth, right? And embodied, and so then you can, logically you can derive from that the idea that If things are spoken into being through truth, then they’re good And so yeah, I think that that association exists And I think that that’s… well I also think that that’s in some sense the deepest claim of faith I believe that, because I think you have to make a decision in your life As far as I can tell, and I think Kierkegaard knew this more clearly than anyone else I’ve ever read And that is that if being is good, then an honest relationship with being also has to be good And then if you have an honest relationship with being, then you’re going to speak the truth And then I think what you have to decide is that speaking… if you speak the truth, then what happens is good Regardless of what happens And that’s the rub of faith, and I think that’s something that Kierkegaard wrestled with, you know And I mean… I’m trying to think if I can provide an example about that Easily and quickly Easily and quickly Well I guess it’s partly because… It’s partly because you can live your life two ways You can use your language to manipulate You can use your language as a tool to get what you want But the problem with that is that that assumes that you know what you want, and that you’re right And that’s a problem, because there’s lots of things you don’t know And if you get what you want, you may find A. that you didn’t really want it And B. that you’re not the person that started the journey towards that That happens a lot to people, especially when they use their language in a manipulative way And so the alternative seems to be… and I think this is one of the lessons, for example That’s laid out in the movie Pinocchio, which happens to be a kind of archetypal favourite of mine Is that part of the act of faith, let’s say And then I wouldn’t say Christian faith necessarily, I would say faith in being itself is the decision It’s like the decision that God is good The decision is, there’s no better way to bring better being into being than to speak the truth And I do think that’s echoed, I think that’s a very wise observation I think that’s echoed in that first story First of all, the act of speech, and second, the observation that the consequence was good So yeah, yeah Thank you Good morning, Citizen Peterson First, I have a bunch of questions, and the one to have them answered immediately Like, you have a post on Quora, in which you encourage all children to incur skateboarding injuries But also, stated in this post, you wrote that Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued And be very careful about rescuing someone who does And can you reconcile this with what you stated about transcendent morality And the heroic impulse that I guess men are supposed to be born with Okay, okay, okay, so Well, the skateboarding question is I wrote, I have a book coming out in 2018 Called 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos And one of the chapters in there is from that Quora posting And it’s called Don’t Bother Children When They’re Skateboarding It’s sort of associated with what I had said earlier about parkour, for example Is that, you know, kids need to go out and push themselves against danger Because that’s what life is, is pushing yourself against danger And when you see kids doing things that are dangerous, but spectacular Then you kind of have a moral obligation to back the hell off And let them experiment with their own mortality Because you can’t keep them safe The best thing you can do is make them able and courageous And I would say that that’s a more difficult lesson Generally speaking, for mothers to learn than for fathers to learn And that was Freud’s fundamental observation But it’s absolutely crucial And so I’ve seen kids do I mean, you know, you can obviously be a fool on a skateboard Although the distinction between being a fool and developing yourself Is not as clear as people might like to imagine And when kids are out there with no helmet and doing dangerous things It’s like there’s a part of me that of course is very worried about it But there’s another part of me that admires it very much Because they’re practicing what they need to practice in order to cope with the world Okay, so there’s that Now, the other one was rescuing people Yeah Well, I got this partly from Carl Rogers You know, because Rogers was He’s a clinician, a very famous clinician And he was a Christian missionary to begin with But he didn’t end up that way But he was very interested in the utility of listening as a means of redemption essentially And listening, by the way If you have someone that you know that has a problem The best thing you can often do is listen to them If they’re actually trying to communicate Because people configure themselves through speech And most people can’t think And I don’t mean that in a mean way I mean the way they think is by talking And they can’t talk unless they have someone to talk to And it’s partly because they’re bouncing the idea off them And seeing if it makes sense and seeing how the person responds So listening is a great thing But Rogers was also interested in the preconditions for having a redemptive relationship And that could be a therapeutic relationship or an intimate relationship And one of the things he claimed was that Unless the person was aiming upward There was nothing you could do about it And that seemed to be associated with this idea of that initial choice, say, between good and evil See, once someone comes to therapy They’ve already done something They’ve already said, I have a problem Conceivably I could fix it And I need to do something about it And then, so half the work is already done by the time they show up Because they’ve already said, well, things aren’t as good as they could be And I could do something about it The question is, can you do anything about someone who isn’t at that state? And my observation, and this is Rogers’ observation as well Is that you can’t I think you can serve by example But until the person has decided on their own That they’re wrong That’s why they’re suffering That there’s something wrong about what they’re doing And that they want to fix it I think that even trying to hammer against that often makes it worse So, and I know that Solzhenitsyn, when he was talking about The communist ideologues The really hardcore communist ideologues that were eaten up by the Gulag archipelago system You know, sort of devoured by their own He saw the same thing, was that until they were willing to admit that Something was wrong with the manner in which they had construed the world That it had resulted in their own demise That there was actually no way of communicating with them They’re in kind of an authoritarian bubble And so, I don’t think that So even if you orient yourself as an archetypal hero There’s no way you can get through that barrier that they put up? Well, I think that that’s part of the issue of free will I do not think that people can learn unless they admit that they’re wrong There was this play, The Cocktail Hour by T.S. Eliot He has this woman in the play And she comes up to a psychiatrist and she says Just in the course of casual conversation She says, I really hope there’s something wrong with me And of course the psychiatrist is a bit taken aback by that And he says, well, why in the world would you hope such a thing? And she says something like Well, like I’m suffering, man, things are not good for me I’m having a dreadful time of it And as far as I can tell, there’s only two possibilities Either the world, in its essence, is conspiring against me And I’m doomed, because what am I going to do about the world? Like it’s just built into the structure of reality Or I’m doing something wrong So I’m really hoping that I’m doing something wrong Because if I am, then maybe I could fix it And I’d stop suffering And it’s something like that And see, it’s also, I think that if your life isn’t what it could be And you’re suffering Then it seems to me that that should be sufficient evidence That you don’t know enough And if that isn’t sufficient evidence that you don’t know enough Then I don’t know how anyone else could provide you with that evidence And so, I’m going to leave it at that This is psychological rescue, not like rescuing someone who’s drowning, for example? Yes, you can rescue people when they’re drowning even if they don’t want you to Perfect I’ll tell you something about that though Something interesting about that, and that’s relevant I don’t know how many of you know how you rescue someone who’s drowning You do it like this You come to them like this And you push them away with your foot I’m telling you, that’s what you do if you’re a lifeguard Because if they’re panicking and they grab you, you both drown And that’s stupid, because then you both drown And that’s a really good metaphor for trying to help someone too It’s like when people are in real trouble Some of it’s they’re confused And some of it is that their life has collapsed around them And there’s some malevolence there And there’s some desire for vengeance It’s just like one dangerous mess And if you’re going to wade in there unprepared The probability that they’re going to take you down Compared to you elevating them is very, very high You know, because you don’t even know what your damn psychological stability rests on You might be sane just because you’re lucky and surrounded by sane people That doesn’t mean that you have the psychological wherewithal To really pull someone up from the depths of the underworld Especially if they’ve also got one foot in hell So you should bloody well be careful about doing that kind of thing It’s hubristic to attempt it And I would definitely caution people very carefully About trying to rescue someone who doesn’t want to be rescued It’s very dangerous activity And it can easily be counterproductive Okay, so about since 2006 I’ve been trying to figure out Like extract the meta, the way you put it Of social justice warriors And I think I found it actually They seem to have this behavior where they just They nebulize every standard we have So they take a standard you have that is full of criteria They say what something is is how it is Like that’s a podium, but it has these criteria within it that make it Oh, sorry They do something called nebulization Where they take something, a what And they dissolve the criteria such that there is no way to say how it is So you see this now with gender Where someone will say they’re a gender But there’s no way to get logically from how they can be that gender Like how you can be an attack helicopter, a male or a woman or something like that But the thing that came from this And I figured this out when I found about you When I learned about you is that nebulization Appears to be the exact opposite process Of individuation It’s the philosophical version of individuation That rests on three premises or three core axioms Which is I exist Which is an axiom that exists in the objective That you exist here And then I am, which is a reiteration Of the reincarnation of I exist Which is Basically you have to say I’m right about having existed Or else it’s just false part And then you have as, which is the question begged from that Well if you exist and you’re right, as what? And you’re talking about God being the Metaphor of God in Genesis being the Metaphor for the creation of consciousness And it appears that individuation Actually fits that triad Because if you take as, for example The as is the predictive aspect Where you try to take the subjective and make it objective So you have an idea, you test it in reality And time is the ultimate arbiter that determines these things And it changes your understanding of reality It lets you know God, it lets you know the objective And then from that point There’s the subjective which is supposed to be formed from object to reality But because you’ve changed that You now have to sacrifice your old self The old way you saw Jordan Peterson of ten years ago Was not who he is now So it gets sacrificed and at the same time you can point back to that Guy, that Jordan Peterson and say Well that guy was wrong And that’s the scapegoating of the son So the subjective aspect, the I am right is the son And the Holy Spirit which is supposed to lead you to God Is the as I don’t understand the relationship between that And the first part So can you just clarify that? The social justice aspect And the nebulization Oh, the social justice is the exact opposite process Of individuation, that’s all it is It actually occurs at as If you’re at as and you’re thinking, well what am I You either apply individuation You try to apply criteria, you try to find out what you are in reality Or you refuse that paradigm and say, well look, I am I’m always going to be right, I’m completely Self-righteous, and you stop at that Subjective aspect where everything becomes subjective And you ultimately become relativistic and nihilistic So I’m asking, have you considered That the Genesis Tale and the Creation myth and God Is actually the Process of individuation And the trinity is actually those three core premises The three axioms that come from that Okay, I haven’t considered that I mean, I know that Jung drew a Parallel between the idea of the Passion, for example And the development of human Individuality, and so there’s That idea is lurking inside The Jungian notion of individuation Because it has to do with voluntary Confrontation with mortality and also With evil, right, as two of the key Elements of genuine Self-realization I haven’t considered the Metaphorical pathway that you just Described, so I can’t comment On that, I’d have to think about that But I could say that One of the things that does disturb me About the ideological battle that’s going On right now, and I think This is a very deep part of it, and this is The part that’s a battle against the Logos In Derrida’s old terms, right The phallogocentric West Needs to be taken down to its essence Is the refusal to engage In precise language And I see that in part, for example Manifested in the refusal of the People who I’m criticizing to ever Engage me in any debate, they don’t Believe in debate, and they don’t believe in In the, let’s say The redemptive power of dialogue Because mostly what they believe in is power So there’s a nebulization in that Manner, there’s this tendency To hide behind what’s vague and fog-like Instead of making things Sharp and clear and crystalline And I do think that that’s, well that’s part of the Regeneration of a civilization as far as I’m concerned So So you haven’t considered that then? Would you please? I’ll do my best I’ll do my best Thank you Thank you Thank you Okay, so one, this is it One more question, and then I’ll make it quick My question is I know you stated in the last Lecture that the importance for Setting aims in life and To kind of have Goals to work towards Right, so my question was How do you Do that if you don’t know where you want to go Because that’s kind of where I got Stuck on your future Authoring program because Okay, that’s a good question, that’s a really good Question I think it’s echoed to some degree In the structure Of the biblical stories In this manner, so there’s this notion In the Old Testament that morality is Following a sequence of Prohibitions, there’s a bunch of Bad things you shouldn’t do and then basically You’re good enough And I think there’s wisdom in that, and I think That’s kind of where children start, right? I mean I love children and all that But they’re crazy little creatures And they need to be Civilized and Partly what you do is you lay Prohibitions on them and mostly What you’re trying to do is lay prohibitions On them for the Behaviors that if they manifested would make Their life miserable, so I have another Chapter in this book that I’m writing called Don’t let your children do anything that makes You dislike them and the idea There is that your job as A parent is to help Your children become the sort of four year olds That adults genuinely Smile at when they come into a room Because that makes the entire social Environment both truthful and welcoming And so your job is to Make them desirable social Beings and a lot of that is prohibition Okay, and there’s this Ethical transformation It happens to some degree in the Tradition of the, in the prophetic Tradition where there’s a spirit that Seem in some sense to rise above the law But there’s a real transformation between the Old Testament And the New Testament because the Old Testament Is prohibition and the New Testament Is, well here’s the good things You do once you’re more than Merely prohibiting yourself From, from impulsive Sin let’s say, there’s a positive good To be accomplished Well you might say well I don’t know what the positive Good is, fair enough man So, so this is why This thing that I’ve said to people Has become this crazy internet meme but that’s To clean up your room Which is a lot better and more useful Than people think, it’s a lot harder too But the thing, the first thing You do I think, and I learned this in part from Solzhenitsyn when he was trying to iron out his soul When he was in the Gulag because he was trying to Figure out how he got there, how he Contributed to how he got there You know, not Stalin and Hitler even though they Were kind of to blame, you know, but There wasn’t much he could do about that I think what you have to do, and this is part of Humility, is you have to look around you Within your sphere of influence Like the direct sphere of influence And fix the things that Announce themselves as in Need of repair, and those are often Small things, you know, and They can be like Your room, put it in order, because the Thing is, it isn’t exactly so Important that your room is in order, although it is What’s important is that you Learn how to distinguish between Chaos and order, and to be able to Act in a manner that produces order And in most households there’s a hundred Things that could be done to just Make it less hideous and horrible And so, practicing That is, it’s a real useful form of Meditation, and it’s also I think it’s a divine act Because you’re taking chaos And you know, if you pay attention even to A room, it’s so interesting, and I learned Because I’ve renovated many places now And tried to make them beautiful, and one of the things That I’ve really learned is that, even if you Own a structure, unless You’ve investigated all the nooks and crannies And cleaned them up, and Put your own imprint on them And made them yours, they’re not yours The mere fact of physical ownership Doesn’t make them yours, you have to Establish a dynamic Relationship with the objects before They’re actually yours, and I think You can do something as simple as Just sit on your bed and think, okay There’s probably like five things I could Do today so that tomorrow Morning is slightly better than this Morning was, at least, or at least I’m not Falling behind, and those will usually be It’s like having to eat a toad in the morning Right, it’s like, it’s not going to be something you want to do There’ll be things you’re trying to avoid They’re snakes, essentially But if you ask yourself, like you’re asking Someone, which I think is a form of prayer If you ask yourself Instead of telling yourself, you know What is it that I could do to set things More right today That I would actually do It’s usually some small thing, because You’re not that disciplined, you know Then you can go do it, and then You put the world together a little More when you do that And that spreads out But you also construct Yourself into something that’s better Able to call order Forth from chaos And that makes you just incrementally Stronger, and then the next Day, you can maybe take on a Slightly larger task, and like You get the benefit of compound Interest if you do that, it’s a tremendously Powerful technique, and I think if you do That, at some point Instead of just having to fix Things up, that are not good You’ll start to get a glimmer of the positive Things that you could do You know, the positive Things that you could do that would actually constitute A vision, and that’s what I would Recommend. Thank you. Alright, good night.